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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, December 20, 2003
My Reflector Isn't As Overweight As I Thought I mentioned a few days ago that my 8" f/7 reflector needed to go on a diet, so that I could get it light enough to fit on a Losmandy GM-8 equatorial mount--and get fully into the 21st century. I went out and bought a bathroom scale today--and I discovered that it wasn't as overweight as I had thought. The entire OTA (optical tube assembly), including the rotating ring assembly, is only 31 pounds. Going to a carbon fiber composite tube might well get me down to 20-22 pounds--light enough for the GM-8! This is encouraging. I'm still trying to figure out whether to tackle a more dramatic change. Right now, I have an ancient 1.25" focuser, and a 1.83" elliptical diagonal. It is tempting to switch to a 2" focuser, so that I can use wide field eyepieces. If I go to a low profile focuser, I can reduce the diagonal to 1.3", reducing lost light and diffraction damage to the image. The downside is that just about all the low profile focusers have very limited range. My current rack and pinion focuser has 3.75" of travel--enough that I can very comfortably use a camera as well, and still have the focal point inside the camera. Low profile focusers generally make you trade off focuser travel for overpenetration into the tube, possibly adding a new set of diffraction problems. Anyway, there's no urgent need to make a decision right now. I just have to figure out what to do before replacing the current tube. If I am going to drill a bunch of new holes, I would rather do it in the current fiberglass tube, which bears the scars of an unfortunate incident involving my daughter, our Mitsubishi, and the garage. Oh yeah, feel free to throw money in the tip jar for that Losmandy GM- 8. Labels: telescopes What a Concept: Locking Up Violent Criminals! From the Detroit News: DETROIT — Gun prosecutions in federal and state courts continued to rise this year, helping to drive down the violent crime rate in Detroit, law enforcement authorities said Thursday.Shocking concept! Send people who commit serious crimes to prison, and crime rates fall! What will they think of next? UPDATE: A reader reminds me that Michigan passed a non-discretionary concealed weapon permit law in 2001. It would be interesting to see if the decline started coincident with news coverage of the news law. A Member of The Pervocracy Has a Change of Heart A little while back, in response to my concerns about how libertarian ideas, at least at the extremes, lead to some unfortunate results, I received an interesting piece of email, which I am editing to hide this guy's identity: Amen. As a recovering libertarian, former BDSM toy maker and soon to be former BDSM web site operator, you have perfectly captured the revelation that is leading me away from my libertinism-for-all youth. Part of it came from watching Cops, part from living in [big city], and another part from the tales I hear from my wife, who is a [prosecutor] in the juvenile justice system here.There were wealthy slaveowners who could look at the system that they participated in, and decided that they could not, in good conscience, do so any longer. Cassius Marcellus Clay, for one. As a young man, he inherited a sizeable fortune built on slavery. He freed his slaves, and devoted the rest of his life to abolitionism. That's the real sign of a person's character--when they can walk away from a profitable operation because they don't feel that it is right anymore. There Are Books Amazon Isn't Willing to Sell So much for Amazon's commitment to free speech: Amazon.com paid undisclosed damages and apologized in a Belfast court Friday for promoting a book that accuses seven retired Northern Ireland police officers of plotting murders, and promised not to sell the discredited book anymore.But selling a book that promotes molesting children is okay? Stolen: A Very Unique Item You won't find this at the average pawn shop: A 30-inch StarMaster Dobsonian reflecting telescope, one of only six in existence, has been stolen from the residence of Brock B. Parker of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The theft occurred in the early morning hours of Thursday, November 13. The telescope was stored inside a white, 17-foot, Haulmark V-nose tandem wheel trailer. The trailer has a ramp rear door and a 36-inch side door on the passenger side. CNN Presents: Infidelity If you missed it, it will be presented again on Sunday evening. Okay, don't be cynical. It's not a how-to, and to my surprise, it didn't play the typical liberal game of moral equivalence: "What makes you think fidelity is better than infidelity?" They didn't even mention the most famous adulterer in recent history, the Philanderer-in-Chief. Instead, they interviewed some couples that had survived infidelity--and what they had to say was sobering. Somehow, you could not watch any of these interviews without sensing that their marriages were never going to be quite the same afterwards. They also interviewed a woman who discovered her husband's time online was being spent in cybersex, and perhaps actually arranging to meet some of these women in the flesh. (He declined to be interviewed, for some reason.) They also reported that a majority of divorce attorneys recently surveyed reported that online activities (including pornography and cybersex) played a role in these divorces. A pastor of ours in California told us that most of the marital problems that he sees involve online porn. Unless you are married to someone who looks like a porn star, I guess you won't be surprised by this. One part of the program pointed out that infidelity is actually the norm in the animal kingdom--and that most of the assumptions that biologists have traditionally made about animals that seem to mate for life (such as many birds) fell apart when DNA testing revealed that a number of these supposedly lifetime monogamous creatures were behaving more like stereotyped Californians than stereotyped Iowans. Infidelity is "natural," but as one married couple (a biologist and psychiatrist) pointed out, there are lots of animal behaviors that we don't follow--that is part of what separates us from the animals. One valuable point that one couple made was that infidelity doesn't require a bad marriage. The husband admitted that he was completely happy with his wife and their relationship--he simply found the ego stroke of having some other woman attracted to him just too powerful of a lure. Libya Giving Up Weapons of Mass Destruction From BBC: President Muammar Gaddafi said that, after months of negotiations with the West, his country was ready to play its role in building a world free from all forms of terrorism.What a surprise! Of course, you will recall that a few months back, I blogged about how Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi reported that Gaddafi told him: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." To be loved internationally is very nice--but not an option in a world where many nations are run by despots. I would rather that America be respected, or at least feared. Friday, December 19, 2003
