On tonight’s episode of FX’s Over There – Situation Normal, they have some civilian, who claims to be an “engineer”, telling some local imam, “we’re building our oil pipeline through here, whether you like it or not!” I’m just waiting for him to say he works for “Calliburton”, or some such.
This from the Biloxi Sun-Herald:
Despite massive storm damage, the historic Beauvoir House is structurally sound and can be restored, with time and money, according to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
[…]
Beauvoir’s elegant porches, recently refurbished, are gone. So is the graceful front staircase. Entrance doors, each with nine oval glass panes, were destroyed. A corner of the roof is missing. Original windows have been broken. Louvered green shutters are badly damaged.
This from Michelle Malkin:
The HuffMobile
Reader Doug, who posts at FreeRepublic.com, sent this photo, which he took while covering the Sierra Club’s national summit in San Francisco last weekend. The handsome, full-size sport utility vehicle pictured above is a Chevy Suburban. It was sent by the anti-SUV environmental puritans of the Sierra Club to pick up fellow, eco-zealot Arianna Huffington, who gave rousing, Bush-bashing, closing remarks at the eco-summit.
Yes, Arianna “Why I Drive a Toyota Prius” Huffington. Yes, Arianna “SUV drivers enable terrorism” Huffington.
[…]
Curious, I asked Antebi whether any of the staff at the Sierra Club headquarters owned and drove SUVs. He stumbled and said the group didn’t keep track of who drove what. It’s “a personal decision,” he explained. “People drive different cars for different reasons.”
Well, um, exactly. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if these anti-SUV green busybodies took the same attitude towards the rest of us and left our car choices alone?!
I actually know a lot of Sierra Clubber types who drive SUVs. And, when queried about this apparent paradox, the response is almost always the same, “well, I actually USE mine.” To this, I have the experience of our own dear Joe to point to, and say, “some people may not use the capability of their 4×4 often; but it’s indispensable when you need it.”
Actually, if we based of vehicle “allotment” on just what we absolutely needed most of the time, we’d almost all be riding motorcycles. 🙂
This from NYTimes Public Editor Byron Calame:
Columnist Correction Policy Isn’t Being Applied to Krugman
An Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times who makes an error “is expected to promptly correct it in the column.” That’s the established policy of Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Her written policy encourages “a uniform approach, with the correction made at the bottom of the piece.”
Two weeks have passed since my previous post spelled out the errors made by columnist Paul Krugman in writing about news media recounts of the 2000 Florida vote for president. Mr. Krugman still hasn’t been required to comply with the policy by publishing a formal correction. Ms. Collins hasn’t offered any explanation.
[…]
A bottom-line question: Does a corrections policy not enforced damage The Times’s credibility more than having no policy at all?
A better question is whether the NYTimes has any credibility in the first place, particularly when it comes to Krugman.
Hat Tip: InstaPundit
So says Cindy Sheehan:
I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don’t care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don’t fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest.
Hat Tip: LGF
The new Biography Channel series, Girl Racers is a MUST SEE.
Just reflecting upon Wal-Mart’s announcement yesterday of opening their gift registry to Katrina victims, which our own dear APV had blogged on earlier: The idiot Bill Maher, who has used Katrina, on the last two episodes of his HBO series Real Time With Bill Maher, to justify some of Hollywood’s most savage and blindered Bush-bashing, led his last “New Rules” segment off with the proclamation, “no more gift registries.”
Well Bill, I think you owe Katrina victims, and Wal-Mart, an apology.
Oh, and equal bad-ons to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker, who falsely claimed it took the US military “two days” to respond to the tsunami at Banda Aceh. In fact, it took five. And, as I think we all know, we had the first large-scale operation on the scene. (Singapore got there in two days, but on a scale that was trivial relative to ours.)
Although I didn’t see it at first, in his rather cryptic post, DemoMan came up with the answer to my Movie Trivia for 9/12/05 puzzle yesterday. John Hughes frequently goes by “Edmond Dantes”, the protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo.
Today’s episode of Top Gear was focused upon the Lamborghini Miura. Personally, I consider the Miura to be the most beautiful post-war car. And, I stress that post-war qualifier: as there simply is no frame-of-reference with which one can compare a Lamborghini to a Bugatti Atlantic, or a Mercedes 540K Special Roadster. Anyway, they had a poll of the audience, and what alarmed me was that the Jaguar XKE never came up. Well, as I said, I am a Miura fan. But the general consensus among automotive pundits is that the XKE is the most beautiful post-war car. And the fact that the XKE wasn’t even an also-ran in their studio poll troubles me.
