How to Reinvent the G.O.P.

In How to Reinvent the G.O.P., David Brooks asks "What Would Hamilton Do?" and presents "A New Conservative Platform" with more popular appeal than the anti-statist platform of the past:

By using government in limited but energetic ways, conservatives could establish credibility that would enable them to reduce the size of government where it is useless or worse — export subsidies, agricultural subsidies and the like. Then they could use that credibility to reduce the increases in entitlement spending — the giant set of programs that crowd out everything else.

Its pillars:

• The War on Islamic extremism
• Entitlement reform
• Social mobility
• Restore the integrity of our institutions
• The energy revolution
• National service

I'm not convinced.

Team America: World Police

Only Trey Parker and Matt Stone could come up with Team America: World Police, a movie done in the style of Jerry Bruckheimer (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys), but with Thunderbirds-style marionettes.

RNC: Giuliani's Speech

I didn't catch Giuliani's Speech last night, and I only heard a few snippets on NPR this morning, but I enjoyed reading this passage about the president meeting with "the people" after 9/11:

Now New York construction workers are very special people. I'm sure this is true all over but I know the ones here the best. They were real heroes along with many others that day, volunteering immediately. And they're big, real big. Their arms are bigger than my legs and their opinions are even bigger than their arms. Now each one of them would engage the President and I imagine like his cabinet give him advice. They were advising him in their own words on exactly what he should do with the terrorists. Of course I can't repeat their exact language. But one of them really went into great detail and upon conclusion of his remarks President Bush said in a rather loud voice, "I agree." At this point the guy just beamed and all his buddies turned toward him in amazement. The guy just lost it. So he reached over, embraced the President and began hugging him enthusiastically. A Secret Service agent standing next to me looked at the President and the guy and instead of extracting the President from this bear hug, he turned toward me and put his finger in my face and said, "If this guy hurts the President, Giuliani you're finished." Meekly, and this is the moral of the story, I responded, "but it would be out of love."

Computer Maker in an Alien World

If you want a cutting-edge PC — OK, if you want a cutting-edge game-playing machine — you go to the guys at Alienware. Computer Maker in an Alien World explains Alienware's entrepreneurial history:

Gonzalez and his business partner, Alex Aguila, launched Alienware seven years ago with an initial investment of $13,000 for office equipment and rent. The company was unable to establish credit lines with computer parts vendors, so each Alienware customer had to pay in advance for their system, which allowed the company to purchase the products to manufacture that system.

Gonzalez got the idea to custom build high-performance machines for gamers from his own experiments constructing computers that would allow him to run flight simulators on machines designed primarily to handle spreadsheets and word-processing software.

Once he figured out how to squeeze the most performance out of off-the-shelf parts, he began building machines for his friends. Shortly after, he figured he'd "just roll the dice" and start a business based on what he'd learned. He named it Alienware in tribute to his longtime fascination with both UFOs and computer hardware.

Gonzales also tried to make the building process a bit different from that of the competition.

"First we handpick each component that goes into the machines based on performance — we choose the best," he said. "Then we build a clean machine — there are no bird's nests of wires and cords, everything is neatly tie-wrapped. That makes for better airflow and the system components don't overheat."

"Then we tweak. We do all the things the obsessed overclocker geek would do with their own machine. We turn some services off; we accelerate some things. Sometimes we add our own custom drivers or just twiddle component settings. People who know how to tweak a machine like Alienware � because it doesn't take them a few days to set up their system; it's all been done for them. People who don't really know computers just like the way the machines run."

Wired 12.09: The Giants of Anime are Coming

Excellent. From The Giants of Anime are Coming:

In coming months, anime's three most prominent directors will release major films in the US. Oshii's Innocence will hit theaters in September. Soon afterward, Katsuhiro Otomo will debut Steamboy, an Indiana Jones-style adventure that takes place in an alternative Victorian age where turbo unicycles and pressure-powered jetpacks battle for supremacy. Then Hayao Miyazaki will deliver Howl's Moving Castle, about a teenage girl who flees a curse by hiding in a gigantic mechanical castle that prowls about on insectlike legs. In addition, Disney will issue three older Miyazaki films on DVD early next year, two of which have never before been released in the US.

A bit of anime history:

Anime is both radically new and the latest variant on an ancient tradition. Japanese hobbyists made animated shorts as far back as 1917, and the industry grew steadily from there. For the most part, its films were warmed-over Disney, based on homegrown folk tales. By the 1960s, the studio Toei Animation was producing feature films for an increasingly receptive domestic audience.

But after decades of imitating American models, anime suddenly made a sharp turn in the late 1960s and embraced a totally different influence: manga, Japan's wildly imaginative comic books. "The soul of anime is manga," Otomo has said, and it is an old soul indeed. Unlike US comics, which took off from the rakish spirit of vaudeville and minstrel shows, manga stem from the ancient practice of lavishly illustrating woodblock-printed books.
[...]
In the immediate aftermath of Astro Boy, anime was considered pabulum for kids. But something changed in the early 1970s. Like every nation in the developed world, Japan brought forth an impatient new generation of artists. Unlike other countries, though, Japan's music, theater, and film industries didn't welcome boat-rocking young people. Meanwhile, manga publishers were abandoning their previous self-censoring code of content. Suddenly, what had been subliterature began looking like an opportunity for creative newcomers.

"There was tremendous energy in Japan bubbling up then," says Masuzo Furukawa, founder of Mandarake, Japan's largest manga store. "In your country, someone like Martin Scorsese got to make Mean Streets. In our country, somebody like Otomo went into manga."

WSJ.com - Rooms for Rent: Maid Service, Hot Meals, No Men

I remember finding the premise of Bosum Buddies — the early 80's sitcom, where Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari play men dressing as women to live in a women-only apartment complex — preposterous, if only because I couldn't imagine a women-only apartment complex. As WSJ.com - Rooms for Rent: Maid Service, Hot Meals, No Men reports, one still exists in New York City:

Perhaps the most ancient stereotype about New York is that it is a metropolis of easy virtue. But just a block and a half from this week's Republican National Convention, the little-known Webster, a fortress-like apartment building with Doric columns and steel doors, defies the darker side of Gotham so often portrayed in movies, literature and popular music.

