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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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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).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, March 01, 2008
Barack Obama's Troubled Father This article from the January 27, 2007 Daily Mail is more than a year old, and most of it is an attempt to throw mud on Barack Obama by pointing out what a monstrous creep his father (Barack Obama, Sr.) was. It's a sad story, but not relevant to Obama Jr.'s character. What is of some relevance, however, is the extent to which Obama's autobiography falsifies what actually happened:
The article also takes Obama to task for his description of the constant racism that he encountered growing up: There's a saying that the higher the office a politician seeks, the more humble the home in which he was raised. (This is rather like the manner in which the older you get, the longer of a walk through the snow to school you had--at least, as you tell it to your kids.) I find myself wondering if Obama is telling Democrats the story they want to hear--how he overcame the ferocious racism of redneck America--you know, Hawaii, and Columbia University--rather than the more mundane story of a privileged kid working his way up the ladder. Texas Governor Ann Richards's description of President Bush as someone who was born on third base, and thought he had hit a home run, comes to mind. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Progress on Carry in National Parks Here's a letter from Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne (who used to be Governor of Idaho) to Senator Crapo (R-ID) indicating that the Interior Department is at work on a revision of the National Park Service ban on loaded firearms to bring the rules for each park into compliance with the laws of the surrounding state. For those who are upset that we aren't going to get right to carry in national parks in New York, Massachusetts, and California--calm down. One slice at a time, until we get the whole loaf. Labels: gun rights, gun self-defense An Interesting Experimental Opportunity Paul Huebl at Crimes, Guns, and Videotape makes an interesting observation that suggests an opportunity for criminologists: What if 30, 000 or even 60,000 armed ordinary Americans traveled to an American city? Riots, bloodshed, skyrocketing crime may result you say? These events happen at least twice a year when the NRA Convention and the Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade Show holds their events in various larger cities.Some years ago, I attended the NRA Convention in Phoenix to promote a splendid little book that I had written, called Firing Back. Almost no one bought it, unfortunately. While I was there, the local paper had a column lamenting that the NRA was in town--but at least the rest of America was a bit safer, while all the gun nuts were visiting Phoenix. Now, if the NRA is actually the dangerous, lunatic fringe that a lot of gun control advocates claim, one would expect that cities that host either the NRA Convention and the SHOT Show would have somewhat elevated rates of violent crime relative to other conventions of comparable size. There have been dozens of NRA Conventions over the last 40 years--and because they are in different cities each year, here's a chance to see if changes in violent crime rates follow the NRA Convention around. Labels: gun rights Robert Ferrigno's Sins of the Assassin A bit more than two years ago, I reviewed Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin--a disturbing but powerful novel set in a future where the combination of terrorism, elites embracing Islam, and the disappearance of Christianity as a significant influence on much of the United States, leads to the division of America into the Islamic States of America and the Bible Belt--an impoverished Christian nation occupying roughly the South. At the time I wrote that review in January of 2006, I expressed my belief that two of Ferrigno's assumptions about what would be required for this nightmarish future were a little implausible. I still would like to think that's the case--but watching what has happened to America in that short period of time makes me a bit less confident that something a little like this couldn't happen. In the intervening two years, we have seen the following worrisome situations: 1. We have someone running for President (who has a chance of winning) who was raised Muslim, purports to be a convert to Christianity, and whose middle name is "Hussein." He attends a church that is Afrocentric, parrots Islamic hostility to "Zionism," and the day after 9/11, blamed the U.S. for it. Furthermore, Louis Farrakhan, the whacko in charge of Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama--and Obama's response was to deplore Farrakhan's anti-Semitism, but Obama refused to reject the endorsement. This is perilously close to something that might appear in a prequel to Prayers for the Assassin. 2. In Western Europe, freedom of speech is increasingly being vetoed by politicians who are afraid of offending Muslims. In America, public schools are building facilities specifically for Muslim religious rituals--something that would never be done for Christians or Jews--and setting aside classroom time for Muslim prayers--while liberal fascists (the natural allies of Islamofascism) are filing suits to get crosses removed from city and county seals and from publicly owned memorials. 3. The post-9/11 change to FISA that allowed warrantless monitoring of terrorists expired--at least partly because the Democrats weren't willing to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that, after 9/11, complied with government requests to tap suspected terrorist communications. And why? Presumably because the trial lawyers, who own the Democratic Party, see a chance for some really big contingency fees on those lawsuits. 