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June 30, 2009

The company you keep

The quality of the reporting on events has been pretty poor, with even supposedly knee-jerk rightwingers like Fox News buying into the "coup d'etat" meme, notwithstanding the Honduran Supreme Court and the Congress essentially ordering the military to act, in accordance with their nation's laws.

Charles Krauthammer addressed our Supreme Leader's rather misguided response on last night's panel segment of Special Report.

Well, the president has a knack for getting all of these big decisions wrong. Two weeks ago, he refuses to meddle in a country where peaceful demonstrators are getting shot by a theocratic dictatorship. He doesn't want to choose sides.
 
And now he's eager to meddle on behalf of the president in Honduras who is a Chavez wannabe, who is strong-arming his way to a referendum — that has been declared illegal by his Supreme Court — as a way to...establish a constituent assembly which will establish a new constitution, which will be a Chavez-like dictatorship.
 
That's what everybody understands in Honduras, and that's why the Supreme Court had ruled the referendum illegal. Only Congress has a right to call it, not the president. Congress had denounced it.
 
The Supreme Court had told the military not to assist in the referendum because it's illegal. So Zelaya fires the chief of staff of the army. The Supreme Court orders him reinstated; he fires him again.
 
This guy is acting extra-constitutionally. Yes, he was elected, but Hitler was as well, and Chavez also was. It's easy to dismantle a democracy if you're president and if you are intent on doing it — and [Zelaya] is intent on doing it.
 
So our decision ought to be: Yes, a coup isn't a nice thing, but it's preferable to having Zelaya dismantle the democracy. And we should insist on the elections of a president as scheduled in November, so it is a temporary situation.
 
Look, a rule of thumb here is whenever you find yourself on the side of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro twins, you ought to reexamine your assumptions.

Sometimes the company you keep says a lot about who you are.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:58 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 28, 2009

Shortchanging national defense

The federal government exists if for no other reason than to provide for the common defense, yet the current budget proposed by Pres. Obama will slash defense spending to levels not seen since before September 11, 2001. Hard though it may be to believe for my pacifist friends, the United States, even under the allegedly bloodthirsty Pres. Bush the Younger, spent less money on defense as a percentage of GDP than did even the Appeaser-in-Chief, otherwise known as Jimmah Carter.

The North Koreans are threatening to launch a nuke towards Hawaii, and the Secretary of Defense announces that we're sending an ocean-going ballistic missile interception system to protect the state. And yet Obama's budget cuts the funding for ballistic missile defense -- which is actually a perfect metaphor for this government, demanding that we get something for nothing, while spending trillions for something we'll never get, like a solvent GM, or better healthcare via socialized medicine.

So, to reiterate, North Korea has gone nuclear and nutty, the Iranians plan on getting the Bomb, no matter how much Obama begs them not to, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez threatens to invade Honduras, and we keep slashing funding for the military.

Well, at least there's money for PBS, NPR and the NEA, to keep us informed and entertained.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

California's top Democrat: Conservative voters are terrorists

This is perhaps the most outrageous thing I've heard uttered by an American politician in recent history. Karen Bass, the Democratic Party's top dog in the California Assembly, was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times' Patt Morrison; the wide-ranging conversation touched on a variety of topics, including why Bass thinks women are better then men when it comes to governing.

But the Assembly Speaker, who talked about her background as a "community activist" (why am I not surprised?) really got going when asked about the relationship between Republicans and voters.

Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature's work?

A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: "You vote for revenue and your career is over." I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair.

Opposition to "revenue" -- notice Bass never says "tax increases" -- is "terrorism"? Voters who demand that Republicans hold fast and vote against tax increases are "terrorists"? My loathing for this politician, this feckless crapweasel who equates fiscal responsibility in this post 9-11 world with terrorism, is incandescent.

And who knew that free speech could be so darn "extremely unfair"? Democracy can be so inconvenient, especially when your putative subjects won't go along with the Politburo's Five Year Plan.

Patterico points out that Republicans pledged to vote against take increases and won the votes of their constituents as a result of their promise to control spending, instead of raising taxes. Pat links to a study from the Reason Foundation laying out in unambiguous terms that California is bedeviled by out of control spending, which cannot be cured or fixed through ever higher taxes.

Examining the state’s revenues clearly demonstrates there is not a revenue problem. Since FY 1990-91, revenues have increased 166.9 percent, or 5.61 percent a year, and have risen rather steadily over this period.

In FY 1990-91, the state took in over $38 billion in General Fund revenues. In FY 2008-09 revenues are $102 billion. Based on these revenues, if California had simply limited its spending increases to the 4.38 percent average increase in the state’s consumer price index and population growth each year since FY 1990-91, instead of a $42 billion deficit, the state would be sitting on a $15 billion surplus this year.

The study examines specific problem areas, including the huge increase in the number of state employees (9.3 for every 1,000 Californians), as well as the explosion in education spending (with crap-tastic results); it's an easy read, with informative charts, too. Check it out.

Pat comments about Assembly Speaker Bass and her Democrat cohorts in Sacramento:

This is the sort of attitude we’re seeing in Sacramento. They want to do what they want to do (raise taxes ad infinitum) — and they’re so very irritated at having to deal with petty annoyances like their signed pledges, and the voters’ wishes.

The arrogance is breathtaking, the condescension maddening, and the contempt for the democratic process (from California "Democrats," no less, is, unfortunately, not particularly surprising.

If this is what passes for political leadership, Californians are doomed.

Posted by Mike Lief at 04:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Looking for ammo?

I've been reading that the ammo shortage -- bare shelves nationwide for most calibers -- is beginning to ease, but it's still hard to find a lot of popular and not-so-popular flavors, and what there is to be had is often quite expensive.

This fellow keeps a running post of 7.62mm NATO on the market, with the following info broken out: supplier, country of origin, year of manufacture, lot size, and, most important, cost per round. First posted in February 2005, it was last updated on June 23.

There are links to the retailers selling the ammo, too. It's a convenient and valuable resource.

If 7.62 NATO isn't on your shopping list, the folks at M4Carbine.net have posted links to a number of on-line retailers, making the shopping process a bit less painful. They haven't done the cost-per-round analysis like the fellow I just told you about, but it's still quite helpful.

Check 'em both out.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2009

Michael Jackson: Puh-leeze

I really hadn't planned on posting anything on the death of America's creepiest celebrity, but the unseemly and undeserving avalanche of media coverage, along with the outpouring of manical adulation from otherwise sane citizens has provoked a response, including -- but not limited to -- nausea and revulsion.

Jonah Goldberg posted his thoughts over at National Review; they're exactly on point, and worth excerpting.

... I find the media’s instinctive rush to sanctify Michael Jackson disgusting.

Look, I understand that Michael Jackson was an “icon.” I understand that some people loved his work and that many people who never met him believed they loved the man too.

But I didn't, and I’m hardly alone. If Michael Jackson were just another famous person, I’d probably stay silent and let the pro forma celebration of his memory roll by without comment. (For instance, I have no problem whatsoever with the media taking a moment to pay respects to Farah Fawcett).

[...]

I think part of [the problem] is the narcissism of our celebrity culture. Here was a guy so many of “us” read about in People magazine for so long. His passing, therefore, isn’t a loss in the sorrowful sense of the word, but in the selfish one. It’s a loss of an interesting subject, a creature to gossip about and to fill a few minutes on E! or Entertainment Tonight.

[...]

Calling Michael Jackson an icon doesn’t let him off the hook for anything. But to listen to the news anchors you’d think it absolves him of everything.

I say: Who cares who his famous friends were? Who cares what a “fascinating” person he was? If you want to talk about his death as an end of an era, have at it. But that’s not what the Barbara Walters set is doing.

I know that Michael Jackson wasn’t convicted of the despicable crimes he was accused of. And that’s why he never went to jail. Three cheers for the majesty of the American legal system. But in my own personal view, he wasn’t exonerated either. Nor was he absolved of his crimes because he could sing, moonwalk, or sell 10 million records. (Though many of us suspect the money and fame he made from those things is precisely what kept him out of jail).

And, while I merely think he was a pedophile, I know he was not someone responsible parents should applaud, healthy children emulate, nor society celebrate.

And while we’re at it, his relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.

Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we're hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.

If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.

[...]

Michael Jackson had many accomplishments. But the press is sanctifying him because he was famous, deservedly so to be sure, but not because he was good.  So much of the coverage seems to miss this fundamental point, as if being famous made him good.

I feel sympathy for Jackson’s family and friends who understandably mourn him. But I can't bring myself to mourn him any more than I mourn the random dead I read about in the paper everyday. Indeed, I confess to mourning him less.

Every channel says this is a sad day for America. I agree. But not for the same reasons.

The only thing I can add is my profound disappoint at the number of long-time friends who have seemingly taken leave of their senses, mourning the passing of this deeply flawed -- I'll go further and say "evil" -- man who preyed upon children, because he also had the ability to entertain.

The most charitible explanation is that my friends are engaging in a bit of self-reverential navel-gazing, mourning the loss of their youth, along with the singer who provided the soundtrack to their school days and parties.

In the meantime, Iranians are rioting for their freedom, Congress is getting ready to pass the most massive tax hike in the nation's history, and the destruction of our healthcare system is fast approaching.

Like Goldberg, I think this is indeed a sad day for America; the media -- and the public -- should take a deep breath and get a grip.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:19 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 25, 2009

Choosing to live in the palace of your memories

Gerard Vanderleun has written a remarkably moving piece about his 100-year-old uncle, a man who has lived a long and full life but now sits quietly in a rest home, eyes closed, seemingly lost in the depths of dementia.

But what if dementia was a choice? And what if choosing dementia made sense?

If you knew that everyday for the rest of your life, you'd be dressed in diapers and confined to a wheelchair with blurred eyesight in a small brick walled room what would you do? If you knew that at every meal for the rest of your life a woman who talked to you as if you were a baby would spoon three flavors of baby food into your mouth, what would you do? If, opening your eyes, you knew that all you would see would be a bright fluorescent glare and the blurred shapes of dozens of others, mostly women, lolling about in wheelchairs, what would you do?

If you knew to a dead, solid certainty that you were never going to be released from your room until you were released, at long last, from your body, what would you do? If you were a sane man, just what would you, at long last, do?

I don't know about you, but I would figure a way out and if that way out was only deeper in, that's where I'd go. I'd go deep into my palace of memories and I'd use all my energy to construct a world inside that was made of the most vivid moments of all the years I'd lived.

I'd be building the world's worst sandcastle on the beach in Balboa as my father and uncle tossed a football back and forth on the hot sand. I'd be waking up in the back seat of our 1951 Chevy and seeing my grandparents' faces pressed against the glass as the first snow I'd ever seen fell softly behind them in the twilight. I'd be with my first wife on my wedding night at the Pierre. I'd be at my job on the better days. I'd be in a taxi in New York going downtown at three in the morning making all the lights. I'd go back to a warm field in a California twilight and listen to the breath and laughter of a young girl heard once and never again. I'd sit in the sun in front of a rose-covered cottage in Big Sur. I'd be laughing on the Spanish Stairs or weaving drunk along a cliff road on Hydra under a bronze moon and above a wine-dark sea. I'd be high up in a hotel in Paris looking down at the Seine in the rain. I'd hold my one-year-old daughter over my head while lying on the grass in the Boston Public gardens in the spring and see her face framed with cherry blossoms. Those and a million other rooms in my Palace of Memory I'd visit over and over again until they all ran together in a blur as the train, accelerating, finally left the station and leapt towards the stars and beyond and, finally forgetting all of that, I saw for a fleeting moment the mystery complete.

More than anything else, I would not be in that room any more than I absolutely had to.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Eyewitness to eruption

Astronauts on the International Space Station just happened to be above a volcano when it erupted, capturing some stunning photos of the initial blast punching a hole through the clouds.

