Posted 4:01 PM by Floyd

"The state is the enemy of law, not the source of law. The state is the enemy of law, for it makes itself the exception to all laws. " - James A. Donald

From the Volokh Conspiracy:

Nevada appears to be in the middle of a fiscal crisis: Its constitution more or less requires a balanced budget (art. 9, sec. 2(1)). There's a shortfall. The Legislature hasn't funded the budget. Various state functions, including the educational system, are right now (as of July 1) unfunded. And the Nevada Constitution (art. 4, sec. 18(2), enacted by voter initiative in 1996), requires a two-thirds vote to increase taxes, which has contributed to the budget deadlock. (I have no independent knowledge of this; I'm paraphrasing the court's statement of the facts.)

The Nevada Supreme Court has (1) ordered the Legislature to enact a budget, and (2) suspended the operation of the two-thirds majority requirement. That's right, the two-thirds majority requirement is right there in the Nevada Constitution:

2. Except as otherwise provided in subsection 3, an affirmative vote of not fewer than two-thirds of the members elected to each house is necessary to pass a bill or joint resolution which creates, generates, or increases any public revenue in any form, including but not limited to taxes, fees, assessments and rates, or changes in the computation bases for taxes, fees, assessments and rates.

3. A majority of all of the members elected to each house may refer any measure which creates, generates, or increases any revenue in any form to the people of the State at the next general election, and shall become effective and enforced only if it has been approved by a majority of the votes cast on the measure at such election.

But the Nevada Supreme Court has held that the Legislature must ignore this requirement.

I wish I could say that I was shocked.

Posted 3:50 PM by Floyd

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A Paris court today banned Reporters Without Borders and the French advertising agency Rampazzo from using a world-famous photo of Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara wearing a beret with a red star on it. [Reporters Without Borders showed Che wielding a policeman's club, captioned "Welcome to Cuba: World's Largest Prison for Journalists" - fm] The ban was at the request of Diane Diaz Lopez, daughter and heir of the late Cuban photographer Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, known as Korda, who took the picture.

(From Damian Penny.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Posted 3:20 PM by Floyd

Look at the pretty skeletal horses!

Last night I went to the Palo Alto club with my wife. We expected to play in a nice peaceful matchpoint club game, and were unprepared for what was in store for us.

When we arrived at the club the director told us that the game was a silver-point Swiss -- like a STAC but with Swiss teams. In a Swiss movement (also used for other tournaments such as chess), teams of four play short matches against each other. Then winners play winners, and losers play losers. This can be slow because of the time it takes to match up teams between rounds. So the director planned a board-a-match game with a matchpoint movement.

Board-a-match is matchpoints with a top of 1. If your team's combined scores are postive, you get a 1. If negative, you get 0. A tie awards one half.

We didn't have teammates, so I flopped down at a table where two young Chinese guys were sitting. I had never seen them before and they said they had not been playing long. I explained the matchpoint scoring to them and even warned them about some of the strange methods played by a pair from another team. Then we moved out to play the field; we would play 12 rounds of two boards, then compare to our teammates.

Sherry and I had a really good start, mostly because our opponents did strange and sub-optimal things. After we had cycled through half the room, we could see our teammates' results on the traveller. I quickly determined that they were very much beginners, as the results made little sense. Fortunately they did have some good luck and after several losses we did score some wins.

We were playing the last round when there was a commotion up front. There is a fellow named Todd who is a fixture at several club games, including the Wednesday night game. He is in a wheelchair because he has no lower legs. Todd, without any warning, fell unconscious. Fortunately there were an emergency room doctor and a fireman amongst the players. Gary, the doctor, and Rich, the fireman, laid Todd on the floor and began to apply mouth-to-mouth and CPR.

After a few minutes the paramedics arrived and began to help. It was clear that things were not going well, as they had been performing CPR for the better part of half an hour. They finally gave up and packed him on a stretcher to take to the hospital. I asked Gary as he was washing up how it looked. Gary said that Todd had no heartbeat and was 99% not to make it. (Emergency-room-ese for "heartbeat" is "rhythm", as in "He had no rhythm", making it sound like Todd expired because he was musically inept.)

Watching someone die is not pleasant, and what I found really scary was how sudden it was. No goodbyes, no reflection on a life well or not well spent. Just out like a light.

Posted 11:30 AM by Floyd

What the hell is wrong with the world? Here are two stories I plucked more or less at random from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Pittsburgh first baseman Randall Simon whacked a mascot with his bat during a popular sausage race at Miller Park, and prosecutors are considering whether to file charges.

Sausage races?

The race is a fan favorite at Miller Park. Held between the sixth and seventh innings, people dress as bratwursts, hot dogs, Polish sausages and Italian sausages and run around the field.

Ever notice how sometimes middle America is much weirder than the urban centers? San Francisco is a city of freaks, and proud of it, but I never heard of fans at Pac Bell Park dressing up as drag queens or whatever.

Meanwhile, pedagogy advances in the North Bay:

A political science instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College is being investigated by the Secret Service for telling his students to compose an e- mail to an elected official that included the words "kill the president, kill the president," a school administrator said Wednesday.

Michael Ballou, a part-time lecturer who teaches an "Introduction to U.S. Government" course at the college's Petaluma campus, intended the assignment to be an "experiential exercise that would instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why more people don't participate in the political process," ...

I'm afraid to participate in the political process because I might develop a heretofore unknown form of Tourette's that applies to written communication.

...

Most of the 30 students in the class dismissed the June 25 assignment as a joke, but after it was repeated at a subsequent class, one student did send the e-mail to U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Napa Valley) on July 5.

"You students are going to repeat this assignment until you learn it or I get fired, whichever comes first."

