When Professors Attack

I found this to be telling, and typical:

Should an organization that is largely composed of UNC professors be involved with participants in such a vicious political smear campaign as the one suggested by Blueprint N.C.? Perhaps it is within their legal rights, but the title “scholar” implies a higher standard than the down-and-dirty program planned by Blueprint.

To be a “scholar” means to adhere to a high level of objectivity. It also suggests that one uses terms with precise meaning. But there was little objectivity or precision at the Duke event, and given the lack of professionalism exhibited by some of its leaders, Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina and Blueprint NC are a natural pairing.

In one instance, UNC-Greensboro history professor Lisa Levenstein described Republicans as “ideology-driven” whereas liberals are “not driven by ideology” but are instead motivated by “the common good.” This is intentionally misleading and false; the liberal concept of “common good” in itself implies an ideology of sorts. (Unless of course, she does not comprehend the meaning of “ideology,” which would be cause for great concern about her ability to teach history at the university level.)

My emphasis. This is the century-old Leftist trope/tripe that they are “pragmatic” while those who disagree with them are “ideological,” and of course, ideology is bad (except, apparently, when it masquerades as a religion that justifies suicide bombings). I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the irony that the people actually had a choice last fall between an ideologue who claimed to be a pragmatic empiricist, and someone who had no actual political principles, but just wanted to be president and try to make the country actually work better. They went for the ideologue.

Low Fat, High Carb

I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:

It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.

I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.

The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.

“If It Saves Just One Life”

I agree with this take on how the terrorists won in Boston. This sort of irrational risk aversion is the theme of my book. “Safe” is never an option, in any absolute sense. In order to prevent a potential death of a citizen, the authorities shut the whole town down, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to the local (and probably national) economy. The whole town, that is, except for the Duncan Donuts shops. Which, as he says, really tells you everything you need to know. It was security theater, just like TSA.

George W. Bush

…and the historians’ rush to judgment:

The animus that scholars have directed toward Bush has at times made a mockery of the principle of academic objectivity. At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2009, a panel on the Bush-Cheney years organized by a group called Historians Against the War featured scholars from Columbia, Yale, Trinity College, New York University and Yeshiva University. They compared the Bush “regime’s” security practices to those of Joseph McCarthy and various “war criminals.” The cover illustration of the roundtable’s report showed Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, seated on a pile of human skulls.

All of this overheated rhetoric and fear-mongering has come from academics who profess to live the life of the mind. In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.

I was no big fan of George Bush, but he was better than the available alternatives, and the fact that these hacks and mediocrities have such irrational hatred for him only increases my own respect for him. He must have done something right to get their leftist panties in such a twist.

Paper Tigers

I was thinking about going to Anaheim this weekend to see Detroit play the Angels, but I’m sure glad I didn’t go today. I just turned on the game, and saw that they were down 9-0 in the bottom of the first inning Must have been a real pitching collapse. And not much hope for a comeback, given how lousy they’ve been hitting recently.

Two Terrorists

A tale:

As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.

Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.

Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.

The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”

“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.

We have a sick culture, particularly in Hollywood and academia.

Miranda

Some people are making silly (dare I say ridiculous?) comments in this thread about how I’ve suddenly become a big-government authoritarian because I don’t think that the Boston bomber should be read his Miranda rights, or necessarily questioned with a lawyer present. I think that this criticism arises largely from ignorance of the law and Constitution (along with a healthy dollop of hysteria). Orin Kerr explains the legal situation:

A lot of people assume that the police are required to read a suspect his Miranda rights upon arrest. That is, they assume that one of a person’s rights is the right to be read their rights. It often happens that way on Law & Order, but that’s not what the law actually requires. The police aren’t required to follow Miranda. Miranda is a set of rules the government can chose to follow if they want to admit a person’s statements in a criminal case in court, not a set of rules they have to follow in every case. Under Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003), it is lawful for the police to not read a suspect his Miranda rights, interrogate him, and then obtain a statement. Chavez holds that a person’s Miranda rights are violated only if the statement is admitted in court, even if the statement is obtained in violation of Miranda. See id. at 772-73. Further, the prosecution is even allowed to admit any physical evidence discovered as a fruit of the statement obtained in violation of Miranda — only the actual statement can be excluded. See United States v. Patane, 542 U.S. 630 (2004). So, contrary to what a lot of people think, it is legal for the government to even intentionally violate Miranda so long as they don’t try to seek admission of the suspect’s statements in court.

Emphasis mine.

It’s just that simple. There is no need to get his testimony in court, because the other evidence against him is overwhelming. What there is a need to do is to find out if there are other co-conspirators, and other bombs, and other plans. And as Orin also points out, there are even ways to get the evidence into trial even under these circumstances, should it be necessary.

The Warsaw Uprising

Thoughts on the seventieth anniversary:

I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.

Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.

That’s the purpose of the Seder, to preserve memories, and rituals like that grow more important as the events of seven decades past pass from living memory with the aging and deaths of their participants.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!