Trump-haters Paranoid about Retribution

It is rare to hear any pro-Trump views on NPR Rad. The latest one-hour episode of This American Life actually squeezed in a couple of minutes at the end.

Come Retribution

Donald Trump has talked about taking retribution on his enemies since the early days of his 2024 presidential campaign. After his conviction last week in New York, his talk intensified. We try to understand what his retribution might look like by speaking with people who have the most to lose in a second Trump administration: people who believe Trump will be coming for them.

Most of the show tracked Trump-haters who were paranoid about Trump seeking retribution. They all vindictively attacked and tried to jail Trump for bogus political reasons, and they feared Trump would do the same to them. A couple talked about leaving the country to evade justice.

Listening to this would give the impression that Trump was going to send them all to concentration camps.

This is all delusional, as Trump was President for four years, and did not prosecute any of this political enemeies. Biden has prosecuted dozens.

At the end of the episode, the show tried to find some Trump supporters who were motivated by this sort of revenge. But it could not find any. It as

I started talking to people, asking everyone, what are the top things you want from Trump if he's back in office, curious if they'd say revenge.

Voter 1 - Inflation to go down, lower inflation, gas prices, migrants, the borders closed. ...

Notice what never came up-- retribution. ...

another guy I met had flown in from Indiana to support Trump during the trial. That's passion.

Zoe Chace Would you be comfortable with Trump using the levers of the federal government against his political enemies? Like, he's talked about going after the Biden crime family, or he's talked about going after the radical AGs, radical prosecutors. Would you be comfortable with that coming from him?

Jason King No, my preference would be that as soon as Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president that he pardons himself and he pardons Joe Biden.

Zoe Chace Well, Joe Biden's not on trial right now.

Jason King No, he's not on trial now. But I would like him to issue a pardon for the crimes that he has done, rather than prosecuting him, so that no one could prosecute him.

Zoe Chace I see. If Trump becomes president, you just want to move on.

Jason King Yes.

Zoe Chace Retribution doesn't seem to be motivating these Trump voters

I expect that Trump probably will pardon Hunter Biden.

The idea of retribution strikes a nerve because everyone knows these Trump prosecutions are bogus. But Trump is all about Making America Great Again, and that means stopping the political prosecutions of bogus crimes.

By comparison, the Italy prime minister is suing a historian for calling her a “neo-Nazi at heart”. If that were a crime in the USA, a lot of Trump-haters would be in jail.

Joe Biden compares to Hitler

Breitbart reports:

Former Vice President Joe Biden has used footage of Nazi dictator and mass murderer Adolf Hitler in a new campaign ad attacking President Donald Trump.

Here is a video of Jews arguing about using these Hitler analogies for political purposes.

The videos are revealing about Jewish thinking. Hating Hitler is a religion to them, along with pushing the interests of those of Jewish ancestry.

The final polls say that Biden will win in an 8-10 point landslide. This means Biden has a 96% chance of winning. We shall see.

Biden is the most dishonest and divisive candidate that we have seen in a long time. I cannot remember any other comparing his opponent to Hitler. If Biden wins, and goes thru with his plans for taxing the rich and paying slavery reparations, we could see a lot of trouble.

MeTooism is a plot to enslave men

For the last week, the mainstream news media has been filled with stories about how some White House aide had some fights with his ex-wives. The most serious specific allegation is that they had a fight 2 years into their 5-year marriage, and she ran off to the shower, and he opened the shower door, grabbed her by the shoulders, and yelled at her. She also said that the good times outweighed the bad, that he is a good man, and that she is now consumed with jealousy about his new girlfriend.

This is really trivial. It is hard to see how anyone could think that this was relevant to his White House job, even if it were true. Something else must be going on here.

I think that we are witnessing a new movement taking hold. A coalition of feminists and white knights is promoting the belief that in any dispute between a man and a woman, we must always take the side of the woman. They are aided and abetted by opportunists, who want to sell gossip or take down enemies, and cowards, who are afraid to express their true opinions.

As evidence for this, I point to the increasing ridiculousness of the accusations. It is as if the feminists and white knights deliberately want to make a spectacle out of baseless accusations, in order to make the point that we must all take the woman's side even if it has no merit.

