EdDriscoll.com

Posted 3/23/2002 11:38:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
KUDLOW ON THE ECONOMY:Larry Kudlow's slant on Alan Greenspan and the current state of the economy:

On the economic side, the Fed statement confirms that official Washington now believes the recession is definitely over, and that a stronger-than-expected recovery has begun. How strong? Today, what we're looking at is much more of a normal recovery cycle than most people — including Mr. Greenspan — expected a month or two ago. In fact, we're actually looking down the barrel of a noninflationary economic recovery, one that will provide basketfuls of profit.

Kudlow goes on to describe how the recovering economy could impact the upcoming elections. I'll believe the economy is really recovering when I start to see some sign that the markets are heading north. Right now, they appear to be locked in a trading range--and while the Dow may be creeping upwards it's like watching paint dry. I don't think most voters will believe the economy is recovering until they see significant upward movement in the stock markets--a few of those hundred or more point rally in the Dow days that make the evening news would be nice--and the Nasdaq has even more work cut out for it.

Posted 3/23/2002 02:13:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
MUHAMMAD ALI, SONNY LISTON, GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE MIDDLE EAST: The secret connection will all be revealed by reading this post from the eclectically named Captain Scott's Electric Love Bunker.

Posted 3/23/2002 01:52:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
BLOCKING ADS: I always feel a twinge of guilt when I employ a new program to block Web advertising. Having been self-employed for the last 12 years, I understand that everybody is in the self-promotion business, to one degree or another. I have ads for my tip boxes, and am an Amazon.com associate. My previous businesses have, at various times, relied on newspaper ads, telemarketers, and direct mail to build up clients. And today as a freelancer, I send out truckloads (OK, maybe cardboard box loads) of queries every year both via snailmail and email. But the latter half of the twentieth century in America has had a constant running battle with advertisers and the general public. The answering machine and caller-ID help to cut down on telemarketers interrupting dinner. The VCR and ReplayTV help to cut down on TV commercials. In fact, I think it was George Gilder’s Telecosm, where he wrote that the next big trend in business is respect for their customers’ time, and not wasting it. (I think Gilder's usually pretty accurate in his predictions. But it would be nice if that trend would finally arrive!) I believe that X-10 did their reputation a lot of damage with their seemingly omnipresent pop-up ads. Originally, X-10 was only known by us home automation freaks, because they developed the first (fairly) reliable home automation technology, back in 1977. Today, millions of Internet users know X-10 as “those jerks that put out the annoying pop-up ads for their webcams. I see them on every site I visit!” I started using Pop-Up Stopper Pro with Internet Explorer a few months ago, because I was sick of those ads, and similar pop-up ads. (I’ve already given X-10 a reasonable chunk of my cash, and wife gave me a subscription to National Review, so it’s not like I’m boycotting those folks who use pop-ups). Lately, I’ve started seeing those really annoying Macromedia Flash ads, where Alka-Seltzers fizz across a Web page, or ET flies across your monitor or things go splat, creepy crawlies creep and crawl, or other silly things interrupt a Web page you were trying to read. In a way, they're worse than pop-up ads, which usually open up behind a Web page, or can quickly be deleted. So earlier today, I downloaded FlashSwitch, to toggle Flash on and off. I can’t help but think that somewhere hidden in the boilerplate of the CBDTPA, formerly known as the SSSCA, or whatever Fritz Hollings is calling it this week, is some legislation to block our attempts to block ‘Net advertising. I know Replay TV’s automatic commercial zapping feature has the TV networks annoyed. But geez folks, it’s not like we don’t see enough advertising already!

Posted 3/23/2002 01:25:35 AM by Edward Driscoll
YOU'RE A BETTER MAN THAN I: Nina and I saw Gunga Din on Friday night at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. What a fun movie--and one that there's no way could be made in these PC times. Unless of course, the producers hired Noam Chomsky as their technical advisor, to add a postmodern subtext that informs us how evil those mean old empire building Brits were. The other curious element of Gunga Din is that it's one of the few films where Hollywood actually cast Cary Grant to play an Englishman. Most of the time of course, he was all-American, often as a Madison Ave. advertising man (Mr. Blandings, North by Northwest), or working for the US government (Notorious, Destination Tokyo). Today, whenever Hollywood employs Sean Connery, they build an elaborate backstory to explain why he's a Scotsman in a film full of Americans. Back then, audiences suspended disbelief and assumed Cary was all-American--because he was so terrific to watch. Speaking of which, if you're reading this from the Bay Area, it will be playing these for the next few days, as the Stanford is in the middle of a Cary Grant retrospective.

