Over at the Republic of T, Terrance has been chronicling battles in Wisconsin and Virginia over the interpretation of either Defense of Marriage amendments or alterations thereto. The argument is wearily familiar: that the text of the legislation is overbroad, and that it risks not only banning same-sex marriage and civil unions, but also private contractual arrangements regarding visitation, inheritance, etc. between same-sex couples.

The language in the Wisconsin amendment is typical:

Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.

And yet the legal realist finds myself unable to fathom the argument. Opponents of these Defense of Marriage Amendments (or whatever the latest Virginia iteration is calling itself) claim that there is a significant risk that, should the measures be passed, a radical conservative judiciary is going to expansively read the provisions to enforce them to the utmost bounds of their meaning, knocking out not only privately-contracted civil unions (plausible) or state-sanctioned domestic partner benefits (possible), but also private contracts between homosexuals on the ownership of corporations. Why? If those states have judiciaries that will twist the text beyond the bounds of reason to restrict gay rights (so much so that they'd abrogate many contracts entered into by non-married heterosexuals), why did the voters of these states feel they needed DOMAs in the first place? Who are these justices just about to give progeny to Goodridge that yet would overenforce a ban on civil unions?

I wonder how effective these arguments will be in campaigning against DOMAs. Certainly there is a risk that moderate voters will see opponents bewailing the coming conservative judiciary to be at least partially crying wolf, isn't there?

Posted by Anthony at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Another "oops" in Lebanese photography, this time from the AP. Fact-checking seems to have gone out of style these days.

Worse than journalists, credibility seems on shaky ground with lefty law professors. The ever-dependable for the lunatic fringe view Brian Leiter takes Jim Lindgren to task for talking about these scandals:

Jim Lindgren (Law, Northwestern) here protests lack of attention being paid in the US media to the fact that Israel is killing large numbers of civilians in Lebanon, one-third of them children.

Whoops, sorry, I misread that:  his moral outrage is reserved for the fact that US media won't give sufficient attention to the fact that in at least one case a survivor of an Israeli airstrike went out of his way to make sure the media carried pictures of the children killed.  Shocking, just shocking.

First, he's playing the "But the Real Story is" game, something he's wont to do. The rules are simple: when Person A decides to talk about X, Person B (lacking much of any real value to say on X, often because it would require specialist knowledge) insists that the real story is Y, and that any talk at all about X is trivial. [1]

"But the Real Story Is" stands as the last refuge of the scoundrel with nothing to add. As with the underlying story in Rathergate, the evidence offered after the fact (in that case faked letters, in this case faked and staged photos) makes no particularly new observation, nor adds or detracts to the case made for Israel's offensive or Lebanese resistance. Prof. Leiter seems to have felt Israel's offensive unconscionable before the pictures, and Prof. Lindgren felt them justified, and the photos themselves offer no new information to change any minds. After all, we knew that children are dying, although the death counts go up and down depending on who does them and the time of day. The story of media manipulation--and media's willingness to be manipulated--yet has life in it as a controversy. [2]

Second, and most depressingly, why is a man who once told me he "expect[s] better of students who are planning on joining my profession" so disrespectful of the actual tools of law? I know that Prof. Leiter is a Law & Philosophy guy and the many jokes among students as to what "Law &" normally means. [3] Nevertheless, attacking bias in evidence presented by an opposing party is a critical litigation skill and a common tool of the legal trade. It's part of your regularly-balanced legal breakfast. Most if not all rules of evidence (and evidence courses) spend a great deal of time arguing about what "authenticates" a document, and what information can be used to show the bias of a witness.

These legal tools clash with what seems to be an informal norm increasingly common within the journalistic world: evidence that fits with a narrative is acceptable even if one can't confirm the facts. It's no bad thing that lawyers take the same methods of attack used to discredit a witness in court and apply them to journalists. Pace Leiter's suggestion that this is non-important, the staging of photographs violates a duty reporters have to their readers to present facts clearly and honestly. If the "candid" photograph of Green Helmet holding up a baby is no less posed than the image of Posh and Becks sitting upon thrones (in this week's Economist), then news services should not present these to readers as spontaneous events, even if they are symbolically representative of something "true." Leiter suggests that the "real story" is elsewhere, but to legal readers the falsification of evidence should be a story in and of itself.

Finally, the stories of photoshopping and staging retain their power because the malfeasance all seems to go in one direction: against Israel. Certainly there have been children in Haifa brought into hospitals wounded or dying, but no AP photographer has misidentified such a child as a victim of Hezbollah violence. No Israeli stringers have been found photoshopping additional missiles into the skies. There are some more or less flimsy excuses for this imbalance that don't involve intentional bias, mostly revolving around the difficulty of using employees (rather than stringers) in Lebanon. Yet this doesn't explain why, if the AP or Reuters knows that they are forced to use less reliable sources in Lebanon, their editorial controls are not strengthened to reflect this. Reuters may not be able to prevent their source from sending them photoshopped pictures, but there is no force in the world that compels them to print photographs that will embarass them later.

Even supposing the bias is unintentional, it remains a bias in favor of one side of an armed conflict. That bias goes to the credibility of the narrative presented by organizations like AP, Reuters or services that use their photography. It is reasonable, scholarly, and yes lawyerly to recognize that the credibility of a narrative of disproportionality may be called into question when presented by a party who makes frequent preventable errors, hides relevant information and insists in the face of contrary evidence upon its own objectivity. To say that the story is elsewhere, that evidence of bias is trivial, flies in the face of what we're taught--or at least should be taught--as lawyers.

[1]:It helps if, as Leiter does, you mischaracterize X and make up facts. First, Leiter is the only person, left or right, suggesting that "Green Helmet" (about whom much silliness has, admittedly, been written) is a survivor of any Israeli airstrike (not quite true), much less the one the airstrike shot in the video Lindgren presents. The most charitable view is that he's merely a civil defense worker, the least that he's a more or less official propaganda agent for Hezbollah. Secondly the accusation is of course much broader: that far from being an outlier ("in at least one case"), this kind of staging is business as usual for the stringers used by national media.

[2]: Of course, Leiter's accusation suggests that Lindgren is also playing "But the Real Story Is" with the mainstream media by "protesting" a "lack of attention." That's at best a mischaracterization. Lindgren's not really protesting, and I doubt he'd expect a response to his "protest." He's making an evidentiary point.

At the end of a post accusing the media of intentional or unintentional bias, the lack of reporting on the scandal is mentioned to further support the idea of bias. Journalism relentlessly insists that no mark of bias casts a shadow on their souls. The argument is not that "the real story is" the bias rather than the bombings, as the bombings are indeed the story. Rather, the hypothesis being advanced is that the storyteller cannot be trusted.

[3]: The kindest of jokes I have heard would be that "Law &" folks don't care much for anything that comes before the ampersand. One of the least kind was a classmate who joked that in his last year he took no "real law," and instead focused on "Law &" and "The Law of" courses.

Posted by Anthony at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I guess the guys at DailyKos are a bit giddy after their victory over Kiss Me Joe, because they're hawking the story of a photoshopping scandal. According to the Kossacks, the GOP decided to paint a Hitler moustache on Howard Dean in an advertisement ridiculing the "Defeat-ocracts." When I first saw mention of it, I thought, "Well, maybe. I mean, Fascist Dean seems like a tough meme to propogate, and photoshopping to do it virtually guarantees a backlash, but hey, I've never claimed that Republicans used the web effectively. So who knows?"

Click through to the first link above and prepare to be underwhelmed. The "moustache" doesn't seem to be the result of intentional malice, but rather of having used this photograph, pulled off another blog. Don't get me wrong: the picture looks awful (so do the other four victims), but you have to really squint to look at Dean and think "mysterious Naziesque facial hair" rather than "wow... fire the photo editor." (Take another look at that picture. The injudicious use of the lasso tool leaves Dean's finger looking frighteningly skeletal, and if I were to make any complaint, it would be the fact that Rep. Murtha resembles a large, fleshy growth developing out of Michael Moore's left shoulder blade.) There's certainly nothing to suggest that someone sat down and painted a moustache onto Dean.

In other words, the story is the same as always when it comes to Republican web work. Don't assume malice where simple incompetence will suffice.

Nevertheless, the GOP has issued a new image (which seems to use a better picture of Dean as the source). Fair enough, although no one has corrected the whole Murtha-Moore-tumor problem. In the meantime, if this is supposed to be the left-wing version of Reuters photoshopping, there's just no comparison.

Posted by Anthony at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After forcing Reuters to pull a third rate forgery from its video archives, bloggers are having a field day finding more suspicious photos from the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict. My guess is that many will turn out to be perfectly valid images, but a few will turn up as very embarassing errors that will take a large toll on media credibility. While I'm not qualified to judge most of the scandals, this one certainly seems suspicious. In two photos dated two weeks apart, what seems to be the same woman is bewailing the destruction of her apartment. I suppose there are explanations: she owns two apartments, the second picture is her evil twin, etc. But the idea that the major news agencies aren't paying enough attention to the activities of their men on the street is becoming hard to shake.

Posted by Anthony at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For a while now, there's been a bit of a storm in the more feverish bits of the right wing blogosphere over possible fakery in photographs of the Israeli attack on Qana. For the most part, I've not bought the allegation that these images were "staged." The evidence is mostly circumstantial, and while I'll freely admit that staging such a thing isn't beyond what I'd believe of Hezbollah, I also think those making such an allegation have a higher burden of proof. After all, allowing such staging would require at least the gross negligence, if not the connivance, of quite a few major media outlets.

The trouble is today Reuters admitted to publishing a doctored photo of another bombing. And much like the Rathergate memos, the photo is not even a third-rate forgery. Anyone who's ever used the "clone" tool in Photoshop can see that the image has been badly faked. (Further, as someone who once watched an entire Scientology banner be photoshopped out of a publicity photo for a company we represented, I can tell you that a reasonably competent college graduate with little training could do a better job.) There is literally no excuse for letting a picture like this go out. It's laughable.

Therein lies my difficulty. I still don't think the Qana photographs are faked, and that most of the tempest over them in the right wing blogs is misplaced. But if the photographer who filed the Reuters photo is also willing to hack out a lousy Photoshop, who says he's not willing to look aside while some (relatively more competent) Hezbollah fakers set up on stage left? If the reason we should trust those photographs is the integrity of Reuter's editorial process, where was it when these latest photographs showed up? I'm willing to put the burden of proof on the bloggers, but for pity's sake, it would help if the media majors would make some attempt at retaining their credibility.

Posted by Anthony at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Prof. Yin highlights one of those wonderful articles by concerned liberals (in this case Anna Quindlen) that causes a moment of pause. I have to remind myself that there are quite sensible people who object to the death penalty, and they don't all offer drivel as arguments. It's worth listening to them.

I find this tough to remember because death penalty abolitionists have some pretty staunch spinmeisters in their corner. Justice Scalia's concurrence in Marsh today challenged some of the key figures one hears, but for my money Amnesty International takes the Arachne Award for the Service of Spun Statistics to Public Policy. For instance, it's hard to find a death penalty press release that doesn't contain some variation of the statement, "In 2005, 94 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the USA."

That sounds pretty damning, doesn't it? But what if I told you that (based on the same statistics), the U.S. came in fourth place and counted for only 2.8% of all executions in 2005? That's a bit less impressive. On a per capita basis, Singapore's hangmen are busier by almost a factor of ten? (OK, the figures are old, but it's still a high multiple.) The big deal, of course, is China, which accounts for over 80% of all executions worldwide.

Amensty choses the "top four" cut off, of course, not because the U.S. is exceptional among countries retaining the death penalty (that would be China), but because the United States is fourth. Amnesty often precedes the line I quoted above with, "As in previous years, the vast majority of executions worldwide were carried out in a tiny handful of countries." True so far as it goes. But the vast majority of executions are carried out by a single country, and the rest are just frosting on that particular cake.

This spin also allows people like Quinlen to blithely write:

Hardly any other civilized place does this anymore. In the past three decades, the number of nations that have abolished the death penalty has risen from 16 to 86. Last year four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Despite being flat-out deceptive, Amnesty is happy to push these little statistics, and commentators like Quindlen trot them out like respectable toy poodles. The trouble is that once one learns how the numbers have been massaged, it's hard not to judge the rest of the abolitionist claims with some skepticism. Hundreds of exonerations? Well, were these innocent people or are we trying for large headline numbers by including procedural faults?

I'm sure Amnesty's heart is in the right place, which is normally the excuse one hears for them. But it's hard to think that when the "best of intentions" are promoted by rather shady means.

Posted by Anthony at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Some will probably interpret this column as a defense of Ann Coulter, so let me be clear: she's pretty far beyond the bounds of reasonable defense. My only hope is that a third party does arise in the next election.Perot's party drew Pat Buchannan away from the Republicans, and I can hope lightning strikes twice, right?

But the fever-swamp left of the blogosphere is all a-titter today over this little quiz, which purports to challenge visitors to distinguish between the words of Ann Coulter and Adolph Hitler. It gets a favorable link from Brian Leiter, who has taken a brief vacation from his blog-sabbatical to highlight it.

It's a bit odd to see a law professor trumpeting this piece so loudly, though. At least in theory, we legal folks are supposed to care about correct citation, honest usage of quotations, etc. A brief look at this "gem" of a quiz reveals that it's not entirely forthright. I think it gets the Coulter quotations right, but the Hitler quotations suggest that the most evil man of our time was obsessed with liberals and America. For instance:

We must study this vile liberal technique of emptying garbage pails full of the vilest slanders and defamations from hundreds and hundreds of sources at once. . . .

As long as millions of the bourgeoisie still piously worship their liberal democratic press every morning, it very ill becomes these gentlemen to make jokes about the stupidity of the 'comrade' who, in the last analysis, only swallows down the same garbage, though in a different form. In both cases the manufacturer is one and the same liberal.

Here the liberal's procedure is as follows: He approaches the worker, simulates pity with his fate, or even indignation at his lot of misery and poverty, thus gaining his confidence...With infinite shrewdness he fans the need for social justice, somehow slumbering in every American man, into hatred against those who have been better favored by fortune. . . .

Hence it is that at the present time the liberal is the great agitator for the complete destruction of America. Whenever we read of attacks against America taking place in any part of the world the liberal is always the instigator.

My readers being a pretty clever lot, they've by now figured out the ruse. Hitler actually said very few of the things attributed to him in this quiz. If you substitute for "Jew" or "Jewish" for "liberal," and "Aryan" for "American" and "Germany" for "America," these are all passages from Mein Kampf. But I'm sure my readers are a cleverer lot than even that, and are now asking, "OK, Tony, but what's you're point? What's all the lead up about?"

I bother pointing this out for two reasons. First of all, looking through Technorati I didn't find that anyone had pointed out the obvious: the "quotes" from Hitler weren't any such thing. Secondly, the alterations are important, because once they've been pointed out, the whole little bubble becomes little more than another good argument for Godwin's Law. What made Hitler evil wasn't his habit of rhetorical excess, but the means to which he put it. Comparisons to Hitler hold their force precisely because they imply that the subject of comparison is similarly odious for similar reasons. And yet "liberal" is a policy position, not a race or religion, and hence the comparison is not particularly appropriate. For instance, consider the last "Hitler" quotation I gave above. The quiz places it, presumably for emphasis, right next to this Coulter remark:

It was a crushing defeat for the liberals, not because liberals were necessarily Communists, though many were, but because they had been morally blind to Communism...Liberal elites defended traitors. In response to the Soviet threat, the Democrats consistently counseled defeat, supplication, and retreat.

On the other hand, hyperventilating columnists can be found by the dozen. It wouldn't be difficult, following the same rules of engagement, to doctor a few passages of Mein Kampf and come up with a "Hitler or Huffington Post" quiz. But to do it would be silly, wouldn't say much, and the proper role of a professor in response would be to say so. Were he a law professor, he might also point out that honest argument demands integrity, especially in the use of quotations.

Update: After some conversation, Prof. Leiter has now updated his post to recognize that the "quotations" are nothing of the sort.

Posted by Anthony at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Prof. Bainbridge displays an uncommon lack of class today when moaning about a practice with which I am similarly annoyed. Writing about folks who park SuperSized SUVs in spaces reserved for diet-sized cars, he gripes:

I was standing there thinking, "only somebody from Texas would be dumb enough to think a GMC Yukon qualifies for a compact parking space," . . . ... but then one of my fellow Californians pulled a (nearly) full size truck into the compact space right beside the Yukon.

Certainly the practice is obnoxious, although I must also admit that given the number of SUVs in my lot, it's a bit strange the parking garage hasn't redrawn the lines to accommodate more small trucks. But there's no reason--nor has there ever been any--to suspect that only Texans are blase enough about the convenience of their fellow citizens to engage in such behavior.

(Come to think of it, I never saw an SUV parked in a compact space when I lived in Texas, but I can't recall ever seeing anything but a full-sized parking space.)

Posted by Anthony at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I know two or three formerly meat-eating vegetarians who really miss the taste of bacon. Apparently this is not uncommon. If you too have such a friend, you should introduce them to Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier. Although completely meat-free, it tastes like bacon in a big frosty mug.

I promise, this is much better than it sounds.

(If you're in New York City, you can try a bottle at the West Side Brewery.)

Posted by Anthony at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Law professors first and foremost teach their student to "think like lawyers," which in legal-land is this special way of cogitating foreign to everyone else. I either missed the import during law school--possible, I suppose, given my Fed Courts grade--or "thinking like a lawyer" is the same thing as logic, except you get to put "esq." after your name.

Thinking like a lawyer may be great when you're in front of a judge, but as University of Houston Professor David Dow shows in his New York Times editorial today, it may be distracting when one is considering politics. Prof. Dow suggests that death penalty opponents should put aside this pesky "innocence" topic and instead focus on the many flaws in our death penalty appeals process:

Innocence is a distraction. Most people on death row are like Roger Coleman, not Paul House, which is to say that most people on death row did what the state said they did. But that does not mean they should be executed.

Of course, Professor Dow is selective in which process he obsesses over. Racial strikes on juries or incompetent counsel, of course, is critical, but res judicata or federalism concerns are . . . well, not really one of our deeply-held procedural values:

When the Supreme Court brushed aside Mr. Coleman's appeal 15 years ago, the justices said that a death row inmate cannot complain when his lawyer misses a filing deadline, because the lawyer is the agent of the client, and clients are responsible for the failings of their agents.

As a result of this syllogism, my client Johnny Joe Martinez was executed in 2002, because his court-appointed appellate lawyer neglected to file a proper appeal — a mistake he freely admitted to, attributing it to inexperience. When the Martinez case reached the federal courts, those courts, invoking the Coleman decision, said too bad for Mr. Martinez; the mistake of his lawyer was attributable to him.

And there's some logic to this. Presume that the system is mostly working. Is it just for one murderer to die because his lawyer filed all the appeals properly, and yet another to live longer because his lawyer was incompetent? The best way to challenge that argument is to attack the presumption that the system is functioning within a reasonable margin of error, and even better, that it cannot. But that is precisely what Prof. Dow suggests not be done:

The House case will make it hard for abolitionists to shift their focus from the question of innocence, but that is what they ought to do. They ought to focus on the far more pervasive problem: that the machinery of death in America is lawless, and in carrying out death sentences, we violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

Further, focusing on process opens death penalty opponents up to charges of bad faith. Most death penalty opponents, while perfectly happy to point out the flaws in the system, are at heart not that interested in improving it. And Prof. Dow concedes that as a substantive matter, the system is pretty much working: most people executed did commit the crime for which they were convicted. Hence, the question can be asked: if we fixed these procedural problems, are people like Prof. Dow going to stop arguing for the removal of the penalty? If not, isn't the process just an excuse?

Focusing on innocence isn't a "distraction" for death penalty opponents, it's their strongest, best argument so long as they are faced with a polity that doesn't find state-sanctioned execution to be wrong in and of itself. The death of an innocent man, after all, is a tragedy. But the tragic tale of a misfiled appeal leading to a slightly earlier execution of a doubtlessly guilty man holds little traction beyond those who have been trained to think that "substantive due process" isn't a contradiction in terms.

(Hat tip Ann Althouse.)

Posted by Anthony at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I wake up on yet another Friday and find that Karl Rove isn't indicted yet. As I've said before, I admire Rove, since he's got the best job perk imaginable. He can wake up in the morning, pour a glass of scotch, kick back and flip on I Love Lucy reruns, safe in the knowledge that anything bad that happens to the left will be blamed on him by the end of the day. He's Satan's own scapegoat.

(The latest lefty jibe for Rove is to call him porcine, but let's face it: the Democrats haven't been doing much to force him up off the couch and get the blood pumping recently. [1])

I'm hoping that Rove's getting a particular kick from the misery of his abusers. After Truthout.org "leaked" (note: good leak) a story of his upcoming indictment, they've watched their credibility ooze out the door. First the indictment was coming in three days, then three "business" days, then soon, then . . . Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin announces that Fitzgerald has no plans for indictment. The kicker? According to many of the "Plameologists" (and Truthout's latest defense), this may be their Dan Rather moment! Luskin may be lying about a letter from Fitzgerald!

Really, I'm not making this up.

Even those who don't believe it (including, for instance, Jane Hamsher) seem unwilling to call a spade a spade:

For those who are tempted to believe Luskin is lying about the letter he received from Fitzgerald — don’t. I know that irresponsible types will try to exploit people’s natural mistrust of Gold Bars and his willing to limbo around the truth, but lying about this goes well past what I think his limits are. I believed him when he said Rove had not been indicted, and I believe him now . . . .

This, however, stand's as Truthout's last defense for not "burning" its confidential sources (as they promised) if it turns out they weren't . . . well, "outing" the "truth." The jury's still out on the stupidity of Marc Ash, it seems.

[1]: Yes, things are bad for the Republicans, and we very well may get trounced in the next election. But almost every Republican wound is self-inflicted. It's like Mike Tyson getting into the ring with me and then, in an act of desperation, biting his own ear off.