Another target in the news is Woody Allen. The accusations against him don't make any sense, and were obviously cooked up to support a child custody dispute in court.

Furthermore, the accusers in most of these cases are pretty obviously mentally ill. The publicity is not helping them, because it is fueling their delusions, shame, anger, paranoia, and weirdo obsessions.

So what is the point of these accusations? What is the endgame that the feminists and white knights seek?

Believe it or not, there are people who genuinely believe that we should move to a matriarchal society. You see it from Hillary Clinton and others who say "the future is female". But you also see it from some men who consider themselves traditional conservatives. They seem to believe that marriages will be better if the husband is under a constant blackmail threat. That is, if things go bad and the husband does not behave as the wife wishes, then she will claim some sort of abuse, and he will be ruined. She will get the house, the money, and the kids, and he will be permanently blackballed from any respectable position in our society. His future employers will be told to fire him, as what happened to Porter, the White House aid.

What if we passed a law saying that in any dispute between a white man and a black man, the white man is always to be believed and the the black man is not allowed to testify? Everyone would agree that his would just be a trick to enslave blacks. Likewise, MeTooism is a trick to enslave men. The purpose to blackmail all men by holding them under a threat of an accusation from many years that will be impossible to refute.

Academic left suffering from paranoia

Texas complexity theorist (and typical Jewish liberal) Scott Aaronson writes:

The entire question might be moot at this point: I’m not certain that the United States will have additional elections, as opposed to Putin-style stamps of approval. But the good news is that, if there are more elections (and no mass expulsions or executions), then the country’s demographics are ultimately on our side.

IOW, unless Donald Trump takes drastic action, the Left will succeed in their plan for White Genocide.

But there’s even a further issue. Namely, while I have trouble predicting exactly what Trump and his cronies will do, I have no trouble whatsoever predicting how the academic left will respond. Namely, as Scott Alexander explained in detail, faced with a complete loss of power over the direction of the country, SJWs will respond by consolidating their power over what they still do control (e.g., academia and various tech organizations), punishing the slightest dissent or heresy with a vehemence that made them look like Care Bears previously. If that’s not what happens, come back here in a few years and tell me I was wrong.

So Clinton and the academic left are nearly pure evil, and he cannot blame Trump for anything, but he still fears Trump.

A reader responds:

Scott, the left has been tormenting you all your life, as you stated right here on this blog. Right now they are rioting and burning things in the city you live in, and making dire death threats in every direction. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if you’ve ever even _met_ a Trump supporter. And yet, you reel in terror before the one but not the other. Why is this?

You can read Scott's response, but he essentially admits that his fear of Trump is completely imaginary. He is just brainwashed to adopt stereotypical Jewish positions even if they are against all of his personal interests.

In spite of Aaronson's outstanding academic credentials, I am convinced that he suffers from a mental disorder. He lives in a pro-Trump state, but all of his colleagues are doctrinaire leftists, and he does not even know any Trump supporters.

Black lives matter, if you ignore the facts

The NY Times philosopher column argues:

The correspondence theory of truth no longer reigns supreme in philosophical circles when it comes to the study of knowledge and judgment. But it remains handy for everyday people, especially citizens. That theory says, simply, a proposal is true if it corresponds to an observation in the world. Not a bad way to go when people are trying to figure out the stuff of democratic living. After a week in which we have seen the unwarranted killing by police of two black men — Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana — I’d like to think the correspondence theory of truth would get all Americans on the same page. But this has consistently failed to be the case. Maybe we can figure out why together.

So, I say: In America, black lives don’t matter. You say: That is false. I respond, implicitly invoking the correspondence theory of truth: Just look at the rate at which blacks are killed by the police and the rate at which police officers are exculpated. ...

Chris Lebron is an assistant professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale University and the author of “The Color Of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time.” He is at work on a book on the history of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Yale students deserve better than this.

First, there is not enuf public info to determine whether those killings were warranted or not. Previous killings were widely reported to be unwarranted, such as Trayvon, Ferguson, and Freddie Gray having had narrative collapses, and the killers were not to blame.

Second, the rate of black killings says little if not compared to black crime and other black misbehavior.

