FROM REASON TV, it’s the Nanny Of The Month.
Archive for 2010
August 2, 2010
BRING ME THE HEAD OF JOE ARPAIO? Reader Patrick Wilson writes: “I blame the incendiary language and race baiting from the White House.”
OFFICER PUNISHED FOR THREATENING PHOTOGRAPHER: “A Mt. Pleasant police officer is placed on administrative leave with pay after an incident at the North Charleston Market Saloon early Saturday morning. A viewer told News 2 that the officer was spotted using his patrol car as a taxi service to take drunken women home. . . . The viewer says once the officer realized that someone was taking pictures of the incident, he demanded that the person turn them over. According to the viewer, if he didn’t receive the pictures he was going to wait and pull them over to get them.”
IT’S NOT A JETSONS CAR, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE ONE: Maker Faire Detroit 2010: Amick A2 wind-assisted electric spaceship vehicle.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT TELLS YOU TO EAT MAY BE KILLING YOU. “In an age when aggressive government agencies in places like New York City seek a greater hand in shaping Americans’ diets, the next set of guidelines, published later this year, could prove more controversial than usual because increasing scientific evidence suggests that some current federal recommendations have simply been wrong. Will a public-health establishment that has been slow to admit its mistakes over the years acknowledge the new research and shift direction? Or will it stubbornly stick to its obsolete guidelines?”
Can we sue them and jail their executives, like we’d do if they were drug companies . . . .?
RADIATION DANGERS from stroke scans.
REMEMBERING THE 1978 Ford Thunderbird: “The most powerful engine that Ford was willing to install into this car was the optional 166-horsepower 400-cubic-inch V8; the base engine was a 134-horse 302. Curb weight: 4,104 pounds. No further comment is needed.”
IN THE MAIL: From Jane Hamilton, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece.
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S JUICEBOX MAFIA: If you missed it on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio this weekend, the latest PJM Political is now online.
RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN:
Growing infestations of the ravenous bloodsuckers have New Yorkers annoyed, angry about officialdom’s inadequate responses — and “itching” for answers. . . . Frustration over absurd bedbug programs? Imagine the reaction Africans must have to “malaria no more” campaigns that claim they’ll (eventually) eradicate the disease solely with insecticide-treated bed nets, drugs, “capacity building,” education and (maybe someday) mosquitoes genetically engineered not to carry malaria parasites. As for insecticide spraying, especially DDT, forget it.
DDT is the most powerful, effective, long-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Spraying the eaves and inside walls of mud huts and cinderblock homes every six months keeps 80 percent of the flying killers from entering. It irritates most that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land.
Yet many aid agencies refuse to encourage, endorse or fund spraying. Many don’t even want to monitor mosquito and malaria outbreaks or determine success in reducing disease and death rates. That’s more difficult and costly than counting the number of bed nets distributed and underscores the embarrassing reality that their “comprehensive” (and politically correct) programs achieve only 20 to 40 percent reductions in morbidity and mortality. By contrast, as South Africa and other countries have shown, adding insecticides and DDT can bring 95 percent success.
Read the whole thing.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Hikers, The Mullahs, And Their Friends.
IN POLITICO KENNETH VOGEL WRITES about Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations as a Tea Party manual. It’s an interesting book — making many of the same points about horizontal knowledge and diseconomies of scale as I made earlier in Army of Davids — and the application to the Tea Party movement is obvious (even to why the Big Media folks are always trying to name a Tea Party leader, so that the movement can be tied down and destroyed). But has the book really become a manual for the Tea Party, as Vogel claims?
UPDATE: Reader Andrew Medina emails:
I’m not sure how many Tea Partiers have read it, but I know one thing for sure. Such movements are more of a state of mind and being than political movements with structure.
If one branch of the Tea Party stops, another one will pop up because it’s members don’t stop ever believing in what they believe. The left’s attempts at astro-turf fail because of this.
As further evidence to this I submit Anonymous and the hacking community. Its not an organization, its a state of mind and being. Anons will always be Anons, with or without the ‘chans. Hackers will always be hackers, with or without computers.
The Tea Party has truly succeeded where others have failed because the Tea Party’s essence is a state of being that is self-contained within each and every member of the Tea Party.
Good point.
AN ACADEMIC-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX? “Dr. Jackson and Dr. Sample are part of a cozy and lucrative club: presidents and other senior university officials who cross from academia into the business world to serve on corporate boards. . . . According to a 2008 survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education, presidents from 19 of the top 40 research universities with the largest operating budgets sat on at least one company board.” This is best understood not through standard conflict-of-interest analysis, but through the lens of Angelo Codevilla’s ruling class analysis.
STUDY: Women View Modesty As A Sign Of Weakness. “Women see modesty amongst men as a poor character trait that could adversely affect their employability or earnings potential.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Voters Want Supersized Government To Go On Crash Diet.
UBIQUITOUS VIDEO UPDATE: A good review for the new Panasonic TA-1 shoot-and-share camera.
NEW YORK TIMES: Prepare Yourself For Social Security’s Failure. So is this the hope, or the change?
Key quote: “One financial planner, who has dual citizenship in the United States and Greece, said he was not taking chances. ‘Having seen what happened in Greece, I feel even more strongly today that I should not count on any Social Security for me and my younger clients,’ said the planner, George Papadopoulos, 43, of Novi, Mich. ‘I will continue to tell clients not to highly rely on Social Security and think of any money coming their way as gravy.’”
CONGRESS DISCOVERS ETHICS, Ira Stoll has thoughts. He thinks we need more attention to substance, and less to procedure and appearances. Somebody should write a book on that.
BERNARD CHAPIN: Maureen Dowd and the Left: All Race, All the Time. So much for that post-racial presidency.
THE BP SPILL: How Bad Is It, Really?
UPDATE: More here.
JOAN VENNOCHI: The yacht vs. the pickup truck: Democrats are now the party of perceived privilege, and GOP is the party of the people. “From Newport, R.I., where Kerry’s ‘Isabel’ was berthed before heading to Nantucket, to Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Chelsea Clinton was married in a mansion modeled after Versailles, today’s Democrats are looking more like Louis XVI than Tip O’Neill. Kick in the First Family’s vacation plans for Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s a real air of Marie Antoinette & Co. retreating to idyllic gardens, while Fox News whips up revolutionary flames. The ethics charges against Representative Charles Rangel of New York are added foie gras.”
UPDATE: Thoughts from Rob Sama.
Plus, from Roger Simon:
Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and the weekend manse in Southampton.
Of course that was pretty idiotic then (a Kennedy was in the White House), but it’s outright moronic now.
We live in an era — the worst economically since the Depression — when the daughter of the first couple of the Democratic Party has a multi-million dollar, Marie Antoinette-style wedding with port-a-potties almost as luxurious as a toilette in Baden Baden; it’s self-proclaimed environmental leader, the first global warming billionaire, sprouts “green” McMansions from Nashville to Montecito; and its already multi-billionaire senator from Massachusetts moors his yacht in another state to escape taxes we hoi polloi could only dream of paying.
But wait, as they say, there’s more.
Read the whole thing.