Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

Friday, January 28th, 2005

According to Victor Davis Hanson, Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old:

But this country is now in its third century and assurances that the United States is about through are getting old. In the early 20th century the rage was first Spengler and then Toynbee who warned us that our crass consumer capitalism would lead to inevitable spiritual decay. Next, the Hitlerians assured the Volk that the mongrel Americans could never set foot on German-occupied soil, so decadent were these Chicago mobsters and uncouth cowboys. Existentialism and pity for the empty man in the gray flannel suit were the rage of the 1950s, as Americans, we were told, had become depressed and given up in the face of racial inequality, rapid suburbanization, and the spread of world-wide national liberationist movements.

In the 1960s and 1970s we heard of the population bomb and all sorts of catastrophes in store for the United States and the world in general that had unwisely followed its profligate paradigm of consumption; yet despite Paul Ehrlich?s strident doomsday scenario, the environment got cleaner and the people of the globe richer. And then came the historian Paul Kennedy, who, citing earlier Spanish and English implosions, “proved” that the United States had played itself out in the Cold War, ruining its economy to match the Soviet Union in a hopeless arms race — publishing his findings shortly before the Russian empire collapsed and the American economy took off (again).

In the Carter “malaise years,” we were warned about the impending triumph of “Asian Values” and the supposed cultural superiority of Japan, Inc., which would shortly own most of whatever lazy and ignorant Americans sold them — before the great meltdown brought on by corruption, censorship, and ossified bureaucracies in Asia.

Combat Ki and Genki Sudo

Friday, January 28th, 2005

I don’t understand Japanese particularly well, but I can nonetheless recommend this video of a Japanese TV show segment on juko-kai practitioners (Americans, by the way) demonstrating their combat ki by getting punched in the throat, kicked in the ribs, and kicked someplace else (even more delicate) — first by what look like American football players, then by Japanese (lightweight) puro resu fighter Genki Sudo (or Sudo Genki, in Japanese).

On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run

Friday, January 28th, 2005

As Dale Bozzio used to sing, “Nobody walks in LA.” Nobody (in the middle class) takes a bus or train either. On the east coast, things are a bit different. Anyway, Greyhound is now facing competition from buslines that go from one Chinatown to another. From On the East Coast, Chinese Buses Give Greyhound a Run:

A bus pulled out of South Station terminal on a Friday morning and headed for New York City. Its windshield was cracked, its speedometer motionless. Orange peel graced its seat trays, and its safety warnings consisted of a single sign: “Watch your step.”

The driver said not a word until he stopped the bus outside Cheng’s Driving School in New York City’s Chinatown. Then, as passengers gathered their bags, he stood up and screamed, “No parking here! You get out!”

The bus, according to the lettering near its luggage compartment, was owned by “Kristine Travel” and operated by “Lucky River,” though the sign on its side said “Travel Pack” and its ticket agents called the company “Lucky Star.” Its price for the trip from Boston to New York — 187 miles in 4 1/2 hours — was $15.

That may seem an impossibly low fare, yet another carrier on the Boston to New York run has lately started charging $15, too. The name on the side of its buses is Greyhound.

Greyhound Lines Inc. is a $1 billion company owned by Laidlaw International Inc., a $4.6 billion company. The only national bus network, “big dog” was racing along America’s highways even before Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert hopped on a Greyhound in 1934′s “It Happened One Night.” But today, a dozen or so Chinese-owned bus lines are giving the dog a run for its money.
[...]
“If Greyhound wasn’t a giant, maybe they could beat us,” Shui Ming Zheng says through an interpreter. “But because they are a giant, they cannot.”
[...]
“Common sense tells me that if JetBlue profits on a $79 fare to Buffalo, we can profit on a $15 fare to D.C.,” says Mr. Wong, who handles management. “We copied the airline concept to a bus line.” Greyhound, he adds, “really feels the pain.”

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow

Friday, January 28th, 2005

As Europe Cuts Corporate Tax, Pressure Rises on U.S. to Follow:

Following the lead of Ireland, which dropped its rates to 12.5% from 24% between 2000 and 2003, one nation after another has moved toward lower corporate rates with fewer loopholes. The Netherlands, the second most popular European target for U.S. investment, recently joined the movement, lowering its corporate rates by three percentage points to 31.5% and simplifying its tax structure.

