Archive for 2011
July 18, 2011
ED DRISCOLL interviews Ben Shapiro about his new book, Primetime Propaganda.
AT AMAZON, bestselling books in History.
DRIVER’S LICENSE REVOKED because facial-recognition system thought he looked like someone else.
Here’s a question: Why have driver’s licenses at all? No, really. Why not just make it about financial responsibility? If someone’s willing to insure you, or if you can self-insure, why shouldn’t you just be able to drive? Does the licensing process really do much to weed out bad or irresponsible drivers? Enough to justify the expense and irritation of the DMV? After all, if you drive badly or drunk, the DMV doesn’t have to pay out any damages for licensing you. Somebody who was at risk, and not mostly just a place to park overpaid state workers, would probably do a better — and less intrusive — job.
Meanwhile, police are rolling out portable face-recognition devices. I don’t think they work well enough yet, but that’s not stopping them. Why should it? They’re not liable for damages the way a private company would be. . . .
YOUNG MEN AND FIRE: Adam Savage reviews William Gurstelle’s The Practical Pyromaniac. Gurstelle is also the author of Backyard Ballistics.
Key bit: “I took my boys camping last summer. We drove a hair-raising set of muddy cliffside roads to a secluded campground in the middle of nowhere. We lit a fire and ate mediocre food and slept in a soggy tent and woke up in a puddle. What do they remember from that trip? The fire. Only the fire. All the sticks they burned in it. Watching it change as the evening wore on. Getting close and burning new things. Their fascination with our firepit is the foundation of all scientific discovery. This is, I believe, Mr. Gurstelle’s point, and he has explored it admirably.”
A SOLAR PANEL ON A ROBOCAR: “I often see people say they would like to see solar panels on electric cars, inspired by the solar-electric cars in the challenge races, and by the idea that the solar panel will provide some recharging for the car while it is running and without need to plug it in. It turns out this isn’t a tremendously good idea for a variety of reasons. . . . People really are in love with the idea of a solar powered car. It’s not really possible to go green this way right now, but the future might bring something interesting.”
JOHN HAWKINS ON THE END OF THE INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE BLOGOSPHERE. But I think the comment by Perry De Havilland is spot-on:
Don’t look at The Big Players as all that matters as it just does not work that way any more… that is ‘Old Think’, i.e. newspaper era think. The heterarchical nature of the internet changes things fundamentally.
100,000 small blogs with 100 readers per day move ideas around in ways that are vastly harder to track but they are just as important as 100 blogs with 100,000 readers each. . . .
I no longer get my information from a newspaper whilst drinking my morning coffee… I spend about the same time quickly scanning a selection of blogs and then mine deeper based upon what I find, and many, indeed most of those blogs are not high readership… so what? It matters much less than you think
Somebody should write a book on this phenomenon. Of course, as another commenter points out, it does matter if you’re trying to make a living off of your blog.
ON MAKING LOVE and having sex.
I, FOR ONE, WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOT KILLER OVERLORDS: The Future Belongs To Drones. “Some military strategists already think that the job the F-35 is meant to do can be better handled by cruise missiles and remotely piloted drones. In many roles, unmanned planes are more efficient: they carry neither a bulky pilot nor the kit that keeps him alive, which means they can both turn faster and be stealthier. And if they are shot down, no one dies. Even the F-35’s champions concede that it will probably be the last manned strike fighter aircraft the West will build.”
THE MACON MACHER: Erick Erickson on what he reads.
I agree, by the way, that the WSJ iPad App is great. I think it’s the best newspaper app out there. And the WSJ is the only newspaper I pay to subscribe to on the Web.
IN DIFFICULT TIMES LIKE THESE, what the world really needs is cute kitten videos.
COINCIDENTALLY, THE MARKET IS TANKING: Breaking: White House Threatens Veto Of Cut, Cap & Balance Bill.
CHANGE: Mid-term review of 2017-2025 CAFE goals a possibility. “Basically, if sales of plug-ins take off, the proposed 56.2-mpg target will not be altered. On the other hand, if plug-ins tank, expect the 56.2 mark to be adjusted downwards.”
IN OTHER NEWS, ALMOST 3/4 OF OBAMA WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS SUPPORT THE PRESIDENT’S PLAN: The Number CBS Is NOT Trumpeting in Its Latest Poll. “You know it’s easy to make the President look better than the GOP in a poll that has only 24% Republicans among the respondents—and in which Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 50% in the sample.”
SO MY EARLIER LINK TO EXOTIC MEATS AT AMAZON led some readers to follow the links and enjoy the reviews for “fresh, whole rabbit.” My favorite is this one:
I ordered one of these Fresh “Whole” Rabbits, but when it arrived its head, fur and insides were missing. Not exactly whole, I’d say! Maybe it was just damaged during shipping, but I won’t be buying another one. I mean – without the long ears, how do I know it even WAS a rabbit? It was the same size and shape as a cat…not that I’ve seen a cat with its head, fur and insides missing. I mean, not like really close or anything.
