While I have discussed RU-486 (mifepristone, or "miffy") in previous posts, my thoughts turned to the drug again in light of this statistic:

A medical abortion is a type of non-surgical abortion in which an abortifacient is used to induce voluntary miscarriage. Safe and effective abortifacients for use in the first trimester became available in the 1970s.[1] The most widely used medication are mifepristone or methotrexate either alone or in combination with a prostaglandin.[1] Medical abortions accounted for 9.9% of abortions in the United States in 2005, 35% of abortions in England and Wales in 2007, 46% of abortions in France in 2006, 61.8% of abortions in Scotland in 2007, and 64.2% of abortions in Sweden in 2008.[2]

The only reason I can see which would explain the much higher percentage of medical abortions in Sweden (and in the rest of Europe) is the length of time mifepristone has been available.

Worldwide over 30 million women have used mifepristone and a prostaglandin analog to terminate pregnancy with impressive safety and efficacy. In France, Sweden, and Great Britain, where mifepristone has been available for more than 15 years, there has been an increase in the proportion of abortions performed at earlier gestation [2].

It is a prescription drug, but it is not available to the public through pharmacies; its distribution is restricted to specially qualified licensed physicians, sold by Danco Laboratories under the tradename Mifeprex.

Medical abortions as a percentage of total abortions in the United States have increased every year since the approval of mifepristone: 1.0% in 2000, 2.9% in 2001, 5.2% in 2002, 7.9% in 2003, 9.3% in 2004, 9.9% in 2005 (15.1% of those at less than 9 weeks gestation); although data is limited by ten states not reporting statistics to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (including California where an estimated >23% of total U.S. abortions were performed in 1997).[34]

I realize that to the anti-abortion people, mifepristone is morally no different than surgical abortion, and the main reason I disagree with that is because I think that earlier abortions are less immoral than later abortions, and to the extent this drug encourages earlier abortions, I would consider it to be ultimately less of a social evil than the previous methods.

But what fascinates me the most is the change it will ultimately have on the dynamics of activism. Americans (myself included) have long been accustomed to seeing an abortion as a procedure done by a doctor using instruments. This has caused the anti-abortion activists to view such doctors as murderers and demonstrate in front of clinics of known abortion providers. By allowing any doctor to provide pills, the whole process becomes much more anonymous -- almost impossible to detect or protest. (I'm sure that's a major reason the activists hate these drugs.)

Through a strange process the logic of which I cannot comprehend, women who have abortions tend to be seen by the activists as victims of doctors, with the doctor as the greater villain than the woman. Which doesn't make sense, for even if we assume abortion is murder (which I don't), by going to a clinic and paying a doctor for an abortion, the woman has quite knowingly hired a hit man to kill her baby -- just as much as if she went to the Mob and took out a contract on her son or husband. Since when is someone who hires a killer less guilty than the killer?

But when a woman takes pills to kill the fetus, unless they are pushed down her throat she becomes the actual killer, and it is much harder to visualize a prescribing doctor as a murderer. I think that's a good result, because I have long believed that women who terminate their pregnancies are the ones who are responsible for their actions. And just as I get sick of people calling doctors murderers, I get even more sick of people who say that "we" as Americans are murderers. Call me callused, but I do not consider myself responsible for the conduct of others, whether they terminate their pregnancies, take fatal overdoses of drugs, or eat themselves to death. I realize that the immorality of a doctor who wields his pen to write a prescription is the same as the one who wields a scalpel, but ordinary people will not see it that way. Mifepristone will be seen as less ugly, and therefore less culpable.

To continue with the responsibility argument, if in fact the providing doctor or nurse is guilty of murder, then why wouldn't the pharmaceutical distributor be guilty? How about the manufacturer? Right now, mifepristone is only approved as an abortifacient, but it appears to have a number of other possible uses:

Other medical applications of mifepristone that have been studied in Phase II clinical trials include regular long-term use as an oral contraceptive, and treatment of: uterine fibroids, endometriosis, major depression with psychotic features, glaucoma, meningiomas, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and prostate cancer. Mifepristone has been used to treat Cushing's syndrome with treatment durations being as long as 10 years without noticeable adverse effect[10].

Mifepristone has been studied as an antiretroviral for its in vivo interference with the HIV regulatory protein vpr. It showed no detectable anti-HIV activity in clinical trials.[11] [12][13][14] It is currently being studied as a treatment for chronic multisymptom illness.[15] Mifepristone has not been approved by the FDA for any of these uses.

Mifepristone has shown significant effectiveness[16] in psychotic major depression, a form of depression resistant to normal treatment. The effect was rapid and the study was double-blinded, but it was limited by small study group and limited treatment duration.

I am also fascinated by the way emergency contraception (the so-called "morning-after pill") is being discussed. Now sold over the counter, the way these drugs work is by preventing implantation of the fertilized egg. As abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy, whether or not emergency contraception is abortion depends on how pregnancy is defined. I realize that many activists and the Catholic Church maintain that life begins at conception. But does pregnancy begin at conception? If it does, then the existing abortion statistics are understating the number of abortions by a substantial, possibly huge, number. That's because countless women take contraceptives which not only prevent ovulation and fertilization, but also prevent implantation of any egg which does get fertilized.

One of the forms of contraception which prevents implantation is the IUD, which is so effective in preventing pregnancy that not only will it work as normally worn, but it will work even if inserted within five days after intercourse.

An alternative to emergency contraceptive pills is the copper-T intrauterine device (IUD) which can be used up to 5 days after unprotected intercourse to prevent pregnancy. Insertion of an IUD is more effective than use of Emergency Contraceptive Pills - pregnancy rates when used as emergency contraception are the same as with normal IUD use. IUDs may be left in place following the subsequent menstruation to provide ongoing contraception (3-10 years depending upon type).[42]

I realize this sounds a hair-splitting distinction (and at 145 microns, the human egg is only slightly wider than a human hair), but a lot of people care. I was also told by a doctor that about half of all fertilized eggs never make it to the implantation stage, and if they were all people who had a right to life, in theory we could be talking about a lot of murders. The reasons for the failure of implantation are varied (and most of them are natural causes -- which means that God might be the world's biggest abortionist), but if a woman was taking a drug known to prevent implantation, and if preventing implantation is murder, then there may be millions and millions of mass murderesses walking among us.

Whether they're guilty of murder or not, I think they are responsible for their actions, not "us."

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I also like the following interview of Breitbart done by Instapundit. You can see several of the themes he presented in his speech previewed here.

Part 2

And just to add to the mix, here is Bill Whittle on how Breitbart splashed on to the scene.

H/T Andrew Marcus at Big Government

Cross Posted at Power and Control

You can't be an image President unless you can control all the information sources. And even that is not possible. There are leakages. The best you can hope for in this age of the Internet is about 30 to 60 days. Long enough to win an election campaign. And thus we have a quote from an Old Joe. The whole quote. Because the usual excerpt doesn't do it justice.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Joseph Goebbels

And who would the reality based community be? People with unicorns and Obama in their heads.

There appear to be thousands of these paintings (made by mental patients, we think) of a naked Obama astride a unicorn, being rubbed down with oil by a unicorn, and doing things with unicorns that would be grossly inappropriate anywhere but deep within the bowels of Man's Country in Andersonville.

But reality seems to be settling in with some frequency (Kenneth is that you?) these days among the very people who who shielded him for long enough to win an election.

Let me start with Edward Luce of the Financial Times.

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration's position. "Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president," says an exasperated outside adviser.

"There is an old joke," says Mr Gergen. "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don't think President Obama wants to make any changes."

...close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. "There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government," says one. "Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn't happening."

Steve Clemons at the formerly reliable Huffington Post piles on. Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post has some words to add. And even hacks like Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times are firing shots across Mr. Obama's bow.

It is not all rainbows and unicorns or rainbows and unicorns any more. Or even a Plastic Jesus of one version or another riding on the dashboards or rear view mirrors of some cars.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

I can think of few people more deserving of Christopher Hitchen's vitriolic wrath than Gore Vidal. Once a talented writer, the latter has clearly degenerated into a tawdry peddler of ridiculous crackpot conspiracy claims.

...in an article headlined "Vidal Loco", Hitchens launches a stinging attack on Vidal, claiming that the events of 9/11 "accentuated a crackpot strain" in the author. He claims that Vidal's work after the terrorist attacks consists of "a small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces [which] either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks."

"He openly says that the Bush administration was 'probably' in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would 'certainly fit them to a T'; that Timothy McVeigh was 'a noble boy', no more murderous than generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that 'Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war' by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor," Hitchens writes.

yesterday, a British academic, who was also criticised by Hitchens, leapt to the author's defence. Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of Sussex University, described Hitchens' attack as "extraordinarily vitriolic". He claimed there was a "sense of jealousy he never did quite get to Gore's level of literary flair and his almost iconic status. It does seem like a kind of bizarre personal vendetta being carried out on the pages of Vanity Fair, replete with factual inaccuracies and not very much substance."