New Polling About Iraq This is from the Guardian: Saddam's capture appears to have given Bush's re-election prospects a boost: The poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos-Public Affairs found that nearly half of respondents, 45 percent, said they would definitely support Bush's re-election, while 31 percent said they would definitely vote against him.What I find encouraging about this number is that Americans seem to recognize that the Iraqi war increased our risks--but still consider it part of a long-term strategy worth pursuing. Almost two-thirds said they expected a terrorist attack on a major U.S. city, building or national landmark in the next year. But only 15 percent said they thought such an attack was very likely. In a different poll in May, almost half said a terrorist attack was very likely in the near future.This is also a sign that Americans have realistic expectations--hardly the "rah-rah" cheerleader approach that the Democrats seem to think drives American support for Bush. No Surprise, But It Shows Hussein Was Not Too Bright From ABC News: Agents for deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein have penetrated the U.S. command in Iraq, ABCNEWS has learned. As a result, they have the potential to undermine U.S. authority.I suppose if I were Saddam Hussein, and I kept a list of such spies, I would make sure that I had some way to destroy it in a hurry. Bookies, once upon a time, kept all records that could be used as evidence on a type of nitrate-soaked paper know as "flashpaper." All they needed to do when the police started to kick down the door, was to put their cigar onto the flashpaper, and it was gone in a flash! Why didn't Hussein do this, or at least have the list encrypted in some way? I guess you don't have to be brilliant--or even terribly cunning--to run a country like Iraq. You just have to be willing to torture people. "Sony shows off jogging robot" Yes, that's the headline! My first reaction was, "And how many miles must it run for me before I lose thirty pounds?" But it's actually an pretty important step forward in robotic technology. Hmmm. Robocop is coming.... I'm Disappointed, But Not Surprised From the Washington Post: Hundreds of videotapes that federal prison officials had claimed were destroyed show that foreign nationals held at a New York detention facility after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were victims of physical and verbal abuse by guards, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday. Amazing: The Courts Actually Found For Diversity! Another Defeat For Liberalism! In this case, the schools were doing what they do best: propagandizing in support of homosexuality as part of a "diversity" celebration--but refusing to allow more than one point of view to be represented. The case is Hansen v. Ann Arbor Public Schools (E.D.Mich. 2003): This case presents the ironic, and unfortunate, paradox of a public high school celebrating “diversity” by refusing to permit the presentation to students of an “unwelcomed” viewpoint on the topic of homosexuality and religion, while actively promoting the competing view. This practice of “one-way diversity,” unsettling in itself, was rendered still more troubling -- both constitutionally and ethically -- by the fact that the approved viewpoint was, in one manifestation, presented to students as religious doctrine by six clerics (some in full garb) quoting from religious scripture. In its other manifestation, it resulted in the censorship by school administrators of a student’s speech about “what diversity means to me,” removing that portion of the speech in which the student described the unapproved viewpoint.Public schools in America, having done such a great job of teaching reading, writing, math, and geography, have decided to remove the moral blinders from the eyes of their students as well about homosexuality. Where I lived in California, one of the public high schools organized a similar pro-homosexuality event--without getting parental permission first, as was required by state law. When parents found out about this, they attempted to get some balance at the event, but were basically told what Professor Volokh is arguing--that because any sort of panel selection necessarily involves viewpoint discrimination, the school has that right: But of course some viewpoints will be excluded, because they are too far out of the mainstream, or factually unsupported, or too close (in the organizers' subjective judgment) to the viewpoints of others, or (sometimes) politically irrelevant. A race relations panel need not include a Klansman and someone from the Nation of Islam, nor does it need to include speakers whose views the organizers think are factually unsound.I expect public schools to be in the business of education--not propaganda. If any public school in America organized a similarly one-sided panel discussion about the evils of homosexuality, from either a secular standpoint, or a religious standpoint--but why continue with this statement? I might as well start out my statement with, "If pigs could fly...." The rest of the sentence would be just as relevant to the real world. Public schools--and all public institutions--should either stay away from controversial topics, or allow a broad diversity of viewpoints. Professor Volokh says that it is legitimate for a school to exclude panelists whose ideas are "out of the mainstream, or factually unsupported...." Gee, if public schools had operated on that standard when I was in school, the vast majority of the environmentalist propaganda would not have been allowed. There would not be "Gay/Straight Alliance" clubs on high school campuses. Unfortunately, liberalism screeches about "diversity," but as this case demonstrates (and many other examples demonstrate quite regularly), liberalism doesn't believe in diversity. Liberals believe in propagandizing in favor of homosexuality--and are absolutely terrified of opposing points of view. How far they have moved from Justice Brandeis's eloquent statement: If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.UPDATE: In the 1840s and 1850s, the abolitionist movement started to grow beyond its original anti-slavery origins. Some farsighted Americans began to recognize that completely aside from the evil of slavery, the slaveocracy was beginnning to corrupt our political institutions. The Southern states passed laws that made it a capital offense to distribute abolitionist literature. Southern states tried to blame Turner's Rebellion on Walker's An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Free speech was in grave danger. The right of petitioning of Congress had been rendered meaningless by the Gag Rule, which prohibited anti-slavery petitions from even being considered. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered for having the nerve to publish an abolitionist newspaper--in a free state--even in Boston there were prominent men prepared to argue that Lovejoy had brought this upon himself, and compared the mob who murdered Lovejoy to the Patriots who had resisted British oppression. The parallels are becoming stronger by the day. It isn't the slaveocracy anymore, but the pervocracy that increasingly rules America. Like the slaveocracy, it's a pretty small number of people, but they use their wealth and influence to suppress any significant dissent from their point of view. I say "pervocracy" because it isn't just homosexuality (although that drives the movement, and supplies the money); it's the ACLU's effort to get sex with minors decriminalized as a Constitutional right; to redefine the schemes which old men justify taking brides of 13 and 14 as constitutionally protected "plural marriage" based on the Lawrence decision; it is the continual propagandizing in Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs in support of casual group sex; it is the insistence that opposition to casual sex in public is equivalent to setting up death camps; it is the ACLU insisting that letting people know that their neighbors have felony convictions for child molestation and rape is "discrimination." For a lot of Americans, the opposition to homosexuality has either a religious basis, or a personal revulsion basis. My increasing concern about homosexuality isn't based on either of those, but on the manner in which our institutions are being corrupted to make homosexuals feel good about themselves. (As a sin, homosexuality is no different from adultery, or other forms of extramarital sex.) There are secular arguments that could be advanced for discouraging homosexuality, but they are not essentially different from the arguments for discouraging promiscuity of any sort, or for discouraging drunk driving--in all of these cases, such laws are going to be overly broad. Yes, not every drunk driver hits someone (but the odds are high); not every promiscuous person is going to spread an STD (but the odds are much higher); not every homosexual is infecting others with AIDS in a public restroom or a South of Market Street sex club (but the odds are certainly higher than for a straight person). My greatest concern about homosexuality is cases like this one involving the Ann Arbor schools: there seems to be no limits to the contortions that the left will apply to the Constitution, and to traditional liberal ideas of free speech, to make America's loudest small minority (about 2-3%, maximum, of the population) stop looking in the mirror and asking what's wrong with them. Thursday, December 18, 2003
The American Library Association and Cuba I had mentioned a few days ago Nat Hentoff's concern that the ALA was failing to say anything about the problem of Cuba's independent libraries. A reader informed that Hentoff is mistaken; the ALA has said a lot about this problem, and recommended that I search their website. So I did so. The results were not impressive. There's a January 15, 2001 report about the problem that characterizes these "independent libraries" as: Ms. Sparanese says that the "independent libraries" are collections of books in individual's homes and are not operated by librarians or library workers of any type. Almost all the individuals operating these "libraries" identify themselves as dissidents and members of anti-Castro political parties. She also asserted that she has seen no evidence of censorship or confiscation of books in her many visits to Cuba.I am so glad that the ALA won't get themselves involved with "unofficial libraries" who aren't even staffed by qualified librarians. Even worse, the ALA certainly doesn't want to get involved in anything "political" about censorship and government oppression. Stinking hypocrites. More Global Warming Discussions Remember I mentioned a few months back about the Martian ice cap melting? Nature has apparently recently published an article about how Earth and Mars are both between ice ages at the moment: Earth and its companion planet, Mars, are both enjoying a period of warm climate between their respective Ice Ages, according to a study published on Thursday in Nature, the British science weekly. Labels: global warming Michael Bellesiles Defends His Accuracy and Integrity What next? Will Bill Clinton defend his marital fidelity? Because Soft Skull Press (aptly named) is publishing the only slightly revised 2nd edition of Arming America, Bellesiles has released his defense of his book. You can read an excerpt from his defense here. You can read comments by Professor James Lindgren and Professor Jerome Sternstein here. You may see a more detailed criticism by me at History News Network in the near future. Unsurprisingly, there are historians still defending Arming America. Here's one who uses the moral equivalency argument: I have taught the Bellesiles controversy to my classes, and the obfuscation on both sides is enough to convert even a die-hard empiricist into a postmodernist. The "Report" commissioned by Emory is often cited confidently, but it is a slippery document which raises many troubling questions in itself about the integrity of the profession. Most upsetting is the disproportionate punishment of Bellesiles. One of his critics was criticized herself in a _Choice_ review of her book because she "abandons any pretext of objectivity," adopts a "clearly partisan approach," and "ignores the overwhelming difficulties" in the data. Yet no one to my knowledge has called for her dismissal.I think this guy is talking about Joyce Malcolm's book, which I reviewed a while back. Malcolm was careful not to overstate the value of the statistics she uses, and my criticisms of her methods you can find here. Malcolm, however, to the best of my knowledge, didn't falsify documents. I checked some of her sources