The Orbital

Opaque finance?

2012-01-28T11:30:00.001-05:00

Steve Randy Waldman has one of his typical long, subtle series (one, two, three) looking at the concept of opaque finance:

Financial systems help us overcome a collective action problem. In a world of investment projects whose costs and risks are perfectly transparent, most individuals would be frightened. Real enterprise is very risky. Further, the probability of success of any one project depends upon the degree to which other projects are simultaneously underway. A budding industrialist in an agrarian society who tries to build a car factory will fail. Her peers will be unable to supply the inputs required to make the thing work. If by some miracle she gets the factory up and running, her customer-base of low capital, low productivity farm workers will be unable to afford the end product. Successful real investment does not occur via isolated projects, but in waves, forward thrusts by cohorts of optimists, most of whom crash and burn, some of whom do great things for the world and make their investors wealthy. But the winners depend upon the existence of the losers: In a world where there was no Qwest overbuilding fiber, there would have been no Amazon losing a nickel on every sale and making it up on volume. Even in the context of an astonishing tech boom, Amazon was a pretty iffy investment in 1997. It would have been an absurd investment without the growth and momentum generated by thousands of peers, some of whom fared well but most of whom did not.

To summarize, if I may, the idea is basically that the financial system is successful because it is a systematic con. It's similar to some ideas I'm reading in Reasons and Persons right now, where Derek Parfit talks about "coordination problems" where if everyone does what is rationally worse for them individually, everyone as a whole is better off. Waldman makes a lot of intelligent points about finance, and worries a bit about opacity and how it might be eliminated. It's natural given the 2008 cataclysm, and as a lot of his readers pointed out, finance unregulated leads inevitably to recurring economic crises.

However, I took a different message away from it. A utopian, transparent financial system would obviously be ideal, but if we concede the point and treat finance as a black box, and financiers as, collectively, a bunch of dopes, I think we can then gain some real benefit. As Waldman says in the third post:

Financiers aren’t especially bright, and they are in the business of mobilizing capital, it’s what they get paid to do. As a group, they can’t distinguish periods with excellent real opportunities from periods in which they are shepherding capital into idiocy and waste. Financiers are first and foremost salesmen. Some of them do understand when they are selling poison. But many of them, like most good salesmen, persuade themselves of the amazingness of what they are selling in order to persuade the rest of us more effectively. So there are periods, as we’ve just seen, when financiers attract huge gobs of capital and confidently deploy it into an incinerator.

The great thing about the idea of opaque finance is it makes financial regulation very easy. If all the hysterical arguments about efficiency and crippling our financial competitiveness are bogus—if, in fact, the very thing that makes finance work is that it is a kind of collective madness, conducted by knaves and fools—then those arguments may be safely jettisoned. We don't need smart regulation that takes into account all the theoretical advantages to having umpteen complicated forms of derivatives contracts on soybean futures, we need dumb regulation that is easy to understand. We need blunt, brute force kinds of rules that take a claw hammer to the largest institutions and make the accumulation of excessive risk as hard as possible.

Some ideas:

-Ban banking across state lines.
-Break up any bank with more than 5% of total deposits.
-Break up any institution with assets greater than 5% of GDP.
-Institute a public option banking program.

You see what I'm getting at. Obviously enforcing those rules would be an entirely different proposition, but I would also note that once-implemented this would make financiers substantially less wealthy and therefore easier to crush underfoot when the time came.

Fool of a Took!

2012-01-27T11:13:00.001-05:00

Locked myself out of my house like the idiot that I am. It wouldn't be nearly so frustrating if I hadn't done this once before and as a result become very paranoid about forgetting my keys, usually triple- and quadruple-checking to see if they're there. The one time I don't have them I stroll cheerfully out, probably thinking about some useless trivia.

Then, of course, I just miss the train to go down and borrow my housemate's keys so I'm sitting here listening to Metro agitprop: "EXCUSE ME, IS THAT YOUR BAG?"

How to waste infrastructure tax dollars in Forest Glen, Maryland

2012-01-26T17:44:00.004-05:00

This metro stop is about a five-minute walk from my house:

The background here is that a month or so ago they demolished an old house on a great big lot, probably the better part of an acre, right across the street from the Forest Glen metro station on the Red Line. You can't see, but if you zoom in on the picture the sign across the street says that they're going to be building some single-family homes soon.

The natural question here is just what in God's name would make a developer or real estate agent think that single-family homes are the best use of vacant land literally ten steps from a heavy rail station. There are trainloads of money to be made, and good public policy to boot. One would hope if we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on public transport the logical thing to do would be to put up big-ass apartment buildings, or at least some townhouses, near the stops when possible.

The answer, of course, is that if you look (pdf) the place is zoned for single family residential only. More generally, if someone proposed rezoning the lot the neighborhood busybodies (of which, I can assure you, there are legions) would likely respond with howling, purple-faced outrage, probably centering their complaints around parking and ill-concealed hatred of the young and/or poor. (I can tell you this because that is exactly how they reacted to me.)

It's not all bad, as there are at least some medium density-zoned sections nearby, but this could have been a great opportunity to sneak in a little improvement, especially given this station is already mostly devoted to giant parking lots.

UPDATE: Here's another shot which gives a sense of the size of the lot they're throwing away here. It's huge.

Collected links

2012-01-26T11:00:00.000-05:00

1. Why is Type 1 diabetes rising?

2. Google will now systematically collect all your personal information across its entire platform. Ugh. It's hard for me to imagine extricating myself from their tentacles. I'm using their browser, their email, Blogger, Android, Reader, and Docs just right now.

3. Excellent Cory Doctorow essay on the coming war against general computing. I'm not sure if I'm quite as pessimistic as he is. A lot of his case rests on peripherals like 3D printing, which would be a lot easier to control than computers.

4. Powerful New Yorker piece on the America's prison hell.

5. Ryan Lizza on the Obama memos.

Vice President Biden Strolls through the Nevada Higher Ed Apocalypse

2012-01-25T22:14:00.005-05:00

Joe Biden was in Reno the other day, doing one of those stock vice president speeches where he made a bold call for high school kids to go to college, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Vice President Joe Biden spent time Thursday imploring Galena High School students to make some kind of post-secondary education a mandate upon graduation from high school.

The whole thing would be utterly trivial if it weren’t for the fact that Nevada’s higher education system is starting to resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy. A blighted dystopian hellscape where the few surviving students wander aimless in the wastes.

Ok, slight exaggeration. But Nevada’s higher education system has been hit hard since the recession. In Reno, state tuition is up almost 60 percent. Cuts for this fiscal year alone were 14 percent, coming on top of a 13 percent cut from previous years. Its six-year graduation rate is a lousy 40 percent.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Nevada Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich lean on the panic button in a recent memo:

Since too many of our elected leaders seem to be so focused on the bottom line, allow me to summarize the previous points: Nevada public higher education will no longer be competitive with any state in the U.S., let alone the Western states. Our main competition for students, faculty, and businesses needed to diversify our economy will be with Third World countries. […]

This budget crisis cannot be solved with new taxes alone, and certainly there are concerns with this budget other than education. There will be cuts, and I expect cuts to education. Everyone must share the pain to heal our state. What I am saying is that to pretend that cuts alone should be the answer is wrong.

If you want to continue to live in a state that consistently ranks in the bottom of every education and quality of life measure, then by all means, sit back and watch your state burn.

Italics in the original. It is true that Nevada’s economy is in sad shape. It has the highest unemployment rate in the country. As Klaich says, some cuts are probably inevitable, but he has outlined some slight revenue increases to patch the budget and avoid staggering tuition hikes. Nevada’s Republican party has gone medieval doctor, using the state’s atrocious graduation rate as justification for further cutting.

Might have been a good thing for the vice president to mention.

Cross-posted at College Guide.

Africa is not a country

2012-01-24T12:12:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum ponders Mitt Romney's anti-China paranoia:

Are we doomed to a future in which we are mere vassels to a burgeoning and aggressive Chinese hegemony? If you vote for Barack Obama, yes! In fact, according to Mitt Romney, he's actively working toward such future.

But seriously. Are we? I don't think so. Sure, China is going to grow and there will inevitably be some shifts in influence as that happens, but if I had to make a 50-year bet on any region of the world, I'd pick the United States. Europe has demographic and growth problems; Russia is doomed once their energy resources run out; Africa will remain a basket case for the foreseeable future; India is starting from a poor base and I'm not convinced they have the governance or institutions to maintain rapid growth over the long term; and China — well, China has its problems, as I've noted multiple times in this space.

Ok, whatever. My natural question when talking about stuff like this is: who cares? Being the sole superpower seems to mean we just have a greater than average propensity to launch idiotic wars of aggression that actively damage our security while letting our own vital infrastructure crumble to bits for lack of funds.

But I have a better quibble. So America and Russia are both single countries, that makes sense, Europe has nailed itself to a cross of 2 percent German inflation, all sinking as one, so that's defensible too. But Africa is not a region in any sense like the previous ones. First of all, it's fucking enormous. As big as Japan, the UK, the US, Europe, India, and China combined. Second, it's not universally a "basketcase." Some countries are doing quite well, others not so much. Overall the 2000s were probably the best decade for Africa writ large in hundreds of years. Botswana and Mauritius in particular are doing very well for themselves, more than twice as rich as China.

You could make the case for various regions of Africa making sensible units. French-speaking Western Africa, English-speaking Eastern and/or Southern Africa, Arabic-speaking North Africa. But "Africa will remain a basket case?" Not good enough.

