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11.Mar.2010
This Hobson guy, crying Wolf!
I saw "Hobson's choice" in print for the second time in a couple days
and I was wondering
where that
expression came from when I saw that today's was Rick Hobson,
joking with his own name in
a
letter to the Statesman. In his case, the choice was
posting the names of successful Idaho wolf hunters
on his blog.
(Sadly, the pun doesn't really work; the original Hobson's choice, "a
free choice in which only one option is offered" is not operative
here.)
You'd think they be pleased at the publicity for their manly
(were any womanly?) achievement, but instead they and their
legislators got all worked up and are
trying
to get a law enacted. (It's awaiting action by our Senate.)
It all started with the wildlife, its defenders
scaring tame partridges away to keep them from getting shot. Idaho
makes it a crime
(36-1510)
to "disrupt lawful pursuit or taking" of any animal, and now we feel
the need to protect our hunters against those who would "harass,
intimidate or threaten [them] by any means including, but not limited
to, personal or written contact, or via telephone, email website."
I'm not in favor of harassment, intimidation or threatening, but
do our fearless hunters really need Idaho Code to protect themselves?
Apparently man is still the most dangerous game!
Hobson says he sought to "illustrate the public nature of hunting," but
instead he seems to have revealed that hunting has a decidedly
private nature.
Cashing in on "public service"
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association (you think I'm making that up? No,
really.), for its second act of
communication to me is touting Karl Rove's book just out. The first act
was a message to offer me a chance to opt out; as ever, the team is
happy to assume that silence equals assent. In my case, I did make the
decision to act by not acting, and see what they had to say. So stand
back for
"never-before-told details about his own groundbreaking career and the
legacy of the Bush presidency," as "Rove sets the record straight,
explodes myths, responds frankly to critics, and passionately
articulates why he made the choices he did as a conservative in the
center of politics."
Ka BOOM!
10.Mar.10
Glenn Beck is coming after ME now
Will this man stop at NOTHING?!
This CNNBC news report has the details from the broadcast of Le
Bebe-Homme Pleurant. (Sorry about the volume too loud and the lame
controls on the Flash... this is the best I could do. Thank me for not
embedding. And if you're on Facebook, go ahead and accept the login
thing. What's the worst that could happen? Ok, well, he could come after
you, too... Sorry about that.)
A successful non-profit
In the middle of the real estate bubble, with plans afoot for huge
housing developments up and down the foothills of the Boise front,
thousands of new units,
various of the to-be-impacted parties put up resistance. Apart from
little things like the
lack of water to support the land rush, people already occupying a
slice of heaven weren't keen on thousands of new neighbors.
The Save the Plateau
group was specifically focused on a place called Hammer Flat, which I
know mostly as "up there" while driving by the dam that diverts the New
York Canal from the Boise River (or "over there" from up at Lucky Peak
reservoir).
The Boise Weekly's article about the city acquiring 700 acres
of critical wildlife habitat has a nice Pete White aerial photo of the
place. From the highway, the basalt palisade ("Black Cliffs") is
striking; you don't see up to the "flat." This acreage is adjacent to
50 times more land in the "Boise River Wildlife Management
Area."
We taxed ourselves starting not quite a decade ago to buy up some of the
prize foothills land before it was too late, and this is the capper for
almost all that's left of the $10 million. Money well spent if you can
believe
the estimate in the Statesman that our 10,471 acres are
now worth more than 3 times what we paid.
Not that we're selling, eh.
So anyway, "Save the Plateau" can restyle itself "Saved" and fold up its
tent. Job well done!
More to the story
from the Boise Guardian, including the fact that Idaho Fish
and Game tried to buy the Flat for $2 million "as late as 2004... and
was out gunned when the developer offered about five times that
amount."
7.Mar.2010
Dark night of the nation's soul
John Yoo is
dancing a jig with his Philadelphia Inquirer columnist
job, exercising his thesaurus to marshall "farce," "cooked-up," "deeply
riddled with errors," "incompetent," "pure incomptence," "obviously
biased," "shoddy," "left-wing conspiracy theories," and finally,
"persecution."
The good news is that it stopped short of torture, however, since
there is no evidence the pain Mr. Yoo suffered was as great as
organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or death. He might have an
argument for psychological harm, as the investigation of the Office
of Professional Responsibility did continue for some years, starting
as it did before the 2004 election, and
continuing through the Bush second term.
