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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 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). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, August 16, 2008
Everything Is On The Web And I mean everything. I am looking for a 20-21" steel pan or ring for the double secret project, and I ran into this site, somehow: Autopsy and Morgue ScalesWell, someone has to sell them. It was just somehow, unexpected. Friday, August 15, 2008
Arming Teachers In Texas, where reality seems to be making a comeback. From the August 16, 2008 Austin American-Statesman:
Is this something to celebrate? I don't think so. But consider the alternatives. We've seen a bunch of tragedies over the last few years where sometimes adults, sometimes children, have come to school with the intention of committing mass murder--and for some reason, the laws prohibiting them from having a gun aren't very strong deterrents. Many of these disturbed creatures weren't expecting to ever be tried. All the gun-free school laws in the world wouldn't do any good at all. Remember the pedophile who barricaded himself inside a Amish school in Pennsylvania last year with the intent of molesting the girls, then committed suicide? Or the man who took girls hostage and molested them in Bailey, Colorado a few days earlier? He wasn't planning to be taken alive. Authorizing teachers to be armed to defend themselves and their students is a sign of how tremendously wrong our society has gone, largely because of the delusional ideas that caused deinstitutionalization. Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun self-defense How To Enlarge NATO Invade Georgia. What a surprise: Poland has agreed to base our missile interceptor system...right after Russia invades Georgia. And Russia responds in a way that demonstrates why this is a good idea. From the August 15, 2008 Associated Press: MOSCOW - A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile interceptor base exposes the ex-communist nation to attack, possibly by nuclear weapons, the Interfax news agency reported.I'll be curious to see how Noam Chomsky and the rest of the leftist lunatic fringe turn this into the U.S. is the source of all evil. I haven't said much about the Georgia matter, partly because I have been too busy to blog, and partly because I sensed that Georgian actions in South Ossetia might have given the Russians an excuse. But the scope of the invasion clearly takes this out of "we're just protecting the rights of South Ossetians" category, and when you see Russian soldiers burglarizing banks in Georgia, it does suggest that the old Russia is still there. I had some hopes in the 1990s that Russia might be able to move forward. Unfortunately, it wasn't that Communism destroyed Russia. It was that Russian traditions reinforced Communist barbarism. I remember reading somewhere, perhaps when I was taking Russian history in grad school, that the history of Russia is "Autocracy relieved by assassination." I think that we are going back into a Cold War--but at least many of the most technically advanced parts of the Soviet bloc are now on our side: Romania; the Czech Republic; Bulgaria; Poland. Thursday, August 14, 2008
Exercise: It Does A Body Good I've been working out at least twice a week, often three times a week--and it is showing. I can't say that I have gotten a lot thinner, but the blood work came back--and my doctor was pleased to see a significant change for the better on my cholesterol--and believe me, I haven't changed my diet. (A previous doctor put me on the cardboard and grass cuttings diet--it didn't lower my cholesterol; it just made me irritable.) The other good news is that my blood pressure was 128/74 today--and this is in spite of my employer terrorizing everyone with the prospect of getting laid off shortly. It won't be everyone, of course--we're making something like a billion dollars a year profit in the division that needs to have the fat cut out of it--but they are giving no one any clues. I was transferred to a new boss yesterday, so I assumed that this was a good sign. Why would they exert the effort to transfer me to a new boss (which I am sure cost them hundreds of dollars in administrative foolishness) if they were going to lay me off in two weeks? But my new boss told me not to get too confident; he has no idea if he will have a job in two weeks. Productivity, not surprisingly, has fallen like a stone. It is a good thing that I am trying to get this solar power startup going--good timing. Polishing Aluminum: A Dirty Job I needed to polish a large piece of aluminum to a reflective state--and what a lot of work this was, for only a so-so result. I started with 400 grit sandpaper, then advanced to 800, 1500, 2000, and 2500. (I went to Spray & Paint, an auto body supplies shop in Garden City to find the 2000 and 2500 sandpaper.) Then I used Mothers' Mag Polish with one of those rotary buffers that goes into an electric drill. I've done something similar before, and got much better results--not quite sure why. (I was polishing a 1/4" thick piece of aluminum last time--this is .025" instead.) I can recognize myself in the aluminum, but it isn't quite as shiny as it ought to be. And did I get dirty. Nor does the black aluminum oxide/polish mix come off your skin very easily. I have a vague awareness that flophouse hotel rooms into the 1960s sometimes had what were labeled as "unbreakable