Of Mice and Men... and dogs.

"I'm looking for a broken dog..."

“These Brats Bust Unions!”

The anti-Scott Walker sticker campaign.

“You don’t have to be in Madison or NYC to participate!!... You can be anywhere where there are stores. Here’s the deal: the struggle in Wisconsin is not over. It has just changed course. One of the current tactics is a boycott of the companies that donated to the Scott Walker campaign last year. No matter where we live, we can support Wisconsinites, spread the word about the boycott, and let these companies know that we are taking action against them.”

So... vandalism is the tactic. Another "peaceful" protest. If you don't like this political attack on grocery stores, buy the products the protesters have targeted. Johnsonville Brats. You know you need toilet paper: Get Angel Soft toilet paper for your angel-soft ass.  Sargento Cheese and Coors beer — the menu suggests itself.

Meanwhile, there's this "Post-It Campaign" that Instapundit is pushing, which I never thought was cute. (Meade can verify that when I heard about it, I called it "littering" and expressed contempt for it.) "Ten Rules for Liberty Guerrillas." Ugh.

How about some respect for the work of people who run small businesses? Hang your scrappy signs on your own damned property.

Man, I have seen too many signs this year!


(Date of photo: February 25, 2011.)

"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a certain sense, for many Catholics he’s already a saint, even without beatification and, let’s be honest, even without a miracle."

ADDED: Longer video here.

Birtherism and racism.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury talk it out. The diavlog begins with McWhorter asserting that birtherism is not about race:

"Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron."

"Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of us are merely stunned."

Donald Trump, redefining presidential, sublimely entertaining, or...

... fucking stupid?

During a 30-minute stump speech focused mostly on foreign affairs, Trump blasted Obama's handling of Libya, Iraq, China and Afghanistan, and in one of his many curse-bombs, he lamented the nation's focus on building schools in war-torn Iraq, while neglecting education in the United States.

"In the meantime we can't get a f---ing school in Brooklyn," he said.

He also cursed the spike in gas prices: "We have nobody in Washington that sits back and said, you're not going to raise that f---ing price."

Trump even dropped what's considered the most offensive f-bomb when he promised to use swear words while negotiating with China.

"Listen you mother f---ers, we're going to tax you 25 percent," he said.

Trump also sprinkled in a number of insults directed toward the nation's leaders.

"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people," he said. "It's just very, very sad."

He knows what he's doing, but do we?

ADDED: It looks and sounds like this:



The audience loved it.

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devils."

Russell's film was adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting's follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold....

Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles.... Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," [says Russell's wife  Lisi Tribble].

Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."

I had a list of my 5 favorite films that remained the same 5 films for quite a few years, and "The Devils" on the list. What was the rest of the list? Can I remember? "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner With Andre," "Mahler," and "It's a Gift." I have had the same 11 films on my Blogger profile list for a long time, maybe going all the way back to 2004. 3 of my old 5 favorites are still on the list. The 2 that are not are Ken Russell films. Ken Russell was really important back in the 1970s and 80s, and I've forgotten about him in the last 20 years. I wonder what sort of impression "The Devils" would make on me now. Or "Mahler." Or all those other fabulous Ken Russell movies we submerged ourselves in, in the isolation chamber of the movie theater.

"I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The wedding is accomplished.

The bride wore a dress that had been designed by a designer.

Mr. Bean was there.

“Do you want to wait this market out in your current house or do you want to wait it out in your next house?”

Are you irrationally loss averse?

[M]ost of us wildly overestimate the benefits of waiting. We convince ourselves that avoiding a potential future loss is the same as saving money. We underestimate the risks that we’ll face by waiting another year. And we totally ignore the real, measurable costs of staying in a home that’s too big or too small or poorly located....

Lots of detail at the link. Here's an analogy:

Overall, it’s helpful to think of house prices as a river that flows forward and, on very rare occasions, backward. It’s natural for us to prefer to jump from one raft to the next when the river is moving forward—that is, when prices are rising, not falling. But even when the river is flowing backward, jumping rafts midstream can make sense. When the river is flowing backward, we tend to fixate on the speed of the next raft relative to the stationary riverbank (e.g., “My next home is going to fall 5% in value after I buy it”). We should focus instead on the speed of the two rafts relative to each other (e.g., “Both homes are going to fall 5% in value”).

