What A Croc

There's a saying that goes "good ideas have a very short shelf life. Bad ideas take on a life of their own." Via Overlawyered we learn that the lawyers are going after the makers of Crocs sandals over a 47% decline in the stock price of the company following a decrease in earnings despite a 130% increase in sales. Apparently the company is dealing with distribution issues and a build up in inventory, which ties up cash and can be indicative of a slowdown in sales.

One brilliant theory as to why sales might be slowing down is that sandals are a seasonal item and demand might just fall off a bit with the arrival of Winter. That may be so (and I'm not putting the theory down), but I have an additional observation.

Crocs is a one trick pony. Its sole (no pun intended) product is a line of garish, neon-colored, ugly, plastic sandals. I have a hunch that the market for such a product might be somewhat finite and once the demand is satisfied, sales are going to crash unless the company comes up with a way to reignite demand or comes up with some new products. Crocs apparently hasn't.

Like most fad investments, unless you invest in it early and look to get out before it peaks, you will get burned. Once everybody else has already noticed, it's too late. I have no sympathy for the kind of herd mentality investors who get into these things and then start whining about it when the bubble pops, as it inevitably does. I hope the plaintiffs get thrown out of court.

Amazon Black Friday Deals

Amazon has decided to go head-to-head with the shopping mall on Black Friday, otherwise known as the day after Thanksgiving. Go to this link if you have some Christmas shopping to do. It beats fighting the crowds and it will help this humble blogger, an Amazon Associate out with his own Christmas shopping. Many thanks for your patronage.

Mark Steyn on Thanksgiving. And Starbucks?

Mark Steyn's column this week is about the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, and why the rest of the world should be thankful for America. He also had a comment to make about Starbucks:

"Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!"

Of course he had a larger, more serious point to make.

"We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together."

As Always, it's worth your time to read the whole thing.

An Exceptionally Eloquent Argument For Gun Rights

Via Instapundit, this short but well written and very persuasive essay: "Why The Gun Is Civilization." A sample:

"Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it."

Read the whole thing.

The Democrat Debate - A Blow By Blow

The inimitable Vodkapundit, Stephen Green, drunk/live-blogged the CNN sponsored Democrat debate the other night. I thought this line was hilarious:

"7:44pm Three out of four undecided voters on CNN are pear-shaped middle-aged women with a tendency to ramble, and who want things from the government. Don't blame me if you think that's cruel--I'm just reporting what I see."

It's all pretty amusing really.

A Word To The Unwise

Your public defender has some advice for you. Let's just hope you actually learned to read somewhere along the way. (via Instapundit)

Accomplished Meterologist or Al Gore - Who Are You Going To Believe?

A friend forwarded me this post on global warming today. It was authored by John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel and a trained meteorologist. Among other things, he had this to say:

"I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party. However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe a me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it. "

I'm far more inclined to take Mr. Coleman's position on global warming/climate change seriously than a rather indifferent student who only took two Natural Sciences courses as an undergraduate, pulling a D in one course in his sophomore year and a C-minus in another course in his senior year, Nobel Prize winner or not. As I have said before, it has to be one of the most undeserved Nobels in the history of the prize.

Michael Yon Shows You What the MSM Won't. Again.

Via Instapundit, another great story plus an iconic photograph from Michael Yon. The MSM continue to studiously ignore any good news coming out of Iraq, that is unless they can find a way to put a negative spin on it.

Indoctrinate U - An Interview With Evan Coyne Maloney

I really want to see this movie when/if it comes to Phoenix. It's been 25 years since I graduated from college and I found much the same atmosphere that Evan Coyne Maloney's interviewees describe. Here's his interview with Sean Hannity on Sean Hannity's America:




And here is the actual film trailer:

Mark Steyn on The Real War on Children

In response to all the (nauseatingly predictable) liberal hysteria about the President's veto of the expansion of SCHIP to cover 18-25 year old "children" and families with income up to $80,000 a year, Mark Steyn points out the non-sustainability of that and similar entitlement programs, once they get entrenched. A sample:

"And so, in a democratic system today's electors vote to keep the government gravy coming and leave it to tomorrow for "the children" to worry about. That's the real "war on children" – and every time you add a new entitlement to the budget you make it less and less likely they'll win it"

Nobel Prize Blunders Rectified

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has belatedly recognized exactly how useless it really is and gone out of business, but not before correcting a few of its most egregious errors.

