ABC just hit a new low in polling teh stupidz

Their latest polling says American people are in a political "snit," as they called it.

First, the reality.

ABC idiocy, refudiated / Chart from Wikipedia

The American public talks like this every two years, but until they start voting out their own bastards, it means nothing. Even if wingnuts vote out halfway sane Republicans in a few primaries, it still means nothing. What that ultimately is, is an anti-political snit.

Here's the really dumb part:

Single women also are a markedly more Democratic-inclined group. But married men tilt heavily in the opposite direction – toward the GOP – and there’s twice as many of them. Of such threads are election strategies woven.

Talk about bad use of stats. As I told friend Perry, where I first saw that, without use of teh Google, I'm sure that, political affiliation aside, there's more than twice as many married men in general as single women.

And, that nice Wikipedia chart helps me out. Throwing out the slightly larger number of women than men in America, and setting aside the small numbers of gay or lesbian marriage, for which there's almost certainly no national stats yet of note, and from 25-70, we have approximately two-thirds of the public currently married and one-third not.

So, yes, there's twice as many married men as conservative women. Duh. Try comparing married men to married women and single men to single women. Or married men to single men, or married women to single women.

Every idiot who knows anything about statistics, polling, etc., knows that you "control for" all but one variable in a comparison in normal such research.

There's other problems, too. The poll claims Hispanics are highly disenchanted with Republicans, without mentioning their abysmal turnout to vote

But Perry's right, overall, that this probably isn't good news for Democrats.

PGA: #TigerWoods lags Mrs. Doubtfire by 4 and #RyderCup by more; what about Rory?

OK, so Tiger Woods is technically healthy for the PGA Championship in Louisville at Valhalla.

But, he finished the first round four strokes behind Colin Montgomerie, the majors-skittish Scot who is anti-belovedly known to many American golf fans as Mrs. Doubtfire, thanks in part to hijinxing commenter David Feherty.

That's pretty sad. From what I've observed, he's spraying that driver all over the place, and the back 9 at Valhalla is not as forgiving as the front 9.

In addition to the surprise of Lee Westwood, in about an eight-way tie for first on the current list of best Englishman never to win a major, Red Shirt is behind a bunch of "who dats" and at least one other senior-circuit aged golfer, Miguel Angel Jimenez. My man Vijay Singh is at par. (And three under after Friday!)

That said, should Red Shirt hold on to make the cut, yet finish so far behind the leaderboard that he can't see it due to the earth's curvature, does he continue to beg the real TW, Tom Watson, for a Ryder Cup slot? (That's the Tom Watson who finished today a shot ahead of Tigah.)

Stay tuned. (And, yeah, I sent that zinger in by Twitter to John Hawkins at Golf Channel, and he ran it.)

There was another good one there on Friday:

Tiger talking a lot the last two weeks about his "firing sequence". I assume that means Fluff, then Butch, then Haney, then Stevie, correct?

And another:

 I don't like him, but Tiger is going to go down as the best golfer to have never won 15 majors.

Good night, prince.

That's assuming he makes the cut. He's tied for 110th right now. Valhalla is an easy track with lots of low scores out there. The only chance Tiger has at the cutline is going even or below tomorrow.

And, Rory McIlKing (nice pun, eh?) is far behind Westwood right now, but stand by. As he's at -3 through 14. And  has now finished at -5, just a stroke off the lead.

Anyway, with Rory, I think we're at the point, at least, where Vegas will soon automatically install him as the betting favorite at majors.

And again, with Tiger, we're at the point of no Ryder Cup for you! I don't want to come off as showing too much schadenfreude, but that could change if WDs before his second round is over, or tells some BS story afterward about his bad back even though on Wednesday he said he was totally healthy.

Social justice warriors, #mansplaining hit baseball blogosphere (trigger alerts)

Ugh is all I have to say. And, per the parentheses in the header, here's more explainer about the trigger alerts, which is where that picture comes from.