The Daily Mail (U.K.) reports:

Sarychev Peak, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, had been sitting quietly in the Kuril Island chain near Japan for 20 years, when it suddenly sprang to life on June 12.

Fortuitously, the International Space Station was flying overhead at the time, and managed to capture this spectacular image of the ash-cloud tearing through the atmosphere, sending clouds scattering in its wake in a perfect circle.

The station, which orbits the earth from a height of 220 miles, makes nearly 16 orbits of our planet every 24 hours, and happened to be in the perfect spot to see the dramatic eruption.

The unique images have provided a wealth of new information about the eruption process, and volcanologists are now excitedly poring over the data.

Most unique is the mist-like 'roof' to the cloud, believed to be either steam or condensing water pushed ahead of the advancing cloud of ash. Known as a 'pileus cloud', it lasts just moments, making this a rare snapshot.

Also visible, far below on the hillside, is the thunderous pyroclastic flow of super-heated rock as it cascades down the mountainside ... Appearing at the start of an explosive eruption, they can travel at 130mph, meaning there's nearly no escape for anyone or anything caught in its path.

But the most stunning aspect of the picture is the effect on the clouds: As the ash column punches its way towards the top of the atmosphere, the shockwave causes the clouds to scatter.

An alternative theory, one which these pictures is helping to test, is that as the ash rises, the surrounding air is pushed down, where it warms, and the increased heat causes the clouds to evaporate.

[...]

The last explosive eruption from Sarychev happened in 1989, with eruptions in 1986, 1976, 1954, and 1946 also producing lava flows.

Ash from the eruptions has been recorded to reach more than 1,500miles from the volcano and commercial airline flights have been disrupted.

The height of the plume was measured at five miles high - a huge distance into the sky, although not enough to worry the astronauts peering down from above.

The space program has yielded unexpected discoveries over the years, serendipity often playing a part in the process. The odds against astronauts being in the perfect location to observe the instant the volcano erupted must be galactically high, and yet here we are, with high resolution photos of something never seen before.

Oh, sure, pyroclastic flows have been seen over the centuries, just not often by people who live to tell about it.

Vulcanologists must be giddy.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 23, 2009

Ed McMahon, 1923-2009

Boy, do I miss Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, the once and future king of late night TV and his trusty wingman. Carson was always fun to watch, a gentleman and a pro, and McMahon provided a warm Irish bluster to play off Carson's waspy Midwest reserve.

The irony of their on-air relationship is that McMahon was an officer during World War II, a Marine pilot during Korea, as well, retiring from the Air National Guard as a brigadier general. Carson spent the war as an enlisted man in the navy, dungarees and dixie cups. Carson used to joke about the role reversal, but I don't think I'd ever seen a picture of McMahon during the war.

There are a many obituaries running today highlighting McMahon's years on the Tonight Show, with photos of him in his dotage. I've always liked those obituaries that show the subjects not as elderly, rheumy-eyed pensioners, but rather as they were in their prime, strong handsome men and gorgeous gals in dresses straight out of a '40s Warner Bros. film.

So, let me do you the favor of a couple of shots of Ed McMahon in his prime.

Here's McMahon in uniform during the Big One, looking quite dapper. He was good enough in the cockpit to get instructor duty, training the guys heading overseas.

This shot was taken in 1951, when McMahon was hosting his own TV show in Philadelphia. Although he spent decades at Carson's side, McMahon always had solo gigs lined up, too.

Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon ended their 30-year run in 1992, and late nights just haven't been the same for me -- and millions of other Americans of a certain age -- ever since.

Rest in peace.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 22, 2009

Prostate

http://discoverysedge.mayo.edu/de09-2-kwonblute/

Learning you have prostate cancer is bad enough, but then to be told that your condition is inoperable can be devastating. That’s where Rodger Nelson found himself. He and his wife Carol were wintering in California. Doctors there made the diagnosis, but it wasn’t until he decided to return home to Minnesota for treatment that he was told an experimental therapy was his best option.

“I arrived Tuesday and was told my surgery was scheduled for Friday,” says Nelson. “But when the final test came back late on Thursday, I was told the surgery was cancelled.” MRIs had shown the tumor had grown beyond the prostate and was encroaching on the stomach. That’s when urologist and surgeon Michael Blute, M.D., referred his patient to urologist and immunologist Eugene Kwon, M.D., who was conducting a clinical trial on prostate cancer.

Dr. Kwon had been working on the foundations of this study for over ten years, when he did the initial laboratory and modeling studies when he was on staff at the National Institutes of Health. He was a practicing surgeon at Loyola Medical Center recruited to Mayo Clinic by Dr. Blute and then developed collaborations with him and others.

“The goal of the study was to see if we could modestly improve upon current treatments for advanced prostate cancer,” Dr. Kwon explains. “The candidates for this study were people who didn’t have a lot of other options. However we were startled to see responses that far exceeded any of our expectations.”

Though many men experience prostate cancer when older, the cancer usually doesn’t progress quickly enough to be life threatening. However, a significant subset are aggressive forms of prostate cancer. These are aggressive, virulent and deadly, advancing so quickly, that diagnosis often comes too late for any effective therapy. They are the second largest killer of men with cancer. Currently all treatments for the aggressive forms are palliative, not curative.

Study coordinator Diane Mann, R.N., M.S.N., says that hearing a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer can be disheartening. “Many of these patients are told by their urologist to get their personal business in order because they likely have only months to live. Learning about our clinical trial offers them some hope.”

“We heard Dr. Kwon’s presentation,” says Nelson, “my family, my wife and my children. And we decided to join his study.” Nelson was injected with an experimental drug called MDX-010. One dose, administered by IV, takes about 3 hours, including observation. Nelson describes it as painless. He was also placed on hormones to reduce his testosterone levels. Then he went home to Alexandria, Minn.

In Vera Cruz, Mexico, Fructuoso Solano-Revuelta, owner of a wholesale food supply company, found himself in a similar situation — with a cancerous tumor the size of a golf ball that had grown from the prostate into the bladder. In March 2008, he phoned Mayo Clinic’s office in Mexico City. “When I heard I had prostate cancer I took the first airplane to the best clinic in the world.” His feelings stemmed from Mayo’s previous treatment of his father and the fact that his physician brother had trained in orthopedics at Mayo.

Tricking the Immune System

Before receiving the MDX-010, both men underwent a hormone therapy called androgen ablation. It’s a combination of a pill that blocks testosterone and an injection tells the brain to order the testicles to stop producing it. This removal of testosterone from the system usually shrinks the tumor to some degree.

When Dr. Kwon was a surgeon at Loyola Medical Center in Chicago, he observed that during androgen ablation prostate tissues are swamped with immune cells — T cells — due to cell injury or death, as they are dependent on testosterone (Mercader et al, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2001, 98:14565-70). At the same time, a second observation was made by Dr. Kwon’s collaborator, J.P. Allison, M.D. (then at UC Berkeley, now at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center). He found the first off-switch for T cells. It’s called the CTLA-4 (cytotoxiclymphocyte-4) receptor (Leach et al, Science. 1996, 271:1734-6).

Cancer has a propensity for turning off T cells. Dr. Allison hypothesized that if you block the off-switch, T cells will stay turned on and create a prolonged immune response. Dr. Kwon, then at NIH, demonstrated that CTLA-4 blockage could be used to treat aggressive forms of prostate cancer in mice (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 1997, 94:8099-103). There was one limitation to that concept — the worry that by simply leaving all the T cells on there may not be enough response aimed at the tumor. Dr. Kwon called Dr. Allison and designed the trial together. The idea: use androgen ablation or hormone therapy to ignite an immune approach — a pilot light — and then, after a short interval of hormone therapy, introduce an anti-CTLA-4 antibody that acts like gasoline to this pilot light and overwhelms the cancer cells. MDX-010 (now called Ipilimumab) is the clinical antibody being tested in the Mayo trial.

Patients Influencing Research

Several weeks went by. Rodger Nelson noted that his PSA scores were dropping about 50 points a month. At the end of four weeks Fructuoso Solano-Revuelta saw his go from a high of 74.4 to 1.2. “Within the next month it was undetectable. The MRI in June showed the tumor was quite a bit smaller,” he explained. “Then in September the radiologist who performed the MRI was quite surprised. He asked if I had undergone radiation therapy. I said no.”

On Nelson’s MRI the shadows representing the tumor extending from the prostate and into the abdominal area had disappeared. His PSA was also undetectable. The discussion with Nelson and his wife, Carol, returned to the issue of surgery. The physicians wanted to wait.

“I never thought surgery should be totally off the table in my husband’s case,” says Carol Nelson, a retired registered nurse. “I always thought the answer was more than just this therapy. It wasn’t easy to tell a Mayo physician that, but they really listen to patients here.” Dr. Kwon and Dr. Blute left the room to talk and returned to suggest they vote on the idea of surgery.

“There were four people in that room and I was the only one who didn’t vote for surgery,” says Rodger Nelson. “I quickly came around.”

In this way, according to Dr. Kwon, a patient and his family influenced the direction of Mayo research. “We left the room to consult with each other,” says Dr. Kwon, “because history had taught us that surgical treatment of advanced forms of cancer like this were disappointing and oftentimes unadvisable. It was Carol Nelson who pressed us to entertain a surgical approach. Dr. Blute and I realized we were in uncharted waters. This was something new.”

“Were it not for Carol Nelson’s tenacious nature we would not have gone off study. You have to handle the voices of the researchers, the surgeons and the patients and their families. We remained flexible. This was a significant collaboration.” By ultimately opting for surgery, Rodger Nelson left the clinical trial, opening the way for discovery. Within a few days Solano-Revuelta’s check up revealed similar findings.

“I realized something unusual had happened when Dr. Kwon saw the results. He ran off to find Dr. Blute — and then the two of them came running down the hall. They were surprised and happy and they were saying ‘Incredible’ and ‘This is a fantastic result!’ I heard Dr. Kwon say, ‘This is like the first pilot breaking the sound barrier.’” Like Nelson, surgery was also scheduled for Solano-Revuelta.

With Nelson, Dr. Blute spent more time in the OR than planned. “I was cutting away scar tissue, while trying to find cancer cells. The pathologist was checking samples as we proceeded and sent word back asking if we had the right patient. He had a hard time finding any cancer. I had never seen anything like this before. The pathologists were floored.” The same story played out for Solano-Revuelta. In that case there were two phone calls from pathology, one asking if he was operating on the correct patient.

Both investigators are quick to point out that the outcomes in these two patients need to be validated in further studies. Plans are already underway for extended trials at Mayo Clinic to determine the dosage to optimize this therapy and explain how this combined treatment actually works.

“It’s important for us to understand the mechanism of favorable response in these patients,” says Dr. Blute. “This could have significant implications for other forms of cancer, including hormone-sensitive forms, such as breast and ovarian cancer.

Dr. Kwon agrees, praising highly collaborative interactions as essential for important discoveries. He credits Dr. Blute for his knowledge and his grasp of how study findings and experience in the OR can be synergistic in moving scientific approaches to useful clinical treatments. He also does not underplay the significance even though publication of the findings will await more data.

“This is one the holy grails of prostate cancer. This is what we’ve been seeking for years. Now we’ve got to build on this.”

Both patients return regularly to Mayo Clinic for follow up. Both are free of cancer, feel fine and have returned to their businesses.

“You know, I am 71,” says Solano-Revuelta, “but I have the spirit of a 25-year-old.”

Carol and Rodger Nelson will celebrate their 43rd wedding anniversary in November.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:14 PM

The downside of faster-than-light travel

There's some good news/bad news for space travel advocates and sci-fi fans. First the good news: Faster-than-light travel may be possible!

Now the bad news:

"Star Trek" makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole.

[...]

