That’s the topic discussed in the latest edition of Peter Robinson’s long-running Uncommon Knowledge video interview series:

This is graduation season, so we thought it was the perfect time to ask author/journalist Andy Ferguson (Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College) and essayist and former editor of American Scholar Joseph Epstein to discuss the origin and value (if any) of getting a classical liberal arts education.

Meanwhile, Aaron Clarey, the Blogosphere’s self-described “Captain Capitalism” and author of the hit book on what the outcome of the 2012 election portends for those of us who aren’t collectivists, Enjoy the Decline has designated June 2013 as “Worthless Degree Awarness Month:”

It may sound funny, but it really is no laughing matter.  The single worst thing we do to our young kids is cripple them financially for the rest of their lives by telling them to waste 4-8 years of their youth and anywhere between $50,000-$150,000 on worthless degrees.  Economically, the education bubble is on par with the housing bubble, but this time it is within our own control to stop it.

Since most kids graduate from high school during early June, it’s the perfect time to “raise awareness” (I always wanted to use that vile phrase for something that’s actually good, legit and noble) about the threats and dangers of majoring in a worthless field.

All we have to do is get the word out there.

Got a blog?  Start linking and citing articles about worthless degrees.
Got a child or a family member?  Sit down and have a chat with them.
Got a PTA group you know?  Have someone come speak to them.
And as always if you don’t know how to broach the subject with your children, buying them a copy of “Worthless” is definitely a diplomatic and caring way to tell them about the economic realities of choosing a good degree.

And of course, PJM’s own Glenn Reynolds has written a book on the topic of The Higher Education Bubble that’s well-worth your time. Here’s a link to my interview last year with Glenn on his then-new book:

1 Comment

“A disaster in slow motion’: Wine country latest California region to face fiscal crisis,” Canada’s National Post reports:

The serpentine strip of asphalt known as Sonoma Mountain Road wends its way through a bucolic landscape 50 miles north of San Francisco, curving past rows of grapevines, dipping into redwood groves, rising again through rippling hills.

It’s a beautiful ride. But it is also a bumpy one.

“You get pothole patch after pothole patch,” groused Craig Harrison, a local resident and attorney who is part of a grass-roots campaign to fix the crumbling roads of Sonoma County. “We’re going to be a test case of what a county does with a completely failed road system.”

Sonoma may be known for its wine, and for a burgeoning artisanal food scene, and for its lush, rural landscapes and great weather — all of which have attracted growing numbers of retirees, long-distance commuters and international tourists.  But Sonoma County is struggling with the same type of government financial crisis that has driven California cities such as Stockton and San Bernardino into bankruptcy.

Here, too, a toxic combination of inflated public employee salaries and pensions, combined with reckless financial decision-making and the 2008 housing market crash and subsequent recession have stripped that financial cupboard bare.

Driving the county’s back roads, you literally feel the pain. Spending by the county to maintain some 1,400 miles of Sonoma’s roads totalled US$4.2-million last year, compared with US$7.6-million in 2003, according to the county budget office. Spending is set to increase slightly this year, but is still a fraction of what is needed.

Even the Ministry of Truth known as NPR has admitted that California has some of the worst-maintained roads in the country, as core services of basic government are ignored or deferred in favor of spiraling welfare and pension expenses. Why did wine country think it would be spared similar aggravations as the state as a whole circles the drain?

(Via SDA; read the comments there for more on this topic.)

Comments

“Is there a moral case to be made for the British Empire? To even ask the question at your typical university would be to invite derision. That’s a shame because the British Empire’s legacy is one Western Civilization should be proud of,” as a historian with the seriously anglophile name of HW Crocker III explains in a video from Prager University.

The British Empire worked for centuries; and yet somehow, by the 1930s, British elites had decided that their system was exhausted and had to go, as Jonathan Last noted in a memorable 2005 article, with ramifications to today’s dissipated elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Coincidentally, in the 1930s, someone on the other side of the Channel was pretty sure England had to go, as well:

Why did it all crumble? Several interrelated reasons – among them the grisly fact that England had lost virtually an entire generation of future leaders in the trenches of Europe. But another important cause was the waning of confidence on the part of liberal British elites, whose pacifism evolved into anti-patriotism.

In 1933, the Oxford Union — a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion — held a debate on the resolution “this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country.” The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England’s leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: “There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate.”

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of “that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . ” So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” who, to his shock, “remain[ed] firmly seated while ‘God Save the King’ was played.”

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a “threat to peace,” but instead worried that the “panic that the Right was spreading” would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would “then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections.”

In an important sense, the British Empire’s strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

The parallels with 21st-century America are striking. In little more than 10 years, England went from victory in World War I to serious discussions about completely disarming herself. Talk of a “peace dividend” began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and culminated 10 years later with a major draw-down of forces and the abandonment of the two-war doctrine.

Where the Great War robbed England of a generation of its best and brightest, in America the baby boom generation was lost in Vietnam or, perhaps worse, in Canada, in the Air National Guard, and in the universities, where they learned to hide and not lead. This has taken its toll. Our two baby boom presidents have been exceedingly imperfect. (As Edmund Burke once cautioned, “A great empire and little minds go ill together.”)

The American left, too, eerily echoes its British counterparts. Consider the “Peace is Patriotic” bumper stickers; the howls of protest against the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, for fear that he might be too assertive of American values; the comparison – by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) – of American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis and Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag; the protest cries of “No blood for oil” and the left-wing fringe speculation that the endgame of George W. Bush’s 9/11 fear-mongering would be to cancel elections and establish a fascist police state.

The liberal opponents of the British Empire were proved wrong, but their misplaced disillusionment was enough to sap the vitality of imperial confidence. After rising one last time to fight Nazism, the sun set on the British Empire.

Monty Python was wrong: It isn’t the tenants that need to believe, lest the building falls down, it’s the management. If they don’t believe, neither will those who send them their rent checks, with disastrous results:

Exit Question: Given that interwar British socialist elites took down the empire and created the modern socialist welfare state, even as they defeated the modern national socialist welfare state, why does President Obama loathe 21st century Britain so?

1 Comment

All hail Google’s Memorial Day celebration!

Try not to be blown away by the majesty and the power of what the finest team of design artists, working for the most powerful Website on the planet have at last unveiled, particularly since that’s it above, full size, on Google’s splashpage today.

At the Search Engine Roundtable, the Website contrasts Google’s pathetic effort with screen captures of Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Ask.com today:

Today is Memorial Day in the United States of America, a very important day to show your American patriotism and thank our soliders for protecting the country.

To celebrate the day, some of the search engines place logos, ribbons or deck out their pages with full designed themes. The question is, which is most appropriate?

Google goes very minimalistic with a small ribbon, while Bing completely overhauls their background image. Both are very tasteful but some might say Google is doing too little, while others might say Bing is going over the top. Is there a middle ground or are we looking into these things way too much?

