A conservative in hollywood...

Explains why President Bush is like Batman in the WSJ. Klavan succinctly articulates a large theme of The Dark Knight, and like Orwell, he understands that " We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. "

More about Klavan and conservatives in hollywood here.

Breaking news:

"As soon as this sad situation will be solved we’ll be ready for a great and mighty come back. A new album, a real masterpiece of Speed/Epic Metal, is already composed and ready to be recorded and after its release an immense worldwide tour will finally follow for yours and our extreme satisfaction."

So spake Luca Turilli, Italian guitar maestro and epic speed metal Jesus.

Slaps you have to be a Dodgers fan now

cuz the Tribe traded Casey Blake to the Dodgers for two minor league prospects. I refuse to buy another ticket until they fire Wedge as my form of protesting the Blake trade (and yes I know he's not GM and doesn't make trade deals, but he sucks as a manager. So if you trade Blake you must fire Wedge. There's alot of Rod math there that doesn't seem to make sense, but trust me, it's proven. Q.E.D.).

I agree Dark Knight was pretty fantastic (is Harvey Dent dead?). Heath Ledger turned out to be a fantastic Joker. Also, we got the watchmen preview. It's a homoerotic movie right? Cuz it looked like a homoerotic movie based on the preview. Is it really homoerotic?

Batman in Terminator

You all probably knew this before me, but Christian Bale is playing John Connor in Terminator Salvation.

The first chance you get

go and see The Dark Knight. It was effing awesome. There is a car chase scene that destroys the one in the second matrix movie. Heath Ledger is scary as shit. Batman beats the shit out of everything (thugs, cops, animals...). The only thing that really disappointed me was the lack of previews (wtf IMAX?). I really wanted to see the new Watchmen preview on the big screen.

Oh yeah, and Anthony Michael Hall is in the movie. You might remember him from such classics as Weird Science and Sweet 16.

Anyway, go see it. You won't be disappointed.

Also, I'm really glad that both Bert and John picked the Dunecat. LOLcat humor is lost on Taiwanese people so far.

While we're at it

Turns out Roger Clemens' dealer (the one he sued for defamation when he said Clemens used steroids and HGH) found some packing slips from sending such things to the Clemens household. Not that it comes as much of a shock that Clemens was on the juice and lied about it. I just don't understand why beneath the television wasn't the first place he looked.

Steroids

In my mind, the olympics (and anyone who actually watches them) lost the right to complain about doping when they allowed professional athletes to compete. If it were still a competition of amateur athletes, the use of steroids and whatnot would be more significant. And while I don't have an inherent repulsion to the use of performance enhancing drugs by professional athletes (score more TDs and hit more HRs - makes things more fun to watch imo), the small interest I did have in the olympics, which was based on the fact that it was illegal for professionals to compete, is completely gone now. That being said, I'll take Jordan and Bird over any of the ragamuffins hopped up on strength juice today. And maybe Wilt Chamberlain. You know, to keep me pure and protect my virtue.

For the record

I sent you the dunecat on facebook last week, Slaps.

I saw the Dara Torres thing on Slate today. For me, the drug issue makes sports less interesting or entertaining. Marion Jones would probably not do it if she had it to do again. Didn't work out so well for her, but only because she got prosecuted. I don't remember what for, but probably lying to the government, so maybe she would do it again and just not do that part. Drugs have really hurt cycling from what I've gathered. So whether you care about steroids or not or even if you think they're ok (John), I think they have been damaging to some sports (if not all of them). Fans will be less in awe of athletic achievements and hence athletes. (perhaps this is not a bad result given our low culture). Is it better to think of them as monstrous freaks or exceptionally accomplished people? That seems to be the trade-off.

This goes with the preceding post...

... to get your attention.


more cat pictures

Red Queen Theory, Olympic Doping Style

So the 41-year-old swimmer Dara Torres is breaking records she couldn't touch in her 20s. Alright. She submits herself to extra testing, and has never failed a drug exam.

