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Clayton Cramer's BLOG
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
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Saturday, January 05, 2008
The Spider Has Legs
I finally got around to slicing this .050" steel into three spider legs, and attaching them to the diagonal holder.
Obviously, I still have to paint everything flat black. Those are 8-32 screws holding the legs to the diagonal holder. It was very satisfying to drill the holes in the legs by measuring .500" from the bottom edge, drilling a hole, then measuring another 1.000" over, and drilled another hole. Because I had used precision tools to drill the holes in the diagonal holder, everything just screwed right in, with no obvious discrepancies in location. Since all three legs are identical, I taped them together, and drilled all of them at once.
There are two set screws used for making fore/aft adjustments to the mirror position, at the top of the Delrin piece that holds the 1/4"-20 screw in position. The set screws are on opposite sides of the cylinder. I didn't plan quite far enough ahead, so I had to drill another hole in one of the spider legs to make sure that I could get access to both set screws.
If it looks like the legs in the picture immediately above aren't in the same plane, that's a perspective problem. They are actually within a few thousandths of an inch of the same position relative to that Delrin cylinder.
The .050" steel isn't stiff in the sense of extraordinarily rigid; that would mean something quite a bit thicker. Instead, better spider designs (as I fancy mine is) rely on tensioning the legs. Once I have the upper tube assembly (scheduled for January 18th delivery), I will bend the ends of the legs to a right angle, and bolt them to the inside of the tube. By having all three legs under similar tension, the diagonal holder will be in a very non-flexible position. Because the legs are 2" high, there's considerable resistance to rotation across the optical path, which is the most important direction.
Dave Hardy at Arms and the Law has a copy of it here for your amusement. I won't comment too precisely on the many flaws in it to avoid giving away too much too early, but let's just call it a target-rich environment.
The wind really picked up during the night. It was pretty consistently 35 mph, with one gust of 38 mph this morning. Now, it has picked up even more--in the 40-50 mph range. Fortunately, the air is warm, so the snow is rapidly disappearing. It's very dry air, so while some of it is melting and evaporating, some of it seems to be sublimating (going directly from frozen to water vapor)!
I mentioned some months back that I was tempted to put up a wind generator, but just like solar panels are very dependent on clouds and the season, wind suffers from extreme variability. Right now, I could be producing huge amounts of power--but most of the time, the wind barely hits 15 mph around here. A generator that produced any appreciable power under those conditions would have to either shut down or suffer from "energetic disassembly" in a wind like this.
Even though outside air temperature is about 50 degrees, wind chill is astonishing. The good news is that when I come inside, the cat wants me to hold him--and he makes a fine handwarmer. posted by Clayton at 3:04 PM permalink
A mentally ill man shot to death by Santa Rosa police yelled "slashing, slashing" and raised a large kitchen knife as he approached officers responding to a call for help, authorities said Thursday.
Family members identified the man as Jesse Hamilton, 24. He rented a room in a home near downtown with several other mental health patients.
Hamilton refused orders to drop the knife and a Taser stun gun had no effect on him, according to a statement by the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, which is investigating the shooting. Hamilton was shot four times by one of three Santa Rosa police officers who responded early Wednesday afternoon to the call for help at the A Street home.
Hamilton died about 6½ hours later.
Investigators said the officers tried to defuse the situation by having a mental health worker contact Hamilton first.
"Unfortunately, as the events unfolded they didn't have a lot of time to react to it," Sheriff's Lt. Robert Giordano said. "He comes out of the door and the knife is up in a stabbing motion. And he's screaming as he's walking toward them."
Hamilton's family was disturbed by the shooting, the county's third involving law enforcement and mental patients in less than a year. Family members also expressed displeasure with a county decision to release him into a less restrictive treatment program.
"It didn't turn out right," said Hamilton's mother, Valerie Barber of Point Arena. "I don't know why so many mentally ill people are being shot to death these days. I kind of feel things needed to be done differently. I didn't think he was ready for that level of freedom."
...
Hamilton suffered from schizo-affective disorder and had been treated for mental illness since he was 15. He returned to Sonoma County more than a year ago after a lengthy residency at a Modesto mental health center, his mother said.
Hamilton's family said his treatment regimen was gradually reduced from 24-hour care to his placement in the Telecare outpatient program.
For the past three months, he lived in the house on A Street north of Santa Rosa Plaza. It is about three blocks from Telecare's office, where psychiatrists, nurses and social workers assist adults suffering from mental illnesses.
On Wednesday, residents said Hamilton threatened them with a knife on two separate occasions. One resident went to the Telecare office and alerted social workers, who called police. They said Hamilton was not taking his medication.
The first officer arrived at 12:54 p.m., three minutes after the call. Two more officers arrived by 1 p.m., according to an account released by the Sheriff's Department.
A mental health worker who helped Hamilton arrived about the same time; police asked him to make the initial contact.
"The mental health worker knocked on the door and immediately they heard an aggressive movement coupled with the suspect ranting, 'Slashing, slashing,' " according to the Sheriff's Department statement.
"The mental health worker, in fear for his safety, retreated behind the officers," the statement said. "Moments later, the suspect came out of the bedroom door yelling a death threat at the officers."
Officer Gregory Yaeger tried to stop Hamilton with a Taser stun gun but he kept coming, with a kitchen knife with a 10-inch blade raised to shoulder height, "in striking position," the statement said.
Officer Michael Heiser fired his handgun four times, with all four rounds hitting Hamilton.
Hamilton fell and dropped the knife but continued to struggle, the statement said. Officers used a Taser again before he was handcuffed.
I am disappointed that the article quotes the Sonoma County sheriff as thinking that cuts in mental health funding were the cause of the problem. Cuts in funding have been the result of deinstitutionalization--not the cause.
