The advertising above is just a source of revenue, and sometimes, I don't know what will appear there.
Unique grips and accessories for your 1911!
Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.
Labels: telescopes Labels: enviromental lunacy A former Hauser city employee accuses a city councilwoman of offering her a city job, then retaliating against her when she declined sexual advances, according to a complaint filed with the Idaho Human Rights Commission. In the complaint, often the first step in a discrimination suit, former City Clerk Janet Crapo outlines alleged sexual harassment by Carmen Miller, one of four City Council members in the 670-person lakeside town. The allegations include home phone calls, questions about sexual orientation and other salacious comments. Crapo resigned as city clerk March 26 after 15 months on the job. Her last day was April 8. "I just don't want anybody to have to go through what I went through,"? the 51-year-old mother of two said in a phone interview. "I was so uncomfortable that I left a job that I really loved." Miller, who newspaper archives show has been involved in town politics since at least 1995, declined to comment, directing inquires to City Attorney Nancy Stricklin. Stricklin said the complaint is being treated as a tort claim and will be handled by the city's insurance company, the Idaho Counties Risk Management Program. ... Crapo began her job in December 2006, three months after she said she met Miller at a free fitness class offered twice weekly at the town fire station. The two seemed to become fast friends, Crapo said, and the two-day-a-week city clerk job Miller pitched sounded perfect. In the complaint, Crapo writes that Miller said the job would be great for her if she would "play the game."? "When I asked Ms. Miller what 'play the game' meant, she explained that it would be like any other job, you just have to 'play the game,' "? according to the complaint. In a short time, Miller began visiting Crapo at work, bringing her lunch or offering to take her out. Crapo claims Miller talked about having gay friends, discussed her own sexual orientation and showed pictures of herself in a bikini during a body-building competition in Hawaii. "I was so uncomfortable being around Ms. Miller, I would come home from work and cry or tell my husband that I did not want to go back because I was so uncomfortable," Crapo wrote. "I even spoke with my doctor about the situation." Crapo said she spoke with then-Mayor Ed Peone and City Council President Don Werst about the alleged harassment. After Crapo made it clear she wasn't interested in Miller, "she began picking me to pieces and making me look bad in front of the council members at our meetings,"? according to the complaint. Labels: homosexuality Labels: Idaho politics Labels: global warming Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: Idaho politics Labels: telescopes Labels: homosexuality Arthur Cunningham, 48, and Joseph Abraham, 65, both full-time evangelical ministers, have launched legal action against West Midlands Police, claiming the officer infringed their right to profess their religion. Mr Abraham said: "I couldn't believe this was happening in Britain. The Bishop of Rochester was criticised by the Church of England recently when he said there were no-go areas in Britain but he was right; there are certainly no-go areas for Christians who want to share the gospel." ... The preachers, both ministers in Birmingham, were handing out leaflets on Alum Rock Road in February when they started talking to four Asian youths. A police community support officer (PCSO) interrupted the conversation and began questioning the ministers about their beliefs. They said when the officer realised they were American, although both have lived in Britain for many years, he launched a tirade against President Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Cunningham said: "I told him that this had nothing to do with the gospel we were preaching but he became very aggressive. "He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said we were committing a hate crime by telling the youths to leave Islam and said that he was going to take us to the police station." Labels: freedom of religion, Islamofascism In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the "very effective targeted decapitation operations" that have removed "several echelons of commanders". This in turn has left the insurgents on the brink of defeat, the head of Task Force Helmand said. Labels: terrorism 2. Bestiality is not “my thing.” I have never participated in it and have no expectation that I ever will. But it seems to be a harmless foible or idiosyncrasy of some people. So, as long as the animal doesn’t mind (and the animal rarely does) I don’t mind, and I don’t see why anyone else should. If bestiality with consenting animals provides happiness to some people, let them pursue their happiness. That is Americanism in action. There doesn't seem to be any limits, once you abandon a Biblical morality, is there? Labels: homosexuality Labels: homosexuality Labels: telescopes Labels: humor Labels: Idaho politics April 17, 2008 Mr. David D. Ripley Idaho Chooses Life P.O. Box 8172 Boise, ID 83707 Dear Mr. Ripley: As I