Plisetskaya’s jump
By popular demand, I’m going to try to explain Plisetskaya’s jumping ability as shown in a recent open thread.
Here’s the video again:
You won’t see other women in ballet jumping like that. You’ll see a few men getting that kind of height, but not women. But Plisetskaya was undoubtedly a woman – and quite a woman – and she could jump like that. How did she do it?
Some of it cannot be explained, like all greatness. But there’s quite a bit that can be explained about her superior jumping ability, and it boils down to strength and what’s known in ballet as attack.
You can find plenty of instructional videos on the basics of the step, which is called grand jeté en tournant (see for example this one). But they won’t tell you much about what Plisetskaya did to create such a dramatic effect.
Why could Plisetskaya do this and almost no other ballet dancers – except quite a few men, who don’t tend to kick the preparation leg up so high at the end? Plisetskaya had a very unusual combination of flexibility and strength, even among dancers, who must have both. Most female dancers today sacrifice jumping strength to flexibility. They are very hyper-flexible and develop that flexibility even further – to the detriment of the beauty of their lines, I think, although today’s audiences seem to love and require it. But that emphasis weakens their jumps and also slows them down. Ballet dancers today generally have more trouble moving fast than olden-day dancers.
They also have different body shapes and proportions. They are longer and thinner, more ectomorphic than mesomorphic. You will notice that Plisetskaya is slender but not very thin, and her limbs – though longish – are not very long. Simply put, she has a more normal body type than today’s female ballet dancers. She carries more strength and bulk in the all-important jumping muscles of the glutes and thighs, more like a man although she’s all woman. She was a ballet dancer with unusual sex appeal, but she never was the fragile type.
And she had the preparation of an athlete in terms of what this man explains with the example of the javelin thrower. Plisetskaya covers a tremendous amount of ground in her set-up steps. Boy, does she move, and there’s nothing delicate about it. That gives her tremendous lift because of her momentum. It’s partly a matter of timing in addition to strength.
Take a look at his tutorial on how to do the step, and I think you’ll see how it relates to what Plisetskaya does, although he doesn’t mention her (plus, I would say that all of her preparation steps are very big and strong, not just the last one or two):
Jonas Salk and merit
[NOTE: Because of the Gilot open thread earlier today, I decided to look up Jonas Salk and get up to speed on some of the details of his life. What I found was interesting enough, and relevant enough to today, that I decided on a post about it.]
I thought the story of Jonas Salk might make a nice contrast to today’s war on merit. For example:
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents, and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated to the United States when she was twelve. Salk’s parents did not receive extensive formal education…
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students.
Surprisingly, this school is still in operation – and even more surprisingly, it still seems to base its enrollment on merit:
Well over 15,400 students compete for approximately 270 seats in the freshman class each year based on their middle school grades, standardized test scores and even attendance records. Admission is available to all New York City residents in 8th grade. A minimum grade point average of 91 is required of all applicants to be considered for admission. Minimum standardized reading and math scores at the 90th percentile are also required (4.3 on both English and Math)…
In sharp contrast with the original school which was open to male students only, the new school has been dominated by female students from its inception, today comprising approximately 70% of the student population.
As of 2019, the school’s minority population is largely Asian, with the New York City Department of Education’s “Asian and other” category making up 44% of the student body total, comprising the largest segment of the school’s population. White students comprise 37% of the population, Hispanic students 12% and black students 7%.
48% of students at Townsend Harris are from an economically disadvantaged background.
The school maintains a 100% graduation rate.
But back to Salk:
Salk enrolled in CCNY, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that “for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth.”…
After graduating from City College of New York, Salk enrolled in New York University School of Medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was “comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews… while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place.” Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in.? During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
That probably was enough to pay his tuition.
As for what happened to CCNY later on, there’s this:
Additionally, as the population of New York grew, CUNY was not able to accommodate the demand for higher education. Higher and higher requirements for admission were imposed; in 1965, a student seeking admission to CUNY needed an average of 92 or A-. This helped to ensure that the student population of CUNY remained largely white and middle-class…
Calls for greater access to public higher education from the black and Puerto Rican communities in New York, especially in Brooklyn, led to the founding of “Community College Number 7,” later Medgar Evers College, in 1966–1967. In 1969, a group of black and Puerto Rican students occupied City College and demanded the racial integration of CUNY, which at the time had an overwhelmingly white student body…
Under pressure from community activists and CUNY Chancellor Albert Bowker, the Board of Higher Education (BHE) approved an Open Admissions plan in 1966, but it was not scheduled to be fully implemented until 1975. However, in 1969, students and faculty across CUNY participated in rallies, student strikes, and class boycotts demanding an end to CUNY’s restrictive admissions policies. CUNY administrators and Mayor John Lindsay expressed support for these demands, and the BHE voted to implement the plan immediately in the fall of 1970.