Men are received only in the first-floor drawing room, the library or in the doorless, floral-wallpapered 'beau parlors.' One exception: Fathers are allowed upstairs, but only with an escort.

There used to be a number of such residences in New York, most famously the Barbizon Hotel on the Upper East Side, a white-glove establishment for young women including Grace Kelly and Sylvia Plath. Its denizens were often employed by women's magazines or nearby retailers before they got married and moved out.

'Aside from these residences, living on your own in New York was impossible to afford because even women who were college graduates were limited to low-paying jobs,' says Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at New York City's Barnard College. Women's residences provided a needed veil of respectability to the notion of an unmarried woman living independently of her family, she says.

By the end of the 1960s, those considerations had withered in importance. Today, apart from some college dorms and women's residences run by religious organizations, the Webster is one of the last of its breed. "The feminist and sexual revolutions killed them," says Prof. Rosenberg.

I owe it to the party

I owe it to the party looks at China's athletes and the Communist Party:

"I owe my Olympic gold medal to my parents, my coach and, above all, to the wise leadership of the Republican Party and President Bush." Can anybody imagine such a remark from an American athlete speaking to Fox News Network? Of course not. Not even the irreverent, wise-cracking talk show host Jay Leno has such a fertile imagination.

But when it comes to Chinese athletes, this extravagant tribute to the political leadership of a country is anything but fictional in the 28th Olympic Games now under way in Athens. The minute a young Chinese girl bagged the gold medal in the women's table-tennis singles final on Sunday, a Beijing TV network reporter stuck a microphone under the nose of her parents. The father, without batting an eye, told the audience that his good daughter was a good Communist Party member and her success was a tribute to the party organization. We can only imagine the hyperbolic tributes, straining credulity, when Beijing hosts the 2008 Summer Olympics.

For all intents and purposes, he is right: the government and the Communist Party own all the Chinese athletes. They are trained, funded, and sent to the Olympics in Greece and to other sporting events by the China Sports Bureau, a cabinet-level ministry in the government. [...] And the government treats its athletes well, too. Each gold medalist will receive 200,000 yuan (US$24,000) in reward money, or 23 years' worth of an average Beijinger's annual income, when he or she returns home, because such athletes have repaid the party's kindness by, as the grateful father put it, "bringing glory to the party and country".

beyond bullets: Signal to Noise

Signal to Noise explains the purpose of a headline — in a newspaper or a PowerPoint presentation:

Journalists have developed an art and craft of writing headlines that serve 3 very important functions — they quickly communicate the main ideas of the article, entice you to read more if you have the time, and allow you to skim the paper if you don't

Inform, entice and distill:

Re-write "The Market" to say "The Market Has Split into 2 New Segments". Edit "Product Benefits" to say "External Drives Reduce Risk by 10%". Each of these new headlines stakes out a specific conclusion, that you can then support with the visuals on your slide along with your spoken words.

Turn Hollywood Secrets into Blockbuster Sales

Turn Hollywood Secrets into Blockbuster Sales is a fairly lackluster article on using "Hollywood secrets" to improve your PowerPoint presentations — but it opens with a fairly insightful (if hokey) revelation: you, in the audience, are the star, as far as Hollywood is concerned:

One Hollywood secret is that the ultimate goal of any movie is to make you feel like you're a star. To the degree that a film makes you feel like you're the one on screen, is the degree to which it is successful. That's because audience empathy translates into dollars. Audiences are willing to pay top dollar if they feel like they 'own' the characters, as if they had created them and lived their lives.

Cabinet Magazine Online - American Photographs: The Road

In 1935, writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov traveled to the United States from the Soviet Union on assignment as special correspondents for the Pravda. The Road is their installment explaining their road trip across America:

On the fifth day of a journey across the Atlantic Ocean, we saw the gigantic buildings of New York. Before us was America. But when we had been in New York for a week and, as it seemed to us, we began to understand America, we were quite unexpectedly told that New York is not at all America. They told us that New York is a bridge between Europe and America, and that we were still situated on the bridge. Then we went to Washington, being steadfastly convinced that the capital of the United States is indisputably America. We spent a day there, and by evening we managed to fall in love with this purely American city. However, on that very same evening we were told that Washington was under no circumstances America. They told us that this was a town of governmental bureaucrats and that America was something quite different. Perplexed, we traveled to Hartford, a city in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer Mark Twain spent his mature years. Much to our horror, the local residents told us in unison that Hartford was also not genuine America. They said that the genuine America was the southern states, while others affirmed that it was the western ones. Several didn't say anything but vaguely pointed a finger into space. We then decided to work according to a plan: to drive around the entire country in an automobile, to traverse it from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and to return along a different route, along the Gulf of Mexico, calculating that indeed somewhere we would be sure to find America. We returned to New York, purchased a Ford (transportation in one's own automobile is the least expensive means of travel in the United States), insured it and ourselves, and on a chilly November morning we left New York for America.

While visiting New York and Washington, I've definitely thought, if you were a foreign tourist, you'd think this was America — but it's not. Not by a long shot.

This picture (above) should be captioned as follows: "Here, this is America!"

And, indeed, when you close your eyes and try to rekindle memories of this country where you spent four months, you don't imagine yourself in Washington with its gardens, columns, and full collection of monuments, nor in New York with its skyscrapers and its poor and rich, nor in San Francisco with its steep streets and suspension bridges, nor in the mountains, factories, or canyons, but at such an intersection of two roads and a gasoline station against a ground of wires and advertising signs.

A lovely alternative

Michael Blowhard holds that "this review here of a new Lexus is some of the best — the most insightful, daring, and fun — new criticism of any kind I've read recently." It certainly transcends mere automobile review, asking "just what constitutes a 'chick car,' anyway?":

When I drive the Lexus SC430, I feel pretty. Oh so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and let's just leave it at that, hmmm?

The SC430 � as polished as a manor house banister, as smooth as Napoleon brandy strained through Naomi Wolf's silk stocking � is that mightily maligned thing: a chick car.
[...]
It's instructive to note that in Europe, the equivalent term for a chick car is a "hairdresser's car." Gay, in other words. A chick car is not only feminine in some ineffable way, but feminizing. It imputes femininity � or perhaps a kind of gender-preference valence � upon its owner/driver. Men don't like having their male credentials called into question; women resist the onus of femininity in the second-sex sense described by Simone de Beauvoir.

Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood

Joining Film Fight, Hungary Tries To Go Hollywood describes recent efforts to build up Hungary's film industry — and gives a bit of Hungarian film history:

In Hollywood's early days, Hungarians helped build the movie business. Adolph Zukor founded Paramount, William Fox (born Wilhelm Fried) started 20th Century Fox, and director George Cukor blazed a trail from 'The Philadelphia Story' to 'My Fair Lady.' In Hollywood legend, a sign on one studio door once warned, 'It's not enough to be Hungarian, you have to have talent too.'
[...]
Hungarians were part of a wave of Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish, who found success in Hollywood beginning in the early 1900s. Kept out of other occupations by prejudice, they were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons.

Throughout the 1920s, Paramount's Mr. Zukor and his rivals made trips to Europe, scouting for talent, such as Hungarian Michael Curtiz, who directed "Casablanca." Hungary was among the European nations where a domestic film industry was already flourishing, partly through government support. Hungarian directors and writers benefited from training at formal film schools. Cinematography students were required to study painting, sculpture, classical literature and music.

Hungary's film industry continued to thrive under Communist rule, with plenty of state-funded work. Vilmos Zsigmond, who studied cinematography at the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film went on to shoot "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Deer Hunter."

But in the 1990s, the fall of communism and aging film studios sent the domestic industry into a tailspin.

Why is Hungary pushing film? Politics:

The European Union, which Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in May, tries to prevent its members from propping up industries with government aid that creates an uneven playing field. But films and television receive a "cultural exception" originally won by France to protect its heavily subsidized film industry. That has opened a rare door for government incentives and spurred a studio-building boom. EU nations now use the exception to compete for Hollywood action flicks as well as home-grown art films. Many countries also hope that movie exposure will boost their image, triggering tourist dollars.

Yahoo! News - 'Sorcerer' Kills 10, Sells Bodies for Cremation

When I saw the headline — Yahoo! News - 'Sorcerer' Kills 10, Sells Bodies for Cremation — I must admit that I assumed it was another story out of Africa. But I was wrong:

Chinese police have detained a 'sorcerer' who killed 10 people and sold their bodies to bereaved families to cremate in the place of loved ones who were secretly buried, police and a state-run newspaper reported Thursday.

The 34-year-old man, surnamed Lin, strangled or poisoned the 10 villagers at his home, next to a temple, in the southern province of Guangdong, the Beijing Morning Post said.

Chinese tradition, especially in rural villages, holds that burial brings peace to the dead and tombs are placed according to the laws of geomancy. But in a country of 1.3 billion people, the seemingly haphazard siting of graves wastes scarce farmland.

Since 1978, when China launched its reform drive, all levels of government have recommended cremation to save land.

'This region cremates its dead, but local people prefer to be buried in the ground. People bought the bodies to be cremated in place of their relatives,' a police official told Reuters Thursday.

Lin, whom the newspaper called a sorcerer locals consulted to communicate with spirits, sold the bodies for 1,000 to 8,000 yuan ($120 to $966) each, the newspaper quoted local police as saying.

If the common people are willing to have innocents murdered to get around government regulations, either (a) the common people are unusually depraved, or (b) the government regulations are a bit too restrictive. Or (c) a sorcerer's involved.

George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics

George Lakoff is a "progressive" UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, and he's upset at how conservatives have successfully defined their ideas, carefully chosen the language with which to present them, and built an infrastructure to communicate them — something "progressives" have completely failed to do. In George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics, he explains "framing":

Language always comes with what is called 'framing.' Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like 'revolt,' that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" � something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Here's another example of how powerful framing is. In Arnold Schwarzenegger's acceptance speech, he said, "When the people win, politics as usual loses." What's that about? Well, he knows that he's going to face a Democratic legislature, so what he has done is frame himself and also Republican politicians as the people, while framing Democratic politicians as politics as usual � in advance. The Democratic legislators won't know what hit them. They're automatically framed as enemies of the people.

Another example of successful conservative framing:

The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

"Tax relief" has even been picked up by the Democrats. I was asked by the Democratic Caucus in their tax meetings to talk to them, and I told them about the problems of using tax relief. The candidates were on the road. Soon after, Joe Lieberman still used the phrase tax relief in a press conference. You see the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot.

It's not an accident that conversatives have built a communications infrastructure and "progressives" haven't:

There's a systematic reason for that. You can see it in the way that conservative foundations and progressive foundations work. Conservative foundations give large block grants year after year to their think tanks. They say, 'Here's several million dollars, do what you need to do.' And basically, they build infrastructure, they build TV studios, hire intellectuals, set aside money to buy a lot of books to get them on the best-seller lists, hire research assistants for their intellectuals so they do well on TV, and hire agents to put them on TV. They do all of that. Why? Because the conservative moral system, which I analyzed in "Moral Politics," has as its highest value preserving and defending the "strict father" system itself. And that means building infrastructure. As businessmen, they know how to do this very well.

Meanwhile, liberals' conceptual system of the "nurturant parent" has as its highest value helping individuals who need help. The progressive foundations and donors give their money to a variety of grassroots organizations. They say, 'We're giving you $25,000, but don't waste a penny of it. Make sure it all goes to the cause, don't use it for administration, communication, infrastructure, or career development.' So there's actually a structural reason built into the worldviews that explains why conservatives have done better.

More on the strict father versus nurturant parent:

Well, the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline � physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones � those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant � and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.

Notice how both the strict father and nurturant parent treat citizens as children.

Why Teachers Love Depressing Books

I guess I was fortunate enough to dodge the "problem novel" phenomenon — until high school, at least. From Why Teachers Love Depressing Books:

An avid reader growing up, I decided that there were two types of children's books: call it ''Little Women'' versus ''Phantom Tollbooth.'' The first type was usually foisted on you by nostalgic grown-ups. These were books populated by snivelers and goody-two-shoes, the most saintly of whom were sure to die in some tediously drawn-out scene. When the characters weren't dying or performing acts of charity or thawing the hearts of mean old gentlemen, they mostly just hung around the house, thinking about how they felt about their relatives.