Posted 3/23/2002 12:55:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
PHOTO PAGES ADDED: I have no idea how these will load, or look, on other browsers. But I just uploaded a collection of photos of myself, playing with trains, battleships, and rockets, as well as a couple of my run-ins with celebrities. (That Chewbacca--what a nice guy. Some stars let their fame go to their heads, but he's one wookie who's got a solid, if extremely furry, head on his shoulders.) NOTE: These pages are both fairly large (over 400K each) and best viewed via a broadband connection. Click here to view photo section.

Posted 3/22/2002 03:54:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
ORWELL WAS ALRIGHT, BUT HIS DISCIPLES WERE A BIT THICK: Back in late January, the omnipresent Instapundit had a link to Bjørn Stærk's comments about the two types of people who quote George Orwell:

those who quote his fiction, and those who quote his non-fiction. When fiction-quoters find themselves in a debate way over their heads, they drag out their handy little Orwell toolbox, and throw out some ominous buzzword (Orwellian! Big Brother! Doublethink!), and then leave, considering the debate won. To them, Orwell is an excuse not to think, because any complex issue can be reduced to some 1984 or Animal Farm analogy. To non-fiction quoters, Orwell is a painful reminder never to stop thinking. You can read 1984 and emerge as much a blathering fool as you ever were, but read his essay on language, and it'll haunt you, forever poking at your self-importance and lazyness, as it has mine. 1984 is a brilliant book, and I'm sad to find yet another example that confirms my theory: It is always quoted foolishly.

I think the difference between Orwell's fiction and non-fiction quoters is a terrific observation, one that Jonah Goldberg runs with today. Goldberg quotes a couple of reporters who have recently used the phrase "Big Brother is back" or variants of it to describe cameras in schools or around monuments.

I could go on for pages. Variations on the phrase come up all of the time, in congressional testimony, editorials, news reports, press releases, political debates. But nobody sees the irony. Not only was Big Brother never here in the first place, but the knee-jerk belief that he was here reflects precisely the sort of ideological brainwashing 1984 was supposed to be warning us against. It is a popular myth, a bit of self-reinforcing hysteria that civil libertarians and the simply unthinking buy into without even knowing it. To ask "Is this return of Big Brother?" is only slightly more reasonable than to ask "Are we looking at the rebirth of Narnia?" or "Is the Bush administration concerned that when Superman returns, he might handle Saddam Hussein without consulting the White House?" The roots of this Big Brother mythology are deep and intricate, but surely it arises in part because of the general liberal conviction that the past is bad and Big Brother is bad, thus — since we don't have Big Brother now — he must have existed in the past. I'm sure there are kids in Ivy League English classes right now who think that Big Brother existed in 1984 (the year) because that was the name of the book.

As much as I hate the idea of cameras at intersections (and they seemed to be all over the roads in London when I was there in 2000), I have to agree with Jonah when he says:

If the slippery slope is the rule, why have civil liberties become more secure since the internment of the Japanese or the isolated abuses of the 1960s — or the suspension of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln, for that matter? If we are going to use slippery-slope arguments, let us at least use the real-life examples Edmund Burke spoke of rather than invoke the fictitious apparition of a past that never was.

Posted 3/22/2002 01:39:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
FROM QUAGMIRE TO "MISSION-CREEP": Yet another call the beware the Ides of March. Oh wait, we're past those. OK, yet another call (humorously issued by Jeff Jarvis) to beware The dreaded Afghan springtime:

Remember when we were told that winter in Afghanistan would be a killer, assuring us a quagmire? Now we're supposed to dread the melting snows of springtime.The Guardian:
American military and intelligence chiefs are bracing themselves for an upsurge in guerrilla-style attacks from al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan when the snows melt in a few weeks time. As concern continued to grow among British backbench MPs of a possible "mission creep" in Afghanistan, the CIA director, George Tenet, warned that al-Qaida terrorists were poised to step up their activities following the spring thaw.
We advance from guagmire to "mission-creep." I dread that Afghan summer.

Posted 3/22/2002 10:27:13 AM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER: A while back, we mentioned the Robo-Scribe, the robot news reporter. Last week, the New York Times ran an articled called Where the News, but Almost Nothing Else, Is Real. It's about the construction of a virtual reality set for KJTV's news in Lubbock, Texas.

The set, an enormous high-ceilinged room, would have remote-controlled cameras capable of swooping above and around it. Announcers would be able to take an open elevator up to a sweeping second story and walk across the exposed higher floor. But this set would not be an elaborate wood, glass and metal affair. It would exist virtually, inside the hard drive of a Silicon Graphics workstation and the brain cells of its viewers.

OK, we've got the robot reporter, we've got the virtual reality set, need I say more? Hey, Max Headroom, tanned, rested and ready...

Posted 3/22/2002 10:18:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
POSTAL RATE INCREASE APPROVED: AP is reporting that Americans will be paying an additional 3 cents to mail a letter this summer.

