Obama’s body servant, Reggie Love, carries the papers.

Business Insider serves up today juicy details from Reggie Love’s Power Forward: My Presidential Education, a memoir of the 21-year-old Duke University sports star’s experience of working as Barack Obama’s personal body servant.

Love got to fetch and carry for his Obamaness, buy Obama’s clothes, serve Obama’s meals, babysit his children, and even shoot basketball hoops with the great man.

When Love made mistakes, we learn, the wrath of Obama could be terrible.

The night before Love’s first official trip as Obama’s “chief of stuff” he made a trip to a local supermarket to buy black and silver Sharpie’s, black pilot G2 Gel Roller pens, Trident chewing gum, and trail mix. Mulling over the plethora of trail mix options Love recalls, “Salted or dry roasted? Sweet or spicy? With or without dried fruit or candy? I realized I hadn’t a clue what the man (Senator Obama) would like. I also had an accompanying thought: how much could it possibly matter? He’d be grateful regardless, right?” Turns out, the trail mix selection did matter to Obama. Hours later Love flew with the senator on a commercial flight from D.C. to LaGuardia. While on the flight Love offered Obama the bag of trail mix. “The senator opened the bag of trail mix I’d bought and proceeded to pick out every M&M, holding them all in his palm like pieces of candy-coated toxic waste. ‘I’m not going to eat these,’ he said while pushing his hand in my general direction. ‘Do you want them?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose. ‘No thank you, sir,’ I answered, then made the first of what would be thousands of notes to self: No candy with the trail mix.”

The Washington Post hit back a few days ago at Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s Republican response to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. Joni Ernst, who grew up in the small Iowa town of Red Oak, in her speech, remembered working a low wage job at Hardee’s to pay for college. Ernst was pointing to her own life experience as proof that opportunity is available to every American.

The WaPo feature is a sob story, intended to make the point that Joni Ernst’s youthful Hardee’s stint is just an irrelevant parable, but for various people described in WaPo’s story working at Hardee’s is real life.

Charlotte Allen read all this and summarized: “WaPo goes to Iowa Hardee’s, finds that unwed moms and meth addicts don’t become senators.”

Nearly all these women have kids—but there’s not a father to be seen in their children’s lives. Brandi has four children from past relationships, for example. She’s the only one of the bunch with an actual husband: former Hardee’s employee Luke, with two kids of his own and no current job (Luke, apparently, would rather dream about the diet-supplement business he intends to start, with a $1,000 stake that will presumably come from Brandi).

Emily had been thinking about college—but she never did enroll and now she’s got a baby. Trina has a history of meth problems, starting at age 15, when she was sent to a juvenile facility after a drug-fueled car-stealing spree. Her live-in boyfriend, Jeff, also a $7.50-an-hour Hardee’s employee, just blew $200 on a really cool tattoo. In fact, blowing money seems to be what it’s all about for those two. Here’s Jeff’s and Trina’s monthly budget:

“Working part time at Hardee’s, they each earn between $140 and $170 a week. The plan is always to save money, and within five days the money is always gone. DVDs, cigarettes, HDMI cables, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, cherry Pepsi — Wal-Mart and Casey’s convenience store get most of their paycheck, while $250 goes for rent each month.”

So–how are these Hardee’s employees on the biscuit line different from Joni Ernst?

There’s, let’s see, saving for college, for starters. There’s also not having kids until after you get married. There’s not getting into drugs when you’re teen-ager. There’s planning a future for yourself instead of drifting from job to job–and then working toward that goal. But in the world of the Washington Post, Joni Ernst’s stint at Hardee’s as the first step on the road to the Senate was just a silly Republican “parable.”

From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:

LEGENDARY HISTORY OF ST. PATRICK

That St Patrick chained the serpent in Lough Dilveen, and that the serpent calls out to him every Monday morning, is firmly believed by the lower orders who live in the neighbourhood of the Lough.

As Hillary’s fortunes decline, Kevin Williamson volunteers to write Hillary’s epitaph for her.

Bill Clinton won because he was always winning; if Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost, it is because she is losing.

