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Considering some of the lawyers I’ve known, I find it difficult to believe that most literate children would have a tough time passing U.S. law school exams:

Brazil’s lawyers have been shocked to find that a boy aged eight has managed to pass the entrance exam to law school. The Bar Association said the achievement of Joao Victor Portellinha should be taken as a warning about the low standards of some of Brazil’s law schools…. My dream is to be a federal judge,” the boy said, according to Globo TV’s Web site. “So I decided to take the test to see how I would do … it was easy. I studied a week before the test.”

I don’t know why they don’t simply let little kids who can pass the tests practice law or rule from the bench, the results couldn’t be significantly worse. Imagine how effective a little girl crying in front of an all-female jury would be.

I’m sorry about the absence of bloggertainment for the last two days, but I actually had to do a bit of what passes for labor these days. This took me to Germany, and the most remarkable thing I noticed was that during my entire trip, I saw a grand total of three children. Now, granted I wasn’t often in an environment where one would expect to see a lot of children, but even at the train station or when a friend and I walked to lunch through the middle of town, I saw virtually no one younger than 15 or so.

When I mentioned this yesterday to a media relations woman – a pretty, married German lady in her late twenties and childless – she commented that German women are taught to believe that if you take the time to pursue a college education, you have wasted those years should you subsequently fail to “use” that education by having children instead of a career. But when I asked her if she felt she was making effective use of her education by keeping the press informed about her company’s latest innovations in a minor field of electronics, she laughed and admitted that she was already beginning to wonder what was so damned important about her career. This was remarkable, since questioning the intellectual status quo isn’t exactly what you’d call a strong point for Germans of either sex.

In the Terry Pratchett novel Interesting Times, the British humorist notes that a breeding bias for treacherous killers eventually creates a situation where it is dangerous to lean over a cradle. In light of this observation, it seems remarkable that even the most staunch proponents of evolution fail to recognize the obvious problem intrinsic in teaching the more intelligent 50 percent of the female population that they have a moral imperative to unquestioningly render themselves worker drones. It’s also remarkable that so many people believe themseselves to be “using” their education by virtue of their employment in a job that has nothing whatsoever to do with their university studies.

GoTT feels that I didn’t give Sam Harris a fair shake in TIA:

First off, an apology. I have been unfair to Vox Day. I sent him an email yesteray after readin his book. I suggested that he made up that quote form Harris that rape is better than relgion. It was a shocking quote, but I should never have accused Vox of lying, and that’s essentially what I did. I turned out that Harris DID make this quote. I sent an email afterward saying I was disappointed in Harris’s comment. But I did not get through. I also said that the Blue State argument was one I did NOT think was erronous, although others were.

Apology accepted. To be honest, I wasn’t offended by the accusation of lying – the damning Harris quote that begins the chapter was a Sep. 2006 interview entitled “The Temple of Reason” – but rather the idea that I’d be dumb enough to lie about something in a book that thousands of people would be scrutinizing closely. And to GoTT’s credit, at least he attempts to list what arguments he feels are erroneous, rather than hiding behind a nebulous general statement.

I told him in the email that I thought his attacks on Harris were unfair becasue they seemed to misconstrue the intention of Harris’s arguments. Here are some examples I posted on Samharris.org:

For example, Vox says that Sam’s definition of morality (about happiness vs. suffering) is incorrect, because this is not the system of morals Christians subscribe to. this is exactly Sams’ point, that religious concersn of morality often lie outside happiness vs. suffering, and thus often even contribute to suffering. Harris proposes this definition of morality becasue he beleives it is superior to the Christian definiton, of “whatever God says.” Vox ignores this, saying that “morality should never be confused with a hedonic metric of happiness or suffering.”

GoTT doesn’t understand the point. I’m not saying that Harris is incorrect because his imagined definition of morality is different than the Christian one – although he is incorrect when he states that Christians use human standards of good to define God’s goodness – but because he is simply inventing a morality ex nihilo. Since the morality he discusses in Letter to a Christian Nation are Christian morals, it is incorrect to criticize them from the perspective of a non-existent standard. I’m not ignoring the fact that he’s proposing a new standard, I’m pointing out that it’s a stupid one.

He also faults Harris’s blame for AIDS transmission in Africa, on the reluctance of teaching condom use, saying that STDs are caused “by the very prudery that Christians condemn.” Right, but it’s the sex taboos that actually contribute to that very promiscuity whicb is Sams’ whole point.

Sex taboos don’t tend to contribute to promiscuity. They tend to inhibit it, which is why would-be libertines like Christopher Hitchens hate them and complain about sexual repression.

