A Hospital? What is It?

It’s a big building with patients.

But what’s Glenn Reynolds doing there?

Me at Outside the Beltway, yesterday:

For most of my adult life, I’ve worked in the Downtown area of Rochester, at one job or another. For the first year or so, and on and off after that, I tried using the bus. After getting mugged twice, having bums hassle me for change, (Which I never carry anyway) having people smell up the bus with various remarkable bodily functions, having one person puke on me, and having my journeys take often as not an hour longer than a car trip would have taken, I gave up on government transport.

I’ve ridden on rail systems, which admittedly were marginally better, (DC and the TTC) but even in those situations, being totally dependent on such systems being on time proved problematic when they were not.

I will tell you that in recent years, the TTC rail is showing signs of going the way of the less desirable bus systems, in that one of the first things I did on a recent visit to the GTA was trip over a kid in a sleeping bag coming out of the Bloor street station.

Granted, that’s a function of the neighborhood going to hell, but that’s part of the point; In my truck I never run into such problems, regardless of neighborhood conditions, particularly if the employer is good enough to provide an enclosed parking space, which I usually get as a part of my employee negotiations.

For me, this is not simply a matter of cost, but of function, particularly where getting back and forth to work is concerned.

(Fascinating fact: It’s hard to give a good impression to a customer when your clothing smells like beer and vomit. Who knew?)

Derb has decided to side with John Ratzenberger, who is on a kick to keep tinkering alive.

I think they’re both right. Understand; I wrote most of this without bothering to actually read Derb’s article. The first couple paras of Derb’s were enough to set my fingers in gear, because it’s something that’s been nagging at me for years, now. I was amazed to bang out the thoughts as they occurred to me, and then come up for air and actually read his article and find so much similarity in our line of thought.

I myself grew up in a mechanics’ household. I don’t think he was ever a professional mechanic, but my Dad was one of those people who could keep a car running on the fine edge for years after most people had given up on the automobile, had it towed to the junkyard, and get themselves into a newer one. He could listen to the description of a problem, visualize what was happening, and have the solution identified in his mind faster than anybody I ever knew, including most professional mechanics.

While I think I inherited a lot of his ability in terms of envisioning solutions, and his love of just plain tinkering with stuff, I’m sorry to say that I never got around to picking up a lot of the talents that he had with automobiles. Oh, sure, I can diagnose automotive problems with the best of them. Repairing most of the problems anymore, particularly where it involves the engine and drive train, I don’t know so much about anymore, mostly because of the amount of electronics that go into the average car and truck anymore. for example, I could tell you that the engine I’m listening to is running a little on the rich side, or that your ignition didn’t sound spot on, and so on, but repairing that problem, well, that’s another matter. THe way cars are anymore prevents a lot of repairs, frankly. The general advantage for me these days is that I can tell the mechanics what’s wrong, when I take the car into the shop. That’s a point that John himself brings up…. Cars are nigh on impossible to tinker with anymore. Electronics, too. I used to tinker with Stereo gear. CD’s and now MP3 players changed most of that. The big amps and huge investment in turntables and speakers then I made is just another group of anachronisms sitting around my office.  Mostly my big fancy amplifier and speakers are driven by my MP3 player, anymore.  it’s almost like we’ve been successful in engineering our way out of the next generation of engineers.

I think I translated a lot of that ability from what I learned about 60s and 70s vintage automobiles, to computers, code, and frankly electronics of all sorts.

Understand me clearly; I’m not suggesting that I am better at this particular aspect than anybody else, what I’m suggesting is that tinkering, as John Ratzenberger correctly points out, is vital to that visualizing process. It helps us to understand how things work, and helps us to envision new solutions for all the problems. It is what gave us America’s spirit of invention during the first part of the last century. It is those kind of people that gave us a successful space program. That’s why I always considered the hobby of amateur radio to be very important to the aid and development of our communications systems. I still think that that particular hobby has a role to play, going forward, though I consider it to be in a transitional stage… like every other kind of tinkering, anymore.

