Yes means Yes | affirmative consent | Ezra Klein | assault

Yes means Yes | affirmative consent | Ezra Klein | assault

I’ve written previously about California’s new “Yes Means Yes” law, which codifies a strict definition of “affirmative consent” as it applies to students on college campuses. It’s a terrible bill, but some liberals are touting its absolute failure to address any real problems as its greatest achievement. A group of professors at Harvard Law School recently published a joint letter in the Boston Globe begging the university to rethink its implementation of a similar standard:

We call on the university to withdraw this sexual harassment policy and begin the challenging project of carefully thinking through what substantive and procedural rules would best balance the complex issues involved in addressing sexual conduct and misconduct in our community. The goal must not be simply to go as far as possible in the direction of preventing anything that some might characterize as sexual harassment. The goal must instead be to fully address sexual harassment while at the same time protecting students against unfair and inappropriate discipline, honoring individual relationship autonomy, and maintaining the values of academic freedom.

28 professors from one of the finest law schools on the planet believe that these laws go to far. They’re not just a change in policy; they redefine the meaning of “sexual assault,” and “consent.” They’re a gross overreach into the lives of students that flies in the face of the basic concepts of justice and due process. Chief Voxsplainer Ezra Klein recently penned an article explaining why he believes affirmative consent regulatory overreach—and subsequent overregulation of the sex lives of young Californians—will eliminate the alleged culture of “sexual entitlement” on college campuses. In Ezra Klein’s illiberal utopia, we achieve that goal by making examples out of men whose only crime is that they are male:

The Yes Means Yes law is trying to change a culture of sexual entitlement. That culture of sexual entitlement is built on fear; fear that the word “no” will lead to violence, or that the complaint you bring to the authorities will be be ignored, or that the hearing will become a venue for your humiliation, as the man who assaulted you details all the ways you were asking for it. “No Means No” has created a world where women are afraid. To work, “Yes Means Yes” needs to create a world where men are afraid. For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

This idea that a law must first victimize the innocent in order to achieve social change flies in the face of the original concepts of justice. Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine points this out; it’s not that we expect campus disciplinary proceedings to exactly mirror judicial proceedings, but there is an inherent expectation that those sitting as judge and jury are there to suss out the facts, not settle the score in the Battle of the Sexes. Chait argues that this is exactly the case—that fans of this new law “[argue] for false convictions as a conscious strategy in order to strike fear into the innocent.”

And indeed, the notion of presumption of innocence has been decried, to me, in person, as "just what I'm talking about" as "rape culture".

I hate the phrase “hookup culture,” because it implies there’s some sort of implicit agreement between the sexes that by default, it’s going down; but the fact is that this sort of culture exists, at least in some fashion, and the result can either go one of two ways: you can either have a great time and leave the next morning happy (if not fulfilled,) or you can leave feeling sloppy, and dirty, and more than a little upset with what happened. Laws like Yes Means Yes assume for all of us that when this kind of sex happens, it happens towomen. They assume that women as sexual creatures are not only incapable of making choices, but will by default crumble under the fallout of their bad ones. At best, it is as Heather Mac Donald called it “neo-Victorian.” At worst, it is a mindset thatactually sets back women/feminism/the human condition back into the stone ages. What the philosophy behind “Yes Means Yes” means—and what Klein believes, even if he doesn’t realize it—is that a woman is only empowered by her ability to decide post facto that it is actually menwho are responsible for her now-regretted choice to have sex. In the real world, you would wake up from your encounter with Ted, toss the guy a water bottle, and throw him out with his pants still in his hands. You would sit on the couch and dial your friend and talk about how you’re going to shower for the next five hours because you drunkenly hooked up with some guy named Ted. Then you would move on with your life, because you are a grown woman who can deal with her choices. In Ezra Klein’s world, you would wake up from your encounter with Ted, toss the guy a water bottle, and throw him out with his pants still in his hands. You would sit on the couch and dial your campus counselor to discuss your options—as opposed to just doing some self-searching about why you chose to become so intimate with a stranger.
Did he force you? No.
Did he threaten you? No.
Were you into it? …Maybe?
Were you drunk? Definitely. I was definitely drunk.
Bingo. Now, instead of going to class on Monday, Ted is going to be having a very special conversation with a panel of bureaucrats about the consensual sex he had on Saturday. Ted is no longer a student. Ted, as it turns out, is a rapist without ever having committed a rape; and you, by default, are a victim who has pressed the statutory rewind button and changed the game after the fact. The Harvard professors understand exactly what these laws mean, and why Ezra Klein is so hopelessly wrong in his analysis of them. “Yes Means Yes” doesn’t institute a power shift; “Yes Means Yes” changes the rules and picks a winner in a hypothetical sexual assault scenario forced into reality. This isn’t justice. This isn’t empowerment. This is vindication on behalf of a particular class of women who have taken advantage of their sexual liberty, and realized that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

College Sexual Assault Rules Trample Rights of Accused Campus Rapists | New Republic

College Sexual Assault Rules Trample Rights of Accused Campus Rapists | New Republic

 I was curious to know what a lawyer outside the university system would make of one of these codes. So I sent the document to Robin Steinberg, a public defender and a feminist.
A few hours later, Steinberg wrote back in alarm. She had read the document with colleagues at the Bronx legal-aid center she runs. They were horrified, she said—not because Columbia still hadn’t sufficiently protected survivors of assault, as some critics charge, but because its procedures revealed a cavalier disregard for the civil rights of people accused of rape, assault, and other gender-based crimes. “We are never sending our boys to college,” she wrote.
Columbia’s safeguards for the accused are better than most. For instance, it allows both accuser and accused to have a lawyer at a hearing, and, if asked, will locate free counsel. By contrast, Harvard, which issued a new code in July, holds investigations but not hearings and does not offer to obtain independent legal assistance. But Steinberg, like most people, hadn’t realized how far the rules governing sexual conduct on campus have strayed from any commonsense understanding of justice.
Most colleges that do allow lawyers into sexual-misconduct hearings or interrogations do not permit them to speak, though they may pass notes. Students on both sides must speak for themselves. This presents a serious problem for a young man charged with rape (and in the vast majority of campus cases, the accused are men). On one hand, if he doesn’t defend himself, he’ll be at a disadvantage. On the other, if he is also caught up in a criminal case, anything he says in a campus procedure can be used against him in court. Neither side may cross-examine witnesses to establish contradictions in their testimony. A school may withhold the identity of an accuser from the accused if she requests anonymity (though it may choose not to). Guilt or innocence hinges on a “preponderance” of evidence, a far lower standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” test that prevails in courtrooms. At Harvard, the Title IX enforcement office acts as cop, prosecutor, judge, and jury—and also hears the appeals. This conflation of possibly conflicting roles is “fundamentally not due process,” says Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor whose areas of expertise include feminist legal theory and procedural law.....So what should colleges do about sexual assault? In February, RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, wrote to the White House task force to argue that complaints should be dealt with by the police. Victims’ rights advocates counter that the criminal justice system is insensitive to rape victims and bad at securing convictions. Either way, universities view it as their right and educational mission to create internal justice systems for their communities. The quickest fix would be to upgrade their procedures: to ensure that the rights of both parties are equally protected and that every administrator or faculty member involved is properly trained. If nobody trusts the process—and right now, nobody appears to—campus unrest will only grow.
What’s happening at universities represents an often necessary effort to recategorize once-acceptable behaviors as unacceptable. But the government, via Title IX, is effectively acting on the notion popularized in the 1970s and ’80s by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon that male domination is so pervasive that women need special protection from the rigors of the law. Men, as a class, have more power than women, but American law rests on the principle that individuals have rights even when accused of doing bad things. And American liberalism has long rejected the notion that those rights may be curtailed even for a noble cause. “We need to take into account our obligations to due process not because we are soft on rapists and other exploiters of women,” says Halley, but because “the danger of holding an innocent person responsible is real.”

