Profiles In Courage: Part 344

I'll always remember the year 2011 as the time brave souls took to the streets and fought for the right to camp illegally whenever and wherever they damn well feel like it.

Power brothers and sisters.

You Heard It Here First (Or Thereabouts)

Back in July I wrote:

In the aftermath of the Oslo atrocities the usual braying from conservative bashers was to be expected. After all, the chance to score political points in this country usually trumps everything else, up to and including common human decency. Still if one bothered to look at the "manifesto" published online by Anders Breivik (or even a selection of "highlights") one could get a feel for the perpetrator of these heinous acts of barbarism.

My take, for the outset, was that this man was completely delusional....

For myself, it was hard to read [Breivik's manifesto] and not think we are dealing with a situation such as was depicted in the film A Beautiful Mind about the real life struggles of mathematician John Nash. As depicted in the film Dr. Nash in the grips of a terrible mental disorder begins to believe he is part of a secret code breaking operation bent upon unmasking dangerous agents communicating by code in newspapers and magazines. In order to flesh out his "world" Nash's diseased mind invents enemies and friends to populate it.

It seemed pretty obvious reading Breivik's ravings about "Knight Templars" and the like, that we were dealing with something similar here. Breivik seems to actually believe he went to London to be part of a meeting of a new Templar order hellbent on reviving anti-muslim crusades throughout Europe. It also is becoming increasingly clear it was all in his fevered imagination.

Today comes word that my suspicion was correct:

Psychiatrists assessing self-confessed Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik have concluded that he is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

They believe he was in a psychotic state both during and after the twin attacks on 22 July that led to the deaths of 77 people and injured 151.

Their report must still be reviewed by a panel of forensic psychiatrists.

Breivik will still be tried in April but it seems likely he will be placed in psychiatric care rather than prison.

Breivik admits carrying out the attacks but has pleaded not guilty to charges, arguing that that the attacks were atrocious but necessary for his campaign to defend Europe against a Muslim invasion.

The two psychiatrists who interviewed him on 13 occasions concluded that he lived in his "own delusional universe where all his thoughts and acts are guided by his delusions", prosecutors told reporters.

Seemingly in only people to actually believe in Breivik's delusions were Breivik himself and the lefty side of the blogosphere.

That fact is its own editorial comment.

Damn! I Always Miss My Blogoversary...

Maybe its because early November is so... early Novemberish, I forgot to make a note of the anniversary of The Iconic Midwest back on the eighth. This one man dog and pony show has been annoying the good citizens of the world for seven years now.

What do you get for seven years worth of whatever the hell it is I'm doing here? Mostly disapproving stares.

I'll take it.

Here is to seven more good years! (Yes, that is a threat.)

Irony, It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

From the "People Who Do Not Listen To Themselves" File:

Jonathan Gruber, a key intellectual architect of President Obama's overhaul of the American health care system, is a little frustrated.

"I'm frustrated that the future of the American health care system rests in the hands of one or two of these unelected people...

Amazingly, he's not talking about himself.

I myself find it particularly disturbing that all of our fates are being determined by a unelected "intellectual architect" who seemingly knows nothing about American government:

He credited Mitt Romney for not totally disavowing the Massachusetts bill during his presidential campaign, but said Romney's attempt to distinguish between Obama's bill and his own is disingenuous.

"The problem is there is no way to say that," Gruber said. "Because they're the same fucking bill. He just can't have his cake and eat it too. Basically, you know, it's the same bill. He can try to draw distinctions and stuff, but he's just lying. The only big difference is he didn't have to pay for his. Because the federal government paid for it. Where at the federal level, we have to pay for it, so we have to raise taxes."

Here is a clue for the great intellectual: they are different fucking Constitutions. What is allowable for Massachusetts under their state Constitution may not be allowable for the Federal government under the U.S. Constitution. Really, its not that hard a concept to grasp.

