Social Psychology Fraud: Just Tell Professors What They Want To Hear | VDARE.com

Link: http://www.vdare.com/posts/social-psychology-fraud-just-tell-professors-what-they-want-to-hear

(NY Times)


A good reason not to trust "scientific consensus"?

Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. And just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study indicating that eating meat made people selfish and less social.
...
On his return trip to Tilburg, Stapel stopped at the train station in Utrecht. This was the site of his study linking racism to environmental untidiness, supposedly conducted during a strike by sanitation workers. In the experiment described in the Science paper, white volunteers were invited to fill out a questionnaire in a seat among a row of six chairs; the row was empty except for the first chair, which was taken by a black occupant or a white one. Stapel and his co-author claimed that white volunteers tended to sit farther away from the black person when the surrounding area was strewn with garbage. Now, looking around during rush hour, as people streamed on and off the platforms, Stapel could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment.
...

The key to why Stapel got away with his fabrications for so long lies in his keen understanding of the sociology of his field. “I didn’t do strange stuff, I never said let’s do an experiment to show that the earth is flat,” he said. “I always checked — this may be by a cunning manipulative mind — that the experiment was reasonable, that it followed from the research that had come before, that it was just this extra step that everybody was waiting for.” He always read the research literature extensively to generate his hypotheses. “So that it was believable and could be argued that this was the only logical thing you would find,” he said. “Everybody wants you to be novel and creative, but you also need to be truthful and likely. You need to be able to say that this is completely new and exciting, but it’s very likely given what we know so far.”

Government conspiracy

From the Morning Jolt from NRO"

3. How Do Our Most Irrational Foes Get Formed?

I was actually thinking these thoughts before I heard the news that somebody "SWATed" Erick Erickson of RedState and CNN -- that is, anonymously called his local police with a false report of a shooting, to harass Erickson and his family and perhaps hope for some police raid to go . . . quite wrong.

I think our culture's ratio of crazy-people-to-non-crazy-people is getting out of whack.

There have always been crazy people in every society. And mind you, I'm not talking about psychosis or hallucinations. I'm just referring to people who develop an obsession and whose focus upon that obsession makes... public life more challenging for the rest of us.

In the past, if you had a worldview that was far from the mainstream, you had to seek out people who agreed with you, and sometimes that was hard. There was a good chance that you would encounter lots of people who would say, "What on earth are you talking about? That's crazy! How could you possibly believe that?"

Enter the Internet. The good news is, if you really want to talk about obscure bits of history, or political issues, or sports, or pop culture, chances are, there's some online community for you. Of course, this applies to every interest, including the bad ones -- hate groups, child pornographers, extremists of every stripe. (In the book about online social networks, Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky discusses anorexia support groups online where the anorexics encouraged each other to remain anorexic.) And of course, with the Internet, every conspiracy theorist can finds dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people who find their theory completely plausible and in fact convincing, and provide reinforcement. It's the Pauline Kael effect on a massive scale; everyone they know -- or more specifically, the majority of the people who they interact with online -- believe the government arranged 9/11 or whatever.

(Walking through a Barnes & Noble this weekend, in the remainders bin I saw Jesse Ventura's latest, 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read. Now . . . if a guy like Jesse Ventura can collect all of these documents in one book, and get that book published and distributed in every major chain bookseller in America . . . then our skepticism of the effectiveness of government bureaucracies is proven well-founded once again. Or the government doesn't really care if we read those documents. I'd like to think that if the documents really were the sort of thing the government didn't want us to read -- say, the NOC list -- the government would have a better method of keeping the information secret. Although having the documents published by Jesse Ventura could be a fantastic reverse-psychology method of making sure no one takes them seriously.)

So I can't help but suspect that we have more crazy people walking around than in the pre-Internet days. Again, I'm not talking about hearing voices or the other off-the-charts categories of crazy. Just the all-consuming obsession with a particular topic: Since this is a political newsletter and chances are you're interested in politics, chances are we're going to encounter folks who just have some sort of unhealthy level of focus on a particular topic or political figure or belief that "they" are responsible for almost everything that goes wrong in this world.

