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Saturday, April 30, 2005Forget all the gibber-jabber (jibber-jabber?) like this about judicial nominees. The TurkeyBlog has solved the President's problem: What the President needs to do in nominate a Conservative Catholic illegal immigrant.If we can keep the National Review on board long enough for the scheme to run its course, the Left will be annihilated by the force of its collective head swimming in simultaneous contrary directions and the President will then be free to do as he pleases. 
posted by gbarto at 11:08 PM Thursday, April 28, 2005I did not see the President's press conference tonight, but am mostly pleased with what I have read. The President may not hit all the right notes or hold positions I fully agree with, but he's working in useful directions on the big stuff.I am pleased to see the specter of sliding scale benefits raised. It's about damn time. It is ridiculous that minimum wage workers at McDonald's are forced to watch a meaningful chunk of their checks disappear into Social Security so that wealthy retirees can live a little better off a program that today's younger workers will never see. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are, predictably, making apoplectic. After all, Social Security is a) a cornerstone Democrat "achievement" and b) a something for nothing fraud. It's sold as getting back what you paid in, but that's bunk. It's getting whatever the pols can get the younger generation to cough up transferred to the older generation. If it were really about getting back what was rightfully yours, the Dems wouldn't be upset about personal accounts; they'd celebrate them as a way of making concrete what the government was "helping" you to do. On the energy front, of course, we're screwed until we wake up on nuclear. It's cute to pretend that the government can "do something" about oil prices, but experience shows that it can only push them up in the short term. In the longer term, energy policies can help alter supply sources, affecting the dynamics of energy acquisition and consumption. But in the short term, anything the government does is transparent enough that it will be priced into the market in hours. At that point, any pullback on the price lowering policy will be priced in just as quickly. Short term government interventions in any market are in tough competition with fad diets for good intentions with bad longer term results. Finally, I'd mention Iraq. Looks like they're getting a government together. Who, three years ago, would have predicted a freely elected Iraqi government whose leadership and program were being worked out through political haggling? Color me impressed. As for the mighy insurgency, it seems mostly to be mightily murdering police recruits and ordinary folks on the street. Hard targets are apparently too hard. This stuff makes for great headlines in the U.S., but in an Iraq not so long ago under Hussein, lots of senseless civilian deaths aren't quite so extraordinary a thing. The insurgency is counting on America buckling, because as long as we're there, the Iraqis won't. To bad for the thugs that John Kerry isn't president, though, because this president isn't likely to budge.
posted by gbarto at 10:45 PM Wednesday, April 27, 2005Is it just me? Or are judges, senators and the government all too powerful or important when people take the time to attend protests about government procedure?Instapundit has a photo of exactly the sort of messed up people who show up for a protest (!) about how to vote to keep from voting in the U.S. Senate. The only question: Are they nuts for being there? Or are we nuts for having let the feds get involved in so many things that people care?
posted by gbarto at 3:40 PM No Mozart Effect? Apparently not. But maybe it's for the best. If Mozart inspires your child, who knows what others might do. A Dog's Life has.
posted by gbarto at 3:28 PM pulled off AOL: Black College Student Charged With Racist Death ThreatsHer little prank caused authorities at the Christian school to move more than 40 minorities out of their dormitories and into a hotel last week.When tuition goes up next year, we'll all know who to thank. In the meantime, the student has traded four years at a college she didn't like for up to five years in prison, a place she'll probably really detest. It's sad for the girl that she felt this was the only way to broach the idea of changing schools. It's sad for society that this particular approach seemed so obvious. But with Al Sharpton still prancing about in his finery, what could be more natural than to solve a personal problem or advance your cause by putting your brothers and sisters on edge about whitey and seeing if you can gin up a little more racial antagonism? One hates to deny all notion of personal responsibility, but one wonders: did the girl realize that what she was doing was wrong? Did society teach her? There's enough lingering racism to make her letters believable. But there's also an unwritten code that says they will be believed. Had the young girl concocted a sexier explanation for what she did, universities would be signing her up to give talks on the racism that is felt, if not actually present, explaining how as long as blacks fear whites, what she did merely serves to underline the experience of the frightened African-American in 21st century America. The letters would have been an act of creativity, a piece of art to convey to fellow minorities what she feared about the white student sitting next to her in the cafeteria. Enough chutzpah, and she might have gotten a tenured position - without the proper credentials!
