Established; the left hates, and wants to extinguish, charter schools.

Charter schools – invented about twenty years ago in Minnesota, and given life by a 1991 law that allowed schools, run by sponsoring organizations and elected boards of parents, teachers, sponsors and other interested parties, to use the money that would have been allocated to the student at a public school – have been a lightning rod ever since.

For the teachers’ union and the educational/industrial complex,anyway.

For parents – especially parents underserved by the decaying inner city schools with their sub-50% graduation rates, violence and miserable achievement – the word I’m looking for is “lifelines”.  City parents – especially the Afro-American parents that have the most to gripe about with urban schools – are leaving the city schools in droves; 1/8 of Saint Paul’s kids have left the system, with even more in Minneapolis, as of two years ago.

Charter schools offer what public schools not only lack, but actively squelch; parental involvement; beyond that, parental control; staff whose jobs are intimately tied to their success with the kids, since the board that hires them administers only the school they’re in; perhaps most important, immediate accountability – not to some politicized, “elected” school board (which is in the bag for the teachers union, not the parents) and careerist administration, but to them via a decision loop that is a microscopic fraction of what it is at a public school.  If a charter school screws up with a kid, they know it right away; the board hears it and must respond immediately, or the kids, and the money, go away.

The accountability, in other words, is immediate.

Which the teachers union and the educational-industrial complex hates.  They’ve been working for almost two decades to extinguish the charter school experiment.  They’ve tittered about “academic achievement” rates that, in the cases of some schools, is a tiny hair below that of public schools, in press releases that carefully ignore two inconvenient truths:

• Charter schools are often where parents go after kids have “checked out” of the public system, developed atrocious study skills, and lost interest in education.  Call it educational recovery; it’s where many parents – myself included – go to salvage the mess our inept public schools create.
• When a kid in a public school is performing poorly enough to blow the school’s rates for purposes of “No Child Left Behind”, they’re shunted off to an “Alternative Learning Center” (ALC), which, being explicitly for kids with academic problems, is “off the books”.  Charter schools don’t have this; there’s just one Grade Point Average for a charter school!

But more than anything, it’s about the money.  Since the per-student money from the states follows each charter student, every family that decamps for the charters takes tens of thousands of dollars away from the factory school system.  It’s adding up fast.

They want it back.

John Fitzgerald came out yesterday with a hit piece on charters’ “Financial Accountability”. for “Minnesota 2020”, the “non-partisan” think tank founded by former DFL Representative Matt Entenza and employing, as far as I can see, nothing but partisans.

Seventeen years after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, this examination of fiscal year 2007 charter school financial audits shows that the vast majority of charter schools do not follow basic financial guidelines or, in some cases, state law. Since this analysis agrees with a recent report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor and audit examinations written in 2001, 2002 and 2003, we conclude that these financial problems are not being adequately addressed by the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and, further, are endemic of the charter school system.

Well, that sounds pretty damning.   Of course, the damnation is in the details -which we’ll look into later.

Efforts by the 2009 Legislature to provide more accountability to charter schools was welcome, but shorthanded. The charter school program is financially flawed and basic concepts about charter schools – such as unelected school boards and under informed business management – need to be changed.

Let’s clarify a few things about the language in this paragraph, since they obfuscate a few things that, for the charter advocate, are better re-clarified.

Some charters do have unelected boards.  Most of them do elect their boards.

And any parent that’s ever been involved in a charter school knows that most of them are run by teachers, not managers or accountants. At some charters – schools with excellent academic records – the staff freely admit they work hard to keep the regulatory hogs’ troughs slopped with the pails of paperwork that attend the spending of any public money.  It’s not an unfair charge – although to try to turn that charge into a conviction, as Fitzgerald does later in this piece, is laughably misleading.

Fitzgerald cuts to the chase

In November and December, 2008 and January, 2009, Minnesota 2020 combed through the financial audits of 145 charter schools for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2007 – reports that were filed with MDE by December 31, 2007. Our research found several trends in charter school financial management:

• 83 percent were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

Well, that sure sounds bad.  And those are the numbers that MN2020 will splash all about the state’s media (the media that so many of MN2020’s staff used to work for).

But what’s behind those numbers?  You have to do some reading for that.  We’ll look into the numbers tomorrow.

But Fitzgerald reaches a conclusion:

If charter schools can’t run their schools in a financially competent manner, Minnesota should reconsider whether charter schools are worthy of public funding at all.

