Author: VD

Obama cracks the whip:

The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said. On Monday, President Obama is to unveil his plans for the auto industry, including a response to a request for additional funds by GM and Chrysler.

I expect the conservative media will be in a tizzy over this, but there’s no reason for it. The evil was in the bailout, not in the reality that once someone is into a corporation for 13 billion dollars, they’ll be calling the shots, thank you very much.

Fascism isn’t conceived when the government decides to flex its muscle in a public-private partnership, the conception takes place when the public-private relationship is consummated. I have no sympathy for Republicans whining about this, Bush teed it up and Obama is dutifully laying the wood. The only surprise is that it’s not the Lizard Queen playing executive whack-a-mole.

Mike Florio demonstrates what happens when mindless emotion replaces reason:

Mike Vick didn’t make a mistake. He engaged in a lifestyle for a period of years and changed that lifestyle only because he got caught. A “mistake” is adhering so literally to the commands of a navigation system that you drive your car into a lake. Vick lived a life that revolved around an abomination — raising dogs for the purposes of pitting them against each other for sport and for money, and killing the dogs that weren’t deemed fit to die while fighting other dogs.

He felt so strongly about this lifestyle that he bought a house and surrounding land at which the lifestyle unfolded.

Though some readers have suggested that the conduct of men like Leonard Little (who killed a woman while driving drunk) and Donte’ Stallworth (who might have been drunk while driving a car that killed a man) is more despicable than Vick’s behavior, we disagree. Little (and possibly Stallworth) engaged in criminally reckless actions. They didn’t intend to harm anyone. Little’s crime (and possibly Stallworth’s) was to drink to excess under circumstances that did not prevent him from exercising impaired judgment by getting behind the wheel of a 2,000-pound sculpted block of rolling steel.

Vick intentionally, deliberately, and soberly embarked on a hobby that violated multiple federal and state laws, and that was premised on the cold-blooded torture and killing of dogs. And then he lied about his conduct, to anyone who wanted to know the truth. He even tried to deceive about the killing of underperforming dogs after pleading guilty, and while strapped to a polygraph.

If it were up to us, Vick wouldn’t play for the Bears or any other NFL team. Ever.

I have never been a fan of Michael Vick. Long before news of his dog-fighting pursuit broke, I was openly critical of the idea that he was a competent quarterback, much less a superstar in the process of reinventing the position as many sportswriting experts had it. So, I’m not inclined to defend him. I am also a life-long dog enthusiast. I grew up with dogs in the house, I have had my viszla for nearly 15 years now, and one reason that Spacebunny and I hit it off right away was because we are both dog people. I don’t like to see dogs mistreated or even left alone; there is a sweet little pit bull down the street who gets left outside for long periods of time and I always make sure to give her a treat and some ear scratches when I’m walking around the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, dogs are property, not people, and how a man treats his property is his concern, not mine, so long as he isn’t doing it in a manner that will offend the neighbors or disturb the community. Vick went well out of his way to avoid disturbing anyone else, and while his treatment of unwanted dogs that would not fight is both savage and disturbing, it’s little different in the end than the fate of most dogs at the humane society or destined for the table in Asia. The reality is that dog-fighting laws exist primarily because Americans love dogs; there would be absolutely no outrage whatsoever if Vick had been running a cockroach-fighting ring. And to call dog-fighting barbaric, as some have, is deeply ironic, given that one of the greatest civilizations in the history of Man is known, among other things, for its massive gladitorial games pitting animal against animal and man against man. Clinical slaughter may be more fastidious and less offensive to the modern psyche than impromptu killing, but it is not morally distinct. Indirection is not absolution, and we do not praise the National Socialists because they killed impersonally, with bureaucratic efficiency, and folded the clothes neatly afterwards.

Regardless of how one feels about such things, emotions are neither a wise nor reasonable basis for law. You may feel that Vick is a monster in human form. You may even, for all I know, be correct. But that doesn’t make the law a good one, it merely means it is in accordance with your feelings. If one form of property is violate, then all forms of property are violate, and history shows that an absence of property rights is not a formula for societal wealth or stability.