The people in the other kind of book, however, were entirely different. They had adventures.

Miller is reviewing Barbara Feinberg's Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up:

Feinberg, who runs an arts program for kids, was provoked to write this unusual hybrid of memoir and polemic by the trials of her 12-year-old son, Alex. She had seen him steel himself, again and again, for the joyless task of completing the assigned reading for his ''language arts'' class, and she decided to investigate how those books could so oppress a boy who otherwise happily gobbled up Harry Potter novels and anything by or about his idol, Mel Brooks.

Her curiosity plunges Feinberg into the contemporary genre of young adult (Y.A.) ''problem novels,'' the bane of her son's existence. These books describe, with spare realism, child and teenage protagonists weathering abuse, addiction, parental abandonment or fecklessness, mental illness, pregnancy, suicide, violence, prostitution or self-mutilation — and often a combination of the above. ''Teachers love them,'' the local librarian explains as Feinberg scans a shelf of such titles. ''They win all the awards.''

Most of the books chosen by the English committee at Alex's school are problem novels, and the curriculum proves inflexible. ''We can't ever say we don't like the books,'' Alex tells his mother, because, according to his teacher, ''if you're not liking the books, you're not reading them closely enough.'' The books are so depressing — '' 'Everybody dies in them,' he told me wearily'' — Alex insists on reading with his bedroom door open.

I can distincting recall asking a girl classmate in sixth grade about the book she was reading, Flowers in the Attic. I was pretty much horrified by her synopsis; here's how Ingram, the book distributor, summarizes it:

Upon their father's tragic death, Cathy and her three siblings are ensconced in the attic of their hateful grandparent's mansion, unaware that their deceitful mother is planning to keep their existence secret forever.

"Ensconced" doesn't sound as bad as "locked up," and the Ingram summary doesn't mention incest.

Anyway, this is what an 11-year-old girl was reading for fun.

Yahoo! News - GM Pulls 'Jack Flash' Corvette Ad

Some people don't "get" the latest 'vette ad. From Yahoo! News - GM Pulls 'Jack Flash' Corvette Ad:

Protests from seven safety groups prompted General Motors Corp. to pull a television ad that shows a young boy driving a Corvette sports car so recklessly that it goes airborne, officials of the automaker said on Wednesday.

The ad, featuring the Rolling Stones song "Jumpin' Jack Flash," has aired repeatedly during the Olympics. The groups, including Consumers Union and the Center for Auto Safety, complained that it was "the most dangerous" spot they have seen in recent years.

Directed by singer Madonna's husband Guy Ritchie, the spot shows a boy's daydream of racing the Corvette through downtown streets and through a construction pipe. The safety groups said in a letter to GM released on Wednesday that the spot could encourage children to take their parents' cars for a drive.

My hat's off to Mr. Ritchie.

newsobserver.com | The Bridge | A Young SEAL

The Bridge cites an anecdote explaining how Scott Helvenston was destined to become a SEAL:

When he was about 4, his mother said, some college football players taunted him at the neighborhood pool, saying he was too little, the pool was for grownups. Scott dashed angrily to the diving board, tore off his flotation vest and, before she could stop him, dove in and swam the length of the pool.

Underwater.

The Bridge

The Bridge examines the famous killing and mutilation of four contractors in Iraq — and, in the process, explains the origins of Blackwater USA, their employer:

Set on more than 6,000 acres in the state's northeast corner, Blackwater was known as one of the best of the private military contractors. Its close ties to the elite Navy SEALs grew from its owner, Erik Prince.

Prince, 35, had been a White House intern and was a billionaire's son, yet he volunteered as a firefighter and for the Navy.

Prince, a widower and father of four, was a former member of the SEAL commandos. He maintained the unit's characteristic secrecy while positioning himself at the intersection of free enterprise, activist Christianity, conservative politics and military contracting. He made his first political contribution at 19 — $15,000 to the Republican Party.
[...]
His father, Edgar Prince, started his own company in 1965. He hit it big by making sun visors with lighted mirrors. Business grew, and his factories churned out parts seen in most cars today: overhead consoles, map lamps, headliners for roofs.
[...]
Erik Prince molded himself after his father: a devout Christian, astute businessman and family man who shunned the limelight.

After Holland Christian School, Prince attended Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school that champions free markets and individual freedom. Erik Prince fit in at what Gary Wolfram, a professor of political economy who taught him, called a "Mecca of market economy."
[...]
He was one of the first interns at the Family Research Council in Washington. He worked as a defense analyst on the staff of U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from Orange County, Calif. And he interned in the White House of President George H.W. Bush, father of current President George W. Bush. In 1992, he campaigned for Patrick Buchanan.

"I interned with the Bush administration for six months," Prince told The Grand Rapids Press in early 1992. "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with — homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns."

Back at school, Prince volunteered on a more humble scale: He was the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. He'd be sitting in class when his radio crackled. As amused classmates looked on, he'd dash out.

"When you've been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd's gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink," said Kevin Pauken, one of the squad's full-timers. "Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik."

In 1992, Prince enlisted in the Navy, was commissioned as an officer, and the next year joined the SEALs, who get their acronym from the attack routes of sea, air and land. He spent four years with Seal Team 8 in Norfolk, Va.

"Prince was a first-class SEAL, he was the real deal," said Messing, the retired Special Forces officer.

Prince left the SEALs in 1996. His father had died the previous year, and Erik took over the family business. About this time, his wife, Joan, was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2003 at 36). Also in 1996, the Prince family sold its automotive business to S.C. Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. Prince headed the Prince Group, which held several nonautomotive factories and the company that developed downtown Holland.
[...]
Prince has been equally secretive about his biggest venture since the SEALs: At 27, he founded Blackwater USA, buying an expanse of farmland in Camden and Currituck counties. He saw an opportunity as the shrinking military closed some of its own training centers, and he wanted to build the SEALs a good one just a short drive from the unit's East Coast base at Little Creek, Va.

Former Navy SEALs form the backbone of Blackwater, which advertises its Moyock compound — now more than 6,000 acres — as "the most comprehensive private tactical training facility in the United States."

