Fathers, sons, Georges, Mitts.....
Since it's become obvious with the Bush family that -- despite all hopes and prayers -- the son echoes the father, I decided to examine Mitt Romney's 'pedigree'. It appears that the blogosphere has looked in some detail at George Romney's rather brief political career, but he had a longer and more interesting career before that. Let's start back -- way back -- in Michigan in 1880. Charles W. Nash was orphaned at the age of 12. The county handed him to a farmer as a bond-servant. Nash didn't like involuntary servitude, so he escaped and made his way to Detroit, where he got a job stuffing buggy seats for Billy Durant's carriage works. He moved up quickly into management, and in 1908 when Durant pulled together several budding automobile companies to form General Motors, Nash came with him. Durant, like most of those early auto founders, was a high roller. Easy come, easy go. Buy companies, lose your shirt, start over. Nash wasn't comfortable with the wildcatter's ethic, and decided to try something different. So in 1914 he left GM, bought the Jeffery company, and applied his own name to its cars. Through the '20s and '30s, Nash became known for a belt-and-suspenders approach to both cars and business. His cars were superbly engineered, with extra main bearings and two spark plugs per cylinder. His company was superbly managed, with 'just-in-time' production methods and absolutely no borrowing. While other small auto makers, relying on debts and banks, foundered and failed in the Depression, Nash sailed through in fine form. Nash in 1934:
In the late '30s Nash handed over power to George Mason, who continued the same way of thinking. Stay in the black; keep customers and employees loyal; find a niche too small for GM but large enough for profit. Mason decided to focus on low-priced cars, with special emphasis on gas economy. In 1941 Nash introduced the '600', the first high-volume American car to use unit body-frame construction. The model number was not arbitrary: it signified 600 miles on a tank of gas. Though not quite accurate, still a clear appeal to frugality by a frugal company. It sold well, but was halted almost immediately when WW2 stopped all car production. After the war Mason knew his health was beginning to decline, so he looked around for a successor. George Romney had worked for a couple of auto companies, and was heading up the Auto Manufacturers' Assn at that time. When Mason showed Romney his big postwar idea, Romney fell in love with it, and was thus hired as the heir apparent.
The Nash Rambler became an icon of smallness and non-conformity, until the VW swept everything else aside. What's not so well remembered is that the Rambler was by no means the only American small car of that era. Willys, Hudson, and Kaiser made cars of similar size. Why was Rambler the only success? Why did it survive until 1987 in various forms? Mason's secret, carried on by Romney, was to separate smallness from cheapness, economy from austerity. The Rambler was not the cheapest car available in 1950 by a long shot. It came fully equipped with radio, heater, and fancy trim at a time when most low-priced cars had a deceptive 'base price'. When Mason died in 1954, just after buying out Hudson to form American Motors, George Romney took over full control. He wasn't as visionary as Mason, but had a talent for doing the right thing at the right time. In 1957, when Ford was blowing its wad on the Edsel, Romney understood that middle-priced cars were not the Next Big Thing. He yanked the full-sized Nash and Hudson off the market and concentrated purely on Rambler. Result: in 1960, Rambler took over the #3 sales spot from Plymouth. How did Romney manage? More like Reagan than Bush. He found the most talented people and kept them happy. A story from 1960 or so: American Motors styling director Ed Anderson strode along the hallway at AMC headquarters in Detroit with his head down in thought. He was upset because he believed others in the organization were torpedoing important styling features of his latest design. Lost in concentration, Anderson suddenly heard a voice. Looking up, he found himself face to face with AMC's legendary chairman and president, George Romney. "How's the new American coming along?" asked Romney. Anderson hesitated, then blurted out that things weren't going as well as he'd hoped. Although the program was just a re-skin of the existing Rambler platform, Anderson was trying to give the car a completely new look. He wanted to give the American a flatter, more modern roofline, but to do so he needed to reshape the windshield frame as well. Engineering vetoed that, decreeing it not worth the expense. Anderson declared, "They've got me over a barrel, George." Romney paused a moment then said, "Tell you what, Ed. You take care of the design and I'll take care of the barrel." [Anecdote is from the latest issue of Collectible Automobile magazine.] If Mitt is anything like George, he could turn out to be the right thing at the right time. We could use a leader who knows how to distinguish austerity from economy, a leader with a talent for selling and explaining.

Much later: Of course Mitt turned out to be the exact opposite of George, a ruthless business-killing robber baron. Still, my discussion of George himself was valid.
  ¶ 10:00 PM

  Mr. Dillon and Mr. Bush
Still thinking about Mr. Dillon ... he provides a good model for leadership.

In bumper sticker form: Respect, Expect, Protect. He told his kids they could do a good job; he expected them to do a good job; and he protected them against snide wiseasses like Pete and me. Big caveat: This measurement doesn't apply to the direction or goal of a leader, but only to his interactions with his people.

Does Bush measure up to the Dillon model? No.

He never respects our intelligence by telling us what he's doing or why, except when he uses strange sets of concepts designed to appeal only to people (like the UN) who will never, ever, ever follow him in a trillion years. Even though the solid evidence and strategy of the Iraq war have been explained clearly by people like Hitchens, Hayes, and George Friedman, we never hear any of that clarity from Bush.

Does he expect anything from us? No. He doesn't expect us to pay more taxes or buy war bonds, and he refuses to describe the enemy accurately, leaving us to be 'vigilant' against 'odd behavior' and 'undefined color-codes'. This is an unfulfillable expectation, and was obviously intended as such.

Does he protect us? Possibly, since there hasn't been another 9/11 scale attack. But after seeing FEMA's total misfeasance against Katrina, we are left to wonder if this is just luck. Post hoc doesn't always mean propter hoc.

Does Jesse Jackson measure up to Mr. Dillon? Unfortunately, yes, though with an evil purpose. Jesse constantly tells his remedials that they are worthwhile. He expects them to protest or riot on his command. He shows up with a phalanx of lawyers to protect them against any hint of impartial justice or open competition. Under Jesse's leadership, which was locked in place by LBJ, the remedials have zoomed backwards toward cynicism, fatalism, criminality, sullen laziness and whining, as we witnessed beautifully in New Orleans.
  ¶ 9:03 AM

  Hmph.
Fox reports that the military is asking the President to develop a national response plan for disasters or terrorist attacks.

Why would that be necessary? I don't understand.

We already have instant and massive responses to stop or prevent the following disasters and emergencies:

1. A child of the wrong race attends a public school.
2. A state doesn't waste enough money on public schools.
3. A weird Christian cult exists.
4. A weird Christian family dares to own a gun.
5. A state judge dares to decorate his courtroom with an ugly stone monument.
6. A Los Angeles policeman enforces the law.
7. A prison guard embarrasses the enemy in time of war.
8. A volunteer tries to help with a disaster.

So why in the world do we need a plan for little trivialities like attacks?
  ¶ 9:51 AM

  Hiatus, sort of


I'm working on a potentially money-making graphics project, so for the time being my energy and interest are elsewhere.

Not formally declaring a hiatus, because Polistra will undoubtedly have something that needs to be said....
  ¶ 7:50 AM

  Czars


What a great commonsensical idea! When a mechanism, such as CIA or FEMA, is obviously broken, you fix it by adding a new mechanism on top of the old one, and call the new mechanism a Czar!

Now we're really driving, huh? Vroom! Vroom! Vroom!
  ¶ 12:03 PM

  Old events, new understanding (INTROSPECTION ALERT!)
Didn't sleep much last night; sort of ill and worried. Fell into a stew of guilt and resentment over old misdeeds, which didn't help a bit with the ill and the worried. Finally focused on a couple of events that happened -- sheesh -- 43 years ago, in 7th grade, and reached a new understanding.

Both events can be described simply: A teacher chewed me up one side and down the other for being a smartass. I always felt one teacher was justified and the other wasn't, but I didn't really understand why until just now.

---

Event 1:

Every Friday in fall, the school football game started in the middle of last period. Most teachers walked their entire class to the stadium, about six blocks away. School wasn't dismissed, though; some teachers kept their classes in, and every student needed parental permission to attend the game. (Maybe there was a good reason for this confused arrangement, but more likely it was just typical woodenheaded school administration. Some things don't change!) On this particular Friday, Pete and I were the only students in Mr. Schoening's history class who didn't have permission slips. So Mr. Schoening sent us down the hall to spend the hour in Mr. Dillon's remedial math class, which was among the few classes remaining in session.

After a while, with nothing better to do, Pete and I started working the math problems along with the class. Two-digit multiplication, as I recall, normally mastered in 5th grade. Pete and I reached the answer in a few seconds, and compared notes audibly: Boy, this one was really easy, wasn't it? Yeah, I don't know why it takes so long for these guys. Chortle, chortle.

Mr. Dillon instantly caught on. He threw his chalk to the floor, stormed to the back of the room, yanked both of us out of our seats, and shook us by the shoulders: You miserable smartalecks! What do you think you're doing, making fun of my students?

By the time he tossed us back down, we were nicely deflated.

The new perspective: Back then, everyone knew which kids were dumb and which were smart. Still true now, but we know how to eliminate the difference by using Sensitivity and Self-Esteem to make everyone dumb. Poor benighted Mr. Dillon, working before those two concepts were invented, saw his job in a different light. He knew that these remedial kids would only have a chance to achieve something in life if they mastered as much math as they could. And he knew that the only way to get there was by working. What a laughably primitive idea! But those kids, equally unaware of later developments, did in fact work their hearts out for Mr. Dillon.

And Mr. Dillon also knew that their enthusiasm would not survive a head-on collision with fatalism or cynicism. Those remedials couldn't afford to think "Hey, this stuff is easy for Pete and Dave, why isn't it easy for me?" Nor could they afford "Why bother? Why not just hang around the streets and steal stuff?"

