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Labels: telescopes Labels: fake hate crimes Labels: house project Labels: global warming
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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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
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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
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A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
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J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
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Machining
I've received a lot more emails about than I expected--and it appears that many of my readers have misunderstood my complaints. It is, of course, simply impossible that I have not articulated my irritation properly. :-)
Why am I not running out and buying a lathe right now? It is not because my time is too valuable. I actually have a bit of spare time at the moment. I am not interested in investing upwards of $700 for a quality piece of machinery, only to discover that what I think is a medium sized market for the telescope mount accessory that I am building is really a very, very tiny market. If the market turns out to be as big as I think, I'll run out and buy a lathe.
It is not because learning to use such a tool is beneath me. I am actually fascinated by machine tools. If I were fabuluously rich, I would have a lathe and a vertical mill in my garage. I like working with tools. But I also know that there is a learning curve associated with any skill, and I have seen just enough of machining to recognize that it is a substantial skill--it involves both significant book learning, and significant hands on experience.
My frustration is that I have now had two different machinists agree to build parts at prices that were either very reasonable, or tolerable. One just disappeared on me, and another essentially decided that he was too busy.
I understand that setting up tooling for some types of machining is substantially time consuming. I've built some tooling for manufacturing one set of parts from Delrin--fortunately, parts that I can make with a miter saw and a drill press. In this case, there isn't really any tooling. The steps required to make these parts are:
1. Turn a 2.375" plastic rod down to 2.355". Depending on the accuracy of the lathe, and the length of the rod, this can be a problem, but you can also start by cutting the rod into 4" lengths, and turn each 4" length. Because the two ends are going to be cut off in step 2, you can hold the stock in place with a Forstner bit or a screw.
2. Make two 30 degree angle cuts with a saw. A miter saw works for this--the only hard part is getting the rod to not rotate while cutting. (This is not a machining operation; no precision requirements.)
3. Make a 3/8"-16 x 1" deep tapped hole in the face of one end. There is no requirement for even hundredths of inch accuracy on centering the hole. Because you have cut both ends in step 2, you can put this in a drill press clamp, drill the hole, and then use an electric drill with a 3/8"-16 tap in it.
The only part of this operation that is beyond my ability is step 1. If I could buy 3.355" and 3.460" diameter rod, I wouldn't be looking for a machinist. Unfortunately, almost all extruded rods are made only to nominal diameters. If you buy plastic rod that is listed as 3.375", it may be as much as 0.1" oversize. You pay for precision--and in some sizes, you can't even pay fo precision--you just can't get that size.
Fortunately, I have a co-worker who has a lathe and a mill. He is taking the fairly sweet layoff incentive package that our employer is offering, and he figures that he can put his equipment to work doing something interesting, and perhaps it will turn into a steady income for both of us.
UPDATE: It occurs to me that 2.355" is also 59.814 mm. It is possible that some precisely 60mm plastic rod could be sanded down to fit. But I am not having much luck finding 60mm Delrin, UHMW, or similar plastics. The other size that I need--2.460"--is not any even size in metric.
Federal Judge Strikes Down Nebraska Constitution's Same Sex Marriage Ban
The decision is here. I would ordinarily pick it apart, but Professor Volokh--who is friendly to gay marriage, but not to judicial activism--has already done a fine job of pointing out the errors in the decision.
This Is Disturbing
African little boys are disappearing in Britain: Scotland Yard today revealed it has been unable to trace all but two of 300 black boys aged four to seven reported missing from school in a three-month period.
Now, the claim is that many of these children supposedly returned to their home countries--but international efforts to trace them have been unsuccessful.
Child welfare experts say the number highlights the scale of the trade in children brought to Britain as domestic servants and covers for benefit fraud.
The figure emerged through the murder inquiry following the discovery of a child's torso in the Thames in September 2001. The identity of the victim, named "Adam" by police, is not known but his background was traced to Nigeria, it is believed he died in a ritual sacrifice.
Detectives asked each London local education authority to give them details of black boys aged four to seven reported missing from school between July and September 2001. It emerged 300 had vanished, 299 from Africa and one from the Caribbean.
Police only managed to trace two children. The true figure for missing boys and girls is feared to be several thousand a year.
My wife says that one of the measures of a society is how well it protects its weakest and most vunerable members. Britain, unfortunately, is not alone in this regard.
Border Patrol Told To Reduce Arrests?
This Washington Times article indicates that the Border Patrol has told its agents to reduce arrests, so as to hide the effectiveness of the Minuteman Project: U.S. Border Patrol agents have been ordered not to arrest illegal aliens along the section of the Arizona border where protesters patrolled last month because an increase in apprehensions there would prove the effectiveness of Minuteman volunteers, The Washington Times has learned.
It appears that keeping labor costs low is very critical to the Bush Administration--more critical than national security. I am very disappointed.
More than a dozen agents, all of whom asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, said orders relayed by Border Patrol supervisors at the Naco, Ariz., station made it clear that arrests were "not to go up" along the 23-mile section of border that the volunteers monitored to protest illegal immigration.
If the Democrats had any brains at all, they would run with this issue. Their natural constituency (at least, their claimed natural constituency) of blue collar workers are being badly hurt by low wages caused by illegal aliens. The border states are badly injured by public safety and health care costs associated with illegal aliens; the low wage rates mean that illegals are not taxed heavily enough to cover governmental costs. Even ignoring the national security aspects of the problem, the Democrats should cynically decide to pursue this issue to differentiate themselves from the Republican Party, which is a bit too beholden to corporate interests who want the cheap labor.