I first noticed this at NBC Sports' Hardball Talk, when top blogger Craig Calcaterra blogged last week about Dirk Hayhurst's confession to "something" when he was in the minor leagues. I commented there, and ultimately blogged, that things weren't as open and shut as some claimed, and that, for all we know, Hayhurst is the next Chad Curtis waiting to explode. At the least, I said, he's affecting to be the next Jim Bouton, with the addition of a social justice warrior type of martyrdom.

Well, I and others who questioned details of his account, or details of male-female behavior in relation to sexual liaisons, the effects of alcohol and more — with things like a national online media column explaining young female sobriety as a preventative without letting men and men's responsibility off the hook — and got flamed by a couple of people.

That said, per that alcohol discussion, my updating of someone else's work, as shown at right, needs posting here, too, I think. Not just for SJWs in general, but per some of the discussion on Craig's Dirk Hayhurst piece.

And, when one commenter trotted out the "mansplaining," I said, I'm outta here. More on mansplaining right here.

Well, said person showed up again last night, on Craig's post about Kim Ng's attempt to become a general manager, in this case of the Padres, which she didn't get.

First, as for SJWs who question my own liberality, I don't normally do the "some of my best friends are black" schtick, but, I'm going to pull one of my comments from the piece:

She entered the Yankees front office in the late 1990s. Interviewed to run the Dodgers while an assistant there. Was a finalist for Seattle.

The one way to tell for sure if she’s qualified? 

Double-blinded interviews, where she’s behind a screen and her voice is disguised.

And, no, that’s not joking. That’s how major orchestras hire instrumentalists, after allegations of sexual discrimination in hiring.

And there you go. And, as I also noted, I think she's qualified enough to be a baseball GM.

But, at the same time, even though the apparent SJW in question hadn't directly fired at me this time, she had on the Hayhurst piece, so I decided I'd be a bit pre-emptive. 

I was led to that idea by another commenter saying he wanted to make an SJW-related addition to Godwin's Law:

"As an online discussion of race/class/gender issues grows longer, the probability that 'white male privilege' will be invoked approaches 1."

Sounds about right.


So here's my add-on response to "Whatacrocker," also serving as a cut-off response to "Fearless."

You forgot to add that the likelihood of some neologism ending with #splaining entering the conversation will also approach 1.

And that the likelihood that any objection to that will be held against you in a social justice warrior court of non-law will also approach 1.

Fearless? Save it, please. Remove the martyr’s back of hand from your forehead. I’ve met plenty of SJWs in the courts of Gnu Atheism/Atheism Plus. You’re probably small fry compared to some I’ve tangled with.

And, on issues like true freedom of thought?

You’re just not that liberal.

Get over it, and yourselves.

Or don’t. You make few converts that way, though, like other JWs, the ones who knock on my door every week, SJWs get to reinforce their own martyrdom.

And, that's about it. 

No, that's not about it. Let me remind the SJWs that they can lie just as much as anybody else. 

No, that's not even close to it.

I've apparently hit a nerve with "Fearless," who on Twitter said she obviously hit a nerve with me.  To which, I responded:

Again, and you chose to comment on that fact? Nerves, pots, kettles, and self-righteousness, perhaps?

It soon may be time to fill in the SJW stereotype blanks. I've had my one response and don't need more, other than to note that "Fearless" had more than 140 characters for unpacking the "rich and delightful web of issues" when she commented on Craig's two posts.

And chose not to. 

To put this more directly, in SJW words, casual use of words like "mansplaining" is stereotyping and labeling, things the likes of you allegedly abhor. I do hope that, in my ongoing Twitter exchange with "Fearless," that came through without (too much) snark, etc., on my part.  Maybe, to be generous, some people don't recognize that they're engaging in labeling and stereotyping. Being less generous, without being harsh, I pretty much doubt that, though.

I don't know if Craig is himself a full-on, or even half-on, social justice warrior, but, I think at a minimum that he's the type that could go weak in the knees for them. Which I can accept, should he not go down their rabbit trail in attempts to stifle discourse. Massimo Pigliucci discusses in detail this issue, which is of course one of the biggest problems with the SJW movement. 

That said, we'll see if he's any more tolerant than the Orwellians at MLBTradeRumors.

