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Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Labels: astrophotography DETROIT — A federal judge today denied an evangelical Christian group's request for permission to hand out literature on sidewalks at an Arab festival in the heart of the Detroit area's Middle Eastern community. U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds denied Anaheim, Calif.-based Arabic Christian Perspective's request for a temporary restraining order. The group describes itself in its court filing as "a national ministry established for the purpose of proclaiming the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ to Muslims ... (that) travels around the country attending and distributing Christian literature at Muslim festivals and mosques." A lawyer for the group said it would seek a permanent injunction against the city of Dearborn. "It's not over," said Robert J. Muise of the Thomas More Law Center, an Ann Arbor-based Christian rights advocacy group. Another lawyer on the case said the Dearborn officials action could be part of what he described as a broader Muslim legal attack on critics of Islam in our "Judeo-Christian nation." "Muslims are using the courts in this country to stop our free speech rights," said William J. Becker Jr., a Los Angeles attorney who has represented a number of prominent critics of Islam. The 14th annual Dearborn Arab International Festival is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors Friday through Sunday to the city that has the Detroit area's greatest concentration of Arab-Americans. Wow. How many parts of the First Amendment can this judge violate at once? Labels: establishment of religion, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, religion Labels: gun history, gun rights, history The new regulations, which come as the District continues to grapple with last year's Supreme Court decision that threw out the city's gun ban, will allow residents to legally obtain at least 1,000 additional types and models of handguns. City leaders sought to play down the effects of the new regulations, but gun rights advocates said they were another boost to their efforts to undo the District's long-held restrictions on personal possession of weapons. "We are gratified the District is recognizing their approach is unworkable and unconstitutional," said Alan Gura, who was the lead attorney in the District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court case. "There is now a whole new universe of guns that will now be available." In addition to permitting guns in the District that are legal in California, the city will also allow residents to apply to register handguns that are permissible in Massachusetts and Maryland. The new rules will give gun owners a broader array of choices when they go shopping for handguns to keep in their home. In some cases, the change could mean something as minor as what color of weapon they can purchase. In other instances, gun owners will have access to weapons with additional design features. Labels: gun rights Labels: feminism Labels: health care Labels: health care Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-terrorism powers – simply to provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed. Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had "ample anecdotal evidence" of it happening, adding that such a practice was "totally wrong" and constituted an invasion of civil liberties. "I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice," he said. "But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches." "While arrests for other crime have followed searches under the section, none of the many thousands of searches has ever resulted in a conviction for a terrorism offence. Its utility has been questioned publicly and privately by senior Metropolitan police staff with wide experience of terrorism policing," said Carlile. He added that such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month. Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the "section 44 stops" allow the police to search anyone in a designated area without suspicion that an offence has occurred. But Carlile is critical of the use of the powers by the Met police, saying that he felt "a sense of frustration" the force did not limit its use of section 44 authorisations to some boroughs or parts of boroughs but used them across its entire area. "I cannot see a justification for the whole of the Greater London area being covered permanently. The intention of the section was not to place London under permanent special search powers." He noted that the damage done to community relations was "undoubtedly considerable". Examples of poor use of section 44 abounded. "I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop." Labels: terrorism Labels: health care Labels: concealed carry Labels: intelligent design Labels: global warming Labels: global warming Labels: conspiracy theory Brent wants people to know that forced underage marriages were not the only horrors under Warren Jeffs. Brent years ago filed a civil lawsuit against Warren Jeffs in which he alleged that his uncle had raped him several times when he was in kindergarten and first grade. Warren Jeffs used church tenets to satisfy his own perverse sexual appetites and to control every aspect of members' lives, Brent claims. As prophet — the title the sect gave its leader — he banned almost all music and all literature except the Book of Mormon and the Bible. He even banned dogs and, most infamously, ejected many young boys from FLDS families. With Warren Jeffs now in the Utah State Prison after conviction on two counts of being an accomplice to rape, the sect's towns, such as Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah, are coming back to a semblance of normal life, Brent said. Labels: homosexuality Family advocates are outraged by a prom held at Boston City Hall that was open to children apparently as young as 12 featuring crossdressers, homosexual heavy petting, suspected drug use and a leather-clad doorman who teaches sexual bondage classes. Children from middle schools and high schools across Massachusetts on May 9 attended a Youth Pride Day event ending with a prom inside of Boston City Hall sponsored by the Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Youth, or BAGLY, a group seated on the Massachusetts Commission for GLBT Youth. He said three middle-aged lesbians with military haircuts shouted from megaphones at the more than 300 youth attendees in line for the event. They barked: "If we find you bringing alcohol, you're going home!"; "Don't have sex on the dance floor!" and "Are you ready to party?" Two men helped the lesbians herd youth into City Hall. One of the men reportedly wore exceptionally tight pants and eyeliner while calling the children "sweetie" and everything around him "fabulous." The other man wore leather bondage gear. While BAGLY advertised the event for youth 22 and younger, Max said identification was not checked – even for people who were obviously older than 22. "Why would 22-year-olds be mingling with 14 and 15-year-olds?" Camenker asked, troubled by the details of the event. "As we saw, they pay no attention to any age limit at all. It was full of all of these strange adults." A doorman, with a Mr. Boston Leather sash, had BAGLY's official chaperone credentials around his neck, Camenker noted. He identified himself as a "leather BDSM (bondage discipline and sado-masochism) fetishist" and handed out business cards to youth. His card asked, "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Mr. Boston Leather's MySpace profile describes him as a single, middle-aged gay male who attends spanking parties and waxes for leather dancing events. "Starting in April I am teaching month BDSM classes at the MALE Center in Boston, and I will be running an event called Kinky Kamp ... in Upstate New York at Easton Mountain Retreat Center," it states. Labels: homosexuality
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What A Shock: Newsweek Just Figured Out That Obama Isn't Transparent
This June 20, 2009 Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff just floors me:As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged "presidential communications." The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig's office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a "new era" of openness, "nothing has changed," says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."
