Need Data on Timed Release Prolixin Dosage Decay Curve

There is apparently a graph out there (or perhaps just data) that shows the decay curve of time released prolixin decanoate (fluphenazine decanoate  which is administered by deep intramuscular injection. It apparently (and unsurprisingly) takes a number of hours from injection to maximum blood level, and a number of more hours to decay to the level that provides the therapeutic effect.  During this rise and decay period, there are apparently substantial impairment effects that it has--although this description isn't very detailed about those impairment effects.

I am not having much luck finding that information on the rise and decay characteristics.

UPDATE: Thanks to the reader who pointed me in the right direction: R. H. Mindham, "Assessment of drugs in schizophrenia. Asessment of drug-induced extrapyramidal reactions and of drugs given for their control," Br J Clin Pharmacol. 1976 June; 3(3 Suppl 2): 395–400, available here for free. It indicates that the maximum effect of the unwanted side effects (the ones that make it hard to walk a line, or do other tasks involving coordination) is three to five days after injection.

John Adams on Patriotism

I ran into this while looking for information on the Browning 1903 Pocket Pistol, and decided to verify that the quote is accurate.  It is.  From Old Family Letters by John Adams:

Our obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives.

Some things, unfortunately, never change.  In the same letter:

An Aristocracy of Wealth, without any Check but a Democracy of Licentiousness is our Curse.

Sounds Like A Matter/Anti-Matter Problem Could Result

An aide to Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) made the "50 Most Beautiful People" on Capitol Hill list:

Mandi Critchfield is not your usual Republican aide. For one thing, Sen. Mike Crapo’s (R-Idaho) press secretary is a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the National Rifle Association (NRA)....
“Just because I want to protect our Second Amendment rights doesn’t mean I want to hurt innocent animals,” she said.

Things That Annoy Me....

Employers who keep advertising for the same position because they want a perfect match for their requirements--not even a 90% match.  I remember many years ago working for a startup where we interviewed a candidate who very nearly the experience we wanted for a firmware developer--but there was a belief that we could not afford to spend four or five months waiting for this guy to get the particular experience we needed with DMT.  Nine months later, we again were sitting around a conference room, discussing a candidate for that same position, who was again, not exactly a match.  I reminded everyone, "So, if we had hired [name now escapes me] nine months ago, he would have the experience we need now, wouldn't he?"  And everyone looked sheepish.

If someone has the intelligence, but lacks some very specific experience, and you don't have an alternative available, does it really make sense to keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting for perfection to walk in the door?  I don't think so.

A Reminder That There Is No Accounting For Different Tastes

From Craig's List:

WTB Waterworld - $5 (N.W.Boise)
I want to buy "Waterworld". 

Sad to say, there are movies so bad that they are funny in places, but not the places intended.

Did My First Ever Power Tapping Today

Theoretically, you should use a reversing tap attachment on a drill press under power, but in this case, I was tapping a through hole in aluminum, and it was jig for holding something, so if I screwed it up, no big deal.  I set the drill press at 200 rpm, made sure the tap was exactly centered over the hole, started it running, and then lowered into the hole and turned it off as soon as I was sure it had engaged.  However: even then it still made quite a few more turns in than I needed, so I had to back it out by hand, and this took quite a while. 

I'm not sure that it actually saved me anything time wise over hand turning the tap in the drill press.  It was nice to know that it worked, however.  Perhaps I will try this again with my finger on the power switch, and turn it off as soon as it contact metal.  At 200 rpm, even one second is a bit more than three turns, and that's most of the way through the 1/8" wall aluminum that I am usually drilling and tapping.

Way Too Busy

Starting to put together my online U.S. History course for fall.  Also: I have two different new products that I am working on, one of which involves writing PostScript, one of which involves aluminum origami.  And supervising my son manufacturing ScopeRoller products.  And also, I'm still going over my next book on the Kindle, finding stupid little typos and clumsy little errors.

This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a full-time job to go to...of course, if I didn't have a full-time job with a salary, I would be too frantic to working on these other things.

Fast & Furious

Over here you can see video of ATF agents testifying about all the agencies involved in, and aware that our government was actively assisting the smuggling of guns into Mexico for the drug cartels.  Which agencies besides ATF are identified as "full partners"?  ICE, IRS, and DEA.