No, we’re not, since they reveal what a corporate Website wants to tell its users about its management’s worldview and its place in history. Speaking of the latter, at Maggie’s Farm, they’re amazed that Google actually has anything at all on “This Day in History:”

And you were there.

I imagine you’ve seen some pretty splashy ‘doodles’ in place of the ‘Google’ name when there’s an important event to honor, like the birthday of some Italian painter from the 17th century.  Lesser events, like the Junior League’s Summer Cotillion or the Annual Cornhuskers County Fair, don’t get any doodle at all.

Or Memorial Day.

After all, to the sensitive leftists who run Google, that would be glorifying war.

And we can’t have any of that.

Now, I could be wrong and maybe they did this last year and I just didn’t notice, but I went to Google just now and my jaw nearly hit the floor.

The way it just leaps out at you!

Heh. I believe Google actually first added a microscopic Memorial Day thumbnail to their splashpage in 2009, both after President Obama took office, and after a decade of the tranzi Website being beaten up annually by troglodytic rightwing neocon deathbeast websites throughout the Blogosphere, such as ours. The previous year, while Google’s bête noire was still in the White House, our own Zombie even offered readers a contest where they could submit their own ideas for a Google Memorial Day splashpage. Too bad Google didn’t use any of them for inspiration, but then, presumably, their current effort is designed much more to shut down complaints than it is to actually celebrate the holiday.

Related: At Twitchy, “Bing vs. Google: Which search engine did a better job honoring Memorial Day?”

Yahoo, incidentally appears to have nothing on its homepage commemorating Memorial Day. But here’s Bing’s eloquent, beautifully composed image for its splashpage today:

1 Comment

Click on most photos to enlarge. If you dare!

Pro tip: If you look like anything at all like this when you reach the apex of your vacation, you are definitely doing it wrong.

Unfortunately though, that is indeed a photo of me taken on Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013, when I was actually much much better than I had been. My wife refrained from taking any pictures at the nadir of this story. All of which is why I, writing this up in retrospect,  think I’ve just returned from the Apollo 13 of vacations. Or maybe the Fantastic Voyage of vacations, considering that a miniaturized camera and high-tech equipment were sent deep into the nether regions where the Sun. Does. Not. Shine.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Even before things began hitting the fan, so to speak, in a way, my timing in getting away on vacation was ill-fated: the week that the Obama administration was very visibly melting down, with scandals on all fronts, my wife and I skipped town for a 9-day long cruise through the Caribbean followed by 3 days visiting friends and family in New York, or at least that was Plan A. Still though, unlike El Rushbo, who always claims to think that bad “Progressive” news happens when he’s away, I don’t think my rep is quite that big enough to say that the Obama-ites deliberately picked this week to implode.

The flight out from San Francisco Airport on Wednesday, May 15th was remarkably uneventful, though the in-flight magazines provided by American Airlines were a hoot. There’s the base magazine distributed throughout the airplane cabin, and “Celebrated Living,” American Airlines’ “Premium” magazine, which can be found in their Admirals Clubs, and onboard their planes, in the first and business class cabins. Nothing tells your executive passengers that they’re part of a swank, exclusive First Class One Percent Livin’ Large elite group like a last-page magazine profile of the drummer from a heavy metal group, with a toothpick dangling from his unshaven mug:

Paging David Brooks — your idea of “bourgeois bohemians” has officially exhausted itself, along with the rest of the American limousine left. And paging heavy metal: the idea that there’s any sort of “rebellion” involved is done as well. Why it’s as if Keith Richards had himself photographed endorsing Louis Vuitton luggage. (Oh wait…)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 20 Comments

In his introduction to The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the 1999 update of Ayn Rand’s early 1970s anthology originally titled The New Left, Peter Schwartz, the editor of the new edition, wrote:

Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: “Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; pertaining to early times …” With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl— all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphysically subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.

This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert.

If primitive man regards the world as unknowable, how does he decide what to believe and how to act? Since such knowledge is not innate, where does primitive man turn for guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.

This is the state of mind to which the multiculturalists want us to revert. They hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western— i.e., individualistic— civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.

Both environmentalism and multiculturalism wish to destroy the values of a rational, industrial age. Both are scions of the New Left, zealously carrying on its campaign of sacrificing progress to primitivism.

In addition to the shocking Islamic terrorist attack yesterday in London, a troika of pop culture-related stories making the rounds today reminds us that reprimitivization is well on its way.

First up,  “Movement to Normalize Pedophilia Finds Its Poster Girl,” Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator:

In January, Rush Limbaugh warned that there was “an effort under way to normalize pedophilia,” and was ridiculed by liberals (including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien) for saying so. But now liberals have joined a crusade that, if successful, would effectively legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.

The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. (Click here to read the affidavit in Hunt’s arrest.) It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.

Using the slogan “Stop the Hate, Free Kate” (the Twitter hashtag is #FreeKate) this social-media campaign has attracted the support of liberals including Chris Hayes of MSNBC, Daily Kos, Think Progress and the gay-rights group Equality Florida. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of the case is that Hunt is a petite attractive green-eyed blonde. One critic wondered on Twitter how long activists have “been waiting for a properly photogenic poster child of the correct gender to come along?”

Portraying Hunt as the victim of prejudice, her supporters claim she was only prosecuted because she is homosexual and because the parents of the unnamed 14-year-old are “bigoted religious zealots,” as Hunt’s mother said in a poorly written Facebook post. The apparent public-relations strategy was described by Matthew Philbin of Newsbusters: “If you can play the gay card, you immediately trigger knee-jerk support from the liberal media and homosexual activists anxious to topple any and all rules regarding sex.”

Meanwhile, giant cable television conglomerate Viacom must be especially proud of MTV today, as we’ll discuss right after the page break.

Pages: 1 2 | 21 Comments

“Liberals Are Now Shocked, Shocked at Obama’s Culture of Intimidation,” Peter Wehner writes at Commentary:

Now that the Obama administration has conducted an unprecedented intrusion into newsgathering activities, it’s dawning on liberals – four years and four months into the Obama presidency – that something is slightly amiss.

For example, the New York Times, Dana Milbank and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post have all expressed concerns about the Obama administration tactics. They have done so, of course, with a fraction of the umbrage they would be showing if this had occurred under a Republican administration. But at least it’s progress.

It’s late in coming, however, And let’s be honest: it would have been helpful if liberals had expressed some alarm years ago when top Obama White House aides like David Axelrod and Anita Dunn were targeting Fox News in an effort to de-legitimize it. Some of us warned at the time that “The White House’s effort to target a news organization like Fox is vaguely Nixonian.” Yet very few members of the elite media shared those concerns. In fact, they seemed to be sympathetic to what the White House was attempting to do.

