Goolsbee on Government Research Grants

Greg Mankiew points to a devastating comment by Presidential Science Advisor, Austan Goolsbee, on the efficacy of government funded R&D.

Basically, government attempts to stimulate research by throwing money at researchers is counter-productive. The money does little more than enrich the researchers and actually crowds out private research.

Read it here.

Dinosaur Death Watch -- The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Sun moves closer to full extinction.

BALTIMORE (AP) -- The Baltimore Sun has laid off 61 people in its newsroom, about a quarter of its editorial staff, including veteran editors and managers, columnists, photographers and designers.

Maryland's largest newspaper laid off managerial employees at the end of the day Tuesday, and notified union-represented employees Wednesday afternoon, said Renee Mutchnik, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore Sun Media Group.

Twenty-one managers and 40 staffers represented by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild were laid off, Mutchnik and union leaders said. The union cuts included one employee who volunteered to be laid off. The cuts represent about 27 percent of the newsroom staff at The Sun, which is owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co.

Among the managers who lost their jobs were one of the deputy managing editors, the opinion page editor, the op-ed editor and the copy desk chief. Many had decades of experience at The Sun.

Read the whole thing here.

Chopper Chick

The more we learn about Sarah Palin the more I like her. Turns out she is into motorcycles.

People Magazine reports:

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin recently welcomed the crew from Orange County Choppers... to Anchorage where show star Paul Teutul Sr. ...hangs out with the Governor in her office and talks about the Alaskan weather, snowmobiling and fishing in the summer.... After inviting the OCC crew back for the summer months, she suggests having fun Alaska style, saying, "We'll ride the bike to the fishing hole."

Read it here.

Sarah on the back of a bike.... Woo Hoo!

More important, though, is the fact that the "Chopper" program took pains to seek her out and interview her. They know their audience and they know that she is immensely popular with their fanbase. Will we someday see Sarah participating in "Rolling Thunder"? Could be.

UPDATE: Holy Moly! Here's a link to a video of the interview [including a criticism of Sarah for having a bearskin in her office].

Sarah Twitters

Sarah Palin is on twitter at http://twitter.com/AKGovSarahPalin

The Scariest Words You Will Ever Hear

From ABC News:

"The overture has finished and now it truly begins," said one adviser to the White House, referring to the healthcare, energy, and automaker debates to come. "If people thought the first 100 days a productive one, it genuinely only served as a curtain raiser," the adviser added.

Read it here.

UPDATE:

I take it back -- this is even scarier because it comes from the horse's mouth.

Bloomberg reports:

President Barack Obama marked his 100th day in office by telling Americans that “we’ve begun the work of remaking America.”

Read it here.

Bush was Right (continued)

Tom Friedman unwittingly devastates his paper's [and his own] criticism of President Bush's conduct of the war on terror.

Now that the Dems are safely in control, Tom Friedman has decided to admit [here] that President Bush was right to go after al Qaeda aggressively in Iraq using every means possible.

His reasoning starts with the recognition, strenuously denied by Left loons and opportunistic Dems, that al Qaeda is an enemy unlike any other we have faced before.

Al Qaeda was undeterred by normal means. Al Qaeda’s weapon of choice was suicide. Al Qaeda operatives were ready to kill themselves — as they did on 9/11, and before that against U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen — long before we could ever threaten to kill them. We could deter the Russians because they loved their children more than they hated us; they did not want to die. The Al Qaeda operatives hated us more than they loved their own children. They glorified martyrdom and left families behind.

Second, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aspired to deliver a devastating blow to America. They “were involved in an extraordinarily sophisticated and professional effort to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In this case, nuclear material,” Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. bin Laden expert, told “60 Minutes” in 2004. “By the end of 1996, it was clear that this was an organization unlike any other one we had ever seen.”

Third, Al Qaeda comes out of a stream in radical Islam that believes that it has religious sanction for killing absolutely anyone, including fellow Muslims. Al Qaeda in Iraq has blown up Muslims in mosques, shrines and funerals. It respects no redlines or religious constraints. One of its leaders personally severed Daniel Pearl’s head with a butcher knife — on film.

