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Labels: house project Labels: machining, telescopes Labels: deinstitutionalization, gun rights Labels: concealed carry Labels: telescopes Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, Al Gore, enviromental lunacy, hypocrisy, overprivileged liberals COTATI, Calif. — A 3-month-old cat is clinging to life at a Sonoma County animal hospital after having been set on fire by two teenage girls who now face charges of animal cruelty. The kitten, named Adam by hospital staff, has undergone two surgeries and had its tail and the tips of its ears amputated. The skin on its back was burned off in the attack, leaving nothing but raw tissue. "The degree of injury is greater than our normal level of trauma that we care for," said Katheryn Hinkle, the head veterinarian and owner of the Animal Hospital of Cotati. "He's our most critical patient, and we're watching him constantly." The cat, one of several feral felines trapped for spaying and neutering, was in a cage outside an apartment in Santa Rosa when two 15-year-old girls allegedly poured flammable liquid on the animal and set it on fire last month. An 11-year-old boy and his friend saw the smoke and heard the cat, then eight weeks old, shrieking while the girls laughed. The girls, whose names have not been released, were charged with cruelty to animals in Sonoma County Juvenile Court last week. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Labels: abortion Labels: religion Muslim women who wear the hijab are at risk of serious illness because they do not get enough sun, doctors have warned. They said an alarming number of women who cover their skin are suffering bone deficiencies over a lack of vitamin D. Most of the body's vitamin D - which prevents rickets - is obtained through sunlight acting on the skin. Only a little comes from food. Doctors told a London conference today that people with dark pigment are at risk because of "cultural reasons" and because they are less efficient at producing the vitamin. The bone disorder rickets has now broken out in young Muslim children as babies are not getting enough calcium from mothers' breast milk. The National Health Service is launching a campaign aimed at Muslim women, particularly Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Somalis, to encourage them to increase their vitamin D intake. A Department of Health spokesman said: "For ethnic groups there is an increased risk of vitamin D deficiency as people with dark and pigmented skin are less efficient at making vitamin D in their skin. "They need to spend longer outside to make similar amounts and those who wear concealing clothing are unlikely to make enough. "Studies have shown low vitamin D levels in Asian women in the UK - particularly among those who cover most of their skin for cultural reasons." Labels: Islamofascism Labels: astrophotography Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, abortion The U.S. command said Wednesday the highest-ranking Iraqi in the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq has been arrested, adding that information from him indicates the group's foreign-based leadership wields considerable influence over the Iraqi chapter. Khaled Abdul-Fattah Dawoud Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, also known as Abu Shahid, was captured in Mosul on July 4, said Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a military spokesman. "Al-Mashhadani is believed to be the most senior Iraqi in the al-Qaida in Iraq network," Bergner said. He said al-Mashhadani was a close associate of Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born head of al-Qaida in Iraq. Bergner said al-Mashhadani served as an intermediary between al-Masri and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri. Labels: terrorism ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore's green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter's wedding in Beverly Hills. Gore and his guests at the weekend ceremony dined on Chilean sea bass - arguably one of the world's most threatened fish species. Also known as Patagonian toothfish, the species is under pressure from illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing activities in the Southern Ocean, jeopardising the sustainability of remaining stocks. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates, enviromental lunacy Labels: cars Labels: deinstitutionalization "He was well done." That's what one woman said Monday after helping her son apprehend an alleged child rapist using her barbecue meat fork. "I stuck him in his butt!" Linda Rhodes told MyFOXdfw.com, explaining how she and her son John Jennings apprehended the 17-year-old suspect Friday night in Garland, Texas. Jennings was barbecuing chicken when he heard a 7-year-old boy calling for help. He said he saw the suspect, Deshaun Ridge, on top of the child, allegedly raping the boy. "He stood up, and I just punched him right in the face," Jennings said. "He put his hands up and I grabbed him, and we went fighting." Labels: child sexual abuse State Controller Donna Jones said Idaho's $247 million surplus should be enough to fix roads without raising taxes. "Taxes are too high on Idaho's families," Jones said in a statement released Monday. "Instead of looking at raising taxes to pay for road and bridge repair, the Legislature could potentially use $200 million of this surplus to tackle Idaho's backlog of road repairs." Hanian said there are plenty of needs for the surplus money, like overflowing prisons, higher education, pre-kindergarten and mental health, as well as the costs that will likely stem from this year's forest fires. "When it comes to surplus dollars, the needs comes up like quills on a porcupine," Hanian said. Labels: Idaho politics Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion. It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn. At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran. In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.” Labels: intelligent design AMES, IA—In an effort to jump-start a presidential campaign that still has not broken into the top Democratic tier, former Sen. John Edwards made his most ambitious policy announcement yet at a campaign event in Iowa Monday: a promise to eliminate all unpleasant, disagreeable, or otherwise bad things from all aspects of American life by the end of his second year in office. "Many bad things are not just bad—they're terrible," said a beaming Edwards, whose "Only the Good Things" proposal builds upon previous efforts to end poverty, outlaw startlingly loud noises, and offer tax breaks to those who smile frequently. "Other candidates have plans that would reduce some of the bad things, but I want all of them gone completely." According to Edwards, his plan is composed of three steps. Everyday bad things, such as curse words and splinters, would be eradicated during his first six months in office. Next, very bad things, including child abduction, soil erosion, and resurgent diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis, would be ended by the the end of 2009. Finally, extremely bad things—plights such as genocide, species extinction, and virtually every form of cancer—would take a full two years to wipe out. Labels: 2008 presidential candidates As with Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt, this seems like more excessive complaint from the privileged classes. (Brook and Kamenetz overlapped at Yale, in fact). And is it really true, as the back cover asserts, that only the "corporate elite" can now enjoy middle-class comforts? I opened Brook's book up and saw this passage: After graduating Yale in 2003 with a double major in film studies and gender studies, Tara moved to San Francisco to pursue queer documentary filmmaking. She settled in the Castro district, the historic epicenter of American gay culture, and quickly discovered plenty of enticing projects. "There were lots of opportunities to do film and to help people with their films, but no one had any money to pay me so I did a lot of volunteering and part-time work," she told me in a Castro coffee shop. My goodness. What message could the market system have been trying to send? Labels: overprivileged liberals Labels: deinstitutionalization
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I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
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Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
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Wind Power
The difference in wind speed between the house, and the top of our hill is pretty impressive. I have seen wind speeds by the back door that ranged from 0 to about 5 mph. With no measurable wind at the house, at the top of the hill I was getting a pretty consistent 8 mph, holding the anemometer as high above my head as I could. As you probably know, wind speed increases as you get higher above the ground. The next step is to build a weathervane driven rotating gadget to hold the anemometer fifteen feet in the air, so that I can get a more reliable reading.
