The latest example of California's propensity to turn every perceived problem into a new law (or, in this case, a bill that could become a new law). The latest crisis: too many AOL CDs in the mail.
Again, the problem is not the particular bill, which is a trivial solution to a trivial offense. The problem is systematic. If you pass a new regulation every time some citizen finds something he or she doesn't like, pretty soon you have a terrible place that discourages enterprise--and encourages exit.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 16, 2004 • Comments
The WSJ's Dan Henniger has a good column on the innovative work Spirit of America is doing to help troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with civilian aid projects--everything giving school supplies and toys for kids to providing tools and training to carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and masons, to getting local TV stations on the air:
Jim Hake's organizational insight is to deploy the best practices of the modern U.S. economy--efficiency and speed--around the margins of the Iraqi war effort. The Amazons, Best Buys, FedExes and DHLs can get anything anywhere--fast. Why not use the same all-American skill at procurement efficiency and quick distribution to get the soldiers in Iraq (and Afghanistan) the stuff that government red tape will never provide in time?
His operation, in Los Angeles, is wholly New Economy. For past projects he's gotten the word out via Web loggers such as Glenn Reynolds's InstaPundit.com, windsofchange.net and hughhewitt.com. Mr. Hake finds low-cost suppliers on the Internet and negotiates prices. His donor network also suggests suppliers.
Earlier projects for the Marines flew over cargo planes of school supplies, basic medical equipment and toys (turns out Iraqi children love Frisbees). One anecdote: The day before the school equipment was to ship, they found that all the pencils broke easily. On a hunch, Mr. Hake made a morning call to a Staples manager in southern California. By midafternoon the Staples man lined up sources for 120,000 pencils--cheaper than the original buy. Mr. Hake bought and shipped them. Spirit of America is all-volunteer. The accounting for its projects, down to the penny, is listed on the Web site.
Spirit of America's buy-list for the Marines' TV-stations project includes digital video camcorders, desktop PCs for video editing, video editing software, televisions, 21-inch satellite dishes, KU-band universal transponders, satellite decoder/receivers, Philips audio/video selectors (4-in/2-out), VCRs (PAL and NTSC compatible), DVD players (multiregion compatible), step-down voltage converters (220 to 110) and lighting sets. The cost of this equipment is about $100,000.
Mr. Hake, incidentally, insists on paying for all the goods in his projects. He says donor relationships with big companies waste time getting sign-offs by senior management. I asked if he thought they could get the TV stations under way by the June 30 handover: "Absolutely. My goal is to have the gear at Pendleton by May 7. The Marines will fly it over and they are ready to get going on this. Needless to say, plans can always change in a combat zone but this is an undertaking to help turn the tide there." If this works, the Marines and Spirit of America hope to rebuild TV stations elsewhere around Iraq.
I've been making a donation to one Spirit of America project each month and I urge you to do the same.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 16, 2004 • Comments
The great Glenn Garvin, surely the only TV reviewer who's been detained by Castro's police (admittedly in another incarnation, as a foreign correspondent), takes on the Oliver & Fidel show with his usual combination of wit and telling detail:
Having revived the Western with Deadwood and the gangster genre with The Sopranos, HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy. Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone's latest round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front of a crowd of natives that's trying hard not to look bored while it waits for evolution to take its course....
Stone occasionally prods Castro with an uncomfortable question about free speech or secret trials. But followups are non-existent, and mostly Stone allows the dictator to stage his own little set pieces for the cameras. In one, Castro generously meets with some accused hijackers, who with straight faces say 30 years in prison would be a generous sentence.
In another, he walks among adoring throngs of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the Revolution was so wildly delusional (they claim, among other things, that Cuba is the only country in the world where blacks are permitted to own businesses) that I had to wonder if they weren't a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the documentary.
At times, it's hard to tell who is less lucid, Stone or Castro.