Finally, Al Qaeda’s tactics are designed to be used against, and to undermine, exactly what we are: an open society. By turning human beings into walking missiles and instruments from our daily lives — cars, airplanes, shoes, cellphones, backpacks — into bombs, Al Qaeda attacks the very feature that keeps our open society open: trust.

It was, Friedman admits, perfectly reasonable for the Bush administration to use extremely aggressive methods to combat such an enemy -- one that, more than any foe we had faced in the past, threatened the very foundations of our free society. And, contrary to those who have argued that aggressive interrogation provokes resistance from the Islamists, Friedman notes that al Qaeda does not care whether or not we torture, or who occupies the White House. They declared war on us while Bill Clinton was President.

He then makes a devastating observation regarding the cheap moral posturing of the unhinged Left.

We have the luxury of having this torture debate now because there was no second 9/11, and it was not for want of trying.

In other words, he agrees with Dick Cheney that the Bush administration's efforts against al Qaeda worked, and because they worked we have the luxury of engaging in this irresponsible and fatuous debate. The point has been made before, by Richard Fernandez who wrote:

It is one thing to swear that you will not divulge secrets to the Marcos police under any circumstances, while sitting safe in a bolthole, with a .38 in your lap. It’s quite another to say nothing when your interrogator is prying your eyeball out with a penknife. It is one thing to say I won’t use coercive methods even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on Terror, but entirely another matter to maintain that stance when your child is gasping for breath through his anthrax ridden lungs. Anybody who tells you different is probably a liar or fooling himself.

Read about it here.

Considering the nature of the enemy and the threat it represented to the fundamental institutions of our society, the aggressive actions undertaken by the Bush administration were not only understandable, but wise, justified, and effective. Rather than shutting down our open society, George Bush and Dick Cheney protected it, and because they did so effectively, we can afford to indulge the idiotic protestations of the Left. Rather than being an abuse of power, the Bush administration's response to al Qaeda was a wise and measured one.

And, regarding the oft-repeated canard that the war in Iraq was a "mistake". Friedman writes:

I believe that the most important reason there has not been another 9/11, besides the improved security and intelligence, is that Al Qaeda is primarily focused on defeating America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — particularly in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that if it can destroy the U.S. effort (still a long shot) to build a decent, modernizing society in Iraq, it will undermine every U.S. ally in the region.

Conversely, if we, with Iraqis, defeat them by building any kind of decent, pluralistic society in the heart of their world, it will be a devastating blow.

Wow!

What an admission by one of Pinch's minions!

And why would Friedman be moved finally to write the truth about President Bush? Well, the answer is easy. He is doing so to defend President Obama from Leftloon critics who object to his decisions not to prosecute CIA interrogators or to withdraw precipitously from Iraq.

UPDATE:

Jennifer Rubin, over at Commentary, writes regarding Friedman's piece:

So to recap: the Bush team kept us safe from an implacable foe by using interrogation methods which the American public approved of and by fighting (often against the admonitions of Friedman and his colleagues) and largely prevailing in Iraq. The latter effort may deal a death blow to Al Qaeda which one supposes made it a very worthwhile endeavor....

It must be some other George W. Bush who was the worst foreign policy president in history – because the 43rd president, by Friedman’s accounting, got some very big things right, despite ferocious odds.

Read her here.

After Specter

In the wake of Specter's defection Pennsylvania politicos are madly recalculating their chances. Jim Gerlach is expressing interest in challenging Pat Toomey; Joe Torcella, Fast Eddie's puppet, is looking for a place to perch; people are starting to mention Tom Ridge again. It's all a "cesspool of political speculation and innuendo."

Read about it here.

