Reticulator

Nobel laureates

Oct 182007

The DNA pioneer James Watson today apologised “unreservedly” for his apparent claim that black people are less intelligent than whites.

And this isn’t the first time.

Prof Watson has regularly courted controversy, reportedly saying that a woman should have the right to abort her child if tests were able to determine that it would be homosexual.

He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing that black people have higher libidos, and claimed beauty could be genetically manufactured.

Sure, he’s probably a bigot, but shouldn’t we make allowances? After all, he’s a Nobel laureate, and we know how those Nobel laureates are.

And shouldn’t there also be headlines about how his Nobel prize puts pressure on him to run for President?

Interesting definition of “internal affairs.” Apparently China thinks the issue of Bush giving out an award in our own capital city is an internal affair of China’s. China must be a pretty big place if it includes Washington D.C.

The move of the United States is a blatant interference with China’s internal affairs which has severely hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and gravely undermined the relations between China and the United States,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference.

Here is URL

Corporate behavior

Limits on government power No Responses »

Oct 182007

Time to do some reticulating — about corporate behavior and whistleblowing.

First there’s Vinegar Boy by way of Fark. He refused to buckle under when his boss and his boss’s boss told him to apologize to a customer who had lyingly accused him of saying vinegar was OK to drink. He was vindicated in the end, when the boss’s boss’s boss found out what was going on. A heroic whistleblower, you might say.

Then there was Bob Lewis’s Advice Line column at Infoworld, “When your boss tells you to terminate an employee.”

One other point about the termination conversation: When you tell the employee he’s being terminated, tell him “the company” has decided that this is what has to be done. Don’t identify yourself as the decision-maker; don’t identify your manager, either. The company has made the decision and as his manager, your job is to make sure the company handles the termination properly.

If that isn’t corporate behavior, I don’t know what is. People will do things under cover of or on behalf of a corporation that they would never do on their own individual responsibility. I think Lewis is giving good advice in this column, as he almost always does. Read the entire article to see. (Too bad his politics are not informed by all of his observations about corporate life.) But a lot of bad things can be done under that rubric. When people talk about evil corporations, they have a legitimate point about this part.

Of course, the government is the biggest corporation of them all, these days.

Finally, there is Texts for torturers by way of Arts & Letters Daily. It’s about Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment showing how students assigned the pretend role of prison guards started abusing prisoners. His latest book is about more than that one experiment, though. The reviewer writes:

He is at his best, then, when analysing the current state of our knowledge about the role of situations in eliciting bad behaviour. Research has amply confirmed that people of many different kinds will behave badly under certain types of situational pressure. Through the influence of authority and peer pressure, they do things that they are later amazed at having done, things that most people think in advance they would never themselves do.

and

Zimbardo’s first plea, appropriately, is for humility: we have no reason to say that atrocities are the work of a few “bad apples”, nor have we reason to think that they are done only by people remote from us in time and place. We should understand that we are all vulnerable, and we should judge individuals, accordingly, in a merciful way, knowing that we don’t really know what we would have done, had we faced similar pressures. His second appropriate plea is that we learn to “blame the system”: namely, to look at how situations are designed, and to criticize people who design them in ways that confront vulnerable individuals with pressures that human beings cope with badly.

The reviewer doesn’t completely buy it, btw. The article is written with the torture at Abu Ghraib, but I say these lessons also apply to things like nationalized health care. I say we should blame the system in advance for the atrocities that will result when people can make life or death decisions for other people on the basis of economic efficiency. And there will be no recourse for people like there was for the one who stood up to his boss in the case of the Vinegar Boy.

Souls that look like maggot-infested corpses

Clinton scandals No Responses »

Oct 162007

Sean Macomber, on an expedition somewhat reminiscent of Dante Alligheri’s, travels deep into leftwing blogdom to find out what they’re saying about us conservatives. Here is some of what he came back with:

“They’re vicious, violent, and unprincipled, just like unaffiliated muggers,” he wrote, adding, in retort to one conservative who protested, “We are not animals,” “Well, you’re sure not human…not if you can still call yourself a conservative after seeing what your people really have in mind for this country. I won’t say ‘our country’ as I’m now ashamed to admit that I was born American, and technically still am one, although I’ve washed my hands of your nightmare psychologically, and soon, physically as well.”