But neither did Marion Jones. So let's say, hypothetically, that the technology for testing new methods of doping will always necessarily lag behind the current methods athletes are using which allow them to pass current tests. Which means we can catch the dopers, eventually, but only after the technology catches up to what they were doing.

She can win fleeting glory, set records, and making lots of money off endorsements in the span of time before she could be caught, the records erased, and the endorsements removed. Is it worth it? If that's the calculation, I suppose, maybe, it is. We could ask Marion Jones or Floyd Landis how it worked out for them.

Of course, there may also be a fair amount of hubris involved. Torres may legitimately believe she is doing nothing wrong, or that she will never be caught.

But my question for the scientists is, with the financial incentive so amazingly high for top-tier athletic performance (even in the very short term), will there ever be a time when testing can adequately rule out performance enhancing drugs, or will it always lag behind?

How'd you miss these?

Because you guys have been lazy:

Beer

There's a flavor ranking below Miller? Yuck.

Re: Bert's award

All the more reason to drink Coors! Delicious, magical Banquet Beer is the only thing I miss over here. Seriously, 90% of ALL BEER over here is "Taiwan Beer" which ranks a little below Miller in taste, which isn't bad. But dark beer is near impossible to find.

On a side note here's a funny/sad/infuriating story about the TSA's utter crappiness. And they're going to start doing similar things on Amtrak trains I hear.

Making the All-Star fiasco more exciting

I personally think home run derby is the best part of baseball. I also enjoy drinking. So I'm pleased to present this drinking game for home run derby. Slaps, since you're in the future, don't ruin it and tell us who wins.

Bert's award

...is that Anheuser-Busch is no longer an American owned company.

Radiohead

I say yes. I'm a fan of OK Computer, I used to have The Bends but I seem to have misplaced it. I haven't heard their other albums.

And that is Busch beer, my friend. Do I win anything?

Radiohead?

Is that really a serious question? That's like asking if you should read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at least once in your lifetime.

(Answer: Yes, you should, but after its over you may wonder what the hell everyone thought was so great about it. Dirty hippies.)

Question

Radiohead: yea or nay? Seriously, are they worth even checking out? Or will I bored like I was when I tried Coldplay?

Also, a treat: What beer is this? John, you can't guess. I'm sure you already know. Hint: it was on sale at 7-11 .

Minor league baseball is better than MLB

I give you three pieces of evidence - a crazy ninja foul ball girl and 2 manager explosions. I rest my case.

Re: Will and beer

It's an interesting hypothesis, but I wonder if the author looks into the propensity for Asian populations to fewer copies of the alcohol dehydrogenase gene or less active forms. That being said, I'll go ahead and assume my immortality with my beer consumption.

Just for Bert:

lolcats! c'mon, man!

I think if we need a link to any site it is i can has cheezburger.

Changes

Added some links to the right. Let me know if we should have any others or you have some recommendations.

Beer = Civilization?

Who would've thought? George Will argues that beer is (well, maybe was) essential in the progress of civilization. Indeed, it is a health food.

Didn't we already know this?

From today's headlines: Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself

Venerating Helms at NR

This post by some guy named James Antle at the American Spectator's Blog gets the tone about right, I think:

"Helms did have an actual, regrettable record as a racial segregationist early in his career (though he did in fact shift toward color-blind rhetoric and policies later in his career, even if he didn't apologize for his past statements). He defended policies that hurt and denied opportunities to his black fellow Americans. Conservatives should not minimize that or pretend he was an early Ward Connerly. Neither should they discard all recognition of Helms's real, substantial, and, yes, admirable accomplishments just because he was, like all of us, a product of his time and place."

(My only quibble here is that I think the "product of time and place" argument grows less convincing as interconnectivity through technology increases. Obviously, a kid raised in Massachusetts in the 1940's has a much different experience than a kid raised in Alabama, but as time goes on I think that experiential gap decreases. In other words, the "product of time and place" argument holds truer for, say, Thomas Jefferson than it does for Jesse Helms, and truer for Jesse Helms than it does for us.)