Of course — having survived the eight years that proceeded from an event that many on the left viewed as traumatic an occurrence as 9/11 — when the election of 2000 was finalized and GWB became president-elect, they believed in January of 2009 that the revolution was at hand, and “We Are All Socialists Now.” Or as John Judis of the New Republic wrote at the time:

A decade ago, I might have been embarrassed to admit that I was raised on Marx and Marxism, but I am convinced that the left is coming back. Friedrich Hayek is going to be out; Friedrich Engels in. Larry Kudlow out; Larry Mishel in. And why is that? Because a severe global recession like this puts in relief the transient, fragile, and corruptible nature of capitalism, and the looming contradiction between what Marx called the forces and relations of production evidenced in unemployed engineers and boarded up factories and growing poverty amidst a potential for abundance. As capitalism itself–or at the least the vaunted miracle of the free market–becomes problematic, the left is poised for an intellectual comeback.

If they had to break a few eggs in the process, well, the resulting omelet would undoubtedly be delicious. And concurrently, they managed to convince themselves that an unknown Chicago machine hack pol was the second coming of Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and God Himself* all rolled into one man inside of a size 40 long bespoke suit with trouser creases passing that keen David Brooks test. (Scroll through the — I think — unintentionally hilarious archives of the blog called Is Barack Obama the Messiah? if you need a refresher course for how zany the 2007-through 2009 period feels for those of us who never drank the Obama Aide.)

In any case, we noticed the Nixonian-like tone of the Obama administration early on, with posts bearing titles such as “Ron Ziegler’s Revenge” and “Ron Ziegler Redux.”

But hey, didn’t those horrible Red Staters have it coming anyhow? How dare they build networks such as talk radio, the Blogosphere and Fox News? It’s like…a counterculture to our obviously far superior liberal overculture! And countercultures must always be tamped down. (The left has experience with this, given that they devoured their earnest mid-century liberal predecessors in the mid to late 1960s.)

Besides, if you view a television network as the equivalent of the Nazi propaganda machine, as Ted Turner said in 1996, then you’re giving yourself maximum leeway in defeating it:

When Fox News started out, it got a generally skeptical and unfriendly reception from the journalistic establishment. Even reporters, who generally view any news media organization as a good thing (not to mention a potential source of employment), were largely disapproving. But no one greeted Fox News with more pure vitriol than CNN founder Ted Turner.

“I look forward to crushing Rupert Murdoch like a bug,” Turner told the press. He compared Murdoch to Hitler, which would make Roger Ailes a reincarnation of Goebbels, and followed up with an explanation, quoted by the Los Angeles Times [in October of 1996]: “The late Führer, the first thing he did, like all dictators, was take over the press and use it to further his agenda. Basically, that is what Rupert Murdoch does with his media.  .  .  .” The Nazi analogy was too much for the Anti-Defamation League, which rebuked Turner for trivializing the Holocaust. Turner apologized, but that didn’t prevent him from likening Murdoch to “the late Führer” a year later; or, in 2005, comparing the success of Fox News to the rise of Hitler.

If you’re looking for a central Rosetta Stone to connect up the scandals, as Jim Geraghty writes, “All of Obama’s Scandals Are Ultimately About Information Control,” but then, all of Obama’s actions since taking office were an attempt to run An enormous and diversified country through the White House, the same dream as FDR in the 1930s and (to a lesser extent) LBJin the 1960s. And it’s doomed to failure. As Milton Friedman illustrated, based on an essay by fellow economist Leonard Reed, no one man can design a pencil, let alone run the largest economy on the planet. Or its media:

The old joke about the repeated failures of Communism is that “This time, it’s sure to work.” The same can now be said about its cousin, the centralized, top-down economy, or to give it another title, Liberal Fascism. But then, David Horowitz’s long-running Front Page Website recently adopted the slogan, “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” The left’s inner totalitarian has gotten quite a workout in from 2008 through the present day, not just from the Obama itself, but from those who have heeded their dog whistles. And despite the sclerotic feel of 20th-century-style “Progressivism” the left’s inner totalitarian won’t be volunteering for retirement any time soon.

* Or perhaps, Obama is the Green Lantern. He does have a sort of  Dr. Shelden Cooper vibe going on at times, doesn’t he?  Except that Obama’s case, his Monsters of the Id can easily be summoned up via a phone call or memo.

Related: From Doug Ross: “TREY GOWDY SPRINGS A TRAP: Did former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman commit perjury today?”

As Doug writes, “When the history books are written, Richard Nixon will look like a guy who stole a few boxes of Girl Scout cookies compared to Barack Obama.” But compared to actual accomplishments, “I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon.”

Hey, just ask your average New York Timesman.

Comments

On April Fools’ Day of 1976, two very different businesses were launched:

Perhaps no day illustrates the rate that varying institutions change better than April Fool’s Day 1976, when two divergent businesses began operation. The government-funded, rustbelt-oriented Conrail began operations on the same day that a corporation called Apple Computer was formed by three young Californians: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (who left shortly thereafter, becoming the computer industry’s equivalent of The Beatles’ Pete Best). And it’s been the computer that has transformed how wealth is created in the last 40 years, just as the railroad did in the 19^th century.

Besides tremendous changes in the economy and wealth creation, the 1970s was a decade full of fuzzyheaded thinking, and a load of doomsday books predicting economic and environmental doomsday. The Tofflers’ 1980 book, The Third Wave (the concepts of which Revolutionary Wealth builds on) bucked this trend. In the midst of the hyperinflation, astronomical interest rates, and rampant unemployment of the Carter-era 1970s, the Tofflers were able to look past that to see the actual long-term causes of many of these trends: much of the free world was making the transition from what a rustbelt mass-production assembly line economy of heavy manufacturing to a high-tech, on demand, service-oriented economy.

That’s from my Tech Central Station review of Alvin Toffler’s most recent book to date, Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006, when it seemed like the mid-20th century smokestack era was finally bested by high-tech demassified Internet-based entrepreneurialism.

So much for that idea. Two years after Toffler’s book hit the streets, America would elect a president whose mindset is trapped somewhere between 1933 and 1968. Or as Michael Barone wrote last year, Obama offers “Industrial Age Solutions to Information Age Challenges.”

Which is but one reason why Glenn Reynolds is asking this week in USA Today,  “Where are the start-ups?”

A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well.

In fact, it is yet another sign of a United States that is looking more like Europe: A society in which big businesses have cozy relationships with big government, while unemployment remains comparatively high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job at one of those government-connected businesses, GE, for example, your situation is pretty good. If you’re a recent college graduate looking for work, your situation is not so great. If you’re a low-skilled worker, your situation is dreadful.

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%” ” about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

If, as Glenn writes, the US is looking more like Europe, it’s worth looking back at a snapshot of Europe’s business community at the start of the 21st century, focusing on its own lack of entrepreneurial start-ups.

As Orson Welles said in 1941′s Citizen Kane, “How did I find business conditions in Europe? With great difficulty!” Six decades later, based on this Steven Den Beste post from December of 2002, very little had changed there to alter that formula; “Europe is a high-tech disaster area,” he wrote:

It’s a desert pock-marked with occasional oases. For an area with the kind of overall education level Europe has, and the kind of industrialization Europe has, and the overall average wealth that Europe has, and the transportation and communication infrastructure that Europe has, the amount of ground-breaking work in science and technology happening on the continent is embarrassingly small.

