What if Bush had said "Corpse Man"?

Video linked to this piece by Tony Gallardo at The American Thinker.

If Bush had so badly mispronounced "corpsman", the mainstream media would still be running it on a continuous tape loop.

But of course, there's no media bias.

Environmental Myths

The top ten environmental concerns have changed over the years. Opposing Views: Old and New Environmental Myths

...nine of the ten concerns that preoccupied Greens two decades ago have eroded if not fully evaporated. When did you last hear "America is running out of landfill space" listed as an environmental problem? Twenty years ago it was myth #1.

Nine of the ten myths focused on the consequences of consumer behavior. They included: Americans are especially wasteful (We weren't.); packaging, plastics, and disposables are inherently bad (They weren't.); recycling is unambiguously good (It isn't.); and biodegradable is best, while solid waste is necessarily dangerous (Not necessarily.).

The Rights of Corporations

Ilya Shapiro, writing at Cato@Liberty, observes that When Individuals Form Corporations, They Don’t Lose Their Rights.

This line of attack demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the freedoms protected by the Constitution, which is exemplified by the facile charge that “corporations aren’t human beings.” Well of course they aren’t — but that’s constitutionally irrelevant: Corporations aren’t “real people” in the sense that the Constitution’s protection of sexual privacy or prohibition on slavery make no sense in this context, but that doesn’t mean that corporate entities also lack, say, Fourth Amendment rights. Or would the “no rights for corporations” crowd be okay with the police storming their employers’ offices and carting off their (employer-owned) computers for no particular reason? — or to chill criticism of some government policy.

Or how about Fifth Amendment rights? Can the mayor of New York exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there?

So corporations have to have some constitutional rights or nobody would form them in the first place. The reason they have these rights isn’t because they’re “legal” persons, however — though much of the doctrine builds on that technical point — but instead because corporations are merely one of the ways in which rights-bearing individuals associate to better engage in a whole host of constitutionally protected activity.

Heather Mac Donald on the changing family

Heather Mac Donald has an article on National Review titled Reengineering the Family.

Technology, and the willingness to sanction same-sex couples having children, are changing the nature of the family.

Parental identity and responsibility for children in a homosexual family do not flow from biology; they result from choice and intent. To the extent that a gay couple wants to retain the traditional number of parents in the home, it must exclude one biological parent from inclusion in the family unit. To the extent that a gay couple wants to preserve the traditional connection between that biological parent and his offspring, however, the adult side of the family becomes more of a non-traditional threesome.

These features of homosexual families also characterize infertile heterosexual couples who have used other people's gametes to conceive. Indeed, heterosexual demand drove the medical revolution that allows gays to procreate. Infertile heterosexual couples unwilling to accept a biological limit in their lives spurred the ever-increasing array of gamete- and womb-swapping technologies that now includes sperm banks and complicated surrogacy arrangements.

This division of genetic and parental responsibility has been present throughout human history, of course. Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents; divorce alienates one biological parent from the child's household and sometimes replaces that parent with another adult. But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity. However felicitous and loving a new family arrangement turned out to be, it did not challenge the understanding that the ideal route to a family was the shared conception of a child by a married man and woman. Likewise, the use of fertility techniques by heterosexual couples is still regarded as an exception to ordinary conception and child-rearing, and may not even be perceptible to outsiders. By contrast, every gay (and single-parent) conception by definition entails an absent parent; it is a visible affirmation of the social acceptability of severing genetic contribution from parenting. Every gay couple and never-married single parent raising a child trigger the same potential question as the couple in the "Family Values" ad: "Where's the mother (or father)?"

A large number of people will respond: "Why does it matter?" New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen recently considered the possibility that reproductive technology will eventually allow "three or more people . . . to combine their DNA to create a baby." Cohen's response ultimately boils down to: "So what?" The "law should move toward a greater recognition that the intent of the people involved is more important than the genes," he wrote. The concept of "fractional parents," a phrase coined by a professor at the University of San Diego law school, causes no obvious disquiet in Cohen, and the legal conundrums that the reality of "fractional parents" would generate — "Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough?"

