Archive for February, 2011
12 Feb 2011

Giving Rush His Due

Wilfred M. McClay has a good article in Commentary assessing Rush Limbaugh’s talent and importance and putting his role in the national political debate into the appropriate perspective.

Like it or not, Rush Limbaugh is unarguably one of the most important figures in the political and cultural life of the United States in the past three decades. His national radio show has been on the air steadily for nearly 23 years and continues to command a huge following, upward of 20 million listeners a week on 600 stations. The only reason it is not even bigger is that his success has spawned so many imitators, a small army of talkers such as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, and so on, who inevitably siphon off some of his market share. He has been doing this show for three hours a day, five days a week, without guests (except on rare occasions), using only the dramatic ebb and flow of his monologues, his always inventive patter with callers, his “updates,” song parodies, mimicry, and various other elements in his DJ’s bag of tricks.

He is equipped with a resonant and instantly recognizable baritone voice and an unusually quick and creative mind, a keen and independent grasp of political issues and political personalities, and—what is perhaps his greatest talent—an astonishing ability to reformulate complex ideas in direct, vivid, and often eloquent ways, always delivering his thoughts live and unscripted, out there on the high wire. He conducts his show in an air of high-spiritedness and relaxed good humor, clearly enjoying himself, always willing to be spontaneous and unpredictable, even though he is aware that every word he utters on the air is being recorded and tracked by his political enemies in the hope that he will slip up and say something career-destroying. Limbaugh the judo master is delighted to make note of this surveillance, with the same delight he expresses when one of his “outrageous” sound bites makes the rounds of the mainstream media, and he can then play back all the sputtering but eerily uniform reactions from the mainstream commentators, turning it back on them with a well-placed witticism. …

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

12 Feb 2011

America, Land of Lawsuits

, , , , ,

Walter Olson, who blogs at Overlawyered, linked this video demonstrating that even anime characters have learned to fear the American penchant for resorting to litigation.

11 Feb 2011

Decline and Fall

, , ,


Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of Paestum from L’ancienne Ville de Pesto, 1778

The Wall Street Journal reported that the end of the era of New York City and the United States as the world’s leading center of finance is not just imminent, it is here right now.

After 219 years as the citadel of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange was near an agreement to be acquired by Deutsche Börse AG in a deal that would create the world’s largest financial exchange.

With the parent of the New York Stock Exchange and Germany’s Deutsche Borse in advanced talks to merge, Aaron Lucchetti and Dennis Berman look at the likely impact on Wall Street as the financial capital of the world.

If a deal is reached and regulators approve, the combined company would trade more stocks and futures than any rival in the world and more options than any U.S. exchange. The takeover would culminate a decade of tie-ups by exchanges around the world eager to find new sources of growth and catch up with smaller rivals that have been quicker to embrace new and lucrative kinds of trading.

For New York, the move is symbolic of the city’s fading dominance on the world stage as other countries are drawing investors directly to their markets. The move also is a recognition that securities trading today goes on at all hours and in all time zones, making the actual bricks and mortar of Wall Street far less important than before.

“New York is going to be important, but it’s not the financial center. Capital markets are everywhere now,” said Michael LaBranche, CEO of LaBranche & Co, the family-run firm that traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for 87 years before it sold that part of its business to Britain’s Barclays Capital in 2010. …

The exchanges, which are presenting the deal as a merger of equals, said the combination would leave 60% of the company in the hands of Deutsche Börse shareholders, with NYSE Euronext shareholders holding the remaining 40%. The combined company, with a putative market capitalization of some $25 billion as of Wednesday, would be incorporated in the Netherlands and split its headquarters between Frankfurt and New York.

————————-

To put all this into perspective, take this little news item into account.

Dow Jones:

The U.S. budget deficit grew in January, heading for an expected record in 2011 amid warnings about the nation’s burgeoning debt and wrangling over government spending.

The Treasury Department’s regular monthly statement, released Thursday, showed the U.S. spent $49.80 billion more than it collected last month.

That’s right. In one single month, your government spent an amount of money in excess of its actual income totaling twice what it would cost to buy the combination of the New York Stock Exchange and the German Deutsche Börse, the largest merged securities trading entity in the world.