So when Mr. Dillon shook the smugness out of our smartass skulls, he wasn't just teaching us that mockery is bad. We knew that anyway, though the reminder was certainly useful. He was mainly trying to save his kids from infection by the mindset of criminality.

---

Event 2:

Toward the end of that year, the English teachers got together to run a spelling bee. Miss Johnston would run a first level bee in each of her hours, then take those winners to an after-school session to find the best of her students. Each teacher did the same, and then the representatives from each teacher were matched.

Well, I was the best speller in school that year, and Miss Johnston knew it. So she wanted me to reach the finals. I had different ideas, though. Spelling was as easy as breathing. I wanted to move out of the comfort zone and try my hand at a task that required a little challenge. (Who knows, maybe I had learned something from
the remedials.) So I skipped the last session of the spelling bee, and attended a meeting for students who wanted to run for Student Council. The next day in class, Miss Johnston ripped me a new one. She didn't use Mr. Dillon's style of physical force, but she used a whole lot more words.

With this fresh understanding, was Miss Johnston right or wrong?

Still wrong. Unlike Mr. Dillon, she was not pushing her students toward maximum work and achievement. Her anger was selfish: I had failed to win for her team. Possibly she assumed team spirit was sort of automatic, a decent enough assumption in the highly conformist semi-Sovietized America of 1962. But she didn't understand how nerds feel about teams after many years of being the last one selected, and she didn't appreciate my drive to explore new areas, which is the only good part of adolescence!

Labels: Experiential education

  ¶ 11:10 AM

  Putin's wisdom Listening to the 'George and Vladimir Show'. George seems to be back in good form, showing evidence of original thought, which is reassuring.

Vladimir just said something which deserves a good long think.

Roughly: In the Soviet Union, we spent many decades focusing solely on future generations. Because we were not paying any attention to the current population, we destroyed the country.

Excellent advice for those Americans who worry so much about debts, deficits and waste that they can't get anything done in the present. Of course, most of those who 'worry' about such matters, emphatically including the treasonous saboteur who asked the question, are only pretending to worry. What they really want is chaos, revolution, and a Soviet regime in America. No wonder Vladimir understands them so well.  ¶ 12:25 PM

  LBJ ?= GWB ?= FDR
Bush's speech last night has been compared to FDR and LBJ in its expansion of government.

Yes, but which? The difference is important.

Here is a description of what LBJ was doing. A quote from Fred Siegel, perhaps the only modern thinker who accurately describes the purpose of welfare:

[Before the welfare explosion of 1965] New York City had a black male unemployment rate of 4 percent. We were in the midst of the greatest economic boom in U.S. history. The city was thriving. Five years later, there were 600,000 more people on welfare. Now, this was a tragedy in many ways, especially for the city's African-Americans. They were on the up escalator of jobs and participation in the economy, but they were pulled off the up escalator and shunted off into welfare. The effect on the city was twofold: Fiscal calamity and family breakdown. It's fascinating that this policy was specifically chosen. People sometimes argue that this welfare explosion was the price of good intentions. Nonsense. The theorists behind this movement are two people named [Frances Fox] Piven and [Richard] Cloward, who are still alive. It's difficult to imagine how they get through the day knowing what they did, but they seem to do it. One's at Columbia University, and the other is at City University of New York. Their logic is that, if you expanded the welfare role sufficiently, you would bankrupt the city, force a political crisis, and set people at each other's throats. The idea was that New York was at a median point, so if New York exploded like this, then the rest of the country would have to respond. Well, they succeeded in part. People were at each other's throats, and the city did go bankrupt.

This was the logic that LBJ adopted as the basic principle of welfare.

A permanent underclass with a carefully developed sense of entitlement, ready to riot at the drop of a diss. (You can hear this class loud and clear in this morning's news!)

---

Now here's FDR's approach, as given in 1933, Fireside Chat 2.

First, we are giving opportunity of employment to one-quarter of a million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have dependents, to go into the forestry and flood prevention work. This is a big task because it means feeding, clothing and caring for nearly twice as many men as we have in the regular army itself. In creating this Civilian Conservation Corps we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress. ...
Second, I have requested the Congress and have secured action upon a proposal to put the great properties owned by our Government at Muscle Shoals [Alabama] to work after long years of wasteful inaction, and with this a broad plan for the improvement of a vast area in the Tennessee Valley. It will add to the comfort and happiness of hundreds of thousands of people and the incident benefits will reach the entire nation.

Note the emphasis on work and improvement, for the men who will be earning money and for the land. Note also: for FDR, improving the land meant flood control and parks, to be used and enjoyed by people. Not returning the land to its prehistoric malarial condition and bringing in wolves and bears.

So which way did Bush go? Both. Too much of the rhetoric in his speech belongs to the Loony Left:

Our third commitment is this: When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm. Within the Gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America. As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.

But the programs he announced are much more New-Dealish, with a focus on home ownership and jobs rather than entitlement.

When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more residents should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created.

The real question, then, is whether he will crack the whip to hold Permanent Washington in line. The bureaucrats are pure LBJ, and if allowed to run free, will generate 100% class war and 0% work.
  ¶ 10:33 AM

  Local random
Interesting discussion in one of the online graphics forums yesterday. Somebody asked "how long do you typically spend at the computer between breaks?" The answers were varied, but almost everyone distinguished between "inside the zone" versus "outside the zone". When inside, time disappears, and we often spend 8 or 10 hours without noticing it. Outside, maybe half an hour between pauses for coffee and stretching.

I suppose the "zone" has always been understood by creative people, but it wasn't a topic of conversation nor even a commonly understood concept when I was young. Marks a positive change. 50 years ago, only a small number of Americans had jobs that allowed them to reach the zone.

-----

Immediately after Kaiser Karlton of the 9th Reich announced his edict of forced atheism yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Spokane public schools made her way to each of the local TV stations, and declared in firm language that Spokane kids will continue giving the Pledge in its complete form. She clearly wasn't happy doing this, but the school system clearly understands its taxpayers.

This is the first case I've ever seen of a local government unit rebelling against Fed authority in the CORRECT direction! When I get jaded about the virtues of democracy, I need to remember this.

-----

Truly strange dream this morning. I was working for my old engineer boss at Penn State. Instead of developing acoustical pollution control systems, we were collaborating with G. Gordon Liddy to develop new and nasty weapons for special-ops commandos. I was working on an improved ear-chopper, for use in cultures where losing an ear is a mark of shame.

Where in the hell did that come from???? I never [consciously] think about the details of commando fighting, except to be deeply thankful that we have men who are willing and able to do it. When younger, my Walter Mitty fantasies were about inventing, not fighting.
  ¶ 8:51 AM

  Random Good news on the southern border:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff signed an environmental waiver that expedites the Border Patrol's plans to fill in canyons and erect additional fencing along the final 3 1/2 miles of the border before it meets the Pacific Ocean.

Good work, Chertoff! Finally, after 4 years of this war, the Bushies may be starting to understand that defending HUMANS matters more than defending tweety-birds and preserving miasmal swamps.

-----

The Roberts hearing is unusual in several ways. Senators of the Party of Treason are, of course, opposing civilization as usual. But they're doing it without throwing any of their usual Leninist tantrums. No pubic hairs, no marijuana. Just questions about law and judicial practice, which is exactly what such hearings should cover. And the Republicans have been remarkably tough and clear. Brownback and Coburn's questions will stand for a long time as fine little pieces of pro-Constitution rhetoric, even though Judge Mannequin never answered any of them. Makes me proud of my old home states.

I'm still not convinced that Mannequin is not another Souter. I really wanted to believe that Bush Junior was different from Bush Senior. Really hoped that would be the case....

Mannequin made one good point in response to Brownback's questions, though. Many of these bad court decisions can easily be undone by Congress, if it really wanted to solve problems. And though he didn't say this, Congress can prevent future bad decisions by including a clause in every new law, removing this law from the jurisdiction of federal courts. They have in fact included the clause in a few laws recently, so it's not an alien idea; just needs to be applied universally.

-----

Update: After hearing Rush's soundbytes of Roberts answering Town Drunk Teddy, I no longer have any twinges. In those answers, Roberts left no doubt that he understands the Constitution accurately. I don't have enough spare blood pressure to spend actual time listening to Kennedy, so it's good that somebody like Rush is willing to wade through the shit and find the pony.
  ¶ 7:11 PM

  Run, Steve, Run
Rep. Steve King (of Iowa) just finished a splendid speech, broadcast on C-Span. He's been my favorite Congresscritter for a long time. It's too bad he doesn't seem to have the 'fire in the belly' for seeking the Presidency. He'd be the nearest thing to a new FDR, if he had the desire.....

[Edit: by new FDR, I don't mean a socialist; I'm thinking more of FDR's facility for communicating, explaining, and experimenting, with focus on results.]

The speech started with a blue-pencil analysis of the emergency request that was passed quickly by Congress. King voted against that request, because the numbers didn't make sense.

Example: 5 billion to buy 300K house trailers for relocated families; only about 10k of those trailers are actually available. The rest would be back-ordered, most likely finished a year from now. Well, where will all those people be a year from now? They will either be back home or scattered widely, so the huge trailer communities would sit empty.

He then told a long story about his trip to New Orleans, with emphasis on river engineering. What came through clearly, though he didn't explicitly say it, was that the important work down there is being done by the military and by private and church organizations. He never mentioned a FEMA operation.