National Review's adulatory coverage of his death and life seems to be suggesting that anyone who points out his racist past and tendencies is a frothing mad leftist liberal, and runs the deeper risk of conflating "states rights" arguments with segregation as part of the pantheon of conservative positions. Many of the conservatives I have known (among those, ones I have respected and worked for) seem all too willing to wax nostalgic about their Dixie roots, unaware of the damage and perceptions they cast of themselves. This, to put it mildly, is a problem.

Hitchens v. Helms

I'm not fully aprised of Helms biography, but there is little in Hitchens's column about Helms that is disgraceful. I am a reluctant Hitchens fan, but from time to time his moralizing wears on me. Also a trotskyite(ist?) critique of Helms admirably staunch anti-communism gets nowhere with me. Hitchens's cold war allegiance (or lack thereof) manages to sneak out occasionally despite his present neocon foreign policy leanings.

Perhaps Helms was a racist. I don't know. Perhaps he was a philistine when it came to art. (Very few Americans aren't through little fault of their own. And the "art" in the Hart building is horrific BTW.) However, opposing the MLK holiday is not obviously racist nor was it wrong. MLK has been whitewashed (forgive the word choice) much more than Helms has been. Supporting white Africans was certainly not politically correct, and perhaps Helms's motivations were impure. Again I don't know. However, the merits of these positions would seem to be vindicated by recent events in South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as far as concern for Africa goes and as concerns America's interests.

The idea that segregation and bigotry were Helms's driving concerns seems simplistic at best, and is a convenient way to attempt to discredit his conservative positions.

Slaps

You're boy is apparently some kind of hero now. Saved a dude from choking to death. Chiefs might suck but now Tony Gonzalez can add saving some dude's life to his list of awesome things (TE reception records, swimming with a marlin, etc.).

Re: Fine

In fact, forget the refinery. And the blackjack!

Now the question is...1 $300 hooker or 300 $1 hookers?

No, I'm sorry...

It makes a nice story, but the legacy of Jesse Helms is more complicated and more disgraceful than NR makes it out to be. The fact that conservatives of the pen cannot seem to acknowledge that (or do so only in passing) is one of the reasons they are fixing to get whalloped in November.

Energy

Slaps, you make a good point about refineries. I don't think one has been built since the seventies, nor has a nuclear plant because it is so difficult to get the government to allow one to be built. We (our government) are willingly abetting high energy prices.

An American Patriot died on Indpendence Day

Jesse Helms, RIP.

Fine

Then I'll go build my OWN refineries. With blackjack. And hookers.

Beverly......Beverly Hillbillies....

I think I can lend something to this discussion (other than obscure, yet totally awesome Simpsons references) about oil and gas prices. When I was up in Alaska in May I was talking to friends, associates, etc. about the price of oil/gas and one thing that came (even with the few petroleum engineers I know) is the fact that there aren't enough refineries to process the oil the U.S. needs. This is a serious part of the problem underlying gas prices, as the Middle East can pump all the oil they want (Hell, AK and Canada can drain the North Slope dry), there aren't enough refineries in U.S. to process the oil into gasoline for use. Here are refinery numbers. The top US refinery produces 557,000 barrels/day. The US uses 20,687,000 barrels/day AS OF 2006 (EIA data).

Just some stuff to consider.

Also, Bert, no one here really know what Formosa is. But the food is delicious. And the girls are pretty. But it's hot and humid as hell.

Calling Ed Begley Jr.

It's a good thing I've developed a car that runs entirely on my own sense of self-satisfaction then.

Take that, oil companies!

Exxon (cont)

I thought demand was down....