Posted by Anthony at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's DailyKos open thread ended with the curious tagline:

In the American theocracy, video games which allow you to kill those who don't convert to Christianity are apparently okay.

Meanwhile, the secular authors speaking about the game have become deranged:

Comparisons to Grand Theft Auto and other such video game titles are irrelevant to this discussion. It is not the level of violence that is at issue, but the Christian supremacy. This game immerses children in an environment that copies present-day New York, and indoctrinates and rehearses children in the mass killing of New Yorkers. This is religious indoctrination that forms children's identities and teaches that they must be prepared to do a deadly deed to defend their creed. That message is unAmerican and unChristian; patriots and Christians alike should oppose this game.

Further, Left Behind: Eternal Forces has one thing going for it in the "don't do this at home, kids," stakes that GTA does not. I've not read the Left Behind books, but my impression is that they're apocalyptic in very a literal sense. The rapture has occurred, a bundle of the righteous have used their "Get Out of Perdition Free" cards, and the world is now caught in a last-days type battle. The anti-Christ shows a significant lack of political savvy and starts taking over the United Nations. (Management, unsurprisingly, seems to improve.) God, in the meantime, plays a more active hand in events, causing squadrons of planes to fall from the sky rather than attack Jerusalem, etc. In other words, in this setting the existence of the Almighty is not much more in question than the existence of sunlight.

This reminds one of the old C.S. Lewis comment about why we object to the persecution of witches: burning them is improper because we do not believe that they exist, not because those who actually aligned themselves with the devil to torment their neighbors would not be evil and deserving of burning. Similarly, if the question of the existence of a divine creator were settled, there's a reasonable argument that qualms about religious toleration can be set aside more lightly.

In this sense, the Left Behind game shares an ethos with just about every fantasy game that has a supernatural element. (In Dungeons & Dragons terms, any game that has clerics.) In the new Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, the demon Mehrunes Dagon may have a colorable argument for the ownership of the "real" world. Were the various characters making claims about a supernatural eminence who never appears, then religious toleration would have its place: seeming 'heretics' would be members of an alternate religion who ought to just found a political party. When gates to hell start popping up all over the place, however, the game sets aside a need for interfaith dialogue.

By contrast, GTA III actually takes place in a "realistic" world, and indeed a modern setting. Mr. Hutson's concern thus leaves out a required predicate: any "indoctrination" seems predicated upon the happening of rather fantastical events. If all Left Behind communicates is that in the face of concrete and tangible evidence of the existence of God normal rules of religious toleration should be reconsidered, we can rest pretty easy. After all, if you're an atheist (or even not an evangelical), you aren't really putting the Rapture in your project plans.

The various left-wing blogs writing on this also seem a bit perturbed by the "kill or convert" aspect of the game. According to reports--I can't find a demo of the game, and I don't have time to play it--protagonists have the choice of either killing their enemies or converting them. I'm not sure why this is so upsetting, however. It's a pretty standard real-time strategy (RTS) game mechanic. (In the game Sacrifice, one converts one's enemies through a form of rather energetic altar torture, as I recall.) The game is set in a world where one is either for God or quite busy following an AntiChrist. Assuming we take that as a factual premise (within the game), kill-or-convert becomes nothing more than a gameplay decision.

None of the above should be read as an endorsement of the Left Behind books or the eventual game. I've not read the books, but they certainly don't sound like my cup of tea. The game--at least judging from the website--doesn't look like it's breaking any new ground in RTS, and I'm not sure the world needs another inferior skin of StarCraft. But one should at least be consistent in dealing with video games. I credit the players of Grand Theft Auto with enough sense to know that hijacking cars is a no-no. I'm pretty certain that anyone paying for Left Behind: Eternal Forces is going to know that the Rapture doesn't come at the double-click of a mouse.

Posted by Anthony at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

And in other good but thoroughly predictable news, Karl Rove isn't going to be indicted. Shockingly, otherwise smart people are having to learn you can't trust everything you read on the internet.

And as of right now, Truthout.org's website hasn't posted any news of Jason Leopold burning his sources, as he promised to do.

Posted by Anthony at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I suppose that in keeping with my frequent assertion that it's important to denounce lunatics on one's own side of the aisle, I should register disgust at whatever it is Ann Coulter has said recently about 9/11 widows. The trouble is, I have no idea what she said and I'm too busy to really want to spend time falling into the sewer to educate myself. Can we just take it as read that I think she's a few bricks short of a full load and leave it at that?

On the other hand, there's some fun and games over at Instapundit. At the same time that his blog is suggesting that Coulter should be ignored, his Pajamas Media ad is suggesting that his readers can get free copies of her book.

Gotta love automated ad feeds. . . .

Posted by Anthony at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Volokh Conspiracy, ThinkProgress and Planned Parenthood have all recently commented on a "new" Bush Administration policy: supposedly, homosexuals should be abstinent for life. A quick look through the statute book, however, leads one to believe that not only is the policy not actually as harsh as suggested, but it's not particularly novel.

The fuss is over a new set of guidelines for Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) Programs published by the Administration for Children and Families. (Oh for those glorious small-government days of Republican lore, when our children and families didn't really need to be administered.) The ACF has stepped up to the plate with a new definition of abstinence:

Abstinence curricula must have a clear definition of sexual abstinence which must be consistent with the following: "Abstinence means voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage. Sexual activity refers to any type of genital contact or sexual stimulation between two persons including, but not limited to, sexual intercourse."

Throughout the entire curriculum, the term "marriage" must be defined as "only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." (Consistent with Federal law)

All this seems rather histrionic. Reading through the CBAE materials, they seem a bit silly, but none of them are couched in terms of "teens having no choice but to" or "you should be taught to never, ever." They promote the idea that certain decisions are healthier. I don't really agree as to the health risks and one could argue all day about the evidence given, but the descriptions of the programs are a bit breathless. After all, tobacco and alcohol education programs don't advise that I have "no choice" but to smoke or drink. They recognize that I do have such a choice and explain that my lungs and liver would probably object. Nothing on the ACF's page suggests that these programs are different in type. [1]

More to the point, I'm wondering just what statutory wiggle room these organizations--including the Guttmacher Institute--thought that the ACF actually had. Explicitly defining "abstinence" as meaning "no sex until marriage" may be quite novel as a matter of government policy, but is the definition so much more horrible because it's now explicit instead of implied? The statutory standards required of the CBAE have not changed since 1996, and are found in 42 U.S.C. §710(b)(2):

For purposes of this section, the term "abstinence education" means an educational or motivational program which--
(A) has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;
(B) teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school age children;
(C) teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;
(D) teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity ;
(E) teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects;
(F) teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child's parents, and society;
(G) teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increases vulnerability to sexual advances; and
(H) teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

Which then leads us back to my confusion as to these accusations of a "new" policy. Certainly one can see the difficulty that ThinkProgress is gnashing it's teeth over, but those teeth should be well worn to nubs by now. After all, the definition of "abstinence education" was signed into law by the same president who signed the Federal Defense of Marriage Act: Bill Clinton. At the very worst, the ACF has made the intent of an objectionable law more clear, but they hardly seem to be breaking new policy ground.

[1]: Sadly, it's rather typical of current discourse to conflate "X is bad for you" with "you have no choice but to abstain from X." One can mark this down to health fetishism, a desire to live forever, some form of neo-puritanism, but whatever the motivation it's still a faulty form of reasoning.

Posted by Anthony at 04:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Finally sick to death of Dell's horrible customer service, I decided I'd splurge a bit this Christmas and buy myself a new notebook. Anything but a Dell, I thought, and so I bought a lightweight but relatively powerful Alienware Sentia. No more Dell!

Some days the universe just hates you.

Posted by Anthony at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Before heading off to sunny Texas for spring break I've cleaned like a demon. Unless the room floods while I'm gone (not entirely impossible), I should return home to a room that sparkles like a hotel. Part of this has involved throwing out or donating some of my old clothes, something at which I've never been very good. Today I've been strict: anything I've not worn consistently in the last six months is going. I really need to limit my closet consumption.

I'm especially loathe to throw out t-shirts that have silly slogans on them. (Yes, I've got the fashion sense of a color-blind zombie.) Sadly, I can't seem to find anyone who makes the following anymore:

• STOP PLATE TECTONICS
  
• "I've got the body of a god. Unfortunately, that god is Buddha."
  
• Pave the Planet! One World, One People, One Slab of Asphalt!

Come to think of it, it's probably best for me that these things have gone thoroughly out of fashion....

Posted by Anthony at 02:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Enough pixels have already fluttered regarding the constitutional repercussions of Rumsfeld v. FAIR, and I really have nothing to add to the kind of commentary that engages Con Law professors. My thoughts are slightly broader and less focused.

1) Broadly speaking I think the opinion comes out correctly. Law schools can't be forced to hire pro-Solomon professors, one supposes, but they must allow military recruiters on campus. The schools will continue to grant them access whilst posting signs in GREAT BIG CAPITAL LETTERS telling us what horrible people the military are, maybe in the future making applicants run a gaunlet of screaming protestors, but they can't close the door altogether. There's a justice in this: as I've said before, if you're going to take the king's shilling, you can't be upset when you get dragooned.

That's not to say that "don't ask, don't tell" is good policy: it isn't. (On the other hand, it's not disastrous policy: keeping homosexuals out of the military will result in, at the very worst, a slightly less-than-optimal allocation of resources to the armed forces.) We should change that policy, but to do so we'll need to change hearts and minds both within the military and without. To do that, at least insofar as JAG recruiting is relevant, the ivory tower of law would have to reconnect with the serfs living outside the keep, at least now that the legal equivalent of the Sacred Council of Cardinals has declined to intervene in more temporal affairs. Maybe this will provide the incentive.

2) Thankfully, Chief Justice Roberts and the rest of the Court soundly rejected the amicus brief of Columbia's law faculty. As a quick recap, the professors argued that when Congress passed Solomon, they meant to ban discrimination against military recruiters, and that an even-handed anti-discrimination policy on sexual orientation applied to both law firms and the military does not do that.

First, this argument borders upon an arid textualism. The military isn't disadvantaged if the rule is stated "we don't allow any employers to interview if they discriminate." Yet they are disadvantaged if we state a more robust rule: "we don't allow any employers to interview if they discriminate other than as required by law." Is it the honest opinion of the law faculty that in any other situation, they'd apply their anti-discrimination policy against employers who were complying with a statutory mandate? (If a law were passed stating that no declared homosexual would be allowed to pass the bar--presuming its constitutionality--would the law schools really shut out everyone?) Can an organization that accredits students who are presumably expected to comply with the law really say that their antidiscrimination policies should trump a valid act of Congress?

While I respect most of its signatories, the logic within the brief borders upon farce. How could many of the same professors who have spoken so favorably of legislative history in my classes be so parsimonious with it in front of the Court? From the legal realist perspective--and one of the signatories is one of my favorite of Columbia's realists--what possibly can the law schools have hoped to gain if the Court ruled in their favor? Unless the professors truly believed that Congress really intended such a stingy reading of Solomon--go ahead, take a moment to laugh--didn't they expect that a ruling in their favor would result in yet another revision to the statute, this time erasing the scintilla of doubt that might somehow be scraped from its text? At best, such a result punts the issue six months to a year down the road. Woohoo! We can bar the doors to the military for one year at the risk of draconian wrath from a Congress that--it's hard to realize this from New York--still sits in Red State hands.

3) It's worth placing this debate in its larger context. Rumsfeld v. FAIR follows Romer and Lawrence as part of a larger debate this country is having: is it acceptable for our society, or even subsections of it, to disapprove of certain sexual behavior? And here I find myself having--uncomfortably--to side with the social conservatives.

There is a difference between saying that one should stigmatize certain sexual behavior and that the country can do so through legislation. To say that anti-sodomy laws should be overturned merely requires the expression of a political opinion, and one I share. To agree with Lawrence is to fantasize that this country at some point collectively decided that anti-sodomy laws were so vile that our descendants should require a supermajority if such policies were to be instituted. To believe that discrimination against homosexuals in employment should be prohibited, one must merely think that Congress or the states have the power to do so if they wish. To believe in Romer, one must think that at some point a majority of us agreed that any other law was beyond the pale.

Me, I'm sure I do a lot of things of which other people wouldn't approve, simply because they're legal, fun and I don't feel they harm anyone else. (Some of my best friends are Mormon, and almost certainly disapprove of my Chestertonian fondness for wine.) But those others should still be able--electorally, if need be--to disapprove of my choice. To do otherwise not only trivialize their opinion: it trivializes my choice to disagree with them.

Such dismissive attitudes come with political cost. After Lawrence and Goodridge, after all, came a multitude of state constitutional provisions making obvious clarification. To paraphrase the intent of each such resolution: "Whatever we've said before about equality, it didn't change the common sense idea that when we say 'wife' we mean a woman, when we say 'husband' we mean a man, and when we say 'marriage' it means between a husband and a wife. If we were ever convinced otherwise, we would have mentioned it sooner. Judges, take note."

It's great that my law school doesn't think homosexuality--or even much in the way of consensual sex--should be verboten. But law schools accredit lawyers, and however much I disagree with folks who think sex should be limited by tradition, religion or what have you, they should have the right to have their lawyers too.

4) Finally, my favorite part of Chief Justice Robert's opinion occurs on page fifteen of the slip opinion:

The schools respond that if they treat military and nonmilitary recruiters alike in order to comply with
the Solomon Amendment, they could be viewed as sending the message that they see nothing wrong with the military's policies, when they do. We rejected a similar argument in PruneYard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U. S. 74 (1980). In that case, we upheld a state law requiring a shopping center owner to allow certain expressive activities by others on its property. We explained that there was little likelihood that the views of those engaging in the expressive activities would be identified with the owner, who remained free to disassociate himself from those views and who was "not ... being compelled to affirm [a] belief in any governmentally prescribed position or view." Id., at 88.

The same is true here. Nothing about recruiting suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters, and nothing in the Solomon Amendment restricts what the law schools may say about the military's policies. We have held that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech a school sponsors and speech the school permits because legally required to do so, pursuant to an equal access policy. Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens, 496 U. S. 226, 250 (1990) (plurality opinion); accord, id., at 268 (Marshall, J., concurring in judgment); see also Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819, 841 (1995) (attribution concern "not a plausible fear"). Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school.

(Update: a few text errors, including the embarrassing mistake of confusing Romer with Roper, corrected.)

Posted by Anthony at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Look what happens if you Google for Paris Hilton Sex Tape:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

Remember, the longer you take, the more your unlawful conduct damages us and the more you incentivize the infringer / fraudster for the next time!
Why does it take many hours for Google to remove an infringing site? By contrast---for example — it only takes EBay/PayPal a matter of minutes (even on a Sunday) to terminate PayPal accounts — associated with infringing sites — in response to my similar reasonable demands.

Posted by Anthony at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

From the doyenne of the Huffington Post:

We've only scratched the surface, but the more we learn about the Armstrong Ranch, site of the Cheney shooting, the more it feels like the GOP equivalent of Tony Soprano's joint, the Bada Bing. Of course, at the Bada Bing the girls are strippers; at Armstrong they're the ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. But both hot spots feature quite a bit of gunplay.[1]

Tune in next week for more exciting HuffPo metaphors, such as why the Democrat's Renaissance Weekend is an awful lot like the Amsterdam Red Light District. . . .

(Yes, yes, I get the point Ms. Huffington is trying to make: lots of Republican bigwigs go to the Armstrong Ranch and network. But even to a casual Sopranos viewer, it's a stupid metaphor. The Bada Bing is Tony's place, which would make Katherine Armstrong the kingpin of the Republican Party. On top of that, more corrupt deals are made at Artie Bucco's restaurant than the Bada Bing. But focusing on the Nuovo Vesuvio wouldn't allow the HuffPo to make a completely gratuitous slam on a female ambassador. Isn't that odd for a progressive site?

Incidentally, shouldn't it be she's the Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein? There's only one ambassador to the two countries, and unless Arianna knows something the rest of us don't want to know about, the last one wasn't likely to get hired by Bada Bing.)

[1]: Astute readers will note that the quotation above doesn't match the text found at HuffPo. I've quoted the excerpt given on the HP homepage at the time of writing, but linked to the "under the fold" text. The only other option was posting a screenshot.

Posted by Anthony at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Professor Volokh today posts an excerpt from The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS)-Palestine. He makes a serious point, wondering how one can negotiate with a group so disconnected from reality. Me, I just wonder how certain groups become bees in the Hamas bonnet. Take, for instance, these bizarre accusations:

That is why you find [the Zionists] giving [attempts at liberalizing women] constant attention through information campaigns, films, and the school curriculum, using for that purpose their lackeys who are infiltrated through Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs.

With their money [the Zionists] formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.

Hamas has always been a bit of a Janus organization. Suicide bombings against enemies are good, as are non-corrupt social services for allies. One can rationalize those positions if one tries hard. But either its constitution is an attempt at comedy--and this I doubt--or the organization is also what a friend of mine would characterize as "plain batshit crazy."

Thankfully, however much Lions or the Rotary Club members are tools of Jewish Hegemony, Inc., they're pretty mild-mannered about it. I mean, imagine what might have happened if Hamas had published some cartoons of prominent greedy Rotarians with sheckels in their eyes! We might have had mosques burnt down, the Iranian embassy stormed and hostages held, and all sorts of other things that I'd feel compelled to denounce. Fortunately, these folks have been pretty quiescent since 1988.

Posted by Anthony at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

First, let me say that whatever one's partisan opinions, this is pretty funny. Attorney General Gonzales at the Senate hearings on Monday:

"I gave in my opening statement, Senator, examples where President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance of the enemy on a far broader scale -- far broader -- without any kind of probable cause standard, all communications in and out of the country."

So yes, he may be a member of my party, but anyone--even the Attorney General--should be able to have a laugh at that. It's fairly harmless.

On the other hand, we should also be able to laugh at its opposite. A number of leftish websites, for instance Pat Morrison of the Huffington Post, take issue with the AG for citing not only Washington, but also a supposedly anachronistic President Lincoln. But Lincoln actually belongs to the age of early electronic surveillance, and the civil war wasn't exactly scarce on wiretaps. They seem to have forgotten the telegraph, which is a shame considering the role it played in the Civil War.

UPDATE: Actually, looking at his speech, he might have used the words international. Anyway, what all those presidents have in common is wanting to spy on communications going into and out of the United States.

Posted by Anthony at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hopefully I'll be off this topic tomorrow, but I do like to update posts when someone proves me wrong, or at least not-so-right. After giving the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) grief for not forcefully condemning violent responses to the Cartoon controversy, I should note that today's press release mentions in passing that they "condemn all violent actions by those who are protesting the cartoons." I can't find a transcript of the press conference itself, so I don't know what or who they actually condemned, but heck, it's a start.

(Link via Prof. Volokh, who rightfully wonders at CAIR's crabbed vision of free speech.)

In the meantime, a somewhat amusing article in the Daily Telegraph asks two questions about the controversy that I'd like answered:

• Is it irony alert time? Shouldn't non-Danish Christians be up in arms about the desecration of religious iconography, given that the flag of Denmark is pretty much a white cross? Actually, scratch that: the last thing we need is one more reason for one more group to get righteously angry over something trivial.
  
• More important to those who worship the almighty dollar: who's supplying Danish flags to Palestinians? Given the way things are going, we need an internet startup promising to rush deliver ready-to-blaze flags to demonstration-prone areas. ("The flag of your oppressor in 24 hours or less! Free box of matches with every order! Ask about our Frequent Immolator special, and remember, there's always bulk discounts on Old Glory or anything with a Magen David on it!") Is this the next hot IPO?. . . .

UPDATE: Apparently, it's a highly competitive market.

Posted by Anthony at 04:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Top Gun 2 : Brokeback Squadron

I love it when the internet meets people with too much free time on their hands.

Posted by Anthony at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No, not the movie. The lady is a fully paid-up member of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (although she's let her membership in People for the American Way lapse), so no overly-lengthy shepherd kiss-fest is going to give her the vapours.

No, she was shocked at the short story. Disgust filled her before she reached the first page. Actually, she was appalled as soon as she opened the cover of the unmanfully short paperback and found not a semi-naked Heath and Jake in full-clinch step-back mode, but instead the engorged price of $9.95.[1]

(That's almost sixteen cents per page. I'm glad she didn't see that the hardcover version goes for $14.95, though there's a 32% discount at Amazon. This for a story that you can find for free with some simple Googling.)

Me, I'm a good little capitalist, and this octavo nearly inspires me to same-sex marriage myself. Heck, if I happened to find the marketing genius, whoever he or she is, who figured out how to sell a New Yorker short story at ten bucks a pop, I'd be tempted to get down on bended knee.

[1]: Did I mention she's been teaching me romance-novel metaphors?

Posted by Anthony at 03:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Google enters the Chinese market, and in order to do so has agreed to actively censor materials in its searches that annoy the local authorities. There's a lot of largely unreflective thinking on how this contradicts Google's mission statement, "Don't be evil."

Hogwash.

The silliest comparison I've come across finds expression on Publius Pundit:

Google will resist the U.S. government, but won’t stand up in any way to China? Judging by its actions at home, one would think Google to be a pioneer in bringing access to information and resisting attempts from governments to repress it or monitor it. This says that isn’t the case, and it makes me wonder — just a little — what its motivation is to resisting the U.S. government and giving in to the Chinese. Perhaps they should change their motto to, “It’s just business.”

We know Google works. We also know that most internet filters are pretty easy to avoid. If the new system is filtering based on government blacklist, ineffective filters have a double benefit: not only don't they stop the flow of information, but they also burn hundreds of man-hours in maintenance time that might be used on some more effective method of oppression. Unless Google is unveiling some vast new technology that will allow the Chinese government to throttle information more effectively through Google.cn, we have a net win for Chinese freedom.

