Remembering WWII

Bill Whittle on PJTV has the first of series of interviews with Leon Cooper, a navy Ensign in command of a landing craft during the War in the Pacific. We need to remember these people and their stories. Before long they'll be gone, and our reminder of what America can do gone with them.

Thanks to all heroes

A hero came to my house today. My son's friend from kindergarten came to play this afternoon, and his dad came to pick him up. The man has put in 24 years in the Army as a front-line soldier. He served a year in Iraq, where he permanently damaged his hearing. He now serves in the National Guard and with the Sheriff's department.

We told him we were grateful for his service. Somehow that doesn't seem adequate.

The demise of dignity

David Brooks has an interesting editorial on the New York Times site concerning dignity and the loss thereof from our culture:

Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artificial systems have to be created to balance and restrain their desires.

The dignity code commanded its followers to be disinterested — to endeavor to put national interests above personal interests. It commanded its followers to be reticent — to never degrade intimate emotions by parading them in public. It also commanded its followers to be dispassionate — to distrust rashness, zealotry, fury and political enthusiasm.

He has me right up until he holds up Barak Obama as a modern example of dignity. But then perhaps when he lists a trait of dignity as putting national interests above personal interests he equates party interest with national interest. Certainly Obama has done much for his party, his followers, and his supporters. I don't see much sign of him doing what is best for the national interest.

Why Americans don't understand the Middle-East

Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Jeffrey Goldberg about the Middle-East, and especially about Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Well worth the read, as usual. Michael is the first blogger I've sent regular money to (at least before I lost my job), he's just that good.

Palin going all "Obi Wan Kenobi"

So what do I make of Sarah Palin's resignation as Alaska governor? I didn't know you even cared! ;-)

I think she's decided that both the Republicans and the Democrats aren't going to leave her alone. I don't doubt she's got operatives from both sides scrutinizing her every move in Alaska looking for something to discredit her. Like it or not, they're forcing her to be something larger than she is--or probably even wanted to be.

By resigning as governor she can return Alaska to something more normal while putting herself in a position where she can choose who she surrounds herself with. She'll have a much easier time watching her back.

The only real question is what she means about influencing politics from the outside. I suspect she's already given up on a run for president in 2012. But other than that I don't know what she's got in mind. She may be hoping to help rebuild the Republican Party before 2010. I'm not sure I'd even be surprised if she went Libertarian and became a thorn in both parties' sides. But I highly doubt she's going to disappear quietly from public life.

You see, it was one thing to attack her during the presidential campaign. But they've continued to attack her long after that particular dance was over. By continuing to attack her they've shown her at least one important thing: She's on to something. Both parties fear her, but especially the party in power. The sheer hatred and meanness from the left indicates that she has the ability to hurt them. They hate that, and they feel they have to destroy her before she can hurt them.

It's like one of those myriad of movies where some tough-but-quiet guy who is just trying to mind his own business get pushed too far by the local heavies and kicks some serious butt.

But first she's got to pull an Obi Wan Kenobi and appear to give up her power in order to become "more powerful than you can imagine". I wish her all the luck in the world.

State Department, Twitter, and the Iran Protests

I had heard nothing about this until yesterday in an interview with the president of a new internet startup.

Twitter, as most know by now, has become a critical link to the outside world for the protest movement in Iran. When the State Department found out that Twitter had a maintenance outage scheduled for the middle of the day Tehran time, they asked the company to reschedule so as not to disrupt service in Iran. Twitter agreed, and the outage occurred during the day in America instead.

However, over all, the administration gets a mixed grade for protecting internet freedom of speech abroad:

The week before supporters of Mousavi were Tweeting and coming together in the streets, China announced it would require the installation of a Web-blocking program called “Green Dam Youth Escort” on all new computers in the country. While ostensibly meant to block pornography and violent images, many technology experts pointed to its ability to block sites that are politically distasteful to the communist government. Chinese lawyers, academics, and even many in Silicon Valley were up in arms and vocal with their criticism, but Washington stayed silent. The Chinese government ultimately relaxed the requirement, but battles still loom, especially in Iran.

McDonalds and restaurants, Lithuanians, Cap and Trade

Another potpourri day! First up...

McDonalds takes over France!
From Slate:

As reprehensible as Bové's tactics were, it was difficult for a food-loving Francophile not to feel a little solidarity with him. If you believed that McDonald's was a blight on the American landscape, seeing it on French soil was like finding a peep show at the Vatican, and in a contest between Roquefort and Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this attitude was a belief that McDonald's had somehow been foisted on the French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn't true. The French came to McDonald's and la malbouffe (or fast-food) willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it—the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French.

Just as a prophet is without honor in his own country, not even the French are willing to pay more to preserve their national cuisine. Let the bourgeois tourists pay for it! Give us a quick, cheap meal.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've never been one to hate McDonalds, even though I haven't eaten there in years.

And speaking of food, I'll have what he's having...or else!
Here's an interesting insight into the world of high cuisine...which I'll probably never experience first hand:

When I talk to people in the kitchen after their meal, people frequently tell me they made a special trip to Chicago just to eat at Alinea. Of course I find this completely flattering. They call two months before to the date they want to dine and plan their trip around the event. One can hardly blame them for expecting the maximum experience, given the commitment that they have vested.

