For you football lovin morons. Ravens and Bengals on now, Raiders and Chargers later on account of they are way out west or something.

I'm already kicking ass in the picks with four points. THERE. ARE. FOUR. POINTS!

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:59 PM | Comments (393)
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Some fretted of a Romney "walkback" on his promise to repeal ObamaCare.

No. He's always said he'd replace it with a series of reforms.

Posted by: Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (291)
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Via @justkarl. Something to keep in mind.

Since Labor Day, the media have released about 20 polls on the presidential race. Three show a dead heat, one shows George W. Bush leading by a single percentage point, and the rest show Al Gore leading by one to 10 points. In the latest polls, Gore leads by an average of five points. It's fashionable at this stage to caution that "anything can happen," that Bush is "retooling," and that the numbers can turn in Bush's favor just as easily as they turned against him. But they can't. The numbers are moving toward Gore because fundamental dynamics tilt the election in his favor. The only question has been how far those dynamics would carry him. Now that he has passed Bush, the race is over.

Yes, in principle, Bush could win. The stock market could crash. Gore could be caught shagging an intern. Bush could electrify the country with the greatest performance in the history of presidential debates. But barring such a grossly unlikely event, there is no reason to think Bush will recover. Ultimately, reasons drive elections. For months, pundits yapped about Bush's lead in the polls without scrutinizing the basis of that lead. Now they're doing the same to Gore. But look closely at the trends beneath the horse-race numbers, and you'll realize why it's practically impossible to turn those numbers around. Gore doesn't just have the lead. On each underlying factor, he has the upside as well.

It should be noted the "underlying factors" do not presage well for Old Man Obama this time around.

There are four possible responses to being behind in polls; we should be at stage 1. The rest are unwarranted, at least at the moment.

Stage 1. Concern

Stage 2. Great concern

Stage 3. Panic

Stage 4. Spazzing out with full, 100% Retard Strength, going at people like a whirlwind of elbows and teeth.

So we're behind. We've been behind before.

CNN, Meanwhile... has Obama over 50%, at 52%, but I've now been told by two people that if you subtract out the number of Democrats and Republicans they cop to (Democrats +5%), it turns out they only contacted 37 independents.

Not 37%. 37 total.

Among those 37, Romney's up 54-40. But then again: 37 of them.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (326)
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They could make so much more in another field, you know.
Just ask 'em.

Strange, they keep saying "for the children," but every utterance out of them concerns being personally paid more.

Lots of stuff at Instapundit, including this from John Fund.

Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.

The city is being bled dry by the exorbitant benefits packages negotiated by previous elected officials. Teachers pay only 3 percent of their health-care costs and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois in the last five years, a full 71 cents has gone to teacher retirement costs.

But beyond the dollars, the fact is that Chicago schools need a fundamental shakeup — which of course the union is resisting. It is calling for changes in the teacher-evaluation system it just negotiated by making student performance less important.

It's all for the children, all of it, all for the children. Why don't you understand?

President Present: No comment, says Jay Carney.

Posted by: Ace at 01:15 PM | Comments (444)
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A few days old now, but DARPA has a new "cheetah" robot that can outrun a human.

Video under the fold.

@kenwheaton writes to note that this demonstrator, while neat, "cheats" because the power supply is external (note the power cords attaching to the "cheetah's" back). It's a neat demonstration, but obviously the thing will need power, and that's going to add weight.

One thing that occurs to me is that they keep finding that mimicking the actual movements of animals is both doable and very efficient. And it occurs then to me that the "cheetah" maintains the same movement the whole time it's running, and doesn't break into, say, the cheetah version of a charging gallop. I bet when they perfect this it will do that, changing the locomotion of its legs to kick in on the top speed.

Much closer to deployment out on the field is Boston Dynamic's "Mule" robot, which looks just like a mule, actually. (Well, you have to imagine a skin over it.)

Watch it follow the leader, navigate hills and rocky terrain, and get up from its belly: more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (195)
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A lot of signs informing me that just because a girl dresses like a bit of trollop doesn't give me the right to rape her.

