JustOneMinute

On The Road With Obama

Peter Baker of the NY Times hits the road with Obama. The TimesLove from 2008 is not still there, so we see some surprising criticisms. But they leave a few comic stones unturned, so on we march:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — By the time President Obama took the stage at the Fox Theater here, he was in the 18th hour of a 19-hour day. His tie was still knotted to the top as he launched into his stump speech, attacking his opponent’s record and defending his own. “I still believe in you,” he said, “and I hope you still believe in me.”

He still believes in me! Giminy, it's feeling stronger every day. Why is Obama singing old Chicago classics? Which bright light among his speechwriters (or ad-libbers) thought that his belief in me was the issue? And why pick a song about lovers going their separate ways?

Obama shows an odd news sense here:

Flying on Air Force One last week, Mr. Obama read to aides a letter he had received from a 90-year-old man from Florida who said he was looking for work in sales and marketing. “I’m rounding third but not ready to slide into home,” the man wrote the president. “This is the best letter of the day,” Mr. Obama told the aides.

Hmm - does the old guy plan to score standing up? Is he going to head back to third and wait for the next batter (Romney, presumably) to bring him home?

And more importantly, why is this old chap looking for work? Did his home equity fall off a cliff in Florida? Did his 401(k) implode? I think it is great that this guy has the energy and motivation to look for a job but my goodness - if Obama has led us to a point where ninety year olds need to look for work to avoid the cat food diet, it's time for a change.

I hope the media tracks this guy down to hear the rest of his story.

Zimmerman Case - Jeralyn Merritt's Perspective

Having reviewed the first wave of discovery Jeralyn Merritt lays out her best guess as to what happened on the night of Feb 26.

Do keep in mind it is a mix of "facts" (i.e., witness statements and physical evidence) and highly informed speculation.

Let me highlight this:

GZ did not have TM in sight when the dispatcher told him they didn't need him to follow TM. He responded OK. He didn't follow him after that. He didn't know where Trayvon was. He continued walking towards the front of the Retreat View Circle, where the first house is 2861, home to W-13 and W-12. He then turned around to walk back to his car. He just passed the T and the pet waste can when Travyon came up on his left. 

That is Zimmerman's story, as told by his father - crossed the top of the sidewalks 'T' from Twin Trees Lane to Retreat View Circle and then headed back.

However, several minutes elapsed between the end of Zimmerman's 911 call and the fatal encounter. Zimmerman had plenty of time to wander down and around the commons area, which was my guess at the end of March.

Legally, one might say, so what? It was dark, no witnesses saw him, and Zimmerman is legally free to walk around his neighborhood. However, it speaks to his credibility, and it seems to me that crossing the 'T' to Retreat View Circle and then heading back should not have taken as long as it seems to have taken.

Well. This may have inspired doubts in the minds of the police and we hope it helped motivate their investigation, but there comes a time when the state needs to move past a theory of the crime and start offering proof of a crime. I think the state is stuck at a theory.

Bucking Up John Roberts

George Will tries to push Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts back on track. Hard to believe that in a few short weeks it will be the 4th of July and Obamacare will have been affirmed, repealed in part, or repealed in whole.

I think repealed in part is a non-starter, so fully repealed it will be. A possible hint - Obama is running on culture wars and his sons, but is he mentioning his unpopular legacy achievement?

 

Elizabeth Warren's Ride On The Diversity Train

The Boston Globe does an exhaustive review of Harvard University's push for diversity in the 90's, with special emphasis on Elizabeth Warren's place in that push. As the only Native American female on the law school faculty and the faculty of the entire school, she was quite a catch, as the Harvard Federal filings made clear:

US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has said she was unaware that Harvard Law School had been promoting her purported Native American heritage until she read about it in a newspaper several weeks ago.

But for at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.

In addition, both Harvard’s guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.

Ms. Warren has insisted that the topic of her prized ethnicity never cme up in job interviews. So how, one wonders, did Harvard ever discover her non-secret?

The answer is in Harvard's 1999 Affirmative Action plan (291 page .pdf) dredged up by the Globe. Here is the law school desription of their approach to identifying minority candidates for recruitment (p. 110, my emphasis):

In furtherance of its commitment to increasing the diversity of the Faculty, the School has, for many years, acted in the following ways:

• Faculty Solicitation....

• Canvass of HLS Honors Graduates. ...

