15 Seconds

My Bob/Frum post got mentioned in the recent BhTV Bob/Eli diavlog. There was a rebuttal comment, so I figure I may as well have another bite at the apple. My BhTV response is below, the footnotes expand and defend.

The rebuttal by Namazu said:

Quote:

I think I can guess who does the finances in the Wright household (to be fair, David didn't really nail the issue either). You can blame Bush for running up the national debt, and for failing to adequately regulate mortgage originations and Wall Street. You can't blame him for high mortgage rates, for the simple reason that we've been enjoying record low rates for over a decade. The credit crunch we're experiencing now is part of the inevitable unwind of the most massive credit bubble in history. Easy credit (i.e., Greenspan, with an assist from Chinese mercantilism) is responsible for the bookends of the problem: cheap money on the front end and yield-hungry suckers willing to buy the sausage (CMOs, etc.) on the back-end. In the middle (where you Adminstration bears responsibility, along with others) are lightly-regulated originations, corrupt bond rating and insurance industries, under-capitalized banks and brokers, and the Fannie/Freddie clusterf*ck. Sub-prime is going to be a small fraction of the problem, whether measured as a fraction of household wealth destruction or losses to the financial system. Speculators were a significant part of run-up in select areas like South Florida and Vegas. It remains to be seen how many non-flippers who aren't under financial stress will engage in "jingle mail" because they're underwater on a bloated re-fi. What is certain is that US household wealth was vastly inflated by the run-up in housing prices and is now evaporating in amounts measured in the trillions. Regardless of how deep the recession is or how many jobs are lost, we will feel the effects for many years. I think bhtv should have some people on who really understand this stuff, and will forward some names to the booking department.

I should probably admit that I'm not a Fed governor.1 Nonetheless, it seems to me that as long as the mortgage is getting paid, the sausage machine, loose agencies and cluster f*king aren't a problem for the consumer. Similarly, if you own your own home and are planning to stay there for at least five years, you have a good chance of coming out ahead of renting, so 'jingle mail' seems likely to remain all anecdote and no statistic (as it is right now).2

The problem, then, is mortgage holders paying the bills. By incurring a deficit, Bush puts Greenspan in a bind - he can either raise rates to prevent inflation, directly harming mortgage holders, or he can not raise rates, allowing inflation, which will raise mortgage holders' other bills.3 Coincidentally, a deficit will also depreciate the currency, raising the price of imports, like oil.

Can you lay all the mortgage woes at George Bush's feet - no. But the deficit does contribute to the mortgage problems, as do other other government failings Namazu implies.

We could stand to have some economists on, though. Is neo-con Friedman available?4

1. By which I mean I'm not obviously qualified, but that even most businesspeople and economists do not have sufficiently more understanding of economics to pull rank on me.

2. My understanding of mortgages is that speculators, whackadoodle 120% mortgages and things with giant balloon payments are a small minority, but that adjustable rate (i.e. affected by changing economic conditions) mortgages are quite common. This large group of people put, perhaps, 10% down and are making the minimum payment, so if the house goes down 15% in price, their mortgage is suddenly upside down.

But what does it mean for the price of your house to go down? It means you bought your house for $200,000 3 years ago, and your neighbor just sold his house for $150,000. But if you're not planning to move for a few years, the price right now doesn't matter, just the eventual sale price. Depending on how bad the downturn is, and how far into the exurbs your house is, it's quite reasonable for you to get back to the original purchase price, or at least flip your mortgage right-side up. Given that, and that a house is most people's biggest asset, and the fact that they don't want to move, I think voluntary foreclosure (jingle mail) is very unlikely. In addition, while I think being forced into foreclosure may kill your credit for 7 years, jingle mail could result in a permanent black mark, indicating that you just don't want to play ball with creditors.

3. Do I blame Greenspan? Tough call. I had a wave last night that we have just been trying to hold off the 1997 'Asian Contagion' with succeeding asset bubbles, which would place the blame squarely on Greenspan. Also, I strongly believe that Greenspan's testimony about the Bush tax cuts was key KEY VITAL NECESSARY to getting them passed, so in a sense Greenspan put himself in the bind. btw. which U.S. presidential candidate said that if Greenspan died he would put sunglasses on him and prop him up 'weekend at Bernie's style' in order to keep him as fed chair.3a Bonus! Which U.S. presidential candidate is being advised by Paul Volker, the fed chairman that earned the fed its inflation busting cred in the first place?

