POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Michigan State Police Defend Themselves

I was initially skeptical when I read the foxnews report yesterday, and Dan's reference to the issue didn't change my skepticism.  Cops aren't stupid, and they all have to work with prosecutors to build cases.  None of them want to be the guy who brings about a lawsuit that ends up creating case law that is detrimental to their work, so they tend to be very careful with how they search vehicles.  This includes the way they access cell phones.

It seems my skepticism is somewhat validated, although not completely because it's still a he-said/he-said deal.  My initial complaint, and still my main one, is that conservatives who can't stand the ACLU are buying the ACLU's accusations without reservation.  The ACLU was basing their allegation on nothing more than the fact that the MSP actually has the machines that can download cell phone data.  They mentioned no citizen complaints, which the MSP says don't exist anyway (a claim that can easily be debunked if it's false).  Well, that's not their only basis, the other being their general animosity towards police anyway.

Adam Wells

Living life at 84 mph and 7000 feet. All I ask is that you don't block traffic, act like a professional, and don't act all surprised when your actions have consequences. Oh, and don't complain about the refs; trust me, they don't care if your team wins or not.

The Wonkette Trig Insanity [Now with Kloppenburg!]

I mentioned it in passing, but there were enough people pounding on it that 12 businesses took their advertising dollars elsewhere, and others may do so, as well. Pretty much everything I would have said about it, and more, Joy has covered in this post, in case you missed the action.

On the other hand, the terminally ill Canadian baby who couldn't receive life-extending treatment there was deemed well enough to go home with his parents. There's a very vague line between life-extending and life-saving, in point of fact; all of us live on . . . not borrowed, but gifted time. Is a life, because of its brevity, of lesser worth? Not where there is love. Is a life, because of its limitations, of lesser worth? Again, not where there is love.

You will find among many of the most humorous people on the web--people like Ace and Treacher and Iowahawk--some of the most deeply moral. It's from that perspective that they are able to identify and mock the insanity that one always finds where morality is not. A person who is secure in his or her beliefs will find her tongue more readily, formulate a response straightforwardly, and hedge and qualify it less than a person given to abuse casuistry for their own momentary purposes. There's a lesson there, too, about timing. For those of us who flip our pillows to the cool side, when, 15 years after receiving an insult, we formulate the perfect response, there is also a lesson in fearlessness.

Certainly, unless we bring our outrage to the matter, the Death Panels, acronym IPAB, will give us much to exercise our gallows humor upon in years to come.

Ah, well. All their religion is politics, now.

It is hard to know what to do when you see a “catholic” site post something that is simultaneously heretical and thoroughly dopey.

Do you ignore it? Do you post about it and therefore drive traffic to it?

This is my dilemma today in the case of Jamie Manson of the National Catholic Fishwrap. Her piece today is both as weird and as heterodox as any NCR reader could ever wish.

Nutshell:

Jesus did not come into this world or endure His Cross and death to save us from our sins. That’s just a guilt trip the Church laid on people. Its Religious Power that killed Jesus. He came – so far as I am able to glean from her article – to save us from the Roman Curia and the Republican Party.

Spirituality is nothing but power relations, rightly considered. Is it any wonder they're angry when thwarted?

UPDATE: Aaaaaaaand, like klopwerk (stay with it):

Via The Blast

ALL UR EPISTEME BELONG 2 US!

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Another Long, Hot Summer for Obama: $6 Gas? [UPDATED]

With the weakening of the dollar, some say it might get there by July (via Insty). We've written on a couple of occasions how higher gas prices create higher crop prices which stimulate more Mideast unrest, leading to higher gas prices, and how this cycle is exacerbated by ethanol subsidies and mandates. Of course, now the administration is considering upping blends to 15% (on the backs of poor people!).

We've also been saying for some time that, given the illegal drilling moratorium in the Gulf, the flight of US equipment and expertise to Brazil and other areas where drilling is subsidized by the US government, the failure of green energy to materialize in any meaningful way, and the rest of Obama's havoc-wreaking fiscal and energy policies, $5 gas was likely just about everywhere this summer, and that this would pose a problem for the President. Belatedly, he seems to have acknowledged the likelihood by combining his 2012 campaigning with blaming everyone else for the price of gasoline.

Can't get all your kids into a smart car? That's what Planned Parenthood is for.

The guy is dismal.

UPDATE: Now he appoints a commission to figure out why gas prices are so high. I'm sure their recommendations will be given the same consideration as his fiscal commission's.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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New York’s West Side Highway Has Only 17 Years To Get Underwater

Anthony Watts looks at a James Hanson prediction and a paper charging that rise in sea level hasn't accelerated since 1850. Stupid old Mt. Pinatubo.

Meanwhile, drunken King Crabs on the march in Antarctica are supposed to make me worry about ocean temperatures, but mostly make me hungry. SCIENCE!

