Acts of God
The Oil Drum has the details on Gustav. (Much better than MSM).
The election is pegged on where this storm lands. More importantly, LOOP (East coast’s oil supertanker port) is smack dab in the middle of the storm’s likely pathway.
GOP Pick Ends the Campaign
Pawlenty/Romney/etc look to be the VP choice. McCain sold his soul.
GOP is playing this all wrong. Feedback loop won’t complete until election night, at which point Rovelings and Gringrichians will be wandering around with misfiring neurons wondering what went wrong.
As is often the case, they should have turned him loose. Instead, he’s stuck in irrelevance because he can’t get any traction.
It’s over.
Jindal has one hell of an opening here for 2012. If he can fire up the creaky broken GOP machinery, he can really take off.
Update: The problem is that the GOP machinery (party discipline) killed itself.
McCain’s Dilemma
This interview (really just the intro) gets at the core conflict within the McCain campaign – him and his guerrillas vs the establishment – Rovelings and Gingrichlings who are more concerned with The Party than the election.
The VP pick is at the center of this conflict. Who he picks will be the final marker of where the soul of the campaign is – Lieberman if his guerrillas win, Romney-esque if the GOPlings win. The first is the only way he can win the actual election.
Pakistan’s Falling Apart
ThreatsWatch is doing a good job of keeping track (especially Steve Schippert).
Subscribe to his Twitter feed for the datapoints. (His bet: Kiyani coup.)
Narrow Arrogance
I think this phenomenon, as discussed by Tanji, KI, and McArdle, is symptomatic of what happens when you have narrowly focused institutions to create entire generations of a field.
Look, narrow institutions can be useful but based on commonplace complaints (like KI, or anyone who talks about the military service academies, or academia via McArdle) it doesn’t look as though anyone has figured out the secret sauce: generalist teachings in what is basically a funnel.
Turn them loose in school, where what they do does not really matter, educate them enough on the specifics of your arena to function, and then get them their guaranteed (signing up for your institution in the first place) jobs. You’ll end up with a much smarter, albeit flatter, agile organization.