Look, it's like a lot of the other areas where Obama's policies are turning out to be Bush-Lite (and sometimes not even Lite). The policies are being driven by both international and partisan political reality, not beautiful little fantasies that delusionary sorts wanted to believe could happen.
It's the same reason that I don't criticize Nancy Pelosi for her willingness to go along with "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" in 2002; I criticize her for her hypocrisy in criticizing the Bush Administration for adopting policies that she approved, and she thought were necessary for national security.
The Obama Administration told a bunch of whoppers: it was going to support gay rights; it was going to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell; it was going to close Gitmo right away; it was going to pull our troops out of Iraq almost immediately; it was going to have no lobbyists working in the government; it was going to be transparent; it was going to have every bill visible in final form for five days before Obama signed it.
And unfortunately, the mainstream media bought all this garbage, asking no questions, never challenging candidate Obama about how all this was going to happen. And they are now just barely starting to challenge President Obama when they discover that he either lied to them, or didn't have a clue what he was getting himself into as President.
I had some concerns that Sarah Palin wasn't qualified to be President, in the event that McCain didn't last the first term. But I'm guessing that being governor of a state--even a small population state like Alaska--means that she has had at least a few hints about what is involved in running the executive branch of a government. It's clear that Obama did not have a clue, and even McCain's knowledge was necessarily limited to what he learned from being in Congress.
Bright Angel Point Trail
Bright Angel Point Trail is the path we walked on the morning of the second day. It leads out (way out) onto a mildly unnerving point where you can see Bright Angel Canyon--and see where the fault line breaks the layers on the south side. I might not have noticed it without the signs telling me--but once you see it, it's obvious.
This is a panorama shot stitched together from several pictures, and pretty big--almost 10 MB. (Remember that if you click on the picture, and your browser shows you a plus sign in a circle when you mouse over the picture, you can click the picture, and blow it up full size, and get a lot more detail. You can also use the scroll bars in the browser to move around the picture.)
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My wife had to just keep staring straight ahead on some stretches of this trail, and I confess, the steep slopes--without rails of any sort on the sides--were a bit scary, especially when the winds started to blow. It's a long ways down, and at least a 70 degree slope.
There's another trail (name now escapes me) that cuts roughly north to south across the Grand Canyon, and we walked along the rim for several miles--which at more than 8300 feet of elevation, I could definitely feel.
Here's a panorama I took as walked along that rim. This is about 6 MB.
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Eventually, we ran into a ramshackle collection of trailers and motor homes where the employees live during the tourist season. Some of the inhabitants look like they aren't eating very nutritious food.
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As It Got Dark That First Evening...
I used the 200mm (300mm equivalent for 35mm film) zoom lens at 1/60th second, ASA 100, and then cropped the picture. It's a reminder that you really need a bit more focal length to get detail, but it still came out rather well.
I'm Used To Christians Not Being Allow To Proselytize in Muslim Countries
I'm just not used to it being in the United States. From the June 18, 2009 San Jose Mercury-News:
1. Public streets can't be used for a protected form of free speech.
2. And this is a violation of the freedom of religious exercise clause, since proselytizing is a fundamental part of the Christian faith.
3. And arguably a violation of religious establishment clause, since it would appear that there is a distinct penalty assessed against a particular religion.
And what makes this especially silly is that even by progressive notions of not offending, this doesn't make sense. A lot of Arab-Americans are Christians; that's one of the reasons that a lot of them came here. I have attended church with Arab-Americans in the past, and I know that they aren't particularly unique.
UPDATE: Professor Volokh in email points out that the restrictions in question are content-neutral; at this point, there is no evidence that Christians are being especially disfavored. I confess that I am a bit sensitive on this subject, simply because Islam is favored by the left (because they have imagined that Bush was making war on Islam), and Christianity an especially disfavored religion for the left (because we won't get with the program on homosexuality, abortion, and Gaea worship).
And while it is true that prohibiting leafleting does not preclude other available means of expressing an opinion--it is also true that the ACLU doesn't seem to ever recognize the validity of this approach when it comes to something like virtual child pornography, where they argued that because the law was overbroad, and therefore might apply to some serious artistic works, that therefore the law was unconstitutional. (There were no alternatives in making a film that wouldn't run afoul of the law?) I mean, you don't have to burn a flag to express your opinion, do you? According to the ACLU, alternate means of expressing an opinion just aren't adequate. (Except, of course, when wearing a T-shirt might offend homosexuals--then you have to shut up--at least, according to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who is married to the ACLU of Southern California's director.)
I also find the notion that leafleting can be forbidden because of crowd control issues--but going out into the crowd to talk to people isn't--is absurd. Go into a crowd and start talking to people about something as emotional as religion, and I suspect that it is going to produce some pretty heated discussions--which will slow the flow of traffic. Leaflets, on the other hand, get stuffed into a pocket, producing no real change in traffic flow.
This street festival is supposedly different from a public street because there's some sort of public event being carried on. Somehow, I'm hard pressed to see how this makes it equivalent to a courthouse, a legislative body, a jail, or one of the other places where government is ordinarily granted additional power to restrict speech because they are performing a landlord function. Considering that the Supreme Court ruled in the Pruneyard decision that a private property owner may not exclude persons gathering signatures in a shopping center, because this is a form of public forum, it is hard to see how the government has authority to prohibit leafleting on public streets.
Grand Canyon in Early Evening
Because we arrived about 5:30 PM--and because my clever wife saw that by grabbing a seat in the restaurant before a line developed, we could get in promptly--we didn't get out to look at the view until the sun was pretty low in the sky. For west-facing slopes, this worked out okay--and the fire on the South Rim hadn't yet started to haze up the views, as it did on subsequent days.
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There's a reason that some of the promontories are called "Temple of Mars" or "Temple of Venus." (None named, "Temple of Obama yet, thank goodness.) It's very easy to draw a parallel between man's creations and some of these limestone formations that have survived atop the red sandstones.
