Vox Popoli

Obscure College Score of the Week: Bucknell 20, Cornell 5. The Big Red faithful lament — if only we’d gotten eight more safeties! Located in Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell is too renown to qualify as an obscure college. But the school has a little-known quality as regards modern sports: It both plays Division I and graduates its athletes. Bucknell sent its men’s basketball team to the NCAA tournament last March, where the Bison were the sole tourney college that had graduated all scholarship athletes in the most recent NCAA ranking. Bucknell won the clever athletics-and-academics bracket recently assembled by Inside Higher Education. Bucknell’s Sean Conover, a rookie defensive end on the Tennessee Titans’ practice squad, was busy last spring because before reporting to the Titans he put on a funny-looking gown and graduated. Bucknell often leads Division I schools in athletes’ graduation rates, and is fourth all time in total Academic All-American honors dispensed by ESPN The Magazine. Attention other universities — it is not impossible to have major sports programs that graduate their athletes, you just have to care about education.

Their recent March Madness runs notwithstanding, I haven’t been this proud of my alma mater since Big Chilly called to tell me the town had to call in two busloads of riot police to deal with House Party.

I’m more than a little bit annoyed right now. I’m trying to get two separate domains up and running on a single account, which should theoretically be a very simple matter of a .htaccess file which points one domain to one specific URL and the other domain to another specific URL. Despite the fact that the company exists to sell and host domains and this is precisely what creates more business for them, I haven’t gotten a reasonable and specific answer on how to do this from two calls to tech support, a reading of the FAQ and a survey of the forums on this very topic.

It tends to remind me of a tremendously irritating habit of many a pastor, albeit because the explanations I saw in the forums were exactly the opposite of the way in which pastors unnecessarily stretch out their sermons for no good purpose I can discern. Apparently, one is taught in seminary that one cannot mention the X of Y without going into a long and tangential riff on Y before returning to the actual subject of X. It drives me up the wall, especially when they do it during what purports to be a benedictory prayer but is actually the first of three inflicted upon you before you can get out the door.

So you hear things like: “the Lord God of Abraham, Abraham the father of Isaac, who believed that he would be given a son despite his age, who obeyed God when commanded to leave the land of his fathers in much the same way that our forefathers left their homelands to escape religious persecution of the sort that our brothers in the faith are now experiencing in North Korean and China, from where stems some truly tasty sweet and sour pork which unfortunately our Jewish friends are not permitted to eat by the command of the Lord God of Moses… and Abraham.” It sometimes makes me want to stand up and shout “stick to the bloody point!”

I don’t know if some pastors think they are performance artists or simply like to hear the sound of their own voices, but I have developed some serious reservations about the modern concept of the pastor preaching to the zoned-out flock being compatible with Christianity.

Now, this wasn’t actually intended to be a post about religion or anything. It’s just that I notice programmers do the opposite, instead of providing the information that would naturally proceed from that previously provided, they shut it off. Again, I don’t know if it’s out of a desire to field questions or simply the need to feel smarter than the questioner, but it’s even more annoying than pastoral meandering.

For example, on the forum I was perusing, an individual who had successfully navigated the .htaccess shoals was asking why his images weren’t showing up. The response from the technical guy was “you probably need to change your permissions to 644”. However, instead of continuing by explaining how one changed one’s permissions, he simply left it at that.

Programmers often spin this neglect as some sign of superior intelligence, but actually the reverse is true. While they do possess information that the other lacks, a truly intelligent individual would recognize that the nature of the first question indicated that the questioner would not be able to understand how to perform the required task and would therefore explain that as well.

For example, if someone asks me what GDP is, they are informing me that they don’t know anything about economics. To answer “GDP is C+I+G+(X-M)” is accurate, but to leave it at that is also stupid. If the questioner doesn’t know what GDP is, he won’t know what C or G is either.

Don’t confuse being informed with being intelligent, or vice-versa. They’re not mutually exclusive, but they aren’t synonymous either.

JS, PhD demonstrates how reading comprehension is unnecessary in academia:

Torture/Interrogation does work or it would not be done. If you think that stop trying to get information out of captured terrorist will stop them from cutting the heads off our prisoners is folly. The whole war is about civilization, ours or theirs and the choice should be clear. We don’t try to kill them as a matter of religious doctrine and we will leave them alone if they would do the same. You as a Christian should know that.

