A BACKSTAGE LOOK AT Saturday Night Live’s Corporate Counterculture.
Archive for 2012
March 21, 2012
ANSWERING QUESTIONS about the new iPad. I’m pleased to see that my impression that it runs substantially hotter turns out to be correct. Well, maybe “pleased” isn’t quite the right word.
WISCONSIN UNIONS ACT CHILDISHLY: “Seriously? Having a handful of high-school students counterprotest — even just in jest, which is what this seems to be — causes the union activists so much grief that they have to make nasty calls to the school? That doesn’t sound like a confident movement; it sounds like a bunch of crybabies that can dish out the protests but need to threaten people to keep them from speaking their own minds.”
Yeah, pretty much. Fire ’em all and privatize.
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: A Peek Behind the U.S. News Rankings Curtain: Law School Hiring of Graduating 3Ls. “Bernard A. Burk (North Carolina) reports some eye-popping numbers of unemployed graduates hired on a short-term basis by several law schools to improve their placement data, which count 18% in the U.S. News rankings.” I’m really beginning to wonder if I work at the only law school in America that doesn’t game the system outrageously. . . .
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SHOOT LASERS FOR A LIVING.
TOULOUSE UPDATE: The Jihad In France. “Mohammed Merah is suspected of killing seven people in eight days, including three Jewish children.”
A SIGN THAT THERE’S A DEMOCRAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE: CNN: Hey, high gas prices aren’t really a bad thing if you think about it. Coming next: The joys of “funemployment!”
Yeah, I know, Iowahawk was ahead of the curve.
THE ECONOMICS OF ECONO-BLOGGING: “How did America’s economics blogosphere develop the necessary density? Early buy-in by important economists mattered, but the growth of the community has been more driven, in my opinion, by an aggressive horde of strivers. Economists, journalists, and would-be pundits with less access to traditional outlets (newspapers, conferences, and journals) were attracted by the low barriers to entry of the web. This ready group of writers created sufficient ‘liquidity’ of opinion to drive an effective conversation, the value of which has subsequently pulled in other respected voices.”
I like to think that my linkage helps create liquidity in the blogosphere. Just call me the Bernanke of Bloggers! Okay, maybe not . . . .
UPDATE: A reader emails that I’m not Ben Bernanke, I’m Johnny Carson. I guess I should come out with a line of suits.
JIM TREACHER: Congratulations to David Brock and Media Matters on the runaway success of their new book, The Fox Effect. “Well, give David Brock a break. It’s pretty tough to promote a book nobody wanted in the first place when you’re hiding from the Daily Caller.”
LAW: Unanimous Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Property Owners in Sackett v. EPA. “The position taken in this case by the Federal Government—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) employees.”
IS THE QUALITY OF APPLE PRODUCTS slipping?
DAILY CALLER: Media Matters Wants A Fight But Can’t Take A Punch. “After facing down more than a month of tough reporting, David Brock’s Media Matters for America still has nothing to say for itself. The progressive messaging group has all but clammed up about its internal turmoil under a constant barrage of scrutiny from conservatives and liberals alike.”
Related item here.
REMEMBERING CATHY SEIPP.
I REALLY THINK PROSECUTORS NEED MORE OVERSIGHT: Criminal Defendant Outs Anonymous Web Site Commenter — Who Turns Out to Be One of the Prosecutors.
ALEX NUNEZ REVIEWS the 2012 Aston Martin Virage.
ANOTHER “FAR-RIGHT GUNMAN:” French Spree Shooter is a Muslim Named Mohammed Who Fought With the Taliban in Afghanistan. Other Than That He Fits The Media’s ‘Far-Right’ Profile Perfectly. “Large sections of the media got this one spectacularly wrong, but don’t expect them to acknowledge that fact. Instead, look for them to move move seamlessly from the ‘far-right extremist’ theme to asking what could have provoked Merah . . . . When Westerners kill, it’s the West’s fault. And when Muslims kill, it’s the West’s fault. It’s Liberal Journalism 101.”
UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails: “Given the popularity of Mein Kampf in the Middle East, couldn’t the Islamists be said to be neo-Nazis? They certainly have taken up the project where Hitler left off with gusto, much more than the folks who march around with swastikas.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jeffrey Turner writes:
The reflex to blame “far right” elements rather than Islamists for atrocities like the shootings in France is indeed a little creepy. It’s worth noting, though, the deep and long-standing ties between Islamists and the Nazis, going back to before WWII, so the idea of a link between Neonazis and Islamists is not that far-fetched: they both want to finish what Hitler started. I suspect the rush to blame “far right” elements in France has the same roots as the reflex that blamed Sarah Palin for Gabriel Giffords being shot: it’s a denial mechanism to help the accusers avoid having to confront their own shameful past associations, the Vichy regime in the case of the French, and the Stalinists in the case of the American left.
Indeed.
IN THE MAIL: From Robert Heinlein, The Star Beast.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Beyond Blue Part 8: Even The Dems Can’t Hack It Anymore.
The conventional wisdom today holds that deep splits between conservatives and liberals have paralyzed the United States government. The country needs major changes, fast, writers like Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum say in their recent book That Used to Be Us, but polarized politics have stopped change dead in its tracks.
Actually, the situation is a little bit more complex — and the news is substantially better than Friedman and Mandelbaum fear. Yes, there is partisan gridlock and bad feeling in American politics. But we are not as stuck or as deadlocked as it may appear. The forces driving change are stronger than many understand while the forces resisting it are weaker and more divided than things sometimes look. The blue social model is breaking up; the outlines of a new social order are beginning to appear.
Politically, it’s clear that of the two parties Democrats tend to be most closely tied up in the blue social model, and Republicans, though not without some blue sensibilities of their own, tend to promote more aggressive reform. But the necessity to move toward something that takes us beyond the blue model is increasingly felt on both sides of the aisle. The public union wing of the Democratic Party and its close allies want to defend the old model and even expand it, but increasing numbers of Democratic officeholders — including the governors of New York, California and Illinois — are moving (sometimes out of conviction, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of both) toward something beyond the old style of liberal governance.
Not a moment too soon. Read the whole thing.
A CLOCK for the next billion years:
Researchers are aiming for a clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe.
The new research by Georgia Tech physicists, scientists in the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales in Australia and at the department of physics at the University of Nevada provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion. Such a clock could be useful for certain forms of secure communication – and perhaps of greater interest – for studying the fundamental theories of physics.
A nuclear clock could be as much as one hundred times more accurate than current atomic clocks, which now serve as the basis for the global positioning system (GPS) and a broad range of important measurements.
But if I owned it, I’d forget to adjust for daylight savings time.
JUDITH CURRY ON climate science and pseudoscience. I would say that climate science isn’t pseudoscience, but some of its public faces are acting as pseudo-scientists.
AT AMAZON, Top Deals In Electronics.
Plus, today only, a Motorola CommandOne bluetooth headset for $39.99.