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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Friday, December 13, 2002 :::
Froogle, a web-shopping search engine launched by Google. Good name.
::: posted by dWj at 5:56 PM
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I confess to being the über-geek who charged Jonah dork-demerits -- is that really a punishment? -- for his Klingon orthography. He also received a few incorrect corrections, and asserts:
All of these words are phonetic transliterations, so whatever english spelling I use for making the sound of another language are ok.
Since I've already jettisoned any dignity I might have, I might as well spill everything I know on this. Jonah's assertion actually isn't true -- the roman alphabet for Klingon is definitive. Michael Okuda, the artistic designer of Star Trek, didn't want his creativity constrained by some linguist, so any cool-looking characters you see on Klingon computer-displays in Star Trek are just randomly selected strings from the font he invented, and have no connection to Okrand's language.
I have The Klingon Dictionary in front of me, and it confirms "Qapla'".
UPDATE: To backpedal slightly, this knowledge comes more from an interest in languages than from an obsession with Star Trek...
::: posted by Steven at 5:40 PM
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It's good that Trent Lott apologized, but I don't think he should be doing it repeatedly. Either step down, or don't (preferably the former); don't keep dragging it out.
::: posted by Steven at 5:12 PM
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I don't know whether there's an informal grassroots advisory process, but the Catholic church is very much a top-down organization. I'm pretty sure archbishops and cardinals are appointed directly by the Pope. And there's no reason to think the next archbishop of Boston will be someone currently serving anywhere near Massachusetts.
Cardinal, incidentally, isn't a rank above bishop or something -- it's a separate post. In practice, I think all Cardinals are bishops, and the heads of certain large dioceses get appointed Cardinal. Aside from getting to wear the cool hats -- and, if you have a fortuitous name, getting to be called "Cardinal Law" -- I think being a Cardinal just means participating in the process of filling any vacancy in the papacy.
::: posted by Steven at 2:27 PM
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Yesterday's result of the day in men's college basketball was Central Florida's smart drubbing of College of Charleston.
::: posted by dWj at 2:21 PM
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Seems to me if I were Cardinal Law, my statement would make a reference to having made mistakes the magnitude of which most people aren't priveleged to be in the position to make. It's also quite possible that wouldn't fly terribly well.How do Cardinals get appointed to Archdiocese (is that the plural?)? Is there local involvement, or would the Cardinal of Boston be appointed by the same folks as choose the Cardinal of Chicago? If not, he should; we've done quite well here, at least for the two I've known.
::: posted by dWj at 11:54 AM
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I just know you've all read Lileks this morning, or you wouldn't be wasting your time here. But. I just had to excerpt this passage:
So we went down to the children's book section of Barnes and Noble. I was looking for gift ideas; [my two-year old daughter Gnat] seemed to like the Curious George backpack - it looks as if the little fellow is clinging to your back. Very cute. It would be different if he had red eyes and sharp teeth, of course; if the bag looked like that, I'd train Gnat to run around screaming whenever she put it on, shouting GED OFF! GED OFF MONKEY! Just for fun.
::: posted by Steven at 5:11 AM
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Thursday, December 12, 2002 :::
Yale's men beat a good Holy Cross team last night in basketball. On the women's side, it looks like the Big 12 isn't the juggernaut it was last season. (The SEC, though, is the juggernaut it is every season.)
::: posted by dWj at 3:23 PM
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Conversely, Steve, if it is our fault the world's temperature is rising, but we can't do anything about it, then, well, that, then we can't do anything about it.
::: posted by dWj at 3:16 PM
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Dean's comment on affirmative action is similar to a line of reasoning I encounter on global warming. Some people will stipulate that the earth is getting warmer, but that it's a natural cycle rather than a result of industrialisation.
But this only matters to the extent that it indicates our ability to affect it. If we screw ourselves by raising the world's temperature, surely we're just as screwed if the world raises its temperature without our help, no?