In a way, this kind of modern ease of slipping into an obsession is a luxury. You get the feeling that in past generations, perhaps there was some other all-consuming goal -- a societal one like avoiding the Black Plague, or westward expansion, or beating the Nazis and Japanese -- that occupied the minds of most of the populace. To be crazy meant you weren't dealing with this potentially life-threatening problem, and as a result, you would probably die earlier than normal.

Modern life is safer and better, thankfully. We don't fear smallpox, an invading army, or rabid beasts; few of us fear dying from exposure or hunger. Making ends meet has become a bit more challenging, but even with the seemingly endless economic hard times, many places have 99 weeks of unemployment insurance. For the unemployed and under-employed, the lack of work means limited money but a surplus of time. Time easily spent online, and time spent alone: "Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone." Perhaps idle hands really are the devil's workshop.

The computer -- the glowing screen that I'm typing these words on, and that I spend large chunks of every weekday and weeknight staring at -- is not great for reinforcing one's sense of reality. From my interactions online -- this newsletter, e-mail, the comments in response to the Campaign Spot, Twitter, etc. -- it would be very easy for me to conclude that the public at large is a) as interested in politics are I/we are and b) as conservative as I/we are. And then I finish writing the Jolt, go about the actions of daily life and child-rearing, go to get my morning coffee, and throughout my morning's travels, I encounter many, many people who appear to spend little or no time thinking about politics.

When we see people behaving in a way that seems so inexplicable to us -- political activists who seem consumed with vindictiveness towards those who disagree, and hell-bent on inflicting whatever misery they can upon those whose only sin is to express a contrary opinion -- it probably reflects a worldview shaped by words on a screen, and interaction with a very small and unrepresentative group, focusing on topics that are obscure and odd to most of the general public. (Yes, I realize about half of that description applies to all of us.) They wear the obscurity of their cause as a badge of honor; they are the few enlightened ones, while the rest of the "sheeple" sleepwalk through their lives. Those who express contrary opinions aren't just exercising their First Amendment rights; they're perpetuating the system of injustice. They cannot be permitted to continue doing such seemingly innocuous acts; only the harshest and most brutal retaliation will intimidate them into silence. After all, the end justifies the means. Everyone they talk to agrees. Well, everyone they type to, at least.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Brett Kimberlin Gets His Wikipedia Entry Removed

Brett Kimberlin Gets His Wikipedia Entry Removed

via Patterico's Pontifications by Patterico on 5/27/12

[UPDATE: I have heard once again from the Wikipedia editor who removed Brett Kimberlin's Wikipedia entry. He refuses to tell me who claimed Kimberlin had been the victim of a harassment campaign. He evidently has no regrets about his decision even though Kimberlin has now been exposed as making repeated bogus claims of harassment.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia is moving to restore an entry after an absence of several months, and currently links Kimberlin to an entry on the Speedway Bombings. Over 700 versions of the article await review.]
I have described Brett Kimberlin's campaign of harassment against his critics as "brass-knuckles reputation management." The idea is to intimidate and harass anyone daring to bring up Kimberlin's extensive criminal history. There are other examples I'm aware of that can't be fully told for various reasons, although I hope the victims choose to tell them.
But one of the most concerning aspects of this reputation maintenance campaign is the way history is rewritten. And one example of that is the way that Kimberlin's Wikipedia entry was whisked away from view on September 14, 2011.
Let's look at the reason the editor gave for the deletion:


Oh, really? There was a harassment campaign against Brett Kimberlin, was there?
And here I thought it was the other way around. Here I thought he was the guy harassing others. Silly me!
And we certainly can't discuss in public the reason that accurate facts are being whisked away from a source that 4 out of 5 suckers consider reliable.
The idea that there is a harassment campaign against Brett Kimberlin is a reputation management theory that has been pushed for months by Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, and Ron Brynaert — three people who engaged in the extraoardinary and very real harassment campaign against myself and other critics of Brett Kimberlin.
So where did the Wikipedia editor get the idea that there was a harassment campaign against Brett Kimberlin? In early May 2012, I decided to write the editor, Richard Symonds, and ask why the page was deleted.
Our dialogue follows.