The independent Postal Rate Commission on Friday gave its approval to an unprecedented agreement on postage prices, reached by the post office and nearly all of the businesses and organizations that normally fight rate changes vigorously. All that remains now is for the postal governing board to set the date, probably around June 30. The decision gives the post office "breathing room" after it was strapped by the economic slowdown and costs related to anthrax-tainted mail, said Rate Commission Chairman George Omas.

A couple of years ago, Rick Merritt, Executive Director of the non-profit watchdog group PostalWatch, while calling for a hiring freeze said,

“The Postal Service seems to be the only organization on the face of the planet that has invested Billions in automation technology without deriving any significant increase in workforce productivity. Only a government-sanctioned monopoly could raise prices and increase its workforce in the face of reduced demand for its services.” Merritt went on to say, “The Postal Service is in a Death-Spiral, prices keep going up, quality of service is going down and the Postal Service continues to become a bigger and bigger mouth to feed. What America really needs is a Postal Patron’s Bill of Rights which; requires postal head-counts to shrink along with first-class mail demand, strictly prohibits the agency from regulating competitors and outlaws rate-payer subsidized forays into non-postal ventures.”

Given that big chunks of the American population have email, and electronic bill paying, the Post Office has to be the only enterprise not to understand that to increase business, you have a sale, not raise prices. Instead of letting the Microsoft trial grind on, couldn't we try to break this monoply up--finally? Oh, and while a virus could kill my computer (in Norton we trust), you can't get Anthrax from an email. (But if you're reading this, you knew that already.)

Posted 3/21/2002 07:22:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOUIS RUKEYSER OUT: AP is reporting that Maryland Public Television is retooling Wall Street Week, and in the process, Louis Rukeyser, its host, is being shown the door.

"They decided unilaterally not to proceed with me as the host of the show I created, wrote and maintained for 32 years," Rukeyser said. "They then tried to get me to remain with the program in a senior-commentator capacity, but I decided I didn't want to have anything further to do with them." MPT and Fortune magazine are creating a new version of the weekly program called "Wall $treet Week With Fortune." The show, slated to air in the fall, will feature Fortune editorial director Geoffrey Colvin and an undetermined co-anchor, MPT said. Rukeyser's contract runs through June. He said the final edition of the show will air June 28.

I'm very sorry to see Rukeyser get the boot--his was one of the very few PBS shows I enjoyed watching, especially in the early 1990s, when I began my career as a financial planner, something I did until the mid-1990s, when I moved out to California, and sold my practice. Of course, in that time, we've seen the rise of CNBC, CNNFN, and Bloomberg (and of course, all of the cable news channels have daily financial shows as well), rendering a weekly financial show largely superfluous. It will be interesting to see how Wall Street Week does under its new hosts.

Posted 3/21/2002 01:52:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
REMEMBERING 9/11: Glenn Reynolds writes:

JONAH GOLDBERG says we should work to remember the horror of 9/11, but that the TV networks are papering it over. Yeah, I know I mentioned that already, but at least you can link to this website, which I should have mentioned when I posted on Goldberg's piece the first time around.

Keep a case of Kleenex, or an airsick bag, or both, handy when viewing these images--they're truly a punch in the gut, and a reminder of the purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom. As Jonah wrote in his column, it speaks volumes about television news organizations and their fear that we're too weak to handle these images. And that's the whole point: putting the people who created them--savage, inhuman terrorists--out of business, and off the planet, permanently.

Posted 3/21/2002 12:50:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE GLASS ENGINE: Found via "The Spirograph", JamesEdmunds.com has a link to a truly unique interface constructed by IBM to search the music of Philip Glass. I'm not sure how intuitive it is, but it's definitely a fun way to explore Glass's music--and somehow, very much in keeping with the flavor of Glass's style. I could definitely see museums or archives adopting this type of interface to view an online catalog of related works.

Posted 3/21/2002 11:11:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
WE STILL HAVE NIXON TO KICK AROUND: Michael Potemra, on The Corner on National Review Online links to today's Washington Post, which has an article with transcriptions of some of Nixon's White House rants against drugs and homosexuality. Potemra writes:

Here's my personal favorite: "Let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root [gays] out, they don't let 'em hang around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them. Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us." You know what I love most about this? The idea that the Soviet Union, less than two decades before its complete destruction, is a "strong" society because it tyrannizes over its own citizens. Well, we didn't take Nixon's advice and become more like the Communists. And guess which country is still standing.

Posted 3/21/2002 10:31:07 AM by Edward Driscoll
MAP OF THE KNOWN WEB LOG UNIVERSE: Inspired by the work of Edward Tufte, A Picture of Weblogs has a huge Spirograph-like map of what looks like hundreds of Web logs. Found through Megan McArdle's blog.

