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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, August 28, 2004
HP Jornada 820 I've had this gadget for a couple of days now, and I've found that it has some very endearing qualities--and for my purposes, a couple of serious defects. 1. It is very small, and very light. If you need a gadget for taking notes in Word or Excel, or you need to take documents or spreadsheets on the road with you, this is a pretty clever way of doing so. 2. I'm told by those who use it that it has about ten hours of life on a battery. There's no hard disk drive, which is why the battery life is so long. 3. It is instant-on. Very nice! The downsides--at least for my purposes: 1. It runs something called Microsoft Pocket Word which has a subset of Word's features. The most critical deficiency is that it has no notion of footnotes. If you load in a document loaded with footnotes (as I was planning to do), you lose the footnotes. 2. Big deal, I'll read in Rich Text Format files instead. Nope, that loses those footnotes also. 3. Okay, I'll convert the document to PDF. Adobe has an Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC handheld computers like this. The Jornada family is supported, but the Jornada 820 uses an instruction set that is not supported. 4. Okay, I'll save my document as HTML. That preserves the footnotes--but the version of Internet Explorer that comes with this gadget doesn't allow you to search a document--which is the major reason for bringing this along. 5. Microsoft Pocket Excel converts standard Excel workbooks--but only one worksheet gets converted. The rest seem to vanish into J-space. As you might expect, some of my spreadsheets I wanted to take along have multiple worksheets. I could separate them out, and save each of them individually, but this still doesn't solve the Word document problem. It's cute, it's clever, but it doesn't do what I need. I suspect that I will have to either lug a notebook, or put my stuff up somewhere that I can get access to it remotely (since web access seems to be common now). Amazingly enough, someone has ported Linux to the Jornada 820, but I'm not sure that I want to invest the time into figuring out how to install it, and work around the rest of the struggles involved. Perhaps I will just take this along to take notes with, so that I don't have to scribble, and then try to decipher my scribbles later. UPDATE: It turns out that Excel worksheets do carry over okay--I just wasn't pulling down one of the controls to let me see the other worksheets in the file. Still don't have a solution to the Word footnote problem, except to bring both the Word document (no footnotes, but searchable) and an HTML version (footnotes, but not searchable). Friday, August 27, 2004
Great Artists and Intellectuals Think Alike, Apparently A really bizarre interview with Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. If he sounds like some of the lunatic left of the United States, this is no surprise, since he was both a communist and a fascist at different times of his life: Question: Mr. Theodorakis, on November 4, 2003 you said in this house the words that shocked Jews and non-Jews across the world. You said that the Jewish people are at the root of evil. What did you mean?My mind just boggles. Everything Is About Gay Rights, Apparently! Over at Classical Values (one of the only blogs by a gay person that I read with any regularity), we learn some more about Governor McGreevey's boy-toy problem. Apparently, Cipel is now saying that his $110,000 a year job was not about internal security after all, but just an appointment secretary: In other words, the guy got a meaningless, do-nothing job at $110,000 a year.My feelings exactly. The attempt to portray McGreevey's problems as the result of a "homophobic society" is nonsense. Cipel was paid well for a job that didn't require him to do much--at least at the office. McGreevey's corruption is really no different from what a lot of others have done over the years. The only difference was the sexual plumbing. Classical Values also has another post about how the lunatic left is reimagining Watergate as being "centered around gay rights and health care." No, seriously. At Least Bush Is Admitting This It's pretty obvious to most Bush supporters that this describes what happened: WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said for the first time on Thursday he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" after U.S. troops went to Iraq, The New York Times reported. The insurgency, he maintained, was the unintended result of a "swift victory" that led to Iraqi troops disappearing into the cities and mounting a rebellion.As I've pointed out previously, some of the problem was that we expected an intense fight to the death by Baathists and al-Qaeda during the invasion. Most of them either lacked the courage or the stupidity to do that. I suppose if we had killed tens of thousands of them during the invasion, and we had a relatively quiet year afterwards, the left would be calling him "Bush the Butcher" now instead. This Doesn't Seem To Be Urban Legend I blogged a few weeks ago about a man found in an abandoned Tokyo building who had been dead for a very, very long time, and a number of readers pointed out that it had all the earmarks of an urban legend: no name, for example. This news story has gobs of details: name; dates; people interviewed: WINNIPEG—His telephone number was still listed in the telephone directory and his condominium fees and bills were automatically being withdrawn from his bank account. Thursday, August 26, 2004
