Mar08
Lileks is disturbingly, invariably good, but today’s bleat is great. Particularly the part about Our Boy Ted.
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Lileks is disturbingly, invariably good, but today’s bleat is great. Particularly the part about Our Boy Ted.
Here’s a little whining in the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record about the fact that handguns have become fashionable among coeds at Mt. Holyoke.
Defenders of guns can intelligently argue that, as with fast cars, the pleasures of gun ownership are worth the increased mortality. That is an opinion with which one can agree or disagree. Likewise, it is true that the overwhelming majority of guns will be used responsibly (from the point of view of everyone except hungry coyotes). But it is pointless to try to deny the link between more handguns and increased murder and suicide.
Pointless? I suppose. Unless you’re actually familiar with the data and statistics…
It seems that the White House wasn’t the only one to back the wrong horse in the Republican primary. The NRA apparently screwed up as well–it was urging its members to vote for Bill Jones. Presumably, they didn’t take Simon seriously enough, and thought that the race was between Jones and Riordan. Then, even after it became clear that Simon was the Second-Amendment candidate with the best chance, they didn’t want to go back on their endorsement, but risked splitting the conservative vote.
They’ve gotten themselves a black eye with a lot of conservatives in California as a result. One expects that they’ll now endorse Simon for the general election.
It seems that the White House wasn’t the only one to back the wrong horse in the Republican primary. The NRA apparently screwed up as well–it was urging its members to vote for Bill Jones. Presumably, they didn’t take Simon seriously enough, and thought that the race was between Jones and Riordan. Then, even after it became clear that Simon was the Second-Amendment candidate with the best chance, they didn’t want to go back on their endorsement, but risked splitting the conservative vote.
They’ve gotten themselves a black eye with a lot of conservatives in California as a result. One expects that they’ll now endorse Simon for the general election.
It seems that the White House wasn’t the only one to back the wrong horse in the Republican primary. The NRA apparently screwed up as well–it was urging its members to vote for Bill Jones. Presumably, they didn’t take Simon seriously enough, and thought that the race was between Jones and Riordan. Then, even after it became clear that Simon was the Second-Amendment candidate with the best chance, they didn’t want to go back on their endorsement, but risked splitting the conservative vote.
They’ve gotten themselves a black eye with a lot of conservatives in California as a result. One expects that they’ll now endorse Simon for the general election.
I don’t agree with Dan Weintraub that often, but I think that he’s nailed it here:
Way ahead in the early polls, Riordan expected a coronation but found himself in an election instead. He ran as a leader and a competent manager. But given the way he managed his own campaign, or failed to, it’s probably best that he’ll never get the chance to run the state.
Someone should suggest to Ira Stoll that he add Megan McArdle as a columnist to counter the idiocy from Krugman over at the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record.
The budget crisis in Sacramento may affect California’s bond ratings with S&P. This bombshell will hit this summer, when people are starting to pay attention to the race.
While Davis is indeed a vicious campaigner, I don’t think that anything that he can do at this point can reverse his negatives in peoples’ minds. The Republicans could probably run Goofy against him and win in November. Simon is still ahead in the latest Field Poll (though it’s within the margin of error).
But when an incumbent can only get 40% support for reelection right after the primary, he’s in deep, deep kimchi.
He’s about to be interviewed on Fox News.
[a few minutes later]
He looks almost like a normal person. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I always imagine him as looking like one of his own characters (his art imitates his life, as it were).
His excuse is that he wasn’t going after the bereaved, per se–just the ones who have put themselves in the news and gone on Larry King.
According to him, we’re just too dumb to understand the nuance of his art.
According to Space.com, Lori Garver, former National Space Society director, and NASA Associate Administrator (and a friend of mine) is angling for a seat in a Soyuz. I hope she can pull it off. She’s likely to do more for public space travel than any of the others who are trying to go.
There’s an interesting article in the Orange County Register about high-tech ghost towns in Silicon Valley, many of them only recently built.
The amount of excess capacity up there right now is staggering, but it may lay the foundation for a good recovery, once people figure out how to actually make money off the Internet.
The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.
I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.
The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.
I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.
The Lone Ranger may be returning to the big screen–with a female Tonto.
I’m sure those fussy, anti-cowboy Europeans will have a fit over this.
From ABC.
Drew Carey was forced to make changes in a script that poked fun at airport security. Apparently he was going to have the congenitally-incompetent Lewis and Oswald get jobs as security guards. Sounds like good casting to me. But I guess ABC isn’t into “reality TV.”
Note that the story is being reported by MSNBC…
Bob Novak provides some more interesting background on Riordan’s electoral slapdown.
I wasn’t previously aware of this, but apparently (and bizarrely), Riordan was actually proud of his RINO label. And for people who thought that he was a conservative Republican in 1992, check this out:
I first met Riordan, a fabulously rich businessman, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. His suggestions for urban peace sounded sensible but not very conservative. In passing, he informed me he was about to run for mayor the next year. He indicated he would not stress his Republican affiliation in seeking the non-partisan mayoralty in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
He was true to his word, even after entering the mayor’s office. Apart from flashing his RINO button, he fawned over President Bill Clinton, endorsed Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein for re-election and avoided Republican Party functions. He was so excessive in praising the way Federico Pena handled the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake as Clinton’s secretary of Transportation that he suggested Pena would make a good president.
Riordan has no one to blame for his loss but himself.
An eleven-year-old boy in Omaha, dressed as Jesus for a school function, got into a fight with another boy who called him “Little Bo Peep” and “Heidi.”
Guess he hadn’t gotten to the part of the book about turning the other cheek yet.
I haven’t said anything about the now-famous penned atrocity that Ted Rall had pulled from the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record, but Protein Wisdom has been battering him pretty steadily, and hilariously for the past couple days. Today, they reprise the earlier Anne Coughman slicing and dicing of his monumentally stupid scribblings of a couple months ago.
Boy, I hope that I never get on her bad side…
But as long as we’re doing greatest hits, and using Teddy boy for target practice, here’s my take on him from my Media Casualties piece:
“For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.
Old newsroom veterans call it the ‘thousand-word stare.’ They’ve all seen it–that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.
He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it.”
But somehow, he keeps getting up, and coming back for more. Masochist.
Yesterday’s Opinion Journal had a piece by Ralph Peters on how the fact that we are now seeing more casualties in Afghanistan is a “good” thing.
While at first reading, such a statement sounds appalling, I agree, in the relative sense of the word “good.” That the casualties have so far been low has possibly been an indicator that our war strategy has been insufficiently aggressive, and insufficiently…effective. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have killed some of our troops, and who we are now destroying, escaped from Tora Bora last fall, when we relied on Afghan troops to corral them, rather than putting our own at risk. Tragically, but necessarily, some of our own are dying now so that future others, perhaps in the thousands, or millions, many of them women and children, will live.
Risk-averse strategies can fail in many spheres–not just military campaigns. In the training and fitness industry, there’s an old saying (crass though it may sound in the context of dedicated soldiers who will never come home to their families…) of “no pain, no gain.”
And any competent financial analyst can describe the indisputable and inevitable relationship between risk and reward. That’s why junk bonds pay a much higher interest rate than the debt of blue-chip stocks, or why startup firms offer a potentially much larger rate of return–with the corresponding chance that the entire investment may evaporate.
The same principle applies to research and development. Over the years, particularly since the Challenger disaster, NASA has become risk averse to the point of impotence. They will spend billions of taxpayer dollars in analysis, to avoid an outright and telegenic failure, even if the goal of the program itself is not achieved.
As an example, consider the X-34 program. It was supposed to produce a vehicle that would demonstrate the ability to fly hypersonically, reliably, as a major step on the way to affordable space access. (Unfortunately, NASA insisted that the contractor use an engine developed by NASA, which they later said was never intended to be a usable engine).
After the vehicle was mostly developed (minus the engine that the vehicle had been designed for, per NASA specifications), and NASA had a failure in a Mars mission, the agency decided that X-34 lacked sufficient redundancy and safety to fly. When they got an estimate of how much it would cost to add these (unnecessary) modifications to add the required redundancy, NASA decided instead to cancel the program.
Result? The vehicle never flew.
And the data obtained from it?
Zero.
All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further).
If you want to know why only governments can afford spaceflight, seek no further than the outcome of this program…
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Norm Mineta Knows Best
by Rand Simberg on March 8, 2002 at 8:41 amI made the mistake of listening to NPR again this morning, and they had a story about airline security that had me chewing ten-penny nails, due to both the story itself, and their coverage of it.
I only caught the tail end, but apparently some federal Air Marshals arrived late for an American flight, and tried to commandeer seats in first class, insisting that the passengers whose seats they wanted be put off the plane. Their excuse was that they needed to be able to see the cockpit. The airline had given them aisle seats in the front of coach, with a clear view, but that wasn’t good enough for them. Perhaps they wanted to get the free booze, to complement their intoxication with power. The airline didn’t let them get away with it, but it wasn’t clear what the outcome was (the story’s over at NPR in audio, but my sound card is on the fritz right now).
But what really fried me was the ending. The reporter says that there’s an inherent tension between the government, which wants to fight terrorism, and the airlines, who want to generate revenue.
She really said it, just like that. As though the airline has no intrinsic interest in fighting terrorism, as though they’d cheerfully set up charter flights full of Al Qaeda operatives, even help them plan the flight, from takeoff to skyscraper, as long as they got paid.
She got it precisely reversed, of course. The airlines are taking a balanced approach–they are interested in both fighting terrorism and staying in business, whereas the government, at least if we are to judge by its actions, has no interest in the financial health of the industry whatsoever.
This reminds me of the old arguments about how we needed more government regulation on aircraft maintenance and procedures, because in its absence, the airlines would cut corners, and skimp, and crash airplanes, and kill people.
It never seems to occur to these nimrods that crashing airplanes is bad for business. For some unaccountable reason, people don’t like to fly on airlines whose planes fall out of the sky with any regularity. Insurance carriers won’t give very good rates to airlines whose airplanes have to be replaced often. Airlines will have trouble hiring employees who feel that they’re taking their lives in their hands on every trip.
No one has more incentive than an airline to make an aircraft safe, whether from mechanical failure, or from nutballs with box cutters.
On the other hand, government bureaucrats will fanatically seek safety, to the exclusion of all else, including the rights of passengers and their willingness to tolerate the disastrous state of air travel today, because they know that if there is another hijacking, they’ll be blamed, particularly now that air security has been made a federal responsibility.
But no bureaucrat will suffer if an airline goes under–there are too many other excuses that they can use to deflect blame.
And no bureaucrat will lose his job because of marketing trips not made, hands not shaken, deals not done, acquaintances not made, wealth and jobs not created, because it’s just gotten to be too much of a pain in the ass to fly. But the damage to the economy will continue unabated and silently.
This is another reason why the federalization of this function has been, and is going to continue to be, so disastrous for the industry–there’s no counterbalance to the madness.