As a number of people have pointed out, the Iowa caucuses have a very poor track record in picking the major party nominees, and therefore, an even worse record of indicating who will be president. I see that Obama and even Edwards stomped Clinton. As much as I detest the Clintons and their (even by the standards of politicians) corrupt fundraising methods, Hilary Clinton would probably fight the Global War on Terror much more seriously than Obama or Edwards.
I also see that Huckabee did very well in the Republican caucuses. Again, the Iowa caucuses are representative of highly organized political activists within the two parties. I don't see that this means all that much. I also don't think Huckabee is going to survive serious discussions of foreign policy and GWOT questions in primary states.
I decided to use a total of 9 6-32 screws to hold the spider legs to the diagonal holder. I used the vertical mill to very accurately drill the holes--and then I broke two 6-32 taps trying to tap the holes. Maybe I didn't use enough thread cutting oil when doing this, or maybe tapping 6-32 holes in aluminum is just asking for trouble. Anyway, since I now had two pieces of aluminum with broken taps in them, I gave up, and made the next piece of Delrin. It machines easier, and is still adequately stiff and strong. I also switched to 8-32 screws on this one because I had run out of 6-32 taps.
Since there will be three legs on the spider, how do you get the holes exactly 120 degrees apart on a cylinder without a rotary table on your mill? Since I have a 1/4"-20 hex head bolt going through the length of the cylinder, this was pretty easy. I used a right angle against the hex head bolt's edge. Each rotation of the face moved the cylinder 60 degrees.
Convicted killer Erick Hall, who is on Idaho's Death Row for killing Lynn Henneman in 2000 and Cheryl Ann Hanlon in 2003, will never leave prison even if something happens to his death sentence in either case.
That is because Hall was given a life sentence in prison for the rape of Hanlon Thursday by 4th District Judge Thomas Neville.
This means that in addition to his two death sentences, Hall is serving three life sentences, without the possibility of parole.
In 2005, Hall was sentenced to concurrent terms of life in prison without parole for separate rape and kidnapping charges in the Henneman case.
The sentencing came less than three months after Hall became the first man in Idaho to be given the death penalty by a jury for the murder charge.
I'm reminded of a case out of Texas where a guy was given a 3000 year sentence. With good behavior, he might have been eligible for parole in 2000 years.
A Santa Rosa police officer shot a 24-year-old man who was wielding a knife Wednesday inside a home where he and several other tenants receive care for mental illness, police said.
Police said officers responded after a social worker called to report that his mental health client was ``off his meds,'' violent and had a knife.
One of three officers at the A Street home fired on the man after a Taser stun gun proved ineffective and the man advanced toward them with the knife, police said.
Police declined to identify the man, say how many times he was shot or describe his injuries.
A source familiar with the situation, however, said the man was upgraded from critical condition Wednesday night and is expected to live.
From this account, the officers did what they were supposed to do, and escalated to deadly force only as a last resort. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time that this has happened in Sonoma County--even the first time recently:
The shooting was the third in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and a person reported to have mental health problems.
...
The other two shootings in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and people reported to have mental health issues were in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.
Two sheriff's deputies fatally shot Jeremiah Chass, 16, at his home near Sebastopol on March 12. He had resisted his parents' efforts to take him for help, and fought with the deputies.
On April 9, Santa Rosa police shot and killed Richard DeSantis, a 30-year-old bipolar man who fired a gun inside his house and later charged officers outside.
Those cases sparked a series of meetings involving Santa Rosa Mayor Bob Blanchard and other elected officials, law enforcement, mental health advocates, and representatives of civil rights and minority groups.
This particular incident involved a man in a program called "assertive community treatment"--which is an alternative to hospitalization, and apparently intended for those who are considered no longer so dangerous that they need to be locked up. Unfortunately, it appears that someone may have made a serious mistake in deciding that this guy didn't need to be hospitalized.
One of the many downsides to deinstitutionalization is that people with serious problems who would not have access to deadly weapons in a mental hospital are released into the larger society. Now, in spite of the best efforts of California government to make the entire state like a low-grade mental hospital with increasingly restrictive gun control laws--there's no hope of preventing deinstitutionalized Californians from getting knives. And that makes tragedies like these unavoidable.
Much of the rationalization for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was that it was bad for their human dignity to be locked up in mental hospitals. But it's also bad for your human dignity to get shot (and killed) by a police officer. Freezing to death on the streets of San Francisco, or dying of pneumonia, or developing tuberculosis because of malnutrition caused by panhandling for alcohol, is also not very dignified.
I keep asking myself, "Am I the only person who sees the insanity of pretending that reducing human beings to a condition that we would not allow pets to suffer from is somehow good?" I talk to a lot of different people every week about what has gone wrong on this, and I seldom meet anyone who wants to argue that this great social experiment of the 1960s worked out for the benefit of the mentally ill. Yet inertia seems to be winning this public policy debate.
Sebastopol Councilwoman Linda Kelley is seeking to have her misdemeanor vandalism case moved to another county, arguing in court papers that because she is a lesbian, liberal and a politician, she can't get a fair trial in Sonoma County.
Kelley argued that news coverage and reader comments posted on The Press Democrat's Web site have subjected her to ridicule such that she will be prejudged as guilty.
Kelley, 53, a two-term councilwoman, has pleaded not guilty to keying a truck parked on a street in front of her home in September. If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in county jail, fined $10,000 and ordered to pay restitution.
Kelley also faces unrelated misdemeanor drunken driving charges stemming from a May 20 arrest in Guerneville. That case also is pending.
A hearing on the change-of-venue motion is scheduled for Jan. 31.
Assistant District Attorney Christine Cook said the prosecutor is preparing papers to oppose Kelley's motion.
"We're confident the defense and the people can get a fair trial before the people of Sonoma County," she said.
