eViscera

2005-04-15

Blair seeks to limit damage as MG Rover goes under

LONGBRIDGE (Reuters) - The government said it would offer a support package for workers at collapsed carmaker MG Rover, seeking to limit the damage from up to 5,000 job losses as it seeks re-election.

Administrators said on Friday there was no hope of selling the last major British carmaker whole and 5,000 workers would be made redundant immediately, dealing a blow to Blair's ruling Labour Party.

Administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), appointed last week after a rescue deal with China's Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp (SAIC) collapsed, said it would 'mothball' the MG Rover plant over the next two months, effectively locking it up until buyers can be found for its assets."

[snip]

If Blair really"seeks to limit damage", he should get up on his podium, clear his throat, and say "This is what happens when a company is uncompetitive, unresponsive and basically makes crap. The job losses are unfortunate, but this is a lesson to other complacent companies who are not listening to their customers or minding their competition. If others learn from this once-proud company's pain, its passing will have been a good thing overall. That is the essence of the free market, which is the true engine of prosperity. I hope other companies such as General Motors are taking close notes."

But of course, as Vice President of Socialist International, I would not expect Blair to say anything of the sort.

2005-04-12

First Take-off Of Airbus A380 Due in 8 Days

8 days are left until one of the most spectacular first flights of avionic history is scheduled. The Airbus A380, the only commercial airplane with an end-to-end double deck, will take off on the 20th of April for the first time.
Only the weather or problems in previous ground test can cause a delay. If all conditions are met, former Mirage jet pilot and chief-test pilot Jacques Rosay (49) can give full throttle on the runway of the Airbus production plant in Toulouse, France, to take off at a speed of 300 km/h.
The highest risk during the flight are expected to be vibrations of the wings, which will be filled with 310000 litres of kerosene, as well as vibrations of the tail section.
[snip]

[snork]

I bet.

2005-04-05

Paul Krugman is a One-Man Circle-Jerk

An Academic Question
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 5, 2005

It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that?

Conservatives see it as compelling evidence of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion. And they say that new 'academic freedom' laws will simply mitigate the effects of that bias, promoting a diversity of views. But a closer look both at the universities and at the motives of those who would police them suggests a quite different story.

[snip]

One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."

[snip]

Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.

[snip]

Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.

And it wouldn't just be a matter of demanding that historians play down the role of slavery in early America, or that economists give the macroeconomic theories of Friedrich Hayek as much respect as those of John Maynard Keynes. Soon, biology professors who don't give creationism equal time with evolution and geology professors who dismiss the view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old might face lawsuits.

If it got that far, universities would probably find ways to cope - by, say, requiring that all entering students sign waivers. But political pressure will nonetheless have a chilling effect on scholarship. And that, of course, is its purpose.

Oh, man, this guy makes my head hurt.

First, in a spasm of oratorical onanism, he flatters himself by implying that academics, through a process of intellectual self-selection, today represent some sort of awesome-brained uber-species of hominid, much as knuckle-dragging Republicans have grunted and scratched their way into populating the ranks of the brutish military. Well, if one accepts this basic thesis, then perhaps Krugman stands as testimony to the dangers of inbreeding, for Mr. Enron Advisor stands prominently as perhaps the economist most associated with the longest and broadest train-wreck of a professional record. Where else could the likes of Krugman achieve gainful employment than in academia, where accountability is too often a foreign concept? Are this guy and the New York Times a match or what?

Then he delves into "values", citing no less than charter RINO Chris Shays in indicting the Republican Party as no longer a "party of ideas". Okay, Paul, in your own words or less, name some essential Democrat ideas of the past decade:

...waiting...

...waiting...

Aw, hell, let me help: there aren't any. Higher taxes, more dependency and a bigger nanny-state pretty much round out an idea-free agenda anchored on infanticide, buggery, dictator-licking and obstructionism for that faded Party, when they aren't claiming credit for Republican initiatives like welfare reform, that is.