I wrote:

Hello. My name is Patrick Frey and I operate a blog at patterico.com. I am interesting in knowing why you deleted the Wikipedia page on Brett Kimberlin. I have seen the deleted page and it was quite well sourced, with links to TIME Magazine and other news publications.
There was an entire book about this individual written by Mark Singer, a New Yorker writer. There is simply a wealth of reliable information out there about Kimberlin.
I read the reasoning for the deletion and did not understand it. I wonder if you could enlighten me. Thanks very much.
Patrick Frey
Patterico.com

Symonds responded (emphasis mine):

Patrick,
I deleted the article back in September as a volunteer, because it served as an attack page. It was sourced, but was also unduly negative, and written by people who "had an axe to grind". Although some of the facts were sourced, there was an undertone of maliciousness in the way that the article was written.
Mr Kimberlin was not a paragon of virtue, but the article as it stood simply painted him as a man with no positive qualities at all, which is obviously problematic in a neutral encyclopedia.

I responded:

If the facts are sourced and accurate, perhaps the negative picture is accurate. Mr. Kimberlin is a man convicted of violent crimes. Portrayals of violent criminals tend to be largely negative, do they not? It sets a disturbing precedent to remove accurate facts from a neutral encyclopedia because those facts portray a violent convicted criminal in a negative light.
Also, how do you know the authors had an "axe to grind"? Who made this claim to you?
And why would that matter if the facts are accurate?

Symonds haughtily blew me off:

Patrick,
I've answered your questions and I have no real interest in discussing foreign politics with a blogger by email on my day off. The decision I made was backed up by others, the creators of the article were banned by the community, and I barely even remember the while episode. The whole event was entirely run of the mill, the sort of thing that happens on Wikipedia every day, and I have no real interest in left or right wing politics in North America.
All the best,
Richard Symonds

Note that he didn't explain who had complained about the entry. My response suggested that I planned to blog about this:

Politics? I did not say a word about politics. This has nothing to do with politics. I simply asked why a factual article was removed. I find it odd that you would bring up politics when that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I asked you.
You say you answered my questions, but in point of fact you have not. I asked a couple of follow-up questions which were not answered at all: 1) who told you the authors of the article had an "axe to grind" and 2) why would that matter if the facts were accurate?
You're entitled to refuse to answer my questions, but please don't say you have answered all my questions when you haven't.
If you want to wait until it's no longer your day off, be my guest. I do not plan to publish anything about this today anyway.

In response, this Wikipedia editor Googled me, found several false claims made about me — mainly from Kimberlin's band of defamers — and presented them as examples of "reliable" facts:

You are a right-of-centre blogger who has an interest in a left-of-centre individual. You've also been threatened with legal action by him, it seems – in my opinion, politics, and general 'bad blood' is involved here. I am answering your questions below, although I do so as a volunteer, and you must be aware that my memory of this non-event is hazy at best:
The community decided that the authors have an axe to grind due to their conduct. One of the authors behaved in a threatening manner towards a new editor. None of the editors showed any interest whatsoever in editing about other topics, even when asked to stop editing about Mr Kimberlin. Their interest in publicising their views about Mr Kimberlin (and his family) was more important to them than the general advancement of knowledge, ergo, they had a 'conflict of interest'.
Furthermore, their comments towards new users – described by an uninvolved administrator as 'truly chilling' – showed that they harmed our project, rather than helped it
The problem is, I would have thought, obvious. Let me give you an example, using phrases I've literally just picked up out of Google:
"John Patrick Frey is a blogger and LA city prosecutor obsessed with the liberal bias of the Los Angeles Times. He has a long memory, especially for all things LA Dog Trainer Times. He has been reported as having harassed Jamie Gold, and has been accused of running a "infamous right wing extremist hate blog"".
They're all facts that can be backed up by reliable sources, and they have a hint of truth about them, but they paint a biased and patently untrue version of events. The way that sentences in a neutral article are constructed is just as important – if not more so – as the facts out of which the sentence is built. The article, as written, had that sort of problem.
I'd be interested to know what version of the deleted article you have – there are two flying round, one of which is less 'problematic' than the other!