More on Apple's EULA

2012-01-24T11:25:00.002-05:00

Joe Wilcox provides a good roundup. These two points get to the heart of the issue:

This is a software EULA which for the first time attempts to restrict what I can do with the output of the app, rather than with the app itself. No consumer EULA I've ever seen goes this far. Would you be happy if Garage Band required you to sell your music through the iTunes Store, or if iPhoto had license terms that kept you from posting your own photos online? It’s a step backward for computing freedom and we should resist it...

Restricting use is what EULAs have traditionally done. This one does something different: it restricts what you can do with the output of the software after the software is closed and put away. If you make a document using iBooks Author, you aren't allowed to sell that document except through Apple, ever, for the rest of your life.

And a bit about the legal background:

Qualifying that I'm not a lawyer, I know a few things about copyrights, as someone who writes for a living and who has reported on software copyrights and EULAs for 18 years. For example, software sidesteps typical US copyright terms allowing copying by being licensed, not sold. Developers like Adobe and Microsoft would be helpless against people copying software for personal use if not for laws supporting licensing. You pay for the application, but the developer retains all rights; technically you didn't buy anything, and the developer can retract your use of the software at any time.

Content produced by software like Word is typically sold, not licensed, which is one of many, many reasons why Microsoft couldn't restrict distribution of the writer's works like Apple tries to. It's also major reason why Wineman's calling the EULA "unprecedented" is gross understatement. Apple is trying to extend its rights over yours and doing so attempting to establish a dangerous precedent about which copyright supersedes the other -- yours as the content producer and Apple's as software developer and content distributor. I simplify complex copyright laws here, to make the point.

For online freedom types, this is a point well worth pressing in the courts, both to obtain clarification and to provide an angle of attack should the courts rule that software developers can claim infinite rights. As Dan Wineman (quoted above) hat we're seeing here is the sharp edge of developers' ever-increasing claim on power.

The whole "licensing" idea is bogus in my opinion, and should be replaced by something more akin to the "first sale doctrine," but in any case this is even more outrageous. Imagine if your toaster company laid legal claim, not only to your toaster, but also to what you did with your toast.

No one would stand for it.

Front page picture of the day

2012-01-23T13:13:00.001-05:00

This was an inspired choice:

Via Sullivan.

Collected links

2012-01-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

1. The big NYT piece on Apple's manufacturing that has everyone talking.

2. A heartbreaking piece from the same.

3. Are you an Afrikaner? Or do you know any? This guy would like a genotype for science. It's legit.

4. Apple's mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement. Title pretty much says it all.

5. Some thoughts from Steve Randy Waldman on opaque finance. More on this later.

How I am racist, part I

2012-01-22T18:10:00.003-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates asked awhile back:

I think there's an essay to be written about why any accusation of a racial offense is so often reduced to "Are you a racist?" It would be as if my wife said, "You forgot to check Samori's homework" and I responded, "I'm not a bad father."

But that piece isn't for me to write. It's for some white person daring enough to plumb the depths of their soul. I don't think this is something that can be explained from the outside.

I would like to try. The strict answer to that question is straightforward. It's as he implies, an evasion. A way to move the terms of the debate to more open, maximalist, easily-defended ground, where counterexamples are easier to find and inflate. "Ron Paul is racist? But he's against the drug war!" etc.

But I think Ta-Nehisi was looking for something deeper. Let me start with a story and a confession.

Some time ago coming home from work on the train three young black men got on and came to my section. One sat next to me, the other on the floor next to him, and the third across the aisle. They began talking loudly, the one next to me pointing at me kind of behind my head such that it was impossible to determine whether he was trying to subtly signal me as some kind of target or just try and intimidate me out of my chair so he and his buddies could sit together.

There commenced in my mind a vicious battle between 1) the modern secular liberal, arguing (correctly) that I knew nothing about these guys and it was wrong to judge them as I was doing, and 2) the lizard-brain defender of life and limb, arguing (also correctly, in my view) that these guys were setting off some alarms and it would be prudent to evacuate. The winner, of course, was 3) the seat of cowardly, guilty, white middle-class maledom, who argued it would be least awkward to just sit there and continue reading, or pretending to read, The Power Broker. The next ten minutes or so were awful.

Nothing happened. I sat there until my stop and got off without incident. But I was afraid of those three kids in a way which made me almost ill. I had to admit: I am a racist. And in the way of a disease, where my reactions have been hijacked by old programming, where my conscious "self" watches in horror.

This kind of thing is, I think, common. The way racism is most obviously manifested in everyday American society is against young black men. I even have a half-plausible excuse. During my two years in South Africa I was three times attacked by thieves, once successfully and twice not. In all three cases the perpetrators were young to middle-aged black men. Though I do not always trust my own memory or impressions, I think in this case it is fair to conclude that my negative reaction to black men has gotten much worse since before my Peace Corps service.

I think Ta-Nehisi's question cuts to something deeper in the soul of white Americans. We do not like talking about race. I don't mean talking about how black people are oppressed by the system—that's easy, even satisfying—or even "owning our privilege." I mean rooting around in the rancid basements of our minds, finding the most vicious rottenness down there, and spreading it out for the world to see.

It's partly the result of a lot of very positive development. It's now generally accepted that slavery and white terrorism in defense of Jim Crow were atrocities. Martin Luther King is one of our most cherished heroes. Being a committed racist is now about the most awful thing someone can be in public life. But imagine Nancy Pelosi talking about being afraid of black men. Better to avoid the subject altogether. Too much potential downside.

But just avoiding the issue is not enough for me. Another piece from Coates:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this--You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't and then ask "Why?"

This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking "Why?" The fact that we -- and I mean all of us, black and white -- are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling. The upshot of all my black nationalist study was terrifying -- give us the guns and boats and we would do the same thing. There is nothing particularly noble about black skin.

I met many Afrikaners in South Africa who were utterly, abjectly racist. I met them in bars, backpackers, or was picked up by them hitchhiking. Nice folks to me for the most part, but when the subject turned to race, as it inevitably would despite my efforts to avoid it, things got ugly. I can't tell you how many times I heard the phrase fokken kaffirs, which is Afrikaans for "fucking niggers." These people were gripped by a cancer of the mind. It was at first horrifying, like watching some trembling junkie shoot up in the stairway of an abandoned tenement; numbness eventually set in.

But the worst part was the creeping realization: that could be me. That is the context underlying whites' unconscious goalpost-shifting. "Is Ron Paul a racist?" Well, that's hard to prove. "Is there a potential KKK member in nearly everyone?" That is far more uncomfortable territory.

In the next post, I'll try to find that "muscular empathy."

Colorado could be a renewable energy powerhouse

2012-01-22T12:24:00.000-05:00

From this extremely encouraging post by James Wimberley:

Take my three resources, together more than enough to meet all US energy needs. The overall picture is clear. Colorado has everything. South and West of Colorado has solar. North-East of Colorado (the Plains) has wind. The Rockies have geothermal. The Northeast has nothing apart from offshore wind (which generates temporary construction jobs but not rents).

This map, in particular, ought to have Colorado politicians'—particularly those on the Western Slope—eyes bugging out of their heads:

Ya-hoo! I'm smelling me a geothermal bonanza! A good time for, say, Scott Tipton to be lobbying for some tax credits. As Wimberley says:

At present geothermal is is numerically insignificant. I put it in because I bet this will change. Geothermal is the Mercedes of renewable energy: it’s expensive but top quality. Íslandsbanki (the Icelanders are experts on this) give the capital cost per kw capacity at $4,000, against $2,600 for solar PV and $1,900 for wind. Since the big cost in geothermal is drilling, a mature technology, geothermal costs aren’t likely to come down as fast as those of its rivals are doing. However, with hot dry rock fracking , there is orders of magnitude more recoverable geothermal energy than used to be thought. It’s technically beautiful: reliable (95% capacity factor, beating everything else), safe, frugal with land. As we push the load management envelope with cheap but variable wind and solar, geothermal will compete with storage for the high-cost zero-carbon baseload.

It's coming, sooner or later. No better time than now to be making those initial investments in plans and right-of-way.

The week in review

2012-01-21T15:13:00.002-05:00

Arby's Customer: 'Look At All This Beef I Got!'

Chris Christie: "No life is disposable."

2012-01-20T22:52:00.000-05:00

Check it out:

Obviously not nearly enough policy-wise, but rhetoric-wise he's miles away from the drug warrior frame. From here it's only a short step to evidence-based, rather than punishment-based, drug strategy.

Intern jams

2012-01-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

A great unreleased Deadmau5 track:

Why unemployment is so high in South Africa, prologue

2012-01-19T22:08:00.002-05:00

I'm considering a smallish project: trying to tease out the factors which make for South Africa's staggering unemployment rate—at last count 25 percent. I've been reading up on it a bit myself and soliciting questions from some random economist types (also, to see if there is any consensus at all).

A further question is how it manages to survive with such a problem. That level of unemployment was a grinding, horrible crisis which shook the foundations of our democracy during the Great Depression, but South Africa has been dealing with it basically since 1994, when it could actually be called a real country.

Stay tuned for further developments.

The Eye of God

2012-01-19T13:03:00.002-05:00

Phil Plait captions: "About 700 light years away sits the expanding death cry of a star: the Helix Nebula, a four-light-year wide gas cloud blasted out when a star that was once like the Sun gave up its life."

Strike to save the internet!

2012-01-18T10:55:00.002-05:00

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSCRITTER TODAY. Tell them not to break the internet. I gave some poor Mark Udall staffer a extensive—though polite—rant.

