A quick thought

Throwing judges out of office for a single unpopular decision may be reasonable in isolation (or valid in a specific case), but sets a horrible precedent for when the popular opinion isn't on your side.

The Wisconsin Recall

Quoth my fellow Williams grad Emily:

When Barrett conceded, I started crying. Not because I necessarily will be affected by Walker’s horrible excuses for policies, but because my students will be. My students depend on BadgerCare and WHEDA. Their parents are overwhelmingly either a) unemployed, b) on a fixed income, or c) working in jobs that benefit from union support (i.e. janitors, factory workers, etc.). 

This morning, my 3rd graders (3rd graders are 8-9 years old, FYI) had an intense discussion about Walker and Barrett. They decided unanimously that if they could vote, they would vote for Barrett. I had to pretty much sit out this discussion due to my AmeriCorps restrictions on discussing politics while on the clock. One student said, “Walker doesn’t care about anyone but rich white people.” Another student asked me, “Will you lose your job if he gets reelected?” Then they decided it didn’t matter, they didn’t need to worry - Walker would be recalled.

They believed in the democratic process. Believed. I doubt that they will still believe tomorrow morning. And for this reason, among many others, I cry for them.

 I don't agree with a lot of the above, but it is true that Walker's strategy wasn't about uniting anyone, but instead the cold calculus that he would win the battle against public sector unions. That sort of choice has a cost - seen in these 3rd graders.

Super Tuesday

This is a horrible night for Mitt Romney. It's not devastating (he'll barely win Ohio), but it's really not good. Romney can't close this sale, and every state he wins via massive negativity is one that will weaken him in the long run.

On Yale, Sexual Assault, and College Hearings

The New York Times is up with a story about Patrick Witt, the Yale Quarterback that famously chose to play against Harvard instead of attending his Rhodes Interview in Atlanta.

But Witt was no longer a contender for the Rhodes, a rare honor reserved for those who excel in academics, activities and character. Several days earlier, according to people involved on both sides of the process, the Rhodes Trust had learned through unofficial channels that a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault. The Rhodes Trust informed Yale and Witt that his candidacy was suspended unless the university decided to re-endorse it.

Witt’s accuser has not gone to the police, nor filed what Yale considers a formal complaint. The New York Times has not spoken with her and does not know her name.

This is one subject with which I am entirely acquainted, with over three years of membership in Williams's student-led Rape And Sexual Assault Network (RASAN) and four years on Williams's Honor and Discipline committees. I know enough about Yale, as well, to claim some familiarity with its campus culture, which resembled Williams in many ways.

I have nothing but condemnation for whoever leaked that story to the Times.

Sexual assault is an incredibly fraught subject at colleges - alcohol and hormones often lead to decisions that one or both parties regret. In some of these cases, explicit consent is never given, and while legal line is clear (no consent = rape), the moral line is much less so, especially when memories are blurred and intentions are misunderstood. Yet while this is true, it is also true that many, many sexual assaults on college campuses (and beyond them, in the real world) are never reported - the perpetrator is generally someone well known to the victim, unlike "stranger rape" scenarios of dark alleys, self-defense classes, and pepper spray.

But such accusations are violent to the social fabric of a campus, and for this reason often remain only as rumor, hearsay, or unproven allegations. And even if brought up: what proof can be found to differentiate between a sexual act with consent and a sexual act without it, save physical bruises? Anyone who reacts by "playing dead" in the situation has no recourse, and is faced with a variety of obstacles in the form of "friends" who would never believe that anyone would do something so horrible.

This is a recipe for all kinds of problems, because in this environment, survivors are silenced even as the forces that seek to aid them can cause miscarriages of justice in the other direction. But in my experience, the former is much more true than the latter.

We don't know what happened with Patrick Witt and the unnamed female - alcohol could make both of them unsure. But now, because of the rush to raise him up as the best example of us, the media will tear him down via an allegation that Yale MUST keep private. I have been on the inside of these sorts of discussions and conversation; what is known publicly can often vary radically from the truth - students who say they want to "take time off" but are actually suspended, for example.

All we know is that the accusation made its way to the Rhodes folks, and that they wanted a re-endorsement. We know also that Witt withdrew his application. That's all.

I can make bets, based on my own experience, about what actually happened. But that's irresponsible in a public forum. Instead, I just hope that Yale's internal processes provided justice to both parties, whatever that was in this case, and that this incident does not dissuade other survivors from coming forward.

Williamstown!

I've had a great visit back at Williams - coming back is always going to be nice, especially as the projects I was involved in continue to progress. I've had a lot of coffee visits, some good chats, and a few long conversations, all with the right people who are in town.

However, I can't say I'm that happy to have come in with the 0 degree fahrenheit weather, though apparently Madison was also slammed. Alas.

FYI: Links Feed at risk

Hi everyone,

I don't know how big the audience is of my links feed (it's at least 20 people, and probably more), but after this announcement I'm not sure what will happen to it - the sharing feature is going to get Google+'d.