A change of venue is rare in Sonoma County, usually reserved for the most heinous and attention-grabbing cases. The last trial to be moved was a case involving the 1998 murder of a Petaluma plastic surgeon. Theresa Ramirez, a disgruntled former patient, was convicted by a San Jose jury.
Legal experts said Kelley's motion has a slim chance of succeeding because it involves a minor crime that hasn't sparked much public outrage.
The vandalism case was reported to police by Alameda author Michael Zinsley, who was sleeping in his truck in front of the house of a friend, Sebastopol City Councilman Sam Pierce. Zinsley said he heard a loud scratching sound and got out of his truck's camper shell to see Kelley standing nearby.
For those of you not familiar with Sonoma County, this request for a venue change because of being liberal, lesbian, and a politician is roughly equivalent to a Klansman in 1955 Alabama accused of assault on a civil rights activist demanding a change of venue to a less hostile jury pool. posted by Clayton at 12:58 PM permalink
Adjunct Faculty Status
My wife is adjunct faculty for several universities. While visiting some friends over the holidays, she expressed disappointment at the failure to be picked up for the coming semester by one of her employers. (They are short of students for the spring.) One of our friends, not being part of the university world, asked, "Adjunct faculty are 'at will' employees?" Before my wife had a chance to respond, I chimed in with, "Actually, more like 'at whim' employees."
Acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has fired the city lawyer who had been preparing to defend the longtime District ban on handguns in the high-stakes Supreme Court case this spring.
Alan B. Morrison, who has argued roughly 20 cases before the high court, was asked to leave his post as special counsel by the end of this week, Morrison said today. Morrison had been hired by former Attorney General Linda Singer, who resigned two weeks ago, and put in charge of arguing the handgun case.
The city has appealed to the Supreme Court to maintain the handgun ban after a lower court overturned the ban in the spring. The high court agreed to hear the case, probably in March, which would mark the first time the Supreme Court has examined a Second Amendment case in nearly 70 years.
Singer cited frustration that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) had relied more heavily on Nickles, who had been his general counsel, to make key legal decisions. Upon Singer's resignation, Fenty replaced her with Nickles, a former high-powered corporate litigator at Covington & Burling and friend of Fenty's family.
Nickles met with Morrison on Dec. 21, but did not tell him that he would be fired, Morrison said. Last week, Nickles asked Deputy Attorney General Eugene A. Adams to inform Morrison of his decision.
"I've been asked to tell you that Peter has decided that he will not be relying on you to make the . . . argument before the Supreme Court," Adams wrote in an e-mail to Morrison, which Morrison provided to The Washington Post. "It's a decision he's been wrestling with since you met with him last week. He thought it only fair that you be informed sooner rather than later."
Morrison had taken an active hand, along with a team of lawyers from the city and two private firms, in writing the 15,000-word brief that is scheduled to be filed with the high court on Friday. It is not clear whom Nickles will select to replace Morrison.
Okay, maybe who is at the top of the team doesn't make that much of a difference on this, especially since DC's brief is due at the Court on Friday. But at a minimum, it means that the new guy either is, or has been, playing catch-up on the work that Morrison was doing.
The January 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal has an article which, unfortunately, isn't visible except to subscribers, about United Technologies' Hamilton Sundstrand division. They are building a type of solar power plant that is a bit different. Part of it is unsurprising--the use of an array of mirrors to concentrate heat on a boiler filled with salt. This is similar to the Solar One project built near Barstow back several decades ago, which failed to meet its design goals because of the amount of power the plant consumed.
One of the great difficulties with solar power is that it is highly synchronized with sunlight. It doesn't help at night--or even much past 5:00 PM. Peak demand for power in areas where solar power makes sense is often in late afternoon and early evening, because of air conditioning demand, and use of dishwashers, washing machines, and other domestic electrical appliances.
I am reminded of one of the 1960s attempts to produce and sell "appropriate technology" solar ovens in India. It didn't work, because solar ovens only really worked in the middle of the day. (A friend of mine and I, along with our fathers, built a solar oven as a demonstration project in 6th grade. It worked great at cooking hot dogs and hamburgers--until about 2:30 PM, at which point it became quite disappointing.) As the song goes, "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." Indian women, not being in either category, weren't too keen on using such an oven, and in addition, the main meal of the day in rural India wasn't lunch, but dinner.
What makes this new design by Hamilton Sundstrand interesting is that it is using the power not necessarily to directly produce electric power (which would limit it to morning to late afternoon), but to heat up the salt until molten, then pump the molten salt into insulated containers. The molten salt will stay hot for a very long time--long enough to boil water to turn generators during the night. This might have some merit, in large industrial applications. I don't see that it has much potential on a small scale, such as domestic power production. And I do not find it implausible that the same problem that made Solar One not work--that there's enormous energy inputs in making the components--might be hidden by the government subsidy involved.
The other problem of solar power being sun synchronized is not just day vs. night, but winter vs. summer. The farther you get from the tropics, the more severe the problem becomes. Not only do days get much shorter in winter, the farther north you go, but the sun angle becomes a problem. Here at 44 degrees north latitude, the maximum altitude of the sun above the horizon is 69.5 degrees--and that's at the summer solstice (when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer). At the winter solstice, the sun is directly above the Tropic of Capricorn, or 47 degrees farther south--and then the highest position the sun can get for us is 22.5 degrees above the horizon.
You can store heat in molten salt over night, or even for a couple of days (which might solve the problem of cloudy days). But I shudder to think of the amount of heat that you would need to store to get you through the winter. This kind of system, however, does make sense for peak load power production.
UPDATE: A couple of readers pointed out that if you can solve the energy storage problem, it would be beneficial not only for solar power, but any energy production method that is not completely at your control, such as wind or hydropower. The difficulty is that batteries are not perfectly efficient at accepting a charge, they don't hold a charge indefinitely, and they don't last forever.