Thus, "only first-time buyers face a substantial risk when buying in a declining market."

"[T]he courts have no obligation to entertain pure speculation and conjecture."

Said the Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, threatening sanctions against the plaintiffs' lawyer:

[T]he appeals court said, the plaintiff advanced inconsistent theories, including that the defendants may have ordered explosives to be planted in the Pentagon, may have hired Muslims extremists to carry out the attacks, may have used Muslims as dupes or patsies, or may have fired a missile into the Pentagon. Nor did the plaintiff cite any facts to support a conspiracy among the defendants, according to the opinion....

The lawyer, William Veale, said the judges were "dishonest" and "didn’t mention half of what we presented to them in the complaint. They simply disregarded mountains of evidence.”

Here's the opinion (PDF):

While, as a general matter, Gallop or any other plaintiff certainly may allege that the most senior members of the United States government conspired to commit acts of terrorism against the Untied States, the courts have no obligation to entertain pure speculation and conjecture.

The Untied States? Perhaps that's another clue for your imaginary mountain range, Mr. Veale.

Indeed, in attempting to marshal a series of unsubstantiated and inconsistent allegations in order to explain why American Airlines Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon, the complaint utterly fails to set forth a consistent, much less plausible, theory for what actually happened that morning in Arlington, Virginia. See, e.g., Complaint & 3 (alleging that defendants may have caused “high explosive charges to be detonated inside the Pentagon”); & 21 (alleging that defendants “may have employed Muslim extremists to carry out suicide attacks; or . . . may have used Muslim extremists as dupes or patsies”); id. (alleging that “four planes” were in fact hijacked on the morning of September 11); & 33 (alleging that “[i]f Flight 77, or a substitute, did swoop low over the [Pentagon], to create the false impression of a suicide attack, it was then flown away by its pilot, or remote control, and apparently crashed somewhere else”); & 40(d)(3) (alleging that apart from Flight 77 “a different, additional, flying object . . . hit the Pentagon”); & 43 (alleging that there “may have been a missile strike, perhaps penetrating through to the back wall, which helped collapse the section that fell in, possibly augmented by explosives placed inside”).

"Test Flags Babies With Autism, But Also Feeds False Alarms."

It's a 5-minute questionnaire, to be answered by the parents of 1-year-olds. The point would be to begin treatments earlier, when they might be more effective. I'm not sure what the treatments are... but perhaps there are exercises that could beneficially be done with all babies, so that it would not be crucial to know early on if a child is autistic.

"What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."

The NYT interviews, Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted in Egypt on February 11th:

She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands”.... She estimated that the attack lasted for about 40 minutes and involved 200 to 300 men....

As the cameraman, Richard Butler, was swapping out a battery, Egyptian colleagues who were accompanying the camera crew heard men nearby talking about wanting to take Ms. Logan’s pants off. She said: “Our local people with us said, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here.’ That was literally the moment the mob set on me.”

And from Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News:

Mr. Butler, Ms. Logan’s producer, Max McClellan, and two locally hired drivers were “helpless... because the mob was just so powerful.” A bodyguard who had been hired to accompany the team was able to stay with Ms. Logan for a brief period of time.

... Ms. Logan “described how her hand was sore for days after — and then she realized it was from holding on so tight” to the bodyguard’s hand.

From the CBS interview with Logan:

"There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying... I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever..."

She says that to try to survive, she thought about her children, and when she saw them again: "I felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn't deserve...because I did that to them. I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them."

"I don't know how anyone survived."

"We're used to tornadoes here in Tuscaloosa. It's part of growing up. But when you look at the path of destruction that's likely 5 to 7 miles long in an area half a mile to a mile wide ... it's an amazing scene. There's parts of the city I don't recognize, and that's someone that's lived here his entire life."

Effort to recall Wisconsin State Senator Mark Miller ends... in a somewhat strange way.