4. The increasingly willingness of news organizations to bend to the will of Islamic extremists, for fear of offending them--in a way that they have never shown with respect to Christians. Even worse--the left's increasing support for Islam as the future. In light of how rapidly the world is changing into something that makes Prayers for the Assassin's world seem more and more possible, I picked up Sins of the Assassin with a heightened sense of dread. Ferrigno's new novel won't turn out to be the future in a literal sense, but an indication of how much worse the world in which my grandchildren will grow up might be. Sins of the Assassin is a freestanding novel; if you didn't read Prayers for the Assassin, you can read Sins of the Assassin without a sense of having missed something. There are enough references to the events that the previous novel covered that you shouldn't spend a lot of time scratching your head and saying, "How did that happen?" On the other hand, if you read the first book, there's a lot of stuff here that will be better explained. You might assume that Ferrigno buys into the anthropogenic global warming claims--but if you have carefully read Prayers for the Assassin, you know that there's a connection between cheap oil and this frightening future for America--and one that explains the ecological problems in Sins for the Assassin. I suspect that some Christians will read Sins of the Assassin (which largely takes place in the independent nation that is called the Bible Belt) and take offense. If you read Prayers for the Assassin, you will realize that it actually compares pretty favorably to the Islamic States of America--and I think Ferrigno is making a point about the nature of fanaticism. As I observed in my review of the first book: I find it interesting that Ferrigno paints the centers of Islamic fundamentalism in the new America concentrated in the places most prone to leftist derangement today--places such as Seattle and San Francisco. While Ferrigno is never explicit about it, it is instructive that members of lunatic fringe groups seem to have no problem leaping quite astonishing political chasms--because it is the fanaticism that defines the kooks, more than individual belief systems.You can find fanatics in any religion or political movement--people that use whatever cause they espouse as an excuse for power, control, and the infliction of pain on others. In some cases, such fanatics are sociopaths or marginally psychotic--people like Rev. Jim Jones, John Brown, Stalin, Hitler. Some ideologies or theories are better suited to concentrations and abuse of power than others, of course--hence, our Constitution's separation of powers--between the federal and state governments, and separation of powers within the federal government. Islam's emphasis on the unitary nature of religion and government makes it especially suited to power-mad lunatics. At least since the Enlightenment, Christians have generally recognized the dangers of concentrations of power. As a novel, Sins of the Assassin works very well indeed. There are people that you grow to care about, and even those that you hate--such as The Old One--have a compelling logic to their cruelty and evil. As with any novel of this form, Ferrigno paints a future derived from our present that seems a little bit of a leap. The Branch Davidian Waco theme park seems a bit bizarre to me, but only because the very serious questions that have been raised about what happened there have fallen off the popular radar. But who knows? Perhaps a later generation will worry less about government wiretaps of terrorists being conducted for our own safety, and worry more about how and why more than 80 people died at the hands of their own government. I also don't have as much confidence as Ferrigno that the response to the external threat of Islam would be a decline in differences between Protestants and Catholics, and a decline in racism. Societies that are under external threat become, if anything, increasingly focused on internal unity and orthodoxy. Judaism had considerable toleration for differing perspectives before the destruction of the Second Temple, and quite a bit less afterwards. America in the 1950s might be another good example. While racism has definitely declined in this country over the last 50 years--and quite definitely so in the South--I suspect that the frightening future Ferrigno paints would produce more suspicion and more intolerance, not less. As with Prayers for the Assassin, this is a book with rough language (about how many seventh graders in California talked when they didn't think adults were listening), a lot of violence, and a bit of sex. It is a harsh and realistic book about a harsh and very ugly future. I didn't read it entirely in one sitting, unlike Prayers for the Assassin, but it was definitely one of those books that you find yourself saying, "I really don't want to stop reading right now, what's going to happen next?" Utterly unpredictable; clearly written; and with a pretty traditional narrative style. I have come to despise the cypherpunk style because it drops you into a future that you don't understand, and lets you wallow in your confusion for far too long. Don't get me wrong; Sins of the Assassin isn't the pedestrian style of writing that explains everything. (I'm thinking of one of the "Left Behind" series novels I ran into a while back.) But Ferrigno does recognize that there are merits to an omniscient narrator when describing a world thirty years away, and with some new and startling technologies. Labels: book reviews, Islamofascism, terrorism Angelina Jolie On Iraq This isn't going to get her any kudos from the Hollywood crowd--but then again, I'm not surprised. I've respected Jolie's commitment to unfashionable concerns for some time, and this very thoughtful piece in the February 28, 2008 Washington Post just adds to my positive impression of her: The request is familiar to American ears: "Bring them home." Labels: terrorism Friday, February 29, 2008