Another strategy that I have seen proposed is to pump water to an higher elevation. If the water is stored in a covered container, there shouldn't be any evaporative losses, and because the stored energy is gravity pulling the water to a lower level, the energy so stored will last for decades, if need be. But pumping water against gravity isn't terribly efficient, and turning it back into electricity later isn't terribly efficient. There is also a big capital investment in creating such a water storage mechanism, especially if it is covered. Of course, if you don't have access to natural elevation changes, building an artificial slope is extremely expensive.
One reader points out that perhaps too much energy is being spent on the electric car problem when the real problem that needs to be solved is: why are people living so far from work? If everyone lived a couple of miles from work (or telecommuted most days, like I do), it wouldn't so much matter what fuel we used for our cars. Of course, that would require social changes probably more dramatic than the technical challenges of electric cars.
UPDATE 2: Another reader points to this article on Wikipediathat claims that pumped water storage schemes can return 70%-85% of the original input energy, depending on evaporation of the body of water.
New Hampshire residents awoke up yesterday to big flakes, gusting winds and a treacherous morning commute as the latest in a string of storms piled more snow onto what was already on the ground from the state’s snowiest December in more than a century.
Concord saw 10.1 inches, beating its December record — 43 inches in 1876 — by an inch and a half. Elsewhere in the state, Wolfeboro got 13 inches.
Record-breaking temperatures are expected to arrive in Southwest Florida on Wednesday and Thursday.
The National Weather Service has issued a Hazardous Weather Outlook for West Central and Southwest Florida.
The weather service e is warning that a strong cold front will move across the Florida Peninsula Tuesday ushering in much colder and drier air.
A freeze watch is in effect for the overnight period of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. A combination of cold weather and winds will produce low wind chill temperatures.
The coldest night is expected to be Wednesday night-Thursday morning. Freezing temperatures are expected inland.
Predictions range from 37 to 31 degrees in Lee County. Temperatures are expected to drop even lower. The record low for Lee County on Jan. 2 is 37 degrees in 1949. The record low for Jan. 3 is 34 degrees set in 1979.
SAN JUAN COUNTY — Plumbers throughout San Juan County had their day cut out for them when they opened their doors for business Friday: A long day of thawing people's frozen pipes.
"I'll bet I've had at least 30 calls and I could only take 10 because my guys were already scheduled for other things," said Christine Hopper of Home Plumbing and Heating. "I can't believe people weren't watching the Weather Channel last night. It said we were going to get really cold."
An overnight low of 2 degrees tied a record for Dec. 28, set first in 1990.
"There's a gap in data for the airport, but the record low temperature recorded at Farmington Agricultural Sciences Center is 2 degrees and was set in 1990," Amanda Abeyta, of the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said.
But 2000 also logged a record for cold — with a temperature of minus 21 at 1 a.m. Christmas Day, surpassing the previous low of minus 15 set on Dec. 25, 1983. And 2000's record snow and cold caused the roof of the Dane County Coliseum — now the Alliant Energy Center — to reach its load limit, forcing postponement of a Harlem Globetrotters game.
Until global warming advocates start to die of frostbite while attending conferences on Bali, or start being mauled to death by polar bears attending conferences in San Francisco, the evidence will continue to be selectively used by the news media.
You know, if this were legal for sale in California, I don't think there would be any danger of gang members being willing to use it. Don't worry, it's work-safe, unless you work for NRA.
It's a very small world. Someone that I used to work with--and who, several years before that, sold a small telescope to a friend of mine--has done extensive work with carbon fiber composites for aircraft. Anyway, he tells me that the polyester resin style of fiberglass that I am using is much less stiff than the epoxy kind--and for the intended purpose (repairing car fenders and such) that is probably a good thing.
Also, as my wife suggested, and I surmised, fiberglass stiffness is highly dependent on cross-section, and scaling up the diameter of the tube requires scaling up the wall thickness as well. As a result, four layers of fiberglass cloth for a 1.75" ID tube is far less stiff than four layers of fiberglass cloth for a 20.4" ID tube.
I had thought about contacting Sky Valley Scopes about a tube because they used to make honeycomb composite fiberglass tubes that were very strong, and very light. See this example of a remarkably strong and light tube. The honeycomb composite use a very strong honeycomb layer in between two thin skins of fiberglass. You get all the benefits of the strength of the honeycomb and its lightness. (The XB-70, to my knowledge, was the first to use this approach, with stainless steel honeycomb sandwiched between titanium skins.)
Unfortunately, Ken Ward, who ran Sky Valley Scopes, reached a point where his arthritis prevented him from continuing to make the tubes. His wife Judi forwarded his instructions on how he made these tubes to me. It sounds like something that I could ruin a lot of materials before I got good at it!
Anyway, I have abandoned the idea of making a fiberglass tube for the Big Bertha rebuild. As soon as National Metal Fabricators opens for business Wednesday I am going to order up aluminum tube sections for this. I will also return the unused container of polyester resin--but not the fiberglass cloth. I may continue to experiment with making fiberglass tubes, using epoxy instead of polyester, and the honeycomb material that you can buy from operations like Aircraft Spruce and Specialty.
I have been tempted for some time to rebuild the 3" f/4.5 reflector that I built some years ago. Because of the scarcity of parts in this size, there are a number of compromises to it. I used a larger tube than I needed (4" ID) because the only mirror cell that I could find had that as an OD for the base plate. The diagonal was bigger than it needed to be, because of what I could buy at the time, and the limitations of a high profile focuser. Now that I can machine the parts that I need (especially in this inky-dinky size), I may do a complete rebuild, with an optimally sized diagonal, tube, and focuser. And maybe I will replace that heavy piece of PVC that is the current tube with something made of fiberglass. Even the polyester resin should be capable of making an adequately stiff and light tube, based on the 1.75" ID experiment.
