NEWS YOU CAN USE: A photo report on booth babes from the SEMA car show.
Archive for 2008
November 11, 2008
HIGH MILEAGE NEWS: A review of the 2009 Honda Fit Sport.
Plus, a status report on the plug-in hybrid Saturn Vue. I just bought gas for a bit over two bucks a gallon, but if you expect those prices to last long term then you’re more of an optimist — or, perhaps, economically, a pessimist — than I am. . . .
NOBODY TELL JOHN SCALZI: Bacon, plus mayonnaise, yields: Cooking with Baconnaise!
UPDATE: Reader Karim Fattah writes:
And for more bacon goodness, why not try some Chicken Fried Bacon!
I just heard about this on the Paul Harvey radio segment. I can’t wait to try it!
There’s no goodness like bacon goodness . . . ..
RETAIL FEARS mean that this should be the best Christmas shopping season for sales ever. Of course, I plan to do most of my shopping online, so please remember to have plenty of good sales there, too!
FROM FABIUS MAXIMUS, a look at the promise of small nuclear reactors.
I MENTIONED A WHILE BACK that Brooks & Dunn were at the law school speaking about the future of the recording industry. Here’s a webcast of their talk.
“WHY OBAMA LOOKS LIKE A ONE-TERMER:” A little early for those predictions, I’d say — even if they’re really predictions about the economy, not Obama.
IRAQ UPDATE: Baghdad Bridge of Death Becomes Bridge of Hope: “Sunnis and Shi’ites made an emotional reach across the sectarian divide on Tuesday, reopening a Baghdad bridge between the two communities closed since a 2005 stampede, the deadliest incident of the war. . . Sunni children from Adhamiya raced to see their Shi’ite friends in Kadhimiya. Women from the two communities met up on the bridge, kissing and hugging each other with joy.” And this positive story is from Reuters. Now that the election’s over, we may get more of those!
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Progress in mass-producing graphene.
Meanwhile, last week I noted successful demonstrations of mechanosynthesis, and noted that this proved some critics wrong. I just happened to run across this passage from Wired from 2004:
In practice, Drexler’s critics charge, chemistry is more complicated. Each atom in a molecule interacts with every other atom nearby, including those in the proposed tool tips, conveyor belt, mill wheel, and so on. Thus, to deposit a single atom, a nanoassembler would need to restrain every atom in the vicinity. The sheer number of atoms that would need to be controlled, and the machinery it would take to control them, make mechanosynthesis a practical impossibility.
Apparently, not so much. I suspect that Eric Drexler will have the last laugh where these critics are concerned.
THE PROMISE AND POWER of RNA interference technology.
IN THE MAIL: Eric Flint and Dave Freer’s Pyramid Power.
NO SURPRISE: “President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party. Civil-liberties groups were among those outraged that the White House sanctioned the use of harsh intelligence techniques — which some consider torture — by the Central Intelligence Agency, and expanded domestic spy powers. These groups are demanding quick action to reverse these policies. Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration.” For some, this will come as a relief. For others, a disappointment verging on betrayal.
UPDATE: A reader emails:
I don’t know if you noticed, but if you didn’t I thought you might be interested to see that the HuffPo reprint of the WSJ article on Obama continuing the Bush administration Intel policies bars comments:
0 comments and a statement that “Comments are closed for this entry.”
I don’t know if this is normal policy or not at the HuffPo, but I thought they were pretty open to letting people vent about things.
Well, not where Obama-criticism might result, surely . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Is this the start of Bush’s rehabilitation?
Whoa, whoa whoa! Pragamatic? Bush’s polices are suddenly pragmatic? What about the incessant ranting for years that Bush had gone far beyond any practical necessity? . . .
Of course, this means that Obama will have to rehabilitate Bush in order to defend his adoption of Bush’s policies. He can’t say that Bush went far beyond necessity and the constitution and then turn around and do the same thing. No, he will patiently explain that it turns out that Bush had most things right and that we need to respect the wise decisions that he made and to finish the work he started.
I predict this will be only one area in which leftist will quickly “re-evaluate†Bush’s legacy. Now that leftists face the same responsibilities that Bush has faced, they will see his actions in a different light. As a result, I predict that Bush will be much better thought of five to ten years down the road than he is today.
Seems likely. [LATER: Above link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!]
A GOOD WAY TO OBSERVE VETERANS’ DAY: Consider donating to Project Valour IT.
Asheville, North Carolina.
PREPARING FOR TAX HIKES: Time for an Insta-Poll.
Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don’t think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?
There is an element of the “wannabe” about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington.
Read the whole thing. (Via Roger Kimball, who has some thoughts of his own). If anything is certain, it is that disillusionment will not be blamed on the too-readily illusioned.
A LOOK AT five myths about recycling.
ED CONE: 10 insightful Web 2.0 books. Plus, Robert Scoble on corporate blogging.
HOW THEY’RE RESPONDING TO PENSION PROBLEMS IN BRITAIN:
In a sign of the growing pensions apartheid, they say it is only private sector workers who will lose out.
Public sector workers have nothing to worry about. Around 90 per cent have a protected pension, and the Government is controversially ignoring the demands for these generous schemes to be cut back. By comparison, just 11 per cent of private sector workers have a final salary pension, and the number is falling fast.
Similar trends are underway here.
BARACK OBAMA: “Visionary minimalist?”
DAVID HARDY: OBAMA GOING AFTER RIGHT-TO-CARRY LAWS? “His people are seriously considering a federal ban or restriction on ‘right to carry’ laws. Exactly where the constitutional power to enact such a measure is to be found is less than clear to me. But so are a lot of other things like that.” That seems like it would be a major mistake to me. Plus, the missing assault-weapon ban language reappears. I can think of nothing more likely to generate a nasty backlash than a move like this.
“HOW I MET YOUR BACTERIUM:” A fateful hookup 1.9 billion years ago.
SO IS THIS the right-wing answer to MoveOn?
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? “Barack Obama promised he would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans and presumably raise them for the 5 percent who benefited most under President Bush’s tax policies. But, remarkably, the most affluent 5 percent supported Obama and that was perhaps the key to his victory last week. This group — and the rise of a new elite class of voters — is at the heart of the fast-paced changes in demographics affecting the political, sociological and economic landscape of the country. While there has been some inflation over the past 12 years, the exit poll demographics show that the fastest growing group of voters in America has been those making over $100,000 a year in income.”
UPDATE: Reader Bob Rogers writes: “Haven’t you been listening at faculty meetings? There is no deeper class hatred in the US than that felt by those making six figure salaries toward those making seven. (And no greater delusion than the idea that those making five figures hate those making seven more than they hate those making six.)” Heh. Not much class-envy in my faculty meetings, happily, but the point is a good one.