It puts many military ranges to shame. One range is two-thirds of a mile long and perfect for sniper training. There are computerized target systems and an entire mock town for urban tactical training, and a track for tactical driving techniques. Soldiers can shoot from boats or hovering helicopters into junk cars, trucks and buses. Blackwater boasts that it can custom-design any sort of training a soldier wants.

An Army Surgeon Says New Helmet Doesn't Fit Iraq

An Army Surgeon Says New Helmet Doesn't Fit Iraq:

The Army had begun issuing a new helmet, dubbed the Advanced Combat Helmet. Made of a new type of Kevlar, the helmet is stronger and lighter than its predecessor. But the new helmet has a critical flaw, Col. Poffenbarger contends: It is about 8% smaller than the old helmet, offering less protection on the back and side of the head.

In past wars, this might not have been a big problem. In infantry-style combat, soldiers typically are struck in the front of the head as they charge toward the enemy. But in Iraq, where the deadliest threat is remote-detonated roadside bombs, many soldiers are getting blasted on the sides and back of the head, says Col. Poffenbarger. In other words, they are getting hit in areas where the new helmet offers less coverage.

Col. Poffenbarger bases his conclusions on what's he's seen at the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad:

His research is based on about 160 head-trauma patients who have passed through the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, where he works. Because the hospital houses the only American neurosurgeons in Iraq, virtually every serious head-trauma patient is treated by him or his partner. "If you get shot in the head in Iraq, I see you," he says.

He has gone through the records of all the hospital's head-trauma patients, documenting the exact entry point at which the shrapnel or bullet entered the brain and the type of helmet the soldier or Marine was wearing. Extrapolating from this, Col. Poffenbarger estimates the new helmet might result in a 30% increase in serious head traumas if distributed throughout the entire force in Iraq.

When in doubt, follow the Marines' example:

The Marines have developed their own new helmet, made of the same stronger Kevlar as the Army's. The Marines decided not to alter the shape, so their new helmet will continue to cover portions of the side and back of the head.

The Marines say their helmet provides protection against mortars, remote-detonated roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades — three of the biggest killers of U.S. troops in Iraq. "We felt like the extra coverage was needed to protect against those indirect fire threats," says Lt. Col. Gabe Patricio, the Marine Corps' project manager for infantry equipment.

Why did the army make the helmet smaller in the first place? They had a good reason:

There's a good reason that the new helmet is slightly smaller, Col. Norwood says. For years, soldiers have complained that when they are lying on their stomachs firing rifles, their body armor rides up — tipping their helmet over their eyes. The new helmet was designed to address that problem. "We think it is a good trade-off or we wouldn't be fielding it," he says.

The new helmets — which cost $300 each, compared with about $100 for the old ones — are made to the Army's specifications by MSA Corp., based in Pittsburgh; Specialty Defense Systems of Dunmore, Pa.; and Gentex Corp., of Carbondale, Pa. Like the Army, the manufacturers say the new helmet allows soldiers to see and hear better than its predecessor. A spokesman for MSA says soldiers are likely to wear the new helmet longer because it is more comfortable.

The Unpolitical Animal

As The Unpolitical Animal explains, political scientist Philip Converse examined beliefs and voting behavior forty years ago in an article called "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics":

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Some more stats:

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don�t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor.

Man on Quest for Knife-Proof Body Bleeds to Death

Oh, those zany African witch doctors! From Man on Quest for Knife-Proof Body Bleeds to Death:

A Tanzanian who went to a witch doctor in search of the power to resist bullets and knife attacks died when ritual cuts made on his body proved fatal.

He was one of four suspected robbers from a village in Kasulu district in western Tanzania who visited the witch doctor on a quest for magic, the African newspaper reported Tuesday.

The ritual included cutting their skin and rubbing in potions and powders.

The witch doctor fled after the man died Monday from profuse bleeding, the newspaper said, adding that the three survivors were arrested when they went to a hospital.

Forbidden Zone - Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes

Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes describes an insane fan-edit project: to re-cut the original Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone episode:

When I first started gathering information about POTA, I was surprised to learn that Rod Serling co-wrote the screenplay for Planet. Then suddenly it all made sense. 'Of course! Planet is a two-hour episode of The Twilight Zone!'

That idea stuck in the back of my head ever since. Then with the recent advances in digital filmmaking technology and especially after reading about fan edits (particularly the couple of Star Wars: Episode I edits that surfaced), another thought struck me: 'Wouldn't it be cool to take Planet and edit it down into a thirty minute episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with Rod Serling narration?' I knew the project would take a lot of patience to assemble the pieces, but once I got them together, it would be great fun to create the final product.

You can download the half-hour episode in QuickTime format.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Republicans Against Prohibition

If you look hard enough, you can find a few Republicans Against Prohibition:

The Drug Policy Alliance is running an ad in The New York Sun aimed at convincing Republican delegates that opposition to the war on drugs is a respectable position on the right. The ad quotes Milton Friedman, Bill Buckley, Grover Norquist, George Shultz, Gary Johnson, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is by no means a full-fledged antiprohibitionist but has come out in favor of medical access to marijuana).

The Making of an X Box Warrior

The Making of an X Box Warrior opens with Clive Thompson's experience in a virtual Baghdad, leading virtual troops in a game of Full Spectrum Warrior:

My job, as squad leader, was to order my soldiers where to go and what to do. First, I sent half of my men into an alleyway, where they immediately came under fire from insurgents hiding nearby. Scrambling for safety, I ordered us to duck into a building, pausing to marvel at the detail of the architecture. I then led us back out onto the street, directing my team to crouch behind a car while we tried to locate the snipers. This was a bad idea. Despite what you see in action movies and other video games, cars do not provide good cover from bullets. The snipers cut loose, and my troops crumpled to the ground. It was surprisingly distressing. In barely three minutes, I had led every single one of my soldiers to his death.

What makes Full Spectrum Warrior different from other video games?

Full Spectrum Warrior was created by the Institute for Creative Technologies, with help from the Army, to teach soldiers realistic strategies for surviving what the armed forces call ''military operations in urban terrain.''

