Archive for 2006
January 12, 2006
BIDEN: The gift that keeps on giving. The sad thing is that he’s one of my favorites on the Committee . . . .
(Via Mondo Alito).
A SHAKE-UP at the Boston Globe?
GUILTY AFTER ALL: A while back, I linked to a story about efforts to get DNA testing to find out if executed convict Roger Coleman was guilty after all.
Well, they’ve done the test, and here are the results:
A new round of DNA tests that death penalty opponents believed might finally prove that an innocent man was executed in the United States confirmed instead that Roger Keith Coleman was guilty when he went to the electric chair in 1992.
In a case closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate, Gov. Mark Warner announced that testing on DNA taken from sperm proved Coleman committed the 1981 rape and murder of his sister-in-law, Wanda McCoy.
In a way this is a “dog bites man” story, but on the other hand, there’s this bit from the same report:
Coleman went to his death proclaiming his innocence, and a finding that he was unjustly executed would have been explosive news that almost certainly would have had a powerful effect on the public’s attitude toward capital punishment.
Not this time, though.
A TIMELINE for nanotechnology development. I can’t vouch for its accuracy (who could?) but it looks plausible.
NIKON is dropping its 35mm cameras almost completely. This will bum a lot of people out, but it was inevitable.
BRIAN ANDERSON warns of efforts to crush dissent in America.
PROTESTS in Mongolia. Registan has a roundup with links and photos.
I WROTE ABOUT ANYA KAMENETZ’S Generation Debt here a while back. Now Daniel Gross gives it a thumbs-down in Slate:
Look. It’s tough coming out of Ivy League schools to New York and making your way in the world. The notion that you can be—and have to be—the author of your own destiny is both terrifying and exhilarating. And for those without marketable skills, who lack social and intellectual capital, the odds are indeed stacked against them. But someone like Kamenetz, who graduated from Yale in 2002, doesn’t have much to kvetch about. In the press materials accompanying the book, she notes that just after she finished the first draft, her boyfriend “proposed to me on a tiny, idyllic island off the coast of Sweden.” She continues: “As I write this, boxes of china and flatware, engagement gifts, sit in our living room waiting to go into storage because they just won’t fit in our insanely narrow galley kitchen. We spent a whole afternoon exchanging the inevitable silver candlesticks and crystal vases, heavy artifacts of an iconic married life that still seems to have nothing to do with ours.” The inevitable silver candlesticks? Too much flatware to fit in the kitchen? We should all have such problems.
Indeed.
APPLE HAS PUT UP a series of podcasts on how to podcast. You need iTunes to listen, though it’s free.
MICHAEL FUMENTO looks at the dark side.
GOOD NEWS FROM NEW ORLEANS:
If you drive into New Orleans from the airport the back way, down Jefferson Highway to St. Charles Avenue, everything on the river side is as gorgeous and decadent as ever. Some live oaks have toppled, and many magnolias have died, but all the way to the French Quarter, the shops and restaurants are open, and people have come home.
It’s not that good everywhere, though.
UPDATE: Several readers say that this paints an overly rosy picture of New Orleans’ recovery, even along this route. Not having been there, I can’t say, but certainly the overall picture isn’t as rosy as this bit, as noted. Here’s an extensive blog report, with some photos, from earlier this month.
IRANIAN NUCLEAR BRINKSMANSHIP: Austin Bay offers link-rich commentary.
SOXBLOG ON ALITO: “From a tactical point of view, this has been the Democrats’ worst week since John Kerry saluted and said ‘Reporting for duty.'”
MERYL YOURISH crunches the numbers on terror attacks in Israel.
HERE’S A LIST OF ABRAMOFF POLITICAL DONATIONS: He got around.
HEH: “Evan Coyne Maloney, the thinking teenybopper’s heartthrob.”
The InstaWife: “Well, that’s true!”
SOME DRUG-RELATED ADVICE for German Chancellor Angela Merkel:
German firms once dominated the biopharmaceutical field. Known as the “medicine chest of Europe,” German drug makers spawned U.S. divisions that are now multinationals in their own right. But today, as The Philadelphia Inquirer detailed in a recent series, there is not one German company among the top ten drug-makers.
German medical and biopharmaceutical firms are now lagging far behind their younger cousins in the U.S. when it comes to developing the new “wonder drugs” that are shaping the 21st century: By some estimates, U.S. labs are churning out 70 percent of all new drugs.
A range of shortsighted government policies did much of the damage.
I hope that doesn’t happen here. People tend to take innovation for granted.
THE INSTA-WIFE AND I watched this Ann Coulter documentary yesterday. Here’s her review. I find Coulter rather over-the-top, though she comes across much better in the documentary than in her columns or TV appearances.
“We did so well on [Amazon.com] with the Firefly box set and the performance of that helped us get the movie made. We wish the audience would get up and go to the theater, but it shows that they like to keep coming back and revisiting the world Joss created.” Serenity made $25 million at the domestic box office after it was released Sept. 30.
Whedon and his crew are waiting to see how well the DVD numbers go before proceeding with a Serenity sequel, Peristere said. “We really hope to return to this work,” he said. “We love the characters. It’s fun storytelling, and we all love using our talents. … It all depends on Joss. He’s not giving up on the characters. He had incredible writers who had a million stories to tell, and we’re all just hanging out and seeing what the world has to give us, and given the opportunity we’ll make more.”
I’d like that to happen. (Via Dean’s World.)
HE’S DOOMED, THEN: “The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his mouth.”
The Bush Administration would be well-advised to let these hearings run on as long as possible.
THE BELMONT CLUB looks at Venezuela and “Peak Oil.”
THE CARNIVAL OF TOMORROW is up!
January 11, 2006
SOME INTERESTING PORKBUSTERS SUGGESTIONS from Mark Tapscott. Applying the Freedom of Information Act to Congress seems like a no-brainer, though Congress may well disagree . . . .