The advertising above is just a source of revenue, and sometimes, I don't know what will appear there.
Unique grips and accessories for your 1911!
Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through.
Labels: telescopes Labels: gun rights Labels: abortion Labels: telescopes Labels: intelligent design Labels: telescopes
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
Click here to find out why the Amazon.com Honor System paybox is no longer here.
RSS feed
Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
archives
Search only this site: Click here and enter your search string at the beginning of the search field.
Sorry I've Been So Quiet Today
Remember the "wax on, wax off" sequence out of The Karate Kid? I only did one car, not 38 (or however many it was)--my Corvette--but then again, I'm not a kid. The car looks great, but am I sore! (An aerobic exercise by the time I was done, covered in sweat.)
Then I started the rebuild of my reflector. I originally was just going to weigh all the major components, but by the time I was part way through removing the rotating tube ring assembly from the tube, I decided that I was going to reinstall it.
Just to explain: this is a really neat assembly of stainless steel and aluminum that provides a way to rotate the telescope tube in place--often useful because of how a German equatorial mount design sometimes moves the eyepiece into odd and inconvenient locations. Unfortunately, this neat assembly weighs ten pounds--turning the reflector into a 31 pound behemoth. That's just too heavy for the mount that it is on now, and a bit too heavy for the Losmandy GM-8 mount. Replacing the rotating tube assembly with something designed to attach to the Losmandy dovetail knocks it down to 25 pounds--light enough that the Losmandy should be very happy with it.
Removing the rotating ring assembly, however, turned out to be quite a process. The rings attach to the telescope tube with what seems like an excessive number of 3/8" hex head screws that go through the tube, and attach to nuts on the inside. Somehow, I managed to get all these nuts onto the screws 10 years ago--but either my arms have gotten a couple inches shorter, or the fiberglass has grown a couple of inches in the meantime. There were uses I was making of tools that would make your junior high shop teacher either shake his head, or start lecturing you. At one point, I was using a torque wrench to hold the nuts in place while trying to unscrew with the other hand. Most of these were just unpleasant and slow, because the screws and nuts were not stainless steel, and were well rusted. (Why anyone would include non-stainless fasteners for use on a telescope just makes me shake my head.)
Fortunately, one of the many friendly strangers walking by in front of the house while I was doing this offered to help, and had the magically longer arm to deal with the last three screws that were beyond my reach.
Tomorrow's mission after church: patch the holes with epoxy; repaint the interior of the tube in flat black; sand the exterior's many battle scars from car collisions; then repaint the patches in bright white; wash the mirror again; reassemble.
First Reported Use By A Concealed Carry Licensee in Minnesota Under Non-Discretionary Law
In this case, we have a copy of the blacked out police report available here as a multi-page TIF file. A summary of the report appears here.
Important points: the attacker (as even the attacker admits to police) is a bicyclist who loses his temper when a driver honks his horn. The driver asserts that he was honking the horn to let the bicyclist know of his presence. The bicyclist catches up at the next light, throws the bike down in front of the vehicle, and grabs the driver by the throat. The driver starts to pull his gun, warns the attacker, and drives over the bike.
Both call the police: they charge the bicyclist, based on his own statement, and that of a witness to the confrontation.
Kerry Just Needs to Ride in a Tank
I've been noticing the increasing Dukakis-like behavior from John Kerry--trying hard to run from his Massachusetts liberalism, while giving sufficiently "nuanced" answers not to offend the left-wing of the Democratic Party. He has been sinking himself, very quickly. Now this! WASHINGTON - John Kerry (news - web sites), seizing control of his party, tapped Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign manager to represent his interests at the Democratic National Committee (news - web sites).
Oh yeah, and he did such a great job in 1988.
John Sasso, 56, was named general election manager of the DNC, a position created by the Kerry campaign and the DNC staff to give the nominee-in-waiting control of the party without upsetting the current structure.
He will work with Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to oversee presidential election activities at the party, officials said.
"A Lot Can Change Between 9 And 5"
This was the slogan that the evening paper in San Francisco used a few years ago, and for the artwork, one of the posters showed Red Square with the famous statue of Lenin haranguing the workers (or is he asking for a light for his cigarette?), and then the same scene, with Bob's Big Boy in place of Vladimir Illich.
This change is almost as amazing: Senator Boxer demanding that the federal government work faster on arming civilians--with handguns: Frustrated by the Transportation Security Administration's delay in arming airline pilots with guns, four members of Congress said Thursday they want the agency to quit dragging its feet.
The article goes on to point out the entertaining aspects of this:
"We're not interested in any excuses from here on out. This is too important to our national security," said Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), who introduced legislation that would require TSA to speed up the process of arming pilots.
Bunning was joined by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who is sponsoring a companion bill in the House. But it was the Kentucky senator who had the harshest words for TSA.And for someone like Boxer, who flies frequently to her home state of California, the issue transcends her typical alignment with gun-control proponents. Both the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and Gun Owners of America are strong proponents of the legislation.
"We're not just going to sit quietly by," Boxer said. "This whole program was meant to make sure that what happened on 9/11 never happens again. This is a plan that is a very important part of that never happening again. And they're not executing it. And we've pretty much had it."
The End Of Trash Cans?
I was told (even before 9/11) that the reason that trash cans were no longer present in the Paris subway system was because it was too easy to hide bombs in them. I groaned, and thought to myself, "At least we don't have to operate at that level of fear in the U.S." I'm afraid that these days may be about over. As part of a news story about Homeland Security Department warnings about bomb plots this summer: The new bulletin lists a number of suggestions for city transportation systems to enhance security. These include close monitoring of parking lots, removal of trash receptacles, limiting access points, improving lighting and beefing up overall law enforcement presence.
If there is any lesson to be learned from this confrontation with al-Qaeda, it is that we can't let this be anything but a fight to the finish. Al-Qaeda's efforts will force us to choose between al-Qaeda's especially pestilent form of Islam, or complete and overwhelming victory. A continual low-level war without a clear victory will mean the gradual loss of an open society.
We've already lost bits and pieces of an open society since 9/11. Considering the severity of the attack, I am very impressed with how little we've lost. It will get worse, however, just because al-Qaeda will continue to change their methods, and more and more of our liberties will come under government supervision. I don't see any way to avoid this, especially because the threats in question are certainly worse than any single intrusion into our personal privacy and rights will seem at the time. Even worse, those making the arguments for these losses of liberties aren't going to be motivated by evil intentions, but a genuine concern about protecting American lives.
The ACLU has enaged in a public relations campaign concerning the Patriot Act that has been very misleading. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that their motivations have been fear of where this may take us--not simple political partisanship. The ACLU needs to understand that the best protection of our civil liberties would be a complete and overwhelming victory against al-Qaeda--one so overwhelming that those Muslims who fancy that Allah is on their side will be disillusioned, and start to question their moral certainty in their immorality.
Of course, this would require the ACLU to take sides in a battle between our government, and an ideology that relies on terrorism, genocide, torture, and a form of theocracy that makes Jerry Falwell look like a liberal. I can see why the ACLU might be conflicted about a choice like that.
The Dane-Geld Didn't Work for Spain, Either
You are doubtless familiar with Rudyard Kipling's poem Dane-geld--the traditional method by which the English paid protection to the Danes to not invade--and it didn't work.IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
Now we seem that the Spanish people, having tried to buy protection from al-Qaeda, have failed:
To call upon a neighbour and to say:--
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:--
"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
There is only way to win against monsters like al-Qaeda--complete extermination.
MADRID, Spain (AP) - Police found a bomb Friday under the tracks of Spain's bullet train line between Madrid and Seville, the interior minister said, less than a month after a deadly commuter rail attack that killed 191 people.
Bomb-disposal experts alerted by a railway employee found 22-24 pounds of explosives about 40 miles south of Madrid, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
The explosives were connected to a detonator with a 450-foot cable, the minister told a news conference.