Posted 3/21/2002 09:50:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
SHIPS NO LONGER "SHE", MERELY "IT": "Group Captain Lionel Mandrake" is reporting (check out his source...) that:

Lloyd's List, founded in London in 1734 (making it one of the world's oldest daily publications), will no longer be referring to ships as "she". From here on they will be known as "it". Hmmmm ...... sounds about right - given the soul-less nature of modern ship design. Imagine a fully-rigged tea clipper - the Cutty Sark - barelling down the English Channel in a 30-knot wind, bit between her teeth, close-hauled to the wind, racing to be the first into London with the new season's tea. Nobody with a romantic sould would call her anything but "she". One is an incurable romantic.

I'm really curious as to why the editor of Lloyd's is doing this. Is this something that politically correct female sailors have been clamoring for? Have Oprah or Rosie gone on TV to decry the feminization of nautical pronouns? What do the women of DACOWITS think of this? Hey, even on Star Trek: The Next Generation, set in a Marxist, uber-PC future, with the Federation modeled after the worst excesses of the UN, the Enterprise is still "a she". (Slipping into John Belushi doing Capt. Kirk) "But for...how long?...how...long...?"

Posted 3/21/2002 09:41:52 AM by Edward Driscoll
PACIFIC STOCK EXCHANGE TRADING FLOOR GOES BYE-BYE:

The Pacific Exchange (PCX) today announced that it is closing its San Francisco equities floor on Thursday, March 21, 2002. The PCX also announced that, on Friday, March 22, it is moving its equities trading operations to the fully electronic Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx). The PCX and its forerunner, the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, have operated a trading floor for stocks and bonds in the city since 1882. The floor has been housed in the "Temple of Capitalism" at 301 Pine Street since 1930, but advances in technology have eliminated the Pacific's need for centralized, physical facilities to make markets in equity issues.

I wonder if the NYSE will ever close its trading floor, which also has got to be rapidly becoming superfluous in these days of electronic trading. And does this mean that telecommuting is not dead, despite all the panicking stories I read about it in late 2000 and 2001?

Posted 3/20/2002 10:37:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
4 DIE IN US EMBASSY BLAST IN PERU: AP is reporting that an explosion outside the U.S. Embassy in Lima late Wednesday killed at least four people, local media reported. The blast comes three days ahead of a visit by President Bush.

Details about the dead and injured were not clear, and some reports said the death toll from the apparent car bomb was as high as 10. At least four bodies could be seen in the rubble, including a boy wearing roller skates, radio reports said. A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said no American citizens were hurt in the explosion. The official declined to comment further.

UPDATE: I don't know if this is a later or earlier report. But Matt Drudge has a link to a Reuters article, which puts the death count at seven.

Posted 3/20/2002 09:41:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
A WORTHWHILE ENTERPRISE? Some amusing thoughts on Enterprise, the latest Star Trek series from Charles Oliver's Shoutin' Across the Pacific Web log:

I’ve seen almost all of the episodes of Enterprise. It isn’t great, but it’s probably the best first season so far for a Trek spin off. TNN has been running Star Trek: the Next Generation and I’ve seen all of the first two seasons of that show. I had forgotten just how bad those early episodes were. Clipping my in-grown toenail is less painful that watching anything from the first season.

Oliver's best riff, which Glenn Reynolds also picked up on was:

I figure that any civilization that can perfect faster-than-light travel, transporters that can move people tens of thousands of miles while only occasionally splitting them into good and evil twins and holodecks so realistic that the fake guns can kill people and the fake Moriarty can take over the ship can find a way to make Marxism work.

I've also liked the new series, but with reservations. The Andorians episode was quite a good piece of action/adventure, but the most recent one, with the "evil" hunters in camouflaged jump suits chasing shapeshifting wraiths, was just silly. I wonder if the 22nd century will need an NPA to protect the rights of non-military personnel to bear phasers, and hunt with them...

Posted 3/20/2002 04:19:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE WORLD'S FASTEST PC? Speaking of nifty technologies, the BBC (also by way of GeekPress) is reporting on a customized PC, called the "Vapochill", clocked at a blistering 3 GHz:

The Vapochill PC takes an off the shelf 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor and speeds it up to the record-breaking pace. PCs which have been "overclocked" in this way are often unstable, because the whole system, including the memory chips and the interface circuitry, is run well past its design speed. But the Vapochill takes advantage of the way that some computer circuit boards are designed to speed up only the processor and leave the rest of the system unchanged.

Posted 3/20/2002 04:07:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM CLEARS THE SENATE. THE DOW DROPS 133 POINTS. COINCIDENCE? Yeah, probably, but spooky. I really do hope that having been chastised for going wobbly on steel, Bush vetoes this thing before he goes wobbly on the First Amendment. We'll see... By the way, I'm typing this entry from a laptop sitting on my back deck, via my wireless 802.11b rig, while listening to Miles Davis' Miles Ahead, with Gil Evans' sublime arrangements on headphones, via the laptop's CDROM. God I love technology!