• Recruitment of Non-Harvard Scholars. Members of the appointments committees monitor faculty composition at leading law schools around the country to identify and solicit the candidacies of promising scholars. In 1996, the Lateral Appointments Committee began to identify professors who have recently received tenure at major law schools for possible recruitment as tenured faculty or visiting professors. The Entry Level Appointments Committee targets promising women and minority candidates, among others, through an exchange of information with their counterparts at other leading law schools.

• Participation in the AALS Annual Meeting. The American Association of Law Schools (AALS) holds an annual conference where teaching candidates are interviewed by interested law schools. The Law School regularly sends two members of the Entry Level Appointments Committee to interview approximately 20-24 job-seekers, who have been selected in advance for their scholarly promise and fit with the existing and anticipated needs of the School. After the AALS interviews, the most attractive candidates are invited back to make mini-presentations to the appointments committee and, if successful in that forum, the full Faculty. At each step in this process, the appointments committee gives weight to the affirmative action goals of the School in determining the relative strength of a particular candidate. Promising women and minority applicants are identified at the outset, and tracked in their progress from application through interview, mini-presentation, and Faculty presentation.

In short, they were actively looking for minority candidates and (utterly unsurprisingly) used the AALS as a key resource. Which strongly suggests they used her minority listing in the AALS to find Elizabeth Warren, even if she never realized that recruiters at other schools did that sort of thing (as if).

TALKING IT OVER: We can hear from Jane here.

Barack, Youthful Leader!

Up to now Barack Obama's youth has been a cipher. The future President,Nobel Prize Winner and world-changer was not a student council president club president, or much of a presence at all in high school, Occidental, or Columbia.

But now David Maraniss, in his new Barry bio, digs up compelling evidence of Barack as a young leader. We are with the 'Choom Gang', a group of highschool potheads:

The first Obama-inspired trend: “Total Absorption” or “TA”.

“TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” explains Maraniss. Here’s how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, “you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around.”

As one of Obama’s old high school buddies tells Maraniss: “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated.”

Another Obama innovation: “Roof Hits.”

“When they were chooming in a car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.”

Maraniss also says Obama was known for his “Interceptions”: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

I think some of that has carried over to the White House. Of course, "TA" is now "Total Self-Absorption".

Patterico And The Brett Kimberlin Gang

Patterico has a stunning post about the extreme lengths to which a group of nutjobs will go to harass and intimidate their opponents. Of course, Brett Kimberlin was convicted of planting bombs back in the 1980s, so maybe one man's extreme is another man's normal:

You’re about to listen to one of the most bone-chilling pieces of audio you will ever hear. At least, it was to me when I first heard it.

It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed.

In this post you will hear that audio clip. You will also read about a months-long campaign of harassment carried out by at least three individuals: Ron Brynaert, Neal Rauhauser, and Brett Kimberlin — much of it directed at critics of Brett Kimberlin. This harassment includes repeated references to critics’ family members, workplace complaints, publication of personal information such as home addresses and pictures of residences, bogus allegations of criminal activity, whisper campaigns, frivolous legal actions, and frivolous State Bar complaints.

A deadly phone call? What is this, Ring II? Hardly:

At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.

OK, that is crazy stuff.

Reason highlights the free speech issue. Ken at Popehat deplores the reality that this will break down as yet another left-right thing, even though a few lefties have been caught up in Kimberlin's madness as well.

Breitbart attempts to follow the money by contacting donors to the 501(c)3s run by Kimberlin. They get off to a limping start by failing to understand that Fidelity and Schwab run donor-directed funds.

Actually, those donor directed funds could be an excellent money laundering gambit. If, for example, I were Mr. Kimberlin myself, I could donate to a Fidelity directed fund, have that fund donate to my charity, and then report the cash as having come from the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift. Since Mr. Kimberin was a drug dealer back in the day, he might have problematic cash to clean up. Just ruminating, obviously.

Rosslyn Smith of the American Thinker provided the donor list and this TIME piece from 2007 examining how Kimberlin became a hero to the left. Apparently he got on the vote fraud bandwagon and has helped make the case that Diebold and various Republican operatives have stolen various seats. That said, one of the evil-doers has been booted off of DKos, so there is hope.

My thought - since it is mostly righties being harassed, this story lacks a legacy media news hook. Obviously, if (heaven forbid) this were happening to a Times reporter or columnist we would read about nothing else. Similarly, it would be front-paged and leading the evening news if Kimberlin could be connected to the Tea Party.

