Saturday, August 16, 2003 :::
Colby Cosh has a short tale of government action in Alberta.
::: posted by Steven at 10:53 AM
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Friday, August 15, 2003 :::
The baseball game (to which I referred in my most recent post) was fun to watch, especially in the last inning, where the defenses started to sag (though the game did end on a double-play). It probably would have been fun even if the team I was cheering for had lost.
One more note on black-out coverage: I don't remember exact phrases that they used last night (or who my first news source was), but I had the distinct impression, near the beginning, that the black-out was only hitting major cities. NYC, Toronto, Ottawa, Detroit, etc. were mentioned, rather than "New York, parts of New Jersey, Ontario, Ohio," etc. Presumably this was just their way of describing the general geographic area -- or maybe because their initial information was from the large cities, and they weren't certain whether or not power was on in Ithaca or Lake Placid -- but they didn't say "a large region, including such cities as..." -- whomever I first heard the story from was just talking about power being out in these large cities. If the goal was to increase the chances that I'd think of terrorism, well, it worked.
::: posted by Steven at 5:48 PM
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Also at NR, the editors point out that the recalltugs representation in the direction of plebiscite. Representative government depends on a degree of trust, and on drawing proper conclusions when trust is violated. We may pick our representatives, and throw them out when their terms end. But while they hold office we should be stuck with their bad behavior, limited by the checks and balances of other office-holders. It's worth rereading Edmund Burke's Speech to the Electors of Bristol from time to time.My worthy Colleague says, his Will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If Government were a matter of Will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior.
::: posted by dWj at 5:24 PM
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There is so much more than what follows to recommend the latest from Victor Davis Hanson, but I'll get you started:Surely, Canberra's past history and present friendship — coupled with its strategic location, stuck as it is with neighbors like Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, China, and North Korea — make it a key ally worthy of American deference and military assistance. The old notion that prosperous, friendly Western countries do not need our assistance, while fickle non-Western states deserve blackmail aid, is passé — and, of course, has no public support. Most Americans would rather give 600 tanks to Australia than sell one to Cairo; or prefer to work closely with the democracy in India than with the dictatorship in Pakistan, where the current, transitory order is one bullet away from Islamic chaos.
::: posted by dWj at 5:23 PM
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On blackout overkill: I watched ABC a bit last night, and I have to say, when they ran across the bottom of the screen that Miami and the West Coast were among locations not affected by the blackout, I changed the channel to football.
::: posted by dWj at 5:21 PM
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It's time for a waste-of-bandwidth post, don't you think?Through much of the past decade of my life, laundry has required quarters. I'm thus in quarter-acquisition mode; if something costs $6.30, I offer $7.05 if I have it, receiving 3 quarters in change. For the past year, though, I've not needed quarters for laundry; I have needed coins for tolls. Most of the tolls I pay are 40 cents; quarter, nickel, dime. If you pay for everything in dollar bills, on the average transaction, supposing the amount due has a mantissa randomly distributed with an equal probability of 1% for each possible number of cents, you'll receive 1.5 quarters, .8 dimes, and .4 nickels (plus 2 pennies). Thus nickels, the bulky, cheap cousin to the penny in terms of its nuisance-to-value ratio, are the hardest to acquire; one has to conciously acquire nickels. What I properly ought to acquire is probably the automatic toll-paying doohickey that lets me go through tollbooths at 30mph while it charges my account, but what is of more interest to me is the fact that the value of a nickel to me is not exactly one fifth the value of a quarter; it's now slightly higher, while before it was slightly lower. Certainly the value ratio is constrained by the fact that there are a number of market-makers out there willing to accept quarters and pay out nickels, or vice versa, in a fixed ratio; there are change machines that will only give, say, 95 cents in coins for a paper dollar, but those have never really taken off, probably in part for cultural reasons. I think it would be interesting, though, if the Federal Reserve and the U.S. mint took their signals from market prices; a couple years back, when there was a penny shortage in New York, the mint might (in a particular theoretical world) have noticed that the value of a penny, relative to a basket of other coins and bills, was a few percent higher than 1 cent before it ever got to be newsworthy, and could have cranked up the output as best as possible to avert the problem.
::: posted by dWj at 3:01 PM
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Libya to accept responsibility for Pan Am 103 bombing, renounce terrorism, U.S. official says. How seriously do we take them?
