No Media Bias Here...
"The Bush administration's decision to call off the quest for an 80-mile-per-gallon car in favor of research on fuel cell-powered vehicles will delay the nation's freedom from foreign oil for years, fans and critics of the move agreed yesterday. The fans, however, say that although it might be 20 years before drivers zip around in cars that drip only water from the tail pipe, the wait will be worth it. Critics doubt it. The administration's energy shift, many said yesterday, is a shortsighted blunder that gives up on the best thing going and will allow Detroit to keep churning out gas guzzlers."

--The San Francisco Chronicle, lead sentences of a front page news article, Thursday, January 10, 2002. Not an editorial. Not news analysis. News.

I wonder what the AP stylebook has to say about the phrase "gas guzzlers." Notice the other loaded words? "Quest"? "Freedom"? In the last sentence, he (Mr. Michael Cabanatuan) deftly maneuvers for the subject to be "many" rather than "critics." The "fans" (fans?!? do they wear foam fingers?) don't even get to make their point until after the "although." The phrase "shortsighted blunder" speaks for itself. The rest ("zip around" and "drip only water" and "Detroit" as a representative noun) isn't bias so much as a reporter's prose suddenly slipping into tabloid. Or Examiner.

Left unanswered, at least in the first few paragraphs, is why would this be Bush's decision in the first place? Have we completely forgotten the existence of R&D facilities within private industry? Yes, if you're utterly ignorant of economics you'll assume it's in "Detroit's" (all one company, naturally, or did the City itself socialize auto production while I wasn't looking?) best interest to keep "churning out gas guzzlers." Nonsense: If 80 miles a gallon were anywhere near that achievable, the car that could do it would be a phenomenal best-seller, precisely because consumers would be willing to pay more for it because it would save money on gas.

This is so blindingly obvious that it's unclear why we wouldn't just let individuals, businesses, and markets feel out their own way and let the best idea win. (Oh wait. I'm in San Francisco. God forbid we trust entrepreneurial spirit to accomplish anything.)

It's unclear why the federal government should be spending anything on miles-per-gallon improvements when the companies that would benefit most from them have plenty of wherewithal to accomplish this.

But why spend money on fuel cell research either? Well... I'd actually vaguely agree with this but I have enough friends on NSF fellowships various places that I've become modestly brainwashed about the utility of taxpayer-funded research. If you're going to spend money at all, spend money on the right solution. Which, in the long run, fuel cells are. Anything related to gas is, as software developers would put it, a kludge.

Remember all the fuss about Aaliyah?

One of my most impolitic thoughts back in mid-September was to wonder, suddenly, whether Al Sharpton had called off his fatwa against Rod Dreher. This was apparently big news in New York, all the way up to the point that something bigger and more terrible than anyone could imagine hit the city and made everyone forget all the petty things.

Al Sharpton is nothing if not petty.

In any case, there's something I don't get; in fact, the more I think about it the more it freaks me out: It's not okay to criticize her music ability or even the lavishness of her funeral. And yet it is okay, months after her death, to bring her back to household name status as, of all things, the Queen of the Damned?!?

Where's the outrage? That is to say, where's the respect for those who've passed on to a better place?

Who Are You, and What Did You Do With The Real Steve Chapman?!?

The Steve Chapman I enjoy reading is a no-nonsense, common sense libertarian. Whoever wrote this column, among other things:

Treats an unexplained 4% increase in fatalities as far more statistically significant than it actually is;

honestly recommends sobriety checkpoints (maybe they work, maybe they're a civil liberties nightmare, not to mention -- I'm just guessing -- a pain in the butt for cops who hate paperwork and want to stop violent criminals);

and even treats the rise in the drinking age from 18 to 21 as a good thing. Let's put it this way: Prohibition didn't work. The war on drugs isn't working (people are gradually starting to realize this). Most importantly, the specific attempt to make a group of teenager sober by fiat isn't working.