It sounds like they made an effort to get the little details right:

Cummings's job was to ensure that Full Spectrum Warrior conformed to military doctrine. He brought military manuals so that he could show the programmers the myriad details of how soldiers are really trained to act, down to the way they go into a room when they are entering and clearing a building. Particularly crucial, he said, was developing the ''nudge'' — the player's ability to physically grab a fellow soldier and point him in the desired direction. ''A squad leader is very physical,'' he said. ''He goes up, and he grabs people literally on the shoulder and says: 'Hey, knucklehead. Over here.' He drags people around.''

Mad Max Mods in Iraq

From Mad Max Mods in Iraq:

Since March, 2003, army mechanics in Iraq and Kuwait have installed 8,000 armor kits, 2,000 aid conditioners and 4,500 bulletproof windshields in trucks and hummers. The units that do this work are sometimes called �Mad Max Shops� (after the armored vehicles in the Mel Gibson movie of the same name.) The mechanics also do all sorts of modifications, many of them experimental (some work, some don�t). The Mad Max Shops work at night, as the metal becomes too hot to pick up and handle by day. The preferred material for armoring vehicles is a Swedish steel/nickel/chromium alloy called Hardox 400. It costs $1,200 a (40x120 inch) sheet, but is popular because the 10mm thick steel is really good at stopping bullets and bomb blast fragments. There are also commercial armoring kits, and bullet and blast resistant stick-on material. But the Hardox 400 armor is preferred. This corrosion and wear resistant metal was developed for industrial uses, and not only is tough, but looks and feels tough.

I wonder, do they do crossbows and shoulder pads too?

Victor Davis Hanson on Europe and Troop Withdrawal on National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson has long called for a withdrawal of American troops from Europe. In Welcome Back, Europe, he explains that it's not just that there aren't any conventional enemies left on Europe's borders:

Unwittingly, we had created an unhealthy passive-aggressiveness in Europe that clinicians might identify as a classic symptom of dependency. Europe — now larger and more populous than the United States — has reduced defense investment to subsidize a variety of social expenditures found nowhere in the world. So insular had its utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over.

Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse

A single human gene boosted running endurance in mice by 100 percent. From Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse:

'Marathon mice,' genetically engineered by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers, can run twice as far as their unaltered buddies. Previously, the only known way to increase endurance was through training.

With no previous running experience, most mice can run about 900 meters before exhaustion. But the genetically altered mice can run 1800 meters (more than a mile) before running out of steam, and keep it up for two and a half hours — an hour longer than unaltered mice can run.

"Records are broken on a fraction of a percent," said Ron Evans, the head researcher in the mouse experiment and a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory at The Salk Institute. "A few percentage points is like a minute or two in a race. This was a big change: 100 percent."

Humans have amazing endurance. Evidently this comes, in part, from their PPAR-delta gene:

To perform the genetic enhancement on the mice, researchers injected a human version of a protein called PPAR-delta attached to a short DNA sequence. The injection permanently incorporated enhanced PPAR-delta production into the mice' genomes. The change is transgenic, meaning the mice will pass down the trait to future generations.

The mice were also resistant to weight gain, even when fed a high-fat diet that caused obesity in other mice, according to research published online in the Aug. 24 issue of the Public Library of Science Biology.

You don't have to be a transgenic mouse to take advantage of this though:

It's too late for next week's Olympic marathon competitors in Athens to take advantage, but, coincidentally, GlaxoSmithKline is developing an oral drug that activates the same protein in humans (called PPAR-delta) that was stimulated in the marathon mice.

GlaxoSmithKline has completed the first phase of three human trials necessary for FDA approval to market the drug as a good cholesterol, or HDL, booster. (Increased HDL can help prevent heart attacks.) Evans said researchers at GlaxoSmithKline were surprised when told about the other benefits he and his colleagues had found were associated with increased levels of the protein.

Let's see how long it takes to crush existing marathon records.

Older Boys Really Are a Bad Influence

It's nice to have some science to back up common sense. From Older Boys Really Are a Bad Influence:

Parents who forbid their daughters to date older boys may be on the right track. A study published on Thursday finds that teenage girls who associate with older boys are more likely to smoke, drink and use drugs.

I was quite surprised to find correlation not confused with causation:

The survey of 1,000 teens found that friends do influence behavior, or at least reflect behavior, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University said.

Here are the stats:

The study found that 58 percent of girls who had boyfriends two years or more older drank alcohol, compared to 25 percent of the girls who dated boys their own age or not at all.

Fifty percent of the girls who went for older boys or men smoked marijuana, compared to 8 percent of the other girls, and 65 percent of these girls who preferred to date someone older than themselves smoked, compared to 14 percent girls who stuck to younger boys.

Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe

Gordon Marino, philosophy professor and boxing coach, opens Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe with quotes from Socrates and Tyler Durden:

'Know thyself' was the Socratic dictum, but Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the movie Fight Club, asks, 'How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?'

His comparison of boxing and philosophy could come straight out of a Conan story (where the civilized tend to be decadent and cruel):

For a decade, I have been teaching both boxing and philosophy. My academic colleagues have sometimes reacted to my involvement with the sweet science with intellectual jabs and condescension. A few years ago at a philosophy conference, I mentioned that I had to leave early to go back to the campus to work with three of my boxers from the Virginia Military Institute who were competing in the National Collegiate Boxing Association championships. Shocked to learn that there was such a college tournament, one professor scolded, "How can someone committed to developing minds be involved in a sport in which students beat one another's brains out?" I explained that the competitors wore protective headgear and used heavily padded 16-ounce gloves in competition as well as in practice, but she was having none of it. "Headgear or not," she replied, "your brain is still getting rattled. Worse yet, you're teaching violence."

I countered that if violence is defined as purposefully hurting another person, then I had seen enough of that in the philosophical arena to last a lifetime. At the university where I did my graduate studies, colloquia were nothing less than academic gunfights in which the goal was to fire off a question that would sink the lecturer low. I pointed out, "I've even seen philosophers have to restrain themselves from clapping at a comment that knocked a speaker off his pins and made him feel stupid."

I have to agree with Marino and Aristotle here:

According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between fearlessness and excessive fearfulness. The capacity to tolerate fear is essential to leading a moral life, but it is hard to learn how to keep your moral compass under pressure when you are cosseted from every fear. Boxing gives people practice in being afraid.