mention on the first page, I have moved over the last few years from reluctantly pro-choice (and, I should add, only for the first trimester) to mildly pro-life. Let me explain why I have moved the direction that I have, and why we are a little ways apart. There are strong similarities between the pro-choice arguments and the pro-slavery arguments in the period before the Civil War. As I researched my fourth book, Black Demographic Data, 1790-1860 (Greenwood Press, 1997), the similarities became more apparent, and my discomfort with my old position became stronger. In both cases, proponents argued that they had a right based in the Constitution—although slavery’s defenders at least had an historical basis for their claim. The right to abortion is based on a misreading of the Constitution in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which is in turn a misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment. A number of states, including California (of all places) have laws that expressly recognize the fetus as a human being—and an intentional killing of a fetus, except if committed by a doctor at the mother’s request—is homicide. This is derived from the common law recognition that once a fetus had started to kick, it was human. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England is explicit about this: once the “quickening” had occurred, killing the fetus was homicide. This is part of the section on “the right to life.” When I taught Constitutional history some years ago at Boise State, I had my students read that section. I wanted them to understand that contrary to the claims that pro-choicers like to make, this dispute isn’t modern at all. So if it’s human life—what makes it acceptable for a licensed physician to kill it with the mother’s permission? Does she own the fetus? The parallel to slavery was very disturbing—although again, slave owners at least acknowledged that slaves were human beings, and the laws at least theoretically prohibited masters from murdering their slaves. Another disturbing similarity popped up when reading Nat Brandt’s The Town That Started the Civil War, which details what happened when U.S. marshals and private slavecatchers took into custody a runaway slave from near Oberlin College in Ohio. The entire student body, and most of the professors, took up rifles, surrounded the hotel, and announced that the slave wasn’t going back South. With minimal bloodshed, the slave was spirited away. The ringleaders were soon known as the Oberlin Rescuers (rescue being a legal term for removing a prisoner from the custody of lawful authorities), and were charged under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The parallels between FACES and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 are also astonishing. The Fugitive Slave Act’s provisions concerning runaway slaves were Draconian--$1000 fines (equivalent to perhaps $20,000 today). More importantly, because this was a federal law, prisoners were not tried under state laws, in state courts, by juries of sympathetic Republicans, but tried in federal courts in largely urban areas where Democrat-dominated juries were less sympathetic. As the Oberlin Rescuers explained, when the laws of God conflicted with the laws of men, the laws of God took precedence. I have come to the conclusion that the internal inconsistencies of the pro-choice position, the disturbing parallels to slavery, and the gruesomeness of partial-birth abortion,[1] makes me quite interested in doing what Lincoln intended to do to slavery, when he was elected. Crush it out, as best he could, within the limitations of the law and human frailty. But how to do that? What is the most effective mechanism? Current Idaho law already goes as far as it can to prohibit abortion within the limits the federal courts have allowed. Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided—and even Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), while abandoning the strict scrutiny standard used in Roe, was still wrongly decided. Until the U.S. Supreme Court mends its activist ways, there’s not much Idaho can do with respect to first trimester abortions. Even if the Court does eventually return authority to the states to determine what the abortion laws should be, I am skeptical that a broad ban on abortion would be either enforceable or particularly effective, as long as support for abortion remains as strong as it is. Before Roe v. Wade, Oregon, for example, prohibited elective abortions except to save the life of the mother—and yet Oregon had 199 abortions per 1,000 live births in 1970.