Acebes said it was not clear who was behind the bombing. The national news agency Efe quoted police sources as saying preliminary analysis suggested the explosives might be a Spanish brand called Goma 2 Eco, the same used in the March 11 terrorist bombings in Madrid.
How Trustworthy Is The Consumer Price Index?
I always knew that the CPI tended to overstate and understate inflation because of the way that mortgage interest rate changes were factored in--but this article claims that the use of "substitution" for particular brands of products makes the CPI understate inflation quite substantially. I don't know if this is true or not--just passing it along for your consideration.
UPDATE: As I said, I don't know if this claim is true or not. This response from reader Steven Vickers argues otherwise:Just had to quickly comment on the misguided analysis you linked regarding the CPI. Bill Fleckenstein makes some strange judgements which cause his results to be dramatically different from that of mainstream economists.
He argues that the Bureau of Labor Services commits what amounts to deception in order to understate inflation: "By using hedonics, price increases can be deemed quality improvements and therefore wiped away with the government's magic wand. If that doesn't work, the bureau uses the substitution technique to banish the price increase." As "evidence" for this, he criticizes the government's practice of subsituting for a good after a price increase of a particular brand.
Yet the government's practice is entirely logical. Consider the example of a particular brand of ice cream (the example the BLS uses that Fleckenstein criticizes). Suppose, responding to what they thought was an increase in demand for a luxury product, Ben and Jerry's doubled the price for ice cream. Now, a reasonable person would conclude that the price for ice cream in general has not dramatically jumped, but increased by a much lesser degree, yet Fleckenstein would have you believe that one can take Ben and Jerry's market share, and slap a huge increase on their price, and--boom!--the "cost of living" has severly changed.
Let me take Fleckenstein's logic to it's conclusion. Virtually anyone who has touched an economics textbook would agree that an increase in demand for a product results in an increse in its price. Suppose that, due to a particularly successful marketing campaign, more people wanted to buy Coke than before. After the price has been driven up, according to the Fleckenstein metrics, "inflation" has risen--yet common sense tells you that this cannot be the case, as for every additional dollar spent on Coke, one less dollar was spent on other goods. Indeed, ANY change in consumer preferences results in either a deflation or an inflation by his standards, and as this defeats the entire purpose of measuring inflation (defined as an increase in the AGGREGATE price level), his analysis seems rather shoddy.
One a more psychological note, note that he accuses the Fed and the BLS of "insanity." The Fed, the executive branch, most mainstream economists (search the National Bureau of Economic Research at nber.org if you don't believe me) all believe that the CPI OVERSTATES inflation, and yet he has the magic key that shows how it's all just a fraud. In truth, he sounds more like the "physicist" who has discovered how to create energy out of nothing, or the "doctor" who sells snake oil than like someone interested in real economic analysis.
Great Bumper Stickers
"186,000 miles per second - it's not just a good idea, it's the law"
"Red meat isn't bad for you - green, fuzzy meat is bad for you"
Interesting First-Hand Account By A Bystander
Over on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog, my coblogger Pete Drum excerpted a somewhat more exciting than usual news story a few days ago: Two construction workers beat and tried to rob their client in his home yesterday, but he chased them off by grabbing a gun and shooting at them, police said.
Today I received an email from someone who claims to have been present, and thinks this was just horrible:
The workers pistol-whipped the victim and at one point handcuffed him and covered his mouth with duct tape, police said.
"They figured he was rich, and they would rip him off," said San Diego police Sgt. Rich Nemetz. "They all know each other."
The victim, in his 50s, had hired a contracting firm to work on his house. Two workers came to the home on Avenida Chamnez about 5 p.m. and first talked about the job, Nemetz said. Then, when the man left the room and returned, one worker pistol-whipped him.
At some point, the victim's wife drove up with their two children. Her husband got outside, but the robbers caught him again and threatened the wife with a gun, Nemetz said. The woman and children drove away and called police.
Meanwhile, Nemetz said, the robbers ordered the homeowner to open his safe and give them money. He opened the safe, but pulled out a handgun.
The robbers ran outside, toward Via Espana, with the victim behind firing his gun, police said. Neighbors called police after hearing two shots and seeing him return home with his head bleeding.Just thought you might be interested in the complete story of the shooting on Avenida Chamnez. I was playing with my 2 year old daughter in my driveway at 5:00 pm when the supposed victim shot twice in the middle of the street whizzing bullets past me and my two year old. By the grace of God, we were not walking with my husband down the center of the street with our dog on our nightly walk. We were lucky to not be killed by a ricocheting bullet.
Supposed victim? Do you have some reason to believe that he was not a victim? The news account doesn't give much reason to suspect otherwise.
People do not have a right to shoot their attackers when they are no longer in eminent danger, nor do they have the right to endanger their neighbors and innocent children. So if you think this is a good example why people need guns, you are wrong. This was almost a tragedy.
California law does, in fact, allow civilians to use deadly force to prevent the escape of fleeing felons. (Penal Code sec. 196, although the case law is a good bit more complex than the statute suggests.) Police officers are subject to a more rigorous standard since Tennessee v. Garner (1985) was decided by the Supreme Court, about 20 years back. Civilians are subject to civil liability for their actions.
This wasn't "almost a tragedy." It was a tragedy for the robbery victim, and his wife; had you or your children been hit by a bullet, it would have been a more severe tragedy. Somehow, considering the level of violence involved, it doesn't sound like the robbers were going to let the victim (who knew who they were) live to testify. I think you would agree that would have been a tragedy comparable to the one that "almost" got you.
I'm curious: would you have been even slightly worried by these robbers wandering the streets? They were prepared to threaten his life to get him to open the safe. What do you think they would be willing to do to you, if they thought there was some money in your home, or your bank account?
PETA: Fanaticism Unleashed
Take a look here at the materials that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals plans to hand out to kids as part of their vegetarian campaign.
Just Saw A MoveOn.org Commercial This Morning
It was built entirely around a Richard Clarke statement--hardly a high credibility source, even to many liberals by now. My son, who is almost 16, not terribly political, and vastly more cynical than I was at that age, proclaimed it "a stupid commercial. It doesn't even say to vote for someone else." Indeed.
I suspect that it will come across to many Americans in the middle--those who think Bush did a good job after 9/11, but might be open to seriously considering voting for a Democrat for President--as a nasty attack piece.
The bad thing about being isolated is that you start to think that everyone thinks like you. MoveOn's leadership needs to leave the Millionaires & Billionaires Club long enough to find out what working Americans think.
UPDATE: A reader points out that MoveOn.org is funded with soft money, and isn't allowed to advocate (directly) for a candidate.
Don't Spend It All In One Place: The Citibank Schwartz Settlement
I received a check today settling a class action lawsuit that I didn't even know about. As explained here, some lawyer claimed that Citibank's cutoff time for payments was unfair, and filed a class action lawsuit against Citibank. I tried not to snicker when I walked my enormous $0.37 check down to the credit union.
In general, class action lawsuits are a very good thing. They provide a mechanism for assisting injured parties who could not justify suing on behalf of very small amounts. They also act as a club upside the head to get corporations to behave (although a fair number of class action lawsuits seem highly questionable).
There comes a certain moment when you have to ask if there is something a little absurd about the lawyer who filed the suit getting $9 million--while Citibank probably spent a dollar to send me a $0.37 check. So here's a question for all you lawyers out there: at what point does a class action lawsuit qualify as absurd, based on how much the injured parties get, and how much the lawyers get?
Just to clarify the principles involved, imagine that XYZ Corporation did something wrong that caused 1.000,000 customers to be injured in the amount of one dollar each. That's a million dollars--a pretty substantial injury collectively, and enough so to cause even a medium-sized corporation to get their snout out of the trough. The lawyer expects to be paid for his time litigating this, and certainly he is performing a useful function here. What if lawyers fees come to $990,000, and every member of the class receives a check for one cent? Would this be reasonable?