The doors to CUNY were opened wide to all those demanding entrance, assuring all high school graduates entrance to the university without having to fulfill traditional requirements such as exams or grades. This policy was known as open admissions and nearly doubled the number of students enrolling in the CUNY system to 35,000 (compared to 20,000 the year before). With greater numbers came more diversity: Black and Hispanic student enrollment increased threefold. Remedial education, to supplement the training of under-prepared students, became a significant part of CUNY’s offerings.
Additionally, ethnic and Black Studies programs and centers were instituted on many CUNY campuses, contributing to the growth of similar programs nationwide.
However, retention of students in CUNY during this period was low, with two-thirds of students enrolled in the early 1970s leaving within four years without graduating.
Two-thirds did not graduate during that era.
There’s much more at the link, but note this:
In 1999, a task force appointed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani issued a report that described CUNY as “an institution adrift” and called for an improved, more cohesive university structure and management, as well as more consistent academic standards. Following the report, Matthew Goldstein, a mathematician and City College graduate who had led CUNY’s Baruch College and briefly, Adelphi University, was appointed chancellor. CUNY ended its policy of open admissions to its four-year colleges, raised its admissions standards at its most selective four-year colleges (Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens), and required new enrollees who needed remediation, to begin their studies at a CUNY open-admissions community college…
CUNY is the fourth-largest university system in the United States by enrollment…
The university has one of the most diverse student bodies in the United States, with students hailing from around the world, but mostly from New York City. The black, white and Hispanic undergraduate populations each comprise more than a quarter of the student body, and Asian undergraduates make up 18 percent. Fifty-eight percent are female, and 28 percent are 25 or older.
This was the dropout rate in 2015:
12% of the cohort completed their degree in four years, 47% in six years, and 51% in eight years.
The official graduation rate of CCNY is 47%. This is the percentage of students who completed their degree within 150% of the published time. That means six years for a standard bachelor’s degree program.
I couldn’t find any data on the dropout rate when Salk was getting his education, but it’s interesting that at his specialized high school, the dropout rate was said to be quite high during his time there. At present, the graduation rate there is 100%.
College loan forgiveness: Democrats campaign on “Republicans are mean”
“Republicans are mean” is pretty much the story told by Democrats, and has been for a long time, and it’s often very successful. I don’t think there’s a Democrat I know – and I know plenty of them – who doesn’t think it’s true. And, particularly for those who don’t feel like getting into the details of the actual effects of policies proposed by each party, it’s a shorthand way of simplifying politics in a reductionist manner and of allying themselves with the Good Guys.
Joe Biden has been a Democratic politician for most of his long life, and if there’s one thing he knows, it’s this fact. He may be cognitively challenged, but the habits and instincts of a lifetime are still present. And so we have the following:
Biden spoke at the White House hours after the court struck down his student loan scheme in Biden v. Nebraska. He announced he will try a new path for student loan forgiveness, using the Higher Education Act of 1965. His most shocking comments came in response to a brave reporter who asked whether he had given borrowers “false hope.”
“I didn’t give any false hope,” the president said. “But the Republicans snatched away the hope they were given, and it’s real—real hope … . I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution.”
Earlier in his remarks, Biden attacked the six Republican attorneys general for suing to block his student loan scheme.
“These Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans,” he said.
The Great Uniter strikes again. Also, the great constitutional scholar.
But Joe knows what works and he knows that, for a lot of people, “Republicans are mean and they’re out to get you, whereas I’m from the government and I want to help” rings true.
The article goes on to state this:
Yet Biden, a longtime politician, must have known from the beginning that it was an extreme stretch to argue that the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act justified canceling about $430 billion in debt for borrowers across the U.S. He must have known that this scheme would almost certainly never hold up, so it was indeed the falsest of hopes…
Yet Biden must also have known that it would take some time for the policy to fall apart.
If Biden did know such things – and we can differ about how much he “knows” at this point and how much he doesn’t know – that knowledge was and is quite irrelevant to him. What matters is what works in the political and tactical sense. Yes, he would have been happy had SCOTUS let this debt forgiveness proposal stand. But he’s got another trick up his sleeve – or, someone in his administration does:
President Joe Biden said Friday that he will pursue canceling student loan debt through an alternative legal authority after the Supreme Court blocked his signature program to eliminate up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of Americans.