He's willing to accept what "media reports suggest" to make his own
accusation, against the OPR (the whole office?), of "another violation
of professional rules of conduct," and—maybe—"a serious
violation of federal criminal law."
It was under the Obama administration, and Eric Holder's Department of
Justice that Deputy Attorney David Margolis was given the job of
reviewing the OPR report. Margolis expressed his narrow conclusion in
a memorandum dated just shy of the first anniversary of the
Obama adminstration. He rejected the OPR's finding of "professional
misconduct" because in his judgment they hadn't identified a "known,
unambiguous obligation or standard [for] the attorney's conduct."
Yet somehow Yoo manages to cook his bile stew into a "witch hunt" of the
Obama adminstration's making. And he takes a verdict of
only "poor judgment" as vindication.
The bar has never been set so low.
6.Mar.2010
Free PopSci!
Popular Science
has partnered with Google to put
its entire 137-year archive online for free browsing. Complete with
the always popular "period advertisements" to "bring back memories for
longtime readers." The magazine was a staple in our house when I was
growing up; I would read every issue, cover-to-cover.
"Some things we projected with startling accuracy, and others remain
today what they were then—dreams. We hope you enjoy it as much as
we do."
Mmm, probably won't, given the execrable interface offered by
the Google Reader. But it's a darn cool idea.
5.Mar.2010
Obama... it's OK to be American again
Paul Rockower, on
Innocents
abroad: backpacking in the age of Obama.
"...on this recent trip I saw a relative dearth of Canadian flags on
backpacks, suggesting that those camouflaged Americans finally removed
the maple leaf 'security' patches from their bags."
More from him:
Photography as Public Diplomacy, an exhibition. In addition to the
lovely website, it's showing at the USC
Annenberg Gallery,
second floor, through May 17, 2010.
The alternate universe
Good
column by Paul Krugman today, debriefing the end of Jim
Bunning's one-man show in the U.S. Senate.
"[W]hile the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons
involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to
focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up
between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different
universes, both intellectually and morally."
The graphic from the latest report
on the Employment Situation in February shows the gravity of the
situation: while the monthly change in employment has returned from
horrific, to flat, the effect on the unemployment rate in the
last two years has been huge.
What a time for Republicans to be more concerned with the estate tax
than unemployment benefits.
You can't learn from failures you won't admit
Who says hindsight is 20-20? Certainly not the U.K.'s Prime Minister
Gordon Brown, who
insists that the Iraq war was the "right decision made for the right
reasons."
No, seriously?
He did offer "veiled criticism" of the actual carrying out of
the mission, forgetting perhaps that first principle of war so
eloquently provided by ex-SecDef Rumsfeld: "stuff happens." (Insert
two-armed gesture deflecting all possible blame to the sides of the
room.)
Even better, "Right up to the last minute, right up to the last weekend,
I think many of us were hopeful that the diplomatic route would
succeed." Some of us were hopeful that the diplomatic route would
be attempted, actually. Because that "greater certainty amongst
the intelligence community that this weaponry was there" was actually
not all that greater.
Poll
results reported on March 11, 2003
still showed a majority of respondents (let's say "half" within the
margin of error) said "inspectors should be given more time to search
for evidence of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons on the ground in
Iraq," although the Bush administration's
marketing campaign had caused that number to drop in the previous
month.
4.Mar.2010
Call of the wild
The romantic appeal of "the mountains" and wilderness were what
attracted me to Idaho, strongly enough that I moved to Moscow in 1975,
site unseen. (Things are rarely what you imagine: I came to the state
in August, riding up the old Lewiston grade in the back of a pickup
truck, to roll out onto the loess hills of the Palouse.)
This appeal extends to
Oath
Keepers and the Age of Treason as well. As featured in
Justine Sharrock's report:
"When ['the shit hits the fan'], Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL
and make their way to their 'fortified bunker'—the home of one
comrade's parents in rural Idaho—where they've stocked survival
gear, generators, food, and weapons....
"A strapping Idahoan, Brandon (who doesn't want his full name used)
enlisted as a teenager when he got his girlfriend pregnant and needed a
stable job, stat.... Unlike his friend, he doesn't think the United
Nations must be dismantled, although he does agree that it represents
the New World Order, and he suspects that concentration camps are being
readied in the off-limits section of Fort Drum. He sends 500 rounds of
ammunition home to Idaho each month."
Massive fraud perpertrated on voters
Here in Idaho where any and all voter fraud could only have served to
entrench Republican leadership, our burning issues are
too
many people wanting to vote in Republican primaries and the desire to
force people to show photo IDs at polls there is ample outrage
available over "those people" in our fair state (even if, ah,
we don't know who those people are).
It's not easy to push back on a well-established meme, regardless of the
truth of the matter, but we have to try, don't we? So please go climb
up on your roof and shout as loud as you possibly can that
the whole ACORN pimp scandal was a hoax. Which even a
deprecated Republican "gut feel" could have told you was pretty likely.
Andrew Breitbart, the guy who helped O'Keefe's fantasy film go viral to
become best Mockumentary of 2009
has admitted he
didn't know what was on the tapes. There goes that
Pulitzer!
"This minor discrepancy" that O'Keefe didn't actually have the pimp
get-up on when he went into the ACORN offices, that he didn't actually
represent himself as a pimp. And other stuff. "Just like
Borat" is an interesting defense... for something that led to
a bill
of attainder in the U.S. Congress. It passed the House last
September, but it's a safe bet it won't be sailing through the Senate
any time soon.
As the lost CPAC Breitbart video states,
two different investigations, "one
by
the Congressional Research Service and one
by former
MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger
each found no evidence of crimes committed by ACORN workers on the
highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed video tapes."
After
O'Keefe was arrested for a scheme to tap the phones in the office of
a Democratic U.S. Senator, "Breitbart revealed he pays O'Keefe a 'fair
salary' to provide content for his three websites."
Ramajamadingdong
E.J. Dionne Jr. deconstructs
the Republican's big lie about reconciliation, including Orrin
Hatch's opinion starting "wrong on a core fact." Recall that both our
House of Representatives and Senate have passed a health-care reform
bill, with a majority, and a super-majority, respectively. And what
would come under reconciliation rules would be amendments, to...
yes, reconcile the two bills.
(Hatch's
piece lost me when he got into the Constitution schtick,
which has precisely nothing to do with filibusters and arcane
rule-making.) Dionne:
Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for "substantive
legislation" unless the legislation has "significant bipartisan
support." But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed
under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion
during his presidency, were "substantive legislation." The 2003
dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney
had to break the tie. Talk about "ramming through."
(My emphasis. That was back
before the media
had been told to care about reconciliation.)
There's also the disingenuity of "significant bipartisan support."
When there is such a thing for legislation, we don't need Senators
talking to us from Op-Ed pages or other media histrionics, they just go
ahead and pass the bill.
Karl Rove: Mr. Hindsight
And no slouch at looking out for himself, with that job at Fox "News"
and
now a memoir inflating his "courage and consequence." Be still my
heart.
Bush wouldn't have taken the country to war in Iraq if he hadn't really,
really believed there were W.M.D., he says. Biggest mistake of the Bush
years! Oh no, wait, that was "not countering the narrative" that "Bush
lied." Well hey, a memoir is nothing without a narrative, he should
know.
Adam in St. Louis isn't the only one who's disappointed:
"...We are supposed to elect Republicans for their acumen in foreign
affairs, yet the Bush [administration] responded with the least
strategic and most resource heavy approach imaginable (i.e. full-scale
invasion of a country that has little to do with Islamic extremism).
"They spent the US into oblivion fighting this 'enemy' while
decentralized terrorist cells continue to operate across many
countries. Now there is no money for health care and other domestic
priorities. So in essence terrorism is still alive and well (because
they fought the terrorist battle in the wrong way), and we are broke
because of it. Thanks Karl!"
Life-form of the month: grass
That's
Olivia Judson's nomination (just in time for hayfever season) in
honor of "one of the most momentous events in the history of the Earth,"
the evolution of grasses.
Long ago and far away, I took a course in
Agrostology, and I'm sure I
must've been told that "their leaves grow from the base, not the top,"
but the fact had slipped out of mind. (That's why your lawn doesn't mind
being mowed, eh.) Plenty more fun facts in her column, such as how much
of the planet's land is covered with grasslands (one third); how
recently they showed up (around 80 million years ago, "in evolutionary
terms, that’s yesterday") and took over; and yet another related
science I hadn't heard of,
phytolithology. She didn't even get into
polyploidy, the multiplication of genetic material that grasses seem
so good at.
Among the comments, one by
Joseph Crane of Manhattan, Kansas was
appropriately highlighted by the Times, and worth reading for some
interesting specific scientific rebuttal. He's OK with the nomination,
but he testily "fail[s] to see why book reports would be included in the
Op-Ed section." (Because she writes well, about interesting things,
Joe.)
3.3.2010
Mike Gwartney's future in state government
The guy most Idahoans never heard of, at the head of a state department
that makes you go huh? is all of a sudden much in the news, thanks to
Cynthia
Sewell's story on Sunday about the misbegotten state contract for
the Idaho Education Network, a statewide broadband system linking Idaho
public schools, universities and businesses. The Statesman
followed up with
an editorial yesterday, saying Gwartney's problems are Otter's
problems. Randy Stapilus' thoughtful
"Chain of command" got me starting a comment that I thought I'd
extend here.
"I heard one legislator say, 'We're only paying Gwartney $1 a year and I
still don't think we're getting our money's worth.'"
– becourteous
I don't know either government or business as well as Gwartney does, but
I've seen enough of each to recognize that large bureaucratic
organizations have a great deal in common. That means they can both
benefit from the same sorts of organizational development techniques,
even as their core purposes differ broadly, from business' primary goal
of making profit, to government's primary goal of maximizing the common
good, within its limited purposes.
It's one thing to tackle making money as a bureaucratic Hero, quite
another to tackle the fuzzy and often not agreed-upon mission of
government the same way. As for the $1 salary, even beyond the
brilliant snark that the Statesman promoted to print from its
"online voices," it raises interesting questions:
Wall Street defends their obscene pay by reminding us how important it
is to retain the "best and the brightest." What's Idaho getting for its
non-pay?
Is Gwartney in it for humanitarian reasons, because he likes the
power, what?
The Department of Administration for
a state with a $2½ billion annual budget (give or take)
has a lot of leverage. One big lawsuit could make the "savings" from
Gwartney's salary even more irrelevant than it is now.
And still more
The
details about the statistical analysis behind the quiz state its
purpose as predicting "the probability of your being in the Millennial
age group, currently 18-29." A score of 51 or higher means its better
than even odds that you are. The box plots and histograms of scores by
generation show how dispersed the response data is, ranging pretty much
from 0-100 for all but the "Silent" generation.
Looking again at
the raw data it seems pretty clear that the supposed cultural divide
has mostly to do with technology adoption, and the fact that you take
for granted what you grow up with. The questions about cell phones and
text messages, social media, and body art have most of the predictive
power, it would seem, which boils down to a heapin' helpin' of common
sense.
More on that Millennial quiz
After I saw a bunch more scores role in from my Facebook friends,
I did a few more runs through
the quiz. I know that my holding out on getting a cellphone puts me
in edge of the "late adopter" realm. I do, in fact, have a cellphone in
the house, but it's the one I bought for the
Funeral Consumers Alliance of
Idaho (oh HA! That would definitely put me in the Silent
group, eh?), and that has enough spare bandwidth to meet my
"emergency" and travel cellphone needs well enough.
From my "baseline" of 5, if I add a cellphone, I bump up to 13, and I'm
over the threshold for my rightful place as a baby boomer. If I would
just send some text messages, I get 21, and if I'd send at least 10 text
messages, I could be well on my way to GenX (31), even though I read a
newspaper. (If I just stop watching TV and reading a newspaper, my score
goes from 5 to 35.) Stop contacting government officials, and I'm up to
48, on my way to Millennial. Either a non-ear piercing or a tat, I get
59, both, and it's 70.
I didn't get around to reading the whole report, but it was clear that
what they'd done with their survey results was to select questions, and
apply weighting factors that would best match answers to the groups
as they found in their survey.
Fun parlor trick, but actually an illegitimate technique for
extrapolating from their survey to the whole population they
purport to study. In essence, the game show amplifies what they
concluded from their sample, which, while large enough to be
representative (and with a modest margin of error) is by no means
exhaustive (let alone definitive).
My constituents want a gamer
Or as Faux Boehner put it in his Onion headline,
My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs,
Health Care, And The Economy.
"My constituents deserve better.
"They deserve a leader willing to roll up his sleeves and play the types
of twisted, greedy political games that, by their very nature, tear
apart the fabric of our democracy for the sake of assuring reelection.
They deserve someone on their side who will ask the tough questions,
such as how will painting Democrats as radical ideologues play in, say,
Arkansas? Can we vote "no" on the health care bill and still make it
look like we give two craps about the welfare of ordinary Americans? How
can we twist positive news about the GDP into a negative for the Obama
administration?"
Are you millennial?
Julie sent me to
the
Millennial Quiz from the Pew Research Center (now styling itself a
nonpartisan "fact tank," cute). I scored a whopping 5 out of 100;
not only am I not Millennial, I didn't even make it up to "Baby Boomer"
(for which I'm centered in the date range).
The full report (take the quiz first, of course)
says Millennials ("Generation Next") are
Confident.
Connected.
Open to Change.
Which I daresay characterizes me well enough. (And I have more reason to
be confident than someone basing it only on hope.) "Open to change" is
one of those things you might not be able to measure for yourself,
though. Am I really open to change? I'm set in my ways,
comfortable enough.... I watch more than an hour of TV a day (as do 57%
of the Millennial respondents; in my case, the Newshour and
The Daily Show are part of what keep me "connected" after all),
and I read a newspaper, that's old school. The video game playing is
kind of a red herring. The vast majority of everyone didn't do
that in the last 24 hours.
Must be the "only a landline" that got me, and no text messaging.
And I usually find Pickles funny, very "Silent" of me.
(And what's up with "Silent" for everyone born from 1928 to 1945?
Silent because they're not blathering on cellphones and Twitter?
And you don't really think any Millennials have a long enough attention
span to read a 149 page report do you?) Going through
the response data, what I see is that we're more alike than
different. Most people in every age group don't play video games, don't
have tattoos, don't have piercings other than in their earlobes, and
are spread across the political and religious dimensions they asked
about.
1.Mar.2010
Early spring
Sure felt like it today: 2nd day running in the mid-50s, and sunshine.
Crocuses are well up, daffodils coming, and we've got finches starting a
new family in the eaves.
Spinning wheel
It'll be one week tomorrow morning that my big PC's motherboard
took early retirement, raising a stink and adding to the "disaster
preparedness drill" that started with Westhost's fire suppression test
gone bad, leading to many days' outage for way too many of its
customers. If fortboise.org had gone out, it would've been the trifecta
for me, but as it was, "only" my main PC and
the church website I look after as
"volunteer staff."
I would've been down for a much longer count had it not been for a
trusty WinXP laptop that kept on ticking, with a somewhat synchronized
set of files. (I do wish I'd done a more complete synch, though.)
The hard drives survived, and I've got at least one copy of everything,
multiple copies of most everything (and too many copies of a lot of
things; but better three too many than one too few).
My main man had a 5-month-old Windows7 box that was way more buffed
than the 5+ year-old DIY tower I'd built, and after
the local PC shop
pronounced the MoBo gone, I took him up on the offer.
Now, Windows7. My expectations were modest: don't make it too much
harder to do the same things I've been doing with WinXP, and hey, if
a useful new feature or two, that'll be fine. So far, no good.
My rollover list included getting some basic tools and configuration in
place, installing the software packages that I use frequently, and of
course, copying the tens of gigabytes of useful files off my old
disks.
That part went majorly pear-shaped as I learned about the thing people
hated about Vista that Microsoft carried into the latest and greatest
O/S: an absurdly over-protective "security" interface that obstructs
more than it protects. The ease of home networking touted by their
everyman marketing campaign might apply if you just happened to start
from scratch and all your computers had Windows7, but how likely is
that? The same legacy that has been the bane of their O/S development
comprises those things we find most useful about computers.
So, we get a bucket of eye candy, a collection of selling points
for corporate buyers, and a pig in a poke with a headache for just
trying to get our work done. It'll be spring before I get back to
my pre-disaster productivity.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Thursday, 11-Mar-2010 11:47:42 MST
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