[2] Pretty clearly, doctors and pregnant women were ignoring the law. The progress that we have made in reducing abortion rates in recent years[3] is because pro-life forces have been effective at persuading women that abortion is wrong and they should either not get pregnant, or not abort a child if they do get pregnant. There is still a large fraction of Americans, and of Idahoans, who refuse to see elective abortion as evil. Many refuse to even see it as pragmatically bad. The more Idahoans that we can persuade that abortion is either wrong or at least an incredibly destructive type of birth control, the fewer abortions there will be, and the easier it will be to pass much more restrictive measures when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. I would say that as long as 20% of Idaho’s population considers abortion to be acceptable, passing a more severe restriction would be politically divisive—without being particularly effective at reducing the abortion rate. The parallel to slavery—which was prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment—is quite strong. Slavery went away in the formal sense, but debt peonage, the sharecropping system, and the renting out of prisoners to private employers for the most trivial of crimes, meant that conditions were still abominable into the 1960s. Why? Because the hearts of white Southerners hadn’t changed. What’s the most effective way to do this persuading? Remember: we aren’t trying to persuade the adamant pro-choice activists. Many of them have their own personal tragedies that drive them, traumas of long ago that make it impossible for them to bend. We are trying to persuade people in the middle—those who are uncomfortable with abortion, don’t like it used as birth control, but aren’t prepared to support too broad of a ban. Things we can do: I support laws that provide women more information about the consequences of abortion as a requirement for abortion. The more information that is available about some of the long-term health risks, the fewer abortions there will be, and the greater willingness of pregnant women to see abortion not as a choice, but as something really gruesome. I have pointed to a few situations where it is very, very difficult for me to oppose abortion: anacephaly (short, meaningless lives, with no chance for repair, and no prospect of survival); Tay-Sachs disease (short, incredibly painful lives). I’m sure if we spent some time at it, we could find a few other examples of horrifying, terminal, non-treatable conditions where abortion is an act of mercy. This doesn’t mean that every defect justifies abortion, especially as the science of in utero surgery continues to advance. (Britain has had a spate of abortions because of clubfoot, for example, even though this is a readily correctable problem.[4]) But these tragedies are reminders that any restrictions on abortion must be based on both respect for human life and a recognition that certain congenital mistakes may justify abortion as an act of mercy. Very Truly Yours, Clayton E. Cramer [1] See Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-380.pdf, for an extraordinarily detailed description of the procedure, clearly intended to impress upon anyone reading it the barbarism of the procedure: The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed. A doctor may make 10 to 15 passes with the forceps to evacuate the fetus in its entirety, though sometimes removal is completed with fewer passes. [2] John R. Lott and John E.Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births" (April 30, 2001). Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=270126 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.270126, Table 1. [3] SJ Ventura, WD Mosher, SC Curtin, JC Abma, S. Henshaw, “Trends In Pregnancy Rates For The United States, 1976–97: An Update.” National Vital Statistics Reports; vol 49 no. 4. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics. 2001, Table 3, available at http://origin.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_04.pdf. [4] Sarah-Kate Templeton, “Babies aborted for minor disabilities,” Sunday Times, October 21, 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2689787.ece, last accessed April 17, 2008. Labels: abortion
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
Click here to find out why the Amazon.com Honor System paybox is no longer here.
RSS feed
Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
archives
Search only this site: Click here and enter your search string at the beginning of the search field.
It's Been Busy Around Here...
ScopeRoller seems to be averaging almost an order per business day now--which doesn't sound like much, but they are a diverse range of casters assemblies, so there's no great advantage to doing a production run all alike--and it is hard to keep enough stock on hand, because it is always different sizes.
The double secret project is also gobbling up lots of time--all the desire to make the working model beautiful (as opposed to merely functional) is making it take longer than it should. It is astonishing how beautiful a piece of boring aluminum is once you have used Mother's Mag Wheel polish on it!
Nuclear Power in Elmore County
I received the following announcement, and thought my readers in Idaho would find it of interest:
Remember that the 1% of the population of Elmore County that are raving leftist environmentalists will show up and start talking about three eyed fish and other evidence that their knowledge of nuclear power comes from 1950s science fiction movies and watching The Simpsons.
June 2, 2008
For more information, contact:
Martin Johncox, IEC spokesman, 208-658-9100
Don Gillispie, CEO, 208-939-9311
Idaho Energy Complex representatives will hold public meetings on Tuesday, June 10 and Monday, June 16 to inform the public about their plans to build a 1,600-megawatt nuclear reactor in Elmore county.
