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My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000. McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh. Labels: global warming MOSCOW, Idaho (Map, News) - The sheriff of a north-central Idaho county where a shooting rampage left four dead and three wounded last May wants more people to obtain concealed weapons permits and carry guns, including on the University of Idaho campus, to improve public safety. "In my opinion, if there were more students with (concealed weapons permits), the world would be safer," Latah County Sheriff Wayne Rausch told the Lewiston Tribune on Tuesday. "Just because we (law enforcement officers) are charged with protecting the public, doesn't mean the public shouldn't be able to protect itself." The university bans guns except under supervised circumstances at its firing range. Except for law enforcement officials, the university requires that firearms "be transported to the range unloaded, encased, with a trigger lock attached or otherwise rendered inoperable." Rausch's idea also contradicts Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney, who late last month asked for a legal opinion from the state attorney general's office on whether the city has the authority to ban both concealed and exposed weapons in public areas such as city buildings. Labels: gun rights Attorneys for the city of Kennesaw, where landowners are required by law to own and maintain a firearm, said Thursday they are asking local officials to throw out an ordinance that bans people from toting guns in city parks. The gun-in-parks ordinance violates state law, which pre-empts the Kennesaw ordinance, said Stuart Sims, an attorney for the city. He said the recommedation was made to comply with a Georgia law that says only the state has the power to determine where guns may be carried or transported. The action by Kennesaw's attorneys came in response to a letter from GeorgiaCarry.org, which pointed out that the revised state law preempted the council's prohibition on guns in parks. He said in a letter to GeorgiaCarry.org's attorney, John Monroe of Roswell, that the mayor and City Council of Kennesaw have agreed to consider repealing the ordinance and that therefore, "no legal action is necessary to cure this contradiction between the preempting state statute and this city ordinance" and that Kennesaw now considers "this matter closed." Fred Bentley Jr., of the Marietta-based Bentley, Bentley & Bentley law firm that represents Kennesaw, said he did not know how long the Kennesaw ordinance has been on the books, but that the Georgia Legislature has reserved the right for itself to determine where firearms can be carried. GeorgiaCarry.org President Ed Stone said "we believe it is important for Kennesaw and other cities to comply" with state law. "Georgians should not have to research the minutiae of local ordinances while visiting cities and counties throughout Georgia," he said. Since Kennesaw has compled with his group's demands, he said no legal action will be taken. He said his group has similar litigation against Coweta County pending in the Georgia Court of Appeals. Labels: gun rights SAN FRANCISCO (Map, News) - A city hit hard by gun violence should not have gun sales at its back door, said Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is expected to announce today that The City is seeking state legislation to end gun shows at the Cow Palace. While the exhibition hall is technically located in Daly City, it is just blocks away from San Francisco’s Sunnydale Housing Project, one of many neighborhoods in The City plagued by gun violence. Although the gun shows are legal, Newsom said numerous illegal gun transactions occur in the parking lot during the show, which will take place Saturday and Sunday. Another gun show is scheduled in November. “It needs to be shut down, and we’re going to do our best to do that,” Newsom said. Labels: gun rights Critics of the program, who said it was nothing more than a sly way for Baca to pay back friends and supporters, were incensed when, less than a month after the unit was initiated, one of those reservists—Scott Zacky of the Zacky Farms chicken dynasty—was stripped of his badge for drawing a gun outside his Bel Air mansion after mistaking a couple on a date for car thieves. The unit was suspended in late 1999 after one member, a wealthy Baca supporter who owns a jewelry store, was arrested for money laundering. A FEW MONTHS AFTER LEE BACA TOOK OFFICE AS SHERIFF OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY, HE moved up to a tony San Marino address. He left behind the Pasadena bachelor's condo he'd been living in since his 1994 divorce and bought a rambling Mediterranean-style home for himself and his soon-to-be bride, Carol Chiang. Baca's real estate upgrade has raised questions, however, particularly in regard to the sheriff's relationship with a wealthy Beverly Hills mortgage broker named Robert "Bob" Weiss. Weiss, through his company, the Richland Group, helped arrange for Baca to buy the $750,000 house for no money down, which several experts interviewed for this article called an unusually generous financing package. At the same time, Baca took it upon himself to help Weiss promote a new program marketing home loans directly to cops, called the PRIDE Program. Baca joined the PRIDE Program's so-called "Advisory Board," and lobbied county officials to let Weiss' marketing teams set up sales booths and make presentations in department facilities across the county. Baca also talked up Weiss and the PRIDE Program to other top law-enforcement officials across the state. "Something stinks here," says Bud Treece, head of the department's largest employee union. "Why would a professional cop want to endorse a commercial enterprise?" Even one of the sheriff's inner circle seems taken aback by the arrangement. "I don't think Lee should get involved in something like that," says Dan Bryant, a Pasadena real estate broker who calls himself Baca's "personal, political and spiritual" adviser. "I don't know what the hell he is doing that for." Baca, for his part, isn't saying. His spokesman, Captain Doyle Campbell, says the sheriff has "no comment" regarding his relationship with Weiss, his endorsement of the Richland Group's products or his lobbying on the company's behalf. Likewise, after the Weekly made repeated attempts to contact Weiss and other Richland executives by telephone, a spokesperson for the Richland Group said that the company had "no comment" on his relationship with the sheriff, and declined to provide any information about his company. But a review of real estate records, court documents, financial-disclosure filings and other public records, supported by interviews with key participants, confirms Weiss' role in financing Baca's house, and Baca's activities on behalf of Weiss' PRIDE Program. Moreover, in the glad-handing and back-scratching circles of police boosterism, it's not hard to turn up anecdotes about Weiss' relationship with the sheriff. Weiss has worked hard to ingratiate himself -- and his company -- into that world. And Baca has worked those same networks, using his office and its prerogatives to help those who help him, while cultivating political and financial supporters across the Southland. Now the FBI in investigating Sacramento County Sheriff Blanas, according to this August 9, 2007 Sacramento Bee report: The FBI is looking into concealed-gun permits issued by the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, according to documents filed in a lawsuit that alleges former Sheriff Lou Blanas issued permits as political favors. Documents filed Friday in the federal civil rights suit say FBI investigators have requested gun permit documents from the department, which include a permit Blanas issued to Sacramento businessman Edwin G. Gerber. Gerber gave $3,500 to Blanas' election campaign, election records show, and bought a vacation home with Blanas in Reno in the fall of 2005, according to property records. The former sheriff signed Gerber's gun permit a day before leaving office last summer. He issued the approval without following the department's usual procedure, which calls for a three-person committee to review applications from people asking to carry a loaded gun in public, according to interviews and court documents. When I lived in Sonoma County, Sheriff Michaelsen issued concealed carry permits more freely than his successor--but his own deputies told me that some of the people getting permits were big campaign contributors--and at least one was issued a permit before the background check was complete--and the guy had a felony conviction! Yet even as freely as Michaelsen issued permits to people that would not pass a background check, it wasn't because Michaelsen issued permits to any law-abiding adult in the county. It was a very dirty business. Thanks to Dan Gifford for bringing several of these news reports to my attention. Labels: gun rights Labels: global warming Labels: homosexuality Labels: gun rights Labels: terrorism Different parts of the brain must work together to understand sarcasm, new research suggests. The prefrontal cortex - a small area in the front of the brain - seems to play the biggest role and may integrate the literal meaning of a phrase with the speaker’s emotional intent. The findings on the anatomy of sarcasm could have implications for understanding personality changes in people with brain injury or disease. “Decision making, emotional processing, empathy, and theory of mind all appear to be involved in understanding sarcasm,” says lead researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a neuropsychologist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel. Previous research has shown that people with damage in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) have difficulty understanding non-verbal aspects of language like tone, says Richard Delmonico, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at Davis, US. Researchers studied 25 participants with damage to their prefrontal lobes, 16 participants with damage in the posterior lobes, and 17 healthy controls. They assessed people’s ability to understand someone else’s emotional state by testing how well they could recognise different facial expressions and tone of voice. To determine if participants understood sarcasm, researchers read a sarcastic and non-sarcastic version of a story and asked participants what the speaker meant in each situation. They also tested ‘theory of mind’ - the ability to understand another person’s frame of mind - by determining if people could recognise when a story contained a “social faux-pas”. The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth. The dark patches on the surface of the Sun that we call sunspots are a symptom of fierce magnetic activity inside. Ilya Usoskin, a geophysicist who worked with colleagues from the University of Oulu in Finland and the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, has found that there have been more sunspots since the 1940s than for the past 1150 years. Sunspot observations stretch back to the early 17th century, when the telescope was invented. To extend the data farther back in time, Usoskin's team