The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Amazon Business Model Question

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 29 Comments

by Smitty

Britsol Palin’s new book is $19.31 on the Kindle, and $15.59 hardcover.
If there is no physical printing and shipping cost associated with buying the bits, why does the .azw file cost ~24% more?
I’d certainly buy her book over Meghan McCain’s meanderings any day, but still. . .

Category: Books

Science Gone Wrong

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 37 Comments

Instapundit’s enthusiasm for all things scientific leads him to write this headline:

MORE WOMEN ARE freezing their eggs
to make babies later. Makes sense.

Well, excuse me for disagreeing. It is a preposterously stupid idea to encourage women deliberately to postpone first-time motherhood until they are middle-aged, without concern for the obvious arguments against such a decision.

For a woman to have her first (and most likely only) child at age 45 — to do this deliberately, as I say — is to ensure that her child grows up with an elderly mother, one who will be in her 60s when her child is a teenager. And it is quite likely that, should this child eventually become a parent, that child’s grandmother will already be in the grave. You are almost guaranteeing a sundering of direct cultural continuity between generations.

It is one thing, I say, when such things happen by luck or accident or fate (call it what you will), but it is another thing to pursue this preposterously unnatural course of action deliberately, with the aid and encouragement of science. And I wish Professor Reynolds, whose admiration of science extends also to science fiction, would keep in mind how often sci-fi offers dystopian warnings about well-intentioned Science Gone Wrong.

We are just now seeing how “scientific” intervention on the other side of the procreative ledger has brought unintended consequences, and perhaps we ought to consider whether it is time for a return to making babies The Good Old-Fashioned Way.

IYKWIMATIYD.


Category: Abortion, Family, Instapundit, Science

Bombshell Headlines With Jane Russell

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 15 Comments

After my wee-hours insomniac rendezvous with Anna Maria Alberghetti, I slept past noon and woke up to discover that Turner Classic Movies is having a Jane Russell marathon in recognition of the late bombshell’s birthday. The film was His Kind of Woman, a 1951 noir thriller that pairs Russell with Robert Mitchum and also features Vincent Price, Raymond Burr and Jim Backus.

Between my disrupted sleep schedule and my fascination with classic beauties from the Golden Age of Hollywood, however, I’ve fallen behind on the news, and thought I’d better catch up:

  • New York Times: John McCain and John Kerry introduce a bipartisan resolution to legalize Obama’s Illegal War™ in Libya.
  • Conservatives for Palin: Buy your tickets now for the July 15 theater debut of the Palin documentary, The Undefeated.
  • Associated Press: Newt Gingrich’s top fundraisers quit, saying the Republican’s presidential campaign is more than $1 million in debt already. We’ll know more when the second-quarter FEC reports are released next month, but I wonder if Newt will still be an active candidate by then.
  • Human Events:  First it was Joe Camel, now it’s Tony the Tiger.
  • Ed Driscoll: Kiddie movie targets Big Oil?
  • Gallup: Obama’s popularity plunging?
  • Piece of Work in Progress: Summer’s here, and it’s snowing in Colorado. I blame global warming.
  • Moe Lane: Roger Ebert, Ryan Dunn and Westboro Baptist Church? Yeah, there’s your trifecta.
  • ABC News: Some guy named Huntsman declared his candidacy for 2012. A friend called to get my reaction, which I summarized in four words: Charlie Crist for President. Huntsman’s challenging Romney for the RINO vote. Good luck with that.
  • American Power: Jon Stewart is a bitter, angry man. Let’s face it, he’s a slightly funnier Bill Maher — and it would be impossible to be less funny than Bill Maher.
  • Associated Press: Worst housing market EVAH!
  • Instapundit: A physics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University has been arrested in New Mexico for running a prostitution Web site that connected some 200 hookers with 1,200 johns. And he says he did it as a “hobby.” Here I am trying desperately to monetize my blog, and this guy’s pimping hookers online for fun. You should hit my tip jar, just for consolation.

OK, so you’re caught up with the latest news and, if you’ll excuse me now, TCM’s showing Jane Russell in The Young Widow (1946) and you wouldn’t want me to keep Jane waiting, would you?

Category: Movies

Disorderly Conduct at Right Online?

