BRINGING BACK THE VW Microbus? For people who want SUV room without the mileage penalty, but want something cooler than the average minivan, it might be a big seller.
Archive for 2008
September 7, 2008
DAN RIEHL is defending Andrew Sullivan.
MOVING NEW SOLAR TECHNOLOGY TO MARKET in three years? Bring it on.
IKE DEVASTATES TURKS AND CAICOS, STILL CATEGORY 4: More from Brendan Loy.
DAVID FRUM ON THE VANISHING REPUBLICAN VOTER: Well, Frum looks at economics, but I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the role of broken promises: they ran as a small-government party of reform, and they — at least the GOP delegation in Congress — then acted as if they were trying to stuff their pockets as fast as they could, basically because they were trying to stuff their pockets as fast as they could. Dissatisfaction is a natural result. (That said, I eagerly await Mickey Kaus’s comments on what Frum says about immigration and middle-class wages.)
And it puts the country in a bad place. My ideal — at least in terms of potentially attainable scenarios –would probably be a centrist Democrat as President and a small-government Republican majority in Congress. The GOP delegation’s miserable behavior over the past decade or so has made that impossible, at least in the foreseeable future. A centrist Republican President and a center-leftish Democratic Congress looks like the closest we can come, and I suspect it will be considerably less useful in a small-government sense.
IN THE MAIL: A new Harry Turtledove book, After the Downfall.
JUST TALKED TO MICHAEL YON on the satphone from Afghanistan. He reports that the big picture remains poor, but reports some big tactical successes, including a successful turbine delivery of to the Kajaki Dam hydroelectric facility. He’s posted a big report on the operation, which was the biggest of the war.
He’s with British troops now, and his comment is: “These guys are studs. All they do is work out and fight.” He says troop morale generally in Afghanistan is really good, partly because there’s more public support for that war, but that the overall situation is “not great” and “clearly deteriorating.” He adds that “we’re not losing,” but that we’re not making progress either. “I’ll tell you Glenn, we really need more troops here.” With what he describes as a “meltdown” going on in Pakistan, he says that Afghanistan needs a lot more troops — like 50,000 or more. Part of the problem, he adds, is that many of the Coalition troops, like the Germans, aren’t really allowed to fight, making the effective number of available troops lower than it seems.
Meanwhile, remember that Michael is supported by reader donations. With people focused on the election it’s worth remembering that he’s still out there covering this stuff. I’ve donated.
Until last Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other groups had posted large amounts of aggregate human DNA data for easy access to researchers around the world. On Aug. 25, however, NIH removed the aggregate files of individual Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). The files, which include the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), run by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the Cancer Genetic Markers of Susceptibility database, run by the National Cancer Institute, remain available for use by researchers who apply for access and who agree to protect confidentiality using the same approach they do for individual-level study data.) The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard also withdrew aggregate data.
The reason? The data keepers fear that police or other curious organizations or individuals might deduce whose DNA is reflected in the aggregated data, and hence, who participated in a research study.
Read the whole thing.
MICKEY KAUS: “McCain would like everyone to think his campaign imploded last summer because of his courageous support for the surge in Iraq.” But, says Mickey, McCain’s real problems came from his immigration stance. “Supporting the surge was no more a huge courageous risk in a GOP primary than opposing the war was a huge courageous risk for Obama in a Dem primary.”
MICHAEL BARONE on the election. Note Barone’s explicit denial that he is old enough to have covered William Jennings Bryan. . . .
DAVE KOPEL WRITES that the media’s fixation on Palin has been a boon for McCain. What’s the Tolkien phrase? “Oft evil will shall evil mar.”
IT’S THE Google Navy?
September 6, 2008
A PHONY BOOKBANNING LIST from the Obama campaign?
UPDATE: From Jim Lindgren’s update to the above post:
The list has now been determined to be a complete hoax. The list has nothing to do with Palin; it is one that has been circulating for years, with exactly the same books and in exactly the same order. It is a list of important or great books that have been banned from libraries somewhere at some time.
After being up for most of the day, the Obama campaign page spreading the phony list has now been deleted. The reason I listed the background of the official Obama website blogger was because, if I had not listed his position, it would have looked like it was probably coming from the Obama campaign leadership, rather than just a low-level local Obama campaign worker who was nonetheless given a national Obama blog.
Well, good.
HURRICANE IKE IS BACK TO A CATEGORY 4: More news from Brendan Loy.
ROGER SIMON on Oprah, politics, and the culture of narcissism.
AT THE TRUTH ABOUT CARS, A REVIEW of the 2009 Honda Accord NX. About 15 years ago, Bill Stuntz told me that what was amazing wasn’t how good the $50,000 cars were, but how good the $20,000 cars were. Adjust for inflation and he’s even more right today.
UNVEILED: The movie poster for Oliver Stone’s W. That’s probably as much of the move as I’ll wind up seeing.
THIS IS WHY I WANT MORE MEDICAL RESEARCH NOW:
Nearly one in five U.S. adults (46 million people) has arthritis and an estimated 67 million people will be affected by 2030. Osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis, currently affects more than 27 million people in the U.S. . . . Add in rheumatoid arthritis, decaying spinal disks, and other joint problems and your odds of eventually living in pain from skeletal pains become quite high. If you aren’t living in pain now you probably will eventually – barring big advances in biomedical science and biotechnology.
Ugh. Aging is a disease, and romanticizing it in terms of the great wheel of life or something is just a species of denial.
MORE ON CHRYSLER’S PLUG-IN HYBRID PLANS: “Press didn’t elaborate on a timeline for releasing the plug-ins — which further makes us wonder how real they are — but Reuters says Envi should have its first product in showrooms within three to five years. According to Chrysler spokesman Nick Cappa, the first vehicles out of Envi will have an electric-only range of 40 miles. Considering the Chevrolet Volt is on track to hit dealerships by the end of 2010 and just about everyone else is working on plug-ins and EVs, Chrysler may once again be so late to the party that the hosts already have passed out. Of course, that might be when the party’s just getting good.”
OPRAH’S DECISION TO BAN SARAH PALIN is getting her roasted in the comments on her website: Just keep scrolling. (Via Jessica’s Well). Click “read more” for a few representative examples, or follow the link to read ’em all.
OBAMA REACHES TO HILLARY TO COMBAT PALIN, but Jules Crittenden comments: “Obama may want to do the math on that ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thing and make sure he’s figured it right.”
MORE ON Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I guess I’m glad to see the franchise do well, but honestly I haven’t had much interest after the first three films.
MOVING TOWARD OFFSHORE WIND POWER: “The Interior Department, the agency that handles oil-and-gas leases in U.S. waters, is preparing to lease swaths of the outer continental shelf to companies that want to erect massive wind turbines. With the public-comment period for the proposal scheduled to end Monday, competition is heating up to develop wind projects on the shelf, the same underwater formation largely covered by an oil-drilling ban that has become a contentious issue in the presidential race. The federal program signals the start of a broad push to develop offshore wind energy in the U.S. The country often is dubbed by renewable-energy experts as ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind’ because of its vast, windy expanses, particularly in the Western plains. Now, rising interest in renewable energy is spurring exploration of the ocean.”
Two thoughts. First, nobody tell Ted Kennedy! Second, this is probably also a stealth way to advance oil drilling — once there are lots of offshore wind turbines, who’ll complain about a few oil rigs mixed in among them? Seems like a good idea, though.
UPDATE: Reader James Egan emails: “Why not put the wind turbines ON TOP of the off shore oil rigs : )” Good idea!