Did Obama's team make Chrysler shut dealerships of GOP donors?

Lots of blogging being done about this. The dealers who've been closed are overwhelmingly GOP donors.

But one basic statistic that must be found is the percentage of GOP donors among the dealers remaining open. For instance, what if Chrysler car dealers in general tend to be GOP donors? Then having a high percentage of Republicans among those that are closed would be what we'd expect, all other things being equal.

If, on the other hand, the dealers that remain open show a significantly lower percentage of GOP donors, then we ought to start being suspicious. Even at that point, there might be non-political reasons for the discrepancy. Perhaps there's a correlation between dealers that perform poorly and dealers that donate to the GOP. The neighborhoods could have a different economy that affects both, for instance. Though if that were the case, then it would make a nice retort to the "rich Republican" stereotype.

Anyway, thus far, I haven't seen anyone do a look at the control sample, and we ought to withhold judgement until then.

North Koreans apparently conduct nuclear test

To quote Gomer Pyle, Surprise, surprise, surprise! Actually, the surprise for me is that Russia has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting.

Damn Yankees

Trying to break the tradition of Presidents sending wreathes to the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. It's a tradition I was unaware of, although as a member of the D.C. camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I have taken part in several activities there. I just don't remember a wreath from the President. Southern Senators, Congressmen, etc., yes.

Interesting that they say President Bush changed the tradition from sending the wreath on Jefferson Davis' birthday to (Yankee) Memorial Day. Yankee Memorial Day is different from Confederate Memorial Day. Offhand, I don't recall the exact dates, but I think Confederate Memorial Day as we celebrated it there was on Davis' birthday. We don't have any services on Yankee Memorial Day.

British Parliament scandal: a sentence I wouldn't see in the American version

The British Parliament is going through an expense-account scandal this week. Members of Parliament have been claiming all kinds of things as reimbursable expenses (especially house-related items) , and the public is getting absolutely outraged. Some MP's are claiming that these are within the rules, but if so, the rules themselves are a scandal. Sounds like the House banking scandal back about '92 that helped usher in the Republican majority.

But here's one sentence that I wouldn't expect to find in an American version: "Mr Hogg was forced to stand down by David Cameron, the party leader, after it emerged that he had 'claimed' for the cost of having his moat cleaned because it was listed on the bills for his estate."

I wish...

that Turner Classic Movies wouldn't ruin the channel with this disgusting pandering to ethnic grievances. They're running grossly heavy-handed interviews with hispanic actors about hispanics in film. It's non-stop whining and complaining about the roles hispanics get or got in movies. Please, please, PLEASE stop! Come on--you've got a respectable reputation, but you're ruining your image. Plus, it's just cringe-inducing to watch. Yeugh.

...and they're away!

Congratulations and deep thanks to the STS-125 crew for such a great mission.

Atlantis is "go" for release!

Hubble release in 15 minutes

The astronauts are preparing to release the Hubble Space Telescope in just 15 minutes! As I see the screens now, they've got it detached from the docking ring and are holding it with the Canada Arm.

All has gone well in this final servicing mission, and we can only pray our telescope holds up for several more years.

Good line from the space walk

"I'm ready for a hot shower and a good meal."

--John Grunsfeld, on finishing up his EVA for today.

(The other astronaut laughed and replied, "We'll...uh...see what we can do.") Actually, they do have halfway decent facilities on board, and the food's improved a lot since the '60s. No more freeze-dried meals.

Hubble Servicing Mission 4

I'm watching John Grunsfeld (whom I've met a few times) do some repair work on the Hubble right now. It's funny how an ordinary thing like operating an electric screwdriver can become so exciting when you see it done in space.

I was sad to have the camera I used for my grad school work (WFPC2) finally be removed after 15 years of service. I feel like holding a memorial service for it.

Egypt's pig cull

Unsurprisingly, it's exacerbating religious tensions. The oppressed minority Coptic Christians are the only ones raising pigs, of course. So even if Egypt's Moslems weren't intending to take an anti-Christian measure, it has been felt that way. Of course, there's no reason to cull pigs anywhere because of the swine flu--it's already made the jump to people, and the person-to-person transmission is what is causing the problem now.