3a. Actually the reference has him saying that about putting Greenspan on a tax reform comission, but he has said it before about the fed. Here's an original.

4. Alas, Friedman is dead. Long live Friedman.

Second best acting I have ever seen from Paris Hilton

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/paris-hilton-re.html

Half caff skinny rabbit with no whip

There is a further anachronism in Red Rabbit (set in 1984, published 2002) beyond everyone knowing that the Soviet Union is about to collapse.1 Jack Ryan loves the coffee of this little company in Seattle. Thinks they're going places. Wants to buy a lot of it and bring it over to England. Going to buy stock. Everyone's going to want to get into coffee. What's the chain? (hint: look at the title)... Starbucks.

I'm gagging again.

1. Apparently there's some controversy about this. The common belief is that the CIA and U.S. Sovietologists were completely surprised. The CIA defends itself, saying that its reports clearly showed the drop in Soviet GDP that caused the ultimate failure. As to resolving the situation, I quote one of the KGB officers in Red Rabbit, "The Americans have a saying which I have learned to respect, 'that is above my pay grade.'"2 But I'll go for it anyway... I look at America in 2008, I see political unrest against the ruling party, a draining war in central asia, and economic stagnation, emphasized by fluctuations in commodity prices. Yet, the ruling party has a decent chance to hang on to the presidency. On a rhetorical level, CIA protestations that they penciled in the dots are an admission that they failed to connect them. See, for instance, the CIA's failure to predict 9/11 (yes, I went there. If the CIA isn't for predicting 11/9 or 9/11, what is it for?).

2. Translation: lazy author. Note that later in the book an American does say just that.

Bob v. Frum

Bob Wright and David Frum argue over who caused the housing meltdown.1 Bob argues that large deficits drove up interest rates + caused the credit crunch, Frum blames it on unqualified people getting houses. I'm going to bat for Bob here... Many people got adjustable rate mortgages, so an increase in interest rates could make a just-barely-affordable house go out of reach.

1. They call it the credit crunch, which from my bench refers to the troubles of banks / investment houses e.g. Bear Sterns, IndyMac., but they are clearly talking about the housing market (which in an economy of course interacts with the banking sector).

Dollars and Dollars

In re: Megan McArdle's pondering about single payer spending.

Right now, just about half the healthcare dollars spent in America come out of government coffers. This is expected, in the not-too-distant future, to open up unsustainable holes in the budget. Single payer will patch those holes only if we can generate a dollar in reduced spending on the currently uncovered for every new dollar we want to spend on the sickly. The three general proposals to do so are:

1. Reduce administrative costs
2. Squeeze out pharma profits
3. Preventative care

With administrative costs only 15% of private spending, and pharma profits about 10% of the 10% of healthcare costs represented by drug spending, that had better be some amazing preventative care.

This strikes me as a weird comparison. Assume that the government does pay ~50% of medical costs, including medicare, medicaid, and the VA. If the government picks up the rest of the population, they get the other half of the funding.1 The 15% administrative costs is not just wrangling (which medicare doesn't do), but also profits. Medicare admin costs are frequently cited at 3%, which would mean that if you take the other 50% of revenue, 12% of that, i.e. 6% of total spending gets freed up to cover the currently uninsured. Sure, it's weak math, but then so is McArdle's.

1. Or whatever. The public will feel they are entitled to approximately what private insurers were getting before.

Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!

So, I just finished listening to Tom Clancy's Red Rabbit. I read a lot of Clancy in high school - they were large, adultish looking books, they were about war, and you could be sitting calmly in class reading a semi-decent sex scene. Clancy wrote a book in which an airliner is used by a terrorist to crash into the U.S. Capitol, so he got a lot of credit in the post 9/11 world.1

In the End of History, Clancy stories about a more dangerous world held a fascination. In an actually more dangerous world we see how Clancy has been refighting the last war, Thinking about a clash between a secret cadre pulling the strings in China/India/Japan/Iran and the U.S. in which Japan, India, and Iran try to distract the U.S. in various ways so China can seize a large chunk of Russia, completely ignoring how such a group would come together or possibly exercise power in a type of 'Risk Board Thinking.' The only non-state actors are a group of eco-terrorists based in the U.S. When Muslin terrorists set off a bomb in the U.S., the real problem is making sure the President doesn't launch nukes at Russia.

