Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
![]() Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Sunday, January 04, 2009
Selfishness vs. Marriage Dennis Prager, a conservative columnist, normally writes about politics and culture--but he seems to have opened up Pandora's box with these two columns about sex in marriage, provoking an interesting reaction from readers. Before getting to what Prager wrote, let's recast his argument in somewhat different terms: "Husbands, you may not always feel like doing house chores, but there are times that you really should do so, because it's important to your wife." Is there anyone who finds that argument objectionable? Prager's argument is essentially that for a variety of reasons, the sexual drive of women tends to decline much more quickly than men:
The reactions of readers was quite interesting. I'll engage in some very broad generalizations and say that generally the socially conservative sorts (many of them women) agreed with Prager--with some even saying that even if they weren't in the mood, they found that doing so improved the relationship with their husbands. On the other side, many of Prager's critics seem to be generally more liberal and feminist, some of them calling Prager's suggestion "rape" -- even though Prager specifically and repeatedly emphasized that this was no excuse for men pushing or demanding, and specifically excluding relationships that have significant problems. The more I thought about Prager's columns, and the reactions to it, the more it occurred to me that one of Prager's points is quite valid: The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.”My experience is that almost every marriage that fails has, somewhere below the layers of depression, financial conflict, infidelity, or domestic abuse, a fundamental problem of selfishness. If one partner is selfish, and the other is selfless, eventually, there is a good chance that the selfless partner will start to feel taken advantage of. If the selfless partner expresses that anger, the marriage may break apart; if she (and it is usually she) represses that anger, she will likely sink into depression. If both partners are selfish, conflicts over money or time will drive a wedge between them. Some couples can paper over those conflicts by spending money like Hollywood stars, but for most people in the real world, that just isn't an option. In my experience, really successful marriages require both husband and wife to overcome the natural selfishness to which all of us are born. The first few years of many marriages are a time of adjustment, as (ideally) both partners adjust from traditional single life (what will I do next?) to being part of a couple (what does my spouse want?) It isn't a complete transformation, of course, and there are going to be conflicts between spouses, but it does reduce the conflicts to a manageable level. Unfortunately, in a lot of marriages, one half may not abandon that selfishness--and the other spouse does all the adjusting. Or one spouse gives up a littlle selfishness, while the other spouse does nearly all the changing. This may make it possible for a marriage to survive, but it isn't ideal, and over time, a spouse who has done nearly all the giving starts to resent it. One traditional Christian model of marriage is Ephesians 5: 22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.Sad to say, there are men who have used verses 22-24 to put their wives in their place--and neglected to read the following verses, which compares what husbands are supposed to do for their wives to Christ sacrificing himself on the Cross. You can see why petty domestic tyrants might be reluctant to keep reading. "A text without a context is a pretext." Do you want your marriage to be successful? You and your spouse must both work beyond selfishness and to concern for each other. If that means doing the dishes without being asked, or bringing flowers occasionally, or surprising her return from a trip with a house freshly vacuumed--or creating a night of passion when you aren't really "in the mood"--this all part of working beyond selfishness. Jaguar As Road Car I'm really impressed with the Jaguar as a road car, having driven to Bend. Quiet, comfortable, and very stable at speed. It doesn't have the passing power of the Corvette, of course, but it still gets up and goes when you punch it, with the engine revving happily up into the orange warning area between 6500 and 7000 rpm. Gas mileage was just under 24 mpg--which considering the speeds that I was driving is pretty decent. Labels: cars What Would Obama Do? You have probably seen the bracelets that say WWJD. (What Would Jesus Do?) It's a common method of reminding people that have embraced Christianity that every action of their lives needs to be measured against the standard that Jesus set. We aren't perfect, and to expect Christians to conform perfectly to Jesus' standard is unrealistic, but having this as a goal is certainly valuable. We've