The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving our programs out to cassette tape. After three months, I sold the computer and TV back to Robert — not because I didn’t like it, but because I was spending far too much time on it.

A few years later — in 1982 — my close friend Wayne Holder hired me into his nascent software company, Oasis Systems, in part to help with his existing and planned word processing utilities (The Word Plus, Punctuation + Style), but mostly to develop computer games. And we did, developing Sundog: Frozen Legacy on the Apple II, a game for which I still get e-mails (and which Wayne is even now working on resurrecting for modern platforms). In January 1984, a few months before Sundog shipped, we were invited by Guy Kawasaki to come up to Apple to see  a preview of the Mac and to talk about what software we could port to the Mac. Through my connections with computer stores in San Diego, I was able to get a personal loan of a Mac for a few days at home prior to the official announcement in Cupertino later that month, which Wayne and I attended as well. That was my first time seeing Steve Jobs in person, and it remains a memorable highlight of my professional life.

When the Mac shipped a few days later, I went down to the one computer store in San Diego that I knew would be getting machines from Apple. I took $3000 in cash with me and managed to convince the store owner — a friend — to let me have one of the three Macs he had to sell. Through a connection with Phil Lemmons — editor-in-chief at BYTE — I ended up writing the official BYTE review of the 128K Macintosh (August 1984 issue). By the end of 1984, I was writing full-time for BYTE, including on-going coverage of the Macintosh, particularly once my BYTE column started in mid-1985. After a few years of writing for BYTE, I switched to writing for Macworld magazine. Steve was now long-gone from Apple, and Apple was having some of its own problems going forward.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

To quote John Perry Barlow over on FB, “The world is suddenly a less interesting place.”  ..bruce w..

[1] The first was an HP-67 card-reading programmable calculator.

I could do without the music and intense narration, but I post this in memory of my late father, John A. Webster, who was there at Pearl Harbor as a 17-year-old seaman first class aboard the USS San Francisco.  If you click through on the video to YouTube, there are additional segments. Hat tip to Philip Klein at the American Spectator blog.  ..bruce w..

Hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest. ..bruce w..

A big hat tip to Andrew Malcom over at Top of the Ticket (one of the best political blogs on the web) for posting this video.  ..bruce w..

Heh. Hat tip to American Digest. ..bruce..

Matt Welch over at Reason reminds us of a critical historical event that, curiously, we don’t celebrate:

November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world, and instead leapfrogging back to what Steve Forbes describes in this issue as the “Jurassic Park statism” of the 1930s (see “?‘The Last Gasp of the Dinosaurs,’?” page 42). There have been more Hollywood hagiographies of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in the last five years than there have been studio pictures in the last two decades about the revolutionary anti-communists who dramatically toppled totalitarians from Tallin to Prague (see Tim Cavanaugh’s “Hollywood Comrades,” page 62). And what little general-nonfiction interest there is in the superpower struggle, as Michael C. Moynihan details on page 48 (“The Cold War Never Ended”), remains stuck in the same Reagan vs. Gorby frame that made the 1980s so intellectually shallow the first time around.

Please read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

Mayday! Mayday!

ADMIN: Yeah, I know today’s post title doesn’t rhyme with the others — but here’s a quick test of your own nit-pickiness: did the difference between Monday’s title and the rest of the week bother you?

MORNING LINKS (and these are likely the only link you’ll get today).

LINK: Speaking of workers, I’m going to be tied up all day today. So for this glorious morning, let us remember, courtesy of Amity Shlaes, the true efforts and consequnces of the New Deal:

As for President Hoover, his tenure was marked not by laissez faire or respect for private property–indeed, Hoover had labeled property a “fetish” before he became president. The Great Engineer was in fact the Great Intervener, meddling in multiple areas, raising taxes and backing tariffs, to the economy’s detriment. Mistrusting the stock market as unreal, Hoover berated short-sellers and exhorted businesses to keep wages high when they could ill afford it.

International, monetary and banking factors all played a role in creating the Depression, but the counterproductive Hoover mattered as well. As economist George Selgin has noted, the most absurd of the Hoover increases was a 2% levy on checks, which caused people to further drain money out of their bank accounts so they could pay their bills, untaxed.

