Posted 6/14/2003 07:19:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
A CLASS ACTION SUIT AGAINST SPIKE: "Millions of dogs named Spike have launched a class action suit against director Spike Lee, alleging that the terminally petulant filmmaker misappropriated the name 'Spike' in an attempt to associate himself with tough canines", writes Happy Fun Pundit, who has an exclusive interview with retired veteran Warner Brothers character actor Spike the dog.

Posted 6/14/2003 04:19:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
COLD BURN: Science journalist Russell Seitz (one of the rare guys who looks good in a bow tie), writing in Tech Central Station says that "Preoccupied with constant vigilance on ozone depleting gases, and greenhouse heavyweights with the lifetime of Methuselah, the Jeremiah's of the atmospheric modeling world neglected to pay much attention to the flyweight champion of the Greens, hydrogen." Seitz says that "As usual, the answer required a lot of calculation, and Cal Tech scientists only applied themselves to the requisite calculating when it became evident that the Bush administration was getting serious about the future of the hydrogen economy." A growing amount of hydrogen has radical implications for the Earth's ozone layer, as well as the potential for global cooling:

But there's more, and it will not give Greenpeace joy. Clouds happen. The higher water vapor goes, the more counterintuitive things it can do. Above the stratosphere lies the mesosphere, where higher grows colder, again. There is no law that says natural history has to be simple, and sure enough, after the mesosphere comes the thermosphere, where higher is very hot indeed. But in the high region where the stratosphere and mesosphere merge, water can turn to ice, and wispy, but spectacularly reflective noctilucent clouds can alter the Earth's albedo. The paler the planet gets, the less solar energy heat it collects, and when that energy gets reflected by the highest of clouds, it's the stratosphere that feels the cooling. What's more, adding hydrogen can change the concentration of hydrogen dependant chemical species, like the hydroxl radical, which affect the lifetime in the atmosphere of everything from methane to carbon monoxide. So all previous modeling work will have to be repeated with corrections for the hypothetical future hydrogen that has so far been overlooked.

As Seitz says, "Pass the popcorn; this is getting interesting again." He's right--read the whole thing. (Possibly a couple of times--it's writing that's dense with scientific jargon, but fascinating stuff nonetheless.) UPDATE: Speaking of scientists and global warming, Iain Murray, a member in good standing of The Volokh Conspiracy, says, "greenhouse theory is manipulated":

The base theory suggests warming that isn't happening to the extent it should. Science then suggests something else. A new theory is produced, or an old one updated, to make the new data fit with the base theory. Worst-case scenarios are dreamed up and promulgated, normally worse than before. Action is then demanded now from policy-makers to avert the worst-case scenario. Whatever this is, it isn't real science. It's science distorted to fit a politically-accepted view of nature. Those who question the progress of the science are vilified and pilloried. Galileo would recognize what's going on here, I think.

Even more damning, Shell of Across The Atlantic compares the global warming scientists to creationists. Ouch. ANOTHER UPDATE: Sgt. Stryker weighs in on a similar story.

Posted 6/14/2003 03:34:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
A STORY MADE FOR DAVE BARRY: "Flush Toilets Called 'Environmental Disaster'", reports CNSNews.com

Posted 6/14/2003 02:08:44 AM by Edward Driscoll
JURASSIC TERRORISTS: Reason reviews The Weather Underground, now playing a limited engagement in New York City, with a wider release to follow.

Posted 6/13/2003 04:09:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
WILL THERE BE A DAIMLER-LESS CHRYSLER? If it prevents things like this from happening in the future, I'd say it's a very good thing.

Posted 6/13/2003 03:34:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR THE RECORD: This series of events did not happen to me the first time I got on a Segway. (I did bob and weave for a few seconds, however.)

Posted 6/13/2003 11:36:46 AM by Edward Driscoll
GIFT IDEAS: Know someone in your life who's wound just a little...too...tight? Who mutters words like "Trilateral Commission", "Bilderbergers", "Illuminati", or believes that the earth is controlled by giant lizards, or that the mothership is hovering just out of site above? Then have we got a gift for you!