It’s not that they cannot do it. There are significant examples which demonstrate otherwise. The Ariane program has been a substantial technical success. Airbus is the only company in the world which is even challenging Boeing in the passenger jet business (though Airbus only was able to get going through substantial subsidies by the French and British governments). Philips has been creating cutting edge technology for years. At least three major pharmaceutical companies are headquartered in Switzerland. CERN is doing good work, and has one of the world’s best particle accelerators. And I have only the highest regard for the engineering which is being done by the European Southern Observatory for its sites in Paranal and La Silla, (not to mention their full intention of creating a telescope with a one hundred meter main mirror).

But what these few successes show is that the potential is there and that it is not being realized very broadly. The Europeans can do this stuff, but it seems as if they mostly don’t bother. You have a small number of companies which are competitive in production of high technology, but most of Europe’s companies seem to produce rather prosaic me-toos, using fundamental technology developed elsewhere (usually the US).

If you ask someone with any kind of technical background to list high-tech Japanese companies, they’ll have no trouble at all reeling off several names immediately (often brandnames chosen for the American market, like Pioneer), and several more after a few seconds of thought: Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita; the only reason there aren’t more names on the list is because of the Japanese zaibatsu system. Ask pretty much anyone to list American high tech companies and they may come up with 50 names before they have to slow down.

But ask people to list high-tech companies from continental Europe, and I think most people would have to think hard to list even one. I, myself, having been in the industry for 25 years can only list a few: Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel, Philips and then I run out, and honestly can’t think of any more right now. And among them, Philips as the only one actually doing cutting-edge research. (They developed the laserdisc, which led to the CD and DVD, among other interesting things.)

What the Europeans seem to spend most of their time doing is to refine or develop or apply basic technology coming from other places. Americans created the transistor, the laser, the MOSFET, the integrated circuit, the LED, the first computer built out of transistors, the first microprocessor, the hard disk, television, wide area networks, cell phones. Europe uses computers, but the only major contribution from Europe in my field is the development of the first block-structured programming language, ALGOL, which influence later languages like C but which itself was too bloated to really be very useful. And in general, I’m really pretty hard pressed to think of anything (except the laserdisc) which has come from the continent which ranks the same as that long list of American innovations, which is far from complete.

Where is Europe’s Intel? Where is Europe’s Microsoft? Where is their IBM? Their Dell? Their Applied Material?

On the next page, some thoughts on what Europe does export all too well.

Pages: 1 2 | 27 Comments

The White House Correspondents Dinner is tonight; “an annual orgy of narcissistic self-indulgence where the biggest stars in media, Hollywood, and politics gather to become even more corrupt and insulated than they already are,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Things have gotten so bad that the E! entertainment channel is going to broadcast live from the event tomorrow night, and Tom Brokaw has felt the need to again speak out against it. Last year Brokaw surprised many when he made this statement about the event on “Meet the Press”:

What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles? And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.

This year, Brokaw doubled down with this statement to Politico:

But I think any organization… has to have a kind of self-policing instinct and what we’re doing with that dinner, as it has been constituted for the past several years, is saying, ‘We’re Versailles. The rest of you eat cake.’

Brokaw’s pretty good at telling the rest of America to eat cake himself; he very publicly defended fellow anchorman Dan Rather in the fall of 2004, when all of us crazy rubes in our pajamas in our basements were pointing out that Rather cooked the books. In December of 2008, at the perigee of the Great Recession, he begged President-Elect Obama to kick off his nascent administration by raising America’s gas taxes:
XXX

XXXXX
At the start of 2013, again carrying Mr. Obama’s water on one of his pet issues, as Noel Sheppard wrote at Newsbusters, Brokaw denigrated the Bill of Rights and its supporters:

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, Tom Brokaw appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe said that not supporting gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre is akin to those that didn’t back the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s.

Noel linked to Mark Levin’s epic monologue, which punched back twice as hard against Brokaw’s rhetoric, as Mr. Obama is wont to say, before concluding:

LEVIN: [Brokaw] is a disgrace. I don’t care they keep putting these guys up on pedestals. They don’t deserve it. They’re a disgrace. He’s a disgrace. The history he refers to has absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on right now. But he brings it up, the same way Tim Kaine wants to interject race. Oh that word nullification, that’s a code word. The same way Colin Powell did it on Sunday. Every single issue that involves actual individual liberty, conservative principles, constitutionalism, they’re now twisting it and turning it, attacking our motives, when in fact we don’t have any motives other than to exercise our free will, and to defend others who seek to exercise their free will.Ladies and gentlemen, Washington is digging in. When I say Washington, Tom Brokaw is a creation of Washington. He may be up in New Jersey at MSNBC doing this, but he’s a creation of Washington. They’re digging in. Scarborough, little irrelevant gnat. Digging in. Schieffer, digging in. The NBC crowd, the CBS crowd, the ABC crowd, just listen to the broadcasts. CNN, and of course, MSLSD, MSLSD which would have been perfect during the times of like Brezhnev because Brezhnev and MSNBC, you know, their ideologies they’re almost like one and the same, but that for another day.

So the point is this: they’re digging in because you refuse to surrender your God-given inalienable rights and your Constitutional right to big government. And Tom Brokaw and Schieffer and all the rest of them are about big government, big government. This is why they defend Obama, this is why they defend the Democrats, this is why there’s not a federal program unless it has to do with the military, national security, law enforcement that they would support reducing then your respect. These are the phonies who are bringing news to you and are bring news to you. The absolute phonies.

As we’ll see tonight at Nerd Versailles Prom.

Oh, and speaking of Bob Schieffer, CBS and the White House Correspondents Dinner: “Courtesy of CBS News, Korean pop star Psy will be there. Because nothing qualifies you as a member of the media/Hollywood/DC elite faster than being a one-hit wonder who openly called for the death of American troops serving in Iraq.”

Update: The swells at Versailles Prom are not amused by Brokaw. “White House correspondents partiers say Tom Brokaw’s got it wrong — White House correspondents just want to have fun,” the JournoList-tainted Politico glibly notes, ironically stumbling over the precise issue of disagreement the rest of us have with those entrenched inside what Walter Russell Mead calls the “Acela Cocoon.” We know they want to have fun — carrying the presidents’ water, fighting his opponents; making America safe for socialism. And we know they’re not covering the White House to objectively report the news. Particularly in the case of anyone from NBC and its spinoffs:

“As a former White House Correspondent, it’s really nice for people in politics and media to come together and have a little weekend of fun,” MSNBC host Alex Wagner told POLITICO at a reception at the Hay Adams hotel. “I understand the idea of the ‘celebrification’ of the event but I think it’s more of a testament to how interesting and compelling Washington politics is to the outside world.”