Skystream Energy offers a wind generator intended for low wind speeds--and which as an inverter built in, so it produces a 240 VAC output instead of DC. According to the chart here, it starts producing power at 8 mph, although the amount is pretty small. (Of course, around here, we get at least an 8 mph wind 24 hours a day. Somewhere around 25 mph, it is producing 2.4 kilowatts. If we ended up averaging 15 mph (which I suspect isn't too far off for the top of our hill), that would be a bit better than half of monthly energy use.
Most wind generators (all wind generators?) have a maximum speed, with various mechanisms for shutting off the blade when the wind speed gets too high. A generator like the Skystream 3.7 gets no benefit from wind speeds above about 25 mph--while generators intended to take advantage of high speed (and therefore, high power) winds usually don't start turning until the wind is already moving pretty briskly. It makes me wonder if, in a place like this, where we have continual winds of 10-15 mph--and at least monthly, hour after hour of 40-60 mph winds--whether it might make sense to have both a generator intended for the light breezes, and one of the larger generators that can take advantage of the high wind conditions as well. The light wind generator would be turning 90% of the time, producing a low but steady current--and the other 10% of the time, the wind would be moving 50 mph, and producing prodiguous output.
At least so far, when I look at products like the Air-X and Whisper wind turbines at this website, they all seem intended for relatively low wind speeds.
Zero Motion Bearings
I've had another customer decide that there was too much play in the ScopeRoller caster assembly for his astrophotography needs, and I'm not one to let an issue like this stop me. He confirms that my solution to the problem of motion in the locking mechanism works--the play is now in the bearings of the caster itself. This is a few thousandths of an inch to perhaps a few hundredths of an inch. This may not sound like much, but .05" of motion here can turn into several trillion miles at the far end of the beam of light, so I am interested in finding a solution.
Obviously, a caster with zero motion when locked doesn't exist--unless it's made by the Frictionless Surface and Dimensionless Point Corporation. (You remember Frictionless Surfaces and Dimensionless Points from physics class, right?) But does anyone know of a maker of locking caster assemblies that might be so well made that applying a force of several pounds to a locked caster will result in a thousandth of an inch or less of motion? This is a tall order, and I would probably have to pay a lot more for such casters--and charge customers that need such perfection a tall price.
HR 2640 & Horatio Miller
Those of you who receive updates from Gun Owners of America may recall this press release of July 10, 2007:So it's not surprising that, having skipped much of the legislative process, there are still a lot of unanswered questions regarding HR 2640. In fact, these questions have only been magnified after an offhanded, tongue-in-cheek remark made at the Harrisburg Community College in Pennsylvania cost a man his gun rights for life in that state.
I don't know whether Miller was improperly locked up or not. This gun rights activist suggests that there might have been more in Miller's past than just one foolish remark. It is clear that the district attorney in question needs to hire an lawyer (or someone who knows how to read) before shooting off his mouth.
Newspapers last month reported that Horatio Miller allegedly said that it could be "worse than Virginia Tech" if someone broke into his car, because there were guns there. It is not clear whether he was making a threat against a person who might burglarize his car, or if he was simply saying that the bad guy could do a lot of damage because of the guns he would find there. Nevertheless, Miller was arrested, but not charged with anything.
The comment Miller made was certainly not the smartest thing to say. But realize, we don't incarcerate people for making stupid statements in this country -- at least not yet. Miller was a concealed carry permit holder who, as such, had passed vigorous background checks into his past history. Miller does not have a criminal record.
Regardless, the county district attorney did not like what he had said, so, according to the Harrisburg Patriot News on June 20, "I contacted the sheriff and had his license to carry a firearm revoked. And I asked police to commit him under Section 302 of the mental health procedures act and that was done. He is now ineligible to possess firearms [for life] because he was committed involuntarily."
