lexicography.com

Now that Cathy Seipp is blogging about her lung cancer, I have decided that I might make a post or two a week about my diabetes. Not to imply that I am a large time blogger like Seipp or that my health problems are of similar scale.

Actually I have added three personal categories to this site, cars, bicycles and diabetes. They happen to be interests of mine by choice or force.

I was walking along living my life well into middle age when suddenly the beta cells in my pancreas were blown away. I lost pound after pound, which I sort of liked, but my energy level was low, I suffered murderous rages, I got cramps in my legs.

My body had shifted from a glucose metabolism to a fat metabolism; sort of involuntary Atkins, writ large. At the extreme, fat metabolism leads to acid blood and potassium deficiency, which leads to muscle cramps, including the heart muscle. When diagnosed my doctor said that my potassium was so off she thought it surprising I was alive.

I learned to take injections. I take five per day minimum and six or seven typically. I tell my kids honestly “it is nothing and so are you shots”.

Here’s the answer, guess the question:

I nominated a qualified woman. Look what Senator Pat Lehey did to her.

Miers is gone. Scooter is off the front pages, permanently. He’s the Lance Armstrong of politics.

The rest of the world loaded Internet Protocol (”IP”) on their hardware, peered with or paid for connections to our tier one Internet providers and voluntarily pointed their resolvers at our root name servers. That is how the Internet came about. No one asked them to do it, and there was nothing about the development that required it to happen this way. They could have started Internet II with lots of better features (secure mail transport ending spam comes to mind). They did not.

As a matter of fact, Cisco and other high level routers for years had all the internationally negotiated, NGO, UN developed protocols in addition to IP - but hardly anyone used them.

Now that the network they voluntarily joined turns out to be so important, rather than start their own root name servers and trying to convince the world to use them, other countries demand that the US turn over control of its name servers to international organizations. Scheesh!

And the Wall Street Journal prints an editorial lamenting that if the US does not negotiate skillfully with other countries they might actually make their networks independent (presumably meaning set up their own root name servers) thereby fragmenting the precious Internet. Fat Chance. If any country cuts off its participation in the Internet they will simply be shooting themselves in the foot not fragmenting the Internet. No one else will join their network, like the world in fact joined the US Internet, and their network will slip into the dustbin of history like Minitel. Period.

All we did was start a network, and the whole world joined in. There is nothing to prevent you from starting a network, we have even donated the protocols we developed for use by anyone royalty free, so start your own, please.

I’ve got some advice for the UN and any nation that wants to control the Internet.

Get a copy of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain). It is free and complete source code is available to anyone who wants it. A version runs on almost any operating system.

Get a copy of the present root server file. If you ask nicely I am sure anyone who runs one of the root servers will give you one. Use nslookup to get the SOA record which contains the email address of the administrator for one of the roots. The roots are named I through M.root-servers.net

Install BIND and the present zone files for com net org info biz, etc. and all the two letter country domains. Point the computers in your country to your new nameservers. Your computers will use the data in your nameservers instead of the data in the nameservers controlled by ICANN and the Department of Commerce.

You now control the Internet. Go crazy.

Airline schedule.

“W” seems to be at a nadir. Half his coalition of the social conservatives/Christians cabal and the economic conservative/capitalist/libertarian cabal has learned that he is not one of them. The MSM reports the war as if it will be endless and as if there is no discernible progress.

I think W is at a political apex. Sometimes you have to look at problems differently to find a solution.

Lets take the war first.

Many countries are facing an expansionist Islamo fascist ideology. Some countries are pursuing a policy of appeasement. They allow immigration without requiring acculturation. They withdraw from any geopolitical activity condemned by the Islamo fascists. This might be American policy should the Democrats regain control of the White House, but is not in serious contention today.

Russia is following what I call the Daily Pundit or Claremont Institute policy. Hit anyone who harms your citizens hard, and hit any country who harbors or aids such people harder. No nation building, no neo-colonialization, simple brutal punishment for harming our countrymen.

Moscow has reduced Grozny to rubble, yet is further than ever from solving its Chechen problem. Moreover, the sheer blundering thuggery of the Russian approach has no merits other than affording Moscow some short-term sadistic pleasure as it exacerbates the situation. The allegedly seething ‘Arab street’, which the West’s media doom-mongers have been predicting for four years will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels, remains as seething as a cul-de-sac in Pinner on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federation’s Muslim street is real, and on the boil.