What's the difference between the Department of Justice and a daycare center?  Adult supervision.

The Oslo Terror Attack Arrest

My first reaction is utter shock: a Norwegian anti-Islamic nationalist did this?  This had all the fingerprints of something from al-Qaeda, right down to simultaneous attacks, and an Islamic group claimed credit for it.

But it does seem plausible that this guy was the equivalent of Timothy McVeigh.

I do think it will be interesting to watch how leftists who make excuses for Islamic terrorists (being victims and all that) will make no such excuses for this guy.

UPDATE: It appears that of the 90+ deaths so far, at least 85 of them were done by Breivik shooting. I am guessing that Norway is going to go down the same path on gun control that Britain has.  This account from the Los Angeles Times is quite worrisome:

Police are focusing on a darker side. Though they said Breivik had no criminal record, they described him as a "right-wing Christian fundamentalist."

Murdering dozens of defenseless, begging teenagers?  Either the police are not accurately describing Breivik, or he missed something along the way.

UPDATE 2: The more I look at this, the more it makes me wonder if he is going to pass a sanity check.  He has apparently confessed, and he is clearly a very smart but evil guy: dressing in a police uniform to get people close enough to commit mass murder shows intelligence--but the nature of this crime is certainly going to discredit those Norwegians who are concerned about multicultural and Islamic immigration.  I am not sure what he could have done to make his ideas less appealing.  His description of himself as:

Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement

certainly sounds wacky enough.

Yet his manifesto (1500 pages long) is here. I have not read terribly far into it, but several things strike me about it:

1. It is pretty well-written, considered this guy's native language isn't English:

The US’s founders recognised three primal values in the Declaration of Independence, and they ranked them properly: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If the order of these fundamental human rights is switched – with happiness before liberty or liberty before life – we come to moral chaos and social anarchy.

This very condition is what Judge Robert Bork describes as “modern liberalism.” He defines its characteristics as “‘radical egalitarianism’ (equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and ‘radical individualism’ (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification).”

Judge Bork also identifies radical feminism as “the most destructive and fanatical” element of this modern liberalism. He further describes radical feminism as “totalitarian in spirit.”

2. His analysis of the methods of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School are, within my level of knowledge, accurate.  He seems to have a good grasp of the methods by which the left has accomplished its goals of destroying Western Civilization, and appears to be well read on the subject:

The most readable English-language history of the Frankfurt School is Martin Jay’s book, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1932 - 1950 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1973 – new edition in 1996). This book is in print in paperback and can be ordered through any bookstore. The reader should be aware that Jay’s book is, in the words of another work on the Frankfurt School, a “semiofficial” history, which is to say that it is largely uncritical. Like virtually all other English-language authors on the Institute, Jay is on the political left. Nonetheless, the book provides a solid factual introduction to the Frankfurt School, and the reader should have little trouble discerning in it the roots and origins of today’s Political Correctness.

3. It doesn't sound crazy.  He is saying things that are apparent to lots of people who would never think of doing a crime this horrendous.

And yet mowing down dozens of teenagers is about as shocking as it gets.  He has managed to take what might have been a worthwhile document (although in desperate need of editing for length) and made it completely vile by his actions.

Linux Box Again Working

Reinstalling from 10.04 CD seems to work.  I noticed that the Wi-Fi driver wasn't working.  This tells what to install to get it working again.  The problems that people are having getting the Atheros wi-fi drivers working with 10.10 and later versions of Ubuntu Linux inclines me to stay well back.

Kindle Book Pricing

There's a discussion going on right now on one of the Kindle publishing forums about whether it is best to cut prices and increase volume, or charge a higher price and make more money on a smaller volume.  It turns out that one author has done the math with a number of his Kindle books:

We can draw some simple conclusions looking at these numbers.

Ebooks priced at $4 sell an average of 1100 ebooks per year.

Ebooks priced at $8 sell an average of 342 ebooks per year.

Ebooks priced at $2 sell an average of 4900 ebooks per year.

I don't know how applicable this is to non-fiction (the subject of current concern for me), but it suggests that doubling the price (at the low end) reduces volume by slightly more than 1/4th (inverse square)  (22.5% of the sales when going from $2 to $4).  At the higher end, it is not linear, but it is a bit less than inverse square (31.1% of the sales when going from $2 to $4).