That said, there is some glimmer of an Anthony Weiner connection. This is not to allege that Anthony Weiner is in any way supportive of this group, but they seem to be supportive of him.

Per Patterico, we have a snppet from Andrew Breitbart's last interview:

[O]ne of the things they’ve done to people who have worked with me in the past, including an L.A. prosecutor, is to “SWAT.” That means that they’re spoofing phones, pretending to be somebody else’s phone, calling 911, and saying “I killed somebody” and then the person’s home is met with the guns drawn, the SWAT and the helicopters, in a horrifying act. It’s happened twice: once in New Jersey, once in Los Angeles, with an L.A. County . . . prosecutor who [is] associated with me.”

Still with Patterico:

As Andrew Breitbart noted, this happened to two people within the course of a single week: a man in New Jersey and myself. Both of us had had contact with Andrew Breitbart. Both of us were writing about the same story. And both of us received email threats days before we were swatted

The man in New Jersey was Mike Stack, who came to fame with WeinerGate. And, by what I assume is a non-coincidence, Patterico was on the phone at the time of the 'swatting' opign to discuss the Weiner case. Let's also note that outing the Ace of Spades seems to be a priority for the Kimberlin crew, and the Ace played a role in the Weiner story.

Well. Following the donor money seems like a good course. Surely some of these donors (Heinz Family Foundation, $20,000) ought to show a bit more awareness.

Just to pick one - here is the HKH Foundation (my emphasis):

For over 30 years, the HKH Foundation has been guided by a fundamental philanthropic imperative: to create new possibilities in pursuit of meaningful and lasting change. We have sought to convene, challenge and enable visionaries, advocates and activists across our areas of grantmaking towards the goal of re-conceiving "the possible." Historically the Foundation has made grants in the arenas of Environmental Protection, Safeguarding Civil Liberties and Peace and Security. We have also fostered non-partisan Civic Engagement as important to securing change across issues. Recently, we have developed a cross-cutting initiative on Protecting the Commons. We have long had a regional focus on the Adirondacks.

One of Kimberlin's groups, Justice Through Music, is a grantee in the Civic Engagement category. HKH ought to review their rules of engagement.

Some Zimmerman Maneuvering

Both sides have motions to seal some of the evidence (State, defense).

The Orlando Sentinel includes this amusing detail about the state's motion:

Also mentioned are "tests" performed by police on Zimmerman that de la Rionda argues may not be admissible...

From the filing, we are very probably reading about the voice stress test Zimmerman allegedly took and passed. It almost looks as if the prosecutor is worried about his ability to secure an unfair trial.

And new video of Zimmerman visiting the Sanford Police Dept. three days after the shooting shows him still bandaged on the back of his head. The usual noisemakers will insist that this simply shows Zimmerman acting on shrewd legal advice and that, lacking video of whatever was under the bandage, it tells us nothing other than Zimmerman is very crafty. Can't rebut that.

GUESS HIS WEIGHT: From that video and knowing his height to be around 5' 8", Zimmerman must be the lightest 200 pounder ever.

Mama Also Said There Be Days Like This

Elizabeth Warren, the favorite of right wing comics everywhere, is back on the warpath:

Elizabeth Warren says she knows she is part Native American 'because my mother told me so'

George Will noted this:

Blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate and Harvard professor who cites "family lore" that she is 1/32nd Cherokee, was inducted into Oklahoma's Hall of Fame last year. Her biography on oklahomaheritage.com says she "can track both sides of her family in Oklahoma long before statehood" (1907) and "she proudly tells everyone she encounters that she is 'an Okie to my toes.'" It does not mention any Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother. A DVD of the induction ceremony shows that neither Warren nor anyone else mentioned this.

I guess her Cherokee pride was a variable thing.

Some Questions Answer Themselves

Overheard: "Who is more famous, Rush Limbaugh or that other guy?".

Hmm. I put my money on Rush.

Hope And Change, RIP

ABC News surprises us with a eulogy to Obama's era of hope and change.

Zimmerman Case - The Evolution of The Evidence

George Zimmerman will presumably claim self-defense in the Tryvon Martin shooting, and (presumably) will also claims that Martin attacked him. An important factoid in evaluating the plausibility of this claim would be George Zimmermn's size. However, I have a concern - in the newly released evidence, are the Sanford PD trying to pull a fast one on the defense?

