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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).
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Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Outsourcing, Taken To A New Extreme Some door problems at my employer recently spent several times unrepaired. Some wag, a little embittered by this, and the outsourcing craze, put a note on the door explaining that, "Building repair has been outsourced to Bangalore." (That's in India.) Now I see an example that I find hard to believe--unless someone at McDonald's wanted to make a point: The McDonald's restaurant in Hermiston, Oregon is outsourcing customers drive-thru meals to North Dakota. Little Victories, One By One Houston Metro (the public transit district, I gather, in the Houston area) has finally decided to obey the laws of the state in which they are located: Metro's board unanimously approved the policy change this afternoon without discussion. It removes a section of a 1995 regulation that stated no exception to the authority's weapons ban was provided for concealed-handgun license holders. The new rule prohibits ``the possession of dangerous weapons'' and ``the unlawful carrying of a concealed handgun in or on Metro facilities or vehicles.''I will tell you that if I lived in a state that banned concealed weapon permit holders from riding mass transit, I would conclude that either there was no crime on their buses or trains, or that the mass transit authority wanted me to drive a car everywhere. Kim Jong Il Proves His Claim Kim Jong Il has ordered all men in the country to get short haircuts: The reclusive communist country is waging a hair war, telling its male population to mow the mane to conform to "socialist style" - no longer than two inches.Oh, the reduced brain activity caused by his pompadour sucking up all the oxygen--that explains North Korean policies for the last forty years, I guess. Same-Sex Marriage Constitutional Amendment in Idaho Senate Joint Resolution 101 went down to defeat today, failing on a 21-14 vote to get the 2/3 vote required for passage. In looking over the language, I think I can see why. Rather than simply reserving authority to the legislature or the people to make laws defining marriage, this would actually prohibit the state legislature from recognizing both same-sex marriage and civil unions. Now, I don't particularly want either recognized, but if the point is ever reached that a majority of Idahoans want either to be recognized, I don't see any strong reason to prohibit their representatives from doing so. (And if pigs had wings....) My biggest objection is to having judges impose this through whatever bizarre theory or dishonest history they are using at the moment. More On Taking Dolls As Hostages As Tim Blair points out, "We were warned that Bush would turn Iraq into a puppet regime, but none of us suspected that he’d use actual puppets." Oh yeah, visit here for a series of photographs showing the exciting rescue of the world's shortest hostage. I'm surprised it hasn't made it to CBS yet. Courage & Cowardice Actually, cowardice doesn't even began to describe this. Remember, these are the guys that Michael Moore compared to the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord. From Iraq the Model, in which an Iraqi describes events within his personal knowledge: The suicide attack that was performed on an election center in one of Baghdad's districts (Baghdad Al-Jadeedah) last Sunday was performed using a kidnapped "Down Syndrome" patient.There are stories of courage beyond the call of duty, too. For example, the first Congressional Medal of Honor issued since 1993: Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who spent his boyhood in Tampa, became a man in the Army and died outside Baghdad defending his outnumbered soldiers from an Iraqi attack, will receive America's highest award for bravery.It isn't just Americans showing real courage. Compare the scum who kidnapped a retarded guy, put a bomb on him, and then blew up him, with this Iraqi policeman. This other story from Iraq the Model was mentioned in our local paper, the Idaho Statesman today, although I can't find it online: one story that is famous now in Iraq is about one brave Iraqi (A'adel Nasir) who saw a suspicious looking guy walking around a polling center in (Al- Hurriyah) district and soon the brave man realized that the suspicious guy was trying to commit a suicide attack; he ran towards him, wrestled him and knocked him down causing the bomb carried by the terrorist to explode, sacrificing his own life and saving the lives of the people standing in line at the gate of the voting center. It turned out later that the terrorist carried a Sudanese id.Michael Moore and fellow leftists pretend that there's something "courageous" about opposing the war. They don't have a clue what real courage is. Poignant Songs As I prepare to fly to Boston, it is difficult not to get teary-eyed thinking about the Dave Loggins song, "Please Come to Boston." Please come to Boston for the springtimeFor those of my generation, who came of age when Loggins & Messina recorded this song, it is hauntingly powerful at several levels: as a love song; as a story about the importance of roots; and now, as a memento of an era that seemed to have limitless opportunities and what now seems like a very quaint innocence. The real world for most Americans that age was not so full of limitless opportunity. To a large extent, that's a song about a generation of kids who grew up in very middle class homes, who could spend a few years bouncing around the country, from Boston, to Denver, to Los Angeles, to Berkeley, to Big Sur, secure in the knowledge that if worst came to worst, they could call their parents, get a bus ticket (or maybe a plane ticket) home, and have