This article from the December 30, 2007 Santa Rosa Press-Democrat is rather startling--because it actually admits that there are decent people who buy guns out of fear of the scum that have started to terrorize their neighborhood:
Marie Ibanez walks through her neighborhood in Bellevue Ranch in southwest Santa Rosa, pointing at various households where she says she knows residents are armed with guns.
The two-story homes, not more than a decade old with neatly trimmed lawns, have all the appearances of a classic suburban scene, not a modern-day danger zone where neighbors talk of their fears and how they sleep with shotguns next to their beds.
Ibanez and her husband bought a shotgun in March after repeated incidents of vandalism and seeing more crime and gang activity in the area.
The latest incident occurred Thursday night, when someone wielding a baseball bat busted out the windows of five cars in front of four households. Video from surveillance cameras that the Ibanez family installed a year ago in front of their home on Antelope Lane does not show the crime, but does show three people, two wearing hooded sweat shirts and another wearing a beanie, casually walking down the sidewalk with a bat at about 7:30 p.m.
Getting a gun was no easy choice for the couple. They have three kids between the ages of 3 and 11.
"It was a difficult decision to make because we have kids. It's the last thing you want in your home," said Marie Ibanez's husband, Tim.
It also seems like the last thing that would happen in this maze of short streets and cul-de-sacs in the heart of Bellevue Ranch, a 500-home subdivision built in the late 1990s that drew many families moving into their first homes, and that is now dotted with for sale signs, reflecting the housing downturn.
Santa Rosa police Lt. Hank Schreeder, who is assigned to the area, said Saturday the fear and concern arise from issues of personal animosity as well as broader community conflicts, and he cautioned against homeowners taking up arms.
Despite such assurances, some homeowners say they are acting in self-defense.
Laurie Pachorek, who lives around the corner from the Ibanez family, said she and her husband purchased a gun because they fear crime could soon escalate into home invasions.
The Pachoreks have three children, with the most recent addition coming 4½ months ago.
"At night, my husband takes the firearm out and puts it next to the bed in case somebody breaks in," said Pachorek, adding that both she and her father-in-law have had their cars broken into.
Unfortunately, because Sonoma County is so intent on being so liberal and multicultural, they have problems like this:
Neighbors say gang activity in the area is on the rise, and some have seen all-out brawls in front of their homes. They say they've practically ceded Bellevue Ranch Park to young thugs who regularly drink alcohol there and harass passers-by.
"Yesterday, I saw some kids in broad daylight passing what looked like a joint around," said Sharon Cisneros, a real estate broker who moved to Santa Rosa from San Diego a couple of years ago.
Cisneros' car was the last of the five vehicles that had their windows broken Thursday.
"I moved here two years ago and was basically floored at the level of gang activity," she said. "I thought that I was moving to a safer, more rural area. When I came up here, I was very surprised."
Oh, and here's one of those terribly complex to describe relationships that, in some language, I'm sure, has a single word:
Marie Ibanez said the incidents were likely retaliation for a restraining order her family obtained against the ex-husband of her husband's stepsister, a man with a criminal history who died earlier this year.
The father of the 25-year-old shot to death by Knoxville Police Sunday night says he's sure officers did what they had to do.
Instead of blaming officers, Charles Rudd of Sevierville feels his son David's death is the result of a lack of affordable - or available - mental health care.
He says David suffered from severe bipolar disorder, as well as paranoid schizophrenia. He had been living on the streets for the past five years.
Charles Rudd and his wife Diana adopted David as a 10-month-old baby. They knew David's biological family had a strong history of mental illness, but hoped their son wouldn't fall victim.
They say that until age 13, David was a happy, healthy child who made excellent grades in advanced classes and enjoyed art. But in early adolescence, symptoms began appearing. David started hearing voices, and by young adulthood, David Rudd was severely afflicted with major mental health problems.
His family says they worked tirelessly over the years to get David the mental health treatment he needed. They also encouraged him to take his prescribed medication, which David resisted.
"He always said it made him feel tired and kind of out of it," Charles Rudd says. "We tried to make him take it."
The family, originally from Maryville, moved to Ohio for a period, and it was there David first spent three months in a mental health facility. He was in middle school, and the struggle to find and pay for the type of care their son needed has been ongoing for the Rudd family ever since
"As long as your mental insurance lasts, you have a spot," Charles Rudd says. "It's 'Here's the door' after that.'"
After the family moved back to East Tennessee in 1999, David Rudd was committed to Peninsula Hospital when he was 18 years-old, but only for three days. Two years ago, David spent another three days at Lakeshore Hospital.
"Three days," his father says. "I guess he was suddenly 'cured' and shown the door. It takes months to get on medications, not days.
"We've tried. We had him in treatment in Sevierville with a psychiatrist within the last year," says Charles Rudd, adding that David also had outpatient treatment again at Peninsula.
According to his father, David refused to stay in shelters or motels, for the same reason he couldn't hold a job.
"He had 10 jobs in seven years in Sevierville," Charles Rudd explains. "None lasted more than two weeks."
Rudd says David couldn't keep a job or stay in one place because he had "bizarre thoughts that weren't real." He often thought people were talking about him behind his back.
"Sometimes, he thought there'd be a man that would change into a woman," Charles says, struggling to explain his son's condition.
Charles Rudd believes his son likely was the man who shot two people at a Knoxville Hooters restaurant, killing one of them. He says David probably went to Hooters Friday night to drink beer and warm up for a few hours. He says David often stayed along the railroad tracks that ran through that area of West Knoxville.
The senior Rudd says he feels terrible for the families of the victims hurt and killed at Hooters early Saturday morning.
Charles' brother in Florida had seen a news story about the shooting on TV and called. Both say they "just knew" from the suspect description that it was David. Family members alerted police to their concerns, telling them what area of town they were likely to find their suspect.