If you've happened to spend time on any college campus in the last 15 years, you know this. People drink, because in college that's just one of the things that people do. In an environment where two-thirds of the students can't legally drink but one-third can, absurdities arise. The law is impossible to enforce without going far beyond in loco parentis and into the realm of a police state. Worse yet, the arbitrary legal regime has even created a cultural artifact:

People about to turn 21 are so happy to be finally legal that they go out and nearly drink themselves to death. For that matter, people who can't drink legally anyway and so never learn to drink responsibly, also go out and nearly drink themselves to death.

When I was in college I liked to drink. Then I got over it. Come to think of it most of my drinking was illegal and as luck would have it right when I became legal was around the same time that drinking lost its allure. I'm not saying I drank because it was illegal to do so, but rather that drinking (at least drinking to excess) is something that people grow out of.

Toughen the penalties for DUI, yes, but as far as the surrounding culture goes, whoever used Chapman's good name for that column needs to chill.

An Eye For An Eye?
When juvenile delinquents go and set a puppy on fire, the appropriate punishment seems obvious enough to me. As someone who cares deeply about animals, let me be the first to light the match.

Among the world's most inane bumper stickers is the one that says, "An Eye For An Eye - And Soon The Whole World Is Blind." Bullshit: It just means if you value your own eye, you won't go poking out someone else's, now will you?

Those Annoying Times When They Get It Right
"'Privacy experts' (an interesting media coinage) fear that the national standard for driver's licenses is the first step toward some form of national ID card. Well, of course it is. I'm all for it. It will make cashing checks easier, reduce the old "two forms of ID" to one and give me a cool souvenir of a Republican administration dedicated to reducing big government." -Jon Carroll, Big everything is watching you

I really have no use for Jon Carroll but he says something interesting here. It's unclear just how sarcastic he is about supporting a national ID, but he has two reasons:
1. Whatever sense the idea supposedly makes on its own;
2. Whatever political hay he can make out of Republicans going along with it.

This is exactly what Democrats did in 1990 when they logrolled George Bush into raising taxes. They said it was necessary, then they crowed about how bad it would make him look, then they turned on him so that it would make him look bad. Not that he didn't deserve it, but liberals' ability to have it both ways when they want conservatives to do something unpopular is astounding.

On the other side there's Bill Clinton, who absolutely sold out the far Left but was fawned over by them anyway. Sadly, so many Democrats and big-government types love politics for its own sake. For the most part, Republicans and small-government types don't. It's contrary to our core philosophies. There are a few exceptions but those are the people you can look at and know right away that you really don't trust them. The kids who went around shaking everyone's hand on the first day of school when they wanted to run for student council? Duh. All of them become Democrats. It's a big power trip.

The Reaper Is You and The Reaper Is Me
When I was a kid, Suicide Solution was the prime exhibit for all that the moralists thought was wrong with heavy metal. (Think of it as the Smack My Bitch Up of its era.) No radio station in the area would actually play it -- I had no idea how it sounded or even what the lyrics were -- but major publications opined that this song was directly responsible for teenagers deciding to kill themselves.

While I was out and about today, a local radio station actually played "Suicide Solution." I must have heard it before but clearly never until the last year or two. The song just seems so tame to me compared to what all the fuss was about.

Everything that people complain about ends up seeming so tame when I actually hear or see or do or try it, relative to what the fuss was about. I can only assume this will be true when I finally get around to smoking marijuana, although the assumption that it's probably lame is now the latest reason for me not to, other than inertia.

About Me
I was born and raised in Tulsa, a city that exemplifies all of the best (but also many of the worst) traits of bedrock conservatism in this country. My parents are happily married (they moved to the Chicago area five years ago) and made raising good kids their first priority. My sister and I both seem to have turned out reasonably well. In 1992 I went off to college; ever since then I've lived in the most liberal places in the country.

