Category: Uncategorized

Hung jury in Grisham trial

Some of the jury members obviously refused to go along with the judge’s attempt to railroad Chris Grisham’s trial:


A six-person jury was unable to reach a
verdict in the misdemeanor trial of Christopher Grisham, with the trial
ending in a hung jury Friday afternoon. Bell County officials announced they would try Grisham again, with the case slated to start on Nov. 18.

I’ve seen the video of the arrest. The fact that Grisham was arrested at all was absolutely outrageous. It was mostly because the policeman was clearly angry that Grisham was underwhelmed by the way he was throwing his badge around. It would appear that the county officials determined to keep trying him until they get the verdict they want.

Safety has its price

I don’t see why this poor federal air marshal is being prosecuted. Given that TSA agents can strip-search women and molest them up in the name of airplane safety, shouldn’t this guy be praised for his diligence in ensuring there are no underwear bombers boarding planes?

A federal air marshal has been arrested and accused of taking cell phone photographs underneath women’s skirts as they boarded a plane at Nashville International Airport.

Nashville police say Adam J. Bartsch was on duty on Southwest Airline Flight 3132 on Thursday when a witness noticed he was taking the photos and grabbed his cell phone. Police say the witness notified a flight attendant and Bartsch was taken off the flight and charged with disorderly conduct.

Has our society descended to this, when an innocent government employee simply doing his job of protecting the public can be harassed and even charged with a crime?  Why the next thing you know, the NSA will be banned from poring closely over naked pictures being sent from teenagers’ cell phones!

Congratulations are in order

Jill is rather pleased with her new cover for her book Anna and the Dragon. She writes: “Check out the book cover [JartStar] made for me. I think it’s beautiful.”

It is, indeed, an unusually pretty cover. I particularly like the rich colors and the ur-Celtic pattern underneath the dragon. And, let’s face it, who doesn’t like slender redheads?

So congratulations to her, and congratulations to JartStar as well. It’s always good to see readers collaborating in such a productive and mutually beneficial manner. There is a lot of talent here, so whether you’re looking for a writer, an artist, a programmer, a physicist, a lawyer, or any number of other specialties, it might surprise you what can be found here.

I am, of course, always available for consultations concerning gratuitous cruelty, should my own artistic services ever be required. “Look to Wowbagger” will probably be the title of my autobiography.

The Economist notices bad science

I look forward to all of the science fetishists who have shrieked with outrage every time I pointed out the uncomfortable fact of the increasing departure of scientistry from scientody finally realizing, with all due horror, that I was correct about modern professional science, all along as the mainstream media begins to repeat my previous criticisms. Science has gone wrong, badly wrong. And it has done so by abandoning the method that gave it its reputation.

A simple idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article). A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties….

One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern
academic research took shape after its successes in the second world
war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists
numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m
active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their
taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish
or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is
cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in
2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for
every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other
people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And
without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.

As in the case of university degrees, scientistry has been badly diluted. Scientists of a wide variety of disciplines are cashing in on the reputations of physicists from more than sixty years ago.  The science of Bohr and Feynman is simply not the pseudo-science of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

This is not a surprise. I’ve been reading Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it is eminently clear that we are rapidly approaching a crisis in biology, the sort of crisis that has historically led to new scientific paradigms. It may take a long time for the crisis to resolve itself, but this Second Crisis of Darwin should be sufficient to put the theory of evolution by natural selection in the dustbin of scientific history with phlogiston, heliocentrism, and other erstwhile scientific “facts”. Instead of salvaging Darwinian theory through a synthesis, the continued refinement of Mendelian genetics will destroy it once and for all.

And it’s not a coincidence that the growing awareness of bad science is occurring as the global warming debacle continues to unravel. Those who attacked the skeptics of global warming and staked science’s reputation on the idea that Man was cooking the earth are directly responsible for the public’s increasing dismissal of scientific authority.

God is not mocked

I couldn’t help but think of Galatians 6:7 when I read about the tragic death of this father on his misguided trek in remembrance of his dead son.  “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

I can’t link to the story, for some reason, but the headline is: Oregon Father’s Memorial Trek Across Country Ends in a Family’s Second Tragedy. So you can probably find it on Google or wherever.