#Pseudoskeptic #BrianDunning gets himself 15 months, boo-hoos

Brian Dunning

Brian Dunning, one of the godfathers of conflating political libertarianism with scientific skepticism, and also con artist extraordinaire (the federal legal term is "guilty of wire fraud") found out yesterday what his near-term future holds.

(Update, Oct. 21, 2015: Dunning is out of the federal clink and unrepentant; he gets his first post-incarceration smackdown from me.)

 Fifteen months in the stir. Three years supervised release after that, a supervised release that will likely include monitoring of his online activities.

I suppose there's fanboys and fangirls of his that still, after not just his plea but now his sentencing, who think he's not a criminal. (One of the biggest of his early defenders, Doubtful News, has yet to post anything about Dunning's sentence. at almost a week and counting, even with Dunning posting a statement himself; see below for more on Dunning's statement.) However, United States Attorney David Callaway is not one of them.

In sentencing arguments, he fought for some significant incarceration time. Given the fact that this was on a plea deal with all other counts dismissed, he got at least half a loaf, I think. The defense wanted a "non-custodial sentence," in other words, a fine, no jail time, and, probably, about the same, maybe less, supervised time as in the post-release supervised time he actually got, based in part on cohort Shawn Hogan only getting five months.  Read below, if you will, before voting on the poll at right.

Callaway actually asked for 27 months. After saying that Hogan may have gotten lucky to get that short of sentence, he noted this about Dunning:

Finally, there are the letters. The government shares the discomfort U.S. Probation Officer Flores expressed at the recurring theme in so many of them, that the FBI "raid" allegedly "traumatized" the defendant's family, as if somehow the Dunning family deserved to be insulated from the adverse consequences caused by law enforcement agents simply doing their jobs, executing a search warrant to investigate the crimes that he, Brian Dunning, knowingly, willfully and fraudulently committed.

In other words, Dunning wasn't repentant. Maybe Hogan was, but we know Dunning wasn't. In fact, Callaway suggests that Hogan was more repentant, more cooperative and both, noting his "substantial and well-earned departure" from sentencing guidelines. Indeed, there's more in this in-depth piece about how eBay was "on" to Dunning and his cohort in crime, Shawn Hogan, which includesHogan "manning up" on responsibility, but Dunning being too much of a wuss or putz to comment.

Why does that not really surprise me, that Dunning either wasn't that repentant, that cooperative, or both? Especially since he knows that all about Hogan!


The suggested sentencing range, pre-hearing, of up to 27-33 months, was based on Dunning's fraud having an actual estimated value of $200,000-$400,000 per stipulation by all involved parties as part of his plea deal. Given that Kessler's Flying Circus, Dunning's front group, raked $5.3 million in eBay commissions in one 18-month period alone, that was a generous concession by the feds as part of the plea deal.

I posted a long blog at about the time he pled guilty, which includes that information and more. You can click the link for the whole thing, but I'll extract a few highlights, or lowlights, here.

That includes that, this spring, Lousy Canuck at Freethought Blogs reported Dunning was trying to use 501(c)3 status, allegedly started in 2012, to shield his ill-gotten gains.

Yours for just $15!

So, sell that swag, Brian!

(At highly inflated prices, like $27.95 for a T-shirt. Sounds like a guru selling to his cultic followers. Or $15 for the aptly titled rubber stamp; more on it below.)

Back to the serious on this part. I don't know how much he was selling on his own on eBay, or if any of his Skeptoid stuff was sold there. But, the principle of a man with a sharp eye for a sharp product, whether through "raking" with groupies on his own stuff or defrauding other affiliates with eBay, still stands.

And, yes, "groupies" is about the right word.

Have fun in the stir, Brian.

And, I hope you serve as a lesson not only to other Internet fraudsters, but people like you who fuse libertarianism and skepticism.

Hell, I hope you serve as a warning to people entranced with libertarianism in general, or even those who are too readily defensive of the neoliberal halfway house.

Your whole attitude reeks of supporting a libertarian Wild West. Lawyers and lawsuits are supposed to replace the rule of actual criminal law but, of course, only the rich can afford lawyers in Plato's Libertarian Republic.

