Round Three

In which Michael Hiltzik decides he's had quite enough drubbing by Patterico and decides to take on Hugh Hewitt instead.

Which leads to the question - exactly how in touch with reality is Hiltzik?

Apparently not much. Read Patterico. Read Hiltzik. Ask yourself - is this a smart move? (Better yet, read them in reverse order).

As of this writing Hugh Hewitt is at Number 9 in The Truth Laid Bear rankings. About where it has been for a long time. Mr. Hiltzik does not have a ranking. At all. None whatsoever.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have always maintained that's it generally a bad idea to continue digging after reaching the bottom. Reaching bottom and then deciding to take on a whole new contender? That would be right out. We here at the Boulevard, incidentally, barely register in the TTLB rankings. But we are higher than 1%.

UPDATE: Winds of Change on Hiltzik. That will leave a mark.

UPDATE: Sorry, I left out the link to the round two post; here it is. The first round happened before I started this blog.

The Waiter Rule

Here's an interesting story. It seems that CEO's almost all agree on one thing: you can judge a person's character by the way they treat a waiter. I had no idea that the CEO of Raytheon, Bill Swanson, wrote that rule down in a short booklet called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.

The CEO who came up with it, or at least first wrote it down, is Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson. He wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. Raytheon has given away 250,000 of the books.

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

I had noticed this myself quite a long time ago. It basically applies to more than waiters as well. People who are rude and nasty to store clerks, bank tellers or almost any "lower level" service jobs are, generally speaking, not folks you'll like in the long run.

It's not just service people, either. I had a boss once who, on a company outing to a fun park, got into a go-cart and ruthlessly ran his competition into the guard rails to 'win' the race. His competition consisted of kids for the most part. He celebrated when he ran the last boy, probably about 10 years old, into the rails and finished first.

Absolutely the worst boss I ever had, bar none.

Good Analogy

Mark Steyn has one of the best analogy to describe the current situation with Iran I've seen.

You know what's great fun to do if you're on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you're getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, "I've got a bomb!" Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, "It's OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn't got a bomb." And then the second marshal would say, "And even if he did have a bomb it's highly unlikely he'd ever use it." And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, "Relax, everyone. That's just a harmless rhetorical flourish." And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, "Yes, but it's entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew."

That's how it goes with the Iranians.

The passengers in rows 4 to 7, of course, want to reframe the argument.

Update: This is not encouraging.

Retired Generals

Just keep making the news. General Richard Myers, USAF (Ret), told ABC News on Sunday that the other retired generals speaking out against Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were acting in an  "inappropriate" fashion.

"There are professional standards that you have when you are in uniform that carry on when you retire," former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers told ABC television.

He is, in my opinion, absolutely correct in that assessment. This rash of critics is bad for discipline and ultimately bad for the country. General officers do not really ever retire and remain subject to military discipline.

UPDATE: Well, I agree with Richard Holbrooke on one thing - the generals involved are revolting. Very revolting. So is the fact that it now appears to be a genuinely coordinated effort. That this also smacks of an attempt to influence civilian politics by generals, retired or not, should make every person in this country very upset. You simply do not comprehend what you are risking if you embrace these people. The far left anti-war types should be very, very afraid of this.

Shame on every one of these retirees who would endanger the troops to participate in a political campaign.

UPDATE: Bravo, General DeLong.

UPDATE: The NYT weighs in. On the wrong side.

I Can’t Even Begin

To describe how a story like this makes me feel. A 26 year old man from Purcell, Oklahoma, has been arrested for the murder and rape of a 10 year old girl. The crimes were committed in that order, but he was apprehended before he could carry out the next step and eat the victim.

Jamie Rose Bolin had deep saw marks on her neck and was apparently hit several times with a wooden cutting board, Purcell police Chief David Tompkins said. Agents removed meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers from his apartment, one floor down from where the girl lived with her father.

"Regarding a potential motive," Tompkins said, "this appears to have been part of a plan to kidnap a person, rape them, torture them, kill them, cut off their head, drain the body of blood, rape the corpse, eat the corpse, then dispose of the organs and bones."

Local prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty. Undoubtedly some folks will try to stop that from happening and many years will pass before the vicious murderer of Jamie Rose Bolin will face execution. She will nave grow any older, but he will. I sincerely hope there is a Hell and that there is a very, very special place reserved there for the killer of Jamie Rose Bolin.

Cracks Showing?

Interesting article in the Washington Post this morning that details indications that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second in command of Al-Qaeda may be losing his grip on the organization. His messages seem to indicate a growing frustration with other Islamists and an attempt to gather them in closer to his ideology.