a place to crash for a few months while figuring out what to do next. For a lot of these privileged kids, it was back to grad school, or into the family business. Hence, the vast sea of aging hippie millionaires and tenured radicals in the universities. Most of my generation didn't have that option. We had to start working, because there wasn't either the wealth to fund this "discover yourself" craze, or a place to which to return home. A friend who attended MIT told me of a fellow student who had nowhere to go over the Christmas holidays, while the dorms were shut down. He put everything he had in storage, bought a Greyhound three week pass, and traveled a lot, sleeping on the bus. I regarded a lot of the hippie "discover yourself" stuff as self-indulgent, and yet I envied them tremendously--especially in retrospect. Having to be responsible--paying for car insurance, health insurance, making sure that I wouldn't be a burden on others--simply made the hippie foolishness impossible. It rather scares me to think what we are going to see in another generation. The hippies, once they stopped spreading STDs and mooching off Mom and Dad, took their rightful places of power and influence as scions of the affluent. We have been engaged in a dreadful struggle with this crowd for the last 30 years: Hilary Clinton and John Kerry being too of the more prominent examples. I shudder to think what is going to happen as the children of this generation's multimillionaires reach the same dangerously powerful age. Remember also that this generation's multimillionaires are also consistently much harder left than the generation that whelped the hippies. Among the more surreal conversations that I have ever had was debating the merits of Noam Chomsky with a guy who raced--and occasionally wrecked--classic Ferraris on the weekends. What Age For Adulthood? Our society has long had a lot of different ages that had legal significance. When I was young, California law distinguish a "minor" (those under 21) from a "juvenile" (those under 18). There were many rights--and responsibilities--that adults enjoyed, but minors didn't. There were a few areas where juveniles had even fewer rights and responsibilities than minors between 18 and 21. Even today, most rights of adulthood start at 18: voting; buying a long gun; making contracts; leaving school; moving out, whether your parents want you to or not. A few rights of adulthood start later. You can't buy a handgun until you are 21. In most (all?) states, you can't buy alcohol until you are 21. There's no consistency about these ages. Idaho, for example, requires you to be 19--not 18, not 21--to enter an adult bookstore. (Yes, Idaho has them. I've seen one in Garden City.) Age of sexual consent is generally 18, but some states, such as Illinois, set the age at 17. In most states, with parental consent, you can get a driver's license at 16. In a few, the age is lower. Again, no consistency. When I was young, a popular slogan was, "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote." This was because young men could not only enter the military at 18 years of age, but many were compelled to do so. Like most bumper sticker slogans, it sounds good, but doesn't mean much. If someone is too old for military service, are they too old to vote? If someone is ineligible for military service because of a physical or mental disability, should they be ineligible to vote? All these various ages reflect both historical precedent and legislative decisionmaking. I've read that, as with most traditional cultures, boys were considered men in early medieval Europe at 14, but that the inability of boys that age to handle the physical demands of combat forced a change. For a number of reasons, the age eventually was set at 21. In Colonial America, the age at which men were obligated to serve militia duty varied. Connecticut's 1637 statute required you to serve starting at age 16. This 1742 Delaware statute required every free person above the age of 17 to be enlisted in the militia. This 1756 Pennsylvania voluntary militia statute did not allow anyone under 21 to enlist without consent of parent, guardian, or master. So I found this article about recent brain research on age and risk-taking quite interesting, because it suggests a scientific basis for the setting of a legal age--not just tradition: A National Institutes of Health study suggests that the region of the brain that inhibits risky behavior is not fully formed until age 25, a finding with implications for a host of policies, including the nation's driving laws.I have some aversion to a "one size fits all" approach to legal ages, but I must confess that there is a lot of merit to setting an age based on something like this. I agree that 25 is probably too old, but I think back on some of the stupid things I did at 18, and 19, and 20--and I was actually more risk-averse and more careful than many of my peers--and I sometimes wonder if 21 was not a good choice for quite a number of these legal barriers. Why Am I Up At This Ridiculous Hour? Because tomorrow, I have to get up at an even more ridiculous hour to catch a 6:00 AM flight to Boston. Professor Sweeney is presenting a paper Thursday evening at the Massachusetts Historical Society about gun ownership in the Connecticut Valley 1640-1800. Generally, he has the details right; gun ownership was widespread among white men, although not universal. There are a few areas where his assumptions appear to have led him astray (for example, that blacks both free and enslaved had no guns). There are a few areas where I am curious to know how he reached his conclusions. He asserts that few female probate inventories had guns, which does not match what I have found. (I confess that I have read far fewer probate inventories than Sweeney, and he may well be right.) He