He also says that Harris is wrong in declaring that faith presents a nuclear threat becasue,” it is Science, not Faith that is the factor in the equation represents a deadly danger to mankind.” This is where he goes terribly wrong. THis is technophobia and full-flower. Not too different from what we see in Hollywood from Terminator to Godsend. Now, he has a point in declaring that “all risks are inherently NOT worth taking. He gives the example of “weapons designed to kill anyone with a genetic marker” as a possible abuse of future technology. But he ignores what Sam has already pointed out–that atoricites that are generally held up as the abuses of science–like those of the Nazi doctors or Hiroshima–are really not attributable to science but to tribalism. LIke giving chimps advanced weapons to carry on their petty warfare. To be fair, it’s not really faith that’s the root problem either–Vox is right here. The underlying problem is still tribalism, not belief in God. Vox admits he doesn’t want to do back to the stone age, and has no desire to eradicate science. But his contention that science is the worst offender is entirely false.

I don’t ever say anything about science being the worst offender, except to point out that IF Harris’s extinction equation is correct and that Man is under dire threat of extinction, logic dictates that it is science that must be eliminated to end this threat, not faith. This is an unavoidable conclusion, since eliminating faith will not end, or even seriously reduce, the threat.

If I was unfair to Sam Harris, it was the cruelty of taking his arguments seriously enough to address them in a straightforward manner.

It’s more appealing to female readers than sexy were-seals:

Kelly’s exposé could be the start of a widespread backlash against misery literature, a genre kick-started by Angela’s Ashes in 1996, and which took off globally four years later with A Child Called It, Dave Pelzer’s account of growing up with an alcoholic mother who beat, starved, stabbed, burnt and force-fed ammonia to him. “Inspirational memoirs”, the polite term for this type of book, now account for nine per cent of the British book market, shifting 1.9 million copies a year and generating £24 million of revenue for the publishing industry.

I’m embarrassed that I failed to see this coming. For years I’ve hated television because it’s little more than emotional porn for women. But this misery lit offers precisely the same rush of tears and Elendfreude that keeps ER on the air.

Lisa Schiffren provides an excellent example as well as conclusively claiming the title of Worst New Addition to The Corner:

Last night was the very first time I’ve thought Cindy McCain looked really good this season. All through the campaign she has favored very sharp-shouldered jackets, (an 80’s, Dynasty look), usually in hard and bright colors like tomato red. Her naturally thin frame doesn’t need, or benefit from either the hard shoulder or the wasp-waist it is constructed to suggest….Not that I’ve given this much thought…. (The sad things is, I haven’t. This stuff just glares at me while I am trying to pay attention to the substance….)

It’s only been a few days and already Buckley is rolling over in his grave. I note that despite the fact that WFB stated that the struggle between Christianity and Atheism was the supreme issue of the age, even more important than the one between Communism and the West, NRO is demonstrably less interested in that intellectual debate than in what the presidential candidate’s wives are wearing.

Justin Raimondo remarks on the irony of the American and European medias complaining about the Russian media and what passes for Russian democracy:

We are bombarded on an almost daily basis with anti-Russian, anti-Putin propaganda in the mainstream media, falsely claiming that the “independent” media is being curtailed by the Kremlin. Yet there is no government censorship in Russia; no newspapers or television stations have been closed down by the authorities. Putin’s critics are exercised over the alleged lack of “freedom of the press” because the Russian owners of privately owned media outlets exercise the same editorial control that private owners exercise in the West.

For the American media to complain that their Russian counterparts are too subservient to the government is a classic case of pot-kettle-black. It wasn’t the Russian media that wore flag lapel buttons while reporting the start of a major military assault and shamelessly transmitted government propaganda disguised as “news reporting” to a frightened and shamelessly manipulated public. It wasn’t the Russian media that put Judy Miller’s tall tales of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” on the front page of the New York Times as the rest of our “free” and “independent” journalists followed dutifully along. If Russia’s reporters are government lackeys, then their Western brothers and sisters are cut from pretty much the same cloth….

If the Council of Europe is so concerned about the state of democracy in the world, then let them look into the practices of the European Union, which seem to involve repeating an election until one gets the “right” result.

Raimondo is the most underrated columnist in America today. If you’re not reading him on a regular basis, you are seriously missing out.

I never met Gary Gygax, although I once did a book signing with Dave Arneson, who was the other creator of Dungeons and Dragons. I wasn’t much of a D&D player, although my best friend was, and D&D was the inspiration behind two of the games I loved most, the SF role-playing game Traveller and the computer game Akalabeth. D&D also served as the basis for the fiction of the fantasy writer that I imitated in learning how to write my own fiction, Joel Rosenberg.