Again, emphasis is mine.
"Reliable sources," eh? I responded:

In your response, you construct a description of me that you say is composed of "facts that can be backed up by reliable sources." Yet your description is nothing of the sort. I am a blogger. I am not an "LA city prosecutor." [I am an L.A. County, not city, prosecutor, speaking in his personal capacity, as always. --ed.] Calling me "obsessed" is not a "fact" but a characterization. Calling my letters to the LAT Readers' Rep "harassment" is a tendentious characterization and not a "fact." Calling my blog an "extremist hate blog" is a tendentious characterization and not a "fact."
Please tell me what "reliable sources" you used to determine these "facts" about me.
There is a difference between tendentious claims and factual claims that can be supported by reliable sources in the media.
For example: one version of Kimberlin's Wikipedia entry said: "In 1981, Kimberlin was convicted of a series of bombings that took place in Speedway, Indiana in 1978." That is simply a matter of public record — as are his convictions for drug smuggling, perjury, and impersonating a federal officer. Yet you deleted these facts from Wikipedia.
If Charlie Manson were to file or threaten lawsuits against anyone who has ever written about his criminal history, that would not change the facts about his criminal history. I am not asking Wikipedia to rely on my blog for the facts regarding Brett Kimberlin. But there are numerous court decisions, articles in mainstream media, and even a published book by a New Yorker writer, testifying to the facts surrounding Kimberlin's record. For Wikipedia to whisk the facts regarding his record away based on the arguments you have made is Orwellian, and casts serious question on the reliability of Wikipedia as a source for information.
I am attaching a screenshot from one version of the Wikipedia article. It appears to be pure fact. It contains nothing about Kimberlin's family, just facts. The one opinion I see is that his claims about selling pot to Dan Quayle are called "false." That cannot be established as fact, and rather than deleting the article outright, editing out the word "false" would have been the truly neutral and factual action to take.
Have you ever heard from a fellow named Neal Rauhauser concerning Brett Kimberlin? Is he one of your "reliable sources" for information about me?

Here is the screenshot I sent Symonds of a version of the Wikipedia entry I found on someone's Facebook page.


Once again, Symonds blew me off:

Patrick,
I'm afraid that our views on neutrality differ rather wildly. I'm not really sure that I can help you any further without inflaming something which, for me, is a non-issue. As a result, you should probably leave a note at the Wikipedia Administrators Noticeboard if you have serious concerns about the actions I took as a volunteer in this case.
I stand by the actions I took in my capacity as a volunteer administrator.

I responded:

Nah, I'll just blog about it instead. I think people will find this "non-issue" very revealing indeed, as well as the questions of mine (like the one about Neal Rauhauser) that you have refused to answer.

In his final email, Symonds claimed he had never heard of "Neal Rauthouser" — which is not how Rauhauser's name is spelled. (Was he seeking deniability or did he just not try to spell it accurately?) He also agreed that "facts are facts" but that "in this case we didn't think they were represented accurately."
In an odd twist, Ron Brynaert — who has furiously been portraying himself as an enemy of Rauhauser's and a critic of Kimberlin's, despite the similar nature of his tactics and theirs — wrote a post about the deletion of the Wikipedia article. He wrote his own version and submitted it. I don't recommend going to Brynaert's site, but here is a safe link to a Google cache of Brynaert's post, where you can read this amusing passage from Brynaert's submission:

Since October of 2010, conservatives have hounded Kimberlin about his bombing conviction, after articles were published at a website owned by Andrew Breitbart and other conservative blogs that questioned donations to his non-profit. Lawsuits and back-and-forth online battles have transpired between progressives backing Kimberlin and bloggers on the right ever since.