Dr Ahmed, director of the London-based think tank the Institute for Policy Research and Development, claimed Hitchens failed to contextualise Vidal's comments.

"Hitchens has taken them very literally and Gore is being much more playful and much more provocative," Dr Ahmed said.

Vidal was not trying to absolve the Oklahoma City bomber, McVeigh, he added, but to make people think critically.

I admire Hitchens for having the balls, the patience, and the intellectual rigor to go after these people, because otherwise their ideas spread like unchecked viruses. Somebody has to do what Hitchens is doing, and too often those who could and should don't or won't.

No wonder he drinks to excess. Who wouldn't?

I'd say thank God for Christopher Hitchens, but I won't, because he might take it the wrong way. Perhaps I should just toast him later.

Anthony Watts has a great article up on how he changed out a fixture that used a CFL Flood Lamp to one using an LED lamp. Anthony bought 5 LED fixtures and got a deal. He paid $80.00 each for them. So let us run some numbers.

LAMP	PRICE	OPERATING HOURS	WATTS
Cree LED Lighting LR6-GU24 White 6	$80.00	50,000	12
GE 47478 15 Watt (65 Watt equivalent) Energy Smart Floodlight 6 Year Life R30 Light Bulb	$6.25	10,000	15
5 CFLs	$31.25	50,000	15

For 50,000 hours You pay $31.25 capital

In 50,000 hours you save 150,000 Wh or 150KWh with the LED fixture. The LED fixture costs $48.75 more than 5 CFLs . If your electricity costs less than 32.5¢ a KWh The CFLs are a better deal.

On new construction or when replacing a fixture the cost of the fixture enters the picture. Don't forget to figure out what it is worth in time and hassle changing bulbs more often vs installing a fixture. Another point is that you can dim the LEDs and the CFLs do not dim. Dimming the LEDs should add to their life since ordinary LED lifetime is roughly proportional to current. Not only that: light output per watt goes up at lower currents.

My advice to cheapskates? At 10¢ a KWh wait until you can buy one for $45 or less. A couple of CFLs should see you through.

Those are the economic issues - roughly. As Anthony points out there are other considerations. And thank you Antony for being an early adopter. It will help bring the price down to one I can afford.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

In a fit of homesickness, earlier I was thinking about surly service in favorite decrepit Chinese restaurants I have known over the years. (For some reason the two tend to go hand in hand.) In Berkeley, some of my fondest drunken memories involved Robbie's Chinese American Hofbrau, which used to be on Telegraph Avenue. The place had been there since the 1950s, and old wooden table tops in the booths were covered with carved writings, including (so I was told by elder Bohemians who "knew" about such things) stuff that had actually been carved by Allen Ginsberg back in the days before he was allegedly running around with Michael Savage. The problem was, everyone carved stuff in there, and there was no way to distinguish what Allen Ginsberg might have carved from what decades of drunken frat boys might have carved. (That sort of indistinguishability I'm sure Ginsberg would have approved.) Beer flowed, and the food was your basic Chow Mein, egg foo young, sweet sour pork fare. One day in the mid 1970s, Robbie was gone, and when I asked where he was, the other Chinese guys laughed and said, "He get too old!" Not long after that, the place closed and was abruptly sacked, the tables violently ripped out and piled in the middle, and when I went in demanding to know what was happening, a Mideastern cheapskate type who appeared to be now in charge looked at me and with what seemed like a gloating expression on his face, said "Robbies is closed. Permanently." History was gone with the wind. I never forgot it.

Then there was the Wong Star, on Haight Street in San Francisco. A few words in a passing blog post cannot hope to do justice to either the place, or its proprietor, a stout, energetic, and probably manic woman known to everyone simply as "Kim." Kim ruled. Over the greasiest dive this side of South Brunswick, New Jersey. The prices were out of the 1950s, as was Kim. Normal people would have been scared away by the shocking tackiness of the decor. I doubt the front windows had been washed since 1952, but this might have been a good thing, actually. For while you could read where "WONG STAR RESTAURANT" had been painted, the window dirt obscured the window "display" -- which was nothing but a long, bent curtain rod over which was hung plastic greasy yellow shower curtains. And between the shower curtains and the window was a vase holding plastic flowers so covered with grime and dust you really couldn't tell what color they might have been. It was wonderful.

Kim was the ultimate tyrant, and brooked no attitude. And I mean, no attitude, for Kim feared no man. (And no woman.) I'll never forget the time that some jive-ass pimp type (a man quite accustomed to getting his way) came in and ordered food to go. While he waited, he and one of his girls carried on loudly, and when the food was brought out, the bags were stapled shut with the receipt on top, per Kim's usual practice. The man paid, but suddenly decided that now he wasn't going to leave, and instead he sat insolently down and started opening up the food to eat it.

Instantly Kim launched into action.

"YOU ORD' TO GO NOT EAT HERE!" she shrieked, while literally lunging at the man. Realizing that he was out-gunned psychologically and probably physically, the guy got up and left, defensively muttering things like "crazy bitch, what she talking bout?" under his breath.

At this point, Kim turned to the entire restaurant and announced something I will never forget as long as I live --

"I ONLY LIKE NICE PEOPLE!"

Everyone got it. There was just an understanding there. Kim was so brutally right and so politically incorrect in the most innocent and charming sort of way....

The food was actually quite good, and there was no other place I had seen (least of all in San Francisco) where you could get a decent steak and egg breakfast for $2.95 in the 1980s.

Feeling nostalgic, I tried to find these places and had no luck with the Wong Star. Robbie's is mentioned here and here and I was lucky to find it mentioned here as an early 60s poetry hangout.

Where I really scored was with another favorite -- San Francisco's Sam Wo Restaurant. The place used to be (and amazingly, still is) the most inexpensive restaurant in Chinatown, and you had to walk up a skinny flight of not-to-code stairs and then through a dingy kitchen, where you would be greeted by a man who really took delight in being insane. I used to love going there just to watch his behavior. He would yell at you as soon as you got to the top of the stairs, specks of foam flying from his mouth, tell you where to sit and what to order. He was something of a San Francisco legend (who had regular mentions in Herb Caen's column -- especially when he would chase non-paying customers into the street waving a cleaver) and I figured he must be dead by now and long forgotten. But I was very encouraged when I Googled "Sam Wo" and found that not only is the place still there, but there are many reviews, mostly favorable, and one mentioned a crazy waitress who no longer works there:

sorry to break it to you guys, but the non-english speaking waitress who loves to throw chopsticks and what not at you has retired!!! Apparently the owner's daughter (who by the way, speaks English and is way awesome) has taken over her job duties. So customer service has definitely stepped up a notch.

But what I really remembered about Sam Wo was the man who took delight in being insane -- a truly immortal San Francisco character with the unforgettable name of "Edsel Ford Fong." When I saw that the place still existed, I thought maybe there'd be a mention of him somewhere, so I did what modern people do. I Googled him.

To by utter astonishment, not only did I get hits, but the man (who died in 1984) has his own Wiki page. A Wiki page! The last thing on earth I would have expected. In all these years of blogging, never have I been more surprised to discover the existence of a Wiki page, yet no one is more deserving of a Wiki page than Edsel Ford Fong.

Edsel Ford Fong (May 6, 1927 - April 1984) was a Chinese American restaurant server from San Francisco, California. [1] He was often called the "world's rudest, worst, most insulting waiter".[2]

Edsel Ford Fong was born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown. He worked the second floor of the Sam Wo Restaurant on Washington Street. (The restaurant name means "three in peace", a reference to its founding partners.)[3] As head waiter, Fong greeted visitors with an admonition to "sit down and shut up".[4] He was known for calling patrons "retarded" and "fat", criticizing people's menu choices before telling them what they should order, slamming food on the table, complaining about receiving only 15% tips, and groping female patrons.[2] An imposing man with a crew cut hair style, he also was notorious for seating people with strangers, forgetting orders, cursing, spilling soup on customers, hazing newcomers, refusing to provide forks or English menu translations, and busing tables before diners were finished.[5]

I have to agree with all the other yelpers and say that if you want a clean, rated-A Chinese restaurant, then don't come here!!! Entering through the dirty kitchen and seeing random poultry parts everywhere might be enough to make anyone turn in their tracks... and yes, I was rather grossed out, HOWEVER the food is scrumptious. The service isnt too fabulous or attentive by any means, but I was rather disappointed to not hear any yelling or screaming or see any chopsticks thrown.

