The Gantry Launchpad

John Murtha, RIP

2010-02-09T05:43:06Z

John Murtha served his time in the Marines. When I read the report of his death, I checked his Wiki entry. Murtha joined the Marines in 1952, and later became a Drill Instructor. He was later selected for OCS. Murtha was discharged in 1955, remaining in the Marine Reserves. He later volunteered for duty in Vietnam, "receiving the Bronze Star with Valor device, two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry." (Wiki) In other words: no matter what we think of his politics, he was no chickenhawk or Limousine Liberal. The man without a doubt got his hands dirty, and his blood spent. That said, in this writer's opinion he sacrificed his moral authority when he slandered the Haditha Marines before the official inquiry was finished. In short: while we should honor John Murtha's service, we should also recognize his abdication of loyalty. Hence we should accord former Congressman John Murtha the title of EX-Marine.

Christmas 2008

2008-12-25T05:40:06Z

A year ago, I posted the words. Now... Back when I was a wee lad (born 1959) I just couldn't wait for Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the TV. Me'n'Rudy; we were outcasts together! As I grew a (tad), my compass tended a touch more "Peanuts-ward," when I finally began to absorb the message repeated by Linus, in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Last year I reproduced the words, now I'll add the video. :) --- And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. --- My best wishes and prayers to all, on this most wonderful of days.

Veteran's Day, 2008

2008-11-11T08:33:34Z

This is the day I thank veterans I've known, met, heard about, or read their work. So thank you to Baldilocks, John Donovan, Blackfive, CDR Salamander, Neptunus Lex, Greyhawk, and the rest. This includes sidekicks like Uncle Jimbo, Deebo, and company at B5, Dusty'n'Bill over at Castle Argghhh!!, and Mrs. G. at Mudville. To all of you, to the men and women who have served before, or are serving now; thank you, and God bless you. You are the sheepdogs who keep the wolves from the door, In salute give you 3 Doors Down, and their magnificent Citizen Soldier. How many rock bands can quote the Soldier's Creed?

A not-so-bold Electoral Map prediction

2008-11-04T17:27:05Z

Vodkapundit got me started on the EC-wargaming thing. Back on October 13 I did a little twiddling of my own, with the results here. ]]> The logic behind it is fairly simple; instead of just following the polls, I folded in the recorded actual vote listed for 2000 and 2004, as well as the trend (say, Bush +6.3, Bush +12.9, or Bush +1.4, Kerry + 0.9). Quite a few of the poll results don't match up well with actual voting patterns. For example, I tagged New Mexico as "leaning McCain" since the votes were Gore +0.1 (2000), Bush +0.7 (2004). A slight, but reddish lean. Florida went Bush +0.1 (2000) to Bush +5.0 (2004), but I only flagged it as leaning, not solid. Just to be safe. Here in Ohio we went Bush both times, but he dropped from +3.5 to +2.1. I suspect a lot of that was due to the terrible GOP Taft administration. On the other hand I doubt that Obama will do well in Ohio after his "bitter clingers" and Joe the plumber remarks. Hillary pretty much cleaned his clock here during the primaries, and would have presented a much stronger challenge to McCain. And, yes, I have Colorado leaning red, because that state went for Bush, with diminishing results (+8.4, +4.7). Colorado may end up a very tight race, but I doubt they'll go +5.5 Obama as RCP is predicting. Again, if Hillary were running, it would be a different story. Stephen has Montana as undecided, when it went +25, +20 for Bush. Indiana is also shown as "undecided," but it went for Bush +15.7, +20.7 the last two elections. You'll notice there are no "toss up" states on my map, because this is supposed to be a prediction. At the end of the day, each state will have voted for Obama, or McCain. Period. No "toss up" EC votes will exist. So I removed those from my map and committed them to a candidate, usually only as leaning unless the historical vote indicated otherwise (such as Montana, above). Feel free to check out the map, but note the recorded votes for each state. Also note that my map gives Obama 204 "solid" votes with only 60 "leaning," while McCain has only 140 "solid" with 134 "leaning." Still, I'm fairly confident about a healthy number of those leans. Doing a little checking, and I see that my map runs very close to the actual 2004 election, except that Obama picks up two states: New Mexico and Iowa.