The corporate-tax cutters of recent years stretch from Portugal, where the rate has dropped 10 points to about 27%, to Austria, down nine points to about 25%. Even Germany, which has Europe’s highest rate and has bitterly opposed the plummeting tax rates elsewhere in the region, has done some dramatic trimming — from as high as 56% six years ago, according to data from KPMG LLP, to 38.3% last year.

At this point, you may be asking, just what is the corporate tax rate in the US?

Germany’s trims leave the standard U.S. rate — about 40% including average state taxes — above that of every country in Europe, according to separate studies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and KPMG.

Sigh.

New York Post Online Edition: ‘C’ Sickness on the Subway

Friday, January 28th, 2005

As my friend, Dan, said, “Man, who needs terrorists when you’ve got bums?” From ‘C’ Sickness on the Subway:

A fire in a subway control room has put the C line out of service for up to five years and caused serious problems on the A line that will make the commute miserable for hundreds of thousands of subway riders, officials said yesterday.

The unstaffed room containing 600 electrical devices called ‘relays’ that are used to power signals and switches along a segment of the vital Eighth Avenue line were destroyed Sunday in the blaze.

Cops blamed a vagrant who set a shopping cart full of wood blocks ablaze six feet into the tracks at the Chambers Street station. Cops are searching for the derelict.

The flames quickly spread across the ceiling and along a wall, igniting wires that led to the locked control room.

The blaze melted thousands of the wires and knocked out power to dozens of signals and switches.

‘It’s major, major damage,’ said Transit Authority president Larry Reuter.

“It’s a barbecue. It’s black and melted.”

Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori’s War on Terror

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

Fascinating. From Film Shows Rise, Fall of Fujimori’s War on Terror:

When Ellen Perry began making her documentary ‘The Fall of Fujimori,’ she said, she never thought her tale of a government wielding sweeping police powers in the name of democracy would become a story with eerie parallels to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Iron-fisted Alberto Fujimori ruled Peru from 1990 to 2000, before fleeing to Japan amid allegations of murder and corruption.

He was democratically elected in 1990, but used dictatorial powers throughout his reign while proclaiming that his actions were done in the name of democracy to defeat a brutal insurgency.
[...]
Even while death squads roamed Peru, his government built schools, provided food and clothes to the poor, tamed inflation of more than 7,600 percent in 1990 and ended guerrilla warfare and terrorism waged by the Shining Path and other groups.

“On paper, he was extremely successful,” Perry told Reuters. “The questions lie in how he did it. (His methods) were draconian. They were unconstitutional. They were undemocratic, but do the benefits outweigh the consequences?”

AFF’s Brainwash – A year’s end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper

Thursday, January 27th, 2005

Johnny Ramone died soon after Ronald Reagon. Many people find it odd, even ironic, that a punk musician like Ramone looked up to Reagan and shared his conservative politics. From A year’s end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper:

Yet it wasn’t only political beliefs that Johnny Ramone had in common with Reagan. Each played a central role in a major movement once considered on the fringe.

Every movement needs a founding myth — not myth as in a belief in fantastical stories, but as in an easily retold narrative that tells us how we got where we are today, helping us make sense of the current situation. Interestingly, the oft-retold narratives of punk rock and the modern conservative movement follow a somewhat parallel story line. They go like this.

First, there is the Fall from Grace.

The Old Republic, choked by FDR’s odious New Deal, gives way to a decades-long left-liberal dominance in politics. Conservatives who advocate limited government are derided as anachronistic survivors of a time that we’re better to have left behind.

Rock ‘n’ roll, the first art form centered on youth, grows old and sclerotic by the 1970s. The chaotic excitement of The Blackboard Jungle gives way to the self-destructive decadence of Woodstock and Altamont; where there was once Buddy Holly, there was now Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Though darkness descends, a remnant of true believers thrives.

Amidst a hostile political atmosphere and an ascendant welfare state, a small reduct of conservative intellectuals and activists keep the flame of freedom alive. But they’re few and dismissed by “respectable” opinion; Barry Goldwater was written off as a dangerous warmonger.

In an area marked by rock-opera excess and singer-songwriter smarminess, a few groups — the Stooges, New York Dolls, and Dictators — quixotically cling to the idea that rock is supposed to be about fun and danger and not about some higher purpose. Yet they remain confined to a few dingy clubs.

Redemption. The remnant finds a champion and finally fights back against the forces of darkness.