Steyn.

Then there is W’s approach. Many people state it better, but basically it is to force a revolution in the disfunctional politics of the Middle East. It might fail. IMHO, the first two choices are sure to fail.

Now let us take small government. People have been voting in politicans who say they will shrink government and get it out of our way for generations. To put it mildly, this apporach has not worked. Even the”Contract wih America” has been a failure in its stated goal.

Germany is such a sterling example of why this avemue to reform is doomed from the start. People like handouts and benefits from the government. Human nature is to seek economic rent. That is why the Consitiution had so many limits on what Americans could do when they were acting in their roles as participants in the government. Even all those clearly stated prohibitions slowly eroded and fell.

To continue playing the political game in the same way surely meets Einstein’s definition of insanity.

W has been very clear in his perscription for this problem. He advocates creating an ownership society.
People who own their own homes, with fat retirement accounts and dividend income view the welfare state as something they must support instead of something supporting them.

To me, the reduction of double taxation on dividend income is a good example of a major change which gets minor recognition. Before the reduction, huge sums of money were tied up in our largest corporations. To pay out earnings to the stockholders was foolish because of the double taxation of earnings and dividends. Corporations horded cash (Microsoft) or made foolish acquisitions (Time-Warner AOL) or just spent lavishly rather than pay a dividend to their owners.

I once interviewed for a legal position with Dow Jones in Manhattan. They flew me by helicopter down to some facility in New Jersey to talk to the legal staff there. Stupendous waste. When I was starting an ISP Lucent invited some of us to a meeting in Manhattan about their new terminal servers. They had an entire office suite unused and on standby should their CEO desire to have a business meeting in New York. The window shades and mood lighting ran by remote control and the view was of the Statue of Liberty. Stupendous waste.

Today, management has to give a larger portion of earnings to the stockholders. W’s tax plan helped make management more accountable to stockholders. This is a major change affecting the use of literally billions of dollars worth of economic assets.

UPDATE: Some people will think that I am part of an army of “Bush Defenders” because I write this. Reagan was too liberal for me. I hate all present politicians. What W is asking is, what will change what people want? Lets do something to change their wants to goals that we can live with. You know, people with a want are the most powerful things in the universe. You may exert great military or other power against it, and yet fail. Someone who finds a way to influence “wants” will be truly a world historical individual. I expect W wil be the first world historical individual of the 21st century.

How do you tell if someone is smarter than you are?

I can understand telling if someone is less smart than you. You apply your intellect to their expressed thoughts and rationalizations and with your own judgment see flaws or errors.

If you are evaluating someone smarter than yourself, how do you judge? Is it the universal acclaim the person receives? “He is another Einstein.” “Oh, now I know.” Is it the reaction of others you respect? Is it the general consensus that he is a smart person combined with observing him speak without hesitation and with a large vocabulary?

The reason I ask is, everyone says Roberts is so smart and Miers is not so smart. I don’t know a thing about their relative intelligence. However, I will bet that Miers has a higher IQ than the average journalist. I do know how hard it is to rebut a meme that someone is smarter than another. Many serious and well educated people considered Ronald Reagan a dolt. Probably most of America thought Carter and Clinton were high powered brains, while Reagan, Ford, Bush and W were below average.

In the hard sciences, where results can be the final arbitrator, people dismissed as fools sometimes come back with the discovery. I am not saying everyone who claims to be a big brain deserves equal respect. This cult of the big resume troubles me.

Who was smarter, Bork or Roberts? Bork said much that hurt his political prospects while Roberts negotiated a process and had to say some stupid things (which we excuse because we understand the process). We are comfortable crowning each as super smart, particularly with the credentials they carry (the same people without the credentials?) Yet they differ greatly, in more important ways than their credentials. One is on the Supreme Court the other is not.

