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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'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Monday, May 12, 2008
The Beauty of Idaho The snow has not completely melted yet--we're having an unusually cool spring. Here's the last remaining patches of snow a few hundred feet above us, on the north facing slopes:  Click to enlarge And here is the ski resort--a couple thousand feet higher at the base:  Click to enlarge While it is still quite cool at night, there's enough sunlight and warmth in the day to get the wild flowers well under way:  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge My wife knows the name of the intensely bright yellow flowers, but she's not here right now. Here you can see some of them closeup, and a hillside in the distance that is so covered with them that you can only see the integrated result:  Click to enlarge Every once in a while I start feeling sorry for myself that I still have to work for a living, unlike lots of other people--and then I think about it and realize that I am really quite fortunate to be able to live and work in a place this beautiful. Yesterday after church, my wife and I drove through the back country of Boise County, placing campaign signs. The roads are just terrible back there--but it is astonishingly beautiful. Much of it is Alpine meadows and granite. It looks much like the high country of Yosemite. Labels: welcome to Idaho Saturday, May 10, 2008
Other Candidates Today These were candidates running for other offices than mine. One (whose name I didn't remember) was trying to get the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate (trying to get Larry Craig's seat), and suggested that we could solve many of the economic problems of rural Idaho by having the Idaho legislature take back federal lands so that Idaho could administer them for the benefit of the timber workers. He wasn't saying that as a member of the U.S. Senate, he would try to get Congress to transfers the National Forests back to the states--but that the states should simply take back ownership. Hmmm. I think South Carolina tried that with Fort Sumter. There was some unpleasantness as a result. You might want to look it up. Another candidate is trying to get the nomination for one of the county commissioner positions. (Idaho counties are administered by commissioners, roughly equivalent to supervisors in a number of other states.) She made what sounded like a pretty good suggestion at first glance: put the county commission hearings online as live video, to enhance public involvement and reduce driving costs. This is a fine idea--but I asked her, "How many Boise County residents have a sufficiently broadband connection to watch streaming video, except in a 60x20 pixel window?" My guess is that that the vast majority of Boise County residents are dialup. Labels: Idaho politics Let Me Say Something Nice About My Opponent In some ways, he is not your conventional notion of a politician. He gave a speech at an event today in which he said something quite direct and blunt. He pointed out that since the environmentalists largely destroyed the timber industry in much of the West, rural counties like Boise County have been dependent on Craig-Wyden Act funds which are supposed to provide transition funding as we move on to...something else. Each year, it gets a bit harder to get Congress to provide the funding--and when the day comes when they stop funding Craig-Wyden, counties like Boise are going to have to raise taxes to cover operating costs. This isn't an easy thing to tell people--especially here, where enthusiasm for tax increases is extremely low. Corder didn't sugarcoat this, either. It made it just a little easier for me to make something of the same point in a different way: Idaho isn't a particularly bad operation in terms of Big Government. The legislature makes a serious effort to keep spending under control, and sometimes goes a bit too far in the penny-wise, pound-foolish direction. I explained that the contractor who built my house asked me if I was going to be able to cut taxes, and I had to tell him that I wasn't going to make any promises that I couldn't keep. There are some services that the government provides that are either necessary, or that make life a lot nicer, and those services are paid for by taxes. The format of this event was too much like a Presidential debate. We each had five minutes to speak, and then time for a few questions. No one had any questions for me. I can't believe that I spoke so powerfully that everyone had made up their mind based on my five minutes. Labels: Idaho politics Friday, May 09, 2008
The $100,000 Economy Car The Tesla Motors sports car costs about $100,000--so why would anyone buy it? Because it's so cheap to own. Okay, let me explain. The correct comparison isn't to a family sedan. The correct comparison is to a high performance two seat sports car--like a Corvette. You could buy a new Corvette for about $50,000 (maybe less, if you hit up the Chevy dealer in Boise in the depths of winter). Tesla claims that the electricity for their little whizbang costs about two cents a mile. The gasoline for a Corvette is going to cost you about nineteen cents per mile right now--and the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised to see it at forty cents per mile by the time you either wear out the car, or wrap it around a tree. I don't know what the long-term maintenance costs of the Tesla are going to be, but I would be very surprised to see them comparable to a gasoline engine. Think of the number of