Criminalizing justice

Guilty for the crime of demanding a day in court:

The jury, which deliberated for more than two days, rejected a bunch of counts against Ravi, including the hate crime charges involving Clementi's visitor (who testfied during the trial, identified only as M.B.). Because of this selectivity, one juror told the Trenton Star-Ledger, "You feel like justice has been served." I don't. Ravi is scheduled to be sentenced on May 21. In addition to a potentially lengthy prison sentence, he faces the likelihood of deportation to India, where he was born. Reprehensible as his conduct was, he does not deserve either of those punishments. Had Clementi not killed himself a few days after what he dismissively called Ravi's "five sec peep," leading to the completely unproven conjecture that Ravi's spying drove him to suicide (a claim the prosecution never made during the trial), Ravi probably would not have faced criminal charges at all, let alone a possible 10-year sentence. Before the trial the prosecutors offered him a deal that involved no jail time and a chance to avoid deportation, which suggests even they do not believe he should be punished as severely as a violent felon. So in addition to all of the questionable crimes for which Ravi is about to be punished, there is one more: insisting on his right to a trial.

Setting aside the absurdity of the "bias intimidation" laws and the idea that the jury was capable of correctly reading, post mortem, the late roommate's thoughts in the absence of any testimonial or documentary evidence, Jacob Sullum is right to note that the main reason Dharun Ravi is facing jail time is because he refused to be served up as the sacrificial victim demanded by the increasingly gay-influenced mainstream media.

While it makes practical sense to offer criminals far lighter sentencing in order to avoid the time and expense of trying them, it is a complete miscarriage of justice. Such a system rapidly devolves into one where even the completely innocent given massive incentive to plea guilty, not only because they avoid the risk of a disproportionate punishment, but also save themselves the expense of defending themselves.

The myth of the evolution myth

The New Scientist doesn't understand what "a prediction" is, and in doing so, underlines the very point it is attempting to dismiss:

Cosmologists make precise predictions about what will happen to the universe in 20 billion years' time. Biologists struggle to predict how a few bacteria in a dish might evolve over 20 hours. Some claim that this lack of precise predictive power means evolution is not scientific.

However, what matters in science is not how much you can predict on the basis of a theory or how precise those predictions are, but whether the predictions you can make turn out to be right. Meteorologists don't reject chaos theory because it tells them it is impossible to predict the weather 100% accurately - on the contrary, they accept it because weather follows the broad patterns predicted by chaos theory.

The amusing thing is that in an effort to claim that evolution really is a predictive science despite the inability of scientists to use it to predict anything, the article then denies that the failure of any evolution-based predictions could falsify the theory. And it is telling that the primary examples it cites cannot be reasonably described as predictions, which relate to the future and not to the past.

"Most predictions relate to very specific aspects of evolutionary theory. If a eusocial mammal like the naked mole-rat had not been found, for instance, it would have proved only that Alexander's ideas about the evolution of eusocial behaviour were probably wrong, not that there is anything wrong with the wider theory."

Right, just like the failure of Keynesian theory to predict the simultaneous rising inflation and unemployment of the 1970s only related to the very specific aspects of the historical American economy, not that there was anything wrong with the wider theory. This article makes it very clear that evolution, or if one wishes to be more specific, the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is not a science when viewed from either a predictive or Popperian perspective.

Peggy Noonan's real war

Peggy Noonan gets the vapors:

But the real war is against women in American public life, in politics and media most obviously, but in other spheres as well. In this war, leaders who are women are publicly demeaned and diminished based on the fact that they are women. They are the object of sexual slurs, and insulted in sexual terms. The words used are vulgar, and are meant to tear down and embarrass. Every woman in American public life knows of it. They talk about it in private. They've all experienced it.

Here are some of the words that have been hurled the past few years at public figures who are female: "slut," "whore," "prostitute," "bimbo." You know the other, coarser words that have been used. But the point is, these are not private insults. They are said in public. This is something new in American political life, that women can be spoken of this way.

Wait, I thought they wanted equality... they wanted equality, right? So, why shouldn't one call a slut a slut? Now, I am thankfully not privy to the details of Ms Sandra Fluke's sex life, but given that we know she is a 30 year-old unmarried woman who claims to spend $3,0001,000 on birth control annually, I think that "slut" is probably a significant understatement. According to the Internet - that same Internet which Ms Noonan holds responsible for giving her the vapors - a box of 12 Trojan Magnum XL Condoms is $9.29.