Kindle Virtues

I tend to wear Hawaiian shirts--and the Kindle 3 fits in my shirt pocket just fine.  There are not a lot of books, even paperbacks, that do so.  Right now, I have dozens of books loaded into my Kindle that I can read if I ever stuck in a car repair shop, or a doctor's office, or any of a number of different time wasters.  That's kind of neat!

By the way: if you are going to be buying something from Amazon.com anyway, if you use a link to the product on this blog, or the Amazon 2.0 Search tool on the right side, it puts a little money in my pocket, without increasing your cost at all.  While Amazon.com is not always the cheapest store on the Internet, they are often the cheapest, or at least very near the bottom.

That Linux Problem

Very odd.  I had actually installed 10.04 on this box before.  The 11.04 CD would not boot.  The 9.04 CD is installing just fine.  All the RAM and hard disk tests passed.

UPDATE: And yet on reboot, grub won't boot.  I'll try and upgrade to 11.04 while running 9.04 from the CD.
Grub 1.5 is installed by 9.04, and Error 18 means that the BIOS is incompatible with this size of hard disk.  But I had this working a few months ago, so I suspect that the version of Grub installed with 10.04 Ubuntu Linux handles this.  Now I will download 10.04 and put that on a CD.

Any More Understatements, Sir?

July 19, 2011 Channel 7 in Denver has a news report about a group of robbers using baseball bats to attack couples leaving bars and restaurants at closing time.  Denver's police spokesman engages in a great understatement:

The attackers are “not nice people," Jackson said.

I will say that the baseball bats simplify the identification problem.  Were I living in Denver, and a group of men carrying baseball bats approached me in an urban setting, there would certainly be a good cause to draw and insist that approaching within 15 feet would get someone shot.

Odd Ubuntu Problem

We had a pretty serious power failure a few days ago--and afterwards, my dual boot Linux/Windows box became a zero boot box.  The hard disk passes the BIOS diagnostics, but it comes up in grub (which means that it must be booting something from the hard disk).  I can see three partitions at the grub prompt: (hd0), (hd0,5), and (hd0,1).  The (hd0,5) is the Windows partition, and (hd0,1) is the Ubuntu 9.0 Linux partition.  I can't seem to get either of them to boot.  (Admittedly, the sparse help display of grub might be part of the problem on this.

I downloaded and burned an Ubuntu 11.04 boot CD, and thought, "What the heck, I will get the latest version of Ubuntu Linxu while I am at it."  But it won't boot from the CD.  Or rather, it starts to bring up the Ubuntu logo, and then:

(initramfs) mount: mounting /dev/loop0 on //filesystem.squashfs failed: Input/output error
Can not mount /dev/loop0 (cd/romcasper/filesystem.squashfs) on //filesystem.squashfs

Any suggestions?  If I spend enough time hunting, I can probably find what I need to reinstall whatever goes in some boot file to tell it to boot from my Linux partition--but I know that there are some Linux fans here, and one of you probably knows the answer.

Kindle Arrived: I Did Not Realize That Two of My Existing Books Are Already Available

Armed America and Black Demographic Data.  (The pricing on the latter means that it probably isn't going to sell well.)

Compared to this, the Kindle my boss has is a brick!  This is far thinner and lighter than any paperback.

UPDATE: And with a larger screen.  I downloaded Republic: A Novel of America's Future by Charles Sheehan-Miles, largely because the Kindle edition was free, and I wanted to see how well this worked for reading fiction.  The Kindle is growing on me as a way of doing pleasure reading.


Republic starts out a little clumsy; the author's method of explaining what is going on is a little pedestrian, but it is growing on me.  He is telling a pretty good story, with people that you care about, and I found myself staying up late reading this in bed, when I should have gone to sleep--and that's a good sign that someone is a storyteller.  Remember that there are great writers (in the technical sense that literary critics like), and there are great storytellers (like Stephen King), and sometimes you get both in one writer!

I do see a lot of annoying typos ("lot's" instead of "lots") and some rather surprising mistakes: the political party is "Democrat" with a capital "D"; newspaper titles are supposed to be italicized.  The dialog, however, is quite good.  Remember that real world dialog is never as grammatical or clear as novel dialog; we rely heavily on various non-verbal cues that prevent this from being a problem.  A novelist has to improve on how people really speak--but not so much that it sounds stilted or implausible, and Sheehan-Miles  is doing that pretty well.

This Heat Wave Is Clearly Global Warming

To quote from a July 25th newspaper account:

The first official figures on the death toll of last week's heat wave indicated today that literally thousands of lives were lost in the temperature of 100 degrees and higher throughout a large part of the nation.

By now you are wondering how I can link to a news story next week.  It's July 25, 1936.

When The Los Angeles Times Reports This...

It is no longer something coming out of right-wing fever swamps.  From the July 19, 2011 Los Angeles Times:

The Justice Department is trying to protect its political appointees from the Fast and Furious scandal by concealing an internal "smoking gun" report and other documents that acknowledge the role top officials played in the program that allowed firearms to flow illegally into Mexico, according to the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF's acting director, also told congressional investigators this month that the affidavits prepared to obtain wiretaps used in the ill-fated operation were inconsistent with Justice Department officials' public statements about the program. Justice Department officials advised him not to raise his concerns with Congress about "institutional problems" with the Fast and Furious operation, Melson said.

The article goes on to say that Melson claims that the Justice Department "repeatedly thwarted his attempts to tell investigators about the failures of Fast and Furious" when Congress started investigating.  There seems to be major incompetence, and perhaps even criminal actions by Justice Department officials.  Unfortunately, because these are Democrats, nothing will happen.

Doesn't This Sound Like The Plot Out of a Twilight Zone?

From the July 18, 2011 Washington Post:

DENVER — A convicted murderer is suing the state of Colorado for saving his life after his heart stopped beating.

Daniel Self says he suffers from sleep apnea and he ordered prison guards not to resuscitate him if he stopped breathing. The 54-year-old says in a lawsuit filed in federal court that prison officials were deliberately indifferent to his right to refuse medical treatment when he stopped breathing in 2009.

I feel for Colorado.  If they had followed his instructions, his next of kin would probably be filing suit for allowing him to die.  But you have to admit, doesn't it seem like what might have happened if the pages from episode 6, first season "Escape Clause" (where a hypochrondriac sells his soul to Satan in exchange for immortality) had been shuffled together with episode 37, second season "Shadow Play" (where a man keeps getting tried and executed for murder, again, and again, and again).

So: does saving a man's life who doesn't want to be saved qualify as "cruel and unusual punishment"?

Someone Has Been Watching Righthaven...

But not learning.  The July 15, 2011 San Francisco Chronicle reports on a law firm out of Chicago that is filing lawsuits alleging that defendants are violating copyright law by downloading porn over BitTorrent. It does not appear that there is any allegation that the defendants are republishing it, selling it--not downloading it.  Since it is impossible to play a video without downloading it to your website, it is pretty difficult to figure out how this would survive in court.  By comparison to this, Righthaven at least had half plausible claims, depending on the definition of fair use.

Nor is it clear that the defendants are actually the right parties to sue:

Jane is in her 70s, a retired widow who spends her days doing volunteer work in the East Bay and fussing over her grandchildren. She also downloads porn illegally over BitTorrent....

This particular Jane (who didn't want her real name used for that very reason) said she's never downloaded porn and doesn't know what a BitTorrent is. She can't afford an attorney to make her case, but she's not about to settle either.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/14/BUG51KA26R.DTL#ixzz1SW5mq7ID

The article goes on to explain that Jane has no idea whether her wireless router is password protected or not.  There are a number of young men living next door, however.

So, why file these suits demanding $150,000 if there is effectively no chance of winning?  Ah, because the demand letters these attorneys send out (to 10,000 defendants so far) are

strongly suggesting that these "digital pirates" settle out of court for several thousand dollars. Letters to defendants helpfully remind them the amount is below what they'd probably pay in attorney's fees and that settling would avoid publicly linking their names to pornography.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/14/BUG51KA26R.DTL#ixzz1SW6BlHZG

But the letters ask you to give the lawyers your credit card information, and they will settle out of court for $3400. Maybe Jane did not know that someone was using her wireless connection to download porn.  As a commenter on the article points out, is Starbucks (with its wireless connections) next on the defendants' list?  My guess is no, because Starbucks has the resources to fight this.

