August 11, 2007

TOM SMITH BEATS ME in the tire-pressure geek arms race.

IN THE LONDON TIMES, questions about BBC bias:

The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple – much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group? . . .

We in the BBC were acutely detribalised; we were in a tribal institution, but we were not of it. Nor did we have any geographical tribe; we lived in commuter suburbs, we knew very few of our neighbours and took not the slightest interest in local government. In fact we looked down on it. Councillors were self-important nobodies and mayors were a pompous joke.

We belonged instead to a dispersed “metropolitan media arts graduate” tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the royal family, the defence budget – it’s a wonder we ever got home.

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground.

Read the whole thing, which is probably applicable beyond the BBC's confines.

A ROMNEY VICTORY in the Iowa Straw Poll, according to Romney HQ.

UPDATE: Full report from Marc Ambinder. A surprise second-place showing by Huckabee.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots of candidate and pundit reactions at The Corner.

BRENDAN LOY: The 2007 hurricane season is right on schedule.

HEH: "Oh, don't you just know the linked-to article is a lifestyles piece in the NYT? Where do they find these people?"

THE ARMY ISN'T STONEWALLING -- BEAUCHAMP IS: An Army response to TNR.

THANKS, Skippy!

DOES A REPORTER HAVE A DUTY TO APPEAR ON C-SPAN?

Nope. Just as nobody has a duty to talk to reporters.

A LIST OF terror websites based in the West.

OKAY, this is just disturbing:

Thomas Martel, 28, of Bonnie Brae is a big guy. So he has a hard time using the features on ever-shrinking user interfaces on devices like his new iPhone. At least, he did, until he had his thumbs surgically altered in a revolutionary new surgical technique known as "whittling." . . .

The procedure involved making a small incision into both thumbs and shaving down the bones, followed by careful muscular alteration and modification of the fingernails. While Martel's new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift "pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery - though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise."

(Via Physics Geek. And it's inspired a contest.)

UPDATE: Apparently, it's also a hoax, which I actually find a relief.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

KIND OF A COUP: The Amazon page for Bjorn Lomborg's new book on global warming features a review by Michael Crichton.

SHIP OF FOOLS. Reader C.J. Burch emails: "How come the bloggers are the first to notice and the reporters are the last to notice?"

It's all about the narrative.

MICKEY KAUS:

I thought Wall Streeters were paid big money because they took big risks. Capitalism, etc. But when those risks actually materialize, and the Wall Streeters are actually threatened with large losses that might change their lifestyles, Jim Cramer shows up to demand that the government bail out his friends.

Plus: "Should the campaign of John Edwards be accusing other candidates of exploiting tragedy?"

UPDATE: A Cramer defense.

MILITARY VETERANS SPEAK OUT at Yale Law School.

COMPLAINTS ABOUT The New York Times' Lebanon coverage. And an earlier complaint here.

A "DIRTY BOMB" THREAT in New York.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Plus, helpful background from Dan Riehl.

TAKING THE WSJ WEBSITE from subscription to free?

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch has said he might make the Wall Street Journal's Web site free, a shift that could compel Pearson to do the same with the online version of its Financial Times. . . .

"It would be an expensive thing to do in the short term. In the long term, it may be a great thing to do," Murdoch said this week as he sketched his plan for the future of Dow Jones.

Hmm. I think the WSJ is one of the few publications of its type that can make a subscription model work.

U.N. TROOPS "HELPED TO SMUGGLE GOLD:"

The BBC has obtained an internal UN report examining allegations of gold smuggling by Pakistani peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It concluded that Pakistani officers provided armed escorts, hospitality and food to gold smugglers in east Congo.

The confidential report recommended the case be referred to Islamabad for appropriate action against the troops.

I wonder what will happen.

THE CLINTONS AND THE GAY COMMUNITY: "Hillary Clinton has gone about as far as Hillary Clinton will go in disavowing her earlier positions on major gay issues."

NEWTROOTS vs NetRoots.

August 10, 2007

WATCHING BASEBALL SMARTER.

SOME HOUSING HORROR STORIES, from James Lileks.

SO THE DOW FINISHED THE WEEK slightly up, as were the other indexes. Good news? Or just a brief reprieve? Beats me.

THE BLOG WAR BEGINS.

A FLIP-FLOP ON TERRORISM PREDICTIONS, at the New York Times?

MORE ANIMAL-RIGHTS TERRORISM: Violent radicals aim to kill Jules Stein Eye Institute researchers who test on animals. There's already been a car-bomb attempt.

SACRED BANDS AND SPARTA: A HISTORY LESSON FOR MIKE GRAVEL, from Victor Davis Hanson.

A NEW BEAUCHAMP STATEMENT from TNR, though still not terribly informative.

UPDATE: Dave Price is unimpressed. "Well, that's a neat, lawyerly trick: insist that the Army do something they know the Army cannot do, and claim they are helpless to admit the story is fake otherwise. Slick."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jules Crittenden is unpersuaded.

SAVING GAS WITH A digital tire gauge? Not a bad idea, I guess, and keeping your tires inflated properly is a good idea anyway, but don't expect anything really dramatic.

UPDATE: Some readers recommend filling tires with nitrogen. I'm pretty skeptical of this -- air is nearly 80% nitrogen anyway, and upping the percentage to something likely to be still well below 100% (because of residual air in tires, etc.) doesn't seem at all likely to make a difference.

ACE WONDERS WHY NOBODY'S TALKING ABOUT the NASA climate data revision.

UPDATE: Well, here's a bit of notice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: "Will the mainstream media report the corrected story with as much gusto as they initially reported the claim that 1998 was the warmest on record? Doubtful. But they should. Good public policy can not be made on bad data."

MORE: This comment at Ecotality distinguishes hottest years in America from hottest years globally, but I always understood this to be about American, not global, records. And I think I was right. As I noted in my earlier post, it indicates problems with the data sets. More here:

The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.

Much more information at the link.

Plus, reports of Denial-of-Service attacks.

IS IT "PAY FOR PLAY" in Spitzer's New York?

IT'S THE Tennessee Pork Patrol! Rope 'em and brand 'em.

LINDA GREENHOUSE IN A TIFF WITH C-SPAN: Why are journalists so often unhappy about being recorded? "What we're hearing is that Linda Greenhouse wanted to be as free as possible to criticize the Supreme Court's recent turn to the right -- without having to worry about such pesky things as, you know, 'impartiality' (which we bloggers don't have to worry about, thankfully)."

BRYAN PRESTON gives John Murtha a call.

LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE BUSTING ON STEVE LEVITT for trying to think like the enemy. I understand the point, but there's lots of this kind of brainstorming going on at jihadist sites anyway. Plus, presumably the NYT will harvest IP addresses and turn them over to the FBI, thus ensuring America's safety.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer emails:

It is exactly because of the firestorm surrounding Steve Levitt's comments that the blogosphere is becoming increasingly unreadable at the general level. Not only is it simply impossible to find something to become offended by and infuriated at on a daily basis, but it is even harder to do so about such stupid things.

In just about every terrorism class at any university in the country, students must think like terrorists in order to judge what they might do. In my own class, our final project was to plot our own terrorist attack and present it to the class. (We hacked and brought down the electricity grid, followed by an attack in a blacked out city).

Don't intelligence analysts do this every day when they're tracking down foreign jihadis? Don't Homeland Security officials do this every day when thinking about the most vulnerable parts of our country?

I hope they are, because if they aren't, I'm more worried about that than some smart comments that Steve Levitt made.

Yeah, people need to calm down a bit.

DESMOND LACHMAN: The housing bust is a big deal. The markets seem to agree, pretty much.

THOUGHTS ON earmarks, corruption, and rational ignorance.

WHAT NOT TO NAME YOUR BLOG: At least "InstaPundit" doesn't come up . . . .

OUCH: "The top-quality fact-checking that can only be achieved by large media corporations is on fine display today, as Reuters is caught by a 13-year old Finnish schoolboy representing still photos from the movie 'Titanic' as pictures from the Russian North Pole expedition."

A JOHN EDWARDS / ZAC EFRON nexus?

A LOOK AT NANOTECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE, from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

CARRY PERMIT CORRUPTION in California.

And more on the Boston Globe firearms straw purchase scandal. No explanations from Steve Bailey, just attacks on his critics.

Lots of background on the Bailey case at SayUncle.