Liberal policies are not only tremendously economically destructive. Their impact is far more rapid than is commonly recognized. New York City’s financial industry has been been propping up not only New York’s tremendously misgoverned city and state for decades, but the entire region. Picture the financial district of New York before long coming to resemble the manufacturing districts of the Northeast. Then picture the US in the position of post-WWII Britain, obliged to dismantle its military and retreat from its traditional role of world leadership permanently, because it just cannot afford military power or a major international role.

11 Feb 2011

Best Line of the Day

, ,

At this point, Obama’s Harvard diploma says more about Harvard than it says about Obama.

Iowahawk

11 Feb 2011

Century Association Severs Ties to Garrick Club

, ,


The Century Association Clubhouse

One of New York City’s most prestigious club is the Century Association, founded in 1847 by a group including William Cullen Bryant to bring together (originally, 100) men of achievement in the fine arts and literature. The Renaissance-Style 43rd Street clubhouse’s arrogant second-floor loggia seems to sneer down at neighboring mere university-based clubhouses. A Century Club membership has long been a token of full membership in New York City’s intellectual establishment. These days the club has more than 2400 members. The Century’s cuisine is reputedly grand, and its membership enjoys exclusive access to a notable private art collection.

The Century Club began admitting female members in 1989, and this has produced in the minds of many of today’s New York’s most illustrious representatives of the life of the mind A PROBLEM.

The Century Club long maintained reciprocal relations with London’s Garrick Club (founded 1831), allowing members visiting the British capital to enjoy similar exclusive perqs and accomodations, but the Garrick Club’s membership is limited to men, and ladies are permitted entrance to the club only in the company of a gentleman member.

A group of 50 eguality-minded Centurians began agitating for the severance of ties to the wicked Garrick, and after months of the customary argle-bargling, the left as usual got its way.

The membership of the British Garrick Club does not seem to care very much about the loss of the relationship to its colonial cousin . According to the Telegraph, one of them remarked:

It is America’s obsession with political correctness that helps make it such a charmless, humourless and paranoid society, frankly.

Another Garrick member did not think the issue was very important. “The Century’s a crap club anyway.” he said.

11 Feb 2011

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer

, ,

This New York Times feature has a representative slide-show:

Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered. The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers. … Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz, while elevating and dignifying the people in her frames — vulnerable, noble, defeated, proud, fragile, tender and often quite funny. …

What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

Vivian Maier blog

Russell Bowman Art Advisory Exhibition, Chicago, April 15, 2011 – June 18, 2011

Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer exhibition, January 8, 2011 – April 3, 2011


Vivian Maier, 1926-2009

Hat tip to Xavier.

10 Feb 2011

WikiLeaks Threat Report Leads to Hacker War on Security Firm

, , , , , ,

The Tech Herald identifies Bank of America as the “major bank” that Julian Assange boasted last November 29th that WikiLeaks was going to “take down.”

The Tech Herald exposé then proceeds to describe how the Justice Department recommended the law firm of Hunton & Williams to undertake an internal investigation at BOA, and Hunton & Williams brought three security consultancies and US defense contractors, Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary, on board to do a report on WikiLeaks in order to pitch BOA on hiring all of these organizations to undertake a concerted effort to stop WikiLeaks and protect Bank of America.

The document prepared by the three security firms, titled Wikileaks Threat, contains some interesting information on the organization of WikiLeaks and identifies a number of major players.

WikiLeaks was launched in 2006 by self-described Chinese dissidents and interested parties from five continents.

Within a year of its launch, WikiLeaks claimed to possess over 1.2 million documents from thirteen countries.

As of January 2010, the WikiLeaks team consisted of five full-time employees and about 800 volunteers.

The employees and volunteers are spread across the world, with their identities largely unknown. …

Part of the strategy involves incorporating and registering WikiLeaks in different countries under different auspices that provide maximum protection under the laws of these countries: a library in Australia, a foundation in France, and a newspaper in Sweden, and two no-­name tax exempt 501c3 non-­profits in the United States are some examples. Many of the releases of documents for a while were based in Iceland where laws are extremely protective of speech.

