Democrats Only Pretend to Care About the Integrity of Our Elections

 Election integrity

Here are three very important points. Please pay attention.

1) Barack Obama, you will recall, made light of the suggestion that U. S. elections could be rigged or stolen back in October of 2016.  You can hear his own words here. He and almost everyone else was sure Hillary would win a couple of weeks later. That is what all the pundits were saying, and anyway how could such an obnoxious cretin as Trump who had insulted so many people  possibly become president? When Hillary  lost in the electoral college, lefties couldn't believe it. It shocked them deeply.  You can see the depth of their reaction if you watch the many videos from election night depicting the tears of anguish and the tears of rage.  And so it is very easy to understand how lefties, who never stray from their enclaves, and never sully their precious minds with conservative commentary, and have no contact with the unwashed deplorables who stink of Wal-Mart and the barnyard, could believe that Trump just had to have colluded with the Russians to secure his victory. To their minds, there is no other possible explanation.

I heard Rosie O'Donnell say the other night that she "firmly believed" that Trump's win was due to Russian help.  I don't doubt that Rosie and her fellow travellers firmly believe it in a way that admits of no possible disconfirmation. It has become an idée fixe in their benighted brains.  They can't help it. They see themselves as good people, as progressive, bien-pensant, caring people, on the right side of history. It is simply incomprehensible to them that Trump won fair and square.

The reversal of position from 'no possible rigging' to 'Russian rigging' is very easy to understand: it's all about getting Trump out of office by any means.  The only reason the Dems care about election integrity now when they didn't before is that it aids and abets their drive toward impeachment.

2) Democrats support open borders, sanctuary cities, the sanctuary state of California, and the awarding of the franchise to illegal aliens. All of this is a giant middle finger in the face of the rule of law. Their grand strategy is perfectly obvious: to advance leftism and destroy America as she was founded to be, and to do so  by demographic means. If you don't see that you need the services of that proctologist I mentioned in an earlier post, the one who specializes in head injuries and especially difficult extractions.

3) And then there is the business about photo ID that Dems insanely oppose.  The reason they oppose it is obvious: they intend to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. It is part of their demographic grand strategy.  You will enjoy this YouTube video in which white liberals claim that blacks lack ID and blacks on the street react to the absurd claim.

On the Correct Use of ‘Begging the Question’

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 I  heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.'  This is a very common mistake nowadays.

I correct Mr. Prager because I love him.

The visage of Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' signals that a language rant is in the offing should you be averse to such things.

WalterTo raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.

Suppose A poses the question, 'Does Allah exist?' B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists. 

The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.

Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto.  The battle has already been lost.  So why do I write things like the above?  Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises. 

And perhaps there is a bit of virtue-signaling going on. 

A Note on Beccaria and Kant on Capital Punishment

Here:

According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence.

Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals from committing additional crimes since criminals continue to commit all sorts of crimes in prison, including murder. Execution of murderers, however, is a most effective means of restraining them from committing additional crimes. It works every time.

Just as dead men tell no tales, dead men commit no crimes.  Does it follow that we ought to exterminate humanity to prevent crime? I don't think so!  

The topic of deterrence raises the following question.  Suppose the execution of a murderer has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Would the execution be nonetheless morally justified?  I should think so, on retributivist grounds. Retribution, impartially administered by the state apparatus, is not revenge, but a form of justice.  Immanuel Kant takes this line in perhaps its most rigoristic form. 

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members–as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world–the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is another interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Propaganda

Despite the term's largely pejorative connotation, propaganda is not by definition false or misleading or harmful. Propaganda is anything of a verbal or pictorial nature that is propagated to influence behavior.  Propaganda can consist of truths or falsehoods, good advice or bad, exhortation to good behavior or subornation of bad. Anti-smoking and anti-drug messaging are propaganda but the messages are salutary.  Leftist propaganda is destructive while conservative propaganda inspires ameliorative action.

Here is a very good collection of visual propaganda from yesteryear.

Shooting Up Chicago

This is what happens when leftists are in charge. And you are still a Democrat? Perhaps you need to see a proctologist who specializes in head injuries.

