Author: VD

I’ve seen variants of this argument in defense of permitting bailout banks to pay massive bonuses from various parts of the political spectrum, but it makes no sense at all:

We cannot legislate to cap bonuses or pay. There is no room in a free society for a law that curbs the pay proffered in private companies.

This may be true, the problem is that a society that hands over billions of dollars in public money to private companies is no longer a free society. If the government can hand money to the banks, it can take money away from the banks just as easily. So, this is a bogus and illogical line of defense.

You may recall that I viewed the announcement of the landmark discovery of Darwinius masillae in May as an ideal candidate for the falsification of Darwinism as well as the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Or, at least, in the scientific basis for many individuals belief in such things. After all, “Ida” was described “in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her ‘the eighth wonder of the world,’ ‘the Holy Grail,’ and ‘a Rosetta Stone.'” And who can forget how researchers said that “proof of this transitional species finally confirms Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the then radical, outlandish ideas he came up with during his time aboard the Beagle.”

Of course, it didn’t take long for other scientific skeptics to cast doubt on the significance of this supposed wonder of the scientific world. And now, the ever-mutable scientific consensus appears to be in the process of concluding that Darwinius masillae is of little more significance to the theory of human evolution than Piltdown Man or any other of the many scientific frauds and exaggerations of the past.

Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group. Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. “I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.

I will now await with interest for the various devotees of the cult of Darwin to admit one of the three logical possibilities that stem from this entirely predictable – and predicted – outcome:

1) The Darwinius masillae incident means that the theory of human evolution by natural selection remains unproved.

2) The Darwinius masillae incident proves that scientific assertions about the factual scientific basis for the theory of human evolution by natural selection are not intrinsically reliable.

3) The Darwinius masillae incident is irrelevant because your belief in the theory of human evolution by natural selection is not based on science.

Why the media is dying:

THE PUPPY DIARIES
Taking the Plunge With a New Dog
By JILL ABRAMSON

The first article in a weekly series about the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy through its first year of life.

All the news that’s fit to print….

Well, okay, it’s not so great for the Crimson Tower. But its toppling would be good for the nation and the greater Academy:

If Harvard were a serious business facing a liquidity crisis, it would have done something drastic by now: fired senior employees, closed departments, sold off real estate. But Harvard, like most other leading universities, is stubborn and inflexible. “None of these schools has the ability to cut expenses fast enough” is how a hedge-fund manager who counts Harvard among his investors explained the problem. Running the numbers for me, proving how impossible it is for a shrinking endowment to keep up with the university’s bloated, immovable costs, the hedge-fund manager concluded, “They are completely fucked.”

One particularly interesting fact about Harvard’s financial crsis is that the gentleman who created this situation is now duly employed… as the top economic advisor to the present administration.

1. Spook Country by William Gibson

2. The Cambridge Medieval History Series vol I: The Christian Era edited by J.B. Bury

3. The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert: 7/10. I was surprised to learn that this novel was published 13 years after Dune, since the ideas it contains appear to be rather less well-formed and less interesting than those in the earlier book.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles Kindleberger: 6/10. A detailed, but unsystematic chronicle of historical financial crises. Kindleberger describes these events in an engaging manner, but is handicapped by having no coherent economic or socionomic philosophy through which he can explain why they took place.

The Darwath Trilogy by Barbara Hambly: 8/10. I read The Time of the Dark as a boy and was deeply impressed by the awesome horror of the Dark. They must be one of the most inherently frightening monsters in the history of the fantasy genre. But the books are even better when seen from the perspective of an adult writer, as the scope of the books and the way in which they draw on various scientific disciplines as an integral part of the plot is truly impressive.

More from the No, It’s Still Not Working department:

The federal government has devoted $4.7 trillion to help the financial sector through its crisis, a level of assistance equal to about one-third of the overall U.S. economy, a watchdog report said Monday. Under the worst of circumstances, the report said, the government’s maximum exposure could total nearly $24 trillion, or $80,000 for every American.