The main answer to the "Why does it matter?" question is this: The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children's lives. This phenomenon is increasingly common among the less educated, and dominates in the black community. Too many children — including the great majority of black children and large numbers of children of struggling working-class mothers — are now raised in single-parent homes; many do not even know who their fathers are. The negative consequences of this family breakdown for children include higher rates of school failure and lack of socialization. Moreover, in a culture where men are not expected to raise their children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility and self-discipline.

Gay child-rearing undercuts another understanding of why fathers should stay with their children: that mothers and fathers bring complementary attributes to child-rearing. On average, men and women have different biological dispositions towards aggression, competition, empathy, and cooperation — a proposition that even radical feminists and gender constructivists sometimes affirm.

To be sure, most of the attributes of gay procreation and gay marriage can be found individually in other family structures. But those attributes — most important, the absence of a child's biological father or mother from his life — have been considered exceptions and second-best solutions to the norm for child-rearing. (Contrary to gay-marriage proponents' favorite rhetorical strategy, the existence of an exception does not mean that a norm or rule does not exist.) When gays procreate and marry, all those exceptions become the rule. To the extent that you worry about, rather than celebrate, the dissolution of biological ties between parents and children, gay marriage could be a straw that you are reluctant to add to the camel's back.

And fertility technology is hardly the only source of stress on families; heterosexual adults have been wreaking havoc on the two-parent family for the last five decades in their quest for maximal freedom and choice. The self-interested assumption behind that havoc has been that what's good for adults must be good for children: If adults want flexibility in their living arrangements, then children will benefit from it, as well. Perhaps children are as infinitely malleable as it would be convenient for them to be. But if it turns out that they thrive best with stability in their lives and that the traditional family evolved to provide that stability, then our breezy jettisoning of child-rearing traditions may not be such a boon for children.

The facile libertarian argument that gay marriage is a trivial matter that affects only the parties involved is astoundingly blind to the complexity of human institutions and to the web of sometimes imperceptible meanings and practices that compose them. Equally specious is the central theme in attorney Theodore Olson's legal challenge to California's Proposition 8: that only religious belief or animus towards gays could explain someone's hesitation regarding gay marriage. Anyone with the slightest appreciation for the Burkean understanding of tradition will feel the disquieting burden of his ignorance in this massive act of social reengineering, even if he ultimately decides that the benefits to gays from gay marriage outweigh the risks of the unknown.

Privatizing Space?

Dafydd ap Hugh at Big Lizards suggests getting NASA out of space exploration may be the best thing that's happened to the Amercan space program.

If we actually give a green light to private space exploration -- and a modest guaranteed market by renting space for our astronauts to fly on private launches -- then the Moon will come soon enough: Thar's gold in them thar craters! (Along with every other element we could possibly need to sustain an industry, and even extract breathable oxygen and create potable water for "Lunatic" colonists.)

The legacy of the government monopoly approach to space explation is an aging Shuttle fleet (currently three [3] flyable birds), plus a misguided and mismanaged "International Space Station," as our entire space program for the last thirty-plus years.

By the time Nixon canceled Apollo, NASA's bureaucracy had become sclerotic, unimaginative, anti-capitalist (seriously -- they actively suppressed private space launches), penny-foolish and pound-foolisher (killing the Air Force's X-15/X-20 program, for example, so it wouldn't "compete" with NASA's Mercury program), and in many ways an impediment to space exploration and colonization, not a boon.

NASA still conducts desultory research into more long-term goals; but where are the solar sails for long-range manned space exploration? Where is a truly reusable space "taxi" for shuttling spacefarers up and down the gravity well?

Where are the alternatives to launching from ground to low-Earth orbit (LEO), something to replace the "disintegrating totem poles" of the Saturn V or the one-shot solid booster rockets used to lift the Shuttle? There are many remarkable launch designs out there, but NASA seems uninterested in developing them.

For that matter, where is such a simple vehicle as the unmanned orbital booster, which would orbit in LEO; then upon radio command, latch onto some cargo (like a satellite) in low orbit, and just boost it up to a higher one? That way we wouldn't have to put boosters on every satellite we launch, an incredible extra mass that must be carried up.