President Clinton had a diabolical knack for turning his self-inflicted problems into referenda on the moral standing of his opponents, or of anybody who happened to be convenient for the purpose; thus the Monica Lewinsky scandal became a question not of the president’s venality in the Oval Office and elsewhere or of his consequent crimes — perjury, etc. — but a public trial of Kenneth Starr for the crime of being a buzzkill. Everybody — everybody, friend and foe — knew that President Clinton and his minions were lying about the matter, but the Democrats place an extraordinary value on cleverness: They are the party of the student council, and Bill Clinton has spent 50-odd years proving to the world that he is the cleverest boy at Hot Springs High School, and his admirers loved him not in spite of his gross opportunism and dishonesty but because of those very things. Finally, the Democrats rejoiced, a man who can show those Republicans for the unsophisticated, unclever fools that they are! Mrs. Clinton is at the moment looking somewhat short of clever. President Clinton not only survived his worst scandal but positively thrived off it, because his response hit his conservative tormentors in their most vulnerable spot: their reputation for being scolds and prudes, hypocritical sexual obsessives, etc. Mrs. Clinton’s response to the e-mail controversy, conversely, finds her repeatedly punching herself in her political nose, giving the impression that she is too old and out of touch to understand how e-mail works, that she is curdled, that she is the unslick half of the couple, that she does not have what it takes to do what her husband did to his rivals. She isn’t winning because she does not look like a winner to Democrats seeking a champion.

Read the whole thing.

When I was in high school, I had Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually, in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.

The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.

Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, (I was one of them) and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.

Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.

Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.

Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in his heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.

Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today, alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and are thought more relevant.

My high school Latin teacher is the large chap wearing glasses. He also coached one of our sports teams.

Today, March 14 is Pi Day, the date selected by uber-nerd Eliezer Yudkowsky aka Less Wrong for the release of the 122nd and final chapter of his widely-acclaimed Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Wrap parties celebrating the conclusion of what is, in the eyes of many readers, the greatest all-time performance by a piece of fan fiction will be taking place in Singapore, Bombay, Melbourne and Sydney, Cambridge, Berkeley, Mountain View, Brussels, London, and Berlin.

If we wanted to capture the ultimate Boone and Crockett Club record-book specimen of Nerdus Americanus to be mounted and displayed in a diorama in the Museum of Natural History, we’d be hunting for Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Yudkowsky is an autodidact who quit attending other people’s schools after 8th grade. He nonetheless is pretty successful. He co-founded his own university, the Singularity Institute, and he hobnobs with and advises billionaire capitalist Peter Thiel on change-the-world tech projects.

HPMOR differs from J.K. Rowling’s original in its ruthless consistency. All the background sob story is removed. Harry grows up happily and without being neglected and abused. Neither is Harry is humanized. Harry is not unhappy or insecure. Harry is one of us, a gifted intellectual and thoroughgoing rationalist of keen scientific bent, skeptical of authority and completely self-confident. He knows he’s smarter than everybody else. This Harry is not willing to accept Magic as traditionally taught at Hogwarts. This Harry intends to understand Magic in the light of Muggle science.

As HPMOR develops, Yudkowsky follows the pattern of the early portions of the J.K. Rowling original, but he continually revises. The reader looks on in admiration, noting with astonishment that Yudkowsky is certainly right. Again and again, he successfully improves upon the original.

It’s a great achievement, but it did not go entirely smoothly. Writing HPMOR took years and years, and Yudkowsky found himself distracted from continuing by his own reviews. He bogged down about halfway through, and production slowed to a trickle. He made promises of completion, which he broke. His readers have been sitting around, tapping their feet impatiently, for all of last year.

Today, at last, it’s all finished. Yudkowsky will be releasing his final chapter.

It’s going to be interesting to see what he writes next.

