WillCollier.com

Name That Party!

2012-01-30T21:05:00.001-05:00

"Reporter" Steven Adams of Reuters offers up this article about electoral shenanigans in West Virginia:

A West Virginia sheriff pleaded guilty to voter fraud in the state's 2010 primary election including illegally filling in some absentee ballots out of fear he might lose a close election, authorities said on Monday.

Lincoln County, West Virginia Sheriff Jerry Bowman admitted falsifying absentee ballots in a case stemming from an investigation by federal authorities, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Also pleading guilty to lying to investigators was Lincoln County Clerk Donald Whitten, the U.S. Attorney said.

Adams--with, as the story notes, "Editing By Ellen Wulfhorst and Greg McCune"--goes on for another eight paragraphs before admitting, "Both men, who are Democrats, also agreed to resign from office."

But I'm sure that's just an innocent editorial decision. Just like vote fraud is a "right-wing myth."

Previews Of Coming Attractions

2012-01-27T20:08:00.001-05:00

Ferris Bueller, 2012.

UPDATE: This is another one of those cases where the trailer is better than the actual movie--or in this case, commercial. But if you want to see the whole thing (a Honda Super Bowl ad affectionately spoofing "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"), you can watch it here.

MegaProtectionism For The Record Companies?

2012-01-25T08:56:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting take on the recent government takedown of Megaupload, which had been a large-scale digital "locker" site where people could upload large files for public access. Megaupload had been ostensibly targeted because of pirated movie and music files, but Matt Burns at TechCrunch voices suspicious that the company may have been taken down because it was preparing to launch a service that would have competed directly and legally with the record companies:

Megabox was just in beta at that time with listed partners of 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi, and Amazon. Megaupload was in a heated marketing battle with the RIAA and MPAA who featured Kim Dotcom in an anti-piracy movie (5:10 mark). The site had just sued Universal Music Group for wrongly blocking Megaupload’s recent star-studded YouTube campaign. Things were getting vicious in December but the quiet launch of Megabox might have been the straw that broke the millionaire’s back.

Dotcom described Megabox as Megaupload’s iTunes competitor, which would even eventually offer free premium movies via Megamovie, a site set to launch in 2012. This service would take Megaupload from being just a digital locker site to a full-fledged player in the digital content game.

The kicker was Megabox would cater to unsigned artists and allow anyone to sell their creations while allowing the artist to retain 90% of the earnings. Or, artists could even giveaway their songs and would be paid through a service called Megakey. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works,” Kim Dotcom told TorrentFreak in December. Megabox was planning on bypassing the labels, RIAA, and the entire music establishment.

Copyright protection is a legitimate problem in the digital age, but if the speculation here turns out to be accurate, the Justice Department has been used to facilitate the crib death of a legal competitor to the RIAA. If that pans out, we've got a much bigger problem than piracy to worry about.

Read This, You Knob

2012-01-18T12:50:00.001-05:00

Rick Moranis, once better known as his Hoser alter ego Bob McKenzie, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today:

I ran a hot iron quickly over the front of a previously worn shirt, saddened at the thought of the jolly staff at my local dry cleaner who will suffer because of my thrifty initiative and tolerance for rumpled, mildly aromatic haberdashery.

I jumped into a cab, thinking about the MTA's budget deficit and my part in not helping to reduce it.

The traffic was terrible. Here I was, going nowhere, idling in a quick-ticking metered medallion taxi, driving up the price of oil, edging the country further into runaway inflation while spewing noxious fumes into the precious air around me. I am such a horrible person.

The driver, a pleasant Middle-Eastern man who I did not suspect was part of, or supporting, any terrorist organizations, was sipping a very large cup from one of several dozen popular coffee shop locations within a three-block radius of my home. I was pleased that at least one of us was supporting the hardworking baristas of this great nation.

I wondered out loud if the driver thought the price of his beverage would be higher or lower if baristas were unionized. He told me that in his country only men could be baristas and if a woman was caught even trying to be a barista she would be roasted, percolated and covered in scalding, foamy nonfat goat's milk. He said "Only America is free. Only America is great. God Bless America."

Beauty, eh?

Heh

2012-01-18T07:53:00.003-05:00

Jonah Goldberg:

Very soon Wikipedia will go dark for a day to protest something called SOPA. During this event — future historians will call it a “knowledge eclipse” — no one under the age of thirty will know how to confirm or disprove a statement of fact.

It’ll be awesome.

Tomorrow you should go up to a 20-something and tell them things like “the fern is the world’s most popular carnivorous plant” and “Henry VIII invented the internal combustion engine, but kept it secret to protect the environment” and they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a “reference book.”

Can't Wait For the Bye-Ku

2012-01-16T10:33:00.003-05:00

To the disappointment of literally dozens of people (many of them named "David" and collecting checks from media organizations), Jon Huntsman stopped running for president today.

The 99% of you who just muttered, "Jon who?", carry on. You didn't miss anything.

UPDATE: Taranto's Bye-Ku was, in fact, worth the wait.

¡Salud!

2012-01-10T17:28:00.006-05:00

Stephen Green, better know as the VodkaPundit, celebrates his ten-year blogaversary today.

I stumbled across Steve's site sometime in 2003 or so, thanks to nothing more than seeing the words "VodkaPundit" on Glenn Reynolds' blogroll and thinking, "That's a cool name."

It turned out to be a cool blog as well. Steve was a natural for the new media: smart and witty, with an omnivorous curiosity and an uncanny knack for sniffing out not just interesting stories, but also the various dogs lurking within them that had mysteriously failed to bark.

Somewhere along the way I dashed off an email on a topic I happened to have personal knowledge of, and we've basically been friends ever since. In early '04, just before taking off on vacation, Steve sent me a login for the site and basically said, "Go nuts while I'm gone!" I wound up hanging around as a co-blogger for the better part of the next four years.

That was an interesting week for me. From 1997 through the beginning of 2001, I'd been what would eventually be called a blogger, publishing a twice-weekly opinion column to my original site (creatively called "Will's World"). But--establishing my well-known sense of impeccably-reversed timing--I'd burned out just before blogs broke through as a feasible mass medium, and hadn't joined in with the rest of the crowd up until that point.

"I'm not a blogger," I said to myself. "I don't do this one- or two-line, 'hey, go read this' stuff--I write columns." A couple of days guesting for Steve cured me of that myopia, and I've been happily blogging ever since. I stuck around at VodkaPundit until it and Steve were assimilated into the PJ Media empire in 2008, and along the way wound up as a columnist for two national sites as well as starting two blogs of my own, and even broke through to the dreaded Mainstream Media on occasion.

And it probably never would have happened if Martini Boy hadn't had to go run off to Mexico and drink with his new bride, leaving the keys to his bar in my surprised digital palm. Funny how life works, isn't it?

¡Salud, 'mano!

Krushed

2012-01-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

I confess that I pay very little attention these days to anything written either by or about the New York Times' stable of editorial propagandists, but this Kevin D. Williamson demolition of the most recent Paul Krugman effluence is well worth a read.

Reminds me a bit of this old instance of Brad Delong indulging his inner Pauline Kael...

Crumbled Curtain

2012-01-09T07:38:00.002-05:00

Check out these stunning photos of the Russian NPO Energomash rocket factory, just outside of Moscow. Despite the rundown appearance, it's a working operation that supplies Soyuz and other rockets for civilian and military purposes (although given the recent rash of Soyuz failures, perhaps that's not so surprising).

As io9's Jesus Diaz notes, this one in particular is amazing, it looks like Geiger concept art from an Alien movie:

The pictures were taken by a young Russian blogger who hopped over an unguarded fence, and apparently had the run of the place for quite a while. To no one's particular surprise, the Russian authorities are not terribly happy about all of this; hopefully young Lana will get some kind of commendation for revealing lax security instead of a "friendly" visit from the current revision of the KGB.

Dang

2012-01-04T14:32:00.000-05:00

Larry Downes of Forbes has an absolutely brutal--and accurate--article on why Best Buy is a dead company walking. Shorter version: Best Buy's management is focused on making things easier for themselves, while successful companies (Amazon is Downes' example) make it easy on their customers. A sample:

[Best Buy] Management, at least, still believes it has competitive advantages–advantages that even make it attractive to shareholders. According to the company’s most recent annual report,

"We believe our dedicated and knowledgeable people, store and online experience, broad product assortment, distinct store formats and brand marketing strategies differentiate us from our competitors by positioning our stores and Web sites as the preferred destination for new technology and entertainment products in a fun and informative shopping environment."

There’s just one problem. Not one word of that, at least in my experience, is true. Their “people” are not knowledgeable; they are annoying. The store “format” is entirely generic; perhaps a little confusing. The stores and Websites are not “preferred destinations”—they are destinations, at best, of inertia, or in the case of exclusives, destinations of the only resort. The “shopping environment” is the opposite of fun and informative. It’s depressing and humiliating, as in “I can’t believe I had to go to Best Buy to get this.”

What He Said

2012-01-03T08:57:00.000-05:00

Jonah Goldberg lays the wood to the asininity of the Iowa Caucuses in USA Today this morning:

The problem with this demographic critique is that you can make a similar complaint of any state. If New Mexico had been first in the nation since 1972, we'd all be familiar with the rich democratic traditions and civic-mindedness of New Mexicans. Journalists would tell war stories about Albuquerque instead of Des Moines. D.C. would be filled with generations of grizzled New Mexico veterans selling their contacts, e-mail lists and homespun insights into the unique contours of the New Mexican political landscape. Meanwhile, people would laugh at the very suggestion that Iowa — Iowa! — be given the pride of place in our precious electoral system.

The real problem with the Iowa caucuses is simply that they confer too much entrenched arbitrary power on one state in perpetuity. For instance, without the Iowa caucuses we would never have wasted billions of dollars on environmentally damaging and economically wasteful ethanol subsidies.

It's nice that Iowa is the Saudi Arabia of corn, but there's no reason for presidential aspirants to kowtow to Big Corn's interests every four years. Even worse, every politician who even fantasizes about sitting in the Oval Office pays obeisance to the preservation of government moonshine.

Read the whole thing. It ought to be required reading for the leadership of both parties.

The Early Leader

2012-01-02T11:07:00.002-05:00

Here’s a vote for the most unintentionally (I have to assume) funny headline of the new year:

Some Iowans fear irrelevance if Paul wins

Presidents Gephart, Harkin, Robertson and Huckabee were unavailable for comment.

(H/T to Martini Boy for reminding me I ought to post this sort of thing on my blog instead of just emailing it to another blogger...)

Music Therapy at the AFLAC Cancer Center

2012-01-01T22:31:00.002-05:00

While driving my wife-to-be to dinner on our first date not quite ten years ago, I asked her what her job was. I knew she worked at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta (since mutual friends who also worked there had set us up), but I couldn't remember what exactly she did at the hospital.

"Music Therapy," she replied. My inner crusty engineer kicked in, and I immediately thought (but fortunately didn't say aloud), "That's pretty fru-fru."

Then at dinner, she told me about how that very day she'd asked the mother of a comatose kid who'd been in an awful car accident what his favorite song was. Beth picked up her guitar, started playing that song, and the kid woke up out of the coma singing it back to her.

At that point I felt like I was approximately two feet tall and covered with camel mucus. Wasn't the last time she'd get in the last word on a subject without so much as lifting an eyebrow.

Anyway, that's more than enough about me; here's a great feature WSB-TV in Atlanta did about Beth and her job over the holiday weekend:

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is a nonprofit hospital, and music therapy at the AFLAC Cancer Center is 100% supported by private donations.

We're All Allright

2011-12-29T14:29:00.002-05:00

Cheap Trick played a short-notice charity gig last night at Atlanta's Buckhead Theater (formerly The Roxy, before a much-needed refurbishment a year or so back). My wife and I went to the show, and had a great time. The crowd ranged from people considerably older than us to young kids, and included everything from Buckhead hipsters to grungy teens in Motorhead jackets. I think I'm safe in saying that pretty much everybody there had a blast.

Like most of the surviving 70's and 80's road warrior bands, Cheap Trick still has the chops (although original drummer Bun E. Carlos has retired from touring due to back trouble; he's replaced live by guitarist/songwriter Rick Neilsen's son Daxx) and stage savvy to pull off a solid show. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, vocalist Robin Zander could still hit every note, including a jaw-dropping cover of the Beatles' valedictory medley from side two of "Abbey Road." I'm reasonably sure Zander sings those parts far better than Paul McCartney himself could today.

