Category: General

Dude for Thought

A little addendum to my  earlier post…

First off, just wanted to thank everyone for their comments. Even the ones that made me want to have crazy, uninhibited screwdriver-eyesocket sex were instructive, so…thanks. Secondly, I noticed a lot of people expressing concern for those were “there first.”

Some food for thought: Everyone is new at something. Everyone–at some point–has to dip her toe into the geek waters. Everyone–at some point–has to be the newbie. Everyone–at some point–is going to be less of a geek than someone who’s been geeking out longer. But when you gate-keep in a douchey way, that doesn’t really give people who are giving geekiness a try much of a shot.

How is this not supremely assholish, and, ultimately, self-defeating behavior?

“We shall drink only distilled water or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol, and maybe Black Butte Porter.”

Portland, I love you, but you’re bringing me down:

Late last night, Portlanders rejected a plan to fluoridate their city’s water supply (and the water of over a dozen other cities). It’s the fourth time Portland has rejected the public health measure since 1956. It’s the fourth time they’ve gotten the science wrong.

When new medical treatments are implemented, when new drugs are introduced into the populace, there is always some hesitation. There are (hopefully) some clinical trials to back up the new intervention, but the long-term implications are often unclear. Water fluoridation doesn’t have this problem. For over 65 years, it has been rigorously tested as a public health measure, and considered one of the most successful measures of the last 100 years, alongside others like recognizing that tobacco use is a health hazard.

Simply put, the refusal of water fluoridation doesn’t have any scientific support. A review on fluoride’s effect on IQ out of Harvard was waved about as the main scientific opposition, but has since been thoroughly refuted. Decades of studies in different cities in different states, involving millions of people, have concluded that there is a safe level of fluoride—one part-per-million—that can be added to water for enormous benefit to our teeth and oral health with little to no adverse effects.

Does anybody understand the politics of this?

Peak Law School

Bill Henderson and Kyle McEntee have a couple of interesting articles regarding the ongoing crash in law school applications and enrollments, and the implications it has for law school budgets.

Some numbers:

First year enrollment at ABA schools:

2010: 52,500

2011: 48,700

2012: 44,481

This fall the 2010 matrics will be replaced by a new entering class. We can roughly estimate its size, because typically 95% of applicants have applied by mid-May. Since last fall law schools have been frantically soliciting applicants, when it appeared the applicant pool might be as small as 52,000-53,000. It now appears it will be around 58,500. If 75% of applicants are accepted to at least one school (this would be a historic high), and 87% of these people — the typical percentage — matriculate, that will produce an entering class of about 38,000 1Ls.

A 28% decline in enrollment over three years sounds daunting enough, but the real situation is probably worse. What these numbers don’t reflect is the extent to which schools are slashing real (as opposed to nominal) tuition, in order to fill even this drastically reduced number of first-year seats.

For example, I just got an email from an applicant who is considering a “scholarship” offer that would save him 60% of the advertised tuition price for a fairly high-ranked law school. (These price cuts aren’t scholarships in the traditional sense of income from an endowed fund that offsets the actual cost of tuition, but rather straight-up price reductions from the advertised rate).

The applicant received this offer just a couple of weeks ago, even though he had been admitted two months earlier. More telling is the fact that the applicant’s LSAT and GPA are both below the median for last year’s matriculants at this school. (Traditionally, discounts of this size off nominal tuition have been employed to lure applicants with significantly higher than average LSAT/GPA numbers). Many schools now seem engaged in the academic equivalent of a Priceline fare war, as they scramble to fill seats with steep discounts at the end of the application cycle, even as they slash admissions standards.

When law school faculties reconvene in three months or so, the $64,000 question they’ll need to pose to their administrative superiors is, exactly how much did we have to cut prices to get this 1L class in the door?

A Kinsley Coda

A useful reminder related to Michael Kinsley’s argument about how horrible it is to criticize people who compare gays and lesbians to pedophiles:

Oh, but, look: It’s next Tuesday now. What has happened since Kinsley made his case on behalf of the people who aren’t yet ready to accept gay people as equal? Over the weekend, Mark Carson, a gay man, was fatally shot in the face in New York City, apparently murdered by someone who was offended by seeing him walking out in public with a man. Two more gay-bashing attacks reportedly happened in New York last night. Overseas, Georgian Orthodox priests led a rock-throwing mob against a gay-rights march. And the most pressing gay-rights issue is whether people are being too easily offended by homophobia?

Harrumph.

Help, Help, I’m Being Repressed!

Or not.

Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.

A couple of notes on the late keyboardist. First, it should be noted that he produced Los Angeles and Wild Gift, two of the best American albums of the 80s (as well as the two quite good followups.) Exene and John remember.

On the Doors…they’re become sort of like an overhyped New York roleplayer, so overrated by the media a lot of people stop giving him credit for their modest but real virtues. Christgau has the right basic idea:

Shaman, poet, lizard king–believe that guff and you’ll miss a great pop band. Ass man, schlockmeister, cosmic slimeball–that’s where Jim Morrison’s originality lies, and he’s never been better represented. Right beneath the back-door macho resides a weak-willed whine as El Lay as Jackson Browne’s, and the struggle between the two would have landed him in Vegas if he hadn’t achieved oblivion in Paris first. Compelling in part because he’s revolting, Jimbo reminds us that some assholes actually do live with demons. His three sidemen rocked almost as good as the Stones. Without him they were nothing.