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Fat Ass Sheila Jackson Lee 2 fast 4 trillions

Starve the beast:

Republican Party members of Congress and the Senate now have extra motivation to oppose President Barack Obama’s budget proposals on tax increases. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced (D.-Tx.) that she will go on a hunger strike unless Congress signs a $4 trillion tax increase.

Perhaps, it’s a good time for Republicans to allow for lengthy budget debates on Capitol Hill and make long speeches about reducing government spending. Maybe Congress should wait a few months before signing on to a budget deal. Besides, this is an important issue and Congress should take some time for deliberating over every detail of the budget.

According to the Washington Post, “among the highlights: A $4 trillion tax increase over 10 years, an increase in the top tax rate to 49 percent. A $2.3 trillion cut in defense spending – and an increase in domestic spending. Oh, and they would revive the ‘public option’ to offer government-run health care.”

On Wednesday, Rep. Barbara Lee (D.-Ca.) announced that 30 members of Congress were fasting to “raise the level of awareness about the People’s Budget.”

If that doesn't work, they will hold their breath till their faces turn blue.

The biggest news, yesterday, was that Obama & Co. tried to prevent S&P from downgrading the US's credit rating. Gaming of credit-worthiness, I seem to recall, had something to do with how we got into this economic mess in the first place. Protein Wisdom on the same, via Wombat.

Obama: Remember, kids, it's the Republicans who are radicals!

Voter fraud in Minnesota? Say it ain't so!

Civility NOW!!!

Cops unconstitutionally downloading smart phone info in Michigan traffic stops.

Matthew Vadum:

Left-wing supporters of ACORN love to play word games, I responded in some detail on the comments thread. The commenter argued that ACORN wasn't convicted of actual voter fraud. The commenter is dead wrong. ACORN was convicted earlier this month in Nevada of unlawful "compensation" for registration of voters, a felony that is a type of voter fraud. There was a conspiracy and ACORN participated in it. In fact, two senior ACORN executives were also convicted in the scheme.

I suppose leftists think "voter fraud" sounds scarier than "voter registration fraud" so whenever "voter fraud" is used in the context of ACORN's misdeeds they all suddenly become election law experts and start spewing mind-numbing, hair-splitting arguments in order to show that whatever ACORN did it wasn't really so bad. (One of the worst offenders is leftist blogger Brad Friedman.)

ACORN is a criminal organization and its leaders should be in prison.

Read about the nihilistic adventures of ACORN in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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The Curious Case of the Obama Manse

Jerome Corsi:

This, the first of a series of articles on the Obama home at 5046 S. Greenwood, establishes that three individuals other than Obama are listed in public records as owners and taxpayers on the property.

Barack Obama is not among at least three people listed as current owners and taxpayers of the mansion his family calls home in Chicago's upscale Kenwood neighborhood, according to public records.

WND reported in December 2008 that William Miceli, the attorney for convicted political operative Tony Rezko and a fundraiser for Obama, owns the Obama home at 5046 S. Greenwood.

Make your contribution to the TV ad campaign for Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate?" now. Donations of $25 or more gets you a first-edition, author signed copy of the book as soon as it rolls off the presses.

Miceli is a lawyer at the Chicago law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which employed Obama when he did legal work for Rezko.

Now, WND has discovered that, along with Miceli, there are at least two other people listed in public records as owners and taxpayers of 5046 S. Greenwood in the South Side neighborhood of Kenwood, an oasis of pricey homes that has attracted professors at nearby University of Chicago.

Read the whole very strange thing. (via @katnandu)

Have you ever asked a white President whether he owned the house he claimed to own, you raaaaacist?

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Desperation: Kloppenburg Files for Recount [UPDATED]

If you look at her educational background, you'd have to conclude that JoAnne Kloppenburg was a woman person of rare intelligence. If you consider her behavior, it's another matter.

Incorrectly believing that she had won the election for State Supreme Court Justice, defeating incumbent David Prosser in a vote that has been represented as a referendum on Governor Scott Walker's Budget Repair bill and the hullabaloo that surrounded it, Kloppenburg relied on AP totals showing her to have a 240 vote margin of about 1.5 million cast to declare victory, thank Prosser for his decades of service, and express her conviction that the margin would hold.

When it was discovered that Brookfield's totals, heavily in favor of Prosser, gave him a margin of over 7300, most observers believed that she couldn't possibly then put the state through the expense of a recount. Most observers were wrong. Despite Prosser's certified margin being 30 times the margin she was confident would hold in her favor, she has now asked for a recount.

Now you understand why she was passed over time and time again for lesser posts, even by Democrat Governors: she's an idiot. Undoubtedly, she has the right to ask for a recount, but she's done, finished, stick a fork in her as a serious contender for anything in Wisconsin.

