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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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Saturday, July 23, 2005
Wonders of the Internet I brought my laptop along, and I am very glad that I did. One of the customers for the ScopeRoller 11 Deluxe emailed that he was having problems with one of the casters; the locking mechanism was not reliably unlocking. I had some problems with one of these caster assemblies, but I thought that I had worked through it--some sort of metal burr that hadn't worked its way completely as delivered to me. I guess not. Anyway, along with being able to respond to him, I was also able to send detailed instructions to my son to find a replacement part, forward the customer's address, and provide detailed instructions to my son to test the replacement part, packaging, how to ship it, instead of having to wait until I return on Wednesday. The greater value of the Internet was that one of my suppliers who machines a particular part for me found that he didn't have enough stock to make all the parts that I need for orders that have either arrived, or are on the way. (Such a problem! I may have to start advertising.) I was able to submit an order to a raw materials vendor in Missouri; pay for it with PayPal; arrange direct shipment to my machinist; all without leaving my motel room. Health Notes: Skin Cancer I am here in Southern California assisting my father-in-law and his wife preparing to move. His struggles with skin cancer, and my youngest sister's problem with a misdiagnosed skin cancer, are pretty sobering. My father-in-law's skin cancer was apparently not properly recognized and treated at first, and has required excavation of a very large part of his leg. Worse, it has spread into his lymph system. He probably has months to perhaps a couple of years to live. This was a very athletic mature man when my wife and I married 26 years ago, and he remained active as a golfer and tennis player until quite recently. (Being out in the sun so much, skin cancer on his leg is no surprise.) The loss of so much muscle tissue, as well as the consequences of chemotherapy, has had a predictable effect. My youngest sister had a growth on her arm that her doctor did not regard very seriously--even when she continued to point out that it was growing. After several years, a dermatologist identified it as melanoma--but by then, it had grown to a size where she now has a very large scar on her arm. She was a sun-worshipper in her youth. When we were growing up in Santa Monica, three blocks from the ocean, we would walk down to the beach every day of the summer. She soaked in the sun, trying for that stylish brown tan that typified the era. Anyway, I have never been focused on getting a tan. Partly because I was aware of the hazards, I have generally done my best to stay pasty white (or as pasty white as my odd mixture of WASP, Italian, and apparently German Jewish ancestry allowed). My wife noticed an odd little bump on my back recently, so with all these examples, I went to my family practice doctor. He didn't think that there was anything to worry about, but he referred me to a dermatologist for a second opinion, and measured it so that we can see if it is growing. Stay out of the sun, or at least keep properly sun protection. HAve someone do a thorough examination of your skin periodically to look for things that have changed. This is one of the advantages of being married. If you have something that is growing, and your doctor refuses to consider he possibility of skin cancer--get a second opinion, ideally from a dermatologist. UPDATE: A friend pointed me to an interesting article about sunscreens. According to this Washington Post article, sunscreens sold in the U.S. only block the short-frequency UVB rays, while those sold in a lot of other countries block the long-frequency UVA rays--which are suspected of also being a serious cancer hazard. Why is the U.S. lagging behind? In the United States regulatory scheme, sunscreen ingredients are regarded as drugs and are thus subject to intense scrutiny. Drugs' active ingredients have to pass FDA muster both in terms of their long-term safety (which manufacturers have to demonstrate through research) and their efficacy: You have to prove that these things really do what you say they do. This degree of regulation is both a blessing and a curse. It's meant to ensure that when you buy a bottle of sunscreen, it'll be safe and effective. But the process of securing the FDA's blessing can be long and arduous, and it can keep a promising product off the shelves for years.You can, however, buy sunscreens that provide UVB protection as well, over the Internet. It sounds like it might be a very good idea if you spend much time in the sun. Travel Notes I am on the road, staying at the Laguna Hills Lodge in Orange County, California. This is a very nice place without being luxurious. It compares very favorably with some Hiltons and Sheratons in which I have stayed over the years. In light of the blog entry of several days ago about nail clippers being taken away from armed Georgia National Guardsmen, there were a couple of amusing moments at Boise's airport. As we were waiting for our plane, there was an announcement over the PA system: "Would the person who left the bag with the nail clippers, cell phone, and scissors please return to the security area?" I saw a kid waving around a plastic sword about three feet long; I don't know if he was going to fly that day, but it might have been amusing to see what happened when they saw that coming. There's a car rental ad that suggests that if they didn't care, they would be like the other car rental agencies. You see this incredible line of people waiting to pick up their cars, and my reaction has always been that it was a mildly amusing ad, but an example of hyperbole. Nope! The Dollar Rent-A-Car at Los Angeles International was not so different. We literally stood in line for an hour to rent a car--and we had a reservation. They had about six people processing us, but they had an incredible number of people trying to rent cars. Amazing. I am so glad that I don't live in this overcrowded place anymore. We heard more horn honking between the airport terminal and the rental car agency than we have heard in the entire 3 1/2 years we have lived in Boise. Friday, July 22, 2005