And as is obvious from the subject of this post, it's been thirty-seven years, one month, and 21 days since we last put a man on the Moon; and if everything went well, it would be an additional twenty years before we returned: More than half a century between Moon landings is unconscionable. Clearly, the big-government approach to space exploration, industrialization, and colonization is a complete flop... as is the big-government approach to virtually everything, with the possible exception of national defense and interstate highways.

But there's a problem:

But the Regulators already have their long knives out for the irregulars; back to the Long Beach Press-Telegram story:

But there's some concern about that - from former NASA officials worried about safety and from congressional leaders worried about lost jobs. Some believe space is still a tough, dangerous enterprise not to be left to private companies out for a buck. Government would lose vital knowledge and control, critics fear.

Yes, God forbid we should allow filthy capitalists out for a buck into the space program. Far better that everything be in the hands of altruistic federal bureaucrats -- out for a pension.

Why is private enterprise better for space exploitation? Manifold reasons:

• Cost: A private space-launch business has to turn a profit, so it must keep costs down; this in turn keeps the price down, and more and more customers can launch to orbit, creating a positive feedback loop dragging the human race into space.
• Reliability: A business must hit its schedule nearly every time, or it loses business to its competitors (think of FedEx); therefore, reliability becomes much more of a premium than with a government monopoly.
• Responsiveness: It must continually offer new services to stay ahead of said competitors; it must create markets, create and exploit opportunities, and move rapidily to seize the initiative.
• Wealth creation: It would open up whole new markets for orbital manufacturing of machine parts, pharmaceuticals, and very large structures that would collapse under Earth's gravitational pull (see next bullet); new markets mean new wealth for everyone.

• Energy abundance: Entrepeneurs would quickly realize that the biggest market of all would be energy: solar cells in orbit -- outside 99% of the Earth's atmosphere and 100% of Earth's weather -- can generate orders of magnitude more electricity than terrestrial solar cells, and considerably more than even a nuclear power plant.

Remember, in orbit, you can make the collection surface as big as you want, several square kilometers; energy can be beamed back to Earth by microwave lasers or somesuch.

Here is where the conservatives' demand for large power availability and liberals' demand for non-carbon energy production can meet in the middle in a true bipartisan Kosmic Kumbaya!

• Innovation: Finally, it's the private sector, not the government, that is truly innovative; if we want humans in space on a full-time, permanent basis, it's private enterprise or bust.

At the moment, we've got "bust."

It's a little odd that such a lover of big-government Obamunism and nationalization of private resources would suddenly go all capitalist over the space program; I worry that this will just turn out to be more empty rhetoric. But entrepeneurs can use even empty rhetoric to fly below the radar and actually bring about some of the dreams that Obama has woven, perhaps unintentionally and against the president's own better judgment.

Now go read the rest of it.

Intelligent Design = Creationism

Intelligent Design and Creationism are basically the same.  Both are the proposition that "God-dunnit".

As evidence, Wesley Elsberry cites Michael Medved at  a symposium in Tampa:

Michael Medved dismissed accusations that the IDC movement was disguised religion as a "big lie". Elsewhere in his remarks, he claimed that the vociferousness of the attacks on IDC were because of belief. IDC advocates, Medved claimed, would have no change in their faith if "Darwinian evolution" were proved correct (to the satisfaction of their doubts, certainly), but that atheists would have to admit that they were wrong if IDC proved correct.

OK, so if IDC is correct, how would that change any atheist's mind about things? It seems to me that's only the case if one assumes that the "intelligent designer(s)" is/are identical to some conception of God(s). That rather diminishes the force of Medved's other assertion that IDC isn't about religion.

Haiti doesn't want your old shoes

A commentary at AidWatch looks at the kind of aid that actually helps the people in Haiti, and the kinds of aid that just get in the way.  Nobody Wants Your Old Shoes – How Not to Help in Haiti

Don't donate goods. Donating stuff instead of money is a serious problem in emergency relief. Only the people on the ground know what's actually necessary; those of us in the rest of the world can only guess. Some things, like summer clothes and expired medicines are going to be worthless in Haiti. Other stuff, like warm clothes and bottled water may be helpful to some people in some specific ways. Separating the useful from the useless takes manpower that can be doing more important work. It's far better to give money so that organizations can buy the things they know they need.
....
Don't go to Haiti. It's close to the US, it's a disaster area, and we all want to help. However, it's dangerous right now and they don't need "extra hands". The people who are currently useful are people with training in medicine and emergency response. If all you can contribute is unskilled labor, stay home. There is no shortage of unskilled labor in Haiti, and Haitians will be a lot more committed than you are to the rebuilding process.