Derbyshire pooh-poohs the idea of computer coding being the next level of tinkering. I’m not sure I agree. It most certainly is less than a physical relationship. But again, I have to lean on my own anicdotal experience… so, I’ll let you in on a little secret; When I code… When I program a computer to do something for me. I like considering, and picturing in my head, the various elements as physical elements. I code, so as to arrange those physical elements in a spatial relationship. I guess we could picture it as a flow chart… it’s as close a picture of my envisioning as you’re going to get.

Where Derbyshire and I agree, however, is that there is a massive difference between the physical tinkering and electronic tinkering lets say, via code. I have often thought that my ability in the physical world as taught to me by my father gave me a leg up on the coding world. That, because it gave me a means to visualize what I was doing… To understand the relationships that I was creating with my code. I wonder sometimes how people without that background visualize their code. I don’t know if I could do it that way.

I’ll tell you something else that might not be exactly intuitive. I have the notion that blogging, such as it is is an extension of our desire to tinker with things that interest us. It’s an outlet. A creative outlet, certainly. But we as humans like to think about the way things work, and I think that blogging of all sorts, helps us to form our thoughts and our ideas about how things work, as we bash them into words and paragraphs and set them in the photons for everyone to read. The web, you see, was something that everybody could get their hands into, and get them dirty at it. it was something that after getting your hands dirty with it, you could stand back and look at it and say. “I did that”.

And, perhaps, that is the most important part of all to this discussion,  a feeling of accomplishment. The tinkerer, can always go into his workshop and point at projects that he’s done and be proud of them. The sense of accomplishment has a tendency to engender further experimentation, further successes, and yes, further failures, too. After all, those tend to go hand in hand.  To be perfectly candid, I wonder if our lack of tinkering, and the successes that that kind of thing brings, isn’t what’s brought us along this transitional road, from independent accomplishment to Dependencyville.

The American tinkerer today, has taken on something a bit different aura. The last 20 years or so, he’s kind of viewed as a lovable crank like Dr. Brown in “Back to the future”. Time was, though, where just about everybody had some kind of project that they were working on. Growing things, the electronics, even consumer electronics, (ever heard of Heathkit?) and of course the 60s muscle car you’re a brought forward an awful lot in the way of tinkering with automobiles. A lot of that fell by the way in the Jimmy Carter gasoline prices. We moved in consumer electronics from tubes and discrete components to transistors and then to integrated circuit chips, which are approximately is interesting to build with as watching mold grow on bread. Watching the neighbors car rust. And of course, counting dandelions on the front lawn. As we moved in that direction of increased technocracy, individualism within that technocracy became harder and harder to maintain or it finally it got to be such a struggle, where most people just said the hell with it.

Okay, I know, I’ve been talking a lot about myself, and perhaps spending too much time in the areas that aren’t earthshakingly interesting. Thing is, without those experiences to lean on, I’d have no way of explaining any of this to you.

The point I’m making here, is the idea that I think we’ve lost something as a society, as a culture, and as individuals, when we sacrificed tinkering in the name of efficiency, or whatever it was that we sacrificed it for. It was the source, frankly, of the can-do attitude that made us as successful as we were, as a nation, as a culture, as a people. Derb tends to agree:

To anyone under forty, a garage is a place to keep your car, and a basement is a rumpus room for the kids. Yet the U.S.A. sprang up out of garage and basement tinkerers, small workshops, teen boys fixing up their cars on a Saturday morning. Everything from the aeroplane to the personal computer started in someone’s garage.

Take a walk down your street on a Saturday morning. See any young guys fixing up their cars? No, they’re all indoors playing Grand Theft Auto and texting each other.

If no American ever again paints anything as good as Cole’s Garden of Eden, my guess is that the republic will survive anyway. If we give up tinkering, we might survive, but only as a bureaucratic empire of paper-pushers and lotus-eaters.

And this is the poison pill in the left-liberal cookie. Everybody must go to college! Never mind that tinkering stuff. It’s not worthy of full-fledged Americans, who have grander destinies as lawyers, doctors, and … community organizers … hospital diversity consultants … professors of literary hermeneutics. That’s where the future lies! Throw away that wrench — hit the books!

This cast of thought, utterly dominant among liberals, and by no means unknown among conservatives, scares me much more than Iran’s bomb.

[It scares Charles Murray, too. I understand he has a book coming out this summer that touches on these things.]

I make no prognosis here. I have no prediction of the future of tinkering. I merely identify the relationship between it, and our national accomplishment.

Now, you’ll pardon me; I’ve got to fix that longwire antenna in the backward. I want to try and catch Radio Vilnius this weekend.

(Edit, Bit, a few typos)

No question that on the political front, todayw as a slow news day. The big story on the 6pm (Eastern) newscasts would have been Hillary Clinton’s drubbing of Brrack Obama in West Virginia, last night.  What to do to take the edge off that wave?

Arrange for Barrack Obama to get an endorsement from John Edwards… at 5:00 eastern, or so.

(Note the posting time on the story.)

So it is that the news coverage at 6pm was not of Obama being handed his head by HillBilly, it’s of a totally meaningless ‘endorsement of someone nobody cares about, (Edwards) of someone who ostensibly already has the nomination. (Obama)

A deft move by someone who knows how to manipulate the news media.

I’d say there’s a few people who are scared as hell he doesn’t have that nomination.

Well at least this black reverend manages to keep his allegations pausible, video:

[wp_youtube]ejTmistHFw0[/wp_youtube]

It would explain why Andrew Sullivan is so avid about BO.

Hat tip:  Ace

• You’re quite right, Billy, McCain may end up actually winning this thing, but at what cost to the Republicans, in terms of having to make them more like socialist Democrats? And by that same token, what is the level of damage to the country both during and after the election? That’s what I wonder.
• As Billy mentions, (And David confirms with a link to Sis…) HillBillary rolled West Virginia last night. That win takes on a frightening aspect when one considers what both of the candidates think about people like that which live in that state… and Kenucky…. and Arkansas.  the difference between them; Obama is honest enough to project those negative feelings. It’s amusing, to watch Patrick Healy of the New York Times blame the whole thing on racism, and Obama’s campaign is saying the same… saying the folks in West Virginia are racist hicks. Notice, please; that’s not something that was said said when Obama got something like 99% of the black vote in South Carolina the other day. Here we go again with the unspoken conclusion that racism can only flow in one direction… a charge that seems to usually come up when Democrats are in the room.
• I’m still toying with the add-ons at the bottom of each post. I’d like to get the font smaller for them. We’ll see.
• Looks like price hikes on Crude oil have hit that bursting point we’ve been talking about. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
• I allowed a few days ago that one reason for Hillary clinton to stay in was to help pay off the millions of debt she’s racked up. Starting to look like I called that one, too.
• Florida police are saying they’ve arrested a suspect in the wildfires there.
• Me to Billy, last night at the Q&O comments section, speaking about the application of principle:
  

  I’ve always had the notion that principles are merely long- view- pragmatism. What I’m suggesting is that principles… at least the ones that last… become such for a reason. Man learns over time what works and what doesn’t and those things get called principles. And that’s precisely because the reason you mention… working outside those principles, doesn’t work.Which is not to say that a lot of nonsense doesn’t get the ‘principle’ label. The phrase ‘Social Justice” for example….

  OK, perhaps a bit obvious to some. But that it is not so obvious to others is perhaps the point.

• Too bad the Congress wasn’t listening to Ariel Cohen. He’s correct, of course… the appearence of ”doing something’ is perhaps of larger import to these morons than the actual effect of what they do.

Honk if you’ve never seen an Uzi fired from a car window

Dana Milbank once again shows why nobody… even Democrats… should take the guy seriously;

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier

It strikes me as possible that Milbank doesn’t understand the concept of photo-ops, and that what he describes is a matter of course for any public figure… including liberal Democrat pols… but I doubt he’s quite that stupid. I’m forced to conclude he’s just looking for… and finding… the cheap shot. A humorist he may be, but I’ll tell you what; when I see similar shots being taken at Obama, I’ll consider it possible he’s not in the tank for Obama.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) – Hillary Rodham Clinton coasted to a large, but largely symbolic victory in working-class West Virginia on Tuesday, handing Barack Obama one of his worst defeats of the campaign but scarcely slowing his march toward the Democratic presidential nomination

The Sister is following the coverage.