electric motors that you use on a daily basis--and that never, ever wear out. EVER. I've never had a kitchen appliance electric motor fail. I think that I have had one electric drill motor fail. Electric motors are remarkably durable and maintenance free. Have you ever had a tune-up on an electric motor? Ever changed the oil? Ever replaced an air filter? Other parts of the Tesla are going to be similar--like brakes, wheels, tires, steering gear, etc. I would not be at all surprised to see a Tesla end costing at least $0.25 per mile less to operate. In 200,000 miles, the Tesla's lower operating cost might well enable you to break even. I really look forward to seeing Tesla's family sedan--and the Chevy Volt. UPDATE: A reader tells me that the Tesla uses a different battery technology from the Prius--and one that is more likely to wear out. The batteries won't be cheap. Labels: cars Texas Concealed Handgun License Backlog The Texas Department of Public Safety issues concealed handgun licenses--and they are getting backlogged for an interesting reason. From the May 8, 2008 Houston Chronicle: It might well be that Presidential politics is driving this--although whoever wins the election won't affect CHL issuance in Texas. Perhaps young people are applying for CHLs more in awareness of how vunerable they are from incidents like Virginia Tech--and are hoping that Texas changes the law to pre-empt state college rules on the subject this year. I keep hoping that incidents like Virginia Tech (and the Omaha mall shootings, and the church in Colorado Springs, etc.) will generate the groundswell of support for doing something about the disgraceful condition of mental illness treatment in America. To make that happen, however, requires everyone to be able to work together. Applying for a concealed weapon permit doesn't require any collective action at all. Labels: concealed carry What's With Leftists & Children? This isn't the first time--not by a long shot. From the May 9, 2008 San Francisco Chronicle:
People that believe that there is nothing right or wrong (except being a Republican) not surprisingly sometimes act on it. Labels: child sexual abuse, overprivileged liberals Wednesday, May 07, 2008
What Happens When You Don't Plan Things? You get disasters like this, where a First World country can't even arrange its health care system adequately to handle its own births. Fortunately, they live next to a country where the government doesn't run things. From the May 5, 2008 Toronto Globe & Mail: Will someone please page Michael Moore? Part of what makes this happen isn't just that Canada has socialized health care. It is that, unlike a number of other countries with socialized health care, it prohibits doctors treating anyone outside of that system. Some of the problem is also that when you adopt socialized health care as a way of controlling costs--one way to control costs to reduce the amount of health care provided. That might be a legitimate collective, social decision--but prohibiting health care outside of the socialized system is what takes you from a bad collective decision to something that smacks of totalitarianism--the grave fear that someone, somewhere, might be able to buy better health care because they have more money. Labels: health care Gun Control Movement & Political Fundraising Snowflakes in Hell has an interesting comparison of fundraising by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence's Political Action Committee and the NRA's Political Victory Fund. NRA-PVF has raised about $8.4 million, and spent about $3.7 million. The Brady Campaign's PAC has raised $73 and spent $3,161. Yes, you read that right: $73. Not $73,000. Not $73 million--but $73. Okay, it's not exactly a fair comparison. The gun control movement gets an enormous amount of free promotion from the mainstream news media--although somewhat less than they used to get. The Democratic Party, in spite of both Obama and Clinton trying to distance themselves from gun control, is an almost wholly owned subsidiary of the gun control movement. This means that the gun control movement doesn't need to spend even close to as much money as our side does to elect its friends to office. But there does come a certain moment when the disparity becomes so large that it makes the gun control movement irrelevant. Perhaps the more interesting point that Snowflakes in Hell makes is what this astonishingly weak fundraising tells us about the level of support that the gun control movement has in America. Traditionally, gun control financial support has come from a small number of billionaires (and not all on the left--think of Reagan's crony Justin Dart). Our support comes from rather more ordinary people: More importantly, if you go to opensecrets.org yourself, and look at NRA-PVF’s top donors, you’ll see professions like “Machine Operator”, “Police Officer”, “Computer Technician”, “Engineer”, “Mechanic”, “Truck Driver”, “Art Teacher”. Sure, you also have your attorneys, doctors, and businessmen, but think about how much $1000 dollars means to a truck driver? Or an Art Teacher? Meanwhile the Brady’s have raised not just a little money, but nothing. Think about that, and what it says about where the passion is on this issue.At least, that's what I hope it means. My primary election is coming up in a bit less than three weeks, and I know that NRA members will be looking at my grade and my opponent's grade--and I suspect that very few are going to vote for him. Labels: Idaho politics "Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign" If you are old enough, this chorus will bring back