So anyway (here's the "look at me!" part), for years and years during the song "Surrender," Cheap Trick used to toss Kiss albums into the crowd after a line referencing that band. Nelisen often jokes that Cheap Trick was responsible for several Kiss albums going platinum, since their roadies were always having to go to a local record store to buy up additional copies for the gag.

No doubt partly due to the end of vinyl records as easily-found items, they've knocked the Kiss part off, but Neilsen did toss an autographed cover from Cheap Trick's own latest album (cleverly titled "The Latest") into the crowd during "Surrender" last night. It careened off a light fixture on the theater's ceiling, and ricocheted basically into my hands. Which was, y'know, pretty cool.

Here it is, complete with a ton of guitar picks that had been kindly stuck into the seams:

... and here's a sample of the song itself:

Hitch, RIP

2011-12-16T06:58:00.007-05:00

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, at the far-too-young age of 62.

Matt Labash offers up one of the first of what will surely be a tidal wave of encomiums from Hitchens' vast list of friends (and enemies). Labash recalls Hitchens leading a rag-tag band of reporters from Kuwait into Iraq during the first Gulf War:

At the first checkpoint, we were turned back by a British Air Force policeman who told us passage was unthinkable due to security reasons. Hitchens was incensed. “Security is only a word, but it’s not a reason, is it?” When we wished to talk to the head Kuwaiti in charge, our efforts to bribe him were met with cool resistance, and our yellow-bellied driver breached his contract and turned back. We made it onto a humanitarian run the next morning, rolling down the Highway of Death, while being periodically pulled over and delayed for hours as the Kuwaitis—worshippers of all things bureaucratic—kept demanding we fill out more paperwork declaring our affiliations. “Who wants to know?” barked Hitchens, castigating reporter colleagues for complying like sheep, while pointing out particularly egregious offenders: “Look at him, reading the list upside down. Do you sign anything they put in front of you? You’ve got to push back hard or you’ll get too used to being pushed around.”

Steve Green and I have had a running bet for years regarding which one of us would manage to go drinking with Hitchens first. Sadly, we--along with those of any ideology or religion who love great writing and admire the mighty of heart--both lost.

UPDATE: Speaking of Steve, he knocked it out of the park today.

Synchronicity

2011-12-13T15:40:00.000-05:00

December 12, 2011:

Gallup: In U.S., Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level

December 13, 2011:

AP: NTSB recommends ban on driver cell phone use

Yet nothing is invincible...

Mom

2011-12-09T15:54:00.005-05:00

As you can see from the preceeding post, my mom passed away last month.

The minister at our old church in Enterprise had never met my folks before my mom's funeral. My dad, who cared for Mom throughout her long illness, hadn't been able to get out to do much of anything other than work and look after her for the last couple of years.

I though it was ridiculous that we were asking this guy to give a eulogy for somebody that he didn't know and knew nothing about (I could barely speak when we met with him), so I wrote this up the night before and emailed it to him. It is a very poor effort, but even now, it's about as much as I can manage.

* * *

My mother was born into an Alabama farming family on Sand Mountain in the Appalachian foothills. Her people were by any modern standard (or even the standards of those days, at the end of the Depression) dirt poor. But when they could leave the fields, they were musicians--the Johnsons had a bluegrass and gospel band that Mom sang with on the radio as a child--and storytellers and craftsmen beyond any level of those arts we see today.

Her uncles made fiddles and guitars from scratch, and her father, despite having only an eighth-grade education, was one of the first men hired by NASA when it was started up in the 1950s. By the time he retired, Granddaddy was on a first-name basis with Werner Von Braun, and replaced by a degreed electrical engineer. He worked two jobs for most of his life, and put his two daughters through Birmingham-Southern College. He and my grandmother were the two hardest-working people I've ever known.

Until my aunt Lauren was born in the 1950s, Mom was the only child between my grandmother Bernelle and her older sisters Connie and Ruby Jo. She was loved as intensely by those three families as anyone could imagine, and she passed on that remarkable bond of affection for home and kin to her own children and her two grandsons. I think the soft weight of those four generations of close-knit family ties is why it's so difficult for me to talk about her today.

Without exaggeration, Mom was something of a star in her hometown of Albertville. She was the drum major in the marching band, a straight-A student, and a famous beauty. Just a couple of years ago, by chance, I ran into Robert O. Johnson, Albertville's long-time photographer and unofficial historian, and the first thing he told my wife Beth upon meeting her was what a pretty woman my mother was. Robert, now in his eighties, retired and nearly blind, still says his most famous photograph out of the untold thousands he took in a long career was a shot of teenaged Lynda holding up the head of a gigantic fake snake that had been wrapped around a car as a cheerful hoax. That picture has been reprinted in Sand Mountain newspapers at least a dozen times since it was taken in the late 50s, and it always brought a light to Mom's eyes when someone dug out a copy.

My parents met in Birmingham, when my dad was in dental school at UAB and mom was about to finish college. They were a blind date, set up by mutual friends who are themselves still married and attended Mom's services last month. The details of that date--a raucous dental-school banquet--made for a seemingly-endless chain of funny stories doled out by their friends during my childhood, but it obviously went well. They were married in 1962, and Mom taught high school in Birmingham until Dad finished school. He was commissioned in the Air Force upon graduating, and the two rural Alabama natives moved together to RAF Lakenheath in England shortly afterwards.

For Mom, this was a bit like being assigned to Heaven. A Phi Beta Kappa English major, she was already an Anglophile who could (and did) go toe-to-toe with Cambridge dons discussing Shakespeare. Together they soaked up the history, survived the lousy East Anglia weather, collected antiques and a couple of English bulldogs, and tried to start a family. My older brother Charles was born and died on the same day in 1967, and Mom never really got over his loss. Two decades later we visited his grave together, in a lonely corner of the American cemetery at Lakenheath.

When Dad's term of service was over in 1968, they returned home to Alabama and settled in Enterprise, although neither of them had any family here. I arrived shortly afterwards, followed by my sister Kitty, thirteen months and one day later; which Mom always referred to as "twins the hard way." Mom rebutted the admonition of a college friend that she was moving to "a cultural wasteland" by helping found the Coffee County Arts Alliance, which has brought everything from Broadway to opera to Dizzy Gillespie to Enterprise over the years, and thrives to this day.

She was a fascinating person to have as a mother. Mom would recite snippets of classical poetry while dropping a Billy Joel tape in her car's 8-track on the way to a college football game. She encouraged every variety of hobby or interest Kitty and I might have (well, she did draw the line at my request for an ant farm), and pushed us, sometimes (but not always) subtly to expand our horizons. When I entered college as an engineering major, she cajoled me for a year to go convince Auburn's writer-in-residence to admit me into her fiction writing course (she finally did, and as a matter of course, later became a pen pal of Mom's). After reading a blurb about a new scholarship in a game program, she nudged me again to apply for a study abroad grant that would send me to London and Oxford to read literature and history. She was that kind of a mom.

She was this kind, too: when I was a little boy, we went to Atlanta's Grant Field to watch Auburn play Georgia Tech. Once in the stadium, I sat down next to a particularly obnoxious Tech fan who made a point of leaning over to bad-mouth Auburn whenever he saw my dad looking the other way. Mom put up with that for about five minutes before picking up a full cup of icy Coke and dumping it over the guy's head. He leapt up and glared at me, thinking I'd done it, and yelled at Mom, "Lady, what kind of kid are you raising here?"

Mom jumped up herself, all five-foot-nothing and 100 pounds worth, poked her finger in the soaking Tech fan's chest and replied, "My son didn't do that--I DID!" She got a standing ovation from the Auburn fans around us, and the Tech guy slunk away, never to be seen again.

Mom tried a million different things herself. She took a couple of years worth of German at Troy State, just because she wanted to learn the language. She wrote feature articles for the Southeast Sun (a local weekly paper) for a few years before getting fed up at the ham-handed editing. Mom was ahead of her time; she would have been a great blogger. She became a part-time travel agent and tour guide, leading groups of Alabamians across England and Scotland. She dabbled in court reporting. She learned to ski, she painted, she wrote, she played the piano and had a beautiful singing voice.

Kitty got the music and the social graces and the beauty; I got the writing and the take-no-bull attitude. Most days I'm convinced Kitty got the better end of the deal.

She loved her family, and she loved her friends, and their numbers are seemingly endless. I was hardly able to turn around in Enterprise the week of her funeral without being embraced by them. Everywhere I went, people I barely recognized (if that) stopped to tell me how much they loved my mother.

Most of them have told me that it's been a long time since they'd seen her. They lost her all at once; her family had been losing her one little piece at a time for nearly a decade. People have always told me that I take after her, and for myself, I can't imagine a fate more terrifying than slowly, steadily losing your mind.

When she went in to be examined for possible dementia years ago, Mom asked us not to tell her if the diagnosis was Alzheimer's. We kept that promise, so I don't really know whether she understood what was happening to her or not. I suspect she did, though. Mom was a very smart lady.

And so she suffered, for years, with just my amazing dad and a few dedicated care-givers to help her. Dad did everything anyone possibly could to help her, but simply because he is a mortal man, that could not be enough.

Finally, last month, the disease took everything she had left, with one sole but vital exception: the memories of the people she'd touched during her life.

Those are nothing to take lightly, but they are not enough. I still want my mom back.

Lynda Collier, 1940-2011

2011-12-09T15:41:00.004-05:00

Lynda Collier, age 71, died at her home in Enterprise, Alabama on November 11, 2011 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's Disease.

Mrs. Collier was born in Albertville, Alabama on March 9, 1940, the daughter of Brelen and Bernelle Chambers, both of whom preceded her in death. Lynda attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, and graduated with honors from Birmingham-Southern College. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society and her beloved Alpha Omicron Pi social sorority. She taught English at Ensley High School in Birmingham, and was later a feature writer for the Southeast Sun in Enterprise.

Lynda and her husband of 49 years, Dr. William (Bill) Baxter Collier, Jr. were married in 1962. They were stationed at RAF Lakenheath in England, where their first child, Charles Amos Collier, was born and died in 1967. They returned to Alabama in 1968, settling in Enterprise.

Lynda was a member of St. Luke United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, and a founder of the Coffee County Arts Alliance. A life-long Anglophile and lover of English literature, Lynda led tours of England and Scotland, and was a devoted patron of the Alabama Shakespeare Theater.

Lynda is survived by her husband Bill, their son William (Will) Baxter Collier, III and daughter Anne Lynn (Kitty) Collier Mingus, daughter-in-law Beth Herr Collier, son-in-law Matthew Mingus, grandsons Collier and Matthew Mingus, her sister Lauren Elizabeth and aunt Connie Dee Chambers Brown.

Services were held at St. Luke United Methodist Church in Enterprise on Tuesday, November 15. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alzheimer's Association (alz.org).

The family wishes to send special thanks to Mary Sue Frazier, Mary Thames, Paula Catrett and Day Springs Hospice for their devotion and care, and to the community of Enterprise for the countless acts of kindness and love during Lynda's long illness.

New at PJM: The Man Who Sold The Future

2011-10-07T06:40:00.000-04:00

I have a new column at Pajamas Media today, about the life and words of Steve Jobs. A preview:

Universities are always awash with bright (and, let’s be honest, not-so-bright) kids who claim they want to “change the world.” Vanishingly few of them have the abilities to do anything of the sort, and still fewer have the innate drive and relentless, adamantine will to see their personal visions through to reality. Almost none actually succeed at changing even their own immediate surroundings, much less the world.

Steve Jobs was one of the infinitesimally tiny group to see that youthful ideal through. In the space of 35 years, Jobs, the on-and-off-and-on-again founder and leader of Apple, changed the way the world works, plays, communicates, listens to music, and watches movies — to say nothing of changing movies themselves, in his “spare time” job as CEO of Pixar.

Grasping the totality of Jobs’ life and accomplishments defies any short account. When Jobs started working in the tech field, as a teenaged summer hire at Hewlett-Packard (he got the job by cold-calling William Hewett, scrounging for hobby-project parts), personal computers weren’t even a blip on the horizon and the internet existed only as a crude, text-based network between defense bases and universities. Telephones were black, rotary, and run by a monolithic monopoly. Video games didn’t exist (Jobs was hired by the nascent Atari a few years later; he proceeded to design the seminal game “Breakout”), music came from vinyl records, and animation was something done laboriously by hand on endless sheets of plastic.

