Seven rules for recording the police

Handy tips on staying on the right side of the law while recording police.

I'm a law-and-order guy, but I emphatically support the moral right of all people to record police officers who are acting in their official public capacity. I support the right to record the police because I'm a law-and-order guy.

In a free country, law enforcement officers are our employees, and they are accountable to us, and accurate  documentation of how they are doing the jobs we have hired them to do is a very good thing.

Officers who interfere with citizens exercising their right-- their responsibility to record them-- should face legal consequences themselves.

Transparency in law enforcement protects all honest citizens and public servants. 

Real Science:NASA's climate nut James Hansen is a fraud

Hansen breaking the law in "defense of the planet".
It seems that he breaks rules of scientific integrity as well.

Real Science gives NASA climate "scientist" a colonoscopy; they compare his predictions to reality, and examine his manipulation of data. Please read the whole thing. The animated image (about 20% down the page) is particularly damning.

Conclusion:

For the past 30 years, NASA climate scientists under the leadership of Dr. Hansen have demonstrated nearly complete incompetence in forecasting, and they have tampered with data to try to hide their mispredictions.

Vice-President Biden holds urgent press conference

"The height of the bear is irrelevant" noted the Vice-President.
"No bear should be armed"

Vice President Speaks Out Against the Right to Arm Bears

(Dissociated press) Vice President Joe Biden today held an urgent press conference to denounce recent efforts by right-wing groups to enforce a Second Amendment right to 'arm bears'. Biden, recently returned from a six-month series of foreign state funerals in countries without electronic communication, expressed concern about conservative activists' recent efforts to enforce the Constitution.

"I've overheard reports that the right wing is pushing for laws that allow the arming of dangerous animals" Biden explained.

"I'm all for the Constitution and all that" Biden reassured reporters, "but we have to take public safety into account. We will never accept the right to arm bears. That's not what the forefathers intended. Do you think that FDR would ever have included that when he wrote the Constitution? Here-- I'll read the whole thing. See if it's in there."

Biden pulled out a dog-eared copy that he always carries "in my pocket close to my heart", and began reading:

"When in the Course of Human Events..."

After he finished, Biden grew solemn. "Now I've got nothing against bears" the Vice-President insisted. "but bears are not reliable gun owners, despite what the NRA and the right-wing gun nuts say."

Biden noted that he'd be happy to meet with representatives of the bears-- "black, brown, polar, it doesn't matter to me-- as long as they aren't armed."

"We could call it a 'Picnic Basket Summit' Biden quipped, winking at stunned aides. "As long as there's an... escape claws clause..."

In related news, President Obama has asked the Vice-President to conduct a fact-finding mission to the South Pole as soon as possible, despite reports that electronic communication from the pole will be impossible. But before he leaves, the Vice-President has scheduled another speech to be delivered tomorrow at the National Health Club Association's annual convention in Burbank, California.

His speech will be entitled 'The Free Exercise Clause and its impact on health club revenues'.

Lawrence Krauss' book of nothing

Physicist-philosopher David Albert reviews atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss' new book A Universe From Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing.

Krauss, as you might have guessed, asserts that the universe arose from nothing, thereby obviating the need for God.

Albert, a physicist who is also a professor of philosophy at Columbia, takes Krauss apart. It's one of the more devastating book reviews I've read.

Excerpt from Albert's review:

The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise. 

Actually, "nothing" has been a topic that has been subjected to profound philosophical investigation, most notably by the scholastic philosophers. The philosophical discipline of ontology-- the study of what it means to exist and to not exist-- is devoted to the exhaustive analysis of what is meant by "nothing".  Krauss' idiotic concept of "nothing"-- he means transient absence of solid stuff--  hasn't been taken seriously by serious thinkers for a couple of thousand years.

Albert finishes Krauss off with an eloquent synopsis of what is wrong at the core of atheistic scientism:

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

One of the scandals in modern public academic discourse is that philosophical sub-literates like Krauss are taken seriously. Hopefully Albert's review evisceration of Krauss' book in the Times' Book Review is evidence that even the godless snobs at the New York Times are beginning to notice that the arguments of the New Atheists are the clearest examples yet discovered of... nothing.

"Test of Fire"

Catholic groups are fighting back against attacks on religious freedom, on marriage, and on the right to life.

Just the beginning. 

Why do we re-elect these people?

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Dan Riehl from Big Journalism:

MURDER IN CHICAGO: 

WHY RE-ELECT THESE PEOPLE?

Murder [in Chicago] is so out of control that, to the extent Emanuel discusses it at all for the camera, he's reduced to talking about reprisal killings. In short, we can't stop the killing; however, if we stop the killing that happens because of the killing, we can start making progress. Progressives have a knack for rationalizing their way out of actually dealing with any problem.

It's a revealing and sad look at the problems of the community our community-organizer-in-chief spent the largest amount of his time organizing. The result of his efforts appears to be a skyrocketing murder rate and a community that lives in fear every day--one in which women are afraid to talk on camera or cross the street to buy groceries.

I imagine both Emanuel and Obama would offer the same answer to the problem: namely simply re-elect them in their respective offices. How is that going to solve anything after years and years of liberal and progressive Democratic Party solutions that can't seem to deal effectively with any of America's problems, when they aren't making those worse?

Watch the video and judge for yourself whether these progressive Democrats are worthy of being re-elected to lead cities like Chicago down the same dead end road, over and over again.

Virtually every war-zone-charnel house municipality-- Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans,  Detroit-- is run by, and has been run by, generations of liberal Democrat hacks. The most fundamental responsibility of any city government is to keep the peace. Progressives claim to hold the solutions to our nation's problems, yet our most violent dysfunctional cities invariably have "progressive" governments.

I lived in New York City during the crime waves of the late 70's and early 80's. We had a series of idiot liberal mayors-- Lindsay, Beame, Koch, Dinkins-- crime exploded and you took your life in your hands to ride the subway to go out to dinner. One of our surgery residents at Columbia Presbyterian was robbed and shot to death walking back to the hospital after having dinner with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.

Finally, the idiot NYC electorate elected someone competent-- by definition not a liberal Democrat-- and the transformation was astonishing. I couldn't believe the change when I returned to the city. Law-abiding people had taken back the streets. Even now it remains a safe and beautiful city. My 17 year-old daughter is (as I write this) watching a show on Broadway, and will return to us alone by train tonight. I don't fear for her safety.

We need to do simple diligence as citizens and hold local elected officials responsible for public safety. And we need to hold ideologies and political parties responsible for the social consequences to which they give rise. The Democratic party, where it has governed cities, has left a swath of murder and urban mayhem and desolation. Republicans have problems as well, but they are much much better.

When will we learn?

Mockingbird at 50

Gary Furr has a nice post on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published a little more than 50 years ago.

Mockingbird is a masterpiece. It moved me deeply as a child-- I saw the movie at age nine, and read the book shortly thereafter. I didn't even know what rape was, but I knew what Atticus Finch did, and he was my hero. He still is.

Furr quotes Harper Lee:

“Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

The story resonated with me in many ways, and perhaps when I can I'll post more on it. But I have always considered the novel as something transcendent. Sometimes artists break through into Truth beyond the mundane things which men ordinarily are given to see. Harper Lee did that.

In high school, I asked my beloved English teacher (Mr. Mysrall-- God rest his soul) why Harper Lee never wrote another novel. Why did she stop with To Kill a Mockingbird?

He eyed me for a moment, and replied "She scared herself".