The new Rolls-Royce Phantom gets reviewed in the Telegraph:

There are lots of clever design touches, such as the self-righting RR emblems in the wheels, or the Spirit of Ecstasy that can be lowered out of sight at the touch of a button, but there are some plain stupid ones, too. The “Power Reserve Indicator” on the dashboard is perhaps the nadir. In a car that can’t tell you what gear you are in, or how fast the engine is spinning, or on which side the indicators are flashing, this gauge is a useless distraction. Why not have a gauge showing the driver’s mojo level or collar length? Perhaps you could link up satellite navigation and accident statistics and create a “Calamity Probability Meter”. Or else leave a gaping hole for the customer to insert his own special gauge.

I have always preferred British car journalism to American.

Some of the cases resulting from the Fairfax County Police’s raids on bars in December have come to trial. These are the raids where people were arrested for ‘public drunkenness’, allegedly as part of an effort to curb drunk driving. Whether the people were planning to drive anywhere — or whether they were particularly drunk, apparently — was not much of a factor in determining whether to arrest them, though.

The Washington Post tells the story of Daniel Crowley, one of the people who was arrested:

Crowley and his drinking companions disputed police testimony that they observed him spilling beer in his lap, slurring his speech and having trouble staying upright on his seat.

“He was at a table with a group, and his behavior stood out from all the others,” said Fairfax County Police Sgt. O.W. Elam.

Under cross-examination from Crowley’s attorney, police acknowledged that neither they nor bar patrons had complained that Crowley was acting unruly or meddlesome. They also testified that he did not disobey their orders, even though he declined to submit to a breathalyzer test.

Crowley, 29, testified that he has a chronic problem with red eyes and pulled from his pocket a bottle of eyedrops that he said he uses every day.

Wendy Richards, a friend who was drinking beer with him that night, denied that Crowley showed any symptoms of intoxication. She testified that she had been chatting with the two undercover officers, not realizing they were anything but customers.

“They humiliated me,” she said after the hearing. “They used me as a decoy.”

Jacob Perkins, an attorney for Crowley, argued that Crowley should not have been arrested because he was not bothering anyone. “There’s a difference between being drunk in public and being rowdy and drunk in public,” he said.

After the hearing, Crowley decried the police sweep and said he no longer frequents bars in Fairfax.

“I’m not happy with the way they can walk into a restaurant and do as they please,” he said of police. “I don’t want to go to places in the atmosphere where you don’t know who is who.”

Crowley was sentenced to 25 hours of community service to repay his debt to society for allegedly being drunk in the noisiest bar in Reston — and this in a state and county with such serious money problems that the prisons are cutting back on feeding inmates, the DMV is closing offices, and many other random things have been cut, including the hours that state liquor stores — which actually generate revenue — are open.

Good to know there’s still enough money left for the police and courts to waste their time on this garbage!

A letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post perfectly depicts the general competence of the D.C. government:

A recent experience provides an interesting metaphor for life in Washington. As I was walking along Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, I was passed by a huge city dump truck with a revolving device astern scattering chemical pellets across the frozen pavement. Before I could finish a silent “thank you” to Mayor Anthony Williams for this service, another city vehicle traveling behind the dump truck passed me. It too was a huge truck — with rotating brushes extending to its sides. It harbored a huge vacuum and was sucking up every loose item on the street.

The Post titled this letter ‘Zero-Sum Service’. Of course, the sum is actually a good deal less than zero, since the city is spending money to achieve this zero sum.

And it’s interesting that the writer, a Washington resident, gives a description of the second ‘truck’, rather than calling it a street-sweeper. If he’s lived in Washington all his life, it’s possible he’s never seen one before.

In today’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes a column headlined ‘Antiwar And Illogical’, in which he calld Rep. Dennis Kuchnich, a Democrat from Ohio and a man who’s running for president, a fool. In those words.

The Washington Post is a liberal newspaper.