Unfortunate Behavior I'm not suggesting that this report shows that Americans are better than Britons about this sort of thing--but I am reminding everyone that the small number of anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S. after 9/11 suggests that we certainly aren't any worse of a nation. Of course, none of the 9/11 terrorists had homes and families here to attack: Police have today arrested three people after an attempted arson attack at the home of suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay. The Importance of Semicolons A vertical milling machine on eBay, described thusly: VERTICAL MILLING MACHINE WITH MITUTOYO DRO AND DRO ON THE QUILL. MACHINE COMES WITH R-8 COLLETS AND A VISE. ORIGINAL OWNER IN GOOD SHAPE.So the machine hasn't eviscerated the original owner? How comforting! Planting Forgeries in National Archives Eric Muller points to a news story about forged documents being planted in the British archives, and opines that, "Now, that's devious." This is all well and good, except for the title to his posting: Well I'll Be! Look At This Document! So There Really Were Legions of Japanese American Spies!Michelle Malkin's book in defense of the Japanese internment argued (and she isn't the first to make this argument) that there was substantial Japanese espionage activity among Japanese-Americans, and the internment was an understandable if excessive reaction. Muller has set himself up as principal advocate against Malkin's book. Short of finding a Japanese government document that says, "We have made repeated efforts, but we have been unable to recruit spies among Japanese-Americans," the most that Muller and others could argue was that there is no evidence to support Malkin's claim. Malkin actually has produced evidence to support her claim, which is consistent with actions of some Japanese residents in China and the Philipines; I'm not impressed with Muller's counterarguments. Muller's title for this implies that if evidence comes out of the National Archives that corroborates Malkin's claim, that he would assume that the documents were planted forgeries. "Don't bother me with evidence; I've made up my mind, and anything that contradicts my PC-driven belief must be forged." Muller reminds me of some Creationists with whom I have argued; anything that contradicts his worldview must have been planted by the Devil (or Michelle Malkin). The Whispering Campaign: I Confess My 1970s Bad Clothing Taste The left is again demonstrating how open-minded they are by running a whispering campaign suggesting that Judge Roberts is actually secretly gay! (It was bad enough when they started making that suggestion about his son--and then they discovered he was only four.) Reasoned Audacity has a number of examples of left-wing bloggers either explicitly raising the question, or implying it: Just a caution for my male readers: if there are any extant photos of you from the '70's in plaid pants, better get rid of them now. And it's not just the evidence of questionable fashion sense. Apparently now that's the goods on being gay.For those of you whose knowledge of the 1970s is from watching That 70s Show (which I confess that I have never seen), let me assure you that it was nadir of American taste in men's clothing. I can now come out of the closet (as it were), and tell you about some of the stuff that I wore back then. I had some red checked pants, and a blue checked shirt of the same pattern. When I wore them both at the same time, I kidded people that it was my optical illusion outfit. I can remember walking into the office one morning at Jet Propulsion Labs wearing this combination, and Kathy Kubler, one of the other engineers, who had just been putting down her coffee cup, immediately grabbed it for another dose, since she seemed a bit uncertain whether she was actually awake, or suffering some sort of nightmare. I don't still have this crime against good taste. When we married, my wife went through my closet and insisted that I dispose of this unique pairing, along with my disco shirts and double-knits, and fortunately, there is no photographic evidence surviving. More seriously: that leftists are trying to start such a whispering campaign about Judge Roberts almost certainly establishes that he is not a closeted homosexual, or the left wouldn't be trying this character assassination scheme. Historically, these dirty tricks schemes really haven't worked that well for the party of tolerance and openmindedness. Making a big deal about Dick Cheney's daughter being gay turned out to be completely useless. I can remember a few days before the 1980 election, the CBS Evening News ran a minute or more piece showing Ron Reagan Jr. performing in a ballet. As a news story, it was completely absurd. As an attempt to suggest, "Well, this guy Reagan has a son who is probably one of them" didn't throw the election to Carter. Now Bush Is Too Focused on Exercise? This opinion piece by Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times really captures the pettiness of the left: A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise. When asked by the president of the United States how often he exercised, Wilkinson impressively responded that he runs 3 1/2 miles a day. Bush urged him to adopt more cross-training. "He warned me of impending doom," Wilkinson told the New York Times.What I don't think Chait understands is that if you are under a lot of stress (and being President of the United States is a somewhat stressful job), your need for exercise increases. I work out between 45 and 60 minutes a day, five days a week. (I'm skipping today because I have to leave early to fly to Southern California at 6:30 PM.) I think that Bush's focus on exercise is a darn good idea--unless, of course, you want a heart attack to make Dick Cheney the President of the United States. British Understatement Don't you just love how understated Britons can be? BBC correspondent Danny Shaw said there were unconfirmed reports police had said the man shot at Stockwell was the Oval bomb suspect.Yeah, that describes it: "nervous." Oh, and count on