mirrors," which probably means that they were actually highly polished aluminum. Perhaps the next time I should look for a vendor of such. What's scary is that I don't know how I know about those unbreakable mirrors--but I'm quite sure that they existed, and were either labeled or advertised as such. Religion, Education, & Standards The August 14, 2008 Inside Higher Education has an article about the lawsuit concerning University of California's standards for recognizing private high school classes: I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the admissions officials. There are a lot of private schools in the U.S. Some of them are really outstanding; some of them are pretty mediocre. (Of course, that also describes a lot of public schools, also.)If you look at the admissions requirements of most colleges, you’ll find I can appreciate the concern that the University of California has about this. A teacher I know taught 7th and 8th graders in a private Christian school in California. The biology textbook had a definite fundamentalist streak to it, but was still pretty decent with respect to description, how systems work, and so on--until the subject of evolution came up. The book didn't even make a serious attempt to discuss evolutionary theory, its basis, or its weaknesses--it was simply childish insults. Not surprisingly, the teacher didn't use that part of the book. Instead, she and I worked together on producing a useful discussion of evolutionary theory, its origins, the philosophy and purposes of science. I'm sure that the kids ended up with at least as complete an understanding of evolutionary theory as they would have received in a public middle school--perhaps better. At the same time, there is a very serious issue involved here. If a state school treats certain positions as "wrong" or intellectually inadequate, and the state school's position is on something like evolution vs. creation, there is a serious question as to whether their actions run afoul of the First Amendment's establishment clause--or at least, if you interpret the establishment clause as broadly as the ACLU does when it comes to a Ten Commandments monument in a city park. In both cases, strictly speaking, the government is not recognizing an establishment of religion in the sense that the Framers meant. The Framers meant that the government should not pass a law that did anything relative to a particular religious body. (Hence that word "respecting"--meaning having any reference to, positive or negative.) No special tax break for Baptist churches--but if all religious institutions enjoyed a tax break, no problem. No special legal protection for Congregationalist churches--but a law that prohibited disrupting religious services would be perfectly lawful, as long as it protected all churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques (although that would have startled the Framers). No punishment of a particular church's method of worship--but a law that prohibited polygamy, as long as it applied to everyone, regardless of their reasons, would be Constitutional. The ACLU's notion that anytime government says something positive about religion, or encourages religious worship or belief, that it violates the First Amendment--that's an absurd stretch. The evidence is just not there that the Framers understood the First Amendment this broadly. But for those who insist on that reading--this case involving the University of California is perilously close. If they put students who attend private religious schools at a disadvantage because the values that those classes promote are religious--even if the objections aren't phrased in antireligious terms--then the government is saying that the values associated with some religious (Unitarians, Episcopalians) are acceptable, while the values associated with more fundamentalist religions are not. That's a pretty clear hostility towards the values of some religious establishments--in the same way that getting all twitterpated about a Ten Commandments monument on public property is expressing hostility towards the religious values of at least 2/3 of Americans (the percentage who regularly indicate that they have no problem with such displays). Still, some of U.C.'s concerns make me wonder if they have any idea what goes on in a lot of public schools who they doubtless consider orthodox: The judge’s decision goes through the various rejected courses and finds that the university’s rationale meets the “rational basis” test, and rejects arguments that there was evidence of religious bias. For example, one of the courses was an English course called “Christianity and Morality in American Literature.” The university noted that the text used “insists on specific interpretations” of various literary works, rather than allowing students to engage in critical thinking about them.Wow! A textbook that behaves like a few university professors that I've had! What a shocker! I wonder what their reaction would be to a biology textbook that "insists on specific interpretations" of the fossil record concerning evolution, or a science textbook that "insists on specific interpretations" of the motions of the planets with respect to the law of gravity. UPDATE: After I posted this, I was reminded of the situation in eighteenth and nineteenth century England, where Oxford and Cambridge required you to be Anglican to be student or faculty. One consequence was that Dissenters (essentially, all