Perestroika?

I still read the Earlham Word occasionally not so much as a source of shadenfreunde as I did in the past but because Earlham remains a fascinatingly weird place for me. (I’m also utterly fascinated by North Korea BTW. The DPRK has a “heart” too, but it has a 60 foot statue in the middle that you’re strongly encouraged to give flowers to.). In the most recent Word, Doug Bennett, I believe, made the most candid admission yet that all is not well in Earlham’s intellectual ecosystem.

Bennett also warned against two particular threats to the search for truth. The first threat, he said, is the threat posed by fundamentalist religions. There are elements of fundamentalist religions that believe simple readings of their holy texts can reveal all truth and tolerate no compromise. For these elements, Bennett said, "reason leads to dangerous conclusions." Bennett insisted that free inquiry is essential to a genuine search for truth. Echoing Cardinal Newman, Bennett declared, "Our truth seeking should be fearless and unfettered."

According to Bennett, the second danger to the free exercise of reason comes from reason itself. In searching for truth, we may end up seeing only what we want to see. Our search may be distorted by relationships of power and diverted by our passions and interests. "Our commitment to truth seeking must be thoroughgoing, even if it leads to unpleasant conclusions."

Unless you consider “Fair Trade” a fundamentalist religion, I think the possibility of being influenced by the former at Earlham is remote. The latter posited by Bennett is clearly the greater threat to Earlham’s (and academia in general) intellectual integrity (knee jerk pseudo-intellectual criticism from predictable sources adds credence).

While my Kremlinology may be a little a little excitable in this case, in the past year or so from the many EC mailings I somehow still receive I’ve detected increasing notes of perestroika from Bennett; more or less acknowledging that the long campaign to unencumber the academic establishment from tradition may have gone too far; that instead of intellectual discovery being hindered by ridged social and religious tradition, it is now being compromised by those unwilling to let their newest thought experiment be constrained, much less respect the inherent value of convention/tradition. This environment helped bring about the civil rights movements, but also gave us new math and crippling political correctness. In short I think Doug was very reasonably trying to say that in order for institutions of higher learning to regain their once lofty place in the marketplace of ideas (outside of stuff you can patent) balance needs to be restored between absolute and relativistic perspectives.

I'm a blog whore

I haven't been very communicative lately. I guess it's time to fess up...I started my own blog. I'm a whore-slut-hussy. It's a little more journal-esque, describing my life, including my recent career crisis/mental breakdown. It was awesome! Here it is if you want to see it

My one political observation of the day: maybe W. is starting to realize...democracy can be a bitch! Be careful what you ask for, George.

"Don't Be Evil"

tiananmen - Google Image Search.

tiananmen - Google Image Search in China.

Even billionare idealists have a price.

New York Times == Village Voice part 2

With today’s editorial begging Democratic senators to filibuster the vote to elevate Alito to the Supreme Court the NYTimes has now completely undone it’s legacy of being the “paper of record” and has nearly become the equivalent of one of those metro-rags chocked full articles that earnestly ponder whether Bush is retarded, evil or both. There is nothing wrong with these papers it’s just that it’s unlikely that their writings would ever seriously be held up in the Senate as justification for criticism a given policy as the Times was most recently with NSA eavesdropping (Though Teddy surprises me more every year). In a more reasonable, credible era, such a plea for filibuster from the paper of record would have served as justification itself. Now in a few days we’ll likely see that the utterings of the NYTimes have no more import than the latest street corner screed on Chimpy HalliBushitler.

Disillusioning

Knight Rider used to be my favorite TV show when I was a kid and I thought Michael Knight was a badass. This has sent many a happy childhood memory into disarray.

Banjo goodness

This is me playing "Spanish Point" by Bela Fleck. Check it out--it's a pretty cool song. I filmed it just to have as a memory, then later thought that it'd be fun to share on the blog. The audio isn't great but you can get the gist of it. (It's a 5 minute song so it may take a bit to load).

The Decline of Sullivan

Until recently, Andrew Sullivan’s blog used to be one of the 3 or 4 blogs I checked every day. He seemed to “tell it as it is” and had few if any sacred cows. This is no longer the case. This is not a matter of disagreeing with any of his positions as I’ve always disagreed with some but instead his transformation into a shrill ideological hack; a rigid believer rather than the questioner he was before. Kevin Holtsberry does a pretty good job summarizing this recent rhetorical decline:

It seems to me, that he rarely argues in good faith and his animus and personal obsessions color almost everything he writes.

Sullivan is a skilled polemicist. He is obviously smart and can be, or at least has been in the past, an effective advocate for a particular type of conservatism. It is not, nor has it been, the dominant form in this country, but it is a legitimate form worthy of debate and discussion.

But I am afraid I can no longer take his arguments seriously on a host of issues when he blatantly over-generalizes and argues from bad faith based on emotion and sloppy rhetoric rather than logic and first principles. As I noted above, Sullivan would not tolerate this type of argument from others regarding homosexuality or any of the issues important to him. His double standard is a mile wide: trust those who support your ideas and distrust everything the other side does.

Urban Artifact

We did the “Pleasant Run” bike trail yesterday (the last two weekends have been unseasonably warm here) which happens to go through many scenic inner-city neighborhoods. It was among some spectacular urban decay that I found this picture on the trail which appears to be a family photo snapped during a prison visitation. Which begs the question: Of all the backgrounds a prison could have, why a Star Trek theme? And I suppose more importantly, if the prison is going through the trouble of allowing family photos with a spectacular star trek background, why not let the guy put on some regular clothes? I mean, what kid is going to want a collection of photos where daddy’s in prison jumpsuits?

“What’s does you your* daddy do?”

“5 to 10.”

* Jeez-o-pete I hope people didn't think I was trying to write in dialect. I already discovered black people don't like white people attempting this in my required (diversity credit) Afro-Lit class.

Democratic Katrina policies at work

Remember all the energy price control hullabaloo from the Democratic party after Katrina to “help the poor”? Fortunately this didn’t happen because the democratic party currently has about as much influence on policy as a double scotch does on Ted Kennedy. But assuming they did, through the miracle of crappy socialist dictatorships, we can see into a likely democratic future in Venezuela if below we substitute “coffee” for “oil”:

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Coffee is vanishing from Venezuelan stores as producers protest price controls they say are strangling profits -- no laughing matter in a country where drinking the bitter brew is not simply a habit but a culture.

Troops and inspectors have begun raiding inventories held by private companies in an effort to ease the scarcity, authorities said on Wednesday.

The dispute over the bitter beans can be traced back to early 2003, when coffee fell under price controls for staple foods imposed by President Hugo Chavez's government as a way to counter inflation and protect the poor. But prices set in early December outraged coffee producers, prompting protests in downtown Caracas and paralyzing deliveries.

National Guard troops have so far seized about 330 tons of coffee stored by wholesalers in Yaguara and Guacara, near the capital of Caracas, and more raids were planned, said Gen. Marcos Rojas Figueroa of the National Guard.

"That coffee is going to be sold ... at the established price," he said.

NYTimes in self-parody

For a paper so squeamish about attaching the label “terrorist” to individuals who blow innocents up in Iraq to create “terror” they seem awfully at ease at applying labels to the individuals and actions of those involved in the various leak cases in which they’ve become enmeshed. While each leak case involved the potentially illegal public disclosure of sensitive information by current and former executive officials, the NYTimes explains their reasoning for why one leak is bad and the others are good; leakers that provide information that validates the papers editorial views – that the Iraq war and the Bush administration are bad – are “whistleblowers” and leakers that challenge these views are engaged in an illegal campaign to “silence and discredit” said brave whistle blowers. It’s a wonder that they haven’t simply done away with the pretense that conservatives are capable of ethical behavior and simply refer to liberals and conservatives as “good folks” and “evil doers” respectively.

I never knew how entertaining a Judicial ruling could be...