the professional whiners to second-guess the shooting: he Muslim Council of Britain said Muslims were concerned about a possible "shoot to kill" policy.To my surprise, this BBC account actually gives an eyewitness account that I would say satisfies my due process requirement: Another passenger on the train, Anthony Larkin, told BBC News the man had been wearing a "bomb belt with wires coming out".Hey, maybe this guy had some perfectly good reason to be wearing something on his person with wires sticking out the day after suicide bombing attempts. The House Project: Fun With Propane We are going to be using propane for the cooktop, for the water heater, and for the furnace. It will also be the fuel for the emergency generator. Thursday I spent making calls and asking questions. The obvious way to do this is an underground storage tank, both because aboveground tanks are unsightly, and because I really don't like the idea of a brushfire lighting up a thousand gallon tank of propane. But should we lease or buy the tank? The builder pointed out that if you lease, then you are tied to the propane vendor. If you buy, you can switch to a different vendor. It turns out that in this area, there are only two real vendors to speak of: Suburban Propane and Amerigas. Amerigas won't lease underground storage tanks, and their purchase price for a 1000 gallon underground tank was $2942.40. Suburban Propane does lease the underground tank for $160 per year. Purchase price is about $2546. In both cases, if you buy the tank, you now have the cost of excavation and dropping it in. If you lease, they install it and run the line to the house. Let's see: at $2546 to buy or $160 per year, that's more than 15 years of leasing to buy the tank. Whatever advantage there might be to having multiple possible vendors of the gas, it is hard to see putting out that kind of capital on a tank--and then being responsible for maintenance of it. How much propane will I use? Suburban thought it would be about 1400 gallons per year; Amerigas indicated that most customers use 500 to 1000 gallons a year. At about $1.79 a gallon, this would roughly equivalent to what we pay for natural gas here in Boise--and with the advantage that we are pretty much independent of the world for months on end. If al-Qaeda managed to disrupt our economy, and we were careful in our use of propane, we could live for many months without getting our tank refilled. Obviously, if we lost electric power, we would run through the gas rather more quickly. Previous house entry. Labels: house project Random Searches In the New York City Subways This is both unconstitutional, and completely necessary: New York City will begin making random checks of bags and backpacks at subway stations, commuter railways and on buses, officials announced today in the wake of a second wave of bombings on the London transit system. The checks will begin on Friday morning.It is clearly unconstitutional, at least under any existing understanding of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches. It is also clearly necessary, because of the nature of the attacks in London. I can't imagine any other way to accomplish the legitimate and necessary goal of preventing a terrorist attack, except perhaps by prohibiting the carrying of bags, purses, and backpacks into the subways. I've written before about why the ACLU, if it really cares about preserving our civil liberties, should be on the side of a quick and decisive victory in the War on Terror. If we are fighting al-Qaeda for the next twenty years, we are going to either have to substantially destroy our traditional freedoms by amending the Constitution, or judges will have to use the "living Constitution" (really, the mutating Constitution) excuses to excuse the loss of liberties to deal with the crisis. The net effect, either way, will be very destructive. This, of course, is exactly what al-Qaeda wants--the destruction of our freedoms, so that we become like most Arab countries. UPDATE: Michael Williams describes the "I do not consent to be searched" T-shirts that civil libertarian zealots are printing up in New York as "terrorist uniforms." Well, no. These are more like terrorist assistants. All the time that the police will spend arguing with these clueless sorts about whether or not they can enter the subway stations will make it more difficult to find the people carrying bombs in backpacks. If you want to argue the legal points in a court of law, that at least won't be interfering with what is a legitimate effort to keep New Yorkers from being a red paint spatter. Really Cool Artifacts From Pompeii BBC is reporting: A set of ancient silverware has been dug up from Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcano 2,000 years ago.The pictures in the article are really beautiful. Thursday, July 21, 2005
The House Project: Walls Up! The builder said that the exterior wall framing would be done today. Well, pretty much. The big square is the family room sliding glass door; the rectangle is the kitchen door:  Click to enlarge Here's the east end of the house, with bedroom rooms near the center, the front door and living room on the right:  Click to enlarge Here's my wife looking through the kitchen window. At least if you are standing at the sink, rinsing dishes, you have a great view!  Click to enlarge More detail of the family room. Big windows on either side of the sliding glass door. That's the view we want to look at while talking to friends!  