Caught Our Eye Archives

Assorted Links 6/27/10

Brown Bailout

• Drafting Effective Federal Legislation and Amendments, July 21, 2010
• Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, July 22, 2010
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, August 2-3, 2010
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, August 4-6, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• Undercover Operation: Strippers Take Clothes Off! - "Here is a truly wonderful story: After a six-month (!!) undercover sting operation, the men of Charlottes's finest have concluded that strippers take. their. clothes. off.
  
  Thank goodness we have a police force, to protect us from dangerous naked women. I think Mr. Fall has it right, below:"
• Rolling Stone - "This sort of thing is what happens when a senior officer and his aides, under pressure, blurt out the truth. Biden is indeed something of a stuffed shirt, and the president has been disappointing to many people who once hoped for more.
  
  Update: Most of the general’s dissatisfaction appears to have been generated by friction with US ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who was himself a 3-star general and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan. The sometimes controversial COIN changes that McChrystal has instituted are changes to Eikenberry’s policies, while the ambassador has declined to release funds to sponsor the kind of local anti-Taliban militias and infrastructure upgrades in Kanduhar that made the Sons of Iraq game changers in the Sunni-dominated Iraqi province of Anbar. As for Holbrooke and Jones, well: Too many cooks spoil the broth.
  . . .
  Update 5: The Rolling Stone article itself. Read for content -- and not for the reporter’s reflexively anti-military spin -- it’s not so bad, really. The 'Biden who?' thing was about keeping his mouth shut if he had to answer a question about his previous disagreement with the vice president at a dinner party in Paris."
• Does McChrystal Rhyme with MacArthur? - "Look past McChrystal, a man who has given his life to the military, and has much to show for it. Look at the enlisted guys who are just beginning their careers, or the NCOs or junior officers who are in the third or fourth tours (in either Iraq or Afghanistan). They’re growing frustrated. They’re in an impossible situation. They are fighting a war that depends upon strong support here in the United States, and that aims to boost support for a government that no one believes in. And while they understand COIN as preached by McChrystal, they struggle with the rules of engagement that COIN requires."
• Greenberg: For-Profit Schools ... Subprime Redux? - "But [Steve Eisman of FrontPoint Partners]’s comments were the most direct. Key claims include:
  
  * 'Until recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.'
  
  * With Title IV student loans, 'the government, the students and the taxpayers bear all the risk and the for-profit industry reaps all of the rewards.'
  
  * 'We have every expectation the industry’s default rates are about to explode.'
  
  * 'How do such schools stay in business? The answer is to control the accreditation process. The scandal here is exactly akin to the rating agency role in subprime securitizations.'"
  
  Steve Eisman & FrontPoint Partners Ira Sohn Presentation: Subprime Goes to College
  
  
• Without Good Evidence, Bad Evidence Must Do - "Lawyers fight tooth and nail over the admissibility of evidence in a typical case. The reason they fight is simple: There's evidence to be had and rules to apply in determining its admission. Thanks to Mr. Richardson, we can argue the nuanced points all day long.
  . . .
  Prosecutions alleging domestic violence are fraught with arguments, and decisions, that wreak havoc with the rules of evidence. Proponents argue that the nature of the relationship, private and personal, precludes the availability of reliable evidence, and thus gives rise to a different set of rules that should permit evidence that would otherwise be laughed out of court. The use of rampant hearsay evidence is indefensible, but proponents contend that a murderer shouldn't get away with it just because they've killed the only competent witness.
  
  The only thing truly required to feel comfortable with the concept of convicting in the absence of good evidence is the certainty of the defendant's guilt, thereby justifying anything needed to obtain the verdict to validate that belief. When the defendant's guilt is prejudged, the absence of good evidence gives way to the admission of bad. After all, we can't let a man like Drew Peterson get away with it."
• Grassroots Lobbying, Campaign Finance Laws and the Integrity of Democracy - "It’s been my pleasure to guest blog this week on the topic of grassroots lobbying regulations. In the four previous posts, I’ve summarized the lessons from Mowing Down the Grassroots: existing lobbying regulations in 36 states are so broad as to cover situations in which individuals or groups communicate to other citizens about public issues (i.e., grassroots lobbying) and such regulations have costs that have gone largely unrecognized.
  
  The traditional rationales for regulating lobbyists -- corrupting or buttonholing public officials -- do not apply to grassroots lobbying; instead, states have asserted a right to know 'who is speaking' for the furtherance of the 'integrity of democracy.' I leave for others to debate whether such a purpose is a legitimate reason to burden political speech, association and the right to petition."
• Learning the rules of an unengaged president - "What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they're both Democratic Party supporters.
  
  Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They'll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their 'Beyond Petroleum' marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats' favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.
  . . .
  Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their 'super-skimmers': Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. 'He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,' reported the senator.
  . . .
  'The ugly truth,' wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, 'is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.'
  
  Well, that's certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you'll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats' war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons' Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems' usual shell game -- to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you're opposing -- Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.
  
  Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, 'no one knew how to get out of it.' The 'pragmatist' settled for 'nuance': He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It's not 'victory,' it's not 'defeat,' but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, 'quagmire' would seem to cover it.
  
  Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi 'quagmire,' was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?
  . . .
  Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be 'I don't want to hear about it.' Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama's war would be run by Bush's defense secretary and Bush's general?
  
  Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated 'General Betray-us' ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the 'anti-war' movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don't care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c'est la même chose.
  
  Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be."

How to make a liberal case for Israel

• New Or Used?: The Third Car Edition (teen driver) - " My soon to be 16 year old daughter will be driving soon. She is heavily involved in sports and marching band, so a car for her to get to such things would be a great relief for mom and dad. That’s 1000’s of miles to and from school, and whatnot! We will have NO car payments around the same time (wife’s 2005 Exploder will be paid-off in July).
  
  So what to get??? A 3rd car to use as a city car? A newer used car for wife, I jump into the Explorer and share it with daughter?
  
  A car for daughter solely??? We will not be getting rid of my truck or wife’s explorer. It has to be used, domestic brand prefered, but V-Dubs are OK. And no more than 8 grand."
  
  Lots of good advice in the comments.
• The Search World Is Flat - "How does Google’s unchallenged domination of Search shape the way we retrieve information? Does Google flatten global knowledge?
  I look around, I see my kids relying on Wikipedia, I watch my journalist students work. I can’t help but wonder: Does Google impose a framework on our cognitive processes, on the way we search for and use information?
  . . .
  -- Students who bring academic experience to an online research task are more likely to succeed than those with technical expertise alone:
  . . .
  --The highest performing students use copy/paste to organize their thoughts.
  . . .
  --Younger students tend to be more opinionated than their elders; they begin to write their essay after only seeing 5 URLs, and they extract sources mostly to support their beliefs
  . . .
  --Google is the source.
  . . .
  --Search processes showed a definite lack of imagination on the students part. For instance, they made little or no effort to restructure search terms.
  . . .
  --Most of the students performed rather a small number of actions, going though 18 different web sites to find 2 or 3 quotable sources, this without much difference between graduates and undergraduates.
  . . .
  There is little doubt that the overwhelming use of technology such as search engines -- and the preeminence of Google in that field -- tends to flatten global knowledge. Let’s not forget that Google’s algorithm is based on popularity rather than relevance; the PageRank system acts as some kind of popular voting in which links are the ballots. The consequence is a self-sustaining phenomenon in which superficial research will value the most popular results which, in turn, are linked and gain in popularity, and so on.
  
  And, unfortunately, most of the searches are superficial. ‘It is certain that an overwhelming amount of information reduces serendipity’, says Monica Bulger. ‘Over a thousand of results, we tend to select the top five’."
• The Age of the Infovore - "Tyler Cowen’s 'Create Your Own Economy' is now out in paperback entitled 'The Age of the Infovore', perhaps an acknowledgement that the initial title wasn’t working out.
  
  I liked the book at lot. As suits the infovoracious it is wide-ranging, somewhat scattershot but extremely creative, original and thought-provoking. If the book has a theme it is that different people think very differently - not just that they have different tastes or different beliefs but that the entire way they organise the world is different - and that the internet offers some people a much better way to order their encounters with the world than they have previously been offered. It changed the way I think."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Mickey Foley: The Doomer's Curse - "Mickey Foley takes a look at the underlying motivations of people who predict collapse of society as a result of Peak Oil, Anthropogenic Global Warming, or other causes. Foley sees Doomers motivated by an underlying desire to lower the status of others in order to boost their own relative status.
  
  'The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies. This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.'"
• Why Engineers Hop Jobs - "People in my generation have a very low tolerance for bullshit, and software engineering, in general, is a very high bullshit career. If you couple that with the standard load of bullshit you would get from a non-technical Harvard MBA type boss -- like many CEOs that you find trying to get rich in Silicon Valley by hiring some engineers to 'code up this idea real quick' -- it's no wonder that a good engineer will walk off the job after his one year cliff vesting.
  . . .
  I recognize the value of business people and management. Somebody has to sell the code that I write, which in turn puts food on my table. Since I am an engineer, I like iterative optimization. Every time I have left a job, I have further refined the requirements that a person must fill before I agree to work for him. After every job, I add one or two requirements to the list, and I have found that my happiness at work improves dramatically with every step."
• Toyota To Produce Small Subarus. And A FT-86baru? - "Toyota will supply small Subarus to Fuji Heavy, so that Fuji Heavy and Subaru can focus on midsize cars. According to information developed by The Nikkei [sub], 'Toyota and Fuji Heavy intend to release a jointly developed sports car under their respective brands as early as the end of 2011.' If the Nikkei has its stuff together, then we might finally see the often delayed FT-86 next year. As a Toyota and a Subaru."
• Anti-virus is a Poor Substitute for Common Sense - "A new study about the (in)efficacy of anti-virus software in detecting the latest malware threats is a much-needed reminder that staying safe online is more about using your head than finding the right mix or brand of security software.
  . . .
  'People have to understand that anti-virus is more like a seatbelt than an armored car: It might help you in an accident, but it might not,' Huger said. 'There are some things you can do to make sure you don’t get into an accident in the first place, and those are the places to focus, because things get dicey real quick when today’s malware gets past the outside defenses and onto the desktop.'"
• 800 Watt Portable Generator - "I've owned this generator for two years and it's great for light field work. Turn all your electric tools (weed trimmer, hedge trimmer, leaf blower, even electric chain saws) into gas tools. This generator is OEM'ed to a lot of distributors, who then put their own facade on it. The cheapest version appears to be available at Harbor Freight for $99.
  
  It's very robust and endures overload gracefully (it just peters out without any damage.) It's the antithesis of the previously reviewed Honda EU Series. You could wear out and throw away a lot of these generators for the price of one of the Honda inverter generators."
• Bringrr Ensures That You Never Leave Your Phone At Home - "Bringrr is a small Bluetooth accessory that detects when your phone is nearby. If you start your car and the phone isn’t present, it will emit a sound to let you know. It’s small, rather cheap ($35) and helps to ensure that you never leave home (or anywhere else, for that matter) without your phone."
• How To Recycle An Airplane - "A recycled jetliner produces tons of metal and millions of dollars in parts, but a mistake could cost hundreds of lives. Here's how the company that salvaged the plane from Lost does its destructive business.
  
  A car's typically just parted out once and then scrapped at the end of its life, but a jumbo jet is full of thousands of valuable parts that will be salvaged or recycled numerous times. One passenger plane may transition into service transporting packages, or off to commercial service in Africa, and then the fuselage used for training purposes.
  
  Approximately 450 large aircraft are completely scrapped and disassembled each year, according to the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association, with another 5,900 passenger jets to be recycled by 2028 according to Boeing. Given the high prices for parts, dangerous materials, and the risk involved in recycling airplane parts it's not a job for any dismantling yard.
  
  'In short, it's not like the auto [recycling] business,' says aviation archeologist and plane recycling expert Doug Scroggins, who was responsible for recycling the airliner that's the centerpiece for ABC's Lost and serves as managing director for ARC Aeropsace Industries. 'If you sell an engine off an aircraft and it crashes, you're going to be spending a great deal of time in jail.'"
• 'I Hate My Room,' The Traveler Tweeted. Ka-Boom! An Upgrade! - "You might think that the only ones following your online musings are your mom and college pals. But if they include a gripe about a hotel, the front-desk clerk at the offending property may be listening, too.
  
  Hotels and resorts are amassing a growing army of sleuths whose job it is to monitor what is said about them online--and protect the hotels' reputations. These employees search social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for unhappy guests and address complaints. They write groveling apologies in response to negative reviews on TripAdvisor. And they keep tabs on future guests who post about upcoming stays--and sometimes offer them extra perks or personalized attention at check in.
  
  For travelers, the upshot is that if you use social media, your complaints could have more power. In years past, guests unhappy about a lumpy bed, grimy bathroom or an awful view had to take their frustrations to the front desk or hotel manager and hope for some restitution. Now, with some guests having hundreds--and even thousands--of followers on Twitter and Facebook, complaints can have a big audience. It's like every guest has a virtual megaphone."
• One Droid X killer feature the iPhone 4 lacks - "Though the 4.3-inch display (in the case of already-small smartphone displays, bigger is better), the Flash 10.1 support, DLNA streaming, and the Texas Instruments 1GHz ARM processor are nice, the icing on the cake is the built-in Wi-Fi hotspot--or what Verizon calls the 3G Mobile Hotspot."
• World Cup 2010: Kenya's field of dreams – if you inflate it, they will come - "The screen is inflated – it blows up like a bouncy castle – the PA system is cranked up and suddenly the sights and sounds of the World Cup are beamed into an African community that might otherwise have missed out.
  
  Within a few minutes the screen, the brightest thing for miles around, draws a crowd and the spectacle of the world's best players strutting their stuff is greeted with whoops and cheers.
  
  England fans may feel hard done by following the team's poor performance on Friday but they could learn patience and optimism from the people watching this temporary screen in the town of Kilifi and surrounding areas just north of Mombasa thanks to a project called Kenya Field of Dreams."
• Verizon Motorola Droid X Hands-On Review - "Still, the Droid X's closest kin is the Sprint Evo. Both devices run on Android, both offer mobile hotspot functionality, and both have very similar screens, physical dimensions and feels. As for which one is better for you, it really comes down to a few simple questions: Do you demand 4G network access, and how much are you willing to pay each month?
  
  The Sprint Evo is a tricky device. Yes, it offers Wimax and mobile tethering, but these things do not come cheap--the mobile hotspot feature costs users an extra $30 per month, and users must pay $10 extra per month to use the Evo over any other Sprint phone, whether or not they live in a Wimax-covered city. (Sprint attributes this surcharge to a 'premium multimedia experience,' vague language that has many tech critics screaming shenanigans.) Verizon doesn't charge users a premium to use the Droid X over their other phones (although their network isn't the cheapest to use either), and the mobile hotspot fee is just $20 on top of your bill.
  
  So which phone is for you? The answer is actually quite simple: If you're already locked to Verizon on contract, go with the Droid X. If you've signed to Sprint, go with the Evo. And if you're on AT&T, there's always a little device called the iPhone 4."
• Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks - "Earlier this week, Google Voice opened to everyone in the U.S.. The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood. Here are our favorite tricks every Google Voice user should know about.
  
  If you're just signing up for Google Voice, and wondering, in general, what it's good for, we've previously offered our take on whether Google Voice makes sense for you, and how to ease your transition to your new number and system. Google Voice also offers the option to just use it for voicemail and keep your number, but you won't get use of much of the SMS features touted here. Now, onto Voice's lesser-known perks and features:"
• Set Google Voice as Your Skype Caller ID - "A Google Voice number, one that rings all your phones, makes good sense as the caller ID number for outgoing Skype calls. Google Voice blocked the verification SMS that Skype needed until recently, but Google's flipped the switch and made it convenient."

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Assorted Links 6/20/10

Here Come Da Judge! Andrew Napolitano on Lies The Gov't Told You & His New Fox Business Show

• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Drafting Effective Federal Legislation and Amendments, July 21, 2010
• Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, July 22, 2010
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, August 2-3, 2010
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, August 4-6, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• DWI Convictions Due to Faulty Breathalyzer Calibration - "There is good reason to question the foundation of DWI laws and enforcement. Radley Balko makes the case that the federal push for reducing the national DWI BAC standard from .10 to .08 achieved little for public safety in Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking. Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) founder Candy Lightner regrets the no-tolerance direction her organization has taken: '[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned… I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.'"
• Now they finally have something to fight about - "
  
  The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
  
  People, this could make the Dutch disease and blood diamonds look like kid's stuff, no? We have already seen all the years of violence, all the corruption and now there is actually something valuable in play. Kudos to the NYT reporter for recognizing this:
  
  
  Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.
  
  Not to mention how it will affect the US and our willingness to keep soldiers fighting and dying there."
• Congress to Big Biz: Lobby more, or else - "Congressmen, especially Democrats, like to attack lobbyists and lobbying. They also supposedly hate corporate influence through campaign spending. Why, then, are they always criticizing businesses that don’t lobby or give enough in the form of campaign contributions?
  
  Apple is the latest corporation in the crossfires for insufficient influence peddling/brown-nosing. Check out these nuggets from today’s Politico story:
  
  
  While Apple’s success has earned rock-star status in Silicon Valley, its low-wattage approach in Washington is becoming more glaring to policymakers….
  
  It is one of the few major technology companies not to have a political action committee….
  
  Compared with other tech giants, Apple’s lobbying expenditures are small. In 2009, Apple spent only $1.5 million to lobby the federal government, less than Amazon, Yahoo and IBM. In 2009, Google, for example, spent $4 million, Microsoft $7 million and AT&T $15 million….
  
  More lobbying benefits lawmakers. More lobbying means more people begging you for favors. It means more people hiring your staffers as lobbyists -- staffers who then become your fundraisers. It also means more job prospects for you when you call it quits."
• No Keynesianism in the Berliner Morgenpost - "Germany, of course, is one of the most successful countries in the world since its postwar reconstruction. (You could make a good case for giving Germany the 'best country award' for the last fifty or sixty years.) Yet German policymakers adhere reasonably consistently to the following views:
  
  1. It is the long run which matters and we should be obsessed with the long run consequences of our choices.
  
  2. Economic growth comes from high productivity, most of all in quality manufacturing.
  
  3. Borrowing to finance consumption is a nicht-nicht. Savings is all-important.
  
  4. If we need to make a big change, we'll all grit our teeth and do it. For instance Germany has done a good deal, on the real side, to restore its export competitiveness in the last ten years, not to mention unification and postwar recovery.
  
  5. These strictures should be enforced by rigorous rules, to limit temptation, because indeed you will find cases where it appears to make sense to break the rules.
  
  6. Values matter, as do norms of cooperation.
  
  7. Don't obsess over the creation of too many low-wage jobs, because in the longer run it will be bad for your cultural capital. If need be, pay people to be unemployed, but hold high human capital. In the longer run, try to educate them up to higher productivity and thus employment.
  
  8. Be obsessed with self-improvement, most of all at the personal level.
  . . .
  I'm a fan of the northern European social democracies, but in part they succeed because those countries don't follow all of the prescriptions you might hear coming from their boosters in the United States. For instance American liberals often admire the activist government in such countries, but it's built upon a very different set of cultural foundations. I hear or read liberals calling for the comparable interventions but usually remaining quite silent about the accompanying cultural foundations or in some cases actively opposing them.
  
  The cultural elements of the current Keynesian debates remain underexplored in the United States, but they are fairly well understood in Germany."
• Obama Oval: Nothing but nets - "President Obama has waited all this time to throw down the big Oval Office address to the nation. Tuesday night at 8 p.m. will be the debut Oval chat of his presidency -- carried live on all four networks, says Yahoo.
  
  Because nothing says 'I mean business' like wooden, artificial remarks to the pool camera from behind the Resolute desk to an impatient, non-cable audience who thought they were tuning into 'Losing it with Jillian.'"
• How Illinois is that? Testimony at Blagojevich trial: Barack, Rod and Tony hanging with Big Bob - "Hopium smokers might consider it a buzzkill, but Wednesday's testimony in the Blagojevich corruption trial sure gave me the munchies.
  
  What could be tastier than two Democrats -- President Barack Obama and former Gov. Rod Blagojevich -- hanging out with the treasurer of the Republican National Committee at a Wilmette fundraiser hosted by a political fixer who would soon be in federal prison?
  
  According to testimony by businessman Joseph Aramanda (who later wrote a $10,000 campaign check to Obama), it happened in 2003 as Obama was mounting a campaign for the U.S. Senate.
  
  Obama was there. So was Gov. Dead Meat. And their buddy, the political fixer they had in common, Tony Rezko, was there, too, because it was Tony's house.
  
  It's not unusual to see a bunch of suave Democrats at a Democratic fundraiser. But what about the chunky Illinois Republican boss, just chillin', shaking Aramanda's hand?
  . . .
  We're so focused on the criminal aspects, but what about the fascinating political aspects?
  
  Big Bob Kjellander, Republican bigwig and buddy of Bush White House Rasputin Karl Rove, was hanging at Tony's crib with Obama and Dead Meat. How cool is that?
  
  Was it the appetizers? Maybe fresh figs wrapped with prosciutto? Empanadas? A pitcher of Peach Bellini?
  
  Whatever the refreshments and sweet meats, Illinois political bosses are always hungry to cross party lines in order to score. Just the other day, in writing about the trial, I said party affiliation means nothing to them."
• I asked Helen Thomas about Israel. Her answer revealed more than you think. - "I merely asked a question with a video camera to a columnist. She answered me with an opinion that was unacceptable not just to me but to former and current press secretaries, politicians, the president, her agent and a great many other people. Her freedom of speech was not stifled; on the contrary, it was respected.
  
  She didn't say that the blockade was unjust, or that aid was not getting to Gaza, or that there was a massacre on the high seas, or that East Jerusalem is occupied, or that the settlements are immoral . . . and get out and go back to West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Eilat. No. This was not the two-state solution. This was get the hell out and go back to the places of the final solution, Poland and Germany. The Jew has no connection with the land of Israel.
  
  And why? Because, as Thomas went on to explain to me, 'I'm from Arab descent.' That's it? That's all you got? Do we all travel with only our parents' stereotypes to guide us, never going beyond them to get to a peaceful destination?
  
  In the past weeks I have relived this moment over and over, on television and radio, in newspapers and blogs. I've listened to a constant stream of commentary. And my sharpest impression is this: Where before I saw a foggy anti-Israel, anti-Jewish link, it's now clear. This feeling is not about statehood. It's about an ingrown, organic hate. It's a sentiment that bears no connection to history, dates, passages or verses. Erase the facts, the dates and the lore. Erase the Jew. Incredibly, even the Nazis said to the Jews, 'Go home to Palestine.' But Thomas and a babbling stream in our world and country dictate to Jewish people to 'go home to Poland and Germany.' Yeah, I said 'oooh.'"

Radley Balko Discusses SWAT Teams and the Drug War on John Stossel's Show

• Try, Try Again - "The saga of Dr. Jayant Patel is that of a man who concealed his incompetence by never staying in one place long enough for consequences to catch up to him. But though he buried his true track record, Patel took care to bring with him enough social proof to persuade a new set of victims to trust him. As long as he could stay one step ahead, he was gold. It wasn’t as if nobody suspected Patel wasn’t all he claimed to be. One gets the sense that many of his patients had doubts even as they looked up to him from the operating table, but never enough to challenge him openly; to impel them to say the one thing that would have saved them: ‘I don’t want this doctor, get me another’. And yet the truth was that he was probably trying; trying hard to be a doctor. One of the charges against him was that he treated patients that’s weren’t even his. Maybe he figured he needed practice. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But that didn’t help him because the basic problem was that Patel was incompetent. He should have been something else. And getting an incompetent to try harder only gets you more incompetence.
  
  Patel killled 17 people and removed many more organs and limbs than can easily be counted, often for no medical reason whatsoever. Wikipedia has a summary of his career. At each stage, 'Dr. E. Coli' as he came to be known in Australia, was suspected of being a dud. Yet such was the system of deference built into the medical system that he went on long after he should have been stopped."
• Book review: History and the Enlightenment by Hugh Trevor-Roper - "It was military service that taught Trevor-Roper his attitude of quizzical amusement about everything (or almost everything). He spent most of the Second World War in Britain decrypting German intelligence, but in 1945 he went to Berlin to write a report -- later a best-selling book -- demonstrating that, contrary to widespread belief, Hitler had indeed died in his bunker. These out-of-the-academy experiences turned him against the narrow disciplines in which he had been trained. Professional historians were in danger of killing off history, he wrote, just as philosophers were killing off philosophy, through a misplaced zeal for 'unimportant truth'. He therefore committed himself to promoting history as a public discourse aimed at helping ordinary readers to understand the world in which they live.
  
  During the war Trevor-Roper had fallen under the spell of Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century sceptic and author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. If there was such a thing as a perfect work of history, he thought, Decline and Fall was it, and if there was such a thing as a 'science of history', then its founder was not Marx but Gibbon, or rather Gibbon standing on the shoulders of the French social theorist Montesquieu. For the rest of his life, Trevor-Roper kept trying to persuade his fellow historians to recognise that their own discipline had a significant past, and the essays and lectures that he devoted to the task have at last been gathered together under the title History and the Enlightenment.
  
  He was not interested in the rather threadbare notion (doted on by some humanists) that the lights of truth were suddenly switched on in Europe at the beginning of the 18th century, revealing that the demons which people had spooked themselves with in the past were mere figments of their superstitious imaginations. The Enlightenment that Trevor-Roper celebrates is historical rather than philosophical: it is marked by Gibbon’s creation of a new kind of history, dedicated not to pointless facts or edifying examples but to 'sociological content' -- in other words, to the revolutionary notion that 'human societies have an internal dynamism, dependent on their social structure and articulation.' By bringing history 'down to earth', Gibbon and the other Enlightenment historians had contributed more to the discombobulation of know-nothing theologians than any number of philosophers would ever be able to do."
  
  . . . . . .
  
  
• Message to Freshmen: Let's Start with Kafka and Darwin - "For the past two years, Bard College has asked first-year students to read works by Kafka and Darwin over the summer. These texts then become subjects of analysis when the students arrive on campus in August for an intensive three-week program of reading and writing before the fall semester begins. Let me explain the thinking behind this approach.
  
  The idea of assigning summer readings to students entering college has three justifications. First, since American high school students usually take more of a vacation from serious thinking and study during the summer months than is warranted, readings remind them that college promises to be demanding and difficult and that it would therefore behoove them to stay in some sort of intellectual shape. This exercise is especially welcome because once high school seniors learn what college they will attend, they often cease to study seriously so that the final months of high school are wasted.
  
  The second reason for summer readings is that most colleges have a program of general education that complements the normal process of choosing a major.
  . . .
  In the case of Bard College, to some extent all three reasons inform our decision to assign summer readings to incoming first-year students. We have staked out a clear position against the conventional high school curriculum in the sense that we believe high school is not sufficiently rigorous and takes too long."
  
  . . .
  
  
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Future of Real Estate, Part 1 - "Anyone who has ever had a beef with a real estate agent should take a look at the website ReallyRottenRealty.com. It’s all in fun, but the name suggests what some buyers and sellers believe to be true — that their agents failed to earn their pay for one reason or another."

