Have Russian Troops Seized Ukrainian Airports?

Washington post link.

What's Up With The Walking Dead???

First two episodes of this season really, really good...I felt like I was watching a different show entirely...

Third episode ok, but the soap-opera melodrama seemed to have returned...

Splitting everybody up is a great idea, though. Buffy used to be good at that--showing you different permutations of characters. One reason most shows suck is that you see the same combination of characters every single show--you're never given an opportunity to see the characters pairwise (etc.) in different combinations.

The Extinction Crisis

Old news, but still gut-wrenching.

Carolina 85, State 84

Congratulations to both teams on a hard-fought game.

J.P. Tokoto kept us in in until Paige took over in the second half and went bugshit crazy.

T.J. Warren was a beast. I will not miss him next year.

I kinda feel bad for State. This could have so easily gone the other way, and they seem to have been on the wrong end of such games a lot of late...but, well, I also really like beating them...

Go Tar Heels / Beat State

I'm a bit nervous about this game.  Roy sure does love beating State...but the Wolfpack will be highly motivated for this one...

Females Are Shorter Than Males Because They are Discriminated Against And Fed Less As Children

Oh, Sweden...you so crazy.

Yanukovych, Wanted For Mass Murder, Still On The Lam

KyivPost

RIP Meredith Legg Stapleton

link to preliminary obituary.

The moving story of Stapleton's attendance at the Carolina-Duke game.

George Washington, Boozehound

link

And I thought I couldn't respect the guy any more than I already did...

(h/t/ J. Carthensis)

Carolina-Duke Filmed With a GoPro

From the risers.

Damn I miss that...

0.8% Of Pregnant Women Surveyed Claim They Are Virgins

link

Kinda throws an interesting light on that whole Bethlehem story...

Paul Bloom: The War On Reason

This is worth a read if your fed up with Jonathan Haight-esque non-sequiturial hyperbole about alleged human irrationality.

Most importantly: it's important to recognize that failures of perfect rationality under odd conditions do not entail global irrationality. The usual suspects are hunting hard for weird results. It's not that some results aren't intriguing...but they're often poorly-justified and seldom a threat to the proposition that humans are sometimes to some extent rational. Um...and if you hoped for something more than humans are sometimes, to some extent, rational...well, you were, I'd say, hoping for something that flies in the face of facts we knew about well before modern psychology had anything to say about the matter...

Biscuits! Carolina 102-Wake 72

Apparently getting us all cheap biscuits comes at a cost...

Ukraine President Flees Kiev as Protesters Take Control

Holy smokes.

Anthony Hernandez's Day At Carolina

A great story about Roy and the boys welcoming Anthony Hernandez, a Tar Heel with muscular dystrophy.

Gives some of the backstory for the end of the Lucas piece.

Lucas: Write It Down

Nice work covering Thursday night at the Dean Dome.

Carolina-Duke + The Aftermath In 4 Minutes

link

Carolina-Duke Postgame

JUMP AROUND

Carolina 74-Duke 66

Daggum it, the boys gutted that one out.

I have to go throw up and pass out now.

Heels Looking Bad

37-30 bad guys at the half.

Heels just can't seem to really get it going.

Parker is tough.

Paige having a terrible game.

Not looking good, but could be worse than 7 points.

Carolina-Duke: Missed Calls and The Rivers Shot

ESPN is running the Rivers shot over and over again, and it's really getting irritating.

I mean, Rivers is inherently irritating--a paradigm dookie of Laettnerian proportions...

But the reason it's most irritating is that none of the unutterably terrible calls that kept Duke in the game and made that shot possible are ever mentioned when the shot is played.

Here's a collection of them. With less than 2:30 left, the refs missed (1) Seth Curry taking 4 steps just before hitting a 3, (2) Ryan Kelly airballing the ball out of bounds (which was called a Henson tip), and (3) the very worst one, with 18 seconds left, a Plumlee shoving Zeller out from under the goal as he went up for the ball, resulting in an own-goal rather than a rebound.

Duke did not, as we might say, actually win that game--it was handed to them by absolutely unconscionably bad officiating. It's bad enough that they came away with a 'W'...bad enough that they weren't in Carolina's league that year...bad enough that they basically weren't playing basketball for those last 2:30, but, rather, some sport that lets you walk around with the ball, shove people out of the way, and have a do-over if you airball out of bounds...  Really damn angrifying...but the kind of thing that happens in sports, and you just have to move on...