Adopt a Sniper

This is a charity organization I never thought I'd see — Adopt a Sniper:

In every war it seems that the military must re-learn the lessons of the past. The war on terror is ideally suited for the tactics of the sniper. With the convoy escorts and house to house fighting, the US military is using snipers in numbers not seen in modern history. It seems like a no-brainer but a man with a rifle that knows how to use it, is in much demand in a war. Soldiers and Marines that have not been to a formal sniper school but who shot 'Expert' on the range are being issued special rifles and basically doing the same job as the school trained snipers in some cases. Adoptasniper makes no distinction between these two types of operators and offers assistance equally. We currently support snipers on each end of the spectrum; from the very well trained and equipped who normally request smaller, specialized items to the marksman soldier with little to no support that needs 'everything' to do the job asked of him ... and every variant in between.

One shot, one kill

One shot, one kill cites a New York Times article that states that Marine snipers killed 62 people on Tuesday. As Phillip Carter explains, that's a lot of killing being done by a relatively small number of Marines:

So we're really talking about 20-30 Marines — only half of whom are actually shooters, due to the marksman/observer team concept — killing 62 Iraqis in one day.

High body counts don't indicate success, but they do indicate combat intensity and combat effectiveness:

One point that comes through again and again in stories of engagements in Iraq is that the Iraqi insurgents simply don't understand tactical fundamentals such as cover and concealment. I have seen Al-Jazeera tapes and U.S. military tapes of engagements where Iraqi insurgents, whooped up by their buddies into a frenzy of martyrdom, literally rush out into the middle of the street to launch an unaimed RPG at U.S. forces. In nearly all the videos, they are instantaneously cut down by a few short bursts of aimed rifle and machine gun fire. No trained soldier would ever do something so stupid. But the Iraqi grunts do it again and again, almost inviting death.

Still Groping in the Dark?

Cato's Still Groping in the Dark? summarizes last year's blackout:

In short, three 345-kilovolt transmission lines went down when heat caused them to sag and come into contact with trees. That created an imbalance between supply and demand along the lines feeding the Cleveland area, which led, in turn, to higher current flow and accompanying lower voltage on a large portion of the remaining Eastern interconnection as the power raced along other routes to get to Cleveland.

When devices known as 'relays' detected the unusual power flows around the Cleveland area, they automatically triggered circuit breakers that removed a number of lines from service (a preventative measure to ensure that billions of dollars of capital stock are not fried by unusual power flows). In the words of the report, the 'cascade became a race between the power surges and the relays.' The lines that tripped first were generally the longer lines that split the grid into those sections that blacked out and those that recovered without furthering the cascade. The upshot is that 'protective relay settings on transmission lines operated as they were designed and set to behave on August 14.'

The Big One

The Big One opens with the "clear, ringing, and, unfortunately, contradictory lessons" of the two World Wars:

The First World War teaches that territorial compromise is better than full-scale war, that an "honor-bound" allegiance of the great powers to small nations is a recipe for mass killing, and that it is crazy to let the blind mechanism of armies and alliances trump common sense. The Second teaches that searching for an accommodation with tyranny by selling out small nations only encourages the tyrant, that refusing to fight now leads to a worse fight later on, and that only the steadfast rejection of compromise can prevent the natural tendency to rush to a bad peace with worse men. The First teaches us never to rush into a fight, the Second never to back down from a bully.

Going into the Great War, no one expected such unprecedented levels of carnage:

The scale and suddenness of the killing that began that summer still has the power to amaze us. The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead. The first battles were as bad as the last. A German lieutenant led his virgin division into battle in Lorraine that month and, coming under French fire for the first time, looked around after a minute �to see how many are still fit to fight. The bugler, who has remained by my side like a shadow, says to me sadly, "Herr Leutnant, there is nobody there any more!�" Almost the entire unit had been annihilated at first contact.

The means of annihilation are familiar. The machine gun, in particular, created a zone of death that would simply saw a soldier in two if he entered it. At Waterloo, an infantry soldier could fire twice a minute. The machine gun fired six hundred rounds a minute. Even the infantry rifle now could fire a dozen times a minute, and at a mile's range.

Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester

Henry Chauncey: The Aptitude Tester looks at the man who transformed Harvard — and our entire university system — by introducing the SAT:

The son of Episcopalian minister Egisto Fabbri Chauncey and deaconess Edith Lockwood Taft, Chauncey was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1905 to privilege, albeit the sort based more in erudition than wealth. Chauncey was also a gifted athlete, and his baseball exploits at Groton and Harvard attracted an offer to play professionally for the Boston Braves.

Chauncey instead accepted an offer after graduation as an assistant Harvard dean and temporary Harvard baseball coach. There, becoming more and more interested in why Harvard was churning out such lackluster graduates, Chauncey found his patron in Conant, a Harvard president who had already caused controversy among alumni by articulating his vision of a student body primarily comprising students with superior academic achievement, regardless of wealth or social status.

One of Conant's motivations was creating what Thomas Jefferson had coined a "natural aristocracy," a ruling elite self-selected by intelligence and ability, not lineage. Chauncey's observations of Harvard classes full of mundane underachievers and Conant's vision of a better America built by the nation's best thinkers perfectly coalesced. All they needed was the mechanism to bring their dream society about.

In his research on standardized tests, Chauncey chanced upon the SAT, an obscure mutation of an IQ test that had been developed at Princeton University. Chauncey retooled it to focus primarily on verbal and math skills, and in 1934 he presented it to Conant as their new tool to find the best students in America and bring them to Harvard. By 1941, Harvard required the SAT for all applicants.

World War II helped bring the test into the mainstream. Strapped for officer candidates and with no good way to identify and promote so many leaders so quickly, the Army and Navy contracted with Chauncey in 1943 to give a one-day SAT test to over 300,000 people across the country for help in officer selection. Chauncey's ability to pull off this logistical feat illustrated the potential for using the SAT to assess high school students nationwide.

Chauncey left Harvard in 1945 to create ETS, a company to manage the test and bring it to a national audience.

Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven

Soichiro Honda: Uniquely Driven explains how the founder of Honda was a driven individualist who hated the myth "that the industrial success of post-World War II Japan was rooted in the country's traditional values of consensus, sublimation of the individual, and worker harmony":

Honda left school at age 15 to seek work as an auto mechanic in Tokyo. His first job was hardly auspicious: For a year he cared for the infant baby of his boss's family. With the child in tow, he often wandered the garage, watching the mechanics and making suggestions. As Honda tinkered with engines in between diaper changes and bottle feedings, it became obvious that his strength wasn't in child care but rebuilding engines.