Which brings up a slew of interesting questions.

Why should charter schools be the only ones required to be “financially competent”?  Can we have the same debate about “worthiness” with our union-strangled, factory school system?

We’ll be back to look at Fitzgerald’s numbers tomorrow.

UPDATE:  Yep, it’s John, not Peter Fitzgerald.  I hadn’t had coffee yet; I’m lucky I didn’t write “Edmund”.

And I guess I don’t keep up with my “progressive” non-profit trivia like I used to: Entenza isn’t with MN2020 anymore.

(Part II, Part III and Part IV of this series)

In the future, everyone will have a cult following for fifteen minutes.

Including actresses in commercials:

She’s bubbly and beaming, high-volume, with a flip of dark hair and a face like a lollipop. She irks as she endears, bemuses as she bewitches. She’s a bundle of energetic contradictions, bursting here, retracting there. Her expressions blink and change like a neon sign. Her eyes are popping globes. And she just sold you a bunch of car insurance.

Well…close.

Flo is her name. She’s the spokeswoman for Progressive Auto Insurance…First she caught our eye; now she’s snatched our heart. Viewers are smitten. They’re crushin’. They want to know: Who’s that girl?

From a recent blog at HoustonPress.com, with the headline “The Cult of the Progressive Car Insurance Chick”:

“Am I the only one completely and totally enamored of the woman in the television ads for Progressive car insurance? You know, the ones starring that babelicious brunette named Flo with her ‘tricked-out name tag’ and her ’60s style eye makeup and her kissable red, red lips?”

No, sir, you are not. There’s more where that mash-note came from, out there in the blogosphere’s infinite confessional space: “She’s hot.” “She’s weird but, God, she’s fine!”

“It’s so weird,” says Stephanie Courtney, the actress who plays Flo.

Or at least, plays her after two hours in makeup:

In related car-insurance-cult news, I found out a while ago that I was not the only one who thought Dennis “David Palmer” Haysbert…

…was actually saying “That’s Allstate, Stan” during the first run of his spots a few years back (which is why he enunciates the “d” in “stanD” so hard these days).

…this may be just as ominous.

If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could visit America in 2009 they would call the Chinese attacks Acts Of War.

Russia, the Peoples Republic of China, Iran and others will soon have a cold dose of reality that in awaking the American sleeping giant Cyber attacks can run two ways.

Update Obama Set to Create A Cybersecurity Czar With Broad Mandate

If it’s the notion that I could build my own combat drone…:

Peter Singer, author of the new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, says ‘You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000.’

…or the way the various commenters in the threat completely eviscerate the book’s hystericial concept (which, inevitably, involves “militias” getting drones to do their mischief).

New York banishes cars from Times Square.

As part of a plan to make the Big Apple nicer to live in, the Department of Transportation has banned cars from stretches of Broadway at Times Square and at Herald Square – near Macy’s flagship department store.

Times Square without cars?  Sounds like the Mall of America without Japanese tourists…

Saint Paul is looking to bring…

…Cray Supercomputer to downtown Saint Paul?

The St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority will vote Wednesday on whether to approve a $400,000 forgivable loan for Cray Inc. to move into a downtown building.

Cray, a global supercomputer company based in Seattle, is considering moving about 200 employees from its Mendota Heights operation to 48,000 square feet of space in Galtier Plaza, 380 Jackson St.

On the one hand I, who used to be a contractor at Cray, am just a little surprised that Cray still exists (and that it’s based in Seattle), and that it still employs 20, much less 200 people.  I know there’s still a market for “supercomputers” in doing fluid dynamics and other really large-scale number-crunching applications, but I’d sort of thought that massively-parallel Unix and Linux distributed networks had eaten up the whole market.

Well, most of it; when I worked at Cray, it occupied an entire complex out on Lone Oak Road (it’s now an R&D facility for Ecolab) and was overflowing even that.   Then Silicon Graphics bought the place, and we know how that turned out, judging by how many Silicon Graphics computers you see out there anymore.

Crayons are a pretty tightly-knit clicque  Ex-Crayons have had their own website ever since Cray started shredding jobs in the mid-nineties. And while I was the lowliest contractor in the whole building (a tech writer doing a business plan for the Software Division), I still have some sentiment for the place; it was there, having been a tech writer for a year and already bored out of my mind with the field, that I first encountered Usability and User-Centered Design; it took four years of reading and self-study, but it was the first step in getting to my current career.

