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Novak On Riordan

Bob Novak provides some more interesting background on Riordan’s electoral slapdown.

I wasn’t previously aware of this, but apparently (and bizarrely), Riordan was actually proud of his RINO label. And for people who thought that he was a conservative Republican in 1992, check this out:

I first met Riordan, a fabulously rich businessman, after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. His suggestions for urban peace sounded sensible but not very conservative. In passing, he informed me he was about to run for mayor the next year. He indicated he would not stress his Republican affiliation in seeking the non-partisan mayoralty in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

He was true to his word, even after entering the mayor’s office. Apart from flashing his RINO button, he fawned over President Bill Clinton, endorsed Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein for re-election and avoided Republican Party functions. He was so excessive in praising the way Federico Pena handled the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake as Clinton’s secretary of Transportation that he suggested Pena would make a good president.

Riordan has no one to blame for his loss but himself.

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Ralling With The Punches

I haven’t said anything about the now-famous penned atrocity that Ted Rall had pulled from the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record, but Protein Wisdom has been battering him pretty steadily, and hilariously for the past couple days. Today, they reprise the earlier Anne Coughman slicing and dicing of his monumentally stupid scribblings of a couple months ago.

Boy, I hope that I never get on her bad side…

But as long as we’re doing greatest hits, and using Teddy boy for target practice, here’s my take on him from my Media Casualties piece:

“For some, a lucky few, catatonia is a blessed escape. One poor wretch named Ted just sits up in his bed all day. His brow is furrowed, and his eyes are unfocused, or focused on some distant unreality, unseeable by the rest of us.

Old newsroom veterans call it the ‘thousand-word stare.’ They’ve all seen it–that look you get as you gaze intently at a blank computer screen, in a futile attempt to conjure up some words that will somehow spin an obvious and just victory into humiliating and immoral failure.

He had been leading a frontal assault on common sense, when he was cut down in a withering fire of logic and irony by a brigade of blogger sharpshooters and fact checkers. The hits were effective, but not always clean. He lived, but his syntax was badly mangled, and his credibility was shattered beyond any hope of salvaging it.”

But somehow, he keeps getting up, and coming back for more. Masochist.

Space

No Pain, No Gain

Yesterday’s Opinion Journal had a piece by Ralph Peters on how the fact that we are now seeing more casualties in Afghanistan is a “good” thing.

While at first reading, such a statement sounds appalling, I agree, in the relative sense of the word “good.” That the casualties have so far been low has possibly been an indicator that our war strategy has been insufficiently aggressive, and insufficiently…effective. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who have killed some of our troops, and who we are now destroying, escaped from Tora Bora last fall, when we relied on Afghan troops to corral them, rather than putting our own at risk. Tragically, but necessarily, some of our own are dying now so that future others, perhaps in the thousands, or millions, many of them women and children, will live.

Risk-averse strategies can fail in many spheres–not just military campaigns. In the training and fitness industry, there’s an old saying (crass though it may sound in the context of dedicated soldiers who will never come home to their families…) of “no pain, no gain.”

And any competent financial analyst can describe the indisputable and inevitable relationship between risk and reward. That’s why junk bonds pay a much higher interest rate than the debt of blue-chip stocks, or why startup firms offer a potentially much larger rate of return–with the corresponding chance that the entire investment may evaporate.

The same principle applies to research and development. Over the years, particularly since the Challenger disaster, NASA has become risk averse to the point of impotence. They will spend billions of taxpayer dollars in analysis, to avoid an outright and telegenic failure, even if the goal of the program itself is not achieved.

As an example, consider the X-34 program. It was supposed to produce a vehicle that would demonstrate the ability to fly hypersonically, reliably, as a major step on the way to affordable space access. (Unfortunately, NASA insisted that the contractor use an engine developed by NASA, which they later said was never intended to be a usable engine).

After the vehicle was mostly developed (minus the engine that the vehicle had been designed for, per NASA specifications), and NASA had a failure in a Mars mission, the agency decided that X-34 lacked sufficient redundancy and safety to fly. When they got an estimate of how much it would cost to add these (unnecessary) modifications to add the required redundancy, NASA decided instead to cancel the program.

Result? The vehicle never flew.

And the data obtained from it?

Zero.

All because NASA was unwilling to risk a failure of an experimental vehicle (the purpose of which is to determine whether or not a particular technology is viable or worth pursuing further).

If you want to know why only governments can afford spaceflight, seek no further than the outcome of this program…

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Is It Wrong To Break The Law?

There seems to be a subtle point missing in much of the discussion of Andrea Yates’ sanity.

Yes, she called the police because she knew that drowning her children like so many kittens in a sack was illegal. But if she (insanely, in my humble opinion) thought that the alternative was to consign them to hell, then she also thought that what she was doing was not wrong.

My opinion–she’s mad as a hatter (or at least she was on the day that she murdered her kids). She’s probably not a danger to society at this point, but she should get years of confined therapy, and never be allowed to bear any more children.

But the larger point is that all that is immoral is not necessarily illegal, nor should it be. And vice versa. Yes, we all know that killing your own children is wrong, but not simply because there’s a law against it. And not all things that are illegal (such as not reporting the location of Jews in Nazi Germany) are wrong.

And the point of this post is that, just because Andrea Yates reported her crime to the authorities, and was willing to accept the consequences, it does not mean that she properly understood the moral implications of her act.

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Condolences

I’ve been as hard on the EU as anyone in blogdom, but I want to extend my most profound sympathy to the families of the German and Danish (and any others of which I’m unaware) soldiers who were killed in Kabul, in defense of civilization.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!