At the end he recommended that Congress should consider these three points toward rebuilding New Orleans:

1. Gates at the inlet of Lake Pontchartrain.

2. Raise the pump stations and storm-proof them.

3. Floodgates at inlets of the canals.

Semi-quote from the end of speech:

New Orleans is a shipping city, with a pivotal location. With or without federal help, it will be rebuilt. Then, if 25% of the refugees decide to make their future where they are relocated, we shouldn't insist on rebuilding the residential parts of the city in the shortest time possible, just repeating the mistakes from before. That would be throwing good money after bad. The low ground should be put to some other use, possibly a park.

Exactly (ahem) right.
  ¶ 8:09 PM

  Cheaper Floodwalls
Via NRO, this interesting article about how the floodwalls appear to have broken. It raises the question of sabotage, since the walls broke after the hurricane itself passed through. Did barges hit all of these spots? Or were they moved by something less accidental?

Our own environmentalists have been thinking about ways to break dams and levees for a long time. Google "Monkey Wrench Gang" to see a panorama of sabotage plans. Since the monkey-wrenchers and the Mohammedans want the same century, and since Adam Pearlman-Gadahn has linked the two groups in a more formal way, it's worth pondering.

If the breaks resulted from overtopping, there is a neat new technology called "Invisible Floodwalls", which avoids overtopping without completely rebuilding the entire levee system, and without permanently raising the visual blockage of a floodwall. It's already being used in Grand Forks, ND. Note: the Corps approved this method, so they will undoubtedly be considering it among many other possibilities. I'm just sort of placing it on the blogworld table here (i.e. Technorati) ... so when a porky politician says it's impossible to improve the walls without total rebuilding, this answer will be a bit more available for public debate.
  ¶ 9:22 AM

  Politicizing
Each party loves to accuse the other of 'politicizing' the war, the hurricane, the Supreme Court, etc, etc, etc.

If 'politicizing' means scoring false points, then I'll agree that it's bad.

If -- and let me boldface, italicize, and underline* that IF -- politicizing means taking advantage of the event to show that you can do a better job than your opponent, then politicizing is the heart and soul of a representative government. Old-style politicians like Huey Long, Alfalfa Bill Murray, and Richard Daley the Elder understood this point deeply. (Here is an interesting essay on how Huey Long might have handled Katrina. The essay slides off into strange paranoia, but the basic point is valid.)

We don't see nearly as much of this old-style politicizing nowadays, because the legacy of campaign reform and Good Government makes it much harder for a poor man to run for office, and harder for any pol to exchange favors for votes among the poor.

Thanks to McCain, politicians now deal exclusively with the rich.

One shining exception: Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Perry politicized Katrina in the right way by showing how quickly and effectively Texas could help the refugees.

Oops: I should add Gov. Barbour of Miss to the shining exceptions. Because Barbour was doing what a governor should do, while Perry was doing the unexpected, I focused on Perry. But that doesn't make Barbour's achievement any less! Perception, saliency, and all that...

---
* A little Dan Rather lingo there. Ironic, isn't it? Rather, who constantly used typefaces as metaphor, was brought down by typefaces.  ¶ 10:00 AM

  Specific, non-specific
Adam Gadahn, identified as an environmentalist and Mohammedan (redundant, I know) says the following:

Yesterday London and Madrid, tomorrow Los Angeles and Melbourne, Allah willing. And this time don't count on us demonstrating restraint or compassion.

We are Muslims, we love peace, but peace on our terms. We love peace, but when the enemy violates that peace or prevents us from achieving it, then we love nothing better than the heat of battle, the echo of explosions and slitting the throats of the infidels.

The mayor of Los Angeles says:

We have no specific credible threats.

Wrong, mayor. Dead wrong. See, lemme splain you something, by comparing with Christians.

When a Christian says "Love thy neighbor", it's not a threat; he's just stating the basic purpose and conversion method of Christianity.

But when a Christian says "Hey, wanna come to church with me this Sunday?" that's a specific threat. It means he's going to keep throwing friendliness and Bible verses at you until you submit and come to church. Unless you say No convincingly enough.

Okay, now here's the Mohammed side of the comparison.

When a Mohammedan says "I will bomb and slit the throats of all Crusaders and infidels", it's not a threat; he's just stating the basic purpose and conversion method of Mohammedanism.

But when a Mohammedan says "Yesterday London and Madrid; tomorrow Los Angeles and Melbourne", that's a specific threat against Los Angeles. See, he actually mentioned your city. It means he's going to bomb you and slit your throats until you're all dead. The only way to say No is to round up all the Mohammedans in town RIGHT NOW and grill them, by whatever means necessary, until you get specific information about the threat. Then you keep them rounded up. Hint: you might start with Gadahn's father, since you know where he is.

-----

Update: Power outage, cause still undetermined. Betcha $100 that the employee who 'accidentally' cut the wire will have a name beginning with Mo or Al.

And just plunking this down for the record: Last night (Sun) about 10 PM, there was a very brief outage here in Spokane. It struck me as slightly odd at the time, because it didn't behave like the usual outage caused by a car hitting a pole or a squirrel committing suicide.... Those outages tend to affect only one part of town, and have a sort of three-blink rhythm. This one was a single blink, and it shut down the TV stations as well, which are at the opposite corner of town from my house. Testing, maybe? However, there is a major solar flare this week, which could account for any or all outages.
  ¶ 7:20 AM

  Crescents

There's a lot of aesthetic discussion about the use of crescents to commemorate 9/11. Well, I don't know anything about modern art, but I know what I like, and this would be the prettiest crescent of all.

----- ----- ----- -----

There's something deeply wrong with modern artists, especially the ones who get subsidized and supported by governments. They seem to view themselves as Coyote the Trickster, whose duty is to play nasty and expensive pranks on the dumb yokels.

I'm reminded of a fellow named Dale Eldred, who died some years ago.

Eldred was based in Kansas City. His cruelest joke was played on the downtown development council of Kansas City, Kansas. For those unfamiliar with the area, KCK is a drab industrial city, which feels more like Cleveland or Toledo than anything you'd expect to find in Kansas. Eldred was commissioned to redesign several blocks of the dying downtown. He drew, and the poor deluded city proceeded to build, a horrible parody of KCK's sharp hills. It was like one of those "Magic Gravity Mountain" tourist traps, with each block rising and falling unpredictably. My VW could scarcely negotiate it; a normal-sized car scraped its bumpers at each corner. After a month or two, the remaining stores left, and the whole thing was finally demolished.

Later, KU paid Eldred to build this thing, sort of like a railroad trestle on stilts,



in a residential area. Though Lawrence is a decidedly artsy town, even the Laurentians couldn't stand this monstrous rabbit trap, which felt -- and probably was -- deadly. Citizens repeatedly 'petitioned for redress' as shown here, and after several repaints, KU finally moved the atrocity to an obscure location on campus.

When will we learn? Artists never commemorate anything, they just laugh at us, and we pay them to do it.
  ¶ 1:18 PM

  Oh really?
The Republican team keeps excusing Bush's failure by saying that a President can't federalize the Guard. That may be the law, but it didn't stop Eisenhower. When Ike sent in the Guard to force school integration in Arkansas, he didn't negotiate with Orval Faubus first. When Kennedy did the same in Alabama, he didn't negotiate with George Wallace first. And those two acts had nothing to do with saving thousands of lives or quelling riots; they were only about forcing people to associate with each other.

-----

Also: Brit Hume mentioned the organization that sponsored the Blanco & Mr. Bill commercial seen below. "America's Wetlands" sued the Corps to stop rebuilding of levees. I no longer feel even the tiniest pang of guilt for using that picture!

I googled the subject, and found a tangled swamp of lawsuits from all sides coming at the Corps. Envirotyrants suing to prevent dams, mining companies suing to prevent wetland preservation..... It's no wonder the Corps is paralyzed.

This would be easy to cure. As it now stands, the federal gov't actually pays the legal fees of Commie organizations. We must stop this, institute Loser Pays for all federal civil suits, and raise the threshold for "standing" to sue in the first place. This wouldn't automatically make all bureaucracies competent, but it would allow the competent ones (like the Engineers) to make rational decisions, and it would force organizations on all sides to work through the legislature, not the court.
  ¶ 9:45 AM

  Common sense exam


Some years ago I inherited an elderly cat named Emily from relatives. Emily was not highly intelligent as cats go; she was prissy and precise and wanted every day to be predictable. She was thus happier in my prissy and predictable little house than she had been in the fast-moving and multi-pet household of the relatives.

Emily had good common sense, though. After pooping she didn't even pause to do the symbolic covering-with-dirt routine; she sprang away from the shit and skidded through the house at top speed.




Now let's check another precise lady's common sense.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she had not signed off on the decision [to force evacuation].

"The mayor certainly has ordered that but the governor, and that would be me, would have to enforce it or implement it. We are trying to determine whether there is an absolute justification for that," she told FOX News.

"I think the most important thing driving that decision would be the possibility of disease. If indeed the disease problem is evident, is inevitable, we'll have to move to the next stage," she said.

Emily wins.

-----

Sidebar:

I felt a twinge of guilt for using this particular picture of Blanco. She was taking part in a silly little morality play aimed at raising children's awareness of wetlands, and supposedly the lack of wetlands was part of the New Orleans problem.

But then I realized this is an excellent illustration of our larger mess. Two contributing factors:

(1) Too many of our leaders have female minds, whether they were born genetically female or not. These cross-thinkers believe that endless jabber is the way to "address an issue." Male minds believe that action is the way to "solve a problem." A male-minded governor who realized the potential for disaster would have used available resources to fix the physical problem, instead of raising consciousness about a theoretical cause of the problem.