Posted 3/20/2002 02:36:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CYBORG GETS HASSLED AT THE AIRPORT: Strange story in the New York Times, by way of GeekPress (which I found by way of Virginia Postrel's blog), which says:

Don't mess with airport security -- real-life cyborg learns that "resistance is futile". Due to increased airport security measures, Canadian engineering professor Steve Mann was forced to unplug all his cybernetic implants that help him augment his memory and vision. According to the article, Mann (who has worn these implants continously for 20 years!), found the experience extremely disorienting: "Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair."

It will be interesting to see how the airport security debacle plays out in the next five to ten years, as more and more people will probably have some of the cybernetics that Mann is testing. I'd also be interested to see what happens to Mann's lawsuit, and if he's able to rebuild his equipment.

Posted 3/20/2002 01:11:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
BROCK ON FOX: Media Research Center's CyberAlert for 03/19/2002 has a transcription of David Brock's recent appearance on Fox New Channel. Among the many amusing moments during one of the few grillings Brock has recieved over his new book, in this case, by Fox's David Asman:

Raising Brock’s claims that former FBI agent Gary Aldrich misused a baseless allegation Brock had passed along to him, Asman asked: "We’re supposed to believe you, a person who has admitted that you’ve lied in print as opposed to an FBI agent who was assigned to two different administrations?"Asman, who was with the Wall Street Journal editorial page before jumping to FNC, showed how Brock was inaccurate in his claim about how the Journal had identified Aldrich.

Posted 3/20/2002 12:56:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE ON MOORE: Yesterday, we linked to an Instapundit Michael Moore update. Today, a reader of The Corner on National Review Online took offense at Moore's alleged nasty behavior, as reported in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune, and, according "The Corner":

wrote Moore to complain about it, calling himself a "former fan." Former Fan forwarded me the e-mail he received from Moore (mmflint@aol.com), reproduced here verbatim (except for the profanity): dear former fan, glad you are former! 'casue i don't need any fans who would believe that scummy anti-union paper! that pr--k who wrote that column is best friends with the guy who was married to my sister and abandonned her and the two kids there in san diego. so f--k him, f--k you. everything he wrote was a lie, and i plan on taking action. mike

Posted 3/20/2002 11:36:43 AM by Edward Driscoll
PROFILE OF MY WIFE AND I: I was literally in the process of scanning this article, which I wrote for House of Business magazine in the fall of 2000, (now known as Broadband House), when I discovered that my wife's "virtual assistant", Terri Lee Romine, already has it scanned on her Web site. This is a pretty good look at the technology inside our home, that drives our two home offices. And Terri does a terrific job of assisting my wife in her legal practice, even though they're located 350-odd miles apart. We've updated much of the technology featured in that article--we're on Windows 2000 now for the most part (a couple of PCs still have 98, and my main PC is 98/2000 dual boot), and we've also installed an 802.11b network which makes working all over the house (and outside, on the rear deck) even more flexible, but the general principles--that it's more than doable to largely run two businesses out of a single home--that's it's possible to mix business and pleasure (I often work out of our den, which doubles as a media room), are still very much up-to-date. By the way, I noticed earlier today that Glenn Reynolds is still writing many of his Instapundit columns on a $400 eMachine. I used a heavily modified eMachine for a number of years (until I gave it to a friend when I bought the Win2000/98 PC that I now use as my primary business computer), and still have another one that's used in our guest room/study as a spare PC (with a TV card built-in, so guests can watch DirecTV). By the way, to paraphrase Glenn, nice of eMachine to help destroy the digital divide...

Posted 3/20/2002 12:00:00 AM by Edward Driscoll
FAQ ME BABY! Q: When will your Frequently Asked Questions page finally be up? I'm sick of reading "Coming Soon!" A: It's online now! Click here to read it. Q: When will your About Me page be done? A: Good question. How does "in the not too distant future" sound? Q: Really vague, but I guess it will have to do. A: OK. On to the FAQs Page!

Posted 3/19/2002 04:28:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ASTHMA INHALERS: As someone who has suffered with asthma since he was three or four years old, I almost needed a puff from my inhaler after working myself up into a lather reading Catherine Seipp's article "Asthma Attack", with the subhead of "When 'zero tolerance' collides with children’s health", on Reason's Web site. Seipp's article is full of terrifying run-ins with odious little school beaurocrats and teachers, including Seipp and her daughter (who also has asthma) and their incident with her school's principal, who quickly backed down from his "zero tolerance" policy preventing Seipp's daughter from carrying her own inhaler after Seipp called the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of nursing. "Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker’s desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly." Another classic is this one:

Ellie Goldberg of Newton, Massachusetts, advises parents of children with various medical problems how to deal with schools. She gets calls about asthma inhalers every day. One of the most memorable: "A person from Louisiana called and told me about a teacher who pulled a drawer out, spilled all the medicine out of the cups, refilled them randomly and said, ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t hurt anybody.’" When Goldberg’s own asthmatic daughter was in the second grade, the school secretary mistakenly gave her Ritalin instead of her inhaler.

