Success is hard to define.  We think we know it when we see it.  But we seldom do.  In fact, more often than not we actually misidentify things such as material abundance, popularity or power as “success.”  They can in fact be correlative with success, but they are not success or even necessarily proof of success.

Thankfully as we get older this becomes more and more intuitive to us.  We learn to focus our inquiry when thinking about success.  The old maxim that “no man is a hero to his valet” reminds us that we are all ultimately only human.  The march of mortality as well prevents any illusion to the contrary from lodging with sustained firmness in any but the most unsuccessfully matured mind.  So we come to realize there are a lot of ways to define to success, to measure it, and to weigh it in terms of the overall picture of what or who it is we’re considering.

We also, it is to be hoped, stop fearing failure, and learn what it is there for, and how there is no success without it.

Now, this blog’s title is an allusion to one of the criteria used by courts to decide whether or not to issue a preliminary injunction in a civil litigation matter.  Typically the elements weighed by a judge are (a) a balancing of harms as between what will happen if an injunction does issue, compared to if it does not; (b) whether the harm sought to be prevented is “irreparable harm”–meaning the relief sought is the only way to compensate the party seeking it or whether plain old money will do the trick without too much guesswork or speculation regarding the harm done; (c) a consideration of whether the issuance of the injunction will be in the public interest and (d) whether the party seeking the injunction can show its likelihood of success on the merits of the underlying legal claim.

This last element requires a judge to do a quick once-over of “the case” presented to him and evaluate whether the party seeking the injunction has put forth a plausible and appropriately authenticated prima facie factual set of claims which, in the framework of the applicable legal doctrines set out by the plaintiff, looks like a winner.  Typically along with the issuance of a preliminary injunction, a court will require the plaintiff to post a bond, so that if something material turns out to have been misrepresented or misunderstood and harm results to the enjoined party, the court knows that party has recourse to the bond for compensation.

Blogging, however, does not require such profound undertakings. I liked the name Likelihood of Success for this blog because it seemed like a nice assertion of confidence in light of my having been, albeit as it turned out temporarily, made to feel very unwelcome at Dean’s World, where I did all my non-legal blogging at the time.  It also made a nice twin to my law blog, LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, and, well, I owned the domain name already.

But it’s just a blog, after all; I don’t have to post a bond if I’m wrong about whether it will be a success.

I will for a change limit the extent of the self-indulgence here and say that very few bloggers not named Michelle Malkin would be dissatisfied with the speed with which this blog received decent respect from established bloggers, meaningful and frequent link love that sometimes drove traffic to silly heights, raised the blogger’s name recognition to a level that I was in the mix for a coveted Pajamas TV gig for a few months, and more or less qualified as a successful undertaking—whatever on earth that means for a blog.  So what turns out is I ended up having a pretty good little run of success, at least the way I defined it when I first thought about it.

What I didn’t figure on was that I, the blogging party, would be the one seeking relief.

Two blogs are too much for me.  And this one can’t really be justified as a demand on my time—call it a balance of harms, or benefits, or something.  And let’s not even talk about the “public interest.”

Continuing to advance this blog “further” up the “curve” of whatever it is I was doing with it would have required a sustained, intensive investment in time I am no longer in the position to make; a commitment to hewing to pretty clearly delineated political and topical positions that I happen not to be interested in assuming just to please certain power brokers in the blogosphere; and the kind of blogging you do when you’re really interested in traffic per se, which is not usually such good blogging.

Really, to have more “success” with Likelihood of Success, I would have to figure out why the world needs just another general topic blog by another clever loudmouth and, after realizing it doesn’t, do the things people who want to be big-shot bloggers for some reason do in order to constantly draw attention and traffic and whatever (we know it’s not money) to themselves.

And yeah!  What exactly do you get if you achieve this “success”?  It’s like the joke they tell about the person who supposedly turned down the offer of a partnership in one of the elite law firms.  “No thanks,” he said.  “This is like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize is just more pie.”  I’m full, too.

Then there’s the fact that blogging may be peaking, or perhaps has already peaked.  Comments on blogs and links from blogs are in serious decline, in favor of Twitter and other ways of having topical conversations.  Combined with all these other factors, and the serial failure of a number of would-be co-bloggers to come through on their ambitions or promises to contribute, the serious question of whither general interest blogging is one more reason not to continue the dispersal of focus, energy and time that Likelihood of Success would represent.

So I am retiring this blog from the active roster.  Legacy posts will stay up.  But I am focusing my efforts as a blogger almost exclusively on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®. I still have posting privileges on Dean’s World and Right Wing News if I think there’s a reason to say something else.  I’m out there.  But the successful run of Likelihood of Success is over.

