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Here’s a pleasant change. Instead of writing about the cretin, we get an analysis from Charles Krauthammer on the particle that possibly passed light. In a race, that is.
… The world as we know it is on the brink of disintegration, on the verge of dissolution. No, I’m not talking about the collapse of the euro, of international finance, of the Western economies, of the democratic future, of the unipolar moment, of the American dream, of French banks, of Greece as a going concern, of Europe as an idea, of Pax Americana — the sinews of a postwar world that feels today to be unraveling.
I am talking about something far more important. Which is why it made only the back pages of your newspaper, if it made it at all. Scientists at CERN, the European high-energy physics consortium, have announced the discovery of a particle that can travel faster than light. …
Continuing the Obama free zone, The Economist has a good send off for Steve Jobs.
WHEN it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an “incredible” new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and “the results appear to be magic”. Mr Jobs, who died this week aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products.
The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and the internet humming with tributes from politicians, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more significant than just a clever money-maker. He stood out in three ways—as a technologist, as a corporate leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning. …
Here’s Jim Cramer on Steve Jobs too.
… He created an ecosystem that allowed all people to figure out everything. Sure, Intel and Microsoft harnessed power in smaller-form factors from the behemoths that were invented by IBM. But they harnessed them only in ways that were too difficult for so, so many.
Not Jobs.
He created them so that they were simple machines. It is as if Jobs invented the wheel, and the wedge, the screw, the pulley, the lever and the inclined plane.
We take them for granted now, like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But they were invented once, too. Can you imagine if one man invented all of them? Would you still think that he was only as good as Ford or Carnegie? Bell?
Of course it wasn’t enough that the devices worked. They were brilliant to look at and attractive by nature. As if they were feats of nature, lyrical even.
It’s as if he invented devices like Mozart and Beethoven wrote music. Even more so, Beethoven’s best work was accomplished when he went deaf while writing the Pastoral Symphony. How much more did Jobs give us when he got his death sentence eight years ago? A fury of invention buttressed by a level of courage that is unimaginable given the pain he must have endured.
Oh, and just for the moment, let’s talk about wealth creation — $350 billion of it. He has paid for more tuition and more retirement and more vacations and more meals on the table than anyone ever, maybe more than Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Walton and Bell combined. Empirically, as a commercial success? Best ever. …
And Clive Crook thinks the new iPhone is pretty neat.
… Today a few people have told me, by the way, that disappointment over the new iPhone is a sign of things to come: the first post-Jobs product launch was a letdown. Well, I think Jobs’ departure will be a crippling setback, but this was not the first post-Jobs product launch (it will be a year or two before we see the first Apple product that Jobs did not direct from the moment of conception) and I’ll have you know the new iPhone is no letdown.
The new device is an impressive advance over its predecessor in every respect but for the look. (It’s still beautiful.) I’d say this, even if it did not introduce Siri, the natural-language voice-control feature. I’m surprised this has not caused more of a stir. It could be revolutionary, don’t you think? We’ll see how well it works in ordinary use when consumers get hold of it, but I thought the Apple demo was startling. Jobs at his best, even if he wasn’t there. Usable voice control will be a far, far bigger breakthrough than touch-screens when it comes–and it may just have arrived.
Mark Steyn reminds us to think about Europe.
In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, “Europe.” The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent’s elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West’s last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it.
“Europe” has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn’t enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks’ vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality. …
Last month’s jobs report of 103,000 new jobs was a welcome sight. What was it like 28 years ago when Reagan was president? The country added 1.1 million jobs in one month!!! WSJ Editors have the story.
… As it happens, the biggest one-month jobs gain in American history was at exactly this juncture of the Reagan Presidency, after another deep recession. In September 1983, coming out of the 1981-82 downturn, American employers added 1.1 million workers to their payrolls, the acceleration point for a seven-year expansion that created some 17 million new jobs. …
Tony Blankley wants to praise Romney’s “flexibility.”
William F. Buckley Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable. Let me presume to add an analytic codicil: The GOP and the conservative movement have tended to support the most conservative policies only when they are understood to be conservative and are plausibly supportable by the conservative half of the electorate.
As the ideological center of gravity on various issues has shifted back and forth across the conservative-liberal spectrum over the decades, so inevitably has conservative policy support. I have in mind four examples: abortion, federal aid to education, “cap-and-trade” and individual health mandates.
As a campaigner for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in all his campaigns, starting in his 1966 campaign for governor of California, I can vividly recall that in 1964, Goldwater and the conservative movement were against federal aid to education in its entirety.
But as the decades advanced, even the most conservative voters came to support at least federal loans for college students, if not other federal education aid programs, such as for the handicapped. …
To start the humor section, David Harsanyi has a manifesto for Occupy Wall Street.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, women and transgendered — and any other human who is able to elude the tyranny of work for a couple of weeks — are created equal. We gather to be free not of tyranny, but of responsibility and college tuitions. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that a government long established and a nation long prosperous be changed for light and transient causes. So let our demands* be submitted to a candid world.
First, we are imbued with as many inalienable rights as a few thousand college kids and a gaggle of borderline celebrities can concoct, among them a guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment and immediate across-the-board debt forgiveness — even if that debt was acquired taking on a mortgage with a 4.1 percent interest rate and no money down, which, we admit, is a pretty sweet deal in historical context but down with the modern gilded age!
We demand that a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing, with a minor in German, become an immutable human right, because education is crucial and rich people can afford to fund unemployment checks until we find jobs or in perpetuity, whichever comes first. …