At Harvard I studied math, did trivia competitions, and edited the Salient. Compared to life before and after I got there, the mid-1990s were a surprisingly apolitical time at Harvard, in some ways a bad time to be a political newspaper editor. I was arguably the least consequential editor in the history of that newspaper, although I knew what it took to produce the thing and when we needed articles I knew how to write them. Previously, people like Chris Caldwell went from the Salient to The Weekly Standard. More recently, Roman Martinez went on to National Review and the Wall Street Journal.

Naomi Schaefer, two years behind me, made a name for herself both at Commentary and via free-lance work. By comparison, my most widely-read writing has been in the form of trivia questions and baseball columns. Meanwhile, Corwyn Hopke, president when I was editor, went on to study immunology.

In 1996 I had an interview at The Weekly Standard but badly blew it; not worth talking about the mistakes I made on that trip. Barring that, and without enough foresight to go into Internet work before it went big, I went to law school. Within three years I realized I had no desire to become a lawyer and instead spent several months processing baseball statistics before moving out here.

From February 2000 to October 2001 I was happily employed writing java code. When I was laid off I decided to try to join the Army or Navy or whoever wanted or needed me in the fight against terrorism. I began exercising and losing weight and became gung-ho enough to send a column about it (soon to be posted or linked here) to the Journal (which rejected it). Then the U.S. and allies began clobbering Afghan forces and I lost my sense of urgency and I got contract work from one of my old employers. That first contract ran out yesterday; supposedly they'll renew it soon.

Welcome to the Outer Sunset
Hi. My name is Matt and I'm an opionated, somewhat conservative software developer, temporarily out of work. I gave this blog its name for two reasons: First because I actually live in a neighborhood of San Francisco known as the Outer Sunset, second because the name sounds metaphorical even though it isn't necessarily so.

This is explicitly a political blog, in the tradition of Andrew Sullivan and Virginia Postrel and Joanne Jacobs and so on. I can only subject my closest friends to the things I believe for so long before it starts to feel uncomfortable; meanwhile, since I have delusions that one day my favorite "celebrity" bloggers will start citing me whenever I happen to say something smart, I don't want to subject them to my day-to-day personal angst or silly things said about past crushes who deserve better or whatever else goes into my original, more diary-like blog.

The first name I thought of for this blog was something like Surviving the Left-Wing Dystopia. It comes from my conclusion that San Francisco is, in fact, the closest thing in this country to a left-wing dystopia. Even the Chronicle just got around to noticing the other day that downtown is filled with squalor even though we shovel money out in the name of ending homelessness. (In a surprising fit of common sense, Rob Morse actually noticed the correlation.)

If I were given to conspiracy theories -- I'm decidedly not -- the best one would be to theorize that California itself has become a giant social experiment to see just how catastrophically left-wing ideas can fail. Gray Davis fails to understand how markets work, or assumes that the rest of us won't and tries to exploit this for political gain, and costs the stat tens of millions of dollars in moronic energy trading. Taxes are high, services are poor, Willie Browne does his best impression of a Third World tin-pot dictator, and laid-off techies pay more rent than they can afford.

The first problem with the dystopia title is that we're doing more than just surviving: Everything stupid that Left-wingers do here has two unintended, pleasant consequences. People see how dumb the ideas are and know better than to emulate them in the rest of the country. Meanwhile, people see that even the worst ideas don't really lead to disasters. The human spirit bounces back easily, plus this is just too beautiful a place for anyone finally to abandon.

The second, more important problem with the title is I'm not about to focus on local issues, not entirely and probably not even much after this introduction. I'm not from around here; I came out west only at the height of the tech boom, when an eighth consecutive Boston winter seemed to be just too much to endure. (Speaking of liberal dystopias, the Boston/Cambridge area is a close second. The traditionalism of Boston proper helps to rein in the radical impulse, though it also means that labor unions and party hacks get to inflict their own kind of mischief.)