The Threat report (now hosted on WikiLeaks) identifies in particular:

“Confirmed Employees”:

Founder: Julian Assange

Registered Owner: John Shipton of Nairobi

——————-

“Uncertain” organizational status:

Spokesman: Kirstinn Hrafnsson (Boing, Boing)

IT Specialist: Jacob Applebaum

——————-

“Volunteers” (Allied Left-wing Bloggers):

Journalist: Glenn Greenwald (“the left’s most dishonest blogger“)

Journalist: Jennifer 8. Lee (Wikipedia)

Journalist: James Ball

Journalist: (Postdoc / Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Boston College): Daniel Matthews (left-wing libertarian blog)

Proposed counter-measures included:

Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.

Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.

Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.

Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt amongst moderates.

Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.

They were planning to bring in Booz Allen to conduct the internal review at Bank of America, and were conducting initial social media investigations, when Aaron Barr, head of security services firm HBGary Federal, boasted to the Financial Times that he had used social media sites to gain enough information to threaten hackers with arrest.

An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed.

Supporters of the internet group – known as Anonymous, which gained wide attention after it co-ordinated attacks that crashed the websites of some businesses that had broken ties with WikiLeaks – have continued to ambush high-profile targets, recently forcing government sites in Egypt and Tunisia to close. …

[A] senior US member of Anonymous, using the online nickname Owen and evidently living in New York, appears to be one of those targeted in recent legal investigations, according to online communications uncovered by a private security researcher.

A co-founder of Anonymous, who uses the nickname Q after the character in James Bond, has been seeking replacements for Owen and others who have had to curtail activities, said researcher Aaron Barr, head of security services firm HBGary Federal.

Mr Barr said Q and other key figures lived in California and that the hierarchy was fairly clear, with other senior members in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Australia.

Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who “are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions”, Mr Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.

Retaliation was quick.

The response was brutal, resulting in full control over hbgary.com and hbgaryfederal.com. They were also able to compromise HBGary’s network, including full access to all their financials, software products, PBX systems, Malware data, and email, which they released to the public in a 4.71 GB Torrent file.

In a statement emailed to The Tech Herald, Anonymous called Barr’s actions media-whoring, and noted that his claims had amused them.

“Let us teach you a lesson you’ll never forget: you don’t mess with Anonymous. You especially don’t mess with Anonymous simply because you want to jump on a trend for public attention,” the statement directed to HBGary and Barr said.

“You have blindly charged into the Anonymous hive, a hive from which you’ve tried to steal honey. Did you think the bees would not defend it? Well here we are. You’ve angered the hive, and now you are being stung. It would appear that security experts are not expertly secured.”

Anonymous also released more than 50,000 HBGary internal emails to the public.

HBGary admits that the attacks were successful:

HBGary, Inc and HBGary Federal, a separate but related company, have been the victims of an intentional criminal cyberattack. We are taking this crime seriously and are working with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities and redirecting internal resources to investigate and respond appropriately. To the extent that any client information may have been affected by this event, we will provide the affected clients with complete and accurate information as soon as it becomes available.

Meanwhile, please be aware that any information currently in the public domain is not reliable because the perpetrators of this offense, or people working closely with them, have intentionally falsified certain data.

Hat tip to Slashdot.

10 Feb 2011

One Six-Year Senate Term

, , ,

Virginia Senator James Webb announced yesterday that he does not intend to run for reelection in 2012.

James Webb ought to have been exactly the kind of candidate anyone of my political views would be eager to support, an Appalachian redneck who attended the Naval Academy and then served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, a war hero deservedly awarded the Nation’s second highest medal for valor, a former Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan Administration, an intellectual who published several decent novels. What was not to like?

Webb announced his political ambitions in a history book he published in 2004 celebrating his native culture and ancestry, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.

Reading it, followed by his 2008 A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, I was persuaded that Jim Webb’s intention was to enter national politics as a second Andrew Jackson, that he was convinced that he had a role as a populist conservative champion of the values of rural working class America, that he intended to take on the liberal urban national elites on behalf of the same ordinary Americans among whom lay his own personal roots.

It seemed strange, then, that Webb proceeded to announce his intention to run as a democrat, challenging a conservative Republican incumbent, who was, at the time, one of the leading and most desirable conservative presidential prospects. It was not what anybody would call helpful to the conservative cause.

The next thing we knew, Webb went into attack mode, using an attempt by his opponent to mock the conniving presence of a Webb campaign agent filming him at one of his rallies to accuse George Allen of racism. Allen had referred to the opposition tracker of Indian extraction using a nonsense word, and Webb’s establishment media allies concocted an extravagantly implausible analysis of the word as an antique Moroccan slur applied to Negroes, imported into the Allen family’s customary parlance in Southern California by a mother of Shephardic Jewish ancestry.

