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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, April 02, 2005
Back Among The Living; About Houses I finally feel reasonably healthy--thanks for all the kind words from readers. My wife and I went up to take a look at the property today, and met our new neighbors across the street. It was so beautiful and peaceful up there, with birds singing--I'll take some pictures next time of the wildflowers growing on our land. I have promised in the past to unload some information about manufactured, modular, and stick built housing. Manufactured housing is built in a factory to standards set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This means that all manufactured housing meets a single national standard. Manufactured housing is built on a steel frame which has wheels on it when it leaves the factory. The wheels are typically removed when the unit arrives at the property. Manufactured housing, at least in the last few years, is a far cry from traditional mobile homes in terms of standards and materials. At least some of them are, from the inside, indistinguishable from stick built homes. But because quite a number of people who bought manufactured housing in the late 1990s defaulted on their loans (perhaps because salescritters bent a few rules to get some of these people to qualify for loans), most lenders won't touch manufacturing housing anymore. From what I have read, manufacturing housing--as long as it is on a conventional lot, not in a park--appreciates about the same as stick built houses--although with somewhat wider standard deviation than stick built houses. A manufactured home, at least here in Idaho, will be marked as a manufactured home on real estate listings, now and forevermore. This will probably reduce the number of buyers willing to consider purchasing your home when it comes time to sell. Modular housing is often built in the same factory as manufactured housing, but it conforms to local building codes, and is often close to the same cost as manufactured housing--adding a few percent here in Idaho to the cost. These differences include details such as roof angle, width of the eaves, some requirements about how electrical junction boxes are located. I've seen the tables showing differences between modular homes intended for Oregon, Washington, California, and Idaho delivery, and for the most part, the differences in state building codes tend to reflect the experiences of those states, and their level of environmental concern. Unlike the manufactured home, which arrives on a steel frame with wheels, and loses only the wheels, a modular home is lifted off the steel frame by a crane, and dropped directly onto the foundation. This means that for practical purposes, a modular home is as permanent as a stick built home. My realtor tells me that a modular home is considered a stick built home for purposes of real estate listings, and will never bear the mark of Cain that a manufactured home does. Lenders (at least those that I have talked to so far) will lend on modular home construction on the same basis as stick built homes, and so far, that is what we are currently planning to do--have about a 2100 square foot, four bedroom, two bath home built on our eleven acre parcel. (This is going to be about $130,000 delivered--quite a bit cheaper than a stick built house around here.) Now, this is where it gets rather interesting, and why this is still a little uncertain. We talked to one local builder with a very good reputation for integrity who quoted us about $18,000-$20,000 for improvements (driveway, well, septic tank, foundation, garage) and about $70 to $75 per square foot to build a home. For a 2000 square foot home, this would be about $150,000 + $20,000 + the $55,000 we paid for the land. For those of you in California, you can stop turning green now. The dealer for Guerdon Homes that we are working with sent his general contractor up to meet us last Monday morning at the parcel of land. The driveway is going to be a little steep, and it is easily 500-600 feet from the road to where we want the modular home located. They may have to use a Caterpillar to get the two sections of our modular home up the hill--and I shudder to think of what may be required to get the crane up there. A gravel road is going to cost us about $1.50 per square foot. Because each section of the modular home is 15 feet wide, this means that the road up there will have to be at least 15 feet wide, maybe more so. A stick built house would not require anywhere near as wide a road, nor will there will be any additional charges for hauling stuff like a crane up the hill. We have not yet received an estimate from the dealer, but my wife is a little concerned that much of the price advantage of a modular home may evaporate because it needs a wider and better road to get the pieces in place. We'll see. In the meantime, I am trying to find a way to keep this house reasonably priced, because my employer is in the process of encouraging many of its employees to volunteer for layoffs. If they don't get enough volunteers.... Anyway, I am looking for a way to be able to afford the house payments on my wife's dream