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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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Friday, January 02, 2009
The Modern Language Association The MLA is the academic association for English professors, and I confess that I have less than warm feelings about them. If Ambrose Bierce were updating his Devil's Dictionary for modern conditions, he would list MLA as a synonym for Political Correctness. So I was not surprised to see this discussion in the January 2, 2009 Inside Higher Education of a recent panel at an MLA convention. I'm quoting rather carefully from the article, because some the language is a bit too...modern...for my blog. (Do you remember when the use of vulgar language was the sign of a poorly educated person?) Some of the comments by readers of the article about this panel at a supposedly academic conference are rather entertaining: Is this what students, their parents and taxpayers are subsidizing instead of classroom instruction?The short answer: yes. And a lot of stuff not even this valuable in many classrooms. And this marvelously clever observation (someone must have done well on the analogies section of the SAT): To me, this panel’s work seems like the scholarly equivalent of Britney Spears’ publicity strategy; if you can’t sing well, wear skimpy clothing. Labels: academic integrity ScopeRoller Orders Flying In Okay, not enough to quit the contract C# work, but suddenly I'm getting lots of orders, in the dead of winter. And lots of nice remarks from customers who have received their shipments: Hi Clayton, Got the plugs in Wed mail. Thanks for the super fast shipping--it's amazing. Hat's off to you for running a real customer oriented business. You rank right at the top!and from someone replacing a Scope Buggy with my product: The advantages are that the tripod now takes up less space in the garage, I frequently 'tripped' on or over the large wheels in the dark while using the scopebuggy, and I never quite felt completely comfortable with the 'fit' of the tripod legs in the rings provided. (Too much 'extra' room in those rings.) Labels: machining, telescopes Annoying Design Flaw in the Jaguar's Key I was wondering why the "door ajar" icon keeps appearing--and I have to keep running back and closing the trunk. It turns out that the way that I grasp the remote control when starting the car, I keep hitting the "open trunk" button. I just have to retrain myself a bit, I think. Labels: cars A Neat Product: The Womb Bear My wife and I went over to babysit our granddaughter (boy, that still sounds weird) on New Year's Eve so that our daughter and son-in-law could get out for an elegant meal without the baby. She was generally pretty calm, but at a certain point in the evening, Olivia would start crying as soon as we stopped holding her, and put her to bed. My wife thought about this for a couple of minutes, and then remembered that someone, somewhere, had given our daughter a stuffed bear with a wind-up mechanism that simulates the sound of the human heart (assuming that you are still in the womb--there's a "wooosh" sound to it). Sure enough, we dug into the closet in the baby's room, put the Womb Bear in the crib, and then quickly transferred her from my wife to the Womb Bear--and Olivia just kept sleeping. Thursday, January 01, 2009
Jaguar X-Type Here are my impressions, now that it is out of the body shop, and I have a bit more chance to drive it. A friend described his Jaguar as the most comfortable car he has ever owned for high speed travel. I agree. It's not a sports car--but it is a very comfortable ride without being soft. It has road feel. You can tell when you are changing from one road surface to another, and it corners with great certainty and aplomb. But it is never harsh. My wife (who has always found the Jaguars to be very attractive) says it is the quietest car in which she has ever ridden. Tire noise is by far the biggest problem--and that's almost nothing, except on a few roads where there is some interaction between the tread of the all season tires and the pavement. It is far more quiet than the Corvette, of course, but it is even more quiet than the 2000 Impala LS that I owned, and I would say as quiet (or perhaps more quiet) than the Cadillac CTS I rented in Ohio a couple of years back. The Jaguar does not have the gut wrenching torque of the Corvette, of course. The saying that there is no substitute for cubic inches is really true. The Jaguar has a 3.0L V6; the Corvette has a 5.7L V8--and the Corvette weighs several hundred pounds less, as well. But the Jaguar is very responsive, and the five speed automatic transmission is really quite effective at finding the right gear when you stomp on the accelerator--it has a lot of choices to pick from when you are in top gear! As of last night, we were just about out of snow, and there was nothing on the roads down in the Boise area, so I was able to try the Jaguar out a bit more on dry roads. It corners well--not with the "my stomach is trying to move outside my body" force of the Corvette, but the full-time 4WD system means that the Jaguar feels extremely surefooted as it goes around corners in a way that the Corvette does not. The Corvette will certainly outcorner the