used a physical model to calculate past sunspot numbers from levels of a radioactive isotope preserved in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. Ice cores provide a record of the concentration of beryllium-10 in the atmosphere. This is produced when high-energy particles from space bombard the atmosphere, but when the Sun is active its magnetic field protects the Earth from these particles and levels of beryllium-10 are lower. There was already tantalising evidence that beryllium-10 is scarcer now than for a very long time, says Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. But he told New Scientist that when he saw the data converted to sunspot numbers he thought, "why the hell didn't I do this?" It makes the conclusion very stark, he says. "We are living with a very unusual sun at the moment." The findings may stoke the controversy over the contribution of the Sun to global warming. Usoskin and his team are reluctant to be dragged into the debate, but their work will probably be seized upon by those who claim that temperature rises over the past century are the result of changes in the Sun's output (New Scientist, print edition, 12 April 2003). The link between the Sun's magnetic activity and the Earth's climate is, however, unclear. Labels: global warming Labels: academic integrity, gun rights There's been some recent discussion about how only rural stations have been used in the NASA GISS analysis, and those rural stations are qualified by looking at night time DOD satellite photos, and doing a count of visible streetlights within a radius to quantify UHI potential or lack thereof. The "best" stations are labeled "lights=0" One of those stations is Happy Camp, California, population 2182, an old gold mining and logging town located in the rugged NW corner of the state, and about 100+ miles from any major city. NOAA MMS metadata website reports data back to 1931 with 3 small distance station moves, and no changes to equipment. NASA GISS reports data back to 1914. But what you can get from satellite images and databases can't really prepare you for what you may find. I "expected" to find an old classic Stevenson Screen, probably near the Ranger Station office. Check on that. But what I didn't expect to find was a "rural" station swimming in a sea of exhaust from 22 air conditioning units within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen. Ridiculous, you are making this up you say? Well that would be my first reaction too. But here they are, count them, I've labeled the A/C units for your convenience: Additionally. for other biases, positive and negative there's the buildings, the windows, the shade trees, the wind sheltering, and the lawn sprinkler. There's also the big parking lot to the southwest, and the Stevenson Screen is at the top of a slope and there's a parking lot downslope. When I mentioned to the site curator about the A/C units she said "hmm, I never thought about that" but then added, "But I can tell you that when we water the lawn, my high temps are lower". I asked the curator what the prevailing wind direction was, and she said from the "south to southwest usually". Labels: global warming Labels: my books It's not a ban as the term "ban" is normally used, nor is it "unenforceable" in the sense of being unenforceable because it's trumped by the First Amendment or because it's hard to effectively enforce. There's nothing here to enforce -- this is essentially government speech condemning the words, and calling for people to stop using them. The City Council would be perfectly free to proclaim such a view. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization, freedom of speech, vulgarity After slimming down the staff through recent buyouts and layoffs, the paper, Bronstein reportedly told his people, will no longer be serving up "buffet style" journalism -- simply trying to cover everything that goes on in the region. Details are a little vague, but essentially the new slogan is: "Journalism of Action." Call it the ChronicleWatch-ification of the Chron: Bronstein reportedly envisions a paper whose staff will not simply report, but seek to effect positive change in the community and drive public policy. In addition, the editor, who did not return phone calls today, reportedly told his staff that the Chronicle would focus on a handful of "master narratives." He noted five, four of which were local politics, green living, real estate, and technology. The tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited “Baghdad Diarist” for the discredited New Republic magazine, is an old tale: Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier’s tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier’s ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud. Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John F. Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. The ward is filling up. U.S. military investigators concluded this week that Beauchamp concocted allegations of troop misconduct in a series of essays for The New Republic. “The investigation is complete and the allegations from PVT Beauchamp are false,” Major Steven Lamb, a spokesman for Multi National Division-Baghdad, told USA Today. The New Republic is standing by Beauchamp’s work. But Michael Goldfarb, online editor and blogger at The Weekly Standard who first challenged Beauchamp’s writing, reported Monday that Beauchamp had “signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in The New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods — fabrications containing only ‘a smidgen of truth,’ in the words of our source.” However, the transsexuals I knew were all adults when they decided. A new and emerging (and controversial) treatment is changing that, by interrupting and shortcircuiting the process of sexual maturation: Long prescribed to temporarily stave off puberty in kids who start developing too young, the drug blocks the brain's release of the compound that triggers the chain of hormonal reactions, body mutations, and moody angst. Now an unknown number of doctors in the Bay Area, the country, and across the globe are following the lead of a fledgling treatment pioneered at a Dutch clinic that's sparked debate in medical and ethical circles alike. The Dutch clinicians are suspending kids in physical childhood to buy them time to decide if they wish to begin the sexual reassignment process. If so, after a few years of continued psychological monitoring, they can start hormones to induce an "opposite-sex puberty." If not, the teen can stop taking the periodic Lupron injections and appear to develop normally, as kids treated with the drug for early puberty have for years. While opponents of sex change surgery are generally stereotyped as religious, certain radical feminists oppose it too. And the high rate of dissatisfaction with the results confirms the anecdotal evidence with which I'm familiar. Too many times, I think people feel pressured into accepting the premise that it is "wrong" for a man to be like a woman, or vice versa, and that they gravitate towards a surgical solution in order to be "normal." (And conforming.) Considering that this occurs in adults, how could anyone predict what might be happening with a child? Might this same "desire to be normal" be even more overwhelming in children? Labels: homosexuality Labels: homosexuality After realizing that his home had an intruder, a homeowner chased down a 19-year-old man and shot him to death on the Northwest Side early Saturday, according to a police report. Raymond Lemes, 48, said he was asleep when he heard a scream. Lemes grabbed his gun and realized an intruder, later identified as Tracy Glass, was in his home in the 9800 block of Autumn Star. Glass took off and Lemes chased him down the street. When he caught up to the suspect, Lemes said Glass took a swing at him so he shot the man. When police arrived at 2:35 a.m., they found Glass facedown, dead with gunshot wounds to the chest, neck and arm. The homeowner had a license for his .40 caliber Glock pistol, a police report said. He told police Glass probably had gained access to his home through a sliding door that had been broken for some time. Labels: gun defense aftermath, gun self-defense Labels: abortion James Taranto has given a name to the idea that the country is getting more and more anti-abortion partially due to abortion being legal. Calling it “The Roe Effect”, it postulates that since those who favor legal abortion are more likely to get one, and assuming children generally follow the political leanings of their parents, more abortion foes are being born than abortion advocates, and thus over time support for legal abortion will dwindle. (See the Wikipedia entry for links to other articles on this.) After the Roe decision, it would take at least 18 years for the effect to start being seen, when the post-Roe kids were of voting age. However, there’s another trend occurring that may have an effect on American politics without the waiting period. Labels: cars Labels: gun history, my books Labels: terrorism Labels: Idaho politics Labels: gun self-defense Labels: deinstitutionalization Labels: terrorism Labels: stupidity
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Evidence of Who Won the Cold War
This is even more persuasive evidence than McDonald's in Moscow. Go there, start the video, with the Red Army Choir doing the backup on this utterly peculiar version of "Sweet Home, Alabama." As one of the commenters over there observed:Mr Gorbachev, tear down this hair!
And another one:This must be that bad acid trip I never had come to me 25 years later as a flashback
Corvettes
YouTube has a pretty amazing collection of Corvette videos, including this segment from a British car show where they show the Corvette Z06 going from stationery to 175 mph in fifth gear, and outaccelerating a gasoline fire over a quarter mile.
Loreena McKennitt at Alhambra
My wife and I are big fans of Loreena McKennitt and her electic mix of Celtic/New Age/Middle Eastern/wherever she's been last music. This evening, PBS was playing "Great Performances: Loreena McKennitt at Alhambra," and wow! Even watching it on television was a powerfully moving experience! I can't imagine what it was like to be there at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain.
Loreena McKennitt's voice is so powerful, she could be reading the periodic table of the elements off, with atomic weights and electron shell configurations, and it would still be magical. There was a drop dead gorgeous blonde cellist who was making that instrument grab you viscerally as she played. What an emotionally powerful instrument that cello was in her hands!
There was this bald fiddler whose passion and energy was overwhelming. On "Night Ride Across the Caucasus," he looked like he was about to have smoke start pouring out of ears, followed next by broken gears!
There are musical pieces that you hear and say, "What is that instrument?" Watching this performance, we could see the instruments and we still had to ask the question. One string and bow device looked so simple and ancient that I would be tempted to guess, "Celtic Bronze Age." Another instrument with keys and a crank that the musician kept turning made me think "Martian Bronze Age."