A scene from Mr. Hulot's Holiday

• To Err Is Human. And How! And Why. - "Despite their titles, the two books in front of us today -- 'Being Wrong,' by Kathryn Schulz, and 'Wrong,' by David H. Freedman -- are not biographies of Alan Greenspan. They’re not accounts of the search for Saddam Hussein’s W.M.D. They’re not psychological profiles of Nickelback fans or the imbibers of chocolate martinis, either.
  
  Here’s what they are instead: investigations into why, as Ms. Schulz writes, with a Cole Porterish lilt in her voice, 'As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.'
  
  Bookstores will shelve these two volumes side by side, and critics like me will think, bingo!, and set them up for a blind date too. But they could not be more unalike. Ms. Schulz’s book is a funny and philosophical meditation on why error is mostly a humane, courageous and extremely desirable human trait. She flies high in the intellectual skies, leaving beautiful sunlit contrails. God isn’t her co-pilot; Iris Murdoch seems to be.
  
  Mr. Freedman’s book is a somewhat cruder vehicle. It’s a John Stossel-like exposé of the multiple ways that society’s so-called experts (scientists, economists, doctors) let us down, if not outright betray us. It’s a chunk of spicy populist outrage, and it can be a hoot to watch Mr. Freedman’s reading glasses steam up as he, like Big Daddy in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,' sniffs mendacity around the plantation. But Ms. Schulz’s book is the real find here; forgive me if I spend more time with it."
  
  . . .
  
  
• The bright side of wrong - "There are certain things in life that pretty much everyone can be counted on to despise. Bedbugs, say. Back pain. The RMV. Then there’s an experience we find so embarrassing, agonizing, and infuriating that it puts all of those to shame. This is, of course, the experience of being wrong.
  
  Is there anything at once so routine and so loathed as the revelation that we were mistaken? Like the exam that’s returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seats. It makes our hearts sink and our dander rise.
  . . .
  If we hope to avoid those outcomes, we need to stop treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect -- an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence. What’s called for is a new way of thinking about wrongness, one that recognizes that our fallibility is part and parcel of our brilliance. If we can achieve that, we will be better able to avoid our costliest mistakes, own up to those we make, and reduce the conflict in our lives by dealing more openly and generously with both other people’s errors and our own.
  
  To change how we think about wrongness, we must start by understanding how we get things right.
  . . .
  You use inductive reasoning when you hear a strange noise in your house at 3 a.m. and call the cops; when your left arm throbs and you go to the emergency room; when you spot your spouse’s migraine medicine on the table and immediately turn on the coffee, turn off the TV, and hustle your tantrumming toddler out of the house. In situations like these, we don’t hang around trying to compile bulletproof evidence for our beliefs -- because we don’t need to. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly."
• The Mother of All Invention: How the Xerox 914 gave rise to the Information age - "The struggles, obstacles, and ultimate triumph of its principal inventor, Chester Carlson-- beginning with his frustrations as a patent analyst in the late 1930s--seem ripped from a Frank Capra film. Few people thought a market existed for the machines, which went on to become ubiquitous. In fact, the 914’s 17-year production run, which ended in 1976, was Methuselahian compared with today’s technology product cycles. No wonder Fortune later called the 914 'the most successful product ever marketed in America measured by return on investment.' Yet David Owen, the author of the well-received 2004 book Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine, was not asked for any interviews to commemorate the anniversary--and both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ignored the milestone.
  
  Why no champagne? Although Xerox celebrated the 914 in fall 2009, it wants to move on from hardware-manufacturing alone to being what its Web site calls 'a true partner in helping companies better manage information'--that is, a provider of business services, software, and new forms of paperless imaging. The 914 is a classic brand, but not a living one like the Swingline stapler or Bic pen. And although millions still make photocopies, the practice has been in decline."
  
  . . .
  
  

. . . . . . . . .

aguyinnewyork-20

Assorted Links 6/11/10

Battleship Island & Other Ruined Urban High-Density Sites

• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Drafting Effective Federal Legislation and Amendments, July 21, 2010
• Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, July 22, 2010
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, August 2-3, 2010
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, August 4-6, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• Impact of Decennial Census on Unemployment Rate - "My estimate was that the 2010 Census would add 417,000 payroll jobs in May; the actual was 411,000 payroll jobs.
  
  My preliminary estimate is the Census will subtract 200,000 payroll jobs in June - and most of the remaining temporary Census jobs (564,000 total in May) will be unwound by September."
• Baltimore Police Officer Fires 13 Shots, Kills Unarmed Man - "An off-duty Baltimore police officer and a former Marine had a disagreement about the Marine’s advances toward the officer’s girlfriend. The officer ended it with thirteen rounds fired from his service pistol, six hitting the Marine and killing him. Baltimore police have confirmed that the Marine was unarmed. The officer refused a breathalyzer at the scene. (HT Instapundit)
  
  It gets better. The officer was involved in another shooting five years ago, which was determined to have been justified, but the officer was disciplined… for being intoxicated.
  . . .
  Of course, anyone recording the exchange that led to the shooting could be prosecuted for a felony under Maryland’s wiretapping law. Just ask Anthony Graber."
• The education of Peter Beinart - "Perhaps you haven't paid attention that in the last 25 years, since this older generation has faded, you've seen the growth of Islamic extremism on a global scale, much of it aimed at Israel. And they are not so much interested in the territories, as such. They are interested in the very existence of Israel, as they openly state. So I don't see how you can dismiss the sea of hostility. It’s in front of your face every day. It’s not the professors at the Sorbonne and it’s not The New York Review of Books that we're talking about. It’s Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and Syria and Islamic extremists from one end of the globe to the other.
  
  So you’re talking about a very deeply threatened country. It’s not threatened because of one policy or another or the personality of Bibi Netanyahu or any other single thing. The pro-Israel organizations -- I worked for one, AIPAC, for 23 years, I ought to know -- see themselves as part of an activist effort to fight against that tidal wave."
• U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe - "Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
  
  SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
  
  Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
  
  He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing 'almost criminal political back dealings.'
  
  'Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,' Manning wrote."
• Ninja Bureaucrats on the Loose - "Quinn Hillyer has an excellent piece at the Washington Times highlighting the simultaneously farcical and frightening use of armed agents in enforcing suspected regulatory violations.
  
  
  ”The government,” wrote 50-year-old Denise Simon, “is too big to fight.” With those words, in a note to her 17-year-old son, Adam, she explained why she was committing suicide (via carbon monoxide) three days after 10 visibly armed IRS agents in bulletproof vests had stormed her home on Nov. 6, 2007, in search of evidence of tax evasion. Her 10-year-old daughter, Rachel, was there with Simon when the agents stormed in.
  
  “I cannot live in terror of being accused of things I did not do,” she wrote to Adam. To the rest of the world, in a separate suicide note, she wrote: “I am currently a danger to my children. I am bringing armed officers into their home. I am compelled to distance myself from them for their safety.”
  
  The IRS is not the lone culprit. The EPA, National Park Service, Small Business Administration and even the Railroad Retirement Board have acquired a taste for tactical enforcement of administrative sanctions."
• ObamaCare's Defenders to the Public: Trust Us, You Really Like This Law! - "Before the Affordable Care Act passed, many of its supporters argued that, despite the law's not-so-great poll numbers, passing it would give the president a popularity boost, and the law would become more popular over time. It was a public policy version of the "try it, you'll like it" argument that parents use to get finnicky kids to eat weird casseroles. But it didn't seem likely at the time, and, sure enough, it turns out there was no bounce for Obama. Similarly, most polls since passage show that the law's popularity has not improved, and slightly more people still dislike it than like it. In fact, Rassmussen (which is an outlier amongst pollsters), says the law has become less popular since passage, though its numbers also show opposition receding slightly in recent weeks.
  . . .
  And at this point, I suspect it will be more difficult to defend the law than before it was passed. Since its passage, bad news has continued to pile up, and many the claims made about it have become increasingly difficult to maintain. We've already seen reports that the total cost will be more than expected, that the administration isn't hitting its deadlines, that it won't bring overall health care spending down, that some health insurance premiums will probably rise, that Medicare benefits for many seniors are scheduled to go on the chopping block, that it will strain emergency rooms, and that employers expect medical costs to rise and are looking at dropping millions from their health care plans--all of which is to say that what the law's advocates sold to the public isn't quite what they delivered. If protecting the public from distortions and misrepresentations is really what these folks hope to do, maybe they ought to start with their own side."
• Report: More than 1,400 former lawmakers, Hill staffers are financial lobbyists - "Even for Washington, the revolving door between government and Wall Street spins at a dizzying pace. More than 1,400 former members of Congress, Capitol Hill staffers or federal employees registered as lobbyists on behalf of the financial services sector since the start of 2009, according to an exhaustive new study issued Thursday.
  
  The analysis by two nonpartisan groups, Public Citizen and the Center for Responsive Politics, found that the "small army" of financial lobbyists included at least 73 former lawmakers and 148 ex-staffers connected to the House or Senate banking committees. More than 40 former Treasury Department employees also ply their trade as lobbyists for Wall Street firms, the study found."
• Verizon Strives to Close iPhone Gap - "'The carrier model is an established model,' Google Android chief Andy Rubin said in an interview. 'Consumers can walk in off the street and put their hands on a device and feel it. When you're choosing among three devices, it's best to use them side by side, and that's something you can't do on the Web.'"
  
  Doh!
  
  
• California: Appellate Decision Strikes Down Red Light Camera Evidence - "Appellate courts in California are becoming increasingly upset at the conduct of cities and photo enforcement vendors. On May 21, a three-judge panel of the California Superior Court, Appellate Division, in Orange County tossed out a red light camera citation in the city of Santa Ana in a way that calls into question the legitimacy of the way red light camera trials are conducted statewide. Previously, a string of brief, unpublished decisions struck at illegal contracts, insufficient notice and other deficiencies. This time, however, the appellate division produced a ten-page ruling and certified it for publication, setting a precedent that applies to the county’s three million residents.
  . . .
  'The photographs contain hearsay evidence concerning the matters depicted in the photograph including the date, time and other information,' the ruling summarized. 'The person who entered that relevant information into the camera-computer system did not testify. The person who entered that information was not subject to being cross-examined on the underlying source of that information. The person or persons who maintain the system did not testify. No one with personal knowledge testified about how often the system is maintained. No one with personal knowledge testified about how often the date and time are verified or corrected. The custodian of records for the company that contracts with the city to maintain, monitor, store and disperse these photographs did not testify. The person with direct knowledge of the workings of the camera-computer system did not testify.'"
  
  
• Repeal the 17th Amendment? - "Quick, what's the 17th Amendment? Good on you if you didn't need a lifeline: It's the one that mandated direct election of senators, instead of having them appointed by state legislatures."
  
  17th Amendment
  
  
• Taliban hang 7-year-old boy accused of being a spy, suicide bomber kills 40 at Afghanistan wedding - "A 7-year-old boy accused of being a spy was hanged by Taliban militants, according to published reports Thursday.
  
  The child was allegedly put on trial by the militant group and later found guilty of working for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's government, reports the Daily Mail.
  
  Karzai called the act a 'crime against humanity.'
  
  'I don't think there's a crime bigger than that that even the most inhuman forces on earth can commit,' Karzai said.
  
  The child was publicly hanged in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province, a local official told The Associated Press.
  
  'A 7-year-old boy cannot be a spy,' Karzai added. 'A 7-year-old boy cannot be anything but a seven-year-old boy, and therefore hanging or shooting to kill a seven-year-old boy... is a crime against humanity.'"
• Democrats not only party in trough with Blago - "Those foreign correspondents covering the corruption trial of our former Gov. Dead Meat are sending dispatches back East, warning of a big problem for the Democrats.
  
  According to common wisdom, Republicans are ready to hop on Dead Meat's back, whomp him with a stick and ride to power just as fast as you can say Rod Blagojevich.
  
  Except for one thing.
  
  It was that photograph shown to the jury on Wednesday, during the first day of testimony by Lon Monk, the admittedly corrupt former chief of staff to Blagojevich.
  
  The photograph was of a large-headed, middle-aged man half smiling through an open mouth. He's no Democrat.
  
  'That's Bob Kjellander (pronounced $hell-an-der),' said Monk from the witness stand. 'He's a lobbyist and head of the Illinois Republican Party.'
  
  Kjellander was a de facto Illinois Republican boss who'd gone national as treasurer of the Republican National Committee. He's also a buddy of former Bush White House adviser Karl Rove."
  
  

Misconceptions about Israel on the college campus





Jihad on US campuses




16-yr old "Daniel" confronts lion's den of haters to stand for the honor of Israel

• Genetic Evidence Shows Common Origins of Jews - "I don’t think that Zionism, etc., depends on whether Jews really have common genetic origins or not, anymore than Palestinian identity is any more or less real depending on whether, as some claim, a large percentage of “Palestinian Arabs” had immigrated rather recently from other countries in the Middle East. But I do think that manipulating history for ideological purposes is bad..."
• Rabbi Receives Death Threats Over Helen Thomas Video - "The New York rabbi who videotaped veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas telling Jews to 'get the hell out of Palestine' says he has received numerous death threats and thousands of pieces of hate mail in the days since Thomas' abrupt retirement.
  
  Rabbi David Nesenoff said he is facing an 'overload' of threatening e-mails calling for a renewed Holocaust and targeting his family -- a barrage of hate he said he planned to report to the police on Wednesday.
  
  'This ticker tape keeps coming in,' Nesenoff told FoxNews.com. 'We got one specific one saying, 'We're going to kill the Jews; watch your back.''
  
  Nesenoff said he was shocked not only by Thomas' original remarks -- which he called anti-Semitic -- but by the wave of insults and threats he has received since his videotape brought about her public shaming and the end of her 50-year career at the White House.
  
  'This is something that I thought was a couple of people here or there, [but] it's mainstream and it's frightening," the Long Island rabbi said. '[Thomas] is just a little cherry on top of this huge, huge sundae of hate in America.'"
  
  To see a few samples of the email being sent to Rabbi Nesenoff, see his web site at RabbiLive.com. Wonder how many of the death-threat haters are in violation of the terms of service (ToS) of their ISPs and email providers....
  
  
• Hebrew origin of Palestinians theory - "According to [Tsvi] Misinai, unlike the ancestors of the modern day Jews who were city dwellers to a large extent, the Hebrew ancestors of the Palestinians were rural dwellers, and were allowed to remain in the land of Israel to work the land and supply Rome with grain and olive oil. As a result of remaining in the Land of Israel, the Palestinians partially converted to Christianity during the Byzantine era. Later, with the coming of Islam, they were Islamized through a combination of conversions, mostly forced conversions, mainly to avoid dhimmi status and less frequently out of genuine conviction.
  
  Conversion to Islam occurred both in large numbers and progressively throughout the successive periods of foreign elite minority rule over Palestine, starting with the various dynasties of Arabian Muslim rulers from the initial Muslim conquest of Palestine"
• Kaifeng Jews - "According to historical records, a Jewish community lived in Kaifeng from at least the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127) until the late nineteenth century and Kaifeng was Northern Song's capital. It is surmised that the ancestors of the Kaifeng Jews came from Central Asia. It is also reported that in 1163 Ustad Leiwei was given charge of the religion (Ustad means teacher in Persian), and that they built a synagogue surrounded by a study hall, a ritual bath, a communal kitchen, a kosher butchering facility, and a sukkah.
  
  During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), a Ming emperor conferred seven surnames upon the Jews, by which they are identifiable today: Ai, Shi, Gao, Jin, Li, Zhang, and Zhao. Interestingly, two of these: Jin and Shi are the equivalent of common Jewish names in the west: Gold and Stone.
  
  The existence of Jews in China was unknown to Europeans until 1605, when Matteo Ricci, then established in Beijing, was visited by a Jew from Kaifeng, who had come to Beijing to take examinations for his jinshi degree."
• My favorite things *Modern Principles* (Cowen and Tabarrok) - "Here are a few of my favorite things Modern Principles:
  
  1. It has the most thorough treatment of the interconnectedness of markets and the importance of the price system; most texts only pay lip service to this.
  
  2. It is the most Hayekian of the texts on micro theory without in any way ignoring the importance of externalities, public goods and other challenges to markets.
  . . .
  10. The financial crisis was written into the core of the book, rather than being absent or treated as an add-on. This means for instance plenty of coverage of financial intermediation and asset price bubbles.
  
  11. The book's blog, a teaching tool with lots of videos, powerpoints and other ideas for keeping teaching exciting, is lots of fun and updated regularly (FYI, this is a great resource for any instructor of economics.)"
• Peter Suderman on Helen Thomas and the FTC's Push to Reinvent Journalism - "Helen Thomas wasn't celebrated as a journalist so much as a monument to journalism's historical legacy. She kept her front-row seat, her column, and her steady stream of awards for no reason other than she always had. And the reverence she inspired had little to do with her work and far more to do with the political media's sense of institutional self-importance. Thomas wasn't a very good writer, but she was a living symbol of a media age past--and the press corps couldn't let her go.
  
  These days, journalists have successfully inculcated a similar sense of sentimental reverence for the media in the federal government. As the media transitions into the digital age and old business models look increasingly shaky, both the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission are investigating how the government can prop up journalistic institutions edging past their prime. And, writes Associate Editor Peter Suderman, the spirit that drove Washington's press corps to endlessly celebrate Helen Thomas despite her thoroughly mediocre output is the same one driving these agencies' efforts."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• An 800-Pound Gorilla? Google Gets Into Case Law Search - "Even so, I am lulled into complacency by the simple fact that Google does what it does so well. So it is with Google’s entry into case law research with its recent announcement that Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com, now allows users to search full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state appellate and trial courts.
  
  Even before the cases were added, Google Scholar was a useful research tool for lawyers. It allows researchers to search a broad selection of scholarly books and articles, including law journals, drawn from the web and from academic and library collections.
  
  But case law takes Scholar to a whole new level of usefulness. As you would expect from Google, the search interface is simple and familiar. Enter any name, word or phrase and hit 'search.' The default search covers all of Scholar’s collection of federal and state cases and law review articles.
  
  An advanced search page lets you tailor your search more precisely. You can specify words and phrases to include and exclude and set a date range. You can choose to search just federal cases, just a single state’s cases or across multiple states. Searching multiple states requires you to check a box for each state, so if you want to search a significant number of states, you’ll have a lot of checking to do."

Crazy underwater base jump
In Dean's Blue Hole

• Phone 4 vs. the smartphone elite: EVO 4G, N8, Pre Plus, and HD2 - "You might be surprised by some of the results -- and sorry, RIM, you don't get to play until you bring some fresh, media-heavy hardware to the table."
• Should I Buy an iPhone 4? - "The one question Apple never answers at keynotes—their opinion is implicit—is always the most pertinent: Should I buy this new thing? Here's a simple guide:
  
  Steve Jobs lobbed a few surprises today, but the majority of iPhone 4's new features were established back when we published it in April, and when Apple showed the world OS 4 (now known as iOS). Now as it was then, it's an impressive piece of hardware—but is it worth your money?
  . . .
  So, Who Should Buy an iPhone 4?
  The answer is actually pretty simple: If you're eligible for the advertised prices of $199 and $299, don't mind signing up for another two years with AT&T, and don't have any anxiety about Android's rate of progress leaving your iPhone 4 feeling behind the curve, it's a recommended buy, especially if you're currently using a 3G.
  
  But it's hard to swallow at higher prices, and compared the the 3GS, the upgrades feel kind of marginal. For the 3GS user trapped in limbo, waiting for his contract to come to an end, take comfort at just how fast the world (read: Android) is moving and that you're not losing out on too much by waiting."
• Five Best Web-Based Conferencing Tools - "Increasingly sophisticated but inexpensive webcams, microphones, and speedier broadband make web-based conferencing more economical and attractive than ever. Here's a look at five excellent solutions for web-based conferencing."
• The Step-by-Step Guide to Digitizing Your Life - "Your increasingly digital lifestyle has left your analog media collecting dust. Save it from obsolescence and digitize your life.
  
  This guide covers many different kinds of media, so feel free to skip to the section(s) that interest you the most:
  
  
  1. Paper
  
  2. Images
  
  3. Audio
  
  4. Video
  
  5. Storage and Organization
  
  "
• Microsoft, Apple Ship Big Security Updates - "In its largest patch push so far this year, Microsoft today released 10 security updates to fix at least 34 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and software designed to run on top of it. Separately, Apple has shipped another version of Safari for both Mac and Windows PCs that plugs some four dozen security holes in the Web browser.
  
  Microsoft assigned three of the updates covering seven vulnerabilities a 'critical' rating, meaning they can be exploited to help attackers break into vulnerable systems with no help from users. At least 14 of the flaws fixed in this month’s patch batch are in Microsoft Excel, and another eight relate to Windows and Internet Explorer."
• How Does Office Web Apps Compare to Google Docs? - "Microsoft rolled out its free Office Web Apps earlier this week, introducing a free, basic Office suite for the web. How does it compare to Google's own Docs offering? Here's a rundown of each webapp's strengths and weaknesses."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 6/7/10

Richard Feynman on Bigger is Electricity!, from the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983)

• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Drafting Effective Federal Legislation and Amendments, July 21, 2010
• Preparing and Delivering Congressional Testimony, July 22, 2010
• Advanced Federal Budget Process, August 2-3, 2010
• Advanced Legislative Strategies, August 4-6, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• The Hard Truth About Residential Real Estate - "Anyone who believes that housing is on the rebound, and that now is the time to buy, should take a very hard look at the numbers I dredged up for my spring lecture and luncheon tour.
  
  There are 140 million personal residences in the US. Today, there are 19 million homes either directly or indirectly for sale. According to a survey by Zillow.com, a real estate appraisal website, 5 million homeowners plan to sell on any improvement in prices. Add to that 4 million existing homes now on the market, 1 million new homes flogged by companies like Lennar (LEN) and Pulte Homes (PHM), and 1 million bank owned properties. Another 8 million mortgage owners are late on their payments and are on the verge of foreclosure, bringing the total overhang to 19 million homes.
  
  Now, let’s look at the buy side. There are 35 million who are underwater on their mortgages and aren’t buying homes anytime soon, nor are the 35 million unemployed and underemployed. That knocks out 50% of the potential buyers.
  
  Here is where it gets really interesting. There are 80 million baby boomers retiring at the rate of 10,000 a day. Assuming that they downsize over time from an average 2,500 sq ft. home to a 1,000 sq. ft. condo, and eventually to a 100 sq. ft. assisted living facility, the total shrinkage in demand is 4.3 billion sq.ft. per year, or 1.7 million average sized homes. That amounts to a shrinkage of aggregate demand for a city the size of San Francisco, every year. You can argue that the following Gen-Xer’s are going to take up the slack, but there are only 65 million of them with a much lower standard of living than their parents."
• Buy Vs. Rent - "Rent in Manhattan: Home prices there are way too high, says Trulia. (Ditto San Francisco.)
  
  Buy in Miami. And Phoenix. And Las Vegas. And most of the other places that have been flattened by the crash. Homes there are cheap compared to rents.
  
  The cross-over point is about 15 times annual rent, the company believes. In other words, as a rough rule of thumb, homes are probably fairly valued in a city when they cost about 15 times a year’s rent. So, for example, if you’re paying $10,000 a year to rent a place, think twice about buying a home that costs more than $150,000. Dean Baker, economist at the Washington, D.C. think-tank The Center for Economic and Policy Research, came to a similar conclusion in research on the subject in recent years. Fifteen times is the historic average, he said."
• DOD’s Guns Versus Butter Debate - "The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Todd Harrison has a new paper out warning that DOD is fast approaching a difficult choice: either fund the people or the weapons they operate, it will soon reach the point where it can’t do both.
  
  Harrison has been warning anybody who will listen about the labor cost challenges at DOD for some time now. Last fall, he wrote a piece warning that DOD potentially faces a GM sized fixed labor cost problem, necessitating a massive increase in federal dollars, a 'bailout' in essence.
  
  His latest paper lays out what he calls DOD’s internal 'guns versus butter' debate. The butter includes pay and benefit increases that have what economists call 'stickiness': they are almost impossible to rollback. The increase in pay and benefits that congress allots DOD each year will crowd out investment in research and new weapons.
  
  First a sense of the scale of the problem: with some 2,250,000 people on the payroll, DOD is the single biggest employer in the U.S., public or private sector. In fact, DOD has more people on its payroll than Wal-Mart (1.1 million) and the Post Office (600,000) combined. The size of the payroll means any changes, even seemingly minor year-to-year increases in pay or benefits, have an outsized effect on the defense budget because of the compounding and cumulative effects of pay hikes.
  
  Since 2000, the cost to pay and care for one active-duty serviceman has increased 73 percent in real terms: from $73,300 to $126,800 today."
• Law entrepreneurs - "My presentation will continue my speculation, begun in Death of Big Law, on the 'legal information industry' that could develop in the aftermath of the demise of current models of delivering legal services. Consistent with the theme of the mini-conference, I focus on opportunities for entrepreneurship in this new industry. So the project might be especially intriguing for those, including the law school class of 2010, who might appreciate alternative employment opportunities.
  
  The paper begins by discussing the forces that are giving birth to the new industry: globalization, new information technologies, clients’ demand for cheaper law, and deregulation of legal services.
  
  I then examine some possible ways to tweak the existing industry model based on customized advice to clients. We can expect to see new ways to connect lawyers and clients, and ways such as outsourcing to substitute contracts for firms. Also expect new kinds of firms that can be sold to the capital markets and that combine law with other disciplines.
  
  Then I look beyond legal advice to refashioning legal information into products. Entrepreneurs might develop new ways to sell legal ideas, uses for contract templates, ways to standardize contract drafting, private development of new business associations, mechanized contract review and investments in legal think tanks that engage in research and development.
  
  The r & d idea could be of particular interest to law professors. I consider the potential for a law version of “Bell Labs” that could privatize some of the research now happening in academia. Good thing, too, because I’m not sure how much room will be left in the brave new world of legal information for research subsidized by law school tuition based on big law jobs that no longer exist."
• Our 1979: The Year That Was - "It has been sort of a topos to evoke the specter of 1979. I’ve done it repeatedly, as have other observers.
  
  Aside from the growing stagflation in the U.S. (I remember farming that year at the ending of an inflation-driven boom), that was the year that China invaded Vietnam. Muslims assassinated the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Russia later invaded Afghanistan. The world seemed to have become unhinged. And there was more still.
  
  The shah was abandoned and soon fell, amid American proclamations of support for him on Monday, and then denunciation of his dynasty by Tuesday, and yet more leaked reports on Wednesday of reaching out to Khomeini in Paris. Soon in his death throes he would jet the globe looking for a home and a doctor, as the U.S. let the phone ring when he called.
  
  Soon Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Teheran from Paris and proclaimed an Islamic revolution. Iranian students (Ahmadinejad probably among them) stormed our embassy and took hostages. In no time Ramsey Clark was denouncing America on Iran’s behalf, and rumors abounded of Carter’s backdoor deal-making to get them home at any cost before the 1980 election. (In 1980 a humiliating and disastrous rescue mission would see imams desecrating American dead on worldwide television. I recall an odious Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhal, the hanging judge who sent thousands to the gallows, zipping open the body-bags to poke and probe the charred American corpses.)
  
  The Sandinistas also took over Nicaragua. Radical Islamists torched the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. I could go on, but you get the picture. In all these cases, a baffled Mr. Carter sermonized a lot, blamed a lot -- and in the end retired to the Rose Garden or fought rabbits from a canoe. He seemed petulant that he had come into the world in divine fashion to save us, and we flawed mortals were unwilling to be saved by him. The so-called “malaise speech” summed up his disappointment in the rest of us.
  