As I have previously posted, federal law and regulation defines pretty narrowly what constitutes a person who is "mentally defective" (meaning retarded or dangerously mentally ill). It requires a due process adjudication--and Section 302 of the Pennsylvania Mental Health Procedures Act does not qualify:§ 7302. Involuntary emergency examination and treatment authorized by a physician--not to exceed one hundred twenty hours
There's no adjudication under sec. 302--it's an emergency hold to determine if this person is mentally ill. It does not cause any loss of gun rights under federal law.
(a) Application for Examination.--Emergency examination may be undertaken at a treatment facility upon the certification of a physician stating the need for such examination; or upon a warrant issued by the county administrator authorizing such examination; or without a warrant upon application by a physician or other authorized person who has personally observed conduct showing the need for such examination.
(1) Warrant for Emergency Examination.--Upon written application by a physician or other responsible party setting forth facts constituting reasonable grounds to believe a person is severely mentally disabled and in need of immediate treatment, the county administrator may issue a warrant requiring a person authorized by him, or any peace officer, to take such person to the facility specified in the warrant.
(2) Emergency Examination Without a Warrant.--Upon personal observation of the conduct of a person constituting reasonable grounds to believe that he is severely mentally disabled and in need of immediate treatment, and physician or peace officer, or anyone authorized by the county administrator may take such person to an approved facility for an emergency examination. Upon arrival, he shall make a written statement setting forth the grounds for believing the person to be in need of such examination.
(b) Examination and Determination of Need for Emergency Treatment.--A person taken to a facility shall be examined by a physician within two hours of arrival in order to determine if the person is severely mentally disabled within the meaning of section 301 and in need of immediate treatment. If it is determined that the person is severely mentally disabled and in need of emergency treatment, treatment shall be begun immediately. If the physician does not so find, or if at any time it appears there is no longer a need for immediate treatment, the person shall be discharged and returned to such place as he may reasonably direct. The physician shall make a record of the examination and his findings. In no event shall a person be accepted for involuntary emergency treatment if a previous application was granted for such treatment and the new application is not based on behavior occurring after the earlier application.
(c) Notification of Rights at Emergency Examination.--Upon arrival at the facility, the person shall be informed of the reasons for emergency examination and of his right to communicate immediately with others. He shall be given reasonable use of the telephone. He shall be requested to furnish the names of parties whom he may want notified of his custody and kept informed of his status. The county administrator or the director of the facility shall:
(1) give notice to such parties of the whereabouts and status of the person, how and when he may be contacted and visited, and how they may obtain information concerning him while he is in inpatient treatment; and
(2) take reasonable steps to assure that while the person is detained, the health and safety needs of any of his dependents are met, and that his personal property and the premises he occupies are secure.
(d) Duration of Emergency Examination and Treatment.--A person who is in treatment pursuant to this section shall be discharged whenever it is determined that he no longer is in need of treatment and in any event within 120 hours, unless within such period:
(1) he is admitted to voluntary treatment pursuant to section 202 of this act; or
(2) a certification for extended involuntary emergency treatment is filed pursuant to section 303 of this act.
Video Capture
I'm interested in starting to record digital videos. (Yes, I am suffering from YouTube fever.) There are two strategies:
1. Spend significant money to buy a digital video camera with an IEEE 1394 interface.
2. Buy a box that takes analog video signal from my Hi-8 camcorder, and either feeds into the IEEE 1394 interface on my notebook, or into the USB 2.0 interface. My hope is that this would be relatively inexpensive.
Any suggestions?
Do You Have a 5.25" Floppy Diskette Drive Still?
My mother has a number of files on 5.25" floppy diskettes that she would like to be able to read. Do you have a 5.25" floppy drive on your computer still? (Try not to laugh.) If so, could you be persuaded to copy those files and email them to me?
UPDATE: Thanks to the reader who found a 5.25" floppy drive, installed it in his computer, and offered to do the transfer!
Lubbock TV Station Coverage of Concealed Carry Licensing
Interesting item--and surprisingly positive--from KCBD channel 11:Recent violence in Lubbock appears to have sparked a larger interest in concealed handgun licenses, so NewsChannel 11 taking a closer look into what it takes to receive one of those permits.
"The object of carrying a weapon is to prevent things from happening," Beverly Ellis, owner of Gun Shak in southwest Lubbock County said.
Ellis is also a concealed handgun license instructor. Before you can get a conceal-carry license from the Department of Public Safety, you'll have to spend hours of class time with her, or at least another instructor like Ellis, and it appears more people in Lubbock are up to the challenge.
"In the last two or three months there's been a much greater interest. With all the things that have been going on, they just feel like they want to be prepared, in the event that something happens," Ellis said.
ScopeRoller's First Shipment to Hungary
Yup! We're expanding our customer base once again!
How Dare I Quote An Environmentalist About Al Gore!
Over at 43rd State Blues, BinkyBoy does his usual classy and accurate number, complaining that the reports about Al Gore dining on an endangered species were inaccurate:Al Gore recently was seen eating Chilean Sea Bass. To those that are ready to jump to judgement, that suddenly makes him less of an environmentalist.
Now, there has since been a news report that says the first news report was wrong. It turns out that the environmentalists who made the first, and inaccurate claim--were wrong.
Unfortunately, they're lying again.
