Month: September 2011

#rsrh Donald Rumsfeld ignores yet another antiwar protester. #p2

I love these stories: even through the third-person prose of the news article you can get a taste of the baffled anger and hate that rolls off of these people like a physical funk*.  This wasn’t what they signed up for, you understand.  The antiwar freaks were promised that their desires would be fulfilled.  They were told that they would see Bush administration officials in jail… and now they can’t even do citizen arrests.  They get arrested!  While THAT MAN walks past them as if they weren’t even there!  Like the antiwar movement doesn’t even matter!

Which it doesn’t, of course.

Hey, line of the day:

Police said one protester was arrested outside for assaulting a cop with a bullhorn.

I really hope that just meant that the cop was yelled at through the bullhorn.  Actual swinging at a police officer seems a bit… confrontational.  Well, maybe the cop wasn’t a Caucasian male; your average antiwar protester has a real problem with seeing nonwhites in the way as being, well, real.  And God help you if you’re simultaneously a: nonwhite female; and inconvenient to that crowd…

Via @MarkImpomeni.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, buy Don’s book!

You have got to be kidding me.

So I get to have a weeknight off, for a change – we have a babysitter and everything – and I think to myself: Hey, you could go see a movie!

…except that they all look like they suck.  Anybody got a suggestion?  As you may have gathered, I am more or less Jerry Bruckheimer’s target audience – so assume that I’m going to be not down with the rom-coms or the art films or the… anything where there’s no explosions, really.

#rsrh Kirsten Gillibrand to NOT run for NY-SEN in 2012?

There’s a rumor going around that she’s being tapped to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket (no link, sorry: I’m getting this one via email).  Supposedly it’s at the point where certain NY Republicans are quietly exploring the possibility of doing a run for the seat, after all; I’ve heard that at least one downstate Republican elected official is seriously considering going for it.

I’m not all that convinced that this rumor is credible, but I have to admit that my reasons for discounting it are as follows:

  • It’s a bad idea for New York Democrats (win or lose, they’ll be removing a potential candidate for Governor down the line);
  • It’s a bad idea for national Democrats (they can ill-afford to put yet another Senate seat in play for 2012);
  • It’s an embarrassment for everybody who dutifully insisted that Biden would be a net positive for the Obama administration.

Which is to say, none of the reasons would have any effect on Barack Obama – even the last one; he can always claim that choosing Biden wasn’t really entirely voluntary on his part* – and God knows that the man is narcissistic enough to think that he could get away with it.

So, there’s that.

Moe Lane

*It’d be easy, really.  Party leadership wanting to add the voice of experience to the ticket, blah blah, no wish to hurt the party further after the primary, yadda yadda, Obama now realizes that he should have trusted his own judgement more, etc, etc, etc…

Fast & Furious update: BATFE *sold* modified AK-47s to Mexican narco-terrorists!

Fox News has the basic story, which goes as follows: an agent of the BATFE was ordered to go and buy six Draco semi-automatic pistols from gun shops. Those guns were then resold to “known illegal buyers:” i.e., people known to resell guns illegally. So far, this is not actually bad, because this would be how standard sting operations go… except that they didn’t arrest the buyers immediately. Which makes… sense, right, because Dracos are legal-to-own guns in the USA; so the BATFE would just have to keep a constant watch on the guns to make sure that they didn’t miss it when the bad guys tried to smuggle the guns out of the country – no, wait, it’s reported that ATF group supervisor David Voth ordered that there be no 24 hour surveillance. Well. Good thing that Agent John Dodson ignored that order and did a personal stakeout of the bad guys for six days, huh? Because he was there when they moved out with the guns! He was able to call in a request for an interdiction team!

…Which was refused.

This would be the point where I show you what a Draco semi-automatic pistol looks like. Continue reading Fast & Furious update: BATFE *sold* modified AK-47s to Mexican narco-terrorists!

Why is Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 only *now* in doubt?

I should note right from the start that I like Stu Rothenberg as a pundit and a political handicapper: he’s a pretty bright person and he has a lot of experience.  But Rothenberg is also very much plugged into the professional political establishment… and sometimes, it shows.  Case in point: Rothenberg’s otherwise spot-on analysis about the travails of Barack Obama these days has what I will charitably call a ‘howler.’

This president, like Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush before him, learned the lesson that every investment fund manager knows: Evidence of past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

And now the president, who is expected to raise close to $1 billion for his re-election campaign, who faces a Republican field widely mocked as undistinguished and who can rely on the same team of brilliant political gurus who masterminded his 2008 victory, suddenly finds his re-election in doubt.

Two howlers, actually: the first is the frankly unsupported-by-historical-evidence assumption that Barack Obama ever learns a lesson on anything.  The second is that Barack Obama’s past performance should have justified any expectations in the first place. Continue reading Why is Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 only *now* in doubt?

Is Julian Sanchez over-analyzing superhero/supervillian CEOs?

His point that iconic superhero CEOs inherit wealth, while iconic supervillian CEOs generally earn it from scratch is interesting (it’s also interesting that Bruce Wayne is both the most competent CEO and the closest-to-evil superhero on Julian’s list); but I wonder if he’s reaching too far, or too deeply, in his explanation why.  Could it simply be that comic artists and writers generally don’t like it that they have to at least sometimes have fights with the business/management side of the comic book companies that they write for?  That could easily bleed over into their creative output…

Via AoSHQ.

Moe Lane

PS:

Why the CERN Neutrino thing could be a *very* important thing.

Michio Kaku over at the WSJ has an article up on the subject.  For those who missed it, the basic story is this: researchers at  CERN had a “Huh.  That’s odd*” moment when they discovered neutrinos apparently moving at speeds that were faster than light.  This, of course, flatly contradicts our current understanding of physics, which is why the researchers in question are being very, very careful to ask their fellow-physicists to descend upon their observed data and beat it with analytical and procedural sticks.  The safe way to bet – as xkcd literally notes here – is that there’s something wrong with the observational method; in fact, Dr. Kaku himself thinks that this is probably the case.  Honestly, I expect that myself.

But if it is right… well, here’s the reported results that jumped out at me.

…after analyzing 15,000 neutrinos, they found that they traveled faster than the speed of light—one 60-billionth of a second faster, to be precise. In a billionth of a second, a beam of light travels about one foot. So a difference of 60 feet was quite astonishing.

If I am reading that right – and I may not be – that certainly sounds like… well, that time-to-Alpha-Centauri just can’t be right.  I’ve sent out the math to be checked by an actual physicist. I’ll let you know what she tells me.

[UPDATE: turns out that I was reading it wrong (but that the explanation wasn’t very good anyway): the aforementioned physicist tells me that the neutrinos are apparently moving at 100.002% the speed of light, instead of the 60x implied by the article.  So, three days off of the total.  On the bright side, if this data pans out then it’s a start.]

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

*That is, by the way, the single most exciting thing that one can say or hear in the sciences.