George Zimmerman | Trayvon Martin | Disobeyed Police

George Zimmerman | Trayvon Martin | Disobeyed Police

Mistakes happen, of course, so I promptly sent off an email to Professor Coker alerting her to the error in the certainty that she would wish to issue a correction.  That email follows below.  I only sent it an hour or so ago, which is far to little time to expect a response of any kind, but should I receive a response I will naturally share it.

Dear Professor Coker,

I recently came across your Foreword for the University of Miami Law Review Summer 2014 edition, dealing with issues around Stand-Your-Ground law and other aspects of self-defense law. I myself am an attorney with a particularized interest in self-defense law, and found your article very interesting.

I did note one substantive factual error, however, that I know you would want me to bring to your attention for purposes of correction. It particularly references the Zimmerman trial.

On page 955 you write:

“The dispatcher advised him not to pursue the teenager, but Zimmerman disregarded this warning and set out on foot to follow the youth.82″

Your footnote #82 comments:

82. See id. Alafair Burke argues that had the court granted the prosecution’s request for a first
aggressor instruction, the trial outcome might have been different. See Alafair Burke, What You
May Not Know About the Zimmerman Verdict: The Evolution of a Jury Instruction, HUFFINGTON
POST (July 15, 2013, 11:19 AM), available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alafair-burke/
george-zimmerman-jury-instructions_b_3596685.html. See also FLA. STAT. § 776.041 (2013)
(“The justification described in the preceding sections . . . is not available to a person who . . . (2)
[i]nitially provokes the use of force against himself . . . .”).

The primary substantive error in your text is the mistaken order. You have the sequence as:

(1) The dispatcher advised Zimmerman not to pursue the teenager.
(2) Zimmerman disregarded this warning and set out on foot to follow the youth.

Self-defense cases are always exquisitely fact sensitive, and the sequence of events is of course critical. In fact, you’ve placed the sequence of events backwards, and stripped them of context that likely played a critical role in the jury’s conception of that night’s events.

In fact, the sequence of events as they actually occurred is:

(1) Zimmerman informed the dispatcher that Martin had fled from sight around the corner of a building.
(2) The dispatcher asked Zimmerman where Martin was running to.
(3) Unable to observe Martin from his vehicle, Zimmerman exited the vehicle and set out on foot to look around the corner of the building.
(4) The dispatcher, sensing that Zimmerman had exited his vehicle, asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin.
(5) Zimmerman affirmed that he was.
(6) The dispatcher advised Zimmerman, “We don’t need you to do that.”
(7) Zimmerman responded, “OK,” and began returning back to his vehicle.

On the way back to his vehicle Zimmerman concluded his call with 911. It was then that Zimmerman and Martin had their fateful encounter.

That my recounting of events is accurate is readily confirmable by listening to the 911 recording of Zimmerman speaking with the dispatcher. It is available from many sources, but for your convenience you can also listen to it here:

Zimmerman Trial: Myth Busters: Did Zimmerman disobey police orders to stay in car?

That post also has a transcript of the relevant portion of the recording.

As you can see, there’s a very good explanation for why the court did not grant the prosecution’s request for a first aggressor instruction. There is zero evidence–literally, none–to support a claim that Zimmerman was a first aggressor. He did not disregard dispatcher advice to not pursue the teenager, quite the contrary–he immediately complied. Indeed, it seems likely that the only reason Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to follow Martin in the first place was in the reasonable belief that the dispatcher was asking him to do so in order to ascertain Martin’s direction of travel.

Even if, however, Zimmerman HAD followed Martin in disregard of police instructions I am unaware of any state’s law that holds that merely following someone, absent malice (of which there was also no evidence) is sufficient to qualify as a first aggressor.

Frankly, the notion that a “first aggressor instruction would have saved the day” is just silly, once the actual facts of the case are known.

In any case, clients call. Again, I enjoyed your article, and I’m confident you’ll wish to make that correction.

Of course, it goes without saying that if you have actual evidence in support of your statement, I’ll adjust my understanding of the case accordingly.

Best regards,

Andrew

Andrew F. Branca
Attorney at Law (MA)
www.lawofselfdefense.com
@LawSelfDefense
Facebook: Law of Self Defense

I guess we’ll have to see what, if anything, happens.

