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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, April 22, 2006
American Family Headed to Mexico The following arrived in my email. It is not completely fair or accurate--but it isn't too far off, either. MR. PRESIDENT, I'M HEADED TO MEXICO New Mexico's Best Known Concealed Handgun Licensee You've seen him on television before: Legislators and lobbyists beware — Gov. Bill Richardson has just received a license to carry a concealed handgun.Perhaps someone is trying to make himself more attractive to NRA members for the 2008 Presidential election? Friday, April 21, 2006
Blogging From The New House You'll have to take my word for it. I'm sitting here (on the floor--no desk in the office yet) using an HP Pavillion running SuSE Linux 9. The 800 Kb/sec. rate is a little slower than the cable modem connection that I have down in Boise, but it's okay. If I ever get too grumpy about it, I will think back to my excitement the first time I used a terminal with a 300 baud modem. (That's 30 characters a second.) No Whining About Your Commute You think you have a long commute to work? NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dave Givens drives 370 milesHaving lived in San Jose many years ago, I am not surprised. Judge Reinhardt: Speech That Offends Homosexuals Isn't Constitutionally Protected This is an astonishing decision by the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals--one of those reminders why liberalism is a dirty word to most Americans: Because of these conflicts in 2003, when the Gay-Straight Alliance sought to hold another “Day of Silence” in 2004, the School required the organization to consult with the Principal to “problem solve” and find ways to reduce tensions and potential altercations. On April 21, 2004, the date of the 2004 “Day of Silence,” appellant Tyler Chase Harper wore a T-shirt to school on which “I WILL NOT ACCEPT WHAT GOD HAS CONDEMNED,” was handwritten on the front and “HOMOSEXUALITY IS SHAMEFUL ‘Romans 1:27’” was handwritten on the back. There is no evidence in the record that any school staff saw Harper’s T-shirt on that day.So how did Judge Reinhardt, a well-known First Amendment absolutist, who is married to the chair of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, deal with this question? We conclude that Harper’s wearing of his T-shirt “colli[des] with the rights of other students” in the most fundamental way. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 508. Public school students who may be injured by verbal assaults on the basis of a core identifying characteristic such as race, religion, or sexual orientation, have a right to be free from such attacks while on school campuses. As Tinker clearly states, students have the right to “be secure and to be let alone.” Id. Being secure involves not only freedom from physical assaults but from psychological attacks that cause young people to question their self-worth and their rightful place in society.18 The “right to be let alone” has been recognized by the Supreme Court, of course, as “‘the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.’”Except, of course, if you wear a T-shirt to school that offends homosexuals. Reinhardt goes on and makes explicit that freedom of speech stops when it offends homosexuals in school: Speech that attacks high school students who are members of minority groups that have historically been oppressed, subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and made to feel inferior, serves to injure and intimidate them, as well as to damage their sense of security and interfere with their opportunity to learn.19 The demeaning of young gay and lesbian students in a school environment is detrimental not only to their psychological health and well-being, but also to their educational development. Indeed, studies demonstrate that “academic underachievement, truancy, and dropout are prevalent among homosexual youth and are the probable consequences of violence and verbal and physical abuse at school.”Wait a minute: you don't have to be homosexual to be subject to demeaning treatment and violence in school. (Believe me, I know, first-hand.) But Reinhardt, good liberal that he is, believes that freedom of speech only goes in one direction. Professor Volokh properly recognizes the absurdity of this decision--that freedom of speech only protects some viewpoints. The comments on his blog posting about this are a reminder of how many liberals there are out there who are prepared to make an exception to the glorious freedom of speech if it involves criticism of homosexuality: 1. Meh, it's one thing to say homosexuality is wrong, but it's another thing to say it's shameful. Saying it's shameful, I think, is fairly equivalent to saying that members of an ethnic group are depraved. I don't think school children need a right to call each other depraved, really for any reason. Nor do I think that's what the First Amendment requires.Or this one: In this case, there's a reasonable argument that the text of the shirt was "plainly offensive" and could be regulated by the school under Fraser.I suppose that we could have made the same comment about Cohen v. California (1971), in which the defendant wore a jacket with a four letter word expressing his opinion about the draft. I suppose that the Supreme