Five are dead. Fifteen are still missing.

Ship's captain: "We were about 300 meters from the shore, more or less."

You know what else was 300 meters from the shore? A huge rock. See for yourself. Paste the above coordinates into the Google Earth search field or choose "satellite view" in Google Maps. In Google Earth, you can click on the "show ruler" icon (looks like a ruler); select meters, and measure from the nearest shore. 300 meters.

Captain Schettino is a real piece of work:

Meanwhile, attention focused on the captain, who was spotted by Coast Guard officials and passengers fleeing the scene even as the chaotic and terrifying evacuation was under way.

. . .

A French couple who boarded the Concordia in Marseille, Ophelie Gondelle and David Du Pays, told the Associated Press they saw the captain in a lifeboat, covered by a blanket . . . .

Coast Guard officers later spotted Schettino on land as the evacuation unfolded. The officers urged him to return to his ship and honor his duty to stay aboard until everyone was safely off the vessel, but he ignored them, Coast Guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo said.

. . .

The route the ship followed turned out to be too close to the coast, and it seems that his decision in handling the emergency didn't follow Costa Crociere's procedures . . . .

Jorgen Loren, chairman of the Swedish Maritime Officer's Association, said the captain clearly deviated from the ship's intended route.

"It is remarkable because weather conditions were good and these cruise ships have the best and most modern technical equipment. All conditions were ideal," he said.

(Emphasis mine.) Isn't "Schettino" Italian for "little shit"? Just askin'.

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Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:49 PM | Comments (235)
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I wanted to give it a couple of weeks because initially I just absolutely loved it. Maybe I was just smitten.

But three weeks later and I still love it.

I got the Kindle Touch with 3G for Christmas. Most of this review applies to any Kindle, but the specific one I'm reviewing is the Touch with 3G. (Clarification: All Kindles are wi-fi and connect to your home wireless. The 3G ones will also plug into the 3G phone system and download your book when on a train or the like. I don't know if this 3G capability is really worth it, because the number of times you're going to want to read a book, and yet have had no notice at all that you should spend the twenty seconds needed to download a book at home, are going to be rare bordering on the nonexistent.)

And with "Special Offers," which is Amazon's right to advertise to you, in exchange for knocking about twenty dollars off the cost of the thing. The advertisments are pretty unobtrusive -- the main thing they do is that when the device powers down, it puts up a full-page ad for something or other, and you can click on it to find out more. When you're actually reading it, though, there aren't any ads.

This is an aesthetic consideration. Is a $20 discount (or so) worth it to have the main page, as you power it up, consist of an advertisment? I can't answer that, of course. I'd prefer to have a selected image in there (I assume that's possible, but I don't know). Then again, it's $20 off. The ads are low-pressure and pretty tasteful; the one that was on there just now was a couple, in silhouette, walking at the edge of a shoreline; a small bit of text placed in the photo's sky promised half-off for some kind of footwear. No further details.

I should note for anyone who doesn't know that the Kindle isn't the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is a tablet, like the iPad. It's a browser and a media player. The screen is like the screen of a computer or phone -- it is a source of light, and beams light at your eyes.

I didn't get that one, because I wanted a pure reader. I didn't want the device blazing light at my eyes like a computer screen; I was specifically looking for something that wouldn't contributed to eye-strain, as I'm on the computer all day and I'm pretty sure it would be bad for my eyes to add an additional hour of book-reading on a computer every day. So note that nothing I'm writing about has to do with the Kindle Fire, which, despite the Kindle name, really is unlike the actual Kindle e-readers.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (271)
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"Effectively killing the bill," Instapundit says.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (78)
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Yay, it's Martin Luther King Jr. day.

If anyone feels like writin', get to writin'.

I'll be posting stuff and I think we're doing the last (?) liveblog of a debate tonight, but I'm treating this as a half-day.

I'm writing my review of the Kindle now.

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (75)
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Is John Weaver to blame for Huntsman's flame-out?

That's the consensus, but of course John Huntsman bought into this strategy.

Weaver's a moron, certainly, but who is the moron, the moron or the moron who follows him?

John Huntsman actually had a good conservative record, in the main, in Utah. There's no reason he could not have been a contender.