Bees and pesticides - Matt Ridley

Bees and pesticides - Matt Ridley

The European Union’s addiction to the precautionary principle — which says in effect that the risks of new technologies must be measured against perfection, not against the risks of existing technologies — has caused many perverse policy decisions. It may now have produced a result that has proved so utterly foot-shooting, so swiftly, that even Eurocrats might notice the environmental disaster they have created.
All across southeast Britain this autumn, crops of oilseed rape are dying because of infestation by flea beetles. The direct cause of the problem is the two-year ban on pesticides called neonicotinoids brought in by the EU over British objections at the tail end of last year. The ban was justified on the precautionary ground that neonics might be causing the mass decline of bees. There is, by the way, no mass decline of bees, as I shall explain.
Neonics are primarily used as a seed dressing: seeds are soaked in the chemical so that the plant grows up protected from pests and — crucially — often does not need to be sprayed. The beauty of this is that it targets pests, such as flea beetles, that eat the plant, but not the bystanders such as other insects. In the laboratory, bees exposed to high doses of neonics do indeed die or become confused. So they should — that’s what the word “insecticide” means.
Yet large-scale field studies and real world evidence consistently demonstrate that rape pollen does not contain a high enough dose to have an impact on bee colonies. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs report on the subject concluded that lab studies used to justify the EU ban severely overdosed their bees and that bees are not affected by neonics under normal conditions. Australian regulators claim that neonics have actually improved the environment for bees by replacing older pesticides. And in the US, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency have so far resisted calls to ban neonics for much the same reason.
Even though there was literally no good science linking neonics to bee deaths in fields, they were banned anyway for use on flowering crops in Europe. Friends of the Earth, which lobbied for the ban, opined that this would make no difference to farmers. Dave Goulson, a bee activist and author of a fine book on bumblebees called A Sting in the Tale, was widely quoted as saying that farmers were wasting their money on neonics anyway; though how he knew this was not clear. Presumably he thinks farmers are stupid.
Well, the environmentalists were wrong. The loss of  the rape cropthis autumn is approaching 50 per cent in  Hampshire and not much less in other parts of the country. Farmers in Germany, the EU’s largest producer of rape, are also reporting widespread damage. Since rape is one of the main flower crops, providing huge amounts of pollen and nectar for bees, this will hurt wild bee numbers as well as farmers’ livelihoods.
Farmers are instead reluctantly using pyrethroids. These older insecticides are less effective against pests (flea beetles are becoming resistant to them), more dangerous to other insects, especially threatening to aquatic invertebrates when they seep into streams and less safe to handle. So the result will be more insect deaths. In a panic, Defra has just announced that it will allow the use of two neonics, but — and here you have to laugh or you would cry — both are sprayed on the flowering crop, rather than used to dress seed! So they definitely can harm bees.
The ban was brought in entirely to placate green lobby groups, which have privileged and direct access to unelected European officials in policymaking. They hotted up their followers, using the misleading lab studies, to bombard politicians on the topic. The former health commissioner, Tonio Borg, felt so inundated by emails that he had to do something. Owen Paterson, as environment secretary, received 85,000 emails to his parliamentary address alone. Yet he warned colleagues that a ban was unjustified and would be counterproductive. He was  right.
Back to bees. What decline? The number of honeybee hives in the world is at a record high. The number in Europe is higher than it was in the early 1990s when neonics were introduced. Hive mortality in Britain was unusually low in the year before the neonic ban. It’s a myth that honeybees are in dire straits.
That’s not to say beekeepers don’t have  problems. There was a severe problem eight years ago caused by the mysterious colony collapse disorder — a phenomenon that has happened throughout history and seems once again to have disappeared. Greens tried to blame it on genetically modified crops, but it happened in countries with no GM crops. The battle against the varroa mite continues to be hard. A newly virulent strain of tobacco ringspot virus has made the rare leap from infecting plants to infecting bees.
What about wild bees, and bumblebees in particular? Having read again and again of the terrible decline of bumblebees, I set out to find some graphs or tables. I came away empty-handed. In Britain some species contracted their ranges and some expanded during the 20th century. The specialist species seem to have suffered while the generalists have thrived. But claims of a continuing fall in the abundance of bumblebees over the past 20 years seem to be entirely anecdotal.
As Dr Goulson recounts in his book, it’s hard to study bumblebee nests because so many get destroyed by badgers. The huge expansion of the badger population in recent years cannot have helped the populations of their favourite prey.
Full disclosure: I have a farm. My oilseed rape is looking all right this year, but the farmer is not happy at having to use pyrethroids and nor am I. The local beekeeper is hopping mad about the neonic ban, which he thinks has done more harm than good. And he’s genuinely worried about a new threat to honeybees from the small hive beetle, which is spreading in Italy, a major source of honeybees and queens for Britain. Currently there is free movement of potentially contaminated bees from Italy into the UK. In short, nobody’s taking any precautions about the real threats.

Judith Curry: The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown - WSJ - WSJ

Judith Curry: The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown - WSJ

Human-caused warming depends not only on increases in greenhouse gases but also on how “sensitive” the climate is to these increases. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global surface warming that occurs when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles. If climate sensitivity is high, then we can expect substantial warming in the coming century as emissions continue to increase. If climate sensitivity is low, then future warming will be substantially lower, and it may be several generations before we reach what the U.N. considers a dangerous level, even with high emissions.
The IPCC’s latest report (published in 2013) concluded that the actual change in 70 years if carbon-dioxide concentrations double, called the transient climate response, is likely in the range of 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. Most climate models have transient climate response values exceeding 1.8 degrees Celsius. But the IPCC report notes the substantial discrepancy between recent observation-based estimates of climate sensitivity and estimates from climate models.
Nicholas Lewis and I have just published a study in Climate Dynamics that shows the best estimate for transient climate response is 1.33 degrees Celsius with a likely range of 1.05-1.80 degrees Celsius. Using an observation-based energy-balance approach, our calculations used the same data for the effects on the Earth’s energy balance of changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols and other drivers of climate change given by the IPCC’s latest report.
We also estimated what the long-term warming from a doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations would be, once the deep ocean had warmed up. Our estimates of sensitivity, both over a 70-year time-frame and long term, are far lower than the average values of sensitivity determined from global climate models that are used for warming projections. Also our ranges are narrower, with far lower upper limits than reported by the IPCC’s latest report. Even our upper limits lie below the average values of climate models.
Our paper is not an outlier. More than a dozen other observation-based studies have found climate sensitivity values lower than those determined using global climate models, including recent papers published in Environmentrics (2012),Nature Geoscience (2013) andEarth Systems Dynamics (2014). These new climate sensitivity estimates add to the growing evidence that climate models are running “too hot.” Moreover, the estimates in these empirical studies are being borne out by the much-discussed “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming—the period since 1998 during which global average surface temperatures have not significantly increased.
This pause in warming is at odds with the 2007 IPCC report, which expected warming to increase at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade in the early 21st century. The warming hiatus, combined with assessments that the climate-model sensitivities are too high, raises serious questions as to whether the climate-model projections of 21st-century temperatures are fit for making public-policy decisions.

Citizen journalists don’t need “Press Credentials” — but that badge may help

Citizen journalists don’t need “Press Credentials” — but that badge may help

...The ACLU also cautions against breaking any unrelated laws, like trespassing, while photographing or videotaping. Pretty simple, right?Yet the police harassment of citizens with cameras or video recorders continues. About the only thing that police will respect– sometimes – is a display of press credentials.& Enter the Constitution First Amendment Press Association, or CFAPA. Started by James Rawles, survivalblogger and author of several
post-apocalyptic best-selling books, the CFAPA website will issue free press credentials and a press badge.
Here is how it works: go to the CFAPA website, found at cfapa.org, read and agree to the Constitutional Journalist’s pledge and member terms. These essentially spell out ethical rules for journalists and provide indemnity for CFAPA. Then download and fill in your name and date of issuance for your press credentials and badge. The press badge would also need a recent photo before you laminate it. That’s it!
Even for someone who does not intend to seek and record the actions of the police in public, it is good to have the CFAPA press credential and press badge handy, just in case. And besides, they are free. CFAPA operates on donations, or sales at its Amazon store, which, humorously, lists for sale trench coats and fedora hats. Presumably, wearing this will enable the citizen journalist to look like one of the reporters in the movie His Girl Friday. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Rawles told me.
But the CFAPA Amazon store also contains more serious items like press badge holders, cameras, voice recorders, books on reporting style and dealing with the police.