So closely after last Sunday, I am a bit uncomfortable about questions of terminal velocity. But anyway, on today’s rerun of Mythbusters, they are addressing the urban myth of a penny, dropped from the Empire State Building killing a person on the street.
Well, it seems that the terminal velocity of a randomly dropped penny is about 65 mph – not enough to kill someone, but perhaps enough to hurt, like a good slingshot pop.
But they don’t address the case of a penny, rolled down a chute. and exiting at the top of the Empire State Building, so, as it falls, it is spinning about an axis parallel to the Earth’s surface. This is a WHOLE ‘nother matter.
Update – More stupid MythBusters: Currently, they are poised to run-off a Hot Wheels car against a Dodge Viper at Lake Tahoe. Well, this is a rerun which I already saw. And it is so idiotic. They came up with an “unproven” result, because the Hot Wheels car kept jumping of the track.
But we already know the answer: A gravity powered vehicle, less mechanical and aerodynamic losses, will accelerate at .5g down a 100% grade (we’re talking off-roader stuff here, folks). And we know, from various road tests’ G-G graphs, that the Viper has forward acceleration well in excess of .5g. So, why are we even fucking with this?
I really don’t like my favorite jazz arias, when done in MP3, The root of this seems to be the dynamic compression intrinsic to the MP3 algorithm. This all may be good for trite pop. But it is the death of fine jazz, chamber, or classical music.
About a year ago, I looked forward to Bill Goldberg’s AutoManic series, on the History Channel. I said, “at last, and American car show hosted by a real car guy. Well, Goldberg ain’t no Jay Leno; he’s obviously another head-up-his-ass celebrity car guy. On one show, Extreme Bikes, they showed an animation of the BMW boxer engine with a common crankpin (the beauty of the boxer design is that the opposed crankpins yield perfect primary and secondary balance). On another, Gangster Cars, he claimed first that Al Capone’s 1929 Cadillac V-16 was “the most powerful sedan of its day” (every car guy worth his salt knows it was the Duesenburg Model J), and that John Dillinger’s second Essex Terraplane had a “V-8” (no, it was a straight-8). What an idiot.
Update: Actually, I have heard Leno say one stupid thing. And, while far more esoteric than the matter of Duesy vs. Cadillac, it was still unsettling to hear it from a car guy of Leno’s stature. On some car show (I don’t recall which), he claimed that the Jaguar XK-120 was “the fastest production car of the early ’50s. No, Jay – that title goes to the Pegaso Z-102. You should know this.
Food for thought from Joel Kotkin & David Friedman at TNR:
While these and other basic needs went unmet, New Orleans politicians, like so many liberal leaders in cities nationwide, focused on an elite-driven agenda designed to create an ephemeral economy rather than a broad-based one. Their lack of proper economic focus allowed what should have been a healthy city to fall largely into poverty and decrepitude. From its earliest origins under the French, New Orleans’s most fundamental commercial advantages arose from its role as the largest port at the intersection of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet for decades New Orleans leaders sought to attract conventions and the arts while failing to compete with Houston and other places around the Gulf in developing a high-wage economy around trade activities and related services.
Despite being one of the nation’s premier entry points for grain and oil, New Orleans has proved remarkably unable to stimulate production or wholesale trade jobs. Before the storm hit, these two essential sectors accounted for 11 percent of the city’s job base; in Houston, where many of the Katrina refugees may end up staying, they account for 14.2 percent. In addition, New Orleans relied upon the leisure and hospitality sector to provide 13.3 percent of its jobs; in Houston, the tourism industry has a hold on only 8.7 percent of the city’s jobs. The difference between the two cities’ economies is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that between 1994 and 2004, the number of jobs in New Orleans grew by only 4.3 percent compared to 23.1 percent for Houston, in part because the Texan metropolis has successfully attracted jobs connected to international trade.
So if not in trade and commerce, where did New Orleans place its bets for the future? Like many cities, its leadership gambled that the arts, nightlife, and a tourist economy could build prosperity, or at least a semblance of it. Just a month before Katrina hit, the city hosted a major conference in which edgy culture and high-end-tourism were touted as the key to its economic prospects. Other cities, of course, have also embraced the disastrous idea that hipness, not economic fundamentals, would lead to urban renewal. And in all of them–Detroit, Baltimore, San Francisco–the cost of this strategy has been substantial. Trying to foster a cool atmosphere has done little to stop Detroit’s economic decline. Baltimore struggles with rising crime and a tepid economy. And San Francisco, despite all its natural advantages, has lost jobs and much of its middle class, mutating into a playground for young, affluent liberals.
