Loser pays

One small step for tort reform.  Well, I know it's not tort, exactly, but it's the same principle.  A patent troll may find itself on the hook for $200,000 in defense counsel fees.  The recent Supreme Court that made this result possible was issued by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan (with Scalia quibbling only over some footnotes): a decidedly nonpartisan decision.

Elections

Moe Lane tries to cheer us up about democracy.

A Viking Age Cookbook

If Tex's recent post about bread-making has left you feeling adventurous, nothing says 'adventure' like Vikings.

Liberation

Now that President Obama has proven Congress can’t stop him from releasing terrorists, the administration could be primed to empty out the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

It's amazing what can be accomplished once you prove to yourself that you aren't bound by the law.

Failure

Geraghty again, whose newsletter I can't link to, unfortunately--you have to sign up for it (it's free) if you're interested:

And now the mild sympathy for President Obama:  one of the most difficult tasks in life is coming to terms with a really awful failure of one's own making.  And while you can spread blame around — Shinseki, Kathleen Sebelius, Hillary Clinton -- ultimately the buck stops with him; he's the one who put all of those folks in that position. 

If Obama had come out Friday afternoon and declared he felt betrayed by Eric Shinseki, that he had trusted him to keep a close eye on his department, and that he never imagined such a distinguished veteran would prove so ineffective at combatting a culture of complacency and unaccountability . . . those of us who aren't so enamored with him could at least believe the president was learning some hard truths about the presidency.  Bureaucracies always tell you that they're making progress.  They'll always spotlight circumstances of seeming or even genuine improvement, and downplay or hide inexcusable failures.  They'll never tell you that they've screwed up royally, with catastrophic consequences, until it's on the front page. 

If you were Obama, wouldn't you be furious with Shinseki?  Would you be mad at yourself?  Mad at Sebelius?  Wouldn't failures this big prompt you to rethink how you approach these types of challenges? 

My suspicion — and fear — is that Obama can't do that.  He can't have an honest reckoning of his increasingly disastrous presidency because it would shake the foundation of his life's work.  It would mean his critics were largely right all along.

I'm angry enough with the President to enjoy reading this, but it also makes me thoughtful about how I've come to terms with really awful failures of my own making.  Shame has a tendency to make me run and hide, too, rather than own up, improve, and keep at the job.  Not all failures make me react that way, but really shameful ones do.

No Knock

A local magistrate issued a “no-knock warrant” to raid the house, partly because of the info linking the suspect to “assault-type weapons.” When the cops got there and tried to open the door, they felt something blocking it so they tossed in a flash-bang. The obstacle turned out to be … the playpen, with the baby inside. Here’s a photo of the aftermath, if you can stomach it. The suspect wasn’t even there[.]

Why not knock? The danger is that the drugs could get flushed. That danger has to be compared to other dangers.

The Road Helps

The consolation of tragedy is a renewed attention to the world.  For those of you who are interested, some pictures from the road.

Dragon's Lair

Movements of peoples

Zerohedge has some interesting maps of immigration patterns over the last century, showing the predominant country of origin of immigrants to each state in the U.S.  The overall trend is toward a massive influx from Mexico, which is hardly news, but there are lots of surprises tucked in there.  For instance, I never would have guessed that the largest flow of immigrants to New York State in 1910 would be from Russia.  It's also surprising to see what a worldwide melting pot was going on a century ago, and how little of that there is now.

Switching gears to much older immigration patterns, I've been tempted to buy the new book by Brian Sykes, "DNA USA."  I enjoyed "The Seven Daughters of Eve," which traced movements of peoples by examining their mitochondrial DNA.  The new book is getting lukewarm reviews, though, and sounds like it's got a bit of interesting DNA data patched together with a rambling travelogue.  So I'm hoping someone will publish a summary of the good stuff.  One good source is Amazon reviews, which yield the following interesting snippets:

Native Americans descended from a handful of matrilineal (mitochonddrial) clusters that arrived in the New World between about 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Three of the clusters are genetically linked to Siberians who originated in Central Asia.  The fourth cluster is linked to a Polynesian strain that arrived in the Cook Island about 3,000 years ago, from Taiwan; it is absent among the Eskimos and concentrated in Central and South America.  A fifth cluster is found in North America, but not Alaska.  It appears not to have originated from Asia, but instead from Europe--not the 16th-century European wave but a population from 16,000 years ago.  How did they get here?  Presumably not overland, across Asia and then Beringia, or they'd show up in Alaska today, but it's hard to imagine an Atlantic crossing, either, not that early.  That cluster seems like a real wild card.

Memos From The Road

Truck Stop Men's Room Graffiti, Georgia/Carolina Border
Due to family business, there has been a great deal of travel to do just lately. I may be a bit catching up.