A General Takes A Biased MSM To Task

Via Powerline. Read.

Update: It's worse than I thought. The MSM ignored all the criticism of themselves, constituting a major chunk of the Sanchez speech, and focused their reporting on a criticism of George Bush and the strategy/prosecution of the war, thereby proving Sanchez' point about them, the MSM. Absolutely shameless.

The Third Most Undeserved Nobel Peace Prize In History....

...goes to Al Gore. Holding the number 1 and 2 slots are:

1. Yasser Arafat - bloodthirsty terrorist and;
2. Jimmy Carter - one of the chief enablers of number 1

The Nobel Peace Prize has become a bad joke.

Update: Now you can win your own Nobel! Three easy ways to get it.

Update 2: I'd permalink the following but no matter what, I end up at the front page of the paper. Anyway, The Manchester Union-Leader thinks Gore's Nobel is worse than a joke. Here's the full post:

"Five Norwegians gave a prize to Al Gore, and all the world is supposed to heed his counsel henceforth. No, thanks.

Alfred Nobel felt horrible about the uses to which his invention -- dynamite -- was put. So he endowed the Nobel Peace Prize and instructed that it go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Al Gore has done exactly none of those things.

Gore, however, did write a book and make a film about global warming. He has become the second environmental activist to win the peace prize in the past four years. Wangari Muta Maathai won it in 2004 for planting trees.

Thus we have indisputable confirmation that the Nobel Peace Prize is no longer a serious international award. In 1994 the five Norwegian politicians who award the prize gave it to the murdering thug Yasser Arafat. Two years before that they gave it to literary fraud Rigoberta Menchu, whose autobiography was largely fabricated. (An example: The brother she supposedly watched die of malnutrition was later found by a New York Times reporter to be very much alive and well.)

On Friday the prize was given to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change. Two days before, a British judge ruled that Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," contained so many errors (read: lies) that it could be shown in British public schools only if accompanied by a fact sheet correcting the errors.

The Nobel Peace Prize is worse than a joke. It's a fraud. It is such a transparent fraud that the five Norwegian politicians who award it have been reduced to defending their decision by concocting elaborate rationalizations. This year they laughably claimed that Gore deserves the prize because, well, global climate change" may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the Earth's resources," and "there may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars." (Emphasis ours.)

And Islamic terrorists may give up jihad and sing Kumbaya after listening to old Cat Stevens records. But that's no basis for distributing the world's formerly most prestigious prize. If winning this useless medal prompts Al Gore to get into the presidential race, which we doubt, the irony will be that the American people will turn a more skeptical eye to His Smugness than the Nobel committee did.

The American public won't accept at face value Gore's self-righteous proclamations or his self-serving predictions of looming global catastrophe. And Gore has to know that, which is why he will almost certainly stick to the world of make-believe -- Hollywood and International Do-Goodery -- where he can pretend to be the great sage and savior he wishes he really were and left-wing Europeans and thespians try to convince us he is."

More National Health Madness....

From The Times Online, another sample of what our health care system will eventually become if we socialize our medical care:

"The NHS is Britain’s last big state monopoly. It is the largest employer in the developed world. Its 1.4 million staff outnumber the private and public healthcare workforce of Germany, a country with 25 per cent more people and better health outcomes. Its powerful unions view any slowdown in spending growth as a “cut”. And cut is a deadly word in political terms. The Government had its chance, when it was flush with cash, to demand reform as a quid pro quo for more money. But it did not go far enough.

In the 1990s it was possible to argue that the NHS was starved of cash. But not any more. Britain is now spending at about the European average, but lags behind too many other European countries in terms of results. Far too many cancer patients, babies and stroke victims are still dying needlessly. Far too many patients, particularly the elderly, are treated with a callousness bordering on brutality. Almost everyone I know who has had a baby recently has been told by the nurses to bring their own Jif, and not to set foot in an NHS shower without scrubbing it. World-class that isn’t. "

Cashing In On Cory Lidle

David Nieporent has a post over at Overlawyered on the legal feeding frenzy that the crash of New York Yankee player Cory Lidle has become with claims now totaling $63 million against either the estates of the deceased pilot and his instructor or the aircraft manufacturer. Lidle's widow is of course trying to assert a claim through her lawyer that the aircraft itself, a Cirrus SR20, was defective: "Macaluso [the lawyer] charged Cirrus "knew about these flight control problems ... which cause the controls to lock up." This claim is utter BS of course but that doesn't mean he won't gull some jury into buying it.

