The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
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).
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Gun Show Today This gun show was rather like gun shows were in Sonoma County, California before about 1991. Gobs and gobs of guns, lots of people, but it didn't seem like an enormous of buying of guns was happening. There were lots of accessories, ammunition, and the like going out the door. I only spoke to one person who actually lives in my district--but quite a few people who have friends or family in district 22, and took a flyer to hand off to them. What startled me, considering that they aren't in the district, was how many people I spoke to knew who the incumbent was, and agreed that he was too liberal to represent district 22--and maybe even too liberal to represent a district in Boise. I am getting encouraged. The one person with whom I spoke who was actually from my district sounded very positive, and I suspect will arrange a coffee with neighbors and friends over in Elmore County to meet the candidate. Of course, there's a selection bias here. This is a gun show, and I would expect that would bias the voters a bit conservative. But one recent Idaho arrival (whose accent told me he was from the Northeast) told me that he wasn't even a Republican, and found much in my flyer that he found attractive. He was also one of the more knowledgeable people that I have met in Idaho about the nexus of gun control and black history. Everyone has a story, and some are more interested than others in talking. I am pleased to report that I only talked to one person suffering from conspiracy theories: Catholic/Masonic/Illuminati/CFR one worldism--five members of the Supreme Court are Catholics! "I've never been much interested in politics," he told me, but Ron Paul running for President got this guy involved. (Why am I not surprised?) One such person out of this many conversations actually is a pretty decent ratio; I shudder to think what the ratio would be at a meeting of DailyKos readers! These are always difficult conversations for me. Even though this guy isn't in my district, I prefer not to unnecessarily offend or anger someone. Instead, I take the approach that it is best to point out evidence that would damage the neat little world that elaborate conspiracy theories usually spin. For example, I pointed out that several of the Catholic justices are clearly hostile to unconstitutional expansions of government power, and that rather than looking for Cardinal Spellman behind the assassination of John Kennedy, it might more sense to look at the CIA plots against Castro described in the Church Committee report, Lee Harvey Oswald's involvement with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (a Communist front group), and the possibility that this was some sort of tit for tat. Conspiracy theories are very popular with certain kinds of people. They used to be associated with conservatives, like the John Birch Society, but you can find far more examples today on the left: the perennial JFK theories (and admittedly, how the Warren Commission operated opened a lot of reasons to be skeptical); TWA 800; 9/11, and so on. Labels: Idaho politics Use The Right Tool For The Job Remember when your father taught you not to use a screwdriver to drive a nail? Not to use a knife to turn a screw? Use the wrong tool, and you are likely to damage something--maybe yourself. Here's yet another example of "use the wrong tool, someone gets hurt." It almost reads like a redneck joke. From the April 9, 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch: SEDALIA, Mo. -- Prosecutors are not expected to file charges against a Missouri man who fatally shot his wife while he was trying to install a satellite TV system in their home.If someone later establishes that it didn't really happen this way, I won't be surprised. Labels: stupidity He Just Doesn't Get It Ted Reinstein is a journalist who claims that gun owners "overreact" to discussion of reasonable gun control. His column at March 14, 2008 WCVB is here: Message after message decrying any attempt to take away the legitimate rights of responsible gun owners. All of which convinces me that gun control talk creates such a knee-jerk reaction among most gun owners that they literally are not capable any longer of hearing nuance. No one -- NO ONE -- talks seriously of taking away legal guns from responsible owners. Not one -- NOT ONE -- of the proposals I myself articulated (background checks, one gun a month purchase limit, assault weapon ban) on Wednesday night would significantly affect the vast majority of responsible gun owners.Here's the response that I sent to Mr. Reinstein. Perhaps part of the anger is that until HR 2640 (which enjoyed support from both NRA and gun control groups) very, very few gun control laws were aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. Most such laws were indiscriminate. For example, the assault weapons ban that you want. The state laws (New Jersey, California, New York) were complete bans. They were not an attempt at preventing criminals from obtaining these guns. Everyone was prohibited--even people like myself who have never been arrested. Many of the