What is the half-life of A Few Good Men?
At least 13 years, as these fellows recreate the courtroom scene using Half Life 2.
A Few Good Half-Lives
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Memo to Magazine Circulation Departments
To questions for you, largely rhetorical since you’re megalithic corporate entities swaddled in corporate procedure and disregard for individual customers:
- Why is it that when I am not a subscriber, 12 issues of your magazine cost $10, but when I am a renewing “preferred customer,” 12 issues of your magazine cost $36?
- Doesn’t it occur to you that this might explain why I don’t freaking renew?
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Post-Dispatch Columnist: Keen Insight Into Own Stereotype of Opposition
Sylvester Brown digs shallowly into his knowledge of Bush supporters to explain why we’re delusional in his column today, “Isn’t it time we accepted the truth about Bush?“:
BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, comedian Richard Pryor used to tell a story about a woman, so in love with her man, she tolerates his obvious indiscretions. Once, after catching her beloved in bed with another woman, Pryor told how the man persuaded the woman he did nothing wrong.
“Who you gonna believe — me or your lying eyes?” the man asked.
While listening to the comedy routine recently, I finally figured out why President George W. Bush has managed to deflect scrutiny and backlash for his actions. Most Americans, it seems, look upon Bush like starry-eyed lovers. No matter what he’s done or what’s happened on his watch, most refuse to see their “man’s” reckless behavior for what it is.
Who are you going to believe, me or this lying mistaken columnist, who faults Bush for:
- Forget the flimflam, sleight-of-hand, word manipulation Bush used to justify invading Iraq — a country he claimed possessed a cache of nuclear and chemical weapons. It wasn’t about WMDs, he later told us with a straight face. We’re fighting for more democratic, nobler causes.
Wow, Sylvester Brown got dinged for making that very same claim before. See also Instapundit posts here and here. Perhaps like me, Mr. Brown just wants the attention from Instapundit and the readership he brings.
- And what about those “secret memos” that were all the buzz in Europe?
That’s the discredited Downing Street Memo.
- A news story about a politician who vengefully jeopardized the life of a government agent — now that’s juicy stuff. Surely such a story, even if remotely true, would signal the end of any political career.
Gunning for Rove with BBs. Yawn.
So that’s what our lying eyes–the media–would tell us are important. Not elections in Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Not the recovery of the economy. Not the nomination of judges who are not voted on in the Senate. No, believe what columnists like Brown tell you, America, or you’re a fool in love.
(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)
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What We Have Here Is A Failure To Imaginate
DC officials have a rather silly idea about how to deal with potential suicide bombers in the Metro stations: random backpack searches:
Subway riders may face random police checks of their bags under a security measure being considered in the nation’s capital, the latest city to look for ways to deter terrorism on rail systems.
No decision has been made on the idea for the city’s 106-mile Metrorail system, and the logistics would be difficult. But “it would be another tool in our security toolbox,” says Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein.
All right, class, let’s hit the highlights of how this would not work:
- If the random searches occur in crowded stations or, heaven forfend, crowded trains, what’s the difference of detonating the backpack on schedule or when the Metro cop says, “Hey, you!”? Not much to a suicide bomber.
- Fine, you say, search all backpacks before people get into the system. Capital idea! As in waste of capital except for the new TSA hires for screening backpacks who will draw new salaries and government benefits.
But when you look at an airport, a subway, or other mass transit system, you have two locations where passengers are grouped and vulnerable: In the little metal tubes, and in the queues. Adding a new queue checkpoint where everyone regardless of train, plane, or bus has to crowd together will give terrorists and malcontents a fatter opportunity to wreak their havoc and up their body counts with a bomb.
- Searching backpacks won’t stop bombers wearing bomb belts. Or bomb shoes. Or whatever other nefarious creativities will arise to subvert the check and balance mechanisms put in place to deal with a very specific threat.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is on the cusp of creating yet another perpetual inconvenience for temporary appearance of security.
At worst, these measures will be ineffective or even more dangerous than the current situation, and at best will only send the bad guys to blow something else up.
But at least the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority will have done something!!!
UPDATE: As a story seen on Outside the Beltway indicates, New York will begin random searches. I hate to be the first cop to try to search a suicide bomber.
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San Francisco’s Right to Riot
Cinnamon Stillwell takes a look at the “protest” environment in San Francisco, where criminal miscreants have the right to vandalize and commit mayhem and police are sued for everything but getting their skulls fractured by rioters (but attorneys are still looking into that).
