Links and Minifeatures 2008 02 04 Monday

Carnival of Personal Finance

January visits were up: 71,138 visits, 804,805 page views (not counting webspiders and bots and other automation). Running totals: 2,315,945 visits, 9,639,449 page views. If the current pace of just shy of 26000 page views per day continues, the ten millionth (human) page view will happen around the middle of February.

A sad day for Western Civilization

Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth

He was larger than life, but quite real. The man who led Britain vicorious through WWII has only been dead 43 years.

I can understand why 47 percent think Richard the Lion-Heart was fictional - his association with the Robin Hood legend. But Richard himself was real. Mahatma Gandhi, Florence Nightingale, and the Duke of Wellington - who beat Napoleon Bonaparte, and was himself later Prime Minister, as was Churchill - also were believed fictional by significant fractions of the populace.

One the other hand, many Britons thought Sherlock Holmes was real.

It's almost enough to make you hope there is no afterlife, just so those heroes won't know this sad state of affairs. It's also a sad commentary upon the state of schools everywhere. My 7 year old gets taught all sorts of nonsense about minor figures of PC adulation - but if my wife and I didn't take the time, she'd be really in the dark about really great and pivotal men in American History. She hasn't yet heard the names Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson in school. George Washington, they've talked about once. Not to take anything away from Rosa Parks and Harriett Tubman, but this is focusing upon bumps in the road when you're on the shoulder of a great mountain, looking out upon a great vista afforded by standing upon their work, and while the work of Martin Luther King is itself another great mountain, it stands upon a foundation built by Jefferson, Lincoln, and Gandhi. All of these were great people, including great imperfections. But whose shortcomings we ignore, whose we pretend do not exist, and whose we emphasize, says a great deal about us.

Navy Tests Incredible Sci-Fi Weapon

"I never ever want to see a Sailor or Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage," said Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. "We should never lose sight of always looking for the next big thing, always looking to make our capability better, more effective than what anyone else can put on the battlefield."

Amen!

They've got video.

I live in California - and this last week is the first time I've ever been subjected to presidential campaigning. Tomorrow, I go to cast my ballot in a Presidential Primary that actually matters. Okay, I'd rather not have my phone ringing with autodialers and recorded messages. But for the first time, the most populous state in the union matters to the nominating process.

I did have some fun with one telemarketer who called asking if I supported Obama or Hillary. I do regret what I said, which was, "I hope someone throws them both out an airlock." After a couple minutes of me explaining the flaws in both candidates record, she asked, "Are you a Republican?", as if that was the ultimate zinger in her pantheon of insults.

MY answer to that? "No, I'm a libertarian. But tell me truthfully, if your candidates were white males, would you be supporting them?"

She hung up. Since this is the penultimate victory over any telemarketer, score one for me. The best is being able to ding their employer or sponsor for something like a Do Not Call violation. I do my best to make the practice economically unprofitable. If everyone else did their share, we wouldn't have telemarketers.

Now, if we can get California to the point where it isn't so blue that it gets ignored in the general election (Prediction: at 8:01 PM on November 4th, every network covering the election will call California for the Democratic nominee, on the basis of less than 1% of polls reporting), we might start to matter on the national stage.