Oh, Great

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

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

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

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

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

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

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