If you are a nurse or physician, especially with experience in trauma, and you want to volunteer, email Partners in Health – volunteer@pih.org – and offer your services. Or submit your details to International Medical Corps. They'll take you if they can use you.
....
Don't ignore rebuilding. The physical damage done to Port au Prince is going to take a long, long time to repair. The human consequences will have a similar slow recovery. Haiti will still need our help next year, and the years after that. It is going to take more than just a short-term infusion of relief money. Give your money to organizations that will be in Haiti for the long haul, and don't forget about Haiti once the media attention moves on.

There are two kinds of aid people can give: the kind that makes the giver feel good, and the kind that actually helps. There is some overlap between the two, but not as much as people assume.

The Roots of Muslim Rage

Analysis at the ICJS:  <http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=7678&ICJS=6252&article=2271>

Definition of an Intellectual

According to Thomas Sowell, in his book Intellectuals and Society :

An intellectual is a person whose end product is ideas.

This is distinct from being intelligent, or being educated, or doing heavy brain work. 

Lots of people do heavy brain work, but the ideas result in things (new medicines, bridges, or even winning chess games) that can be tested according to how well they perform in the real world.

If the end product is only ideas, the ideas are only tested by how good they sound to other intellectuals.

9/11 Revisited

Respectful Insolence pulls from the archives a report on the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

No doubt you've heard of the 9/11 "skeptics" who don't believe that the impact of two large jetliners was enough to bring down the Twin Towers. These and conspiracy theorists like them have been responsible for the movie Loose Change (the producers of which, contrary to their claims that they are doing this "for the victims," have some really vile and despicable things about those who died) and the 9/11 "Truth" movement. These guys love to spin tales about how somehow the U.S. government (sometimes, depending on who's telling the tale, with the help of the Mossad) was actually responsible for the attacks, how supposedly the planes alone were not enough to bring the buildings down, and how there must have been bombs or other devices already in the towers. All of this was done, if you believe the tinfoil hat brigade, for nefarious purposes like giving the government a pretext to invade Iraq, to enrich Haliburton, or a variety of other reasons connected to reality only in the most tenuous way, if even that. One of the more prevalent among the many competing claims (some of which are mutually exclusive) is that it wasn't really commercial jetliners that struck the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon at all, but rather missiles or refueling military tankers. Never mind the thousands of eyewitnesses and the copious photographic, documentary, and physical evidence that do in fact support the conventional idea that it was suicidally murderous Islamic terrorists who hijacked these jetliners and piloted them into these buildings. It must have been the government or the Jews who did it. Popular Mechanics and the most recent episode of Skeptic Magazine have deconstructed the conspiracy theories of the 9/11 "Truth" movement quite well, as has the blog Screw Loose Change and the website Debunking 911, including its claims that the fires in the building couldn't have weakened the steel enough to cause the buildings to fall and that there must have been explosive charges that caused a "controlled implosion."

A report at Skeptic's website can be found here.

Did trials by ordeal work?

Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy links to a Boston Globe article suggesting trials by ordeal might have actually worked.

For the better part of a millennium, Europe’s legal systems decided difficult criminal cases in a most peculiar way. When judges were uncertain about an accused criminal’s guilt, they ordered a cauldron of water to be boiled, a ring to be thrown in, and the defendant to plunge in his naked hand and pluck the object out. The defendant’s hand was wrapped in bandages and revisited three days later. If it survived the bubbling cauldron unharmed, the defendant was declared innocent. If it didn’t, he was convicted.
....
First, consider the reasoning of the defendants. Guilty believers expected God to reveal their guilt by harming them in the ordeal. They anticipated being boiled and convicted. Innocent believers, meanwhile, expected God to protect them in the ordeal. They anticipated escaping unscathed, and being exonerated.