So, we can conclude that if Ms Fluke requires $1,000 annually, she must be having sex around 3,8751,292 times per year. Frankly, it's amazing that she has any time to attend her law school classes, much less testify before Potemkin Congressional panels.

Noonan claims openly expressed male contempt for women is "the real war on women", which is more than a little ironic, as her argument is only likely to generate more contempt, especially among the sort of men who tend to believe that the abortion of millions of female babies every year is an activity much more deserving of the title.

Comment update

Thanks to the HTML master MK - who has the same initials, but is NOT Markku of the Dread Ilk - the Blogger comments now closely resemble CoComment and are much more legible. He was not, however, able to recreate CoCo's special mashup feature, which I'm sure everyone will regret. A few things.

1. Clicking on the post title now accesses the comments, embedded below the post.

2. Anonymous commenting is technically permitted. This doesn't mean you should use it because it's too confusing. Pick a name and stick with it; you don't have to register, just use the Name/URL option and leave the URL blank. Anonymous comments will generally be shot on sight.

3. To post with the embedded comments, your browser must be set to accept third-party cookies. Otherwise, you'll see the "post comment" box, you'll be allowed to click both Preview and Publish, but the comments will not appear. I'm not crazy about this either; it wasn't set to embedded previously because they didn't work with my usual setup, but just set the cookies to flush when you close your browser and you'll be fine.

4. At the bottom of the post, you can now cycle through the comments on the individual posts using the OLDER/NEWER text.

Science and the problem of the hammer

Stephen Law not only points out that science is fundamentally incapable of answering many questions and solving many puzzles, but that it wasn't even involved in one of its landmark "experiments":

KEY POINTS ARE:

(i) this is not a puzzle that can be solved by empirical research.
(ii) It’s a conceptual puzzle that requires a conceptual solution. It’s a puzzle that takes armchair reflection to solve.

So not every puzzle is a puzzle that is best solved by empirical investigation. Some of the deepest and most baffling puzzles can, in fact, only be solved by armchair reflection.

In fact, all sorts of interesting discoveries can be made from the armchair. Mathematical discoveries, for example, can be made from the armchair. They can be achieved by pure thought alone – without doing any data collection or laboratory experiments.

We can also RULE OUT certain hypothesis from the comfort of the armchair.

Suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle on their travels. Should we mount an expedition to go and check whether this momentous claim is correct? Of course not. We can figure out, from the comfort of our armchairs, that no such triangle exists. Triangles, by definition, have three sides. So a four-sided triangle involves a contradiction. It cannot possibly exist.

This is a rather obvious example. It’s obvious that four-sided triangles are ruled out conceptually. They involve a logical contradiction. But sometimes what is ruled out conceptually is NOT so obvious.

Aristotle claimed that objects of different mass will fall at different speeds. A large, heavy metal ball will fall faster than a small, light metal ball.

Back in the late 16thC, Galileo proved that Aristotle was wrong. Some say he did this by dropping two balls off the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. The two balls landed at the same time. Neil Armstrong did the experiment with a feather and hammer on the Moon

But actually, Galileo probably didn’t perform that experiment. He actually performed a thought experiment – one that he describes in his book On Motion. And of course thought experiments can be run from the comfort of ones armchair.

Galileo reasoned like so…

Imagine two balls, one heavier than the other, connected by a string. Drop this system of objects from the top of a tower. If we assume heavier objects do indeed fall faster than lighter ones (and conversely, lighter objects fall slower), the string will soon pull taut as the lighter ball drags on and slows the fall of the heavier ball. But the system considered as a whole is heavier than the heavy ball alone, and therefore should fall faster than the heavy ball on its own. So Aristotle’s theory, just like the claim that there exists a four-sided triangle, generates a contradiction. Galileo could establish that it is false from the comfort of his armchair.

True, this is a scientist doing a scientific thought experiment, but it illustrates the point that highly significant discoveries can indeed be made from the armchair.

Of course, philosophers need to be scientifically literate. Scientific discoveries can be of philosophical relevance. But, at heart, philosophy IS an armchair discipline. And it is none the worse for that.

Philosophy is about conceptual investigation and clarification. Philosophers make conceptual discoveries. I have illustrated how they tackle conceptual puzzles – puzzles that the scientific method just isn’t equipped to solve.