Roosevelt, for his part was indeed courageous, and his call to action did inspire. FDR’s free-trade moves and some of his regulatory moves–the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal deposit insurance–helped to stabilize the economy. But the argument that FDR saved the U.S. from fascism is an exaggeration. And, like Hoover and his interventionists, FDR and his New Dealers did much to hurt the economy.

Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, created in 1933, pulled wages up when perishing companies could not afford it; come 1935, the Wagner Act gave unions more bargaining power, forcing further wage increases on companies. Roosevelt’s multiple tax increases caused businesses to postpone investment. Especially counterproductive was FDR’s “undistributed profits tax,” which punished firms for being cautious and forced them to disgorge cash at the worst possible moment.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Then go out and by Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. It’s now in paperback, and we have massive deficits as far as the eye can see, so it really behooves you (so to speak) to do so.

ITEM: Speaking of inappropriate steps, can you imagine the reaction if back during the 2000 recession, Laura Bush made a public appearance in a $540 pair of sneakers? I’ll be it would have appeared in far more places than the New York Daily News. (Hat tip to the Drudge Report.)

Some links sometime on the weekend, I think.  ..bruce w..

P.S. Behooves — Hoover — get it?

The Obama/Democratic financial plan in a nutshell

MORNING LINKS — apparently, Monday’s also a snowy day

ITEM: I went to bed with rain falling outside and woke up to about an inch of snow on the ground, with more falling. And apparently we could get more on Friday Morning (May 1st).

ITEM: For about two years before things collapsed, my co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, was pointing out the profound financial risks of the housing collapse and subprime crisis — backed with data gathered automatically from multiple listing services all over the country. He wasn’t alone; it’s just that nobody wanted the good times to end.

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: A Russian politician sets an example for the US Democrats — “Winning Candidate From Ruling Party Renounces Fraudulent Victory“. Now, if Al Franken could just take inspiration from this man. . . .

ITEM: On the other hand, the Labour Party in Merry Olde England just seems determined to beclown and befoul itself with idiocy that I can scarce believe:

They were ready to lay down their lives for Britain  -  and have been rewarded with an act of treachery.

Thousands of Gurkhas were yesterday shut out of the UK in what was described as ‘shameful betrayal’ by the Government.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas claimed changes in the rules would allow 4,300 more former Gurkhas to settle here out of the 36,000 who served in the British Army before July 1997.

But lawyers battling for the Gurkhas said they believed only around 100 would benefit. Hundreds of former rank-and-file soldiers will face deportation while thousands more will be barred from entering the country. . . .

Lawyer David Enright said: ‘It’s an absolute betrayal of the Gurkhas, who have been told they are not welcome in this country.

‘It is shameful. This Government has welcomed 600,000 Eastern Europeans, and tens of thousands of asylum seekers every year.

‘But these men, who have fought for us in our darkest hour and in the worst parts of the world, are not welcome. It is a scandal and an outrage.’

Miss Lumley, whose father fought alongside the Gurkhas, said: ‘These men do not want charity. They want this Government to recognise our moral debt of honour.’

Hat tip to Stoaty Weasel.

ITEM: Ya think?

In an interview with FOX News, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday ahead of elections there, said Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons makes it extra important for the government to keep a lid on the Taliban there.

ITEM: As has been the case for nearly a century now, the rest of the world looks to the United States to save them — this time, financially:

While much of the world blames the United States for triggering the global financial crisis and recession, most nations also are looking to America to start pulling the rest of the world out of the slump.

A parade of foreign financial leaders in town for this weekend’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank denounced the financial excesses on Wall Street that have cost millions of jobs and caused trillions of dollars in lost output from Detroit to New Delhi. Yet they also hailed some tentative signs of stabilization in the U.S. economy after a winter of free fall that led the world economy into its worst downturn in modern times

Because, you know, the rest of the world was doing so well before financial troubles hit the United States.

ITEM: The US Supreme Court’s decision regarding the “reverse discrimination” case involving white and Hispanic firemen in New Haven (CT)  should be interesting:

Wednesday morning, a lawyer defending in the Supreme Court what the city of New Haven, Conn., did to Frank Ricci and 17 other white firemen (including one Hispanic) was not 20 seconds into his argument when Chief Justice John Roberts interrupted to ask: Would it have been lawful if the city had decided to disregard the results of the exam to select firemen for promotion because it selected too many black and too few white candidates? . . .

