Coyote Blog

My guess is that there are no new cocktails under the sun, but I have not found anything similar out there so here is my current favorite homegrown concoction.  Call it a Coyote Cocktail if it has not been named yet.   I suppose it is sort of kind of like a Sidecar but I actually started from an Old Fashioned to get here:

• 2 parts Bourbon (I think a slightly sweeter one like Makers Mark works well)
• 1 part Cointreau
• 1 part fresh grapefruit juice (we have a tree so this is easy)
• a couple dashes of orange bitters

stir over ice.

A lot of restaurants in my area are serving slightly spicy tequila drinks, making Palomas or Spicy Margaritas with pepper-infused tequlia.  We have home-infused a bottle of tequila with peppers and really like it.  Our first try was a disaster -- we put 2 or 3 small dry peppers in bottle of tequila and let it sit for 5 days.  Mistake!  That is way too long.  A day is all that is needed for a good infusion and a nice level of spice.  We held onto the five-day flamethrower tequila.  It is fun to serve as a shot to friends who think they are manly for pounding Jagermeister.  Really gets their attention.

As an awful aside, apparently my son and his friends at college drink some concoction made of Jagermeister and Red Bull.  I am told this is a standard at clubs nowadays.  gahk.  Possibly even worse than the Schmidt Beer I drank occasionally at college when we were short on cash.

The AZ Republic has some of the first information I have ever seen on the nature of Phoenix light rail ridership.  The first part confirms what I have always said, that light rail's primary appeal is to middle and upper class whites who don't want to ride on the bus with the plebes

Light rail has changed the demographics of overall transit users since the system opened in 2008, according to Valley Metro.

Passengers report higher incomes than bus riders, with more than a quarter living in households making more than $50,000 a year. Many riders have cars they could use.

The 20-mile system running through Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa recorded more than than 14 million boardings last year. Still, census data estimate less than one-third of 1 percent of Phoenix commuters — or about 2,000 people — use rail as their main transportation to work.

.0033% huh?  If we built similar facilities to serve everyone, it would only cost us about $420 billion at the rate of $1.4 billion per third of a percent.

But I thought this next bit was the most startling.  I always had a sneaking suspicion this was true but never have seen it in print before:

While the much larger bus system reaches most corners of the Valley, light rail connects specific destinations along a single line. Nearly half of light-rail riders are enrolled in college.

I must have missed this in the original sales pitch for the light rail line: "Let's pay $1.4 billion so ASU students can get to more distant bars."   Note that by these numbers, students likely outnumber commuters 10:1.  Doesn't bode well for light rail extensions that don't plow right through the middle of the most populous college campus in the country.

Postscript:  They don't break out people riding to get to sporting events downtown, but sporting events make up most of the largest traffic days on the system.  From my personal acquaintances, many people use light rail as a substitute for expensive downtown parking at sporting events, parking (often semi-illegally) near light rail stops and taking the train the rest of the way in.  On the whole, its not very compelling as a taxpayer to be helping to subsidize someone else's parking.  And from a municipal fiscal standpoint, it means that light rail fares may be cannibalizing (on a much greater ratio than 1:1 given the price differential) parking fees at municipal parking lots.

I thought this was pretty clever, and probably took some guts as this person will likely get a lot of criticism on campus.  Princeton student Tal Fortgang writes "38 Ways College Students Enjoy ‘Left-Wing Privilege’ on Campus."  A small taste:

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my political persuasion most of the time.

2. I can spend my entire college career taking only classes with professors who think exactly as I do.

3. I can take classes and earn degrees in departments that are designed to line up exactly with my worldview.

4. I can be sure that an overwhelming majority of the material I am assigned to read for class will confirm what I already believe.

5. My professors will assume that I already think just like them, and use examples and anecdotes that testify to our philosophical uniformity.

6. I can almost always be sure that my professor will present or corroborate my side of a debate.

7. I will likely never have to make the choice between writing what I believe to be true and writing what I think will get a good grade.

In the same vein:

Yeah, neither do I.