My idea for a tech company blackout—though clearly other more important people had the same idea—has been adopted today. Wikipedia is down. Reddit and Mozilla are down. Google, though it remains functional, has blacked out its banner in support. If I weren't a little uncomfortable with fiddling with my site code (and more realistically, if I had more than a dozen readers) I would do the same.

For more, here's Julian Sanchez with SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship.

Also, Dan Gillmor makes the important point that this really isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling information:

So, why do [SOPA supporters] make unsupportable statements?

Because they don't dare make an honest argument. If they were saying what they believe, it would go roughly this way:
"The internet threatens our longstanding control of information and communications, and that is simply unacceptable. Therefore, it is essential to curb the utility of the internet for everyone else."

That is true.

UPDATE: Check out this gallery of striking sites.

Chris Hayes interviews Lakhdar Boumediene

2012-01-17T14:13:00.001-05:00

The translator is a bit distracting, but everyone should see this.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hard not to run howling down the street tearing out your hair.

Cormac McCarthy on political journalism

2012-01-17T11:15:00.002-05:00

Brokaw cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was the campaign.

Polls say that people are disgusted with modern politics, said Fineman.

Brokaw smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The electorate does indeed count politics an evil, said Matthews. Yet there’s many people concerned about it just the same.

It makes no difference what men think of politics, said Brokaw. The campaign endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. The campaign was always here. Before man was, the primary season waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Ignatius, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

Politics. The campaign is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and video cameras and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of political journalism.

Is that why the campaign endures?

No. It endures because old men love it and young men love it in them. Those that ran, those that did not.

That’s your notion.

Brokaw smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the worth of that which is put at hazard. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of presidential campaigning for here that which is at stake swallows up the game, player and all.

Suppose two men at Iowa with nothing to campaign with save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the ballot. The whole universe for such a candidate has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the campaign to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of policy. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such elections as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of positions is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of presidential elections, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, politics is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. Politics is the ultimate game because the election is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. The campaign is god.

Adapted from this:

Best thing I've ever read on South Africa

2012-01-16T19:31:00.000-05:00

It's not comprehensive, but a truly amazing look at the rot that has taken root in Mzanzi's poorest slums. It focuses on the random mob murder of a Zimbabwean immigrant named Farai. I liked this graf in particular:

At age 17, the Republic of South Africa is still young enough to be appreciated as a marvel. The “skunk of the world,” as Nelson Mandela called the apartheid state, has been peacefully transformed into a constitutional democracy. There are disappointments, without question. The optimism of the early years — the glorious idea that South Africa would be an inspiration of enlightened leadership — has long faded. The frail, 92-year-old Mandela may remain the most beloved and respected man on the planet, but during its years in power, the organization he championed, the African National Congress, has become, in the words of the historian Martin Meredith, “just another grubby political party on the make.”

Check it out.

Why is DC so bland?

2012-01-16T10:27:00.002-05:00

MS over at Democracy in America, talking about the new MLK memorial, suggests it's about the monuments:

There are many culprits in the devolution of much of Washington into a cloddish, ugly, characterless city. And in some neighbourhoods the past 20 years have seen momentum in the opposite direction. But the relentless drive towards ever more memorials is definitely part of the problem. There hasn't been an interesting or culturally significant one built since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the early 1980s. The FDR memorial is weird. The second-world-war memorial is pompous, empty of ideas, and militaristic; if the other guys had won, they probably would have built something that looked very similar.

Too true. Though I like a lot of the monuments and museums, the overall effect is lame. We could definitely stand to relax some of the insane restrictions on the style of new construction at the least.

MLK day

2012-01-16T10:21:00.000-05:00

Never seen a better orator. Better than Hitler, I think.

Collected links

2012-01-15T09:38:00.000-05:00

1. This is your brain on a really old-school drug.

2. Some intriguing finds in the Amazon.

3. Amazing pictures of a cruise ship sinking off the coast of Tuscany.

4. GAHHH!

5. A new bill could strip citizenship from Americans accused of "hostilities". I was vaguely wondering why they didn't quickly bash through something like this before they assassinated Al-Awlaki.

Department of WTF, mountain bike bureau

2012-01-14T19:59:00.000-05:00

(Hey Pops, check this out!)

When I was back home it was unseasonably warm and dry, and I did a lot of mountain biking with my dad as a result. It's great fun, and good exercise. I'd like to think that I'm somewhat more than passably mediocre, but watching this I see how really, I'm only just out of training wheels:

Sheesh. Ah well, can't let being way worse than the world's best at something interfere with the fun. Still the best cardio I can imagine.

Schadenfreude watch

2012-01-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

SOPA supporter (the break-the-internet bill) Lamar Smith is a copyright violator:

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organization did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

He should clearly be convicted of a felony and go to prison for five years.

And Arthur Laffer, famous supply-side bullshitter, is being sued:

Fifty-two investors claim fund managers associated with supply-side economist Arthur Laffer took $3.1 million to prop up a Ponzi scheme, then said nothing as their money was "wasted with no reasonable expectation of recovery."

Now if only Thomas Friedman's house could get ransacked by like Belgium or something.

Economic crisis as debating point

2012-01-12T14:57:00.002-05:00

Michael Mandel has a new piece (which I fact-checked) in the latest issue of the Monthly arguing that economic statistics are exaggerating the productivity of American workers. It's an interesting idea, and might be correct; I can't judge that. At the end, though, he dismisses the idea of more economic stimulus:

For example, economists and journalists repeatedly say that the U.S. economy won’t recover and jobs won’t come back until the consumer starts spending again. That seems to imply that the U.S. needs another massive jolt of fiscal stimulus directed toward pumping up consumers. But which producers would really benefit from such a jolt? If U.S. manufacturers have cut back on factory jobs because of higher domestic productivity, then boosting consumer demand will indeed cause the factories to hire back American workers. But if cutbacks in manufacturing employment have come from increases in supply chain productivity, then giving Americans more money to spend on clothing and consumer electronics will simply boost employment in other countries.

This is a basic error. The story behind more stimulus is as follows. The economy was ticking along in 2007. Then we had a gigantic demand shock in the form of a worldwide financial meltdown. Unemployment more than doubled and output crashed. The standard remedy for one of those is Keynesian stimulus in the form of fiscal stimulus from the government, and Friedmanite stimulus in the form of, basically, printing money. Once we're back to within a percent or two of the 2007 unemployment rate, we could tie off the stimulus and start looking at deeper problems.

Critically, that story has nothing to do with Mandel's thesis. It doesn't preclude the obvious fact that the economy of the Bush years was terrible. Growth was weak, median incomes were flat, inequality was skyrocketing, and the government was racking up a huge deficit for no reason. But taking a look at that 2007 economy, it is surely better than the current situation:

Ygesias had something along these lines awhile back:

My view is that the fact that we’re facing a major short-term emergency is not in tension with the reality that we’re also facing a serious longer-term problem. On the contrary, desire in various quarters to leverage the short-term problem as a way to increase the salience of their preferred long-term ideas has become an impediment to fixing the short-term problem. Meanwhile, the existence of a massive short-term problem is creating new long-term problems as unemployed workers and recent graduates lose opportunities for on-the-job training and skill-enhancement and state/local policymakers scrape together emergency budgets.

Italics mine. Mandel's piece is a perfect example of that attitude. I think it's telling that he's been writing essentially this same article since at least June 2007 with only minor adjustments.

UPDATE: More here.

The Bush Inquisition

2012-01-12T13:13:00.000-05:00

Cullen Murphy has a great, and horrifying, article that draws a straight line from the Dark Ages to today:

The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades. Arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages. The documentary record pried from intelligence agencies could easily be mistaken for Inquisition transcripts.

One big difference—today, it's worse:

The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” To place this in perspective: the administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.

Physics question

2012-01-11T20:53:00.000-05:00

Check this out:

If you can't see, the water boiling on the stove is somehow making the pot vibrate on the burner. What's causing it?

My hypothesis is that the burner and pot make for a barely-balanced system that can rock back and forth just a bit, and the bubbles coming up are prodding it such that it gets a harmonic oscillation going. Thoughts?

Matt Stoller, Ron Paul, and crankery

2012-01-10T16:57:00.000-05:00

There's been some smoke in the lefty blogosphere over Ron Paul recently. Glenn Greenwald argued that, despite his many flaws (abjectly racist newsletters published under his name, for example), Paul is a valuable presence:

But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Kevin Drum disagrees, saying that Paul's crankery is so thorough he's doing more damage than good:

If you want to advance the cause of a less interventionist foreign policy, you need to find a way to persuade the American public to agree with you. Ron Paul doesn't do that. He's never done that. He's such a stone libertarian that he literally doesn't know the language to do it. Because of this, giving him a bigger spotlight does little for the cause of a saner foreign policy. At the same time, it does plenty for less sanity everywhere else because you don't get to control where the spotlight falls. Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but there are limits. There are some allies that aren't worth having.

That's a debate we can have, and though I think I lean more toward Greenwald's position, given that the media doesn't show much inclination for putting Paul in the crank box and we have no progressive anti-imperial champion (the real tragedy), but I can see the logic of Kevin's position.

