Archive for June, 2007
22 Jun 2007

Some People Are Lucky

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Some people fall off roofs. Others are more lucky.

1:33 video

22 Jun 2007

Visit Ancient Rome

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University of Virginia web-site

22 Jun 2007

Couple Making Love Fall to Death From Roof

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An overly enthusiatic pair of 21-year-old lovers evidently fell 50 feet (15.24 meters) to their deaths from the roof of an office building in Columbia, South Carolina.

KNBC

slideshow

1:20 video

22 Jun 2007

Ex-Marine Kills Bear With Firewood

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Former Marine Chris Everhart was camping with his three sons, ages 6 to 11, at Low Gap Creek Campgrounds near Helen, Georgia in the Chattahochee National Forest.

Around 9:30 in the evening, a (variously reported as 275 or 300 lb – 125 or 136 kg) female black bear invaded the Everhart campsite, attempting to make off with a food cooler. The overly adventuresome six-year-old Logan Everhart sprang to his family’s defense, seized a shovel and advanced on the bear trying to frighten off the dangerous predator. The bear responded by growling and advancing on the small boy.

Everhart’s knife and pistol were packed away and out of reach, so the desperate father simply grabbed the first weapon that came to hand: a large piece of firewood. Everhart flung the log, striking the bear in the head, fatally. Everhart’s score was one log, one bear.

Everhart was a hero to his sons, but not to the government. The Forest Service promptly gave him a $75 ticket for “failing to secure his campsite.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

AP

22 Jun 2007

Musical Tesla Coil

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The instrument was built by Steve Ward, an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

tesla coil

2:41 video

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

21 Jun 2007

Racism, Then and Now

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John Steele Gordon, in the Wall Street Journal, compares two cases of gross injustice in America arising from racial stereotypes, one recent, the other over 80 years ago.

Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman’s limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.

The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.

The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.

On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.

The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women’s story — black men attacking and raping white women — fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).

A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the “Scottsboro Boys” had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor’s office demanding justice.

The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state’s highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool — all of them white, of course — as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.

Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937 — six years after the case began — four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama.

It is now clear to everyone that the nine Scottsboro boys were guilty only of being black.

When the accuser in the Duke case charged rape, the district attorney — in the midst of a tough primary election — saw an opportunity to curry favor with Durham’s black community and exploit the town-gown tension found in every college town. He ran with it, inflaming public opinion against the accused at every opportunity.

To be sure, there was no lynch mob, which happily is almost inconceivable today. But many Duke University students and faculty, and many members of the media (Nancy Grace of Court TV comes to mind), simply plugged the alleged circumstances into their racial paradigm — wealthy white college jocks partying and behaving badly with regard to a poor black woman — and pronounced the Duke boys guilty. Wanted posters went up on campus with pictures of the accused; 88 members of the faculty sponsored an ad in the college paper effectively supporting the posters; and the university president suspended two of the accused upon their indictment (the third had already graduated), cancelled the rest of the season for the lacrosse team, and forced the resignation of the team coach.

Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.

The district attorney won his election. But when the case fell apart and his almost grotesque malfeasance was exposed, he first resigned his office and ultimately was disbarred from the practice of law. Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university’s legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum. Meanwhile, the 88 members of the faculty have yet to apologize for a rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.

The country has come a long, long way in regard to race relations since 1931. But we have not yet reached the promised land where race is irrelevant. Far too many people are still being judged according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character, let alone the evidence.

21 Jun 2007

Satanism is a Serious Business!

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Following up a link this morning I arrived at (Gawd help us!) a pagan blog, forsooth! which did justify its existence however by delivering up this delectable item:

Quotation heard on a bus by Peregrine:

Gothling 2, sulking: “I did everything right out of the Necronomicon, and the candles didn’t even flicker. I don’t get it.

21 Jun 2007

The Problem May Soon Be Global Cooling

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R. Timothy Patterson, Professor of Geology at Carleton University, argues with the popular junk science of climate change, noting that some significant research suggests that a major cooling cycle may occur around 2020.

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the science is settled.” At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have “a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,” would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists. …

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.

My interest in the current climate-change debate was triggered in 1998, when I was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council strategic project grant to determine if there were regular cycles in West Coast fish productivity. …

My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. …

Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more than 5,000 years’ worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. …

Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a “time series analysis” on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we have discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year “Schwabe” sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing. …

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called “proxies”) is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

Read the whole article.

20 Jun 2007

Bones Make the News

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An Apache warrior

AP is reporting that an alleged great-grandson of the fierce Chiricahua Apache warrior Geronimo has heard the urban legend that claims that some Yale men belonging to a well known Yale senior society, while stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma during WWI, “crooked” (a traditional society practice meaning “to appropriate for permanent addition to the society’s memorabilia”) Geronimo’s skull, and the alleged great-grandson is writing to the White House and demanding the skull’s return.

Legend has it that Yale University’s ultrasecret Skull and Bones society swiped the remains of American Indian leader Geronimo nearly a century ago from an army outpost in Oklahoma, and now Geronimo’s great-grandson wants the remains returned.

Harlyn Geronimo, of Mescalero, N.M., wants to prove the skull and bones that were purported spirited from the Indian leader’s burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to a stone tomb that serves as the club’s headquarters are in fact those of his great-grandfather.

If so, he wants to bury them near Geronimo’s birthplace in southern New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness.

“He died as a prisoner of war, and he is still a prisoner of war because his remains were not returned to his homeland,” said Harlyn Geronimo, 59. “Presently, we are looking for a proper consecrated burial.”