myself, because I had them available to me. I didn't check hundreds of citations, but then again, by the time I had checked a dozen of Bellesilles's citations, I already had clear evidence of carelessness, at least. I've checked enough of Malcolm's citations from both of her books to have some confidence that she knows how to read, and honestly report what she found. Another comment, from someone who at first defended Bellesiles from political attacks, now seems to have had her eyes opened: I am shocked if a historian has written something that he deliberately distorted and lied about. Why would a historian do such an thing? What could his motive be?I am trying hard to make sense of this statement as sarcasm. The alternative (lethal naivete) is too frightening to imagine. In case you are wondering: my book on the subject of gun ownership, violence, and hunting in early America still has no publisher. The stack of "on place in our list" letters isn't quite as thick as Arming America, but it's getting there! Of course, Oxford University Press rejected it, but they are publishing a book by Bellesiles next year. I guess when your choice is a book by someone who "resigned" from a tenured position after accusations of fraud--and had his Bancroft Prize revoked for that same reason--and something like this--well, the choice is easy, isn't it? More About The Tinfoil Hat Party The Washington Times has an article about the increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories that are taking over the Democratic Party: Joe Cerell, a Democratic campaign consultant who has worked in every presidential campaign since 1956, said the comments — even if in jest — do not help the party. "You'd better know what you're talking about, you'd better have some evidence, or it's counterproductive," Mr. Cerell said. "The more outrageous the comments are, the greater the chance that it's going to turn into a headline."At least the Democrats aren't starting to talk about the Trilateralist Conspiracy and the Illuminati. What provokes conspiracy theories of government? Over the years, I have run into a few of this crowd, usually out on the right end of the spectrum. After a while, I started to see a pattern. These were smart, but not well-educated people, at relatively low socioeconomic status. Being intelligent, they looked for patterns in what would otherwise be a chaotic mass of data points. Patterns turn into conspiracies with surprisingly little effort (especially if you start to look for data points that fit the pattern). I think the larger problem, however, is that these conspiracy buffs are smart people who, having failed to rise into positions of importance (usually because of not going to college), assume that therefore the people who run our society must be dramatically smarter than themselves. Over the years, I've had occasion to meet with a variety of elected officials, and I can't say that any of them was brilliant. Smarter than average, sure. Often they showed a certain level of cleverness or cunning, but as smart as the average engineer in a startup? No way. As smart as the average college professor? Not even that bright. Conspiracy requires lots of intelligence to maintain and to keep secret. Stupidity is a much more likely explanation for what actually happens in government, because stupidity is in greater supply. I think the current Democratic Party focus on bizarre conspiracies reflects an increasing frustration with the Bush Administration's successes. The possible explanations are: 1. Luck. This comes perilously close to "God picked Bush to be President," and therefore leftwing Democrats have to ignore it. 2. Bush is a lot smarter than the Democrats have admitted. Bush has worked hard to give the impression of being an amiable fool, and the Democrats have let their regional and party prejudices work with this impression. They certainly aren't going to admit that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice, are actually pretty darn smart. 3. Conspiracy is all that's left! My Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog If you haven't visited it lately--go ahead, and be prepared to be awed. It's here, and almost every day co-blogger Pete Drum and I manage to find at least one incident that has been covered by local media. Yeah, that's right, "civilian self-defense with guns isn't common," as an antigunner tried to persuade me a while back! The Struggle in Ohio There is a struggle going on in Ohio about whether a non-discretionary concealed weapon permit law should make permitholder names public or not. Quite a number of proponents of the new law are not thrilled that this information would be public. My reaction? Why does it matter if this information is public record? The vast majority of the time that a permitholder will use a gun in self-defense, it will be against a complete stranger who attempts murder, robbery, or rape. These sort of crimes are not done by intelligent and methodical people. The person who is likely to search out information on whether you are carrying or not in order to put you at a disadvantage is someone who has decided to murder you. They aren't going to get close enough, or give you enough warning, to draw your gun. Fortunately, these sort of crimes are exceedingly rare. For a few years, the antigunners will use these public records to try and prove that the background check system is inadequate. They may, indeed, find one or two examples of people falling through the cracks. Eventually, they will get bored with the struggle to embarrass the Ohio system on this, because, based on the experience of other states, there will be very few such examples. At that point, you can probably get some future legislature to remove the public records aspect of this law. In states with discretionary permit systems, like California, public records are absolutely essential, as a way to identify corruption in the permit issuance process. (Visit Jim March's page devoted to this subject. It's a big site, and unfortunately, not because Jim likes to talk, but because of the scale of the corruption.) In a state with a non-discretionary system, public records aren't necessary, but neither are they the crisis that some people make them sound like. A Crisp, Clear Night in Boise This is the first such night that we have had here in Boise in some weeks. I was able to drag out my 8" f/7 reflector for the first time since I obtained an easier to use laser collimator. Unfortunately, the atmosphere was still pretty turbulent (or perhaps those were tube currents inside my telescope). The temperature contrast was strong enough that I could see the focus of the