Cost Alone Should Be a Reason To Be Concerned Even if they weren't fellow human beings, and even if they weren't overrepresented in scary mass murder situations. I've read that before deinstitutionalization, schizophrenics were the single largest category of hospital bed-days in North America. That's not mental hospital bed-days--all hospital bed-days. Why? Schizophrenics are about 1% of the U.S. population. But because most schizophrenics become ill in their teens to mid-20s, only about 30% recover, and it doesn't directly kill them--schizophrenics typically have 40-50 years during which they are sick. I was digging around for more data to fill in one of my stubby little chapters, and I found this disturbing piece of data from a government agency called the National Quality Measures Clearinghouse about schizophrenia: It accounts for more than 10% of all disabled people in the United States (U.S.) and 2.5% of all U.S. healthcare expenditures. The cost due to society of schizophrenia is enormous (more than $20 billion/year in the U.S. alone).According to this table, the total monthly disability insurance payments for 2005 was $6,607,972,000--or $79,295,664,000 annually. Schizophrenia thus is costing us more than $8 billion a year just for disability checks. This page indicates that U.S. health care costs were slightly less than $2 trillion in 2005. So health care for schizophrenics (which isn't done all that well, since many are living on the streets) comes to about $50 billion. Why is this not a major issue in the presidential campaign? I know that there's a lot of research funded to try and understand various mental illnesses. My first reaction to these numbers is that an investment of even $10 billion a year into understanding the causes and trying to find either preventative methods or cures would be a sensible investment. I've mentioned previously that The Lancet, the most important British medical journal, a few years back reversed its editorial position about marijuana being harmless because they published a review of existing studies--and concluded that there was a 40% increase in psychosis among marijuana users--and the psychosis came after the marijuana use. This is merely a correlation--perhaps, for all we know, people who are going to become psychotic are attracted to marijuana, and it doesn't really have any effect. Still, if that correlation does indicate causality, this suggests that Americans are paying at least $23 billion a year extra so that those potheads who don't go psychotic can get mellow and giggle stupidly. Labels: drug laws, mental illness Channels The Right Size Are Scarce It turns out that the aluminum channels turn out to be either too thin or too narrow. I am thinking that buying a 5" wide 1/4" wall rectangular aluminum tube, then running it through the bandsaw to get a channel might be the simplest solution. Of course, I'm a little unsure whether my bandsaw is going to be happy cutting 1/4" wall aluminum. Hmmmm. Labels: telescopes Thursday, February 28, 2008
Miracles of Channel Stiffness I mentioned yesterday that I was hoping someone would tell me if my calculations were correct. I spent a bit of time checking the spreadsheet (and updating it), and I am now confident that the calculations are correct. Of course, that requires the underlying equations be right.... It is astonishing how non-linear the relationship between thickness and stiffness for a channel is. As an example, with a 4" wide channel, .125" thick, and the verticals are .5" high gives a maximum deflection of .0326" inches. At .25" thick, the deflection drops to .0107". Doubling the thickness cut the deflection by about 2/3. Making the channel wider, however, is also non-linear in its effects. Doubling the width of the channel only gets about 1/3 more stiffness. When making the trade-off, if stiffness were the only goal, you would want thick but not very wide. Now, the trick is to call Metal Supermarkets, and find out what sizes of channel they have in stock, plug the dimensions in, and see what makes the best fit. Because the goal is to reduce roll, wider is better. At the same time, the price goes up, and thick contributes more to the stiffness. Since I have to trim the verticals so that the tube fits into the bottom of the channel, I don't want two thick of a channel--because I have to run this through my table saw to make it fit. Labels: telescopes Bipartisan Corruption This is a dirty little story from the February 26, 2008 Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal-Gazette: A lawyer accused of trying to bribe a judge also paid two associates $500,000 to convince Attorney General Jim Hood not to file criminal charges against an insurance company over its handling of Hurricane Katrina claims, according to an FBI report in court records.This is a complicated case, but I guess what strikes me about it is that even if Mississippi Attorney-General Hood is telling the truth--that he did not bend to either a bribe or a threat--it doesn't say much for his reputation that someone found it plausible that paying $500,000 to a third party to either influence or bribe Hood was a reasonable business investment. Before we go to single payer health insurance, I think we should see how single payer legal insurance works! Just think: you would never have to hire an attorney, or give him 1/3 of the eventual settlement, or have to hire an attorney to represent you in a criminal case. All attorneys, civil or criminal, would work for the