Then, rapid-fire, he starts in with a lefty Clif's Notes version of claimed Republican pseudoscience. These, like his economics and his Enron advice, he gets rather wrong. Sure, Bush says the jury is still out on "evolution", because it is, especially regarding certain of the more ambitious aspects of the theory: One doesn't have to be a Young Earther to have difficulties with the many hoaxes that have crept into the fossil record, and one needn't be a fundamentalist to see striking parallels between Genesis and the Big Bang theory. Meanwhile, Inhofe and Crichton et fils don't necessarily deride the "vast body of research" supporting the "scientific consensus" on "climate change"... rather, they'll point out that the first two are not as monolithic as Krugman holds (and I note his expertise in atmospheric physics approaches that of his Enronomics), but mostly Inhofe and Crichton et fils focus their debunking not so much on "climate change" as on the Left's leap to judgment of human activity (and especially American activity) at its root.

And nice touch, Paul, in aligning Keynes vs. Hayek with "scientific consensus on climate change" vs. loony wild-eyed fundamentalist creationists. Did you counsel Enron on subtlety too?

Meanwhile, if any reader wants to see a "chilling effect on scholarship," try admitting you're a Republican on any major campus today.

2005-04-04

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt Unveil Current ...

Set to Launch August 1, Independent Venture Will Be First National Television Network Created For, By and With an 18-34 Year-Old Audience; Google Zeitgeist Data Used to Produce News Feature, 'Google Current'

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Offering a glimpse of the independent network first announced at last year's National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention, former Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, joined by executives and on-air talent, revealed this morning that the name of the new venture, formerly known as INdTV, will be Current.

[snip]

The first national network created by, for and with an 18-34 year-old audience, Current will offer 24 hours of programming in a unique, short-form content format when it premieres August 1.

[snip]

'The Internet opened a floodgate for young people whose passions are finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit.' "The Internet opened a floodgate for young people whose passions are finally being heard, but TV hasn't followed suit. Young adults have a powerful voice, but you can't hear that voice on television ... yet," said Gore, who serves as the network's chairman of the board.

[snip]

Promising a slate of programming that's smart, fun and fearless (as a truly independent network), Current seeks to cater to the Internet generation's need for choice and control.

[snip]

Taking its cues from their media consumption habits, Current will offer short-form programming in the TV equivalent of an iPod shuffle. Its "pods" will be 15-second to five-minute segments...

[snip]



[Sigh.]

Where to start.

First, I can think of no Chairman of the Board less qualified to head a network than Al Gore.

Nor can I think of a Chairman of the Board less qualified to lead an endeavor with ambitions of being "smart," "fun," "fearless" or "independent" than Al Gore.

Nor can I think of a social trend more chilling than a generation incapable of being entertained in more than "15-second-to-five-minute segments".

But my expectation, frankly, is that this will flop. There's no doubt in my mind that the elevator pitch for this venture was "Get this: Sesame Street for twentysomethings. Teevee like an Ipod. How ssswingin' is that?" My bet: the condescension inherent in its premise will be a huge turnoff, as will be the whole notion of the bloated, pasty has-been that is Al Gore getting' jiggy with the youngsters.

2005-04-03

Chiaroscuro -- Sandy Berger and The Pope


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Chiaroscuro: In painting, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark.
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Few weeks in history are rendered in such strong contrasts between light and dark than the one just past. For few personalities contrast as vividly as two pivotal characters who swept across our view this week: one who exited our sight with regrettable finality and the other who did so with regrettable fleetingness.