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This is looking up one of the side canyons that goes to the northeast from Bright Angel Point, where the Grand Canyon Lodge is located.
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Grand Canyon North Rim
When you enter the park from the north side, there is absolutely no question that you are in a forest.
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We stayed at the Grand Canyon Lodge, built in the late 1920s, then rebuilt in the 1930s after a fire. The guest rooms are actually a series of cabins, described as "rustic." What they are is a curious blend of modern plumbing and electrical fixtures with 1930s buildings--really quite comfortable, and quiet, but without TVs or Internet service. (There is wireless Internet service at the general store a couple of miles away, but if you really want Internet service, as I did, this isn't very convenient.)
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It isn't obvious from the picture, but some of the window panes are the wavy glass that was still being used into the 1920s before newer techniques for making proper plate glass came into use.
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You pay a little bit of a premium for the rim view cabins--and I would have gladly done so, but they are booked well in advance, and I could not get one. But guess what? There are so many trees along the rim that:
1. Many of the rim view cabins are somewhat screened from the view anyway.
2. Cabins like ours are so close to the rim (about 200-300 feet) that it doesn't make that much of a difference.
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Here's one of the rim view cabins that is really, really on the rim!
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The outside of the lodge:
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Yes, the sign is done in the same font as the buildings in Jurassic Park. I suspect that this is some common style of the period when a lot of these national park concessions were being built, and the set designer for Jurassic Park used it for that reason.
This picture of the inside of the restaurant really doesn't capture its grandeur--the combination of bright illumination from those amazing picture windows, and a fairly dark interior. The food was expensive (along with everything else there), but astonishingly good.
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And of course, here's a picture from our table, taken the last morning, after smoke from a forest fire had started to obscure the view.
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If you arrive in the afternoon, make reservations immediately, or you will be getting your dinner from the deli, which was so-so on food but expensive.
More pictures later--and there are some astonishing pictures to show.
We Had A Lovely Summer
Both days of it. Now we're back to clouds and rain.
By the way, it's always worthwhile to read Watts Up With That? a blog that spends a lot of time looking at the incredible dishonesty or religious fanaticism (take your pick) of the global warming crowd. Among the more recent astonishing items:
1. Honolulu Airport had day after day of record temperatures in June. Or rather, their temperature gauge was defective--and when replaced, the temperature dropped at least three degrees. But even after acknowledging that these "record temperatures" were an artifact of a defective sensor--NOAA won't correct the data--which means that they will become more evidence for global warming.
2. Breathless excitement about a dramatic increase in weather-related U.S. electric utility disturbances--but the dramatic increase between 2007 and 2008 was because of improved utility reporting--not an actual change.
3. Oh yes: the increasingly violent weather because of "climate change"? You mean like the tornado chart?
More Stuff Added To The Web Page
Added images of State v. Wilburn (Tenn. 1872), Fife v. State (1876), and Wilson v. State (Ark. 1878) and Holland v. State (Ark. 1878) to the right to keep and bear arms decisions page.
I Had A Brilliant Idea Last Night...
It was a self-aligning tap wrench, using a series of rods and springs to hold the tap wrench perpendicular to the workpiece as you turned it. Alas, when I searched online, I found that someone had the same brilliant idea a few years back--and phrased it just about identically to how I would have done so:A tap and die wrench for threading flat and round workpieces and, formed of hardened steel or a softer material with hardened steel inserts at those points sustaining torque and tensile forces during operation, provides a body member adapted for receiving and retaining taps and a base adapted for receiving and holding round or hex dies, and the body member and base are mounted upon parallel alignment rods and held apart by a spring bias effected through springs mounted on each of the rods.
DC Dragged Into the United States, Kicking & Screaming
The June 20, 2009 Washington Post reports that DC is slowly, fighting the whole way, joining the United States, in allowing its serfs to own handguns:The D.C. government released emergency regulations yesterday that greatly expand the models of handguns that District residents can own, a shift designed to stave off another lawsuit over its compliance with the Second Amendment.
DC tried to use California's list of legal handguns to restrict ownership, because California now requires handguns to pass a completely unnecessary "safety" test, as a method of reducing the number of handguns sold there. Pretty clearly, DC's attempt to restrict handgun ownership using the California list was in violation of the Second Amendment, or they would not have backed down. And once the Supreme Court rules that the Second Amendment applies to the states, I suspect that California's restrictive list will also be subject to challenge.
UPDATE: Whoops! Shortly after I posted this, I got an email from Alan Gura indicating that he has already filed such a suit against California's roster law.
Part of Why I Don't Think Much Of The State of Academia
This abstract from a recently published piece in the Berkeley Journal of Law, Gender, and Justice:Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men's orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women's interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.
The paper isn't much less silly. "Culturally despised body part"? This isn't East Africa, or Afghanistan. The paper gets properly upset about some things:
This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz's Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz's analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, "'[c]ultural cliteracy' denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence and power and supports women's liberation." Stiritz tracks the role of the clitoris and women's sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women's texts. She calls for the integration of "adequate understandings of the clitoris" into a variety of different discourses, including law.Overall, popular culture remains notoriously androcentric, sexualizing even young girls in the interest of men, reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies, and creating dangers (including exposure of young persons to sexually transmitted disease) abhorred by family law.
And yet it is clear that the author has not a clue that is the collapse of traditional values, and its replacement with the values that the author certainly approves of, that has created this disaster.
Get Used To Abandonment On Ice Floes
There's a widespread belief that the Eskimo tradition was that when someone got really old, they would be abandoned on an ice floe to die--resources couldn't be spared on those who didn't have long left. This article says that while it was done, it was hardly universal among Eskimo cultures, and was generally reserved for extraordinary famine conditions.