  And after such a wonderful beginning…
  
  So 1979 followed two years of Carteresque utopian proclamations. Do we remember them all still? There was Cy Vance, in perfect aristocratic style, and in perpetual atonement for his earlier support of the Vietnam War, with his creased brow and sermonizing tone, bringing in the kinder, gentler order. He resigned over the failed hostage rescue, replaced by a stoic Ed Muskie. And there was Andrew Young at the UN trying to be a sort of proto-Barack Obama, reaching out to the radical Palestinians, and so on.
  
  Remember the commandments? No more inordinate fear of communism; human rights governing U.S. foreign policy; no more nuclear weapons housed in South Korea which was to be free of U.S. troops; outreach to the terrorist/rebel/reformer Mugabe, and so on.
  
  In other words, it took a flawed world about 24 months to size up the new idealistic administration, and to determine that it either could not or would not continue U.S. foreign policy of the previous three decades. Soon the more daring then decided to make 'regional adjustments.' Finally a panicked Carter was attempting everything from boycotting the Olympics and arming Islamists in Afghanistan to threatening to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East and restoring draft registration to reclaim lost U.S. deterrence."
• How Free Explains Israel’s Flotilla FAIL - "The organizers of the “Free Gaza” flotilla spent almost nothing on their campaign. The government of Israel poured millions into its botched raid on the ships -- and now is in a worse position than when the flotilla launched. How did it happen? Part of the problem is that the Israeli government never bothered to read Wired.
  
  Israeli commandos may not have known that members of the Free Gaza flotilla were carrying knives, guns and metal bars. But they should have known that many in the incoming flotilla were armed with cameras, cellphones, blogs and Twitter accounts. For a country so technologically advanced, and with such acute public diplomacy challenges, to fail so miserably at preparing a communications offensive over new media is a failure of strategic proportions.
  
  And it was all so utterly predictable. In his book Free, Wired editor Chris Anderson lays out a new media model that foreshadowed the flotilla meltdown.
  
  It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage (unlimited email storage) now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. There’s never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.
  
  How much money did it cost the organizers of the Free Gaza flotilla to get their message out across the world?
  
  Answer: Almost nothing. Turkish TV placed a camera on one of the flotilla ships and kept it on all the time to livestream events on the boat, while constantly placing activists in front of the camera to speak about their cause. The costs of a camera, some other technical equipment, and hosting of a website are negligible."
• Are Cameras the New Guns? - "In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
  
  Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.
  
  The legal justification for arresting the 'shooter' rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.
  . . .
  When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.
  
  Happily, even as the practice of arresting 'shooters' expands, there are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested 'shooter,' the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen.
  
  As journalist Radley Balko declares, 'State legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials.'"
• The BP Oil Spill and at Least One Lesson Unlearned from Katrina - "Of course, we want this fixed now, stat. Nobody questions that. However, I don't think you need to be a libertarian zealot to think that BP is in a much better position to plug this more quickly than the government. Just what information or ideas does the White House or Congress have to fixing this problem that they are withholding from BP? Just what relevant resources are owned and operated by the federal government that BP does not have? Frankly, I find Bill Nelson's hubris disgusting at a time like this."
• One of the most touching ‘ads’ you will ever see - "One doesn’t think of emotion when watching ads regardless of how much spin advertisers might like to to wrap their usual dreck in. Nor does one think of seeing a homeless man as the center piece of an ad unless of course it is for some goodie two shoes charity.
  
  While Momentos might not be considered an ad in the typical sense it is one of those new style of ads that we are seeing in a growing number on the web. The only indication that it might even be an ad is that the televisions used are all LG’s but even then it is really a muted appearance.
  
  In truth this is a beautiful human moment that regardless of the fact that it is an extended advertisement for LG is touching and lets you forget that you are being advertised to. Nicely done."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."

DVP Remote App Keyboard works with New Roku Netflix App

• Forget Noisy Blimps, Say Hello To the Airfish - "The next time you're at a music festival and see a giant rainbow trout swishing around in the sky, there's just a chance you might not be intoxicated. It might be scientists testing an airship that moves like a fish.
  
  The materials scientists from Switzerland call it the Airfish.
  
  The 8-metre-long helium-filled prototype glides through air as a fish swims through water – by swishing its body and tail from side to side. As well as moving more gracefully than a conventional blimp, the Airfish is also much quieter and cleaner because it doesn't require the fume-belching engines and noisy propellers normally used for mid-air manoeuvres. As such, TV broadcasters might favour it for capturing aerial footage of music and sports events, the team suggests."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 6/3/10

89 Dead In The NHTSA Complaint Database? It’s A Sham

Immigration Law -- Up Close
The vehicle is not stopped on a warrant, probable cause, or reasonable suspicion. As far as I can tell, all the cars are being stopped. The police ask about his immigration status and the driver declines to answer. The man in the car knows the law well and quickly makes it crystal clear that he’s not interested in a “voluntary” encounter with the police -- he wants to be on his way. The police repeatedly evade his attempt to clarify the situation. That is, if the police are detaining him, the driver does not want to flee or resist the officers (that’s a crime) -- but if the police are not detaining him, the driver does not wish to hang out with them and talk -- he wants to be on his way. Watch the police lie and/or illegally threaten that he will be detained -- until he answers their questions. Watch the police threaten to arrest the man for causing a “safety” hazard, or for “impeding” or obstructing their "work." Given those police actions, most people will come to the conclusion that they have no choice in the matter -- answer the questions and produce the ID papers. These are the situations that the courts rarely see. The citizen who was understandably intimidated by the threats may get mad, but it is not worth it to sue. If an illegal is discovered, he would be deported in a matter of hours. This video is thus a real public service announcement -- whatever your view is on the immigration matter, do understand clearly how the police will be are interacting with people.

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• Guest Post: Slouching Toward Despotism - "And the question we keep pondering is, 'Are we there yet?' Are we merely slouching toward despotism, or have we arrived? Are we already so corrupt so as to need despotic government, what with Vampire Squids and corporate/union-bought elections and Congressional bystanders and regulatory capture and Systemically Important Too Big To Fail and Gulf of Mexico oil well disasters?
  
  (Despotism, by the way, describes a form of government by which a single entity rules with absolute and unlimited power, and may be expressed by an individual as an autocracy or through a group as an oligarchy according to Wikipedia, the world's leading source of made-up information, which is good enough for us.)
  
  In previous posts we have observed the growing and discernible disconnect between several types of government-reported economic data such as Retail Sales and actual state sales tax collections, and the Employment Situation and withholding tax collections. Others also have made solid cases for these disconnects between statistical theory and economic reality and it occurs to me that, far from being isolated or random events, they are evidence of much more disconcerting forces at work.
  
  Fudging on unemployment numbers or 'rounding up' retail sales reports may seem like minor infractions, and many of these government data reports have been manipulated for years, maybe half a century, but they represent a pattern of conscious, calculated design of 'don't worry, be happy, the government's in charge, nothing to see here, so move along.'
  
  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, estimates who is working and who is not, but conveniently excludes millions of people from its composition of the unemployment rate who are not working but neither deeming them 'unemployed' because they are 'marginally attached' to the workforce or are “discouraged” by a lack of job prospects and no longer are looking for employment (2.3 million as of March 2010 plus another 3.4 million 'persons who currently want a job,' who also aren’t counted as unemployed).
  
  Side note: You are well aware, of course, the Social Security Administration probably could tell us monthly almost exactly how many people really are working, not working, working part time, self-employed, and so on based on its receipts of tax withholdings from employers. It is beyond the pale to imagine SSA could not furnish a version of the monthly Employment Situation that would be far more reliable by orders of magnitude than the guesses of the BLS."
• Sestak Case Casts Light On Murky Political Boundaries - "When the White House enlisted former President Bill Clinton to see if Representative Joe Sestak would accept a presidential appointment to drop out of a Senate race, there is no question it was committing politics. But was it committing a crime?
  
  The dispute surrounding the White House effort to nudge Mr. Sestak out of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary has once again cast a harsh light on the murky boundaries that govern American political life. When does ordinary horse-trading cross a line? When does behavior that may violate sensibilities actually violate federal law?
  
  The law does ban promising any position to influence an election and Republican lawmakers have called for a special prosecutor or the F.B.I. to investigate whether Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, or his colleagues made an illegal quid pro quo proposal. So far, the Justice Department has rebuffed such calls and, as of a few days ago, officials said neither the department nor the Office of Special Counsel, which looks at politicking by federal employees, was investigating.
  . . .
  At the same time, it can depend on just how subtle or explicit the offers are. Political deals offered in a particularly raw way have gotten officeholders in trouble before. In 2004, the House ethics committee admonished Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, then the Republican House majority leader, for offering to support the Congressional campaign of a fellow lawmaker’s son in exchange for a critical vote on a Medicare bill. And in 2008, the authorities arrested Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, a Democrat, accusing him of trying to sell the appointment to fill the vacated Senate seat of President Obama. Mr. Blagojevich is scheduled to go on trial on corruption charges this week."
• “Woman sues strip club after her 16-year-old daughter is hired as dancer” - "The girl, described as a chronic runaway, got herself a job at the Emperors Gentleman’s Club in Tampa, and now mom wants damages."
• Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it - "Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."
  
  That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.
  
  In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
  
  That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today."
  
  Which reminds us of this old joke:
  
  
  A drunk loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. A policeman comes over and asks what he’s doing.
  
  “I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.
  
  The policeman looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?”
  
  “Because the light is so much better”.
  
  We all look for things where the light is better, rather than where we’re more likely to find them. In words of Anais Nin, “we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are”.
  
  
  As well as Rudyard Kipling's poem, "White Man's Burden".
  
  
• If you like the BP spill, you’ll love cyberwar - "Rather, the BP crisis is giving me a sense of what cyberwar will be like. If it happens, and I think that’s likely, it will be pretty ugly. As I say in Skating on Stilts,
  
  “It’s not just that you could lose your life savings. Your country could lose its next war. And not just the way we’re used to losing – where we get tired of being unpopular in some third-world country and go home. I mean losing losing: Attacked at home and forced to give up cherished principles or loyal allies to save ourselves.”
  
  Hostile nations are probably already seeding our privately owned infrastructure with logic bombs and malware designed to shut down critical services -- power, telecom, Internet, banks, water and sewage. Each private company has a private, and unique, network design. Each private company has a private, and unique, set of defenses and recovery plans.
  
  So when an attack occurs, if it’s successful, some of those defenses will fail. Some citizens will spend days, weeks, maybe months, without power or phones or water or access to their bank. We’ll be at war, under attack, hurting. We’ll look to the Commander in Chief.
  
  And he’ll look pretty much the way President Obama does today.
  
  Helpless.
  
  He won’t be able to send troops to protect, say, Verizon’s network. His troops mostly don’t have the skills, and if they do have the skills, they don’t know the network. Even if a company has screwed up badly, failing to adopt basic backup and malware protections, he’ll have to defer to the idiots who got us into the mess until they find a way to get us out.
  
  Of course, by the time they do, the war may be more or less over.
  
  So, if we expect a replay of the BP experience in the event of cyberwar, can we learn something from the current experience? Maybe. Here are a few ideas that occur to me. First, it’s often the case that private companies can quite confidently get us into trouble that they then can’t fix; when that’s true, we ought to be very dubious about their confident assertions that regulation is excessive or unneeded."
  
  From the comments:
  
  As a cybersecurity expert, I’d have to disagree with this post.
  
  It is based on fear of the unknown. The less people understand hackers, the more they are afraid of them. The idea that hostile nations are seeding our private networks with viruses to cause a black out is a fictional scenario you see in movies, and far different from the reality.
  
  There are reasons why government regulation is unwelcome, and it’s not because it’s “excessive” or “unneeded”.
  
  The first is that government regulators don’t understand the problem. Regulators end up favoring the politically connected rather than addressing the problem. Government networks are far less secure than corporate networks -- there are few in government with any meaningful cybersecurity expertise.
  
  The second is that government places ideology above reason. Phrases like “you can never be too secure” make a fine speech, but it’s wrong. You can be too secure. When the marginal costs of additional security exceed the marginal benefits, then you are too secure. Moreover, ideologues exaggerate the benefits of security, and ignore the costs -- they will gladly take away human rights and crush innovation in the of the Almighty Security. Government ideologues are a greater danger to the Internet than Islamic ideologues.
  
  
• I’m dumb and I’m proud! - "It’s not easy being dumb. It never has been. We’re made fun of in school. We’re the butt of jokes. Prejudice has barred us from many vocations.
  
  We in the Dumb Community have always desperately needed role models; people who, despite their unquestionably low intellectual wattage, have still managed to achieve great success. Of course, the Hollywood community has always been an inspiration to us, its members never failing to let their dumb flag fly. But you have to more than dumb to be a movie actor. You have to be good looking, too. So, for a long time now, we’ve hoped for someone who could blaze new trails; who could go where no dummy has gone before. Finally, that role model has mounted the national stage, front and center. I speak, of course, of Attorney General Eric Holder."
• ‘Do Something, Superpresident!’ - "Amid the din of James Carville’s screeching, you may have missed a couple of reasonable voices taking issue with the 'do something, Superpresident!' approach that’s dominating the discussion of the Gulf Spill. (They both mention Cato work, which is a bonus).
  
  In the Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan writes that this isn’t
  
  
  “Obama’s oil spill,” if by saying so we mean to ascribe culpability to the president. He didn’t run the rigs, or oversee the plans, or grant the licenses to drill, or write the rules that govern the granting of those licenses. He was just president when the bloody thing happened."
  
  
  Neither Varadarajan nor Greenwald is particularly ready to feel sorry for a president who’s done everything he can to stoke irrational public expectations for presidential salvation in virtually every public policy area. Nor am I. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, as they say.
  . . .
  But it’s not entirely clear what Carville, Palin et al actually want done. A government takeover of the spill site? That’s a stupid idea. Better regulation (retroactively?)? There’s plenty of blame to go around, but color me unsurprised that incompetence and regulatory capture characterize the Minerals Management Service, and that a president who sits atop an 2-million-employee executive branch, pretending to run it, didn’t 'fix' those problems beforehand.
  . . .
  When the public views the president as the man responsible for curing everything that ails us--from bad weather, to private-sector negligence--presidents are going to seek powers to match those superheroic responsibilities. With Great Responsibility Comes Great Power (to torture one superhero slogan)."
• BP oil spill: Who's your daddy? - "'Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?' 11-year-old Malia demanded Thursday morning while the president was shaving. Poor President Obama: even his kids won't give him a break about the Gulf oil spill.
  
  Tough. It's hard to feel sorry for the 'Yes We Can' candidate, who got the job by stoking the juvenile expectation that there's a presidential solution to everything from natural disasters to spiritual malaise.
  
  But the adults among us ought to worry about a political culture that reacts to every difficulty by screaming 'Save us, Superpresident!'
  . . .
  When Hurricane Katrina hit, liberals who had spent years calling President Bush a tyrant suddenly decided he wasn't authoritarian enough when he hesitated to declare himself generalissimo of New Orleans and muster the troops for a federal War on Hurricanes.
  
  Now the party of 'drill, baby, drill' -- the folks who warn that Obama's a socialist -- is screaming bloody murder because he's letting the private sector take the lead in the well-capping operation. It's almost enough to make a guy cynical about politics.
  . . .
  Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal may have a legitimate gripe about the feds delaying permission to build protective sand barriers. But most of the complaints dominating the airwaves aren't nearly that specific. They smack of a quasi-religious conception of the presidency. If only Obama would manifest himself at the afflicted area, shed his aura of cool reserve, and exercise the magical powers of presidential concern, perhaps the slick would recede.
  . . .
  BP will pay dearly for its apparent negligence, ending up poorer and smaller as a result of the spill. Not so with the federal government: disasters are the health of the state."
• Wake Me Up When They Actually Put Any Income at Risk - "From the AZ Republic:
  
  
  Zack de la Rocha has issued a statement on behalf of an organization called the Sound Strike urging music fans and fellow artists to boycott Arizona “to stop SB 1070,” which he labels an “odious” law.
  
  Among those artists joining de la Rocha’s boycott are Conor Oberst, Kanye West, Rage Against the Machine, Rise Against, Cypress Hill, Serj Tankian, Joe Satriani, Sonic Youth, Tenacious D, Street Sweeper Social Club and Michael Moore.
  
  
  So it turns out that at the local Best Buy here in Phoenix, Arizona, I find many examples of these folks’ work still for sale. Moore’s videos, for example, still seem to be available for purchase. Possibly their requests to have their merchandise removed from store shelves in Arizona have not reached the sales floor yet, but my guess is that these guys have absolutely no intention of actually pulling their product from Arizona stores. My guess (and please tell me if I am being unfair) is that most of these folks, at best, are committing to cancel tour dates that for most of these bands are not even scheduled yet. This is about as much of a sacrifice as me promising to cancel my next date with Gisele Bündchen. This kind of statement is the moral equivalent of Hollywood stars who decry global warming from the steps for their private jet."
• Power lunch, alive and well - "The 'steak, oysters on the half shell, asparagus with hollandaise and old men' meal, as former 'Top Chef' contestant and owner of Alchemy Caterers Carla Hall characterized a typical power lunch, has gone the way of the dodo. Indeed, 'the three-martini lunch has not been popular since the ‘90s,' said Adam Williamowsky, general manager of BLT Steak. 'People are eating sandwiches and salads now. You have a mix of guys and girls in golf shirts and khakis having Arnold Palmers and salads.'
  . . .
  Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) is the lead cosponsor on legislation that Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) introduced last summer that would offer a tax boost to business lunchers. H.R. 3333 would increase the business meal tax deduction from 50 percent to 80 percent -- a move that the National Restaurant Association’s Maureen Ryan says could boost business meal sales by $6 billion nationwide.
  
  For a city that thrives on doing business while noshing, it makes sense.
  
  Business 'definitely improves some when there’s legislation -- you’re going to get a lot more diners,' said Monocle owner John Valanos.
  
  Especially when that legislation is designed to encourage lunching."
• Walk Aways, NYT Version - "I would like to read one person make the honest statement:
  
  
  'I’ve done the math, and it doesn’t make sense to pay the mortgage. I can rent the same house a block over for half of what I am paying. I am so far underwater that if I stay here, struggle, and make all the payments, in 10 years, I will merely be back to break even. Why bother?
  
  Like all the big banks have all done, I’ve made the calculation that it is financially beneficial to default on the loan -- so that is what I am doing. As Sonny was told in the Godfather, 'This is business, not personal…'”
  
  I suspect this will be an ongoing story for the next 5 years . . ."
• Housing Bust and Labor Immobility - "Here is a theme we've been discussing for a few years - when a homeowner is underwater, it is difficult to make a career move ...
  . . .
  Negative equity is impacting one of the historic strengths of the U.S. labor market - the ability of households to easily move from one region to another for a better employment opportunity."
• Visualizing the BP Oil Spill - "Centered on DC"
• 89 Dead In The NHTSA Complaint Database? It’s A Sham - "This week, NHTSA came out and said that after a recount of their complaints database, they found 89 dead bodies in their computers, allegedly killed by evil runaway Toyotas. The MSM ate it up. If it bleeds, it leads. Even if it smells. In this article, we will show you the secrets of the incredible killing machine at NHTSA."
• Buffett Expects ‘Terrible Problem’ for Municipal Debt - "Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has been trimming its investment in municipal debt, predicted a 'terrible problem' for the bonds in coming years.
  
  'There will be a terrible problem and then the question becomes will the federal government help,' Buffett, 79, said today at a hearing of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in New York. 'I don’t know how I would rate them myself. It’s a bet on how the federal government will act over time.'
  . . .
  Buffett said last month that the U.S. may feel compelled to rescue a state facing default after the government committed $700 billion to bail out financial firms and automakers.
  
  'It would be hard in the end for the federal government to turn away a state having extreme financial difficulty when they’ve gone to General Motors and other entities and saved them,' Buffett told shareholders in Omaha, Nebraska, at Berkshire’s May 1 annual meeting. 'I don’t know how you would tell a state you’re going to stiff-arm them with all the bailouts of corporations.'
  
  A report by the Pew Center on the States in February estimated that by the end of the 2008 budget years, states had $1 trillion less than needed to pay for future pensions and medical benefits, a gap the center said was likely compounded by losses suffered in the second half of 2008."
• Journey of Mankind: the Peopling of the World - "a virtual global journey of modern man over the last 160,000 years."

Witnessing the heart as it cracks

• Another NYU Graduate with Six-Figure Debt. Quelle Suprise! - "Students and their parents invest $100k for a degree from an elite institution because they believe it will land them a job that pays enough to pay off those loans in a reasonable amount of time. No one plans to default or flee the country when they sign up for a student loan. You get a degree from an Ivy League or top tier college and you expect to get a decent paying white collar job. I can't speak for third tier graduates, but back in the good ol' days, the majority of graduates from my college and law school found jobs that paid more than factory line workers. That is why people, and especially working class people with academically gifted children, believe higher education is a good investment - perhaps the only investment - that will allow their children to enter a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle."
• Cyber Thieves Rob Treasury Credit Union - "Organized cyber thieves stole more than $100,000 from a small credit union in Salt Lake City last week, in a brazen online robbery that involved dozens of co-conspirators, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
  
  In most of the e-banking robberies I’ve written about to date, the victims have been small to mid-sized businesses that had their online bank accounts cleaned out after cyber thieves compromised the organization’s computers. This incident is notable because the entity that was both compromised and robbed was a bank."
• Judge convicts mother in Facebook flap with son - "ARKADELPHIA, Ark. -- A woman who locked her son out of his Facebook account and posted vulgarities and other items on it was convicted Thursday of misdemeanor harassment and ordered not to have contact with the teenager.
  
  Judge Randy Hill ordered Denise New to pay a $435 fine and complete anger management and parenting classes. He said he would consider allowing her to see her 17-year-old son, Lane, who lives with his grandmother, if New takes the two courses."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Italian priests' secret mistresses ask pope to scrap celibacy rule: Forty women send unprecedented letter to pontiff saying priests need to 'experience feelings, love and be loved' - "Dozens of Italian women who have had relationships with Roman Catholic priests or lay monks have endorsed an open letter to the pope that calls for the abolition of the celibacy rule. The letter, thought by one signatory to be unprecedented, argues that a priest 'needs to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved'.
  
  It also pleads for understanding of those who 'live out in secrecy those few moments the priest manages to grant [us] and experience on a daily basis the doubts, fears and insecurities of our men'.
  
  The issue was put back on the Vatican's agenda in March when one of Pope Benedict's senior advisers, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, said the abolition of the celibacy rule might curb sex abuse by priests, a suggestion he hastily withdrew after Benedict spoke up for 'the principle of holy celibacy'.
  
  The authors of the letter said they decided to come into the open after hearing his retort, which they said was an affirmation of 'the holiness of something that is not holy' but a man-made rule. There are many instances of married priests in the early centuries of Christianity. Today, priests who follow the eastern Catholic rites can be married, as can those who married before converting to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism."
• College grads unprepared for workforce - "Many college graduates aren’t prepared for the workforce, concludes a York College study. So the Pennsylvania school is trying to teach professionalism as well as liberal arts, reports NPR.
  
  Business leaders and human resources managers told researchers what qualities they look for in new college graduates.
  . . .
  Half of college degrees are useless, writes Flypaper’s Mickey Muldoon, citing a New York Times’ story on a slight improvement in job prospects for new grads:"
• D.C. drivers among least knowledgeable - "Drivers with District of Columbia licenses rank among the least knowledgeable about the rules of the road in the nation, according to a study by GMAC Insurance.
  
  The insurance company surveyed licensed American drivers from across the country by administering 20 questions taken from Department of Motor Vehicles written exams. DC drivers averaged 71.9 percent on the tests, the third-worst showing in the nation. New York and New Jersey drivers scored the lowest.
  
  Nationwide, GMAC says nearly 20 percent of drivers, or about 38 million Americans, would not pass a written exam."

Lane Bryant, Victoria’s Secret, and arbitrary moral lines

• Mark Twain's Autobiography - "Mark Twain's will stipulated that his autobiography remain unpublished for 100 years after his death, the 100th anniversary of which was April 21st. In November, the University of California Press will release the first volume of what's anticipated to be a rip roaring good time."
• Devious New Phishing Tactic Targets Tabs - "Most Internet users know to watch for the telltale signs of a traditional phishing attack: An e-mail that asks you to click on a link and enter your e-mail or banking credentials at the resulting Web site. But a new phishing concept that exploits user inattention and trust in browser tabs is likely to fool even the most security-conscious Web surfers.
  . . .
  Google Apps user Matt Jacob explains his frustrations with the Google (Apps) account dichotomy. I love how he refers to Google Apps accounts (lowercase a) versus Google Accounts (uppercase A). Clearly FREE vanilla Google Accounts get more preference than potentially-paid Google Apps accounts, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense."
• Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained - "If you've taken the leap and hosted your domain email with Google Apps, no doubt you've noticed that you miss out on services that regular Gmail accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Analytics, and right now, Buzz.
  
  After complaining about the disparities on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a helpful Googler unofficially got in touch to clarify and confirm the problem. Let's call her/him 'Helpful McGoogler.' Here's what HM said.
  
  To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there's only one kind of account: a Google Account."
• America's Most Wired Lunch Trucks: Thanks to Twitter, the culinary star system is hitting the streets. The result: some very unusual treats. - "A plethora of food trucks serving hip and exotic cuisines are rolling into cities and towns across the country, and they're using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to advertise their gastronomic offerings and provide up-to-the-minute location information."
• The World Cup 2010 is coming - Watch in Washington, DC - "June 11 - July 11, 2010"
• NerdWallet Picks Your Best Match from Hundreds of Credit Cards - "The best credit card isn't the one your bank offers--it's the one that pays back the most and costs the least. NerdWallet, a credit card search and filter app, pulls from over 600 cards to find the best candidate.
  
  NerdWallet's certainly not the first site in this space. BillShrink, a previously covered competitor, comes to mind. Where NerdWallet differs is in its larger database of card offerings--some seriously obscure cards and banks came up in our testing, for sure--and its claim to not limit its database to cards offering affiliate sign-up rewards. "
• New Dyson bladeless fan set to make a cool fortune in summer as sales increase by 300% - "Instead of using rotors to chop the air, which causes an uneven airflow and buffeting, the DAM blows out cooling air as a constant smooth stream.
  
  And with the absence of blades, you can safely put your hand through it.
  
  Air is sucked in through the base by a 40 watt electric motor, and then pushed out at high speed through a lip which runs around the inside of its circular head.
  
  As this is forced out, other air is drawn into the airflow, resulting in the epulsion of 405 litres every second.
  
  The fan also has a dimmer-type switch, which means the powerful current can be easily controlled.
  
  Without blades, curious children will not catch their hands in it, and the simple design makes it easy to clean."
  
  $300 for a table fan. Uh huh.
  
  
• Five Best Computer Diagnostic Tools - "Below, we've rounded up the top five answers, and now we're back to highlight the most popular computer diagnostic tools among Lifehacker readers.
  