made fun of Obamessiah during the campaign--but the idol worship continues, as this December 13, 2008 Washington Post article explains: Now, don't get me wrong. I think President Obama might be a good example to many young black men. There are vast numbers of young black Americans who do the right thing: they go to school; get good jobs; marry; and raise families. But there are also a lot of young blacks who take the path of least resistance, and buy into the idea that studying and preparing for school is "acting white." Obama can be a positive example that yes, "acting white" can get you a decent job in America. Still, I look at the adulation that Obama is enjoying, and I shake my head at the parallels to the twentieth century's cult of personality leaders. Michelle Malkin brought this amazing story to my attention. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates Friday, January 02, 2009
The Modern Language Association The MLA is the academic association for English professors, and I confess that I have less than warm feelings about them. If Ambrose Bierce were updating his Devil's Dictionary for modern conditions, he would list MLA as a synonym for Political Correctness. So I was not surprised to see this discussion in the January 2, 2009 Inside Higher Education of a recent panel at an MLA convention. I'm quoting rather carefully from the article, because some the language is a bit too...modern...for my blog. (Do you remember when the use of vulgar language was the sign of a poorly educated person?) Some of the comments by readers of the article about this panel at a supposedly academic conference are rather entertaining: Is this what students, their parents and taxpayers are subsidizing instead of classroom instruction?The short answer: yes. And a lot of stuff not even this valuable in many classrooms. And this marvelously clever observation (someone must have done well on the analogies section of the SAT): To me, this panel’s work seems like the scholarly equivalent of Britney Spears’ publicity strategy; if you can’t sing well, wear skimpy clothing. Labels: academic integrity ScopeRoller Orders Flying In Okay, not enough to quit the contract C# work, but suddenly I'm getting lots of orders, in the dead of winter. And lots of nice remarks from customers who have received their shipments: Hi Clayton, Got the plugs in Wed mail. Thanks for the super fast shipping--it's amazing. Hat's off to you for running a real customer oriented business. You rank right at the top!and from someone replacing a Scope Buggy with my product: The advantages are that the tripod now takes up less space in the garage, I frequently 'tripped' on or over the large wheels in the dark while using the scopebuggy, and I never quite felt completely comfortable with the 'fit' of the tripod legs in the rings provided. (Too much 'extra' room in those rings.) Labels: machining, telescopes Annoying Design Flaw in the Jaguar's Key I was wondering why the "door ajar" icon keeps appearing--and I have to keep running back and closing the trunk. It turns out that the way that I grasp the remote control when starting the car, I keep hitting the "open trunk" button. I just have to retrain myself a bit, I think. Labels: cars A Neat Product: The Womb Bear My wife and I went over to babysit our granddaughter (boy, that still sounds weird) on New Year's Eve so that our daughter and son-in-law could get out for an elegant meal without the baby. She was generally pretty calm, but at a certain point in the evening, Olivia would start crying as soon as we stopped holding her, and put her to bed. My wife thought about this for a couple of minutes, and then remembered that someone, somewhere, had given our daughter a stuffed bear with a wind-up mechanism that simulates the sound of the human heart (assuming that you are still in the womb--there's a "wooosh" sound to it). Sure enough, we dug into the closet in the baby's room, put the Womb Bear in the crib, and then quickly transferred her from my wife to the Womb Bear--and Olivia just kept sleeping. Thursday, January 01, 2009
Jaguar X-Type Here are my impressions, now that it is out of the body shop, and I have a bit more chance to drive it. A friend described his Jaguar as the most comfortable car he has ever owned for high speed travel. I agree. It's not a sports car--but it is a very comfortable ride without being soft. It has road feel. You can tell when you are changing from one road surface to another, and it corners with great certainty and aplomb. But it is never harsh. My wife (who has always found the Jaguars to be very attractive) says it is the quietest car in which she has ever ridden. Tire noise is by far the biggest problem--and that's almost nothing, except on a few roads where there is some interaction between the tread of the all season tires and the pavement. It is far more quiet than the Corvette, of course, but it is even more quiet than the 2000 Impala LS that I owned, and I would say as quiet (or perhaps