also believes that hunting was rare before 1680, and some of his methods for making that assertion are logical, based on the evidence he has--but I have some evidence that I don't think he knows about that suggests otherwise. Anyway, this is what history is all about--scholars with a detailed knowledge of an area critically examining the work of other scholars, and bringing other puzzle pieces to the table--not inventing history to suit a political agenda, as happened with Michael Bellesiles. I look forward to being there; I do not look forward to the trip and being away from my family for four days, and I especially do not look forward to getting up at 4:00 AM tomorrow morning to catch a taxi to the airport. However, I think it is important to do so, because the work of people like Professor Sweeney is the sort of honest and serious scholarship that most historians do. This is important work, not only for an accurate understanding of American history, but also for preventing politically motivated fables masquerading as history (of which Michael Bellesiles's Arming America is the best recent example), from being used by the courts as a rationalization for restrictive gun control. In Case You Missed It... The terrorist assistance organizations (also known as mainstream journalists) went ahead and initially ran with the story of the American soldier taken hostage in Iraq, who they threatened to behead if their demands were not met. Bloggers quickly demonstrated that the American soldier in question is only a few inches tall, and can be purchased from Dragon Models USA. CNN finally got with the story. Leftists Everywhere Must Be Weeping The determination of ordinary Iraqis to reject fascism and terrorism (the essential goals of leftists in the West) was extraordinary. Chrenkoff again has a collection of good news from Iraq. A few memorable excerpts: Throughout the Kurdistan, the turnout has been described as "very high". In Kurdish Erbil, the lines were lengthy and crowds turned up right from the start, despite the early morning chill. In Basra, a 90% turnout was reported. In other part of the Shia south, the enthusiasm was just as palatable: "Some rode on donkey-carts. Others piled into buses laid on for voters. Most came on foot, steadying the elderly and pushing the disabled in wheelchairs to the ballot box. Voters in Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Najaf turned out in force on Sunday, many walking for kilometres through filthy streets, to cast their ballots in Iraq's first multi-party election in half a century... Some began trickling in as soon as the region's 240 polling centres opened at 7 a.m. By mid-morning queues of voters snaked around schools used as voting places, everyone holding their documents at the ready. 'It is a good feeling to experience democracy for the first time,' said Isra Mohammed, a housewife in the black Islamic robe traditionally worn by women in southern Iraq." 80-year Mahdeya Saleh had this to say: "I had often been forced to vote under Saddam Hussein. Today I come out of my own will to choose freely the candidate of my choice for the first and last time in my life."Scrappleface as usual has a very clever satire about how the mainstream media report this: (2005-01-30) -- News reports of terrorist bombings in Iraq were marred Sunday by shocking graphic images of Iraqi "insurgents" voting by the millions in their first free democratic election.Indeed, this isn't far from the truth of what happened. Instapundit points out that the New York Times is demonstrating that they consider the actions of terrorists news in a way that the first free election in Iraq in decades is not. Anti-War Liberal Asks, "What If Bush Was Right?" Mark Brown's column in the Chicago Sun-Times asks a question: Maybe you're like me and have opposed the Iraq war since before the shooting started -- not to the point of joining any peace protests, but at least letting people know where you stood.Brown was apparently mightily impressed with the voting: For those who've been in the same boat with me, we don't need to concede the point just yet. There's a long way to go. But I think we have to face the possibility.Let me make it clear that Brown's concerns are those of a liberal. A leftist will never admit even the possibility that the U.S. could ever accomplish anything good, much less accomplish anything good at the point of a gun. It is both slightly amusing and profoundly sad that the left's hatred of America takes precedence over its supposed enthusiasm for democracy. What does it say about Michael Moore and that wing of the Democratic Party that in the struggle to install democracy, Moore has taken the side of people that set off car bombs to kill civilians, claim that democracy is intrinsically evil, and support a state preferential position for one branch of Islam? Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Amazing! There Are Consequences For Defending Evil! Even in academia! I mentioned this buffoon who is a department chair at Colorado University a few days ago, describing 9/11 as justified, and the dead in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." But now: Embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill resigned his chairmanship of the school's ethnic studies program Monday.Death threats really aren't appropriate responses to this evil twerp. Unfortunately, he will remain a professor, where I presume that he will engage in similarly intelligent and thoughtful commentary in the classroom. BBC Backs Down An acquaintance living in Europe who hates George Bush with a truly purple passion (because Bush is a fundamentalist Christian) was blathering at me a few days ago about how the BBC was reporting that 2/3 of civilian deaths in Iraq were caused by the U.S. military. Now, BBC is admitting some problems with those numbers: The BBC has apologised for incorrectly broadcasting figures which suggested more Iraqi civilians had been killed by coalition and Iraqi forces than by insurgents. Snake River My wife and I went out for a drive Sunday afternoon, and managed to get fairly lost along the Snake River southeast of Boise. This is one of those stretches that looks like a Western movie set; you expect to see wagon trains, Indians, and the U.S. Calvary. Indeed, we passed a sign memorializing "The Utter Disaster," in which a wagon train led by a man named Utter was attacked by Indians. The Snake River cuts through (sometimes quite dramatically) basalt left by the Columbia Plateau eruptions: 