The only defendants who would have been willing to go through with the ordeal were therefore the innocent ones. Guilty defendants would have preferred to avoid the ordeal - by confessing their crimes, settling with their accusers, or fleeing the realm.

The next thing to understand is that clerics administrated ordeals and adjudged their outcomes - and did so under elaborate sets of rules that gave them wide latitude to manipulate the process. Priests knew that only innocent defendants would be willing to plunge their hands in boiling water. So priests could simply rig trials to exonerate defendants who were willing to go through with the ordeal. The rituals around the ordeals gave them plenty of cover to ensure the water wasn’t boiling, or the iron wasn’t burning, and so on. If rigging failed, a priest could interpret the ordeal’s outcome to exculpate the defendant nonetheless (“His arm is healing well!”).

Laws Banning Cell Phone Use While Driving Don’t Lower Accident Rates

In recent blog post at The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr reports on a study:Laws Banning Cell Phone Use While Driving Don’t Lower Accident Rates

Laws banning cellphone use while driving apparently haven’t reduced crashes, according to a study released on Friday that compared the number of total crashes before the ban with the number after. The study found virtually no difference in the numbers, a finding that had the researchers scratching their heads.

Orin's comment:

Any guesses as to the likelihood that jurisdictions will repeal their bans in light of the evidence that they don’t work?

Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution - life - 26 January 2010 - New Scientist

A look at how evolution itself may have evolved. Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution - life - 26 January 2010 - New Scientist

JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed - billions of years, in fact - the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn't Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.
....
In particular, he argues, nothing in the modern synthesis explains the most fundamental steps in early life: how evolution could have produced the genetic code and the basic genetic machinery used by all organisms, especially the enzymes and structures involved in translating genetic information into proteins. Most biologists, following Francis Crick, simply supposed that these were uninformative "accidents of history". That was a big mistake, says Woese, who has made his academic reputation proving the point.
....
This is all very different from evolution as described by Darwin. Evolution will always be about change as a result of some organisms being more successful at surviving than others. In the Darwinian model, evolutionary change occurs because individuals with genes associated with successful traits are more likely to pass these on to the next generation. In horizontal gene transfer, by contrast, change is not a function of the individual or of changes from generation to generation, but of all the microbes able to share genetic material. Evolution takes place within a complex, dynamic system of many interacting parts, say Woese and Goldenfeld, and understanding it demands a detailed exploration of the self-organising potential of such a system. On the basis of their studies, they argue that horizontal gene transfer had to be a dominant factor in the original form of evolution.

Tracking your Browser Without Cookies

Bruce Schneier brings this to our attention at his blog.

My results:
"Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 430,332 tested so far. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 18.72 bits of identifying information."

Tracking your Browser Without Cookies

How unique is your browser? Can you be tracked simply by its characteristics? The EFF is trying to find out. Their site Panopticlick will measure the characteristics of your browser setup and tell you how unique it is.

I just ran the test on myself, and my browser is unique amongst the 120,000 browsers tested so far. It's my browser plugin details; no one else has the exact configuration I do. My list of system fonts is almost unique; only one other person has the exact configuration I do. (This seems odd to me, I have a week old Sony laptop running Windows 7, and I haven't done anything with the fonts.)

EFF has some suggestions for self-defense, none of them very satisfactory. And here's a news story.

EDITED TO ADD (1/29): There's a lot in the comments leading me to question the accuracy of this test. I'll post more when I know more.

Questions About Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

From This Ain't Hell blog, Unanswered Questions About Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Lets go over some of the questions that nobody in the Obama administration or Congress has addressed in regards to repealing DADT:

Will there be seperate barracks, berthing, and living quarters for homosexuals?

...Mandating that homosexuals have their own living quarters (like some colleges and universities do) will require new construction of barracks and a complete rearrangement and reconfiguring of hundreds of naval vessels. On the other hand, allowing homosexuals to live with heterosexuals, will cause a whole different set of headaches for military commanders.