more quiet) than the Cadillac CTS I rented in Ohio a couple of years back. The Jaguar does not have the gut wrenching torque of the Corvette, of course. The saying that there is no substitute for cubic inches is really true. The Jaguar has a 3.0L V6; the Corvette has a 5.7L V8--and the Corvette weighs several hundred pounds less, as well. But the Jaguar is very responsive, and the five speed automatic transmission is really quite effective at finding the right gear when you stomp on the accelerator--it has a lot of choices to pick from when you are in top gear! As of last night, we were just about out of snow, and there was nothing on the roads down in the Boise area, so I was able to try the Jaguar out a bit more on dry roads. It corners well--not with the "my stomach is trying to move outside my body" force of the Corvette, but the full-time 4WD system means that the Jaguar feels extremely surefooted as it goes around corners in a way that the Corvette does not. The Corvette will certainly outcorner the Jaguar, but the Jaguar feels very calm and collected at its ultimate cornering limits; the Corvette, at its much higher cornering limits, requires a lot more care and attention to avoid at least embarrassment, if not worse. Compared to the Corvette (at least my 2000 Corvette), there are some areas where the Jaguar feels a bit primitive. I've gotten so used to the heads-up display on the Corvette that looking down at the dash to read the speed from a dial seems positively twentieth century. In addition, the Jaguar's speedometer is a bit harder to read than the Corvette, with divisions too close together. What is especially unfortunate is that the Jaguar has a 150 mph speedometer, even though it is speed governed to 122 mph--but I think that they were trying to share the speedometer with the Sport model, which I believe may have had a 140 mph governor to go with the higher speed tires. (Or tyres, as the Jaguar manual likes to call them.) I really like the steering wheel mounted stereo controls--but unlike the 2000 Impala LS which also had such controls, the Jaguar's channel selection button only advances through the button presets--you can't use the channel seek without reaching over to the dashboard. On the plus side, you can set at least nine button presets per band, which should be enough. Except, of course, that Bend has different stations than Boise. One surprise to me is that the Jaguar has sensors in the back of the car that detect when you are within 12 inches of something--useful for avoiding parallel parking embarrassments (not that this could ever happen to me, of course), and backing into walls. There was an option for this on the front end as well, but mine does not have this option. Heated seats with memory settings were also an option that sounds pretty neat, but I thinking having a remote starter installed might be a more cost effective way to make it tolerable climbing into leather seats when it's 25 degrees outside. When you turn on the defroster, it also electrically heats the side view mirrors, which should both remove snow and fog. The salesman tells me that the 2005 X-Type manual is no longer available--and he remains quite sure that it was in the car when we picked it up. The body shop doesn't know where it went, and claims that they would not have had any reason to look at it, which makes sense. My only other option is the PDF on the Jaguar website. I pulled it into Adobe Acrobat, used the Crop tool to cut it down ot the actual contents of the printed pages, then used Adobe Reader 8.0 to print it in booklet mode. The trick to making this work well is not to print all 200 pages as a single booklet--then you end up with a very thick wad of paper all folded over. Instead, I printed it in 32 page chunks, double-sided, so that I now have a series of fasciles, each of which is relatively thin and easy to open, which tomorrow I will have Kinko's bind. This is very much the way that real books are printed--a series of individual chunks, which are then bound together. The garage isn't big enough for the Jaguar, the TrailBlazer, and the Corvette, so the only sensible choice was to put the cars that we drive daily inside. The Corvette is now sitting under a car cover on the back driveway, whimpering and whining that it isn't good enough to sleep indoors with the newer cars. If I can get a permanent job--or maybe if I just feel a bit more willing to spend some money this summer--I'll have a separate two car garage/workshop built on the south part of the platform, and then the Corvette, the machine tools, and the telescopes can go in there. Labels: cars National Park Service Rule Change You are probably aware that the National Park Service is changing the rule about loaded firearms in national parks to conform to the surrounding state. So, if the surrounding state allows concealed carry of handguns by permit holders (or in the case of Alaska or Vermont, by anyone who can legally possess a handgun), then you can carry in the national