Archive for April, 2016
21 Apr 2016

The Kill: Greatest Lines Before and After

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Hat tip to Vanderleun.

21 Apr 2016

Tweet of the Day

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Tweet123

20 Apr 2016

“It was Midnight on the Sea, the Band was Playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee'”

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Watch the Titanic go down in real time.

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Needless to say, Jamie Brockett’s Legend of the Titanic (though amusing) is not really at all factual.

20 Apr 2016

Philosophic Insults

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Heiddeger1
That skunk Heidegger

From Scientific Philospher (who mentions 30, but only list 10 and offers no link, but I found them at Flavorwire).

Bertrand Russell on Aristotle
“I do not agree with Plato, but if anything could make me do so, it would be Aristotle’s arguments against him.”

Jean-Paul Sartre on Albert Camus
“Camus… a mix of melancholy, conceit and vulnerability on your part has always deterred people from telling you unvarnished truths. The result is that you have fallen prey to a gloomy immoderation that conceals your inner difficulties and which you refer to, I believe, as Mediterranean moderation. Sooner or later, someone would have told you this, so it might as well be me.”

Camille Paglia on Michel Foucault
“The truth is that Foucault knew very little about anything before the seventeenth century and, in the modern world, outside France. His familiarity with the literature and art of any period was negligible. His hostility to psychology made him incompetent to deal with sexuality, his own or anybody else’s. … The more you know, the less you are impressed by Foucault.” …

Bertrand Russell on Georg Hegel
“Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.”

Noam Chomsky on Slavoj Žižek
“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find… some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a 12-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.”

Slavoj Žižek on Noam Chomsky
“Well, with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my… point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate… well, I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong.”

Karl Popper on Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” (On being challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule; the discussion degenerated quickly from there.)

Karl Popper on Martin Heidegger
“I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger. This man was a devil. I mean, he behaved like a devil to his beloved teacher, and he has a devilish influence on Germany… One has to read Heidegger in the original to see what a swindler he was.”

Arthur Schopenhauer on Georg Hegel
“Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.”

20 Apr 2016

Leptocephalus

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Leptocephali
The leptocephali are about 300 – 400 mm long and appear to be metamorphosing larvae of some type of moray eel of the family Muraenidae. The morphological similarities between these leptocephali and Ribbon Eels, Rhinomuraena quaesita, suggest they may be Ribbon Eel larvae.

Leptocephali are transparent because they have only a thin layer of muscle over a mucinous pouch inside the body. The pouch contains glucosaminoglycan (GAG) compounds that form a transparent jelly-like substance. The GAGs are converted into tissue during metamorphosis, and thus in addition to being transparent, they are also an energy storage material.

20 Apr 2016

Rush Takes on the Key Question

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TrumpLies

Rush Limbaugh yesterday:

CALLER: Yes. The question is, Rush, you’ve been analyzing the Trump phenomenon for months — you know, giving it real full thought — and just to close the circle, I have a question here. Assuming Trump becomes the nominee and he wins the general election and things don’t go so well on trade or other things he promised, are his supporters gonna keep on cheering him on or are they gonna start bitching and saying, “You know, he’s not doing what he said he was gonna do”? …

RUSH: Trump gets elected, and everything he stands for, many of the things bomb, nothing happens on trade, no changes. What will his supporters do then?

CALLER: Start blaming the ChiComs. That’s why we voted him in, that’s why these people voted him in, to seal the deal. This is what he is.

RUSH: No, wait a minute now, you’re kind of jumping the gun. If the trade deals don’t happen, if his people blame the ChiComs, they’ll eventually be saying that the ChiComs outsmarted Trump and Trump was gonna be the one to outsmart them. … Let’s take something Trump has said that is going to happen, that he’s gonna do, and let’s assume it doesn’t happen, and you want to know what his crowd’s gonna do. Let’s take the iPhone. Trump has said on at least two different occasions that I’ve heard that he’s gonna, quote, make Apple make their phones in America. I’m gonna make Apple make their phones and their computers in America. And audiences cheered wildly.