I may have mentioned picking up Lomborg's "Skeptical Environmentalist" over Thanksgiving. I haven't managed to get to it yet.
::: posted by Steven at 3:10 PM
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I just saw this gem (from Media Research Center -- Notable Quotables -- 11/25/02)
Helen Thomas: Does the President consider this [election outcome] a mandate to fulfill his agenda? Going to war with Iraq, privatizing Social Security, weakening the Civil Service Commission and so forth?
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: Helen, you sound like a commercial that didn't work.
- Exchange at White House press briefing on November 6.
::: posted by Steven at 2:46 PM
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HPV linked to mouth cancer
New research to be published next year will provide powerful evidence that oral sex can cause mouth cancer.
Doctors who first suggested a form of mouth cancer could be linked to the same sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer have found more data to back their controversial theory. Two years ago, the group from Johns Hopkins University in the US published a paper suggesting the human papilloma virus (HPV), the cause of most cervical cancer, can also cause mouth cancer.
::: posted by Steven at 1:26 PM
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Kate Malcolm, addressing John Jenkins and his opposition to hardship exemptions, responds You yourself note that the students in areas with minority majorities may not be "prepar[ed]" "as well" by their schools. Is that their fault?
I have a friend who went through law school (kind of), and once commented while preparing a brief, "I don't care about ethics; I care about liability." "Is that why you're in law school, or because you're in law school?" I asked. "You know, Dean, it's a little bit of each," he said.
Anyway, I'm not sure "Is that their fault?" seems like as relevant a question to me as it might once have. If the student isn't going to be a good student or provide other students with an improved learning environment, regardless of whose "fault", if anyone's, it is, it's a waste of class space to admit him.
Insofar as it does mean his scores may be lower than they would be for another student of equal ability who was already given the chance that admission would constitute for him, it does make sense to take it into account; perhaps this is a brilliant student who will flourish when finally opened up to a new world. (This is the argument for the Texas 10% plan, and perhaps is all Kate meant by the question.) The SAT used to try to measure ability rather than acheivement for just that reason. It is also likely that diversity is useful in certain kinds of classroom discussions (and race, even in conjunction with other things, may be a useful proxy for the kind of diversity that is relevant here). As for trying to compensate people for the blows they've suffered, though, I really don't think there's any good in that.
::: posted by dWj at 1:25 PM
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I think the floor traders are required to wear ties; it must be enforced, but it must be a rather literal rule. The style seems to be to have the knot on the chest somewhere; the ties chosen are the kind of ties you'd expect traders to wear (if you weren't addled by the picture of "Wall Street" with which some people appear to believe; it's less like the New Yorker cartoons of pigs, and more like a frat, like what Michael Lewis describes in Liar's Poker — or like what some women described in a sexual harassment lawsuit not too long ago).
::: posted by dWj at 11:21 AM
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It's taken most of a week, but my instinct to defend someone who's being hectored a bit too much is starting to become aroused. Look at the context, people; it was the guy's hundredth birthday. He has a fair amount of respect for what he's done in the last third of his life, in spite of his first average human lifespan, and one flatters a fellow like this on an occasion like this. Sure it was put a bit weirdly, but Lott didn't come out in support of segregation; he came out in support of an old man who's going to be dead in three months. The radio report goes something like, "expressed the wish that Thurmond had won the Presidency when he ran as a segregationist"; I don't know whether that last clause is provided for people who dropped out before American History, or whether it's a deliberate attempt to make it sound as though Lott said something he didn't, but if it was the former they should either afford the story five extra seconds to give each thought its own sentence or they should just drop it and refer people to history books once in a while.Lott's a miserable excuse for a majority leader, and this isn't nearly the worst thing he's ever done.