Racial spoils systems must involve incessant mischief because they require a rhetorical fog of euphemisms and blurry categories (e.g., “race-conscious” measures that somehow do not constitute racial discrimination) to obscure stark facts, such as: If Ricci and half a dozen others who earned high scores were not white, the city would have proceeded with the promotions.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Speaking of the Supremes, wondering what that student strip search case is all about? Debra Saunders lays it out, and it isn’t pretty:

[Savana] Redding was an honor student with no disciplinary marks against her when another student was caught in class with prescription ibuprofen, small knives and a cigarette. That girl falsely told Assistant Principal Kerry Wilson that she got the pills from Redding.

Redding denied the charge. Wilson searched her backpack and found nothing. So he asked a female assistant and school nurse to strip-search Redding. The two women took Redding down the hall and instructed her to remove her socks, shoes and jacket, then shirt and pants, and finally, when she was down to her underwear, they asked her to pull and twist her underwear — exposing herself — to see if any pills fell out. Redding later described the episode as “the most humiliating experience” of her life.

The experience should have been among the most humiliating for Wilson, the assistant and the nurse: They didn’t find any pills.

Yeah, I’d sue their butts off, too.  Hope Redding wins.

ITEM: Speaking of hope, how’s that Hope and Change™ working out? Not so well, it turns out:

Across the dark living room, one of Childs’s favorite pictures is displayed on a worn coffee table. It shows Childs with her arms wrapped around Barack Obama, his hand on her back, her eyes glowing. They met at a rally attended by 37 supporters on a rainy day in 2007, when Childs responded to Obama’s sluggishness on stage with an impromptu chant: “Fired up! Ready to go!” She repeated it, shouting louder each time, until Obama laughed and dipped his shoulders to the rhythm. The chant caught on. “Fired up!” people began saying at rallies. “Ready to go,” Obama chanted back. He told audiences about Childs, “a spirited little lady,” and invited her onstage at campaign appearances. By the day of his inauguration, when Childs led a busload of strangers bound for the Mall in her now-iconic chant, her transformation was complete. She was Edith Childs, fired up and ready to go.

But now, as Obama nears the 100-day milestone of his presidency, Childs suffers from constant exhaustion. In a conservative Southern state that bolstered Obama’s candidacy by supporting him early in the Democratic primaries, she awakens at 2:30 a.m. with stress headaches and remains awake mulling all that’s befallen Greenwood since Obama’s swearing-in.

ITEM: And, of course, there’s all that transparency that Obama promised during the campaign:

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. Instead, union officials will now be allowed to file older, less detailed conflict reports.

Because, you know, the Obama Administration will not be beholden to special interests.

ITEM: Speaking of unions, it looks as though the Union of Auto Workers (UAW) blinked in the face of Chrysler’s possible bankruptcy:

It’s crunch time for Chrysler: The automaker has until Friday to slash billions of dollars in debt off its books and partner with Italian automaker Fiat.

Huge hurdles, no doubt. But this weekend it cleared two big ones: It successfully negotiated new deals with the United Auto Workers union and Canadian Auto Workers. The government had been leaning on the UAW to cut wages, making them on par with those of the transplant auto plants in the U.S. In a statement late Sunday, the UAW said the changes meet the requirements set forth by the Treasury Department.

Funny how the prospect of total disaster tends to focus one’s mind.

ITEM: Speaking of economic disaster, Robert Samuelson takes on the utter silliness that surrounds “green economics”:

The trouble is that these models embody wildly unrealistic assumptions: There are no business cycles; the economy is always at “full employment”; strong growth is assumed, based on past growth rates; the economy automatically accommodates major changes — if fossil fuel prices rise (as they would under anti-global-warming laws), consumers quickly use less and new supplies of “clean energy” magically materialize.

There’s no problem and costs are low, because the models say so. But the real world, of course, is different. Half the nation’s electricity comes from coal. The costs of “carbon capture and sequestration” — storing CO2 underground — are uncertain, and if the technology can’t be commercialized, coal plants will continue to emit or might need to be replaced by nuclear plants. Will Americans support a doubling or tripling of nuclear power? Could technical and construction obstacles be overcome in a timely way? Paralysis might lead to power brownouts or blackouts, which would penalize economic growth.

This sounds remarkably like the problems with the actual anthropogenic global warming models.

