Are you honestly saying that occasional terrorist attacks (which have been happening for *years*) are anywhere near the threat to the US that a full blown civil war or World War II was? You have consumed some seriously messed up Kool Aid.
I would love to come face to face with a judge who would buy the argument that taking a single photo from your property on a whim falls under the definition of "surveilance" that those statutes were written to regulate. Actually, no I wouldn't. A judge like that would scare me. A lot.
"Next item: turning Wyoming into the new San Francisco landfill. All those in favor..."
And Wyoming would use its mighty sway over the workings of the federal government to prevent this how? We're talking about a single executive here, not a whole legislative body, so it's less a matter of mob rule and more a matter of who the executive identifies with. I'm trying to think of a reason for a particular elected representative to "have it in" for small states like Wyoming any more than he has it in for any state that he's guaranteed not to win. He's a lot more likely to have it in for agrarian states or industrial states or secular states or religious states. The idea that size factors into it for a President any more than those other factors is silly. Making a protected class out of a class that is unlikely to be victimized is likewise silly.
You might have notice the studied lack of interest our current President has shown in the nation's most populous state. Why? Because he never had a chance at any electoral votes from California. If he could have won Florida by promising to nuke San Francisco, he would have done so without any ill effects. Clearly, a "winner take all" system can cause just as much neglect and unbalanced treatment as a popular vote system would. As I see it, you have a choice between representing nebulous regional interests (e.g. the "unique" interests of the Wyoming lobby) at the expense of the interests of "safe" states or representing broad national interests at the expense of those who pine for the days of a loose federation in which Virginians are Virginians before they are Americans.
We'd see a much higher quality of govt if the feds were responsible to somebody local not "everybody" in a nebulous get elected next term way.
This is an interesting idea. Given the way things are currently running, I find the idea of having our President vaguely beholden to "everybody" as opposed to the small number of states that constitute his base very appealing.
Going w/ a purely popular vote system would make your vote count even less than it currently does. In that case, New York and California by themselves could pick the President regardless of what the rest of the country wants.
I understand what you're saying, and I'm not rabidly in favor of abolishing the electoral college (even though my vote is significantly attenuated by living in the most populous state), but your numbers here just don't work out. I have to point that out just in case somebody reads your post and actually believes that the population numbers are that skewed. California and New York don't even come close to making up 50% of the US population, so the only way what you're proposing could actually happen if both CA and NY voted 100% for a particular candidate and a lot of other states had record low voter turnout. In fact, last I checked, Texas has more people than New York.
More interesting is the fact that Wyoming has a smaller population than many large US cities. So the question is, is it reasonable for a single city to have as much influence over the election as the state of Wyoming? I guess that depends on whether Wyoming has particular state-specific interests that would otherwise be trampled. I have a hard time believing that this is the case in 2006.
On top of that, I would argue that the best way to protect the rights of a minority is not to make the minority's voice louder (while keeping it a minority), but rather to limit what the prevailing majority can impose on that minority. For example, the Bill of Rights protects minority religions by explicitly prevening the majority from foisting their religion on the minority. It doesn't say, "In order to protect Muslims from Christians, we're going to give each Muslim 3 votes and let them fend for themselves."
Oh yes, to the parapsychology review board. If the public are randi's peers, you have made my point most eloquently; unqualified, hysterical, and prone to knee jerk reactionism. Not unlike most of the responses here.
So the problem you have is that there is no established panel of experts deciding whether the experimental procedure is valid. Point taken. There isn't. There's also no recourse other than publicly complaining. There are advantages and disadvantages to an adversarial system, but when it's done the way the JREF challenge is done, it has its benefits: theoretically, an agreed upon protocol should be unfair to neither party. That's not a bad place to start.
Everybody except science [carries bias]. The laws of nature couldn't give a crap, and any honest researcher admitting he has a bias one way or the other is not worth a crap.
Yes, that would be because "science" is not a person but a framework of procedures. Any honest researcher who doesn't admit that he has bias (and not even necessarily of the "I want it to work out this way" sort) is a liar or overly confident in himself. The whole point of the scientific method is that you set up a protocol that can be executed by the most biased, illogical agent and still get the same results. It's about keeping everybody honest by laying out expectations in advance and ruling out confounding variables. Biased people can design experiments that work as long as the experiments are designed honestly. Having both sides working to design the experiment should keep each party honest.