All the tables are pretty small, so the four of us smushed in the back corner. We ordered a bowl of bbq pork noodles, and a plate of chow mein with beef and sprouts. The bowl of soup was huge, definitely enough for the four of us to share. Very tasty on a cold, rainy day. The chow mein was nice and greasy, and I had to add some soy sauce to give it some more flavor, but it was also very tasty. The bill came out to something like $12, which you can't go wrong with!! Cash only though, so be prepared.

The Wiki piece recognizes that the man's style was an art form:

Sam Wo Restaurant continues to operate (as of 2009) in Chinatown, and is still listed in tourist guidebooks as being where Fong practiced a "wicked sarcasm [that] took on aspects of performance art".[12]

A Chinatown institution for over 100 years, Sam Wo's is a ramshackle speakeasy of a restaurant where you are more likely to get yelled at and berated rather than unctuously served. As you walk directly into the kitchen, a waiter yells at you, already exasperated, to come up the rickety stairs to the meager dining area. Saw Wo's was the home of the legendary Edsel Ford Fong until he passed away recently--this surly, rude "waiter" would treat you like a recruit at his own private Chinese restaurant boot camp. The tradition continues: you are most likely told what to eat, instead of choosing the food yourself--but its eternal redeeming quality is the fact that Sam Wo's is some cheap, cheap eats.

"But it was a despotic head waiter known as Edsel Ford Fong that made SAM WOH such a formidable Babylon-by-the-Bay institution. Edsel, big for an oriental chap at 6' 200 lbs. in his whitewall crew cut, long apron and omnipresent game-face scowl. If you walked in at prime time and didn't know Edsel you were in for some first-class abuse taking. He was the Pol Pot of noodledom and when it came to insults, he took no prisoners."

I think his customers enjoyed the treatment he meted out, and it was probably well deserved. Look at this picture:

The caption is Edsel Ford Fong and some "abused" customers, 1982

Hmmm...

(I'd say he wasn't rude enough, except I don't want to be disrespectful.)

Eric of Classical Values sent me this link via e-mail about the Tea Party Convention held Saturday.

I was particularly struck by this comment:

RueTheDay says:

The whole Teaparty Movement is a fraud.

Charging $600 for tickets to the Tea Party Convention, so attendees can eat steak and lobster at the Opryland while listening to a mainstream politician (Sarah Palin) who's being paid $115k to give a speech - this is supposed to be a grassroots populist movement aimed at changing the status quo in DC? LOL.

I thought this book title seemed apt: It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

To what class should Barack Obama be assigned? That is not an easy question to answer, because while it's clear that he is now at the top of the political and "intellectual" ruling class elite, his background cannot easily be characterized in ordinary class terms as we understand them (or, as we once understood them). To call his background "working class" would be dishonest, because he lacks the trappings of that. Much as he wants and pretends to have them. He certainly was not rich, but neither was he poor. That would place him in the "middle class" except that doesn't have quite the right ring to it -- because classes in this country are not defined solely in economic terms.

Thus, if a guy who works a blue collar job for a living has a Ph.D. in History or Public Policy, it seems less than honest to refer to him as "working class." I have met many people in the San Francisco Bay Area who work with their hands despite advanced degrees. Cab drivers with Ph.D's are considered part of the Bay Area charm. Gay guys with genius IQs (smart enough to contribute great things to any number of fields) can be found working in "stereotypical" careers as hairdressers. Not that this should come as a surprise; one of the smartest guys I ever knew did nothing with his life but have sex and collect comic books. Yet it would never have occurred to me to assign him to the category of "lower class" -- much less "the poor."

The old "upper class" that used to exist when I was a child has become largely a joke. They're still there, they still have old family names and inherited money, but forget about people looking up to them, them setting an example for the middle class, or any of that "noblesse oblige" stuff. They just sit on their money and hide from the world, hoping to avoid attention, and hoping they'll be left alone. The middle class is still quite large, but they are now so culturally diverse that it is misleading to use that term to define them as a cultural group. Maybe "culturally diverse" is the wrong term, because within that group we call the middle class, there are enormous, bitter cultural divides. Silly little things of the sort I laugh at -- like condoms and sex ed in the schools and whether the boy scouts should allow gays -- have become cultural battlefields. People hate each other over them, and they provide a perfect opportunity for one "side" to look down on the other. Even religion isn't religion anymore, but another battleground. Stuff that was once a fairly straightforward and non-controversial part of a normal education has been politicized. Evolution is routinely attacked as a form of "political correctness." Little wonder, because the parents who want condoms on bananas in class and gays in the Boy Scouts often enjoy baiting people so they can feel superior, and the people they bait bait back. So, while I don't know what class is anymore and cannot define it, I see class war everywhere. It frequently takes the form of "the elites" versus "us regular people."

Part of what we call the American Dream involved class mobility. These days, I pity those who moved their way out of a genuine working class background into Ivy League degrees only to find that they are subject to derision. While this derision might not be as severe as it would if they were inner city welfare blacks caught "acting white," populism -- like most isms -- tends to work that way.

I've said this before and I am sure I'll say it again. It really shouldn't matter where someone went to school or how much (or how little) money that person had, or whether he -- and more importantly his father before him -- worked with his hands. But matter it does -- to the people on both sides who fight these class wars.

I find it refreshing that Sarah Palin is a down-to-earth real person, and not an Ivy League snot. I can't stand the fact that a degree from Harvard conveys a quasi divine right to tell people what to do and how to live their lives, and I like the fact that Sarah Palin very definitely does not want to do that. However, if I thought she did want to run people's lives, where she went to college would be a secondary issue. Similarly, if a hands-off libertarian type had gone to Harvard, I'd be be very quick to forgive. These things should not matter. Just as an Ivy League education should convey no right to rule, unless we're going to use a neo-Maoist litmus test, neither should the lack thereof.

Wow, how did this get started? I'm on the verge of denouncing conservative Marxism or Marxist conservatism, when all I wanted to do was say something about Barack Obama's elusive "class issues" in light of this poignant piece by Sean Kinsell. For a little class background, Sean happens to hail from the "real" working class. His father wasn't a factory worker with a Ph.D. but the real thing. Unlike me, Sean did not condescendingly flee from something that was in his "blood"; he saw the Ivy League as something to aspire to, and he dislike the unthinking attacks on everything Ivy League:

...a lot of actual working-class people tend to perceive "public service" positions like his (Obama's) as out-of-touch condescension, geared less toward helping the disadvantaged to clear a path toward achieving their own goals than toward making the public servant feel good about his own magnanimity. It's the modern version of the manor-house-ladies-visiting-food-and-moral-hectoring-on-the-cottage-dwellers routine.

Perhaps Obama did doubt that he was "accomplishing much" as a community organizer, in the sense of serving people in need. Or perhaps, like seemingly thousands of other Ivy grads each year, he decided that what he was doing wasn't fast-track enough and that, as a humanities/social-science major, his best shot at giving himself a grad-degree boost was law school. And when I say "fast-track," I'm not just talking about money; power, influence, and image figure into a lot of people's calculations of self-worth as much as money does. (Judis does recognize that.) New York is chock-a-block with cutthroat lawyers who imagine they're more moral and civic-minded than the bankers downtown--just because, as nearly as I've ever been able to tell, they don't work for banks.

There are two major problems in perceiving these things clearly, I think. One is that there's a serious class divide in America based on expectations. Obama grew up, it appears, among people who saw going to a hoity-toity college and then bossing people around for a living as the natural progression of things. Working-class people do not. (I say this as the son of a steelworker and a high-school dropout who later got a GED and a data-operations certification. My parents and their friends were optimistic and happy, but the idea of wanting to devote your working life to lording it over people would have been very foreign to them.) I'm sure Obama had times when he had to struggle--difficult exams and all that--but he was following the same path as his peers, and one that his elders were presumably easing him along. That doesn't diminish his actual accomplishments, but I suspect it does make it pretty much impossible for him to imagine what life is like for people who have succeeded by working their way up.

It never occurred to me in high school that I wouldn't be applying to Ivies like my more comfortably-off friends. (I have my parents to thank for that, BTW. They would have been perfectly justified in informing me that it was my responsibility to work my way through college. Instead, they took out parent loans so I could spend four years daydreaming about Japanese literature for a Penn degree.) I go back to my hometown, and much as I love spending time with my parents and other relatives, I'm an outsider there.

In a way, it breaks my heart. We all want to feel close to our origins, and I'm far more distant from mine than the two-hour drive might suggest. In another way, though, this is the richness of America: you the individual do not have to be what others assume you were born to be. Though I won't pretend I don't like money, I don't value the way I live because I make more than my father does; I value it because it suits my personality. Happily, I'm not a politician, so I don't have to go back to Allentown and pretend unconvincingly to be sunk in and at home there. If President Obama wants to succeed more with regular folks, maybe he could stop trying to act like one of them (seriously, man-no...just, no) and be frank about being an outsider and politician.