In 1976, conservatives, smarting from the Nixon years of wage and price controls and government expansion — Amtrak, EPA — unite behind a new champion, a California governor willing to challenge his own party’s sitting president. Ronald Reagan’s efforts fails that year, but four years later, he realizes the goal that was so out of reach for Barry Goldwater — the White House.

That same year, the Ramones release their eponymous first album, giving the back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll revival — dubbed “punk” around this time, thanks to Punk, the magazine that chronicled it — a new flag to rally around. Ramones was unlike any else that had come before it. No one played as fast or wrote (complete!) songs as short. And no album since has inspired so many people to start their own bands, launching an entire movement.

And, finally, a look back in appreciation.

Once derided as a right-wing nut, Ronald Reagan lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union — two things his detractors said couldn’t happen. He received a hero’s goodbye from the country he loved, and even old adversaries paid him tribute.

After a career of incessant touring, commercial frustration, and various indignities — an early gig opening for Johnny Winter resulted in the band being pelted with garbage — the Ramones went out on top of the world, with a guest star-studded final concert, induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and a critically acclaimed film documentary of their career.

The Long Tail: Maximum City

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

From Maximum City:

One of the complaints I used to have as a foreign correspondent was how hard it is to find places in the world that still feel foreign. What’s foreign? How about this: 2am, driving back from a state-of-the-art call center in the middle of Bombay, my driver is slaloming through rubble in a scene that would look like Fallujah but for the Brahman cows grazing in the fast lane. On the shoulder a half-naked five year old girl is squatting to pee on a huge slab of broken concrete, lit by a fire of burning garbage. The billboard behind her advertises the latest BlackBerry. India!

Improvised Bombs Baffle Army

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

Improvised Bombs Baffle Army reports on a number of high-tech efforts to detect and destroy improvised explosive devices. The PING project can find weapons caches:

Another Pentagon microwave project, code-named PING, is already in the country, and has been ‘very successful’ at finding insurgent weapons caches, said Billy Mullins, an associate director of strategic security for the Air Force. The machine, which fits inside a Humvee, sends out waves, looking for metal that will bounce the signals back. Concrete won’t stop the microwaves, so PING can examine a building’s interior.

‘When you find a large amount of metal in a country that doesn’t use a lot of metal in its construction, you have an idea that there’s something there that there shouldn’t be,’ Mullins told a military research conference last week.

Roger Ebert’s Movie Glossary and Stop Signs

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

Roger Ebert has a tongue-in-cheek Movie Glossary with entries for various movie tropes and clichés. I didn’t know this bit of trivia though:

All movies set before 1955 should have yellow and black stop signs.

From the Wikipedia:

Stop signs originated in Detroit, Michigan in 1915. The first had black letters on a white background and were somewhat smaller than the modern one. As they became more widespread, a committee supported by AASHO met in 1922 to standardize them, and it selected the octagonal shape that has been used in the US ever since.

The unique eight-sided shape of the sign allows drivers facing the back of the sign to identify that oncoming drivers have a stop sign and prevent confusion with other traffic signs.

In 1924, the sign changed to black on yellow, the predominant color until 1954. Another competing group, the NCSHS, simultaneously advocated an even smaller, red-on-yellow stop sign. All of these signs were typically mounted only two or three feet above the ground.

These two organizations conflicted but eventually combined into the Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which in 1935 published the famous Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD) detailing the stop sign’s appearance. The MUTCD stop sign was altered eight times between 1935 and 1971, mostly dealing with its reflectorization and its mounting height; the most drastic change came in 1954, when the sign gained its white-on-red color. Red is also the color for stop on traffic signals, unifying red as stop signal for drivers worldwide.

The mounting height reached its current level of seven feet in 1971.

Shattered Glass

Tuesday, January 25th, 2005

I finally saw Shattered Glass, about Stephen Glass, the reporter who fabricated “Hack Heaven” and other colorful stories for The New Republic. I had been meaning to catch it ever since I heard NPR’s interview with Charles Lane, the editor who fired Glass, and it definitely pulled me in. It’s amazing what a compulsive liar can get away with…for a while.

