Decline and Fall

We can see a lot of the decline and fall of the MSM at the hands of those damnable innertube world wide web log, or “blog” startups what with their cursing and pajamas and whatnot in last night’s press conference.

First, we have the Huffington Post’s Stein:

“Today, Senator Patrick Leahy announced that he wants to set up a truth and reconciliation committee to investigate the misdeeds of the Bush administration. He said that before you turn the page, you have to read the page first. Do you agree with such a proposal? And are you willing to rule out right here and now any prosecution of Bush administration officials?”

Of interest for being the first non-plant blogger called on at one of these thing. Let’s compare and contrast to the performance of the MSM, in this case the Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher asked:

“What’s your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?”

I think we can all agree that that’s pretty much exactly what anyone given one question would ask the sitting President. At least it failed to include the traditional four-paragraph lead-in. Been nice knowing you, MSM.

The Year We Make Contact


Interesting results from the folks over to Gallup. Turns out that, despite major (and continuing) assistance from the MSM, ‘Merica is seeing right through this shit.

Seemingly forgetting the downright ruly 2-million person mob at their doorstep on Inauguration Day, seemingly forgetting that, in many cases, Obama carried their own districts by large, double-digit figures, seemingly forgetting that, you know, the economy is in freefall and that most everyone in America places blame squarely at the doorstep of the GOP; most of all, seemingly forgetting 2010.

On behalf of the mob

Ezra opines on the scene:

This is, in other words, no time for moderation. And on the Mall today, you could believe it. The press was seated directly before the podium – I had a second-row seat to history, you might say – and behind us stretched the long lawn. And all we could do was gape. It was a sea of people. Millions of people. A mass of moving, yelling, dancing, joyous humanity, filling every patch of green and surrounding the Washington Monument. The image richly recalled the iconic photographs of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. And the assembled politicians knew it. Up on the podium, you could see senators snapping pictures on their digital cameras, pointing at the crowd, shaking their heads in disbelief. They weren’t pretending to be blase about the scene. This was different. This was dramatic. It was a screaming, laughing, cheering rejoinder to those who would constrain the scale of Obama’s ambitions, or question his political assets.

And, as somebody out there moving, yelling, dancing, and actively being humanity: I agree on all points. You’d think the members of both the “loyal” Democrats as well as both the vigorous/healthy and the lunatic, nothing-will-move opposition from the GOP side would look out and have exactly the same moment…and, upon hearing Obama’s own “the ground has shifted beneath them” line would combine the two streams of information and move out accordingly in the coming days and months. Instead, Jay Boehner gives us this:

I’m not sure that anyone knows exactly what [Obama] was trying to say.

Indeed, the meaning of the various threads at work on the day were quite muddy. I guess we know what we have to look forward to.

Stanford and Son

You can understand a lot about the iPhone and the iPod Nano (which cost more to produce yet still replaced (at the same price point) the most popular iPod ever, the “mini”) from this quote from Steve Jobs, re: Macintosh 25th anniversary

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Then consider this, from the then-titan of the industry:

“I’d shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
–Michael Dell, 1997.

And, perhaps even more telling, this notorious quote from Jobs himself, to Fortune magazine in 1996:

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.”

Which is basically exactly what he did the next year. At any rate, worth considering the state of Dell today, run to the whim of Wall Street analysts, and the then-doomed Apple (Wired circa 1997: Silence grips Apple Deathwatch). One commoditized, the other innovated. This despite the fact that even Macworld magazine had inexplicably begun running Windows NT tips. And in every major instance, Apple’s moves were greeted with derision and a fall in stock value (iMac, iPod, Apple Stores, iPhone were all (wrongly) crowned as the last gasp of a desperate company; after all, even might Dell couldn’t figure out how to do bricks and mortar. My stars!).

This is ultimately Steve Jobs value to Apple. The actual products aren’t nearly important as the corporate daring, the brass balls that are necessary to tack hard against the wind and discontinue your best seller in favor of something even better. Or to say “fuck it, we will put no floppy drive in there.” And etc… Very few other companies of size do the same. Hell, very few Mom and Pops will make moves like that. Worth considering.

Simple Solutions to Simple Problems

John Glenn, first American man to orbit the Earth, on the upcoming interregnum in America’s spacefaring capacity:

“I never thought I would see the day when the world’s richest, most powerful, most accomplished spacefaring nation would have to buy tickets from Russia to get up to our station,”

Umkay. I hear that India is in the Space Station market. Just give them the damned thing. That’ll leave them significantly less money for ongoing nuclear development…

I’m all for teh Space Science and all, but that thing is a free-fall to nowhere in particular and costs ~$1bn per shuttle launch (setting aside for the moment the 1 in 50 potential for the death of seven, count ‘em, SEVEN astronauts) to even get a refrigerator up there.
I say we go robotic and do all of our ant farms studies on the good Earth until the next ride arrives. We did the same throughout most of the 70s and the Republic is still here.