But what does the maximum experience require? As it turns out, this was the main reason we created the Tour menu to begin with. When I was at the French Laundry it was common for the kitchen to give selected guests extra courses. Perhaps they were repeat diners, people in the industry, or friends of the chef. Of the 12 meals I had there, nine were in the 17- to 20-course range, and they ranked as the best I had ever had. Not that the typical nine-course menu they offer is lesser, but it is...after all...less.

Evidently people have been known to burst into tears to find out that someone else gets special treatment they didn't know was available. Silly me. I probably just would have thought I'd missed something on the menu, decided whatever it was probably wasn't worth the extra they were probably paying, and go on with my meal. But then I am a barbarian.

Michael Yon reports on our Lithuanian allies in Afghanistan:

The base itself is an international potpourri with soldiers and civilians from Croatia, Denmark, Georgia, Japan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Romania, the USA, and probably a few more countries. And today there are Italian pilots whose helicopter is having difficulty. From above, this base is just a sesame seed on the body of Afghanistan, but down here it’s a little Starship Enterprise. When I met the Lithuanian base commander, Colonel Alvydas Siuparis, I wanted to call him Captain Kirk, but he’s pretty big so I didn’t push my luck.

Read the whole thing here. It's the typically high-quality background piece we've come to take for granted from Michael Yon.

Waxman-Markey will cost much more than we're told
Robert Zubrin reports in Roll Call:

On June 25, the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate stabilization act, which would institute a cap-and-trade system to restrict Americans’ carbon emissions. While proponents of the bill have sought to argue that the costs of such a system would be negligible, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the bill proposes a massive and highly regressive tax on the U.S. economy, and could potentially cause not only extensive business failures, unemployment and privation within our borders, but starvation among poorer populations elsewhere.

It really distresses me to see how quick the administration is to mess with complex systems. They seem to have no idea what they're doing..and they don't seem to care.

Three articles of interest

Which to talk about? All of them: Obama brings about watered-down change, unnecessary copyright protections, and our staggering national debt.

Is diluted change really change?
Clive Crook writes in the Financial Times:

Mr Obama aims to keep his promises, which is admirable. Unfortunately, there is a problem. This is not, as many Republicans argue, that neither issue requires forthright action. Both do. The problem is that the bills emerging from Congress are bad and Mr Obama does not seem to mind.

I've noticed that. It's like he's still in the Illinois legislature and still trying to pad his resume. "Lets see, I promised to deal with Global Warming, revise our health care system, and get us out of Iraq. Okay, let's get Congress to pass some bills about those topics so I can check these off my to-do list." It doesn't matter if the bills are bad legislation. It doesn't matter if they actually accomplish what he promised. They just need to have the write terms attached to them.

I've seen very few who really like the Cap-and-Trade bill on either side of the issue. The Right feels it will have a terrible impact on business. The Left feel is won't actually accomplish anything. Does ANYONE like this bill besides Pelosi and Obama?

Should copyright law be used to protect certain business models?
Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine calls out certain lawyers-cum-lobbyists for advocating bad copyright law:

Following the frighteningly dangerous thinking of Judge Richard Posner – proposing rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing (aka talking about) news stories – now we have two more lemming lawyers following him off the cliff in a column written by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Connie Schultz.

...

Schultz says that David Marburger, an alleged First Amendment attorney for her paper, and his economics-professor brother, Daniel, have concocted their own dangerous thinking, proposing the copyright law be changed to insist that a newspaper’s story should appear only on its own web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold.

Incredible. So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours. A First Amendment lawyer said this.

So this post would not be possible if Posner and company get their way. I have to wonder how many news organizations actually support this bad idea. If there is a problem on the internet, it's from bloggers, et al, not attributing/linking their sources. Do they realize that if the law is changed the way they want people will just start summarizing and not link to their sites? As long as they paraphrase carefully it will be difficult to prove they lifted it from their site.

And yes, Jarvis raises a good point. Would this inadvertently impact other news sources who develop the story independently? Would it impact the AP News Service in that the first newspaper that prints an AP story is the only one allowed to do so for 24 hours?

That these people appear to have thought this through so little frightens me.

Congressional Budget Office issues warning
The Washington Post has coverage on the CBO's latest warning to the administration:

Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government's long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO's most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 -- roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.

This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

Walt Minnick opposes Waxman-Markey

I tell you, if this keeps up I'll be voting for the guy next time he's up for re-election:

This bill raises many concerns. Idaho farmers are worried about increased fertilizer and power costs. Idaho energy companies believe it lacks proper consideration for hydro power and nuclear technology. Idaho businesses are frustrated with giveaways that rig the system in favor of pollution-heavy industry in the Midwest and California. Idaho investors are concerned that the price of carbon credits – which virtually all businesses would be required to buy – will be controlled by Wall Street speculators. And Idaho citizens struggling to meet expenses are worried that gasoline and electric bills will go up during this time of economic recession and high unemployment.

“For all of those reasons, I must vote ‘no.’

I just hope he's one of many who will shoot this thing down.

Read my Examiner.com article on the bill here.

UPDATE: This is incredible. With only three hours of debate scheduled today, they've now added 300 more pages to the bill as of last night. So here we have yet another case where lawmakers are expected to vote on a bill before anyone can be sure what's in it. This is disgusting. Nancy Pelosi is out of control and is determined to throw democracy under the bus. California, PLEASE curb your dog!