Doomed, Doomed writes John Derbyshire. Why? Lets see:

All the windsocks are now pointing in the direction of more socialism. As the population ages, Americans will want more leisure, drugs, health care, nursing homes, security. As the Jihadist threat continues to metastasize (from the MidEast to Indonesia, Thailand, Africa, the Caucasus, Europe), we shall want the state to have more police powers, more scrutiny of us and our lives. The trend of the last 40 years away from the old Anglo-Saxon rights and liberties — private property rights (google “tobacco settlement,” “Kelo,” etc.), freedom of speech, contract and assembly (”speech codes,” anti-discrimination laws, etc.), limited government (is Washington DC shrinking? looking poorer and shabbier? not that I’ve noticed) — will accelerate. And everybody will be fine with all this, because that’s what everybody wants, except for a few freakish intellectuals like ourselves.

Anything difficult with serious setbacks will lead to some participants calling failure. “Game over man” [Aliens].

How can you tell if the tide has turned against you or more resolve, more effort, more work is required for victory. You cannot. When you meet your personal limit you call defeat.

If these words were people, I would embrace their genocide.

Any given writer might write in a vague, lofty, convoluted, and romantic style. But when all the people who write on a given subject write that same way, there is something else going on. Try to think of any defender of progressive education or judicial activism who writes in a plain, straightforward and factual style.

Thomas Sowell

Again Lexicography turns to Steyn.

Mark Steyn points out that the MSM is unwilling to even identify the parties to this particular dispute. There is a clear reason for that, the party obscured by the MSM is the one they favor at some level, and they do not abide by too much close examination.

Does anyone else think that Drudgereport looks seriously out of date

I mean it looks like a web page from 1880.

I know he gets lots of major trafic, but so does USS Clueless and he stopped writing a year ago.

Ann Coulter says that graduates of Harvard Law ( “The Law School”) on average are very smart:

The average LSAT score at SMU Law School is 155. The average LSAT at Harvard is 170. That’s a difference of approximately 1 1/2 standard deviations, a differential IQ experts routinely refer to as “big-ass” or “humongous.”

Well “whoopee do,” I don’t know why she is writing about the relative averages of two groups, when we are talking about individuals. After all, the average woman has a lower IQ than the average man. I do not think that that statistical truth has any bearing on the qualifications of any given individual.

More importantly, Ms. Coulter seems to say that someone who is first in their class at Harvard Law or first in their class at Stanford Law is more qualified to sit on SCOTUS than lawyers without such stellar academic qualifications.

As in the case of most written communications, she omitted the implied ceteris paribus clause. It means roughly, “all other things being the same.”

First in her class at Stanford Law is more qualified than middling at Michigan, unless the Stanford lawyer does not take the oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States seriously. We all know how the MSM will not make a stink if SCOTUS makes up some law or twists words into a pretzel to justify some outcome, as long as the outcome is politically correct. There is no higher court to correct SCOTUS. There is no MSM oversight. There is no Congressional oversight.

Three times recently, Republican Presidents appointed stellar scholars to SCOTUS, only to have the person become someone willing to substitute their belief in what is the greater good in the place of honestly following the Constitution.

I agree with Coulter, ceteris paribus.

Supreme Court Justices are held in very high regard

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I would never expect an Ox to voluntarily place its head in the yoke. People, however, seem to have that little bit of pack-hunting animal left in their makeup, such as where the dominate male does all the thinking and impregnating for the pack by common agreement. I cannot believe I am seeing reasonably intelligent free men say that only some ivy lawyer can understand what the First Amendment means, when they know perfectly well that McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional and the ivy lawyers claimed otherwise.

Ann Coulter says:

if we’re looking for lawyers with giant brains to memorize obscure legal cases and to compose clearly reasoned opinions about ERISA pre-emption . . . I think we want the nerd from an elite law school

Why? ERISA is a federal law, the drafters had the power and ability to state exactly the extent of preemption of any inferior law, if they failed because it was too difficult to do or they just forgot to think about it, why is some big brained lawyer better at filling in their failure? Are the big brained the best at ruling us in general?

The best thing about the Miers discussion is it allows me to run forth about one of my favorite subjects, “The Law”. Having been a law student and a lawyer, it gives me a chance to feel as if I have something to contribute.

You can tell my premise from the header. Believe me, I am not taking a position and spinning many plausible arguments in support of it, or playing “devil’s advocate.” For dozens of years I have thought that being a lawyer or judge ain’t rocket science or even brain surgery. Let me tell you why.