Brett Kimberlin could not have written it better himself. According to Brynaert's submission, Kimberlin is being "hounded" by conservatives, and his extensive harassment campaign against us is really nothing but a blog war between the left and the right.
That's exactly what Kimberlin wants you to think. Also from Brynaert's entry:

During his imprisonment, one of the victims from the bombings killed himself, and Kimberlin was held liable for the death and a $1.61 million dollar judgment was awarded to the widow. An appeals court later ruled he wasn't directly responsible for the suicide, and the judgment was reduced to $360,000 but it's unclear if Kimberlin ever paid anything.

Yeah, except that the judgment of that intermediate court of appeals in 1993 was itself reversed in 1994, by the Indiana Supreme Court.

In the present case, the complaint alleged intentional injury. Kimberlin's federal criminal conviction, through collateral estoppel, discussed in Issue 1(c), supra, establishes his conduct as malicious and thus intentional rather than negligent. Moreover, Carl's DeLong's death, although occurring more than four years after the explosion, was within the scope of harm intended by Kimberlin's intentional criminal conduct. Under such circumstances, we decline to treat suicide as independent intervening cause protecting a highly culpable defendant from liability for his victim's death. We hold that an action may be maintained for death or injury from a suicide or suicide attempt where a defendant's willful tortious conduct was intended to cause a victim physical harm and where the intentional tort is a substantial factor in bringing about the suicide.
[T]he jury finding of damages in the amount of $1,250,000.00 does not appear outrageous at first blush. The verdict does not indicate passion, prejudice, or partiality rather than reasoned assessment. We decline to find the wrongful death judgment to be excessive.
. . . .
As to the damages awarded for Mrs. DeLong's separate personal injury claim, the defendant asserts that the $360,000 verdict was approximately 18 times her special damages and therefore excessive. In response, the plaintiff notes evidence demonstrating the particularly painful nature of her injuries from the bomb blast and her ordeal during treatment, including multiple surgeries and permanent continuing pain and impairment established by medical testimony. . . . In the present case we find no basis for finding the verdict for Mrs. DeLong's injuries to be excessive as a matter of law.

$1,250,000.00 plus $360,000 is $1.61 million. The state's highest court upheld that judgment. Once again Ron Brynaert is seen to be misrepresenting the facts in a way that benefits Brett Kimberlin.
It's almost as if Kimberlin's supporters tried to whisk away any mention of him on Wikipedia — and when they got caught, tried to replace the entry with something that sounded neutral, but actually benefited his point of view.
Almost!
Anyway, since yesterday's blogburst, it appears that all of a sudden Wikipedia is taking a second look at Symonds's deletion. On Symonds's talk page, someone writes:

There's a lot of discussion about Brett recently, and it must be surprising for individuals to find no article about him.

Symonds the Wikipedia editor responds in part:

That's fine, but I recommend you have a look at the related deletion review. The previous article was written by some people with rather a large axe to grind! I've had a couple of emails from right-wing bloggers, but nothing from anyone I'd trust to write a neutral article.

Never mind that the original article was almost entirely accurate! Another person chimes in and says:

Going through the deletion review, I'm not seeing a clear cut consensus to support the deletion. It seems like the action primarily taken because of objections to the users who had created the article in the first place. Also, I think the condition to "start from scratch" is overly burdensome. Yes, the article is almost entirely negative, but there's nothing stopping someone from adding balance once the article is restored. Keep in mind that the behavior being alleged against Kimberlin involves inappropriate and extreme efforts to suppress negative but accurate reporting on his past. If you are in possession of ORTS information complaining about "harassment", please note that many have accused Kimberlin of filing bad-faith harassment claims in the past.

No kidding!
By the way, I wrote Symonds again to ask him the question he never really answered: who told him about this supposed harassment campaign. Oddly enough, he has not responded.
It seems like our little blogburst might be working to get history re-rewritten to conform itself to the truth, rather than the "truth" as determined by a small band of thugs determined to intimidate anyone who tells the actual truth.
Who knew that telling the truth was so dangerous and so difficult?

Math without a license?

I guess Mr. Cox needs a deriver's license.