Exploring the law of unintended consequences

Tuesday, January 25th, 2005

Exploring the law of unintended consequences shares a number of anecdotes about…unintended consequences:

Bruce Schneier, in his excellent Beyond Fear, reports that drivers in Russia have made interesting choices that have not always resulted in improving their situations. Crime is a large and growing problem in Russia, and one of the biggest threats is in the area of auto theft. To combat car theft, automobile owners installed car alarms. The result? Thieves waited until the owner approached the car to turn off the alarm, and then shot him, took his keys, and drove away in the car. Round one to the bad guys. Fine. So car owners quit using alarms, and instead installed security systems that made cars virtually impossible to hotwire. Ah ha! Round two to the good guys. Not so fast — since cars were extremely difficult to hotwire, thieves turned to carjackings instead, which is far more likely to result in injury or death to the car owner. Round three to the bad guys, and once again we see how ‘security’ sometimes serves only to make things easier for the criminals.

This one’s beautiful:

Microsoft has touted its Windows Media Player (or WMP) as an industy- and DRM-friendly app that supports so-called “protected” media files. Basically, if you try to play a DRM-laden Windows media file, WMP checks to see if you have a valid license to do so. If you do, the file plays; if you don’t, WMP heads off to a web site specified by the media file to acquire and download (and often purchase) a license.

But guess what? WMP doesn’t check to see where it’s going, or even what it’s downloading, so individuals up to no good simply redirect it to sites where users end up with spyware, viruses, and other nastiness on their Windows machines.

Many safety measures simply convince people to take more risks.

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy

Tuesday, January 25th, 2005

Da Vinci Workshop Discovered in Italy reports on a hard-to-believe discovery:

A forgotten workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy, researchers said on Tuesday.

The details:

The find was made in part of the Santissima Annunziata convent, which let out rooms to artists centuries ago and where the likely muse of the Renaissance artist’s masterwork, the Mona Lisa, may have worshipped.

“It’s a bit absurd to think that, in 2005, we have found the studio of one of history’s greatest artists. But that is what has happened,” said Roberto Manescalchi, one of three researchers credited for this month’s discovery.

“The proof is on the walls.”

Frescos adorning part of the workshop were left undisturbed over the centuries and gradually forgotten. The wing of the convent was eventually split by a wall and is partially claimed today by the Institute of Military Geography.

In a slide-show presentation to media, Manescalchi pointed to one colorful fresco with a character conspicuously missing from the foreground.

The white silhouette bore a striking resemblance to da Vinci’s painting of the archangel Gabriel, who appears in his “Annunciation” hanging in Florence’s Uffizi gallery.

Manescalchi, who refers to the silhouette as “The Ghost,” told reporters it was not clear to him whether the angel was removed or perhaps never completed.

The walls were also adorned with paintings of birds, one of which strongly resembled a sketch from da Vinci’s “Atlantic Codex,” a 1,286-page collection of drawings and writings by the painter, sculptor, inventor and scientist.

Another painting was similar to a drawing in da Vinci’s codex on the flight of birds.

Manescalchi speculated that da Vinci had assistants in his workshop and probably used a “secret” corner room for his dissections of human corpses, aimed at improving his understanding of anatomy.

BBC NEWS | Health | Untidy beds may keep us healthy

Monday, January 24th, 2005

If only I’d known this argument when I was little. From Untidy beds may keep us healthy:

Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies.

A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed.

Wired News: Many Faces of the Mac Mini

Monday, January 24th, 2005

According to Many Faces of the Mac Mini, “Apple’s new Mac mini computer appears to be something of an omnia omnibus — all things to all people”:

Lots of sites, like (PVRblog or MacMerc, are detailing how to turn a mini into a living-room digital video recorder.

[...]

In Austin, Texas, a colocation company is building a low-cost data center out of dozens of Mac minis.

Underwriters Technologies’ Mac mini colocation is housed in Austin’s Data Foundry facility, a former bank vault where space is at a premium.

Because the Mini measures only 6.5 inches square and is 2 inches high, Underwriters can cram a standard server rack with three times as many minis as full-size servers.

“Size is a huge advantage,” said Patrick Dayton, a senior project manager at Underwriters. “By taking into consideration remote power, we can get approximately 100 units in a single cage, as opposed to 30.”

[...]

Benzaquen said the mini is the ideal size for a standard car stereo compartment, and it’s 18-volt power supply is easily fed with standard 12-volt auto power. And because Mac OS X has voice recognition built in, the mini can be controlled hands free.

Benzaquen said the Mac mini could be a high-end stereo, storing as many as 16,000 songs on an 80-GB drive. Add an LCD screen, and passengers can watch DVDs or play games.