Exxon

Costs don't have to go up for Exxon to legitimately charge more. More demand drives prices up regardless of costs. This is Econ 101. Now, I don't know how much greater demand is. I suspect it is growing fairly rapidly in places like China and India as their economies grow and their people have more income as many economists are saying. There are other factors driving up the price of gas too, most of which have little to do with what Exxon wants to make today. China subsidizes gasoline purchasing. Thus, demand is higher than it would be if the consumer were paying full price. Here, we tax gasoline, thus we purchase less than we would without the tax. Again, remember your high school supply/demand graphs.

I'm no economist, but oil companies are always the bad guy when prices go up. Congress investigates to please their angry constituents, and no collusion or price fixing/gouging or even much evidence is ever found. This is not to say it doesn't exist, but it seems unlikely to me.

Sausage sausage

Freeze some and bring them back. I want one. I like how they make the outer sausage kind of bun-colored.

Exxon

Price gouging. They keep breaking their own profit records. Prices keep going up. I fail to see this as some sort of uncorrelated coincidence. Granted I'm no business major, but if the rise in prices to consumers were proportional to the rise in cost, net profits should stay the same, not continually break new records.

Gentlemen,

I give you sausage in another sausage:
Delicious. I hope they sell them at baseball games here.

No More Volt--Okkusenman!!

I'm not sure it's a function of price-gouging. I don't know any Exxon execs, but I know some Exxon people, and they assure me it's not. They say it's China, India, etc. and the fact that all the Chinese and Indians want to drive now. Maybe so, maybe not.

Anyway, this is what I imagine its like to grow up as a child in Japan.

Volt(ron)

I don't much have a problem with a significant push towards electric cars. Bert, I haven't "plugged any numbers" to compare, but I would guess a wholescale change from coal to nuclear power would decrease the cost of running electric cars significantly. While I typically don't support government bailouts (fuck airlines - it's getting ridiculous what they are doing to customers - one would think that in a failing industry they would be doing more to accommodate passengers, not make their trips more miserable) as I don't see why any money should be spent on morons endorsing bad business ideas, there is one reason I can support the government putting money into GM to produce a working prototype like the Volt: they have done squat, absolutely jack shit, to compensate for the ridiculous artificial inflation and price gouging the gas companies are throwing at consumers. It's getting to be more and more reasonable to compare gas prices to stealing. While one can make the argument that people don't "need" to drive, it seems a flimsy and unreasonable attempt to justify oil comanies' greed and lack of interference by a governing force in modern American society. The fact is, people do need to drive to work where they are barely making enough money to drive home. It's ridiculous that gas prices force such a lifestyle change that it's impacting every other area of the economy.

I normally hate people who tout "green movements" because they have no idea what they are talking about (the morons that automotive president mentioned), but if by some strange twist of fate the government bail out leads to an efficient non-gasoline car, I'll buy one. And drive straight to every Exxon trustee's house and kick em right in the nuts.

Re: Volt(aire?)

To some extent it may be motivated by the greenish fad. But the rise of the cost of energy derived from oil relative to other sources is beginning to create a space in which a $40,000 car you plug-in can be a money-maker. Demand for gasoline is not going down, and so its completely realistic to assume we will be paying more per mile to travel each successive year. This makes room where current and near-current batteries can function in the marketplace. We're beginning to see that at $4+ a gallon, Americans are altering their behavior. This is a valuable benchmark because we did not see such trends at $2 a gallon or even at $3 a gallon.

Bailout aside (which I agree is pretty terrible), I think GM at least should be commended for the moving forward so aggressively on the project. Even if the Volt doesn't happen to be the first electric (or nearly electric) car we own, surely it will be the direct ancestor of such a vehicle.