Great fake bands from movies and TV

2008-10-03T03:46:27Z

Ace links to a list: "20 Real-Cool Fake Bands from TV and Movies." The sad thing is that they included some really lame bands, and forgot several excellent ones. First, as Ace points out, Eddie and the Cruisers didn't even make the list. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!? Other great movie groups they missed: -Wyld Styllyns (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure) -the Blues Brothers -the Monkees (ok, they're TV) -The Wonders (That Thing You Do) -The Lone Rangers (Airheads) -Suburban Funk (The New Guy) -James "Thunder" Early and the Dreamettes (Dreamgirls) ... and my all-time personal favorite: The Commitments, from the movie of the same name.

A little note of gratitude for my friends on the Left...

2008-10-03T01:14:27Z

Patterico recently had something to say about the Horrible Reporting that the L.A. Times Did on the US Attorneys purge last year. It's good stuff. What caught my eye was his mention of an earlier argument (March '07) that then-Attorney General Gonzales should resign, something I would have heartily agreed with had I seen it. Patterico then mentioned that he had opposed nominating Gonzales for the Supreme Court back in September of '05, which brings me to this post. To my friends on the Left, who opposed the Gonzales nomination for the Supreme Court:

THANK YOU

Back when "progressive" was a good thing

2008-10-02T19:00:35Z

Neptunus Lex had something to say about the differing reactions that McCain and Obama recently faced, when commenting on a proposal to lift the ROTC ban at Columbia University. The thread quickly became a discussion about "keeping (or encouraging) liberals out of the military," with the majority opinion developing that political diversity is very important for our military. It's a good thread, you should Read The Whole Thing, as they say. What caught my eye towards the end was a secondary thread started by russiannavyblog (comment #15) wherein he mentioned more than a few liberal military members of excellent standing. Others took issue as to whether certain politicians (Teddy Roosevelt) were "really" liberal or not, and in what context. Mention was made of Teddy's trust-busting work, in contrast to McKinley. That's where I jumped in: Back in the day, more than a few of those trusts were (economically) objectionable. The problem is that both the economic & political context have changed, as well as our terms. Back then, "progressive" or "reformist" meant something. Truly large corporations (including especially the railroad companies) held an enormous power over local politics. Unions were still scrabbling for a toehold, up to the point where the Supreme Court struck down one collective bargaining agreement on the basis that said agreement violated the individual's right to freely contract their own labor. Even most conservatives today would, I think, be appalled at that logic. ]]> more change. They have failed to grasp that we have reached the actuarial point of diminishing returns for more extensive government intervention in society. We've managed to more or less eliminate sexism and racism from our social and corporate structure, and even homosexuals have gained a tremendous degree of freedom unthinkable even thirty years ago. Progressives see an imperfect society with residual bigotry, while independents such as myself see that it's impossible to mold to 100% perfection. One may not refuse to hire, or fire someone else based on their race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or even sexual orientation. Any citation of any of the above as a basic for some sort of political disqualification results in protest and abuse; I cite Obama and Romney in evidence. In other words, all the legal and social barricades are gone. Alas, we still have the barricades inside citizen's minds, and government is worthless for that. Doesn't mean the loyal progressive will stop trying, which I think explains speech and hate-crime legislation. Progressive intentions are good -they trying to eliminate bigotry, racism, etc.- but the methods are questionable. They see such legislation as improving society. I see such legislation has criminalizing thought without any measurable social benefit. Such impulses really do demonstrate a law of diminishing returns, excuse the pun. But that's why (I believe) many progressives advocate things like hate/crime speech laws, or AA quotas. All real barriers addressable by government power have been overthrown, but they're still determined to build a perfect world, so they're sucked down the rabbit hole of social engineering. This is not to say there are no issues with modern conservatism, but that isn't the current topic. In both cases we need to acknowledge how our society works today, and think of new approaches. Get our minds "out of the box," as it were.

Bernie Mac

2008-08-10T05:12:59Z

Man. I just read that Bernie Mac died. I can't recall the first movie I saw him; it was probably Booty Call. Next would have been Ocean's Eleven, then Bad Santa. Aside from his excellent sequels in the Ocean's series, my favorite has to be his starring roll in Mr. 3000. Bernie played Stan Ross, a baseball player as talented as he was arrogant. That was one of the best hooks of the movie; Stan really was that good, in his prime. The problem is that -after his early retirement, but before he's voted into the Hall of Fame- he finds out he didn't really get 3,000 hits. Worse yet, he's gone all soft and sloppy, and it truly hurts his pride that can't even get on base, once they allow him back. It's not a "great" movie, but a good one, and Mac does a very good job of allowing Stan to oscillate between between the goals of become a good ballplayer again, vs. becoming a good human being for the first time. I might not go along with his politics, but I respect ability as an actor and an entertainer. Godspeed, Bernie, and I hope you're enjoying yourself in the real hall of fame, upstairs.