Emails That Promote Felonies I've received emails promoting pornographic websites that encourage you to "share them with adolescents in your house." Alessandra blogs about an email that she recently received that is much more bluntly promoting incest. I try, very hard, to imagine that the vast sewer of pornographic spam email is simply an expression of the tremendously greedy obscenity industry. But encouraging people to commit felonies that are likely to get you locked up in prison, where you won't be able to spend any more money on pornographic websites? I sense that there is something a lot darker going on out there than just simple greed. Kerry/Edwards Bumper Stickers Aren't Real Common Here in Boise But I did see one last night at Target. It was, of course, on a Mercedes SUV. Performance Bonds Are Nothing New I was surprised, but not terribly so, to find that the Revolutionary government of Maryland required contractors to post a bond conditional on meeting deadlines and quality expectations: Sir. By order of the Honorable Convention we return Someone's Military Service More Than Thirty Years Ago isn't all that spectacularly important. I wish Democrats had believed that when they tried to raise a fuss about whether Bush actually completed his Air National Guard service or not. What does matter is whether someone is lying about it. This article by Max Boot from the Los Angeles Times argues that it is hard to tell if Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are wrong (memories are among the last reliable pieces of evidence in court) or if Kerry's "seared" memories need some correction. But he does make the point that Kerry's opportunism is plainly visible: Kerry's problem has been the persistent perception that he is a consummate opportunist who is willing to say anything to advance his own career. The New Republic unearthed a classic example when it found letters his office had sent to one of his constituents in 1991: One explained why he favored the Gulf War, the other why he opposed it. The Swift boaters' stories fit his image as a slippery schemer. Reality Check for Margaret Cho A bizarre statement by Margaret Cho, the "comedian." (Many who saw her short-lived TV show, I understand, would also use scare quotes there.) Cho is also writing a book, due next year, about the year in politics. It includes a how-to guide to activism and social change. The 35-year-old has also just completed a CD/DVD rap album about health and nutrition.Let's see, your cellmates are likely to be mentally ill, prostitutes, drunk drivers, and drug addicts. If you have been held in a jail cell for more than 72 hours in the last 12 months, you may not give blood, I presume because people in that category are at heightened risk for AIDS because of jail rape. Boy, Margaret Cho sure knows how to have fun! Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Have I Got A Deal For You! I just got a Jornada 820 that I would like to use as my traveling notepad. Unfortunately, it came without a serial cable, and I have had no luck finding a list of which PCMCIA Ethernet cards will work with the drivers that are installed with Windows CE 2.11, and no easy way to install drivers for any other NIC. I have an 8 MB compact flash card, and a Jornada specific parallel cable (goes into a USB port, and talks to a parallel printer output on the other end) that I would love to swap for one of the Jornada serial cables. (Yes, it's rather special.) Alternatively, if you can find a list somewhere of PCMCIA Ethernet cards that have been tested with the Jornada 820, and are known to work, that would be nice to have as well. UPDATE: I know that there are lists of Ethernet cards that work with Windows CE. Because of the chipset of the Jornada 820 is a bit different, I need an Ethernet card that works specifically with the Jornada 820. Tuesday, August 24, 2004
The Russian Plane Crashes One of the planes sent a hijack signal. One broke apart in the air; the other crashed. Does anyone seriously doubt that this is the action of al-Qaeda's Chechnyan franchise? I know that the Russians, then the Soviet Union, then the Russians again, have an ugly history of human rights abuses in Chechnya. The al-Qaeda/Chechnyan extremist connection leads me to this unfortunate conclusion about Chechnya's self-styled "freedom fighters": lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas, and there's no choice but to exterminate you. If al-Qaeda's leadership had the intelligence of toasters (instead of suffering from turbans wound too tight syndrome), they would recognize the importance of limiting their enemies to one at a time. Russia, for a variety of poor reasons, didn't want us to clean out the Iraqi nest of scum. I do hope that they start to figure out that the entire Middle East is going to require some sanitizing of terrorists. Professors Fired For Refusing To Inflate Grades The details are here. The president of the college decided that "effort" should count for 60% of the grades of freshman--even if they didn't understand the material at all. Two science professors thought that this was ridiculous, and refused to pass students who simply didn't understand the material. Wouldn't it be wonderful in the real world if trying hard was enough? "I worked really hard at writing this software you wanted---but it doesn't work. Shouldn't our customers buy it anyway, because we tried so hard?" Public Domain LPD For Windows 98 I need a public domain lpd that runs under Windows 98, so that my son's Linux box can print to a color printer connected via USB to a Windows 98 box. (Yes, I should move everyone to Linux, but I haven't gotten around to it.) There are a lot of lpd implementations that cost money--someone must have a public domain verison. Monday, August 23, 2004