The reason I call BS on the lawyer, and why the NTSB got the accident cause exactly right (in short: inadequate planning/pilot error), is that I am familiar with that airspace and fly aircraft with similar capabilities to the SR20. I used to live in New York City and once in a while I'd rent a plane from an FBO up at White Plains airport.

The airspace around New York is Class B airspace, meaning you need to have a clearance from the local approach control to enter it. However, there is a corridor of class D airspace, where clearance is not required, running down the width of the Hudson River and below an altitude of 1,100 feet (or maybe 900', I don't have the chart and it's been a while) to the harbor then hooking left, around the tip of Manhattan and going up the East River to the tip of Roosevelt Island. This is where Mr. Lidle and his instructor came to grief that day.

Cory Lidle was a freshly minted private pilot. I don't know how long his instructor had been flying or how many hours he had but he was not familiar with the area or the airspace. I made the excursion down the Hudson several times, turned around in the harbor and came straight back up the Hudson again. I was very leery of trying the East River because it is essentially a dead end and it would be necessary to get the attention of New York Approach and get permission to penetrate controlled airspace and fly over Manhattan back to the Hudson. The alternative is to attempt to do a 180 degree turn and fly back to the harbor. I have a commercial license with instrument rating and at that time about 400 hours. I was not willing to go into that part of the airspace because the risks weren't worth the view in my opinion.

At the point where Lidle & Tyler attempted to turn around the East River is approximately 1,100 to 1,300 feet wide. Call it a quarter mile. On the day of the crash there was a fairly stiff wind coming from the East at about 12-15 knots (13-17 mph), nearly perpendicular to their direction of flight, coming from their right. The rules of the airspace (uncontrolled is a bit of a misnomer, there are still procedures to follow) are that in those corridors aircraft should stay to the right (just like a car on the road) with southbound traffic staying to the west side of the corridor and northbound traffic to the east. If they were doing this, then when they attempted to turn, they were turning left, downwind. The SR20 is a fairly high performance airplane for being a single-engine aircraft. It is capable of cruising at 150 knots (about 165 mph) or roughly 2.75 miles / 14,500 feet every minute. At that rate of travel, even allowing for the fact that he was flying in an arcing turn and not going straight across, he would have crossed the river in roughly 9-10 seconds and he picked up a 15 knot tailwind in the turn, thereby increasing his speed in relation to the ground. Even if they had banked the airplane to a steep 60 degrees, which would have produced about 12 degrees of direction change per second (4 times standard rate or 3 degrees/second, 180 degrees per minute), a 180 degree turn would have taken 15 seconds. As you can see, the math doesn't work out too well.

The only way they may have gotten away with this maneuver, and this is pure speculation, is if they had bent the rules by staying to the left coming up the river then turning into the wind. They might have violated controlled airspace but there's a lot less to hit on the east side of the river. As it was, they essentially sealed their fate the minute they made the decision to go up the river and not use the option of contacting approach and get clearance to exit what was effectively a box canyon by climbing and overflying Manhattan. Given the conditions that day, there was simply no way they could have gotten away with what they tried. There just wasn't enough physical airspace for it. It wasn't a matter of the "controls locking." I was always taught by my instructors that when I was flying, my head needed to arrive at where I was flying next at least five minutes ahead of the airplane, i.e., I needed to have anticipated what was coming and plan accordingly. Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger didn't do it.

That's my long winded way of saying that Cirrus should not settle this case because it ought to be very clear, it wasn't the equipment. It was the operator. The problem is that the operator didn't leave a large enough estate and the aircraft manufacturer is perceived to have the deep pockets here, regardless of whether its product is actually at fault.

Update: corrected minor typo in second to last paragraph and added a couple of words for clarity in how many degrees of direction change per second for a standard rate turn.