In normal physics, nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Einstein's theory of relativity forbids it. In normal space any object approaching the speed of light will increase in mass exponentially, and require an exponential increase in the amount of power needed to propel it forward.

There are two exceptions to this rule however. The first is what's commonly called a worm hole, a bridge connecting two different parts of space. A ship crossing this bridge would move at below light speed, but still arrive before a beam of light that would have had to go the long way around.

Warp drives are the second and more appealing option. A ship can't move through space faster than the speed of light. But with enough energy, space itself can move faster than the speed of light.

Known for the Mexican physicist Michael Alcubierre who originally developed the idea in the 1990's, an Alcubierre warp drive would create a bubble of energy behind the ship and a lack of energy in front of the ship, like a giant cosmic wave a space ship could surf. That particular section of space can travel faster than the speed of light in the surrounding space, and anything on or in that bubble will accelerate with it.

[Researchers] propose creating this bubble of space-time by using a massive amount of "exotic matter," or dark energy. (Exactly how this bubble would be created is still a mystery.) According to their calculations and simplified, it would take a huge amount of energy to create the bubble, and then increasing amounts of energy to contain the highly repulsive dark energy.

Eventually the energy would run out. The bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10^32 degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble.

Anyone watching the ship nearby wouldn't be much better off.

Surfing the leading edge of a space/time bubble, before being shredded-vaporized?

Cowabunga, dude!

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Can a journalist be an American?

In the February 1996 edition of The Atlantic author James Fallows wrote an article: "Why Americans Hate the Media." The subtitle rephrased the question and offered an answer: "Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems."

Fallows opens his article by recounting one of the most compelling things I've ever seen on television, a panel discussion on ethics and morality in wartime, a discussion that highlighted the professionalism of the American military -- and the profound moral rot at the core of the journalism trade, personified by the two media stars participating in the debate.

In the late 1980s public-television stations aired a talking-heads series called Ethics in America. For each show more than a dozen prominent citizens sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator. The series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull, but at least one show was riveting in its drama and tension.
The episode was taped in the fall of 1987. Its title was "Under Orders, Under Fire," and most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school's famous Socratic style.

During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion.

Ogletree asked Downs to imagine that he was a young lieutenant again. He and his platoon were in the nation of "South Kosan," advising South Kosanese troops in their struggle against invaders from "North Kosan." (This scenario was apparently a hybrid of the U.S. roles in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) A North Kosanese unit had captured several of Downs's men alive--but Downs had also captured several of the North Kosanese. Downs did not know where his men were being held, but he thought his prisoners did.

And so Ogletree put the question: How far would Downs go to make a prisoner talk? Would he order him tortured? Would he torture the prisoner himself? Downs himself speculated on what he would do if he had a big knife in his hand. Would he start cutting the prisoner? When would he make himself stop, if the prisoner just wouldn't talk?

Downs did not shrink from the questions or the implications of his answers. He wouldn't enjoy doing it, he told Ogletree. He would have to live with the consequences for the rest of his life. But yes, he would torture the captive. He would use the knife. Implicit in his answers was the idea that he would do the cutting himself and would listen to the captive scream. He would do whatever was necessary to try to save his own men. While explaining his decisions Downs sometimes gestured with his left hand for emphasis. The hand was a metal hook.

Ogletree worked his way through the other military officials, asking all how they reacted to Frederick Downs's choice. William Westmoreland, who had commanded the whole U.S. force in Vietnam when Downs was serving there, deplored Downs's decision. After all, he said, even war has its rules. An Army chaplain wrestled with how he would react if a soldier in a morally troubling position similar to Downs's came to him privately and confessed what he had done. A Marine Corps officer juggled a related question: What would he do if he came across an American soldier who was about to torture or execute a bound and unarmed prisoner, who might be a civilian?

The soldiers disagreed among themselves. Yet in describing their decisions they used phrases like "I hope I would have the courage to . . ." and "In order to live with myself later I would . . ." The whole exercise may have been set up as a rhetorical game, but Ogletree's questions clearly tapped into discussions the soldiers had already had about the consequences of choices they made.

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening's panel, better known even than Westmoreland. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.

Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, he replied. Any reporter would--and in real wars reporters from his network often had.

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.

What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?

Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans."

Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked.

Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."

Ogletree turned for reaction to Mike Wallace, who immediately replied. "I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," he said, obviously referring to himself. "They would regard it simply as another story they were there to cover." A moment later Wallace said, "I am astonished, really." He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: "You're a reporter. Granted you're an American" (at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship). "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."

Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn't Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot?

"No," Wallace said flatly and immediately. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"

Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said: "I chickened out." Jennings said that he had "played the hypothetical very hard."He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.

As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush's National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. "What's it worth?" he asked Wallace bitterly. "It's worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon."

After a brief discussion between Wallace and Scowcroft, Ogletree reminded Wallace of Scowcroft's basic question. What was it worth for the reporter to stand by, looking? Shouldn't the reporter have said something ?

Wallace gave a disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "I don't know." He later mentioned extreme circumstances in which he thought journalists should intervene. But at that moment he seemed to be mugging to the crowd with a "Don't ask me!"expression, and in fact he drew a big laugh--the first such moment in the discussion. Jennings, however, was all business, and was still concerned about the first answer he had given.

"I wish I had made another decision," Jennings said, as if asking permission to live the past five minutes over again. "I would like to have made his decision"--that is, Wallace's decision to keep on filming.

A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform. Jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell said, "I feel utter contempt."

Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell said, Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces--and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. When that happens, he said, they are "just journalists." Yet they would expect American soldiers to run out under enemy fire and drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield.

"I'll do it!" Connell said. "And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get . . . a couple of journalists." The last words dripped disgust.

Not even Ogletree knew what to say. There was dead silence for several seconds. Then a square-jawed man with neat gray hair and aviator glasses spoke up. It was Newt Gingrich, looking a generation younger and trimmer than he would when he became speaker of the House, in 1995. One thing was clear from this exercise, Gingrich said. "The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have."

That was about the mildest way to put it. Although Wallace and Jennings conceded that the criticism was fair--if journalists considered themselves "detached,"they could not logically expect American soldiers to rescue them--nevertheless their reactions spoke volumes about the values of their craft. Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story." In other important occupations people sometimes face the need to do the horrible. Frederick Downs, after all, was willing to torture a man and hear him scream. But Downs had thought through all the consequences and alternatives, and he knew he would live with the horror for the rest of his days. When Mike Wallace said he would do something horrible, he barely bothered to give a rationale. He did not try to explain the reasons a reporter might feel obliged to remain silent as the attack began--for instance, that in combat reporters must be beyond country, or that they have a duty to bear impartial witness to deaths on either side, or that Jennings had implicitly made a promise not to betray the North Kosanese when he agreed to accompany them. The soldiers might or might not have found such arguments convincing; Wallace didn't even make them.

The series, "Ethics in America," and this episode, "Under Orders, Under Fire (Part 1)", can be viewed as a streaming video, and it's well worth your time.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:33 AM

June 21, 2009

Jib Jab on the powers of the president

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2009

Are there any grownups in charge at the White House?

"Professional" skateboarder Tony Hawk rides his skateboard in the White House Saturday, with the permission of the current residents.

According to the Daily News, the Obama Administration gave Tony Hawk permission to ride his skateboard in the White House, with photos of the middle-aged man gliding down the hallways on his toy.

I was bothered when I saw the photo on Drudge this afternoon; it strikes me as fundamentally unserious and undignified, an unfitting use of our White House. Greg Gutfeld thinks it says something about the current occupants of the President's home, too.

Am I an old fart or am I right to be pissed that some jackass is skateboarding down the halls of the White House while all this Iranian shit is going down?

We truly have succumbed to the idiocy of the MTV/Mountain Dew/Road Rules backward hat and baggy short culture. Did I miss something, or is the White House the future set for the next Real World? Where are the wallet chains? Is Hot Topic handling our foreign policy? Obama should be grounded for a week for letting Tony Hawk play in OUR house. Where in hell are the adults?

Look: Tony Hawk is in his mid forties. He’s a grown man…and he skateboards. Could you imagine your dad or anyone who lived during World War II treating a man who skateboards with anything less than scorn and ridicule?

Right now, people are risking their lives for the glimmer of freedom, and Tony Hawk is in the White House tweeting about Frosted Flakes.

Someone please dig up Reagan. I’d take a dead leader with balls over a living camp counselor who wants all the cool kids to like him.

What a screaming joke.

It's a joke, alright. The joke's on us.

So why am I not laughing?

George Bush, a president with whom I had numerous disagreements -- hell, he ultimately drove me away from rejoining the GOP -- believed that the White House and the office of the president deserved respect, and as such declared that the era of jeans and sneakers, favored by his predecessor, was over on the day he took office. Suit and tie was the dress code, and class and dignity were the watchwords.

The Bush years were derided by liberals, who claimed that our international reputation suffered as a result of the supposed rube in charge. These same folks proclaimed that Pres. Obama would swiftly restore us to our proper place of honor on the international stage, through his spectacular oratory, intellect and charm.

Instead we're treated to days of waffling and indecision as millions of Iranians demonstrate against the repressive regime of the mullahs -- and the spectacle of eternal adolescents goofing off in the heart of the American presidency.

Can you imagine what the mullahs are thinking? What the steely eyed Russian strongman Putin must think? How this looks to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il? Serious men all. Deadly serious.

Does "serious" seem like the most accurate adjective to describe our nation's leaders?

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Iko Iko

Man, does this song ever take me back to the '80s. It's a cover of the Dixie Cups "Iko Iko," this version recorded by the all-girl English group The Belle Stars in '82 and subsequently used in Rainman and another Tom Cruise film, Mission Impossible 2.

Make sure to hit the "HQ" button for a better picture.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 18, 2009

Barbara Boxer: What an embarrassment

Barbara Boxer has long been an embarassment, perhaps the stupidest senator in a chamber chock-full-o-idiots, but this is compelling evidence that California is represented by an insecure maroon.

Overheard at a Senate hearing yesterday:

"Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?' It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title. I'd appreciate it."

--Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to Brigadier General Michael Walsh during Senate hearing Tuesday, when he the general repeatedly said, "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," when answering Boxer's questions at hearing she chaired on New Orleans' levee system.

In the military, it is a sign of respect to refer to someone as "Sir" or Ma'am," and is also a means of recognizing that the person being so addressed is higher in rank. Futhermore, if one watches C-Span on a regular basis, it becomes apparent that military officers refer to male senators as "Sir" far more often than "senator." As a matter of fact, referring to someone by his rank -- instead of "Sir" -- can sometimes be perceived as a subtle act of insubordination.

One would think that Boxer, having been in the Senate for far too many years, would have noticed her male colleagus being called "Sir," as well as her fellow Californian, Diane Feinstein, being addressed as "Ma'am."

Furthermore, Boxer hasn't "worked so hard to get that title." She is an elected representative of the People. I'd say she was a feckless crapweasel, like the rest of the politicians, but that's just me. We don't have royalty in this country, no peerage; if "Mr." is good enough for the president, then Boxer can accept the same honorific as the rest of her colleagues.

If her deep-seated insecurity about her incompetence and stupidity will allow her to stop demanding special treatment from General Walsh.

Way to go, Babs. Nothing screams gravitas and dignity like a whine and a pout.

Jimmy Dugan: Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There's no crying! THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!

Doris Murphy: Why don't you give her a break, Jimmy...

Jimmy Dugan: Oh, you zip it, Doris! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game. And did I cry?

Evelyn Gardner: No, no, no.

Jimmy Dugan: Yeah! NO. And do you know why?

Evelyn Gardner: No...

Jimmy Dugan: Because there's no crying in baseball. THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL! No crying!

Cripes.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Mark Steyn: Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody

Mark Steyn, whose political expertise is dwarfed only by his encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical, recently noted the passing of Sam Butera, the saxophonist who engaged in spirited note-for-note duels with Louis Prima.