Anyway – glad to see ’em coming downtown. Hope they avoid the fate of every other entity that has ever taken up shop at Galtier…

I’ve never been much of a video game player. 

Part of it was that even as a kid, I was never much wired to stand around the arcade feeding quarters into game machines.  Part of it was that I was an incredible cheapskate as a kid; I found myself wracked with guilt one day my junior year of high school when I wasted four quarters playing Asteroids (which is still the best vid of all time) in one orgy of dissipation. 

But later – as in, in my mid-twenties – as I hung around one or another of the bars I worked at, I found the urge to while away the odd hour here or there playing videogames.  And then, finally, I succumbed to addiction.  I burned up countless after-work hours and quarters playing Tetris, the Russian-themed geometry speed game whose theme music I can hum note for note to this day.

And I suspect that I could surround myself in a miasma of post-video-traumatic stress disorder by sinking a buck or two into Tetris Furniture.

Dream?  Nightmare? 

Discuss.

It was 1940.  Britain had been tossed from the continent, leaving most of its equipment behind in France.  It was facing an imminent invasion, and was being choked off from supplies from the outside world by the German submarine offensive.

Britain needed weapons.  It needed ’em fast. And it needed ’em cheap.

And so the “Sten” gun – the Saturday Night Special of submachine guns – was designed.

The Sten – named after its designers, Shepard and Turpin, and its factory, the Enfield works – must have been kicked off by Scots.  It was not only designed to be ruthlessly cheap to build (the Mark 2 shown above, similar to the one I shot many many years ago, cost $11 in 1944 dollars to manufacture), but designed to be fed by captured ammunition that no other Brit firearm used (the Brits had captured immense stockpiles of 9mm ammunition from the Italians in North Africa; British pistols of the day used a .38 caliber round).

It was a cheap expedient that jammed constantly. And it was light enough that the recoil of the 9mm round and the bucking of the bolt back and forth in the receiver made it extremely difficult to control when firing full automatic (which was,with the Mark II, the only option).

And yet it was a symbol; that the ingenuity of Democracies would find a way to muddle through in the face of fascism.

And it’s a hoot to shoot, too.  Not especially because of any redeeming qualities of its own; I believe the old saying is “the worst full-auto shooting is more fun than the best semi-auto”.

Or something like that.

Anyone know if there’s a flag store in the Twin Cities?

I finally mounted a flagpole holder on  my porch.  I have the Stars and Stripes, of course, ready for all flag-waving occasions; I also have the Saint Andrews Cross, which inaugurated the flagpole on Tartan Day, earlier this month. 

So I need a Norwegian flag in time for Syttende Mai, and there are only 17 shopping days left until Norway’s Independence Day.

Any tips?

What would Edgar Allen Poe write if he had to watch MSNBC?

Erik Hare takes a swing at it.

What Would Edgar Say?

On the show 24 this few seasons, I’ve noticed (along with a few million other fans) that Cisco Systems must have paid huge money to the producer to have not only the government, but the terrorists, using their “NetMeeting” virtual conferencing system (in a very, very slicked-up Hollywood version utterly unfamiliar to those of us who’ve been using the more mundane versions for the past several years).

And then I noticed – everyone on the show uses Heckler and Koch firearms; Jack Bauer dropped his SIG 226 and switched to a USP back during Season Three; the various redshirts “tactical” guys all carry MP5s; this past several seasons have seen Jack, his friends and his enemies blasting at each other with G36, MP5, MP7, PSG1 and the HK416; indeed, the slick black HK pieces seem to have displaced pretty much everything else on the show.

And they’re popping up on other shows as well.  And I joked “H’nK must be paying great money for product placement!

And when I joke about something like that, it seems to turn up as reality as often as not:

The German gun maker Heckler & Koch (H&K) intensifies a marketing strategy of product placement in movies and TV-series, a feature of the British TV-station Channel4 has found: “You can’t advertise guns on TV, so what do you do?” According to that report the Oberndorf based company has increased its efforts to convince armourers in Hollywood of its newest models. Already in 2004, the then spokeswoman of H&K, Andrea Franke, confirmed to the Greenpeace magazine that the U.S. subsidiary of H&K closely cooperated with the movie makers.

I’ve heard from friends that Hollywood’s “armorer” community – the prop-wranglers that handle firearms for movie shoots (which are usually done in places like California, New York and Vancouver, places with institutionalized government paranoia about guns) are among the most eagerly-awaited guests.