Law professors Stephen J. Schulhofer and Erin Murphy are trying to update the criminal code when it comes to sex offenses, believing current definitions of rape and sexual assault are antiquated. The focus of their draft is on what constitutes consent. It adopts the "yes means yes," or "affirmative consent" model that was passed in California last year.

The California law applies only to college campuses, however. Schulhofer and Murphy aim to take that definition of consent — which says that before every escalation of a sexual encounter, clear and convincing consent must be given — to the state or federal level. No one actually has sex this way, requesting permission and having it granted perhaps a dozen times in a single encounter.

But the theory that millions of Americans are having sex wrongly has gained currency among campus activists. This new attempt to alter the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, a highly influential document that has been adopted in whole or in part by many states' legislatures, is part of a push to bring authoritarianism into the bedroom.

I often argue that our political parties are not just internally inconsistent (ie they simultaneously hold positions whose logic essentially contradict themselves) but they are inconsistent across time.  This is a great example of the latter.

Arizona has one of the worst asset forfeiture laws in the country, essentially allowing law enforcement to help themselves to any money or real property that takes their fancy, and then spend it on anything they like.   For example, one AZ sheriff is spending the asset forfeiture stolen money** on buffing up his image by providing scholarships, even though such scholarships sure seem to be specifically prohibited as a use for the money.  You can think of this as pure PR - give 1% of the stolen money to some worthy cause so no one will question what you do with the other 99%, or more importantly question why they hell you had the right to take it without due process in the first place.

The Cochise County Sheriff's Office is providing nine high school students with college scholarships financed by money and assets seized from people suspected of illegal activity.

The $9,000 for scholarships is paid from the county's anti-racketeering revolving fund. State law specifies that cash in this account is to be used for things like gang and substance-abuse prevention programs and law enforcement equipment.

So, how do the scholarships fit the bill?

Though federal law appears to prohibit such a use of the money, Cochise County says the spending is permissible because it plays a role in substance-abuse prevention....

[The IJ's Paul] Avelar agreed.

The categories that specify how the money should be spent are "incredibly broad," allowing for a gamut of expenditures, he said.

"It's very loosey-goosey on what they spend it on," Avelar said. "They have the ability spend it on a lot of things that we might not think are wise expenditures of public money."

But McIntyre said that it's essential that counties retain broad spending power over this money, because "local elected officials are in a much better position to determine what priorities need to be addressed than people outside of the county."

"And additionally, the reality is that if the local voting populous doesn't agree with the use of those funds or the priorities that have been set by these decision makers, they have the ultimate remedy to vote us out," McIntyre said.

The last is a total joke.  First, most sheriff's offices refuse to provide any comprehensive reporting on their seizure and spending activities, so without transparency there can be no accountability.  And second, this is a classic redistribution scheme that always seems to get votes in a democracy.  Law enforcement steals this money from 1% of the citizens, and spends it in a way that seems to benefit most of the other 99%.  It is exactly the kind of corrupt policy that democracy consistently proves itself inadequate to prevent -- only a strict rule of law based on individual rights can stop this sort of abuse.

** While the forfeitures are legal under the law, that does not make them right.  The law is frequently used by one group to essentially steal from another.  Allowing police to take money at gunpoint from innocent (by any legal definition, since most have not been convicted of a crime) citizens is stealing whether it is enabled by the law or not.

I grew up in the Deep South (in Houston -- for outsiders, Texas acts like the South when one is east of I-35 and then is more like the West).  Though my immediate family was fairly open-minded, I was surround by a scolding Southern Baptist culture that seemed deeply offended by everything -- dancing, drugs, drinking, youth behavior, movies, TV, games -- you name it.  I remember visiting aunts and uncles and cousins who were in a perpetual state of being offended.  And it carried over into the whole political culture of the place -- it seemed there was always some debate about book or textbook passage that needed to be banned to save the delicate eyes and impressionable brains of the children.

Going to college in the Ivy League was a breath of fresh air.  I never cottoned much to the authoritarian command and control favored by many at college, but I loved the liberal atmosphere of tolerance for most any speech or behavior.