They also probe what we take for granted, our common sense assumptions, sometimes with dramatic results. Philosophers may reveal that what we believe has quite shocking unacknowledged consequences, for example.

This can lead to important breakthroughs. Particularly in moral philosophy. Many of the most important developments over the last couple of hundreds years or so have come about because of philosophical reflection – questioning of, and thinking through the consequences of, some of our most basic moral assumptions and principles.

So philosophy, it seems to me, is not just fascinating, it is also hugely valuable. Blah blah…

Richard Dawkins thought the mirror puzzle and solution was science not philosophy (really? - the last two papers I read on it were in philosophy journals, and I cannot imagine they'd be published in a science journal as they were purely conceptual and involved no empirical claims). Richard wondered why what I do is labelled "philosophy" at all. It's just thinking, he said.

It's been conclusively demonstrated that Richard Dawkins doesn't know much about history, theology, or philosophy. But I have to admit, I find it remarkable, bordering on astonishing, that he apparently doesn't even know what philosophy is. No wonder he doesn't believe in God, he doesn't even believe in philosophy when it is being performed right in front of his face.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that due to their enthusiasm for science, the scientific-secular faithful is like the proverbial man with the hammer, always searching for a nail.

Of infidelity

The results of the Alpha Game survey on sexual fidelity. Here are three of the key observations:

1. 31% of women and 28% of men admit to cheating in their premarital relationships.

2. The risk of female sexual infidelity rises considerably with increased sexual experience.

3. The risk of both male and female sexual infidelity rises considerably with male sexual experience.

Mailvox: the autoneurotic atheist

EC wonders who is reading whom:

I love the blog and your book TIA; TIA is actually the best polemic I've ever read. Anyway, I saw that Edward Feser recently posted a blog article in which he says that the New Atheists engage in "mutual mental onanism". That's pretty close to your "atheist circle jerk". So, who owes whom a royalty check here?

I think it is readily apparent that the use of the similar phrase - and it says much about the difference between Mr. Feser and me, mostly to his advantage, that he prefers the relatively genteel description "mutual mental onanism" to "bukkakelypse" - is nothing more than straightforward observation. It is simply an obvious metaphor for the autoneurotic activities of the leading New Atheists. The only significant difference between Mr. Feser's independent observations and my own is my preference for the vulgate. It's interesting to note that he also pins down the intrinsic anti-intellectualism of the Fowl Atheist's misguided foray into philosophy.

"[T]hat Dawkins’ arguments are directed at ludicrous straw men has been demonstrated time and again (for example, here). Yet he resolutely declines to answer those who have exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in his writings -- dismissing them as “fleas,” without explaining how exactly they have got his arguments wrong -- or, in general, to debate anyone with expertise in the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile, the even more vitriolic P. Z. Myers’ main claim to New Atheist fame is his “Courtier’s reply” dodge, a shamelessly question-begging rationalization for remaining ignorant of what the other side actually says. New Atheists will ridicule their opponents, but actually read only each others’ work. Hence Christopher Hitchens derives his main arguments from Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss learns everything he needs to know from Hitchens, and Dawkins has his confidence in the atheist worldview bolstered from reading Krauss. And now this mutual mental onanism will be expanded across the National Mall. Somewhere Joycelyn Elders is smiling."

She sounds lovely!

Roissy posted this, complete with some excellent commentary, and as the guy who sent it to him suggested, it really merits going viral. It should be subtitled "I'm throwing in the towel".

So this is it--I'm not looking, I honestly don't care if I meet anyone on here anymore--and this is what I've learned about the men that I have had interactions on here with a little parting advice.

If you are over 40 and you do not take care of yourself, unless you truly don't care that a woman is dating you for your money, then maybe a better site for you is sugarbaby.com

Those of us that are of a certain age and reasonably successful on here are on here, want to meet someone reasonable--intelligent, successful, happy, that we're attracted to physically and emotionally, not because we're desperate, but usually because we're too busy to date, or we do not wish to date through our work. We have businesses to run, we travel frequently, or we be on here because our friends and family are bugging us about being single and this is way to get them off our backs. What that means is--
1. We are not desperate--we do not need you to have a fulfilling life.
2. We are busy people--just like you--and we mean what we say, and say what we mean because we don't have time to play silly word games or have drama like 20 somethings.
3. The silly little texting games are the fastest way to blow it. If we give you permission to call--then call--don't text to see if its ok to call--we have a life--random texts from people we don't know don't cut it if we haven't met you.
4. If we ask you not to contact us further--then don't--unless you want to appear as a crazy person.
5. If we call you on the above..we're not crazy, or scary..we just don't have time to waste on people who don't get it. We deal enough with that in our work.
6. Life gets shorter for us every day--we have no time or desire for drama, games or people who do not have their act together.
7. If we reject you after you have done any of the above, put your big boy pants on and move on.
8. We are not angry--we know what we want--we know what we're willing to put up with. With age, the list of what we want gets a little longer, while the list of what we're willing to put up with gets infinitely smaller because we have learned from our youth.