My wife noticed that she abbreviated a number of her longer pieces, such as "Lady of Shalott," probably to get more pieces into one concert. All the more reason to buy her albums. These make great music for the Corvette while driving through Idaho's forests. It helps me to drive at a more relaxing speed!
More on NASA Correcting Their Temperature Data
Over at DailyTech:
These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.
The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.
UPDATE: A reader points to this data set, which appears to be the "before."
Sarcasm
I blogged a couple of days ago about sarcasm and brain structure, and a reader sends me this intriguing observation about cultural construction of sarcasm:Interesting post on sarcasm and brain structure. Sarcasm is also socially constructed, I'm sure. When I lived in west Africa, the Ghanaians, Nigerians, etc., I met there didn't get sarcasm at all. If one explained a sarcastic remark to them, they would say, "Ah, irony!"--but only as if they were putting a label on something they didn't really get. Sometimes a fed-up American would lash out at a local person, telling him (sarcastically) what a wonderful person he was, etc. This relieved the American's feelings and often did no visible harm because the African person didn't realize what was going on.
I'm curious: has anyone else had the experience of discovering that sarcasm was not recognized in some cultures? Or is it perhaps that sarcasm exists in other cultures, but the methods of recognizing a remark as sarcastic are so culturally specific that a west African couldn't recognize it from an American, but could recognize it from another west African?
UPDATE: The reader who sent the above about west Africans confirmed that it is a cultural recognition problem. They have sarcasm as a mode, but use it less, and don't recognize the manner by which we signal it. Another reader who lived in Japan for many years observed:Japanese are another group that has great difficulty with sarcasm. They do have it and use it on occasion, but in a very obvious and heavy form. One politician going on and on about how great and wonderful a rival is, for example.
UPDATE 2: Yet another reader responds:
In my experience in normal conversation Japanese are unable to detect it or understand it when explained. So a lot of American humor is unintelligible. At the movies, Japanese always laugh at different places than Americans do.
One simple example, Americans will often say something like 'hot enough for you?' on a very cold day. Japanese NEVER can figure that one out, unless they have lived a long while in the US. In 15 years there I may have met a half-dozen Japanese who could use sarcasm.
My experience in Central America was very different, Latins seem to love sarcasm, use it a lot and can be very cutting with it. I was the one who was slow figuring it out there.I'll second the comment about the Japanese and add the Koreans, and largely, most other East Asians as well. I spent over 5 years in Korean and speak the language fluently, and it is very difficult to tell subtle jokes or use sarcasm in that tongue without being offensive. Sarcasm is not a mildly humorous way of relating to people there, it is insulting. Only the most blatant use will even be picked up on, unless you are already on hostile terms.
In my experience on 3 continents now, I find that sarcasm and irony are very anglo-centric, or at least very Western European (including our derivitave North American culture). Perhaps this is largely due to the unique structure of English and the diverse elements of culture and language that have been absorbed into it. (I wrote a little bit about language and how it may affect communication modes here: http://thebastidge.blogspot.com/2007/01/semi-random-thoughts-on-language.html)
Here in Iraq, I find that some of the better educated and more cosmopolitan people 'get' sarcasm, but most other Arabs I have dealt with don't, and neither do the less educated Iraqis. Gallows humour abounds, of course. I think that just as city dwellers are more appreciative of and apt to use intellectual, subtle humour and country people are more apt to coarser, earthier, more direct humour, the more industrialized nations have a broader range of humour.
Asians tend to appreciate slaptick, vaudevillian comedies on TV more than ironic, self-deprecating intellectual comedy like you'd see on "Friends" or "Seinfeld". These shows were popular enough in subtitled or dubbed form, but a large portion of them went over the audience's heads, or just didn't make it into the translation. Drama translates better. Most Korean jokes, when translated into English seem simplistically childish.
Idaho: It's Not California
Let me point out that Latah County is one of the more liberal parts of the state, probably because that's where the University of Idaho is located, so lots of college students, lots of college professors, and a downtown that reminds you that the 1960s isn't over for some:
I have some misgivings about drunken college students carrying guns. But I have misgivings about drunken college students and everything.
alcohol + guns = suicide, murder, accident
alcohol + cars = drunk driving accidents
alcohol + ladders = falls
alcohol + power tools = nasty injuries
alcohol + opposite sex = STDs, pregnancy, and rape
What's the common element to all of these problems? Drunkenness. If there's something that needs to be absent from a college campus, it's alcohol.
Lots of Things Have Changed For The Worse Since I Was Young...
But not everything. When Kennesaw, Georgia passed a law mandating gun ownership in reaction to Morton Grove, Illinois banning handguns, they were the butt of many jokes among the intellectuals. Now we have the weird situation where they are having to amend one of their ordinances to be more pro-gun! From the August 10, 2007 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
San Francisco's Mayor Newsom Decides To Punish Illegal Acts By Criminalizing Legal Acts
The August 9, 2007 San Francisco Examiner reports:
Let me get this straight: what's happening in the Cow Palace is legal--background checks are being run, people who can't legally buy guns are prevented from buying them. What is happening in the parking lot is illegal--people are buying and selling guns without background checks, waiting periods, etc. So the city needs to shut down the lawful activity?
I'm sure that Mayor Newsom thinks that if the gun shows didn't happen at the Cow Palace, there would be no illegal gun sales going on in the Cow Palace parking lot. He's probably right. But they would certainly be taking place elsewhere in San Francisco. So which is it easier for the police to do? Look for unlawful transfers in one relatively small place (the Cow Palace parking lot), or the entire city of San Francisco?
My recollection of the Cow Palace parking lot suggests that a few police officers on top of the surrounding buildings with spotting scopes could see situations that undercover officers could rapidly respond to, and catch unlawful transfers as they take place, or shortly after they have taken place. Video footage through zoom lens in combination with actually catching people in possession of firearms would be sufficient to get convictions, and because this is all in a public place, there's no basis for claiming that the criminals were having their rights to privacy violated, or that there was a requirement for a search warrant. If you can see some sort of covert or semicovert transaction taking place in the parking lot, this would seem like probable cuse to search the participants for the items that were exchanged.
The gun shows at the Cow Palace are making it easier for the police to enforce the existing law, by bringing criminals together into the parking lot. A sensible elected official (unlike Mayor Newsom) would regard this as a benefit of the gun show, not a problem. But this is really more about appearing tough on guns rather than about doing something about San Francisco's violent crime problem.
Corruption in California, And Why Liberals Won't Fix It
California is one of a small number of states that still has a discretionary concealed handgun carry statute that grants nearly unlimited discretion to a sheriff or police chief whether to issue a permit or not. When this law that when first passed in 1923, it was part of a bill that was explicitly stated by supporters as part of a strategy to disarm Hispanics and Chinese:
This is not really a surprise; racism is one of the three pillars of American gun control law.
it will have a salutary effect in checking tong wars among the Chinese and vendettas among our people who are of Latin descent.
There have been problems for my entire adult life with California sheriffs issuing permits to political supporters and big campaign contributors, as my friend Jim March has documented in detail here.
The corruption is ongoing--not just history. Los Angeles County Sheriff Baca has pulled some pretty sleazy stuff in this area, as this June 15, 2007 MSNBC report discusses:It is not the first time that Tinseltown's sheriff has been criticized for being too cozy with the Hollywood crowd. Baca plays golf with actor Michael Douglas, and has received campaign contributions or endorsements from the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Les Moonves, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman and Steven Segal. The sheriff has issued concealed-weapon permits to such actors as Ben Affleck, and in 1999, less than a year after being sworn in, he set up an “executive reserves” unit that allowed celebrities to wear a badge and carry a gun. All they had to do was take 64 hours of training and pass the department’s background check.
Baca has a long history of questionable financial dealings that seem to involve his use of office, as this December 1, 1999 L.A. Weekly report describes:
How Gray Was My Valley
All the wildfires in Idaho and surrounding states made this a very ugly place. I think some of the fires are still going, but we're making progress! At least there's only some haze in the air now.
Click to enlarge
I think this is a mourning dove. We have a lot of them around, making their cute little cooing sounds. I have a very soft spot in my heart for these creatures. When my wife and I married in 1980, there was a mourning dove that nested on her porch in Santa Monica, and the sound of its cooing (and that of its chicks) was very satisfying in the mornings.
Click to enlarge
Some Ideas Are Too Dangerous To Allow
Apparently, the Climate Audit blog had a posting about a serious error in the climate data that NASA has been using--showing that contrary to what the global warming true believers wanted, 1998 was not the hottest year on record, but 1934. And guess what? Power and Control reports:It appears that Climate Audit after posting on a NASA error that made 1998 the warmest year on record (it is now second warmest after 1934) Power and Control link has been hit with a denial of service attack according to a commenter at Watts Up With That?