It's a long article, full of horrifying incidents like this, making you wonder if the kids should have stickers on their backpacks saying "You can have my inhaler when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of it". Every parent of a child with asthma, or any other medical condition, should read this article--it's excellent.

Posted 3/19/2002 04:04:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
SUPPLY-SIDE, PHILLY STYLE: Patrick Ruffini on tax cuts, and supply side economics, in Phildelphia:

Tax cuts are on the intellectual offensive in the City of Brotherly Love, even though I think the political will for them will lag far behind for a long while, if not forever. Remember, this is also the city with the most rapacious, violent unions in the country, where there's always a clamor for more "services" (ultimately a fig-leaf for paying Democratic precinct-captains-cum-city workers well above-average salaries to sit around City Hall offices doing nothing). It's great that city Democrats appreciate what we were saying all these years about the job-killing effects of high taxes. Now let's see them do something about it.

Posted 3/19/2002 01:40:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
MICHAEL MOORE, HYPOCRITE: Glenn Reynolds has a couple of amusing Michael Moore updates today. I love this one:

Moore endorses chain restaurants over local ones, because small business owners vote Republican: "F*ck all these small businesses - f*ck 'em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. F*ck 'em all. That's how I feel." And it's all about how he feels, isn't it?

Posted 3/19/2002 12:38:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
ORRIN JUDD ON THE FEDERAL RESERVE, which left interest rates unchanged today:

One of the problems with the Fed is that they tend to combat the problem that prevailed when they were young men. Thus, they were far too slow reacting to inflation in the 70s, because unemployment had been the big problem of the governors' Depression youths. Now they are fighting non-existent inflation because it was the big problem when Greenspan served in the Ford Administration.

I wonder just what it would take to get Greenspan to admit that inflation isn't the beast it was in the past? Personally, I'm rather fond of the idea that Milton Friedman suggested last year in an interview:

"I've always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer." In essence, a PC could determine the economy's monetary base and consistently increase it by, say, 3 percent annually. "That amount of money would be created and distributed, either by buying up government securities or by financing current government expenditures," Mr. Friedman explains. "It would do that week after week, month after month, hopefully year after year."

Posted 3/19/2002 11:47:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
MICHAEL JACKSON AND PEDOPHILIA: The Internet Movie Database's Movie and TV News has this article today, which Uthant could have lots of fun with:

An episode of a British comedy show that drew the anger of numerous child advocacy groups as well as the censure of two regulatory agencies provoked new controversy Monday when it was nominated for an award by the British Academy of Film and Television. After the nominated episode, which satirized the media's treatment of pedophilia, was aired last August, the country's Independent Television Commission and the Broadcasting Standards Commission issued orders to the network to apologize for airing the program. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell charged that it contributed to the destruction of "all the boundaries of decency on television." In response, Channel 4's then CEO, Michael Jackson, defended the program and said, "We would not hesitate to ... transmit such a program again." On Monday, Britain's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children issued a statement expressing "regret that a program that trivializes the abuse of children should be considered worthy of an award."

OK, so it's not that Michael Jackson. But it is a weird coincidence, isn't it?

Posted 3/19/2002 09:06:40 AM by Edward Driscoll
DUBYAMAN? Matt Drudge links to this peculiar Reuters article about an Indian comic strip called "Dubyaman":

The controversial comic strip -- being exhibited in New Delhi -- was launched in one of the country's leading newspapers, The Times of India, after Bush vowed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice "dead or alive" after the plane attacks in September. "The situation has all the elements of a black comedy. I saw an American style superhero -- in the mould of a comic book Superman -- but one who had the knack of tripping over his tonsils every time he opened his mouth," said Jug Suraiya, the writer of the comic strip. "And so Dubyaman was born. A deranged superhero destined to skid on the banana peel of his own ineptitude," said Suraiya, India's answer to Art Buchwald

And Ted Rall as well, judging by the rest of the article. And notice how the writer of the piece (no byline is given) never comments on Suraiya's enormous moral equivalence, equating America's war on al-Qaeda with the terrorists themselves. And it ends with this doozy from Suraiya:

"In either case, today Dubyaman is no longer an individual but a state of mind: a combination of arrogance, ignorance and intolerance."

A state that Suraiya sounds intimately familiar with, himself.

Posted 3/19/2002 08:56:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE BROS START BLOGGING: The Brothers Judd have succumbed to the world of blogging. Check out their Blog by clicking here. Speaking of the Brothers Judd, Orrin and I exchanged a couple of emails on the merits of Norman Jewison's original 1975 film of Rollerball. Orrin was kind enough to link to my review of Rollerballon DVD. My comments on Orrin's review of one of the more offbeat of the 1970's post-apocalyptic distopian doomsday sci-fi films also follow his review.