The June 10 meeting will be held from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Mountain Home Junior High School Gym, 1600 East 6th South in Mountain Home. The June 16 meeting will be held from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Glenns Ferry Opera House, 208 East Idaho Avenue in Glenns Ferry. Boise City Councilman Jim Tibbs will moderate the meetings.
Don Gillispie, president and CEO of the Idaho Energy Complex, noted Idaho Power’s recent decision to raise rates by an average of nearly 11 percent, in part because the company was forced to buy electricity out-of-state to meet demand last year.
“Idaho seriously needs in-state generating capacity to keep our costs down,” Gillispie said. “Our homes, farms, factories and businesses need it and Elmore and surrounding counties will especially benefit from the economic impact of the plant.”
An economic study calculated the IEC would grow employment in Elmore and Owyhee counties by 25 percent and produce total annual labor income benefits in Owyhee and Elmore counties of $52.3 million during operation. Building one reactor would contribute $2.6 billion to the State’s economy, boosting it by nearly 6 percent, while its operation will generate $74 million in state tax revenues a year.
The Idaho Energy Complex (www.idahoenergycomplex.com) will be a 1,600-megawatt; $4.5-billion advanced nuclear reactor with low cooling water requirements located about 65 miles southeast of Boise, in Elmore County. The plant will also include a biofuels component, using excess reactor heat to produce fuels from local ag waste and crops. Company officials plan to submit a Combined Operating License Application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2009. The approval process is expected to take three years and cost $80 million. Construction could begin as soon as 2012 and finish with power generation beginning in late 2016.
I've always thought that nuclear power could be done right. The environmentalists whine about carbon dioxide; they won't allow drilling for oil in ANWR; they want the existing hydropower dams breached; they won't allow drilling for oil off the coasts of California or Florida (although the Chinese are apparently slant drilling from international waters off Florida); this June 2, 2008 Associated Press story reports that the first new refinery in decades has been approved in South Dakota. Nuclear power is one of the few options left.
Sexual Harassment Case
Bryan Fischer at Idaho Values Alliance discussed this complaint to the Idaho Human Rights Commission in the context of sexual orientation discrimination, but the charge in this case is actually far more serious. From the June 5, 2008 Spokesman Review:
I don't know if Crapo's complaint is valid or not. I tend to be a little wary of sexual harassment claims because many of them are not as clear-cut as the phrase suggests.
Cases where a supervisor or co-worker either requires or hints that sex is part of the requirements for keeping a job get no sympathy from me. This is clearly sexual harassment. Vulgarity also gets no sympathy from me--although we seem to be living in an increasingly vulgar society. If such vulgarity is directed at someone (usually a woman) for the purpose of making them uncomfortable on the job, that's sexual harassment.
However, at least some of the sexual harassment claims that I have seen made over the years are a bit over the top. In some federal circuits, women have filed and won sexual harassment claims because of pinups on the walls of the workplace creating a "hostile work environment." This is definitely an ugly situation, and I can see the point of these suits, especially if guys are making vulgar or suggestive remarks about the pinups--but there really isn't a clear dividing line between appropriate material and inappropriate material in the workplace. In other cases, I have seen a compliment turned into a sexual harassment claim.
So far, all we have is Ms. Crapo's side of the story--and it wouldn't be the first time that someone has made such charges without merit. But I have read far too many similar news accounts over the years where it did indeed turn out that a lesbian used her power to attempt to get sex from a female employee--behaving as badly as a few piggish men do.
This claim, if Ms. Crapo's version of it is what happened, is not discrimination based on sexual orientation; a lesbian who resented being harassed into sex by an employer would have just as valid a complaint, as would a man being harassed by a woman supervisor, or a woman being harassed by a male supervisor. Senator Corder's sexual orientation bill would have added nothing to Ms. Crapo's standing on this.
The Last Postmortem on the Campaign
I attended the Boise County Republican Central Committee's reorganization meeting. (They apparently had gone moribund some time back, as I discovered during the campaign.) I had a chance to talk to a number of those present--several of whom expressed great surprise that I lost the primary, especially since I was much more in tune with what they perceive as the political sympathies of most Boise County Republicans. I did hear a few interesting aspects which may partly explain my loss:
1. When Corder first got himself elected in 2004, he visited every business in the district, trying to drum up support. He has name recognition because of it.