But, I guess trivial matters like rule of law are a matter of indifference when you are an "intellectual architect."

Why Is Paterno Being Singled Out?

All I'm saying on this matter is this: Joe Paterno, by all published accounts, did not witness any wrongdoing by anyone. Merely being told of the allegation by the actual witness does not shift the burden away from the witness and onto Paterno.

That being the case I have to wonder if the outrage (if such it is) is being directed at Paterno at the behest of his enemies. And make no mistake, Paterno has enemies, alumni and boosters who have been campaigning behind the scenes for his dismissal for more than a decade.

Just saying.

UPDATE:

I see the lynch mob has been successful. Oh, happy day. After all everyone knows hounding an innocent 84 year old man out his job makes the pain of child rape go away.

Gravy Train Time

From the "It's crap like this that make me want to tear my hair out" file:
Loophole lets union officials claim big teacher pensions

Last fall, Ed Geppert, then president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, co-wrote a scathing public essay that alleged some politicians and pundits in Illinois were "waging a relentless war against public employees over state pensions."

The "claim that the state pension shortfall was caused by overly generous pension benefits paid to state employees and teachers is provably false," stated the essay.

What Geppert didn't mention during that debate is that he personally was already getting an annual pension of roughly $185,000 — far more than most working teachers make in salary — through that same struggling system.

Geppert taught in the Metro East for seven low-paid years in the 1970s before leaving teaching and rising through the union ranks for three decades. Thanks to a little-noticed loophole in the system, he was allowed to apply the regular state teachers' pension formula to his much higher union salary.

The formula is based on an average of the retiree's highest four recent years of salary. For many teachers, that average may be around $50,000. For Geppert, it was more than $200,000 because of his union salary, which was six figures through most of his IFT tenure. That average was helped along by a salary spike of about 15 percent, to $260,000, just before he formally retired in 2004.

There was nothing in the law to prevent him from continuing to collect that pension after he returned to the union as its president three years later.

When asked last week about the arrangement, Geppert's combative tone from the essay had become more pragmatic. "I followed the law," he said. Using the system as it was available to him "was only the prudent thing to do."

Prudent, eh? Geppert stopped working as a public employee in the pension system in 1977, back when his average pay was only $12,100. Now he is drawing $186,000 a year from that same pension fund. That is patently absurd. If Geppert continues to draw his pension for another ten years we will have taken out over $3 million dollars out of the fund.

And Geppert is not alone:

Among former Metro East teachers who went on to boost their public pensions through union positions, the Post-Dispatch review of records found, was Terry Turley, a former East St. Louis schoolteacher. Records show Turley left teaching in 1995 to work for the IFT, making a union salary of between $90,000 and $157,000, then getting a final-year spike to $184,000 in 2005. Turley's resulting pension annuity through the Teachers' Retirement System is about $129,900.

That list also includes ex-teachers such as Andrea Baird, who taught in Carrollton for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s, topping out at a salary of $17,300. After joining the staff of the IFT, her salary roughly doubled, then continued to climb, to $165,000 by 2003. She retired a year later, with a $32,000 final-year raise to $197,000 — setting up a $140,700-a-year pension annuity through the teachers' pension system.

Neither Turley nor Baird could be reached for comment despite messages left last week and on Tuesday.

While some pension recipients spent most of their careers as union officials, others actually did teach for most their careers, then were able to substantially boost their pensions with just a few high-paid years with a union.

That was the way it worked for Martha Bowman, who spent 33 years teaching in Marion, climbing to a salary of about $62,000, according to records. She then spent her last six years before retirement with the Illinois Education Association, the state's second major teachers union. There, her salary rose to $143,500 in five years — $24,000 of that coming in a final-year boost — setting up a retirement annuity of about $100,000 annually, more than twice what it would have been for her teaching service alone.