Now, this site suggests that it could be because of an overwhelming volume of traffic after both Rush Limbaugh and Instapundit mentioned it at once--but hours later, it's still down. That's more likely a Denial of Service attack.
Evidently the news was too much for some people to bear.
New Articles From Shotgun News Up
I hadn't updated the articles from Shotgun News since March of 2006, and I knew that I should do so, but just hadn't gotten around to it--and there's a lot of good stuff in those articles, all meticulously sourced.
Then a detective with a Florida police department contacted me, explaining that he received part of my article series Psychosis and Tragedy series--and he wanted the rest of it for other police officers in his department.
Anyway, here's the list of articles (and remember, you are obligated by the software license that you agreed to when you started reading this blog, which you have doubtless forgotten by now, to follow every link, and look for typos and HTML errors, so get to work!):
"News From All Over," Shotgun News, April 1, 2006, pp. 26-28 "Amending the Maryland Constitution," Shotgun News, May 1, 2006, pp. 26-28 "Victories in Kansas and Nebraska," Shotgun News, June 1, 2006, pp. 26-28 "The Wisconsin Supreme Court Defines 'Reasonable'," Shotgun News, July 1, 2006, pp. 26-28 "Odds and Ends," Shotgun News, August 1, 2006 "Lifetime Licenses," Shotgun News, September 1, 2006 "Emergency Gun Confiscations," Shotgun News, October 1, 2006 "George Bush Is Not Running," Shotgun News, November 1, 2006 "School Shootings,"Shotgun News, December 1, 2006 "A Tough Two Years," Shotgun News, January 1, 2007 "Two Victories," Shotgun News, February 1, 2007 "Originalism Matters," Shotgun News, March 1, 2007 "Is Compromise A Dirty Word?" Shotgun News, April 1, 2007 "Parker v. D.C.," Shotgun News, May 1, 2007 "Machine Guns in the Classroom," Shotgun News, June 1, 2007, pp. 26-27 "Psychosis and Tragedy," Shotgun News, July 1, 2007, pp. 26-28 "Psychosis and Tragedy, Part 2," Shotgun News, August 1, 2007, pp. 26-28, 30
Oh, So That's What Causes School Shootings...
There are times that you wonder if these groups are really agent provocateurs for social conservatives. The Gay Straight Alliance website has this amazing excuse for murder at the bottom of it: WITHOUT GSA ACCESS, STUDENTS ARE FORCED TO SIMPLY KILL CLASSMATES WHO TAUNT & BULLY - SHOOTING, STABBING AND POISONING ARE THE COMMON FORMS OF RETRIBUTION. FAR TOO MANY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS LIKE BULLYING CHILDREN TO THE POINT WHERE RETRIBUTION AGAINST CLASSMATES AND FACULTY IS ONLY OPTION TO REDRESS RELENTLESS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN MANY REGIONS. SPECIOUSLY-NAMED "PRO-FAMILY" LEADERS ARE CHILD MOLESTERS WHO MAKE MONEY STIGMATIZING HOMOSEXUALITY TO SILENCE GAY VICTIMS; EVERY 2 MINUTES IN THE USA ANOTHER GLBT AMERICAN DIES AS A RESULT OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
Oh yes, all caps makes it so much more persuasive!
I do not doubt that bullying plays some part in causing some of the violence in schools. I do not doubt that there are schools when homosexuals get bullied. But nerds get bullied too (I speak from experience), as do kids who wear glasses when no one else is wearing them yet (I speak from experience), as do smart kids, and slow kids, kids of all sorts who are "different."
There's no question that a lot of schools have failed to do enough about bullying--but I don't believe for a second that "FAR TOO MANY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS LIKE BULLYING CHILDREN." They sometimes lack the will to do much about it, or do not realize the extent or the seriousness of the problem. Realistically, if the values of the kids are that bullying is okay (as is unfortunately quite common), there's a limit to what school administrators can do.
But this notion that if school districts don't allow "Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs" then gay kids have no choice but murder is essentially making excuses for murder. And oddly enough, for all the school shooting incidents that I can recall reading about, I can't remember ever seeing homosexuality mentioned as a factor.
Pro-family leaders are child molesters? Not, "Some pro-family leaders" or "many" or even "disproportionately." Fascinating. If any of them claimed that "homosexuals are child molesters," without any qualifiers or limiters, that would be clear evidence of homophobia. What's this?
That's 30 an hour, 720 a day, 262,800 a year. Huh? What kind of "human rights violations" (other than murder) cause 262,800 homosexual Americans to die each year? That's about 16 times the number of all murders, and more than eight times the suicide rate. Isn't it wonderful to be able to just make up numbers as you wish?
EVERY 2 MINUTES IN THE USA ANOTHER GLBT AMERICAN DIES AS A RESULT OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS
You know, we all need to believe that our website is valuable, but someone is pretty arrogant when they write:Gay Straight Alliance
Oh yes, definitely in the top 10% of educational places on the web, without question--and especially educational about how often homosexual Americans die of human rights abuses.
Welcome to the Gay Straight Alliance portal, one of the most educational places on the web updated daily and dedicated to each person who strives for human rights.
UPDATE: One of the gay sites says that the website above isn't an official gay organization site, and isn't connected to the Gay Straight Alliance clubs. The domain name is owned by a person who has a number of gay websites, so it doesn't appear to be a false flag operation.
More About That Other Armed America
Newsweek has a slideshow about Kyle Cassidy's book, which presents the pretty typical gun owners that I know are the average in America. This must drive the gun control nuts crazy!
Brainstorming for Terrorists
Steven Levitt is already on my list of economists with an honesty problem--as the letter he had to write to settle a lawsuit recently pointed out--but now we have this incredibly stupid item by him in the New York Times that asks readers to post suggestions on how terrorists might attack us, taking advantage of our vunerabilities. Of course, since he is very supportive of disarming law-abiding people, he suggests that terrorists could take advantage of the relatively free access to rifles and ammunition by sending out 20 teams to randomly shoot people in American cities, provoking terror, in the style of the Beltway Sniper.
I'm sure that Levitt is hoping that such actions would give us the very restrictive gun control laws that he and many other liberals want; I think it would more likely give us martial law, and mass roundups of Muslims, especially since we now know that the Beltway Sniper team was, in fact, Muslim, and provoked by hatred of the United States.
Now, it is certainly true that there is some value in understanding our vunerabilities. Levitt could have performed a very useful public service by asking readers to email him their ideas, and then providing those to Homeland Security as a list of things to worry about. But making them publicly visible? A terrible idea. As much as Levitt and some of his readers want to believe that they aren't providing any new ideas to the terrorists, this is almost certainly not true.
Terrorists within the United States probably count in the dozens to hundreds (I'm hoping), and most of them haven't been here long enough to be fully engaged in our culture. Even if they are spending 16 hours a day looking for vunerabilities, and concocting schemes to take advantage of them, they are unlikely to figure out all the possibilities that Levitt's readers and commenters will. Making these ideas publicly visible is brainstorming for the terrorists. If the New York Times had any sense of responsibility, it would immediately take down the comments.
Once terrorist attacks start in the U.S., as much as some want to believe that it will make Americans see the error of their ways, cut off aid to Israel, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, recognize Hamas and Iran, apologize for everything that we have ever done to anyone anywhere, etc.--it won't have that effect. It will lead to actions and laws that even the ACLU's puppets in black robes will be able to justify because of the exigent circumstances requiring it.
An Oddly Ironic Name
The August 9, 2007 Idaho Statesman had an article about the extraordinarily rough year that Boise is having for murder--nine so far, which is quite remarkable for this place. One of the victims, I am guessing, is Native American, with an oddly perfect name:Feb. 16: Yazzie Billie Plentywounds, 26, was found dead in a Boise Bench field, shot six times. No one has been arrested.
My guess is that one of her ancestors was a strong and courageous warrior who survived a battle with many injuries, and acquired that name as a statement of his strength. Unfortunately, Ms. Plentywounds wasn't so fortunate.
In spite of having extremely lax gun control laws, of the nine murders so far this year, only two seem to involve a gun. The rest are knives, arson, beatings, and one recent murder where the cause of death is still uncertain. (That's usually not difficult to figure out if a gun was used.)
UPDATE: A reader points out that it is Mr. Plentywounds, and points to this Wanted poster for him from a couple of years back.
Sarcasm & Brain Structure
Interesting article from May 23, 2005 New Scientist about research into brain structure and sarcasm:
It is, when you think about it, quite amazing that we can understand each other with the complexity of sarcasm added to the equation. How, exactly, do you know that someone is being sarcastic? There's clearly some information provided by the sarcastic speaker that helps you figure that out. Sometimes, you figure it out because otherwise the statement makes no sense. And look how complicated it gets to understand sarcasm in email, where you have no tone at all!