Just to get my bearings, I thought I'd look again at the various litmus tests. Not much has changed.

My answers to this test supposedly indicated that I was overall 80% conservative and 20% liberal:

Overall: 80% Conservative, 20% Liberal

Social Issues: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

Ethics: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

I found another test called Typology, and the results indicated that I belong to the "Enterpriser" group. While I probably belong to that "type," I am very suspicious about the way it is described in stereotypical terms that did not represent the answers I gave. I doubt its accuracy and reliability as a serious test. (But it's from the liberal left Pew Center, which has a long history of trying to write libertarianism out of the political equations, and is just as guilty as conservative organizers who relentlessly try to do the same thing.)

Then there's the simple old "world's smallest political quiz," which I have taken before, and which continues to show me as solidly libertarian.

(How solidly depends on my waffling answers to the question about the military draft; which I would support in the event of a serious war. If I say "NO" to the draft, then my little red dot moves all the way at the top of the chart's libertarian apex.)

Lastly, there's the so-called "political compass test" which is long and irritating, and which seems designed from a left-wing perspective, and which made me out to be a borderline authoritarian, which I am not:

As to my class, much as I find the subject annoying, I found a rather silly online test which asks about things like the quality of your teeth and what you like for leisure and travel, and here are my results:

You Are Upper Class

Class isn't always about money, and you've at least got the brains, manners, and interests of an upper class person. You don't have a trashy bone in your body, and you don't pretend to be someone you're not. You're comfortable with your station in life, and class issues don't really bother you. The finest things in life are within your reach, and you're comfortable enjoying them. You may end up: A business leader, corporate lawyer, or philanthropist Other people who share your class: Bill Gates, Oprah, former world leaders like Bill Clinton, and those reclusive billionaires no one ever talks about.

More stereotypes. Class issues don't bother me? Really? Were I not too culturally fatigued to care, I would consider the test to be little more than a dissembled and manipulative ad hominem attack.

UPDATE: Many thanks for Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a warm welcome to all.

Comments welcome, agree or disagree.

Since Eric put up a mystery doo wop song, I thought it might be nice to put up a song that was no mystery and that has over a million YouTube hits.

For you young whipper snappers here is a wiki on doo wop. Note: whipper snapper may have been derived from whipster. And if they had only left off the "w" they would have had hipster. Which turns everything on its head and leaves the old farts as squares. And of course head..... I could go on. But I'm not going to.

Earlier today I found a longtime favorite doo-wop song that I've listened to for years recently uploaded to YouTube.

Hardly a video, but it does have a cute picture, and I also think it's cute that it has only had 23 views!

The song is the mysterious "Oh You," by an obscure doo-wop group called The Chalons. Great rhythm, great vocals, great piano and an amazing guitar lead. There's also a disconcerting skip at 2:01 -- in exactly the same place as in the MP3 version that's on my player, so it's probably the same tune that's been lovingly passed around.

I would love to know more about them. Anything about them. Despite a diligent search, though, I have been able to learn next to nothing about this very talented group, except I did learn that someone else has also discovered nothing:

The Chalons were a typical black doo-wop group of the time. I cannot find out more about them.

They're great, though, and I'd like to help immortalize them, whether I know anything about them or not.

(Whether the Chalons were named after the important ancient battle, will probably remain equally mysterious.)

Yuri Besmenov was a KGB Agent. You can watch more of Yuri at YouTube.

H/T Big Journalism

Cross Posted at Power and Control

From time to time, I write posts about Salvador Dalí. However, I tend to move on from one thing to another, and unfortunately, this blog doesn't have categories, so things get lost.

Last night I collected and cross-posted the Dalí posts into a blog I started years ago, but neglected, Daliblog.com.

I don't know whether there is anyone who might want to read only my Dalí posts, but if so, there it is.

Maybe I should come up with categories for the rest of the stuff here. Yeah, and maybe I should get organized and clean up the blogroll, which deserves an intervention from professionals who save people from their own clutter. Right.
One neurosis at a time.....

But yes, a facelift of some sort is probably in order.

And no but about it, in the case of Lenin, a butt lift is in order!

Dali got in a lot of trouble for dissing Lenin, and remains much hated by the PC pigs to this day.

Contrary to what his detractors say, he had unbridled contempt for politics. (Yay!)

But esteel, Dalí he wuzzzz....

pohLEEticall!

If you like my Dalí posts, do check out my modest little Dalí Blog.

A fairly absurd argument that Dems' health care reform bill will increase liberty from William Galston:

So when the Tea Partiers complain that a government health insurance mandate invades their liberty, they reveal a defective understanding of the logic of liberty in a modern society. Individuals who choose to go without health insurance could try to resolve the contradiction by signing a document foreswearing all reliance on health care they didn't pay for themselves. But, because our medical norms don't permit us to leave injured accident victims at the side of the road, such a document couldn't be enforced. To be a citizen of the United States today is to live in a community where individual health care choices can have social consequences, a fact to which government can legitimately respond.

And such a policy is counterproductive anyway. Stephen Spruiell cites a Democrat who makes an relevant analogy to WalMart:

In most goods and services there are very few active consumers. What happens is, everybody selling a good is affected by Wal-Mart. You benefit from that wherever you are. So many of those who oppose consumer-driven health care use the perfect as the enemy of the good. You're not going to shop for health care if you're hit by a bus. That's not the point. The point is you're served in a health-care system that's been tightened up, both from a cost and quality point of view, by the fact that some consumers, for many procedures, are shopping around, and not just on price.

While he was guest blogging for Glenn Reynolds yesterday, Michael Totten linked an interesting analysis which tends to confirm my previous suspicions:

...for those seeking a true measure of Obama's judgment, on both policy and politics, the meeting between the president and Senate Democrats yesterday was much more instructive. Obama's words made it clear that, notwithstanding his party's recent election losses at the polls and its declining poll ratings, he has no intention of embarking on a Bill Clinton-style "triangulation" strategy.

But if OTOH, the Republicans re-take Congress in the fall, that dramatically increases Obama's chances of reelection (as the guy who would help keep in place that reassuring gridlock that American voters historically favor). Say what you want about Obama, but I think he's smart enough to realize this.

If my theory is correct, then once the Democrats lose Congress, then and only then would the Obama triangulation strategy begin in earnest. I think that any comparisons with Clinton triangulation are thus premature, and I think it should be remembered that Clinton's triangulation began after the disastrous Democratic losses in 1994 (which was the birth of the "Contract With America").

There's plenty of time for triangulation. Meanwhile, it is in Obama's best interest to have his party lose.

What's especially remarkable about this is that even as he betrays his party, he is nonetheless being praised for his "principles" -- by the very people he is screwing:

The second striking thing was how easily he appeared to write off [Senator Blanche] Lincoln politically. Conceding nothing, he implied that her defeat was not only a foregone conclusion, but also an acceptable price to pay for staying the course on policy. To be sure, maybe the whole thing was just kabuki -- Lincoln standing up to the president for the benefit of the folks back home who don't like him, and Obama obligingly playing his part. But it sure looked pretty spontaneous to me.

The Lincoln-Obama debate epitomized the left-vs.-center debate within the Democratic Party these days, which is much broader than health care, even though it is necessarily focused on that for the moment. The question is whether the party should cut its losses on comprehensive health reform, or keep pursuing it despite the political headwinds, on the grounds that even an initially unpopular bill would be easier to defend than no bill at all.

David Plouffe, back in the White House to direct post-Massachusetts political operations, favors nailing the party's colors to the health-care mast. He wrote recently in the Post that "if we do not pass it, the GOP will continue attacking the plan as if we did anyway, and voters will have no ability to measure its upside. If we do pass it, dozens of protections and benefits take effect this year."

Obama's answer to Lincoln suggests that he fully embraces the Plouffe strategy. I don't understand it. Independently of what anyone might think of the health-care bill's merits, the public's attitude is hardening against it; it is politically toxic, period. If Virginia and New Jersey didn't prove that, Massachusetts did. And November could prove it again. If the Dems tip-toe away from health care now, it would be embarrassing, but they would at least give the electorate time to forget the issue and focus on the Democrats' other accomplishments -- if they can come up with some between now and November.

Still, give the president credit: No one can accuse him of bending his principles to politics. Of course, if there's a price to be paid for that this year, he won't be the one paying it. Blanche Lincoln, among others, will get to do that.

Truer words were never spoken.