government, for a flat salary. It might be a very nice salary--say, $100,000 a year--but think of all the really sleazy lawsuits that ambulance chasers file today in the hopes of getting 1/3 of $10,000,000. No lawyer would file a suit like that, because it wouldn't affect his income in the least. O.J. wouldn't have any more of a Dream Team than any other defendant being tried for murder. Labels: health care, politicians behaving badly Planned Parenthood's Return To Its Roots This is one of those stories that just amazes me. It started out as a UCLA student newspaper (one apparently on the pro-life side--yes, at UCLA!) had a "donor" call Planned Parenthood operations around the country, and offer money to them with the proviso that it would be used just to abort black babies--and for an explicitly hate-filled reason. The February 28, 2008 Idaho Statesman, shockingly enough, actually ran a story about it, and included the amazing transcript of the conversation with the Planned Parenthood representative here in Idaho: Autumn Kersey of Planned Parenthood in Boise: Good afternoon, this is Autumn.It wasn't just Idaho where they found someone at Planned Parenthood willing to accept a donation for an explicitly racist reason. Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder, saw her objective as (in part) reducing the supply of inferior races--not just blacks and Hispanics, but also southern Europeans. Nor was she alone. I am always astonished, when I read through newspapers of the 1910-25 period, how many progressive sorts were explicitly pushing birth control as a method for keeping blacks from outbreeding whites. But I find it very hard to believe that Planned Parenthood offices are staffed by the modern version of this. I am more inclined to think that what we are seeing is: 1. An enthusiasm for abortion that transcends everything else--including standards of decency that I thought were pretty universal in America. 2. A generation that has grown up with so little exposure to ferocious racism, and so little knowledge of history, that they don't find statements like the one above repugnant. Labels: abortion Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tragedies That Lead To Reform I was reading this report by the New York State Office of Mental Health about the outcomes of New York's adoption of "Kendra's Law" back in 1999, which provides for involuntary outpatient commitment. What is that? And who is Kendra? Involuntary outpatient commitment essentially means that a person who is mentally ill, and is considered a danger to himself (although perhaps not an imminent danger) is ordered by a court to take their medications, go to counseling, and be under the supervision of a social worker or mental health worker who is responsible for making sure that this person does not deteriorate. Many states have such programs. California has something called "Laura's Law" that provides for such treatment--although only in a few counties so far. I mentioned earlier today a bill under consideration by the California legislature to expand the program statewide. I know that as of 1999, at least Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia--had such programs--and by some accounts, all of these (except Tennessee) have been effective at reducing hospitalizations and improving the condition of mental patients who are so committed. Idaho (in some counties) has something called Mental Health Court that imposes similar rules on those with less serious criminal offenses who are mentally ill. Of course, as with all these programs, the threat of being institutionalized is one of the mechanisms used to ensure medication compliance. For those mentally ill who are well enough to understand and respond, this works. For those who are not that well, this provides a fast way to restabilize the person, without waiting for him to get to a point where he kills someone. And why is New York's involuntary outpatient commitment program called "Kendra's Law"? And ditto for "Laura's Law" in California. In both cases, they are named after a person who was murdered by a mentally ill person who desperately needed help from a society that was awash in bizarre fantasies about how the mentally ill would benefit from being deinstitutionalized. The New York Times has an impressive list of articles about Kendra Webdale, who was pushed in front of a subway train in midtown Manhattan on January 3, 1999 by Andrew Goldstein. Goldstein was one of those really smart people who was going to probably contribute something wonderful to the world, even if only in a small way. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York City's remarkable specialty public high schools. This isn't an easy place to get into, and being a graduate meant that he was going to be something some day. But at age 16, Goldstein started to show symptoms of schizophrenia--which became disabling in college. Eventually, after at least thirteen violent incidents, and frequent hospitalizations (usually not lasting for very long), he murder Kendra Webdale. One of the frequent claims that I see made is that it isn't possible to interest taxpayers in paying for adequate mental health treatment. I look at this long list of articles describing Goldstein's hearings and trials--and I know that processing it through the system wasn't cheap. I do not expect that we will see Goldstein back on the street anytime soon. Public mental hospitals weren't cheap; some states in the 1950s were spending almost half their budget on just mental hospitals. But tragedies like the death of Kendra Webdale aren't cheap, either. Labels: deinstitutionalization Solving the Roll Problem I mentioned a few days ago that I was thinking of using a piece of aluminum channel to solve the problem of the round tube (especially the part holding the main mirror) from