On the other hand, we've got Matt Stoller, who's cooked up a bizarre theory (one, two) about how Ron Paul gives liberals fits:

The basic thesis was that the same financing structures that are used to finance mass industrial warfare were used to create a liberal national economy and social safety. Liberals supported national mobilization in favor of warfare and the social safety net during the New Deal and World War II (and before that, during the Civil War and WWI), but splintered when confronted with a wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The corruption of the financial channels and the destruction of the social safety net now challenges this 20th century conception of liberalism at its core (which is heavily related to the end of cheap oil). Ron Paul has knitted together a coalition of those who dislike war financing, which includes a host of unsavory and extremist figures who dislike icons such as Abraham Lincoln and FDR for their own reasons. But Paul, by criticizing American empire explicitly and its financing channels in the form of the Federal Reserve, also enrages liberals by forcing them to acknowledge that their political economy no longer produces liberal ends.

The reasoning seems to go something like this (hat tip to Matt Yglesias, who helped me with the scheme):

1) Modern states use financial innovation, like fiat money and central banking, to do things.
2) Some of those things are good (WWII, Social Security), while others (Vietnam, Iraq) are bad.
3) Ron Paul thinks all those are bad and wants to destroy the capacity of the state to do things.
4) ???
5) Liberals hate Ron Paul because he's forcing them to confront the failure of their "political economy."

No, it doesn't make any sense. It's fair to say that most liberals would like the state to do things, like provide a safety net, police, and Medicare, which means it must have the capacity to do things. Therefore Ron Paul is a lousy candidate for a liberal (plus about three dozen other self-sufficient reasons). The liberal "political economy" still works, we've still got Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. It's not like countries that don't invade random countries for no reason, and provide a decent life for their citizens (i.e., Sweden) got there by abandoning paper money and central banks. I think Digby's instincts serve her well in just tossing Stoller's faux-intellectual mess of pottage aside and reiterating basic progressive common sense:

...I will simply say that I define my own liberalism as a belief in egalitarianism, universal human rights, individual liberty and social justice, all tempered by a pragmatic skepticism of all forms of power, private as well as governmental. I prefer democracy because it provides the best possibility of delivering on those desires while keeping authoritarian power at bay even though it's ridiculously inefficient and often corrupt.

Amen. It's especially noteworthy how Stoller openly flirts with goldbuggery in his first post:

What connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing. If you think today’s deficits are bad, well, Abraham Lincoln financed the Civil War pretty much entirely by money printing and debt creation, taking America off the gold standard. He oversaw the founding of the nation’s first national financial regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which chartered national banks and forced them to hold government debt to back currency they issued. The dollar then became the national currency, and Lincoln didn’t even back those dollars by gold (and gold is written into the Constitution).

Big time economists like Paul Krugman and John Kay (not to mention Yves Smith) have been strongly criticizing the foundations of economics. There may be a economics revolution in the offing. But there are still some ideas out there that are definitely nuts, and the gold standard is one of them. If an idea leads you anywhere close to Ron Paul's economics ideas, it's a good sign you're in dangerous territory.

Collected links

2012-01-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

Some good longform stuff from here and there:

1. Lakhdar Boumediene tells how he was wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo. For seven years. Read it.

2. The psychology of procrastination.

3. The man who sailed his house.

4. Gangs in El Salvador.

5. Wikipedia and the death of the expert.

6. Inside the mind of an octopus.

Utah trip slideshow!

2012-01-09T13:58:00.000-05:00

My first one of these, check it out:

On the road again

2012-01-08T11:47:00.001-05:00

Flying back to DC today. Here's the lovely Ute Mountain Casino.

Free scientific knowledge!

2012-01-07T12:47:00.000-05:00

One of the most obnoxious things I run into as a fact checker is paywalled papers. Journals and places like JSTOR usually want you to pay an outrageous sum for a single paper—usually $25 or more. If you google around, you can often find the paper for free someplace, or someone with a lot of twitter followers will have mercy on you and get their followers to send it to you. It's still a pain though, and increasingly anachronistic.

On another plane of outrage is this recent effort from Elsevier (another publishing cartel). The National Institutes of Health came up with a "Public Access Policy," mandating that all taxpayer-funded research should be public domain. Elsevier doesn't like this:

But the policy has been quite unpopular with a powerful publishing cartels that are hellbent on denying US taxpayers access to and benefits from research they paid to produce. This industry already makes generous profits charging universities and hospitals for access to the biomedical research journals they publish. But unsatisfied with feeding at the public trough only once (the vast majority of the estimated $10 billion dollar revenue of biomedical publishers already comes from public funds), they are seeking to squeeze cancer patients and high school students for an additional $25 every time they want to read about the latest work of America’s scientists.

So they've bought themselves a congress critter to outlaw the Public Access Policy and make the public pay to see research we already paid to produce. Complain here:

Twitter: @RepMaloney @CarolynBMaloney

Phone: 202-225-7944

FAX: 202-225-4709

Collected links

2012-01-06T22:54:00.000-05:00

I made it back from Utah late last night, and didn't manage to get to sleep until 2. I'm packing it in early today, but for now here are some links:

1. Julian Sanchez annihilates some bogus statistics thrown around by media companies.

2. How the meth panic can impede good research.

3. I thought fish and chips were already popular in South Africa.

4. Why do humans have chins?

5. A tyrannical theory of politics throughout society, or How to Be a Dictator.

I'll be back tomorrow with some better stuff.

On the road again

2012-01-03T14:39:00.002-05:00

I'm heading over to my old Utah childhood hometown to help my dad with some roofing. Might be there won't be cell phone service, in which case I'll be back on Thursday.

Department of WTF, free solo edition

2012-01-02T01:09:00.000-05:00

Saw this guy on 60 minutes today:

Freakishly, frighteningly badass. See here for more.

2012 off to a good start

2012-01-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

If it's Sunday, it's my dad's world famous omelettes:

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T02:03:00.001-05:00

Just hit it in my time zone, listening to Garrison Keillor sing Auld Lang Syne, feeling oddly melancholy. Hope all is well with you, and may next year be better than the last.

Quite the instrument

2011-12-31T00:32:00.001-05:00

Ok, I didn't get to the epic post. But this is still pretty awesome:

A trip to Belt Salvage

2011-12-29T22:45:00.001-05:00

News is a bit light (plus I'm cooking up a whopper of a post for tomorrow, hopefully), so for now here are some pictures I took on a trip down to Belt Salvage with my dad for your consumption. It's a recycling and metal sale place that deals mostly in scrap metal; you can sell them your scrap copper, steel, or aluminum (plus some more, probably). This means they have some truly awesome piles of random scraps.

These two pictures are of some complex machine made by Mueller Martini of unknown function. A bit of googling makes me suspect it's a book-binder:

Our theory for this one was that it was some kind of reaction vessel for making industrial quantities of some chemical:

This crane, presumably functional, was in the "for sale" lot:

This looked like an old cannon, but on closer inspection it was really a lawn ornament—the inside of the barrel was made of rubber:

Here we have a giant pile of refrigerators. We were looking to scavenge a few of the feet that come on such appliances for a table my dad is making (more on this later this week):

Here's one of the scrap piles, with my dad on the lower left:

It was a lot of fun just wandering around and trying to guess the functionality of the more bizarre items.

Sunset over Cholla Bay

2011-12-29T20:35:00.001-05:00

The Congo mineral embargo

2011-12-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

David Aronson compares it to a hypothetical pharmaceutical:

Imagine that your stated goal is to help patients suffering from a terrible, debilitating disease. And imagine that a new drug comes along that promises to alleviate many of the worst symptoms of this disease, and that you launch a blitzkrieg campaign to persuade the relevant decision-makers to put the drug on the fast track for approval.

Now imagine that reports start filtering in from clinics where patients are being treated experimentally with the drug. The reports, at best, are mixed. At worst, they suggest that the drug may be truly harmful.

What do you do?

Do you redouble your efforts to get the drug approved? Mobilize the public to lobby elected officials by emphasizing the horrors of the disease and demanding that the government take action? Blame sensationalist media for playing up negative reports? Dismiss them as "temporary setbacks" or "inevitable side-effects"? Do you hold conferences in prestigious venues where only one side of the issue gets discussed? Plant stories in friendly media casting dissenting voices as corporate shills rather than patient-advocates? Cherry pick a couple of patients to act as spokesmen? And if all else fails, rely on that old standby, that the drug was never meant to be a "panacea"?

Or do you take a step back and revisit the research? Do you spend a little bit of the money you have on hand to make sure that you've got it right? Hire a few of the top specialists to conduct an independent evaluation? Make sure that you aren't breaking the physician's first commandment--to do no harm?

The idea here is that the "conflict mineral" campaign which was a part of the Dodd-Frank legislation is completely ineffective and in fact hurting the very people it was meant to protect. I'm not well-versed in the Congo, but Aronson has made a fairly persuasive case. Anyone else care to weigh in? *cough* Becca *cough*

My gift to you

2011-12-27T19:58:00.001-05:00

Since I can't afford gifts for all my loyal readers (or anyone, come to think of it), I present to you some pictures. I was going through some of my sister's pictures from back in the day and found some atrocious ones of me circa 2004, back before all my hair fell out. I was a college freshman then. Here's me as a wannabe war photographer with a 10-buck camera.

Here's me doing my best "jaunty."

This one might be my favorite. Boy looks into the future!

Hard to believe that was seven years ago, and that I have only gotten more embarrassingly hideous since then. This life stuff doesn't let up.

Collected links

2011-12-27T19:36:00.000-05:00

1. It's always obnoxious when big-time organizations steal journalism without attribution.

2. Medical science seems to have hit a wall.

3. How big media companies are actually the ones guilty of content theft.

4. Louis CK's internet experiment has gone well.

5. Some technical details on how SOPA breaks the internet.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T14:30:00.002-05:00

I hope everyone has a good holiday season. Tomorrow I'll be driving back stateside, and assuming we don't get renditioned by the border patrol or something I'll be back in Colorado tomorrow.