::: posted by dWj at 11:14 AM
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I guess I still maintain that the media aren't liberal so much as urbanist; liberalism is certainly part of it, though. New York and L.A. seem to have trouble realizing there's anything in between them (geographically), and most of the media emanate from the coasts; while some journalists certainly came from the Midwest or the South, the media as a whole seem, particularly when discussing religion or guns, to have no idea what middle America is thinking, while they seem vaguely aware that conservatives at least exist. (On that, though, an interesting comment by Dinesh D'Souza, who mentioned that conservatives seem to have a powerful advantage in debates with liberals: the conservatives have heard and prepared for the liberal arguments, while many of the conservative arguments are completely new to the liberals, who haven't seen them on the national news. I do think there are more liberals in Nebraska than there are conservatives in those media outlets that were prominent ten years ago.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:06 AM
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I was wondering when the earliest sunset of the year was to be; it seems I just missed it (for the Chicago/Boston latitude).
::: posted by dWj at 10:46 AM
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Michael Kelly writes about liberal and conservative bias in the media.
I don't think any media organ has shifted to the right lately, and the New York Times has shifted from left-leaning to untrustably-ideological. What's true is that some right-leaning media outlets have grown to some prominence. The broadcast-network news programs still tend slightly to the left (mostly in story selection, though once in a while Dan Rather says something blatantly leftist), and CNN is still more left than right, but Fox News has grown up in the last few years to surpass it. Likewise, much of what's on the Internet is right-of-center, and there certainly weren't a lot of news sources on the Internet ten years ago, not counting Usenet, which was not a reliable source for facts -- someone asked me in college once about a rumor he'd read on the Internet, and I said, "if you read it on the Internet, it must be true." It was more obviously sarcastic when I said it than it is now.
To sum up, the liberal media haven't moved to the right or shut down, but they've lost some significance as alternatives have grown up. Which is ideal, really.
::: posted by Steven at 4:25 AM
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Kids do the darndest things.
::: posted by Steven at 3:15 AM
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I haven't said enough good things about John Rosenberg's Discriminations recently. He's been talking about the UMich affirmative action cases, naturally, but also about whether the call for "diversity" will extend to historically black colleges.
::: posted by Steven at 3:08 AM
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I believe Trent Lott when he says he's stupid rather than evil. And if it were just this one incident, I probably wouldn't support removing him from his position. It's not, though, and I do.
::: posted by Steven at 2:28 AM
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Justice Volokh brings up the confusion between "epitaph" and "epithet". I sent him the following paragraph from Kors and Silverglate's "The Shadow University", page 169 (at least it's 169 in my hardcover version -- 55% of the way through chapter 7). Typos are mine, editorial comments are theirs.
When federal courts began striking down codes restricting "verbal behavior" at public universities and colleges, other institutions, even in those jurisdictions, did not seek to abolish their policies. Thus, Central Michigan University, after the University of Michigan code had been declared unconstitutional, maintained a far broader and vaguer policy outlawing "offense" on grounds of race or ethnicity, not to mention "epitaphs [sic, we hope] or slogans that infer [sic] negative connotations about an individual's racial or ethnic affiliation."
That "sic, we hope" cracked me up.
::: posted by Steven at 1:55 AM
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Uh oh -- even Sasha's girlfriend has trouble telling the Volokh's apart!
The story on the cross-burning oral argument (at the Supreme Court) that she links to is interesting and funny (the best lines are actually quotes from the Justices, though the author generates some good ones herself, too).
::: posted by Steven at 1:31 AM
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002 :::
Incidentally, be it noted that one would expect prices of services to increase faster than inflation over the years as labor becomes a scarcer resource and productivity gains in the production of goods outstrip those in, say, education. Still, 3% a year seems a bit much for such a sustained move, and I think we could have that product in higher quality for less money.
::: posted by dWj at 4:00 PM
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Kate Malcolm on salaries of educators. As one to make such observations, I note that what matters as to how much an employee should be paid is not how much he adds to the job, but how much more he adds than someone who might be more cheaply acquired. A study indicating very small to no benefit to smaller class sizes over a range typical of U.S. high schools. Education spending per student has well more than tripled in the last forty years after adjusting for inflation, and the product doesn't seem to have improved. I personally believe better teachers would make a difference; hence my education platform:- Eliminate (or mitigate) the union rules that thwart paying good teachers more than bad teachers, or at least mitigate the difficulty of replacing the latter;
- Double class sizes;
- Fire (the right) half of the teachers;
- Double teachers' salaries;
- Fire more teachers as better candidates from industry trickle in.