The American elites have declared that there is nothing wrong with what God calls abomination. The usual suspects will insist, in defiance of both traditional morality and secular logic, that there is no such thing as objective universal morality while simultaneously insisting that homosexuality normal and it is wrong to say otherwise.

But at the end of the day, God’s Game, God’s Rules. Are they arbitrary? Perhaps. So is the intentional grounding rule. That doesn’t make them nonexistent and it doesn’t mean we can safely ignore them, given that we are warned about what the wages of sin are.

That being said, I very much doubt that the grieving father was struck down by God simply because he was on a personal crusade to popularize the acceptance of a particular form of sin; the ironic malice involved tends to strike me as the handiwork of a very different supernatural being.

This is something many Christians don’t seem to understand. Evil revels in grief, pain, and suffering. Not good. And not God.

Guess That Race!

What could possibly prompt a pack of strangers to viciously attack a young woman walking home from a football game? It’s a complete mystery! It’s like crop circles or other perplexing conundrums for which there are obviously no answers in science, religion, or history.

Speaking exclusively to CBS 3, a 15-year-old high school student,
whose identity we are concealing, described a terrifying attack by a
gang of at least nine teenage boys as she was leaving an Interboro High
School football game Monday night.

The teenage victim described first being taunted by the attackers,
who followed her down a neighborhood street, cursing and spitting at
her, before she was repeatedly kicked and punched, at least one of the
blows to her head.

“It was scary, just horrible, just the worst feeling in the world,”
she said. “He punched me in my back and then kicked me in the back, and
then punched me in the back of my head. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t
move, I couldn’t talk. I was just straight crying.”

The victim says as at least two of the teenagers pummeled her, the
others cheered them on shouting, “come on, let’s get her.” At one point,
the victim says, the gang tried to throw her under the wheels of a
passing car, which swerved, narrowly missing her.

My guess? I suspect yet another Eskimo-on-Pacific Islander attack. Those bad boys from the frozen tundra can be seriously hard core and we all know how they feel about Hawaiians.

Remember this in 2014 and 2016

Republicans give House leader John Boehner a standing ovation for kicking the can one more time:

At the last GOP conference meeting of the two-week government shutdown, no lawmakers went to the microphones to give their take.

Instead, after Speaker John Boehner told Republicans they had “fought the good fight,” they all rose up to offer a standing ovation. “It was one of the easiest meetings we’ve ever had,” says Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.

“I think he has strengthened his position in leadership,” Representative John Fleming says about Boehner. “He hung in there with us. He’s been reluctant to go to these fights and now that we have stood up and fought for our values and he’s been there with us, leading, I think his stock has risen tremendously. He has great security as our leader and our speaker.”

The message from Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor was unity, with warnings not to point fingers of blame.

“Everyone in this room ran on the Republican ticket,” Cantor told colleagues.

“We all agree Obamacare is an abomination. We all agree taxes are too high. We all agree spending is too high. We all agree Washington is getting in the way of job growth. We all agree we have a real debt crisis that will cripple future generations. We all agree on these fundamental conservative principles. . . . We must not confuse tactics with principles. The differences between us are dwarfed by the differences we have with the Democratic party, and we can do more for the American people united,” he told them.

Walking out of the meeting to the throng of reporters, the conservatives kept to that script, but the moderates drew their knives out for the Right.

Representative Peter King of New York urged more Republican officials to speak up about Senator Ted Cruz and “condemn him for what he did.”

Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois said the lesson of the episode was that Boehner should cut out the far-right flank and work with centrist Democrats.

The Republican Party is neither a conservative nor a small government party. It is not a pro-Constitutional party either.  And I think dh and Ross Douthat are both wrong with regards to the failed attempt by the “far-right flank” to stop the credit madness. It did accomplish one very important thing: it forced the bi-factional ruling party to reveal itself in public.

The USA is one of the very few Western nations that doesn’t have a viable third party. They have grown up faster in Europe thanks to a) the parliamentary system, and b) the European Union forcing the bi-factional “left-right” parties to expose themselves to their euroskeptical populaces. And the USA desperately needs an alternative to the Demopublican-Republicrats.