This underhanded use of obviously false accusations of racism was pretty disgusting, particularly coming someone who would normally be expected to have good cause to fear being on the receiving end of similar accusations from the left.

James Webb proceeded to run for the Senate successfully, as an anti-war candidate no less, simultaneously waving around his Marine Corps son’s combat boots and insulting George W. Bush in public on the basis of his alleged grand indignation over the president’s sending his son into combat.

For a while, I entertained the hypothesis that all this villainy was perhaps merely the ruthless means by which Jim Webb meant to fight and claw his way into high office, and that once he had acquired a usable platform out would emerge the second incarnation of Old Hickory to turn the tables on the establishment and shake things up in Washington. They do train young men to be hard-nosed at Annapolis. The Marine Corps’s fighting techniques do not emphasize fair play for the enemy. Maybe Webb as just being a ruthless SOB for ultimately patriotic reasons. It seemed to me that a populist conservative democrat presidential contender would be a real game changer in national politics and the two party system as we know it could possibly never be the same. Maybe Webb would redeem himself in the end by challenging the current democrat party’s elite leftism and restoring the party of Jefferson and Jackson to its Southern libertarian and working class roots.

But then we saw James Webb the Senator. All the stuff in those books about “fighting” had nothing to do with Webb’s senatorial behavior. As Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid steered the ship of state hard left and opened wide the deficit sea valves, Senator James Henry Webb, Jr. representative of the Commonwealth of Virginia and of the Scots Irish culture of America faithfuly voted the left-wing party line every single time. Yes, Webb voted for the Porkulus. Yes, Webb voted for Obamacare. It seemed to me a pity that the democrats didn’t see their way clear to introduce a ban on handguns or a hunt ban, so we could watch good old Jim Webb vote with the democrat party on those, too.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More, upon learning that his protege Richard Rich has been appointed Attorney General for Wales as a reward for betraying him by misquoting their private conversations, remarks, Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales? One might say much the same thing of Mr. Webb, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for one lousy six-year term in the Senate?

.

09 Feb 2011

Most Americans Think Obama Will Lose in 2012

, ,

A new CNN Poll that Obama’s slightly improving poll numbers do not necessarily translate into electoral support.

More than half of registered voters believe President Obama will lose a bid for a second term, even as more Americans say they approve of his job performance than at any time in more than a year.

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, released Tuesday, shows 51 percent of registered voters, and the same percentage of adult Americans, believe Obama will lose if he runs for re-election. 46 percent say he would win.

And more voters say, at the moment, they will vote against Obama. Fully 51 percent say they definitely or probably will not vote for Obama, while 47 percent say they’re predisposed to vote for him. Independent voters would vote against Obama by a 44 percent to 53 percent margin, while he would win moderates by a much larger 55 percent to 45 percent margin.

The numbers come in the same poll that showed Obama gaining from a big positive bump. The sample of all adults approve of the job Obama is doing by a 55 percent to 44 percent margin, the highest Obama’s approval rating has gone since a poll conducted November 13-15, 2009.

I think Obama’s position would look completely hopeless, if we had an obvious strong candidate waiting in the wings to oppose him. The closest figure we have to that is Sarah Palin, who does have real star power, but who also provokes disadvantageous class antagonism, and who has given in the past much cause for concern by a propensity toward gaffes and failures to provide articulate responses. The current supposed GOP front runners, Romney and Pawlenty, are both losers of previous nomination campaigns. What has changed to make either more attractive to the Republican base? Nothing that I can see. Newt Gingrich is apparently running. And Gingrich has taken a sufficient number of unsavory and opportunistic positions that he has certainly lost credibility with serious conservatives. John J. Miller and Rich Lowry recently floated Jeb Bush trial balloons. The problem is that electing Bushes has not really worked out very well for Republicans in the past. I don’t think many of us are eager to have another representative of the Bush dynasty in the White House. The Republican Party is in great shape on Vice Presidential candidates, but Sarah Palin is extremely iffy and there is no obvious other choice for the top of the ticket. Yet.

09 Feb 2011

More on Political Bias in Academia

, , , , , ,

Megan McArdle contemplates yesterday’s New York Times academic bias against conservatives article. She does not pretend to have a solution, but thinks it would be nice if liberals actually recognized their own biases.