  If things haven't gotten bad enough that you're forced to take refuge with a Live CD, SIW is a Windows-based diagnostic tool that can help you get to the bottom of things.
  . . .
  Hiren's BootCD is an impressive toolkit rolled into one packed DOS-based Live CD. Sporting over a hundred separate diagnostic and repair tools, Hiren's BootCD can help you do everything from diagnose a memory problem to clone a disk to speed test your video card. If you can't find out what is wrong with your computer after running through all the tools on Hiren's BootCD the diagnostic answer you may end up at is 'Time to buy a new computer.'
  . . .
  Your first reaction to the phrase "computer diagnostic tool" might not be 'Google!', but every computer diagnosis begins with the user wondering what the error code or chain of events leading up to the error means.
  . . .
  You'll find no shortage of Live CDs for Linux distributions, but Ubuntu has a particularly user-friendly Live CD and many people have experience with Ubuntu outside of diagnostic work, both make an Ubuntu Live CD extra appealing.
  . . .
  Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) (Live CD, Free)"

. . . . . . . . .

Inside the congressional hearings process: Not sexy perhaps, but necessary

At this time of the year, Congress and its committees are in the midst of, or concluding, hearings on numerous topics, bills, and budget considerations. Authorization, budget, appropriations and oversight hearings abound on every conceivable subject. Later this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings to consider the President's nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

On the other side of the witness table, company executives, association leaders, heads of non-profits, government officials, and presidential nominees alike are preparing for the experience of testifying before a congressional committee, an exercise likened by some to having a root canal. Recently we've seen automobile executives, energy company officials, financial industry representatives, and even White House party crashers take their turn to testify in front of congressional committees, with very mixed results and reactions. One need only consult policy periodicals or committee web sites for a schedule of the seemingly never-ending stream of congressional hearings that typically commence in February each year and run heavily through early summer.
. . .
For those engaged in preparation for a hearing, you might want to consider a handy checklist of the essential elements of an effective and successful congressional hearing, and of effective testimony, from the perspectives of both a congressional committee and a witness:...

"Inside the congressional hearings process: Not sexy perhaps, but necessary," by Bill LaForge, The Hill's Congress Blog, June 2, 2010

See also

Testifying Before Congress

Testifying Before Congress
A Practical Guide to Preparing and Delivering Testimony before Congress and Congressional Hearings for Agencies, Associations, Corporations, Military, NGOs, and State and Local Officials

By William N. LaForge

As a practical guide to assist witnesses and their organizations in preparing and delivering Congressional testimony, this book is designed for use by anyone or any organization called upon to testify before a committee of the United States Congress, and for those who are providing assistance in preparing the testimony and the witness. This book can serve as a guide through the unique maze of the Congressional hearings process for virtually any witness or organization, including especially federal departments and agencies, the federal judiciary, members and staff of the legislative branch itself, associations, corporations, the military service branches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private and voluntary organizations (PVOs), public interest entities, state and local governmental officials and institutions, and individuals who are chosen to appear as a witness before Congress for any reason on any topic.

Forthcoming Summer 2010
2010, 475-plus pages

Hardbound, $77
ISBN 10: 158733-172-1
ISBN 13: 978-1-58733-172-5

Softcover, $67
ISBN 10: 158733-163-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-58733-163-3

For more information, see TestifyingBeforeCongress.com

Assorted Links 5/28/10

One Track Mind

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• FHA Commissioner: Housing on "Life support", "very sick system" - "'This is a market purely on life support, sustained by the federal government. Having FHA do this much volume is a sign of a very sick system.'
  
  Federal Housing Commissioner David Stevens at Mortgage Bankers Association Government Housing Conference (see Bloomberg, the FHA was involved in more transactions in Q1 than Fannie and Freddie combined)"
• Scene from an Airport - "TSA Officer: A beloved name from the blogosphere.
  
  Me: And I always thought that I slipped through these lines anonymously.
  
  TSA Officer: Don't worry. No one will notice. This isn't the sort of job that rewards competence, you know."
• Murphy's Law - "[T]he Haitians who interacted with our base was that the locals viewed us with suspicion. In particular, when they would see a team of HODR volunteers engaging in literal hard labor, using sledgehammers and wheelbarrows to remove rubble from a collapsed residence, many of the Haitians apparently resented the fact that we were "stealing their jobs." In other words, the Haitians -- where unemployment is apparently 90 percent -- thought they should be getting paid to remove the rubble from their collapsed homes.
  
  When those who were affiliated with HODR would explain to the people that we were all volunteers, some of them were still suspicious. They speculated that even if we weren't being paid right then, we would probably be paid when we returned back home.
  
  Now here's what struck me about all this: isn't it incredible that after their neighborhoods got wiped out, and hundreds of thousands of Haitians died, that many Haitians were apparently devoting a lot of mental effort to speculating on how much we were getting paid to cart away their rubble?..."
• Patrick says Obama critics are ‘almost at the level of sedition’ - "Governor Deval Patrick, even as he decried partisanship in Washington, said today that Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda has become so obstinate that it 'is almost at the level of sedition.'"
• Mandatory Opinions on Public Campuses - "After serving as a trustee of The Ohio State University at Mansfield for the past nine years though, I have begun to wonder whether, in some very important ways, they are actually undermining and doing significant harm to these essential goals.
  
  Numerous surveys and studies show that the faculty and administrations of America's major public campuses are politically well to the left of the typical American. But it's not just one-sided campus opinion that's the problem. Even more so, it's the highly ideological programs, courses, centers and approaches to teaching and learning that these believers keep imposing on our students.
  . . .
  During its freshman orientation, Ohio State Mansfield has included Internet-based bias surveys that point out a student's 'bias' if the student believes that the traditional societal perspectives on sexuality and marriage are better and healthier for individuals and for our society and culture. A news article about this also said that the students who believe this were asked to physically identify themselves in front of other students. These exercises were apparently designed to single these students out in front of their peers to try to make them feel as though they are being unfairly discriminatory and prejudicial. Campus 'diversity' tends to isolate and punish dissenters.
  . . .
  At another Ohio university, in May 2008, Crystal Dixon, a black woman who was the University of Toledo's interim Associate Vice President for Human Resources, wrote a letter objecting to an op-ed in the Toledo Free Press that equated discriminating against someone because they have black skin with disapproving of a person's gay sexual activity. University President Lloyd Jacobs published a letter in Toledo's largest paper, The Blade, repudiating Ms. Dixon for this opinion. A short while later, he fired her.
  . . .
  What I have seen and learned during nine years as a trustee has convinced me, beyond doubt, that the politicization of the curriculum, programming and scholarship on our nation's public campuses is indisputably real, systemic, and pervasive; and that it is gravely detrimental to the fundamental purposes for which our public colleges and universities were founded and to the well-being of our nation and its citizens. Thomas Jefferson said, 'It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.' Fair-minded people do not want to silence the gay activists or the leftist theorists, but we all should mount resistance to the imposed ideology and punishing of dissent that too often flies the flag of 'diversity.'"
• Militarizing the Border - "President Obama is sending 1,200 National Guard troops to the border with Mexico. This should not be viewed as an innovative solution; Bush sent 1,600 troops to the border under parallel circumstances in 2002. As Ilya Shapiro recently wrote, sending some Guardsmen is no substitute for substantive immigration policy reform.
  
  The National Guard, and the military generally, should not be seen as the go-to solution for domestic problems. Certainly the role they will play on the border will not be as offensive as policing the streets of an Alabama town after a mass shooting (which the Department of Defense found was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, but declined to pursue charges) or using a city in Iowa as a rehearsal site for cordon-and-search operations looking for weapons, but politicians from both major parties have at one point or another suggested using the military for domestic operations that range from the absurd to the frightening."

Richard Feynman on The Mirror, from the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983)

• Zappos Admits Pricing Mistake Cost It $1.6 Million; But Is Upfront About Taking The Hit Itself - "For many years we've seen stories of companies making pricing mistakes at e-commerce stores. The news of those mistakes tends to spread very quickly, with lots of people piling on to order something for way less than it cost. Inevitably, the company realizes the mistake, and usually contacts everyone who ordered to let them know the order won't be fulfilled because it was a mistake. I actually have no problem with this, though some people think it's horribly evil. Either way, what seems to almost always happen is that the negative publicity that follows leads the company to change its mind and honor the original price. Sometimes, it actually takes a lawsuit to make that happen.
  
  However, this weekend, it looks like Zappos had a pretty massive pricing glitch on its sister site 6pm.com. It lasted a few hours. But what's different this time is that once Zappos fixed things, it immediately decided that it would still honor the wrong prices, even though the mistakes would end up costing the company (now owned by Amazon) $1.6 million."
• "Little-Noticed" is the New "Unexpected" - ""Unexpected" has become the term of choice for the mainstream media to excuse the Obama administration's economic failures.
  
  Yesterday I read an article in The NY Times about something unexpected in Obamacare, and one term jumped out at me (emphasis mine):
  
  About one-third of employers subject to major requirements of the new health care law may face tax penalties because they offer health insurance that could be considered unaffordable to some employees, a new study says.... It suggests that a little-noticed provision of the law could affect far more employers than Congress had assumed.
  
  That term, 'little-noticed,' sure sounded familiar. It seems that we hear that term a lot.
  
  I didn't intend on this post being so long, but the examples are so numerous:"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Progressive Christianity’s habit of ‘Embracing the Tormenters’ - "Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They 'spiritualize' the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.
  
  Church officials and partner organizations such as the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) issue strident policy statements on such topics as 'eco-justice,' broadband access for 'economically depressed rural areas,' the Israeli 'occupation,' and 'unnecessary Department of Defense spending.' But one is hard-pressed to find these church leaders denouncing the recent appointment of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. One searches in vain for an expression of solidarity with the Christian community in Jos, Plateau State, in central Nigeria, where hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Fulani jihadists during March and April of 2010. If there are any such statements, they address vaguely 'ethnic conflict' and are masterpieces of moral equivalency.
  
  Such reticence to speak about persecution is not new for liberal church leaders. Downplaying or denying the egregious human rights violations of the Soviet system was symptomatic of Leftist hatred of America and Western values. It was also considered essential to the type of appeasement of tyrants necessary to achieve the liberal Utopian dream of a peaceful, nuclear weapon-free world."
• Treat Your Own Neck - "'Treat Your Own Neck' saved my neck! The book is very thin but packed with the info you need to treat your neck pain. The author clearly explains the physiology of the neck, and describes specific exercises to treat specific types of neck pain/injury. The exercises are simple, but not intuitive."

New Definition of Crazy: 120,000-Foot Supersonic Free Fall

• Two more Census workers blow the whistle - " Last week, one of the millions of workers hired by Census 2010 to parade around the country counting Americans blew the whistle on some statistical tricks.
  
  The worker, Naomi Cohn, told The Post that she was hired and fired a number of times by Census. Each time she was hired back, it seems, Census was able to report the creation of a new job to the Labor Department.
  
  Below, I have a couple more readers who worked for Census 2010 and have tales to tell.
  
  But first, this much we know.
  
  Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs.
  
  Labor doesn't check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month.
  
  One hour! A month! So, if a worker is terminated after only one hour and another is hired in her place, then a second new job can apparently be reported to Labor . (I've been unable to get Census to explain this to me.)"
• How Universities Breed Dependency: Modern universities are providing a failure-free existence that eliminates an important component of a free society: self-reliance. - "Critics of today’s university education typically direct their displeasure at universities’ ideologically infused curriculum or the triumph of identity politics. But the role of a college education in fashioning an independently minded citizenry is central, and our schools are failing in this role.
  
  While independence is difficult to define, it certainly entails self-reliance, a preference for autonomy, a capacity to choose wisely, and the ability to conquer the passions through reason and shoulder responsibility for one’s actions. Such independence links higher education to republican governance: Self-rule is possible only if citizens have acquired the self-determining habits of mind and body; a republic of subjects is unimaginable. Indeed, the term 'liberal' in 'liberal arts' comes from the Latin liberus, which means befitting a free man, as opposed to a slave or craftsman beholden to a master.
  
  I submit that the university’s penchant for breeding dependency is far more pernicious than its tendency to slight Shakespeare. In fact, I prefer the word 'infantilizing' to dependency: it is here, in college, that generations of Americans are 'taught' to surrender liberty to the omnipotent state. It is no accident that college kids so warmly embraced Obama’s socialist vision--they already live in something resembling Sweden.
  
  Today’s academy has become a 'total institution,' a single-ticket admission theme park paid for by parents. When I tell my students that medieval universities only offered lectures, they are dumbfounded. They cannot imagine attending college bereft of school-supervised housing, pre-paid meal plans, multiple school-supplied recreational programs, spectator sports, armies of academic counselors to help write papers, and ample health professionals to cure depression or prescribe birth control devices. The university even provides self-worth, cost-free--by joining a university-funded identity group one can reaffirm one’s homosexuality or blackness.
  . . .
  There may be good news today, however. The current economic downturn is squeezing many colleges and parents financially. Drastically reducing the university’s bloated paternalism and the hoards of rescue-minded administrators could probably cut tuition in half. But more important than lowering tuition, such educational minimalism might reinvigorate independence among college students. Juvenile-style higher education could be transformed into education to inculcate adulthood. The way to do this is to remove the academic props and crutches. Private gyms, even playgrounds, could replace university bureaucracies while tuition savings could be applied to personal health insurance.
  . . .
  All and all, colleges should just treat students as responsible, independent adults, people who must choose wisely, whether it is their living arrangements or their academic majors. If they screw up, they screw up, and there will be no interventions from above. Treat them like adults and they will become adults. College graduates will have learned powerful lessons--one, that they have free will and two, perhaps even that it is unnecessary to rely on state rescues."
• Surefoot Foot Rubz: Foot massager - "Best $5 I've ever spent for relief of tired and achy feet." Surefoot Foot Rubz
• Super-carbohydrate - "Wheat starches are composed of polymers (repeating chains) of the sugar, glucose. 75% of wheat carbohydrate is the chain of branching glucose units, amylopectin, and 25% is the linear chain of glucose units, amylose.
  
  Both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme, amylase, in the human gastrointestinal tract. Amylopectin is more efficiently digested to glucose, while amylose is less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested.
  
  Amylopectin is therefore the 'complex carbohydrate' in wheat that is most closely linked to its blood sugar-increasing effect. But not all amylopectin is created equal. The structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source, differing in its branching structure and thereby efficiency of amylase accessibility.
  
  Legumes like kidney beans contain amylopectin C, the least digestible--hence the gas characteristic of beans, since undigested amylopectin fragments make their way to the colon, whereupon colonic bacteria feast on the undigested starches and generate gas, making the sugars unavailable for you to absorb.
  . . .
  The amylopectin A of wheat products, 'complex' or no, might be regarded as a super-carbohydrate, a form of highly digestible carbohydrate that is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than nearly all other carbohydrate foods."
• Computing smart-scope gunsight for US snipers - "US military boffins are about to produce a field-ready computer gunsight which will let snipers kill people on their first shot from a mile away - even with troublesome winds blowing.
  . . .
  Modern-day sniper rifles can easily throw their bullets across tremendously long distances, but beyond a certain point it becomes impossibly difficult to adjust the aim to allow for atmospheric effects - in particular for the wind. It can also be a time-consuming business allowing for all the changing factors which can affect the path of a bullet's flight - range, temperature, atmospheric pressure, the spin of the projectile itself, the relative heights of the target and shooter.
  
  Thus it is that very long-range hits beyond 2km do get made, but they are rarities. The current combat sniping record is nowadays generally credited to Corporal of Horse* Craig Harrison of the British Army, who hit and killed two Taliban machine-gunners at a distance of 2,474 metres in November last year in as many shots - and then destroyed their weapon with a third round."

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 5/24/10

Radley Balko Discusses SWAT Teams and Police Militarization on Russia Today

• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
  
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
  
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
  
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
  
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
  
• Report: Majority Of Government Doesn't Trust Citizens Either - "At a time when widespread polling data suggests that a majority of the U.S. populace no longer trusts the federal government, a Pew Research Center report has found that the vast majority of the federal government doesn't trust the U.S. populace all that much either.
  
  According to the poll--which surveyed members of the judicial, legislative, and executive branches--9 out of 10 government officials reported feeling 'disillusioned' by the populace and claimed to have 'completely lost confidence' in the citizenry's ability to act in the nation's best interests.
  . . .
  Out of 100 U.S. senators polled, 84 said they don't trust the U.S. populace to do what is right, and 79 said Americans are not qualified to do their jobs. Ninety-one percent of all government officials polled said they find citizens to be every bit as irresponsible, greedy, irrational, and selfishly motivated as government officials are."
  
• Newspaper Edits Politicians Out Of Bill Signing Photograph; Doesn't Get Why People Think That's Bad - "This is a newspaper that won't run photos of candidates running for election? It makes you wonder how they report on those elections. With illustrations? And then to claim that it's okay to edit a photograph by then calling it a "photo illustration" rather than a photo that's been edited seems a bit questionable no matter where you stand on the question of journalistic ethics."
  
• Any Excuse Will Do - "There is a law or regulation covering essentially every aspect of human existence. Over time, lawmakers with too little to do create the rules that keep us from bumping into one another by telling us to keep to the right. They protect us from ourselves by telling us to wear seat belts and helmets, and eat less salt. They appease grieving parents and outraged communities by crafting laws named after dead children that duplicate, triplicate, existing laws with minute additional requirements. In isolation, some people applaud these laws as serving a good function. Proponents are always well intentioned, but they become part of the vast mass of laws regulating us.
  
  For every regulation, there must be a consequence for its violation. When Harvey Silverglate wrote Three Felonies A Day, this could have been his inspiration, even though Scott's referring to petty offenses. The point remains that, as a society, we seek the elimination of crime and encourage and support the police in their efforts to enforce our laws. We do not, however, think much about the scope of our laws that render each of us a criminal, to some greater or lesser extent.
  
  If there was a machine that would detect every violation of law, we would all be found guilty of something. Granted, most of us would be prosecuted for petty, stupid offenses, but they are offenses nonetheless. If they are so petty and stupid, and if we wouldn't want to be prosecuted ourselves for them, why do we support their existence, enforcement and prosecution for others? Largely because we don't think it will ever happen to us. We don't mind unfairness to others anywhere near as much as we hate it when it happens to us."
  
• Mocking Muhammad:a shallow Enlightenment - "Tomorrow is ‘Draw Muhammad Day’. Bloggers, cartoonists and artists around the world plan to publish sketches of the Prophet in all sorts of weird poses. And of course they should be absolutely free to do so, free to depict the bossman of Islam with a bomb in his turban, a bee in his bonnet, or a carrot up his arse. Or even to draw a picture of themselves taking a dump on Muhammad’s head if they want, inspired, perhaps, by the American writer who responded to the recent attempted bombing of Times Square in NYC by writing: ‘I shit on Muhammad.’
  
  But while they go crazy with their doodles, which is their right in free, secular societies where we should never have to bow down before religious sensitivities, I’m going to raise some questions: Why are you so keen to mock Muhammad? Why has it become the fashion to draw silly-funny-bizarre pics of the Prophet, to the extent that leading hacks such as Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan are backing Draw Muhammad Day? Why do some people want to shit on Muhammad?
  
  Muhammad-baiting is a shallow, theatrical performance of Enlightenment values. It is a simple (in both meanings of that word) and shortcut way of demonstrating that you are for Freedom and Truth at a time when those values actually lie in tatters in Western society and few seem to know what they really mean or even whether they’re worth defending. For those who find the thought of really standing up to cultural relativism and anti-Enlightenment backwardness too terrifying a prospect, drawing Muhammad has become a quick-and-easy way of demonstrating that you’re a secular, liberal kinda guy.
  . . .
  The censorship of any piece of art, humour or journalism on the basis that it might offend religious people is a disgrace. Muslims -- like Christians, Scientologists, environmentalists, dentists, sheep-farmers and any other section of society -- don’t have a right not to be offended. The deal in properly free societies is that you have the freedom to follow whichever religion you choose, and everyone else has the freedom to mock that religion. However, the main mistake made by the supporters of Draw Muhammad Day is to assume that Islam is the main barrier to free speech today, that gatherings of irate Muslims annoyed by pictures of their Prophet are singlehandedly demolishing hard fought-for liberal values.
  . . .
  However, presenting the undermining of freedom and Enlightenment as a result of a foreign ‘jihad against free speech’ is far easier than facing up to the reality -- which is that it is not barbarians at the gates but institutions inside the gates that have denigrated Enlightenment values. The ‘jihad against free speech’ idea is more thrilling, too, giving the secular, liberal lobby a feeling that they’re involved in a life-and-death, cross-continent struggle to defend the soul of Western liberalism from baying gangs of religious types. When in fact all they’re doing is drawing pictures of Muhammad with his knob out."
  
• A Public Service for Press Secretaries - "We know you press secretaries out there have a lot to deal with. Angry reporters. Policy staffers who think they’re communicators. Aggressive colleagues. Passive aggressive committee staffers. Tickle fights. It’s a rough life. And if you stick around long enough, chances are your boss will be caught in a sex scandal. When that happens, the last thing you want to be doing is writing a statement (you’ll be more interested in making sure your resume doesn’t scream 'I work for a deviant'…trust us).
  
  So we thought we’d save you all some time, and draft a generic release for that special day. We made it pretty easy for you. Just fill in the holes…which, come to think of it…"
  
• ‘Anti-Government’ Libertarians - "Michael Gerson writes in the Washington Post, '[Rand] Paul and other libertarians are not merely advocates of limited government; they are anti-government.'
  
  I can’t speak for Rand Paul, but for the libertarians I know, this is just wrong. Libertarians are not against all government. We are precisely 'advocates of limited government.' Perhaps to the man who wrote the speeches in which a Republican president advocated a trillion dollars of new spending, the largest expansion of entitlements in 40 years, federal takeovers of education and marriage, presidential power to arrest and incarcerate American citizens without access to a lawyer or a judge, and two endless 'nation-building' enterprises, the distinction between 'limited government' and 'anti-government' is hard to see. But it is real and important.
  . . .
  What does 'anti-government' mean? We’re hearing about 'anti-government' protests in Greece. But as George Will says, 'Athens’ ‘anti-government mobs’ have been composed mostly of government employees going berserk about threats to their entitlements.' The anti-government protesters in Bangkok appear to be opposed to the current prime minister, protesting to bring back the former prime minister. And then there are the 'anarchists' who protest government budget cuts. But none of those have anything to do with American libertarians."
  
• A Bum Rap for Limited Government - "Every so often an editorial comes along that is so obtuse that you wonder if it came from human hand. I allude, not surprisingly, to the item in this morning’s New York Times, 'Limits of Libertarianism,' which arises from the kerfuffle over Rand Paul’s critique of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for its undermining the private right to freedom of association.
  
  The editorial’s main target, however, lies beyond the Paul senatorial campaign. It’s the tea party movement and its libertarian, limited government themes. But from the start the Times conflates limited government with anti government. They’re not the same. More broadly, the editorial shows beyond doubt that the Times, ever the friend of 'enlightened government,' finds danger lurking mostly in the private sector. (One wonders just how it is that those not-to-be-trusted private actors become so quickly enlightened once they get their hands on monopoly government power.)
  . . .
  Where to begin. Skip the Depression point; it’s been so often refuted that one does so again only with embarrassment for its authors. The first claim, however, warrants more than passing attention. Contending that only government power saved us from slavery and Jim Crow, it ignores the role of private power -- the abolitionists, and the civil rights movement -- that brought about that government power. More important, it invites us to believe that government had little or nothing to do with slavery and Jim Crow in the first place when in truth we would have had neither without government’s creation of those legal institutions, with legal sanctions that kept them in place. Indeed, it is limited government, government limited to securing our rights, that is the surest guarantee against those twin evils."
  
• FTA chief to transit officials: Get real and get honest - "Federal Transit Administration Administrator Peter Rogoff was unflinchingly candid in a May 18 speech he delivered to the nation’s top public transit officials in Boston. Pointing out that the future of public transportation in the U.S. is in jeopardy, Rogoff bluntly told attendees that solutions are not only about engineering and economics: They are also about 'honesty' and 'moral choices.'
  
  Transit officials and local politicians need to be more honest with the public, Rogoff said bluntly, especially about the high costs of rail versus bus transportation.
  
  'Supporters of public transit must be willing to share some simple truths that folks don't want to hear. One is this: Paint is cheap, rails systems are extremely expensive.
  
  'Yes, transit riders often want to go by rail. But it turns out you can entice even diehard rail riders onto a bus, if you call it a ‘special’ bus and just paint it a different color than the rest of the fleet.
  
  'Once you've got special buses, it turns out that busways are cheap. Take that paint can and paint a designated bus lane on the street system. Throw in signal preemption, and you can move a lot of people at very little cost compared to rail.'
  
  Did I just hear the head of FTA telling local officials to stop misleading the public about the costs of bus rapid transit versus heavy rail like they did during the Dulles Rail debate? Especially since building and operating a BRT line costs about a tenth as much?"
  
• Turn out the lights, the party's over - "People, we have seen a literal mountain of government spending around the globe. And what do we have to show for it? An avalanche of unsustainable deficits and sovereign debt levels.
  
  In the long run, it is true that we are all dead. But meanwhile, until that blessed day arrives, we are all broke!
  
  The smartest thing many countries could do right now is the old double D; Default and Devalue. However, the likely result will be a 'lost decade' of immiserizing policies undertaken at the behest of Keynes' most horrible creation, the IMF."

"Our government is the worst loan shark in history."

• Discipline Outdoes IQ in the Long Run - "A recent study at the University of Pennsylvania concluded what most of us already suspected: Hard work has more to do with performance than being naturally gifted."
• Father Maciel, John Paul II, and the Vatican Sex Crisis - "Of all the terrible sexual scandals the hierarchs in the Vatican find themselves tangled in, none is likely to do as much institutional damage as the astounding and still unfolding story of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel. The crimes committed against children by other priests and bishops may provoke rage, but they also make one want to look away. With Father Maciel, on the other hand, one can hardly tear oneself from the ghastly drama as it unfolds, page by page, revelation by revelation, in the Mexican press.
  . . .
  In 1938 Maciel was expelled from his uncle Guízar’s seminary, and shortly afterward from a seminary in the United States. According to witnesses, Maciel and his uncle had a gigantic row behind closed doors, and one witness, a Legionary who had known Maciel since childhood, told the psychoanalyst González that the bishop’s rage had to do with the fact that Maciel was locking himself up in the boarding house where he was staying with some of the younger boys at his uncle’s seminary. Bishop Guízar died of a massive heart attack the following day.
  
  Later, it would become known that Maciel had his students and seminarians procure Dolantin (morphine) for him. This led to Maciel’s suspension as head of the order in 1956. Inexplicably, he was reinstated after two years. Much later still, someone realized that his book, The Psalter of My Days, which was more or less required reading in Legionary institutions, and was a sort of Book of Hours, or prayer guide, was lifted virtually in its entirety from The Psalter of My Hours, an account written by a Spaniard who was sentenced to life in prison after the Spanish Civil War.
  . . .
  Quite apart from the damage to Maciel’s victims, there is the pressing question of why the Catholic Church, as an institution, did not condemn him when he was ordained as a priest, or when he founded the Legionaries, or when the story of his pederasty made the cover of magazines, or when enough evidence was found to conclude that Maciel should live out the rest of his life in seclusion, or even when the rumors grew strong enough to warrant a Vatican investigation of the order as a whole. The answer surprises no one: at a time in which churches are emptying, the Legionaries have been a rich source of conscripts, money and influence; in Mexico everyone from Carlos Slim to Marta Sahagún, the wife of former president Vicente Fox, gave money to or asked favors from Maciel.
  