Unfortunately, it will actually serve no such deterrence.

Shane Brady seems proof of that. (No surprise; I've run into his libertarianism before, and would argue that he has one foot down the road of Dunning, Penn & Teller, Shermer and others who in various ways conflate skepticism and libertarianism.)

Brady describes his background (his post just mentions "advertising") as such: I’ve been a programmer for as long as I can remember, and my interest in computers, the Internet, and technology runs deep. Elsewhere, in a comment on a non-public social media thread, he does indicate that he has IT experience relevant to this.

That said, let's jump in.

First, Shane in essence tries to say Dunning is no criminal. He gives a de jure admission that Dunning is one, while at the same time giving a de facto defense of Dunning as ... well as having been set up by some nefarious combo of eBay and the FBI.

Here's his narrative set-up:

The case also includes very little background of the industry and how it worked. There were two companies involved, eBay and Commission Junction. CJ’s job is to handle affiliate programs and, this is key, fraud prevention. You don’t become a top affiliate with the numbers Brian was pulling and not get noticed. Someone would be looking at you within the first week. ...

By far, though, the biggest red flag for me is the way eBay describes the investigation. Somehow an eBay employee was working with the FBI for a year to catch Brian. They even set up a “sting” to catch him in the act. What makes this all so perplexing to me, is that this should have taken all of an afternoon to figure out.  ...

Really, none of this makes all that much sense. Does this exonerate Brian? Nope. I will not say he is innocent. I can only say that what eBay alleges almost certainly didn’t happen, and I say that based on fifteen years working in the advertising industry. My personal opinion is that people in eBay and CJ knew what was happening, were being compensated well because of the program, and then let Brian take the fall later. In that case, I don’t know who committed the fraud against who. I don’t know how much Brian might have known. My guess is that eBay itself would be on the hook for defrauding other affiliate marketers if people within eBay conspired to jack one affiliate’s numbers up. This is complete conjecture on my part, but even so, it is more believable than eBay’s current claims.

If there were a twisted pun at the end, I'd call that a "shaggy dog."

But, there's not, so I'll call it ... a fictional short story? Counterfactual history?

In any case, noooo, it's not at all closer to being more believable.

In any case, while I'm plenty familiar with the FBI's history of entrapment, it also arrests real people for real crimes without any entrapment whatsoever.  Given the fact that Shawn Hogan also pled, and per what I and many other people who are not social justice warriors have seen about the original indictment documents, etc., I have no doubt that the FBI plus eBay had them both dead to rights. And, among the people included in that group, in italics, are multiple tech websites who have written about aspects of this case without seeing anything askew.

So, Shawn, sorry, but we'll file you in the semi-groupie category until I invent a new name. Especially because you seem to think you have secret insights that escaped all those other tech websites. (And, it's not like tech websites in general don't have bits of libertarian leanings.)

I can't call you a full groupie, though:

Brady does admit that Dunning continues to remain a psychologically slippery fish:

With all that, though, it’s time for Brian to come completely clean if he expects to ever have a future in skepticism. No talk about what his lawyers won’t let him say. No more vague statements. He will have to be more brutally honest with his audience and perhaps himself than he has ever been.

We're agreed there. And, without specifying what legal actions are involved, Brady also hints this, to be legal, "goes to character":

The whole eBay thing ended around the same time he started the Skeptoid podcast, and for most of Skeptoid’s existence, he’s been involved in some legal actions.

OTOH, isn't this part of at least certain strands of libertarianism? Objectivism and Straussian economics both even encourage lying for the "higher good" or whatever.  It's also funny that, as part of his post, Brady excoriates "progressives" for suddenly changing their tune over "big bad business," like this:

Another thing that has struck me is how so many progressives, who are normally skeptical of corporations, and who complain about the unfairness of the justice system, suddenly believe the words of a billion dollar corporation to the letter and praise the prosecutor as a beacon of skepticism. 