The ACLU Once Again Demonstrates Their Unique Understanding of the First Amendment
The ACLU seems to think that it protects the constitutional right of someone to display his penis on television. Shockingly enough, there are judges not prepared to go along with this: A penis that tells jokes on late night public access television may be expressive of something. But it is not the kind of free expression protected by the First Amendment, the Michigan Court of Appeals has decided, confirming the indecent exposure conviction of the show's producer and host.
I've suggested before that it would be entertaining to produce really grotesquely obscene and offensive materials to see if you could get the ACLU and similar deranged liberals to defend these as protected by the First Amendment. Similarly, I've suggested that the only way to get liberals to stop their wild enthusiasm for the National Endowment for the Arts would be to get funding for a [National] Socialist Realism art exhibit--and then watch their brains explode when it consists of Aryan men chasing and exterminating stereotyped Jews. These have always been thought experiments because I would like to think that the ACLU, at some point, would see the absurdity of their ahistorical and often insane extreme view of what constitutes free speech. But seeing that they chose to defend the presentation of "Dick Smart" on public access television, perhaps there is nothing crazy enough to stop the ACLU from defending it in court.
Timothy Huffman, 47, who lives north of Grand Rapids, was convicted in Kent County after the penis episode aired twice in spring 2000 on the Grand Rapids public access cable channel GRTV.
In affirming the conviction in an opinion released Wednesday, the appeals court said any "incidental restriction" on the First Amendment is "no greater than is essential to the furtherance of the governmental interest in promoting public morality by prohibiting public nudity."
Huffman, whose defense was assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed the three-minute segment, "Dick Smart," was an expression of free speech and not obscene.
The Small Decision
I didn't blog about it when Small v. U.S. (2005) was announced--in truth, I was too busy working on getting this new house of mine nailed down--but having read the decision in preparation for writing an article about for Shotgun News, I am appalled.
The majority--largely the left-end of the Supreme Court bench, and generally no friends to gun owners--have mutilated one of the few federal gun control laws that gun owners are generally prepared to accept: the ban on convicted felons possessing guns. As the law now stands, those convicted of any violent felony in a foreign court may own guns in the U.S.--while those convicted of even non-violent felonies in U.S. courts may not own guns. As Justice Thomas's dissent (in which Justices Scalia and Kennedy joined) points out: the majority's interpretation permits those convicted overseas of murder, rape, assault, kidnaping, terrorism, and other dangerous crimes to possess firearms freely in the United States. ... Meanwhile, a person convicted domestically of tampering with a vehicle identification number, ... is barred from possessing firearms.
Had the majority's decision been properly reasoned, I would have said, "Oh well, Congress screwed up. They need to fix it." But the majority's opinion claims that Congress did not intend to include felony convictions from foreign courts--and their claim to support this simply does not fly.
They point out that another part of the Gun Control Act of 1968 excludes "antitrust or business regulatory" crimes from the list of disabling felonies, and the statute specifically says "federal or State." From this, they conclude that provision banning felons from possessing guns applied only to convictions in the U.S. But having evidently limited the scope of this exemption to domestic convictions, why did Congress not similarly limit the scope of the felon in possession statute?
There's a simple reason: the "antitrust or business regulatory crime" provision is there because a rather prominent U.S. maker was convicted of a felony: Congress first provided an avenue for relief from firearms disabilities in 1965. Federal Firearms Act, Pub. L. No. 89-184, 79 Stat. 788. That provision was enacted after the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, the parent corporation of the firearms manufacturer Winchester, was convicted of a felony. H.R. Rep. No. 708, 89th Cong., 1st Sess. 2-3 (1965). The relief provision allowed Winchester to remain in business.
Limiting the "antitrust or business regulatory crime" felony exemption to domestic convictions was a way to keep Winchester in business--yet still leave room to prohibit individual felons of the less white collar form from owning guns.
No Oil For Torture!
That should have been the slogan. Here's the Congressional report on Charles Pasqua (now a member of the French Senate, at the time, Minister of the Interior) and Charles Galloway (British MP). The report also makes clear that the Hussein government gave lots of oil to influence Russia, China, and France, because they were permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Hussein wanted to influence them to keep the Security Council from taking any actions against Hussein's charnel house. I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the left end of American politics was on the side of the torturers, rapists, and genocidal maniacs.
I Guess This Blows Condoleeza Rice Out Of The Running For President
An interview with Larry King reveals the deep dark secret that will make the national media veto her becoming President: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recalling how her father took up arms to defend fellow blacks from racist whites in the segregated South, said Wednesday the constitutional right of Americans to own guns is as important as their rights to free speech and religion.
I would vote for her, and I suspect that millions of other Americans would vote for her on this one issue alone. But the people that really matter--the few thousand people that form the intelligentsia--will exercise their veto power to quash the Rice for 2008 campaign.
In an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live," Rice said she came to that view from personal experience. She said her father, a black minister, and his friends armed themselves to defended the black community in Birmingham, Ala., against the White Knight Riders in 1962 and 1963. She said if local authorities had had lists of registered weapons, she did not think her father and other blacks would have been able to defend themselves.