Democrats losing long war against voter ID | WashingtonExaminer.com

Democrats losing long war against voter ID | WashingtonExaminer.com

You would not know it if you read only the New York Times or watched only MSNBC, but the Left and President Obama are losing their fight to block the widespread introduction of voter ID cards. In courts of law and the court of public opinion, the issue is gaining traction. With few exceptions, liberal pressure groups have lost lawsuits in state after state, with courts tossing out their faux claims that ID laws are discriminatory, unconstitutional or suppress minority voting.

Polls show that a large majorities including Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks and Hispanics support voter ID as a common-sense reform. The myth that voter ID is a new Jim Crow-type effort to reduce minority voting is widely rejected for the rubbish that it is — except by academia and the glitterati of the mainstream media. One Rasmussen poll found that 72 percent of the public believes all voters should prove their identities before being allowed to cast ballots, and also that when it comes to voter ID, “opinions have not changed much over the years.”

Properly drafted voter ID laws, with safeguards against absentee ballot fraud and strict limits on laws that allow people to register and vote on Election Day, improve public confidence in elections. Even though in-person voter fraud isn’t rampant, it is easy for fraudsters to commit it without getting caught. New York City’s Department of Investigation last year detailed how its undercover agents claimed at 63 polling places to be individuals who were in fact dead, had moved out of town, or who were in jail. In 61 instances, 97 percent of the time, they were allowed to vote. (To avoid skewing results, they voted only for nonexistent write-in candidates.) How did the city’s Board of Elections respond? Did it immediately probe and reform them sloppy procedures? Not at all. It instead demanded that the investigators be prosecuted. Most officials don’t want to admit how vulnerable election systems are, but privately they express worry that close elections could be flipped by fraud.

Take Al Franken’s 2008 victory over incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. A watchdog group matched criminal records with the voting rolls and discovered that 1,099 felons had cast ballots illegally. A local TV news reporter found that nine of the 10 felons he interviewed had voted for Franken. State law allows prosecutions only of those who admit knowingly committing voter fraud, and 177 were convicted. Franken’s victory margin was just 312 votes. It gave Democrats their 60th Senate seat, creating the filibuster-proof majority that helped make Obamacare law.

Many good people are mistakenly convinced that voter ID laws and other measures to buttress the integrity of elections are discriminatory. Many also say fraud isn’t a serious issue. Rather than fighting such laws, however, they should be working to ensure that everyone can easily obtain an ID.

There is sharp disagreement over how many people lack proper identification. Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who is himself black, pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that “one of the most often-cited factoids — something that sounds authoritative but is not fact-based — is the NAACP’s claim that 25 percent of black American adults lack a government-issued photo ID. Think about that for a moment. This would mean that millions of African-American men and women are unable to legally drive, cash a check, board an airliner or participate in everyday activities of modern life.” Hyperbole of this sort perpetuates the patronizing view that minorities are helpless victims. Liberals say Blackwell doesn’t understand how high the barriers are for some people who lack ID. But if he were really wrong, it is difficult to see why so few voters apply for a free ID in states with such requirements.

GUN WATCH: Charles Cooke at National Review Writes About Threats based on Gun Watch Picture

GUN WATCH: Charles Cooke at National Review Writes About Threats based on Gun Watch Picture

Charles C. W. Cooke writes about it at National Review.com.   I would have been happy to have him use the photograph, with attribution, but perhaps, because the MDA page did not give attribution, he never contacted me.

He does a good job of covering the issue.  I would have been happy to give him more background.   From nationalreview.com:

Reacting to a photograph of a man standing at a checkout with a handgun holstered upon his hip, mom-who-demands-action Joyce Ward asks, “Why weren’t the police called immediately?” And “why,” Ward continues, “wasn’t he shot by the police for having a weapon”? Fellow poster LisaMcLogan Shaheen has a similar inquiry, wondering, “Why hasn’t someone called 911 so the cops can gun him down?” Others go a little further, proposing that they might help their cause along if they were actively to bring about an altercation. “Every time I see someone with a gun in a store I will call 911,” Jennifer Decker vows, “they’ll get tired of that right quick!!!” Even that plan is too limited for Ann Marie. “Just call the police every time you see someone with one,” she counsels, “the police will get sick of it eventually or have a run in with one of these clowns and then things will change.”

I am the person in the  checkout that they are discussing, so the threats are of more than academic interest to me.   If you  wish to read the original story, it is at this link.   To understand why the people making these threats are doing so, I have found this article by Sarah Thompson, M.D. to be informative.   For those of you who do not wish to read the whole article, she discusses  projection, denial, reaction formation, and rage.  

Andy Puzder: Minimum Wage, Maximum Politics - WSJ - WSJ

Andy Puzder: Minimum Wage, Maximum Politics - WSJ - WSJ

Running the numbers....

The middle class and working poor are struggling. While the stock market soared to historic highs, the labor-participation rate dropped in September to 62.7%—the lowest since 1978—according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than six million people, BLS reports, are “not in the labor force” but “want a job now.”
Will a 40% minimum-wage increase improve this picture? No. Let’s examine how it would affect a restaurant franchisee, a typical small business owner attempting to run a profitable enterprise. My company, CKE Restaurants, has more than 200 franchisees running about 2,000 restaurants nationwide.
Our typical franchised restaurant employs 25 people and earns about $100,000 a year in pretax profit—about 8% of the restaurant’s $1.2 million annual sales. Our general managers, often also the store owners, are responsible for the success or failure of the business. They manage the employees and are in charge of a million-dollar facility. General managers are responsible for at least 25% of store profits. The other 24 employees are responsible for the remaining 75%, which comes to about $3,125 an employee. That is a generous estimate, as entry-level employees likely contribute less than their more experienced colleagues.
If minimum-wage crew members working 25 hours a week received a 40% raise, they would earn an additional $3,705 a year. That is $580 more than what the employee contributes to the restaurant’s profits.
The point is simple: The feds can mandate a higher wage, but some jobs don’t produce enough economic value to bear the increase. If government could transform unskilled entry-level positions into middle-income jobs, the Soviet Union would be today’s dominant world economy. Spain and Greece would be thriving.
But here’s what middle-class business owners, who live in the real world, will do when faced with a 40% increase in labor costs. They will cut jobs and rely more on technology. Such changes are already happening in banks, gas stations, grocery stores, airports and, more recently, restaurants. Almost every restaurant chain in the country from Applebee’s to McDonald’s is testing or already implementing automated ordering with tablets or kiosks.
The only other option is to raise prices. Yet it would be near-impossible to increase prices enough to offset the wage hike, particularly given today’s economic conditions. More important, price increases burden consumers, particularly those with low incomes who are supposed to be helped by a minimum-wage increase.