2. Yes, the mailers from IACI PAC did come across as too slick, too professional for our district. As one person put it, "When I saw these, I said, big money from out of state." (And this is someone who still voted for me.) In fact, IACI PAC's funding, I think, is all from within Idaho. Corder's pathetic, amateurish mailers...were exactly right for this district.
3. Only some noticed that my campaign sent out mailers, and that the others were from IACI PAC. They were similar enough in graphic layout (although not in content) that many of those present assumed that they were all from the same organization. And these are considerably more politically aware voters than I would guess the average Republican in Boise County.
I have also concluded that while there were people who were genuinely upset about IACI PAC's inappropriate use of a picture of a soldier in uniform, there are others who I believe were just Corder supporters trying to stir up trouble.
Someone named Geoff commented over at IdaBlue attacking me for not doing enough about the IACI PAC mailing. At first I assumed that he was a genuinely upset veteran--who apparently went out and got Corder yard signs because of the IACI PAC's inappropriate use of that picture. But when I asked him why he would vote against me for something that I didn't do, didn't like, and had no control over, his response was this:"I didn't do it"... "It wasn't my fault"..."It was something I had no control over"..."I don't like it either".......as opposed to "I will put a stop to it immediately, and their apology is forthcoming"- which one sounds like a victim, and which one a leader? I will vote for a leader over someone who chooses to be a victim.
My response:Geoff, I was prepared to believe your claim that you weren't a Corder partisan using a legitimate complaint as a basis for attack. But no longer.
I'm no longer assuming that Geoff is what he claims.
You tell me that I should have said: "I will put a stop to it immediately, and their apology is forthcoming"
How do I stop it? In case you haven't noticed, there is this little thing called freedom of speech. I don't have the authority to stop someone else from mailing campaign materials. Even government officials don't have the authority to do that.
And how do I force a group that doesn't even want me to inform them of my campaign activities to apologize?
The Global Warming Scam Bill Is Before The Senate
For those of you from Idaho, Senator Crapo has apparently not made up his mind yet. Give him a ring at 202-224-3121 and ask him to vote against the Lieberman-Warner global warming tax bill. For the rest of you, what the heck: call the number, and let your U.S. Senators know how you feel.
Regular readers of my blog know that how much of the warming is anthropogenic remains open to serious debate--if any. Further, the temperature drop last year coincident with a dearth of sunspots argues that if there's something behind the process, it is one that even the U.S. Congress lacks the power to stop.
And remember: a lot of rich people intend to get even richer off this "cap and trade" scheme. The fact that Democrats are behind it should tell you that this is about stealing from the middle class and giving to the rich.
The Fractured Party
I mentioned in March a national poll that found very large numbers of Clinton backers who indicated that they would not vote for Obama in the general election. This June 4, 2008 The Politico article indicates that the problem is continuing--perhaps even getting worse:On the night that Barack Obama clinched his party's nomination, one-third of Hillary Clinton's supporters in Montana and South Dakota said they would not vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Instapundit points out that some of this sour grapes won't last, which is certainly true. How many left-wing Democrats threatened to move to Canada after the 2004 election? And how many actually did? Of course, failing to vote for Obama--or even voting for McCain, as some of the Clinton backers in the March survey indicated they would do--is a lot easier and lot less painful than moving to another country.
What's driving this, "No we can't" response? I'm sure that there is some racism involved. And I'm sure that there is some feminist fury that Clinton didn't get the nomination. But Obama is well to the left of much of the Democratic Party--and there are a lot of moderate to even conservative Democrats who recognize that civilization comes first. Barack Hussein Obama seems not to fully understand the seriousness of the battle between civilized behavior and those who use power tools to torture people to death.
Idaho Statesman Reporter Called Me Up
He wanted to talk about the campaign and the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI), whose PAC sent out mailings supporting me that I now know did me some damage--and may not have done me much good. I did my best to emphasize that the laws concerning independent election campaigns are the real problem, but I will be only slightly surprised to see an article in the Statesman shortly with the headline:IACI Wanted Me To Bear Their Alien Love Child!
