When small really is beautiful

Think small

But automation and communication technology have evolved to the point that a large number of small units may be better, cheaper, or more efficient than a small number of large units. Consider supercomputers: until the 1990s, the supercomputer industry focused on increasing computing speed and capacity by building bigger, more specialized machines with greater processing power. “But by the mid-1990s it had become cheaper to network the capacity of CPUs and memory from large numbers of personal computers and computer workstations rather than relying on a single microprocessor,” van Ryzin notes. This shift from large to massively modular computing led to an abrupt collapse of the traditional supercomputer industry in the 1990s. Are we now on the cusp of a similar radical shift in other industries?

The researchers, who also worked with doctoral students Eric Dahlgren and Caner Göçmen, conducted a plausibility analysis to show why thinking smaller might be viable or even preferred. They conclude that many industries are approaching tipping points that will soon make transitioning to small modular infrastructure practical and cost-effective.

Related:

Diseconomies of scale

Perspective is critical

Ace:

This fact in particular just leaped off the page at me ("literally" as gun-grabbing Joe Biden might say):

Typically, the immediate deployment of law enforcement is required to stop the shooting and mitigate further harm to victims. Typically, active shooter situations are over within 10 to 15 minutes.

Let me rephrase that for you: "Typically, victims are sitting ducks for the 10-15 minutes it takes law enforcement to arrive."

Conservatives and messaging

An interesting and important essay by Bookworm:

Conservatives need to create powerful, “sticky” messages that lead the electorate to a tipping point

(HT: Neo-neocon)

It contains a lot of good sense and hard-headed analysis. OTOH, there are some glaring weaknesses in current conservative thought/messaging that Bookworm ignores or glosses over.

This is a point that the Obama administration hopes we will ignore:

What Obama did do successfully was vilify his opponent (“not one of us“) and make narrow, often fear-based appeals to particular interest groups. His campaign also demonstrated a mastery of technology for identifying voters and coaxing them to the polls….

[and]

The cultural bias the Democrats have created against conservativism reached its tipping point in November 2012 when a president with a disastrous economic record rather handily got reelected. Relying on decades of indoctrination and sophisticated modern social networking, Democrats spread a message that stuck: Republicans are evil. Everything else, whether from the Left or the Right, was just chatter that people ignored.

If President Obama won any mandate at all, it was a negative mandate: the voters rejected the Romney caricature that the Obama campaign created.

Another good point:

The Law of the Few says that studies show that there are specific people in society who are information, idea, and style vectors. Whether they have a vast network of contacts, a reputation for sharing useful wisdom, or the innate gift of salesmanship, these few people exercise a disproportionate effect when it comes to dispersing ideas. When they talk, other people lots of other people listen.

Do we have anybody like that articulating conservative ideas? I’m not so sure. Gladwell’s point is that these people spread their ideas because of their ability to connect directly with other people. All of our conservative talking heads are just that talking heads on TV or the radio. Conservatives, perhaps true to their commitment to individualism, do not have networks of people on the ground (i) who are themselves networkers, (ii) who are viewed as reliable information sources, or (iii) who can sell anything to anybody.

One of the big problems with conservative talking heads is that they make their money playing to the base. That is a great strategy for radio or cable news, but it does not do much to win over the low-information, swing voters. A few years ago I noted:

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

Still another good point:

In a way, the internet has made things even worse for conservatives. While it’s increased information dissemination, it’s also increased information ghettoization. We don’t talk to our neighbors about politics anymore. Instead, we go to a like-minded blog and enjoy the feeling that we’re not alone. But by doing so, we delude ourselves into believing that there are more like-minded people out there than a walk in the community and a talk in the park would reveal.

By definition, low-information voters aren’t reading Ace of Spades or Powerline. We can’t engage them if we don’t know them.

Plus, ghettoization isn’t healthy.


G.K. Chesterton:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing that is really narrow is the clique....The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment like that which exists in hell. [Heretics]

Now to my dissent.

I don’t think that the right has no “sticky” messages. Rather, part of the political problem is that a majority of the public views our sticky messages with suspicion.

For instance:

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

Let’s not forget the biggest, stickiest Republican/conservative message of all:

We {heart} W.

The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.

Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right. The short version goes something like this:

Tanked the economy (worse than LBJ)

Started two wars he could not win (worse than Carter)

Is that fair? Not entirely, but it is accurate.

Is the truth more complex than this stamp-sized report card? Sure, and there are plenty of right-wing pundits who are eager to explain why Bush deserves more credit than he gets.

Their explanations do more harm than good.

The first political professional I ever met had a ready answer when complex explanations were required:

If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Or as Lee Atwater might say “if you can’t spin it, change the subject.”

So quick, what’s the spin on that Bush record? Remember, it has to be sound-bite length and fit on a bumper sticker?

Even worse is all the talk about the “47%” and “makers and takers”. It reflects a vicious and simplistic worldview that equates income with virtue and reduces the value of a citizen to his effective tax rate. It is a worldview that elevates the hedge fund manager over a retired fireman or Mayor Mike Bloomberg over a disabled combat veteran.

No wonder it is not an electoral winner. Especially when the wealthy vote liberal despite their high taxes. It's hard to build a majority when you exclude nearly half the electorate out of "principle."

Something Piers Morgan won't tell you

Clayton Cramer notes that women have double the risk of rape in the gun-free United Kingdom than in the US with its "violent gun culture."

Somewhat related:

Convicted rapist organizes gun control demonstration at Dayton gun show; Media fails to note his sex offender status

In short, "Anti-Gun-Protestor Jerome McCorry" and "Rapist-and-Convicted-Felon Jerome McCorry" are one and the same person, and WHIO-TV and The Dayton Daily News have been treating this man as a legitimate voice of reason that should be considered in the debate over whether or not rape and other crime victims should be able to buy firearms in order to protect themselves from attack.

Ace spanks Dave Weigel

He cruelly uses facts and logic.

Shorter Weigel: NRA Responsible For Media's Shoddy Sandy Hook Reporting

Journolist punk Dave Weigel has a ridiculous hit piece on the NRA in amateur webzine Slate….