Weaver and Huntsman apparently made a bad tactical decision: As Huntsman was already perceived as being a liberal-ish Charlie Crist figure for serving as Obama's ambassador to China, they would run on that, embrace it, rather than do what would occur to most non-morons, which would be to run as a conservative and explain away the ambassadorship in a "patriotism knows no party" pitch.

I believe that deviations like that can help a candidate in a general election, because independents like seeing someone who, like themselves, is "independent minded," which is a nice way of saying "indecisive" and "irresolute." It's not helpful in a primary, of course, but neither is a necessarily disqualifying.

It's difficult to like someone who clearly doesn't like you. While in the past several weeks conservatives, seeking some alternative to Romney, have started to at least entertain the possibility of backing Huntsman, it was all but impossible given Huntsman's frequent obnoxious signaling that he just doesn't like us.

It's not just an emotional thing, either. If a candidate specifically lays down the marker that he doesn't think much of our opinion but cares a great deal about what the editors of Vogue might think, that's a pretty strong sign that he'd govern in such a way to pander to their opinions and against ours.

Add to that my basic belief that you can't pitch too hard to one segment of the electorate. If your strength is with one segment, great, bank that, and begin attempting to attract a different segment. Don't keep singing songs to the audience who already likes you. That was a problem I had with Palin, and in Huntsman's case it was even a bigger problem, because the segment he was pitching to was smaller. And also was already largely in Romney's pocket, anyway.

Imagine if Huntsman came out with the following plan: I've probably already got a lot of liberal or moderate Republicans who would probably vote for me, because they like that I'm willing to serve as Obama's ambassador. So what I'll do is consider that constituency 90% won, and pitch myself hard as the real conservative in the race, the real conservative who's even willing to honor the often-ignored conservative rule that politics ends at the water's edge.

In politics you're not always trying to win a constituency. America's now-abandoned two-front war doctrine didn't call for us to win two wars at once; I believe it called for us to fight to win one, while holding the other (which could then be won once the other one was finished).

Sometimes you're just trying to get constituencies to accept you, even if they're not fully won over.

Any kind of breakout hit -- a car, a movie, a book, a clothing company, a computer app -- is going to have a core constituency it's pitched to, but it's going to have potential appeal to a larger audience. Whether it becomes a breakout hit is determined by whether people outside its core audience give it a chance and wind up liking it. Your first audience might be a small cohort you've designed the thing for, but if you're smart, you've built it to have a wider, more general appeal, so that it's always possible the wider customer base will start buying your product.

Huntsman didn't do that. Under Weaver's guidance he seemed to be saying: You're not even permitted to buy this product. Only the smallish cohort of socially liberal pro-life (???) Republicans who read Vogue are permitted to buy this product.

The Huntsman/Weaver strategy seemed to be to chase on segment of the primary electorate while deliberately alienating the others.

That's not politics. I don't know what that is, but it's not politics. It's just dumb. Or it's John Weaver's ego still trying to win back a bet he lost long ago.

It's Not Huntsman: Via Hot Air, a BuzzFeed article makes it pretty clear that Huntsman was betting big on an ObamaFuture.

Then the Republican Party faced a choice: Did Obama's election raise real questions about the party's future and identity, as Governor Huntsman told any reporter who would dial the 801 area code from Washington? Or was it, as figures like Haley Barbour argued, merely a moment that would pass? Then Huntsman contemplated an alternate future for Republican Party. They would be modernizers and reformers, less hostile to the role of an activist government that had been vindicated in Obama's election, and finally untethered from the fantasy of a pure Constitutionalist past worshipped by fringe figures like Rep. Ron Paul.

“It’s just a matter of enduring the early days of transformation – it’s never going to be pretty and it’s never going to be fun to watch it play out beyond a pure entertainment level,” Huntsman told us back then. “We haven’t had a healthy, rigorous discussion about our future in many years, and meanwhile the world has changed. Unless we want to be consigned to minority-party status for a long time, we need to recognize these tectonic shifts happening under our feet.”

But even having made this miscalculation, a smart man still could have recalibrated and adjusted to the new (old) reality.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (247)
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Awww.