I'd be very intersted in what standards aren't being followed that you propose should be followed. It is my understanding that the experiments as designed are repeatable, empirical tests whose results are not subject to interpretation (e.g. "I will telepathically guess the value of hidden playing cards over the course of 100 trials and demonstrate a better-than-guessing accuracy rate to a 95% confidence interval"). I'd agree with you if he was proposing tests like, "The subject must impress me" but the fact is, they're pretty meticulous about specificity and leaving no wiggle room.
You are asking for proof that randi turns down valid applications. My point is that hes running a three ring circus (look at the front page) to his own profit (and STFU about the million already, his running costs don't come out of that, so don't get all pious on me). So heres you, asking for evidence from the foundation that the foundation doesn't really give a crap. Nice one.
No, the JREF would not be the only place to find claims of impropriety. See if you can find claims of impropriety from the wronged parties. Those claims should be verifiable by going through the JREF's records, but even a short list of claims that are not nutty on the face of them would be nice. I don't deny that Randi makes a handy living at doing this stuff, but given the number of genuinely dangerous frauds he has exposed in his career, I can't complain.
Added to that, their methods are opaque, unscientific, arbitrary (and if you don't like them, you can get lost, but hey, no blame or damages, remember?), and their results are dubious in the extreme, as well as being tainted by gutter press tactics.
Nasty PR behavior, I'll give you. Randi can be a coarse individual, and I'm sure it doesn't hurt his popularity to turn it up a notch. Opaque, though? Come now. The experimental designs are available for the asking. No, there are no consequences if a design turns out to be half-assed, but calling them opaque is simply nonsense. As for no blame and damages, you have to grant that conservatively, 90% of the applicants are complete kooks who would never sign on to any reasonable test protocol. Leaving themselves open to finger pointing when they're generally not dealing with rational actors is a bad game to play.
You mention contributing to the sum of knowledge o
As I pointed out, it's all available on file, and the applicants can go public with any complains they have. Either side can come forward and complain to the public all they want, and they'll have the documentation to support their claims if they're legit.
Standards.
You yourself pointed to the rules about a mutually agreed upon test protocol. That's not a standard? Until you or anybody else can figure out what you mean by calling for ISO certification for this stuff, you're not giving much in the way of a complaint.
Transparency.
Again, the information is available. They don't go to the expense of hand delivering it to your door, but if you have a specific question, or want a specific document, it's on file.
Non bias.
Everybody carries some sort of bias. Randi is biased against the claimants, and the claimants are biased against Randi. Scientists often *really* want results. The whole point of the scientific method is that you can come up with a protocol to control that bias and ensure that you're not fooling yourself. That's why they follow a mutually agreed upon protocol and document everything. Where's the bias, exactly? Your posts are long on implications of impropriety and short on examples of exacly how it could happen or evidence that it has.
Thats science. Until you have those, you have zero right to claim what you are doing is any more scientific than dowsing. Which is about the level of the amazing randi.
So, you have publicly avaialable results, clearly stated and mutually agreed upon test protocols, and objective criteria for success and failure. That's about as close as you're going to get when dealing with a single person claiming to be in possesion of unique powers. Sure, they're not statistically significant studies, but that's not the point. The point is to demonstrate that a given clamint has or does not have a particular power.
Yup, just keep dropping those strawmen in, its not making my argument any weaker.
I think it's an apt comparison. Show us the bias. Where have the results been unfair? Who has come up with a reasonable test protocol and had it rejected? Can you describe even a hypothetical case where they could act unfairly and not be called on it, given the documentation trail they leave? If I had a reasonable claim to the million dollars and documented proof that they had cheated me out of it, you can bet that I would go public with it. Seriously, do you give any creedence to the creationists who claim that they're shut out of journals but who never produce any rejected submissions as proof?
Well if you can pick it up via scientific method, why should there be an ISO standard for it? Whats wrong with this picture is that you won't ever see any third party audits, any standards, or any real science being done here. You want to ask yourself, are you fighting for a belief thats every bit as non-rational as the beliefs in psychics and spoon benders?
If you want information on a particular case or protocol, it's on file. You can get it. Likewise, the claimants have their own copies and copies of the communications between them. The claimants could just as easily say, "Hey! I had a good claim and they shut me down! Look at this!" Nobody seems to have come forward with a quality claim that was silenced.