Not that I have anything against getting rid of administrators as well.
::: posted by dWj at 3:44 PM
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Pete du Pont writes about the search for newer, better energy sources.
::: posted by Steven at 3:42 PM
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Colby Cosh presents an interesting objection to the build-up against Iraq.
Why are they marching in the streets of Tehran, and not Baghdad? The Iraqi opposition rightly sees no sense in hazarding lives and fortunes needlessly, what with the U.S. perched on the doorstep of deposing Saddam. Unfortunately the war machine seems to be having trouble getting off the doorstep. Have the years of post-Gulf War U.S. policy in the region done anything but keep Saddam in power? Are they keeping him in power now, when a "Vietnamization" of the Iraqi struggle might do the trick at no cost in American blood and treasure? These are questions worth asking.
I think Iraq differs from Iran in crucial ways besides American foreign policy. It's my impression that the culture of fear is better-maintained in Iraq, and I suspect this is a bigger factor than any hope the Iraqis have had for the last dozen years that our troops would be "getting off the doorstep". Still, it's one of the better objections I've seen lately to Bush policy.
::: posted by Steven at 3:10 PM
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Professor Volokh has been badly mis-represented in the San Francisco Chronicle.
When I was at MIT, I thought our student newspaper (The Tech) was unusually bad at getting the facts right. Then I started to see accounts of events I knew first-hand in more commercial news-sources, and I realized that the Tech isn't all that unusual.
::: posted by Steven at 2:56 PM
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A shareholder advocate -- I wasn't paying enough attention to get his name -- was on CNBC saying that, political skills notwithstanding, Harvey Pitt was the best SEC commissioner in his lifetime. In particular, he mentioned proposals to decrease restrictions on shareholder resolutions and requiring mutual funds to disclose how they vote their proxies (though I don't really understand the reasoning behind that).
I'd heard something like this before, too, around the time he resigned. Mostly vague, though.
::: posted by Steven at 2:25 PM
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Twenty-five Chicago airport workers have been charged with criminal violations and the security clearances of 553 others have been canceled in a crackdown on employees using fake IDs, officials announced Tuesday. For most jobs having lied to get it will get you fired, but I'd think for a job of this sort one might think, "Hm, I could get in a lot of trouble here."
::: posted by dWj at 1:12 PM
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Penn's men's basketball team beat Villanova, 72-58. This is a Villanova team that has beat Michigan State and hasn't lost to anyone embarrassing. Incidentally, Notre Dame's recent performance has been getting a great deal of attention, at least in Chicago, and well it might, but their only loss is to Creighton, which is undefeated; how good is this Creighton team, one wonders?
::: posted by dWj at 12:54 PM
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Lily Malcolm on looking for love. There was a poster in my high school French class that read, "Je t'aime, pas seulement pour ce que tu es, mais pour ce que je suis quand je suis avec toi." I will pretentiously decline to translate that for the readers.
::: posted by dWj at 12:17 PM
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Pete Rose apparently has been in talks with the (acting?) commissioner of baseball to have his lifetime ban lifted. His crime was gambling on his own team (though it was betting to win, which seems much better to me than if he had been betting on them to lose); Shoeless Joe Jackson simply knew about gambling on his team, appears not to have acted on that information, and, if his ban was for life, his sentence was completed fifty years ago. There's something vaguely Soviet about excluding a great, famous player from your hall of fame because he took actions that reflect poorly on the sport; regardless of what else Shoeless Joe did, he played baseball, played it fabulously, and belongs in Cooperstown.