BILL ARDOLINO is going back to Iraq.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Now go vote! "With the states on a race to set primaries and caucuses earlier than everywhere else, both major candidates will be probably known by the end of January, nine full months before the election — or as much time as it takes to make a baby. It’s a major change in the way the US has been electing presidents, and something that the Founders probably didn’t have in mind."

SINCE I MENTIONED IT YESTERDAY, people want to know what I think of William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country. Alas, I haven't started it yet. I'm currently reading the new Harry Turtledove book, the conclusion to his alt-history series in which the South won the Civil War, producing a series of follow-on conflicts making America look more like 20th Century Europe. It should be required reading for all those neo-confederate types who wish things had gone the other way in 1865. Meanwhile, if you follow the link there are some very positive reader reviews of Gibson's book, and an interview, too.

TED KENNEDY DOESN'T LIKE WIND TURBINES, but Boston's Electricians' Union thinks they're great. Because they mean jobs for electricians. But what's that compared with a trivial infringement on Ted Kennedy's ocean view? (Thanks to reader Matt Szekely for the tip.)

IF IT'S AUGUST, it must be time for another round of "Gender in the Blogosphere." Ellen Goodman serves, and Ann Althouse volleys. "Goodman doesn't really have too much to say, but I note that she doesn't come up with one idea that's not about how men are a problem. Somehow women never have any shortcomings. It's really a shame, because if you're a woman, then there's nothing you can change about yourself to do better."

TASK FORCE WARHORSE: Reporting from Haifa Street.

PERHAPS MIKE BLOOMBERG SHOULD HAVE WORRIED ABOUT THIS PROBLEM, instead of spending his time on trans-fats:

In a Crisis, Subway Riders Get Little Guidance

Compared with commuters in many of the world’s leading cities, subway riders in New York live in something of an information vacuum once they enter the system’s 468 stations. For decades, riders have regarded their creaking and antiquated subway network as a minor miracle, tolerating frequent delays, cramped stations and malfunctioning public-address systems.

But the storm this week, highlighting yet again deficiencies in how the authority gets information out, seemed to push riders past the limits of their patience.

This is not just a convenience issue, but a safety issue.

ARNOLD KLING looks at the Facebook Generation Gap.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON the TNR / Beauchamp affair: "We already knew from all of America’s armed conflicts — including Iraq — what war can make men do. The only thing we learn from Scott Thomas Beauchamp is what literary ambition can make men say."

MATTHEW HOY: "It appears as though efforts by some in the military and media to turn a tragedy into a crime are going to fail. Yesterday, Lt. Gen. James Mattis decided not to court-martial Lance Cpl. Justin L. Sharratt and Capt. Randy W. Stone." Something of an embarrassment for John Murtha, if he's capable of embarrassment.

UPDATE: Murtha still running for cover.

ORIN KERR: Questions and answers on the new FISA bill. Plus a report on the FISA conference call for bloggers. Glad he was taking notes, as I was unable to, er, listen in . . . .

IF ONLY: "We’re entering the early mid-late summer blur, I suspect. Something deep, ancient, elemental and ancestral in the back of our minds has noted the angle of the sun at noon, and concluded: in two weeks I shall see school buses making practice runs. Of course, this information was useless to our Neolithic forebears, but it explains their epic poems about giant yellow beasts that prowled the land and devoured the first-born." School started here yesterday. The insta-daughter's opinion? . . . . Mixed.

SEGWAY FAN CLUB disbands.

MICKEY KAUS: "One way to characterize Bush's second term in domestic policy is that he's consistently moved to Plan B too late to salvage anything from the demise of his Plan A. That was certainly the case on Social Security reform, and in all probability will be the final story on immigration. Will he replicate that misjudgment on Iraq?"

DEFENDANT WINS BREATHALYZER SOURCE CODE. Well, without that being public it's just a black box.

August 09, 2007

THEY USED TO BE CALLED "THE POPULAR PRESS," BUT NOT ANY MORE:

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

More than half -- 53 percent -- of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for "failing to stand up for America".

Do you think?

DON SURBER: "Come next January when the top is up on my Mustang and I am shoveling my driveway, I will be warm in the knowledge that at least some of my federal tax dollars will be used to allow members of anti-alcohol groups to sun themselves at the Bahai Resort hotel in Mission Bay, Calif."

LIVEBLOGGING THE Democrats' gay debate. I'm disappointed that no Republicans showed up. Not even Ron Paul.

UPDATE: More from Ryan Sager.

MORE: "The President of Canada?"

DIRTY BLOG TRICKS: A fake Fred Thompson website.

UPDATE: More here.

IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE THE RIGHT SENTIMENTS -- you must have them at the proper time:

Hillary Clinton, who has criticized rival Barack Obama for saying the use of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and Afghanistan should be "off the table," expressed a nearly identical sentiment about Iran a year ago, the Associated Press is reporting this afternoon.

After Obama made his remarks about nuclear weapons, Clinton said, "I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons." But in an April 2006 interview with Bloomberg Television, the AP reports, Clinton, when asked about reports that the Bush administration was considering a nuclear strike against Iran's nuclear program, said: "I have said publicly no option should be off the table, but I would certainly take nuclear weapons off the table. This administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven't seen since the dawn of a nuclear age. I think that's a terrible mistake."

Clinton's campaign says things are different now. Yep.

"AREN'T YOU A LITTLE SHORT FOR A STORM TROOPER?" Francis Fukuyama denies any connection to "armies of cloned Hitlers."

ARE THE DEMOCRATS peaking too early?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Club for Growth has put up a Congressional Pork Scorecard tracking members' votes on all 50 anti-pork amendments that have been presented.

Highlights:

* Sixteen congressmen scored a perfect 100%, voting for all 50 anti-pork amendments. They are all Republicans.

* The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2%.

* The average score for appropriators was 4%. The average score for non-appropriators was 25%.

* Kudos to Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who scored an admirable 98%-the only Democrat to score above 20%.

* Rep. David Obey (D-WI) did not vote for his own amendment to strike all earmarks in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. Rep. Obey scored an embarrassing 0% overall.

* 105 congressmen scored an embarrassing 0%, voting against every single amendment. The Pork Hall of Shame includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.

* The Democratic Freshmen scored an abysmal average score of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored an average score of 78%.

Follow the link for much more. Bottom line: "Unfortunately, the Club for Growth RePORK Card shows that most congressmen care more about lining their buddies' pockets than they care about protecting American taxpayers."

And, sadly, it's a bipartisan problem. Incumbistan is a one-party state. Upside: My own congressman, Jimmy Duncan, scored 88%, which I actually find somewhat surprising.

KNOXVILLE -- VALLEY OF THE BLOGS: "You can't swing a cat in this town without hitting a blogger."

FROM IPHONE TO ICLONE: "The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I'd spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple's iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers." But read the story to find out what happens, and get a look into the Chinese market for cloned products -- even part-for-part Chevrolet copies.

SUBPRIME MORTGAGES AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

In short, government has been the principal factor preventing the "affordable housing" that politicians talk about so much.

Politicians have also been a key factor behind pushing lenders to lend to borrowers with lower prospects of being able to repay their loans.

The Community Reinvestment Act lets politicians pressure lenders to make loans to people they might not lend to otherwise - and the same politicians are quick to cry "exploitation" when the interest charged to high-risk borrowers reflects that risk.

The huge losses of subprime lenders, some of whom have gone bankrupt, demonstrate again the consequences of letting politicians try to micro-manage the economy.

Yet with all the finger-pointing in the media and in government, seldom is a finger pointed at the politicians at local, state and national levels who have played a key role in setting up the conditions that led to financial disasters for individual home buyers and for those who lent to them.

While financial markets are painfully adjusting, and lenders and borrowers are becoming less likely to take on so much risky "creative" financing, politicians show no sign of changing.

Why should they, when they have largely escaped blame for the disasters that their policies fostered?

Perhaps we should have hearings and subpoena some politicians for tough questioning. Oh, wait . . . .

BILL BRADLEY: Wake me up when the debates are over.

MORE DDT NEWS:

Mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever avoid homes that have been sprayed with DDT, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The chemical not only repels the disease-carrying insects physically, but its irritant and toxic properties helps keep them away, the researchers reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

They estimate that DDT spray reduced the risk of disease transmission by nearly three-quarters. . . ."The historical record of malaria control operations show that DDT is the most cost-effective chemical for malaria control. Even now DDT is still considered to be the cheapest and most effective chemical for use in house spray operations," the researchers wrote.

Read the whole thing.

A CHRISTIAN CHINA? Lots of people seem excited by this article, which begins: "Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history."

