Likelihood of Success

Ron Coleman’s pretty good blog

The wrong message

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 20, 2010

One of the things I found so frustrating about “hanging out” online with conservatives is that so many of them didn’t realize that whatever it is that’s going to happen next that’s good for conservatives has little or nothing to do with the GOP leadership.  Conservatives and even old and discarded Republicans such as myself have and had every reason in the world to be pretty much disgusted with the political and ethical ineptitude of the party over the last ten years.

Unsurprisingly, given his “Army of Davids” theme, Glenn Reynolds gets this exactly right:

[W]hat the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the Tea Party movement, to a much greater degree than he got them from the RNC. Smart candidates will realize that, too.

As will the entrenched Republican leaders.  They will make every attempt to co-op this energy and this source of hope (not that I don’t remain skeptical about “tea party” meetups per se), and ultimately they will succeed on one level or another.  The question is, will independent, principled conservatives at least extract an appropriate price — not platform planks or sops, but fundamental change in how the party works on an ongoing basis?

It’s hard to be hopeful.  John McCain was so wrong in how he went about trying to unhinge money and politics, but he was so right about the scope and profundity of the problem.  Here Brown won in no small measure because he took everyone, including the GOP leadership, by surprise, and he may have a bit of fun for a while because he owes them very little (did you see the musical “Fiorello”?).

In the long run, history has never shown such a dynamic to be sustainable.  And yet, while we may dispair of completing the work, we are not free to abstain from it, either.  So let’s roll!

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Scared of the truth

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 17, 2010

Did you hear about this travesty in Haiti?

Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.

The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night.

Truly awful.  But check out this subtle spin in an excerpt from that CNN article quoted by Instapundit:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic’s medical staff was unforgivable.

“Search and rescue must trump security,” Honoré said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there.”

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

“I find this astonishing these doctors left,” he said. “People are scared of the poor.”

“Scared of the poor?”  General, they aren’t scared “of the poor” — at least not because they’re poor!

MSNBC:

The early reports of looting came as United Nations peacekeepers patrolling the capital said people’s anger is rising that aid hasn’t been distributed quickly, and the Brazilian military warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting.

Toronto Sun:

Next to burning corpses, young men fight over the goods they’ve looted from the crushed shops in the city’s downtown core.

They lit the bodies on fire, one man explains, to avoid spreading diseases. Thick smoke and dust hangs like a dense cloud.

The men hit each other violently as they fight over aluminum bowls and computer bags.

Riots erupt. The stores are ravaged.

BBC:

Reports say scores of people went on the rampage in the town of Les Cayes, blocking roads, looting shops and shooting at UN peacekeepers.

The UN said its personnel had opened fire at some of the armed protesters.

For two days running, parts of Haiti have been erupting into violence triggered by the soaring cost of food.

Those doctors may not have done the right thing that night.  Or maybe they did.  Can we say, perhaps, that he who heals and runs away may leave to heal another day?  We weren’t there, and neither was General Honoré.  But he’s a military man.  I’m not one.  Doctors and nurses aren’t, either — they’re doctors and nurses.  They didn’t volunteer for martyrdom.

There’s nothing unique to a brick or shard of metal between your eyes that gets there via a poor man, as opposed to anyone else.  These medical people may or not be guilty of cowardice.  But as they surveyed the simmering crowd they decided to escape, it seems hardly unlikely that they were adding up the net worth of its desperate, madding members.

Cross-posted on Right Wing News.

Posted in Medialites, Oppression | Leave a Comment »

Verizon agonistes

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 11, 2010

I have this new Verizon FIOS service at home. (I replaced our old proprietary — and incredibly costly — Internet filtering with free service from OpenDNS.)  After it was installed — well, after it was re-installed, the first installation having been done wrong — I have really enjoyed having that sort of broadband speed at home.

We’re not media downloading people, we Colemans, so it’s not that.  It’s just the browsing experience, and, for me, I can really experience true virtual commuting; using LogMeIn I can work at my office desktop from home with almost no perceptible lag.   I also really appreciate being able to upload big files fast, something I sometimes have to do when filing legal papers online by a deadline that is all of a sudden bearing down fast.  Not only this, but the pricing is great; with all that bandwidth I was able to completely drop my extra landline, which despite the best efforts at phone service discounting was so laden with taxes (“fees”) that it was an utterly unjustifiable luxury just for dedicated faxes to home.