We will let Charles Blow of the NY Times set the stage, as of March 25:

Zimmerman’s statement, as related by police, says he was following the boy but “he had lost sight of Trayvon and was returning to his truck to meet the police officer when he says he was attacked by Trayvon.”

Trayvon’s personal account of who initiated the physical encounter is forever lost to the grave, but the initiation is likely to be the central question in the case.

To believe Zimmerman’s scenario, you have to believe that Trayvon, an unarmed boy, a boy so thin that people called him Slimm, a boy whose mother said that he had not had a fight since he was a preschooler, chose that night and that man to attack. You have to believe that Trayvon chose to attack a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds...

That weight differential was based on a 2005 police report showing Zimmerman weighed 250 lbs. Eventually, after the ABC News video of Zimmerman at the police station and an interview with a friend of Zimmerman's, the NY Times took a new guess - 170 lbs.

When he was finally booked on April 11, per his Intake Sheet, Zimmerman weighed 185 lbs. But what did he weigh on the night of the shooting? Did he lose fifteen pounds due to stress or crafty legal advice to look small and non-threatening? Did he balloon up from 170 due to, well, stress and a Dorito-heavy on-the-lam diet?

And here is the fast one. Baack when the Sanford PD first released parts of the relevant Offense Report (printed March 6, 2012) Zimmerman was listed as having a height of 509 but his weight was left blank.

Yet the same report, clearly updated with new witnesses, appears in the latest evidence dump in the first few pages. Because there are more witnesses, Zimmerman is moved back a bit in the "Persons" section (p. 4 of 183). However! He is also described as having a height of 507 and a weight of 200.

And what is that based on? Is that a weight actually recorded on the evening of Feb 26 which no one entered into the system until sometime after March 6? Is it somebody's subsequent guess based on something, such as the station house video? Did Zimmerman agree to be weighed sometime after March 6 while cooperating with the investigation?

Well. This number is being accepted by some as clear evidence of Zimmerman's weight on the night of the shooting. I don't think it is firmly established that this was Zimmerman's weight that night, since the March 6 report did not include it.

The defense may never need to reach this level of detail, but if they do, let's keep in mind the uncertain provenance of that 200 lb. figure.

FWIW: The March 6 police report has height/weight info as part of the description for all  of the other witnesses (this was redacted for the evidence dump). Were they all put on scales, were these eyeballometric guesses, or did they come from a driver's license database?

NOW WE PLAY 'GUESS THE AGE': On p 182 of the evidence dump we see that the EMTs described Trayvon Martin as "approx. 20 y/o male". That relates back to 'GOOD POINT' in this post - Zimmerman described Martin as 'late teens' in his 911 call but in his bond hearing apology he said he thought Martin was " little bit younger than I was". Zimmerman is 28, so the first guess was better.

Zimmerman Case - Witness Evolution

The Orlando Sentinel has an interesting article about the evolution of witness testimony in the Zimmerman case. Their key insight is on 'John', who saw Martin on top beating Zimmerman, who was calling for help and later waffled on who was screaming. However, I cannot replicate their scorecard:

Evidence released last week in the second-degree-murder case against George Zimmerman shows four key witnesses made major changes in what they say they saw and heard the night he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford.

Three changed their stories in ways that may damage Zimmerman. A fourth abandoned her initial story, that she saw one person chasing another. Now, she says, she saw a single figure running.

I have it as three changes that hurt the defense and the abandoned story helping the defense. Here we go:

Witness 2

A young woman who lives in the Retreat at Twin Lakes community, where Trayvon was shot, was interviewed twice by Sanford police and once by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

She told authorities that she had taken out her contact lenses just before the incident. In her first recorded interview with Sanford police four days after the shooting, she told lead Investigator Chris Serino, "I saw two guys running. Couldn't tell you who was in front, who was behind."

...

That all changed when she was reinterviewed March 20 by an FDLE agent. That time, she recalled catching a glimpse of just one running figure, she told FDLE Investigator John Batchelor, and she heard the person more than saw him.

"I couldn't tell you if it was a man, a woman, a kid, black or white. I couldn't tell you because it was dark and because I didn't have my contacts on or glasses. … I just know I saw a person out there."

This sounds like the shadow-watcher from the bond hearing, so I guess we may never learn which shadow was black and which was Hispanic:

Gilbreath: "We have a witness statement who observed shadows or figures running by her residence." He says he can't identify who they were.