It's crazy. It also, it must be noted, is not a loophole. "Loophole" suggest an unintentional ambiguity in a law or regulation. This was very clearly intentional, and a legalized fleecing of Illinois taxpayers and the rank and file teachers the unions are supposed to be supporting. It amazes me liberals can bitch and moan about CEO pay for Fortune 500 companies while at the same time signing off on the pillaging of millions, if not over a billion dollars nationwide, from the pension funds of rank and file teachers.

And make no mistake, these unions officials want this "system" to carry on forever, because, they say, they work hard not like those lazy-layabout-all-summer teachers:

Bowman said she doesn't agree with the move in Springfield now to prevent union salaries from being applied to the teacher pension system. "Most teachers work nine months out of the year. When you're a union leader, you're on call 24/7. You don't have time off. There are a lot of weekends and evenings."

Geppert, the former IFT president, also is opposed to the legislation.

"I think it's a sad thing to occur," he said. He predicted it will be difficult to lure high-quality people into union service without allowing them access to teacher pensions.

That's right. What could possibly induce a teacher making $35,000 a year from taking a job making over $100,000 a year? Hmmm.... I wonder.

I'm sorry, but there is no rational reason why highly paid union officials should be in the teachers pension funds. By all means, set up your own pension fund for union officials, and even apply for a teacher's pension if you are properly vested in it. However, that pension must be based solely upon your work and salary as a teacher.

That's how it would work in the real world.

Matthew Yglesias Comes Out Forcefully Against The Enlightenment

From Think"Progress" (or is that "Think""Progress"?: Let Children Vote

Sally Kohn writes about a campaign in Lowell, Massachusetts to let seventeen year-olds vote in local elections. More power to them, but I say let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to.

Objections to this usually take the form of imagining a highly disciplined party of seven year-olds reliably delivering bloc votes to whichever candidate credibly promises endless kindergarten.

Uh, no. The usual objections would cite John Locke or John Stuart Mill and acknowledge children have insufficient reason to be held responsible for their actions. That Yglesias is seemingly unaware of any such fact, and instead believes children were not voting because of the difficulty in molding them into a coherent voting block - I'm not joking... he actually says that is what he believes is the rationale - really, it's impossible to have an argument with such a person. After all, Yglesias is denying reason itself as being anything other than an arbitrary notion.

I really fear for our civilization. Half of our "educated" classes are morons. I'm sorry folks but intellectual doofism will be our downfall.

A Step Into The Wayback Machine

Remember all the riots that broke out in 2010 because of all those degenerate and violent and racist tea party protests? All the hundreds of arrests? All the hundreds of riot police called out into the street to re-establish public order?

Yeah, me neither.

There are those who are saying the reason for the difference is because the governments involved, like the Oakland City Council, are not just friendlier to right wing causes then to left wing causes, nay!, they are the very source of authoritarianism! (They are also overwhelmingly Democratic. Funny how that happens.)

I'm sorry lefties but the fact that hundreds of Tea Party demonstrations have happened without a single canister of tear gas being fired puts the lie to the claim that our government is simply an authoritarian Leviathan hell-bent on denying us our rights. What it does mean is there is a difference between lawful orderly protest and mob criminality.

And if they think for a second any of this crap is going to generate sympathy for their "cause" they are a lot higher then they ought to be.

Paul Krugman As Outsider

LOL moment of the day:

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”)

This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to take the Left seriously in this country. I'm sorry but in no one's theory of a ruling elite, be it Pareto or Veblen or Weber or Burnham or even Marx, is someone like Krugman not a member of said elite. In order for anything like OWS to be even remotely interesting, and not merely the mass temper tantrum it actually is, they would have to start targeting elites like Krugman. That they cannot even correctly identify him as being a member of the ruling elite says something about their lack of intellectual acumen.