::: posted by dWj at 3:01 PM
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My brother wants me to discuss Bill Bulger, the recent (i.e., until last week) president of UMass. It's an interesting story; I don't have much to say on it, but I'll provide whatever background comes to mind.
Bulger was, for a long time, the president of the state senate. One of his brothers, James "Whitey" Bulger, was in a similar, if somewhat rawer, profession. To quote the FBI's Ten Most Wanted website:
James J. Bulger is being sought for his role in numerous murders committed from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s in connection with his leadership of an organized crime group that allegedly controlled extortion, drug deals, and other illegal activities in the Boston, Massachusetts, area.
Late in Bill's stint in the Senate, the FBI decided to arrest Whitey. Whitey fled, having been tipped off by his handlers in the Boston FBI office.
Oh, yes, Whitey had friends in the Boston office of the FBI. I believe they intended to get information on other members of his Winter Hill Gang, but they cozied up a bit much.
Anyway, Bill left the Senate, got appointed President of UMass, took the Fifth before a congressional committee investigating his brother, received immunity from said committee (thereby eliminating his fifth-amendment defense against testifying), testified before the committee a few months ago, and resigned his position at UMass last week.
The Boston Globe has collected some of its articles; you can read more there, if you like.
I'm now going to go downstairs with my laptop, so I can do some work while watching the team from Saugus (about ten miles northeast of here) in the first game of the Little League World Series.
::: posted by Steven at 2:53 PM
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If you visit The Corner of last night and this morning, you'll find a lot of discussion about whether there was media over-kill on the blackout. I'm going to take the side that there was.
Some readers wrote K-Lo saying that it's a NorthEast thing. While the news often displays a New York bias, I do think this was the biggest story of the evening, and I suspect there would have been media over-kill if the black-out had happened elsewhere. My objection is that they spent time repeating themselves, and interrupted programming to show interviews with "men on the street." Later in the evening, I spent some time with the Fox News Channel, and I can't complain if they focus on the biggest news story. But NBC didn't need to pre-empt their prime-time schedule to tell us that they didn't know anything that they hadn't reported on the evening news.
Maybe I'm just saying that because I like Scrubs.
::: posted by Steven at 2:28 PM
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Incidentally, that news yesterday that we caught Terrorism, Inc.'s executive vice president for Southeast Asian affairs? That was six minutes into the ten minute news "round-up" on the radio this morning.August is a slow news month, isn't it.
::: posted by dWj at 11:07 AM
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On TV last night, someone (Jesse Jackson?) suggested that, in Liberia, we follow the example of the British in Sierra Leone. I have a different idea: we follow the example of the British in Hong Kong. For no reason other than to turn it into a monument to our greatness, we colonize it, throw open the economy, stand by willing to defend it, and eventually hand it over to a corrupt imperial dictatorship to squander theWell, maybe we don't have to follow the script to the letter.
::: posted by dWj at 11:06 AM
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Some well-conceived jingoism from the NY Post.We are products of the immigrant spirit and the pioneer mentality. Our ancestors (as well as today's new immigrants) dared to take a chance, instead of remaining in the "old country," with its degrading social and economic systems.The Europeans with whom we must deal today are those whose ancestors lacked the courage to pack their bags and board the ships in Hamburg or Antwerp or Danzig. They chose a miserable security over hope that carried risks. ... Europeans are correct when they insist that America has become a danger. We are, indeed, a tremendous threat to their self-satisfaction, to their dread of change, to their moral irresponsibility and to their dreary, state-supported cultures. Link from National Review.
::: posted by dWj at 11:06 AM
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S&P futures had basically recovered by 5 hours later. Consumer Prices looked like Producer Prices, with the core rates .1% higher than expected and the overall rates on target. New York manufacturing was worse than expected. Consumer confidence report has been delayed till Tuesday for some reason. (That's to be a preliminary figure anyway.) Energy company stocks didn't do anything terribly interesting on open.Today's an options expiration date, and there was some concern being expressed that a lot of excercises could create a clearing backlog; a lot of the clearing companies may not be up. (A number of clearing companies were in the WTC, which is part of the reason why the stock market was closed for so long two Septembers ago.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:05 AM
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Thursday, August 14, 2003 :::
S&P futures down 7 points.
