Newmark's Door

Amazing speech by Mark Helprin at West Point, 10/11/92: "I Dodged the Draft, and I Was Wrong."

Weekly Standard writer is so, so right: "As for media treatment of celebrity and professorial pundits, I and others should offer any of them as much time as they'd like. Far from repressing Robbins and other thigh-slappers, I'd give them their own cable channel and let them whine away in full view, 24/7. Their full-frontal foolishness is a friend of my causes. They are all welcome to as much airtime as they will suck up. Team them with Robert Byrd and Tom Daschle and arrange for a barnstorming tour. There won't be 40 Senate Democrats left if we open the gate wide enough."

Dixie Chick record sales supposedly off 40% since Natalie's comments. They decide to fight back by getting naked.

FOLLOW-UP: Prompted by Patrick Sullivan?s extensive, interesting comments, I spent a little time Googling the charge that General Motors maliciously and heinously destroyed urban mass transit in America. In addition to the link cited below (see Wednesday, 4/23/03), two online sources for the charge are as follows: excerpts from the film, "Taken for a Ride," by Jim Klein and Martha Olson, shown on PBS. This film was extensively praised. (Also here.) The charge originates principally in the work of antitrust attorney Bradford Snell, former staff member for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly; an article by Mr. Snell is here.

But, alas for lovers of mass transit everywhere, the hypothesis appears to be profoundly flawed. We can start with the ever-reliable Cecil Adams who concludes, ". . . blaming GM [for the decline] is like blaming the inventor of gunpowder for war." A Los Angeles Times article reports, ". . . most historians agree that GM and the other mega-companies only helped to speed the end of the railway, which already was deep into red ink." It points out some serious problems with the mass transit lines as of the early 30s: ". . . mass transit riders complained of massive traffic jams and hourlong delays. The hard wooden seats and the open-window 'air-conditioning system' in the summers were no picnic either. The conflict between the trolley and the automobile was often played out at intersections, where they collided repeatedly, resulting in many injuries and deaths. Newspaper editorials raised the alarm about the accidents and crusaded against the streetcars."

Another nice, short piece debunking the claim was written by Stan Schwarz, system administrator for the U.S. Geological Service and "lapsed science nerd," and is here. It provides a half dozen links to other good resources: one by Cliff Slater, advisor to the Reason Foundation, and one by George Hilton, professor of economics at U.C.L.A.

Another academic, Vincent Mareino at Georgetown, concludes, "Many groups attempted to influence the future of American transportation. Nevertheless, majority rule won out in every case. Citizens were fallible, and often took actions not necessarily in the best interests of a minority or even a majority of the population. Yet those actions were never coerced or forced by outside conspirators."

But the best piece I found in my short search is a paper by Martha J. Bianco, "Kennedy, 60 Minutes, and Roger Rabbit: Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations of the Decline of Urban Mass Transit." (Available from this page in Adobe .pdf format.) Professor Bianco details the charge, and it seems to me, decisively refutes it. Her analysis is consistent with Professor Mareino's: government regulation and government policy played key roles in the decline. "The fact is that transit companies faced demands either by their riding constituency or by the regulatory bodies to provide unprofitable service. Transit companies were politically and often legally unable to refuse to provide unprofitable service. The motor bus allowed them to operate such service at the least loss, since it would have been entirely prohibitive for them to extend streetcar tracks or install trolleys on suburbanizing routes, where they were required to provide service." (p. 13.)

But, Professor Bianco asks, if the story is so clearly wrong, why does it persist? Because it serves the purposes of policy activists with an agenda, an agenda to replace cars with mass transit. "The GM conspiracy myth, understood in this way, makes a great deal of sense. It becomes irrelevant that GM did or did not cause or even contribute to the decline of mass transit in the U.S. What becomes compelling, from a larger perspective, is the manner in which the GM story is used, the political and economic climates in which it is most likely to emerge, and the types of policy initiatives under consideration during the periods in which the story is being told." (p. 21.)

This is going to make a fine story for a couple of my classes.

Java implementations of Wason's famous 2-4-6 experiment.

Larry Miller: "I don't give a rat's crack about what has or hasn't happened to some damn museum in Iraq." Mark Steyn also has some thoughts on the museum: "The National Museum fell victim not to general looting but to a heist, if not an inside job, for which the general lawlessness provided cover. Am I sorry it happened? Yes, because it has given the naysayers, who were wrong about the millions of dead civilians, humanitarian catastrophe, environmental devastation, regional conflagration, etc., one solitary surviving itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny twig from their petrified forest with which to whack Rumsfeld and Co. The retrospective armchair generals are now complaining the generals didn't devote enough thought to saving armchairs from the early Calcholithic age. It isn't enough for America to kill hardly any civilians or even terribly many enemy combatants or bomb any buildings or unduly disrupt the water or electric supply, it also has to protect Iraq's heritage from Iraqis."

Joel Spolsky's 12 Steps to Better Code. (If bug-fixing is not part of the schedule, when the schedule gets tight programmers will write bad code deliberately.)

It looks like the drought is over.

Tip: if you have a math question, don't ask for help from someone attending the Univ. of British Columbia journalism school.

Another claim that General Motors destroyed mass transit in California.