Volokh is right about this, though my ax to grind here is that I tend to associate "none" with plural verbs if I don't happen to think about it.
If you'll pardon the math jargon, an empty set is much more likely to have a relevant comparison to a set of many things than to a set of one thing.
Read today's (March 27) Pearls Before Swine first, then today's Sally Forth. The first panel of the latter slayed me, given that context.
Reason's bog, of all sites, posts an approving link to a this Washington Post op-ed.
There's potentially slippery slope: You already know full well that I don't intend to pay any attention to the 2008 games (unless they're moved out of the PRC) and might actually choose to avoid Olympic sponsors (depending on how much of a pain that would be to pull off).
But please, don't use the word "boycott." In this realm, "boycott" is what Jimmy Carter forced U.S. athletes to do in 1980 (and the Soviets forced their athletes to do in 1984).
Don't even think about preventing athletes from attending. THEY'VE TRAINED FOUR #&@(& YEARS for this. (It may not but just about the competitors, but it is about them at least in part.)
All that said, I'm quite gratified that people recognize the monstrosity coming out of Beijing. A few days ago I called them "totalitarian clowns," and I'll stick with that epithet.
Stereotypically, you'd think of liberals as in favor of "international law" and conservatives as fearing and loathing same.
For punitive damages there might be a switcheroo effect.
"They're not really being realistic about what the place is worth."
So claims the would-be seller of a house nobody wants to buy (at the listed price).
(From Yahoo! Finance via David Bernstein, in turn via Instapundit.)
"Greg and Barbara Abbott have already cut the price twice on the two-bedroom condominium they are trying to sell on the Las Vegas strip. They're asking $669,900 now -- and an offer in the $650,000 range means they'll lose money."
You mean to tell me goods occasionally lose market value? THE HORROR!
This post claims: "[T]he FBI has taken it upon itself to arrest people in pre-dawn raids for what they say is the crime of clicking the wrong link."
That would be horrible if true; Declan McCullagh's original article seems to suggest it's true, yet that contradicts what I'd already read in Orin Kerr's post on the topic.
In Kerr's reading, "the FBI has begun using fake hyperlinks to alleged child pornography images to build cases in child porn investigations" -- and "The key question is whether clicking on a link constitutes probable cause to search a home."
(For what it's worth, I think it's obvious that there are many cases where simply clicking a link is probable cause to suspect you possess child porn, but equally obvious that simply clicking a link should never be in itself a prosecutable act.)
And yet, from the original article:
"Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren't having sex, but their genitalia were visible)."
He was convicted on the first count (clicking the hyperlink) and the last (having images of naked minors). Given the description of those images, I suspect that they swayed the jury to convicting him at all.
Matt Welch's New York Times op-ed is bracing.
Along those lines, Mickey Kaus is wary of one pro-Obama argument. Kaus quotes Jonathan Alter: "The hard part [of the presidency] is using the bully pulpit to instruct and illuminate and rearrange our mental furniture." Kaus describes that as "four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension."
I'd be alarmed if Clinton were the major candidate most likely to just live and let live. She isn't, though none of the three are anywhere near ideal.
Some say this is heartless corporate greed; I say it's legal malpractice, and the "family lawyer" responsible for the cockup should be disbarred for epic failure.