::: posted by dWj at 5:36 PM
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NEW YORK -- A huge power blackout hit U.S. cities spreading from New York to Cleveland and Detroit and north into Canada Thursday afternoon.The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Thursday said that a massive power outage that hit New York City and other East Coast cities was not caused by a terror attack. Power outages were reported in the New York metropolitan area and Detroit, as well as in Toronto and Ottawa, witnesses said. The outage was caused by an outage at a Manhattan power plant which destabilized the power grid as far as Canada, FERC spokesman Bryan Lee said. Washington Post.
::: posted by dWj at 5:23 PM
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Homeland Security says it's unaware of any terrorist connections the blackouts might have.
::: posted by dWj at 4:49 PM
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Fire at Consolidated Edison something in New York?
::: posted by dWj at 4:36 PM
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CNN says NYC, Cleveland, Detroit affected by power outages.
::: posted by dWj at 4:29 PM
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There are stories I'm hearing about major power outages, especially in New York City.
::: posted by dWj at 4:27 PM
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The CIA has captured another major al Qaeda leader who is believed to have planned bombings in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, ABCNEWS has learned.A top al Qaeda member and a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, Riduan Isamuddin, (aka Hambali), 36, was arrested as part of a CIA undercover operation in the last 24 hours. He is currently being returned to Indonesia to face terrorism charges there.
::: posted by dWj at 2:47 PM
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Kate Malcolm points us to an article on early starts to the school year; there's a district in the Chicago area (Mundelein?) that has been in school for a week now.I always felt that summer was a chance to learn something, unimpeded by schoolwork. The longer school year may well be a plot to propagate ignorance and stupidity in our children, wherein the AEA and the AFT try to gain increasing control over them until they can obtain full, legal guardianship and sell of the parents for parts. It's a communist conspiracy, people! We must protect our purity of essence! I need my coffee.
::: posted by dWj at 10:37 AM
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economic dataProducer Price Index up .1% as expected, core up .2% against a consensus of .1%. Initial claims of unemployment 398,000 against 393,000. Continuing claims fell 6,000 (they're in the 3.7 million range). Trade deficit smaller than expected. CPI comes out tomorrow.
::: posted by dWj at 9:56 AM
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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 :::
Candidate Schwarzenegger Taps Buffett as Economic AdvisorActor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the leading Republican candidate for governor of California, has signed up investing legend Warren Buffett as an economic advisor.Mr. Schwarzenegger signed up Mr. Buffett, a longtime friend, after a round of personal wooing in recent days, two people familiar close to the Schwarzenegger campaign said. Both Mr. Buffett, the billionaire chief executive of Berkshire- Hathaway Inc., and the Schwarzenegger campaign had no immediate comment. The campaign says it is planning an announcement of interest to the financial community. Okay, so, uh, hm. Now, Buffett is a Democrat (unlike the rest of his family); I guess I'll put that out for starters. Not that Arnold has shown himself to be a hyperconservative fiscally. This could well produce policy reminiscent of Clinton's. I'd certainly expect tax hikes on the rich.When I saw the headline I thought Jimmy Buffett. Seriously. Fascinating thing about blogs, how one can be at a loss for words and go on anyway.
::: posted by dWj at 4:32 PM
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The NewsHour had a spot on the recall election (I'm sure that's not a surprise), and I thought I'd whine about it.ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: I promise you that I will be the people's governor. As opposed to the robots', no doubt. I am automatically suspicious of any politician who claims to be possessed by the people. At best, it's the kind of "nobody could possibly disagree with me" solipsism as Huffington, as is typical, illustrates with such alacrity:This is not a right/left issue. This is a right/wrong issue ... If she's referring to actual illegal tax evasion, that's one thing, but if she's referring to "loopholes" — that usually means "the law does what someone else wants it to, not quite what I want it to" — then this is the same "shut up and agree with me" to which I referred yesterday.Clinton did this sort of thing all the time, and it drove me nuts. "The time for debate is over; the time for action is now." And his opponents, no doubt, would have had little complaint if he had proceeded to roll over so they could enact what they felt was the best plan, but that, of course, is not at all what he meant. (Many politicians do this, but it seemed to me that Clinton did it much more than most.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:48 AM
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Children in India make paper airplanes; they aren't unique to our culture. Updates as they become available.
::: posted by dWj at 11:20 AM
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Get your very own Bush action figure! (The Clinton action figure has been precluded by the department of Justice.) Make him walk! Make him fly! Make him repeal the steel tarriff!