Christians who had disagreements with the Anglican Church) had to either lie, or attend the Dissenter colleges--which had the advantage that they were starting from scratch, and ended up for a while being well ahead of Oxford and Cambridge in practical subjects such as engineering. One consequence was that Dissenters ended up dominating Victorian industry. If it wasn't for the enormous subsidies that public schools enjoy that private schools do not, I suspect that something similar could happen here and now. If you think about it, with the exception of biology and cosmology, there would be no intrinsic disadvantage that evangelical Christian school preparation would suffer relative to public institutions. Labels: establishment of religion Interesting Health Insurance Strategy My wife has started working full-time at a private high school, and for the first time in many years, she has health insurance of her own, instead of through my employer. (There are disadvantages to working for universities--and how they treat adjuncts is one of those reminders that the most liberal parts of the society are among the least socially conscious.) What's very interesting is how the school has set up the health insurance--an interesting model that many smaller employers who can't afford to offer insurance to their employees might consider. The insurer is Blue Cross of Idaho, and there is a very high deductible: $1250 per year. The school reimburses 90% of the expenses paid to meet that deductible. This means that the school has much lower premiums than a conventional major medical insurance plan, and is effectively self-insuring for the majority of medical care that its employees will use. A major medical problem will rapidly run through the $1250 annual deductible, of course, and that's really for what you should have health insurance: the big disasters. I'm mentioned before that the way that most health insurance plans work makes very little sense for exactly this reason. Insurance should cover stuff that is very expensive but that you don't expect to happen consistently. This is why the various vision insurance plans make so little sense. Someone with glasses knows that every year or two, they are going to need an eye exam, and probably new glasses. Look carefully at what most of these vision plans cost, and what they cover, and it isn't clear to me that they make much sense. Labels: health care Spin, Not Green Here's another item out of the August 14, 2008 Inside Higher Education where again, a commenter immediately noticed what I had noticed: So what, exactly, does this ban accomplish, except inconvenience students who will now drive to school at the start of the semester, force them to find a spot off campus to park their car, and then drive it home again at the end of the semester? Like most environmentalism today, it's about appearing righteous, not being protective of the environment. UPDATE: A reader points out that the net effect is more likely that the freshman's parents will deliver their child to college, and then retrieve him from college. What was one round trip to school will now be two round trips to school--and with somewhat worse mileage, because the vehicle will have at least two, perhaps three persons in it for some legs. Labels: enviromental lunacy This Requires Training? The August 14, 2008 Inside Higher Education reports that the University of Iowa is going to start requiring sexual harrassment training for all faculty and staff. But reading their account of why they are requiring this caused me to ask the same question that one of the commenters there pointed out (great minds think alike): you really need training to recognize that this isn't appropriate? The University of Iowa plans to require all faculty and staff members to undergo sexual harassment training, The Des Moines Register reported. The announcement follows allegations that a professor — currently on leave pending an investigation — asked several female students to let him grope their breasts in return for higher grades. Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Another Endorsement for Barack Obama From the Communist Party, USA: Barack Obama is not a left candidate. This fact has seemingly surprised a number of progressive people who are bemoaning Obama’s “shift to the center.” (Right-wingers are happy to join them, suggesting Obama is a “flip-flopper.”) It’s sad that some who seek progressive change are missing the forest for the trees. But they will not dampen the wide and deep enthusiasm for blocking a third Bush term represented by John McCain, or for bringing Obama by a landslide into the White House with a large Democratic congressional majority.Along with Obama's endorsement by North Korea, Castro, and Khaddafi, what more could he add to the list? And you thought Jon Voight was off his rocker when he claimed that Obama would take us down the road to socialism? I'll be curious to see if Obama rejects this endorsement or not. I rather suspect that he won't, for fear of offending the billionaire's wing of the Democratic Party. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Worrying About The National Debt There's a new ad on the blog for a movie called I.O.U.S.A. I'm guessing that since they interview Warren Buffett and other billionaires that the proposed solution will be an increase in tax rates--not a reduction in spending. But what the heck: running deficits is really a bad idea. I wish that I could blame this on Democrats, but Republicans have been quite willing to whore after votes with various special interest spending projects the last few years. I try not to laugh when I see liberals worried about deficits. What next? Will John Edwards and Bill Clinton start making impassioned speeches about the importance of fidelity? Will Nancy Pelosi start arguing that young women are spending too much money on plastic surgery? Perhaps Michael Jackson will start warning parents of the dangers of child molesters. Here's a piece of bad news: President Clinton raised taxes in 1993 to solve the deficit. It made very little difference--because Congress (then controlled by Democrats) increased spending enough to wipe out most of the gain. What finally helped was when Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, and actually, for the first time in decades--cut spending. Deficits are bad. Raising taxes might be a partial solution to deficits. But when nearly all Democrats in Congress, and most Republicans, pass a $300 billion farm price support program that transfers taxes from middle class Americans to couples making $1.5 million a year--it is clear that most of Congress doesn't see a crisis. Democrats like Warren Buffett are hard to take seriously when they give money to people like Barack Obama--and then complain about the deficit. Labels: economics Monday, August 11, 2008
Thugs Intimidating Political Contributors Yup! There are people threatening contributors to political campaigns with legal action and attempts to poke into their private lives. And of course, it is liberals who are doing the threatening. From the August 8, 2008 MarketWatch: According the August 8 edition of The New York Times, Accountable America, a liberal group, plans to send a letter "to confront donors to conservative groups, hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions... The warning letter is intended as a first step, alerting donors who might be considering giving to right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives. The group is also hoping to be able to respond if an outside conservative group broadcasts a television advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama, or another Democratic candidate, by running commercials exposing the donors behind the advertisements."Liberalism is finally dropping its pretense of support for civil liberties, and exposing itself as the totalitarian movement that it is. And you will notice that they are backing Obama. What with liberal law professors defending "war crimes trials" for Bush after Obama takes office, on the theory that the Iraq War was equivalent to the Holocaust, any rational person who wants Obama in office obviously wants a civil war. Criminalizing policy disagreements for those who leave office is so Soviet Union. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Sunday, August 10, 2008
Confederates in the Attic Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War came out in 1998--and won the Pulitzer Prize. At the recommendation of some good friends, my wife and I just finished reading it. Ordinarily I wouldn't mention the demographics of the couple that recommended it--but it has some relevance, in a weird way, because of the subject matter of the book. They are a right-wing, gun nut, Jewish/American Indian couple--members of a remarkably small group, like left-handed lesbian Albanian-American midgets. I can see why Horwitz's book won the Pulitzer Prize. It is both serious and funny, both journalist as observer and journalist as participant--and while Horwitz drops a few hints that give you the idea that he's a liberal, he is not afraid to tell you all sorts of uncomfortable, Politically Incorrect details along the way. In part, it's a book about how some Southerners--to hear Horwitz tell it, actually a pretty large fraction--have still not worked their way past the Civil War. Horwitz came to the subject after a number of years abroad, covering foreign wars. He compared America's general amnesia about its past [with] lands where memories were elephantine: Bosnia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Aboriginal Australia. Serbs spoke bitterly of their defeat by Muslim armies at Kosovo as though the battle had occurred yesterday, not in 1389. Protestants referred fondly to "King Billy" as if he were a family friend rather than the English monarch who led Orangemen to victory in 1690. [pp. 5-6]Confederates in the Attic, however, follows Horwitz as hangs out with Southern Civil War reenactors for whom this is, shall we say, a bit more than an interesting hobby--people who are "hardcore" in their obsession with getting everything right: Between gulps of coffee--which the men insisted on drinking from their own tin cups rather than our ceramic mugs--Cool and his comrades explained the dinstiction. Hardcores didn't just dress up and shoot blanks. They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism proudced a time-travel high, or what hardcores called a "period rush."I've known a few Civil War reenactors in my day. Some took the authencity quite seriously; no coolers full of beer in their tents. But none of them were "hardcore" like this. Horwitz has some fun with the "hardcore" crowd's focus on losing weight (to look more authentic), sewing their own uniforms, and the like: Eavesdropping on the chat--about grooming, sewing, hip size, honed biceps--I could help wondering if I'd stumbled on a curious gay subculture in the Piedmont of Virginia.From there, Horwitz explores a darker, more worrisome side of "Confederate" America--people who are still nursing grudges about the Civil War--and making excuses for the Confederacy. If I hadn't met more than a few people like this over the years, I would find myself wondering Horwitz was exaggerating. But I'm afraid that he isn't. While Horwitz's conversations would suggest that many of these apologists are Republicans, I can say with some certainty that some are not. I've had a few conversations with a guy who would give the standard liberal, "Bush lied! People died! It's all about Halliburton and oil!"