His purpose, apparently, was to blame the NRA for pushing the conspiracy theory. Which is odd, since the NRA didn't have anything to do with it.

I’m glad Ace mentioned Weigel’s involvement with the Journolist cabal. Such things deserve to be remembered.

For one thing, it is a small but important step that can negate the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

Moreover, it makes sense to give the MSM a healthy dose of their own medicine. Big media loves to use these kinds of thumbnail signifiers. To this day they can’t mention Andrew Breitbart without recalling Shirley Sherrod and the edited video.

The MSM is quite selective in their use of negative reminders. What is sauce for a Breitbart is not sauce for a Sharpton. The reader must always remember the great harm done to Shirley Sherrod but Steve Pagones and Yankel Rosenbaum and the victims at Freddy’s Fashion Mart can be tossed down the memory hole.

So why not redress the balance? The public deserves to know that Piers Morgan published fake pictures of non-existent war crimes and edited newspapers that relied on phone hacking. It is highly relevant that a reporter or pundit sees no problem with libeling dissenters as racists. People should know that NPR’s “high standards” allow journalists to entertain “masturbatory fantasies about Rush Limbaugh's death” but Juan Williams isn’t fit to work at NPR because he also appeared on Fox news.

The book that made paradigms cool

Paradigms, after Fifty Years

Peter King gets a clue

I think America is getting tired of Ray Lewis.

What went wrong with the Dreamliner?

Bean-counters and outsourcing make an appearance.

Requiem for a Dreamliner?

The more complex a supply chain, the more chances there are for something to go wrong, and Boeing had far less control than it would have if more of the operation had been in-house. Delays became endemic, and, instead of costing less, the project went billions over budget. In 2011, Jim Albaugh, who took over the program in 2009, said, “We spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we’d tried to keep the key technologies closer to home.” And the missed deadlines created other issues. Determined to get the Dreamliners to customers quickly, Boeing built many of them while still waiting for the F.A.A. to certify the plane to fly; then it had to go back and retrofit the planes in line with the F.A.A.’s requirements. “If the saying is check twice and build once, this was more like build twice and check once,” Aboulafia said to me. “With all the time and cost pressures, it was an alchemist’s recipe for trouble.”

Heh

Cam Edwards

The AR was designed in 1957 and sold to the public beginning in 1964. Perhaps we should go ahead and ban that newfangled rock and roll too.

HT: Shall not be questioned

Remembering a great conservative

A new biography of National Review's long-time publisher, conservative advocate, and key organizer.

The Great Bill Rusher

Gentleman Bruiser

Here is a talk by the author on CSPAN

Rusher's The Rise of the Right may be the best first person account of the conservative march from the wilderness to the Reagan landslide of 1980.

Rusher's conservatism had a streak of hard anti-communism. He was unapologetically pro-McCarthy and pro-HUAC. (He served for a time on the staff of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.) He lived long enough to see both the fall of Soviet communism and the release of the documents that proved the Red hunters had it mostly right. This piece he wrote in 2004 is probably the last expression of the anti-communism which animated NR at its founding.

A Closer Look Under The Bed

What Rand got right

Roger Kimball:

Ayn Rand and the criminalization of everyday life

I’ve found that as I get older I become more and more libertarian, which I suppose means in part that I am more and more sympathetic to John Galt. Why? I’m sure there are several reasons. One is the increasing bureaucratization of life in this country, the progress of what Tocqueville called “Democratic Despotism,” i.e., the insidious proliferation of rules and regulations (and their concomitant rulers and regulators) that we’re told are being put in place for the commonweal but in fact are really put in place to squelch individual liberty and solidify state control over our lives.

Thinking clearly about mass shootings and self-defense

We Know How to Stop School Shootings

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.


WHY GOOD PEOPLE NEED SEMIAUTOMATIC FIREARMS AND “HIGH CAPACITY” MAGAZINES

The reasoning is strikingly clear. The cops are the experts on the current criminal trends. If they have determined that a “high capacity” semiautomatic pistol and a .223 semiautomatic rifle with 30-round magazines are the best firearms for them to use to protect people like me and my family, they are obviously the best things for us to use to protect ourselves and our families .

Our debased press

Democrat Hurricanes Versus Republican Hurricanes

Sandy would not be Obama’s Katrina, because the press is on his side. President Obama parachuted into New Jersey after the storm and declared that he would not tolerate “red tape” or “bureaucracy” by the government. He then hopped back aboard Air Force One and resumed his campaign schedule. His admirers, including, alas, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and the besotted Krugman, swooned.

Six days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, President Bush’s presidency had been declared a failure and a disgrace. It was all FEMA’s fault, we were given to understand, and, by extension, Bush’s fault. It wasn’t the incompetence of local and state officials, or the levee collapse (a failure, by the way, that impartial observers lay at the feet of another government agency going back years, the Army Corps of Engineers). No, within a few days of the storm’s impact, Bush was an enemy of the people.

Six days after Sandy hit the East Coast, most of the press had utterly lost interest in the human toll, though thousands of people went without food, water, gasoline, or electricity for the better part of two weeks. The Washington Times reported two weeks after Sandy, “Bodies are still being recovered in Staten Island. Chaos reigns in the streets of the outer boroughs. Residents have taken up arms — baseball bats, machetes, shotguns — as crime and looting soar.”

Remembering a hero

The Man Who Stopped a School Shooting

Until the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, the deadliest school shooting in American history occurred at the University of Texas in 1966. Charles Whitman, an architecture student at the university (and a Marine Corps veteran) climbed the landmark, 28-story clock tower on the UT campus with a high-powered rifle, then opened fire. Sixteen people died before a small group of Austin police officers, accompanied by armed citizens put an end to the rampage.

Now, one of the heroes of that deadly day has died.

Way-points on the path to irrelevance and oblivion

The Harrisburg Patriot-News is no longer a daily newspaper.

New year starts change for The Patriot-News and its readers

They are trying to put a brave face on it and sound positive. The focus is on the opportunity, not the problems.