If only Verizon didn’t so absolutely stink!

These guys are constantly, constantly pushing you to their incredibly powerful-looking customer-interfacing website for customer service.  Seeing as how you have to fence on the phone with a talking computer anyway, you give it a try.  And look at all the buttons to click!  It’s true one-stop shopping! Here’s the warning sign:  It only “really” works with Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Short of requiring you to get access to it via AOL, that’s about as grim a warning sign as you can get.

And so it goes.

Nothing — nothing — works on the Verizon site.  And when I say nothing, I mean of course pretty much nothing, or a majority of things you want to do once you get there.  THIS is not available “at this time.”  THAT is not available “at this time.”  THE OTHER just hangs up.  Please come back later.  Please try again another time.  Please call customer service.  Only not now, ok?  And so on.  And so on.  And so on.

I knew this already.  I knew it years ago.  I just kept hoping against hope that this offspring of the great Bell trust had really begun to understand how to serve customers, and that one of the main things you do to serve them is not make promises you can’t keep — including promises of things websites can do but which they really can’t.  And that one of the corollaries of that is not to push your customers to that resource when it is not even remotely up to the job.

Nope.

Verizon is fast, all right.  But it seems that once a monopoly, always a monopoly.

Verizon is still just the phone company.

Posted in Nuvo-Techno, Sisyphus | Leave a Comment »

Be “happy”

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 10, 2010

Everything you know about happiness is wrong, according to Professor Daniel Gilbert, who (unlike a lot of the professors quoted authoritatively in magazine articles) seems to have really made some strides in knowing what he’s talking about:Purim mesiba, mesivta, New Jersey

Gilbert ponders the subject that is known, thanks largely to him, as affective forecasting — the how and why and error of human perceptions of time, value, reward, sorrow, and, yes, happiness. Just as we often recall the past as we’d like to remember it instead of as it was, so do we predict incorrectly what the future will be like, including our emotional responses to it. This is important, he says, because it influences our attempts at planning — and we do it again and again. . . .

What’s responsible for our self-deception? According to Gilbert, blame imagination, because its forces and flaws distort our predictions and our recollections. Imagination works powerfully and quickly, he explains, but it tends to make us believe that the future we envision will be a lot like the present we are experiencing. And when we imagine an event in that future, he explains, we humans consistently overestimate the length and intensity of our emotional response to it. As he writes: “Teenagers get tattoos because they are confident that DEATH ROCKS will always be an appealing motto …” . . .

Gilbert has said that on an imaginary happiness scale of 0 to 100, humans tend to place themselves around the 75-point mark. Regardless of our baseline happiness “level,” a setback will drag us down the scale or some amazing stroke of luck bump us up, but only briefly — within a matter of months from the “life-changing” event, we’re pretty much right back where we started.

“Basically, the death of your entire family is the kind of event it takes to have a major impact on you for a very long time,” he says.
Old bald guy at Yankee StadiumCan money buy happiness? Sort of. That is, a little more money can buy the poor a lot of happiness, but only a lot more money can buy the rich even a little happiness. Material wealth has, as Gilbert says, “very diminishing returns.” A far more reliable indicator of a person’s happiness is his or her wealth of personal relationships.

That’s “relationships.”  Not “followers.”

Posted in Heart and spirit, Social networking | Leave a Comment »

Social insanity

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 7, 2010

I have had some weird experiences out there in social space, which by all lights is surely getting creepier and creepier.

First a few months ago there was this lady on LinkedIn who was pushing so so hard to make some kind of presence for herself.  She kept pressing and pressing to build this kind of community around her, not without some success.  Seeing as how she didn’t seem to have an actual day job (I don’t think just anyone can list themselves as “visionary” or “happenings mover” or whatever) it seemed no worse than all the other snake oil, and at first I thought perhaps she had something to say in there.