While noting that ... erm, eBay may have had a reason to lie, or at least shave the truth. Brady ignores that Dunning "became a business" with Skeptoid when the eBay shit started hitting the fan, and that he "became a business" by incorporating as Kessler's Flying Circus as an eBay affiliate.

Greed corrupts, and absolute greed corrupts absolutely.

And, Brady may be an even bigger bullshitter about this than Dunning.

Why don't we call you a groupie for libertarianism, rather than a groupie for Dunning? Or, even more, a groupie for his own self-alleged brilliance? (If Brady is truly seeing something that nobody, nobody else is seeing, and has that much expertise, why isn't he a multimillionaire by now?)

But, let's get back to Dunning. The "slippery fish" himself has posted on his own website. The first one-third sounds like it could have been "as told to Shane Brady." The rest of it sounds like he was lawyered up even more than in his "partial response" shortly after his indictment.

Some quick responses.

1. If his share was only 1/3 of $200-$400K, why did he and his lawyers agree to that stipulated amount in the plea deal? (Answers that FBI is always thugs not allowed.)
2. He never denies that he set up a nonprofit for a "shield," just that that doesn't work. Duh!
3. If he really regretted this "stain on his past," his lack of cooperation with the government, especially as compared to codefendant  Hogan, doesn't show that. In other words, he only regrets it as far as how it makes him look bad, not as far as what he actually did.
4. As for the family that has been "hurt" by the FBI, et al, would that include the Mrs. Brian Dunning getting 10 large a month from the widget rakings?

And, per a new post by Lousy Canuck, Dunning's more of a schmuck in other ways. He apparently added some Javascript to block text copying, and has blocked his website from being crawled for online indexing.

Anyway, I've provided Brady with multiple links off my original post, including a long story by Business Insider. I doubt it will change Brady's mind. And I know it won't get Dunning to be more honest, should he see any of this. But given that I posted that on another person's Facebook page, that's not my goal. My goal is to show people that Brady most likely just isn't right about his claims.

This all goes back to Dunning's original "partial explanation," linked on my long post about his plea deal. Dunning, pre-plea, kept claiming "eBay knew this, eBay encouraged that," etc. When the FBI said, "Got some documents?" well, of course Dunning had none. (And Hogan never made Dunning's claims in the first place.)

In short, as I continue to blog about this? I'm seeing Brady as sticking a toe in the waters of conspiracy thinking. Just a toe, but a toe, nonetheless.  And Shawn, this goes on much more? I'll do a post about exactly that. And, per my long post about Dunning's plea deal, one persistent commenter who never would show links to back up his claims show Brady's not alone.

That said, that's only one of the "unfortunates" associated with this case.

Also unfortunately, the site which first posted the PDF of the sentencing, to my knowledge, is an Atheism Pluser website, making Dunning a continuing voodoo doll in the ongoing war between Gnu Atheism (Plusism's godfather) and "scientific skepticism." I will agree in part, but not in full, with Brady's observations about them. I'll agree to the point he's not forwarding his own objectives.

And, they've got objectives, too.  No doubt about that. In fact, I'm probably going to be doing a post about SJWs infiltrating the world of baseball blogging this afternoon. Yes, really.

Anyway ...

All of this again illustrates why I usually don't use either "atheist" or "skeptic" to describe myself.  I will, around philosophers professional or amateur, to be precise, use "skeptic" in its proper philosophical sense, as a good Humean.

As for "scientific skepticism" or "movement skepticism," that's probably its biggest failing after failure to "police itself" over the Dunnings of the world when they fuse libertarianism and skepticism. It's got a quite narrow focus, overall; much of it isn't even necessarily about developing a broader critical thinking mindset beyond narrow areas like ghosts, bigfoot, UFOs, etc. Because, if it were about that, the libertarian-fusers would either apply the proper mindset and stop mixing in libertarianism, or else they'd get the boot. Beyond that, without any thought about, or wrestling with, skepticism as a philosophy, there's no real way to ground a methodology of what "scientific skepticism" is supposed to be. For example No. 1? Do you folks even know the difference between the Academic and Pyrrhonic schools of ancient Skepticism? The differences are big, and very important, as the likes of David Hume knew, unless you want to keep swimming in the same very small pond.