All that being said, dog-related laws clearly exist regardless of what one might think of them, and Vick just as clearly violated them. I take no exception to his conviction or his punishment. But the legal considerations lead to another problem here. Grandstanding individuals like Florio wanted to stand on the process of the law in seeing Vick punished, which is reasonable, and abandon it now that Vick has paid an extremely substantial cost, which is not. To attempt to prevent the man from working for a living is outrageous, and I’m sure Vick’s debtors, who committed no anti-canine crimes, don’t appreciate Florio’s efforts to prevent their repayment.

The NFL should not be subject to behavioral standards outside of those upheld by the individual team owners. Florio would be outraged if the NFL Commissioner banned players known to have had premarital sex, drink alcohol, or attend church; the only difference between these hypothetical bans and the retroactive ban he is advocating is the specific moral standard applied. And his expression of the idea that purposefully killing dogs is worse than accidentally killing men and women only goes to show how substituting emotion for reason rapidly leads one into untenable positions.

Michael Vick is a thug. I would not want him to dog-sit my dogs… I wouldn’t want him quarterbacking my team, for that matter. But, if there is an NFL coach wanting to roll the dice with a strong-armed quarterback who is less accurate than a Keynesian economist analyzing the latest stimulus plan, he should be free to do so.

Can the first White House drug scandal be far behind the news that the drug warrior Vice-President’s daughter is a cokette?

The video, which the shooter initially hoped to sell for $2 million before scaling back his price to $400,000, shows a 20-something woman with light skin and long brown hair taking a red straw from her mouth, bending over a desk, inserting the straw into her nostril and snorting lines of white powder….

The woman appears to resemble Ashley Biden, 27, a social worker for a Delaware child-welfare agency and a visible presence during her father’s campaign for the White House. The dialogue is difficult to discern, but the woman makes repeated references to the drugs, said the lawyers, who said they viewed the tape about 15 times.

“At one point she pretty much complains that the line isn’t big enough,” said the second lawyer, who declined to identify himself. “And she talks about her dad.”

Biden has been an outspoken crusader against drugs, coining the term “drug czar” in 1982 while campaigning for a more forceful “war on drugs.”

It would be nice if this proved to be the straw that broke the back of the ridiculous camel that is the War on Drugs. But, unfortunately, it’s unlikely than anything more than the usual round of tears, rehab, and Oprah appearances will occur. Still, it’s funny that after years of the media laying for the Bush twins, it took barely three months for the Obama team to generate its first family-related scandal.

There is, of course, no chance that Biden, the mighty drug warrior, is going to see his daughter locked up like all the young black men currently in prison for nothing more than possession.

At first glance, the news that there was a massive turnout for the funeral of the four slain Oakland police would appear to conclusively contradict my contention earlier this week that public sympathy for the police has greatly decreased over the years:

21,000 turn out to mourn slain officers
Mourners from across the country packed Oracle Arena to the rafters Friday, as the city and nation said a heavy-hearted goodbye to four Oakland police officers fatally shot in the line of duty March 21.

However, the media narrative is a little misleading, as the giant crowd apparently consisted of “at least 10,000 police officers”, including every employee of the Oakland Police Department. In other words, this appears to have been more of a massive gathering of the badge clan paying tribute to its fallen warriors rather than the huge outpouring of public support that the reporter clearly implies it to be with that reference to “the city and nation”.

Dianne Feinstein’s tribute to the four officers particularly struck me as worthy of notice. “They knew they were outnumbered, outgunned and, all too often, underappreciated.”

So, here’s my question. If the police know they are outnumbered and outgunned, then how come most of them that I’ve encountered in their professional capacity insist on behaving as if they’ve got the upper hand and you’re fortunate if they elect not to give you a hard time? (I refer to professional capacity because I have some friendly acquaintances who are police officers and I’ve never seen any of them behave like that in their private lives.) The point is, there is a direct connection between the public’s lack of appreciation for the police and the behavior of the police in dealing with the public. Also, shooting unarmed people in their homes in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly help.

The police can’t have it both ways. They can’t reasonably expect to play high-handed law enforcement master one day, and outnumbered, outgunned hero persevering against all the odds the next. Perhaps the public needs to remember that police are people too, but then, it’s hard to do that when the human side is effectively hidden behind a badge, a gun, and an attitude. And on the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt the police to remember that they don’t create a law-abiding society, but that a law-abiding society that makes their job possible.