mirror changing. Over a period of about 30 seconds, the telescope went from perfectly focused to a bit fuzzy, because the temperature was changing the shape of the mirror. Saturn is an especially good target for this sort of change, because you have crisp lines (such as Cassini's Division) that you can see blur. At 157x (9mm orthoscopic), Saturn was crisp, although somewhat small. The Cassini Division was more gray than black at the ansae (the extreme left and right sides of the rings), and only occasionally popped into view in front and back of the planet. I could see at least one cloud band on the planet itself--a medium brown against a very, very pale yellow body. At 236x (6mm orthoscopic), everything started to fuzz up, with even the ansae portions of the Cassini Division only appearing briefly as the turbulence calmed down. At 283x (5mm ortho) and 353x (4mm ortho), the image wasn't any worse, just larger. I used some of the money from the PayPal tip jar (thanks!) to pay for a slightly used Photon Instruments 127mm f/9 achromatic refractor this morning. With a little luck, it should be here next week, when I have a whole week off work. Labels: telescopes Newsweek Says The Iraqi Intelligence Document About Mohammed Atta Is Probably a Fake Here. But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert tell NEWSWEEK that the document is most likely a forgery—part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime. Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Ann Coulter: Witty As Ever Not necessarily always very fair, but at least funny. (Sorry, but this link is to the main page--she hasn't given her current column a permanent link yet.) Ann discusses the sort of people that are the passionate campaign workers for Howard Dean: Their passion for Dean was aptly summarized by 24-year-old Lauren Popper – the "official representative" at a Dean campaign office one particular night. Though she "broke into tears several times while trying to explain" the allure of the Dean campaign, Popper managed to convey that she was first attracted to Dean based on his policy of having a state social worker visit every new mother in Vermont (not to be confused with the Arkansas policy from the 1980s in which the governor would visit every woman who was hoping to become pregnant). Not that I'm trying to privatize anything here, but in my home state of Connecticut, a new mother is traditionally visited by her own mother.How old-fashioned Ann is. Next thing, she will tell you that new mothers actually have the father present as well. Popper added that Dean's becoming president was "a side effect" of the Dean campaign. Cold comfort to the candidate, I imagine. Rather, she said: "This campaign is about allowing people to come together and tell their life stories."The Oprah-fication of America. Groan. Apparently, some Americans think choosing the leader of the free world should be a process of people coming together to tell their life stories. (At least that's a step up from the Democrats' 1996 presidential campaign, which, if I remember correctly, was about people telling their stories to grand juries.) Spam vs. Junk Mail Punditite Princess doesn't understand why I am so upset about spammers: I gotta ask after reading his current BLOG how spam is any different than what I get in my mailbox at the curb everyday.Let's make the snail mail situtation analogous to the spam problem: 1. You go to your mailbox, and find that there are 200-300 pieces of mail in the box every day. 2. Much of the junk mail has envelopes designed to simulate a credit card bill, or a personal letter from my sister. The time it takes to open each letter that looks like a Discover Card statement, or an Idaho Power Co. bill, is time that is just wasted. 3. About one quarter of the time that I open one of these cleverly simulated envelopes, the contents are either useless to me (sorry, I don't want my breasts enlarged, and I have no question that the pills that propose enlarging other body parts are fraud, if they aren't downright hazardous), or really, really offensive (no, I'm not interested in receiving even one more email that promises "Barnyard Fun"). 4. In order to get rid of the junk mail, I can either hire a service, or get someone to do it as a volunteer. The results of both either let some junk mail arrive in my mailbox, or throw away bills or personal letters that too closely resemble the junk mail. This is what distinguishes spam from junk mail. The marginal costs of sending junk mail are measured in fractions of a dollar, and so economic self-interest tends to keep the junk mail at a tolerable level. The marginal costs of sending spam are measured in, at most, a thousandth of a cent. There is therefore no economic self-interest on the part of the spammers to stop sending this crap--and they don't. Putting My Reflector on a Diet I'm thinking of rebuilding my scope with lighter components. The current fiberglass tube weighs 17 pounds. It sounds like these people can get me a carbon fiber/expoy tube at about 6 pounds. Yikes! "Yikes!" also applies to the price. On the other hand, I have been thinking about replacing my telescope's current mount with something a bit more modern. My current reflector is too heavy for the Losmandy GM-8 (about $1500) while the Losmandy G-11 costs about $2100. Spending $500 on a lighter tube means that I can put the scope on the GM-8. This allows me to save $600 on the mount. The GM-8 is also a lighter and more portable mount, so there is a net gain, no question. This is an economic fungibility variant of a friend's "40 pound bike rule." When she went to MIT, bike theft was enough of a problem that you needed really good locks to keep someone from stealing your your bike. A 30 pound bike needed a 10 pound lock to keep a thief from taking it; a 20 pound bike needed a 20 pound lock, because it was so valuable. A 40 pound bike barely needed a lock at all--who wants it? The next part of the diet is probably going to be finding a carbon fiber mirror cell, and carbon fiber tube rings. If you know where to find these goodies, let me know. A Coffee Table Book For Very Strong Coffee Tables A Reuters news story: A 130-pound book the size of a dining room table about Bhutan went on sale on Monday as part of an effort to raise awareness about the tiny Himalayan kingdom. Does Marijuana Make You Stupid? I heard this on Fox News last night as well: SYDNEY (Reuters) - An Australian who called police to report thieves were trying to break into his home and steal his cannabis plants wound up getting arrested himself. Is There Any Way To Make a Profit On This? I see from this news item that two more