Boobs on the Supreme Court

Mo Dowd's editorial in the Times today:

And now into the circus comes Lillian McEwen, an old girlfriend of Thomas’s.

Looking to shop a memoir, the 65-year-old McEwen used the occasion of Ginni’s weird phone message to Anita — asking her to “consider an apology” and “pray about this” and “O.K., have a good day!” — to open up to reporters.

If “the real Clarence” had been revealed at the time, he probably wouldn’t have ascended to the court, McEwen told The Times’s Ashley Parker. Especially since the real Clarence denied ever using the “grotesque” argot of the porn movies he regularly rented at a D.C. video store.

In her interviews, McEwen confirmed Thomas’s obsession with women with “huge, huge breasts,” with scouting the women he worked with as possible partners, and with talking about porn at work — while he was head of the federal agency that polices sexual harassment.

About 1973, I had a state of the art Texas Instruments SR51A hand-held scientific calculator. As part of an ongoing research project that has resulted in the discovery of notably stupid, nihilistic capabilities of personal computing devices, I found a sequence of digits when divided by zero and rotated by 180 degrees by repositioning the calculator flashed

b00bS

until the battery of the calculator fully discharged.

The State of the Union

AP, today

Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware, on Tuesday appeared to question whether the First Amendment to the Constitution imposes a separation between church and state.

In a debate at the Widener University Law School, Ms. O’Donnell interrupted her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, as he argued that the Constitution does not allow public schools to teach religious doctrine.

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” Ms. O’Donnell asked him, according to audio posted on the Web site of WDEL 1150 AM radio, which co-sponsored the debate.

The audience at the law school can be heard to break out in laughter. But Ms. O’Donnell refuses to be dissuaded, and pushes forward.

“Let me just clarify. You are telling me that the separation of church and state is in the First Amendment,” she says.

When Mr. Coons offers a shorthand of the relevant section, saying, “government shall make no establishment of religion,” Ms. O’Donnell replies, “That’s in the First Amendment?”

Sociology

I studied History, Urban Sociology and English outside my Chemistry major at Northwestern. While History and English were presented as placid areas of study, my Chicago location guaranteed real fireworks in my Urban Sociology classes. It was the early 70s, post-Moynihan report, but pre-William Julius Wilson. We read Banfield's "The Unheavenly City Revisited", Jencks' "Inequality", as well as early work by criminologist James Q. Wilson (?!); "City Politics" (with Banfield), "Varieties of Police Behavior", and papers that became "Thinking About Crime". Back then, I was a Classical Marxist (Marx-Engels), having rejected my father's Soviet-styled Leninism/Stalinism. I found much of the material humorous and misguided. I imagined bearded professors dressed in ostentatious 19th century millitary parade regalia marching spastically in all directions on a football field before 50,000 screaming Big 10 fans. The professors are carrying enormous Sousaphones, emitting a cacophony of blatts and gurgles akin to a herd of dyspeptic elephants who snorted too much coke. They collide with each other and redouble their efforts.

As a chemist, I discovered that there was no mechanistic relationship between hypothesis and theory in Sociology. (bear with me) In Organic Chemistry, a hypothesis is validated as consistent with bedrock stereoelectronic/structural theory by "watching" the electrons and noting where the atoms end up. There a few simple rules: electrons don't like to bump heads and don't dig crowds; nothing happens if it takes too much energy or effort, and the final products like to be relaxed, mellow, almost soporific. That's called "formulating a plausible reaction mechanism." Sociology is devoid of this.


Today in the Times (‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback)

For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named. Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture [rrrrriiiiinnnnnggggg: THEORY].
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others, researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference [buzzzz: HYPOTHESIS] , Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

Now if I had a moral cynicismometer with a disorder detector, maybe we could put this puppy to bed and publish in PNAS.....

Da financial industry (3)

NYT today
Stevie and Grandpa Harry read the newspaper

“Mozilo’s record penalty is the fitting outcome for a corporate executive who deliberately disregarded his duties to investors by concealing what he saw from inside the executive suite – a looming disaster in which Countrywide was buckling under the weight of increasing risky mortgage underwriting, mounting defaults and delinquencies, and a deteriorating business model.” (What does that mean, Stevie? Well, It means that Mr Mozillo doesn't have to pay back the money he borrowed....No, it's not fair....If I lent him money? I'd just ask him nicely, and he'd give my money back....Ida, don't talk that way around your grandson!!! What Stevie?...what does "find him in a swamp in Canarsie with no hands and his balls jammed down his throat" mean?)