Which most of you probably do.

One final note for now. Along the lines of Doubtful News, SkepticBlog, where Dunning used to be a regular contributor, has also said bupkis about his fate. That said, Donald Prothero's been the only contributor who's actually contributed for more than 2 months. And, I wonder about the long-term future of that blog, connected with Skeptic magazine. Loxton's two midsummer posts are the only non-Prothero ones in the past five months. And the two of them are the only posters for this entire year.

Before #drought brings "dead pool," "dead power pool" could hit Powell and Mead

People who live in or near the Colorado River drainage (the real one, not the Texas one) know what the phrase "dead pool" means when applied to either Lake Mead or Lake Powell. It means that said damned lake has dropped so low that water can't flow through even the lowest outlet and we have a man-made Great Salt Lake.

Dead pool has been a worry for a few years among the knowledgeable, between persistent drought in the area — but not  unhistorical drought, as archaelogists and paleometeorologists know — and the effects of climate change.

But now, as High Country News notes, there's the worry of dead power pool, too.

That's where water levels in the lakes, even if not at dead pool yet, drop too low to generate significant hydroelectric power. Of course, the Colorado hits its lowest in August, right when sweltering Phoenix and Las Vegas are begging for kilowatts to juice up air conditioners.

A serious concern? Er, yes:

Here’s a sure sign that your region’s in drought: you stop paying your utility for the privilege of using water, and the utility starts paying you not to use water instead.

Outlandish as it sounds, that’s what four major Western utilities and the federal government are planning to do next year through the $11 million Colorado River Conservation Partnership. Under the agreement, finalized late last week between the Department of Interior and the utilities Denver Water, the Central Arizona Project, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, farmers, cities and industries will get paid to implement two-year, voluntary conservation projects that put water back into the Colorado River. The goal is to demonstrate that so-called “demand management” can prevent water levels in lakes Powell and Mead from dropping too low for their dams to generate electricity.

It's that serious.

So serious that requesting big farmers to fallow land on a rotating basis is part of the discussion.

Which is a discussion no farmer or rancher wants:

“Fallowing is really a blunt force tool that would harm agriculture,” said Terry Frankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. “We want to try to explore other ways of reducing demand,” like switching to less water intensive crops, watering less and accepting reduced yields, or water banking—foregoing diversions when you don’t need them in exchange for the right to use more later.

Well, you'd better figure it out soon, and start telling any of your members who are climate change denialists to get real. As it is, you and others are draining groundwater in the basin even faster than river reservoirs.

And, on Lake Powell, as a graphic at HCN shows, dead power pool will happen 1,200 feet above dead pool.

And, unless water usage is cut more, or else there's a massively snowy winter this year into next, dead power pool could happen as early as next year.

Have fun, climate change denialists in Arizona. If dead power pool actually happens in the next year or two, your summer electric rates in Phoenix will surely about triple, off the top of my head.

WWI — the height of folly, repeated today; above all, the folly of Woodrow Wilson

The senselessly romanticized Tower of London.

You can romanticize it with red poppies, either in the poem "In Flanders Field" or, as shown in the picture, by stringing up ceramic poppies on trellises at the Tower of London.

Or you can, on a romantic peace-making celebration of its anniversary, bury your head in the sand to reality like David Cameron and call it a noble cause, pretending that Wilhelmine Germany, for all its faults, was an evil empire just like the Nazis a generation later, in contradistinction to those who call it senseless slaughter. Here's Britain's more articulate answer to George W. Bush:

"That is wrong. These men signed up to prevent the domination of a continent, to preserve the principles of freedom and sovereignty that we cherish today," he said, only dozens of footsteps away from the headstones of Roy and Dietrich and 241 other Commonwealth and 288 German casualties.

Tosh, to use a good old British word.

First, let's debunk the romanticism.

As for the poppies? I have had friends on Facebook like the whole thing.

Not me, especially knowing those are ceramic fakes, rather than horticulturists doing some hard work with real poppies. Besides, if anybody knows the actual history of "In Flanders Fields," it was a pro-war poem used as a recruiting tool by the British, with their volunteer army.