UPDATE: This reminds me of one of my favorite impersonations:

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-23T12:44:00.001-05:00

I'm going down to Mexico for a couple days. See you on Monday!

Please, no more goddamn wars

2011-12-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

Larison points to a Chronicles article that makes the case:

Instead of plotting a military action against Iran with no clear exit strategy at a prohibitive cost to our core interests, Washington would be well advised to prepare a strategy for dealing with Iran as a nuclear power. Deterring and containing Iran would be easier than deterring and containing the Soviets 50 years ago. The country’s regime, admittedly unpleasant, is neither suicidal nor tainted by the blood of untold millions, as the two communist nuclear powers were. If the Iranian government considers itself threatened by the United States, the solution is to try bilateral diplomacy based on an offer of U.S. security guarantees to Iran in return for a rigorous supervision regime and a formal pledge that Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons. The Obama administration should make a direct approach to Tehran. A reasonable agreement would also allow Iran to enrich uranium to the extent needed for power generation and accept Iran’s right to the enrichment technology, so long as she agrees to subject her entire nuclear program to international oversight.

I can't believe we're having this conversation. But nevertheless it remains true that probably the best reason to vote Obama in 2012 is that he will be marginally less idiotic on this issue. Still a cold-blooded killer to be sure, but not the staring, glassy-eyed lunatic that the GOP primary will likely vomit up.

Hitchens and booze

2011-12-19T13:31:00.002-05:00

Katha Pollitt, a colleague of his at the Nation, says what I would have suspected:

So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. And so, I’m betting, were the cruder manifestations of his famously pugilistic nature: as F Scott Fitzgerald said of his own alcoholism: “When drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.”

No shortcuts to good writing on the booze track. I am (somewhat famously among my friends) terrible at holding my liquor; I've never been able to take even a small, mass-adjusted fraction of what some others I know can put away. But I wonder if in the long run that will turn out for the best.

Portland as a model for the world

2011-12-19T11:20:00.002-05:00

Created by: Healthcare Management Degree

Does the new defense bill apply to American citizens?

2011-12-17T09:04:00.000-05:00

I said it did earlier, but Adam Serwer at Mother Jones says it doesn't:

So it's simply not true, as the Guardian wrote yesterday, that the the bill "allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay." When the New York Times editorial page writes that the bill would "strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military," or that the "legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial," they're simply wrong.

Glenn Greenwald disagrees:

Myth #3: U.S. citizens are exempted from this new bill

This is simply false, at least when expressed so definitively and without caveats. The bill is purposely muddled on this issue which is what is enabling the falsehood.

He goes on at length. Obviously, I'm quite unqualified to judge who is right, though Greenwald does provide a lot more detail. More broadly, the question of truth in law these days seems mostly a partisan football. Regardless of who is right between Serwer and Greenwald, any president could find a Jon Yoo-style lapdog to give his professional opinion that the statue says whatever he commands it to say.

If the President has the power to assassinate American citizens on his word alone, locking them up forever doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

Star scale guide

2011-12-16T20:55:00.000-05:00

This is the best demonstration of the scale of astronomical objects I've ever seen.

One more example of the difficulty of really grasping the scale of human insignificance.

Eurodoom watch

2011-12-16T17:10:00.001-05:00

Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum join the chorus calling for breakup. Yglesias adds:

If I were an elected official, I'd be extremely reluctant to pull the plug on this endeavor even though it was misguided from the start and isn't functioning in practice. But I'd be leaping at the opportunity to be the second prime minister to bail on the whole thing if someone else went first.

Who will take that bullet? Anyone want to start a pool? Greece is the obvious choice, but they still seem quite committed, sort of how the smaller, poorer countries are still joining up, despite the obvious sucking chest wound the Euro has inflicted on nearly everyone in it. It might take a bolder, more confident state, or perhaps one with a great history but not-so-great present. Spain? Italy?

Bueller?

Hitchens links

2011-12-16T13:33:00.002-05:00

The internet is alight with tributes to the cranky bastard. Here are some of my favorites of his:

1. The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas.

2. On the death of Jesse Helms: Farewell to a Provincial Redneck.

3. A savage takedown on the death of Jerry Falwell.

4. A far kinder obituary of Hunter S. Thompson.

5. Mother Teresa: a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

6. Perhaps my favorite: against taboos.

UPDATE: On the other hand, it's important not to forget even Hitch could be staggeringly full of shit.

UPDATE II: Gawker and Greenwald pile on. Also see this amazingly boneheaded article, titled "In Defense of Endless War." And the man called himself a fan of Orwell??

RIP Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000-05:00

Here's him talking about George Orwell and writing:

And here's a sample of his devastating wit:

The Iraq war is over (not really)

2011-12-15T18:42:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Bernstein strains mightily for optimism:

And, as it turns out, the decision to leave casts quite a bit of light on how Madisonian democracy works in the US, both for good and for bad. It’s a story in which the ocean liner metaphor people use was absolutely apt. It took a whole lot of pushing, but this certainly appears to be the case in which citizen action, working through a political party, ended a war.

I suppose this is basically true, but to me it really emphasizes how much the American system of government sucks. After Bush lied us into war, which ignited a disastrous bloody catastrophe in which thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died to no benefit whatsoever, we finally get to end the damn thing nearly nine years in—three years into a Democratic presidency.

Bernstein seems to think this means the system is working. I'd say it means the system is close to failure, and we are increasingly incapable of confronting even the most obvious challenges. If we take nine years to end a crisis of that magnitude, imagine what other, slightly less-visible calamities are slowly building to a boil. It's no mystery to me why we need $2 trillion in infrastructure spending right now and aren't going to get it.

Statistics of the day

2011-12-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

From MSNBC:

About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure.

As Atrios says:

We're basically in an extraction economy right now, where the real money is in finding points to siphon off all of the income that people generate. Unregulated utility monopolies, rapacious health insurance companies and the medical industry generally, and of course Big Finance, are all devoted to increasing the slice of your life that they can steal from you, fair and square.

We're witnessing the return of the robber barons.

"There is no such thing as law, there is only power"

2011-12-15T11:40:00.001-05:00

So indefinite detention will become part of US law shortly. Glenn Greenwald provides the background at length here. Andrew sums up:

This soon-to-be-legislated power will also apply to American civilians. It is a legal and indefinite abolition of habeas corpus. And you will find every so-called liberty-lover in the GOP (with Ron Paul as the exception) rushing to vote for it

Greenwald (video above) made the quite true and and relevant point that this is not quite as horrible as it sounds in that it is not new—Obama, like Bush before him, has been claiming this power for years already. But this is still a new step. Most people do not pay attention to the legal arcana that is Greenwald's bread and butter. This total and codified disintegration of the rule of law in this country is now an agreed-upon fact.

Reading up on some Orwell, I came across this passage in "The Lion and the Unicorn," an essay about English culture:

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ’They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England...Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point.

Emphasis mine. I felt almost sick reading that this morning. We are now a nation of naked power worship, and the corruption can now go very far indeed.

It's a hard world for women, even in the US

2011-12-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

Dear god:

Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported being beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.

Easy for most guys to overlook, I suspect. There is a long ways yet to go to civilize men.

Political decay watch

2011-12-14T13:46:00.000-05:00

It's that time again! Read, if you dare, this Byzantine account of the fight to avoid blame for yet another government shutdown. The system is traveling mostly on inertia. One day some nutter is going push this over the edge.

Collected links

2011-12-14T12:11:00.001-05:00

1. Need a quick way to make $100? I wouldn't do this for $10,000. And that is saying a lot.

2. The austerity fixation is killing Europe.

3. A crackdown on illegal immigration is snaring American citizens. People are being sent to jail illegally for days (perhaps by illegal police?). Imagine what is happening to the actual undocumented workers.

4. Best space pictures of 2011.

5. The next Eurozone crisis, coming to an economy near you in time for Christmas.

Lightspeed camera?!

2011-12-13T19:45:00.000-05:00

Via Scientific American, some scientists have developed a camera that is so fast it can record the progress of photons. Check it out:

Unbelievably cool.

Department of WTF, ex-con bureau

2011-12-13T18:27:00.001-05:00

Guess who's started a career as a crusading anti-corruption activist? Jack Abramoff. No, really. He's judging TPM's "Golden Dukes" competition for the worst (or best?) in Washington corruption, and he wrote a book about his life as a corrupt lobbyist.

At first I thought, jeez, that's kind of greasy. But then I reconsidered: shoot, the man did his time. That's more than the vast majority of Washington and Wall Street's panoply of criminals. Prison is not fun by any stretch of the imagination. If he wants to make a career profiting on the promotion of a pretty good cause, I say more power to him. I hope he discovers that working for something genuinely worthwhile can bring benefits no pile of cash, no matter how big, can match. Now let's see him come out for prison reform!

A new Tunisian president takes power

2011-12-13T15:40:00.001-05:00

A new president was just inaugurated in Tunisia:

Rights activist and former opposition leader Moncef Marzouki became Tunisia's first elected president since the revolution.

"I am proud to carry the most precious of responsibilities, that of being the guarantor of the people, the state and the revolution," said the 66-year-old Marzouki on Monday, wearing his trademark oversize glasses and his usual grey suit with white shirt and no tie.

Marzouki was elected with 153 votes in the 217-member constituent assembly, with three of the 202 deputies present voting against, two abstaining and 44 opposition members casting blank ballots.