I understand that the judge has to approve the settlement details, but since I don't have much respect for federal judges (who are generally unelected legislators pretending to be apolitical), I find myself wondering if there might be some other manner of righting the wrongs, and discouraging corporate misbehavor, that doesn't put so much of the money that belongs to the injured parties into the hands of the lawyer.
New Advertiser
Apparently this is an organizational method for bring Bush supporters together locally. Now, where I live, this may not be all that important--most every neighbor we have supports President Bush's re-election campaign. But if all your neighbors are millionaires, or at least most of them are, you may have trouble finding a Bush supporter--you may even be a little afraid to express your opinion openly. In that case, this might be a very effective strategy to meet fellow Bush supporters so that you can work together on assisting getting Bush re-elected.
Thomas Sowell Being A Troublemaker Again
He makes some interesting suggestions for the sort of changes to the government that he would like: Government subsidies would be drastically reduced, starting at the top. That is, there would be a prohibition against giving a dime of government money to anyone whose annual income or total assets exceed one billion dollars. Why should agricultural subsidies be going to Ted Turner and David Rockefeller, or "universal health care" pay for their medicine?
Wrong motivations? A few years back, the Department of Justice investigated corruption in the Chicago courts. (Can you imagine that?) I recall seeing one local newspaper reporter observing that the press should have been come curious why judges would spent a million dollars to get re-elected to jobs that only paid about $65,000 a year. The reason was the extra benefits that came with the job. Better to pay our officials well, and hope that we get people of considerably higher talent in the jobs.
Who could object to cutting off subsidies to billionaires? Once that was done, however, the next step would be to cut off millionaires. Then we could proceed on down the income scale until people making a hundred grand a year could no longer expect to be subsidized with the taxpayer's money.
The great advantage of this way of proceeding is that it would rob the media of opportunities to run sob stories about how some poor person was hurt by cutbacks in some government program -- even when the vast majority of those who were hurt were the bureaucrats who run these programs and slick special interests who hide behind the poor.
...
With all the money saved by ending vast numbers of subsidies, the government could afford to pay the kinds of salaries that would attract highly qualified people from the private sector. For example, if every member of Congress were paid a million dollars a year, that would cost less than one percent of what it costs to run the Department of Agriculture.
As things stand today, a successful doctor, lawyer, executive, engineer or economist would lose money by becoming a member of Congress. This means that Congress is largely filled with people who either already have great wealth or people who don't have what it takes to earn a high income in the private sector -- or people hungry for power, who are the worst of all.
On those rare occasions when delusions of running for state legislature or Congress have hit me, the harsh reality of low pay (until the 1990s) has brought me back to Earth. Congresscritters now receive $157,000 a year, but remember that unless they live very close to DC, they end up having two homes: one in their home state, and one in DC--and a lot of air travel back and forth. (That link also shows you a history of Congressional salaries, from 1789 to the present.)
Is This Really Necessary?
A recurring theme is that gay people are just like everyone else, except for who they love. Why, then, is Viacom planning a gay TV channel? Redstone also said Tuesday that he has been in discussions with U.S. cable operators about the possibility of launching a gay and lesbian channel. He called the would-be network "a good channel for them, and a good channel for Viacom."
So, if gay people are no different, other than who they love, why do they need their own cable channel? What sort of different programming will this cable broadcast that straight people wouldn't want to watch?
"We are prepared to give it a go, and I'm optimistic about it," he said, adding that "there's no reason why we shouldn't aspire to reach such an enormous demographic, not only in the United States, but in the world."
Imagine if someone announced that they were going to start a cable channel for left-handers. Would anyone find it credible that us left-handers are so different from the majority that we are going to watch a cable channel aimed just at us?
Successful Films
Tyler Cowen points to the evidence that wholesome movies make more money than films that do not, but he is skeptical of film critic Michael Medved's claim that this reflects a bias that Hollywood has in favor of depravity: What are we to make of this? Michael Medved has argued for years that Hollywood has a left-wing, secular, 1960s bias, and could make more money with wholesomeness. Perhaps the moguls simply can't comprehend how such movies could be popular, just as they turned away Mel Gibson and made him finance Passion with his own money.
Cowen also uses the fact that such films are being made as evidence that Hollywood would make more, if there were a market for them:
While some bias may be present, enough moviemakers are simply greedy. The study shows that many wholesome movies are in fact made and succeed financially. So if more wholesome movies would make more money, we would get them. They are not shut out of the market. So in financial terms I doubt if the bias can be a large one.The more interesting economic question is why wholesome movies (read: children's movies, which I take to include young teenagers) hold a more concentrated market position. That is, they make a high average amount of money yet their success cannot be replicated easily by competitors. My best guess? Children want to see the same movie that their peers are seeing, which implies a concentration of returns. Yet their parents will only take them to the cinema so many times, which limits the number of movies in that market. Furthermore, these movies, which rely on focality, face especially high marketing costs.
Here I strongly disagree. Gibson's Passion of the Christ is pulling in movie audiences that seldom see movies. I will tell you that my wife and I watch far fewer films (rentals or in theaters) than we did twenty years ago, simply because there are so few movies that we find worth our time--and it is not a matter of kids driving the demand. Second Hand Lions was a fine film, a reminder that a movie can be very entertaining without being vulgar or crude. It was a film well-suited to both adults and children. Ditto for Pirates of the Caribbean.
The bottom line: Hollywood may indeed be a corrupt Babylon, but there is no easy way out of the box. There is only room for so many wholesome pictures in the market. Beyond this point, consumers demand sex and violence in their movies.
My wife and I are, I think, pretty typical of a big chunk of America: we would go to a movie theater every week, if there were enough movies being made that appealed to us. There really aren't. I am always amazed at how many movies seem to be running along just fine, and then it is as if the screenwriter suddenly stopped in his tracks and said, "Wow! I haven't written anything yet to offend ordinary Americans!"
Here's an example. I was watching Forces of Nature on TV a while back. It wasn't a great film, but it wasn't a bad one, and Sandra Bullock has such an ingratating way about her that if I have nothing better to do, I'lll watch a movie with her. Everything is going pretty well, until suddenly, this mismatched pair needs to scrape up some money to complete their journey to his wedding--and they go into a strip joint so that she can earn some money. I was hoping that at the last moment, the script would veer away from this, but no, it turns into the guy is being encouraged to strip for money. At that point, I turned it off. It was so bizarre to turn a light romantic comedy into something sleazy--why?
There are a lot of interesting stories out there that could be made into lavish costume dramas--and drag in an audience that doesn't ordinarily see movies. As an example, Nat Brandt's The Town That Started the Civil War, about the Oberlin Rescuers trial in 1858, would make a splendid film. It has a serious conflict: slavecatchers and U.S. marshals capture a runaway slave in Ohio, and try to take him back South. Oberlin College's students and faculty surround the hotel, with rifles, and demand freedom for the slave. It has social significance, with the Rescuers insisting that the laws of God take precedence over the laws of men. It has a trial, with all the drama that a trial entails. It has political machinations in the background, as abolitionist and slaveowner forces struggle over a jury. It has a great closing sequence, as we see John Brown reading about the case--and becoming increasingly committed to the Harpers' Ferry Raid. So why are properties like this sitting unused? But there's no sex; no homosexuals; no cannibalism; and no torture (although, if Hollywood insists, we can have the slave flashback to being whipped).
UPDATE: Lead and Gold has some important comments on this, with respect to worshipping of markets: By that reasoning, all cars should still have tailfins and weigh 5,000 pounds. After all, if there was a market for smaller, more Teutonic cars, Detroit would have offered cars like that in 1958.
And that is one of the points that Medved's Hollywood vs. America makes--that much of Hollywood is so out of touch with America that they don't understand their customers, or potential customers, very well.