Little would I have believed it, but college students today now sound exactly like my Southern Baptist aunt.  They are humorless and scolding and offended by virtually everything.  Many of the same pieces of literature those good Texas Baptists were trying to censor from school curricula in my day because they conflicted with religious doctrine are now being censored by good campus Progressives because they might be triggering.   What a bizarre turn of events.

Ian McEwan had a nice line in his graduation speech at Dickinson:  "“being offended is not to be confused with a state of grace — it’s the occasional price we all pay for living in an open society.”

In 1984 I graduated from college, ending the period of my life with the most intimate and sustained contact with hard-core progressives (less intimate contact continues to this day, mainly trying to save my business from the laws they pass).

If you had asked me to predict where progressives would be in 30 years, one thing I would never have guessed is that progressives would be in the vanguard of trying to re-establish anti-blasphemy laws in this country.

Also, more good thoughts on this same phenomenon here.

From the Onion

Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus.

A while back I wrote

Universities are, if anything, institutions based on ideas and thought.  So it has always been amazing to me that university diversity programs focus not on having a diversity of ideas, but on have a diversity of skin pigment and reproductive plumbing.  In fact, if anything, most universities seem to be aspiring towards creating an intellectual monoculture.

In the late 1970's, I guess it was OK to mock Islam because Gary Trudeau sure did it a lot in his Doonebury comic.  I remember one panel where the Iranian Chief Justice was in the states for his college reunion, telling his old school mates he stayed in such great shape by "flogging" rather than jogging.

Today, though, the Left seems to feel that Islam is off-limits and even needs their protection.  It's OK to mock Indiana for not forcing every photographer to work gay weddings but God forbid anyone mock countries that kill gays just for being gay.   In Trudeau we have an icon of the 1960's radicals advocating for limits on free speech and for blasphemy laws.  Too bizarre for words.  Eugene Volokh has a good commentary on Trudeau's remarks.

Look, sometimes commentators like myself adopt a sort of feaux confusion on the actions of folks we disagree with.  But I am being honest here -- I really, really don't understand this.

I will say that I think this position tends to support a pet theory of mine.   Remember that I start with a belief that American Republicans and Democrats are not internally consistent on their politics, and not even consistent over time (e.g. Republicans opposed wars of choices in Kosovo under Clinton, supported them under Bush in Iraq, and then opposed them again under Obama in Libya).

So here is my theory to explain many party political positions:   Consider an issue where one party is really passionate about something.  The other party might tend to initially agree.  But over time there is going to be pressure for the other party to take the opposite stand, whether it is consistent with some sort of party ideological framework or not.   After 9/11, the Republicans staked out a position that they thought that Islam as practiced in several countries was evil and dangerous and in some cases needed to be subdued by force of arms.  In my framework, this pushed Democrats into becoming defenders of modern Islam, even at the same time that domestic politics was pushing them to be critical of Christian religion as it affected social policy (i.e. abortion and later gay marriage).  Apparently, the more obvious position of "yeah, we agree much of the Islamic world is illiberal and violent, but we don't think we can or should fix it by arms" is too subtle a position to win elections.   I fear we have gotten to a point where if either party is for something, they have to be in favor of mandating it, and if they are against something, they have to be in favor of using the full force of government to purge it from this Earth.  And the other party will default to the opposite position.

The counter-veiling argument to this is two words:  "drug war".  This seems to be a bipartisan disaster that is generally supported by both parties.   So my framework needs some work.

Well, it is time for many of our seasonal operations to open over the next few weeks so I have been running in circles on business issues.  Also, I must confess that blogging is becoming a sort of Groundhog Day (the movie) experience, with the same arguments circling over and over.  How many more times can I write, say, a long article about how minimum wage increases are a terrible anti-poverty program only to get one line emails asking me why I hate poor people.  So blogging will be light as I do real world work and try to recharge.

I will leave you with one note of optimism, from Mark Perry.  I went to college in the nadir (1980) of the American beer industry, where a small oligopoly of mediocre beer producers was protected by government legislation.  It was a classic example of how regulation drives monopoly, consolidation, and loss of choice.  With deregulation, the American beer industry has exploded.