::: posted by dWj at 12:13 PM
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It's nice today, as it was yesterday; Chicago isn't supposed to be this warm in December. It's convenient that it is, though, because I read on the train last night the Lomborg essay on global warming not being worth the cost of fixing it. It's not a cheery piece of work; it seems to have less of "global warming's not so bad" about it than of "there's nothing we can do about it; we're doomed". (I'm simplifying here.) One other interesting item I culled from it, though, was that the current best guess appears to suggest that insofar as it would be worthwhile to curb emissions, it would be so only well into the century. By then the science will presumably be better, anyway; we have scientific justification for procrastinating! Which reminds me I have to do some Christmas shopping at some point. But the other bit about global warming is that, if large-scale stupid limitation of emissions is not cost effective, that doesn't necessarily mean that every bit of emmission being done now is cost-effective; a Pigouvian tax, ideally designed, doesn't care about cost of compliance, but if there's not much benefit to cutting carbon dioxide only a little bit, the ideal tax would be fairly low, and would only discourage those activities that are fairly gratuitous. Mind you, if the taxes collected and improvements in allocative efficiency are less than the associated frictional costs, it's not worth doing — and that that's the case seems quite possible based on what the article says.
::: posted by dWj at 11:28 AM
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My new employer provides a breakfast, and I'm enjoying fruit this morning. The dental plan, on the other hand, isn't worth a bucket of warm Vice-Presidency; I suppose each place has its own perquisites.
::: posted by dWj at 11:09 AM
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There's a commercial for the local power company that consists of a woman in a factory singing with enthusiasm commensurate with her lack of talent; it makes slightly more sense when one sees the factory and finds out who's wasting money on the ad, but the first several times I heard the ad I was in the kitchen wondering what was going on. We need commercials for blind people. (Not ones advertising blind people, ones that don't make it absolutely crucial that you see the picture.)
There's also an ad out for the Illinois Lotto where they start with an ad for something else — Gnomefest, or Sausage of the Month, for example — and then declare that "fun for some", while the Illinois Lotto is "fun for all". Well, it seems to me there was one item they've used that sounded less fun to me than the lottery, but I can't remember what it was. Of course, I'm the person who stopped conversation at the company Christmas party for several seconds by using the word "nonGaussian"; these ads probably work better for their target audience.
While I'm at it, a local ad for an auto dealership a handful of stone throws away from where I live starts with the owner announcing, "I'm Roland Gardner and you're not," whereupon he asserts that if we shop at his dealership we'll be treated as if we owned the place. It seems to me one of the Beatles had a line like that in one of their movies.
Segueing through the Beatles, the anniversary of Lennon's death on Sunday instigated a tribute show to which I listened on my drive back from Iowa. Sergeant Peppers was mentioned, then a clip of Lennon talking about how pleased he was when he'd written something he new would be timeless, and then they played the song "A Day in the Life". A fine song, but I can immediately think of three songs on that album that are unarguably more timeless, and can't see that Day in the Life is definitely fourth, even. With a Little Help from my Friends and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (of which they later played the Elton John version) are recognizable immediately, but "When I'm 64" transcends its very origins. If there's a song from Sergeant Pepper's that, 200 years from now, occupies the place in our culture now held by "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", it will be "When I'm 64". Of course, they couldn't play a Paul McCartney song on Lennon's day.
(Come to think of it, the other two Beatles songs that seem the most "timeless" to me are also both Paul songs: Yesterday and Hey Jude.)
I spent some time last night with Eleanor Rigby (Revolver is the first CD I owned, by the way); I was listening mostly to the double string quartet behind the vocals, after I had listened to it on the anthology where they present it without the vocals. (The melody is completely missing from the instrumentation, by the way, but the support is interesting in its own right.) I had pulled that out after discovering I had Nirvana Unplugged (for those too young to remember when MTV had music related programming, this was a series of concerts they did without electric guitars, sythesizers, etc.), and becames fixated on the cello backing "Where did you sleep last night" — the song was written in the twenties, but I don't know whether the original instrumentation included the cello.