Markets are efficient information processors, but they are not omniscient. Buyers can only purchase what is presented to them by producers. Since producers are not gifted with perfect foresight, they often miss opportunities. That is why innovators and new entrants can reap high returns. As Clayton M. Christensen shows in The Innovator's Dilemma, established firms usually are locked into existing customers and are blind to the profits to be found in new or underserved segments.
...
The movie industry is as much a creative community as it is a business. Tom Wolfe has skillfully dissected the "compound mentality" that can infect such communities. Artists begin to care less about what customers want, and worry a great deal about what their peers think. Again, such groupthink (does Cowen think this only happens in government bureaucracies?) can create blind spots.
Medved tells of asking Hollywood producers what percentage of Americans regularly attend church, and usually gets an answer like "oh, about 5%." This explains why they completely missed the potential of Passion of the Christ--and did not realize (or did not care) about the enormous backlash from The Last Temptation of Christ. To most of the entertainment industry, a movie dramatically at odds with Christianity would seem an easy sell, while a film that was firmly in the mainstream of Christian belief would seem like a marginal market.
Bumper Sticker I Saw This Morning
I was dropping my son off at school this morning, and I noticed a bumper sticker that I've never seen before: Pay no attention to the car. My treasure is stored up in Heaven.
This refers to Matthew 6:19-21: 19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The car, however, was fairly old--old enough that this bumper sticker qualifies as sardonic. Still, a nice mixture of the sardonic and the serious.
UPDATE: My favorite bumper sticker of all time: "Eschew Obfuscation." My least favorite bumper sticker (one that I saw a lot in Sonoma County): "Sorry I wasn't in church Sunday morning, I was practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian." But of course, that describes Sonoma County to a tee.
Traffic Congestion in West Boise
On my way to work the other morning, I had to honk at a Canada goose to get it to waddle out of the road.
Reasons Why High Capacity Firearms Make a Lot of Sense
This was just posted by my co-blogger Pete Drum on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog: Renter Fires Gun During Alleged Home Invasion
Six home invaders? Even with good aim, I can see a need for at least a 13 round magazine here.
A woman and her husband were arrested and put behind bars early Tuesday morning after an alleged early morning home invasion failed in northwest Houston.
Investigators said the couple, along with four other men, forced their way into a northwest Houston apartment around 1 a.m. Tuesday and ransacked the apartment.
The renter told officials the intruders demanded money and drugs.
New Article Posted
I am substituting for Neal Knox in Shotgun News every other issue while he undergoes chemotherapy. This is the April 1, 2004 article: "Victory in Missouri, Again--Sort Of".
Being Right Isn't Enough
There are times that I worry that Bush and his people are a little focused on being right, as opposed to winning the election. There is no question that, in the long run, a global economy, with employers able to pick and choose where to have work done, is good for the U.S.--even though it is often not good for individual workers who can't find jobs, or can't find good jobs. As much as Kerry's proposal to change the tax laws to discourage businesses from outsourcing jobs overseas is nonsense to my rational mind, it is emotionally very satisfying: if you want to send the jobs overseas, you won't get the benefit of our tax structure while you do it!
There are also outsourcing deals that are disturbing from a symbolic and nostalgic standpoint: Just Tuesday, 87-year-old Radio Flyer Inc. announced it was closing its Chicago plant and moving the production of its metal red wagons loved by generations of American children to China, resulting in the expected layoffs of nearly half of its 90 employees.
And this is the issue where Bush and company seem to have missed an important point: the manufacturing jobs were largely union, a crowd likely to vote Democrat anyway. White collar, college-educated workers are more likely to vote Republican than Democrat--and failing to recognize the fear that a lot of them have is really, really stupid.
...
Economists, who as a group are big supporters of free trade, said the administration appeared to be bungling the politics of trade in a period when many jobs have been lost and there are now worries that high-paid white-collar workers could be vulnerable to having their jobs sent abroad as well.
"There is no difference from an economic standpoint from outsourcing manufacturing jobs, which we have been doing for 20 years, and outsourcing white collar service jobs except college-educated workers whine louder when they lose their jobs," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
I'm not suggesting that Bush should play the protectionist game on jobs. I am suggesting that he and his minions need to be a lot more careful to emphasize that as good jobs get exported, that many individuals are going to be hurt, while others may benefit. There is also nothing wrong with encouraging--as loudly as possible--"Buy American." It doesn't impair free trade, it might actually save a few jobs, and it helps to remind Americans that buying the cheapest goods (and often not very high quality goods) may not be good for their neighbors.
If you are looking to buy something American, let me emphasize how tremendously pleased I am with the Losmandy GM-8 mount that I bought used a month or so ago. Yes, it is quite a bit more expensive than the nearest Chinese equivalents--but wow! What a beautiful piece of machinery!
You Always Have To Be Careful How Much You Believe From This Guy...
It does sound, however, as though Bush's response to 9/11 saved an awful lot of lives in Chicago and Los Angeles: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.
Oh yes, this changes everything!
Those plans were aborted mainly because of the decisive U.S. response to the New York and Washington attacks, which disrupted the terrorist organization's plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, according to transcripts of his conversations with interrogators.
Mohammed told interrogators that he and Ramzi Yousuf, his nephew who was behind an earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, had leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the first operation.
"We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors.
He specifically mentioned as potential targets the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which was "blown up" in the film "Independence Day," and the Sears Tower in Chicago.
...
The transcripts are prefaced with a warning that Mohammed, the most senior al Qaeda member yet to be caught, "has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead."
According to the transcript, Mohammed has maintained that Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan facing trial in the United States as the "20th hijacker," had been sent to a flight school in Minnesota to train for a West Coast attack.
That would buttress Moussaoui's contention that he is improperly charged with participation in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because he was preparing for a different al Qaeda operation. The new transcripts confirm an earlier report by the Associated Press that al Qaeda originally had planned to crash hijacked airliners into targets on both coasts.
...
"The original plan was for a two-pronged attack with five targets on the East Coast of America and five on the West Coast," he told interrogators, according to the transcript.
"We talked about hitting California as it was America's richest state, and [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden had talked about economic targets."
He is reported to have said that bin Laden, who like Mohammed had studied engineering, vetoed simultaneous coast-to-coast attacks, arguing that "it would be too difficult to synchronize."
Mohammed then decided to conduct two waves of attacks, hitting the East Coast first and following up with a second series of attacks.
"Osama had said the second wave should focus on the West Coast," he reportedly said.
But the terrorists seem to have been surprised by the strength of the American reaction to the September 11 attacks.
"Afterwards, we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run," Mohammed is quoted as saying.
The Problem With Being "Reasonable" With Respect to Rights
One of the recurring questions that comes with the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms is what are the limits of that right. Even judges that acknowledge that such a right exists, and is individual in nature, such as the dissent in U.S. v. Parker (10th Cir. 2004), usually hold that certain limitations on that right are reasonable, usually because the places where those limits apply are not too all encompassing. (See my previous blog entry about this decision.) There are problems with this "reasonable regulation" approach, of which the biggest is the lack of a bright line that clearly separates "reasonable" from "unreasonable."
Professor Volokh points to a Michigan Court of Appeals decision that upheld the authority of a public housing agency to bar tenants from having guns in their apartments. The defendant came to the attention of the police at least partly because she was emotionally disturbed, and perhaps suicidal. Someone concerned about her informed police that she had a gun in her home. This led to a search warrant, and eventually, to her eviction.
The defendant's argument is that her right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment and the Michigan Constitution's guarantee has been violated. The Court of Appeals did acknowledge that the Michigan Constitution's guarantee is individual in nature, but argued that: This Court has determined that "the constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms is subject to a reasonable exercise of the police power." Swint, supra at 363, citing Gasta, supra at 788. The state has a legitimate interest in limiting access to weapons. McFadden, supra at 540-543.
Limiting access to weapons to whom? Just to tenants of public housing? Can they prohibit gun ownership as a condition of receiving a driver's license?