The speech, translated

Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club channels the President at West Point:

Those who argue otherwise — are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics – or simply remember what I promised only 5 years ago and are holding me up to my promises. For it's true I promised to reach out to the Islamic World, win Afghanistan, stabilize the Middle East, and reset the relationship with Russia. None of that happened, because I’m playing the Long Game. You thought success would look different. I’m saying you’re not smart enough to realize what success is.

. . . Inside every Islamic extremist is a nice guy just waiting for a payoff. Today, as part of this effort, I am calling on Congress to support a new counterterrorism partnerships fund of up to $5 billion, because I need a slush fund to keep doing whatever we weren’t doing that night in Benghazi.

. . . With the additional resources I’m announcing today, we will step up our efforts to support Syria’s neighbors — Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq — in order to spread the trouble there. That way the solution, when it comes, will not be piecemeal but comprehensive. We must not create more enemies than we take off the battlefield. Nor must we help our allies when sucking up to our enemies will work just as well.

. . . NATO was the strongest alliance the world, made up mostly of us. Now that I’ve taken out the “us” we have more room for diplomacy. You see, we have to talk. We can’t fight any more. That’s why you owe me one. I’ve saved your life. Never again will you have to take to the battlefield. There’s no point. With any luck you’ll just have work as props from now on. To sit in front of me when I talk, to stand behind me when I talk. American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. Let’s show everyone that there’s no enemy, no danger, no peril we can’t run away from or try to buy off.

Isolated incidents

I'm starting to wonder whether there were any VA facilities that didn't falsify their waiting lists.

The audit, issued as VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned Friday, found that 64 percent of the 216 VA facilities reviewed had at least one instance where a veterans’ desired appointment date had been changed. The review found 13 percent of schedulers had received specific instructions to misrepresent wait times. …

"We've been looking for you for a long time."

A U.S. soldier is freed after five years of captivity in Afghanistan.

Instruction manuals

DNA uses three-base "words" for each amino acid building-block for a protein.  Some of the words, though, have alternative functions as punctuation, as in "start sequence" and "stop sequence."  Our remote ancestors settled into these punctuation conventions so long ago that most current life on Earth uses the same ones, but it seems that a few organisms here and there employ a different system.  That wouldn't matter so much if all their DNA did was talk to their own cells, but bacteria and viruses have a way of spreading their DNA around somewhat promiscuously.  What a mess it seems this would make, if DNA from a system with one convention for "start/stop" ended up in the genes of a system with another.  Somehow, they work it out.

Friday Night AMV

"Louder than God's revolver and twice as shiny"

Extra points for the pink HMMV.

The staff of life

I've been trying to make bread for years, but producing only unappealing bricks.  Our newest cookbook, "Twenty," by Mark Ruhlman, promised that it would remove all the frustration from breadmaking.  The main thing, he says, is to weigh the ingredients instead of measuring their volume.  Keep the flour and water at a 5/3 ratio by weight, and everything will work.  And just look at this gorgeous loaf:

The bread mystery is solved!  My loaf was so tender that it was hard to cut it even after it had rested for 30 minutes, and yet it has a nice crust. I hand-kneaded the dough on the first go-round for about ten minutes.  The "crumb," if that's what you call the size and patterns of holes, is satisfactory for the first time.  The recipe said to keep it up until a small piece could be stretched to translucency; I'm not sure I got there, but it must have been OK.  Then I let it rise in a bowl covered with cling wrap for about 2-1/2 hours.  The recipe said 2-4 hours, but stop when it's about doubled in size and doesn't spring back when you poke a hole into with a finger.  This is the stage where I normally fail, as the dough never seemed to rise properly.  Then punch it down and knead it briefly, let it rest 10 minutes with a towel over it, squish it into as small a ball as possible, and set it in a covered dutch oven that's been oiled on the bottom and sides.  (Whoops, edit, I forgot this part:  let it rise a second time in the oiled pan for 30-60 minutes, depending on how warm the kitchen is.  Without punching it down this time,) Oil the top of the dough slightly and score it with a sharp knife.  Put it in a preheated 450-degree oven for 30 minutes, covered, then reduce the heat to 375 degrees and remove the cover.  Bake a few minutes longer until it looks beautiful and an instant-read thermometer registers 200 degrees in the center.  I used one of those remote-sensor devices that buzzes when the temperature hits a set point.  Then cool it on a rack for 30 more minutes before cutting.

This loaf contains 33 ounces of white bread flour and 20 ounces of water, about 2-1/2 tsp. of salt, and 1-1/2 tsp of active dry yeast.  I really meant to use 20 ounces of flour and 12 of water, but I got confused and poured in 20 oz. of water.  No problem, I just added another 13 oz. of flour and increased the yeast and salt a bit from the original recipe's call for 2 tsp salt and 1 tsp yeast.  The final loaf was a suitable size, taking up most of the room in a large Le Creuset enameled cast-iron pot and producing sandwich-worthy slices.

This truly is a lifetime triumph.  For this and other reasons, Ruhlman's cookbook is well worth the price.  It has 20 chapters, each focusing on something basic like stock or eggs.