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It is clear, and sadly predictable that John McCain has fallen for the hoax of anthropogenic global warming,.    Roy Spencer on “McCain’s Assault on Reason:”

John McCain’s global-warming speech on Monday made it clear that there will be no presidential candidate this year willing to question the assertion that global warming (a.k.a. “climate change”) is manmade, or the assertion that we can fix global warming by passing a few laws.

Along with Clinton and Obama, McCain’s proposal to attack global warming now gives voters three choices for a car color – as long as it is black. Like Clinton and Obama, McCain’s proposal involves a “cap and trade” mechanism to legislatively limit CO2 emissions in the coming years, with the free market minimizing the economic damage by allowing a trading of emission credits between companies. He also includes an allowance for carbon offsets, although everyone (except Al Gore) believes this to be more smoke-and-mirrors than a real-world strategy for reducing carbon emissions.

Anthropogenic global warming is not a fact   It is conjecture on the part environmental wackos.   John there simply is no anthropogenic global warming.  Pull your head out and see the sunlight.

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• At some point, someone with some brains is going to show up and figure out that all the candlelight vigils ever held don’t mean squat for stuff like this. And for that matter, stuff like this. And stuff like this, as well. The great lesson to be learned here is some people don’t want peace. And you know what? We’re talking about matters of scale here, when we get to international levels. Iran, for example.
• An honorable mention at the OTB Caption Contest
• The New York Times finally got round to admitting Obama was born a Muslim. See how long this took, and how many times they had to get beat over the head with facts before admitting it? James Joyner discusses this here. Note my comments. Michelle reports they’re selling the new 57 state lapel pin. This has me concerned, frankly. I mean, I’d not want anyone to think there was a false patriotism, here. Meanwhile, I note Rush Limbaugh pointing out that there are 57 Islamic states. Hmmmmm… Rush is joking, I’m sure, but then again, Obama does label Israel a ‘constant sore’. Gee, guess whose pocket that script came from?
• Oh, speaking of Obama, Billy, I’m not convinced those two options are mutually exclusive.
• Blogging before blogging? Heck, I did that on BBS’s back in the GT network. Did a weekly column, too.
• Is Obama Dukakis?: When even Democrat loyalist Susan Estrich says it…
• I wonder how the earthquake in China will affect the Oympics. Perhaps more correctly, I wonder how the effort to keep the Olympics on schedule will affect the relief effort there. Current figures are floating around 20,000 and given the well known accuracy of the Chinese media you can add another zero to that figure.
• Did you note the fires in Florida, last night? Still going on of course. As of this morning, they had a few miles of both I95 and US1 closed because of them. I’m hearing 70 or 80 homes destroyed. I find interesting, that there has not been nearly the pants wetting one usually sees attached to similar fires in California.  Some of that, of course is the fact that there are more news crews in SouCal. Then again, Palm Bay is hardly to be compared with such urban settings as Benson, AZ. So what makes SouCal more important to the news teams, I wonder? Could it be that California is the more liberal, and therefore more worthy of our sympathy? Ya gotta wonder, sometimes. Interestingly, they’re now suggesting that they’re dealing with arson.
• I have to say this; In watching what’s developing with Ron Paul and with Boob Barr, (No, that’s not a typo) I grow increasingly annoyed. Clearly, I want neither of them near the reins of power, but perhaps that’s part of the point.  I grant that Barr and Paul speak the truth when they say McCain isn’t a conservative, but no more are they. In fact, whereas McCain is merely not a conservative,  Barr and Paul not only not conservatives, they’re both babbling nut cases, as I have been saying for years now. Having them arise… self-appointed or not.. as the spokespeople for the real right does the cause of conservatism no good whatever, and is in fact more damaging to that cause than John McCain.  Can’t we as conservatives find better representaton for our interests than John McCain or Barr or Paul?  Please?

I told you people a year back when the liberals were busy boarding the “Straight Talk Experess” that if he ever got close to the White House, they’d start finding excuses to bail out.

So, comes today, the bespecticled Richard Cohen, leaping out the bus window, saying:

In 2000, I boarded John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, and, in a metaphorical sense, never got off. Here, truly, was something new under the political sun — a politician who bristled with integrity and seemed to have nothing to hide. I continue to admire McCain for those and other reasons, but the bus I once rode has gone wobbly. Recently, it veered into the mud.

It is not the investor owned oil companies driving up the price of oil.  Doctor Sowell, Townhall, explains the price of oil in terms simple enough for even BO and  Mrs. Clinton to be able to understand:

With all the commotion in the media and in politics about the high price of gasoline, is there really some terribly complex explanation?

Is there anything complex about the fact that with two countries– India and China– having rapid economic growth, and with combined populations 8 times that of the United States, they are creating an increased demand for the world’s oil supply?

Maybe BO and Mrs. Clinton ore too stupid to understand the law of supply and demand or maybe they are simply too greedy to place the interest of the American public ahead of the craven political ambitions.   In any case, a vote for either BO or Mrs. Clinton is a vote for yet more misery at the pump.  The choice is yours.

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Ed Morrissey:

I guess this means it’s on. O’Reilly gets the worst of this exchange for not comprehending that the Geneva Conventions bind nations to standards of conduct regardless of reciprocation and for many different kinds of detainees and refugees; doesn’t the man research the topic before an interview? He also lets McCain off the hook on the allegation that it makes American soldiers less safe in future wars, given the fact that we don’t plan on fighting France or the Brits any time soon:

And Ed has vid of the exchange.

McCain is dead wrong on this.

What McCain is trying to do here is to reduce morality to a lawbook, and that simply cannot be done. At what point has morality ever been non-contextual? At what point has morality ever been so simple as rulebook?

What were the methods involved? Getting wet,  placing panties on their heads and sleep deprivation. Well, excuse me, but in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man, being beheaded, burned alive, etc, would seem to trump these. We need information to save lives. Are you suggesting these animals… and that’s what they are… are going to tell us what we need t know to save lives because we’re very nice to them? Perhaps you think cookies and warm milk will work better?

As an example… Let’s say I come to you and say that there is a couple that hates you so much that they will kill their six month old baby so as to kill you, I am describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery that is beyond any possibility of recognition that they’re being treated nicely, wouldn’t you say?

And spare me the nonsense about questionable intelligence coming from it. In the handful of cases where the mild procedures we have used have been brought to bear, the intelligence has been solid gold. KSM, for example.  Funny how McCain never brings this up.

Spare me the nonsense about how our Allies will be reluctant to join us. Our Allies in this war on terror, have been conducting more stringent and trying investigations then are we. Nobody’s accused them of being ‘immoral’, except for the anti-war crowd who wouldn’t be happy unless the US lost anyway.   On that basis it seems to me that our Allies are going to be reluctant to join us not because we “torture” , but because we make the mistake of not doing so.

I’ve said this before, and will continue to say it until I get an answer or an admission: Spare me the delusional fear that they will torture our people, because we very occasionally torture theirs. Please explain to me in what war this country has ever fought, the Geneva conventions have been actually followed at all points. You cannot, because they have not been.

Spare me the pretenses of morality. In this situation, they mean little, because war is, in fact the absenceof morality. Morality only gets re-established once the war has been settled… and that morality gets defined exclusively by the winners. If you’re going to argue from a morality standpoint and ‘civilized warfare”, allow me to remind you that the Brits thought we did not fight according to the laws if civilized warfare, during the Revolutionary war. They considered the American army a band of guerrillas. Should we give them their Colonies back?

Finally, allow me to remind Mr. McCain that if we’d stuck by the letters of the Geneva convention, we’d have been summarily executing terrorists, not interrogating them, and then housing and feeding them three Halal squares a day at great expense. 

Survival …as a people, as well as survival as individuals… is the focus, here.