Third, he is rejecting the idea that facts can illuminate the matter. If blacks feel aggrieved, then whites must do something, regardless of the facts.

Lots of people believe that they are unfairly treated, based on paranoia and subjective impressions. I post this because even Yale students are taught to disregard facts when concluding that blacks are unfairly treated.

The NY Times is run by (((Trump haters))), of course, and here is their latest attack:

But Tony Schwartz, the book’s ghostwriter, who spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump, says that it is really a work of fiction. ...

“I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If the guy is willing to lie in a book for money, and if he thinks that Trump will end civilization, then I assume that he will tell any lies he can to damage Trump.

Is anyone going to believe this hysterical paranoia?

Hillary Clinton is the biggest warmonger Presidential candidate in many decades. If Schwartz is really worried about war, then he would vote for anyone who might defeat her.

Since he is not rational, I assume that Schwartz has some sort of emotional ethnic hatred for Trump.

Secret Lizard Person denial

Gizmodo reports:

Mark Zuckerberg hosted his first ever Facebook Live Q&A today. And it went about as well as you’d expect. One of the key things we learned? Mark Zuckerberg is not a lizard person. Or so he says.

The hour-long Q&A has been viewed by nearly 6 million people, and it even had a celebrity cameo in the form of a very awkward looking Jerry Seinfeld. But the most interesting part of the Q&A was when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and billionaire, denied that he was actually a gigantic lizard posing in human form.

There have long been conspiracy theorists who believe that the world’s most powerful people are actually lizards disguised in giant human-shaped costumes. David Icke, the British conspiracy theorist, is perhaps the most famous person who contends that almost all powerful people are actually shape-shifting reptilian humanoids.

But Zuckerberg insists that he isn’t one of them.

“Mark, are the allegations true that you’re secretly a lizard? Um... I’m gonna, I’m gonna have to go with ‘no’ on that. I am not a lizard,” Zuckerberg said seeming oddly nervous.

“But keep the high quality comments coming in please, this is surely on track to be a great Live Q&A if we continue getting stuff at that level of quality,” Zuckerberg continued sarcastically.

The weirdest part is that the questions seemed to be pre-screened, at least in part. It almost seems like Zuck wanted to address the issue.

A 2013 poll found that roughly 4 percent of registered voters in the United States believe that “lizard people control our societies by gaining political power.” At the time of this writing 11,275 people have liked the Reptilians fanpage on Facebook.

Of course (((Zuckerberg))) would deny it.

The more relevant question is: If he were a secret lizard person, how would he behave any differently?

If there were a conspiracy of lizard people, the first thing they would do would be to set up a FaceBorg network to control all the humans on the planet, and brainwash them against any allegiances that would resist the lizard people.

I am going to use echo parentheses for (((suspected lizard people))).

The danger of Leftism to any movement

The Urban Dictionary defines O’Sullivan’s Law

O’Sullivan’s Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist John O’Sullivan.

Television shows are the best examples of this. 24, House. Charitable foundations are worse but harder to see.

One of the reasons for this is leftist intolerance versus right-wing tolerance. Right wingers are willing to hire openly left-wing employees in the interest of fairness. Left-wingers, utterly intolerant, will not allow a non-Liberal near them, and will harass them at every opportunity. The result over time is that conservative enterprises are infiltrated by leftists but leftist enterprises remain the same or get worse.

Also, leftism is in and of itself a form of decay. It’s what happens not just to television shows but to nations, churches and universities as the energy given off by the big bang of their inception slowly ebbs away. Rather than expend vitality in originality and creation they become obsessed with introspection, popularity and lethargy. Leftism is entropy of the spirit and intellect.

Another reason is that the parasitic nature of Liberals/Leftists attracts them to existing money.

An enterprise can stave off O'Sullivan's Law if their creators keep it in mind and remain vigilant and truthful.

I doubt that the Unabomber was reading National Review in 1989, but he was concerned in his 1995 manifesto that an anti-technology movement would be taken over by leftists:

THE DANGER OF LEFTISM

213. Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type are often unattracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and membership are not initially leftist. The resulting influx of leftish types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one, so that leftist goals replace or distort the original goals of the movement.