An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 12 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday.

[. . .]

Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” 

The Logic of the Trinity Revisited

Trinity diagramOur question concerns the logical consistency of the following septad, each limb of which seems entailed by the dogma of the Trinity as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  How can the following propositions all be true?  My concern is whether the dogma in its Roman Catholic form can be expressed in such a way as to satisfy the exigencies of the discursive intellect.  The prime exigency or requirement is that it not violate the Law of Non-Contradiction. The question is not whether the dogma can be known to be true by reason unaided by revelation; it can't. The question is whether the dogma can be rendered rationally acceptable to intellects of our sort.  Can it be expressed in such a way as to make logical sense to us?

1) There is only one God.
2) The Father is God.
3) The Son is God.
4) The Holy Spirit is God.
5) The Father is not the Son.
6) The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7) The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

If we assume that in (2)-(7), the 'is' expresses absolute numerical identity, then it is clear that the septad is inconsistent.  (Identity has the following properties: it is reflexive, symmetric, transitive, and governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals).  For example, from (2) and (3) taken together it follows that the Father is the Son by Transitivity of Identity.  But this contradicts (5).

To spell it out: if the Father is God, and the Son is God, and these are identity statements, and identity is symmetric and transitive, then the Father is the Son, which contradicts (5).

So what we have above is an inconsistent septad each limb of which appears to be a commitment of orthodoxy.  The task is to remove the contradiction without abandoning orthodoxy.  There are different ways to proceed.

One way is to invoke the standard distinction between the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication, and construe (2), (3), and (4) as predications rather than as statements of identity.  Well, suppose we do this.  We get:

1)There is only one God.
2*) The Father is divine.
3*) The Son is divine.
4*) The Holy Spirit is divine.
5) The Father is not the Son.
6) The Son is not the Holy Spirit.
7) The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

But this implies that there are three Gods, which contradicts (1).  The trick is to retain real distinctness of Persons while avoiding tritheism.

Matthew Kirby in correspondence suggests the following:

1K) There is only one Divine Nature.
2K) The Father hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Source/Lover).
3K) The Son hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Logos/Form/Image/Beloved).
4K) The Holy Ghost hypostasises the fullness of that Divine Nature (as Spirit/Gift/Loving).
5K) The Father is not the Son, but gives him fully his essence.
6K) The Son is not the Holy Spirit, but shares with him fully the very same essence.
7K) The Father is not the Holy Spirit, but gives him fully his essence.

Unfortunately, Fr. Kirby does not explain what he means by 'hypostasises,' but I think I know what he means. He means that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are each subjects of the divine nature.  One nature, three hypostases/persons.  Compare the Incarnation: One hypostasis, two natures. Thus the Son has two natures, one human, the other divine. In the Trinity, however, we have one divine nature in three divine persons.

Well, are we in the clear now?  I can't see that we are. For Fr. Kirby's septad is just a variation on the second one we examined. If the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each subjects of the divine nature, then we have three Gods, when the dogma clearly implies that there is exactly one God in three divine persons.

The Police Were Not Policed

Conclusion:

For some reason, many still in the current FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSC, and State Department are incapable of accepting that their agencies in the Obama years were weaponized to alter a U.S. election and were directed to do so by many top dogs in their Washington hierarchies.

Until we get the truth, an accounting, and some sort of justice, we will not quite become galvanized by those who rightly warn us of real Russian interference.

The reason?

We always expect Russian skullduggery, but we never anticipated election interference from those entrusted with protecting us and our institutions from our enemies.

The police were not policed — and so became like the enemies they warned us about.
The government and its police agencies, the Catholic Church under Bergoglio the Termite, the Fourth Estate, the universities in the grip of political correctness . . . institutions once respected no longer command respect and trust. 
 
What is to be done?

Once Great Newspaper Becomes Radicals’ Rag of Record

Of course, the Grey Lady has been slouching left for a long time now. Her Op-Ed pages have gone from being piss-poor to being positively feculent. David Brooks, who I once respected, is increasingly in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And he was one of the sane ones.

