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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Friday, July 03, 2009
Things I Love About The Corvette On the road to Bend Sunday: 28.6 mpg. On the road back from Bend today (by wild coincidence): 28.6 mpg. And the cruise control was set at 65, 66, or 68 almost the entire way (except for a stretch of I-84 when I re-entered the Free State of Idaho). It took me 4 hours and 19 minutes elapsed time to get there on Sunday from Horseshoe Bend. (The Corvette has an elapsed time counter as well.) In spite of being a "sports car," it has a very comfortable, controlled but firm ride on reasonably smooth pavement. Labels: cars Thursday, July 02, 2009
Epoxy Over Aluminum Fiberglass is made by combining epoxy with glass fibers, and carbon fiber composite is made by combining epoxy with carbon fiber. Epoxy by itself is stiff, but not terribly strong. Glass fiber and carbon fiber are flexible and strong, but not stiff. The combination of the two gives a material that is very stiff for its weight. So, what happens if you use the same approach to combine epoxy with aluminum? Thin sheets of aluminum, like glass and carbon fiber, are very strong but flexible. Could you apply epoxy to aluminum to create something that gives you a high stiffness to weight ratio? I see references that suggest that it gets used in boating, but I can't find anything specific to discussing this. Unless you can provide me with better information, I'm tempted to experiment with this over the weekend--take a thin sheet of aluminum, epoxy it, and then see how it compares to an uncoated sheet of aluminum for stiffness and weight. Yes, I'm trying to find a way to get Big Bertha 2.0's weight down a bit more. Am I Being Unreasonable? I received a ScopeRoller order on July 1. I emailed the customer back the same day, informing it that because we were waiting on wheels to ship from Missouri, it would be July 10 before we could ship. The response? A refund request because I couldn't ship immediately. I'll make a refund--a customer this easily upset isn't likely a customer that I want that badly. But I don't think responding same day to an order with an anticipated production and ship date 10 days in the future is particularly absurd. Has the Internet bred a generation of hopelessly impatient sorts? Labels: telescopes Very Un-PC Humor This was forwarded to me, and who knows, maybe it didn't really come from a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. But it sounds like it could have, and it's still pretty funny!
Labels: humor Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Do These People Have No Shame? From July 1, 2009 Washington Post/MSNBC: WASHINGTON - Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.As I pointed out with respect to a Republican member of Congress a couple of years ago, you can somewhat understand why someone who is scraping by to pay his bills might be tempted to abuse his political position. But when you are already wealthy enough that you don't need to work--and in the case of Senator Inouye, you are so old that you can't possibly spend the money that you already have before you die--why takes actions that at least look corrupt, and probably are? And there are so many of these of late: Sen. Conyers' wife, Monica Conyers, who resigned from the Detroit City Council after her conviction, and whose husband used his position to assist in the corruption. And the list of these crooks (overwhelmingly Democrats) is so long and disappointing. You know, if Americans cared about corruption by public officials, the Democrats would have something to worry about at the next election. But pretty clearly, most Americans don't let this bug them much. Labels: politicians behaving badly Monday, June 29, 2009
Dealing With Inflation I mentioned a bit more than a month ago that I was wrestling with the question of how to deal with an inflationary economy. I'm still wrestling. The economic disaster hasn't injured me quite as much in the non-retirement portfolio as I had feared, or rather, the damage to my stock mutual funds and some of my bonds has been almost compensated by the improvement in some of my other bonds. The Fannie Mae bonds, for example, are actually above par! And I have some hope, that over the next ten years, either the voters will get smart enough to kick the Democrats out of power, or more direct action will make the value of anything but freeze dried food and ammunition rather irrelevant. Liz Ann Sonders of Schwab is indicating that there is beginning to be a cautious, realistic optimism about the market, and investors are moving from cash to a variety of investments. I don't find this hard to believe; the economy was supposed to rebound by second half anyway, and even the crooks who control Congress couldn't completely screw this up. As Sonders pointed out on June 24, the Fed believes that the recession is beginning to ease, and their actions reflect this. But also: Schwab's Investment Strategy Council continues to believe inflation is not a near-term risk.Which fits with some stuff that I linked to several months ago. For those that are still many years from retirement, slowly easing back into conservative growth stock mutual funds might be a good idea. For those of us who aren't that many years away, perhaps either short-term bonds (maturities of 2-5 years) make sense, or adjustable rate bonds. Of course, don't make the mistake that I made, buying some Sallie Mae adjustable bonds--ones that could theoretically drop to 0% interest if interest rates fell to 0. Not like that could happen, I told myself! Unlike a fixed rate bond, where falling interest rates at least make the value of the bond go up--with these, not only does the interest rate fall--but so does the value of the bond, since it now pays a much lower interest rate. I guess that I will just hold onto these, until they mature (some years out), or the inflation ogre shows up and spoils the party--at which point, those bonds will probably be worth having. Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing: 1951-1963 This is part of the Battlefield of the Cold War series, volume 1. This is a detailed history of nuclear weapons testing by the United States. In spite of the title, it actually covers 1945 to 1963, and is not limited to the Nevada Test Site. It includes information about the Pacific and outer space nuclear weapons tests, as well as those conducted at the Nevada Test Site--including a list of all the test explosions (including yield and purpose) in this period. In light of the subsequent problems of the Downwinders (who allege, and I guess with good reason, that they were injured by fallout from the tests), there's a lot of interesting discussion of the struggles over what the proper limits of the tests performed. It would appear that there was a genuine effort to avoid unnecessarily dangerous exposure to those outside the test site--but the combination of bad luck and insufficient understanding of the risks meant that these efforts failed. This makes a nice companion to Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Labels: history More Humorous Posters The first one really gave me a laugh.  The second one is a little more vulgar in language than I prefer, but it really captures the insanity of our first Affirmative Action President. (Why couldn't our first black President have been Thomas Sowell?)  Labels: humor "Pedophiles Aren't Gay" This is conventional wisdom--and I've been told this repeatedly by gay activists and their liberal apologists--even when the pedophile preys exclusively on little boys. Sexual preference is on a different axis from pedophilia. There are heterosexual pedophiles, bisexual pedophiles, and homosexual pedophiles. As I pointed out in 2006, in spite of the talking heads that the news media interview on the subject, serious, very PC scientific journals still use terms like "homosexual pedophile" and "heterosexual pedophile" to describe these offenders. It is true that a majority of homosexuals are not pedophiles. It is also true that a majority of pedophiles are heterosexual. (Since heterosexuals are about 97% of the population, of course a majority of pedophiles are heterosexual.) Scholarly works published into the early 1990s (before Political Correctness took over) were still showing that homosexuals and bisexuals were 20-30% of pedophiles--or about 8-10x disproportionate to their fraction of the population. While I'm a bit skeptical of the article linked here, because Paul Cameron has a strong ideological orientation on this, it is curious that the percentage of homosexual child sexual abuse that he found analyzing Illinois foster care data was...24%, right in the middle of historical data. And there are cases like this one, involving an openly gay couple, molesting a foster child. Or Paula Poundstone, a lesbian entertainer who was charged with lewd acts on one of her under 14 foster children. I've also pointed out that one rather special group of pedophiles--Catholic priests--overwhelmingly victimize little boys: 81%. And guess what? Catholic priests have about 11x the rate of AIDS of the general population. (Surprised? I was, too. But when I look at those two figures together, I'm not surprised.) So let's not pretend that this horrific case from Duke University is just a big surprise, shall we? From the June 28, 2009 North Carolina News-Observer: Federal authorities say Lombard, 42, of 24 Indigo Creek Trail, performed sexual acts on his son and invited an undercover investigator online to fly to North Carolina and do the same.Professor Mike Adams points to the wailing fest from the Duke faculty when the lacrosse players were falsely accused of raping a black woman, and were almost railroaded by a dishonest district attorney. But this is going to be a lot more entertaining: As I said, most homosexuals are not molesters. And there are enough heterosexual molesters out there--certainly a strong majority--that if you decide to focus on gay men as the danger to children, you aren't being very honest. I suspect that most gay couples that are adopting children are trying to create a white picket fence middle class life that they can't have without marrying the opposite sex. But there are some creeps out there, too, and I do worry a bit that in the mad rush to allow gay adoption, the agencies involved aren't being careful enough in screening. When we were raising our kids, we were extraordinarily careful who we let watch our children, and I encourage you to be similarly careful. Do not assume that [fill in your favorite male relative] could never have done something like that! Children make stuff up, without question. But they are victimized--a lot. As I pointed out a while back, both here and here, there is a curious connection between child sexual abuse (CSA) and adult homosexuality--enough so that it seems plausible that CSA causes at least some adult homosexuality. More worrisome is that a small percentage of CSA survivors end up becoming molesters themselves when they grow up. Usually male victims become molesters--but sometimes, female victims do so as well. The exact mechanism isn't well understood, but the connection seems clear enough. And that's part of why we aren't making any progress on stopping it. This ideological pretense that pedophiles are always heterosexual, or don't have an adult sexual orientation is not only false, it is dangerously false. Labels: child sexual abuse, homosexuality Sunday, June 28, 2009