Posted 3/19/2002 08:34:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE BLOG OF THE FUTURE: Stanley Kurtz, writing on The Corner on National Review Online, says that the CampusNonsense site run by Josh Mercer’s "is more than just a conservative campus blog."

It aims to be a kind of clearing house for conservative blogs nationally, which are linked in the right-hand column. Click on Arizona State’s “Collegiate Conservative,” for example, and you’ll read the story of yet another conservative paper theft. Many of these papers were burned. (The Left seems to have entirely forgotten the terrible images of Nazi book burning.) CampusNonsense has also got a bunch of links to campus conservative papers. And the blog itself features entries by Mercer and others. Check out Harold Eustache Jr.’s account of what happens to black conservatives when they try to speak their mind. This blog is the future.

The Internet has long allowed anyone who can type to have a voice. I think the significance of blogging, is that it makes so much of the design and HTML work transparent, so it's easy to create a template and get content up there. Just choose a template and start writing, in many cases. And this CampusNonsense blog (and the other conservative campus blogs it links to) looks like something that's long overdue.

Posted 3/19/2002 08:16:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHITHER FIREMEN? Eli Lehrer in National Review Online says:

Although few Americans needed reminding, last week's gripping television images of men rushing into the hellish infernos of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11 brought home the incredible workaday bravery firefighters must demonstrate. According to the United States Fire Administration, firefighters fall victim to two thirds of all fire-related injuries: Police officers, on the other hand, suffer only about three percent of all crime-related injuries. Firefighters have done their job so well they may become obsolete in the near future. Modern buildings resist fires, technology useful against fires has improved, and as a result, fire-related deaths, injuries, and damages have entered a period of permanent decline.

Besides modern building technology, Lehrer says that other technologies and education have also helped to protect Americans from fire.

Mobile phones allow citizens to report puffs of smoke as soon as they appear while smoke detectors warn sleeping families to evacuate before smoke and flames threatens lives. Cheaper and easier-to-maintain helicopters, likewise, allow quicker responses to fires in distant rural areas while computers have simplified and improved dispatch for urban agencies. Fire-safety efforts in schools have played a role in a near-50-percent reduction in the number of fires started during children's play.

P.J. O'Rourke once said that whenever anybody pines for the "good old days" he has two words: modern dentistry. (I can heartily agree to that). And while many people probably loathe the manners (and often morals) of today's society, it's hard to argue with many of the advances of modern technology--especially when it comes to reducing fire. As to how all of this will transform the profession of firemen (it is safe to call them that again after 9/11, right?), Lehrer has some excellent ideas in his article.

Posted 3/18/2002 11:27:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
WI-FI NATION: On Thursday of last week, I posted about 802.11b wireless LANs. Paul Boutin has a link to Wired magazine's list of more than 400 public 802.11b access points in America. It's bigger than WiFinder's database, and presented as a PDF file you can store on your computer for those times you can't get online. On the same site, Boutin also has more information to refute those silly French conspiracists who don't believe that a 757 crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Posted 3/18/2002 09:19:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE VESPER: Spent Sunday night having a wonderful Saint Patrick's Day dinner at home with friends, especially one from the east coast who likes Martinis almost as much as I do. However, this time around, I made a pitcher of Vespers, James Bond's Martini from an Fleming's Casino Royale. The recipe, for those who wish to imbibe, is:

3 ounces gin 1 ounce vodka 1/2 ounce Lillet blonde Shake ingredients with cracked ice; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.

Like Bond himself, it's a drink that's smooth and deadly. Just hand Blofeld the keys to your Aston Martin ahead of time, if you plan to drink a couple of these at a party. For more information about the Vesper, check out this page about it, and the many other wonderful libations on the same site. For more information about Martinis in general, their history, celebrities who drank them, and much more, check out Barnaby Conrad's fun book on the subject, The Martini : An Illustrated History of an American Classic.

Posted 3/18/2002 08:58:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE TIMES, THEY ARE A CHANGIN'...Tim Blair (link by way of Joanne Jacobs) compares the protestors of the 1960s with the protestors of today, and he doesn't like what he sees: 1967: Give peace a chance 2002: Give police states a chance 1967: LSD is good 2002: Genetically modified food is bad 1967: Ban the bomb! 2002: Ban the burger shops, shoe makers, crop scientists, coffee stores, trade, business, and commerce! 1967: Think global, act local 2002: Think local, act anti-global 1967: Expand your consciousness 2002: Throw rocks

Posted 3/18/2002 08:43:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
CRASH! Sorry for the lack of content today, but my wife's PC's hard drive is seriously on the fritz, and we spent much of the day trying to get things back to normal, so the Web site (unfortunately) got put on the back burner. Look for more on Tuesday. Hopefully.