I just read page 137 of the Pennsylvania ID ruling. I'll admit it. I started at the end. I never do that with stuff I read, but this time I'm hooked and have to start at the begining. It's just great.

Here's what caught me:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the
Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals,
who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would
time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID
Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID
have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor
do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As
stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an
alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an
activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction
on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a
constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an
imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the
Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which
has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers
of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal
maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Oddly enough I found it courtesy of Neil Gaiman's blog, where he described it thusly:"The 139 page decision in the Pennsylvania "Intelligent Design" case is facinating reading -- remarkably lucid and interesting." I repeat, great.

Same ole' song and dance. Sort of.

I just came across this post from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-owner of 2929 Entertainment (who own the Landmark theater chain and produced the movie "Good Night and Good Luck", among others). It details a recent experience he had as the subject of a New York Times piece. It's pretty amazing to see all of the communication that passes between Cuban and Randall Stross, the author of the piece, and then the end result.

It's pretty blatant that Stross had a good idea of what kind of article he wanted to write, how he wanted to portray Cuban's position in the movie/distribution industry, and what value he placed on the Cuban's perspective. To some degree, the tone of the article (which, if you don't feel like reading it, is bitchy) is to be expected, but when compared to the dialogue that preceded it, seems extreme.

Cuban followed up his post with this:

the more time i spent on my last blog entry, the more it became apparent i wanted to ask this question and see the comments to this blog, and inevitable commentary around the blogosphere and in traditional digital and analog media..

even a year ago, this would have seemed like a preposterous question.

Given the admitted rush job by Randall Stross for the Sunday NY Times Business column that I discussed in my last blog entry, along with my previous experiences with that paper, i dont think it is preposterous any longer.

Who has higher editorial and reporting standards. Your typical fulltime blogger, or the NY Times ?

Who puts more effort into researching their articles ?

Who conveys more depth ?

The NY Times is obviously feeling some financial pain and cutting back. Costs impact the amount of space they can provide for any article, or for all content as a whole. Bloggers do not have that limitation. I can write as many pages as i like.

The NY Times is limited by deadlines. They have to get to print and get the product out the door. Bloggers do not.

Costs and deadlines limit the amount of resources that can be applied to any given article for both bloggers and the NY Times. Who is more constrained as a result ?

This has nothing to do with bias, per se, but it does have to do with the preconcieved notions of journalists. You may as well extrapolate from here... but I can't help but think of how many pieces of good news I've heard from Iraq via the NYT. Hmmm, I think I know the answer to Cuban's question...

Reason for Iraq pessimism?

This may be a pretty big reason people have such a pessimistic view of the situation Iraq despite steady progress for the last year. Even news that is almost unqualifiedly good gets spun as negatively as possible. Seriously, if gold coins began to rain from the sky and all the Sunni's, Kurds and Shiites all spontainiously joined hands and started singing "I want to buy the world a coke" the headline would still probably be "US Corporations Claim another victim: Commercialism Runs Rampant in Iraq." and "Numerous eye injuries from projectiles."

Does intel have an axe to grind?

Since the Plame controversy, and all the subsequent articles that have been sourced to “unnamed intelligence sources” about renditions of suspected terrorists and domestic NSA spying, many have commented that it appears that there is a rift between the Bush administration and the intelligence gathering establishment. While occasional leaks are normal, the flood of leaked info that – on its face – casts the current administration in a negative light doesn’t seem to be coincidence. Pundits on the left have interpreted these leaks as coming from people of conscience sick of bullying by the white house while those from the right view the intelligence leakers as ineffective bureaucrats retaliating for post 9/11 shakeups. What if it’s something more simple than that?
In my field one of the biggest career risks is to acquire skills based on technologies that die. For example before 2003, numerically most people who developed windows applications used Visual Basic and then very rapidly – companies switched to .Net. In most cases VB developers with many years of experience went from being highly valued to requiring assistance from recent college grads for even the most basic programming tasks. Those who couldn’t adapt were demoted or let go. Is it possible that something similar is happening with the intelligence organizations? Imagine if you busted your ass for learning Russian and all the ins and outs of the Soviet regime only to see the cold war end and Democratic Russia turn out mostly okay? How would it feel instead of being an agent in Moscow to be a desk jockey (like Plame) with all the best assignments going to people less experienced but with the right skill sets? After years of high risk and crap pay only to be thanked by getting warehoused in an office somewhere there may be some intelligence folks that are understandably resentful and want to be in the limelight again(Plame). This doesn’t excuse them for potentially violating national security laws but it seems to be more likely than some of the more extreme scenarios being discussed in the media.

Done and done.

I just finished my last final for the semester! YAY!!!! And I'm almost positive I passed everything. Yay!!!!

The anti-Churchill party

Now I know Dean is a nutcase, but he is the head of the DNC. His guaranteeing US defeat is a little unseemly is it not?

Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years.

Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

While I think Ann Coulter is a nutcase as well, doesn’t this make her charges that anti-war liberals are tip-toeing on the borders of sedition slightly more credible? (And believe me, I'm glad no one like Ann is the head of the RNC)

UPDATE: Kerry intimating that US soldiers in Iraq are behaving unprofessionally – almost as if they were terrorists (If plumbers plumb; terrorists ________)
-- probably doesn’t weaken Ms. Coulter’s argument either.

Kerry: “there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the--of--the historical customs, religious customs. ...Iraqis should be doing that.”

Ok so I now think that 2012 is probably the soonest I won’t be pants pissingly terrified of Democrats being in charge of national security. Anyone who views occasional lapses in cultural etiquette as reason enough to turn over a country with incalculable oil wealth to the next new-and-improved Taliban cannot be taken seriously.

UPDATE: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claims over half of house Democrats favor "speedy withdrawl" (much to the consternation of the other half).

UPDATE: Dean changes his mind (again)
"We can and have to win the War on Terror." "We can only win the war -- which we have to win -- if we change our strategy dramatically. ... if we want to win the war on terror we cannot pursue the failed strategy we've pursued..."

UPDATE: This can be filed under Murtha’s “Democrats not sure what they believe at any given moment” category. Delaware Sen. Tom Carper seemingly criticized much publicized pro-withdrawal comments by Howard Dean and other Democrats after returning from a tour from Iraq which I first thought was a rare display of candor.

"I wish more of my colleagues, and folks like Howard Dean, would try going to Iraq to see the situation there for themselves"

Great! So he’s implying that what they said was poorly informed and incorrect. Err no.

“Anyone who has visited Iraq and talked to the people there, he said, is not going to come back thinking this thing is going to be won militarily. It's not."

Huh? Isn’t that exactly what Howard Dean said? (see above)

Has Rove figured out a secret weakness in the liberal mind that causes pandering engines to engage simultaneously in forward and reverse inevitably causing a full logic meltdown? Will we see Dean interrupted in a future speech on the necessity of the Iraq war by a rebellious left hand attempting to make a peace sign?

UPDATE: So while conservatives are actively trying to allow democracy to take hold in Iraq liberals are exporting well worn tactics to discredit democratic elections through claims of disenfranchisement.

Juan Cole: ”The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents car bombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair.”

Goodness that’s sounds almost as bad as Ohio. Everyone knows inconvenience = Jim Crow unless you happen to be in country with a tin-pot socialist dictator and then it isn’t inconvenience but a valid cultural preference we’d be arrogant and ignorant to judge. Just ask Jimmah.

UPDATE: Holy cow. I was totally joking about the Iraq/Ohio comparison and Eric Alterman is actually making the comparison....seriously.

Animation projects

I did these animations a few months ago for an After Effects class and have been pretty tardy in putting them anywhere they might be seen. I have no reason for the delay, besides laziness, but I'd be quite interested in any type of feedback you have to offer. They've been fairly compressed to speed up the download, so check them out and I hope you enjoy.

Yay! Gervais!!!

