Needed: 2" Threaded Diagonal For A Few Days



Okay, the Chromacor for the 5" refractor arrived yesterday, and I started preparation to install it--and then I discovered that the 2" diagonal that came with the refractor isn't threaded. (There is something on the inside of the barrel that looks like threading, but according to Photon Instruments, this just prevents internal reflections.)



Okay, I could buy a 2" diagonal that is threaded for filters, but I only need this for a few days to make sure that the Chromacor justifies its expense in improved image. If not, back it goes. So if you hve a 2" diagonal threaded for 48mm filters lying around, and you could let me borrow it for a few days, I would be happy to pay the shipping costs both ways.

Astronomy



Enough with heavy topics today. I mentioned that I had purchased a Photon Instruments 5" refractor, and after a little bit of struggle, I am reasonably pleased with its optical performance. I also purchased a Losmandy GM-8 mount recently, used, for about $600 less than new. I was reluctant to buy Chinese for fear of putting money into the hands of a kleptocratic government that I consider the most likely future direct war threat to the U.S., but I was also a little wary because the Chinese factory quality control leaves a lot to be desired. I am so glad that I spent a bit more to get a used Losmandy. You can't see it in the pictures, but it is a real quality piece of work.



Here's a couple of pictures of the scope on the mount:









Now, the mount didn't come with what is called a dovetail plate. This mounts to the bottom of the telescope, and lets you slide the telescope in and out of the saddle quickly. I ordered up a dovetail plate ($75 from Woodland Hills Camera), but since the sky was gloriously clear Saturday, I decided that I couldn't wait, and I made an interim dovetail plate out of red oak, which you can see here:







It's actually pretty simple; I started with a 1/2" piece of red oak, then set the table saw to a 45 degree angle. I trimmed in down both sides to the required width. Then I kept trimming, until it actually fit into the dovetail. Then I drilled and tapped metric M6 holes into it, and screwed the mounting rings into the dovetail. It's not beautiful (the real part is black anodized aluminum), and I expect that it won't last forever, but it works for a few days. I can use drill some more holes and use it to mount any other telescopes or odds and ends.



Here's a detailed picture of the Losmandy GM-8 head:







I can't give a detailed description right now, but I called my son out to show off one of the nice features--that I can use the four button hand controller to pan slowly across the Moon's surface. (I've been using ancient mount technology until recently; I'm surprised that there isn't a steam engine in the mount that I use for the reflector.) He thought that was cool, but he was also really impressed how sharp to the Photon Instruments refractor is.



I will be doing some astrophotography soon. Alas, just as I was getting set up, my daughter called to talk about wedding plans, and as such conversations go, by the time I was back outside, the little motorcycle battery I have been using to power the mount had gone dead. By the time I finished recharging it, frost had formed on the front lens.



The incident Saturday night where I tripped over the power card, breaking the plug--well, not quite as catastrophic as the scene where Gilligan trips over the space probe, dooming the castaways to several more seasons on Gilligan's Island, but frustrating, nonetheless.

What Can We Deduce From the Priest Sexual Abuse Numbers?



It's always tricky working with statistics. Looking at this item by Michael Williams I found myself wanting to rewrite his ideas in a form that gave me more confidence in the conclusions. After pointing out that 81% of the sexual abuse victims were male, Williams argues that this suggests three possibilities:



1) Homosexuals are over-represented among Catholic priests compared to the population as a whole.



2) Homosexual Catholic priests are more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual Catholic priests.



3) Some combination of the above.



Now, let me try to rephrase his points into a form with which I am more comfortable, because there are some logical leaps in his article that may be correct, but that leave out some assumptions or steps.



Male priests abuse male victims 81% of the time. Homosexuals like to insist that pedophiles aren't really homosexuals. Okay, fine. I don't buy this, because you would then expect roughly equivalent numbers of male and female victims. Homosexuals like to draw a line between "pedophiles" (those who victimize prepubescent minors) and "ephebophiles" (those attracted to pubescent and later minors). Most seem to admit that "ephebophiles" who pursue same sex minors are homosexuals.