We may be headed back there. I am utterly flabbergasted by this interview from the May 3, 2009 New York Times with President Obama:THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
Well, of course. And if you put this crowd out on an ice floe, metaphorically speaking, they won't be 80% of the total health care bill anymore. They might be 5% of the bill then, because morphine for pain is cheap, and disconnecting life support equipment is cheaper still. But there will be another group that will be 80% of the total health care bill. It won't be the same 80%, of course. Any guess that people dying (expensively) of AIDS won't be part of the crowd that gets put out on Obama's metaphorical ice floe?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
Health care is expensive. And yes, I think most people will, if the costs are high enough, say that we have to draw some lines, somewhere. Would we spend a billion dollars to save one person's life? Would we spend a million? What bugs me is that Obama next admits that someone in the government is going to make those choices--and he doesn't want the people to be too deeply involved in making those decisions:THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
I'm so glad that we have an adequate supply of philosopher-kings to handle these hard decisions!
Cutting Medical Costs
Another PajamasMedia reject.
President Obama is hot to extend health coverage to the 46 million uninsured Americans. (I’ll be polite, and not ask how many of those uninsured “Americans” are actually illegal aliens.) One of the strategies that White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers was talking about in April was to reduce unnecessary surgical procedures. As economist John Lott pointed out, rationing medical care for the more than 250 million of us that do have insurance is the only realistic way to get everyone covered, without a substantial increase in government spending.
I cringe at the prospect of rationing, partly because I rather like having high quality medical care—I have no desire to live (and die) like a Canadian or Briton—but also because I’m concerned that rationing isn’t going to be across the board cuts. Some animals on this farm, I suspect, are going to be more equal than others. (I rather doubt that elective abortions, for example, are going to be rationed by the Obama Administration.)
I do have a suggestion, however, for one form of medical rationing that is less objectionable than others: prohibit medical procedures that are not medically necessary. For starters, prohibit all non-reconstructive, cosmetic surgery. Now, most health insurers don’t cover purely cosmetic surgery, I agree. (But not all. I recall one of the San Francisco Bay Area school districts went bankrupt some years ago at least in small part because the union contract covered a variety of cosmetic surgical procedures.)
But think about this: every doctor, nurse, operating room, and piece of equipment that is currently being used to do breast implants, tummy tucks, nose jobs, and a dozen other vanity procedures, would be freed up for medically necessary work. Competition would drive down wages. Plastic surgeons, after all, are medical doctors—and some doctors who advertise themselves as plastic surgeons aren’t really so specialized in their training that they couldn’t switch specialty.
How much of a difference is this going to make? In 2007, there were more than 1.8 million cosmetic plastic surgery procedures, along with “over ten million minimally invasive or non-invasive procedures” (such as Botox injections). Of those 1.8 million procedures, 347,000 were breast augmentations—about as unnecessary as a cosmetic procedure can be. (Even more absurdly, some of these are minors.) Do you suppose that with some spare on their hands, some of those doctors might be able to do something a bit more useful?
There’s another set of surgical procedures that are not only medically unnecessary, but are also hideously expensive: sex change. And some government health insurance plans actually cover it for employees: San Francisco (of course); Berkeley (of course); and a few other governments that have confused progressivism with extravagance (and confused confusion with needing a sex change). UC Berkeley’s Student Health Insurance Plan covers it (up to $75,000 per lifetime). And of course, the ACLU has sued Wisconsin and Idaho (at least) to require prisons to provide sex changes for prisoners who were born in the wrong bodies! But something tells me that the Obama Administration isn’t going to open that can of worms—it is so much safer to ration medical care for those who really need it. (If you think, “maybe they do need it,” read this 2004 article from the British Labour Party paper The Guardian, which recounts some of the experiences of those who have been changed once—then decided to go back—because sex change didn’t solve their unhappiness.)
I’m sure by this point some of you are getting huffy about how judgmental of a tone I have taken about cosmetic surgery and sex changes. I have no interest in the government making these decisions for others. But then I expect at least the same level of respect for my right to receive medically necessary care without governmental interference. I’m pretty sure, however, that these expensive and unnecessary procedures will be untouched—while millions of other Americans are waiting for colonoscopies, MRIs, and other truly necessary medical care.
Like A Really Bad Monty Python Skit
The British police were given sweeping new powers to deal with terrorism a while back--including the ability to stop people in certain designated areas without probable cause for search. The problem was that because the left runs British policing, they apparently decided that it would be unfair to disproportionately stop people based on racial profiling. From the June 17, 2009 Guardian (a left-leaning British newspaper):
He said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism.
Colonoscopy Outcome
The actual colonoscopy at the Digestive Health Clinic was far less unpleasant than the day beforehand spent taking laxatives to empty out my GI tract. Dr. Schutz came in, explained that they would look for polyps, and because it impossible to tell at this stage if they will become cancerous or not, they would remove any that they found. He also said that while not all colon cancer starts as a polyp, so much of it does that the current screening strategy is reducing color cancer deaths each year. This May 27, 2009 CNN report mentions the dramatic reduction in U.S. cancer death rates 1990-2005.[T]he cancer death rate among men dropped by 19.2 percent, mainly due to decreases in lung, prostate, and colon cancer deaths. In women, the cancer death rate fell by 11.4 percent, largely due to a drop in breast and colorectal cancer deaths.
This American Cancer Society report indicates that a widening racial gap is developing, with white colorectal cancer incidence and death rates falling much more rapidly than for blacks. Curiously, while the report suggests that being uninsured (or being on Medicaid) is the cause of blacks being less likely to be screened for colon cancer, I find myself wondering if this is really the primary factor.
Blacks with private insurance are, like whites, making more progress in reducing colon cancer rates. I presume that Medicaid provides for colon cancer screening. This suggests that it isn't the lack of insurance that is the problem, but the same present orientation that causes people to not bother getting private health insurance is also causing them to not be screened. This May 1, 2007 New York Times article points out that patient squeamish probably plays the major part in why more than half of those who should be screened--are not.
Nonetheless, I do agree that if lack of health insurance is playing a part in discouraging screening tests, all the more reason to find ways to get as many people insured as we can. I don't know what the total bill on this will turn out to be, but it has to be dramatically cheaper than waiting until it turns into colon cancer.