I haven't seen "Extras" yet, but the original "The Office" is the greatest TV show ever. I've been thanking my lucky stars ever since I read this blurb from the Guardian Unlimited (hat tip: the Geek-tastic site Ain't it Cool).

Ricky Gervais says: "I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world. We didn't want it to just be the best bits of a radio programme you'd missed so this is a show that is straight-to-Pod-cast. I suppose we're trying to create an exclusive club. We'd prefer this to be a few people's favourite show than a huge samey ineffectual broadcast"

Ricky is going to be unleashing 12 podcasts, one every week begining Dec. 5. Just bookmark the link to the Guardian Unlimited, check the site next monday, and subscribe to the podcast. It will be lovely.

The left and economics

If you haven’t already guessed from my previous ramblings, the biggest reason I’m not a democrat is their fundamental rejection (misunderstanding?) of basic economic principles. They insist on making policy using an alchemy composed of an odd mixture of feelings and Marxism. Anything resembling the sort of intro-econ stuff you learn as a freshman they look on to with suspicion. Fire baaadddd! This is revealed by Mickey Kaus’ summary of a NYTimes analysis on the latest GDP numbers.

Gregg Easterbrook's rule that All Economic News is Bad was effectively illustrated by yesterday's NYT front-pager, "Upbeat Signs Hold Cautions for the Future." The article notes several positive economic trends, including lower gas prices, but then warns darkly that

... as always with the United States economy, it is not quite that simple.

For every encouraging sign, there is an explanation. ...[snip] Gasoline prices - the national average is now $2.15, according to the Energy Information Administration - have fallen because higher prices held down demand and Gulf Coast supplies have been slowly restored. [Emph. added.]

It's indeed deeply disturbing to learn that higher gas prices have held down demand, causing those prices to fall back to a level at which demand begins to rise again! It's almost as if some insidious law was at work--as prices rise, demand declines! As supply increases, prices fall! You can't win! ... P.S.: The price drop might be alarming if the decline in demand for gas reflected a general economic downturn. But that doesn't seem to be the case. What the NYT's Vikak Bajaj ominously describes is the market working exactly as it's supposed to, coupled with successful rebuilding efforts on the Gulf Coast. It appears to be "quite that simple." ... P.P.S.: Nor can I spot any "cautions for the future." .... P.P.P.S.: Bijaj further reported that

the Federal Reserve and businesses will have a big part in setting the economy's pace next year - the Fed through interest rates and companies by their hiring decisions. [Emph. added]

Yikes. Who knew? That's the sort of alarming macroeconomic information investors can use to make millions--and yet this wasn't even a TimesSelect article. They charge for Bob Herbert but they're giving away Bijaj's explosive contrarian insights for free! The hapless Pinch Sulzberger misses yet another revenue stream. ...

Update: Only a paranoid right-wing blogger would suggest that the NYT's editors are so eager to explain away any positive economic news because the healthy economy is the one remaining prop holding up Bush's presidency, and they can't believe his policies haven't produced another recession yet. Easterbrook's Bad News rule indicates that they'd have written exactly the same piece if a Democrat were in the White House. ... 1:20 A.M.

hmmm....

Topic for discussion: OIL.

Demand is growing very fast (50% in the last decade according to a BP exec I saw on C-SPAN). Production levels are not growing as fast. If we run out of oil, things won't go, people won't make money, economies will stagnate, unless we find something else to make things go. Oil will get more and more expensive as supply decreases, making it more expensive to make stuff go, making economic growth slow down.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Legal Torture

I'm surprised this didn't turn out to be the longest jury deliberation ever.

Georgie gets lost

This is hilarious. Watch as GW tries to wrap up a press conference and finds the door locked.

Also funny

Chicom college students give this song the treatment it deserves.

Awesome Prank

Wow...shocked at first, but slowly overcome by the hilarious genius of it.

Protecting the wrong people

After listening to an insane amount of self righteous demagoguery involving the McCain amendment (Cheney as Torquemada) I’ve found myself supporting the amendment less and less. Primarily I think this is because the arguments employed all generally involve a certain degree of bait-and-switch. When sound moral arguments are employed to question the wisdom of disallowing all “torture”, proponents of the McCain bill shift to a legalistic argument invoking the third Geneva convention as if it’s Mosaic law. And when this is questioned the argument seamlessly shifts to anyone who is against the McCain amendment is implicitly pro-torture. There are many strong arguments against torture I agree with and would cause me to support regulation to limit torture as much as possible but none are convincing enough to persuade me that the human rights of an evil person trump those of their present and future victims. While torture may be ineffective in 99 out of 100 situations, should a situation arise where depriving someone of sleep might help keep 50 people from being blown up; well then let the Christina Aguilera blast away.

But wouldn’t this be a war crime? Article 4 or the Third Geneva convention clearly states that treaty protections only extend to:

o "Members of the armed forces"

o "militias...including those of organized resistance movements...having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance...conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war"

o "Persons who accompany the armed forces"

o "Members of crews...of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft"

o Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

I don’t see where anyone detained by the US in Afganistan or Iraq meet any of the criteria. The McCain ammendment goes far beyond the Geneva conventions though. If passed it would extend protections of the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Torture is a horrible thing but I think it’s too easy to lose track of who the real victims in this conflict are. I believe it would be far worse to instill a greater fear of legal consequence within those that are working to protect the innocent. This is a bad law backed up by bad arguments.

One other thing: I do want to briefly acknowledge just how f'd I think the Republican party is at present. While I think too much was made over NJ and Virginia continuing to have democratic Governors, all of Ahnuld's amendments being defeated and the House's inability to pass the most recent budget doesn't bode well for 2006. God I miss Newt...

Taking a Stand

The Indy Star takes a gutsy stand against tornados.

Excellent critique

Steven Green of Vodkapundit has an excellent post that speaks equally well to both supporters and critics (the reasonable ones anyway) of the war in Iraq . He puts the war on terror in historical context, but primarily focuses on the growing role of the media in war and how what has been reported has influenced it's outcome. He attributes some of the media's tendencies to the lack of perspective in its coverage, primarily its lack of embeded reporters.

However it's worth noting that he also has this to say:

I don't mean to imply that the MSM needs to hop on board the bandwagon and cheerlead for any President along any military campaign, no matter how foolhardy – far from it. In case you hadn't noticed, I used a good portion of this essay to complain about Washington, and that's something the media can do a whole lot more effectively than one small blogger. Criticism isn't just necessary, it's a necessary good. But the MSM needs to relearn constructive criticism, and they need to remember which country defends their rights, and which group of people would gleefully slit their throats.

Here's the first section of the piece:

Four years into the Terror War, "What's the most important element for victory?" is a question long overdue. It's also a question our national leadership, nearly all of our intellectuals, and none of our mainstream media have yet to answer.

President George W Bush hasn't told us, because he doesn't know. His rivals for the Oval Office never answered the question – either because they also don't know or because they don't like the answer. Our Congress and Senate ought to be debating this issue, the most important of our postmodern era. Instead, they're doling out the pork, posing for the cameras, or busy keeping the campaign dollars flowing in by treating small, partisan differences as matters of life and death. Here we are, with a real life-and-death struggle on our hands, and our leadership fiddles while the barbarians beat us at our own game.

Our public thinkers – pundits, intellectuals, whatever you want to call them – are the people we should most rely on for guidance in times such as these. However, they've come up short even using the pathetic standard by which this blogger measures them. Too many of our intellectuals are caught in the past, real or imagined. Most liberal thinkers think one of two things: That this Terror War can be safely ignored (or treated as a police matter, which is effectively the same thing) or that "America isn't worth dying for." Either path leads to defeat – but at least Cindy Sheehan is cheering openly for the other side. Conservatives fall into three camps. Paleoconservatives, like Pat Buchanan, have joined in the loony left's "blame America first" chorus. If only we'd cut off Israel, buy off the Arabs, retreat behind our borders, and act a lot more like France – then we wouldn't be in this mess. Neoconservatives hold the naïve hope that if we just topple the dictators, democracy will sprout like shiitake mushrooms after a cool rain. Vanilla conservatives might have some reservations about singular campaigns in this war (George Will's reservations about Iraq, for example), but usually get all gung-ho whenever and wherever the troops are involved. But as I discussed in an essay called "Game Plan" last year, this war is about a lot more than combat.

