Now Make Him Wave

When Russell Feingold committed political suicide on the floor of the Senate, liberals' first impulse was to avert your eyes: "Move along, nothing to see here." The Washington Post respectfully buried the sad event on A8 (or was it A9? I can't remember). But when the feet sticking out from under the tarp didn’t go unnoticed, they quickly picked him up, applied some makeup, and -- hey presto! -- today he's a "maverick," right smack on the front page.

[Read the rest of the post at The Right Angle at Human Events Online]

Another One Jumps the Couch

George Clooney's a liberal, he'll have you know. A huge one.

In an obscenity-laden post at HuffPo (remember: profanity = passion), the activist-actor admits, "I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I'm proud of it."

Well, I'm not so much proud of him as in awe of the career risk he's invited. After this, he won't so much as see a script in Aramaic. And imagine all the hurtful emails he'll get from the left-wing websites. They've been weaning people off of "liberal" for the relatively pristine "progressive," and with one post Clooney sets their exodus back a year.

A word of caution, though, George: They love you now, but they'll turn on you after they've used you up. They'll throw you away just like, um, just like…what's her name, um…Cindy Sheehan.

[Note: Originally posted at The Right Angle, a Human Events blog]

Quote of the Day (and perhaps month)

I think my paranoid schizophrenia has improved my ability to be a good ruler of my fellow Aztec citizens. - Anonymous

Still Stuck on Angry

I started reading The Democrats’ Real Problem by Bush critic E.J. Dionne with a sense of anticipation. Maybe, thought I, he could solve the paradox of the angry left. Alas, the piece doesn't deliver on its title, and just deposits the reader back at square one.

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show that their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward an alternative program.

Okay, in other words, they need to get off of angry. But anger is not only the central concept of modern anti-Bush lefties -- it has become an essential attribute that cannot be removed without destroying its host.

This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, ``Bush hatred'') as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of ``American Idol'' love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.

With Gore yelling, Dean screaming, Kennedy blathering, and Hillary shrieking, who needs the GOP to make the president’s critics look crazed? The American People can diagnose each disorder by symptoms presented. But I guess if you’re crazed, marveling at The Scream amounts to dirty trickery on a par with forcing Dukakis into that tank with the big helmet on. Or making Kerry crawl around in that powder blue bunny suit. That Rove! He's behind it all.

The president's critics need to identify precisely why they oppose him, not only so they can make clear that they are not psycho basket cases, but also to convey that they know what needs to be put right.

But that gets right back to not having any ideas, doesn’t it? Dionne's conclusion that fighting bad policies can be constructive is fine, but in practice the Democrats' oppositionism is perceived as both reflexive and transparently calculated for political effect.

Thoreau’s Law in Action

Wes Pruden has a tragicomic piece you should check out. It appears the mayor of Ocean Springs, a town devastated by Katrina, approached FEMA to fund locally popular permanent housing for $60,000 (which incidentally is what it costs the agency to “ship and set up” a trailer).

FEMA said no. The law allows FEMA to provide housing only "on a temporary basis," and the Gulf Coast residents who qualify for one of the 10,000 trailers currently parked and going to rust and ruin on an abandoned muddy airstrip in Arkansas can have one for 18 months. So Ocean Springs will soon have a trailer park, with 600 trailers to replace the 700 houses destroyed by the storm. "FEMA," the mayor says, "is creating trailer trash."

Your community can’t have permanent housing it likes, but it can have rusting blight -- for 18 months. Rules are rules.

Read the whole thing.

Differently Abled Encryption?

Granted, it's a mere bump in the road to consumer acceptance of fingerprint-based authentication, but this is hardly Microsoft's finest moment.

From Engadget:

If you've got a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader hooked up to your PC and thought you had the latest and greatest in biometric security, you're out of luck. A Finnish researcher has discovered that the reader -- which Microsoft has said shouldn't be used to protect sensitive data (meaning, we assume, you should just use it to check out those wild whorls) -- sends fingerprint info to the PC unencrypted, which could enable anyone with the right tools to snag your fingerprint image, and use it to log into your PC. Strangely, Microsoft licenses the technology from another company, Digital Persona, which does encrypt fingerprint data. For some reason, however, Microsoft chose to disable encryption in its product, making it less secure than the passwords it purports to replace.

This is less secure than the passwords for another reason, as well: If consumers trust that an authentication product is secure, they may tend to relax about other security measures.