I prefer the "war is hell" quote from William T. Sherman, which reads in full:

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

And, writing a poem about poppies, or putting fakes on the Tower of London, changes that not one whit, per Omar Khayyam.
And, now, let's look at the likely outcome had we simply not gotten involved.

First, it's unlikely Germany would have dominated Europe. Without Hitlerian lightning seizures of Denmark and Norway, with much more limited submarine warfare, despite Woodrow Wilson's one-sided trembling over that (more in a minute on that), and with WWI Germany generals actually looking askance at tanks, no chance that Ludendorff, his puppet Hindenburg, and their joint puppet Wilhelm II dominate Europe. Let alone the whole world.

Oh, yes, back to Woody Wilson and his crusade to make the world safe for Anglophilia.  That's what he really wanted, as anybody who knows of his intellectual love affair with Walter Bagehot can attest. Every time, from the sinking of the munitions-carrying, 4-inch-gun armed Lusitania on, when Wilson pretended to be "neutral," he took another step closer to Britain.

The best example is agreeing with Britain that submarine warfare was illegal while disagreeing with Germany that Britain's blockade by extension was illegal. (Germany also did a poor job of rounding up support from sympathetic neutrals, above all, the Netherlands and Denmark, who stood most to gain from a traditional blockade.)

This knowledge is so rare even among educated Americans that I'm presuming I need to explain a blockade by extension.

A traditional blockade is like the US did to its own rebellious Confederate states in the Civil War. A blockade by extension would have been to also blockade Mexico, because the French, in addition to sending arms to Emperor Maximilian there, were sending further arms, or food, or whatever, through Mexico to the Confederacy.

And, this is what Britain did to European neutrals, namely to the Netherlands and Denmark above all, and also to Norway and Sweden.

If Denmark imported, say, a total of 100,000 pounds of wheat a year, on average, from, say 1900-1913, then in 1915, that's all Britain allowed. It couldn't import an additional 500,000 pounds, with the presumable intent of then exporting the surplus to Germany.

And, until World War I, it was illegal to do that under international law. It was part of the freedom of the seas for which we went to war against Britain in the War of 1812.

In other words, if a secular hell existed, Wilson should be rotting in it.

We should have insisted on the fact that blockade by extension was just as illegal under international law as submarine warfare (the British would have maintained the blockade and worked on better anti-sub work against a relatively small number of subs), and let Europe beat itself senseless. Which it would have.

Had everything else played out, including the Germans slipping Lenin into Russia, with the same result, etc., here's what things would have looked like by November 1918.

On the Western Front, Germany knocking on the doors of Paris, but not quite breaking in. Its army half-starved, but fighting on. The French Army as mutinous as the Germany Navy turned out to be. The British Army close. Defeatism in all three. That said, the British and French would have held the line by pulling troops from their joint front in the Balkans, British troops from the Middle East and scattered troops from colonial Africa.

So, in the Middle East, Turkey tottering, but perhaps not exiting the war, as it actually did in October 1918. In the Balkans, the Dual Monarchy only moderately threatened, not nearly as much as in reality, due to the removal of British and French troops to the Western Front. (In reality, the Allied breakthrough in the Balkans didn't happen until September 1918.) Austria-Hungary, in turn, able to shift troops to the Italian Front, destabilizes that country.

I blogged more here, on the centennial of Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, about an alternative history of WWI.

Europe would have ended up bloodier if the US hadn't intervened, and at more threat of Lenin exporting the Communist revolution.

Or, it could have come to its senses while a truly neutral American was an honest peace broker.

As for the poppies? I have had friends on Facebook like the whole thing.

Not me, especially knowing those are ceramic fakes, rather than horticulturists doing some hard work with real poppies. Besides, if anybody knows the actual history of "In Flanders Fields," it was a pro-war poem used as a recruiting tool by the British, with their volunteer army.

I prefer the "war is hell" quote from William T. Sherman, which reads in full:

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

And, writing a poem about poppies, or putting fakes on the Tower of London, changes that not one whit, per Omar Khayyam.