Now, if BinkyBoy is upset that his hero is being falsely castigated by environmentalists in a newspaper article, then this is where the rage should be directed. If the environmentalists who made the initial claim knew that it was a false statement, you could claim that they were "lying." But to claim that people who report a newspaper report by someone on Al Gore's side is "lying" is about what I have come to expect from BinkyBoy--a rather severe carelessness about the meaning of words.
"Lying" means that you are making a statement that you know or have good reason to be believe is false. A statement can be incorrect without being a lie.
BinkyBoy has an awful lot of rage at people that don't agree with him, and it shows up in very juvenile behavior--such as calling people liars for linking to a news report by people whom BinkyBoy would normally defend.
What's really interesting is that 43rd State Blues has a comment section where a reader might ordinarily point out this distinction. But I have been specifically prohibited from commenting there. Policing comments is a lot of work; that's why I don't have comments enabled on my blog. If BinkyBoy didn't want the extra work of doing so, I could understand and agree. But BinkyBoy apparently doesn't mind doing the work of policing comments--he just won't allow me to comment there. How typically Democrat: they believe in free speech, as long as you agree with them.
More Sonoma County News
A reader pointed me to this horrifying story of animal cruelty in Sonoma County:
My reader tells me:Like you, I lived there too - in the 80's. What an absolute wasteland of common sense. I could relate a few stories about the absurdity of thinking there, especially when it came to my two sons in school.
UPDATE: Another reader asks why the cat wasn't euthanized? The injuries must be extremely painful.
The Dangers of Reading What You Want Into Someone's Else Stuff
A couple of bloggers over at Classical Values misread something that I wrote about Oregon abortion rates in 1970 as some sort of defense of Roe v. Wade (1973). Instapunk took their misreading as a defense of abortion on demand by me, and proceeded to vigorously prove something that I completely agree with--that abortion increased as a result of Roe--a decision that I do not approve of for many reasons. I have updated that post to make this a bit more clear.
Wolves
A reader sent me this announcement concerning a hearing which I won't be able to make because I'll be picking up my mother at the airport:
I am generally prepared to let wolves be wolves, but if the choice is shooting a wolf, or letting it destroy a domesticated animal in the presence of a human being--I'm hard pressed to see why the wolf should have a higher priority than a horse or a dog.
Interview with Rodney Stark
I recently mentioned a book by sociologist Rodney Stark about the factors that caused the growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire. A reader pointed me to this interview with Stark with a publication called Our Sunday Visitor (which I've never heard of before). There's a few interesting exchanges in the interview about that book--and some that are rather more broad:The received tradition is that many Christians were martyred. Yet you say that blood witnesses were few.
RS: There’s a consensus among historians that the numbers weren’t large at all, and that we may know the name of just about every single martyr. The Romans decided to attack the movement from the top. This would have worked with other religions because there was no bottom to paganism. Paganism was really temples on a shopping mall, and people were very casual about which ones they patronized. If the Romans knocked off the chief priest and took away government subsidy, a pagan temple would fold up.
So the empire went after Christianity the same way, thinking, “If we butcher the bishops, things will take care of themselves.” Of course, it didn’t work because there were 92 guys waiting in line to be bishop. That’s what you get with a mass movement.
Does this minimize the traditional notion that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”?
RS: Not at all. One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?
...
Even Christian historians tend to discount stories of the miraculous and minimize the veracity of early Church documents. Yet you accept the record to a remarkable degree.
RS: People in the patristics field recently were hammering me for naively accepting early accounts. One woman in particular mentioned the early Church’s rules against abortion and female infanticide. She said that I didn’t seem to understand that these prohibitions served all kinds of polemical purposes. Well, of course I know that, but I guess I’m so naive as to believe that groups that constantly hammer against something are more opposed to it than groups that, in their official writings, say that the same thing is laudable and wonderful and that we ought to do it.
From Plato and Aristotle on, the classical philosophers were advocating abortion. And infanticide was fine with them, too. Of course there were Christians who didn’t obey, just like there are Mormons who chew tobacco. But the fact of the matter is: most of them don’t. The same thing applies here.
And as for miracles: listen, people do get healed—spontaneously and, it would seem, miraculously. There’s not a physician on earth who would deny that. What is the agency? I don’t know. But to deny that people in tabernacles around the United States are getting healed is simply wrong. There’s no reason to deny that these things happen just because we don’t share the definitions put on them by the people of another time or place.
Somebody at Harvard Divinity School might say, “That wasn’t a miracle. It was a spontaneous remission.” “Spontaneous remission” is the way the experts say, “We don’t have the slightest idea what happened.” The most hard-nosed scientist has no reason to doubt that miracles took place in the early Church. The opinions of the village atheist are as fundamentalist as anything any Baptist ever believed.
...
Does it concern you today that blood sports and violent movies are on the upswing, and that abortion and infanticide are back in force?
RS: It doesn’t surprise me. It offends me. For more than a century we managed to have a period of considerable public decency. Now, maybe we’re sliding back to what’s more typical. I blame the courts, which say we can’t censor anything but religion. The fact of the matter is, when I was a kid, there were rules about what you could and couldn’t put in the mail or show in the movies.
Some of the rules may have been a bit much, but where do you stop? Where do you put your limits? If you don’t set them pretty tight, pretty soon they’re blowing people’s heads off. It’s not, for example, that people didn’t get killed in movies in the forties, but there wasn’t this enormous immorality. Evil was to be punished before the movie was over. And they didn’t show all this gratuitous gore. There are people who get turned on by this stuff, and we are helping to build monsters.