Click to enlarge Here's a view from bedroom two (which I will probably use as an office, and from which I will probably be blogging):  Click to enlarge And another view, facing south:  Click to enlarge Here's the back of the house:  Click to enlarge Here's the front of the house:  Click to enlarge I took the water samples to Alchem Labs in Boise. The coliform bacteria test came back clean; the water is at least not biologically hazardous. We are still waiting on tests for lead, iron, arsenic, and hardness. To my surprise, these take a couple of weeks, I suspect because they send them out somewhere. Previous house entry. Labels: house project Did Iraq Cause The London Bombings? Australian Prime Minister John Howard points out that several of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks precede the invasion of Iraq. The Bali bombing, for example, was in retaliation for Australia's role in liberating East Timor. An acquaintance in Europe (an American citizen of British birth) is again banging the drum about how the Iraq war caused these bombings. In a sense, probably true--but al-Qaeda has been running around trying to get its way by brutality and murder for a lot longer than that. As I wrote to him: Throughout the world, Islamofascists have been engaging in acts of extraordinary brutality, such as that school in Beslan, murdering Muslim diplomats, cutting the heads off living people. Mars The Historic Icebox One of the reasons why so much of the Martian exploration activity is focused on water and looking for evidence of life is the belief that Mars at one time had large quantities of liquid water--generally considered a requirement for the evolution of life. Looking only at solar history, this would seem an unlikely possibility. In general, our sun is getting warmer (measured over a period of billions of years). It would be unlikely that Mars a billion years back was warm enough for liquid water. Looking at the surface features, however, you can see why areologists (Martian geologists) would be inclined to think that the place must have had lots of liquid water. The question is, for how long? This BBC report suggests that the periods of liquid water might have been infrequent: Although the current average temperature at the Martian equator is about minus 55 Celsius, many scientists believe that the Red Planet was once warm enough for water to have existed on its surface, and for life to possibly have evolved.If correct, this suggests to me that the water erosion periods of Mars might be catastrophic events--perhaps asteroidal collisions that melted a lot of frozen water. Many years ago, I had an acquaintance who was working on his MS in Planetary Geology. The conferences he was attending about Mars were causing considerable discomfort to a lot of his colleagues, because the evidence was arguing that catastrophism was a more appropriate paradigm for understanding Martian structures than uniformitarianism. The apparently contradictory evidence of flowing water--and yet few periods of above freezing temperatures--seems to fit catastrophism. This evidence would also suggest that we could waste a lot of money looking for evidence of life on Mars and never find it. If there was only above freezing temperatures for a million years out of 3.5 billion, what would the chances be of life evolving? Border Patrol Auxillary? It appears that even if President Bush isn't willing to do something about the border problem, at least some of the bureaucrats are getting in touch with reality--at least a little: The top U.S. border enforcement official, in what would be a significant change in approach, said yesterday that he is exploring the idea of having civilian volunteers work with the Border Patrol.The rest of the article is very interesting. The Border Patrol union is concerned about being too closely allied with these "controversial" groups, and says something that makes perfect sense: "They wouldn't need to do this if they came up with a national strategy that makes sense," Bauder said. "The Border Patrol will never be successful if all they do is focus on the border.Well, duh! But that would require offending employers of cheap labor by enforcing the existing laws about hiring illegals. Jim Gilchrist, who organized the Minuteman Project, isn't thrilled about the auxillary idea, either. He says the real solution is to be serious about enforcement, with full-time law enforcement. What is really disappointing is the extent of the problem. This news story from Washington State really shows the scale of the people against whom we are working: SEATTLE - Border and DEA agents, watched construction of an underground tunnel for months, before making arrests yesterday.Maybe this tunnel was built to smuggle drugs. Maybe it was to smuggle illegals who would be obviously "not Canadian" (a euphemism for non-Anglos). Maybe it was to smuggle al-Qaeda operatives. I don't know. But someone spent a lot of time and money on this. Whatever the goal, this is a serious problem. If only the Border Patrol could work this aggressively to shut down smuggling above ground. UPDATE: Homeland Security has now nixed the idea of using auxillaries. Bombs That Didn't Explode It appears that all four bombs failed to explode--or more precisely, that the blasting cap or other detonator failed to set off the primary explosive charge. I am going to explain this because my wife didn't understand it, so I suspect others are also confused. Most of the really interesting explosives--the ones that have very high velocity wavefronts, and can therefore shred not only people but also break concrete and cut steel--are fairly stable. You can't just light a stick of dynamite or a brick of TNT, and make it explode. Typically you need a detonator to set off a high explosive. A detonator may be fired electrically, by heat, or by impact. It would appear that the detonators fired, in some reports, ripping apart backpacks being carried by the terrorists--but failed to set off the main explosive charge. The result was simply a loud pop, considerable smoke and fear, but no big blast. That this happened in all four bombs suggests that this batch of explosive was defective in some way. From my reading into the industrial methods for manufacturing TNT, I suspect that the more interesting high explosives aren't all that easy to make in the bathtub. Another possibility is that the same batch that worked on 7/7 degraded in the intervening two weeks. Remember that just about all high explosives are nitrates, and are made by combining various materials with nitric acid. (TNT, for example, involves a rather specific temperature/pressure/time sequence of nitric acid combined with tolulene, an organic commonly used by "huffers" to turn their brains into succotash.) I suspect that a failure to properly remove excess nitric acid or some impurity from a homebrewed explosive might render it less prone to explode. Just to clarify: I have never made high explosives at home. The closest that I have ever come to this was an