But I knew something was weird, including the fact that she kept saying in her postings that certain people were hacking her LinkedIn account and things.  I mean, I guess anything’s possible.  But then she started intensely hitting me with requests to tweet or link to these articles she wrote, and I sent her a message saying that, hey, maybe she’s being a little overly aggressive here?

Man.  Big mistake!  Check out this dialogue — I had to recreate my lines because I didn’t keep them, but hers I did (for the authorities):

NuttyLady: Would you please RT [re-tweet] a couple of my stories you like most today? I’m still not getting into the Key Word Search stream at all!

Me: Sure, I did that in fact just yesterday, but you know, you are maybe pushing a little hard here?  Maybe you want to RT some of my links?

NuttyLady: I have to rely on my network to get any exposure to the general Twitter audience. Thanks so much for your help.

Me: No, I get that, no problem, I just saying you’re asking a lot and it seems kind of one-sided.

NuttyLady: I am not getting into the Key Word searches because of malicious code someone put on my account. I am not automated and do everything myself.

NuttyLady (a minute later):  I am a professional writer with more stories to my credit than most people at, say, Huffington Post. You don’t mind RT’ing their stories!

I don’t?  Actually if I have ever RT’ed something from Huffington Post that would be news to me.  It could have happened by accident, but… while I was preparing that response, this came in:

NuttyLady: You are showing bias towards “Little Media” versus “Big Media.”

And with that she not only unfollowed me — she BLOCKED me so I couldn’t respond to her — and deleted me as a connection on LinkedIn!!

No, no, believe me — I’m grateful.  But I just wasn’t ready for that kind of nuttiness out of nowhere.  What with her Ivy League Ph.D. and all.

I lived.  And, mind you, this is all in the context of a very, very contracted social networking profile and much less time spent on this stuff than at this point a year ago, or six months ago.  Yet even as I narrow the gauge of my efforts, more and more loons parade through view via the keyhole.

Like yesterday — this guy with no identifying information on his profile whatsoever friends my law firm’s Facebook page, which I administer.  And I am not just adding people to my firm’s visible, online social networks.  There has to be some rationale, right?  So I ask him, as nice as pie, like this (again, the name has been changed to protect the unhinged):

Goetz FitzpatrickGoetz Fitzpatrick January 5 at 12:00pm

Posted in Heart and spirit, Social networking | Leave a Comment »

There’s no such thing as “underfunded” for our Uncle

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 5, 2010

Kenneth Anderson asks, are underfunded public pensions underfunded public pensions $2 trillion in “stranded” costs?

One question about these obligations is whether taxpayers will stick around to pay them, or instead will vote with their feet. . . . Many of these pension obligations have been incurred by municipalities and others by states, and in some cases the obligations are intertwined. But what happens if voters-taxpayers move out? The assumption has long been that taxpayers are stuck, on account of jobs and other circumstance. But query whether that is necessarily true as the baby boom generation retires.

That’s why the baby boom generation won’t ask us.  This will be will “resolved” by the stroke of a pen — the same moral hazard pen that bails out everything else; and why should state governments be worse than all the other failed states of corporate America?

Federalization, people.  We can run, but we can’t hide.  (Via Insty.)

Posted in Gelt, Politics and Poker, Sisyphus | Leave a Comment »

Five years of blogging

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 4, 2010

Yep, it’s five years since I changed history, and the very course of human evolution itself, with the launch of the LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® blog.

Does it ever feel as if I work for the blog, rather than the blog for me?

Yes.

But in fact this is the way of everything that is worthwhile.

It has been worthwhile.

Will it always be? Would I blog about law at all if it didn’t do great things for my practice?

I don’t know.

But five years in, it seems, so far, to have been time well spent.

Posted in Blogophilia, Narcissus Rex | Leave a Comment »

Reluctantly, no

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 3, 2010

It started out, great this piece from the Worcester Business Journal about Attorney General Martha Coakley — the designated heir to Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat — linked to by Instapundit:

We understand when politicians are busy. We deal with it all the time. After all, talking to journalists can be tedious and repetitive, especially when you’re running for office.

That’s why we wanted to give Attorney General Martha Coakley the benefit of the doubt when her campaign staff was initially stand offish after we approached them about setting up an interview for our story on the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat.

But then we were put off several times by her staff. We suddenly got the feeling Ms. Coakley, a Democrat, didn’t want to speak with us, and the media in general.

At the end of the day, it’s disheartening to think that a potential U.S. Senator for the Bay State would be so reticent to speak to the media.

Ouch.  It’s at least equally as disheartening when professional journalists use the word “reticent” when they mean “reluctant,” as in “reluctant to speak” — as opposed to merely being … reticent.

(Someone had to say it.)

Posted in Medialites | Leave a Comment »

Best of 2009: “Life imitates Steve Martin”

Posted by Ron Coleman on January 1, 2010

This was posted August 7, 2009.


Only worse. Steve Martin, from the old days:

How many people have cats? One, two, three, four…okay, ten. Now- let me ask you this…do ya trust ’em? Because I’ve gotta get a pair of cat handcuffs and I gotta get ’em right away. Just the little ones that go around the little front paws or maybe the manacles..four, to get all four paws. But what a drag; I found out my cat was embezzling from me. You think you know a cat for ten years, he pulls something like this. I found out that while I was away, he would go out to the mailbox, pick up the checks, take ’em down to the bank and cash ’em… disguised as me. He had the little kitty arrow through the head…and the little kitty bunny ears. And I wouldn’t have caught him, but I went out to his house where he sleeps…and there was about $3,000 worth of cat toys out there. Any you can’t return ’em ’cause they have spit all over them! So now I’m stuck with $3000 worth of cat toys! Oh, sure…they’re fun. You got the little rubber mouse; has a bell inside of it- Haw haw haw! Boy, I hate it when it goes under the sofa! Whoa, gimme that! Gimme that! Hiss! hiss!

And now, this:

Keith Griffin was charged Wednesday with 10 counts of possession of child porn after over 1,000 illegal images were found on his computer, and he claims it’s all the work of his kitty.

//

The 48-year-old Jensen Beach, Fla., man told cops he would leave his computer on and the cat would jump on the keyboard and just like that, the images would appear.

Time was a crooked cat, while bad enough, only harmed his own soul.

Posted in Homo sapiens, Nuvo-Techno, Sisyphus | Leave a Comment »

Best of 2009: “Was Rosen really right?”

Posted by Ron Coleman on December 31, 2009

This was posted on July 16, 2009.

Hm. Instapundit cites Randy Barnett, who writes:

When [Jeffrey] Rosen published his critique [of Sonya Sotomayor], I knew very little about Sotomayor. After forcing myself to watch much of the hearings, I wonder if those who criticized him then are having any second thoughts today.

I am having second thoughts about my own measured enthusiasm for Sotomayor, which was based on a selfish interest in a particular area of law plus what I believed was the range of options from this Administration, yes.

But do I have second thoughts about my criticism of Jeffrey Rosen (it’s buried in here; and no, I don’t think Jennifer Rubin meant me when she asked the question)?

No. Rosen’s article seemed rushed, and was based on very few specifics, and a lot of anonymous sources. The specifics were also very pedestrian. She was obviously vulnerable on Ricci v. DeStefano, but, well, “everyone” knew that — I am sure that that includes Randy Barnett. If her opinion in Ricci was that bad (and evidently it was!), why couldn’t Rosen give us six more such-a’s? That was his job as a reporter.

To the contrary, Rosen is to be criticized not only for pulling back from his original view so he wouldn’t lose out on invitations to all the right parties, but for writing such a damned lazy legal journalism article when in fact there may have been not only smoke but some fire to report. There’s a lot of that going around.

I also didn’t, and still don’t, think much of this slam by Jennifer Rubin, also cited by both Glenn and Randy:

The question is not whether Sotomayor will get through, but why the president felt so compelled to select her. If he was desperate to find a Latina, he should have found a wise one.

Talk about “wise.” I know wisdom is not the same as intelligence, but I don’t think Jennifer Rubin has the slightest inclination to make that distinction here. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Best of the Blog, Lex scripta, Medialites, Politics and Poker | Leave a Comment »

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