Heh. More fun at the link.
IN THE MAIL: From Steven Pressfield, The Warrior Ethos and The Profession: A Thriller.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Why The Blue Model Can’t Build A Black Middle Class.
MICHAEL BARONE: Federal Expansion The Real Issue In Debt-Ceiling Debate.
The bedrock issue is whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government. Over many years federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of gross domestic product.
The Obama Democrats have raised that to 24 or 25 percent. And the president’s budget projects that that percentage will stay the same or increase far into the future.
In the process the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product has increased from a manageable 40 percent in 2008 to 62 percent this year and an estimated 72 percent in 2012. And it’s headed to the 90 percent level that economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have identified as the danger point, when governments face fiscal collapse.
This is a level of spending as a share of the economy Americans haven’t seen since World War II. It seems more like Europe than like the America we have known.
As Tim Noah noted back when the financial crisis was young, Washington loves it because it takes down rival power centers. “On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”
And as I noted, that creates an incentive problem if you’re expecting Washington to fix the economy . . . .
ED DRISCOLL: The Gray Lady Gets Yet Another Case Of Depression Lust.
When people are financially pinched, I notice that Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey always tell them to cancel their newspaper subscriptions. . . .
JEFF CARTER: A Chilling Interview With Tim Geithner.
NOEMIE EMERY: A Fling with the Welfare State: From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminations. I’ve come to doubt, though, that the intentions were ever as benign as assumed.
JANET DALEY: Media Pile-On On Murdoch Is About Eliminating An Ideological And Commercial Rival. Well, yes. “This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown’s surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch’s papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre. . . . . But the power of the BBC – and its historical hatred for the ‘Murdoch empire’ – is just one aspect of a larger battle which has now leapt across the Atlantic, where the target is not newspapers which can be legitimately charged with having committed unconscionable acts, but Fox News. Its offence is to have filled such a huge gap in the market for television news and current affairs that it has swept all before it. Its raucous Right-wing orientation is, in fact, matched by an equally raucous Left-wing equivalent in the cable news channel MSNBC, so why should anyone who believes in open and free debate among news providers object to this?” It’s about ensuring the absence of alternate power centers.
UPDATE: British reader James Spiller writes:
I was glad to see you linking to a rare article that mentions how ridiculous the BBC makes the fear of “too much media power being concentrated in one man” seem. It’s partly that, unlike Murdoch’s ill-fated proposed TV channel ownership, the BBC is an overt monopoly in the UK. It is not just that their many TV and radio channels dominate the mediums, but also that there is a legal compulsion to purchase their services if you purchase the services, or own equipment that allows you to purchase the services, of any of its rivals. Ma Bell had it good, but Independent Telephone Company customers did not have to buy them, too. Standard Oil did OK, but filling your tank with Gulf or Texaco gas didn’t enrich the Rockefellers.
Worse than merely being a uniquely powerful commercial monopoly in the western world, the BBC serially abuses its monopoly in ways that Murdoch would never dream of. All advertising on UK BBC channels, from the lowliest micro targeted local radio station to the flagship television channels and websites. By removing all commercial advertising, they enhance the power of their cross media subsidization. Charity events that get employees to work for their monopoly employer for free would be a caricature of abuse in any other sector, but is a mainstay of BBC success.
News International’s three newspapers operated in a fiercely ideologically competitive market and did not cooperate with each other. For instance, in the 1997 election, the Sunday Times supported John Major, the Sun switched to support Tony Blair 6 weeks before the election, and the News of the World supported Blair throughout. The Times leaned slightly towards Major, but was more neutral than the Sunday Times. Rivals of News International dominated the market and supported a variety of positions allowing people of most political persuasions and cultural leanings represented in the UK to buy a newspaper that supported them. In contrast, the BBC monolithically supported Blair, and the relatively minor rival television channels offered only fairly similar perspectives (although Channel 4 news could sometimes be a little more centrist; sort of a WaPo to the BBC’s NYT). There is no dimension of monopoly power that Murdoch held that could have rivaled the BBC’s, and no aspect of abuse that he could have stooped to without the BBC having gone well beyond him.
Even if we have to have our entertainment and news being dominated by a state owned entity whose fees are collected by mandate rather than by attracting customers, there’s no reason that the BBC should not be split up and have the license fee allocated to a variety of different state owned companies. If there is one good thing that has come out of this, it may be that the excited words of Murdoch haters may come back to form a key support for radical reform of the BBC.
One can hope.
AMAZON CARRIES assorted Exotic Meats.