Now, I can tell you here, Levin, it’s impossible. The iPhone cannot be made in America. Not as it is currently assembled. You would not believe, people would not believe what all is involved in manufacturing, assembling, designing the iPhone. Just the final assembly takes place in factories where three to five hundred thousand people work. But the supply chain, the parts that go into an iPhone, or any other smartphone, is impossible to even know, it is so extensive, it’s so detailed, it’s so deep.

All the different parts in that phone come from everywhere on this planet. And a system has been developed of transportation and distribution where all those parts happen to be available in China or Japan, just a day away, should something be needed. To move all of that, not just the assembly, but all of that to the United States is not possible, and specifically if you want to keep the iPhone priced as it is. Okay. So let’s just take that as an example. He has said he’s gonna make Apple bring the iPhone home. Apple will not do that. Question, what do Trump supporters think when it doesn’t happen?

CALLER: Oh, he was just saying as a negotiating thing to bring pressure on China or —

RUSH: No, your question is specifically what are Trump supporters gonna do. That may be too complicated, but I’m just telling you, iPhone is not gonna be made in America.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: It can’t be. Unless you want to pay a couple thousand dollars for one. And wait. We just don’t have the infrastructure here to do it. It’s not a cut on the country, it’s not a criticism of the country. Let’s take the wall. Let’s say the wall doesn’t get built, Levin.

CALLER: That’s a good example.

RUSH: What if the wall doesn’t get built? What happens? I mean, that’s a signature deal, right?

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: If that wall doesn’t get built and the Mexicans obviously don’t pay for it, then what will Trump fans — that’s what your question is, right — what are they gonna do?

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Well, the correct answer is at that point, it doesn’t matter what they do, because Trump’s already elected.

CALLER: Well, he wants to get elected again.

RUSH: Maybe. Would assume so. But it still might —

CALLER: For Trump, the winner to be a one-term president? I mean, that’s almost worse than not winning the presidency at all.

RUSH: No, it’s not. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. …

CALLER: Hm-hm.

RUSH: That’s not true. Being president for four years — Jimmy Carter wouldn’t trade — he was the worst ever, he wouldn’t trade it, he’d do it again. If everything was exactly the same, he’d do it again. Even having to go to the Nixon funeral and listen to people praise Nixon, that was the worst day of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Don’t doubt me out there.

20 Apr 2016

“All You Need is Trump”

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19 Apr 2016

Really Good Down-Home Commercial

I draw the line at Trump, but I still like redneck culture.

19 Apr 2016

Give it to Trump, Good and Hard

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TrumpGrimacing

Canadian Cincinnatus, at Ricochet, quotes Marion Evans:

    One way to deal with gadflies, rogues and bullies is to give them exactly what they want on the theory that they will eventually do themselves in. Since his Colorado debacle, Donald Trump has been arguing that the delegate attribution should reflect the percentage earned by each candidate in each primary/caucus. But under these new “Trump rules,” his total delegate count today would be 564 (table below), well below his official current total of 755.”

[and he observes himself:]

The simple truth is that Trump is in over his head. He lost Colorado because his team failed to show up. Tens of thousands of people showed up and voted in the caucuses … just not for him because his campaign was AWOL. In contrast, Cruz has set up dedicated campaign teams in every state, in some cases, for years, and continues to operate them after the primaries are over in order to snag the actual delegates. This is called playing by the rules.

Until recently, this part of the game eluded Trump’s attention because nobody else was paying attention to it either. There hasn’t been a brokered convention in decades. But Cruz paid attention, and began working on this before anybody thought a brokered convention was likely That says a lot about Cruz’s perspicacity and thoroughness… as well, as Trump’s. These qualities are supremely relevant to the job of president.

I think Trump entered the presidential race on a self-promotional lark and — to his great surprise — found himself winning, mostly because he accidentally tapped into underlying issues such as political correctness and immigration. When he first adopted them, I don’t think he had any clue about their potency.

He is like the dog that caught the car he was chasing; he doesn’t know what to do next.

19 Apr 2016

Bounty Hunters Today

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dillingerwantedposter4

Katie Bo Williams, in the Atlantic, looks at the Bounty Hunting industry and finds that it is pretty good at policing itself.