But in general, few Democrats seem to really care about whether he's betraying his party. The important part of the White House strategy is that he be sung the praises for standing up for his principles.

For now, of course.

What I can't figure out is how many Democrats -- especially the rank and file -- have caught on to him. I suspect that in elite Democratic circles, a decision has already been made to basically throw Congress under the proverbial bus now in order to save the Obama administration later, but they don't want the ordinary people to know. Hence the sycophantic talk of "principles" -- and the meme fits the Obama as hero narrative. Plenty of Democrats will buy it. (Plus, it's red meat for the hard left base.)

And when the time comes from him to finally be "forced" to move to the center, he will have had no choice, and they can blame the Republicans.

That the Democratic elite seem to prefer having an Obama administration with a Republican Congress to a Democratic Congress with a Republican president begs the question of what people on the right might prefer.

I realize this isn't a professional poll, nor are my readers necessarily on the right, but short of Republicans controlling both the White House and Congress, but I'm just wondering.... If you had to choose, how many of you might prefer an Obama presidency with a Republican Congress? Or A Republican president with a Democratic Congress?

MORE: The president's fascinating call to his fellow Democrats to "just turn off... the blogs" is making sense, especially because the advice was directed to a Democrat faced with the lose of his seat:

The president's advice came in answer to a question from Sen. Mike Bennet, D-CO, who is facing a difficult re-election fight back home and wanted to know what Democrats and Republicans can do "to fix this institution so that our democracy can actually withstand the test that we're facing right now."

"You know what I think would actually make a difference, Michael? I think if everybody here -- excuse all the members of the press who are here -- if everybody here turned off your CNN, your Fox, your blogs," Obama said, before being interrupted by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, who piped up, "And MSNBC!"

Obama, appropriately reminded of the network with shows more friendly to liberals, continued, "Just turn off the TV -- MSNBC, blogs -- and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics. ... It is much more difficult to get a conversation focused on how are we going to help people than a conversation about how is this going to help or hurt somebody politically."

And frankly, I think they're more than a little bit jealous of the rebellious Tea Party phenomenon, because they're the ones in power, which means they cannot protest, cannot, um, fight the power.

God, how they must hate seeing people on the right doing that.

This is a must watch video. About 19 minutes. And worth every pico second. I really liked his take on the elitists of America and the world near the beginning. I also got a kick out of his Jewish shtick about 9:50 into the video. I also liked the fact that he considers himself a traitor to his class. Having gone to U. Chicago I can definitely relate.

The book mentioned at the beginning of of the video:
Intellectuals

and later in the video:
Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives

The Magic Negro - LA Times

Walesa Comes To Illinois

Commenter newrouter Notes that Breitbart also gave a speech this morning.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

For those of you not familiar with Latin "iter" means "the way". And the ITER Fusion program now headquartered in France is undergoing a top management shake up.

In an effort to put the world's largest scientific experiment back on track after delays and cost overruns, Europe is shaking up the agency overseeing its portion of the multinational ITER reactor.

On 16 February, Frank Briscoe, a British fusion scientist, will take the reins as interim director of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the agency in Barcelona, Spain, that manages Europe's ITER contribution -- the largest of any partner's. Briscoe replaces Didier Gambier, a French physicist who joined the F4E as director when it formed in 2007. Gambier was originally appointed for a five-year term.

The European Union (EU) is also formulating a plan to complete construction on the multibillion-dollar machine in 2019, a year after currently scheduled, Nature has learned.

ITER aims to prove the viability of fusion power by using superconducting magnets to squeeze a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes to temperatures above 150 million °C. When full-scale experiments begin in 2026, the machine should produce ten times the power it consumes.

Europe has faced increasing criticism from ITER's six other international partners: Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, China and the United States. A budget proposed last week by US president Barack Obama would slash America's funding for ITER in 2011 by 40%, to US$80 million; it cited "the slow rate of progress by the [ITER Organization] and some Members' Domestic Agencies". And on 2 February, Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian fusion researcher and head of ITER's council, called Europe a "weak link". "Unfortunately, their organizational structure is very poor," he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview that appeared on a Russian government website.

Finishing ITER in 2019, a goal that the F4E is now working towards with industrial contractors, would involve risks such as producing components in parallel, but scientists think that those risks can be managed. "There should be no doubt that Europe is trying hard to get ITER ready in the shortest time that is realistic," says one senior European scientist. The new schedule will be presented to other ITER partners at a meeting on 23-24 February in Paris.

And let me leave you with a few words from a Polywell Fusion fan who is no fan of Tokamak designs (ITER and similar devices): Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma Physics Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And the best thing about Polywell is what Physicist Rick Nebel, who is now herding the project, has to say about it: We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Who said that? If you think it's some liberal bigwig, you'd be wrong.

Tom Tancredo said it, and I agree with Dan Riehl, who calls it "stupid pandering."

While no big fan of McCain, if Obama gets the two more SCOTUS appointments he might, don't tell me we're better off because McCain lost. We'll be living with the result of that for decades. And for Tancredo to be correct, one has to assume he thinks conservatives are just a bunch of sheep who wouldn't be protesting big government under McCain, just as they began doing under Bush.

McCain may be wrong on many things, but he was more right on many than Obama will ever be.

Do you want someone is wrong half the time, or someone who is wrong all the time?

What is Tancredo smoking?

And what a well-deserved tearing it was!

Never have I felt more destroyed, disemboweled, mauled, hammered, ripped, slammed, and buttf*cked than I did when I watched this.

Hilarious.

Because I know that Jim Treacher is a humorist, I thought that this early, one paragraph report of him being hit by a State Department vehicle might have been intended as some sort of satire. I'm sorry to see (via Glenn Reynolds' later link) that I was mistaken, and that this was actually a very serious accident, compounded by very scary behavior on the part of government officials:

The State Department has refused to answer basic questions about an accident that took place in Washington on Wednesday night, in which a U.S. Diplomatic Security Service vehicle struck Daily Caller employee Sean Medlock as he was crossing the street.

An agent in the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not identify himself to Medlock at the scene, or apologize for running him down. Indeed, Washington, D.C., police drove to a local emergency room to serve Medlock with a jaywalking citation as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, while a man who identified himself as "special agent" stood by watching and taking notes.

Reached on his cell phone the following day by the Daily Caller, McGuinn refused to answer questions about the incident.

"I'm a federal agent and I'm not allowed to talk to the media," McGuinn said, citing "liability." McGuinn initially declined even to reveal which agency he works for. "You can refer to the [DC] police department report," he said before hanging up abruptly. (According the police department, no report will be publicly available for at least three days.)

According to Medlock, who writes under the name Jim Treacher, he was struck at about 7:15 p.m. on Wednesday, while crossing M Street in downtown Washington. Medlock says he was walking within the bounds of the crosswalk, toward a blinking white signal, when a government SUV suddenly turned left and plowed into him, knocking him to the ground.

Bystanders tended to Medlock, collected his crushed glasses and called an ambulance. McGuinn, meanwhile, called The Daily Caller's offices from the scene to tell Medlock's colleagues about the incident. But he did not identify himself to them or to Medlock.

Medlock was taken to Georgetown University Hospital with a broken left knee, lacerations and bruises. He will undergo surgery later this week.

At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a "special agent." He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.

First the cops tried to make it look as if Treacher was jaywalking. But then later, the guy in the SUV gave a different story:

Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with the Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking "outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred."

The question is: Did the federal agent driving the SUV, faced with potential liabilities from the accident, encourage local police to issue some sort - any sort - of citation to Medlock, to establish his culpability?

If not, what exactly did happen? Calls to the State Department were met with evasion and indifference. Spokeswoman Grace Moe first asked a Daily Caller reporter where the publication's offices were located before taking a message.

A second DSS spokeswoman, Sarah Rosetti, requested that questions be submitted in writing. When she responded in an e-mail, Rosetti claimed that "a jogger collided with one of the U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Security Service's official vehicles" - as if Medlock, who does not jog, had somehow attacked the SUV.

One of the things that has long galled me is the way wrongdoers will frequently refuse to acknowledge that they did wrong (and instead go on the offensive), when a simple apology at the right time would have sufficed. This can lead to protracted litigation; I remember a case I worked on in which a client's car (an older VW bug) had been broadsided by a driver who ran a red light. All he had wanted was a simple acknowledgment that the other driver was in the wrong, and he wanted to get his car fixed. But the insurance company wouldn't admit liability and refused to pay for the damages, maintaining that the car was basically worthless because of its age. So the guy was pissed, and went the full, all-out litigation route. He ended up getting $15,000 or something, and I'm sure the insurance company spent a lot more than that on their attorneys, expert witnesses. But that's nothing compared to some of the insurance bad faith cases I remember. (There was one in which millions of dollars in punitive damages were awarded because an insurance company tried to avoid paying out a modest settlement in a simple fender bender.)