::: posted by dWj at 10:28 AM
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Tuesday, August 12, 2003 :::
A British man was arrested in Newark, N.J., Tuesday in an alleged plot to smuggle a surface-to-air missile into the United States, the FBI confirmed to Fox News.Details of the arrest, originally reported by ABC News, were sealed. Authorities said that other arrests were under way in the international probe into the smuggling attempt.
::: posted by dWj at 5:17 PM
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Perseids tonight. Also, full moon. The new moon later this month coincides with the closest approach of Mars in several millenia. I suggested to Grandpa that I go to the mountains for Mars viewing, because that way I'd be a mile closer; that should improve the viewing.
::: posted by dWj at 3:48 PM
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CNN/Money ran a piece on the web comparing teachers' hourly wages to those of other professionals; today there's a piece relating and (to some extent) responding to letters written in response. There's a bit of the typical "shut up and agree with me""Shame on you for even running this story," added another reader, taking issue with the very question. and some claims that, if meant to be typical, are far-fetchedFrank claims to work "3,000-plus hours a year." Spread out over a 40-week school year, that would mean 12 hour days, six days a week, resting only on Sundays. But what I find most interesting is an argument that seems quite selectively applied:Joel, for example, estimated that babysitters are paid $5 an hour or so per child. Multiplying that by the 30 students in his class, Joel figures he would make $162,000 a year as a baby-sitter.He then asked, in a tone not uncommon among the story's critics: "What does it say about a society that pays its baby-sitters more than three times what it pays its teachers?" Now, this is the kind of thing we see once in a while about how much it would cost to hire fifteen specialists to do "the same things" a stay-at-home Mom does, but I don't often seen it given as a response to the other popular comparison point to teachers' pay: that of professional athletes. Why do we pay professional basketball players so much more than we do teachers?, goes the question, to which the answer is, We don't; "we" pay teachers $100B a year, and basketball players less than $2B. Each basketball player makes more than each teacher, of course, because not only are economies of scale more difficult in education, but the teachers' unions tend to resist what efforts could be made. (The minimal value of small class size has been mentioned here recently.) Ultimately, the answer to the question as to whether teachers are underpaid is best addressed by a comment that doesn't mean to address it:"I've come to the conclusion that the trade-off of working 80 or so fewer days a year, combined with the slightly more altruistic environment of education," he added, "make this modestly paid profession a good career choice." If we're attracting the teachers we want to attract, then we're paying enough to do so. If we aren't, we're not, and need to evaluate whether new teachers drawn by higher salaries would be worth the cost. How much somebody else is making, except insofar as it affects the answer to that question, is irrelevant.
::: posted by dWj at 2:32 PM
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Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. & Lee Hoskins on Iraq & Private Property on National Review Online
Maintaining state ownership over the oil industry in Iraq will ensure a struggle among competing ethnic groups. Winning at the ballot box will bring the victor control over oil. Elections literally become life-and-death struggles. Losers cannot afford to accept the outcome. Again, that scenario has played out in Africa and the Middle East, regions that account for 70 percent of all major conflicts in the world.
If you want a libertarian argument that applies to any issue, there you go.
::: posted by Steven at 1:45 PM
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1980 Olympics hockey coach Herb Brooks dies in car wreck. Link from the Corner.
::: posted by Steven at 1:13 PM
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Lileks's Bleat is picture-heavy today. It's about Fargo, his childhood home, where he spent the weekend. I'm not selling it well, but it's worth a read -- not brilliantly epiphanic, as Lileks sometimes is, but well worth a read.
His latest Backfence -- which he writes for the Star Tribune, for actual money -- informs us of an inflated kiddy slide based on the sinking of the Titanic, the "Totanic". I have nothing to add.
::: posted by Steven at 2:23 AM
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In the current "Best of the Web", Taranto responds to a characterization of Howard Dean (hereinafter, again to avoid confusion with my brother, "Francesca") as this cycle's Barry Goldwater:
Let us suggest one problem with this analogy, as well as one additional reason why it may be pertinent. The problem is that unlike Goldwater, it's hard to say that [Francesca] has any coherent philosophy of government. There's no 'Conscience of a Liberal' by Howard Dean; indeed, [Francesca] insists he's actually a 'centrist'--an epithet it's hard to imagine Goldwater applying to himself.
But here's the similarity: [Francesca], like Goldwater, has no answer for the greatest issue of the day. In Goldwater's case it was civil rights; and although he was no segregationist himself, his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made him the de facto segregationist candidate. Along with his home state of Arizona, he won five other states, all in the Deep South--'the wrong ones for the wrong reason,' as The Wall Street Journal's Vermont Royster observed in a postelection column.