gun control advocates over the years have stated that their goal wasn't keeping guns out of the hands of criminals or the mentally ill, but to completely ban either all handguns, or all guns. See Professor Volokh's quotes of politicians promoting complete bans here, media sorts promoting complete bans, and advocacy groups promoting complete bans. Imagine what your reaction would be to laws requiring newspapers to delay publishing columns for five days while the government checked the accuracy of the facts and quotes contained therein. (Think of all the minor errors of fact, libelous statements, and misleading information that would not be published.) Now, imagine your reaction if such a law was proposed amidst a continual whining for a complete ban on liberal media outlets. Would you find something a bit worrisome about that? The 20th century is awash in governmental mass murder--tens of millions of people murdered by their own governments, in almost all cases, after the targeted group (or the entire civilian population) has been disarmed. While we don't have the mass murder experience in America, restrictive gun control laws in the South played a significant role in allowing the Klan to terrorize black people--because the Klan could be sure that they wouldn't have to worry about getting shot at by their victims. And you think that people are overreacting to this prolonged drumbeat of efforts to disarm them? There's no question that we have a serious gun violence problem in America. We also have a serious non-gun violence problem in America. It isn't clear to me that restrictive gun control laws without a police state to implement have ever been effective at disarming criminals. In practice, such laws largely disarm people who are only a small part of the gun violence: the victims. And the victims do use guns in self-defense with surprising frequency. See the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog for just examples that received media attention. There's a lot of them. Labels: gun rights Friday, April 11, 2008
The Gun Show This Weekend I don't spend much time frequenting gun shows; I'm generally too busy. But I will have a table at the gun show this weekend at the fairgrounds in Garden City. It isn't in my district, but I'm sure that some of the crowd coming through will be from district 22, or will have friends or relatives who are in the district. This is pretty clearly a population that I need to connect with; I would expect that these will be among my more committed voters. Labels: Idaho politics For Those Unclear Who Is Supposed To Run Things Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy quotes from a recent book review by 9th Circus Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt--among America's most liberal judges, married to the director of the ACLU's Southern California Reinhardt is the judge responsible for the Harper decision that free speech in schools, which has generally been allowed since the Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969) decision, only applies to pro-homosexual agitation--but not to opposition to it. (Except, of course, when Reinhardt feels like free speech takes precedence.) And Reinhardt, as you might expect, cites decisions that demolish his argument on his gun control with no apparent awareness or concern. And when someone pointed out that Reinhardt cited Bellesiles's fraudulent work to support his claim in an opinion--he just replaced the reference to Bellesiles with the footnote that Bellesiles had used. But Reinhardt didn't bother to see if the cited source actually said what he and Bellesiles claimed that it did. So what did Judge Reinhardt have to say that has Professor Kerr and me upset? I found the quote so disturbingly honest in its elitist tyranny that I thought it best to verify that Professor Kerr didn't misread it. Unfortunately, he did not. From Stephen Reinhardt, "Weakening the Bill of Rights: A Victory for Terrorism," Michigan Law Review 106:963, 973: I feel more confident in judges than in elected officials safeguarding our constitutional liberties. But I would feel even better were there some Warrens, Brennans, Marshalls, Douglases, Blackmuns, or even more Stevenses currently making the decisions that will determine the nature of our rights and freedoms—and indeed the nature of our society—for years to come. [emphasis added]I can somewhat forgive the remark about trusting judges more than elected officials. The judiciary does serve an important role in checking popular enthusiasms when they run contrary to the Constitution. But what I have highlighted above--about determing "the nature of our society" is a frighteningly power-mad view of the judiciary's function and authority. Instead of Plato's philosopher-kings, I guess we get philosopher-judges instead. Someone seems to be unaware that, "Here, the people rule." Labels: judicial activism Nicely Done Piece of Analysis Maybe I'm just in a really good mood, but this article Steven P. Segal and Philip M. Burgess, "Effect of Conditional Release From Hospitalization on Mortality Risk," Psychiatric Services, 57:1607-13 [November 2006] really impressed me. It is an analysis of the effects on mortality risk for psychiatric patients under what Victoria, Australia