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 24 Comments

Well, maybe we got a little rowdy at happy hour, but I didn’t think anyone did anything worth getting arrested for, so you can imagine my surprise at this headline today:

GOP blogger arrested at Netroots Nation
for allegedly harassing two female bloggers
for wearing Muslim head scarves in public.

What was that about? Minnesota Public Radio:

A St. Paul blogger faces misdemeanor charges after he allegedly harassed two Muslim women last week in downtown Minneapolis.
Minneapolis police say John Hugh Gilmore, 52, who writes a blog called Minnesota Conservatives, caused a scene Thursday night on Nicollet Mall. Sgt. Bill Palmer, a police spokesman, said Gilmore appeared to be drunk when he confronted the two women wearing the Muslim headscarf known as the hijab.
“Mr. Gilmore made some comments that he didn’t believe the women should be in the United States, and that he thought that they were ruining America,” Palmer said.

I have never met Gilmore and, until I saw this story, had never heard of him or his blog. The “hijab flash mob” appears to have been a provocative stunt by the Left — at one point, these women came to Right Online trying to waylay Herman Cain — and I regret that any conservative would allow himself to be provoked, which served only the purposes of the provocateurs. Here is Tony Katz of PJTV covering this publicity stunt:

Since the Left is so intent on accusing the Right of bigoted insensitivity, I’ve got an idea: Next year, I’ll ask a couple dozen of my buddies from the Sons of Confederate Veterans to show up at Netroots Nation in authentic rebel uniforms, flying the Confederate battle flag, and see if we can get any “progressives” arrested for disorderly conduct.

After all, if the Left wants to demand that multiculturalism requires us to enthusiastically embrace the devotees of a 7th-century Arab fanatic like Mohammed, I don’t see how they could deny such tolerance to the admirers of Jefferson Davis.

Deo Vindice!

UPDATE: Related news:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Organizers of the liberal Netroots Nation conference to be held in Providence in summer 2012 have taken steps to keep a traditional conservative counter-event at a distance.
The conservative conference RightOnline, a project of the Virginia-based group Americans for Prosperity, has staged its convention in the same city around the same time as Netroots Nation since 2008.
Raven Brooks, Netroots Nation’s executive director, said Tuesday the group had a noncompete clause in its contracts with the Rhode Island Convention Center and two Providence hotels.
“Good luck finding a venue in 2012,” he tweeted over the weekend, in reference to RightOnline. “Two words, non-compete clause. Hugs and kisses.”
Erik Telford, executive director of RightOnline, said his group has made “no firm decisions” on where to hold its 2012 conference. Providence is a top contender, but locations on the West Coast, among others, are also under consideration.

Permit me to say that many bloggers at this year’s Right Online kept saying, “Minneapolis? Why the hell are we in Minneapolis?” The 2010 conference in Las Vegas was awesome, and many Right Online attendees suggest that we stop following around Netroots Nation and instead establish Vegas as the permanent location. I’ll leave it up to Erik Telford and the AFP brain trust to decide, but I’d personally prefer a genuine resort location — Miami, San Diego, or any place with sun, sand and palm trees — to Providence, Rhode Island.

Category: Islam, Progressivism, Right Online

Individual Compassion: Federal Task?

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

I’m concerned that Lowry at The National Review may be missing the larger point. His article’s point, that we should expect some bizzare pivot on the part of the media to long for the days of Bush43, is a good one, as far as it goes. The Chris Matthews of the world are into recreational perversion of their ideas. The act of making, breaking, and remaking public figures like clay is their favorite pastime; we should give them all clay and set them in the corner of the room while we recover the country from a century of Progressive idiocy.
The deeper problem with Compassionate Conservativism, as dreamt up by Karl Rove and articulated by Bush43, is that it tries to justify Progressive Federal overreach by setting the Golden Rule against the Constitution. We are left with a sprawling Federal government that wants to own your food, health, education, housing, job, and retirement.
As someone who takes a strongly Federalist view of the Constitution, the idea of Washington DC as an organization with copius resources that steps in to alleviate multi-state natural disasters seems ‘about right’ in terms of the ‘compassion’ that would be proper.
The Golden Rule of ‘loving thy neighbor as thyself’ makes good Judeo-Christian sense in the case of actual neighbors. Or, if spiritually led, to take up the cause of distant ‘neighbors’ voluntarily, sure. The dirty reality of the Progressives is that their socialist attitudes, time and again, breed contempt. People do not scale. The Iron Law wins in every situation.