Our mainstream media haven't answered the question, because they know the answer – and they're deathly afraid you'll find out what it is. But we'll get to them in a moment.

Incredibly Disturbing

For many people in Africa, it sucks to live. You can imagine how much worse it is to be in prison there.

Times up Bambi

Well there’s a sliver of good news for Republicans this week. It looks like the NRDC hippies and Larry David’s wife will no longer be able to keep us from our precious. The Senate voted (86-13) (51-48) today to allow drilling in ANWR. The 1.33 gallons-per-minute dream is still alive! Vroom!!!

Chomp

Noam Chomsky, the well known critic of US foreign policy and now retired Professor of Linguistics at MIT was recently named the worlds "top public intellectual" by Prospect magazine. I know nothing about his theories on linguistics and only a little about his politics, but it was his politics that got him on this list. The more I read about this guy, the more I wish folks on the left would distance themselves from his critiques. His logic, such as it is, is entirely incongruous with any conception of a moral high ground. I.e., since personal politics boils down to which ideology most reflects your broad ideas of right or wrong, consistency matters. If one truly cares about the plight of oppressed people, one does not flippantly excuse the actions of a despotic/totalitarian regime. This interview from the Guardian, hardly a bastion of conservative journalism, offers a pretty dramatic example of how morally capricious this fellow is.

"on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."

or

"Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and "using your intelligence to decide what's right".

This is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren't as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the "massacre" at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)"

More profound examples of these basic views online, simply google his name and browse through the results. The most concise and efficient grouping of critiques is can be found on Wikipedia.

How common is this?

While it’s likely that Mary Mapes is just an especially nutty (ex)member of the media establishment I wonder how many Journalists like Mapes rationalize ideologically motivated journalism by comparing themselves to Edward R. Murrow. Is this the security blanket journalists like those at the NYTimes wrap themselves in every time it’s revealed their reporting is less than objective? If this self-indulgent Robin Hood fantasy is what allows ideologues to believe they’re still good journalists, what does this say about Academia? I’m sorry but Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy are hardly the hero and villain liberal mythology (and George Clooney) would like them to be.

That’s it?

So after 2 years of heavy breathing by the media all we get is an indictment of a subject of the probe (Scooter) who testified that they heard about Plame from Tim Russert instead of Cheney -- which in itself is perfectly legal? While I won’t dispute that what Scooter did was obviously very stupid (he of all people should know how and why you don’t perjure oneself), isn’t the real story that the whole basis for the investigation was a joke; that the administration did nothing illegal in their handling of Joe Wilson’s leaks, lies and subsequent editorial? Unfortunately I think the Democrats and their media sycophants will use this indictment as a foothold, however tenuous, to try to argue that the administration started the Iraq war knowingly on false pretenses despite the fact this investigation has essentially proven the opposite.

UPDATE: As usual, Andrew Sullivan needs to take a deep breath and meditate on Occam’s Razor. None of the conspiracy theories over the last 2 years have played out and there’s no reason to expect that any others created by his excitable mind will either.

ONE MORE: Tom Maguire is compiling a list of every reporter that admitted to having knowledge of Valerie Plame prior to the Novak editorial. What does this mean? Probably not as much as it would have a few months ago before Fitzgerald doused any hopes of indictments related to Plame's identity, but it still could make a Libby prosecution much more difficult; forcing Fitz to prove that Journalists didn’t bring up Plame before he did; in effect to prove a negative. At the very least it further demonstrates just how idiotic this whole controversy is.

Remote control people

I just found this article on Drudge, and it's incredibly bizarre.

Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind.

I can envision it being added to militaries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal" weapons.

A special headset was placed on my cranium by my hosts during a recent demonstration at an NTT research center. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head _ either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved.

I found the experience unnerving and exhausting: I sought to step straight ahead but kept careening from side to side. Those alternating currents literally threw me off.

The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation _ essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance.

I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced _ mistakenly _ that this was the only way to maintain my balance.

The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands.

Freaky.

The right thing to do

Harriet Miers just withdrew her name from consideration for the SCOTUS post. Tell us what you think.

Google Earth

If you haven't yet, you should try playing with Google's new Google Earth program (currently only for PC's). It's freakin' awesome. You can explore any part of the world from almost any height and any angle. I've already "visited" the pyramids, hoover dam, mt. everest, mt. saint helens, the grand canyon, eiffel tower, mt. rushmore (you can actually make out some of the faces), and several other places.

My only complaint is that searching for locations, even popular ones, can often be a pain. It will tell you "Your search returned no results" for some places even if, once you've found it manually, it recognizes the name you originally searched for. I recommend having a second internet window open to use to find the coordinates of the place you want to visit, then find it manually using those--I find it quite entertaining. (FYI: Wikipedia often has the coordinates of famous landmarks).

Good point

My favorite "contrarian", Christopher Hitchens, has a very informative/chastening piece on the preconceptions of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups and where they rest politically, check it.

Ever wonder how to piss off an Iraqi? It's relatively simple. Just ask one, no sooner than you have been introduced: "So you're an Iraqi? How absolutely fascinating. Do tell: Are you a Kurd or a Sunni or a Shiite?" This will work every time, just as it's always so polite and so useful to ask a brown-skinned American if he or she is Chicano or, you know … Latina.
...

When it comes to Iraq, one of the most boring and philistine habits of our media is the insistence on using partitionist and segregationist language that most journalists would (I hope) scorn to employ if they were discussing a society they actually knew. It is the same mistake that disfigured the coverage of the Bosnian war, where every consumer of news was made to understand that there was fighting between Serbs, Croats, and "Muslims." There are two apples and one orange in that basket, as any fool should be able to see. Serbian and Croatian are national differences, which track very closely with the distinction between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. Many Muslims are Bosnian, but not all Bosnians are Muslim. And in fact, the Bosnian forces in the late war were those which most repudiated any confessional definition. (And when did you ever hear the media saying that, "Today the Orthodox shelled Sarajevo," or, "Yesterday the Catholics bombarded Mostar"?)

You should watch the "Colbert Report"

His debut ruled. I hope he can keep it up. Slate has a review.

An oldie but a goodie

Ever since I saw him on Charlie Rose a couple years ago, I've been terribly impressed with one Lt. General David Patraeus. I stumbled on this post from Tigerhawk a while back, and it addresses many of the worries folks like me have had about how things have proceeded in Iraq. I was reminded of it when reading about the recent voting for Iraq's constitutional referendum. This by no means provides excuse for those who have led poorly, but it does give me hope that there are some terribly competent folks out there doing their damndest to help this process to work and who are showing progress. What follows is copied directly from Tigerhawk's post and is long, but is quite engaging. If you'd prefer not to read it, here's the video (note, I got the realplayer link to work, but didn't have luck with the window's media player file).

In General Petraeus' conception, the Transition Command has five missions:

To "help Iraqis." "We believed what TE Lawrence said: “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.”

To "organize" the Iraqi military. The task of building a functioning military and special police force is extremely complex, and the Iraqis are doing it with Coalition and NATO guidance. Iraq is doing its own "recruiting and vetting." We are helping them design the units, which includes the personnel and command structure of each unit from the platoon on up.

The organization of the training of the special Iraqi police had to be particularly original. We have "dramatically shifted" the police training from the Kosovo model. “Iraq is not a 9mm pistol world, it is an AK47 world.”

To equip the Iraqi military.