Enough with public policy; back to my experience. They put in a IV, put some Versed and something else. I spent a minute or two discussing how it wasn't making me sleepy. The next thing I remember, I was waking up.
The doctor told me that they found one very small polyp, which they removed. I should plan on another exam in five years. I'll scan in the pictures later, and add them to the blog.
UPDATE: The wife vetoed putting up the colonoscopy pictures.
However: another reader suggested that Medicaid reimbursement may be so low that doctors may be reluctant to suggest it--he recently had a less certain blood in the feces test, because his deductible is so high. And indeed, I found indications that at least as of a few years ago, Medicaid reimbursement was so low that I am quite it would be out of the reach of most Medicaid recipients. This letter from the May 23, 2002 New England Journal of Medicine is mostly behind a $$$ firewall, but even the opening is pretty suggestive:To the Editor: Ransohoff and Sandler (Jan. 3 issue)1 underestimate the cost of colonoscopy. Medicare reimbursement to the physician may average $380, but the total cost is much higher if reimbursement to health care professionals and the hospital are considered. In my small community, Medicare reimburses physicians $172 for screening colonoscopy, and the hospital receives $395 for procedural costs.
I don't what this procedure cost my insurer, but considering that I had a half hour of a specialist's time, a nurse, and an IV--I'm guessing that this was well over a thousand dollars. This abstract indicates that Medicare started reimbursing for colonoscopies for average risk patients in 2001--but Medicare isn't Medicaid.
This chart shows Medicaid reimbursement schedule by state for 2004/5, which I am guessing is just the reimbursement to the doctor. I'll be curious to see what the total bill submitted to my insurer is.
UPDATE 2: This site indicates the cost of a colonoscopy in Minnesota is $1568--quite a bit more than Medicaid pays, it appears.
A Project For Someone That Wants To Advance The Concealed Carry Cause
I have been asked by a U.S. Senator's staff to identify people with a concealed carry permit who have used a gun in self-defense to testify before a subcommittee next week. The goal is to get a bill passed provided for national reciprocity on concealed carry permits. (Yes, I've discussed the need to phrase this correctly to avoid violating standards of federalism.)
I have 220 examples here of concealed weapon permit holders using a gun in self-defense. I need a list of their names and hometowns that I can provide to this senator's staff. If you can further divide the list into especially sympathetic cases (women, people defending themselves from hate crimes, etc.), all the better. (If you can find phone numbers for these people, even better!)
I'm working on written testimony concerning the subject, so if we can work in parallel on this, great! If you can do this, please let me know. If I get multiple workers, we can split the task up.
The Language of God
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief (New York: The Free Press, 2006), x + 305 pp.
Regular readers of my blog know that I am a Christian, and I have some serious problems with how evolution is taught--particularly the dogmatic, "We've got all the answers nailed down" approach that is used by many primary and secondary science teachers. I support discussion of Intelligent Design, not necessarily because it is correct, but because it raises some useful questions, and tends to lead to a better form of science teaching--one that emphasizes that science is a process, not Revealed Truth.
Similarly, I have no patience with those who insist that the Earth is 6000 years old (okay, maybe 10,000 years old). It could be--but only if God created a world that was an enormous fraud, with a million details to give the impression of great age. This is not at all consistent with the God of the Bible.
I've mentioned previously that there are two reasons that Young Earthers stick so tenaciously to this idea: because of a mistaken belief that the Bible teaches it (it does not); and because a Young Earth simply leaves no time for evolution. As it turns out, the more fossil evidence of early life that geologists and paleontologists find, the more of a problem even a 4.4 billion year old Earth becomes for the "blind, random chance" evolutionary theory. Our planet goes from oven hot because of the Late Heavy Bombardment to astonishingly sophisticated life in 300-500 million years.
Collins is the director of the U.S. Human Genome Project--a profoundly ambitious effort to sequence the entire genetic code of a human being. As such, his scientific credentials are impeccable--and what better Christian to write a book than this? Even more amazingly, Collins's Christianity is not the result of growing up in a Christian home, and somehow holding onto his faith while going to college. By his own admission, he grew up in a very unreligious, even somewhat antireligious home, of freethinking academic parents.
Collins describes how an encounter with an older woman, suffering from "severe untreatable angina" while he was in medical school caused him to reconsider his smug agnosticism--and the more he tried to come up with answers, the more he realized how limited his understanding really was. I had a similar realization, sitting in a symbolic logic class, trying to come up with a completely consistent and logical code of ethics from first principles--and realizing how sterile were the results. Collins was more influenced by C.S. Lewis's teachings than I was, but still, I find enough parallels in how both of us have dealt with hard and sometimes painful issues that I am charmed by The Language of God, even where I sometimes find myself not completely agreeing with Collins.
One of the areas where I found myself disagreeing with Collins--and yet wishing that I could have had a conversation with him before he wrote it--is his position about Intelligent Design. Yes, he is correct that much of what has driven the development of Intelligent Design is that the scientists and philosophers behind were definitely starting with a Christian perspective. But so what? So were Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and thousands of other scientists, great and minor, throughout the last few centuries.
He also makes the point that Intelligent Design has staked itself on challenging evolution because of questions such as the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum. Collins worries that as science fills in the gaps in our knowledge, it will somehow demolish a faith built around those questions. Except that Christianity is not built around those questions. Even though some of the proteins required to produce the flagellum have now been demonstrated to have other uses (and thus potentially impair the "irreducible complexity" question), we are still quite a ways from solving that question--and for that reason, ID serves a useful function, even strictly from the standpoint of poking scientists to figure out how we got something as miraculous as a flagellum!
Collins also argues that ID isn't really a scientific theory, because it isn't testable. I agree. But a critique of a theory doesn't have to be a full fledged useful theory--it only has to point out holes or flaws in an existing theory to serve a useful function in science--and I'm a bit disappointed that Collins couldn't see that.