A little patch of blue in an unrelenting desert: 
Someone has a very nice house in the middle of nowhere:  Monday, January 31, 2005
The Latest Refuge for Democrats There's been a discussion at the H-OIEAHC mailing list (devoted to professional historians interested in Colonial America). The History Channel is busily putting together a documentary about George Washington and military history, and in the course of discussions, there was a bit of discussion about how the History Channel devotes too much time to military history: Hurray, just what we need: another blockbuster on great battles of the Revolution! For these endlessly re-done series, it's as if there had been no social history, just great battles and great men. Rather than waiting for the dreadful eight-hour showing of this stuff, I think it makes senseSomeone else raised the point: We have read repeated pleas by members of the list to use history as aMy response was: Unfortunately, the notion that history (and art, and science, and everything else under the sun) exists to serve a political agenda--and only one political agenda at that--is one of the reasons that the general public does not have a very positive feeling about the academic community. ... I am sure that most members of this list are committed to serious scholarship, but it doesn't take a lot of examples of academics engaging in unbalanced or even fraudulent work (as a recent rather glaring example demonstrated) to create very negative reactions.The responses to this have been quite amazing. One of these responses which hasn't made it into the archive yet, by Trish Roberts-Miller, who appears to be faculty at University of Texas (although fortunately, not an historian): Thus, for instance, 51% of *your* fellow citizens, Mr. Cramer, did not vote for Mr. Bush. That's a statistical sleight of hand being pushed by the GOP to legitimate a President supported by a minority of citizens. It isn't true. That you would toss out a false number as though it's true is an interesting sign about with whom you talk.It turns out that Bush isn't a "legitimate" President because a large fraction of the eligible voters didn't bother to vote. And others on the list responded similarly--it appears that the latest rationalization for the left that Bush is illegitimate is because a majority of all eligible voters didn't vote for him. By this definition, there has never been a legitimate President. Even Johnson's 1964 election landslide still had 39% of the eligible voters not voting--meaning that Johnson's 61% of the popular vote cast was only approval from 37% of eligible voters. Are There Differences In Human Sensitivity to Magnetic Fields? This whole question of water witches has made me rather sensitive to questions of human variability and sensitivity--especially after reading this rather macabre paper about experimental methods for locating graves. One interesting item that they discovered: Monitoring with MAG [magnetic] surveys after interment demonstrates that MAG surveys can be used at this site to detect areas of excavation, even when metallics are not present. This effect, a MAG anomaly, appears to be directly related to a reorientation of magnetic soil particles upon backfilling the graves. EM [electromagnetic] surveys have proven more useful than MAG as the ground conductivity changes over graves due to the increased porosity of the backfill materials. EM surveys can be utilized to determine changes in ground conductivity and to detect the presence of ferrous and nonferrous metallics.So here's the question: we know that human beings have a remarkable range of sensitivity to smells and flavors. Some people think it tastes like soap, and I've read that this is an inherited trait. Is it possible that "water witches" have some sensitivity to some electromagnetic fields that might be, at least more often than by chance, related to the presence of running water? This study claims that there are people who are electromagnetically sensitive, although most are not. This article absolutely rejects it. How Long Does Fossilization Take? I was having lunch today with several people, the best educated of whom (Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering) is a rather ardent Young Earther. I must confess that I find almost any argument that starts out, "The Earth is only a few tens of thousands of years old" impossible to swallow, simply because the evidence is so overwhelming that the Earth is just a bit older than that. Even a fair number of Creationists, such as Hugh Ross the astrophysicist, do not find the "Young Earth" argument even slightly plausible. (Not surprisingly, he gets a bit of flak from Young Earthers about this, such as here. Some Young Earthers, such as Kenn Hamm, are not even polite in their disagreement.) I will agree that the Earth could be very young, and everything has been set up to make it appear far older than it is--rather like the way that modern bronze statutes in Greece today are dipped in hydochloric acid to give them the patina that lets them be sold to gullible collectors as classical--but this seems rather a stretch. Why would God work so hard at making