Posted 6/12/2003 11:54:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
BILL CLINTON SUDDENLY MORE POPULAR WITH REPUBLICANS: Scott Ott has exclusive new poling data, courtesy of Dick Morris.

Posted 6/12/2003 12:45:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
REBUILDING THE IRAQI STOCK MARKET is being spearheaded by an ex-American stockbroker who joined the Army in the wake of September 11. Group Captain Mandrake has the details.

Posted 6/12/2003 11:55:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
TWO MEDIA DEATHS: AP reports that Oscar winner Gregory Peck dies at 87, and broadcaster David Brinkley dies at 82.

Posted 6/12/2003 11:01:28 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEXT TAX CUT: Kevin Hassett has some ideas on what he thinks could be next in what (hopefully) is becoming an annual event.

Posted 6/11/2003 05:38:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
H.O.T. TOPIC: Jeff Taylor of Reason looks at high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes as a way to break the logjam that commuter lanes, with their characteristic low automobile occupancy, causes on Washington DC's highways. Naturally of course, the idea of scrapping the commuter lanes altogether is never considered. But I'd be more than willing to pay extra to use a commuter lane if I'm driving alone in rush hour. It makes sense--which is why it's probably doomed in the Beltway.

Posted 6/11/2003 05:23:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE END OF HISTORY: John Derbyshire neatly sums up the last seven years of politics:

The principal political fact about the Clinton presidency is that during it, politics in the U.S.A. came to an end. That's a bit of an exaggeration; but from the long view, 20th-century American politics was a struggle between those who wished to expand the scope of government — most especially the federal government — and those who wished to resist that expansion. The resistance was a long rearguard action, as the government and its expenditures grew from the 1930s to the 1990s — even, as David Frum documented in Dead Right, through the Reagan years. Margaret Thatcher called it "the ratchet effect": when the Left was in power, government grew fast, when the Right was in power, it grew more slowly — in a very good year, not at all. That struggle ended in the spring of 1996, with the Clinton-Gingrich-Dole compromise on the federal budget. That marked the defeat of the main conservative enterprise, the end of any real hope of reducing the size of our federal government. This defeat seemed at the time to be merely tactical — an exceptionally masterful, fluent, and unscrupulous president had outwitted the slow-footed Republican leaders of Congress, cumbered as they were, in the role of Senate Majority Leader, with one of the most spineless politicians the U.S.A. has ever produced. Clinton's brilliant State of the Union speech, and Bob "Whatever" Dole's pathetic response to it, encapsulated the situation. Hopes of shrinking the government were dead. In 1996 the tax bite — federal, state, and local — on an average two-earner family hit 41.5 percent, the biggest in history, bigger even that in WWII. Less obvious at the time, liberalism was also dead. It had died in November 1994, when the Republicans took Congress. This was a clear popular defeat for big government liberalism. The people had spoken: They did not want any extravagant new government programs. It was not that the era of big government was over; only the era of expanding government was over. The 1996 debacle demonstrated that the people did not want a smaller government, either. All polls showed that Americans at large were unhappy about the government shutdowns of 1995, and blamed congressional Republicans for them. The lesson our political classes read from the events of 1994-6 was: The people don't want any more government, but they don't want any less, either. Well, perhaps a wee bit less. That 41.5 percent has declined slightly since 1996 and a conservative president was elected in 2000 by a constitutional fluke. On the whole, though, we are in a period of ideological stasis, and that period really commenced in the last few months of the first Clinton presidency. This situation is frustrating for both liberals and conservatives. The liberals have lost their momentum. They want to add big new government programs — that's what liberalism is all about. To do that, they must either increase taxes, or kill current programs. The voters won't let them do the first, and the lobbyists won't let them do the second. (No government program can ever be ended. That is one of the iron laws of modern American politics. Remember the mohair subsidy? It's b-a-a-c-k.) Conservatives are just as frustrated, since by the same token they have no real hope of reducing the size of the government. Ideologically, we are deadlocked, and have been since the mid-1990s.