The Obama Economy, In Eleven Charts | Power Line

The Obama Economy, In Eleven Charts | Power Line

Today the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee put out a chart book that documents the Obama administration’s failures in economic policy. From the introduction:

The great economic tragedy of our time is the erosion of the American middle class. Millions of Americans find themselves locked out of the American Dream. Their wages are either flat or falling, even as the price of energy and goods surges; the labor force is shrinking; and the government stimulus which was claimed to lift the economy to prosperity has instead sunk the nation into a chasm of debt. This chart book highlights what working people know all too well: under President Obama, economic life today is much harder today than it was just a few years ago.

A day or two ago I saw a clip of a rather bewildered Wolf Blitzer asking Debbie Wasserman Schultz why President Obama doesn’t get more credit for the economy. Blitzer makes $3 million a year, so the economy probably looks pretty good to him. But the answer to his question is no mystery: for a large majority of Americans, the Obama economy has been a disaster.

Sandwalk: Metabolism first and the origin of life

Sandwalk: Metabolism first and the origin of life

I don't have time to explain it all. Here's a teaser ...

At first sight, the idea that chemiosmosis is a very ancient means of energy transduction might seem counterintuitive. More familiar to many is the old (and popular) doctrine that the most ancient pathway of energy metabolism is a fermentation such as glycolysis [77], an idea that goes back at least to Haldane [2] and hence arose long before anyone had a clue that biological energy can be harnessed in a manner that does not involve substrate-level phosphorylations and ‘high-energy’ bonds [149,150]. In modern life, all biological energy in the form of ATP comes ultimately from chemiosmotic coupling [151], the process of charge separation from the inside of the cell to the outside, and the harnessing of that electrochemical gradient via a coupling factor, an ATPase of the rotor–stator-type. It was not until the 1970s that it became generally apparent that Mitchell [152] was right, his Nobel prize coming in 1978, and it is hard to say when it became clear to microbiologists that all fermentative organisms are derived from chemiosmotic ancestors. We also note that Mitchell's consideration of the problem of the origin of life introduced key concepts of his later chemiosmotic hypothesis, including a definition of life as process, and the idea of vectorial catalysis across a membrane boundary that is inseparable either from the environment or from the organism itself [153].

The maxim that glycolysis is ancient might be an artefact of experience, since it was the first pathway both to be discovered and that we learned in college; in that sense, it really is the oldest. When one suggests that chemiosmotic coupling in methanogens or acetogens might be ancient, many listeners and readers shy away, mainly because the pathways are unfamiliar and often entail dreaded cofactor names.

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Sousa, F.L., Thiergart, T., Landan, G., Nelson-Sathi, S., Pereira, I. A., Allen, J.F., Lane, N. and Martin, W.F. (2013) Early bioenergetic evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 368:20130088. [doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0088]

Raise the Minimum Wage? A Socratic Dialogue : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

Raise the Minimum Wage? A Socratic Dialogue : The Freeman : Foundation for Economic Education

In his January 28 State of the Union speech, President Obama called upon the U.S. Congress to enact a hike in the hourly minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. (The dime may have been added because a nice round number without a decimal would sound unscientific.) Economists have long argued that raising the cost of labor, especially for small and start-up businesses, reduces the demand for labor (as with anything else). But Congress may do it anyway—with the usual, oversized measure of self-righteous breast-beating about helping workers. Maybe what members of Congress need is not another lecture on the minimum wage from an economist, but rather an old-fashioned Socratic inquisition. If the old man himself were with us, here’s how I imagine one such dialogue might go...

Not Everyone Can Work for Costco - Bloomberg View

Not Everyone Can Work for Costco - Bloomberg View

But you need to explore safely. You can’t just plunge straight into advocating a $15-an-hour minimum wage; you need to know all the facts so you can make sound, educated decisions about your labor-policy activism. So let’s talk about efficiency wages and how they work.

When an employer loves his workers ... OK, never mind. Straight to the real talk.

Have you heard the legend of Henry Ford’s $5-a-day wage, how he paid his workers enough to buy one of his cars, and thereby unleashed a wave of prosperity upon America, the likes of which the world had never seen? Here’s the truth about that $5 wage: Ford Motor Co. didn’t pay those wages so the workers could afford the cars, because mathematically, that could not possibly have been profitable even if employees actually spent every cent they earned on the product they made. Which they never do.

Ford Motor Co. moved to a high wage because Ford Motor Co. had a turnover problem. Working on an assembly line is a fantastically awful job. Yes, I know it is fashionable to lament the decline of “good manufacturing jobs,” but what was good about those jobs was the steady, high wages. Much of the work Ford offered was unbearably tedious -- tightening the same bolt, over and over, for the majority of your waking hours. It’s about as entertaining as watching paint dry, only with a foreman yelling at you to watch faster, dammit. If hell were designed by industrial engineers, this is what it would look like.

Understandably, turnover was high. And turnover is expensive. You have to train a new person to tighten that bolt and get him used to the rhythm of the line. While he’s learning, he’s slower than other workers and more prone to accidents. The $5-a-day wage may have owed something to Ford’s rather, um, unique ideas about labor relations: It came with strings attached, including having the company’s Socialization Organization pry into your personal life. But mostly, it was about reducing turnover and thereby speeding up the line.

This is what economists call an efficiency wage. Paying workers more than the going market rate for their skill level can bring a lot of benefits to your company. You get lower turnover and, arguably, better on-the-job performance. This springs from four sources:

1. Paying workers more than other workers in their skill class makes them feel warmly toward you. Humans are hard-wired for reciprocity: When someone gives us something, we feel obligated to give them something in return. So if you treat your employees extra-well, they feel obligated to treat you extra-well.
2. Workers know that if they lose this job, they are likely to end up with a job that pays less. They are thus highly motivated to keep this job.
3. Employers get to be choosier about who they hire.
4. The wage attracts people with better skills.

As you can see, this concept is very exciting. But that excitement can get out of control; it frequently leads hot-blooded young progressives to conclude that if we just paid everyone more, all the companies would be more profitable! This is folk wisdom akin to believing that everyone should buy a lottery ticket because your cousin won $1 million that day.

Here’s what they are missing: Efficiency wages only work because the workers are getting more than they could make elsewhere. If everyone was paying the same wages, all the benefits to the employer would disappear.