park within that state. Well, shock of shocks, the Brady Campaign has filed suit to block this rule change, claiming, among other things, that the rule would allow carrying on the National Mall in DC (even though concealed carry is very tightly restricted in DC) and Ellis Island (where the surrounding state is New York). More details of the idiocy at Arms and the Law. Labels: gun rights Weird: Obama's Successor's Resume in Granite Governor Blagojevich's arrogance in picking a successor to Senator Obama is exceeded only by the weirdness of this December 31, 2008 CNN news story: (CNN) -- Anyone who doubts Roland Burris' qualifications to serve as the next senator from Illinois may want to head to Chicago's Oak Woods Cemetery.If Burris left detailed instructions of what he wanted on his tomb, I could understand that. But having it built while he is still alive? That's weird. Wednesday, December 31, 2008
An Unfortunate Juxtaposition Right down the street from St. Luke's Hospital in West Boise: ![]() Click to enlarge is this unfortunately named restaurant: ![]() Click to enlarge What next? A restaurant called "Epidemic Enchiladas"? Labels: humor Tuesday, December 30, 2008
"Like It Never Even Happened" It's unfortunate that ServPro is already using this service mark, because that's how I feel about the job that Treasure Valley Collision did on the Jaguar. ![]() Click to enlarge ![]() Click to enlarge ![]() Click to enlarge ![]() Click to enlarge There is one very, very minor scratch on the hood that was there before the accident, the insurance adjuster says--and I have no reason to doubt it. I suspect that it will polish out. Otherwise, it is as perfect looking and driving as before the unfortunate incident with the ice. The salesman says that he thinks the manual was in the glove compartment when I received the car, so I'm going to call the body shop tomorrow and see if someone removed it to check something, but if not, there's on one order, and I can read this one online. Labels: cars Sunday, December 28, 2008
Nice Piece From the British Paper, The Telegraph From December 28, 2008: And yet President Obama still wants a carbon tax to solve a problem that is increasingly clearly non-existent. Labels: global warming Playing Into the Hands of Holocaust Deniers This type of fraud plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers:
It is never right to do wrong to do right. Labels: history Clever Snow Plow We finally have a patch of 40 degree weather, and the driveway is now almost completely clear, but think ahead! I'm looking at the snowplows that attach to TrailBlazers, most of which involve considerable complexity with attachment hardware, wiring, etc. But I did find this very clever product from SuperPlow that attaches using a standard trailer hitch and trailer wiring, making it "Plug and Plow." (Groan.) You can either drag it and scrape the road clear, or back up and push snow out of the way. It is still at a price point that justifies paying someone to come up and do our driveway periodically. Progressives Making Progress David Gans and Doug Kendall over at Balkinization admit that the method by which the Supreme Court has applied parts of the Bill of Rights to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment is suspect: For the last forty years, the Court’s fundamental rights jurisprudence developed under the Due Process Clause has been dogged by persistent claims of illegitimacy. Roe v. Wade has been the target of most of these attacks, but the claims made by Roe’s attackers go well beyond Roe or even abortion rights. Justice Scalia – the most fervent of the challengers – argues that the protection of unwritten fundamental rights is simply not lawyer’s work. “The tools of this job,” he says “are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not the judge’s – workbox.” But one need not reach for tools beyond Scalia’s favorites—text and history—to see that judges properly protect substantive fundamental rights not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution. On Scalia’s own terms, his objections fall flat when faced with the text and history of the Privileges or Immunities Clause.They start out well, but then insist that using the "Privileges or Immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment gets to the same results as Roe v. Wade (1973) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003). This is incorrect. To use the P&I clause in an honest way would require us to look at what rights were generally recognized in 1868. Was there a right to eat meat in 1868? I doubt that there was even a single state law that regulated it. But for many of the examples that Gans and Kendall, such as abortion and homosexuality, there was a consensus the other direction, that these were legitimate exercises of state power in the interests of public morality. Hence, homosexual sex was a felony in every state. Abortion, at least from "the quickening" had been a criminal offense (although infrequently