Cohen bases his comments on Kuchnich’s performance on “Meet the Press” this weekend, where he repeated the allegation that the pending war with Iraq is all about oil. Richard Perle, also on this weekend’s “Meet the Press”, took exception to this, to put it mildly.

“It is an out-and-out lie,” he said. “And I’m sorry to see you give credence to it.” But Kucinich, who must have studied logic in France, came roaring back. “Well, if America is not at threat, then what is this about? And many people are wondering: ‘How did our oil get under their sand?’ “

A better question is: How did this fool get on “Meet the Press”? The answer is disheartening. Not only is Kucinich running for president, but he has emerged — along with former Vermont governor Howard Dean — as the darling of antiwar Democrats who will have much influence in the Iowa caucuses.

The column goes on to deal with Dean and his characterization of the United States’ determination as “unilateral”. Unilateral, that is, except for the support and agreement of the UK, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Kuwait and Australia, among others.

And these are professional politicians making these arguments, not random idiots in the street. I don’t mean to say that it’s not the case that a lot of politicians are idiots; but it’s hard to accept that these people are so uninformed and naïve as to believe that war on Iraq will help the oil industry (it won’t), or that the American position lacks broad democratic support (it doesn’t).

These politicians simply oppose the war. I am sure they have their various reasons for opposing it, and there’s nothing wrong with having concluded that war is not the best option at this point. I, and a lot of others, have concluded that it is, but given different information, different values, and different expectations, it’s perfectly reasonable that someone may have reached the opposite conclusion.

The trouble is, very, very few of the anti-war arguments that I’ve heard — and none of the anti-war arguments I’ve heard from positions of power — are coherent. They all require you to a priori believe things that just are not supported by evidence or deduction — or, in some particularly egregious cases, things that are clearly disproved by the best available evidence. The truth doesn’t matter, if you shout loudly enough.

Most of the arguments I disagree with these days — not just the anti-war arguments — strongly seem to be based on a willful ignorance (both what we normally think of as ‘ignorance’ as well as ignore-ance, i.e. plugging one’s ears) of reality; it’s the result of holding some opinion and then constructing an argument to support it, rather than holding an opinion because logic and your available information leaves you with no choice but that opinion.

Viewpoints in opposition to your own can be quite valuable, whether they point out holes in your position or whether they bring you to a clearer understanding of the fundamental difference between what you and the people you disagree with believe.

Incoherent arguments, on the other hand, merely tend to polarize opinion, and change the matter from a disagreement into a fight. The merits of the various arguments are forgotten entirely, and the disagreement is ultimately settled by a proxy for argument, such as combat or political maneuvering to destroy your opposition.

The problem with that is that the winner is then the side most skilled at political machination, or the person who’s physically stronger — not the person whose conclusion is better.

This shift from debate to dispute — which, despite the fact that I’ve picked on the left as my examples here, is something that afflicts most of the mainstream political spectrum in the U.S. — is deeply troubling. Since the beginning of time, people have decided on conclusions and then manufactured arguments to support them. To me at least, it seems as if this practice is on the rise of late — possibly because there is no politico-intellectual shame attached to making obviously absurd arguments. Nearly every important public policy debate these days is argued from both sides with flawed (at best) premises, and the nuclear bomb of American political debate — the effect of x on the well-being of children — has become a first-strike weapon.

The fools need to be identified as such; Cohen’s column is a step in the right direction. If journalism generally moves more toward the kind of confrontational reportage examplified by weblogs, and particularly Ken Layne’s “we can fact-check your ass” statement, it will become more difficult for anyone involved to pass off incoherent drivel as public debate and remain credible in the future.

It’s hard to dispute that one of the things that led to the SUV trend is the federal government’s CAFE standards. These rules dictate that the average fuel economy of all the cars sold by a given manufacturer in the United States must be at least 27.5 miles per gallon. “Light trucks”, meaning things like SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks, are not included in this average (they’re counted separately). The CAFE standards killed off the nine-passenger station wagons, because those vehicles couldn’t be made to have both good enough fuel economy and the performance that buyers demanded.