Court could have suggested that Mr. Cohen "elevate the level of his discourse" in the future, but let Cohen's conviction stand. I suppose that we could make similar requests concerning virtual child pornography--an issue so important that the ACLU went to the Supreme Court over in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002). The mistake was Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969). Children are not adults, and there are a lot of situations where children lack the rights of adults. A public school is certainly one of them. The nearly unlimited freedom of speech that an adult enjoys in the public square, if applied to a student in a school, would preclude a teacher from telling little Johnny to stop talking and work on his assignment; prohibit a teacher from asking Melissa to stop talking why the teacher is talking; and prohibit a school from adopting a dress code that banned T-shirts that said, "Every woman is a ho'." Tinker reflected the strong antiwar sentiments held by liberals at the time, and rather than admit that public schools and students are not equivalent--or even close--to an adult standing in a public park, the Supreme Court decided to create this situation where the First Amendment somewhat applies--but not entirely. Tinker was wrongly decided; if the students wanted to wear black armbands to protest the war in Vietnam, they could just as easily have done that outside of school. A public school should not have unlimited discretion as to what constitutes a disruptive message. The remarks of some commenters here justifying why this particular T-shirt should not have been allowed are a reminder that many liberals only believe in free speech when they agree with it. Reinhardt's decision--making a distinction based on minority status and oppression--is one of the reasons that I think so little of the organization that Reinhardt sleeps with--they are constantly prepared to twist the law to suit their political ends, with no concern for consistency. There needs to be either a consistent policy that says, "Nothing controversial or commercial on T-shirts" (and then, a detailed list of what constitutes these categories), or no restrictions at all. If gay students want to wear T-shirts that make them feel good with pro-gay messages, then T-shirts that express disapproval of homosexuality need to be allowed as well--or homosexuals should just admit that they have so little confidence in the strength of their position that they can't tolerate any debate about it. Labels: homosexuality Thursday, April 20, 2006
Spring in the Mountains; Getting Stuck in the Mud I have updated my previous posting about installation of the wireless internet service with some photographs. The hills are beginning to green up as warmer weather and more sunlight wakes up the chloroplasts in plant cells.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge We are also getting volunteer shoots of grass in the areas where we intend to plant a lawn.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge We had a lovely evening up at the new house, moving some stuff in, and trying to get a router installed because I couldn't figure out how to tell the Linux box to use fixed IP addresses--and the router has a DHCP server in it. On the way home, my wife decided that she wanted to see the new subdivision that the Loomises are doing up the hill from us. They have requested Boise County Planning Commission authority to divide a 40 acre parcel into two parcels of about 7 and 33 acres. The Loomises have a goat trail up to the new properties, so I figured that there wasn't much problem getting the Equinox up there. Well, part way up, we came around a corner, and before we knew it, we were in a several day old mudslide. My wife calls it the Piguinox for what happens when she gases it up, but it lived up to its name, and wallowed in the mud. We not only could not back it out, but it took a tow truck about 25 minutes of effort to pull us free. One of the problems is that some parts of our area have a mud with large amounts of montmorillionite. As a geological report about the problems with the old highway described it, this mud takes serious off-road vehicles and makes them completely inoperable. This stuff is simultaneously sticky (so it doesn't come off the wheels, even when you spin them), soupy (so you can't traction, even with lots of cardboard under the tires), and yet still thick enough that you can't ever sink to something upon which you could get traction. While the rear wheels were on reasonably solid material, the Equinox won't send power to the rear wheels if both of the front wheels are spinning. (I'm sure that there's a good reason for this, but it sure didn't make sense last night.) We walked down the hill to Summit Ridge Road, and tried to decide which ask to go to ask to call AAA. The closer house has two very aggressive dogs that have actually tried to jump into my Corvette while I was driving down the road--and they were on top of the embankment, growling. So we walked down the entrance to our subdivision, and knocked on the neighbor we actually have met, who is the police chief (and entire paid police department) of a nearby town. Nice family, and we got to spend some time in a warm house while waiting or the tow truck to arrive. The tow truck driver's speech became