This prompted yet another commenter to relate a lesson from his father — a “very smart man,” we are assured — who taught him long ago, “people like these right-wing pundits have souls that look like maggot-infested corpses, you know, like the ones you always see in horror movies.”

PROGRESS! MAGGOT-INFESTED OR NOT, a liberal acknowledges the existence of a conservative soul!

This was about the assault on Randi Rhodes that it turns out never took place.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the people who thought these unkind thoughts about conservatives were not the same people who were concerned about why Kathleen Willey’s cat was killed and why her tires were slashed.

Differences

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Oct 162007

From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There’s no sign of a family reunion planned, but U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama are distant cousins.

So says the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, who said she discovered that her husband of 43 years is eighth cousins with the senator from Illinois.

The two men could hardly be more different. Cheney is an advocate for pursuing the war in Iraq to try to stabilize the country, while Obama wants to get U.S. troops out of Iraq.

So they have two different opinions about the Iraq war. How is that such a huge difference? Sure, it’s a different opinion, but there’s a lot more to being a person than that. Now if you said, “Cheney is an advocate for the war, hates cauliflower, and has a type A personality while Obama wants to quit the war, loves cauliflower, and takes Reagan-style naps” you’d be a little further along in showing that they have differences. But you’d still be a long ways from saying, “the two men could hardly be more different.” There are a lot more things than that which could distinguish one human being from another.

Tale of two headlines

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Oct 152007

Tale of two headlines at thehill.com

1. GOP targeting Clinton on phone-call snooping

2. Scandal usurps Idaho’s legacy

Note that the second headline is NOT “Democrats target Republicans on Larry Craig sex scandal.”

Note also the first headline is NOT “Clinton phone-call snooping scandal usurps Democratic message.”

Whacking

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Oct 152007

Is there anything more vacuous than a bunch of Republican candidates arguing about who is the real conservative?

Why, yes, there is. The news coverage of that argument is much more brainless! It makes these candidates look like a bunch of Einsteins in comparison.

Consider this ABC news article, “Thompson whacks Guiliani on Home Turf.”

Whacks? Whacks??? This isn’t slapstick. It’s criticism. it’s debate. Why does ABC demean it by calling it “whacking”? (No, don’t answer that. We know why.)

Here are the airheads at ABC News:

Thompson’s salvo, which he planned on repeating Monday evening at a meeting of New York’s Conservative Party, fit in perfectly with the latest back and forth among the GOP presidential candidates about who is authentically Republican, and who is faking it.

It’s more than traditional campaign rhetoric — they are challenging one another’s very legitimacy as Republicans. It’s a dynamic that seems natural in this race, with no clear Republican front-runner who can claim overwhelming support among the GOP’s conservative base.

Some analysis, huh? They tell us there is a fight, but avoid any mention that there is some substance to it. But when ABC news lets the candidates speak for themselves, we get to some important issues:

Giuliani campaign press secretary Maria Comella responded, “Mayor Giuliani is the only candidate who does more than just talk about the importance of Republican principles — he actually has the track record to back it up.

“It’s easy to throw around meaningless rhetoric, but quite another thing to stand up to a Democratic majority and successfully cut taxes, control spending and reform welfare.”

Good question, that. It’s one thing to talk Republican principles. But so many Republicans fold when faced with real opposition from the leftwing hate machine. I’ll bet I would if I was in their shoes, on account of I’m too easy-going. This is one reason you don’t want me to be President, even though I have a disconcerting habit of being right about things. You need somebody who has been tested under fire.

And there is more. It isn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates by any means, but it’s a whole lot more meaningful than the ABC reporting on the topic. Maybe ABC would do well to just shut up and let the candidates speak if it can’t do any better than words like “whack” and “salvo.”

Oh, btw, I don’t think there’s any more chance I’ll vote for Giuliani than that I’d ever vote for George W. Bush. I’m just saying he made a good point.

