Posts Tagged ‘Elena Kagan’
Great Moments in Supreme Court Questioning
Justice Kagan said she could not understand why the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office persisted in defending its conduct. “Did your office ever consider just confessing error in this case?” she asked.
Friday Night Everything
* The long-awaited (but oddly dissatisfying) Lost epilogue has appeared online, though who knows for how long or with whose permission.
* Decadence watch: municipalities are cutting back on public transit, de-paving roads, cutting back on education and even city lights, and closing public libraries. Naturally, the wars continue apace.
* Elena Kagan post-mortems from Jonathan Chait and Glenn Greenwald.
* Neal Stephenson talks SF at Gresham College. The link has another, shorter talk from David Brin as well. Thanks to Melody for the link.
* Silly games of the night: Epic Coaster and Color Theory.
* Visiting the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
* Power stations of the retrofuture.
* America’s first test-tube baby has turned her back on her heritage.
* You had me at huge Back to the Future trilogy timeline.
* Google says there are 129,864,880 books In existence. I swear, I swear, mine’s coming.
* And neither English nor philosophy makes this list of the ten lowest-paying college majors. Take that, everyone I knew in college!
Lots of Tuesday Links
* A key feature of the case for Elena Kagan is her supposed ability to convince Anthony Kennedy of things. (Bill makes one version of this argument in the comments, though he himself doesn’t quite endorse it.) Like pretty much everybody I’m skeptical of this; I don’t know what the evidence is supposed to be that Kagan is better positioned to persuade Anthony Kennedy than anyone else on the shortlist, and her record as Solicitor General hasn’t exactly distinguished itself in this regard.
* Nate Silver makes the actuarial case for Elena Kagan.
Wood’s VORJ, we’ll assume, begins at 50, since we’re supposing that she’ll side with the liberals 100 percent of the time rather than 50 percent for her replacement. Kagan’s starts at 40: the 90 percent of the time we’ve supposed she’d vote with the liberals, less the 50 percent baseline.
As we go out into the future, however, the Justices become less valuable as they are less likely to survive. For instance, Wood has about an 18 percent chance of no longer being with us 15 years hence, so we’d have to subtract that fraction from her VORJ.
After about 20 years, Kagan overtakes Wood even though she’s less liberal, because she’s more likely have survived. She continues to provide excess value over [Wood] from that point forward, until we reach a period 40+ years out where both women are almost certain to be dead. On balance, Kagan’s lifetime expected VORJ is actually higher than that of [Wood]’s (1,280 rather than 1,206, if you care), assuming that she’ll defect from the liberals 10 percent of the time whereas Wood never will.
Favoring near-term outcomes at a discount rate of 1.7% or more, though, favors Wood.
* What to do next to stop the spill in the Gulf? The New York Times speculates. Or, you know, we could just nuke it.
* Related: BP makes enough profit in four days to cover the costs of the spill cleanup thus far.
* Something good in the climate bill: Climate Bill Will Allow States to Veto Neighboring States’ Drilling Plans.
* Something good in a very bad-looking November: Richard Burr will almost certainly lose in NC.
The confusion of natural and cultural or economic concerns in the arguments over the prohibition of flights raised the following suspicion: how come the scientific evidence began to suggest it was safe to fly over most of Europe just when the pressure from the airlines became most intense? Is this not further proof that capital is the only real thing in our lives, with even scientific judgements having to bend to its will?
The problem is that scientists are supposed to know, but they do not. Science is helpless and covers up this helplessness with a deceptive screen of expert assurance. We rely more and more on experts, even in the most intimate domains of our experience (sexuality and religion). As a result, the field of scientific knowledge is transformed into a terrain of conflicting “expert opinions”.
Most of the threats we face today are not external (or “natural”), but generated by human activity shaped by science (the ecological consequences of our industry, say, or the psychic consequences of uncontrolled genetic engineering), so that the sciences are simultaneously the source of such threats, our best hope of understanding those threats, and the means through which we may find a way of coping with them.
* ‘Confessions of a Tenured Professor’: a tenured professor takes note of his adjunct colleagues.
* Middle-class white people are the only people: Atrios discovers a very strange lede at the Washington Post.
The idealized vision of suburbia as a homogenous landscape of prosperity built around the nuclear family took another hit over the past decade, as suburbs became home to more poor people, immigrants, minorities, senior citizens and households with no children, according to a Brookings Institution report to be released Sunday.
Just so we’re clear, in the 21st century, Republican gubernatorial candidates are attacked for accepting modern biology and being only a partial Biblical literalist.
* That about wraps it up for Britain.
* And confidential to Playboy: putting the centerfolds in 3D will not save you.
Monday Morning Miscellany
* In case you missed it last night, a joint statement from students in the Program in Literature and the Polygraph Editorial Collective on the closing of the Philosophy program at Middlesex University is up at Polygraph‘s website, as well as down the page.
* Media Matters fact-checks the Kagan nomination. My favorite is the one about her college thesis, which will fuel a thousand wails of SOCIALISM! from the right. Meanwhile, “elena kagan husband” and “elena kagan personal life” are #2 and #6 on Google’s trending searches right now; someone in the White House is undoubtedly freaking out.
* His thesis is both simple and surprisingly complex: over the course of thirty years, Washington politicians have pressured federal economists to tweak the methods by which they assess key metrics of the economy, to inflate the numbers and protect the incumbents from voters who would surely rise up in anger, if only they knew the truth. Oh, surely.
* This Google Maps app compares the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill to your local metropolitan area.
* …so far, the state has lost between $6 million and $10 million in projected business revenue, with 23 group hotel bookings–from small meetings to large conventions–having been canceled in protest since the stroke of Brewer’s pen, according to the Arizona Hotel & Lodging Association.
* Fantasy Soccer ’09-’10 has ended and I have once again been denied my rightful crown: I came in first place in MetaFilter’s league and in our head-to-head league but silver-medaled in the elite Blue Devils United division. The good news is we’ll be doing a Fantasy World Cup next month; details sometime in the next few weeks.
* This Wired piece seems to be ground zero for the Facebook backlash. Judging from my newsfeed the Facebook backlash backlash is already beginning in earnest; I’m planning on spearheading the backlash backlash backlash.
* Science proves “babies know the difference between good and evil at six months.” So now we can try babies as adults.
* Trailer for my cousin’s upcoming documentary about Afghanistan, Where My Heart Beats.
* And the single most difficult surgery ever performed.
Tuesday Night and I’m Way Behind
* Even Tea Party darling Mark Rubio opposes the new Arizona immigration law. Meanwhile, Kos highlights a clause that will launch a thousand lawsuits later this year.
* You had me at Fantasy & Sci-Fi Magazine Art.
* When Malcolm X’s assassin was paroled earlier today, he walked out onto the corner of West 110th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. You can’t make stuff like this up.
* High school senior Brent Jones had a problem: officially he didn’t exist.
* Great news: Noah’s Ark has been found again (again).
* The case against Laurence Lessig’s case for Elena Kagan.
* And the Coast Guard may set the Louisiana oil spill on fire in an effort to contain the spreading damage. Drill, baby, drill…
Gerry Canavan 
