The Cornell Lemmings Society

"If people in Ithaca seem inured to suicide, that's because they are. For as long as anyone can remember, Cornell's gorges have furnished a wide open casket for those so inclined, and Ithaca, in turn, earned the unwanted distinction of 'suicide capital of the combined Ivy League, Big Ten, Little Three, and Seven Sisters,' as one local writer put it. Although commensurate with national averages, suicide at Cornell — or to borrow the local vernacular, 'gorging out' — has become the stuff of myth. And sometimes reality, as this month, when the university lost three students — in February, Bradley Ginsburg, 18; three weeks later, William Sinclair, 19; and the very next day, Matthew Zika, 21 — in as many weeks to its precipitous gorges."

Rob Fishman (Huffington Post) moans about sail-kids flying off the edges of Cascadilla and Fall Creek -- but they don't fly for long.

I wish I had a nickel for every step I've taken up or down Cascadilla Creek in my life. Then: I would give them all back, because those steps are priceless in my memories. Back when I didn't own a car, and lived on Court Street (directly across from the Tompkins County Jail), the walk to Collegetown up Buffalo Street was strictly pedestrian: if you were a sport, you hiked up the gorge. You did that even when ice and rock falls crashed down on the path and the place was ostensibly closed.

Once at the top, it was a natural pause at the Collegetown Bridge to catch your breath and reflect on the achievement. I spent innumerable hours there, admiring that arch of stone across the gorge, watching the water rush below (not staring morbidly -- despite Immanuel Kant) and the passersby. This was long before a great deal of the charm of the spot had been wrecked by the bloody hideous performing arts center, and the exit from the gorge ran up instantly upon the bridge. It must be said: even in those days, I was grateful for whatever common-sense had resisted caging that space in wire in order to restrain the finished from their flights.

Since, however, everyone must now be responsible for everything and nobody can mind their own business anymore, I think it won't be too long before both Cascadilla and Fall Creek will be completely swaddled in bubble-wrap, replete with sirens and rotating beacons in International School-Bus Chrome. And another piece of grown-up life will have gone to hell here in America.

I just wish I had one of the "Lemmings Society" t-shirts that were going around back in the 70's.

I would wear that thing all the way out, now.

Principles

John Venlet pops Glenn Reynolds from the other side of his own coin.

Splendid.

"The Roots Of War"

Oh, I do believe that it's time to review chapter two of Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal".

Yes, I do.

Kid Stuff

"Now, my objections to the very existence of a federal department of education aside, the proliferation of raid teams in every federal agency is not as much alarming as it is ridiculous. It's empire-building, plain and simple. If the guys at the DEA get a SWAT team, then ATF wants one, and if ATF has one, then the Bureau of Land Management wants one, and so on down the line. Once upon a time, even the FBI served mostly investigative functions and relied on local authorities for muscle; now the Department of Education has its own in-house door kickers, its own slice of FLETC pie."

That's Tam, with her finger squarely on the "OMFG! DoE Is Going Postal!" story. Yes; it's disgusting, along with her weigh-out of two other adjectives, but she's right about disposing of one of them. Given the general tenor of disaster now, this sort of thing is most certainly to be expected: this time of ours is about proliferation of power, even down to the most absurd examples. Bureaucracy, in its advanced stages, conserves, accumulates and asserts power as independently as possible despite each discrete organ's character as fief to higher authority. If it needs a desk, then it eventually covets and acquires a building. If it has a car, then it will have a badge, and sooner or later (think decades, lifetimes, and generations, kids) its truest nature will necessarily become manifest with resort to main force.

Yes, yes, of course one could bet on the thing to go off later in the performance, but even so: it's no great big deal. After all: that's just kid-stuff, and if DoE ever tries to step up to something a bit more in its weight-class, it can rely on FedGovCo help all day long.

Even If You're An Objectivist, I Can Keep This Stuff Straight For You

"...they wish to plunge the country into economic chaos and civil anarchy chaos."

There, Ed: that's fixed, now. It was wrong, but now it's not.

I'm always happy to help.

The Whip Of The Week

"Nearly Every Human Who Has Ever Lived Denied Fundamental Human Right"

Subject header -- Warren Meyer.

The Rat-Ship Comes

"Obama is not worried that the American economy is slow to recover; he's worried that it will recover. And he is doing everything conceivable to see that it doesn't. Adding an unaffordable entitlement to already bankrupt entitlements; making energy unaffordable; raising taxes; harassing business; growing government while the economy shrinks; shrinking the economy while government grows; and most important of all, draining the wealth out of the middle class. Squeezing the last savings and remaining asset value out of them. He has the public employee unions living large in lean times, and their mission, from his point of view, is to scavenge whatever meat remains from the bones. It's not for nothing that he has his buddy Andy Stern over to the White House so often.