(2) Cross-thinkers are especially susceptible to religion. And our established religion is environmentalism. Contrary to popular opinion, American leaders are not short-term thinkers in this realm. A short-term thinker would have developed a solid evacuation plan, and wouldn't need days to ponder the consequences of using it. But we are long-termers. Given a choice between an action that saves human lives NOW versus a way to decrease theoretical risks by .00001%, we will reliably pick the latter. This is the basic sin of the environmental religion. The most obvious examples are shutting down nuclear power and using small cars. A couple of local examples come to mind as well: Spokane no longer uses oil-based paint (which lasts about six years) to mark lanes on streets, because oil-based paint supposedly leaches into the aquifer and does some kind of harm. Instead, we use water-based paint, which wears off in six months. So we have to use far more paint, resulting in far more leaching, and the street markings are hard to see most of the time. Poor visibility causes actual accidents. Similarly, we had to stop using sand for winter de-icing because the sand gets into the air. Instead, the street department uses a liquid de-icer which is more expensive and far less effective. Result: Actual lives lost in accidents.

  ¶ 12:28 AM

  1700 years of idiocy
Watched a Senate hearing on gas prices last night. Too often the senators are 'bipartisan', i.e. uniformly leftist, but this hearing showed the genuine ideological difference between the parties in sharp colors.

The R's were using the experts as foils, asking questions like "If we were to draw a line on this map for you, could you then allow more drilling for natural gas?" Each question was basically "What can we as Congress, and you as regulators, do to improve supply and distribution?"

The D's were, as usual, proposing price controls. Ron Wyden of Oregon was the worst and stupidest of all.

Why can't people get this through their heads? It isn't some kind of avant-garde macroeconomic theory. It's been known since 300 fucking AD, for heaven's sake. The Roman emperor Diocletian was the spiritual ancestor of today's leftists.

A nice clear account:

When he ran out of funds Diocletian resorted to the use of forced labor for his projects. But Diocletian had issued vast amounts of copper coins. This led to price increases. When prices rose Diocletian attributed the inflation to the greed of merchants. In 301 AD Diocletian issued an edict declaring fixed prices; i.e., price controls. His edict provided for the death penalty for anyone selling above the control prices. There were also penalties (less severe) for anyone paying more than the control price. Irate consumers sometimes destroyed the businesses of those who sold higher than the control prices.

In the short-run these draconian measures may have curbed inflation but in the long-run the results were disaster. Merchants stopped selling goods, which led to penalties against hoarding. People went out of business but Diocletian countered with laws saying that every man had to pursue the occupation of his father.

Once you start down that road, you have to take it all the way to complete slavery.

PRICE CONTROLS NEVER WORK.

PRICE CONTROLS NEVER WORK.

PRICE CONTROLS NEVER WORK.  ¶ 10:18 AM

  Biru cans
Tired of Japanese automakers taking all the prizes for originality and quality? Nostalgic for the old days when Jap cars were cheap knockoffs of British and American models? Well, nostalge no more! The old days are back with Mitsuoka Motors.

A knockoff for every palate and pocketbook, all described in fruent Engrish!

---

Want a knockoff Jaguar Saroon with no talent?



Or a knockoff MG Magnette?



Or an illogical Stutzu Bearucato?



Or a 1962 Worserey Mini? (Why would anyone? Never mind.)



No, it's not a parody, but it's not quite what it seems either. Mitsuoka have been building replicars for 20 years, and now they are trying to push into the mainstream. They even have an American dealer, which doesn't look terribly active.

I suspect the American dealer will have the most success with Mitsuoka's microcar series, especially the one that stokes you like the Santa Claus.




Seriously, though, I'm tempted by the MC-1 electlic moder, priced at $3600. Pure kawaii, and would get me around town more flexibly than the bus. It comes with side curtains for winter weather.

Even more seriously, this is actually the best evidence of Japan's superiority. Can you imagine a small American company starting fresh in the '80s, and producing a wide range of interesting cars? Not on your broody rife. Our automakers are going bankrupt. We have more lawyers than engineers. Japan has more engineers than lawyers.
  ¶ 2:42 PM

  Carless poor
Since I'm carless poor (more or less by choice) and faced the possibility of evacuation in an ice-storm here several years ago, I have a distinct interest in this discussion of poor folks, cars, and busses.

Here's some condensed info from the US Census housing survey for New Orleans, 1995. The data separates the metro area into Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Tammany parishes.




All numbers in thousands or percents.

Note that Orleans, which ended up being the wettest, is also the poorest. About 50,000 of its households are listed as carless. Each household has 2.1 occupants on average, so this gives us about 110k carless people. Adding the other areas, we get about 130k carless in New Orleans.

Tonight's headlines indicate 500k refugees. We don't know how many of those got out by car, but I'd guess that most who drove their own cars have found their own housing with relatives or friends, and are not part of the government burden. So we can conclude that a significant part of the total refugee burden did own cars but chose not to leave.

-----

Tues. morning: Rush is reading the NO evacuation plan, which estimated 134k carless. They must have been using the same Census data!

Rush is, as usual, playing exclusively for the team, but his point is valid. The poor folks in NO were accustomed to letting their liberal gov't take care of everything. Then, when the chips were down, the mayor said "Take care of yourselves!"

That's good advice if it's given consistently, guiding people toward discipline and preparation. But when the local authorities have spent decades encouraging the welfare and criminal mentality, "Every man for himself" at the last minute is deadly.
  ¶ 8:24 PM

  Polistra's new fashion statement.


-----

It's been clear for a while that Bush Junior shares his father's character flaw: maintaining personal relationships is more important than getting the job done. This is an essentially female cast of mind. It drives them to keep inadequate people in subordinate positions, and to believe that other nations and leaders will return favors. Bad enough when running a war, but even worse when managing a disaster. For both purposes we need a leader who is willing to discard friends and "allies" if they don't perform. In short, we need a man.

After decades of thought-policing and vocabulary enforcement, we have very few men in top positions. I suspect Gen. Honore is too goddamn smart to want the bullshit of the Presidency. So who's the most likely available Man?

Hillary.

  ¶ 12:26 PM

  Rehnquist
Rehnquist, after selfishly and irresponsibly pretending to serve for several months, has finally died.

If the Republicans in the Senate were competent adults, they would now do something like the following:

1. Ask whoever is in charge of the executive branch -- Barney, the White House janitor, a potted plant, I don't know -- to submit the name of Janice Rogers Brown for nomination.

2. Abolish the filibuster.

3. Appoint Roberts.

4. Move Scalia to Chief.

5. Appoint Brown.

This is all perfectly legal and perfectly possible for a party with a 54% majority.

This could be done in about one hour by competent politicians. Any high-school Student Council could do a similar job without breaking a sweat.

Since we know the Republicans in the Senate are not competent, we know this will not happen.

Instead, this will happen:

The Party of Treason (which does include some competent politicians, no matter how wrong and disloyal) will tie up the Senate until Mr. Bush is either impeached, resigns, or abdicates. Since this is likely to happen before the next Supreme Court term begins, the Party of Treason will then be able to appoint Phyllis Hamilton and Laurence Tribe to the empty seats. They will do this in about one hour.

-----

Hmm. Bit pessmistic last night, weren't we? Tell you what, I'll come back here and eat crow if the Senate shows any signs of competence. Or if Stephen Hawking leaps out of his wheelchair and becomes a pro wrestler. The crows are safe, I think.
  ¶ 10:23 PM

  Smart Chao
U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao today announced a National Emergency Grant of up to $62.1 million, with an initial release of $20.7 million, to provide approximately 10,000 temporary jobs for dislocated workers to help in recovery and clean-up efforts underway in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

First really smart move by the admin in responding to Katrina. Getting ahead of the curve for the first time. Sort of like WPA/CCC redux... Let's hope it doesn't get blocked or ruined by idiot bureaucrats or judges. Especially the latter.
  ¶ 3:16 PM

  For the Corps
I'm sure the Army Corps of Engineers is going to receive a lot of spankings in the coming months, for failing to anticipate.

I have no connection with the Corps, but I've watched them at close range over the years, and think they deserve a bit of defending.

During the years I lived in Manhattan ('56-'66) the Corps was building Tuttle Creek Dam just north of town. This was a totally justified project, since the Big Blue had destroyed parts of Manhattan in 1903 and 1951. Nevertheless, the first signs of environmental opposition were already showing in '56, with billboards saying "Big Dam Foolishness."

Later, in the '60s and '70s, the Corps got carried away, building many dams just for recreation. For instance, Milford Lake near Fort Riley, and Kaw Lake near Ponca City. Both are on streams that never caused significant flooding, and Kaw Lake hasn't even become an important recreation area.

Partly because of this extravagance, but mainly because of eco-pressure, Congress has reined in the Corps in the last 20 years. So even the most basic task -- keeping the Miss flowing in its unnaturally high delta -- has been underfunded.

Look at the Industrial Canal project page for an indication of how the Corps is forced to operate these days. The project was first authorized in 1956 (hmm), but Congress didn't get around to funding it until 1998. Work didn't actually begin until 2002, which means that the Bush Administration has been pushing harder than previous admins. What slowed the work for 50 years? Controversy about wetlands and neighborhood impact.

Look especially at this part of the project, which is pure Jesse Jackson-style pandering to Democrat constituencies. A significant part of the Industrial Canal funding went toward job training, community outreach, historically-black colleges, playgrounds, etc, etc, to the tune of $33 million. (What was the estimate for strengthening the main levees? $40 million?) So New Orleans got what it wanted: subsidies for historically-black colleges before improved levees. If this project had been completed when first planned, the levees in that area would have been improved already.
  ¶ 7:04 AM

  Environmentalist's paradise


Hey there eco-freaks!
Hey there Luddites and leftists!
Hey there Mohammedans!