Posted 3/18/2002 12:07:37 AM by Edward Driscoll
HACKING THE EMPIRE: Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News apparently has screened a rough cut of Star Wars: Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. At one point in his description of viewing the film, Knowles wrote:

When I saw this, I screamed like a little girl. I mean it was like Uncle Tony grabbed my pantied ass. I jumped about 12 feet up in the air and squealed. WHAT A THRILL!

Knowles told Matt Drudge:

that while at a book signing in Austin this weekend he was extended a secret invitation by a mystery source for a private viewing at a hotel room during the South by Southwest Film Festival. And Knowles says there's no way the LUCASFILM or FOX will ever figure out who gave him this extraordinary access. "The source is so protected that Lucas will never find out. The film is safe. It won't be shown further. The source wanted ME to see it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the material was already safe back in Marin County as we speak!" Knowles predicts that team Lucas has hit paydirt with a film that explains away many of the flaws of STAR WARS, EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE, including minimizing the presence of the heavily criticized character Jar Jar Binks.

Posted 3/17/2002 02:56:07 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FATAL FLAW: Spinsters.com has a post with a terrific line in it: "Who knew the fatal flaw to Communism is the fact that there’s no money in it?" The rest of the post by Lee Ann Morawski is quite good as well. And the other Spinster apparently writes from the same Borders as the Instapundit, thus proving The Vast Blog-Wing Conspiracy is growing by leaps and bounds.

Posted 3/17/2002 02:18:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
EBERT, YOU MAGNIFICENT SONOFABITCH, I READ YOUR REVIEW! Roger Ebert has an insightful review of Patton as part of his "Great Movies" series. Ebert notes:

The most famous scene is the first one, Patton mounting a stage to address his troops from in front of an American flag that fills the huge 70-mm screen. His speech is unapologetically bloodthirsty ("we will cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks"). His uniform and decorations, ribbons and medals, jodhpurs and riding boots and swagger stick fall just a hair short of what Groucho Marx might have worn. Scott's great nose could be the beak of an American Eagle. The closing shot is the other side of the coin, a graying and lonely old man, walking his dog. Even then, we suspect, Patton is acting. But does he know it?

I watched "Patton" last week on laser disc (which reminded me that I've got to pick it up on DVD. The speech at the beginning of the film is surprisingly faithful to the actual speech given by Patton to the Third Army on June 5th, the night before D-Day, minus all of Patton's profanity, but with a subtle, 1960s-updating of "individual heroics" to "individuality". As far as the film's great, if far more subtle, last scene, I'm surprised Ebert didn't mention its obvious Don Quixote homage. There's a huge windmill, silently revolving in the foreground of the shot, as Patton walks his dog. And the film made great use of the German generals and their staff to deliver much of the expository information about Patton, using the distancing of the foreign language and subtitles to make their role in the movie less obvious. It's funny, all of the flak that Nixon took from the left for watching, and being inspired by Patton, because Patton is the consummate war leader, who understood, far better than Nixon or Johnson seemed to during Vietnam, that "no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." and that "war is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours." Yes, and it's a bloody, killing business no matter how much you sanitize it for TV, or try to be "merciful" to the enemy. Win the war--then you can show mercy. Was Patton crazy? Delusional, maybe. A romantic, certainly. But as a war commander, he knew how to motivate his troops, and how to win a war: use overwhelming force, advance as quickly as possible, and fight like hell. I suspect he'd have a wonderful time if he were alive today, going through the Afghanis "like crap through a goose". Anyhow, read Ebert's review--it's a very good article about an excellent film made by a most underrated director, Franklin J. Schaffner and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, before he would go on to direct another film about an equally charismatic, if far more corrupt, leader. By the way, for another review of Patton, and what a well-crafted film it is (especially for the time in which it came out), read Doug Pratt's essay from The DVD-LaserDisc Newsletter.

Posted 3/17/2002 12:43:52 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PARKING LOT AS ECONOMIC GUIDE: Nina Yablok, Silicon Valley's best business attorney, and Mrs. Ed Driscoll, says (on her Web log) that one of her personal leading economic indicators is parking lot space in malls. "Today I went to the Westgate Mall in San Jose. School's not about to start and it's no where near Christmas. It is slightly shy of Easter, but I don't know if that's normally a big shopping day. But at 2:30 pm the parking lot was exceedingly full. There was at least one car at the end of each aisle waiting for someone to leave. I finally went to Valet parking, which also had a line. And the Crocodile Cafe had a waiting list. So it seems that someone is at least thinking of shopping these days. Good sign for the economy." Yes, it's an un-scientific survey, but I'd say this bodes well for Silicon Valley to recover its place in the economy in the coming months. And it's nice to know the Retail Support Brigade isn't shirking its duty these days!