Scientific Research on Global Warming & Solar Activity
I'm impressed. Every time I do a search for more information on global warming, there seems to be something new out there--or at least, stuff that was already out there is linked by someone that I find with a search. Like this very well done page filled with graphs and charts from a variety of books and papers about the relationship between solar activity and climate change. And this series of graphs showing temperature variations in historic times, sunspot cycles, and solar irradiation variation.
Or this article from the November 2, 2003 New Scientist:
Yes, unclear is a very good word. I mean, why would anyone think that changes in the behavior of the source of nearly all heat on this planet might affect our climate?Global warming
Lott v. Levitt Suit
Here's the letter where Levitt basically admits that previous letters attacking Lott's integrity wasn't just wrong--but that Levitt made statements that he knew were false.
It's about as self-damning of a letter as an academic can write--I mean, without admitting to have shot JFK.
Lunatic Fringes Meet
I mentioned a few days ago a report from Zombietime.com about how neo-Nazi literature is being distributed in the Bay Area--and apparently because it says pretty much the same thing that leftist antiwar literature does, the local news media are being careful not to let their viewers know how much neo-Nazis and the billionaires' wing of the Democratic Party have in common.
One of my readers pointed me to the Institute for Historical Review website, which has a link to an article by Glenn Greenwald (one of the antiwar leftists). In case you are wondering, "Where have I heard of the Institute for Historical Review before?" They lost a lawsuit some years ago when they offered $50,000 to anyone that could prove the Holocaust happened--and then refused to pay one of the survivors who came forward, and proved it in court. Their own attempts to distance themselves from Holocaust denial are almost funny:Detractors of the IHR have often mischaracterized it as a “Holocaust denial” organization. This smear is completely at variance with the facts. The Institute does not “deny the Holocaust.” Every responsible scholar of twentieth century history acknowledges the great catastrophe that befell European Jewry during World War II.
Now, Greenwald isn't responsible for the IHR's linking to his article--but if you read the list of news items on the IHR's main page, there's no question where they stand about the Iraq War--on the same side with the antiwar leftists.
All the same, the IHR has over the years published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods. IHR publications have devoted considerable attention to this issue because it plays an enormously significant role in the cultural and political life of America and much of the world. As a number of Jewish scholars have acknowledged, the “Holocaust” campaign is a major weapon in the Jewish-Zionist arsenal. It is used to justify otherwise unjustifiable Israeli policies, and to extort enormous sums of money, especially from European countries and companies.
Temperature Monitoring Station--With 22 Air Conditioners Within 100 Feet
That troublemaker over at Watts Up With That? keeps running around to the weather stations that provide the U.S. data about global warming history. I've mentioned this troublemaker before. The latest is another marvel:
Here's another gem, where he shows you the graph--and it doesn't take much smarts to figure out what year the A/C compressor was installed right next to the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climate Network) weather station.
...
If each A/C unit was 2000 BTU, that would be 22x2000=44,000 BTU of waste heat dumped within 100 feet of the Stevenson Screen where the thermometer is located.
Has Anyone Received a Review Copy of My Book Armed America?
I am beginning to suspect that very, very few (if any) review copies were sent out to bloggers--hence, the complete lack of attention that it has received from pro-gun bloggers who get thousands of visitors an hour.
This Is Not a Positive Sign For American Culture
New York City is considering a symbolic ordinance expressing their disapproval of the use of the words "bitch" and "ho." (For those of you who are over 40--"ho" is the black English mispronounciation of "whore.")The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.
The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.
Professor Volokh points out that the measure actually doesn't do anything, and therefore doesn't qualify as a First Amendment violation:
...
But in any event, let's not make a federal case out of this: The proposed resolution may be condemned on various grounds, but not because it violates anyone's free speech rights.
What I found most troubling is the degraded state of New York City residents. From that same New York Times article:While the bill also bans the slang word “ho,” the b-word appears to have acquired more shades of meaning among various groups, ranging from a term of camaraderie to, in a gerund form, an expression of emphatic approval. Ms. Mealy acknowledged that the measure was unenforceable, but she argued that it would carry symbolic power against the pejorative uses of the word. Even so, a number of New Yorkers said they were taken aback by the idea of prohibiting a term that they not only use, but do so with relish and affection.
Paging Bill Cosby! Paging Bill Cosby!
“Half my conversation would be gone,” said Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist, whom a reporter encountered on his bicycle on Sunday night on the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street. Mr. Musto, widely known for his coverage of celebrity gossip, dismissed the idea as absurd.
“On the downtown club scene,” he said, munching on an apple, the two terms are often used as terms of endearment. “We divest any negative implication from the word and toss it around with love.”
Darris James, 31, an architect from Brooklyn who was outside the Duplex, a piano bar in the West Village, on Sunday night was similarly opposed. “Hell, if I can’t say bitch, I wouldn’t be able to call half my friends.”
They may not have been the kinds of reaction that Ms. Mealy, a Detroit-born former transit worker serving her first term, was expecting. “They buried the n-word, but what about the other words that really affect women, such as ‘b,’ and ‘ho’? That’s a vile attack on our womanhood,” Ms. Mealy said in a telephone interview. “In listening to my other colleagues, that they say that to their wives or their friends, we have gotten really complacent with it.”
San Francisco Chronicle Headed Farther Left?
The East Bay Express reports on the new direction of the San Francisco Chronicle, which has recently laid off a number of its reporters:
More Liars
Michelle Malkin has a nice compilation of all the soldiers who have written about war atrocities in Iraq to make the left happy--and how they have turned out to be liars:
Transgenderism & Mutilation
Eric Scheie over at Classical Values points to the increasing use of drugs to interfere with the sexual development of children--and he's not happy about it: I've always been a bit skeptical about the transgender phenomenon, because I've known male-to-females who have been bitterly disappointed with the results, and who confided in me that they wouldn't have had the surgery if they had the choice to do it all over again.
The preferred drug for the controversial process is Lupron Depot. Slogan for the pediatric version: "Pause the child within." It's potent, yet reversible, and incredibly expensive, and for transgender kids backed by increasingly supportive parents, it's ushering in a new era. Boys who've always known they were girls won't get beards or deep voices. Girls who feel like boys will never have to grow breasts or tinker with a tampon.
My concern is that there are always certain individuals who cannot handle being effeminate males or masculine females, who feel pressured by society to fit in, and who, without fully thinking it through, can commit themselves to "conform" to something external to their individual uniqueness.
A Reminder Of What San Francisco Is All About
Warning: Zombietime has photographed the San Francisco part of World Naked Bike Ride 2007. It was not misadvertised, this is not a work-safe link to click to--lots of completely naked people walking around and bicycling through San Francisco. As Zombietime points out, a lot of this just an excuse for exhibitionism by the crowd that thinks bicycling is a political strategy against George Bush.
Oh, and the Trans March held on June 22, 2007 in San Francisco, also photographed by Zombietime. This isn't quite as shocking, but still not really work-safe. If you don't know what a trans march is? Well, from their website:We are calling for this march to demonstrate that we are a significant and growing portion of the lgbtiq community; to increase our visibility and presence in the tgiqlb community and the overall community at large; to encourage more trans and gender-variant people to come out; to build connections among ftm, mtf, bayot, crossdressers, sadhin, hijra, transvestites, bantut, drag queens, drag kings, mahu, transsexuals, bakla, travesti, genderqueers, kathoey, two spirit, intersex and those with other labels for themselves and no labels for themselves, those who see gender as having more than two options, and those who live between the existing options; to support one another as a community, through all of our struggles; to speak out against violence, hate, transphobia, and the oppression of any and all of us under the existing social structure; and to be fabulous and powerful in the company of others that are fabulous and powerful.
If most of this looks like gobbledygook or typographical errors, that's because you don't keep up on the rapidly enlarging community of the hopelessly weird. There used to be "lgb" which means "lesbian, gay, and bisexual." Then it morphed into "lgbt" which included transgendered sorts.
Somewhere the "q" got added in for those people who are proud and loud about being "queer." Queer? Isn't that an insult? Oh no. This is a crowd that thinks that most homosexuals are too heteronormative in their behavior--meaning that many homosexual men act like men, and many homosexual women act like women. The self-defined queers revel in acting like the nasty stereotypes of homosexuals. For men, simpering, mincing, effeminate, and histronic--really, acting like an exaggeration of a 13 year old girl that hasn't grown up. For women, the bull dyke stereotype of a blue collar beer belching man.
What about the "i" in "lbtiq" above? Heck if I know. Interspecies, perhaps?