Would Chinese websurfers be better off with Google obstinately refusing to enter the market? Only if one feels that the search engine behemoth is so powerful that the Chinese Communist Party is going to adopt First Amendment jurisprudence in wholesale lots just to get some GoogleJuice.

I'll change my opinion if it turns out that Google has set up a brand new Censorship Division looking into CensorRank technology. Until that happens, consider this my corollary to the Google mission statement: "Most of the time, doing evil very badly isn't functionally different from not doing evil at all."

Posted by Anthony at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The first post from "I Can't Believe I'm Not President" John Kerry on DailyKos should make a Democrat want to forcibly rip the keyboard from his hands so that he may never embarass his party again.

To recap quickly, Chris Matthews made a rather tin-ear comment on the latest from Osama:

This is from bin Laden in the audio today. “There is no defect in the solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America.” I mean, he sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore.

There's something that doesn't sit right with me when, on the day Osama Bin Laden resurfaced in a disturbing audio tape, cable television ends up in a game of name calling as a war protester is compared to Osama Bin Laden.

And here's the problem: Matthews never compared Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden. He compared Osama bin Laden to Michael Moore. That makes all the difference.

The current game of left-wing outrage is Rhetorical Question Bingo, as exemplified by Mr. Daou in his Salon piece. The rules are simple: ask what firestorm would erupt if you replaced Moore with some conservative icon. But even cursory answers to Mr. Daou's silly questions reveal what faux-offense this really is:

• "Bin Laden sounds like Clint Eastwood": I'm trying to figure out how that's possible. "Go ahead, Bush, make my day," would be obvious, or maybe "Are you feeling lucky, America?"
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Rush Limbaugh": I can hear the opening line of the next bin Laden tape now: "Live from the Excellence in Islam Institute, your host, Osama bin Laden, seated on the prestigious Saladin the Conqueror Cushion. . . ." (probably makes more sense if you've ever actually heard the show)
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Ron Silver": Did bin Laden announce he was playing Alan Dershowitz or start quoting Douglas MacArthur? (I'll admit, I'm not really familiar with Silver.)
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Bill O'Reilly": What's the likelihood that bin Laden is going to start harassing us with conversations about "phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies"?
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Anthony Rickey!: That one's not on Salon, but man, that would be great! If Bush's War on Terror is going so well that bin Laden sounds like a law school weblogger whose Sitemeter doesn't exactly runneth over, I think we can declare at least partial victory.

When Matthews compares bin Laden to Anthony Rickey, I'll assume that he means that the most-wanted man in the world can't keep his word-count down. If this subject is enough to get your blood boiling, switch to decaf--and don't run for President.

Posted by Anthony at 05:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I may not agree with the politics, but this is a work of pure genius. I should do something similar with Howard Dean.

(Hat tip PF, who must be old enough to remember when computer games came on two 5.25" disks. Who needs a hard drive?)

Posted by Anthony at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Nothing I've read since I last touched on the subject suggests to me that the present NSA scandal will have much in the way of legs, and indeed references to it have largely been overshadowed by the Alito hearings. While there are some interesting constitutional and legal questions, NSAGate lacks one key ingredient necessary to create a proper political scandal: evidence of malicious intent.

Put it this way: unless one already hates G.W. Bush (in which case the evidence is irrelevant), the most the NSA program can be accused of is excess in the protection of American citizens against terrorism. Unless one can some up with a story of the NSA not only stumbling across an innocent conversation, but then somehow using it to a non-terrorist's detriment, there is simply no story here.

Bush's opponents know this, which is why every effort is made to drum corruption up out of thin air. As one critic put it, "One of the parties to an intercepted communication is not (or need not be) in any way affiliated with, or part of, Al Qaeda, nor in any way connected to the attacks of 9/11. It could be you, or me, or our grandparents." (emp. mine) This is a statement that's technically true, but for there really to be outrage, one needs evidence that Mr. Lederman's grandparents have been spied upon.

Among the radical left, the desperation to find such a hook is shifting from the funny to the slightly pathetic. Take this piece from The Raw Story, "National Security Agency mounted massive spy op on Baltimore peace group, documents show". (Hat tip, as you might expect, to Prof. Leiter, who takes it seriously.) Sounds horrible, doesn't it? And you can expect to see noises like "Well, Bush's NSA is even monitoring Quaker peace groups" from your favorite lefty websites, talking heads and politicians.

But credit to the Raw Story: though they try to bury the reality in the lower paragraphs, they do actually publish copies of the NSA documents that are supposed to get our blood boiling. It turns out that the "spying" done by the NSA consisted of little more than increased security at an NSA facility when this group decided to stage a protest without permission. They monitored the movements of this group on their way to the facility, while there, and shortly after, in a manner that might be slightly overexuberant, but still more policework than espionage. Now I know that among a certain set, the idea that one does not have the right to protest at any place or time of their choosing, including the visitor's entrance of a secure facility, is a sign of creeping fascism. Nevertheless, crying, "Help! Help! We're being oppressed!" at this juncture is not likely to make a mass movement.

Maybe the Republicans should take a hint from the Democratic playbook. Before the 2004 elections, Charles Rangel introduced a bill to bring back a live draft, which prompted enough posts about a hidden administration conspiracy that Republicans eventually had to bring the bill to the floor just to vote it down. It was a cunning bit of PR, and Karl Rove should take the hint: find a couple of moderate or dissenting Republicans and ask them to file articles of impeachment.

If the Democrats tried to impeach, Bush can pretty much expect polls in the high sixties as Republicans paint themselves as strong on security and Democrats seek vainly for a reason Joe Sixpack should concern himself with Fourth Amendment fetishists. [1] At the moment, John Kerry can "joke" about articles of impeachment if the Dems take the House in '06. This fires up the base nicely. So give the Democrats a chance before the election to show where they really stand. If enough Republicans announce an intention to "go along with their colleagues," then Democrats will find themselves having to either vote against the articles (and disappoint their base) or vote for them (and alienate the center).

Ah, one can dream. In the meantime, expect a lot more smoke and mirrors from the far left, a great many more flip-flopping editorials from the NYT, and not much in the way of political impact two weeks from now.

[1]: Yes, the Fourth Amendment is necessary, and we should pay attention to our Constitution, etc. etc. I'm not making an argument here that Con Law is irrelevant, merely that lawyers make the "defense" of the Constitution into a greater issue than it warrants politically. Look at it this way: suppose arguendo that Bush's authorization to the NSA violates an obscure section of FISA, but that he has done so out of a reasonable concern for national security and that FISA really isn't appropriate for handling vast packet-sniffing operations. Failing to punish Bush for this can be looked at as an act of prosecutorial discretion on the part of the American people.

Posted by Anthony at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

In response to my post on AUMF and FISA, Will Baude provides two things. First, he gives us a wonderfully short paragraph to recap the argument:

The President maintains 1, that his warrantless wiretaps do not violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because FISA was implicitly repealed in part by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and 2, that it is vital that the PATRIOT Act be renewed.

These Senators need to explain why they thought the Patriot Act was a vital tool after the Sept. 11 attacks but - but now think it's no longer necessary.

The terrorists want to strike America again. And they hope to inflict even greater damage than they did on Sept. 11.

Secondly, it ignores the fact that (as even Marty Lederman noted) there are areas in the Patriot Act that would certainly not be covered by AUMF. Both Baude and Lederman presume that the President was talking about acts covered in the AUMF/FISA relationship, but they give no reason for such exclusion. The interplay between the two statutes involves little more than the issue of wiretapping, while the Patriot Act puts forward a broader regulatory scheme.

But the true "let's parse a press conference like we would a statute" award goes to this argument of Lederman's, again linked to approvingly by Baude:

One of the parties to an intercepted communication is not (or need not be) in any way affiliated with, or part of, Al Qaeda, nor in any way connected to the attacks of 9/11. It could be you, or me, or our grandparents.

What about the other party to the communication? Here's what the Attorney General said:

"Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda."

"To the extent that there is a moderate and heavy communication involving an American citizen, it would be a communication where the other end of the call is outside the United States and where we believe that either the American citizen or the person outside the United States is somehow affiliated with al Qaeda."

"It is tied to communications where we believe one of the parties is affiliated with al Qaeda or part of an organization or group that is supportive of al Qaeda."

I don't think it's hard to understand from these carefully phrased formulations that many of the communications in question -- say, a phone call from me to someone who is not part of Al Qaeda, or working with Al Qaeda, but who is "part of" an organization "supportive of" Al Qaeda -- are between two people, neither of whom is covered under the terms of the AUMF. (Thanks to David Barron for bringing these broad formulations to my attention.)

AUMF authorizes the use of force against "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons" (emphasis mine) Inconsistency only arises if the organizations "related to" or "supportive of" Al Qaeda (in the Attorney General's speech) were not also organizations that "aided" or "harbored" Al Qaeda prior to September 11, 2001.[1] Is the AG saying that the wiretaps covered groups outside the conjunction of those two sets? True, as Baude says, "it's not clear." But it's not outside the bounds of possibility that the AG used different terms for the same idea.

It's ridiculous to parse a press briefing spun to non-lawyers and reporters, even if given by the Attorney General, and expect it to precisely match the text of a statute. This is a good thing, too: read any statute out loud, and you'll quickly see that using statutory language in a press briefing would make them even more soporific than normal. Does the AG interpret AUMF more broadly than its language would allow? Maybe, but you can't really tell without more information on who was tapped (and how). We don't have that.

Of course, all this is fairly well tangential to Baude's real heartbreak:

It is possible that the administration will eventually decide to reconcile the two positions, but at the moment it is showing no sign of even trying to pretend that there is a theory of legal interpretation (other than national security purposivism) at work here.

(Come to think of it, if it takes that many lawyers maybe I don't hope Baude lives to see it.)

That's not to say that a consistent theory isn't discernable from the administration's actions, but that looking for it during a glorified photo op is probably a fool's errand.

[1]: Those who harbored or aided Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001 would not seem subject to AUMF. This, of course, immediately points out one more absurdity with Baude's claim that Bush's use of "the terrorists" in his press conference must mean individuals to whom AUMF applies. Baude's assertion makes logical sense only if you are willing to think "the terrorists" means Al Qaeda to the exclusion of any groups that might have allied themselves with Bin Laden in the last few years. I humbly submit that anyone who thinks press conferences should be parsed that closely overestimates the precision of political speechwriting.

Posted by Anthony at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

In discussing the present Bush wiretapping scandal, Marty Lederman and Prof. Kerr make one curious assertion. One of the Bush administration's arguments is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn't apply because Congress authorized the President through the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after 9/11, thus placing any wiretapping within the "except as authorized by statute" language of 50 U.S.C. 1809. In his rather detailed discussion, Prof. Kerr says in passing:

Note that Congress passed the Patriot Act about a month after passing the AUMF; if Congress had intended the AUMF to give the president wide authority to conduct domestic surveillance against Al Qaeda, I don't think they would have spent so much time amending FISA for terrorism investigations.

Lederman takes the argument even further:

In any event, if the Administration is correct about the legality of its wiretaps, then the President's impassioned scolding of the Congress this morning for failing to reenact the PATRIOT Act is entirely misguided: After all, the President already has the authority under Article II of the Constitution to do most of what the PATRIOT Act authorizes -- indeed, to override statutory provisions that would prohibit such Executive acts -- and, as if that weren't enough, Congress has already (in the AUMF) authorized the President not only to do whatever it takes to defeat Al Qaeda, but also to ignore any preexisitng legal restrictions.

(emphasis mine) Will Baude calls this argument savvy. "If the President and his attorney general are correct that the AUMF and Article II provide an implied repeal of other pesky procedural laws where national security demands, it is hard to imagine why they need the Patriot Act renewed at all--presumably the AUMF already implicitly does everything they need it to." Yet arguments that "If X did Y, he had no reason to do Z" are particularly pernicious: the fact that no reason springs immediately to mind does not mean no reason exists.

(I agree that the Article II assertion is a bit rich, but it is also to be expected. Every constitutional actor expresses their authority to its most colorable limits, and backs off only when pushed. That's checks and balances, and I don't think we need take the argument too seriously.)

The idea that AUMF under the President's argument rendered the Patriot Act unnecessary rests on an unspoken--and I'd wager unrealized--assumption. AUMF by its terms applies only to "those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. . . ." Hence, even if one credits the President's argument, the Patriot Act would be necessary with regards to against any terrorist group not allied with Al Quaeda, or even one that allied with them after September 11. The Patriot Act would apply to Hamas even if it later joined with Bin Laden, or a terrorist group with different motives for attacking the US (e.g. the IRA, the Tamil Tigers). AUMF would not, and thus presumably would not override FISA.

Both authorizations thus seem like sensible executive policy: ask immediately for a limited authorization on force that can be passed quickly , then ask Congress to pass more wide-ranging structural change at a later date. Kerr, Will, and Lederman implicitly assume that the President sought authorization for, and Congress only intended the Patriot Act to apply to, terrorist organizations that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Are those the only terrorists in the world?

Posted by Anthony at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Prof. Althouse, discussing the recent decision of a U. S. District Judge John E. Jones III in the recent Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision forbidding the teaching of intelligent design, takes a pot shot at activism of a sort that frequently causes me to shake my head. First, Judge Jones:

As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.

I love that last part about who's the real activist here.

There are endless debates out in the blogosphere--and in academia--about whether the popular term "judicial activism" is useful. (See, e.g., here.) But to the extent the term has meaning, it connotes something undesirable not because a judicial activist is an activist but because he's judicial. When someone is concerned about judicial activism, that person is not merely worried about the existence of politics in the world--unless he's an idiot, I suppose--but that representative politics are being subverted by unaccountable judges perverting texts through "interpretation," particularly where such interpretation can only be overruled by supermajorities. A school board, on the other hand, is more like a mini-legislature that passes instructions then carried out by others. If a democratic polity and its elective representatives believe that a constitutional imperative has been misconstrued, this is precisely where activism should be: in a politically accountable branch subject to removal by voters. The political arena allows them to settle large and divisive societal disputes in a way that is more likely to be seen by the losers as legitimate.

Which makes me wonder about the parallel Judge Jones uses and particularly Professor Althouse's ringing endorsement. There is much to be said about the behavior of the school board in this case, but to accuse an elected panel of activism is sort of like accusing a law student of studying. It's what they're supposed to do, right?

Posted by Anthony at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

One of the many reasons I miss the Curmudgeonly Clerk: his habit of giving Dahlia Lithwick the pummelling she deserves for the sloppy left-wing drivel that passes for a "jurisprudence" column at Slate. Today, under the provocative headline Bring It On, the Doyenne of Dunce seems to having bizarre auditory hallucinations. In her madness, the roar of thunder all around her makes no more noise than a light spring breeze:

Or listen instead to the near-deafening silence from the columnists, advocates, and politicians who only weeks ago begged the president to ditch Harriet Miers for a candidate who would boldly and lucidly articulate the arguments against liberal judicial activism, "legislating from the bench," and the results-oriented judging that brought us decisions like Roe.

Ms. Lithwick, it's possible that the near-deafening silence you hear has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with the fingers you've got stuck in your ears. You show no sign of a penny's worth of research, and as such you should refund Slate whatever pittance they gave you for that misery of a column. I mean, you'd be nutty even to ignore the conversations going on in the blogosphere, but you missed Hugh Hewitt, for pity's sake! If your Silence of the Elephants includes the voice of a major conservative commentator, who do we need to get for you to notice? Should we re-dub the Mouth of Sauron? Perhaps request a papal emmissary be sent to you? Commission sky-writing?

(Readers are welcome to leave their own suggestions as to how Ms. Lithwick's attention might be garnered in the comments. Keep it clean.)

Fortunately, even with the Clerk's retirement, folks like Will Baude will do the five minutes of research necessary to prove the old adage about those who will not see. Even Mr. Baude, however, cannot explain how columns this bad keep being published. (One would have thought an editor, before publishing a piece grousing about a lack of controversy, would make a quick check to make certain there was indeed silence on the issue.)

Posted by Anthony at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After National Review posted a PDFof Miers' response to Senate Judiciary questions, Professors Bainbridge, Fleischer, Hurt and Lindgren let fire with all barrels at the quality of the writing, taking particular glee in the (mis)use of commas. Given that most law students spend a good part of at least one year bent over drafts of law review articles submitted in 'final' form, I'm sure I'm not the only law student who saw the irony in this particular barrage of criticism.

Me, I say let he who is without sin cast the first stone here. Certainly no one submits a law review article with the expectation that it will be used to judge their fitness for the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, law review articles are still professional writing, and they are usually written in conditions distinctly more conducive to error-free drafting. For instance, very few essays (not to say articles) are written in around a week's worth of time, they are generally on a topic of the author's choosing, and they often benefit from the dedicated ditch-digging of a research assistant.

Here's a challenge to those profs (or anyone else, for that matter) who wish to judge such work: tomorrow, post a draft of the last law review article you sent off for publication, preferably before a research assistant went through it. Post it against a blueline of the next two rounds of commentary received from the staff editors and highlight the grammar and spelling errors. Or even better, hand the draft over to someone with an incentive to show the same generousity of spirit--say, someone to whom you gave a bad mark on an exam--and let them publish a piece on your blog highlighting all the errors of grammar, spelling or citation.

I wouldn't relish doing that, but I went through enough blue pencils last year to suspect that very few people, even distinguished academics, would take that challenge.

Posted by Anthony at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Glancing over at Technorati, I find that the most commented-upon news article at the moment is titled Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible, referring to the Catholic bishops of England, Wales, and Scotland publishing The Gift of Scripture, a teaching document explaining the Dei Verbum. The article is a perfect example of shoddy journalism. There's nothing in it that isn't at least technically true, but the entire piece is meant to give an impression that's false. The leader makes the document sound like a revolution in Catholic thought (and Dei Verbum's 40th anniversary gets one sentence, and little explanation, in paragraph 19), instead of a teaching document on forty year old doctrine.

And sure enough, if you browse through blogs that cite the piece, you get quite a few like this: "This is huge. Of course, the Phariseeic theo-conservatives of our country has to maintain that the bible tells the absolute truth in order to manipulate the "faithful". Hopefully atleast [sic] some of that brainwashed crew will catch on." No, it's a teaching document, and the idea that Catholics and Protestants (and even different Protestants) disagree on interpretations of the Bible hasn't been "news" since Martin Luther and the 95 Theses.

A more accurate but less hot-button headline might read "Catholics Uphold Forty Year Doctrine: Bible Not To Be Read Literally." But one notes the article is by Ruth Gledhill, the credulous incompetent who wrote a love letter disguised as journalism to an obscure and badly-researched study purporting to show that religion causes social dysfunction, so that explains the over-the-top headline and the spin-to-distortion writing.

The bigger question is what's going on at the Times. Certainly Ms. Redhill's articles are getting her name noticed, which is probably good for her professionally. I'd also suppose that her breathless writing is getting more hits for the Times online edition. But can it really be good for the newspaper itself to be publishing pieces so blatantly bad?

Posted by Anthony at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Professor Bainbridge questions a perceived lack of conservative influence in the blogosphere:

I have the distinct impression that the Democratic Party sees the liberal blogosphere as being inside the tent, while the Republican Party views the conservative blogosphere as being somewhere between an irrelevance and a minor nuisance. . . . [A]ll of this raises the question of how those of us in the conservative blogosphere can elevate ourselves into the category of genuine problem as opposed to mere nuisances. I'm open to suggestions.

I touched upon these here and here in a discussion of a report by the New Politics Institute. While the report was blatantly self-serving in stating that the blogosphere as a whole is more left than right (basically doctoring its survey to get the results it wanted), they did point out that left-wing blogs have a tendency to use community-building software like Scoop, and that the sites are often not so much "blogs" as aggregations or communities of bloggers. (Indeed, Scoop sites have a tendency to look more like politicized versions of Livejournal or Xanga. While both describe themselves as "blogging" software, much of their usefulness lies in their ability to form communities.)

By aggregating large numbers of internet users in one place, sites like DailyKos muster more political influence simply because they make it easier to find the pulse of a subgroup of the Democratic Party (or at least the extreme left, and there is considerable overlap). They're also much more useful as support tools, because fundraising or campaign support can be organized at a grassroots level at a much lower cost.

To the best of my knowledge, a Scoop-style site of Kos-level prominence doesn't yet exist, although there's probably considerable room for such a site if it were to attract sufficient talent. Imagine if The Volokh Conspiracy were to move towards a Scoop-style community, or even better, if some of the conservative law professors like Bainbridge or the Federalist Society were to start one.

Now if someone wanted to start one and needed a sysadmin....

(Post updated, embarassingly, to correct the Bainbridge quote, although there's no substantial difference. (I forgot the ellipses.) I should also point out that the only reason I'm surprised by Prof. Bainbridge not jumping to an institutional analysis of how blogs are structured is because I've been reading a lot of his corporate law writing recently for a different project. As a result, it's natural in my mind that the first thing he should do when looking at differential influence in the blogosphere is build a model explaining it. This is more my tunnel-vision, however, and just shows how one's judgment can be skewed by "knowing" someone primarily through their published work.

That does lead me to wonder, however, if someone who only read Bainbridge on Wine might expect Bainbridge would first hypothesize a merlot/chardonnay split between liberal and conservative blogs. . . .)

Posted by Anthony at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

I'm in the market for upgrading my phone on another two year contract right now. This makes two questions particularly relevant, and I welcome input from my readers. Does anyone have a suggestion for either a good phone company to switch to (I'm only moderately happy with Verizon) or a good cell phone that I can get as an upgrade?

Posted by Anthony at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

With any luck, this is one of those decisions that will be reversed after public outcry:

NOVELTY pig calendars and toys have been banned from a council office — in case they offend Muslim staff.

Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Bosses acted after a Muslim complained about pig-shaped stress relievers delivered to the council in the run-up to the Islamic festival of Ramadan.

More, including a good political cartoon, here.