Looks to Me Like You've Been Doing Some Unlicensed Figurin'

via Hit & Run by Radley Balko on 2/4/11

A citizen in Raleigh, North Carolina presented the city a proposal to install traffic lights near his home. One city official responded by calling for the citizen to be investigated for what basically amounts to doing math without a license.

Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.
After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners' Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own...
The eight-page document with maps, diagrams and traffic projections was offered to buttress their contention that signals will be needed at the Falls of Neuse at Coolmore Drive intersection and where the road meets Tabriz Point / Lake Villa Way.
It did not persuade Kevin Lacy, chief traffic engineer for the state DOT, to change his mind about the project. Instead, Lacy called on a state licensing agency, the N.C. Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors, to investigate Cox...
Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report "appears to be engineering-level work" by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer...
Lacy said he had told the group last year that it should hire an engineer to make its case. He said he was surprised to see engineering-quality work in a report that was not signed by a licensed professional.
"When you start applying the principles for trip generation and route assignment, applying judgments from engineering documents and national standards, and making recommendations," that's technical work a licensed engineer would do, Lacy said.

Lacy is right. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if we let just regular, unlicensed people use sophisticated arguments when petitioning their government.
(Thanks to Michael Chaney for the link.)

Seeing Patterns

Seeing patterns in random events...

At least that's what people did with David Levine's game. What he devised as a game to see who could decipher "alien" messages, has been taken for reality.

So on Sunday, March 28, 2010, I happened to do another of these searches, and found... well, that I was apparently at the center of a small conspiracy theory surrounding my game.

....

"Ra" mathematics was not created to explain my SETI game. It was created to aid Bateman in his study of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Bateman claimed it also applied to the understanding of crop circles. But coincidentally, the number of symbols used in my first two messages (37) happened to match the number of elements of the "Ra table of nines". This was important enough that Bateman saw this as no coincidence and the starting point for all of his work. Everything was built off of this one fact.

Things people do while driving...

The latest -- giving birth.

Paco

I'm distressed to read that Delta Airlines has managed to lose a family's dog, and offers thoroughly inadequate compensation for this loss.

 

I've seen a couple of pieces about how, if you pack a firearm in your luggage, that luggage will be secured and tracked much more thoroughly than regular luggage is.   (A starter pistol, legal without a permit in every state, counts as a "firearm" for this purpose.)

 

Does anyone make animal crates with a compartment for storing your starter pistol?

"Toy Yoda" lawsuit

Remember the case of the Hooters waitress who busted her buns to win a Toyota?  She was led, blindfolded, out to the parking lot to see her prize:  A "toy Yoda".

 

April fools!

 

The manager's joke didn't go over too well.  The waitress sued.

 

I decided to try Google once again to see if the case was ever resolved.

I see by the papers, the company settled. 

David Noll, her attorney, said Wednesday that he could not disclose the settlement's details, although he said Berry can now go to a local car dealership and "pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants."

 

The case was settled in 2002, after about a year of legal infighting, it would appear.

 

I don't know if I blogged about the case at the time, but I remember thinking the honorable thing for Hooters to do is to settle, let the waitress have her pick of any car on the lot (pick a good-sized dealership!), and call the papers to report on her having won the contest.   The cost of the car could have come out of the corporate advertising budget, and would have been money well spent.

Stop Alien Abductions

OK, OK! I promise to stop abducting aliens!

Apparently, the good old tinfoil hat has been superseded by better technology: Stop Alien Abductions

Dungeons and Dragons banned in Dungeons Prisons

From the Volokh Conspiracy

The prison’s rationale for the ban is that playing D&D might stimulate “gang activity” by inmates. But the government conceded that there is no evidence that Dungeons and Dragons actually had stimulated gang activity in the past, either in this prison or elsewhere. The only evidence for the supposedly harmful effects of Dungeons and Dragons were a few cases from other states where playing the game supposedly led inmates to indulge in “escapism” and become divorced from reality, one case where two non-inmates committed a crime in which they “acted out” a D&D story-line, and one where a longtime D&D player (not an inmate) committed suicide. Obviously, almost any hobby or reading material might lead people to become divorced from reality, or in rare cases commit suicide. And disturbed individuals could potentially “act out” a crime based on a scenario in almost any film or literary work. Should prisons ban The Count of Monte Cristo on the grounds that it might encourage escape attempts? Moreover, the “escapism” rationale conflicts with the gang argument. People who become engrossed in escapism and retreat from society are presumably less likely to become active gang members.