Not long after, Jobs founded Apple, and became the driving force in creating the personal computer, helping build out the massive industries supporting that technology and also fundamentally changing virtually every other industry on the planet. That alone would constitute one of the more impressive legacies in human history, but Jobs didn’t stop there, even after being ousted from Apple in a 1985 corporate coup.

Here's the rest.

FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

2011-09-27T10:31:00.000-04:00

M.G. Siegler at TechCrunch has the scoop on the long-rumored Amazon Tablet, which they say will be announced tomorrow:

On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale. And while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will show off the Fire on stage, it won’t be ready to ship until the second week of November, we’ve learned.

Everything we’ve previously reported on the hardware remains the same. It will be a 7-inch backlit display tablet that looks similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook. Gdgt’s Ryan Block was able to dig up a bit more about the connection. Apparently, the Kindle Fire looks like a PlayBook because it was designed and built by the same original design manufacturer (ODM), Quanta. Even though Amazon has their own team dedicated to Kindle design and development, Lab 126, they wanted to get the Fire out there in time for this holiday season so they outsourced most of it as a shortcut.

Block’s sources seem very wary of this shortcut move. But having played with a DVT model myself, I can assure you that it’s better than the PlayBook because the software is better and, more importantly, the content available is much better. Amazon has built their own custom version of Android (that looks nothing like Android) and it utilizes their own Android Appstore. While that store doesn’t offer all the apps found in Google’s Android Market, Amazon has been rounding up the big app makers to get them on board for the Fire launch, I’m told.

Is it the long-sought (by anti-Apple enthusiasts) iPad Killer? Heck if I know, but Amazon did do a bang-up job on previous Kindles, and they're the only company in the world with the content muscle to hang right in there with the iTunes Store.

And just try and tell me this isn't the perfect background screen for one of these suckers:

Hurricane Memories (1 - Eloise)

2011-08-27T09:57:00.004-04:00

I've spent most of my life in "hurricane country," near the Florida Gulf Coast. When I was seven years old, Hurricane Eloise blasted up through the Gulf, laying waste to much of Panama City Beach and scarcely losing any steam before she wrecked most of my hometown, Enterprise, Alabama.

For a small child, watching Eloise was like having the greatest disaster movie ever made playing outside your window. My sister and I sat on her bed, watching one pine tree after another snap over and fall in our backyard. One of our bulldogs cowered in her doghouse, unwilling to cross the yard to come inside--until a gust picked up the doghouse and carried it a few yards across the ground. She set a new bulldog land-speed record getting to our back door after that.

When a tornado passed over our house, taking down our TV antenna but fortunately doing no other damage, our mom grabbed us up and huddled against the house's brick chimney. Even amidst the deafening freight train noise as it went by, I was too young to be anything other than excited. It was years before I realized how close we'd all come to being killed in that moment.

Inside the eye, at the heart of the hurricane, we all went outside to look around. The rain and winds had stopped, and most of the trees around our house had already been knocked down. Even the bulldogs came out to snuffle around in the eerie calm. The approaching back end of the eye-wall looked like the interior of a stone castle keep, dark gray, cyclopean, towering, advancing relentlessly to bring on the second round of destruction.

After the storm, we kids were convinced that Enterprise had been converted into the biggest playground in the world. Trees knocked over like dominos became massive jungle gyms, and there was seemingly no end to all the interesting things to explore amidst all the damage. Our dads got to go chop stuff up with chainsaws instead of going to work, and school, of course, was out for more than a week.

Steve Green, Call Your Office

2011-08-16T15:19:00.000-04:00

Now here's a media scandal for the summer "silly season": The Weekly Standard runs an umpteen-word cover story on vodka... but doesn't bother to interview the internationally-renowned VodkaPundit.

Victorino Matus, you got some 'splainin' to do...

Boomhauer Reviews "Cowboys & Aliens"

2011-08-01T07:15:00.002-04:00

"Dang ol' movie got James Bond man, got Indiana Jones, it's a dang ol' Western with spacemen and goin' waddaya call, BOOM! and carryin' on, man.

"Dang ol' thumbs up, man."

Behold, The Return Of... Cornholio

2011-07-22T19:15:00.001-04:00

Get More: Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV Shows

... and there was much rejoicing.

Barry Was Told There Would Be No Math

2011-06-30T12:15:00.002-04:00

Charles Krauthammer, via NRO:

I did the math on this. If you collect the corporate jet tax every year for the next 5,000 years, you will cover one year of the debt that Obama has run up. One year.

To put it another way, if you started collecting that tax at the time of John the Baptist and you collected it every year — first in shekels and now in dollars — you wouldn’t be halfway to covering one year of the amount of debt that Obama has run up.

As for the other one, he mentions again and again, the oil depreciation tax break — if you collect that one for 700 years, you won’t cover a year of Obama deficits.

And then here’s my favorite. I worked it out in the car on the way here. If you collect the corporate jets and the oil tax together — get all the bad guys and the fat cats at once — and you collect it for 100 years, it covers the amount of debt Obama added… in February!

And he pretends that he’s the serious adult at the table.

"Greeks Don't Work"

2011-06-27T09:31:00.003-04:00

Whenever I read something like this Dan Mitchell post on a prospective second bailout of bankrupt Greece, I'm reminded of my honeymoon.

No, not because of that. Get your mind out of the gutter.

The wife and I spent a couple of weeks bumming around the Aegean after the wedding. Our favorite stop was the village of Oia on Santorini, where we spent a few too-short days in a beautiful, tiny boutique hotel built literally into the side of the island's volcanic caldera.

The hotel's manager was an American who had made his money in software and retired young to Greece. He was sufficiently acclimated to his new home to talk about "your elections," meaning the 2004 U.S. presidential contest, and to go on at length about hormones and such in American food (a European obsession, it seems).

This was in mid-March, a couple of weeks before the tourist-season-proper would begin that year, and as our host noted, the island was gearing up for the oncoming throng of visitors. Plumbers and carpenters were busily making repairs, and untold gallons (sorry--liters) of white and blue paint being applied to every exposed surface.

"There's not much time until the cruise ships start showing up," the hotel manager said as we looked out over the indescribably-gorgeous bay in the center of what had been a circular island before an ancient volcanic eruption. "So the Greeks are all very busy fixing their places up." He paused for a moment, and then corrected himself.

"Actually, the Albanians are all very busy." He gestured down the cliff towards a couple of apparently-foreign laborers putting in a new window. "Greeks," he finally sighed, "don't work."

My Professional Opinion As An Aerospace Engineer

2011-06-22T07:37:00.002-04:00

"Whoa."

Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine. Neither fixed wing nor rotor craft, the D-Dalus uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating, cylindrical turbines for its propulsion, and by altering the angle of the blades, it can launch vertically, hover perfectly still, move in any direction, and thrust upwards and hence "glue down" upon landing, which it can easily do on the deck of a ship, or even a moving vehicle. It's also almost silent, has the dynamic stability to enter buildings, handles rough weather with ease, flies very long distances very quickly and can lift very heavy loads. It's also so simple that it requires little maintenance and requires no more maintenance expertise than an auto mechanic. It accordingly holds immense promise as a platform for personal flight, for military usage, search and rescue, and much more.

Somewhat more seriously, I'd like to see more detailed info about this sucker, but if the performance is anything close to the full description, it's one hell of a design.

Assuming it, you know, works...

Why Not?

2011-06-17T09:18:00.002-04:00

Say hello to Maggie, 75lbs of runt Bullmastiff, rescued a couple of years ago and now spoiled entirely rotten:

I Don't Think So, Mickey

2011-06-17T07:48:00.001-04:00

From his latest perch at the Daily Caller, Mickey Kaus opines in regards to the "greater meaning" of Weinergate,

Pre-Web, this wouldn’t have happened. Weiner could have made lewd comments to a few followers, but wouldn’t have had instant, intimate access to so many (initially) starry-eyed women at once. He couldn’t have counted on his crowd to mobilize in rapid-response style, and he wouldn’t have been able to wallow in their like-minded approbation. He’d have of necessity heard a more balanced range of opinions. And he wouldn’t have thought he could get away with it. He’d have repressed.

Mickey, if you really believe that, I've got two words for you: Ted Kennedy. Teddy didn't need no stinking web to do stuff the likes of which Tony Weiner likely only fantasized about, and his apologists didn't need no stinking web to provide cover for him.

Oscar Meyer Weeps

2011-06-16T14:44:00.000-04:00

From al-Reuters, this bit of fail:

I guess one man's Democrat is another man's Republican. Or something...

Leisure Rules

2011-06-16T07:10:00.003-04:00

In the "even better because he saved me the trouble of writing it" category, Steve Green takes The Atlantic's lame slam of Ferris Bueller's Day Off out behind Chez Quis and grinds it into a sausage so delectable, Abe Froman himself would be proud to serve it with a side of pancreas.

So go read it now, before I have to get snooty.

Rock You Like A Herman Cain

2011-05-23T11:57:00.004-04:00

The wife and I went to Herman Cain’s kickoff rally in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park on Saturday. Among my wife's many sensible traits is a predilection to be apolitical, but she’s a became a fan of Cain's thanks to his local radio show, and I've liked Cain since he pulverized a gobsmacked Bill Clinton in that now-famous 1994 "town hall meeting."

Cain was impressive onstage Saturday, and the sizable crowd (announced at 15,000, but my admittedly-amateur guess would place the number at about half that) was an interesting mix. Lots of Tea Party and Fair Tax types, as you’d imagine, but noticeably more black folks than you normally see at Republican events around here. If you made me put a label on the common denominator, I would choose 'emphatically middle class.'

Most of the local media were there in force, including staffers from the station that carried Cain’s radio show, who arrived complete with “Here I Am—Rock You Like A Herman Cain” t-shirts (surely the best independently-offered candidate slogan since “Fred Thompson: Because The Russians Don’t Take A Dump Without A Plan”).

Cain's candidacy has plenty of drawbacks: no money, no experience in government (although many, including Cain himself, view that as a feature), no foreign policy background, considered “fringe” by even heart-in-the-right-place establishment types like Hugh Hewitt, but I have to say, the moment of the announcement itself was surprisingly moving.

Even though I like the guy, and voted for him in the 2002 senate primary, I was still surprised to find myself getting choked up at that point. Where else in the world would the son of a chauffeur and a maid rise to the top of the business world and then push himself, basically by sheer force of personality, into position to have even a marginal shot at the Presidency? Add to that Cain being a black man from the South running as a Republican, and the sheer unlikely-ness of it is at once breathtaking and quite heartening.

It's hard to imagine Cain returning to Centennial Park eighteen-odd months from now to greet a much-larger crowd from a more-elaborate stage, but stranger things have certainly happened. I don’t know how well Cain do from here on out, or even whether his candidacy is a good idea, but a half-hour after noon last Saturday was still a very fine moment.

Similitude

2011-05-19T07:01:00.003-04:00

Via the Blogfaddah, this long account in Time of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's long history of bad behavior:

Strauss-Kahn may have been abetted by the fact that most of his so-called conquests involved ideological fellow travelers — as was reflected by the Banon case. Says the French lawyer who asked not to be named: "My clients and other women I've been contacted by with reports of sexual aggression by Strauss-Kahn were all either Socialist Party members, supporters, or involved in wider leftist political activity that eventually brought them into contact with Strauss-Kahn. He has said he loves women, but it seems more accurate to say he loves Socialist women. I suppose he viewed that milieu as providing his supply of new women, and as one where women who caught his eye would either be compliant, or keep quiet about having to fight off his advances. Either way, there are a lot more women — and men — in Socialists circles who know about his activity than have ever said so."

The next sentence of the Time piece has a French "diversity" expert saying,

"If I try transposing the situation in New York on Sunday to France, I just can't do it," says Diallo. "Not only because the woman is black and apparently an immigrant. But also because she's a housekeeper. Perhaps even more than her race, her station in society would probably prevent authorities [in France] from taking her accusations against a rich and powerful man seriously. Racism is on the rise here again, but class discrimination has never gone away."

Well. I won't presume to opine on the state of French social mores, but here's a thought experiment for you: In the first paragraph quoted above, replace the words "Strauss-Kahn" with "Ted Kennedy," and the word "Socialist" with "Democrat."

Now it isn't so hard to imagine such things happening in New York... or Chappaquidick... or Washington, D.C., is it?

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg kindly quotes the above in his syndicated column today.

Buy Pitchfork Futures

2011-05-11T15:40:00.002-04:00

Ugly news from Ireland:

The Irish government plans to institute a tax on private pensions to drive jobs growth, according to its jobs program strategy, delivered today.