  It was not until last year that Karol Wojtyla’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, at last authorized a visitation--churchspeak for investigation--of the entire order of the Legionaries of Christ. As usual, the press and some disaffected religious have been way ahead of the Vatican. Now we learn from the press that the order kept some 900 women under non-binding vows as consagradas, or quasi-nuns, in conditions of emotional privation and subjugation that violated even canonical law. "
• Floyd Landis: An American Hero - "Landis made, as his website notes, a very public affair out of his fight against the doping allegations, and embarked on a substantial fund-raising campaign to raise the several million dollars that he needed to fight the charges. He toured across the country, asserting his innocence over and over again, and asking for contributions to his legal defense fund. Let’s see -- I think we have a name for that in the law. Intentionally and knowingly stating a falsehood, on which others might reasonably be expected to rely (and on which they do rely) to their direct financial detriment. 'Fraud.' If I had given Landis any money after hearing his sad tale of persecution and laboratory foulups, I sure would be angry right about now."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Payback Time: Europeans Fear Crisis Threatens Liberal Benefits - "Across Western Europe, the 'lifestyle superpower,' the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.
  
  Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.
  
  Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. 'The Europe that protects' is a slogan of the European Union.
  
  But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.
  
  With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions." Emphasis added.
• Asleep at the Seal: Just how bad does a college have to be to lose accreditation? - "There was an aura of gloom in the squat, deteriorating building on the fenced-in corner lot that comprised the beginning and the end of the Southeastern campus in Washington, D.C. And for good reason: the university was about to be shut down. Two months earlier, the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools had decided to revoke the school’s accreditation. Because only accredited schools can accept federal financial aid, upon which the large majority of Southeastern students depended, the decision amounted to a death sentence for the beleaguered college.
  
  But the fact that this had happened was less surprising than the fact that it hadn’t happened sooner. Southeastern had lived for many years on the most distant margins of higher education, mired in obscurity, mediocrity, cronyism, and intermittent corruption. Students routinely dropped out and defaulted on their student loans while the small, nonselective school lurched from one financial crisis to another. Yet during all that time Southeastern enjoyed the goldest of gold approval seals: 'regional' accreditation, the very same mark of quality granted to Ivy League universities including Princeton, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell, along with world-famous research institutions like Georgetown University, which sits in wealth and splendor above the Potomac River just a few miles away.
  
  The decades-long saga of Southeastern’s perpetual dysfunction and ultimate demise exposes a gaping hole in America’s system of consumer protection for higher education. The government exercises remarkably little oversight over the colleges and universities into which hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are poured every year, relying instead on a tissue-thin layer of regulation at the hands of accreditors that are funded and operated by the colleges themselves. The result is chronic failure at hundreds of colleges nationwide, obscure and nonselective institutions where low-income and minority students are more likely to end up with backbreaking student-loan debt than a college degree. The accreditation system is most egregiously failing the students who most need a watchdog looking out for their interests. The case of Southeastern shows how.
  . . .
  On August 31, 2009, Southeastern finally lost the accreditation it had clung to, barely, for thirty-two years. The students and faculty dispersed, and the tiny campus sits empty today. In December, the university’s few remaining assets--the building, the student records, and materials associated with the degree programs--were absorbed by the Graduate School, a thriving continuing education program that was associated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture until last year. Southeastern itself seems destined to fade into memory. The picture of President Obama has disappeared from the Web site, which now simply says, 'We are not accepting students at this time.'"

Name that Tune II

• ReclaimPrivacy.org: Facebook Privacy 101 - "If you’ve been watching the slow motion train wreck that is Facebook.com’s recent effort to revamp its privacy promises, you may be wondering where to start making sense of the dizzying array of privacy options offered by the world’s largest online social network. Fortunately, developers are starting to release free new tools so that you don’t need to read a statement longer than the U.S. Constitution or earn a masters degree in Facebook privacy in order to get started.
  
  Reclaimprivacy.org hosts an easy-to-use, open source tool that can help Facebook users very quickly determine what types of information they are sharing with the rest of the world. To use it, visit reclaimprivacy.org and drag the 'bookmarklet' over into your bookmarks area. Then log in to facebook.com, and browse to your privacy settings page. Then, click the bookmark and it will run a series of Javascript commands that produce a report showing your various privacy settings, and suggest ways to strengthen weaker settings."
• Google TV: everything you ever wanted to know - "Google made some waves yesterday when it announced the new Google TV platform, backed by major players like Sony, Logitech, Intel, Dish Network, and Best Buy. Built on Android and featuring the Chrome browser with a full version of Flash Player 10.1, Google TV is supposed to bring 'the web to your TV and your TV to the web,' in Google's words. It's a lofty goal that many have failed to accomplish, but Google certainly has the money and muscle to pull it off. But hold up: what is Google TV, exactly, and why do all these companies think it's going to revolutionize the way we watch TV? Let's take a quick walk through the platform and see what's what.
  
  Google TV isn't a single product -- it's a platform that will eventually run on many products, from TVs to Blu-ray players to set-top boxes. The platform is based on Android, but instead of the Android browser it runs Google's Chrome browser as well as a full version of Flash Player 10.1. That means Google TV devices can browse to almost any site on the web and play video -- Hulu included, provided it doesn't get blocked. It also means that Google TV devices can run almost all Android apps that don't require phone hardware. You'll still need to keep your existing cable or satellite box, however -- most Google TV devices won't actually have any facility for tuning TV at launch, instead relying on your existing gear plugged in over HDMI to do the job. There's a lot of potential for clunkiness with that kind of setup, so we'll have to see how it works in person."
• 'Steve Jobs' switches to Android: 'Apple now is chasing Google' - "Steve Jobs -- no, not the one in Cupertino, the one who blogs -- is ditching his iPhone, going Googly, and venting his spleen.
  
  "Goodbye, Apple. I'm ditching my iPhone. Seriously, I'm gone," writes Newsweek senior editor Dan Lyons on his Newsweek blog. In his alter ego of "Fake Steve," Lyons also comments on all things Apple on his parody website The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
  
  Fake Steve/Dan Lyons hates AT&T's iPhone service -- so much so that last December, in his Fake Steve persona, he launched what he intended to be a parody protest movement entitled Operation Chokehold. However, it turned out that so many non-parody-minded AT&T haters thought that Fake Steve's idea of slamming Big Phone's service was a real-world good idea, that he was forced to recant the idea and request that his Chokeholders chill.
  
  But his distaste for AT&T's lousy service isn't the only reason for his defection from the iPhone. 'I was already fed up with my lousy AT&T service,' he writes for Newsweek, 'and was seriously considering switching to the HTC Incredible, an Android-powered phone that runs on the Verizon network. But then, after seeing Google's new mobile-phone software, I've made up my mind.'
  . . .
  And so Fake Steve is switching to Android. After congratulating the unashamedly 'mocking' Apple-bashing by Google execs at that company's just-completed developers conference, he notes: 'Now Google is saying, hey, nice garden, have fun sitting in it. By yourself.'
  
  Real Steve would do well to sit up and notice. There's something to be said for Malcolm Gladwell's concept of a 'tipping point,' and if Apple's carefully polished public image tips from that of sexy, future-defining innovator to selfish, defensive control-freak, it will be no easy feat to tip it back. "
• Low Flow Showerheads - "Low flow showerheads (low-flo, low-flow) are an inexpensive way to save water."

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Low Flow Showerheads

Low flow showerheads (low-flo, low-flow) are an inexpensive way to save water.

It's not just low flow, it's the law. In 1995, the National Energy Policy Act mandated the use of toilets that use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. Since then, low-flow plumbing fixtures including toilets, faucet aerators and showerheads have been developed that save substantial amounts of water compared to conventional fixtures while providing the same utility.
. . .
Conventional faucet aerators don't compensate for changes in inlet pressure, so the greater the water pressure, the more water you use. New technology compensates for pressure and provides the same flow regardless of pressure. Aerators are also available that allow water to be turned off at the aerator itself. Showerheads use similar aerator technology and multiple flow settings to save water.

Low Flow Plumbing Fixtures, from ToolBase

Numerous models are available, but one that we use and like is the Ultra Saver Showerhead (manufactured by Whedon Products model USB3C), which can be purchased for less than $10 at most hardware stores.

More

• WaterSense Showerheads - from the EPA
• American Water Works Association (AWWA)
• Water-Saving Tips - from AWWA
• Ways to Save Water - from the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection
• Water Use It Wisely
• Low Flow Plumbing Fixtures - from ToolBase (NAHB)
• The Best Low-Flow Showerheads

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 5/20/10

Richard Feynman on Seeing Things, from the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983)

• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• Green: Obama is a victim of Bush's failed promises - "It’s all George Bush’s fault.
  
  George Bush, who doesn’t have a vote in Congress and who no longer occupies the White House, is to blame for it all.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to put all bills on the White House web site for five days before signing them.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to have the congressional health care negotiations broadcast live on C-SPAN.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to end earmarks.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo in the first year.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to make peace with direct, no pre-condition talks with America’s most hate-filled enemies during his first year in office, ushering in a new era of global cooperation.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to end the hiring of former lobbyists into high White House jobs.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to end no-compete contracts with the government.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to disclose the names of all attendees at closed White House meetings.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise for a new era of bipartisan cooperation in all matters.
  
  He broke Obama’s promise to have chosen a home church to attend Sunday services with his family by Easter of last year.
  
  Yes, it’s all George Bush’s fault. President Obama is nothing more than a puppet in the never-ending, failed Bush administration.
  
  If only George Bush wasn’t still in charge, all of President Obama’s problems would be solved. His promises would have been kept, the economy would be back on track, Iran would have stopped its work on developing a nuclear bomb and would be negotiating a peace treaty with Israel, North Korea would have ended its tyrannical regime, and integrity would have been restored to the federal government.
  
  Oh, and did I mention what it would be like if the Democrats, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, didn’t have the heavy yoke of George Bush around their necks. There would be no earmarks, no closed-door drafting of bills, no increase in deficit spending, no special-interest influence (unions), no vote buying (Nebraska, Louisiana)."
• America 101 With Dean Obama: America is now a campus, and Obama is our Dean - "This is the strangest presidency I have seen in my lifetime. President Obama gives soaring lectures on civility, but still continues his old campaign invective ('get in their face,' 'bring a gun to a knife fight,' etc.) with new attacks on particular senators, Rush Limbaugh, and entire classes of people--surgeons, insurers, Wall Street, those at Fox News, tea-partiers, etc.
  
  And like the campaign, he still talks of bipartisanship (remember, he was the most partisan politician in the Senate), but has rammed through health care without a single Republican vote. His entire agenda--federal take-overs of businesses, near two-trillion-dollar deficits, health care, amnesty, and cap and trade--does not earn a majority in the polls. Indeed, the same surveys reveal him to be the most polarizing president in memory.
  
  His base was hyper-critical of deficit spending under Bush, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan, and government involvement with Wall Street. But suddenly even the most vocal of the left have gone silent as Obama’s felonies have trumped Bush’s misdemeanors on every count.
  
  All this reminds me of the LaLa land of academia. Let me explain.
  
  Last week, Obama was at it again. He blasted the oil companies and his own government for lax regulation in the Gulf, apparently convinced that no one in the media would consider his last 16 months of governance in any way responsible for, well, federal governance. (I don’t have strong views on the degree of culpability a president has for lax federal agencies amid disasters, only that I learned from the media between 2004-8 that a president must accept a great deal of blame after most catastrophes [at least Katrina was nature- rather than human- induced].)
  
  Obama also trashed, inter alia, Halliburton for the spill, as he had done on other matters ritually in the campaign (“I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all,” “The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton will be over when I’m in the White House”). Obama seemed to assume that few cared that his administration just gave Halliburton a $568 million no-bid contract.
  . . .
  The list of his blatant contradictions could be multiplied. I’ve written here about the past demagoguing on tribunals, Predators, Guantanamo, renditions, Afghanistan, Iraq, wiretaps, intercepts, and the Patriot Act, and the subsequent Obama embrace of all of them, in some cases even trumping Bush in his exuberance.
  . . .
  I think we, the American people, are seen by Obama as a sort of Ivy League campus, with him as an untouchable dean. So we get the multicultural bromides, the constant groupthink, and the reinvention of the self that we see so often among a professional class of administrator in universities (we used to get their memos daily and they read like an Obama teleprompted speech). Given his name, pedigree, charisma, and eloquence, Obama could say or do almost anything--in the way race/class/gender adjudicate reality on campus, or perhaps in the manner the old gentleman C, pedigreed rich students at prewar Princeton sleepwalked through their bachelor’s degrees, almost as a birthright. (I am willing to apologize for this crude analogy when the Obama Columbia undergraduate transcript is released and explains his next rung Harvard.) In other words, the public does not grasp to what degree supposedly elite universities simply waive their own rules when they find it convenient.
  . . .
  On an elite university campus what you have constructed yourself into always matters more than what you have done. An accent mark here, a hyphenated name there is always worth a book or two. There is no bipartisanship or indeed any political opposition on campuses; if the Academic Senate weighs in on national issues to 'voice concern,' the ensuing margin of vote is usually along the lines of Saddam’s old lopsided referenda."
• Anchors Aweigh and the Goatf*** in the Gulf - "Hey, no disrespect to the United States Coast Guard, which does a heckuva job patrolling for drunks in speedboats and rescuing those in peril on the ... um, still waters.
  
  But somebody please tell me, as I am watching grandly uniformed Coast Guard officers testify about the Goatf*** in the Gulf: What are all those splendid ribbons on their chests for?
  
  I mean, the Coast Guard is a branch of the Homeland Security Department, not a military outfit per se. So are these combat ribbons? Are they merit badges for rope-tying and seamanship? I really want to know.
  
  It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to be so rude as to pose the question -- if these grandees didn't have so many ribbons festooned across their chests. I mean, the last time I saw the genuine war hero General Petraeus on the TV I counted eight rows of ribbons on his chest, many of them representing medals for valor in mortal combat."
• A.P.: The Drug War Is a Disastrous Failure - "Today the Associated Press distributed a story that takes a remarkably skeptical view of the war on drugs.
  . . .
  'I have been the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance for ten years,' says Tony Newman, 'and this is one of the hardest hitting indictments against the drug war I've ever seen.' I've been covering the war on drugs for more than 20 years, and I can't recall seeing a more skeptical treatment of current policy in a news story from a mainstream media outlet.'
  
  Still, the story implicitly favors a timid and probably inconsequential solution: shifting anti-drug money from interdiction and enforcement to 'prevention and treatment.' The fact that Kerlikowske and the president who appointed him (an admitted drug user, as A.P. notes) officially favor such a shift speaks volumes about its limitations. As I've argued before, moving money around in the anti-drug budget does not necessarily produce a more effective, or even less repressive, policy. The only effective way to address the prohibition-related problems highlighted by the article--such as corruption, black-market violence, and diversion of law enforcement resources--is by repealing prohibition."
• The Roots of the Tea Parties - "The sight of middle-class Americans rallying to protest overtaxing, overspending, Wall Street bailouts, and government-directed health care scares the bejeezus out of a lot of people. The elite media are full of stories declaring the Tea Partiers to be racists, John Birchers, Glenn Beck zombies, and God knows what. So it’s a relief to read a sensible discussion (subscription required) by John Judis, the decidedly leftist but serious journalist-historian at the New Republic. Once the managing editor the journal Socialist Revolution, Judis went on to write a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. and other books, so he knows something about ideological movements in the United States. Judis isn’t happy about the Tea Party movement, but he warns liberals not to dismiss it as fringe, AstroTurf, or a front group for the GOP:
  . . .
  There’s plenty for libertarians to argue with in Judis’s essay. But it’s an encouraging report for those who think it’s a good thing that millions of Americans are rallying to the cause of smaller government and lower spending. And certainly it’s the smartest, most historically grounded analysis of the Tea Party movement I’ve seen in the mainstream liberal media."
• Are Democratic lobbyists invisible to the media? - "Did you know Harry Reid’s former banking staffer is a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs? Did you know former Democratic Senator John Breaux is also a Goldman Sachs lobbyist and a Citigroup lobbyist?
  
  Not if you rely on the New York Times, which glaringly omitted these facts."
• "The Strategic Imperative Not to Hire Anybody" - "I've been telling my students, particularly my undergraduates, two things:
  
  1. Almost every employee today has to consider him- or herself to be, at least partially, an entrepreneur. You should be looking frequently over your shoulder for competitive threats and opportunities. You should continually be updating your portfolio of skills and assets.
  
  2. If you don't like this--the insecurity and the risk--do what I do: work for the government. (Well, that may change soon, too.)"
• Update on Libertarian Videographer Arrested for Filming FIJA Action: Facing Possible Eight Years - "I blogged about George Donnelly's arrest and release last week outside a Allentown, PA, courthouse for videotaping FIJA activists handing out information, but he was released merely into house arrest, and faces a possible eight years in jail for allegedly assaulting one of the federal agents who accosted him. This report from the 'Photography Is Not A Crime' blog has some details, though Donnelly himself is not talking to the press about it right now:"
• Neocons Finish Out of the Money in Kentucky Race - "Rand Paul’s landslide victory in the Kentucky Republican primary is being hailed as a big win for the Tea Party movement, a slap in the face to the Republican establishment, and maybe even as a harbinger of the rise of libertarian Republicanism. (Only 19 percent of Kentucky Republicans say they’re libertarians, but that’s got to be more than before the Rand Paul campaign.) It’s also a big loss for Washington neoconservatives, who warned in dire terms about the horrors of a Paul victory.
  . . .
  The big-government Republican establishment rallied to Grayson’s side against the previously unknown opthalmologist from Bowling Green. Late in the campaign, Grayson ran ads featuring endorsements from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Cheney, Rick Santorum, and Rudy Giuliani. That’s more raw tonnage of Republican heavyweights than you’d see on a national convention stage.
  
  And after all that Kentucky Republicans gave a 25-point victory to a first-time candidate who opposed bailouts, deficits, Obamacare, and the war in Iraq. That’s a sharp poke in the eye to the neocons who tried so hard to block him. They don’t want a prominent Republican who opposes this war and the next one, who will appeal to American weariness with war and big government. They don’t want other elected Republicans -- many of whom, according to some members of Congress, now regret the Iraq war -- to start publicly backing away from perpetual interventionism.
  
  There were plenty of winners tonight. But the big losers were the neoconservatives, who failed to persuade the Republican voters of Kentucky that wars and bailouts are essential for national progress."
• Why Dershowitz? - "Slate has started a new sub-blog by Kathryn Schulz on what it means to make mistakes, called The Wrong Stuff. Naturally, the first place she looked was criminal defense lawyers, who (as opposed to any other discrete group on the planet) are universally wrong more than any other. So why is her first interview with Alan Dershowitz?
  . . .
  There is possibly no individual who dabbles in the field of criminal defense who less reflects the mainstream of criminal defense than Dershowitz, Harvard lawprof and perpetually available guest whenever there's an open microphone. This opening Q&A smacks of his disconnect from reality. I bet you didn't know that your problem is that you're making too much money. I bet other people didn't know that they think well of you. I bet.
  
  Dershowitz is one of the few in criminal law to attain the status of household name. Whether it's Larry King or the Jewish Daily Forward, Dershowitz is the go-to guy to espouse the criminal defense lawyer's point of view. The only problem is that he doesn't have the slightest clue what it means to be a criminal defense lawyer in the trenches.
  . . .
  It must be wonderful to be Dershowitz, always self-aggrandizing and never suffering the 'discomfort' that permeates the work done by the rest of us. Rarely has anyone been held out as an example of the criminal defense lawyer who less reflects what we do. There is absolutely nothing in his answers to Shulz's questions that suggests the he has the slightest appreciation of what real lawyers do every day in the trenches. But then, we're often wrong and fabulously wealthy, so why should Dershowitz care?
  
  And this is the understanding that the public has of our efforts. It must be great to be a superstar criminal defense lawyer. For the rest of us, who haven't managed to meet Dershowitz's norm, it's just hard work in the trenches."

Narcoleptic Cat

• Fat Duck and Noma - "Increasingly, I think meals like this are B.S. Two years ago I ate at Noma, now labeled 'the best restaurant in the world' and I barely enjoyed it."
• TITLE - ""
• TITLE - ""
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Mexico: Updated U.S. State Department Warning Adds Three New Areas - "The U.S. State Department issued an updated travel warning that added three states to areas it recommends travelers avoid because of drug violence: Tamaulipas, parts of Sinaloa, and Michoacan. Michoacan is the wintering ground of North America’s Monarch butterflies."
• 10 most profitable college majors and highest paying college degrees - "Here's Money College's list of the highest and lowest-paying college degrees, based on data gathered by Payscale.com. If you love numbers and science, you're in luck: 'The kinds of majors where you learn to integrate mathematics and science with the everyday world have a tremendous benefit in terms of earnings potential,' PayScale.com's Al Lee said.
  ,br>Making money may not always be the biggest priority, in which case, go with your gut. You can always make billions of dollars, and give it all to charity.
  ,br>Ten most profitable majors that turn into the highest paying college degrees:"
• Harvard, Plan B - "There's something about a Wheeler and dealer who outsmarted Harvard. Adam Wheeler, that is.
  . . .
  What he's seriously undermined is the belief that this can't be done, that some kid who got tossed from Bowdoin College beat Harvard at its own game. Absolutely wrong. But some feat. If he gets time, anybody want to bet he won't find a way to become the warden before he's done?
  
  Sorry for this post, but in an internet with more marketing scammers than anything else, this kid stands out. I'm so ashamed of myself."
• Invisible Assholes: Elena Kagan and America's Rude Legacy of anti-Harvard Bigotry - "Professor Kagan's story is not so different than those of countless other Harvard Assholes; born precocious, a budding intellect nurtured by a crib full of Swedish monochrome creativity blocks and gender-neutral Balinese finger puppets, at age 3 she earned admission to Hundred Acre Wood Academy, one of the Upper West Side's most selective Ivy League feeder preschools. From there it was off to Leon Trotsky Prep where she distinguished herself as captain of the state champion Feminist Theory team. She displayed a promising raw talent for academic Asshole bullshit, but it was not quite yet up to Harvard's exacting standards. Still, she would not be dissuaded in her quest for the coveted brown brass ring of Harvard Assholicity. She persevered, honing her bullshit at Princeton and Oxford, two less selective junior colleges that sometimes offer a backdoor path into Harvard. And then, the long awaited call to 'The Show' -- the famed Asshole Big Leagues of Harvard Law School, where in three years of intensive study America's most promising young Assholes are taught everything there is to know, about everything worth knowing.
  
  Despite her underprivileged background Professor Kagan rose to the challenge and graduated magna cum laude, an honor reserved for the top 89% of Harvard Law alumni. Although her diploma fully qualified her for any conceivable position in the known Asshole universe, she took her first paying job in the charitable sector -- teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, a lonely academic legal bullshit outpost in the harsh intellectual wilderness of the American Midwest. Her Asshole missionary work and softball skills quickly drew the attention of then-President Bill Clinton who, despite his Yale degree, was wise enough to see that she had 'the right stuff' to serve as his Assistant Deputy White House Under-Under Subsecretary for Minority Elderly Women's Domestic Pet Policy. Her leadership in that critical office was nothing short of revolutionary, increasing its bullshit report output by 15% while introducing colorful pie charts. From there she made a triumphant return to Harvard Law as a fully tenured faculty Asshole, eventually rising to Dean of Assholes where she introduced important reforms such as free student lounge coffee and banning the U.S. military war machine from campus. It thus came as little surprise that she was tapped by fellow Harvard Asshole Barack Obama to serve as his Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee.
  . . .
  But no matter how padded our resumes, no matter how brown our noses, no matter how many faculty parking permits on our Subaru Foresters, it never seems enough in the eyes of America's non-Harvard power elites who laughingly deign themselves worthy to sit in judgment of us. I was shocked as you when I learned that -- even in this late date in our history -- some have openly suggested there are 'too many' Harvard-trained Assholes on the court, even as that number barely exceeds 60%. No thanks to its unwritten Affirmative Action program for Yalies. And now it appears that Professor Kagan will be compelled to face a public inquisition by a panel of her inferiors, some of whom I am told are actually are products of Cornell. For God's sake, what next? Brown?
  
  But Supreme Court vacancies are only one area in public life where Harvard Assholes face a daunting glass ceiling. As hard as it is to imagine, anti-Harvard Asshole discrimination is even worse in America's non-lifetime appointment job sector. Harvard graduates regularly find themselves all but blackballed from participation in some of our society's most prestigious and highest-paying professions. One need only look at the curriculum vitae of America's country music singers, NBA all-stars, and lingerie supermodels to realize that entire swaths of society have hung out a de facto 'Harvard Assholes Need Not Apply' sign. The message from the Old Boys network may be transmitted in silence, but it comes through loud and clear: 'You're good enough to run our FCC, Harvard boy, but not good enough for a hiphopper recording contract. We'll let you design our GM bailout plans, but don't even think about driving our Nascarmobiles.'"
• Super Terrific Japanese Thing: Ramen Fork - "Behold, the Ramen Fork. A fork with both tine for noodles and a small bowl for soup base. It's basically a spork, just a little more professional. As a frequent ramen eater -- mostly thanks to Ramenbox -- I am constantly irked by the difficulty of eating noodles and slurping soup simultaneously. Their supposed to be eaten together, and yet, no utensil has been able to accomplish this. Until now. Because of the Ramen Fork."
• Augmented Reality Systems May be Beneficial in Treating Real Phobias - "Exposure therapy is one well known technique used to treat people's phobias, but the knowledge that one will have to face the actual source of the fear may be too much for someone to even consider starting. A team of Spanish scientists has now shown that using special glasses to overlay virtual cockroaches onto one's field of view resulted in real anxiety in six women who truly hate the pesky buggers."
• It’s Just Cool: Lasers Zap Mosquitoes - "Besides guiding your saw or projecting level and plumb lines, lasers can now zap mosquitoes. A team at Intellectual Ventures Lab created a working prototype of their Photonic Fence to detect mosquitoes flying at a distance and shoot them down using lasers. The basic components came from inexpensive consumer electronics (e.g., laser printers, Blu-Ray disc writers, camcorders, and video game consoles).
  
  The Photonic Fence would comprise posts up to 100′ apart with infrared LEDs, retroreflectors, and cameras mounted on each one. Software -- lots and lots of software -- would monitor the cameras’ outputs for shadows caused by insects flying through the infrared vertical planes between the posts. A nonlethal laser then illuminates the intruding bug, and determines its size and how fast its wings are beating to distinguish a variety of bugs (e.g., mosquitoes, butterflies, bumblebees…). The sex of a mosquito can also be ascertained because females are larger than males and have slower wingbeats. 'This is useful because only female mosquitoes bite humans.'"

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 5/16/10

Noted Bear Bob Janjuah Sighted on Bloomberg

• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• The Dark Magic of Structured Finance - "In Too Big To Save Robert Pozen gives a clever example, based on an excellent paper by Coval, Jurek and Stafford, which explains both the lure of structured finance and why the model exploded so quickly.
  
  Suppose we have 100 mortgages that pay $1 or $0. The probability of default is 0.05. We pool the mortgages and then prioritize them into tranches such that tranche 1 pays out $1 if no mortgage defaults and $0 otherwise, tranche 2 pays out $1 if 1 or fewer mortgages defaults, $0 otherwise. Tranche 10 then pays out $1 if 9 or fewer mortgages default and $0 otherwise. Tranche 10 has a probability of defaulting of 2.82 percent. A fortiori tranches 11 and higher all have lower probabilities of defaulting. Thus, we have transformed 100 securities each with a default of 5% into 9 with probabilities of default greater than 5% and 91 with probabilities of default less than 5%.
  
  Now let's try this trick again. Suppose we take 100 of these type-10 tranches and suppose we now pool and prioritize these into tranches creating 100 new securities. Now tranche 10 of what is in effect a CDO will have a probability of default of just 0.05 percent, i.e. p=.000543895 to be exact. We have now created some 'super safe,' securities which can be very profitable if there are a lot of investors demanding triple AAA."
  
  From the comments: So is Congress like the Good Witch of the North?
  
  
• Auditing the Fed: “The Single Greatest Act of Bipartisanship Since Obama Took Office” - "Yesterday, I noted that there weren't many opportunities for conservatives to find themselves in agreement with the Congress' only declared socialist Bernie Sanders. But that's exactly what happened when the audit the fed amendment was attached to the financial reform bill on a 96-0 vote. Are the left and the right finally coming to agree that crony capitalism and rent seeking by big business has had a corrupting influence on our government?"
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorses Trey Grayson over Rand Paul in Kentucky Senate - "If anything could push the GOP towards some free-market populism -- opposing bailouts, standing up to lobbyists, cutting spending -- it would be the election of Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul, in Kentucky. The younger Paul has railed against bailouts and lobbyists, while the establishment of the GOP has rallied behind Secretary of State Trey Grayson in the primary.
  
  But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has endorsed Trey Grayson, TPM reveals. I generally like the Chamber, as it tends to oppose regulatory robbery. But when the Chamber shuns a candidate for being too free market, that’s quite an endorsement."
• Who Is Fighting (Or Helping) Whom In Mexico’s Drug Wars? - "Are Mexican authorities fighting an all out war against drug cartels or simply helping one drug organization win the battle against other criminal gangs for the most lucrative trafficking route to the United States? Street banners alongside Mexico’s highways--put up by rival drug gangs--have long suggested that the administration of Felipe Calderon is in bed with the Sinaloa cartel, that country’s most powerful drug organization. As The Economist reported earlier this year, the Mexican government’s efforts against drug trafficking have been fairly one-sided:
  . . .
  Also, these allegations present a conundrum for president Obama, who happens to host Felipe Calderon on Monday for a state dinner at the White House. The administration has been pressed by the Mexican government to substantially increase the level of assistance in the fight against cartels. However, if it becomes clear that high-ranking Mexican law enforcement officials are in bed with one or more criminal organizations (not the first time that something like this has happened) and that U.S. intelligence has ended up in the hands of drug lords, there will be growing resistance within the U.S. government to further aid Mexico. This in turn, will only exacerbate the tension between both governments.
  
  'Plata o plomo' (which literally means 'silver or lead' and refers to how officials are either corrupted or killed by drug lords) has long been a common feature of the drug war in Latin America. It is not surprising that multi-billion dollar cartels corrupt the officials who are supposed to fight them. What is surprising is some people in Washington still believe that this is a winnable war."
• 16 Reasons Why California Is The Next Greece - "THE BIG ONE: California has no central bank and can't print money to stave off debt.
  
  This is everything.
  
  The inability of Greece to give itself some monetary flexibility was devastating, and it's the reason the UK is not facing an acute crisis, despite a very high level of debt. Eventually, California will need a bailout from DC, but while European leaders came together for Greece and the PIIGS, could you imagine our fractious Congress saving Europe -- especially if the GOP takes over in November?"
• Housing never really improved -- 10 charts showing the United States housing market is entering the second wave of problems. 1 out of 4 people with no mortgage payment in the last year are still not in the foreclosure process. - "To put it bluntly, the U.S. housing market today is in deep water. Nothing exemplifies the transfer of risk to the public from the private investment banks more than the deep losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae announced a stunning first quarter loss of $13.1 billion while Freddie Mac lost $8 billion. At the same time, toxic mortgage superstar JP Morgan Chase announced a $3.3 billion profit for Q1. This reversal of fortunes has been orchestrated perfectly by Wall Street. Since the toxic assets were never marked to market, the big losses have been funneled to the big GSEs (and as we will show in this article, now makes up 96.5 percent of the entire mortgage market). In other words, banks are making profits gambling on Wall Street while pushing out mortgages that are completely backed by the government. We are letting the folks that clearly had no system of underwriting mortgages correctly or any financial prudence lend out government backed money and the losses are piling up but only in the nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What a sweet deal. Stick the junk in a taxpayer silo.
  . . .
  In total the housing market is in worse shape today than it was a few years ago. If the stock market was tied to housing we probably have a Dow 20,000 with 14 million foreclosures. The bailouts have been one large transfer of wealth to the banking sector. Remember that the bailouts were brought about under the guise of helping the housing market and keeping people in their homes. None of that has happened. Ironically the only thing that seems to keep people in their home is when they stop paying their mortgage! If that is the strategy we have arrived at after $13 trillion in bailouts and backstops to Wall Street we are in for a world of problems."
• Black, Brown, and Beige: Duke Ellington’s music and race in America. - "Celebrating Ellington’s seventieth birthday, in 1969, Ralph Ellison recalled what it was like when, in his youth, in the thirties, the Ellington band came to Oklahoma City 'with their uniforms, their sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined fantasy,' all of it like 'news from the great wide world.' For black boys like Ellison all over the country, the band had been 'an example and goal,' he wrote. Who else--black or white--had ever been 'so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?'
  
  Two years before Ellington died, in 1972, Yale University held a gathering of leading black jazz musicians in order to raise money for a department of African-American music. Aside from Ellington, the musicians who came for three days of concerts, jam sessions, and workshops included Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams, and Willie (the Lion) Smith. During a performance by a Gillespie-led sextet, someone evidently unhappy with this presence on campus called in a bomb threat. The police attempted to clear the building, but Mingus refused to leave, urging the officers to get all the others out but adamantly remaining onstage with his bass. 'Racism planted that bomb, but racism ain’t strong enough to kill this music,' he was heard telling the police captain. (And very few people successfully argued with Mingus.) 'If I’m going to die, I’m ready. But I’m going out playing ‘Sophisticated Lady.’' Once outside, Gillespie and his group set up again. But coming from inside was the sound of Mingus intently playing Ellington’s dreamy thirties hit, which, that day, became a protest song, as the performance just kept going on and on and getting hotter. In the street, Ellington stood in the waiting crowd just beyond the theatre’s open doors, smiling."
• California Wants to Attract Jobs -- But What About Retention? - "The debt and taxes in California are a deterrent to job creation. Can Schwarzenegger's new coordinating agency fix that? In his YouTube address announcing his new Office of Economic Development, Gov. Schwarzenegger said the office would make starting or growing a business 'as painless as possible, because we'll be cutting through all the red tape and streamlining state bureaucracy. And believe me, there's a lot of state bureaucracy.' While it's nice to streamline, maybe part of the problem is that the state is running 100 programs in 28 state agencies in the first place. All that job-creating bureaucracy costs money, and that means job-killing taxes.
  
  If your state isn't business friendly, billboards and 'one stop' permitting won't matter. Marketers know that it is many times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain existing ones. The same is true with jobs. Instead of working so hard to spur job growth, lowering taxes and easing regulatory burdens can enable existing businesses to thrive."
• A 'High Risk' State: California Makes Top Ten List For Potential Government Default - "California bonds are now viewed as one of the riskiest places in the world for investors to put their money. At least that is according to the latest 'CMA Sovereign Risk Monitor,' which ranks the world’s most volatile sovereign debt issuers. The analysts, in a May 11 list, said California has the seventh highest risk of default.
  
  The six with rankings more worrisome than California are Venezuela (the worst), followed by Argentina, Pakistan, Greece, Ukraine and the Emirate of Dubai. California ranks ahead of the Republic of Latvia, the Region of Sicily and Iraq. See the list under 'Highest Default Probabilities.' (The report is issued by CMA Market, a 'credit information specialist' with offices in London, New York and Singapore.)"

Duke Ellington: Take The "A" Train

• Tyler Cowen, a blogger, professor and organizer of rules on how the world works - "Cowen is 48. He grew up in Hillsdale, N.J., an hour's drive from New York. His mother stayed home and his father was president of the chamber of commerce. He has a younger brother (a cook) and an older sister (a grocery store manager). Holly Cowen recalls her brother acquiring vast quantities of information before he was 4. He read constantly, even at dinner, though not to the exclusion of playing sports. 'He wasn't a total nerd,' she says. 'He was balanced.'"
• Vanity sizing: the consumer spending edition - "Yes, it’s another installment in my pet theory series, the myth of vanity sizing (links to previous entries appear at close); this one being a discussion of the influence of the evolution of consumer spending. Described most succinctly:
  
  Manufacturers don’t know who their customers are anymore.
  
  I concede this broad generalization is at least the size of the side of a barn. Humor me, let’s just say most large apparel firms have less an idea of who the end consumer is than at any other point in history. The reasons they don’t know anymore are influences that can be attributed to:
  
  1. The average clothes buying consumer is changing where and how they buy.
  
  2. How the windfall of low cost off-shore manufactured apparel has contributed to evolving expectations and subsequent disappointments.
  
  3. Why the unintended consequences of consumer credit to finance apparel purchases has created an apparel sizing problem for all concerned.
  . . .
  Do you recall the very first time you were in a store and noticed a great top name brand that was being sold for an uncustomary low price? Perhaps you noticed because it was a brand you coveted (confirmation bias). This would have been about 15 to 20 years ago, give or take five years. In the beginning, people were very excited about it. They were happy to buy big names they previously could only have aspired to own. These products were the first of the big push coming in from off shore. Product landed at the loading dock with the 40% hang tags already attached. People were so excited, they didn’t care that the fit was a little off. Between price and the anticipation of acquisition, they were willing to overlook a small defect (like fit or diminished product complexity) because they wanted The Brand so badly. I remember that. It was exciting. Nobody cared that the back neck was cut too deeply so the front rode up into the neckline, it had a horsie dammit! And everybody wanted one. Me too."
• Pattern of Death - "The future of terrorism, according to John Robb, will be the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to broadly shared narrative. That might include attacking artists in university lecture halls who’ve had the temerity to draw ‘Mohammed’ cartoons, encouraging piracy, sowing mines and IEDs at random, or using cell phone technology to stage flash events. Open Source Warfare is open season on everybody. According to this view the challenge comes from the grassroots. To some extent the challenge of distributed warfare has been accepted, and war in the grassroots it is. One example of a America’s counter is the so-called 'pattern of life' of life targeting, which tracks individuals, such that if a person looks persistently guilty, then he is ‘engaged’.
  . . .
  The program has been criticized as a violation of human rights. But one criticism which is rarely heard is whether the program is moving the target list in the wrong direction. It is moving it down the chain. Suppose instead of moving down from the Taliban and al-Qaeda top leadership, it moved up? Suppose Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were not at the top of the terrorist food chain? Why not hit the guys above them? Hillary Clinton recently hinted that Pakistani officials were more deeply connected to terrorism than they were letting on, and that they may have been sheltering Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership. On a CBS interview the Secretary of State said, 'We’ve made it very clear that if -- heaven-forbid -- an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.' This suggests that the Taliban and al-Qaeda, rather than being the Alpha and Omega of terrorism, are just proxies in a war with bigger fish.
  
  But what would Washington do with a bigger fish if it found it with stratospheric UAVs and super databases? Would the President impose 'very severe consequences'? Or on the contrary, would it find a reason to let the monster fish go in the name of maintaining 'world peace'. Suppose Hillary actually found a smoking gun linking the leadership of Pakistan to al-Qaeda? Which incentive would prevail? Is saving 500 or 1,000 American lives worth war with Pakistan? There would arguably be a huge incentive to do nothing because of the risks of taking action against Islamabad would be so great. One example of how catching a big fish can cause problems was recently illustrated by a New York Times report that the South Korea found torpedo explosive residue on the sunken hull of its corvette, the Cheonan. It is almost impossible to avoid concluding that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean Naval vessel. Does this mean 'very severe consequences'? God a-mighty, no.
  . . .
  The War on Terror isn’t being fought to win, it’s being fought to keep the lid on. The conflict will be managed, not resolved. The War will be kept within bounds, at all costs. An explosion in New York will be met by a flurry of missiles fired from robotic aircraft circling over certain countries. Tit for Tat. Corpse for corpse. Missile for car bomb."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Solitude and Leadership - "We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.
  . . .
  How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered--and this is by no means what they expected--is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
  
  One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call 'mental filing': keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks."
• A Hidden History of Evil: Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? - "In the world’s collective consciousness, the word 'Nazi' is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology--nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle--led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
  
  For evidence of this indifference, consider the unread Soviet archives. Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia. Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet he can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all."
• My Thoughts on Gold - "Here’s a good rule of thumb. Gold goes up anytime real rates on short-term U.S. debt are below 2% (or are perceived to stay below 2%). It will fall if real rates rise above 2%. When rates are at 2%, then gold holds steady. That’s not a perfect relationship but I want to put it in an easy why for new investors to grap. This also helps explain why we’re in the odd situation today of seeing gold rise even though inflation is low. It’s not the inflation, it’s the low real rates that gold likes.
  . . .
  My view is that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates earlier than expected. I don't know exactly when that will be but it will put gold on a dangerous path. For now, my advice is to stay away from gold, either long or short."
• Black & Decker’s Alligator Lopper Is The Awesomest Pair Of Scissors I’ve Ever Seen - "Maybe it’s the fact that Black & Decker has gone to the trouble of printing a mean-looking alligator graphic on this lopper that has drawn me to it, but the super villain-esque combination of pruning shears and a miniature chainsaw doesn’t hurt either. A 4.5 amp electric motor and a wide set of jaws allows the Alligator Lopper to chew through a branch up to 4 inches thick like it was a wounded gazelle’s hind leg, and the clamping action ensures it won’t let go until it’s all the way through."

The 4 chord song....s

• Honda To Exhibit Walking Legs at the Smithsonian in New York - "Rather goofy-looking at first glance, Honda's new legs (aka Bodyweight Support Assist Device) makes walking and stair-climbing easier for the elderly and folks on rehab. Leveraging walking technology from full-body ASIMO robot, the leggy device provides natural walking and crouching support with its combined saddle, motorized leg frame and force-sensing shoes. With a control computer and battery pack neatly tucked away under the femur of the frame, the legs sense and guide motion while walking, going up and down stairs and in a semi-crouching position. An assisting force is directed towards the user's center of gravity and in sync with movement to support one's bodyweight and reduce the load on the user's leg muscles and joints."
• Household Debt Around the World - "From a new report, a look at household debt levels around the world. Interestingly, Canada leads the way -- in a bad sense -- in one measure."
• Phished Brands Seize on Teachable Moments - "Not long ago, most companies whose brands were being abused in phishing scams focused their efforts mainly on shuttering the counterfeit sites as quickly as possible. These days, an increasing number of phished brands are not only disabling the sites, but also seizing on the opportunity to teach would-be victims how to spot future scams.
  
  Instead of simply dismantling a phishing site and leaving the potential phishing victims with a 'Site not found' error, some frequent targets of phishing sites are setting up redirects to phishing education pages.
  
  For the past 20 months, Jason Hong, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, has been measuring referrals from phishing sites to an education page set up by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an industry consortium. Hong said the site now receives close to 25,000 referrals per month from phishing sites that brand owners have modified."
• Errol Morris on the postmodernity of the electric chair - "There is nothing post-modern about the electric chair. It takes a living human being and turns him into a piece of meat. Imagine you -- you the young journalists of tomorrow -- being strapped into an electric chair for a crime you didn't commit. Would you take comfort from a witness telling you that it really doesn't make any difference whether you are guilty or innocent? That there is no truth? 'I think you're guilty; you think you're innocent. Can't we work it all out?'"
• People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps - "Back in February, when many in the media were insisting that iPad apps were going to save the media business, we wondered why all the stuff they were talking about sticking in their apps couldn't work on the web as well. It appears that others are noticing that as well. Jason Fry at the Nieman Journalism Lab is noting that publications' own websites may be the biggest competition to their iPad apps -- and he was apparently a big believer in the concept of iPad apps originally. But after using the iPad for a while, he's realizing that the web is pretty good again:"
• Caribbean Corner, 4008A University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 703-246-9040 - "Mostly Jamaican, this is a real mom and pop restaurant in the middle of downtown Fairfax. It’s strangely silent. They only have two tables and a few chairs. The dining room is not really separated from the kitchen, or for that matter the cashier station, by any clear line. I’ve tried the jerk chicken and that was genuinely good. I’ll go back, at the very least this place is worth a try."
• Facebook faces a consumer backlash over security concerns as bloggers urge users to 'kill' their accounts - "The backlash comes as Facebook yesterday announced the launch of new security features to combat malicious attacks, scams and spam.
  
  It remains to be seen whether this is a case of too little, too late.
  
  Peter Rojas, the co-founder of respected gadget site Gdgt.com, announced this week that he had shut his Facebook account down.
  . . .
  Tech blogger Jason Calacanis blamed Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg's woes on overplaying its hand.
  
  He wrote: 'Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand.
  
  'Facebook is officially “out”, as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realisation that Zuckerberg and his company are - simply put - not trustworthy.'"

. . . . . . . . .

aguyinnewyork-20

Assorted Links 5/12/10

Richard Feynman on Big Numbers and Stuff, from the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983)

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
  
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
  
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
  
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
  
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
  
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
  
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
  
• Reform Bites - "I am not a fan of taxpayer financing of elections. If you want to get money out of politics, get government's hands off our money. The reason that election outcomes are so crucial right now is that government has metastisized into nearly every aspect of our lives."
  
• What Do The Economist’s Bloggers Think a Free Market Is, Anyway? - "I wonder what convinced M.S. that the new health care law is an entirely free-market-based reform. Was it the expansion of the government’s Medicaid program to another 16 million Americans? Was it the 19-million-plus other Americans who will receive government subsidies to purchase private health insurance? Was it the new price controls that the law imposes on health insurance? Or the price and exchange controls that it will extend to even more of the market? Was it the dynamics those regulations set in motion, which will reduce variety and innovation in health insurance? Was it the mandates that require private actors to spend their resources according to the wishes of the state? Or the new federal regulations that will shape every health insurance plan in the United States, whether purchased through the employer-based market, the individual market, or the new health insurance 'exchanges'? Was it the half-trillion dollars of (explicit) tax increases over the next 10 years?
  
  I wonder what it is about this law that M.S. thinks is consonant with the principles of a free market. Perhaps we have a different idea of what 'free' means."
  
• Greatest Fossil Fuel Disasters In Human History - "The fallout from the Louisiana oil rig explosion is continuing to be horrendous, and efforts to stop the damage aren't looking promising. But this isn't the worst fossil fuel disaster we've ever had. Here are 10 of the worst.
  . . .
  Largest Oil Spill Of All Time: Really, this list could be mostly oil spills. There have been so many. You only have to look at the Wikipedia page to see that enough oil has been splashed in the water to keep all our cars running for decades. The largest, in terms of volume of oil, was the Gulf War Oil Spill, in which Iraq opened the valves at its oil terminal and dumped oil into the Gulf, in an attempt to keep U.S. forces from landing. The resulting slick was 4,242 square miles, and five inches thick. It's between five and 27 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. The largest accidental oil spill, in gallons, was Ixtoc I in Mexico, which dumped half a million tons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and polluted 162 miles of U.S. beaches. A rare sea turtle's natural habitat was flooded, and the endangered turtles had to be airlifted to safety. Honorable mention also has to go to the Atlantic Empress, a Greek oil tanker that managed to be involved in two separate massive oil spills."
  
• Are you ready for the United States of Germany? - "The strong euro and burgeoning liquidity it brought on meant that much of Germany’s trade surplus had to be absorbed within the eurozone, forcing especially southern Europe into high trade deficits. These deficits were dismissed, very foolishly it turns out, and against all historical precedents, as being easily managed as long as the sanctity of the euro was maintained. A very false analogy was made with the US, in which it was argued that because European countries all use the same currency, trade imbalances within Europe are sustainable in the same way they are sustainable between states in the US.
  
  But states in the US are not like states in Europe. Labor and capital mobility in Europe is very low compared to the US, and the Civil War in the US ensured that sovereignty, including most importantly fiscal sovereignty, resided in Washington DC, and not in the various state capitals. The US is clearly as much an optimal currency zone as any large economy can be.
  
  This isn’t the case in Europe. In fact I would argue that the existence of a common currency in Europe, the euro, is only a little more meaningful than the existence of various currencies under the gold standard, and it was pretty obvious under the gold standard that balance of payments crises could indeed exist.
  
  So why not also in Europe under the euro? As I see it, domestic German policies, perhaps aimed at absorbing East German unemployment, forced a structural trade surplus. The strong euro, along with the automatic recycling of Germany’s large trade surplus within Europe, ensured the corresponding trade deficits in the rest of Europe -- unless Europeans were willing to enact policies that raised unemployment in order to counter the deficits. As long as the ECB refused to raise interest rates, southern Europe had to accept asset bubbles and rapidly rising debt-fueled consumption.
  
  This couldn’t go on forever, or even for very long. Now southern Europe is paying the inevitable price, and of course the moralists are accusing the south of being shiftless and lazy, confusing the automatic balancing mechanisms in the balance of payments with moral weakness.
  
  This is not to say that it is all Germany’s fault (although I’m sure I will be accused of making this claim anyway), but rather that the existence of the euro seriously exacerbated the problem by making it very difficult for certain countries to adjust to Germany’s domestic policies, which generated employment growth at home at the expense of Germany’s trading partners. There is no question that a long history of fiscal irresponsibility in southern Europe made things much worse, but the imbalance could have never gotten so large without Germany’s role, and since in a crisis it is always easier to blame foreigners, bashing Germans will become a very popular sport in much of Europe."
  
• Metra boss Phil Pagano's suicide a repeating pageant for Illinois - "When politicos play musical chairs in Illinois, what happens after the music stops and there's no safe place to sit?
  
  There have been four dead in recent years, unrelated cases of suicide, different except for the acts of the common pageant: The corruption investigators call. The music ends abruptly.
  
  Two were done in by guns, one on a beach, the other under a bridge. A third was by pills in a construction trailer.
  
  The fourth came Friday morning during rush hour, announced by that body under that white sheet on the Metra tracks in McHenry County.
  
  The flesh once belonged to Phil Pagano. For the past 20 years, Pagano was the respected boss of Metra, the commuter rail agency that, unlike the Chicago Transit Authority, actually keeps the trains running on time.
  
  Over the past week or so, Pagano was under siege, facing investigations both federal and local, suspected of finagling a bonus of more than $50,000 by finessing vacation time, among other things."
  
• Real Homes of Genius – Culver City 900 square foot home with three mortgages up to $572,000. A few places down, a 800 square foot home is selling for $500,000. L.A. cities still in housing bubbles. - "From the Zillow description we get the following:
  
  'Gorgeous poinsettia hedge out front. BIG yard, dog-tight fencing. Huge tree shades the back. Charming retro gas kitchen. Hardwood floors throughout. New tile in kitchen and den/converted garage.'
  
  This is a lot of description for a 920 square foot home with 2 bedrooms and 1 bath built back in the 1950s. But leave it to Southern Californians to put a nice spin on it! Although we don’t have a picture of the home from whoever gave us the description outside of the Poinsettia, we can thank technology for this front view:
  . . .
  Let us walk through the above. The home was purchased for $235,000 back in 1989. It looks like the person even back in 1989 was required to come in with 10 percent down. It looks like $23,500 was put down on a home costing $235,000. This is really where we should be today. Instead, you can now buy a $670,000+ home with the same down payment. This has tripled the buying power of home owners today even though the economy is in much worse shape than it was back in 1989.
  
  After the 1989 purchase, a loan was secured on the property from the SBA for $13,300 in 1994. Nothing too big here. Things were calm for a few years after that. Then things in 2003 started picking up. A first mortgage of $239,500 was secured on the place. By 2006, getting $90,000 off a second was a piece of cake in Culver City. Now the home has $329,500 in mortgages. The bubble keeps getting bigger and a third mortgage is put on the place in 2007 for $243,000 (an amount larger than the first mortgage back when the place was purchased!). In total, this 920 square foot home in the end went up to having $572,500 in mortgages from a modest $211,500. This is the history of the housing bubble.
  
  But now, the home is in foreclosure. Back in November a notice of default was filed. A few months later, the auction date was set. The auction is scheduled for May 19 but hard to say what is going on beyond that. The Zillow Zestimate has this place valued at $538,500. If that were the case, this place wouldn’t be going to auction. Use caution when going by appraisals in high flying Southern California cities loaded with Alt-A loans."
  
• Fannie Mae's MyCommunity Mortgage - "Fannie Mae's MyCommunity MortgageTM was at the forefront of the credit crisis, and had many sub-programs, all targeted at low income communities and borrowers. These programs highlighted the mission that made these GSEs essential: they were doing what the private sector would not, serve the historically underserved.
  
  Unfortunately, lending to people without the ability or willingness to payback homeloans is not sustainable, something that seems obvious now, but try telling that the Boston Fed or the American Economic Review in the 1990s. The key is that MyCommunity Mortgage got bundled into Fannie's ubiquitous DeskTop Underwriter, a mortgage origination program that made these abominations standard. Once they set this up (around 2000, with new twists every year), one can see how these bad ideas spread all over the industry.
  . . .
  The practical credit criteria was merely a signature with an affirmation ('yeah, sure I'll pay you back'), as long as the borrower is sufficiently poor with sufficiently bad credit. It wasn't adverse selection--taking on disproportionate bad credits inadvertently--it was active targeting the bad credits."
  
• ‘Vacancy’ Signs Still Posted in Front of Many Colleges - "The disproportionate attention that journalists, including this one, devote to the high rates of rejection at several dozen colleges and universities sometimes masks a basic truth of admissions: hundreds of other institutions have more available slots than qualified applicants.
  
  Nowhere is that point made more clear than in the annual Space Availability Survey of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, released today.
  
  In it, students, parents and counselors can find the names and contact information of several hundred colleges and universities that are still accepting applications for the freshman class that will take its seats next fall, and for transfer applicants.
  
  Among those that still have room are Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut; Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania; Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire; Texas Wesleyan University, and the University of Arizona."

Theatrical Bookstores

• Racist Email Leak Was Revenge By "Friend" - "The reason Stephanie Grace's racist email made the tour of the Internet? Yalena Shagall, her 'friend' sent it out because she was angry that Stephanie had confronted her because Yalena f*cked a mutual friend's ex-boyfriend. They had a fight and Yalena told her she would 'ruin her life.' Gawker is reporting the gruesome tale of revenge and pettiness:"
• Top Law School Grad Sells Movies and Music On-Line From Parent's Basement! - From the comments: "I attended a T14 school and grades DO matter, especially right now when everyone is competing for the few Biglaw first year associate openings left. The T14 schools perpetuate the myth that whoever goes through their halls is guaranteed a lucrative legal position with biglaw or government until they choose to leave or 'burn out'. This is utterly false. Even before the recession, there were people in the bottom half of the T14 graduating without job offers. I knew people who didn't even get a job their 2L summer. It was shocking because my grades were not good but I always got a summer internship. Some people ended up doing research for a professor or working at the law school library. One guy even had his 2L employment rescinded at the last minute after he gave them his first year grades which placed him in the bottom quartile of his class. Never underestimate the callousness of these biglaw partners or their ability to screw over people even after they guarantee you a job.
  