prosecuted) for decades, and at least some states were beginning to criminalize it in the first trimester. There was no recognized right to homosexual marriage in 1868; indeed, I suspect that if you had argued the case in print, you would likely have been prosecuted for publishing indecent material (another reminder that freedom of speech and the press, while certainly examples of "Privileges or Immunities" did not include the broad definition that the Court has recognized). It is important to recognize the dangers of ends-based legal theories. Originalism doesn't always give us everything we want. Was there a right to keep and bear arms? Yes, but not quite as unlimited a right as I would like there be there. The only laws that interfered with the broad exercise of that right were the ones that the drafters of the 14th Amendment clearly intended to destroy by its passage--and that opponents acknowledged would be struck down. But as much as I would like it to be otherwise, I do not think that an honest assessment of the evidence from 1868 would argue that ALL modes of bearing arms were completely protected. There was certainly no consensus that concealed carry was a protected right--and many states that clearly regarded it was a grievous evil within the authority of the state to regulate. I'm glad to see progressives acknowledging that the Due Process clause precedents are seriously flawed, and coming back to looking at Privileges or Immunities. But an honest evaluation of the evidence doesn't give them the results that they want. Labels: constitutional history Saturday, December 27, 2008
Auto Backup for Macs Any recommendations for a backup program for Macs that lets you specify to backup specified folders on a daily basis? I bought my son a 640 GB external hard drive for his Mac, and we are chagrined to not find anything built into the Mac OS to do this. There are some freeware programs out there, but if you can recommend one, that would be fine. It doesn't have to be clever--just clever enough to identify which files have been modified or added since the last backup, and copy those files to an external drive. UPDATE: It turned out to be simpler for my son's needs to just set up a crontab to run rsync to do the backups. Perpetual Criminal There is almost certainly more to this guy's story--but it adds a whole new dimension to the idea of a criminal with a long rap sheet. From the December 1, 2008 Nashville Tennessean: One single police department had charged this guy 146 times? How many other crimes has this guy committed in other jurisdictions? How many crimes did he commit for which he was never arrested? I also notice that "since June 1989" means since Sullivan turned 18. How many juvenile arrests were sealed? Sullivan seems to have been a one man crime wave. Labels: gun self-defense Cheapskates And Projection I was very pleased to see this column by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof that appeared in the December 24, 2008 Santa Rosa Press-Democrat: I am convinced that at least part of why liberals push so hard for the government to play Robin Hood is projection: liberals know what cheapskates they are, and assume that everyone is similarly unwilling to open their pockets to help those in need. Fortunately, liberals are still a minority of Americans. There are a lot of reasons why governmental redistribution is an inferior way of providing for the needs of the poor. One reason is that the costs of administration and processing mean that more than half of the revenues spent by the federal government on helping the poor seem to get lost in the bureaucracies that collect the taxes, figure out who needs it, and then actually dole out the money. I would like to think that this is just because government is not very efficient, but I am reminded by Professor Milton Friedman's observation that when you ask middle class, college educated people to design a system for helping the poor, they inevitably come up with a system that creates jobs for middle class, college educated people. A second reason why charitable contributions are better than governmental redistribution is that for the most part, charities for the relief of the poor don't seem to suffer from "mission creep" that transforms them into something that they were not intended to be. Rural electrification, when started during the New Deal, was intended to provide electric power to rural, usually desperately poor parts of America. Within the context of the welfare state, this was a commendable and sensible action to take. Today those rural electrification co-ops--which I understand still receive big federal subsidies--are overwhelmingly suburban communities that aren't poor. A third advantage of charitable giving is that you get to decide which programs you consider most important. Most of our December charitable contributions (somewhat reduced from normal because of my job situation) went to World Vision and The Salvation Army, two groups whose work I greatly respect. I