Author: Simon

I have been following the nuclear plant “meltdown” story from Japan trying to figure out what happened. I’m a former Naval Nuke so I know a fair bit about Nuke plants and I must say that this has been my experience so far: I have been reading every news release on the incident since the…

I was at Mary’s Place Friday night listening to my son’s band Alpha Drop (he is the drummer) and got to talking to a sound man about this and that (mostly my experiences at WFMT from ’62 to ’63) and I mentioned I had just done a post on Ken Nordine. He suggested I look…

Eric has a nice post up on grief mongers and their lawyers. Each little grief enacted into our common law (by judges decisions on what claims are actionable) adds friction to the system. A kind of creeping arthritis. The grief is justified and now everyone suffers. But just a little from each. So it creeps…

The news is somewhat old (1 Feb) but I don’t recall seeing it elsewhere. Las Vegas-based Righthaven LLC sues alleged copyright-infringing website operators and message-board posters in partnerships with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post. Since March, at least 229 lawsuits have been filed in a campaign the then-publisher of the Review-Journal said…

The voice is that of Ken Nordine whose voice was legendary in radio back in the day. The only similar voice I know of was the voice of Tom Donahue who I listened to on KSAN and KMPX in San Francisco. Here is a nice video about radio back in the day. The good stuff…

Jessie Jackson Jr has come up with a really good idea for breaking the government monopoly on schools. Give every kid a laptop. Jesse Jackson Jr. wants the Constitution changed so that every kid has the right to an ipod and laptop. I think his method is wrong but the idea is very good. At…

Eric’s post, Just another junkie? Or a mother’s beloved son?, got me to thinking about the premise of the drug war. Here it is: The premise of the Drug War is that by inflicting enough pain you can get people to stop taking unauthorized pain relief medications.

This is some really weird news. Who thinks Obama needs a cabinet czar? If you can believe the news reports – Obama. The larger mission is to make the dealings between the Cabinet and the White House more functional, several senior officials said. Daley, a former commerce secretary himself, has been calling agency heads for…

Ross Douthat has a column up about Rethinking The Sexual Revolution. There is only one problem with his thesis. There was no Sexual Revolution. We did have loose women and Dionysian Parties. But Revolution? I don’t think so. The Sexual Revolution of the 1920s was about Demographics. The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s was about…

A while back Eric wrote a bit on divorce with the theme that state involvement with personal matters is a bad idea. I had a few comments on the subject but nothing worth a blog post. I now have something I’d like to say. And it came about because Instapundit linked to this video about…

Hollywood is betting that Sarah Palin will be a hot issue in 2012. Maybe even in the running for President. …look at this newly greenlit Johnny Knoxville-starring laffer about a fun-loving, rowdy, red-blooded man whose wife is elected President. This is a movie that will film in 2011 and hit theaters in the summer of…

A couple of news items on the drug war have caught my interest today. One of them from the Market Watch discusses how the current economic situation has made states rethink how they handle Drug Prohibition. A growing number of states are renouncing some of the long prison sentences that have been a hallmark of…

Evidence of Islamic terrorism is difficult to find. Especially if your mission is to avoid finding it. And yet when things went the other way (Giffords in Arizona for instance) it took a long time for the White House to chime in. So maybe that is the rule for judging actual White House opinion. If…

H/T Hot Air Cross Posted at Power and Control

By now everyone has one or is repeating someone else’s Charlie Sheen story. I have my own. The first mate was telling me yesterday how lucky Charlie was to have two ladies. I told her that those girls were far too young and besides if something like that ever happened to me I’d insist that…

I was looking for some information for my post Bussing In Outside Agitators and came across this bit: Deadbeat Union’s $90 Million Debt from 21 May 2010. Interesting. In 2007, the SEIU owed Bank of America nearly $95 Million. By the end of 2008, SEIU owed more than $156 Million in total outstanding liabilities. Only…

Since Eric did a post on the Communists Who Support The Wisconsin Teachers Mafia, I thought I ought to do a cross post with supporting evidence. ==== According to Hill Buzz this little bit of excitement happened on 27 Feb. 2011 in Atlanta. Be sure to note the flier at the end of the video…

Thanks to Instapundit I was perusing the comments at Althouse and came up with this really great one about the Wisconsin Teachers Mafia. Seven Machos said… 3. Your union foolishly raised wages and benefits to a point where it priced itself right out of a monopoly market — really fucking hard to do, but as…

Did you ever wonder why India produces so many engineers? Well there is an answer. It is the culture. But not in a way you would imagine. India is perhaps the only country in the world where parents decide the career of their children a few moments after birth. This has famously been captured in…

Patrick Poole is looking into: Was the financial meltdown of September 2008 an inside job? It is more than possible that insiders gave the system a timely push. But the rot was already more than evident. NINJA loans? Puhleeeze. We dug this hole. Why complain when the guys on the surface start refilling it with…