While there is no secret that the owner of the German pistol producer Carl Walther travels himself to the movie sets of each James-Bond-sequel to hand over the PPK or lately the new P99 for 007, it is not known whether H&K’s owners Andreas Heeschen and Keith Ralston, who are both part of British High-Society anyway, do likewise. However, it is noteworthy that Bond defeats his adversary in “Casino Royal” (2006) with the submachine gun HK UMP which is used by many special police units in the US. The poster for the new film “Quantum of Solace”, which is due to be released in November 2008, shows Bond’s silhouette with H&K’s MP5 submachine gun (http://movierls.info/?p=9). And the expert on war cinema Peter Bürger points to the fact that Bond’s opponent in “Die Another Day” (2002) uses an XM29, which H&K had developed for the US-Army.

Of course this piece was written by someone from the pants-wetting set (emphasis added):

Also, in the successful TV series “24”, which has evidently inspired some US soldiers to torture, agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his colleagues use some current H&K weapons, the assault rifles G36 and HK416 [and the USP, UMP, MP7, MP5 and PSG1.  Amateur].

This is the first I’ve seen Jack Bauer -a  fictional character – replace Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in that claim.  Fact-check time; the only real life torture the show has ever inspired was a desire on the part of fans to waterboard the writing staff after Day Six; the urge was communicated clearly enough that 24 seems to have done the improbable – having jumped the shark in Season 6, it feels like it’s actually jumped back this year.

With all this talk of torture of late it would be easy to overlook the fact that American forces, often at their own peril, have taken extreme measures to minimize civilian and even combatant casualties in defense of our interests around the world.

Last week’s standoff between pirates and the U.S. Navy in the Indian Ocean ended famously with three sniper shots, as a drone watched overhead. In 2008, French special forces captured six pirates on land after ransom had been paid. “There were four helicopters involved,” The Independent reported at the time. “A sniper [in a Puma helicopter] shot out the motor of the pirates’ four-wheel drive vehicle. A second helicopter [a Gazelle] then landed nearby, allowing the six pirates to be arrested” — without any casualties.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) uses helicopter-borne snipers to take out drug-running boats. They are accurate enough to knock out engines without harming the crew or damaging fuel tanks. “The driver just threw his hands up,” concludes the description of one such action in Men’s Vogue, after all three engines were disabled with three shots.

The latest installment in technology designed for the precision required for this policy: behold our latest Hot Gear Friday Installment, the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System

Sniping from a chopper currently takes tons of skill and training. But ARSS is literally point-and-shoot for the operator on the ground, using a videogame-type controller. The software makes all the necessary corrections, and the system should ensure first-round kills at several hundred yards. The secret is in the control system and stabilized turret (on the right in the picture above), which is currently fitted with a powerful RND Manufacturing Edge 2000 rifle specifically designed for sniping work, using the heavyweight .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge.

HT Dr. Dave

From Making Light, we have to wonder…:

…is ACORN getting really sick of all us uppity peasants?

(And it’s just as funny even if it is a spoof…)

…who has trouble mixing up Janet Napolitano – former Arizona “governor”, current DHS secretary, and bureaucrat who sees a potential terrorist in every conservative – and Johnette Napolitano, singer for the ’80s garage-punk band Concrete Blond?

I mean, the names.  Not so much the resemblances:

Janet:

Johnette:

Wonder if the DHS secretary gets requests to sing “Joey” at the department’s Karaoke night?

It’s been almost four years since I codified the various “Berg’s Laws” in one convenient place.

It’s high time I updated things.

Berg’s First Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary – “No liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the President’s justifications for the War in Iraq at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive”

Berg’s Corollary to Bissonnette’s Law – (Whenever someone introduces an “Old West” analogy into a discussion on civilian firearms ownership, the person can be presumed to be covering for absolute ignorance on the subject). Corollary: Whenever anyone says “people who favor guns are compensating for something, ifyaknowwhatImean”, know what they mean only in the most academic possible sense.

Berg’s Third Law of Human Resilience – After any disaster, whenever government and the media declare “there can not be any more survivors, and this is now a recovery operation”, they will be wrong.

Berg’s Fourth Law of Media/Sports Inversion – The Vikings will be contenders until the moment the local media actually believes they will be contenders. At that moment – be it pre-season or Week 12 – the season will fall irredeemably apart.