Posted 10:00 PM by Floyd

A few months I mentioned that I liked to read Michael Kelly on Wednesdays. Not any longer, as he was killed covering the Iraq war. I do have a new treat on Wednesday's though: Ray answers Achewood reader email every Wednesday. Onstad really seems to get a kick out of this feature, as it is always published on time.

Friday I was rereading Ray's Place, and got to the letter which Ray answered "Dear Eyeball Eating Person." People say "now there's coffee all over my keyboard" when they read something funny, but have you ever really spewed liquid from laughing. I did, and I had read it before!

I may have to dispense my own advice. Here's the debut edition of Floyd's Place:

We're not hitting well, and we're losing a lot of games. Do you have any advice?

A Baseball Team, Oakland


Dear Team,

I have seen some of your games and am ready to do a makeover. Every week I'll give you some advice. This week we'll work on patience. I see a lot of people swinging at the first pitch. I am ready to completely slap them on their faces and the sides of their heads/ears. I will slap them.

So when you see that first pitch coming, think of it as a bridge hand. Is it a hand so good that you wish you were playing a strong club system with a Kokish Relay and lots of artificial bids? If not, lay off.

I definitely helped you with this advice!

Posted 9:50 PM by Floyd

After receiving email from Frank Cohen I also heard from a guy I worked for at a startup several years ago, who is also a member of the Arab Jewish Dialogue Group. If I get any smarter I will have to nominate myself for a Nobel Prize.

Let me explain what ticked me off about the Declaration. Whenever I see a newspaper editorial about Israelis and Palestinians, I find it irritating. The purpose of a newspaper article is to communicate ideas to the newspaper's readers. And a newspaper editorial about Mideast Peace fails that purpose. No one in the Israeli cabinet, and no one in a "refugee camp" training to strap Semtex on himself, cares what some journalist 7,000 miles away thinks about Israel and Palestine.

Does the person writing the editorial realize that? If not, he or she is a borderline megalomaniac. There is a bit of that in all newspaper editorials. "This is what should happen in Jerusalem. This is what should happen in Iraq. This is what should happen in Washington, D.C."

I do think that editorial writers know that they are not going to change any minds in Tel Aviv or Bethlehem. So what they are writing comes across as condescending, as a way for the author to demonstrate his moral superiority. "I'm in favor of peace." Well, it's easy to moralize in favor of peace when you live in a stable society. It's easy to talk about how one side has to compromise with the other when you don't have to deal with the consequences.

So when I saw the Declaration it annoyed me in the same way that all the newspaper editorials have annoyed me over the years. And it was probably unfair for me to treat the two as equivalent.

The other reason I got annoyed was that I'm just plain exasperated at the flat-out failure of the "peace process." By which I mean not any specific set of accords, but the whole meta-process of "peacemaking" that has been going on for almost thirty years. Most of it is bullshit -- how many times has the Secretary of State said he would not tolerate any more violence? -- and all of it appears to be counterproductive. When I was kid, Palestinians threw rocks.

Posted 8:26 AM by Floyd

A soft answer turneth away wrath, and maketh Floyd feel rather ashamed of himself:

Hi Floyd: I ran across your blog on my op-ed piece for the Mercury news and the Arab Jewish Dialogue Group's Declaraction. Thanks for the blog. I agree that the both documents come across self-congratulatory and I'll try to tone that down in future pieces. I don't agree with your points that the Declaration is irrelevant to the peace-process. The group's members believe that leaders from Israel and Palestine know what the final negotiated peace deal is going to include. We see posturing, positioning, and hate mongering that has kept the parties from doing the final deal. Getting a group of Arabs and Jews together once a month to talk is an antidote to that.

-Frank Cohen

Posted 8:18 PM by Floyd

Journalistic bias can take many forms. One of the more obnoxious is puff pieces that present lunatics in a favorable light:

Like many Californians, Chris Biffle is sick about the looming cuts to education and tired of bickering Sacramento power brokers. And he's ready to fight.

And walk. And walk.

Along with a tiny cadre of students, Biffle, chairman of a community college philosophy department, set out June 21 on a walk to the state Capitol from San Bernardino City Hall -- his own mission of educational reform.

...

He's armed only with a set of gloomy statistics, a free reading game for young students, and a bunch of dirty sweat socks. If legislators still haven't adopted a budget before July 22, when he arrives in Sacramento, he plans to leave a pair of smelly socks on the Capitol steps for every day the state has remained without a budget since July 1, the constitutional deadline.

``It's the Big Stinker Award,'' he said.

To be followed by the Huge Stinker award, which will consist of his used underwear. And the Poopy Stinker award -- his grandchild's used diapers.

Biffle works for the state, which is about to reduce his funding. Tough luck, but it happens all the time. Here's more of Biffle's mewling:

Sadly, Biffle said, at least 60 percent of California elementary, middle and high-school students are one grade behind in reading. In a national fourth-grade reading test, only 28 percent were deemed proficient in reading. In California, the figure was 18 percent. The pending budget cuts will make ``a serious problem catastrophic,'' he said.

A reporter would have asked Biffle why California schools that do such a poor job teaching should be showered with unlimited amounts of funding. Too bad the Mercury News employee who interviewed Biffle was not a reporter, but a fawning scribe.

Posted 8:07 PM by Floyd

Oh look, Molly Ivins is still occasionally lucid. From the San Jose Mercury News editorial page, this teaser paragraph and link:

Here's to ordinary goodness -- and slight absurdity
Happy birthday, America! Two-hundred twenty-seven years old and still ready to boogie til we puke. What a great country. Another glorious year in the land of the free and the home of the brave, with only the usual idiocy attendant.

Isn't that supposed to be "attendant idiocy?" Whatever, I have better things to do than read the whole editorial and send her my corrections.