Steyn also discussed perhaps their most famous number, Just A Giggolo/I Ain't Got Nobody, reintroduced -- some might say stolen -- to a new generation by rocker David Lee Roth in the '80s.

Sam [Butera] died in Las Vegas a few days ago, and, if you never saw him during his half-century at the Sahara and other landmarks on the Strip, you missed a treat. As Louis Prima's saxophonist, he was an indispensable component of what was billed as "The Wildest Show In Vegas". And they were: Butera, Prima, Keely Smith, together in a rowdy, bawdy on-stage party that did a lot to define the desert resort in its early days.

[...]

The on-stage dueling - with Louis scatting lines of ever more frenetic gibberish and demanding that Sam instantly recapitulate them on the sax - delighted audiences right up until the day, in 1975, when Prima fell into an irreversible coma. After the shock, Butera picked up his horn and went back to work, providing customers for another quarter-century almost as much fun sans Prima. Almost.

[...]

"I Ain't Got Nobody" was written before America entered the First World War, and "Just A Gigolo" was composed over a decade later and thousands of miles to the east as a melancholic Teutonic reflection on what had happened to the Habsburg Empire in the wake of that war. In 1928, a composer called Leonello Casucci and a lyricist by the name of Julius Brammer enjoyed a big hit in Austria called "Schöner Gigolo". And, as was often the case back then, a New York publisher noticed its success in Europe and snapped up the English-language rights (one feature of our supposedly more "multicultural" age is how comparatively parochial the music biz is compared to 80 years ago).

The US publisher handed it to my old friend Irving Caesar to adapt. As you'll know if you read my obituary of him in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, I adored Caesar, mainly because, to the impressionable lad I was back then, he was exactly what you were looking for in an old-time songwriter: A small man with a shock of white hair and a bow tie, he chewed cigars, sang songs, and regaled you with well-honed anecdotage about his biggest hits - and flops. Among the latter was a disaster of a Broadway show called My Dear Public, which earned him the worst notices he'd ever had. He served as the show's lyricist, librettist, co-composer and producer. "Okay, they didn't like it," he told Oscar Hammerstein. "But why blame me?" He went to a costume party dressed as his near namesake, Julius Caesar, but got pulled over for speeding. "Name?" demanded the cop.

"Caesar," said Caesar.

"A wiseguy, huh?"

When I knew him, he lived in the Omni Park Central in New York, having moved in many decades and several remodelings earlier. So you'd pass through a lobby of chrome or leather or whatever that season's hotel decor was, and then cross Caesar's threshold and step back through the years, to a Tin Pan Alley publishing house, circa 1924. Irving would recline in his BarcaLounger, singing "Swanee" or "Tea For Two" or another of his hits, squeaking the chair in time to the music.

I asked him about "Just A Gigolo" and, for a few minutes, he stopped squeaking. His credo was simple - "I write fast. Sometimes lousy, but always fast." So, when he was handed "Schöner Gigolo", he decided he liked the tune - a simple melody, but given a wistful bittersweet quality by the underlying harmony - and that he'd get someone to translate the German text and tell him what it was all about, and then he'd write it, fast. When he saw the translation, he realized Julius Brammer had written an allegory of Austro-Hungarian post-imperial decline in which a former hussar who still recalls the good old days is forced to eke out a living as a gigolo. Caesar reckoned that nobody in America cared about social upheaval in the Habsburg Empire but thought the basic scenario had potential. "I moved him to France," he told me, "and then I begin by describing him":

'Twas in a Paris cafe that first I found him
He was a Frenchman, a hero of the war
But war was over, and here's how peace had crowned him
A few cheap medals to wear, and nothing more
Now ev'ry night in this same cafe you'll find him
And as he strolls by, the ladies hear him say,
'If you admire me
Please hire me...'

I loved how Irving sang that line to me in his BarcaLounger that day: "If you admire me/Please hire me..." He put a real yearning into it, really getting into the part. Which was impressive, because it would be hard to conjure anything less like a Parisian gigolo than a genial bachelor pushing ninety. (Irving told me he didn't want to get married too young. In the end, he waited till he was a hundred to tie the knot, and died the following year at 101.) Anyway, after that bit of Jolsonesque pleading, complete with outstretched arms, he went into the chorus. "Schöner Gigolo" translates as "beautiful gigolo", but Caesar decided to go for something more alliterative:

I'm Just A Gigolo
Ev'rywhere I go
People know the part I'm playing
Paid for ev'ry dance
Selling each romance
Ev'ry night some heart betraying...

And, if you know the Louis Prima record, that line is most likely unfamiliar to you. But that's how everyone sang it when Caesar unleashed it on the English-speaking world 80 years ago. That's how Crosby did it, and Ted Lewis, Ben Bernie, Leo Reisman and the other bandleaders who made the first recordings. That's how it went on the big screen, too, after "Just A Gigolo" proved so popular that they used it as the title for a 1931 feature film and a 1932 Betty Boop cartoon.

But that was all ancient history by the time Louis Prima and Sam Butera were reconstructing the song a quarter-century later. So here's what Louis sang:

I'm Just A Gigolo
Ev'rywhere I go
People know the part I'm playing
Paid for ev'ry dance
Selling each romance
Oooooooh, what they're saying...

In Prima's version, he sings two choruses of "Gigolo", and then:

When the end comes, I know
They'll say Just A Gigolo
Life goes on without me
'Coz
I...
Ain't Got Nobody...

Somehow, Prima and Butera had hooked up Julius Brammer's metaphor for post-Habsburg Austria with a somewhat self-pitying ballad from 1915, written by a fellow son of New Orleans, Spencer Williams. The composer of "Basin Street Blues", "I've Found A New Baby", "Everybody Loves My Baby" and more, Williams has an enviable catalogue, but in 1956, having relocated to Stockholm, he'd more or less given up on "I Ain't Got Nobody", for whom there'd been few takers since the bluesier mamas like Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith had given it some mileage back in the Twenties. Who knows how or why the muse descends? But somehow Butera and Prima decided to combine "Just A Gigolo" with "I Ain't Got Nobody", and make it a nightly Vegas ritual:

I'm so sad and lonely
(Sadandlonelysadandlonely)
Won't some sweet mama
Come and take a chance with me?
('Cause I ain't so bad...)

That lyric's wandering some ways from the 1915 original, too. But the Prima medley rescued the song, using the exotic scenario of "Just A Gigolo" as a foundation to pile on, tongue in cheek, the self-pity of "Nobody". In April 1956, Sinatra's producer Voyle Gilmore brought Prima, Butera, and the Witnesses (with Keely Smith among the backing vocalists) into the Capitol studios in Los Angeles and put "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" down on record. It wasn't a big chart hit, but it became a classic of sorts.

Three decades later, I called Irving Caesar to wish him a happy 90th birthday. For an old guy, he always seemed to have a new lease of life, professionally speaking. And so it was this time. "I'm back in the Hit Parade," he barked down the phone. "'Just A Gigolo.' Some black fellow out on the coast covered it." Actually, it was a white fellow - David Lee Roth of Van Halen - and, if memory serves, he's from Indiana. But, other than that, Caesar had got the essentials right: "Just A Gigolo" was back in the charts. Or, rather, "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody". And, to my amazement, upon hearing the record, I discovered he'd lifted the Louis Prima medley note for note (albeit without Sam's sax).

As I say, I was amazed. Sam Butera, on the other hand, was mad as hell. "He copied my arrangement note for note," Butera told The New York Times, "and I didn't get a dime for it."

[...]

In essence, David Lee Roth decided to launch his solo career with an act of karaoke. And not only did he lift another guy's arrangement but he couldn't understand why Butera would be miffed about it. One night, while the Witnesses were playing in Vegas, Roth swung by to catch the act and, afterwards, hailed Butera with a cheery, "Hey, Sam!"

"Who are you?" asked the sax man.

"I'm David Lee Roth," replied the rocker.

"Then where's my money?" said Butera.

[...]

Five years ago, during the 2004 presidential election, here at SteynOnline, thanks to an avalanche of lyrics submitted by readers, we started running a weekly "John Kerry Songbook" of pop parodies: An extraordinary number of them were versions of "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" - or in John Kerry's case, as one reader put it, "I'm Just A Gigolo/I Don't Like Nobodies". One day someone will figure out something new to do with "Just A Gigolo", and somewhere on the other side of the planet someone else will come up with a new wrinkle on "I Ain't Got Nobody". But for now those whom Sam Butera joined together no man can put asunder. A three-minute medley cooked up at the Sahara Hotel that will play forever:

When the end comes, I know
They'll say Just A Gigolo
Life goes on without me.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 17, 2009

Louis Prima: Jungle Book

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:57 PM

June 14, 2009

Introducing the newest member of my family: Roscoe!

This is the newest member of our family: Roscoe. We found him at the Camarillo shelter, the same place that brought Bogie into our lives seven years ago. Roscoe's about a year old, a quiet, gentle dog. He and Bogie get along, although it remains to be seen if he and Pepper the Cat can achieve peace in our time.

Bogie (foreground) and Roscoe (background) quickly discovered that they were good partners for the U.S. Dog Olympics Synchonized Napping Competition.

Here's another view of Bogie and Roscoe, enjoying the numerous dog beds scattered throughout our home. It truly is a dog's life around here. Where do I sign up?

This is the view that greeted me when I rounded the corner at the animal shelter when we first met. Roscoe's reacting to a weird noise I was making.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Why do GM interiors suck?

The Truth About Car's Robert Farago says an inside source -- dubbed "Agent X" -- has given him the scoop on why GM's interiors haven't measured up to the standards set by the foreign competition:

[E]ver since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

Well, did the DPG at least send a list of changes to the design and production teams? “The tweaks were never reported to anyone,” he says. “That would’ve been a sure way to kill your career . . . We’d see the cars come back to us after production with the exact same problems.”

According to Farago's source, the problem is getting worse, too, which should really help GM (Government Motors, thanks to the bailout) reclaim market share.

Make sure to read the comments following the article.

I particularly like the fellow who purchased two Corvettes -- and noticed that "The Legend Lives" sticker on the door was applied crooked to both of them.

Years ago, when I was at The New Jersey Herald, I picked up an Oldsmobile Achieva at the plant to drive for a week and review. The fit and finish was horrendous, leading me to become probably the millionth journalist to dub it the "Unda-Achieva." Did I mention the razor blade left in the pocket behind the door handle? Ouch.

It was around the same time that I took a good look at the Cadillac CTS, the supposed reputation-making car at the New York AutoShow. Glue on the carpeting, glue on the headliner, misaligned interior panels -- it was a quality-control nightmare.

However, in all fairness, my GMC Sierra pickup has a pretty sweet interior, with high-grade plastics and soft-touch surfaces.

Well, there is that rattle from the A/C vent the dealer couldn't figure out. And the diesel exhaust smell in the cab, but that's only when the REGEN cycle for the particulate filter is running, nothing having the windows down and an air-sickness bag close by can't fix.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 13, 2009

The story behind the famous last words

In the annals of "Famous Last Words," perhaps none have drawn more derisive snorts than those of an American general who admonished his troops that they had nothing to fear from snipers, telling them, "The couldn't hit an elephant --" just before being gunned down.

The broad outlines of the incident are correct, but Union General John Sedgwick's death was more than an oddity of war; he was a respected member of the Army's leadership during a time when incompetents and politicians in uniform managed to get their soldiers slaughtered in a seeming endless series of poorly fought and miserably led battles.

A contemporary account of his death was written by Martin T. McMahon, Brevet Major-General, U.S.V.; Chief-of-Staff, Sixth Corps.