Sarah Jeong is a miserable twerp of no significance. Her hiring, however, is a major event signaling an institutional legitimation of deviant and destructive behavior. Things should prove interesting in the months and years to come. You are well-advised to keep your powder dry.

What we have here is  a struggle for the soul of America. Or is that too dramatic a way of putting it?

The New York Times has embraced the bigotry of identity politics. 

See also: Why Racism Begets More Racism

  Jeong

Does Capital Punishment Infringe the Unalienable Right to Life?

Paul J. Griffiths in Against Capital Punishment gives the following argument against C. P.:

The U.S. is a constitutional democracy, committed in theory to serve and protect the inalienable rights of its citizens, who are also its sovereigns. Those inalienable rights include the right not to be killed. A sovereign authority that permits or requires itself to alienate that right from any one of its citizens, for whatever reason, performs an incoherent act. It arrogates to itself the right to make exceptions to the universal economy of rights it theoretically serves, and thus makes itself sovereign over the economy of rights it is supposed to recognize, acknowledge, and serve. Dictatorships can coherently do this; constitutional democracies can’t. 

Here is my pithy formulation of the argument. It is logically contradictory to maintain both that (1) the right to life is a unalienable and thus inviolable natural right logically antecedent  to the state and its constitution, and that (2) the state has the right to violate the right to life as a punishment for certain crimes.

Edward Feser in Hot Air vs. Capital Punishment: A Reply to Paul Griffiths and David Bentley Hart  is not impressed with Griffiths' argument:

Then there is Griffiths’ claim that, at least in the American context, when the state executes an offender it “performs an incoherent act.” How so? Because, says Griffiths, the American system is “committed in theory to serve and protect the inalienable rights of its citizens” and “those inalienable rights include the right not to be killed.” But there are at least four serious problems with this argument. First, it proves too much. While it is true that the Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights,” and includes the right to life among them, it also includes the right to liberty. Hence, Griffiths’ argument, followed out consistently, would entail that in the American context the state performs an “incoherent act” even when it imprisons offenders, and indeed when it inflicts any punishment at all, since all punishments in some way or other infringe on an offender’s liberty. Presumably Griffiths would not want to do away with the entire system of criminal justice. In that case, though, he cannot consistently appeal to the Declaration as a justification for abolishing capital punishment, specifically.

Second, precisely because Griffiths’ interpretation would have such absurd consequences, it is hardly plausible to suppose that Jefferson and Co. meant for the term “unalienable” to be understood the way Griffiths understands it. Surely what they had in mind is the idea that an innocent person cannot have his basic human rights taken from him by the state. A guilty person, however, forfeits his rights by virtue of his offense, and for all Griffiths has shown, this can include the right to life no less than the right to liberty. (Indeed, the same generation that gave us the Declaration of Independence enacted capital punishment laws in every one of the original thirteen states and in the First Congress. The Bill of Rights itself recognizes that citizens may be deprived of “life, liberty, or property” as long as there is “due process of law.”)

Third, it is in any case far from obvious that the presence of these words in the Declaration would make the American system “incoherent” even if we accepted Griffiths’ interpretation of them. For while the Declaration expresses certain widely shared moral ideals, it does not follow that they have, simply by virtue of being in the Declaration, any legal or constitutional significance. While an explicit or implicit contradiction in the law itself would plausibly ground a judgment to the effect that there is “incoherence” in the U.S. system of criminal justice, a mere reference to widely shared and vaguely defined moral sentiments hardly provides a compelling argument.

Fourth, what matters ultimately is not what the Declaration says, but what natural law reasoning actually establishes. And what it establishes, as we argue in the book, is that an offender can forfeit his right to life, just as he can forfeit his right to liberty. Human law, including the American system of criminal justice, is answerable to natural law, not the other way around.

Feser 1 – Griffiths 0.

Punishment and Proportionality

This just in from Daniel M.:

Thanks for the recent posts on capital punishment. I acknowledge the distinction you make between lex talionis (LT) and "punishment must fit the crime" (PFC), which you use to rebut this objection from a reader:

If your argument is that the punishment must fit the crime, what about cases of extreme cruelty (Ted Bundy, e.g.)? Should the state have tortured him? Of course not, that would be inhumane. What makes this different from the death penalty?