To see what I mean, imagine if we could go back to 1913, the year before the $5-a-day revolution, and we offer those workers a chance to work for $8.50 an hour at Wal-Mart, 40 hours a week. Adjusted for inflation, that would be a 25 percent raise, a shorter workweek, and instead of tightening a bolt for nine hours in a dark and dangerous auto plant, they’d get to spend their time walking around a nice, air-conditioned, well-lit store. And the chance to buy health insurance!

You might well be able to skim the cream of the crop from Ford’s workforce with such an offer. Those men might be so intensely grateful for the opportunity to be inside, in a comfortable climate-controlled environment, that they’d work their butts off to be employee of the year, every year. You would obviously not have the same impact if you made the same offer today. You’d get, well, the folks who are working for Wal-Mart right now.

The point is not that Wal-Mart employees should be grateful for what they’re paid; the point is that an efficiency wage is determined by the overall wage level in the marketplace. A wage is generous or stingy not by some naturally ordained scale, but in comparison to your alternatives.

That’s one reason why labor agreements in the 1950s through 1970s emphasized compensation arrangements -- such as pensions and seniority raises -- that made it costly to switch firms. Turnover was still a problem for manufacturers even when they were paying higher wages than ever, because some people just can’t hack the monotony of an assembly line. So they gladly acquiesced to pay structures that rewarded longevity. Eventually all that back-loaded compensation became a huge problem for manufacturers, as their markets and their workforces shrank and their legacy costs rendered them uncompetitive. But at the time, it made sense, because with the general wage level high, they could no longer rely on the efficiency-wage effect to deliver a more reliable workforce.

In other words: A strategy of paying efficiency wages to attract, and retain, a higher-quality labor force is by definition a business model that cannot be followed by everyone in the market. If all the employers of minimum-wage labor followed Costco’s lead and paid higher wages and benefits, Costco would be less profitable, because the quality of its labor force would revert to the mean. And Costco’s loss would not necessarily be a gain to any other employer; they’d be paying higher wages but still enjoying the same average workforce quality. Of course, they might attract better-skilled workers from other industries, which could raise productivity. But that’s not a good progressive argument for efficiency wages, because what happens to the workers who used to have those jobs?

When you’ve got some laudable goal in mind, it’s easy to forget that you really can have too much of a good thing. If the Kennedy tax cuts were a good idea, then we should just keep cutting to zero and really unleash some economic growth. If you liked an $8-an-hour minimum wage, why not $15? Why not $25? If it works for Costco, why not for every retailer in the country? Analysts end up acting like teenage boys with a can of Axe body spray: If some is good, more must be even better.

But even good things have natural stopping points, and efficiency wages are one of them. Costco indeed shows that it is possible to pay wages like Costco's -- if you are running a Costco. It does not follow that every company could profitably do the same. In fact, it demonstrates that they couldn’t.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t advocate for higher wages? No; you can make an argument that companies should pay higher wages, and just too bad for the shareholders and consumers who have to take a haircut. I don’t necessarily agree with that argument, but it isn’t undercut by efficiency-wage theory.

But it does mean that you can’t argue for such raises from the behavior of Costco and other companies that follow an efficiency-wage strategy. If you’re going to advocate for higher wages, do so safely, responsibly and with all the facts.

When we consider all US CEOs and all US workers, the ‘CEO-to-worker pay ratio’ falls from 331:1 to below 4:1 | AEIdeas

When we consider all US CEOs and all US workers, the ‘CEO-to-worker pay ratio’ falls from 331:1 to below 4:1 | AEIdeas

Here are some questionable statistics about CEO pay that we learn about from the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch webpage:

1. In 2013 the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 331:1 and the CEO-to-minimum-wage-worker pay ratio was 774:1. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, a country where hard work and playing by the rules would provide working families a middle-class standard of living. But in recent decades, corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie while wages have stagnated and unemployment remains high.

2. Highly paid CEOs of low-wage employers are fueling this growing economic inequality. In 2013, CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies received, on average, $11.7 million in total compensation, according to the AFL-CIO’s analysis of available data from 350 companies.

3. It doesn’t have to be this way. Politicians should raise the minimum wage. Corporations should pay their employees a living wage. And workers should have a collective voice on the job to demand their fair share.

MP: As I pointed out in a post earlier today on CD, this frequently cited AFL-CIO analysis of CEO pay is an example of “statistical bait-and-switch.” Or call it a “statistical canard” or a “statistical fallacy.” Here’s why:

The AFL-CIO is comparing: a) the average salary of a small sample (350) of the highest paid US CEOs, out of a total CEO population in 2013 of 248,760 CEOs, according to BLS data here, and b) the average worker pay for production and nonsupervisory workers, which represents only 8.5 million factory workers out of a total of 136.3 million payroll employees nationwide. In other words, the AFL-CIO’s reported “CEO-to-worker pay ratio” of 331:1 is calculated by ignoring 99.9% of all US CEOs and 93.8% of all US workers. A more accurate description would be to call it a ratio of the pay for 350 of the highest-paid US CEOs to the pay of only 6.2% of the American labor force, or a ratio of an unrepresentative, infinitesimally small, and statistically insignificant group of CEOs to a small minority and unrepresentative group of US factory workers. It’s a completely bogus and meaningless comparison.

The top chart above shows a more statistically valid comparison of CEO pay to average worker in the US pay by considering: a) the average annual pay of all US CEOs in every year from 2002 to 2013 (data here) and b) the average annual pay of all US workers in a comprehensive, national BLS dataset that includes workers in 22 major occupational groups, 94 minor occupational groups, 458 broad occupations, and 821 detailed occupations (132.6 million workers for 2013). Based on those data, the average CEO earned $178,400 last year, the average worker earned $46,440, and the “CEO-to-worker pay ratio” was 3.84:1, and that’s a LOT different from the AFL-CIO’s ratio of 331:1 by a factor of more than 86 times! Call it a “statistical falsehood-to-truth ratio” of 86:1 for the AFL-CIO’s exaggerated, bogus ratio. The chart also shows that the real CEO-to-worker pay ratio has not been increasing as is frequently reported, but instead has been remarkably constant over the last 12 years, averaging 3.8:1 in a tight range between a maximum of 3.89:1 in 2004 and a minimum of 3.69:1 in both 2005 and 2006. The ratio of 3.84:1 in the most recent year (2013) was actually slightly lower than the ratios in 2004 (3.89:1) and in all years between 2009 and 2012.