rather....colorful, as he tried to wrestle the Piguinox out of its mud wallow. He managed to remain in good humor in spite of the struggles--the only that prevented a miserable evening from becoming much worse. UPDATE: Driving down the hill, the Piguinox was shaking up a storm starting at about 50 mph--almost like a tire balance problem, but much, much worse. We cleaned as much of the underbody mud as we could, but it didn't help. On the off chance that something had been mechanically damaged by either the mud or the strain required to pull the Piguinox out of the mud, my wife took it to the dealer. The dealer rotated the tires (they needed it anyway), and then started removing vast quantities of mud from the drivetrain and underbody. They reported that they removed forty pounds of mud from one wheel alone. Hence the vibration problem. Wheel weights to balance a tire usually a few ounces; imagine having forty pounds of mud in an unbalanced form. They filled up a trash can with mud--apparently, had to bring a rather large party together in the shop with hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, and a powerwash. The Piguinox is now again behaving. Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The Fruitcake Stasis Field If you've read much of Larry Niven's science fiction, you are probably familiar with the "stasis field." A number of Niven's story involve technology invented by a now long-dead alien species called the Slavers. The Slavers are long gone, but some of their inventions have survived--at least partly because one of them is called a "stasis field"--a device that, when activated, causes time to cease elapsing within a particular space--until someone on the outside presses a button that turns the stasis field off. Now, it has long been known that there must be something rather similar to a Slaver stasis field that explains fruitcakes, as this article demonstrates: Lance Nesta did what many people do when receiving a fruitcake _ he set it aside, only to rediscover it more than 40 years later in his mother's attic. Nesta couldn't resist taking a peek at the cake, still in its original tin and wrapped in paper. I Wish I Could Get This Problem For A Couple of Weeks I'm sure it is a serious and expensive problem for this guy--but don't you wish that you could suffer from this for just a little while? A 5-foot-9, 22-year-old man who eats 6,500 calories a day _ two and a half times the average intake for an adult male _ has earned a special reward for breaking the 100-pound mark: When Will The Last Japanese Soldier of World War II Be Found? There were many Japanese soldiers at the end of World War II who simply refused to believe that Japan had surrendered--and right into the 1970s, there were still Japanese soldiers who had to be persuaded to come in out of the jungle. These were usually in the Philipines and various small Pacific islands--but just when I thought that we had reached the point where no more stories like this could take place, we get this weird news story: TOKYO (Reuters) - A former Japanese World War Two soldier who recently turned up living in Ukraine set foot in his motherland Wednesday for the first time in more than six decades for emotional reunions with surviving relatives.What do you suppose the chances are that the Soviet Union refused to repatriate this guy, along with a lot of other prisoners of war? No, This Wasn't In Utah It reads like some of the polygamous sects in Utah, but it wasn't: SINGAPORE: A Singaporean Muslim man with 10 wives and 64 children was sentenced to 32 years in jail and a caning for raping five of his under-age daughters, court documents showed.I'm a bit confused by the ten wives. Islam apparently sets the limit at four. I would think that this creep was not only violating secular law by raping his daughters, but Muslim law by having too many wives--and by raping his daughters. I don't why it is, but it seems like an awful lot of men who decide that they need lots wives don't even find that sufficient--and have to go after their daughters. Wireless Internet Service At The New House BitSmart Internet Services showed up today. It was a rather longer process than either the installer Pete or myself expected--and it was a reminder that you have to be able to trust your testing tools! I'll have pictures this evening, but essentially, they put an antenna on the roof pointing to the water tower at Horseshoe Bend High School, where BitSmart's transmitter sits. Then Pete ran CAT5 cable down the side of the house, and did a very nice job of making it not stand out. Then he drilled a hole through the wall into my office, and hooked up the cable. Then it got interesting. There are eight conductors in a CAT5 cable--some of which BitSmart uses to run power back up to the radio in the antenna. The signal kept going in and out, so Pete put a transmitter test box at the antenna end, and a receiver test box in my office. Conductors 5 and 7 were not conducting. Hmmm. Bad Ethernet connector in the office, maybe? So he replaced that. Still broken. So Pete went back to the roof, and replaced the Ethernet connector on that end. Conductors 5 and 7 were now working--but conductor 6 (required for transmitting data) was not. We've replaced conductors at both ends--and I suddenly said, "Pete, how sure are you that the test boxes are working?" Sure enough, when