The Ted Rall Academy Make sure you visit here to see their ad for the Ted Rall Academy: Do you hate yourself and everyone around you? Are you haunted by voices directing you to kill? Is everyone an idiot--except you? If so, chances are you have the ability to become a syndicated political cartoonist!I fear that this ad parody is far, far too accurate. Another Government Bans Same-Sex Marriage The Cherokee Nation: TULSA, Okla. -- About a month after a lesbian couple successfully filed for a tribal marriage application, the Cherokee National Tribal Council voted to clearly define marriage as between a man and a woman.As the Dawn Patrol (from whom I filched this link) observed: Proving that even the pagan religions so exploited by today's New Agers have a sense of right and wrong—what C.S. Lewis called the Tao, or Natural Law that underlies most world faiths—a Cherokee representative says, "If we don't address this, we'll have a flood of same-sex marriages. This will be a black eye on the Cherokee Nation. Even the state of Oklahoma doesn't allow same-sex marriage." A Lot Of People Seem To Be Betting On United Airlines Going Under... and taking quite a bit with them. If you visit this website where recent municipal bond transactions can be displayed, you will see a fair number of municipal bonds that were sold to finance airport terminal facilities for United Airlines, like this one "CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE CMNTYS DEV AUTH SPL FACS REV UNITED AIR 13077YAL0" that have annualized yields to maturity of more than 49%! An Illinois muni bond described as "CHICAGO ILL O HARE INTL ARPT SPL FAC REV UNITED AIR LINES PJ 167590ER5" has an annualized yield to maturity of more than 16%. Someone expects those facilities to not only be not paying their way, but apparently not paying their way for quite a long time! Sunday, August 22, 2004
Losing the Culture War Over at Reflections in Order Not to Go Insane, Alessandra ruminates on a 1999 letter by Paul Weyrich about how conservatives have won the political war, but lost the cultural war. Weyrich argues: What many of us have been trying to do for many years has been based upon a couple of premises. First of all, we have assumed that a majority of Americans basically agrees with our point of view. That has been the premise upon which we have tried to build any number of institutions, and indeed our whole strategy. It is I who suggested to Jerry Falwell that he call his organization the "Moral Majority." The second premise has been that if we could just elect enough conservatives, we could get our people in as Congressional leaders and they would fight to implement our agenda.I guess that I am not quite as discouraged as Weyrich. I will agree that in a lot of respects, what calls itself "conservative" today is a mixture of social conservatives, libertarians, and quite a number of younger people who are bugged by sexual depravity--but reluctant to seem judgmental, at least until it involves animals or children. I recall that the National Review Online blog "The Corner" had a discussion of "barebacking" a while back, and one of the NRO contributors observed, mocking an Oldsmobile slogan of a few years ago, "This isn't your father's National Review." Alessandra observes: I think this profound loss in the cultural sphere is being felt more and more with each passing day. Given that it didn´t happen overnight, and it is a war, not some smooth transition, it has taken people time to react and start devising strategies. Although it is a profound loss, it has at least served to show conservatives how important the personal sphere is. I wouldn´t want to go back to a Stepford Wives conservative scenario, which was highly oppressive and full of problems, but I certainly don´t want to live in today´s oppressive pigsty, with this garbage of homosexuals and bisexuals and the legitimation of homosexuality (in all its most dysfunctional modes) as normal, sexually degenerate/violent people, people who spit on respect and commitment regarding relationships, etc., dominating education, law, social relations.Perhaps because I didn't grow up anything even remotely like "a Stepford Wives conservative scenario," I don't spend much time worrying about this. I recognize that there was (and still is) a traditional culture that treated women as second-class citizens (and often much worse), but it doesn't seem to have gone away, in spite of the left's complete control over the culture. If anything, the degradation of women in the methamphetamine subculture makes 1950s America look pretty darn respectful and affirming of women. I disagree with Weyrich in one respect, where he refers to the culture war victors as "Cultural Marxists." I don't think so. One of the important points that Orwell's 1984 makes is that totalitarian societies are dreadfully afraid of sex. I watched the movie version of 1984 (appropriately made in 1984) last night, and it emphasizes that sex leads to