As an aside, my current go-to beer is actually Brazilian, Xingu Black

The Supremes are going to discuss whether displaying a confederate battle flag on your custom license plate is protected by free speech.

In 1980 when I went up north to school I had a Confederate battle flag on my wall.  I keep calling it the battle flag because in fact the flag you are thinking about (the one on the Dukes of Hazard's car) is not actually the flag of the Confederate nation.  Most folks could not describe the original Confederate flag under torture (here it is).

So the flag you are thinking about, and the Supremes are considering, was actually based on the battle flags of certain state militias, like that of Virginia and Tennessee.  It was also used by the Confederate Navy, and was incorporated into a redesign of the official Confederate flag late in the war.

Anyway, there were a couple of reasons a young Texan might put up this flag in his northern dorm room.  First, it is awesome looking.  There are a lot of bad flags in the world, but this is a great-looking flag.  Second, at the time it represented the southern pride of a lot of us who found ourselves displaced and living in that odd northeastern college culture.  It never represented (at least at the time) anything racist for me.  For southerners (many of us raised, without knowing it, on the Lost Cause school of Civil War historiography) it represented pride and pluck and scrappy determination.

Anyway, I don't remember getting any pushback on the flag at the time.  Over the years, though, I came to recognize that the flag was seen by many as a symbol of racism.  Part of that was my increasing awareness but a large part was shifts in society and its perceptions -- remember the Dukes of Hazard was a real, popular network show that could likely never get made today.   I suppose I could have retained the flag as a symbol of what I thought it was a symbol for, and just ignored other peoples' opinion.  But at some point, I realized that other peoples' good opinion of me had value and that I needed to acknowledge how they saw the flag and put it away in a box.

Which brings me back to license plates.  If a state is going to create a license plate program where people can make statements with their license plates, then people should be able to make the statement they want to make.  I know there are folks in the south who honestly still cling to the symbolism I used to attach to the Confederate battle flag.  But let's leave those folks aside.  Let's assume for a moment that everyone who wants to display this symbol on their car is a racist.  Shouldn't we be thrilled if they want to do so?  Here would be a program where racists would voluntarily self-identify to all as a racist (they would even pay extra to do so!)  What would be a greater public service?

I make this same argument when people want to ban speakers from campus.  If people are willing to come forward with evil thoughts and intentions and announce them publicly, why wouldn't we let them?  It's is fine to want to eliminate evil from the Earth, but shilling banning hateful speech doesn't do this -- it only drives evil underground.

Postscript:  I actually started thinking about this driving down I-40 from Knoxville to Nashville yesterday.  In a bend in the road, on a hill, there is a large home.  Their land goes right out to the bend in the highway, and on that bend they have put up a huge flag pole with a big Confederate battle flag.  You can see it from miles in each direction.  I didn't get a picture but there are plenty on the web. From searching for it, there are apparently similar installations on private land in other states.  As I drove, having nothing else to do, I thought a lot about what message they were trying to send.  Was it just southern pride?  Were they really racists?  If they weren't racists, did they know that many would think them as such?  And if so, did they even care -- was this in fact just a giant FU?

 Update:  Fixed the typo in the last line.  Did I mean chilling?  Not even sure.  Banning is what I meant.

Via Reason, a college rugby team has been banned because, gasp, they sang boorish songs when drunk:

The University of Mary Washington permanently cancelled its student rugby team after evidence surfaced that team members had engaged in sexist chanting at an off-campus house party. All members of the team were also required to attend sexual assault training.

But while UMW's rugby team has 46 players, only 8 of them were even in attendance at the party—meaning that not only did a public university punish a few students for engaging in inappropriate (though constitutionally-protected) speech, it also punished other students who had nothing to do with said (again, constitutionally-protected!) speech.