attempt at making nitrocellulose (a form of gun cotton) with my brother when I was in junior high. In theory, it should have gone up in a flash of fire and smoke. It would not even light! We did successfully distill ethyl alcohol by combining sugar and yeast for a few days, then heated it on the stove, ran it through a condenser, and produced a very small quantity of reasonably pure alcohol in the Erlenmeyer flask at the bottom of the condenser. (No, we didn't drink it.) Can you tell that I was a chemistry major when I first went off to college? UPDATE: The explosive in question seems to be one of the unusual type that doesn't involve nitrates. This abstract from the Journal of Forensic Sciences describes it as: An unusual primary explosive, triacetonetriperoxide (TATP), was found along with instructions for its manufacture from commonly available ingredients.This discussion of the use of it by Richard Reid describes it as extremely sensitive--and that Reid's bomb had it mixed with PETN, a more conventional high explosive. This is not surprising. I remember in organic chemistry class at UCLA our professor explaining that organic ethers (R-O-R, where R is any hydrocarbon) over time can oxidize to organic peroxides (R-O-O-R), "which are extremely explosive." From the back of the lecture hall, "Alright!" The professor explained that if you see old bottles of ether in a chemistry lab, and you see crystals in the bottle, do not pick it up. Immediately call the bomb squad, and evacuate the building. Part of the advantage of TATP for terrorist actions is that because it contains no nitrates, bomb sniffing dogs can't find it. I think that most of the neutron activation scanning technologies also rely on the ability to detect nitrogen--and TATP would get right past that. The only other non-nitrate based explosives of which I am aware are nitrogen triiodide (and xenon trioxide. Nitrogen triiodide isn't a high explosive), so probably not particularly worrisome. Xenon trioxide isn't something that I would worry about either. Xenon gas is a bit scarce and expensive, and the difficulties in manufacturing the trioxide are substantial. Xenon, until the 1960s, was believed to be completely incapable of making chemical bonds. I Just Locked My New House Mortgage I wish I had done it yesterday: July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Treasury notes dropped after China let its currency strengthen, boosting speculation the country will reduce purchases of U.S. government debt. The yield on the benchmark 10-year note reached the highest since May.Falling Treasury prices means rising yields--and rising mortgage prices. I've seen a run up at my credit union from 4.125 to 4.375 in just the last week. This will be good news for people with money to invest, and probably not such good news for people in interest-rate sensitive industries. A rising yuan, however, which is what this news is connected to, would probably solve some problems for U.S. manufacturers. UPDATE: Daniel Drezner points to this Chinese central bank press release, indicating that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar, and indicating an initial revaluation of about 2%. Drezner doesn't think such a small revaluation will make much of a difference on the trade deficit, but that another revaluation will follow. UPDATE 2: At the end of the day, the 30 year Treasury bond yield is 4.499%. A year ago, it was above 5%. I would not be surprised to see that yield in the 5.5-6% range in another year. Wednesday, July 20, 2005
The U.S. Military... is again sticking its nose into the internal affairs of a Muslim country. I'm sure that the left will be screaming and hollering about it: 7/19/2005 - KIGALI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, Rwanda (AFPN) -- A C-17 Globemaster III departed here July 18 carrying 95 Rwandan troops deploying to help ease the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.I found the link to this press release over at Mudville Gazette who reports that he can't find coverage of this in the U.S. news media. What a surprise. Hereditary Titles One of the traditional rationalizations for hereditary titles was that the traits that made for a great ancestor made for great descendants. Americans have long regarded that claim with some skepticism, as Jefferson's famous last letter observes: The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.While reading about this Californian who is next in line to be the Earl of Essex, I found this rather curious coincidence: The 10th Earl of Essex, who died on June 5 aged 85, was a Lancashire grocer so bemused by his success in confirming his claim to the earldom in 1981 after years of research that he was initially uncertain as to whether he would take his seat.And then there's the occupation of the California heir apparent to the title: SACRAMENTO - Retired grocery clerk Bill Capell woke up to a phone call from a British reporter last month informing him that a cousin had died. He told his wife to go back to bed, gave the reporter a comment and was snoozing minutes later.Hey, I know that there are lot of people who work in grocery stores--but perhaps there is something to this claim about hereditary merit. Finally, Some Action on Pornospammers Spam infuriates me. I am using an email agent with a reasonably good spam filtering algorithm, but like any Bayesian filtering, it isn't perfect. Some spam still sneaks through (especially when you get hundreds of pieces a day), and because some non-spam gets misinterpreted, I have to go through my Junk folder periodically and make sure that I am not missing any important email. All of this spam is a waste of my time. Much of it carries viruses in attachments. Some of the pornospam is really, really vile. I don't mean that there are pictures of naked women in it. I mean that there are pictures involving animals. The text on some of it is either implicitly or explicitly promoting child pornography--and when I receive this sort of stuff, I inform the FBI's task force. Yeah, a lot of these emails offering child pornography are probably fraud--but it is still repulsive. Repellent; wasting bandwidth; wasting mailbox capacity; requiring me to run email clients just to filter our garbage; requiring me to run