calls a community treatment order, or what we would call involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC) in the United States. It wasn't just that the results were encouraging (a 14% reduction in noninjury-related deaths compared to similar psychiatric patients who were simply released), but I was very impressed with the various methods that they used to look for selection bias problems as well. One of the problems with studies of this nature is that they are often comparing psychiatric patients who were under IOC with patients that were not--and those under IOC tended to be substantially different in either history of violence, severity of illness. This study seems to have done a nice job of making sure that even though the populations in aggregate are different, that they are comparing the results for similar groups in both populations. Labels: deinstitutionalization Thursday, April 10, 2008
Panorama Shot I've never been happy with the pictures that I take from the backyard--they really don't capture the grandeur of the view. So I thought, "I'll stitch together some pictures to make a panorama shot." I figured it would be a little effort, but worth it. Imagine my surprise when I found that HP PhotoSmart includes a feature that does all the work for you. Remember when you click on the picture that it is about 3.5 MB. It may take a moment to load.  Click to enlarge I'll try this again when everything is better lit. UPDATE: Here's a better one.  Click to enlarge Logo Design Is An Art And not all logos convey quite the meaning that was intended. (Warning: while worksafe, these logos are unintentionally suggestive.)      Labels: humor Islam's Decline A very interesting article from Pajamas Media about Islam's decline. Quoting an article by an Islamic scholar: Pajamas Media goes on to point out that some of the conversion of Muslims to Christianity represents a repudiation of tyrannical state religion in places like Iran and the former Soviet Union: Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000. One Iranian religious scholar believes youth are abandoning Islam because it is identified with the corrupt Iranian government. Now the Iranian Majlis (parliament) is debating the death penalty for conversion.I guess that I can't claim to be surprised; intellectuals and academics in America make increasing excuses for Islam, and if they are picking this horse in the race, it's a pretty good bet that they are picking the loser, not the winner. Worth reading in full. News: San Francisco Still Part of California The California Supreme Court unanimously upheld a California Court of Appeals decision striking down San Francisco's Proposition H, a ban on handgun ownership. From the April 10, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle: The only real hope for San Francisco, which keeps losing these battles over gay marriage, gun bans, etc., is to withdraw from first California, and then from the United States. We fought a war over secession, long, long ago. But I think we might make an exception for Babylon by the Bay. And we should adopt the same visa standards for San Francisco that we have for Cuba, and North Korea. Perhaps we can get Berkeley to join them. UPDATE: A reader suggests that we offer China a trade; San Francisco for Hong Kong. It's an interesting idea--but China isn't that stupid. Labels: gun rights The End of Freedom I mentioned yesterday Elaine Huguenin's $6600 fine for not approving of gay marriage. It occurs to me that if a photographer can't refuse a job like this, then almost anyone else in the business of providing a service is in danger. Can a New Mexico newspaper refuse an ad from Rev. Fred "God Hates Fag" Phelps? Why? Can a gay newspaper refuse an ad offering reparative therapy, to help homosexuals become straight? We are in grave danger of losing our freedom to disagree or disapprove to America's loudest and most boorish minority group. UPDATE: There's also a 13th Amendment question here. Elaine Huguenin has been effectively enslaved. She made no contract with the lesbian couple; indeed, she explicitly refused to make a contract. Yet she has been ordered to make payment because she refused to work against her will for another person, and without being convicted of any crime. Unlike jury duty or military service, this is for a private person--not the government, and not an activity for the common good. Even the abusive system of the postbellum South, where convicts were "farmed out" to private employers to pay off their fines, at least involved people convicted of crimes (even if the crimes were somewhat made up for the purpose, and the justice system wasn't fair). The lesbian masters, in this case, made a demand for Elaine Huguenin's services without her being convicted of any crime--and now she is forced to make a payment to them for her refusal to be enslaved. UPDATE 2: Hans Bader at Competitive Enterprise Institute's blog has some comments as well. Labels: homosexuality Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Lunch With Lobbyists I had lunch with lobbyists for a number of business interests today. Nice guys. No horns or tails, and no dorsal fins, contrary to the popular image. They were sizing me up to see if I am serious