Without the ability sell debt due to soaring interest rates, and with severe spending rules in place due to its EU-IMF bailout, Ireland has few ways of spending to stimulate the economy. Today's jobs program includes specific tax increases, including the tax on pensions, aimed at keeping government jobs spending from adding to the national debt.

The tax on private pensions will be 0.6%, and last for four years, according to the report.

Lovely. Raiding citizens' savings to pay for a "jobs program." That's not just robbing Peter to pay Paul, that's ripping off Peter's grandma to give Paul a bar of genuine iron pyrite.

Worse news, at least from an American's viewpoint: Barack Obama is visiting Ireland this month.

Further investment advice: boost your holdings in tar and feathers manufacturers while you're at it...

Life Imitates The Wire

2011-05-10T14:44:00.002-04:00

From today's AJC:

Public safety advocates are condemning Atlanta Police Chief George Turner's ouster of an officer they credit with restoring confidence in the police in their neighborhoods.

Turner booted Major Khirus Williams as top cop in the zone that includes Midtown last week after Williams told neighborhood leaders about a proposal to eliminate foot and cycle patrols and to instead put the officers in squad cars. The proposal had not been made public when Williams alerted neighborhood leaders.

Those same leaders are now questioning if Turner is more concerned about keeping subordinates in line than he is about having quality commanders. They also question Turner's commitment to community policing, a strategy in which cops work closely with the community. They credit it for last year's 16-percent drop in crime in Zone 5, which stretches from downtown to Atlantic Station.

[snip]

Leaders from Midtown, Home Park, the Old Fourth Ward and other neighborhoods plan to converge on the Atlanta City Council's public-safety committee Tuesday afternoon to protest Turner's decision to remove Williams as major in command of Zone 5 and demote him to lieutenant. Williams said he is retiring Wednesday rather than accept the re-assignment.

Commissioner Burrell, Major Colvin, please call dispatch...

Last Fair Deal Gone Down

2011-05-10T07:22:00.000-04:00

Nice piece here about the centennial of blues godfather Robert Johnson, who would have turned 100 last Sunday. According to legend, Johnson got his licks thanks to a deal with the devil, but in reality, his teacher was a man from tiny Grady, Alabama, which is also my dad's hometown:

LaVere credits Johnson's talent not to a soul-selling crossroads deal, but to a self-imposed apprenticeship under another little-known musician, Ike Zimmerman.

"Ike showed him how to play and Ike was a studied musician. They used to spend all night knees to knees, and Ike would teach him how to sing and present himself," LaVere said. "He left the blues early on and became a sanctified preacher and died in Los Angeles in 1965."

Johnny Shines, a contemporary and friend of Johnson's is quoted in the article. Shines, who passed away in 1992, had a much longer life than Johnson, and performed well into his seventies. He often played on Sundays at the War Eagle Supper Club when I was in college. If you never got to see him, you really missed something; he was one of the last living links to the origins of the blues.

New at PJM: Gas Jumps In A Flash

2011-04-26T07:25:00.001-04:00

I have a new column up at Pajamas Media... here's a preview:

Obama and his minions have been chasing the green jobs chimera for so long that it’s an instinct. They pompously suggest that Americans ought to trade in their current vehicles for pricey, government-approved matchbox cars, asserting still that there’s “no quick fix” for high energy prices. History, and very recent history at that, indicates that they are mistaken.

Take a look at this chart compiled by metalprices.com. It’s the price of a barrel of crude oil over the past 5 years.

See that big peak in the middle? That was the last oil spike, in the summer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterwards?

The day corresponding to that peak, an all-time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coincidence, that was the very same day then-President George W. Bush lifted, by executive order, a federal ban on offshore oil drilling.

Bush’s order was, of course, immediately dismissed by the “experts.” Reuters waved away the action as “a largely symbolic move unlikely to have any short-term impact on high gasoline costs.” Barack Obama’s campaign lectured that if “offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.”

The movement left was even more dismissive. ClimateProgress.org blasted The Washington Post for failing to headline their story about the order “Offshore Drilling Raises Oil Prices.” In response to Bush’s assertion that additional offshore extraction could equal current U.S. production in 10 years, they editorialized: “Yes, and monkeys could fly out of my butt” (emphasis in original).

There was just one problem: reality. Even though, as critcs were eager to point out, any additional American drilling was years in the future, oil prices immediately went into free-fall. By Friday, July 18, the price of a barrel of crude had dropped to $128.94, a 12% decrease. A month later, on August 14, the price had fallen to $115.05. In spectacular fashion, Bush’s academic and media critics were proven seriously wrong.

Here's the rest.

Heh

2011-04-25T10:31:00.000-04:00

When I read this one-liner at Instapundit today...

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Will The Khan Academy Knock Out The University Degree?

... I immediately got a mental image of university presidents from coast to coast doing this.

Nobel Ignorance

2011-04-04T13:24:00.000-04:00

From today's WaPo (H/T to Jim Geraghty):

On May 10, President Obama ordered his Nobel Prize-winning secretary of energy, Steven Chu, to dive into the response. Two days later, Chu showed up at BP headquarters with a hand-picked team of advisers, most of whom had limited experience with petroleum engineering. (Chu, a physicist, had won his Nobel for figuring out how to freeze atoms with lasers.)

BP executives were not thrilled to see the scientists march through the door. It looked to the company as though the administration had said, “Where are our experts?” and then rounded up anyone who did not flinch at the sight of a differential equation. Science, engineering, it was all the same. The Obama folks were obviously in love with the idea of Chu — this notion of having an in-house Nobel Prize winner who could be dispatched, superhero-like, to solve intractable problems with the power of his giant brain.

It says quite a lot about the Obama Administration--and Barack Obama in particular--that nobody in the White House understood the difference between a scientist and an engineer. It's not at all surprising that these guys (and gals) think they can solve any problem by waving credentials at it ('Guy's got a Nobel Prize! So what if it's in a completely unrelated field?'), but even so, it's disheartening.

Learning what you don't know is one of the most important lessons of adulthood (to say nothing of engineering). Shame that all these allegedly-brilliant lawyers still haven't figured that out.

Oh, Great

2011-03-20T15:29:00.002-04:00

AT&T announces it will purchase T-Mobile.

Wonderful news. The Death Star needs less competition about like Charlie Sheen needs more press coverage.

What He Said

2011-03-10T10:57:00.001-05:00

J-Pod, on Newt Gingrich:

I’d spend some time parsing this, seeking to show how he simultaneously takes responsibility and doesn’t take responsibility and how he actually praises himself when he’s supposedly criticizing himself. But what’s the point? He’s a fascinating, and occasionally brilliant, political thinker, but one thing the merciful and forgiving God who has so blessed him did not bestow upon Newt Gingrich was a sense of when to stop talking.

Podhoretz's headline, and eminently good advice: "Memo to Newt Gingrich: Seriously, Don’t Even Bother Running."

Tanker Anecdote

2011-02-24T18:05:00.004-05:00

Disclaimer: I don't have a dog in the seemingly-endless Boeing/EADS tanker battle. I am very happy to report that I don't work for any of the various companies that have been competing for that next-generation tanker contract for what seems like decades now. That said, I did want to pass along this true story from the relatively-early days of KC-X.

Several years back, before the original Air Force tanker contract winner was announced (EADS, with the senior partner being France's Airbus), an exceptionally senior Air Force official made the following observations--paraphrased from memory here--one afternoon in a squadron bar:

"Here's what's gonna happen: Airbus is gonna win. Boeing's bid is way out of bed. They think it's a slam-dunk, and they got greedy, and what's worse, they were lucky they were even allowed to bid after Darleen Druyun. So they're gonna lose . And then everybody will freak out because the prime isn't an American company, so there'll be a s**t-storm in Congress, and there'll be a challenge, and the contract will get tossed out. Then we'll start over, and go through all this again, and it'll be set up for Boeing this time, and they'll win.

"And then it'll be six or seven years later, and we still won't have any tankers, and the ones we do finally buy will cost twice as much."

Those long-ago predictions have been correct all the way down the line. The latest: Boeing officially won the re-compete today.

Hell Of A Way To Run A Railroad

2011-02-14T15:18:00.000-05:00

Robert Samuelson absolutely demolishes the alleged case for "high speed rail" today. Here's a sample, but read the whole thing:

Rail buffs argue that subsidies for passenger service simply offset the huge government support of highways and airways. The subsidies "level the playing field." Wrong. In 2004, the Department of Transportation evaluated federal transportation subsidies for the period 1990-2002. It found passenger rail service had the highest subsidy ($186.35 per thousand passenger-miles) followed by mass transit ($118.26 per thousand miles). By contrast, drivers received no net subsidy; their fuel taxes more than covered federal spending. Subsidies for airline passengers were about $5 per thousand miles traveled. (All figures are in inflation-adjusted year 2000 dollars.)

...

Governing ought to be about making wise choices. What's disheartening about the Obama administration's embrace of high-speed rail is that it ignores history, evidence and logic. The case against it is overwhelming. The case in favor rests on fashionable platitudes. High-speed rail is not an "investment in the future"; it's mostly a waste of money. Good government can't solve all our problems, but it can at least not make them worse.

"Because Joe Biden likes taking the train" is not a good reason to spend billions. Forget new expenditures for mythical "high-speed" trains for imaginary passengers who don't want to ride in them; Amtrak's outrageous subsidies need to be redirected to the path of the dodo.

Nostalgia is not a budget priority in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Passenger rail's day had long since come and gone. It's long past time to send the passenger cars that can't pay for themselves--meaning just about all of them--to the scrapyard.

"Comandante Eternal" For Kindle

2011-01-17T07:58:00.004-05:00

Over last weekend, the indefatigable Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit and The Blogfaddah) ran a number of posts related in part to the growth of electronic publishing for fiction writers. In particular, Glenn interviewed author Sarah Hoyt for PJTV, and Hoyt later expanded on her e-publishing experience on her own blog and at Classical Values. You can also click here for an archive of Hoyt's posts at CV, the more recent of which are mostly dedicated to writing and e-publishing.

It all made for interesting reading, and got me to asking myself, "Self, what have you got to lose? Why don't you give this a try?" So a few minutes later, I was on Amazon's upload site for Kindle books, checking out how it all works.

The Amazon e-publishing site is straightforward: if you have a regular old Amazon customer account, you can publish. That's a bit of a simplification; you need to have something to publish, and you really need to convert that something to HTML format before uploading (which can be a bit tricky in terms of page formatting), but it's not unbearably convoluted. My biggest complaint is that any change to a book's sales page (say, if you want to raise or drop the price) entails a 24-hour wait while the changes are "published" to Amazon's massive database. That's annoying, especially when you think you're done and have pushed the "publish" button, but then notice one little thing you forgot to tweak.

But at any rate, I've now got a Kindle "book"--actually a 33-page short story--titled "Comandante Eternal" up for sale at the low, low price of 99 cents. I'm still trying to get some artwork nailed down and posted on the ad (inevitably, that will add another 24 hours or "publishing"), but as far as I can tell "Comandante" is available for the Kindle right now. You don't have to have a physical Kindle device to read it; Amazon has free PC/Mac Kindle reader software, and free Kindle apps are available for smartphones as well.

So what's "Comandante Eternal"? Little thing I put together a couple of years ago, involving a certain bearded, dying island dictator and his rather nasty plan to gain eternal life. There's just one catch: if it works, he'll only be able to, er, dictate at night.

Hope you enjoy it.

People Power

2011-01-06T10:55:00.001-05:00

Outstanding Atlantic piece here by Tim Kane about the self-defeating nature of the U.S. military's promotion and personnel management systems:

65 percent of the [West Point] graduates agreed that the exit rate of the best officers leads to a less competent general-officer corps. Seventy-eight percent agreed that it harms national security.

The shame of this loss of talent is that the U.S. military does such a good job attracting and training great leaders. The men and women who volunteer as military officers learn to remain calm and think quickly under intense pressure. They are comfortable making command decisions, working in teams, and motivating people. Such skills translate powerfully to the private sector, particularly business: male military officers are almost three times as likely as other American men to become CEOs, according to a 2006 Korn/Ferry International study. Examples abound of senior executives who attribute their leadership skills to their time in uniform: Ross Perot, Bill Coleman, Fred Smith, and Bob McDonald, the new CEO of Procter & Gamble, to name a few. The business guru Warren Bennis reflected in his recent memoirs, “I never heard anything at MIT or Harvard that topped the best lectures I heard at [Fort] Benning.”

