Interesting Theory

Why are poll numbers for the Iraq war slipping? According to Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post, the obvious answer is:

Not enough hippies:

In the absence of an antiwar movement, the American people have turned against the war in Iraq. Those two facts, I suspect, are connected.

He also goes on to use the term “U.N. aegis” without sarcasm, which indicates that the word does not mean what he thinks it means.

The aegis was Zeus’s shield, and as the residents of Rwanda and Srebrenica could attest (if they weren’t dead) that the U.N. cannot defend anyone but its leaders. The aegis was not Zeus’s proclivity to come down from on high and copulate with underage natives, which is a trait UN peacekeepers do share with the lord of the thunderbolt.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

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Everyone Loves Government Bailouts

American Airlines management, unions stand together on pensions:

Keep those pension checks coming.

That will be the battle cry today of some 300 American Airlines employees, who plan to flood the halls of Congress and lobby for pension reform. Airline management and key unions say they are united in preserving employee pensions, a benefit that’s been waylaid at other passenger carriers that have succumbed to bankruptcy.

I bet they can all agree that the lush government teat can do everything: Keep those checks coming to employees, and remove obligations from the company and its management.

Remind me to offer a pension plan that I cannot afford to anyone I hire; after all, if I get big enough and bankrupt enough, I won’t have to follow through on my contractual obligations, either.

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Banned in Illinois

A story about a biofeedback video game as part of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder:

Once a week, Pfc. Joshua Frey, a Marine who spent several months in Fallujah before he was shot Dec. 12, heads to a darkened office in the Naval Medical Center here and places a headset over his eyes.

He attaches biofeedback sensors to his arms, hands and chest, grabs hold of a joystick and enters a video game version of the Iraq war. As he moves through a “virtual” Fallujah, he encounters sniper fire, explosions and insurgents lurking in shadows. A Navy psychologist checks readouts from a flat-screen monitor showing the Marine’s heart rate, breathing, hand perspiration and skin temperature.

But for Frey and the U.S. military, this is no game. It is part of a potentially groundbreaking approach to treating the effects of severe combat stress, in Iraq and elsewhere.

A game with explosions and gun fire that’s designed to make people saner? Surely, Illinois Governor “Bod” Blagojevich’s head must be spinning, pending a catastrophic failure akin to supercomputers whose logic circuits Captain Kirk fried routinely through paradox.

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Unbalanced Powers

So in St. Charles County, Missouri, we have this bit of foolishness:

St. Charles County Executive Joe Ortwerth says he will veto legislation that would allow voters to decide whether the County Council should have the power to stop his office from filing lawsuits against other political entities.

This is the equivalent of the President of the United States vetoing a constitutional amendment.

What’s the reason? Oh, of course:

“The council’s action is designed to breach the separation of powers,” Ortwerth said. “I am going to defend the prerogative of the executive branch.”

He’s going to defend the prerogative of the executive branch from the will of the people. From whence its prerogative stems. Or from whence we used to delude ourselves government power comes; I guess current government “leaders” are stripping those scales from our eyes. Government power stems from government.

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Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Turns To Its Classifieds As News Source

Sure, some periodicals put headlines on press releases and run them as news. But the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel goes further and innovatively turns to its classified ads as a news source:

From a pale pink velvet fringed chaise to wrought iron patio furniture, the earthly belongings of Milwaukee restaurateur Sally Papia and her daughter will be sold piece-by-piece this week in an estate sale described in a classified advertisement as of one of the area’s finest in 33 years.

I wonder how much that cost, but I am cynical.

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Howard Dean Ducks the Question

Not a refutation:

Dick Cheney says:

“I’ve never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I’ve never met anybody who does. He’s never won anything, as best I can tell,” Cheney said in an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.”

Howard Dean responds:

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, responding to criticism from the vice president, said he doesn’t “care if Dick Cheney likes my mother or not.”

Um, the only aspersion Dick Cheney cast against Mrs. Dean was that she might have loved Howard Dean. That’s hardly an insult against Mrs. Dean, no matter how the press or Howard Dean want to portray it.

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San Francisco Wants to Sterilize Undesireables

The Summer of the Pit Bull continues in San Francisco:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom endorsed a series of measures Monday he hopes will reduce the likelihood of attacks by aggressive and dangerous dogs in the city, including spaying and neutering regulations, a ban on backyard breeding, and imposing fines on irresponsible canine owners.

The city can enact some new policies right away; others that regulate specific breeds, however, would require a change in state law first.

The primary target of the city’s crackdown will be pit bulls and pit bull mixes, which are responsible for at least half the vicious dog cases handled by city authorities. City officials don’t want to ban pit bulls but are seeking to regulate them.