memories. Anyway, my campaign signs arrived today, and we are busily distributing them and putting them up. A couple of interesting lessons learned: 1. These are 14" x 22" signs--which is a common size in urban and suburban settings for front yards. But out here in rural Idaho, along high speed roads, these are a little small. In retrospect, I should have ordered 100 of the larger size, instead of 250 of this size. 2. The metal stands that these signs come with work fine in relatively soft soil (such as a lawn). They require a bit of hammering to put into a lot of the hard soils that we have in Boise County. I really find the notion of campaign signs obnoxious. They convey no real information--nor can they, considering that they are intended to be read by passing drivers. They exist for one purpose only--to create name recognition, and the illusion of widespread support for the candidate--and they aren't cheap. For the same money, I could have done a mailing to about 500 households that gave a thoughtful discussion of public policy. But the name recognition is very important--more important than intellectually engaging the voters. In some ideal democracy, voters who knew nothing about the candidates would either learn enough to make rational decisions, or not vote for either candidate. But the real world isn't like that. Many people vote based on, "I've seen that name around" or decide to not vote for someone because, "They don't stand a chance." Anyway, if you live in my district, contact me about a sign. We've got plenty, and the more of them we have up, the more likely we are to win. UPDATE: Here's the sign:  Labels: Idaho politics Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Home Feeders (Part 2) I mentioned a couple of days ago how differently our society might regard people who dine at home if we had taken the same path about food that we took about public schools a century ago. A reader points out that the kibbutz movement in Israel did try to eliminate "home feeding" with everyone eating communally. More importantly, he points to this article in the Autumn 2002 City Journal about malnourished criminals in Britain--adults who grew up in such abusive homes that their mothers (what are fathers?) simply never fed them, and who seemed incapable of recognizing and preparing a healthy meal. Of course, we have such situations here too, and I mentioned that there are parents this neglectful. I rather doubt that these British criminals are that way because of the lack of a public restaurant system, however. It is more that the completely dysfunctional family structure that means that these kids were living on potato chips and chocolate also failed to teach them healthy approaches to life. Monday, May 05, 2008
Government Size & Efficiency A reader shared this example with me of an interesting problem with consolidating small governmental agencies and made some very useful suggestions: You mention that many small school districts in Idaho have lots of administration, and wonder if perhaps they should consolidate. Such consolidations can, in the short run, create interesting political problems if the populations of the districts are unequal, especially if rural districts are consolidated with an "urban" district.One problem with trying to improve efficiency of small districts without consolidation is that in some cases, there might not be enough work to keep someone working full-time at a particular position for a single district--and yet, if you make the job part-time, suddenly, you discover that many potential employees can't afford to take a job without benefits. This is one of those cases where it may make sense to consolidate several governmental agencies--or perhaps arrange for a single employee to be shared by several agencies, full-time with one agency, but with the other agencies sharing the expenses. Labels: Idaho politics There's Gotta Be A Way To Do This It turns out that the 5.5" ID aluminum tube is just a little too small to accept the CI-700 equatorial mount head. How much too small? Close enough that the calipers claim that it will fit (although the accuracy of these calipers declines as they approach the end of their 6" range)--so this is hundredths of an inch too small, and partly because the tube isn't perfectly round. This is too big to put on the lathe, so I can only hold it under the drill press with an end mill in it, and slowly turn the tube. I've done something like this before, but it sure is inelegant. These are the times that I wish that I had a low accuracy lathe--something that if it turned parts to an accuracy of .05", that would be just fine. Labels: machining Louisiana Voters: Time To Light Up The Phones Xavier Thoughts tells us that a concealed carry on campus bill escaped the lower house Criminal Justice Committee. Labels: concealed carry, gun rights Kettle Calling Pot Black Ben Smith at The Politico has a scan of the mailer that Clinton is using against Obama--pointing out that he is a liar about gun control--telling different groups radically different things about his position. Now, Clinton is correct about this, as I have pointed out before. But this really says something about Clinton's desperation--that she is reminding voters that Obama is a gun banner. What next? Will she send out a mailer accusing Obama of supporting increased taxes? I suppose if Clinton's point is that Obama isn't honest about this, and she is at least an honest supporter of restrictive gun control, that might be a valid way to spin this. But the target audience for this mailer are those of us who "cling" to our guns and religion because we are so desperately poor. This isn't a mailer going out to the obscenely rich Democrats on the coasts. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, gun rights Sunday, May 04, 2008
