Category Archives: Social Commentary

Unwarranted Assumptions

June 13, 2010 Rand Simberg 14 Comments

This writer has some tips on finding the best seats on a plane, but there’s an apparent bias:

Middle seats tend to be filled starting from the front of the aircraft and moving toward the rear—which means that if your flight isn’t full, you’re likely to get an empty seat next to you if you request an aisle seat in the center section in the back.

…I love 767s because there’s only one middle seat per row. This means that your chances of getting one are less than on any other two-aisle aircraft: A 767 can be 86 percent full before anyone gets stuck in the middle. Two-aisle planes tend to give you bigger seats, more legroom, and larger overhead bins than one-aisle aircraft.

…Unless I’ve achieved my personal nirvana of an aisle seat in an exit row, I always ask the gate agent if a better seat is available. Preferred seats (e.g., aisle seats up front) often open up at the gate because the elite-level or full-fare passengers who were occupying them get upgraded at the last minute.

Emphasis mine. Note that there’s an apparent assumption on her part that a) middle seats bad and b) aisle seats nirvana, for everyone. But why would I ask for an aisle seat when I don’t like aisle seats? I prefer windows, a word that doesn’t appear in the article. I actually almost prefer a middle seat to an aisle, because there is one less person to have to let out during the flight, and I’m not constantly getting jostled by passengers or flight attendants walking up and down the aisle. The only reason, to me, to prefer aisle is for safety (get out a little faster, unless you’re in an exit row), or a desire to get up occasionally and walk around (either for leg stretching or nature calls). My preference is to just cocoon at the window, where I can look out, and not be bothered by anyone else’s needs.

Yes, obviously, if you like aisles, then a two-aisle airplane is preferable. But if you prefer windows, wide-bodies suck, because they provide the lowest window-seat/seat ratio in the sky. My favorite plane, actually, is any variation on the old DC-9 (nowadays B-717 or S-80), because with only five seats per row, forty percent of them are windows.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The President Said What, Now?

June 11, 2010 Rand Simberg 6 Comments

Thoughts from Lileks on the KeisterKicker-in-Chief:

“He didn’t mean donkey,” she said, this being the only possible explanation. I shook my head. It will now be difficult to tell her not to use that word; it will now be a matter of time before my wife says, “Well, your daughter was sounding presidential today,” and it won’t be a reference to mankind’s universal aspirations. Unless you include the desire to kick BP’s tuckus, which seems fairly widespread.

I don’t know if I’ve written this, but I’ve certainly thought it. When I heard the president, my first response was, “Who is he kidding?” My second one was, “Gee, and here I thought that the purpose of getting people together to assay the facts was to determine what effective action to take. How Chicago of him to think that the only effective action is to take one’s boot off the throat of the country long enough to bury it in the appropriate fundament.”

And I, for one, haven’t been complaining about the president not emoting enough. I’ve never been interested in a president that “felt my pain.” All I’ve ever wanted is one that isn’t the cause of it.

No, my complaint is that he’s incompetent. So the all the talk about the asskickery isn’t very impressive to me. Usually, I’m glad that he’s incompetent, because most of the things he wants to do are awful, and I want them to fail at them, but this is a case where I wish that he could actually get it right.

[Update a while later]

Rich Lowry agrees with me: Mr. President, please don’t feel our pain.”

Was it Bill Clinton who started this infantilization of the American people?

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg isn’t impressed, either:

It’s like a Tonight Show joke.

Leno: “The president is so dorky . . . ”

Audience: “How dorky is he?”

“He’s so dorky, when he gets angry he convenes a panel of experts to tell him whose ass to kick.”

And speaking of The Tonight Show, let me reassure both editors and readers of family newspapers everywhere about my use of the word “ass.” Historian Steven Hayward reminds me that in 1979, Jimmy Carter responded to Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge by declaring he would “whip his ass.” It was one of those moments of presidential lameness that conjures the same bile of pity, schadenfreude, and heebie-jeebies one feels upon seeing a middle-aged balding dude with a long gray ponytail dancing at a rave.

As John Stewart said, the president is going to have to kick himself. In fact, if he had sufficient self awareness, he’d know that there are many reasons to do so.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The Democrats can’t put the blame genie back in the bottle. This is the kind of situation for which the Bard came up with the expression, “hoist onwith his own petard.”

[Update a while later]

Three reasons that the president should be kicking himself.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

It’s The Thirties Again

June 5, 2010 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

Time to blame the Jews. You know the old saying that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone? Whoever came up with that had Helen Thomas in mind. The doddering moron should have been put to pasture years ago.

[Update a while later]

A story of two Rachels:

Rachel Thaler was a British subject. Yet not a single British journalist has ever mentioned her, profiled her, interviewed her parents or other British relatives, or published her diary in a Fleet Street newspaper – except for a single solitary mention by the great (Jewish) comedienne Maureen Lipman noting that nobody ever mentioned her, or the other victims of Palestinian terrorism.

Ah, but Israel is an “apartheid state”, and the Palestinians are the Europeans’ unending adopt-a-Third-World-pet project. I write in the new National Review (on sale now-ish) that, if old-school judenhass was a by-product of more or less traditional racism and conventional nationalism, the new judenhass advances under the cover of “anti-racism” and “multiculturalism”. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without the ability to adapt.

What’s really frightening is how many useful Jewish idiots they have.

[Update a few minutes later]

So, should the Jews apologize to Turkey, or go back to Germany and Poland?

[Early afternoon update]

The most ancient virus to infect the soul:

Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.

With the advent of the “Palestinian cause” becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles — driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s — being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies. It is now actually a badge of pride in many Western circles to appear at various events wearing gold-plated buboes inset with multi-faceted Kaposi’s sarcoma that contain the virus at their core. Many now believe this intellectual adornment to actually be beautiful.

In a recent mutation, the virus has shown that it can leap the blood/brain barrier and actually infect Jews — if they feel safe within their “advanced” society. The current term for this mutation is “Juicebox Mafia” in which self-styled “intellectuals” of Jewish lineage actually feel it is “intelligent” to call for a world in which it is easier for Arabs and other Islamic groups to kill Jews wholesale. This sort of strange host to the virus is replacing the previous host termed “the self-hating Jew.” The reason for the rise of the Juicebox Mafia is unclear, but it may well have to do with desires for celebrity and paychecks that exceed the desire to live.

Or maybe “intellectuals” aren’t very smart.

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