the Earth look so old? Just to help out the evolutionists? Sorry, this seems implausible to me, to say the least. Anyway, my friend tells me, and several others at the table mention that they were aware of a fossilized cowboy leg found some years ago. My skepticism meter was fully pegged. The term "fossil" in a strict sense is usually reserved for remains that have been completely, or almost completely mineralized--meaning that the organic molecules that made up the creature have been replaced by a mineral. (It appears that in some contexts, some organic material can survive.) In the process of doing so, the original shape has been preserved, but little else. The frozen mammoths of Siberia are not really fossils, because there has been no mineralization. Dogs have been fed steaks from these oversized TV dinners, with no ill effect. (This takes the concept of "aged steaks" to a whole new level.) Similarly, many human and animal remains of the Holocene (such as at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles) have not been mineralized. They are still bone. No suprise--mineralization is a very slow process, as mineralized water flows through a specimen, and replaces molecules. When I went Googling for the fossilized cowboy leg, I was surprised at how few references I found to it. Of the websites that were still operational, those discussing it all seem to derive their information from the Creation Evidence Museum, in Texas. This website, for example, has a picture and a description, and credits the Creation Evidence Museum. But oddly enough, what should be among the powerful pieces of evidence of very, very rapid fossilization (a post-1920s boot on a fossilized leg), isn't listed on the Creation Evidence Museum's online list of displays. If you have a pointer to information about this, I would love to see it. Also, if you have a pointer to the youngest known fossil (that is, where the organic material has been largely mineralized), please tell me. Saponification of animal remains are not really mineralized; the fat has simply been converted to soap by alkaline soil. Yes, I've seen pictures of the woman who became the world's largest, grossest soap bar. Not A Very Encouraging Set of Survey Results I would like to see more about how the questions are phrased, but this is not an encouraging sign: One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.Yikes! I'm glad that there is a majority in favor of freedom of the press, but it isn't exactly an overwhelming endorsement of the concept with only 51% in favor. Of course, it is possible that some of that 36% is expressing disapproval not of freedom of the press, but of the current overwhelmingly leftist control over most news media. Asked whether the press enjoys "too much freedom," not enough or about the right amount, 32% say "too much," and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.I guess we can safely call the ten percent who say the press "has too little" freedom uninformed. What freedoms does the press lack? About the only areas where the press is controlled now is that they can't publish child pornography, and they can be sued for libel by private parties for factually incorrect and injurious statements. The standard for a successful libel suit against government officials after Sullivan v. New York Times (1964) is so high that for practical purposes, the only way for a publisher to lose a libel suit involving a government official in the U.S. is to make notes that say, "We're going to be intentionally dishonest in attacking this guy," or publicly fail a Breathalyzer test just before sitting down at the word processor. Perhaps what this survey shows is that the schools need to put history and government and other boring types of education a little higher on the list--at least higher than sex education and sexual orientation sensitivity training. Old Eyes? The last few weeks, when I have first turned on my headlights in late twilight, I have been alarmed at how little difference it made (although by later in the evening, the problem was less severe). I remembered from biology classes that as we age, the ability of the eye to rapidly rebuild rhodopsin declines, and I was beginning to worry about this. Coming back from the country property Saturday evening, the Corvette was truly filthy, and it struck me--whenever I was the Corvette, the headlights are hidden. Sure enough: the problem wasn't my eyes, but my headlights. They were filthy. I took some Windex to them, and my night vision is restored! Where Strict Application of Equal Protection Can Take You A couple of years back, Germany legalized prostitution. One unintended consequence was this: A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.I have always thought that legalizing prostitution was the best way to control the public health hazards and remove pimps from the equation. But I must confess that reading this makes me pause for a moment. If prostitution were made legal here, the ACLU would doubtless file an equal protection suit to demand that unemployed people be obligated to accept jobs as prostitutes as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits. After all, why should anyone be allowed to discriminate against an employer simply because the job involves having sex for money? Those notions are strictly religious, anyway, and we know that the ACLU would insist that allowing people to refuse a job as a prostitute is a violation of separation of church and state, because they are not allowed to refuse other jobs that do not have a religious scruple problem. (Yes, I know that the ACLU has often taken the opposite position in other circumstances, but forcing people to violate their conscience is the ACLU's major mission these days.) UPDATE: There are some questions being raised about the accuracy of the newspaper story. |