Hmm, *IF* this is the same person, this witness had more or less invalidated herself by the time of the bail hearing. Even though it was factualy accurate that she had made earlier statement about seeing things, one wonders whether Gilbreath was skirting the line of truth and falsehood here.

Obviously, the non-chase helps Zimmerman.

Witness 12

A young mother who is also a neighbor in the town-home community never gave a recorded interview to Sanford police, according to prosecution records released last week. She first sat down for an audio-recorded interview with an FDLE agent March 20, more than three weeks after the shooting.

During that session, she said she saw two people on the ground immediately after the shooting and was not sure who was on top, Zimmerman or Trayvon.

"I don't know which one. … All I saw when they were on the ground was dark colors," she said.

Six days later, however, she was sure: It was Zimmerman on top, she told trial prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda during a 21/2-minute recorded session.

"I know after seeing the TV of what's happening, comparing their sizes, I think Zimmerman was definitely on top because of his size," she said.

Does that hurt Zimmerman?  I suppose it is not helpful, but still - *after* the gunshot Martin ended up on the ground and Zimmerman ended up on his feet. If she witnessed that transition, that tells us nothing abut the prior fight. It's hard to believe the prosecution can hang their hat on this.

Unless I have gotten turned round, Jeralyn Merritt discussed the evolution of Witness 12 over time. Here is her original 911 call ("Why would this man just shoot hinm") and her interview with Anderson Cooper. A TalkLeft commenter provides a useful breakdown, including the detail that she originally described two men arguing and a man screaming for help. Later, youth was served. Or at least, served up to the credulous.

Witness 6

This witness lived a few feet from where Trayvon and Zimmerman had their fight. On the night of the shooting, he told Serino he saw a black man on top of a lighter-skinned man "just throwing down blows on the guy, MMA-style," a reference to mixed martial arts.

He also said the one calling for help was "the one being beat up," a reference to Zimmerman.

But three weeks later, when he was interviewed by an FDLE agent, the man said he was no longer sure which one called for help.

"I truly can't tell who, after thinking about it, was yelling for help just because it was so dark out on that sidewalk," he said.

He also said he was no longer sure Trayvon was throwing punches. The teenager may have simply been keeping Zimmerman pinned to the ground, he said.

He did not equivocate, though, about who was on top.

"The black guy was on top," he said.

Well, that is 'John', obviously. He is the best 'scream' witness, so losing him on that point hurts the defense. Obviously, the defense will have to raise questions about why the guy on top would be screaming for help; the prosecution will counter that Zimmerman had drawn his gun while lying on the ground, brandished it for forty seconds or so, and then fired.

As to the notion that 'John' saw Martin pinning Zimmerman to the ground, Zimmerman claimed Martin was trying to cover his mouth with his hands. That is an odd way to suffocate someone - why not choke them out? Still, it does tie in to what 'John' may have seen.

Witness 13

He is important because he talked with Zimmerman and watched the way he behaved immediately after the shooting, before police arrived.

After this neighbor heard gunfire, he went outside and spotted Zimmerman standing there with"blood on the back of his head," he told Sanford police the night of the shooting.

Zimmerman told him that Trayvon "was beating up on me, so I had to shoot him," the witness told Serino. The Neighborhood Watch captain then asked the witness to call his wife, Shellie Zimmerman, and tell her what happened.

In two subsequent interviews about a month later — one with an FDLE investigator and one with de la Rionda — the witness described Zimmerman's demeanor in greater detail, adding that he spoke as if the shooting were no big deal.

Zimmerman's tone, the witness said, was "not like 'I can't believe I just shot someone!' — it was more like, 'Just tell my wife I shot somebody …,' like it was nothing."

Those witnesses are likely to be interviewed at least once more before Zimmerman's trial. Defense attorneys in Florida routinely question witnesses under oath as they prepare for trial.

So a month later this witness is an authority on how people ought to react to extreme stress.  Stress he was not feeling  himself, despite just having come across a homicide scene.

[Maybe we can find a stress expert or two at Wikipedia, the site libs love:

Symptoms of acute stress reaction

The symptoms show great variation but typically include an initial state of "daze", with some constriction of the field of consciousness and narrowing of attention, inability to comprehend stimuli, and disorientation.

This state may be quickly followed by either further withdrawal from the surrounding situation (to the extent of a dissociative stupor), or by agitation and overactivity, anxiety, impaired judgement, confusion, detachment, and depression.

I have no doubt the defense can find an expert to say that Zimmerman's reaction, as described, is well within normal bounds.  Still, I can see why the OS chose to score this as 'not helpful to the defense'.]