Government

Is

Not

God

Category: Uncategorized

Freeberg Nears A Breakthrough

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

M. K. Freeberg is one of the deeper thinkers in the blogosphere. Here he is dealing with some organizational behavior issues. RTWT, but let me focus early on.

Yesterday was the first 20% of a work week. I clocked out on time, and returned home in the daylight to attend to the personal side of my life. I noticed my evening hours were spent much like my daylight hours, trying to solve problems that were of someone else’s making and had grown in size over long periods of time. Only many hours after that, in the depths of slumber, did I realize the similarity between what was happening in these two different worlds. I also argued with someone about who should become the next President; this person and I happen to share the concern about my country’s massive public debt. So you could say there, too, the pattern persists. So that’s three worlds, three sets of problems, all alike.

The common theme I’m seeing is lots of people who are willing to take the responsibility of saying — “do not attack the problem from that direction there because it is not my vision that it be solved that way.” That much responsibility and no more. They are not willing to take the responsibility of saying — “it would be preferrable for you to stand over there doing nothing, compared to solving the problem in a way contrary to the way I had in mind.” But some variant of that, is exactly what comes out of their mouths. They hear of a course of remedy and they want it abandoned before it has been begun. They act like it would do some actual damage, but they can form no coherent explanation of how this would be. They counsel toward the status quo without actually counseling toward the status quo.

And so in all three cases a problem is created and allowed to snowball as no steps are taken to solve it, or the progress shown in solving it, is insufficient compared to the rate at which the problem continues to grow. In all three cases, there is a great abundance of ideas about what people should not do and a scarcity of productive ideas about what people should do. Nor has it escaped my notice that out of these vast stockpiles of ideas-about-what-not-to-do, many of those ideas — a clear majority — are centered around not a what but a who. Such-and-such a person needs to go away…or become ineffectual…be dismissed. It’s as if everyone wants to say “I have a vision of how this problem is to be solved, and my vision involves an observation after it’s solved that Person X was not part of the solution, therefore Person X should not be allowed to contribute.”

I suppose I could learn to accept that. But there’s one sticky issue: It has nothing to do with solving the problem.

This is actually a variation on the theme of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. I see this frequently. In a bureaucracy, people are rewarded for talking about solving problems. This must be seen as distinct from problem solving. Bureaucracy thrives on maintaining a problem. Bona fide solutions are permitted only in cases where they breed at least two follow-on problems.

Category: Uncategorized

Cut, Cap, And Balance

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

My own thoughts on fixing the fiscal mess are probably too radical for reality. The Cut, Cap, and Balance pledge looks like a place to begin.
Also important: trust building activities. Given that the government, as a whole, has completely expended all confidence in its veracity, the idea of a “Balanced Budget Amendment” sounds like YAFE: Yet Another Futile Exercise. Real control will be exerted by voters at the ballot box, eliminating incumbents until some notion of the seriousness of the electorate sinks into these creeps. The years it would take to ratify such a swell-sounding figleaf of an Amendment would be plenty of time for new feats of verbal gymnastics. The BBA would join Amendment X in the ‘honored in the breach’ club.
A more serious overture by the Government would be load-shedding useless Excecutive departments/agencies, e.g. Labor and HUD, for two examples among many. Also worth considering: paring back both the scope and the ability to tax of the Federal government.
Struggle on, ye patriots.

Update: government goober Geithner goes gaga over ‘responsibility’. Recommendation: first, acquire credibility. In Turbo Tax Timmy’s case, the first step would involve resignation. Step two would be an extended, sincere public apology. Then, a few years of silence. After that, some notion of responsibility may have come to him.

Category: Uncategorized

Too Ugly for BeautifulPeople.com

Posted on | June 21, 2011 | 18 Comments

That’s got to hurt:

An exclusive online meeting place billed as a dating website for “beautiful men and women” was causing new outrage Monday after dumping 30,000 members deemed too ugly. . . .
Such is the level of fury, the site’s operators have set up a counseling helpline to ease the pain of rejection.
“We have to stick to our founding principles of only accepting beautiful people — that’s what our members have paid for,” BeautifulPeople.com’s Greg Hodge told The Guardian. “We can’t just sweep 30,000 ugly people under the carpet.”

Maybe they can go to NotQuiteBeautiful.com or KindaHomely.com.

Category: humor
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