ON May 8th, 1864, the Sixth Corps made a rapid march to the support of Warren, near Spotsylvania, about 5 P.M., and passed the rest of the day in getting into position on Warren's left. After nightfall General Sedgwick rode back into an open field near General Warren's headquarters and, with his staff, lay down on the grass and slept until daylight. Shortly after daylight he moved out upon his line of battle.

We had no tents or breakfast during that night or morning. The general made some necessary changes in the line and gave a few unimportant orders, and sat down with me upon a hard-tack box, with his back resting against a tree. The men, one hundred feet in front, were just finishing a line of rifle-pits, which ran to the right of a section of artillery that occupied an angle in our line. The 1st New Jersey brigade was in avarice of this line.

After this brigade, by Sedgwick's direction, had been withdrawn through a little opening to the left of the pieces of artillery, the general, who had watched the operation, resumed his seat on the hard-tack box and commenced talking about members of his staff in very complimentary terms.

He was an inveterate tease, and I at once suspected that he had some joke on the staff which he was leading up to. He was interrupted in his comments by observing that the troops, who during this time had been filing from the left into the rifle-pits, had come to a halt and were lying down, while the left of the line partly overlapped the position of the section of artillery. He stopped abruptly and said,
"That is wrong. Those troops must be moved farther to the right; I don't wish them to overlap that battery." I started out to execute the order, and he rose at the same moment, and we sauntered out slowly to the gun on the right.

About an hour before, I had remarked to the general, pointing to the two pieces in a half-jesting manner, which he well understood, "General, do you see that section of artillery? Well, you are not to go near it today." He answered good-naturedly, "McMahon, I would like to know who commands this corps, you or I? " I said, playfully, "Sometimes I am in doubt myself"; but added, "Seriously, General, I beg of you not to go to that angle; every officer who has shown himself there has been hit, both yesterday and to-day." He answered quietly, "Well, I don't know that there is any reason for my going there."

When afterward we walked out to the position indicated, this conversation had entirely escaped the memory of both.

I gave the necessary order to move the troops to the right, and as they rose to execute the movement the enemy opened a sprinkling fire, partly from sharp-shooters. As the bullets whistled by, some of the men dodged. The general said laughingly, "What! What, men, dodging this way for single bullets! What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." A few seconds after, a man who had been separated from his regiment passed directly in front of the general, and at the same moment a sharp-shooter's bullet passed with a long shrill whistle very close, and the soldier, who was then just in front of the general, dodged to the ground. The general touched him gently with his foot, and said, "Why, my man, I am ashamed of you, dodging that way," and repeated the remark, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." The man rose and saluted and said good-naturedly, "General, I dodged a shell once, and if I hadn't, it would have taken my head off. I believe in dodging." The general laughed and replied, "All right, my man; go to your place."

For a third time the same shrill whistle, closing with a dull, heavy stroke, interrupted our talk; when, as I was about to resume, the general's face turned slowly to me, the blood spurting from his left cheek under the eye in a steady stream. He fell in my direction; I was so close to him that my effort to support him failed, and I fell with him.

Colonel Charles H. Tompkins, chief of the artillery, standing a few feet away, heard my exclamation as the general fell, and, turning, shouted to his brigade-surgeon, Dr. Ohlenschlager. Major Charles A. Whittier, Major T. W. Hyde; and Lieutenant Colonel Kent, who had been grouped near by, surrounded the general as he lay. A smile remained upon his lips but he did not speak. The doctor poured water from a canteen over the general's face. The blood still poured upward in a little fountain. The men in the long line of rifle-pits, retaining their places from force of discipline, were all kneeling with heads raised and faces turned toward the scene; for the news had already passed along the line.

I was recalled to a sense of duty by General Ricketts, next in command, who had arrived on the spot, and informed me, as chief-of-staff, that he declined to assume command of the corps, inasmuch as he knew that it was General Sedgwick's desire, if anything should happen to him, that General Horatio G. Wright, of the Third Division, should succeed him. General Ricketts, therefore, suggested that I communicate at once with General Meade, in order that the necessary order should be issued. When I found General Meade he had already heard the sad intelligence, and had issued the order placing General Wright in command.

Returning I met the ambulance bringing the dead general's body, followed by his sorrowing staff.

The body was taken back to General Meade's headquarters, and not into any house. A bower was built for it of evergreens, where, upon a rustic bier, it lay until nightfall, mourned over by officers and soldiers. The interment was at Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2009

Lost liberty

Classical conservatives often lament the loss of freedom in modern-day America, stolen not by a jack-booted dictatorial regime, but by a nannystate determined to infantilize the American people.

Douglas Young, a political science & history professor at Gainesville State College in Georgia, has captured the lament of conservatives (like me), who remember growing up with freedoms that must seem unimagineably reckless and ... dangerous to today's safety-addled citizens.

We so feared a Stalin or Hitler that we ignored endless assaults on our liberty by idealistic home-grown statists and the seductive narcotic of ever more government goodies buying our acquiescence.

What makes Americans' surrender to statism so shameful is that we freely chose this course in direct contravention of our founding principles.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain's Huck Finn are verboten - required reading in those decadent days of my 1970s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.

Similarly, so many high schools have become gated, closed campuses. Mine was wide open. 'Zero tolerance' for drugs and violence policies punish students carrying aspirin, cough drops, and Tweety-Bird key chains. Now diligent do-gooders want to ban school coke machines as well. And to think at my high school we could even smoke!

Today political correctness constipates free speech at many schools (as well as in much of the public and private sectors), and hysterical sexual harassment policies suspend children for hugging a classmate. If you had predicted all this to my 1980 senior high class, we would have laughed that you had smoked some mighty bad dope to conjure up such an Orwellian dystopia.

Young folks' freedom has been lost off campus as well. The drinking age has of course been raised, and now there is a host of teen driving restrictions I never had to obey. But we have all lost so much liberty. Look how government's neurotic nannies have restricted us with a host of seatbelt, child seat, and helmet laws. Likewise, so many cities and states ban smoking even in private restaurants and bars. A WWII vet can not even light up in his own bar.

So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O'Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we would all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.
Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we have lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we are set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea. Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.

In recent years, obsessive-compulsive environmental regulations halted a Massachusetts town from using fireworks on Independence Day since an 'endangered' bird's nest was found near it. News flash: on July 4 we celebrate independence from a tyrannical government. Yet George III never taxed, regulated, or policed us remotely as much as Washington, D.C. does today. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says "Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory".

Everywhere rules and paperwork mushroom as nit-picking bureaucrats grow in numbers and power. As a buddy bemoaned, the increasingly shrill message of the establishment is “Sit down - and shut up". No wonder so many Americans feel frustrated and impotent.

Why has our liberty eroded so badly? Statist public schools have long taught that equality (of results) and 'social justice' trump freedom since liberty is the handmaiden of 'selfish' individualists harming 'the community'. As we have grown affluent, there is more desire to protect everyone from risk, and our burgeoning welfare state demands ever more of our economic liberty. Plus, as societies get more secular, they become more socialist (see Western Europe).

We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety.

But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned:

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Steyn on the EMP apocalypse

Mark Steyn, writing in McLean's

link

“ ‘Hey, Dad, something strange.’

“ ‘Yeah?’

“ ‘Listen.’

“He stood there silent for a moment. It was a quiet spring evening, silent except for a few birds chirping, the distant bark of a dog . . . rather nice, actually.

“ ‘I don’t hear anything.’

“ ‘That’s it, Dad. There’s no traffic noise from the interstate.’

“He turned and faced toward the road. It was concealed by the trees . . . but she was right; there was absolute silence. When he had first purchased the house, that had been one disappointment he had not thought of while inspecting it but was aware of the first night in, the rumble of traffic from the interstate a half mile away. The only time it fell silent was in the winter during a snowstorm or an accident . . .

“ ‘Most likely the accident’s further on and people were told to pull over and wait,’ he said.

“The girls nodded . . . It was almost eerie. You figure you’d hear something, a police siren if there was indeed an accident, cars down on old Highway 70 should still be passing by.

“And then he looked up. He felt a bit of a chill.

“This time of day any high-flying jets would be pulling contrails . . . ”

But there aren’t any contrails, or jets. It’s America “one second after,” to use the title of William R. Forstchen’s novel.

One Second After what? After an EMP attack. What’s EMP? “Electromagnetic pulse.” You’re on a ship hundreds of miles offshore floating around the ocean, and you fire a nuke. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hit Cleveland, or even Winnipeg. Instead, it detonates 300 miles up in the sky at a point roughly over the middle of the continent. No mushroom cloud, no fallout, you don’t even notice it. That’s the “second” in One Second After and what comes after is America (and presumably pretty much all of Canada south of Yellowknife) circa 1875—before Edison. The cars on the interstate stop because they all run on computers, except for Grandma’s 1959 Edsel. And so do the phones and fridges and pretty much everything else. If you were taking a hairpin bend when your Toyota Corolla conked out, don’t bet on the local emergency room: they’re computerized, too. And, if you’ve only got $27.43 in your purse, better make it last. The ATM won’t be working, and anyway whatever you had in your account just vanished with the computer screen.

Mr. Forstchen tells his tale well, putting an up-to-the-minute scientifically sound high-tech gloss on an old-fashioned yarn. One Second After is set in small-town North Carolina, but the stock characters of Anyburg, U.S.A. are all here—the sick kid, slow-on-the-uptake local officials, gangs of neo-barbarians, the usual conflict between self-reliant can-do types and the useless old hippies. I liked this passage:

“ ‘What a world we once had,’ he sighed.

“The parking lot of the bank at the next corner was becoming weed-choked, though that was being held back a bit by children from the refugee center plucking out any dandelions they saw and eating them.”

And at that point I stopped thinking of One Second After as a movie-thriller narrative, and more in geopolitical terms. After all, the banks in America and western Europe are already metaphorically weed-choked, and may yet become literally so. In the Wall Street Journal a couple of months back, Peggy Noonan predicted that by next year the mayor of New York, “in a variation on broken-window theory, will quietly enact a bright-light theory, demanding that developers leave the lights on whether there are tenants in the buildings or not, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression no one’s here and nobody cares”—or, to put it another way, lest the world stand on a rise in New Jersey and get the impression Manhattan’s already been hit by an EMP attack. A friend of mine saw his broker in February and asked him where he should be moving his money, expecting to be pointed in the direction of various under-publicized stocks or perhaps some artfully leveraged instrument novel enough to fly below the Obama radar. His broker, wearing a somewhat haunted look, advised him to look for a remote location and a property he could pay cash for and with enough cleared land and a long growing season. My friend’s idea of rural wilderness is Martha’s Vineyard, so this wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear.

And this is before EMP hits.

So it wipes out your bank accounts. What’s in there? I mean, really. The average American household is carrying $121,953 in personal debt. What would be so bad if something goofy happened and all the meters got reset to zero? And Joe Schmoe’s credit card debt is as nothing compared to what the government’s signed him up for: USA Today recently calculated that the average American household is on the hook for $546,668 in federal debt—i.e., not including state and municipal. The Atlantic crunched the numbers further and reckoned that, to pay off the federal/personal debt over half a century at three per cent, the average household would have to write an annual cheque for $25,971. U.S. median household income is 50 grand, before taxes—and that $26,000 cheque assumes no further increase in federal or personal liabilities.

Critics of USA Today’s methodology say they’ve conflated two separate things—hard government debt, and the rather more amorphous obligations of Medicare, social security and other unsustainable entitlement programs. But, insofar as that’s a distinction with a difference, it’s the entitlements that are harder to slough off. A couple of decades down the road, Greece’s public pensions liabilities will be approaching 25 per cent of GDP: for the political class, it’s easier to default on foreign debt and risk unknown consequences than to renege on social commitments and ensure the certainty of violent insurrection. As attractive as it might be to tell ingrate geezers to go eat dog food, it’s not politically feasible in a democracy in which they’re the most electorally vindictive demographic group.