Here it's the government, and not an insurance company, but I don't think the government should be allowed to behave in a manner that an insurance company would not be allowed to behave. (But so far, it appears that's just what the government is doing.)

For more, see Matt Welch's "How Does the D.C. Establishment Compensate You for Smashing Your Leg with a Diplomatic SUV? By Giving You a Jaywalking Ticket for a Faraway Intersection, Then Accusing You of "Jogging" Into the Vehicle." Asks Welch about the above report,

how many dumb government lies are packed into those six paragraphs?

All I know is that if a California insurance company acted this way, Jim Treacher could very well end up owning the company.

It's just too bad that Treacher can't end up owning the federal government.

(But then maybe I shouldn't wish such a fate on poor Treacher....)

MORE: Frank J. offers his analysis:

despite him crossing at the crosswalk while the light was telling him to cross, they gave him a ticket for jaywalking. So it's like, "Sorry we ran you over and broke your knee, but pay us this fine." Except without the "sorry" part.

Anyway, I hope Treacher gets better soon and then attacks more State Department SUVs.

MORE: It is being pointed out by commenters that this is a joke. If so, then I was right before I was wrong. But the ever-reliable Media Matters is taking this oh-so-seriously, and Eric Boehlert is fit to be tied. He claims initial reports of a hit-and-run were wrong, and demands retractions. So why isn't he saying the whole thing is a joke when he clearly has the opportunity?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links the most recent post from Jim Treacher, which ought to clear up any lingering questions about whether this was a joke.

It was not.

So now I'm in the hospital, and in a few hours they're going to try to fix my knee. It is my considered opinion that my knee never should have been damaged in the first place.

To recap: I was hit by an SUV while crossing a DC street legally, the driver who hit me is a federal agent who failed to identify himself in any way, I'm about to undergo reconstructive surgery to repair the knee injury he admits he caused, and somehow I was issued a jaywalking citation whose particulars in no way match what was seen by multiple eyewitnesses.

Wednesday night I just wanted to get a few things at CVS, watch Lost on Hulu, and go to bed after a long day of work. Now it's turned into a whole big thing.

Fine by me.

(And I hope he is able to sue for bad faith so he ends up owning the United States government!)

Amazon and Apple are having a book war. Which is to say a war over who will get the biggest market share for electronic books.

"One defends when his strength is inadequate, he attacks when it is abundant."--Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Apple iPad isn't even available yet, but already it is forcing Amazon (stock symbol AMZN) to respond in a variety of ways to protect its competing Kindle eBook business. Amazon just snapped up a touchscreen technology startup, presumably to update the already ancient-looking Kindle. Emboldened book publishers are pushing back on Amazon's $9.99 pricing now that they can sell the same eBooks on the iPad for $14.99, and Amazon is capitulating. And the Kindle team at Amazon, which once had an arrogant approach towards publishers when it was the only game in town, is now bending over backwards to solicit their loyalty, says one editor at a publishing company who has noticed the change in tone.

The coming battle between Apple (stock symbol AAPL) and Amazon will occur on many fronts, but the place where Apple can really hurt Amazon is on pricing. Just as Apple initially did with 99-cent songs on iTunes, Amazon imposed a uniform $9.99 price on bestsellers in the Kindle Store. A single price helps to establish markets for new product categories, especially when that price is at a discount to the physical alternative. While the 99-cent strategy worked well for Apple in digital music, in books Apple doing a jujitsu move on Amazon by allowing publishers to have more control over the pricing. Now Macmillan is demanding that Amazon sell its eBooks for $14.99, and News Corp's Rupert Murdoch is making similar grumblings about HarperCollins.

Another thing I see happening is a reduction in prices. For one thing high prices will encourage pirates. Just as they do for music. Why should a song which costs under 1¢ to deliver have to cost $1.00? If the artist was getting 50¢ of that it might be a reasonable deal. At least you are supporting the artist.

But that is not how it works.

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

The above is a little Moby Grape ditty called Omaha. Which brings to mind a report on how Omaha voters view the Obama administration.

OMAHA, Neb.--As President Barack Obama began his first State of the Union address Wednesday night, Kevin Fischer glanced at television above him and compared his 2008 vote for the president to ordering from an infomercial.

"You listen to the sales pitch and you're so excited and then it arrives and you open the box and it just crumbles," Mr. Fischer said. "It turns out you didn't get what you thought you were going to."

Regret for supporting a Democratic presidential candidate is an unusual sensation in this quiet, snow-covered prairie city. That's because heading into the 2008 election, no Democratic presidential candidate had won here since 1964. Nebraska was second only to Utah in its red-state reliability.

The Obama campaign succeeded by drawing from the district's substantial pool of independent voters and by coaxing a critical mass of registered Republicans in middle-class neighborhoods to cross party lines, according to Douglas County election records. Here, where the urban core gives way to 20- and 30-year-old subdivisions with names like Ridgefield and Eagle Run, Mr. Obama turned Omaha blue.

Some of those voters eat breakfast at Billy's Cafe, a small restaurant in a busy strip mall where a short stack of pancakes and an egg costs $2.85 and photos of dirt-track racing cars adorn mustard-colored walls. Jennifer Wood, a waitress at Billy's for seven years, said a lot of her customers own their own homes and pay cash for new cars.

"All of a sudden, a lot of them lost a lot of money and instead of retiring in a year, they're hoping to retire in five years, minimum," she said. A Republican who voted for Sen. John McCain, Ms. Wood said that Mr. Obama, "had a chance to be a great president. But he focused on the wrong thing, he focused on health care instead of jobs, and people are angry about that."

Chris Pflaum, a liquor salesman who also abandoned his party to support Mr. Obama, said in retrospect, he voted with his heart instead of his head.

"I think I got caught up in the fact that he was the first African-American president," Mr. Pflaum said. "With the economy the way it is, that doesn't seem as important anymore."

What is the most common sentiment in America about Mr. Obama's election and subsequent performance according to totally anecdotal evidence I have collected?

Mr. Fischer said when he voted he believed Mr. Obama would draw down U.S. troops abroad, close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and help get the economy back on track.

"None of that has happened," he said. "I feel duped."

There is evidence that there are a lot of rubes in Europe. And there is no evidence that any of the European people quoted ever lived in Omaha.

And for the record: I voted for Palin. I could see the Three Card Monty dealer now ensconced in the White House from half a continent away. Actually I didn't have to look that far. Chicago is less than 90 miles away from where I reside.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

In an earlier post, I made a point of hesitating, ironically, to use the word "savages" in characterizing those Pashtuns who have sex with men who would kill one of their own for admitting homosexuality

I'd say that the British had a word for people like that -- "SAVAGES" -- except I'd be inviting trouble from the people who piled on Sarah Hoyt, and then they'd conspire to ensure that I would never get ahead in life. (Like I care at this point.)

Eric,

You need to brush up on your Koran.

viz your comment about savages "piling on Sarah Hoyt", what are you talking about?

Political correctness deliberately - IMHO - conflates race and culture so you can't point at cultures as dysfunctional and so that anyone criticizing a foreign culture can be called racist.

What I saw today in a post by Donald Sensing that Glenn linked made me decided to return to that remark made in irony.

Only this time, I'm going to claim it for real.

I'm hardly what anyone would call a gay rights activist. I have long criticized the gay rights movement (especially gay identity politics), I don't endorse same sex marriage, in many posts I have questioned the wisdom of using human sexuality to classify people, and it would be dishonest for me to classify myself that way. I believe in sexual freedom, not judging people by the content of their orgasms, and I find sexuality classifications stultifying and oppressive.

I ask very little from people by way of ideological agreement, though. I'm even willing to concede that there is a right -- at least in a philosophical sense -- to be intolerant, even judgmental, about these things. Just because I don't care what consenting adults do with their genitalia doesn't mean I can demand the same from others.

However, there is one thing I absolutely refuse to tolerate (and I don't care what the source is), and that is demanding death for homosexuals. I have repeatedly condemned Christians who do that (as well as those associated with them), as well as Muslims. The difference, of course, is that Muslims don't just advocate killing homosexuals, they do it. In the name of their dreadful interpretation of a religion we are told is peaceful and civilized.

Sorry, but advocacy of killing homosexuals is neither peaceful nor civilized. And killing them is even less peaceful and less civilized than advocacy. It is savagery.

Yes, I consider the hooded thugs who are hanging the two young gay men in this picture to be savages:

So is Vanderbilt's chaplain who said that homosexuals should be killed:

What Chaplain Binhazim said was that [the above] hanging, and countless others in Iran and other Islamic countries, was dictated by the basic tenets of Islam and that he agrees with those tenets. Hence, these executions are right and proper and unobjectionable.