On the other hand, Obama might have a use for her.

Little Miss Attila, on still another hand, deserves congratulations for surpassing one million visitors at her very excellent blog.

More Wisconsin news:

Jesse Jackson claims Milwaukee most segregated city in the US; Hymie Town comes in second.

Eight purveyors of fake medical excuses for protesters under investigation.

Recall petitions being filed for three Democrat Wisconsin State Senators.

And the perfect Kos companion piece for Wonkette's sick post on Trig Palin:

Liberals attack Paul Ryan because his father died young, resulting in survivor benefits

UPDATE: William Jacobson, who's also followed the events in Wisconsin very closely, links to the Journal-Sentinel regarding the recount, as well as to Prosser's recount fund.

“I do not make this decision lightly ... I have weighed the options and I have considered the facts,” Kloppenburg, currently an assistant state attorney general, said. The tight margin — small enough to trigger a provision allowing the state to pay for the recount process — means that “the importance of every vote is magnified and doubts about every vote are magnified as well,” she said.

This is just another way of saying every vote is sacred, as long as it's for me. As was demonstrated above, the margin of victory was clear enough when she declared it, with 1/30th the spread that Prosser has. Now she will attempt to get a hand count, before which she will have to demonstrate that a machine recount would somehow likely be inaccurate.

I imagine this would be an appropriate time to break out my brother-in-law Patrick's p-shop.

Let's also look into those 30% or more of Dane County ballots that had votes for Kloppie only.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Exclusive Preview of Matthew Vadum’s Subversion, Inc.

Not really, but you'll get a fair idea of where he's coming from from this comment he left to other comments in an earlier post, where an ACORN apologist trots out the usual evasions about their solicitation of fraud, and then is seconded by the ACORN apologist par excellence, John Atlas:

So many untruths in the comments string, so little time.

Although he wrote an informative book, bear in mind that John Atlas is ACORN’s institutional hagiographer. The real story of ACORN is in my upcoming book Subversion, Inc. See the book’s Facebook page. ACORN and all Alinskyite community organizers are vicious horrible people who want to destroy America.

In terms of ideology, there is only about a dime’s worth of difference between the Weather Underground and the antisocial small-c communists of ACORN. They’re on the same team. Bill Ayers himself was a huge supporter of ACORN and worked with President Obama to direct charitable funds to the group. This is not a coincidence.

The commenter above discussing voter fraud throws out a red herring used by left-wingers to minimize the crimes they commit. In fact voter registration fraud is a species of voter fraud. Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud or election fraud, is a blanket term encompassing a host of election-related improprieties. The term is used by lawyers. ACORN’s defenders are like con men who protest, “but I didn’t commit fraud, I only wrote a bad check!”

It is a fact that ACORN was convicted earlier this month in Nevada of unlawful “compensation” for registration of voters, which is a kind of voter fraud. There was a conspiracy and two senior ACORN executives were also convicted. ACORN knew about and sanctioned the conspiracy.

Game, set, match, trupe : ACORN is a criminal enterprise. It’s time for a proper racketeering investigation.

ACORN doesn’t want to help people. It wants to hurt people and cause upheaval. Its leaders should be in prison. John Atlas is their apologist.

The book is due out next month, around the middle of the month, I believe.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Ur-Spracht

A week or so ago, we poked fun at the "Gay Caveman" unearthed in the Czech Republic, not because we didn't find the story interesting, but because of the interpretation that paleoanthropologists had decided to toss over the bones, like a male muu-muu. NTTAWWT.

But, you know, it's science. And the story of the theory that all languages spoken on earth are descended from a single African Ur-Spracht is certainly interesting, though some of the conclusions based on the analogy of genetics seem to me tendentious.

It is true that it has been a (mostly) useful conceit of popular science that the genomes of living things represent a sort of language, but it is truer to say that they are represented as a kind of language, whose complex web of associations we can understand much more readily than the terpsichorean dance of molecules in living cells. Nevertheless, it is just an analogy, and when it's pushed too far, it is liable to end up where the chain of inference takes the people involved in this study. That is to say, to conclusions that flatter their presumptions.

[Dr. Quentin Atkinson's] research is based on phonemes, distinct units of sound such as vowels, consonants and tones, and an idea borrowed from population genetics known as "the founder effect." That principle holds that when a very small number of individuals break off from a larger population, there is a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group.

Dr. Atkinson figured that if a similar founder effect could be discerned in phonemes, it would support the idea that modern verbal communication originated on that continent and only then expanded elsewhere.

In an analysis of 504 world languages, Dr. Atkinson found that, on average, dialects with the most phonemes are spoken in Africa, while those with the fewest phonemes are spoken in South America and on tropical islands in the Pacific.