You wanted the 11th Century? You got it!

No evil electricity!
No evil cars!
No evil dams or levees! All breached, just the way you like it!
No evil oil refineries or drilling rigs! All out of commission.
No racist pig cops!
No evil corporate-owned media!
No evil corporations or businesses!
Not even a rich Republican anywhere in sight!

Isn't it romantic?
  ¶ 11:57 PM

  Jimmy Bush


I'm afraid this emergency is Bush's hostage crisis, his Waterloo. (Pun intended.)

Minimal and reticent government is wonderful in normal times. It's not wonderful in wars and disasters.

I keep hearing the Call of the Wild Bureaucrat echoing in my ears. The entrenched, unionized, solidly Democrat permanent Washington, unwilling to move under the best of circumstances, totally intransigent when the President wears an R. There may have been things happening under the surface, especially in military circles, but it's fairly obvious that the bureaucrats didn't start moving for real until Bush returned from Texas, two days late.

Basic rule of any institution, first codified by C. P. Snow: BE THERE.

If you want to have any effect, you can't assume the other players will do what's necessary, especially when they are Democrats and you are a Republican. Herbert Hoover, who ironically made his bones by effectively leading the Red Cross to assist New Orleans after the 1927 flood, nevertheless showed the same kind of Republican naivete after he was elected President. He figured Congress and the bureaus would help him deal with the Depression. Nope, Congress turned Dem just after the stock crash, and proceeded to block all his efforts. Hoover didn't crack the whip, and the blocking worked; FDR was elected in '32 and immediately implemented Hoover's programs. (They weren't very good programs, but that's irrelevant here.)

No New Tone. No New Tone. No New Tone.

-----

Addendum: I'll bet Osama's research staff is learning from this event. For best results and maximum chaos, don't pick a city with a tough mayor like Giuliani. Cities with good leadership will recover quickly. Instead, pick a city like New Orleans where criminals have been allowed to run free, and where infrastructure has been allowed to decay.

And I hope (which means I do not expect) that the mayors of other cities will also learn from it. Serious local governance is a matter of national security now. Stop protecting the owls, clams, gangsters and illegal immigrants; start protecting the law-abiding people.

-----

Another addendum: Former Okla Gov Keating clarified things nicely in a comment on Fox this aft. He said that emergency response -- including the decision to call in Federal support -- is strictly up to state governors. He didn't explicitly say that Blanco was incompetent for failing to start the ball rolling, but his meaning was perfectly clear. Unfortunately, the ball still ends up in Bush's hands, because anyone with a television could see how quickly things were falling into chaos. Even if he doesn't watch the news, a President presumably has people who do that for him. And if he doesn't have such people, or if he doesn't listen to them, that's still his failure. The Pres is supposed to know more than the common yokel, not less.
  ¶ 9:03 PM

  Jack it up!


Sort of shocked into silence.

Few comments:

1. Disasters are a litmus test for competent leadership. It's obvious that Louisiana and New Orleans do not have competent leadership, while Mississippi does.
Blanco is falling apart. The Feds are not moving anywhere near as aggressively as they should. This is not the time for careful delegation of power; this is the time for someone to grab the wheel.

2. Since the only part of New Orleans that will be worth saving is the big downtown buildings, the rest should be rebuilt elsewhere. Turn the low land into a park, re-channel the Miss into the Atchafalaya where it's been trying to go for a century, and build a new city on higher land. If necessary, generate the higher land. The need for this change has been known in detail since the Miss flood of 1927.

Impossible? Hardly. Dozens of small towns in the Plains states moved and rebuilt on higher land when they realized their original townsites were flood-prone. Even poor East Saint Louis regraded its downtown at one point.

3. Of course, all of those rebuilds happened in an era when Americans were builders and fixers, and they also happened before the state-sponsored terrorist organization EPA took over our government. Maybe we should bring in Japanese or Korean companies, since they are now the sole owners of the former American spirit. Maybe we should outsource government to the Koreans while we're at it.

Update: Texas Gov Perry is firmly grabbing the wheel. He's even attempting to break out of the EPA's iron grip to get something done. Good.

  ¶ 8:36 AM

  Random
BRAC

The leftover media seem to be focusing on BRAC's decision to close Walter Reed Hospital.

Though I've been strongly opposed to closing many of the military bases on the list, I don't see the fuss about this one. Hospitals are not uniquely military; there are lots of civilian hospitals available. More importantly, there are plenty of empty beds at other VA Hospitals, and beds are far more interchangeable than firing ranges or ammunition storage areas.

-----

Operation

Also, what's wrong with labelling gravestones at Arlington Cemetery as "Operation"? That's how we label wars nowadays, so it's the simplest way to describe the time and place of service.

We would do better to return to accurate labels for the wars themselves, though. When Bush peculiarly gave the exact casualty figures a couple days ago, he announced "We have lost 1,864 members of our armed forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and 223 in Operation Enduring Freedom".

What's an Enduring Freedom? I assume it was the Afghanistan war, but I don't recall hearing anyone except possibly Bush himself use the title. "Operation" formerly referred to a short campaign like the Normandy invasion (Operation Overlord), not an entire war.

-----

Prose

This is just the most breathtaking bit of writing I've encountered in quite a while. From the WPA Guide to Mississippi, a way of life condensed to one magnificently architected paragraph:


For us calendars are bits of advertisements that the storekeeper mails out about the time taxes are due. They are usually of oblong dimensions, with brightly colored Biblical pictures at the top and small neat pads of black numerals at the bottom. They are pretty and tasteful and fit to tack up in our bedrooms; but beyond that and the fact that our very hopeful imaginations may see in the receipt of one an indication of extended credit, they have little to do with our year. For, eating hog jowls and black-eyed peas on New Year's Day notwithstanding, our year neither begins with the first day of January nor ends with the last night of December. Our year begins with planting-time and ends with the gathering-in. Between those two extremes comes the hoeing-and-chopping season and a spell of laying-by. In all, this covers a period of about seven months -- from March, when the snowy white blooms of the cottonwood tree tell us not only to put our cottonseed in the ground, but, more happily, to resume our charging at the store, until sometime in September, when we pick, gin, and bale the soft white bolls we have raised, and are told in a way less subtle than by the receipt of a calendar to stop our charging at the store. Yet it is enough. It is a "year", and for us complete. Come the tenth of the month following and we will have weighed it, tagged it, and laid it quietly aside as having been simply "good" or "bad".

------

Modern WPA

My favorite haunt on the Web (aside from the sleazy parts, of course) is one LiveJournal community of photographers. Rural Ruin gathers some pro and semi-pro chroniclers of local life and history. It's marred by a few Gothish fans of abandoned mental asylums, but those aren't the rule. Search especially for entries by a fellow using the name Wander. He may not be Walker Evans or Russell Lee, but he's mighty close.
  ¶ 9:47 PM

  What if...
If Homeland Security controlled the Weather Bureau...........

[This is a 1 MB SWF file, so dialup beware!]



  ¶ 2:57 PM

  Walt, you up there? Spinning?
Walt Disney, Missouri born, was a great patriot. During WW2 his studio switched over to 'war work', trying to uphold our national morale.



His successors have turned the other way with a vengeance. They fire radio talkers who call the enemy by its correct name, and they disavow preachers who, however inappropriately, advocate fighting our enemies.


  ¶ 8:14 PM

  GMO takes over oil's most critical use....
From a Press release:

Finding "green" methods to make key chemical intermediates like succinate is a high priority for the chemical industry. Green technologies use renewable resources like agricultural crops rather than non-renewable fossil fuels, and they produce less waste.

"Succinate is a high-priority chemical that the U.S. Department of Energy has targeted for biosynthesis," said process co-developer George Bennett, professor and chair of the department of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice. "One reason for this is succinate's broad utility -- it can be used to make everything from non-corrosive airport deicers and non-toxic solvents to plastics, drugs and food additives. Succinate's also a priority because some bacteria make it naturally, so we have a metabolic starting place for large-scale fermentation."

The centerpiece of Rice's succinate technology is a mutant form of E. coli that makes succinate as it's only metabolic byproduct. The bug contains more than a half-dozen genetic modifications. It was created over the past four years by the research groups of Bennett and collaborator Ka-Yiu San.

The technology is taking its first step from the lab to the marketplace this month with the start of industrial scale-up efforts in Kansas. These efforts resulted from an $80,000 award from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bennett and San are working with Manhattan-based AgRenew Inc., which just began testing how to use farm-grown products like grain sorghum as feedstocks for the succinate-producing bacteria.

-----

GMO science is the most under-reported story of this decade. Partly because of the old country mouse / city mouse thing: elites, conservative or liberal, look down on anything that sounds rural. Conservatives trash ag research as silly waste and abuse (cow farts and all that), and libs just hate science. More to the point, libs hate GMO's ability to break the mainsprings of their power. They have already inoculated their pet African leaders against using GMO to relieve famine, because self-sufficient farmers break the welfare cycle. It will be interesting to see how the Left plays this development. You might call it a battle between Mutant Organisms and Mutant Thinking.

Meanwhile, good things are developing rapidly and quietly -- yes, even in the Flyover Manhattan.
  ¶ 7:09 AM

  Yup again.
Andy McCarthy again. NRO again. Ipse dixit again.

The Kurds should have been our chief ally from the start. Of course, that should have happened in 1990 as well, which gives us even more reason to do it this time -- at the very least we should give them everything they want in the reformed Iraq.

As you might expect, FDR knew how to handle a similar situation. Sicily broke loose from Mussolini, and we used them as a fulcrum to work on the rest of Italy. Here's a bit from Chat 25, July 1943. Again as you might expect, Roosevelt did not try to distinguish the 'moderate' and 'pure' forms of Fascism from the 'militant' forms. They're all bad, and all need to be eradicated from the earth.