According to this detailed report (on p. 58), a majority of the victims were males 11-17--showing that the priests were largely homosexual "ephebophiles" not "pedophiles." We've therefore established that at least half of the priests engaged in sexual abuse were homosexuals.



So here's the question, rephrased from how Michael Williams asked it: Why is it that at least half of the priests engaged in sexual abuse of pubescent minors were homosexuals? Obviously, half of all of priests aren't homosexuals; it is a lot more likely that this reflects higher rates of sexual abuse by homosexual priests than by heterosexual priests.



If homosexuals are proportionately represented among Catholic priests, this means that about 4% - 4.5% of Catholic priests are homosexual--and yet they represent, even taking the homosexual's preferred claim that "pedophiles" aren't homosexuals, at least 50% of the sexual abuse. In other words, homosexual priests who engage in sexual abuse of minors are at least ten times overrepresented from a normal distribution (Michael Williams' point #1).



Okay, maybe homosexuals are overrrepresented among Catholic priests. I'll buy the claim that someone who is conflicted about their sexual orientation might go into a line of work that requires them to be celibate, in the vain hopes that this will protect them from temptation. (That is Michael Williams' point #2.)



There is no way, however, that more than half of Catholic priests are homosexual in orientation. That would mean that homosexuals were at least 10x - 12x overrepresented in the priesthood. At best, part of the overrepresentation of homosexuals among molesters is #2. We are still looking at very disproportionate overrepresentation of homosexuals among molesters in the priesthood.



Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny's Human Sexuality, 4th ed., makes the claim that 26% of molesters go after boys only, with another 4% that go after boys and girls. The lowest claim that I have seen on this subject is from Janet Shibley Hyde, Understanding Human Sexuality, 4th ed., (New York, McGraw-Hill Co.: 1990), 422, which says that only 20% of child molestation is homosexual (and she uses that word). In conjunction with the data from Catholic priest molesters, and that only about 4%-4.5% of men in the general population are homosexual or bisexual, we see general agreement that the sexual orientation of child molesters is disproportionately homosexual.



This doesn't mean that every homosexual man is a molester, but it does mean that the traditional concerns about this have a factual basis. This is not simple ignorance. It is as valid a basis for discrimination as our laws that discriminate against drunk drivers (by prohibiting them from driving drunk) and against convicted felons (by taking away their right to possess firearms). Is this unfair to homosexual men who aren't interested in little boys? Sure.



Guess what? There's a lot of that sort of unfairness. If I walk down a dark city street at night, 200 feet behind a woman who doesn't know me, she will be afraid, and she will noticeably speed up her walking to get away. This isn't theory; I've had this experience before. I was at first offended and hurt, because I was a nice guy. If she had anything to fear from a guy, it wasn't from me; I would come to her defense. But she didn't know that.



Her "discrimination" against me for being a guy was completely rational, because she knows as a first approximation that a man is twice as likely to be a rapist as the average member of the population. (Simple math: effectively all rapes are done by men, who make up half the population. Ergo: any unknown man is twice as likely to be a rapist.) She loses nothing by assuming the worst of an unknown man, and she has much to lose if she incorrectly assumes that a guy is harmless.



