Over at Free Republic, “lowbridge” has been checking out what’s going on with the candidates in Second Life.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Fading Star Power Of The Clintons
The Clintons turned the Democratic party into a star vehicle and designated everyone else as extras. But their star quality was strictly comparative. They had industrial-strength audacity and a lot of luck: Bill jumped into the 1992 race when A-listers like Mario Cuomo were too cowed by expert advice that Bush Snr. was unbeatable. Clinton gambled, won the nomination and beat a weak opponent in a three-way race, with Ross Perot siphoning votes from the right. He got even luckier four years later. So did Hillary when she embarked on something patently absurd — a First Lady running for a Senate seat in a state she’s never lived in — only to find Rudy Giuliani going into instant public meltdown. The SAS, Britain’s special forces, have a motto: Who dares wins. The Clintons dared, and they won — even as almost everyone else in their party lost: senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators. Even when they ran into a spot of intern trouble, sheer nerve saw them through. Almost anyone else would have slunk off in shame, but the Clintons understood that the checks and balances don’t add up to much if you’re determined not to go: As at that 2000 convention speech, they dared the Democrats not to cheer.
With hindsight, the oral sex was a master stroke. Bill Clinton likes to tell anyone who’ll listen that he governed as an “Eisenhower Republican,” which is kind of true — NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. If you have to have a Democrat in the Oval Office, he was as good as it gets for Republicans — if you don’t mind the fact that he’s a draft-dodging non-inhaling sex fiend. Republicans did mind, of course, which is why Dems rallied round out of boomer culture-war solidarity. But, if he hadn’t been dropping his pants and appealing to so many of their social pathologies, his party wouldn’t have been half so enthusiastic for another chorus of “I Like Ike.”
Read it all.
I Guess They’re No Clintons
Hillary managed to keep her thesis under wraps throughout the Clinton presidency. Michelle Obama’s is now apparently available for download. I’m sure that many will be commenting on it.
I have to say that I’m not sure that it’s fair to judge her by this (though attempting to hide it somewhat increased the justification for why we might want to). Her recent words are bad enough in themselves, in my opinion.
[Update on Saturday morning]
Captain Ed has read the whole thing.
Again, what she thought and wrote as a college student is much less important (and perhaps not important at all) compared to what she says, writes and (to the limited degree we can ascertain it) thinks now.
I Guess They’re No Clintons
Hillary managed to keep her thesis under wraps throughout the Clinton presidency. Michelle Obama’s is now apparently available for download. I’m sure that many will be commenting on it.
I have to say that I’m not sure that it’s fair to judge her by this (though attempting to hide it somewhat increased the justification for why we might want to). Her recent words are bad enough in themselves, in my opinion.
[Update on Saturday morning]
Captain Ed has read the whole thing.
Again, what she thought and wrote as a college student is much less important (and perhaps not important at all) compared to what she says, writes and (to the limited degree we can ascertain it) thinks now.
I Guess They’re No Clintons
Hillary managed to keep her thesis under wraps throughout the Clinton presidency. Michelle Obama’s is now apparently available for download. I’m sure that many will be commenting on it.
I have to say that I’m not sure that it’s fair to judge her by this (though attempting to hide it somewhat increased the justification for why we might want to). Her recent words are bad enough in themselves, in my opinion.
[Update on Saturday morning]
Captain Ed has read the whole thing.
Again, what she thought and wrote as a college student is much less important (and perhaps not important at all) compared to what she says, writes and (to the limited degree we can ascertain it) thinks now.
Mystery “Solved”
Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:
By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of “mud-rich slurry” that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly – and enduringly – in a deep-sea tomb.
The mass death was “not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one – and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures,” said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.
I use the scare quote because that’s the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like “fact,” rather than “theory”) that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes “solved” a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.
In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they’d been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have “proven” that this is what happened? No. As I’ve written many times, science is not about proving things–scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.
There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.
And of course, I won’t even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that’s what they are, even if they don’t recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we’d like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn’t science–it’s just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).
Mystery “Solved”
Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:
By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of “mud-rich slurry” that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly – and enduringly – in a deep-sea tomb.
The mass death was “not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one – and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures,” said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.
I use the scare quote because that’s the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like “fact,” rather than “theory”) that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes “solved” a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.
In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they’d been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have “proven” that this is what happened? No. As I’ve written many times, science is not about proving things–scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.
There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.
And of course, I won’t even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that’s what they are, even if they don’t recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we’d like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn’t science–it’s just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).
Mystery “Solved”
Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:
By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of “mud-rich slurry” that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly – and enduringly – in a deep-sea tomb.
The mass death was “not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one – and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures,” said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.
I use the scare quote because that’s the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like “fact,” rather than “theory”) that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes “solved” a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.
In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they’d been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have “proven” that this is what happened? No. As I’ve written many times, science is not about proving things–scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.
There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.
And of course, I won’t even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that’s what they are, even if they don’t recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we’d like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn’t science–it’s just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).
How Clueless Is Obama About The Military?
A platoon is the smallest unit deployed outside of [special forces] operations. Sending 24 men to one theater and 15 to another would destroy unit cohesion, leave one group without an officer and be a nightmare for the next higher unit’s (the company) command, control and communication structure. You should take this story with a grain of salt — that grain being the size of the moon.
“Ready to be CiC.”
Riiiigggghhhht.
Of course, if Hillary wasn’t equally clueless, she would have called him on it–she missed a huge opportunity to embarrass him. But then, it took a couple years for Bill Clinton to learn how to throw a proper salute (IIRC). And of course, she’d have probably loved to use the story herself.
[Update in late afternoon]
Despite comments, my post title stands. The fact remains that whatever the actual story, Obama told a tale in the debate last night that was implausible on its face, for reasons that many pointed out. The fact that there was an actual story that was somewhat like it (it was a Lieutenant at the time, they were split up before they were deployed, they didn’t actually have to capture Taliban for their weapons, etc.) doesn’t change the fact that as actually related in the debate, it was clueless about the way the military works. Someone with actual military experience would have realized this, and worded it differently (and more accurately).
And the point was never that the Obama campaign fabricated the story. It was that they didn’t recognize one that seemed implausible, because they didn’t have the wherewithal to recognize it as such, and it fit their political agenda (Bush is the Worst President Ever) as was, ignoring the fact that there’s never been a time when troops had everything they needed, when they needed it, under any president.
Ace has more thoughts, and continues to call bovine excrement.
Could It Get Any Better?
Ralph Nader may be jumping into the race
I’m going to have to go over to Costco to pick up a fifty-gallon barrel of Orville Redenbachers.