Thank you very, very much for it.  A little piece of me dies… but that is life.

Thank you.

(By the way — I’ll still be blogging “off topic” back at Dean’s World.)

In various countries, plaintiffs have sought court orders to halt the operation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, with the most extraordinary of allegations: that the experiment may create a black hole that will devour the Earth.

Up until now, the various lawsuits filed against the LHC have faltered. But if the right kind of claim is filed in the proper court, a judge may soon have to face the question of whether an injunction might be needed to save the world.

That Eric Johnson knows how to get your attention.  Read the whole thing, while you still can!

I scanned sites on like topic, but never saw your blog. I summed it to dearies and i’ll regular reader.

I love the “dearies” part. I would love it if somewhat would tell me what radio station or remote ham radio broadcast these people are listening to in their attempts to simulate our language.

“Summed it to dearies”! That is rich.

As well explained in the Book of Esther, it’s the holiday of turnabout, surprises, false identities, intrigue, perhaps some emotional legerdemain, and not a little spiritual confusion. The outcome isn’t always funny, or even fun, except perhaps in the sense of the divine comedy.

It all comes around in the end, though!

My point is this: Antisemitism is an important element of gentile anti-Zionism. They are not the same, but those who claim that they are unrelated are, well, antisemites, actually. And when Israel is accused of committing war crimes, or preparing to; and these war crimes are redolent of medieval accusations of well-poisoning as well as the classic blood libel, you can see a certain similarity: The Jews are claimed to be agents of not only mayhem but bearers of malefaction, poision, offal into the otherwise pure nature of things. This, then, is not such a nutty analogy.

You’ve got to understand these things.  In fact, the real dedicated anti-Semites do come in all sorts of sizes and varieties, much like a can of mixed nuts left out in the August sun for a couple of weeks.  And now, thanks to Meryl Yourish, they bloggy kind have been thoroughly categorized in a new taxonomy of online little Hitlers:

Eight years ago this spring, at the height of the suicide bombings of Yasser Arafat’s terror war known as the second intifada, I started blogging about Jewish and Israeli issues. This, of course, brought out the anti-Israel crazies. I came up with a corollary to Godwin’s Law to describe these trolls: “In any internet discussion area concerning Israel, politics, or religion, the probability of anti-Semitic comments approaches one.” (In fact, I’ve seen comments threads that have absolutely nothing to do with Israel, politics, or religion still devolve into anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing, but that’s a post for another time.)

And so, based on the thousands of comments and emails I’ve read over the years, both here and on other blogs and media sites, I present The Blogger’s Guide to Anti-Semitic Comments Trolls. Below are the some of the types of anti-Israel commenters I’ve identified over the years, but the list is by no means complete.

Bloggers:  Consider yourself guided!

Brancheau’s older sister, Diane Gross, said the trainer would not have wanted anything done to the whale. “She loved the whales like her children. She loved all of them,” said Gross, of Schererville, Ind. “They all had personalities, good days and bad days.”

In a profile in the Orlando Sentinel in 2006, Brancheau acknowledged the dangers, saying: “You can’t put yourself in the water unless you trust them and they trust you.” . . .

Howard Garrett, co-founder and director of the Washington-based nonprofit Orca Network, . . . . said Tilikum was probably agitated before Wednesday’s attack, possibly from some kind of clash with the other whales.

Gary Wilson, a professor at Moorpark College’s exotic animal training program, said it can be difficult to detect when an animal is about to turn on its trainer.

“One of the challenges working with any animal is learning to read its body language and getting a feel for what’s going on in its mind,” he said.

Right.  But here’s the thing:  If Dawn Brancheau wasn’t up to meeting that challenge–she who “loved the whales like her children,” and who knew their personalities, and the fact that they had “good days and bad days”–who is?  She was everything you would expect someone to be who is capable of “learning to read [an orca's] body language and getting a feel for what’s going on in its mind.”

So is the job of killer whale trainer at Sea World one in which you acknowledge the distinct possibility that you could do everything right but still get killed doing it?  That would not make such a job particularly unusual; millions of people do such work, and have a lot less fun at it than Dawn Brancheau did at her job until the sad day when it stopped very hard at being fun.  And not all such jobs are all that more “serious” than the one that took Brancheau’s life, or as economically productive either.