I think the larger issue that no one wants to confront, however, is that child molesters are nearly always former victims. The exact mechanism, from what I have read, isn't completely understood, but some of the characteristics fit into several examples that I have blogged about recently:

The perpetrators in our sample had all had sexual encounters as children, and there was evidence of a relationship between this childhood experience and sexual abuse as an adult. The sexual abuse had a narcissistic quality to it that the perpetrator identified with the victim. The victim was usually the same sex as the perpetrator, and frequently the victim was approximately the same age as the offender when he was victimized, and in a number of cases the sexual acts were the same. In addition, the family backgrounds of perpetrators reflect deprivation and harsh treatment.[Kathleen Coulborn Faller, Child Sexual Abuse: An Interdisciplinary Manual for Diagnosis, Case Management, and Treatment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 85-86]

Homosexuals fight any discussion of a possible link between child sexual abuse and adult sexual orientation. The idea, I am told, is preposterous. Why? It's not like I am proposing two completely unrelated activities, say, child sexual abuse and hating broccoli as an adult. Anyone that can't see a pretty obvious mechanism that could lead from one to the other must be extraordinarily clueless.



One book that I read made an interesting point about how sexual abuse victims deal with their pain, especially once they start to confront it in therapy:

Apart from this obvious repression, a client may also have diminished the intensity of the event by some form of the disassociative process. As one woman so clearly summarized after describing years of brutal physical and sexual abuse by her father, "You know, being beaten up isn't that bad; after the first hit you don't feel it anymore." It is worth reflecting that these kinds of defenses may have been the person's protectors and friends -- in many instances a victim's only solace. When casting off these defenses and telling someone about the trauma, the person may feel that the only shield has been stripped away and that he or she is without anesthesia against the pain of the original assault. One client described a previous therapist, the leader of a woman's group who aggressively confronted the client's defenses before the group, in these words: "That therapist attacked me! She tried to take away my way of coping. I know I'm hard. I have a shell and there's some stuff I won't look at. But I protect myself the best way I know how. Who is she to attack me... trying to take away all I have that protects me from me?... Is she going to protect me? No!" [Diana Sullivan Everstine and Louis Everstine, Sexual Trauma in Children and Adolescents: Dynamics and Treatment (New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1989), 155-156]

I'm not expecting homosexuals to confront what is probably a very painful memory--one that many homosexuals have acknowledged that they have repressed. A survey done some years ago about drug and alcohol abuse in the gay community asked this question about child sexual abuse: "As a child, were you ever sexually assaulted or abused?" [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Appendix A, (San Francisco, San Francisco Dept. of Public Health: 1991), 6.] A startling 28% of the men and 48% of the women answered, "Yes." [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, p. 24.] When compared to the survey results for more general populations, these are astonishing numbers for men, and somewhat surprising for women. One of the volunteered marginal comments on the survey included the painful acknowledgement:

I am beginning to deal with the possibility I may have been sexually abused as a child. I know I use alcohol to medicate that pain and my drinking has increased with 'seeping' memories and work stress. [EMT Associates, Inc., San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Alcohol and Other Drug Use Anonymous Survey Vol. I, 55-56.]

This unwillingness to seriously consider a possible connection between child sexual abuse and adult homosexuality is insane. I was astonished at how many books written even 15 years ago on the subject of child sexual abuse admit that adult homosexuality is a common response. Yet this has become almost like arguing for a flat-Earth today.



UPDATE: One reader points out that the suvey was not a random sample, because not everyone that was given a survey actually returned it, and may thus not be particularly representative. That's true (and it was true of Kinsey's sex surveys as well, but homosexuals were quite willing to use a misstated version of Kinsey's results to create the 10% myth). One of the difficulties when you try to gather any sort of data about a minority population is that you have to either:



1. Pick from a list of members of that minority population; or,



2. Survey the entire population, then identify members of the minority population as part of the survey.



For homosexuals, both of these are difficult problems. It's not like you can stand on a street corner and pick out homosexuals with any certainty. Yes, there are certain subgroups of homosexuals who stand out--but there are a lot that do not, and do not fit the stereotypes. A survey based on who is willing to identify him or herself as homosexual is going to bias the survey to those who are most "out" about their sexuality.



Option #2 is problematic both because to get a statistically significant sample, you will need a huge sample of the general population--and then you have the same problem about homosexuals who are closeted perhaps being less willing to identify themselves as such on a survey.