Berg’s Fifth Law of Historical Illteracy – 99% of the invocations of Godwin’s Law are done by 1% of the online population. Corollary: That 1% understands .000001% of the history required for a literate invocation of Godwin’s Law.

Berg’s Sixth Law of writing a Blog in a city full of people with dubious senses of Humor – To every joke, there is an equal and opposite inappropriately petulant reaction.

Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Blogging – When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.

I got my kids cell phones for Christmas.  The cheap ones, mind you – the kind you get for next to nothing at WalMart, and use the ultra-cheepo pay as you go plans.  It’s mainly so I can stay in touch with ’em.

But they hit me up for the unlimited text plans. 

“Unlimited?”, my taciturn Norwegian and thrifty Caledonian sides exclaimed simultaneously.

“Yeah.  We text more than we talk.”

“Well”, I responded, “how about the $4 for 1000 a month plan”.

Bun rolled her eyes.  “I can do a thousand in a week, Dad”.

However, I did find that by trading talk time for text messages, it made the whole deal cheaper while actually improving my main goal – having my kids reachable (it’s much cheaper to make sure they never run out of text messages than talk time) anytime, anyplace.

Although I was a little skeptical about that whole “thousand message a week” thing.

I said I was skeptical.  No more.

A cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

Gregg Christoffersen told KUSA-TV of Denver this week that he thought texting had been disabled on her daughter’s phone, which he smashed hours after getting a phone bill for more than $4,750.

There’s good news, too:

The family said Verizon has been willing to knock the bill down to a reasonable level.

20,000 a month.

Where does she find time to breathe?

It’s that most wonderful time of the year, Tartan Day!

Today, Scots-Americans will stream through downtown Saint Paul and Minneapolis, clutching ill-concealed liquor bottles and blaring on noisemakers. Politicians and media people will prepend “Mac-” to their names and recite Keats and Burns before crowds of cheering onlookers.

Large, unruly parades led by bagpipe bands will step through slicks of vomit (tinted blue, from the blue-dyed stout and single-malt whiskey that’ll be lubricating the good times) amid hordes of tartan or blue-and-white clad, kilt-bedecked revelers, wending their way to both City Halls, where the crowds will paint their faces a merry Saint Andrew’s Blue and moon the government, bellowing “Ye canna take our FREEDOM!”

The questions they should ask themselves is, without Scots-Americans, would there even be an America as we know it?

From the framers of the Declaration of Independence to the first man on the moon, Scottish-Americans have contributed mightily to the fields of the arts, science, politics, law, and more. Today, over eleven million Americans claim Scottish and Scotch-Irish roots — making them the eighth largest ethnic group in the United States. These are the people and the accomplishments that are honored on National Tartan Day, April 6th.

So put some Black Watch and Big Country on your IPod (you do have some Black Watch, right?  Or the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders?  The Pipes and Drums of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards?  Oh, for crying out loud, even the amalgamated Bands of the Highland Division? C’mon, people) and celebrate!

It’s Tartan Day, 2009.  Rejoice!

May I present for this week’s Hot Gear Friday Wednesday installment, the Phillips Norelco Nose and Ear Trimmer Model NT9110.

This high-performance, smartly-designed and thoughtfully-engineered grooming aid is a quiet, yet powerful hair removal system for the demanding, highly visible, metrosexual lifestyle of prominent bloggers like Mitch Berg and your own Johnny Roosh.

The NT9110 is 100% water resistant for easy use and cleaning, runs on one widely available AA Battery and includes:

• 2 eyebrow combs, long and short
• 2 trimming combs
• Protection cap
• 2-year world wide guarantee

I especially appreciate the motor’s turbine-like smoothness, the body’s quality feel, it’s sensuous form factor, and the tactile pleasure of holding my Phillips Norelco NT9110’s Soft-Grip rubber jacket as I advance it’s humming proboscis ever deeper into my aural and nasal cavities so as to keep my nostrils and ears free of follicular overgrowth for many hours at a time.

The business end of this precision-designed grooming machine is intuitively canted to maximize comfort and reach.

The water resistant design allows full-stream rinsing to remove the bounty of organic debris that collects as you comfortably navigate the aforementioned body cavities.

The efficacy of this appliance is demonstrated here in recent photos of me “before” and “after” employing my Phillips Norelco NT9110 before a recent MOB Gala.

As you can see, I’m no April fool. So if you’re like me, and of course you are – who wouldn’t want to be – you will appreciate the ease and efficiency with which the Phillips Norelco NT9110 keeps unwanted follicles at bay, leaving you with that just-groomed look for gatherings both business…

…and pleasure.

