Quotulatiousness

November 19, 2009

How could Sarah Palin become a viable presidential candidate?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:46

Mike Potemra has a solid idea of how Palin could overcome her weakness in public perception . . . and it’s not even something she has to do:

According to this CNN poll, only 28 percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president. For a person as well known to the public as Palin, that is an appallingly low number. For someone who is already so firmly fixed in the national consciousness — more: who has already reached a stratospheric level of celebrity — where is the room for growth in popularity? Who are the people who could possibly move from the 70-odd percent who declare Palin unqualified, into the 30-odd percent who believe she is qualified?

The answer is: people who become convinced that her current low public image is largely the result of unfair depictions of her in the media. [. . .]

If prominent media figures show an obsession with Palin that is so deep that they put the rest of the world on hold just because she wrote a book — then people might start suspecting that, yes, maybe there really is some animus in media elites, and maybe we should give Palin another chance. That’s when the 70-some percent starts to melt away, and a Palin presidency becomes conceivable. The second step, from “conceivable” to “likely,” is an even shorter step than the first.

November 18, 2009

Your opinion on Sarah Palin is a political litmus test

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 19:02

David Harsanyi provides the (political) science:

These days, where you fall on the crucial issue of Sarah Palin tells the rest of us all we need to know about your character. You’re either A) a scum-sucking, terror-loving elitist or B) a radical, tea bag-loving simpleton.

Yet believe it or not, one can (as I do) admire Palin’s charisma and roots, appreciate her dissent on the policy experiments brainy folks in Washington are cooking up, and, at the same time, believe she has no business running for president in 2012.

In fact, all you haters out there motivate me to root for her.

There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press’ assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, Going Rogue, for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking were applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap-and-trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration had awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to nonexistent congressional districts—which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess.

I thought Palin was a daring choice for the VP slot . . . one of the few decisions I could applaud in the otherwise hide-your-eyes shambles that was the last Republican presidential campaign. I still think she’s not the right person to run against Obama in 2012. But the campaign would at least be fascinating to watch.

November 17, 2009

F-35B to be too hot to handle?

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:59

Well, handling isn’t really the issue . . . it’s landing where there’s some strong concern for US Navy carrier captains:

It’s now official. The new generation of high-tech hovering aircraft — namely the famous V-22 “Osprey” tiltrotor and the upcoming F-35B supersonic stealth jump-jet — have an unforeseen flaw. Their exhaust downwash is so hot as to melt the flight decks of US warships, leading Pentagon boffins to look into refrigerated landing pads.

[. . .]

The jarheads* will want to operate their new machines from their existing helicopter-carrier amphibious assault vessels, which can’t practically be torn apart and refitted with massively reinforced upper decks as this would be likely to make them capsize. Similarly it would be extremely difficult to refrigerate the whole deck from beneath.

Hence the Marines would like someone to invent “a system that can be installed on top of the existing decks”, capable of resisting the hot breath of the F-35B and less than one inch thick. It should also, of course, be tough enough not to suffer any damage from the aircraft landing on it. This miracle fridge-sheet assembly should be covered with “thermally stable non-skid” finish — this latter perhaps incorporating “amorphous metal coatings”.

QotD: Characteristics of death-squads

Filed under: Military, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society’s principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being “Islamophobic.” (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that’s his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors’ fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.

I wrote some years ago that the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits — with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure — and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide.

Christopher Hitchens, “Hard Evidence: Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan”, Slate, 2009-11-16

Is your avatar racist?

Filed under: Africa, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

For some reason racism is a hot topic at the moment. And not just ordinary racism, online racism seems to be the particularly irritating bee in a lot of bonnets. First, there’s the Twitter matter:

What happened? Last June a thread with the hashtag #thatsafrican became a trending topic. Here are some tweets that appeared with the hashtag, cited by the blog Afrolicious:

#thatsafrican when your last name when your lst name is OD too hard for teachers to pronounce
#thatsafrican if your son is the leader of the free world
#thatsafrican when your mum negotiates the prices of sneakers at footlocker. 99 dollars. come oooon!
#thatsafrican when your ringtone is african queen by 2face. haha!

A journalist from the Huffington Post, David Weiner, published a piece “#Thatsafrican — when Twitter went racist?” shortly after the topic was removed from the Twitter stream. He said:

The debate is already raging over the appropriateness of the trend. Is it self-deprecating humour? A cover for racists? Something only Africans and African-Americans can joke about? Something no one should be talking about?

What’s more, it brings into question the role of free speech on Twitter and the company’s role as moderator, or lack thereof. If a popular trend on Twitter is deemed racist, what action is required on the part of the company.

Twitter is not — and cannot be — responsible for what its millions of users post every day on the service. Any hopes that it could do so are technologically unreasonable. Anyone can join Twitter, and there are no particularly difficult hurdles to clear in order to get an account. So Twitter posts can’t be policed in real time, and they can’t be pre-screened through restrictive membership requirements . . . they can only be removed after the fact.

Racism is a particularly difficult topic for Americans, in spite of the last 50 years of improving racial equality. Any conversation that veers toward race-based topics becomes potentially volatile and divisive. In the real world, visual identifiers like skin colour can still cause trouble between individuals. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue online . . .

