Author Archive

Seminole truck stop.
Bought coffee, didn’t like vibe.
Got out of there fast.

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Financial experts:
Often wrong, never in doubt.
Caveat emptor.

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Your probiotic
Killed my antibiotic!
Ha ha, just kidding.

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Chinese scraper sites
Steal copyrighted photos.
Nothing you can do.

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Jeff Carter is raising money to benefit the National World War II Museum, a worthy cause.

Here’s the link to Jeff’s GoFundMe page.

That’s what a friend of mine said about the guys who just pumped out her septic tank. It’s an important job. They did it well. They have high standards and a good attitude. We need more of all of this.

Advanced trial techniques for defense attorneys.
 

Conrad Black:

Beneath the façade of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney and most of Hollywood’s production before it was taken over by the limousine left, the United States is a jungle, and that is its strength and its weakness. It assures an immensely competitive Darwinian society in constant fermentation with high levels of achievement in practically every field, but it also causes inordinately large numbers of people to be ground to powder. The land of opportunity is the place where anyone can accomplish almost anything, but there is a threadbare safety net and more than 30 million people live in poverty. It has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people as other large, prosperous democracies, including Canada. And like all jungles, it is run, even if from a little behind the scenes, by the human equivalent of 30-foot constricting snakes and 700-pound cats. Trump’s offence, and his strength, is that he doesn’t make much effort to disguise the fact that he is a fierce, tough and often ruthless alumnus of the very tough schools of American capitalism, entertainment and politics.

Trump is a man of his times. It’s sad that the times are such that only a Trump can promote America’s interests successfully, but that’s reality as recognized by a plurality of voters. Trump, unlike most elected Republicans in national office, gets results and that’s what counts. The media clerics will always misrepresent what’s going on, not only because of their partisan bias but because they deal in words and Trump is a man of action. Trump doesn’t play their game and they are unwilling or unable to understand what he does. Ordinary voters are probably more clear-headed.

TACOMA (AP) – Ever the watchdog and vigilant guardian of printed truth on the internet, legendary fact-checking site Snopes.com has discovered and reported yet another gross inaccuracy coming from the deservedly-maligned and completely untrustworthy Trump administration. This time, President Trump has followed up his “#SharpieGate” assertion that Alabama could’ve been hit by a hurricane with an even less justifiable weather-related claim – that “the sky is blue”. Rigorous investigation by Snopes concludes that this questionable Trump assertion is “mostly false.”

Read the rest.

Satire, truth – or both?

… Foremost on the front burner is an attempt by the Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. A fiscal review by the Senate Budget Committee, however, showed that doing so would make human labor costs so prohibitive that all human workers would quickly be replaced by AI software, self-serve kiosks, or those creepy headless Boston Dynamics robots. As companies could no longer afford to pay people $120 to not do a lick of work on the first Monday in September, “Labor Day” would have to be changed to “Robot Labor Day,” and the focus would switch to celebrating how our robot friends keep companies in business, rather than how minimum wages and unions almost destroyed them.

Read the entire post.

Satire, like skateboarding, is not a crime – yet.

Interesting observations:

On August 18, 2019, on Conlawprof, Professor BBB wrote:
 

Your note reveals a common misunderstanding of the predictive models. First, the models tend to under-predict. That is, the observed macro-effects exceed what the models predict. The models and reports also tend to under predict global temperatures. (The IPCC noted that “the [observed] level of warming in 2017 was 0.15°C–0.35°C higher than [predicted] average warming over the 30-year period 1988–2017.”) [citing: ]

 
I note that Professor BBB adds the word “predicted”. It is not in the original quotation. I checked the original quotation in IPCC5, and it struck me—generalist though I am—that he had inadvertently inverted the meaning of the quoted material. But not being expert, and realizing that different minds might reasonably disagree about such things, I promptly wrote my friends at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Secretariat…

Seth links to a paper he wrote whose abstract includes this passage:

Legal academics and the public are fascinated by both constitutional text and the processes by which it is interpreted. The precise role for legal academics in the interpretation of such charters is controverted. Doctrine and case law as established by the courts remain the core of academic legal discourse. Case law is, after all, the object about which doctrine is based, built, and extended. But the interpretation of constitutional text through case law comes with costs — it seems to lack democratic legitimacy, and where unconnected to text and history, it has a tendency to fence out (even the well-educated) the public. On the other hand, when legal academics shift to text and history, their work gains populist credentials, but, at that point, the legal academic risks his privileged position. For the legal academic has no monopoly, or even highly developed expertise, with regard to textual exegesis or the best use of historical materials…

Substitute “scientists” for “legal academics”, and “climate data” for “text and history”, and there might be some kind of parallel here.

Don’t give them ideas:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he was “excited” about the rollout of the new feature.
 
“For at least 2 years now, maybe even longer, America has been faced with the tragedy of mass shootings,” said Dorsey. “While some people waste time considering the feelings of the victims and their families, others do the smart thing and start offering solutions to the problem. Now, the only solution that would have any effect – at least according to all the angry tweets I’ve read on the topic – is a complete ban on assault rifles. The problem is, not everyone is doing all they can to spread that message – like those ‘why don’t we discuss this calmly and study our options’ morons.”

UPDATE: This is satire.

From this helpful summary of recent trends in US gun laws at Ammo.com:

After a wave of mass shootings in 2017 and 2018, one of the most fashionable pushes for gun control was the rise of so-called “red flag” laws, or Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs).
 
[. . .]
 
Red flag laws enable law enforcement to confiscate firearms from an individual who is considered a threat to themselves or others. However, these confiscatory actions can be taken based on simple allegations. An accusation from a family member, friend, or associate is enough of a justification for law enforcement officers to seize an individual’s firearms.
 
Potential for due process violations has emerged since red flag laws started gaining traction. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, who views the Second Amendment as a collective right as opposed to an individual right, has expressed concern about how red flags will essentially create Minority Report-like scenarios in America. Individuals could see their rights stripped just based on speculation on the part of petitioners and a judge.
 
Subsequently, the accused are compelled to take their accusers to court, even though the accused has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. To make matters worse, the defendant could have their weapons seized without even a hearing before a judge. Months could go by before a gun owner wins back his gun rights in court.

It seems likely that govt officials will use red flag laws to harass unpopular people. It seems likely that red flag laws will have perverse unintended consequences such as ex-girlfriend empowerment. Red flag laws will be enforced by the same institutions and officials whose inability to prevent or stop mass shootings is used as an argument for passing red flag laws.

In politics, if it feels good, if it’s fashionable, if it’s glib, if everyone seems to want it, it’s probably a bad idea.

Seth quotes another law professor:

I don’t know how many such voters [for Trump] there are, but even one is too many. They are nuts, and complicit in evil… (emphasis added)

From the comments:

“Vote for us you deplorable scum”
Now that’s a bumper sticker that I want to see.

The western Left, having gotten by for decades on slogans, ad hominem attacks and physical intimidation, is unable to make its case against an opponent who won’t be intimidated and who has mastered the Left’s own rhetorical tools. Center-Right voters have caught on, thus Trump. Center-Right pols are catching on slowly. Or so it seems. Don’t get cocky, as the man said.

Same weather, different bridges.
 

IMAO:

“Facebook opposes hate speech,” said Zuckerberg. “Also hate agents, hate statements, hate signals, hate ideologies, hate entities, hate symbols, hate slogans, hate paraphernalia, and neutral statements about the aforementioned hate items. However, until now, all we’ve been able to do is deplatform violators. But then they just go to Gab and go right on hate-speeching, because the stupid government won’t let us control everyone’s speech even though it’d be best for everyone.”
 
“Then I thought, well, they sure couldn’t do what they wanted if they were in prison. Epiphany! I’ll just buy a prison and put all the people I don’t like in it.”

As a famous blogger says, It’s parody but is it really? Worth reading.