  Another myth that most T14 students believe is that they can keep their biglaw job for as long as they want until they eventually 'burn out', usually in about five years. That's not true, at least not anymore. I know plenty of people who were laid off in less than a year, a year, or two years. Some were fired after failing the bar exam. Others were unlucky enough to accept an offer with a firm that immediately went under several months after graduation. And then there are people who quit after 18 months or so after finding out that they hate practicing law. I couldn't even stand being at my summer job. The work and the Type-A personalities were awful. That's why I recommend to anyone thinking about attending law school to work as a paralegal or legal secretary after college to give you an idea of the type of work and people you will need to deal with to be successful as a lawyer. Being smart and attending a T14 school doesn't mean that you're cut out to be a lawyer and unfortunately a lot of people don't figure that out until after they spend $200k, three years in law school, and take the bar exam. "
• Don't Assume That You Will Get a High Salary from an Established Employer within Nine Months of Graduation from Law School - "Many enter law school clueless about law practice and how the world works in general. Many of them had spent the past four years in academia having never paid a car payment, insurance premium, phone bill, rent or mortgage. Yet every graduating class (high school, college, grad school) is always sent off with some message of hope that they've made an excellent choice and that they have accomplished a major feat. They're rewarded with jobs at McDonald's, retail stores, and financial advisor service firms too eager to take them on for unpaid training. What pre-laws assume is that at least one firm will be able to pay them a decent salary within a reasonable time after graduation, and it's just a matter of networking and applying until a firm is just dying to hire you.
  
  Yes, there are firms dying to hire you, but only if you will work for little to nothing! Competition for these is growing by the day, and standards for these positions are increasing. It won't be long until a doc review (once reserved for the bottom of the class) will only be available to law review and top ten percent. Oh, wait, I think that has happened in New York already. "
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Hardworking students without clout are left out - "According to a Tribune story this week, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Lisa's Daddy, applied his clout to help dozens of political allies and campaign donors trying to get their relatives into the University of Illinois.
  
  Many of the relatives who were accepted wouldn't have made it into the U. of I. on their own merits, the story said.
  
  Three of the students backed by Madigan are relatives of North Shore attorney Steven Yonover and Illinois Appellate Judge Margaret Frossard. Yonover dropped more than $70,000 into campaign funds controlled by Mike Madigan.
  
  Wouldn't the lawyer and the distinguished appellate judge make fine lecturers at a university-sponsored seminar titled 'Ethics in Illinois'?
  
  Boss Madigan is one of the most powerful politicians in the state, and the least accountable, hiding from reporters, working in the shadows.
  
  But U. of I. officials know who butters their bread.
  . . .
  Right now, I'm picturing that high school student, the one at the kitchen table past midnight, the one without clout. This student's parents can't afford to make big campaign donations, to put the student on Madigan's clout list, or on the clout lists of all the other legislators.
  
  I'm thinking of that Illinois student reading American history, about the Revolution, about all the Americans who suffered, yet refused to drop to their knees.
  
  What do you tell that student now? That it's OK to bend a knee and kiss the hand because this is Illinois?"

Sisters on the fly

• Five Hidden Dangers of Facebook - " 1. Your information is being shared with third parties
  
  2. Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
  
  3. Facebook ads may contain malware
  
  4. Your real friends unkowingly make you vulnerable
  
  5. Scammers are creating fake profiles"
• Jaccard Supertendermatic - "The Jaccard SuperTendermatic 48 blade meat tenderizer is simply the best tool I have ever found for turning tough but flavorful cuts, like flank steak and skirt steak, from chewy and hard to eat into tender and easy to bite and chew. To use the tenderizer you simply place it over the piece of meat on a cutting board and push down like an ink stamp forcing the blades through the meat. I am a professional chef and serious foodie from Texas, and I simply cannot imagine making either a chicken fried steak or a good fajita steak without it. "
• Shall We Laugh or Cry at Morgan Hill? - "What are we to make of the five students who were temporarily suspended by the administration at Live Oak high school in Morgan Hill for purportedly seeking to provoke--by the wearing of various American flag insignia, no less--Mexican-American students who were at the time celebrating, with some Mexican flags, Cinco de Mayo Day?
  
  Or, in the words of aggrieved student Annicia Nunez, as picked up by the news services, 'I think they should apologize ’cause it is a Mexican heritage day. We don’t deserve to get disrespected like that. We wouldn’t do that on Fourth of July.'
  
  Let us deconstruct this episode to discover, if we can, the proverbial ‘teachable moment ’ of this collective farce.
  . . .
  I learned from this episode only that Cinco de Mayo is the moral equivalent for many of our citizens to the Fourth of July, that no one in authority at an American high school understands the U.S. Constitution, that students wearing American flags were at one point to be suspended, and those ditching class in mass were not; that reconciliation is defined by each group putting their own respective flags next to each other and then blaming the press for this national embarrassment; and that in our parochial and isolated culture of central and coastal California, no one seems to imagine that elsewhere Americans are not all unhinged, but in fact see us as the deranged. The Live Oak people seem wounded fawns, hurt as if everywhere in the United States all Americans naturally assume that Cinco de Mayo is simply the alternate Fourth of July."
• Reevu Helmets Feature A Rearview Mirror In The Visor - "What’s most intriguing about these Reevu helmets isn’t the fact they let a rider see what’s behind them without looking back, similar helmets using cameras and LCDs already exist, it’s that they do it all with optics and mirrors, so there’s no electronics to power, or malfunction. In fact, the multiple mirror system used by the Reevu to ‘bend’ the light around the rider’s head is made from a reflective polycarbonate material instead of glass, making it lighter and almost impossible to break. Kind of important for something designed to absorb impacts."
• What Every Developer Should Know About URLs - "Being a developer this day and age, it would be almost impossible for you to avoid doing some kind of web-related work at some point in your career. That means you will inevitably have to deal with URLs at one time or another. We all know what URLs are about, but there is a difference between knowing URLs like a user and knowing them like a developer should know them.
  
  As a web developer you really have no excuse for not knowing everything there is to know about URLs, there is just not that much to them. But, I have found that even experienced developers often have some glaring holes in their knowledge of URLs. So, I thought I would do a quick tour of everything that every developer should know about URLs. Strap yourself in – this won't take long :)."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 5/8/10

"How Russians play the balalaika these days."

• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
  
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
  
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
  
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
  
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
  
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
  
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
  
• Illegal Immigration: Not Like Getting Drunk or Stealing Television Sets - "The best way to get rid of the bad external effects of unlawful immigration is to bring what is lawful in line with what is right. A common North American labor market would bring cross-border labor migration within the rule of law, thereby establishing order and peace where there is now disorder and violence. All this while increasing liberty and encouraging rather than discouraging cooperation and the efficient production of wealth!
  
  I’m not sure if I buy Ross’s argument that (much more modest) liberalizing reform becomes more realistic if enforcement under current law is improved. To me this sounds like an argument that if the state is able to make its coercion more effective, and the side-effects of its injustice less visible, Americans will feel more comfortable about opening things up a bit. Maybe it works like that, but I’m skeptical. Would a better executed Jim Crow have sped the way toward racial equality?"
  
• Tip-Toe to the Exits? - "I got Bank of America to sign off their rights to pursue a deficiency judgement on a short sale, when the mortgage was purchase money. You’d think it would make sense for the lenders to cooperate when the borrower can walk without recourse, but it’s not automatic.
  
  Maybe this example is a sign of BofA trying to clean out the drawer? This short sale has been in process since September, and we already lost the buyer.
  
  In addition, for the first time they’ve issued a prompt for me to hurry up with my BPOs. They are making their agents produce two opinions of value before listing, which is annoying, but getting some additional pressure from them might mean they’re trying to pick up steam?"
  
• Expect Nothing - "If you want to call for a 'rescheduling' of Greece’s debts -- a position that is becoming increasingly popular among leading north European intellectuals -- that is fine. But you also need to recognize that the policy elite (central banks and ministries of finance) are completely unprepared to handle the consequences, which would be immediate and devastating for other weaker eurozone countries.
  
  You simply cannot do a low-cost or small unilateral restructuring of government debt in this kind of situation; the market will at once take that as a signal that Portugal, Spain, Italy and perhaps even Ireland will face difficulties (in fact, this is exactly what spreads in the 2-year European government bond market are saying today). The French may smile upon such outcomes with a feeling of superiority, but they might also consider not throwing bricks in glass houses.
  
  It is fine -- even appropriate -- to emphasize that big European banks have aided and abetted the irresponsible behavior of eurozone authorities. The profound stupidity of these banks-as-organizations is beyond belief, and it is deeply puzzling quite why leading figures in the US Senate would see them as a model for anything other than what we need to euthanize as soon as possible in the global financial system.
  
  But do not fall into the trap of thinking just because 'megabanks are bad' (undoubtedly true) that you can whack them with losses and not face the consequences -- these people are powerful for a reason; they hold a knife to our throats. For all his hubris, missteps, and over-reliance on Goldman group think, Hank Paulson had a point in September 2008: If the choice is chaotic global collapse or unsavory financial rescue, which are you going to choose?
  
  The Europeans will do nothing this week or for the foreseeable future. They have not planned for these events, they never gamed this scenario, and their decision-making structures are incapable of updating quickly enough. The incompetence at the level of top European institutions is profound and complete; do not let anyone fool you otherwise."
  
• The Mother of All Bubbles: Huge National Debts Could Push Euro Zone into Bankruptcy - "For the moment, this is the last skirmish between the old ideas and ideals of prosperity paid for on credit and a generous state, against the new realization that the time has come to foot the bill. The only question is: Who's paying?
  . . .
  European governments agree that saving Greece is imperative. They are worried about the euro, and the Germans are concerned about their banks, which, lured by the prospect of high returns, have become saturated with government bonds from Greece and other southern European countries. They are also terrified that after a Greek bankruptcy, other weak euro countries could be attacked by speculators and forced to their knees.
  
  There are, in fact, striking similarities to the Lehman bankruptcy. This isn't exactly surprising. The financial crisis isn't over by a long shot, but has only entered a new phase. Today, the world is no longer threatened by the debts of banks but by the debts of governments, including debts which were run up rescuing banks just a year ago.
  
  The banking crisis has turned into a crisis of entire nations, and the subprime mortgage bubble into a government debt bubble. This is why precisely the same questions are being asked today, now that entire countries are at risk of collapse, as were being asked in the fall of 2008 when the banks were on the brink: How can the calamity be prevented without laying the ground for an even bigger disaster? Can a crisis based on debt be solved with even more debt? And who will actually rescue the rescuers in the end, the ones who overreached?
  . . .
  All of the major industrialized countries have lived beyond their means for decades. Even in good times, government budget deficits continued to expand. The United States, in particular, paid for its prosperity on credit. The poor example set by the state was contagious -- US citizens began buying cars and houses they couldn't really afford, and banks speculated with borrowed money.
  
  Things couldn't possibly go well forever and, indeed, the financial crisis put an end to the days of unfettered spending. To avert a collapse, governments came to the rescue with vast sums of money, guaranteed their citizens' savings and jump-started the economy with massive stimulus programs -- all with borrowed money, of course.
  . . .
  The current government debt bubble is the last of all possible bubbles. Either governments manage to slowly let out the air, or the bubble will burst. If that happens, the world will truly be on the brink of disaster.
  
  When Greece faces a possible bankruptcy, the euro-zone countries and the IMF come to its aid. But what happens if the entire euro group bites off more than it can chew? What if the United States can no longer service its debt because, say, China is no longer willing to buy American treasury bonds? And what if Japan, which is running into more and more problems, falters in its attempts to pay for its now-chronic deficits?
  
  The conditions that prevail in Greece exist in many countries, which is why governments around the world are paying such close attention to how -- and if -- the Europeans gain control over the crisis.
  . . .
  Washington is worried about being drawn into the vortex of national bankruptcies itself. The national debt has exploded in the United States in the last two years, more than in almost any other country, because the government has had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to support the economy and banks.
  
  Geithner fears that investors could also at some point lose confidence in the soundness of American government finances. According to a strictly confidential IMF document, referred to internally as an early warning exercise, the US's finances are still considered sound -- with, however, some qualifications.
  
  The United States is still capable of fulfilling all of its obligations, the document states, but it also points out the worrisome rate at which the national debt is growing.
  . . .
  The rescue package is now a done deal, and the Greeks have a clearer idea of what is in store for them. A European nation has hardly ever been expected to make comparable sacrifices in peacetime. In return for the bailout deal announced Sunday, the Greek government will implement further cost-cutting measures, including drastic reductions in salaries and pensions, further tax hikes and a stricter austerity program for all of the country's public budgets.
  
  It won't be long before new unrest and protests erupt among the Greeks, with their penchant for strikes. Metalworkers and candidates for civil service positions took to the streets of Athens last week, and there were further protests over the weekend. 'Panic is slowly taking hold in the minds of people,' says economics professor Savvas Robolis.
  
  Because the Greeks, despite the massive capital injections from Brussels and Washington, face an extremely uncertain future and the country can expect to see 'explosive unemployment,' Robolis isn't certain that social protests will remain peaceful in the future.
  
  If not, speculators will quickly pounce on the euro again. They have made enormous profits in recent weeks and months, after betting on Greece's growing difficulties and a constantly weakening euro. Now they are just waiting for the next opportunity."
  
• Don't Panic - "Some big stocks like Procter & Gamble and Citigroup had bid-ask spreads effectively at 10%. It wasn't clear if the Mayan doomsday had been accelerated, Israel was in a war, who knew? Later it was mentioned this was caused by some poor guy at Citi who sold $16 Billion worth of S&P futures, not the $16 Million he was supposed to trade (his performance review this year should be leaked to the internet as comedy gold) Some exchanges are going to cancel some silly trades, but they had to have moved more than 60%, meaning a lot slightly less ridiculous trades are going through.
  
  Just another reminder: if the market is going bananas, stand back. Retail traders get screwed in these environments, but only the impatient ones. Don't think you will get out first, the institutions are way ahead of you."

How to Resist the Federal Government?

• The Case for Keeping a Clunker - "That less-than-attractive, somehow-still-working car in your driveway? It seems just ripe for a trade-in for a more efficient and green vehicle. Then again, it might be better for your wallet, and the planet, to let it ride out its remaining life.
  
  Kentin Waits at the Wise Bread blog sums up some of the fallacies of thinking you'll save money, and environmental impact, by trading in a working but weathered car for a brand-new hybrid. As Waits writes, there's a lot to be said for the advancements in safety, but depreciation, insurance rates, and manufacturing costs should weigh into the equation:"
• Google jumps on the online bookstore bandwagon - "Following in the footsteps of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple, Google announced today that the search giant will be launching an online bookstore this summer. The bookstore will launch as Google Editions and will include a Google-managed online storefront as well as an affiliate program that will allow book retailers and independent shops to sell Google Editions’ books on their own website. Google will leverage its current book search service to provide customers with the ability to search and purchase books from the online bookstore."
• Three-year bachelor's degree gains popularity - "Bortolazzo said she knows that finishing college in three years won't work for most students and that many are not rushing to graduate into a depressed economy. But she recommends a fast track 'to anybody who is really motivated, feels they have the time to commit to it and really wants to get out in the job market.'
  
  Students like Bortolazzo are drawing attention these days as families look to reduce tuition bills and colleges try to stretch limited budgets and classroom space. About a dozen, mostly small, U.S. colleges and universities now offer formal routes to earning a degree in three years instead of the usual four or five. And many others, including the University of California, are studying ways to start such an option.
  
  'It's really indefensible in the current environment for universities not to be exploring more efficient use of their facilities and how to save students time and money,' said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. Education Department secretary who is a strong advocate of three-year degrees. Even if they make up a minority of college populations, he said, 'some well-prepared students can do their work in three years, and colleges should create a track for them.'
  
  Not everyone agrees. Some educators worry that academic quality could suffer in three-year programs, which usually waive some requirements or push students to take very heavy course loads. Others say that most college students just need the extra year to grow up -- and to explore."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Shahzad the Sleeper - "JJA: which gets us to the first question after all: was Mr. Shahzad supposed to blow himself up or what? He seems to have been trained by experts in suicide terrorism, after all, and the jihad doesn’t like to leave witnesses behind. As my old Israeli friends can tell you, once a terrorist decides he doesn’t want to go to paradise, he’s likely to be very cooperative with those who love life.
  
  ML: yes, he seems to be quite happy to talk to interrogators, doesn’t be? But that’s a good question. I remember that in Iraq, Al Qaeda recruited young men who were told that they were not going to die, that they only had to place the car bomb or truck bomb close to the target and then walk away. It was always a lie, however, and there was some very grisly evidence. One poor chap was blown out of his truck and ended up in the hospital. When he realized what had happened he went on Iraqi television to warn his fellow jihadis that they shouldn’t believe the recruiters. I wonder how Shahzad feels. He’s certainly got away from his truck in a big hurry didn’t he?
  
  JJA: Of course he did. His handlers may have made a mistake. On the one hand, he was almost certainly a sleeper. He came here legally, he had assimilated, and he became a citizen. Then they brought him over for training and sent him back to the battlefield. It’s standard operating procedure."

Things Economists Should Stay Away From, Fire Safety Edition…

• How to Block Cellphone Spam - "As it turns out, Verizon Wireless offers these features, too. Sprint and T-Mobile don’t go quite as far, but they do offer some text-spam filtering options. Here’s how you find the controls for each company:
  
  * AT&T: Log in at mymessages.wireless.att.com. Under Preferences, you’ll see the text-blocking and alias options. Here’s also where you can block messages from specific e-mail addresses or Web sites.
  
  * Verizon Wireless: Log in at vtext.com. Under Text Messaging, click Preferences. Click Text Blocking. You’re offered choices to block text messages from e-mail or from the Web. Here again, you can block specific addresses or Web sites. (Here’s where you set up your aliases, too.)
  
  * Sprint: No auto-blocking is available at all, but you can block specific phone numbers and addresses. To get started, log in at www.sprint.com. On the top navigation bar, click My Online Tools. Under Communication Tools, click Text Messaging. On the Compose a Text Message page, under Text Messaging Options, click Settings & Preferences. In the text box, you can enter a phone number, email address or domain (such as Comcast.net) that you want to block.
  
  * T-Mobile: T-Mobile doesn’t yet offer a 'block text messages from the Internet' option. You can block all messages sent by e-mail, though, or permit only messages sent to your phone’s e-mail address or alias, or create filters that block text messages containing certain phrases. It’s all waiting when you log into www.t-mobile.com and click Communication Tools."
• Six reasons to hate Facebook's new anti-privacy system, "Connections" - "Wondering exactly why people are so pissed about Facebook's latest display of contempt for user privacy? The Electronic Frontier Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl has a good, short article explaining just what's going on with the new 'Connections' anti-feature:"
• Do Girls Speed More Than Boys? Survey Says Girls Drive More Aggressively; Insurers Up Rates - "Car accidents are the leading cause of death for U.S. teenagers, according to government statistics. But accident rates have plummeted in recent years, even as the proliferation of digital devices has added a huge new source of distractions."
• Woman painting nails before crash found guilty - "Though Lora Hunt insisted she wasn't painting her fingernails when she hit and killed motorcyclist Anita Zaffke, a Lake County jury Thursday convicted her of reckless homicide in the 2009 crash.
  . . .
  Hunt was charged after her Chevrolet Impala struck and killed Zaffke on May 2, 2009, as she stopped her motorcycle for a traffic signal at Route 12 and Old McHenry Road near Lake Zurich.
  
  Lake County prosecutor Michael Mermel argued during the trial that Hunt was so distracted as she painted her fingernails that she never saw Zaffke stopped ahead of her.
  . . .
  But her attorney said he thinks authorities filed the charge against Hunt in part because she told police after the crash she had been painting her nails as she drove."
• Facebook's Anti-Privacy Backlash Gains Ground - "Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself -- and its advertising and business partners -- to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.
  
  You want to make your Facebook totally private to anyone but your actual friends? You can’t, though you can come close. And it will only take you 50 clicks inside Facebook’s Wonderland-like labyrinth of privacy controls. Have fun.
  
  This week brought news of two separate bugs that let Websites secretly install their apps on your Facebook profile and let your friends eavesdrop on your private chats. Facebook swatted both bugs relatively promptly, but not before they made their way into the press. I can understand how Facebook missed the chat security hole -- you have to follow a fairly arcane series of steps to reproduce it. But calling the secret app problem a 'bug' is a bit hard to swallow.
  
  Somehow, in the months of testing data integration with third parties, we’re expected to believe nobody at Facebook noticed a few extra apps on their profiles? Please."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 5/4/10

Advice to the Tea Party from John Samples, author of 'The Struggle to Limit Government'





Richard Feynman on Ways of Thinking (1), from the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983)

• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
  
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
  
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
  
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
  
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
  
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
  
• Mark Twain on Copyright - "Remarks of Samuel Langhorne Clemens Before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents, December, 1906 (Mark Twain on Copyright)"
  
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
  
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
  
• Protesting For All the Wrong Reasons: Student Walkouts in New Jersey - "This week students in Newark, Montclair and South Orange, N.J. walked out of class. They were protesting Governor Christie’s proposed education cuts. The walkouts were organized in part via Facebook and a college student who attended high school in Bergen County.
  
  And now there is even worse news. Only ten percent of high school students taking the Alternative Graduation Exam passed language arts and 34 percent passed math. This exam is given only to those students who fail the traditional High School Proficiency Exam. For years, the 'alternative' has been a subject of controversy. Districts graded their own exams. And nearly everyone passed."
  
• Planned Economy, Privacy Problems - "If someone asked you what’s wrong with a planned economy, your first answer might not be 'privacy.' But it should be. For proof, look no further than the financial regulation bill the Senate is debating. Its 1,400 pages contain strong prescriptions for a government-micromanaged economy--and the undoing of your financial privacy. Here’s a look at some of the personal data collection this revamp of financial services regulation will produce.
  . . .
  The Office of Financial Research is also a sop to industry. Morgan Stanley estimates that it will save the company 20 to 30 percent of its operating costs. The advocates for this bureaucracy want to replace the competitive environment for financial data with a uniform government data platform. Students of technology will instantly recognize what this data monoculture means: If the government’s data and assumptions are bad, everyone’s data and assumptions are bad, and all players in the financial services system fall together. The Office of Financial Research itself poses a threat to financial stability.
  . . .
  Nor was the Social Security number about creating a uniform national identifier that facilitates both lawful (excessive) data collection and identity fraud. The construction of surveillance infrastructure doesn’t turn on the intentions of its builders. They’re just giving another turn to the wheels that crush privacy."
  
• Culture of Deceit: Why Dick Fuld So Needlessly and Recklessly Perjured Himself Before Congress - "Yet another whistle blower who has been completely ignored by the SEC just stepped forward to finally be acknowledged by the media.
  
  A Bloomberg analyst reported around noon NY time that they had verified Mr. Budde's story, and that indeed Dick Fuld easily had received cash in excess of $500 million in compensation for the period in question, higher than even Henry Waxman had asserted in his charts during Dick Fuld's testimony.
  
  Mr. Budde, a former counsel who was frustrated and plain fed up with the culture of personal greed and deceit among the Lehman executives stepped forward again to tell his story after being completely ignored by the SEC and the Lehman Board of Directors."
  
• Ghost estates testify to Irish boom and bust - "David McWilliams is the man who coined the phrase 'ghost estate' when he wrote about the first signs of a disastrous over-build in Ireland back in 2006.
  
  Now, it is a concept the whole country is depressingly familiar with. Most Irish people have one on their doorstep - an ugly reminder, says the economist and broadcaster, of wounded national pride.
  
  'Emotionally, we have all taken a battering,' he says. 'Like every infectious virus, the housing boom got into our pores. You could feel it.
  
  'You'd go to the pub and people would be talking about what house they'd bought. And now a lot of people, myself included, think 'God, we were conned'.'
  . . .
  There are 621 ghost estates across Ireland now, a legacy of those hopeful years. One in five Irish homes is unoccupied."
  
• Foreclosure Woes Loom As Housing Stimulus Ends - "Friday marks the last day that homebuyers can qualify for an $8,000 federal tax credit. The government has been trying to rescue the housing market from collapse. But now it's taking away most of that life support.
  
  The Federal Reserve a few weeks ago stopped another program that was helping to keep mortgage rates low through the purchase of mortgage securities. So the housing market is now going to have to try to stand on its own two feet.
  
  But some analysts say millions of people are still headed for foreclosure, and the added inventory of homes could glut the market and keep pushing prices down."
  
• Will there be a doctor in the house? - "If anyone would take the trouble to talk to doctors, they would be able see through some of the myths being accepted without question by most of the players in this yearlong debate. Since the start of this round of ‘free health care for all’ free-for-all, Obama has stated “if you like you doctor, you can keep him or her”. Has it never occurred to anyone that your doctor might not want to keep you?
  . . .
  What is causing this mass exodus by doctors? The same AAPS survey yielded results that could only be surprising to anyone but practicing doctors. Of the respondents, 66 percent said the main reason was government interference in the practice of medicine, 63 percent cited hassles with Medicare, 80 percent expressed fear of unwarranted investigation or persecution and 56 percent listed the reason as the reduced fees from Medicare. Those who bandy back and forth how great government run health care is have never tried to deliver medical care under it. Unless you are in it, you have no idea of the immense burden, down-right hassle and fear-provoking ordeal it is to have to work with the government in providing medical services and getting reimbursement.
  . . .
  Now image what it is like to be called for an audit, where the rules are stacked against you and the same people who run your audit adjudicate the outcome. As awful as that sounds, multiply that several times over. A decade ago the tax code was 17,000 pages, it is now estimated to be 80,000. The Medicare law, however, is now over 100,000 pages. The paperwork is unbelievably oppressive and for so little result. Payments from the government are so low that they often don’t even cover the expense of collecting the money. A stroke of a pen in Congress and doctor’s salaries are reduced, notwithstanding that expenses rise continually, including the expense of trying to work with the government to get paid. Doctors who do accept Medicare patients relegate 22 percent of their staff time to Medicare compliance issues. It costs over 25 percent more to process a claim to Medicare than private insurance. Even so, it is nearly impossible to participate in the existing government health care system without making mistakes. Just try to keep your nose clean following all of those extensive, ambiguous and ever changing rules. You can’t. For all of these reasons, doctors have been leaving the Medicare program in droves, more with each passing month. Almost 25 percent of doctors refuse to treat new Medicare patients. This is the government’s idea of 'Medicare is working.' But it gets worse. Much worse.
  . . .
  A few examples of the draconian measures aimed at doctors include fines and jail time for trivial errors. There are now mandated $10,000 fines for each instance of putting the wrong billing codes on claims. That means a busy, minimum wage clerk putting one wrong digit on a claim form subjects the doctor to accusations of intentional fraud. ObamaCare would increase those fines to $50,000 per mistake. There are five-year prison sentences for refusing to release private medical records to the government (without the patient’s permission) or having the audacity to give medical care other than the market value. That means that doctors offering charity care are at risk for prison or fines. Even more shocking is that through the law doctors accused of fraud are subject to asset forfeiture and arrest, actions that until the bill’s enactment into law were originally used to stop organized crime. I did not say their assets were seized, bank accounts frozen and goods confiscated when convicted of a crime, these things happen on suspicion of wrongdoing.
  . . .
  Why would anyone in their right mind want to go into a profession, let alone stay in a profession, where one can be falsely accused for even the most minor of clerical transgressions, the result of which is that all one’s money and possessions are confiscated by the government even before you are found guilty by a proper court of law?"
  