antivirus software (which slows the process down) to filter out the emails with virus attached. It is all an enormous waste of resources. I am therefore pleased to see this news item: WASHINGTON — Federal regulators accused seven companies Wednesday of hiring others to send illegal e-mails with pornographic messages to tempt consumers to visit adult Internet sites.I presume that the ACLU will defend the pornospammers. Ann Coulter Isn't Happy With Bush's Supreme Court Nominee She points out that he smells suspiciously like a stealth candidate: [H]e is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada.On the question of stealthiness, Coulter observes: Finally, lets ponder the fact that Roberts has gone through 50 years on this planet without ever saying anything controversial. That’s just unnatural.Look at this way: when Bush the Elder nominated David Souter, he was picked specifically because Republicans had learned that having a long history of engaging in public intellectual exhibitionism (that is to say, actually writing serious works about the theory of the Constitution) was a sure way to prevent confirmation by the Democrats. And where was Roberts back when Judge Bork was being Borked for thinking out loud? At a point where it was still within his power to go into deep cover. So perhaps there's hope that Roberts will turn out to be a conservative, or even better an originalist. Since I consider Bush a tremendously clever politician, I would like to think this is the case. I must confess, Justice Souter has left a foul taste in my mouth, and it makes me suspicious of Roberts. Labels: abortion Ward Churchill's Bizarre Explanation of the Bellesiles Scandal There's an interview with him in one of the hard left publications: Consider the case of Michael Bellesiles, the young historian at Emory who wrote Arming America, a study devoted to debunking many of the more cherished myths of the country's thriving gun culture (for which he won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2000).This is wrong and deceptive in more ways than I can count. Yes, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize--and it was then revoked--for the first time in the Bancroft Prize's history. The public nature of the fraud became so massive that even Columbia University couldn't ignore it anymore. It wasn't other academics who went after Bellesiles, but the National Rifle Association, which commenced a campaign alleging "academic fraud" even before the book was published (there were nearly 250 national articles published on the "Bellesiles Hoax" in less than two years).Nearly 250 articles? Perhaps Churchill is counting when newspapers around the country reprinted a story that originally appeared somewhere else. The notion that the NRA "orchestrated" this is laughable. It was largely my doing, James Lindgren, and a few journalists who were concerned about this fraud. There were questions about Bellesiles's numbers before the book came out because many of the same claims appeared in a 1996 Journal of American History paper by Bellesiles--but while some historians, such as myself, thought he was in error about this, and perhaps that he was blinded by his ideological zeal, I don't know that anyone thought that Bellesiles was intentionally lying until his book came out. I certainly didn't think Bellesiles was making things up at first, and I don't know anyone who did. Ultimately, the "fraud" claim hinged on a single footnote in which Bellesiles gave the wrong archival location for certain documents he cited to demonstrate that gun ownership in early America was much less common than those of the NRA persuasion-which, by the way, includes me-would have it. The documents actually existed, and they said pretty much what Bellesiles said they said.Bellesiles's problem was not just "wrong archival location"--it was that much of the data that he claimed to have extracted from various probate inventories couldn't be found in any archive. Bellesiles's answers about which archives he visited kept changing. James Lindgren has demonstrated that Bellesiles's numbers (from combining published sources and his supposed work in archives) were mathematically impossible. Several historians went back and checked some of the archives where the probate data that Bellesiles claimed to have used did exist, and found that Bellesiles's numbers were often far at variance from his claims for it. Bellesiles's problem wasn't just the probate data--it was massive fraud involving vast numbers of documents that he misquoted, often to say the exact opposite of what they actually said. Nonetheless, in the face of an unrelenting barrage of negative publicity-the NRA was able to orchestrate nearly 250 articles on the "Bellesiles Hoax" in less than two years-a panel of "impartial" scholars commissioned by Emory to "investigate the integrity of Professor Bellesiles' scholarship" concluded that in this instance his handling of data was "less than professional."They concluded a heck of a lot more than that. I don't know if Churchill can't read, or is simply relying on sympathetic accounts that leave out important details. The report found that his answers were often evasive. They were evasive for a reason--he kept changing his story about when a flood destroyed all of his notes; he was unable to supply the electronic form of the data from which the graphs must have been derived. The rest of the interview is equally bizarre. He mentions Michelle Malkin's book In Defense of Internment and argues that she plagiarized it: the fact is that the bulk of her argument on the World War II internment derives from a fairly obscure right-winger named Lillian Baker. Yet Baker's material is cited nowhere in Malkin's book.I don't know what the truth of the story is about Lillian Baker; in light of Churchill's general regard for truth, I am inclined to believe Malkin over Churchill. But the claim that the left has engaged in "all but total silence" is absurd. See, for example, this spirited attack on the book. It would appear that Malkin may be considering a libel suit against CounterPunch and Churchill. Churchill refers to himself and Bellesiles as "oppositional" scholars. Yeah: in opposition to honesty. UPDATE: I notice that a little deeper in the interview, Churchill gives a new book by Jon Weiner of UC Irvine as his source for his knowledge of the Bellesiles matter. This explains Churchill's highly inaccurate explanation of what happened. Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Al Pacino in The Merchant of Venice The 2004 version with Al Pacino playing Shylock is really astounding. I understand that there has been a reluctance to do this play, because Shylock is such a hateful and stereotyped character. Not surprisingly, the Nazis were very partial to it. Still, I have enormous respect for what Michael Radford's direction has done with this. Remember: relative to other portrayals of Jews in Elizabethan England, like Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (who has horns), Shakespeare's play is almost a sympathetic character. He is at least three dimensional, and his vengeful pursuit of a pound of flesh is shown as a response to the mistreatment that he has received. Since my wife teaches Shakespeare, I am obligated to sit through all the different versions of every Shakespeare play--and then engage in detailed analysis of each version's strengths and weaknesses. (This isn't really as painful as it may sound to you.) Radford's version of The Merchant of Venice is easily the strongest version that I have seen, and at least partly because there is an prologue to the play that helps us to understand far more effectively the anti-Semitism that makes Shylock into such a vindictive person. Understanding this turns Shylock from a nasty stock evildoer into a person that one can find both repellent and sympathetic--a person who does evil because the evil that he has received has embittered his soul. The acting is absolutely first-rate throughout, and Pacino's performance is as strong as I have ever seen. He captures the torment of a man who has spent his life being called a dog, being spat upon--and yet his services as a moneylender, abhorrent as they are, are also in demand. The loss of his daughter, and the way in which he loses her, turns up the heat on his embitterment. I have seen a couple of other versions. There is one version with Sir Laurence Oliver made in 1973, but set in late Victorian times. It just doesn't work for me, because by that point, the legal barriers for European Jews simply weren't there. There were certainly social obstacles, but nothing like the problems of Shakespeare's time. I will tell you that one of the strong points of Radford's production is the decision to open up the play, and take advantage of the ability to use realistic sets. BBC has produced the entire set of 37 Shakespeare plays, faithful to the spirit of the Globe Theater--which means that the sets are about as minimal as they would have been on the stage. Where a film production might have hundreds of extras (for example, for an army), the BBC versions will use a handful. I appreciate the intentions of BBC in keeping all the plays in the original stage setting, but it makes it too obviously a play; something like Radford's production grabs those of us who lack imagination, and drags us into the human tragedy (and comedy) that are part of The Merchant of Venice. The downside of Radford's production is that the film is rated R for a very odd reason. No, it isn't the violence; the most violence is when Shylock is spat upon. Remember, he never actually takes the pound of flesh "nearest the heart" of Antonio. The R rating is because, inexplicably, the prostitutes of Venice are constantly exposing their breasts, earning the R rating for nudity. I wish that I could say that this was because of the relentless pursuit of accuracy, but these prostitutes are prettier, younger, and look suspiciously like the work of Dow Corning, than I would expect real prostitutes of the period to be. Now, I don't know if working girls of Elizabethan times were partial to exposing themselves this way. I wouldn't be surprised; San Francisco Gold Rush prostitutes would hang out of windows at street level (and hang out in both senses). By Napoleon's time (two hundred years later), even respectable women were wearing dresses with necklines that left nothing to the imagination above the waist. Still, it didn't add anything to the film, except turning what might have been a PG film into an R. Perhaps Radford was afraid that parents would assume that it was a kiddie film otherwise. A Very Useful Service Some years ago, when I was working for a company that developed digital loop carriers, I had to explain in a design manual why this new technology called DSL was the up and coming thing. (This was about 1994.) I explained that one of the advantages of DSL was the ability to provide video on demand for customers that were sufficiently unusual that broadcasting or renting a video at the local video store wasn't likely to work. To fill these niche markets, I theorized, there would be niche video services providing streaming video over the Internet. I gave two examples of unusual videos that DSL would help to sell, but would otherwise not stand a chance. The examples were: Helicopter Maintenance for Fun & Profit and Janet Reno Does the Dance of a Thousand Veils. If you don't remember Attorney General Reno and her charms, well, let's just say that you are fortunate indeed. It could be worse; she could send people over to set fire to your home and kill you and your family. (Oh wait, she did!) Well, as it happens, while this sort of niche marketed Internet video store doesn't seem to have taken off in a big way (other than for pornography), there is a niche video store called Technical Video Rental. I recently had the chance to view Fundamentals of Machine Lathe Operation from Technical Video Rental. Okay, it wasn't quite as exciting as Star Wars, but it was quite informative, filling in gaps in my knowledge and visually clarifying a number of questions that I had as a result of reading about machining using an engine lathe. Why Computer Science Isn't Attracting Students Bill Gates is surprised by the lack of interest in computer science degrees: Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he's baffled more students don't go into computer science.I can think of two very important reasons why. The first is not a new problem. I can remember when I first