Jaguar, but the Jaguar feels very calm and collected at its ultimate cornering limits; the Corvette, at its much higher cornering limits, requires a lot more care and attention to avoid at least embarrassment, if not worse. Compared to the Corvette (at least my 2000 Corvette), there are some areas where the Jaguar feels a bit primitive. I've gotten so used to the heads-up display on the Corvette that looking down at the dash to read the speed from a dial seems positively twentieth century. In addition, the Jaguar's speedometer is a bit harder to read than the Corvette, with divisions too close together. What is especially unfortunate is that the Jaguar has a 150 mph speedometer, even though it is speed governed to 122 mph--but I think that they were trying to share the speedometer with the Sport model, which I believe may have had a 140 mph governor to go with the higher speed tires. (Or tyres, as the Jaguar manual likes to call them.) I really like the steering wheel mounted stereo controls--but unlike the 2000 Impala LS which also had such controls, the Jaguar's channel selection button only advances through the button presets--you can't use the channel seek without reaching over to the dashboard. On the plus side, you can set at least nine button presets per band, which should be enough. Except, of course, that Bend has different stations than Boise. One surprise to me is that the Jaguar has sensors in the back of the car that detect when you are within 12 inches of something--useful for avoiding parallel parking embarrassments (not that this could ever happen to me, of course), and backing into walls. There was an option for this on the front end as well, but mine does not have this option. Heated seats with memory settings were also an option that sounds pretty neat, but I thinking having a remote starter installed might be a more cost effective way to make it tolerable climbing into leather seats when it's 25 degrees outside. When you turn on the defroster, it also electrically heats the side view mirrors, which should both remove snow and fog. The salesman tells me that the 2005 X-Type manual is no longer available--and he remains quite sure that it was in the car when we picked it up. The body shop doesn't know where it went, and claims that they would not have had any reason to look at it, which makes sense. My only other option is the PDF on the Jaguar website. I pulled it into Adobe Acrobat, used the Crop tool to cut it down ot the actual contents of the printed pages, then used Adobe Reader 8.0 to print it in booklet mode. The trick to making this work well is not to print all 200 pages as a single booklet--then you end up with a very thick wad of paper all folded over. Instead, I printed it in 32 page chunks, double-sided, so that I now have a series of fasciles, each of which is relatively thin and easy to open, which tomorrow I will have Kinko's bind. This is very much the way that real books are printed--a series of individual chunks, which are then bound together. The garage isn't big enough for the Jaguar, the TrailBlazer, and the Corvette, so the only sensible choice was to put the cars that we drive daily inside. The Corvette is now sitting under a car cover on the back driveway, whimpering and whining that it isn't good enough to sleep indoors with the newer cars. If I can get a permanent job--or maybe if I just feel a bit more willing to spend some money this summer--I'll have a separate two car garage/workshop built on the south part of the platform, and then the Corvette, the machine tools, and the telescopes can go in there. Labels: cars National Park Service Rule Change You are probably aware that the National Park Service is changing the rule about loaded firearms in national parks to conform to the surrounding state. So, if the surrounding state allows concealed carry of handguns by permit holders (or in the case of Alaska or Vermont, by anyone who can legally possess a handgun), then you can carry in the national park within that state. Well, shock of shocks, the Brady Campaign has filed suit to block this rule change, claiming, among other things, that the rule would allow carrying on the National Mall in DC (even though concealed carry is very tightly restricted in DC) and Ellis Island (where the surrounding state is New York). More details of the idiocy at Arms and the Law. Labels: gun rights Weird: Obama's Successor's Resume in Granite Governor Blagojevich's arrogance in picking a successor to Senator Obama is exceeded only by the weirdness of this December 31, 2008 CNN news story: (CNN) -- Anyone who doubts Roland Burris' qualifications to serve as the next senator from Illinois may want to head to Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery.If Burris left detailed instructions of what he wanted on his tomb, I could understand that. But having it built while he is still alive? That's weird. Wednesday, December 31, 2008
An Unfortunate Juxtaposition Right down the street from St. Luke's Hospital in West Boise:  Click to enlarge is this unfortunately named restaurant:  Click to enlarge What next? A restaurant called "Epidemic Enchiladas"? Labels: humor Tuesday, December 30, 2008