This is an odd bit of provocation: They're announcing something that's obviously true, and which I agree with. But they're shouting it a me and behaving as if this is a live debate, and we (collectively) disagree with them.

Who disagrees with this? Well, rapists, yes, I suppose. But murderers also disagree with hypothetical signs that might say "My Insurance Policy and/or Blackmail Plot Against You Does Not Give You The Right To Murder Me." This doesn't really make it a "political" issue, though.

Was "Columbo" a political show? I never got that vibe.

So, here are the pictures, and as usual, it's... well, it's like closing time at the bar, when the lights come up. There's some material here to work with, if you're really determined.

I love all the dudes showing up at these. "Solidarity." Uh-huh.

I don't know. There's a level of emotional and physical exhibition going on here that seems part of the I'M A SUPERSTAR syndrome plaguing us.

Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated story, Joe Walsh wrecks Sandra Fluke's sh*t and stuff.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (184)
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But none of that played any role in their decision, you understand.

The timing here isn't quite perfect, as she'd been hired (I think as a visiting prof) in 1992 and this statement was made in 1994. However, I think it's a fair deduction that this sort of thing was in his mind in 1992, too.

“We’re clearly trying to add more women to the faculty,” Clark told the Harvard Law Record in March 1994.

“Clark said HLS was engaging ‘affirmative action’ to the extent it was working to increase the number of women considered and interviewed,” wrote the Record’s Greg Stohr. “He also said the Law School would be willing to hire a qualified woman, even if her area of expertise did not fit an immediate need, but he stopped short of saying the school would lower its qualification requirements for women.”

“I guess what we’re not ready to do is to have a different standard,” Clark told the Record.

But Warren, now on a leave of absence from Harvard to run for office, is the only law school professor there who did not graduate from a top-ten law school. Of the 350 Ivy League law school professors, Warren graduated from the second worst ranked school — Rutgers, ranked no. 82 according to a May 2012 analysis by The Washington Examiner.

Clark had been feeling pressure. In 1992, positive tenure decisions about four white male faculty members touched off student protests and demonstrations which included taking over the deanÂ’s office.

WarrenÂ’s first tenure offer in February 1993 coincided with a Friday vigil held by law students demanding more female and minority professors. Students agitating for more campus diversity praised ClarkÂ’s commitment to bringing more women on campus, but wanted more minorities.

The article also hits Warren's article on bankruptcy -- a deeply flawed article which Dances With Gross Academic Misconduct.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (128)
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Via Twitchy (via @snarkandboobs) with the sarcasm and such, a Portland educator wants you to ponder all the ethnonormative assumptions packed into your PB&J.

By the way, the Portland Tribune isn't snarky about this -- they give this idiot the Bold Hero Slant.

Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day.

Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.

“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.

“Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

Guitierrez, along with all of Portland Public Schools’ principals, will start the new school year off this week by drilling in on the language of “Courageous Conversations,” the district-wide equity training being implemented in every building in phases during the past few years.

Through intensive staff trainings, frequent staff meetings, classroom observations and other initiatives, the premise is that if educators can understand their own “white privilege,” then they can change their teaching practices to boost minority students’ performance.

I remember reading, say, 20-25 years ago, a pundit fretting about the loss of liberal persuasiveness -- why was the public growing tired of liberal appeals and electing awful insane conservatives?

The proposed answer was "Compassion Fatigue." That liberals had created such a vast and sprawling list of things we all needed to be compassionate about, and think lots of bien pensant thoughts about, that many were getting weary of it all and just wanted to get back to something called "living our own lives."

Do we ever get to just make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for a kid, or do we have to don the hairshirt whenever we do anything?

"Courageous Conversations:" These seem to be the "Courageous Conversations" referenced in the article. Via @morgenr.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (337)
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Very good piece at NRO. Read the whole thing.

Also, as it stands, useless.

Some think I "panicked" over the weekend and am now getting my bearings back. I don't think that's true -- I feel the same way as I did over the weekend. Worried, not panicked.

I stand by what I wrote earlier: Clinton gave a rebuttal to Romney/Ryan that, while dishonest, will be taken as true by the public unless exposed to its own withering counter-rebuttal.