Gygax and Arneson unlocked a world of imagination for tens of thousands of bored teenage boys. The computer game industry owes as much to them as it owes to Tolkein, Wozniak, and Jobs. Even today, the basic mechanisms they created are still operative in games like The World of Warcraft, indeed, they are so dominant that it is difficult for game designers to even conceive of mechanisms to replace them.

Too often we lionize those who come later, those who cash in, and we forget the conceptual giants upon whose shoulders they stand, who many times are bypassed and ignored by the very industries they created. Every role-playing gamer, every fantasy reader, every computer game player, owes a genuine debt to Gary Gygax. Roll your favorite D20 today in his honor.

Hillary Rodham Clinton scored comeback primary wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island Tuesday night, denting Barack Obama’s delegate lead in a riveting Democratic presidential race.

I tell you what’s going to happen, you tell me I’m crazy. I tell you it’s still happening, you begin to see I might have a point. I tell you what’s still happening, you tell me I’m crazy. I tell you it’s still happening, you see again that I might have a point.

Are you beginning to recognize the pattern yet? Don’t you recognize the comeback theme from the last time a Team Clinton member was making his first run for office? This riveting race should end in a dramatic climax of unity, with Obama saying “yes he can” to the vice-presidency. What other choice is there for her? A squatty Hispanic toad?

No, this story needs its happy ending for the fainting masses.

UPDATE – yes, it really is that predictable:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton hinted at the possibility of a Democratic “dream ticket” with Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking on “The Early Show” on CBS, Clinton said “that may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of the ticket.”

I also dislike people who like New York City on principle. Especially if they’re not from New York City:

Often times if you ask a white person about where to travel, you will get a lot of responses. But if you ask them about New York, white people will go nuts. They love the city universally and all either live there, have lived there, will live there or want to live there.

White people like New York because it has artists, restaurants, a subway, history, diversity, plays, and other white people. It literally has everything white people need to thrive! The only thing it’s missing is nature, but Central Park is right there, and since you are walking all the time, you are outside!

If you are from New York, tell this to a white person. They will instantly be interested in you “what part of New York? and you are really from there?” When they inevitably tell you about your home town (”I know this great italian place…”) you should respond by saying “man, I thought place was only known to New Yorkers.”

I’ve only ever had one good friend from New York City. She absolutely loathed the cult of NYC, I think I may have picked up a bit of that from her. Living in Europe, I can understand the annoyance; I can’t tell you how many people have attempted to tell me all about their two-days experience of Florence or Venice.

One of the more amusing things that happens while travelling is the way tourists compliment me on my English. Pretty much all of my old American clothes have worn out now, so I am usually taken for an Italian even though no Italian would make that mistake for a second. (They usually think I’m English, sometimes Swiss.) Needless to say, I seldom bother to disabuse them of the notion, it’s more fun to make up something about the wonderful four years I spent learning English and studying the art of mime in Iowa or whatever.

But Europeans are positively the most annoying members of the NYC cult. Seven times out of ten, if a European under the age of 30 finds out you’re an American, he will tell you that he feels a special connection with NYC and it is his heart’s desire to visit it someday. That’s bad enough, but what makes it incredibly irritating is that it is invariably conveyed in a manner that indicates they actually believe that this feeling is unique to them. The other three all want to go to Los Angeles.

Brett Favre has decided to retire from the NFL after 17 seasons.

I will always appreciate Brett Favre for his competitive spirit, his love of the game, and the many passes he threw directly into the chests of Vikings defenders. He was unique, he was a thrower nonpareil, he was the only quarterback whose interceptions you could see coming even before the ball was snapped. He’d narrow his eyes, hunch his shoulders, and hurl the ball at an incredible velocity directly into triple coverage as if he hoped to throw it right through the covering cornerback.

I’ve told this story before, but it seems an apt time to repeat it. When Favre reached his first Pro Bowl, he entered the game when the NFC had the ball in the AFC’s red zone. I have no idea why we were watching the game, but we were, and as soon as he came in, I said “and here comes the INT”. Sure enough, Favre didn’t hesitate for a second, but took a five-step drop and then hurled a ball at about 500 MPH directly into an end zone blanket-covered by the AFC’s very best secondary.

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence for Peter King and the OC, two men who are suffering today.

I’ll actually miss watching Brett play. I will not, however, miss the obsequious behavior of the commentators so smitten by him for lo, these many years.