Duane Patterson has a piece about the Washington Post's recent shot at Republicans

Duane Patterson, writing at Radio Blogger, has a good piece dissecting the Washington Post's piece that is taking shots at Tom Delay, in particular:

Karl Rove has slipped through the left's fingers. George Bush and Dick Cheney are only guilty of wrongdoing in the minds of the fever swamp of the left. The 2006 elections are coming up and the Democrats have nothing to run on, except trying to scandalize the Republicans. If Tom Delay walks on the bogus indictment brought by Ronnie Earl, the partisan hack in Texas, that may be too much to take. So the Post has stepped in to weave this very convoluted tale to make sure that Delay is the prime subject this weekend and early next week in Washington.

At least three times in this story, the Post admits that Delay apparently had not done wrong, but his actions and associates sure look suspicious. I'm sure to the Post, anybody that would associate with a Republicans is suspicious.

(Tell me that Patrick Fitzgerald's witchhunt is not somehow politically motivated, although it has hard to figure)

Someone who is doing good things

We had a chance to help Prof. Dunin relatively recently, and it seemed like a good idea to point out her work. This is a link to a page about her career with a photo that must be of her when she was younger. She has an MA in Dance from UCLA in 1966. Notes from the Field has a piece about her, as well, with a more recent picture. There is another page with a Marco Polo connection that is quite interesting.

More Michigan

This is sort of fantasy, but Jennifer Granholm is kind of Michigan's Castro while Kwame Kilpatrick provides the sort of comic relief like Hugo Chavez. As you can see, I think that Michigan has descended to the sort of Banana Republic status achieve by San Francisco. The Michigan economy, while not good, is better than the nadir of the early 1980's, prior to Lee Iacocca and the mini-van. The dominant phrase was "last one out, turn out the lights".

The Democratic People's Republic of Michigan

Henry Payne, the editorial cartoonist with the Detroit News, has a cartoon showing Governor Jennifer Granholm (the moled-wonder) as a goalie, using the veto to stop reform, which is shown as a puck. Jennifer Granholm is another case like Arnold Schwarznegger, in that she is not a native-born US Citizen. She is a Canadian. If circumstances were different, she would be another hot prospect for President for the Democrats. Although, she may have lost a good bit of luster based on her performance as governor (for life?) of the Democratic People's Republic over which she reigns. We might wonder if she is more reactionary than progressive, since she is protecting all the Democratic constituancy group "birds nests on the ground".

I heard about this on the radio last night

These guys who do the "honor killings" are emblematic of the third-world mindset where they are living in the 11th Century. The mindset seems to transcend borders and culture. It easily could have happened in India, rather than Pakistan. Michelle Malkin writes about the latest incident:

Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family's "honor" — a crime that shocked Pakistan.

The 40-year old laborer, speaking to The Associated Press in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret — that he didn't murder the stepsister's alleged lover too.

Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such "honor killings" will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.

You can almost imagine our leftist buddies saying: "don't be judgmental".

I understand a little more about the bugs in Firefox

I found out, tonight, that part of what is happening when there are problems copying and pasting from Firefox is that Firefox is confused about which tab is open. I copied and pasted and got text from a page that was hidden, instead of the text in the tab that was exposed.

Michael Crichton on the environment, complexity, and hysteria

Michael Crichton, the novelist, has an essay called "Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century". He sums up the essay by writing:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods?

No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule.

At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe.

Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world. It’s time we knew it. Thank you very much.

(thanks to Clayton Cramer for pointing this out)

Costs and Healthcare

"Winterspeak", writing at Asymmetrical Information, has a good piece commenting on a column by Paul Krugman. The discussion centers on efforts by "activists" to reduce the cost of healthcare. The result is that all incentives to development new treatments evaporates:

An AIDS vaccine would eliminate the value of retroviral therapies. Since those are expensive now, an AIDS vaccine would only be worthwhile to develop if it could be priced high -- say $100,000 a pop.

Some people would pay this. Certainly it is worth far more than $100,000 a pop -- in Africa we are told repeatedly that AIDS is costing these poor countries billions of dollars in healthcare and lost productivity. But Merck, or whichever poor schlub actually invested the damn thing could not charge Africa, or anyone, $100,000 for a dose of AIDS vaccine. Public opinion would force them to give it away for free, or for a very low price. For God's sake -- we're talking about the AIDS vaccine here! (And if anyone got sick from the vaccine they would sue the company for $billions.) Therefore, drug companies will not invest money in developing this vaccine, but they will not say they are not developing a vaccine for the very same reason.

You can see this simple logic play out in this CNN piece, where an NIH expert says the private sector has no incentive to develop a vaccine, and a bunch of pharma execs say "no, we're working on it".

In short, this is what Krugman--and all public-healthcare advocates--advocate. Since expensive new medical technologies increases the price of healthcare, eliminating healthcare development (by taking the profit out of it) will reduce the costs. We can then spend this saved money on... I don't know, the leisure needs of healthy 55 year old ex-government employees.

Paul Graham on "Procrastination"

Paul Graham has a new essay about "Procrastination". The key points he makes are:

If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.

When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on big things, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty about it. I don't think they should feel guilty. There's more to do than anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can is inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems a mistake to feel bad about that.

I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.

Duane Patterson has a post about the Red Cross

Duane Patterson, writing at Radio Blogger, has a post about some bad things happening at the Red Cross. Sadly, anytime a lot of money is involved, this sort of thing could occur:

In Tuesday's front page of the Washington Post, there is a report of fifty Red Cross workers, based just up the road from us in Bakersfield, California, who worked at a claimi center there, who have have been arrested for bilking hundreds of thousands of dollars, supposed to go to Katrina victims. In reality, the people picking up the relief money had nothing to do with Katrina, other than they were family or friends of the workers at the Red Cross in charge of doling out the money.

The Red Cross has to clean house, and they have to clean house in a very public, and very drastic way. I just don't trust them anymore. And I'm not alone. This kind of stuff just can't happen. Every time a major crisis hits, and the pitches for money come, how can we not be concerned that the money is going to be wasted by a corrupted relief agency bureaucracy?