EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: My brother sent me an MP3 file of a cut from his next album and wrote: “Here’s the first recording in the new studio space. The ‘phone mic’ is the handset from an old Bell dial-phone that has been modified to take an XLR plug. Totally nails the “telephone tone” — if you can imagine such a thing. The guy who makes them even offers some where you plug into the base, so you can keep the whole phone as a mic.” I love that.
Archive for 2010
August 13, 2010
“GROUND ZERO IS, INDEED, HALLOWED GROUND, BUT . . . .”
It’s the return of the “damning but.”
TODD HENDERSON: “There are no unicorns, Prof. Lessig, as much as you and I both wish there were. Our best hope for changing Washington is not to let hope triumph over experience and believe if we just elected the right person everything would change, but to make the structural changes that will deny the politicians the power they always abuse.”
NAME THAT ETHNICITY.
LOU DOLINAR: Our Real Gulf Disaster. Like his Katrina expose, it’s a must-read. “There was a broad-based failure on the part of the media, the science establishment, and the federal bureaucracy. With the nation and its leaders looking for facts, we got instead a massive plume of apocalyptic mythology and threats of Armageddon. In the Gulf, this misinformation has cost jobs, lowered property values, and devastated tourism, and its effects on national policy could be deep and far-reaching.”
ROLLING THE DICE: Fed official calls low rates a ‘dangerous gamble.’
PRINT YOUR OWN JOURNALISM WARNING LABELS.
A LOOK AT home espresso makers. Plus, a warning: “One day, you will run out of coffee beans or milk or something else and just go to your usual place and get coffee and the next morning, you will still forget it, and the morning after, you will find that what you missed was the fact that you liked having someone making it for you, and you liked being around other people having the same ‘thing’.”
PASCAL BRUCKNER: Europe’s Guilty Conscience: Self-hatred is paralyzing the Continent. “We too often forget that modern Europe was born not during a time of enthusiastic historical rebeginning, as was the United States, but from a weariness of slaughter. It took the total disaster of the twentieth century, embodied in Verdun and Auschwitz, for the Old World to happen upon virtue, like an aging trollop who moves directly from debauchery to fervent religious belief.” Well, those tend to be tiresomely preachy, too . . . .
DELICIOUS! A Lobster Tale.
ROGER SIMON: The Obvious Message Of Jerry Brown’s Pension.
It seems California’s one-time and now aspiring governor Jerry Brown has been drawing down a healthy pension from the state — perhaps double-dipping — causing a mild embarrassment to Jerry that could grow into something more than mild. At the moment he is locked in a tight race with Meg Whitman.
What’s troubling in all this is not that Brown makes a good pension — or even than there may be some discrepancy about how much he makes versus how much he deserves. It is that the whole thing is SECRET! (rare use of caps and exclam very deliberate).
Let’s think this through for half a second. At a time when pension funds are bankrupting or potentially bankrupting states all across the country, when aging populations are forcing the reconsideration of all sorts of social security programs on practically every country on Earth (countries that have them, anyway), and when the state of California — the sixth, or is it seventh, biggest economy in the word — is about to, once again, pay its employees with vouchers because it’s got zippity-do-dah in the bank, some officials of that state are receiving pensions whose size and identity we do not know and are not allowed to see.
Read the whole thing.
BARTON HINKLE: Health-Care Mandate’s Proponents May Have a Hard Time. “Because federal law has infringed on the autonomy of health-care providers by ordering them to provide care no matter what, it must then (so goes the argument) infringe on the autonomy of everyone else to make up for this mistake. Because government has foisted on the taxpayers the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, it then must also dragoon everyone else into a more nationalized system to correct for the excesses of those federal programs. Because it forces insurers to provide coverage, it must force individuals to buy it. In other words, the principal reason for further federal intervention is . . . previous federal intervention. We all must pay for Washington’s sins.”
MESSAGE: Man Scrawls World’s Biggest Message With GPS ‘Pen’. “One man drove 12,238 miles across 30 states to scrawl a message that can only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: ‘Read Ayn Rand.'” Well, it’s timely.
NOT FOR THOSE AFRAID OF HEIGHTS: A ride in a hot air balloon with a glass-bottomed gondola. “Ordinarily, you would look over the edge of the basket to peer at the ground below but there is something very disconcerting about seeing it right beneath your feet.”
THE IMPORTANCE OF finding a good grenadine.
SOME INFLATION reality checks.
AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.
GALLUP: U.S. Approval of Labor Unions Remains Near Record Low. “Gallup finds significantly more Americans saying they want labor unions to have less (40%) rather than more (29%) influence than they have today. Twenty-seven percent say their influence should stay about the same.”
OUR PRESIDENT: Not much of a reader, according to Political Wire. He sure is into golf, though.
UPDATE: Reader Dave Ivers writes: “Am I the only one that finds him ‘intellectually incurious’?”
THE CALVIN AND HOBBES search engine.
CAN STANFORD BECOME THE #1 LAW SCHOOL? Outlook Not So Good. “The reason for Yale’s domination is that it spends much more money per student than Harvard and Stanford. In other words, it’s all about the benjamins, baby.” The rankings, of course, are driven by inputs more than outputs. . . .
RECOVERY SUMMER! Manufacturing and trade sales drop 0.6% in June.