Yahoo! News – GM Pulls ‘Jack Flash’ Corvette Ad

Wednesday, August 25th, 2004

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.

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newsobserver.com | The Bridge | A Young SEAL

Wednesday, August 25th, 2004

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.

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The Bridge

Wednesday, August 25th, 2004

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.

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An Army Surgeon Says New Helmet Doesn’t Fit Iraq

Wednesday, August 25th, 2004

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.

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The Unpolitical Animal

Tuesday, August 24th, 2004

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.

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Man on Quest for Knife-Proof Body Bleeds to Death

Tuesday, August 24th, 2004

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.

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Forbidden Zone – Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes

Tuesday, August 24th, 2004

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.)

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Republicans Against Prohibition

Tuesday, August 24th, 2004

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).

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The Making of an X Box Warrior

Monday, August 23rd, 2004

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.”

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Mad Max Mods in Iraq

Monday, August 23rd, 2004

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 (40×120 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?

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

Monday, August 23rd, 2004

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.

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Scientists Breed a Tougher Mouse

Monday, August 23rd, 2004

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.

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Older Boys Really Are a Bad Influence

Thursday, August 19th, 2004

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.

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Boxing and the Cool Halls of Academe

Thursday, August 19th, 2004

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.

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Adopt a Sniper

Thursday, August 19th, 2004

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.

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