What I found most peculiar, however, is that Collins calls himself a "theistic evolutionist," while seeming to act as if Intelligent Design scientists such as Professor Michael Behe or Professor Scott Minnich are not. A theistic evolutionist believes that God created a situation that made life not only possible, but guided and directed it by changing the environment--a position that while Collins never says in quite those words, he clearly believes. I do not know the exact position of Professors Behe or Minnich, but it is rather difficult to imagine that this is not also their position. I don't quite see why Collins found it necessary to draw an artificial division between theistic evolution and ID. They aren't incompatible; in fact, I would argue that they make more sense together than separately.
Finally, Collins objects to the idea of too direct of a God-involvement in the species on this planet by pointing to the "junk DNA"--segments of DNA that are clearly leftover from earlier times, but no longer used. He finds the presence of these segments in almost exactly the same locations in multiple, highly different species, as evidence that these are leftovers from the earliest life forms, and thus a form of evidence against intelligent design.
These "junk DNA" segments, I would argue, are hardly signs of a lack of intelligence however. If you have ever worked on a large software project, you know that even there is clearly intelligence behind every large software project (sometimes an intelligence that fancies itself God-like, when sufficiently stimulated by coffee)--and yet the equivalent of "junk DNA" is there. You find functions or methods that served a useful purpose at one time, but are no longer being executed. Why are they still there? Not because the code develops randomly, or blindly (although it can appear so, when you are the testy maintainer of it)--but because the effort to remove it was not worth it. It did no harm; removing it might complicate the rest of the code.
Perhaps the most powerful statement of Collins' book, however, is that Collins at one point acknowledges that life seems to have developed in as little as 150 million years after the planet became habitable. If I were Collins, I would have emphasized rather strongly how implausible such a rapid movement from inorganic molecules to self-replicating life (with all the informational and chemical complexity that this involves) really is. To believe that blind, random processes did this without a little direction or guidance--that takes a rather remarkable faith, too!
Anyway, I'm glad that I read it, and I suspect that even for the discussion of the human genome project, many people will enjoy reading it, too. I suspect that if I ran into Dr. Collins on an airplane somewhere, we could have a fascinating conversation.
An Interesting Memorial Proposal
The scientist who first noticed what we know call the "Maunder Minimum" (a period of greatly reduced sunspot activity--by amazing coincidence, largely corresponding to the depths of "the Little Ice Age"), has recently died. There is a proposal to name the next unusual decline in solar activity (which we have already entered several years ago) after Jack Eddy.
Great graph showing solar activity changes over recent centuries, based on sunspot counts:
Click through the graph to sign the petition!
What I want to know is: how did the Industrial Revolution's increase in greenhouse gases cause the sun to become more active?
Global Warming Nonsense
I keep waiting for the Goracle worshippers to admit that maybe, he overstated the crisis. It has been raining--and cold--for weeks now in Horseshoe Bend. If this keeps up, I'll either have to sell my telescopes, or move south. And FROM WGN-TV in Chicago:So far this June is running more than 12 degrees cooler than last year, and the clouds, rain and chilly lake winds have been persistent. The average temperature at O'Hare International Airport through Friday has been only 59.5 degrees: nearly 7 degrees below normal and the coldest since records there began 50 years ago.
Niacin & Schizophrenia
I mentioned a few days ago the death of Dr. Hoffer, who promoted a theory of the biochemistry of schizophrenia that argued that it was caused by a failure of the epinephrine metabolism process. Drs. Hoffer & Osmond argued that significantly better cure rates could be achieved for schizophrenia by the use of high doses of niacin, and eliminating caffeine, sugar (and, I think, white bread) from a schizophrenic's diet. Because Dr. Harvey Ross used this "orthomolecular therapy" with my brother in the early 1980s--with very positive results, at least for a couple of years--I have always been disappointed at how little effort was made to replicate these claims.
I was having a conversation with my daughter the social worker about this, and she wondered if anyone was still using orthomolecular therapy for schizophrenia--since all the treatment that she sees is antipsychotic medicines. My curious got the best of me, and I started hunting around with scholar.google.com--and found some very interesting stuff. While I didn't find any indications that niacin is being experimented with for treatment, there is something very different between schizophrenics and others in how they react to niacin. From the abstract of a 2006 article:This study compares the skin reactions to the niacin flushing test of 16 schizophrenic patients with those of 17 depressed patients and 16 healthy controls. Methyl nicotinate (niacin) in a concentration of 0.1 M was applied to the forearm for 5 min. Significant differences could be observed between the group of schizophrenic patients (less flushing) in comparison to the other groups. There were no statistical differences in niacin flushing between patients with depression and healthy controls. Gender, age and the use of antipsychotic agents did not appear to be confounders. The differences in flushing within the group of schizophrenic patients were striking, however. Most patients showed little or no flushing, but some patients reacted strongly. Although the three groups could be differentiated by the niacin flushing test, to develop a reliable clinical application of this test, further research is necessary.
Here's a 2007 article seeing if smoking played a role in the peculiar difference of how scizhophrenics responded relative to bipolar main and normal controls. And many other articles appear as well about how schizophrenics respond differently to niacin than others. This is clearly a hot research topic right now.
Now here is a startling article, published in 2009 in a journal whose title makes a bit nervous, but by a couple of doctors at Duke University Medical Center, where an attempt to help a long-term (in her 70s) obese schizophrenic female lose weight--unexpectedly and quite suddenly caused her hallucinations to end, literally, overnight, on the eight day. Okay, it's one patient alone, and there are in fact a lot of other mental disorders that are associated with vitamin deficiencies (such as Korsakoff's Disease, caused by thiamine defiency, and pellagra dementia caused by niacin deficiency). It is at least possible that this patient's hallucinations (involving skeletons) were actually some nutritional problem other than schizophrenia. But that article also references other studies suggesting that increased grain diets are correlated (on a regional or national level) with increases in schizophrenia.
Here's an article from Psychiatric Times (2006) that references recent studies involving vitamins for treatment of schizophrenia:*Homocysteine and vitamin B redux*
There's a LOT of current research out there on connnections between vitamins and schizophrenia.