Stone, halting and distracted, seems to be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago as he ticks off the Latin American countries supposedly less democratic than Cuba -- including Brazil and Chile, both now governed by socialists.
Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some seriously senior moments. What are we to make of this impromptu little speech? "Today, with a computer and a dozen compact disks, you can hold all the literature ever written," he tells Stone. "So many things have changed. I do not know why the world has been making so much progress to end up in this. I am so sorry for the younger generation."...
The Dallas Morning News, by contrast, has an article by the Cuba bureau's Tracey Eaton that is so puffy that I have to wonder whether the editors appear to have been too embarrassed to put it on the DMN website. The headline pretty much sums it up: "Stone puts tough questions to Castro for documentary." I guess articles like that are why the DMN gets to have a Cuba bureau.
Update: The DMN story is finally online.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 15, 2004 • Comments
"Objectivity" and "balance" are no substitute for intelligence, knowledge, and skepticism in reporting. Compare this A.P. account of Oliver Stone's latest Castro kiss-up movie to this Q&A by Ann Louise Bardach on Slate.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 14, 2004 • Comments
The newsletter from the SMU Friends of the Library brings an interesting sign of economic improvement. The library offers a commercial research service to local businesses:
About six months before national economists announce a positive change, [the service's head Dev] Bickston notices that companies increase their inquiries about new technology and new products. Before the economy slows, businesses cut their research to the basics. Bickston's current workload may be an indicator of better times to come--business for his staff of four is better than it's been in five years, he says.
This service is also a good example of corporate outsourcing--contracting out functions that used to be done entirely in-house and thereby spreading the costs of, for example, maintaining a specialized staff and large library over many different organizations. In addition to providing research services to clients who don't have libraries, SMU works with about 60 corporate librarians:
Laurie Crim, law librarian at Texas Instruments, often orders technical articles related to the semiconductor industry for TI attorneys and engineers. A TI librarian for 20 years, Crim says the firm had many corporate libraries at one time; however, now she manages the corporation's only library. Other clients include small business owners and entrepreneurs.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 13, 2004 • Comments
George W. Bush is not the most articulate of men, but he is really good at one kind of speech: laying out in simple language the way he's thought through a policy decision. He most famously did that on stem cell research. Tonight's speech opening the press conference was another good example. If you've only seen snippets, I recommend reading, watching, or listening to the whole thing. Here's the conclusion:
Above all, the defeat of violence and terror in Iraq is vital to the defeat of violence and terror elsewhere; and vital, therefore, to the safety of the American people. Now is the time, and Iraq is the place, in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world. We must not waver.
The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes hostages, or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali, and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew.
We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September the 11th, 2001.
None of these acts is the work of a religion; all are the work of a fanatical, political ideology. The servants of this ideology seek tyranny in the Middle East and beyond. They seek to oppress and persecute women. They seek the death of Jews and Christians, and every Muslim who desires peace over theocratic terror. They seek to intimidate America into panic and retreat, and to set free nations against each other. And they seek weapons of mass destruction, to blackmail and murder on a massive scale.
Over the last several decades, we've seen that any concession or retreat on our part will only embolden this enemy and invite more bloodshed. And the enemy has seen, over the last 31 months, that we will no longer live in denial or seek to appease them. For the first time, the civilized world has provided a concerted response to the ideology of terror -- a series of powerful, effective blows.
The terrorists have lost the shelter of the Taliban and the training camps in Afghanistan. They've lost safe havens in Pakistan. They lost an ally in Baghdad. And Libya has turned its back on terror. They've lost many leaders in an unrelenting international manhunt. And perhaps most frightening to these men and their movement, the terrorists are seeing the advance of freedom and reform in the greater Middle East.
A desperate enemy is also a dangerous enemy, and our work may become more difficult before it is finished. No one can predict all the hazards that lie ahead, or the costs they will bring. Yet, in this conflict, there is no safe alternative to resolute action. The consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable. Every friend of America and Iraq would be betrayed to prison and murder as a new tyranny arose. Every enemy of America and the world would celebrate, proclaiming our weakness and decadence, and using that victory to recruit a new generation of killers.