ITEM: And the Washington Post (God bless ‘em) points out what Obama and the Congressional Democrats are trying very hard to hide: that Obama’s proposed tax increases would fall squarely on the back of small businesses:

Since last year’s campaign, President Obama has vowed repeatedly not to increase taxes for families making less than $250,000 a year. That pledge, while politically popular, has left him with just two primary sources of funding for his ambitious social agenda: about 3 million high-earning families and the nation’s businesses.

Johnson, with her company, falls into both categories. If Obama’s tax plans are enacted, her accountant estimates that her federal tax bill — typically, around $120,000 a year — would rise by at least $23,000, a 19 percent increase.

“You hear ‘tax the rich,’ and you think, ‘I don’t make that much money,’ ” said Johnson, whose Rainbow Station programs are headquartered near Richmond. “But then you realize: ‘Oh, if I put my business income with my wages, then, suddenly, I’m there.’ “

Guess where almost all of the job growth in the US over the past decade has come from? And guess what will happen to job growth if and when those taxes hit?

ITEM: Speaking of deception from the Obama Administration, FactCheck.org finds that Obama has “fudged” or “spun” on a number of items, though their list looks like outright mistakes or lies:

– He told a joint session of Congress on Feb. 24 that “we import more oil today than ever before.” That’s untrue. Imports peaked in 2005 and are lower today.

– He claimed in the same speech that his mortgage aid plan would help “responsible” buyers but not those who borrowed beyond their means. But even prominent defenders of the program in his administration concede that foolish borrowers will be aided, too.

– He said in an address on March 10 that the high school dropout rate has “tripled in the past 30 years.” But according to the Department of Education, it actually has declined by a third.

– Obama also got it wrong when he claimed in his March 24 speech that “we are reducing nondefense discretionary spending to its lowest level since the ’60s.” His own forecast puts this figure higher than in many years under Reagan, Clinton or either Bush.

Let’s say it all together: What if Bush (0r McCain) had made these same ‘errors’? How would the press deal with it?

ITEM: Finally, have you wondered what Newt Gingrich and Fidel Castro might have in common? Hint: it involves President Obama.

More links in the morning, maybe.  ..bruce w..

Gee, Maw, tell me again: how does this stimulate the economy?

[For those of you coming in from Ace of Spades HQ, here's the Atlas Shrugged review.]

AFTERNOON LINKS

ITEM: Visualization is always a good thing. The Heritage Foundation graphically illustrates the minuscule nature of Obama’s proposed  — and far from realized — cuts (hat tip to Instapundit):

MORNING LINKS — things are heating up a bit.

ITEM: The stimulus ain’t stimulating fast enough. Actually, I have serious concerns as to whether the stimulus can truly “stimulate” the economy (as opposed to distorting it, followed by a crash — kind of like drinking three Red Bulls on an empty stomach). And here’s the key reveal: ” The reports do not say how many jobs have been created.” I wonder why.

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert — “U.S. to put conditions on TARP repayment“:

Strong banks will be allowed to repay federal bailout funds, but only if such a move passes a test to determine whether it is in the national economic interest, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing a senior U.S. administration official.

The report said banks that had plenty of capital and demonstrated an ability to raise fresh capital from the market should, in principle, be able to repay government funds.

But the judgment would be made in the context of the wider economic interest, the report said.

Stop and think about that for a moment: strong banks that have received bailout funds will be allowed to repay those funds — our tax money, present and future — only if the government decides it’s “in the national interest.”

ITEM: In the meantime — and completely unrelated to the half-million people who gathered in tea parties nationwide last week — Obama orders $100 million in budget cuts! Big whoop;  we face a $1.7 trillion deficit this year alone. Imagine being overdrawn by $17,000, and then trying to find ways to reduce the amount by $1. This clip immediately came to mind:

ITEM: Sun, having botched its acquisition by IBM, has agreed to be acquired by Oracle. Frankly, I think that IBM would have been a better fit for Sun technology and culture, and I think IBM was foolish to let Oracle (its arch competitor in the database market) get its hands on Sun. On the other hand, it’s a big win for Oracle; kudos to them.