214. To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with leftists. Leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology. Leftism is collectivist; it seeks to bind together the entire world (both nature and the human race) into a unified whole. But this implies management of nature and of human life by organized society, and it requires advanced technology. You can't have a united world without rapid transportation and communication, you can't make all people love one another without sophisticated psychological techniques, you can't have a "planned society" without the necessary technological base. Above all, leftism is driven by the need for power, and the leftist seeks power on a collective basis, through identification with a mass movement or an organization. Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology, because technology is too valuable a source of collective power. ...

219. Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism; everything contrary to leftists beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists' drive for power.

One of his concerns was that machines would take over the world. That has been portrayed in science fiction many times, such as in the Terminator movies. I never found those plausible. However, I now think that the Unabomber's scenario is likely:

173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decision for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Just look at how people let Google, Apple, and Facebook make decisions for them. People are reduced to clicking "Like" as a meager way of informing the machine of a minor preference, so the machine can make better choices. A few years ago I would not have believed that the people could be so easily enslaved.

FBI wants your crypto keys

FBI Director James Comey writes:

But my job is to try to keep people safe. In universal strong encryption, I see something that is with us already and growing every day that will inexorably affect my ability to do that job. It may be that, as a people, we decide the benefits here outweigh the costs and that there is no sensible, technically feasible way to optimize privacy and safety in this particular context, or that public safety folks will be able to do their job well enough in the world of universal strong encryption. Those are decisions Americans should make, but I think part of my job is make sure the debate is informed by a reasonable understanding of the costs.

See this SciAm article for background.

Some prominent cryptologists have written an essay on The Risks of Mandating Backdoors in Encryption Products. They say that the govt plan cannot work, and and the NY Times says that a previous Clinton administration plan was shown to not work either.

I am inclined to agree that giving the Obama administration everything they want would infringe our civil liberties, but the cryptologist argument is nonsense. The Clinton administration plan was defeated politically, not by technical weaknesses.

Every other country spies on its citizens, and does it without any statutory limitation or due process. Apple, Google, credit bureaus, Obamacare, and others collect vast amounts of privacy invading data on us, and we have very few protections. The main forces against encryption are businesses who profit from selling our private data.

It would be possible to give the feds what they ask, and give citizens better protections than they have today. There are no technical barriers to this.

These cryptologists are saying something that is popular with civil libertarians, and with big data companies who would like to keep spying on us. But those big data companies are eager to give the false impression that all of your data can be trusted with them, and that the FBI is the real threat to your privacy.

Here is a bigger threat, from a Latina political appointment in the Obama administration:

Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, resigned under pressure on Friday, one day after the government revealed that two sweeping cyberintrusions at the agency had resulted in the theft of the personal information of more than 22 million people, including those who had applied for sensitive security clearances.

I think that it is just a matter of time before massive files on everyone get put on the web, with Social Security numbers, addresses, and health info. Once that happens, people will see little point in making that info secret anymore.

Update: James Baker says that he convinced the NY Times to issue a correction about the supposed technical weaknesses of the Clinton administration plan.

While I was on the opposite side of Baker in the 1990s crypto wars, I agree with him that the press has fallen for lame arguments from cryptologists.

Leftist distrust of science experts

I occasionally hear people claim that Republicans are anti-science, but the Democrats seem much more anti-science to me. Here is an editorial cartoon from Monday's Santa Cruz Sentinel, the daily paper for a leftist Democrat California beach town.

Thalidomide was never FDA approved (until it was later approved for leprosy). No one was injured a Three Mile Island. I don't think that anyone ever said that the space shuttle was perfectly safe, altho the risk did turn out to be higher than estimated. (Note also the spelling error of Challenger.) Dow Corning was bankrupted over breast implant lawsuits in 1995, but that is just proof that our legal system is broken. There is a consensus now that the lawsuits were bogus, and millions of women get implants today without major problems. Asbestos is not really that dangerous unless you are a smoker who inhales the fibers.

Leftists also hate GMO foods, pesticides, DDT, antibiotics, and preservatives.

Journalist Chris Mooney has made a career out of blaming Republicans for not trusting scientific experts, and has a Wash. Post column on The science of why you really should listen to science and experts. SciAm's John Horgan refutes it:

I recently knocked science journalist Chris Mooney for asserting that “You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.” Non-experts have the right and even the duty, I retorted, to question scientific experts, who often get things wrong. ...