You're sounding a lot like the creationists who appeal to some sort of vast scientific conspiracy to silence them in the journals. On one hand, they present as evidence the fact that they have no published articles. On the other hand, they fail to produce any rejected articles for scrutiny. Wake me when you find the interesting protocols or claims that were rejected unfairly.
The point with quantum encryption is not that it's a magic algorithm that can't be broken, but rather that you can set up a channel that you can guarantee that Eve has not snagged any data from, giving the users the ability to use an OTP system without distributing the OTP beforehand. Alice sends an OTP to Bob one bit at a time. Using bizarro quantum magic that is outside the scope of a/. post, Bob and Alice can tell if Eve has seen each bit. If the bit has not been seen, the Bob XORs it with a bit of the data he wants to send and sends the result back to Alice. At this point, Eve has no way of decrypting that bit because she never saw the key bit. Continue until the entire message is sent. If Eve ever starts snagging key bits, Bob and Alice will know.
Anyway, the whole point of the system is that it's resistent to the MTM attack by relying on observer effects.
So you're admitting that your way of life has not been destroyed, as I suspected. I would assume the same goes for most US citizens.
Part of my way of life used to be not having to worry AT ALL about being charged with a crime using secret evidence. Part of my way of life used to be not having to worry about a lot of abuses that have become more likely. That's definitely an erosion of my way of life.
Of course, part of what I enjoyed about living in the US was not just my freedoms, but the fact that everybody else shared those freedoms with me. Your argument seems to be that even if 99% of everybody loses all of their civil liberties, as long as MINE are intact, it's no big deal. That may work for you (and it certianly seems to play to the typical conservative "I've got mine" attitude), but it doesn't work for me.
depends on what religion he is. Don't believe me, I can can point you to many pro ACLU posts that essentially say the same thing.
Don't be disingenuous now. You still haven't posted anything to support your assertion that the ACLU is biased against Christians. Please do come up with a case when they should have interevened but didn't. Let's talk about it. Really.
Ahhh now I get it. The rights of those who happen to share the same faith as those in power are worthless to the ACLU.
No, the rights of those who happen to share the same faith as those in power ARE RARELY TRAMPLED. That's the point. Try hard now: come up with an example of a case when the ACLU should have stepped in on behalf of a persecuted Christian and failed to do so. Until then, you're just blowing smoke, and your general observation is explained by pro-Christian bias in the system, not anti-Christian bias on the part of the ACLU. First, show us that there is a problem and then complain about the ACLU not being part of the solution.
Sorry, I don't liked to that ole top 40 carnival barker. Just pointing to the numerous anti Christian stances the ACLU have taken. Sure, they do actually read their charter occasionally and do defend a small Christian church being foced out of it's localtion every year or two. But when the record is like 100 to 1 against, you can't point to the one and say they are being even handed.
The ACLU is there to keep people who aren't in power from having their rights trampled by those who are in power. Think about that for a minute. I know that a lot of politically active Christians have this bizarro world persecution complex, but they control every branch of government at essentially every level of government. It's pretty damned rare that any government entity takes an actionably anti-Christian stance. That's why the ACLU doesn't typically take up those cases--BECAUSE THEY HARDLY EXIST. Can you think of a defensible case when they should have taken action and they didn't? I'd love to hear about it and talk a bit about the details.
Really, if we ever get to a point where Muslims are the majority and are running the show, all the Christians who whined about anti-Christian bias in the ACLU will be pounding on the ACLU's door for protection, and I have a strong suspicion that the ACLU will answer.
Then why not just attach a fake box to the suspect's head and tell them it's a real brain scanner? I'm sure they never get to see the results anyway, so why build the real thing when you can fake them with little cost? They must be building the real thing because they expect real results.
Well, a polygraph is basically a fake magic box designed to freak people out as well, so you could say they're already doing that. More to your point, though, I have been told by some people who do interrogation in Iraqw that simply having the person hold on to a USB cable and claiming that a laptop is a lie detector has worked wonders for some suspects.
Your first two examples are the ACLU's internal policy, not government censorship, so they have nothing to do with the First Amendment. Of course, the policy is controversial even in ACLU circles. I imagine that it will be repealed soon enough, if for no other reason than it provides fodder for critics.