Americans are about to go into space, for $20 million each: Two Americans have won the go-ahead to become the next tourists in space, and two more spots for a Russian rocket trip to the International Space Station (news - web sites) are now on the market, the U.S. firm selling the spots said on Tuesday.Now, I would love to go into orbit--and at least some people here on Earth would probably like to help, as long as I didn't return--but I find myself wondering if there is some way to turn such a trip into a profit-making operation--and would I find someone willing to lend the money based on that expectation? France Shows Its Commitment to Freedom and Diversity An AP news story that reads more like something Scrappleface might write: French President Jacques Chirac said Wednesday he will ask parliament to pass a law banning Islamic head scarves and other religious insignia in public schools, a dramatic and potentially explosive move aimed at shoring up the nation's secular tradition.If a Republican in this country talked about a measure like this, the left would be screeching up a storm about narrow-mindedness. But Chirac wants to do this in France, and the left will bend over and ask for another swat. Scrappleface Does It Again! A wry piece of satire on the proposal to put the "morning after" pill into the over the counter class: Rather than causing a quick abortion, like the so-called 'morning after' pills, Plan A works on the cerebrum in the brain to actually keep women from getting into sexual situations in the first place.UPDATE: A reader reminds that calling the "morning after" pill a "contraceptive" is somewhat Orwellian, because it doesn't actually prevent conception, but prevents a zygote (fertilized egg) from implanting. Technically, the "morning after" pill isn't a contraceptive, but an abortifacient, in the same way that an IUD is. Labels: abortion Airplane As a Genocidal Tool of the Ruling Class Thanks to Kris Murray over at The Edge of England's Sword for the pointer to this amazing article. I kept looking for evidence that this was satire. Unfortunately, this article in the Guardian is so typical of the left: But history belongs to those who record it, so tomorrow is the official centenary of the aeroplane. At Kitty Hawk, George Bush will deliver a eulogy to aviation, while a number of men with more money than sense will seek to recreate the Wrights' first flight. Well, they can keep their anniversary. Tomorrow should be a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine.Of course, if Americans invent something, the left just knows that it must be evil. John Rhys-Davies Engages In Heresy You've seen the actor John Rhys-Davies, as Sallah, in the Indiana Jones movies, and as the professor in the short-lived but entertaining sci-fi series Sliders. He plays Gimli the dwarf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. National Review has an article in which they describe his recent heretical statements while on the Lord of the Rings promotional tour: "I'm burying my career so substantially in these interviews that it's painful. But I think that there are some questions that demand honest answers," he confessed after being asked about how much resonance he had with Tolkien's religious beliefs and perspectives. Tuesday, December 16, 2003
The ACLU Doing Its Part Again This San Jose Mercury-News story about the failure of Megan's Law to do its job in California explains the many ways in which California's implementation of sex offender reporting pales in comparison to most other states: To assess California's Megan's Law, the Mercury News obtained details from unnamed sources on the 54 "high-risk'' sex offenders listed as living in the region.Twice convicted rapist? Charming. I love that moral equivalence argument. Sam sounds like he could be a philosophy professor somewhere. Here's the quote that reminds us that the ACLU lives on Planet Delusion: State officials adopted a restrictive system in 1996 in part because of legislators' privacy concerns, and in part because they feared the courts would not allow wide distribution of sex offender information.That's right! It's "discrimination." Why shouldn't child molesters have a right to work in day care centers? Why should you know if you are renting a room to a twice convicted rapist? That's just discrimination! The entire notion of "privacy" in this context is ludicrous. As a friend of mine who teaches law back East pointed out: They were convicted in public trials, of violent felonies. Why do they have a right to privacy about this? The More I Read By Michael Crichton, The More Impressed I Get I read Crichton's spectacular first novel, Andromeda Strain, in high school. It was, quite literally, a book that I couldn't put down. I read it one sitting, finishing it at about 2:30 AM--and then off to school in the morning. His later novels read more and more like screenplays, and are less impressive for that reason. But some of these speeches he has been giving! Wow! Like this one, that starts: My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.His point is about the corruption of science for political purposes--and he gives the example of the TTAPS "nuclear winter" survey. One point Crichton doesn't mention is that TTAPS hired a public relations firm six months before they completed their supposed scientific study. This fits in with Crichton's point--politics is running these sort of "studies," not science. Labels: global warming Ninth Circuit on Medical Marijuana I'm still reading the decision here, but they seem to be taking the position of U.S. v. Lopez (1995) and U.S. v. McCoy (9th Cir. 2003) that Congress is overreaching when it uses the interstate commerce clause to justify regulating actions that do not involve interstate commerce. The argument distinguishes this case from Wickard v. Filburn (1942). It claims that the aggregation of individual activities that allowed Congress to regulate a farmer growing his own wheat, grinding his own flour, and baking his bread because he was engaged therefore in interstate commerce, doesn't apply in a medical marijuana case. The argument is that marijuana isn't really a commercial activity, I presume because there's no lawful market for marijuana in the U.S.