I'm not sure about the reporter's description of relations between Christians and Moslems in Egypt as "usually harmonious." Actually, that may be true, but there's a lot of tension there, and it doesn't take too much to make strife bubble up.

SRB SEP

Solid Rocket Boosters have separated successfully

STS-125

T-2 minutes

Watching the last shuttle mission to the Hubble

T-7 minutes and counting! I can't wait to see the new instruments (COS and WFC3) installed. My old camera, WFPC2, is being retired, though...

Fiscal discipline? Riiiight.

So spendthrift California, having gotten themselves into a nice mess with their budget, actually decides to do something that might help, namely cut some salaries. And the Obama administration tells the state to raise those salaries back or lose its "stimulus" package. Would you be surprised to find out that the employees (home healthcare workers) were in a union? Would you be shocked to learn they were in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)? Would you be aghast to be reminded that SEIU was a really, really influential group with Obama's campaign?

Nah, didn't think so.

P.S: The blatant loss of any pretense of principle is really what gets me, though. Telling a nearly-bankrupt state to spend more, or else?

Best line on Arlen Specter

Mark Hemingway at NRO's Corner:

I read that he was switching parties, but I was disappointed to learn he's still a Democrat.

Pithy.

Roots of Italian Fascism

An older (1980s) article; worth reading now that I've read Jonah Goldberg's book. It brings up the differences between fascism and naziism, which I'd never known before reading Liberal Fascism.

Protestors turn on CNN's hack reporter at the Chicago Tea Party

Wow. Very worth watching. I found myself wishing I'd been able to say that to her, myself.

Texas governor reminds everybody that secession is a right

Not saying any of us need to go this far, but it is a right, after all. Amen, brother!

Totalitarian architecture

Nazi design: Impressive and intimidating. They stripped out the decoration from classical architecture and scaled it up, massively. It does have the intended effect of making you feel the power of the state and its domination.

Soviet architecture was its cousin. Here one architect gives it a gothic twist. (I note his imitation of Monet's studies of Note Dame in varied lighting.)

Both of these have some connection to these other early 20th century designs from around the world. Not that I'd want to live in any places like these, but the Metropolis movie set was pretty impressive. Still, they all dwarfed the human scale. Man was essentially a cog in the machine in some of these visions.

Strange but interesting...

...musical scores and notation.

Some of it's just art, using musical notes for abstract decoration. But I'm more interested in those that are innovative uses of notation that actually mean something as music--Sylvano Bussotti's "Pour Clavier" (1961) or John Stead's "Play II" for harpsichord and synthesizer (although I'm not sure if it's really writing music). There's also "World Beat Music," which cleverly uses actual notation to draw a map of the world. Pretty neat, but I wonder if it actually sounds pretty. In college, we performed the world premier of a piece called "Pyramids." The conductor's score drew out a pyramid at one point. It didn't sound like much.

An amazing mechanical pocket calculator

The Curta pocket calculator, designed from within a German concentration camp, of all things. Absolutely amazing device, with about all the details you'd want, here. And yet, more here. And here's an online simulator.

The UN's blogger front on piracy

The "UN Dispatch" bloggers are such tools. Of course, that blog is funded at least in part by the UN Foundation, so what else would I expect?

Origins of modern liberalism

Fred Siegel writing in Telos about how modern liberalism evolved historically. Very scholarly; lots of things I wasn't familiar with, and Siegel seems to have a deep understanding of the evolution of political thought and movements.

Roundup of pirate discussion

Here's a set of links to various articles on the ongoing pirate problem. A lot of Americans were probably unaware of the extent of worldwide piracy until this past week, because this is apparently the first time in over two centuries (can that really be true?!) that pirates have attacked an American-flagged ship. But it's been a real danger for quite some time. I remember an old National Geographic article from about the 1950s on piracy in the South China Sea, and a decade ago, I first found out how bad the problem still was there, and that it was even coming back in the Caribbean.

So here are links to several articles I've read or planned to read recently:
Strategypage on why the pirates are immune from attack.


Fabius Maximus on why we don't hang pirates any more. I don't think I agree with his apparent stand (that we shouldn't treat piracy as a capital crime or as a problem beyond the normal criminal code), but he's worth reading.


The Weekly Standard's Seth Cropsey on why we need to hit the pirates' land bases.
Cropsey, again, on Obama and the pirate problem.