They might have been on stronger ground had they argued that there is a legitimate state interest in limiting emotionally disturbed or mentally ill people from having access to weapons, but that wasn't the basis on which the defendant was being evicted. She wsa evicted for having a gun, not being an emotionally disturbed tenant with a gun.
Another part of the decision that I find disturbing is: Restrictions on the right to possess weapons in the environment and circumstances described by plaintiff are both in furtherance of a legitimate interest to protect its residents and a reasonable exercise of police power.
If you assume that banning guns makes everyone safer, then this makes sense--but this is merely an assumption, and one that seems pretty arguable to me--especially in light of the violent crime problems (both with and without guns) that are endemic in many public housing projects.This is particularly true given defendant's failure to make any allegation she feels physically threatened or in danger as a resident of plaintiff?s complex necessitating her possession of a weapon to defend herself.
She lives in public housing; does she really need to articulate that she might need a gun to defend herself? Well I guess so. Leave nothing out, including the color of the sky.
The Court of Appeals asserts that the Second Amendment is not incorporated through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment--a statement that is accurate, because the Supreme Court has not done so. The rest of their reasoning, however, is why I can't take the selective incorporation method of the Supreme Court seriously: Substantive due process has been determined to safeguard against only the most arbitrary and conscience shocking intrusions by the government into personal matters. ATC Partnership v Town of Windham, 251 Conn 597, 606; 741 A2d 305 (1999). As such, even if applicable, plaintiff?s prohibition against weapons fails to ?shock the conscience? or exceed the ?decencies of civilized conduct.? Co of Sacramento v Lewis, 523 US 833, 846; 118 S Ct 1708; 140 L Ed 2d 1043 (1998).
This rather depends on whose conscience is being shocked, doesn't it? Rochin v. California (1952) from which the term "shocks the conscience" comes, involved police officers tried to pry a suspect's mouth open, and then using an emetic to force him to vomit up the morphine pills. Yes, this seems pretty shocking. But what is also shocking is to read Rochin, and see Justice Hugo Black's concurring opinion, where he points out that the majority was not prepared to incorporate the Fifth Amendment's protections against the states, instead relying on "shocks the conscience," a principle plucked out of thin air: In the view of a majority of the Court, however, the Fifth Amendment imposes no restraint of any kind on the states. They nevertheless hold that California's use of this evidence violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since they hold as I do in this case, I regret my inability to accept their interpretation without protest. But I believe that faithful adherence to the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights insures a more permanent protection of individual liberty than that which can be afforded by the nebulous standards stated by the majority.
In brief, Justice Black's point was that the majority wasn't prepared to engage in a principled position on this. They didn't like the result, but rather than incorporate the Fifth Amendment against the states, or admit that the U.S. Constitution contained no clause that clearly struck down this abhorrent practice, they decided that they would just make this stuff up as they went along. And that's exactly what the courts have been doing for decades: striking down laws that they don't like, without any text to justify that action (such as Lawrence), while refusing to strike down laws that they do like, but that have clear conflicts with the actual text of the Constitution (such as the federal assault weapons law).
What the majority hold is that the Due Process Clause empowers this Court to nullify any state law if its application "shocks the conscience," offends "a sense of justice" or runs counter to the "decencies of civilized conduct." The majority emphasize that these statements do not refer to their own consciences or to their senses of justice and decency. For we are told that "we may not draw on our merely personal and private notions"; our judgment must be grounded on "considerations deeply rooted in reason and in the compelling traditions of the legal profession." We are further admonished to measure the validity of state practices, not by our reason, or by the traditions of the legal profession, but by "the community's sense of fair play and decency"; by the "traditions and conscience of our people"; or by "those canons of decency and fairness [342 U.S. 165, 176] which express the notions of justice of English-speaking peoples." These canons are made necessary, it is said, because of "interests of society pushing in opposite directions."
The Comments On Scrappleface Are Often Funnier Than Scrappleface
Scrappleface goes for sharply pointed satire more than belly laughs, but some of the comments are laugh out loud. Here's a bit of Scrappleface's explanation of John Kerry's Catholicism: 2004-03-29) -- The strict anti-abortion stance of Pope John Paul II is "tragically not nuanced," according to U.S. Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry, a practicing Roman Catholic.
A few of the better comments on this:
"I pray for an America where rosary beads are sold in abortion clinic gift shops," said Mr. Kerry. "But I won't be a Catholic president, or even, as John F. Kennedy called himself, 'a president who happens to be Catholic'. I will be a president who happens to say he is Catholic but doesn't feel constrained by the black-and-white teachings of a church which is the bedrock of values, of sureness about who I am."
Mr. Kerry made the remarks as he left Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Flexible Doctrine.Kerry is the omni-candidate. He represents all views possible or impossible, that may or may not have been realized yet, those of now, the Vietnam War, The Revolutionary War, etc... But that is phrasing it in military terminology - Kerry does not openly endorse war (nor oppose it). In the battle of political ideals as well, Kerry takes both, nay, several, nay, infinite sides. (For after all, does not a circle have an infinite number of equally perplexing sides?) Is he a patriotic American? Yes. Does he have the support of foreign leaders? Yes, of course, but they're too secret to name, except of course for Kim Jong Il.
and
All hail Kerry - Bush's flimsy "one-sided" approach can never stand a chance to Kerry's Omni-tactics.
Vote Kerry - if he doesn't support you yet, it doesn't mean he won't - he just hasn't gotten around to it.
Posted by: creativename at March 29, 2004 03:16 PM I'm trying to get Senator Kerry to speak at one of our black masses, would any of you have his direct number?
and the followup:
Posted by: Anton LeVay-Church of Satan at March 29, 2004 03:47 PM Mr. LeVay,
and
How did you manage to dial c-a-l-l-A-T-T from where you are? Because of the heat, I'd expect all the numbers to have melted together.
Posted by: Carrot Top at March 29, 2004 03:58 PM Sinator,(YES, I spelled it right), Heinz-kerry and his buddy Teddy Kennedy think rosary beads are those things you give the girls at Mardi Gras for exposing themselves.
Posted by: The Republican 'Attack' Machine, NOW with Vitamin R (Rabies) at March 29, 2004 05:05 PM
Astrophotography
There's obviously still some room for improvement here.
This was shot on ASA 800 Kodak film, with a Pentax ME using a Photon Instruments 1147mm f/9 telescope with a 25mm eyepiece projection adapter, and 1/60th second exposure.
Conflicting Rights? Or Government Overreaching?
I've mentioned before that when you find a conflict of rights, it is often because the government has become a bit too overreaching. Focus on the Family Canada has an description of two of those "conflict of rights" situations here: Meanwhile, homosexual-rights activists are threatening to lodge a complaint with the BC human-rights tribunal against civic officials in Terrace, Kelowna and Oliver. All three had bowed to complaints filed with the tribunal in 2000 for having balked at declaring "gay pride" days in their communities. As a result, they have now decided not to issue any more civic proclamations no matter what the event. But that, says lawyer Barbara Findlay, targets homosexuals for hatred. "It further contributes to the intolerance in the community," she told the Vancouver Sun. "By saying that they will not do any more proclamations, the eyes of the community may direct fault at our community."
In both cases, homosexuals are arguing that their right to be heard takes precedence over the right of conscience and political speech of others.
As Vancouver's The Province commented in an editorial, "Go figure: civic officials violate human rights if they refuse to advertise and support gay pride days but it's okay for gay day organizers to refuse officials who don't bow to their political views."
But neither are pro-family advocates adverse to filing their own human-rights complaints. Last week, the No Committee 2006 - which wants to prevent Montreal from hosting the Gay Games in 2006 - complained to the Quebec Human Rights Commission against the Royal Bank of Canada. Last year, the bank had refused the committee's request to open an account on grounds that its stance incited discrimination against homosexuals. The committee argues that on the contrary, it was the victim of discrimination.