2. Will homosexuals be allowed to serve in combat arms units?

Women are forbidden by Congress to serve in combat arms units (infantry, arty, tanks, etc.). Some of the same issues surrounding women serving in combat units are present in the debate over gays serving openly in these same units.

3. Will people discharged under DADT be allowed to reenlist/recommission in the military if the policy is repealed?

I don’t know how many people who were discharged under DADT would want to reenter the military, but there are even more questions that need to be answered if they are allowed to reenter. Will they retain their same rank/billet regardless how long they have been out? Will they get retroactive promotions?

4. If homosexuals are allowed to serve openly in the military, will the military recognize and award benefits to gay marriages or civil unions?

5. Will each service be allowed to craft its own policies regarding homosexuals?

6. How much money is repealing DADT going to cost?

Everytime the military changes a policy, it costs money.

People may differ over how much of a problem each of these may be, or how concerned the military should be about each item. For example, many will see no problem with recognizing civil unions. I think, all else being equal, why not? I suspect the military takes into account matters like blood relation between brothers and cousins, simply because the brothers and cousins are almost certain to.

(Of course, the comments are open for corrections.)

Alito's "You Lie" Moment

Randy E. Barnett, writing at the Wall Street Journal, takes the President to task: Obama Owes the High Court an Apology

In his State of the Union address, the president of the United States called out the Supreme Court by name for sharp condemnation and egged on his congressional supporters to jeer its recent decision.
....
Even before he finished, hundreds of Democratic senators, congressmen and cabinet officials surrounding the six seated justices stood, applauded and cheered.

Suppose for a moment that you were a justice seated there as the president of the United States singled you out for criticism and the room stood and cheered. Could they take it? Yes, of course. Should they have been put in this position? Absolutely not.
....
Judge not the words themselves, but their effect on the audience. The president fully expected that his hundreds of supporters in the legislative branch would stand and cheer, while the justices remained seated and silent, unable to respond even afterward. Moreover, the president's speech was only released about 30 minutes before the event, after the justices were already present. In short, the head of the executive branch ambushed six members of the judiciary, and called upon the legislative branch to deride them publicly. If you missed it, check the YouTube video. No one could reasonably believe in their heart that this was respectful behavior.

Then there is the substance of the remark itself. It was factually wrong. The Court's ruling in Citizens United concerned the right of labor unions and domestic corporations, including nonprofits, to express their views about candidates in media such as books, films and TV within 60 days of an election. In short, it concerned freedom of speech; in particular, an independent film critical of Hillary Clinton funded by a nonprofit corporation.

While the Court reversed a 1990 decision allowing such a ban, it left standing current restrictions on foreign nationals and "entities." Also untouched was a 100-year-old ban on domestic corporate contributions to political campaigns to which the president was presumably referring erroneously.

That is a whole lot to get wrong in 72 sanctimonious words. Clearly, this statement had not been vetted by the president's legal counsel. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, for example, would never have signed off on such a claim. Never.
....
If the president, himself a Harvard Law School graduate, is going to criticize a judicial opinion, it is incumbent upon him to be legally accurate and responsible in his commentary. If that is too much to expect of a politician giving a nationally televised speech to the general public, then this again illustrates the inappropriateness of making this remark in this venue.

For those who strongly object to the ruling in Citizens United and still do not see the impropriety of criticizing the Court this way, consider Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst during the president's address to a joint session of Congress in September. No one denied the right of a congressman to criticize the accuracy of the president's remarks. The objection was to the rudeness and disrespect shown the president, for which Mr. Wilson promptly apologized. So too should the president.

Obama vs the Supreme Court

Betsy Newmark writes about Obama's SOTU dig at the Supreme Court, saying: You'd think a former professor of Constitutional law would know better

During the speech, the President made a direct dig at the Supreme Court for their decision in Citizens United and alleges that they allowed foreign corporations to spend unlimited money in our elections. Bradley Smith, the former head of the FEC sets the record straight.

...The president's statement is false.