returned to school in 1981-82, trying to get a BS in Computer Science. I was working for an electronics company at the time, so I had some real world experience. Most of my fellow students were traditional age, and saw a computer science degree as a ticket to a high paying job and perhaps even real wealth. Within a semester or two, the computer science program at Sonoma State University, which had been bursting at the seams, wasn't quite so crowded. A lot of these students really weren't that interested in computers; it was just a fast way to wealth--and my, it was hard. Part of why I eventually changed my major to history is that I could get As in two history classes with less effort than one computer science class. You couldn't BS your way through a programming class. Assignments had to work. Even worse: there are a lot of classes that you need to take to get a computer science degree. Calculus. Differential equations. Statistics. These are all classes that if your primary and secondary education failed to teach you math (or more typically, you failed to apply yourself to learn math), you aren't going to get a computer science degree. The second reason, however, why computer science majors are in decline, is buried at the end of the article: "The best investment we've ever made is having our Microsoft Research groups," Gates said.It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out that for an American to get a computer science degree right now is equivalent to a young person in 1910 deciding to apprentice to a buggy whip maker, or in 1980, deciding that they wanted to train for work building television sets. I think there are always going to be some engineering jobs in the U.S., especially at the lean and efficient companies that will be be able to compete with Indian and Chinese engineers. (The technosaurus American companies, however, probably can't.) I just wouldn't expect that engineering is going to be a spectacularly high paying job competing with Asian wage rates. Why work your tail off to get a degree that lets you compete with people who are prepared to work for $12 per hour? You can become a plumber, or an accountant, and make more money. Goodbye, Columbus The city in Ohio, not the Italian explorer: COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 18 - Looking to punish this city for enacting a ban on assault weapons, the National Rifle Association announced on Monday that it had canceled plans to hold its national convention here in 2007, an event that was expected to pump more than $15 million into the local economy.The Columbus City Council passed a ban on sales of semiautomatic weapons, and requiring existing owners to register them. What is amusing about this New York Times article is how they actually provide enough information to make the pro-gun control forces look like idiots: "We need anything that puts another tool in our belt to keep weapons out of criminals' hands," said Detective Daniel R. Jones, the officer who was wounded in that firefight and has lost hearing in one ear.Yup. Full automatic weapons are fairly tightly regulated under federal law--and I guess it didn't work. Monday, July 18, 2005
Rethinking Multiculturalism Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner has an astonishing collection of links to recent British newspaper articles that shows that the multiculturalist ideal may be in danger of being discarded in favor of a more American "melting pot" concept. Now, if only we could return to the melting pot concept here. These articles are in the conservative British papers, of course, such as this Niall Ferguson article in the Telegraph. Still, this article by one of the non-Anglo Britons is titled, "Multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism." This article by an antiwar liberal also argues that Britain has made a serious mistake: The thing about wet and woolly liberals is that all our dithering and fretting about the black/white, right/wrong, yes/no issues takes up so much mental strength that by the time we've come to clarity, we tend to stick with the decision. The Iraq war was wrong and there's an end to it, OK?Oh my! The notion of right and wrong as something other than a culturally determined idea finally gets through to a liberal! A reader pointed me to this article about how the Netherlands is losing its cool: AMSTERDAM — For centuries the Netherlands has been considered the most tolerant and liberal nation in the world. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe.Well worth reading in full. More Advertising Banners At least they load quickly. As you might expect, this house project has made me increasingly interested in taking advertising revenue. At least these load fast, since they are text-only. If you find these annoying--you can always use PayPal to make contributions, and wean me off the advertising habit! The House Project: Well Pump, Water, Walls I've gotten a bit behind in documenting this project, what with figuring out logistics for helping my father-in-law and stepmother-in-law, who are in declining health, get moved from Orange County in Northern Mexico to Boise. My wife and I went up Thursday evening, and there is now a pump that had filled the water tank about half full (600 to 700 gallons), and a water line down to the house with a water faucet. Unfortunately, without a pump from the water tank, there isn't quite enough pressure to run the water four feet up the pipe to the faucet. I really don't see why this would be--the faucet is still several feet below the bottom of the water tank. At the request of readers with dialup connections, I am now using thumbnails (which are reduced size pictures) which you can click to see the pictures full sized. Here's the faucet:  Click to enlarge The well pump interface to the well was a bit different than I expected. I assumed that they would take the cap off the well, and stuff the pipe and pump into it. No, they drilled a hole into the side of the well casing well below ground level instead. The yellow cord is temporary electrical power, until we the permanent electric meter and house wiring.  Click to enlarge Here's the electrical power for the well pump (which goes all the way down into the bottom of the well) going into the top: |