It's Called A Flashback And Not A Flashforward For A Reason

I've not been paying too much attention, obviously, to the various "Occupy" rallies going on hither and yon... mostly because I have a life. I did read this however and thought it worthy of a sympathetic chuckle: The 1960s radicalism of Occupy Wall Street will help elect a Republican in 2012

Photos confirm what I suspected: that most of the protesters are kids looking for their Sixties rush. Naked girls are painted in psychedelic colours. Handsome boys lounge around in cable-knit sweaters. Angry, doomed youth wave signs in the faces of frustrated policemen. Numbers are exchanged; kisses are snatched behind the barricades; disease is spread. This is what every generation of liberal has tried to recreate since 1968, be it the Watergate protests, the Battle of Seattle or the Stop the War Movement. I know this because I, too, once grasped for my 1968 moment. In 2003, I joined the sweaty ranks of the antiwar campaign. I was honestly motivated and intellectually sound, but I can’t deny the heady anticipation that a life of protest would lead inexorably to drugs and girls. I got the drugs but not the girls, and woke up several months later in a squat surrounded by Trotskyite bores who seemed far more intelligent when I was stoned....

Protest is exciting when you are young, and everyone deserves their chance to burn something down. But the political reality is that voters don’t actually want the wheels of Capitalism to stop turning. They don’t want free love or a rainbow nation of stoners. They want a job. That’s why Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have made a big mistake in expressing sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’ve endorsed a happening that is moral in principle but politically toxic. Ordinary voters – the boring, unpretty folks who get up every day and go to work and never once complain – will reject it at the polls. The silent majority will be heard eventually, just like it was back in 1968.

Bingo.

Early Onset Curmudgeondom

I swear, as time goes on I find myself looking at the topics of political discussion displayed at Memeorandum and saying "Oh, go away already. I know what I feel is important in this world, and it has nothing to do with whatever the hell is occupying your tiny little minds."

And I'm not 83. I'm 43.

If I don't see some intelligence enter the fray soon I'm giving up.

What that entails exactly I have no idea. But I'll tell you one thing... this won't be a political blog anymore.

Dumb Guys Calling Other People Dumb

Really, David Frum has no business calling anyone else on earth dumb... so, of course, he does:

I like walkable urban centers, so I want to take a hopeful view of this Washington Post report about the future of Tysons Corner. Unfortunately for my belief, the story ends with one of the most foolish quotes I’ve ever read about the future of the American city, from Joel Garreau, normally a smart guy.

With broadband, employees no longer need to physically be transported to work. He sees Americans moving to scenic, ideal locations such as the mountains of Montana or the hills of Santa Fe. Garreau splits his time between Fauquier County and Arizona.

“What you’re seeing now is what I call the Santa Fe-ing of the world, or the Santa Fe-ing of America,” he said. “The fastest growth you’re seeing is in small urban areas in beautiful places, because now you’ve got e-mail and Web and laptops and iPhones and all that jazz.”

Here’s one thing we know about the America of the future: It’s going to contain lots and lots and lots of poor, low-skilled people – in percentage terms, many more than the America of, say, 1995. And the America of 1995 already contained tens of millions of poor, low-skilled people. Those people won’t be telecommuting from Santa Fe. If your vision of the future of the American city does not include those people, it’s going to be missing a very large fact.

Which is why, when you look at the actual list of the actual top 10 fastest-growing US cities of 2000-2010, you see no examples of small scenic places (unless you count Orlando, Florida, which I sure wouldn’t).

Frum then gives a list of cities growth by absolute number, and not by the rate of growth, thereby insuring you would not get any smaller areas. Nice going Sherlock.

Gee, I wonder what happens if you look at the actually fastest growing urban areas by percentage growth.

#1 Palm Coast, Fla. - 92% growth
#2 St. George, Utah - 52.9% growth
#3 Las Vegas, Nevada - 41.8% growth
#4 Raleigh, N.C. - 41.8% growth
#5 Cape Coral, Fla. - 40.3% growth
#6 Provo, Utah - 39.8% growth
#7 Greeley, Colo. - 39.7% growth
#8 Austin, TX - 37.3% growth
#9 Myrtle Beach, S.C. - 37% growth
#10 Bend, Ore. - 36.7% growth

Of these only Las Vegas would be in the top ten in terms of absolute numbers. As for the rest of them, they strike me as being a hell of a lot more like Santa Fe than New York or Houston.