————————–

Facts About Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky’s pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s favorite food is printouts of Rice’s theorem.
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, “A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory”. It was thus that the universe was created. …

‘Bitter is the wind tonight

This anonymous poem is written in the margins of an Early Irish manuscript that now resides in the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland. Most likely dating from around 850 AD, the text may have been complied in a northern Irish monastery such as Nendrum or Bangor (both in Co. Down). In a just a few, short words it conveys the sense of dread that was permeating through Irish monastic communities in the 9th century AD. During this period Viking raids were an every present danger and the Irish Annals’ record numerous attacks on monasteries.

From Irish Archaeology via Ratak Monodosico.

Sean Davis explains what happened after God created cancer, bureaucracy, and black flies.

And on the 8th day, God looked down on his creation and said, “It’s way too honest and forthright.” So God made a Clinton.

God said, “I need somebody willing to do anything, believe anything, say anything, no matter how false, in order to attain power.” So God made a Clinton.

“I need somebody with a finger strong enough to wag at the cameras, but gentle enough to hit the power button on an industrial strength paper shredder. Somebody to bark at Congress, threaten cantankerous committee chairs, ignore subpoenas, and hide long sought after document troves deep in the bowels of the White House residence.” So God made a Clinton.

God said, “I need somebody willing to spend decades nursing naked ambition. And then watch it die when some upstart nobody from Chicago decides he doesn’t want to wait his turn. Then dry her eyes and say, ‘Maybe in 2016.’ I need somebody who can shiv a political enemy with nothing more than a nail file and an iPhone case she swore was way too inconvenient to carry around in addition to a Blackberry. And who, in primary and general campaign season, will doggedly complete the Sunday show sweep, and then pop up on TV again later that evening to tell you, ‘The server will remain private.’” So God made a Clinton.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

At The Game in 2004, Yalies tricked Harvard fans into holding up signs creating this message.”

Fred Schwarz explains why SAT compression resulted in Harvard becoming an athletic powerhouse.

Harvard has won or shared the Ivy men’s basketball championship every year since 2010–11. And it isn’t just basketball: Harvard football has won or shared five of the last eight Ivy championships, up from a modest one or two per decade over the league’s first half-century (since 1956). In 1977, during oral argument before the Supreme Court on the momentous Bakke affirmative-action case, the distinguished lawyer Archibald Cox found time to joke about how bad Harvard’s football team was. But now the Crimson dominate the league in the only two sports that most people care about. What happened? The explanation lies in … policies imposed in the 1980s and 1990s, which … give Harvard a significant advantage over the rest of the league in recruiting athletes — and provide a lesson in unintended consequences. …

[The key cause was] the College Board’s decision in 1995 to “recenter” its SAT scoring. This meant that instead of the average score for all SAT takers being somewhere around 400, the board arbitrarily set it at 500 (midway between 200 and 800). Cynics suggested that this was done for political reasons, so the discrepancy between white/Asian SAT takers and others would be less dramatic; in any case, the effect was to crunch together all the good students near the very top of the scale. For example, any SAT Verbal score of 730 or higher from before the recentering would be an 800 today. This means that double 800s are “not that great a distinction any more”; over a decade ago, Harvard was already getting 500 double-800 applicants a year, and rejecting half of them. That’s part of the reason for the insane gauntlet today’s high-school students have to run, with activities, music, volunteer work, and all the rest, trying desperately to distinguish themselves from the herd. When applying to elite colleges today, it’s difficult to make yourself stand out from other very smart kids with your test scores or grades, since everyone has high SATs and straight A’s. More important, though, this compression means that the AI standard that Harvard athletes have to meet is not much higher than that of the rest of the league, whereas before the recentering, there was a significant gap, which gave the less selective schools much more latitude. So: Harvard has the best reputation among American universities and the most money to give out for scholarships, and when another member of the league goes after a talented athletic prospect, regulations prohibit it from sweetening the deal by offering extra money or relaxing its admission standards. That’s why the Crimson have been tearing up the league lately, and will probably continue as long as they want to. Letting colleges compete for students is all to the good, and there’s nothing wrong with a group of educational institutions’ agreeing to put education first. But in this case, as so often happens, when strict regulation meets vigorous competition (with a bit of statistical manipulation thrown in), the result is that the rich only get richer.