You may recall that when Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007, he said there are no homosexuals in Iran. Now we know why. He has them killed.

Let me be clear of my own position here. Asked a straightforward question, Mr. Binhazim gave an equally straightforward answer: This is what Islam says and I am bound by the tenets of Islam to accept it. I personally do not think he should be disciplined or fired for answering the question, even as bluntly as he did.

But the point here is that because the man advocates savagery, that makes him a savage. I'd say that about any Christian who advocates killing homosexuals too.

And would someone then me that I need to study the Bible? I doubt it. So what's with telling me I need to study the Koran?

I would hate to think that we live in a world where it's OK to call Christian savages savages, but we have to tiptoe around the sensibilities of Muslim savages lest we offend them by calling them what they have demonstrated themselves to be.

When we can no longer call savages savages, civilization suffers.

So I'll say it again. Those who advocate killing homosexuals are savages.

Such a point would seem so obvious and unremarkable to most civilized people that it's really not saying much. It requires no more of a moral standard than saying that slavery is evil. And naturally, all civilized people would condemn Islamic slavery just as much as they would Christian slavery, right?

Obviously then, my ironic hesitation in the previous post was unnecessary.

I've been so preoccupied with personal business yesterday and today that I have had no time to blog about whatever is happening in the real world. I haven't even had time to look. Between a household repair emergency and trying to help out a friend who has become a villain in a compelling but false narrative, I am only now venturing into the real world of regular onlineliness. I have still not checked my email, the news, nothing.

But still, the narrative thing pisses me off. I won't get into detail about what it is, but there is a disease which affects the human mind which I should call want-to-believe-itis. Hmmm.... Maybe it's more properly an ism. Wantingtobelieveism. We all fall for it, Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservative, and of course libertarians including yours truly. For some reason, when we hear something that resonates with whatever narrative we've got going, we just want to believe it. If, for example, I started a convincing rumor (from, say a "staffer who refuses to be named") that a well-known conservative senator used the n-word in reference to President Obama, lots of lefties would love it, and could be depended upon to repeat it. And once "established" by numerous quotes and links going to each other, it would be believed by more and more people who wanted to believe it. Same thing if there was a rumor that a senior presidential advisor who used to be a ballet dancer had been caught in flagrante delicto with a page boy and that Obama forces are covering it up while paying money and making threats to the boy's family. Wantingtobelieveism works that way.

It is now looking like AGW has been fueled by phony or sexed up statistics, which in turned fueled another Wantingtobelieveist cult.

The process disgusts me, and I wish there was a way to drive a stake through its heart. But that's impossible, because the heart lies in the human brain.

I have covered the troubles the ITER fusion project is having in ITER Gets Clipped which covered the American view of ITER's troubles. The The European Voice is taking a look at the problems from an European view.

ITER's projected costs have soared since the first estimates were made in 2001. Contributions will generally be made in kind (through provisions of construction materials, reactor components, labour and expertise). The EU's total in-kind contribution was estimated at €1.491 billion in 2001. By 2008, when the EU's Fusion for Energy agency, which was set up to manage the EU contribution to ITER, reviewed the costs, the estimate had risen to €3.5bn.
Rising costs

Concerns about the ballooning budget led the Commission last year to set up an expert group tasked with reviewing the construction costs. The group's report, released to member states last month and seen by European Voice, said that the construction costs alone could rise as high as €1.5bn (compared to a 2001 estimate of €598 million).

The report said that the increase was a result of "omissions or underestimates" in the original estimates, inflation in concrete and steel prices and "changes in specifications".

The Commission has set up a task-force to identify sources of additional funding for ITER. One option being considered is a loan from the European Investment Bank.

Interesting that the budget was low balled to get things going and then things started spiraling out of control. Making up for missing resources in out years always costs a lot more than budgeting for them from the start. We see this in the space program all too often. The reason is that you have people you have to keep on board while changes are being made. What we in engineering like to refer to as "the burn rate" - the amount you have to spend to keep going while actual progress halts to make the changes. Every day's delay can cost millions of dollars. Then there is the problem of bringing new people up to speed. Adding people to a late project will often increase the delay over what making do with the people you have will cause. It is easy to get into a regenerative mode where you can never finish at an acceptable time with an acceptable budget. Another thing that happens when you add new people to a project is that the design suffers because the new people never know as much as the old hands.

Fredrick Brooks originally looked at this problem with respect to big software projects. He published his observations in a 1975 book called The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.

It is probably the best book on big project management ever written so far. I have used his insights often in my engineering career. Management will hardly ever listen to these types of insights at the beginning. But occasionally you can get them to accept the insights provided once a project is in trouble.

Let me add that the much smaller Polywell Fusion project is not having any such difficulty. Physicist Rick Nebel said of his WB-7 experiment: it "runs like a top". Rick has been mum about WB-8 progress. Since he has the same team that did WB-7 working on WB-8, I expect he will deliver the knowledge required on time and within budget. Of course he has an advantage. It is easier to keep a small project ($ millions) on time than it is to do the same for a large project ($ billions). If the experiments look promising I expect that he will have a lot more trouble getting a real power plant operational. The logistics get harder.

You can look at recent list of the design problems ITER faces at Talk Polywell.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Are we facing an epidemic of "Internet addiction"? Apparently so.

There are more and more studies like this warning of dire dangers, which are said to include depression and the risk of suicide:

Study leader Dr Catriona Morrison, from the Institute of Psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds, said: "The internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker side."

The scientists employed the internet to carry out their research.

An online questionnaire was used to assess levels of internet dependency and depression in 1,319 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 51.

In general, the longer people spent online the more depressed they tended to be, the scientists found.

"There was a high correspondence between the amount of time spent on the internet and levels of depression," said Dr Morrison. "If you look at how dependent people feel they are on the internet that is likely to correspond with how happy or sad they feel."

Her team identified a small group of 18 hard-core internet users who spent many hours online each day and were classed as "internet addicted".

Their average depression score was more than five times higher than that of non-addicted users, and they were more likely to be moderately or severely depressed.

The addicts spent proportionately more time browsing porn sites, gaming sites and online communities. They also tended to be young, having an average age of 21.

Although they only made up 1.2% of the total number of participants, this was a higher fraction than the 0.6% of people in the general population who are addicted to gambling.

"While many of us use the internet to pay bills, shop and send emails, there is a small subset of the population who find it hard to control how much time they spend online, to the point where it interferes with their daily activities," said Dr Morrison.

"Our research indicates that excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don't know is which comes first - are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?

"Now we need to investigate the nature of that relationship and consider the issue of causation."

Incidents such as the spate of suicides among teenagers in the Welsh town of Bridgend in 2008 have led to questions about the psychological dangers of social networking sites. Some experts are worried about their potential for fuelling depressive thoughts in vulnerable teenagers.

As to the correlation between the Internet and depression, it wasn't that long ago that I read about another study linking television watching to depression. It should come as no surprise that depressed people (as well as people with various anxiety disorders which might make them not want to leave the house) would tend to engage in passive forms of entertainment. It's all too easy to say that this is what "caused" the depression, but is there any reason to suppose that taking away their TV and Internet would make them happy? Depression has been with humanity for a long time. Winston Churchill called it "my black dog" and he used to build brick walls in his garden. (Today that would probably be called an obsessive building addiction or something.)

Since Internet addiction seems here to stay, I thought I'd take an unscientific look at the popular addictions and see how they compare on Google.

Because it's where the addiction word came from, drug addiction ought to to be the granddaddy of them all, and it does get a whopping 12,100,000 hits. Internet addiction is of course close behind and at 8,700,000 hits, I think it's fair to call it our fastest growing addiction.

However, you would have to add drug and Internet addictions together to surpass what seems to be the number one addiction -- sports addiction, which at 16,400,000 hits, seems to be the top-rated addiction.

At 9,770,000 hits, music addiction is only slightly ahead of Internet addiction. But that may change. As to which addiction is "better for you" (more "wholesome" perhaps), that would seem to depend on your point of view.

EDITORIAL NOTE: It might be Google, or it might be my error, but music addiction seems to have done down to only 6,350,000 since I first wrote this post. Are people that fickle about such serious matters?

Maybe it's a form of addiction nostalgia, but today I pity poor television addiction. A much-discussed topic among concerned parents when I was a child, today it seems almost left out. Only 1,280,000 hits. Even cell-phone addiction is ahead of the television, with 1,870,000 hits. Not bad, but even the ubiquitous cell phone has a little ways to go to catch up with shopping addiction -- currently standing at 2,000,000.

