Month: June 2004

So the Pistons won it in 5, just as I predicted. That bit of forecasting was obvious, so now let’s go out on a limb and predict a Bush victory in November based on NBA logic. The Pistons are the working class team without a superstar, guys who follow their coach’s leadership and play as a well-oiled machine. They beat the flashy, pampered, narcissistic Lakers by putting their heads down and doing what had to be done, and Kobe’s team had no dramatic come-from-behind moves left by the last game.

Hollywood’s team lost in Detroit, and Hollywood’s candidate will lose as well.

I was prepared to hate the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Newdow pledge-of-allegiance case, but it appears that they got it right:

Sandra Banning, the child?s mother, then filed a motion to intervene or dismiss, declaring, inter alia, that she had exclusive legal custody under a state-court order and that, as her daughter?s sole legal custodian, she felt it was not in the child?s interest to be a party to Newdow?s suit.

Newdow doesn’t have legal custody, either joint or sole, despite the fact that the kid spends 10 days a month with him. It’s extremely unusual for a California family court not to award joint legal custody – dad has to be a wacko or an abuser not to get this status, which is largely viewed as window-dressing. But in this case we see that it actually means something, so fathers shouldn’t accept anything less.

Here’s an interesting quote from Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet Politburo in 1987:

“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things:

One, we want the Americans to withdraw conventional forces from Europe.

Two, we want them to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe.

Three, we want the Americans to stop proceeding with Strategic Defense Initiative.”

I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but it doesn’t sound like the sentiments of a man who was so dead set on democratizing the Soviet Union that he would have done so without any encouragement from the outside. (via The Argus )

So the historical revisionism is setting in, evinced by the unified theory of Perestroika that maintains Gorby shut down the Soviet system out of the goodness of his heart and over the objections of a stubborn cold-warrior Reagan who actually wanted the MAD to continue. That’s not the way I remember it, of course. The advent of the SDI gave the US a first-strike capability, and Gorby didn’t want to go down in history as the Communist in Charge when the US attacked the Soviet Union and took it down by force.The technical lag between the US and the Soviet Bloc opened into a wide chasm in the mid-80s, which I saw up close in Singapore where I met various Eastern Bloc engineers who were running around the island trying to scoop up the technology necessary to built a credible Personal Computer and failing.

The modus was like this: each satellite country had responsibility for a part of the system, the Soviets the CPUs, the East Germans the hard drives, the Bulgarians the keyboards, the Czechs the DRAMs, the Poles the floppies, etc. When the 286 was in full-scale production along with 20MB hard drives, and the 32-bit 386 was sampling in the US, the Soviet CPU was a slow, 8-bit 8088 equivalent and the East German hard drive was a 5MB model that crashed all the time. The Polish floppy was three generations behind, and the Bulgarian keyboard had to be build on Hong Kong switches. The cost was incredible, and the people had new access to videotapes from the West that showed a lifestyle vastly out of their reach as well. The evidence that their system was a failure could no longer be hidden, and the people were restless for change.

The Soviets and their stooges knew full well that they would never be able to bridge the technical gap, and that its inevitable outcome would be the destruction of their system, peacefully or otherwise. So they did the only sensible thing, laid down their arms and asked Reagan and Thatcher for help in transforming their system, knowing that help would be forthcoming.

Without Reagan and SDI, it would have happened anyway, but at least a generation later, and at the cost of many more lives and much more suffering. And that’s why Reagan is considered a saint within the former Soviet bloc today, and a demon within the Postmodern Gulag.

Among other things, Thatcher said:

“He was able to say ‘God Bless America’ with equal fervour in public and in private. And so he was able to call confidently upon his fellow-countrymen to make sacrifices for America – and to make sacrifices for those who looked to America for hope and rescue.

“With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world.

“And so today the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw, in Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself – the world mourns the passing of the Great Liberator and echoes his prayer ‘God Bless America’.
…
“And as the last journey of this faithful pilgrim took him beyond the sunset, and as heaven’s morning broke, I like to think – in the words of Bunyan – that ‘all the trumpets sounded on the other side’.

“We here still move in twilight. But we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had.

“We have his example. Let us give thanks today for a life that achieved so much for all of God’s children.”

Very moving words, from one who knew him well.

Kobe Bryant’s judge has determined that Colorado’s so-called Rape Shield Law is constitutional, even though it’s discriminatory on its face:

Enacted in the 1970s, the law prevents the sexual history of an alleged victim from being introduced as evidence unless the defense proves that it is relevant…Bryant’s attorneys had argued that the law was unfair because a defendant’s sexual history can be disclosed at a trial.

This is a bad ruling, and Rape Shield Laws are bad laws. The basic principle here should be what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, so either we talk about both parties’ sexual histories or we talk about neither’s. Innocent until proved guilty, after all.

Perhaps depressed about this ruling, Kobe turned in a pathetic performance in Game 3, where the Pistons showed the world that the Lakers are vastly over-rated. This was one of the most enjoyable sporting events I’ve ever seen, and not in small part because it showed the so-called experts for what they really are. The Pistons didn’t just put Kobe into a box, they shut down O’Neal and the rest of the team. Even the usual pro-Laker bias on the part of the officials wasn’t enough to turn the tide in LA’s favor, and the defeat was so convincing I imagine several Lakers are wondering if it’s even worthwhile to show up for the next two games.

So we stand by our prediction: Pistons in 5.

UPDATE: See Laker anguish here.