THIS IS NEXT

The clearest statement I’ve yet seen on where the GOP goes from here is available from this piece that quotes that lovable scamp, Newt Gingrich:

“Look,” Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, said the other day (on the air, to Bill O’Reilly), “I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence… . I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.” For diversity’s sake, he added that “the historic version of Islam” and “the historic version of Judaism” are likewise menaced—which is natural, given that gay, secular, fascist values are “the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.”

Warnings of violence from the ever mysterious, yet surprisingly well organized “other” couched in a pseudo-religious patina. Welcome to the next four years; Campaign 12, ‘Merica Decides! has begun.

GOP: look out, Constitution Party, Here we come. Absolutely determined to become a predominantly southern, crazily religious splinter of a party. The real question, then, is: will the new major party be to the left of the current Democrat? Wouldn’t surprise me, actually. All depends on the economy.

File under: Yep.

Nice to hear, not unexpected quote from the National Governors Association meetings:

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, the incoming head of the DGA, was more blunt: “Just to have an administration, a president, a vice president, who listened, engaged, and came to meeting prepared – it’s a brand new idea.”

Competence! What a fucking concept. Next: It is discovered that Obama doesn’t hold the very notion of “government” in contempt. Remarkable!

All your recruitment positions are belong to us

Yet another “I interviewed with teh Googul” story. This one recounts the eight (count ‘em) 8 interviews that were required to sift said applicant (or supplicant?) into the OUT pile. Not ready for mission critical jobs said they. Google probably has 3000 people working on said mission critical project, but–hey, if even one of them is only 110% ready on day one, all of Google will resolve to: fail. There’s a whole post in the notion of mission critical here, but what really gets me is the initial pitch.

Said supplicant wrote some ki11er k0de that caught mighty Google’s unblinking eye. So they wrote him thusly:

I recruit top notch Software Engineering talent at Google. I recently came across your name as a possible world class Engineer and am intrigued to know more about you. I promise to exchange some detailed info about us as well.

Uh, okay. Said Supplicant apparently still believed this note actually came from Google, and managed to attend some interviews to prove it. We can only assume the letter went on to say:

I are having some 92 million dollars UNITED STATES to park in you’re accounts. Do you have sum numbers’ so I can begin to moving the UNITED STATES dollars to your accounteds?

Clearly, recruiting “world class Engineers” isn’t in and of itself a mission critical operation.

I can eat 50 Hiroshimas

Yarr! Pirates attack and seize an oil tanker some 450 miles off East Africa. Despite the obvious and salutary effects on global warming, the steady growth in these pirate attacks has some wondering where it will all end. Some are already figuring these guys must have bigger operations in mind, like hijacking a gas tanker and blowing it up (or just selling it to somebody who will). Something like that would indeed be pretty bad:

“If it was an LNG tanker seized, we’re looking at something potentially catastrophic,” said Candyce Kelshall, a specialist in maritime energy security at Blue Water Defence, a Trinidad-based firm that provides training to governments and companies combating piracy. “An LNG tanker going up is like 50 Hiroshimas.”

We certainly don’t want that happening. Unmentioned, of course, are a few little details. First, said pirates would have to seize this LNG tanker without anyone noticing. Then, they’d have to sail it from the coast of East Africa (presumably, anyway…after all, these guys don’t exactly operate off Long Island Sound) to somewhere much more interesting. Without anyone noticing. Then they’d have to park it within a 50-Hiroshima blast radius of, say, a big city. New York City certainly suits with all the shipping traffic. LA would work too. But again: motor this ship up to and then park this ship in a major harbor without anyone noticing. Then they’d have to blow it up such that it actually exploded catastrophically. This, in and of itself, is actually a non-trivial step. However, conditioned by Hollywood as we are to expecting a colossal, city block flattening explosion after even the most minor fender-bender, this is perhaps the hardest point to make with the public. After all, it’s a well established fact that 99.999% of all elevators suffer catastrophic cable failure within 30 seconds of any unscheduled stop. This, of course, is also followed instantly by catastrophic emergency brake failure…it’s plainly a wonder that anyone survives an elevator ride.

Can we ever get past all the “We’re all going to die! This is the end of the Republic!” nonsense? The second most likely outcome of such a LNG tanker seizure is a 50-Hiroshima detonation way the hell and gone out to sea, being the result of a sailor pressing a button mid-coffee-sip on a US Navy missile cruiser located somewhere well over the horizon. The first most likely is, of course, the surrender of said pirates once their situation becomes clear to them. But either way works out pretty well.

Real security means focusing on the relatively easy to secure, already here type targets that can be turned into seemingly ubiquitous engines of fear, uncertainty, and doubt subsequent to the initial attack. As a rule, we don’t need to be wasting our efforts on the theoretical plots that require professional laboratory conditions aboard an airplane, or that rest upon ridiculously complex, multi-step, slowly evolving plots that, though summarily rejected by the audience in Die Hard 14: This Time It’s Really Personal, are at least 1% feasible…and thus MUST be defended against without consideration of expense or probability of said event while the 98% feasible targets languish because, gosh, that would require some minor outlay of money on the part of Cheney’s hunting buddies. Naturally, these “easy” targets are precisely the ones the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed that it could give a fuck about. Who could have expected that?