What? Your copy of the Constitution doesn't grant a veto power to America's arrogant multimillionaire class? That just shows that you have the "dead" Constitution, not the living, ever evolving Constitution.
Forging Checks: How Not To Do It
Most people who forge checks are smart enough to make the checks relatively inconspicuous, or they are smart enough to cash the forged check, and leave the area immediately. This example is not a sign of intelligence: An Arizona couple is in the Ada County Jail accused of taking a $37 cashiers check, forging a new figure of $317,000 and attempting to use it to buy a new $300,000 Meridian home, according to Boise police.
First mistake: the size of the check demands attention. The second mistake: instead of getting cash, and then disappearing, they bought a house! Houses are not mobile, and not quickly resold. Third mistake: they moved in, apparently planning to stay.
Kathy Lynn Jean, 42, and Robby Joe Jean, 39, moved furniture into the Nephrite Way home in a new subdivision near Eagle and Victory roads over the weekend before they were arrested at the home Tuesday, Boise police detective Wade Spain said.
...
Police say the Jeans bought a legitimate cashiers check at a Boise bank for $37.06 but then altered it so it appeared to be a check for $317,000. That altered check was then presented to a title company after business hours on Monday as a cash payment for the Meridian home, Spain said. The couple had moved in Friday, he said.
The check the Jeans presented to the title company was a "low tech" forgery with the numbers changed, Spain said.
"The title company was instantly suspicious and went to the bank the first thing in the morning," Spain said.
Pat Buchanan's Controversial Essay
The essay--arguing that World War II was a mistake, is here. Not surprisingly, quite a number of people are expressing their profound disapproval.
Buchanan writes:If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR? At Yalta, this pair secretly ceded those small nations to Stalin, co-signing a cynical "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that was a monstrous lie.
I would agree with him about FDR. Churchill knew that this was a monstrous act. Unfortunately, the West was dependent on Soviet assistance to end World War II. I wish it had been different, but the costs in blood and wealth to fight World War II had been enormous. Churchill had tried to alert FDR to the evil of the Soviet system, but too many of FDR's closest supporters were either blind, or agents of Soviet influence.If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?
First of all, I don't see that Bush implied it was a "tyranny even more odious." Secondly, when Britain went to war, it was to stop Hitler, not just from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, but all of Europe. No one had any illusions that Hitler's aims stopped at Poland.True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.
Except that the invasion of France, the Netherlands, and Belgium was going to happen whether Britain declared war on Germany or not.When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?
Ask the millions of Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, Poles, and political dissidents murdered by Nazi Germany.If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.
Tyranny is still evil, even when it is popularly elected.
I will tell you, if this was an essay written by a high school student, or even a college student, I would assume that he did not understand the history of that time. But Pat Buchanan knows better. I have long resisted the popular leftist view that Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite. Reading essays like this makes such a position more and more sensible.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Don't be a stranger! I try to add interesting, useful, and humorous material every day.
Adjunct Faculty
There's a very interesting, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking blog called the Phantom Professor. It describes the frustrations and nuisances of being adjunct faculty. I've only taught two classes (at two different universities) as an adjunct, so I haven't had the experience that the Phantom Professor has, but I still found that it reminded me of my experiences.
It turns out that the Phantom Professor was eventually unmasked and just coincidentally, her contract at SMU was not renewed. On the one hand, I see the point of those complaining that they were being ridiculed (even though they weren't identified in the blog). Students can be very sensitive. At least one of my students became quite upset because I blogged about my disappointment at the poor quality of the research papers that I had received. I didn't identify any particular students, and I put the blame on their secondary education--but I resolved that I wasn't going to do that again. Still, I think it is important for adults to realize the situation on college campuses: the intoxication; the often shockingly low skill level of today's college students; the level of emotional damage that some of the kids are displaying.
I suspect that the Phantom Professor and I are worlds apart in our political sentiments, and yet I still found an awful lot of what she has written that rings very true to me.
The Death of the Perfects
It turns out that the guy who is being charged with vehicular manslaughter in the deaths of this family didn't just have a previous DUI conviction--the circumstances are surprisingly similar: Lazinka's 2002 DUI conviction stemmed from similar circumstances but less-dire consequences, according to sheriff's reports. According to the records:
Now, you may be wondering why Lazinka wasn't convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. I suspect that there wasn't enough evidence to prove that the collision with Allen was an intentional act. It is certainly plausible that someone with a blood-alcohol level of 0.17% just didn't notice the car of ahead of him coming to a stop. (Some years back, one of California State Senator Art Torres' drunk driving arrests involved him not noticing a police car, lights running, at the state capital--until he was 18 inches away from the police car's bumper.)
On Feb. 2, 2002, Christopher Allen told police that he was driving northbound on Edgewood Lane from Hill Road in Eagle. He drove his Honda Civic up behind a GMC pickup truck, which Allen said was traveling 10 mph in a 25-mph zone. When Allen tried to pass, the pickup driver sped up and would not allow Allen to pass. After Allen passed the truck a short time later, the pickup driver rammed into the Honda's rear end, causing $4,000 in damage.
Lazinka, the pickup driver, told police that he struck the Honda when its driver slammed on his brakes. Allen was not cited. A breath test determined Lazinka had a blood-alcohol level of 0.17, over twice the legal limit of 0.08.
Lazinka later pleaded guilty to a DUI charge and was sentenced to five days in jail and one year of probation.