The microaggression unfolded last November at a house party near the Fredericksburg, Virginia, campus, according to Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan. Some students, likely drunk, sang a demeaning song about raping corpses and "wiggling it" inside whores—inappropriate stuff, to be sure, though not really targeted at a specific entity in a threatening way. The chant apparently has its origins in rowdy "pub" songs. It's a curious tradition, though not one intended to inspire actual malice, it seems.

I played rugby for several years (for Harvard Business School, of all places) and never encountered a rugby club that did not have a repertoire of raunchy pub songs.  It was a tradition, which I presume was copied from the mother country, that teams would share in singing of these songs over many drinks after a match.   While often crude and offensive, they were known to all to be so.  I can't remember anyone being somehow confused between what was in those songs and what was a correct way to comport oneself in society.  We sang crude songs for a few hours, and then went back to crafting strategies for water meter manufacturers.

Leaving aside the first amendment issues and whether there is really any harmful behavior here, think for a moment about the nature of crime and punishment here.  College rugby teams have comported themselves as such for literally scores of years without any blowback except for occasional disdain from the blue bloods (the inciting of which is probably half the reason for the exercise in the first place).  No laws or written rules were broken and the team was comporting themselves in a way that had been at least implicitly tolerated for generations.  Then all of a sudden the team is disbanded.  No advance warning, no discussion in advance that such behavior would now be treated in the future as illegal.

Well, that is kind of over-dramatic.  I will certainly continue to run sometimes.  I really enjoy running in cities where I travel as much as an exploration tool as for exercise.  But my knees are shot and I barely got through the half-marathon last weekend in 3 hours.  We had a great time though and Disney does a great job running these races.  And just about everyone wears costumes, which is fun.   It was worth the pain to do this event one last time with my daughter before she goes off to college.  Plus I now have another really awesome princess medal.

I am off for Disney World to run in the Princess Half-Marathon this weekend.  My knees feel like I have four flat tires and have been driving on the rims for 20 miles, but I am running this last time with my daughter.

We started running this race together a number of years ago and the first time we ran was something of a breakthrough for my daughter -- the experience dedicating herself to a goal and the confidence she gained from achieving it led to many knock-on benefits, so much so that it became the core of her college essay.

That essay began with the story of she and I making our first tutu together.  At the time, I did not even know what tulle was, but we watched a YouTube video about how to make a tutu without sewing and we eventually got it done.   She ran the whole race, as she has ever since, with a tutu and a tiara on.  (By the way, I am always amazed at the niches in the Internet that I never knew existed.  This is the video we watched to make the tutu -- it has 2.4 million views!  We basically followed this process except we used a piece of underwear elastic for the waist band rather than ribbon).  My job is to cut the tulle into strips -- we make them twice as long as she wants the skirt, and then my daughter ties them to a piece of elastic in the middle, so two strands hang down.

The challenge has increasingly become to use different colors than any past tutu.   The last one looked more like a skirt.  This one she wanted to be shorter and puffier, more like a ballet tutu.  It is hard to capture it well in a picture to get the detail but this is the result:

Not to worry, your humble correspondent will be in costume too.  I have some great Darth Vader running gear I will be wearing.  I wore a rebel pilot outfit last time.  Disney really hit on something with these runs -- they have 8-10 different ones now.  The Princess half-marathon is still the most popular and sells out in about 45 minutes.  It was as hard to get a spot in it as it is to get Comicon tickets.  But given the popularity, there are whole web sites specializing in themed and costumed running gear.  I love capitalism.

PS -- I am still amazed she takes on all this extra weight and drag for fashion.  When I have to run this far, I am tempted to cut off the ends of my shoelaces to save weight.

PPS-- Here was the first one, at the finish line (a little worse for wear)

The Left has absolutely bent over backwards to make sure we understand that Islamic terrorists are not representative of the Muslim religion or Islam in general.  Further, they seem really quick to excuse or at least ignore a lot of really awful illiberal behavior by Islamic nations, including systematic abuse and near-enslavement of women, execution of gays, harassment of any non-Muslims, or even of Muslims from competing sects, etc.   We need to be tolerant, dontcha know.