The election seems to have gone off quite well. Now comes the real challenge. Overthrowing an oppressive regime is often the easy part. While it can be terribly bloody to face down a dictator, it's relatively easy to maintain focus. The goals are easy to understand and widely supported.

Let me be clear: I am in no way diminishing the courage or the achievements of the Tunisian opposition. They have done a very great thing. But instituting a democracy on the bones of a dictatorship is a tough proposition. The democratic norms are weak among the political class. The incoming administration has little governing experience, and usually has tremendous credibility from their work overthrowing the oppressors. If they make mistakes leading to a loss of popularity, they can be tempted to leverage large majorities in the assembly to consolidate a new oppressive regime. This is basically what happened to countries all across Africa after the end of colonialism. Ghana, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda, Ivory Coast and others, all fell into close to the same trap.

On the other hand, the atmosphere for democratic institutions is far better than it was back in the 50s and 60s. The Soviet Union's manifest failure means that Tunisia is far less likely to try disastrous socialist experiments. The internet (assuming the US government doesn't break it first) makes organizing and transparency easier. Many of the previously mentioned African countries (like Ghana) have since rebounded, so the new government can learn from their mistakes and their successes. For even more positive examples, there's always tiny Botswana, one of my favorite countries, which managed to successfully transition from colonialism to a representative democracy. "Washington Consensus" capitalism has been badly discredited; the government is less likely to try revolutionary Thatcherite mass privatizations right out of the gate.

The critical issue will be if the populace remains watchful of the government. If the leaders feel pressure to provide for their citizens, then things have a good chance of working out. So far I remain hopeful.

Note: expanded and clarified.

Happy 1111 posts!

2011-12-13T13:17:00.001-05:00

Here's some Onion pop music commentary to celebrate. To be clear, I actually like some pop stars today, but this is still funny:

Pop Star's Single, 'Booty Wave', Most Likely Civilization's Downfall

The Gingrich Tax Plan

2011-12-12T22:03:00.002-05:00

Yglesias points to the new Tax Policy Center report on Newt's tax plan, and provides some handy graphs. He missed the obvious thing though, which is to give it the treatment CBPP gave to Herman Cain's plan.

UPDATE II: The y-axis is dollars of tax cuts under the Gingrich plan. Bad science major!

UPDATE: Though I did spend about 12 seconds on Excel making this thing, obviously feel free to spread it far and wide. It did take me far, far longer to figure out how to make the picture appear full resolution. Blogger kept resizing it to an unreadable degree, as did Flickr and Photobucket. Finally Imageshack did the trick. They've got an option there to upload full whack, without any alterations, and then an embed function. Good to remember!

Department of WTF, the GOP id bureau

2011-12-12T14:07:00.002-05:00

You can't make this shit up:

An anti-gay Alabama Republican was reportedly making secret sperm donations to at least nine New Zealand women he met over the internet, unbeknownst to his wife back in America...

Johnson has spent much of the last year in Christchurch, where he moved without his wife and her three kids (from a previous marriage), in order to help the country’s recovery from the February earthquake.

All the while Johnson was reportedly trolling the internet under the username “chchbill” for women who needed help getting pregnant. He reportedly had exchanges with at least nine women — among them several lesbians — at least three of whom are now pregnant.

I'm reminded of the second panel of this old Tom Tomorrow:

UPDATE: If you like that comic, check out the Daily Kos comics page, and the Tom Tomorrow merchandise site! I imagine it's tough to be a cartoonist these days; they need all the help they can get.

Greenwald bait

2011-12-11T10:36:00.000-05:00

The case that established the "state secrets" doctrine was United States vs. Reynolds. After an Air Force plane crashed, the widows of the men who died on the plane sued the government to find out facts about the crash, and the government refused, claiming that those documents would reveal super-important secret information that would compromise national security.

The government was lying. It turns out that there was no information that would damage national security. As a cynic might have predicted, the documents did contain a lot of embarrassing details about the crappy condition of the plane.

Now fast forward to present day. The background to this story: awhile back the government seized a hip-hop blog and put up a big banner on its site accusing it of being a criminal enterprise:

Okay, now some details. First, remember Dajaz1.com? It was one of the sites seized over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend back in 2010 -- a little over a year ago. Those seizures struck us as particularly interesting, because among the sites seized were a bunch of hip hop blogs, including a few that were highly ranked on Vibe's list of the top hip hop blogs. These weren't the kinds of things anyone would expect, when supporters of these domain seizures and laws like SOPA and PROTECT IP talk of "rogue sites." Blogs would have lots of protected speech, and in the hip hop community these blogs, in particular, were like the new radio. Artists routinely leaked their works directly to these sites in order to promote their albums. We even pointed to a few cases of stars like Kanye West and Diddy tweeting links to some of the seized domains in the past...

The Dajaz1 case became particularly interesting to us, after we saw evidence showing that the songs that ICE used in its affidavit as "evidence" of criminal copyright infringement were songs sent by representatives of the copyright holder with the request that the site publicize the works -- in one case, even coming from a VP at a major music label. Even worse, about the only evidence that ICE had that these songs were infringing was the word of the "VP of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs for the RIAA," Carlos Linares, who was simply not in a position to know if the songs were infringing or authorized. In fact, one of the songs involved an artist not even represented by an RIAA label, and Linares clearly had absolutely no right to speak on behalf of that artist.

Despite all of this, the government simply seized the domain, put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals, and then refused to comment at all about the case. Defenders of the seizures insisted that this was all perfectly legal and nothing to be worried about. They promised us that the government had every right to do this and plenty of additional evidence to back up its claims. They promised us that the government would allow for plenty of due process within a reasonable amount of time. They also insisted that, after hearing nothing happening in the case for many months, it meant that no attempt to object to the seizure had occurred. Turns out... none of that was true.

As in Reynolds, when the government commits an outrageous, unforgivable screwup, making hell out the lives of dozens of innocent people, what do they do? Hide behind secrecy:

Then, the deadline for the government to file for forfeiture came and went and nothing apparently happened. Absolutely nothing. Bridges contacted the government to ask what was going on, and was told that the government had received an extension from the court. Bridges, quite reasonably, asked how that was possible without him, as counsel for the site, being informed of it or given a chance to make the case for why such an extension was improper.

He also asked for a copy of the the court's order allowing the extension. The government told him no and that the extension was filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He asked for the motion papers asking for the extension. The government told him no and that the papers were filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He again asked whether he would be notified about further filings for extensions. The government told him no.

He then asked the US attorney to inform the court that, if the government made another request for an extension, the domain owner opposed the extension and would like the opportunity to be heard. The government would not agree.

And file further extensions the government did. Repeatedly. Or, at least that's what Bridges was told. He sent someone to investigate the docket at the court, but the docket itself was secret, meaning there was no record of any of this available.

If the government, or the government taking orders from large corporations, has unaccountable power, they will abuse it. It has always been thus. That's what makes SOPA and PROTECT IP so troubling.

What is the point of the European Union, anyway?

2011-12-10T18:16:00.000-05:00

David Cameron's vetoing a new EU treaty seems to me obviously the right decision, even if he cloaked it in some rather bullshitty reasons about a financial transactions tax. The real reason, as Sullivan points out, is that the British people would have certainly rejected this treaty and his government would have collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. Cameron has been catching hell for this, as it apparently "isolates" Britain.

Suppose for the sake of argument that Britain is now isolated from the decision-making powers in Europe. My question: so what? I am increasingly skeptical about the whole rationale for the whole European project. People often talk about a possible "United States of Europe" as if the American version were a self-evidently good thing. America is certainly among the worst-governed countries in the developed world, suffering galloping political decay, and it's not at all obvious to me that it will survive intact even into the medium term. We barely made it through the debt ceiling debacle; imagine what President Gingrich will do to the place.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the best-governed countries around the world, like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Singapore, etc., are all small- to medium-sized. Countries like that are big enough to be able to fund reasonable infrastructure and defend themselves, but small enough that their governance problems are surmountable, and perhaps most importantly, weak enough that they aren't tempted to traipse around the globe and engage in boneheaded meddling.

I think what people forget when they talk about the need for unifying Europe, especially looking back at WWII, is that Hitler was fundamentally a product of horrible economic collapse. These days if countries are fat, content, and prosperous, the chances of great power wars are zero. Nuclear weapons plus development = peace. It's akin to airline security. There is one development that has increased security aboard airlines, and that is the expectation that the passengers will fight any hijacker. Yet governments feel a need to impose a bunch of totally ineffective rules and a bloated agency over the top so they can say they've "done something" about the problem.

Is it so crazy to think that countries should just focus on their own homes and try to provide a good life for their own citizens, instead of jockeying for position in loopy supranational entities run run by lunatics? To my eye "influence" in Europe plus $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee, plus your very own lounge chair on the Hindenburg.

Weekend links

2011-12-10T06:00:00.004-05:00

1. This twisted story on a Vegas real estate scam has to be read to be believed.

2. I didn't know I was psychic!

3. I might be surviving on Ramen noodles, but it still warms my heart to know that crazy old rich people can still give gigantic fortunes to their pets.

4. How doctors die. Worth considering.

5. The history of the world's most influential operating system.

UPDATE: More links!

6. How to beat a tantrum.

7. Another view from the dystopian future.

8. The only way to save the Euro is to destroy the EU.

9. The jet packs are here!

10. Defeating planned obsolescence: a new product will let you sharpen your disposable razors.

11. The Senate is, unsurprisingly, trying to crush innovation in wireless connectivity. More innovation = more competition = less profits for large, established players.