I've mentioned before my belief that drunk drivers should be limited to motorcycles for life--they can do less damage that way. I would prefer that they be banned from driving anything for several years instead--but there's a real reluctance by legislators just about everywhere to treat drunk driving as a serious matter, perhaps because they know (often first hand) how common drunk driving is.
The Spam Calendar
I saw this on a co-worker's wall. It consists of Hormel ads for Spam from, it appears, the 1950s and 1960s--and if you found James Lileks' book The Gallery of Regrettable Food entertaining (which I did), I suspect that you will find this calendar good for a chuckle or two as well.
I have no financial connection or arrangement with calendars.com, who sells that calendar. But perhaps they will enjoy the traffic that this sends their way, and decide to advertise here!
Why Are Manufacturing Jobs Going To China?
Because practically everyone who is capable of machining stuff is too busy? I've been trying for a couple of months now to get some parts machined to support my Losmandy telescope mount accessory business. I've contacted local machine shops; I've contacted people who did machining as a sideline; I've contacted machine shops at a distance. The results have not been encouraging.
The materials cost on these parts is pretty minor--$1 or less for the plastic. There's nothing intricate about these parts. One is a cylinder with two holes in it; the cylinder has tolerances measured in hundredths of an inch. The other two items are a little more precise, but the only operation that requires machining is thousandths of an inch precision. These are really, really simple.
Yet most machine shops, even when I go in and hand them a detailed drawing (showing three sides of the part) with dimensions and tolerances clearly marked, never get back to me. Two local shops quoted me more than $19 a piece. (As I said: the materials cost less than $1, and the time to machine, saw, and tap each part comes to about ten minutes at most.) A third local shop just kept dropping the ball; I got tired of having to hound them into quoting me a price. I guess that they have all the large scale business that they needed.
One hobbyist in the Midwest managed to make a few of part #3 for me. Then he made a few of part #1--but they were "lost in the mail." Now he won't even respond to my emails--even the email asking where to send the check for the small number of part #3 that he made.
Another operation, a real machine shop in the Midwest, quoted me more than $12 per part, but seems to be taking forever, and also has stopped responding to email.
I don't really want to buy a metal working lathe and become competent with it. I also don't want to send this sort of work abroad. But it seems as though Americans have lost either the willingness to build stuff, or they are suffering some pretty serious delusions about the value of their time.
UPDATE: I've gotten a bit of flak for not understanding how a free market economy works. I understand perfectly; I'm frustrated because somewhere there must be some underemployed machinists (or at least hobbyists) with a lathe, who could do this work, and who do not need to be paid $108 per hour to use equipment that they already have.
Another Gay Hate Crime
Whoops! Actually another hoax: A 17-year-old top female wrestler at a local high school faked a series of gay-bashing incidents that prompted a police investigation, authorities said.
(Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link.)
The rash of gay-bashing incidents at Tamalpais High School, dating to November, was the work of a student who claimed she was the victim of hate crimes, said police Capt. James Wickham.
The teen, who was not identified by police, admitted that she was the perpetrator of the incidents, which included defacing her own car, authorities said.
I remember a few years ago seeing the claim that the San Francisco Bay Area had a much higher rate of hate crimes against homosexuals than many other parts of the country. My first thought was, "Well, there are a lot more homosexuals in the Bay Area per capita than most other parts of the U.S." Then I thought, "Well, the Bay Area has a pretty high crime rate--it shouldn't be surprising that hate crimes are happening at a higher rate, too." But now I wonder, based on how many of anti-homosexual hate crimes turn out to be hoaxes, if the high rate of these incidents in the Bay Area is because there are a lot of homosexuals prepared to claim that they were victims of such crimes.
Spokane's Mayor
This is an embarrassing story. First, there were accusations that he molested a couple of Boy Scouts, back in the 1970s, when he was a Scoutmaster. Then, he admits, after getting caught using the city government's computers, that he spends time in gay chat rooms, and has had sex with adult men. But he also opposed antidiscrimination laws to protect homosexuals: A lifelong Republican and former state Senate majority leader, West was best known in Olympia as a fiscal conservative. He rarely led on social issues.
It makes you wonder if he supported such legislation because he knew too well the dangers of having gay men working around kids.
Still, he opposed extending protected-class status to gays during his two decades in the state Legislature, and last week threatened to veto a city ordinance giving benefits to the gay partners of city employees.
In 1986, he supported legislation barring gays and lesbians from working in schools and day-care centers. At the time, he was actively involved in the Boy Scouts.
There is another possibility, of course, and that is that the accusations of child molestation are false, and have been constructed because he was closeted and in opposition to the homosexual agenda.
This set of accusations does raise an interesting question. It is conventional wisdom in gay activist circles that:
1. Pedophiles who are interested in little boys are not homosexuals;
2. Men who have sex with other men aren't necessarily homosexuals;
3. Some homosexuals never have sex with other men--and that their homosexuality is a matter of self-identification.
It seems clear that Mayor West is a homosexual: he has admitted sex with adult men, and used the online identity "RightBi-Guy." This makes him a homosexual by both conventional definition, and "self-identification." If the accusations of child molestation turn out to be true, then we have yet another example of men who identify themselves as homosexual and yet molest little boys.