I’m not so much a “there oughtta be a law guy,” as I said in a recent post where I uncharacteristically said just that.  I don’t think there is a need for a law here, either.  It’ s hard to imagine choosing to risk death so you can do a whale show. But if it’s truly a choice, so be it.  That means, however, that if orca trainers and those like them are going to at least be said to have made their potentially deadly career choices voluntarily, they’ll have to think more clearly than at least the Associated Press wrote in lining up those quotations and leaving the obvious contradiction they raise hanging.

UPDATE:  A tad more rigor at Overlawyered.

That’s the other reason I don’t go to CPAC.  Because I’m the last cultural conservative, remember?

Today is the one-year anniversary of the landmark stimulus bill which most economists agree has staved off a second Great Depression. The evidence that the stimulus has worked is overwhelming – the New York Times has an in-depth article looking at its actual impact on jobs, and an indispensable graphic showing a timeline of key economic indicators before and after its passage. There’s another beautiful chart based on job loss data from Dec 2007 to Jan 2010 which also makes the impact of the stimulus crystal clear. The recognition of the stimulus’ success isn’t just data-driven – Republican lawmakers who have publicly denounced it for political gain have been quietly and hypocritically scrambling for stimulus money for their districts – as documented by the Wall Street Journal and by the Washington Times.

The only real flaw in the stimulus bill was that it wasn’t big enough . . .

Aziz, Aziz, Aziz.  Where do we start with this?

• How about the leap from “most economists agree” to the sole source of his authority for this breathtaking proposition–”the New York Times has an in-depth article . . .”  That’s it.  I don’t even have to find economists who don’t agree and with this and try to figure out whether they are or aren’t “most”–Aziz thinks the New York Times is actually a trustworthy source for this preposterous statement.  That actually tells me, in contrast, that the entire remainder of his article is not worthy of reading, because Aziz, who is not an economist, is not making  a serious attempt to objectively see if his central premise is correct.
• Then there’s the fact that “most economists” didn’t agree what ended the first Great Depression until about 20 years ago (it wasn’t the New Deal, by the way).  The idea that “most economists” would agree “the landmark stimulus bill . . .  has staved off a second Great Depression” –and that they would have nothing to say about a trillion dollar deficit that has resulted–is, to any serious student of economics, truly laughable.
• And what exactly do “all economists” say?  It would be too easy to merely cite Cato and Heritage economists who are predisposed not to agree.  But what else is out there?  Everyone knows the “jobs saved” metric is no metric at all, or at least not much more than half of one.  On those lines, in the Atlantic, columnist Derek Thompson votes a lukewarm slightly-thumbs-up in a piece reprinting some Times charts and graphics from a couple of months ago, but much like the ones that make Aziz all woozy, regarding which one commenter writes, “I like the line for ‘if no stimulus’. It’s kind of like drawing the line of the number of girls I could have slept with if I weren’t married. Useless. A huge guess made to make the other number look good (or bad).”   But beyond merely the jobs figure, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times writes:

The policies that new-Keynesian economists are advocating stem from a theory that is built on sand. Before economists become policy advocates we need a theory that is internally consistent and that can explain the evidence from the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s and the current economic collapse. The Keynes of The General Theory was right about the problem, but he was wrong about the solution. High unemployment can persist forever unless we do something about it. But fiscal policy is not the way to restore full employment.

If new-classical and new-Keynesian economics are both wrong, where do we go from here? The classical economists argue that the economy will repair itself. The new-Keynesians argue for more fiscal stimulus. I agree with the Keynesians that very high unemployment will persist if we don’t do something about it. But I do not believe that large fiscal deficits that will be paid for by our children and our grandchildren are the answer.

Okay, well, that’s the fat cats at the Financial Times, right?  In contrast, we can count on NPR for objectivity, I suppose?  It’s at least as dependable, politically, as the Times.  What does NPR say?

Obama’s critics have been helped by the continuing flood of bad news on the jobs front. The unemployment rate, which stood at 7.7 percent in January when Obama took office, has shot up to 10 percent, even with the stimulus spending.

Most economists agree that the economy was even weaker at the beginning of 2009 than many experts, including those at the White House, had realized. But there is little agreement in the political world over what role the stimulus played.

“The problem with the stimulus is that while people have their own direct experiences with the economy, the impact of government action on the economy is almost always subtle and less than powerfully visible,” Franklin says.

It’s not that I know the answer to this question.  I don’t.  I’m not an economist; I’m an economics major who can’t balance a checkbook.  But the breathless conclusion by Aziz is a joke, and just proof, not of how good the stimulus is, but–even still–how good that Kool-Aid really is.

U.S. Encounters Limits of Iran Engagement Policy

Well, let’s be sure and learn all this stuff from scratch.  Each time.