ITEM: Only 13% of CIA personnel speak another language. What makes this item funny is that last Friday, I was driving home (here in the Denver area) and flipping through radio channels. I settled on a Spanish-language music station to practice my listening comprehension. In the middle of a commercial break came a recruiting ad for the CIA. The really funny part: the ad was in English. That makes sense, actually — you want your recruits to be bilingual — but it was certainly weird.

ITEM: Obama will hold his first cabinet meeting today with “the most diverse Cabinet in history.” I’m more concerned about their ethics, their competency, and their ideology.

ITEM: Jackson Diehl cites the key challenge in Obama’s foreign policy efforts:

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence — and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them. . . .

Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don’t crack long-standing problems. Some of his new strategies may produce results with time. Yet the real test of an administration is what it does once it realizes that the quick fixes aren’t working — that, say, North Korea and Iran have no intention of giving up their nuclear programs, with or without dialogue, while Russia remains determined to restore its dominion over Georgia. In other words, what happens when it’s no longer George W. Bush’s fault? That’s what the next 100 days will tell us.

ITEM: Meanwhile, Robert Samuelson — always worth reading — questions our obsession with the Great Depression, but in the end hedges his own bets:

Some indicators now imply that the present decline is ebbing (“glimmers of hope,” says President Obama). China shows similar signs of improvement. All this diminishes the dreary comparisons with the Depression. But if these omens prove false, a more somber conclusion could emerge.

The mistakes of the Depression were rooted in prevailing economic orthodoxies, which had been overtaken by new realities. The present policies likewise reflect today’s orthodoxies. But what if they, too, turn out to be misguided because the world has moved on in ways that become obvious mostly in retrospect?

OVERNIGHT LINKS

ITEM: Yeah, I know it’s been a few days, but between attending the Denver Tea Party and reading Atlas Shrugged (as well as Alas, Babylon — what a fun week!), I’ve been busy. So shoot me.

ITEM: Speaking of Atlas Shrugged, the New York Times says that Obama is looking forward to a redefinition of capitalism. Which brings to mind this quote from Atlas Shrugged:

“My purpose,” said Orren Boyle, “is the preservation of a free economy. It’s generally conceded that free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won’t stand for it. If it doesn’t develop a public spirit, it’s done for, make no mistake about that.”   . . .  “The only justification of private property,” said Orren Boyle, “is public service.”

Hint: Orren Boyle isn’t one of the good guys.

ITEM: Yet more Atlas-Shrugged-in-real-life, this time up in Canada:

Indirect bureaucratic control proved to be a failure, filled with problems that rendered it unworkable and prone to disaster: wasteful investment decisions, pork barrel projects, clumsy redistribution programs and general failure to achieve objectives. “The planners,” says Prof. Ellman, “are often no more able by indirect levers, than they had previously been able by direct levers, to guide the enterprises to socially rational decisions.”

This is all very old news in economics, I know. But it seems not yet to have reached Canada’s National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, the federal government’s official advisor on how to bring the United Nation’s “sustainable development” model to Canada via major government economic intervention and control.

This week the NRTEE produced the latest report in its current mission, which is to turn Canada’s market-driven energy economy into a what Prof. Ellman would call a centrally planned indirectly bureaucratically controlled low-carbon economy.

Titled “Achieving 2050: A Carbon Pricing Policy for Canada,” the report adds hundreds more pages to the NRTEE’s existing volumes on carbon and climate issues. It also adds a fresh batch of horrifying economic ideas to a planning agenda that is already on the brink of parody.

Read the whole thing.

ITEM: Speaking of apocalypse, J. G. Ballard has died. His end-of-the-world SF novels — The Drowned World,  The Burning World– were staples of my high school reading years. But his greatest work (IMHO) was Empire of the Sun, based on his own experiences as a child caught up in the Japanese occupation of Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp.

ITEM: Memo to Microsoft: you know you really screwed up when a news article about the impeding release of Windows 7 is headlined, “Meet Microsoft’s antidote to Vista.”

ITEM: Speaking of not having a clue, DHS Sec’y Janet Napolitano is blaming “politicization” over the outrage about the “rightwing extremist” report. The real “politicization”, of course, is the report itself.

ITEM: More cluelessness: Obama says that the Republicans are “the party of no”, as if that’s a bad thing. “Just say no!” was one of the more popular chants at the Denver Tea Party last Wednesday, and with trillions of dollars in deficits projected for the next decade, we need to hear “No!” more often. Meanwhile, White House advisor David Axelrod thinks that dissent and demonstrations are “unhealthy”, at least when directed against his boss.