The SUV makers and drivers don’t go out of their way to point this out, but a cursory examination will show that an SUV is really little more than a station wagon sitting on a truck frame. As such, it’s a ‘truck’ and counts differently toward a manufacturer’s CAFE average. Other than that, and the fact that most SUVs have four-wheel drive, there’s not much difference. Compare the specifications of the 1996 Buick Roadmaster wagon, the last full-size American station wagon, with those of the current Ford Expedition, the largest and most-vilified of the mainstream SUVs:

The SUV weighs a little more, is significantly taller and has more cargo volume. The station wagon is longer by over a foot, though, and wider by over an inch.

These things sold by the thousands back in the heyday of station wagons, and nobody suggested that people were buying them because they were insecure, or stupid, or because they wanted to show off their buying power. It anything, people who bought stations wagons were seen as dull people, people who were so uninterested in showing off as to be worth ridicule for that.

Selling the sports car and buying a station wagon was a key part of the transformation from carefree Young Marrieds to solid People With Responsibilities. The station wagon had room for the parents and 2.2 children, and room for the giant loads of groceries that mark suburban life.

Since the station wagon boom in the 1960s, the suburbs have only sprawled more, and it’s more likely today than then that little Johnny and Sally will have to be driven around by their parents — and worse, the current safety groupthink holds that kids should never ride in the front seat of a car. Carrying more than two kids thus requires a vehicle with at least two back seats, or a willingness to endure squealing fights from the rear.

So people buy SUVs. They’re practical vehicles, and their gas mileage isn’t so bad as to make a difference here in the land of low fuel taxes. Minivans — presumably what the SUV-hating crowd would have people drive instead — usually get better mileage, but not by much at all (the Ford Windstar minivan’s EPA average fuel economy is 20 mpg; the Ford Explorer’s is 17; and the Ford Escape actually gets better mileage than the Windstar), and they tip over during stupid driving maneuvers at about the same rates as SUVs. The SUV, though, has more power and doesn’t carry the negative cultural image of the minivan.

The anti-SUV forces are trying to create a similar negative image for the SUV, but it’s not going to work. For one thing, nobody was ever really opposed in any organized way to the minivan, so there was never any kind of ‘rebel’ image that went along with having one. The minivan’s entire image problem is quite the opposite: that some people — a lot of people — see it as signifying that you’re an unthinking conformist. When these people need a lot of vehicular space, they go out and buy SUVs even though a minivan might actually serve just as well.

Demonizing SUV owners will likely backfire badly. The majority of the people who will agree with the anti-SUV argument already don’t drive SUVs; and a lot of current SUV owners will be turned into hard-core SUV owners, rather than give the impression that they can be bullied around by people like Arianna Huffington.

SUVs, to the extent that they’re undesirable, are a symptom, not a problem. If you’re against the use of SUVs, you should consider that you’re really against the zoning laws, building codes, and high-tax cities that push people to live in widely-scattered houses in the suburbs. And, while you’re at it, you might examine why you think SUVs are so evil, while station wagons and minivans are not.

About fifteen years ago, I bought a book called One-Sixth of the World’s Surface from the St. Louis Public Library’s bargain table . It’s a personal travelogue of the American author’s trip through the Soviet Union in 1931.

The author is a Communist, or at least a fellow-traveller, and he’s agog at just how wonderful the Soviet Union is — although he finds some cities to be quite dirty. It’s not entirely unlike a pale Red version of Democracy in America.

I have scanned in the book, and it’s now available, complete with illustrations, here in Tinotopia.