I’d very much like to know how many of the nominal conservatives in the media who supported the bailouts would have done so if they’d known the price tag was going to be somewhere between $5 and 25 trillion. And it’s amusing to hear those defending the status quo protesting that the $24 trillion estimate is an unlikely, worst-case scenario.

When, one wonders, has a cost estimate of a government program EVER failed to hit the over?

I got the required information, so we’re good. In the meantime, discuss amongst yourselves.

NA sends an answer to his question about the Cook case from a military lawyer:

The fact that there is a lawsuit counts as proof of nothing. Its simply a suit. In the same way that when an accused is charged with a crime, the fact that he has been charged is not considered evidence. As well, the way I read the suit (or at least the press account of this suit) the logic is flawed. At this point President Obama is, in fact, president. Cook’s deployment would NOT violate international law under any interpretation of the Hague or Geneva conventions or customary international law.

I would agree that the Army response is puzzling. I do not agree this creates a “get out of war free card”. Each case under the UCMJ must rise or fall on its own merits. If the next Maj Cook steps forward with the intent to disobey a lawful order, the Army/Navy/Air Force can certainly prosecute if they see fit.

In such a case, an accused would be entitled to a full and fair trial, and if convicted, to a full appeal. I suspect time will tell if there are more “Maj Cook’s”

As is so often the case with lawyers, I think this gentleman’s response is essentially correct in the particulars while somehow managing to completely miss the point. There is clearly no precedent created by the revocation of Major Cook’s deployment order. It was an extrajudicial action at the discretion of the responsible officers and they could certainly decide to take the next case to court.

And while I’m not sure about whether Obama can be legally considered president if it turns out he was, in fact, Constitutionally ineligible for the office, that’s not relevant here because I was never talking about a legal “get out of war free” card. Whether the Supreme Court would decide to call shenanigans or a mulligan in the event of an ineligible office-holder doesn’t matter anywhere nearly as much as the public perception of the office-holder’s legitimacy. So, the card is an effective one so long as the Pentagon is unwilling to stand its ground in court.

I find the Pentagon’s response less puzzling because this isn’t ultimately a legal matter but more an issue of public perception. Right now, the only thing the public knows for sure is that they simply don’t possess sufficient facts to reach any definite conclusion, even if one can draw apparent conclusions from the actions of various parties. The problem is that one can ask “why would Obama ever run for office if he knew he was ineligible?” just as reasonably as one can ask “why didn’t the Pentagon prove the eligibility of the Commander in Chief in court and ship the major off to Afghanistan?”

What many on both sides of this issue fail to understand is that I’m agnostic on the matter. I only know that I don’t know… more importantly, I know that you don’t actually know either. And I also know that the birth issue stopped being a matter for laughing at the conspiracy theorists the moment that the Pentagon created an effective “get out of war free” card by revoking Major Cook’s orders.

As if the Minneapolis suicide bombers weren’t enough:

While many of the estimated 32,000 Somalis who settled in the state have struggled to adapt, Ali flourished, blazing a path to Minneapolis’ Augsburg College on a soccer scholarship by age 20. He studied political science and aspired to a political career modeled on President Barack Obama’s.

He was shot and killed last September outside a busy community center where he worked part-time as a youth counselor, and prosecutors said the 16-year-old accused of killing him was part of a gang. Ali was one of seven Minneapolis-area Somali men killed over a 10-month period, and authorities believe all were killed by fellow Somalis.

What was the benefit of importing these people again? The lesson of history is that mass migrations change the recipient culture as much as it changes that of the migrants. In twenty years there, I can’t think of a single Minnesotan who ever said “you know, this place would be much improved if it was just a little bit more like Somalia.”

‘Get out of war free’ card

The case of the missing birth certificate grows more and more curious. It has been fascinating to see how quickly various news sites have been frantically altering their assertions regarding Obama’s birth hospital ever since Jerome Corsi broke the news of Barack Obama’s letter to the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children on July 6. This means that Obama was either born twice in Hawaii, or he was not born at Queen’s Medical Center, as he claimed, (or, more accurately, was reported by UPI to have claimed), in 2007 when he first announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill.