- A silver lining of drought.
- Hard measures or torture?
- Kelo scrubbed up and baptized.
- Blaming the victim in Kentucky.
- TMI from The Enablers.
- Movement conservatism and, what, crypto-liberals?
- Bonus.
The Wabash River gets some subterranean contribution (maybe the Pearl River, source of much of our local water), and essentially doesn’t run dry. But it’s really low in this drought – and it’s surprisingly beautiful.
First, with sandbars exposed, it meanders back and forth charmingly. Second, with topsoil not being rinsed into it, it’s running clean. That’s really rare.
I now see why people once wrote songs about the Wabash. The muddy, silty open storm sewer I’ve known most of my life, carrying Indiana soil off toward the Gulf of Mexico, is much less songworthy.
The New Yorker interviews Jose Rodriguez, who presided over “enhanced interrogation techniques” he now calls “Hard Measures.”
Is Mr. Rodriguez engaged in Euphemism in the First Degree, Causing Bodily Injury (a crime I just made up), or is “enlightened opinion” all wet? I feared I’d find a crude argument that “it isn’t torture when guys in white hats do it,” but his position is more subtle – and for my taste, chillingly bureaucratic and matter-of-fact – than that.
Something very interesting is happening.
There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.
But there’s something brewing that looks like it might be a blueprint to effectively take on the financial services industry: a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain. I can’t speak for how well the program will work, but it’s certaily been effective in scaring the hell out of Wall Street.
Under the proposal, towns would essentially be seizing and condemning the man-made mess resulting from the housing bubble. Cooked up by a small group of businessmen and ex-venture capitalists, the audacious idea falls under the category of “That’s so crazy, it just might work!” One of the plan’s originators described it to me as a “four-bank pool shot.”
Matt Taibbi, From an Unlikely Source, A Serious Challenge to Wall Street, Rolling Stone.
I can’t let this go without comment. Like the author, I admire the creativity of the thought, and “can’t speak for how well the program will work.” I’ll bet it will have some serious unintended consequences. (I’m starting to think serious unintended consequence are the natural result of the cry “What else are we going to do?! Any alternative’s got to be better than this!”)
What’s worse from my perspective is that it builds on Kelo v. City of New London, toward which case my opinion agreed, at least in conclusion, with the unfavorable “public reaction.”
I hate to see Kelo scrubbed up and baptized; I want it consigned to hell. This audacious plan also may have a California constitutional hurdle to clear.
The Courier-Journal (Louisville) reports:
Frustrated by what she felt was a lenient plea bargain for two teens who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her and circulating pictures of the incident, a Louisville 17-year-old lashed out on Twitter.
“There you go, lock me up,” Savannah Dietrich tweeted, as she named the boys who she said sexually assaulted her. “I’m not protecting anyone that made my life a living Hell.”
Now, Dietrich is facing a potential jail sentence, as the attorneys for the boys have asked a Jefferson District Court judge to hold her in contempt because they say that in naming her attackers, she violated the confidentiality of a juvenile hearing and the court’s order not to speak of it.
A contempt charge carries a potential sentence of up to 180 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Bully for her! Eugene Volokh explains here why the court order is unconstitutional and the 17-year-old cannot be punished for revealing the names.
This reminds me of a story told by Notre Dame Law Professor Charles Rice 25-30 years ago. He described how his busy wife was doing her bit to close down porno shops. Observing that the parking lots are always full of out-of-county plates, she made it a point to honk and wave every time she saw a guy entering or leaving, leaving many a man thinking “Oh, s***! Who do I know with an SUV from St. Joseph County?”
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I don’t typically do “the world is going to hell because someone, somewhere, is having illicit sex” stories. (Really. You can check it for yourself.) But this AP story really irked me.
It’s not so much the Olympians, who apparently are not just randy, but brazen, too. What bugs me is their enablers, including this cutesy story with a tone that is the polar opposite of “the world is going to hell because someone, somewhere, is having illicit sex.” The Brazilian doctor in particular is an idiot:
(Sex) is common at the Olympics. It’s necessary. It’s natural,” Dr. Joao Olyntho Machado Neto said. “If you are going to be healthy people, why not make sex? … Brazil is very tolerant with sex as a country. We don’t have Victorian minds and we’re not religious.
C.S. Lewis thought it unrealistic to expect Christian sexual standards from non-Christians, and I think I’ve got that lesson down pretty well. But while everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, they’re not entitled to their own facts. No, doc. Sex is optional for every individual. Even for testosterone-crazed athletes. Repeat after me: you will not get warts on your hands or go stark raving made if you practice chastity.
One of the main arguments that dissidents conservatives have made for at least the last ten years (and some for much longer than that) is that movement conservatism and temperamental, philosophical conservatism are not at all the same thing. “Going left” grants that movement conservatives have essentially been right that conservatism in this country is whatever they pretend that it is for the current election cycle or presidential administration. It would create the impression that dissident conservatives were ultimately the crypto-liberals that the enforcers of movement ideology claimed that we were. It would be a serious mistake to give that impression, since nothing could be more false.
Daniel Larison, Obamacons and Dissident Conservatives at the America Conservative blog.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 