Whether the book is still under copyright I have no way of knowing. It was published by the author in 1932; that copyright would have expired in 1960. If the copyright was renewed in 1960, it would then have run out in 1988, which effectively means that it’s in perpetual copyright, thanks to the Great Perpetual Copyright Scam being put over on us by Disney and the Congress.

In any case, the book isn’t being exploited now — web searches turn up nothing — and it’s too interesting to just leave languishing on my shelf.

The International Herald Tribune has a story about pop music in China, and how it survives despite near-ubiquitous piracy.

Wang Lee Hom, a Chinese pop star and actor who was born and educated in the United States, appears to have become something of an anti-piracy activist in China.

“Pirates have already killed China’s music industry dead,” Wang said. “It frustrates my life and destroys China’s creative future.”

Though the fact that Wang makes enough money from recording music for him to continue doing it seems to directly contradict his statement that the Chinese music industry is “dead”. The IHT notes this as well.

That may be an overstatement. Record companies say that what piracy has really done in China is to cause fundamental shifts in the way the country’s music industry operates. It has simply forced Wang and his fellow stars to change the way they live, work and play. ‘‘There is no income from the royalties, so artists in China record single songs for radio play instead of albums for consumers,’’ said Lachie Rutherford, the president of Warner Music Asia-Pacific. ‘‘Stars need to look elsewhere to finance the rock-star lifestyle.’’

And therein may lie the problem: the rock-star lifestyle.

Those of you who are regular readers know that I am, or at least used to be, a fan of MTV Cribs. These days, it’s become a parody of itself, as even Andy Dick tells viewers that they “ain’t a playa” unless they have some specific posession. But even with the schedule packed with B-grade and lower ’stars’, Cribs still manages to tell the same story, that in the entertainment industry, success appears to be almost totally binary: either you are playing gigs at night and working a regular job during the day, or you have an 18,000-square-foot house with a guitar-shaped swimming pool and a garage full of Bentleys. And you know what the almost all of the people with the Bentleys say? That they love what they do, and that it’s all about the music.

The record companies, on the other hand, tell us that it’s all about the money. Without the fantastic payoff of the rock-star lifestyle, they expect us to believe, no decent music would be created.

Music, like other arts, has traditionally not paid very well. An awful lot of art of all kinds — from sculpture to painting to music to writing to performance — is undertaken around the world, despite the near-certainty that there will never be any financial return for the artists in their lifetimes.

Substitute any other job for that of pop musician, and it’s hard to deny the absurdity: let’s consider computer programmers.

Some computer programmers get unbelievably wealthy, far wealthier than even someone like Michael Jackson. Some more get into the Ferrari-and-giant-house league. A great many make it to the Porsche-and-big-house league, and some — particularly those just starting out and those who aren’t very good — drive Chevies and live in townhouses.

Imagine now that the universe was changed in some way that resulted in computer programmers having a 1% chance of making many millions of dollars, and a 99% chance of never being able to do much but recoup the expense of the tools of their trade, their computers, chairs, and Jolt cola — and maybe not even that. In that universe, would there be more computer programmers, or fewer?

If pop musicians were paid like computer programmers, we’d have much, much more music, and potentially better music as well: the market would make decisions, rather than a small number of label A&R men.

It’s probably true that the collapse of music distribution as we know it — which appears to be inevitable — will make the current rock-star lifestyle much rarer. It’ll be a little harder to make millions upon millions of dollars (it’s already very difficult), but it’ll be much easier to make a living. This is what the rock stars and record labels are considering when they complain about ‘piracy’: it’s not that the collapse of the music distribution racket will result in less music, or worse music, or that it’ll make it harder to make money at it. It’s that it’ll make it harder — but still not impossible — to make enormous amounts of money without working very hard.

Maybe this isn’t all that new a tactic, but I don’t spend all of my time looking at spam, either. Every few weeks I look through the things that my spam filter hasn’t caught, and I try to figure out appropriate rules to ensure that whatever particular tricks the spammers have adopted won’t continue to work.