We don't need no water

2011-12-09T15:09:00.000-05:00

The Eurodämmerung seems to be continuing apace:

Angela Merkel wants to use the EU institutions to police government budgets and financial rules. David Cameron had the idea of using the fact that Merkel would need his support to get that done as leverage to get her to agree to water down ideas about a financial transaction tax. Merkel didn't back down, and Cameron didn't back down either. So now Merkel's plan seems scuttled, which I think is exactly what I would have done if I were Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But the rules of British politics seem to be that you must subject the PM to withering criticism any time anything newsworthy happens, so they seem to be going with the line that Cameron erred in letting Britain become "isolated" when defter manoevering would, allegedly, have gotten him a feisty coalition of Swedes and Hungarians to stand at his side.

Felix Salmon adds:

It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to implode in a spectacle of pathetic ignominy. Its individual countries will survive, of course, albeit in unnecessarily straitened circumstances. But the dream of European unity is dissolving in real time, as the eyes of the world look on in disbelief.

I am getting increasingly cavalier about this whole thing. Bugger European unity, the cure is making the disease worse. Here's a chart of the "Taylor rule," which is a rule of thumb about how a central bank should manage its monetary policy. (Taken from this great round-up by Kevin Drum, which is more thorough but comes to the same conclusion.)

It's clear that, as various Euroskeptics predicted, the Eurozone is an insane currency area that has never worked and will never work. The ECB demands austerity for backstopping sovereign debt, solving the immediate crisis, but that will just make the underlying problems worse. Ezra Klein:

But the truth is, Europe can have all that and still fail because the crisis has another powerful driver: slow growth. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects that, continent-wide, Europe will grow 0.6 percent in 2012 and 1.7 percent in 2013. Remove the strong performers like Germany and the Netherlands and it’s quickly apparent that the growth prospects for the others are grim.

The masses across the periphery won't take this forever. Sullivan:

So what we've got is a plan for serious austerity, enforced by Brussels and destined to pummel the economies of the peripheral countries even further. So forget the British veto, the real threat to the EU is that, at some point, the peripheral countries risk becoming less autonomous within the EU than the individual states are within the US, during what could become the worst depression since the 1930s. If you don't see future strife built into that formula, you are a more optimistic reader of history than I am.

We already have Germans dictating government fiscal policy in Athens and, to a lesser extent, Italy. Neither country has a democratically elected government. And so we see that Europe risks degenerating into a Franco-German bully zone, and in an era where democracy is resurgent in the Middle East, it is retreating in Europe. Does anyone think this is feasible in the long run? That the publics in countries whose economies are being effectively run by Berlin won't buckle at some point - especially if the core problem of an imminent new depression remains likely.

I think most European countries would be reasonably happy as long as they have a chance of growth and the various states aren't organizing to murder each other. The Euro's time has come. Time to rip off the band-aid.

The magic of the internet and why media companies want to kill it

2011-12-09T11:42:00.004-05:00

Imagine a 16-year-old dude from France loves music and wants to make a career as an electronic musician. Imagine furthermore he remixes a Killers song, posts it on YouTube, and catches the eye of some industry players. He becomes a successful DJ, still only 17. He releases a mashup taking bits from dozens of different songs and weaving them into a new whole.

Now imagine someone else uses that song as background for an awesome dance video. Suppose for the sake of argument that someone is a balding math professorish dude with a predilection for backflips:

Would that not be the very height of awesome? Who is being harmed in this process? The playing field is more level; music and performance is democratized such that nearly anyone has a reasonable shot of getting their work out there. For all its flaws the internet is sometimes truly amazing.

The "anti-piracy" bill before Congress would make nearly all of the above process illegal. That is on purpose. Media companies want the only content out there to be the things on which they control monopoly rents. There was once a copyright bill (the Eldred Act) which would have granted basically infinite rights to anyone who was willing to pay a dollar to maintain their copyright, but released into the public domain the literally millions of works whose copyrights are fifty years old and for which there is no one willing to pay a dollar.

Media companies killed that bill. Why? Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture:

But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked self-interest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn’t interfere with any copyright owner’s desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the “Dark Content” that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question:

What does this industry really want?

With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting their content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn’t require their permission first.

The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs.

It is not hard to understand why the warriors take this view. It is not hard to see why it would benefit them if the competition of the public domain tied to the Internet could somehow be quashed. Just as RCA feared the competition of FM, they fear the competition of a public domain connected to a public that now has the means to create with it and to share its own creation.

Humanity suicide watch

2011-12-08T22:19:00.002-05:00

Dave Roberts brings the doom:

In my last post, I discussed a new peer-reviewed paper by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. It paints a grim picture:
-The commonly accepted threshold of climate "safety," 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] temperature rise over pre-industrial levels, is now properly considered extremely dangerous;
-even 2 degrees C is drifting out of reach, absent efforts of a scale and speed beyond anything currently proposed;
-our current trajectory is leading us toward 4 or 6 (or 8 or 10) degrees C, which we now know to be a potentially civilization-threatening disaster.
Like I said, go ahead and pour yourself a stiff drink.

He sets a deadline of 2015 as the point at which rich countries must start decreasing their emissions. I sure hope that we will get our collective act together, but if I had to guess, I'd say that not only are we not going to make that emissions target, we're going to accelerate past it.

The only thing that might save us is a giant global recession. Hey, it did the trick last time.

UPDATE: William deBuys has a new book out on this topic:

The Age of Thirst in the American West
Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization
By William deBuys

Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres).

The fires were a function of drought. As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

Intern jams

2011-12-07T21:10:00.002-05:00

I was doing by far the most difficult fact check I've ever done today, digging around in various corners of the internet looking for facts about Colombia, and stretching my Spanish to the limit. Here's a sample of what I was jamming to:

A luxurious but intense feel.

UPDATE: This reminded me of a couple articles from the NYT not long ago, one on Kaskade and one on Deadmau5 and Skrillex. The second is a bit hard on Deadmau5 for being musically dull at his shows; I can't speak to that, having never been to one. I can imagine that this might not play that well at an arena, perhaps more headphones music.

But I still think it's great.

The raindrops had it coming

2011-12-07T20:51:00.000-05:00

My umbrella bit the big one awhile back, so I picked up one of these online the other day:

I get some funny looks on the metro, but it's totally worth it.

Collected links

2011-12-06T10:43:00.000-05:00

1. Launching the innovation renaissance! Working on this now and it's not bad.

2. Should Greece leave the Euro? My thinking is that it's time to rip off the band-aid.

3. This new Euro deal looks increasingly terrible.

4. Potentially Earth-like planet discovered!

5. Radley Balko on the militarization of the police. "It is, to put it bluntly, a terror tactic."

Self-promotion watch

2011-12-05T13:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much time to write recently—it's getting close to issue time and I've been fact checking like a beast. I was pleased to notice Tyler Cowen pulled out a comment of mine, though:

Thinking in the short term, obviously the solution involving the least collective misery for everyone is for Germany to bite the bullet and backstop the whole continent’s debt in one way or another. But just past the immediate crisis I don’t see any reason for optimism. If recession really does hit, how are the SPIIG crowd going to get out of the “debt -> austerity -> crap growth -> more debt (or at least not much extra money to pay down the principal) -> more austerity” cycle? It seems like a 1918-style suicide pact.

The SPIIG governments have to be weighing the costs of cutting their losses and getting out. (Right?) People seem to agree that would be another devastating financial crisis, and thinking selfishly that would be bad, but if I were Spain and it’s a choice between 2-3 years of total chaos and 20-30 years of grinding hopeless misery, I think I’d go with the first option.

Huzzah!

Department of WTF, Batman bureau

2011-12-04T19:29:00.002-05:00

Jeb Corliss, "Grinding the Crack:"

Best watched in HD.

Collected links

2011-12-04T09:55:00.000-05:00

1. Sky timelapses! Orion, Tempest, and Sub-zero.

2. More on police militarization.

3. The paranoid style in American politics. An oldie but a goodie.

4. The 45 most powerful photos of 2011.

Good old Oregon

2011-12-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

This one is best watched on HD in full screen.

Finding Oregon from Uncage the Soul Productions on Vimeo.

Amazon review comedy strikes again

2011-12-01T19:06:00.000-05:00

This time it's the world's saddest book.

Proposal: a general tech company strike

2011-11-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

Taking a look at the execrable bills before Congress trying to quite literally destroy the internet as we know it, creating massive security holes at the same time, I was struck by a thought. The idea behind this bill—of a piece with the drug warrior mentality—is to seriously expand the reach and severity of legal punishment for downloading copyrighted material. Among other things, websites like YouTube and Twitter will be dragooned into policing their own users for fear of lawsuits, normal netizens will live in fear of criminal prosecution for infringing content (like singing a copyrighted song), and search engines will have to deal with the terrific headache of de-indexing a blizzard of infringing domain names, which will for obvious reasons pop up by the millions.

Here's the thought. This would be a stupendous waste of money for all the big internet companies. What if they all went on strike? Say the bill passes Congress and it's headed for the President. The next day, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter, and so on all go dark, and are replaced by a sober video explaining why the bill is atrocious, plus the phone numbers of the president and their local representatives. Can you imagine the outrage?

In fact, the best objection I can think of is that it would be too effective. The internet is so key to the economy and basic support infrastructure that shutting down those key sites might cause serious damage. I don't know the technical details of this, but one might preserve functionality for key personnel, or maybe do it just for a day, or make it a click through on every site. The point is that the tech companies, their flaws aside, are for once all on the same side, the side of the average netizen, and they have tremendous leverage they could exploit in some way to defeat this bill. They should use it.