You say that Christianity succeeded in part because of its high moral standards. Today, however, many churches are lowering the bar to make religion more popular. How would you analyze their efforts?
RS: They’re death wishes. People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing. You’ve got a choice: you can be a church or a country club. If you’re going to be a church, you’d better offer religion on Sunday. If you’re not, you’d better build a golf course, because you’re not going to get away with being a country club with no golf course. That’s what happened to the Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and, indeed, to some sectors of Catholicism.
We Finally Have Electricity Again
Lightning storms yesterday started about forty brushfires in the low foothills of southwestern Idaho. One consequence was that we lost electric power this morning about 10:30 AM, as one of the pieces of transmission equipment burned. For a while, there was no electric power from Horseshoe Bend to near McCall--which is a long ways north of here. (However, that meant only about 13,000 homes.)
Anyway, I suffered the indignity of having to actually go into work because of this. I have a backup generator to power the essential house circuits, and backup power supplies for the computers. But my ISP apparently does not have backup power on the antenna that my wireless service talks to--or perhaps somewhere upstream of that antenna doesn't have backup power. The result was that I had working computers (at least for a while), but no Internet connection, so no way to work. Grrrr!
At the end of the day, I came home, and decided that my wife needed a meal out. So we drove down to Horseshoe Bend, expecting that at least some of the restaurants would have backup generators. Nope! We ended up going into what used to be the Riverside Restaurant, but is now Kit's Steakhouse, where the employees of El Durango were waiting to order their dinner. The only dishes available at Kit's were hamburgers and hot dogs--barbecued outside. The good news is that we each had a hamburger with a side (coleslaw for my wife, and potato salad for me), and beer for my wife--and the bill came to $9.56. I can't complain. As near as I can tell, Kalac's Market was the only significant business with backup power.
I am thinking very seriously about upgrading my power systems. As usual, we had some wind blowing the whole day. I'm thinking of wind generators and battery backup--perhaps about 2-3 kilowatts of capacity. In conjunction with the 7 kilowatt LP gas generator, this would be sufficient to operate the essential circuits, plus the air conditioning compressor. At night, as power demands drop, we might be able to cut back to just battery backup to run the compressor, and turn off the LP gas generator.
The Health Risks of Wearing Hijabs
This article in July 18, 2007 Daily Mail refers to the hijab, which I believe does leave the face exposed, so I'm not sure if there a British local meaning for the word that leaves even less covered. It is a reminder of the hazards of keeping too much of your skin covered, especially if you are dark skinned in a northern climate:
Moon and Venus
This was a beautiful site on the western horizon last night--a three or four day old Moon with Venus.
Click to enlarge
This was a 1/8 second exposure at ASA 1600. Hand-held, too.
How To Make a Lot of People in the Middle Vote Republican
There's a majority of Americans who are not comfortable with abortion. They don't want it banned, but they are not comfortable with how widely it is used as a form of birth control. If it makes you feel better to call them hypocrites for opposing something that they won't call murder, fine, but this is an audience that politicians have to win over to win elections. And now Edwards and Obama are saying something that is going to take a fraction (perhaps a big fraction) of these uncomfortably pro-choice voters, and make them think about voting Republican. From the July 18, 2007 Chicago Tribune: WASHINGTON -- Elizabeth Edwards said Tuesday that her husband's health-care plan would provide insurance coverage of abortion.
Speaking on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards before the family planning and abortion-rights group Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Edwards lauded her husband's health-care proposal as "a true universal health-care plan" that would cover "all reproductive health services, including pregnancy termination," referring to abortion.
Edwards was joined by Democratic candidates Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at the group's political organizing conference in addressing issues at the core of the political clash between cultural liberals and conservatives, including abortion rights, access to contraception and sex education.
...
Obama, who earlier gained the endorsement of Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty, offered the group a vision of equal opportunity for women, tying a call for improved access to contraceptives for low-income women with a call for an "updated social contract" that includes paid maternity leave and expanded school hours.
Asked about his proposal for expanded access to health insurance, Obama said it would cover "reproductive-health services." Contacted afterward, an Obama spokesman said that included abortions.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Just in case there was any question in your mind about the connection between the group that calls itself Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the fun guys who attacked us on 9/11:
Al Gore, Environmentalist
The Humane Society International isn't happy with Al Gore:
You might almost get the impression that Al Gore is more interested in being President of the United States instead of saving Mother Earth.
UPDATE: This is what I get for trusting an environmentalist. See the correction in the July 19, 2007 Telegraph.
The Church in Europe
No, that's not an oxymoron. This article from the July 14, 2007 Wall Street Journal tells us that after decades of decline, Christianity seems to be making a modest comeback:Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was "boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.
The rest of the article suggests that the ending of state establishments of religion might have something to do with it--which is consistent with an emerging view among historians of Colonial America that the dramatic increase in church membership after the Revolution might have been provoked by the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.
In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?
Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.
"Sweden is not as secular as we thought," says Christer Sturmark, head of Sweden's Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.
After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.
God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.
As it happens, I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment by Rodney Stark, a sociology professor at the University of Washington: The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Harper San Francisco, 1997). Stark argues that the traditional view--that Constantine's making Christianity the official state religion is what caused the Roman Empire to turn Christian--is backward. He points to data that suggests that Constantine made Christianity the state religion because Christians had become a dominant force within the Roman Empire. Why? Because demographics is destiny.