"I just feel terrible for the families involved with this," Charles Rudd says. "I don't know how they feel, but I have a pretty good idea."
Rudd says he always thought he would hear that something happened to his son.
"I kept expecting a phone call that he'd be either hurt or killed on the street," Rudd says. "I couldn't make him seek help. Once they turn 18, it's very difficult."
Rudd says his son was home for the holidays, but he had a "bad episode." David apparently thought someone had poisoned his food and the situation escalated. He showed his father a gun, and his father told him he would have to leave.
Rudd says he knew his son had "a couple starter guns," but he says he had no idea before this that his son had a real firearm. Rudd says he figured his son picked it up on the street.
"I told him he couldn't come back to the house because I could tell he was getting out of control," Charles says.
The Rudds called the police to tell them their son had a gun, but by the time authorities arrived, David Rudd was gone.
I'm guessing that the three days wasn't determined by insurance, but by how long someone can be held without a finding of dangerousness. I can't quite figure out from reading Tennessee's mental health laws how long someone can be held against their will, but I do notice that a lot of stuff has to happen in intervals of 72 hours (which is three days).
These were probably devilishly hard to make, and perhaps not very reliable, but it does show that lots of clever people were working the problem--and apparently with some success--more than a century before Samuel Colt--and more than a century before the Second Amendment.
You should always, always be sure before using deadly force. Here's a case that at first appeared to be a clear-cut use of deadly force against a burglar:
"It's so bad around here and i'm just afraid for my safety," says one woman we spoke to as she stepped outside of her apartment and saw crime scene investigators. Police were combing her neighbor's apartment following an alleged burglary attempt that ended in gunfire. Rhonda, who didn't want to give us her last name or show her face on camera, says crime at the Camelot Apartments has driven her to leave.
"I was already in the process of making preparations to move, but this has done it. This has given me the right to make the decision to just leave here," Rhonda says. A little before 5:00 this morning, a woman returned home and caught who she thought to be a burglar in the act.
Lt. Tony Armstrong, a homicide detective with the Memphis Police Department, says, "The victim called her boyfriend. Her boyfriend came over and investigated, found him inside the house and shot him multiple times."
Medics took the suspect to the hospital where he later died. Police spent several hours later combing the apartment for more evidence. We're told the man who shot the suspect did have a state gun carry permit. It's likely the man who shot the intruder will not face any charges. Neighbors like Rhonda agree with that decision.
"People work too hard to make a living for someone to just come in and take things, your personal items or to invade your apartment like that. I think it was justifiable," she adds.
However, further investigation revealed that it was not what it first appeared:
On Sunday, December 30, 2007, we have new information on a deadly shooting at the Camelot Manor apartments in Southeast Memphis.
Memphis police have charged a woman who lived at the apartment in connection with the shooting.
22 year-old Asa Marmon was shot and killed in Antionita Clay's apartment by her boyfriend after she told her boyfriend Marmon was a burglar.
Memphis police say Antionita Clay knew it was Marmon inside her apartment before she called her boyfriend and police about a burglar.
Police say that Clay and Marmon had a prior relationship and she wanted to end it.
Clay is charged with false reporting and reckless homicide.
The boyfriend didn't do anything illegal (although I would not be surprised to see him sued by the next of kin). He operated based on what Clay told him, and there was nothing particularly implausible about the claim or the circumstances. It is rather like this case, where a man found his wife in the front seat of a pickup truck. She screamed rape, and the man fired at the fleeing rapist. But it turned out that the relationship was consensual, and the wife made the false claim to hide her adultery. The wife was indicted; the husband was legally not at fault.
When my wife and I took concealed weapons class in California, the deputy sheriff who taught the class showed us a videotape that showed a number of situations where at first glance, you know who the criminal is, and who the victim is--and where it turned out to be not the way it first appeared. It is very important when you make that very serious decision to draw and fire that you are completely certain--or as completely certain as the circumstances allow--who the bad guy is.
I encourage you to think through the different scenarios now, while you are calm, and not in fear. A person dressed all in black comes into the mall carrying a rifle? Look carefully to make sure that it isn't someone from a police SWAT, who tend to dress in ways designed to make them less visible. Waiting until the person has opened fire on someone who is clearly not a threat is probably wise.
You walk onto a situation where a man and a woman are engaged in some confrontation, and the man is holding a gun or a knife? Very likely, she's the victim--but this is by no means certain.
Waiting until the last possible moment to use deadly force is both morally right, and puts you in a much better legal position with respect to both criminal and civil liability.
S-CHIP isn't particularly a hot topic at the moment, after the President's second veto of it. My daughter had to write a paper analyzing some aspect of public policy for one of her classes, and gave me permission to share it with you.
I suppose that I should explain that she is rather partial to S-CHIP because she sees such a program (regardless of the fine details) as an alternative to a broader and more costly system, such as single payer health coverage.
I am not comfortable with the national government funding such a program. The decision about whether to operate such a program properly belongs with the states, simply because there is nothing intrinsically national about medical care. I have some concerns about the way that some states have implemented S-CHIP, and the dangers of mission creep.
As an example of mission creep, the Rural Electrification Administration was originally established in the 1930s to assist in setting up rural electric coops for desperately poor farmers with no electricity--and some of those coops are now very prosperous suburban communities. When last I checked, some years back, the REA was still enjoying a very nice subsidy from the federal government, when the justification for it no longer existed. More recently, I blogged about how families with incomes above $100,000 a year live in government-subsidized low income housing. They were poor when they moved in, but they aren't poor now.