My goal is mostly to maintain my ability to curate an archived RSS feed - as long as I can do that, I'll be fine.

Anyhow, just an FYI.

Could an Unmarried Woman Sink Obama?

That the title of this article, and some VERY creative spin. Let's deconstruct.

1. Barack Obama won, in part, because of his huge support in the 18-25 demographic, and in younger Americans more generally.
2. A lack of voter engagement and turnout could hurt Obama in 2012.
3. Young women constitute some young Americans.
4. Younger Americans tend to be unmarried.
5. Therefore, unmarried women were strong Obama supporters, and failing to turn out might hurt him.

Sing-off picks

First place for showmanship: Yellow Jackets

 Still waiting for a kickass opening number a la "Use Somebody" from Season 2 on the Sing-Off. Then again, there were only 8 groups left at this point; we're still looking at 11, so there may be better work in store. I hope.

First place for technical excellence: Afro-Blue.

Steve Jobs thought. Just as Jobs excelled in understanding human nature in his life, achieving raw success in a cutthroat corporate world against a range of detractors, his death is also a window into our true nature. We forgive his megalomania; his questionable labor practices; his ridiculous markups that led to gigantic profits. We do this because he found a way to build products that we LOVED - had some attachement to, both via marketing and a all-consuming attention to perfect design that literally led to pointless screws put in place solely to provide visual symmetry.

In any case, I'll keep watching, and cancer sucks. RIP Steve, and thanks for everything you did, and everything you revealed.

An Annotated RedState Posting

Original here: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/07/23/god-and-oslo/

With Al Jazeera, international news networks, and domestic networks all raising the link to an Islamic radical Norway was deporting, I put on twitter that the odds were it wasn’t an angry Lutheran doing the bombing and shooting and noted on the radio the possible links to Islamic radicals.
Turns out, the now captured shooter, who I think we can probably say is connected to the bombing, lists himself as a conservative Christian on a Facebook page.
I was wrong. But the reaction to me and others being wrong and to how the news is handling this event is quite instructive.
In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had. I don't know if "downplay" is the right word, unless you mean they specifically did not report the person's faith. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.
Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a “conservative Christian.”

And the NYT did not do that with other terrorist acts?

It reminds me of the left-wingers who always point out that Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh were Christians. They ignore the fact that McVeigh himself described himself as at best an agnostic, though more clearly an atheist, and Rudolph’s FBI file showed he belonged to an extremist cult more Aryan than Christian.

Note that. An extremist cult more Aryan than Christian? Sounds JUST LIKE Al-Qaeda. Exactly what many of us have said for years.

But why all the angst from the left on this.
There are a few instructive points.
First, those of us on the right who point out the now fairly common ties between terrorists and Islam Except not: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05#terror_05sum (scroll to the bottom) do so largely because the secular left has become willfully naive. The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam. Read Andy McCarthy if you suffer on the delusion that it is not mainstream.

With Christians, it is rather rare to see a self-described Christian engage in heinous terrorist acts. In fact, in as much as there is an Arab Street filled with muslims more often than not cheering on the latest terrorist act of radical Islamists, you will be very hard pressed to find a Christian who does not condemn the act regardless of the faith of the person doing the killing.
But then why is the left so gleeful that the Norwegian is a “conservative Christian” and why do they feel it so necessary to rub it in when they’re downright apathetic and hostile to the notion of radical Islam being rather mainstream within Islam when terrorist Christianity is largely nonexistent except among a few crazies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Bible is quite on point about this.
Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

The left doesn't embrace "activist Muslims" who kill people in the GLBT community. False comparison.

All of them can pile on and condemn the Christian because the Christian is just passing through, a stranger in a strange land.
Over the next week, assuming the budget fight in Washington doesn’t over shadow it, you can expect lots more gloating that the guy in Norway described himself as a conservative Christian. Never mind that a conservative Christian would not do what the guy did. The left, however, will not be persuaded otherwise. They are of this world and this world is all that matters until the last day.

Never mind that a true Muslim would ever do that, either. Ever.

First Day At Work!!!

Madly exciting. Lots of information. Awesome co-workers. Further comment will come once I actually know what's going on.

President Obaam just overruled the OLC

In which I lose a lot of respect for Obama: (NYT article)

WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days

“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”

 Read the rest of the article. The White House knows that most people have never heard of the OLC, and they're going on that, forgetting that the OLC is a vital, vital institution, and that being cavalier with it (or portraying it as "just another adviser") is setting all sorts of bad precedents. One of the strongest controls on the foolishness that David Addington (Cheney's Cheney: nice in person but wiht crazy ideas about executive power) was the OLC and its refusal to allow Bush a free leash, as if the President could ignore the law.

Obama is now repeating the same mistake that Bush made, and which originally made me a supporter of him, but he's gone a step further by straight-up overruling the OLC. It's a horrible, horrible precedent and the ends do not justify the means. Not. At. All.