Switzerland Loses It At first glance, it reads like a really, really deadpan parody of animal rights. But it seems to be deadly serious. From the Swiss government's Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH), The dignity of living beings with regard to plants: Moral consideration of plants for their own sake: The Federal Constitution has three forms of protection for plants: the protection of biodiversity, species protection, and the duty to take the dignity of living beings into consideration when handling plants.Huh? The dignity of animals? No, they mean the dignity of plants. It became clear, however, that for plants – unlike animals – it was almost impossible to refer to moral intuition. There is no social consensus on how to deal with plants. Even within the ECNH, the intuitions relating to the extent and justification of moral responsibilities towards plants were highly heterogeneous. Some members were of the opinion that plants are not part of the moral community, because they do not satisfy the conditions for belonging to this community. Others argued that plants should not belong to it, because otherwise human life would be morally over-regulated. A further group felt that there were particular situations in which people should refrain from something for the sake of a plant, unless there are sufficient grounds to the contrary. This opinion was justified either by arguing that plants strive after something, which should not be blocked without good reason, or that recent findings in natural science, such as the many commonalities between plants, animals and humans at molecular and cellular level, remove the reasons for excluding plants in principle from the moral community. The only criterion on which all the members could agree, despite their very differing intuitions, was that we should not harm or destroy plants arbitrarily.G. K. Chesterton is often credited (perhaps incorrectly) with the saying, "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything." The proof is visible above. What next? Should we be concerned about mistreatment of rocks? Rocks might "strive after something" also. I found this astonishing indication of where Europe is heading over at Volokh Conspiracy, where the winning comment has to be: Can ‘Mineral Rights’ be far behind? I don’t know about moral equivalence, but this panel has clearly demonstrated that they are intellectually inferior to a box of rocks.UPDATE: Oh yeah: here's the music video by the Arrogant Worms: "Carrot Juice is Murder." Labels: enviromental lunacy, overprivileged liberals Flying Buttresses, Solid Buttresses, & Tripods Okay, the square tube is plenty stiff; the 1/4" thick L-brackets that link the square tubes to the vertical tube that holds the tripod isn't. It occurs to me that nearly all tripods use some variant of a triangle. Either they have the legs going out at a angle, or they use a triangular bracket to tie each leg to the vertical tube. The reason is that the diagonal distributes the load. I am thinking that perhaps what might be the right way to do this would be to either add a diagonal from the top of the tube (which is 10.5" tall) to the end of the leg, so that most of the load would be distributed directly to where the casters are located, or replace the L-bracket with a right triangle 3/4" thick, and perhaps 10" high. The right triangle is much easier to make, although the material cost if made of aluminum is substantial. I could drill out lightening holes to get the weight down. Adding a diagonal member might not be so difficult. I could use some square tube (I still have plenty), cut it at the correct angles to make the L-brackets be the right angle. Somewhere there must be something that shows how the load works for cathedrals, flying buttresses, and solid buttresses. The good news is that it won't be written in Latin; medieval cathedral builders did everything like this by experiment. The cathedrals that stayed up inspire wonder in us today; a number didn't stay up. You could say that they buried their mistakes. UPDATE: I went back out to the garage, took another look at everything, and had a sudden inspiration. Dobsonian telescopes (as Big Bertha 1.0 was) consist of: 1. A flat base. 2. A cradle that rotates in azimuth on the flat base. 3. The telescope tube that rotates in altitude on bearings on the cradle. I thought about it for a couple of minutes, and realized that I had already put the casters onto the flat base--which is two inches thick of solid oak. Hmmm. I think that would hold the 5.5" ID tube into which the CI-700 mount should go. All I had to do was: 1. Remove the casters that I had removed from the flat base, and put them back in the flat base. 2. Remove the square aluminum tubes from the L-brackets. 3. Drill and tap (yes, you can tap oak) the flat base to match the holes in the L-brackets that were attached to the square aluminum tubes. 