If the bones aren’t those of Geronimo, Harlyn Geronimo is certain they belonged to one of the Apache prisoners who died at Fort Sill. He said they should still be returned.

Harlyn Geronimo sent a letter last year to President Bush, asking for his help in recovering the bones. He figures since the president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was allegedly one of those who helped steal the bones in 1918, the president would want to help return them to their rightful place.

But Harlyn Geronimo said: “I haven’t heard a word.”

The White House did not respond to messages asking for comment.

Their alleged custody of Geronimo’s skull is just one of numerous self-aggrandizing legends artfully disseminated by mischievous members of a certain Yale senior society over the course of its long existence.

But some politically correct and probably deluded younger alumni in a recent article in the alumni mag swallowed the yarn hook, line, and sinker.

Earlier report


A Yale senior society

20 Jun 2007

Hillary & Bill Clinton Parody Sopranos Ending

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That clever Ann Althouse has a larger, easier-to-watch version than Hillary’s own web-site does.

Despite the cut-to-black, Hillary’s website actually does reveal her choice of campaign song: Celine Dion singing You and I.

The video is amusing. Her choice of song is lame.

20 Jun 2007

Black Bear Kills 11-Year-Old Camper in Utah

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A black bear (Ursus americanus) made two attacks on campers’ tents in a camping area about two miles above Timpooneke campground in American Fork Canyon, Utah on Sunday.

BYU Newsnet:

The first incident took place before dawn when a bear swatted a tent. The DWR dispatched hunters and hounds to the scene to kill the bear, but conditions were hot and dry and the search was unsuccessful, Karpowitz said.

The second incident took place at about 11 p.m. The boy was alone in a section of the family’s multi-room tent when the bear slashed the tent open and removed the boy in his sleeping bag. …

More than 30 law enforcement officers, four civilians and several bear hounds assisted in the search for the boy, checking nearby campgrounds and vehicles leaving the canyon.

At 1:35 a.m., the boy’s remains were found 300-400 yards from the family’s campsite.

Root said agents from the Division of Wildlife Resources and houndsmen from State Wildlife Resources shot the bear just after noon on Monday.

Deseret News

MSNBC 2:51 video

19 Jun 2007

Toy Soldiers Disarmed in California

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The Daily Breeze, last Friday, reported a truly mind-boggling case of institutional insanity, of the sort that nearly always comes out of California.

A fifth-grade promotion ceremony in Rancho Palos Verdes turned into a free-speech battleground Thursday, when students were asked to remove weapons from toys that had been placed on mortarboard caps because of the school’s zero-tolerance policy for weapons on campus.

Each year, students decorate wide caps with princesses, football goal posts, zebras, guitars and other items to express their personalities and career goals. Cornerstone at Pedregal School is the only Palos Verdes Peninsula public school to practice the tradition.

On Thursday, before the ceremony, one boy was told he couldn’t participate unless he agreed to clip off the tips of the plastic guns carried by the minuscule GIs on his cap. Ten others complied with the order before the event.

Parents reacted angrily, calling Principal Denise Leonard’s decision censorship, but the Palos Verdes Peninsula School District defended her.

Cole McNamara and Austin Nakata, 11-year-old buddies who share an interest in all things military, said they put the toys on their hats to support American troops in Iraq.

“I was kind of mad because they just went over and clipped them off and didn’t say anything about it,” Austin said.

His father, Glen Nakata, said he was disappointed that parents were not approached or consulted on elimination of the “firearms.”

“I felt they were keeping the boys from expressing their patriotism, their strong beliefs toward the military,” he said.

Glen Nakata’s father served in the U.S. Air Force. And Austin wants to attend a military academy when he’s older. Cole wants to join the Marine Corps, said his father, Paul McNamara.

To treat the “injuries” caused by the order to remove the offending weaponry, Austin wrapped the plastic stumps in white gauze and painted on faux blood.

The principal pulled Cole aside Thursday morning, handed him a pair of scissors and said the guns had to go. …

In enforcing the decision, the district cited its Safe Schools policy and the federal Gun Free Schools Act of 1994, a federal law designed to remove firearms from schools.

Susan Liberati, an assistant superintendent, said she believes “the principal has interpreted district policy accurately, and we support her in that.”

A copy of the district’s Safe Schools policy obtained by the Daily Breeze includes no mention of toy army men. Students found to be “possessing, selling or otherwise furnishing a firearm” are expelled for one year, the policy states.

Weapons are also mentioned in the board’s “weapons and dangerous instruments” policy that allows only authorized law enforcement or security personnel to possess “weapons, imitation firearms or dangerous instruments of any kind” on school grounds.

Board President Barbara Lucky declined comment on the incident or the policy.

“Sounds like a good question for legal counsel,” Lucky said.

It’s wrong for public institutions to adopt policies embodying extremist and Utopian forms of Pacifism or other doctrines wildly at odds with the religious views and moral philosophies of normal and rational Americans. But it is considerably worse to adopt policies which, whatever their philosophic content, represent pure insanity.

It’s bad enough that we have lots of people in this society so lacking in common sense that they hope to prevent criminal violence by trying per impossible to eliminate the material cause (the weapon), while opposing taking effective action to stop the operation of the efficient cause (the criminal). We’ve reached the point where persons in charge of educational institutions are incapable of distinguishing between real objects and their images. They shouldn’t let people that stupid go out by themselves, let alone trusting them to run any kind of school. The 5th graders have more sense.

Hat tip to Wordsmith from Nantucket.

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