Obviously, there's a lot of other factors swirling around here. Emissions laws, mileage laws, etc, are all thorny things which, when built into profitability models, can make an electric car look great on paper, say, as early as 2010. But then the laws change, or are altered, and we have an EV1 situation all over again. The "green" fad has its limits, and my guess is those limits for most people don't extend much past what kind of lightbulbs they purchase. Though GM may be sleazy enough to market (and apply for gov't subsidies) the Volt as some green-wondercar, the truth is it that the move from oil to electricity opens up a range of energy options (such as nuclear) which would be a significant breakthrough all around. If Toyota gets there first, great. But I don't think GM should be thrown under the bus for trying to get ahead of the Japanese for once in their lives.

Re: Volt(ing)

If by ballsy you mean spending a ton of money on an unlikely success to keep up with a marketing trend, then yes, ballsy.

It seems really that the Volt idea is at least a little driven by the green push in marketing. Obviously an efficient and powerful electrical car would be in some ways attractive and would be a money-maker. But experience with all kinds of batteries shows that no one has come close to this yet despite all the anti-oil company conspiracy theories. If the technology had a feasible future date as GM has set (2010), GM wouldn't be the only company putting itself on the line. As you mentioned tons of people are already working on fuel cells and GM should be too. But to have this car out there before any realistic expectation of success is only going to hurt. They're already wedded to the car even though they're not going to make any money on it.

Among it's non-profit incentive drawbacks is a big one electric car fanatics seemingly forget: you have to produce electricity with some other source of fuel. 6hrs of charging with the Volt is not inexpensive or necessarily carbon emission reducing. This makes all the enviro-talk with cars going green all the more absurd. The need for energy efficiency will drive the market in the longer term. Once people realize their plug-in cars are not saving the world and are simultaneously more expensive than other cars, the marketing fad will end. And it is a marketing fad. I think it was one of Toyota's executives (maybe one of Ford's too) who had the candor to say their cars were not more efficient economically for the consumer, but the consumer is dumb enough to buy because for fashionable political reasons or in the belief that the consumer is helping the environment. Trouble is you had to be on the front end of this fad to make money (Toyota) and not get in the game in 2010.

GM needs to (or should have) shed old labor costs with buyouts and such and focus on building better cars and trucks. However, whether they're anticipating a bail-out or not, it is in the wings. Can we honestly anticipate our political class letting Ford and GM die? We can't even let airlines go without them feeding at the public trough and still being unprofitable.

Re: Volt

Here's a more in-depth feature on the Volt, specifically the kind of balls GM is putting on display in order to compete with foreign automakers. This is partly why I thought John McCain's $300 million cash prize to the person who invents a crazy-good new battery was so ludicrous--every car company and most energy companies and even stoners out in Silicon valley are trying to do just that. The incentive for a crazy-good battery is already there--the person who invents one will surely make more than a paltry $300 million. In other words, there's a fine line where 'incentivize' becomes 'subsidize,' and it seems clear that neither presidential candidate is going to find the right place on the issue (which is probably "do nothing").

It's really discouraging though if GM is banking on a bail-out; that takes all of the boldness (or, put another way, recklessness) out of the venture that comes through in the Atlantic piece.

Also, I fogot one...so

Bert

Your last post about screwing american car manufacturers was post 911. I smell a conspiracy. Also, I agree. Let 'em die.

Screw American Car Manufacturers

Here's a good column about GM's Volt and the (inevitable) government bailout of American car companies. GM (and Ford) are struggling mightily. They have done a good job of trying to shed their overpriced labor problems, but labor is still hurting them--not to mention the fact that they are making products (for the most part) inferior to Toyotas, Hondas, and Nissans. I say let 'em die if they can't compete, but that won't happen.

can't get enough lolcats

Cuz I haven't forgotten

Indians catcher is my hero

This guy's name is Sal Fasano. The Tribe signed him when Victor went down to be Shoppach's backup, but he caught when Bert, JB and I went to the game last weekend. As you can clearly see, he is the best catcher in the majors. Hands down. Also, the black guy from the High Life commercials was at the game as well drinkin High Life and dancin. Needless to say, despite the Tribe losing, it was perhaps the greatest baseball game ever.