The study also found that the pattern of phoneme usage globally mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity, which also declined as modern humans set up colonies elsewhere. Today, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa that have hosted human life for millennia still use far more phonemes in their languages than more recently colonized regions do.

"It's a wonderful contribution and another piece of the mosaic" supporting the out-of-Africa hypothesis, said Ekkehard Wolff, professor emeritus of African Languages and Linguistics at the University of Leipzig in Germany, who read the paper.

Dr. Atkinson's findings are consistent with the prevailing view of the origin of modern humans, known as the "out of Africa" hypothesis. Bolstered by recent genetic evidence, it says that modern humans emerged in Africa alone, about 200,000 years ago. Then, about 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, a small number of them moved out and colonized the rest of the world, becoming the ancestors of all non-African populations on the planet.

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven't left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

Here, genetic variation stands in as an analogical proxy for the god, Diversity.

Both assertions are probably true: that Africa contains both the greatest genetic diversity and phonemic diversity on the face of the earth. But to claim that the phonemic simplification of language mirrors the slenderized gene pool of nomadic populations seems to me ridiculous. Presumably, there is an evolutionary premium placed on the parsimony of language as well as on limiting its ambiguity, or we would all be speaking the way that linguist Tolkein's Ents do.

It could be that by saying that there is "a gradual loss of genetic variation and complexity in the breakaway group," the writer means that the complexity as well as the variation refers to "genetic." In that case, at least for someone who knows something about genetics and populations, the expression is redundant. As far as I know, each individual human being is as genetically "complex" as the next (barring multiple chromosomes and the XY v XX difference between men and women). On the other hand, he may be stating that Africans are somehow more complex as individuals than individuals from populations who hit the road. It's hard to say.

That there's some looseness in the language used by the writer seems confirmed here:

our own observations suggest that it is possible to detect an arrow of time" underlying proto-human languages spoken more than 8,000 years ago, said Murray Gell-Mann of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, who read the Science paper and supports it. The "arrow of time" is based on the notion that it is possible to use data from modern languages to trace their origins back 10,000 years or even further.

Surely he means human proto-languages? Or not? It's hard to say from this.

Most evolutionary anthropologists, I think, would hold it likely that human speech organs and the language centers of the brain developed in concert, in an astonishing positive feedback loop. Chimpanzees, for example, seem capable of learning a kind of language that has a very basic grammar and vocabulary. Lacking the ability to enunciate words, though, that capacity never really got off the ground, comparatively speaking. It begs the question, then, why this prodigious explosion of sounds at the very beginning, and only simplification thereafter? Certainly the enormous palette of African phonemes didn't suddenly exist as a kind of fundamental linguistic tool kit (to use another analogy) and then develop only in the direction of less variation over time. Or to put it another way, why should the evolution have gone all in the direction of variation during one period and then apparently only in the other direction thereafter? Did syntax and grammar evolve on the road, such that humans afoot found it easier to do with a stripped-down articulatory tool kit? Did arriving at that condition permit them to radiate to other climes?

Or would that be raaaaacist to consider? Certainly, there have been re-radiations back into Africa.

There's another problem with the language, if not of the study, then of the article, which is the slippage between phonemic variation in languages and areas.

Today, areas such as sub-Saharan Africa that have hosted human life for millennia still use far more phonemes in their languages than more recently colonized regions do.

Areas do not speak languages. Yes, I know that the Hawaiians use Humuhumunukunukuapua'a to designate what we call the Lagoon triggerfish.

Well, I'll let Myles na Gopaleen have the last words:

A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact (I mentioned it myself as long ago as 1925) that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.

My point, however, is this. The 400/4000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all of this is strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, planás, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it is a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home.

********

The plight of the English speaker, with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads, may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal, there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Strip Poker with a Stacked Deck

The DISCLOSE Act is designed to impose burdensome and unconstitutional reporting requirements on corporations, while exempting unions.

An impeccable source has provided me with a copy of a draft Executive Order that the White House is apparently circulating for comments from several government agencies. Titled “Disclosure of Political Spending By Government Contractors,” it appears to be an attempt by the Obama administration to implement — by executive fiat — portions of the DISCLOSE Act.

This was the bill introduced last year by Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC. The bill had onerous requirements that were duplicative of existing law and burdensome to political speech. It never passed Congress because of principled opposition to its unfair, one-sided requirements that benefited labor unions at the expense of corporations. Democratic commissioners at the Federal Election Commission then tried to implement portions of the bill in new regulations. Fortunately, those regulations were not adopted because of the united opposition of the Republican commissioners.

As my source says:

It really is amazing — they lost in the Supreme Court, they lost in Congress, they lost at the FEC, so now the president is just going to do it by edict.

I'm sure that all those people lionizing the University of Wisconsin for refusing to turn over Professor Cronon's correspondence regarding the Budget Repair Bill will denounce this for the executive seizure of congressonal authority that it is.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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