I don't think this woman understands that any man with half a brain not only prefers younger, hotter women to the likes of her, but she is such a nasty piece of work, rotting from the inside out from all of her bitterness and barren professional ambition, that only the most masochistic of gamma males would ever want anything to do with her.

Some women are astonished by the fact that I repeatedly assert that men actively dislike intelligent, successful, educated women. What, I ask them, sounds even REMOTELY attractive about this woman and her poisonous attitude. I wouldn't want to spend five minutes with her, let alone an entire evening.

And here is a little nota bene for women. "Busy" doesn't impress men. I don't quite understand what women think they're conveying by resorting to the term as they do - I suspect it's supposed to be a display of high value - but when a woman says "busy", men hear "bitch".

I know! (raises hand)

Victor Davis Hanson asks a multiple-choice question concerning American strategy in Afghanistan:

Somehow the U.S. finds itself in a position of having to apologize for the inadvertent burning of terrorist-desecrated Korans; of not expecting an apology from Karzai (a recipient of the 2004 Liberty Medal) for the murdering of U.S. troops by their supposedly friendly Afghan counterparts; and of again having to apologize for a horrific mass murdering spree by a lone, rogue gunman, who, nonetheless, off-the-record, is said to be emblematic of the frustration of U.S. troops. Our troops are largely forgotten by the administration and the public, cannot trust fully those on behalf of whom they are risking their lives, and are not sure what the U.S. mission has become. When an invading and occupying force apologizes so repeatedly to the resident population, it is a sign that locals have lost any fear of its unpredictability and lethality, or respect for its proven record of reconstruction and humanity, or for its own sense of self-confidence in its mission.

So what now?

a) To escalate is politically impossible and strategically nonsensical.

b) To leave abruptly is to admit defeat and cede complete control of the country de facto to the Taliban, and to confess that the previous human and material cost was wasted, while relegating millions of pro-Western-reform Afghans in the major cities to Taliban reprisals or refugee status. (I assume that at this point the Afghan Security Forces would not fight on, or at least not fight very well, alone against the insurgents.)

c) To continue with the present policy of announced withdrawal dates, and a final departure in two years, punctuated by periodic apologies to the Afghans when their customs are abridged, or civilians killed, in the hope that the Karzai government and its successor by 2014 will come to a power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban, one that will not nullify all the gains achieved in the last decade — a dubious proposition at best.

The answer is (b), VDH. The answer is (b). No one is fooled when the defeated occupation force "refuses to admit defeat". All that refusal does is square the stupidity. Not only was all of "the previous human and material cost" wasted, people like me have been telling people like you that for years!

And as for the "pro-Western-reform Afghans", screw them. Don't even think about bringing them over here, or you'll soon discover that they're a hell of a lot closer to the Taliban than they are to the West.

In which we are amused

I don't know which is more amusing to me, the fact that some of you are actually lamenting the demise of CoComment or the idea that the world has suffered any loss from the disappearance of the comments into the great digital void. The comments are a daily conversation, and like most conversations, exist only in the moment. When they did produce one of those rare moments of enlightenment, I usually turned them into posts anyhow.

Since none of the external comment systems are either very good or play well with the old Blogger template, I've simply gone with the existing Blogger comments since they've worked fine on Alpha Game. Unfortunately, there is no quote button, so I would encourage everyone to adopt the practice of italicizing text that one is quoting in order to distinguish it from one's own comments. I would also encourage everyone who wants to provide links to learn how hotlink a URL; it's not difficult and it will significantly increase the chances that someone will visit the link you are recommending.

Seriously, at this point, you look downright retarded when you copy an entire URL into a comment rather than hotlinking it. If you don't care enough to hotlink the URL, then obviously it's not important enough to bother pasting it in there in the first place.