He cites a study that found that judges and other lawyers show less ideological bias—or “identity-protective cognition”–in their application of the law than law students and lay people. ... To my mind, the study merely shows that lawyers and judges know the law better than law students and non-lawyers.

Mooney’s citation of Tetlock is bizarre, because Expert Political Judgment—far from a defense of experts—is a devastating critique of them....

“people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. ... People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.”

Attack on NSA dwells on 40yo DES

I responded to complaints about the NSA from mathematicians and scientists, and now there are more.

A letter to the AMS attacks the NSA:

This track record includes reducing the key length of the block cipher DES in the 1970s to make it breakable, blacklisting an inventor of DES from other cryptography jobs, advocating for control of cryptographic research in the 1980s, and, according to NSA's 2013 budget request, covertly influencing "commercial products' designs" and "policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies" for the purposes of exploitation. Indeed, the track record speaks for itself.

Most of this is dubious. An AMS history of DES only says that

There have been persistent rumors that NSA had pressed for the shorter key length.

While IBM originally proposed a 128-bit key cipher, NSA pointed out weaknesses, and the 56-bit DES was stronger than IBM's 128-bit cipher. At the time of its release, DES was stronger than any other civilian cipher, so I don't see how NSA could have weakened it.

The blacklisted inventor was supposedly Horst Feistel, but he seems to have had a successful cryptology career.

The NSA is a military spy agency, so I do not doubt that it budgets money for spy work.

Here is another response:

In a recent letter to the American Mathematical Society titled 'Encryption and the NSA Role in International Standards', Dr. Wertheimer, a former NSA Mathematician and Research Directer, works very hard to leave the impression that the NSA did not place a backdoor in the DUAL_EC_DRBG algorithm. He never directly says that though because the evidence is so overwhelming to the contrary. Instead he chooses to engage in what can only be called aggressive and willfully misleading

If the evidence is so overwhelming, then how is anyone misled?

I do think that it is silly to complain about NSA's influence over DES 40 years ago. Here is what I originally said in my letter to the NSA:

Back in the 1970s, attacks on the NSA were based on how it influenced the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The accusation was that NSA crippled it in order to spy on everyone.

In fact DES was a big advance over anything else in the public domain, and more secure than what IBM developed on its own. Years of analysis have not turned up any backdoors, and the most practical attack is a brute-force key space search. There is no known example of anyone ever losing a dime from a DES weakness.

The chief complaint about DES was that the key size was limited to 56 bits. However this was not even a material limitation as everyone quickly realized that DES could easily be augmented to Triple-DES or DES-X for larger keys.

It is likely that NSA had some ciphers that were better than DES at the time. However it would have surely been against policy to release a military cipher into the public domain. What it apparently did was to make sure that DES was exactly as good as it appears to be, so it could be used appropriately for unclassified purposes. As computers got faster, it later helped facilitate AES as an improved cipher.

These mathematicians are embarrassing themselves with their criticisms of NSA. If they are against spying, they could just say so, instead of all the silly complaints about how NSA has not always fully explained itself.

I am all in favor of public concern about computer security. We hear regular stories about naked selfies posted online, identity theft, stolen movies, email tampering, hacking credit card databases, etc. How many of these were caused by NSA choosing too few key bits or poorly seeding a pseudorandom number generator? Zero. These complaining mathematicians keep acting as if something bad has happened, but they cannot point to any ill effect anywhere.

Chinese domination

If I read the economic news once every ten years, I would have learned this:

1960: USA had a missile gap, so we built a military-industrial complex.
1970: Nixon bragged that we built the world's largest shopping center.
1980: USSR was the economic equal of the USA.
1990: Japan was the economic equal of the USA.
2000: EU was the economic equal of the USA.
2010: China is the economic equal of the USA.

The business news is covered with stories about how China has passed us up in various ways, how we have been completely dependent on China for raw materials, manufactured goods, and money, and how even American schools are teaching Chinese so that our kids will be able to speak to our new overlords. Even my kids are going to be outdone those reared by Chinese Tiger Moms.