The idea, I take it, is something like:

(1) If PFC, cruel acts should be punished with cruel acts.

(2) Punishment shouldn't be cruel.

(3) So PFC is wrong (and so can't be used to support the death penalty).

(Another line of thought here might just be: the death penalty is inhumane!)

I can't speak for the reader, but it's not clear to me that this sort of argument depends on conflating PFC with LT. Admittedly, here's one way of supporting (1):

(A) If PFC, the manner of punishment should resemble the crime.

That's a spurious basis for (1), as it confuses PFC with LT, as you explain. But here's my concern: might there be another way of motivating (1), or at least a related claim to the effect that PFC sometimes licenses cruelty in punishment?

Suppose A and B are killers, but that A's crimes are more cruel and depraved than B's. If the gravity of the punishment should match that of the crime, doesn't PFC call for a more severe punishment for A? But suppose the only way the state can make A's punishment more severe than B's is by adding cruelty into the mix. To make this a bit more concrete, suppose B gets death by injection, and that this is fitting. Then by PFC, that punishment would be too lenient for A. To emphasize that this doesn't depend on LT, we might suppose that whatever extra treatment A deserves need not resemble the particular cruel acts in A's crimes.

I'm not endorsing cruelty in punishment, but just trying to articulate a problem or puzzle, as I see it, for PFC.

RESPONSE

I agree that that there is a bit of a problem for PFC.  Suppose A rapes a woman and then kills her gently to keep her from talking.  B rapes a woman and then tortures her to death over a 12-hour period. He crucifies her and whenever she is at the point of passing out, he revives her with smelling salts so that she suffers her agony to the fullest.

Both deserve the death penalty. But if the punishment is to fit the crime, or be proportional to it, then the penalty inflicted on B ought to be more severe than the one inflicted on A.  Or so it seems if we go by PFC.

How implement this intuition? Well, crucifying people is out. But death by lethal injection is too lenient.  There is death by firing squad, which is slightly worse, and death by hanging which is considerably worse.  Gas chamber and 'the chair' are somewhere in the middle. So one approach would be to consider options that are not cruel, but tougher to endure than lethal injection.

Or one could solve the problem by simply stipulating that death by lethal injection shall be punishment enough for all capital crimes, no matter the number of victims or how they are killed.

The latter would be my practical suggestion.

REPLY BY DANIEL M. (8/6):

Thanks! It's indeed tempting to take there to be some "anti-cruelty" moral principle that constrains the implementation of PFC. (It seems to me that this is what you're suggesting.)  One proposal you float is allowing for a spectrum of execution penalties, some "tougher to endure" than others, to accommodate the fact that some capital crimes are worse than others – yet while avoiding cruelty. You also float the idea of stipulating that one kind of punishment is "punishment enough" for all capital crimes.

Either proposal seems promising as a way of honoring both PFC and an anti-cruelty principle. However, I think they also weaken, or at least complicate, the PFC-based case for the death penalty. This may be more clear with the second proposal. If some kind of punishment is "punishment enough", that implies that we can't simply use PFC to infer, from someone's deserving to die, that the state is morally required to bring that about. For on this proposal we're granting that PFC doesn't require the state to always give someone the full extent of what he deserves. So it seems something further is needed to take us from PFC to the rightness of the death penalty.

RESPONSE:

Suppose Ali cuts the throat of only one innocent Christian while Murat cuts the throats of a thousand innocent Christians.  My second proposal implies that some non-cruel form of C. P.  is punishment enough for both jihadis. This of course is counterintuitive.  For if the punishment must be proportional to the crime, then it would intuitively seem that the penalty for the second jihadi ought to be more severe.  Intuitively, Ali gets what he deserves whereas Murat gets far less than what he deserves.

On the other hand, we cannot jettison the PFC principle. A just punishment for a crime must correspond both in quality and quantity to the nature and extent of the crime.  What exactly this 'correspond' comes to is part of the problem.