Anyway, I don't want into an extended debate about how wholesome or healthy (or unwholesome or unhealthy) any of these things are. My purpose here is only to look at the various addiction ratings. (Or "ratings of addictions" -- take your pick.)

Lagging behind cell phones is the
NASCAR addiction, which has 1,160,000 hits. Surprisingly, gambling addiction (despite the hype) comes in slightly behind NASCAR, with 1,020,000 hits. Go figure.

Not to sound classist or anything, but where I grew up, many a man was addicted to golf. Yet today, golf addiction doesn't even break a million -- at 919,000 hits. Slightly behind that is Skiing addiction (905,000).

Another popular (and therefore addictive) pastime is surfing, but I left out the numbers, because the activity is so hopelessly entangled with Internet addiction (via "surfing" the web or the Internet), that any number would be misleading.

It may come as a surprise to many people, according to Google, Porn addiction (939,000) is ranked more highly than either skiing or golf.

There are few things I can think of that are more "wholesome" than exercise, but even that can be addictive, and there are a number of sites devoted to combating it. However, out of fairness, I don't think it's reasonable to rate exercise addiction according to the 1,320,000 Google hits it receives, because many of them refer to exercise in the context of fighting other addictions. But if exercise can be addictive too, doesn't that beg the question of whether addicts are just substituting one addiction for another?

While I didn't mean to overlook work addiction, with 551,000 hits, the good old all-American work ethic just doesn't seem to be stretched to the obsessive compulsive proportions it was in my childhood. Perhaps Going Galt has helped people break free from these neurotic chains.

Make of these numbers what you will. But I was surprised to find so many addictions, and I am sure there are many that I overlooked. It occurs to me that if so many of us are as addicted as it seems we so obviously are, we might be in danger of becoming a nation of addicts. And if things get to the point where we are all addicted to one thing or another, doesn't this beg the question of what addiction is, and whether it is unhealthy? Who gets to decide these things? The same people who seem ready to declare that we are all suffering from one mental illness or another?

At the rate things are going, pretty soon we'll all be abnormal. I guess I can handle such a fate, but sooner or later someone is bound to ask, "if we are all abnormal, then what is normal?" And if we're all sick, what is well?

Reuters has pulled a story on how the Obama Administration intends to short circuit any incipient American economic recovery by stealth tax raises.

NEW YORK (Reuters.com) -The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.

In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year -- effectively a tax hike by stealth.

While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.

The targeted tax provisions were enacted under the Bush administration's Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. Among other things, the law lowered individual tax rates, slashed taxes on capital gains and dividends, and steadily scaled back the estate tax to zero in 2010.

If the provisions are allowed to expire on December 31, the top-tier personal income tax rate will rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent. But lower-income families will pay more as well: the 25 percent tax bracket will revert back to 28 percent; the 28 percent bracket will increase to 31 percent; and the 33 percent bracket will increase to 36 percent. The special 10 percent bracket is eliminated.

Investors will pay more on their earnings next year as well, with the tax on dividends jumping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent and the capital-gains tax increasing to 20 percent from 15 percent. The estate tax is eliminated this year, but it will return in 2011 -- though there has been talk about reinstating the death tax sooner.

And why was the story pulled? Instapundit says it was due to pressure from Obama who claims the story is in error - at least in part.

- Our budget explicitly calls for permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. - Our budget explicitly calls for allowing the top rate on dividends to increase to 20% for households making over $250,000. - Our budget accounts for the cost of continuing the AMT "Patch". The last administration's budgets ignored these costs, but we explicitly account for them. - Our budget extends expiring tax provisions through 2011.

Brilliant.

Perhaps Obama needs to read a book. This book: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.

I like what one reviewer had to say when discussing what he learned from reading the book.

3. The struggle over economic policy in the 1930's was really an episode in the long, historical conflict between business participants in the market and anti-business academics. Roosevelt gave free rein to the professors, until the start of the Second World War led him to realize that he would need the tycoons to help mobilize to defeat Hitler. I suspect that one reason that Roosevelt and the New Deal come off so well in the conventional wisdom is that history books are written by professors, not by entrepreneurs.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Did you know that if you like small breasts on women, you're likely a "pedophile"?

I didn't, but today I learned that some people think that, and they're just the kind of people who enjoy career censorship. In Australia, they're behind an effort to insist on large-breasted women in porn. No really. (I couldn't make this up if I tried.)

A reader writes, "Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as 'abhorrent.'"

The Board has also started to ban depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year. Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint's Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications. "We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size", she said. "It may be an unintended consequence of the Senator's actions but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late".

The war on sex can take many twisted turns. Fortunately, I have yet to see an equivalent effort like this in the United States. But ideas spread, don't they?

I'm surprised that no one has picked up on the possible latent homophobia displayed by the censors. It is well known that small-breasted women (and the men who find them attractive) have long been ridiculed as "gay," with the women being called "boys" or "boyish" in a direct attempt to impute homosexual pedophilia. A classic example of this was the reaction of Frank Sinatra's ex to his marriage to Mia Farrow:

Ava Gardner on Frank Sinatra's marriage with Mia Farrow: 'I always knew Frank would end up with a boy.'

In practice, what this amounts to is a ban on androgynous porn. I suppose that if they were "fair," they would also ban male porn models who lacked sufficient muscle definition, or who were deemed insufficiently hirsute.

People are of course free to criticize or condemn the sexual tastes of others, but Australia is a good lesson in what happens when the government gets into the business of setting sexual tastes.

And if you don't think there are organized activists in this country who are just chomping at the bit to get into regulating porn, why, there are plenty of sites like this where you can go have yourself a scroll. I keep telling myself that people like that are few in number and only represent the lunatic fringes of cultural conservatism.

But I've also seen similar activism on the left, so I worry.

MORE: A commenter to the above worries about the size issue in the context of men:

Next they will ban porn with men with smaller penises because it may promote pedophilia.

Here is a list of the T Party candidates:

GOP Primaries:
Adam Andrzejewski - for Governor
About 15% in a race where the top vote getters got 20%. Not bad. But he came in 5th.

Don Tracy - Lt. Governor
About 11% - 3rd place

Jason Plummer - Lt. Governor
About 34% - 1st place so far. Second place has 33% of the vote.

Kathleen Thomas - United States Senate
About 7% - 4th place.

John Arrington - United States Senate
About 3% - 6th place.

Bobby Schilling - United States House
Unopposed

Not a bad night for T Party Candidates in the first election in Illinois in which the T Party was a real factor. It looks very likely that Jason Plummer will be the Republican Candidate for Lt. Governor. He is ahead by about 7,000 votes.

Let me add that I saw Dave Winters on the tube. Dave is a local Democrat in State Government and he was talking like a Republican - lower taxes, less regulation, lower the cost of workers comp., make Illinois more business friendly. He said Illinois was losing jobs to Indiana and Wisconsin. I think the hand writing is on the wall. And I liked his punk haircut.

You can check The Chicago Sun Times for the latest preliminary results. The results are not final until the State certifies them.

Cross Posted at Power and Control

Sean Kinsell has noted a downright authoritarian streak in Frank Rich, and quotes a remarkable passage from his column about President's SOTU address:

One year into Obama's term we still don't know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.

But to be fair to Frank Rich, it may be that he's more than just an angry liberal with armchair fantasies about slamming people around. Physically, he has heft -- every bit as much as your stereotypical doughnut-munching policeman. And I think that many a doughnut-munching policeman (regardless of political orientation) would agree with the general philosophy of the sentiment Sean identified.

So where does this leave Frank Rich? What sort of man advocates body blows?
If a right wing pundit had urged George W. Bush to do that, wouldn't he be accused of authoritarianism? Of "eliminationist rhetoric"?

Frank Rich's views are shared by many on the left, and his latest authoritarian "body blows" broadside is being cited with approval at TPM, while other commenters are repeatedly urging President Obama to eat doughnuts!

Really, now. This almost makes me feel sorry for the president. Because after all, doughtnuts are extremely dangerous (witness the crackdown in New York and other cities), and to urge the president to eat them comes close to urging him to take poison. Surely they know doughnuts are bad for people. Do they wish ill-health upon the president? What's up with such nastiness?

doughnuts are rich. obama is blue. and as we all know, transfats will kill you!

Hmm...

Sounds like a strong undercurrent of eliminationist rhetoric to me.

And doesn't it just beg the question of another subtext running through the TPM thread?

Um, might it be that Frank Rich actually enjoys eating doughnuts? (Wink wink?)

I won't go so far as to say "when you've seen one doughnut-munching authoritarian you've seen them all," but would it be too nasty to wonder whether Frank Rich and Chief Wiggum were separated at birth?

Please, don't anyone blame Sean for the above. He only inspired my fearless investigation.