It could happen, I suppose, and my colleague Rosalind Hackett, who studies these things, has suggested that militant Christianity, not Islam, is likely to be the religious force of the 21st century. (She also notes that few Americans realize how much missionary activity there is by African Christians in North America.) Still, I'd be surprised if these predictions bore out. Question left as an exercise for the reader: How long, at 10,000 / day, does it take to reach 200 million?

JEROME ARMSTRONG'S S.E.C. TROUBLES, explained.

WHEN HIDDEN EXPERTS are found.

WARMEST YEAR OF THE PAST CENTURY? New analysis suggests it was 1934, not 1998 as previously thought. Not sure what that means, but it's kind of interesting that this sort of thing remains subject to uncertainty.

UPDATE: More here.

OUCH:

An overnight post from ABC's Political Radar: "ABC News' Raelyn Johnson reports...All day the blogosphere has been buzzing with the question, 'Did Elizabeth Edwards really say that?' Finally tonight there is an answer as the Edwards campaign confirms the remarks to ABC News."

Ed Cone reports to ABC News' Raelyn Johnson: Bullshit.

There was a lot of buzz, but little if any of it was about the veracity of the quote. In any case, you could have done what other media outlets, and the Edwards campaign, did: contact me for details of the interview.

Don't mess with Ed.

RUNNING OUT OF RESOURCES?

I'm often asked about our consumption of natural resources, e.g., oil, iron, and copper. Since these resources are finite and population continues to grow, aren't we in danger of running out? My short answer is no, we'll never run out of anything that trades in the marketplace. But, we should be concerned about running out of "resources" that have no price and no owner, e.g., wild things and the ecosystems upon which they depend. Here's why I'm concerned about the one and not the other.

Read the whole thing.

A ROBOT ROUNDUP FROM DARPATECH, by Erik Sofge. And here's more reporting from DARPAtech by Noah Shachtman.

IN THE MAIL: William Gibson's new novel, Spook Country.

INDEED: "TNR's silence is deathly."

ASSOCIATED PRESS: "Polls show shift in attitudes on Iraq following military inroads."

UPDATE: And there's this:

WASHINGTON (AP) - One senator said U.S. troops are routing out al-Qaida in parts of Iraq. Another insisted President Bush's plan to increase troops has caused tactical momentum.

One even went so far on Wednesday as to say the argument could be made that U.S. troops are winning.

These are not Bush-backing GOP die-hards, but Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed. Even Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, said progress was being made by soldiers.

The suggestions by them and other Democrats in recent days that at least a portion of Bush's strategy in Iraq is working is somewhat surprising, considering the bitter exchanges on Capitol Hill between the Democratic majority and Republicans and Bush. Democrats have long said Bush's policies have been nothing more than a complete failure.

Perhaps we'll see less partisanship in the months to come.

JAMES FALLOWS on the dangers of excessive security. On the other hand, his final question demonstrates that hyperbole is present among the critics, too.

GREEN FAKERS: Radar on why eco-hypocrisy matters:

Take Laurie David, soon-to-be-ex-wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry, and producer of An Inconvenient Truth and other save-the-earth extravaganzas. Though she boasts about using recycled toilet paper and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, David has been pilloried for, among other excesses, flying on private jets. Here's what she has said in defense of her travel habits: "I'm not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don't expect anybody else to be perfect either. That's what hurts the environmental movement—holding people to a standard they cannot meet."

Apparently, when you're worth a few hundred million dollars, being asked to refrain from the most carbon-intensive indulgence known to man qualifies as "holding people to a standard they cannot meet." Note, too, her use of emotional jujitsu: the ones who are really hurting the environment are the ones who are so impolite as to point out her bad behavior. . . . It's always galling to be exhorted to curb your consumption by people who are living the poshest lifestyle imaginable. But the problem here goes beyond aesthetics. Eco-hypocrites undercut the very message they're trying to peddle. How desperate could the planet's plight be if the people who present themselves as most concerned about it consider flying first-class commercial an unacceptable sacrifice?

Read the whole thing. As I've said before, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

SOUTH CAROLINA MOVES ITS PRIMARY: Marc Ambinder looks at the fallout.

ROGER SIMON: The Netroots are Rotting: "Now, as we all know, sleaze and corruption are not unique to either side of the political spectrum. But Armstrong, Kos & their netroot cronies have made a big deal out of clean government (and they should). So this kind of allegation speaks even more deeply to their ethics, as it it would for anyone in that position."

NIGERIA UPDATE:

Police and military forces have been unable to halt the spread of kidnapping activity in the Niger Delta oil region. With security forces and civilian body guards tied up protecting officials and foreigners, the kidnappers have switched to grabbing family members (children, parents, and so on) of prominent Delta politicians. The ransoms aren't as large, but the money is still good by Nigerian standards.

The navy is spread so thin that it cannot protect commercial traffic, particularly ferries and regular passenger runs, from pirate attacks. The criminal gangs have been doing so well that they have taken to fighting each other over territory. In the past week, at least a dozen people were shot dead in Delta cities, as gangs fought each other in the streets. The government is barely in control in the Delta, and a coalition of gangs is offering the government a deal to ease up attacks on oil production, in return for a cut of the oil profits. In theory, these diverted oil profits would go to "the people," but the gangsters would grab most of it, emulating the gangsters that have long been passing themselves off as politicians and elected representatives of "the people."

Downside: Pretty obvious. Upside: Getting Iraq to be a "normal country" like Nigeria is getting easier as the gap narrows . . . .

COL. BUZZ PATTERSON really went after Jon Soltz, the antiwar activist last seen shutting up Sgt. David Aguina at YearlyKos.

THE EXAMINER: The Surge is Working: What Now?

The U.S. military surge, widely denounced as a last-ditch effort by an embattled, lame-duck president fighting an un-winnable civil war, is working. Even as vocal a war critic as Deputy Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has now acknowledged as much, telling CNN that the U.S. military is “making real progress.” . . .

The surge is also having a positive impact on Iraq’s political equation, according to Petraeus: “We’re also heartened by the number of Iraqi tribes and local citizens who have rejected al Qaeda. We cannot attribute that to the surge but the surge certainly enabled that to move much more rapidly, we believe, than it otherwise would have.”

Military and political progress is heartening but with it comes a critical decision for war critics, especially Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, who declared the war lost months ago, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last week pledged to continue seeking withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Public support for the war effort has been growing in recent weeks and the expected positive report from Petraeus to Congress in mid-September will likely generate additional support for giving victory a chance. In other words, the political ground on which Reid and Pelosi are standing is shifting beneath them. Do they now really want to bring our boys home just when they are poised to win?

Read the whole thing.

FOUND: A life preserver from the Edmund Fitzgerald?

ANN ALTHOUSE: "My iPhone self-destructed in less than a week." But there's a silver lining.

GOOD NEWS: Search engines starting to compete on privacy.

THE NEW REPUBLIC LOOKS AWFULLY BAD in this AP story about the Beauchamp affair.

August 08, 2007

CALLING JAMES WEBB A COWARD: Seems politically unwise.

UPDATE: A related post from Ed Driscoll. And Iowa Voice is just amused.

THE DAILY SHOW SKEWERS Cape Wind opponents. (Bumped, because I like it.)

IT WON'T BE HOSTING INSTAPUNDIT: "The University of Tennessee will receive one of the world’s most powerful computers as part of a five-year, $65 million project to be funded by the National Science Foundation. . . . UT teamed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the NSF proposal, and the supercomputer — capable of nearly 1,000 trillion calculations per second — would be housed in the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, a state-funded facility at ORNL."

More at Slashdot.

TAKING ON THE "CHICKENHAWK" CANARD at The New Republic:

It should be an obvious point that in democracies, elected governments decide on policy and armed forces implement it. If you believe that armed forces should be doing the deciding--whether because of their greater expertise, or the moral superiority that comes from their greater willingness to sacrifice--then you are not a democrat (small d), but a militarist. In democracies, elected governments can certainly let their armed forces down. They can do so, for instance, by giving them a job and then failing to provide them with sufficient resources to accomplish it, as many argue the Bush administration has done in Iraq. But elected governments--and last I heard, our own included something called the "legislative branch"--cannot by definition let the troops down by debating policy, or changing it. This is the government's job. It can do it unwisely, but the fact remains that the troops' own job is simply to carry the policy out, however misguided it may be.

Okay, it's not actually presented as an attack on the "chickenhawk" canard, but it seems equally valid in that context, no?