rotating off the square tube that mounts to the dovetail plate. I've been doing the math, and I think I've got a reasonable solution. A channel definitely is stiff than a plate, but as the height of the verticals approaches zero, the more closely the channel approaches the stiffness (or lack of stiffness) of a plate. A channel that was 20.4" wide that captured both sides of the tube (as one person suggested) would be immensely stiff--and far too heavy. It would also be hard to find off the shelf! So, I have resigned myself to a channel of a more reasonable width, probably just a bit wider than the dovetail plate, which is four inches wide. A 5" wide channel that is .5" thick needs to have verticals that are .5" high so that the tube fits into the bottom of the channel, where the bolts lock the tube to the channel. (The verticals prevent rotation.) My first reaction was that a channel with such low shoulders isn't going to be a lot stiffer than a plate of the same width and thickness. Yet when I run the numbers, I get results that tell me that even with these low shoulders, it is really, really stiff! So much so that I don't trust my calculations. When computing deflection of a beam with a central support, the formula appears to be: deflection = FL^3/48*E*Iwhere F is the force, L is the length of the beam, E is Young's modulus for the beam, and I is the moment of inertia. E is approximately 70 GPa for aluminum. The moment of inertia for a plate is really simple: I=bh^3/12, where b is the width of the beam, and h is the height. Because the plate is different width and height, the moment of inertia in the Y-axis is 0.00000002 and 0.00000217 in the X-axis. (No surprise: the plate is more resistant to bending on the 5" than the 1/2" dimension.) Using this formula, a 5" wide by 1/2" thick aluminum plate with a 35 pound weight (156.07 Newtons) 18 inches (or .46 meters) from the end produces two results: a deflection in the Y-axis of 0.0002048 meters (.0081") and 0.0000020 meters (.0001") in the X-axis. The weight of the plate comes to 4.39 pounds. At this point, only the real engineers, or masochists (which are somewhat the same thing) are still reading. Now we do the more complex set of equations for computing deflection for a channel. Over at eFunda.com you can see this lovely set of equations for computing the moment of inertia for a square channel. I'm going to put my spreadsheet up at the end of this post for those who really want to check the math. (And if you do so--I'm grateful.) In this case, I'm using a channel that is 5" wide, 1/4" thick, with 1/2" high verticals (the right size to cradle the 20.4" tube). The moment of inertia in the Y-axis is 0.00000022, and in the X-axis, 0.00004966. Using the same force of 156.07 Newtons, the same length .46 meters (18"), gives an X-axis deflection of 0.00000009 meters (0.00000352") and a Y-axis deflection of 0.00002037 meters (0.00080216"). As you can see, this is substantially stiffer than a much thicker plate--and a weight of only 2.85 pounds. Anywhere, here's the spreadsheet. If you see any errors, let me know. UPDATE: I found a couple of errors in the spreadsheet--which actually understated the stiffness of the channel. I have updated it as of 2/28/08 9:28 PM Mountain time. Labels: telescopes Another Mental Illness Tragedy I blogged about this on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog last month. The first news accounts only described Marshall Fink as "mentally ill." There's a bit more about the tragedy in this February 26, 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article: WELDON SPRING — The veins in Marshall Fink's neck bulged with fury as he pumped his fist, telling his parents they should stick a shotgun in their mouths and pull the trigger.About 2.6% of the adult population suffers from bipolar disorder. Not everyone with bipolar disorder ends up as out of control as Marshall Fink. A lot of people with bipolar disorder manage to lead productive lives--using the energy in the mania stage to get a lot accomplished, and sleeping or sulking during the depressive stages. I've read that CEOs are disproportionately bipolar, and there are some astonishingly creative characters out there, such as Sir Isaac Newton and Howard Hughes, who are believed to have been bipolars whose condition was not severe enough to disable them. (Although Newton, in his later years, seems to have collapsed into a pretty severe depressive state.) From my reading, it appears that alcohol can pitch people with mild bipolar disorder over into acute bipolar disorder. I have watched several relatives whose acute bipolar disorder appeared shortly after they started smoking marijuana--and one of them has not recovered. Since marijuana appears to increase the risk of a psychotic breakdown by about 40%, I do not find it difficult to believe that it might play a part in aggravating bipolar disorder. This is part of the reason that I no longer regard legalization of marijuana as a great idea. Yes, most people who start smoking marijuana aren't going to suffer a psychotic break, or find their unrecognized bipolar disorder aggravated. But for those who do, it's tremendously bad news. Another interesting problem is that SSRI antidepressants, if prescribed without a mood stabilizer, can aggravate the mood swings of someone with bipolar disorder. One of the advantages of Prozac, when it was first released, was that it was relatively low risk for side effects, and so a lot of GPs were encouraged to prescribe it. Unfortunately, people suffering from bipolar disorder would show up at their doctor when they were depressed--not when they were feeling energetic and powerful. Not surprisingly, GPs assumed that they were treating depression--not the depressive phase of bipolar. And the mood swings would just get worse. If you have a really