I’ve written before about spammers making strenuous attempts to get around filters. It seems idiotic to me, to go to extra trouble to see to it that your messages get through to people who’ve taken specific steps to not read your message, but then I’m not a spammer, so what do I know?

Until recently, the spammers got around people who excluded messages that included words like “fuck” and “viagra” and “cock” and “hardcore” by spelling these things differently or by mixing punctuation or spaces in: “F U C K”, “V.I.A.G.R.A”, “C0CK” (that’s a zero), and “HARDC0RE” (another zero) served them well for a while. It didn’t take too long for people to incorporate this stuff into their filters. A zero surrounded by letters doesn’t normally occur, so a rule to exclude “C0CK” is easy. Strip the punctuation before running the message through the filter, and “V.I.A.G.R.A” is no problem. Assuming that most of your incoming messages are in English, it’s safe to assume that messages containing “F”, “K”, and a lot of other single letter surrounded by whitespace involve someone trying to hide potential red-flag words.

The spammers are determined to make money out of this while they can, though, and they’ve now started putting empty HTML tags in their messages, breaking up suspect words.

(Warning: I include an excerpt from a sexually-explicit spam below this point. You might not want to read any more if you are of a sqeamish nature.) (more…)

A New York Times story today portrays Ted Turner as a nut. Now, this isn’t much of a surprise to anyone who’s paid the least bit of attention to Mr. Turner, but the article further seems to hint at the possibility that Turner himself was responsible for at least some of the disorder that’s plagued AOL Time Warner since the merger.

To AOL Time Warner’s top executives, Mr. Turner’s loud and often-changing views have become a difficult fact of life. He is a constant center of speculation and attention, exposing internal disputes to the public, stirring up news coverage about soap operas in executive suites, and rattling the company’s stock. Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of AOL Time Warner, has worked hard to keep Mr. Turner involved, calling him “my man,” “Uncle Ted,” and “brilliant” at the television business. But other executives and directors say they regard him with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, and some roll their eyes at his quicksilver moods.

Over at the Washington Post, though, they’re still happy to print Turner’s blasts (scroll down to the bottom) without comment, even when he seemingly can’t get the name of AOLTW’s chairman right:

We really feel for former gazillionaire Ted Turner, whose shares of AOL Time Warner have plunged in value and turned him into a mere zillionaire. “I’m hoping to recoup some of my losses with this movie,” Turner told us cheerfully at Monday night’s premiere party for “Gods and Generals,” his 3 1/2-hour Civil War epic. “I hate incompetence,” the Mouth from the South added. “I always thought the rule of business was: Buy low, sell high. These people [in AOL Time Warner management] don’t do that. Didn’t they just sell Hughes Electronics for $800 million, when they bought it for something like $1.5 billion?” As for rumors that new Chairman Richard Parsons might spin off the troubled AOL division, Turner said: “Perkins? Perkins? I hope Perkins doesn’t spin it off. I hope he sells it for a good price!”

Oh, and that AOL-Time Warner merger that Turner thinks was such a colossally bad idea? Turner had 100 million shares of Time Warner at the time, and he voted them in favor of the merger — “with as much or more excitement and enthusiasm,” he said at the time, “as I did on that night when I first made love some 42 years ago.”

I’ve written about the tendency of American regulation to require that everyone lead a middle-class lifestyle as one of the main causes of homelessness “problems” in this country. Recently Reason Online had an article about the same thinking baing a major cause of the health-care “crisis”:

In other areas, we accept that the distribution of wealth is unequal: that some people live in small condominiums while others dwell in McMansions. Some eat at Jean-Georges, while others are lucky to dine at Carl’s Jr. And some shop Ross Dress For Less while others browse through Saks. And these decisions seem to work out pretty well, with people for the most part getting what they need, if not always what they want.

But imagine if state regulators insisted that only haute cuisine and high fashion could be offered? Costs would obviously get prohibitive for many.