I’ll say it: 0 down, about 10 to go.
As I have mentioned in the past: this is what the legal process of “discovery” is for.
The minimum is to own the houses, incomes and pensions of these cretins. If a quisling judge says qualified immunity prevents that, well, defendants’ names will be public record long beforehand.
Why, for public ridicule in the public sphere, of course! whatever else did you think I meant?
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Carbon fiber over foam. I fall asleep in the tub all the time. With this one I think I could ditch my bed.
Would make a dandy outdoor bed, too. Warm & toasty even in winter.
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RNS celebrates change in Washington, as a mystified K Street looks on:
[After highlighting the formidable elite firepower on both left and right pushing Rubio’s POS]: …the House won’t pass the Senate’s immigration bill. The odds are against the House, Senate, and White House ever reaching agreement. … Republicans elected since 2010 simply do not feel they need to answer to K Street, the GOP leadership, or any party elites. Newer Republican members came to Washington without the help of business PACs, often running against K Street in primaries and general elections. Republican leaders also can’t use pork to win over the rank and file, thanks to the earmark ban. …the Republican rank and file today calls the tune for its leadership. Speaker John Boehner, no enemy of K Street, has declared Rubio’s bill DOA in the House.
One telling wrinkle here: Tea Party organizations aren’t uniting against the establishment GOP and industry organizations. … even the official anti-establishment organizations on the Right aren’t united against the establishment in this fight — and the establishment may still lose. It looks like the Tea Party really has changed Washington — and if you’re the a Republican business lobbyist, that’s no good.
Emphasis mine. They should know by now that any “official anti-establishment organization,” which is as much of an oxymoron as you’d expect, is not even close to a reliable source for how we Tea Party-ish types will actually react.
Pat yourselves on the back, folks. Could Rubio’s bill be as DOA as it is now if gun-control hadn’t run into the same brick wall of opposition earlier this year? I think not.
We’ll be doing finger & toe counting here tomorrow. So be sure to have a safe one as well.
Apparently 90% of fingerprints (especially on metal) aren’t identifiable. They’ve fixed that problem.
In other news (to me), despite all the buzz in the ’90s and ’00s about how Daubert challenges were going to invalidate fingerprint evidence in the courtroom — and apparently that actually happened in Federal Court in 2002, until the judge was pressured to reverse himself — it all seems to have eventually come to naught.
ETA: Heh. Originally the post title was “Another Reason to Apply NuSkin Daily.” Two decades ago, when I first learned that trick, New Skin was the trade name for a single liquid bandage product. As with the Daubert stuff, things change, including my memory, and apparently NuSkin is a widely-reviled multilevel marketing company. NewSkin’s what you want, folks.
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The late Haynes Johnson’s literary career scribing “notebook dumps” provides a cautionary note for those, like me, who tend to focus on doom-and-gloom observations.
I remember watching the guy on various political news programs when I was a kid, and he didn’t strike me as particularly pessimistic at the time, but then, I didn’t read his books.
We may indeed be doing better than the UK or EU, but it’s small comfort to be the best-looking horse in the glue factory.
In response to this Dan Drezner article on how the US “recovery” is better than anything in the UK or EU.
How many evil geniuses were created because their high school dry spell extended past college? Here, I suspect, is one:
Many people mistakenly think that creating a smarter than human AI, that will ultimately destroy all other life on earth is wrong. They have a very distorted sense of morality….
An AI he appears to be attempting to develop. Why?
…The only way we can truly eliminate human suffering is to eliminate humans and create a super-intelligent watcher system that ensures that they never again evolve back into existence.
Well, that’s actually noble in an Olaf Stapledon sense, and I love me some Stapledon. But say, what’s the real reason?