Zawahiri's visibility, eclipsing Osama bin Laden's, reminds al-Qaeda's enemies that the network is capable of more attacks. But a closer look at his speeches and writings, and interviews with several longtime associates in radical Islamic circles, suggest another motive: fear of losing his ideological grip over a revolutionary movement he has nurtured for 40 years.

But his efforts appear to be almost desperate:

The schisms are reflected in Zawahiri's many speeches, in which he has attempted to assert influence over a host of seemingly unrelated issues: the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, elections in Egypt, oil production in Saudi Arabia and obscure questions of Muslim theology.

He is risking his credibility among Islamic radicals by speaking out on so many subjects, according to Osama Rushdi, an Egyptian who spent three years in a Cairo prison with Zawahiri in the 1980s and now lives in exile in Britain.

Particularly revealing is his deep fear of democracy and what it could do to stifle his ideals. He warns Hamas:

"Power is not an end in itself. Real power is application of sharia on earth," he said. "Entering the same parliament as the lay people, recognizing their legitimacy and the accords they have signed is contrary to Islam."

The lecture echoed comments made by Zawahiri on Jan. 6, when he ripped the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood for taking part in last year's elections in his native Egypt, where the al-Qaeda figure got his start in radical Islamic politics as a teenager and medical student.

He also notes that much of this war is actually being fought in the media. It would be a good idea for our media to be on our side in that battle.

Education Or Indoctrination

Rightwinged has a roundup of educators in the news. There are some truly frightening examples of educators using their positions to advance their personal political views. What I find particularly upsetting is that parents in effect delegate their parental rights to teachers, and some teachers abuse that authority. I expect teachers to educate my children, I do not give them permission to force their political views to my children.

Unearthing History

In today's Washington Post, there's an article on organized relic hunters searching for artifacts from the American Civil War.

The buzz began in the chow line. "Did you hear?" asked one relic hunter.

"Yeah. A Mississippi plate," said another. "Absolutely perfect."

The proud new owner of the Confederate belt plate embossed with an eagle held out his treasure on his dirt-caked palm.

Looking on, a man with a long beard and flannel shirt whistled low. "That's $12,000 right there."

It was the prize find of a three-day relic hunt called Diggin' in Virginia, one of a new breed of organized digs in the history-rich state. More than 200 relic hunters in camouflage hauled metal detectors up and down the hills of a Culpeper County farm one weekend this spring. They'd paid a couple of hundred bucks each — and cleaned up.

Archaeologists are rather upset with these commercial relic hunts saying that they are losing all the historical context when the relics are removed. Some of the relic hunters are extremely careful to fully document exactly where they find something, even using GPS to mark the positions. Others are not as scrupulous and sneak into protected sites at night.

I understand the concerns the archaeologists have, but the reality is that these sites may have been hopelessly disturbed by years of farming. There's also little if any chance that there will ever be any efforts to scientifically excavate them. Rather than fighting for legislation to outlaw the hunts, as opponents have been doing, it would seem a better idea to get the relic hunters on board to cooperate with trying to maximize the amount of historical context gathered. In other words, use that Army of Davids approach as Glenn Reynolds calls it and get at least some gains rather than lose everything by leaving the artifacts to rust away to nothing.

Just a thought.

Patrick Moore On Nuclear Power

One of the original founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore has a piece in the Washington Post today in favor of nuclear power. It's rather well written an makes many good points about the myths and misconceptions about nuclear power that have become ingrained in the average person.

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do — prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.

I've known for years that TMI was actually an overwhelming success story about the safety designs incorporated in American light water reactors. Despite the operators of the plant literally doing almost everything wrong, there was no major release of radiation. This was also a deeply flawed B&W design (the elevation of pressurizer was lower than that of the reactor vessel - since redesigned)  and the containment still held.

Moore also explains something I've posted on before, the unreliability of wind power.

Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.

Moore addresses Chernobyl and puts some perspective on it:

· Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.)

The Soviet RBMK reactor was an appallingly bad design, period. Part of the problem is that it always was, at heart, a weapons reactor, used to produce plutonium.

And on recycling fuel:

· Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.

We should be recycling fuel, it reduces the amount of waste to be disposed of enormously. With techniques to glassify the remaining waste, storage becomes much simpler and less worrisome.

UPDATE: Here's an AP report on the multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum report Moore mentions.

Judging Rumsfeld

Gateway Pundit has a big roundup on what Rumsfeld has accomplished during his tenure as Secretary of Defense.