Plotinus Strikes Again:

asymmetric – adjective

1. Immoral; unjust; unfair; illegal. 2. Cowardly.

USAGE: The detainee's suicide was an act of asymmetric warfare, the Gitmo commander said. (Source)

COMMENT: The word is typically applied to unjust acts, tactics and strategies in war. Examples include international treaties, judicial processes, and terrorism (see highlighted portion of U.S. National Security Strategy).

On the established principle that "might makes right," the weaker actor in war, faced by overwhelming force, cannot but act immorally – that is, unless that actor is principled and accepts his slaughter (or torture). Critics claim morality couldn't possibly sanction such an advantage to one side. S uch critics fall into confusion by assuming morality is symmetrical.

And he's got a lot more of those....

Something to think about when watching Wimbledon, or for that matter, any other professional sporting event:

The point of the exercise was to identify exactly when a seasoned player knew where the ball would head. (Damian) Farrow established five possible windows: First, he blackened the goggles just as the ball's flight path over the net was determined; second, as the server's racket made contact with the ball. Then he gave players less and less information — cutting off the image when the server's arm was cocked, as it was being drawn back, and, finally, at the very start of the toss.

Not surprisingly, receivers were better at guessing the ball's direction the later their vision cut out. But the results also revealed something more interesting. Graphs of the amateurs' reactions showed that they could anticipate where the ball would go only if they witnessed the racket making contact with it. Experts knew what would happen roughly a third of a second earlier, when the server's cocked arm was still unfolding.

What happened in that fraction of a second? A lot, Farrow reasoned. Up to a point, he theorized, the direction of a serve was fundamentally unpredictable: Whatever clues existed weren't ones that an opposing player could discern. By the time the ball had been hit, on the other hand, even a novice could make a plausible guess at its trajectory. What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head. This fraction of time is game- changing. A serve going 120 miles per hour takes approximately a third of a second to travel the 60 feet from baseline to service line. This means that an expert, who doesn't have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

This discovery fit with something Farrow and other tennis researchers had already suspected: Reflex speed is not the key factor in returning a serve. "People have tested casual players and experts, and their reaction times are essentially the same," Farrow says. The fact that Roger Federer can drill back a 140-mile-per-hour serve is partly a matter of muscle control. But it's also about processing subtle visual cues to predict where the ball will go and get to the right spot.

Dr. Farrow is an Australian sports scientist who is a pioneer in the study of "field sense," the ability, long thought to be innate, of an athlete to perceive his surroundings during a game. Read the whole thing.

Regnery Bulletin: Congrats to Matt Welch, who's putting ink to paper on a soon-t0-be-published blockbuster about a certain straight-talkin' Senator from the Southwest.

I have never understood the mentality of the sub-human thug that delights in the death of another. All I can say is that the wheels of justice grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.

Something I'd like to do more of: Attend "Eating Liberally" get-togethers. A good cross-section of the local lefty blogosphere, including Kevin Drum, David Ehrenstein, Mark Kleiman, and "Cactus" from Angry Bear, at Farmer's Market in Hollywood, where the food is excellent and the conversation sparkles.

Remember when Monica Goodling's lawyer was shedding crocodile tears over Congress' insistance that his client, who was then still an employee of the Justice Department, testify under oath about her actions in the firing of several U.S. Attorneys? Well apparently, when the issue is really important, like, say, whether baseball players have the right to remain silent before the Commissioner's Officer over their alleged use of anabolic steroids, he's much more flexible in his devotion to the Fifth Amendment:

The lawyer who headed baseball's investigation of Pete Rose wants commissioner Bud Selig to suspend players who don't co-operate with the steroids probe spearheaded by former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

John Dowd said Selig should try to overturn the 1980 arbitration decision in a case involving Ferguson Jenkins, a native of Chatham, Ont. The ruling upheld a player's right to refuse to answer questions from baseball management if it jeopardized his legal position in a criminal case.