smart child who is also defiant and is rapidly getting out of control--you should at least consider the possibility that the problem is bipolar disorder. Until quite recently, psychiatry would not acknowledge that minors can suffer from bipolar disorder--partly because it is so difficult to easily distinguish from normal adolescent behavior. Demitri Papolos, M.D. and Janice Papolos's The Bipolar Child: The Definitive and Reassuring Guide to Childhood's Most Misunderstood Disorder is a good place to start. You may decide, after reading the Papalos's book, that you just have a strong-willed child. You may decide that it is time for psychiatric evaluation. Labels: mental illness Broken Telescope Mount Part I mentioned a couple of days ago that my attempt at using 5 minute epoxy to repair the broken part on this CI-700 mount was unsuccessful. This morning I took it in to Riverside Welding and Fab in Eagle for repair. Because this is cast aluminum, apparently you need to heat the part up before you can start welding--and the two pieces that broke off were so small that they were starting to melt before the welder could get the big piece hot enough. So the solution was that they welded a large piece of aluminum on in place of the broken parts, and cut off the excess. It doesn't look very good (especially because the original part was black anodized), but it works just fine. You have to look inside the mount to see the bare aluminum, so I consider this sufficient. (I might use some glossy black spray paint here in there to make it look a bit better.) I was also able to straight out the bent bolt. It still isn't perfect, but it is close enough that you have to look carefully to see the bend, and it works just fine. Best of all, it only cost $35 (their minimum shop charge) to have this done. Labels: telescopes Californians Concerned About Mental Illness Problems You might want to read this one. Apparently, SB1606 is under consideration, and would provide assisted outpatient treatment (which is a type of outpatient commitment) for every county in the state. A few counties have been operating such programs, but most apparently do not--including, from what I have read, San Francisco, which needs it more than most. The bill itself is a bit more complex than that. One provision would extend the 14 day intensive treatment period that is currently provided for those hospitalized under Cal. Welfare & Institutions Code sec. 5150 to include those who have been ordered into assisted outpatient treatment by a court. Another provision removes one of the notice requirements related to these hearings. I'm not quite sure why, and this probably won't survive a court challenge under substantative due process requirements. Other provisions that seem understandable and aren't obviously unconstitutional delete the requirement that those certified for assisted outpatient treatment get recertified every 60 days for the program. This makes perfect sense to me; most people with severe mental illness problems don't recover in 60 days. Many never recover at all. Recertification every 60 days seems like a lot of paperwork for no good purpose. Another provision changes the extension period for assisted outpatient treatment from 180 days to 360 days. This makes sense to me for the same reason as the recertification change. Most importantly: this bill would make assisted outpatient treatment programs available in every county in the state. That's a big win. It turns out that New York State has used a similar program for some years now. Here is a report from 2005 on the consequences. Over the roughly five four years the program was in effect, 10,078 persons were referred to the program; 4,041 were apparently determined to be ill enough that a petition was filed seeking to put them under this supervision. Of these, 3,766 persons were placed under supervision (meaning that 93% of the petitions were granted). The diagnosis of those placed under this outpatient supervision was 71% schizophrenic, 13% bipolar disorder. Unsurprisingly, a bit more than half had a combination of mental illness and a substance abuse problem. The rest of the report gives details on the improved situation of those who were placed on this program. I guess that most of you won't be surprised that the net effect was to substantially improve the condition of those who were now under court-ordered outpatient supervision. We probably aren't ever going to go back to the mental hospital system that we had in the 1960s. This may be an alternative for many of the mentally ill whose conditions just deteriorates until they die (the usual case), or until they become an ugly newspaper headline (a relatively rare situation). Labels: deinstitutionalization Islamic Extremism An interesting video by some random Briton that is a bit raw on language, but makes some important points about how multiculturalism is preparing Europeans to live under one culture's rules. I've just finished reading Robert Ferrigno's new book Sins of the Assassin. I'm going to need some time to gather my wits together enough to write a review as important as this book, and its predecessor, Prayers for the Assassin deserve. Labels: Islamofascism This Wouldn't Be Believable Fiction So instead, it becomes fact. From the February 25, 2008 Washington Times: Montana officials are warning that if the Supreme Court rules in the D.C. gun ban case that the right to keep and bear arms protects only state-run militias like the National Guard, then the federal government will have breached Montana's statehood contract.Now, I think this is something of an overreaction--but it does raise an interesting question: if the Supreme Court were to rule that the Second Amendment protects the right of the states to arm and discipline their militias without federal interference (a position that gun control advocates used to argue very seriously), then Montana would have the authority to issue machine guns, grenades, Stingers, etc. to the unorganized militia. Maybe the Court should go ahead and clarify that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, instead! And I thought Idaho was pro-gun! Here's the letter (scroll down a little). Labels: gun rights Finally: The Corvette Is Operable! The road out is good enough that I was able to drive the Corvette today--for the first time in about two months. While our driveway is pretty broken up from the TrailBlazer's narrower tires chewing up the mud, I was able to get down it and back--and the wide rear wheels on the Corvette seem to be flattening the ridges (which are still wet) nicely. It was very strange after driving nothing but a 4WD for the last two months to be so low to the ground. Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Idaho: Global Warming Nonsense Idaho Senate Concurrent Resolution 128 is supposed to be coming up to a committee vote in the Senate Resources & Environment Committee Wednesday afternoon. As regular readers of my blog know (or, for that matter, almost any other blog that pays attention to this question), anthropogenic global warming involves at least two highly arguable points: 1. Is there actually clear evidence of global warming? I'm inclined to think that there is, but the evidence is far from certain--and some of the data on this has experienced significant revisions of late. This is an especially troublesome question because many of the U.S. weather stations that feed data on the supposed warming--when inspected--turn out to have serious repeatability problems--such as 22 air conditioning compressors next to the station or a station at the end of a jet aircraft runway, or five feet from a burning barrel put in place when a condominium complex was built in a rural setting. 2. There is clear evidence that Mars has warmed since 1976--and by 0.5 degrees Celsius--an amount not much different from the claims of the AGW crowd. There is far less certain evidence that Neptune is getting more illumination as well--and again, roughly in parallel with the AGW claims. Pretty obviously, if, as some astrophysicists claim, the warming we experienced from the late 1970s to a couple of years back, is primarily the result of solar output changes, we're going to burn an enormous amount of money, impoverish a lot of people--and accomplish nothing. It's time to let members of the committee know that this "settled science" is far less settled than they want to believe. Here are the email addresses: gschroeder@senate.idaho.gov mpearce@senate.idaho.gov dcameron@senate.idaho.gov blittle@senate.idaho.gov jandreason@senate.idaho.gov ccoiner@senate.idaho.gov jsiddoway@senate.idaho.gov stennett@senate.idaho.gov dlanghorst@senate.idaho.gov Labels: global warming Monday, February 25, 2008
That Dirty Harry Line Remember the line in Dirty Harry where Sgt. Callahan tells the punk that he's holding a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum--the most powerful handgun in the world? Well, since then, more powerful handguns have been made--but even they don't really compare with this gem, the Pfeifer-Zeliska .600 Nitro Express Magnum, made in Austria. The video of it being fired is one of those reminders that there times that engineers come up with solutions to problems that do not yet exist. I suppose that there might be a need for this gun if rampaging elephants herds became a problem in urban areas. But other than that? This is one of those guns that, if you were mounted on roller skates, would make a tremendously expensive and noisy method of getting yourself up to speed. Labels: gun technology Epoxy As A Repair Agent For Aluminum I mentioned several days ago a stupid accident that snapped a couple of pieces of aluminum out of the CI-700 mount. I have not found any solution that I am completely happy with for fixing this. Welding the two broken parts back in place would require complete disassembly of the mount. There is a soldering product called Alumaloy--which appears to be largely zinc. You heat the aluminum parts up with a blowtorch, and that's hot enough to melt the zinc. Zinc is not as strong (or as flexible) as aluminum, but it isn't orders of magnitude worse than aluminum. A number of comments that I found indicate that Alumaloy works, but it isn't as easy as the demonstrations of it suggest. And I would still have to the take the mount entirely apart to do this. However, epoxy might make sense. Epoxy seems to have a yield strength in the 12,000-15,000 psi range, while aluminum is in the 15,000-20,000 psi strength range. This isn't going to be anywhere as strong, but it's worth a try. I've got some five minute epoxy that I used to repair the counterweight lock knob which broke, and while I will never want to treat it roughly, it doesn't seem to be preparing to fall apart. Once I have everything in position, I'll use the blow dryer to accelerate the curing process. It's a confined space, so this should work well. UPDATE: For some reason, the 5 minute epoxy would not set--and being as the broken parts were upside down, getting them to stay in position was hopeless. I'm told that J.B. Weld epoxy, which is made specifically for metals, works better. Fortunately I was able to disassemble the mount head, and ended up with a single small part with nothing electrical on it that I could feel comfortable taking to a welding shop.  