On one of my hobby-oriented mailing lists, someone posted a message about a new list covering basically the same topic of interest, but this new list “serves to highlight modeling achievements either personal or hobby-wide amongst minorities and/or people of color”. Ideally, the invitation would be ignored by those to whom it didn’t apply, and followed-up by those to whom it did. But we don’t live in an ideal world:

“This kind of thing is highly inappropriate. We have more than enough politically-inspired, politically-correct nonsense already. I suggest you post your comments elsewhere – perhaps on liberal blogs. Not appropriate here.”

“Weak man. who dies and made you god?”

“Wow. Just wow. Yours is the post that is inappropriate. Bone-headed, really. And completely off-topic for this list. There was nothing political or inappropriate about the original post.”

Okay, so perhaps the discussion dies down now, right? No . . . now the real trolls come out to play

“I hate to break this to you, but the Nam generation may not exactly of had your best interests at heart educational wise. Only the finer dept. stores frequented by northern tourist would have black and white water fountains while the Woolworths down the street did not.

Did they teach you that the “Montgomery Bus company” and one other interstate travel company were the only 2 that ever had Jim Crow.

It was a few rednecks and societal snobs, nothing more.

Your living a lie while empowering a political base that feeds on unrest.”

From that point on, Godwin’s Law is almost certainly going to go into effect quickly.

November 16, 2009

Harrier replacement moves to next stage

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:28

The F-35B has been delivered to an American base for testing of its vertical take-off and hover capabilities:

The F-35 “Lightning II” B model will, like other versions of the same aircraft, offer supersonic performance and stealth technology – a combo so far offered in only one aircraft in the world, the famous F-22 Raptor ultrasuperfighter. But the F-35B, unlike its tailhook and normal-runway counterparts, is also equipped with a central lift fan mounted in a shaft through the fuselage and can swivel its jet exhaust downwards too.

This means that an armed and fuelled F-35B should be able to make a very short takeoff run to get airborne and then, having burned fuel and perhaps released weapons, make a vertical landing supported entrirely by engine thrust. This Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing (STOVL) capability has so far been offered in the Western-aligned world only by the famous Harrier, originally developed in Britain and now in service with the RAF, the Royal Navy and the US Marines.

Of course, Britain’s interest is moving toward being purely intellectual . . . the bookies are offering long odds on Britain ever commissioning even one of those two new aircraft carriers, never mind both of them. Back story here, here, and here.

November 13, 2009

Follow-up on Northwest’s overflight situation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 19:41

The New York Times reports on the FAA’s investigation into the October 21st incident (see blog post here, including commmentary from one of the spokesmen involved):

Air traffic control supervisors delayed nearly an hour in notifying Norad, the military air defense command, that a Northwest Airlines jetliner was not responding to radio calls, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday. The delay was a violation of detailed procedures put in place after the quadruple hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001.

The lapse probably made no difference to Norad, said the administrator, J. Randolph Babbitt, because while the Air Force did ready fighter jets in the incident, it never decided to order them into the air.

Decisions on how to handle planes that do not respond to air traffic control instructions are based on a variety of factors, Mr. Babbitt said. Among them are whether the plane is in a metropolitan area, whether it is flying erratically and whether it is sending signals that it has been hijacked. None of those was the case on Oct. 21, when Northwest Flight 188, from San Diego to Minneapolis, flew about 150 miles past the airport.

Fedex vs. UPS

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Law, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:15

November 11, 2009

Why would he do this?

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 18:05

My best guess is for two reasons: 1) He can. 2) It drives the opposition batshit insane:

The president who campaigned for a more “open government” and “full disclosure” will not unseal his medical records, his school records, his birth records or his passport records. He will not release his Harvard records, his Columbia College records, or his Occidental College records — he will not even release his Columbia College thesis. All his legislative records from the Illinois State Senate are missing and he claims his scheduling records during those State Senate years are lost as well. In addition, no one can find his school records for the elite K-12 college prep school, Punahou School, he attended in Hawaii.

The whacky public image of the “Birthers” continues to do much damage to more rational criticism of Barack Obama’s administration. Whether there is “fire” to go along with all the breathlessly described “smoke”, it’s taking lots of attention away from the actual policies and actions of the current president, and tarring-by-association those who do criticize. That’s enough of a political win that Obama would be very foolish to do anything to calm them down by releasing these documents.

November 9, 2009

US unemployment rate, graphically

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:36

The New York Times has a useful interactive graphic for determining the unemployment rate for various groups. They show the 12-month rate, due to the unreliable nature of monthly estimates.

November 7, 2009

Watch for those dreaded ellipses

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:04

Patterico does some reconstructive surgery on Glenn Greenwald’s less-than-totally-honest practice of partial quoting:

Greenwald’s implication is clear: right-wing blogger Patterico shouldn’t have recommended Allahpundit’s coverage — and right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds shouldn’t have linked Patterico’s recommendation of Allahpundit.

If only those right-wing bloggers had warned their readers to be skeptical and avoid jumping to conclusions . . .