Red Rabbit (written 2002) is set during Tom Clancy's comfort period, the cold war. Unfortunately, it bears the marks of its time travel. The narrator lectures on how the CIA is much more competent than people think, if only we knew of their successes. Everyone knows the Soviet Union is about to collapse, despite it coming as a surprise in the real world.

This is the plot: The KGB decides to kill the Pope, a guy in the KGB decides to defect, Jack Ryan sits in the same truck with him as he is snuck out of the S.U., then Jack Ryan tries to stop the Pope getting shot, and basically fails.

But that's not what the book is about. The first quarter of the book is about Jack Ryan moving to England and talking about how Engly it is, and Ed and Mary Pat Foley moving to Moscow and talking about how Sovi it is. The next quarter is a bunch of Russians pushing paper to kill the Pope, with all (all!) of them pausing to briefly consider that Marxism-Leninism (always said by my narrator in a particularly haughty accent MARS SCHIZM LENA JISM). Then, the Russian Protagonist, Zeitsev (the Rabbit) decides that he doesn't want to kill the pope. He'd rather defect. Sorry, I just don't buy it. I live in a country where the largest single religious faction is the Catholics, so I've gotten plenty of Rah Rah Pope in my life, and if I were at CIA and they said 'the Pope is causing political trouble for us, let's whack him' I'd do it. Zeitsev was raised in a country that's actively anti-religious, he's not a secret Christian, and Mother Church in his country is the Orthodox, not the Catholic. So his motivation is a no go for me.

As the 'Jack Ryan series' has progressed, the U.S. government gets more competent - in Cardinal of the Kremlin, Jack Ryan is the only competent person in the government, In Clear and Present Danger, Clark appears as a guy that's super competent at killing people, and by the time we get to Rainbow Six, all the named characters (Robbie Jackson, Dan Murray, Clark, Ding, the Foleys) are in the top jobs, so the Gov't can do no wrong. Chronologically, Red Rabbit takes place before Hunt for Red October, but the 'super competence' juice has sunk in completely.

This causes serious plot problems. Before the Foleys can have sex in every room of their apartment (Clancy has them screw an unusual amount), Ed is contacted by the Rabbit and both Foleys proceed to have several conversations with him totally unobserved, apparently Golovko, the Clancified future KGB chief hasn't gotten his juice yet. The Rabbit tells the Americans that their communications are compromised, but that the British are not. He also tells them that there is a high level spy in Britain. He refuses to tell them about the Pope till they get him out of Russia. Since Ryan is in England, they send him to Romania to get the Rabbit on what is the most boring fetch quest ever. Ryan meets the Rabbit and his family, they take a truck to Yugoslavia and an airliner back go England. Because the Brits are super duper competant. The Russians don't realize the Rabbit is gone since the Americans subbed a bunch of burnt up corpses and started a fire in the Rabbit's hotel room. Because the CIA doesn't want people to know they have the Rabbit, they won't try to stop the Pope getting shot, so Ryan goes down there, has a gun in the back of the putative assasin, but the assasin has hired a flunky to take the shot, so the Pope still gets shot. The story ends with Ryan bitching about having a long plane flight from England to Virginia so he can drop off the Rabbit at CIA headquarters.

Oh, and it turns out that American communications aren't compromised, so there was no need to involve the Brits. Oh, and there's a bunch of Rah Rah Catholocism.

That's super boring. This is Patient Etherised's Red Rabbit:
Zeitsev is a secret Catholic, descended from Americans that came over during the '30s and reverted to Catholocism after they saw how bad it was. They're thoroughly back-crossed so he looks Russian. He approaches the chief of Moscow station that's NOT Ed Foley. The Chief of Station gets made because someone saw Zeitsev reverse pickpocketing him, but they didn't see that it was Zeitsev, and Ed Foley has to arrange a crash meeting with Zeitsev while Zeitsev is still under vague suspicion, the meeting taking place in front of the KGB headquarters as Foley pretends to bug Zeitsev for a story. Zeitsev tells Foley the Americans have a spy high up in their espionage community, so the Brits are involved, despite having a spy high up that passes on diplomatic and political intel. The Zeitsev family goes to Slovenia to do the escape, the bodies get switched, but when they try to cross the border to Yugoslavia, they are challenged by the Secret Police. The Rabbit has been sold out by the British Traitor, Ryan's officemate, Harding!!! Dan Murray plays a tense game of cat and mouse with the latter day Philby as he tries to make his way to an East Bloc embassy, finally throwing himself into the Thames. Ryan, the Rabbit et al. make a run for the Aegean Sea, bugging out to a backup spot on some rugged terrain. After a tense day of listening to their radio, they hear from a sub in the area and are picked up by Seals on boats (so it's a repeat of Cardinal in the Kremlin, so what?).