What not to do when a girl hits you

One Marine provides a very good example of where sweet reason and physical passivity in the face of female force will lead a man:

She
kicked my head into the solid wood base. I blacked out, came to, stood
up, bleeding. My daughter was screaming, “Stop hurting daddy!”

It
was over. We were over. I headed out the door to the police and then
the hospital. My daughter stopped me. “Daddy, you need to go to a
doctor, here take this,” she handed me a bandage. “I love you” was the
last thing I said to her. It’s been almost a month….

An hour later I was handcuffed to a hospital bed waiting for CAT scan
results to know if my head was bleeding.

I’ve shared my thoughts on a more effective strategy at Alpha Game. When faced with repeated and abject failure, apply The Theory of Game. What do the naturals do? And in cases such as these, exactly who are the naturals?

Top 10 novels list

It’s hard to distinguish between great novels and great novelists. There are those who are great due to their ability to consistently deliver very good novels, but never write a truly great novel. And then there are those who wrote one great novel and never again approached such heights.  Regardless, in this list, I’m again applying the one book per author rule.

There are almost certainly books that belong on this list that are not there, but because this is my personal list, only novels that I have read are included.

  1. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
  2. Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
  3. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  4. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu
  5. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
  6. The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse
  7. If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, Italo Calvino
  8. Watership Down, Richard Adams
  9. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  10. The Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse

I understand it is customary to put James Joyce first and I have read three of his books. Ulysses, in particular, is a grand achievement, but it fails in the primary purpose of the novel, which is to entertain. In my opinion, it is a work of great technical virtuosity rather than great literature; to give it pride of place here would be akin to declaring that an extended guitar solo was the greatest rock song.  In contrast, the literary pyrotechnics of Calvino do not substitute for the entertainment aspect, they have the effect of enhancing the reader’s pleasure.

The Tale of Genji is massively underrated in the West, both as entertainment and as a historic literary achievement. It is quite possibly the first true novel and it is the most alien fiction you can possibly read, given the temporal and cultural distance between the reader and the author, an imperial lady-in-waiting of the Heian court circa 995.

Umberto Eco is fantastic in English, and he’s even more spectacular in Italian. In fact, one of the reasons I learned Italian was so that I could read him in the original. (Always intended to read Hesse in German as well, but I never got to quite that level.) Perhaps my subscription to the conspiracy theory of history is one reason I rate Foucault’s Pendulum so highly, but I stand firmly by my high regard for Eco. Everything he writes is excellent, even the nostalgic, self-indulgent The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

If there is a theme concerning what I consider greatness in literature, it is the novel’s depth of commentary on the human condition. I value substantive thoughts on this matter much more highly than mere technical prose mastery. Others may disagree, and some will no doubt find my preferences indicative of my own limitations, but of the books on the list, only Calvino, and to a lesser extent, Wodehouse, can be reasonably described as a true masters of style.

The inclusion of The Code of the Woosters is perhaps the most dubious proposition on the list. I’m including it because Wodehouse delved much more deeply into human psychology than a superficial glance at his light-hearted, endlessly amusing work would indicate, because it is one of the few Wodehouse novels that has some political bite to it, and because humor is far and away the most difficult kind of fiction to pull off. I admit, however, that one could reasonably cite Wodehouse as an example of the great novelist sans a truly great novel. But in my opinion, his only serious rival as the greatest humorous writer in history is Douglas Adams.

A failure of parenting

On the part of the parents of the bullies and the bullied alike:

Brimming with outrage and incredulity, the sheriff said in a news conference on Tuesday that he was stunned by the older girl’s Saturday Facebook posting. But he reserved his harshest words for the girl’s parents for failing to monitor her behavior, after she had been questioned by the police, and for allowing her to keep her cellphone.

“I’m aggravated that the parents are not doing what parents should do: after she is questioned and involved in this, why does she even have a device?” Sheriff Judd said. “Parents, who instead of taking that device and smashing it into a thousand pieces in front of that child, say her account was hacked.”

The police said the dispute with Rebecca began over a boy. The older girl was upset that Rebecca had once dated her boyfriend, they said.

“She began to harass and ultimately torment Rebecca,” said the sheriff, describing the 14-year-old as a girl with a long history of bullying behavior.

The police said the older girl began to turn Rebecca’s friends against her, including her former best friend, the 12-year-old who was charged. She told anyone who tried to befriend Rebecca that they also would be bullied, the affidavit said.