["Chickenhawk canard"? Isn't that a multilingual poultry pun? -- ed. I like to include those little Easter Eggs. Eggs -- there's another! This is getting fowl! -- ed. Switch to decaf, please.]

ANOTHER PETRAEUS RADIO INTERVIEW: And crickets from the left.

MORE BOGUS REPORTING from Iraq?

IF CAIR KEEPS THIS UP, people will start thinking that they're a bunch of terrorist apologists or something. No wonder its membership is so minuscule.

UPDATE: More on CAIR at the Counterterrorism Blog.

MICKEY KAUS: "Markos Moulitsas' co-author and MyDD blogger Jerome Armstrong--recently quoted assessing the state of the left blogosphere in Salon--has agreed to pay $30,000 to the S.E.C. to settle stock-touting allegations, according to TimesSelect prisoner Chris Suellentrop. That seems like quite a bit to me, though I'm no S.E.C. expert. It apparently includes a $20,000 fine." More at the link. Note that Armstrong neither admits nor denies the charges.

UPDATE: More thoughts here. Meanwhile the Kos Krowd responds -- Matt Drudge is gay! -- and Dan Riehl collects more sane reactions. What is it with the lefty types and gay slurs?

DEPARTMENT OF "HUH?" Benjamin Zycher emails:

I notice that your blog has shined virtually no light on Steve Levitt's utterly embarrassing letter to John McCall, a letter that most scholars with a shred of dignity would write only after having crawled into a deep hole. (As best as I can tell, all you have done is offer an "update" posting with a link.) In case you missed it: Levitt admits that even as he claimed that the special issue of the JLE that Lott put together was not refereed, Levitt himself was one of the referees. Second, Levitt's claim that Lott invited only authors whose views were consistent with his was undermined completely by his admission that he had been invited to submit a paper. (As, by the way, were others with views differing from Lott's.) And, third, the comedy highlight of Levitt's letter is his claim that "[Levitt] did not mean to suggest that Dr. Lott did anything unlawful or improper in arranging for the payment of the publication expenses for the Conference issue." Of course not; precisely what, then, did he mean to suggest?

Perhaps you could offer some of your usual musings on that. More generally, your rather loud silence on this latest development in the Levitt/Lott controversy is interesting, particularly given the massive amounts of attention, quotation, and credibility over these past few years that you have deemed appropriate for those attacking Lott's integrity. Now, why is that? Could it be that you simply are far less objective or "fair" than you like to pretend?

No obfuscations, please: A straight answer would be appreciated. Feel free to post this note if you wish.

Really, I don't have anything to say besides "huh?" Well, and my earlier characterization of the Lott/Levitt dispute as "In my opinion, a lawsuit that shouldn't have been brought, over a chain of events that shouldn't have happened, and involving accusations that shouldn't have been made." Neither Lott nor Levitt has come off especially well in this, though it's true that the latest news, which I did link, makes Levitt look bad. As for the rest, I really don't think I've devoted "massive amounts of attention" to attacks on Lott's integrity, though I did mention some of the problems he's had, and I'm quite surprised to be accused of harboring some sort of brutal anti-Lott agenda resulting in "loud silence." Whatever. Judging by the email address, it's this Benjamin Zycher, (whom I actually gave space on my blog to defend Lott over an earlier matter) and the email seems a bit intemperate for a scholar.

THOUGHTS ON THE SURGE, FROM Victor Davis Hanson: "So the key is not debating whether the surge is 'working' (it is), but rather concentrating on the post-surge, and defining exactly what are the conditions that result from it vis a vis Iraqi security and our military situation and national mood."

UPDATE: More here.

"AUTODOCS" ARE A STAPLE of science fiction. Now they're moving closer to reality:

One of the first announcements at this year's three-day DARPATech conference is going to be hard to top: the first portable, self-contained surgical robot will be deployed in the next two years. Brett Giroir, director of the research agency's Defense Sciences Office also announced that the system, called Trauma Pod, has successfully "treated" a mannequin during a test, with no complications.

It's remote-controlled, not autonomous, though.

IN WHICH I AGREE WITH A DAILY KOS COMMENTER:

Biden has single-handedly f****d more Americans than Wilt Chamberlain with his 2005 Bankruptcy bill. He can talk a good game from time to time, but don't kid yourself - he's playing for the other team.

Unfortunately, the other team doesn't lose many players. I think it's the excellent pay and benefits.

Earlier stuff on the bankruptcy bill, which inspired a lot of cross-blogospheric agreement, here, here, and here. I wouldn't mind if this came up in future Republican and Democratic debates.

DANIEL DREZNER ON THE DECLINE OF TERRITORIAL WARS, as a sign that the world is becoming "more pacific."

A JET-POWERED PORT-A-POTTY: And some of you will want one after seeing the photo.

BUT IT STILL SMELLS BAD: The Beijing Olympics are one year away.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS ON the Democrats' views of economics as displayed in last night's debate.

JAMES LILEKS: "What I wouldn’t give to find the exact location, and deepest fear, of the miscreant who’s spamming Buzz."

Hmm. Here's a suspect . . . .

O.J. SIMPSON'S HOUSE, WITH A KNIFE-SHARPENING VAN PARKED OUTSIDE: Yes, really.

DON SURBER: "Politics is a stock car race, meaning the crashes into the wall are just as important as who wins. And far more entertaining. Edmund Muskie crying. Gary Hart’s follow-me romp. Dr. Howard Dean’s scream. Ah, sweet memories."

A FACEBOOK FUNERAL.

A LOOK AT CAMPAIGN WEB DATA: Most surprising: "The oddest thing is that despite all of John Edwards net-roots efforts and his popularity with power-house web presences like DailyKos and MoveOn.org, he lags in fourth place with 12.08%."

UPDATE: "Interesting, but not surprising."

PELOSI ARM-WRESTLES OVER cash for the House Gym. "Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are not eager for a multimillion-dollar renovation of the congressional members-only gym to be one of the first accomplishments of the Democratic majority. They worry that freshman Democrats could be attacked on the campaign trail next year for approving a fancy new gym for themselves after winning office."

DAN RIEHL continues to bird-dog the Goose Creek arrests. [Bird-dog? Goose? -- ed. Just keeping the metaphors consistent.]

ETHANOL PRODUCTION CREATES A STEAK SHORTAGE in New York City?

Reminiscent of the Soviet Union -- because, of course, the subsidies for ethanol are, in a modest way, the kind of market-distorting policies that the Soviet Union loved. And with similar effects.

JOHN TABIN ON TNR and Beauchamp.

UPDATE: Further thoughts here.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: "At least 1 million pounds of suspect Chinese seafood landed on American store shelves and dinner plates despite a Food and Drug Administration order that the shipments first be screened for banned drugs or chemicals, an Associated Press investigation found."

FEMINISTS: They're everywhere.

HOW ORGANIC FOOD contributes to climate change.

BLOGGING FOR TIBETAN INDEPENDENCE, from Beijing.

REAGAN VET TO HEAD THOMPSON EFFORT: It's Bill Lacy. Here's a piece by Lacy on prior Fred Thompson campaigns.

IN THE MAIL: Stephen Baum's What Made jack welch JACK WELCH: How Ordinary People Become Extraordinary Leaders.

Also, Dan Farber's Retained by the People: The "Silent" Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have.

RANKING THE Democratic candidates.

DOONESBURY turns anti-Chavez.

WINTER SOLDIER SYNDROME. "Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier’s tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier’s ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud."

GROWTH SECTORS: Online ads, former bloggers.

UPDATE: GM's Olympics TV advertising dollars shifting to online.

BAD NEWS FOR JOURNALISTS: Google News is adding a new feature:

We'll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we'll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as "comments" so readers know it's the individual's perspective, rather than part of a journalist's report.

Lots of errors that usually slide by will get pointed out. I think it's good news for readers, though. (Via TechMeme).

JAMES KIRCHICK IS DISAPPOINTED WITH SOUTH AFRICA:

This stance toward Iran is cause for concern on its own. Unfortunately, it is also illustrative of a much broader and more chilling trend in South Africa's postapartheid foreign policy: one that cozies up to tyrants, and is increasingly orientated against the West--even at the cost of its self-proclaimed principles of human rights and political freedom.

Postapartheid South Africa's easy relationship with dictatorships, it should be noted, is not a new development. Until very recently, however, it has largely been overlooked by the media. . . . For decades, the international community rightly considered South Africa a pariah state. With the fall of apartheid, South Africa earned the unique right to be a clarion voice for freedom and human rights around the world. What a shame, then, that the ANC pursues policies hearkening back to its country's discredited past.