Stark uses traditional sociological statistical methods and some very clever use of both data from the classical period, and such things as archaeological counts of churches in various Roman cities, to argue that Christianity grew at a rate comparable to the rise of Mormonism in modern America (about 43% per decade). I'm not sure what the reaction of sociologists was to his clever use of data from a period when demographic data in the modern sense really doesn't exist. Did they react with disgust? Or were they impressed that he managed to find anything to work with at all, like Mark Twain's comment about a dog walking on its hind legs? It didn't do it very well, but that it did it at all was rather impressive.
Stark argues that there were several reasons for this dramatic increase, and there's no need to look for any miraculous explanations. In brief (and not doing justice to how Stark uses the data, as well as primary and secondary sources):
1. Early Christians, because they utterly rejected infanticide, abortion, birth control, and non-vaginal intercourse, had extraordinary birth rates--and eventually outreproduced the pagans. (The parallels to today, where conservatives are outreproducing liberals in America, and Muslims are outreproducing non-Muslim Europe--should be obvious.)
All of these factors meant that Christians were reproducing like rabbits, while the pagan part of the Empire was actually declining in population at the time that Christianity appeared.
2. While it may shock a lot of feminists, Christianity attracted women in very large numbers because of the dramatically higher status that they held relative to both the pagan Romans, and the Jews. One little horrifying example of the difference--and how it played a part in probably increasing Christian birth rates, and the willingness of Christian women to get pregnant: marriages between adult Roman men and little girls (under the age of puberty) were not simply contracted, but consummated--with often significant physical damage to the girls.
By comparison, Christians delayed marriage until about 18. Considering that puberty probably came later in classical times than today (because of nutritional deficiencies), this meant that Christian women were less likely to be damaged by sexual intercourse, and less likely to be traumatized by it as well.
3. Because Christianity gave women a higher status, it attracted them in large numbers--and it would appear that a fair number of pagan Romans became Christians because of their wives.
I haven't finished reading the book, and there's quite a bit there that I haven't summarized. I wouldn't exactly call it a popular read, but for a book with tables of Pearson Products, it's not bad.
Let me emphasize that while I am an historian, I really can't tell you how reliable Stark's history or sociological analysis is. I don't see anything obviously wrong, but this is way outside my period. As my Ancient Middle East professor once put it, "Everything after the fall of Rome to me is current events."
UPDATE: A reader points me to this article about how Roman use of a relatively rare plant as an abortifacient (a drug that induces abortion) eventually drove the plant into extinction! And just because it's "natural" doesn't make it safe. When I lived in the Bay Area, Marin County's hopelessly New Age crowd was using a variety of similar drugs as "natural" ways to induce abortions--with occasional deaths and often quite severe health consequences.
Stupid Corvette Tricks
I don't wash the Corvette as often as I should--why bother, with the driveway and dirt roads that it has to cross to get to and from our house? But I washed it today. My mother is visiting shortly, and I thought, what the heck, I can at least get the top eighteen layers of dirt cleaned off--it will only have two layers of dirt caked on it.
Even with all the paint chips that it has picked up over the last few years, it is still gorgeous when it is all freshly waxed.
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However, it is time to admit to something stupid. Saturday night I drove over to my daughter's place in West Boise, and since I was parking the car on the street--and Boise is becoming a very rough town, almost like Los Angeles was in oh, maybe 1955--I put the glass top on the car.
When I left a few hours later, I pulled out on to Eagle Road, which is a 55 mph highway, and a few seconds after I made the right, and I was up to speed--whoosh! Suddenly, I had hot air blowing in on me.
I forgot to latch the top when I put it on. The wind picked up the glass top and sent it flying. Amazingly enough, it did not break. I parked, walked back, and retrieved it from traffic. People behind me either saw it in flight, or saw it lying on the right side of the right lane, and went around it.
The glass did not break. The frame did not bend. All of the hardware that locks it in place works exactly as it did before. But the glass is hopelessly scratched:
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Click to enlarge
Anyway, it's covered under the comprehensive glass policy of my car insurance, so it's only a $100 deductible that I have to pay, and it doesn't count as an accident as far as setting my rates is concerned. But do I feel stupid! As I explained to my insurance representative, "I'm sure that I'm not the first Corvette owner to do this, but I may be the first one to do so while sober."
Colorado's Emperor
I mentioned yesterday that it was pretty obvious that this man who was shot and killed when he drew a weapon in the governor's office was mentally ill. There seems to be have a bit of advance warning that he was suffering some sort of mental breakdown. This AP news story in the Vail Daily reports:Before he was shot, Snyder said, “I am the emperor and I’m here to take over state government,” said Evan Dreyer, the governor’s spokesman.
This news report from Denver's channel 9 just breaks your heart to read:
About three hours earlier, Snyder had gone to a suburban Northglenn shop with a gun and knife in his pockets, rented a tuxedo and told a woman it was “the day of the emperor’s reign,” Northglenn police said.
Also on Monday, Snyder told a co-worker in an e-mail that God made him “the emperor, the sovereign ruler of this nation,” said police in Fort Collins, where Snyder had been an intern for Advanced Energy.
“God has bestowed this honor on me. Today is the appointed day in which God has chosen for me to begin my reign,” the e-mail read.