I am inclined to think it is time for a serious revision of copyright law.  At the top of my list would be limits on demands (perhaps $5 on newspapers, $100 on books) unless there was evidence that a defendant was commercially reselling the copyrighted material.  Any video where more than 20% of the frames had exposed genitals or female breasts would not be protected at all.

Boise Only: Need A 20" CRT Monitor? Like For Your Computer Museum?

Okay, I'm kidding.  There are people who need any old working monitor for the crummy computer that they have in the garage, controlling their science experiment or Christmas lighting.  (You would be amazed at the stuff I have seen in the garages of HP employees.)  I have two 20" CRT monitor, one a Micron, one an HP.  Both work, at least 1024x768 resolution (maybe a bit higher, but I haven't tried them at a higher resolution).  If you live in the Boise area, I could hand one or both off at work.  I would be very happy to get $10 for each.  If I don't get a buyer in next few days, off they go to whatever thrift store doesn't shriek in terror when they see them coming.

Gluten

We made pizza using Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Pizza Mix this evening.  I would say that while it wasn't quite up there with Boboli, it was actually pretty respectable.  My wife made the thin crust form, and since I am used to thick crust, that may account for some of the disappointment relative to restaurant pizza.  Still, she hasn't had pizza in quite a while.  While I am not affected as severely as she is, I do see some unpleasant consequences from eating gluten-containing foods.

Also, warning: Kraft has a new cracked pepper mayonnaise out there, and my wife used it for a sandwich yesterday--and suffering pretty noticeable side effects.  It turns out that the ingredients labels (which she should have checked before buying it) shows modified food starch.  Generally, if a food lists "modified food starch" as opposed to the more specific "corn starch" or "potato starch," it is generally made from wheat.  It certainly treated her intestines that way.  She did say it was very tasty,  for those of who can eat gluten.

Just Finished Renewing My Maine Concealed Weapon Permit

It isn't really particularly painful, and even $60 isn't bad--but I confess that I do find it attractive to think that some day the courts may require every state to recognize every other state's concealed weapon permits as a Fourteenth Amendment privileges or immunities provision.  I have permits from a number of states that I have not visited in decades (like Florida and Maine) simply because I have this fantasy of the economy recovering, me being able to get a private sector job again, and then being able to afford to go on vacations again.  At that point, having licenses from states scattered around the country will be somewhat useful.

Dark Sky Finder

I've seen these before, but here's one with pretty fresh data.  I am disappointed but not shocked to find that my very dark skies are still not as dark as I can get just a few miles north or east from here.

New PajamasMedia Article

Is Romney Our Best Choice?

Michelle Bachman and the Shot Heard Round the World

I remember hearing a few weeks back that Michelle Bachman spoke in New Hampshire, and made a fool of herself because she didn't know that the Battles of Lexington and Concord were in Massachusetts--not New Hampshire.  I was disappointed to hear this, but not spectacularly surprised.

I am putting together presentation for this coming semester, including examples of politicians who misuse history, out of either malice or ignorance, and of course I have the video of Joe Biden talking about how Roosevelt went on television right after the stock market crash.  So I went out, in the interests of fairness, to find the video of Bachman's ignorance.  And guess what?  The lamestream media are lying.  Here's the video: she clearly knows that Lexington and Concord are not in New Hampshire:

The news media are lying whores for the Democrats.  It is beyond repair.

PowerPoint 2010 Question

I am using Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 because I need the ability to record a lecture on top of the PowerPoint presentation.  I imported the presentation from OpenOffice Impress and everything came through just fine...except that when I add notes, on some pages, the notes do not wrap when printed, and on others, they do.

As an example:

•In a traditional classroom, the professor lectures, and ideally, students ask questions.  Sometimes because the professor isn’t clear about something, or because a student sees a connection and wants to talk about it.

Appears fine in the notes window--but when I print the notes pages out, it does not wrap this paragraph on the output--it just disappears off the end part way through "because."  I don't see anything that controls word wrap, and even I cut and paste fresh text into the notes section, it does change the behavior.  Any suggestions?