Biden said his administration will work to forgive student loan debt through the Higher Education Act of 1965, which authorizes the education secretary to modify, waive or compromise federal student loan under certain circumstances…
“President’s Biden [original] plan was a historic action that would have provided life-changing relief to young people,” said Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, a progressive advocacy group for young voters. “Instead, Republican and partisan forces worked to obstruct this relief – and we know that young voters will remember this come 2024.”
Indeed, they do know – and they will do their best to amplify that turnout by young voters eager to get their debts cancelled. So the SCOTUS decision, although a loss, is only a temporary one, and could lead to a greater win.
Never mind wonky stuff like this:
Loan cancellation transfers the debt of an individual who freely agreed to repay a loan onto other individuals (through higher taxes and inflation) who did not agree to take out that loan. Many individuals made a conscious decision not to attend college in order to avoid debt. Loan cancellation foists someone else’s debt onto them.”
Others worked their way through college or duly paid off the debt that they voluntarily took on, after graduation. “The Biden debt transfer punishes the 240 million Americans who do not hold college degrees, who constitute more than half of the population ages 25 and above and are less able to bear this new burden.”
“Mean Republicans” works so much better.
Open thread 7/1/23
Françoise Gilot, an artist who had a ten-year-long relationship and two children with Pablo Picasso and later was married to Dr. Jonas Salk for 25 years, died on June 6, 2023 at the age of 101. In this 1998 interview, Gilot tells the story of how she and Salk met:
SCOTUS rules on free speech as well as Biden’s debt forgiveness
SCOTUS is on a roll, with two more decisions in which the justices have voted 6-3, with all the Republican-appointed justices in the majority and the Democrat-appointed justices dissenting. The first case defends free speech:
The Court held 6–3 that “[t]he First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees.”…
Petitioners Lorie Smith and her company, 303 Creative LLC, challenged the application of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) against Smith, whose religious beliefs prohibit her from crafting some custom messages. Smith is a website designer who wants to expand her company’s offerings to include custom wedding websites.
While Smith and her company will serve any customer regardless of sexual orientation, she could not, consistent with her Christian faith, create a custom wedding website celebrating a same-sex wedding. Smith also wishes to post a notice that she will not create these custom websites for same-sex weddings.
The second decision – which actually involved two cases – says “no” to Biden’s debt forgiveness program:
Cardona announced on August 24, 2022, a plan to use the HEROES Act as the basis for executive action to discharge up to $20,000 in student-loan debt for qualifying borrowers.
In both cases, the Court was called on to decide whether the states and borrowers had standing to sue. In Nebraska, the Court needed to determine “whether the plan exceeds the Secretary’s statutory authority or is arbitrary and capricious.” In Brown, the Court needed to determine “whether the department’s plan is statutorily authorized and was adopted in a procedurally proper manner.”…
In Nebraska, the Court held 6–3 “[a]t least Missouri has standing.”…
Finding standing, the Court addressed the merits of the challenge to the plan. The Court accepted Cardona’s authority “to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions” for student loans under the HEROES Act but rejected the argument that this authority extended to “canceling $430 billion of student loan principal”…
In Brown, the Court, in an opinion by Alito, unanimously held the borrows lacked standing to challenge plan “[b]ecause respondents fail to establish that any injury they suffer from not having their loans forgiven is fairly traceable to the Plan.”
In a deft touch, the opinion cited a quote from none other than Nancy Pelosi, as follows:
Roberts quoted in the majority opinion comments that Pelosi gave during a press conference in July 2021, in which she said Biden did not have the authority to cancel student loans by executive order, only delay it.
“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” Pelosi said at the time.
But of course she later changed her mind.
More of the Court’s reasoning can be found here. Suffice to say the decision doesn’t rest on the quote from Pelosi as some sort of legal authority.