4. Screw 3" long 3/8"-16 bolts through the L-brackets into the flat base. 5. Put nuts on the bottom of the flat base to hold the bolts--in case, for any reason, the threads in the oak give way. It is an elegant reuse of materials! It might look better to use a 1/4" thick stainless steel square instead, and it would certainly be resistant to the weather, but I already have the oak, and I know that it will handle the load--it has been handling the far greater load of Big Bertha 1.0. Tomorrow: I need to drill and tap 3/8"-16 holes at the top of the 5.5" ID tube for the bolts that hold the CI-700 equatorial mount head into the tube. At that point, it's just a matter of moving the mount, bolting everything together, and then moving Big Bertha 2.0 into the saddle. Labels: telescopes Home Feeders A while back, I wrote an amusing piece (well, I thought it was amusing) analogizing education to food--and imagining a society where public restaurants fed every resident, free of charge (as well as illegal aliens, of course, but not tourists just passing through). In the course of that piece, I made a reference to home schoolers that I thought would be immediately recognized as sarcasm--but at least one home schooler thought that I was seriously calling them whackos, by comparing them to people who insisted on having meals at home with their family, instead of going to the tax-funded public restaurant system. Anyway, I was thinking more about home schoolers today, and I found myself wondering: what if, in 1870, elites of Western societies had made a concerted effort to create a tax-funded public restaurant system? How would we regard people that ate at home today? If this seems like an absurd idea, I've read that part of why Britain started its family nutrition supplement program after the Boer War (1899-1902) was because so many young men that volunteered for military service were so badly nourished that they simply could not pass the physical. (This page seems to be acknowledging as much.) Imagine if the dominant idea of Edwardian England had been socialism, not welfare state capitalism? Today we would have a public restaurant system like I described previously. I admit that this is a radical concept. Even the Soviet Union, to my knowledge, didn't try to abolish the concept of families preparing and eating meals together. Some socialists did float the idea--but even Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward only imagined a future where dinner was eaten in the community dining hall. Still, how would we today look at "home feeders"--those who insisted on preparing meals at home for themselves and their children? Defenders of the public restaurant system would admit that some parents had sufficient knowledge of nutrition and food preparation to prepare adequate meals for their children. But how, without a degree in nutrition, could most parents expect to prepare properly balanced meals? Why, just look at how bad the situation was a century ago! People sickened and died of pellagra, beri-beri, and a host of other malnutrition diseases! Even today you hear of parents who let their kids go hungry, or inadequately nourished! Just think what it would be like if parents had the option of keeping their tax dollars, and were given the enormous responsibility of buying food at the store! And without the professional training and state certification in food preparation, how could the average parent expect to consistently prepare meals without giving their children food poisoning? Look at how often people get food poisoning even in licensed restaurants that are subject to health inspections! It is just asking for trouble for most parents to try this themselves. It might work for a few weeks, but you just know that a parent is going to fail to wash his hands in between cutting up the chicken and putting the plates on the table! A few defenders of the public restaurant system would insist that "home feeders" were just kooks who wanted to teach their children "fringe ideas" about eating which shouldn't even be allowed until the children were 21--or that "home feeders" are going to give their kids nothing but soft drinks and Twinkies for every meal--because that's what the kids want, and parents are too lazy to say no. Because the tax structure forces you to pay for the public restaurant system, almost everyone will use it. Since most people won't know any "home feeders," all sorts of outrageous lies will be told about them, and many people won't know any better. Labels: public education Why It Has Been Silent Here I've been busy talking to people, getting the first direct mail piece printed, and identifying who gets that first mailing, etc. The Idaho World had a nice article about my campaign which is generating some positive responses from voters. And I've been getting the shorter tripod built so that I can put the Celestron CI-700 and Big Bertha 2.0 on it. I still have some misgivings about whether the square tube that I will be using for the legs will be stiff enough to support the weight--I'm try this first with something heavy and cheap, just in case the tripod either bends or fails. I also spent yesterday struggling to mill the part required to fill an order for a caster assembly for the Vixen HAL tripod. I finally gave up, and refunded the customer's money. I just couldn't get the mill vise to hold the chunk of Delrin in place well enough. Why? I've had this problem intermittently before, and I am now convinced that the screw that clamps the vise in position is the problem. It is a socket (Allen) head 10-32 screw--and over time, the wrench damages the socket from a hexagon into something closer to a circle--and so I can't get enough torque. I could just keep replacing the screw. They are cheap. But the problem is that there isn't a bright line that separates "adequately tight" and "not adequately tight." The damage to the head takes place very slowly, and so it isn't obvious when it is time to replace it. I think I will replace it with a hex head 10-32 screw instead--something that I can use a wrench to tighten that won't chew up the interior surfaces. Labels: Idaho politics, machining |
