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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).




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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:

1. If most women wait until they are in the mood before making love with their husband, many women will be waiting a month or more until they next have sex. When most women are young, and for some older women, spontaneously getting in the mood to have sex with the man they love can easily occur. But for most women, for myriad reasons -- female nature, childhood trauma, not feeling sexy, being preoccupied with some problem, fatigue after a day with the children and/or other work, just not being interested -- there is little comparable to a man’s “out of nowhere,” and seemingly constant, desire for sex.

2. Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

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.

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."[c] 32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

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.

posted by Clayton at 8:19 PM permalink

 
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.

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posted by Clayton at 7:53 PM permalink

 
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:

Sherry Jones was driving her 13-year-old son, Malcolm, to school the other morning when he mentioned something about some kid he didn't like.

Something about the kid being a jerk.

Jones told him that wasn't kind. When you speak of people, she said, always speak good of them.

"Look at Barack! . . . During the campaign, no matter what, Obama always took the high road," she told him. "During the debates when John McCain would say a dig, Barack would never react. . . . He was always positive."

Malcolm, who likes a good debate, was, for that moment, quiet.

In that silence, Jones realized that something about her spontaneous, trapped-in-the-car lecture was working. "If my son didn't agree, he would let me know," says Jones, an accountant who lives in Silver Spring. "He always has something else to say. . . . Usually, he will say, 'Yeah, but . . . ' When I use Barack Obama as an example, I can see him. He's quiet. He may sit up a little straighter.

"He hasn't gotten to the point where he says, 'You are right.' " But there is something to be said for him saying nothing.

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.

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posted by Clayton at 7:09 PM permalink

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?)

SAN FRANCISCO — Here’s a shocker: The one-night stand may be being replaced by long-term monogamous relationships when it comes to sex at academic conferences. That was among the revelations Tuesday at a panel of the Modern Language Association devoted to conference sex. Well, actually it was devoted to theorizing and analyzing conference sex, although it was probably the only session at the MLA this year in which a panelist appeared in a bathrobe.

The annual meeting of the MLA has long been known (and frequently satirized) for the sexual puns and imagery of paper titles — even if many of the papers themselves are in fact more staid than their names would suggest. As the MLA meeting concluded on Tuesday, however, one session sought to put sex at academic conferences center stage. Drawing on literature, theory and experience, panelists considered not only the role of sex at conferences, but talked about identity, love and (perhaps more timely to many MLA attendees) the dismal academic job market.

Many presenters at the MLA use categorization to make their points, and this session was no exception. Jennifer Drouin, an assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Allegheny College, argued that there are eight forms of conference sex (although she noted that some may count additional forms for each of the eight when the partners cross disciplinary, institutional or tenure-track/non-tenure track, or superstar/average academic boundaries).

The categories:

  1. “Conference quickies” for gay male scholars to meet gay men at local bars.
  2. “Down low” sex by closeted academics taking advantage of being away from home and in a big city.
  3. “Bi-curious” experimentation by “nerdy academics trying to be more hip” (at least at the MLA, where queer studies is hip). This “increases one’s subversiveness” without much risk, she said.
  4. The “conference sex get out of jail free” card that attendees (figuratively) trade with academic partners, permitting each to be free at their respective meetings. This freedom tends to take place at large conferences like the MLA, which are “more conducive” to anonymous encounters, Drouin said.
  5. “Ongoing flirtations over a series of conferences, possibly over several years” that turn into conference sex. Drouin said this is more common in sub-field conferences, where academics are more certain of seeing one another from year to year if their meetings are “must attend” conferences.
  6. “Conference sex as social networking,” where academics are introduced to other academics at receptions and one thing leads to another.
  7. “Career building sex,” which generally crosses lines of academic rank. While Drouin said that this form of sex “may be ethically questionable,” she quipped that this type of sex “can lead to increased publication possibilities” or simply a higher profile as the less famous partner tags along to receptions.
  8. And last but not least — and this was the surprise of the list: “monogamous sex among academic couples.” Drouin noted that the academic job market is so tight these days that many academics can’t live in the same cities with their partners. While many colleges try to help dual career couples, this isn’t always possible, and is particularly difficult for gay and lesbian couples, since not every college will even take their couple status seriously enough to try to find jobs for partners. So these long distance academic couples, gay and straight, tenured and adjuncts, must take the best academic positions they can, and unite at academic conferences.
...

At a conference, he said, “a collegial discussion of methodology becomes foreplay,” and the finger that may be moved in the air to illuminate a point during a panel presentation (he demonstrated while talking) can later become the finger touching another’s skin for the first time in the hotel room, “where we lose our cap and gown.”

For gay men like himself, Wendland said, conference sex is particularly important as an affirmation of elements of gay sexuality that some seem to want to disappear. As many gay leaders embrace gay marriage and “heteronormative values,” he said, it is important to preserve other options and other values.

“Conference sex encounters become more than mere dalliance and physical release,” he said. It is a stand against the “divorcing physicality from being human, much less queer,” he said.

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.

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posted by Clayton at 10:20 PM permalink

 
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.)

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posted by Clayton at 5:42 PM permalink

 
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.

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posted by Clayton at 5:36 PM permalink

 
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.

posted by Clayton at 5:30 PM permalink

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.

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posted by Clayton at 2:12 PM permalink

 
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.

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posted by Clayton at 1:10 PM permalink

 
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.

There, Burris, whom embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed to succeed President-elect Barack Obama in the Senate on Tuesday, has erected a granite mausoleum listing his many accomplishments.