Different people will draw different interpretations of events.

My old pal Erik “Transit Geek” Hare (the nick is purely a NARN creation, feel free not to use it in regular conversation) has – if you read his blog, Barataria – invested a lot in the notion that world is on the brink of a huge realignment of some sort of another, and has since I’ve known him.  That’s going on fifteen years now.

He thinks the recent splatter at Facebook is a sign of this. I, naturally, take a more prosaic view that, as is happens, ties in with my little corner of the IT world.

The design team at Facebook thought it had a winning strategy to defeat Twitter – offer users everything that Twitter has, and more. What they didn’t realize is that Twitter’s base were fans for one key reason – it was less. The resulting firestorm has Facebook scrambling to regroup. This may seem like an isolated situation, a simple business decision gone wrong, but it appears to be something more. Observed from the perspective of general trends in culture and the arts, minimalism appears to be the fashion and thought of the day.

Well, if you constrain your perspective to that of “currently-vogue-y social networking websites”, that sure seems to be true.

The implications extend far beyond one software product.deskMinimalism is, at its heart, an ethic of stripping everything down to its essential elements. It’s different from utilitarianism in that in minimalism the structure and essence speak for themselves, creating a style that goes beyond the simple use of an object. There is a philosophy at the heart of minimalism, a plan and ethos that is not unadorned, but the ornamentation grows naturally from the essence of what the thing at hand really is. In short, form closely follows function.

Except that if you look beyond that, throughout society, you’ll find that minimalism in and of itself only goes so far.

Microsoft Word, the big-screen TV, the IPhone, video games with seemingly-complex user interfaces with buttons and little flippy gizmos, American Idol (with its byzantine voting and judging arrangments and its patina of excess), cars loaded with IPods and Satellite Terminals and packed with hybrid engines whose engine compartments look like Auxiliary Equipment rooms in nuclear submarines, Deal or No Deal (with its permuted plot and masses of models)  and Google – the very definition of “feature creep” – are all mind-warpingly popular.

What do they have in common? Not much!  Some look complex from the outside; others, like Google, mask immense complexity in a benign wrapper with just one input field and two buttons.

What they – or at least, the parts of “they” that are successful – have in common is “usability”.  Can a person sit down and, without any “training” and with a minimum of muss and fuss, use the thing, first successfully, then productively, and finally with enough pleasure to make someone want to buy another one?

Minimalism alone isn’t it.  Google is a page with an input blank and a couple of buttons.  Pretty minimal, right?

WordPerfect for DOS was also simple; you booted it up and looked at a blue screen with no controls and few cues.

One of them is utterly self-explanatory; try Google once or twice, and one pretty well has it down.  On the other hand, WordPerfect – once the lingua franca of world processors, for those of you who remember the early ’90’s – spawned an immense industry for people to train people how to use the thing. It died when Microsoft Word – anything but a “minimalist” program – figured out how to make visual complexity relatively usable.

Software that has the minimalist ethic is not much different in its approach. By keeping things simple and allowing the user to put themselves and their needs into the program, a programmer can create something that fills a fairly narrow niche that has a lot of room to grow. Flexibility and customization are usually key points…The basic ideas are heavily modernist in origin – form follows function.

Except that in the cases of products that succeed in the market, form and function both follow usability.  In the cases of each of the products I listed above, from the Prius to the IPhone, designers and the various flavors of “usability” people – human factors engineers, usability analysts, designers and the rest – manage to tame and shape both form and function to make the product work with people rather than against them. So whether the product is, on its face, complex (the IPhone, the video game) or simple (Google) or familiar (the “user interface” for the car is pretty well-know everywhere in the world), the common thread isn’t minimalism, or even the system’s form or function themselves.

It’s this;when the product was being desgned, did the designers ask themselves “what will it take to make this thing work with users, rather than against them?”
Erik’s piece delves into minimalist music as well. That’s worth another article.

…but I have to confess, this site is incredibly cool.

I have been wearing Gold Toe^® hosiery for as long as I can remember. I prefer the Metropolitan over-the-calf in Black and Brown. The stretch nylon holds up to months and months of wear and they never lose their elastic so, they never come back down your calf.