posted by gbarto at 11:51 AM Tuesday, April 26, 2005Says Chizumatic (the post is 20050423):Engineers have a saying: Don't start vast projects based on half-vast ideas.He's talking about anime series, noting that often half-season (13 episode) series are better than full-season (26 episode) series. The first are written cleanly and efficiently so as to fit their point into limited space; the longer feel padded out. I think this applies to just about anything, which is why I groan whenever anything "comprehensive" gets proposed in Washington. Especially comprehensive reforms and budget resolutions. However, we may be moving in the right direction. "News" is comprehensive - 1/2 hour of news per day happens according to the nets, 24 hrs worth a day according to cable. But blogs are packed - they only cover as much as someone working for free or close to it is willing to fuss with. Software used to be comprehensive. Suites, systems, etc. But now, I download plug-ins, applets and the like. If we're lucky, before the bandwidth revolution kicks in full-force, Amazon's short clips will transition us to a world where we can enjoy small, cheaply produced shorts, not just blockbusters. Imagine something strikes you - say, a mime with larygitis who can't get any sympathy because no one knows anything's wrong. In Hollywood, it's going nowhere. You can't fill two hours with that. But five minutes for a short on the net? Back when I had decent tv viewing options, I loved to watch Lente Loco on Univision. It was cheap, crass and predictable. But by jamming five bits into a half-hour variety show, it worked: nothing lasted long enough to wear out its welcome. SNL could take a lesson from it. And let's not even think about how often a searching review proves better than the non-fiction book it's about - both contain the book's thesis and underlying rationale, but the first does it in five pages.
posted by gbarto at 11:05 PM Monday, April 25, 2005Cicero has dug up an interesting bit on the EU referendum in France. This Spectator piece, reprinted at antiwar.com, lays out what's going to happen with the EU in the coming months and years. The EU will press forward, irrespective of how the people vote. The commentator notes that this is already how the French government works, then notes that where the EU is concerned, the Brits have also created an overclass indifferent to the will of the people.Another reason the EU won't eclipse the US or Anglosphere: the EU elite are good at wielding power, but not doing much else. Without their people on board, they'll be like the powerful in the Little Prince, all ruling over their respective domains but with nothing tangible to show for it.
posted by gbarto at 10:27 PM Sunday, April 24, 2005Did Canada's PM get rich on Oil For Food while Iraqi children went hungry?It seems like a fair question, given what's coming out.Read Roger Simon here and here (and everywhere else; he's reporting on this alot). Then watch Wretchard connect the dots. Now let's look at some of the powerful people who were either tapped into the Oil For Food financial network or close to those who did. Not all these folks, please note, are direct benefactors. I've put a star with those who just hapen to hang out with the schmoes actually in the network, as opposed to having directly been connected (so far). Understand, then, this isn't a scandal diagram; it's just a look at who hangs out with who in a world where liberating the Iraqi people is an abomination but backroom deals with a dictator to get cheap oil (reducing funds available for starving children) is a-okay: Canadian PM Paul Martin ... Power Corp's Paul Demarais ... Power Director John Rae ... his brother Bob Rae, former Ontario premier* ... TotalFinaElf ... Paribas ... BNP executive council member Amaury-Daniel de Seze ... UN Spec Envoy (and Earth Summit founder) Maurice Strong ... Molten Metal Technologies* ... former VP Al Gore* ... Oil For Food investigator Paul Volcker* ... S Korean businessman Tongsun Park ... businessman Kojo Annan ... his father, UN Gen Sec Kofi Annan* ... Saddam Hussein Nothing new here; all culled from the links above and a few others. But it's interesting to see how Canadian government, French finance and Araab oil all run together into a UN program that fed the wallets of fatcats, not suffering Iraqis. One especially wonders what Al Gore was doing running with these people. Maybe he knew more than we did about the stakes in the battle of the People vs. the Powerful. He just didn't tell us which side he was on.
posted by gbarto at 4:04 PM |
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