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Book Report: The Enforcer by Wesley Morgan (1976)

Yes, this book is the novelization of the Dirty Harry movie of the same name. I know, you’re thinking that I am not a very serious reader of true literature and that I should have my English degree revoked for bothering with a mid 1970s movie tie in (as opposed to the high art represented by Harry Potter books in the twenty-first century). But I read a lot of things, and besides, this only cost me 95 cents at Downtown Books in Milwaukee, so I got it, and that’s the last we’ll hear of it.

So I read the book having watched the movie first, which follows the pattern of creation for the book. Unlike regular movies, where you watch them to see how they differ from the book from which the movie sprung (whoops, I need a helping verb there; I mean done sprung), these novelizations use the movie itself as source material, so the writers of these books either give or take away things from the movie rather than the screenwriters doing the opposite. In a lot of my youth, I’ve read novelizations before seeing the movie, so my comparative experience always favored the book anyway. This time, though, it’s different.

I’ve seen the series of movies and it’s through their prisms that I look at the book and say: eh, it wasn’t bad, but it certainly tried to soften up Harry. I will have to review the movie again, but I don’t remember Harry crying at any point, nor did I detect the facial expressions on Harry that the author puts there. Still, perhaps he had one of those new Videocassette Recorder things and was pausing while he typed the manuscript on his Smith-Corona, but most likely he was trying to add something to attract a wider audience, the subtly different audience who did not follow Dirty Harry in the movies nor Clint Eastwood and who wanted more characterization. Well, that’s a laudable goal. He didn’t really succeed.

Aside from the inner sentimentalism added to Harry, the additional characterization-through-a-paragraph-of-exposition trick doesn’t work. All minor characters get one or two paragraphs of explanation for their behavior, but that’s it. The author’s limitations included fidelity to the filmed scenes, and this author doesn’t seem to stray far-or any–from the scenes filmed. And he adds that paragraph to give depth to the characters. Ultimately, it doesn’t bring additional meaning to the source material. Perhaps he could have added scenes that did not run counter to the story or he could have added more interior dialogue to each character than the single paragraph, but hell, man, he was probably just banging it out for a paragraph.

I guess we can’t all be Tom Stoppard, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead isn’t exactly a direct novelization of Hamlet, but its techniques could serve those trying to write novelizations on movies. But that might double the actual writing time from four hours to eight or ten, which eats into the profit.

So would I recommend it? Sure, if you’re a collector, a voracious reader, or someone like me who dabbles in these things for the curiousities that lie outside of the actual text.

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Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Math

Headline: Senate again refuses to confirm Bolton.

According to the crack mathematical theorists at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the 38 Senators who voted against cloiture–the end of the debate, and not actually for or against Bolton’s appointment–is enough to cast the action as though the entire Senate had refused to confirm Bolton.

To express this algebraically:

38%=100%

Compare and contrast this to any action of conservative legislators or leaders, whose mere majority election or decision does not give a mandate for conservatives to speak for all members of a given group.

Update: Apparently, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune has the same mathematicians: Bolton nomination again blocked by Senate

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A Pair of Solitaire

I’m glad I am neither a politician nor a celebrity flogging a product. Regardless of what you think of this blog’s quality, gentle reader, it vapidousity falls below the common watermark of truly inspired.

For example, Jane Seymour on filming her first topless scene at 54:

“But I wanted to appeal to this generation. The script was the funniest thing I’d ever read. I thought the topless scene in particular was the funniest moment in the whole movie. Despite my anxiety I recognised this to be a great role.”

Inadvertent condescension to this generation and a skewed sense of humor that finds Owen Wilson tearing the shirt and bra off of Jane Seymour the funniest moment in a movie in which Owen Wilson appears?

Ew.

UPDATE: Double ew.

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Fun With Statistics

From the story “Supporters of increasing tax on cigarettes quietly push on“, we get this insightful statistical analysis from the Associated Press:

The “why” goes something like this: Missouri has the third-highest smoking rate in the nation, spends the third-lowest amount on anti-tobacco efforts and charges the third-lowest cigarette tax.

The correlation is no coincidence.

No wonder polisybodies like statistics. Unlike real science, statistics are just like language–they can say whatever you want, and you can deconstruct the meaning of the numbers-as-text to imbue them with whatever liberation (of citizens’ money-as-tax) theory you espouse.

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Working Theory

Apparently, our home is the air conditioning unit for the entire St. Louis area.

Whenever we turn the air conditioner on, the daily high temperatures drop. When the high temperatures drop, we turn off the air conditioner and open the windows….at which point the daily high temperatures rise…..

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Excellent Day to Use Tax Money to Prop Up Sports Franchises

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its columnists have chosen an excellent day to expound on the need for tax money incentives to sports teams.

While St. Louis city streets collapse:

St. Louis street crews are working to repair a sinkhole that was nearly big enough to swallow a car. City Streets Director Jim Suelman says the hole on Memorial Drive near the Old Cathedral is about five feet in diameter and nearly a foot deep.