"I tell you what, it's time that stuff was challenged," Dowd said Tuesday in a telephone interview during which he criticized the players' union. "They already have too much power on this whole (steroids) issue anyway, in my opinion. And they've abused it. It's really disgraceful what the union's done here."

Dowd's a real piece of work. He was also the hired gun for Senator John McCain awhile back, defending him during his Keating Five problems, and when McCain's wife was under legal investigation for an addiction to pain killers, induced a prosecutor in Arizona to begin a baseless extortion inquiry into her chief accuser. And he was also co-counsel defending Vernon Jordan during the Clinton Impeachment inquiry. So the man does have an understanding of who the Bill of Rights is supposed to protect: powerful D.C. insiders and government officials.

Steve Gilliard, one of the most passionate voices in the blogosphere about sports and politics, has passed away at the ridiculuously young age of 41. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, or more likely, agreed and disagreed with him at the same time, you always knew where he stood, as he was utterly fearless and unapologetic in expressing his views. His News Blog was a daily habit for me for the past few years; much like Pauline Kael, I would read him just to find out how he was going to piss me off on whatever the big story of the day was, even though our political views were similar. Anyone who has checked out his site recently knows about his health problems, and his prolonged, agonizing stay at the hospital was the stuff of nightmares. My condolences to his wife Jen, his mother, and the rest of his family. Blogging won't be as much fun without him.

Presented, without passion, prejudice or editorial comment:

It's safe to say that bashing Andrew Sullivan has become a stale endeavor on lefty blogs, evidence in large part by this piece, a brief history of the term "enhanced interrogation techniques." He concludes with this devastating point:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

(h/t via Plotinus) Again, it seems a pity that a workable international tribunal doesn't exist to put the reigning junta on trial after 2009.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: That we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Beatles' fifth-best album.

If this is what we can expect from the Republican front-runnner, it will be hard not to be overconfident next year.

Blue-eyed soul meets the Osmonds:



There's a local oldies station, KRTH, that plays this song three or four times a day, seemingly, and I still haven't found who the core audience they're trying to appeal to here. But I guess that's why the IPod was invented.

A Farthing for Your Thoughts: Judging by her notoriety, as well as the fact that it's incredibly easy to win a libel suit in the U.K. (even Roman Polanski was able to win there), being awarded less than $6 thousand in damages seems almost insulting. I doubt Keira paid her attorneys less than that to prosecute the action in the first place.

Desperately trying to distract the attention of a rapt nation from today's volcano eruption, and/or the Stanley Cup Final starting on Monday (Go Ducks !!!) Mickey Kaus is now doing Immigration Reform 24-7, and asks:

Remember when the respectable, bipartisan policy types routinely tarred those who favored welfare reform as bigots who scapegoated blacks and the poor? That didn't really work for them in the end, did it?

Actually, for a long time, "welfare" really was a wedge issue, geared at scapegoating blacks and the poor, but mainly blacks; it was the focus of Reagan's 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford, and it was clear at the time that his intentions weren't to end a program that created stifling dependency and encouraged out-of-wedlock children, but to speak code to the party base. Since there wasn't any substance to his arguments, attempts to reform welfare went nowhere during Reagan's Presidency, in spite of his popularity. It wasn't until those who were sincere about the issue disassociated themselves from the bigots that welfare reform gained traction, and it wasn't until a sympathetic Democratic President got elected that any change in the system became possible.

I suspect that's why conservative opponents of illegal immigration are losing this argument. There may be a liberal argument for tightening the borders, based on protectionist sentiment or on opposition to using low-wage, low-skill immigrant workers to flatten wages, but it's the Tancredos and the Malkins of the world who get the attention. Having them on your side is not unlike having the Trotskyites at ANSWER be the ones organizing anti-war rallies. Sometimes you have to police your own ranks to purge the people who support your cause for the wrong reasons.