Besides, in a society that’s all but eliminated the concept of moral hazard, who isn’t entitled to government largesse? The North American auto industry pays its workers so much that it’s unable to make a car at a price anyone’s prepared to pay for it. So naturally it’s been delivered into the corporate control of the very same unions who demanded those salaries. Under the hilarious Canadian bailout, “social justice” requires that auto workers who make $70 per hour be subsidized by taxpayers making less than a third thereof. If it’s unreasonable to expect a guy on 70 bucks an hour to make provision for lean times, why should anyone else? The advanced Western democracy has, in effect, jumped the bounds of temporal and spatial reality: America lives beyond the means of its 300 million citizens to pay for it, so passes the check to its children and grandchildren. Most of the rest of the West does likewise, but demographically has no kids to stick it to.

Professor Glenn Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, noted that USA Today figure of $668,621 federal/personal debt per household and observed tersely: “Debts that can’t be repaid won’t be repaid.” Or to extend the old saw: if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If everyone owes a million dollars, civilizational survival has a problem. When I first heard about EMP a few years back, the big worry was that in a split-second it would vaporize trillions of dollars of wealth. From the perspective of 2009, vaporizing trillions of dollars of debt has something to commend it.

Published more or less simultaneously with William Forstchen’s EMPocalypse now is Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift by Paul A. Rahe, a scholarly analysis of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville and their lessons for us today. Yet both books are concerned at least in part with the relationship between the modern state and technology. Professor Rahe cites Tocqueville’s observation on absolute monarchs in whom resided “a power almost without limits”—in theory. But in practice, wrote Tocqueville, “almost never did it happen that they made use of it.” They lacked the machinery: you were in your peasant hovel upcountry and His Majesty was in his palace hundreds of miles away, and “the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.” Not anymore: regulations for this, permits for that, government identity numbers for routine transactions, computer records for every humdrum manoeuvre of existence, fulfilling Tocqueville’s vision of an administrative despotism in which all the King’s subjects could be made subordinate to “the details of a uniform set of regulations.” As the “bailouts” and “stimulus” pile up, so the micro-regulatory regime will intensify.

At least until the EMP attack.

I’m not suggesting it’s the solution to all our problems. Just saying that, compared to the various other options for advanced democratic society, William Forstchen’s apocalyptic scenario may be one of those 1950s creature features where you wind up rooting for the creature.

Posted by Mike Lief at 08:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Second Amendment applies to the states

Damon Root Reason

Last year's landmark Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller definitively settled the fact that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right—as opposed to a collective one—to keep and bear arms. Yet that ruling applied only to the federal government (which oversees Washington, D.C.). Does the Second Amendment apply against state and local governments as well?

Although Heller never answered that question, Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion did provide a very potent hint. In footnote 23, Scalia observed that while the Court's earlier ruling in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876) stated that the Second Amendment did not apply against the states, "Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases."

To appreciate Scalia's meaning, consider that the Supreme Court has been protecting First Amendment rights from state and local abuse since 1925's Gitlow v. New York. The Court has done so under the so-called incorporation doctrine, whereby most of the Bill of Rights and certain other fundamental rights have been incorporated against the states via the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, which reads, "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Cruikshank is therefore a dead letter when it comes to free speech. So why should it still matter for gun rights? As the footnote basically points out, Cruikshank was decided before incorporation had even been invented. So it's the modern incorporation doctrine that matters now, not the long-dead reasoning behind Cruikshank.

This controversy lies at the center of last week's unfortunate decision in National Rifle Association v. Chicago (formerly McDonald v. Chicago), where the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Second Amendment offers zero protection against the draconian gun control laws currently in place in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois.

It's a mistaken and also strangely misguided decision, as plaintiff's attorney Alan Gura (who previously argued and won Heller) demonstrates in the appeal he quickly filed with the Supreme Court. As Gura notes, not only did the 7th Circuit decline "to perform the required incorporation analysis," the court "erred in failing to heed Heller's cautionary statement that the pre-incorporation relics [including Cruikshank] lack ‘the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases.'"

Moreover, the 7th Circuit even suggested that federalism would best be served by letting the states disregard the Second Amendment entirely. "Federalism is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right to carry any particular kind of weapon," Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote for the three-judge panel.

Yet as Gura rightfully responds in his petition, "To claim that of all rights, the Second Amendment must yield to local majoritarian impulses is especially wrong considering that the rampant violation of the right to keep and bear arms was understood to be among the chief evils vitiated by adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment." Indeed, the 14th Amendment was specifically written and ratified by the Radical Republicans after the Civil War to protect the recently freed slaves and their white allies from the depredations of the former Confederate states, including the infamous Black Codes, which curtailed property rights, liberty of contract, free speech, and the right to keep and bear arms.

The Second Amendment deserves the exact same respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights, nearly all of which have now been incorporated, something Gura is careful to explain. Which is precisely what the 7th Circuit should have said. Moreover, Gura persuasively argues that now is the right time for the Supreme Court to correct one of its most glaring historical errors by overturning the controversial Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), which essentially gutted the 14th Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause, which reads, "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." As numerous legal historians have now documented, the text, original meaning, and history of that clause all point in one direction: It was designed to nationalize the Bill of Rights and other substantive rights.

The 7th Circuit essentially breezed past this argument, though it's perhaps worth noting that Judge Easterbrook did so while repeatedly referring to the "Privileges and Immunities Clause," which is actually located in Article IV of the Constitution, when he quite clearly meant to write (and refer to) the 14th Amendment's "Privileges or Immunities Clause." It's a small error, to be sure, though it's still one that the federal circuit ought not to make.

So what does all this mean for the future of the Second Amendment and gun rights? Last January, the 2nd Circuit, including Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, reached the same erroneous conclusion about incorporation as the Seventh did last week. Yet in April, the 9th Circuit got it right, holding in Nordyke v. King that, "the right to keep and bear arms is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition'... [and] is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty." This split among the circuits means the Supreme Court will almost certainly take up the issue.

Given that Gura's provocative and sharply reasoned appeal is now in the Court's hands, and given that Chicago's contested handgun ban so closely resembles the D.C. ban nullified last year in Heller, this case offers the perfect opportunity for the Court to fully restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place in our constitutional system.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Suckers!

link

THE OBAMA SURPRISE by Michael S. Malone

Be careful what you wish for.

No segment of American industry did more than high tech to elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. The 2008 Obama campaign will go down in history as having made better use of digital technology than any before it. From a hugely powerful website to the reproduction of the “Hope” poster on thousands of Facebook pages to the President’s own ‘tweet’ on election night, Silicon Valley played a crucial role in the success of President Obama . . .and Silicon Valley naturally assumed that the new President would do the same in return.

It hasn’t quite turned out that way. . .

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive - smart, hip, a gadget freak - and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal - new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create - to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Entrepreneurship has been the single most important contributor to the economic health of this country for at least a century now - and if you were going to systematically destroy that vitality, you couldn’t come up with a better strategy than the one Washington has put in place over the last six months. Indeed, you can make the case that the sole contribution the Obama administration has made to entrepreneurship in America to date is to force all of those millions of unemployed people to desperately set up their own businesses in order to survive.

You might imagine that this would be upsetting to all of those Valley tycoons who played such an important role in underwriting, advising and legitimizing Candidate Obama. But you would be wrong.

What I think is most misunderstood by outsiders is that the electronics industry is not monolithic, and that its players do not all share the same interests. And nowhere is this divide greater than between start-up companies and the giant, well-known corporations - even though the latter, just a few years before, were start-ups themselves.

For example, you may think that the competitive challenge that big tech companies fear most is from other big tech companies. You know: Apple v. Microsoft, HP v. Dell, Cisco v. Juniper, MySpace v. Facebook. But in fact, that isn’t the case. Sure, those are dangerous competitors; but far more threatening is that clever new start-up that seems to appear out of nowhere. That’s the threat that wakes up Fortune 500 tech CEOs at 3 a.m. That little start-up not only competes with you, it can render your entire business - even your entire industry - obsolete and you don’t even see it coming. Think desktop publishing and the printing industry, the iPod and the music industry - and just look at the terror that Twitter seems to be creating at Google and Facebook these days.

Once you understand this dynamic, a lot of the paradoxical recent business behavior in high tech suddenly becomes explicable. For example, why did the big tech companies embrace such regulations as Sarbanes and stock options expensing - even though they would cost them billions of dollars with no obvious gain? And why would they support a Presidential candidate who seemed to have little understanding of, or sympathy for, market capitalism and business?

Because it was the best strategy to crush the start-ups.
And for the most part, that strategy has worked. High tech has only seen a handful of new companies go public in the last five years - compared to hundreds per year before that. Less noticed is that this means most hot new start-up companies, instead of enjoying an IPO and becoming rich enough to compete full-on against the big boys, now can only grow to a certain size then offer themselves up to be bought by the giants. What had once been hugely valuable competition has now been reduced to a farm system for acquisitive mature companies. [And a side benefit has been the near-destruction of the venture capital industry, which big business always described as ‘vulture' capital because it drew away their most talented employees.]

Now you see why the tech world joined the Obama team early on in the campaign. Not only did Senator Obama seem like their kind of guy, but each camp saw in him the President they wanted. The entrepreneurs thought they were getting a fellow entrepreneur, and big business thought they get a confederate in taking out the competition.

No company recognized the advantages to this strategy better than Google. Having just gone public, and seeing competitive threats coming from every direction - not just from established companies and start-ups, but also jealous overseas regulators (i.e., the EU) - it saw in Candidate Obama a potential ally and protector. It’s no coincidence that Senator Obama’s first important Silicon Valley campaign appearance was at Google headquarters, or that Google was a major player at the Democratic Convention. There was even talk that CEO Eric Schmidt would be joining the Obama Administration in some key role.

But that was in November. It’s June now, and while the big companies have largely gotten their wish when it comes to new start-ups - as I’ve said, entrepreneurship is under assault in the U.S. like we have not seen in our lifetimes - the tech giants are now discovering they may have made a devil’s bargain. The Administration’s brute force handling of the Chrysler and GM take-overs, seemingly violating contract law in the process; its mutterings about managing executive bonuses; its creation of industry czars without the need for Congressional approval; and the prospect of endless debt, economic stagnation and runaway inflation waiting in the wings - all have to be making the same CEOs pretty darn nervous these days . . . and asking themselves if they’ve made a terrible mistake.

And that’s only the start. Intel, already getting hammered by a billion dollar-plus fine by the EU, is now facing a similar punishment from the U.S. Justice Department. And poor suck-up Google, which tried to be the President’s BFF, now finds itself facing multiple Federal probes regarding its recruiting policies and its book database settlement - not to mention a Justice Department that appears to be opposing it on net neutrality.

And you’ve got to figure that’s only the beginning. No doubt right now somebody in the White House is looking at the low levels of union membership in high tech and vowing to do something about it. And don’t forget anti-trust. And woe be it to any shareholders or creditors of a big tech company that finds itself in financial trouble as this recession drags on - you saw what happened to Chrysler’s shareholders and creditors.

High tech CEOs are supposed to be the smartest people you’ve ever met. And most of them are. But when it comes to politics and dealing inside the Beltway, experience has taught me that these men and women are fools, dupes and rubes - and too arrogant to realize it. They thought they were electing one of them, and someone pliable enough to help them succeed while at the same time crushing their competition.

It hasn’t worked out that way. President Obama has proven to be not only shrewder than these tech execs thought, but also far more dogmatic and old-fashioned in his world-view than they ever imagined. If, somehow - and almost everything I know about economics argues against it - the Obama economic plan works, these executives will emerge at the head of battered, compromised, but victorious corporations. But if it fails, these same execs deserve a sizable share of the blame. That’s what you call a lose-lose scenario - and they’ve brought it on themselves.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dems endangering the troops

Jed Babbin notes that Democrats seem intent on placing our own troops at risk.