Cheer up, conservatives!

Jim Geraghty points to a number of hopeful signs, and advises us to quit putting our savings into gold and scouting out property in Belize:

Faith in the future is returning; we're making more new Americans — a.k.a. "babies" — again: The newest child birth rate numbers have just been released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the report indicates that there were 4,736 more births in 2013 than there were the year before, which shows an increase that America hasn't seen in five years. 

We're doing this while reducing teen pregnancy, births, and abortions:  In examining birth and health certificates from 2010 (the most recent data available), Guttmacher Institute found that approximately 6 percent of teenagers (57.4 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls) became pregnant — the lowest rate in 30 years and down from its peak of 51 percent in 1991. Between 2008 and 2010 alone, there was a 15-percent drop. 

At 34.4 births per 1,000 teenage women, the birthrate was down 44 percent from its peak rate of 61.8 in 1991. The abortion rate is down too: In 2010, there were 14.7 abortions per 1,000 teenagers, which is the lowest it's been since the procedure was legalized. . . .

The scale of the U.S. energy boom is jaw-dropping: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of new jobs in the oil-and-gas industry (technically a part of mining) increased by roughly 270,000 between 2003 and 2012. This is an increase of about 92% compared with a 3% increase in all jobs during the same period. The BLS reports that the U.S. average annual wage (which excludes employer-paid benefits) in the oil and gas industry was about $107,200 during 2012, the latest full year available. That's more than double the average of $49,300 for all workers." 

We're at the dawn of the era of private spaceflight: "SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada are building new manned spacecraft with the goal of restoring U.S. human spaceflight capability by 2017." 

. . .  As David Plotz lays out, there has never been more news published than there is today; web sites of media organizations from the New York Times to Fox News publish literally hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new items a day. Sure, you can say a lot of it's crap. A lot of anything is crap. But the barrier to entry in the news world is obliterated. We're no longer in an era where the number of pages and column-inches in the New York Times, and the time limits of the nightly news,set the limits for what the public sees and reads. Despite the commencement mobs and the political-correctness enforcers, this is a golden age for free speech.

Customer choice, space exploration department

SpaceX unveils a manned capsule.

Star Wars in a nutshell

Via Ace:

The reason the first three Star Wars movies were so terrific, and the second three sucked so bad, is actually very simple.  The first three were about rebels, shooting guns and driving fast, and speaking with American accents. The second three were about politicians, discussing treaties and holding court, and speaking with British accents. 

          -- Bill Whittle

The Unlegislature

This kind of thing almost gives me hope:

It’s no longer a crime in Minnesota to carry fruit in an illegally sized container. The state’s telegraph regulations are gone. And it’s now legal to drive a car in neutral — if you can figure out how to do it. 

Those were among the 1,175 obsolete, unnecessary and incomprehensible laws that Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature repealed this year as part of the governor’s “unsession” initiative. . . .   

“We got rid of all the silly laws,” said Tony Sertich, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board commissioner who headed Dayton’s effort.

OK, "all" surely is an exaggeration, but I commend the effort anyway.

Customer choice, education division

New Orleans was so ravaged by Hurricane Katrina that apparently people were willing to try anything. The city became a one-of-a-kind petri dish for student choice, and (to the amazement of many) accomplished an incredible feat:

Before the storm, the city’s high school graduation rate was 54.4 percent. In 2013, the rate for the Recovery School District was 77.6 percent.  On average, 57 percent of students performed at grade level in math and reading in 2013, up from 23 percent in 2007, according to the state.

How did they do it?  By spending a boatload of money? Well, in part:

When Katrina struck in 2005, the public schools in New Orleans were considered among the worst in the country.  Just before the storm, the elected Orleans Parish School District was bankrupt and couldn’t account for about $71 million in federal money. . . .

The city is spending about $2 billion — much of it federal hurricane recovery money — to refurbish and build schools across the city, which are then leased to charter operators at no cost. . . .

After Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board fired more than 7,000 employees — nearly all of them African American — while the charter schools hired scores of young teachers, many of them white recruits from Teach for America.  The fired teachers sued for wrongful termination and won a judgment that could total more than $1 billion.

So some new money definitely has been injected into the city's education system.  On the other hand, a lot of that money was spent bribing teachers to go away so they could be replaced.  The comments to this WaPo story contain the predictable complaints that school reformers just want to make a buck.  Whether or not making a buck is a bad thing, though, the fact is that the New Orleans experiment isn't about profit vs. non-profit schools.  It's not even about private vs. public schools.  There is a small voucher program in Louisiana that permits some public-school students to attend private schools, some of which no doubt are for-profit institutions.   And in some parts of the country, there may be a lot of for-profit charter schools.  But what's happened in New Orleans is that the public schools are still public and still non-profit.  The difference is that parents can now leave a failing school and choose another. All that changed was customer choice:  the power of competition and consequences for failure to improve an institution's performance.