It may be legal and proper, but I think some of the judges should have cheated more on their intelligence rolls.

The Peter Principle -- a special case?

Mark Thornton at the Mises Blog writes about "The Skyscraper Curse".

There is often a correlation between financial bubbles bursting and attempts to construct the world's tallest building, says William Pesek on Bloomberg.com. In 1931, for instance, the Empire State building, designed in the exuberant 1920s, finally opened, "presaging years of gloom".

The Sears Tower was the world's tallest building when it opened in 1973, coinciding with the advent of stagflation. In the late 1990s, Malaysia's Petronas Towers, conceived during the 'go-go' days of the mid-1990s, opened in 1998 as the Asian crisis struck. And the "Skyscraper Curse" has struck again in Dubai. The Burj Dubai (pictured, right) is the latest tallest building in the world at almost 820 metres, constructed by property group Emaar. The $1bn tower is due to open in January.

The link between all these buildings is easy credit, fuelling confidence, ambition, exuberance and hubris, says Pesek. "Architectural overreach" thus tends to mark the height of the boom. Commenting on the construction boom in Dubai in 2006, Claudia Zeisberger of the Asia Pacific Institute of Finance at Insead in Singapore said: "all the building going on made me feel like I was experiencing the last days of ancient Rome". Skyscrapers, says Mark Thornton of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, have become a "marker of the 20th-century business cycle."

I think it was Dr. Peter who noted that the vibrancy of a company was inversely correlated to the opulence of its decor, and when a company's reception area started feeling like a twelve-star hotel room, it was time to sell.

Let's hear it for the Argleton Worldcon bid!!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6474746/Mystery-of-Argleton-the-Google-town-that-only-exists-online.html

All natural?

Apparently, the Dr. Pepper/Snapple group is being sued over its use of the phrase "All Natural" in its product.

If I were managing a beverage company, I'd love to try marketing a brand of drinks with the label "All Chemical".  A small picture of the periodic table of the elements would be optional, I suppose.

Any beverage company CEO wishing to use this idea can contact me through this blog to negotiate terms for licensing this idea.

Modern art and artists

John Stossel looks at modern art.

 Do people really know what's art and what's just stuff?

The Christian Science Monitor looks at 8 myths about art, like:

This work generated so much discussion, it must be good!

Anyone could do that.

Maybe you should have tried. A few years ago we ran a test.

We showed four reproductions of art works that are considered masterpieces along with six pieces that will never make it into any museum. We asked viewers to decide which work was art. You can take the test yourself here.

Four of the art works were done by 4-year-olds. Yet the kids' work ranked ahead of most of the masters.

I assumed real artists wouldn't fall for the trick, so we invited some to take our test. Most also put the kids' work up there with the masters.

One artist, Victor Acevedo, described one of the children's pieces as "a competent execution of abstract expressionism which was first made famous by de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and others. So it's emulating that style and it's a school of art."

When I told him the work was finger-painting by a 4-year-old he said, "That's amazing. Give that kid a show."

So can anybody explain to me why people spend millions on abstract art when 4-year-olds can fool them?

President Obama: National Security Risk?

According to this AP story, the Federal Bureau of Prisons twice ruled that Dreams From My Father and The Audicity of Hope could not be given to prisoner Ahmed Omar Abu Ali to read, on account of the risk to national security.

Last November, possibly after the election, the Prison Bureau changed its mind and allowed him the books.

Stupid Security Strikes again

From Peter Hitchens' column:

The mad dictatorship of the 'security' industry reached new depths of lunacy when a Japan-bound traveller was stopped at Heathrow for carrying a paperback thriller with a picture of a gun on the cover.

When Carolyn Burgess placed her Robert B. Parker novel, A Triple Shot Of Spenser, on the security tray she had it snatched away because it 'might upset passengers' on the plane. It had the image of a handgun on the front.

Eventually, after three officials had consulted each other on this serious matter, Mrs Burgess, a 58-year-old bank worker, was told she could take the book on the plane – provided she kept it in her bag and didn't read it.

A spokesman for BAA attempted to explain this loopy behaviour by saying: 'In certain circumstances, a passenger carrying an item which features an image or slogan that could be perceived as aggressive may be asked to cover it up or remove it. Security officers are advised to use common sense when making these requests.'

At least the book wasn't blown up in a controlled explosion.

Obama: Second black US President?

Eugene Volokh links to a post explaining why Barack Obama may actually be the second African-American to be President of the United States.  Who was the first?  Not Bill Clinton, but Condoleeza Rice!

 

Don't try this at home

Or anywhere else, for that matter.  From The Independent:

Chainsaw death was 'carefully thought through suicide'

By Martin Halfpenny, PA

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

A man cut off his own head with a chainsaw in a carefully thought out suicide because he was "irrationally opposed" to leaving his repossessed home, an inquest heard today.

David Phyall, 50, tied the Black & Decker tool to a leg of a snooker table in his lounge with string, taped up the on button and plugged it into a timer, Winchester Coroner's Court heard.

Mr Phyall, who had consumed a small quantity of alcohol but no drugs, then lay down under the snooker table face up and placed the chainsaw against his neck.

A piece of the tool's cardboard box initially cushioned the blades from his neck.

The hearing heard the timer, which is usually used to turn lights on and off, was fixed to start up the chainsaw for 15 minutes.

When it activated, it sliced three-quarters through his neck and across into his right shoulder only stopping from a complete severing when his t-shirt was dragged into the blades.

His elderly parents John and Jean Phyall raised the alarm when they could not contact their son in his ground floor housing association flat in Bishopstoke, Hampshire, on 5 July this year.

Police were called and they broke in asking the parents to stay outside.

Sergeant Mark Carter said he found Mr Phyall in the lounge with blood spattering the walls, floor and a cabinet.

"The electric chainsaw was embedded in his neck. The blade was approximately three quarters through his neck," he told the hearing.

Central Hampshire deputy coroner Simon Burge said to the officer: "It must have been a huge shock to you."

Sgt Carter replied: "In some ways it was sir."

The hearing heard that the block where Mr Phyall had his flat was to be demolished and despite great efforts from his housing association, he had refused 11 offers of alternative accommodation.

Eventually it had gone to court to repossess the property.

At the time of his death Mr Phyall, who had suffered from mental illness and attempted suicide before, was the only person living in the 1960s block with the rest of the properties boarded up.

Recording a verdict of suicide, Mr Burge said First Wessex Housing Group had done all they could to help Mr Phyall but he was "irrationally opposed to moving".

"In the 15 years I have been sitting as a deputy coroner, this is the most bizarre case I can recall," Mr Burge said.

"It is an appalling way to take one's life but that is what happened in this case.

"He thought through how he was going to commit suicide very carefully. He went to a great deal of trouble.

"I think he did it to draw attention to the injustice of his situation."

 

Rent a decoy

From Schneier on Security:

Now this is clever:

"I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour," said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe.

He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11 a.m. Tuesday. He also was told to wear certain work clothing.

"Yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask...and, if possible, a blue shirt," he said.

Mike showed up along with about a dozen other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.

Voter myths

1. Our voters are pretty smart.

2. Bill O'Reilly's viewers are dumber than Jon Stewart's.

3. If you just give Americans the facts, they'll be able to draw the right conclusions.

4. Voters today are smarter than they used to be.

5. Young voters are paying a lot of attention to the news.

 

And in conclusion:

Only 11 percent of the young report that they regularly surf the Internet for news. Maybe Obama shouldn't be relying on savvy young voters after all.

But then again, maybe he's not.

I had a conversation with one young voter who was all set to vote for Obama.  After 5 minutes spent listing issues, he was all set to vote for McCain.  People seem to be voting for Obama because it feels good, not because they know anything.