I forget where I started.
::: posted by dWj at 11:05 AM
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002 :::
Sasha Volokh has written an interesting segment on "FDA screwiness", much of it borrowing from the new Reason magazine blog, which I'd be reading regularly were it less prolific.
Here's the key sentence:
The drug manufacturer, Schering-Plough, insists on remaining more heavily regulated to protect consumer health and prevent consumers from self-diagnosing and self-treating. [emphasis his]
Even without knowing any context or background, that sentence should be enough to suggest that something is screwy, even if you can't figure out what.
Sasha, BTW, used to write for Reason.
::: posted by Steven at 7:34 PM
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I'm sure there's a circle of Hell in which tech writers are forced to use their own documentation.
::: posted by dWj at 2:10 PM
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Robert A. George on Trent Lott. I want to note that I supported Domenici back in '96, when Dole left; I disliked Lott before it was cool. (Dole, I believe, was a better minority leader than a majority leader. Lott has been good at neither; he might make a good dog for Daschle if he can be housebroken.)
::: posted by dWj at 1:36 PM
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Incidentally, I saw the suggestion recently that GE or Boeing might want to incur United because it's a customer of the two companies — keep them alive to sell products to them, you see. (This wasn't written by a spokesman or even employee of any of the companies, or anyone with any other status higher than "yokel".) A lot of people seem to suffer a certain all-or-nothing thinking, that (in this case) leads "if customers are good, I should bail out my customers"; numbers are important, because they tell us how big a cost it's worth bearing for whatever is good. (Hence the Lomborg paper to which Steven refered, as he was able to find in our archives for me. I haven't read it, but I mean to, and I have other comments I want to make, but that will wait until I see it.)
::: posted by dWj at 1:12 PM
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Steven E. Landsburg on Slate about the differences in discipline among different demographic groups. It's an economic sort of discussion; Landsburg is an economist, and in fact a friend of David Friedman, son of Milton. I've reviewed a book of his on Amazon.
::: posted by dWj at 1:12 PM
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A British conservative writes for the Wall Street Journal an essay about conservatism that at least has soundbites worth biting:American conservatism is an answer to that question. "We the people," it says, constitute a nation, settled in a common territory under a common rule of law, bound by a single Constitution and a common language and culture. Our primary loyalty is to this nation, and to the secular and territorially based jurisdiction that makes it possible for our nation to endure. Our national loyalty is inclusive, and can be extended to newcomers, but only if they assume the duties and responsibilities, as well as the rights, of citizenship.
If conservatives favor the free market, it is not because market solutions are the most efficient ways of distributing resources--although they are--but because they compel people to bear the costs of their own actions, and to become responsible citizens. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the thrust of what he's written, but I'm pretty sure I find it interesting at the least.
::: posted by dWj at 1:04 PM
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That last chapter in Eat the Rich is one of the all-time great reads. As for the game last night (I only saw the first half), the officiating was pretty bad throughout, not simply in terms of what calls were made but how the game was run; a moment I remember as typical was where a flag was thrown about five seconds after the infraction was commited; another time, it seemed that the officials had decided that what looked like either a fumble or an incomplete pass was the latter, but didn't blow their whistles to stop the play or otherwise indicate the verdict until, again, about five seconds after it took place. A lot of the players on both teams seemed to be unsure what was going on, in a tax law sort of way.
::: posted by dWj at 10:37 AM
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Lily Malcolm comments on China for the first time ever. (This is a joke -- if you haven't seen the Kitchen Cabineteers write about China, you haven't been reading.)
Quoting the New Republic, she writes:
Look closely at the Chinese economy, and you'll find a far less rosy situation than that portrayed in most of the business press. The country's growth rates are vastly overstated, the result of cooked books and massive deficit spending.... The Chinese economic miracle, in other words, is largely a house of cards.
Sounds Soviet. Or Swedish, as documented further (especially with respect to the deficit) by P.J. O'Rourke in the fourth chapter of "Eat the Rich".