Colleges, affirmative action, and the quest for cosmic justice
Affirmative action is a subset of what the brilliant Thomas Sowell called The Quest For Cosmic Justice (and if you’ve never read that book I highly recommend doing so). Here’s Sowell:
Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position that they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people…
In short, all are not to be judged by the same rules or standards within the given process; pre-existing inequalities are to be counter-balanced. Note also that…the quest for cosmic justice focuses on one segment of the population and disregards the interests of others…
Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and superhuman. Far from society being divided into those with a more or less standard package of benefits and others lacking those benefits, each individual may have both windfall advantages and windfall disadvantages, and the particular combination of windfall gains and losses varies enormously from individual to individual. Some are blessed with beauty but lacking in brains, some are wealthy but from an emotionally impoverished family, some have athletic prowess but little ability to get along with other human beings…and so on and on. Add to this the changing circumstances of each individual over a lifetime – with relative advantages and disadvantages changing with the passing years – and the difficulties of merely determining the net advantages increase exponentially.
There’s much much more, but the point is that assessing advantages and disadvantages and portioning out rewards based on balancing the two is a literally impossible task, and will lead to miscarriages of actual justice in the quest for justice of the cosmic kind. Human beings are incapable of dispensing cosmic justice.
But that doesn’t stop them from trying – oh, how we try, especially the left, who plug in various kneejerk formulas such as race in order to reward their constituents and cloak themselves in supposed virtue, while castigating the right for being both mean and unfair and racist into the bargain.
Which brings us to colleges and yesterday’s affirmative action ruling. It will stop the kneejerk use of race as a category that ignores individual differences, but there are plenty of other ways to attempt to allot cosmic justice, and race can easily slip in the backdoor as well. Using race as a category by which to discriminate is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment, but colleges are allowed to discriminate in other ways as long as they supposedly tailor that discrimination to individuals and don’t overtly base it on racial categories.
The real question is what a college is for: to select the smartest and most able people, and educate them further in order to take their places as leaders in various fields? To create well-rounded individuals? To redistribute wealth? To further cosmic justice, as defined by the left?
The reality is that colleges can select whomever they want as long as they follow the new rules – which allow for plenty of attempts to dispense a cosmic justice that cannot really be just, not on this earth.
RIP Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin has died at 89. His brand of comedy didn’t quite click with me, but it sure did with a lot of people. He was a Hollywood staple for many years, and had a wide range of roles. RIP.
ADDENDUM: A comment jogged my memory into recalling that I really liked Arkin in the movie “The In-Laws,” in which he was linked in a kind of Odd Couple with a zany Peter Falk. A sample:
Open thread 6/30/23
When I was watching this video, I thought about a Bee Gees comparison before Fil made the same point. Were the Bee Gees the male Andrews sisters? Sort of. But I have one disagreement with Fil here – which is that, when the Bee Gees chose to do so, they could and did match their vibratos much like the Andrews sisters, as in the Bee Gees’ “Too Much Heaven.” But it’s a small quibble.
DeSantis has plans
In an interview on Martha McCallum’s “The Story” on Fox News, McCallum asked, “Are you in favor of eliminating any agencies?” DeSantis responded that he would work with Congress to get rid of the Departments of Education, Commerce, Energy, and the Internal Revenue Service. He followed up by saying that if Congress would not work with him toward that goal, he’d use those agencies to attack many of the policies they are foisting on the American people right now.
Will this help him or hurt him? Darned if I know.
Was life better in the 70s?
Ari Kaufman of The Lid says no, and that those who think so are just being nostalgic:
Americans have always longed for the “good old days.” The problem is that most can’t define when or what constitutes those good old days. Most often, it seems to be about five decades earlier than the current day…
With nostalgia being such a powerful human emotion, politicians happily utilize it. Yet I would wager that many people confuse their own hazy personal memories with a narcissistic indictment of today.
When Americans say things were better 50 years ago, do they mean stagflation? Gas lines? Vietnam? Watergate?
We hear a lot about soaring crime these days. It’s surely an important issue, but are we nostalgic for the 1970s because we’ve memory-holed that violent crime exploded then and has been chiefly trending downward since 1993.
The essayist adds that we are richer today, live longer, have more free time, and travel more, with bigger homes and safer cars as well as better air quality.
I don’t argue with any of that. But I was around back then, and I say that nevertheless things were better. It just depends what things we’re talking about, and perhaps the biggest ones have to do with human relationships as well as basic agreement on societal values.
I am not just being nostalgic when I remember the 70s – or the 50s and 60s, or even the 80s or 90s. Yes, there were big problems. Crime was sometimes up, we had to wait in 70s gas lines, and Americans were dying in Vietnam (more during the late 60s than the 70s, when “Vietnamization” was being implemented; you can see an informative year-by-year chart here). Racial discrimination and discrimination against women were still real in the 70s, but both were waning. There were race riots then, but the general feeling was that things were getting better in that regard and that these were growing pains.