I am also concerned about one of Bush's concerns--the danger that S-CHIP might encourage people who are currently have private health insurance to change plans. In the Victorian period, the followers of Jeremy Bentham argued that public assistance in workhouses should be "less-eligible conditions." By this, they meant that if a person sought governmental assistance by entering a workhouse, it should be less pleasant than being on the outside. The reason was simple: there was a limited amount of resources available to the government to spend on caring for the poor, and therefore the workhouse should be of a nature that no one would go there if they had the option of finding a private sector job, and providing for themselves. In the modern context, I think all but the most hopelessly deluded would agree that welfare assistance to the able-bodied should provide less benefits than you would get from working at minimum wage. (At least in Idaho, that is definitely the case.) As I have previously explained, I suspect that both the scale of the expansion Democrats in Congress proposed, and Bush's actual reasons for the the vetoes, have more to 2008 election politics than the stated reasons.
Anyway, without further ado, my daughter's paper about S-CHIP:
Analyzing the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIPRA) of 2007
In the 1990's, the federal government began to evaluate the large-scale issue of uninsured children in the United States.By 1997, 23 percent of low-income children (those from households below 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines) were uninsured (“State Children's Health Insurance Program” [S-CHIP], 2007).Medicaid provided insurance for the very low-income children, but those from “working poor” families (between 100 to 200 percent of the federal poverty guidelines) were ineligible for Medicaid (“S-CHIP,” 2007).As a way to provide insurance for them, the federal government established the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (Kaiser Commission, 2007a).By 2006, the number of low-income, uninsured children has decreased to 14 percent, and S-CHIP (together with Medicaid) is generally acknowledged as the cause (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 2007a; “S-CHIP,” 2007).
While S-CHIP has been successful, funding was only alloted for ten years.As a result, the S-CHIP program funding had to be reauthorized by Congress in 2007 (“S-CHIP,” 2007).In spite of S-CHIP's success, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2007 (CHIPRA) has been the subject of heated debate.The first bill (H.R. 976) was passed by Congress, but vetoed by the President.It was revised and Congress passed H.R. 3963 (the revised CHIPRA bill), only to have it vetoed again in mid-December (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, 2007b; Stolberg, 2007).This second veto leaves Congress and Americans wondering what will happen to the S-CHIP program in the future.
S-CHIP Program Overview
Since S-CHIP is administered at the state-level, there is some variation between state programs.However, as a whole, S-CHIP is designed to insure low-income children “who are uninsured and not eligible for Medicaid, typically from families with incomes up to 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL)” (Kaiser Commission, 2007a, p. 1).Nationally, there were 6 million low-income children covered by S-CHIP throughout 2005, and 4 million children enrolled at any given point during that year (Kaiser Commission, 2007a).Children are the focus and majority of enrollees in the program, though the original legislation allowed states to use waivers to cover parents, childless adults and pregnant women (Kaiser Commission, 2007a).
Today, the S-CHIP program costs approximately $7 billion annually and consists of both federal and state funds.In 2006, S-CHIP was funded by $5.4 billion of federal funds and $2.4 billion of state funds (The Kaiser Family Foundation, n.d.).The federal guidelines regarding the use of the federal funds are fairly broad.States have the choice to use the federally administered funds to expand the current Medicaid program, create a completely separate S-CHIP program, or use a combination of the two approaches – which is what Idaho and twenty other states use (Kaiser Commission, 2007a).
When the program began, the federal funds alloted for S-CHIP were more than the states needed.However, as the program has expanded, the current level of funding is not enough.There are estimates that “over the next five years $13 to $15 billion over current levels will be required to maintain current SCHIP enrollment levels” (Kaiser Commission, 2007a, p. 2).This amount is needed for current enrollment and does not begin to address the eight to nine million uninsured children, the majority of who qualify for Medicaid or S-CHIP, but are not currently enrolled (“S-CHIP,” 2007; Kaiser Commission, 2007b).
The reauthorization of federal funds for S-CHIP is not simply continued funding at current levels; instead, it will require a dramatic increase in funding.Besides objections to the content of the proposed CHIPRA bills, the level of funding is one of the issues debated by Congress and the president's administration.
H.R. 976
With an expiration date of September 30, 2007, Congress began debating how much funding to reauthorize and where the extra funds would come from.In July, the Senate voted on a bill that would add an additional $35 billion beyond the current $5 billion spent annually, resulting in a total of $60 billion for S-CHIP over the next five years.The House voted to increase the $35 billion to $50 billion over five years, but eventually compromised on the final bill – H.R. 976 – and asked for the additional $35 billion (“S-CHIP,” 2007).To increase the extra funding, Congress debated between increasing the federal tobacco tax or cutting Medicaid payments to insurance companies who cared for the elderly (Pear, 2007a).Eventually, the bill proposed a 61-cent cigarette tax per pack which would result in $35 billion, and would allow an additional 4 million uninsured children to enroll in S-CHIP (“S-CHIP,” 2007).The Democrats wanted to make sure that the federal tobacco tax would pay for the extra $35 billion and not add to an already immense federal deficit from the current administration's spending on the Iraq War (Pear, 2007b).
Bush (along with many Republicans) felt that H.R. 976 had several problems, and threatened to veto H.R. 976 almost immediately (“S-CHIP, 2007).Bush had originally proposed to continue paying $5 billion annually and gradually add an additional $5 billion (total) over the next five years.He stated that a very large expansion of the program would be a step “down the path to government-run health care for every American” (“S-CHIP,” 2007, para. 4).In addition, Bush demanded that “nearly all poor children eligible for the program be found and enrolled before any in slightly higher-income families could be covered” (Loven, 2007, para. 12).
There were other criticisms of the bill because it did not “adequately address the following issues: income eligibility for coverage of children, crowd-out, and the treatment of immigrants, parents and childless adults” (Kaiser Commission, 2007b, p. 1).Bush felt that the issues of inadequately addressed expansion, funding and eligibility justified his presidential veto of H.R. 976 on October 3, 2007 (“S-CHIP,” 2007; Kaiser Commission, 2007b).