So why is it that all this absolute cascade of bad behavior by various Muslims is not representative of true Islam but a tiny tiny few American males who are violent sex offenders are somehow totally representative of the entire gender, such that all men have to constantly humble ourselves, avoid speaking certain facts, apologize and bear guilt, go to college re-education programs, etc?

...Probably Nick Saban, coach of the University of Alabama football team at around $7 million a year.  But Jim Harbaugh, recently hired by the University of Michigan for a $5 million base salary, apparently has incentives that can take that up to $9 million a year.

Apologists will argue that this is all OK and shouldn't worry taxpayers at all because these guys are paid out of the college athletic budget which is generated from sports revenue rather than taxes.  Hmm.  Any state parks agency probably generates millions or tens of millions each year in user fees.  Should we be OK with the state employee who runs those agencies making $5 million because it comes out of user fees rather than taxes?  Money is fungible.  $5 million more spent on a football coach is $5 million less that can fund other University services.

(PS - in the US Today ranking of college football coach salaries, 19 of 20 are at public institutions).

In response to the twin notions that sexual assaults are a) increasing and b) particularly prevalent on college campuses where a "rape culture" supposedly exists, comes this recent report from the DOJ on sexual assault prevalence among college aged women.

Update:  For a university the size of UVA (20,000 students, presumably 10,000 women) these data imply about 200 of the current students will be sexually assaulted over their four years.  This is a depressingly large number, and makes one wonder with this many examples to choose from how Rolling Stone managed to find one case that was so obviously heavily embellished (at a minimum) or fraudulent.  200 is, however, an order of magnitude smaller than the 2000 that would be predicted by the "1 in 5" number which is repeated so uncritically by public figures.

As to the declining trend, I understand the issue of under-reporting, though most folks in the know seem to think this type of study (which includes unreported cases) is more accurate than reported crime figures.  But for under-reporting to affect the trend (rather than the absolute numbers) one would have to argue that the reporting percentage is declining, something for which I have never seen evidence and which is a proposition that defies common sense.  Over the last decades, sexual assault victims have gone from being shamed to being protected to being put on a pedestal (given our current fetishization of victimization).  It is hard in this environment to imagine sexual assault reporting rates going down.

In the continuing battle to give males in college roughly the same due process rights as possessed by a black man in 1930's Alabama, my alma mater was one of the last holdouts fighting the trend.  No longer:

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education wrapped up its investigation of Princeton University's sexual harassment and assault policies. The findings were unsurprising, though still striking: the government essentially accused the university of violating federal anti-discrimination law by extending too much due process to accused students.

Princeton had been one of the last hold-outs on the standard of proof in college rape trials. The university required adjudicators to obtain "clear and convincing" proof that a student was guilty of sexual assault before convicting him. That's too tough, said DOE. As part of its settlement, Princeton is required to lower its evidence standard to "a preponderance of the evidence," which means adjudicators must convict if they are 50.1 percent persuaded by the accuser.

Princeton's old policy was also criticized by DOE for allowing accused students to appeal decisions, but not accusers. Both this practice and the evidence standard were revised under Princeton's new, DOE-compliant policy.

Note that Princeton's former policies on burden of proof and restrictions on double jeopardy roughly mirror the due process rights Americans have in every other context except when they are males accused of sexual assault on a college campus.

I wish Princeton had held out and forced the Administration to test this in court.  I certainly would have donated to support the legal fund.

I am not even going to excerpt it.  You need to read Ken Whites satirical take on Miles Sisk demanding that bloggers who made animated GIF's critical of student government be thrown into concentration camps, or something.

How are people like this going to actually survive in the real world?  They are going to leave college and just sort of explode, like deep sea creatures brought up to the surface.  Someone please tell me that Miles Sisk is actually a clever performance artist.

Update:   OK, one little excerpt:

Sisk has not provided any evidence that the mean bloggers have made threats of harm as opposed to trite gifs and memes about banal student politics. "If a privileged kid who is a student leader at a good university feels he has to demand that the state protect him from criticism, what possible hope do most Americans have of governing themselves?" asked Yale historian Margaret Scott. "Freedom is hard. Self-governance is hard. Living together without resorting to tyranny is hard. Our founders pledged to each other 'our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor' to achieve those goals. This kid won't pledge to put up with someone mocking student government with a Parks & Recreation screencap."