I LOVE A MYSTERY: Back in the day Zimmerman's weight, originally reported as 250 lbs based on a 2005 arrest report, was a matter of speculation. That speculation was not eased by the orignal police report placed at the City of Sanford website and immortalized here, since Zimmerman's weight (p. 3) was left blank.

However, the new evidence dump (183 page .pdf) reprises that police report on the first couple of pages. Zimmerman appeared at the bottom of p. 2 of 4 in the report printed March 6 2012; in the new report he appears at the top of p. 4 of 18 but his weight is given as 200 lbs. and his height has changed from 509 to 507.

So when was this weight taken or estimated? He hadn't been booked as of April 2; when he was booked on April 12, his 'Intake Sheet' had him at 5' 8" and 185 lbs.

A related factoid - Trayvon Martin is named correctly in the March 6 report even though he came in as a John Doe and was only identified the next day. Dare we infer these reports are updated over time? So what was the basis for updating Zimmerman's height and weight?

Just from counting redactons in the "Persons" area of the report, I see that the March 6 report has six redacted people plus Martin and Zimmerman. The April 2 report has twelve plus Martin and Zimmerman. Obviously, this has been updated. Lest you doubt, the only juvenile in the March 6 report is Trayvon Martin. By April 2 we see a second juvenile immediately after Martin, which ought to be the 3 year old dogwatcher whose name would fit about there alphabetically (I am not mentioning it but it is easily found).

We All Gotta Go Sometime, But What's The Hurry?

Glenn links to this bit of health news from Theodore Dalrymple at PJ Media.

It is meant to be funny, and is, but it has still summoned forth my Inner Pedant, always lurking beneath the surface of this seemingly fun-loving exterior. And not far beneath the surface, either.

The question is, how much exercise provides a health benefit? The theme is set here:

Between 1996 and 2008, the Taiwanese researchers divided 416,175 people into five categories, according to the amount of exercise, on self-report, that they did: from none to a lot. They discovered that those who did a little exercise, on average 92 minutes per week, had a reduction of 14 percent in their all-cause rate of mortality. They also found that “every additional 15 minutes of daily exercise beyond the minimum of 15 minute per day further reduced all-cause mortality by 4 percent.”

The subsequent letter to the Lancet pointed out that this cannot be correct: for if it were correct, and on the assumption that the relation between exercise and longevity were a causative one, Man would be immortal if only he did sufficient daily exercise, something in the region of six hours. In these circumstances, at least in my opinion, life would not actually go on forever; it would merely seem as if it did, in the sense of being boring and pointless.

I remember reading about life extension by calorie restriction and had a similar reaction - these people may live to age 120 by eating ground shirt cardboard and walking around at 6'2", 120 lbs, but it will seem a lot longer. But then again:

''For every calorie you save, there's about a 30-second increase in your life span,'' he said. ''It's worth more to me to have an extra two to three minutes of life than an extra slice of pizza.''

Worth keeping in mind.

But let's not keep the Inner Pedant waiting! The obvious problem with the 'exercising to immortality' hypothesis is that it represents an extrapoloation beyond the experimental range, and we know how problematic that can be.

In fact, the paper itself makes that very point:

After the minimum recommended 15 min a day of exercise, every additional 15 min of daily exercise (up to 100 min a day, after which additional exercise gave no additional health benefi t) is expected to generate an additional reduction of 4% (95% CI 2·5–7·0) all-cause and 1% (0·3–4·5) allcancer mortality.

This gives me an excuse to clip in their cool graph and use the word "asymptotic":

At a more basic level, this paper does not seem to distinguish cause and effect. Rather than randomly assigning large groups of people to the different exercise intensity groups (as if that could be done over a long period), they rely on self-selection and self-reporting. Consequently, as is so often the case with this type of study, we are left wondering whether exercise makes people healthier, or healthier people simply enjoy exercise more.

Well. Make the mock if you will, but those diligent exercisers are lookin' good and feelin' better. Unless they are laid up with some ghastly injury, natch.

 

Their Lips Are Unsealed

Judicial Watch discovers that Obama 2012 is leaking secrets to Hollywood in order to faciltate the movie about Obama's execution of Osama.

In a bit of a cross-marketing fail the movie's release date has been moved back to December 2012, possibly after Hollywood finally realized it was a Navy SEAL and not Obama himself who killed Bin Laden.