Likewise, the bottom chart displays a more statistically valid comparison of average CEO pay to the annual pay of a full-time minimum wage worker. In 2013, a full-time minimum wage worker earned $14,500, and therefore the CEO-to-minimum-wage-worker pay ratio was only 12.3:1 compared to the grossly inflated 774:1 ratio reported by the AFL-CIO. That’s a “statistical falsehood-to-truth ratio” of 63:1 for the AFL-CIO’s exaggerated ratio. Because of the recent increases in the minimum wage between 2007-2009, the CEO-to-minimum-wage-worker pay ratio in recent years has been lower than the most recent 12-year average of 12.76:1.

Bottom Line: Do a Google search of the phrase “CEO to worker pay” and you’ll find 150,000 links to reports and articles that almost exclusively compare the salaries of a very small, statistically insignificant group of S&P500 or Fortune 500 CEOs to average worker pay. I’m suggesting that those comparisons are statistically invalid and meaningless. A comprehensive and statistically valid comparison of the average pay of all US CEOs to the average pay of all US workersreveals a much different story than the frequently reported narrative of a 300:1 (or higher) and rising CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the US. The reality is that the annual salary of the average US CEO pay is less than four times the annual pay of the average worker, and that ratio has been remarkably stable for more than a decade. 

Maxford Nelsen: 'Living Wage' Laws Are Union Lifesavers - WSJ - WSJ

Maxford Nelsen: 'Living Wage' Laws Are Union Lifesavers - WSJ - WSJ

Los Angeles became the latest to join the movement when the city council approved a law on Sept. 24 requiring large hotels to pay employees at least $15.37 per hour and provide generous paid sick-leave benefits. But the ordinance includes a provision, increasingly common in similar ordinances, that permits unions to waive the requirements in collective bargaining.
This waiver enables labor organizers to approach a nonunion employer struggling to pay the new minimum with the following offer: assist them in unionizing employees by signing a "neutrality agreement," in return for which the union will use the collective-bargaining waiver to allow the employer to pay less than the new statutory minimum.
....
With minimum wage and mandatory paid sick-leave regulations spreading across the country, reports of unions using collective-bargaining waivers to their advantage are starting to accumulate.
In 2013 the Long Beach Business Journal cited the collective-bargaining waiver built into the city's $13 minimum wage law as an important factor in the unionization of two large hotels, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and the Hyatt Pike Long Beach.
In February, following the passage of a countywide living-wage law, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the Service Employees International Union approached a local home-care business owner and offered to give her an exemption from the wage law "if she agreed to deduct union dues from all of her employees' paychecks."
A survey conducted in May by the Seattle, Wash., city auditor found that 37 of the 56 surveyed Seattle unions had waived the citywide paid sick-leave mandates in some or all of their contracts with employers.
....
After unions succeeded in narrowly passing a $15 minimum wage ordinance in SeaTac, Wash., the local United Food and Commercial Workers union boasted in a newsletter that the initiative "provides an incentive for employers to collectively bargain with their employees." Similarly, when asked why unionized firms are exempted from L.A.'s new minimum-wage law, Unite Here union representative Leigh Shelton complained to the Huffington Post that "because it is so hard to organize a union, we have to do it any way we can."

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Review of Evidence from the New Minimum Wage Research

David Neumark, William Wascher

NBER Working Paper No. 12663
Issued in November 2006
NBER Program(s):   LS 

We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a lack of consensus about the overall effects on low-wage employment of an increase in the minimum wage. However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect. A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.

Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics

Jonathan Meer, Jeremy West

NBER Working Paper No. 19262
Issued in August 2013
NBER Program(s):   LS   PE 

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will attenuate the measured effects of the minimum wage on employment if the true effect is in fact on the rate of job growth. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces net job growth, primarily through its effect on job creation by expanding establishments. These effects are most pronounced for younger workers and in industries with a higher proportion of low-wage workers.

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/search/label/minimum%20wage#.VCjBGfldVvI

Feminism | Truth | Prager University | Video | equal pay

Feminism | Truth | Prager University | Video | equal pay

There’s nothing more offensive to me than an article that leaps off the cliff in the first sentence by dropping the “as a woman, I…” bomb.

It doesn’t matter how the sentence ends; what matters is that the author, whoever she may be, believes that on some level her gender proves her point for her.

We’re meant to accept everything that follows because to dissent is to deny not only her opinion, but her equal footing in society.

Does Regulation = Unemployment?

Does Regulation = Unemployment?

Contrary to what public administration profs tell you, everybody pays the cost of regulation and the unemployed may pay most heavily in lost jobs in exchange for rather murky benefits.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) released a report, “The Cost of Federal Regulation to the U.S. Economy, Manufacturing and Small Business,” slamming the Obama administration for burdensome regulations imposed by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal regulatory agencies.

In his foreword, NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons said that the average American company pays $9,991 per employee to comply with federal rules and regulations and the average manufacturer pays almost double that amount – “$19,564 per employee per year.” He noted how small manufacturers, or companies with less than 50 employees, have regulatory costs of $34,671, or more than three times the cost of an average U.S. company.

Timmons added, “The United States needs government policies more attuned to the realities of global competition” because it is the “backbone of our nation’s economy and employs more than 12 million men and women who make things in America.” Thus, the regulatory costs per employee can translate into actual unemployment as factories struggle to make payroll despite the regulatory expense.

(16) Tim O'Neill's answer to Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages? - Quora

Tim O'Neill's answer to Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages?