"Like It Never Even Happened" It's unfortunate that ServPro is already using this service mark, because that's how I feel about the job that Treasure Valley Collision did on the Jaguar.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge There is one very, very minor scratch on the hood that was there before the accident, the insurance adjuster says--and I have no reason to doubt it. I suspect that it will polish out. Otherwise, it is as perfect looking and driving as before the unfortunate incident with the ice. The salesman says that he thinks the manual was in the glove compartment when I received the car, so I'm going to call the body shop tomorrow and see if someone removed it to check something, but if not, there's on one order, and I can read this one online. Labels: cars Sunday, December 28, 2008
Nice Piece From the British Paper, The Telegraph From December 28, 2008: And yet President Obama still wants a carbon tax to solve a problem that is increasingly clearly non-existent. Labels: global warming Playing Into the Hands of Holocaust Deniers This type of fraud plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers:
It is never right to do wrong to do right. Labels: history Clever Snow Plow We finally have a patch of 40 degree weather, and the driveway is now almost completely clear, but think ahead! I'm looking at the snowplows that attach to TrailBlazers, most of which involve considerable complexity with attachment hardware, wiring, etc. But I did find this very clever product from SuperPlow that attaches using a standard trailer hitch and trailer wiring, making it "Plug and Plow." (Groan.) You can either drag it and scrape the road clear, or back up and push snow out of the way. It is still at a price point that justifies paying someone to come up and do our driveway periodically. Progressives Making Progress David Gans and Doug Kendall over at Balkinization admit that the method by which the Supreme Court has applied parts of the Bill of Rights to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment is suspect: For the last forty years, the Court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence developed under the Due Process Clause has been dogged by persistent claims of illegitimacy. Roe v. Wade has been the target of most of these attacks, but the claims made by Roe’s attackers go well beyond Roe or even abortion rights. Justice Scalia – the most fervent of the challengers – argues that the protection of unwritten fundamental rights is simply not lawyer’s work. “The tools of this job,” he says “are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not the judge’s – workbox.” But one need not reach for tools beyond Scalia’s favorites—text and history—to see that judges properly protect substantive fundamental rights not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution. On Scalia’s own terms, his objections fall flat when faced with the text and history of the Privileges or Immunities Clause.They start out well, but then insist that using the "Privileges or Immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment gets to the same results as Roe v. Wade (1973) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003). This is incorrect. To use the P&I clause in an honest way would require us to look at what rights were generally recognized in 1868. Was there a right to eat meat in 1868? I doubt that there was even a single state law that regulated it. But for many of the examples that Gans and Kendall, such as abortion and homosexuality, there was a consensus the other direction, that these were legitimate exercises of state power in the interests of public morality. Hence, homosexual sex was a felony in every state. Abortion, at least from "the quickening" had been a criminal offense (although infrequently prosecuted) for decades, and at least some states were beginning to criminalize it in the first trimester. There was no recognized right to homosexual marriage in 1868; indeed, I suspect that if you had argued the case in print, you would likely have been prosecuted for publishing indecent material (another reminder that freedom of speech and the press, while certainly examples of "Privileges or Immunities" did not include the broad definition that the Court has recognized). It is important to recognize the dangers of ends-based legal theories. Originalism doesn't always give us everything we want. Was there a right to keep and bear arms? Yes, but not quite as unlimited a right as I would like there be there. The only laws that interfered with the broad exercise of that right were the ones that the drafters of the 14th Amendment clearly intended to destroy by its passage--and that opponents acknowledged would be struck down. But as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I do not think that an honest assessment of the evidence from 1868 would argue that ALL modes of bearing arms were completely protected. There was certainly no consensus that concealed carry was a protected right--and many states that clearly regarded it was a grievous evil within the authority of the state to regulate. I'm glad to see progressives acknowledging that the Due Process clause precedents are seriously flawed, and coming back to looking at Privileges or Immunities. But an honest evaluation of the evidence doesn't give them the results that they want. Labels: constitutional history |