But to have to watch that clip of that little twit Rivers over and over again on top of it, as if he had legitimately won the game with skill and grit, and the three terrible calls had never happened...

Damn, that's really galling.

(Oh, and this isn't even to mention dudes from the Duke bench screaming "Duke motherfuckers!" at the fans on their way to the locker room...that was class out that ass, alright...)

Ah well.

Just venting.

Go Tar Heels, Beat Camp Mohawk

GTHD

What Happened With The Walking Dead???

The first two episodes of the season were actually good.

A pleasant surprise.

Maybe The Hot Hand Does Exist After All

Kevin Drum summarizes, and expresses skepticism.

I've got to say, I've never believed Gilovich and the anti-hot-hand crowd...

I know, I know...numbers numbers math math math...

I respect that arguments.

But, speaking for myself, I have very, very pronounced good days and very, very pronounced bad days of shooting. And it's not random. I am pretty good at feeling it when I'm shooting badly. My eyes aren't locking on the back of the hoop as automatically, my release is wrong...I'm often fuzzy-headed and easily upset by missing...  Other days, it's all just clicking...  And I'm also convinced that the cycles can be shorter, even short enough to fit inside one game...

At any rate, my own guess is that (a) the hot hand exists, but (b) its effects are overblown. Obviously we'd observe apparently "hot hand" phenomena even given random variation...but I just don't believe that that's all it is.

Go Tar Heels Beat FSU

That is all.

The Greatest Dunker Ever

The case for Vince.

Carolina 75-Pitt 71

Nice game, nice win.

Ugly final 3 minutes, but we survived.

What's gotten into James Michael MacAdoo?

Nice blocks by Brice.

Nice play generally by Paige, who's our only 3-point threat.

Nice dunk by Tokoto.

And one extra-sweet dunk by Isaiah Hicks, who might still break out this year.

Well done Tar Heels.

The Situation in Raleigh...

...worsens

(via Reddit)

Rumsfeld's War And It's Consequences Now

NYRB

(via MeFi)

Derm Academy Cancels Class With Style

link

Postponementgate! Did d00k Chicken Out????

The interwebs are abuzz!

Why did the UNJ-D hoops team chicken out because the Dean Dome was going to be filled with students instead of alumni????

I SMELL A COVERUP!!!!!!!!!!

It actually doesn't look that bad in the video, and dude did take only 27 minutes to get from Hansbrough Indoor Stadium to the DES...  But we do also have to think about the fact the the d00kies needed to get back home. Especially since Krzyzxyzvzyzki needs to be back to his cof...er...I mean, bed...before dawn...

I think some people are bored on their snow day...

2" of Snow in Raleigh Brings on the Zombie Apocalypse

Note the car on fire...

Carolina-Duke Postponed Until 2/20

That's right you "couldn't make it to Chapel Hill"... I mean, it's eight miles and all...

Too bad. The Dean Dome would have been filled with nothing but students, since the wine and cheese crowd wouldn't have been able to make it in...

Ah, well...sounds like this was not even a "better safe than sorry" decision...but, rather, the bus just can't even get to Duke's own campus to even pick up the team, much less make it to CH.

We've already got the makings of a big-ass storm in the Shenandoah Valley. We could get up to 20", so saith the weather man.

Carolina-Duke Still On

As of 4pm.

Carolina-Duke

We're struggling a little less, and have turned a corner or two...but the forces of darkness, I must admit, are playing really good ball.

Parker is a tough matchup for anybody. Not sure whether Roy will put JMM or JPT on him. But dude is just good. (Also, he doesn't even seem like a real dookie...which is to say: seems like a likeable guy...)

We're actually a solid defensive team, with our defensive efficiency ranking 16th in the country (The bad guys rank 90th...but every other category favors them).

To be honest, the odds do not seem to be in our favor this time around. But stranger things have happened.
(Like Duke's "win" in Chapel Hill in 2012...)

I like the way that Carolina is working to improve right now, but, let's face it, our best player is gone, and he ain't coming back.

Could be a good game, though, and let's hope it is. In fact, let's hope it happens at all, given the weather forecast...

Still, I'm going to predict (in some sense of "predict"...) Heels 74, University of New Jersey at Durham 71.

Get 'em boys!

And, of course:

Go to hell Duke!

The Sixth Extinction

Way to kill everything, humanity.

Letting Beer Warm Up And Then Re-Refrigerating It Does Not Skunk It

I never really believed that goofy theory.