Click to enlarge Labels: machining, telescopes Lawless San Francisco Government Residents of public housing projects in San Francisco are now receiving this new set of rules for tenants. Among the really idiotic provisions is section 1.9 of the rules: Firearms, Knives & Weapons -- Residents and their guests may not possess or store a firearm, BB gun, air gun, paintball gun, pellet gun or any other item that discharges ammunition, bullets, etc. Water guns are prohibited. Anything that looks like a gun or a weapon is prohibited. Use of any item as an imitation weapon is strictly prohibited. Use of any item including but not limited to knives, blades, swords, pipes, bats, sticks, batons, chains, tools, rocks and guns as a weapon or the threat of a weapon is strictly prohibited. Violation of this lease provision is grounds for immediate eviction.This means that if you legally have a gun for self-defense, you must now move out. If this were private housing, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I would at least acknowledge the right of the landlord to indulge his delusory theories of how to make the society safer. This, however, is public housing. The government is subject to a considerably stricter set of standards--including California Government Code sec. 53071 and 53071.5:
All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.You are probably asking yourself, "Water pistols? How many murders does San Francisco have with water pistols?" If California still allowed the sale of realistic water pistols, I might see their point. Back in the late 1980s, after several incidents where police officers fired on kids playing with overly realistic toy guns or pellet guns, the legislature changed the law to require them to orange or green--just to make sure that a cop wouldn't make a tragic mistake. I remember being in a park in San Jose when a big 11 year old walked in carrying what, from a distance, seemed to be a MAC-10. So why ban water pistols, if it isn't legal to sell realistic toy guns? I suspect that this is an attempt to create a culture in which little boys don't play with toy guns. This is doomed to failure. We had some friends in California who, like my wife and I, didn't want their kids playing with toy guns. There is an age where kids aren't clear on reality vs. play, and it seemed foolish to encourage this confusion. So inevitably, they found one of their little boys had grabbed a Barbie, bent the legs over to form the grip of the handgun, while the upper body became the barrel. "Bang, bang, bang!" I remember that the Clinton Administration tried to ban guns in Chicago public housing projects in the 1990s. My memories aren't perfect, but I think I recall that being the Clinton Administration, they decided, "Why violate only one provision of the Bill of Rights, when you can violate two?" I think a federal judge finally intervened and prevented them from doing door to door searches for guns. Can anyone point me to details of whatever federal court decision stopped this insanity? Now, I can understand how, if you were really delusional about how guns cause crime, you might decide that banning guns in public housing would make things better--you know, like banning guns on airliners. But there's a difference: there are metal detectors at the airport, and it isn't terribly easy to get a weapon onboard (unless you are a terrorist, of course). Public housing projects don't have checkpoints and searches going in and out. That still wouldn't work very well, but at least they would be attempting to disarm everyone going into the projects. A rule like this doesn't even attempt to disarm the bad guys. The only people that are going to obey this rule are the victims of the bad guys. UPDATE: I can't find the case myself, but apparently, Pratt v. Chicago Housing Authority, 848 F. Supp. 792 (1994) ruled against the Clinton Administration's attempts to do warrantless searches for guns--and the response was to create the lease requirement that San Francisco is now using. Labels: gun rights Channel vs. Tube Deformation As I mentioned a couple of days ago, it appears that the solution to the Big Bertha 2.0 problem is replace the 1" square aluminum tube with an channel. This will support the tube on both sides, instead of leaving it only supported at the point where the screws go through both parts.  I'm having a little trouble finding the formula for computing the deflection on a channel. I was thinking of using a 4" wide aluminum channel. Obviously, the wider the channel is, the more support the sides of the channel create on the tube, and the less strain it puts on the screws that hold the tube and channel together. Of course, the wider the channel is, the heavier it is, too. I have an intuitive sense that a channel is less stiff than square aluminum tube of the same dimensions because the channel is missing the top of the square. I also intuit that stiffness declines as the verticals of the channel get shorter. The ideal channel, from a longitudinal stiffness perspective, has the vertical as tall as the width of the channel. Obviously, the only way that I could use a channel like that for this application would be if the channel was 20.4" wide, and the verticals were 10.2" tall. Of course, that would be a very heavy channel. The thicker the channel, the more stiff it is longitudinally--but the heavier it is, too. My guess is that to get a channel of approximately the same stiffness as the 1" square tube (which was 1/8" wall) I will need a 4" wide channel that is 1/4" thick. I haven't done the trigonometry yet to figure out how tall the verticals will have to be to get the telescope tube assembly to fit to the bottom of the channel, but a 4" wide channel is going to have relatively short verticals. Perhaps I would be better off with a wider channel of a thinner material? The wider channel means taller verticals, and thus more stiffness with a thinner material. There's no magic solution on this--whatever I build is going to be heavier than the 1" square aluminum tube, I know that. Anyway, the net result is that I need a formula for computing how much deformation is created by applying force N on material with Young's mod |