Scientists agreed that Sisk's lack of fortitude — which was described as "pusillanimous," "snivellingly serfish," "contemptibly spineless," and "typical for a sophomore" — marked the rise of an American citizen unable to carry the burdens of representative government, individual rights, or unregulated daily interactions with other humans. "It's not just his craven thirst for totalitarian rule," agreed Duke professor Wil Trent. "It's also the abject ignorance. Running a society together requires a baseline of civic literacy. When even a student leader at a good university is ignorant of the most basic rights of other citizens — game over, man. Game over."

One of the traditions of college football is that rabid student fans will paint their face, and sometimes whole body, in school colors.  So when some ASU students painted their face black (the school's uniform color for the last several years) for a college football game, one would expect that people would take this as an entirely normal event, an expression of school loyalty.  One would NOT expect that people would immediately assume the face-painting was some sort of racist statement.  I mean, really, you wouldn't expect the rules to be different just because the school's uniform color happened to be black, right?

Well, you would be wrong.  In this hyper-sensitive world of people SEEKING to be offended, people got offended.

PS - when our Coyote's hockey team makes the playoffs, they have a thing called a "white out" where everyone dresses in white, face paints in white, etc.  Next time they make the playoffs (which may be a while), I think I am going to be offended.

Last week, I wrote about how much liberal college sex vigilantism reminds me of the right-wing 1970's Death Wish vigilantism.  Here is Ezra Klein proving my point:

For that reason, the law is only worth the paper it’s written on if some of the critics’ fears come true. Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the law’s success. It’s those cases—particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons—that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

Good God, I have had many differences with liberals on a variety of issues but I have always made common cause with them on civil rights and criminal justice issues.  I can't believe he wrote this.  What is the difference from what Klein writes and and having a 1960's southern sheriff argue that it is OK to hang a few black men because it has the benefit of making the rest of the African-American population more docile?   Last week I asked:

 It is the exact same kind of rules of criminal procedure that Dirty Harry and Paul Kersey would have applauded.  Unacknowledged is the inevitable growth of Type I errors (punishing the innocent) that are sure to result.  Do the proponents not understand this tradeoff?  Or, just like the archetypal southern sheriff believed vis a vis blacks, do women's groups assume that the convicted male "must be guilty of something".

I guess we have our answer.

This is from the Wesleyan (CT) student center.  They had a men's and women's room plus this single stall multi-gender bathroom

Please don't mistake me for a cultural conservative here.  I am not complaining about this or posting it as a sign of the apocalypse.  I actually think the one stall multi-gender bathroom (which a lot of public buildings already have but they are simply called "family" bathrooms) is a reasonable accommodation for those who struggle with the typical two gender classifications.  I did find the third gender symbol sort of funny, and only on a modern college campus would a restroom sign need 14 words of gender explanation in the (probably futile) hope of not offending anyone.

One of the most common survey questions, and one that has become a staple of everything from Presidential elections to college interviews, is "What is your favorite Book."  This is a question that you and I might (or might not) answer honestly with a friend in a bar, but almost no one answers honestly for publication.    The vast majority of the answers are public posturing, selections made to make one look bright or engaged or intellectual, and not honest answers.   Presidential candidates get asked to provide their current reading list and I would bet $100 that they have staff members huddle around working on the list that portrays their candidate the best.   I would be shocked if even 20% of these 50 answers at the link were honestly their favorite books.

I am not sure there is a way to get an honest answer, but if I had to ask the question, I would ask, "what books have your read more than once?"

PS - I do have to recognize Robin Williams choice of the Foundation novels and in particular his statement that the Mule was his favorite character in fiction.  For those who know the books (and the Foundation is definitely on my list of books I have read more than once), the Mule is a fascinating choice for Robin Williams to have made.