...The Actual Scientific Dark Age
Of course, there certainly was a period in which western natural philosophy did stagnate and then languish and in which the whole scientific tradition of the Greeks and Romans was in danger of being lost.  Later Hellenic and then Roman scholars inherited the work of the Greek proto-scientists of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries BC and built on it.  By the First Century AD Roman scholars tended to read Greek and so could read the works of Aristotle and Archimedes in their original languages, but there was also an increasing tradition of encyclopaedic collections of summaries and key points from earlier Greek works which tended to be compiled in Latin.  The scholars of the First and Second centuries added some major contributions to science, especially Ptolemy (astronomy and mathematics) and Galen (medicine), but many Roman scholars made do with the Latin summaries and encyclopaedias for their grasp of earlier work.
In the Third Century, however, there were major social and political upheavals that interrupted many aspects of Roman life, including scholarship, with profound later consequences.  The Empire entered what is now called "the Military Anarchy", where rival emperors rose and fell in rapid succession and the Empire was racked with decade after decade of civil war and political oppression.  The weakened Empire suffered from invasions by the newly resurgent Sassanian Persians and by larger and more aggressive federations of Germanic barbarians. Cities that had been peaceful for centuries began constructing defensive walls, resources that once went into buildings and public works went into endless wars and at one point the Empire even split into three parts.
A form of stability was imposed by a new kind of more centralised and more monarchical emperorship, economic reforms and an overhaul of the army and the Imperial administration by Diocletian and his successors, but parts of the Empire never fully recovered, especially in the west.  Intellectual life and education, which had been badly disrupted in the long century of chaos, certainly did not regain its former strength and in the west fewer and fewer scholars were literate in Greek.  As a result, works that were only available in Greek, especially technical, philosophic and detailed scientific works, were read and copied far less and began to be neglected.  Greco-Roman science was increasingly preserved only in the popular Latin encyclopaedic tradition rather than studied in detail via the original Greek works.
By the Fifth Century the administrative division between the Latin-speaking Western Empire and the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire became permanent and then became a political divide.  The weaker, poorer and more vulnerable Western Empire did not even survive the century, with its final collapse coming in 476 AD after another century of civil wars, invasions and spiralling decline.  What followed was centuries of invasions, fragmentation and chaos, with few brief periods of stability and centralised authority.  The faltering intellectual tradition, which had already been in decline since the late Second Century, languished to a low ebb.
The institution which managed to keep this faltering tradition from dying out altogether during these centuries of barbarian invasion and disintegration was actually the one the Enlightenment myth (wrongly) blames for causing the decline in the first place.  The Christian church came to hold political power when the decline in learning in the west had been under way for over a century, and so could not have been its cause.  Initially Christianity was ambivalent toward Greek philosophy and learning, but prominent Christian thinkers who had been trained in philosophy could see it as something to be embraced.  God, they argued, was a rational intelligence and had created the universe along rational lines.  It made sense, therefore, that humans could and should use reason to understand his creation.  Clement of Alexandria argued that just as the Jews had been given a divine gift of special religious revelation, so had the Greeks been given a gift of rational analysis.  Both were to be embraced and used.
So when the Western Empire collapsed, the Church had long since come to terms with Greek philosophy and science and found ways to incorporate both and reconcile them with their religion.  And it was Christian scholars who saw that the decline of Greek literacy in the west meant much of the original works of Greek learning were being lost.  Cassiodorus and Boethius both tried to preserve key works by translating them into Latin.  Boethius was executed before he could complete an ambitious plan to translate all the works of Aristotle, but he did manage to translate most of the key works on logic - something which meant that logic and therefore reason took a central role in early Medieval education, even in the darkest centuries of the chaos.  The seeds of the Medieval revival of science lay in that stroke of luck.
The Medieval Enshrining of Reason
One writer has compared the long road back from the intellectual catastrophe of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on learning in western Europe to people after a nuclear holocaust trying to revive modern science with nothing but a few volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a copy of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.  Scholars in the Eighth or Ninth Centuries had just enough fragments of information to know that they had barely anything at all but not enough to begin reconstructing what had been lost.  What is interesting is what they did with the bits they had - they revered them.  These ancient writers, mostly pagans, were held up as all-knowing authorities and what elements of their works did survive were studied with immense reverence and painstaking scrutiny.
This meant particular attention was paid to one of the few areas in which a reasonable number of works had survived - logic, or "dialectic" as it was known.  A grasp of logic was central to Medieval education and a student had to master it, via Boethius' translations of Aristotle and other works, before they could tackle any other subjects.  This had the curious effect of enshrining reason as the key to all knowledge - a development completely at odds with the popular view of the Middle Ages and the Medieval church in particular as being fixated on unquestioned dogma and irrational superstition.  There were certainly things that these Medieval scholars accepted on faith but they increasingly came to feel they could also arrive at them, and all kinds of other forms of understanding about the universe, via reason.  In a strange way, the loss of so much Greek philosophy actually focused attention on the elements that had survived and had the effect of enshrining reason at the heart of Medieval thought in a way not seen before.  ....The Church's Suppression of Ideas?
Actually, nothing of the history detailed above sits neatly with the idea of the Medieval Church as a violent and intolerant theocracy that immediately consigned anyone with the whiff of a new idea to the flames.  In fact, the parameters for speculation and investigation into the nature of the physical world were quite wide, because the Medieval Church considered the cosmos to the the rational product of the rational mind of God and that humans were given reason partly so they could apprehend and investigate the universe rationally.
This is why Thomas Aquinas spent years and many millions of words painstakingly applying the rational principles of ancient Greek dialectic to Christian theology in an attempt at showing that all the key ideas of Christian belief could be arrived at by pure reason. It is also why the quodlibeta debates at Medieval universities were such open free-for-alls where all kinds of radical and even heretical ideas could be proposed to see if they stood up to logical analysis.
The Medieval Church also did not insist on a purely literal interpretation of the Bible (fundamentalist literalism is a modern and largely American Protestant idea).  This meant that it had no problem with seeing aspects of the Bible as purely allegorical and with the exploration of how their symbolic truth relates to the real world.  Most people who think of the Medieval period as one where Biblical literalists suppressed original thinking though fear would have a hard time explaining, for example, the work of William of Conches.  Way back in the Twelfth Century this scholar, based at Chartres Cathedral, accepted that his audience already understood the creation story in Genesis to be symbolic and went on to interpret it "according to nature'.  He proposed how natural forces set in motion by God brought about the form of the heavens and earth as we have them today.  He went on to talk about life arising from the primordial mud by the natural action of heat and how it developed from simple early forms.  He even talks about how man arose in the same way and how, in theory, some other species of man could arise via natural processes in the same way.
All these very modern-sounding (even Darwinian) ideas were accepted by Medieval scholars without the slightest problem and the Church had no difficulty with them either - indeed, William of Conches, like all other Medieval scientists - was a churchman.
The closest the Church came to suppressing science in any way was when, in reaction to some of the ideas being debated in the University of Paris at the height of the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning in the Thirteenth Century, the Faculty of Theology attempted at putting some limits on what could be discussed by the Faculty of Arts.  In 1210, 1270 and again in 1277 the Pope, at the request of the Parisian Theology Faculty, published lists of ideas proposed by Aristotle or implied by his philosophy that were contrary to Christian doctrine and so were forbidden.  What is remarkable about this is, firstly, how little in Aristotle etc was actually proscribed by these Condemnations.  Secondly, it's remarkable how ineffective the Condemnations were.  They only applied to Paris, whereas discussion of all these topics continued at Oxford and other universities unaffected.  And, as the fact that they had to be repeated twice indicates, they were widely ignored anyway.  They also had another effect - by arguing that Aristotle was actually wrong on several key points, they stimulated a more critical examination of the Greek philosopher's work which led to several of his idea being critically analysed and found to be incorrect (eg the idea that a heavy object falls faster than a lighter one).  IN a strange way, the Condemnations failed to suppress science and actually helped to stimulate it.
The fact is that the idea of the Church suppressing science and rational analysis of the physical world is a myth.  Not one Medieval scholar was ever burned, imprisoned or oppressed by the Medieval Church for making a claim about the physical world.  This why the modern proponents of the myth always have to fall back on an exceptional and post-Medieval example to prop up this idea: the Galileo case.