In which a new and more accurate metric for comparing blog readerships is proposed. I was intending to link to a rather amusing post on Pharyngula – I’ll get around to it, as the humor inherent in science fetishists moaning about science funding is too good to pass up – when this exchange between commenters there set me to pondering the unreliability of visit statistics.

#443: I haven’t learned too much about science in the time I’ve spent reading this blog. PZs posts boil down to:

1) The latest creationist attacks “threatening” science
1.5) Calling these people and those with faith idiots
2) Look-who-hates-me comments
3)Pictures of invertebrates

No, can’t say I’ve learned a lot about science from here. Based on PZs posts and the comments of those here constantly on his jock, I have learned, however, that science is pervaded by dicks. And that isn’t cool. People tend to paint with a broad brush, and I don’t want to be lumped in with you fools. Luckily this blog has fewer readers than a class of preschoolers, so I think I’m safe.”

#444: “Pharyngula is a very popular blog and with your post, you are now on Google. The average number of views per day is 75,000+. We don’t treat the stupid nicely, and that appears to include you. The only dick here is you.”

#455: “Very popular blog, eh? 75,000+ views? Look, there are about 500 solid readers of Pharyngula, and each hits Pharyngula about 150 times per day to see if someone has replied to his/her comment in a thread. You’ll probably shoot back that the users are unique based on IP address or some other nonsense, but I don’t care….”

The problem in attempting to assess readership by visits or page views is that, as the commenter pointed out, the “unique visitor” concept does not pass logical muster. Consider that the average reader reads 200 words per minute, which is 3.33 words per second. Since the average visit length to Pharyngula is only 9 seconds, this means that the average read per visit is 30 words. The post that the commenters were discussing is 920 words, which indicates that either 1) Pharyngulans needed to visit his blog more than 30 times on average in order to read the whole thing, 2) Pharyngulans are all extraordinary speed readers who read several times faster than a very fast speed reader’s rate of 16.67 words per second, or, rather more likely, 3) Pharyngula is far less popular than the Sitemeter statistic of average visits per day would indicate and the number of visits are, as the commenter surmised, being significantly inflated by recounting regulars who bang the refresh bar like trained monkeys in order to read new comments.* This isn’t just a Pharyngula phenomenon either, as many of the supposedly more popular blogs show the same sign of visit-count inflation.

Compare, for example, Pharyngula with a blog that is theoretically the same “size”, but is noticeably more influential in the blogosphere and theoretically more widely read, Ace of Spades HQ.

PHARYNGULA
V/D: 72,120
VL: 9 seconds
RPV: 30 words
RPD: 2,163,600 words

ACE OF SPADES HQ
V/D: 72,709
VL: 16 seconds
RPV: 53 words
RPD: 3,873,936 words

It’s clear that although the number of visits per day are almost identical, people read nearly twice as much at Ace’s as they do at PZ’s. Now, comparing the words Read Per Day at three of the biggest blogs by conventional visits/day indicates another interesting factor, the division between content creation and traffic direction.

MICHELLE MALKIN
V/D: 252,763
VL: 5 seconds
RPV: 16.65 words
RPD: 4,208,503 words

INSTAPUNDIT
V/D: 380,532
VL: 1 second
RPV: 3.33 words
RPD: 1,267,172 words

DAILY KOS
V/D: 726,387
VL: 1 second
RPV: 3.33 words
RPD: 2,418,869 words

Obviously, Instapundit is much more valued for the aggregation aspect of his posts than anything he’s writing, which makes sense because he isn’t actually writing much on that site; his value derives from his role as a traffic director towards the content created by others. In other words, he, Drudge, and other traffic directors serve the Gatekeeper role that the mainstream media once played in addition to creating actual content. Daily Kos – at least, the home page – appears to serve much the same role, whereas at least a small percentage of Michelle Malkin’s visitors spend some time actually reading what she writes; she possesses an actual readership as well as a viewership and acts in both capacities. I use the term “viewership” because it’s obviously absurd to speak of a “readership” that reads less than four words per visit! Now, here’s where it gets interesting. I selected three blogs that I know people read rather than use as primary traffic pointers.