Given the recent number of backdoor attempts to influence morality (taxes on fast foods, new puritanism, increasing attempts to punish motorists, etc., etc.,) liberalism is far from dead--it's simply gone underground, where it can do its pernicious harm far more stealthily. But certainly in Washington, stasis is the norm. Assuming George W. Bush wins re-election in 2004, what will break it?

Posted 6/11/2003 03:08:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: Howard Kurtz writes:

How's the Hillary book playing? Here's Jay Leno: "Hillary is everywhere. Last night she's on with Barbara Walters, this morning she's on with Katie Couric and tomorrow with Diane Sawyer. This is the first time Hillary has been on more women than Bill."

Incidentally, her book, as the massive PR-blowout subsides, is already sliding down the Amazon charts.

Posted 6/11/2003 11:27:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
AT HOME WITH LES PAUL: Jim Beckerman of NorthJersey.Com has a nice profile of the father of the electric guitar, who recently turned 88, and continues to play every Monday night at New York's Iridium Club. (I only hope I'm as active--or as sharp--when I'm 88!) For my profile of Les, written last year just before his 87th birthday, click here. If you're at all interested in American popular music, you owe it to yourself to stop by the Iridium Club to see Les play, if you're in New York on a Monday Night. He's a tremendous entertainer, and a marvelous guitarist (gee, there's a shock!) who can still work a crowd like nobody's business.

Posted 6/11/2003 10:58:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
R2D2 VS. C3PO: Is there a robot in your future? Dr. Joseph Engelberger, one of the fathers of robotics, says yes, in my latest Tech Central Station piece. This was an offshoot of the article I wrote for this month's issue of Nuts & Volts. Engelberger is the man they named the prize the winners receive on the DIY Network's new Robot Rivals TV series. I called him for an interview, expected to get about five minutes or so of quotes about what it's like to do the TV series. Instead, I got about a half hour on his vision for an affordable home healthcare robot. about 10 minutes into it, I realized there's an article there all by itself. Fortunately, the folks at TCS agreed! By the way, my copy of the June Nuts & Volts arrived a couple of days ago. The editors there did a terrific job of laying out my piece on Robot Rivals, and have lots of photos of the principals behind, and some of the robots featured on the show.

Posted 6/11/2003 02:45:11 AM by Edward Driscoll
DON'T BOTHER, THEY'RE ALREADY HERE: Orrin Judd writes that Berlin is considering resurrecting their 60 foot high statue of Lenin. Ironically, there's already a statue on Lenin in the US. A 30-foot high representation of Vladimir Ilyich is displayed prominently on a street in Fremont, a suburb of Seattle. No really--Seattle has a statue devoted to one of the most evil, destructive men in history--and they're proud of it! When we were there during Memorial Day weekend, we stopped by the Guitar Center that was near our hotel, both so I could explore, and to kill time. I bought a few CD-ROMs of Acid Loops, and the clerk, a bearded, but otherwise surprisingly clean-cut fellow in his mid-30s or so noticed my out-of-state credit card and asked what we were planning to see that day. My wife mentioned she'd like to see the canals and locks in Fremont (just across the bridge from our hotel), and the clerk said, "yeah, they have a state of Karl Marx there. It's really cool!" He didn't notice the death ray I was projecting. I had to bite my tongue to not say, "nahh, I'd like to check out the Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler statues first. Then I'll check out Marx." Instead I just took my purchase and waited to get in the car before blowing a gasket. It's actually not Marx, it's Lenin, which I discovered after a little Googling. But either way, it's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. It might have caused more people to think before erecting statues to mass murderers--especially in the US.

Posted 6/10/2003 04:58:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
THERE IS NO LEFT-WING BIAS AT ABC. And when I say there is none, I do mean there is a certain amount, as ABC as hired long time Bill Clinton crony Rick Kaplan as senior vice president in day-to-day charge of World News Tonight, Nightline, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and the ABC News Political Unit. The Media Research Center, which profiles Kaplan's long history of flak catching and string pulling for the Clintons and Al Gore says, "If you liked the liberally slanted war coverage on ABC earlier this year, you should love ABC during Campaign 2004".