Not Stiff Enough
Big Bertha 2.0 isn't stiff enough. It won't hold collimation as I move it across the sky. A little experimentation with the laser collimator in place, watching where the laser spot moves on the diagonal mirror, suggests that the 4" wide aluminum channel is stiff enough--but the 1" square aluminum tubes are not.
There's a reason that Serrurier truss designs are so popular--and I guess that I just didn't want to accept that there was a reason for this. A Serrurier truss (like the example shown at Moonlite Telescope Accessories) is a series of triangles that hold the two ends of the telescope in the correct position. Because they are triangles, they hold the parts in tension.
I'm still learning, but the most obvious solution for me is to buy two double ball and socket blocks to put on the focuser cage, and four single ball and socket blocks to put on the mirror cage. (Since I already have to have the 4" wide aluminum channel to mount the telescope to the equatorial mount, and this is very, very stiff, I'll leave it place.) The aluminum tubes fit in between these ball and socket blocks. The total weight of these parts is quite small--comparable the square aluminum tubes that I have on there now. It will mean putting a few more holes in the two cages, but perhaps I will be able to patch over the existing holes when I am done.
Censorship at the Nampa Public Library
The book is called The Joy of Stomping Perverts. It tells readers how to find gay bars, tactics to use when following homosexuals out of the bar to make sure that your victim is alone, how to beat homosexuals to death for maximum suffering, how much fun it is to do this, what sort of legal defenses to use when prosecuted ("I was drunk," "I was suffering a homosexual reaction panic"), etc. This important piece of intellectual discourse is no longer available to children!
Whoops! I screwed up a bit. That's not the title. Nor is that the subject matter. The title is The Joy of Gay Sex and it includes, according to the Idaho Values Alliance, it "includes an entire chapter on 'Daddy-Son Sex Fantasies'." (Where, oh where, did that nasty stereotype of homosexuals as child molesters come from?)
But if a book like The Joy of Stomping Perverts existed, and was on the shelf at Nampa Public Library, do you suppose that liberals would be happy having tax dollars buy that book and take up space that might be used to put a decent and useful book in its place? I'm sure the ACLU would still be defending The Joy of Stomping Perverts--but I rather doubt that most of those whining about the Nampa Public Library's actions would be so outraged.
Places That You Aren't Allowed To Evangelize
No, not public schools in the U.S.--public streets in Britain. From the June 2, 2008 Daily Telegraph: A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham.
The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a "hate crime" and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that "no-go areas" for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.
You Won't Be Seeing This On The Evening News
From the June 2, 2008 British Telegraph:Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have "decapitated" the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a "tipping point", the commander of British forces has said.
The new "precise, surgical" tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.
What's Next?
This is a pretty disturbing blog entry. Americans for Truth About Homosexuality is often a bit harsher in its tone than I prefer, but they bring up some important stuff that the mainstream media, in their efforts to normalize homosexuality, prefer to not cover. For example, the International Mr. Leather sadomasochism convention held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago recently, at which, among other things, coprophilia and bestiality videos were for sale. And in response to Americans for Truth About Homosexuality's coverage of this, Frank Kameny, one of the pioneers of gay rights, responded with a letter:
Colorado's New Law
I saw these disturbing news accounts, and found myself wondering, can this be true? From May 29, 2008 World Net Daily:With today's signature on SB200, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, has eliminated gender-specific restrooms and locker rooms statewide, giving woman and girls reason to fear being confronted by predators, cross-dressers "or even a homosexual or heterosexual male," according to a critic.
The bill, SB200, is here. It adds sexual orientation to the already pretty substantial list of prohibited forms of discrimination, and indicates that it applies to:
The state's new "transgender nondiscrimination" bill makes it illegal to deny a person access to public accommodations, including restrooms and locker rooms, based on gender identity or the "perception" of gender identity.
Ritter signed the Expanded Discrimination Prohibitions, approved by the legislature, with this definition:
"'Sexual orientation' means a person's orientation toward heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender status or another person's perception thereof."