Why is the military so bad at retaining these people? It’s convenient to believe that top officers simply have more- lucrative opportunities in the private sector, and that their departures are inevitable. But the reason overwhelmingly cited by veterans and active-duty officers alike is that the military personnel system—every aspect of it—is nearly blind to merit. Performance evaluations emphasize a zero-defect mentality, meaning that risk-avoidance trickles down the chain of command. Promotions can be anticipated almost to the day— regardless of an officer’s competence—so that there is essentially no difference in rank among officers the same age, even after 15 years of service. Job assignments are managed by a faceless, centralized bureaucracy that keeps everyone guessing where they might be shipped next.

Having worked for and around the Air Force since the early 90's, my experience indicates that Kane's analysis is dead on. It is standard for, say, a bright young lieutenant/captain to spend three years learning his job as an engineer, only to be shipped across the country and assigned to push paper in an acquisition office, or for a pilot with thousands of flight hours to leave the service before retirement for an airline job, rather than be reassigned as a staff toad in the Pentagon. Surely there's a smarter way to run a railroad than this, and Kane has some excellent suggestions.

Read the whole thing. H/T: The Blogfaddah.

General Tso's Raptor

2011-01-05T11:09:00.001-05:00

The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, among many other places, has leaked photos of the prototype Chinese J-20 fighter. Check it out:

A Festivus-Eve Suggestion For Congress

2010-12-22T16:23:00.001-05:00

The Shape Of Things To Come

2010-12-17T06:40:00.001-05:00

From last night:

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) says he is “sorry and disappointed” to announce that he does not have the votes for the omnibus spending package. Instead, he will work with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to draft a temporary continuing resolution to fund the government into early next year.

Reid says nine Republican senators approached him today to tell him that while they would like to see the bill passed, they could not vote for it. He did not reveal the names of the nine. A top Senate source tells National Review Online that “it looks like Harry Reid buckled under the threat of Republicans reading [the bill] aloud.”

The Year They Turned Off Niagra Falls

2010-12-16T07:10:00.000-05:00

A very cool story here from (of all places) the UK Daily Mail, complete with vintage photos and even video:

It's taken 41 years, but a previously unseen set of photos of the mighty Niagara Falls reduced to nothing more than a barren cliff-top have finally surfaced.

The stark images reveal North America's iconic - and most powerful - waterfall to be almost as dry as a desert.

In June 1969, U.S. engineers diverted the flow of the Niagara River away from the American side of the falls for several months.

Their plan was to remove the large amount of loose rock from the base of the waterfall, an idea which they eventually abandoned due to expense in November of that year.

During the interim, they studied the riverbed and mechanically bolted and strengthened a number of faults to delay the gradual erosion of the American Falls.

The team, made up of U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, blew up their temporary dam in November 1969 and six million cubic feet of water once again thundered over the falls' sides every minute.

Now, after lying unseen for more than four decades, a set of images showing the eerie calm at the American Falls that year have been unearthed by a man from Connecticut.

Check it out.

News Flash: Overpaying For "Elite" Status Is Stupid

2010-12-02T10:45:00.001-05:00

From the NYT:

The key to success in college and beyond has more to do with what students do with their time during college than where they choose to attend. A long-term study of 6,335 college graduates published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that graduating from a college where entering students have higher SAT scores -- one marker of elite colleges -- didn't pay off in higher post-graduation income. Researchers found that students who applied to several elite schools but didn't attend them -- either because of rejection or by their own choice -- are more likely to earn high incomes later than students who actually attended elite schools.

In a summary of the findings, the bureau says that "evidently, students' motivation, ambition and desire to learn have a much stronger effect on their subsequent success than average academic ability of their classmates.”

In the spirit of the holidays, please, nobody tell Anne Applebaum. This news would do terrible things to her self-esteem.

Priorities

2010-11-29T12:39:00.005-05:00

What does it say about the Obama Administration when two WikiLeaks dumps of classified Department of Defense operational documents rated little more than a shrug, but a similar leak of State Department documents--many of them important no doubt, but many more consisting of glorified gossip--resulted in outrage and calls for prosecutions?

Answer: nothing good. There are a lot more people in the DOD who are in personal danger thanks to WikiLeaks than there ever will be at State.

I Got The News

2010-11-09T07:24:00.001-05:00

The WSJ catches up today with something I noticed a week ago:

On paper, the numbers tell you the Democrats held on to a majority in the Senate last week.

In reality, things won't be quite that neat. In fact, on some issues the Republicans actually may have a functional majority, given the sentiments likely to prevail among certain Democrats who face the voters in two years.

On paper, Democrats kept control of the Senate after the elections. But in reality, Republican leader Mitch McConnell actually may have the functional majority on some issues. WSJ's Jerry Seib explains.

Here's the situation. After last week's midterm election, the Senate next year will have 51 Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and 47 Republicans. (The Republican from Alaska could be either Joe Miller, the tea-party candidate who was the official GOP nominee, or write-in incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. It appears Ms. Murkowski got enough votes to stick around, but all her write-in votes haven't been counted yet.)

So, in theory, that means Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, having survived his own election-day near-death experience, should be able to muster 53 votes if he keeps his troops in line.

But life is never that simple in the Senate and certainly won't be now. Among the Senate Democrats, 23 will face re-election in just two years, and, having just witnessed the drubbing some in their party took at the polls, they likely will be even less willing now to toe the party line. Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who caucuses with Democrats, often leans rightward, anyway.

Advantate: Me.

Free Keith Olbermann

2010-11-05T16:15:00.000-04:00

MSNBC has suspended Keith Olbermann, "indefinitely and without pay," after Politico reported that Olbermann donated money to several Democratic candidates in the last election.

This is completely bogus.

Don't get me wrong, I've got no use for Olby, and I'll shed no tears when his clown act finally shuffles off the air for lack of viewers. But NBC's stance that its employees ought to be removed from participating in electoral politics out of an antiquated notion of "journalistic independence" is, as I wrote in a similar vein six years ago, nonsense on stilts.

Olbermann, like any other American, ought to be able to donate to and support anybody he damn well pleases. The only thing I'd ask of him is that he disclose his donations when talking about those candidates or their opponents (which, in this case, he apparently didn't do, but still).

I suppose if NBC wants to discipline an employee for violation of their corporate rules, that's their business. But that doesn't change the fact that the rules in question are at best nonsense and at worst obfuscatory. This rule is in effect, in my opinion, not to protect the chimera of unbiased reporting, but rather the notion that people in the news media ought to actively hide their personal opinions from the populace.

That's a reprehensible and dishonest stance. I'll take an Olbermann who's up front about where he's coming from over a fraud like Katie Couric any day of the week--although I reserve the right to watch neither of them.

So get over yourselves, NBC suits. Free Keith Olbermann.

New at PJM: Not So Fast, My Friend

2010-11-04T13:01:00.002-04:00

I have a new column up at PJM today (yes, really), here's a preview:

Of the 21 (!) incumbent Democrats in 2012, nine are in deep-blue “safe” states and their seats are likely to remain Democrat even in the case of retirements (Feinstein-CA and Akaka-HI lead that potential list). Four more are in normally Democratic states that shifted to the GOP in the 2010 cycle — Stabenow-MI, Klobuchar-MN, Menendez-NJ and Bingaman-NM — and as such could be considered as possible takeover targets. Assuming Herb Kohl (who will be 77 in 2012) retires, you can likely add an open seat in Wisconsin to that count — but realistically, those seats would only be in danger of flipping in a really big GOP year.

I count seven incumbent Democratic senators up for re-election in 2012 who are, today, in serious trouble: Nelson-FL, McCaskill-MO, Tester-MT, Nelson-NB, Conrad-ND, Brown-OH and Webb-VA. Most if not all of the above, if they had been on the ballot Tuesday, would probably have lost to a GOP opponent — and they know it.

You can also add to the deep-trouble list the newest senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who eked out a special election win this week only by doing a fair imitation of Ted Nugent. Manchin will be back on the ballot in 2012, and running as hard to the right as he can manage in the interim.

What’s interesting here is not so much a long-term prediction for 2012. The political ground will, of course, shift between now and then in ways that no one can anticipate. If the last four election cycles have proven anything, it’s that one who makes long-term predictions based on a single election is liable to look very foolish sooner or later.

But don’t consider 2012 yet, simply consider 2011 and what’s just happened in 2010. If you are one of those eight Democratic senators, how will you react the first time Harry Reid wants your vote on an issue your state’s majority can’t stand? Would you be willing to take the chance of following Blanche Lincoln and Russ Feingold — plus Evan Bayh and Byron Dorgan, who jumped before they could be pushed — right (or more accurately, left) off the cliff?

Click through for the rest.

It's The Great Election, Charlie Brown!

2010-11-03T15:22:00.002-04:00

"I got a cool new gavel!"

"I got a mandate to cut spending!"

"I got a rock."

"I got a bunch of new conservative senators, and a bunch of vulnerable Democrats to pick off!"

"I got to keep my old job!"

"I got a rock."

"I got a ton of new conservative Republicans elected and major clout!"

"I got a rock."

"I got subpoena power!"

"I got a whole bunch of new friends on the way!"

"I got a rock."

Election Eve "Name That Party!"

2010-11-01T14:12:00.002-04:00

From the AP:

MOUNT AIRY, N.C. -- A candidate for a state House seat in northwestern North Carolina apologized Monday to supporters after he was arrested twice over the weekend and accused of impaired driving.

Randy Wolfe, 58, was released on a $10,000 secured bond Sunday night after a Mount Airy police report said his blood alcohol content was 0.20 percent, or more than twice the 0.08 percent that state law defines as intoxicated. He was blowing the horn on his sports utility vehicle excessively in traffic and later charged with driving while impaired, resisting a police officer and driving with a revoked license, the report said.

Wolfe also had been stopped Saturday evening when an officer saw his car weaving on the road, according to police. He was charged with driving while impaired and driving left of center and released on a written promise to appear.

The story, naturally, never names Wolfe's party (he's a Democrat--please, contain your surprise), except, as below, by implication:

Wolfe, a former producer for the CBS Evening News who recently moved to Surry County, said Monday he turned off his campaign web site Monday morning but hadn't withdrawn from Tuesday's election against Republican Rep. Sarah Stevens.

Hey, it's possible you'd think the guy was a Liberterian... until you read the CBS News part, of course.

"Shovel Ready!"

2010-10-13T13:05:00.003-04:00

Lovely:

The Pasadena City Council on Monday approved a $152 million renovation plan for the 88-year-old Rose Bowl stadium.
...
The number of luxury seats will be increased from about 550 to 2,500. The site of the annual Rose Bowl game also will get a new scoreboard, safety improvements, more restrooms and more concession stands.

The city plans to pay for the upgrade with federal stimulus funds, a bond issue, money from the Tournament of Roses and profits from previous games.

You'd think they'd send taxpayers free tickets to next year's game, wouldn't you?

If so, you'd be wrong. Suckers!

Sabotage Or Incompetence? Can Iran Tell The Difference?

2010-10-13T10:38:00.001-04:00

Fascinating Asia Times column today from David Goldman (nee Spengler) regarding the recent reports of malware disrupting Iran's nuclear program:

Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran's most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens' industrial control code to plant malware in Iran's nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. The information technology apocalypse that the West feared on Y2K (the year 2000) is a real possibility.
...
A country that steals its software cannot build its own, even if the sort of individual who excels at software development wanted to live in Iran. Most of those who can, leave. A 2002 study reported that four out of five Iranians who received rewards in international science competitions subsequently left Iran; too few Iranians have won international awards since then to gather comparable data. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund noted that Iran had the worst brain drain of 90 countries surveyed.

Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange.

Read the whole thing.

Applebaum Redux

2010-10-13T10:03:00.009-04:00

Anne Applebaum has responded to Jonah Goldberg's critique of her Tuesday column by... well, by repeating her points from that column. It's a poor effort, and Applebaum doesn't actually bother to rebut or respond to Jonah's points.

Worse, Applebaum insists on reinforcing her errant implication that degrees from the Ivy League (and the Ivy League alone) represent intellect and merit in American society, and entirely ignores Jonah's point that this stance leads directly to the attitude that the rest of us should shut up and do as we're told when our Ivy-credentialed betters speak. That capable and intelligent Americans might not choose to attend six-figure-tuition snob factories apparently hasn't even entered her mind, and she certainly hasn't considered the thought that an Ivy degree is no guarantee of competence.

I'm willing to bet that the executive suites at AIG and Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the time of their respective failures were chock-full of Ivy graduates. Fat lot of good that did them.

UPDATE: Jonah responds.