Read the whole thing. It's very troubling.

STRIKING OUT on Barry Bonds.

IT'S A PRINTER. No, it's a table. It's both!

YOU'D NEVER KNOW that the Republicans lost the 2006 elections: "There are now 162,000 American troops in Iraq, the most ever." The military part is going well.

Corruption, as noted here repeatedly, remains Iraq's single biggest problem, and one that's hard to address with troops.

UPDATE: Somewhat related thoughts, from Jules Crittenden.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Indeed: "The great lie from the anti-war side is that people like me don’t recognize the difficulty — or inherent tenuousness — of what it is we’ve been trying to accomplish in Iraq. But why else do these comfortable defeatists and inveterate contrarians think some of us have devoted so much time and energy to beating back their attempts to undermine the effort?"

HERSCHEL SMITH has thoughts on Iraq's borders. He's right, but I don't understand why we didn't do something like that years ago.

BRITAIN TO BUY two aircraft carriers.

EIGHT OUT OF THE TOP TEN PAKISTANI RECORDING STARS cut a CD that speaks out against terrorism.

MICKEY KAUS ON BLOGGER LISTSERVS: "Wouldn't it be better if these debates were conducted in public, where readers could at least listen in?"

INSTAPUNDIT IS SIX YEARS OLD TODAY: Here's what it looked like that first week.

I FIND THIS NOT ENTIRELY COMFORTING: "An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers." It's true, of course, that it's unlikely to be dangerous, but I'd prefer my germs a bit less robust. On the other hand, advocates of panspermia will feel their case has been strengthened.

JAMES FALLOWS: "There are a lot of smart people in China, but not many of them seem to work for the state propaganda apparatus."

August 07, 2007

CLINTON EARNS loudest boos, biggest applause.

UPDATE: Video here and here.

"AN EASY FORM of academic pandering."

Related thoughts, here.

MORE ON THE SURGE, from Max Boot.

NEW YORK TIMES: Army Says Soldier’s Articles for Magazine Were False.

UPDATE: More from Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post.

4,000 PEOPLE A WEEK, trying to leave Britain.

STILL MORE ON GOOSE CREEK, from Dan Riehl. Events are certainly curious. These guys are just lucky they aren't Goose Creek high school students.

A LOOK AT race, dating, and double standards.

ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE.

GALLUP: "We’re seeing some slight hints of positive news for the Bush administration. For one thing, Bush’s job approval rating has stopped its downward trajectory. Bush hit bottom with his administration low point of 29% in early July (based on our USA Today/Gallup poll readings). Now – in the data just about to be released from our weekend poll – Bush's approval rating has recovered slightly to 34%. That’s not a big jump, but it is the second consecutive poll in which the president’s numbers have been higher rather than lower."

Will Congress go up next?

UPDATE: Maybe not. At least this argument seems persuasive to me, though not terribly flattering to Bush: "I think it’s a natural consequence of having the attention focused on Congress. By comparison, he looks pretty good."

A LOOK AT the politicization of science in recent years.

ACE: "If it is now the Washington Post's explicit style guidance that a man merely serving during a war is in fact a veteran of that war, then I expect them, in accordance with this odd new ruling, to begin referring to President Bush as a 'Vietnam veteran.'"

ANOTHER DEBATE? Stephen Green is liveblogging it.

UPDATE: Hillary channels Rick Santorum?

WHO KILLED THE AMERICAN CAR? Nobody, says Jim Dunne.

Plus, car owners on why people don't buy American.

ED CONE:

The Edwards campaign called. They are in a tizzy over a quote from my article, which is being sensationalized at this moment on Drudge: "Elizabeth Edwards on campaign's troubles: 'We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman'..."

The campaign staff didn't even know I had spoken to Elizabeth Edwards [clarification: some staffers knew because I told them after the fact, but I didn't go thru official channels to reach her]. That is how she rolls. The staffer wanted to know when I talked to her, and what she said. CNN just asked me the same thing.

Follow the link for the full story.

UPDATE: More on Elizabeth Edwards from Marc Ambinder.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Advertising Age isn't impressed: "This comment from Elizabeth Edwards might cut through the clutter, but perhaps in ways not expected."

THE NEW REPUBLIC UPDATES, but doesn't know much. Bob Owens comments.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard responds: "They neglected to report that the Army has concluded its investigation and found Beauchamp's stories to be false. . . . We have full confidence in our reporting that Pvt Beauchamp recanted under oath in the course of the investigation. Is the New Republic claiming that Pvt Beauchamp made no such admission to Army investigators? Is Beauchamp?" More at the link.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Spruiell calls it a "non-rebuttal rebuttal."

MORE: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

STILL MORE: I linked it before but this bit is worth quoting: "There's this notion that war makes the soldiers crazy. Journalists love it. Beauchamp reinforced it. It appears that war makes journalists crazy."

And editors. [And publishers].

MORE STILL: Phil Carter: "Every soldier has a story. Some are even true."

WHAT IS IT, "DOGPILE ON EZRA KLEIN DAY?" First Kaus, then Chait, now Goldberg?

Oh, well. I think Ezra's man enough to take the heat.

JOHN FUND: "But if pork remains part of the GOP governing model, it's one that voters are starting to reject. In exit polls last year, those who actually showed up to vote reported that political corruption was a more important issue than the war in Iraq. In Alaska, where they have seen incumbent Republican arrogance up close, voters last year sent GOP Gov. Frank Murkowski packing. Upstart Sarah Palin defeated him in a primary by a wide margin and then won in the fall. Her approval ratings now top 90%. Her secret is that she won over voters by campaigning against corruption within her own party--much as Nicolas Sarkozy was able to do in France." The GOP leadership, however, doesn't seem bright enough to take advantage of this. But maybe more challengers will.

I'VE HEARD THIS SONG BEFORE: A "bogus study" from the Violence Policy Center.

THOUGHTS ON THE SURGE, from INDCJournal.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Military making gains in Iraq.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND EMINENT DOMAIN: This land is their land.

GETTING IT WRONG about the Lebanese elections.

DAVID BERNSTEIN NOTES A remarkable decline in housing prices in the D.C. area.

A HUGE BEAUCHAMP / NEW REPUBLIC ROUNDUP.

UPDATE: More from Capt. Ed. And an aside from Tom Maguire. Still nothing on the TNR website, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more from Don Surber.

MORE: Missing links at The New Republic.

ELECTION 2008: The Internet campaign.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: An Iraqi interpreter's story.

A ROUNDUP OF RECENT MEDIA FABRICATIONS from John Wixted. There's a discernible theme. . . .

UPDATE: Somewhat related item, here.

MOVIE RIGHTS TO THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS go for big bucks:

After heavy bidding among multiple suitors, Disney and Scott Rudin have nabbed the screen rights to ``The Dangerous Book for Boys'' in a deal worth mid-six against seven figures.

Penned by British siblings Conn and Hal Iggulden, ``Dangerous'' was a smash bestseller when published by HarperCollins in the U.K. last year, and a version slightly altered for American readers bowed in May. Several studios stepped up to bid for the film rights, even though the book is written like a how-to manual without a traditional narrative structure. Rudin swooped to take the book of the table through his producing pact with Disney.

Full story here. I think this is a big deal. Our podcast interview with Conn Iggulden is here.

IT'S AN UPHILL BATTLE FOR THE EDWARDS CAMPAIGN, according to Elizabeth Edwards: "We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman."

Actually, if you hire someone from The New Republic, it's not out of the question . . . .

JOURNALISM IN AMERICA: "No one needs to be an accomplice to the meltdown, but shrugging shoulders and averting eyes and keyboards from the train wreck is not a neutral act."

UPDATE: Related thoughts here: "If the perspective in the Western media were not totally skewed the other way, perhaps we'd see our aspiring writers rushing to Iraq to make up stories about Al-Qaeda brutality. Then again, one hardly lacks real examples."

ARNOLD KLING ON HEALTH CARE REFORM:

The main proponents of "universal coverage" want to throw more money at the current health care system, which strikes me as unwise. I believe that the "universal coverage" mantra is dysfunctional for the same reason that "more money for public schools" is a dysfunctional mantra for education. When your current approach is digging you into a hole, the sensible thing to do is not to dig faster. It is to stop digging.

He also offers this troublingly accurate quote from John Graham: "Nobody is talking about a free-market approach in health care. The spectrum today is between fascism and Communism." But actually, a few people are talking about free markets -- Kling does. And check out our podcast interview with David Gratzer, author of The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care.

GRAND CENTRAL STATION: Quieter than a hospital bed:

On the busiest day at Grand Central, I might visit the bakery and newsstand, buy a train ticket, drop into the bookstore and drugstore before picking up some flowers and maybe buy a coffee for the ride home. That’s about seven transactions, all brief, that I choose to initiate when I have time and energy.

Contrast this with my recent stay in a 235-bed suburban nonprofit hospital where I faced at least 34 separate interactions, most of them convenient for everyone but the patient.

I've written on this kind of thing myself.

Sleep interruptions are one problem. The floor below my wife's housed the sleep-disorder clinic, where they monitor people and try to help them overcome various problems, like sleep apnea, so that they can achieve an uninterrupted night's sleep. Ironically, it's probably the only place in the hospital where they let you sleep all night long if you want. My wife was interrupted, on average, about every 90 minutes or so all night long: To have blood drawn, to have vital signs checked, to have her temperature taken, to be given medications ("wake up, it's time for your sleeping pill" isn't just a hospital joke) and, most irritatingly, to be weighed.

Now, there are good reasons for a lot of this stuff. Medications have to be given at certain times, temperatures have to be monitored, and so on. Even the weight is important, especially for cardiac patients where fluid balance often matters a lot. (Though not in my wife's case, as her problems were different.)

But the end result of all of this stuff, especially when it's spread over the evening, is a huge amount of stress on somebody who's already under stress from illness.

I still want to do an experiment where you take healthy 20-somethings and put them in a hospital for a couple of weeks, then evaluate their condition upon release. I think we'd be appalled at the change.

There's a new hospital in Knoxville that seems to be taking some of the advice I gave a couple of years ago -- comfy chairs, wireless Internet, meals available on a room-service basis, etc. That's all great. But I'll bet they still wake people up all the time.

UPDATE: Physician reader Brent Michael Krupp emails:

Re: your comment about "still want[ing] to do an experiment where you take healthy 20-somethings and put them in a hospital for a couple of weeks, then evaluate their condition upon release."

In medical school, I learned of at least one experiment that did exactly this -- confined healthy young subjects to bed rest for a week or two. Apparently they met diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia afterwards -- i.e. total body aches and pains and fatigue. And this was just bed rest -- I don't think they also messed up their sleep.

When I worked in hospitals as a resident, I *hated* how much we screwed up patient sleep. I need earplugs at home to sleep and it's not even noisy here! I always wished we stocked them on the wards so we could give them to our patients. *Some* patients really did need the constant monitoring, but lots of them were losing sleep purely for nursing (and doctor) convenience.

There are so many reasons to get patients out of hospitals ASAP or keep them out in the first place. This is just one more.

Yes. And another reader emails: "Fifteen years ago my father was in the hospital dying of scleroderma. They were waking him up every 90 minutes or so. I told the doctor that even an Olympic athlete would deteriorate with that treatment. He just looked at me like I was nuts."

ANALYZING AL QAEDA VIDEOS: Things are not as they appear.

HUG A TRIBOLOGIST: RAND SIMBERG NOTES A BREAKTHROUGH IN LUBRICATION with potentially dramatic results.

THE EDUCATION of young Ezra.

SPACE SHUTTLE COMMANDER disputes alcohol reports.

A NEW REPORT FROM MICHAEL YON is posted. "The American press that flooded in for the kinetic fighting in Baqubah left when the shooting stopped. Their interest waned for covering these aspects of counterinsurgency. They were gone and missing the real story. Nobody was even watching, but this play was not for the Americans journalists, it was for the Iraqi people. " Read the whole thing, and note his stress on the problems created by corruption, something that has been mentioned a lot here, and on Strategypage: "Two officials were engaged in a conversation about how al Qaeda was able to infiltrate trouble spots in Iraq so effectively. The illuminating exchange revealed how much of the strife in Iraq is rooted not in religious fervor, but in greed. Greed for power, greed for money. The video camera was running."

A FAREWELL TO ALMS:

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.

Other countries are still working on this transition. It takes a lot of social capital, I guess.

A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT to create a vote swap site.

KIDS AS STATUS SYMBOLS, and "competitive birthing."

August 06, 2007

HEY, WHY DIDN'T I GET THIS ASSIGNMENT? Popular Mechanics tests underwater digital cameras.

SUPPORT FOR SURGE SURGING: "In the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, taken Friday through Sunday, the proportion of those who said the additional troops are 'making the situation better' rose to 31% from 22% a month ago. Those who said it was 'not making much difference' dropped to 41% from 51%." These numbers still aren't stellar, but the magnitude of the shift is pretty impressive, particularly given the generally negative treatment from traditional media.

ECOTALITY: New Orleans will never be safe. Love the graphic.

UPDATE: Link's not working now, I'm disabling it; will let you know when it's fixed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Fixed now.

JOHN PODHORETZ:

The New Republic has, in essence, defended the personal essay by U.S. soldier Scott Thomas Beauchamp on all grounds save one: That Beauchamp relocated to Iraq an incident in which he participated in Kuwait. In that incident, he supposedly made fun of a horribly burned woman while others laughed along.

It is now looking like that incident was entirely invented, and that The New Republic had reason to know there were problems with its veracity before it published its defense of Beauchamp.

Follow the link for more.

UPDATE: Thoughts on semiotics, from Jeff Goldstein.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Podhoretz, here.

MORE: Now this is news: Beauchamp recants: "THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed 'Shock Troops' article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous 'Baghdad Diarist' columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only 'a smidgen of truth,' in the words of our source. . . . According to the military source, Beauchamp's recantation was volunteered on the first day of the military's investigation."

STILL MORE: More on Beauchamp here: "So Beauchamp was lying the whole time, and now that he has two entirely different stories, he was either lying to TNR, which probably paid him $50 per article and which can’t put him in prison for lying to them (because he’s not under oath when he’s spouting off to Franklin Foer), or he lied to the Army, which pays his entire salary and can and will put him in jail for quite a while if he lies to them . . . . So guess which one Beauchamp is more likely to have lied to — the people who couldn’t jail him, or the ones who could. And would. That’s about as definitive a refutation as we’ll get in this saga, but it’s a good one."

Plus, a victory dance from Ace.

And Bill Quick observes: "The biggest mystery to me is why the mainstream media has any credibility left at all. Maybe its users aren’t looking for credibilty any more. Just reinforcement."

Still more at Cadillac Tight.

Mark Steyn comments: "If that Weekly Standard story is correct, it moves Private Beauchamp into full-blown Stephen Glass territory. In essence, they made the same mistakes all over again - falling for pat cinematic vividness, pseudo-novelistic dialogue, all designed to confirm prejudices so ingrained the editors didn't even recognize they were being pandered to. But this time they did it in war, which is worse."

DOES THIS MEAN WE'RE ALREADY INTO THE SINGULARITY? William Gibson gives up on predicting the future:

Even renowned science fiction author William Gibson has given up guessing what the future looks like - for now at least.

The novelist is famous for inventing the word 'cyberspace' and predicting the implications of the networked world long before it became a reality. But his latest book Spook Country is set in the present (in fact, the near past) rather than the far-flung future.

In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Gibson said: "The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can't convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years."

If the next 10 or 15 years is that unpredictable, and it probably is, then I'd say we're already into the singularity. (For more singularity-related stuff, check out our podcast interview with Vernor Vinge.)

AL QAEDA ON THE RUN: Keep 'em running. And dying.

IS THAT A PIPE BOMB IN YOUR TRUNK, OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME? Dan Riehl has more on the Goose Creek arrests.

TODD ZYWICKI LOOKS AT taxes and the increase in families going bankrupt: "[Since 1973] taxes increase in the example by $13,086. By contrast, annual mortgage obligations increased by only $3690 and automobile obligations by $2860 and health insurance $620. Those increases are not trivial, but they are swamped by the increase in tax obligations. To put this in perspective, the increase in tax obligations is over three times as large as the increase in the mortgage (the supposed driver of the 'two income trap') and about double the increase in the combined obligations of mortgage and automobile payments. . . . Overall, the typical family in the 2000s pays substantially more in taxes than in their mortgage, automobile expenses, and health insurance costs combined. And the growth in the tax obligation between the two periods is substantially greater the growth in mortgage, automobile expenses, and health insurance costs combined."

THE DOW IS UP, and Larry Kudlow is happy. Me, I think we've seen the top of the market for a while. But take comfort in the fact that I'm usually wrong about this stuff. . . .

BECAUSE THE THOUGHT OF A BLOGGERS' STRIKE MAKES "THE MAN" TREMBLE: Forming a bloggers' union?

THOUGHTS ON PIRATES AND ANARCHY, over at Cato Unbound. "Notably, the anarchic environment that maritime bandits operated in did not lead them to simply throw up their hands and abandon the idea of their criminal enterprise. On the contrary, the prospect of mutual gains from organizing this enterprise provided pirates with the incentive to find private ways of securing cooperation and order."

I THINK I'VE MENTIONED IT BEFORE, but Kevin Weeks' Seriously Good food blog is worth your attention if you like food- and recipeblogging. He's a pretty well-known local chef, and when I saw him at Panera a while back he was getting a lot of attention from a couple of very attractive women. Cooking: It's better than a Porsche that way!

THE TRUTH ABOUT mothers and nannies.

YEARLYKOS: A "sea of middle-aged white males." Not that there's anything wrong with that!

MICHAEL YON WRITES ABOUT IRAQ in the New York Daily News:

I, like everyone else, will have to wait for September's report from Gen. Petraeus before making more definitive judgments. But I know for certain that three things are different in Iraq now from any other time I've seen it.

1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive Al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.

2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than it was in 2005. It is not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come.

3. Gen. Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.

And yes, in case there is any room for question, Al Qaeda still is a serious problem in Iraq, one that can be defeated. Until we do, real and lasting security will elude both the Iraqis and us.

Read the whole thing. And send it to your Senators.

THE JOYS OF working with the public.

I REALLY DO LOVE the way that all sorts of old stuff is now easy to get. I just noticed that there's a DVD collection of Droopy cartoons from Tex Avery. Droopy was one of the more appealing minor cartoon characters -- I remember how his cameo in Roger Rabbit elicited a surprisingly strong crowd reaction, mostly from people who probably hadn't given him a moment's thought in years. But there he was -- like seeing an old friend show up in a movie. So that's what he's doing now -- good for him!

FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING by raising speed limits! "So it’s less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well. . . So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?"

FROM THE PAUL GILSTER BOOK I MENTIONED YESTERDAY, a disturbing passage:

"If a test pilot crashes at Edwards Air Force Base," muses Landis, "they name a street after him, and the next day someone else flies another mission to see what went wrong. With space, things are different. Every mission has to be a success; we can tolerate no casualties. It may be a cultural thing. Maybe we've grown too afraid of risks."

Yes, I think that they're more cautious even at Edwards these days. But the point holds.

ILYA SHAPIRO: Why I have come to Iraq.

ROGER SIMON: "I had never heard of Captain Jon Soltz before I saw him respond so dramatically to Sgt. David Aguina in front of Andrew Marcus’ pitiless video camera. Soltz leapt to his feet in high dudgeon to threaten the earnest and somewhat naïve Aguina . . . . Soltz’s reaction was clearly out of control. He took poor, confused Aguina aside, scolding him like an errant child while glaring at the camera like a movie star whose privacy had been invaded. Anyone with the slightest media savvy (or human sophistication for that matter) would have realized a polite pat on the head to Aguina and the sergeant would have vanished into the anonymity from whence he came after a few bland words. (Instead, his visage wound up on Drudge, like Mr. Smith come to a virtual Washington.) Something had turned Soltz into an irrational bully."

Simon has some thoughts on just what did that: "The answer, I think, is that politics in our society has become increasingly identified with the self."

JOHN FUND SAYS THAT CONGRESS NEEDS AN INTERVENTION:

The House of Representatives almost turned into the Fight Club Thursday night, when Democrats ruled that a GOP motion had failed even though, when the gavel fell, the electronic score board showed it winning 215-213 along with the word FINAL. The presiding officer, Rep. Mike McNulty (D., N.Y.), actually spoke over the clerk who was trying to announce the result.

In the ensuing confusion several members changed their votes and the GOP measure to deny illegal aliens benefits such as food stamps then trailed 212-216. Boiling-mad Republicans stormed off the floor. The next day, their fury increased when they learned electronic records of the vote had disappeared from the House's voting system.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made matters worse when she told reporters, "There was no mistake made last night." Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had to rescue her by acknowledging that, while he thought no wrongdoing had occurred, the minority party was "understandably angry." Under pressure, the House unanimously agreed to create a select committee, with subpoena powers, to investigate Republican charges the vote had been "stolen."

Congress appears to be gripped by a partisanship that borders on tribal warfare. In a forthcoming book, Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein compares it to a "second Civil War" that has led to "the virtual collapse of meaningful collaboration" between the two parties.

Read the whole thing. Yes, I thought things couldn't get worse, but I was wrong. And note this passage:

Mr. Foley also made a very prescient warning. He urged his fellow Democrats not to exact retribution or respond in kind to heavy-handed GOP tactics should they win back control that November, as they ended up doing: "Democrats [should] clearly and intensely [promise] that if they take the majority back again, they will not go back and try to pay back, so to speak, what they felt were the excesses and even the outrages of this period, but will promise minority rights in reaching those minority decisions."

Clearly, his fellow Democrats in the House haven't been following his advice. Maybe they ought to appoint Messrs. Foley and Gingrich to head an outside task force to recommend ways to make the House work again. If the House had the sense to recognize it had to appoint a select committee to investigate last Friday's vote fiasco, it should see the possible benefits of having an outside group weigh in on its dysfunctional ways.

Foley's advice is made more poignant because it was his action in holding the vote open past the deadline to manage passage of the assault weapons ban that cost him his seat in Congress, and the Democrats their majority last time around.

UPDATE: Reader Rick Lang emails: "And the US Congress has the audacity to say the war is lost because the IRAQI Parliament is non-functional. . . ."

BLOGGING FROM A 737.

THE EXAMINER ON SPEED CAMERAS:

There are, for example, legitimate questions about whether speed cameras actually reduce the number of people killed and injured on area streets, and whether there are more cost-efficient ways of achieving the same or better results. There also is a major concern about whether speed cameras will ultimately function more as revenue-raising devices than effective tools for increasing road safety. Too little attention has been devoted to these and other issues in the region's public discussion on speed cameras.

By way of preliminary analysis, there is a paucity of credible data on the effectiveness of speed cameras in reducing traffic fatalities and injuries. In 2005, British researchers Paul Pilkington and Sanjay Kindra assessed 92 studies worldwide that claimed to provide credible data, but rejected all but 14 of them. Even among the 14 that met minimal standard criteria for methodological soundness, Pilkington and Kindra concluded: "Research conducted so far consistently shows that speed cameras are an effective intervention in reducing road traffic collisions and related casualties. The level of evidence is relatively poor, however, as most studies did not have satisfactory comparison groups or adequate control for potential confounders."

It's all about the revenue. If the money went to the state's general fund instead of the municipalities involved, nobody would be rolling these out.

HARRY MCCRACKEN: I went undercover with Dateline, too.

WORKING-CLASS MILLIONAIRES, in Silicon Valley. You find a lot of those on Wall Street and in big law firms, too.

AN UPDATED VERSION of Daniel Solove's census of law professor bloggers.

August 05, 2007

A DIMINISHED New York Times.

Plus, will the New York Post go national?

FROM JANE FONDA TO DR. STRANGELOVE IN ONE WEEK.

Actually, regardless of what you think of Obama's comments on substance, I think they're beneficial. They make other countries worry that maybe waiting to get a better deal from the Democrats isn't a sure thing, and that in fact they might have to deal with a Democratic President who's . . . a bit scary. That can only help negotiations progress now.

UPDATE: Pakistanis are burning American flags in response to Obama's remarks. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

MORE: Barack Obama, neocon: "At least he's willing to use force against something."

IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER POST ON INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, Frank Tipler emails:

In section N of the Appendix for Scientists in my book THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY, entitled "Relativistic Spacecraft," I point out that, in effect, those books you reference on interstellar travel were obsolete before they were written.

Human will NEVER engage in interstellar travel. Only human downloads and artificial intelligences. Carrying full size human bodies, active or frozen, is too inefficient.

In my more recent book, THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY, Chapter 11, I discuss the ultimate interstellar drive, the neutrino rocket powered by a Standard Model process that allows ordinary matter to be transformed into radiation like neutrinos. Think of the DeLorean car at the end of the movie Back to the Future. This is what this technology will look like. Power is supplied by converting garbage into energy and the propulsion system is a rocket exhaust that has no effect on the surroundings.

I point out in Chapter 11 of the latest book that we'll have both the human download technology and the neutrino rocket within 50 years. You should not teach your students the the future will be based on obsolete physics.

Sounds more like Greg Egan's Diaspora. But I'll be sure to let my students know -- and they'll be amused to see that I've been chided for lack of imagination by a physicist of Tipler's eminence.

DAN RIEHL HAS BEEN FOLLOWING THE TWISTS AND TURNS of the Goose Creek arrests. And there have been some twists and turns.

UPDATE: Frank J. is angry: "I call profiling! We the blogosphere need to investigate this and find out which police officers were involved and hold them accountable." But he sees an upside: "With the luck we've had in America of avoiding terrorist attacks, I guess by Pat Robertson's view no one has done anything gay enough to make God angry since 2001."

ORIN KERR on the new FISA amendment.

Some people are unhappy with the bill's Democratic supporters.

UPDATE: More on the Democrats here. "When push comes to shove, especially on war-related issues, the Democrats have failed almost every time to fulfill their campaign promises. The FISA legislation should enrage the Democratic base. . . . The new majority has proven a little too difficult to manage, especially for Nancy Pelosi. The Blue Dogs have actually made the party less reliably Leftist."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jack Balkin: "The passage of the new FISA bill by the Senate and now the House demonstrates that the Democrats stand neither for defending civil liberties nor for checking executive power. They stand for nothing at all. . . . I hope the Democrats are justly proud of themselves for their cowardly contributions to this slow-motion destruction of our constitutional system." I guess they're enraged, all right.

MORE: Tom Maguire comments:

Let me add my own twist - while Dems were busy playing up to the Kos Kidz in Chicago, back in Washington the House Dems were collapsing before the imagined wrath of George Bush on the new legislation modifying FISA (described by Orin Kerr).

Was Nancy Pelosi really that concerned that Bush would rally the full force of the 29% who still approve of the job he is doing? Maybe!

But I'll bet she was worried that Rush Limbaugh and the right wing talk machine would have chewed on Democrats about this issue all through the August recess - immigration is over, so what were they going to rant about?

Shouldn't she also have been worried about being chewed on by the "netroots" if she cravenly gave in to Bush? Evidently, she was more worried about Rush - go figure.

Who has a bigger audience?

RICK MORAN INTERVIEWS DAVID AGUINA, the soldier who was silenced at YearlyKos yesterday.

UPDATE: More on Aguina here.

"I WENT HOME AT NIGHT IN TEARS. It was awful."

SCOOPS OF THE CENTURY!

The LAT discovers that Matt Drudge has become a favorite conduit for the mainstream media and has a man in Los Angeles who created a side business by pointing Drudge Report links his way. Next up: Times hears Bush may go to war against Saddam Hussein.

Plus, Fred Thompson's wife is an attractive blonde! And a lobbyist! Money quote: "A smart, good-looking woman in Washington in her 30s dating a member of Congress doesn't come as a shocker." You think?

UPDATE: From covering the obvious to ignoring it.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: Mark Steyn on how rich Saudis are using lawsuits to crush reports of Saudi support for terror.

JACK LAIL SEEMS TO HAVE IDENTIFIED A KEY ASPECT TO ONLINE SUCCESS:

The most successful online publications - whether old or new media, whether video or text - all have a lean, mean operation that employs the best people, gives them creative freedom to shape their publication, and frees them from the constraints of the traditional publishing environment and of what has gone before.

Old Media have trouble adapting to this because of internal power dynamics.

FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS IS FINE, but some institutions are too sacred to criticize.

EARTH-FRIENDLY GEOTHERMAL ENERGY:

"The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner, recalls. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building."

But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for new sources of energy. . . .

In Basel, the first shaft was bored last year by a 190-foot-tall drilling rig towering above nearby apartment buildings. Water was pumped down the injection well in the test phase in December, and as expected, it heated to above 390 F as it seeped through the layers of rock below.

But that's where the water remains for the time being; it caused the rock layers to slip, causing the tremors and rumbles that spooked the townspeople.

Geopower Basel, had forecast some rock slippage. In fact, it said the location on top of a fault line — the upper Rhine trench — was an advantage because it meant the heat was closer to the Earth's surface.

Oops.

HERE'S MORE ON NBC'S undercover hacker humiliation.

Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan was heckled and derided as she ran from DefCon, the world's largest computer hackers conference, and raced away in a car. . . . "They sent a moderately attractive young lady with a purse cam whose mission was to first capture someone on film admitting to a felony, which is really not cool, and second to catch a fed on film," said DefCon spokesman "Priest." . . . Madigan's flight was followed by hackers and reporting peers openly disapproving her methods.

Not ready for primetime.

I'M NOW READING PAUL GILSTER'S Centauri Dreams: Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration. I'm thinking of taking my Space Law seminar a bit further afield than usual, with stuff like this, An Introduction to Planetary Defense, and maybe Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. Any other suggestions?

CHARLES JOHNSON ON AIRBRUSHING AT DAILYKOS: "Imagine, if you will, the reaction among LGF’s admirers on the left if I started deleting topics and comments wholesale."

UPDATE: Apparently the airbrushing was by the diarist himself, in response to criticism from fellow Kossacks.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: MCCAIN RAPS CONGRESS FOR BRIDGE COLLAPSE:

Republican John McCain said Saturday that Congress could share in the blame for the Minnesota bridge collapse because lawmakers diverted billions of dollars in transportation money from road work to pet projects. . . .

"We spent approximately $20 billion of that money on pork barrel, earmark projects," said McCain. "Maybe if we had done it right, maybe some of that money would have gone to inspect those bridges and other bridges around the country. Maybe the 200,000 people who cross that bridge every day would have been safer than spending $233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it."

McCain spoke during a town hall-style meeting with activists, saying he was angered not just by Congress wasting money on special projects, but also by it approving reform packages he labeled a sham.

"I'm angry today because we just had a chance to reform this process in Washington and we punted," said McCain. "We pushed off on the American people a joke and a sham in the name of earmark reform."

Actually blaming Congress for this particular tragedy is a bit hyperbolic. But we have big infrastructure needs, and we're spending money on other stuff -- and members would rather have their name on something shiny and new than on unglamorous repairs. So in terms of distorted priorities, he's got a point.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Hill emails:

Hyperbolic? Yes. But this may just be the shot-in-the-arm that his campaign needs. This can help re-establish his creds as the 'town maverick'. It allows him to play the 'us vs them' game, with them being an incredibly corrupt Congress. He's got plenty of material to work with and nothing to lose....

If I were his campaign advisor, I'd tell him to play this for all it's worth. Me, I'm in the Giuliani camp. But McCain declaring open season on Congress would be a good thing for everyone!

True enough.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Morrissey says McCain is wrong. "Just as I criticized Amy Klobuchar and James Oberstar for exploiting the tragedy for their political hobby horses, we need to ask Senator McCain to have a care how he uses the dead in our community. I fully support his efforts to end earmarks and push towards legislative reform, but let's stick to the real consequences of earmark abuse."

THOSE CURSED ZIONISTS: Always making Arabs do terrible things. They're so omnipotent, it's a wonder the Saudis haven't given up and converted to Judaism.

A POSSIBLY INTERESTING ARREST in South Carolina: "Gentlemen of 'Middle Eastern descent' out on a Saturday night with a carload of 'explosive devices' when pulled over in Goose Creek, S.C., home to the Naval Weapons Station and U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig, home to enemy combatants." Of course, this may turn out to be nothing. Stay tuned.

ANN ALTHOUSE STEPS IN WHERE Hillary fears to tread: "I call myself a liberal, which is -- ironically -- something she won't do."

RUPERT MURDOCH: "I won’t meddle any more than Arthur Sulzberger does."

ROMNEY: I'm not running for pastor-in-chief.

YOU DON'T TUG ON SUPERMAN'S CAPE, and you don't spy on hackers unless you're, you know, actually good at it:

The DefCon security conference is buzzing after an undercover NBC-Universal reporter fled the building after being publicly exposed for using a spy camera to film attendees.

DefCon organizer Jeff Moss called out Michelle Madigan, an Associate Producer for NBC-Universal, from stage during the "Tactical Exploitation" session.

Shades of NBC's lame undercover NASCAR trolling.

CONGRESSIONAL pork rinds.

WHEN FAILURE TO POLICE YOURSELF AGAINST CRIMES YOU HAVEN'T COMMITTED becomes a crime.

UPDATE: From the comments: "I used to donate to MADD. That was before they became a branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union."

Yeah, they're even complaining about booze on trains. No drivers there.