Specter's Defection

John Ferrell, over at U. S. News, thinks the Specter defection is bad for both parties. It will increase the Democrats' arrogance and the Republicans' ideological rigidity. [here] His colleague, Robert Schlesinger, predicts that Specter will face opposition from Joe Torsella and (most importantly) from Joe Sestak, but not Allyson Schwartz. [here]

Things really do not look good for Specter. He has no chance against Toomey, which is why he bolted the party. Polls say that he could not win as an independent, and he has to be a long shot against Sestak. Still, Specter has a lot of money in his warchest, so we can't count him out this early. Besides, Obama has promised to support Specter in the primaries. That may, however, not pan out. Obama's promises are not something you should rely on.

What fascinates me about this is that removing Specter opens the way for a new leadership group in the Republican Party, but putting him at the top of the Democratic ticket blocks the rising generation of Democrat leaders. Right now national Democrats are drooling over gaining a Senate seat, but sticking with Specter could hurt the party at the State level.

Things are starting to get interesting.

Death of the Dinosaur Killer

In a recent post paleoanthropologist John Hawks warned against uncritically accepting "umbrella hypotheses" -- those elegant contrivances that would account for a wide range of phenomena by reference to a single, simple explanatory mechanism. He notes that paleoanthropology has historically been susceptible to such monocausal explanations. Examples would include the "savannah thesis" the "killer ape" thesis, the "aquatic ape" thesis, and many more.

Read his article here.

Such explanations are seductive because they are elegant and easy to comprehend and they form the basis for numerous popularized science and history texts and innumerable journalistic accounts. But the world is seldom so simple as these hypotheses suggest and despite their popularity they usually lack staying power because contrary evidence rapidly accumulates to undermine them.

One such elegant hypothesis has been the asteroid impact theory that was held to explain a number of geological features as well as discontinuities in the evolutionary record. Most provocatively, an asteroid impact was supposed to account for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Well, new research seems to suggest otherwise. Bloomberg reports:

The demise of the dinosaurs probably occurred 300,000 years after a giant meteor struck what is now Mexico, scientists said, casting doubt on a popular theory that the impact triggered a mass extinction.

The Chicxulub crater, which is about 180 kilometers (112 miles) across, was formed on the Yucatan peninsula when an extra-terrestrial object struck Earth 65 million years ago. Since its discovery in 1978, the crater has been cited as evidence that the impact’s aftermath led to the extinction of about 65 percent of all species including the dinosaurs.

New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.

Read the whole thing here.

And another scientific consensus bites the dust.

Oh well, the impact theory had a good run, about a quarter of a century, and it inspired a lot of books and TV shows that made a lot of money for a lot of people and in modern science, that's ultimately the name of the game.

Words of Wisdom

Jim Treacher: "I keep telling you, Obama isn't another Nixon. Nixon was an amateur."

Lost Legion Films Marketed as Iraq War Screeds

Two films are being made about a Roman legion slaughtered by the Picts. Both are supposed to be allegories for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

The Eagle of the Ninth is being adapted for a Hollywood film, one of two productions examining the failure of the Roman army to crush the Picts in Scotland in the second century AD.

Both are intended as allegories of recent American experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kevin Macdonald, the director of The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, is directing the adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliffe's 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth.

It tells of a disillusioned young Roman soldier who travels to Scotland to find out what happened to his father who fought there.

The Romans will be made to resemble American GIs in the film in a clear attempt to draw parallels between past and present, said Macdonald.

"In a way it is an Iraq or Afghanistan war film taking place in the second century," he told The Times.

The second film to explore the same theme is Centurion, directed by Neil Marshall, who helped make the horror movie Dog Soldiers. It will look at the Roman army's apparent defeat directly, rather than through the lens of the next generation.

Read about it here.

Jeez, these lefty film guys never give up do they? Iraq and Afghanistan just have to be portrayed as imperial hubris and nemesis. I think I'll be giving these screeds a pass, even though the "Dog Soldiers" credentials are impressive.

Un-Freaking-/Believable

Just how stupid can these Obamamaniacs be? Manhattanites were treated today to the sight of the Presidential jet flying overhead, as low as 150 feet above the skyline, rounding the Statue of Liberty and taking a second buzz run over Manhattan. There was no advance notification and people throughout the city were panicked as visions of 9/11 flashed through their minds. Mayor Bloomberg knew nothing about it until alarms started going off.

