Similitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.