--unlike bread. I don't think they articulated this very well, however. What A Powerful Endorsement Madonna is having a fundraising concert at her house for Wesley Clark. This should get Clark the votes of all the people that thought Madonna's book Sex was worth buying. Am I the only person in America who thinks Madonna has a wonderful voice--and wishes that she had been concerned about polluting the culture while our kids were small, instead of waiting until she was worried about her own? Great Understatement From Someone Who Must Not Be Reading His Own Email From AP: President Bush signed legislation Tuesday meant to stem the flood of unwanted e-mail pitches, a problem he believes is hurting the economy. Yup, They've Solved Their Violent Crime Problem There Instapundit tells the sad tale of Cleburne, Texas, which apparently has so little crime that they sent undercover agents out to buy a vibrator. I suppose if the government has laws on the books, and they become aware of a crime, they are obligated to enforce it--no matter how silly it is. Of course, rigorous enforcement of silly laws will almost certainly cause their demise. I can see why some laws might justify the use of undercover agents. Even though I think drug laws are not the most effective way to achieve a genuine good--reducing drug abuse by minors--I can see why most Americans support drug laws, and use of undercover agents to enfoce those laws. But using undercover agents to enforce a law against vibrators? Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.Especially since the Griswold case found that married couples have a right of privacy that protects contraceptives and applied it through some mysterious logic to the states, a law prohibiting sales of vibrators to married couples is obviously intruding on marital privacy. I have some objections to the Griswold decision's logic. Somehow or another, the Court decided that marital privacy "concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees." I can't quite find where Justice Douglas listed which guarantees he meant, but he seemed to have meant the Fourth and Fifth Amendment guarantees concerning searches--even though the basis of the criminal case involved a clinic that was advertising its services to married couples. No search involved there! Justice Goldberg's concurring opinion at least had the decency to suggest that this right to privacy is hiding underneath the inkblot of the Ninth Amendment--and that somehow the Fourteenth Amendment had incorporated it against the states through the due process clause. Go ahead, read Goldberg's concurring opinion yourself, and try to make sense of it. Somehow bits and pieces of the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights are incorporated against the states; the Ninth Amendment protects other fundamental rights--but Goldberg doesn't seem to recognize that the Ninth Amendment was understood (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights) originally as a limitation on the federal government alone. The Fourteenth Amendment was understood by both authors and opponents as applying the entire first eight amendments against the states--but there's no evidence that I have seen that anyone involved in the Fourteenth Amendment debates thought that it applied the Ninth Amendment to the states. The Party of Tinfoil Hats & Dark Conspiracies Is anyone else old enough to remember a book called None Dare Call it Treason? I'm afraid that it created an image in my mind (not fairly, either) that if you wanted to find a bunch of people who believed in conspiracies to explain politics, you would visit a Republican Party convention. (Obviously, I was much younger then.) Now, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) is teaming up with Howard Dean to create the Paranoid Conspiracy Theory Wing of the Democratic Party: The Washington congressman who criticized President Bush while visiting Baghdad last year has questioned the timing of the capture of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.UPDATE: One of my readers tells me that today on Brit Hume's newshour one of the Beltway Boys (I confuse their names) said he was sitting in the makeup room a couple of days ago with former Secretary of State Albright after the capture of Saddam was announced. In all seriousness, she turned to him and said it was possible that the Bush Administration was holding Osama Bin Laden on ice so that they could announce his capture shortly before the coming presidential election.Indeed. The sooner we wrap up the War on Terror, the sooner we can get the economy running on all cylinders again. War is not good for economies and other non-governmental things. UPDATE 2: Another reader tells me it was Morton Kondracke who said this. What Used To Take A Big Observatory... There was a time when an astrophotograph like this would come out of the research program of an observatory. Now, amateurs are producing amazing pictures like this one of NGC891. Part of the reason is that CCD imaging and computer software are available. Some of it is that there are enough wealthy amateurs to afford the high end "amateur" equipment that Gerald R. Miller used to take this picture. The explosion of wealth in America in the last twenty years is really quite astonishing. I've seen (and I've blogged about) some of the destructive aspects of it. There is an upside to all that wealth, however, and I am glad to see that some people are using that wealth in ways that can fill us with wonder, and not just disgust and envy. Monday, December 15, 2003
If You Are Going To Complain About Stereotyping... Don't conform to the stereotype in your complaint. Red Letter Day proceeds to attack me for homophobic bigotry, along with attacking me for many statements that I did not make. But here's the amazing part: his attack on me goes like this: According to Ms. Cramer, gay people are all cannibals who all have AIDS...Calling me "Ms. Cramer" is obviously intended as some sort of insult. Red Letter Day is suggesting that I am like my daughter or my wife--both of them very smart people. Why would a gay man feel the need to insult by calling me "Ms. Cramer"? It wasn't that many years ago that San Francisco had two separate gay Democratic clubs: one for lesbians, and one for gay men. Why? Because there was enough hostility towards women from some gay men, and enough contempt for men from some lesbians, that they couldn't work together. (At least according to their web page, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club is beyond gender segregation now.) Malvo & Islam Remember when John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were arrested, and the media did their best to downplay the Islamic terrorist connection? Remember the news coverage (in only a few limited places) that indicated that John Muhammad was living in a homeless shelter--but making international flights? Make sure you click here to see some of Malvo's doodles that ended up in the court record. THis one shows the Twin Towers burning--and who he blamed for this. 