home without a job, so I have to be careful not to let this house get too expensive. There being effectively no software engineering jobs in the Boise area, this will require some care. (Even if there were software engineering jobs for fossils like myself elsewhere, my son has another year to finish high school--not a good time to be moving.) Pope John Paul II I'm sure that there are few corners of the world that do not know that Pope John Paul II died this morning. For a lot of younger readers, you may not be aware that Pope John Paul played a significant factor in starting the collapse of Communism. The election of a Polish cardinal to the position--the first non-Italian in a very, very long time--played a part in energizing Lech Walesa's Solidarity trade union in Poland. During World War II, when FDR suggested to Stalin that they should consult with the current Pope, Stalin's acidic response was, "How many divisions has the Pope?" One of the political cartoonists (perhaps Conrad, at the Los Angeles Times) used that as a caption to a cartoon depicting the vast numbers of Poles that allied themselves with Solidarity in the period around 1980. I can remember in particular a photograph of the Warsaw shipyards that were at the center of Solidarity around that time, showing a vast sea of workers on their knees in prayer. Now, prayer by itself didn't bring the Soviet Union down. It didn't even bring Poland's Communist government down. But it did prepare workers for the sort of struggle that they needed to engage in to shake the Polish government's belief in its moral rectitude. Pacifism is not a sufficient or general purpose solution to tyrannical governments. Against sufficiently evil governments, pacifists are just speedbumps. But the example of Solidarity in confronting the Polish government caused the Communists to lose confidence in their morality of their cause. When confronting evil, when you know that there is a strong chance that you will die, or be tortured to death (as happened to at least Polish priest at the hands of the Communists during this period), you darn well better know that your suffering and death, no matter how awful it is, will be a temporary situation on the way to something much better. There are plenty of things that John Paul II did and said that I don't particularly agree with, and I am disappointed at his apparent lack of concern about the widespread problem of pedophile priests and a Church that largely looked the other way for decades. Still, every life has some bright shining moments and some disappointing events, and John Paul II's role in bringing down Communism is one that everyone should respect and appreciate. Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Lack Of Activity Here: I'm Sick I normally get sinus infections; this is the first cold I've had in years. I feel like crawling back into bed. Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Oil Import Restrictions History Question I have a vague memory, back from the era of oil crises, that the U.S. had a cap on the amount of oil that we could import from abroad until 1971. Does anyone know of any authoritative source on this? Sunday, March 27, 2005
How Evil Is Michael Schiavo? This news story about him relenting just makes my blood boil: PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (AP) - Their hopes fading and legal options exhausted, Terri Schiavo's parents appeared quietly resigned Sunday to watching her die but could claim one Easter victory: The severely brain-damaged woman received a drop of communion wine on her tongue - her only sustenance in nine days - after her husband allowed her to receive the sacrament.Is this a silly matter? I don't believe that last rites have any significance to whether you go to Heaven or not. It matters a lot to Catholics--so Michael Schiavo refusing this request can be interpreted as either: 1. Trying to deny Terri full absolution for her sins. 2. Trying to cause more suffering to Terri's parents. Either way, Michael Schiavo just keeps adding to the reasons why I am inclined to see him as a nasty and vicious guy, not a well-intentioned person who just disagrees with the Schindlers about what is best for Terri. There's only one consolation to this bitter ending. In a few days, Terri Schiavo will die, and go where people like Michael Schiavo, his attorney, the judicial system, and whatever caused her original collapse into coma, or PVS, or whatever this, can't cause her any more problems. I've seen defenders of starving Terri Schiavo claim that it shouldn't cause Christians any grief if Terri dies, because she's going to Heaven anyway. I guess we shouldn't let genocide, murder, or capital punishment cause us any grief, either, then. The problem with all of these actions (and I include capital punishment in that list intentionally) is not just what they do the person who dies, but what they do to the society that engages in them: it cheapens and degrades us. Evolving Standards of Decency William Kristol has a devastating criticism of the notion of "evolving standards of decency" on our Supreme Court: Thank God for our robed masters. If it weren't for them, Christopher Simmons might soon be executed. In