Boise
Idaho
windsurfing
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Politics
Religion
Economics
unraveling
31.July.06
Something stinks in CA-11
The defeated challenger to the Republican incumbent of the California
11th District: "Mr. Pombo in my view represents all that is wrong with
the national government in Washington today."
But beyond the lying, cheating and stealing,
McCloskey says
"the clear abdication by the House over the past five years of the
Congress' constitutional power and duty to exercise oversight over
abuses of power, cronyism, incompetence and excessive secrecy on the
part of the Executive Branch" is reason for Republicans to work against
"DeLay-type Republicans."
The nickel-and-dime-you business model
The no-checked-luggage check-in kiosk at the airport is familiar by now,
and more attractive than waiting in line. But here's something new:
would you like to change out of the crappy middle seats we gave you a
month ago in the back of plane? For $15 they would.
The flight was full too, so it meant was that they left some seats
unassigned until the last minute (at "all aboard," some were still
waiting for assignments) seeing if they could squeeze a little more
revenue out of us. We demurred, sat quietly in 20E and 24E, and did not
pay $3 for the afternoon snack, either.
"Every French person wants to run the country."
It figures that the
French would take to blogging.
French blogs... are noticeably longer, more critical, more negative,
more egocentric and more provocative than their United States
counterparts, said Laurent Flores, the French-born, New York-based chief
executive of CRM Metrix, a company that monitors blogs and other online
conversations on behalf of companies seeking feedback on their brands.
"Bloggers in the United States listen to each other and incorporate
rival ideas in the discussion," he said. "French bloggers never
compromise their opinions."
29.July.06
Hallelujah
"...the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on
sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a 'Christian nation'
and stop glorifying American military campaigns."
(NYT)
"You could no more have a 'Christian Nation' than you could have a
Christian flower plant, or bicycle, or, or, Tostido, or something.
You're confusing categories there."
–Greg Boyd
If you've read much of what I've written here, you're not surprised to
find me agreeing with that sentiment. But the pastor—the
founder—of the evangelical
Woodland Hills
Church? That might be a bit more surprising, but God bless him for
that (and for an impressive
archive of his
sermons).
Not everyone agreed: he lost a good 20% of the congregation on the
Two Kingdoms series (but then he brought in 99% of the 5,000 members).
He may make up the difference in book sales for his latest title,
"The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power
Is Destroying the Church." Or not: he talked several million bucks
out of the $7M fundraising campaign.
And not as if Greg Boyd is at the forefront of a mass movement. Consider
the story of
Georgetown, Delaware for the counterveiling tyranny of democracy
version. "If you want people to stop calling him ‘Jew boy,’ you tell
him to give his heart to Jesus."
Edge off, finally
After 9 days running with highs in triple digits, we finally got the
start of relief from our heat: "only" in the high 90s, and the
overnight lows getting down below 70°F. The air conditioner was
able to take a break, finally; maybe it can take the rest of the summer
off?
It ain't Democratic, so it must be Republican
The command and control version of democracy got a boost from the
self-imposed "summer break" deadline: time to get something done, is
time for the rank and file to
shut up and vote
yay or nay.
The Leadership apparently intends to use a process known as "martial
law" to allow these bills to be brought to the floor very shortly after
negotiations are completed, with the result that Members of the House
are likely to have virtually no time to examine and consider the details
of the legislation before they will be required to vote on it.
Ok, martial law in the headline got my attention. Something like
hearing yet another air raid siren and wondering "is this really the end
this time?" The process of working out hundreds of pages in the backroom
and the springing it on the House is the same wonderful means that
brought us the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Now it's pressed in service for
further tax reductions for the rich, pushing corporate pension and war
costs out to some unspecified future generations.
What you might be looking for?
Welcome to Statesman readers coming in from
Greg Hahn's story about the virtual buzz on the Grant-Sali race.
The item he referred to is
down a couple days, but if you're interested in
political issues, don't miss my
correspondence from Thursday along the way.
It's hardly surprising that early poll results show Republicans leading,
given the party-line voting that characterizes Idaho politics. Too bad we
couldn't have kept that 6-way race in the Republican primary going a bit
longer to find out more about what the citizens really care about in the
race. Now that we're down to one R and one D, the contest seems to
revert to the proxy fight of "how much money can you raise?"
On the other hand, given how firmly money is in the driver's seat for
elected politicians, what else would decide who gets to play? If it
were more about the issues, we would have to give the other
three candidates more than a footnote.
28.July.06
EULA Deception
"EULA" being "End User License Agreement. I used to read all the fine
print of most every agreement imaginable before I signed on the dotted
line, but since then the volume (and density) of fine print has
multiplied beyond my willingness to spend portions of my life reading
it in most cases. And signing on the dotted line has morphed into
clicking an "I agree" button, lowering the threshold of caution
another notch.
There are some really despicable decisions being made and shoved under
customers noses in the EULA fine print these days, and the worst that
come to light give pause. Here is
Robert
X. Cringely with the question "who owns your vide?" YouTube
do:
...by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant
YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and
transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative
works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with
the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business...in
any media formats and through any media channels.
But wait, there's more.
You also hereby grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive
license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use,
reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform
such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the
Website and under these Terms of Service.
(One item in YouTube's favor that Cringely doesn't mention, as he
implies the opposite, that you can never retrieve what you give them:
"The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or
delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website.")
Of course, you can still shop around. Links of the Week for the story
include
DVguru's review of 10 competitors for video sharing (but the due
dilligence on their EULAs is up to you: the once over lightly reviews
covers only the "Appeal," "Interface," "Editing," and "Sharing," before
rendering its "Verdict").
27.July.06
Dear Senator Craig
I hope you still
support the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and will oppose
S.2453
and
S.2453. Congress needs to learn the facts of what powers the Bush
administration has taken upon itself in the NSA spying program before it
legislates permission to proceed.
The Attorney General has admitted that President Bush
personally blocked an investigation into the domestic spying
programs by the unprecedented action of denying security clearances to
attorneys from the Justice Department's ethics office, the Congress
needs more facts before it takes action in this matter.
Dear Governor Risch
As a homeowner and a concerned citizen, I've followed the property tax
issue for some time, from the public hearings last year through the most
recent legislative session. I supported adjusting the homeowner's
exemption to preserve its original intent, and indexing it to avoid the
imbalance that we have seen in recent years.
The compromise the Legislature produced was not perfect, but it was a
definite improvement.
I am alarmed at what I now hear about your plan, apparently to be
executed without public participation, in a one-day special session of
the Legislature next month. As you are well aware, because of the
different assessment and effect of property tax on commercial and
investment property (and the current real estate environment), shifting
the M&O levy out of property tax and to an increased sales tax will
NOT provide tax relief to those who need it the most.
Business interests and real estate speculators may well applaud your
plan, but homeowners and low-income residents of the state will see
little or no relief. Our Idaho 4th graders can understand the
mathematics on your
Property
Tax Relief Act of 2006 overview: $167 million less in residential
property tax, $210 million more in sales tax. That does not spell
R-E-L-I-E-F, Mr. Governor.
I hope you or the Idaho Legislature will reconsider this ill-advised
plan.
While I appreciate the idea of your provision of an "advisory" vote,
AFTER THE FACT, I can't help but think this is window dressing. The
Legislature is free to ignore the result of such a vote; they've done it
before.
26.July.06
Yes, ID-01 is really in play
And the Republicans care more about their majority (impeachment
insurance, don't you know) than what kind of fellow-travelling
wingnuts they're pulling along.
The final ROMP pulled in just shy of a $million, and candidate
Bill Sali for Idaho's first Congressional District is one of five lucky
recipients of the proceeds.
Out of state campaign funds suspect in Idaho? Not when they're flowing
to the Republicans, I suppose. But forget about "rumors" of
Republicans defecting to Democratic candidate Larry Grant, you can bank
on it.
One more Pope is all we need
Catchy title, but
John
Dvorak's latest column exhorting Microsoft to annoit a "Windows
Pope" (who he assumes will be male for some reason) is the idle and
unproductive musing of someone with too comfortable a chair in front
of his keyboard, and too distant an apprehension of reality.
Dvorak thinks the problem is that there is no one person who "knows
everything there is to know about Windows." As if that were possible.
Since knowing doesn't do much, what he really implies is that Microsoft
needs someone to control everything there is to control about
Windows, and of course not make any mistakes about design,
implementation and maintenance. Good luck with that. The guy in the
Vatican has an easier job controlling the world's Catholics, and
he's not getting that done, either.
People can be just so willful when you turn them loose.
25.July.06
Honor Killing
John Tierney,
opining off James Bowman’s new book,
Honor: A History:
In the West we've redefined "honorable" as being virtuous, fair,
truthful and sincere, but that’s not the traditional meaning. Honor
meant simply the respect of the local "honor group"—the family, the
extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a
reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy
civilians. Telling the truth was secondary to saving face.
Bowman: "We need a better system that makes it honorable to be
protective of those who are weaker instead of lording it over them."
Sounds almost religious.
Squirrel Feeder
My grandfather loved the gray squirrels in his Whitefish Bay (Wis.)
back yard. He had a feeder by the kitchen window, where the breakfast
table was, and I remember his delight at watching them watch him through
the glass.
Our mighty oak in the front yard substitutes for store-bought feed,
it's the office window instead of the kitchen, and Boise's squirrels
are mostly the red variety rather than gray, but the same story is
playing out these decades later.
Hotter
Is it time for
rolling blackouts in California again? The record high in San
Francisco of 80-something seems humorous, but
115 in Stockton, and 119°F in LA's Woodland Hills is no
joke.
The good news:
"Relief appeared on the way, with temperatures expected to fall to the
usual 70’s and 80’s beginning Tuesday."
For our part, with the nights staying in the 70s and the days topping
100 (and forecast to keep doing that), we've actually run our AC for
part of the 3 or 4 hours (total) it puts in during 2 or 3 days a year.
Don't know if it was an old fuse, too much cycling, or what, but one of
the two 30A cartridge fuses burned up sometime Sunday. Other than that,
I continue to be surprised when the thing works, given its age
(40-something?!), and how infrequently it gets used.
24.July.06
Reaping the Whirlwind
Apparently the latest solution for intelligence agencies delivering
unpleasant information is to stop delivery. That can certainly prevent
an NIE containing the estimate that Iraq is now in a full-fledged civil
war, but it can't quite stop
the facts on the ground.
The violence is on an upward trend, with
more than 14,000 civilians killed so far this year.
22.July.06
What's in a Mission Statement?
"To understand and protect our home planet" is no longer in NASA's,
after its remodeling. Just a coincidence that NASA scientist James
Hansen's nettlesome criticism of the administration over their ignoring the
threats from global warming are "fixed" by the change.
Maybe if we just ignore it, it'll go away.
HOT
I noticed in the weather report last night that our 104°F high
yesterday was shy of the record: 107°F, last year. We all
are going to have to get used to it, looks like. I'm not complaining,
by any means; I know of too many other places that have it worse.
There's no humidity to speak of here, it usually cools off at
night, and just in case it doesn't, we have electricity all of most
every day and could switch on the AC. Oh, and the cool basement.
Is the sanctimony and piety an act, too?
In the
Times Select pundit "debate"
(which was more like friendly banter, in which David Brooks, Maureen
Dowd and Frank Rich were unable to find any significant points of
disagreement), David Brooks offered up a basic observation to help
us understand our war president: "He's about 20 points more intelligent
in private than he is in public; that's because he spent his whole life
as a rich Connecticut kid pretending to be a Texan, uh, idiot. He talks
down in a way to be a 'regular guy' because he hated the people he grew
up with."
How strange that the actor who has been sold to the American people on
the basis of "at least you know where he stands" honesty is using this
play-dumb thing to keep it going. And how tragic that the leader of the
free world (as we so like to call our president) is hopelessly unsuited
to the job's demands.
Pat Buchanan wonders
where are the
Christians?
Who is whispering in his ear? The same people who told him Iraq was
maybe months away from an atom bomb, that an invasion would be a
"cakewalk," that he would be Churchill, that U.S. troops would be
greeted with candy and flowers, that democracy would break out across
the region, that Palestinians and Israelis would then sit down and make
peace? How much must America pay for the education of this man?
20.July.06
Leading to Low Ground
That's the title of
Bob Herbert's latest Op-Ed piece, available from the source to Times
Select subscribers. I suppose you could buy today's NYT, too. I'm sure
it'll be reprinted elsewhere, in deference to its simple moral clarity.
Regarding where we have gone from the moral high ground we held as
injured party in September, 2001, Herbert writes:
(T)he Bush administration deliberately abandoned those heights to pursue
policies that were not just morally questionable, but reprehensible.
Administration officials have fought like tigers to retain the right to
torture. They have imprisoned people willy-nilly, without regard to
whether they had actually committed offenses against the United States.
They set up a system of kangaroo courts at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that
was such an affront to the idea of justice that it should have sent
shudders of shame down the spines of decent Americans.
Some of what's at stake, described in
the
testimony of Elisa Massimino of
Human Rights First:
"We cannot have rules permitting one person or branch of government to
be the judge, jury and prosecutor. Defendants must have the right to be
present at trial.A defendant must have the right to know the evidence
being used against him, to respond to it, and to challenge its
credibility or authenticity.
"Testimony cannot be compelled.... This means not only that a person
cannot be forced to testify, but also that information or witness
statements obtained through torture, cruelty or other coercion cannot be
used as evidence."
The Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld pointed the
way out of the morass the inner circle of the Bush Administration has
taken us into. Will the Congress step up to the challenge?
Keynote
I went to a technology seminar yesterday, put on by a company that had a
vested interest, with related products and services to sell. They
could've made their pecuniary interest more obvious up front, but it was
OK. Everyone there expected a certain amount of sales, and wrote it off
against the treats and the free lunch and the schwag.
Most everyone there was either on salary or in sales, just a consultant
and/or small business owner or two in the audience. I went "on spec,"
hoping there was something I could use for a paying customer. Some
day.
I'd been to such events as a salaryman myself, and I understood the
required signal-to-noise was not particularly high. This is a field
trip, a movie day, a chance to escape the cube farm for a while. One
lucky state employee won a Palm Treo 700w in the business card drawing,
you know she had a productive day.
The guy from Verizon sitting in front of me wore his Bluetooth earpiece
the whole time, had his PDA-phone glued to his right hand... playing
Tetris most of the time. Went really well with his pressed shirt and
professional appearance. He spoke up once during the morning, with a
surprisingly pertinent observation about something or other. Almost
like he was paying attention and engaged. For a brief moment. He
didn't stay after lunch.
Not exactly the main event, but more to keep us from running off during
or after lunch, they had a "Keynote" speaker, who delivered a classic,
bullet-list driven Powerpoint presentation. I give you my nearly
verbatim notes taken after I'd finished eating:
How many upper-level managers are working at this guy's level, good
memory for buzzwords and TLAs, able to stitch them together in seemingly
meaningful ways?
"HTML, that's a browser-type thing."
The audience is flat, bored, done with lunch now, close to
stupefied.
"Design and Implementation. It's really important."
IS THIS MAN ACTUALLY WALKING ON HIS HIND LEGS?!
There's a 1..5 rating scale; he's "below category." He had nothing new
to add, and he didn't present it well.
In summary, "Do not be too ambitious."
Questions? Nope. Strong vote of "no interest."
"He's got his own consulting company these days." Wouldn't you
know.
19.July.06
Murther Most Foul
Or is it just some overheated rhetoric in service to the Base?
Either way, our President's Fox Newsboy has
invoked the 'M' word in the stem cell debate, as Bush pulled out the
VETO stamp for for the first time in his more than 5 years in
office. The majority of Americans disagree with him, as did the
majority of the House of Representatives. But not a two-thirds
majority, so the veto stands.
Will we be prosecuting those blastocyst murderers now? Ah, not exactly.
The vetoed bill was about federal funding of embryonic stem cell
research, not when a potentially viable human life acquires the full
force and protection of what laws Bush has decided his administration
will follow.
57 days to go...
for Symantec's Norton Internet Security to annoy me enough for it to
lose the pole position HP gave it as the essential anti-virus software
on our new computer. Today's stupid software trick is to have three
checkmarks for alerts on each of two accounts, that when unchecked still
do not stop the CRITICAL ISSUE! popups telling me that I have
turned off automatic Windows Update.
Many of those updates are unnecessary, and some—WGA, in
particular— are themselves unwanted spyware. I want to be the
judge of WHAT and WHEN changes are made to my installed
operating system. There's some risk in that, of course, just as there
is risk in letting Microsoft decide for me. I say it's a toss-up.
Symantec says it's much, much, much better to do whatever Microsoft
says.
That's annoying. The decision might not take two whole months.
Odd juxtaposition
Yahoo! reports
weak sales of text ads and its shares dip, while The Wall Street
Journal reports it's going to put
ads on its front page. Text and graphics, no doubt. It'll
be "the most valuable opportunity anywhere in any medium for advertisers
who want to reach a large, affluent and influential audience," the
publisher says. One's tempted to say... Wahoo!
The Yahoo! story notes that the (online) industry leader, Google,
"produces 40 percent more revenue from each search than Yahoo does,"
according to industry experts, "thanks to software that is better at
selecting relevant text advertisements to place on a page of search
results." Which prompts the question: what is the "relevance" of an
expensive colored jewel box of an ad on the front of the WSJ? The
message would be... "we have money to burn, remember us."
17.July.06
Surprisingly ugly
5? 6? hours into this new PC startup, and currently occupying the old
one and new one with animated files flying between folders. After
transfering something surely a percent or two short of 100% of the
wanted files, it occurred to me to try the File and Settings Transfer
wizard to get one important bit done--connecting the new email program
with the old machine's folders full of email.
A couple of false starts later, I seemed to go into an endless mire,
this time with no meaningful status messages estimating the time
remaining. After half an hour with no sign of progress, I cancelled,
and figured out that Outlook Express would happily import the folders
and messages I'd already copied.
The old machine had 6GB of HD space, no more than a third of that useful
data I needed to save and transfer. Should have been under an hour to get
that across the LAN cables, eh? Not so fast, bucko...
The guys and/or gals who designed that idiotic file transfer animation
had better be on their best behavior in this life. If they have the
misfortune to go to Hell, they will be staring at their miserable little
invention for eternity, I'm sure.
Then when I went to turn it off to move it into the prime desk position,
I discover that there have been 34 updates pending, just waiting
for me to shut it down.
Still gold in them thar hills
Worldwide market jitters have joined forces with growing disposable
income among gold-loving Indians, and pushed the price back into the
stratosphere. $650+/oz.
makes it well worth ripping up
a couple mountain tops and creating 27 million tons of "waste" rock
to get at half a million ounces of gold. That works out to be
about 1.4 ppm gold; I assume it's denser below the "overburden" they'll
dump into the nearby valleys.
On Saturday, Jeanette and I visited some of what will be put at risk
by the Atlanta Gold project, for the benefit of some corporate investors
and Canadian miners: the beautiful Boise River, below the confluence of
the North and Middle forks, above the Arrowrock reservoir. It was a
trip arranged by the
Idaho Conservation
League and Idaho Rivers
United that came with informative lectures at beaches along the
way.
The cyanide will probably be managed well enough (given that it
leaches the gold the company's after), but the diesel fuel, the arsenic
and possibly mercury exposed by tearing into tens of millions of tons of
rock, and the heavy equipment traffic on roads through our forests and
along our rivers will have significant impact, at least, with a good
chance of the occasional catastrophe. All this upstream of our Treasure
Valley, and the hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland the river
irrigates, the tens of thousands who rely on the river for drinking
water, and recreation.
Doesn't sound like a great idea for keeping Indian brides adorned with
golden jewelry, does it? But according to our 1872 Mining Law,
extracting wealth from the earth is the highest and best use possible,
and we're glad to have someone try.
Since we likely can't stop it, job #2 is to make sure we hold the
company's feet to the fire and make sure they mitigate the risks and the
damage, as much as economically possible. (The higher the price of
gold, the more that's possible.)
The best part of the trip was that we had a conservative
Republican state legislator with us, for some interesting conversation
on the long and bumpy road in, and while floating. I appreciated Rep.
Pete Nielsen and coming out to do some first-person research, and to
have a look at the territory at risk.
Tracking the User Experience
Finally bought a new 'doze machine to replace our 8-year-old win95 box.
Some good and some bad in the initial startup. As usual when I'm working
with other people's software, I want to have a conversation with the
people in charge, and of course I can't do that.
Who makes the decisions about what to include in the "package," for
example? I had no idea we were going to get a huge wallop of games,
and had I been asked to pay whatever it costs to select, install,
maintain, troubleshoot, etc. the big package, I would've politely
declined.
I'm impressed with the hp/Compaq hardware, and appreciate it being
very quiet. It's nice not to have to shuffle any floppy disks, CDs or
DVDs to get up and going. Threw away all the AOL crap, and couldn't
change the browser's homepage away from AOL quickly enough. Skipped
the "easy connect" wizard to get me onto the internet with one of HP's
preferred providers, given that I was already plugged in.
Went to Windows Update, and that was installing software for Microsoft
before I realized I wasn't going to be asked for specific permissions;
thereby sucking me into the "Windows Genuine Advantage" POS, now brought
to you in an unretractable format. Damnit. I was suprised that there
was NOT a pile of patches to get me up to snuff; another plus for hp,
that the system install package was up to date.
Norton A/V gets the incumbent slot, courtesy of the hardware vendor.
And wanted to do a full system scan straight away. Seemed like
overkill, but I let it go, and accumulated some annoyance as it took
most of an hour to finish.
Then the problem with Firefox site, after I'd previously downloaded
(and saved) the .exe installer... and found it wouldn't run due to an
"unspecified error." hp gave me the choice of browsers, IE or Netscape.
Gosh, Netscape is still around? I wonder why.
Firefox site hacked?
Or are we having some sort of outage? I get 403 Forbidden (and a 404
on the ErrorDocument) from
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ at the moment. (Same thing for
the domain's home page,
http://www.mozilla.com/.) When it first came up, on a new
machine I was just setting up, I wondered if maybe Norton A/V had done
something weird while doing its first scan of the 135,000 or so files
that came with... but no, my known good machine talks to
other sites, but not mozilla.com.
That was 10:03AM MDT. 20 minutes later, it's back.
13.July.06
Bad news for time travelers
The visitors' center at the quarry of the
Dinosaur
National Monument is
closed until further notice, while "significant life, health and
safety issues are addressed." Dang! Right in the middle of the peak
tourist season, too. The quarry was one of the highlights of our
road trip last summer, and we were able
to escape safely.
Cleaning out the riff-raff
The Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry has long had its way with
the state, and the state Legislature, serving the interests of the
well-placed in commerce and industry. Which of course is good for
everyone, right? But to correct an overdose of populism in the group,
they're
upping the ante: $5,000 and up, annually, if you want a vote on the
policy committee.
12.July.06
How to end the war
As the waves of violence build, is it time to study the mistakes?
Or at least to consider the destination? The prescription from
someone with a bit more experience in the country than our
fearless leader is to put an end to the failed experiment.
The End of Iraq : How American Incompetence Created a War Without
End, from Peter W. Galbraith.
Iraq still exists on a map, but it no longer functions as a single
country. We're trying to build national institutions right
now—like the army and the police—when there is no nation.
A nation is a collection of people who share a common identity. You
would expect that Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis would have their religious
or ethnic identity. What they do not share is an Iraqi identity.
(From his answers to Deborah Solomon's
Questions.)
11.July.06
Looters and Beggars
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist, and a Republican, I
hear. He's noticed something wrong and has
some questions. One is: "Is this America, where we will end up so
far behind the financial eight ball we won't be able to see because of
mismanagement by both parties, the America that our men and women are
losing limbs for, coming home in boxes for?"
We are mortgaging ourselves to foreigners on a scale that would make
George Washington cry. Every day—every single day—we borrow a
billion dollars from foreigners to buy petroleum from abroad, often from
countries that hate us. We are the beggars of the world, financing our
lavish lifestyle by selling our family heirlooms and by enslaving our
progeny with the need to service the debt.
Life-size Portrait of a Pit Bull
I would typically cross the street (or further, moving upwind) to avoid
"a big-bellied curmudgeon with a taste for old Caddies, pontoon boats
and enormous cigars." It isn't as easy to avoid the effects of
James Sensenbrenner however, as he cuts a swath through the legacy
of Progressive politics from my home state, "a feared and vital
character in some defining political dramas, like the Clinton
impeachment, the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the current
legislative donnybrook over immigration."
Beyond the can't-look-away attraction of a car wreck however,
Mark Leibovich gives us a remarkable portrait of a career
politician.
10.July.06
Dives, butts and PKs
That's the capsule version of my
World Cup 2006 wrap-up.
Dynamite P.R.
You know you want to go to Preston for the
Napoleon Dynamite festival.
"I thought it was funny, but I was concerned people would think it was a
hick town," said Monte Henderson, a cattle farmer who was in the
Happiness Is Scrapbooking store on Friday with his wife, Linda. "I have
to admit I related to it, though. I mean, I was part of the F.F.A."
Ms. Henderson added: "I drive a school bus and I can't tell you how many
times we've had to tell the kids to reel their little rubber men in from
out the window."
Win-win-win with price signals
From a Jim
Pinto reader: "...Why don't we use the price signal to test the
country's appetite for waging foreign police actions?" $200M/day for
the Iraq war, 10M barrels/day of crude oil... that's $20/barrel to let
the market see the bigger picture, encourage more efficient use of
scarce resources, and maybe reduce politicians' taste for foreign
adventure.
If you like that idea, how about a salary penalty for Congress and the
Executive branch, tied to deficit spending? Subtract whatever percentage
of the budget that's not being paid for by tax revenue. You want your
whole salary? Balance the budget. And of course, during times of
deficit, those automatic pay raises would all be disabled.
Are there adults we can call on for this?
The Center for American Progress offers
an adult approach to defusing the North Korean tempest; it's not a
missile "crisis" in the absence of a credible threat, unless we make it
one (which so many hard-liners seem wont to do).
And oh by the way, "claims by the Bush administration that it has an
anti-missile system that can shoot down an incoming threat are as
useless as North Korea's latest rocket technology. The hugely expensive
anti-missile system built in Alaska is plagued by technical problems,
schedule delays and cost overruns."
The Bush administration says it can't reward North Korea with talks in
the face of threats, but that's the wrong tack. North Korea's decrepit
political economy is destined to fail, perhaps not as soon as we'd like,
but soon enough. Rather than allow Kim to escalate his nuclear threats
to ever more dangerous levels, it's better to open up direct economic
and diplomatic links between North Korea and the rest of the
world—in turn undermining the very foundations of Kim's
regime.
9.July.06
We're in the money
Frederic W. Cook, founding director of a compensation consulting firm
and producer of a "study" on executive pay for
The Business Roundtable found everything to be perfectly in order,
with CEO's "total pay" right in line with (actually lagging slightly!)
shareholder returns from 1995 to 2005 at hundreds of the nation's
largest companies.
"The media has been flooded with a multitude of distorted, misleading
and oftentimes erroneous statistics to portray U.S. C.E.O.'s and board
governance in a negative light," he said in testimony
before a House Financial Services Committee hearing.
His business is of course producing
multitudes of distorted, misleading and oftentimes erroneous statistics
to portray his pals in a positive light.
Gretchen Morgenson's Times Select piece asks whether "Total Pay" is
really that difficult to grasp.
Actually it is.
Tens and tens or
hundreds
of millions of dollars annually,
7-figure annual pensions to keep the wolves from the door.
54% pay
raises. Hard to get your hands around. Maybe easier to swim
in, the way Scrooge McDuke liked to.
8.7.6
No Moore!
Not Michael, but deposed Judge Roy,
as seen on the sign (and in the audience) of a mock activist being
pilloried by the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove. The right-wing
prescription: take two tablets and call me in the morning.
Coming from a state that carries some infamy as the (former!) home of
neo-Nazi "Christians," this business of the toxic mix of politics and
religion in the service of an all-powerful God who has taken sides,
the question of how close right-wing fundamentalism comes to fascism
seems more than an academic question.
Idols in the statehouse, or in the park, are only the warm-up act in
the unfolding passion play of
dominion
theology, teaching that "godly men have the responsibility to take
over every aspect of society" in preparation for the Second Coming.
Stupid church reader board of the day
Experts designed the Titanic
Amateurs designed the Ark
But hey, it got me to thinking, so can they chalk it up as a win? I was
thinking, do they hire an amateur when they need plumbing done? Was
their new church building designed by an amateur architect? Do they
have an amateur preacher?
Nothing wrong with loving what you do, and even the best of us make
mistakes, but expertise comes from honest hard work, and its
track record is way ahead of ignorance. Divine inspiration makes a
jolly story, but realistically, it's not in the running.
Got his internet in a twist
Ted Stevens is miffed 'cause his big truck got tubed and "just the
other day, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning
on Friday and I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with
all these things going on the Internet commercially."
Scroll down for that, after you read the slightly more interesting bit
about "the long tail" and millions of niches that the web has created
for information, and us.
Backing another dictator for oil?
Cheney's cozy
with Kazakhstan's leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, so popular that he
collected 91% of the "vote" in their last election. Simpler choice with
no opposition party. Allowed.
Some basics on human decency
As codified in the Geneva Convention, and
reaffirmed in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. It remains to be seen how the
Congress will deal with that decision.
Geneva tells states to take the common-sense measures of holding swift
hearings on the battlefield to distinguish combatants from those swept
in accidentally. But the administration decided to forego these
essential procedures "to make a point—that the president can designate
them all enemy combatants if he wants to." Congress and the American
public are still slowly learning that Guantánamo detainees are in fact
innocent of all conduct, that we have been frittering away our money,
manpower and reputation not on the "worst of the worst," but on
shepherds and farmers because the administration declined to sort the
innocent from the guilty.
6.7.6
The Next Economic Boom for the West?
The first time around, "reclamation" meant taking the land "back" from
the god-forsaken wilderness condition we found it in.
This time around, re-making the landscape is being billed as
"restoration." There's more gold in them thar hills, "cleaning up the
old economic engines of mining, timber and agriculture." And fixing up
run-down urban landscapes, to boot.
No Exit
Texas judge Sam Sparks rules that
Tom DeLay has to stay on the ballot, even though he's quit the House
without finishing his 12th term, and says he has no intention of going
back. He did win the primary, in a crowded field. He tried to steal
away to Virginia and give up his Texas residency...
Does that mean if he gets elected, he'll have broken yet another
law? Stay tuned for the appeal process first. And the outcome of his
state indictment on charges of breaking campaign financing laws, in
connection with the 2003 Texas gerrymandering recently endorsed (for the
most part) by the Supremes.
"This would be a serious abuse of the election system and a fraud on the
voters, which the court will not condone," the Sparks said, about
DeLay's name on the ballot, not the gerrymandering.
I say, make him clear out of that Sugar Land homestead, at least.
5.July.06
Boys just want to have fun
How else to explain the 4th of July fussilade around the world?
Everything lit off in our neighborhood was just for fun, but the
biggest firework of all was for pushing the envelope of exploration
one more small step. Home-made rockets and
missiles
with murderous intent flew around the Middle East, "as usual" we
would have to say.
And last but barking not to be least,
North Korea sent up seven, the biggest and baddest aborted (or
failed?) 42 seconds out. Kim Jong Il is doing his best to live up to
the Axis of Evil billing we gave him, not happy with being upstaged by
Iraq and Iran.
What a great multiplier he'll get for the effort, with millions of
Americans up and down the left coast now thinking that shouldn't we
ought to have some sort of missile defense? Never mind that it's an
invitation to yet another idiotic arms
race, and we'll continue spending about a hundred times as much
Kimmie's team.
We're just not comfortable going back to the days of duck and cover.
4.July.06
The Hidden Power
Regular readers may recall seeing David Addington's name in this blog,
as a member of the Bush administration's cabal of legal deputies
fighting the memorandum war. I didn't know enough of the particulars
about him, until I read
Jane
Mayer's piece in the New Yorker detailing his "central role in
shaping the Administration's legal strategy for the war on terror."
It's long, but worthwhile reading on the anniversary of independence
from the monarchy.
Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the
Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the
President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard
virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security
demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret
detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside.
Which war are we winning?
Patrick Buchanan's presumably dispassionate assessment of the current
situation is not optimistic: he says it's
Time for an "Agonizing Reappraisal." No mention of the progress
we're making—because he can't think of any positives?
The MSM seem to be doing what they can:
our ambassador
to Iraq's dismal assessment disappeared from view almost
immediately.
Bomb the Press!
Frank Rich
describes better than I can how just how clumsy the recent attempts
by the Bush administration to make the press the scapegoat of its
disaster was:
The real news conveyed by The Times and its competitors was not the huge
program to track terrorist finances, but that per usual from the
administration that gave us Gitmo, the program was conducted with little
oversight from the other two branches of government. Even so, the
reporting on the pros and cons of that approach was, as Mr. Snow said,
balanced.
Or so he said Friday morning, June 23. By Monday, the president had
entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the
"public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live." What had
happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria?
2.July.06
Oh that sort of desecration
Interestingly enough, the
history of laws against flag desecration starts with a desire to
protect the value of the symbol from people abusing it for
advertising.
Where are the true patriots who could express themselves as
intelligently as Justice William J. Brennan? "We do not consecrate the
flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom
that this cherished emblem represents."
The once-upon-a-time Boy Scout in me sees a lot more careless disrespect
than genuine desecration for protest. The former seems worse to me than
the latter, which acknowledges the meaning: to the Republic, for which
it stands.
Which would you like for your kids, jail, or humiliation?
Given the highest incarceration rate in the world, I suppose you could
argue that our system of detention and punishment is the secret to our
success. Not that there's any evidence for it beyond the correlation.
In terms of raising children however, the latest innovations seem like a
symptom of a serious cultural illness.
I wouldn't try to train a dog
this way, would you? Handcuffing a 7-year-old and locking
him up, for days?!
Our locally developed Harbor Method, designed to create a "safe harbor"
for children to learn, attempts to do so by rewarding robotic obedience
and punishing transgressions with public belittling, berating and
other forms of humiliation.
We could do better by getting
a lesson from animal trainers.
What do you stand for?
NewWest has
a review of the state party conventions' and the platforms that came
out of them. Sort of. Kuraitis liked
the
succinct one the Democrats came up with
(for a change), but was stonewalled by the other party: "Idaho
Republicans have not yet posted theirs and regrettably, wouldn't release
a copy to me when I called...." One (Republican?) who responded in the
comments offered a comparison between party platforms and "toiletpaper,"
so I guess that's enough said.
There's no argument that the message needs to be simple. The Republican
approach is to boil it down to one- or two-word nicknames that provide
the kiss of death. Literally: "death tax." "Hate America."
"Disgraceful" media. Their complexity is in the machinery behind the
scenes that keeps those words popping up into the electorate's
consciousness.
The DNC is working to simply the message, but even
an
elevator-speech length postcard might be too much. Think bullet
points.
- End the culture of corruption.
- Tell the truth.
- Don't start wars. Finish them.
- Cure our addiction to oil.
- Universal healthcare.
Your call may be recorded for training purposes
I had this long story of last week's experience with one of the worst
things that can happen with email (yes, worse than spam, but maybe not
worse than what can happen if you arrange a meeting, or wire money to
Nigeria) all typed up, when
this came in: top-of-the-charts recording of an AOL customer service
call. (Don't bother trying the guy's blog, but the
youtube bit off of
NBC is good.)
Mine's not as entertaining, with no video or audio. And probably too
long, but then that's the way these things happen, eh?
A recent discussion about how to choose an ISP got summarized about like
this: get the cheapest deal that meets your needs, from the company that
annoys you the least. Are they really all equally incompetent? Let's
hope not, if my experience with adelphia.net is a measure of the state
of technoloy...
A client had the misfortune to send a bulk email invitation to an event
last week, with a big distribution list that included one of adelphia's
customers. The person who did the mailing made the mistake of not using
Bcc to hide the long list of recipients from each other, and someone had
a brain-damaged autoresponder that didn't recognize its own work.
Worse than that, actually; it
re-sent the original message and made it look as if the original
sender was doing it. There were a few bad addresses in the
distribution, so my client got a bundle of bounce messages every time
this happened. It started Sunday night, and was on about a 15-minute
schedule. Eventually a recipient got annoyed enough to "reply to all"
to ask everyone—anyone—to make it stop. Unfortunately,
neither the recipients nor the original sender knew how to do that.
Even more unfortunately, his message—and an even more
useless "yeah, me too" reply-to-all—got entrained into the
mail loop. Now there were three messages going out to
everyone every 15 minutes (and bounces going three ways).
I got the distress call on Monday, but with other delays, it was almost
24 hours after the loop had started before I got into the office and
started working to figure out how to make it stop, and pushing past
normal business hours. The bounce messages were coming from a
misconfigured postmaster account, which was at least detectable by
inspecting the headers. Adelphia. The replies-to-all were even more
interesting, starting from an address on a hosted domain,
going first to an adelphia server.
"On any interaction, you should assume that it could be posted on the
Web."
–Scott Falconer, an AOL executive vice president
I looked 'em up, gave 'em a call. It wasn't easy getting through the
phone menu, set up for their customers, but I eventually got an agent.
She had no idea how to respond to me, forwarded me up the chain, and up
again to a technician prepared to talk email esoterica with me. By this
time, I'd assembled an excerpt of headers from a bounce, and the two
replies-to-all, and sent them to the tech. Hmm, yeah, it looks like a
problem. He'd send it on up the chain, he told me, without committing to
doing anything, giving me a ticket number or so on. We tracked down the
office and phone number associated with the domain of the actual
originator, called and left messages for them.
Nothing to do but let the messages continue to pile up, wait for Tuesday,
and hope someone would do something to stop the bleeding. It didn't
happen, but there were more phone calls, a sidebar message I sent to the
list (using Bcc!) telling them we were working on it, and finally an
attempt to get through to Adelphia again, through the address the tech
gave me, as well as postmaster, and abuse. abuse@adelphia.net started
with an autoreply, saying it didn't accept attachments. So I put all
the information in line and tried again. That garnered a reply... from
the postmaster, saying that the address the message eventually got
routed to was misconfigured.
It was Wednesday before I was finally on the phone with someone
competent in the matter at adelphia. The magic words were "Internet
Policy Enforcement," and I was able to get him to understand that it was
their customer, a serious matter, and required their action. He
said he'd send it on to management, to see if they wanted to escalate
the issue. I suggested that if he wanted to provide some motivation, he
could tell them that the people on the distribution list were all
lawyers in Idaho, and some of them had already had their mail
systems shut down by the overload.
It was Thursday before they actually got it done, and the good
news from my client that the deluge had stopped came in mid-day. A few
hours after that, I got one last message on the subject, from...
abuse@adelphia.net. It was an autoreply, to a day-old message?! And it
looked like one of those "how many mistakes can you find in this
picture?" puzzles. The first one was that it said it was sent 4:09pm,
but it was not yet 4:09pm in Boise, by most of 2 hours. Wrong time
zone, obviously, and no indication of what the right TZ was
in the Date: header. It had two "From: " lines. Oh and an X-Loop
header; too bad they didn't do that on their customer emails, we
wouldn't be having this conversation.
"Every effort is made to follow up on all reports in a timely manner. All
complaints are taken seriously and investigated fully." You bet.
1.July.06
Secrets and Prisons
It's astounding, really. The Supreme Court opened a tiny ray of legal
light into the prison we maintain in Cuba, and Republicans are trying to
figure out how to turn it into political gain. The starting point seems
to be that the Democrats are celebrating a bit too much for their
taste.
The WSJ reported that House Majority Leader John Boehner accused
Democrats of supporting "special privileges for terrorists."
What on earth is patriotic about stipulating that everyone picked up and
detained by this adminstration must be a terrorist? Oversight
makes us less safe? It's hard to believe that partisans would give up
the rule of law so easily, for so small and so temporary an advantage.
It's a testament to how successful the program of selling fear has
been. We're at war. No end in sight. No questions to ask. Trust us.
We know what's best.
Plan B is to shoot the messenger on the spying programs that lack
oversight. Never mind that
the terrorists already knew we were watching them; this is all about
the "formulaic, knee-jerk, disingenuous and purely partisan."
(Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey do find the monitoring of funds
movement to be "worthwhile"—even if "not highly
productive"—"legal and unobjectionable.")
While (the monitoring of international financial transactions) was not
news to terrorists, it may, it appears, have been news to some
Americans, including some in Congress. But should the press really be
called unpatriotic by the administration, and even threatened with
prosecution by politicians, for disclosing things the terrorists already
assumed?
"There is, of course, another possible explanation for all the outraged
bloviating...."
Dean Baquet (editor of the LA Times), and Bill Keller (executive editor
of the NYT) have a joint editorial,
When Do We Publish a Secret? that describes the full depth of the
administration's hypocrisy:
A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by
our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September
2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our
papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his
aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the
department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team
discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping
they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's
relentlessness against the terrorist threat.
I'm sure there's a job for him in Cheney's office
Right after he finishes his year and a day sentence for
falsifying scientific research. Eric Poehlman "changed and made up
research in applications and papers on the effect of menopause on
women's metabolism, the impact of aging on older men and women, the
impact of hormone replacement therapy on obesity in post-menopausal
women, the study of metabolism in Alzheimer's patients and the effect of
endurance training on metabolism," posing as a specialist in exercise
physiology.
He was good at getting grants with his "work," and the feds say he won
$2.9 million worth with his fraud.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Wednesday, 02-Aug-2006 20:38:18 MDT
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