The whole thing was a publicity stunt set up by the White House, but initial reports blamed the Pentagon. Later the blame game was clarified and lodged squarely at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Supposedly there had been advance notification, but somehow it hadn't been widely communicated. The public was kept in the dark and even Mayor Bloomberg didn't know that it was going to happen. This is an incredibly stupid stunt that was guaranteed to scare thousands and thousands of people.

But then, scaring people is what this administration is all about.

Read about it here.

I guess Manhattan is now flyover country.

People say that the Obamination has a Sept 10th mindset. This confirms it.

Listening To The Renaissance Ensemble

Saturday evening "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I went to hear a chamber concert by the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble. Wow!!! I haven't enjoyed an evening's music this much in a long time. The program began with several well-known English madrigals then progressed through Italian, Spanish and French forms, ending with some wonderful Monteverdi renditions. For me the high point of the evening came with several Sephardic songs that mixed Spanish and North African modes. Several of these are available on the net, but they all have modern instrumentation and sound weak. None of them comes close to comparing with what we heard at the Peabody where the full power of the original came through on the traditional instruments [lots of drums]. For those of you unfamiliar with Renaissance music, much of it is really, really vulgar. Here's an example of a lyric from "Matona Mia Cara":

"I'm no laggard, I'll make love to you all night long, thrusting like a ram."

And that's the bowlderized version. As the director explained, some items on the program were performed only instrumentally because the lyrics were "too obscene to be sung in any language". It reminds us that many of these compositions, which we associate with Renaissance elite culture, had their origins as street songs.

One final note. In any ensemble performance many of the artists spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for their turn to play or sing. Sometimes the boredom of counting measures and beats gets to them, as it did with these vocalists.



How could she possibly be comfortable with her ankles in that position? Ah, youth!

Wretchard on the Torture Debate

Richard ["Wretchard"] Fernandez, over at Pajamas Media, has an excellent article on the current "Torture" debate. I haven't been paying it much attention because I don't consider the Bush administrations' critics on this matter to be intellectually or morally serious on the matter. They simply stake out an extreme position ["We are America, we don't torture"] and then go on the attack. I have equal contempt for the Republican mouthpieces who defend the Bush administration on technical grounds. Torture is a serious matter deserving some serious thought and we are getting none of that from the beltway bloggers.

Fernandez, one of the most serious and perceptive writers in the blogosphere, has actual first-hand experience with torture and its uses. He has thought long and hard about it and he knows how useless absolute moral posturing of the kind now beeing used as a political weapon is when the chips are down. He knows that there are no easy answers. He writes:

It is one thing to swear that you will not divulge secrets to the Marcos police under any circumstances, while sitting safe in a bolthole, with a .38 in your lap. It’s quite another to say nothing when your interrogator is prying your eyeball out with a penknife. It is one thing to say I won’t use coercive methods even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on Terror, but entirely another matter to maintain that stance when your child is gasping for breath through his anthrax ridden lungs. Anybody who tells you different is probably a liar or fooling himself. Some will go further — much further — under duress than they think. Others will break right away. But nobody can predict it in advance.

There is one sense in which I unreservedly sympathize with Cheney’s request to reveal the “successes” of the coercive interrogation program: we ought to know all the facts before making up our minds about moral stances. We ought to look everything in the face. I find it curious that a society which thinks that the CIA’s destruction of the video record of the water boarding sessions is immoral can simultaneously maintain that showing the video of Daniel Pearl being beheaded is inflammatory or inappropriate. Let’s see it all. They are two sides of the same coin.

Read it here.

That is the kind of debate we need, but it is one we will not have.

Sigh!

Interview With Carrie Prejean

Speaking of smoking hot conservative babes (whaddya mean I wasn't? At least I was thinking about them), Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA, is interviewed here by a gay activist journalist. She holds her own pretty well. Whatever, it gives me an excuse to run this picture.