UPDATE: Discussion of Mayor West's problems over at morons.org led to this interesting (and perhaps even accurate) comment: *sigh* The other two men who led the same scout troup as West committed suicide in a cloud of pedophilia accusations in 1981, *before* West began his political career. Hmm, I wonder what made a coverup that lasted 20+ years fall apart now, right after West got the local oligarchs (the Cowles family) just what they wanted in a legal dispute over a public/private development gone really, really bad...
The House Project
I will be blogging a list of links to various vendors of prefab houses as well as some interesting house designs in the next few days.
In the meantime, I met with Idaho Power and the contractor for a site-built house today, at the property. The estimate is about $3500 to run power, plus about $500 to dig a four feet deep trench for the power line. (Idaho Power then drops a conduit into the trench for the power line.)
I learn something new every day on this project. The power lines in our area are 12.5 kV. They run a 12.5 kV line to within 150 feet of the house (ideally, 100 feet of the house), and then put a stepdown transformer there. This takes it down to house current.
The Idaho Power guy wasn't too happy (surprise, surprise) at my suggestion that we use a photovoltaic unit to power the well pump. It turns out that the cost of running the line over from the house to the well pump is trivial, but I still like the idea of using photovoltaics for this.
1. I'm not dependent on the grid to get water up to the water tank--and water is about as critical of a utility as you can have. You can live a few days without electricity, for whatever reason, but a few days without a shower or bath gets really disgusting.
2. The downside of photovoltaics is reduced power in winter time. But the greatest need for water is during summer, not winter. I expect that my well will produce at least 10 gallons per minute. (The neighbor's well, about 80 feet away, produces 35 gallons per minute.) If I can pump that water up the hill to my water tank for just three hours a day, at 10 gallons per minute, I will average 180 gallons a day into the tank. That's more than enough in winter.
3. It is a low-cost experiment to find out actual solar electricity production in my location.
The contractor is still sharpening his pencil--the driveway is still looking pretty expensive--like $20,000, but we are going to look real hard at whether we really need to put the large rock layer known as "pit run" on the entire driveway. (The gravel goes on top of the pit run.) Since much of the driveway is across very thinly soiled basalt, we may be able to get by with just a scrape and then dropping gravel.
The county's original septic tank request involved what was apparently an extraordinary amount of leach field, because of the poor soil. The contractor knows of some techniques that he believes can meet the county's sanitary requirements without quite so much leach field.
So far, we are looking at about $40,000 of improvements before we get to the house--perhaps this can be cut down to $30,000 to $35,000.
The Death of the Perfects
The driver of the pickup truck that slammed into the Perfects' Subaru has been charged with vehicular manslaughter--and surprise, surprise! He has previous DUI convictions: A Boise man was charged Monday with three counts of vehicular manslaughter after being involved in an accident Saturday that left an Eagle family of three dead.
I've long felt that a person convicted of drunk driving should be limited to motorcycles for a long, long time. A motorcycle can still do some damage in a traffic accident, but generally much less than a car or a truck--and if you drive a motorcycle while drunk with any regularity, this tends to be self-correcting.
Mark Lazinka, 45, of Boise, is being held in the Ada County Jail on a $1 million bond. Lazinka is accused of smashing his truck into a car trying to turn north on to Idaho 55 from Beacon Light Road with such force that the entire family inside was killed by the force of the impact. If found guilty, Lazinka faces up to at least 30 years in prison for the charges.
...
Deputies say there was evidence Lazinka had been drinking at the time of the accident; investigators are waiting for a blood test to return to determine whether he was drunk and if so, how intoxicated he was at the time, Raney said.
...
Lazinka was convicted of a DUI in Ada County in 2002, according to 4th District Court records.
1984: The Opera?
The audience apparently loved it; the critics hated it. Somehow, the notion of an opera of 1984 seems extraordinarily unserious. The only thing more outrageous would be if someone decided Orwell's classic needed to be redone as a musical comedy.
Where Do These "Obsessions" Come From?
This news story makes me just want to scream: The German ambassador to Britain, Thomas Matussek, said this weekend that Britain's "obsession" with Germany's Nazi past and ignorance of its transformation into a modern democracy were causing the two countries to drift apart.
Look, I agree that times have changed. Germany isn't the country that started World War II, and murdered 13 million non-combatants. A lot has changed in Germany since then. But it is very hard to forget that one of the world's most civilized nations turned into one of the most barbaric.
Germany and ethnic Germans across Europe suffered greatly from World War II. They are right to remember that suffering--but keep it at an appropriate level, please. Victimhood doesn't properly describe Germany's average experience.
Hans Frank, the German governor of occupied Poland, repented of his sins before he was executed at Nuremberg. On the witness stand, he observed that "A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased."
I Think We Are Supposed To Feel Sorry For This Guy
It isn't working: DEVEN, Mass. -- In an exclusive jailhouse interview, Bill Kamal -- the former Channel 7 chief meteorologist -- sits down and tells everything to Local 10 News.
Get used to it. It is you now. The rest of the article gives you the impression that Kamal is some sort of victim of a system gone made, but the slide show that goes with the article (sorry, I can't link directly to it) reports that Kamal drove more than a hundred miles to meet the supposed 14 year old boy, and police found two condoms in Kamal's car.
Our community was shocked when we learned he had driven to Fort Pierce to meet who he thought was a 14-year-old boy. He was caught in an Internet sex sting, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.
We saw the evidence. We heard the sickening details of the conversations on the Internet. But until now, we never heard Kamal's version of events.
...