I'd be very surprised if this particular rule stands, or is enforced for any length of time. If it is, it will be a very sad day when Good Saint Sensitivity has driven the dire threat of Piglet from out of England.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first sign that Albion is losing track of her identity a bit, even if it's recovering from the warm fuzziness of Blair's Cool Britannia. CNN International ran an article on prison wardens being rebuked for wearing charity pins with the Cross of St. George on them. I have no opinion on the report itself, as there may be good reasons why guards shouldn't wear these. But at the end of the article, Chris Doyle of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (whose website reads much as you'd expect) is quoted as saying:

Doyle added that it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is "not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with."

(language altered to clean it up a bit)

Posted by Anthony at 03:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Prof. Leiter, one learns of an obscure Journal of Religion and Society article purporting to show that the more religious a society is, the more "dysfunctional" it is. You can save a lot of reading if you just trust me on this: the report is crap.

If you don't want to trust me, read on. Much like the New Politics Institute's study on blogs (also linked from Leiter--notice a trend? Yeah--why do you still read it?--ed), the study is an exercise in deciding what you want to prove and then choosing the statistics to get you there. The point of such academic work is transparently obvious: they get you into the media (such as The Times of London), who don't think very much, or bother asking anyone else for a contrary view.

(Oh, yeah: a lot of blogs link to you, too.)

The first sign that the report's not very robust is the selection of what is included in "societal dysfunction." Nowhere is the term defined, and nothing that fails to support the thesis is included as dysfunctional. I would have thought one measure of societal dysfunction was long-term unemployment rates. After all, a functioning society is going to be providing its people with measurable employment. However, according to the Journal of Religion and Society, it seems that a society can be both completely functional and completely out of work. Furthermore, while the report considers homicides (which occur more frequently in the U.S.) to be a sign of social dysfunction, it seems that car theft, contact crimes, and burglary (in which the U.S. does not lead at all, see p. 17) are signs of a healthy and functional society. Either that or atheism promotes car theft, which puts a whole new spin on "property is theft," I guess.

So far, so silly. Then there's the choice of what countries qualify. "Prosperous democracy" doesn't include Israel, even though its GDP/head compares favorably with Portugal. Given the religious nature of Israel, one would have thought it would be a good case study, but the study inexplicably excludes it. What the report actually covers, it seems, is Europe, some of its former colonies, and Japan.

Even better is the data for abortion, where the report is simply wrong. It states: "Abortion data (Panchaud et al.) was accepted only from those nations in which it is as approximately legal and available as in the U.S." (This, of course, makes no sense: if a society is religious enough to limit abortion, why not include the lack of teenage abortions on the graph, especially if you will consider their teen pregnancies?) It then continues, "Increasing adolescent abortion rates show positive correlation with increasing belief and worship of a creator, and negative correlation with increasing non-theism and acceptance of evolution; again rates are uniquely high in the U.S. (Figure 8)." But the report's data is questionable. The abortion rate given for 15-19 year olds for the U.S. (higher than 28) is considerably higher than that given by the CDC (about 24, or equivalent to Australia). Further the source cited for the abortion figure in the report (available here doesn't mention abortion at all. (Say what you want about peer review, at least law reviews make someone check the numbers.)

But the other interesting question about Figure 8 is why Japan isn't listed. Abortion is legal in Japan, and has been since well before Roe. And statistics a're not hard to find, even in English: they're reported in English language news and show up as hits on Google. (The Japanese report referenced, with handy pop-up translation help, is here.)

But including data from Japan subtly undermines the thesis. Japanese abortion rates in the 15-19 age cohort are low (about 12%), but have doubled in the last ten years, while U.S. rates have been falling. (Also, Japanese age of majority is 20. This probably makes some difference, as the U.S. rate increases sharply between 17 and 18.) And Japan's overall abortion rate (which, it seems, is not a function of "societal disfunction") is in the middle of those for the JR&S's countries despite its lower rate of theism non-theism. (see p. 28)

So what's happening? Is Japan getting more theistic, and hence more likely to have underage abortions? Not bloody likely. The Japanese abortion rate has always been pretty high, while at the moment they've been undergoing a bit of a sexual revolution: they may not have been theistic, but Japan has remained far more traditional than most western countries until recently, and in that I'd include the U.S. It's likely that rates of teen sex are rising. In the meantime, it's only been five years since the pill's been legalized and takeup has been slow, but if that becomes more common (and condoms less so), I'd expect to see the abortion rate among the young continue to rise.

I'd wager that for any given statistic in the piece, you'd be able to tell a similar story: the factors and trends change over time, with very little to do with any given preference in messiah. In the end, not even the report pretends it can show causation. You can drive a truck through the holes in the logic. So why bother?

It's worth criticizing because some people find that this kind of half-assed scholarship is acceptable if it confirms their preconceptions about religion. Let's imagine a study that compared factors other than theism. For instance, Japan is remarkably racially homogenous, the European countries are a bit less so, and the United States is rather remarkably mixed. This mixture is a good thing, just as in general religion is probably a good thing. (Let me stress that before someone misinterprets what I'm making obvious: OUR DIVERSITY=GOOD THING.) Yet if you're only meaning to "spark debate" and have no intention of decent analysis, see what you could do with the CDC charts on teenage abortion above. The non-hispanic white numbers aren't much more than the Japanese (especially adjusting for a differing age of majority), after all.

If you were to regraph the charts in the JR&S report with "degree of racial homogeneity" along the bottom instead of a belief in God, I can't believe Prof. Leiter would repost it with only the glib comment "Of course, correlation is not causation..." (Or put it in a section giving the racial equivalent of "Texas Taliban Alerts," for that matter.) Does anyone suspect the Times would headline a story "Societies worse off when racially diverse"? Or think that no other expert would be quoted to give perspective?

Of course not. On the topic of race, no one wants to look an idiot.

If one were to look for U.S.-based differences that explain the statistics given better than religion, it doesn't take a genius. For the health-care related ones, for instance, I'm pretty certain the United States is the only nation listed without a national health care system. (Actually, I wonder if the infection statistics differ between curable and non-curable STDs: presence of a national health system could well affect those numbers, as the spread of curable vs. non-curable diseases should differ with access to health care.) Japan has a much lower murder rate, and also makes it incredibly difficult to get a gun. But health care and gun ownership are not matters of theism, any more than atheism makes people likely to steal cars or be unemployable.

In the end, you can create this kind of report by finding one area in which the U.S. is exceptional and graphing it against any number of others in which we're exceptional. Then you call that dysfunction, blame the cause you chose, and call it a day. Assuming you can find a journal to publish you, a professor who won't critique you, and a newspaper too lazy to read what you've written.

UPDATE: Best line I've seen concisely summarizing the silliness of this study? "Rejection of secular humanism gives your kids gonorrhea!"

Posted by Anthony at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Those of you who have been reading some of the usual suspects might have come across the "Flying Spaghetti Monster." A young physics student has taken it upon himself to write to the Kansas School Board demanding his version of equality:

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory [of earthly creation by the Flying Spaghetti Monster] be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence.

That's not to carry water for intelligent design as an idea. I think it's a poor theory, and usually answer arguments in its favor with a brief nod towards Robert Frost and go on. (Frost is making the same point that Henderson could be making, in a classier way: that Intelligent Design might purport to explain an underlying intelligence behind creation, but even if you accept it, it tells you little about that intelligence.) But in general I see the fight as a political battle in the culture wars, one adopted by proponents of a greater amount of religion in public life because alternative legislative avenues have been foreclosed by an aggressive interpretation of the Establishment Clause. Oh, sure, it's a religious conflict, but one largely religious on both sides: it's no coincidence that the most vocal opponents of ID (or at least the most willing to be obnoxious about it) are a particularly loud stripe of atheists.[1] I pretty much hold with Raffi Melkonian on evolution: even if one accepts it scientifically, there's a reasonable case for just leaving it out of the curriculum to avoid the conflict. [2]

In any event, some good comes from reading and learning about such things. For instance, when I came across the Flying Spaghetti Monster Flash Game at Newgrounds.com, at least I knew what it was about (though I'd forgotten the relevance of pirates). Actually, it's not half-bad for a small flash game. For those of my readers who do think this kind of thing is funny, well, you'll be happy I passed it on.

[1]: I have found very few committed agnostics who are that concerned about evolution or intelligent design being taught in the classroom. Not to say that such agnostics don't exist, but it certainly doesn't appear as a big blip on the radar when I'm chatting with others of my own stripe. Scientifically-minded atheists can easily find themselves taking positions that elevate science to the level of a religion: not that something scientifically provable does exist, but that anything not subject to observable and empirical examination doesn't. (Even that statement is a distortion, but I'll assume Heidi will forgive me, as she explains it better)

Indeed, my own high school experience in the deep South brings me to a few more moderate thoughts. High schools don't teach "science" that well at all, at least as far as scientific method is concerned. Perhaps AP science classes do, but for the most part I learned a set of facts about the physical world that either (a) we didn't question much, or (b) were pretty much instrumentalist. That's fairly practical. I'd like to think that someone building a bridge, and not merely its architect, knows something about vortexes and harmonics. (I'd really like to think that a marching band leader or the like knows to tell his crew to break march when crossing bridges.) But the idea that high schools students are going to be taught to question the universe because evolution is in the curriculum makes me wonder some folks aren't overestimating most science education. Asking most of my high school science teachers about the limits of the scientific method was about as fruitful as asking Jimmy Swaggart about the limits of faith.

On the other hand, my general thought for those in a religious majority is: given how well our schools work, do you want them teaching a complicated subject like religion, or even theology? What little religion that snuck into my high-school education got in through literature, and that was taught horribly. I spent hours convincing my British Literature teacher that Mephistopheles could not be Satan, despite her making that the right answer to a matching question, because Satan is referenced as Lucifer, and later in the play M and L have a chat. Heaven knows what I would have thought had more "information" like that gotten through.

But in the end I'm worried less by the risk that we'll become a "theocracy" if American students of other religions have to learn something of the Christian faith--and maybe share their own--than I am by the world that strict separationists are building and the ignorance it inflicted upon me. The only Song of Solomon I read in high school was Toni Morrison's execrable misery: forcing me to foresake two young roes for a random and inexplicable peacock should be a crime in itself. It's amazing that no one could ever teach me some of the beauty in Christianity until I'd had to learn about the beauty of Buddhism.

[2]: What really amuses me, however, is the argument that it's important to teach evolution because otherwise people will fail to learn skills at rational argument. This entertains me primarily because many of those who argue against ID aren't particularly good at such rationality. I can only imagine that the Economist (premium link) was having a laugh when it published an evolution proponent who challenged intelligent design by arguing that no intelligent creator would build an animal the male of which has facial hair with so little purpose that many such creatures would shave it off daily.

Is that an argument that humans are badly designed? Maybe, although I enjoy the option of being clean shaven or bearded, so maybe not. In any event, something may be the result of intelligent design without being well-designed. This person obviously needed a slightly different version of the paradigmatic ID argument: if you found an Edsel in the desert, you wouldn't assume that it had evolved there naturally or put in place by wild animals, but rather would assume an intelligent creator had built it. You would not be dissuaded from this assumption by the fact that the front grill is butt-ugly, although you might entertain theories about an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of CAD/CAM machines for longer than you might in the face of a better car. In any event, you don't have to look very far to find those busy telling us how important it is to teach evolution for the sake of the scientific method turning from formal logic to flippant fallacy and never noticing.

Posted by Anthony at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Thankfully, most of my friends in the New Orleans area have checked in to say that they're OK, although some of them have no idea what they'll come back to when they do go home. In the meantime, once Amazon gets its charity house in order, the same donation link I provided for the tsunamis will be on this site. I like giving through Amazon, but mainly because it's the devil I know. If you have a preferred way of giving to help, please do so when you can.

In the meantime, it's interesting to read Professor Bainbridge's take on how bankruptcy law should affect giving to Catholic charities. He's right, of course: anyone giving to an individual parish risks their donation eventually ending up fodder for a lawyer's contingency fee. For sheer strength, the Law of Unintended Consequences beats the Laws of Gravity any day of the week.

Posted by Anthony at 07:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For my friends in New Orleans who are currently preparing for Katrina, I hope it's not going to be as bad as everyone's saying. Good luck!

Posted by Anthony at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In a quick spot of reading during lunch, I noticed that Naderite Democrats are contemplating the impeachment of Bush, and some of the usual suspects are granting a ringing endorsement of the tactic. (Hat tip to the Conspiracy.)

I can only think that the Gods of Irony are smiling upon me.

Having seen (to butcher a phrase) the best minds of my generation in the Republican Party driven mad by a semen-stained dress, I can only hope that the Democrats go down their own path to echo-chambered self-destruction. Last time I could only get caught up in the excitement and then mourn at the lost opportunities for the conservative movement. This time I can break out the popcorn.

Howard Dean, Amnesty International, Ralph Nader... I'm not sure I understand this. George Bush is about the least conservative conservative in ages (just as Clinton was mostly a centrist). But whatever the cause, it sure is fun to watch.

Posted by Anthony at 02:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a bit late to the table, but I gotta love DNC Chair Howard Dean. Even when some things look to be going badly for the Republicans, Our Man in Montpelier is there to make sure the Democrats will have a hard time capitalizing on it:

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, unapologetic in the face of recent criticism that he has been too tough on his political opposition, said in San Francisco this week that Republicans are "a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It's pretty much a white Christian party."

"The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people," Dean said Monday, responding to a question about diversity during a forum with minority leaders and journalists. "We're more welcoming to different folks, because that's the type of people we are. But that's not enough. We do have to deliver on things: jobs and housing and business opportunities."

Gotta love this guy. Please, please can we have a Hilary/Howard ticket in 2008?

Update: I just looked back at the November 7, 2003 post I linked to above, where I wrote in reply to a comment:

Gerald Kaufman once described the Labour Party's New Hope for Britain manifesto for the 1983 general election [as] "The Longest Suicide Note in History."

The Dean campaign may go down in history as the most well-financed.

Posted by Anthony at 02:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Via the Anchoress, an interesting article by a gay man who runs an enormous unofficial Disney World website, and whose support for the "homosexual agenda" (along with its Powerpoint) is outweighed by his love of the Mouse:

I’ve watched over the years as Gay Days has grown in scope and size. What once was a small group of well meaning gay men and lesbians has grown – and in my opinion, deformed – into what is now nothing more than a vile spectacle of self indulgence and indecency.

. . . .

Over the years I have heard about, and have witnessed, what is commonly referred to as PDA (public displays of affection) during gay days, and almost always it’s done in full view of a family, or at least children. I don’t care if you’re straight or gay, there are some things kids don’t need to see – and trust me, two queens frenching outside Cinderella castle is really high on that list.

I'd hit the obvious counterargument, but Mr. Werner did it so well:

The argument is often put forth that since Christian groups congregate at Disney World, why not us? Fair enough, except that the ‘Night of Joy’ (the Christian concert that takes place at the Magic Kingdom each year) is a hard ticket event – meaning that it’s not open to the public, and requires separate admission. The Magic Kingdom is closed down to the public at a certain time, and only those people that CHOOSE to be there are allowed in. Families that come to the Magic Kingdom on Gay Days are not afforded the luxury of choice. Since Disney does not sanction the event, it’s not mentioned anywhere, or to anyone booking a reservation during that week. If “Gay Day” at the Magic Kingdom was a hard ticket event like the Night of Joy, sign me up. But it’s not – it’s far from it. Trust me, if a religious group organized 100,000 Christians to go and ‘make yourself known’ in the Magic Kingdom one day a year – and began rubbing their lifestyles in the faces of visitors by preaching to them as they tried to ride Space Mountain – plenty of people would be up in arms.

Of course, as the Anchoress points out, Mr. Werner will now never get either Senator Schumer's or Planned Parenthood's support if he's ever nominated to the judiciary. Let's hope he doesn't hope for a career on a federal court of appeals.

Update: Even worse, when you think about it, is the several times that Mr. Werner feels compelled in his essay to stop and assert his liberal credentials. "I have a liberal streak that cuts through me like a hot knife through butter..." "And before I get any emails from my gay brethren calling me a ‘self loathing aunt tom’ (someone actually called me that once), let me be clear – I’m proud of who and what I am." There's something a bit disturbing about this, not in Werner's words, but in that he thinks his natural political allies require him to say such things merely because he wants the Magic Kingdom to keep its twinkle. Glad you're proud of yourself, Mr. Werner. I'm proud of you, too.

Posted by Anthony at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

It's no longer fun to make fun of the Huffington Post. The big and serious boys of the liberal blogosphere, as opposed to the celebrity-obsessed bits, have the virtue of having writers with serious opinions and the wits to back them up. The Post seems to think that blogging is nothing more than stringing together a list of rhetorical questions, assuming the answer is self-evident, and making no further attempt at analysis. Take, for example, Bill Diamond, writing about this draft that people like Brian Leiter have been predicting, due... err... months ago?:

I refuse to believe that the world has changed so much that 18-year-olds today are any more anxious to die or be maimed on the battlefield than I was back in the late '70s. But given all the talk about the possible reinstatement of the draft, why aren't we hearing more from the nation’s campuses? Is there resistance brewing and it's just not getting reported? Or is it, as I think Jim is suggesting, that college-aged students have become so narcotized by our entertainment-obsessed culture that they don’t see what may be headed their way?

What I want to know is why Prof. Volokh is slumming it over at the Post. Almost alone among his co-authors, he actually tries to answer the questions he poses. Indeed, he tried to give Bill a pointer:

From what I've heard, the talk is mostly from people who don't like the Administration, who oppose the war in Iraq, and who are using the talk to argue against the war.

The Administration is saying it doesn't want a draft. The political party in power in Congress seems to have no interest in reinstating the draft. The minority party seems to have no interest in reinstating the draft. Last time the draft was proposed in Congress, obviously as an anti-war statement rather than as a serious proposal, it was defeated 402-2. As best I can tell, the military has no interest in the draft. And reinstating the draft would be lousy politics, not the sort of thing that a barely-majority party would really want to do.

Is that the stuff that protest movements are made of? "We're resisting the draft that may be headed our way! Everyone in power agrees with us that there shouldn't be a draft! Rumsfeld says there shouldn't be a draft! Congress says there shouldn't be a draft! But we're resisting anyway!"

Posted by Anthony at 01:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

I rarely read James Lileks, but his piece on Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue made me laugh:

It is a rather rude folio, if you're easily offended. The swimsuit issue has nothing to do with the stated goal of the magazine, which is to Illustrate Sports. Pouty women clawing through the sand with their fundaments aimed at Old Sol have a tenuous connection to athletic endeavors. It's as if Martha Stewart Living suddenly devoted an issue to Mortal Kombat cheat codes, or DogFancy suddenly spent an entire issue on automatic transmissions. . . .

Posted by Anthony at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Law Dork, Chris has a smaller branch discussion going in the now perpetual debate among Democrats as to "whither the party." Particularly, he's giving Kerry a hard time for reasserting his long-time stance on gay marriage: that he's against it, and for civil unions:

...Kerry is not only wrong "in principle" -- he's also wrong in fact, as most Massachusetts people and a large majority of Democrats support marriage equality.

Go home and stay home, Kerry. We were looking for leadership, not a timid follower.

As the debate on Rumsfeld v. FAIR heats up, look at it this way: the Democrats need another major judicial win like Lawrence in the same way that my (rapidly expanding) waistline needs a few more helpings of kimchi rice from The Mill. Sure, those Kennedy opinions--full of artificial history and spicy invocations of universal and international law--fill the hunger one has for political change. There's even the possibility of a sweet and vicious little Scalia dessert...er, dissent, so that the Democratic faithful can wonder how fortunate they are that he's in the minority. But in the longrun, these greasy feasts will clog the arteries of your body politic, or at least the party that's eating them.

(Surgeon General's Warning: Blogging while hungry can be bad for your metaphors.)

This is essentially what's happened to the Democrats. Maybe Chris is right--although polls have bounced on this issue, my guess is depending on whether you call it one of "marriage equality" or "gay marriage"--and there is a Massachusetts majority in favor of gay marriage. It wasn't enough of a majority to actually push through a bill on the subject. Rather than try for the artful compromises of politics, proponents took to the courts. As a result, there's homosexual marriage in Massachusetts, and thirty-some anti-gay marriage amendments in state constitutions... and counting.

So where does that get us to Kerry showing leadership? By forcefully rejecting gay marriage, and coming out in favor of compromise. Civil unions are about as American as Mom and apple pie. That is to say, they're the kind of compromise Mom makes when two of the children are arguing over the apple pie, even though she knows that this argument is, in most senses, window-dressing for deeper familial debates going on under the surface. Maybe Elder Brother is upset that the family is paying more attention to Younger Brother's flamboyant ways, or Younger Brother's upset at always having to wear Elder Brother's hand-me-downs and doesn't feel valued enough.

Who knows? Though the compromise satisfies neither brother in the long term, but suffices as a short term resolution so that both sisters, Father, and even Mother can go on to worrying about other things. Implicit in the compromise is a threat: ok, you may not get what you want, but complain too loudly and I'll make sure this comes out on the side of your brother.

Civil unions are just this sort of compromise, and sensible political figures on the left lose nothing by saying, "As much as we might like expanding marriage, we should respect the fact that vast portions of our nation do not want to see traditional marriage altered in this fashion. Let us compromise with civil unions, and come back to it in five or ten years, after we've laid the groundwork necessary." With that issue aside, they could concentrate on dividing the religious vote, becoming the party that once again smacks Republicans on wedge issues, and actually gets themselves into power.

The risk at the moment is also pretty clear: if a majority of the victories of the Democratic Party emerge from the judiciary, Republicans are going to concentrate their fire there. Admittedly, it's a fortified position, and difficult to get at, but it's not impregnable. Sensible leadership--of the kind Chris is criticizing and Kerry is offering--seeks to expand the power base.

But hey, if the Democrats run Howard Dean or Hilary Clinton in '08, I'll be a happy clam.