One thing to note is that we have already modified PFC to disallow the raping of the rapist, the gouging-out of the the eye of the eye-gouger, the crucifixion of the crucifier, and the burning down of the house of the arsonist.  Otherwise PFC is just the lex talionis in its crude "eye for an eye" form. So we have a precedent for modification. We simply take it a step further if we say that the capital punishment of the mass murderer should be no different in quality than the capital punishment of one who commits only one murder.

We must also bear in mind that just punishment must respect both the dignity of the person punished and the dignity of the punishers. Execution by torture degrades both the object and the subject of the execution.  C. P. is morally permissible only if it does not degrade the object or the subject of the penal procedure.

If I understand Daniel's question, he is not asking whether C. P.  is morally permissible, but how it could be morally obligatory if it is not morally obligatory that Murat the mass murderer in my example receive a worse penalty than Ali the one-time murderer. It is not clear to me why I can't just say that PFC does the trick provided it is hedged by the anti-cruelty/anti-degradation principle.

I have said more than once that justice demands C. P. in certain cases. That implies that C.P. is morally obligatory in certain cases. One could also hold that C. P. is morally permissible but not morally obligatory.  But the main battle, I think, is between those who maintain that C. P. is never morally permissible and those who maintain that it is sometimes morally obligatory.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Shortest Album Cut Ever

Michael Bloomfield, Easy Rider, 53 seconds. Or do you know of anything shorter?

UPDATE (8/5). London Ed knows of something shorter:

Depends what US meaning of ‘cut’ is, I am reading it as ‘track’. Contender for shortest track is "A Concise British Alphabet – Pt. 1" at 10 seconds by British 1960s psychedelic band The Soft Machine, from their second album. They were named of course from the eponymous book by William Burroughs, an old mate of Kerouac, as I am sure you know.

Yes, cut = track. And yes, I knew whence the band acquired its name.

The British pronounce ‘z’ as ‘zed’ which clearly confused the YouTube commenters.

Right. So if you want to show that you are in the know, pronounce his name D. Zed Phillips and not D. Zee Phillips. Here is an interesting tidbit: Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips.

On your earlier point about millennials and Trotsky I tried this out on daughter and partner. True, they hadn’t heard of either Trotsky or Lenin, though they had heard of Stalin (‘obviously’). I explained about the complicated relationship between Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, not forgetting the ice pick incident. This means they don’t know about Trotskyism (‘the strategy of a revolutionary class to continue to pursue its class interests independently and without compromise, despite overtures for political alliances, and despite the political dominance of opposing sections of society’) or Marxist-Leninism.

I am surprised that your daughter and her partner hadn't heard of Lenin. When I ask people about Lenin they hear the name as 'Lennon.' Has your daughter heard of John Lennon?  It is hard to believe, but we are coming up on the 38th anniversary of his assassination — if that term is appropriately applied to a famous musician.  He was gunned down on the night of December 8, 1980 outside his digs in New York City.  A student of mine in those days was so distraught that she called me in the middle of the night to report the news.

You know the story. Mark David Chapman, having read J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, didn't much like phonies. Chapman decided that Lennon was a phony and so had to be shot.  Fame is vastly overrated and we who are obscure should take satisfaction in our status.

Trotskyism was pretty much the official doctrine of the UK Left in my day. Perhaps even now, given Corbyn’s call for the ‘complete rehabilitation’ of Leon Trotsky. And if you haven’t heard of Lenin, you probably haven’t heard of Marxist-Leninism. Thus the importance of history. On the other hand millennials are about 40 years younger than us. Trotksy was born 1879, so how much do we know of revolutionaries born 40 years before him, i.e. in 1839? Perhaps Georges Clemenceau who was active in the Paris Commune of 1870, but then most of us remember him not as a revolutionary but as a famous French Prime Minister.

But I do have to correct you on one point, dear Ed.  As I wrote in Trotsky's Misguided Faith,

Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but a climber's ice axe. 

I am sure both are available for purchase in London town assuming your Muslim mayor hasn't banned them. You can find pictures on the Internet and see the difference.

UPDATE 2 (8/5). Ed Farrell sends us to Paul Geremia, Don't You Leave Me Here, which clocks in at 39 seconds, beating my Bloomfield selection by 14 seconds.