If homosexuals were really just like straight people, "except for who they love," they wouldn't be forming common cause with this bunch of kooks, sickos, and exhibitionists. The more I lived in the Bay Area, the more I saw of this emerging sickness, and the more persuaded I was to take a serious look at the available research about homosexuality--and the more obvious it was that this is not an alternative lifestyle.
Reasons To Be Careful
Regular readers know that I support the right to be armed for self-defense. I run the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog where my co-bloggers and me link to news stories of American civilians (not police officers) defend themselves with guns. Most of the time, these are incidents where it is hard to get too heart-broken about the death of the criminal. Incidents like this one. Or this one. Or this one.
There have been other incidents over the years where the shooter was legally in the right, because the shooter had good reason to fear death or great bodily injury, but you still shake your head that someone had to die over such a stupid argument. These aren't terribly common, but they do happen, and we report them.
And there are some incidents (and I emphasize "some" because they aren't very common) that happen that are a reminder that living in fear--even when that fear is completely justified--can have tragic results. Here's one of those cases. My co-blogger Pete linked to this story from the August 5, 2007 San Antonio Express-News:
That Lemes's house had a door with a broken lock at first sounds implausible--but I recently discovered that the slider on my house (which is less than two years old) had a lock that was no longer working. I discovered it only because we were going on a trip.
Lemes certainly did not need to chase Glass down the street, gun in hand. It was lawful to do so. Armed pursuit of a fleeing felon, and even use of deadly force by a civilian is lawful. But it was not particularly wise--and Lemes is certainly going to be fighting a civil suit over this fateful decision. It is conceivable that Lemes may still face criminal charges.
Lemes claimed that Glass took a swing at him, and that he fired out of fear for his life. This news account suggests that the bullet wounds were all in the front of the body--which at least makes Lemes' claim that he was engaged in self-defense plausible.
I will be curious to know if the autopsy on Glass shows intoxicants in his system. This is by far the most likely explanation for both the mistaken entry into the wrong house and Glass' apparent aggressive actions against Lemes. Even if that turns out to be the case, this was a tragedy, one that will cause Lemes enormous difficulties for years.
If Lemes had shot Glass inside Lemes' home, this wouldn't even be under discussion. Glass' mistaken entry at night would have been recognized as a tragedy, but there would be no question about Lemes being in the right. The pursuit of Glass outside was at least a big mistake.
What? You Aren't Pro-Choice?
You may be aware of the Duggars, an Arkansas family, who just had their 17th child. I confess that the accounts that I read of them sounds a bit odd--giving every child a first name that starts with a "J"--but as I (and others) have pointed out before, demography is destiny. Evangelical Christians like the Duggars having children means that their culture will survive into the next generation.
If you want to see how tremendously hate-filled the left is, read the comments on the news story in the August 3, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle, here. Over here, however, is a pro-choicer who admits after thinking about it for a while:Reproductive rights go both ways. It's HER uterus. PERIOD. She can do whatever she wants with it, and until my taxes start paying for her child-rearing, I should have a nice cup of [colorful expression deleted] and tend to my own business. As far as I can tell, these folks are not on welfare or any type of government aid. The kids are home-schooled, so they're not clogging the public school system. They're living in a 7000 square-foot home, not holed up in a log cabin in the Ozarks, inbreeding and plotting a government overthrow, or refusing to pay their taxes. The kids are well-nourished and well-dressed. We're not hearing about the girls being married off to cousins, or sold into prostitution. The boys aren't being arrested for hate crimes, drug trafficking, or gang activity.
It is a rather interesting question, isn't it? Do pro-choicers really mean it when they say they are "pro-choice"? I'm afraid that a lot of the crowd you see commenting at the San Francisco Chronicle website are just pro-abortion, and anti-children.
So, you know what? Live and let live.
UPDATE: Adam Graham has a roundup of liberal reactions to the Duggars. So much for tolerance!
The Roeaux Effect
Considerettes points to how leftists moving to Canada could change American politics:
Considerettes calls this loss of American leftists to Canada the Roeaux Effect as a clever pun on "Roe" with a French Canadian accent! Good points, but unfortunately, some of these American emigres are keeping their American citizenship--and I presume will continue to vote leftist, and send huge quantities of money to support leftist causes.
Lunatic Fringes
Zombietime has a very interesting investigative report pointing out that the literature and slogans of neo-Nazi literature being distributed in the Bay Area is astonishingly similar to the leftist antiwar protest stuff: The question that nags at me is this:
This isn't really much of a surprise. Neo-Nazi groups, as much as they and the left like to describe them as "far right" really aren't. If you've read The Turner Diaries, you may have been struck--as I was--by how much of neo-Nazi doctrine really is "national socialist." For example, in The Turner Diaries, Hispanics (even naturalized and native-born U.S. citizens) are deported so that their jobs can go to poor, unskilled whites.
Why did the media fail to describe the "anti-Semitic" literature distributed by W.A.R. in Berkeley? The reporters surely saw the material, as most of the other flyers and publications were described in the various news reports. Of them all, it seems only that one was left unmentioned.
Was this not a random oversight, but instead a conscious or subconscious decision? One wonders if the reporters, upon seeing the anti-Israel flyer and perhaps realizing that its sentiment was identical to the sentiment of the anti-war movement, decided to just sweep that particular detail under the rug.
All the reports mention the fact that there was anti-Semitic material found, and it was decried and condemned by the various people quoted in the article. But then why -- when the exact same messages are displayed at left-wing rallies -- does the media not produce news reports exposing the anti-Semitism of the "peace movement"?
How To Reduce Greenhouse Gases...Raise the Speed Limit!
At least, that's what One Hand Clapping suggests here. He points out that for many trips, it makes more sense to drive than to fly if your primary concern is carbon dioxide production. But it takes a long time to drive at 65 or 75 mph, compared to flying.
This last weekend, my wife and I drove to Rexburg, Idaho--which was about a five hour drive. Speed limits on I-84 for most of the distance we drove are 75 mph. I actually set the cruise control at 82 mph for most of the trip to Rexburg, and coming back, I set the cruise control at 90 mph. While we passed a lot of trucks, I would say that based on the cars that we passed or that passed us, our speed was about 65th or 70th percentile. We passed more cars than passed us, but not dramatically so.
On much of I-84, in daylight, you can set the speed limit at perhaps 100 mph, and I doubt that it would make much of a difference in accident or death rates. This would cut at least an hour off the drive--perhaps more--and make me less tempted to fly the next time we go to Rexburg.
But is it safe? Unlike a lot of the other highways, I-84 is fenced, so there's almost no wildlife (and no livestock) crossing the road. I-84 is also a controlled access road, so you don't have the vehicles pulling onto the highway, either.
The one area where I would be a bit concerned about raising the speed limit would be tires. I believe most passenger car tires sold in the U.S. now are S-speed rated (intended for unlimited use at 113 mph), but there are a lot of people out there who don't check their tire pressures, ever. A tire that is perfectly safe at 100 mph when properly inflated can suffer catastrophic failure if it is severely underinflated.
Someone's PR Firm Did A Great Job
Kyle Cassidy published a book this year titled Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes. Unfortunately, it is very similar in title to my book Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie.
Cassidy's book is coffee table book of pictures of American gun owners. My book is a serious piece of historical research. So do a Google search for "Armed America" and you will see that whoever his PR firm is did a much better job of getting press for it. Or maybe I need to write books with lots of pretty pictures, and not so many words.
Cluelessness: We All Want To End The Iraq War
My daughter put up something on her blog that has been floating around the Internet about the sacrifices our soldiers are making. I agree with the sentiments of it completely--but it strikes me as a bit too much of an emotional appeal for me to blog myself. However, it does expose one of the dangers of relying on an image that you don't control.
The picture that goes with:You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
was at the Texans for Peace website. I guess once they found out that someone was using this picture to make Americans sympathize with our soldiers, they had no choice but to replace it with a picture that just says, "END THE WAR IN IRAQ!"
He patrols the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.
Now, I could understand that they might be upset if they are getting lots of hits on their website from people using that picture--especially since their goal isn't to create sympathy for the soldiers, but to get them brought home. But removing the picture completely makes far more sense than putting up something so simplistic as "END THE WAR IN IRAQ!" Lots of us want to end the war in Iraq. Withdrawing U.S. forces, however, won't end the war in Iraq. It will just mean that the people that use piano wire to cut faces off and use power tools to torture Iraqis won't have anyone blocking their path to power.
Alamar Ranch (Continued)
I mentioned the other day that my daughter spoke at the Boise County Planning Commission hearing as well. Here's what she had to say. I strongly encourage you to read it in full, to see how important it is to not give up on a troubled teenager.