Curiously, Wagner’s gripe against Brokaw makes him the second veteran NBC correspondent that Wagner has attacked in recent weeks from the left. At the end of January, she described a CNBC contributor as “not a very trustworthy source.” Can we assume she’s implying the same thing about Brokaw? For the sake of having almost as fun as those nutty kooky White House correspondents, I think we can.

Comments

I certainly understand newly-minted CNN head honcho Jeff Zucker wanting to clean house by firing such shrill partisan voices as Soledad O’Brien and Roland Martin. But am I the only one who’s noticed the influx of British journalists on CNN late at night? When the massive explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas occurred last week, CNN’s late night coverage (around 11:30 PM pacific time/2:30 AM eastern) featured a pair of journalists in the CNN studio reporting the heartland of America with posh upper crust BBC accents with the same coolly dispassionate, distanced anthropological tone, as well, Mr. Obama himself. (Who are these strange Americans?) If you’re not a captive viewer in the airport departure lounge, if you’re say, someone from Texas who’s clicking through the cable channels to figure out what the heck just happened, who are you going to watch, Fox News, which goes out of its way – not the least of which in tone – to demonstrate its love of middle America, or this strange BBC-CNN hybrid?

Is this a trend at CNN? It certainly seems to be, from the late night coverage I’ve been seeing for the past week. Now that CNN has quit breaking news and rebranded itself as “CNN Classic,” as satirist Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker described his fellow liberal journalists there, is Zucker running the feed from CNNi (“the anti-American channel,” as Fox’s Roger Ailes once dubbed it) late at night to double-up and cut costs as the ratings continue to collapse? Is he trying out farm team second stringers from that channel or the BBC late at night to see who makes the cut? Is Piers smuggling his fellow Brits into the studio? Or is it something else entirely?

4 Comments

In “Vice City,” his review of HBO’s Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a distaff Joe Biden,  Kyle Smith of the New York Post explores, “How ‘Veep’ exposes silly liberal agendas and the inanity of Washington:”

For the last 20 years, Washington media’s shorthand for all of this has been the cliché, “Kabuki theater” — everyone pointing out that everyone is just putting on a show — but “Veep” shows Washington to be more like theater of the absurd. It’s about how some of the smartest, most ambitious people get addicted to political power and spend their lives rushing around for the next fix. Political parties are never identified, because the ruling dogma is simply Washington itself.

Selena Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) spent much of season one trying to set up a clean-jobs panel that looked like a win-win that would punish oil companies by replacing petroleum-based products with those made from renewable resources. “Polluting corporations. Held responsible by me,” Meyer brags. “Dependence on foreign oil. Ended by me.”

On “The West Wing,” this would have been a noble crusade, but on “Veep” we learn how ludicrous the actual end result would be: A rule change ordering plastic utensils in federal buildings to be replaced by corn-starch forks and spoons. Which melt if you stick them in anything hot. Such as coffee.

It’s a plotline that reflects, and seems inspired by, Washington’s endless, bipartisan green-jobs boondoggles, like bankrupt solar-panel manufacturers and massively subsidized electric cars that run out of power every 20 miles if it’s cold outside. Such as in winter.

Of an august “fiscal responsibility” commission, Meyer notes acidly, “Are you kidding me? Not one of those guys has paid for his own lunch in like a decade.”

Preparing to break a tie in the Senate, she vows to vote, “the way my principles and conscience tell me to go.” Awkward pause. “Which way do you think that should be?”

Cut to: Harry Reid saying he would “vote my conscience” for an assault-weapons ban he previously voted against. So America’s senior Democratic lawmaker has confessed to cynically voting against his principles all those years to appease the gun lobby. Now that the gun-control vote is over, are we meant to believe that he reverts to being just another hack for sale?

As Kyle concludes in his penultimate paragraph:

“Veep,” by taking a magnifying glass and a sense of irony inside the Washington sausage factory (Louis-Dreyfuss says Joe Biden’s staffers told her that they have begun referring to various real-life incidents as “ ‘Veep’ moments”), winds up vindicating the conservative view of government.

Why, it’s as if virtually all comedy is conservative, or something.

Comments

As Diana West wrote at the beginning of the first chapter of her 2008 book, The Death of the Grown-Up, “Once, there was a world without teenagers. Literally. ‘Teenager,’ the word itself, doesn’t pop into the lexicon much before 1941. This speaks volumes about the last few millennia. In all those many centuries, nobody thought to mention ‘teenagers’ because there was nothing, apparently, to think of mentioning:”

In considering what I like to call “the death of the grown-up,” it’s important to keep a fix on this fact: that for all but this most recent episode of human history, there were children and there were adults. Children in their teen years aspired to adulthood; significantly, they didn’t aspire to adolescence. Certainly, adults didn’t aspire to remain teenagers.

That doesn’t mean youth hasn’t always been a source of adult interest: Just think in five hundred years what Shakespeare, Dickens, the Brontës, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, Eugene O’Neill, and Leonard Bernstein have done with teen material. But something has changed. Actually, a lot of things have changed. For one thing, turning thirteen, instead of bringing children closer to an adult world, now launches them into a teen universe. For another, due to the permanent hold our culture has placed on the maturation process, that’s where they’re likely to find most adults.

“How did this happen?”, West asks. Well, that’s the topic explored in the first half of her book, before she explores the equation described in its subtitle, “How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” (The micro-answer to which involves the infantilizing effects of multiculturalism and moral equivalency.)

But to see the birth of the teenager, one need merely click on this photo essay in today’s London Daily Mail: “Drinking milkshakes, an evening at the drive-in and dancing the night away: Candid pictures capture the birth of the ‘teenage’ generation having a gas in 1940s America.”

In a Twilight Zone, six-degrees of separation kind of way, these images also dovetail with the subtitle of West’s book. As Mark Steyn once wrote, recall what set Osama bin Laden’s mentor off in his feverish hatred of America, only a few years after these wholesome mid-forties photos were taken:

Frank Loesser isn’t as famous a songwriter as Irving Berlin or Cole Porter, but, unlike them, he’s apparently responsible for this whole clash-of- civilizations thing. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the U.S. had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:

“The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . .”

Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colo., in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colo., in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” written by Frank Loesser and sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban in the film “Neptune’s Daughter.” Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11.

Incidentally, West’s book is – finally! – now out on Kindle. Also recently published in the Kindle format was The Predator’s Ball, Connie Bruck’s 1989 history of Mike Milken, Drexel Burnham, and Milken’s invention of the organized marketplace for high yield bonds (i.e. “junk bonds”) . So that makes two books I can cross off the list from my January article at the PJ Lifestyle blog on great books missing in the Kindle format.

Related: Found via Aaron Clarey, the author of the recent Blogosphere hit Enjoy the Decline, “Has feminism made women resent being mothers?”

I’m sure MSNBC will be getting right on that topic. Any day now.