Similarly, [Francesca] (and to a lesser extent all of his Democratic opponents, with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman) has no strategy for dealing with the great issue of our day, the battle against Islamist terrorism. [Francesca]'s foreign policy seems to consist entirely of denouncing the president for liberating Iraq. Though he grudgingly concedes that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, what really seems to spark his passion is the various procedural objections to a 'unilateral' or 'pre-emptive' war.
Goldwater was in many ways a man ahead of his time; certainly he helped lay the groundwork for the GOP's revitalization as a conservative party. On the other hand, it seems fair to say he had an ideological blind spot in that he failed to grasp that the enormity of segregation was such that it justified an exercise of federal power that would otherwise have been an anathema. Similarly for [Francesca], who views the liberation of 24 million Iraqis as a trivial matter in comparison to the lack of an 18th U.N. resolution.
An interesting suggestion, and mostly right, I think, though perhaps too dismissive of "ideological blind spots." As a great man once said, the cheif ideal of the American people is idealism. When push comes to shove, most Americans are pragmatic, but we like to think of ourselves as idealists, and if a candidate can convince voters that he's basically competent, the next thing the voters will want is to be sold a vision. People want both a vision to believe in and actual practical results. In Goldwater's case, the vision was one of federalism and small government, but the only practical results a lot of people saw was continued discrimination in the South. Reagan did better at presenting an ideal with effects that appealed to people.
Incidentally, people on the left have underestimated our current President's ability to sell us a vision of national greatness and security. But I worry that Karl Rove underestimates Howard Dean's ability to sell a vision of Europe in America.
::: posted by Steven at 2:04 AM
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Monday, August 11, 2003 :::
Steyn's column on Schwartz Shwarz Arnold.
::: posted by Steven at 5:02 PM
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I'm sure Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. knows more about international relations than I do, but I read most of this piece on North Korea mulling over a counterpoint:Worse yet, the history of arms control in general and past dealings with serial treaty-buster North Korea in particular suggest a sorry prospect: When (not if) Pyongyang violates whatever obligations it assumes in the course of the new negotiations, the West will nonetheless feel constrained to honor its commitment, i.e., not to topple the north's dictatorship. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is exactly what we want; offer the pledge of nonagression as part of the agreement, and design the agreement to be absolutely sure that - it will be violated and
- North Korea will be promptly and publicly caught in the act.
That, then, becomes our pretext. We just need to make sure that this takes place under Bush's watch, so that he'll follow through.
::: posted by dWj at 4:53 PM
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There's a very different point in that Lomborg piece as well:In the US, it is estimated that twice as many people die from cold as from heat, and in the UK it is estimated that about 9,000 fewer people would die each winter with global warming. But don't expect headlines in the next mild winter reading "9,000 not dead". Chicago's police superintendent is retiring this week, which made me think about crime prevention; it's one of those tasks in which success is more difficult to "sex up" (the term du jour) than failure.
::: posted by dWj at 4:53 PM
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I think I'll borrow my brother's habit of quoting the last paragraph of an article, this one from Lomborg.
The major problems of global warming will occur in the Third World. Yet these countries have many other and much more serious problems to contend with. For the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the single year of 2010, we could permanently satisfy the world's greatest need: we could provide clean drinking water and sanitation for everybody. It would surely be better to deal with those most pressing problems first.
::: posted by Steven at 3:36 PM
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There are people who will argue that the coolest thing in baseball is the perfect game, but as a big a fan as I am of pitching, it's an event that has to take place over the course of an afternoon. If you're looking for something with more pop to it, I suggest the unassisted triple play, in which a single player on a single play retires a side that previously had nobody out.With runners on first and second in the fifth inning, Furcal made a leaping grab of pitcher Woody Williams' liner. The runners were going on a 1-1 pitch, and Furcal stepped on second base to double up Mike Matheny before tagging out Orlando Palmeiro as he made a futile attempt to scamper back to first. Note that every single one of these has been accomplished in the same way: catch the line drive on the fly, then tag second and the runner from first in one order or the other. (One of the runners, usually the one from first, has to be badly out of position, and that's not going to happen on a normal pop-up; with a line drive nobody thinks the ball is going to be caught, and nobody has time to react when it is.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:05 AM
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