One presumes that JS equally enthusiastic about astrology and Freudian psychoanalysis, after all, they must work or they “would not be done”. The degree to which he manages to miss the point is astonishing; whereas I never suggested that refraining from torture would change the way in which our prisoners are treated, I stated outright that torture is an ineffective tactic about as useless as cannibalism. And given his contention that the whole war is about the survival of our civilization, one would think that JS would be seriously troubled by the Bush administration’s desire to abandon what has hitherto been a historic aspect of it.

What this administration wants is to clarify what is acceptable under law and what is not. This will not only protect our professionals but also the incarcerated individuals. I do not understand why anybody could be against that. Are we the ones that go out and set roadside bombs to kill anything that is near it? Do we attack and kill our own on a daily basis because we disagree with them? Do we burn mosques because some Islam cleric makes a derogatory remark about Christians?

Do we eat fish on Fridays? Do we wonder why Larry Johnson has not rushed effectively in the first two weeks of the NFL season? Are we the ones who thought Lamont Jordan’s BTK rating was too high in Madden 2007?

These questions are no more irrelevant to the subject than those posed by JS.

As for the rest of your observations about government influence and growth, this happens everywhere. The politicians have become a group of elitists and are no longer the representatives of the people (with very few exceptions). This holds true on either side in the war on terrorism but at least on our side we can still vote our free will. The unfortunate part is that too many of us like the freebees the government hands out to us instead of getting them out of our life’s and let us fend for ourselves. I won’t speak for other countries but in ours, we have a constitution that is more and more ignored by all and we pay a heavy price for it. Let’s defend our country and help other to do same to remain and/or become free.

Apparently JS fails to see the contradiction between stating how the politicians “are no longer the representatives of the poeple” and how “we can still vote in our free will”. Actually, we can’t. We are given a choice between cow crap and horse crap and expected to regard it as delicious food. It’s absurd.

If you still have the haircut as in the picture with you article, get a life and have it changed. You look silly.

Likewise….

How even the rich manage to go bankrupt:

Financial success can breed its own peculiar set of vulnerabilities. “People who are very successful develop elevated sensibilities about their skills, and when things turn on them they won’t admit they’re wrong because their self-confidence has held them up so long,” says Arnold S. Wood, chief executive of Martingale Asset Management in Boston. “In the face of evidence, even subjective evidence, that suggests that something bad is about to happen to someone, a funny thing happens: They reject the evidence.

“These kinds of people just continue spending because they think the money will keep coming in because they’re so successful,” adds Mr. Wood, who says he is fascinated by the possible neurological and social underpinnings of financial delusion and decision-making.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen again and again, and to be honest, it grows incredibly tiresome. Listening to the same stupid justifications and rationalizations for self-destructive actions ceases to become tragic and devolves into a boring farce. The main problem that I see among those who have earned their own wealth is an inability to stop taking the kind of risks that led to their initial success in the past.

The key to securing financial stability is no more secret than the key to losing weight. In fact, the two are almost precisely the same. Always eatspend less foodmoney than you burnearn.

I play the White Buffalo in both the VPFL as well as THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS LEAGUE IN SPORTS. Apparently the level of competition is rather lower in the former than the latter, but it’s hard to make any definitive statements after Week One. It’s always bad to lose to him, but to lose twice on one day while he’s still flashing his championship bling from last year is simply unimaginable.

Football gods, hear my prayer
In my need you have never been there
Greenfield is my week two game
Let him lose, bring him shame

He sports the ring I might have worn
If I had drafted Larry Johnson.
The seasons die one by one
How soon they fly on and on
And I am out of the playoffs again

Shut him out, home and away
You must admit he is practically gay
You can give, you can take
Let Chad throw like last week’s Jake
If we tie, then we tie
Let him lose
Bring me the win, bring me the win
Bring me the win….

In the wake of the chubbos’ calls for London to follow Madrid’s example in banning “too-skinny” models from the runways, I thought I’d calculate a BMI or two myself. Now, keep in mind that I’m a guy of average height with a 30-inch waist, while Spacebunny, despite being quite slender, can bench more than her own weight. So how did we come out?

Vox: at 26, I’m “overweight”.
SB: at 17.8, she’s so “underweight” that she can’t even model in Madrid.

It’s bizarre how as American society gets ever fatter, (and when you haven’t been there in a while, it can be shocking to see how much bigger people have gotten in just a few years), the constant media focus is the peril of being too skinny. Even the questionable CDC study which reduced the number of annual obesity deaths from 400,000 annually to 112,000 is still 112x the highest number of anorexia deaths claimed by anyone with even a vestige of credibility.