Posted by Anthony at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Bush-hatred/fear of the Religious Right/general anti-religious bigotry has gotten to the point amongst some, generally on the political left, that we really need an extension to Godwin's Law to counter it. I'm speaking of the now commonplace habit of comparing the American religious right to the Taliban.

References to the "American Taliban" (or in Prof. Leiter's case, continual references to the Texas Taliban) are just the same inflammatory drivel that Godwin's Law is usually invoked to avoid when it comes to the Nazi's or Hitler. [1] Amy at Crescat put it nicely:

I really really really hate this sort of rhetoric. What bothers me most about the suggestion here that the Bush administration is equivalent to the Taliban is not that the comparison is unfair to Bush et. al., it is that it is unfair to the Taliban.

What made the Taliban a vile, despicable regime whose death went entirely unlamented was not the fact that they wished to enforce certain religious norms upon the population, but rather the brutally extreme measures to which they were willing to go in order to achieve that goal.

What made the Taliban stand out--and what gives the term "Texas Taliban" its emotive force--were the violent methods that the regime was willing to use against those who transgressed. To describe the religious right as part of the "Texas Taliban" isn't just to say that they think homosexuality should be discouraged or proscribed by law: it is to imply they believe that homosexuals should be crushed beneath toppled walls. To talk of Republicans willing to roll back abortion as part of an "American Taliban" agenda means more than such words: it implies a desire to see women draped head to toe, unable to be seen in public.

Such things are deeply unserious at best, calumnies at worst, and generally grounds for dismissing an author who uses them. Godwin's Law has served for a number of years as a way of dismissing--not to mention shaming--those who made such ill-considered comparisons. It's time for us to come up with a corollary.

The trouble is, I can't think of a pithy way to phrase one. Any suggestions?

[1]: I know that Godwin's law doesn't formally state anything about the quality of an argument invoking Nazis or Hitler. I'm going by the more colloquial form, often stated as "the argument's over when someone mentions Hitler."

Posted by Anthony at 02:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

...now Pope Benedict XVI.

Update: The reaction--particularly among those who are too "progressive" for this Pope--has been priceless. The counter from Prof. Bainbridge has been funny, too.

Posted by Anthony at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

One reason I'm a Republican: the Earned Income Tax Credit. OK, I didn't make a lot of money last summer, and I'm living off loans. But there is neither moral nor logical justification for me to be receiving more money back in taxes than I paid to the government last year. (Given that foreign income gets no withholding, the amount there was zero.) Of course, Clintonesque tax policy doesn't require morals or logic.

There's something vaguely unclean about taking the money back. I mean, that won't stop me from taking it, of course, but it seems rather odd.

Posted by Anthony at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Brian Leiter links to an analysis by the the New York Review of Books, which is one of those great holdouts in the "were the Dan Rather Memos faked" story. It just thrills my heart to see how some can keep to this lost cause. Leiter quotes the following:

CBS did rush to make inadequately verified allegations public and it was slow in responding to criticism. The report's conclusions on the other points are not, however, persuasive. Surprisingly, the panel was unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not. If the documents are not forgeries, what is the reason for the report? The answer is: to criticize the newsgathering practices of CBS, whether the documents are authentic or not. As such, the report is less than fully credible.

It's amusing to see a law professor quoting this favorably. Last I knew, if one puts forward a piece of evidence--either as a lawyer or a journalist--it's actually one's responsibility to authenticate it. If the opposition questions the typography in the document, it's not enough to say, "It fits with the rest of our case." You actually have to explain away the fact that the documents shouldn't be able to be created in 1973. The problem with the Rather memos is that they were such bad forgeries as to be immediately recognizable as such.

Now, Leiter's contention is that the blogosphere "missed the story." But what does that mean? Is the story that "Bush is liar," presumably because anything else is uninteresting. But for a law professor, this presents some interesting conundrums. After all, a prosecutor who--honestly believing the defendant to be guilty--recklessly submits forged documents into evidence isn't going to be able to use, "But he was guilty, your honor" in an eventual ethics hearing. Law professors themselves look unkindly on document forgery, at least where it involves their students. I'd suspect that a prosecutor submitting forged documents--even if it were in an open-and-shut case--would be a story. So is it only not a story if the "bigger picture" is that it hurts G. W. Bush?

To me, the story is: how did supposedly impartial news organization broadcast as genuine a set of documents that can't be reproduced by any machine actually available on the market at the time they were supposedly created? Why did they look to the naked eye to be the output of Microsoft Word? That's either recklessness or evidence of significant anacronism. Maybe Leiter thinks that a time-travelling PC isn't a big story. Me, I think it's worthy of a Nebula.

Posted by Anthony at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You decide. Chris and PG have almost sufficiently taken the NYT to task for its bad writing this weekend. I say almost because PG doesn't, I think, deal harshly enough with this article on Spamalot! that only outstrips its stereotyping of homosexuals with its stereotyping of straight men. (UPDATE: What did they put in the coffee there this weekend? Jeremy's assumption is that the New York Times is on crack. )

But I'm confused by the following, which is either very poor reporting or very unclear English:

As such, there's also probably a small cultural movement at work here, too, as evidenced by the rise of recent adaptations of many of the ur-texts of male geekdom, from the blockbuster film saga "The Lord of the Rings" (which is also being turned into a musical) to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a movie being released this month. (And the BBC recently announced that Dr. Who was coming back.)

That's one possibility. The other is just sloppy language. Ten days before Jesse McKinley wrote his piece, the BBC did announce that they're commissioning a second season of the new series, albeit without Christopher Eccleston. Does the Times normally refer to a series as "coming back" when it's in the middle of its run, just because it's been renewed? And certainly to those not well-versed in the "ur-texts of male geekdom", wouldn't it have been better to say "coming back for a new season"? After all, not every homosexual male (or New York Times staff writer) queuing up for theater tickets has access to fine blogs like this to clarify the point for them, and it's important for one to keep track of the new trend-setters in fashion and entertainment. . . .

(yes, tongue is in the cheek, there)

Posted by Anthony at 03:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, that title is utterly ridiculous, as we all know. No one would ever publish that headline, not even the New York Times. Much as Democratic politicians may play the populist card, may campaign against "big business interests," or otherwise make money from those whom their constituents consider the forces of darkness, that's rarely newsworthy. Indeed, when a Democratic politician does something out of character--say, go duck hunting as a photo opportunity--it's not a sign of hypocrisy, but "outreach" to middle America.

But Republicans aren't allowed outreach, at least if you're the Times. Chris rightly takes the paper to task for reaching a new low, reporting on a Republican consultant's gay marriage (congrats to him, by the way, though the marriage happened in December) in a totally non-news event. The article's excitement comes completely from the fact that Mr. Finkelstein has represented some pretty conservative Republicans.

Let's strike a blow for equality here. I'm heterosexual, at least on days that end in "y." Despite that fact, I'm allowed to believe that some political positions are more important than my sexuality. Given the difficulty in enforcing restrictions in sexual behavior (e.g. anyone who really believes there are no sex toys in Alabama is willfully ignorant), I'm quite happy to say that a politician's view of taxes, judicial appointments, or federalism easily trumps whatever disagreements he and I may have on the state's role in my sex life. There's no reason to assume that my homosexual counterparts don't have that same right.

The NYT might have had an interesting article if they'd delved into why a homosexual man might hold conservative beliefs, asking sensible questions and really wishing to find the answer. This piece is no such beauty: instead it's just one more excuse to raise the spectre of the "cracking Republican Party."

Folks, we're a big tent. Not all Republicans agree with one another, but guess what: P. J. O'Rourke wasn't so wrong when, describing a party that was big enough to hold Lloyd Bentsen and Jesse Jackson (let alone someone like Sen. Byrd), he characterized the Democrats as the "Cat/Canary Love Association." Politics is like that.

Perhaps living in the Republican Break-Up Fantasy Land makes NYT editors feel good, but in the meantime Chris is right: it makes the Greying Lady look tacky.

Posted by Anthony at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

While browsing Amazon over the last few weeks, I'd noticed they'd seemed to kill off their "Gold Box" feature. (You know, the one where they gave you a "special" set of offers, basically a discount on something that you had to buy in the next 60 minutes?) The old gold box was pretty annoying, since it gave you ten offers per day, and you could only see the next offer by rejecting the previous one. Still, I'd look at it (mostly during a dull lecture) just to see what Amazon was marketing to me. Mostly they seemed to be pushing jewelry they couldn't sell or power tools I didn't need, and since I wasn't (at that point, at least) in the market, it was a pointless exercise.

Well, today the Gold Box came back, but with a new and interesting twist. Now it displays two offers, and you have two choices: either accept one of the two, or "hold" one in order to see the next offer. In my case, they started out with a book (tenuously-related to the last thing I'd been browsing) and a piece of software. Curious, I decided to "hold" the software offer and see what came next. There seems to be an interesting logic to it: if I held the same piece of software, it showed me more software twice, then picked something from a different section. The rules of what's chosen for you next offer don't seem too fixed, but do seem to make decisions based on my actions.

Anyway, I'm impressed: the Gold Box has gone from being an annoying curiousity to a tool for compiling even more customer data. For one thing, it's more likely to show me a product I'm interested in, thus increasing their sales. On the other hand, information about the product I hold reveals preferences, allowing them to target additional products to me more intelligently. And they get this from one rule change. Nifty.

Posted by Anthony at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

True, today the world lost a pope, but it's always nice to know that when it comes to the faceless orthodoxy of major American newspaper op-ed authors, the old-time religion is alive and kicking. Just look at the New York Times:

The long, bitter fight over the unknowing Terri Schiavo was a stark contrast to the passing of this pontiff, whose own mind was keenly aware of the gradual failure of his body. The pope would certainly never have wanted his own end to be a lesson in the transcendent importance of allowing humans to choose their own manner of death. But to some of us, that was the exact message of his dignified departure.

But hey, the New York Times will draw its own lesson, and that's not going to stop them from singin' that old time secularism, even if they could have had the grace to shut up.

Worse yet is the Washington Post:

He could be -- and was -- called conservative in matters of Catholic doctrine, in his determination to maintain such institutions as the male celibate clergy and in his strict adherence to the church's positions on birth control and abortion. He provoked debate and dissent within the church with his stands in these areas, as well as opposition from outside, including from these pages, for policies that affect the temporal realm, especially in matters of population control.

Posted by Anthony at 02:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (3)

Sad as the news of the Pope's death was, his passage seems to have revealed an enduring truth about the New York Times.

Geez, guys, learn to keep the webmonkeys on a leash. (via Instapundit)

Posted by Anthony at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

As almost everyone has noted by now, the Pope has died after long-failing health. Nothing I could write about this could measure up to a series of posts by Professor Bainbridge today, so I'll direct you there for a better view.

Rest in peace.

Posted by Anthony at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, the information backed up on my PDA just got overwritten by the information from my old Outlook file. As a result, I've lost every contact change, every Calendar adjustment, and most importantly every task list change I've made in the last two months.

I have no idea what tasks I'm supposed to be doing this week. This just gets better and better.

UPDATE: Wow, am I lucky. Just last week I bought a Creative Zen Micro, and one of its trippy features is a synchronization with Microsoft Outlook. I played with it once, and as a result I have all but a very few tasks, contacts and appointments back on the computer.

From now on, I think I'm doing a weekly back up of my critical files to the Zen's hard disk.

Posted by Anthony at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, you were going to hear from me today: some of my work was cancelled, there seemed to be a conspiracy of professors to get my workload reduced for 24 hours, and everything seemed to indicate that finally, I'd have an easy day.

Then there was a fire alarm, an accidental push of my hard drive into "hibernation" mode (which I know doesn't work), and an automated run of Scandisk in DOS mode. As a result, my Outlook.pst file has been reduced to 0 bytes. I haven't backed it up since the middle of January, though thankfully I archived my email yesterday, so I've only lost about two months of data. (All the contacts, tasks, etc. are safe in my PDA.)

So, figure, the two or three hours I thought I'd have free today will be spent repairing this fiasco. Damn, damn, damn.

Update: OK, I've managed to recover all my emails from January 19 and before. Anything after that is almost certainly lost. If anyone knows of an email they've sent me recently that's particularly important, please send it to me again.

Update II: My best file recovery software just gave up. I suppose I could start doing some detailed file-recovery work, but frankly, it's not worth the time just to recover my email. If anyone reading here (particularly at Columbia) has some idea how to recover data that's been lost by Scandisk redefining a file size, I'd be thrilled to know it.

Posted by Anthony at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Way back in the early nineties, pundits who really didn't know very much predicted that online shopping wouldn't really take off because "people wanted that human touch." Anyone saying that has obviously never shopped at the Duane Reade near my dormitory. The managers are generally unfriendly. The store layout seems to have been designed with ineffeciency kept constantly in line: big signs instruct customers to "FORM ONE LINE PER CHECKOUT AISLE," an instruction that customers ignore to a man because to do so would actually prevent other customers from getting to the aisles. And the sales assistants, despite not showing any interest in talking to you, indicate that you are privileged to bathe in their noble presence, and any extra second that you do so is obviously your extreme joy. Hurry, therefore, is not in their nature.

The Rite-Aid is no better, so as you might expect, I'm willing to expend a certain amount of effort in order to avoid getting household goods there. Oddly, Amazon Prime has now provided me a way.

I'm mystified by how Amazon Prime is supposed to make money for Amazon.com. For a flat fee of $80, I get free two-day shipping on everything sold by Amazon (though not their marketplace sellers or other company stores within Amazon, like Target or Toys 'R Us). This doesn't sound like much until you realize what a broad range of products Amazon sells these days.

For instance, in the last 48 hours, I've purchased most of the household goods that I normally buy at Duane Reade: shampoo, bath products, chapstick, deodorant, batteries, facial tissues, etc. (Note: buying or looking at condoms causes the "Your Recommended Products" section to become more interesting than you may desire.) Looking over old Duane Reade receipts, the prices aren't that far off: a reasonable amount of bargain shopping shows that most of my purchases have a pre-tax price within +/-10% of bricks-and-mortar stores, better if something's on sale. (This is probably less true if you don't live in a high cost big city.) Items that I never would have ordered online because of the shipping (Q-tips, for instance) are now available to me, and I can buy items in bulk or in sizes not available at my local store.

It's a strange new experience, and if it works for Amazon, it looks to completely change the way I shop. I would have saved money in shipping simply through my normal purchase pattern, but now I'm looking at smaller, more trivial goods. It raises some major questions for me:

How is Amazon making money on this? Or rather, how did Amazon get its distributors to agree to this? I've tracked the packages every so often over the last few days, and they've been coming from all over America, usually via UPS. Instead of grouping products in the smallest number of packages possible, orders are being split into multiple boxes from multiple distribution sources. Surely on low-margin goods this is suicide?

How did Amazon get its marketplace and associate firms to agree to this? Or at least, are the other firms going to revolt? Even if Amazon charges a bit more than some of their associates, very rarely will the price difference be less than the shipping fee. At the moment, it's not easy to shop only from Amazon. For instance, if I do a search for Kleenex, I get offers from several different stores, and it's not immediately obvious which one I need to click to get free two-day shipping. This is a bit of a frustration, but the interface has gotten easier in only the last few days. (Besides, if you take "amazon" to the end of your search string, most of the items you get will be Amazon Prime material.)

The result has got to be a gradual cannibalization of partner sales, at least for partners whose product line largely matches Amazon's. If this becomes big, aren't partners likely to leave in droves?

Am I going to get in trouble?: I said the prices were competitive. What I forgot to say was that pricing was competitive for many of the items I buy before sales tax. On the other hand, Amazon hasn't charged me any sales tax on any of these goods: a frequent problem with online purchasing.

I'm not clear on the law in this area, but I'm dimly aware that I'm probably supposed to report all my purchases to the state of New York and send them a check. The thing is, I have no idea where I'd go to figure out what I owe or where to send it. I really wouldn't mind if Amazon reported it all to New York, who then sent me a bill, and I know that states haven't strictly enforced any such rule in a while. But given the significant amount of my income (well, loans) that will now be crossing state lines, will that change?

I don't know. What I do know is that my first consignment just arrived, and it is wonderfully convenient.

Posted by Anthony at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I've always enjoyed watching the squabbles between Ohio-blawgers Chris Geidner and the annoyingly-pseudonymed Irishlaw, and their latest back and forth over the Terry Schiavo case is no exception. In general, I approve of Irishlaw's process and Chris's substantive positions, but the entertainment comes from watching them act like an old married couple. [1] That said, this time I think IL has Chris on points, simply because he's trying to prove too much.

First, let me say that I have no position on the whole Terry Schiavo case itself, and intend to follow Prof. Volokh's lead: "I know nothing about the Schiavo matter, and despite that have no opinion." As a matter of policy, I couldn't tell you whether the bill Bush just signed giving jurisdiction to federal courts over the case is wise in this instance or not. When it comes to politics and law, I'm more interested in the overall structure of things than interventions in single instances. In that sense my impression is that intervention in the case is a bad precedent; on the other hand, it seems unlikely to be a matter that gets frequently legislated, and thus falls off my radar screen of major interest.

Continue reading "Victory to Irishlaw, On Points" »

Posted by Anthony at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (3)

What is it about Susan Estrich? Somehow, in an attack on Michael Kinsley, she's managed to stir far too much of the blogosphere and op-ed pages into a flurry of "Where are the women?" Where are the women's voices on our editorial pages? Where are the women's voices in the blogosphere?

As you'll be able to tell from the links above, this debate has been raging for weeks, which is several weeks longer than the debate deserved. Where are the women's voices in the blogosphere? You'd think no one had bothered to look. Most of the commentary has centered on various strange lists of the "top" blogs, in what has to be the most backasswards criterion ever devised. The beauty of blogs is in the linking, not the ranking: as big as they are, giants like Kos or Instapundit make up a trivial share of blog traffic in total, far less than, say, the New York Times share of the newspaper market. A better study--but of course, no journalist will go to this much investigative bother--would have to involve links between blogs: are women under blogrolled? are they ignored and unlinked? And here the evidence would certainly be more mixed. Glenn Reynolds links to Ann Althouse so often you'd think he's got a crush. It doesn't take you long to find the women in the hodge-podge of commentary at Kos. And it's worth noting that even curmudgeonly old me has seven women in the blogroll. (That would be Ann Althouse, Sherry, Not for Sheep, Irishlaw, PG, Heidi Bond, and Sua Sponte, not including the group blog Tres Chicas or any women solely on the group blogs.)

Of course, I'm a conservative, and I've often wondered if we solve our "woman problem" through inattention much more easily than liberals do whilst whinging over quotas. The British Labour Party demands all-female shortlists, while the Conservatives still worship at the altar of St. Thatcher. Estrich laments that the LA Times has a dearth of female commentators, but doesn't suggest that they poach Cathy Seipp or Kate O'Beirne from the relatively female-heavy National Review. And of course, as I've already mentioned, Republicans are trying to see what it would take to get Condi Rice on the ticket. I'd work for her.

What eventually prompted me to comment on this was a final bit of silliness from my friend Chris Geidner. In the process of giving Dahlia Lithwick as much respect as I normally grant her disdain, he bemoans that he only has four women's books on his bookshelf, and a dozen women's blogs on his reading list. Chris, stop beating yourself up. Far from listening to women's voices too little, you link to the perpetually-tacky Wonkette with a frequency that makes me wonder if you have a crush.

The self-flaggelation by bookshelf seems particularly odd. No one is ever going to accuse me of reading by quota, and yet a quick glance at even a portion of my bookshelf reveals more female authors than Chris will admit to. (And this doesn't fully reflect my reading: for instance, all of my Florence King, the rest of my collection of Carson McCullers, and anything I own by Kate Roiphe or Peggy Noonan are in storage.)

There's no reason to think that if Chris has "underread" female authors--to the extent that term has meaning at all, and I'm not convinced he has--it's because they've not written to issues he's been interested in, or he's been more interested in what male authors have had to say. This isn't a "problem."

But then, that's an advantage of being conservative: we actually have to commit a sin before feeling guilty about it.

Posted by Anthony at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

Like many men, I have very little in the way of jewelry, and what I do have does not change very often. For nearly thirteen years, I've worn the same necklace, a small silver chain with a scarab pendant, a gift from my parents when I was in Washington, D.C. for some high school contest or another. They'd picked it up while visiting the Smithsonian, knowing that I had a fondness for Egyptian mythology. To a certain extent, I wear it because it reminds me of them.

On the other hand, I was also mindful of the symbolic meaning of the scarab: while the specifics vary a bit from report to report, the stone is associated with protection, life, and rebirth (through its association with Ra). I wouldn't have worn it if I thought that either it meant something I disagreed with, or that believers around me would find it disturbing.

I mention this by way of Irishlaw and PG's discussion of a New York Times article about a trend among pregnant women to have white weddings.

Continue reading "Symbols, Shame, and A Number of Reasons that Billy Idol is Wrong" »

Posted by Anthony at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

April is coming, which means spring break is a good time for tax preparation, and in my case, tax preparation software. For the last two years, after some frustrations with Quicken, I've been using Microsoft Money as a money management program. Usually, something like TurboTax or H&R Block's TaxCut have done reasonably well in getting my taxes done quickly and (hopefully) accurately.

This, year, though, I got caught in Staple's Rebate Triangle: my software purchases were virtually dictated by the overlapping rebate offers and Staple discounts. Purchasing TaxCut Deluxe gave me a 100% rebate on TaxCut State, and up to $40 off the newest version of Money. Staples only charged me $39.98 for Money Deluxe, making that essentially free. In other words, although $80 went on my card today, I eventually expect to pay $20 for the whole experience (plus the cost of a pack of highlighters).

That is, if I spend 40 minutes, three stamps, and three envelopes to fill in all the rebates. There's something mildly insane about this system...