High homocysteine levels have been found to interfere with NMDA receptors in animal studies. Neeman and coauthors46 reported finding lower plasma glycine levels and higher homocysteine levels in patients with schizophrenia compared with controls, and glycine levels correlated with increased negative symptoms. Findings of higher homocysteine levels in patients with schizophrenia may often involve folate-deficient dietary choices, obesity, or cigarette smoking, but one study found that these variables explained relatively little of the high homocysteine levels.^47 In any case, remediation of high homocysteine levels with vitamin supplements is fairly straightforward, accomplished by adding high-dose folate, vitamin B_12 , and sometimes pyridoxine.
Recently, 42 individuals with schizophrenia who had high homocysteine levels received 3 months of treatment with vitamins or placebo in a crossover study. Those receiving the vitamins were found to have significant improvements in clinical symptoms as measured by PANSS and neuropsychological test scores, compared with placebo.^48
Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Garbage
You know, with all the serious problems we are confronting as a society, there's just no time to waste on nonsensical conspiracy theories. Someone sent me a link to this essay about the UCC, gold fringes on flags, and assorted crazy stuff, all designed to prove that if you file the right paperwork, you don't have to file income taxes. (Well, I'm guessing; the essay is so poorly written at the end that it's hard to tell exactly what they are saying:When you issue your credit to the bankrupt United States they have borrowed it from you and they owe you a return of principal plus interest. To accomplish this quid pro quo exchange, you must report every presentment you receive to the Internal Revenue Service which will, in its turn, adjust the books of account according to which corporation has been using your credit.
One of the reasons that serious scholarly work has footnotes is so that you can look up the claims, and see if the sources say what the author says they do. Not in this "Why the UCC Filing?" essay. Yes, you could probably find the original source documents with a bit of work, but if someone is trying to write a persuasive essay about matters of fact, and they don't bother to give me clear-cut citations of sources, I make one of the following conclusions:
That is what the 1040 form is about, and what the 1099OID forms are about. When you report a presentment on a 1099OID forms you are reporting to the IRS to whom you paid taxes or to whom you issued your credit. And you can’t always know who that was because you don’t know how much of your credit was issued for paving the roads in your county or building the schools or funding that Wal-Mart or whatever.
The 1099OID form enables the money to return to its source – You.
1. They didn't go to college (or even high school), and therefore have no idea why the scholarly apparatus of footnotes exist.
2. They wrote it from memory, without bothering to check if all the facts are correct.
3. They are hoping that you won't try to check up on their claims.
However, there's one claim made in this essay that was sufficiently easy to check that I spent a few minutes doing so:Until the 14th Amendment in 1868, there were no persons born or naturalized in the United States. They had all been born or naturalized in one of the several states. Up until that point in time there was only state citizenship and was a result of state citizenship. After the Civil War, a new class of citizenship was recognized, and was the beginning of the “democracy” (not the de jure republic) sited in the District of Columbia. The American people in the republic sited in the several states could choose to benefit (receive a benefit) as one of these new United States citizens BY CHOICE (kind of).
When it comes to factual errors, let's just say that these two paragraphs are a target-rich environment. But for laughs, I decided to find out how the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 required birth certificates.
This initial nexus for this new citizenship started with the birth certificate under the provisions of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921. This act required that all children born be registered by way of a certificate of live birth, in exchange for which they would receive back a birth certificate describing the property. The specific provisions of the act required that the statement of domicile of the property described on the birth certificate would be Washington, D.C.
My first guess was that this act required vital statistics on births (which nearly all states were doing by then) to be reported to the federal government, and someone confused this requirement with a requirement for birth certificates to be issued. But apparently no.
Birth certificates were issued in almost every state by this point. The primary purpose of this act was to improve pre- and post-natal care by increasing federal funding to the states to assist poor women. Bad idea or not, it wasn't what caused birth certificates, which were not, and are not, ownership certificates in any sense. Contemporary references to the act are quite clear about its purpose--to increase public health spending and education for pre- and post-natal care.
If there was some concern about expanding federal power over individual citizens, you would expect critics to make that argument. See Maine Governor Percival Baxter's argument against the bill here. He makes some legitimate arguments about federal vs. state power, but nothing that matches this wild description of ownership certificates.
Here's South Dakota's law implementing it: it's all about money going to help pre and post-natal care; nothing about birth certificates.
Nor does this 1922 reference work mention anything about birth certificates.
Or the speech introducing it in Congress.
Or this 1920 discussion of the proposal.
I can't find anything to support this claim about requiring birth certificates (or "ownership certificates") in contemporary sources. Now, that doesn't mean that it's wrong; perhaps there was indeed such a requirement in the bill, and no one at the time bothered to mention it--even critics. Or maybe the Bilderbergers (or the Rothschilds, or the Illuminati, or the Martians) suppressed all contemporary discussion of it--or have censored the Internet today so that you can't find it. But when someone makes extraordinary claims without any verifiable sources, it has zero credibility.
There is so much of this conspiracy theory garbage floating around out there (like the 9/11 Truthers, and "We never went to the Moon," and "Jewish doctors inject AIDS into black babies in the hospital") that exists for one reason alone: the belief that one has "hidden knowledge" is very attractive to people that would otherwise have to confront the vastly more common problem of government: stupid people with good intentions.
Recommendations on Survey Meter Recalibration?
I have a Civil Defense V-715 radiation survey meter rather like this:
that was a gift from a friend some years ago who is among the only people substantially more technonerdy than myself. I'm thinking of having it recertified, since it is probably not accurate. (Who knows how many decades since anyone used it for its intended purpose?) And yes, this is a vote of no confidence in President Zero's ability to keep North Korea only blowing up nukes in North Korea, and to keep Iran from selling nukes to al-Qaeada.
There are at least two businesses that do recertification of survey meters: Two Tigers ($80); and RadMeters4U ($78). Any recommendations from my readers as to who to have do recertification?
UPDATE: Correction: I finally found it in the garage. It is actually a Jordan Electronics CD V-710 Model 2, like this:
and only just a little more dusty.