Collapsing streets, schools skating the edge of their accreditation, but hey, great sports venues for the suburbanites to enjoy.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)

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St. Louis Should Throw Good Money After Bad

Not only will the Savvis Center henceforth, temporarily, be known as the TBD Center, but apparently the owners of the St. Louis Blues have put the team up for sale:

Citing heavy financial losses and concern about the future, St. Louis Blues owners Bill and Nancy Laurie have decided to sell the National Hockey League team and its long-term lease on the Savvis Center.

Bernie Miklasz, sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lights upon the obvious answer (for a newspaperman): have the government pay for it:

With some cooperative tweaking, local politicians and leaders can ensure the Blues’ future in St. Louis.

Apparently, the cooperative tweaking that built and maintains a publicly-funded sports venue is not enough. Instead:

The state and the city have wobbled and given in on the tax issue before. The state and the city and St. Louis County teamed to pay for a football stadium that eventually housed the Rams. The Rams’ lease calls for the stadium to be maintained to high standards, so public money is still being used for periodic upgrades, even though the Rams are highly profitable. The Rams also got deal sweeteners, including a new practice facility, for moving here.

The Cardinals open a new ballpark next season, and they’re receiving public money for road and infrastructure work and other stadium-related costs. The city also waived its 5 percent amusement tax for the Cardinals owners to keep the new stadium in the city.

Instead of eliminating or reducing, in general, an onerous tax levied on entertainment events (designed, like hotel taxes, to soak outsiders who come to the city for an event instead of taxing the voters), Miklasz favors more crony capitalistic targeted subsidies so the government can prop up select, poorly-run enterprises. The Prince tour that comes through? Well, that private endeavor makes money, so it should shoulder its share of the burden–and that of the sports teams.

So point one is the government should favor the Blues because it favors the other teams. So it should continue to throw (or forego) good tax money after bad.

Argument two:

Again, I know what you’re thinking: Who cares? No public money for sports teams. OK, fine. But what will we do with Savvis Center? The city owns the arena. If the Blues head out of town, the city is stuck with the arena. Savvis Center creates full-time jobs, and a part-time workforce on the night of the events.

The Savvis Center however, won’t do jack for the city, and downtown interests, if there’s no hockey team or NBA team to fill valuable dates. That’s the reality. So really, it’s up to the city to decide what to do with this investment.

So the city of St. Louis has thrown this money away to build a large public venue that sat empty through the 2004-2005 hockey season. It should forego tax revenue on the main tenant of the building so that the building doesn’t go to waste.

Miklasz concludes that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it:

And we have a history lesson to draw on.

Once upon a time, when Ralston Purina sold the Blues, no local owners stepped up. The team was sold to Harry Ornest, who was based in Beverly Hills, Calif. After a few years, our civic leaders were so fatigued by the bombastic Ornest, they organized a local group to buy the Blues just to get rid of him.

Obviously, it would have been cheaper to buy the team before Ornest got a hold of it; instead the local leaders paid a lot more for the Blues once the team passed through Harry O’s hands.

Same with pro football. After the Cardinals moved to Arizona in 1988, the enormous cost of luring the Rams here was far greater than the cheaper alternative of keeping the Cardinals here.

If high taxes are going to drive the Blues out of this market – say, to Kansas City – then it’ll cost considerably more, long-term, to replace them.

Funny how my obvious solution differs from Miklasz’s. Why replace them? If they cannot make money here with the same tax burden and costs of business as any other enterprise, let them fail or move to some other city from which they can suck tax money.

Because ultimately, the only way the city can ensure that the sports franchise stays here would be to buy it outright and run it like another city department. Which cannot be any worse than sports teams run themselves anyway.

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Where Do the St. Louis Blues Play?

For twenty years, the Blues played at the St. Louis Arena/Checkerdome. Since the new facility was built by the city of St. Louis in 1995, the Blues have played at:

  • The Kiel Center
  • Savvis Center
  • TBD

Just one more instance of how sports are killing tradition. The very name of the same venue changing every couple of years–and lots of venues have–breaks the link between the sports team present and the sports team past that fuels successful sports teams who’ve built a franchise and a fan base over time.

Granted, it’s not as bad as moving teams from city to city whenever the owner things it’s time for a free new stadium, but it’s part of the overall trend (including free agency) that’s made a sporting event as ephemeral as a rock concert.

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Department of Justice Wants to Raise Internect Connectivity Prices

Your ISP as Net watchdog:

The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities.

Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs–that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept.

You think your AOL or DSL is expensive now, gentle reader, just wait until your ISP has to pay for perpetual storage and backup for every packet its users transmit and receive.

(Link seen on Ravenwood’s Universe.)

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