--and then insist that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery--it was all about capitalism exploiting the South--and then a few remarks to make it clear that us Northerners had no idea how horrible it was to live around black people. Now, at this point, you are probably sensing some sort of nasty liberal slam at the South, which has moved increasingly into Republican and evangelical Christian hands over the last several decades--and you would be wrong. Horwitz deftly examines how some of the people he talks to fit that category--and yet many others clearly do not. He recounts how some of these people acknowledge that United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans activities have replaced church involvement (p. 33). Evangelical Christians have been fretting of late about how church attendance is in serious decline in the U.S.--but liberals should probably not be uncorking the champagne, if Horwitz's accounts represent anything but a tiny fraction of Southerners. Horwitz does a pretty good job of showing that this emerging enthusiasm for a Confederate past that never was, while heavily concentrated among those of the lower economic strata, is by no means limited to those groups. He shows also how many of the methods and arguments of the black civil rights movement have been taken over by Southern nationalists, some of whom are overtly racists, and some of whom, I suspect, are simply tired of being assumed to be racists because they are white and Southern. Horwitz points out that shortly after the "X" hats became very popular among young blacks because of the movie about Malcolm X, T-shirts and bumper stickers appeared with the Confederate battle flag, and the caption, "You wear your X, we'll wear ours." The parallels between black pride and southern white pride have been obvious to me for many years--and with the same reason. You take pride in your race, ethnicity, culture, or gender because it is the one thing over which you have no control. There are things in which I take some pride: my ability to design and make products; my ability to develop software; my ability to write. But these are personal attributes that are primarily my doing--actions at which I have personally worked. I didn't choose to be white. I didn't choose to be an American. If you have nothing to be proud about that you have done--why, you can be proud of something that is an accident of birth. How silly. Horwitz also recounts a number of blacks with whom he spoke on his expedition that seemed to have absorbed many of the same worrisome, ahistorical views of the Civil War. A black man in a small town store insisting that the Civil War could not have been even slightly about slavery--because whites would never have done anything to help a black person. It had to be about capitalism and making money. Students in an alternative black school engaging in the same reductionistic, Marxian interpretations of the Emancipation Proclamation that I hear neo-Confederates and "Southern nationalists" make. Oddly enough, this strictly economic interest model--Marxian, because named for Marx--is one that Karl Marx explicitly rejected. He knew what the American Civil War was about: it was about slavery. Horwitz is very troubled to see how, according to people he talked in many of these communities, much of the self-conscious efforts by whites and blacks to bridge gaps in the 1970s, when public schools were integrated, seems to have collapsed by the mid-1990s. Black and white students he talked to admitted the racial cliques that Horwitz could see in lunchrooms were because both blacks and whites were simply not willing to cross racial lines. Some of the black adults he spoke to seemed to have become more enamored of Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism than building bridges across racial lines. Don't get me wrong. There are some uproariously funny parts--for example, the chapter devoted to Atlanta and the Gone With the Wind industry that has developed around it. It is astonishing how many people apparently travel to Atlanta, expecting to the plantation Tara--only to find out that the whole movie was filmed in the San Fernando Valley, outside of Los Angeles! He also explores the way in which Japanese tourists flock to this--and explores the cultural reasons why Gone With the Wind remains a significant cultural icon in a place about as foreign to Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler as you can imagine. But this is also a serious book a serious concern. Labels: book reviews They Allowed This On The Air In Britain? A reader pointed me to a very funny clip from a BBC comedy some years ago called Yes, Minister, about the bureaucrats who work for the prime minister. The DES is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education. |