What skunks beer is apparently...light.

The USA Freedom Act

Jeez I hate these propagandistic names for legislation...  But in this case I'll let it slide...

An attempt to throttle back on NSA data collection.

Joss Whedon: A Bigot For Thinking That Women Do Not Have Testicles

This stuff is now officially completely nuts.

As it were...

Giant Giant Chimp Culture

Apparently there is a giant culture ("megaculture") of giant chimps in the Congo.

Six-foot tall, leopard-hunting, tool-using chimps.

Link to the Metafilter post.

Holy crap.

Whale Fall!

Crazy man.

"Tainted Love" Played By Floppy Drives

Amusing enough to warrant giving HuffPo a hit...

Carolina 73, Notre Dame 62

Nice work Tar Heels!

The boys looked really good today once they got it in gear.

Austerity Is Exacerbating Unemployment

Drum, The Madness of Austerity

Private sector employment is up 6.8 percent. Public sector employment is down 3.4 percent. And that's during a period when population grew 2.3 percent. On a per capita basis, government employment has declined more than 5 percent since 2009, and it's still declining. This is the price of austerity.
If public sector employment had been growing normally during this period, we'd have about a million more jobs than we do now and the unemployment rate would probably be below 6 percent. We are our own worst enemies.

I've been worried about the deficits and the debt since I was old enough to worry about policy. But you've got to be a real zealot to keep push for austerity during the Great Recession.

The CU Philosophy Department Sexual Harassment Debacle

I'm trying to ignore it.

Sexual harassment exists in philosophy--clear, unequivocal, no-question-about-it, paradigmatic sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment harassment also exists in philosophy--that is to say, false/exaggerated charges of sexual harassment are leveled at people, often by those who disagree with them politically.

My own view is that actual sexual harassment needs to be dealt with straightforwardly and mercilessly. That is, inter alia, by making it clear to people that that shit will not be tolerated, and by breaking the tweed wall of silence. In my experience, people frequently know or suspect who the culprits are, but their friends protect them and others often don't want to get involved.

In my experience, the extremist feminism that frequently runs rampant in the discipline fails to target actual offenders, and focuses instead on targeting people perceived as weak, and/or people who are considered ideological/philosophical enemies/opponents.

I've never personally seen a single actual sexual harasser busted by the lynch mobs. In the only case of actual, unequivocal harassment in which I knew what was going on, I had no standing, was asked by victims not to get involved, and had nothing to offer anyway.

I have seen extremist feminists go after a lot of innocent people, and I was in a group that was the main target of unofficial accusations of "hostile environment sexual harassment" in grad school, basically because I refused to take crap from the feminists. (Incidentally, it all eventually blew over and most of us ended up on friendly terms years later, in case that's interesting. Although I probably could have been more diplomatic, and although there were some philosophical points at issue that I now think I was wrong and they were right about, there is no doubt that the accusations were bogus and ideologically-driven.) And I've seen other bogus accusations leveled when I wasn't involved.

At any rate, the point of all this was to post this link to The Laughing Philosopher about the CU incident.

I'm largely in agreement, especially about the totalitarian, anti-philosophical demand that people not criticize nor even discuss certain purely philosophical controversies. Utter madness.

I don't know what happened at CU, but, in general, I'm pretty disgusted by everything in this vicinity. I'm disgusted by sexual harassment, I'm disgusted by false charges of sexual harassment, I'm disgusted by people who are committed to pushing the so-far-as-I-can-tell-unsupported (and, I suspect, ideologically-motivated) view that sexual harassment is worse in philosophy than it is in other disciplines, I'm disgusted by the protected status afforded to feminism in the discipline, I'm disgusted by the fact that people--mostly dudes--can't keep it in their damn pants even just long enough to do their damn jobs, and I'm disgusted with the fact that people are so eager to want to impose a kind of puritanism in response. I'm disgusted by the whole damn mess.

Of course, it's easy to just say "a pox on all your houses" when you're not responsible for actually getting in there and solving the problem...

And none of this should suggest that I think everyone here is equally bad. I detest the actual harassers more than any of the others, just for the record.

The RBC: U.S. Marijuana Legalization Won't Help Mexico Much

Well damn.

Quoting Alejandro Hope:

In the final analysis, Mexico doesn’t have a drug problem, much less a marijuana problem: It has a state capacity problem. That is, its institutions are too weak to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens. Even if drug trafficking might very well decline in the future, in the absence of stronger institutions, something equally nefarious will replace it.