Armed Bystanders
One of the claims that gun control supporters often make is that it doesn't do any good to be armed for self-defense, because a criminal will shoot you before you can draw your gun. This is wrong for several reasons:
1. Most violent crimes aren't committed with guns. Bad guys (as in the example below) sometimes are using knives or other contact weapons.
2. There is a surprisingly large number of cases where the criminal has his gun out, and the victim still has time to draw and fire before the criminal can pull the trigger. This may be because the criminals are drunk or otherwise intoxicated, and their reflexes are slow. But an acquaintance of mine used to keep two cap pistols that he would use for demonstrations where he would have the gun control supporter aim one of the toy guns at him--and he would consistently draw and fire his before the person playing the criminal could pull the trigger.
3. The case below is a reminder that while a bystander who observes a crime may not be able to intervene in time to stop it, he can intervene in time to make sure that the criminal doesn't get away--and doesn't kill the witnesses. From the August 5, 2007 KIRO channel 7 (Seattle):SEATTLE -- Police said a man fatally stabbed a 48-year-old woman at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in south Seattle, then was shot and killed by a man who witnessed the attack.
UPDATE: A reader points out that the reason that victims manage to draw and fire before the criminal even pulls the trigger is that many criminals are not expecting any resistance--much less armed resistance. My guess is that violent criminals are disproportionately of average or less intelligence; people with criminal tendencies and superior intelligence usually get themselves elected to public office instead. If a thug has not thought out what he are going to do in advance, responding to unexpected resistance may force him to think through his options a bit too long.
According to police, the woman had a restraining order against the man who stabbed her at the 9100 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way during a birthday party early Sunday morning.
People at the scene tried to stop the attacker, and at least one other person was injured during that struggle, authorities said.
Police said the woman was pronounced dead at the scene.
The 39-year-old man suspected of stabbing the victim was the woman's former husband. He was transported to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries that he later died from, officials said.
Police said they questioned the shooter, a DJ at the party, who said he did not know the stabbing victim or her attacker. Authorities said he was released and no charges will be filed against him.
This goes both directions. If you are a good guy, this is also a good reason to consider all the possible situations that may come up, and figure out the appropriate responses to a criminal attack. From growing up in Los Angeles, I approach an ATM with considerable wariness, looking around for potential attackers. Similarly, when I was visiting Philadelphia several years ago, I was often walking on streets that were a little worrisome; I spent quite a bit of time planning my sequence of actions in the event that I was confronted by a robber.
I have had two terribly frightening experiences in my life when I thought that I was going to have to draw a gun and shoot someone. Afterwards, I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the circumstances, and exactly what the circumstances were that would both morally and legally justified drawing and then shooting someone. It is a sobering experience when you are in the situation, and it is best to have considered your options and your reasons for the decisions you might have to make when you are not suffering from adrenalin pumping through your system.
Another Tragedy of the Mental Health System
From the August 5, 2007 New Jersey Daily Herald:Samuel Ramos, 19, has been mentally ill and in trouble with the law for years. One day, he drove to a gas station and tried to drive off in someone else's car.
He wound up in the Passaic County Jail, charged with carjacking. Within two weeks, his cellmate was dead, and officials say Ramos killed him.
Experts and advocates say the things that Ramos experienced leading to his alleged crime happen all too often.
He had a troubled past, constant movement in and out of the corrections system, difficulty finding help in an outpatient mental-health clinic and imprisonment for a crime that may have had more to do with his mental illness than criminal intent.
Some jails around the state are starting programs to keep the mentally ill out of jails, which advocates say are poorly equipped to care for them.
The state said it is working to beef up outpatient care at clinics, where waits can be long for people who aren't facing immediate crisis.
But if the system had improved in time for Samuel Ramos, perhaps Ramon Aponte would still be alive.
Troubled at an early age
Maria Diaz said her son was fighting and getting in trouble at age 9 before a school psychologist diagnosed him with depression. He received counseling at a local hospital and was put on psychotropic medication at age 11.
Ramos' problems worsened after his brother, Juan, was shot to death outside a liquor store in Paterson in 2003. Soon afterward, Ramos, at 15, went to juvenile detention on a drug charge, his mother said.
He would bounce from home to various juvenile detention facilities for the next three years. He came back to live with his mother in April 2006 and stayed there until he was arrested on June 23.
This summer, Ramos started deteriorating mentally, but his family encountered roadblocks when they tried to get him help, they say.
Ramos' sister, Stephanie, said her brother announced suddenly one day that he had to leave the house and would not wait for her to come with him. He drove his own car to a nearby service station and tried to fill up the tank but didn't have any money, according to a witness.
When another customer, Purce Farrish, 55, went to pay for his gas inside, Ramos allegedly got into his car. Farrish managed to wriggle into the back window as Ramos started the vehicle. A struggle ensued, Ramos ran over Farrish's foot and Farrish gained control of the car. Ramos ran.
Farrish said Ramos' family and the station attendants told him that Ramos was mentally ill. Although unhurt, Farrish pressed charges, because, he said, he thought Ramos could be dangerous and might get help in jail.
Officials say Ramos fought with fellow inmates, both at the Paterson municipal jail, where he was first taken, and the county jail.
At the county jail, he was placed in a special detention cell for "problem" inmates who are mentally ill. His mother said she called repeatedly to ask that he be treated, but does not think he received any help.
Ramos shared a cell with Ramon Aponte, a 50-year-old in for violation of parole for burglary, theft and making terroristic threats, according to the state Parole Board.
Aponte was suicidal and being held in the cell for observation before a mental-health evaluation, Sheriff's Department spokesman William J. Maer said. The appointment was to have taken place the day Aponte was slain.
Finding outpatient care
Providers of outpatient mental health care say funding has not kept up with increased demand caused by the closing of large state mental health hospitals. Clinics treat the worst cases first, and everyone else waits.
"We get calls a lot where somebody really needs help – they're not necessarily a harm to themselves or others, so they can't walk into an emergency room and get help immediately," said Joanne Green, executive director of the Mental Health Association in Passaic County. "They don't have private insurance, so they have to go to a clinic, and it's, like, two months to get an appointment."
Sybil Schreiber, executive director at the Mental Health Clinic of Passaic, said her clinic has a waiting list and accepts only Passaic city residents because it is often "swamped."
How Smart Do You Have To Be To Operate a Gas Pump?
Many years ago, I mentioned the absurdity of Oregon's law that prohibited self-service gasoline stations--a scheme for creating jobs for unskilled people with no other job prospects. One huffy liberal Oregonian responded that there was a good public safety reason for the law: Oregonians weren't smart enough to pump their own gas without training. Other Oregonians laughed at this, and correctly identified that the ban was a jobs program.
This evening, we stopped at the Albertson's gas station and minimart on the way home, and the lone clerk had to run outside. "There was a customer from Oregon--he couldn't figure out how to operate a gas pump." I shake my head in disbelief and horror. This guy can drive a car, but can't figure out from the very detailed instructions on the pump out to fill up his car? I am beginning to understand Oregon politics a bit better.
Rexburg, Idaho
As my previous posting mentioned, Rexburg is the home of BYU-Idaho, a Mormon school. As you might expect, it's about as squeaky clean as a town can be. (Boise is Sin City by comparison.) There are about 17,000 people there. It is growing fast--but downtown looks like a lot of other small Idaho towns.
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After the competition in which my wife's bagpipe and drum band played, we went to a sandwich shop for dinner recommended by a band member who had attended BYU-Idaho:
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One of the nice aspects of traveling to small towns across America is the discovery of local, non-chain restaurants that have their own unique style and flavor--and Millhollow is one of those discoveries. Great sandwiches at a price that will shock those of you from the coasts!
Is This Legal?
Rexburg, Idaho, is where Brigham Young University-Idaho (a Mormon private university) is located. When I was there over the weekend, I saw dozens of signs that looked like they might have drifted out of the 1950s:
Apparently, if you don't live on campus at BYU-Idaho, you are required to live in approved off-campus housing--and single men can only live in apartment buildings with other single men, and ditto for single women.
Now, let me be clear: I think that if BYU-Idaho wants to impose a requirement like this for its students, it should have that right. They are concerned about putting single young men and women in close proximity, tempting them to sexual immorality, and are trying to make sure that this doesn't happen. Since many (all?) public universities have gone to co-ed dorms over the last twenty years, I can somewhat understand BYU-Idaho's concerns. I can see why they might regard allowing young men and young women to share an apartment as a recipe for cohabitation.