Gates on vaccine deniers

2011-11-29T07:57:00.001-05:00

Watching Bill himself on CNN delivering some pretty apocalyptic language on the vaccine-autism crowd. He said something like it's an "absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids."

Good stuff.

The next round

2011-11-27T11:06:00.001-05:00

After reading a lot about the 2008 crisis, I came to the conclusion that the fundamental issues that drove that crisis—too large, too interconnected banks, captured regulators, and a Wall Street culture that demands stupendous profits—were not only not resolved, they were even worse than before. Another crisis is in the offing, sooner or later.

The answer may be sooner. If the Eurozone unravels, I think the safe bet is that all the big banks will be up to their nuts in it someway or another. MF Global showed how this might work, but mostly I just suspect that if there's a big shitpile out there somewhere the banksters would be making "aggressive" trades on it. Basically just laying down my gut feeling here rather than a detailed argument to see how it turns out.

Sign of the times

2011-11-26T12:59:00.000-05:00

Still as true as it ever was:

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T21:30:00.001-05:00

This was the biggest gathering my family's had since I can remember, as well as the best turkey I've ever had.

Home again!

2011-11-22T23:39:00.001-05:00

Took this picture on the way home from the airport.

Programming note

2011-11-21T16:55:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the recent darkness here. I spent last weekend in Princeton visiting an old Peace Corps friend. This week I'm heading back to Colorado to have Thanksgiving with my family, so posting will probably be light.

The cowardice of Millennial men, ctd

2011-11-18T11:33:00.000-05:00

Ellen Campesinos, who plays bass for Los Campesinos!, in an article explaining why ladies in popular bands apparently don't get any action:

Having eliminated fans and support-band members, we're left with the guy hanging out at the bar whose friend has dragged him along to the gig. In a lot of ways, he's the most appealing choice. I want to hear that someone is not fussed about us. The thing is, this hypothetical guy normally throws me some glances, and I shoot some back, but he still won't talk to me. And I don't want to reduce it to status anxiety or a power issue, because obviously it's intimidating to talk to any stranger, let alone someone who was just performing. But why are there always attractive girls who talk to the male band members post-show? They have insights and they like books and they have no problems with light flirtation. Maybe it's because they're better at hiding their inner crazy fangirl, or maybe it's because some men worry they will come across as slightly creepy.

As you might expect, there's more to it than that, but I since this confirmed my pre-existing beliefs, it's obviously true.

Collected links

2011-11-17T11:52:00.000-05:00

1. More about the double standard in the justice system for rich and poor. The rule of law is dead.

2. Meet Gerry Sandusky, no relation to the Penn State guy. He's had a rough week.

3. Check out the vet pressing for marijuana to be approved for PTSD.

4. Greenwald vs. former drug czar John Walters on drug legalization.

5. Another debate: is technological innovation accelerating or stagnating?

6. The face of modern slavery.

Quick rundown on how media corporations are trying to break the internet

2011-11-17T09:01:00.001-05:00

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Department of WTF, China bureau

2011-11-16T13:58:00.000-05:00

Just check this out. Just awesomely mysterious.

The new Greenwald

2011-11-15T22:23:00.000-05:00

I got this one from the office, and I've been reading it in bursts to control my blood pressure. His central contention, that the rule of law is dead and buried in the United States, and the elite establishment is holding openly celebratory parties on its grave, is inescapably true.

I was watching some old Carlin the other day. It's not really standup, a lot closer to ranting. Five years ago I would have said Carlin was about 50 percent right, but today I'd say closer to 80 percent.

Carl Sagan: The Gift of Apollo

2011-11-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

Collected links

2011-11-14T21:32:00.001-05:00

1. "Toxin" and "poison" are really nonsense terms these days. Mutantdragon brings the science.

2. Check out Thomas Jefferson's expurgated gospels.

3. Awesome piece on how Hispanics are saving small towns. ¡Andalé pues!

4. Hertzberg on Occupy Wall Street.

5. NBC just gave me a sweet job, and I didn't even have to interview! Oh wait, I confused myself with the daughter of a former president. Well, at least she has hedge fund experience. At least I'm not like working for free and broke as shit.

The hidden AmeriCorps and media elites

2011-11-14T20:45:00.000-05:00

AmeriCorps, as noted before here, is the largest national service organization in the United States outside the military. More than 80,000 people every year do service work in this program across the country for a pittance. Its support has historically been broad-based and bipartisan, with one consistent complaint. Despite the fact that today nearly three times the number of people have served in AmeriCorps than the Peace Corps, the latter is still far more well-known. As John McCain noted in the Monthly in 2001, the program’s profile is too low:

But for all its concrete achievements, AmeriCorps has a fundamental flaw: In its seven years of existence, it has barely stirred the nation’s imagination. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched the Peace Corps to make good on his famous challenge to “[a]sk not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country.” Since then, more than 162,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps, and the vast majority of Americans today have heard of the organization. By contrast, more than 200,000 Americans have served in AmeriCorps, yet two out of three Americans say they have never heard of the program.

There is a good reason for this; the program was designed to be as decentralized as possible, which is a large part of its success. Many AmeriCorps workers are distributed to already-existing NGOs and other service organizations where instead of doing grunt-level work, they recruit and manage actual volunteers, giving those organizations the needed logistical backbone operate much more effectively—as McCain notes, each AmeriCorps member generates on average nine additional volunteers. Most of the money is put in the hands of state governors, who get to decide (within reason) which organizations get it.

All this creates broad-based, bipartisan political support, but at the expense of a high national profile. It is of a piece with what Suzanne Mettler calls the “submerged state, ” where beneficiaries of a government program often do not realize they are beneficiaries—according to McCain, even some AmeriCorps members do not realize they are working for the government.

There was a glaring example of this lack of recognition recently. Tom Brokaw just wrote a book called The Time of Our Lives, a goodly slice of which was devoted to national service, and in it did not once mention the AmeriCorps program. In an interview with Andrea Mitchell promoting said book, he mentioned that perhaps the country needs some kind of rapid response team to deal with natural disasters, specifically mentioning the tornadoes that recently hit Joplin, Missouri. The truth, of course, is that AmeriCorps members were actually there helping to clean up and rebuild after that tornado outbreak.

On one level, Brokaw should know better. Surely part of the reason AmeriCorps is so low-profile is that he and other elites who claim to be very supportive of national service can’t be bothered to do some cursory research.

But the government should be doing a lot more as well. One can imagine several ways to build AmeriCorps’ public profile, like McCain’s idea for a highly visible AmeriCorps flagship program, or even just a public service announcement featuring the president, as JFK provided for the Peace Corps. AmeriCorps ought to permeate the national atmosphere to such a degree that by default it forms the backdrop of any discussion of national service, so even Tom Brokaw couldn’t possibly overlook it.

(Cross-posted at Ten Miles Square.)

Quote for the day

2011-11-14T10:30:00.000-05:00

"If the world succeeds in coming out through the other side of this crisis, you should expect to see even more countries joining the perpetual surplus brigades leading to even more demand for safe dollar denominated financial assets. That, in turn, means either big U.S. budget deficits or else some bold new innovations in financial engineering to meet the demand." --Matthew Yglesias, in yet another reminder of the fact that for every creditor there is a debtor.

What do French ambulances sound like?

2011-11-14T06:00:00.000-05:00

Bill Bailey explains:

Probably funnier if you know French.

"I really needed that twenty-five dollars"

2011-11-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

I found this oddly comforting:

Because I, too, am broke as shit.

Pity party for straight dudes

2011-11-12T13:36:00.004-05:00

Via Sullivan, check out this Dan Savage interview:

...heterosexual male identity — and in America I don’t want to get too pointy-headed about it, but it’s really this package of negatives. You know, to be a straight guy is not to be a woman and not to be a faggot and so it doesn’t really leave you much room to maneuver. If there’s anything about your interests or personality that can be remotely perceived as feminine or faggoty, you have to kill it or people won’t believe you’re straight or you’ll be tormented — you know, questions for the rest of your life. And it’s kind of sad to watch how hemmed-in straight guys are.

That is surely true, but there's another aspect to this as well. Growing up as a straight boy, especially in a liberal environment, you are constantly bombarded by the ways men have treated and continue to treat women like shit. They are all absolutely true. Just the other day I read the most horrifying piece on the daily violent abuse to which female bloggers are subjected.

Especially if you self-identify as a thoughtful type, it's quite easy to get into the habit of bending way, way, backwards in a desperate attempt to avoid being a sexist asshole, which can quickly turn into (as most of my ex-girlfriends can tell you) abject cowardice. We still have a (thankfully decaying fast) cultural expectation that guys are supposed to make the first move. I am really almost incapable of this, and thus end up spending a lot of time alone. I admit it, if I'm single and an interaction with a woman turns even slightly romantic, I usually freeze up like I've been doused with liquid helium:

I think this should be obvious, but just to be clear, I am in no way trying to minimize the ongoing oppression of women, or compare the situation of straight males as being somehow just as bad. I'll take my discomfort over specific, detailed threats to come and rape me with a screwdriver. Rather I'm saying that our history of patriarchy and sexism has done men no real favors. Like Southern whites during Jim Crow, or Apartheid-era Afrikaners, men could only achieve subjugation by doing serious damage to ourselves at the same time.

Weekend links

2011-11-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

1. Why American's won't work dirty jobs. Short answer: lousy pay.

2. A Kansas town fights a mercury-spewing plant and the EPA.

3. Glenn Greenwald's new book looks good.

4. Who broke the Penn State pedophile scandal?

5. Great review of Niall Ferguson's latest.