The Democrats forced a House - Senate conference (by a straight party line vote, 17-13) to remove the Graham-Lieberman prohibition of release of more prisoner "abuse" photos.

Obama backed off the release earlier when Generals Petraeus and Odierno objected on the grounds that such a release would endanger the lives of our troops.

So now the Dems are on record (again) in favor of endangering the lives of our troops.

If, as liberals contend, alleged mistreatment of prisoners serves as a potent recruiting tool for terrorist groups, why would American politicians seek to release photos that would swell the ranks of violent terror cells hellbent on killing U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines?

What is to be gained by releasing the photos? Who profits from their release?

I'll tell you who stands to lose: The Americans troops killed and the families who lose loved ones as a result of this idiotic and immoral betrayal of the military by our political leadership.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 11, 2009

Is it time to worry?

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:37 AM

Is it time to worry?

The Wall Street Journal just issued this news alert:

The World Health Organization has told its member nations it is declaring an H1N1 flu pandemic -- raising the pandemic alert level from phase 5 to 6 and marking the first global flu epidemic in 41 years. The move came Thursday as infections climbed in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.

The linked article notes:

The pandemic declaration will require all countries, including the dozens that haven't yet reported any cases, to launch pandemic-prevention plans.

Peter Cordingley, a spokesman for the WHO based in Manila, noted that the term pandemic was "a measure of the spread of the virus, not the severity of the virus." The virus's effects are moderate at the moment, he noted. "But it's still going to infect an awful lot of people."

Just over half the world's confirmed H1N1 cases, or 13,217, are in the U.S., including 27 deaths, according to the WHO.

The numbers don't seem huge, and the fatalities have been few, leading many to question the need for global hypochondriasis, but here's the thing about viruses: they mutate. And history shows that devastating plagues -- pandemics -- have sometimes been preceded by large outbreaks of more benign versions of the bug, seemingly innocuous head- or chest-colds that cause only minor discomfort.

Until the virus involved mutated for reasons unknown, going from cute-and cuddly rhinovirus knock-off to a microscopic cross between a Polar Bear and a T-Rex.

What, me worry?

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 10, 2009

Lawfare strikes again

That sneaking suspicion you've had that no one in the Obama White House understands the first thing about fighting and winning wars? As it turns out, looks like you were right to be worried. The Weekly Standard's blog reports that unlawful combatants -- terrorists, brigands and jihadis -- captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan are being read their Miranda rights

[T]he Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according to a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

“The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Times article.

The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.

Under the "global justice" initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.

Thanks in part to the popularity of law and order television shows and movies, many Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning – so named because of the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona that required police officers and other law enforcement officials to advise suspected criminals of their rights.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

A lawyer who has worked on detainee issues for the U.S. government offers this rationale for the Obama administration’s approach. “If the US is mirandizing certain suspects in Afghanistan, they’re likely doing it to ensure that the treatment of the suspect and the collection of information is done in a manner that will ensure the suspect can be prosecuted in a US court at some point in the future.”

But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the 'right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation--lawyering up.”

According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”

Can you imagine what World War II would have been like with these clowns in charge?

POWs are not entitled to lawyers, access to the American criminal justice system, or the same protections afforded to criminals; they are protected by the Geneva Conventions, provided their nations are signatories to the treaty.

POWs are not entitled to Miranda warnings. POWs have a different set of obligations than do criminals: POWs are honor-bound to resist, to escape, and to kill the enemy.

Criminals, not so much.

Notwithstanding the bleatings of the Left, terrorists, brigands and other unlawful combatants are not members of a uniformed military fielded by a recognized nation-state. As such, they cannot be -- and indeed are not -- signatories to the Geneva Conventions, and are therefore afforded none of its protections.

Unlawful combatants may be summarily executed under the laws of war; to grant them the full protections of the American criminal justice system is not to treat them the same as POWS; rather, it is to treat them better than POWS, better than soldiers fighting honorably in uniform and under the flag of a recognized nation.

If the rationale for ratifying the Geneva Conventions is to seek better treatment of your POWs, and even better treatment is afforded to terrorists who were never signatories to the treaties, then it would seem that there's little reason to seek the lesser protections of the Conventions.

And so we come to the (perhaps) unintended consequences of this dangerous policy: The American people at home, and the GIs fighting on our behalf overseas, are placed at risk, because the interrogations that save lives become Verboten! as a result of lawyers telling their terrorist clients to keep their mouths shut.

And so the GIs in the field are faced with the unappetizing and dangerous prospect of capturing prisoners, shepherding them back to the POW camps ... and being sued. Or killed after the evidence against them is suppressed, thrown out of court, and the jihadis return to the battlefield to resume the fight against American troops.

Can you think of a better incentive for our GIs to simply refuse to take prisoners?

This is no way to fight a war.

But it is how Pres. Obama wages lawfare.

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 09, 2009

Sockin' it to the media

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
"i" on News
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

I feel a little conflicted about embedding a clip of the snarky, often unbearably smug John Stewart, but he does such a nice job of skewering all the cable news networks, right and left, that I'll get over it.

Posted by Mike Lief at 10:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Closeted conservatives

Liberals are forever berating conservatives (and Republicans -- not one and the same) for alleged intolerance, but it's interesting to note that many conservatives (and Republicans) are afraid to (ahem) come out.

Power Line's John Hinderaker notes:

Dan Blatt (Gay Patriot West) attended a Claremont event last night, at which George Will spoke. Dan took a date:

[W]hile he proudly sported a name tage with his real name at this shindig, he asked that I not include his name here, lest the revelation of his conservative politics hurt him professionally.

Once again, it was easier for us to be "out" as gay at a conservative event than to be out as conservatives in Hollywood circles.

Ah, the famed tolerance of Hollywood's liberal elites, where all lifestyles are accepted ... so long as you follow the Party line.

I've long held that the most illiberal group of people you're likely to meet fancy themselves "liberals."

Can you smell the hypocrisy?

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How many balloons does it take to lift a house?

Pixar's latest hit, Up, is drawing nearly unanimous praise for it's astonishing animation and touching plot, but curious minds want to know: Just how many balloons does it take to life a house?

Slate is on the case.

Between 100 thousand and 23.5 million.

Which is the technical way of saying "It depends..."

I would have said one, provided it was zeppelin-sized.

Details here.

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 08, 2009

The legal profession ain't what it used to be

Tough times at venerable law firms, with blueblood names like White & Case laying off hundreds of associates -- and partners, too.

The New York Times covers the bloodbath, noting that firms in existence since before the Civil War have shuttered their doors.

But I found this passage most interesting -- and a bit dismaying, too.

The gentleman's profession of the law is becoming a vestige of the past, removed enough from reality to be remembered, like phone booths or fedoras.

Philip K. Howard, a senior partner at Covington & Burling, another multinational firm, may be the closest thing to a gentleman lawyer that one is likely to find these days. He is courtly, white-haired, civic-minded and blessed with an aristocratic pair of arching eyebrows. While he declined to speak directly about White & Case ("I'm not really interested in the business of the law"), he touched on the firm's current troubles by suggesting that as the bottom line increases in importance, the traditional role of the lawyer as a trusted counselor slips away.

"To the extent that lawyers are simply churning out the same problems one after the other and are treated as factors of production to be laid off or not because of market forces or marginal declines in profitability," he said, "the emotional and professional commitment that goes along with being an adviser and a solver of problems begins to diminish."

The reality of being a lawyer often enjoys only the most tenuous relationship to how the profession is portrayed in the arts and popular culture.

But attorneys like Mr. Howard are living reminders of a time when becoming a lawyer held the promise -- or at least the possibility -- of a more rewarding career, based more upon sound advice and counsel than the soul-crushing grind of billable hours.

The big law firm never really held any appeal for me; they've always struck me as the last example of the plantation economy, associates laboring in the fields while the senior partners sit on the veranda sipping mint juleps.

I can't help but think that law school enrollments would drop dramatically if would-be Atticus Finches learned how mechanical and impersonal the profession truly is.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 07, 2009

Steyn on Obama's Cairo speech: American weakness on display

Mark Steyn takes a close look at Pres. Obama's Cairo speech and notices it ought to give you the willies -- provided you think we ought not be rolling over like a submissive dog and present our throats to our enemies, while simultaneously undermining one of our most reliable allies.

Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department Web site, "President Obama Speaks To The Muslim World From Cairo."

Let's pause right there: It's interesting how easily the words "the Muslim world" roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who'd choke on any equivalent reference to "the Christian world." When such hyperalert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they're implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too.

[...]

But, of course, there is no "Christian world": Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Barack Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Perhaps we're eligible for membership in the OIC.

[...]

The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don't even have to hate him if you're too busy despising him.

The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush, sharing a latrine with a dozen half-witted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers – including the wish to expand the boundaries of "the Muslim world" and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

Steyn then moves on to what was -- for me -- the most galling portion of the speech, wherein Obama abases himself and the United States before the world, confessing that "No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons," telling the Iranians, the North Koreans, and any other tyrannical regime that's jonesing for some nuclear weapons, that the green light is lit. Go for it, my America-hating Third-World Brothers. The U.S., with its (supposed) long history of oppressing minorities and exploiting smaller, weaker nations, will no longer muscle them around, imposing Uncle Sam's will on its ankle-biting enemies.

Except for one nation. Can you guess which one?

On the other hand, a "single nation" certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel regarding its West Bank communities, there has to be "a stop to settlements – not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."

No "natural growth"? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you've got to talk gran'ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn or wherever?

At a stroke, the administration has endorsed "the Muslim world's" view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: the Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow.

Would Obama be comfortable mandating "no natural growth" to Israel's million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced "the Muslim world's" commitment to one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the West but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.

Nuclear proliferation amongst madmen and putting the screws to the only Western democracy in the Middle East. Man, this guy's good.

Read the rest of Steyn's piece; he even manages to tie in the GM debacle, too..

Posted by Mike Lief at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

It's not easy being green

While the Obama Administration wants us all to drive hybrids and ditch our SUVs, the reality is that mass transit may not actually be better for Mother Earth. As a matter of fact, that humongous SUV just might have a smaller carbon footprint -- if you believe in any of that stuff -- than the trains and buses we're all supposed to be riding.

Now, those who have drunk deeply of the Moonbat Kool-Aid tell me that having a smaller carbon footprint is better than having a big one, and that driving my GMC diesel-powered leviathan is an act of ecocide, one that has me stomping on Gaia with size 14 Air Jordans.

As it turns out, though, the authors of a new study say it's all a little ... complicated.

These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple "tailpipe" tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.

Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.

In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

[...]

The pair give an example of how the use of oil, gas or coal to generate electricity to power trains can skew the picture.

Boston has a metro system with high energy efficiency. The trouble is, 82 percent of the energy to drive it comes from dirty fossil fuels.

By comparison, San Francisco's local railway is less energy-efficient than Boston's. But it turns out to be rather greener, as only 49 percent of the electricity is derived from fossils.

The paper points out that the "tailpipe" quotient does not include emissions that come from building transport infrastructure -- railways, airport terminals, roads and so on -- nor the emissions that come from maintaining this infrastructure over its operational lifetime.

These often-unacknowledged factors add substantially to the global-warming burden.

In fact, they add 63 percent to the "tailpipe" emissions of a car, 31 percent to those of a plane, and 55 percent to those of a train.

And another big variable that may be overlooked in green thinking is seat occupancy.

A saloon (sedan) car or even an 4x4 that is fully occupied may be responsible for less greenhouse gas per kilometer travelled per person than a suburban train that is a quarter full, the researchers calculate.

"Government policy has historically relied on energy and emission analysis of automobiles, buses, trains and aircraft at their tailpipe, ignoring vehicle production and maintenance, infrastructure provision and fuel production requirements to support these modes," they say.