I am hard pressed to see how requiring them to live in separate buildings enhances chastity. The distance between apartments in separate buildings was sometimes less than the distance between apartments within the same building. But okay, if BYU-Idaho students consider this absurd, then they don't have to go to BYU-Idaho. (And before you email me: "What about homosexual Mormons?" They do exist; I blogged several years ago about a Mormon man living a double life: sexually abused as a child, who believed that this was what caused his homosexuality, which led to his contraction of AIDS and subsequent death.)
What concerns me is that I'm not sure how this can possibly be legal. Under the Fair Housing Act:As made applicable by section 803 of this title and except as exempted by sections 803(b) and 807 of this title, it shall be unlawful--
Maybe there's some exemption for sex discrimination when done by a university in off-campus housing, but I can't immediately find it. Craig's List was being sued a few years ago for allowing people to post "roommate wanted" ads that specified the sex of the desired roommate.
(a) To refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.
(b) To discriminate against any person in the terms, conditions, or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling, or in the provision of services or facilities in connection therewith, because of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin.
(c) To make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.
I understand why the Fair Housing Act was passed, and I have only a vague intellectual discomfort with it. But I find myself wondering: why is this blatant discrimination above lawful in Rexburg? And if it isn't lawful, why are landlords allowed to not only discriminate based on sex, but advertise it loudly?
Sometimes the best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it to its absurd limits.
UPDATE: A reader points to this statement from BYU-Idaho that suggests that Title IX has an exemption for housing which is strictly for students, and does not allow non-students.
Photographers at Antiwar Demonstrations
I mentioned a couple of days ago my sister's concern about what she described as "the CIA" photographing people at antiwar protests. I received a number of interesting responses. One person suggested that people like zombietime.com might be the photographers in question--who just like to take pictures of the politically deranged at work. (Note: some of the pictures that zombietime.com features are not work-safe, and some are truly disgusting--such as members of Breasts Not Bombs protesting naked--and demonstrating that some of their members are men who haven't completed the sex change process, with female breasts, and male genitals.) This report from the Anti-American July 4th celebration in San Francisco really captures the ability of the left to be offensive, vulgar, and filled with ahistorical inconsistency all at once!
Another reader described submitting a Freedom of Information Act request some years ago about himself:When I was young and nasty stuff in El Salvador and elsewhere was causing there to be talk of re-instituting the draft, I attended a couple of "anti-war rallies." One of them was at UC Berkeley's Sather Gate. It was a pretty innocuous gathering whose only memorable moment was that of Daniel Ellsberg burning his draft card. There were no obvious cameras in attendance.
Another reader pointed to this Washington Post article of April 3, 2007:
Many years later, I did the FIOA requests to see what would come up. I had to be persistent. Eventually, I got my package. Most of it was noise, but interestingly, there was a picture of several people that included me at the rally just mentioned above. To this day, I don't know how 'they' correlated me in the crowd with one [name deleted]. If I remember correctly, that picture was courtesy of the FBI. There was nothing at all inflammatory in the remainder of the packet.A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
Hmmm. I can imagine how that would be appropriate. This December 13, 1999 Time magazine article about anarchists in Seattle points out the objectives of some of the lunatic fringe groups (which doesn't necessarily include every antiwar protester):
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.
But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.
The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.
FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.
The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.
Similar intelligence-gathering operations have been reported in New York, where a local police intelligence unit tried to infiltrate groups planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and in Colorado, where records surfaced showing that the FBI collected names and license plates of people protesting timber industry practices at a 2002 industry convention.
Several federal courts have ruled that intelligence agencies can monitor domestic groups only when there is reason to believe the group is engaged in criminal activity. Experts in police conduct say it is hard to imagine how asking questions about a person's political views would be appropriate in a trespassing case.The anarchist movement today is a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine. Ironically, the groups are increasingly organized; the Pacific Northwest in particular, with its unionist past, grungy youth-culture present and ever Green future, is an anarchist hotbed. Add to that the hundreds of under-25ers from San Francisco to Vancouver who spent months learning nonviolent civil disobedience from groups like the Ruckus Society and the Direct Action Network. "The WTO," notes Ruckus Society coordinator Han Shan, "gave us home-field advantage by coming to Seattle." The '98 trashing of a Eugene, Ore., NikeTown was an informal dry run for last week's mayhem, some of whose perpetrators call themselves the Eugene Brickthrowers Local 666. "Their goal is to take things to the furthest edge of acceptability," says Seattle activist Dana Schuerholz of the Eugene radicals, "to get their message out by literally smashing the state."
If there was not significant overlap between the anarchist riot bunch and the antiwar protesters, there would seem little good reason for the FBI to be taking pictures. But there is substantial overlap there, and identifying particular violent criminals who have a history of violent attacks in cities across the country--such as this incident described in the July 10, 2005 San Francisco Chronicle--seems to be a legitimate action:
That's the anarchist's primal goal: to replace central government with the sort of self-sufficient, egalitarian collective now aborning at 918 Virginia Street, a largely vacant building on the edge of downtown Seattle. The "squat" popped up two weeks ago as a protesters' crash pad. About 100 people a night sleep there. There's no power or water, but organizers have set up a kitchen and security and toilet systems. House rules hang on one wall: NO ILLEGAL DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO WEAPONS and so on, ending with NO VIOLENCE.
Oops. Most anarchists publicly decried last week's vandalism, which was perpetrated in part by local teens whose direct actions for social justice consisted of looting StarTACs from a cell-phone store. "Several press accounts have stated that there were only 'hundreds of anarchists'" in Seattle, an online activist wrote last week. "This would be true if you only counted teenagers dressed in black. This would have left out...the vast majority of us, who look just plain ole working class."A San Francisco police officer was in serious condition with a head injury and three suspects were in custody Saturday following a demonstration by anarchists who broke windows in the Mission District to protest the gathering of the Group of 8 leaders in Scotland.
Police did not release the name of the officer who was hurt in Friday night's melee. Deputy Police Chief Greg Suhr said Saturday that the officer was in serious but stable condition with brain swelling at San Francisco General Hospital. He has developed a blood clot, which doctors hope to dissolve before he is released, Suhr said.
The department's spokeswoman, Maria Oropeza, said the officer and his partner were driving on 23rd Street in response to a vandalism call when protesters threw a mattress underneath their patrol car.
"They got out to apprehend the suspects, at which point they were surrounded by a crowd," Oropeza said. "One of the officers was struck on the head by an unidentified object."
Police arrested Cody Tarlow, 21, of Felton (Santa Cruz County), Doritt Earnst, 31, of Berkeley and a third suspect who refused to identify himself.
They were being held on suspicion of attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery to a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and willful resistance to a police officer that results in serious bodily injury.
In addition, Tarlow was held on suspicion of wearing a disguise for the purpose of escaping discovery or identification with a public offense. Earnst was also suspected of removing a weapon other than a firearm from an officer, and the unidentified man was suspected of inciting a riot.
A posting on a Web site used by the organizers of Friday's protest said, "The legal team is working on getting (the suspects) attorneys and getting them released! There will be a meeting to organize support for them." The meeting is scheduled for this morning.
The protest was one of many from around the world in response to the summit in Scotland by leaders of wealthy nations -- the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. Representatives from China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico also attended.
The San Francisco protest was billed as the "West Coast Anti-Capitalist Convergence and March against the G-8." Protesters broke windows and glass doors at two Wells Fargo Bank locations, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and a shoe store. Red anarchy signs were spray-painted on sidewalks and windows.
There's a Lesson Here for Hardcore Libertarians, I'm Sure
I just can't figure out what it is, other than, "don't be stupid." From August 2, 2007 Baton Rouge channel 9:Kimberly Grosset was visiting her boyfriend, Robert White when their time together took a bad turn. Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Tony Mancuso says, "White and Grosset were engaged in consensual sexual behavior involving a firearm when the firearm was discharged, resulting in his death."
You don't normally manage to get "consensual sexual behavior" and "firearm" into a single news story.
The single bullet struck White in the head, and as he struggled to hold on to life, Grosset made an emergency call for help. Mancuso says, "The shooter called 9-1-1 and we responded."
White was taken to Lake Charles Memorial Hospital where he died around 3:00 A.M. Thursday morning. Authorities say the shooting appears to be an accident. "From the information we've gathered," says Mancuso, "this is an activity that the couple engaged in frequently."
Since authorities believe there was no criminal intent behind White's death, Grosset has been charged with negligent homicide, which carries a maximum of five years behind bars. Mancuso says, "When you know something's dangerous and you're intentionally still doing it, there's still a result and a consequence to that and in this particular case it would be negligent homicide."
Back From Rexburg, Idaho
My wife went to participate in a pipe and drum band competition in Rexburg, Idaho, and we returned fairly late last night. More blogging, pictures, and comments about oddities of the Fair Housing Act later.