candidate, and I got a chance to express my philosophy of government and ask them questions about the issues that they care about. I learned a bit about what works on political campaigns in Idaho, and especially in a rural district. Where Antidiscrimination Laws Take You I mentioned a while back that a photographer who refused an assignment to photograph a same-sex civil commitment ceremony was being sued before the New Mexico Human Rights Commission for discriminating against homosexuals. The photographer has now been ordered to pay costs of $6637.94. Professor Volokh discusses the issues involved, and predictably, lawyers and law students are piling on, most of them defending why this is a good thing. Homosexuality, freedom: pick one. This is why State Senator Corder's bill prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation is so dangerous--it creates all sorts of opportunities like this. Labels: freedom of religion, homosexuality, Idaho politics Where's The ACLU? A publicly funded school that has extended the school day for prayer--and apparently not voluntary prayer. Teachers assist students in religious rituals. And the ACLU isn't suing. Do you wonder why? From the April 9, 2008 Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.If this was being done by Christians, the ACLU would have had this school shut down--or defunded--years ago, because the state department of education was warned about this in 2004. The ACLU should stop pretending that they are genuinely concerned about preference for one religion over another, or of religion over irreligion. They really are the Anti-Christian Litigation Unit. Labels: establishment of religion Global Warming...Sounds Like a Good Idea It is now spring. It has been spring for several weeks.  Click to enlarge Labels: global warming Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Is Corn Ethanol Really Economically Infeasible? One of my readers insists that the claims that corn-based ethanol is too energy inefficient to make sense points to the "State Average Fuel Ethanol Rack Prices" table. The prices range from around $2.52 to $2.83 per gallon. These are the wholesale prices, so I would expect them to be a bit more expensive at retail. But how much more? I know that ethanol fuel is generally exempt from motor vehicle fuel taxes--and at some point, if enough vehicles switched over, we would have to start taxing it--but these prices would suggest that corn-based ethanol may not be that inefficient. If large amounts of energy were going into refining ethanol, I would expect the prices to be higher. How much tax subsidy is there in these prices? I really, really like the idea of ethanol as a fuel. While the global warming thing is probably hype, corn is a renewable resource--we aren't going to run out, and the net carbon dioxide change over several years is zero. I also like the idea that it doesn't come from places where the people have their turbans wound too tightly. Even if sugar cane based ethanol makes more sense than ethanol from corn, that's okay. Just about any moist tropical country can grow sugar cane, and the number of potential growers would mean that a cartel like OPEC would difficult to maintain. In addition, the U.S. has Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In addition, Louisiana at one time was a major grower of sugar cane (and the graveyard of many slaves who were worked to death to bring in the crop). I would be surprised if we can't grow sugar cane in a number of other Gulf Coast states. UPDATE: A reader points out that this table at Wikipedia (for what that's worth) showing the energy content per volume and per weight of various fuels. One problem with ethanol is that the energy density of ethanol is quite low compared to gasoline. Unless you can take advantage of its very high octane number (perhaps with very high compression engines), the amount of ethanol you are going to burn to get the same energy output as gasoline means that even at the wholesale prices listed in the table above, the stuff is still quite a bit more expensive than gasoline. UPDATE 2: A number of readers expressed their concern about rising demand for corn to make ethanol is driving up the cost of food, not just in America, but in the Third World. Another reader asks about jojoba. This March 6, 2003 New Scientist article points to biodiesel based on jojoba oil: And of course, here's the jojoba oil web page! The reader who sent these links suggests: Jojoba yields 194 gallons of oil per acre and can be planted in desert conditions that won't support most other crops. It yields approximately the same BTU per acre as ethanol without the high cost of cultivation while not distorting feed grain markets and food supplies dependent upon them. It's safe to assume it would yield more BTU per acre with even rudimentary cultivation, thus making it much more efficient than ethanol.If jojoba is really the future, what's holding it up? There are a lot of good ideas out there, but I suspect that gasoline is still cheap enough to make a lot of these great ideas not go anywhere. Labels: alternative power, global warming Safari Users Some of you are having problems about word wrap. Do you know when this started? Does it happen if you go back to previous weeks? Monday, April 07, 2008