The Holocaust Museum Shooter
Unfortunately, many of his online essays seem to have gone down the memory hole, perhaps because they show that he has a bit more in common with left-wing lunatics than conservatives. Sweetness and Light quotes a now dead link (which I think is accurate, because the link showed up in Google) that shows that Von Brunn despises Bill O'Reilly and "neocons." Moonbattery.com reports that Von Brunn wrote a rather strong denunciation of Christianity as a false, Jewish religion that destroyed the Roman Empire--although the proprietor of that Ron Paul oriented site (Antichrist.net) has now taken down Von Brunn's little essay. (But the Internet archive site still has it here.)
The honesty of the 9/11 Truthers (those who claim our government did 9/11) is best revealed by the fact that Von Brunn signed their petition--and they have since removed his name. Now Hampshire reports that he was signature 9196 on the petition--but his name doesn't appear there now. But when I did a Google search for: site:http://www.justicefor911.org/ "Von Brunn"
it linked to the page where signature 9196 would have been.Justice for 9/11 Solidarity Petition
www.justicefor911.org/signatures.php?page=92 - Cached - Similar
Grand Canyon North Rim (The Approach)
If you have ever been to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the North Rim is quite startling. It is about 1000 feet higher, and the approach puts you in a mixed deciduous and pine forest. As we approached the entrance to the park, on a long, slow rise, there were lots of pretty flowers!
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The Grand Canyon cuts through an upthrust part of the Southwest, and you are quite aware of the rise as you ascend to the entrance.
Colorado City, Arizona
We didn't intend to pass through Colorado City, the center of the polygamist FLDS cult, but because of missing a sign, we ended up passing right through it on the way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was a pretty poor looking place.
We didn't stop. It's amazing to me that the same crowd that insists that "one man, one woman" is narrow minded are generally not prepared to accept polygamy--which has a far longer history behind it than same-sex marriage. But then again, a lot of what drives polygamy in groups like the FLDS isn't just the desire for a guy to have multiple women. From the June 14, 2009 Denver Post:Brent, the 26-year-old nephew of Warren Jeffs, the convicted felon and former prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is determined to make known the extent of what he describes as his Uncle Warren's evil.
...
Massachusetts Tax Dollars At Work
My, how far we've come in just three decades! This June 12, 2009 World Net Daily article is pretty revolting:
This event included widespread drug use, with children who were middle school age, and homosexuals who, if they appeared in a television show, would be the source of complaints about bigotry and insulting stereotypes:
The I-15 Gorge Northeast From Las Vegas
I can remember a day trip from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah, about 1971. And yet, I don't remember this astonishing gorge!
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UPDATE: There's a reason that I don't remember this from 1971. A reader tells me:I lived in St. George in 1971, less than a mile away from I-15
construction. I'm pretty sure that section of I-15 wasn't finished yet.
I think it opened in 1973. We were still driving up over Utah Hill to
get to Las Vegas at that point.
That Virgin River Gorge is an amazing display of ancient geology and
modern engineering. A lot of the vertical lines you saw in those sheer
rock walls were drill marks from the explosives. It was not a simple
thing, and took many years and mucho dinero to make an even halfway safe
route for the freeway.
Valley of Fire State Park
More of these astonishing red fossilized sand dunes--but in this case, at Valley of Fire State Park, a few miles east of Las Vegas, just a bit south of I-15.
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I read this sign, and I found myself wondering: "What sort of person would think that there was any sport in hunting an animal this slow? Or would intentionally run one over with a car?"
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More of this mix of red and black iron oxides.
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This rock formation is called a beehive, and you can see why. And with a little thought, you can see how erosion on these sandstone formations could give these rounded formations.
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To give you some idea of the thickness of these sandstone layers:
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No, quarters don't naturally occur in these layers.
There's my wife doing her "Atlas" thing.
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It doesn't seem quite as compelling in a picture as it did it person, but there was something anthropomorphic about some of these eroded sandstone rocks. At night, perhaps, with Moonlight, it might be a bit unnerving.
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Here's a picture that really captures the contrast between the red sandstone layers and what I think is the limestone layer that sits atop it across much of the Southwest.
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Red Sandstone
Across much of the Southwestern U.S., through Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, there is an astonishingly beautiful layer of sandstone, exposed in places like Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park (both in Utah), and the Grand Canyon. But a lot of people I suspect don't realize how many other really astonishingly beautiful exposures there are elsewhere. For example, this is Red Rock Canyon, a few miles west of Las Vegas. (Yes, we're the only people in history that went to Las Vegas to visit a museum, and see geology.)
Some of these pictures may look a bit odd. Most of these rocks were backlit, because it was late afternoon. Consequently, I had to adjust contrast and exposure to get a reasonably accurate rendition of the color of the rocks--but often at the cost of fading the sky.
By the way: even when you click through, you are seeing low resolution versions of these pictures. If you are someone who wants a high resolution version for some purpose (like the request to reprint that I received from a Chinese biology textbook publisher a while back), I can provide them.
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Here my wife is up close to one of the easier to get to sections of exposed sandstone layers.
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What's with the red and black? This is a sandstone rich in iron, and depending on which oxidation of iron, you get either red, ferric oxide) or black, ferrous oxide. (For those who took chemistry after the Dark Ages ended, substitute iron(II) or iron(III) for ferrous and ferric.)
Of course, the amount of iron in the sandstone will sometimes determine how intense of a color you get, as this astonishing striping shows.
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One of the more startling aspects of these sandstone formations across the Southwest is that they weren't laid down under water--they are fossilized sand dunes, resulting in some truly wild jumbles.
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As always, I would love to make a living as a writer. Having discovered that writing about public policy isn't one of those methods, feel free to hit the PayPal button to encourage me to be a travel writer!
Central Nevada Does Have Lakes
It's easy to read Mark Twain's colorful description of the Great Basin and forget that there are lakes in central Nevada--like Walker Lake, a natural survivor of the great Ice Age melt lakes.
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