While I'll permit anonymous commenting for the time being, mostly because the alternative is requiring Open ID registrations, I would prefer everyone commenting to at least enter a name using the Name/URL box. It's even easier to Remove Content than it was with CoComment - one fell click instead of the previous 7-step process - so don't operate under the mistaken assumption that it's going to be any harder for me to keep the usual suspects from getting out of hand than it was before.

Anyhow, it's a sub-optimal solution, but a functional one, and should allow the daily conversations to continue to flow freely. A few notes:

1. If you don't want a pop-up, but prefer to see all the posts embedded below the post, click on the hotlink on the bottom of the post in the white box. On this post, it looks like this: "3/15/2012 11:24:00 AM".

2. The blogger pop-up window is not only limited to 200 comments, but won't give you access to comments 201 or higher. To see them, you need to make use of the method described above in point (1), then click on either Newer or Newest depending on whether there are 401+ comments or not.

3. If any HTML-head knows how to adjust the template to allow the functionality described in (1) to be utilized using the post title in addition to the time, please let me know. It works like that at Alpha Game and I think it's more intuitive.

It's fascinating to see how much humans hate change. The traffic here dropped 600 visits from the lowest it has been in more than thirty days on a weekday, including holidays, simply due to the change from CoComment. Who would have thought the old commenting system would have so many fans? Somewhere, on an island not so very far away, Blackblade is wiping away a single tear....

UPDATE - All right, just pick a name, any name. It's too much trouble trying to keep track of multiple Anonymouses, so I'll just delete comments without names. It's a pity Blogger won't permit Name/URL without permitting Anonymous.

An ominous sign

It's readily apparent that the women calling for a sex strike haven't actually thought through the implications of their modern-day Lysistrata:

A group that supports health care coverage of contraception is calling for women to withhold sex from their partners between April 28 and May 5.

"This will help people understand that contraception is for women and men, because men enjoy the benefit of women making their own choices about when and if they want to get pregnant," Liberal Ladies who Lunch says on its website. "Once congress and insurance agencies agree to cover contraception, we will then resume having sex. Until then men will have to be content with their left hand."

On its Facebook page, the group charts a brief history of similar "strikes," starting with Aristophanes' ancient Greek play "Lysistrata," where women refuse to have sex until the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Settling aside this ridiculous and totally obnoxious attempt to exert political control over men - and I recommend that any man immediately rid himself of a woman who would ever attempt to run this sort of power move on him - the basic concept of a sex strike is palpably stupid.

Six years after Aristophanes produced Lysistrata, which of course was written as a comedy, the Athenian fleet was destroyed by the Spartan admiral, Lysander. A year later, a starving and besieged Athens surrendered and lost its walls, its fleet, and its empire. And were it not for the unexpected mercy of the Spartans, granted in gratitude for the Athenian resistance of the Persian invasions, the Athenian women would have been enslaved by the men of Corinth and Thebes.

The lesson is that the society whose women attempt to use the crudest form of what John Adams once describes as "the tyranny of the petticoat" is a society that is unlikely to survive for long.

To Hell with secular society

I no longer have any use for it. None whatsoever. I was raised and indoctrinated in the ideal of the "separation of church and state" and genuinely believed that it was best if religion was not permitted to dictate societal rules or even unduly influence society. But this has finally convinced me that the Muslims have the right idea and secularism merits nothing more than being stamped out, ruthlessly and without remorse:

It is a world-renowned work of literature and one of the foundation stones of the Italian language, but Dante’s Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, homophobic, anti-Islamist and anti-Semitic. The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.

Dante’s epic is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group’s president....

Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked "the filters" to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said. It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.

Consider this. The Papal States produced La Commedia Divina, Catholic Italy produced Vivaldi, Anglican England produced Shakespeare, Christian Austria produced Mozart and Haydn. What have two generations of modern secularism produced despite its lofty claims concerning the female liberation and the unchaining of the human spirit? Avatar, Twilight, and The Vagina Monologues.

Camille Paglia was right. "Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy."

Secular progressives are totalitarians and book-burners every bit as fanatical as religious extremists they decry. They always have been, they just build their cultural walls one stealthy and dishonest brick at a time.

Now this is sad

I am a huge proponent of ebooks. They're fantastic and I now prefer reading on my Android phone to an actual book. But that doesn't one doesn't feel a genuine sense of loss at this news of the classic encyclopedia series ceasing traditional publication:

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

If it weren't for the pervasive political correctness that has infested encyclopedias for the last 20+ years, I would pick up a set. As it happens, I might consider picking up an older one, ideally the legendary 1911 edition.