During the early part of last century, two German immigrants founded a small mill in Bally, Pennsylvania to manufacture men’s hosiery and as a tribute to the country that adopted them, they named their company Great American Knitting Mills. From the start, Great American set out to look for “golden opportunities” in the marketplace. Ironically, the most fruitful and long lasting reward was to come from Great American’s humble efforts to answer the needs of Americans hard hit by the Great Depression of 1929. Consumers wanted hosiery that would wear better and last longer than ever before, so Great American introduced a sock with a gold reinforcing yarn sewn in the toe. Before long, Americans everywhere were asking for the durable “sock with the gold toe.” Gold Toe^® hosiery had emerged as one of the leading brands in America, and The Standard of Quality in the Industry. During 2002 the Company changed its name to Gold Toe Brands, Inc.

Hosiery. Damn good hosiery.

Not so good with shorts though. Word to the wise.

Next time: Boxers or Briefs, Pros and Cons.

…I gotta confess I think this isn’t all that far off.

Sorry, visionaries.  Traction is dicey.

Christopher Walken’s Twitter feed is just about the funniest thing on the web these days.

…telling management “Um…about those bronze windows…”

Still, if you work in technology these days, this bit is pretty familiar stuff.

The Obama Administration apparently now thinks the economy isn’t going to revert to subsistence farming and roving gangs of thugs led by carnivorous warlords.

But I got to thinking; what if he’s wrong?

What Hot Gear are you, fellow American, going to need to get through a real crisis – not the kind Rahm Emanuel doesn’t want to waste, but the kind that’ll have Rahm Emanuel heading to Camp David with a company of Marines and a truckful of MRE’s?

Here at Shot In The Dark’s “Hot Gear” Department, you ask, we’ll answer.

If the balloon really goes up, there are three categories of Hot Gear we’ll cover:

• Defensive Firearms
• Working Firearms
• Guitars

Other equipment – farming, security, milling, and other gear – is outside my immediate expertise; there are other blogs available for this.  “Hot Gear Friday” is, and has always, been about guns and guitars.
Without further ado, let’s get down to business.

Defensive Firearms

There are really three categories of survival firearms:  a close-defense shotgun, a pistol capable of both stopping a threat and being concealeable enough not to be a visible threat, and a big honking battle rifle.

For pistols, the “sexy” points these days go to the big German/Swiss guns, the Heckler and Koch USP (left) and the SIG 22x-series (R) automatics:

Both are excellent firearms.  But for my money, I’ll stick with the good ol’ Colt M1911:

Any of them are big, reliable manstoppers; if faced with a pack of roving cannibal looters, any of them will get you out of a jam.

Of course, any mention of defensive handguns invokes the inevitable argument between automatic shooters and revolver fans.  And while under normal circumstances – i.e., today, with a functioning police department and a civil society that values human life – six rounds should be plenty.  In a time of complete economic and social collapse?  It’s not for nothing the Tutsi saying “it’s always the seventh through 12th looters that get you” has been burned into the consciences of anyone who has one; the seven rounds (plus one in the pipe) of the Colt, or the 15+1 of the SIG or H&K, make the difference between life and death when the only backup you can call is you.

For shotguns?  Remember – a sporting shotgun works in times when you can take a broken feed ramp up to Cavellas when it’s convenient.  When you have a houseful of angry looters to deal with, though, reliability is king.

Which should lead you to the Remington 870 slide-action.   Ubiquitous, time-tested, and rugged as week-old pizza crust, the 870 covers a lot of territory, from hard-core close-defense shredder to utility piece:

Stick with cylinder bores, and if you can, get the barrel cut down; you don’t need a tight pattern for a room-cleaning heater.  The folding stock and pistol grips look cool and aid concealability, but if you’re not a constant 12-gauge shooter, the pistol grip increases the felt recoil.  Just get one and start practicing; worry about the furniture later.

Finally, the question that really gets the wonks spitting tacks: which assault rifle to pick.

Note that the question is not “whether”; it’s “which”.  Despite the best efforts of the gun controllers, there are many excellent choices out there.  The Belgian FN-FAL and the Italian BM59 are excellent, but rare and somewhat pricey choices:

The Springfield M1A – the civilian version of the M14 – is also an excellent choice…

…although you have to be very careful you buy one with a genuine Springfield receiver; many M1As were built in the seventies (during the last economic panic) with badly-welded knockoff Garand receivers; bad idea.

But for the upper midwest, with its wild extremes of weather, the standout choice is the Heckler and Koch HK91.