September 1993, seven months shy of his 18th birthday, Simmons decided it would be interesting to kill someone. He told his buddies they could get away with it because they were still minors. He broke into the house of Shirley Crook in Jefferson County, Missouri, bound her hands and feet, drove her to a bridge, covered her face with tape, and threw her into the Meramec River, where she drowned. He confessed to the crime, and was sentenced to death according to the laws of Missouri.As he goes on to point out, it is not that the courts are consistently biased in favor of death. They are only biased in favor of death if you haven't murdered someone. My wife reminded me about the T4 euthanasia program in Nazi Germany, exterminating the disabled, the mentally defective, and the terminally ill. "Aryans" were killed mercifully; Jews were starved to death in "quiet rooms." True, the situations aren't quite the same. If Terri Schiavo is really and truly no longer here, because her higher brain functions aren't working anymore, she isn't going to feel any suffering. But what if she isn't? What if she is like this woman who could hear and see what was going on around her, could feel the hunger and thirst--but was wrongly misdiagnosed as "persistent vegetative state"? As the article about the T4 program I linked above pointed out, this "euthanasia" program was a precursor to the Holocaust. It is just a little too easy, once you have rationalized killing someone like Terri Schiavo, to starve to death an 85 year old in a coma. After all, he likely isn't going to come out of the coma before he dies of natural causes anyway. Why not starve to death the severely retarded infant? He's not going to have much of a life anyway. What about a girl born in a culture where girls are second class citizens? Maybe it isn't such a bad thing to drown her at birth (as was common, even a few years ago, in Red China)--think of the unpleasantness that she won't have to put up with if she grew to adulthood. Each of these steps is just a little more troublesome ethically than the last. At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say, "STOP." Terri Schiavo's wishes on this are not clearly known, except by the hearsay evidence of a guy with multiple reasons to want her dead. (Other hearsay evidence pointing the other way was discounted by Judge Greer.) The same crowd that wouldn't execute a murderer because it is possible he is actually innocent, isn't prepared to give Terri Schiavo the same benefit of a much greater doubt. A Vegetable Named DeLay The Chicago Tribune carried this news story that I suppose was intended to suggest that Rep. DeLay is some sort of hypocrite for trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive. But the circumstances of DeLay's father in 1988, as DeLay's office pointed out, were dramatically different. 1. DeLay's father's kidneys had failed, and he was being kept alive by extraordinary measures. The only "extraordinary" measure being withheld from Terri Schiavo is food and water--something that you and I don't think of any extraordinary at all. 2. There was no dispute within the family about allowing Delay's father to die. Pretty obviously, DeLay knows something about the hard choices and painful decisions that a situation like this involves. The Struggle At Santa Rosa Junior College It is shocking to read a column like this one in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat: After the Berlin Wall came down, somebody quipped, "there are but four strongholds of Marxism left now ... China, Cuba, North Korea, and the American university."I used to live in the Santa Rosa area, and I am glad to see students finally confronting the political monoculture of the colleges of the area. Back when I was just completing my M.A. in history at Sonoma State University, I briefly considered applying to Santa Rosa Junior College to teach. Then reality hit me. There was another grad student who was just about to finish her M.A. as well. She was a doctrinaire leftist--of the sort who you might at first take for some sort of parody if she was on television. But one evening before class started, we were discussing teaching opportunities, and she mentioned that Santa Rosa Junior College had three adjunct history openings--but that she had been told, when she applied, that one of the openings was reserved for a minority. This was after the voters of California had passed an initiative completely prohibiting this sort of discrimination--but why should government institutions follow the law? It wasn't any different in the late 1950s, when the courts banned racial segregation, and Southern governments openly and by subterfuge refused to obey the law. I really do believe that our society benefits from a broad, liberal (in the old sense of the word) education in the humanities and social sciences. I do not think that college should just be a technical training institution. But when I look at how much the left uses its dominance over the academy to indoctrinate students and suppress dissenting points of view, I find myself wondering if our society might be better off just abandoning the pretense of providing a liberal education as part of a college degree. |