So our terms to Italy are still the same as our terms to Germany and Japan -- "unconditional surrender."

We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner. We will permit no vestige of Fascism to remain.

Eventually Italy will reconstitute herself. It will be the people of Italy who will do that, choosing their own government in accordance with the basic democratic principles of liberty and equality.

...

We are already helping the Italian people in Sicily. With their cordial cooperation, we are establishing and maintaining security and order -- we are dissolving the organizations which have kept them under Fascist tyranny -- we are providing them with the necessities of life until the time comes when they can fully provide for themselves.

Indeed, the people in Sicily today are rejoicing in the fact that for the first time in years they are permitted to enjoy the fruits of their own labor -- they can eat what they themselves grow, instead of having it stolen from them by the Fascists and the Nazis.

Given my perceptual-filter problem with Bush speeches, it's possible that he has made a similar point about the Kurds and I didn't hear or register it. Somehow I doubt it, though. Emphasizing the civilized nature of the Kurds would have hurt the feelings of Arab savages. Can't have that.

-----

Update: Ledeen says the Kurds are thoroughly happy with the new Constitution. If the Kurds are happy, I'm happy!


  ¶ 7:34 AM

  Rhetoric
Listening to Bush's speech to VFW this morning. By the standards of the aphasic Bush family, it's not bad. But it's not good, either.

Basic fact of human nature: we sense change, not repetition. When a stimulus, be it temperature, color, or words, is repeated often enough, we stop attending to it. We notice a suddenly cool day, a suddenly dark room. We can be awakened when the 2:45 train fails to pass our house. Good teachers and good speakers understand this. You do need to repeat the concepts, but you need to approach them from new angles each day if you want your listeners to stay with you.

Bush repeats the same ideas in the same words with no fresh information, so the only thing I hear in each speech is "mlmlmlmml A strong mlmlmlmlm mlmlmlml THEE strong mlmlmlml A broadermiddleast uuuuuuuuhhhhh THEE gooderservice mlmlmlmlm ...."

----------------

Compare with FDR's fireside chats during WWII.

Some excerpts from Chat 27, Christmas 1943. Note the personal detail mixed with actual military news; note that FDR mentions specific things that have been accomplished, specific things that are about to be accomplished, and links them to create a sense of progress. Note also that he doesn't promise democracy or women's rights in the reformed Germany and Japan; only that they should become "respectable" nations.

-----

But -- on Christmas Eve this year -- I can say to you that at last we may look forward into the future with real , substantial confidence that, however great the cost, "peace on earth, good will toward men" can be and will be realized and ensured. This year I can say that. Last year I could not do more than express a hope. Today I express -- a certainty though the cost may be high and the time may be long.

...

At Cairo and Teheran we devoted ourselves not only to military matters, we devoted ourselves also to consideration of the future -- to plans for the kind of world which alone can justify all the sacrifices of this war. Of course, as you all know, Mr. Churchill and I have happily met many times before, and we know and understand each other very well.

...

The Cairo and Teheran conferences, however, gave me my first opportunity to meet the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek, and Marshal Stalin -- and to sit down at the table with these unconquerable men and talk with them face to face. We had planned to talk to each other across the table at Cairo and Teheran; but we soon found that we were all on the same side of the table. We came to the conferences with faith in each other. But we needed the personal contact. And now we have supplemented faith with definite knowledge.

...

Essential to all peace and security in the Pacific and in the rest of the world is the permanent elimination of the Empire of Japan as a potential force of aggression. Never again must our soldiers and sailors and marines -- and other soldiers, sailors and marines -- be compelled to fight from island to island as they are fighting so gallantly and so successfully today. Increasingly powerful forces are now hammering at the Japanese at many points over an enormous arc which curves down through the Pacific from the Aleutians to the Jungles of Burma. Our own Army and Navy, our Air Forces, the Australians and New Zealanders, the Dutch, and the British land, air and sea forces are all forming a band of steel which is slowly but surely closing in on Japan.

...

After the Cairo conference, Mr. Churchill and I went by airplane to Teheran. There we met with Marshal Stalin. We talked with complete frankness on every conceivable subject connected with the winning of the war and the establishment of a durable peace after the war. Within three days of intense and consistently amicable discussions, we agreed on every point concerned with the launching of a gigantic attack upon Germany. The Russian army will continue its stern offensives on Germany's Eastern front, the allied armies in Italy and Africa will bring relentless pressure on Germany from the south, and now the encirclement will be complete as great American and British forces attack from other points of the compass.

...

The United Nations have no intention to enslave the German people. We wish them to have a normal chance to develop, in peace, as useful and respectable members of the European family. But we most certainly emphasize that word "respectable" -- for we intend to rid them once and for all of Nazism and Prussian militarism and the fantastic and disastrous notion that they constitute the "Master Race."

-----

Addendum: Some of the solid content and clear explanation in the fireside chat is wildly false in hindsight (especially all the stuff about dear Uncle Joe); and some of it was known to be false at the time. I don't have any problem with that.

Untruth -- or at least omitting the truth -- is sometimes critically necessary to maintain morale and get the job done. Bush's problem is that he doesn't seem to know which truths to skip and which to emphasize. In today's speech, he gave loyal Americans no positive news to "hang our hats on"; he only gave the exact casualty count, for no discernible purpose. Authors like Richard Miniter and Victor Mordechai give us positive info about the successes of Homeland Security, while the administration tells us nothing ... leaving the field wide-open for Comrade Sheehan, Comrade Kerry, and, yes, Comrade Shep Smith to spread their vicious virus. If Miniter can give this information without being arrested, presumably it's not top secret. So why not tout it officially?
  ¶ 11:19 AM

  Plus ça change ....
At least among American Commies.

Here's a 20-second segment from the 1952 radio show "I was a Communist for the FBI", overacted but largely factual stories drawn from the experiences of a double agent. In this episode, the Commies were planning to protest the House Unamerican Activities Committee. You should be able to recognize precursors of Comrade Gore, Comrade Sheehan, and Comrade Kerry in this short bit.

Sidenote: I think "Plus ça change" must be the single most popular title for blog entries. I googled the phrase in order to paste the cedilla character without having to dig out my old ASCII documentation. [This trick works well for all sorts of diacritic characters, because Google searches by the unmarked character but shows the marked.] Google gives 25 million responses to the phrase, and the majority seem to be blog entry titles!
  ¶ 8:06 AM

  Yup.

Can't say it any better than Andy McCarthy at NRO.

Increasing the size of the Caliphate is Osama's goal, not ours. Or so I naively and mistakenly thought.

To be sure, sometimes you have to retreat or avoid an important battle for tactical reasons. But finishing one stage of the war by giving the enemy exactly what he wanted is not a tactical detour. It is self-imposed defeat.

And when America and Israel commit partial suicide at the same moment, Allah is ecstatic.
  ¶ 8:39 AM

  More seriously, I'm astonished to hear all the great gray experts, including the big-name Neocons, saying things like "Well, of course, the burden is now on the Palestinian leaders to fulfill their side of the bargain."

Burden? Burden? Their only burden is to gather enough weapons and external support to retake Jerusalem.

Funny, all these years I thought "Never again" was shorthand for "We will never again allow Jews to be pushed around." Obviously I was wrong. When spoken by the establishment, it obviously means "We will never again go to the trouble of protecting those pesky Jews."

-----

Fair & balanced update... Michael Medved, in attempting to defend Sharon's actions, makes a couple of worthy points. He says (1) trying to rule over Gaza was a tremendous burden for Israel, using military resources that could have been elsewhere. (2) The scattered Jewish settlers were in effect serving as hostages, making it harder for Israel to strike at terrorist supporters in Gaza. The latter point will be worth watching. It will require some fast and lethal proof to counter the sense of Arab momentum, though.
  ¶ 9:57 AM

  The Sharon Solution
Wow! What a refreshing new non-linear idea! Surrender your country to the enemy to gain peace! Say! If it works for Ariel, why won't it work for George? Let's do it!

The central part of this map, still confusingly marked as "United States", will actually be given to the Original Tribes to divide among themselves, after disarming all the non-Original settlers.




[Just in case there's any doubt at all, I am being sardonic here. Given the infinitely literal-minded nature of many Webizens, this type of disclaimer is necessary.]
  ¶ 9:10 AM

  Guinness book of suckers. 5. He trusted Democrats.

4. He trusted Saddam.

3. Nuff said.

2. He trusted Hitler.

1. New entry: He trusted Arabs!!!!!!  ¶ 7:03 AM

  Hot & Cold Running Science
Here's a little quiz. What do you think will happen to the car at the end of this repeating clip?




Do you think it will go up like this?



Or down like this?



If you chose Up (A), congratulations! You are either a six-week-old kitten or a Professional Climatologist!

If you chose Down (B), you are more likely a full-grown mammal with some experience of the way the world works.

Granted, the last hill is slightly taller than the previous ones. So a full-grown human with some knowledge of history might ask if we've been on a taller hill before, and if so, what happened then? Well, we have been on a taller hill before, around 1000 AD. And some interesting things did happen in that period. Northern countries became more friendly to human habitation. Mohammedans took over most of Europe. After several decades of dillying around, Christians picked a strong Pope, and Christianity finally fought back. (Sounds familiar, for some reason.) Christians were also starting universities, and the Renaissance was just popping up. Was Africa uninhabitable? Not 'ardly. There was a high civilization in Mali, of all places. How could that be? Well, for one thing, Karl Marx wasn't born yet, so Africans hadn't been hopelessly ruined by his evil philosophy.