Posted 6/10/2003 01:53:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
BOB NOVAK WRITES that Gray Davis recall movement looks real in California. I was clearly wrong when I wrote in February, "I doubt this will amount to much". It will be very, very interesting to see how this plays out, and, if he survives, how Davis will react to it. In other California news, Virginia Postrel looks at how the "if it sounds good, do it" boomtime spending of the state has come back to haunt it.

Posted 6/10/2003 01:47:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIES AND BIAS AT AFP: Charles Johnson writes, "Wow. Get a load of the captions for these two photos from our pals at Agence France Presse". AFP: Where we make Reuters look fair and balanced!

Posted 6/10/2003 01:26:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT: Another Jayson Blair pops up, this time at a small town newspaper in Missouri:

A sports writer for a small-town Missouri newspaper has been fired for plagiarizing sports columns and a movie review written by nationally syndicated film critic Roger Ebert. Michael Kinney, 29, was fired by The Sedalia Democrat after an investigation prompted by a reader who called the paper last month to report similarities between a movie review by Kinney and one written by Ebert. Editor Oliver Wiest, in a special column published Sunday, said he fired Kinney June 5. The Democrat is a daily newspaper with a circulation of about 11,800 in Sedalia, a central Missouri town 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Kansas City. Wiest said he searched the Internet and "found several similar instances of plagiarism from online sources in Mr. Kinney's movie reviews dating back to late last year.''

(Link found via The Internet Movie Database.)

Posted 6/10/2003 12:50:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
USING THE T-WORD: Why won't NPR call those who attack innocent Israeli civilians terrorists?

Posted 6/10/2003 11:19:14 AM by Edward Driscoll
A MODEST PROPOSAL: Steven Den Beste has a few interesting ideas about what to do with North Korea.

Posted 6/10/2003 11:04:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
IS THE TSA BIASED AGAINST MILITARY AND POLICE VETS? Jeff Johnson of CNS News reports that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was accused by current and former employees of being against screeners who had "prior military and law enforcement experience and those who currently serve in the National Guard and reserves. TSA officials denied the charges.":

Alfunzo Staley spent 15 years in the Marine Corps before he returned to his home in Detroit, Mich., and joined the Air Force Reserve to become a paramedic. Eager to use his military experience to help his country after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he applied for a job with the TSA and was hired. But when Staley was called up with other paramedics in his unit for chemical and biological weapons injury training in advance of a possible deployment as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he was shocked at his TSA supervisors' response. "Federal law requires federal agencies to award 'leave without pay' status to members of the Armed Forces Reserves who are called to duty," Staley explained. "Instead, the TSA awarded me AWOL (Absent Without Leave) status." When Staley submitted the required forms to be absent from his TSA job to attend mandatory military training, he claims he was first told simply that he could not miss work for that purpose. But had he followed his TSA supervisor's instructions and skipped the training, he could have been court-martialed and sentenced to a military prison. After obeying his military orders, Staley claims his TSA supervisors charged him with being AWOL. When Staley disproved that accusation, he said the time off was then charged to his military leave, which is dedicated to a reservist's annual two-week commitment. Finally, the TSA allegedly tried to deduct Staley's military service commitment from his vacation time.

There are several other, similar examples in Johnson's article.

Posted 6/9/2003 05:41:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT LINE: Right after the 'don't call me a blogger' quip, Drudge gets off a great riff:

Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair.

Exactly. So why didn't Camile Paglia and her associate ask Drudge what his beef with bloggers is?

Posted 6/9/2003 05:32:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
I CALLED HIM A JURASSIC-BLOGGER. DOES THAT COUNT? Matt Drudge officially does not like the "B" word. Ken Layne, on the spiffy new L.A. Examiner site, writes:

Drudge doesn't like the idea of everybody doing the same thing he does: posting stories on a Web page. Weirdly, a few years ago the hatted one was all excited about millions of people running their own one-person news services. Now that it's happened, he ignores it. Doesn't matter; we still love us our Drudge Report.

Yes we do--although Matt probably hates knowing that for thousands of his readers, he's now become a one-two punch in the links department with InstaPundit.