(Feminists, naturally, claim 150,000 annual anorexia deaths. The fact that this is more than the number of Americans dying each year by murder, car accidents, airplane crashes, drowning, poison and treehadist terrorism combined doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to Ms Wolf, Ms Steinhem or their clueless parrots. Math is hard! And you wonder why I call feminism the ideology of ignorant idiots?)

I suspect that it is the fattening of America which is inspiring women to go to the opposite extreme. Seeing a super-obese megachub two-fisting a concoction of grease, lard and sugar is understandably enough to put almost anyone off eating for at least a few hours, see enough of that around you on a regular basis and starving yourself suddenly seems not only reasonable, but an aesthetic imperative.

Obsessive girls are probably safest in the weight room. The compulsion to keep their strength up tends to counterbalance the desire to cut calories and they’ll find the same twisted pleasure in rigidly controlling their diet as they did in not eating at all.

This could set US Soccer back 30 years:

Sven-Goran Eriksson is being considered as a replacement for Bruce Arena as coach of the United States, the New York Times reported Friday. The newspaper said that United States Soccer Federation officials have spoken to the former England coach, although the Americans may struggle to meet his wage demands if he seeks a similar pay deal to the one he had with England.

All I can say is that before they even think of making him an offer, they should do two things:

1) Watch the impotent disaster that was the England attack in the last World Cup.

2) Watch the World Cuppa skit with the Sven Goran puppet stalking Natalie then stealiing panties without her realizing it, followed by his running off and sniffing them. “Oh, Heaven!” It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen on TV.

Sven Goran didn’t manage to do anything but bang his secretary at the Football Association. McClaren did all his coaching for him and his team selections were insane. (Four strikers is fine, but not when two of them are injured and one is a teenager who has NEVER PLAYED A FIRST-TEAM PROFESSIONAL GAME IN HIS LIFE!)

Seriously, the problem isn’t that I would be a better choice for US Soccer than Sven Goran Eriksson, it’s that Spacebunny would be too.

The answer that seems to have eluded everyone is this: 3D video games are the most complete realization of Richard Wagner’s vision of Gesamtkunstwerk yet seen. Discuss amongst yourselves….

Redneck Joe asks about my critics’ great bete noire:

Vox I wonder why you use Mensa as an identifier for yourself. I believe that a 1250 SAT score is a prequalifier for Mensa (I looked into joining a couple of years ago). This falls around the same percentile as a 132 IQ, from what I have briefly read.
I’m an electrical engineer, and I would bet that everyone in my office accomplished that. I scored 800 math and 630 verbal in 1987. Sometimes I have to read your articles slowly 2 or 3 times to follow them. I think you should look into the Triple Nine society (99.9th percentile).

It’s funny that you should mention those annoying Triple Niners. Presumably thanks to my spatial relations retardation, Big Chilly qualifies for Triple Nine while I fall a tenth short. Naturally, this has led to many a magnanimous offer to explain things to me in the event that I should fail to understand them.

Mensa, as some commenters have already noted, is no big deal. If there are 2,000 daily visitors here, at least 40 are likely Mensa material. I joined primarily to give myself at least one qualification that some readers might recognize, since at the time I joined the commentary page every other writer had a radio show, an ambassadorship or had been a presidential candidate. Now it’s unnecessary, but at the time it gave the column a unique identity of sorts. It’s a bit shocking how many columnists wouldn’t qualify for Mensa; while they can hide their shallowness of thought by regurgitating talking points, they seldom manage to do so in the sad publications that are optimistically described as their books. The odd Coulter, Frum and Ponnuru aside, most books by columnists are all but unreadable. [Feel free to insert your slam on my novels here….]

I should mention that an additional benefit of Mensa membership was the way in which it defanged the usual left-liberal criticism, which consists of doing nothing but calling the other side stupid. It’s amazing how much it appears to upset them, especially considering that there are literally millions of Americans with 132+ IQs. But leftists often fall prey to the tautological fallacy of believing themselves to be more intelligent on the sole basis of their leftism, which would be odd even if one were to ignore the left’s long and ignominious historical legacy.

A tangential note: I reject the concept of numerical genius. IQ is merely a measure of cognitive potential, genius is the unique and noteworthy application of that potential to create something genuinely new or accomplish something of historical significance.