Kamal: "I miss the little things that you couldn't possibly even imagine, like when I saw two Canadian geese in the recreation yard. And I'm thinking they don't know they're in prison -- they flew away -- and I can't fly away."
...
Kamal: "We have very few privileges here. We are subject to strip searches. Whenever a visitor comes you have to strip naked. Every time my family visits, I strip naked. They check your mouth, your ears, you open your legs, spread your cheeks, you do everything. It's just so humiliating. How can you ever get used to it? I don't want to ever get used to that because that is not me."
Kosher Certification & Trademarks
Interesting article over at Different River about how kosher certification of foods (you know, the K and the U in a circle that you find on foods to indicate that they are kosher) is all done through trademark law.
Are The Current Gun Control Laws Working?
Posse Incitatus points to the recent Operation Falcon, in which U.S. marshals arrested 10,340 fugitives from justice, but only recovered 243 weapons.
Posse Incitatus suggests that: It seems to us that if half of American households have guns but only 2 percent of criminals do, doesn't this completely, totally and utterly invalidate Tim Lambert's statement that disarmament makes self-defense possible?
My first reaction was: "Maybe the fugitives being arrested were mostly druggies." The breakdown of those arrested at Operation Falcon's site, however, suggests otherwise:
Seems to us that odds are exactly where we want them: heavily stacked in favor of law-abiding citizens.
Shall-issue laws and widespread lawful gun ownership mean that citizens are 25 times as likely to have a gun than a criminal.71% of those arrested last week had prior criminal records for crimes of violence.
Another possibility is that the fugitives had guns, but the marshals didn't grab them. Dave Kopel points out that if these fugitives were arrested in their homes (which seems likely), these arrested would have been subject to "the lawfully-allowed 'protective sweep' by police officers to check the vicinity for weapons."
...
the arrest of 162 murder suspects
the arrest of 68 kidnapping suspects
the arrest of 638 armed robbery suspects
the arrest of 38 arson suspects
the arrest of 1727 assault suspects
the arrest of 1818 burglary suspects
the arrest of 12 extortion suspects
the arrest of 4,291 major narcotics violation suspects, including Organized Crime/Drug Enforcement Task Force
the arrest of 483 weapons violation suspects
the arrest of 553 rape/sexual assault suspects
the arrest of 106 unregistered sex offenders
the arrest of 203 stolen vehicle suspects
I have long been something of a troublemaker among gun rights activists in that I argue that gun control laws do actually have an effect--just like drug prohibition has an effect. Gun control laws do not work perfectly, and in the more extreme forms, they may actually disproportionately disarm the law-abiding--but in most of the United States, gun control is mostly aimed at criminals--and this data would suggest that it works.
Solar Energy Increases 4%
Total solar energy received at the Earth's surface has increased by 4% in the last decade: Data analysis capabilities developed by ARM research were crucial in the study, which reveals the planet's surface has brightened by about 4 percent the past decade. The brightening trend is corroborated by other data, including satellite analyses that are the subject of another paper in this week's Science.
The article points out that the interactions between solar output and global warming are complex and poorly understood. No question. On the other hand, we have this news story from 2003:
Sunlight that isn't absorbed or reflected by clouds as it plunges earthward will heat the surface. Because the atmosphere includes greenhouse gasses, solar warming and greenhouse warming are related.
"The atmosphere is heated from the bottom up, and more solar energy at the surface means we might finally see the increases in temperature that we expected to see with global greenhouse warming," Long said.In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.
Hmmm. A 0.05% increase per decade is far less than the 4% increase in solar energy received at the surface--but it does start to make you wonder how much of the global warming is the work of man, and how much is the result of increased solar output. There are all sorts of non-linear relationships in both natural and manmade systems. Perhaps the increase in solar output is warming up the atmosphere enough to reduce cloud cover--enough so that it overwhelms the increase in evaporation from the oceans (which contributes to cloud cover). I don't know--and from all that I have read, most scientists who study these matters don't know, either. The ecofanatics, however, don't let uncertainty get in their way.
The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.
"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said.
UPDATE: The latest Science has an article titled, "The Holocene Asian Monsoon: Links to Solar Changes and North Atlantic Climate" that gives some insights into the complexity of the relationships--but finds a plausible connection between changes in solar output (as measured by C14 production) and monsoon variability. The article also points out interesting correlations to "the collapse of Chinese Neolithic culture" and what it calls North Atlantic "ice-rafting" events.
The Next Battleground in the Culture War
An Odessa, Texas school district is about to start offering an elective high school class, and not surprisingly, liberals are upset: The Ector County Independent School District unanimously approved an elective course in biblical literacy in April, an action underscoring the marked increase of such "Bible study" classes nationally. Constitutional scholars are concerned that these classes constitute a subtle erosion of what they see as the traditional and necessary wall of separation between church and state.
Okay, I can agree that it is inappropriate for a public school to be engaged in proselytizing on behalf of a particular religion--but all the evidence suggests that Professor Newman has his claws extended prematurely:
More than 300 school districts in 35 states use course material offered by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, said its president, Elizabeth Ridenour.
...
Odessa school officials say they are walking a narrow path to ensure the proposed course meets educational and constitutional requirements.
"This will be an academic elective on biblical literacy, not a devotional," said Odessa Superintendent Wendell Sollis. "We have no intention of proselytizing. . . . You really have to educate people about what you can and can't do."