Advanced Energy said Snyder worked there for two months.Snyder, who lived with his parents in Thornton, rented a tuxedo Monday morning before going to the state Capitol where he was shot and killed by a member of Governor Ritter's security team.
I hate to play amateur psychiatrist, but all of this fits the schizophrenic model well--although 32 is a bit old to suddenly come down with this. I would be curious to know how long he has been ill. I would also be curious to know if he had been previously hospitalized.
On Monday, police say, he drove a 2004 black Kia and left it in the 1200 block of Cherokee Street, about a block away from the Denver Police Department, before he evidently walked to the Capitol.
Meanwhile, police were trying to locate Snyder after being contacted by an employee at the tuxedo rental business who was alarmed by what said was disturbing behavior. Police reports show the employee also reported seeing Snyder carrying the gun and the knife, although she told police she was not sure if the weapons were real.
Records show an officer from the Northglenn Police Department went to the family home and talked to Snyder's mother Kathie, who described her son as mentally ill.
According to the police report, "Kathie stated Aaron has been diagnosed as delusional and he has entered the care of a doctor."
At an officer's request, Kathie Snyder tried to call her son on his cell phone, the report shows, but the call went to voicemail.
The officer then put out a teletype to all agencies along the I-25 corridor requesting officers to check Snyder's well-being.
Minutes later, the shooting at the Capitol was reported.
9Wants to Know spoke with a member of Snyder's family who said, "He had his problems. ... I'm sorry for the officer that had to shoot him. My heart's broken for him. I'm heartbroken for the whole situation. I'm just thankful no one else was hurt."
...
Prior to the incident, Snyder sent a strange e-mail to one co-worker. 9Wants to Know has learned that in the e-mail Snyder introduces himself as the "emperor of sovereign rule of this nation." He then writes, "Today is the appointed day in which God has chosen for me to begin my reign."
He also writes, "Please keep the emperor's desk free for my use in research and development purposes when I have spare time."
This news report from the Sterling, Colorado Journal-Advocate suggests that his problems go back a little while:Property records listed the owners as Richard and Kathie Snyder. Officers said the couple was not at home today.
This account from the Fort Collins Coloradoan, along with other reports, fits the schizophrenic model:
Neighbor Mary Annunziato said the Snyders’ son, Aaron, also lived in the house. Police have declined to say whether they believe Aaron Snyder was the man killed at the Capitol.
Annunziato said Aaron Snyder was kind and loving but “was not well.” She declined to elaborate on his condition.
“Aaron, he never exhibited any aggressive behavior. He was kind, I would almost say docile,” Annunziato said.Another neighbor, Doug Egge, recalled seeing Aaron Snyder walk up and down the street smoking cigarettes. Sometimes he would smile, but "other times it was like he was in his own little world,'' Egge said.
I'm guessing that Snyder's problems may have been going on for a while:
Egge described him as a "nice kid'' who was quiet and reserved. Snyder attended Colorado State University in Fort Collins off and on for 14 years starting in 1992, CSU spokeswoman Dell Rae Moellenberg said. He received a bachelor's degree in 2005 and took master's degree classes in the fall of 2006 but had not been enrolled since then, she said.
It sounds to me like he might have started to have a schizophrenic break sometime in college--bad enough to cause him to take classes "on and off." It could not have been hopelessly bad, or he would not have been able to complete his bachelor's degree. I also notice from searching google for phone numbers that there was an Aaron Snyder listed in both Glendale and Boulder, so perhaps he was living on his own in the last few years. It seems plausible that his situation declined and he moved back in with his parents.
What a tragedy it is to watch a family member sink into mental illness--and be unable to stop it.
I Think A Meat Cleaver Would Have Been A Better Choice
I suspect that liberals are going to be whining in favor of barbecue fork control next, especially since it was used against such a nice young man:
Idaho's Budget Problems
Part of the problem is an unexpected surplus of $247 million. (For you Californians--that's "million" with an "M"--try not to laugh at how small Idaho's budget numbers are.) The other part of the problem is that Governor Otter wants to raise taxes to pay for $200 million in road work. State Controller Donna Jones says that there's enough of a surplus to pay for the road work without raising taxes:
A little later in that same Idaho Statesman article there is an explanation of why we need to raise taxes from Governor Otter's spokesman:
It might well be that there's more than $247 million in needs that require government funds. But if the argument for raising taxes is paying for $200 million in road repairs, shouldn't we pay for those road repairs, and then discuss whether a tax increase is needed? Or if we need to do this in a holistic manner, looking at all the needs, then let's do that. I know that a lot of people in Idaho aren't keen on more funding of pre-kindergarten programs. I am generally supportive of increased funding on mental health--but before we throw money at this, I would like to know if incidents like the recent Moscow mental patient shooting rampage were because of a shortage of hospital space or not.
"Too Beautiful for the Trash Bin but Too Erroneous for Their Shelves"
This is an amusing article about a form of Creationist thought that will put many leftists in a quandry. Sure, they're supposed to regard it as ignorant, but it comes from their favorite religion, so they are supposed to make excuses for its "authenticity". From the July 17, 2007 New York Times:
So what will happen? I rather suspect that the ACLU will suddenly make an about face, and decide that Islamic Creationism is okay in schools because Islam is a minority point of view.