The Court held that 2 U.S.C. Section 441a, which prohibits all corporate political spending, is unconstitutional. Foreign nationals, specifically defined to include foreign corporations, are prohibiting from making "a contribution or donation of money or ather thing of value, or to make an express or implied promise to make a contribution or donation, in connection with a Federal, State or local election" under 2 U.S.C. Section 441e, which was not at issue in the case. Foreign corporations are also prohibited, under 2 U.S.C. 441e, from making any contribution or donation to any committee of any political party, and they prohibited from making any "expenditure, independent expenditure, or disbursement for an electioneering communication... ."

This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind.

Smith is right. Either he's ignorant, or he's deliberately lying. Thinking of how State of the Union addresses get scrubbed by all sorts of advisers in the White House, it's hard to believe that everyone there ignored that line. I think it must have been a deliberate obfuscation of the law and the ruling. No wonder Samuel Alito in the audience was shaking his head that this wasn't true.

As I think about that line, I realized that, while I'd read quite a bit of commentary on the Court's decision, I hadn't seen anywhere that point about foreign corporations. No wonder, because it's not part of the decision so no one would have been talking about it. It had to be something that either Obama or some equally ignorant adviser in the White House thought of. It was too good for them to check and they figured that it would be a good demagogic line to insert into the speech.

It sounds like Barack Obama's been working above his pay grade for a year now.

Quantum Physics

Chad Orzel, author of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, gives an introduction to Seven principles of Quantum Physics.

Here's a list of essential elements of quantum physics that everyone ought to know, at least in broad outlines:

Particles are waves, and vice versa.

Quantum physics tells us that every object in the universe has both particle-like and wave-like properties....

Quantum states are discrete.

The "quantum" in quantum physics refers to the fact that everything in quantum physics comes in discrete amounts. A beam of light can only contain integer numbers of photons-- 1, 2, 3, 137, but never 1.5 or 22.7. An electron in an atom can only have certain discrete energy values-- -13.6 electron volts, or -3.4 electron volts in hydrogen, but never -7.5 electron volts.

Probability is all we ever know.

When physicists use quantum mechanics to predict the results of an experiment, the only thing they can predict is the probability of detecting each of the possible outcomes. Given an experiment in which an electron will end up in one of two places, we can say that there is a 17% probability of finding it at point A and an 83% probability of finding it at point B, but we can never say for sure that a single given electron will definitely end up at A or definitely end up at B.

Measurement determines reality.

Until the moment that the exact state of a quantum particle is measured, that state is indeterminate, and in fact can be thought of as spread out over all the possible outcomes. After a measurement is made, the state of the particle is absolutely determined, and all subsequent measurements on that particle will return produce exactly the same outcome.

Quantum correlations are non-local.

One of the strangest and most important consequences of quantum mechanics is the idea of "entanglement." When two quantum particles interact in the right way, their states will depend on one another, no matter how far apart they are.

Everything not forbidden is mandatory.

A quantum particle moving from point A to point B will take absolutely every possible path from A to B, at the same time. This includes paths that involve highly improbable events like electron-positron pairs appearing out of nowhere, and disappearing again. The full theory of quantum electro-dynamics (QED) involves contributions from every possible process, even the ridiculously unlikely ones.

Quantum physics is not magic.

Yeah, this was on the other list as well, but it's so important that it needs repeating. As strange as quantum physics is-- and don't get me wrong, it's plenty weird-- it does not suspend all the rules of common sense. The bedrock principles of physics are still intact: energy is still conserved, entropy still increases, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. You cannot exploit quantum effects to build a perpetual motion machine, or to create telepathy or clairvoyance.

Marriage Talking Points

Marriage Talking Points - National Organization for Marriage

I. THE MOST EFFECTIVE SINGLE SENTENCE:

Extensive and repeated polling agrees that the single most effective message is:

"Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose,
they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us."

This allows people to express support for tolerance while opposing gay marriage. Some modify it to “People have a right to live as they choose, they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us.”

Language to avoid at all costs: "Ban same-sex marriage." Our base loves this wording. So do supporters of SSM. They know it causes us to lose about ten percentage points in polls. Don’t use it. Say we’re against “redefining marriage” or in favor or “marriage as the union of husband and wife” NEVER “banning same-sex marriage.”

Little Green Responses

Charles Johnson has replied to Dennis' open letter.

<http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35656_A_Reply_to_Dennis_Pragers_Open_Letter>