This really opens up the competition for the voters who prize bad jokes and speaking Mandarin in a candidate. Also hit hardest...reporters and liberal commentators.

On the upside there are two debates this week (including one on Fox News tonight) and that means we can hear more from the other candidates. On the downside, that also means more Ron Paul.

Huntsman is an odd duck. He's demonstrably more conservative than Mitt Romney yet he ran to the left of everyone. I wonder if he regrets making "being as obnoxious as possible" the central rationale of his candidacy. My guess is he's not nearly self-aware enough for that.

(I see Ace mentioned this last night but Huntsman is doing his thing in a few minutes.)

[Update - Andy:] Doomed by this tweet?

Climategate 2.0 gave him the perfect opportunity to walk that idiocy back, too.

[Drew again]: Everything you need to know about Huntsman:

Huntsman, last Monday: "“Gov. Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.” Today deploring "toxic" political discourse in speech

Integrity.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:09 AM | Comments (195)
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The article says they're rare. New to me anyway. Photographs taken by Life magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith of Americans in action on the island of Saipan in June and July of 1944.

The photographs were taken during a battle that claimed the lives of 22,000 Japanese civilians - many by suicide - and nearly all 30,000 Japanese troops on the island. Of the 71,000 American troops who landed on Saipan, 3,426 perished, while more than 13,000 were wounded.

The battle was a turning point for the American battle against Japan's forces. The Japanese situation became so desperate that commanders pleaded with civilians to 'pick up their spears' and join the fight.

via Kevlarchick

update: commenter EBL adds some thoughts.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:12 AM | Comments (88)
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His Majesty thumbs the royal nose at the Founders. History began with His Majesty's ascension to the throne; culture, tradition, and legacy are merely hindrances to His Majesty's plans for his people.

His MajestyÂ’s ministers demand that a private-sector business justify a private-sector business decision.

People unfamiliar with the concept of competition as a discovery procedure – people unaware of the complexity of emergent orders – people unconcerned about concentrated, arbitrary power wielded by worthies in Washington – people unfazed by the arrogance of a bureaucrat presuming to know that some proposed price-hike is to large, but who also cowardly refuses to put her money where her mouth is by opening up a competing insurance company – people unmoved by the prospect of private entrepreneurs and business people having to beg the permission of mandarins on the Potomac in order to conduct business – people unsuspecting that such power can easily be abused to punish politically inconvenient firms and to assist political allies – such people will find nothing frightening about the quoted paragraph.

The rest of us want to vomit out of both fear and loathing.

We need a new kind of Laffer curve -- this time, for government regulation.

E-books are continuing their march to replace paper books. This probably should have been an item in the book thread, but it has economic implications too, especially for brick-and-mortar libraries and bookstores. (Though I will note that trying to create artificial scarcity in the electronic realm through DRM and electronic signing is probably doomed to failure: technology tends to route around blocks like that.)

No developed country in the world is quite as existentially boned as Japan. The great drift of their society in the past two decades hides an even deeper ennui: an inability to decide what kind of future they want. In fact, the Japanese seem to have given up on the future in a very fundamental way -- their birth-rate has fallen far below the replacement rate, and given their cultural hostility to immigration, there seems to be no mechanism to drive future growth. They seem to be hoping (not planning; hoping) that some unforseen technology will save them from the abyss. The future holds many dangers for a shrunken and poorer Japan, and many historical enemies lie in wait at the frontiers looking for weakness.
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Posted by: Monty at 04:31 AM | Comments (190)
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Lots of people have the day off, including Gabe.

The HQ's open for business, though. Monty will bring teh DOOM! shortly, and there's a debate tonight that I'm sure we'll liveblog.

Posted by: andy at 02:48 AM | Comments (116)
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Sorry, guys, there's nothing really here except a thread. Maet couldn't do it tonight, and our back-up, Dave, ran into a snag.

So, um: Overnight Open Thread.

Added [rdbrewer]: From John Huntsman's speech tomorrow, a few words in his native tongue, Chinese:

他妈的你愚蠢的人。

Posted by: Ace at 06:41 PM | Comments (718)
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