Or maybe sad victims of communism day ?

From today’s best of the web column at WSJ, the bottom bit:

There Goes the Neighborhood
Maybe his presence brought down property values, maybe he got hit by the real estate bubble, or maybe he just overpaid. Whatever the case, London’s Guardian reports Osama bin Laden’s house isn’t worth as much as had been advertised:

After Sunday night’s dramatic raid by US Navy Seals, a senior Obama administration official told reporters that the property, an “extraordinarily unique compound” in an “affluent suburb,” was valued at around $1m.

But two property professionals in Abbottabad—a quiet, military-dominated town—said that much of that was incorrect. Based on the size of the plot and the house, which was built in 2005, and using recent property sales as a guide, they estimated that it would fetch no more than $250,000 on the current market.

Assuming bin Laden made the customary 20% down payment and took out a mortgage for $800,000 in 2005, he’s going to be underwater for a long time.

In the civilized world, children may attend “free” public school. In most parts, the law respects the freedom of the families to choose alternatives such as homeschooling. Here in Ontario, it is fairly hands-off; in other jurisdictions, bureaucrats scrutinize such arrangements. In a few places, this freedom does not exist at all. One case made the news recently: Quebec judge orders three-year-old into daycare for ‘socialization’

It sounds like an orwellian intrusion, but the news blurbs and blog firestorm don’t have much real information, so I went hunting just a tad. The most recent decision appears to be this one (2011 QCCQ 3929, Protection de la jeunesse – 11959). Online french-english translators appear to do a reasonable job, and the judgment takes only seventeen minutes to read.

It is a mixed bag. To some extent, the parents appear to be ignorant of the legal procedures involved (in their case, getting a waiver from the school board), and may have neglected to avail themselves of sufficient medical assistance (speech pathology etc.) for their children. On the other hand, the court repeatedly chastises the family for feeling persecuted (even though they have been for some time under the controlling microscope of the state), presumes that social exposure in a school setting is essential to help whatever problems actually exist, and lumps all the children into the same scheme, despite there being barely anything amiss with some of them. It may be justice, but it sure is messy.

The outcome is not final. The family has been assisted by the Home School Legal Defence Association.

That shrew Gaia is dishing out punishment for my CO2-belching ways. How else to explain a weather forecast such as this, someplace other than Canada’s west or east coasts?

Opinion nonsurvey: how should one respond when discovering some spider-web-like filaments inside one’s favorite bag of brown rice?

1. Pretend you didn’t see it. Proceed with scooping, rinsing, cooking, eating said rice.
2. Wipe out the filaments with a rag, then proceed as above.
3. Realize that the filaments may have been recently created by lifeforms still in the bag. Wipe it. Scoop carefully from the central part of the bag, where you hope the lifeforms are not. Rinse thoroughly. Start cooking. Look at rinse leftovers. Notice one of them is moving, and not just from static electricity. What to do next?
3a. Pretend you didn’t see it. Finish cooking, eat.
3b. Hope that it is a “lone gunman”, the good guys got him, and the rest of the rice is good. Finish cooking, eat.
3c. Rationalize that even if there are a few worm friends in the cooking rice, they will simply add spice to the otherwise bland product. Finish cooking, eat, enjoy placebo effect flavours. Resolve to dump the rest of the raw rice though, just in case.
3d. Scoop out more of the remaining raw rice from the bag for a new inspection. Accidentally spill some on the floor. While vacuuming up the mess, notice that there are dozens of cute little non-rice lifeforms squirming around. Lose faith that the already-cooking batch is clean. Lose appetite. Dump the lot, including the batch already cooking. Weep for food quality control. Blog about it.

According to this new BEA report, the last few minutes of Air France 447 were spent with the aircraft plummeting in deep stall, with the pilots exacerbating the situation by nose-up pitch controls. Just like Colgan 3407. It sounds a though big iron pilot practice needs more focus on basic stick & rudder flying. Mechanical emergencies are drilled non-stop, and have become relative non-events when they occur in real life. May aerodynamic emergencies become as well-practiced sometime.

A cliche in courtroom TV dramas is this sort of exchange:

Prosecutor: … And the injuries on the victim, are they consistent with the weapon in evidence?
Expert Witness: Yes, they are.
Prosecutor: I rest my case.

Here, consistency is fallaciously turned into implication. To see why, the next bit in the transcript could have been:

Defender: Are the injuries also consistent with a bite from a common house tick?
Expert Witness: (stammering) Yes, I guess so.
Defender: I rest my case.

So, any time someone is incriminated by some sort of wording about “… it is consistent with …”, alarm bells should be ringing. What else is it consistent with? Could it be a coincidence? If such questions are not immediately answered, then the accuser is covering up for ignorance.

Such is the unfortunate case of Jose Guerena. Bob Kryber, the leader of the SWAT team that killed Guerena, is reported to explain:

They found no drugs, but did discover another AR-15, plus a third rifle and two handguns. There were also several sets of body armor and a hat bearing the U.S. Border Patrol logo. None of these items is necessarily illegal or, for a Marine, even uncommon. But Krygier told his debriefer that the weapons and armor were consistent with what a cartel rip crew would possess.

Whether or not the exact wording of the claim can be attributed to Sgt. Kryber, the implication is clear. Armed with prior expectation that they were dealing with a hard-core drug criminal, every bit of evidence that was not exculpatory was incriminating. And they weren’t looking for exculpatory evidence that morning.