How do I know that average people do not believe the one in five women raped on campus meme?  Because parents still are sending their daughters to college, that's why.  In increasing numbers that threaten to overwhelm males on campus.   What is more, I sat recently through new parent orientations at a famous college and parents asked zillions of stupid, trivial questions and not one of them inquired into the safety of their daughters on campus or the protections afforded them.  Everyone knows that some women are raped and badly taken advantage of on campus, but everyone also knows the one in five number is overblown BS.

Imagine that there is a country with a one in 20 chance of an American woman visiting getting raped.  How many parents would yank their daughters from any school trip headed for that country -- a lot of them, I would imagine.  If there were a one in five chance?  No one would allow their little girls to go.  I promise.   I am a dad, I know.

Even if the average person can't articulate their source of skepticism, most people understand in their gut that we live in a post-modern world when it comes to media "data".  Political discourse, and much of the media, is ruled by the "fake but accurate" fact.  That is, the number everyone knows has no valid source or basis in fact or that everyone knows fails every smell test, but they use anyway because it is in a good cause.  They will say, "well one in five is probably high but it's an important issue anyway".

The first time I ever encountered this effect was on an NPR radio show years ago.  The hosts were discussing a well-accepted media statistic at the time that there were a million homeless people (these homeless people only seem to exist, at least in the media, during Republican presidencies so I suppose this dates all the way back to the Reagan or Bush years).  Someone actually tracked down this million person stat and traced it back to a leading homeless advocate, who admitted he just made it up for an interview, and was kind of amazed everyone just accepted it.  But the interesting part was a discussion with several people in the media who still used the statistic even after they knew it to be outsourced BS, made up out of thin air.  Their logic:  homelessness was a critical issue and the stat may be wrong, but it was OK to essentially lie (they did not use the word "lie") about the facts in a good cause.  The statistic was fake, but accurately reflected a real problem.  Later, the actual phrase "fake but accurate" would be coined in association with the George W. Bush faked air force national guard papers.  Opponents of Bush argued after the forgery became clear to everyone but Dan Rather that the letters may have been fake but they accurately reflected character flaws in the President.

And for those on the Left who want to get bent out of shape that this is just aimed at them, militarists love these post-modern non-facts to stir up fear in the war on terror, the war on crime, the war on drugs, and the war on just about everyone in the middle east.

PS-  Neil deGrasse Tyson has been criticized of late for the same failing, the use of fake quotes that supposedly accurately reflect the mind of the quoted person.  It is one thing for politicians to play this game.  It is worse for scientists.  It is the absolute worst for a scientist to play this anti-science game in the name of defending science.  

I hear Conservatives lamenting all the time that their kids can't get a good college education because academia is dominated by Liberals and liberal assumptions.  I think just the opposite is true.  Leftist parents should be asking for their money back.

I have spoken on campus a few times about topics such as climate and regulation.  One thing I have found is that students have often not heard the libertarian point of view from a libertarian.   I have done any number of campus radio station interviews as a climate skeptic, and I have similarly found is that the students I talk to have a very muddled understanding of what skeptics believe.  In most cases, I was the first skeptic they had ever talked to or read - everything they knew previously about skeptics had come from our opposition (e.g. what Bill McKibbon says skeptics believe).  This is roughly equivalent to someone only "knowing" why liberals believe what they do from Rush Limbaugh.   My son encountered a college woman last week who despised the Koch brothers, but actually knew almost nothing about them and had never actually seen their work or read their views.  Harry Reid and others she considered authorities said the Kochs sucked so suck they do.

This is just incredibly unhealthy.  Living in an echo chamber and only encountering opposing or uncomfortable positions as straw men versions propped up to be knocked down.  What a crappy education, but that is what most liberal kids get.

Not so my son the libertarian.  He is forced to encounter and argue against authoritarian ideas with which he disagrees in every class and in every social interaction.   Not just in economics and domestic policy -- there is still a lot of interventionism and authoritarianism taught in foreign policy and even in history.  Name one US president from academic lists of great presidents who did not get us in a war?