Lily adds:
According to the article, one of the biggest things dragging the Chinese economy down is China's lack of a real legal system.
That's in the eleventh chapter; not regarding China so much as the undeveloped world in general.
::: posted by Steven at 2:22 AM
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If you weren't tolerant of football entries, The Dean and I would have scared you off quite a while ago, so let me discuss a minor change I'd like to see in the replay rule.Just a few minutes ago, the Miami Dolphins were on the wrong side of a questionable call in their game against the Bears. They can't challenge it. This isn't because it's one of those "judgment calls" that can never be challenged -- it's because the Dolphins have already challenged two calls this game, and that's the limit. I can see why they want to limit the frequency of challenges, but a challenge doesn't succeed if the instant replay is ambiguous, and a team that issues a challenge and loses is charged one of their time-outs. Even if you don't consider this sufficient to discourage frivolous challenges, it seems to me that since the Dolphins won both of their challenges, they ought to be allowed an other. So I think the NFL should change it's instant-replay rules to only penalize teams for challenges that they lose. This wouldn't banish the forces of darkness forever from the earth, but it seems pretty common-sense to me. Incidentally, the Dolphins aren't in any jeopardy of losing, anyway. Also incidentally, I'd prefer that they were.
::: posted by Steven at 12:11 AM
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Monday, December 09, 2002 :::
National Review Online has an interesting summary of the legal challenge to McCain-Feingold.
::: posted by Steven at 7:19 PM
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George Will writes on my new favorite subject:The very name of the ATSB, which was created to help airlines cope with conditions after the terrorist attacks, indicates what is problematic about it: ``Stabilization'' is a dubious objective for any sector of a dynamic economy, and especially for sector as troubled--$7 billion in losses last year, perhaps $8 billion this year--and misshapen as the airline industry.
::: posted by dWj at 4:19 PM
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The U.S. military should have an "adopt-a-bomb" program to raise money. For $10,000, you can adopt a bomb; we'll send you pictures of it, write a message of your choice on it before it's dropped, and let you know where it was dropped, whom it killed, and what it destroyed — as soon as it's declassified, of course.
::: posted by dWj at 2:44 PM
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Incidentally, one of the reasons I think United should be quickly put down is its goodwill — or lack thereof. I'll concede there are people who disagree with me on the pleasurability of flying with United versus Southwest — or even American, for that matter — but a goodwill assessment needs to take into account their labor relations. If the entire resources of United were transfered to a company that labor believed to genuinely be a different company, it would have shed a lot of its burden, and any companies that scavenge the assets, even if they mismanage them as badly as United, wouldn't have that to contend with.
::: posted by dWj at 11:02 AM
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UAL operating margins. And once again, the blogger seems to introduce large quantities of whitespace for no identifiable reason.| 1999 | 12.8% |
| 2000 | 4.3% |
| 2001 | -23.4% |
| 2002 Q1 | -21.6% |
| 2002 Q2 | -12.8% |
| 2002 Q3 | -17.3% |
::: posted by dWj at 10:34 AM
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Well, St. John's beat Linfield in a close one, and good for them. My other calls were right, though the previously undefeated but untested SUNY-Brockport took John Carroll to overtime, which, even at home, is better than I expected from them. Mt. Union has to be the best team in the country; don't they? It would be interesting to see them play Northwestern or Duke or someone like that, just to get some idea of how they compare to division I teams.
::: posted by dWj at 9:59 AM
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Canadians go to Baghdad as 'human shields' (Link from The Corner)
I think it should be official policy -- widely-publicized, of course -- to ignore any civilians who deliberately put themselves in a war zone in an attempt to deter us.
::: posted by Steven at 1:02 AM
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The Instapundit thinks right-leaners are more upset with Lott than left-leaners. Stipulating this (I haven't really noticed), I offer the following possible reason: having Trent Lott as majority leader is better for the Democrats than for the Republicans.