This is an enormous task. "I cannot overstate how big this mission is." More than 700,000 uniforms, 210,000 sets of body armor, hundreds of thousands of small arms, helmets, hundreds of million of rounds of ammunition, 20,000 vehicles and so forth have been distributed to Iraqi forces.

All these soldiers and equipment have been housed. We have built more than twenty facilities for the Iraqi military, including five large bases that can house an entire division, "each the size of Ft. Drum."

To train the Iraqi military.

Notwithstanding the huge size of Saddam's military, even experienced Iraqi officers did not know how to train. For example, they did not train with live ammunition because of shortages, and expressed wonder at American methods for teaching marksmanship. Historically, “the inshallah school of shooting” prevailed. Iraqi soldiers in combat would hold the weapon over their head, shoot wildly until the magazine was empty, and “inshallah -- meaning if God wills it -- you will hit something.”

To mentor Iraqi military and police leaders.

There are 115 Iraqi battalions in combat right now, and every single one of them has a ten man American training team. The American training team teaches the Iraqi officers how to lead and helps coordinate Coalition assistance in logistical matters and combat support. “A huge effort paying enormous dividends.”

So, what's the "bottom line up front?" Iraqi soldiers and special police are “very much in the fight,” as evidenced, “sadly,” by the casualties they have taken in combat, which are at least twice the American.

The most impressive thing about the Iraqi units is how tenacious they have become, notwithstanding early reports that they would cut and run. According to General Patraeus, since the January elections, from which the Iraqi security forces “took an enormous lift that still persists,” the Iraqi forces "have not run from a fight, they have not backed down." This strikes me, by the way, as enormously hopeful for the future of Iraq, the persistence of the counterinsurgency, and the power of democracy to motivate the fight against the war on terror.

More highlights from the Transition Command's work:

Under NATO's auspices, the Iraqi military academy is open with entirely Iraqi instructors. It might have been opened much earlier with foreign instructors, but the Coalition felt that it was important to make it an Iraqi endeavor. General Patraeus noted later that he was very unhappy that this achievement got essentially no coverage in the media given its importance to success in Iraq.

Short- Mid- and Long-Range plans for the future development of the military are in place and being executed, relating to force structure, training, institutions, equipment. This all being done in conjunction with Iraqis.

At any given time, there are more than 3000 Iraqis out of the country training, including 2000 at a police academy in Jordan, and another 200 at an elite training facility “in a neighboring country.” It was obvious that this neighboring country is classified, and we can assume that it isn't Jordan, which he mentioned specifically. Assuming that it isn't Syria or Iran, that leaves Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Since there would be no need to keep a facility in Kuwait secret and since it would be in Turkey's external interest to be seen to be helping NATO (given its pending application to join the EU), my guess is that the secret training facility is in Saudi Arabia, which undoubtedly does not want to be caught collaborating with the United States to kill Sunni guerrillas.

General Patraeus' discussion of metrics was very interesting, but I was only able to capture some of it. He did, however, explain the "readiness levels" that have so bedeviled the discussion of Iraqi preparedness.

There are 105,000 “trained and equipped” Iraqi forces through basic training and in the field under the Ministry of Interior Forces, which covers police, police commandos, highway patrol, dignitary protection, etc. These units are not “fully independent,” but they are getting there.

Ministry of Defense Forces Trained and Equipped 89,000, including the Iraqi Army, Special Operations, Air Force, Navy, and Combat Support.

“These are not people who have just walked across the stage. They are out there and in combat. For example, this number is about 12,000 fewer than the number of police trained, because some of them don’t make it.”

Soldiers are graduating every day. By the October 15 referendum on the constitution (which Patraeus predicted will pass), trained and equipped military and special police will total 200,000, and 300,000 by next summer.

The progress since the summer of 2004, when General Patraeus assumed command, has been considerable. Fifteen months ago, only six battalions of Iraqi army (less than 2,000 men) were in training, and none were "in the fight." Now, 14 battalions are in training, and 74 are operational and in the fight.

A year ago, there were no special police units. Now there are 27 battalions in the fight, and five more serving as border patrol and emergency response. These are all top-down units, none that have failed “like the homegrown Fallujah brigade.”

These units are all classified according to "readiness reports" that are very similar to those used for the American army.

Level 1 is fully independent, “capable of planning and executing operations, and sustaining itself, without coalition support.” This is a very high standard, and because it requires no coalition support in combat, whether logistical or in the form of indirect fire support. As reported this week, only one battalion operates at this level now, but the press accounts did not make clear what a difficult standard this is. Indeed, two other battalions had reached this level but were downgraded because of personnel changes (my sense was that a key officer was transferred).

A significant and growing number of Iraqi units are at Level 2, which is substantially, but not totally, independant. Level 2 units are “in the lead,”, "capable of planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations with some coalition support." These units are substantially independent, but still need some assistance with logistics and indirect fire support. However, they operate independently for most intents and purposes. Level 2 battalions now “own Haifa Street” in a way that only local units can, and another unit -- the armored battalion -- is policing the airport road. Level 2 units also run Karbala and Najaf security.

Level 3, “fighting alongside”: "capable of conducting counterinsurgency operations in conjunction with coalition units." The goal is to get most of these Level 3 units up to Level 2 in the next few months.

So, over 115 Army and special police battalions are in the fight, the majority of which are “fighting alongside.”

The training of the special police is also proceeding well. Iraqi cops are learning basic criminal investigation, internal controls, interviews and interrogations, elections security, counter terrorism, SWAT, dignitary protection.

“Not FBI caliber, don’t let me mislead you, but it is still very useful.”

The general took a number of questions from the audience, three of which were interesting.

The first dealt with the controversial disbanding of the Iraqi army. "What lesson could we learn from the disbanding of the Iraqi army?" Patraeus substantially dodged this question as not having been his call, but left the audience with two impressions. First, that the existing Iraqi army was not very useful: “I do not necessarily accept the idea that we should not have disbanded that Iraqi army. It was bloated with general officers – there were 1100 generals in one province alone, each one of whom expected us to do what they wanted – and it was an army that had not fought.” Second, without saying as much it is fairly clear from his comments that he thinks that we blew the means by which we disbanded the army, particularly in not having a plan to employ its soldiers and officers afterward.

The other interesting question involved the "public relations" war. "Are we losing the PR war to the enemy? What are you doing on the marketing PR front?"

General Patraeus said that they have given the media an enormous amount of information, including countless important metrics for measuring progress, but that it is largely ignored. He observed that the enemy “On many days it is impossible to break through the steady drumbeat of sensational attacks occurring in Baghdad throughout the country. The opening of the new military academy got no coverage at all, even though it was a big event with the whole Iraqi government in attendance."

Patraeus is obviously extremely unhappy with the monomaniacal press coverage.

Finally, Anne-Marie Slaughter asked the Abu Ghraib question – “what can we do, going forward, to acknowledge what we have to acknowledge but also to restore the values that we stand for in others eyes?”

Patraeus said that Abu Ghraib had been very damaging, but that there has been “an enormous change in the detainee operations piece... One of the lessons is that the most important job of a commander or leader is the setting of a tone. That sounds very simplistic, but in combat setting the right tone is hugely important.” I think we have gone back and looked very, very hard the tone we are setting. We have 29 operations lawyers [Good God. - ed.]. Patraeus described a recent "very minor" incident, and "we brought in the lawyers, brought in the imams," to discuss it openly and resolve it. And we are doing things that seem unimportant to us, but which are very meaningful to Iraqis. One of the imams asked us to install clocks in the prison so that the prisoners would know when to pray, so we put in clocks.

“How do we portray our sincere desire to help? It is very challenging, because the other side is enormously skilled in information operations. In Fallujah, by the way, there were two broadcasting stations in addition to the car bomb factories and the arms caches. The enemy is very sophisticated."