There's a local effort to collect signatures, which came up little short. Those signatures could have been merged with signatures collected by a Utah-based group, but the leader of the local effort is suspicious of the leader of the Utah group based on "troubling news articles and blog posts" that raise questions about "his integrity and values": "We’ve gone out of our way to run our campaign above board and with integrity. I don’t want to sully our reputation.”

That sounds like a good decision.  Meanwhile, the signatures have been filed for 8 recall campaigns — against 5 Republicans and 3 Democrats.

Justice Stevens: "that was the day I decided to resign... I learned giving that talk that I had a speech problem."

"That talk" = the announcement of his dissenting opinion in Citizens United, which you can listen to here.

From an interview published today in The Atlantic.

Stevens said he retired because, while he still loved the job of judging, he had no desire to linger beyond his physical prime. He had witnessed the final years on the bench of [William O.] Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and others who should have retired earlier for health reasons. A few years ago, he secretly asked Associate Justice David Souter to tell him when it was time for him to go. But Souter left first, in 2009.

"When he retired, I knew I didn't have any safety valve anymore."

The suggestion, as I read it, is that Stevens had to judge himself strictly because he didn't have Souter to reassure him that the time to go had not yet arrived. (How can you tell if you've lost your mental powers?)

Why Souter was a unique confidante, the interviewer did not ask.

Rush Limbaugh talks about Critical Legal Studies... and Obama's legal education at Harvard.

From yesterday's show:

[Obama] attended Harvard Law School at the height of something that it was promoting, education technique or a theory.  It was called critical legal studies.  Critical legal studies was in its ascendancy at Harvard Law when Obama was there.  You can look it up.  Just Google critical legal studies.  It is out and out Marxism. 

In a nutshell, critical legal studies claims that law is just politics by other means.  It is a way for the rich to keep the poor working man down and deny him opportunities for prosperity.  That is what Obama was taught at Harvard and based on what he believes and is doing it looks to me like he probably did get good grades.  Look it up if you want.  Critical legal studies.  Law is just politics by other means.  You can even turn it around.  Politics is just law by other means.

"And yeah, I hear that she wants to now engage in more multidimensional storytelling."

"Versus, I guess, just the straight-on reading-into-that-teleprompter-screen storytelling. So more power to her. I wish her well with her multidimensional storytelling."

Sarah Palin mocks her nemesis Katie Couric.

Multidimensional storytelling is an expression that lends itself to comic riffing. Palin's jab isn't particularly clever. It's mainly just the sarcastic repeating of Couric's own term. How did the term "storytelling" catch on over the last quarter century as a positive way to talk about narration of real-world events? If I remember correctly, before about 1980, the term "storytelling" mainly referred to fiction or lying.

There was a real fad in the legal academy for writing and pontificating about "telling stories" about this or that aspect of law, and it was meant in a positive way. I hate to pick on an individual lawprof, but here's an example of what I'm talking about from a recent law review article:

Narratives matter, place matters, and care's embrace of storytelling situates law in a more robust dialogue on the allocation of rights to controlling our surroundings.

Like most law review article sentences, it has a footnote:

"Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out neighborhoods across a wide swath of the South..."

"... killing at least 201 people in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years... Alabama's state emergency management agency said it had confirmed 131 deaths, while there were 32 in Mississippi, 16 in Tennessee, 13 in Georgia, eight in Virginia and one in Kentucky."

Were you in the path of the storms?

Will no one shed a tear for Jerome Corsi?

Corsi wrote the much promoted book: "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #36 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > One-L
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Government
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > Constitutional Law

#1 in Constitutional Law? Does that hurt, o fellow conlawprofs? Check out the rest of the list? How far down do you have to go before you see a book on constitutional law that you respect? But anyway... who can pity Corsi? He got his #1 book. But no, the book won't be released until May 17, so everyone who's put in an order for the book, everyone who made that book #1, should go right into their Amazon account and delete the book. Or will the publisher find a way to withdraw it and redo it so that it becomes super-timely? Some new chapter espousing some trumped up conspiracy theory about the birth certificate and its release.