No, It Isn't An Article From The Onion But you are forgiven for wondering at first. It comes from the June 25, 2009 Telegraph: Canterbury is sufficiently gay, council inspectors rule Labels: homosexuality Saturday, June 27, 2009
Please Explain This To Me Most homosexuals don't do stuff like this. I know that. Whenever this type of behavior happens in a public place, I'm told by apologists that this sickness is not either typical or accepted by the gay community. So answer me this question: If this sort of sickness--exhibitions of torture and sexual pleasure--is not generally considered acceptable in the gay community--why doesn't the government of New York City (or San Francisco) enforce its laws against public lewdness and indecency? (Or even just stop actively funding and encouraging it, in the case of San Francisco.) It is pretty clear that city governments are at least tolerating, and often encouraging or subsidizing this sickness because they do not want to offend the homosexual community--and doesn't mind offending the majority of its citizens who unquestionably would find this behavior on public streets completely unacceptable. If this sickness is actually a tiny, tiny fraction of homosexuals, and most homosexuals would also find this behavior unacceptable, why do city governments not enforce their existing laws? Remember that even in San Francisco, homosexuals are only about 11% of the men, and 4% of the women--so perhaps 8% of the total population. If this type of pubilc behavior is really only acceptable to a tiny fraction of homosexuals--say, 5% of them--then that means that enforcing the law would upset less than 1/2 of 1% of the population. Does anyone seriously believe that less than 1/2 of 1% of the population is this important to politicians? This isn't "what consenting adults do in private." It isn't the type of behavior that would show that gay people are "just like straight people, except for who they love." It's a pretty clear indicator that there's something terribly broken about homosexuality, that city governments are afraid to offend homosexuals by saying, "You have to obey the same public lewdness laws as everyone else in public places." Labels: homosexuality If The Senate Passes This Insane Cap-And-Trade Bill The good news is that it might solve the inflation problem that is likely to bite us as soon as the economy recovers...because it will prevent the economy from recovering. The damage that it will do is so astonishing that I suspect that it will probably end the Democratic Party's hopes of winning elections again. (I'm hoping that this means that they will lose power, but if things get bad enough, I wouldn't be surprised to see Chicago-style elections become a national norm.) Labels: global warming Humorous Gun Posters A reader sent a collection. Here are some of the more amusing examples.         Labels: humor The Maternal Instinct When we returned from the Grand Canyon trip, we had a new neighbor--a rather loud one at that.  Click to enlarge It appears to be a Western Meadowlark, with an astonishingly bright yellow coloration. And yes, when seen from above, it appears that she has picked one of our rain gutters to build a nest.  Click to enlarge I suspect that in our absence, she decided that this would be a nice quiet place to lay her eggs, without worry about predators being able to get to it. Of course, now we're back, and as soon as we open the garage door, or pull up in one of our cars, she zooms out of the nest, squawking loudly, hoping that we will chase her, and leave her eggs alone.  Click to enlarge She'll take off on a great loop, and eventually land out in the brush.  Click to enlarge Only when we have left the vicinity does she fly back home. Labels: house project Don't Be Stupid From the June 24, 2009 New York Times: A year or two from now, the Supreme Court will have overturned this idiotic Seventh Circuit decision--and Hal Turner will still be spending money defending himself on a criminal charge. Don't be stupid. You can politely disagree with Bauer, Easterbrook, and Posner. You can rudely disagree with them. But calling for their assassination--and then providing information that might be used by some confused malcontent for that purpose? Bad manners, criminal, and incredibly stupid. Ways To Make Your Head Hurt Read the U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the constitutionality of the federal income tax. Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429 (1895) is one of the more obtuse decisions that I think that I have ever read. I am not surprised that a lot of the "income tax is unconstitutional" crowd gets this wrong--what a messy, ugly, confusing, clumsy decision. At the core of the question is this claim made by the plaintiffs: alleged income tax incorporated in the act of congress were unconstitutional, null, and void, in that the tax was a direct tax in respect of the real estate held and owned by the company in its own right and in its fiduciary capacity as aforesaid, by being imposed upon the rents, issues, and profits os said real estate, and was likewise a direct tax in respect of its personal property and the personal property held by it for others for whom it acted in its fiduciary capacity as aforesaid, which direct taxes were not, in and by said act, apportioned among the several states, as required by section 2 of article 1 of the constitution; and that, if the income tax so incorporated in the act of congress aforesaid were held not to be a direct tax, nevertheless its provisions were unconstitutional, null, and void, in that they were not uniform throughout the United States, as required in and by section 8 of article 1 of the constitution of the United States, upon many grounds and in many particulars specifically set forth.You see, there are direct taxes and indirect taxes. Direct taxes, before the 16th Amendment, had to be apportioned among the states by population, because of Art. I, sec. 9, cl. 4: No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census of Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 1, provides for: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;It appears that indirect taxes, including excise taxes and tariffs, were not subject to this same requirement about proportion to population as direct taxes. But makes some taxes "direct" and others "indirect"? Pollock is awash in discussion and example, but can't seem to give a consistent statement, and admits that there is a bit of contradiction in the precedents and original public meaning (as evidenced by debates in the 1790s about a tax on carriages) of these terms, even admitting in one place that an income tax, in the original public meaning, would have been a direct tax:
Yet otherwise Pollock cites precedents holding that an income tax was an indirect tax or excise tax, and therefore not subject to the apportionment requirement. (See the discussion on pages 635-636.) Pollock is the case which is often referred to as ruling that the income tax was unconstitutional. But to my surprise, what it really ruled was unconstitutional was not a personal income tax, but a tax on income from real estate--which was found to be direct, and therefore subject to the apportionment rule:
The net effect of the Pollock decision was to strike down just one little part of the federal income tax code: We are of opinion that the law in question, so far as it levies a tax on the rents or income of real estate, is in violation of the constitution, and is invalid.The Sixteenth Amendment changed not only the apportionment requirement, but clarified that it didn't matter if the income came from real estate or not: The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.I see some pretty amazing claims made by the anti-income tax crowd to the effect that the Sixteenth Amendment wasn't intended to tax personal income--only corporations, or "Fourteenth Amendment citizens" (by which they mean those persons who became citizens of the United States because of the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of the freedmen). The claim is that taxing individual incomes is some rather modern perversion of the original intention. But you certainly won't find anything to support that position in Brushaber v. Union Pacific R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916):
Now, the exemptions were large enough that indeed, the original tax code was a tax on rich people. But it was on people, not corporations. It is the case that very few wage earners had enough income to be subject to that original income tax, because very few people earned that kind of money. But there were some who did. The individual income tax, as unpleasant as it is, was the intention from the beginning. We have the individual income tax because Americans want it. Friday, June 26, 2009
Obama and Prolonged Detention The Ron Paul crowd have taken a Rachel Maddow segment that correctly pillories Obama for hypocrisy and inconsistency and attached their campaign material at the end. And she's right: Obama made a big deal throughout the campaign--and at the start of his speech--about the Bush Administration's ad hoc approach to the problem of detaining unlawful combatants--and then announces that they are going to do the same thing! But somehow, what was unconstitutional and criminal when Bush did it in the heat of the moment, by crossing a few more "t"s and dotting a few more "i"s, will somehow become constitutional and appropriate when Obama does it. PowerLine has the statement of one of Bush's guys before Congress on this issue, in which he agrees that Obama's "prolonged detention" is the right policy for those who are unlawful combatants, but that Obama's emphasis on due process is likely to encourage the U.S. to not take prisoners, or to make sure that third parties--who aren't as nice as we are--end up with these prisoners. I think a lot of people are failing to recognize how fundamentally different non-state actors (such as al-Qaeda) are from traditional nation-state enemies. The closest historical example to non-state actors are pirates and the post-World War II German Werewolves. Pirates were tried (sometimes rather summarily) and hung; unlawful combatants were sometimes not even given the benefit of a trial. Labels: terrorism |