Michelle Malkin has a list of the "interesting" doodles that ended up in the court record, and demonstrate that yes, this wasn't just about money. Speaking Truth to Power This Reuters news story leaves me uncertain whether to call this tactless and rude, or what the Quakers used to call "speaking truth to power": VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - U.S. Hip Hop singer Lauryn Hill, from a stage used by the Pope, has shocked Catholic officials at a concert by telling them to "repent" and alluding to sexual abuse of children by U.S. priests.Alas, not just in the United States. Yes, it was just a few Catholic priests engaged in these crimes against innocence--but too many of these crimes were covered over by archbishops. The Catholic Church needs to do some serious penance for ignoring these crimes. The hierarchy also needs to ask why they were prepared to ignore and tolerate homosexual actions within the priesthood for so long, when the Church's public pronouncements clearly recognized that homosexual action is contrary to the Bible. Labels: child sexual abuse The American Library Association's Concern About The Freedom to Read The American Library Association has been very concerned about the possible misuse of the Patriot Act to keep track of who is reading what. I had assumed that their misguided fears were, at least, based on a legitimate concern. Nat Hentoff's current column in the Village Voice suggests that they are just leftist hypocrites--because they refused to take a stand on a far more serious problem: Castro sending librarians to prison for having books available to read: In this country, the 10 independent librarians have been abandoned by, of all people, America's public librarians—that is, by the democratically elected American Library Association Council that sets policy for the ALA's 64,000 members, the largest organization of librarians in the world.So the ALA is concerned that Ashcroft might use sec. 215 of the Patriot Act inappropriately, and has been leading the fight against the Patriot Act--but refuses to take a stand in support of independent librarians who are sent to prison for making "subversive" literature available to Cubans. This nails it down pretty well; the ALA doesn't support the freedom to read as a principle. No, it is just a little political game designed to attack the Bush Administration. How To Upset A Lot Of People I see that IBM is also planning to ship a lot of software development jobs overseas: IBM's plan, still under development, will take place over a number of months in stages. About 947 people are scheduled to be notified during the first half of the coming year that their work will be handled overseas in the future. It isn't yet clear how many of the other 3,700 jobs identified as "potential to move offshore" in the IBM documents will move next year or some time later.Oh yeah, I can picture the nature of that training relationship. From all that I can find out, the wages of Indian software engineers are not dramatically lower than the costs of Americans. Much of the difference comes from the enormous overhead that the largest American corporations have above and beyond salaries and benefits. From what I know of the actual costs, those same jobs could be performed by less top-heavy American companies located in low cost areas of the United States. (Yes, there are a lot of low cost areas of the United States.) At the same time, the costs of joint development are not trivial: travel to and from the United States; infrastructure and network security issues; that many of the Third World developers are actually working for competing firms. Is This Really a Sign of Discrimination? The Guardian carries a report that is, regardless of the reason, very discouraging: There are twice as many black people in prison than there are at university, a report from the race watchdog will reveal this week.What does that last sentence mean? Is the Commission claiming that racism in Britain is so endemic that the doors are closed to blacks wanting to go to college? Perhaps they mean that racism in British society is so endemic that it drives blacks into lives of crime, rather than to college, but if so, that is either an indication of a really shocking level of racism in Britain--or more likely, an indication of a severe cultural problem in black British society. Around one in six inmates in Britain's prisons is Afro-Caribbean - despite the fact that they make up only 2% of the country's population.This is really disturbing. Either the criminal justice system is profoundly racist in Britain, or blacks in Britain are committing crimes at eight times the rate of the average Briton, or some combination of the two. In the United States, blacks are about 12% of the population, and commit roughly one half of the murders--or at roughly four times the rate of the average American. At least part of this discrepancy in America is because blacks in America are, on average, about six years younger than the average, and therefore a larger percentage are in the peak violent crime years. Perhaps there is some similar explanation going on in Britain. I am very skeptical that racism in the British criminal justice system alone could explain an incarceration rate eight times the average. Sunday, December 14, 2003
A Truly Strange Dream I dreamed that my wife and I rented a helicopter, and I flew it from Seattle to Portland so that she could participate in a golf tournament. What's so weird about that? 1. I am not a pilot. I have no idea how to fly a helicopter. 2. My wife doesn't golf. Neither do I. 3. Everyone else in the tournament was playing fairly conventional golf. My wife, instead of putting golf balls, was putting poached eggs (a common breakfast food for her). 4. After the poached egg golfing, we returned the airport--where I suddenly became preoccupied with the question, "Can I legally fly a helicopter without a pilot's license? How serious of a fine is this if I get caught?" Your Contributions Have Not Gone Unnoticed (Well, Not Forever) I just noticed that several people contributed money through the tip jar over the last month or so--but I didn't notice this immediately, because the very effective spam blocker that I use was throwing the notification email into the spam folder. I was, however, wondering why my PayPal balance kept growing larger. I just went through, and whipped my spam blocker within an inch of its life, and told it to stop doing that! I also emailed everyone who has made contributions recently to thank them. While it's not enough to let me do this full-time, it is appreciated--some of it is going to a 5" f/9 achromatic refractor that I expect to receive before Christmas. The Atta Iraqi Connection This Telegraph news story reports that the Iraqi provisional government claims to have found a memo in the Iraqi archives showing that Mohammed Atta received training from terrorist Abu Nidal in Iraq shortly before 9/11: Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.Thanks to Instapundit for the link. |