James Taranto got me thinking about Corsi:

Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President" has an official release date of May 17. Corsi must be wishing he'd pushed the date up to yesterday...

Presumably Obama could have made this request [Hawaii's Department of Health] at any time, so why now?...

It's an amusing thought if an idle one that perhaps Obama did this just to stick it to Corsi, whose book reportedly hit No. 1 on Amazon after Drudge promoted it. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, is probably smiling. After all, Corsi was co-author, with John O'Neill, of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

But Kerry really was unfit for command, whereas contrary to Corsi's new book, Obama, fit or not, is legally qualified to be president. "We don't have time for such silliness," Obama said at his briefing today. Then, as John Podhoretz notes, the president "flew off to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show."

The NYT calls the "birther" issue "a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones."

The editors want to make sure you see the issue as racial:

[T]he birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race....

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Inconceivable? Really?

There was a price to the party for keeping the issue alive; inevitably, it was picked up by a cartoon candidate, Donald Trump, who rode birtherism directly to the prime-time promontories of cable TV. The Republican establishment began to wince as it became increasingly tied to Mr. Trump’s flirtations with racial provocation, and Karl Rove told him to knock it off.

Oh! The evil Karl Rove is back... seemingly as a measure of how much more evil the birthers are.

"... Obama's political handlers decided to cauterize The Donald sideshow with a nifty piece of political choreography..."

"...releasing the 'long-form' birth certificate the very day Trump was wooing voters in New Hampshire."

Says The Daily News, crediting Obama with brilliant timing. Given the pro-Obama slant to the article, the poll in the sidebar over there has 74% of poll-takers saying the "birther" controversy is not over. Screen cap, just now:

At the Sunset Café...

... you can keep your spirits up.

"Certainly my defense of flogging is more thought experiment than policy proposal."

"I do not expect to see flogging reinstated any time soon. And deep down, I wouldn't want to see it. And yet, in the course of writing what is, at its core, a quaintly retro abolish-prison book, I've come to see the benefits of wrapping a liberal argument in a conservative facade. If the notion of tying people to a rack and caning them on their behinds à la Singapore disturbs you, if it takes contemplating whipping to wake you up and to see prison for what it is, so be it! The passive moral high ground has gotten us nowhere."

Says Peter Moskos, who's written a book called "In Defense of Flogging."

What liberal arguments wrapped in a conservative facade have you seen lately? Is it also sometimes efficacious to wrap a conservative argument in a liberal facade? Examples, please.

"When I kick the bucket... which can't be too long from now. I think I'm getting out just in time."

"Watching the news, everything seems to be in disorder. Everybody seems to be unhappy. We've lost the knack of living in the world with the sensation of safety.... I wonder why people still have children. I mean, why put kids in the world when the world is so insecure? This is how old people rationalize their death. You get a little crotchety with the world."

Said Maurice Sendak. (Via A&L Daily.)

What if you knew you would live for another 100 or 200 years? How would you prepare? Would you work on your survivalist skills? Would you acquire real estate in the far north?

The 20 "most useless" college degrees.

According to The Daily Beast. #1 is, ironically, journalism.

Actually, I think a lot of these degrees look damned useful, and I would scratch this post* — but the photo at #13 (Art History) is worth the clicking.
_______

*Sounds like something a cat would do!

David Foster Wallace's marginalia-filled self-help books.

Maria Bustillos got access and reports in great detail.

That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise to me, as I mentioned earlier. But later I talked with my very old friend, S., who went into recovery almost exactly when Wallace did. S. explained that John Bradshaw was all the rage in AA circles at that time. (Bradshaw is the guy who popularized the idea of the "inner child" in the '90s, and he had a TV show on PBS that was hugely popular.)...

A highlighted passage in Bradshaw On: The Family:

Thought Disorders:
You are always reading about your problems, learning why you are the way you are.
You are numb
You control your emotions and feel shame when you can't
You gauge your behavior by how it looks–by the image you believe you're making.