State Enforcement of Illegal Immigration Laws On my campaign web site, I've mentioned that Arizona is starting to aggressively pursue employers who are hiring illegal aliens. This April 5, 2008 Los Angeles Times story, of course, tries to portray this as a bad situation--but even they manage to admit that it is having some positive effects: "What I love about what Arizona is doing is we don't have to rely on the federal government," said state Rep. Russell Pearce, a Mesa Republican who has authored most of the toughest measures. "It has truly woken up the rest of America that states can fix that problem."I'm not surprised that Republicans who are allied with business interests want to keep the supply of labor pouring into the U.S. It drives down wages. Illegal immigrants are much less likely to complain to government agencies about violations of labor law or safety issues, for fear of being identified and deported. And because illegal immigrants tend to be here for relatively short periods of time (months, rather than a lifetime), they are generally less inclined to join a labor union. What amazes me is that many Democrats are prepared to defend illegal immigration--when all of these issues should be reasons for Democrats to demand enforcement of our current laws. Labels: immigration Charlton Heston Michelle Malkin has a tribute to Charlton Heston here. I remember hearing him interviewed on NPR some years ago, and I was really impressed. His role in Ben-Hur? Wow! Until Titanic, Ben-Hur had the most Oscars of any movie--and when you compare Titanic and Ben-Hur, you can see how much Hollywood's standards have fallen. Sunday, April 06, 2008
Thanks For All The Machining Suggestions I finished the part, got it installed--and then decided it wasn't worth taking the mount apart to take a picture. It mostly looks terrible (at least the parts that I machined first), but it works, and the segment that was broken on the original is now twice as thick on the replacement. This may limit my ability to use this mount in the tropics, but I can't picture taking it there. There are two next steps before I can mount Big Bertha 2.0 on the mount: 1. Get another Losmandy counterweight. (I didn't have enough.) 2. Build a lower tripod. Because of the size of Big Bertha 2.0, the eyepiece would be at ladder height if I used the current tripod. Also, the center of gravity is so high that it makes it less stable than I would prefer. Finally, lifting Big Bertha 2.0, all 55 pounds of her, to the height of the saddle is an enormously difficult and slightly risky maneuver, even with two of us doing so. So, to build a lower tripod, I need to find some pipe 5 1/2" inside diameter (or perhaps slightly larger) and about 12 inches long. Then I will bolt legs made from 1/4" x 1" steel, about 20" long. This will give me a very wide, very low base to lower the center of gravity and make it less likely to tip--even with 55 pounds of scope, 30 pounds of equatorial mount head, and 75 pounds of counterweights. UPDATE: I found a vendor with short sections of 5 1/2" ID, 1/4" aluminum tubing--exactly what the current tripod uses. I've done the math, and I can cut some of the 6' sections of aluminum square tube left over from the first attempt at Big Bertha 2.0 into 2' legs. These provide enough stiffness to handle the weight of this behemoth with only fraction of an inch of deformation. I'll use 1/4" thick, 3/4" wide L-brackets to bolt the legs to the 5 1/2" ID tube, with the L-brackets held in both places using 3/8"-16 bolts, and the L-bracket inside the square tube. Labels: machining, telescopes Radiusing Without A Rotary Table I have one significant, challenging, educational opportunity left on this replacement latitude adjuster block. There is a rectangular extension, .625" deep, 1.75" long, .75" wide, but the four corners are radiused (.375" radius). The normal way that you would use a mill to radius the four corners is to put the workpiece in a mill vise mounted to a rotary table which is vertical. You would then position the workpiece such that the center of the rotary table would be aligned with the center of the radius that you need to turn at the end of the rectangle. Then you position the end mill some distance above the top of the rectangle, start the mill running, and turn the rotary table 90 degrees forward to round off the corner, turn it back 90 degrees to top, and then 90 degrees backward to round off the other corner. Lower the cutting tool .010", and repeat, until you have the reached the top of the rectangle. Then do the other end of the rectangle by switching it around. I don't have a rotary table. Sherline sells one for $270--which perhaps I should buy, since I am sure that I will have other uses for it. The holddown kit I bought last year--I just found a use for it. It sure would be nice if there was some other way to radius this rectangle without having to spend the money and wait for it to arrive--especially since I am about to write some disturbingly large checks to IRS and the Idaho Tax Commission. I have a feeling that there's probably some way to accomplish this with a lathe, or perhaps with a drill press, since the drill press has a table that rotates. Labels: machining |