Don't Be Stupid

Always be sure of your backstop when firing a weapon.  Never fire into the air, or at a glancing angle that might allow a ricochet.  There is no reason for stupidity like this.  From the July 14, 2011 Kansas City Star:

The morning after a stray bullet killed an 11-year-old girl as she celebrated Independence Day in her uncle’s backyard, Kansas City homicide detectives canvassed a nearby apartment complex.
Detective Alane Booth stood on the top balcony of the complex clubhouse — about 1,000 feet from where Blair Shanahan Lane was hit — and tried to put herself in the mindset of someone firing a gun for “fun,” as some Kansas City residents do, especially around holidays.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/07/14/3015275/charges-filed-in-stray-bullet.html#ixzz1SJ0An28K

Opel GT

When I was young, I lusted after an Opel GT (GM Germany's little 5/8 scale model Corvette) because I knew that I would never be able to afford a real Corvette.  (How the world changes!)  I confess: I still think that this was a brilliant design for a car.  If I were fabulously rich, I would be tempted to start a company that would build something just like the Opel GT, but with modern technology.  I think the 2.8 liter or 3.1 liter GM V6 would fit in place of the 1.9 liter four cylinder that came in them--and you would have a car that both extremely fast and with very good gas mileage.  But alas, I am not that rich, and besides, who would want a fast, stylish, high gas mileage sports car?  No one, except me and a couple of other kooks.

Anyway, I saw this 1972 Opel GT being offered for sale on eBay, and all I could think was, wow!  What great shape this is in!

When Will California Get Adult Supervision?

Heather Mac Donald over at City Journal points to some examples of how the University of California is supposedly in deep financial trouble:

California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s regents. 

Yet while scrapping what used to be considered academic programs because of financial problems, they are bulking up in other areas:

In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. 

She gives some examples of hiring that would be absurd in the best of times, but now?

In 2010, Berkeley announced the UC Berkeley Initiative for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, funded in part by a $16 million gift from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. The “new” initiative duplicates existing “equity” projects, not least the Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative, established by Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau in 2006. This latest initiative boasts five new faculty chairs in “diversity-related research”—one of which will be “focused on equity rights affecting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community,” according to thepress release, and “will be one of the first endowed chairs on this subject in the United States.” 

This all fits with the madness of California.  As the July 15, 2011 San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Public schools in California will be required to teach students about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans starting Jan. 1 after Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a controversial bill to add the topic to the social sciences curriculum.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/14/BAL61KAHVQ.DTL#ixzz1SDDBGgI8

What contributions, exactly, have transgendered Americans made to our history?  There are certainly contributions that have been made by the other categories, but because throughout nearly all of American history homosexual sex was a criminal offense (at times a capital offense), the vast majority of LGBT Americans are probably unknown--unless you want to start playing the game of insisting "Lincoln was gay" and similar idiocy that has become popular of late.

What is a bit more worrisome is the provision of SB 48 that prohibits "adopting textbooks or instructional materials" that reflect "adversely upon persons" because of their sexual orientation.  This is already California law with respect to "race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry," and would not seem terribly controversial.

But what happens if a teacher has her students read a classic history work, such as William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich?  Shirer's honest description of the sexual orientation of Ernst Roehm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung who played a major role in helping Hitler rise to power, could certainly be read as violating SB 48.  Could a textbook, or even a teacher, mention John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer, and acknowledge their sexual orientation without violating SB 48?  Or John Maynard Keynes's pursuit of little boys?  I rather doubt it.  I mean, you could, but it seems a bit hazardous--and that's the goal of this, I suspect: to cause a chilling effect on speech in the classroom.  Only positive, uplifting images of LGBT people in history will be allowed.  Certainly not the complexity of real people, who are mixtures of good and bad.

Proof That Fast & Furious Was Done To Promote Gun Control

No Lawyers--Only Guns and Money has an image of an email between two of the BATF officials in which they make it clear that Fast & Furious was to provide anecdotal evidence in support of the firearm sales reporting requirement just imposed by executive order.  That requirement alone isn't so bad (although it is a violation of federal law, but what does Obama care about that?), but it does provide pretty strong evidence that Fast & Furious was not just stupid, and illegal, but done for an improper purpose.  Arms and the Law makes a good case that this was a violation of the Arms Control Export Act.