UPDATE: You must be kidding... there's another rebate in one of the boxes. Unfortunately, each of these require parts of box-tops, box innards, or photocopies of receipts, to the extent that I may need three boxes of one piece of software to claim all of them. So who knows what all of this will actually end up costing...

Posted by Anthony at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Brian Leiter, a University of Texas law professor, does a nice line in mocking opponents and imperially deciding that one commentator wiped the floor with another, or that another law student is a "naif." So it's amusing to see him wax authoritative about a subject that has been thoroughly explored by others and is outside his area of expertise. It's even better to see Heidi Bond take him to task for it.

The debate itself concerns Xoxohth, an online discussion board for law students that Carey finds useful and Prof. Volokh thinks sounds like an old D&D character of his. Oh, yes, and among it's other nicer features, there's a lot of racist and anti-semetic comments raised by the kind of folks who have existed since well before the dawn of USENET. (UPDATE: Since someone wrote asking me to state the obvious, the offensive comments are not one of the "nicer" features, they're interspersed amongst other features that can easily qualify as "nice." The offensive comments are mostly dumb. I must struggle more diligently to avoid ambiguity in language.) What to do about them has been an ongoing debate. Leiter states:

Put aside ethical obligations, and let's just consider good taste and decency: how hard can it be for Messrs. Ciolli and Cohen to delete all the threads with certain words? And if they did that a few times, no doubt the infantile morons responsible for most of this garbage would give up and go elsewhere.

Heidi points out the problem quite nicely:

I also think that Professor Leiter is entirely naive about the effectiveness of filters. Just try filtering out the word "fag". Next thing you know, the perpetrators post "f@g". And then you filter that, and they start saying "ffag" or "fa-g" or "f.ag." It is easier for them to generate patterns that imply "fag" than it is for the few humans in charge of the site to generate filters. Furthermore, the racist, sexist, and abusive crap that comes out is not necessarily a result of language. How do you mechanically filter out a racist discussion bashing Blacks for racist reasons without also mechanically filtering out the discussions on affirmative action?

The other option is human moderation. In an update, Leiter mentions Nontradlaw, which apparently fully moderates its forum. Moderation is a tradeoff, a high-cost strategy because human intervention is continually required, and thus a limiting factor on the size of the system. There are ways of reducing this--the user-moderation systems at Slashdot or DailyKos, for example. These are effective but complex systems, and again raise the price for the system administrator. [1] (Xoxoxth does have an "on/off topic" flag, but it doesn't appear as complex a system as Slashdot's.)

I actually disagree with Heidi on the propriety of deleting comments, as she's much more reluctant to do so than I. If someone leaves a racist or homophobic comment--or even one that I just feel is needlessly offensive--I may very well delete it. Then again, I've left up comments like that simply so that someone else could trash the commentor. (Or in one case, I went ahead and published the name of the firm at which one commentor worked, based on his IP address--I've made my feelings about anonymity well-known.) But that's because 3YoH is very much my project and associated with me: it's a blog, not a bulletin board. Not saying that Heidi's policy is wrong: it's merely hers, as mine is mine.

But what if I missed some horrible comment? Am I under some duty such that I've then become negligent? Have I been ethically lax in providing a forum for a nutcase? Or can we take it as read that those who run forums may choose to expend resources on other things than moderation, and that the occasional troll or flamer doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the board?

In any event, here's a challenge for Professor Leiter. He's got a high-traffic blog with commenting capability. He apparently thinks that deleting the comments, either through filters or manually, is a relatively simple task. Why not prove it? He can open up comments on all his entries, and I'm sure the good folks at Xoxoxth who he's been condemning would be happy to provide a number of comments for him to weed out. If he really thinks that creating this holy grail will be so simple, let's let him write the code. After all, if the man can drive flamers to the point of extinction, I'm sure he can more than triple his salary with the profits he makes from his new software.

Are you looking forward to LeiterFilters 1.0? I know I am.

[1]: For a good discussion of the costs of implementing a Caio M. S. Pereira Neto, Online Collaborative Media and Political Economy of Information: A Case Study, 21 J. Marshall J. & Info. L. 511 (2003). This study compares and contrasts the Slashdot and Kuro5hin accreditation systems and discusses their different goals and outcomes. More than likely, this is the kind of thing that Xoxohth needs, but implementing it is much more than the trivial task Leiter suggests.

Posted by Anthony at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Hunter S. Thompson is dead today of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The founder of "gonzo journalism," a rakehell par excellence, a wordsmith with more talent than I hope to one day have, Thompson's passing shall leave a silence sorely felt. If nothing else, I'd hoped that 2008 would see his color commentary moderating the Condi Rice/Hilary Clinton steel-cage deathmatch.

Go with God, Mr. Thompson. You're missed.

Posted by Anthony at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So tonight, after having dreaded the film for nearly a full year, I'm off to see Constantine. The film has been almost universally panned by the critics, and I can only hope it makes no money at all, simply because then there shall be no sequel.

Given this and the horrible reception given to Bride and Prejudice, maybe the Producers That Be will learn a valuable lesson here: if it was made in England, leave it in England. Only in Hollywood would someone try to make a Tandoori Cornish Pastie with a Budweiser/Guinness Black and Tan.

UPDATE: More later, but today is consumed by guests and grading. Long story short, it's an awful film, but has its bright bits. In other news, National Review Online continues its descent into madness by actually giving the film a positive review...

Posted by Anthony at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

And to the surprise of almost nobody, Howard Dean has become Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. (I'm sure it was my endorsement that put him over the top.)

Perhaps I'm wrong, and it'll all work out well for a newly-competitive Democratic Party. Still, if the 1983 Labour Party manifest has been dubbed "the longest suicide note in history," Dean's Chairmanship of the Democratic Party may very well become history's longest suicide.

(Yes, I'm running behind. It's been a busy few days.)

Posted by Anthony at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

You've got to hand it to the U.N. It takes some serious brass to run an ad like this (blogad taken from Haloscan:

This should inspire a contest. Come up with the best follow up to the line: "Free Elections in Iraq: The UN Is There." For instance:

Free Elections in Iraq. The UN is There... Figuring Out How Best To Take Credit

(via Bloggerbeer and Half the Sins)

UPDATE: Changed the copied code of the Blogad to a screenshot, and linked it to the page to which the ad clicks through.

UPDATE II: The same ad is running today on Instapundit.

UPDATE III: As Martin points out in comments, this isn't really the United Nations: the UN Foundation is a nominally independent body which works with the UN Fund. (I have no clue how operationally independent it is. So it's not clear the UN actually proposed this advertising. Nice catch, Martin! The branding certainly fooled me.

Posted by Anthony at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Draft Cassandras are wearing the smell of desperation like a pre-teen bathing in bad-knockoff perfume. No shred of evidence, no matter how unworthy, seems too little to confirm the fears that a draft is coming. A case in point:

(Since it's another post on the draft-related hysteria of Brian "Any readers of draft age. . . . need to begin making plans before it is too late" Leiter and friends, I've put this one below the fold.)

Continue reading "Can You Smell The Intellectual Bankruptcy?" »

Posted by Anthony at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (1)

So heavily have I been involved in the Note that I've not had a chance to quickly jot down my response to the most important news of the day: Iraq held its elections. Most of the commentary below is for my benefit: I'd like not to lose track of my thoughts on this. It's more like Unlearned Hand's sentiments (and PG collects some good pictures here), rather than anything thought through. If that's what you're looking for, Instapundit's been talking about this all day.

Continue reading "And They Go To The Polls" »

Posted by Anthony at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I wonder the degree to which I'm actually a law student, and not a random PC tech support guy. Some of today's note time was again spent getting some critical files off a broken computer.

I think I'm going to get one of these. The most common task I'm asked to accomplish is the recovery of files that someone didn't back up. A hard drive enclosure like this would allow me to pull the hard drive, plug it into my machine (through USB) and burn DVDs of anything that needed recovery. This done, I could just let the user reinstall Windows through a recovery disk.

Of course with my luck, after spending $45.00 on the enclosure, CLS would experience a sudden wave of hardware/software stability and I'd never have to use it. Which is, of course, why I don't just buy the thing.

Posted by Anthony at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A plea for a little help from my readers:

I had figured that after the election, most of the nonsense that was going on about the "draft to come" would calm down, and fair enough, it did. Howard Dean isn't mentioning it as a centerpoint of his campaign for DNC chair. It's not turned up on Democratic talking points in recent weeks. Indeed, now that the election's over, it's not much in the news.

There's a reason for this: it was always a pretty flimsy prediction. First it was premised a bill put forward by Charles Rangel. (This didn't bother some law professors.) Then it was premised on difficulties in recruiting for the National Guard. [1]. Now, it's premised on the idea that we're going to war with Iran.

I've referred to this kind of thing before as "political haruspicy." I'm wary of doing it myself, although I've made a prediction or two. (Most notably, that same-sex marriage or civil unions will be legal in all 50 states by 2008, although now I'm leaning towards 2010.) On the internet, it's especially dangerous, because your predictions can be so easily referenced.

But predictions about the draft seem particularly pernicious to me, because they started with a credulous acceptance of "alert" emails which left out salient information (such as Charlie Rangel), and have proceeded from distortion to distortion. So this weekend, I'll be launching a page: the Cassandras of the Draft. It'll be a permanent link from my homepage, and will allow my readers to add links and quotations from any of the Augurs of Impending Doom. I'll also include a countdown clock, giving the exact number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Bush has not started a draft. Who knows: if a draft actually does start, I'll be making these people look like predictive geniuses. On the other hand, if no draft occurs then no one will be able to disclaim their words.

In any event, I need a good list to get this going. So I'd like to use this entry as an initial clearinghouse while I'm designing the page. If any of my readers know of a pundit, blogger, politician, or other notable who has predicted a Bush reimposition of the draft, please drop a comment and a link below. And if you have a chance, spread the word.

Oh, and one rule: we're talking about a general draft, one actually involving the selective service. Not a "back door draft" involving the use of military contracts, drafting people into AmeriCorps, or whatever else. Let's keep it focused with this general rule: if it doesn't involve selective service cards, it probably doesn't belong here.

[1]: Chris and I recently had a discussion over why overheated rhetoric does one little good for analysis, and this is one reason. Yes, we're having a hard time recruiting for the National Guard. A serious discussion would ask whether we were having trouble recruiting for the non-reserve military, and whether, were we to reverse the troop cuts of the early 1990s, we'd be able to fill the ranks. But it's not particularly surprising to find out that when both reserves and non-reserve ranks are being called up, fewer people wish to volunteer for reserves.

There's a serious criticism of Rumsfeld's policies on troop strength, and a criticism that I have great sympathy with: that whatever the long-term costs, we should increase the size of our standing army (and even raise taxes to pay for it) because calling up reserves on a long-term basis is bad for morale and effectiveness. Pushing this would have been an excellent issue in the last election. Instead, much of the democratic intellectual firepower was focused on scaring Americans with the fantasy of an upcoming draft.

Posted by Anthony at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

And like a "your note draft is finished" gift, CBS has fired four employees over the RatherGate Memos flap. As almost anyone in the blogosphere knows by now, because let's face it, you heard it before you heard it here.

If you can stomach 234 pages of lawyer-speak, the full report is here, and it doesn't pull many punches in a lot of areas, although they aren't convinced that political bias was involved. I'm going to lay my bias claims on the firm reasoning of one of my fellow students, who once exclaimed, "Why doesn't the left ever get gifts like this?" Well, mainly because if these had been Swift Boat documents, someone would have noticed the presence of Times New Roman at the appropriate interval, which is about five seconds.

While the report itself is also fairly agnostic as to whether or not these are forgeries, Appendix 4 contains the biggest non-news event ever. In pretty much the only real forensic evidence presented in the piece, document examiner Peter Tytell suggests that the Killian Memos were typed on a computer in Times New Roman font.

The summary of Tytell's analysis is good, and it's good that the Panel included it. But if there is a whitewash in the report, it's the same whitewash that has occurred at every stage of the RatherGate investigation: pretending that this was a tough call.

It wasn't. Those documents had webbed-feet serifs, flappy wingdings[1] and now a very expensive lawyer's bill for an investigative report, simply to tell us that all along Dan Rather was holding a duck.

[1]: No, there were no wingdings in the report. It's a metaphor, work with me here.

Posted by Anthony at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Ambivalent Imbroglio, Ambimb boiled my blood. I think I've mentioned before that my father was in Vietnam. Well, he returned before I was born, but oddly the shadow of that shaped my youth a great deal more than one might expect. From the time I was young, my mother would tell me stories of his time away: how they met for R&R in Hawaii (she still loves the memory of it there), how she once ordered 300 hamburgers from a McDonalds while he was in basic training (don't ask), and then a few darker tales, because not all children's stories should be nice. On the desk in my father's room is a disarmed mortar that has a story to it, a story that would be told whenever he and any other Vietnam vet were together in the house. Don't get me wrong. These aren't my tales, and I'm too young to be a part of them. But they're very, very real to me.

So as I'm taking a break from the Note (page seven!) and wandering over to Ambimb's, I see this written about the yellow ribbons on some people's cars:

Brilliant, don’t you think? Support our troops by driving around with a magnet that orders everyone else to support our troops, and if you decide you no longer feel like supporting our troops (whatever that means), just remove the magnet! Support support support! And the real genius of the whole thing is that the damned things are made in Taiwan (at least the ones I saw in stores) and every penny of profit on them is going to a handful of private individuals who don’t give a damn about any troops except insofar as the idea of those troops can be exploited for private gain.

Support our troops! Support our troops! Support our troops!

Damned ribbons.

So I called him out on it. (See his comment section.) To which I got this reply:

The ribbons just strike me as a shallow and relatively thoughtless way to express an opinion that is ambiguous, at best.

And on the subject of moral superiority, it appears there's plenty of moral superiority to go around for both those who support and those who oppose the Iraq war/occupation. I think there's some moral high ground in the idea of elected leaders being truthful, honest, and open with their constitutents, rather than lying, deceiving, and acting in secret against them. You might agree. Or not. The beautiful thing is we can both be right because, in George Bush's America, there is no spoon.

Let me share with you something that happened to me on a drive recently. I stopped in a gas station near Grand Rapids and (since I was filling up a van) had a bit of time to look around the lot. Across from me was an SUV--a type of vehicle I'm really not fond of--with a yellow ribbon magnet on it. After a few minutes of filling up, another guy came over from the pump and started talking to the SUV owner, a middle-aged white woman.

"Got someone over there?"

To which the woman nodded, and the two started a very pleasant and chirpy conversation about their children: where they were serving, what part of the military, etc. I won't pretend to remember the details, but it was one of the more touching moments of my vacation.

Now, I don't know what that ribbon communicates when I see it on the car of someone I don't know. I'm afraid that whatever the existence of spoons, knives, forks, or other kitchen implements in an America that apparently now belongs to one man following an election, I'm not privy to other people's thoughts. Whether something's a magnet or a sticker doesn't tell me a damn thing about the permanence, depth, or thoughtfulness of their heart. But I rather suspect that a number of military families put those on their cars for the traditional reason: because they hope their loved ones will come back. I imagine some others do so because they hope the loved ones of others come back in one piece. Maybe they don't--maybe it has something to do with the country of manufacture of the magnet. But color me charitable to them in imagining that their expressions are no less thoughtful than mine. Maybe you know better.

In the meantime, I think about two middle-aged parents freezing in a parking lot talking about children in sun-bleached sands, and I think about the snide way you're dismissing they way they signalled each other, and I really don't give a fuck about your spoon.

Someone put a yellow ribbon on their car because he's staying up late at night wondering if his child's mother will come back whole. Someone's yellow ribbon means their son's letter hasn't gotten through in a while, and they're worried. Someone's yellow ribbon got put there because every time they see it, they remember this moment.

That's enough. It's enough to make the mockery meaningless and the mockers less so.

Posted by Anthony at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBacks (5)

There's nothing like comparing opposites. Leiter links to this post on tsunami-relief in Aceh with the comment, "Another side of the tsunami disaster in Indonesia...that you won't see mentioned in either the mainstream media or the mainstream (i.e., right-wing) blogosphere." And he's right, because the article he links to is pretty much the familiar parade of horribles regarding the political situation in Aceh, not the tsunami as such:

Well, the coastal areas of Aceh have been crushed by the earthquake and the tsunami. Large parts of Banda Aceh are under water; they’ve become part of the sea. The west coast is hardest hit and whole villages are leveled. But this is not the first catastrophe to hit Aceh. Previously, it was devastated by unnecessary and preventable poverty. Aceh is rich in resources; it’s one of the world’s main natural gas producers. It supplies much of the natural gas for South Korea and Japan, and yet the revenues have gone to Exxon Mobil and the central government in Jakarta, with almost nothing left for the poor of Aceh. And as a result, we’ve seen malnutrition and undernourishment levels among the children of Aceh running as high as 40 percent.

I don't know about the mainstream media, and if the blogosphere has a mainstream, I've no idea where it is. (I would have assumed Kos and Instapundit were both on it.) But in the interests of checking the right-wing blogosphere, I wandered over to The Corner, and sure enough, that bit of it wasn't talking about the Indonesian military. Instead, Ms. Lopez gives this excerpt from Aljazeera.net:

Not everyone was so enthusiastic.

"The Americans have to understand our culture here," said Hilmy Bakar Almascaty, vice-chairman of the Jakarta-based Islamic Defenders Front, which is mobilising relief efforts of its own.

"If they are not sensitive to local issues then there will be problems. If American women come to Aceh, they must wear dilbab for example. There is Sharia law in Aceh and that is what is dictated."

USAid's Bok said it was unlikely US service personnel would adhere to a Muslim dresscode.

"I don't think the practice of Islam in Aceh is such that it forces all people to wear dilbab," said Weiss. "This is not Saudi Arabia."

In addition to the helicopters, American forces have committed six C-130 transport planes to the relief effort. Four Australian aircraft have been flying supplies between Banda Aceh since Tuesday. Both nations are flying C-130 transport planes on a regular run between Medan and Band Aceh.

At the end of a long day in which contrary to my expectations I actually got quite a lot done, I have to look at that and laugh. It reminds me of what Neil Gaiman's words about Dream in The Kindly Ones:

Each facet catches the light in its own way. It glints and sparkles and flashes uniquely. It would almost be possible to believe that the facet was the jewel; not just a tiny part of it. But then, as we move the jewel another facet catches the light ... We see an aspect of the whole. But the facet is not the jewel.

Posted by Anthony at 03:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've added a box on the right-hand navbar that you can use to donate to the American Red Cross in support of relief for the victims of the recent tsunami. It's a good cause: please do if you can afford it.

(My own donation is going to have to wait until my loan-check arrives and another windfall comes through, but that's only a week away.)

Near as I can tell, there's nothing that lets me track who donates and doesn't, and unlike the rest of the Amazon links on the site, I don't get a cut. So don't anyone get cynical, OK? Though frankly, if you make a cynical comment and donate, hell, I'm a big guy and can take it on the chin.

Posted by Anthony at 02:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I would have thought that the last defenders of CBS memoranda might have headed the way of the dinosaurs. At the very worst, I thought I might find the true head-in-the-sand crowd at the blog I love to mock, The Filibuster. But low and behold, I come back from my "vacation" (i.e. doing nothing time) to find that none other than the Columbia Journalism Review has written a very selective attack on the blogosphere, essentially trying to revive the issue of the authenticity of the documents.

Much digital ink has already been spilled attacking the author's factual assertions (pay particular attention to the articles by Volokh and Yourish, and I'm a bit late to the game to add to them. [1] More interesting to me is why such a piece has been written in the first place. A number of theories have been raised, mostly centering on a desire for self-aggrandizement on the part of the author. But I think that's too unsubtle: I think we've just seen a prelude to CBS's best-hope outcome from it's long-awaited report.

The Kid Has A Point...
It should be noted that Corey Pein doesn't spend a word trying to evaluate or analyze any of the evidence she's presented. Indeed, the best hard evidence against her position is dismissed as "long and technical, discouraging close examination." (Amusing, because I and several of my enthralled associates analyzed it quite closely. Pein, it seems, didn't.) Similarly, there's no technical evaluation of the claims of Dr. David Hailey (original link to his work unavailable, since Dr. Hailey's taken it down), although there has been plenty of back and forth with which to do so. What is thrown up is a lot of chatter which attempts to show that blogs didn't prove that the documents were fake. What she's doing is burden shifting--but hiding the ball behind a point that's indisputable true.

Essentially, Pein is stating that if you take the blogosphere as a whole, there was a lot of hasty rushing to judgment that the memos must be false. And I'll grant her that, because when the scandals first broke, I said:

Folks, this is just goddamn dumb. The mistakes--a use of a proportional font, superscript on ordinal numbers, kerning, etc--scream out 'this document is a fake,' obvious to anyone who worked in an office in that era.

It's an admission I'm happy to make, because at the end of the day it's not particularly fatal. Even admitting all of the above, the authenticity question goes from "impossible" to "very, very improbable indeed." Unless the Columbia Journalism Review is equipped with an Infinite Improbability Drive [2], this doesn't get one's argument very far at all. At the end of the day, even using a preponderance of the evidence, things don't look good for CBS News.

...Except That the Kid Don't Got A Point
Which is where the CJR article really falls down. Pein is correct that somewhere in the blogosphere, someone is shooting off his mouth about something he doesn't know about. (Check back here every now and then. --Ed.) If you take the blogosphere as a whole, instead of specific experts or those who talk to them, you're likely to get a lot of misinformation. But that hardly suggests that the "mainstream media," as they're frequently called, charged blindly into accusations a misconduct by CBS because they were duped by spurious charges of forgery promoted by hyperactive bloggers.

What Pein ignores is that the burden of proof of authenticity was on CBS. It was not the job of CBS's critics to prove that the documents were fake: it is sufficient for them to raise questions, to which CBS should have answers. Yes, there was a lot of scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) speculation on the provenance of the memos, but that was mostly because the data needed to evaluate them was firmly in the hands of CBS, which was busy insistently protecting the journalist's favorite "oh just trust me" character, the anonymous source.