Pirates killed; American captain freed

Good.

Fairy-tale cottages in Los Angeles

Wow.

The proper way to deal with pirates

Bret Stephens wrote about the legal issues for the Wall Street Journal last year. I'm coming to this from the "hang 'em" school of thought. Honestly: we absolutely should execute pirates, and only a tough and public campaign against them will make much headway against the current scourge.

SCOTUS justices participate in Shakespearean mock trial

Twelfth Night goes judicial. I'm glad these guys get the chance to do a few things like this; I bet it was fun for them, too. The comment by Breyer is, perhaps, illuminating. Good retort by Alito.

Chinese & Russian spies probing our electricity grid

Well, I'm glad these are being caught. Of course, we don't know what other intrusions we don't know about. They're leaving behind sabotage programs to be activated in case of war, it seems.

Administration refusing repayment of TARP money?

Here might be why. Force the banks to keep the government's money, and the government keeps control of the bank.

Theology, Quantum Mechanics, and Chaos Theory

Well, that's neat. I've been developing some thoughts for a while now about taking chaos theory and quantum mechanics and applying them together to some theological questions. In particular, can God act directly in the world without violating His own rules of physics? I have no problem with this happening, and I assume that most miracles are a suspension of the laws of physics. But could God work within these laws to get a result that wasn't already set from the beginning of time? And thus, in a way that we wouldn't be able to detect or observe any breakdown in natural laws. Being a theistic evolutionist, this would work out nicely in having a divinely-directed natural selection, without the need for a suspension of "normal" evolution in any places, like Intelligent Design looks for.

My basic idea here is that the Heisenberg uncertainty relations between position and momentum, or between energy and time, and so on, give us small error bars on these variables. And in nonlinear systems (described by chaos theory) like much of the world is made of, small uncertainties grow into very large ones in a short time.

I've got to go now, but let me post these links to some related thinking that's been done in both science and religion:

Open theism and physics (I'm not convinced by Open Theism, but it's worth reading.)

Quantum Mechanics and the chaotic orbit of Hyperion (Really fascinating--I'd never heard of this before.)

The paper cited by the Discover article in the above link.

"Did Koh Bork Gonzales?"

This is, interestingly, a grammatically-correct sentence. Diagram away!

Jimmy Hendrix was a conservative

Who knew? Well, apparently the biographers cited here did.

Abstract Mad Libs

I love this. Might have to use it on my next paper or conference poster...

Progressive Corporatism

via Instapundit:

Arnold Kling on Progressive Corporatism and the Resistance

Just for reference...

It's the same with me.

James Lileks: "Maybe I’m old-school, but 'President fires CEO' looks as wrong as 'Pope fires Missile.' Does not compute."

I know what you mean.

Was there a gun sitting on the table?

The Obama administration pushes GM's CEO out the door. Why couldn't this have been done with a formal bankruptcy procedure, again?

Human Achievement Hour and Wikipedia politics

Liberal Wikipedia editors are at it again. This time, they're repeatedly deleting an article about Human Achievement Hour, the pro-Man counterpoint to the so-called "Earth Hour." This is the kind of thing that keeps me from letting my students cite Wikipedia as a source. Since I looked it up, it's been deleted, while I had the page open.

NewScientist goes for tabloid science. Again.

Then again, maybe the National Academy of Sciences is going tabloid, too. This whole disaster scenario for a coronal mass ejection hitting the earth is just 'way over the top. I'll summarize: the electrical lines could go down and take a while to repair. Apparently, that will cause millions of people to die, and the survivors will turn to cannibalism and living in caves. OK, kidding about the cannibalism part, but they actually do claim "millions" of deaths in the US, only because the power's off.

Have these people never heard of back-up generators? Yes, there'd be a hot market for them, and you'd get a lot of selling out, but this solution already exists. Do no key businesses have backup generators for power? Oh, sure, they admit this, but they think that the fuel will run out in hours and can't be replaced, because the gas stations won't have power to pump it out of the tanks. Uh-huh. And there's no way for them to get it out of the ground? None of them could buy backup generators, for instance?

Sheesh! The tunnel vision of the NAS seems designed to create hype. Yes, we need to be conscious of design flaws in our power lines and work those out, but the "Millions dead!" scenario just isn't going to happen.