"Who would have believed that the Colorado state legislature and its governor would have made it fully legal for men to enter and use women’s restrooms and locker-room facilities without notice or explanation?" said James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, the Christian publishing and broadcast ministry in Colorado Springs.any place of business engaged in any sales to the public and any place offering services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to the public, including but not limited to any business offering wholesale or retail sales to the public; any place to eat, drink, sleep, or rest, or any combination thereof; any sporting or recreational area and facility; any public transportation facility; a barber shop, bathhouse, swimming pool, bath, steam or massage parlor, gymnasium, or other establishment conducted to serve the health, appearance, or physical condition of a person; a campsite or trailer camp; a dispensary, clinic, hospital, convalescent home, or other institution for the sick, ailing, aged, or infirm; a mortuary, undertaking parlor, or cemetery; an educational institution; or any public building, park, arena, theater, hall, auditorium, museum, library, exhibit, or public facility of any kind whether indoor or outdoor.
I can't see anything here that specifically requires restrooms to be available without discrimination--but I also don't see anything that exempts restrooms, locker rooms, or other traditionally single-sex facilities from this law. I don't see any lawful way for a business to tell a cross-dressing man that he can't use the women's restroom, or the women's locker room.
It is rather amazing how rapidly Colorado has turned around. In the 1990s, a majority of the voters passed an initiative specifically to prohibit the state and local governments from passing such laws--and now the Colorado legislature has passed such a law. I never cease to be amazed at the amount of power that 3% of the population is able to exert.
Ordinarily, stuff like this is imposed by the judiciary--not the legislature, because Christians still have enough influence to block it. It's a shame that evangelical Christians (who are about 30% of the population) aren't committed to their position as strongly as homosexuals are committed to theirs.
Big Bertha 2.0: Finally Clear Weather
We finally had clear skies last night. After fiddling a bit with the collimation, I aimed at Saturn and I was reasonably happy. There was a bit of turbulence, so I was only getting fraction of a second periods when the image was really sharp. I didn't get any advantage going above 160x, but then again, with a mirror this large, 160x provides as much resolution as the 8" reflector does at 235x. (A 17.5" mirror should do better, actually, but this is only a so-so mirror.)
I'm still working on getting the balance correct, but at least the mount is able to track Saturn across the sky. I was still seeing some slight discrepancies--perhaps because I wasn't aligned on Polaris (which I couldn't see--at this latitude, darkness comes very late in June), and perhaps because I still need to move the scope a fraction of an inch to get the balance correct.
Tonight I may try and getting the digital setting circles working well enough to go hunting galaxies.
No Gangster Left Behind
Amusing video that includes an idea that I had many years ago when I lived in Los Angeles for how to solve the problem of gangsters hitting innocent bystanders--especially since Los Angeles politics is so stinky that no one is willing to tackle the root problems of gang violence.
Sign Removal & Surprising Encouragement
Yesterday afternoon and today afternoon were both spent retrieving "Cramer for State Senate" signs from roadsides. Nearly every sign I put up in Boise County was still there, so we got nearly all of them back.
In Elmore County, not a single one of my signs remained. At first, we thought that either city crews or public spirited sorts had just gone through and indiscriminately removed every campaign sign, but we found a few signs from other campaigns still in the places where our signs had been--so I suspect that every campaign did what it is supposed to do--and my volunteers over in Elmore County removed our signs.
My wife was out for a walk, and ran into the wife of one of the local real estate developers. The wife told my wife that I should try again. She was apparently quite impressed with my ideas--once she had read enough to understand what I was talking about. (Perhaps this isn't a good sign for the reading level of the campaign flyers I produced.)
Another Mistake in the Campaign
I mentioned a few days ago that I feared that the simple yes/no answers on the Idaho Chooses Life and Cornerstone Institute surveys may have hurt with people in my district--since the rather detailed explanations that I included were not. Here's the letter that I wrote to Idaho Chooses Life at the time. In retrospect, I suppose that I should have recognized that anything but 100% agreement wasn't going to go over well.