One of the pet gripes when I first started blogging five years ago was the lousy nature of ESPN Classic, so I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the station has actually gotten worse since then. It's gone from unimportant, unmemorable college games it aired because it happened to have them in the vault, to replays of bowling, poker, NASCAR and Arliss reruns. Jeez, the same people own ABC, so you'd think it wouldn't be a problem to show old Monday Night Footballs or Cosell-announced title fights, but apparently the folks there would rather own the distinction of broadcasting the world's worst cable channel.

USADA v. Landis: Reading between the lines, it's a fair bet to say that the prosecution has pretty much given up trying to justify the "science" behind the positive doping tests, or legitimate the procedures used by the various labs, and are instead trying to prove that because Floyd Landis' manager made a cruel phone call to a possibly unhinged witness, the 2006 Tour de France champion must have been on the juice. The LA Times headline, "Landis Asked About Wardrobe" (a reference about how a good deal of the cross-ex yesterday centered, swear to Kobe, on the color of tie Landis chose to wear last week), on a day when the prosecution had an opportunity to challenge his statements on direct about how he had never doped, but failed to do so, says about all we need to know about who has made the more persuasive case.

Joementum: Why does anyone take this story seriously? His departure won't switch control of the Senate (that was decided when the Senate voted to organize back in January, and it can't be undone unless the GOP can invoke cloture on a potential filibuster), and he rarely votes with the party when it counts anyways. He won office as an independent, so there's no moral claim that Democrats have on him to stay onboard. Reid should tell him to get lost, and not have the door hit his ass on the way out.

Some decent songs here, but frankly, Sugar Ray, Oasis, the Proclaimers and the Rembrandts were about as "alt-rock" as the Spice Girls. Sadly, Matthew Y.'s taste in music is as lily white as Augusta National.

More daily wisdom, from The Terrorist's Dictionary:

testify – verb

1. To fail to recall; forget.
2. To misremember.
3. To smile blandly.

A good, Kenneth Anger-esque primer on l'Affaire Pellicano, in of all places, the New York Times, here. Since his arrest on wiretapping charges a few years back, the raging juggernaut associated with the world's most infamous private detective was supposed to grind Hollywood's Power Elite into dirt, and it obviously hasn't turned out that way; the only people caught in the backdraft so far have been some peripheral figures, like a director and a couple of entertainment lawyers. No Bert Fields, no Michael Ovitz, no Tom Cruise; it's a bunch of nobodies, as far as the public can tell, which is far more interested in the trial of Phil Spector.

It's as if James McCord and John Dean had fallen on their swords in 1973, rather than bringing down the President. But the story is there, and this piece allows the outsider a chance to unlock the code, to see how the various pieces fit together, even if law enforcement can't figure out a way yet to build viable prosecutions against important Hollywood muckety-mucks. The recent revelation that Pellicano did a bit of work for producer Stephen Bing several years ago may revitalize the story, though, particularly as it may shift attention to work the detective allegedly did for certain friends of the Bing a few years before.

The article is co-written by Allison Hope Weiner, with whom I went to law school back in the day, and whose appearance on a panel before the LA Press Club on the "stalkerazzi" caused quite a buzz among the bloggers and freelancers in attendance (and it's already on YouTube; as far as her moot courts skills are concerned, she hasn't lost an inch off her fastball). It's a sign of how disinterested the local paper of record is in entertainment journalism that she's doing freelance work for the New York Times, rather than owning the same beat for the LA Times, but there you have it. She writes about The Business the way Bill James writes about baseball, with a take-no-prisoners approach and an unwillingness to be accept as gospel whatever cliche or cant is peddled. Back when she wrote for Entertainment Weekly, she was the sort of writer who would take a Hollywood "truism", like "all actresses are unemployable after they reach forty," or "bad reviews make no difference at the box office," and actually examine whether it's true. She'd make a kick-ass blogger, if she wanted to get her fingernails dirty and join the fray.