-----

Here's a set of graphs scanned (atrociously) from a 1976 National Geographic, at a time when science was still science. That is, scientists were capable of reading graphs, asking questions, and waiting for the data before answering the questions.

At that time, the consensus was that we were heading for a cooling trend, because the last little piece of the graph was going down. But that consensus was not a Religious Axiom, and there was no Inquisition in academe.


Zoom
  ¶ 8:28 PM

  The Old Tone
Listen.

This is a 2-minute segment from the end of Fibber's radio program, NBC's top-rated comedy, marking V-E day in May of 1945. Note the explicit Christianity; note the appeal to continue our efforts until the whole thing is done; note the mention of Gold-Star mothers. At that point, it looked like we might need one or two more years to finish off Japan. Luckily, the miracle of fission shortened that time.

Now compare with any 2 minutes of today's enemy-occupied media, lionizing traitors, weakening our morale, and turning Gold Star Mothers into a vicious mocking slander.

Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.

  ¶ 9:22 AM

  Polistra's Plea to the President
Replace Spokesjelly Scott McClellan with Gordon Cucullu. Give Cucullu free rein.

Now.

It's probably too late, but at least you can stop further damage.

Read my lips:

  ¶ 7:53 PM

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Listening to the Fox Sunday morning discussion on Traitor Sheehan. One of the reporters just mentioned that he had talked with Sheehan, and that she was 'engagingly naive', stating that she knew very little about the intricacies of politics and didn't want to influence people on those other subjects. Absolute bullshit. Reporter, you're the naive one. "Oh, I'm not really political; I just happened to get passionate about this one issue" is THE OLDEST FUCKING LEFTIST GAMBIT IN THE GODDAMN BOOK.

Rosa Parks wasn't a housemaid who happened to get tired of sitting in the back of the bus; she was a long-time leftist activist. Betty Friedan wasn't an abused housewife who had an epiphany; she was a lifelong Stalinist. And on and on. Among the serried ranks of American Commie heroines, the only one I can remember who was not a Commie first was Karen Silkwood.

More generally, why in the fucking hell do we expect a wartime President to be the National Counselor and Psychotherapist? Why do we expect any President to pay attention to any individual? His job is to protect the Nation. Doing that job properly, especially in wartime, requires ignoring and even coldly sacrificing individuals. He will do far more for national morale, which happens to include individual morale, if he concentrates on HARD AND FIERCE fighting, if he tells us about our successes, and if he honestly explains what he is doing and why. I don't know if any of those things are happening; if so, the information isn't reaching this neck of the woods. This is why Traitor Sheehan has resonance.
  ¶ 9:25 AM

  Random notes [Introspection alert!]
Dreams

Over the years my dream mode has changed, presumably reflecting changes in daytime brain usage. Up till age 33, I was doing jobs with low mental requirements and engaging in considerable social activity on the side: traveling, volunteering, hanging with friends. Dreams were quite dull and standard: houses, womb-escape symbols like narrowing stairways, naked in public, falling, all that textbook stuff.

At 33, after encountering a PC with a primitive sound card, I jumped feet first into graphics programming, which absorbed 100% of my mind for the first time. Suddenly dreams became more structured and closer to reality. Before that point, a naked-teaching dream would have used a superficial childlike view of technical matters. Circuit schematics would look vaguely like circuits but would be meaningless. After that point, if I was nakedly drawing a circuit on the blackboard, it would be fully genuine and often helpful to my current project.

A second change happened around 1998, as my work transitioned toward more graphic design and less programming. Some dreams became fully plotted, with original characters and story-lines that I'd never encountered in books, and often with Lucid segments.

One of those this morning. The world was divided into psychics and non-psychics. The psychics were called sorcerers, wore flowing black robes, and had special privileges. (I've never done any of that role-playing stuff, nor read any books of that type, so have no idea where this came from!) I was a lowly non-psychic; toward the end of the dream, I was cleaning a coffeepot, wishing that I could have the privilege of drinking coffee. At that point I thought, Wait a minute, dammit, this is a dream; if I want coffee, all I have to do is wake up and go into the kitchen. So I did.

--

Semi-related:

After about 5 months of building this illustrated blog, I notice that it makes time slow down in a pleasant way. The Theory of Geritol Relativity is well-known: Time accelerates with increasing age. [Also known as the Lorentz-Welk Contraction.] The previous two years, when I was working hard on courseware projects, ran entirely too fast -- as seen in the rear-view mirror, anyway. Since I started this blog, time has regained much of its old mass and substance. Each of these 5 blog-months feels as solid and long as one courseware-year. And, as Martha would say, that's A Good Thing. Not sure why it's different, though. Described objectively, the work involves the same set of skills. Maybe it's a question of 'dailiness': on the previous projects, I had a year or so to complete an entire blob of stuff, so spent that year in a cycle, adding pieces here and there, debugging the result. With a blog, each day's bit of text and image is new. That's one theory anyway.

-----

Just-onces

Just once I'd like to see a news item relating to Marilyn Monroe that does NOT use the Happy Birthday JFK clip.

Just once I'd like to see a President do the State of the Union the way it was supposed to happen: a document sent to Congress. It was not meant to be a circus.

Just once I'd like to hear a Bush speech that doesn't include the word 'strong' in every sentence.

Just once I'd like to hear Bush talk about economics without using that mysterious technical term 'gooderservice'.

Just once I'd like to get a letter from a charitable organization that doesn't use "Changing the world one _______ at a time" for its slogan.

-----

Busy signals

The Web, for all of its wondrous complexity, still gets along without the clear and predictable signals of the good old landline phone system. On the telephone, a busy signal means busy; a fast busy means a busy trunk line; a continued ringing means the party isn't answering; a 'disconnected' voice message means the phone is disconnected. The Web has dozens of specific-sounding error messages, but none of them predictably signal the condition they nominally describe. Any one of the messages could, and often does, mean 'temporarily busy'.

=====

Later sidenote about dreams: Most dreams feature familiar people, not original characters. But the familiar characters are an oddly restricted set. They are drawn from the people I knew in the 1970s, or more precisely 1966-1979. People I knew only before high school never appear, and people I met after 1978 never appear, even in dreams that are otherwise set in the present.
  ¶ 8:54 AM

  Weldon and Able Danger
Rep. Curt Weldon is unquestionably the man of the hour. While the Administration continues to kowtow to State and CIA, following the atrocious New Tone rules which leave it unable to call evil by its correct name, Weldon is telling the story that desperately needs to be told.

In the blog world, Captain's Quarters is master of the story.

Considering that Iraqi intel agents were working in Germany at the same time when Atta was working in Germany, I'm inclined to think CIA's denial of Atta's Prague meeting is a classic piece of misdirection. Sort of like "No, Mom, I didn't break Mr. Wilson's window on Tuesday morning at 9:30", or "I didn't have sex with That Woman in the Oval Office." As long as everyone is arguing about Prague, nobody bothers to ask whether they could have met in Hamburg, which would have been considerably easier.

Update 8/16: seems to be a lot of backtracking, handwashing, and mea-culpaing on this question. I'm going to stick with Weldon. Over the years, living on both sides of the political spectrum, I've learned a few things. First, the authorities almost always have some kind of informers or double agents in troublesome groups. Second, the presence of such informers makes it hard for the authorities to state the full truth. Third, when a story gets as fuzzy and contradictory as this one, you can be sure the gov't is tripping over its own feet because of such informers. Fourth, we knew a whole lot about Atta and his buddies immediately after 9/11. If they were strictly a surprise, it would have taken months to gain that much info.

Now, at this point in the argument, a leftist would take off into the stratosphere of screechy rage, blaming the gov't for "creating" al Qaeda. That's nonsense, of course. I just wish the gov't would get over the whole Watergate phobia, and find a positive way to acknowledge that it does gather internal intelligence, and that we are generally safer because of such information. Wouldn't it be refreshing?
  ¶ 7:29 PM

  Sorry, wrong number


News item: "Scholars studying a newly discovered fragment of the oldest known copy of the New Testament have determined that the Mark of the Beast is actually 616, not 666."

What a waste. All those centuries of paranoid brainpower devoted to finding 666 in the names and serial numbers of people and things.... and all those gallons of tattoo ink and spray paint wasted by young would-be Satanists marking their bodies and neighborhoods.

Hmm... If a real Satan wanted to protect his pet number, so that his marked minions could do their dastardly deeds undetected, wonder how he'd do it? Hmm.
  ¶ 6:22 PM

  Towels and nickels
I heard this little story from one of my father's K-State coworkers when we moved to Manhattan in 1956. Supposedly this had occurred the previous summer, so it's 50 years old now. As far as I know it's never been published anywhere; if the WPA Writers Project had still been active then, I suspect they would have appreciated and included this story. Probably true, possibly apocryphal, certainly iconic.

Integration was a hot topic in 1955.

The city of Manhattan had a separate black high school, which was merged immediately after Brown vs Board. But the city swimming pool wasn't affected by that legal change. Blacks were still relegated to Douglass Pool, down by the railroad, while whites had the nicer pool in the City Park.

K-State, though, had been integrated from the start, and had graduated important black scholars and writers as early as 1880. In the '50s K-State, being a world-class engineering and agriculture school, had a wide variety of foreign students. (Cosmopolitan Kansas? Yep.) K-State also had a long history of contrarian tendencies, dating from the Abolitionist origins of northeastern Kansas. Aggies were protesting long before protesting was cool.

So a group of college contrarians decided to do something about Douglass Pool, and decided to do it mathematically. One fine summer morning, they gathered up a dozen nice clean-cut foreign students, made sure each of them had a towel and a nickel for admission, and walked them down to the city pool.......