ITEM: And rounding up the Clueless Trifecta for the weekend: “White House: Releasing memos didn’t hurt national security.”And, of course, that’s immediately apparent and provable, isn’ t it? And not everyone agrees.

ITEM: Here’s this bonus assertion: “Obama: Cuban, Venezuelan outreach was ‘positive’.” For whom, Mr. President, for whom? There’s a reason all these statements were released on the weekend. Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson wonders what really goes on in Obama’s thoughts about the world at large. And when you have the Associated Press comparing you to Gorbachev (and not in a good way), it may be time to rethink your approach.

ITEM: Speaking of the former Soviet Union, here’s a news alert: Russia is not a democracy! It’s also not much of a world power any more. And for all my mocking tone, this is truly tragic. I had high hopes for Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union — it has tremendous natural resources and a brilliant, friendly, well-educated population. Sandra and I visited there in 1998, and our daughter Heather spent 18 months there doing missionary work (and went on to graduate with a BA in Russian from BYU); her husband, Michael, did two years of missionary work there as well.  They love Russia and its people, but are quite frank about just how disfunctional both the government and the society are.

ITEM: As much as I snipe at the New York Times, I give them major props for running what could be, in retrospect, their own obituary: “Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%“:

Publishers will start to report first-quarter results this week, but people who follow the industry and have had a glimpse of the 2009 numbers say it is clear that once again, even the most pessimistic predictions were not dark enough. They are expecting declines sharp enough to wipe out profit margins at many papers that, despite two years of battering, had stayed comfortably in the black, and to push already-weak publishers closer to bankruptcy, perhaps even closure. “I think over all we’re going to see a decline somewhere in the mid-20s” compared to the first quarter of last year, said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Company, a research firm. “There have been a lot of signals that things have gotten much worse in the last couple of months — the furloughs, the pay cuts, the layoffs.”

I am a great fan of newspapers and have no particular desire to see them die. During the 6 years (1999-2005) I lived in Washington DC, I faithfully read both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal every morning starting around 6 am. But when we moved here in Parker, Colorado, I found that the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News just weren’t the Washington Post, and I could only get the Wall Street Journal via afternoon mail (and it didn’t always show up then). I cancelled my WSJ subscription and cut back my Rocky Mountain News subscription to weekends only. When I realized that I was primarily using the News to help light fires in our woodburning stove, I cancelled it altogether.

ITEM: “After you!” “No, after you!” “No, I insist — you first.” In the greenhouse gas follies, the great dispute is over which countries should go first at limiting greenhouse gasses. Since everyone realizes that such an effort spells economic disaster, nobody is eager to actually do something.

Maybe some more links this afternoon.  ..bruce w..

Time to get up and moving....

MORNING LINKS — get ‘em while they’re fresh

ITEM:  “Should war be a game?“ is the fatuous subhead of the day, from an article talking about a new videogame recreating the battle for Fallujah (Iraq). The reporter shows no awareness that wargames have been around for centuries and that most of them do indeed “use actual events as a backdrop” and “follow a historical timeline.” In fact, once you set aside abstract wargames such as go and chess (and specialty wargames, such as those with a contrafactual, science fiction or fantasy setting), that’s what the majority of wargames are intended to do.

ITEM: There are no mulligans on the Internet — once you publish something out there publicly, you’ve largely lost control of it. Between Google caches, screen captures, and the Wayback Machine, it’s hard to “recall” a public posting.

ITEM: Will Collier quotes Michael Kinsley with approval on the decline and fall of print newspapers. Key quote from Kinsley: “You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy?”

ITEM: TOTUS comments on David Axelrod’s rants on the Sunday morning talk circuit: “Axelrod decided that instead of explaining Big O’s performance, he’d just spend time ripping into former Vice President Dick Cheney.”

ITEMS: Courtesy of Rachael Lucas, here are two stories that reaffirm why I love dogs: Jasmine the rescue dog (who acts as surrogate mother for wildlife); and Sophie Tucker, the Robinson Crusoe of dogs.

OVERNIGHT LINKS — it’s a brand new week, folks!

The near-daily what-if-Bush/McCain-had-done-this item comes courtesy of Ace of Spades:

“There’s a lot of — I don’t know what the term is in Austrian — wheeling and dealing, and people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics,” [Obama] said in response to an Austrian reporter’s question.