Green pepper mango

Just before dinner this evening I mentioned a phenomena in the Midwest that I've found pretty entertaining. With the exception of my brother, no one at the table had really heard of it, but for us it was only second hand. Karla has told us that on many occasions when she was in high school and working at Subway she heard the word mango or mangoes for what she would consider, a green pepper. As in, "don't put any mangos on it", or "gimme more mangoes." My dad once told me about some neighbors we had who ate Vidalia onions like apples, and I think they also called 'em mangos. Well, I decided I had to do a little research and found this cultural definition or some such from the Dictionary of American Regional English, Harvard University Press, which seems excellent.

2 also mango pepper; pronc-sp mangle: A pepper, esp a green pepper 1. chiefly W Midl See Map1948 WELS Suppl. VA, I was surprised while living in Virginia to see green peppers advertised and sold as " mangoes. 1950 WELS (Large sweet peppers) 2 Infs, WI, Mangoes. c1960 Wilson Coll. csKY, Mango. . . Sweet pepper, bell-pepper. 1964 Gourmet May 2, [Letter:] The use of the term mango for bell pepper . . is not limited to Indiana. I have heard it used in Louisiana and Georgia. We once had an old English gardener up in Vermont many years ago, and he always called the green pepper a mango. Bird and chili peppers are also referred to as mangoes. 1965- 70 DARE (Qu. I22d, . . Peppers—large sweet) 113 Infs, chiefly W Midl, esp sIL, sIN, sOH, Mangoes; IN41, 48, Sweet mangoes; MO39, Mango peppers; MO5, MO27, Mangles; MO4, Tomato peppers—also called the little mangle peppers; (Qu. I22c, . . Peppers—small sweet) 15 Infs, chiefly N Midl, Mangoes; IL85, Small mangoes; OK3, Mango peppers; (Qu. I22b, . . Peppers—large hot) Infs IN76, KS1, PA150, Mangoes; MO6, Mangoes—not so hot nor so small; KS6, KY52, VA28, Mango peppers; IN41, 48, Hot mangoes; (Qu. I22a, . . Peppers—small hot) Infs IL7, MO18, Mango peppers; NJ2, Mangoes. 1970 DARE File KY, sOH, Mango—bell pepper. 1972 NYT Article Letters cnIN, In my home area, green (bell) peppers are called mangos.

Then I found this article from the well named, "Food Resource Website". It's considerably more readable.

GREEN PEPPERS AND MANGOS

The word ‘mango’ is used in some areas to refer to green peppers or stuffed green peppers. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri are all states that I have received e-mails about grandparents, parents and even current usage of ‘mango’ for green pepper.

Recent information I have come across (thanks in part to an e-mail from website visitor Richard Clark) I believe explains how and why the usage of the word spread along the path it did. Usage of 'mango' for green peppers seems to have originated with coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania (1870s +) - and spread with the mining industries, and then with the miners families as they migrated to new areas and found new jobs.

But why the word 'mango' for green peppers? Many of these coal miners were of Eastern European origin, and it has been suggested that the word may have a Slovak origin.
The English 'dialect' of the Appalachian region with its unique pronunciation, grammar, and word usage is due in large part to the immigration of miners, engineers and others from so many countries coming together in one area and being relatively isolated in the small mining towns.
They came from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Scotland, Wales, Greece, Turkey, and Syria to name a few - so the word 'mango' might have been adapted from one of these languages.
Also, in many old cookbooks, 'mango' would sometimes be used to refer to a pickle, especially of melons or cucumber (resembling pickled green mango?)
'Mango' was also a term sometimes used to refer to cantaloupe in many old cookbooks).
So the question is, are there words in any Eastern European languages for melon and/or green peppers that may sound like ‘mango’?
Chef James

In the 1887 Edition of 'The Original White House Cook Book', there is a
recipe for Green Pepper Mangoes.
As follows:
“Select firm, sound, green peppers, and add a few red ones,as they are ornamental and look well upon the table. With a sharp knife remove the top, take out the seed, soak over night in salt water, then fill with chopped cabbage and green tomatoes, seasoned with salt, mustard seed and ground cloves. Sew on the top. Boil vinegar sufficient to cover them, with a cup of brown sugar, and pour over the mangoes. Do this three mornings, then seal.” That is the only recipe I have seen. J.M.

This would fit in with the use of ‘mango’ to refer to a pickle (mentioned above) and also brings in the use of Green Peppers.
Anyone with additional information about ‘mango’ green peppers, please E-mail me: ChefJames@FoodReference.com
I will add any new information here as I receive it. Chef James

8/2/2005
My cousin sent me (the Mango article) and I thought I would respond to the question about "mango" in Slavic languages. Our family originally is from northeastern Pennsylvania and my grandmother used "mango" for "green pepper." We've never been sure why. I can say that at least in Polish, Czech, Slovak and Serbo-Croatian, the word for pepper is some variation on "paprika." Slavic languages have tended to adopt the word "mango," for the mango fruit since historically it has been a non-native, uncommon fruit. In other words, the search for the origin of the use of "mango" continues.
Maybe the hypothesis about chutney is more helpful here. Since mango chutney is a fairly common type of chutney, perhaps it got shortened to "mango" in reference to all things similarly pickled. In addition to people of Eastern European background, late 19th cent. Pennsylvania also had high numbers of immigrants from the British Isles, who may have been familiar with such chutneys. One might think that "chutney" would have been the more logical adoption, but if neither mango nor chutney had any inherent meaning for a speaker of another language, it's reasonable to think that such a mistake could occur. Just a guess. By the way, in case you're wondering, the word for "pickle" in Slavic languages is nothing like "mango" either.
Hope this helps,
Tammy

Verrückt als Fuchs

I remember reading an article about the recall election in Caulleefownya where Arnold’s advisors begged him to respond to constant attacks from Bustamante that were beginning to erode his poll numbers. He responded that “No one wanted to speak first at the Mr. Olympia competitions. Wait for the end, that’s all people will remember”. He had the self-discipline to hold out to the end and won the election – looks like the same thing is happening now. All five of his referendums now appear to be winning which would be the largest political rout of California Democrats in history.

Also, while I’m not the Bush fan I used to be, it is worth noting that his insanely low poll numbers may not be completely by accident. He’s also used the “rope-a-dope” strategy successfully in his last two elections. He knows democrats are unable to DELAY gratification.

Interesting article

I just stumbled on this article in the NYTimes. It's about international food aid...a little confusing, but pretty interesting I thought.

Not the party of Reagan

I’ve been amazed at the effect the Harriet Miers nomination has had on Republicans. It’s not that her being confirmed or rejected is that big of deal but instead it seems like the last straw for conservatives who have put up with unprecedented increases in entitlement spending and gutless leadership. While Bush has pursued the war on terror with a determination not seen since Truman virtually everything else he’s done has left conservatives wanting. Real conservatives don’t want their cake and eat it too. The Bush tax cuts made us happy but he followed them up with a god awful prescription drug benefit entitlement. The reconstruction, military response in Afghanistan, and economic stimulus after 9-11 was followed by more tax cuts and “No Child Left Behind”. After the “It’ll cost what It costs” comment from Bush after Katrina I think conservatives went into insulin shock and this horrible SCOTUS pick snapped them out of it.
I grew up being serenaded by benefactors of the Johnson welfare state blaming Reagan for consigning them to starvation and ridiculous TV movies about being homeless and getting no help from the Government. Nothing says spending cuts like a ketchup sandwich. It was glorious. When Bush was elected I dreamed of long nights watching cable news laughing at the strained arguments Democrats would make for why the cut of a certain block grant or entitlement DOOMED!! their favorite victim group. Well we’re now in the 5^th year and I haven’t once seen Bush called “heartless” 1/100^th as much as Ronnie or even Newt Gingrich. Welfare reform under Clinton was the closest thing I’ve had and that’s pathetic.
The sad thing is that we can’t even wish we voted for the other guy (or party) because they’re even more pathetic. They’re just like that cloying guy that’ll say anything to get in a girls pants (See Stiffler in American Pie/American Wedding). For as good as Andrew Sullivan feels telling conservatives “I told you so” about Bush, at some level he must be relieved that Kerry wasn’t elected. He would have been an utter disaster.