At the other end of the security spectrum, here's a laptop for somebody "who lives in a really bad neighborhood":

NEC introduced its Generation laptop for the education market, but it looks like it’s aimed at somebody who lives in a really bad neighborhood. It’s loaded with security measures that are so extensive they border on paranoia. First, the notebook is password-protected and login is done with via a hardware fingerprint security chip, great for schoolkids because they won’t have to remember a password. There’s an NEC security control panel, which allows administrators to disable USB or optical drives, keeping that unauthorized software out of the picture. Is also has a Kensington lock slot, a Stoptrack anti-theft label and Webtrack geographical tracking software. Of course, the thing is loaded with antivirus protection and to top it all off, it’s covered by three years of antitheft insurance. Just reading this feature list make you wonder exactly what awful thing happened to this notebook’s designer. Pricing starts at $1138.

Maybe the State Department should price a few, too.

Solar Maxed Out

The sun is currently in a quiet part of the solar storm cycle, but that will change beginning sometime around 2007.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has developed the Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model to analyze past solar cycles. Based on its 98 percent accuracy in back-testing, scientists predict the coming sunspot cycle, number 24, could be 30-50% stronger than the last one.

This article touches on some of the mayhem that could be in store:

An 11-year epoch of increasingly severe solar storms that could fry power grids, disrupt cell-phone calls, knock satellites back to Earth, endanger astronauts in space, and force commercial airliners to change their routes to protect their radio communications and to avoid deadly solar radiation could begin as soon as this fall, scientists announced Monday.

When the solar cycle reaches its peak in 2012, it will hurl at Earth mammoth solar storms with intense radiation and clouds of high-speed subatomic particles millions of miles across, the scientists said.

A storm of that magnitude could short-circuit a world increasingly dependent on giant utilities and satellite communications networks. Such a storm in 1989 caused power grids to collapse, causing a five-hour blackout in Quebec.

Power grid disruptions such as the Quebec example above are caused when these storms introduce DC into AC power lines, tripping circuit breakers and/or causing transformers to overheat and fail.

In addition, these stronger geomagnetic storms, which have caused havoc in the past, will batter ever-finer electronic circuitry, which is correspondingly more sensitive to disruption.

Science trivia? Absolutely, but don't forget it.

I Say C2H6O; You Say C2H5OH

I take umbrage at the idea that I’m addicted to oil. I’m not. My SUV is the addict. But even with peak oil and Iran going nuclear, don’t you get a little nervous when politicians roll out tired energy schemes and pretend they’re the solution?

Take ethanol, which doesn’t sell without huge taxpayer subsidies, and can't spur private investment even with its avowed blue-sky potential. Unless you believe studies that play shell games with the system boundaries, it isn't economical, and won’t be in six years, if ever. But, hey, voters don’t know that.

There should be more articles like this:

Touting ethanol is certainly good politics - particularly in Midwestern corn-growing states that already welcome significant taxpayer subsidies for ethanol. But ethanol isn't necessarily good economics.

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley analyzed energy input-yield ratios and reported last July that producing ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more energy than can be derived from the resulting fuel - the switch grass and wood chips ratios are worse (45 percent and 57 percent.)

An energy source can be promising without positive net energy, but to use politician-speak, we can do better.

So Close to a New Idea

Gary Hart thinks the Sunni Triangle is one sprawling Mogadishu. Sometimes the best thing to do is just return Blackhawk Down to the video store, pay the late fee, and move on.

"Our army is in danger," he said. "If all-out civil war breaks out, we could lose our army. If Sunnis and Shiites take to the streets by the thousands, it could literally be impossible to get [the soldiers] out. ... I know that sounds apocalyptic, but it's not out of the question. We need an exit strategy. We have no choice. We're making things worse. Ninety percent of the insurgents are Iraqis who don't like the fact that we have occupied their country. ...

The self-described “Renaissance man of new ideas” (Can anyone name just one? Anyone?) has a lot of experience with exit strategies, but evading Miami Herald reporters doesn’t add much to urban combat doctrine.

"I know we can't just pack up and leave right away, but we're still acting as if we hold all the cards over there. We don't. We're losing control of the situation. ... The British occupied Iraq for 35 years and finally had to leave because there was a constant insurgency against them. We haven't learned anything."

You’d think after 35 years, they’d have figured out that all they have to do is go outside by the thousands...