Your second example is more interesting, but it leaves a number of issues about the case unstated. To summarize, the girl had a speech pre-approved (and that speech *did* include some religious references), but she diverged from it substantially and had her mic cut. It's also worth noting that when a government institution hands you a microphone for a particular function, you have to play by their rules, First Amendment be damned unless you want that microphone taken away. The First Amendment guarantees that they can't jail you for speaking out. It doesn't guarantee you an audience and a mic at a government sponsored function. The ACLU is being completely consistent about this. Are you one of those people who thinks that the ACLU suffers from some sort of anti-Christian bias? Please.
But we don't have to test for all types of potential ID'ers to test for some the same way that SETI does not (or cannot) test for all possible broadcast techniques but merely radio (at this point).
Indeed. And the ID camp has done an excellent job of limiting themselves to testing only... well... nothing at all.
I don't think anyone believes these scientists are stupid. However, like all human beings, they can't help but have their own preconceived notions and political biases. Typically, a majority of scientists tend to fall on the left side of the political spectrum (US politics). And the left already assumes that global warming is man-made.
:::boggle::: Exactly when do you suppose this "assumption" started? Has it always been an assumption, or was it a conclusion at one point that has become widely accepted? I'm not deeply entrenched in the global warming debate, but I can't help but see the parallels between the typical arguments of the anti-global-warming crowd and the anti-evolution crowd. Only rarely does it go to specific data and research. It generally goes back to "bias" and "assumptions" that no person really has any rational reason to have.
No accusations, just bringing up the problematic fact that we are all humans, and thus all subject to human faults. Global warming is, in my opinion, 90% politics and 10% science. Is the science strong enough to ignore the overwhelming politics surrounding the issue? I hope it is. Human nature suggests "maybe not."
OK, so bias-wise we have one side that stands to lose countless billions of dollars if global warming turns out to be a man-made issue. On the other side, we have (a majority) who stands to gain... well... nothing at all from global warming being man-made. I don't deny that there may be legitimate controversy, but to ascribe it to a hidden agenda from which climatologists gain nothing is a little strange. If anything, the more likely source of bias is the other side.
Regardless, the damn alarmists need to shut up. They weren't right 30 years ago, they weren't right 50 years ago (people thought we were causing global cooling back then, whoops), and at best right now they are exaggerating. They aren't helping.
I challenge you to support your implied claim that the academic world supported the "global cooling" idea anywhere near as widely as global warming. Seriously. Try. Pop science articles don't count.
Is your assertion that they're exaggerating supported by anything more than a casual perusal of the data? I ask this because again, your arguments sound more like the "common sense" armchair science arguments that come from evolution deniers and young earthers than the deeply considered conclusions of somebody who is actually in the field. That's a rather harsh judgement to pass against people in a field other than your own.
Yes, in this case, the answer to extortion can be extortion. Just like in some cases, the answer to violence can be violence. It's not an optimal situation, but if the law provides no recourse, your recourse is dirty business practices. It's better than a horse's head in your bed. It seems fair enough, anyway... You wanted Google to perform badly over your pipes? OK.
In my experience, when something goes wrong, everybody blames "the router." I used to take them seriously and look at the router (seemed sensible!), but now my brain has adjusted to the point where "router" just becomes "marklar" and I ignore the sentence containing it entirely. Everything works much better that way.
It seems kind of unreasonable to find an expensive piece of electronics laying about and assume that it has no owner, no? These things don't just pop into existence or run from the factory to the back seats of cabs. It takes some serious logical gymnastics to get around the fact that you are taking ownership of something that clearly already has an owner. This is especially the case when it's something that has a wealth of information stored on it that could be used to locate the original owner.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it's definitely legally theft, especially after the rightful owner has contacted you and asked for it back. The idea that we should all have to keep our property within arm's reach lest it be repossessed by some lucky "finder" is not that far from the idea that anything that's "easy" to steal should be legal to steal.
Absent a written record, what if there is plausible evidence that she is lying in court about what your wishes are?
That would be a very sad thing, but I don't think that we saw any such evidence in this case. I would hope that it would require more than hearsay or some old friend saying, "Oh, I knew her really well and she would never want that!" to abrogate my rights to care for my wife or hers to take care of me. I would also hope to keep quack doctors who make diagnoses based on video footage viewed from their capitol building offices out of it. I would hope to keep it out of the hands of bloodsucking journalists and televangelists.