Really, David. How dumb can you be?

"No One But Us Non-Bigots Here"

Head shaking time:

An Orange County couple has been ordered to stop holding a Bible study in their home on the grounds that the meeting violates a city ordinance as a “church” and not as a private gathering.

Homeowners Chuck and Stephanie Fromm, of San Juan Capistrano, were fined $300 earlier this month for holding what city officials called “a regular gathering of more than three people”.

That type of meeting would require a conditional use permit as defined by the city, according to Pacific Justice Institute (PJI), the couple’s legal representation.

The Fromms also reportedly face subsequent fines of $500 per meeting for any further “religious gatherings” in their home, according to PJI...

“The Fromm case further involves regular meetings on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons with up to 50 people, with impacts on the residential neighborhood on street access and parking,” City Attorney Omar Sandoval said.

Got that? So, if you want to hold weekly "readings" where you and 49 guests "discuss" Gary Regan's The Bartender's Bible: 1001 Mixed Drinks, well, there is nothing the city can do about it. Have fun. However, if you instead discuss the actual bible, well, then you are a "church" and can be regulated by the city as such.

Sorry folks, but this doesn't pass the smell test.

Only an anti-religious bigot would be okay with this.

Sometime I Hate Being Against The Death Penalty...

...because of how freakishly stupid so many anti-death penalty advocates are. The trouble is they are so stupid they have no idea how much damage they are doing to the cause. The recent example in the case of Troy Davis proves my point.

Its depressing. It begins with an assault on the very idea of reasonable doubt. Yes, eyewitness testimony can be tricky, but the lengths people are willing to go to exonerate Davis in this case is ludicrous. The argument they are making is "sophisticated" in the same way "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is" was sophisticated, and it doesn't help.

Second, this emphasis on portraying these criminals as innocent victims has to stop. The point of being against the death penalty is that you are against it even when the person involved is guilty as sin. If you cannot make the hard argument, but instead try to only make the case that innocent people ought not to be executed (well, yeah), then you have lost the argument before it even started. This is particularly the case when in your zealousness you whitewash actual guilt, as is happening in the Davis case. No objective reading of the evidence leads to Davis' exoneration. You only look like a fool if you insist it does.

I'm sorry but the argument that says "we ought not to have the death penalty because we could make a mistake" is a dumb argument. It invites the rejoinder, "Well, what if we reserved it only for the cases we are really sure of." The response to that has been, "But, how can we ever really be sure of anything..." and BOOM!!!!!! The sound you are hearing is the sound of the minds of millions of Americans closing against you...and, if that is the best argument you can come up with, rightfully so.

The real argument is its unnecessary... its barbarous, as witnessed by the fact it is the way the Taliban does business... and its uncivilized. Actually, I'd argue it is worse than uncivilized, it is anti-civilization. In philosophical terms it is a remnant of the closed society. It appeals to our hive/pack instincts, and not to the rational parts of our being. Lots of people will disagree with me, but at least that is an argument worth having. It helps that that it also the only kind of argument we have a hope of winning. Until we are willing to have that argument we will continue to lose, and we will deserve to lose.

What? No More Free Lunch? I'm Outraged!

I must say I'm finding all the hand-wringing concerning the changes to the pricing of Netflix subscriptions a little odd. (See here, here and here.)

When Netflix started offering streaming movies at no extra charge I was an early adopter, and why not? Even if I didn't use it that often it was free. I also realized that it wouldn't be free forever. Nothing is. The real question becomes then how much would I pay for it. Well, whatever that price is it is under $8 a month.

I'll admit having to get used to going to a new site to manage my, now, Qwikster queue will be a little annoying, but somehow I'll manage to cope.