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Mark Their Words
Cigarette tax just the start, some say:
The state’s pursuit of more than $1 million in back taxes and penalties from online cigarette customers could hint at the Department of Revenue’s plans to go after taxes on computers, books and other goods bought over the Internet, tax attorneys and analysts said Wednesday.
Department of Revenue officials disputed that speculation, saying they would pursue only online cigarette customers.
Sure, those particular officials say that now. But in a couple years, Wisconsin will have a different set of officials whose priorities will be to raise even more money, and the precedent–getting back taxes for Internet sales–will have been set by their predecessors.
So how much have you bought from Amazon in 10 years? Plus interest, thanks.
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Not All New Positions Are Executive Level
St. Louis Post-Dispatch insightful report: Low-pay jobs outgrow high-pay positions!
The St. Louis area added thousands more “bad” jobs than it did higher-paying “good” ones from 1980 to 2000, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve this week.
Unfortunately, “leaders” will use this as an excuse to funnel taxpayer money to their friends who own businesses.
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Eric Mink: Late to the Rove Scandal
Hard-hitting, easy- (if at all) thinking Eric Mink weighs in on Karl Rove:
t’s ironic that political genius Karl Rove – and perhaps others – could end up in prison for exposing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Ironic, because their essential mistake in doing so was one of identity: their own.
Excellent work, Mink! Now, tell the rest of us what you think about the electoral mess in Ohio!
New motto suggestion for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Commentary on the news for the people who don’t care or pay attention by people who don’t care or pay attention!
UPDATE: McGehee illustrates that Mink might be just in time.
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Book Report: Desperately Seeking Susan by Susan Dworkin (1985)
I bought this book at a garage sale in my old eBay days. When cleaning out the backstock of those old books, I decided to add it to my personal library since I’ve never seen the movie, but I was kind of familiar with the plot. So I read it.
What do you want? It’s the novelization of a romantic comedy about Baby Boomers being New Wave in the middle 1980s. Man, they actually used to novelize those things. Now, that tradition is only upheld for books that geeks and fanboys will buy.
Roberta, an aging (26!) and disenchanted suburban housewife, lives vicariously through the personal ads, particularly a series of ads wherein a man desperately seeks Susan. When she follows the directions to one of Susan’s rendezvous, Roberta becomes more immersed in Susan’s life than in her own.
I took two things away from this book:
- If Madonna had been born 20 years later, she would have been one of the first stars with a sex tape accidentally leaked to the Internet.
- I find it unintentionally amusing when I read books where characters in their mid twenties think they’re old. You don’t really get old until your middle thirties, anyone in his or her middle thirties will tell you.
Now I’ll have to get the commemorative twentieth anniversary two-DVD retrospective that’s due any day now.
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eBay Changes Rules to Benefit Community; By Coincidence, Also Results in Additional Revenue for eBay
eBay tightens rules for sellers:
- eBay said Monday that sellers could no longer accept PayPal payments from buyers without accepting credit card transactions, thereby avoiding PayPal fees. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002.
Sellers’ practice of restricting PayPal payment methods “was creating a bad buyer experience,” said PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires. “It would be like walking into the grocery store and filling up your cart, getting to the check stand with your credit card and being told sorry, even after you saw the credit card logo outside the store.”
Under PayPal rules, sellers can accept payment through bank transfers or PayPal balances for free. But sellers in the United States who accept credit card payments are charged between 1.9 percent and 2.9 percent of the value of the transaction, based on volume.
Pires sought to quell concerns that eBay was tightening the restrictions merely to boost PayPal’s fee collections.
“We got a lot of community feedback, which is why we’re changing this,” Pires said. “And it was a very small percentage of sellers who were doing this.”
Sure. Like they’re responding to community feedback to lower seller’s fees. I used to spend a lot of time selling inexpensive books on eBay, mostly books I picked up for a buck or so at garage sales and sold for five to ten dollars. Eventually, I calculated that eBay was making more money from my effort than I was.
Community that, eBay.
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New York Times Condemns Activist Judiciary
In perhaps a great case of Laphamization, the New York Times is lamenting judicial activism before the judge is even confirmed:
- One of the most important areas for the Senate to explore is Judge Roberts’s views on federalism – the issue of how much power the federal government should have. The far right is on a drive to resurrect ancient, and discredited, states’ rights theories. If extremists take control of the Supreme Court, we will end up with an America in which the federal government is powerless to protect against air pollution, unsafe working conditions and child labor. There are reasons to be concerned about Judge Roberts on this score. He dissented in an Endangered Species Act case in a way that suggested he might hold an array of environmental laws, and other important federal protections, to be unconstitutional.
Isn’t it a shame how much power the judiciary has?
Only when it’s wielded by judges of whom the New York Tomes disapproves, apparently.