Cracked Peanut

2010-10-12T08:32:00.000-04:00

Joe Queenan had a marvelous review of Jimmy Carter's "White House Diary" over the weekend in the WSJ. A sample:

In November 1980, the American people made a disastrous decision whose reverberations are still being felt today. Rather than biting the bullet and re-electing the glum, uncharismatic, hopeless Jimmy Carter to the White House—thereby ensuring that he would return to Plains, Ga., at the conclusion of his second term and keep his blabberpuss shut—they turfed him out into the street.

That made him mad. Really mad. By giving one of America's dopiest presidents the bum's rush, the American people ensured that Mr. Carter would spend the rest of his life trying to even the score, trying to persuade them that they had made a huge mistake when they cast their lot with Ronald Reagan, trying to convince them that they were a bunch of jerks.

The particular form of retribution Carter chose was as sinister and cruel as any known to man. He took his pen in hand and began to write books. Long books. Boring books. Dour books. Yes, long, boring, dour, numerous books. Books with sanctimonious names like "Keeping Faith" and "Living Faith" and "Leading a Worthy Life." Books with pompous names like "Turning Point," "Our Endangered Values" and "Always a Reckoning." Books with hokey names like "Christmas in Plains" and "Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life." And yes, even books with names like "The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer" that defy classification.

He has not set his pen down since.

Read the whole thing. H/T: Powerline.

A Foolish Column From Anne Applebaum

2010-10-12T08:01:00.003-04:00

I'm generally a fan of Anne Applebaum's work--she's one of the few national media writers who's willing to honestly state just how bad Soviet Communism really was--but she really laid an egg with her WaPo column today. It's a convoluted defense of David Brooks' infamous "educated class" (although Applebaum mentions neither Brooks nor his unfortunate phrasing), i.e. graduates of Ivy League colleges:

[T]hese modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility, by many Americans. On the contrary -- and as [sociologist Daniel] Bell might have predicted -- they are resented as "elitist." Which is at some level strange: To study hard, to do well, to improve yourself -- isn't that the American dream? The backlash against graduates of "elite" universities seems particularly odd given that the most elite American universities have in the past two decades made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies.

The rest of the column is an encomium to the wonders of Ivy alumni (I bet you can't guess where Applebaum went to college) and the perfidy of the little people who resent them.

It's a deeply foolish and self-serving piece. Applebaum's pricey Yale education apparently didn't include any introductory courses in logic; her entire thesis proceeds from the false assumption that to be an intelligent person on the continent, one must by definition have gone to an Ivy school. Applebaum's lazy and (yes) elitist conceit that the 'best and brightest' are the sole property of a dozen or so expensive Northeastern colleges goes beyond elitism or snobbery and very nearly into the realm of flat bigotry.

The idea that anyone with a functioning brain might have willingly chosen not to attend an 'elite' private college with six-figure tuition just doesn't occur to her. One is moved to suppose that such a notion would be entirely too shattering to her own sense of self-worth.

At times like this it's worth recalling Megan McArdle's observation from the early fall of 2008. Megan was speaking at the time of decidedly non-Ivy Sarah Palin, but her point carries through to Applebaum's snide dismissal of today's Tea Partiers:

[She] speaks to the sense of people who didn't go to Ivy League schools that Harvard grads think they're not quite bright, and definitely not competent to run their own lives without a Yale man supervising things. And they're entirely right that a lot of Ivy League grads do think this way, consciously or unconsciously.

… I may not like what she stands for, but I have to acknowledge its power--and yes, that frequently, the coastal elites earn the revulsion of Middle America. They don't, to coin a phrase, hate us for our freedoms--our homosexual coddling, abortion loving ways. They hate us because we act like we think we deserve to rule them.

Apparently Applebaum suffers from precisely this delusion. That's a shame--and the shame is hers.

UPDATE: Jonah concurs.

UPDATE UPDATE: Applebaum responds... poorly.

Happy Tymes Are Over in Alabama

2010-10-04T12:25:00.005-04:00

From al.com:

FBI agents swept across Alabama this morning arresting state lawmakers and lobbyists as part of a federal probe into efforts to pass gambling legislation last spring.

The biggest name arrested so far has been VictoryLand owner Milton McGregor, who was arrested at his Montgomery home this morning.

Also arrested today have been state senators Jim Preuitt, R-Talladega, Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, Larry Means, D-Attalla, Harri Anne Smith, I-Slocomb and Montgomery lobbyist Jerrod Massey.

I've known Milton McGregor since I was a kid, although it's been a good 20 years since I've so much as laid eyes on him. Back in the late 70's and early 80's, he ran a vending machine business in my hometown of Enterprise.

Around 1982, Milton cashed in on the early 80's video game fad by opening the town's only video arcade, a little strip mall joint called "Happy Tymes." For about three years, it was hands-down the number-one hangout for anybody in 'Weeviltown' between the ages of 10 and 20.

That taste for "gaming" might have been what led Milton to become the public face of Victoryland, a dog track in east-central Alabama, when the track was first developed about 25 years ago. McGregor was brought in as a junior partner to Alabama's real gambling godfather, one Paul Bryant, Jr.

"Cub" Bryant did not then and does not now like to be identified with gambling--the foundation of his personal wealth--in the media. The garrulous McGregor was a perfect foil. Milton loved the limelight, and quickly became the face of the state dog tracks, and later the moves towards turning them into full-on casinos--which, as of this writing, are still illegal under Alabama law.

His work paid off, and handsomely. After Victoryland opened, McGregor became fabulously rich in his own right, and has been playing the game of Alabama politics with the big boys for a couple of decades now. Unfortunately, that game has been as corrupt as any in the nation for quite a bit longer than I've been alive, and it looks like the law may finally have caught up with Milton, as well as a whole bunch of dirty politicians.

Alabama's beyond-dirty legislature has needed a thorough defumigation for most of its sordid history. Here's to hoping that today's arrests mark the first influx of disinfectant.

Headline Of The Day

2010-10-04T08:08:00.000-04:00

From the Orlando Sentinel:

"Florida man trying to shoo skunk accidentally shoots himself in face."

Insert your own Alan Grayson joke here.

Dang.

2010-10-01T14:02:00.001-04:00

CNN: "To say Allred, 69, is well-known is an understatement."

Ann Althouse: "To say CNN is a news organization is an overstatement."

H/T: Blogfaddah.

Playing Partisan at Politico

2010-09-28T10:12:00.003-04:00

While chuckling over a Politico story about James Sensenbrenner's intention to take over the House "global warming" committee and turn its investigative cannons around by 180 degrees, I ran across this tidbit:

Sensenbrenner’s remarks foretell a power struggle among top Republicans primed to lead other investigatory committees, namely, Rep. Darrell Issa, the media-hungry Californian who would like to comb through Obama’s policies as chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Well, now. I thought to myself, "Self, I wonder if Politico has ever referred to Democratic politicians as 'media-hungry.'" So I went to Google, and searched politico.com for "Henry Waxman" and "media-hungry". The result was a single link, to an opinion column in which "media-hungry" refers to (wait for it) Levi Johnson.

Could be a coincidence, though. Let's try another infamous Democratic camera-hound, Chuckie Schumer:

Your search - "Charles Schumer media-hungry" site:politico.com - did not match any documents.

Please feel free to try your own selections. I doubt you'll turn much up, though. A search on "Democrat" and "media-hungry" at politico.com turns up zero references to actual media-hungry Democrats; most of the references are to one John McCain.

NOTE: Blogger doesn't seem to want to correctly link the Google searches referenced above, so here are the links written out, if you care to cut-and-paste:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q="Henry+Waxman"+and+"media-hungry"+site%3Apolitico.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q="Charles+Schumer"+and+"media-hungry"+site%3Apolitico.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q="Democrat"+and+"media-hungry"+site%3Apolitico.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Na na na na, na na na na...

2010-09-24T11:34:00.008-04:00

Jonahthan Klein, CNN's president of U.S. operations and in 2004, the originator of the infamous line, "It's an important moment, because you couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks," has finally been canned.

(Klein's famous "pajamas" sneer was, of course, in defense of Dan Rather's fake-documents hit piece; Klein is also a former CBS executive.)

Given the gross mismanagement that led to now-barely-watched CNN's precipitous plunge into irrelevance, the only wonder is that it took this long for Klein to get the boot.

But hey, Jon--if you're hard up, drop me a line. I do have some contacts at Pajamas Media.

UPDATE: In full gloat mode (not that there's anything wrong with that!) from his new perch at Newsweek, Mickey Kaus observes, "The pajamists won that battle, and now they've won the war."

UPDATE UPDATE: Man, talk about a short honeymoon. Mickey's first commenter says, "I don't understand your problem with opinion-driven journalism, Newsweek had been at the forefront of that movement for over 20 years. Newsweek is a paper blog, with few visitors."

I mean, ouch.

Do I Amuse You?

2010-09-23T13:08:00.000-04:00

GQ has a long, outstanding interview with the cast and crew of Goodfellas, celebrating the twenty year anniversary of the movie's release. Among many, many great bits, there's this revelation that many of the extras and bit parts were, um, typecast:

[Writer Nicholas] Pileggi: We'd put the word out [to the Mob guys]: "Anybody who wants to be in the movie, come." [Director Martin Scorsese] must have hired like half a dozen guys, maybe more, out of the joint.

[Ray] Liotta: During dessert, it was like they started auditioning. "I knew a guy who beat somebody up." "I knew a guy who stole this, who stole that." They seemed to be talking about themselves, and they kept topping each other.

Ellen Lewis (casting director): We were told I could consider some of them for the film, but others were a little too hot to be considered: "That guy can't be in front of a camera." It was actually the least likely-looking guys.

Pileggi: Warner Bros. now had to put them on the payroll, and they wanted their Social Security numbers. The wiseguys said, "1,2,6, uh, 6,7,8, uh, 4,3,2,1,7,8—" "No, that's more numbers than you need!" They just kept reciting numbers until they were over. Nobody ever figured out where that money went or who cashed the checks.

It's ten pages long, but if you've ever seen the movie, I dare you not to read the whole thing.

Crushing Of Dissent at UGA

2010-09-23T08:10:00.005-04:00

This dustup at the University of Georgia has to be the lamest thing I've come across in months:

When student Jacob Lovell submitted an email to the UGA Parking Services, he was then threatened with charges of “disorderly conduct” and “disruption” by the associate dean of students, Kimberly Ellis.

“Specifically, it is alleged that Mr. Lovell engaged in disorderly conduct and disrupted parking services when he sent an email to them that was threatening.”

The email was sent to “parking@uga.edu,” which solicits comments from patrons “both positive and negative.”

Here’s the email he sent:

Subject: Scooter parking
Message: To: parking@uga.edu
From: [REDACTED]

Why isn’t there any scooter parking near Aderhold, according to your parking map? There’s like a billion places to park on north campus and over by the Georgia center, but nothing anywhere close to Aderhold. What the hell? Did you guys just throw darts at a map to decide where to put scooter corrals? Can I expect you guys to get off your asses and put in a corral near there some point before I [bleeping] graduate and/or the sun runs out of hydrogen?

Thanks for nothing, ever,

-J

To which the easily irked Parking@uga.edu replied:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: UGA Parking Services
Date: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: Your Parking Services Request – Case 000000000016711
To: [REDACTED]

Your e-mail was sent to student judiciary.

To which Lovell awesomely replied:

——— Forwarded message ———-
From: Jacob Lovell [REDACTED]
Date: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: Your Parking Services Request – Case 000000000016711
To: UGA Parking Services

So that’s a no?

J.P. Friere of the Washington Examiner called up Ellis to ask what the heck was going on here, and was told that Lovell must submit to a 'disciplinary appointment,' or he won't be allowed to register for future classes.

Lame. Lovell's email was obviously sophomoric--but then again, he's probably a sophomore.

Most large universities make tons of money off of overzealously-enforced parking tickets, and the administrators and campus cops really hate it when the deficiencies in their 'master parking plans' are pointed out. But they put out the feedback email address themselves, and don't have any business griping when they get genuine--and genuinely non-threatening--responses.

The only thing Lovell threatened with that email was some officious campus bureaucrat's ego. Georgia deserves to get a big black eye for this one.

UPDATE: Commenter "The Monk" notes that UGA backed down on disciplining Lovell last week, as laid out in this press release from FIRE that was released yesterday. I doubt very much that would have happened if Lovell hadn't gone to FIRE for help, and subesquently had this whole ridiculous affair publicized.