Even the face value meaning of his actions is missed because it cannot be grasped through the normative terms of American politics. But all of it is right there in plain sight. He is using the Presidency and the Congress to wage war against America. That is the meaning of everything that is right there in front of everyone. Of all the people I know only my friend the rogue philosopher Billy Beck understands the full meaning of government force used at this magnitude. And even he, with decades of study of Soviet totalitarianism at close hand for reference, is shocked at the pace of this war on America. "

That's Martin McPhillips.

"Shocked," he says. I, myself, am not quite sure that that's the right word, but I must say at the very least that it's an amazing thing to have a feel for history and watch the destruction of American culture right before your eyes in the very years of your own life. My most general sensation is something like: "It's finally come to this." Yeats' "What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem?" type of thing. One reason why I balk at the word "shocked" is precisely that I know how bad this can get. There's a lot of dull horror left before "shocked", I think.

We are headed into the time of the petitotalists: the horde of mediocrities risen on power voted to them by imbeciles. Each holding a place in a vast machine -- from village to nation -- they all together become the implacable sieve through which all rights will be strained for the approval of the state. The thing is, of course, that the state is nothing but people who hold arbitrary power over others. There are now more of them than ever before in American history, they have never been so impudently dismissive of the very idea of "freedom", and there only promises to be more of them into the future.

I'm still not sure about some aspects of Obama. It is unquestionably true that he is wreaking bloody havoc on an unprecedented scale. What I cannot figure out is whether it really requires evil in order to commit these crimes upon the cradle of liberty. Would it not be possible for ignorance perverted by frightful deviance to sink to this?

If I am "shocked", then it is over this matter of observing the prospect of such hatred of humanity coming to pass, here. It is one thing to study un-relieved malice prevailing in places where ancient despotisms roared straight into the twentieth century without that interval of grace called the Enlightenment. It is quite another to live reversion to despotism right here where Enlightenment principles first came to earth in political practice.

This is unprecedented, and that's the thing that always holds my eye.

Obama? {spit} He's just a vessel upon which the plague arrives.

Brickflight

John Venlet e-mails about Air France 447 --

> After reading that Der Spiegel piece, once
> again, I have a question you can probably
> answer, when you have a moment or two,
> no rush. I may take a roundabout way to the
> question, so bear with me.
>
> In reading the piece, and after looking at
> some photos of the A330 cockpit, it almost
> seems as if the pilots of the plane were
> simply "riding" the plane down to its
> destruction, rather than actually manually
> attempting to "fly" the plane during its time
> of dire, alarm sounding need. I state this
> because as you read through Der Spiegel's
> article you read about the pilots trying to
> reboot the computerized flight control
> systems at least twice, which you touched
> on, but you really don't read anything
> about the pilots attempting to take manual
> flight control of the A330, unless I am not
> comprehending well what I've read.
> Additionally, the Der Spiegel piece states
> that the "pilots would have been forced to
> watch helplessly as their plane lost its lift,"
> which intimates to me that the pilots were
> simply riding the plane much as a paying
> passenger.
>
> In viewing cockpit photos of the A330 I see
> that the planes have a stick, and rudder
> pedals, but the stick is to the side of either
> seat and not what, in the past, would be
> considered a standard stick, centered
> between a pilot's legs. (I know that sentence
> seems a non sequitor, but I mention this
> because I visualize pilots struggling with
> flight control surfaces to control a plane's
> flight, i.e. in a dive or recovering from a
> dive for example).
>
> Like I said, I'm taking a roundabout way to
> the question, and I've intimated the question
> already I see. Specifically, the question is,
> were these poor bastards actually just riding
> the plane to its destruction, kind of like
> riding a Saturn V rocket so to speak, rather
> than actually utilizing any flying skills?

That's exactly what I see, mate: the former. That airplane was falling at 9000 feet a minute, flat as a pancake, while they sat there trying to re-gain flight controls.

> As a follow-up to that question, based on your
> knowledge, if the pilots would have had
> complete manual control of all flight systems
> do you think the result could have been
> averted?

No question about it, to me.

Here's the thing: some airplanes will stall and not "break" -- that is: they will not depart to unusual attitudes; the nose won't pitch up violently, they won't fall off on one wing and roll over, or otherwise tumble, etc. They'll just stop flying and fall flat, like a brick. Even a brick will eventually tumble when falling, but some airplanes' inherent design characteristics will allow them to simply fall flat, without going to unusual attitudes.