Sodastream: Made In Illegal West Bank Settlements

link

No homemade Pepsi for you.

Snipers vs. The Power Grid?

link

This seems like it might be a genuine concern.

Statue of Sleepwalking Man Terrorizes Wellesley!!!111

Apparently a piece of art is terrifying the stalwarts at Wellesley!!!1111oneoneoneone

They are frightened AND TRIGGERED!!!

Plus it is SEXUAL HARASSMENT!!!!!!!

Jebus.

These must be the most cowardly human beings to ever walk the Earth...  Or, rather, they would be, if their "fear" were real, rather than manufactured. Scratch that. It's not even manufactured. It's completely fictional. It's a pose, struck for a political end.

So, good news; they're liars rather than cowards...

Which really is good, because being a liar is something that you can change instantaneously. If you want to.

If they really were so cowardly that that, despite being in the 0.00001% safest portion of the human population had ever lived, they were still actually, honestly, afraid of a statue...well, then, there really would probably be no hope for them.

Look, here's a general rule: if Amanda Marcotte is calling you on your feminist bullshit, then you really have crossed the border into crazytown...

Is Obligatory to Say and Believe False Things About Someone Because They Want You To?

I'm trying to think of a case in which the questions are at all difficult to answer...

Perhaps: if a terrible crime was committed against Smith (e.g. he was tortured horribly)? 

Of course we're not talking about simple requests that you not raise the subject, not tell anyone else about it, never mention it...  Those are all reasonable requests, I think. Nor are we talking about the request that you act as if it never happened, treat Smith as you would anyone else, etc.  

Rather, the question is something like: can Smith demand that you say--and even believe--that he was, for example, in Paris on vacation at the time when the crime occurred in, say, Iraq? 

But that's a specific, not-very-good thought experiment to try to get at the general questions. Which, again, are:

(1) Are we ever obligated to say false things about people because they want us to?

And

(2) Are we ever obligated to believe false things about people because they want us to?

(And, of course, if the answer to (1) is in the affirmative, but the answer to (2) is in the negative--which seems like a real possibility--then other problems will obviously arise...)

But perhaps the questions are really:

(1') Are we ever obligated to say false things about people because it is very important to them that we do?

and

(2) Are we ever obligated to believe false things about people because it is very important to them that we do?

I mean, everybody this side of really strict, literalistic Kantians probably thinks that it's ok to lie sometimes in order to save people great pain...  So that might give us a start here...

So maybe at least (1)/(1') are harder than I initially thought...

Is America Separating Into the Peasants and the Scholar-Gentry?

Maybe

As long as the government says out of this, I'm sure it will all turn out fine.

Report: Administrator Hiring Drove 28% Increase In Higher Ed Work Force

In the Chronicle.

George Lakoff Is Still An Idiot

link

Carolina 75, Terps 63

Nice game Heels.

Ed Cota Mix

My God Cota was a magician with the ball.

A few reminders.

(via IC)

Marcus Ginyard's Website

One of the greatest Tar Heels ever.

Stay safe, Marcus.

What Percentage Of American Indians Think "Redskins" Is A Slur?

Interesting.

Carolina 84, State 70

Heels played very well + not State's day --> Heels win.

Go Tar Heels/Go To Hell State

You heard me.

Feminism's Uncivil Civil War

 A lot of people get annoyed when I criticize feminism, but, well, it's not just me...

Here's The Nation (The Nation!!!) reporting on the emerging problem of extreme feminism turning its nastiness on other Feminists. (Also not a new problem...)

I'm against irrationality and prejudice no matter who's dishing them out. And IMO, there's a prominent, influential wing of feminism that dishes them out liberally.

It's kinda funny (in the sense of: not funny at all) that they get away with this so long as their target is (usually white) males (and women who aren't down with the sickness). But there's outrage a'brewin' now that the target is, increasingly, other prominent feminists.

Feminism has a lot of problems. When you lose somebody like me, you're doing something really wrong. I've not become any less of an egalitarian since my 20's, but feminism seems to have slowly drifting away from me...generally toward the salons where French literary theory and postmodernism live on...  I think the average feminist in the street is still a liberal egalitarian...it's the academic vanguard that's the problem, IMO. Of course, that's the feminism I most frequently encounter...and my experience is not representative. That's worth thinking about...