WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON CHINA AND THE INDIAN OCEAN: Strangled By A String Of Pearls?
Archive for 2011
December 15, 2011
CHRISTOPHER HORNER: Obama’s Justice Department joins Britain’s ‘Climategate’ leaker manhunt.
Hey, whoever it was made important people look stupid. That’s unforgivable.
GREG WEINSTEIN EMAILS:
A belated greetings and hope that you can blog on this tomorrow or Thursday:
I’m working on a fascinating project for Agora Technologies, Inc. Agora Startup Idol is “American Idol” for high-tech start-ups, only completely online — everyone participates remotely. To be held in March, this event, using Agora’s patented Web 3.0 collaborative videoconferencing, will run like March Madness — beginning with 64 start-ups, with half dropping out each week after their pitches are judged, until a winner is crowned. We plan an “ESPN Sports Center” – style roundup show every week with expert commentators.
Contestants, judges, and viewers will all earn “gamification” points by participating, with prizes for the high scorers. We’ve created a web site for it — http://www.agorastartupidol.com — where start-up companies wishing to compete, as well as prospective viewers, can leave their e-mail address to be notified when the schedule is firmed up. If you scroll down on that page, there is a complete PowerPoint presentation about the contest. Also, at the bottom of your web browser window, a bar will appear that permits those with Facebook accounts to log in and immediately start earning game points, just for their interest in and sharing of this site.
I hope your readers will be interested in this idea — and that the directions in the above paragraph will help them start to participate right away!
Check it out.
DID COFFEE FUEL THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT?
TOP HOLIDAY DEALS in Video Games.
INSTAVISION: The Suburbs Are Very Much Alive. I talk with Joel Kotkin about how the conventional wisdom of urban planners is wrong, as Suburbia continues to grow and flourish. Plus, why are urban “planners” stuck in the past?
BYRON YORK: Dramatic Drop In Gingrich Support In Iowa. “Gingrich has now fallen into second place in the Iowa race, behind Mitt Romney, who is at 23 percent, up from 19 percent in the last Rasmussen survey.”
LIGHTSQUARED FLUNKS AGAIN: “At this point, some people at the FCC and in the White House should start feeling a little … nervous. Yesterday afternoon, the Departments of Defense and Transportation released a joint statement stating that LightSquared is about as bad on navigational equipment as everyone knew it would be.”
AMY ALKON ON STOPPING THE INTERNET CENSORSHIP BILL: “Click this Electronic Frontier Foundation link, type in your zip code, and get your Congressperson’s phone number, and make the call. Call Now to Stop SOPA, the Internet Blacklist Bill.” (Bumped.)
FORMER FRENCH PRESIDENT JACQUES CHIRAC CONVICTED OF CORRUPTION CHARGES. “Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995, is the first former French head of state to be convicted since Marshal Philippe Petain, the leader of the wartime Vichy regime, was found guilty in 1945 of collaborating with the Nazis.”
A reader suggests rolling out this classic Chirac photo one more time — and why not?
This is from the protests outside the French Embassy back when France was trying to save Saddam Hussein — for, as it turned out, rather corrupt motives.
SO WOULD THIS MAKE IT THE “DO-NOTHING DEMOCRATIC SENATE?” Payroll tax cut and spending bill stall in Senate, raising threat of shutdown.
WASHINGTON POST: Republicans Turn Keystone XL Pipeline Into An Election Issue.
OVER IN POPULAR MECHANICS, I explain why the NTSB’s effort to ban even hands-free cellphones in cars is wrong. (Bumped).
UPDATE: Reader Todd Ludeke writes:
Perhaps you should add a link to the following statistics on highway fatalities to your post on the proposed cell phone ban.
As this chart shows, from 1990 to 2009, the number of fatalities per 100 million miles driven has declined from 2.1 to 1.1. While other factors obviously impact this decline, it is difficult to imagine that – were cell phones the great threat the NTSB suggests – fatalities per mile would decline nearly 50% in the same period that cell phone use went from rare (less than 15% cell phone penetration in 1996, let alone 1990) to ubiquitous.
Indeed. There’s also this recent study suggesting that a cellphone ban doesn’t prevent accidents.
FRANKLY, THAT SEEMS GENEROUS: Experts Grade Obama C-minus on the Economy.
MILT WOLF: Staying True To The Tea Party: Glenn Beck Dishonors Gingrich Supporters. “That Mr. Beck can see no difference between Mr. Gingrich and President Obama reveals astonishingly flawed analytical skills.”
TODAY ONLY: 50% Off Select Kids’ Craft Sets by ALEX Toys.
TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: China’s Epic Hangover Begins. “China’s credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC’s dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.”
But they drove him around in limousines and treated him like someone important!
Related: China’s Deserted Fake Disneyland. “I’m sure building these ghost cities gooses China’s economic stats, gives its workers something to do (see also: FDR and the WPA), and as the Australian item hints, allows the Chi-Coms to generate plenty of PR to entice useful idiots such as Thomas Friedman. But how many of these ghost cities does China have?”
MEGAN MCARDLE: If I Were A Poor Black Kid. “I think of poverty as a bad equilibrium–a pretty stable bad equilibrium, unfortunately. The coping skills that make it easier to live in poverty make it harder to get out.”
SPENGLER: Dictatorship, The Duc de Saint-Simon, and Kim Kardashian. “In a celebrity culture, people are famous for being famous; in court culture (royal, authoritarian, or corporate), people are promoted for being promoted, or punished for being punished. It is a commonplace that Stalin’s terror succeeded because it destroyed people at random, but promotion at random is the flip side of the coin. Severing reward from accomplishment is just as important to autocrats as separating punishment from crime. To wield arbitrary power, the king/dictator/CEO must wield power arbitrarily. That is when gossip reigns. Every dictatorship lives off a rumor mill; no-one knows who will be rewarded or punished in the next round, so the principal occupation is speculating about it. Gossip also provides a store of weapons to be used against prospective rivals; since no-one knows who will be a friend and who will be a rival in the next round, everyone gathers dirt on everyone. The same principle applies to a fixed population of marriageable women competing for the same population of prospective husbands, for example. . . . Here, I think, is the secret of Ms. Kardashian’s celebrity: In today’s America, rewards and punishments seem almost as arbitrary as they did in the Bourbon court. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of star-struck kids set off to study science — the world recaptured nostalgically in the 1999 film October Sky — the vast majority of Americans stare uncomprehending at the number nerds who build software companies or trade at hedge funds. Quantitative faculties at top universities would shut down if Chinese and Indian students stayed at home. Whether the success story involves a popular figure like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, or hated figures from Wall Street, most people simply cannot imagine themselves doing what they do, the way the coal miners’ kids of the 1950s could imagine themselves as rocket scientists.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: Tom Friedman Goes All Mearsheimer And Walt.
LIKE KIM KARDASHIAN’S LADYPARTS, IT’S ALREADY BEEN EXPOSED, BUT OKAY: Andrew Sullivan’s Endorsement Of Ron Paul Exposes His Hypocrisy. Like Kim Kardashian, though, Sullivan is mostly an attention-whore. And this got him attention.
December 14, 2011
FURIOUS ABOUT FAST AND FURIOUS: Ron Paul calls for criminal charges against Eric Holder.
AT AMAZON, top holiday deals in Electronics.