I am going to wait another ten years before leaping to any conclusions.

Advice for the paranoid

Today's advice letter:

Dear Annie: Years ago, parents used to put up placards in their children's bedroom windows to let firemen know where they were in case of fire. That proved dangerous because pedophiles also knew which bedrooms the children were in.

Now parents are putting up stick figures of their families on the back of the car windows, including how many boys and girls they have.

Yesterday, I saw a car with two soccer ball emblems in the back window, each with the name of one of two girls. I assume those two girls were their daughters. To me, this is as dangerous as the window placards because any pedophile could follow the car home and target the children in the future. Should I be concerned for these children? — New York

Life must be difficult when your bizarre paranoid fears conflict. It seems to me that if a pedophile were going to follow a car, he would follow a car with kids and not a car with stick figures in the window. But then, I had no idea that pedophiles follow placards that were put in bedroom windows to guide firemen. The whole letter seems like a joke to me.

Suspiciousness explained

Wired magazine reports:

A dose of testosterone might be enough to save gullible types from being ripped off, a new study reveals.

Testosterone is linked to aggression, competition and social status. Now scientists have found that the hormone also reduces naive individuals’ confidence in others.

This could explain why women are more gullible than men.

Making it hard to filter porn

Slashdot reports:

The Associated Press reports that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has deferred a decision until June on whether to create a '.xxx' Internet suffix as an online red-light district, ... Backers of '.xxx' have billed the proposal as a way for the adult-entertainment industry to clean up its act, though some adult sites worry that governments would wind up mandating the use of '.xxx' and that sites with the '.xxx' suffix could easily be blocked by government web filters in the future.

If a .xxx top-level domain makes it easier to filter porn, so much the better. I think that laws ought to encourage the hard-core porn to get over to .xxx.

There are always civil-liberties types who complain that filtering should not be easy, because that encourages censorship. I think that is backwards. We should have the liberty to easily reject the porn, if we want.

Yes, I imagine that most employers will block the .xxx domain on company computers. Workers are not being paid to watch porn. Okay with me. There is no shortage of porn on the internet.

Mom thinks snow is dangerous

From Yahoo answers:

How do I convince my kids snow is dangerous?
we are supposed to get record snow where i am. i personally hate it. its cold and wet and cold. i know they are gonna make me play in it. i put them off last snow by telling them they had to clean their room before they could play in it. i dont think thats gonna work this time. how can i make them believe snow shouldnt be played in?

You should tie them to a chair in the basement and bombard them with images of Abominable Snowmen, Avalanches, horrible wipe outs on the bunny hill, etc. Then tell them that all the missing children in the world have gone missing because they played in the snow.....and that the Tooth Fairy, Santa, Easter Bunny and other misc. imaginary characters will never visit them again if they go out there. No kid can defy the laws of the Tooth Fairy. Problem Solved.

That kid is going to learn that "dangerous" is a euphemism for fun.

Cell phone laws failed

The NY Times reports:

Laws banning cellphone use while driving apparently haven’t reduced crashes, according to a study released on Friday that compared the number of total crashes before the ban with the number after. The study found virtually no difference in the numbers, a finding that had the researchers scratching their heads.

I am not surprised. There was never any good data supporting these laws. The laws seem to be driven more by politics than by safety concerns.

Brits fear boy might scare fish

A UK newspaper reports:

Security guards reduced a nine-year-old boy to tears after banning him from sailing his toy boat on a pond because it 'frightens the fish'.

Noah Bailey was distraught after staff at Chiswick Business Park, in west London, stopped him playing with his model of the German battleship Bismarck.

His grandfather Paul Fabricius, 57, said that when they went to complain about the draconian rule the guard refused to tell him the name of the manager for 'security reasons'.

The Brits seem to be a little ahead of us when it comes to advancing paranoia.

Meanwhile, the satirical site The Onion reports that Scientists Discover Portal To Outside World.

Women are also falsely accused

I posted below a fishy story about a man being charged with sex abuse. The accusation seemed improbable and unfounded to me. This is a big problem for men who volunteer for youth activities. Now here is a story about what seems to be a phony charge against a woman:

Nicole Howell, 26, was a first-year English teacher finishing up a lesson on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," when she was pulled out of her Dayton High School classroom in December and told she was being suspended for having sex with a student.