A similar case decided in June of this year, the Ontario Human Rights Commission determined that a business could not reject a client simply because it did not share that client's viewpoint on homosexuality. Toronto printer Scott Brockie was required to pay $5,000 in damages to a pro-gay organization and to complete for it a print job which he had originally refused as incompatible with his Christian beliefs.
Another item concerns a bill before the Canadian Parliament that seeks to expand Canada's already very broad prohibition on "hate speech" to include sexual orientation--and with Canada's history of defining any opposition to homosexuality as improper, C-250 seems likely to further erode freedom of speech in Canada.
HPV: Not Just A Risk For Women
I've mentioned before that HPV is well-established to be a cause of cervical cancer, and there is serious question about the effectiveness of condoms for preventing the spread of HPV. I've suggested that at least part of why this doesn't get any press is that it is only destroying women, and the popular entertainment business doesn't much care what happens to women--there's always another sexual toy available to replace Brittney Spears when she gets too old. They care even less about the teenaged girls that they encourage to regard promiscuity as a path to power.
It turns out, however, that men are not immune from unpleasant cancers related to HPV: The role of HPV in the development of cervical cancer is well established, and studies show that HPV DNA can be isolated from more than 90% of the specimens of cervical squamous cell carcinoma....
It shouldn't be too difficult to guess why. A lot of HIV-positive women are prostitutes, and the combination of large numbers of sexual partners and probably a higher rate of anal sex (compared to non-prostitutes) would explain this.
Similarly, there is sufficient evidence to link HPV infection and development of anal cancer. In one study using PCR technique, HPV DNA was detected in 85% of anal cancer specimens. In a larger case-control study of 388 specimens analyzed for the presence of HPV, "high-risk" oncogenic types of the virus were found in 89% of the tumors in women and in 65% of the tumors in men.
The incidence of anal cancer in the general population is very low, approximately 0.8/100,000. This form of cancer is more common in women, who are affected twice as often as men. However, among some subgroups of men, this risk is dramatically increased. The incidence of anal cancer among HIV-uninfected MSM [Men who have Sex with Men] with a history of receptive anal intercourse is estimated to be as high as 35/100,000, based on data gathered prior to the HIV epidemic. This population risk is comparable to the incidence of cervical cancer prior to the introduction of routine screening by Pap smear.
Even though the data regarding the incidence of anal cancer in HIV-infected individuals are controversial and the true incidence is unknown, recently published data show that overall risks of both in situ and invasive anal cancer are significantly increased for both men and women with HIV. It is also known that the risk for anal cancer in HIV-infected men doubles from 15 to 30-fold as the CD4 cell count declines.
This report from UCSF shows that HPV infection is common among homosexual men: Infection with HPV is common, with one large study at UCSF detecting HPV in 61% of HIVnegative and 93% of HIV-positive of gay and
There is also a recently established connection between oral cancer and HPV:
bisexual men. Typically, infection is with not one but several different types of HPV. In this same study, 23% of HIV-negative and 61% of HIVpositive men were infected with multiple HPV types. Several studies have suggested that having multiple types of HPV increases risk of progression to cancer.Oral sex can lead to oral tumours. That is the conclusion of researchers who have proved what has long been suspected, that the human papilloma virus can cause oral cancers.
Gee, how about monogamy, so that you reduce your risk of HPV infection? Or giving up smoking and drinking? Or would that be too judgmental? Here's a link to the abstract giving more of the sample size data.
The risk, thankfully, is tiny. Only around 1 in 10,000 people develop oral tumours each year, and most cases are probably caused by two other popular recreational pursuits: smoking and drinking. The researchers are not recommending any changes in behaviour.
As I mentioned earlier, condoms appear not to be sufficient protection against HPV. Unfortunately, the popular culture's promotion of promiscuity means that an awful lot of young women are going to be exposed to HPV.
Dr. Stephen Hatfill's Suit
He claims that the federal government has made him effectively unemployable: Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bucholtz said Ashcroft's identification of Hatfill actually was an effort to "downplay" his status by making it clear he was not considered a suspect.
While I generally give high marks to the Bush Administration's efforts in the War on Terrorism, there are incidents like this that suggest a certain lack of competence--or at least subtlety:
Hatfill lawyer Mark A. Grannis scoffed at that claim.
"Mr. Ashcroft acted to protect both the department and his own political image at the expense of Mr. Hatfill's constitutional rights," Grannis said.
Bucholtz also said Hatfill should have gone through federal administrative appeal procedures if he felt he was wrongly fired, because the LSU project was federally funded. Bucholtz added that Hatfill is not barred from any other job.
Judge Walton was skeptical Hatfill could find work in his field after being publicly linked to the anthrax investigation.
"At least by implication, he's disbarred," Walton said. "The information is now out there. The man's a pariah. Nobody's going to hire him." The FBI (news - web sites) had Hatfill under 24-hour surveillance for many months following the attacks. In one incident, agents in a vehicle trailing Hatfill ran over his foot on a Washington street. Hatfill was not seriously hurt, and the surveillance has been curtailed.
Trailing someone implies that you are far enough away not to run him over. Or did I miss something?
This Sits on the Fence Between Tragically Funny and Just Sad
It's from WKMG TV in Central Florida: CORINTH, Vt. -- State officials are investigating a man whose goats and his religious convictions against killing them have collided in a possibly inhumane and definitely stinky way.
There were three goats on the farm Chris Weathersbee's mother bought seven years ago. Now there are 300 -- including 70 living in his house, much of which is covered with a mix of goat droppings and hay.
Authorities last month raided the farm in Corinth, about 20 miles southeast of Montpelier, and seized 44 deemed unhealthy by a veterinarian. State police and the Central Vermont Humane Society are weighing whether to pursue animal cruelty or neglect charges.
"He has more goats than he can care for," said Sherry LeMay, the humane society's director of operations.
Weathersbee, 63, admits he cannot afford to give the herd sufficient care, but he refuses to get rid of the animals. He said his Buddhist religious views prohibit him from slaughtering any of the goats.
"Getting rid of goats means killing them," he said.
Another Reminder Where Demon Rum Can Take You
I remember reading somewhere that a surprising number of economic crimes (robbery, burglary) take place under the influence. Here's an example, and a reminder of why getting drunk is not a good idea: OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - An Oklahoma couple were surprised when they woke up and found a drunk burglary suspect asleep in bed with them, police said on Thursday.
I wish that Brittney Spears's latest vulgarity could be blamed on something as simple as alcohol. Really, really tacky.
The couple from the south Oklahoma city of Ardmore called police, ran out of their house and watched officers arrest the man who was still sleeping in their bed despite the sirens and commotion, police said.
Dan Johnson, 24, was arrested on the scene in the incident that took place on Sunday and was charged with burglary.
UPDATE: A reader reports, I recall an interview with Britney when she was about seventeen, saying she wanted to be just like Madonna, except for the, y'know, sex thing. Looks like she forgot the second part.
This Is Not A Good Sign
Reuters has the following news story in their Reuters Odd collection. There's nothing odd about it at all. What it tells me is that the traditional idea of the Sabbath is lost on the Reuters editors: VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul (news - web sites) on Friday said Sunday should be a day for God, not for secular diversions like entertainment and sports.
"When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of 'weekend' dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens," the pontiff said in a speech to Australian bishops.
Never Get Between a Teenaged Girl & Her Cell Phone
From Reuters: A 14-year-old Hong Kong girl flew into a rage and chased her mother around their flat with a knife and wooden pole after she confiscated the teenager's mobile phone, a police spokeswoman said on Monday.
As the father of a former teenaged girl with a cell phone, I am not even slightly surprised.
Please: Store Your Guns Properly--Not in the Oven
From Reuters: SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A Texas woman heating fish sticks was shot in the leg by a gun that had been stashed in her oven, police said.
See where no guns allowed policies take you? Along with not looking in the oven before starting it?