Bureaucrats, like cockroaches, hate daylight.

Heh™

2010-09-16T13:10:00.004-04:00

I clicked on this Slashdot story, titled "Why Are Terrorists Often Engineers?" entirely because I knew the humor content in the comments would be off the scale--at least if you're an engineer. Which, full disclosure, I am.

One of my faves is in answer to the (huffy) comment, "There are millions of engineers in this country that aren't going around blowing stuff up and killing people."

The reply: "right. that's management's job."

Also, "Just look at Faisal Shazad, the guy from Connecticut who tried to blow up Times Square. He tried to build his bomb with a toy clock and M80 firecrackers. He had a business degree."

Reply: "In all fairness, it was a very economical bomb."

There's plenty more really funny (as well as some insightful) stuff in there.

Broken Clock Chronicles: Chris Matthews

2010-09-16T11:29:00.003-04:00

I stopped watching Chris Matthews once he went all-in for Al Gore back in 2000. By all accounts since, Matthews reverted to his previous job as Tip O'Neill's chief of staff, and devolved into a full-on Democratic shill during MSNBC's descent into all-moonbattery-all-the-time.

But apparently even a shill can read the writing on the wall if the letters are large enough:

I have waited all my adult life for an election in which voters have the fire to reach up and burn those who have been running the show for decades. But I didn`t know it would come from the right and center.

2010 could be the first year in modern times when being in office in Washington and part of Washington is the worst possible credential when facing voters. I don't know how far the fire will burn. Based upon last night's returns, I expect it has a long way to go. It could topple the House and, yes, the U.S. Senate. It could bring the defeat of people who feel even now they are not endangered. It could produce an election night spectacle of name brand politicians standing before stance supporters saying their careers are kaput.

Why is this happening? Because this economic system is failing to produce the security and opportunity people have come to expect in this country. In this middle-class country, the middle class are scared and when people are scared, they get angry. They sense a rot at the top and are ready to chop it off.

If the plan of those in power to raise a ton of cash and run nasty TV ads saying you can`t vote for this new person, that he or she is flawed -- I expect the voter will say, "Are you telling me I have no choice but to vote for you? Are you saying that I, this little voter out there, dare not take a chance on someone who has not yet let me down as you have? If that is what you're telling me, that I have no choice, well, Mr. Big Stuff, you just have to wait -- stay up late election night and see what I have done."

Wow

2010-09-13T14:35:00.005-04:00

I freely admit that I haven't been paying much attention to the in-state campaigns here in Georgia. The GOP field in the governor's race struck me as all-around weak (I voted in the Democratic primary, just so I'll get to mark two ballots against "Representative" David Scott), and based on an apparently-endless supply of glowing reports from the local media, I'd figured ex-governor "King Roy" Barnes was going to ooze his way back into the mansion on West Paces Ferry in January.

Not so much, per this report:

Based on the poll, Republican gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal is set to block Democrat Roy Barnes' bid for a second run as governor with a margin of 49 percent to 38 percent.

I won't be shocked if Deal beats Barnes; the ex-gov burned plenty of bridges during his previous term--but an eleven-point margin is pretty stunning. Deal isn't a particularly strong candidate, and Barnes has him beat cold in money, name recognition and "pull" with a lot of big interests in Georgia (Barnes has the unions and trial lawyers in his pocket).

If King Roy can't even get within 10 points, Georgia is looking at a complete wipeout for the Democrats. The poll linked above has GOP candidates comfortably leading every statewide race. The only survivors will be pols with major double-digit-margin safe seats--and even some of them will be in big trouble come 2012, thanks to GOP-controlled redistricting.

H/T: Geraghty

It's Just The Age

2010-09-10T06:46:00.000-04:00

I think it's safe to say at this point--particularly after checking the headline on his Thursday column--that James Taranto is a Rush fan.

Circumstances, indeed...

Brave Old World

2010-09-07T09:15:00.000-04:00

While catching up on Ed Driscoll's ridiculously-prolific posting from over the weekend, I ran across this gem from CBS's Harry Smith, who asked in a guest-host stint on Sunday, "What about, say, something like a new WPA?"

I'm still waiting for somebody to notice that this suggestion, a favorite of the FDR Cargo Cultists, essentially calls for the government to break out of the recession by funding a lot of... manual labor.

Yeah, that's a great solution for a 21st Century economy. Let's get everybody out there digging some new ditches! That'll show the Chinese!

Hell, even in the Thirties it was a dumb idea. Mediot conventional-wisdom drones like Harry Smith haven't read enough history to know that outside of D.C., "WPA" was universally known at the time to stand for "We Piddle Around." Even in the midst of the Depression, Americans were smart enough to understand that make-work government jobs were good for a get-by paycheck, but not much else.

"Where Were You...?"

2010-09-02T13:37:00.002-04:00

After reading a brief blurb about NRO writer Yuval Levin's recent dissertation defense, I emailed the following story to Jonah Goldberg. Jonah liked it enough to post it to The Corner, here.

My dad is a dentist, and took the honors option in dental school, which entailed a final dissertation. The school (UAB medical) invited a group of distinguished professors from Tufts down to Birmingham to judge his dissertation. Well into the verbal defense, questioning from the Tufts profs had Dad and his research partner sweating things pretty hard, and according to Dad, they weren’t exactly sure whether they were going to get out of there with a passing grade.

Right at that moment, the door to the auditorium burst open. A student ran in, exclaiming, “Oh my God, oh my God, the President’s been killed!”

The date: November 22, 1963.

Complete chaos broke out; being from Boston, the visiting Tufts professors were even more stunned than everybody else. Dad and his partner stood there on the stage, wondering what the hell they were supposed to do next. Finally, one of the judges noticed them, yelled, “You passed!”, and led the rest of the Tufts contingent out of the room

100% true story. Dad is still practicing today.

The Catch

2010-08-31T14:20:00.005-04:00

Glenn links to an Ambrose Evans-Pritchard column in the U.K. Telegraph urging Obama to back large-scale research into thorium reactors:

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

Sounds good, and I'm all in favor of lots of small-scale nuclear reactors as electrical power sources. There's just one problem with Evans-Pritchard's stance, though:

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said.

Ah, incumbents with vast investments in old technology and deep hooks into the politicians. Evans-Pritchard rightly bemoans the thorium-blocking tactics of such incumbents in Europe.

But who's got the heart to break it to him that General Electric and GE employees are among Obama's lead campaign donors, with well over $3 million in donations to Democrats over the last two election cycles?

Petard? Check. Hoist? Check.

2010-08-30T09:59:00.002-04:00

The Blogfaddah is (correctly) fond of noting that he'll take jet-setting "Green" lefties seriously about global warming just as soon as he sees them taking it seriously in with their own behavior. In the same vein, I don't think anybody should be placing too much stock in economic or business advice coming from the Washington Post or Newsweek. Check out this tidbit, buried at the end of a Politico blurb regarding the WaPo Company's remaining profitable subsidiary:

In the last two fiscal years, The Washington Post Company’s newspaper division lost $356 million, while Kaplan’s higher education unit, not even counting its test prep business, posted a profit of $450 million.

I thought it was a big deal with Creative Loafing reported that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was losing $1 million a week. If the Politico story above is correct, the WaPo is losing about half a million dollars a day. That makes the AJC look like middling country cousins.

Rather delightfully, the Politico piece includes a quote from WaPo honcho Don Graham whining about the effects of Obama Administration regulations on the Kaplan division.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap...

Summation

2010-08-27T07:11:00.003-04:00

Rich Lowry:

In the last 20 months, Democrats have had the power to do almost everything they want, except command the allegiance of the public. That has made them and their allies feel embattled, isolated and perpetually aggrieved. They act like a forlorn minority at the same time they control every lever of elective power in Washington.
...

In the midst of a catastrophic loss of the middle, Obama's supporters exhort him to get more angry, insistent and ambitiously liberal. Having already pushed for a bridge too far, they want to go farther still. When they can't, they conclude it's a damning indictment of Obama's failure of nerve and the nation's ungovernablility.

There's little acknowledgment that the country is in a different place than they are. To the extent there is, so much worse for the country, which is condemned for its backwardness and intolerance. The majority is not just wrong on immigration enforcement and the Ground Zero mosque, it's contemptible. Who knew that the American public would get accused of bigotry more often after electing an African-American president than before?

As former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner writes, liberals "are expressing deepening alienation from our nation and turning on the American people with a vengeance." They thought they had a mandate from heaven in 2008 and can't bear the thought that they deluded themselves. They've gone from triumphalism to a petulant and uncomprehending tantrum in less than two years.

Charles Krauthammer:

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
...

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

Oh, I don't know. Insulting the electorate is always a dynamite tactic.

Branding The Maverick

2010-08-25T13:59:00.002-04:00

Oh my, I wish I'd written this. Yuval Levin at NRO:

McCain (who has raised and spent more money than any Senate candidate in this cycle, other than self-financed candidates) must be glad that none of the smug busybodies who have tried through the years to restrict political expression by preventing candidates for public office from raising enormous amounts of money and spending them on attack ads has succeeded.

As we say down South, "Dang."

Bottom Story Of The Day

2010-08-23T15:50:00.002-04:00

Per the NY Times, Chuck Hagel has endorsed Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania.

Please, try to contain your excitement.

Even the Times was obliged to note, "The currency of Mr. Hagel’s endorsement is an open question, given that he has no ties to Pennsylvania."

Who Are You, And What Did You Do With Barney Frank?

2010-08-18T08:41:00.000-04:00

From the "credit where it's due," or perhaps more appropriately, "better late than never" department, check out this account of a recent Fox Business interview with Frank:

"[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] should be abolished," Frank said in an interview on Fox Business, when asked whether the mortgage giants should be elements in housing market reform. "They only question is what do you put in their place," Frank said.
...
Frank also was critical of public policy that promoted homeownership at any cost. He also said the federal government should not be a "backstop" in guaranteeing mortgages.

"There were people in this society who for economic and, frankly, social reasons can't and shouldn't be homeowners," Frank said. "I think we should, particularly, stop this assumption that you put everybody into homeownership."

That's a very far cry from the Barney Frank of 2003, seen here scoffing any suggestion that Fan and Fred were encouraging lending to people unlikely to pay the money back, or that the taxpayers would be left holding the bag:

It's important to wonder just what Frank has in mind as a replacement--he calls explicitly for government subsidies, and given Frank's tendencies, one would expect those to be very large and expensive subsidies--but if nothing else, his change of heart regarding Fannie and Freddie is a welcome change. Too bad Frank's bad judgement cost all of us untold billions first, though.

Back With A Vengeance

2010-08-16T07:35:00.000-04:00

Based on today's mountain of new posts, it looks like Mickey Kaus has shrugged off his post-election blues and returned full-bore to blogging. Go have a look; particularly including now ex-Senate candidate Kaus's rundown of the average senator's personality traits:

No management skill? Talks a good game? Egomaniacal glory-hound? Sounds like a made-to-order U.S. Senator!

Required Reading

2010-08-04T13:53:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hitchens has an extraordinary essay--even by his standards--in Vanity Fair today regarding his cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Read it.

Life Imitates The Simpsons

2010-08-04T07:32:00.001-04:00

When I heard about the Andy Griffith Obamacare ad, the first thing I thought was, a bunch of Obama P.R. juiceboxers probably huddled around a closet office in the EOB, brainstorming how to sell this mess to their worst demographic.

One of them pipes up, "Hey, I saw a Simpsons rerun last week, and Grampa said, 'I'm an old man! I hate everything but Matlock!' Maybe that's our angle."

"Not bad, Parker. We should hire him to talk to old people! But who the heck is Matlock?"

A Game To Bridge The Generational Divide

2010-08-03T17:45:00.000-04:00

Millennial juiceboxers and Eighties slackers--unite!

Behold: HALO 2600!

Here's the backstory.

The Charlie Coverup Happens (?)

2010-07-29T12:35:00.002-04:00

From WCBS in New York:

New York Congressman Charles Rangel has reportedly cut a deal to admit to ethical wrongdoing and avoid a potentially humiliating public trial.

Harlem friends of Rangel tell CBS 2 they have been told that the details could be unveiled when the House Ethics Committee meets Thursday afternoon.

Don't mean to say I told you so, but...

UPDATE: Or not. This is all as clear as mud to me, but the Ethics Committee has released its public report. Negotiations are allegedly "ongoing."