"I thought it was preposterous," she said.

It got worse. Howell was arrested for first-degree sexual abuse less than a month later and faces a trial in the fall. Her teaching certificate is in jeopardy and she's had to move back home with her parents.

All for an affair that she says not only never happened, but one that there is no evidence of other than the ramblings of a high school kid who at first claimed the two were involved in a threesome with another male student. ...

Howell said the beginning of her first year as a teacher was going well until early December when she started hearing rumors in the hallway.

"There were a couple of students snickering about a teacher involved in a threesome," she said. ...

Howell said she was told that both boys denied any sexual contact with her to the principal. Other rumors that followed, including that the accuser's father drove his son to her apartment for sex, was also disproved, Howell said.

But on Dec. 15 when she was suspended, Howell said the principal told her that the accuser, who had been threatened with possible expulsion for lying about such a serious allegation, had recanted his denial and was accusing Howell of having sex with him.

She will have to prove her innocence, but in court in the press, against the flaky anonymous charges.

I don't have all the facts here, but I think that the principal, prosecutor, and newspaper should ignore such an implausible and unsubstantiated story unless there is some rock-solid evidence of something really harmful. And there is not.

Dubious accusation of acting inappropriately

The San Jose paper reports:

A former South Bay youth soccer coach with a long and lauded history in the sport faces charges he molested an 11-year-old child while volunteering as a locker room attendant during a recent FC Gold Pride women's professional soccer game.

Thomas Anderson, 75, of San Jose, who is scheduled to enter a plea in the case Monday, is charged with eight felony counts of a lewd or lascivious act on a child younger than 14, police said.

While at a Gold Pride soccer game July 19 at Santa Clara University's Buck Shaw Stadium, two witnesses reported seeing Anderson acting inappropriately with a child, police said. ... Gold Pride officials ... said he brought the victim to the game with him. ...

His arrest is the latest in a string of high-profile cases in the local athletic scene. ...

"I am in disbelief," said Bob O'Connor, treasurer of the West Valley Youth Soccer League, which Anderson founded decades ago. O'Connor regularly saw Anderson at Gold Pride soccer and Earthquake soccer events, where O'Connor also volunteered. "He was a good friend, we shared a lot of soccer interests so I am in absolute shock over this." ...

O'Connor described Anderson as a friendly, outgoing sort, admired by both children and adults. O'Connor said he never saw any hint of inappropriate behavior toward children. "He was very nonthreatening, he was funny and quite a character, they liked him." ...

Anderson was arrested Friday and arraigned on Wednesday. If convicted, he faces 22 years in prison.

My guess is that a lot of men will refuse to volunteer for youth activities after reading a few stories like this. A false accusation is just too easy, too common, and too dangerous.

I am all in favor of jailing child molesters, but this story seems very improbable to me. The man is 75 years old. He has spent his whole life coaching and assisting youth sports, and everyone praised his work. He brought the kid to the game.

If he is really a child molester, how is it that no one ever suspected anything before? If he wanted to molest the kid, why wouldn't he do it before or after the game when no one was watching?

And what did he do? The accusation is that he was "acting inappropriately". People have widely different opinions about what is inappropriate. It appears that the man and the child were fully clothed. He may have just given the kid a hug, and some bystander disapproved.

The man's life is ruined whether he is innocent or guilty. The newspaper named him in a prominent page 1B story, and allows his accusers to remain anonymous. It does not even detail the accusations. It is impossible for him to defend himself.

I believe that the man should be considered innocent until proven guilty. The accusers in this case could have just notified the child's parents. This smells like a witch-hunt.

Kids banned from snow-covered parks

News from the British nanny state:

Camden Council in North London decided to lock all of its gated parks because the snow has made paths slippery.

It meant that children enjoying a day off because of school closures could not take advantage of the deepest snow for 20 years in at least four popular parks.

A spokesman for the council said that grit put down on the pathways on Sunday had not been enough to cope with the heavy snowfall overnight, so the parks had been closed on safety grounds.

Of course snow can be slippery. That makes it fun for kids.