ANN ALTHOUSE
V/D: 23,741
VL: 200 seconds
RPV: 666 words
RPD: 15,811,506 words

DR. HELEN
V/D: 5,750
VL: 359 seconds
RPV: 1,195 words
RPD: 6,873,953 words

RACHEL LUCAS
V/D: 4,380
VL: 105 seconds
RPV: 350 words
RPD: 1,531,467 words

All hail Althouse! Ann Althouse has a great visit length in addition to a large visitor count and proves to have a much larger readership factor than I would have guessed. Dr. Helen’s visit length is astounding, giving her excellent RPV numbers, although that didn’t surprise me quite as much because her posts often stimulate long and thoughtful comment threads that indicate a lot of people are actually reading them. Rachel Lucas came out well and about how I expected given her amusing posts and a reliable number of regular commenters discussing what she wrote about. My blog, on the other hand, didn’t do quite as well in comparison, which I found a little surprising in that this blog is usually considered by other bloggers to be more discussion-heavy than the norm. Nevertheless, the RPV readership metric tends to indicate that blogs like this one and Rachel Lucas’s have readerships that are similar in size to Pharyngula’s rather than being one-fourteenth the size as the visits per day would have it.

VOX POPOLI
V/D: 5,143
VL: 136 seconds
RPV: 452 words
RPD: 2,324,636 words

I should note that one potential flaw in the RPD metric is that I don’t know how embedded video affects the visit length, although I haven’t seen any change in VP’s average VL as a result of that. I should probably check out the VL on a number of sites that make heavy use of embedded video, although it occurs to me that all this is likely to prove is that the Internet is mostly used for goat porn or something. But at least the RPD statistic does show the inherent flaw in using visits as a means of comparing one blog’s readership with another’s. Even so, a stat that divides RPD numbers by one million is probably a more meaningful comparison of actual blog readerships than supposedly unique visitor stats.

*Ann Althouse points out that there is a fourth possibility, which is that the Visit Length statistic is even less reliable than the Unique Visits statistic. Which, of course, is true.

There’s no need for circus theatrics, the bishop has it right and the best way to show your disapproval is to not show up. As the newspaper and cable news channels have learned, a simple refusal to participate with the Left is the most effective form of dissent by non-leftists:

The University of Notre Dame has a tradition of inviting new presidents to speak at graduation. But this year’s selection of President Barack Obama has been met by a barrage of criticism that has left some students fearing their commencement ceremony will turn into a circus. Many Catholics are angered by Obama’s planned appearance at the May 17 ceremony because of his decisions to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and international family planning groups that provide abortions or educate about the procedure.

I had no qualms about skipping my own college graduation; I was out of there less than 12 hours after taking my last final. Sitting through ridiculous pablum and watching people collect expensive pieces of paper for hours is a waste of time anyhow, but watching your university sell out its core religious principles is really more than any good Catholic should accept. The problem isn’t that Obama is there, as a university should be an intellectual battleground. The problem is that he is being honored by what still purports to be a Catholic institution despite his abhorrent, anti-Catholic attacks on the sanctity of human life.

Mickey Kaus sheds a little light on the secret Internet media clubhouse:

From: Jonathan Chait Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:27:59 -0700 (PDT) Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 2:27 pm Subject: Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist

Perhaps, if his work is going to be brought up here 2 or 3 times a week, he should be invited on the list. Or is the point of this to create a forum where certain people can be criticized (or, more precisely, called names) without the criticizer having to fear a response? I do recall Eric Alterman going after Eve Fairbanks, and then — when Eve mounted a defense — confessing that he didn’t know
she was on the list, and only criticized her because he thought he was speaking behind her back… There seems to be a junior high quality to this list with regard to TNR, where if you’re not on it you get sniped at constantly, but if you are on it you’re mostly safe.

What I find particularly amusing is the way Chait’s response highlights something that we have seen time and time again at left-leaning sites. It’s increasingly clear that very few individuals of a left-liberal persuasion have any ability to distinguish between criticism and name-calling. This explains why I can write a detailed critique ennumerating the specific flaws in Richard Dawkins’s central argument and his defenders will describe it as nothing but an ad hominem attack. It also explains how diatribes directed at my posts and columns which consist of little more than “LOL… so stupid… pwned!” and don’t address any of the relevant points are genuinely regarded as comprehensive and effective rebuttals.

