[Via David Bernstein]
Sucker
Benedict Arlen is losing his seniority:
Senate Democrats have denied Arlen Specter seniority on the committees on which he will now serve as a Democrat. That means Specter, who has been a senator for 28 years, will now occupy the most junior position among Senate Democrats. A few minutes ago, I asked a GOP Senate source for his reaction. “I don’t know if it says more about [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid’s lack of commitment or Specter’s naiveté,” he told me. “But either way, it’s going to be hard for Specter to argue that dumping him now would cost his constituents seniority and clout — he has the same ranking on committees that his successor will have in 2011.”
My schadenfreude runneth over.
[Evening update]
Normally, I’d say that this would be the move of the Stupid Party, except that the Republicans now have some leverage over this creature. And of course, vice versa.
At this point, I’d say that he’s a man without a party…
Irony
This is hilarious:
Eco-sailors rescued by oil tanker…
Of course, folks like this lack a sense of irony. They have to.
Windows Problems
Some readers may recall that my W2K machine died a couple months ago after an update (actually, it’s been over three months now). Well, a few days ago I finally found my install disk. Unfortunately, when I tried to use it to repair, it said it couldn’t find a Windows installation, so apparently the drive really got munged. I know all the data is there, because I mounted the drive on a Linux box and pulled it off, so I’m guessing that the boot sector is screwed up. Unfortunately, it’s a complicated situation, because it was actually set up to boot from Drive D (Drive C was a legacy 98 system, and both drives are partitions on a single drive). And of course, I don’t have a rescue disk, that I know of, for the current configuration.
So is it possible to go in and look at the boot sector in another machine and repair it manually? Anyone have any suggestions?
Futility
Henry Spencer says that it’s time to give up on Ares I:
NASA, predictably, is not happy about being forced to change. NASA’s ex-administrator, Mike Griffin, has been a particularly vocal opponent of the idea, claiming that outsiders shouldn’t try to second-guess NASA on technical decisions, and that it’s cheaper to stay on course after four years of effort than to start over from scratch. Sorry, but that’s not the way it looks to me.
I’d agree that it would be cheaper, if I thought NASA had made four years of progress. But Ares I is the International Space Station of rockets: redesigned again and again, justified using assumptions that no longer apply, and already escalating mightily in cost (and already well behind schedule). There comes a time when it really is cheaper to start over in some more sensible way, because banging your head against the wall harder and harder isn’t getting you through it.
Mike Griffin is employing the sunk-cost fallacy — that the fact that we’ve already invested a lot in something justifies further expenditure. In this case, though, the investment isn’t just taxpayer dollars, but his personal pride and reputation.
Let’s hope that Norm Augustine comes to a sensible conclusion.
Topless Photos Leaked
…of a gay marriage opponent. It’s not what you think.
The hypocrisy of these people never fails to amaze. She’s supposed to give up her crown for having exactly the same opinion as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?
They Voted For The One
They wanted change. They got it:
Not surprisingly, companies’ take on the issue is that the proposals, if passed, would raise their cost of operations and put them at a disadvantage when competing against overseas rivals based in countries with lower corporate tax rates, according to SiliconValley.com. Silicon Valley companies will be among those lobbying against the proposals. Said Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group:
On a Richter scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 20.
So ye sow, so shall ye reap.
We’ll see what this does to his approval ratings in Silicon Valley.
Gun Porn
Here ya go. Cutting down a tree with a gun. It’s pretty amazing to see the brass waterfalling out of that thing. I want to be a mythbuster.
The first known instance of this took a lot longer. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, the hot lead was so unremitting and thick that it cut down an oak tree of a foot-and-a-half diameter over the hours-long duration of the battle. The stump is now in the American Museum of History. It was probably the most intense battle of the war up to that point, and it’s hard to contemplate the hell it must have been for the combatants.
Four Kinds Of Liberty
This isn’t new (Fischer’s book has been out for years), but it may be interesting to those who haven’t encountered it previously:
It’s not hard to pick up echoes of these different “freedom ways” in today’s debates. Probably each of us finds some one of the four more attractive than the others. Very approximately speaking, modern liberalism descends from the first and third of Fischer’s styles, modern conservatism from the second and fourth.
It should also be noted that the War Between The States was a war between the Puritans and Quakers in the north against the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in the south, though the Cavaliers were more likely to be slaveholders, and the latter were just fighting for their states and pride. Modern “liberals” are indeed descended from the Puritans — they’re just puritanical in a more secular way.
Health Care Reform
…versus universal health care. Some thoughts from (MD) Paul Hsieh:
According to a recent CNN poll, 8 out of 10 Americans are generally happy with their current health care. But they are legitimately concerned about rising costs. Furthermore, the constant media drumbeat about our health care “crisis” is making most Americans think that everybody else is having a rough time with health care (even if they themselves are doing relatively well). This fuels the false perception that we need drastic change in the form of government-managed “universal health care.” In fact, the opposite is true. If Americans are satisfied with their health care quality but unhappy with rising costs, then the proper course is free-market reforms that lower costs, preserve quality, and respect individual rights.
Americans have already been burned by the congressional rush to pass the “stimulus” bill, which many legislators now acknowledge that they didn’t even read before voting for. Congress should not make the same mistake by rushing to pass “universal health care” legislation. Instead, Congress should slow down, take a deep breath, and engage in a full, honest discussion about the kinds of genuine reforms we need to actually correct our current problems.
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.