We will succeed in Iraq. We're carrying out a decision that has already been made and will not change: Iraq will be a free, independent country, and America and the Middle East will be safer because of it. Our coalition has the means and the will to prevail. We serve the cause of liberty, and that is, always and everywhere, a cause worth serving.
In the Q&A, Bush was much more expansive, articulate, and comfortable than he's often been in the past.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 13, 2004 • Comments
For those looking for analysis of the current situation in Iraq, I recommend this post and comments at Winds of Change (via InstaPundit).
I have the same problem blogging on this topic that I do blogging on every little twitch in the economic statistics: It's too hard to separate the transient noise from the long-run trend, and the long run is what matters. Things are bad in Iraq right now, but is this a last-gasp effort by our enemies, the beginning of a quagmire, or, most likely, something in between whose conclusion depends largely on our response? Rushing to judgment, especially from afar, is a prescription for foolish conclusions and bad policies.
One reason pundits focus so much on the political, as opposed to substantive, effects of economic or military developments is that political effects do take place in the short run. Plus it's easier to understand poll numbers than to peer through the fog of war (or the complexity of the economy).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 08, 2004 • Comments
Stuart Benjamin on The Volokh Conspiracy predicts what pundits will say about Rice's testimony. He must be psychic:
I'm sufficiently confident about this that I think I can write up the scripts. Here are the buzzwords I expect from both sides. Play bingo at home (or, if you want, make it into a drinking game: one drink for each iteration of one of these words).
Of her demeanor, Rice supporters will say she was: "poised," "confident," "authoritative," and/or "polished."
Of her demeanor, Rice detractors will say she was: "defensive," "visibly annoyed," and/or "brusque" ; bonus (if they feel strongly) "petulant" and/or "schoolmarmish"
On the quality of her arguments, Rice supporters will say: "persuasive," "convincing," "firm," and/or "powerful"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "overpowering"
On the quality of her arguments, Rice detractors will say: "unpersuasive," "weak," "vacillating," and/or "shaky,"; bonus (if they feel strongly) "incoherent"
Overall, Rice supporters will describe her performance as: "a home run," "putting doubts to rest," "answering all the questions," "showing Clarke to be a liar," and/or "letting us get on to the people's business"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "refuting the demagogues on the other side"
Overall, Rice detractors will describe her performance as: "raising more questions than it answers," "a missed opportunity to inform the American people," "vindicating Richard Clarke," and/or "raising troubling questions about this Administration"; bonus (if they are really partisan) "you're the demagogue" (followed by: "am not!"; "are too!"; "am not!"; etc.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2004 • Comments
The new issue of Modernism Magazine features a back-page article on the new O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. Link was a photographer who recorded the waning years of steam locomotives. The museum is in the former Norfolk and Western train station, which famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy redesigned in 1947. As Modernism's Victoria Pedersen writes: "He completely transformed the 1905 neoclassical station, adding 22-foot ceilings, marble walls, terrazzo floors, a futuristic wall of horizontal windows and a dome. He also designed a concorse leading to the train platform that featured the first passenger escalators in the Roanoke Valley, cutting-edge technology for the period." The new station was the epitome of streamlined modernism. But what that meant in the Virginia of a half century ago is spelled out in the letters above the door in these photos from the Library of Congress collection, the first of which Modernism reprinted.
According to the Modernism photo caption, the Link Museum has removed the "Colored" sign. Wouldn't want to remind visitors of just how recent--how modern--legally enforced segregation was.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2004 • Comments
Reader Tucker Quayle sends this picture in response to Lileks's "dang creepy" shot (see below) and writes, "I guess we now know where the inspiration for Bam Bam came from. Right down to the wardrobe and hair color." But it's just not the same without the boots.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2004 • Comments