Given that, Pein completely ignores what was miserable about CBS's performance, and what the mainstream media (to its credit) picked up on in listening to bloggers: not that the criticisms of the bloggers were iron-clad--they couldn't be without access to the source material--but that CBS had no answers. Or rather, they had a stream of answers that turned out, on inspection, to be false.

So Why Is This Important?
OK, so Pein has a pernicious big point hidden inside a true little one. Why does it matter?

Despite everything that Pein puts forward, I can't think of anyone who expects the documents to be revealed as genuine. (I'd be shocked, and if they are, you'll se a retraction from me quickly.) So the question for CBS becomes one of damage control.

At the moment, the best move for CBS is to turn this from something that could only be accomplished through deliberate malice or possibly willful incompetence into someting that a mere mortal might somehow allow to slip. And here's where the blogosphere becomes an unfortunate accomplice in the trick.

You see, hundreds of pages of commentary churned over the internet in the months after Rather made his fateful 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast. There was a lot of back and forth, charge and countercharge, with each side trying to prove what was either impossible or at least very difficult: the absolute falsehood or veracity of the CBS memos. And all of this was accomplished--for the most part--by examining a few PDFs floating about online.

This makes it look like CBS's judgment call might be a battle of the experts, and aw shucks, they just got it wrong.

And here's where I stand by the snap judgment I quoted from my original post on this subject. This wasn't a reasonable mistake, it was really goddamn dumb. Forget kerning, superscripting, proportional fonts and the other technical terms thrown around by folks who remember what hot lead is. These documents looked like Microsoft Word documents, and didn't look like what anyone would expect a typewriter from the 1970s to produce. That should have prompted greater scrutiny, at the very least, and any journalist worth his salt should have made sure that before the documents were run they were bulletproof. Answers to reasonably-expected criticism would be ready, and they wouldn't just be stonewalls.

That's not what happened at CBS. Be it through bias, malice, or incompetence, no one prepared for the backlash that should have been obvious the moment the documents were uploaded. To do such a thing in an election year, in a piece that is an attack on one of the candidates is professionally irresponsible. To not have a better answer than, "Trust me, I'm Dan Rather" isn't a mistake--it's damning.

Pein is right in that there's a double-standard in action with regards to CBS's conduct as opposed to the blogosphere, but that is simply because Mr. Rather bore the burden of proving his reporting to be true, not because the blogosphere is inherently sloppy, or the rest of the media rushed to judgment.

[1]: These factual assertions range from the trivial and indirect (he seems to suggest that Free Republic is a blog) to the downright laughable ("[Being able to reproduce a document in Word] proves nothing — you could make a replica of almost any document using Word.") This last is pretty funny considering it shows a specific ignorance of typefaces (since many typewriter typefaces weren't transfered into digital format) and indeed, a less-than-layman knowledge of forgery.

[2]: I'm unaware of Columbia researching any such thing, not even at the Columbia University Science Fiction Society. As a courtesy to the CJR, however, I will keep my eyes open for two-headed men of felonious intent.

Posted by Anthony at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Although you've not heard much from me recently, don't worry: there will be a lot to write in the New Year. In the meantime, friends, please go out, party, and see this year out and welcome the new.

Posted by Anthony at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I really don't know what to say about the tsunami that's struck throughout Southeast Asia today. I just don't have the words, though I've been browsing through news reports continuously today.

The word "tsunami" to me summons up thoughts of Hiroshige's prints. That image just hasn't cut it today.

Thousands dead. I really don't know what to say.

Posted by Anthony at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I love reading E. J. Dionne. The man is an expert at sounding limitlessly reasonable whilst talking utter rot, in this case about how we must avoid government expressions of "Merry Christmas" in order to avoid oppressing religious minorities. As is usual, Foamy the Squirrel has more sense than the Washington Post Op-Ed page. (Though I'm sure the factual basis of his rant about children's Christmas plays is slightly overstated.) Dionne would probably class as Foamy's "neo yuppie scum."

My take on the entire "Happy Holidays" v. "Merry Christmas" fiasco is pretty easy. Minority religions should be respected by the government: that means everything from no forced conversions and the ability to practice their faiths unmolested to no particular advantages in government hiring. But our Establishment Clause jurisprudence is an unholy mess of trying to reconcile a fetish for "church-state separation" with the fact that we are a Christian nation.

Take, for instance, the simple name of this site. I'm an agnostic, and I get to cherry-pick my religious references. I could have called it Three Years of Gehenna. [1] Though I know far less about it, there's nothing that kept me from calling this Three Years of Naraka. Indeed, there's a vast array of names I could have chosen. But when I went searching for a metaphor, I chose Hell, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense.

To say that the United States is a Christian nation isn't to say that we aren't--or shouldn't be--tolerant of other religions. But just as I'd not say I'd started to understand Japan without studying Buddhism and Shinto, and I wouldn't start to examine the Middle East without sitting down with a Koran, Christianity is the one and only religion without knowledge of which one can fairly be said to be ignorant of American literature and culture. We've had two Great Awakenings, and they weren't awakening us from Samsara. And when we search for a metaphor for otherworldly suffering, we reach straight for that box labelled Hell.

So I guess what it comes down to is, we all have these holidays off because we're celebrating Christmas, and if the majority religion should respect the minority by not interfering with their religion, the minority should have a similar amount of respect, and realize that saying, "Merry Christmas" isn't a sign of the next great Crusade. Having children sing "Silent Night" or dress up as Mary and Joseph in a school play doesn't mean they're all of a sudden going to give up their parents' holy books, but it does mean they'll know something about the larger part of the culture in which they reside.

If you'd asked me about this when I was sixteen and attending high school in Alabama, I'd likely have answered you differently. There's a line to be drawn, and growing up in the South, I can see how that line was often drawn in shaky ways. But that line is miles away from insistence that we must have a happy holiday season, and not simply a Merry Christmas.

Not even I am that curmudgeonly.

[1]: Indeed, given that the period of one's stay in Gehenna is supposedly temporary, this might even be considered more appropriate.

Posted by Anthony at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (2)

Heidi Bond bemoans the fact that because of ExamSoft, she has to reboot her computer and lose her precious uptime. Now, I'm no fan of Examsoft, but I can't say I'm that worried about the loss of uptime. In general, I shut down my machine every time I move it, so it doesn't matter that much anyway.

But uptime is mostly important for servers, and for what it's worth, the server back in my dorm room (Windows) hasn't been rebooted since... eh, since I took back my apartment over the summer, if I recall correctly. (I installed a new card when I came back, and I assume even Linux boxes have to be shut down before you attach electronics to the motherboard.) It chugs on just fine, although I admit it does nothing more than act as a webserver and occasional file storage. The only thing that's even asked me to reboot was, oddly, an Adobe Acrobat update, and I just ignored that.

In any event, I suppose I've pretty much tired of the OS Wars, and the various debates about which operating system is most wonderful. LINUX has its uses, but to date no one has been able to convince me it's worth switching for my PC. I'll consider it when I meet the casual LINUX user.

What do I mean by that? Simply put, every LINUX user I know is a computer specialist. Command prompts hold no fear for them. Mentally mapping a directory structure, and keeping track of locations without a visual interface doesn't terrify them. Rebuild their whole system from scratch? Not a problem.

Now while none of these things hold any fear for me--I remember IBM DOS 2.0, when the command "gwbasic" was actually useful--they're also not something I'm passionate about. Further, they're not things that any of the people I help with technology are passionate about, either. Usually, if I use a term like "uptime" around anyone with a computer that I'm fixing, my next words are something like, "That's how long your computer has been on for." To which eyes will roll, lips will mumble, and hopes that I can actually get their term papers recovered will be expressed.

I can't imagine these users installing or operating LINUX. Maybe Macintosh, a system probably more focused towards task-based users than even Windows, but not anything that requires--or even encourages--them to know what "grep" means. The need and the urgency isn't there, nor even the care for the computer itself. Many of the users I have worked with, personally or professionally, have brought me machines in states that can't hardly be blamed on the OS. This would include hinges falling off due to having been squashed in overful cases, corners damaged from frequent bumps and clangs, monitors with keyboard impressions... you get the point. These are not people who are going to dote over their hardware, much less their OS.

Which is why, at the end of the day, I can't get into the hate-Microsoft mentality. LINUX, to me, will be a great operating system when people are teaching their grandmothers to store recipes on it, and most of its "stability" advantages seem to me to consist of having much more educated users. Yes, Microsoft does its annoying thing occasionally, but it's not particularly bad if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing... well, let's put it this way: I felt it a great leap forward for computing when terms like "Shut Down" started being replaced by "Turn Off." However much I may sometimes like a command line, I don't really want to see us go back to the age of Grep.

(For what it's worth, this blog runs off a LINUX server, and all of my blog maintenance involves Telneting back to England. As I said, it has its place and its uses. But whatever its other faults, Microsoft's proven quite good at moving computers from the fringes of usefulness to ubiquity. I'm not sure LINUX is helping that progress.)

Posted by Anthony at 03:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

For those who've been keeping track, there's two new trailers for Constantine. Neither inspire much optimism.

The domestic trailer is up at MtV. (It's also showing in theatres before certain showings of Blade 3. Aren't you glad I saved you going to see that?) Meanwhile, in proof that cinema really is better overseas, you can see the international trailer here. Mostly the same, except a bit more explicit and seemingly with a better logo.

OK, fine, the international one does have one other advantage: the only scene shown so far that looks like it was taken from original source material.

Posted by Anthony at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't get me wrong: I love the law. It's a fascinating field, and the academic study of law holds a deep fascination. But it's not the only thing that fascinates me, and one concern I have is that as I get further into the profession, my rather eclectic magpie-nest of knowledge will get ever more narrowly-focused. I'm deeply resenting having to stop reading The Hebrew Goddess in order to focus on Property this week. Not because there's not interesting things in Property, but because the last two weeks have been a bit law-heavy.

I'm addicted to little bits of useless knowledge, things that spice up a world-view and keep one's wonder at the breadth of experience alive. In order to share a bit of this, every so often I'm going to post a "Study Break" on here: a link to some source of obscure trivia that won't help you at all with law, won't change your political perspective, but might just be a bit of fun. How will this differ from my other trivialities? Who knows--but maybe you'll enjoy it.

So for the first topic, let's try La Llorona, a bit of hispanic legend. The link above has various versions of the legend, with a fair degree of background. It's a sort of tying-together of ghost stories, each involving a few common features: a wronged woman, a murdered child, and in most cases a river. Many versions have much in common with Medea: the concept of killing one's child to spite a powerful but wrongful man. Another version of the story, from my old haunt of El Paso, can be read here.

In true magpie fashion, I tie my interest in this legend together with my recent commentary on Philip Pullman and his anti-Christian children's story, as the first version of the story I ever heard tied it in with a similar revolt against a Patriarchal figure. She figures prominently in children's tales from homeless shelters in Miami, where she has been merge with other figures from another pantheon. On the other hand, the mythological revisioning of these children is far less comforting than Pullman's.

Posted by Anthony at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

No sooner have I given Hollywood the benefit of the doubt about not turning His Dark Materials into a literally godless train wreck than they turn around and kick my optimism in the ass again.

Seven words to ruin your Saturday. The first six:

Cruise. Spielberg. War of the Worlds.

Final word of the incantation? Modernization.

Say it with me, folks: This is gonna suck.... For less than a movie ticket and a bag of popcorn, you can read the original in hardback instead:

Posted by Anthony at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

[Unlike most of what I print here, the piece below is based primarily on anecdotal experience, more essay than editorial. It should most definitely be taken in that vein, as your mileage may vary considerably.]

Over on Half the Sins of Mankind, PG has an interesting essay on a topic close to my heart: the desires of some members (particularly parents) of some ethnic groups to make sure that their children "marry within the fold":

Sadly, I have become so Americanized that I'm skeptical, not only of this prioritization of information, but even of the necessity of marrying an Indian guy. It would be nice to marry one, but sort of in the same way that it would be nice to marry someone who made enough money that I wouldn't have to produce income and could sit at home and write romance novels if I felt like it. (And if anyone can find me a guy who would respect that as a career, please forward his bio-data immediately.)...

I strongly suspect that many of the people who consciously seek out a spouse of the same ethnic or religious background do so because they know it matters to their parents. And certainly my parents would much prefer a beach-loving, country music-hating, BS in computer science-carrying Republican who was a Hindu Indian to anyone who otherwise fit my preferences perfectly but was not. Still, I've seen enough Indian kids marrying non-Indians to think that our parents are actually more tolerant and fonder of us than we think.

If you bring someone home and everyone says, "He's a nice guy, but he's not the right race/religion/whatever," then they'll probably get over that problem eventually. If everyone thinks he's an asshole, that might be a Sign. People can become honorary members of your group -- oh, the white people we have taught to eat with their hands! -- but asshole-ness is forever.

I've been fortunate in this: I have two parents who have had only one real concern when it comes to my dating habits. They'd like me to be happy with my partner. They've been really, seriously supportive in almost every relationship I've had, even with partners who I'm quite certain didn't fit their ideal conception of marriage material. (Let's put it this way: if you come from a family of staunch Republicans, imagine the fear of innumerable Christmas dinners with an outspoken Democrat in-law...) I've rarely been concerned that when bringing someone home they'd be treated with anything but respect.

On the other hand, I've been in relationships where I was the outsider. It's never comfortable, and I'll admit that I'm unlikely to do so seriously again. The difficulties are too severe for me anymore: no matter how strong the love between two people, blood runs thick. On the one side, there's always family pressure to "look at this good boy--he's a friend of the family, you should at least meet him, even if you are seeing X." On the other side, the knowledge that there's a perpetual fifth-column at the very least passively trying to undermine your relationship can foster a certain sense of paranoia. Perhaps other people manage it well, but it's not been pleasant in my experience.

But of course, our troubles are sometimes our best teachers, as are our scars. I know I'm sensitive to some things I probably shouldn't be. (I've been known to leave conversations where the term shiksa, which I find horribly offensive, was used by one or another party.) On the other hand, I'm ever more committed to the idea that all humanity really shares the same heart, a point best expressed by P. J. O'Rourke:

Finally, people are all exactly alike. There is no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian aborigine have fewer differences than a lhasa apso and a fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. I wish I could say I found this out by spending arctic nights on ice flows with Inuit elders and by sitting with tribal medicine men over fires made of human bones in Madagascar. But, actually, I found it out by sleeping around. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly."

But then, even the most staunch conservative believes in some tradition that's not worth keeping.

[1]: This is just one more example of my Bad Republicanism. As one English friend pointed out, I use public transport, my last car got over 35 miles to the gallon, I'm quite comfortable with premarital sex and interracial dating: the fellow is still seriously concerned that I'll get kicked out of the Party one day.

Posted by Anthony at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

So yesterday my new Dell Axim x50v PDA arrived. For those of my readers interested in tech, I'll give a more detailed review, but for those who don't need the details: great piece of kit, pity about the operating system.

Continue reading "Bring Me The Head of Bill Gates" »

Posted by Anthony at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

So in the computer-related election story of the day, it appears that the Bush-Cheney site has cut itself off from the world outside the U.S. (via Frankenstein). Chris, a sensible fellow who generally admits his lack of computer knowledge, blurts out "this is ridiculous", even though he links to this story.

I'm really hoping that Chris meant for his "this" to have an antecedent of "the distributed denial of service attack," and that his statement is merely misphrased, because otherwise I'm unclear on why the campaign site shouldn't respond as it did. Cutting off out-of-country web traffic may be inconvenient, but in the seven-day run up before an election, one would expect that reliably serving your target audience (voters mainly resident in America) will be more important than not providing service to non-target audiences.

Of course, one of Frank's commentors leaves the charitable: "A-------, but what else is new?" The dialogue on Chris's site again focuses on how horrible this is, and how Bush just doesn't like foreigners. But if we assume that most of the DDOS traffic was originating overseas (reasonable, especially since the block seems to have worked), and that the deciding factor was provision of continued service to the site's target audience, I'm wondering what Chris or the geniuses commenting actually suggest was to be done on the server side? It's worth noting that this decision seems to have been implemented by Akamai, a professional outfit. (I know I'd pay them for hosting before I would Chris.)

Now, I'd have given significant props to anyone--Kos, Chris, whomever--who had made the appropriate noise here without being prompted: that the real shame is the DDOS attack. After all, it's not like the Bush campaign made this decision in a vaccuum. And I'll tell you: if Kerry went on TV tomorrow, addressed the issue, and said to his followers, "I don't care who you are or what you think you're doing, stop it! My opponent has the right to be heard!" he'd probably get my vote. (I'm in New York, so who cares, right?)

I'll be the first to say that this election hasn't been the cleanest in memory, and that partisans on both sides have behaved atrociously: accusations of voter fraud, for instance, are becoming bipartisan sport. But DDOS attacks on the sites of either candidate should be out and out disgusting at this stage of the race. And unless Chris has a better--and by this I mean faster and just as effective--solution to Bush's problem... well, he might at least have said something pejorative about the attackers.

I guess that's just too much to ask for these days.

Posted by Anthony at 03:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Where will I find the time? Ever since I finished Dungeon Keeper 2, I've been wondering what might surpass it.

So now, when I'm too busy to take the time off, they publish Evil Genius.

Damn them. Now I've got to download the demo and haul out my old "Evil Geniuses For A Better Tomorrow Support Clinton" button...

Posted by Anthony at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

The New York Times endorses Kerry.

National Review, on the other hand, endorses Bush.

Since both have been flacking for their candidate for at least the last six months, this is hardly a surprise. But for those of you caught unawares, remind me not to spoil the ending of Titanic.

Posted by Anthony at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ok, so that was the horrible political rant. Before I got back to my work, I started into a great Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson, in which he mentioned something wonderous: I Love Bees.

Wow.

This will seem curious to some of my readers, but bear with me: it's an "alternate reality" game, if you use Stephenson's nomenclature, but it's really just a sort of participatory storytelling. I've missed this round so it's like picking over the remains of the meal instead of enjoying dessert, but the main idea was this: "players" read chapters of the story, and tried to be at hundreds of pay phones called randomly, where they either got bits of the story early or, in very rare cases, had a chance to change events. It's a bit tough to explain, but Wired covers it nicely.

I'm sorry I missed I Like Bees, apparently publicity for Halo 2: it's a strange wonderful confusing form of storytelling, and I love watching it unfold. I played the first of these, made for Stephen Spielberg's movie AI and now named Beast. For the most part the game was a series of websites in which clues were more or less hidden, but it spanned multiple media. If you saw a poster for the movie, you were probably looking at some hidden clue. Soon a group called Cloudmakers formed, a collective of players researching, discussing, auditing and coming up with the next steps. You can still see some of the strangeness: I remember my friend Martin showing this to me and thinking, "OK, this is something you couldn't do before the internet."

As I said, I'm sorry I missed I Love Bees. Somewhere, in the name of an odd narrative, a team of people are working long hours with curious pseudonyms ("Puppetmaster 2"); other people are scanning what these folks have created, trying to meet some challenge in order learn a bit more of that story, with the tantalizing chance of actually changing it; all of them are laughing or wondering struggling through the strange, mixed-up medium.

Man, I hope they're having fun.

Posted by Anthony at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Both Lawrence Lessig and Heidi Bond seem to think that Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (NASDAQ=SBGI) are going to take a hammering due to consumer boycotts. These boycotts arising, of course, because Sinclair has decided to air a special on Kerry's involvement in Vietnam before the election.

I'm skeptical. Lessig notes that SBGI is down 10% since the announcement. This is true enough, but it's also down 50% in the last six months, and the announcement came shortly after an earnings warning. Short-term "shares fell because" analyses are fun games, but I don't give them much credence. Even Lessig notes that, "This drop is no doubt in part a calculation about how Sinclair will fair if the election goes for Kerry." It'll be interesting to watch Sinclair to see how its shares do in relation to the polls: if Kerry tanks, Sinclair may pick back up a few points.

I'm sure I ought to care one way or the other about this: either Sinclair is wickedly using its rights to the broadcast spectrum to manipulate election, and Bush's cronies at the FEC are letting him (Democratic version), or this is all a bundle of hypocrisy being griped at by folks who have no real problem with Farenheit 911 or rankly partisan newscasting using falsified documents (Republican version). [1]

Fortunately, my television reception is lousy, and trying to watch FOX involves fifteen minutes of jiggling antenae. Frankly, I can't imagine a bigger waste of my time than watching this thing, one way or the other. I somehow doubt an anti-Kerry show is going to get huge market share: imagine an hour-long SwiftBoats ad. Nor do I think the boycott's going to make a huge difference. Tempests and teacups...

[1] And before anyone starts pointing out that SBGI is purposefully broadcasting a show and CBS's memorandums thing was a "mistake," just forget it. Those were forgeries that should have been seen through in under a minute by anyone who wanted to look. Sure, you could probably only prove negligence or recklessness in court, but I'm happy to call the "error" intentional. It was dumb enough.

Posted by Anthony at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Never let it be said that the editors of the Columbia Political Review's blog suffer from a surplus of idealism. Their spin on the Mary Cheney controversy?

[I] think it's pretty clear that Kerry meant to do what he did for a specific reason, and it wasn't because he was particularly concerned about Mary Cheney. It was a "cheap...political trick," but it's working perfectly. Every time someone complains about Kerry invoking Mary Cheney, everyone is reminded that the Cheneys have a gay daughter. And every time that happens, maybe one less evangelical Christian goes out to vote. Kerry might take a hit on his likeability, but in a very real way, he might also win electoral votes. It might just be a good trade.

I have to wonder where these guys get their view of evangelical Christianity. You know those doctrines that get quoted all the time, things like "hate the sin, love the sinner"? Well, in a very real sense, a great number of evangelicals actually believe them. I know, I know, to enlightened secularists this kind of contradiction seems impossible, but then such contradictions are the very stuff of religion. [1]. In other words, many Christians act out their beliefs in real life, and vote accordingly.