The bullying leapt into the virtual world, Sheriff Judd said, and Rebecca began receiving sordid messages instructing her to “go kill yourself.” The police said Rebecca’s mother was reluctant to take her cellphone away because she did not want to alienate her daughter and wanted her to be able to communicate with her friends. Ms. Norman tried, she has said, to monitor Rebecca’s cellphone activity.

In December, the bullying grew so intense that Rebecca began cutting herself and was sent to a hospital by her mother to receive psychiatric care. Ultimately, her mother pulled her out of Crystal Lake Middle School. She home schooled her for a while and then enrolled her in a new school in August.

But the bullying did not stop.

Like the sheriff, a lot of people will be upset with the parents of the female bully. The sheriff was right, the mother shouldn’t have worried about preserving either her relationship with her daughter or her daughter’s ability to communicate – that was half the problem, as it happens.

But parents of children who are bullied also have to learn to stand up for their children where necessary. If any of my kids was being plagued in such an insidious manner, I’d not only warn the parents it had better stop, I’d speak to the bully and let them know in no uncertain terms that they had better pray to whatever deity or scientific process they believe in that nothing happened to my child, because neither they nor their family would survive the day it did. The one thing bullies always understand is hard targets; if your child is simply too soft to be one, then you have a responsibility to step into the incoming fire as a parent.

Of course everyone will throw a complete fit if you threaten consequences, especially the women. So what? The point isn’t your reputation among the wicked and the foolish, it is the protection of your children. And the best defense is a strong offense.

Society has become far too soft and tolerant of the wicked. On an old episode of QI the other night, Stephen Fry mentioned Dangerous Dan, a sheriff who cleaned up a town called Shakespeare. One of the men he hanged was executed for the crime of “being a damned nuisance”. If the sheriff in this case had been more like Dangerous Dan, the bullies would be the dead ones rather than their victim. That being said, I’m glad he had the stones to charge the girls with felony offenses. The bullies and the parents deserve to be put through years of legal hell; perhaps that will encourage parents to shut down such behavior on the part of their children in the future.

Ender got in trouble about two weeks ago after a huge younger kid – he’s six feet tall and weighs about 200 pounds – who has bullied his fellow students for years decided to start testing his ability to push the older kids around. Ender couldn’t manage to flip the kid or put him in a judo hold because he was too big and strong, so as the kid tried to force him down to the ground, he switched tactics and threw a pair of hard uppercuts that split the kid’s lip and bloodied his nose. That sent the kid reeling, at which point the adult team players broke them up.  Lesson: mixed martial arts training works. It’s always good to have multiple tools in the toolbox.

The problem is that the idiot first-year coach, who has no sons, no experience, and less sense, overreacted, suspended both boys for three games apiece for fighting, (which will almost surely cost the team all three games since they are two of the four starting defenders), and warned them that they’d be kicked off the team if they got into it again. When Ender asked SB and me what he should do if the kid is dumb enough to try it again, we told him to simply take care of business and let me sort it out with the club, to which we both belong. I’ve already written a letter asking the governing committee to specifically endorse the right of the players to defend themselves without consequence and spoken to two of my teammates who are on the committee. Both of them were incredulous that the coach would suspend someone who was simply defending himself.

Meanwhile, Ender is a hero to the entire younger half of the team, who have been victimized by this kid for nearly their entire school lives. And, perhaps more importantly, he knows his parents have his back no matter what happens.

On a weirdly related note, the Utah Supreme Court is about to decide if an employer has the right to fire an employee on the basis of the employee’s legal exercise of his right to self-defense.

Now, the federal district court in Ray v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (D. Utah Oct. 9, 2013) has just certified this question as to Utah state law to the Utah Supreme Court. The Utah Supreme Court may either issue an opinion answering the question, in which case the federal judge will follow it (since federal judges are supposed to follow state court decisions about state law), or the Utah Supreme Court may decline to do so, in which case the federal judge will decide the matter for himself, drawing inferences from more general Utah state cases. And if the state supreme court does answer the question, then the result should prove quite influential.

I think it is unwise to work or play anywhere you do not have the right to freely defend yourself against an attacker.