How Corrupt Charlie Pays His Lawyers

2010-07-29T09:14:00.000-04:00

From Timothy Carney in the Washington Examiner:

Two of the three firms providing legal counsel to Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., in his pending ethics cases are lobbying firms. In fact, one firm, Oldaker, Belair & Wittie, conducts much of Rangel's political fundraising, while operating four different lobby shops.

But who's ultimately paying Rangel's legal bills? Mostly corporate and union political action committees along with individual lobbyists. Over the past six months, PACs and lobbyists have accounted for a majority of the money Rangel's campaign has raised this year, not counting transfers from Rangel's other fundraising operations (more on them below).

In turn, Rangel funnels his campaign cash into his legal defense. In 2009, three-fourths of Rangel's $2.16 million in campaign spending went to legal fees. The House Ethics Committee allows campaign funds for legal fees that are not "primarily personal in nature, such as a matrimonial action, or could result in a direct personal benefit for the Member." Otherwise, legal fees are a legitimate use of campaign cash because "the protection of a Member's presumption of innocence in such actions is a valid political purpose," the guidelines state.

That means any politically savvy donor who cut a check in 2010 to Rangel's reelection knew the donation was, in part, a contribution to Rangel's legal defense -- indeed, in the first two quarters of 2010, Rangel's campaign spent $655,232, with $230,749 (35 percent) going to legal fees. Zuckerman Spaeder LLP got biggest haul of Rangel cash -- $182,000. The firm had lobbying clients including one top drugmaker until last year, when the K Street legal shop de-registered as lobbyist.

Pathetic, but not surprising.

Get Ready For The Charlie Coverup

2010-07-27T17:45:00.000-04:00

From the AP:

New York Democrat Charles Rangel made a last-minute effort Tuesday to settle his ethics case and prevent a House trial that could embarrass him and damage the Democratic Party.

The talks between Rangel's lawyer and the House ethics committee's nonpartisan attorneys were confirmed by ethics Chairman Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. Lofgren said she is not involved in the talks, and added that the committee's lawmakers have always accepted the professional staff's recommendations in previous plea bargains.

Rangel, a 40-year House veteran who is 80 years old, would have to admit to multiple, substantial ethics violations for any plea bargain to be accepted. Earlier negotiations broke down when Rangel would only admit to some allegations — not enough to satisfy the committee lawyers, according to people familiar with those talks who were not authorized to be quoted by name.

If the talks are not successful, trial proceedings for the Harlem congressman would begin Thursday with a reading of alleged ethics violations that are still confidential.

Now, tell me if you can: why exactly should Charlie Rangel get to choose whether or not evidence of his dirty deeds get to remain confidential? Would you get that choice if you'd been indicted for (oh, I don't know) tax fraud and then copped a plea? Hell, no--all the evidence against you would be a matter of public record. Why should Rangel get to hide his own sins just to prevent embarrassment--or to limit the damage to the Democratic Party in the midterms?

Personally, I hope old Corrupt Charlie fights to his last nickel here--and after four decades of handing out favors, he has a whole hell of a lot of nickels. I remember how much damage Rangel's predecessor, old Dirty Dan Rostenkowski did in 1994, and it'd be a shame if yet another corrupt Ways And Means Chairman got off with a wrist-slap--and a coverup.

They're Called 'Government Motors' For A Reason

2010-07-27T14:35:00.005-04:00

From CNN:

General Motors announced the final price of its Chevrolet Volt electric car Tuesday afternoon, but it's the lease rate that will probably be most interesting to consumers.

The purchase price for a Volt will start at $41,000. The vehicle qualifies for a $7,500 federal tax credit, for an effective price of about $33,500.

So that's bad enough. Taxpayers already have to foot the bill for $7,500 per sale on these turkeys. That's $75 million of your money if somehow GM were to manage to sell all of them the first year. Fat chance, but it gets worse:

Pricing for the Volt isn't a terribly critical business decision for GM, [auto analyst] Toprak said, since the car is expected to lose money, anyway, during its initial run. It's really an image-making "halo car" for GM.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense for a company that's billions in the red and effectively bankrupt--bet heavy on a money-losing car!

You do know who picks up the tab these days when GM loses money, don't you? Go look in the mirror if you're not sure. But it'll make the small number of decidedly-on-the-wealthy-side greenies who buy these glorified golf carts feel oh so much better, and that's priceless.

Right?

If you're stupid enough to buy GM stock in the fall IPO, I heartily suggest that you dump it before November 2.

UPDATE: "Yes," you say, "but Will, they obviously want to lease these cars, not sell them."

M'kay, let's do the math. They're advertising $350 a month for 36 months, plus $2,500 due at signing. That adds up to $15,100 per car. At that rate, GM loses $18,400 per vehicle off the subsidized sale price. Assume they manage to lease 90% of the 10,000 initial run...

... and GM--meaning you--loses $165.6 MILLION on the first year of the Volt.

They ain't called Government Motors for nothing.

I Find Your Lack Of Cash Disturbing

2010-07-23T12:51:00.003-04:00

From the New York Post, clear evidence that the recession has spread to the Empire:

There was no telling whether he needed to use the force to make bank employees comply, cops said, but at one point, the Vader invader kneeled as if speaking to the Emperor and aimed his gun.

Abandon In Place

2010-07-20T09:12:00.000-04:00

The following is something of a tradition for me; it's a column I wrote many years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. I'm rather sorry to say that I see no particular need to revise its conclusions today--although I should admit that I'm starting to doubt whether I'll ever write the book referenced at the beginning.

Every writer--at least every one I've ever met or heard of--has a "trunk." It's where they store work that didn't make the cut, or isn't ready yet, or just had to be left alone for one reason or another. For some it is a literal trunk, a footlocker full of scribbled pages and typed sheets. In my case, it's a computer folder named (wait for it) "THE TRUNK." Here's a peek inside, at the first page of a book I'll write one of these years:

On the Atlantic coast of Florida stands an artifact that looks like a giant's table. It towers over the sand and scrub grass, a massive construct of stained concrete and rusted steel. It sits mutely, in a field of debris, left behind by its makers, all but forgotten by history.

Three men died here, by fire. Three more were hurled from this stone table and very nearly perished on a dangerous mission turned frantic by human mistakes. Eighteen were carried from here on a pillar of flame to land on another world and claim it for all humanity.

It is Pad 34, at the John F. Kennedy Space Flight Center. There is no plaque to mark the significance of the spot, no memorial to the fallen, no record of the great feats that were accomplished from this place. All that remains is the giant's table, its epitaph marked in stencil with a cold bureaucratic notation.

The legs of the table bear a single phrase: ABANDON IN PLACE.

The book that will have that title is years in my future, but its melodramatic foreword will serve for today, the thirtieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. As we look back across three decades at that epochal achievement, it's worthwhile to remember not just what was accomplished, but also at what's been lost since then.

Neal Armstrong had hardly taken his one small step thirty Julys ago when the Apollo program was abruptly truncated. Ten landings were planned, but by the time two billion 1970 dollars had been ripped away from NASA's annual budget, only six would be accomplished (unlucky Apollo 13 would have made it seven). In a panic, NASA scrambled for a new mission, a further reason to exist as a major-league agency.

Casting around madly for a stepping stone to future manned explorations, the agency settled on the Space Shuttle, billing it as a reusable vehicle that would take off and land as easily as an airliner--no more throwing away great chunks of a spacecraft along the way. Pie-in-the-sky proposals assured congressional planners that a Shuttle would dramatically lower the costs of space flight, down to $1000 a pound or less to Earth orbit (the reality was closer to $10,000 a pound in 1988).

As Shuttle development ramped up (only to be cut back itself as budgets were lowered again and again during the 1970's, causing design compromises that eventually led to, among other things, the 1986 Challenger explosion), the "old-fashioned" Saturn rockets, the most powerful machines ever built by man, the chariots that that had taken humanity to another world, were literally left to rot.

The last of the great Saturn V boosters ever flown was used to lift the Skylab space station into orbit in 1973. Three more of the 363-foot-tall Saturns were already built, needing only fuel, payload, and direction to fly... but the decision was made that they were more useful as relics than as rockets. The last of America's Saturn V's were carted off to NASA museums, and there they still lie in pieces today, at Houston, Huntsville, and Cape Canaveral. **

Think about that for a moment. Three... Saturn... V... rockets. Finished. Built. Paid for. Wasted.

These were not just carefully crafted towers of aluminum and steel. These were national treasures--the only machines in the world that could carry a space station to orbit in one launch (it will take dozens of Space Shuttle missions to finish the interminable construction of the current station). A second, completed Skylab was also mothballed--it too sits dismantled, in the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, a waste of untold millions.

These were the only rockets ever built capable of taking a significant payload to the moon. It's been said accurately, many times, if we wanted to go back today, we couldn't. The Soviets tried, frantically and unsuccessfully to duplicate the Saturn V; their highly secret, rarely spoken of N-1, a monster rocket with an incredible cluster of 30 engines, never flew successfully. A final desperate attempt to beat Apollo 11 to the moon ended in a catastrophic launch pad explosion on July 3 of 1969--the marks left behind by that explosion are still visible in satellite photos today.

The Saturn V could do that job, reliably, and they were thrown away, like so much waste paper (speaking of which, legend has it that NASA actually discarded the blueprints during the 1970's). Many of the highly trained people who designed and built the Saturn V's were also thrown overboard and out of work. Some found other jobs--my grandfather, who had worked on every American rocket since the original Jupiter I, which launched the first U.S. satellite into orbit, went on to build and test the Shuttles--but thousands of others were pushed out, never again to use their talents in the pursuit of space flight.

There have been triumphs since then, to be sure. For all their faults and compromises, the Shuttles are dependable and versatile. They will serve us well for decades to come (they will have to, because no follow-on manned vehicle is even on the drawing boards). The roster of unmanned space probes is an astonishing record of achievement in exploration: Mariner, Viking, Explorer, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Pathfinder, more to follow.

But there could have been so much more. Thirty years ago, humanity briefly left its cradle to step out into the unknown. What a pity, what a shame on us all that we promptly jumped back into that cradle, and threw away our hard-won traveling shoes.

***

Postscript: I've been advised since writing this column that somebody has already published a 'coffee table' book of NASA facility photographs titled Abandon In Place. I feel kind of like Snoopy in an old Peanuts cartoon--"All of the good titles have been taken."

** 2009 Postscript: the Saturn V still on display in Huntsville was actually a test vehicle that was never intended for flight. Still, two of them left to rot was two too many.

What She Said

2010-07-20T09:05:00.002-04:00

Jennifer Rubin:

I confess I am always baffled when pundits and voters say they like Obama but not his policies. What has been ingratiating about him? He’s thin-skinned, prickly, and robotic. He’s unduly nasty to political opponents. He doesn’t seem to like us (especially ordinary Americans who have taken to the streets and town halls), so why should we like him?

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

2010-07-20T08:12:00.004-04:00

David Brooks has a broken-clock moment today:

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.

Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.

If the reforms fail — if they kick off devastating unintended consequences or saddle the country with a maze of sclerotic regulations — then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.

What Brooks can't quite bring himself to say is that a substantial majority already endorses those last two sentences.

And the people in that majority are correct.

Break Out The Popcorn

2010-07-20T07:06:00.000-04:00

It looks like Andrew Breitbart has the JournoList archive.

Daily Caller also has at least a goodly chunk; Jonathan Strong has a piece up today regarding Leftie damage control of Jeremiah Wright from 2008. Many of the reprinted emails are very nasty reading.

Rationing For Thee, But Not For Me

2010-07-14T08:51:00.004-04:00

In case you were still wondering why Obama granted a recess appointment to rationing aficionado Donald Berwick, placing Berwick in charge of Medicare, Medicaid, and the first creeping tendrils of Obamacare, wonder no more. There's no way either Berwick would have survived a confirmation hearing given the gap between his fondness for government limitations of medical care and his own cozy healthcare arrangements.

From Byron York:

Last year, [Berwick] said, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care -- the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open." Of the [British National Health Service], Berwick says simply, "I love it," adding that it is "one of the great human health care endeavors on earth."

As it turns out, Berwick himself does not have to deal with the anxieties created by limited access to care and the extent of coverage. In a special benefit conferred on him by the board of directors of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, a nonprofit health care charitable organization he created and which he served as chief executive officer, Berwick and his wife will have health coverage "from retirement until death."

The provision is deep inside a 2009 audit report on the nonprofit's finances.

Emphasis above is mine.

As always, when the government makes the rules, they apply to everybody... except members of the government. For the peons, rationing and scarcity, but the apparatchiks always keep their dachas--and their fully-funded medical care.

WillCollier.com

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