But assurances that the course will be voluntary and nondevotional have done little to allay the fears of nonChristians and religious moderates that the class may evolve into the covert preaching of God's word.
"There's an awful lot of people in this town convinced that they're going to get Jesus taught in the classroom, a tool for evangelism. And that concerns people like me," said David Newman, an English professor at Odessa College who opposes the new Bible course. He is Jewish.
"If they want to teach the biblical influences on culture and art, why not make it a traditional humanities course that examines all the influences on Western culture?" he asked. "If I see this thing becoming more of an advocacy course, I can assure you there will certainly be legal action taken."Roughly 80 percent of the schools using the national council's Bible course are small or rural districts, according to Ridenour, the group's president.
Now, liberals aren't adverse to requiring students at public universities to learn about other religions--such as happened with the University of North Carolina:
"It's not just gone into the Bible Belt states. It's gone into Alaska, Pennsylvania, California," Ridenour said. "We've already had over 170,000 students take the course nationwide. It's never been legally challenged."
Ridenour stressed that the curriculum is designed to help students understand the Bible in the context of its influence on culture and the arts. She emphasized it is not a course in Bible devotion.
"You wouldn't learn this in Sunday school class," she said. "How in the world could you understand what's going on in the Middle East today without introducing the Bible and understanding the background? How can they understand Michelangelo's Moses or Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper without knowing about the figures that inspired those works of art?"UNC officials say they have not only the prerogative but the responsibility to open students' eyes to the Muslim religion and culture.
But certainly, for liberals, there is something suspicious or dangerous about offering an elective class to learn about a book that underlies Western culture. Interestingly enough, the ACLU didn't have a problem with the University of North Carolina's mandatory reading assignment. I will be curious to know what bizarre rationalization the ACLU comes up with for suing the Odessa school district, as I am absolutely sure that they will.
"She's A Witch... She Turned Me Into a Newt! ... I Got Better"
Okay, it was funny in Monthy Python and the Holy Grail. It isn't funny when people take accusations of witchcraft seriously--and no, not in some backwoods fundamentalist part of America: An eight-year-old girl was tortured and was about to be killed after being accused of being a witch, the Old Bailey heard today.
The names of the accused (Sita Kisanga, Sebastian Pinto, Kiwonde Kiese) suggest that some people didn't leave the old country ways behind them when they immigrated to Britain.
The child had been placed in a laundry bag and was about to be thrown into a river to drown when one of her tormentors managed to stop the others, said Patricia May, prosecuting.
Her months of ill-treatment had started when another child told his mother that the girl had been using witchcraft against the family.
Child cruelty charges against three women and a man allege that that chilli peppers were rubbed into the girl's eyes, she was beaten with a belt, slapped, cut with a knife and starved.
That Horrible Traffic Accident
I've updated it with later news accounts. Alcohol was involved. The dead family did nothing wrong. The irony is their name: the Perfects.
UPDATE: The story about the Perfects is even a bit more dramatic and powerful: EAGLE — Newlyweds Tony and Stephanie Perfect were just starting their lives together with their newborn daughter when they died in a vehicle crash Saturday evening.
It is tempting, when you are 20, or 30, or even 40, to assume that you have decades left to make the big decisions. The Emperor Constantine waited until he was near death to be baptized--at least partly because he knew that there things that he did that would be in conflict with Christianity. Sometimes, you don't get that kind of warning. In the twinkling of an eye, everything can change.
Family members said they are embracing their belief in a "faithful" God to help them deal with the loss of Stephanie, Tony and 5-week-old Zoe.
The Perfects, both 23, were headed to a friend's cabin in Cascade when a Chevy pickup truck driven by Mark Lazinka, 45, of Boise slammed into their Subaru near the corner of Beacon Light Road and Idaho 55.
...
Landlord Steve Rudd rented a home in unincorporated Ada County near Eagle to the couple in September. He was caring for their dog while they went out of town for the weekend, he said.
"They were just two young people in love with each other and the baby," Rudd said. "He was working to provide for the family. She was home with the baby. It was the kind of thing you liked to see."
Stephanie grew up in Idaho, Montana and Oregon, Wood said. She was home-schooled in Idaho and later graduated from The Master's College in Santa Clarita, Calif., with a degree in English, Wood said.
...
The Perfects hadn't settled on a specific direction for their life together, Wood said. They were active in their church, Broadway Avenue Baptist in Boise, and they wanted more children. The couple had an interest in missionary work, perhaps through helping orphaned children around the world, he said.
"They were young and they were struggling, but they had a core," Wood said. "They were trying to be a normal family and make a difference in the world. They were trying to do something that would make a mark."
Stephanie's brother, Micah Wood, said he also is relying on his faith to help him deal with the deaths.
"I know that someday I will see them again," Micah Wood said. "They were first and foremost Christians, trying to serve God."
Remember Those "Question Authority" Bumper Stickers?
I guess the left really didn't mean it: Nearly 30 years of teaching evolution in Kansas has taught Brad Williamson to expect resistance, but even this veteran of the trenches now has his work cut out for him when students raise their hands.
Hmmmm. Why did the left think this was a good idea in the 1960s, but isn't happy with it now?
That's because critics of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection are equipping families with books, DVDs, and a list of "10 questions to ask your biology teacher."
The intent is to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of students as to the veracity of Darwin's theory of evolution.