I think this was a big problem for that crew. They didn't have basic flight instruments anymore, like altitude, attitude indications, rate of descent, etc. The bigger problem, of course, was that they also did not have flight controls. (This is a big difference. Instruments tell you how you're doing. Controls are how you actually do it.)

Now, if you have controls, then you can feel the airplane. I've never flown a fly-by-wire system, and I'm not entirely sure how much useful tactile feedback makes it to the pilot's hand in a rig like that. However, at the very least, one can input a control and observe very basic changes in situation -- like observing the horizon, for instance. In zero visibility, the very least one could count on would be a difference in the feel of one's ass in the seat: throw a rudder or aileron and see if the g piles up for you, and in which directions.

These guys couldn't deflect any of their flight controls because the computer had gone tits-up, so they were fucked. They had no way to pitch the nose down and try to get air going over the wing again -- which is what you do when the airplane has stopped flying. This is basic private pilot stuff: when you're stalled, you point the nose down, so the wing can act like a wing again instead of a brick.

If I understand this right, they couldn't do that.

The computer just would not let them fly that airplane.

Barbarian Caprice

"The law is laid down so that the crime need not be proven. The process is expedited without any impertinence of defense."

(shorter People v. Bransford, 8 Cal.4th 894 (1994). See DUI Blog)

Does everyone understand why I keep calling it "Endarkenment"? It's the counter-Enlightenment, kids. Facts do not matter. Try to understand: it means that there is no reference to reality, and the power of the state gets to make it all up as they go along. If that ruins your life, then you get to suck it up and be a good little citizen in the name of whatever depravity it is that drives this sort of thing.

Try to imagine what the culture will come to as this epistemic dynamic is extended into the future. You might as well live under a fifth century barbarian king.

Is that what you want?

In Which I Briefly Explain Something To Some Simpletons Around Here

So, every now & then, a hue & cry arises in some feeblist quarters, which in general goes something like: "How can he be so unaccountably beastly?"

Ladies and gentlemen, let me only point out that the beginning of civility is abstinence from violence, and that sentimental moaning in favor of forcing me -- through the unilateral threat of violence in the law -- to pay for something that I do not value simply does not qualify.

Get those guns out of my face and I can be the sweetest person you ever met. I will always meet you on your premises.

Make up your fucking minds, and do it right now.

That is all.

Dear George

You know who you are, and so do I.

You are a stupid bastard. Now; hold still and consider that these are facts. Your name is not your own, and you cannot think. Oh? You believe that I'm wrong about that? Listen, asshole: how are your investments doing? Nevermind, because I know you're in the shitter, which is exactly where you belong, you despicable piece of shit.

And I know how you tried all your worthless adult life to kill someone else's soul. Well, guess what: you didn't get away with it. That person just keeps on gleaming and there is nothing that you can do about it now.

You lose, bitch, and I hope it chokes you to death, puking, but not before you're flat broke and your entire family knows what you are.

Make the most of that dildo, son. You're gonna need it to keep you warm from here on out.

Have an ice day. I'll see ya in the funny papers.

Obama Bullshit Bingo

Donald Luskin.

The Whip Of The Week

"List them all. Let God sort them out."

(comments@Reason)

Hey Krauthammer: Just Sit Down And Shut Up

On what to do about the Postal Service.

{sigh} You know... every time I see a goddamned conservative moaning about "tradition", I reach for my pistol. And every time you see that word, you should read, "habit". And I have another clue for that fool: I live in a "tiny hamlet" and FedEx has never failed me. The US Postal Disservice has no special or magic ability to go where others cannot, so get the fuck off it.

Finally: I don't care one whit in the world what "Article 1 Section 8 of our constitution" says. Nobody ever asked me about it, and I am not interested to pay for delivery of your perfumed letters, you asshole. So; piss off.

Have an ice day.

Bullets

• Glenn Reynolds links Bill Quick on the matter of ends and means. It really is time for everyone to seriously consider what they're after, and what they might get, instead.
  
  
• Keep William Grigg in your daily rounds. Just do it.
  
  
• Try to imagine: as you sit there now in front of your computer, you have four minutes to restart it and get a crucial set of applications up and going. If you fail, you die. It looks like that's what the pilots of Air France flight 447, lost in the Atlantic Ocean three hours out of Rio, were faced with. They died, along with all their passengers, some of whom were sliced in half by their seatbelts in the 36g impact. Spiegel Online.
  
  I don't like Airbus. (link: Rich Nikoley in e-mail)
  
  
• John Venlet sees right through AARP and declines herding around the cannibal-pot.