The problem is that while great restaurants and music appeal to the urban rich, the economics of tourism leave huge segments of the population behind. In contrast with jobs in trade, manufacturing, engineering, medicine, and finance, culture and tourism pay very low wages and permit little or no upward mobility. For example, a 2002 study for the AFL-CIO showed that nearly half of all full-time hotel workers could not earn enough to keep a family above the poverty line.
Read the whole thing. I might add that San Francisco has had the advantage of a very large and prosperous state to leech of of. Not so with New Orleans.
I’m currently watching some dreck-science show on the Discovery Science channel. And they are talking about the collapse of our Local Group. And they go into this bit about the Milky Way colliding with Andromeda. And they are talking about “the streets of New York” being ripped asunder,
Oh, give me a fucking break. Do you really think anybody with the intelligence to be attracted to a show like this would even remotely visualize the streets of New York existing, as they do today, three billion years from now?
I am currently reading this post at The Speculist, which asks the question: has technological evolution quickened, as customarily believed, or actually slowed? LOTS of food-for-though to be had here. I pose a couple of interesting questions: What of the difficulty in producing truly seminal thought, as a direct result of the easy access to earlier thought? And what of the profundity of current thought, over earlier thought?
Hat Tip: InstaPundit.
This from Las Vegas Weekly:
The shade from the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market sign is minimal around noon; still, six picketers squeeze their thermoses and Dasani bottles onto the dirt below, trying to keep their water cool. They’re walking five-hour shifts on this corner at Stephanie Street and American Pacific Drive in Henderson—anti-Wal-Mart signs propped lazily on their shoulders, deep suntans on their faces and arms—with two 15-minute breaks to run across the street and use the washroom at a gas station.
Periodically one of them will sit down in a slightly larger slice of shade under a giant electricity pole in the intersection. Four lanes of traffic rush by, some drivers honk in support, more than once someone has yelled, “assholes!” but mostly, they’re ignored.
They’re not union members; they’re temp workers employed through Allied Forces/Labor Express by the union—United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). They’re making $6 an hour, with no benefits; it’s 104o F, and they’re protesting the working conditions inside the new Wal-Mart grocery store.
[…]
“We’re just trying to help the women that get discriminated against in Wal-Mart,” says Greer. “We’re out here suffering a lot for these people.” He pauses, moves his sign so that it blocks the scorching sun on his leathery face, and considers the working conditions of his colleagues out here working for the union.
“We had one gal out here in her 40s, and she had a heat stroke. I kept making her sit down, I noticed she was stepping (staggering), and I made her sit in the shade,” Greer said. She went home sick after her shift and didn’t ever return to work.
Another woman, Greer said, had huge blisters on her feet and he took her inside to the Wal-Mart pharmacy. The pharmacist recommended some balm, and Greer bought it for her. Since then, he said, other picketers have purchased the balm for their blisters inside the Wal-Mart they are protesting.
The group has no transportation to go elsewhere—they are dropped off by a union van and picked up later. On weekends, they have to find their own transportation, Greer said.
Inside, the store manager at the Stephanie Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market says he’s perfectly happy with his job, and that his insurance is fine.
“The average rate of pay for Nevada Wal-Mart workers is $10.17 an hour. We have a good insurance program, and every associate—even part-timers—are eligible for the 401k,” says Mark Dyson. “There’s actually different levels of insurance, dental and medical—I have a $500 deductible, but there’s no cap on it. Some other companies’ plans have a $1 million cap, but here there’s no cap. For example, not long ago we had an associate whose husband needed a liver transplant, and that alone was $600,000; but they didn’t have to worry about a cap.”
In today’s NYT, Glenn Reynolds lists five thought-provoking, and telling, questions he would like to see asked of Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts. My favorite is this:
3. Could a human-like artificial intelligence constitute a “person” for purposes of protection under the 14th Amendment, or is such protection limited, by the 14th Amendment’s language, to those who are “born or naturalized in the United States?”
I’m uncomfortable with Glenn’s unqualified use of “born or naturalized in the United States,” as decisions such as Plyer and Wong Wing have since extended equal protection to aliens as well. But the question is still valid, and one I have used, along with others, to discredit the “personhood begins at conception” argument of “pro-life” religious fundimentalists.
And, surely, this is the stuff of science fiction today (see Star Trek: The Next Generation; The Measure of a Man). But the Roberts Court is likely to extend many years into the future. And questions such as this are sure to come-up.
Correlate these two names: Alexandre Dumas, Molly Ringwald.
I’m currently listening to some pledge-drive thing on my local PBS station. And they are playing some sort of My Music Temptations Review. WHAT THE FUCK CAN THEY BE THINKING!!! When I think back on those soaring David Ruffin vocals, and that millisecond-perfect Temptations precision, and then listen to these oafs, all I can do is wretch.