  ¶ 8:28 PM

  Well, poop. A while back I noted some potentially good news from Oklahoma, in the form of a plan to rejuvenate two oil and gas refineries that had been dormant for years. Turns out I should have stuck with my initial skepticism. The planner has disappeared, leaving behind nothing but unpaid rent.

A former refinery manager, Paul Nicholson, said he volunteered much of his time and effort to Winkelman's plans to reopen the Thomas refinery after Winkelman initially contacted him early this year.

Nicholson said his skepticism grew more and more as Winkelman told him he was securing financing from Texas underwriters to the tune of $400 million, yet in the same breath told him he was getting around Enid on a bicycle.

"He (Winkelman) pulled the rug out from all of us. Apparently he was a dreamer. He has done a lot of things to the wrong people. He left me high and dry," Nicholson said.

Grrrrr.

He doesn't appear to have gained any money from the whole scheme, though, and I don't see how he could have gained money without actually building things.
  ¶ 12:42 PM

  NRO's pin-dance
Podhoretz at NRO observes this morning:

What astonishes me in the course of this discussion (to judge from the blizzards of e-mails and other blog items done on this debate) is that I, a relatively secular person, am arguing the position that we cannot understand the mystery of life without faith -- and that a great many pro-llfers, whose commitment to life is religious in nature and whose religion plays a far more central role in their lives than it does in mine, are arguing with me on the grounds that the whole business can be discerned entirely through reason and science.

What should astonish him is that he's essentially taking the leftist side in this discussion. The crossover itself shouldn't be astonishing; Reagan discussed it in the early '80s.

Plain fact: Fundamentalists do agree with science on this point, and secularists, or more precisely 'bio-ethicists', disagree with science. The only possible scientific position is that an egg tells us it's human when it starts dividing. After that, it's human until all signs of organismic function are gone.

This doesn't mean we must say that every death is murder. We don't do that with regular macroscopic visible adults, after all; we can separate death by old age, by disease, by accident, by an unintentional act of another human, by a fully intentional act. Within the latter, we also make various fine distinctions. We've been doing this as long as we've had any form of law.

So we don't need to describe a miscarriage, or the normal slough of menstruation, as murder. Those are natural deaths. We unquestionably need to treat a deliberate abortion as illegal, though we don't have to call it murder. Some abortions have the character of self-defense. And so on. Law already contains the mechanism to make these distinctions.

But any definition, whether allegedly 'scientific' or legal, that gives a less-than-human status to any intermediate stage of life, is religious, because it depends on some notion of ensoulment. And any such definition leaves the field wide open for thanatophiles like Felos and Kevorkian.

[I've discussed this overall point before.]
  ¶ 7:50 AM

  De leg bone connected to de womb bone....
A fairly large discovery in the realm of stem cells. [From 6 Aug paper issue of New Scientist; I don't see it in the online edition.]

Women have long been told that they are born with a fixed number of eggs that eventually run out, triggering the menopause. But now it seems that there may be a way for a woman to replenish her egg stocks. More surprising still is where this egg recharge comes from: stem cells lodged in the bone marrow. If the researchers can show that these bone-marrow-derived eggs can be fertilised and produce healthy offspring, the implications for fertility treatment are huge.

The theory is that germ-line stem cells in the marrow make immature germ cells, which travel through the bloodstream until they hit the ovary, which grabs them and nurtures them into eggs.

Implications for cloning and stem cell research are also huge; if you can develop an egg from bone marrow, you don't need to harvest "genuine" eggs that were "intended" to become actual humans. No zero-sum game, in other words. It will be interesting to watch the ethicists juggling this one.

Hmm... wasn't there something about this in a considerably earlier journal? Something about ribs developing into humans?
  ¶ 10:30 AM

  Hit the 'Undo' button on 1920.
Still thinking about symmetrical vs asymmetrical. Concluded that the ant model is not a bad idea; trouble is, we haven't really implemented it. We've kicked over some piles of dirt, and flushed out the upper layers of one nest, but we've made it crystal clear that we won't kill the queen.

Our original strategic reason for doing Iraq was (1) To show Iran, Syria and Arabia that we can exert force in their back yard. (2) To rig up a base of operations in their back yard.

Iraq was the best choice for such a base because it was central to those three countries, we were already operating in the North, and we had plenty of reasons to revoke Saddam's probation. So okay, now we have the base, but because we didn't have enough sense to kill Saddam when we captured him, we're dealing with constant irritation by Arab ants, which prevents us from exerting the force that was the original reason for the whole business.

I never understood why we didn't explain the operation along those lines, instead of the nonsense about WMD and women's rights, but that's irrelevant now.

Fall back to the original idea. Separate Iraq into its three natural parts, since the 1920 British 'welding' of those parts was a major source of the problem.

Let the Brits have a protectorate on the Shia South, extended over to cover the Syrian border.

Let Kurdistan be a US protectorate. The supposed "reason" for not separating Kurdistan was a bunch of Kissingerian bullshit about stability and Turkey, which never made sense; and Turkey gave up any right to consideration when it refused to help in this war. On top of all that, we owe the Kurds a big one, after Bush Senior's betrayal of their help in 1991.

Fence in the area around Baghdad, cut the pipelines, and let the Sunnis return to their primitive ways. Fill the North and South with tactical nukes, ready to throw outward or inward. Any time we hear a rumor that Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, or Baghdad is funding, supporting, or thinking positively about terrorist activity in the civilized world, we give the appropriate city a U-235 beauty treatment. Remove unsightly blemishes, leave an attractive glow. After three such makeovers are necessary, we toss in a free bonus: transform the queen (Mecca) into a lovely mirror-like pool of glass.
  ¶ 11:47 AM

  Fatwaaaassssup?
For twenty years now, Mohammedans have been striking at American and European interests in the West, without any apology or protest from the allegedly 'moderate side' of that religion.

Suddenly we get heaping helpings of unconditional no-buts apologies and anti-violence fatwas all over the place.

Some trusted experts say that the fatwas are fatuous, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.

What's changed? Why now? The London bombing wasn't the biggest attack by any means, nor the only one that killed fellow Mohammedans.

Polistra has an answer, and a plea to American authorities, in musical form:



Karaoke, anyone?

----

Later (8/5 morning) It's being reported that the International Assn of Police Chiefs is endorsing shoot-to-kill as well. The story as given on TV is a bit misleading, though .... turns out the Assn. actually recommended shooting kamikazes before the London bombings, and they were following the lead of the DC Capitol Police who recommended the procedure a year ago. So the idea began here, oddly enough. Still remains to be seen if any US city police forces will publicly join the crusade. Here's a well-organized collection of stories on the subject.

-----

Benchmark: July 2005 will be remembered as the moment when WW4 was really joined by the West. Up till now, this war has been asymmetrical. Mohammedans in Western countries have mounted a crescendo of attacks for 20 years with no direct response. When we responded at all, it has always been in the Middle East. The London 'shot heard round the world' marked the first symmetrical answer by civilization, the first return fire directed at the local savages. Until now, we were throwing our bullets elsewhere in a peculiar form of lethal ventriloquism.

-----

Yet another irrelevant addendum: Just realized that my own mindset has been changed. Until now, I appreciated the ant analogy: easier to kill the nest than to stop the ants from entering the house. Now that I see the dramatic results of killing ants just before they sting, I'm more inclined to favor the latter method.
  ¶ 11:05 AM

  Random notes
American police, at least in big cities, view their job as protecting criminals and serving the ACLU. The Brits have a radically different view: protect law-abiding citizens from criminals. On the ground, the difference may not be so striking, but the public utterances of police officials are dramatically opposite.

Is there no equivalent of the ACLU in the UK? If there is, how do the police avoid doing its bidding? Could this be a consequence of the British loser-pays system in civil law? Less monetary temptation for anti-civilization forces to take down the police?

-----

Watching the BRAC hearings on C-span is edifying, and not just in terms of statistics about military installations.

From the usual network coverage of Congress, you get the impression that the Party of Treason owns all the articulate speech and oratory, while the Republican 'party' just sits there cowering, or at best stumbles and stutters. You also get the impression that corporate and military leaders are dull and dumb.

BRAC shows an opposite picture. Retired generals and admirals speak with passion and brilliance (and even a few unfeigned tears) about the places and troops that they love; obscure politicians of both parties are articulate and organized. Only a few of the 'big names' appear in these hearings, and they are surprisingly dull and unprepared.

The difference is not primarily media bias; it's more a matter of self-selection. The 'big names', who are mainly Dems, are driven to find cameras with global reach to satisfy their grandstanding addiction, while the executives and generals know that their best loss-cutting strategy in those situations is silence. In BRAC, the networks aren't watching, so real work happens. The back-benchers get a chance to do precisely what they were elected to do: protect the interests of their districts. And they do it magnificently.

It's refreshing and heartening to see that democracy does in fact work.... sometimes. Especially when the legislature is taking responsibility for its own proper job, instead of handing it off to commissions and courts. So why do we need the commission in the first place?

-----

Great news: China has withdrawn its bid for Unocal. This is also heartening, and more evidence that Congress can be effective even without making laws. As a non-social technical type, my first instinct is to discount the power of words: if it ain't concrete action, it ain't nothing. Good to be reminded now and then that I'm wrong about this!

-----
  ¶ 9:09 AM

  Steven Vincent, RIP


I've written to the Murrow Center at Wash State Univ, suggesting that Steven Vincent would be an ideal recipient of the next Murrow Award... posthumously, of course.

Hard to think of anyone in the modern world who comes closer to the tradition of Murrow's London reporting.

Email address:

murrowsymposium@wsu.edu


  ¶ 10:05 AM