Behind the scenes, the entire newsroom will also be focused on delivering news at the speed of the Web while making the best use of all the digital tools at our disposal. Over the last few months, we’ve supplied our reporters and photographers with the technology and training they need to be mobile, digital journalists. At the same time, we’ve rolled out a redesigned PennLive.com to provide the best reader experience across our desktop, tablet and mobile sites.

+++++++

The landscape is littered with failed companies that allowed pride and tradition to get in the way of adapting to the needs of the audience. We didn’t want that to be our fate. That is why we are letting vision, not history, be our guide.

For those of you who are on the fence about our changes and for whom the daily paper means so much, I ask that you give us a try for a few weeks. I believe you will find that The Patriot-News is still the great newspaper our community depends on.

When the changes were first announced, the editor was more open about the economic realities that drove the decision.

Boring and biased is no way to go through life

I would also take issue with the claim that the P-N is a great newspaper.

Why some newspapers deserve to die

In its dotage, the P-N suffers from many of the problems that plague the dinosaur media.

Re-virgining and guild thinking

Kirkpatrick: “What we do is important.”

Krebs: “Journalism is much more a calling than it is a job..”

Like most of the MSM, the Patriot-News skips the whole “journalism of verification” when it comes to journalists and journalism. When they turn their gaze inward, they leave their cynicism behind. Journalists are special people “called” to do important work.

So pay up, chumps.

This is true even when said journalists stop being journalists.

Jeanette Krebs:

It's been a privilege leading The Patriot-News Opinion pages

This is my last column. As with many love affairs, this one is coming to an end. I am leaving The Patriot-News, returning to a position in public relations and advocacy with the Harrisburg-based firm Bravo Group.

Because I have had the rare good fortune of being able to slip between these two worlds, I know there are great and rewarding challenges ahead of me as well. No lack of balls in the air and just a different type of adrenaline rush.

Again, I ask:

How does that re-virgining process work.

Agency problem

Unlike Tina Brown of Newsweek, the people at the P-N have not blamed the Zeitgeist.

Both publications did suffer from some of the same problems. For example, the classic agency problem:

This is a case study in agency theory. The stockholders want Newsweek to maximize the returns it pays to them. The best way to do that is to write a high-quality publication that appeals to a broad audience. The writers and editors are seeking career advancement. You don’t get that appealing to the morons in flyover territory with simplistic bourgeois truth. You get ahead in the media by impressing the media elites, the unofficial campaigners, the reality-based community.

So Newsweek, like many publications, increasingly focused on appealing to a very narrow K-Street/Upper East Side/90210 crowd. That trashed the magazine’s reader base and ruined the company, but it made a lot of journolists into Big Names.

The Agents succeed by gutting the Principals. Tis a twice-told tale.

In the case of the P-N, the editorial page was way out of step with the center-right, gun-owning population of central Pennsylvania. Plus, it periodically felt the need to remind their readers that they were racist.

Commentary: Intolerant public will hinder gun control efforts

Op-ed: Modern day 'slaughter of the innocents' should prompt action

Editorial: Harrisburg and its suburbs need to reacquaint themselves as good neighbors

Editorial: Newtown shooting should prompt safety and gun conversation

This stance did not help it retain subscribers, but it might have helped the career prospects of the people who ran the page.

Heather Long is editorial page editor. 255-8104 or hlong@pennlive.com. Beginning in January, Long will be assistant comment editor for The Guardian.

They really should have taken a page page from the New York Times.

When the Times went looking for a replacement for William Safire, they skipped the castor oil journalism that the P-N loved so much. Instead they placated their core readership:

In 2003, Brooks got a call from New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins inviting him to lunch. Collins was looking for a conservative to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, but one who understood how liberals think. “I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn’t make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,” says Collins. “He was perfect.”

Sandusky scandal--who captured the value?

Like Newsweek, the decline of the P-N illustrates the non-synergistic relationship between print and cable news:

The Patriot-News won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Their lead reporter, Sara Ganim, became a fixture on television news. That worked out better for Ganim than for the newspaper that paid her.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sara Ganim leaves Patriot-News to join CNN

Which raises a question I asked years ago:

In essence, they let newspapers bear the cost while ESPN or Nancy Grace shares in the benefit.

(I’ve long found it puzzling that publishers and editors let their reporters give away their expensive product to the competition. Don’t they know about unsold cows and free milk?)

This could be an interesting read

Epstein is one of the smartest writers around so this is not going to be your usual true crime book.

Smart analysis you won't hear on ESPN

Tim Tebow Could Have Saved 5 GMs, 7 Coaches And 9 Teams

Seven coaches and five general managers were fired on Black Monday, the day after the 2012 regular season came to an end.

A total of nine teams canned one, the other, or both.

Tim Tebow could have saved any one of these jobs – if only these coaches and GMs had the nuggets to stand up to tired old conventional wisdom and had the common statistical sense to acquire and put on the field the most misunderstood quarterback in the game today.

New insight unto the day of infamy

Pearl Harbor 2.0

The “infamy” of December 7, 1941, is deeper than most Americans have ever imagined. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was almost certainly the result of a Soviet plot—“Operation Snow”—carried out by Harry Dexter White, a figure of enormous influence in the Roosevelt administration and a known Soviet spy.

So true

The day that baseball died: Happiness was Roberto Clemente, and then he was gone

If you were a kid growing up in Pittsburgh 40 years ago, you probably feel a little different when New Year's Eve rolls around from the rest of the revelers out there. It was on Dec. 31, 1972, that Pirates Hall of Fame right fielder Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash while delivering relief supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua.

Crazy Tea Partier?

No. The incomparable Dr. Thomas Sowell:

The more I study the history of intellectuals, the more they seem like a wrecking crew, dismantling civilization bit by bit — replacing what works with what sounds good.

A great day in history

December 31, 1942: USS Essex Commissioned

With the coming of World War II, design studies of probable Essex successors were curtailed and the construction of additional ships of the class greatly expanded. Ultimately, two civilian shipyards and three Navy yards built the 24 ships actually completed. Following an accelerated construction period, the Essex herself was commissioned 31 December 1942, and 16 more were commissioned by the end of the war. Arriving in the Pacific, starting in August 1943, these new ships created and perfected-in conjunction with the CVLs and new mobile logistic support forces-one of the most impressive weapon systems of all time, the fast carrier task force.

Starting with the 31 August 1943 strike by the Essex and Yorktown (CV-10) against Marcus Island, 14 of the class participated in the war against Japan. Ten were damaged, eight by kamikaze attacks. Only one, the Franklin (CV-13), was nearly lost. She made it back to the United States on her own power but never saw active duty again.

A sobering report from Egypt

Obama Gives Cold Shoulder to Egyptian Secular Democrats

What the Brotherhood is doing in Egypt is holding a gun to the head of its opposition trying to pass a constitution that so far failed to garner a greater support among Egyptians.

Once that becomes the law of the land, the race is on to turn Egypt into another theocracy headed by an Islamist fascist regime that soon after will threaten the security of the free world. At the heart of it is the Obama administration and its failed foreign policy, and what I see as the desire to destroy moderate Egypt and turn it over to the fanatic elements of the society, creating a monster that will turn on its creator.

David Gregory must go to jail or go to Cleveland

It is the only way he and NBC News can maintain their journalistic independence.

If he is not prosecuted, then he is the recipient of a big favor from the Powers That Be.

How can he viewers trust him to be a vigilant watchdog in D. C. when he owes them such a debt?

Merry Christmas

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.

Luke 2:8-14

Sunday, December twenty-third, a date that lives forever in Steelernation's memory

Steelers' Immaculate Reception: 40 years later, it thrills us still

The 'Immaculate Reception' turns 40

John Ziegler: Defender of Lost Causes

The man who defended Sarah Palin in Media Malpractice is dismantling the media narrative about Joe Paterno.

The Framing of Joe Paterno

UPDATE (12/22/12) : He has an op-ed from today's Harrisburg paper:

NCAA president Mark Emmert completely misses the mark on Penn State

Remembering the lies and a hero

A couple of interesting reviews of the new play about the Times's man in Moscow during the worst of Stalin's horrors.

Stalin’s Sock Puppet

Book Review — ‘The Party Line’

We need to remember the cynical lies of Walter Duranty and the part The New York Times played by giving him a microphone. To dismiss it as old news is to help perpetuate Duranty's and Stalin's successful propaganda efforts.

Even after 80 years, the truth is still lagging behind the lies. Haynes and Klehr amply document that in their book In Denial the historical profession spent decades minimizing the Stalin's crimes including the genocide in the Ukraine. A couple of years ago Howard Kurtz beclowned himself because he did not remember (know?) this episode in journalistic history.

We should also remember the heros of this time. Gareth Jones did what journalists are supposed to do. He dug up the facts and then informed his readers. Of course, this made him a marked man in Stalin's workers paradise. This site is dedicated to his memory and his work.

Rescued from the memory hole

At Last, Honor for Albert Wedemeyer, a Great American Soldier

If the United States had listened to Wedemeyer, World War II might have ended in 1943, with Soviet Russia’s armies still within her own borders, sparing the nations of Eastern Europe their forty year nightmare in the grip of Soviet communism. Even more relevant to our own times, China would not be the stew of communist -- or pseudo-communist -- wealth and power it is today. In 1945, Wedemeyer urged President Franklin Roosevelt to give Nationalist China the military and financial aid it deserved. Alas, Roosevelt’s declining health left him too addled to make a decision of that magnitude. Wedemeyer’s advice was as ignored as it had been when he declared that a massive invasion of Europe could end World War II in 1943.

How did Wedemeyer become World War II’s forgotten prophet? The answer to that question is a tale of the perils of coalition warfare combined with ideological bias, treachery, and treason. McLaughlin tells the story in calm matter-of fact prose, which makes it even more astonishing.

“We lost the battle but we won the war for Polish freedom,”

Polish president makes Reagan tribute on martial law anniversary

President Bronislaw Komorowski laid a wreath beneath the statue of late US president Ronald Reagan in Warsaw on Thursday evening, marking the 31st anniversary of martial law in Poland.

things that make you wonder

Ace:

Sen. Menendez Had an Illegal Alien Sex Offender Working as an Unpaid Intern; Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security Instructed ICE to Delay Arresting Him Until After Menendez's Reelection

A real CIA sex scandal

When I read this article I was left both angry and puzzled.

Spy's Case Offers Rare Glimpse Inside CIA

A highly decorated former CIA deep cover operative’s long quest to nail the spy agency for obliterating his career in retaliation for exposing the security violations of a senior agency official and her State Department husband gets a rare public hearing Friday.

“Peter B,” whose full name and former duties remain classified, contends that he lost his CIA job because he had learned about an affair that the husband of his supervisor, Margaret “Peggy” Lyons, was carrying on with a Taiwanese spy.

What is wrong with CIA? Does no one there care about security?

How does someone with Ms. Lyons’s record get hired at “a government security contractor”? And how does a security company with employees like Ms. Lyons remain a government contractor?

Why is this not a bigger story? It has everything-- sex, spies, whistle-blowers.

Garry Wills-- philistine hipster

When Brubeck Wasn’t Cool

It is worth mentioning, as well, that the Brubeck who is a hapless punchline here for Garry Wills is the same Brubeck who, four decades later, was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, and of whom Barack Obama said at the time, “You can’t understand America without understanding jazz, and you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck.”

If only it were true

An interesting piece on "managerialism" past and present:

HBR Celebrates Its Graveyard Of Obsolete Management Ideas

Denning is spot on about the many failures of managerialism. I fear that he is too optimistic, however, about the future.

The new way of running organizations is not just a different set of management practices. It’s really a change in an ecosystem—from an ecosystem of hierarchical bureaucracy, internally focused and grinding along with the production of outputs, to an ecosystem that is agile and very externally focused on client-perceived outcomes.

It’s a paradigm shift from a mindset of “you take what we make” to “we want to understand your problems and will do whatever it takes to solve them”, as Ranjay Gulati has pointed out in his marvelous book, Reorganizing For Resilience (2010)

The paradigm shift entails a change from a world in which workers and customers are manipulated as things to a world in which workers and customers are interacted with as human beings.

If that really is the future, then sign me up. There are counter-currents at work, however, that make me wonder if the immediate future really belongs to the new paradigmers.

1. Whole industries have discovered that they can make billions in profit by manipulating their customers. Credit cards, cell phones,and cable TV companies have become masters at nickel-and-diming their customers through hidden charges, stealth price increases, and quality fade.

2. We are in the midst of a Christmas shopping season in which retailers took away Thanksgiving for millions of their employees. Does anyone really think that this happened after respectful interaction with said employees?

Today's outrage of the day

Buried Bombshell: CBS Video Shows Obama Refusing To Call Benghazi A Terrorist Attack...On September 12th

As Fox News' Brett Baier points out, that directly contradicts Obama's pre-planned statement during the second debate with Romney. You know, the one where hacktastic Candy Crowely vouched for Obama's lie.

I guess that's what they mean by 'nuance'

Ace:

NYT, 1992: Bush's 2.7% GDP Growth Is a "Gross National Letdown" NYT 2012: Obama's 2.0% Growth Is "Steady Improvement"

"Trust matters"

The Omertà Administration

We know this much: What Barack Obama said is unambiguously false. Members of his administration have not provided information to the American people about Benghazi as they have received it. And in many instances, the opposite has been true. The Obama administration has used every means at its disposal to avoid sharing information about the Benghazi attacks—not only with the American people, but with Congress, too.

Crushing dissent is the next new thing for Facebook

From Patterico:

Facebook Censoring SEALS to Protect Obama

The Benghazi cover-up

I think that this post at Powerline has a lot of interesting analysis in it.

Benghazi: A Reader Assesses the Evidence [Updated]

This is very telling:

So what we have here is the first huge contradiction between Panetta and the military and the CIA. SOMEONE sent those guys from Tripoli, but it was not the military. Why was it ok to send 8 lightly armed American guys from Tripoli into harm’s way to rescue 30+ people in Benghazi, but not ok to send a heavily armed special forces contingent who have trained for just such a scenario?

Panetta’s excuses do seem nonsensical in light of what actions were taken to help the Benghazi personnel.

David Halberstam makes an important point about scandals and investigative reporting:

Time was on the side of Woodward and Bernstein. A story like Vietnam or Watergate has a balance of forces of its own. At first the charges are deniable, the existing structure holds, powerful men with powerful positions can keep their troops in line. All the weight is on one side, and reporters like Woodward and Bernstein are a tiny minority, seeming puny by comparison. But there is the momentum, The denials slowly weaken, events undermine the denials so there have to be more denials, and each denial is a little weaker than the previous one. … Slowly the people who are issuing denials lose credibility, and the reporters begin to gain credibility.

Of course, the pace of this process depends on having enough reporters ask enough questions to chip away at the cover stories and self-serving spin. On Benghazi, most of the press have been slavish lapdogs.

For example, take our local failing daily. On Sunday, they wrote this about Libya:

The president, however, has tough questions to answer. What the administration truly knew before the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, needs to be made clear and quickly.

The only problem is, the “demand” came in the editorial that endorsed Obama for re-election. That is all the evidence one needs to know that the White House does not need to answer any tough questions quickly. Running out the clock---- stalling until election day, is working just fine with the working press.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Any editorial board that takes JFK conspiracy loons seriously is the wrong place to look for hard-headed logic or intelligent analysis.

Paterno

Here is an hour-long interview with the author of the new biographer of Joe Paterno

WITF "Smart Talk"

The author does yeoman's work trying to clear up some of the major factual errors that lie at the heart of the prevailing narrative.

Why Mark Steyn is the go-to guy

Benghazi bungle requires act of urgent political hygiene

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. "Within minutes of the first bullet being fired, the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied," said Ty Woods' father, Charles. "In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured, and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son's life was sacrificed because of the White House's decision."

Is Joe Biden a psychopath or is this evidence of advancing senility?

'Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?'
Biden's bizarre question angers father of Navy SEAL who died in Benghazi attack
VP made inappropriate comment to Charles Woods, father of SEAL Tyrone
Father angered by White House reaction to deadly assault in Benghazi

UPDATE (10/31):
Ace:

Does anyone in the media worry that the currently-serving Vice President isn't mentally all there? We had a National Panic about this when Sarah Palin was running for the post. Not a week goes by that Joe Biden doesn't have a senior moment, but apparently it's now okay that the Vice President might be ever so slightly mentally checked out.

How a journalistic icon covered an election year scandal

Media apologists offer two arguments for refusing to cover the Benghazi attack and its many unanswered questions:

1. People don’t care
2. It’s too close to the election.

I think this piece by Alcia Shepherd is relevant on both counts.

If Walter Cronkite Said It Was A Story, It Was

First, I think it is easy to mistake “don’t care” with “haven’t heard about it.” The average citizen is very different from the news junkies who work in newsrooms.

Nixon campaign operatives broke into the Democratic headquarters inside the Watergate building on June 17, 1972. The Washington Post and others jumped on the story initially but it still didn't have much traction four months later. A Gallup poll in October 1972 showed that 48 percent of the country did not recognize the word Watergate.

Second, Walter Cronkite was not afraid to take on the Watergate story during the 1972 election season.

The ground-breaking, two-part special ran on Oct. 27 and 31, 1972. These two stories were a turning point for the saga that would grip the nation for most of the next two years.

Cronkite's first piece ran for nearly 15 minutes in a 22-minute broadcast the unprecedented equivalent of a newspaper turning two-thirds of its front page over to one story. [The second story ran for 9 minutes.]

The CBS Evening News devoted over half of its air time over two nights to the Watergate story.

They did not just cover it, they demanded that viewers pay attention. At the time they had the biggest megaphone in the country and Cronkite used it days before the election.

America's most trusted newsman said Watergate was a story the nation should be interested it and therefore it was.

That’s a key element of “explanation space”: signifying what events are important and what events are not.

We are in a vicious circle”: The public doesn’t care because the MSM treats the story as unimportant. The deciders use public indifference as a reason to ignore the story.

Hmm…. Maybe this guy has a point.

Benghazi and Obama: the media is trying to shore up this desperate administration

Now it certainly can be argued that there is no story because there is no scandal. Right now facts are scarce and the big picture is obscure.

The same thing was true of Watergate in 1972. Ben Bradlee worried that the Post might be on a fool’s errand. He was reassured by superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams:

If they’re [the Nixon campaign]clean why don’t they show it? Why are there so many lies? I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got them.

Jacques Barzun, R. I. P.

He was 104. He wrote an 800 page best seller when he was in his 90s. That's a good run by anyone's standards

Cultural historian, author Jacques Barzun dies

(HT: Steve Sailer)

Barzun was one of those astounding historians (now perhaps an extinct species) who combined broad learning with graceful writing.

I can heartily recommend any of these books. All of them stand up to re-reading.

Media scandals: will it be sauce for the gander?

Two British media scandals have jumped the pond.

First, the phone hacking scandal has new legs.

CNN keeps quiet over claims against Piers Morgan

The American media was all over this story last spring when the target was Rupert Murdoch. Will they show the same interest now that CNN's Piers Morgan is the one who stands to be embarrassed?

My Magic Eight Ball says--- ARE YOU KIDDING?

A much more serious scandals swirls around the NY Times and its new CEO.

New NYT CEO: BBC sex scandal doesn't alter Times support

The Jimmy Savile scandal and Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Reuters headline understates the seriousness of the scandal. It appears that the late Jimmy Savile was the BBC's Jerry Sandusky with a victim count that may reach in the hundreds.

The Paterno rule (promulgated by the MSM in the wake of the Sandusky scandal) demands that Mark Thompson step down at the Times. After all, he was the man in charge while the serial abuser was active.

The Donald makes an even bigger fool of himself

Call the waahmbulance: Thin-skinned conservafraud Donald Trump attacks Malkin as a ‘dummy’

A feature not a bug

Christina Romer: Obama Is No Roosevelt

Economist Christina Romer defends the stimulus she helped devise and delivers a few laughs in the process. Among the lessons learned from the stimulus experience she notes the importance of salesmanship and public confidence

I've argued before that the Obama administration made a cynical decision not to follow the FDR model and that they are now paying the price for that miscalculation.

September 2009

So it turns out that the Obama brain trust was more realistic than Republicans and many conservatives. They understood that Michael Barone was correct: the US remains a center-right nation. While many Republican “strategists” thought the public had rejected all things conservative, the new administration recognized that their agenda lacked popular support.

Hence, their cynical desire to “not let a crisis go to waste.” The administration hoped that they could lock in their programs while the public was stunned by the financial meltdown and the Obama honeymoon.

December 2010

There is some truth in this assessment. I would also argue that the administration stumbled because it was too cynical, too insular, too high-handed, and too partisan.

If ever there was a president with the opportunity to become a second FDR, it was Barack Obama in January, 2009.

Yet the administration rejected Roosevelt’s focus of his first 100 days: relief, recovery, reform. Nor did it follow his example and rally broad national support for his programs. Instead, the tone and direction were set by the hyper-partisan Rahm Emmanuel: “never let a crisis go to waste.”

The administration was almost eager to move the economic crisis to the back burner while they and the liberal Congress pushed forward with long-standing items on their wish list (cap and trade, health care reform, immigration reform, etc.). Inside Washington, it might seem smart to see a crisis as an opportunity to pass progressive legislation. To the people who are bearing the brunt of the recession, it seems like an abdication of leadership or a heartless betrayal of trust.

No surprise, then, that the stubborn economic weakness has been a drag on Obama’s approval numbers. It is not just that the public is impatient; many voters rightly sense that the White House felt little urgency to fix what was obviously broken.

September 2011

In the Hundred Days Congress did little more than rubber stamp the legislation that flew from the White House to Capitol Hill. That might not be the best way to govern, but it left no doubt that Roosevelt was the Man with a Plan (actually many plans). FDR also used the new medium of radio to connect with voters via his fireside chats. He was at the center of the public debate-- at once the towering authority figure in the White House and the reassuring voice in everyone's living room.

Obama often seemed to disappear off-stage during the major battles of 2009. He deferred to congress and let them craft most of the major legislation. He allowed Reid and Pelosi to move at a glacial pace on important issues like financial reform. The White House was unable or unwilling to find a modern equivalent of the fireside chat that would let Obama sustain public support for his programs.

Maybe, just maybe, the voters did not sour on Obama because he confronted problems that were beyond the powers of government. Perhaps, remembering Roosevelt, they fault him for not trying hard enough to solve the problems they care about most. If i am right, then progressives owe the president an apology. It is not that he did too little for them, it is that he tried to do too much.

June 2012

Unfortunately, the Administration chose to operate as a arm of the most partisan members of Congress instead of fashioning a program and platform of its own. On the really crucial issues, the president ratified the proposals of Pelosi, Dodd, Frank, et. al., rather than crafting his own, more centrist program

For the record

Obama wrong about bayonets

Hoover and Pearl Harbor

I found this paper fascinating.

The FBI’s Role in the Pearl Harbor Attack(.pdf)

However, mounting new evidence clearly demonstrates not only that the Pearl Harbor commanders shouldered the blame unjustly but that the FBI secretly and shamelessly contributed to this result. Specifically, the FBI successfully: (1) shielded investigation of its own failures from all Pearl Harbor investigations; (2) acquiesced to the Commission Chairman’s perjury to Congress; (3) secretly influenced Congress’ report to protect the FBI at the expense of the Army and Navy; (4) secretly made false accusations against Admiral Kimmel and General Short; and (5) conspired to withhold evidence from the Attorney General.

Just another example of the sort of dirty bureaucratic games that Hoover played every day he was with the Bureau. That's old news but the article shows that Hoover's lies and distortions still color the historical record.

First rule of counterintelligence: never say never

While rummaging through some old files, I ran across this review essay from 2000:

The Plot Thickens

One passage turned out to be unexpectedly revealing.

In 1992 KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the British and brought with him an enormous trove of detailed notes he made of the KGB files he handled. Historian Christopher Andrew mined these notes to produce a revelatory book on the KGB.

Andrew is a respected and prolific scholar of Soviet and British intelligence. Thomas Powers (the reviewer) is an astute writer who is no neophyte on the spy beat.

So it was something of a shock to read this:

Nor, Andrew says, do Mitrokhin's six cases of notes suggest that major Soviet spies in the United States and Britain remain undiscovered.

Nine months after this review appeared, the FBI arrested Robert Hanssen. He had been a Soviet/Russian spy for 22 years. For 13 of those years, Mitrokhin was still with the KGB. Yet, apparently, he never saw a hint in the Moscow files that the KGB had a high level source in Washington.

That is no criticism of Mitrokhin; it is simply a useful reminder that the fragmentary revelations from spy agencies never give us the complete picture.

Christopher Andrew, however, is a different issue. He is an inveterate defender of Britain's intelligence bureaucracies and is quick to use his insider status to disparage investigators who raise troubling questions about old spies. See this essay for an example:

Christopher Andrew and the Strange Case of Roger Hollis

Chapman Pincher provides another example of Andrew's tendency to push his evidence too far. Before Andrew worked with the Mitrokhin material, he co-authored a book with KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky (KGB: The Inside Story, 1990). Because Gordievsky claimed to have worked on an official history of KGB operations in Britain, his knowledge is deemed definitive and his judgments were treated as well-nigh definitive when it comes to Cold War mysteries.

Yet, as later investigations revealed, Gordievsky revealed nothing about Geoffrey Prime while the latter was betraying Anglo-British secrets to the Soviets. Nor did his historical studies include the activities of Melita Norwood and Kitty Harris-two agents who helped steal atomic secrets for Stalin.

Gordievsky may have known a lot, but he hardly knew everything.

Robin Winks displayed a more sophisticated understanding of the intelligence game in Cloak and Gown:

[Angleton] had the professional's necessary interest in ambiguity: an intense commitment to the elimination of ambiguity where sources conflicted (rather than the amateur's tendency to attempt to reconcile conflicting statements, as though both might be true, rather than both being false) combined with the ability to live with the unreseolved so that one did not force a premature resolution out of sheer discomfort. Ambiguity related, of course, not merely to factual accuracy; perhaps more important, it related to moral meaning (326-327)

[There are] no secret documents in the romantic sense of the words. On any important subject, there is no single document or even group of documents that contain "the secret." No spy could know enough to spot such a document if it existed, and no vacuum cleaner approach to espionage, even should it gather up two or three documents of the highest importance, would lead without all the analytical skills of the humanists to any valid conclusions. Documents do not speak: they do not declare that they are "the offbeat thoughts and recommendations of a highly-placed but erratic advisor," not a draft intended only for discussion, not a record of a decision rescinded orally the next day. (462-463)

Chris Matthews is deranged

He thinks he coulda' been a contender

Ace

What Matthews just described is a Mary Sue fantasy. He's just constructed a fanfic in which a character much like Chris Matthews, who is in fact also named Chris Matthews, bails Obama out of his troubles using his Street Smarts and Irish blarney in an alternate universe America of 2010-2012.

The case of the dog that barked too soon

Why did the Chicago Tribune tip-off Blogo?

The Blago File

Follow-up question: Why doesn't Patrick Fitzgerald care?

All of which leaves the reader still wondering why a U.S. attorney with a record of not tolerating leaks would be so sanguine about this one, even going so far as to thank the Tribune and then, presumably, grant it exclusive access to hundreds of hours of wiretap evidence. Was Blagojevich’s arrest—occurring, as it did, before any quid pro quo was finalized—a surgical strike intended to warn Jesse Jackson Jr. and, perhaps, Obama’s top aides that they, too, were under surveillance? Coen and Chase don’t even raise the possibility.

CNN circles the wagons (UPDATED)

Mark Whittaker, CNN's Managing Editor:

Let’s start with a big round of applause for Candy Crowley for a superb job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. She and her team had to select and sequence questions in a matter of hours, and then she had to deal with the tricky format, the nervous questioners, the aggressive debaters, all while shutting out the pre-debate attempts to spin and intimidate her. She pulled it off masterfully.

More at Powerline.

It says a great deal about the MSM that CNN is backing Crowley for her bizarre intervention in the debate.

Bryan Preston reminds us of the key fact:

More than a Week After Benghazi, WH Spox Jay Carney Admitted that Administration Had Not Called It a Terrorist Attack

Crowley is relying on a Clintonian parsing of the record to defend Obama.

Jeffrey Lord asks a good question:

Did she at any point say to some Obama staffer something along the lines of "Oh by the way, I have the transcript of the Rose Garden statement on Benghazi with me for the debate"?

She hasn't said.

But suffice to say, there are a lot of people raising the question of behind-the-scenes coordination -- all stemming from Obama's instruction (and it certainly sounded like an instruction) to "Get the transcript." Followed instantly by Crowley complying -- and silencing Romney on the topic.

My fearless prediction: Howard Kurtz will defend Crowley to the hilt on Sunday's "Reliable Sources"

UPDATE: As predicted, Kurtz did what a good lap dog does.

Although i do wonder if using Dan Rather to vouch for Crowley was really a good idea.

Looks like lying is contagious

Candy Crowley’s Big Lie of a “fact-check”

And that, perhaps, is why Crowley did it—so that she could wreak the maximum damage on Romney, carry the largest bucket of water possible for Obama, and count on the fact that any corrections that emerged would reach only a small fraction of the number her lie did.

Bryan Preston

This is the moment that debate moderator Candy Crowley jumped up from behind her desk and tackled Mitt Romney just as he was striding toward a game-changing touchdown. The replacement refs of the NFL had nothing on Crowley. They merely got calls wrong. I don’t recall them ever slipping into a linebacker role and making a game-saving tackle for any team.

Joe Biden's big lie

Joe Biden's War On The Truth

Catholics push back against one of Smirkin' Joe Biden's many preposterous debate assertions.

VP debate reactions

Ace

JOE BIDEN FLAT-OUT LIED ABOUT HIS VOTES ON THE WARS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

Jeffrey Lord

Biden Loses by a Smirk

Hot Air

Angry old man yells at Paul Ryan for 90 minutes

Fred Barnes

Biden Bombed

A good man gone

Vietnam vet Plumley dies; featured in war movie

COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) — Basil L. Plumley, a renowned career soldier whose exploits as an Army infantryman were portrayed in a book and the movie "We Were Soldiers," has died at 92 — an age his friends are amazed that he lived to see.

HT: Paul Davis

Why some newspapers deserve to die

A troubled (redundant: is there any other kind? ed.) local paper decided to offer their paying customers a preview of tomorrow’s VP debate.

High drama: How Joe Biden can defeat Paul Ryan in VP debate

The deciders drew on their vast professional expertise and offered up a piece that was part meandering paean to gaffe-prone Joe and part slap-dash hit job on Paul Ryan.

The real WHAT WERE THEY THINKING moment comes at the end. Here we find the brief bio that tells the reader why they should pay attention to the astute analysis just presented.

Harry “H.C.” Nash is a writer and painter living in Williamsport. He is marketing a book titled “Patsy of the Ages: Lee Harvey Oswald and His Nation Half a Century Later.”

That’s right. The Harrisburg Patriot-News is offering political “analysis” by a loony* JFK conspiracy theorist who believes that “a deliberate fraud was perpetrated by officials of the U.S. government to conceal the conspiracy that assassinated the president.”

*Bryan Burroughs:

What Bugliosi has done is a public service; these people should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts.

I guess some voters are more important than others

Here in Pennsylvania our voter ID law was put on hold for the November elections. The courts were concerned that some voters would be disenfranchised.

The local press treated the law as big news and a big political issue.

I have no illusions that this case of voter disenfranchisement will get any attention whatsowever.

Obama’s Invisible War Against Military Voters

Almost no one has noticed that the Obama administration is waging war administratively against the voting rights of America’s warriors overseas. This bureaucratic assault comes in the form of the Obama administration’s unconscionable foot-dragging on the implementation of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009. The legislation passed, in part, because the nonpartisan Military Voter Protection Project discovered in 2008 that under 20 percent of 2.5 million military personnel voted by absentee ballot. By 2010 that figure had shriveled to just 5 percent.

But the Obama administration, which moves at light-speed to undermine common-sense state voter identification laws, hasn’t bothered to set up half of the installation voting assistance offices (IVAOs) required under the MOVE Act. The law was created to help deployed soldiers, many of whom are constantly on the move, to exercise the right to vote that they risk their lives to protect. IVAOs are supposed to help military personnel find their way through the maze of confusing voting rules enforced by the nation’s 55 states and territories.

Two historians

Stephen Schwartz

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012

The British Stalinist writer Eric Hobsbawm died on October 1, aged 95. I hesitate to refer to him as a “historian,” as other commentators doubtless will, given his extraordinary career as a purveyor of totalitarian lies.

A.N. Wilson

He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?

In his book The Age Of Extreme, published in 1994, he quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad. He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.

In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising - when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid - as 'the penalty of a premature uprising'.

Roger Kimball

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917–2012

In the annals of moral idiocy, the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday at 95, will ever enjoy a conspicuous place. A gifted and prolific writer, the Egyptian-born Hobsbawm was utterly absorbed by the ideology that fired his youthful dreams of utopia. How he must have savored the fact that he was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia which ushered in so much poverty, misery, terror, and freedom-blighting totalitarian oppression. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me,” Hobsbawm wrote in his memoir Interesting Times in 2002, “I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.”

Ron Radosh

Eugene D. Genovese: 1930-2012. Rest in Peace

One of America’s best historians, Eugene D. Genovese, passed away two days ago. He was one of my long-time friends. I knew him when both he and I considered ourselves Marxists, and his scholarship, integrity, forthrightness and outspoken and principled positions made him a figure that everyone had to contend with. Anyone who was lucky enough to have known Gene, even when at times they found themselves on opposite sides from him in a political battle, knows how much they learned from him, and how lucky they were to have had the chance to engage with him.

Hobsbawm kept his mind shut against inconvenient fact. Genovese, even as a Marxist, had a lively intelligence and an honest, open mind.

Guess which one was showered with honors?

Obama Agonistes

Ed Driscoll:

'An Isolated Man Trapped in a Collapsing Presidency’

Neo-neocon posted on the same question a few weeks ago:

Bob Woodward joins the anti-Obama crowd

As i noted there:

Barak Milhous Obama

Like Nixon we see a man in the Oval Office who is temperamentally unsuited for politics: introverted, insecure, and solitary.

Debate reaction

Ace:

The Mile High Massacre

Power Line

It’s Over

Bryan Preston

Knockout: Mitt Romney Crushes Barack Obama in First Presidential Debate

Weekly Standard

Four Takeaways From Romney's Denver Debate Demolition

The Polls: Remember Carter's "re-election"

Jeffrey Lord:

How Carter Beat Reagan

No matter what the polls say, we should remember the words of advertising great Bill Bernbach:

We are so busy measuring public opinion that we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics we forget we can create them.

Related:

Poll Games

A forgotten story is finally told

Here's a review from the Economist:

The Vivisection of Poland

THE biggest gap in most histories of the second world war is what happened to Poland. By the war’s end it had lost not only a fifth of its population but also its freedom—despite having fought from the first day to the last against the Germans....

But until Halik Kochanski’s “The Eagle Unbowed” nobody had written a comprehensive English-language history of Poland at war. A British-born historian whose own family’s experiences dot her pages, she weaves together the political, military, diplomatic and human strands of the story. She ranges from the fatal weaknesses of pre-war Poland (divided, cash-strapped and isolated) to the humiliation of Britain’s victory parade in 1946 when the organisers invited Fijians and Mexicans, but not Poles.

(HT: Bieganski the Blog)