Zeitsev tells Ryan about the Pope Shoot (heh heh) and the probable identity of the assasin. CIA has no files on him, so Ryan takes Zeitsev to Rome for a visual ID. At the same time, the KGB has realized they got the wrong bodies! (This is not so much a missed opportunity as an actual hole). Despite being burnt, the bodies show very low blood carbon monoxide (it would diffuse out of the body in the week of transit and storage + since the bodies can't breathe they wouldn't re carbonate in the fire) also, the blood types don't match (blood is routinely typed, and the Americans didn't ask what Zeitsev's was). Dental records are checked and the discrepancy revealed.

The assasin is notified, but they decide to risk it anyway. In St. Peter's Square, as the Pope begins circulating and blessing the crowd, Zeitsev identifies the assasin to Ryan who puts a gun in his back. At that point, a second assasin emerges from the crowd, shoots Zeitsev and aims for Ryan. Ryan turns his gun on assasin #2, then assasin #1 shoots at the pope while the crowd closes in.

We close with Jack taking Zeitsev's widow and daughter to Disneyland.


1. Debt of Honor / Executive orders.

Petraeus: If Obama says out, we go out

Charlie (paraphrased): Would you still order withdrawal if the commanders advised against it?
Obama: Because the commander-in-chief sets the mission, Charlie. That's not the role of the generals. (link)

[Petraeus] added that the feasibility of withdrawing U.S. troops in 16 months would depend on conditions that could not be forecast with much certainty.

“It depends on the conditions, depends on the mission set, depends on the — the enemy,” (link, emphasis mine.)

Get a life!

Just watched the podcast snippet of Morning Joe in which Joe fails to apologize for saying "what's community organizer?" (link to original quote). Given that this is a major piece of Barack Obama's resume / essential to his worldview, you should know what that is.

Let me translate that: "What's a squadron leader? What's a squadron?"

It's not an offensiveness thing, it's a 'doing your homework' thing.

The end of my toenail

I observed with fear the headline of Wired's "The end of theory." After all, theory is what distinguishes us from the apes, right? I couldn't bring myself to read it, but it popped up again on El Reg. Basically, the thesis is that by mass observation and correlation, no model (i.e. theory of causation) is necessary. Key quote from Reg:

"Would Anderson be willing to help test a drug that was based on a poorly understood correlation pulled out of a datamine?" Timmer challenges, apparently unembarrassed to be seen in flagrante putting an ad hominem argument. Of course not, which is why we test on guinea pigs. (And why should Anderson be first?)

But if anything, this is a reason Anderson could use. With sufficiently good correlations, it might finally be possible to spare guinea pigs, chimpanzees, or rats trial by laboratory testing.

Question: Where would those correlations come from? Sole Possible Answer: Mass observation of humans exposed to random doses of random chemicals.* It's not just Anderson that would be testing it. Note also that a good pharma shop will have thousands to millions of different drugs on the shelf.

Quote two:

Yet increasing computing power, both in hardware and statistical analysis algorithms, can still bring forth useful correlations, and new interesting discoveries. Anderson cites Craig Venter's DNA sequencing: having done with sequencing individuals, "in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms."

"The opportunity is great", he adds, because "correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all."

Well done Craig! Anyway, what's a species? How does DNA sequencing work? Why would DNA sequencing tell you that you've found a new species? What's DNA? Obviously, in order to know that you need to perform a ligation reaction on an air substrate, amplify with phiC31 rolling circle replication, and sequence via CV's secret method, your species must either: A. Have a theory as to how ligation, phiC31, and DNA sequencing work or B: Run around performing random chemical reactions on the atmosphere until something repeatable yet awesomely variable comes in.

Don't get me wrong, this mass observation stuff is great, but a theory provides so much more direction.

*: But, you say, couldn't you just test the blood/urine/semen of people that recover from or are immune from disease X and then correlate some common factor as the cure? 5-FU! Many drugs derive from naturally occuring compounds, but virtually no drugs are in the form / dose / route that could reasonably occur. Sure, some workers might be exposed to fluorine gas in an industrial accident, and some of them might have cancer, and some of those cancers might regress, but in order to get enough N, you'd have to engineer fluorine leaks all over town (and that stuff is NASTY).