In short, it should take a lot more than sleazebags cynically using us as a political football, irrational grief-stricken family members, and tabloids dragging us through the mud to break the bond of mutual care and responsibility that we formed both publicly and legally. The "something doesn't smell right and your decision makes me sad" argument should not be enough to insinuate yourself into a private and terribly emotional issue between spouses unless you have some fairly damning evidence against one of us.
Somehow, which hole in the body a brain-dead, unable to survive more than a few days, baby comes out is not really something I'd think we'd have to have a huge debate over.
That debate would be especially short if Mom & Dad couldn't afford to keep it on life support and the state might have to pay. Once state money for medical care is involved, the "culture of life" inevitably becomes a bit more flexible.
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Are you honestly saying that occasional terrorist attacks (which have been happening for *years*) are anywhere near the threat to the US that a full blown civil war or World War II was? You have consumed some seriously messed up Kool Aid.
I would love to come face to face with a judge who would buy the argument that taking a single photo from your property on a whim falls under the definition of "surveilance" that those statutes were written to regulate. Actually, no I wouldn't. A judge like that would scare me. A lot.
Try getting a security clearance. I can guarantee you that it will come up, whether you were charged or not. Every little bit counts.
You might have notice the studied lack of interest our current President has shown in the nation's most populous state. Why? Because he never had a chance at any electoral votes from California. If he could have won Florida by promising to nuke San Francisco, he would have done so without any ill effects. Clearly, a "winner take all" system can cause just as much neglect and unbalanced treatment as a popular vote system would. As I see it, you have a choice between representing nebulous regional interests (e.g. the "unique" interests of the Wyoming lobby) at the expense of the interests of "safe" states or representing broad national interests at the expense of those who pine for the days of a loose federation in which Virginians are Virginians before they are Americans.
More interesting is the fact that Wyoming has a smaller population than many large US cities. So the question is, is it reasonable for a single city to have as much influence over the election as the state of Wyoming? I guess that depends on whether Wyoming has particular state-specific interests that would otherwise be trampled. I have a hard time believing that this is the case in 2006.
On top of that, I would argue that the best way to protect the rights of a minority is not to make the minority's voice louder (while keeping it a minority), but rather to limit what the prevailing majority can impose on that minority. For example, the Bill of Rights protects minority religions by explicitly prevening the majority from foisting their religion on the minority. It doesn't say, "In order to protect Muslims from Christians, we're going to give each Muslim 3 votes and let them fend for themselves."
So the problem you have is that there is no established panel of experts deciding whether the experimental procedure is valid. Point taken. There isn't. There's also no recourse other than publicly complaining. There are advantages and disadvantages to an adversarial system, but when it's done the way the JREF challenge is done, it has its benefits: theoretically, an agreed upon protocol should be unfair to neither party. That's not a bad place to start.
Yes, that would be because "science" is not a person but a framework of procedures. Any honest researcher who doesn't admit that he has bias (and not even necessarily of the "I want it to work out this way" sort) is a liar or overly confident in himself. The whole point of the scientific method is that you set up a protocol that can be executed by the most biased, illogical agent and still get the same results. It's about keeping everybody honest by laying out expectations in advance and ruling out confounding variables. Biased people can design experiments that work as long as the experiments are designed honestly. Having both sides working to design the experiment should keep each party honest.
I'd be very intersted in what standards aren't being followed that you propose should be followed. It is my understanding that the experiments as designed are repeatable, empirical tests whose results are not subject to interpretation (e.g. "I will telepathically guess the value of hidden playing cards over the course of 100 trials and demonstrate a better-than-guessing accuracy rate to a 95% confidence interval"). I'd agree with you if he was proposing tests like, "The subject must impress me" but the fact is, they're pretty meticulous about specificity and leaving no wiggle room.
No, the JREF would not be the only place to find claims of impropriety. See if you can find claims of impropriety from the wronged parties. Those claims should be verifiable by going through the JREF's records, but even a short list of claims that are not nutty on the face of them would be nice. I don't deny that Randi makes a handy living at doing this stuff, but given the number of genuinely dangerous frauds he has exposed in his career, I can't complain.