(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)
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Presented as Straight News
Survey: 25,000 civilians killed in Iraq war:
- Nearly 25,000 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq war, according to a group that tracks the civilian death toll from the conflict.
The Iraq Body Count — a London-based group comprising academics and human rights and anti-war activists — said on Tuesday that 24,865 civilians had died between March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005. [Emphasis mine]
Swell. How did this survey come about? Did the anti-war activists ask people if they had been killed in the Iraq war? Close.
- “Our data has been extracted from a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports published since March 2003. Our accounting is not complete: only an in-depth, on-the-ground census could come close to achieving that,” the group said.
“But if journalism is the first draft of history, then this dossier may claim to be an early historical analysis of the military intervention’s known human costs.”
At least CNN did add a bit of a rejoinder, some paragraphs down, from people closer to the conflict than press and media reports:
- The Iraqi government disputed some of the finding of the report.
“We welcome the attention given by this report to Iraqi victims of violence but we consider that it is mistaken in claiming that the plague of terrorism has killed fewer Iraqis than the multinational forces,” said the prime minister’s office, citing recent terror strikes, including the Musayyib bombing that killed nearly 100 people on Saturday.
“The international forces try to avoid civilian casualties, whereas the terrorists target civilians and try to kill as many of them as they can.”
So it’s really unclear to me why this piece puts the claims of academics activists above Iraqi government officials and U.S. government officials. No, wait, come to think of it, it’s clear.…
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Brian J. Kills the Small Talk
Them: How is Heather?
Me: I’m sorry, HIPAA regulations prohibit me from sharing medical information about my wife with a third party.
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A Real Estate Challenge The Noggles Share
WHERE do you house 10,000 books? In an apartment with plenty of shelf space, of course.
So that’s what Thomas and Katherine Cole needed when they moved to New York.
Mr. Cole, 71, who retired five years ago as a classics professor at Yale University, likes working from home, which means having on hand the thousands of reference works he might need. (He is writing a literary study of Ovid.)
We can aspire to 10,000 volumes. We’ve got to be at several thousand now. Our next house will need a room dedicated to being the library. Probably not a finished room in the basement which might flood. You see, we’ve thought it over.
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When Scienceocrats Attack!
A new study questions whether conversion of corn into ethanol actually expends more energy than it stores. When confronted with contrary data, modern scienceocrats do the obvious: they attack the study on merits other than scientific:
- Researchers at the National Corn-To-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville said there are several federal studies that cite the opposite and said the recent study is harming their ability to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.
“It discourages me,” said Martha Schlicher, director of the research center. “People tend to remember negative news instead of becoming educated in what may not be as interesting. I worry that in a time so critical for energy security and the environment that this detracts from getting accurate information to consumers.”
Forget about the data. How do you feel? The director of the research center nust feel discouraged, because if scientists cannot disprove this data, then something more important than truth lies at stake:
- At a time when businesses, state officials and farmers are investing millions of dollars in ethanol research, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of California at Berkeley found it takes 29 percent more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount stored in the resulting fuel. [Emphasis mine]
If ethanol proves to as effective as mixing snake oil with banana oil, who’s going to want to pay to maintain research facilities to studying the proper ratios, and more importantly, to keep directors salaried?
Allow me to quickly consolidate the new, revised, and more better
Twenty-First Century Scientific Method
- Observe some aspect of the universe.
- Determine that the aspect of the universe impacts some large corporation, public policy initiative, or both.
- Write grant proposals and get funding for research into the aspect of the universe.
- Organize and attend conferences to confabulate with others who are thinking about the aspect of the universe, or perhaps just related fields, or perhaps unrelated fields–after all, the universe is holistically interrelated.
- When funding is about to run out, invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis. You can make it all up if you want; it only needs to be believeable enough to warrant more funding.
- Use the hypothesis to make predictions and as progress report or new grant proposal fodder.
- Receive more funding.
- Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and conclude you need more funding to conduct further research.
- Repeat steps 6 through 8 until retirement age.
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Book Report: Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard (2001)
I inherited this book from my aunt, which explains why I’ve read a chickthrilla. That in itself lends itself to some interesting contrasts with the crime fiction I tend to read, where every protagonist has a shot in an equal fight with amateur bad guys. Here, the protagonist is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than commone adversaries. Weird.
This book revolves around a true crime writer who has put to bed a book on a south Florida crime of passion. A minister who has argued against the death penalty has been convicted of killing his wife to cover up an affair or to be with his lover. Coincidentally, he’s now on death row in the next cell from the inmate whose cause the minister championed. But as she sends the book off, the narrator has some niggling doubts about the crimes, and she investigates a little more.