[L]iberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination–structural or personal–suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything. Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don’t really want to go into management because they’re much happier without all the responsibility. Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren’t open new ideas; they’re too aggressive and hierarchical; they don’t care about ideas, just money. In other words, it’s not our fault that they’re not worthy.

Besides, liberals suddenly argue, we shouldn’t look for every sub-population to mirror the composition of the population at large; just as Greeks gravitated towards diners in 1980s New York, and the small market business was dominated by Koreans, liberals are attracted to academia, and conservatives to, well, some other profession. …

I don’t actually know many conservatives who want quotas for conservatives, either–I’m sure they’re out there, but even David Horowitz didn’t go that far. Most of the people I talk to think, like James Joyner, that this may be a problem without a solution. It is just my impression, but I think what conservatives want most of all is simply recognition that they are being shut out. It is a double indignity to be discriminated against, and then be told unctuously that your group’s underrepresentation is proof that almost none of you are as good as “us”. Haidt notes that his correspondence with conservative students (anonymously) “reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s”:

    He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal. “I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

Beyond that, mostly they would like academics to be conscious of the bias, and try to counter it where possible. As the quote above suggests, this isn’t just for the benefit of conservatives, either. Just as excluding blacks and women from academia by tacit agreement allowed for a certain amount of wrong-headed groupthink, so does excluding people with different political views. No, I’m not saying you have to hire a Young Earth Creationist to be a biology professor, but I don’t see why it should matter in a professor of Mathematics or Sociology.

Trying to be more conscious of one’s own bias, and even to attempt to work against it, should not be such a hard task for people as brilliant, open-minded, and committed to equality and social justice as I keep hearing that liberal academics are. So it doesn’t really seem like so much to ask.

09 Feb 2011

“I Am the Only One in This Room Professional Enough to Carry the Glock 40”

, , , , , , , , ,

Never Yet Melted remarked about Glocks:

My experience is that the Glock pistol is surprisingly easy to shoot, but it also has—in my opinion—some very objectionable features and can be dangerous to an unskilled user. A lot of police are accidentally shooting themselves in the leg with Glocks these days.

Crack DEA agent Lee Paige tried suing the government over that video. The Smoking Gun:

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent who stars in a popular online video that shows him shooting himself in the foot during a weapons demonstration for Florida children is suing over the tape’s release, claiming that his career has been crippled and he’s become a laughingstock due to the embarrassing clip’s distribution. …

According to the lawsuit, Paige was making a “drug education presentation” in April 2004 to a Florida youth group when his firearm (a Glock .40) accidentally discharged. The shooting occurred moments after Paige told the children that he was the only person in the room professional enough to carry the weapon.

The accident was filmed by an audience member, and the tape, Paige claims, was turned over to the DEA. The drug agency, he charges, subsequently “improperly, illegally, willfully and/or intentionally” allowed the tape to be disseminated.

As a result, Paige–pictured at left in a still from the video–has been the “target of jokes, derision, ridicule, and disparaging comments” directed at him in restaurants, grocery stores, and airports. Paige, who writes that he was “once regarded as one of the best undercover agents, if not the best, in the DEA,” points to the clip’s recent airing on popular television shows and via the Internet as the reason he can no longer work undercover. He also notes that he is no longer “permitted or able to give educational motivational speeches and presentations.”

Alas! Mr. Paige shot himself in the foot again, Lowering the Bar reports the case was dismissed. Getting back into the news means, of course, that more people will see the video.

[T]he judge granted summary judgment on the grounds that (even after many depositions) Paige could not prove how the video clip had gotten out, and even if he could have, the leaked information was not “private” because the incident took place in front of 50 parents and children (who at least did learn an excellent lesson in gun safety). Case dismissed.

—————————————

There is no “Glock 40,” by the way. Mr. Paige shot himself with a Glock Model 22 or 23 chambered in the .40 Smith & Wesson cartridge.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

08 Feb 2011

William Shakespeare?

,


At the Morgan Library the Cobbe portrait believed by some experts to be a portrait of William Shakespeare painted from life. Other experts do not agree.

From lines and colors via Ka-Ching

Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted for February 2011.
/div>








Feeds
Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)
Feed Shark