Bounty hunters usually grab national attention only when somebody gets shot, but in many states, they’re an active part of the criminal-justice system. The modern bail-recovery industry, mostly identified with Wild-West-like Hollywood depictions like Dog the Bounty Hunter or the novels by Janet Evanovich, is largely invisible to the public eye. This kind of incident usually drives two separate criticisms: that America’s archaic bail system disproportionately impacts the poor, and that bounty hunters are acting as wildly unregulated quasi-police. Some areas have addressed the first with pretrial services programs that screen and release low-risk defendants. In certain states the second might be partially true—but the industry is far more sophisticated than it appears at first glance. …

There are four major players in the bail-bonding process: the person who has been arrested, the judge who sets his bail, the bail bondsman, and the bail-recovery agent. Bail is a security—usually money but sometimes property—paid to the court in exchange for release of an arrested person, to be returned when the defendant appears at his or her court date. A judge will typically set a higher bail for defendants who are considered a flight risk or a danger to society. A bail bondsman, backed by insurance policies, then signs a civil contract with the defendant to post bail for a 10 to 15 percent fee. Under the terms of these contracts, should a defendant fail to appear at a court date, the bondsman has the right to apprehend his or her client. If the bondsman fails to procure the “skip,” he or she is on the hook for the entirety of the bail to the court.

Although some bondsmen do their own recovery work in-house, many will contract with independent bounty hunters to apprehend skips. Bounty hunters are considered private contractors, but they are authorized to use deadly force when making an arrest. …

The common perception is that bounty hunters are above the law—and in fact, they are not subject to many of the constitutional amendments that govern law enforcement. Bounty hunters are not bound by the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures under the Fourth Amendment, the privilege against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, or the right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. For the most part, the industry draws its legal standing from Taylor v. Taintor, a 1872 Supreme Court ruling that allows bounty hunters to, among other things, “pursue [a fugitive] into another State; arrest him on the Sabbath; and, if necessary, break and enter his house for that purpose.”

That sounds archaic, but skips actually agree to these terms. The fugitive is a client of a bail bondsman—he or she has signed a civil contract with the bondsman that effectively gives him the right to come arrest him should he fail to appear. This contract is what gives bounty hunters the right to come on to a fugitive’s property to affect an arrest; it’s also part of the industry’s incentive not to abuse skips. It’s tough to get return business if your recovery agents have a reputation for roughing folks up.

Read the whole thing.

In the early 1990s, my wife and I had both sold off our former companies, and had tried a few things that didn’t work out. Time had gone by, we were both still out of work, and we were starting to run out of money.

I happened upon an ad looking for a Bail Bond Recovery Agent, and it occurred to me that this was something I could do. I am a pretty good hunter. I do excellent research. And I come from a family loaded with police, and am not at all frightened of criminals.

I bought myself a very compact and highly powerful Taser, and laid in a supply of plastic wrist restraints. I already owned a number of handguns and even had around a somewhat-antique leather sap I sometimes used as a book weight, which I’d inherited from an uncle who had been a Pennsylvania state cop.

When I talked to a few Bail Bondsmen down in Bridgeport, though, I found that the real deal was the guys I’d be hunting and bringing in were basically just local blacks and Puerto Ricans charged with a variety of petty drug offenses. I did plenty of drugs myself back in college, and I figured that I’d be a very evil bastard indeed if I went out and made a buck enforcing victim-less crime laws on people less fortunate than myself. So I dropped that particular scheme.

19 Apr 2016

Tweet of the Week

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Tweet124

18 Apr 2016

Front-Runners Don’t Always Become the Nominee

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TrumpComplaining

Donald Trump has been vociferously complaining that delegate contests he doesn’t win are undemocratic and unfair, and demanding that the GOP Convention rules be changed to award the nomination to him, if he should be in possession of a plurality of votes on the first ballot. And, as usual, you can find a lot of the dimmer commentators, particularly on television, succumbing to his arguments.

The truth of the matter is that the nomination process was never intended or designed to function as a uniform and monolithic expression of pure and direct democracy.

The contest for the nomination was obviously never meant to be decided entirely and consistently by voting in primaries. Nor was the nomination ever intended necessarily to be decided prior to the convention itself. In recent years, the impact of coverage of the primary contests by the national media has added much greater emphasis to primary voting than was the case in earlier periods, and has encouraged the snowballing of a frontrunner’s success, but 2016 is proving to be an unusual cycle featuring a minority populist groundswell of support for one candidate, who –like some others in the past– is widely unpopular and completely unacceptable to a large portion of the Party.