Late evening update

2008-08-04T02:34:48Z

Looks like I spoke too soon, and I've got the 101st Fighting Keyboardists revived. Yay, me! :) Still need to add Sitemeter, but that can wait. Probably after I track down the fix for IE.

It's ALIIIIIIIIVE!!!

2008-08-03T20:13:30Z

Ok. I think I've finally gotten this sussed. One of the reasons I haven't blogged much lately -aside from near-terminal depresssion- is that I just couldn't figure out how to fix the bloody comment system, which has been broken for nearly a year now. Yes, that's sad. If you go back, (not very far, really, heh) you'll see various tales of horrible encounters, including MT 4.0. Bleh. I eventually backed up all my posts and comments, the SQL database, then nuked my entire MT directory. The whole thing. The tricky part was remembering the steps in recreating a database. For example, you have to manually add a user to a specific database. That's when I went to bed last night (another hint: don't try this stuff at 2:00am). Got up, and exclaimed "Duhh!" Added self as user to database. This allowed me to finally log on to the blog and begin to rebuild things. The good news is that the categories and such seem to have been successfully rebuilt. The bad news is that my blog list, original page setup for the Launchpad, and goodies like the 101st Chairborne are gone.

MT 4.x is the devil

2008-04-28T06:33:13Z

After having witnessed MT 4.x consume my blog during an upgrade, and spending the next three FRACKING HOURS trying to restore the original mess, I have succeeded. I am not, at this point, very happy with Six Apart and Movable Type. We now return you to your original programming...

Slapping Al Gore

2008-04-17T19:08:00Z

Stephen Green is kvetching about the lovely Colorado spring weather, so I thought I would rub it in with a shot from today, here in southwest Ohio. It's a balmy 73.6 F (according to Weather Underground) as I type this, with a light haze overhead. I'm having trouble dealing with the Global Warmening up here, but I think I can tough it out...

Current events in research...

2008-01-19T04:44:53Z

The Instapundit recently linked to this article about new battery research. Apparently some nano-tech research done at Stanford's Department of Materials Science and Engineering indicates that it might be possible to increase the life of a rechargeable lithium-ion batteries by a tremendous amount. The article mentioned the possibility of reaching a 40-hour life. That's fantastic compared to current (excuse the pun) batteries. I agree with Professor Reynolds: "Bring it on!" Something else occurs to me; is it possible to scale this technology up? Forty hours at 40 mph could give an electric car a 1600 mile range. Forty hours might be unrealistic (at least at first) but the possibilities are intriguing.

The Great Sled-Safety Cover-up

2007-12-27T03:29:31Z

Meryl Yourish thinks that safety helmets aren't enough for sledders. I agree. Not only do we need mouth guards and eye protectors, we need to do something about those bloody unsafe metal runners! Yep, it's all fun and games until someone loses a finger... My proposal is to replace metal runners with Nerf runners. This follows in the footsteps of other great ideas like Nerf footballs, Nerf frisbees, and Nerf dartguns. Mind you, the kids won't go very fast with Nerf runners on their sleds, but isn't that all to the good? God forbid someone might get hurt having fun.

Will Smith, credulous fool?

2007-12-25T19:54:14Z

This mindless bit of dreck has caused a bit of a stir by claiming that Will Smith said "Hitler was a good person." What stands out to me is that anyone actually reading the article should immediately realize that there were no actual quotes to that effect. Word to the wise folks: look for the quote marks. If you don't see them, then the reporter is making things up. Eugene Volokh, Ilya Somin, and Dave Price all agree that Smith never said anything resembling the quote attributed to him. Mr. Price seems to think that Smith displayed a certain degree of naivety for his general point of view, while the Volokh Conspiracy writers limited their skepticism to the idea that someone like Hitler could be "reprogrammed" or psychologically reshaped; a position with which I agree. Smith's general point rang a bell with me, and it bothered me for a bit. For quite a while I've held to the belief that no one sees themselves as evil, but I couldn't recall the seed of that belief. Then it hit me: Heinlein, naturally!

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate--and quickly.

While the second part of that directive might prove problematical, I prefer Heinlein's formulation, especially his use of the word "villain" as opposed to "evil." So maybe Will Smith isn't quite so naive after all.