But wait! What’s that little ellipsis in Greenwald’s quotation of my post? Why, I do believe that’s an indication that he left something out of my quote! Let’s just look at that whole quote to see what Greenwald chose to omit, shall we? I’ll put the part Greenwald omitted in bold type:

Whenever there is breaking news, it’s good to keep a few things in mind:

* Don’t jump to conclusions.

* Don’t be afraid to discuss relevant topics even if they seem politically incorrect.

* Always follow Allahpundit.

Hmmm. So Greenwald omits the part of my quote where I explicitly warn readers, as the very first thing I say, that they should not jump to conclusions in breaking news situations. And then Greenwald implies that my recommendation of Allahpundit was a poor one because Allahpundit jumped to invalid conclusions.

November 6, 2009

Those wild and crazy guys . . . in the CIA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has many purposes, but perhaps its most popular function is to provide some underpinning to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists worldwide. But, according to History House, the CIA was also a pretty weird operation in non-conspiracy terms, too:

[Project MK-ULTRA was] conceived by Richard Helms of the Clandestine Services Department (yes, the CIA actually gives its departments silly names like that), it went beyond the construction of mere truth serums and ventured into disinformation, induction of temporary insanity, and other chemically-aided states. The director of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, figured LSD’s potential as an interrogative agent paled in comparison to its capacity to publicly humiliate. Lee and Shlain note the CIA imagined a tripping public figure might be amusing, producing a memo that says giving acid “to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc.” But Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain,

agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other’s drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a … colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives . . . The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party … a Security memo writer… concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did ‘not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.’

The in-house testing phase now over, MK-ULTRA decided to use the drug surreptitiously in the street to gauge its effects. They contract-hired George Hunter White, a narcotics officer, to set up Operation Midnight Climax, according to Lee and Shlain, “in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment.” Lee and Shlain go on to comment, “when [White] wasn’t operating a national security whorehouse,” White threw wild parties for his “narc buddies” with his ready supply of prostitutes and drugs. He sent vouchers for “unorthodox expenses” to Gottlieb, and later said, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” In case one needs reminding, these claims are backed by recently unclassified information. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction.

Emphasis in the original.

I have no idea what relationship this account has to the actual facts, but if the mainstream media can get away with running stories without fact-checking, then I certainly don’t feel guilty about this one.

November 3, 2009

Biggest stimulus success – more government jobs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:49

Veronique de Rugy looks at the most recent claims of the number of jobs created or saved by Obama’s stimulus, and finds that most of the new jobs are in the public sector. The cost to “create” these jobs is eye-watering, too:

The White House claims that 640,329 were created or saved. That, by the way, is way less than what Christina Romer claimed would be created. Last week, she mentioned 1.4 million during a Joint Committee hearing. Remember.

First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job.

However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

I would be happy with one of these jobs.

Second, while the administration is promising good and in time reporting, we can see that it’s far from being the case. Agencies report having spent $207.3 Billion and yet only $36,688,660,161 were reported by states. That’s a big gap, isn’t it?

Third, some 85 percent of the money went to 4 agencies: HHS, Labor, Education and Social Security. That money wasn’t spent on shovel ready projects. For instance, some of the HHS funds went to some rural high school and college students from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee to conduct medical research this summer with a team of leading scientists at Vanderbilt University. The Department of Labor spent $11,058,877 in unemployment insurance (UI) modernization incentive funds to the state of West Virginia. And the Department of Education is mainly spending its money to keep union protected school teachers in their jobs. Not really shovel ready projects, are they?

Desperately seeking . . . combat?

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Strategy Page reports on a morale issue that will seem to come from another planet to many civilians — troops looking forward to combat:

Many young American infantry soldiers stationed in Iraq are disappointed at the lack of combat. These guys are in for four years, and they hoped to get a little action, as in some once-in-a-lifetime combat. The troops know the odds of getting killed or mutilated are low (at least compared to previous wars, the casualty rate in Iraq is about a third of what it was in Vietnam), so there’s not a great deal of fear about “not coming back.” The upside is appealing, with the prospect of exciting stories to last a lifetime, and maybe a few decorations to confirm it all.

Most eagerly sought is the CIB (Combat Infantry Badge), a large device worn above the ribbons on your uniform jacket, and a sign to everyone else that you’ve seen the elephant (been in combat with the infantry). But in another typical reaction, the NCOs who have been in combat, are not eager to get back. The risks are real, and all that violence is hard on the nerves.

That report will stick in the craw of peace campaigners who often try to portray soldiers as little better than armed boy scouts or economic victims of desperate upbringing with no real desire to fight.

November 2, 2009

Ford reaps financial benefit from not joining Government Motors

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

The New York Times has the unexpectedly positive financial news from Ford:

The Ford Motor Company on Monday posted a surprise third-quarter profit of $997 million and said it had its first profitable quarter in North America in more than four years.

The carmaker also said it increased its cash reserves by $2.8 billion during the quarter, ending September with $23.8 billion.

For all of 2009, Ford, the only Detroit automaker to avoid bankruptcy this year, has had a profit of more than $1.8 billion. It reported $834 million of income in the first half of the year.

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