Roxanne Perez, 29, was taken to a local hospital where she was in good condition, police said Friday.
They said a friend of hers had hidden the .357 caliber handgun in the stove two weeks earlier without telling her after she told him no guns were allowed in her house.
More People Confessing to Crimes Because of The Passion
This time, in Norway: OSLO (Reuters) - A Norwegian neo-Nazi has confessed to two bombings a decade ago after a pang of repentance triggered by watching U.S. director Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of the Christ".
Oddly enough:
Johnny Olsen, 41, went to police after watching the movie about the death of Christ to admit that he was behind the previously unexplained bombings against anarchist squatters in Oslo in the mid-1990s.
"The trigger that made him go to police and confess was that movie," his lawyer, Fridtjof Feydt, told Reuters on Monday. He said his client had long been concerned with issues such as reconciliation and redemption."This does not change my view of the film in the slightest," Oslo's Lutheran bishop Gunnar Staalsett told the Norwegian daily Verdens Gang on Monday, reiterating his condemnation of the movie as glorifying sadism and torture.
Hmmm. It also seems to be causing people to feel guilt about their past crimes. It makes you wonder if Bishop Staalsett doesn't get it because the movie is talking to sinners in a language that they understand.
Ways To Win Friends and Influence People
There is a campaign under way to allow illegal aliens to pay in-state tuition at universities. Now, I can somewhat understand the argument. In many cases, these illegals have lived here for many years, paying taxes--why can't they pay the same tuition as residents of those states?
The argument against is that you should obey the law, and go through the proper channels. For the first semester after I moved to Idaho, my daughter had to pay out-of-state tuition to attend the University of Idaho. Why should someone who isn't even legally present in the U.S. get to pay the in-state tuition?
I find myself also wondering what is really going on--aren't illegal aliens overwhelmingly attending college on full scholarships based on poverty? When I attended Sonoma State University, there were all sorts of scholarships that the university awarded that were only available to Hispanics (other ethnicities need not apply). Let me be clear on this: these were not privately funded scholarships, but were publicly funded. When I wrote a letter to the scholarship office pointing out that this seemed to be in violation of federal law, and asking for a clarification as to how this was legal, I received no response whatsoever.
Nonetheless, there are ways to present your argument, and ways not to present it. From the Washington Post: Several hundred people stormed the small yard of President Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, yesterday afternoon, pounding on his windows, shoving signs at others and challenging Rove to talk to them about a bill that deals with educational opportunities for immigrants.
Protesters poured out of one school bus after another, piercing an otherwise quiet, peaceful Sunday in Rove's Palisades neighborhood in Northwest, chanting, "Karl, Karl, come on out! See what the DREAM Act is all about!"
Rove obliged their first request and opened his door long enough to say, "Get off my property."
"Seems like he doesn't want to invite us in for tea," Emira Palacios quipped to the crowd.
Others chanted, "Karl Rove ain't got no soul."
The crowd then grew more aggressive, fanning around the three accessible sides of Rove's house, tracking him through the many windows, waving signs that read "Say Yes to DREAM" and pounding on the glass. At one point, Rove rushed to a window, pointed a finger and yelled something inaudible.
Kennewick Man Can Be Studied By Scientists
A victory for anthropology. You may be aware that a skeleton discovered near Kennewick, Washington some years ago has been a... bone of contention between anthropologists, who wanted to study it, and a number of Northwest Indian tribes, who insisted that they had a right to rebury it, and not allow scientists to study it.
Congress passed a law some years ago to require that human remains that were associated with an existing tribe would be turned over to them for reburial. The idea was understandable; for some Indian tribes, the notion that an ancestor was sitting in a glass case in a museum was religiously offensive. The question has always been how far back does such a link go?
What makes Kennewick Man such a disturbing question is that his facial structure doesn't seem very Indian. Indeed, he would appear to be Caucasian. The reconstruction here bears an uncanny resemblance to the actor Patrick Stewart. This, I fear, may be part of why some of these tribes wanted Kennewick Man reburied, quickly. What if the first inhabitants of the Americas weren't Indians at all? This BBC report from a few years ago discusses the strong similarities of some of the oldest South American remains to Australian aborigines. It would mean that the Indians took over in a manner not so different from how Europeans took the New World from Indians. That would severely injure the Indian victimization industry.
How Trial Lawyers Endanger Wildlife
No, no, no, they aren't going feral and chasing down deer. (How would you know that a trial lawyer had gone feral? In what way would their behavior change?) This news story, link courtesy of Overlawyered.com, details how the state is now being held liable for injuries caused by wild animals: Arizona wildlife managers feel they have to shoot first and ask questions later, says the lawyer who defended the state in a lawsuit that resulted in a $2.5 million settlement for a Tucson girl mauled by a bear on Mount Lemmon.
There's a reason that we call them "wild animals." (Although I suppose that we could call them "trial lawyers," and it might mean about the same thing.)
That settlement and a more recent $3 million jury award for a Tucson man injured when he hit an elk with a vehicle affected the decision to order a mountain lion hunt in Sabino Canyon, said Tucson attorney Mick Rusing. "It is the real driving force behind the scene," Rusing said.
"The default position of Game and Fish is now, 'When in doubt, take it out,' " Rusing said. "If the courts and the Legislature are not going to protect these agencies and the people who make the decisions, that's the way it's going to be."
Attorney Ted Schmidt represented Anna Knochel, the 16-year-old girl who was mauled by a bear in 1996 during a 4-H campout in the Santa Catalina Mountains. He agreed with Rusing that liability concerns are influencing decisions on the mountain lions, but said the concerns are justified.
He said Game and Fish knows it has nonyielding mountain lions in Sabino Canyon and knows that such animals can attack and kill. "I would expect any wildlife expert would tell you that's a pretty serious problem. If anything were to happen, you might very well be able to make that case against the state of Arizona," he said.
Rusing said he drafted a bill that would have provided immunity to game managers but the bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee last month after trial lawyers opposed it and the Game and Fish Commission declined to support it.
It was needed, he said, because the recent court decisions have eroded the state's historical immunity from suits arising over the actions of wild animals. "I told the judge (in Knochel) that if you don't grant this (summary judgment), bears are going to die." Now it's mountain lions as well, he said.
Intelligent Design Arguments
A reader points me to a collection of links that purport to debunk the intelligent design arguments based on the supposed irreducible complexity of the flagellum. I have had a chance so far to look at one such paper, Kenneth R. Miller's "The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of 'Irreducible Complexity'," and it doesn't impress me.
The irreducible complexity argument is that a flagellum consists of about thirty discrete components, each of which is individually of no value to a cell, and therefore if it came about because of mutation, it would provide no advantage. Miller accurately portrays this argument in his paper: In the case of the flagellum, the assertion of irreducible complexity means that a minimum number of protein components, perhaps 30, are required to produce a working biological function. By the logic of irreducible complexity, these individual components should have no function until all 30 are put into place, at which point the function of motility appears. What this means, of course, is that evolution could not have fashioned those components a few at a time, since they do not have functions that could be favored by natural selection. As Behe wrote: " . . . natural selection can only choose among systems that are already working" (Behe 2002), and an irreducibly complex system does not work unless all of its parts are in place. The flagellum is irreducibly complex, and therefore, it must have been designed. Case closed.
Certainly, one component might show up in a population, and if it gave no competitive disadvantage, there is no reason for it to leave the gene pool--but neither would you expect its frequency to rise, either. (A point that neither Miller nor intelligent design advocates seem to have raised is that the mutation might be genetically linked to some other trait that is advantageous.)
Of course, one component caused by mutation might remain in the gene pool until another mutation took place that created another component, and then another component, and so on. But it doesn't do any good for the second component to show up in the gene pool unless it ends up in individuals that have the first component. Ditto for all the rest of the components required for a complete system--until the point is reached that some competitive advantage accrues to individual organisms from this collection of components coming together, these mutations are just random events, scattered across the gene pool for this species.