It’s spendy, and out of production, but incredibly rugged.  The best testimony for those of us in the frozen north? The Norwegian Army uses a variant, the AG3, and is in little danger of replacing it any time soon; when the weather is awful, the G3/HK91 platform is without equal.

(Budget shopping secret; if you prowl through Shotgun News you can find Spanish CETME Model Cs – the weapon from which the G3/HK91 was derived – at a decent price)

You’ll note I stuck with 7.62x51mm rifles, eschewing 5.56x45mm; I figure since most of us will be defending our homes and neighborhoods from marauders, the 5.56’s main advantages, light weight allowing you to carry bigger loads of ammo, aren’t as important.

Of course, while the various AK and SKS-series derivatives are highly overrated in terms of hitting power and tend to be woefully inaccurate, they are inexpensive and ubiquitous.  If they’re all you can get, by all means, do; it can’t hurt to have one around as spare.  I recommend Bulgarian AKs, or if all else fails the Chinese SKS

And it should go without saying that the M1 Garand – relatively inexpensive, available everywhere, and sporting the old but powerful 30.06 cartridge – is way more than merely useful:

It saved Western Civilization during World War II; it can save you this time, too.  Just lay in a big supply of the troublesome eight-round en bloc clips.
At the end of the day, the key isn’t so much which one, but that you have one.  Because if the economy is as bad as the Minnesoros “Independent” seems to say it’s going to be, you’ll need something to keep your food supply safe from “progressive taxes” imposed by those who weren’t so foresightful.

Working Firearms

Things get a little more nebulous here – but suffice to say, a working battery is different from a self-defense battery; while your defensive guns need to be high-capacity, lethal and utterly reliable, with your working battery’s main features are flexibility and economy; killing varmints and putting “targets of opportunity” on the table with minimum expenditure are the bellwethers.

There are many choices – but a good working battery should have at least a good .22 rifle. .22 Long Rifle rimfire rounds are cheap, so you can lay in a HUGE stockpile, and against small varmints and less-determined enemies it’s a good caliber.  There are innumerable good examples; the Ruger 10/22 and Remington Nylon 66 are both excellent semi-auto .22s.  But for pure reliability, it’s hard to top the Savage Mark II; it’s a turnbolt, so there are very few moving parts, and the action is simple, rugged,and foolproof.

To that, I’d add a good large-frame working revolver.  Revolvers beat autos as working guns, since they operate just fine with any kind of load, from hot factory loads to crap your brother in law loads in his basement; you can keep shotshells in a couple of chambers for squirrels or birds, wadcutters in a couple more for nastier varmints, and Glasers in a couple more in case a couple of famished conceptual artists decide you’d make a fine pot roast; I recommend something in a .45 Long Colt (11.43x32mm), which is a little lower-pressure than a .44 magnum, and easier to reload.  I like the Ruger Redhawk…:

…but there are many excellent pieces using this excellent, versatile, reliable caliber.
Guitars

The bitch of it is, complete economic meltdown means no electric power, which means no electic guitars.  You’re best off finding some protected closet, out of the light, putting some Dampits in there (and checking them periodically) to keep them from drying out, and holding onto them for better times.

So what’s the best guitar for a complete societal breakdown?  Some wags suggest a Dobro.

It seems tempting to opt for one of the classic metal guitars with the internal resonator cones – because of their extra volume, and because their metal bodies afford extra protection from small-caliber gunfire and make a better close-range defensive weapon – but the resonator cones are hard to replace under primitive conditions; unless you the foresight to stock spare parts, you could be stuck with a big metal box.

Beyond that, really, it’s a matter of personal preference; some theorize a good dreadnought-body guitar might have lower string tension…

…lowering breakage and reducing demand on your stockpile of spare strings (but lay in as many as you can afford anyway).   At any rate, your choice in guitars isn’t all that differnet from your choice in assault rifles; find something rugged, well-built, that is as unlikely as humanly possible to break down when you need it.

There.  You should be ready now.

(Except for that whole “Food Supply” thing).

UPDATE:  Oh, good lord.

OK, I’ll break it down, for those of you dumb enough to read “Minnesota Progressive Report” (aka “Minnesota Short Bus”, among people of all parties with brains in their heads); the piece is tongue in cheek; a sendup of all the gloom and doomers out there (including in the local blogosphere). 

Oh, it’s true – it is the duty of every real, law-abiding American to own and become proficient with a firearm.  Of that, there’s no rational doubt.

But, um, yeah.  “Satire”. 

Criminy.