Riotously Funny Parody
It is from the the Onion, and what makes it funny isn't that I think that Senator John Edwards is this stupid--but that I suspect that Edwards thinks the voters are stupid enough that he might try something like this:
The tragedy is that back during the 2004 campaign, he came perilously close to this about stem cell research with something that made me think of televangelist/conman Peter Popov:Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator John Edwards said today, “When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk. Get up out of that wheelchair and walk again”… John Edwards may be learning, late in the game, that what may work for a seated jury in a courtroom may backfire in Peoria.
Gee, I Wonder Why
Instapundit has a wondrously droll criticism of the new book: The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America:
Gee, I'm surprised Tara didn't get a MacArthur Fellowship, and funding from George Soros' Open Society Foundation. (Okay, I'm not really surprised, but if they had, it wouldn't have surprised me, either.)
There is nothing so obnoxious as members of America's overprivileged elite whining that the whole society doesn't roll over for them and give them the money to do what they want. Tara might have to wait until she inherits Daddy's millions before she can work on destroying what's left of American culture that is good.
I'll Be Curious To Know How Many Times This Guy Has Been Hospitalized
Before this happened at the Colorado state capitol:State troopers shot and killed an armed man who attempted to enter Gov. Bill Ritter's office inside the state Capitol this afternoon.
Or am I making too many assumptions when I figure that a guy who claims to be the emperor and showing up to take over Colorado government is mentally ill?
The man claimed that "he was the emperor, and he was here to take over state government," said Ritter's spokesman, Evan Dreyer.
Ritter was in his office at the time but was not involved in the shooting at about 2:25 p.m. today.
State troopers, who provide security inside the statehouse, ordered the man to drop his gun. He didn't, and they shot him. The man died where he fell.
How many more tragedies do there have to be before we deal with this problem?
Pulling Out Big Bertha
We had a friend over for dinner last night, so I dragged out Big Bertha and the 5" refractor. I can't say that Big Bertha does any better of a job on something bright like the Moon (which was just the faintest sliver last night) or Jupiter than the refractor in terms of detail--but oh, on the dark sky objects, wow!
The Ring Nebula (M57) was so bright! Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate either the Hercules cluster (M13) or the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), both of which I have found before. There's some practice to this, I'm afraid, and I'm out of practice.
Now, if the sky would clear, I would work on the practice.
Majority Will, Consensus, and Public Policy Making
One of my readers took issue with my comment a few days ago that as long as a large minority supports abortion of demand, a general ban on abortion is unlikely to be successful. Let me point out something that I observed a while back: even before Roe v. Wade (1973), Oregon theoretically made abortion unlawful except to save the life or health of the mother--and yet still had 199 abortions per 1000 live births in 1970. Does anyone really believe that 1/6th of all pregnancies in Oregon required an abortion for the life or health of the mother? You can pass laws, but if a large fraction of the population strongly disagrees, that law will be disobeyed unless you have a very powerful police presence trying to enforce it. Think back to the national 55 mph speed limit, or most restrictive gun control laws.
If there's a lesson to be learned from the Iraq War, it is that majority--even a very large majority--in favor of a policy--is not enough. A minority that disagrees, especially if, like the left, it is control of the news and entertainment business, can frustrate a policy so effectively that you may be better off waiting for consensus to develop--even if the cost of building that consensus is enormous loss of life.
We had a consensus about invading Afghanistan. We did not have a consensus about Iraq--and the left did its best to take what would have been a difficult situation and make it much, much worse. Perhaps we needed to wait until Iraq-produced chemical weapons were going on in American cities before we could have achieved the required consensus.
Similarly, there is a majority that wants some restrictions on abortion--although not a general ban. Even in states where there is a majority in support of quite severe restrictions on abortion (such as South Dakota), I would suspect that at least 30% of the population is strongly in support of at least first trimester abortions being available on demand. Persuading most of that minority that abortion is a terrible action that should be reserved for remarkable circumstances--and not something that is used as secondary (or worse, primary) birth control--would go a long ways towards reaching a political condition where sweeping restrictions would enjoy sufficient support that the courts would go along with it, and where the relatively small number who still disapproved of the restrictions would either move somewhere else, or acquiesce to the law.
If you have to arrest and try your own citizens for a crime on a massive scale (as would be necessary to enforce a general ban on abortion), it is usually a bad indicator for the moral health of your society.
UPDATE: A number of people have linked to this posting, and this one, and misread that I was saying that abortion was as common before Roe v. Wade as it was afterwards. I never made that claim (which is absurd). I was pointing out that in some states, such as Oregon, where abortion on demand was theoretically illegal still had rates so high that it was apparent that the law was not being followed. I certainly would not claim that Roe reduced the abortion rate. Not at all.
UPDATE 2: Over at Instapunk is a long detailed proof that Roe v. Wade (1973) increased abortion rates, and claiming that I cherry-picked the data to make my point. Except that:
1. I have never disputed that abortion rates increased because of Roe--simply that Roe didn't make quite as dramatic of a difference as both pro-life and pro-choice activists like to think. Abortion wasn't completely unavailable before Roe--and Oregon was evidence of how the law was clearly being ignored by doctors. I never claimed that Oregon was representative of the nation--only indicative that even pre-Roe laws could be, and were ignored.
2. I consider Roe wrongly decided as a matter of law, and its effect--to make abortion available on demand--a terrible mistake.