Spring -- It Was Nice While It Lasted

A week ago it seemed that Spring had finally arrived here in Baltimore. There was a riot of color everywhere. It was really fun on a cool day to take my camera for a walk down and around the streets and byways of Charm City. Well, that's all over now. The heat and humidity of deep Summer arrived with a vengeance this weekend. Temps rose into the 90s each afternoon and the big crowds returned to the Harbor. Spring lasted approximately five days this year.


Carnival Cruise Lines was advertising their new season of cruises originating at the Port of Baltimore and so there was a lot of entertainment available to the surging masses. I walked around sampling the delights and spent some time watching tumblers, dance parties, street performers, sand sculptors and the like. Most of the time I hung out on the West side of the Harbor listening to a calypso band. It wasn't the greatest band, pretty bad actually, but it reminded me of my youth, hanging out in South Florida in the Sixties. As I get older more and more things remind me of those salad days.



Today, walking down South Charles toward Cross Street I was struck by the fact that the intense Spring color was nearly all gone. Only a few small trees and bushes still bloomed. Otherwise they were a uniform green. What variation in color there was came from the buildings, not from nature.



And for a real riot of color, you had to go inside like this interior shot of the Cross Street Market. This is the ultimate triumph of the built environment over that of nature. Not only was the inside brighter and cheerier than the streets, it was also air conditioned and provided relief from the heat and humidity that plagues the whole Chesapeake region during the hot months.

More Pennsylvania Pictures -- After the Storm

Spring has finally exploded on the mountainside. The first wave of azaleas are in full bloom. Soon come the lavender, the rhododendrons, the dogwoods, and many more.




And of course Spring means rain, lots of it. Driving through Berks County after an afternoon storm. The sun was bright and low in the western sky but to the east dark storm clouds hung over everything. The result was a dramatic contrast between bright sunlit objects and the dark sky.






And of course the clouds in the sky were spectacular.

Why Does He Hate Us?

From the Telegraph (UK):

If al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest of the Looney Tunes brigade want to kick America to death, they had better move in quickly and grab a piece of the action before Barack Obama finishes the job himself. Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people - not even Jimmy Carter.

Obama's problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.

Read the whole thing here. [emphasis mine]

It is time that we as Americans look hard at ourselves and ask the question: Why does the New Messiah, in his infinite perfection, hate us so much? What have we done to deserve such contempt?

A Night At the Opera

"She Who Must Not Be Named" and I attended the Peabody Chamber Opera Company production of "Dora" (music by Melissa Schifflet, libretto by Nancy Fales Garrett). Friday evening. It was an interesting experience. The opera is based on the case of Ida "Dora" Bauer, a young victim of sexual abuse who was treated by Sigmund Freud for hysteria. Most of the story is told in flashbacks which reveal a horrific series of abusive incidents and also raise questions about Freud's relationship with his own daughter, Anna. There's not much to admire in the story. It is simply the standard feminist indictment of Freud and a litany of male sins against women. There were a number of clumsy jokes at Freud's expense. "Dora" is less a work of art than a political diatribe. The music and libretto are not well integrated and the performances for the most part were merely adequate [this is, after all, a student production]. The standout was Jessica Abel in the title role who was in superb voice. This was a chamber presentation and the staging was interesting. A group of provocatively posed nude female mannequins, symbolizing the objectification and subjugation of women, ringed the stage [no subtlety here]. Given the limited facilities performers had to double as stagehands and it was amusing to watch singers move pieces of furniture around the stage while they were singing. That aspect of the performance did exhibit some ingenuity.

It wasn't a bad evening -- about what I've come to expect from the lefty art crowd these days. A minor diversion, nothing more.

Oh, and there is some nudity.

Diamond Exposed

I never could understand the popular enthusiasm for Jared Diamond's books. They always seemed to me to be simplistic and more than a little deceptive. He was always more a storyteller than a serious student of history. His supposedly historical accounts were little more than morality tales and in his most famous work, the ultradeterministic "Guns, Germs and Steel", Diamond tries to explain the entire course of human history without recourse to human agency. It turns out that he also makes things up and has finally been called on it. Read about it here.