In school, we are looking forward to college. We are told there will be parties, girls, friends and tons of fun in these places. We are let down when we get to college as all of these things are simply myths to keep us on the tread mill. In college we are told that after we get out we will land a cushy job that we love, find a loving wife, start a family and live happily ever after. The nightmare we enter into is very far from this picture perfect fantasy. In one way or another we find out that women are in fact parasites. Genetics studies show that historically 80% of women have reproduced while only 40% of men have. …After realizing this you become quite mad at the world for not letting you know earlier, of giving you false hope for an impossibility…..
Parasites, eh? False hope for an impossibility? I’m reminded of Twins:
Vincent: You do like women?
Julius: Very much so. They’re strange and sensitive. They have compassion. I have the highest respect for women.
Vincent: You’re a virgin!
Hell, I feel for the guy. We’ve all been there at one point or another in our frustrated youth, I suppose. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that this fellow’s thought pattern is a hint of our future. Extrapolate: others have made the argument that hordes of angry young men in the Middle East are willing to kill people precisely because of the disparity between their porn-fueled sexual aspirations and the disappointments of reality. When does that start happening here on a large scale? Has it already?
Now, I personally think the explosion of available porn is a wonderful thing for humanity, and while I also cheer the potential for what I believe is a polygamous near-future for the United States, that’s because of what I hope would be my personal benefit, not society’s. And the sorry fact is that under such a reality there will be some men with multiple sexual partners, and lots more men with none than is the case today. And I fear what comes from the tremendous pent-up tension, energy of a society with a mass of sexually unsatisfied, enraged, and envious young men. Particularly if one or more of them are capable of creating a malevolent AI.
I’m not kidding. Somebody get that guy a hooker, stat.
Here’s a heat-induced cranky rant for you.
Having been weaned on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novelists, I am used to the paragraph form.
Kids today, not so much.
Viz. this Business Insider article that reads for all the world like a Millennial’s blog post.
Seriously, doesn’t the article have all the pacing of a children’s primer?
I am very familiar with the practice of variety or emphasis via a short phrase or sentence.
But writing everything that way?
Really?
It’s just annoying to see this, for someone like me who, if I were editing the damn thing, would turn the Business Insider article’s nearly one hundred “paragraphs” into twenty — and find the result a hell of a lot faster and easier to read. By the way, this — gah — “style” of writing is certainly not a function of our declining educational standards; that’s got nothing to do with it. For example, Chris Byrne’s a very bright guy, and he writes that way all the time. But he writes a blog, and I suspect his prose might look rather different in other contexts.
No, other causes come to mind. Ritalin? ADD? Twitter? An insidious every-thought-deserves-equal-emphasis lingustic socialism permeating our educational institutions? I suspect all these, and I don’t like the result one bit. Academic papers are the next firewall against this sort of thing, but I expect a breach there shortly, if if it hasn’t happened already.
Which will be a shame, really. Think about it: how is one to make a cogent argument, whether in academia or the public sphere about an idea; how is one to transmit the concept of the idea, the train of thought, to other humans; how, indeed, to think when the very mechanism to place individual thoughts (sentences) into logically-related groups (paragraphs) is disdained or discarded? The end of political discourse, that’s the goal:
Indeed, when this stylistic abomination spreads to legal briefs — which, whatever you may think of their readability, at their core provide a relentlessly logical structure with which to make an argument — well, I think I’ll declare intellectual Armageddon and go home.
For now I’ll just retreat to my dead-tree books and their lovely long-form paragraphs. Thus endeth the rant.
For a counterexample you should read before you die, the clearest writing I’ve ever seen is Feynman’s QED. Enjoy.
Of note: How to Write Like a Brief-Writing Rockstar. Yes the lessons apply to your non-legal writing too. Guberman’s article. And Roberts’ brief, “the best the Supreme Court has ever seen.”
…Oh, and if anybody knows of an inexpensive paper or electronic reproduction or of Hooke’s Micrographica, lemme know. Saw one under glass at a museum, and from seeing that single page I know I must read more of it before I die. UPDATE: Ohhh yeahh.