The Europeanization of America

Cliff May has an article on Charles Murray's AEI speech on the Europeanization of America, up at NRO. I haven't read it yet, but I read several Corner posts about Murray's speech, and it's gotten me thinking again about something I've had in the back of my head for several years. I've got a copy of I'll Take My Stand, the literary and cultural manifesto of the early 20th century Southern movements known as the Agrarians and Fugitives. It's a great book in general, but there's one essay in particular that's puzzled me for years. Now, without going and looking it up (lazy), I don't remember who wrote it. But the author notes a cultural kinship between Southerners and Europeans, simultaneously contrasting us culturally with the Yankees.

The latter part is obvious and uncontroversial to me. But the former? I've never quite gotten it. Partly, I think, it's that I'm thinking of the mid-late 20th century Western Europe, which had by my time fallen into decay, destroyed any history of individualism, religiosity, or self-reliance, and developed an infantile dependence on the State. All of which are antithetical to Southern culture. So I've had trouble getting into the mind of the author and seeing European life as it might have been in the late 19th century, the immediate background to his experience.

I'll write more on this later, if I think about it. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a research paper and an observing proposal this week.

New gold rush in California

It's estimated that 80% of the gold from the 1849 rush was never found, so with the price 'way up, people are panning for it again. Neat!

Diagramming Obama's sentences

This is the most complex sentence I've seen diagrammed. I'm impressed with the guy who did the diagram! But I've got to wonder if Obama had this on his teleprompter...

Maxine Waters exposes the grand conspiracy of Goldman-Sachs

Got to love the expression on Geithner's face.

Transnational Progressives are heading to the State Dept

"...Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the Legal Advisor to the U.S. State Department."

Koh chastises the US for failing to “obey global norms.”America, Koh tells us, “promotes double standards” by refusing to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty; “claiming a Second Amendment exclusion from a proposed global ban on the illicit transfer of small arms and light weapons”; and “declining to implement the orders of the International Court of Justice with regard to the death penalty.”

Oh, joy.

Umm...

U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms

This is sounding very early-20th-century to me. I know these guys think they're doing what's necessary, but...

Obama's push for regulation of executive pay

From the IHT.

One thing I haven't had explained clearly to me about these limits on executive pay written into the "stimulus" bill: are they permanent? I mean, it's generally described in the news reports that banks that took stimulus money are limited to such-and-such on executive pay. Well, for how long? Until (if?) they pay the money back? (Do they have to pay this back at all?) Or is it forever and ever? In which case, that's a brilliantly evil scheme to regulate anything and everything a politician wants to do: offer somebody money, and if they take it, they have to submit to all of your plans on how to remake society, forever. You could make them stand on their heads and whistle the Star Spangled Banner every Tuesday at 3:00, if you wanted to. If paying it back doesn't get them out from under your thumb, you've just vastly increased the power of the Federal Government forever, for practically nothing.

Forgive me for asking such a dumb question, but where does it say in the Constitution that you can regulate executive pay? Is that an interstate transaction? Does the executive work in a different state from his company? (Even then, I'm not sure that would be "commerce," in the way the authors of the Constitution used the word.) Sigh.

I'm not one hitting the panic button...

...but this column on the Fed's monetizing the debt has me worried. Maybe Glenn Beck has been right, and I'm going to hide out in a fallout shelter with bags of gold coins, waiting for the apocalypse.

Blow-back against a 90% from both sides of the Atlantic

The Financial Times has a bunch of choice quotations to support the story. I hope Congress starts to get the message and kills this bill entirely.

Mona Charen on the AIG bonuses

Amen, Mona. I have a recurring fantasy that one of these guys who's called to testify before Congress and getting berated by a Congressman will stop the gentlemanly self-abasement and tell those Congressmen exactly what he thinks of their self-important grandstanding. I've got a particular script I'd like AIG's Liddy to read out to Barney Frank. It includes phrases like "corrupt little satrap" and "I'll be d***ed if I give you these names." For Frank to demand a list of names that he can publicize is outrageous, especially in light of the death threats against these officials and their children. And for Frank to say that he wouldn't be bound by any confidentiality agreement if Liddy did turn them over, death threats or not!

Schumer is my least-favorite senator, and I reckon Frank is fast becoming my least favorite congressman.