H.R. 3963
After Bush's veto in October, Congress rapidly create a revised CHIPRA bill (H.R. 3963).Taking into consideration the criticisms of the bill, H.R. 3963 was similar to H.R. 976 with several significant changes.It still required the additional $35 billion of funding, and sought to cover an additional 4 million children (Pear, 2007a).However, it addressed several of the problem areas.Under H.R. 976, states could set their eligibility levels, though the matching rate was restricted if they went above 300 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL).H.R. 3963 did not allow any state (except New Jersey) to cover children above 300 percent of the FPL (Kaiser Commission, 2007b).Neither bill allowed coverage of legal or illegal immigrants, but H.R. 3963 has a stricter citizenship verification process through the use of the Social Security Administration's records (Kaiser Commission, 2007b).H.R. 976 had proposed a two year period for childless adults to transition off of Medicaid.However, Republicans criticized this period as too long, so H.R. 3963 shortened the transition period from two years to one year (Kaiser Commission, 2007b).
Once H.R. 3963 was revised, the House passed it at the end of October.The Senate passed it one week later on November 1, 2007 (64-30) (Pear, 2007b).The bill was sent to the president, who had until December 12 to sign it into law or veto it.He chose to veto the bill, writing to the House that since “Congress has chosen to send me an essentially identical bill that has the same problems as the flawed bill I previously vetoed, I must veto this legislation, too” (Bohan, 2007, para. 4).Once again, he wrote that the problems with the bill were “it allows adults into the program, would cover people in families with incomes above the U.S. median and raises taxes” (Loven, 2007, para. 4).
Future of S-CHIP
After Bush's second veto, there is concern about the next step for S-CHIP funding.On Wednesday, December 12, the House chose to defer the vote to override the presidential veto until January 23.January 23 was chosen since it “coincides with the week Bush come to Congress for the State of the Union address” (Loven, 2007, para. 8).If the veto stands, some Democrats have discussed a possible extension at current funding levels until September 30, the end of the fiscal year (Bohan, 2007).However, the current funding is not enough to even maintain the 6.6 million children currently enrolled in S-CHIP (Stolberg, 2007).
The Congressional Budget Office reports that S-CHIP needs at least $5.8 billion to keep the current enrollment, meaning it will be $800 million short over the next year (Stolberg, 2007).As a result, 21 states estimate that they will have fully exhausted their federal funding before September 30.In fact, nine states will have exhausted their funds by March 2008, leaving millions of children uninsured (The Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007).This leaves people wondering what is next for S-CHIP.Judith Arnold, the director of the Children's Health Insurance Program in New York, sums up what many are thinking: “I am getting more and more nervous about the future of the program” (Pear, 2007a, para. 9).
Implications for Idaho
Although Idaho is not one of the states who will experience a funding shortfall in 2008, Idaho's children depend heavily on S-CHIP and federal funding.In June 2006, 14,287 Idaho children were enrolled in Idaho's separate S-CHIP program, and enrollment is increasing (The Kaiser Family Foundation, n.d.a).Nationally, the percentage increase in enrollment from 2005 to 2006 was 1.7 percent.Idaho's increased enrollment was twice as high with a 3.6 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 (The Kaiser Family Foundation, n.d.a).As Idaho's population rapidly increases, the need for S-CHIP will probably increase as well.
To provide coverage for the approximately 14,000 Idaho children enrolled in S-CHIP, Idaho depends heavily on federal funds.Compared to the national average of 65%, federal funds made up 79% of Idaho's S-CHIP total funding from FY 2004-2007, and is projected to stay at that level if the federal funding is available (The Kaiser Family Foundation, n.d.b).Idaho may not be directly affected yet by the presidential vetoes of both CHIPRA bills (H.R. 976 and H.R. 3963).However, Idaho's dependency on federal funds and increased need for S-CHIP coverage could mean that it will be negatively affected by a lack of increased funding at some point in the future.
Conclusion
S-CHIP is a program that affects six million children nationally, and 14,287 children locally.A program that affects this many children deserves continued attention.The second veto left Congress wondering what was next for the S-CHIP funding debate, but the House quickly decided that they would not let this second veto stand.In the next month, one wouldhope that the House could overturn the veto with enough bipartisan support.Since the second bill (H.R. 3963) passed the Senate with a large margin (64-30) and has both Republican and Democratic support, there may be a chance for Congress to overturn the president's veto (Pear, 2007b).At a minimum, our Congress needs to come up with an alternative for 2008 that keeps the program funded enough to keep the currently enrolled children insured.Ideally, they would extend funding for more.Regardless of what happens, Americans needs to understand S-CHIP, its impact, and demand that our Congress reach a decision to support this program.
References
Bohan, C. (2007, December 12). Bush vetoes children's health bill a second time. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.washingtonpost.com.
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. (2007a, January). State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) at a glance. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.kff.org/medicaid/7610.cfm.
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. (2007b, November). Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization act of 2007 (CHIPRA): The revised CHIPRA bill (H.R. 3963) compared to the original bill (H.R. 976). Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.kff.org/medicaid/7714.cfm.
Loven, J. (2007, December 13). Bush vetoes kids health insurance bill. The Washington Post. Retrieved December 13, 2007, from http://www.washingtonpost.com.
Pear, R. (2007a, July 9). A battle over expansion of children's insurance. The New York Times.Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com.
Pear, R. (2007b, November 2). Expecting presidential veto, Senate passes child health measure. The New York Times. Retrieved December 12, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com.
Stolberg, S. G. (2007, December 13). President vetoes second measure to expand children's health program. The New York Times. Retrieved December 14, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com.
State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). (2007, September 26). The New York Times. Retrieved December 11, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (2007, November 9). FY 2008 SCHIP allotments under current law and projected federal SCHIP financing if current allotments are made available through the end of FY 2008 (dollars in millions). Retrieved December 14, 2007, from http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=599&cat=4.