The book intersperses chapters of the fictional true crime book with current thoughts of the true crime author/sleuth, Marie Lightfoot. It struck me as odd that the chapters of the book are all in third person past tense, but the current investigations are in the first person present. I mean, that’s just weird. I’m sure the author (Pickard, the real author) used the conceit to differentiate the fictional book from the real fictional book, er, story. It’s more jarring than it needs to be, though, and I could have done without it.
Overall, it’s a serviceable book with an interesting plot but with an ending and whodunit resolution that seems sudden, but part of that’s the function of the first part of the book including a higher portion of fictional chapters from the true crime book, which presents the story as it’s thought to be, and the last part of the book includes a higher portion of contemporary investigation of the fictional author. I don’t regret reading it, unlike some books with which I have burdened myself of late, but I won’t actively seek out other works in Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot or Jenny McCain series on the basis of this exposure.
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Dilemma
Brett Favre could easily win election to anything in Wisconsin. But how would I feel if he were to run as a Democrat, like Heath Shuler?
It’s too depressing to speculate.
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Libertarians Tear Hair Out In Missouri
Nudity or lap dances in strip clubs? Now illegal!
Adult entertainment businesses plan to ask a judge to block a new law that would prohibit lap dances and full nudity in Missouri strip clubs.
The Missouri chapter of Adult Club Executives plans to seek an injunction next week against the law, scheduled to take effect Aug. 28, said Kansas City attorney Richard Bryant, who represents the group.
The legislation, signed Wednesday by Gov. Matt Blunt, would prohibit customers and employees younger than 21 at strip clubs. It also would ban nudity and require seminude employees to remain at least 10 feet away from customers and behind a 2-foot-high railing. The bill would prohibit employees from touching customers.
Drinking in public? Now legal!
For revelers in Kansas City’s downtown entertainment district, the party won’t have to end at the door.
A law signed by Gov. Matt Blunt will allow patrons to stroll in and out of restaurants and bars without dumping their alcoholic beverages. Kansas City officials are reworking the city’s alcohol ordinance to make it conform with the state’s law.
We Libertarians would rather not trade one vice for another because we just cannot choose which one we like best.
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Brian J. Does Potter
 Click for full size |
Like everyone else this weekend, Friday night at midnight found me with inked sigils upon my body, attire of coarse robes, and silly-looking glasses. In other words, it was a normal Friday evening. But on Saturday, I too joined America in picking up the latest Potter book, and I read it in one sitting. After which point, I could hardly walk after not having eaten nor napped in the afternoon as is my wont. This one departs from earlier novels and takes the series in a new direction. Harry Potter, having graduated and decided against wizard graduate school or a career in wizard fast food, returns home to Brooklyn to open a new storefront affiliate of Hogwarts. Thus, at Hogwarts High School, he becomes a teacher and mentor to a group of loveable losers called the Sweathogwarts. Although losers in the muggle world, the Sweathogwarts have power in the ways of disco magic and Potter begins to teach them to use their powers for good and not merely peeking into the girls’ locker room. But evil follows Harry across the ocean, and the Sweatwarthogs must confront an evil called the Woodman who’s working for He Must Not Be Named As The Confidential Source. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot, but needless to say the Sweathogwarts work together, with Harry offering guidance, and use the power of their authenticity, ethnicity, magic, and ‘fros to dispatch the Woodman. Rumor had it that someone would die in this book, and the rumor has become fact: Near the end, Malfoy comes into the apartment he has leased in Brooklyn to be evil’s base of operations. He finds a wand on the counter and as he’s looking at it, a nervous Barbarino comes out of the bathroom. Malfoy turns Barbarino into Swiss cheese. To lessen the impact, the book ends with Potter telling his wife Hermy a humorous anecdote about his great uncle’s cousin who owned a fish shop. Perhaps this foreshadowing indicates that the next book deals with evil under the sea? Let the speculation commence! |
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Casting Call for the Plame Scandal
Getting a jump on the movie version of the Plame scandal, which will be as ageless and relevant as All The President’s Men for future generations, we at MfBJN proffer the following suggestion for cast:
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The Operative Word (2006)
Tagline: Love. Politics. Bush=Hitler. Plot Outline: As retaliation for telling the truth about the Bush regime’s illegal war in Iraq, an evil mastermind outs an undercover CIA agent, putting her life in danger as she travels the world’s hotspots and New York’s photo ops to minimize the danger done by the real terrorists, the Republican administration.
Production Notes/Status:
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Scheduled for release in October 2006. Just in time for elections Oscar nominations!
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