At least that ABC article gives us some nice photos of the four top GOP candidates. It made me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of those four on TV. I have no problem with it staying that way. And since I’m not watching the baseball postseason this year, it means I probably won’t go near a television until March Madness. So I’m going to fall behind in cultural literacy again.

AP silenter than I had thought?

Bash the Messenger, Clinton scandals No Responses »

Oct 142007

In my previous post about the AP coverage of the Larry Craig/Sandy Berger scandals, I linked to a Fox News story that I thought was an AP story. I got this by going to google news and entering the search terms “Sandy Berger.”

The only story that came up on the first page that seemed to be an AP one was the third one in the list, the one that is datelined “AP Washington”. I figured FOX news had printed an AP story. But in looking at the Fox News link, there is narry a word about that article coming from the AP.

So is the AP even silenter than we had thought on the Sandy Berger scandal? If you google for “Larry Craig,” you have no trouble at all finding Associated Press articles.

Bush lied, people died!

Bash the Messenger, Clinton scandals 1 Response »

Oct 142007

When comparing the lies of Bush and Clinton, leftwingers would ask how could we possibly compare lies about a mere sex scandal with lies that caused people to die.

So now we have a Republican sex scandal and Democrats are saying, “He lied, he lied! Larry Craig said he would resign, and he isn’t doing it.”

And at the same time we learn that a man who lied about national security, who was convicted for stealing and destroying documents, is serving as an unofficial advisor to one of the leading presidential candidates. If national security really is national security, it’s a matter in which millions of lives are at stake.

So now which issue are Democrats, e.g. the Associated Press, saying is the more important?

Here is the AP on the sex scandal:

Now that scandal-tinged Idaho Sen. Larry Craig has reneged on a pledge to resign this fall, his fellow Republican senators act as though they hardly know him. They want voters to forget him, too.

But they privately acknowledge that an earlier strategy to drive Craig from office has backfired, sticking them with an open-ended ethics investigation likely to keep the issue before the public for months.

And here is the AP about the national security scandal. Note that there is not a word saying this issue is likely to be kept before the public for months.

I assume we can take this to mean that the AP is telling us it is going to campaign hard for the Democrats on the Larry Craig issue, and is going to report no more than absolutely necessary on the Sandy Berger/Hillary Clinton scandal.

Where to give your millions

Academic intolerance, First Amendment No Responses »

Oct 132007

Naomi Schaefer Riley has an article at the WSJ about how rich people have trouble giving money to universities. Well, the universities will gladly take the money, but they are not willing to use it to fund educational programs that the leftwing establishment types don’t like. Example:

The Robertson family at Princeton has not been so lucky. In 1961, Charles and Marie Robertson (an heiress to the A&P supermarket fortune), donated $35 million to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University to prepare students for careers in government service. The Robertsons’ descendants now claim that the university has diverted the funds to projects completely unrelated to this mission. In 2002, they sued Princeton to reclaim the endowment, now estimated to be nearly $500 million. Five years later, they still haven’t gotten a refund.

Apparently there is now an organization called the Center for Excellence in Higher Education which will help donors get their funds used for reform:

Along with John M. Templeton Jr. and the John William Pope Foundation, Mr. Marcus has provided the seed money ($5 million) for the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE). The Indianapolis-based center, launched last month, aims to help donors “use philanthropy as a lever to reform higher education,” says Frederic Fransen, its executive director. Reform includes a greater emphasis on core curricula, a free-market understanding of economics, a more balanced approach to politics, affordable tuition, tenured faculty who spend more time in the classroom, greater transparency in university governance, and an end to grade inflation.

I suppose that might be the thing for some donors. But here is a better idea for all you millionaires and billionaires who rely on me for advice: Give your money to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It is working to protect free speech in academia. The academy was once a bulwark of free speech, but has now become one of its biggest threats. The way things are going, there soon won’t be any universities where one would be proud to have one’s name on a new research building. But a few major donations to FIRE or other such advocacy organizations could have a powerful effect in preserving our once-great university system.

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