OK, so you figure out that nucleoside analogues are great. But you find that only some of them work on cancer, while others work on HIV (you do subscribe to the germ theory of disease, right?). Is there some way to figure out which ones are more likely to work? Well, if you have a theory of DNA, and DNA polymerization, and recombinant DNA technology it just so happens that if you add the right fraction of some goo that kills bacteria to a mixture of factors that contain something significant for allowing human cells to grow [which you produced by heating human cells in a reaction well with some random chemical strains that you synthesized, then heated it, then cooled it, then heated it, then cooled it, and so on {in a chain} 30 times {a number you hit on randomly} ] with something that allows the bacteria to survive when you add that mold extract that a technician dropped the fertilizer in one day, then treat the bacteria with that one solution and fractionate them, you can try to use one of those fractions to do something similar to that heating/cooling thing (EXCEPT YOU MUSTN'T HEAT IT) in the presence of various nucleoside analogs, and perhaps so many mice won't have to die.

What is 538 trying to tell us?

Is it just me, or does this seem to suggest Virginia as the key state in the election?

Revenge of the Cavendish

I was trying to decide whether to rename "The Banana" as "Pudding," so I checked on Google Trends:

Surprisingly, Pudding jumps up near the end of every year - Thanksgiving and Christmas presumably. The surprising this is that Banana tracks with it...

Celebration Guns

There's no good way to come at this.

Reading Spencer Ackerman's blog, I come across a column in which gun rights people are upset with the Republican party. The pro-gun people are upset with the Justice Department because it argued in favor of continuing gun restrictions in the D.C. v. Heller case. In the column he references, one quote stuck out:

As the gun grabbing Brady Campaign acknowledges, such a finding by the Supreme Court could open the door to striking down as unconstitutional most, if not all, of the victim disarmament laws on the books.

Emphasis mine. I was tickled by that characterization of gun laws. It reminded me to write the rest of this post, which was originally hung on a gaffe that Mike Huckabee made at the NRA national convention a couple of weeks ago. A clatter was heard during Huckabee's speech, to which he joked:

“That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair and someone pointed a gun at him and he dove for the floor.”

Barack's gun-phobia is presumably linked to the possibility of assassination, but it could be a more banal, if not benign fear. Michelle Obama (in response to a question about assassination):

I don't really lose sleep over it. Because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station...

She took a lot of flak for that. Reading the words on this page, I can see why. The flat invocation of blackness is weird.* But the invocation of gas station sends a tingle up my spine. I remember one night my first summer in Hyde Park, gassing up the van at the ill lit Mobil on 53rd. The station was flanked on both sides by dark apartment buildings. On the opposite side of the street was a park,** empty. A man riding by on a bicycle abruptly turned in and started calling to me. And I thought, "O.K. this is going to be my first time getting mugged." And I checked my pocket. "Hey," said the man, "are you ready for the anatomy test tomorrow?" It was SDS.***

So, when Michelle Obama talks about a black man pumping gas, I fill in the blank "on the South Side of Chicago," an area where you really could get shot while pumping gas.*4

Which brings me to my last meditation. Amadou Cisse. Cisse was a graduate student in Chemistry at the University of Chicago. I never met him, but his death is still a subject of discussion. Without sources or verification, this is how it went down: Two guys borrowed a car from their neighbor with the intention of going clubbing. However, they realized that they were short on money. No big deal, they figured, we'll just get some off those rich students at the UofC.*5 First they mugged two students coming out of the biology / med school lecture building, and netted a pen. Coming back south, they threatened a professor near 60th and Woodlawn, who ran away as they shot at him (and missed). They continued west, finally running into Cisse near 61st and Ellis. Cisse was coming back from lab, had no money, wasn't even carrying his wallet. They got frustrated, so they shot him.

No. Seriously.

This takes me back to the D.C. gun ban. Chicago also bans handguns, which the murderers used. A lot of people have said a lot of very intelligent things about guns. I have something not very intelligent to add:

If someone were mugging me, and God came down and said, "You can either have a gun in your pocket, or $40," I know that with one of those options, I'm guaranteed to walk away.




*: Is it? The murder rate and murderer rate are much higher in blacks than whites. Concurrently, black on black murder is way more common than black on white or the reverse. This isn't to say Barack is likely to get murdered at the BP in Gunbarrel...

**: A couple years later, gangs of malicious 12 year-olds would ambush students cutting through that park after school and steal their electronics.

