Buyer’s Remorse?

November 12, 2008 Rand Simberg 25 Comments

Some thoughts on Obama, Weatherpeople, and Sarah Palin, from Camille Paglia:

…my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been “pallin’ around” with Ayers, in Sarah Palin’s memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed…

…Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.

I think she gives the press too much credit for their ability to wake up.

[Update late morning]

It may have been politically incorrect for Michael Barone to say it, but I think he’s right when he points to Palin’s greatest sin in the eyes of much of the media and the left:

“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,” Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. “They wanted her to kill that child. … I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.”

Barone, a popular speaker on the paid lecture circuit, is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report and principal coauthor of “The Almanac of American Politics.”

About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Guess the truth hurts. That was obvious to me at the time as well, with all of the criticism of her for having the baby. She was a huge threat to the pro-abortion (and yes, that’s what much of it is) movement.

Humor, Popular Culture

I’d Always Wondered That Myself

November 12, 2008 Rand Simberg 7 Comments

Lileks has been musing on why the Three Musketeers never had muskets:

Where are their guns? They never have guns. They must have been a grave disappointment when they showed up. We are here, my liege! The Musketeers! Fine, fine, take up position on the parapet, and aim down at – say, where are your muskets? We have them not, my liege! We live life at swordpoint! All for one, and one for – Fine, you have a motto, I know, but I wanted guns. Why do you call yourselves musketeers if you don’t have any bloody muskets? Tres simplisme, monsieur! We must see the whites of our foes’ eyes, wide with fright! We must – Oh shut up and take these muskets and start shooting at something, for God’s sake.

Other amusing pop-cultural observations as well (and as usual).

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary

Hoover, Or Reagan?

November 11, 2008 Rand Simberg 18 Comments

Which president will Barack Obama want to emulate? He has said that he admires Reagan, but only for his transformational qualities, not for his political beliefs. But if he persists in his apparent desire to implement some combination of Hoover and FDR policies (raising taxes on the productive, protectionism, enforcing high wages), he’ll end up making a bad situation much worse, and end up being a one-termer for sure.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Better (And Longer) Living

November 11, 2008 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

…through RNA interference:

In monkeys, a single injection of a drug to induce RNA interference against PCSK9 lowered levels of bad cholesterol by about 60 percent, an effect that lasted up to three weeks. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, the biotechnology company that developed the drug, hopes to begin testing it in people next year.

The drug is a practical application of scientific discoveries that are showing that RNA, once considered a mere messenger boy for DNA, actually helps to run the show. The classic, protein-making genes are still there on the double helix, but RNA seems to play a powerful role in how genes function.

“This is potentially the biggest change in our understanding of biology since the discovery of the double helix,” said John S. Mattick, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Of course, as the article points out, there’s still a lot we don’t know, and there are likely to be unforeseen side effects until we understand how this all works much better. But this is a breakthrough in itself.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s an interesting article on how far genetics has come in the ninety-nine years since the word “gene” was coined.

[via Derbyshire, who has other thoughts]

War Commentary

When The Military Gets It Right

November 11, 2008 Rand Simberg

All veterans are to be honored, but these guys seem particularly noteworthy, particularly considering that they’re still serving.

Hope the word gets out what happened to the perps. I don’t think they got their virgins. Perhaps it will discourage further kidnappings in Afghanistan, at least of Americans.

History, Political Commentary, War Commentary

An Extinct Species?

November 11, 2008 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

Would that it had been so. In honor of Veterans’ Day, here’s an interesting story of a recording captured to preserve the memory of the war that was to end all wars. Unfortunately, that part didn’t work out.

[Update mid morning]

On the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, three British veterans are still alive. The oldest is 112, the oldest man in the country. Did he ever imagine, in the midst of the war, that he would survive another nine tenths of a century beyond its end?

Popular Culture

Cottage Cheesy Ruminations

November 11, 2008 Rand Simberg 16 Comments

Did you know that there were regional styles of cottage cheese?

Neither did I, until I moved to Florida (and even then it took me over four years to discover it). I’ve been buying the stuff for a while, and mostly, I’ve been buying the store generic (Publix, if you must know), which I’ve never been that pleased with–liquidy and runny, regardless of curd size. Recently, Patricia tried a different, name brand. Same thing. So it’s not like they saved money for the store brand by adding water and/or other locally available liquids, such as alligator effluent.

But I was recently there, searching for some other kind, and I found a brand called “Friendship.” And on the side of the plastic container, it said, “California style.” And a light went on. That’s why the local cottage cheese sucked (at least to me). I’d been spoiled by eating the real stuff back in the Golden State for the previous quarter century. I bought it. It was dry, flavorful, ricotta like. Just the way I remembered from LA. One more reason that Florida sux (at least southeast Florida), though at least I can buy the exotic import here.

So, question. Why do the locals like it runny, and do they like it that way up in New York and New Jersey (whence came their ancient ancestors)? Are there other varieties in (say) the Midwest, or Mountain states?

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

Space Advice For Obama

November 10, 2008 Rand Simberg 8 Comments

Jeff Foust has some thoughts about issues facing the new administration. It may in fact be an opportunity to undo the damage in the 1990s when Congress arbitrarily put space hardware on the munitions list. Duncan Hunter won’t be in a position to stop it now, being firmly in the minority.

Political Commentary, Space

The Military Space Mess

November 10, 2008 Rand Simberg 7 Comments

The other day I pointed out a report on the general military acquisition problems. Today at The Space Review, Dwayne Day discusses the military space problem in particular. As he notes, Pentagon space makes NASA look like a model of efficiency. NASA at least has the excuse that what it does isn’t really important. The same is not true of our defense systems, but the bureaucracy and porkmeisters act as though it is.

Political Commentary

“When Good Men Did Nothing”

November 9, 2008 Rand Simberg 18 Comments

It’s the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht.

While many Americans would also claim they were unaware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, the events of November 9-10 were well documented. The New York Times ran a front-page story on November 11: “A wave of destruction, looting and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist Revolution swept over Great Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops, offices and synagogues for the murder by a young Polish Jew of Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.” Another Times story was headlined, “All Vienna’s synagogues attacked.”

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT made no immediate comment after Kristallnacht, referring questions about it to the State Department. Only after five days of widespread public outrage did he take any action: recalling the US ambassador from Germany and stating in a press conference, “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the US. Such news from any part of the world would inevitably produce a similar profound reaction among American people in every part of the nation. I myself could scarcely believe that such things could happen in a 20th century civilization…”

Roosevelt agreed to allow 15,000 German Jews already in the United States to remain, but resisted all calls to increase the overall quota of immigrants from Nazi-occupied countries. Equally significant, his failure to take any action against Germany, or to mobilize an international coalition to challenge Hitler, sent the message that the world would not intervene to save the Jews. How much he could have done given the isolationist and xenophobic mood of the American public at that time is debatable, but the consequences of his inaction were catastrophic.

If President Obama continues to show signs of coddling Ahmajinedad and the Iranian mullahs, he will be sending a similar signal. If this history ever repeats itself, it won’t be farce–it will be tragedy anew, because we inexcusably forgot it.