That's how people operate. If you ask a guy if he stole money from the cash register, and he won't address the point directly, you begin strongly suspecting he did.

Statements not rebutted by someone with a strong personal interest in rebutting them are taken to be true. If the person with the strong personal interest in rebutting the statement could rebut it, he would rebut it, and if he's not rebutting it, it's because he can't.

Everyone thinks like this.

And I think Clinton's speech was powerful, and if Romney/Ryan does not specifically refute it, it will be taken as true by many -- possibly most -- voters.

I certainly think it can be rebutted. The NRO piece, for example, notes things like this:

The Democrats cling to the ridiculous claim that the bailout of GM and its now-Italian competitor, Chrysler, saved 1.5 million U.S. jobs. This preposterous figure is based on the assumption that if GM and Chrysler had gone into normal bankruptcy proceedings, the entire enterprise of automobile manufacturing in the United States would have collapsed — not only at GM and Chrysler but at Ford and foreign transplants such as Toyota and Honda. Not only that, the Democrats’ argument goes, but practically every parts maker, supplier, warehousing agency, and services firm dedicated to the car industry would have collapsed, too. In fact, it is unlikely that even GM or Chrysler would have stopped production during bankruptcy: The assembly lines would have continued rolling, interest and debt payments would have been cut, and — here’s the problem — union contracts would have been renegotiated. Far from having saved 1.5 million jobs, it is not clear that the GM bailout saved any — only that it preserved the UAW’s unsustainable arrangement.

Bill Clinton bizarrely tried to claim that the bailout has been responsible for the addition of 250,000 jobs to the automobile industry since the nadir of the financial crisis. Auto manufacturers and dealerships have indeed added about 236,000 jobs since then, but almost none are at GM, which has added only about 4,500 workers, a number not even close to offsetting the 63,000 workers that its dealerships had to let go when the terms of the bailout unilaterally shut them down.

But here's why I say that's useless, as it stands: Because, who sees this? 1, Strong supporters for the conservative ideology (and Romney voters) and 2, a smattering of strong supporters for the liberal ideology (and Obama voters), who read NRO just to keep up on the other guys' attack lines.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it has not fallen, for all political purposes.

I'd love to see the various claims of Obama and Clinton run in a Romney add with the words "LIE" or "MISLEADING" popping up, with the actual facts rebutting them.

Especially Clinton's claims about stealing $716 billion from Medicare somehow "shoring it up," or about his implication that Obama's Clinton-like Miracle Economy is just a few months away, just a few months away before we "feel it."

But this GM business is a good place to start.

I'm not panicking, because the Romney campaign has been generally pretty smart about knowing where the problems are, and crafting a way around them/through them.

But I am re-stating my worry about the Clinton Speech, in case they're currently smoking crack and thinking, "Meh, that won't have an impact. Let's just pretend it didn't happen."

By the way, GM -- and thus the taxpayers -- lose $49,000 on every Volt sold, so I guess we should be grateful for such low sales.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (155)
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What is it, Day 6? It's like smoking; the first 48 hours are the toughest. (And also the just-one-slip-piest.)

My war on time-sucks is not going well. While I've stopped one time-suck, I've simply increased my other time-sucking activities. These involve, as usual, a lot of YouTube and Wikipedia "research" into things I barely, but do slightly, give a crap about.

So I was surprised to see this article.

Internet addiction can be especially harmful for those who make a living through intense focus—such as novelists. A number of esteemed writers including Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith have come forward to admit they are powerless over the endless distractions of the Internet, and to name a new solution: two software programs called Freedom and Self Control. These are computer applications that can be downloaded and configured to increase productivity by completely blocking Internet access at specific times.

This is how Self Control is described:

Is email a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time.

For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application, by deleting the application, or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out.

That's some Doomsday Device ish right there.

Oh: To make clear, I'm not advertising or recommending either of those programs. I don't plan on using either.

I'm just taking some small comfort in the idea that It's Not Just Me.

Coinage: AlexTheChick has a different word for "multi-tasking" -- "multi-shirking." Which is more accurate.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (114)
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