Nasty PR behavior, I'll give you. Randi can be a coarse individual, and I'm sure it doesn't hurt his popularity to turn it up a notch. Opaque, though? Come now. The experimental designs are available for the asking. No, there are no consequences if a design turns out to be half-assed, but calling them opaque is simply nonsense. As for no blame and damages, you have to grant that conservatively, 90% of the applicants are complete kooks who would never sign on to any reasonable test protocol. Leaving themselves open to finger pointing when they're generally not dealing with rational actors is a bad game to play.
You mention contributing to the sum of knowledge o
You're sounding a lot like the creationists who appeal to some sort of vast scientific conspiracy to silence them in the journals. On one hand, they present as evidence the fact that they have no published articles. On the other hand, they fail to produce any rejected articles for scrutiny. Wake me when you find the interesting protocols or claims that were rejected unfairly.
Answer 1) Then they're VERY unlucky.
Answer 2) Their password is still bad because an intruder typing in the weak password still gets the OK from the system.
The point with quantum encryption is not that it's a magic algorithm that can't be broken, but rather that you can set up a channel that you can guarantee that Eve has not snagged any data from, giving the users the ability to use an OTP system without distributing the OTP beforehand. Alice sends an OTP to Bob one bit at a time. Using bizarro quantum magic that is outside the scope of a /. post, Bob and Alice can tell if Eve has seen each bit. If the bit has not been seen, the Bob XORs it with a bit of the data he wants to send and sends the result back to Alice. At this point, Eve has no way of decrypting that bit because she never saw the key bit. Continue until the entire message is sent. If Eve ever starts snagging key bits, Bob and Alice will know.
Anyway, the whole point of the system is that it's resistent to the MTM attack by relying on observer effects.
Of course, part of what I enjoyed about living in the US was not just my freedoms, but the fact that everybody else shared those freedoms with me. Your argument seems to be that even if 99% of everybody loses all of their civil liberties, as long as MINE are intact, it's no big deal. That may work for you (and it certianly seems to play to the typical conservative "I've got mine" attitude), but it doesn't work for me.
Really, if we ever get to a point where Muslims are the majority and are running the show, all the Christians who whined about anti-Christian bias in the ACLU will be pounding on the ACLU's door for protection, and I have a strong suspicion that the ACLU will answer.
Your second example is more interesting, but it leaves a number of issues about the case unstated. To summarize, the girl had a speech pre-approved (and that speech *did* include some religious references), but she diverged from it substantially and had her mic cut. It's also worth noting that when a government institution hands you a microphone for a particular function, you have to play by their rules, First Amendment be damned unless you want that microphone taken away. The First Amendment guarantees that they can't jail you for speaking out. It doesn't guarantee you an audience and a mic at a government sponsored function. The ACLU is being completely consistent about this. Are you one of those people who thinks that the ACLU suffers from some sort of anti-Christian bias? Please.
Indeed. And the ID camp has done an excellent job of limiting themselves to testing only... well... nothing at all.
Is your assertion that they're exaggerating supported by anything more than a casual perusal of the data? I ask this because again, your arguments sound more like the "common sense" armchair science arguments that come from evolution deniers and young earthers than the deeply considered conclusions of somebody who is actually in the field. That's a rather harsh judgement to pass against people in a field other than your own.
Yes, in this case, the answer to extortion can be extortion. Just like in some cases, the answer to violence can be violence. It's not an optimal situation, but if the law provides no recourse, your recourse is dirty business practices. It's better than a horse's head in your bed. It seems fair enough, anyway... You wanted Google to perform badly over your pipes? OK.
In my experience, when something goes wrong, everybody blames "the router." I used to take them seriously and look at the router (seemed sensible!), but now my brain has adjusted to the point where "router" just becomes "marklar" and I ignore the sentence containing it entirely. Everything works much better that way.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it's definitely legally theft, especially after the rightful owner has contacted you and asked for it back. The idea that we should all have to keep our property within arm's reach lest it be repossessed by some lucky "finder" is not that far from the idea that anything that's "easy" to steal should be legal to steal.
He's not from the future. He's a car salesman. Duh.
In short, it should take a lot more than sleazebags cynically using us as a political football, irrational grief-stricken family members, and tabloids dragging us through the mud to break the bond of mutual care and responsibility that we formed both publicly and legally. The "something doesn't smell right and your decision makes me sad" argument should not be enough to insinuate yourself into a private and terribly emotional issue between spouses unless you have some fairly damning evidence against one of us.