Update: I just tuned away, to another local PBS station playing Judy, Dino, and Frank (three of the greatest voices this planet has ever known), singing some perfectly trash number, and then breaking for an appeal for pledges – what can these people be thinking?? Cut in after the highlights, and then only briefly. And then get back to the highlights.
To thier credit, another local PBS station did their pledge-drive feature around Norah Jones and the Handsome Band 2004; MUCH BETTER.
Glenn Reynolds reflects here on reorganization, in the wake of Katrina. Well, shuffling the org-chart might make some difference over the long-haul, But, in the instance, it’s a matter of who takes-up the bit, and who responds? What was it Nagin said about Honore; something to the effect of: “he got off the helo, started cussing, and things started happening.”
What I’m more concerned about just now, is why there weren’t some patriotic citizens around to draw down on the cops at the Gretna Bridge.
This from Mike Gaynor at MichNews:
WARNING: THE BUSH-CLINTON KATRINA FUND IS COLLECTING MONEY TO GIVE TO THE GOVERNORS OF ALABAMA, MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA TO DISBURSE.
IN THE CASES OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI, THAT MAKES SENSE. SINCE THEIR GOVERNORS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DISASTER.
HOWEVER, LOUISIANA’S GOVERNOR IS RESPONSIBLE, HAVING REFUSED TO CEDE CONTROL TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN ORDER TO MINIMIZE THE DISASTER AND HAVING KEPT THE AMERICAN RED CROSS AND THE SALVATION ARMY FROM ENTERING NEW ORLEANS TO MITIGATE THE SUFFERING.
IF YOU WANT TO HELP LOUISIANA’S GOVERNOR BLANCO IN HER RELECTION CAMPAIGN, CONTRIBUTE DIRECTLY TO HER.
IF YOU WANT TO HELP THE VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA, THEN CONTRIBUTE TO THE AMERICAN RED CROSS OR THE SALVATION ARMY, WHICH WERE READY, WILLING AND ABLE TO HELP BUT BLOCKED BY GOVERNOR BLANCO, OR RELIGIOUS CHARITIES THAT ACTUALLY USE YOUR MONEY TO HELP PEOPLE.
…It’s likely been on TV commercials for the new Lexus RX400h. It A Fine Line, the lead song on McCartney’s new album Chaos and Creation In The Backyard. Lexus will also be sponsoring his upcoming tour. This has both McCartney fans, and vegans, including Paul’s own daughter, Stella livid:
Sir Paul McCartney is under fire for agreeing a sponsorship deal with luxury car manufacturer Lexus for his upcoming American tour this autumn because the company uses leather trim in its vehicles.
It is the first time the former Beatle has signed a corporate deal, but his fashion designer daughter Stella, who is an ardent campaigner against the leather trade, is displeased by his endorsement of the product.
The 63-year-old describes the agreement as “a natural fit” because the two parties “share the same philosophy and approach to creating the best work possible”.
But a source tells British newspaper the Daily Mail, “This is something Stella has campaigned against for years so for her father, who is already worth ÂŁ800 million ($1.4 billion), to suddenly feel the need to promote luxury cars trimmed with leather has incensed her.”
McCartney had the foresight to demand Lexus remove the leather trim from the car he will use during his US visit, but the cars on offer to the general public will still come with leather trim.
His spokesperson says, “The Lexus Sir Paul is actually taking on tour has been specially upholstered with no leather.”
Headline: Hollywood’s on a rampage [over the handling of Katrina], and ET is there!
Can any good come of this? I’m skeptical.
…To Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; why do I think this doesn’t EVEN do justice to the book?
… As of tonight: Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff). Why: she’s got a GREAT jab.
Oh, that’s what I want, a woman who knows how to box. 🙂
I have heard lots of tear-jerkers about “all the animals that have been left behind.” Well, I am as much of an animal lover as anyone (anyone with a right-mind, that is). Just now, I am looking out my patio door at two feral cats – mother and kitten. And I’m debating whether or not to give them a bit of canned salmon, at the risk of my landlord signing my lease renewal.
But when it comes to this: When it’s a question of evacuating one dude’s pets, verses paddling on to the next house, where some human might be in hypohydratic shock, no – I’m paddling on.
No, I grieve for the animals. But one human life means more to me than every critter in the country.
Update: I didn’t give them any canned salmon – I gave them some canned pork.
I missed Firefly. That totally destroys what had been, on balance, despite the larger catastrophes, and some personal setbacks, a marginally positive week. Now I’m on a bummer.