Did I say that? I'm sorry -- I'm just paying tribute to a remarkable man. Actually, my main reason -- as a Republican -- for being more irritated than if Robert Byrd had made the comment is that this is how the Democrats love to characterize us. It's embarassing when one of the key figures in our party helps them out.
::: posted by Steven at 12:55 AM
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Punditwatch is up. I watched part of "This Week". Best said:
“[O’Neill and Lindsey] were smart doctors with no bedside manner.” --Fahreed Zakaria on This Week
My favorite comment that Punditwatch doesn't mention was from Michele Martin, who pointed out that Iraq is engaged in a charade, but we're also engaged in the charade, for diplomatic purposes. It's an obvious point, but one I think is worth bringing up once in a while.
::: posted by Steven at 12:39 AM
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I've generally been puzzled by talk of Condi Rice for President. Not that I think she'd be a bad President, or a bad candidate -- I just don't think I know enough about her to have an opinion on the matter, and I'm a bit surprised that other people do think they know enough.
From reading this story, she seems better suited to her current role. Though maybe that's just because she's in it, and doing it well. (Link from Instapundit.)
::: posted by Steven at 12:23 AM
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Much is being made, understandably, about some unfortunate comments made by Trent Lott for Strom Thurmond's birthday party. (Link from Instapundit, one of many he has on the subject.)
I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.
My comment on Strom's birthday was that he came around on treating blacks as people -- at about the same time he became a Republican.
::: posted by Steven at 12:05 AM
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Sunday, December 08, 2002 :::
The Green Bay game was more exciting than it should have been.
::: posted by Steven at 11:46 PM
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Saddam Hussein claims that he invaded Kuwait to protect his regime from the U.S.
Didn't work, did it?
Actually, let me compare two recent statements. This from Saddam's Information Minister:
We apologize to God for any deed that angered him in the past, which we might not have known of and is blamed on us, and on this basis we also apologize to you.
Here's Billy Bulger, in front of the House Government Reform Committee on Friday:
The Fifth Amendment's basic function is to protect innocent men who might be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances. I find myself in such circumstances.
[emphasis mine for both quotes]
I'm not quite as skeptical of Bulger's claim of innocense as I am of Hussein's. Not quite. But that's some nice parallelism happening there, isn't it?
::: posted by Steven at 4:27 PM
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I saw the Chamber of Secrets yesterday. It seemed unsubtle and rushed to me in a way that the first Harry Potter movie didn't -- but, then, I hadn't read the book before I saw the first movie, so I didn't realize how much they were cutting. Even in the scenes that were kept, though, there were a few places where I thought the characters should be more hesitant, or that a scene needed more development to really work, but they didn't have enough time for it, so they just delivered the line and went on to the next scene.
To sum up, my biggest disappointment with the 161-minute movie is that it was too short.
The third book is the best she's written so far (in my opinion; I haven't conducted a scientific poll, but from what I've gathered, the consensus is generally with me on this). I've heard a rumor that they're hoping to have that movie out in a year and a half. The third book was longer than the first two.
::: posted by Steven at 4:09 PM
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Vince Lombardi once said that football is all about blocking and tackling -- whichever team blocks better and tackles better will win the game. One doesn't argue football with Vince Lombardi, but he knew he was oversimplifying, and the Patriots-Bills game today demonstrates this. Buffalo hasn't been blocking and tackling much better than New England, but they haven't been doing it worse. More important in today's game (which isn't over, BTW, so I could still look silly), though, is how many of Buffalo's tackles have come from their offense -- i.e., they haven't been holding onto the football. It's an important part of the game.
Incidentally, there was a sign in the crowd saying, roughly, "New England will always love Drew Bledsoe, but not when he plays the Patriots." (It was long-winded for a crowd sign, though it may have been a little more concise than that.) I don't think that's an isolated sentiment -- Pats' fans generally admire the way he handled himself last year, and upon his transfer to Buffalo.
::: posted by Steven at 3:41 PM
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