Under the seal of the state of Illinois and the words "Trail Blazer," Burris, 71, has listed his many firsts in granite, including being the state's first African-American attorney general and the state's first African-American comptroller.

The memorial also notes that Burris was the first African-American exchange student to Hamburg University in Germany from Southern Illinois University in 1959.

There appears to be enough room to add "U.S. senator" to the memorial, but Burris may never get a chance to serve in Washington.

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.

posted by Clayton at 7:41 AM permalink

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"?

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posted by Clayton at 7:42 AM permalink

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


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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.

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posted by Clayton at 7:17 PM permalink

Sunday, December 28, 2008
 
Nice Piece From the British Paper, The Telegraph

From December 28, 2008:

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.


And yet President Obama still wants a carbon tax to solve a problem that is increasingly clearly non-existent.

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posted by Clayton at 5:42 PM permalink

 
Playing Into the Hands of Holocaust Deniers

This type of fraud plays into the hands of Holocaust deniers:

NEW YORK (AP) - It's the latest story that touched, and betrayed, the world.

"Herman Rosenblat and his wife are the most gentle, loving, beautiful people," literary agent Andrea Hurst said Sunday, anguishing over why she, and so many others, were taken by Rosenblat's story of love born on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence at a concentration camp.

"I question why I never questioned it. I believed it; it was an incredible, hope-filled story."

On Saturday, Berkley Books canceled Rosenblat's memoir, "Angel at the Fence." Rosenblat acknowledged that he and his wife did not meet, as they had said for years, at a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where she allegedly sneaked him apples and bread. The book was supposed to come out in February.

Rosenblat, 79, has been married to the former Roma Radzicky for 50 years, since meeting her on a blind date in New York. In a statement issued Saturday through his agent, he described himself as an advocate of love and tolerance who falsified his past to better spread his message.

"I wanted to bring happiness to people," said Rosenblat, who now lives in the Miami area. "I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Rosenblat's believers included not only his agent and his publisher, but Oprah Winfrey, film producers, journalists, family members and strangers who ignored, or didn't know about, the warnings from scholars that his story didn't make sense.

 It is never right to do wrong to do right.

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posted by Clayton at 5:35 PM permalink

 
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.

posted by Clayton at 5:26 PM permalink

 
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.

The words of the Privileges or Immunities Clause protect the substantive fundamental rights of all Americans. As Senator Jacob Howard said in the Senate debates on the Amendment: “[i]t will, if adopted by the States, forever disable every one of them from passing laws trenching upon those fundamental rights and privileges which pertain to citizens of the United States . . . .” Many others said the same thing, and the Amendment’s opponents never once contradicted them.

The list of fundamental rights the Privileges or Immunities Clause was designed to protect began with those in the Bill of Rights, but it did not end there. In discussing the fundamental rights of citizenship, the framers regularly included a long list of fundamental rights – such as the right of access to the courts, the right to freedom of movement, the right to bodily integrity, and the right to have a family and direct the upbringing of one’s children – that have no obvious textual basis in the Bill of Rights. These were core rights of personal liberty and personal security that belong to “citizens of all free governments;” it did not matter that they were not enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution. The framers’ thinking should hardly be surprising. The Ninth Amendment affirms that the Constitution protects unenumerated rights; as Steven Calabresi reports, more than three-quarters of state constitutions at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment did the same.
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.

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posted by Clayton at 8:40 AM permalink

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.

posted by Clayton at 10:25 PM permalink

 
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:

A 22-year-old uniformed security guard who was buying gasoline at a Murfreesboro Pike station on Sunday shot and killed a robbery suspect carrying an air gun.

Metro detectives are ruling the death of Jamie L. Sullivan, 37, a justifiable homicide.

Wearing a mask and carrying what appeared to be a pistol, Sullivan entered the Mapco market at 2101 Murfreesboro Pike at 1:45 a.m.

Eric Gordon, 22, was also in the market. Sullivan pointed his pistol at Gordon's head and threatened to kill him. Sullivan told Gordon to surrender his holstered gun and a struggle ensued. Gordon drew his 9-millimeter weapon and shot Sullivan once in the face. Sullivan died at the scene.

Shortly after, detectives discovered that Sullivan's gun was a BB pistol that looked like a real gun.

Metro police had charged Sullivan with 146 offenses since June 1989. His last arrest was for trespassing Nov. 20.

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.

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posted by Clayton at 2:23 PM permalink

 
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:

This holiday season is a time to examine who's been naughty and who's been nice, but I'm unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad.

Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, "Who Really Cares," cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals. Other research has reached similar conclusions. The "generosity index" from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less to charity than Republicans -- the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

"When I started doing research on charity," Brooks wrote, "I expected to find that political liberals -- who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did -- would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views."

Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than the United States in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.

Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of GNP, according to a terrific new book, "Philanthrocapitalism," by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.

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.

posted by Clayton at 6:19 AM permalink

 
"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.

...

So if you tell me "Merry Christmas," good for you. If you tell me "Happy Holidays," I confess I'll get a bit annoyed because of its generic air, but I'll just assume that you're trying to play it safe -- often a very good strategy in social relations. Plus why be churlish about someone wishing you a happy anything? If you tell me "Happy Hanukkah," I'll start racking my brains about when Hanukkah actually is this year; I never have any idea. If you tell me "Happy Diwali," I'll assume that this is a good thing in your life, and I'll appreciate the good wishes. (If neither you nor I are Hindu, then I might wonder what you mean by that.) If you tell me "Happy New Year," my favorite greeting, I'll be extra pleased, but that's just a matter of taste.
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.

posted by Clayton at 5:51 AM permalink

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