Don’t agree? Watch.

Now I’m just looking forward to 2008. Hopefully we get a do over with McCain (or Condi).


UPDATE: Ugh. This is just nausiating.

The inevitable outcome of government control?

The safety issues raised in the following articles are interesting but probably insignificant. The odds of being in a plane crash in either a Boeing or Airbus plane are probably equal to being struck by lightning and being struck by lightning while holding a 3 iron aloft, respectively; both are very unlikely. However what the decision making behind these obvious lapses in design reveal is a recognition of the unusual environment in which Airbus exists. However much corporate welfare Boeing receives it’s still a private enterprise largely subject to the same market forces and liabilities as any other company while Airbus appears to be just another corporation, it's really just an extension of the governments of Spain, Britain, Germany, Austria, Belgium and France. This allows Airbus the luxury to pursue a volume business model (more jobs) and be less concerned by profits and quality. The effects of this strategy have been 2 fold: Airbus has supplanted Boeing as the unit sales leader and troubling patterns of safety system failure are beginning to appear. Most troubling is that the Airlines least likely to afford a top notch service crew seem to have the largest Airbus fleets. USAir/AmericaWest are the recent recipients of Airbus aircraft that were practically given away. Those who support initiatives to move to a government controlled healthcare system and support continued monopoly over K-12 education should keep an eye on Airbus in the years to come. However well meaning, government rarely achieves an adequate representation of society’s interests.

Here’s an article about an Airbus whistle-blower who’s actively being persecuted by the Austrian government for revealing a flaw in the new A380 that could cause a catastrophic loss in cabin pressure:

A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built. The A380 is a double-decked engineering marvel that will carry as many as 800 passengers — double the capacity of Boeing Co.'s 747. It is expected to enter airline service next year.Mangan alleges that flaws in a microprocessor could cause the valves that maintain cabin pressure on the A380 to accidentally open during flight, allowing air to leak out so rapidly that everyone aboard could lose consciousness within seconds.

Most passenger jets have two cabin-pressure valves, with separate motors operating each. Because aircraft makers want redundancy on safety systems, the planes have three motors for each valve, with different chips controlling each motor. The Boeing 777, for example, has cabin-pressure chips made by Motorola Inc., Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Most jetliners also have a manual override so that the pilot can take control in an emergency. Airbus has acknowledged that its designers faced challenges as they attempted to reduce the A380's weight. Early on, the company elected to go with four outflow valves on the A380, with only one motor on each valve, which is slightly larger than a cabin window. Each motor uses a TTTech controller chip, and there is no manual override system."Just there, I would not be happy," said Chris Lomax, a retired engineer who helped design the cabin-pressurization systems for Boeing's 737 and 747. "If all four valves [on the A380] were driven wide open, it would be nip and tuck for the crew to get their [oxygen] mask on and begin a descent."

Here’s another article detailing 67 incidents simply involving the nose landing gear of Airbus Aircraft since 1989:

The problems with JetBlue Flight 292 marked at least the seventh time that the front landing gear of an Airbus jet has locked at a 90-degree angle, forcing pilots to land commercial airliners under emergency conditions, according to federal records.
The locking of the nose landing gear on Airbus jets is one of several recurring problems with the plane's nose landing gear.A Canadian study issued last year documented 67 incidents of nose-landing-gear failures on Airbus 319, 320 and 321 aircraft worldwide since 1989.

Another Reason Liberals Should Ditch Unions

Every time a conservative resists increasing funding on some additional social program (God help them if they’d actually cut), Democrats reliably trot out the underclass and play their ace card; “What about the children?” Whatever currency this bit of rhetorical manipulation has left will quickly disappear as stories like this percolate out of New Orleans.

Here’s an amazing article (also courtesy of Mickey Kaus) detailing how unions (and their liberal politician allies) are making the children of inner cities poor and stupid.

ROBERT THOMPSON wanted to give away $200 million to help children escape some of America's worst public schools. But for three years the successful businessman turned education philanthropist suffered the wrath of Michigan's Democratic establishment for his politically incorrect charter-school proposal. Then finally in August, Thompson found an ally willing to accept his charity. The nonprofit Skillman Foundation will join him in creating the first of 15 planned charter high schools in Detroit. The schools' goal is a "90/90 system"--that is, a graduation rate of 90 percent (up from the city's current 50 percent) and a college admission rate of 90 percent.

Officials reacted to Thompson's proffered $200 million not with gratitude but with rage. The Michigan Federation of Teachers urged a walkout, declaring a school holiday so that union members could march on the state capitol in protest of charter schools. State Democrats cowered before the union, while Detroit's politicians bristled at a white suburbanite's "meddling" in the city's affairs. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick--whose own children attended a charter school--responded to Thompson's offer by saying, with a dismissive wave of the hand, "Let us make the rules, and if he can't abide by the rules . . "
Says Thompson, "We thought if we tried to do good things, people would appreciate it. I guess we were naive." Shunned and saddened, Thompson withdrew his offer in October 2003.
Yet he persevered. "I thought, How can you change the world a little bit?" he says. "You can't let those kids down. You've got to figure out how to do this."
The breakthrough came in March 2005, when he received a call from another rich businessman with a passion for Detroit's poor: ex-Pistons basketball star Dave Bing.
Bing's color was a powerful political asset for Thompson, and together they approached the Skillman Foundation, a black-run nonprofit that has long worked with Detroit's public schools. Even so, Bing and Skillman came under immediate fire from Detroit liberals.
A group named the Call 'Em Out Coalition gave Bing a "Sambo Sell-Out Award" at its annual dinner for partnering with a white businessman. The award was bestowed by Democratic City Council member Sharon McPhail. And the Detroit Federation of Teachers expressed its displeasure with Skillman by threatening to end its cooperation with the foundation on other city school projects.

Here's hoping...

Drudge has his little siren up. Looks like Delay is going to be indicted and it says he may have to step down from his leadership position.

Compelling rationale for why Liberals don't need Unions

Mikey Kaus from Slate has a terrific response to Matthew Yglesias's contention that [Kaus is paraphrasing here], "by attacking the Davis-Bacon Act, I'm guilty of pursuing good policy. Instead, "progressive" Democrats should be pursuing not-so-good policies that nurture powerful pro-Democratic interests."

The two most interesting reasons are:

5) "Historically," as Yglesias notes, unions have selflessly helped Democrats solve a number of national problems (Social Security, medical care for the elderly, civil rights, worker safety, unemployment insurance). Unfortunately, what's left are the national problems where this New Deal pairing didn't work because unions actively stand in the way of solutions. Two of these problems, in particular, are among our biggest: a) Unionized teachers stand in the way of the educational changes that might ameliorate our twin education crises (inner city disaster and suburban mediocrity). And b) unions stand in the way of the best solution to the welfare problem (and hence the NewOrleans-style underclass problem, and hence the persistent-poverty problem), namely public jobs programs. Unions have always disliked public jobs programs because public jobs workers threaten to perform work that municipal unions and construction unions now perform for far more money (thanks, in part, to the Davis-Bacon Act). In my ideal of liberal activism, we make sure everyone who wants a job has a job. Then we worry about making those jobs pay $40 an hour rather than $8 an hour. Unions have always (quite rationally) preferred to increase their members' wages even if that means keeping unemployed workers on the dole. That's why FDR had to break a strike to keep the WPA going. Yglesias argues Democrats won't "be able to advance a sustained anti-poverty agenda" with weakened unions. I'd argue that they won't be able to do that without rolling a few unions.