My most recent Record op-ed

I turned 13 on Sept. 11, 2001. Sunday evening, eight years to the day after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, I ran home to Susie Hopkins after learning that the man chiefly responsible for that event had been killed in a firefight.

We live, it is said, in a purple bubble here at Williams, isolated by mountains in every cardinal direction. Our lives are enabled and assisted through the efforts of hundreds of staff who provide us with security and services while we pursue our education. While the Internet has made true isolation less possible, we are sheltered here from hunger and the worst sort of injustices that have provoked the current Arab Spring.

Nate Krisoff ’03 departed from this shelter and entered the United States Marine Corps. The plaque commemorating his life and death on Dec. 9, 2006, sits alone above one of the back doors of Thompson Chapel, dwarfed by the long lists of names from other wars in which Ephs took greater part. He was a co-captain of the swim team, known for his one-liners and the blue and white Adidas tracksuit top that he wore everywhere.
After his death, his father, a surgeon, enlisted in the Naval Medical Corps to honor his son’s memory, serving a seven-month deployment at Camp Al Taqaddum, Iraq, among other places. I know of no other Ephs who followed Bill Krissoff’s example; Williams students are rarely found in today’s armed forces.

We serve in the government, yes, and I have no doubt that many ’11s, ’12s, ’13s and ’14s will leave this valley to accomplish great feats, but many of us will remain within the security and comfort that the privilege of a Williams degree will help to provide. We will not be able to claim the words of Professor of Rhetoric Carroll Lewis Maxcy’s 1926 eulogy:

“And some, in answer to the call of country, have gone out to battle for the common rights of men against the enemy. Some of them will not return to me, for they have given all they had, and now they rest at the foot of a simple cross or lie deep below the waves. But even as they passed, the music of the chimes was in their ears and before their eyes were visions of the quiet walks beneath the elms.”

I am not suggesting that Ephs commemorate Osama bin Laden’s death by enlisting in the armed forces; my own plans do not include military service, though I respect and honor my friends from home who made that choice..... (read the rest at the Record)

After four years of broadcasting...

 Thanks, DQ.

But I should really thank the amazing members of Williams's women's soccer team. They compiled a 32-3 record at home over 4 years, and a 70-7-3 record overall. That's thanks to an amazing group of 2011s who defended and attacked marvelously, making my job a lot of fun, even when it was REALLY cold on top of the metal scaffolding I watched and broadcast from.

Happy Mountain Day!!!!!!

I am, right now, ringing the bells in the chapel to notify the rest of campus. EXCITING!!!!!!

Skip to 3:35.....I'm absolutely honored.

Problem on Facebook - possible hack

DO NOT CLICK ON A LINK IN YOUR NEWSFEED UNTIL YOU READ THIS.

Facebook News Feeds are getting taken over by a site that publishes, without warning, a story on your wall whenever you click the link in News Feed as "Will Slack likes (whatever you clicked)."

So, for example, I saw a friend from church camp on my news feed with a very non-church camp link "liked," which I clicked on, thinking that I had to be misunderstanding.

Nope, it then went up on my profile and he saw it on HIS newsfeed from me, as me liking it. Facebook needs to stop this ASAP.

What happened to studying?

From the Boston Globe:

They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.

Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours....

The article goes on to state that the specific numbers (which I would like to see) show a decline across fields, college types, and various other demographics.

I'd say, though, that in my case, the issue is the accessibility of distractions or other ways to spend my time. I know, cognitively, that I should spend 3 hours reading a book passage, but those 3 hours get filled with a phone call, an e-mail, and other distractions such that my time (and more importantly, comprehension) is more limited. For the most part, I still learn what I need to learn, and oftentimes, more of the "aha" moments occur outside of the classroom. Yet I don't study as much as I should - I feel a lesser need to memorize who said what when it is so easily Googleable.

I don't have a solution, but I have been working for the past few months on building a personal set of memorized information, like the various philosophers whose ideas supported the American government construction of rights, and placing that where no power outage can threaten it.

Eph Music Video

This is Majordomo. Three of the band's newest songs are here.

A past Eph music video (from a very different campus) is past the jump.

EDIT: Videos not displaying for some reason. Click "more" for them.

Actual Headlines, Part 1

Joan Rivers deemed a danger to national security, bumped off Costa Rica flight back to U.S.

Williams College Honors Nine Students as Gaudino Fellows

This press release is near and dear to my heart:

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Nine Williams College students have been named Gaudino Fellows and will spend January Term abroad pursuing projects in honor of Robert Gaudino, professor of political science at Williams from 1955 to 1974, who promoted the idea that to truly learn students must confront uncomfortable ideas and situations and take the intellectual and emotional risks inherent in a search for truth.

Read about the projects - each one is an amazing opportunity, and I can't wait to hear about them.