2 Comments

   “[Charles] Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces. In his Rise of American Civilization (1927) he led a procession of historians who, caught in the disillusion that followed World War I, ignored wars, belittled wars, taught that no war was necessary and no war did any good, even to the victor. All these antiwar historians were sincere, and few of them were doctrinaire pacifists, as their actions in the last few years prove; nevertheless, their zeal against war did nothing to preserve peace. It only rendered the generation of youth which came to maturity around 1940 spiritually unprepared for the war they had to fight.”

– From Samuel Eliot Morison’s Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, via Ricochet. 

In his 2011 book, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, Theodore Dalrymple explored how the meaning of World War One morphed among European intellectuals from the late teens to the 1920s:

At least to the victors, the war did not seem self-evidently senseless, and disillusionment was not immediate. The war memorials to be found everywhere in France are tributes to loss, but not to meaninglessness. The soldiers really did die for France, or so almost everyone supposed; in Britain, my next-door neighbor, who collects coins and medals, showed me some First World War service medals for those who survived the war, with an athletic (and naked) young man upon a horse, wielding a sword as if he were a latter-day St. George about to slay a dragon. One of the medals bore the inscription “The War to Save Civilization.” I doubt that these medals were greeted solely by hollow laughter; for one thing, they would hardly have been preserved so carefully if they had been. And browsing in a bookshop recently, I found a book published in 1918 with the title The Romance of War Inventions. It was an attempt to interest boys in science by explaining how shells, mortars, tanks, and so forth had been developed and how they worked. By the time of its publication, millions had already been killed, and surely no one in Britain could by that time not have known someone who had been killed or at least someone whose child or brother or parent had been killed. It seems to me unlikely that such a publication would have seen the light of day in an atmosphere of generalized cynicism about the war.

“The version of the First World War that is now almost universally accepted as ‘true’ is that of the disillusioned writers, male and female, of the late 1920s and 1930s. The war, according this version, was about nothing at all and was caused by blundering politicians, prolonged by stupid generals and lauded by patriotic fools,” Dalrymple adds.

This sea change in intellectual worldviews during that period would have profound ramifications for Europe’s future, Claire Berlinski wrote in her review of Dalrymple’s book:

Europeans, then, “are fearful of the future because they fear the past” and are desperate to secure material comfort, for it represents the purpose of their existence. So important to them is this that they “see children not as the inheritors of what they themselves inherited, as essential to the meaning of life, but as obstructions to the enjoyment of life, as a drain on resources, an obstacle to next year’s holiday in Bali or wherever it may be.”

Larger efforts to find transcendence in brief, meaningless, mortal lives have failed. Marxism has been discredited. Thus the rise of “small causes”-environmentalism, feminism, and anti-nationalism, too, in the form of enthusiasm for the European integration project.

Patriotism in Europe has been discredited. Like most observers, Dalrymple locates this loss of confidence in World War I, which shattered the belief that European history was a form of natural blossoming toward a garden of peace, rationality, and material advance. Whether in fact the war was “senseless,” as commonly accepted, is immaterial. His analysis of the change of perspective on the war is particularly interesting. The assignation of the epithet “meaningless,” he notes, emerged after the war, not during it: “not as a direct and spontaneous consequence of the war, but as the result of intellectual reflection on its meaning.” It is, again, well known among psychiatrists that victims of trauma are best able to recover if able to assign meaning to the experience they have endured. To have retrospectively understood the war as “meaningless,” in other words, is to have adopted the psychological strategy least likely to lead to emotional recovery. If even the victorious countries concluded that the war had been meaningless, there was no hope whatever in the defeated countries of making a meaningful narrative of events, “no way of incorporating it into a memory that could be other than humiliating to national self-esteem.” We all know the consequences: “In Germany, disillusion bred a mad militarism; in Britain and France, a blind pacifism.” World War II then “destroyed European self-confidence once and for all.”

All of which dovetails perfectly with Jonathan Last’s 2005 Weekly Standard article comparing Britain’s feckless prewar intellectuals to America’s modern would-be Ruling Class and its own nihilistic lack of civilizational confidence.

2 Comments

Robert Redford’s pro-Weathermen The Company You Keep is likely now playing at an “art theater” near you; as Kathy Shaidle writes in her take on the film, in its own way, Redford’s production charts how the Weathermen have gone from being on the lam, running from the Establishment, to becoming the Establishment themselves, yet another reminder of early Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts’ famous observation that you can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde:

As I joked in 2012, that fictional premise is a stark contrast from the fates of all the real Weather Underground terrorists who now teach at major universities, hang out with the president, get lovingly profiled in The New York Times and elsewhere—do everything except disguise their identities and hide from the authorities.

Hell, they are the authorities.

Just a reminder: Unrepentant Weatherman bomber Bill “Kill Your Parents” Ayers is a highly respected “educator” and a longtime associate of Barack Obama; members of the Weather Underground and other Aquarian terrorists such as Ayers’s wife Bernardine Dohrn, Eleanor Raskin, and Kathleen Cleaver teach at various American law schools, even though not all of them have law degrees.

Weatherman co-founder Jeff Jones, who—don’t you hate when this happens?—”was unexpectedly caught up in a police sweep of individuals suspected of participating in the deadly robbery of an armored truck”—now runs a coalition of labor and environmentalist groups called the Apollo Alliance “and was responsible for drafting President Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act.”

I was going to type “write your own joke,” but then I stumbled upon this:

Addressing those in attendance [at the 1969 Chicago rally], Jones claimed to be the living embodiment of Marion Delgado, a Chicano boy who, at the age of 5, had placed a slab of concrete on a railroad track and derailed a passenger train in California 22 years earlier. Though Delgado had never intended to cause such a tragedy, Jones and his fellow leftists revered the boy’s act for its symbolic value….

Just as publicity for The Company You Keep was revving up, another convicted Weather Underground felon, Kathy Boudin, was appointed an adjunct professor of social work at Columbia University. Boudin served 22 years for her role in that 1981 Brinks truck robbery that left three dead, got Jeff Jones “unexpectedly caught up”—and which inspired the backstory of Redford’s new movie.

Surely not a few impeccably degreed and rap-sheet-free young graduates are wondering right about now, “Who do you have to blow up to get a job around here?”

Actually, quite a bit, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism:

Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” [Mark Rudd is now is now "a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico," Jonah adds elsewhere -- Ed] “The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.”

Ultimately, the notion that “The Weathermen were fighting for peace” is just one of “The 4 Most Outrageous Lies in Robert Redford’s New Pro-Terrorist Movie,” John Boot writes at the PJ Lifestyle blog:

The Company You Keep begins with a montage of real news clips (and a fake one) edited together to tell the story that the Weather Underground grew out of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society and that its activities were meant to end the Vietnam War by “bringing the war home.” Nonsense. The Weathermen loved war and wanted more of it. They were a murderous group of Black Power and Marxist revolutionaries bent on the violent overthrow of the United States. After the 1970 accidental explosion that killed several terrorists who blew themselves up with their own bombs in a downtown New York City townhouse, the true intent of the bombs was revealed: They were meant to be used to blow up a library on the campus of Columbia University. Not exactly a military target.

Naturally, Rolling Stone gives Redford’s film three out of four stars. You younger readers might not remember this, but there was a time when the magazine praised songs seeking non-violent solutions to problems such as “Give Peace a Chance.”* But that was before Rolling Stone became The Establishment themselves.

* That were often written by people who’d rather you forget that they supported some rather blood-thirsty causes themselves, of course.

2 Comments

“Would You Trust Your Financial Future to This Woman?” David Foster asks at the Chicago Boyz econo-blog:

Another example of Murray’s ignorance shows her also to be a nasty bigot. When lobbying against a contract award for an Air Force tanker plane to Northrop Grumman, she said:

“I have stood on the line in Everett, Wash., where we have thousands of workers who go to work every day to build these planes. I would challenge anybody to tell me that they’ve stood on a line in Alabama and seen anybody building anything.”

This blogger responds:

Perhaps Senator Murray has heard of “Hyundai.” They manufacture “automobiles.” She might be shocked to learn that Hyundai has a “manufacturing plant” in Montgomery, Alabama. She might also find it surprising to learn that Mercedes-Benz has a huge, state of the art manufacturing facility  just outside of Tuscaloosa. The last time I heard, manufacturing plants had “lines” where people “build things.” In fact, according to the Manufacture Alabama! website, Alabama has a strong manufacturing base.

Patty Murray is chairman of the  Senate Budget Committee. What do you think are the chances that this individual is able to understand the complexities of the Federal Government budget, or that she is willing to work seriously and objectively to analyze the issues involved?

Oh, and don’t forget Murray (D-WA) singing the praises of Osama bin Laden and his “day care facilities,” in 2002. Foster hasn’t — click over for the details. As the Professor is won’t to say, the country is truly in the very best of hands these days.

1 Comment

“Nice puff piece on San Francisco’s Trash Inspectors” in the Atlantic, one of Ace’s co-bloggers quips. “I can’t quite put my thumb on why California has a debt issue. It couldn’t be paying people to do stuff like this can it?” The piece highlights — I take it back, praises — nanny-state intrusiveness to the nth-degree:

To help improve the city’s landfill diversion rate, Slattery and his crew pound the pavement, both in the early morning and in the evening, keeping tabs on what’s being thrown out and educating people about the three-bin system. The early-morning cart monitors are armed with clipboards, and they take notes about the trash sorting behavior of each household, which is later entered into a database and given to the outreach crew.

“Bad, bad, bad,” says Calderon, shaking her head as she peered into the bins in front of a small home. “This goes in here,” she says, pointing to pieces of plastic packaging that had been put in the black bin instead of the blue recycling bin. She makes a note of it and moves to the next house. There’s no time to waste, because it’s garbage day, and the crew has to remain a few blocks ahead of the trash collectors.

In the course of the morning, we encountered a handful of people – mostly Chinese Americans – who looked somewhat surprised to find a group rummaging through their trash. Each time, Slattery points to his vest and explains that he’s with the Department of Environment. By about 7 a.m., the workers take off their reflective vests and headlamps and head back to the office to log the data they’ve gathered.

San Francisco residents are required by law to separate their compost and recycling from the rest of their trash, and soon they’ll have an added incentive to do so. Recology, the city’s trash hauler, will likely be raising its rates this summer. Under the proposed change, compost and recycling would no longer be free, but people who opt to downsize their black trash bin would pay a reduced fee.

Needless to say, this is all bulls***, to give it a name:

And it’s also a case of two Atlantics in one; elsewhere on the Website, Conor Friedersdorf (I know, I know) explores “What Progressives Can Learn From Their California Failures.” But won’t of course:

What vexes me most about California governance is the pervasive dysfunction. Whatever one thinks about taxation in the state, disagreements about how big government should be and what it should do are proper and unavoidable. But the flame-retardant-couch law? The inability to fire the worst teachers in a timely manner? The pernicious giveaways to the California prison guards? The public-employee pensions so unsustainable that they’ve already bankrupted cities? The gerrymandering? The inability to provide accurate cost estimates for high-speed rail? These problems aren’t rooted in different ideological visions or the minority party’s intransigence.

They’re just amateur hourish — seemingly undeniable evidence of inept governance. The state needs its own Washington Monthly just to chronicle all of the dysfunction. Says Krugman, “at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.” Fair enough. The Democrats are running things now. Let’s see how quickly they fix the problems that I’ve mentioned, now that nothing matters save their own ability to govern, or lack thereof. I predict that the legislature will remain captive to teacher and prison-guard unions, that public-employee pensions will continue to eat up an unsustainable share of the state’s revenue, that the increased tax revenue will largely be steered to special-interest groups, and that Democrats will prove unable to complete large infrastructure projects on time or on budget. Let’s revisit in a year to see if my pessimism or Krugman’s optimism proves closer to the mark.

I sincerely hope I am proved wrong.

As long as its cities are featherbedding their payrolls by hiring people to go through their citizens’ garbage, it’s a safe bet he won’t be on this topic, at least.

Pages: 1 2 | 32 Comments

My wife and I watched Casablanca at the movie theater in San Jose’s Santana Row Wednesday night; there was a pretty good-sized crowd in the theater joining us. (We saw the revival of West Side Story at the same theater a couple of weeks ago; Homer Simpson could have counted the audience on his fingers.)

In 1992, as part of the film’s 50^th anniversary, Roger Ebert, who passed away yesterday, penned a beautifully written take on Casablanca, in which he wrote, “There are greater movies. More profound movies. Movies of greater artistic vision or artistic originality or political significance. There are other titles we would put above it on our lists of the best films of all time.” Nonetheless, for Ebert,  “It is The Movie:”

Movies are, in a sense, immortal. It is likely that people will be watching “Casablanca” centuries from now (and how wonderful it would be if we could see movies from centuries ago). In another sense, however, movies are fragile. They live on long flexible strips of celluloid, which fade, and tear, and collect scratches everytime they travel through a movie projector. And sometimes films burn, or disintegrate into dust.

There’s another element about moviemaking that’s fragile as well: the culture that makes them. Casablanca was filmed in the summer of 1942, when World War II could have gone either way; the meat grinder battle of Stalingrad, which in retrospect sealed the Nazis’ fate, didn’t begin until after filming was complete.

The Hollywood culture that made Casablanca would age rather poorly and exhaust themselves in another kind of battle; in his 2009 interview with Peter Robinson, the late Andrew Breitbart chided the aging conservative executives who created the industry for handing it over to the cultural left without a fight in the late 1960s, as the book and accompanying documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls explores:

30 years prior though, in May of 1939 even before WWII had officially begun in Europe, a tough and confident Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring WB vet and Edward G. Robinson, and “considered the first anti-Nazi film produced by a major studio,” according to Turner Classic Movies. In 1942, the studio made Casablanca.

Warner Brothers is now but one cog in a conglomerate whose TV news network looks at dictators ranging from Saddam Hussein to Fidel Castro to Kim-Jong Il, repeatedly shrugs its shoulders and says, “meh.” (When it’s not openly embracing them.) Time, the pioneering news magazine that’s now just another component of that conglomerate was founded 90 years ago with the goal (in addition to turning a profit, of course) of allowing small town Americans to better themselves by having a concise update on the week’s events. (The magazine’s name was chosen by founder Henry Luce because it implied both the timeliness of its contents, and the ability to save its readers’ time.)  Since Luce’s retirement and death in the mid-1960s, his would-be successors at the magazine have consistently looked at its original core readers as The Other, this strange group of unknown readers out there somewhere in the hinterlands.

In the film Casablanca, the back story for Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine character implies that like many Americans, he was broke at the start of the Depression, took to a variety of unsavory socialist jobs afterwards, before hiding out in Casablanca and starting his saloon. With America on the eve of World War II — significantly, there’s a close-up insert shot of a credit voucher Rick signs early in the film, which is dated December 2, 1941, only a few days before Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — he emerges from his moral stupor to fight totalitarianism, beginning with this utterance to Sam, his faithful piano player:

Rick: If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?

Sam: What? My watch stopped.

Rick: I’d bet they’re asleep in New York. I’d bet they’re asleep all over America.

Hollywood went back to sleep long ago. Today, Robert Redford, who at the peak of his career, had the matinee idol box office clout of Humphrey Bogart, and is still capable of having his pet projects green-lit and funded, is making films in praise of a very different wartime American than Bogie’s Rick. The same theater in San Jose that showed Casablanca this week, will be showing Redford’s pro-Weathermen The Company You Keep beginning the end of this coming week. I’m glad there’s a week and a half space between the two films; too close would risk cultural whiplash.

Pages: 1 2 | 19 Comments

“Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper where he made his home for three decades:

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Unfortunately, Twitter revealed the intense far left biases and raging misanthropy inside Ebert, which did much to tarnish the family-friendly middlebrow tone of his previous movie criticism. Ebert’s embrace of the unfiltered medium erased much of the good will he developed through his years of co-hosting his weekly TV series At the Movies with Gene Siskel, his fellow Chicago-based critic, who himself had passed away in 1999.

Ironically, both men warned of the dangers of political correctness in the early 1990s:

GENE SISKEL: You have to summon up the courage to say what you honestly feel. And it’s not easy. There’s a whole new world called political correctness that’s going on, and that is death to a critic to participate in that.

EBERT: Political correctness is the fascism of the ‘90s. It’s kind of this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your ways of looking at things within very narrow boundaries, or you’ll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that kind of thinking. And certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries; it’s also one of the purposes of art. So that if a young journalist, 18, 19, 20, 21, an undergraduate tries to write politically correctly, what they’re really doing is ventriloquism.

I suspect that will be the Ebert that will be remembered by posterity, ironically, before he allowed his opinions to be consumed by what he correctly dubbed “the fascism of the 1990s” — and beyond.

(Clicking on the Drudge Report, where I first saw news of Ebert’s death, I also hope the horrific photo of Ebert after his cancer, with much of his jaw removed will somehow be removed from circulation. But alas, our less-than-middlebrow culture won’t allow that to happen unfortunately.)

Update: At the Breitbart.com Conversation, John Sexton quotes this beautiful passage from Ebert, recorded for the commentary on the DVD of Dark City (the thinking man’s Matrix) before PC consumed Ebert’s journalism:

Before Ebert’s middlebrow movie critic phase, and final days as an archliberal polemicist, he was a screenwriter for Russ Meyer’s late ’60s and early ’70s sexploitation movies, including Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. For that film’s screenplay, Ebert wrote the camp classic line, “This is my happening and it freaks me out!”, which would be spoofed by Mike Myers in his first Austin Powers movie — and which Ebert himself mentioned in his review.

Kathy Shaidle has that phase of Ebert’s career covered, in a post with quotes and videos. Plus a great catch, finding a remarkably unthoughtful gaffe by the Chicago Sun-Times in Ebert’s obit.

More: Given how Twitter allowed Ebert to drop the mask, and how badly the medium would tarnish his reputation, Steve Green’s 140-encomium is remarkably moving in its brevity:

(Bumped to top of page.)

15 Comments

During one of his fundraisers in California, “the president gave Republicans a rather backhanded compliment,” as the Weekly Standard notes:

Look, my intention here is to try to get as much done with the Republican Party over the next two years as I can, because we can’t have perpetual campaigns.  And so I mean what I say.  I am looking to find areas of common ground with Republicans every single day…. I want to find some common-sense gun safety legislation that we can get done.  And I do believe that there are well-meaning Republicans out there who care about their kids just as passionately as we do.

Der Stingle, is that you? Perhaps our legendary anthropologist in chief’s source was the Washington Post, which apparently believes, as Mollie Hemingway wrote at Ricochet last November, “In Conservative Marriages, There Are No Embraces.”

But then, that may not have been the worst gaffe that Mr. Obama made during his fundraising efforts yesterday: “Obama: Newtown Shooter Gunned Down 20 Children With ‘Fully Automatic Weapon.’”

Perhaps by banning fully automatic weapons (which we did in 1934), we can finally achieve the peace in our time we were promised in 1938. And in January.

Comments

This isn’t going to end well. Yes, it’s wrong to make a reservation and then blow it off without calling to cancel. It’s far worse for a business to publicly insult its customers. And note this quote from the restaurant’s managing partner:

The assholes who decide to no-show, or cancel 20 minutes before their reservation (because one of their friends made a reservation somewhere else) ruin restaurants (as a whole) for the people who make a reservation and do their best to honor it. Either restaurants are forced to overbook and make the guests (that actually showed up) wait, or they do what we do, turn away guests for some prime-time slots because they’re booked, and then have empty tables.

Are they only assholes when don’t show up, or is he implying that he considers all of his potential customers to be assholes? I know what I’d think after reading the above. And does he still consider them to be assholes if there are extenuating circumstances?

Such as a relative dying:

I’m not on Twitter and therefore didn’t see the post so it has no effect on me but yes, I am that [Name Withheld]. I wanted to take my fiancée and friends out to Red Medicine because I had been before with a friend and loved it. I set a reservation that day at 6:00 P.M. for a 7:30 P.M. reservation (so clearly they weren’t busy). Unfortunately, about 20 minutes after making the reservation, I got a call from my mom saying my uncle had passed away and it was the last thing on my mind to call and cancel our reservation.

They did have my cell phone # and never called to see where we were. If they had called my cell I would have told them my situation which I hope they would have understood.

Not sure why they would try and publicly embarrass me in this difficult time for me and my family. I would not like to be published by name but don’t mind you letting them know I won’t be back at their establishment anytime soon.

Flashback: Earlier in the month, I collated quotes from “You got served! The hostage drama of dining out in New York City,” from Kyle Smith of the New York Post, and the embittered, intensely angry responses his article generated from Big Apple waiters.

(Cross-posted at Instapundit.)

5 Comments