Lots more at the linked piece, which reads a bit too much like the author's raw notes. The extensive thing ends with this, a quiz Wallace gave to students:

WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:

Foreign
Big
Diminutive
Incomprehensible
Untyped
Pulchritude
S-less
Unwritten
Indefinable
Misspelled
Vulgar
High-class
Invisible
Unvowelled
Obscene

Bustillos offers her answer: "My only stab at a guess is that these are words that can be used to describe writing itself, though I feel like 'pulchritude' is kind of wrong, that way. I would love to hear other ideas." No way she'd win the lunch! Isn't it obvious that Wallace was offering up an inkblot to open up the writer's minds? He could then pick the person who'd be most amusing to talk to for an hour. If you just want a correct answer, it's: They're all adjectives. But who wants to eat lunch with someone who'd say that?

ADDED: As several commenters point out, "pulchritude" is a noun. I need to be more careful. At lunch, I would spill the iced tea.

"The SaVE Act implicitly assumes the guilt of students accused of sexual violence or stalking and ensures that guilt is fairly easy to establish."

Writes Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic:

It requires schools to employ the lowest possible standard of proof -- a preponderance of evidence -- in disciplinary hearings....

Violence prevention programs mandated by the SaVE Act are almost as worrying as the mandatory disciplinary proceedings. Schools must conduct prevention and awareness programs for all new students and employees. In addition to providing relatively objective information about reporting, protective measures, and disciplinary procedures, administrators must lay down the law on highly subjective matters, like "the elements of healthy relationships" and "bystander intervention"  -- the "safe and positive options" open to someone who perceives a risk of violence or stalking.

Prevention programs must also include a "definition of consent in reference to sexual activity," a requirement reminiscent of the notorious, unself-consciously absurd sexual consent guidelines issued by the late Antioch College in the 1990s. Its detailed prescription for consensual sex included these mandates: "The person(s) who initiate(s) the sexual activity is responsible for asking for consent. The person(s) who are asked are responsible for verbally responding. Each new level of sexual activity requires consent."

Policies like these are easily mocked, but there's nothing funny about the prospect of enforcing them with little regard for due process.

"The White House released President Obama's original birth certificate Wednesday."

"The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States."

Trump gets results. So... is there anything surprising on it to suggest why this controversy wasn't nipped in the bud?

ADDED: See it and marvel!!!

AND: So it says "Certificate of Live Birth" at the top. Is this still the "short form" and not the "long form" that the "birthers" say they want?

ALSO: This is — according to the NYT — the "long form."

“Over the last two and a half years, I have watched with bemusement,” [Obama] said in brief remarks. “I’ve been puzzled by the degree to which this thing just kept on going.”

Mr. Obama said there would be a “segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.” But he said that he was “speaking to the vast majority of the American people as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”

Extra points to Obama for correct use of (a form of) the frequently misused word "bemused."

AND: Let me answer my own question. I'd say, the reason Obama did not release the long-form birth certificate before is that he thought it was to his advantage to allow other people to look bad or crazy in one way or another by going on in the birtherist mode. But there was a tipping point, as Trump got traction and polls showed huge numbers of Americans entertaining doubts. So, it was all political strategy. You could criticize Obama for wasting our time by not just releasing the damned thing earlier. But he could have thought it was demeaning to have to do this, so I'm inclined to give him a pass.

"So heavy was the defense of corporate expression in the opening stages of the argument in Sorrell v. IMS Health... that the lawyer for Vermont... obviously had to continue her argument under siege."

"Only later did it seem that some of the Justices wanted to provide some leeway for states to regulate data-mining that threatened to invade privacy, perhaps by crafting a less far-reaching final decision...."

"Without Colonel Qaddafi, she predicted, illegal immigrants from Africa would pour into Europe..."

"... Islamic radicals would establish a base on the Mediterranean’s shores, and Libyan tribes would turn their guns on one another."

She = Qaddafi's daughter, Aisha el-Qaddafi, who did an interview with the NYT.

She presents this critique of democracy:

In an election where one candidate won with 50 percent of the vote and another lost with 48 percent, she asked, “Do you call this democracy? Just this one vote? What happened to the 48 percent who said ‘no’?”