However, the reader who wasn't too happy about my use of the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health survey claims that the 30% and 48% numbers really aren't that far out of the norm:

And as you no doubt know, the values for men are within the range found in general population studies, (3-29%) and the women are just a bit above that (7-36%).

I am a little startled by those numbers. If those are numbers from current studies (that is to say, done more than ten years after the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health survey), then we are not comparing equivalent populations. I would expect there to have been an increase in child molestation rates because so many children are not being raised by their biological fathers now. For a variety of reasons, children growing up in the homes of their biological fathers are at much lower risk of molestation.



In any case, when the survey in question showed child molestations rates of 30% and 48%, respectively, the data that I was able to find on molestation rates for the general population was lower--although the very high end of the numbers for females were getting close to the S.F. Dept. of Public Health survey. The range of the 11 studies summarized in Bagley & King are 12%-40% of females, and 3%-8.6% of males.[Christopher Bagley and Kathleen King, Child Sexual Abuse: The Search for Healing (New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1990), 76.] Faller quotes the same studies, though in less detail.[Faller, 19.] The Everstines use the figures 15%-45% of females and 3%-9% of males, but "believe that the currently accepted percentages for males who have been molested will be revised to 10% or 15% of the population when more accurate data are forthcoming."[Everstine & Diana Sullivan Everstine and Louis Everstine, Sexual Trauma in Children and Adolescents: Dynamics and Treatment (New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1989), 2.] These studies were conducted in Britain, Canada, and the United States, with Bagley and King asserting that child sexual abuse survey reports in California are unusually high, though it is unclear whether this is a methodological problem, or reflects higher incidence in California.[Bagley and King, 69.]

Coincidence? Or Cause?

There is a gay marriage lawsuit under way in Florida--but even those apparently supportive of gay marriage are a little concerned about the caliber of the lawyer and the plaintiffs involved in the case. What I found interesting is this description of one of the plaintiffs:

Rubin said he would file suit later this week on behalf of two men. Rubin identified only one of the two, who, Rubin acknowledged, has a checkered past.

William Patrick Ash, 39, has been arrested 11 times, including several charges of theft, check-kiting and serving beverages to minors, according to state records. Ash, who says he splits his time between Fort Lauderdale and San Diego, has at least two convictions, including a 1996 charge of living off the earnings of a prostitute.

In 1984, he lost his job as an aerobics instructor with the city of Fort Lauderdale. Officials said he falsified his r?sum?, in which he claimed he was a choreographer for Cats on Broadway, and that he started a fundraising project on behalf of the city without permission.

Ash, in a phone interview from San Diego, said he did not want his past to interfere with what he believed was a fairness issue. He claimed many of his problems stemmed from abuse by Catholic priests.

But not his homosexuality, I guess.

Will The Next Scrappleface Announce the Merger of the Holy Roman Catholic Church & NAMBLA?

This would be shameful if it were a secular organization. But from an institution that claims to be the representative of Jesus Christ?

More than 11,000 allegations of sex abuse have been made about Roman Catholic priests in the US since 1950, a new report is expected to show.

One diocese has already confirmed that nearly 4,440 priests - 4% of the total - have been accused of such assaults.

Groups representing victims of abuse say the final figure will be higher.

...

Some Roman Catholics will hope the report will help to close a painful and humiliating chapter in the Church's history.

But groups representing victims claim that people molested in their youth wait on average until they are 44 years old before breaking their silence.

They say there could therefore be thousands of cases still to emerge.

FoxNews.com has more on the results:

Eighty percent of the alleged victims were male, and just over half said they were between the ages of 11 and 14 when they were assaulted, a source who read the reports told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Eighty percent of the victims were male? Somehow, it doesn't sound like a particularly random distribution.

Dioceses nationwide received 10,667 abuse claims since 1950, according to a news release from the Diocese of Yakima, Wash. Of those, claims by approximately 6,700 were substantiated. About 3,300 were not investigated because the accused clergymen were dead.