6) The best way to raise wages at the bottom, we've discovered, is not to increase union power. It's to run a hot economy with a tight labor market like the one we had in the late 90s--when unions continued to decline but low-wage workers and African-Americans made huge strides. (Low inflation helped achieve that prosperous economy and preserved those gains--unlike in the 70s, when still-powerful, oligopolistic unions were the mainspring of a wage-price spiral.) Yglesias says it's "absurd" to fight poverty without unions, but the most effective program to fight working poverty that we've discovered is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which has little to do with unionism and will survive unionism's inevitable withering. So will minimum wage laws.

World travellers

Hello all, I've just added two new links under the Friends section. One is Garrett Bucks' blog, who is currently in Sweden on a Fulbright scholarship. The other is Ian Miller's, who is doing the Peace Corps in Vanuatu. Enjoy their antics with mind-enhacing roots and Swedish pop stars.

Christmas comes early

Bonus Bonus!: NYTimes discovers that continuing the Howell Raines tradition of alienating half their national audience isn’t a good business plan.

The New York Times Co. said Tuesday it would cut about 500 jobs, or about 4 percent of its work force, as part of an ongoing effort to reduce costs. The reductions come atop another 200 jobs that were cut earlier this year.

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. tries to explain the Times’ decline on the economy:

"We regret that we will see many of our colleagues leave the Company; it is a painful process for all of us. We have been tested many times in our 154-year history as we are being tested now.
Given the continued financial challenges and the cloudy economic outlook for the remainder of the year, we believe it is prudent and necessary to initiate this additional reduction. We will be working through the bargaining issues with our unions and will observe all contractual obligations, including severance where applicable. The Company plans to manage the staff reductions in such a way that we continue to provide our readers, users, listeners and viewers with journalism of the highest quality and that our operations function smoothly on a day-to-day basis. This will help ensure that we achieve our long-term strategic goals.”

But Gannett, owner of over 300 newspapers including USA Today, is doing just fine. Unless making money isn’t one of Sulzburger’s strategic goals he better wean his editors off of advocacy journalism real quick.

*Ask me about how the Sulzburger family stripped the New York Times Co. shareholders of all meaningful voting rights therefore removing the last barrier of oversight capabile of keeping the once great grey lady from slipping into liberal crapulence. Do it! Do it!

BONUS: The ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting believes NPR programming is extremely biased and that the resulting alienation this has caused is producing an audience that is completely counter to the populist objectives of the CPB’s founding charter; wefare media for the wealthy.

"Like many metropolitan areas, Washington has multiple NPR and PBS outlets. One evening this summer, Boaz was listening to public radio when a commentary by liberal former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was aired. Boaz switched to another NPR station, only to hear the views of liberal commentator Daniel Schorr. "That's not just liberal bias," Boaz says, "it is a liberal roadblock."

PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell assured the Senate subcommittee that "our viewers and our supporters reflect and mirror very closely the demographic make-up of our communities." Potential advertisers are told instead of a 2003 Mediamark poll commissioned by NPR. Compared to the general public, NPR listeners are 152 percent more likely to own a home valued at $500,000 or more; 194 percent more likely to travel to France; and 326 percent more likely to read the "New Yorker."


I really, really despise(d) Paul Krugman, but I know this already has been talked to death elsewhere so I’ll be brief. I’m just amazed that the ombudsman of the NYTimes has come out publicly stating that the left’s best known economist is a serial liar. Better still -- despite knowing of Krugman’s deceptions, the editorial staff of the paper has apparently decided not to enforce its own editorial policies.

An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who makes an error "is expected to promptly correct it in the column." That's the established policy of Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Her written policy encourages "a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece."

The following refers to a recent column in which he misrepresented findings of the media panel regarding the outcome of the 2000 election, and then lied about them again in his correction of the first column.

All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. Each Op-Ed columnist has a page in nytimes.com that includes his or her past columns and biographical information. Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn't explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong. Since it hasn't been officially published, that posting doesn't cause the correction to be appended to any of the relevant columns.
If the problem is that Mr. Krugman doesn't want to give up precious space in his column for a correction, there are alternatives. Perhaps some space could be found elsewhere on the Op-Ed page so that readers—especially those using electronic versions of his pieces -- could get the accurate information they deserve.
A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times's credibility more than having no policy at all?

So now having been officially reviled by his own paper, I don’t think anyone can argue he has any meaningful credibility anymore. He’s done.

Now I can focus on Robert Reich…

Hitch vs. Galloway

It's been podcast here for posterity. I haven't gotten the chance to listen to it yet, so I don't have a lot to say about it. However, I think Galloway is a contemptable turd on the order of Tom DeLay and I would looooovvvveee to see him verbally thrashed.

For the actual argument's sake I'd much prefer someone like Jon Stewart do battle with Hitchens (who has made some of the best reasoned cases for the war in Iraq that I've read), but this will do.

But I'm quite curious to hear what y'all think, so have at it...

Speaks for itself

More foolishness from Mr. DeLay:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget.
Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible.
"My answer to those that want to offset the spending is sure, bring me the offsets, I'll be glad to do it. But nobody has been able to come up with any yet," the Texas Republican told reporters at his weekly briefing.
Asked if that meant the government was running at peak efficiency, Mr. DeLay said, "Yes, after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

Then there's this from his collegues:

"This is hardly a well-oiled machine," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican. "There's a lot of fat to trim. ... I wonder if we've been serving in the same Congress."
American Conservative Union Chairman David A. Keene said federal spending already was "spiraling out of control" before Katrina, and conservatives are "increasingly losing faith in the president and the Republican leadership in Congress."
"Excluding military and homeland security, American taxpayers have witnessed the largest spending increase under any preceding president and Congress since the Great Depression," he said.
Mr. Keene said annual nonmilitary and non-homeland security spending increased $303 billion between fiscal year 2001 and 2005; the acknowledged federal debt increased more than $2 trillion since fiscal year 2000; and the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill is estimated to increase the government's unfunded obligations by $16 trillion.

I'm not putting this up there as a means to say, "Oh, look this is Republican, look how dumb and corrupt he is, that is a good example of how dumb and corrupt all Republicans are." I'm pointing at him because he, as an individual, is a contemptable liar who needs to be made fun of and put in his place (which should be as far away from the halls of congress and power as possible). Dean and Feinstein may be contemptable, but they're not quite as outragous (to me at least) as this piece of shit.

Good Roberts Piece

Here’s some pretty good commentary on the state of the confirmation hearings from Dahlia Lithwick – who I typically disagree with. After listening to some of the hearings yesterday on my way home from work, I too came to the conclusion that the Senators would have been best served to allow some to assume they're stupid than open their mouths and prove it. Especially Joe Biden – who I think may actually be retarded.

John Roberts is putting on a clinic.
He completely understands that he needs only to sit very quietly, head cocked to signal listening-ness, while senator after senator offers long discursive rambling speeches. Only when he's perfectly certain that a question has been asked does he offer a reply; usually cogent and spare. Here's a man long accustomed to answering really hard questions from extremely smart people, suddenly faced with the almost-harder task of answering obvious questions from less-smart people. He finds himself standing in a batting cage with the pitching machine set way too slow.
It's increasingly clear that Senate Democrats are giving up. They are taking a cue from the petulant Joe Biden, who telegraphs exactly who these hearings are really for when he refuses to let the nominee answer any of his questions. When Sen. Arlen Specter growls at Biden to let Roberts finish just one answer, Biden growls back: "I don't have much time." Later when Biden complains of Roberts, "But he's filibustering!" it's without any sense of irony. How dare this man use our own childish games against us?

LA Power Outage

The power is out in Los Angeles – and where the hell is George W. Bush?

Why hasn’t he said anything empathetic yet? It’s been hours!

Does he even care what the people of Los Angeles are going through? Not everyone in Hollywood can just get into a Range Rover and turn on the air conditioning. Some people only have Mercedes and BMWs and red Corvettes.

How long is the rescue effort going to take? Surely, Bush is not waiting on the mayor and the governor again. Big-foot them now! I’ll bet Bush is playing his silly banjo.

Hee Hee