I hooked the test transmitter and receiver together, conductor 6 was never lighting up. At this point, we went ahead and hooked up a router to the Ethernet connector in my office, and to the Linux box that I have sitting there. The first download I did was from my website, and Firefox claimed that the download was about 60,000 bytes per second. We tried doing a download from another website on Pete's laptop, and it clocked it as 89,000 bytes per second. BitSmart had promised me 800,000 bits per second, upstream and downstream, so 89,000 bytes per second would be about 712,000 bits per second. Because of overhead in data transmission through the Internet and likely performance bottlenecks at the server providing the download data stream, that 712,000 bits per second is probably the 800,000 bits per second promised. The other piece of good news is that when Pete checked the SNR (signal to noise ratio), it was far higher than they consider necessary to deliver these sort of data rates--suggesting that bad weather may not cause much degradation in actual data rates delivered. UPDATE: Some pictures of the blessed event.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge The builder still has some touchup work on the exterior paint, so we'll have him paint over this. (Pete put some silicone sealant on this after I took the picture.)  Click to enlarge Monday, April 17, 2006
How The Bureaucracy Works There is a tendency in some circles to assume that government works as poorly as it does because government workers are lazy or stupid. I wish it were that simple--you could solve the problem by hiring industrious and intelligent workers. My friend Dave Hardy has a sad and amusing memoir of working as an attorney for the Department of the Interior. It is worth reading in full, but here's a taste to get you interested: When people wrote in to the Secretary, he never saw it. The mail room skimmed everything off and sent it to the office they thought handled it. The office (i.e., if you were complaining, the people you complained about) then wrote a letter for the Secretary and it went up the chain of command. In every case I can recall, he signed it -- being quite busy, and knowing only that everyone below him, who knew more of it than he did, said this was what happened. What's Driving This Insane Housing Market? Interest rates, obviously, were driving the housing market. But even as interest rates rise, the Boise housing market remains surprisingly hot. (Some other areas of the country that were insanely overheated have since cooled off.) I found an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that explains that there was (and is) more going on than just low interest rates and "irrational exuberance": The annual number of second homes purchased in the United States doubled between 2000 and 2004, according to new research. The boom is being driven in part by demographics -- mainly a flood tide of equity-laden Baby Boomers -- and in part by a largely unexpected ricochet effect of tax law changes in the late 1990s.Now, according to Chung, some of this was being driven by a desire to get a better return in real estate than was available in the stock market after the market slumped in April of 2000--but that was only part of it, and even though the stock market has recovered, there's still a lot of second home buying going on--and in rather specific places: Where are Boomers and others investing their second-home dollars? Chung's study found that a dozen states have attracted exceptionally high rates of purchases and cumulative growth during the past four years, whether for recreational use or investment.Chung also thinks that this is going to continue a bit longer: How long can the second-home boom continue? Chung says as long as "Boomers are still in their peak earning years and they can afford some homes for vacation purposes or investment" -- at least another decade -- they will "continue to drive housing markets," especially for second-home units. Jamaica: Through The Looking Class Politics Dave Hardy over at Arms And The Law pointed me to this article about the bizarre upside politics of gun control in Jamaica: The controversial call by Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) senator, Prudence Kidd-Deans for the arming of the society in the face of the prevailing high murder rate, has not found favour with the Jamaica Rifle Association (JRA), popularly known as the gun club.Senator Kidd-Deans makes an argument that sounds like a position that I would make, or that the NRA would argue: Chin is also a member of the recently established Firearm Licensing Authority that has replaced police commanders as the persons responsible for granting gun licences.And it gets weirder and weirder, with a former police commissioner agreeing that there needs to be fewer restrictions on gun ownership, and the spokesman for the Jamaica Rifle Association making classic gun control arguments: But Chin, who has owned a firearm for some 20 years, saying he had only used it in practice, insisted that more guns might not be the solution to the country's crime problem. Furthermore, he pointed to a lack of quantifiable evidence or data to show that owning a gun actually made one safer.Do cats chase dogs in Jamaica? Do horses ride men in Jamaica? This is just mind boggling in its strangeness. |
