POLITICAL PROBLEM-SOLVING

Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell: ”What is stupid is believing that politicians are trying to solve our problems, instead of theirs.... No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are ... trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two.”

ABOUT TIME

Sarah Palin’s influence on other would-be politicians can by seen by the growing number of women she has inspired to seek public office.

"I think that for a long time people see politicians as part of an elite establishment, and our nation's at a crossroads where the American people realize that the elite establishment has gotten us into a mess," [Patricia] Sullivan [running to unseat Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson in Florida's 8th Congressional District] said, sounding themes associated with Palin.

But, but ... Andrew Sullivan, a homosexual male, knows women dislike Sarah Palin.

THINGS I’M THANKFUL FOR

Frank J on things he’s thankful for:

• So far, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t destroyed the universe.

• Burritos continue to be cheap and plentiful.

• Having completely squandered public support, the worst of the Democrats being in charge is already over.

• The sun continues to be a cheap and free source of heating and light with no signs of stopping.

• Thanks to Twitter, we no longer have to speculate what inane thoughts are going through a given celebrity’s head at this very moment.

• Due to Sarah Palin’s aerial patrols, wolf attacks are down 30%.

Things I’m thankful for

• Even bankrupted under massive debt and with a ninny as president, America is still like a million times better than any other country.

• Frank J's humor.

IT’S FALL AND THE ACORNs ARE DROPPING

ACORN is left “twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.” I have no doubt that the retrieved documents will make interesting reading over the next few months.

[Update] ACORN responds: “It was theft.”

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

Mark Steyn on The Ego of ‘O’.
























I am "The Won".

WHAT’S NEXT? THE AUGUSTINE REPORT

The space shuttle Atlantis arrived home safely at 9:44 a.m. EST today.
Only 5 shuttle flights remain. What’s next?

Well, the Augustine Report on the future of manned space is in, and it isn’t pretty.

A White House committee is urging President Barack Obama to develop commercial taxi services to fly American astronauts to and from low Earth orbit, a move that would be a major shift in longstanding national space policy.

Under the plan, NASA still would build its Orion spacecraft to fly astronauts beyond Earth orbit -- on missions to orbit the moon and Mars or perhaps land on asteroids. The agency also would move rapidly to develop a human-rated heavy lift rocket to launch large components required for deeper-space missions. That rocket would provide a "fallback option" if U.S. aerospace companies fail to develop space taxi service to low-Earth orbit.

However, the shift in approach essentially would take NASA out of the business of launching its own astronauts -- a job the agency has done since Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space in 1961.

Commercialization of space is an obvious – and personally welcome – development, but the lack of a “Grand Plan” is disturbing:

Also among the big questions Obama will have to answer: Where should astronauts go next? The panel boiled it down to three options: Stick with current plans to go the moon, go straight to Mars instead, or fly interplanetary voyages to orbit the moon, Mars and perhaps land on an asteroid.

As is the clear lack of financial support:

NASA's budget needs to be ramped up by $3 billion between 2011 and 2014 to carry out any "meaningful" human spaceflight program.

Unfortunately, I don’t view the Obama administration as interested in space exploration or competent to develop a vision if it were interested.

It’s going to be a long three years for the next frontier.

PARTY CRASHERS

"United States Secret Service agents are conducting an internal review to determine how Washington area socialites Tareq and Michaele Salahi managed to sneak in to President Barack Obama's first State Dinner on Tuesday despite high security."

The Secret Service will certainly get a black eye over this one, but my bet is that if the media doesn’t go all defensive (likely) we’ll find out that the Secret Service was overruled on security precautions by someone in the White House.

[Update]: Hmm. Lawyer: White House cleared crashers.

WHO DESERVES CREDIT FOR THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS?

Two Bell Labs contemporaries of Nobel Prize winners George Smith and Willard Boyle put some doubt into the accepted history.

An interesting podcast. People tend to think that science and engineering are pretty cut-and-dried. They aren’t.

DEFINING MSNBC

”[I]t’s the Stuff White People Like network.”

I’d only add the single word “Elite” between “Stuff” and “White.”

PALIN DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

It’s in full bloom:

Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:

“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”

Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”

But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”

What is the sound of an ego deflating?

Link from Instapundit.

THANKSGETTING

Why did I have the uneasy sense that Thanksgiving is all about him?



Getting thanks instead of giving thanks?

GLORY DAYS

Rebuilding an IBM 1401 computer (slide show). The story is here.

I feel right at home. As an undergraduate student, I was a systems operator (unpaid; it was love) on the University’s first computer.

JAWS

Taken at the National Geographic Museum in Washington DC. It’s a female great white shark – the mouth is open.

OBAMA'S CHARISMA

I think Obama’s “charisma” was based on voter narcissism — people excited not just about electing a black President, but about themselves, voting for a black President.

CASH FOR CLOTURE

Harry Reid bribed his way to cloture on the Senate healthcare bill.

Well, in Mary Landrieu’s case at least, it’s not bribery; it’s logrolling ... a time-honored Congressional tradition.

WELL SAID

The New York Times tells Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds to ”STFU.” Commenter datechguy (8:39 pm) responds “There was a time about 7 or 8 years ago when Instapundit had a quote at the top that called him the “New York Times of bloggers” ... if the New York Times wanted to regain it’s former status as an actual respected and believed source of news it should strive to become the ‘Instapundit of Newspapers’.”

More.

CLIMATEGATE

Lord Monckton calls it criminal. If the climate-controllers succeed, it should be genocide.

AL GORE WAS RIGHT

Global warming is anthropogenic – the data was rigged:

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

Is there a Nobel Prize for lying?

TEACHING IDEOLOGY

All cultural biases aren’t created equal:

Katherine Kersten wonders when ... universities began demanding ideological purity as a prerequisite to attaining a degree. The University of Minnesota will apparently demand that its education graduates, the future teachers of Minnesota, confess to their own bigotry if they believe in the American dream of equal opportunity as a means to cleanse the Minnesota education system of cultural biases.

What happened to reading, writing, and arithmetic?

[Update] FIRE has taken notice.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

A first look at the climate model computer codes:

As the leaked messages, and especially the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file, found their way around technical circles, two things happened: first, programmers unaffiliated with East Anglia started taking a close look at the quality of the CRU’s code, and second, they began to feel sympathetic for anyone who had to spend three years (including working weekends) trying to make sense of code that appeared to be undocumented and buggy, while representing the core of CRU’s climate model.

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on computer code that, if it generates an error message, continues as if nothing untoward ever occurred. Another debugged the code by pointing out why the output of a calculation that should always generate a positive number was incorrectly generating a negative one. A third concluded: “I feel for this guy. He’s obviously spent years trying to get data from undocumented and completely messy sources.”

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend – so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!”

It’s not clear how the files were leaked. One theory says that a malicious hacker slipped into East Anglia’s network and snatched thousands of documents. Another says that the files had already been assembled in response to a Freedom of Information request and, immediately after it was denied, a whistleblower decided to disclose them. (Lending credence to that theory is the fact that no personal e-mail messages unrelated to climate change appear to have been leaked.)

Maybe the codes are not as sophisticated as we have been led to believe.