Austrian? This from a Columbia/Yale Law grad? I’d argue jet lag, but he’s been over there for what, a week?

ITEM: Y’know, given how much Sun has been struggling for the past several years, and after the whole Microsoft-Yahoo debacle, it probably wasn’t a wise move for Sun’s board to get fussy about what IBM was offering, particularly when that offer was apparently quite well above Sun’s current stock price. Sun is now likely to find itself in Yahoo’s position: stock price continuing to decline and no more suitors.

ITEM: Obama is losing…some African-Americans. But not very many.

ITEM: Obama lost Reason pretty soon after his inauguration, but they keep firing away anyway.

ITEM: Obama is losing…Republicans! No, really!

ITEM: In a bold, critical move at a time of crisis, the Obama Administration wants to limit…tourism to Antarctica. Because, you know, those 5 million square miles of (mostly) ice are in serious danger of being damaged by the 30,000 or so visitors each year (most of whom are on cruise ships).

ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism update: Geithner warns that executives in other industries receiving bailout money could be replaced as well. Even Robert Reich seems a bit ambivalent about this possibility.

ITEM: Creeping…something…update: An effort to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote total for the Presidency — without actually amending the Constitution — is gaining ground. I’m personally appalled.

ITEM: An interesting analysis of the current financial crunch vs. previous popped bubbles (e.g., the dot.com bust):

What we’ve offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr. Bernanke’s analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we’re witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

That’s the closing paragraph, but the whole article is worth a read to see how the authors reached that conclusion.

ITEM: Speaking of boom and bust — the IT sector is queuing up at the “stimulus” trough.

ITEM: And I thought the US was the one with the crumbling, inadequate infrastructure. Actually, I suspect the US has the best infrastructure in the world, especially given the vast expanse of the US (#3 or 4 in the world) and the relatively low population density (hint: the US is #177 on the list).

ITEM: As my old boss Tony Gibson likes to say, when times get tough, cash is king:

Andy Beal, a 56-year-old, poker-playing college dropout, is a one-man toxic-asset eater–without a shred of government assistance. Beal plays his cards patiently. For three long years, from 2004 to 2007, he virtually stopped making or buying loans. While the credit markets were roaring and lenders were raking in billions, Beal shrank his bank’s assets because he thought the loans were going to blow up. He cut his staff in half and killed time playing backgammon or racing cars. He took long lunches with friends, carping to them about “stupid loans.” His odd behavior puzzled regulators, credit agencies and even his own board. They wondered why he was seemingly shutting the bank down, resisting the huge profits the nation’s big banks were making. One director asked him: “Are we a dinosaur?”

Now, while many of those banks struggle to dig out from under a mountain of bad debt, Beal is acquiring assets. He is buying bonds backed by commercial planes, IOUs to power plants in the South, a mortgage on an office building in Ohio, debt backed by a Houston refinery and home loans from Alaska to Florida. In the last 15 months Beal has put $5 billion to work, tripling Beal Bank’s assets to $7 billion, while such banks as Citigroup and Morgan Stanley  shrink and gobble up billions in taxpayer bailouts.

ITEM: In terms of actual coverage and editorial criticism of the Obama Administration, the Washington Post is eating the New York Times‘ lunch. It makes me wish I were living back in DC just so I could subscribe to the WaPo’s print edition. In the meantime, the blogosphere’s own Ed Whelen takes AG Holder and the Obama Justice Department to the woodshed.

ITEM: Mark Liberman over at Language Log dissects another media (mis)reporting of a scientific study.

ITEM: Speaking of scientific insight — increased CO2 means more plants grow and produce more oxygen! Who could have foreseen that? Maybe, oh, most junior high students? And speaking of global warming….

ITEM: Finally, if there can be “cool spells in a warming world“, doesn’t that likewise mean there can be warm spells in a cooling world?

ITEM: I think that the Japanese plan for dealing with their declining population is just to replace themselves with robots.

ITEM: Scary product idea of the day. (I like Gerard’s name for it: the “Sigorney”.)

ITEM: Also courtesy of American Digest, a European equivalent of “Improv Everywhere”. I dare you to watch this and not just grin:

More links during the day, maybe.  ..bruce w..