have no direct control over where my federal taxes will go, and for all I know, the "charitable" actions that I am funding might turn out to be an S&M festival somewhere, because of mission creep, and the inevitable ability of bureaucrats to confuse poverty and an poverty of values. I am not suggesting that all governmental assistance to the poor should stop. There are holes in the private safety net, and the government handles some of this, although perhaps not very efficiently. But I would love to see liberals put more of their enormous wealth into helping the poor through charitable contributions, and a bit less trying to force the rest of us to fund the National Endowment for the Arts, and other offensive or questionable programs. "Merry Christmas" and Taking Offense One of the culture wars battles the last year or two has been retailers that go out of their way to avoid any reference to Christmas at this time of year. Perhaps because I live in one of the more vigorously traditional parts of America--where the population is overwhelmingly Protestant, Catholic, or Church of Latter Day Saints--this doesn't seem to be a big issue. I was pleased and surprised at how many sales clerks wished me "Merry Christmas" over the last few weeks--far more so than I can remember in previous years. What drove the move towards the generic and almost meaningless, "Happy Holidays"? I suspect that it was people convinced that there was something offensive about acknowledging that Christmas is the holiday for the overwhelming majority of Americans. For a majority of Americans, Christmas is not just a "winter holiday" but a holy day, when we commemorate the birth of our Lord and Savior. I wish that more of those who hold Christmas special for that reason operated more consistently as though they actually believed it, but people are strange and not very consistent. For another very large group of Americans, even if they are not particularly religious, Christmas is what this season is all about, because these are people who grew up in Christian homes. Even if they no longer believe--or are too busy sowing their wild oats to believe right now--this season is a time of warm memories. To this bunch, "Happy Holidays" is slightly absurd. I grew up on the West Side of Los Angeles--an area that had a very large Jewish population. I can remember going into my allergy specialist a couple days before Christmas one year. I think he was Jewish, and I can recall the look on his face as he searched his memory of discussions we had had over the years before he reached out his hand to shake mine and say, "Merry Christmas." I think he was trying to figure out if I was Jewish or not, and finally concluded that I probably was not. Professor Eugene Volokh over at Volokh Conspiracy had a very thoughtful piece about what is offensive: I don't celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, but so what? If you wish me a Merry Christmas, is it really reasonable for me to interpret this as a wish that I have a deep relationship with Jesus on this day? I rather doubt it -- "Merry [anything]" isn't much of a call for serious religious action or introspection. Nor is it an assumption that I'm religiously Christian. Everyone, certainly including religious Christians, knows that tens of millions of Americans, including those raised nominally Christian, don't celebrate it as a religious holiday.A lot of the "we don't want to offend anyone" foolishness that provokes "Happy Holidays" is, I think, from people who are not offended by "Merry Christmas," but spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the possibility that there are Muslims, Jews, atheists, and other religious minorities who will be offended--much like when some bureaucrat in one of the British cities decreed no stuffed animals that depict pigs would be allowed in governmental offices, to avoid offending Muslims. Yes, I'm sure that al-Qaeda would be offended by Miss Piggie, but I'm skeptical that even most religious Muslims would find anything offensive about this cartoonish depiction of a pig. A lot of multiculturalism is this same hand-wringing concern that someone, somewhere might be upset. If I knew that someone was not a Christian and religious, I would not say, "Merry Christmas" to them, because I know that it might be taken as offensive. If I meet someone wearing a yarmulke, or one of the several types of Muslim clothing that clearly identify someone has religious, I'm not going to say, "Merry Christmas." But this is--still--a Christian nation. If I don't have a pretty strong indicator that a person that I meet is going to find the sentiment offensive, I see no reason to engage in any form of euphemism. Nor is there any good reason for retailers to do likewise. Doing so offends the vast majority of Americans who, if they don't treat Christmas as the day when we commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ, at least see Christmas as at least a time for reflection and good will towards others. |