Another 1,000 or so claims were unsubstantiated, the diocese said.

Let's see, if the claims not investigated because the accused were dead had the same ratio of substantiated to unsubstantiated, that would mean another 2871 uninvestigated claims that would have been substantiated.

Here is where it gets really horrifying:

The panel noted that any evaluation of the crisis had to take into account that much of the abuse involved men preying on boys, the source said. And the report said that church leaders' failure to discipline sexually active priests created an environment which made clerics reluctant to report abuse of children.

If this reluctance to report abuse had taken place in Hollywood, or the Democratic National Committee headquarters, I would be disappointed but not surprised. But in the Catholic Church?

Celibate Catholic Priests--An Interesting Twist



I am rendered almost speechless by this AP news article:

The interim head of the Springfield diocese apologized Monday for saying the Catholic sex abuse scandal stemmed from a belief once held by some priests that having sex with young men was acceptable.



Monsignor Richard S. Sniezyk said that as a seminarian and a young priest in the 1950s and early 1960s, he heard of priests who had sex with young men, but "no one thought much about it."



"They did good ministry, they were good to their people, they were kind, compassionate, but they had no idea what they were doing to these young men that they were abusing," Sniezyk told The Boston Globe on Sunday. "It was that era of the '60s - most of it took place from the mid-'60s to the early-'80s - and the whole atmosphere out there was, it was OK, it was OK to do.



"Certainly that atmosphere is not present in the church today," he said.

I am still trying to make sense of this.



Did they think that the Church's celibacy rule had been repealed? No. There were priests that married in secret, but they knew that they were breaking the celibacy rule.



Did they think that the Church's position on homosexuality had a special exemption for priests? I can't believe that any of them thought that.



Did they think that taking advantage of teenaged and younger boys was okay? Apparently so.



I am still flabbergasted that such a point of view was accepted among priests in the 1950s--at a time when homosexuality was not just illegal, but still widely regarded with disgust and horror in America, and when the pursuit of children for sex was not just illegal, but regarded as one of the great evils. The Catholic Church needs to come up with some pretty convincing explanation for why priests held such a point of view--and make sure that it never comes back.

Declaring Victory on the Photon Instruments 5" Refractor



I took it to a star party last night. I had a chance to look at Saturn through several different telescopes, both reflectors and refractors, under the same sky, and the same conditions of darkness. There was only one telescope that showed more detail on Saturn than my Photon--and that was an Astrophysics Starfire 7" apochromatic refractor. (These aren't made anymore, but I am sure that I could buy one used for $7500-$8000.)



I looked through a 6" Chinese achromat sold under the Galileo brandname. Cassini's Division was invisible, and there was no detail on the planet itself. I looked through a Meade 8" Dobsonian. Ditto.



The Starfire was indeed an impressive view--but it did not show dramatically more detail on Saturn and its rings than the Photon Instruments 5" refractor. In both cases, Cassini's Division was black at the ansae (the left and right sides of the planet), and visible in front and back of the planet. It was perhaps a little blacker in the Starfire, and there was more detail visible in the clouds on the planet.



Now, the Starfire's image was definitely brighter and whiter, as you would expect with almost twice the surface area to gather light. The Photon's image would have broken down at the magnification that the Starfire was using, and this is definitely one of the virtues of the apochromatic design--it tolerates high magnification much better. The Starfire was also color-free, while the Photon definitely a slight violet haze around Saturn. Still, the difference was not startling between the two, and I feel like my Photon Instruments was a real bargain.



I had a chance to look at Jupiter as well through both the Starfire and the Photon Instruments. Jupiter was still low in the sky, and seeing conditions necessarily limited what either refractor could do. Still, the Starfire's advantage in image detail (once you ignore a bit of color fringing) was not dramatic.



The next step is to install a Chromacor, and see how much better I can make this.