I like engineers. On average, they’re smarter, more pleasant, and more useful than most. But engineers, more than any other type of human being on the planet, occasionally fill me with the desire to wrap my hands around their throats and strangle them. There is no other profession that seems to combine such amazing technical ability with an awe-inspiring capacity for missing the relevant point.

Years ago, Chris Taylor and I came up with the idea to use my company’s 3D hardware for games. Since the company was designing a 3D chip that would do shading, I lobbied hard to have texture-mapping included in it after seeing the two Johns demonstrate what could be done with software-based texture-mapping in Wolf 3D. I must have had ten conversations with the lead engineer in which I told him exactly what was required for the game industry at that time, namely, perspective-correct texture-mapping running 1024×768, 16-bit graphics at 30 frames per second. I could tell he wasn’t really listening and didn’t want to look at the information I was providing him, all he would say was “yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what texture-mapping is, I know what I’m doing.”

The chip came out months before NVidia had their first chip done. Jensen Huang even used to call me, posing as a game developer called “Jensen Software”, in order to find out what we were doing and how far along we were. Big Chilly and I had prepared a 2.5D game demo, a sort of sci-fi Wolf 3D that used pictures of me wearing a flight suit and a swimsuit model friend wearing a wolfshead mask as enemies. The frame rate was great, but everything looked wonky. When I asked what was wrong with the perspective-correction, the engineers looked blank and said: “Perspective-correct? We didn’t know it had to be perspective-correct!”

I could have killed them.

That chip ended up being successful in the CAD and Windows-acceleration markets, but the lack of perspective-correction ruined all the deals that were in the works with the various board manufacturers, and the company eventually disappeared as the CAD and Windows-acceleration markets dried up courtesy of the technology curve. All because a very smart engineer refused to pay attention to what the non-engineers were telling him.

For the last year or so, I’ve been working on a new project which I’ve mentioned a few times here and there, and we’re getting a lot closer to being able to speak intelligently about it. It’s going really well, the development team has done an excellent job and the engineers were just testing the last important feature before going into production mode. This feature is not absolutely necessary, but it will significantly add to the utility of the product, at least as far as I’m concerned, and add an additional degree of unique functionality.

So, I was extremely annoyed when I was surprised with the bad news that this special feature wouldn’t work because it was too slow. But, drawing upon more than two decades of doing technological development with engineers, I elected to ask a few very specific questions rather than go peacefully into the dark slough of despair. How slow was too slow? How was the speed measured? The interrogation revealed that the “delay” was measured in nanoseconds, more importantly, that delay meant that it would run at exactly the same speed as related features in every other product of its type around the world!

Translated into non-engineering terms, this means that the feature works just fine. I swear, sometimes I think they do it on purpose.

Forget what the experts say, you’re better off thinking for yourself:

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise. There’s evidence that what matters in making a sound forecast or decision isn’t so much knowledge or experience as good judgment — or, to be more precise, the way a person’s mind works.

This is the sort of thing that would-be experts like Orac, who despise being questioned by non-experts, never seem to understand. They refuse to grasp that their degrees and experience are often far less significant than an ability to properly assess the situation and its variables, and to then use that assessment to find familiar patterns upon which a judgment can be made. (Anyhow, how much trust could you reasonably place in an expert whose reaction to being shown to have been repeatedly in error is this sort of silly posturing.) An expert is only as good as his track record and past success is no guarantee of future performance. As Passport has taught me, there are enough random variables at play in the success equation, most notably the fact that it occurs at a unique moment in time and marketplace, that one should never get caught up in thinking one’s own efforts or abilities are solely responsible for success, even if one was the only individual directly acting on the matter. Blindly attempting to repeat what led to success in the past is a fairly reliable means of ensuring future failure.

Kristof happens to mention an idea I’d had a while ago myself, which is setting up a system to track pundit predictions. I think this would be a valuable tool to keep track of who said what and whether they were correct or not, as I’m already building a massive database tracking a very different subject. I even already have a scoring system in mind. I don’t know if anyone here would be interested in helping with a pundit-tracker, but if you are, let me know.

On an entirely unrelated note, let me just say that I think a lot of you are really going to enjoy the column next week….

Daniel Hannan rebukes Gordon Brown: “You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the Party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense!”

What in the name of King Alfred are the Tories doing wasting their time with the hapless David Cameron? This is the leader they have been looking for since the Iron Lady stepped down.