It is painful to see two men as representative of their era’s light and dark as Karol Józef Wojtya and Samuel R. Berger sharing the same page. Through his works and through his spiritual leadership, Wojtya stands with the giants of all millennia. One of the two most consequential world leaders of the past half-century, Pope John Paul II grew from a witness to the horrors of National Socialism to play an essential role in the conquering of Marxist tyranny throughout Europe. His brave pilgrimage to Poland in 1979 exposed the corroded scaffolding of Soviet communism, rocking the evil empire off-balance for the first time and making it vulnerable to the perceptive Ronald Reagan’s timely application of sheer muscle to topple it. Never before have so many millions been freed of such awful oppression; since then, only in the past three year’s successive liberations have we seen anything approaching that dawning of freedom, in a process more arduous than the catalytic and cataclysmic collapse of the Soviet Union somehow seems in retrospect. Yet a full decade passed between The Pope’s epic journey in 1979 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Soviets recognized his essentialness early on, ordering his assassination in 1981. His steadfastness--rooted as it was in bedrock principles, another trait he shared with Reagan--served the world well during this era of unparalleled turbulence and danger.

Karol Wojtya changed the world.

It remains to be seen if the world will remain changed, if we are up to the task of keeping the forces of darkness at bay. Communism is on the march in South America; Russia is sliding back to totalitarianism; and by the classical Gramscian script of freeing law “from every remnant of transcendence and absoluteness, practically from all moralist fanaticism”, Europe finds itself sinking again into collectivism and depression like a mammoth in a tar-pit. Truly Europe is off-balance today, and perhaps the forceful vector of radical Islamism is poised to rend it from its foundations in the next decade if amorality and creeping Marxism don’t do it first.

In that way, Sandy Berger’s accomplishments appear more permanent than Karol Wojtya’s. The former National Security Advisor’s record paints him as either fantastically inept or grimly malfeasant. Which interpretation one accepts depends on one’s optimism regarding human nature ...or one’s blindness. Certainly Berger’s election-year admissions that he had "accidentally" taken and “inadvertently misplaced” revealing mark-up drafts of top-secret antiterrorism documents from the National Archives play to a benign image of a rumpled, scatterbrained intellectual. However, this week’s revelations paint a different picture:

  • His previous excuses, both before and after his exit as John Kerry’s top national security advisor, were, he now admits, bald lies.
  • Actually, he had purposefully purloined those troublesome drafts, with their
    damning handwritten commentary from himself and possibly both Clintons, Al Gore,
    Jamie Gorelick, Louis Freeh, John Deutsch, Janet Reno et al.
  • And rather than “inadvertently misplacing” the mark-ups, he’d meticulously cut them to small pieces with scissors in his office late at night.


These admissions endorse the more jaundiced view of Berger’s character. Unfortunately it is one which meshes with a thesis of malfeasance supported by his record.

No less than former FBI Director Louis Freeh subscribed to the harmless rumpled-intellectual image of Berger, dismissing him as merely “a public-relations hack”. This grossly understates Berger’s effectiveness at abetting the enemies of freedom. Berger entered his role as NSA as a successful lobbyist for Communist Chinese interests. He presided as top national-security cop in an Administration which accepted campaign contributions from China and funneled key defense technology back to China, and which instituted legal firewalls to prevent intelligence agencies from detecting such treason. Meanwhile, Berger “seemed to work overtime at opposing tough measures against terror” per top Administration pollster Dick Morris [8], arranging vetoes of efforts to cripple Iranian terror funding and working to block antiterror sanctions. Alarmingly, Berger personally allowed bloodthirsty global jihad to flower by repeatedly rebuffing Sudanese offers to hand Osama bin Laden to the United States in a deal brokered by a major contributor to Democrat campaigns. Then Berger allowed bin Laden and his top lieutenants to escape to Afghanistan and roadblocked opportunities to eliminate them [US News & World Report, Paul Bedard, 15 Mar 2003]. Berger was even singled-out by former UN Inspector Scott Ritter for the collapse of UN inspections efforts in Iraq.

Sandy Berger changed the world, too.

It is our great loss that Karol Wojtya has passed from the stage. His steadfast leadership and adherence to timeless principle will be sorely missed. He was truly a force for change, of the good kind.

By contrast, Sandy Berger is still with us, his plea-bargained deal amounting to pocket change for a man of his wealth, and his temporary loss of security clearance ensures he will be a force for his brand of change again in the 2008 election cycle.