Help me...I can't think of anything funny

From today's Washington Post:

A GOP nominee for the House of Representatives drew sharp criticism from Holocaust survivors Saturday for having participated in a Nazi reenactment group devoted to a Waffen SS division, and Democrats seized on the Ohio businessman's activities as the latest indication that the Republican Party is backing fringe candidates.

The Atlantic magazine reported Friday that Rich Iott, a member of the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program, participated in the reenactment group for several years starting in 2003. Iott told the Atlantic he joined the group with his son as "a father-son bonding thing" and left three years ago after his son lost interest.

Da financial industry (2)

There was a description of another Ponzi investment scheme in the Times today...time for another imaginary lesson from my Grandpa Harry...


Mr. Cook was telling potential investors that he was producing monthly returns of one-half to 1 percent, month after month, without a loss, over a period that included one of the worst investment markets in modern times. (Stevie, something's wrong there. Your Uncle Meyer and I can do that, but, uhhhh, we're in a different type of business.) Mr. Cook claimed to be generating those profits by performing so-called carry trades that allowed him to game the differences on currency yields in various countries. (Ha Ha, Stevie! That's funny! When I was your age, we used to get a loan in rubles, and pay it back in zloty...that's childrens's games...we even used Hanukkah gelt!) Next, he said, he used interest-free loans (Stevie, listen, this very important, When Grandpa lends money, everybody pays him back, and the interest shows what a mensch he was to lend you the money...the vig, I mean interest, is very important!) to set up a mirror-image trading position, creating a perfectly hedged transaction that, he said, produced guaranteed profits (...smoke and mirror-images....nothing, Stevie...Grandpa was just talking to himself). The free money, he said, came from a bank in Jordan, which, because of Shariah Islamic law, was not allowed to charge interest. (Don't play with those Ayyrab kids down the hall! Stevie, did Mr. Cook take your money? That's OK, Grandpa Harry will make everything right. Uhhhh, Stevie, did you put your baseball bat away in the closet like Grandma Ida said? I'll be back before dinner...sure, we'll play chess!)

snarky

Maureen "Mo" Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial columnist for the New York Times. I don't tend to read her columns; she has been described as a "snarky" liberal, with which I have no problem (snarky? I guess if you give wide media coverage to Paris Hilton and Mittel-Amerika puts Oprah Winfrey in charge of the reading list, expressions like this creep into the language), but Mo's writing strikes me as if she is unaware that American literature existed before 1966. Nevertheless, her description of a Get Motivated! seminar is interesting:

"The second time the beach ball hit me on the head, I started feeling motivated.

"Not to become an instant millionaire with the help of Jesus and some cheesy business evangelists. Rather, I felt motivated to flee the 9-hour, $9.95 Get Motivated! seminar at the Verizon Center, which had devolved into a faux beach party with DJs playing ’80s music and audience members tossing around plastic beach balls and dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Van Halen’s “Jump.”

"But I stayed in the church of capitalism, determined to hear what wisdom headliners Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Dan Rather, Steve Forbes and Terry Bradshaw would dispense."

This is the Get Motivated website:

http://www.getmotivated.com/

"The GET MOTIVATED Seminar is an action-packed, fun-filled, explosive, exciting, inspiring, skill-building business event that is world famous for its mega-watt superstar speakers and spectacular stage production. This blockbuster one-day seminar will give you proven strategies to sharpen your business skills, ignite your motivation, accelerate your effectiveness and increase your income!

"Only the BEST of the BEST appear on our stage! Dazzling pyrotechnics, live music and stunning special effects set the stage for our superstar speakers who deliver riveting presentations packed with cutting-edge skills for success.

"The GET MOTIVATED Seminar will give you and your team the latest and greatest information in the arenas of time management, leadership, goal achievement, sales training, negotiation, finances, investing, relationships, health, spiritual success, business strategies, motivation, communication skills and much more!"

Has the American educational system produced a generation of people who would be hard pressed to compete with sponges and coral?

What if you just want to take a shit and watch teevee?