Consider what happens if the mutation for the first component happens. It will happen in one individual of the species. There is no advantage to this mutation, so its percentage of the gene pool doesn't change--it remains rare. If you have a billion individual proto-bacteria in an early ocean of Earth, and one of them gets this mutation, a million years later, that one mutation will have reproduced as fast as the other 999,999,999 non-mutants. To get that fully functional flagellum means that one of mutant bacteria has to get the mutation for component 2. One of its descendants must get the mutation for component 3, and so on, until you get the fully functional flagellum. Do the math: this is a serious problem.
Mutations are random; you should not get the exact same mutation (caused by a cosmic ray zapping an AT or CG pair in DNA, for example) in multiple individuals of a species. In several billion pairs along the double helix, what are the chances that a radiation source is going to cause the exact same positive mutation? Even if you admit the possibility that the same pair gets hit in two different individuals, remember that DNA contains a parity check that looks for and corrects coding errors. What are the chances that two different individuals, getting the same one in a billion mutation, are going to have their error checkers resolve base mismatches identically? (Note that radiation-induced cancers are a somewhat different situation. A cancer is a runaway process, while a positive mutation requires a much more precise change.)
Miller's argument is essentially that the irreducible complexity claim about the flagellum falls apart because of "type III secretory system (TTSS)": However, molecular studies of proteins in the TTSS have revealed a surprising fact - the proteins of the TTSS are directly homologous to the proteins in the basal portion of the bacterial flagellum.
Miller's argument is that the TTSS is the basal portion of the bacterial flagellum, and here is an example of a basal portion of the bacterial flagellum performing some other useful function that might explain its existence, even before the other ten to fifteen parts come into existence. However, making the claim that the TTSS is homologous to the basal portion of the flagellum is not the same as saying that they are same. Homologous means "having the same evolutionary origin but serving different functions; 'the wing of a bat and the arm of a man are homologous'." The author is asserting that the TTSS and the basal portion of the bacterial flagellum have the same evolutionary origin. How does he know this? This is merely an assertion, a form of teleology.
...
According to the doctrine of irreducible complexity, however, this should not be possible. If the flagellum is indeed irreducibly complex, then removing just one part, let alone 10 or 15, should render what remains "by definition nonfunctional." Yet the TTSS is indeed fully-functional, even though it is missing most of the parts of the flagellum. The TTSS may be bad news for us, but for the bacteria that possess it, it is a truly valuable biochemical machine.
An adequate refutation of irreducible complexity would require demonstrating that all, or nearly all of the ten or fifteen components exist in parallel forms as the author argues that TTSS is. It might indeed be the case that this can be done. The author's next statement seems to acknowledge the inadequacy of his claim: A second reaction, which I have heard directly after describing the relationship between the secretory apparatus and the flagellum, is the objection that the TTSS does not tell us how either it or the flagellum evolved. This is certainly true, although Aizawa has suggested that the TTSS may indeed be an evolutionary precursor of the flagellum (Aizawa 2001). Nonetheless, until we have produced a step-by-step account for the evolutionary derivation of the flagellum, one may indeed invoke the argument from ignorance for this and every other complex biochemical machine.
Aizawa can suggest it all he wants; this doesn't make it necessarily true. What Miller calls the "argument from ignorance" is the claim that once we have all the information, and understood all the processes adequately, we will have enough knowledge to refute the claim of irreducible complexity with respect to the flagellum. Very true; once someone has all the data to show that all the thirty components that make up the flagellum exist in other forms, used for different mechanisms, and that these components provided a competitive advantage to the individual mutant bacterium in isolation, he will be right. But this requires biologists to do so, or at least demonstrate that many of these thirty individual components fit this pattern. One example--and TTSS, from Miller's description, isn't even clearly in that category--doesn't destroy the irreducible complexity argument. It only reduces the number of components that must be explained from thirty to twenty-nine.
Why Has It Been So Quiet Here This Weekend?
The sky is blue (and black at night). It has been in the 60s and 70s during the day. I've been lured away from the computer by the beauty of a spring day. Sorry!
This evening I set up to do some astrophotography. (The last roll of film I had Wal-Mart develop was a bit disappointing--I thought I had ASA 100 speed film in the camera, not ASA 800, and everything came out severely overexposed.)
While setting up to do some Moon shots, I decided to see how stable the atmosphere was. As you know, I have been testing an Aries Chromacor and a Baader Planetarium Fringe Killer as solutions to the chromatic aberration problem on my Photon Instruments 127mm refractor. The results for the Chromacor have met my wildest expectations. This evening, the 4mm orthoscopic (287x) was still crisp on the Moon, so I put in a 9mm Orion orthoscopic with a 3x Televue Barlow (382x). Still crisp.
The next step up was a 7mm University Optics orthoscopic (just got it) with the Barlow (492x). The image was no longer crisp, but it wasn't bad, either. Some of the shadows that should be completely black were a very, very dark purple instead (the Chromacor is amazing in what it does, but it won't make an achromat into a true apochromat). The sensation of being less than 500 miles above the surface of the Moon was really quite overpowering.
The last step was the 6mm Celestron orthoscopic with the Barlow (573x). I wasn't seeing any more detail than I could see with the 7mm and Barlow, but I wasn't seeing any less--it was just a bit less pleasing of a image. Yes, I tried the 5mm University Optics orthoscopic with the Barlow (688x), and at this point, I had gone way off the deep end of too much power. I was definitely seeing less detail than the 6mm and Barlow.
Note: the Moon is one of those objects, perhaps because the contrast is so high, that seems to tolerate what amateurs call "crazy stupid" magnification. Jupiter reached the fuzz limit this evening at 229x--although it was still only about 50 degrees above the horizon (and thus impaired by too much atmosphere in the way), while the Moon was just about straight overhead.
UPDATE: Before you ask if I could see the flag (actually, flags, there were at least five Apollo missions that landed on the Moon), do the math, and you'll see why this isn't going to happen. To be perceived as a disc, an object must be about three minutes of arc. (Those of you with really sharp eyesight may see discs at two minutes of arc.) At 573x, it should be possible to perceive objects on the Moon as non-points if they are 600 meters in diameter or larger. To perceive the remaining equipment up there (which is much larger than the flags), you would need at least 16000x, and extraordinarily steady air here. Even then, you would not be perceiving detail, only blobs.
Remember, We Can Reason With This Bunch
Or so the left tells us. From AP: The new Hamas leader in Gaza on Sunday called President Bush an enemy of Islam and said that "God declared war" against the United States and Israel - but stopped short of saying the group would strike U.S. targets.
I can understand why Hamas is upset. They have spent the last few years killing civilians, and now their chief terrorist gets killed. But note the asymmetry: Hamas has been killing people who are not combatants, who in many cases may not even support the Israeli government. (Bombs are such indiscriminate weapons.) Now the chief terrorist gets killed--and Hamas is upset.
The Hamas chief, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, renewed threats to attack Israel in retaliation for the assassination of the group's founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, last week. He was addressing a Hamas rally at Gaza City's Islamic University.
Last week, immediately after the killing of Yassin, the Hamas military wing made veiled threats against the United States, but leaders of the Islamic militant groups later backed off.
Rantisi himself said last week that Hamas' conflict is with Israel and the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and that the group has no intention of opening a new front abroad.
Rantisi said it was no surprise that the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution Thursday condemning the killing of Yassin.
"We knew that Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam and Muslims," Rantisi told the crowd. "America declared war against God. Sharon declared war against God and God declared war against America, Bush and Sharon."
There was a time when I was fairly sympathetic to Palestinian concerns. I still think that Israel often takes actions that are not the most effective way to accomplish their goals. But if Israel hunted down and killed every member of Hamas right now, it wouldn't bother me in the least. Rantisi thinks that the most effective way to win is to broaden the war to include the most powerful country on Earth? He isn't just evil; he's a fool.