Law is not an academic discipline. If we define academic as the cultural accumulation of knowledge, we can see that law fails on many grounds. The study of law is not a study leading to an accumulation of knowledge; law is arbitrary, social and imposed. When Congress enacts a law, or a court expresses a rule of common law, it is silly to talk of accumulating knowledge of it. If the law is expressed well, the reader understands it. If it is expressed sloppily, the reader cannot figure out how to follow it. The proper analogy is the instruction manual to an electronic device. We don’t seek to accumulate knowledge about the device; we seek to figure out what the manual writer was expressing.

Within weeks of entering law school I had an upperclassman teaching briefing and appellate advocacy. I had hardly any instruction other than a few rambling lectures from the upperclassman to this point. One thing he said stuck with me and rung of truth. “Practicing law is simply reading carefully.” I was able to analyze an (uncomplicated) legal problem, write a serviceable brief, and make an oral argument within days. Looking back now after years of additional legal education and years of practice, I would not write the brief any different.

Any honest lawyer will tell you that the first year of law school is all that matters. There you learn legal reasoning, honed by the Socratic method, and the basic common law. Years two and three are marking time. They serve mostly as a barrier to the profession, making it more costly to enter so enhancing the earnings of those in it. After the first year you have the basics of common law, contracts, property, jurisdiction, evidence, criminal law and procedure, as well as legal research and writing. Imagine a second or third year legal course on some statutory law, say the securities laws. A statute is a bunch of orders and procedures. You can read the cases interpreting the statue (binding) and the analysis or commentary (non-binding) but, come on, it is like a graduate course on the repair manual of a washing machine. Someone had the power to require certain things and had other people write it down, and if you cannot figure it out… It is not an academic subject. Today, lots of later year law courses are “law and economics” or “law and dance”; you can imagine my opinion of how that enhances legal scholarship.

Harvard was founded in 1636. It added a law school in 1817, one hundred and eighty one years later. Harvard has been around without a law school (181 years) almost as long as it has been around with a law school (some 190 years). Harvard would add a shoe shine school if they could get away with it and it would enhance student enrollment and public funding. The 181 years of Harvard without a law school was not an accident, nor is the lack of a Nobel Prize in law. Law is not an academic subject.

One can earn an advanced legal degree in Federal income taxation. Imagine if that knowledge were lost to the human race. “Lost to posperity is the exact income level of the phase out of the pernsonal exemption.” Law is intellectually about on par with acounting.

Now let us proceed to our brilliant Constitution. I have great respect for the United States Constitution. However, you must admit much of it is simple proscription (the President must be 35 years old), nothing other than what some people believe is desirable, clearly expressed. Other parts are raw compromise. The Senate and House is not some sort of genius governance construct deducted from prime principles. Sparsely populated states wanted state representation in the federal scheme. More populated states wanted population representation. The compromise was inelegant and unprincipled, simple splitting of the issue – two houses. I think the constitution is so great because of the starting point of the Framers: Rationalism, the Enlightenment, Individualism; given those premises they could hardly create anything less than the Constitution, not due to super brainpower by any person. The smartest guy in
Nile Egypt would come up with wholly different institutions and procedures.

Why do we hold lawyers in such high regard? I read in the Wall Street Journal that some law firms are outsourcing legal work to India because they have an Anglican common law education and India lawyers are much less expensive because lawyers there have a lower social position than in the US. Lawyers have a lower earning power and social position in Japan, India and many other countries. My pet theory is this: prestige and social position to a great extent follows earning power. Before electricity, entertainers were not rich and were viewed with social disapproval. Who has not heard of the actors not welcome boarding house? However, with the introduction of the movie, TV, radio, and recorded performance, performers were able to glean huge sums of money. A performance became like a product which would be manufactured or stamped out by a factory in the millions, causing a great accumulation of wealth in the actor. I remember when the world press realized that the Beatles were not only changing music but were getting rich and buying Rolls in funny paint.

Today some lawyers rank among the wealthiest of citizens. Like entertainers, their social standing has risen with their money and political power.

However, highly paid and credentialed lawyers do not necessarily make for the best legal product. If you were charged with a crime and the punishment might be death would you want the Harvard educated or the charismatic? If your parent died after taking a prescription drug would you want the academic or the proven trial lawyer?