The result is a climate that makes biology class tougher to teach. Some teachers say class time is now wasted on questions that are not science-based. Others say the increasingly charged atmosphere has simply forced them to work harder to find ways to skirt controversy.
There are polite and appropriate ways to challenge orthodoxy in a classroom--my son told me about a biology class he had last year where the student was definitely not doing so--but the tone of the article suggests that it is precisely because the "strategic questioning" is being done so well that it has put the priests^H^H^H^H^H^Hbiology teachers in a difficult position.
Ghosts
James Lileks explains why he doesn't believe in ghosts: This is why I don’t believe in ghosts: if they existed, they wouldn’t float down the hallway weeping or make the walls drip with blood – they’d wake you up, whisper “come here” and bore you with a story about how little Jimmy used to sit in front of the window, here, and wait for the mailman when he sent away his boxtops for something. That’s the stuff ghosts would want you to know about.
The paranormal sorts (I mean, believers in the paranormal, of course) usually claim that ghosts are the spirits of the dead who suffered some sort of great trauma, and their spirits are unable to rest. Yet ghost stories are just about always from places where the traumatic deaths are so far removed in time that they are romantic: the Tower of London; . If traumatic deaths were the cause of ghosts, paranormal investigators would be awash in examples at places such as Auschwitz, Verdun, and the Lubyanka prison--places where hundreds of thousands of people died traumatically.
Need a Suggestion For a Film About Totalitarianism
My wife assigned Orwell's Animal Farm to her class, and she had planned to show them the 1984 version of 1984 Monday evening. (The theme of this part of the class is the rise of totalitarianism.) After watching the movie again this evening, she is having some misgivings, partly because unless you have read 1984, the movie won't make quite as much sense.
So, I'm looking for suggestions for a movie that conveys the horror of the totalitarian state that is:
1. Fairly entertaining (perhaps even optimistic, in a way that 1984 is not).
2. Likely to be available at Blockbuster or other big chain video store.
3. PG-13 or less. Some of the students might have some problems with an R-rated film.
We Saw The Aftermath Of This Accident
We were headed north on Idaho State Highway 55 to show our new property to some friends. Police cars kept passing us, with lights and sirens. At one intersection, they had closed the entire highway. We took a detour onto Beacon Light Road--and then we saw one of the more disturbing traffic accidents. There was a Subaru Outback that had been torn open. There was a damaged pickup truck, flipped. There were scattered fragments over hundreds of feet of road. It looked bad.
One of our friends asked how the truck ended up upside down. I guessed that it was the result of one car making a turn, and getting hit by an oncoming car. "Probably alcohol, or testosterone poisoning." It appears from the article below that it was at least the latter--and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former: EAGLE — A mother, father and infant were killed in a high-speed crash Saturday evening at the intersection of Beacon Light Road and Idaho 55.
All the dead people in the Subaru were wearing seatbelts--and it wasn't enough to save their lives.
Witnesses told authorities that two vehicles seemed to be racing when one, a pickup truck, slammed into a green Subaru Outback carrying what investigators believe was a family of three, according to Eagle Sheriff's Deputy Luis Gutierrez.
The car reportedly racing the truck didn't stop when the crash occurred, instead continuing south on Idaho 55, Gutierrez said. Investigators are working with witnesses to get a description of the vehicle.
...
The Outback was turning north from Beacon Light onto Idaho 55 when it was struck by a southbound red Chevy Sierra about 7:30 p.m., Gutierrez said. The two cars skidded more than 100 yards south of the intersection after the crash, indicating the pickup was traveling at a high rate of speed, Gutierrez said.
The pickup truck flipped and came to rest upside-down on the highway. The Subaru's male driver was ejected.
These are the sort of sobering events that every young person just starting to drive should see, and read about. Cars are dangerous. They are a lot like guns: very useful, very powerful, and very dangerous. They need to be treated with enormous respect, and wielded with great humility.
UPDATE: Yes, alcohol was involved: Road rage, alcohol and reckless driving led to the death of a young couple and their 5-week-old daughter Saturday evening in Eagle, Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney said Sunday.
Tony and Stephanie Perfect, both 23, and their infant daughter, Zoe, died in the horrific crash, said Ada County Coroner Erwin Sonnenberg. ...
Cam Hall, a Boise State University football player, was driving a Ford Mustang southbound on Idaho 55. Hall, 22, was late for work after attending a football game in Horseshoe Bend. Near the border of Boise and Ada counties, Hall tried to pass a Chevy pickup truck driven by Mark Lazinka of Boise.
Lazinka wouldn't allow Hall to pass. Raney said at that point, the two drivers began to drive at speeds up to 100 mph as they continued southbound on Idaho 55.
When the two vehicles reached Beacon Light Road, Hall's vehicle was in front. The Perfect family's Subaru pulled out from Beacon Light and turned north onto Idaho 55. Hall's vehicle swerved and missed the Subaru, but Lazinka's pickup crashed into the Subaru, Raney said. The pickup truck flipped and came to rest upside down on the highway.
...
Stephanie and Tony Perfect were wearing seat belts, and the baby was secured in a carrier.
But the force of the collision was so great that they had no chance of survival, Raney said. Tony Perfect was ejected from the vehicle.
"The impact was so violent, it actually ripped the seat belts out of the vehicle," Raney said. "It ripped the baby seat out of its base."
...
Raney said the men in the pickup truck apparently had been drinking. Hall had not been.