***: SDS is a white guy, so, you see, I'm not racist. I'm afraid of everyone in the dark.

*4: A takeoff of the infamous survey question from Freakonomics "How does it feel to be poor and black on the South Side of Chicago."

*5: We don't think of ourselves as rich, of course, but as people with well-off parents (yup) or very few expenses (yup), we tend to walk around with iPods (nope) laptops (sometimes) or other saleables (yup).

60% Cancer, 20% Parkinson's Prevention, 20% Pure Pleasure*

I was listening to Dan Carlin's podcast, Mad about Torture, and after the apparently controversial bit about hating torture** he talks about the idea that fat people are using all the oil to move their fat butts around and eating all the food, therefore increasing food prices for people abroad.***

I'm not going to talk about that.

I'm going to talk about cigarettes. In the '90s Phillip Morris did a study in the Czech republic indicating that cigarette smoking is a net positive for government revenue. I suppose there's a debate about healthcare costs, but if someone dies before the age of 65, they get no social security, whereas if they die at age 90, they suck up a lot.

This phenomenon is enhanced in the U.S. by private insurance. If someone dies before 65, they don't get Medicare at all, and private insurance pays for it.

So: Cigarettes = Gov't saves money. Private insurers hosed.

Now, the government introduces cigarette taxes, with the idea that they're going to recoup the added costs that smokers cause the government. Remember, those costs are illusory. But, the taxes will cause some people to stop smoking, which will increase government costs, which will be offset by cigarette taxes****

So: Cigarette taxes = Gov't increases spending and revenue (no idea which is greater). Private insurers save money.

It follows that: Smoking Ban = Gov't increases spending with no consummate increase in revenue. Private insurers go to the bank (increased tax revenue?).


Therefore, a cigarette tax is a win, win, win, win, lose situation (gov't, insurers, quitters, smokers, smokers).




*: via VKP, actually cigarettes are a mixture including emphysema, prevention of Crohn's
disease, various cancers, and asbestos, in addition to the ingredients presented above.

**: Apparently some people thought he was pro-torture 'cause he projects a very manly image. I don't know, I just started listening 'cause I wanted more podcasts. Anyway, one of my great formative experiences was reading The Gulag Archipelago. I swore when I read it that I would fight against any government that resurrected those principles. I have to say that an America in which citizenship and fair skin may or may not protect you from getting kidnapped, taken to a black site, disappeared and tortured to death deserves fighting.*****

***: It's the old mother's standby - how can you leave food on your plate when children in India are starving. As far as I can tell, the world food price increase is a result of more numerous meat eaters everywhere, thick and thin, combined with biofuels, and agricultural subsidies in the West.

****: Yes, I realize that cigarette taxes are local and medicare and social security are national. I'm assuming that since governments are always passing around responsibility / grants, it's fungible. Feel free to correct me.

*****: But, you say, It's just a few people. IT ALWAYS STARTS SMALL. Part II of The Gulag Archipelago talked about the establishment of the Gulag in the Solvetsky Islands in the 1920's, and how it started small, and now the original camps were replaced by voleyball courts. Sick stuff, kids.

Obama Must Name VP Nominee NOW!!!

Via Matt Yglesias:

New HRC campaign rationale -- Obama might get shot and killed before formally securing the nomination, so she may as well stay in the race!

...
Specifically (from NY Post MY links to), "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

The thinking being that if Barack gets assasinated now, the Democrats would nominate Sen. Clinton. The only way to avoid this is if Obama names his VP nominee now. While I can't think of any examples of nominees being assassinated, surely the VP nominee would take the top slot?

Creativity = Synthesis

Once upon a time, I was worried that I wasn't creative. All I did was take two things that existed and put them together, sometimes in an unusual way. My friend Marc said "But, J, that is what creativity is."

Haha haha haha what?

I just finished Flyboys. I would have thought a WW I period piece about fighter pilots had real potential. Perhaps it does...

I think I'm usually pretty generous to movies, and don't even notice many of the things that others gripe about. I noticed them in Flyboys. Let's start with the utterly inhuman portrayal of the Germans. Surely, after Downfall we can stand for all of our enemies to have more than 1 dimension. Not a single German word is translated and the 'honorable' German seems more random than deliberately noble. The SWAT-esque ransacking of a French house seems unlikely to impractical.

Move past the 'Real World' rainbow of American stereotypes that make up the protagonists. Forgive the magical learning of English by the female love interest. Pay no attention to the 'one of these guys is a spy' plot that unspools and wraps up, tensionless, in the space of 15 minutes. Feel relieved when the 'hero' American is supposed to get court martialed, and instead gets a medal. Accept the fact that the EXACT wound that kills 'gruff, experienced, but heart of gold' American pilot is not only survived by 'hero' American, but he is able to do aerobatic maneuvers, and shoot 'super-evil' German guy with a pistol at range while flying, and survive.

Whenever characters need to be interacting in the background, or chattering, or filling dead air, they laugh. They always laugh. Everyone in the movie is constantly laughing, but no one ever tells a joke. This 2:30 epic movie was done so cheaply that they couldn't even pay a guy to throw in chatter about the latest cinemas, or whores, or whatever.*

Of course, this happens in other shows as well. The episode of The Tudors I'm listening to right now, for instance. But it usually doesn't rise to my level of notice.

* In all fairness, it's not as bad as the soundtrack of On the Beach.
1. Waltzing Matilda Overture
2. Waltzing Matilda piano only
3. Waltzing Matilda sung by drunk guys
4. Waltzing Matilda flute only
5. Waltzing Matilda variations

One saving grace of OTB is that they seem to realize how annoying it is when the captain yells at the drunks singing WM.

Hardy Heron

One of the things I love about running Ubuntu is that every 6 months I get a 'new' operating system. This time, it's the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron.

I've done this once before (7.04->7.10) and the experience is the same - on the day of the release, you click the upgrade button, hang around while it downloads all the new files, and then reset to a new system.

Here's the thing - everything still works after the reset, and you get a couple of new features. Of course, this is considerably better than Windows.

Being a partial Linux fanboy, I trolled around for sites talking about the upgrade (there were several about new features as they were announced) and came across this piece on the Linux Format site. Other than it's blahblah writing style, I paused when I read:

...as an LTS (Long Term Service - pe) release... [Hardy Heron] will be supported for three years... to give corporate users the reassurance that they are getting something stable. However, having said that, the release cycle for this version was the normal six month cycle, so there's been no surface change to the work rate that has gone into the Hardy Heron ... To be honest, when the delay to Dapper was announced, it communicated that Ubuntu and Canonical were committed to delivering a quality release. Looking at it this way, Hardy feels like just another notch on the bed head of Ubuntu, which is a shame.

Are they saying that because the release was delivered on time, that means It wasn't significant? When a game company, or a filmmaker delays a release date, it usually means something's going wrong.* As a student, when I ask for an extension, the product is usually far from my best work. Would the author feel better if he knew the product wasn't available 'til 9 AM central time, a full 15 hours into the Grenwich mean time day? Also, see what I mean about the writing? Doughy, doughy, doughy (I admit this isn't often my best work, but I hope I'm not that bad)

Of course, that sentiment contrasts with:

The development of Ubuntu has not let up since 6.06 (the last LTS -pe) got out the door, with some impressive releases that have lead up to this point in time.

So they have been working on this LTS for more than six months... right? From my perspective, it seems like what makes an LTS and LTS isn't the work that's put into it before release, but whether it is Supported over the Long Term.

The Linux Format article also included a discussion of some theoretical interest

With the 6.06 release, Kubuntu (Ubuntu + the KDE environment**) was classed under the LTS banner; however, with the advent of 8.04, this is not the case due to the... recent release of KDE 4. ...KDE 4 was [considered] too new to be... stab[le]... for a[n] LTS release, [and it would be ] difficult to... support... KDE 3.5 over the next three years. This is... understandable, but...inconsistent as Ubuntu 8.04 ships with Firefox 3 Beta 5... with which we've had minor stability issues.

I invite you to read the tortured original. My opinion? Apples and Oranges. Firefox may be the most used program on my computer (and probably most others) but it is just a program. KDE is an environment, several programs that run in that environment, and the toolkit used to add programs to that environment. Instability there has much wider ramifications. A downgrade to Firefox 2.x*** is easy. A downgrade to KDE 3.5 may be impossible.

This also has something to do with the fact that Ubuntu releases occur 'like clockwork' not only 6 months after one another, but also 1 month after the most recent GNOME release. Since Ubuntu is coordinated with GNOME, that means it's not coordinated to KDE.

Presumably, the customer also matters. I'll probably upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 in October. A smaller number of critical users and servers will be the ones still using Hardy Heron in 2013. It makes sense to get them all on the same platform to decrease duplication.

Also, screw KDE. I did a test install on my laptop, and it ran slightly faster than Windows Vista. Even my tower stalled a bit. If Ubuntu is going to be the desktop Linux, it should, you know, run on computers people actually use.****

*: I'll make no mention of Windows since, as far as I can remember, no version has ever been released on time

**: KDE = K desktop environment**2, as opposed to the Gnome environment that comes standard with Ubuntu.

**2: Environment = does not translate into Windows world, but do you know how all windows, buttons, menus, icons, text fields etc. in Windows look the same? And how all the windows, buttons, menus, icons, text fields, etc. on a Mac look the same between programs, but always different from Windows? That look and feel is the 'environment.' Also part of that environment is a standard set of programs akin to Notepad, Windows Media Player, Paint, Calculator, Internet Explorer.

***: Firefox 2.x is probably the least stable program on my computer, a comment I have heard from other Ubuntu users.

****: Part of the age-old battle in the linux community. The desktop people have traditionally lost because most of the people paid to work on linux are using servers and other high-end machines.

Disambiguation page

Hopefully you're not too focused on Aliza Shvarts. The Yale art student who claims to have repeatedly artificially inseminated herself and induced miscarriage and is using the resultant blood / products of conception in an art installation.*

via Andrew Sullivan, I see this quote:

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

First, I can think of several ways of accurately identifying the resulting blood, including whether or not there was a fertilized ovum, and whether Shvarts used 'abortifacient herbs.' Shvarts obviously isn't up on her PCR or mass spec.*** Furthermore, the ambiguity on my part exists because something has been artificially concealed from me, but it is not ambiguous to Shvarts. Therefore it is inappropriate to say "it remains ambiguous." IT is not ambiguous. IT is determined. Apparently, Shvarts did not determine whether she had conceived prior to inducing abortion, so that fact is ambiguous. But the cat and mouse over whether this is a prank, a Sokol affair against science, that's definitive.


*: Not related to the point of this post, but my opinion is:
1. Yuck
2. Moral revulsion, possibly tied to my aesthetic revulsion - if an human conceptus has one iota of rights derived from being human then it deserves not to be created for the sole purpose of being aborted for art.
3. Scientific skepticism - what is the success rate for DIY artificial insemination? What is the success rate for 'abortifacient herbs'? What are said herbs?
4. Puzzlement - Why use DIY artificial insemination instead of ordinary sex? Various explanations have been offered, usually based on the romantic preferences of Shvarts or her 'fabricators'** I speculate there is some sort of feminist message a la "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a needle-less syringe." But considering the 'message' which as far as my untrained mind can discern is about the arbitrary control of society over the body of its female members, I would think cruising for roofies would be more meaningful, though perhaps less reliable.
5. Side note that this is exactly what pro-choicers don't need.

**: WTF?

***: Polymerase chain reaction to genotype the blood. Conceptus-containing blood would include 'DNA fingerprints' that are not present in the... artist. Mass spec would identify foreign compounds in the blood. If it were me, I'd spring for sequencing the albumin gene, on the probability that it's actually chicken or cow blood.

I was wrong, sort of.

The final polls had it 43% Obama, 49% Clinton. Of the 8 percent undecided, I figured all 8% would go to Obama. So 2% went to Obama and 6% went to Clinton - a neoclassical Bradley.

CNN has it at - Clinton 55%, Obama 45%

Since 10% is the magic over/under, get out/stay in number, it's worth going into further...

Clinton: 1,258,245 to Obama: 1,042,297... type type type... calc calc calc.... 9.4%

I'm so pithy.

Pennsylvania prediction

I got a bad feeling in my stomach today. Not the rumble of too much 'better-living-through-chemistry' Kosher for Passover coffe cake, no. Barack Obama is going to lose Pennsylvania. Badly.

The voters of Pennsylvania aren't plugged into my narrative. They're going to vote for the candidate they think is best prepared. I can't decide whether to congratulate them for focusing so closely on what matters to them, or damn them for conducting their election in a vacuum, which is exactly the same thing.

RCP has Barack with 43% vs. Clinton's 49%. Consider the lesson of New Hampshire, where undecideds broke almost entirely for Clinton, giving her those extra 8000 votes. Consider Texas, where voters that made up their minds in the last 24 hours overwhelmingly went for Hillary. Those 8 percent of faux fence sitters will swing to Clinton.

Barack loses by 14.

See you in August.