So let's sort out what has to happen on the margin for Mr. Rolfe's gambit here to be a profitable manuever. We can ignore anyone for whom the issue is irrelevant, which means we're balancing essentially two groups. First, there are those who are so reflexively hateful of homosexuality that they are (a) willing to judge a parent for the sins of the child, and (b) believe that the mere existence of homosexual progeny disqualify a politician from office. (Kerry hasn't suggested, after all, that Mary Cheney actually holds substantive opinions contrary to her father's, or even George Bush's. She may, but he's certainly not gone to the length of putting words in her mouth.)

But then there's also the other group of evangelicals: those who will look at Mr. Rolfe's interpretation of Kerry's gambit and say, "Wait a second: even by our own Christian views, there's no good reason not to vote for Bush here. If Kerry is doing this to influence the evangelical vote and get us to stay home, he must be estimating that many of us are so hateful we don't understand our own religious convictions. Well, if I weren't going to the polls for Bush, I am now. And here's an extra $20 to the campaign." For Rolfe's strategy to have any positive effect for Kerry, the first group has to be larger and more influential than the second.

You know how people like to talk about "code words" in the discussion of race, gender and sexuality? Well here's a code word for you: so often when someone on the liberal side of the equation says "evangelical," they're not talking about religion. It's a code word for "hater." And given the number of evangelicals I've been fortunate to know who are anything but haters, I'm never upset when that coded usage comes back to bite the speaker on the ass.

Allawi's still alive. Tony Blair's prime minister. Let's look at evangelical turnout in November, and see if the Columbia Political Review can pull off a hat trick.

[1] See, e.g., G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press Ed. 1995). For those uneasy about a Christian bias and searching for comparative religion, just about anything Taoist, Buddhist (particularly Zen) or Hinduism might easily suffice as support here.

Posted by Anthony at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

As I mentioned earlier, I've not watched any debates this year, given that I sincerely doubt they're going to change my vote. Nonetheless, I thought this was some foolish overstatement by enthusiastic conservatives until I read the transcripts at the Committee on Presidential Debates:

KERRY: Well, let me just say quickly that I've had an extraordinary experience of watching up close and personal that transition in Russia, because I was there right after the transformation. And I was probably one of the first senators, along with Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, a former senator, go down into the KGB underneath Treblinka Square and see reams of files with names in them.

So when does this one make "Kerryisms," or some similar nonsense? Sure, everyone makes mistakes--I know I hate public speaking--but given how fond people are of quoting Bush's errors, historical or otherwise, one would expect at least some similar treatment.

UPDATE: Heidi and Ambimb point to another error by Cheney in his debate. It seems the Vice-President directed users to Factcheck.com instead of Factcheck.org. Of course, someone has set up the former so that it points towards George Soros' site.

I'll quote Heidi's observation on redirects, and then note one further point:

Now, when you buy a domain name you can choose to link your domain name, the www.name.com thing, to any number, anywhere. You can have four hundred domain names, all linking to the same number. And you don't have to own the computer that responds to that number at all.

Of course, I doubt anyone in politics today is that nice.

Posted by Anthony at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

So I'm chatting with some folks in a bar last Friday, and the conversation turns to video games. And to a man, my compatriots mention that the best feature of Star Wars: Battlefront is that you get to kill Ewoks and Gungans. Me, I've promised myself I'd buy nothing that would burn more of my time than my new copy of Chandler's The Simple Art of Murder.

I think the bit about Battlefront was the single coherent fact I learned over this weekend. Otherwise, I slept a lot and recovered from a very hectic last week. More insightful blogging may follow shortly.

Posted by Anthony at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I would like to curse Eugene Volokh. His article made me watch Jimmy Swaggart, just to see if the foolish preacher actually said something so horrifically dumb about gay marriage (about 36:00):

I'm trying to find the correct name for it . . . this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. . . . I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died.

That Swaggart said something disgusting isn't exactly news. But if even the Devil can quote Scripture, let's also point out that the Devil would quote it well. "Kill him and tell God he died." That's been tried before without much success:

9: And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

10: And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

11: And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

So suffice it to say that if Swaggart ever made it four chapters into Genesis--I'll admit, a dubious proposition--he should have some idea of what it means to fib to powers omniscient.

But then, Swaggart isn't the Devil, he's just a fool with a microphone.

Posted by Anthony at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I just wrote a rather crowing piece about the end of RatherGate: even CBS itself now states that the memos they put on air are likely fakes. Their excuses are just as ridiculous as their defenses have been:

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where-if I knew then what I know now-I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But still, it would be more gentlemanly to sit back and watch the apologies roll in than to crow from the rooftops about having correctly perceived the obvious. The various members of the Wingnuts in Pajamas brigade deserve an apology, starting from Dan Rather and proceeding on down. It appears that even wingnuts get their stories right every now and then, especially if they're wearing Pajamas. Still, no news from the Daily Kos, publisher of one of the most absurd and offensive defenses of the documents to date.

Update: Fixed the Kos link so it points to... well, Kos.

Posted by Anthony at 02:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow. I can't believe Rather had the gall to give this interview:

That was why, he said, half of the experts agreed and the other half didn’t. That supposed stalemate left nothing but the truth at the center of the documents.

"In terms of the experts, you’re going to find an equal number of experts on the authenticity arguments," he said. "I don’t think that’s going to resolve the argument. The core truth of the reporting, I think it’s already clear that it’s true. And I think as time goes along, it will become even more apparent."

Posted by Anthony at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

I just have to point this one out. Power Line, which I admit I read infrequently, has been blogging up a storm today about a 60 Minutes show purporting to give new evidence on what President Bush was doing in Alabama around about the time I was born. I'll let you read the whole thing, but the basic allegation is this: 60 Minutes presented documents, on air, that purported to be from 1971 but look like they were prepared on Microsoft Word.

Folks, this is just goddamn dumb. The mistakes--a use of a proportional font, superscript on ordinal numbers, kerning, etc--scream out 'this document is a fake,' obvious to anyone who worked in an office in that era. (For reference, there's been much blather online today about whether a typewriter might use proportional fonts. As one who learned to type on a clunky IBM Selectric in Huntsville, Alabama in the late 1980s, I can say that if such font balls existed, they were pretty bloody rare and not likely to be in a National Guard office.) But then why would Mr. Dan Rather, a man older than I am and supposedly a journalist, have fallen for this?

Well, says today's Washington Post:

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

May I propose that Mr. Rather be given a copy of another work of fiction, Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. Not only would he learn a bit about forging old documents, but he'd gain some hint of possible destinations for those who foolishly rely upon them.

Update: Only fair to note that the left-wing of the blogosphere has been doing its best to uphold the authenticity of the documents, most notably Atrios and The Talent Show. If it turns out I'm wrong about the above, you'll get a retraction from me. Nevertheless, I think there's a bundle of truly bad armchair research going on out there. Yes, there were typewriters--or more often, typesetting machines--that could do superscript thirty years ago. They certainly weren't common. The New York Times reports the latest typewriting suspect to be the IBM Selectric Composer. Still, I've only found one site that has a reproduction on a Selectric. But heck, typewriter enthusiasts are getting more hits than they ever dreamed of today.

I'll let my readers look through the comments on these entries and decide for themselves, but for the moment, I'm still in the "forged" camp. There's evidence on either side, but for my money, the preponderance sits with Powerline. The Composer was a typesetting machine, which seems a bit obscure for use to write standard memos.

Update 2: For those insane, or insomniac because of upcoming callbacks like me, you can try IBM's website for lots of information on the Selectric Composer. Including information on its typefaces and alignment issues.

Posted by Anthony at 04:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

One thing about Law Review articles: at least in theory, someone's checked the substantive facts behind every single sentence. We've gone to the sources, checked out their pedigree, and in general tried to make sure stuff stands up.

Now if only you could say that for the media. The latest "where were you in 1968" story (answer--not born yet) involves former Lt. Governor of Texas Ben Barnes. In an internet video, he's quoted as saying:

I got a young man named George W. Bush in the National Guard when I was Lt. Gov. of Texas and I’m not necessarily proud of that. But I did it. And I got a lot of other people into the National Guard because I thought that was what people should do, when you're in office you helped a lot of rich people. And I walked through the Vietnam Memorial the other day and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been because it was the worst thing that I did was that I helped a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard and I’m very sorry about that and I’m very ashamed and I apologize to you as voters of Texas.

So what's wrong with this picture? Well, I'm not the first to point this out--no one credit me for originality--but it's pretty obvious. Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes takes office in 1969. Whereas even Mother Jones is quite happy to admit--whilst making the same accusation--that young Bush enrolls on May 27, 1968--almost a year earlier.

Now, perhaps Mr. Barnes got Bush his position when he was House Speaker, as Mother Jones says. But of course, all of this has arisen because Barnes is speaking out (Quicktime) about this now, in an agonizingly personal confession. At least he's not said the event was 'seared' into his memory. Perhaps someone should have reminded the man of his own resume?

(As mentioned, I read this elsewhere--if anyone can spot the first source, I'll give a link.)

UPDATE: A keen reader writes in to remind me of another time-travelling member of the Kerry Support Network, Lewis Lapham of Harper's. You can follow the story through this Volokh thread, but the long and the short of it is that Mr. Lapham provided color commentary of the speeches at the Republican Convention several weeks before they occurred. Apparently the laws of the space-time continuum aren't what they used to be.

Posted by Anthony at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I apologize for the break here at TYoH. There will be a Letter to Wormwood tomorrow about law school interviewing, of sorts: for once I have neither law review work or interviewing, and a brief space to breathe.

Instead, I'll leave you with a bit of political blather from NARAL: The Crawford Wives. Because, you know, if you're a woman and you support George Bush, you're obviously a robot. No way you could have made up your mind to disagree with NARAL. (I'm not making that up. The ad-copy from the post-trailer page: "Yet, they unquestioningly support President Bush even as he robs women of the right to make private decisions about their personal lives." Unquestioningly. I wonder how they know that these women never questioned Bush, never thought for themselves.)

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend in England who was complaining about the lack of all-woman shortlists in the Conservative Party. When it was pointed out that completely without the aid of such lists, the Conservatives had managed to not only have a woman as Party Leader, my friend just chuckled and said, "Oh, sure, but she wasn't really a woman."

There's a T-Shirt in this somewhere for conservatives everywhere. Something like, "Become a Republican Woman: either we'll keep you barefoot and pregnant, or make you our leader and liberals will pretend you have no ovaries." But a bit snappier.

And in other news, the BBC reports that 2 million pages of pornography were accessed by the Department of Work and Pensions over eight months. I leave the one-liners in more capable hands: sometimes the UK government just makes it too easy.

Posted by Anthony at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Since it's rare that I write to agree with anything at Crescat Sententia or Amber Taylor, it's worth noting when we're in perfect concord. In this case, she's got it right.

How to help stem the tide of unrealistic imagery? How to teach young people what women look like?

The answer may be more field trips.

Museums provide a multitude of images of women: the models used by artists of previous generations had no access to aerobics classes, weigh lifting machines, breast implants, or diet pills. If they were poor enough that they were willing to pose nude, any visible protruding bones could be attributed to hunger, not fashion. However, portrait after portrait places real women in the poses of goddesses, nymphs, personifications of emotion and virtue. While modern models could be mistaken for Kouros boys, albeit with perfect hemispherical breasts eternally lifted, the women you find in an art gallery are endowed with soft, undulating curves of hip and thigh, full buttocks that put J. Lo to shame, and breasts that have a distinctly fleshy heft.

Of course, a cynic might say I'm willing to agree so vociferously only because (a) it allows me to point out that Amber neglects statuary as a source of knowledge, to the exclusion of painting, and (b) that this means she has little call to use the magnificent word "callipygian." (The word, although now given broader usage, was so far as I know used mostly to refer to statuary, particularly the Callipygian Venus. Sorry, I couldn't find a link to the original, which seems to be in Naples.)

I just like the word, and wish it would see a resurgence.

Posted by Anthony at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (7)

I've been meaning to comment on the ongoing debate between The Fool, Chris Geidner, and Irishlaw with regards to New Jersey governor McGreevey's resignation. I haven't had time, and don't really now. But I find myself drawn to the rather irrational lengths to which particularly Chris will go in order to defend a man who is at the very least an adulterer. If I were looking for a standard-bearer for my cause, I'd hope to find one who could hold it a bit higher.

Writing about adultery is difficult. Whether one is gay or straight, adultery is a very human, very common sin. Desire's chains have bound the heart at least as long as poetry, and brought low the most noble of souls of both history and literature. (Guinevere, anyone? Or even Lancelot, though he was not technically an adulterer.) It is hard to be too condemning: there but for the grace of God go I, after all.

Nonetheless, understanding is one thing. Excusing is quite another. And Chris, in one of his normal diatribes, declares that he is doing nothing of the sort, following such a declaration with paragraphs of mitigation:

I do not at all think his adultery can be written off, however, as the same as a heterosexual man cheating on his heterosexual wife with another heterosexual woman. This is not because gay relationships are somehow different, but rather that the reasons -- as many former spouses of gay people could discuss -- why a closeted gay man cheats on his wife are different.

Ahem. Hogwash. The reason that a homosexual man commits adultery is the same reason that a heterosexual commits it: he wishes to sleep with a person who is not his wife. That desire, for whatever reason, is all that is necessary, and excursions into the heart of the adulterer are not only fruitless--I certainly cannot speak for those feelings--but irrelevant. True, Chris will dress this up in a lot of language about "truth" and who McGreevey "really is," but these are merely exercises in begging the question.

And the sad bit is that this is hogwash of a sort which infantilizes homosexuals. A bit later, Chris continues:

Rather than writing about honesty, Tony writes about a man and "his particular sexual inclinations." This is a demeaning statement. He's gay. We're not talking about some fetish he has or some annoyance with the children that puts on damper on some wild sexual romps. . . . Tony, however, would erase all that and diminish it to a fetish. He writes that "whatever his particular sexual inclinations, he made a promise and he [should] stick with it because there's children involved." Tony feels the best way to raise children is by lying to them in order to make it "easier" for them.

Well, first, I should point out that anyone looking for parenting advice from this site or any comment I've made anywhere on the web should seek elsewhere: my total experience with children extends to one rather awkward evening baby-sitting which convinced me to learn computing as an alternative method of teenage employment. I know nothing of the best way to raise children, nor did I purport to do so: I leave that to experts, which apparently includes Mr. Geidner.

Nevertheless, whatever Mr. Geidner's parenting skills, he lives in a world ontologically impoverished, a world in which no space exists between a fetish and a fundamental truth. As in so many cases, his argument rests upon the assumption that "McGreevey is gay" describes some fundamental truth about the man beyond the fact that he has desires and acts upon them. As I've argued before, this confusion is useful because it allows one to make comparisons between sexuality and truly immutable characteristics like sex and gender.

Homosexuality is not a fetish, nor would I ever describe it as such. Like any expression of desire, it's a complex mix of emotion and longing, one made yet more difficult by cultural disapproval. Concession can be made to all of this without ever running past the most salient of convictions: that man is a creature who may--and should--control his desires, and be held responsible for his actions when he fails to do so.

This is the crux of the argument between IrishLaw, a devout Catholic on the one hand, and Chris and the Fool on the other. She's stated the obvious facts: he was married, he made a vow, and whatever his reasons, passions, predilictions, or subsequent desires he should live with the consequences of it. As she points out: "Would the Times have credited the gov with 'uncommon grace and dignity' if this were a plain ol' sex, fundraising and dirty politics scandal?" The point is not who he wishes to sleep with, but that he's married. As many a wag has observed, sex and marriage often have little to do with one another.

(And yet the Fool misreads IrishLaw almost completely. [1] "Thus, she seems to recognize a difference between McGreevey' situation and "plain ol' sex". It doesn't make much sense to recognize different degrees of infidelity if their is no difference in their application." But of course, she's done anything but. She's recognized that other people believe there is a difference, not at all the same thing.)

Chris (and to a lesser extent the Fool) don't wish to excuse him for what he's done, but to praise his 'honesty.' First of all, honesty when one is backed into a corner is not honesty at all: it's merely damage control. But leaving that aside, they're both willing to give McGreevey a pass on adultery because, if I may quote another philanderer of some note, "It is beyond my control." [2] Marriage, you see, was "a promise that was at odds with [McGreevey's] very being" (Chris) and homosexuality is "an extenuating circumstance." (Fool)

The sad bit is that if one really wants to speak about equality, this talk doesn't help. Chris, a tireless advocate for homosexual marriage, is willing to take the bonds of marriage less seriously simply by taking homosexuality too seriously: what he calls a matter of the very core is--if you look at it another way, something "beyond his control." On the other hand, IrishLaw is merely stating that marriage is a serious commitment, and whatever the 'extenuating circumstances' might be, they do not allow for the breaking of a solemn oath, upon which a family has been built. The truth is that McGreevey is married, and that truth occasionally requires sacrifice. To Chris, this is a lie: homosexuality is the all-pervading truth, and all else is shades of meaning of varying degree.

If anything is "demeaning," that is. Homosexuals, whatever their desires, are no less moral actors than anyone else. If a man enters into a marriage--even if it is against his own sexual urges--he's made a promise to another. Despite homosexuality, he has no greater excuse for infidelity than the man who marries a woman other than his love for the sake of family; or the man who discovers his soul-mate ten years after entering a loveless marriage; or even a woman cut from the fabric of a Bovary. To say this is not to denegrate homosexuality as a fetish. To say otherwise is to treat desire as an object of idolatry.

(Before anyone gets bent out of shape about the title, it's a reference to C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, which makes a similar argument about responsibility outside of this context.)

[1]: May I just say that this is one reason I dislike anonymity among law bloggers? Writing "Chris says Tony believes X" is one thing; writing "the Fool misreads IrishLaw completely" lends the entire venture the air of some fantasy roleplaying game, and simply sounds inelegant.

[2]: Dangerous Liasons, John Malkovitch as Valmont. Valmont is ending things with an innocent married woman he's used and seduced, and claiming that his change of affection is not something for which he can be held responsible. Frankly, one of the most horribly rakish things ever said in a movie.

Posted by Anthony at 01:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (3)

Here's a question for the audio-technophiles out there. I'd like a copy of Jennifer Warnes' cover of Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat. Call it a curiousity, or completeness for completeness' sake: I've got most of the other covers. The trouble is, I don't want to pay Amazon.com $25 for the privilege. Besides, while I'm curious about the one track, I'm not a big fan of Warnes: I don't need the other eight, particularly since I was never fond of Bird on a Wire.

So I've been to ITunes, and I've wandered over to MusicMatch's store, and gotten no joy: the first is blind to the whole album, the second teasingly lists it, but doesn't make it available for download. Maybe Sony's new Connect service has it, but I don't want to download a third piece of music download software just for the chance to find out.

Is there some service out there that lets me scan a database of who has which tracks, in order to determine which service I should purchase from? I mean, I know I can get the thing illegally without much fuss, but presuming I'd like to actually pay someone for the single track, is there an easy way to do it?

Posted by Anthony at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While I'm on the subject of passion: some of you will remember that I criticized Will Baude for equating a working knowledge of Hayek with skill in the bedroom. Baude has sensibly backed away from his original contention, mainly through a lot of 'you can't say that's what I said' half-measures, but some others have been willing press the particular point that libertarian women are the new Shullamites [1], in particular Amber Taylor:

On topic, can anyone convincingly argue that the ladies of Heritage have as much fun as the Cato crew? I've met people who work at conservative DC think tanks, and the gals who are "waiting for marriage" alone bring down the passion index before we even consider and overall quantity & quality ranking. Even moderate "for thee but not for me" conservatives hurt them in this contest. I can't speak to the passion of left wing ladies in DC, but find Spencer's argument persuasive if not entirely convincing.

Give me an ideology that doesn't try to legislate the bedroom AND isn't dampered by political correctness's wet blanket anyday.

I thought of giving this line of argument the thorough shellacking it deserves, but realized that I'd been beaten to the punch by C. S. Lewis and his ever-useful Screwtape, speaking to the Tempter's Training College:

Your dreaded Principal has included in a speech full of points something like an apology for the banquet which he has set before us. Well, gentledevils, no one blames him. But it would be in vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality. Not all the most skillful cookery of our tormentors could make them better than insipid....

Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't. They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their virility or their "normalcy," or even because they had nothing else to do. Frankly, to me who have tasted Messalina and Cassanova, they were nauseating.

Mere experience with the libertine does not correspond to passion, nor does a knowledge or respect for religion and its strictures remove the passion from one's soul. One would have thought that was obvious, especially for anyone who's read the aforementioned Song of Songs. Of course, that's one of the things that drove me away from libertarianism in the first place: it would be out of place for any gentleman to talk of their libertarian partner's skills in the bedroom, but many of my own have displayed a casual disregard for religious sentiment, a disregard that I've rarely found to be based in much actual knowledge of the subject.

UPDATE: A few links fixed/added, and some typos corrected. And, FWIW, deleted some excess trackbacks.

UPDATE II: Originally the second link above read "a working knowledge of Edmund Burke. As many pointed out (see comments, and I got some emails, and Baude mentions it--see Trackbacks), Burke wasn't a Libertarian. For some reason, the brain said 'Hayek' (who at least I consider Libertarian) and the fingers typed 'Burke.' My mistake.

[1]: As I recall, the Shullamite is the female character in the Song of Songs, and I've seen the name used to refer to the purported authoress. One would think she qualifies for a passionate woman. If I've used it incorrectly here, please excuse me, and corrections are welcome in the comments.

[2]: Of course, I'd not make any statements as to who's actually having more sex, as opposed to speaking of it more, but let's assume for the sake of argument that the Liber(tine/tarian) Lobby has data not at my disposal.

Posted by Anthony at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (5)

Will Baude agrees that his experience matches Rad