Just to take one small quality of life example, my parents – who were solidly middle class or even upper middle class – didn’t have a clothes dryer until I was in college. Sounds like that would mean a lower quality of life, right? But I never perceived it quite that way. It meant that we used to hang clothes on a clothesline, which was sort of fun (I held the clothespin bag as a little child, and handed the clothespins off to the adult). The clean clothes smelled of air and wind. And you had to plan ahead if you wanted to wear something that was dirty, because it took a full day to dry.
Big deal, though. In other words, it didn’t feel like a big deal even when I was a teenager. It was just something you planned for. And I knew what had preceded it, because my next-door-neighbors had an old-fashioned washboard and a clothes wringer in their basement, both of them no longer used. We used to play with them. Clotheslines were just normal, and we didn’t even think about the alternatives until clothes dryers became common. When we got one it made life easier, but not necessarily better. It just wasn’t that important in the larger scheme of things.
But what I think was most important in people’s perceptions and pleasant memories was that there was a lot of in-person socializing. Life was more fun, and not just because I was younger. I had plenty of personal problems, but there were more get-togethers, more phone calls, and even going to the movies was a treat (and the movies were actually good, for the most part). The human element in life was warmer and more interactive. The internet didn’t exist. People rarely screened their calls and it was okay to talk on the phone with a friend. When you called customer service you got a real human being whose speech you could understand, and you got actual real live service. There were fewer choices in things like tennis shoes (or as we New Yorkers used to call them, sneakers), but that meant we didn’t spend 100 hours researching something before we bought it. We just made the purchase and went on with our lives.
Theater was better. Ballet was a lot better. Art hadn’t been utterly taken over by woke politics – nor had anything, really. Humor was still funny. Fewer children killed themselves. There were no pandemic lockdowns. There were no Twitter meltdowns over using the wrong term for something. There was no widespread cancel culture. And Watergate was a refreshing walk in the park compared to today’s corruption and use of the government to make clandestine war on the opposition.
We had more liberty and we had more in-person social contact – neither of which is easily measured, but both of which are very important.
SCOTUS says no to affirmative action
The decision was 6-3, so all the Republican-appointed justices were with the majority and all the Democrat-appointed justices dissented. That’s a bit of a surprise; I thought there might be more defections from the Republican side.
The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a blow to race-based affirmative action in college admissions and by implication elsewhere, putting to an end a narrow carve-out for higher education that had permitted colleges and universities to engage in otherwise unlawful conduct in the name of promoting diversity.
Part of the reasoning was as follows:
University programs must comply with strict scrutiny, they may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and—at some point—they must end. Respondents’ admissions systems—however well intentioned and implemented in good faith—fail each of these criteria. They must therefore be invalidated under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment…
Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. See, e.g., 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 17251726, 1741; Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 10. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.
To me, it seems as though the justices have provided a way out of the dilemma for universities that wish to continue to discriminate – and students who will tailor essays to meet this description – while simultaneously warning those universities not to apply this easy way out. I can imagine a ton of lawsuits in which the courts are somehow required to fine-tune whether an admissions essay meets this standard or not.
I have always thought affirmative action is a bad solution to a knotty problem. And the much-vaunted goal of “diversity” – which began with “geographic diversity,” which was a way to limit the number of those pesky Jews being admitted – covers a multitude of sins. In recent years, it’s been used against Asians mostly.
Universities are now utterly controlled by the woke, and they’re not going to give up these policies easily. Also, the left will be using this in the 2024 election in much the same way they will continue to use the SCOTUS abortion ruling. That’s not to say this ruling should not have been issued. But most universities are now rotten to the leftist core, unfortunately, and the rot has been creeping in for over 50 years.
There’s also this post at Legal Insurrection by Mary Chastain, which rounds up many of the agitated responses on the left. For example, on MSNBC the pundit says that now there will only be three black students per law school class. How’s that for a lack of faith in the achievements of black people these days? I have much more faith than that; I went to an elite law school before affirmative action was a policy, and the percentage of black students in my class was a little over 5% (women were only about 7%, by the way), which was a lot more than 3.
Jonathan Turley has this to say:
…I expect that colleges and universities are already working on the circumvention of the decision. They can use essays to identify race, even encouraging students to share any struggles with discrimination…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 29, 2023
As I already said, that’s what I expect as well, despite the SCOTUS warning about it. Institutions determined to continue the policy will continue it covertly if the overt route is blocked.
ADDENDUM: Here’s what Glenn Reynolds has to say on the subject.