So getting a complete view of the ultimate environmental cost of the type of transport, over its entire lifespan, should help decision-makers to make smarter investments.

For travelling distances up to, say, 1,000 kilometres (600 miles), "we can ask questions as to whether it's better to invest in a long-distance railway, improving the air corridor or boosting car occupancy," said Chester.

Hmm, politicians ignoring the costs associated with the construction, manufacture and maintenance of their favorite modes of transit. I'm astonished that our Political Overlords could possible promulgate the policies that control the tiniest nooks and crannies of our lives, based on incomplete and often inaccurate data.

Not.

We're in the very best of hands.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 06, 2009

Remembering D-Day

GIs from Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, are amongst the first Americans to set foot on Hitler's Festung Europa in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. The waiting German troops greeted them with a hail of steel, MG-42 machine guns mowing down men with their distinctive "ripping-cloth" buzz. (Click on image for larger version.)

Having left the relative -- and illusory --safety of the landing craft, GIs from the 16th Infantry Regiment begin the maddeningly slow slog toward the beach, as the German defenders hit them with mortars and machine gun fire.

Men from the 16th Infantry Regiment try to find protection from the German machine gunners, hiding for a few moments behind anti-tank obstacles placed on Omaha Beach as part of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel's plan to keep the Allies from establishing a beachhead on the Normandy coast.

Photographer Frank Capa lay in the surf of the Easy Red Sector of Omaha Beach, snapping pictures from the furthest edge of the American assault, capturing the frenzied rush to get ashore and stop being a sitting duck in the surf. Capa's photos were rushed back to London, where the majority were destroyed in an accident in the lab. Only a few survived, comprising the most compelling images of the D-Day landings taken on the American beaches.

A wounded GI is helped ashore at Omaha Beach my some of his fellow soldiers. Note the still-inflated life preserver on the soldier to his left. (Click on image for larger version.)

An Army medic moves down the beach providing aid to the wounded, as exhausted troops huddle against the base of chalk cliffs, protected for the moment from the barrage of incoming German fire. (Click on image for larger version.)

Less than 24 hours earlier the same GIs had marched through the streets of seaside English towns, on the way to the docks where they'd board the troop transports for the ride across the English Channel to the Normandy coast. It's impossible not to wonder how many of these men made it off the beach the next morning. (Click on image for larger version.)

General Dwight Eisenhower issued this proclamation to the men before they set sail for France. He also wrote another letter to the American people, in case of a catastrophic defeat, accepting blame for the loss. The success of the invasion was not taken for granted by Ike. (Click on image for larger version.)

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June 05, 2009

How to tarnish a reputation: Tom Brokaw edition

I remember Tom Brokaw before he was an NBC Nightly News anchor, way back when he was on KNBC-4, the Los Angeles station's local rush hour show in the late '60s and early '70s.

During his years with the network, Brokaw garnered a reputation for being a thoughtful guy -- or at least appearing to be thoughtful. He was, after all, a blowdried newsreader. Still, I can't remember him saying anything particularly partisan or stupid. In later years, he became something of a gravitas-laden spokesman for the network, lending his midwestern-inflected, somewhat mush-mouthed voiceover work to a number of documentaries. He also wrote bestselling books about the Greatest Generation who fought and won World War II.

Today, though, Brokaw said something so offensive, so remarkably wrongheaded and idiotic, that even Pres. Obama, the king of moral equivalence (see his Cairo speech), was forced to slap him down.

During an interview with the president on this morning's Today show, the TV journalist asked about Obama's visit to a concentration camp. The question comes at the 4:05 mark.

BROKAW: What can the Israelis learn from your visit to Buchenwald? And what should they be thinking about their treatment of Palestinians?

Hmmm. What can the Israelis, a nation born from the ashes of the Holocaust, a nation of Jews the victims of Hitler's genocidal obsession, learn from Obama's visit to a Nazi death camp?

What a great question! Because, you see, it wasn't until the Obamassiah visited Buchenwald, 66 years after the killing stopped, that those darned Jews thought there was anything to learn from the Holocaust.

And, of course, when it comes to dealing with the Palestinians -- who have been dedicated to the destruction of Israel itself, much as the Nazis were dedicated to the destruction of the Jews, it's only appropriate to draw a parallel between the Israelis and their Nazi oppressors, casting the Arabs in the role of put-upon victims.

Power Line's John Hinderaker -- no fan of Obama -- gives credit where credit's due, noting that the president pointedly disagreed with the moral equivalence propounded by Brokaw.

Still, how bad do you have to be to draw Obama's disapproval?

Tom Brokaw bad.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Obama and the Arabs

Commentary writes

Thoughts on the Obama Peace Process
NOAH POLLAK - 06.02.2009 - 8:09 AM
1. It’s pretty amazing — actually, it’s perverse — that Mahmoud Abbas seems to be getting away with his profession of passivity to the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl: “I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements.” Now imagine if the Israeli prime minister had preempted his meeting with Obama by saying flippantly that Israel will not lift a finger on behalf of the peace process until the PA vanquishes Hamas and ends its delegitimization of the Jewish state. This would have made headlines around the world and it would have provoked a stern rebuke from Obama. Abbas’s declaration did neither.

2. Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze is unreasonable for two major reasons: A) No reciprocal demand was made of the Palestinians, and no Israeli leader can make unilateral concessions — especially given Israel’s recent experience of the consequences of such concessions. B) The freeze requires a prohibition on construction inside the footprint of communities that today are de facto Israeli territory. These are the city-settlements that have long been slated for inclusion into Israel in any final-status agreement, with equivalent Israeli territory awarded to the future Palestinian state through land swaps. Ma’ale Adumim, a suburb of Jerusalem with 35,000 residents, is not going to be bulldozed into the Judean Desert as part of the creation of a Palestinian state. So why does it matter — other than as a cheap symbol of Obama’s willingness to push Israel around — that the residents of this city be prohibited from construction? It would have been perfectly reasonable if Obama had said to the Israelis: as part of the peace process, we expect you to dismantle outposts and not expand the footprint of West Bank settlements, some of which will have to be dismantled as part of a final deal. That would have been met with grudging acceptance. But I get the sense that Obama wants to avoid such an Israeli response.

3. Obama’s flippant dismissal of previous agreements between Israel and the United States is going to make his efforts harder, not easier. Why should Israel make new agreements with Obama immediately after he established the precedent that they might be unilaterally discarded at a moment’s notice? And having set this example, what can Obama say in reply if the Israelis decide to begin discarding agreements with the U.S. that they find inconvenient? Obama talks a lot about the imperatives of dialogue, diplomacy, and humility. His behavior, especially in this case, couldn’t be more at odds with his rhetoric.

4. Ever since Yasser Arafat died, observers of this conflict have said that the weakness of the Palestinian Authority, and especially of Mahmoud Abbas, would pose an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of a new peace process. But we were wrong: Abbas’s weakness is turning into his greatest strength. It is the perfect rationale for passivity, for throwing the entire burden of the process onto the Israelis, for avoiding anything that would reveal his fecklessness. I didn’t think this would be possible because I didn’t think it plausible that a U.S. administration would endorse a peace process that consists so far of the United States pressuring Israel to make unilateral concessions.

5. It should be clear that the point of all this isn’t necessarily to advance the peace process. The point is to put Israel on the defensive, to weaken Bibi, and to frighten Israelis into thinking that relations between the two countries could go catastrophically awry if Obama doesn’t get what he wants. It often makes sense to try to soften up your adversary before negotiations. But the problem for Obama is that the peace process — and security matters generally — are things on which there is a newfound consensus in Israel. The politics of the 1990’s don’t apply today. Israelis have seen how territorial withdrawals and fraudulent peace processes get repaid in blood. I could be wrong, but I doubt that Obama, after manufacturing strife between the two countries, will find either Israeli voters or members of the governing coalition turning on Bibi. In fact, probably the opposite will happen.

6. Which leads to the major problem that Obama’s hostile posture toward Israel will create. One of the longstanding principles of the peace process has been that Israel, given the genocidal hostility of many of its neighbors, must be made to feel secure if it is to make concessions. Obama is discarding that formula and attempting to make Israel feel insecure, not just by making unreasonable demands and discarding previous agreements, but by speculating about throwing Israel to the wolves at the UN and restricting arms sales. If Israelis feel that the United States is turning against them they will be less inclined, not more, to trust the U.S. as the steward of the peace process.

7. Which leads, as all things do today, to Iran. President Obama has stated his belief that progress on the peace process will help build momentum in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. If Obama convinces Israelis that they do not have a genuine ally in Washington, the Israeli strategic calculation will necessarily change. And it will be a change that pushes Washington further to the periphery of Israeli decision-making than Obama probably wants. Alienating allies and pressuring them to adopt untenable policies has a price, and the price is reduced influence. I’m not sure our president understands that.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Contrarian View: Not so high on Up

The reviews of Pixar's latest film, Up, have been uniformly top-notch, which reveals more about the critics than it does the movie, according to the Weekly Standard's John Podhoretz.

Here's what you won't hear about Up: It is, for long stretches, very boring.

[...]

The fact is that you won't hear anyone say Up is boring because it would be, well, improper to say it-just as you never heard anybody say its Pixar predecessor, Wall-E, completely ran out of steam in its disastrous second half, even though everybody knew it did. A cultural orthodoxy has been imposed on us, according to which it is impermissible to criticize a Pixar film.

Pixar, the cartoon maker whose 10 feature films since 1995 have set a new standard for the animated film, has now become an Object of Cultural Piety (OCP), which is simultaneously one of the deadliest and most potent forces known to man. Once someone or something becomes an OCP, it must be the subject of veneration.

Podhoretz goes on to tell the sad tale of the most prominent example of OCP, a man who scaled the heights of cinematic acclaim, only to hit such a low that his last film Nuked the Fridge -- which is like jumping the shark, only with a cultural icon much more beloved than the Fonz.

Posted by Mike Lief at 09:45 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 04, 2009

Huh?

Posted by Mike Lief at 07:20 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 01, 2009

How's Obama doing so far?

Not great, if Rasmussen's numbers are accurate -- and the polling firm has a pretty good track record.

According to three recent polls, Obama's failing to convince a majority of Americans that he's heading in the right direction on a variety of issues,

Let's go to the numbers, shall we?

Last week the Obama administration floated a trial balloon for a national sales tax -- a "VAT," or Value Added Tax like the Euros pay -- to close the humongous Obama-made national debt. Only 18 percent of Americans are in favor, with a whopping 68 percent opposed.

How about the nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court? Obama says she's an inspirational figure, and an obvious sop to women and Hispanic voters. According to Rasmussen, 87 percent of Americans think she'll be confirmed to the High Court. Great news for Obama, right? Not so fast, Floyd. Only 45 percent think she ought to be seated on the Supreme Court, hardly an overwhelming vote of confidence in the nominee -- or her patron's judgement and powers of persuasion.

And what about GM? On the morning when the world's largest automaker declares bankruptcy and the Obama administration pays billions of dollars to become the majority shareholder, what do the American people think?

According to Rassmussen, only 21 percent of those polled favor Obama paying $50 billion dollars for a 70-percent stake in the automaker, with 67 percent opposed to the bailout. When the pollster followed up by asking if GM should be allowed to go under, the numbers didn't shift all that much: 32 percent favored saving the automaker, but 56 percent still preferred letting GM die.

But Inside-the-Beltway Washington types, who consider themselves much smarter than the great unwashed masses, favor the bailout by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

As an aside, I'm curious how the United Autoworkers are polling after receiving huge stakes in GM and Chrysler.

While a small statistical sample, I think this bodes ill for Obama's continued plans for a radical economic makeover of the nation; what did Pravda call it? Oh, yeah, a "rapid descent into Marxism."

Up next: Socialized medicine.

Posted by Mike Lief at 06:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack