YOU CAN’T TWEET YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM: You also need battlefield dominance.
Archive for 2010
April 25, 2010
FROM MILES O’BRIEN: Rocket Racing League video.
GEORGE WILL: In Praise Of Cheerful Men.
HEH: Geithner: “I Never Had A Real Job.”
UPDATE: A reader emails: “He still doesn’t.”
FRANK CAGLE IS dreading the Civil War sesquicentennial. I can see why, but by his own terms we’ve come a long way since the centennial, when the South was full of segregationist Democratic politicians who were standing in the schoolhouse door. Now we’ve got Republicans promising to stand up for constitutional rights!
MAYBE HE PICKED IT UP FROM HILLARY: Obama Develops Mysterious Southern Accent.
BUDGET PROJECTION: Spending as much on interest as general spending by 2040?
WELL, THIS STORY DOESN’T INSPIRE CONFIDENCE.
MICHAEL YON ON the Battle For Kandahar.
THE AUTO PROPHET: Lt. Steve Zilberman RIP.
BEST PREDICTION FROM 2008: “Four years of talking down to me and asking me to pay for it.” So far it looks spot-on.
INFORMED CONSENT and the ethics of DNA research.
MARKDOWNS on sports and fitness GPS gear.
WORRY ABOUT CARBON FOOTPRINTS IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years? I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.
(Via NewsAlert).
SMART DIPLOMACY: The Scud Saga Continues.
MAD MEN’S THIRD SEASON IS NOW OUT ON DVD, and Ed Driscoll has some thoughts.
CATHY YOUNG: Tea Partiers Racist? Not So Fast. “The lead investigator, political science professor Christopher Parker, graciously provided me with the fuller data — which strongly contradict the notion of the Tea Parties as a unique hotbed of racism.” Given that Joan Walsh was stumped by a veiled Keith Olbermann reference I wouldn’t expect her to tease out much useful information here, so I’m hardly surprised to find that her take is wrong.
BOB OWENS: Agents of Incompetence: ATF Dodges FOIA, Still Has Seized BB Guns. “PJM asked for documents related to the bureau’s seizure of $20,000 worth of BB guns, but was given documents that had nothing to do with the case.”
RECIPE for a happy marriage.
A REVIEW of the Singularity Is Near movie, based, of course, on Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near. Short take: “It’s awesome.”
Here, FYI, is my review of the book for the Wall Street Journal.
MARKDOWNS on magazine subscriptions.
EVEN IF THEY HAVE CANDY: Stephen Hawking: Don’t Talk To Aliens. “The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.”
I also recommend this piece by Gregg Easterbrook, if you’re interested in the subject.
UPDATE: Fausta Wertz brings the inevitable allusion.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John McCray writes:
From Charles Pelligrino’s The Killing Star,
“Three Laws of Alien Behavior: 1) Their survival will be more important than our survival. 2) Wimps don’t become top dogs. 3) They will assume that the first two laws apply to us.”
Sounds plausible to me.
MATT WELCH: President follows Europe into places Europeans no longer want to go. “What’s worse for us is that we’ve pretty much given up trying to address the root problem, which is the decade long spending binge initiated by George W. Bush and then tripled down on by Barack Obama. The VAT isn’t a way to streamline a complicated tax code; it’s a new spigot to flood money into the pockets of teachers who can’t be fired, and securities regulators who can’t get enough porn. The grand irony here is that the very continent we’re scrambling to emulate has been moving aggressively in the opposite direction on taxes and economic policy. While the US keeps corporate taxes frozen near 40%, EU countries have slashed them down to an average of around 25%. Top marginal income tax rates, which in the US are 35%, are under 25% all across the former East Bloc.”
THE FOUR CONGRESSMEN of the cotton subsidy apocalypse.