Liberal atheists are cowards

It's hard to illustrate their cowardice more precisely than the NYT's rejection of an anti-Islamic ad copied directly from an anti-Catholic ad previously run in the newspaper:

Bob Christie, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications for the New York Times, just called me to advise me that they would be accepting my ad, but considering the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, now would not be a good time, as they did not want to enflame an already hot situation. They will be reconsidering it for publication in "a few months."

So I said to Mr. Christie, “Isn’t this the very point of the ad? If you feared the Catholics were going to attack the New York Times building, would you have run that ad?”

Mr. Christie said, “I’m not here to discuss the anti-Catholic ad.”

I said, “But I am, it’s the exact same ad.”

He said, “No, it’s not.”

I said, “I can’t believe you’re bowing to this Islamic barbarity and thuggery. I can’t believe this is the narrative. You’re not accepting my ad. You’re rejecting my ad. You can’t even say it.”

We used the same language as the anti-Catholic ad. The only difference is, ours was true and what we describe is true. The anti-Catholic ad was written by fallacious feminazis.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Christians should do every single time anti-Christian propaganda is put forth through the mainstream media and every time anti-Christian views are displayed by irreligious individuals. Force them to publicly expose their hypocrisy. Force them to admit that they are actively taking sides in the cultural war. Force them to finally recognize that they are not secular and neutral as they feign to be, but are actively working against the survival of Western civilization.

The hurricane of fraud

Matt Taibbi on Bank of America:

There are two things every American needs to know about Bank of America.

The first is that it’s corrupt. This bank has systematically defrauded almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, homeowners, shareholders, depositors, and the state. It is a giant, raging hurricane of theft and fraud, spinning its way through America and leaving a massive trail of wiped-out retirees and foreclosed-upon families in its wake.

The second is that all of us, as taxpayers, are keeping that hurricane raging. Bank of America is not just a private company that systematically steals from American citizens: it’s a de facto ward of the state that depends heavily upon public support to stay in business. In fact, without the continued generosity of us taxpayers, and the extraordinary indulgence of our regulators and elected officials, this company long ago would have been swallowed up by scandal, mismanagement, prosecution and litigation, and gone out of business. It would have been liquidated and its component parts sold off, perhaps into a series of smaller regional businesses that would have more respect for the law, and be more responsive to their customers.

But Bank of America hasn’t gone out of business, for the simple reason that our government has decided to make it the poster child for the “Too Big To Fail” concept. Because it is considered a “systemically important institution” whose collapse would have a major, Lehman-Brothers-style impact on the economy, two consecutive presidential administrations have taken extraordinary measures to keep Bank of America in business, despite a staggering recent legacy of corruption schemes, many of which were simply overlooked by regulators.

The frightening thing is that this isn't rhetorical exaggeration. The real case is almost surely much worse than Taibbi paints it. And he asks a very pertinent question of so-called conservatives.

"When did we make it the job of the taxpayer to buy failed companies, and rescue companies from their own bad decisions? How is that conservative?"

Furthermore, you smell bad

Mark Kruse of Grantland addresses bracketologists, for varying degrees of "address" that includes "pushing you down and kicking you in the ribs":

The NCAA tournament is properly rated. Many think it’s one of the best sporting events of the year. That’s what it is. But the whole fill-out-the-brackets thing? TOTALLY OVERRATED. I don’t do it. I won’t do it. Because I want to be able to watch Montana beat Wisconsin or Harvard beat Vanderbilt or South Dakota State beat Baylor, and enjoy that unabashedly, without worrying about whether I “picked” them or not. You “had” Montana? You “had” South Dakota State? No. You didn’t HAVE anything. You don’t deserve to claim even the most peripheral form of ownership. Because it matters to the kids on those teams and their coaches in a way that it doesn’t and shouldn’t and could never matter to you. And because they don’t deserve to be depersonalized into pieces to be so cavalierly “picked” or not “picked” in some annual national gambling exercise. And because they also don’t deserve to be called “bracket busters” if they win. It’s insulting and selfish. The point isn’t that they’ve ruined your chances to win some dumb pool. The point is that they’ve done something unexpected, exhilarating, and empowering, for themselves and the people who know them, love them, and have invested in them. Your “pick” does not count as an investment. You say this gives you a reason to watch and to care? “Picks” make you care about the thing you’ve set up to give you a reason to care about the thing … NOT the thing itself. The thing is the thing. Your brackets are not. At stake in games over the next three weeks: goals, dreams, jobs, futures. That’s not enough for you? An interest based on brackets is an inauthentic interest.

I'm kind of with him on this one. I don't bother with brackets, I just want to see upsets and Cinderellas and 15 seeds beating 2 seeds.

Fidelity survey

In light of the interesting information provided by the previous questionnaire, I've posted another set of questions related to one's historical fidelity or lack thereof. It's entirely anonymous, so you want to add to the data available for crunching, please visit Alpha Game and answer the seven questions there.

Autopetard-hoistery

Glenn Greenwald explains why the law demands hanging the anti-speech champions high on their own scaffold:

In June, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 6-3 ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law. In that case, the Court upheld the Obama DOJ’s very broad interpretation of the statute that criminalizes the providing of “material support” to groups formally designated by the State Department as Terrorist organizations. The five-judge conservative bloc (along with Justice Stevens) held that pure political speech could be permissibly criminalized as “material support for Terrorism” consistent with the First Amendment if the “advocacy [is] performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization” (emphasis added). In other words, pure political advocacy in support of a designated Terrorist group could be prosecuted as a felony — punishable with 15 years in prison — if the advocacy is coordinated with that group.

This ruling was one of the most severe erosions of free speech rights in decades because, as Justice Breyer (joined by Ginsberg and Sotomayor) pointed out in dissent, “all the activities” at issue, which the DOJ’s interpretation would criminalize, “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” The dissent added that the DOJ’s broad interpretation of the statute “gravely and without adequate justification injure[s] interests of the kind the First Amendment protects.” As Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, who represented the plaintiffs, explained, this was literally “the first time ever” that “the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment permits the criminalization of pure speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity.” Thus, “the court rule[d] that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be made a crime, and that any coordination with a blacklisted group can land a citizen in prison for 15 years.”

In August of last year, The Christian Science Monitor‘s Scott Peterson published a detailed exposé about “a high-powered array of former top American officials” who have received “tens of thousands of dollars” from a designated Terrorist organization – the Iranian dissident group Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — and then met with its leaders, attended its meetings, and/or publicly advocated on its behalf. That group includes Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh — and Fran Townsend.

For some reason, those who favor an expanded role for government never seem to understand that a government with the power to do things you want necessarily has the power to do a lot of things you don't want. But it's hardly surprising that Giuliani, Bolton, and Freeh are legally considered terrorists. They have been for a long time.

It should be interesting to see how National Review reacts to this news in light of their inexplicable cheerleading for the nonexistent political career of John Bolton.

50,062

That's how many words Word Dynamo estimates me to know. Now, I would argue that it's an artificially low estimate, since it doesn't include any Italian, German, French, or Japanese words. But despite its limited word list, the test is rather well-designed, as it keeps getting harder as you progress up the difficulty ramp.

Check it out and see how you do. And here is another benefit of homeschool. One of our elementary school age kids took the test and scored 20,090. Ender scored 43,814.

But speaking of homseschooled accomplishment, I would be badly remiss in failing to offer congratulations to the daughter of one of the original Ilk:

After correctly spelling "pickelhaube," "idiopathic" and "pharmacology," Elise Stahl of Greenfield won the seven-county metro-area regional spelling bee Saturday on the word "remand." In the 16th round, Elise, 12, outlasted Eva Beeman Trelstad, 10, of St. Paul and Benjamin Pults, 13, of Maplewood to represent Minnesota at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May.

Chalk one up for the Grizzlies! League sources were heard to say that Greenfield would be wise to consider turning the team's drafting responsibilities over to the young Miss Stahl.

That illicit allure

Scott Adams and others have imagined that with the advent of robogirls and virtual sex, the human race is doomed. But in the West, that day may have already dawned.

WND column

Greek default and eurocollapse

Even a regular observer might have lost track of how many Greek rescue agreements were announced over the last two years. A default was impossible. It had been prevented, we were repeatedly assured. And yet, despite all of these many success stories, the Greek government nevertheless announced that it would not be repaying 100 billion of the 206 billion euros it owed to its creditors, while simultaneously signing up for 130 billion euros in new debt. Needless to say, there is almost no chance that any of that new debt will be repaid; this is nothing more than another flimsy support in the giant, extend-and-pretend structure with which the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are attempting to shore up the global economy.