The Nominating Convention is not simply a rubber stamp process which counts up the results of primary voting. Political parties are private organizations operating on the basis of their own systems of rules, whose rules and processes commonly differ over 50 states. Different states choose their delegates at different times and different states appoint delegates by different processes. Some delegates are bound by the rules to vote (on at least the first ballot) for a particular candidate. Others are unbound.

The essence of the situation is that convention will be composed of delegates representing their state parties, and not by robots mechanically operating in accordance with a direct democracy.

If the nominating process were a pure democracy, one would suppose that, instead of our current system, there would be held a nation-wide primary balloting all on the same day, and no convention would be necessary.

But, actually, the nomination contest is intended to function as a complex process, incorporating local and regional customs, preferences, and eccentricities, and going on over an extended interval of time intentionally in order to expose potential candidates to a diverse geographical collection of constituencies and interests, to test their abilities and personalities, and to expose their records and personal histories to intense scrutiny at length.

The fact that, in recent decades, the American nominating system has grown more predictable, more primary-based, and less reliant on delegate contests at the convention itself does not mean that, in this unusual year featuring a highly-unusual front-runner candidate of controversial character and carrying dubious credentials, we may not see a return to a more old-fashioned convention-based decision-making process.

Donald Trump won’t like it if he loses despite entering the convention with the largest number of first ballot votes, but if that happens to Trump, he won’t be the first GOP front-runner to fall behind in the course of convention balloting. It has not happened recently, not since 1940, but Donald Trump would actually be the 23rd of 22 men who had exactly the same experience (two of them, John Sherman and James G. Blaine, twice).

1940:

ThomasDewey
Thomas Dewey had 36% of the delegate votes on the first ballot of the Republican Convention of 1940, but Wendell Willkie (who started with only 10.5% of the votes) won the nomination on the 6th ballot. Wilkie, of course, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was breaking tradition by seeking a third term.

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1920:

LeonardWood
Leonard Wood

FrankLowden
Frank Lowden

HiramJohnson
Hiram Johnson

NicholasMurrayButler
Nicholas Murray Butler

WilliamSproul
William C. Sproul

Five rival candidates had more delegates on the first ballot in 1920, but Warren G. Harding cinched the nomination on the 10th ballot.

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1888:

JohnSherman
John Sherman

RussellAAlger
Russell A. Alger

WalterQGresham
Walter Q. Gresham

ChaunceyDepew
Chauncey Depew

Benjamin Harrison, who was initially not among the top four candidates in votes, won the nomination after 8 ballots. He went on to defeat Grover Cleveland in the general election.

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1880:

UlyssesGrant
Ulysses Grant

JamesGBlaine
James G. Blaine

JohnSherman
John Sherman

GeorgeFEdmunds
George F. Edmunds

ElihuWashburne
Elihu Washburne

WilliamWindom
William Windom

Grant had the most votes on the first ballot, and all these other gentlemen had some, while James Garfield had zero, but after 36 ballots Garfield got the needed majority. Garfield was elected president, but was assassinated a few months after taking office.

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1876:

JamesGBlaine
James G. Blaine

OliverPMorton
Oliver P. Morton

BenjaminBristow
Benjamin Bristow

RConkling
Roscoe Conkling

JohnFHantranft
John F. Hantranft

Dark horse Rutherford Hayes of Ohio rose from an approximate tie for 5th place to win on the 6th ballot. Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden. 20 electoral college votes were disputed, but a special commission (containing a Republican majority) awarded them, and the election to Hayes. Democrats agreed to stop resisting his inauguration after Hayes promised to end Reconstruction.

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1860:

Seward
William Seward

Abraham Lincoln’s floor managers successfully pulled off a deal with the Pennsylvania delegation and got him enough votes by the third ballot to take the nomination away from William Seward.

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1856:

nathaniel-banks
Nathaniel P. Banks

The American Party actually nominated Banks, but it was understood that he would withdraw in favor of John C. Frémont who expected to be nominated by the newly founded Republican Party. Banks did withdraw and Frémont became the nominee of the merged parties on the 11th ballot. Frémont then went on to lose to the Democrat James Buchanan.

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