If we give that up, and we give up control of the situation, what good is any of the rest of it? If we don’t win, if we don’t maintain utter control of the situation, what possibility do any of those “high ideals”, this morality we hold, have, to survive in the world? If we are unwilling to do what’s necessary defend ourselves by whatever means, then what it comes down to is we don’t deserve to survive.

Which seems rather handy, since we probably won’t.

I say again: It is the winners who are the ones who get to decide what constitutes morality… and they won’t pay what YOU or I consider moral, any mind whatever… as they have repeatedly demonstrated.

This argument about torture keeps falling back on the Geneva conventions, and so perhaps this aspect needs addressing:

* There are no rules in war, other than the rules dictated by the winner, afterward.

* The Geneva Convention which purports to be civilized warfare, is in fact nothing of the sort, and is not worth the paper it was written on, having repeatedly been broken in every war ever waged since it’s signing. There’s a reason, here; Warfare is not civil under any conditions. War is, instead, the utter lack of civility. It is therefore unrealistic to assume or demand any degree of civility in wartime.

* Those, such as McCain, who seek closer adherence to the Geneva Convention during wartime, even on moralistic ground, particularly when the enemy is overtly not adhering to said convention, are themselves immoral, given they end up costing their own side lives, by causing their own military to, in effect, fight with one hand tied behind their back. I say yet again,  I include John McCain in this. That he doesn’t understand this disqualifies him from holding the office of POTUS, in my opinion.

* When a people go to war, it is by definition a last resort against an immoral enemy. It’s understood that war of itself is an immoral act. In going to war the line of immorality has already been crossed… but it is also understood that the greater immorality is to allow the enemy to continue it’s immoral activity. It is assumed, thereby, that whatever actions are taken in pursuit of winning said war against said immoral enemy, are in the immediate sense, of lesser moral consequence than the defeat of the enemy, and the actions of the enemy, both before and during said war.

* Hindsight, which is what is being engaged in here by John McCain , is a luxury a nation at war cannot afford. For example, consider the post 9/11 world, and the discussions about ‘How far would you go to stop another 9/11?” We succeeded in stopping any more such attacks on us, and we continue to hold them back. Being concerned now with the ‘rights’ of those attacking us is at least counter-productive, and self-defeating.

The choice before us, as I see it comes down to one enemy combatants comfort, or a handful, over thousands of American lives. McCain has stuck up here not for the Americans and for the west but for the enemy.

John McCain is wrong…dead wrong…  on this issue.

I note James Joyner today, reporting by way of US News that Mike Huckabee is a likley pick for McCain’s VP:

While Democrats debate the likelihood of a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton “Dream Ticket,” the latest word is that Mike Huckabee is currently at the top of the list to be John McCain’s running mate. James Pethokoukis attributes this information to “a top McCain fundraiser and longtime Republican moneyman who has spoken to McCain’s inner circle.”

The rationale?

1) He is a great campaigner and communicator who could both shore up support in the South among social conservatives (Huckabee is a former Baptist minister) and appeal to working-class voters in the critical “Big 10? states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

2) As any pollster knows, voters search for candidates who “care about people like me,” and Huckabee would probably score a lot higher on that quality than millionaire investor Mitt Romney. Plus, given all the turmoil on Wall Street, 2008 would seem to be a bad year to pick a former investment banker for veep.

3) Economic conservatives and supply-siders may balk, but the threat of four years of Obamanomics and higher investment, income, and corporate taxes might be enough to keep them on board.

Reason three is simply idiotic, as it could be said of any plausible choice.

It’s true that Huckabee is an amiable, empathetic fellow who would shore up key parts of the Republican base. But he’ll also alienate other parts of the base and virtually kill the party’s chances of winning over moderate “swing” voters

No, James, I think you under-estimate the damage such a pick would do to McCain among the base.He’ll kill his chances, sure. Of course, given he’s swallowed the ‘Global Warming” kool-aid, I doubt there’s a whole bunch more, short of actually switching parties, that he could do to alienate the Republican base. It’s almost like he’s TRYING to lose.