He was so good at it that he starting building engines for racing. He soon attempted a full-time stint as a professional race-car driver, but a crash suffered in a race nearly killed him and sent him back to work as a mechanic. A second crash soon after, in which he drove off a bridge with several geishas in the car (everyone survived), put a stop to a nightlife that, like his race-car driving, had veered out of control.

A newly focused and newly wedded Honda began working for a succession of mechanics in the mid-1930s, a period in which he focused largely on refining piston action to build a higher performance engine. When he formed his own company in 1937, Japanese militancy was at its height, and in 1938, Honda's company was forced to switch to building engines for the Imperial Navy's boats and planes. After Allied bombing leveled his factory near the end of the war, Honda showed that his mechanical genius extended to pursuits other than cars. For more than a year, he made a living brewing alcohol with a homemade still.

In 1948, he returned to his true love by starting a new company: Honda Motor Co. This time, he took on a partner, Takeo Fujisawa, to handle the back-office operations that Honda found so crushingly dull. They soon came up with the batabata, a motorized bicycle named after the sound the engine made.

Fascinating guy.

XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle

When a .50-caliber sniper rifle isn't enough, there's the new XM-109 25mm Sniper Rifle:

For some long-range sniper missions, a .50 caliber (12.7mm) round just isn�t big enough. The Barrett company, which pioneered the development of the modern .50 caliber sniper rifle, has now built a 25mm sniper rifle (although shoulder cannon may be a more precise term), the XM109. Ten prototype weapons are being made available for testing this month. Designed to destroy light armor, the XM109 is a semi-automatic 25mm rifle that has a 17.6 inch long barrel and an overall length of 46 inches. It weighs in at 46 pounds and has a 5 round magazine. In comparison, the Barrett M107 .50 caliber sniper rifle in general use today has a 29 inch barrel, overall length of 57 inches, and weighs in at a mere 32 pounds, with a magazine capacity of 10 rounds.

Anyone up for dinosaur hunting?

Victor Davis Hanson on Bush Hatred on National Review Online

In Bush Hatred, Victor Davis Hanson tries to explain why the Left hates George W. Bush: southern conservatism, evangelical Christianity, a black-and-white worldview, and a wealthy man's disdain for elite culture. This is what caught my attention though:

Not long ago a Frenchman explained to me why he hates Bush, who "thinks linearly" and has no sense of the "problematique." Face it: We are now an information society, with a premium on talk, not action. To suggest that one need not be 100 percent certain — but perhaps only 60 percent certain — to act is deeply disturbing. And when you add lingo like "bring 'em on," the caricature that Bush belongs on the main street of Gunsmoke rather than in Sex in the City or The West Wing is only strengthened.

Is education good for growth?

In Marginal Revolution: Is education good for growth?, Tyler Cowen notes that "It has long been received wisdom that education spurs economic growth," then points to a skeptical take on the issue:

[T]here is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. [...] Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt's primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled — yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world's forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth. [...] The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn't accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.

As he points out, "Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure." Anyone whose friends spent five years finishing their English Lit degrees knows that.

Judoka as Olympic Flag Carriers

I don't know why I watched the Olympic opening ceremonies last night, but I discovered something surprising — an amazing number of countries chose judoka for their flag carriers:

Georgia - Zurab ZVIADAURI (men's -90kg)
Gabon - Melanie ENGOANGUE (women's -78kg)
Indonesia - Krisna BAYU (men's -90kg)
Iraq - Hadir LAZAME (men's over 100kg)
Iran - Arash MIRESMAELI (men's -66kg) or/and Seyed Mahmoudreza MIRAN FASHANDI (men's over 100kg)
Spain - Isabel FERNANDEZ (women's -57kg)
Israel - Ariel ZEEVI (men's -100kg)
Kazakhstan - Askhat ZHITKEYEV (men's -100kg)
Canada - Nicolas GILL (men's -100kg)
Costa Rica - David FERNANDEZ (men's -60kg)
Great Britain - Kate HOWEY (women's -70kg)
Mongolia - Damdinsuren NYAMKHUU (men's -81kg)
Niger - Abdou ALASSANE DJI BO (men's -66kg)
Netherlands - Mark HUIZINGA (men's -90kg)
Hungary - Antal KOVACS (men's -100kg)
Uzbekistan - Abdullo TANGRIEV (over 100kg)
Portugal - Nuno DELGADO (men's -81kg)
Fiji - Naisiga RASOKISOKI (women's -78kg)

Steroids boost performance in just weeks

New Scientist recently produced a a study demonstrating that fairly low doses of anabolic steroids boost performance in just weeks:

The first rigorous study of the performance-enhancing effects of testosterone in young men was not carried out until 1996. Volunteers were given weekly injections of either 600 milligrams of testosterone enanthate or a placebo for 10 weeks (bodybuilders usually take much larger doses). Performance tests done at the end of this period showed the hormone had improved muscle size and strength in those doing strength training, and to a lesser extent in those who did not exercise.
[...]
In the latest study, Weatherby monitored the performance of 18 male amateur athletes over a six-week training regime. Nine were given weekly shots of testosterone enanthate at a dose of 3.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight for six weeks (equivalent to roughly half the dose of the 1996 trial), and nine were given a placebo.
[...]
The most unexpected finding was that the greatest increases in muscle size and power occurred just three weeks into the trial.

Net Publishing Made Profitable

Net Publishing Made Profitable explains "extreme publishing":

After 13 years of experimenting, veteran Net publisher Adam Engst has finally stumbled on a good business model — fast-turnaround e-books. [...] From the get-go, Engst has pioneered just about every revenue model on the Internet — ads, subscriptions, sponsorships and the now-ubiquitous tip jar — with mixed success. [...] But now Engst thinks he's finally cracked it. Since last fall, Engst has published a series of rapidly produced e-books using a system he calls "extreme publishing."

The nine books in the Take Control series range in topic from customizing Mac OS X to setting up a wireless network.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published "within moments of going to press" as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the