marriage and family--which create divided loyalties for individuals, who must decide whether family or state are most important. I think Orwell overstates this claim a bit. The Soviet Union was a fairly puritanical society, and Red China fiercely so--but I think this had a bit more to do with the fact that both of these were pretty traditional societies before Communism, and many traditional societies are pretty conservative about sex. Of course, there were leftists like Emma Goldman, who were advocates of free love, because they regarded marriage as an instrument of oppression of women. You can find similar sentiments among a number of feminists in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am still not convinced that the cultural degradation that we are seeing is particularly Marxist. (Some of these advocates were expelled from the First International for this position.) I think the larger cause of this apparent relationship is that Marxism was fiercely atheistic, and regarded religion in all forms as a tool of oppression. Therefore, anything identified with religion (such as self-restraint, in any area of human experience) was regarded as evil. I have a little hope for the future. Yes, the news/entertainment industry is dominated by depraved people, who lack self-restraint in many areas. They are certainly degrading the culture. I keep hoping that one of these days, the Hollywood set's repulsive behavior will get so out of control that average Americans will decide that they don't want to keep funding them. But I confess that this requires a level of self-restraint that I just don't see happening anytime soon. I fear that it will take another severe shock, like 9/11, to get Americans to stop and think carefully about larger moral issues. More Scum of the Universe I just received this email, which starts out with a copy of the Google trademark: Google's mission is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.Of course, these scum aren't Google at all, and that "free download" is almost certainly another member of pop-up hell. I've informed Google about this, and hope that they track these scum down and shred them for trademark infringement and fraud. Kerry Demands Bush Tell Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to Stop This has to be one of the most hypocritical demands that I have ever seen a politician make. For a year now, the left's attack dogs have been engaging in character assassination by innuendo and guilt by association: about Bush's Air National Guard service; Fahrenheit 9/11. By comparison, the attacks by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are straight forward. They may be wrong. They may be lying. But the criticisms are direct, and if they are wrong, or lying, at least you can tell what they are saying about John Kerry without doing any connect the dots sort of stuff. The complaint is that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is unlawfully coordinating its actions with the Bush campaign. If so, it is no different from the connections between the Kerry campaign, the Democratic Party, MoveOn.org, and the rest of the section 527 organizations that have been going after Bush. This chart over here is pretty damning on this count. The worst criticisms that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have made about Kerry aren't even close to the garbage that Michael Moore and MoveOn.org keep insinuating about Bush. Yet Kerry now is having a temper tantrum, because someone who dislikes Kerry as much as Michael Moore dislikes Bush, is playing by the same rules. There is one difference, of course: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth members know John Kerry in a way that Michael Moore and MoveOn.org don't know Bush. My Mother's Cat Missing In Redding, California I mentioned a few days ago that my mother's cat Ditto had gotten away at the Motel 6 in Redding, California, and that was heartsick for Ditto's return. Here's a picture of Ditto. 
If you find her, please contact me immediately. A Question for Outlook Express Experts Is there a way to block all email from addresses that are not in your address book? My wife (like me) gets a lot of spam, much of it useless, some of it offensive, and a bit that is legally obscene. Much of it goes straight to the Deleted folder, based on various rules that I have set up in Outlook Express, but she asked me yesterday, "Is there some way to delete all email that comes from an address that isn't in my Address Book?" This way, only people in her address book would end up in her InBox; everything else would go to Deleted. I have looked at Outlook Express's mail rules, and I can't see anything that does this--but I hope some clever person knows a way to do this. UPDATE: A number of people suggested various Bayesian spam filters--which I use for my own email account--but I wanted something simpler, that requires no training. One of my readers came up with a way to do this. Tools--> Message Rules--> Mail... -> New 1 Conditions-->Where the From line contains people--> 2 Actions--> Delete Folder 3 Description--> click on the highlighted words--> Address Book --> highlight everyone in the book --> From --> Ok --> (IMPORTANT) then click Options --> Rule 1 - Message does not contain the people below. --> Rule 2 --> leave 2nd option clicked. --> Ok --> Ok --> --Ok --> Ok. And it really does work! Of course, if you add anyone to your address book, you'll have to repeat the process. |