Appropriately for a Doors defense, this overreaches: they were way too uneven to be great, and let’s leave the Stones out of it, please. (To begin with, Watts/Wyman v. Densmore/Manzarek’s left hand — not a flattering comparison for the latter. And it took Jagger more than a decade in the biz to achieve the level of self-parody Morrison was born with.) But it is true that at their best they were capable of nearly perfect singles — “L.A. Woman,” “People Are Strange,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Peace Frog,” “Break on Through,” inter alia…these are first-rate pop songs. No need to let Morrison’s relatively high pretension-to-achievement ratio or the fact that teenagers are were [thanks for the obvious correction, PP] prone to thinking of them as a Great Band unduly bother you.

Gate-Rape

As I’ve noted before, I’m not really involved in the Realms of Geek, realms like gaming, role-playing and comic booking. These are realms I watch from a distance because I’m interested in how women function in them. One thing that particularly fascinates me is geek gate-keeping, that is self-professed geeky dudes, scoring–mostly women–on how truly geeky they are. There’s even a blog documenting this nonsense. (Spoiler alert: If you’re at all attractive, you’re probably not a real geek.)

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen of “Portlandia” hardly strike me as spokespeople for MRA-inspired idiocy, so it shocked the hell out of me when I saw a short sketch from their show which showed a girl talking to man about being such a “nerd” because she’s into gaming and comic books (it’s implied that this is, like, such a lie, people). The sketch then moves on to inform us that attractive women who see a geeky film are not nerds, then shows us a sampling of Authentic Kung Fu Grip in Their Original Packaging Nerds ™. They are all, oddly enough, dorky-looking white guys. Wow. Slow clap, Portlandia, slow clap. You really kept that gate. You kept it gooooood.

Let me share two letters of the alphabet with you, Keepers of the Gate: A.) I will make sweet love to Andrew Breitbart’s still-ragey corpse if women are–with any frequency–crowning themselves with the sweaty, well-palmed coveted Crown of Geek just because they play Angry Birds or see some comic book movie. (Yes, this is an actual complaint of gate-keepers.) B.) Let’s say there are women doing this. Why do you care? Why do you care? Seriously, WHY DO YOU CARE? Why don’t you just roll your eyes and move on? That you would get so screechy and hysterical tells me that your geeky pursuits aren’t keeping you fulfilled. Now ask yourself this: If you’re not fulfilled, is that really the fault of some silly, random chick who name-checks Angry Birds?

9CA Rejects Anti-Choice Junk Science

Good:

A federal appellate panel struck down Arizona’s abortion law on Tuesday, saying it was unconstitutional “under a long line of invariant Supreme Court precedents” that guarantee a woman’s right to end a pregnancy any time before a fetus is deemed viable outside her womb — generally at 24 weeks.

The law, enacted in April 2012 despite vociferous protest by women’s and civil rights groups, made abortions illegal if performed 20 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period, or roughly 18 weeks after fertilization, even if the woman learned that the fetus had no chance of surviving after birth. At 18 weeks, many fetal abnormalities can be detected through sonograms.

In its opinion, the panel of three judges assigned to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco wrote that a fetus’s viability “varies from pregnancy to pregnancy,” which should be determined by doctors, not legislators.

“While the state may regulate the model and manner of abortion prior to fetal viability, it may not proscribe a woman from electing abortion, nor may it impose an undue burden on her choice through regulation,” wrote Judge Marsha S. Berzon, the opinion’s author.

Whether the Supreme Court will reject this “fetal pain” nonsense is another question, but at least the law will be void if they decide not to hear the appeal. The opinion, which thoroughly dismantles the District Court’s holding that the ban was a “regulation” that was therefore permissible under Casey, is worth reading.

Let Us Return To The Gloriously Bipartisan Government of the Late 90s

Shorter Verbtim Bill Keller: “The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency.”

Atrios skimmed the cream from this unwitting parody, but this is almost as good:

The third reason for a special counsel is that the government has serious business to conduct, and the scandal circus on Capitol Hill is a terrible distraction. Oversight, so-called, is what we do these days instead of passing a budget, reforming the immigration system, or processing the countless government and judicial appointments awaiting confirmation. Handing off the I.R.S. problem to a special counsel and putting congressional hearings on hold would allow everyone, including journalists, to turn their attention to all that unfinished business.

Yes, if history has taught us anything, it’s that hiring Ken Starr as a special prosecutor will ensure that years aren’t wasted on partisan psuedoscandals instead of governing. And it is almost equally clear that in the absence of scandal a productive, bipartisan legislative agenda will proceed quickly through our highly functional Congress.

The whole column is amazing. It’s like the Trailblazers reflecting on drafting Bowie over Jordan and wishing that they could do it again since it worked out so well the first time. I look forward to Keller’s next column, about how Clinton v. Jones was the most prescient Supreme Court opinion in history.