• My problem with congress in a nutshell - "'Balancing the budget and reducing the debt, in my mind, are not ends in and of themselves,' said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. 'We can't afford to skimp on our children's education, assuring access to quality, affordable health care, retirement security, achieving energy independence, investing in our infrastructure, supporting medical research, creating more jobs.'
  . . .
  While I do partly agree with the first phrase to the extent that I don't favor balancing the budget at current spending levels, the hideous combination of arrogance, profligacy and ignorance shown here typifies, to me, how our congress operates (and has operated for quite a while now)."
  
• NSA on Computer Network Attack & Defense - "I spent the past few days in Mexico City participating in the annual meeting of the Honeynet Project, an international group dedicated to developing and deploying technologies that collect intelligence on the methods malicious hackers use in their attacks. The event brought in experts from around the globe, and our hosts -- the National Autonomous University of Mexico (in Spanish, UNAM) were gracious and helpful.
  
  As it happens, honeynets and other “deception technologies” are among the approaches discussed in the following document, written by the National Security Agency’s Information Assurance Directorate. A source of mine passed it along a while back, but I only rediscovered it recently. I could not find a public version of this document that was published online previously, so it has been uploaded here.
  
  The 605-page PDF document reads like a listing of the pros and cons for a huge array of defensive and counterintelligence approaches and technologies that an entity might adopt in defending its networks."
  
• Homeopathic Bomb - "The world has been placed on a heightened security alert following reports that New Age terrorists have harnessed the power of homeopathy for evil. 'Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace,' said President Barack Obama, 'they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating.'
  . . .
  Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes."
  
• Common Sense in the Hands of Dilettantes - "Under the Stanford Revolution, law schools will now broaden the legal education to include all the other aspects of life that will enable them to be metadisciplinaritists, engaging the 'interplay' between technical expertise and common sense." There's a dilettante in the room, and he's called 'Professor'.
  
  Here's the deal, plain and simple. That whole meta-inter-disciplarnialotomist thing you're promoting? We call that undergrad. If you didn't get enough of it there, then there's always the school of hard knocks. We call that life. Are you eggheads kidding us? You're going to charge kids who couldn't get into Med School $40 grand a year to take the electives they missed the first time around and call that law school? Are you nutz?"
  
• The great American mortgage casino -- How the Goldman case is about the broken down system that allowed massive gambling in America’s housing market for the last decade. Average sales price down because distress sales still account for 30 percent of home sales nationwide. - "What is hard to understand from a psychological standpoint is how people can think things are good when we have over 7 million mortgages that are either 30+ days late or in some stage of foreclosure? We are, as of today even with all these new measures, near the peak of the foreclosure problem. Last month was the highest foreclosure filing month ever recorded! This is not good. How someone can interpret this as good news really baffles the senses. Until that distress percentage creeps down into the single digits, the market is highly volatile.
  . . .
  Just like people look back on Tulip Mania or the technology bubble, people will be asking how in the world did we allow so much gambling to take place with mortgages? But more importantly, they’ll be asking why we didn’t reform and fix such an obvious mistake even after so much economic pain was unleashed."
  
• American Baby - "That is one big reason why the ongoing scandals rocking the financial sector are creating such outrage and upset among the American polity. Citizens are discovering that a very large percentage of people whom they used to admire and envy for mouth-watering financial success earned a large portion of that success by cheating, by gaming the system, and by rigging the rules in their favor. What seems to outrage many Americans even more is that these very financiers do not seem to recognize that they have violated the implicit social norms almost everybody else seems to accept. They hide behind a defense of arrogance, superciliousness, and moral obliviousness which makes most Americans' teeth grind in frustration.
  
  This is a dangerous situation for the plutocracy. For, when you get right down to it, most Americans are not really interested in supporting a system that is designed to preserve the wealth and privileges of those who have already made it to the top. Instead, they want one that will give as many people as possible a reasonably fair shot at reaching the top themselves. That is a distinction which seems to elude many of the wealthy and powerful. They misperceive the struggle as one of capitalism versus socialism, when what it really is is a struggle for the heart and soul of capitalism in this country. On one side is a new aristocracy of money, entrenched interests, and cronyism, and on the other is an ethos of equal opportunity for all."
  
• Government Fraud - "'Current state pension accounting practices are inaccurate and outmoded. Private pension plans would not be allowed to use such methods.'
  
  Of course, no one will ever be sued by the SEC, prosecuted by the DOJ, or McCarthied by a Congressional committee for this. Or for the equivalent Federal fraud in making untenable promises for future Social Security and Medicare entitlements.
  
  Because this fraud is perpetrated by people who were Elected, it is sanctioned by Divine Right. Anyway, it cannot possibly be fraud, because government is 'us.'"
  
• Horrible New Paperwork Requirement Slipped into Health Care Bill - "A little noticed provision in the recently passed health care reform bill will require every payment to corporations over $600 to be reported on a Form 1099 to the IRS, including payments for the purchase of merchandise and services. This provision takes effect in 2012.
  
  The current law requires a Form 1099 to be submitted to the IRS when your business pays more than $600 for rent, interest, dividends, and non-employee services if the payments are made to entities other than corporations. Currently, payments made to a corporation and payments for merchandise are not required to be reported.
  . . .
  My small business has over a thousand vendors. I would have to hire someone full time for a month to do this. And it would be to zero purpose. The IRS would be so flooded with forms that there would be no way they could pull any useful information from the blizzard. This is yet another example of legislators operating with absolutely no idea how commerce actually works. We have coined a name for it within our firm -- we call it arrogant ignorance."

The Thought Experiment

• Taboo and Not Taboo at Elite Universities - "In short, what’s taboo on elite American campuses is ideas and actions that many people find offensive, but only if those ideas and actions happen to conflict with the felt commitments of left-wing ideology."
• Muni Bonds: Time to Head for Higher Ground? - "J. P. Morgan and Charles Schwab have just announced a program to make municipal bonds more available to small investors.
  
  Let's see, record low interest rates and looming risk of default from undisclosed obligations, or perhaps a brisk uptake in inflation. Sounds like a plan (for the big dogs to unload)."
• The perfect roast chicken - "The second recipe, from cookery writer Annie Bell, takes a completely different tack, slipping in a crafty 10 minute poach before the bird goes into the oven. It's a clever idea -- poached chicken is famously succulent -- but a risky one too, given the importance of dry skin for a crispy finish. In direct contravention of Keller's prohibition on steam, as well as drizzling oil on to the chicken once it's been patted dry, I'm also instructed to tip a couple of millimetres of water into the roasting tin before putting into the oven at 220˚C for 40 minutes. The ensuing steam sets off the fire alarm, but the cooked bird is browner than I'd anticipated, presumably because of the high cooking temperature. Although the rather elastic skin attracts considerably less excitement, it still tastes pretty good, and the meat beneath is wonderfully juicy. Annie's poaching trick is definitely a crowd-pleaser, with one of the panel claiming it's the best roast chicken she's ever had." ht Marginal Revolution
• Are people remembered by how they lived their entire lives? - "I sincerely hope I have enough foreknowledge of when I'll die to stop being an utter bastard for those 5 minutes before I croak and donate everything to charity."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Big Growth In Geothermal Energy - "For states that do not have good geothermal or wind fulfillment of renewables mandates has got to be tough (meaning expensive). I am wondering what the costs for these geothermal plants turn out to be. One can't predict the costs just from initial construction costs because the drilled pipes to the deep hot areas can clog up and also the heat can not last. So redrilling can become necessary and so geothermal's cost can vary.
  
  Geothermal has one big advantage over solar and wind: 24x7 operation."
• Lies of the Ethics Industry: How the champions of "good government" suppress speech and sow cynicism - "Our 21st century politics might be regarded as an ethical golden age--at least in contrast to the corruption of the 19th century, when senators were on railroad payrolls and urban machines pilfered public treasuries. Yet according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, only 22 percent of citizens now trust government 'almost always or most of the time.'
  
  Ironically, the trust deficit is partly a result of the very transparency rules adopted to encourage confidence in government. Enacted after some idiots in Richard Nixon's White House broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee--apparently guided by the aphorism 'nothing's too cheap to steal'--transparency laws were supposed to shine light on the influence of cash. Which they did. But they also left an even bigger impression that money is the root of all public policy evil.
  
  Four groups now work to convince us we have the worst government money can buy: (1) an ethics industry spawned in Washington by Watergate, which features nonprofits lobbying for regulation of speech they don't like; (2) journalists who collude with ethics purveyors, writing cheap-and-easy stories fitting a corruption narrative they create; (3) politicians, especially Democratic Progressive Era throwbacks, who think evil-doing can be stopped with new and better rules and who pander to the ethics industry, the media, and (ironically) to citizens convinced that Democrats are just as sleazy as Republicans; and (4) citizens, frustrated by the budget-busting consequences of the free lunches we accept from politicians.
  . . .
  Lost in this televised Kabuki theater is any serious attempt to address the really big public policy problems facing the country, including massive entitlement payouts for the elderly, the bipartisan jobs program known as national defense, and gigantic interest payments on the national debt. Who actually believes that removing money from politics will help fix any of that?"
• Acquisitions, from Victor Niederhoffer - "One has seen this happen often times when I was in the finder business with buyers trying to cover up their own lapses by buying to boost lapses in their own business. Often the two blades of the scissors come together with the buyer trying to pull the wool over the seller and the seller over the buyer. The net result to me has always been that companies that make it a principal part of the business to buy companies seem to me to have inordinately poor performance. I have seen innumerable conglomerates in my day go from great to dismal."
• Secular Sex Abuse Gets a Look - "In New York, Queens Assemblywoman Margaret Markey routinely presents a bill which seeks to open a year-long 'window' into the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse cases, allowing victims whose cases may go back as far as 40 years to bring suit for damages.
  
  Because the bill has -until now- always been limited by Markey to impact the churches, exclusively, it always either failed or been shelved. It is difficult to pass a bill that essentially finds some sexual abuse victims to be more worthy of redress than others.
  
  Markey seems to have figured that out; her new bill includes suits against secular institutions, and the previously silent civil authorities, among others, are reeling:
  . . .
  Extending the “open window” to include secular sex abuse cases will impact the whole of society. We will be invited to look in and-seeing the width and breadth of the problem-will be forced to ponder the human animal and the human soul in ways we have not, and would rather not. It may bring home some uncomfortable truths: that 'safety' is relative; that human darkness is not limited to various 'theys' but seeps into the whole of 'us'; that the tendency to look at the guilt of others has, perhaps, a root in our wish not to look at ourselves; that human brokenness is a constant and human righteousness is always imperfect."
• ‘Orangutan-Sized’ Raccoons Invade Chicago - "'He looked like an orangutan swinging-swinging around. It was scary, very scary,' said Chicago resident Wilma Ward about her recent run-in with a raccoon. Ward, who lives in Chicago several miles away from the nearest forest, found herself face to snout with a raccoon she described as being almost her height. She was forced to barricade herself in an upstairs bathroom until morning, and when she emerged she discovered the raccoon had bent steel window-bars to get into her kitchen. Others in the neighborhood have described these raccoons as being the size of German Shepherds."
• Multi-Generation Movies - "I recall a few 1930s-vintage movies that dealt with families over a span of generations, perhaps tracing a main character from youth or even birth to old age and the grave. Some might even have encompassed greater intervals. Don't ask me to name these, because they didn't interest me much at the time and their titles were quickly forgotten. Looking back, I wonder if some of those films were adapted from or inspired by some popular novels of the 1920s and 30s that were epic from a generational standpoint.
  
  As many readers know, unlike Michael Blowhard, I'm not a movie guy. I see perhaps two a year these days, though did go a lot more often up into the 1980s. So I could be dead wrong when I suggest that the movie whose plot passes through 50 or 80 years of a family's experiences is almost completely passé.
  
  Let's assume that in my ignorance I stumbled on a truth: there were a lot more generational epics filmed in the 1930s than in recent years. If so, what to make of it?
  . . .
  From the comments: Slightly off-topic: I'm fascinated by how middle age was treated in '30s and '40s films. People were older then! I mean that (e.g.) a woman could be 40 and portrayed as a gray-haired spinster. Think of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.: shown as an elderly, batty, nearly forgotten has-been, Norma Desmond was supposed to be 50! And Swanson was 50 when she made the film. For comparison, that's younger than Madonna, Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, Andie MacDowell, Bo Derek, Rene Russo, and Christie Brinkley are now. Catherine Deneuve is 66."

Mississippi Fred McDowell

• Did Video Professor Spend Too Much On Lawyers And Not Enough On Its Product? - "Video Professor, a company well-known in these pages for its penchant for suing both its critics and message boards that hosted its critics, not to speak of trying to suppress competition by misusing trademark law, has apparently hit hard times, a TV station in Denver is reporting:"
• Blankfein's Apha Deception - "Senator Claire McCaskill better characterized Goldman as a bookie whose main job is setting a line so they aren't taking a position on the outcome, their customers are, just in offsetting ways. Making markets is first and foremost about pricing (setting the line), secondarily about hedging, and finally about how the residual risk aggregates up. If you price correctly, the other two are de minimus.
  
  But as I explain in my Finding Alpha book, one reason why 'risk' remains prominent in academic finance though it has never been identified precisely is that it has the ability to rationalize a lot of useful deception. Risk is presumably the most important thing in finance, its essence. But what is 'risk'? That depends: it could be beta, a regression coefficient with the aggregate market; it could be volatility, or the correlation with the wealth-to-income ratio. Bill Sharpe, one of the founders of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, now prefers a 12 factor model of risk that totally obviates his Nobel Prize winning insight, though no one seems to note the inconsistency.
  . . .
  So, when alpha deceptors hide behind the 'we are risk managers' defense, remember, a real risk manager has a prosaic job, doing things that one can understand: verifying income on loan applications, measuring CAPM betas, calculating VaRs even. They are straightforward, and you can argue about key assumptions. The whole 'risk manager' spiel is because if you are getting paid $1MM+ a year, you know that there's probably someone just as smart as you making half that who wants your job, so better make it sound like you are doing financial string theory.
  . . .
  Blankfein is a crony capitalist, begging for more 'regulation' because he knows that a 1300 page bill basically only helps those with connections and extant massive legal infrastructure, and hurts potential competitors who merely have good ideas."
• Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline - "Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.
  
  To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!"
• Spirit Airlines Earns Dubious Honor With “Pre-Reclined” Seats - "The pre-reclined seats on the new Spirit Airlines aircraft are fixed in a slightly reclined position. Spirit isn’t the first airline to go with the pre-reclined seats, And if the fixed position wasn’t bad enough, the seats also feature a meager 28 inch pitch, a measure of leg room which is one of the shortest in the industry.
  
  For Spirit Airlines, the fixed seats means lighter seats. Without all the mechanisms needed to recline, the new seats are thinner, lighter and will require much less maintenance. All this means reduced costs for the airline and no more reminders to return your seat to the full upright position.
  
  The fixed seat isn’t necessarily a bad thing by itself. It means no more having the person in front of you seeing how much force is required to spill your drink or crush your knees when they slam their seat back. Of course with the 28 inch pitch, many travelers will already have 'pre-crushed' knees without any extra force needed."
• Is Cocoa Puffs no longer heart healthy? - "Until recently, Cocoa Puffs enjoyed the endorsement of the American Heart Association (AHA) as a heart-healthy food.
  
  For a price, the AHA will allow food manufacturers to affix a heart 'check mark' signifying endorsement by the AHA as conforming to some basic 'heart healthy' requirements.
  . . .
  I suspect that agencies like the AHA, the USDA, the American Diabetes Association as starting to understand that they have blundered big time by pushing low-fat, having contributed to the nationwide epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and that it is time to quietly start backpedaling."
• Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart - "Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country’s biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does--a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.
  
  In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis--which combines data from several studies--that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease."
• Steve Chapman: How starving government gets fat - "Forced to pay for everything they get, right away, Americans would undoubtedly choose to make do with less. But given the opportunity to party now and pay later -- or never, if the tab can be billed to the next generation -- they find no compelling reason to do without.
  
  Think of it this way. If you want people to consume more of something, you reduce the price. If you want them to consume less, you raise the price. For most of the last 30 years, federal programs have been on sale, and they've found lots of buyers.
  
  That's how the low-tax strategy has worked in practice. So if we are going to reduce the size of the federal government, we can't rely on starving the beast. We will have to tackle it and wrestle it to the mat."

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 4/30/10

Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture

• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• The Forfeiture Racket: Police and prosecutors won't give up their license to steal. - " Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show 'probable cause' that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff.
  
  Municipalities have come to rely on confiscated property for revenue. Police and prosecutors use forfeiture proceeds to fund not only general operations but junkets, parties, and swank office equipment. A cottage industry has sprung up to offer law enforcement agencies instruction on how to take and keep property more efficiently. And in Indiana, where Anthony Smelley is still fighting to get his money back, forfeiture proceeds are enriching attorneys who don’t even hold public office, a practice that violates the U.S. Constitution."
• How Dependent Are Police On “Asset Forfeiture” To Pay Police Salaries? - "Americans should be alert to a problematic increase in “police property seizures” as the economy worsens: Police departments having a budget crisis, faced with having to layoff police officers, may increasingly look to civil asset forfeiture of Citizens’ property to pay their salaries and operating costs.
  
  Police corruption abounds [in] U.S. Cities: Citizens are illegally shot, falsely arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. Every American is at risk of being falsely imprisoned despite the conviction standard 'evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.' Frequently reported, Police falsify evidence and or purchase testimony from paid informants to convict Citizens. Imagine how easy it would be for corrupt police to forge evidence to cause 'civil asset forfeiture' of a person’s property like their home. Civil Asset Forfeiture requires a lower standard of evidence than criminal evidence, 'only a Preponderance of Civil Evidence' to seize property: government can use as civil evidence to forfeit someone’s real property, the fact the owner reported to police that a tenant was dealing drugs to show that the owner--had prior knowledge of the activity. "
• Myths About Capitalism: Confronting the biggest lies about American business - "Remember the last time you went into Starbucks, and then remember the last time you went into the DMV to get your license,' Medved said. 'Where did you get better treated? And it's not because the barista is some kind of idealist or humanitarian. She wants a tip. She wants you to come back to the Starbucks ... .'"
  
  Why do so many people apparently want their government to be as warm and cuddly as a barista at Starbux? Maybe some people prefer a state that shows contempt for and disinterest in its citizens.
  
  
• The Financial Crisis: Are We All Responsible? - "The overwhelming majority of people are hard working, honest in their dealings, more concerned with raising families than ruling others, if anything distracted by their day to day problems. Long suffering, patient to a fault, too willing to the give the Wall Street bankers the benefit of the doubt for the very reason of their own good natures. They could not imagine themselves doing the things of which these men stand accused, so they cannot believe that others would so willingly lie and deceive, cheat and steal, attack the very heart of the nation, while wrapping themselves in a flag of hypocrisy, for a few more dollars that they can hardly need or even personally spend. And why? Because it feeds their sickened hearts, their pathological egos, and the need to make others suffer loss for their own gains. It makes them feel superior, as gods."
• The anti-market narrative of the crisis - "Those poor impulsive bankers. They can’t seem to stop themselves and that’s how we know that markets aren’t self-correcting. Ignore the weird (and common) conflating of the efficient market hypothesis and market stability. Let’s just look at market stability and the idea of leaving bankers to their own devices. That’s supposed to mean 'unregulated.' Ignore the fact that financial markets are regulated in all kinds of ways.
  
  Just focus on that phrase 'can’t seem to stop themselves.' They just keep driving the financial vehicles off the cliff using all that borrowed money. Does the fact that the government often reimburses the lenders in the name of preserving financial stablity have something to do with bankers’ inability to stop themselves?
  
  Does the quest for complete stability have something to do with the failure to achieve stability?"
  
  See Crony Capitalism
  
  
• Greece: Dead Man Walking? - "I’m mystified as to the cheerleading in some circles on Greece. It is not clear that its €45 billion EU-IMF band-aid will be deployed (among other things, it faces a legal challenge in Germany) and even if it is, it falls well short of Greece’s anticipated needs beyond one year. More important, a successful deal does not mean the rescue will prevent default. The austerity program for Greece (in terms of reduction of fiscal deficit) has no successful precedents, and street protests indicate that the populace is not on board. And Ed Harrison sees eerie parallels to the rescue of CreditAnstalt, which kicked off more bank runs, ultimately precipitating the second leg down of the Great Depression.
  
  While stock markets are perking up in Asia, credit default swap spread for the other Club Med countries rose on Friday, signaling that investors are worried about the risk of contagion. And in the UK, several savvy investors told me they expect a 20% pound depreciation once the election is over. Europe is clearly on a deflationary path."
• This is What a Greek Debt Crisis Looks Like - "[This chart] shows how much additional yield the market is demanding to hold Greek versus German bonds, in other words, 'the collapse of Greece’s perceived creditworthiness.'"
• Gangster Government becomes a long-running series - "Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration's decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.
  
  This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folks got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. 'We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,' I wrote. 'It is likely to be a continuing series.'"
• The money is gone - "Education funding isn’t going to rebound, writes Mike Petrilli, who’s taking flak for TV interviews in which he said, 'The money is gone and it’s not coming back anytime soon.'"
• Ghana Think Talk: the world majority solves the first world's problems - "By applying a typical process of community development against the grain, traditional power-roles are inverted, places are exchanged, and stereotypes clash with reality as disconnected cultures work together in detached but physical ways.
  
  This project is an attempt to transpose parts of one culture into another, exploring the friction caused by solutions that are generated in one context and applied elsewhere, and revealing the hidden assumptions that govern cross-cultural interactions."
• Obama for Entrepreneurs, but Not American Ones - "The Obama administration and today’s Democrats are driven by regulatory zeal, lust for higher revenues, and apparent ignorance of the workings of the market economy. I don’t think they planned it this way, but their anti-market actions are accumulating cut by cut, threatening major long-term damage to America’s standard of living."
• Small business and big government don’t mix - "My job is basically to report the facts that undermine The Big Myth -- the fable that Big Business loves free markets, and that the effect of Big Government is to curb Big Business. In fact, Big Business often lobbies for and profits from Big Government.
  . . .
  As government gets bigger, more businesses are forced to turn to government as a customer -- which gives more of an advantage to big business.
  
  If you want to help small businesses, shrink the government."
• Sentences to ponder - "'About a quarter of Indonesian boys aged 13 to 15 are already hooked on cigarettes that sell for about $1 a pack or as little as a few cents apiece, according to WHO. A video on YouTube last month prompted outrage when a 4-year-old Indonesian boy was shown blowing smoke rings and flicking a cigarette. His parents say he's been smoking up to a pack a day since he was 2.'
  . . .
  How many of you will bite this bullet?"
• Health Care Cost Control? Don't Count On It. - "Remember all those cost controls that were supposed to be in the health care bill? The bill that just last month President Obama said was supposed to be about 'bringing down the cost of health care for families and businesses and for the federal government?'
  
  Yeah, well, not so much."
• Mayor Daley and other Mayors: Seek “redress against the gun industry” in the World Court - "April 27 was the tenth annual 'Richard J. Daley Global Cities Forum,' held in Chicago. Over a hundred mayors and other local government leaders assembled to discuss global issues. As reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, 'Daley convinced more than a dozen of his counterparts from around the world to approve a resolution urging ‘redress against the gun industry through the courts of the world’ in The Hague.'
  . . .
  from the comments: "I will take Daley’s anti-gun stance seriously when he gives up his 24 hour-seven-days-per-week-taxpayer-funded-armed security. Also when he moves to change the law allowing Chicago’s alderman to carry."
  

No More Beer Summits: Tea Party ‘N-Word’ Incident Didn’t Happen, And the Congressional Black Caucus Owes America an Apology

• "How Restaurants Get You Drunk" - "All that noise in restaurants I find increasingly annoying allegedly has a purpose: higher profits.
  
  'And a study completed in the summer of 2008 in France found that when music was played at 72 decibels, men consumed an average of 2.6 drinks at a rate of one drink per 14.51 minutes. When the sound level was cranked up to 88 decibels, the numbers spiked to an average of 3.4 drinks, with one consumed every 11.47 minutes.'"
• Not Inherently Unsafe - Photo slide show of aircraft having done or doing interesting things
• Ban Portable Electronics Before Bed for More Restful Sleep - "Three years ago we shared some research with you indicating that people who used electronic devices before bed reported feeling less rested the next morning.
  
  The subjects in the study weren't just imagining that working late on their laptop in bed or spending time text messaging was make them more tired--they slept the same number of hours as the non-electronics users--they were actually experiencing the effects of exposure to bright and intense light late in the evening. The Los Angeles Times reports on the science behind it:"
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• WMATA Rule Number 2: Go Before you Go - "On Tuesday evening, at around 8:30, I was at the Bethesda station and wanted to use the restroom before finishing my commute to Columbia Heights.
  
  I tapped on the booth window, and the attendant turned to me and grimaced, like WMATA employees always do upon realizing they will soon be asked to perform a task.
  
  I smiled and asked 'can I use the restroom?'
  
  She huffed, turned her back to me and started typing on the computer again.
  
  I stood at the window waiting for some indication that a plan was being set into motion that would lead to the restroom door being opened.
  
  She glanced at me once again, closed some windows on the monitor and stood up. I moved back so she could open the door.
  
  When she stepped out and growled 'why the hell you still standing there?'
  
  I was speechless."
  
  
• Let There Be Light. Weight - "When I was a kid copywriter on the Volkswagen account, grumpy but thorough VW engineers drummed one tenet of green into me: You don’t save gas with secret carburetors which the oil companies hide. You save by shedding weight. The less weight to push around, the less energy is needed to do the pushing. From the First Law of Thermodynamics to Einstein, all will agree. Like we agree on the need for a balanced diet. Then we go to the next Wendy’s, and order a triple Whopper. Despite the wisdom, cars tend to gain heft over the years like an erstwhile skinny Italian bella ragazza after the age of 30.
  . . .
  But they overlooked another immutable law in the auto business: People love to save the planet when asked by a researcher. People love to get the best bang for the buck when it comes to buying."

Apollo 11 slow-motion launch

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 4/26/10

Wham-O
"It's gotten so bad the Mexicans are hiring Americans to do the jobs the Chinese don't want to do."
"[We, the Chinese] don't want the crappy jobs."



South Park death threats

• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
  
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
  
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
  
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
  
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
  
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
  
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
  
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
  
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
  
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
  
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
  
• School lunches called a national security threat - "Hey Kid: Every time you eat a tator tot, you're letting the terrorists win!"
  
• Fire and Ice - "Der Spiegel examines the chain of events that led to the cancellation of 17,000 flights over Europe, including the diversion of medevacs from Afghanistan and rerouting of the German Chancellor’s flight home. Ash clouds from an Icelandic volcano disrupted flights all over Europe. The question is whether the policy makers over-reacted to the thread. As volcanoes go Eyjafjallajökull was accounted by Icelandic volcanologists as 'a weary old man'. It’s recent eruption was unremarkable.
  . . .
  The military historian Max Hastings wrote that 'the great volcanic shutdown was the price we pay for a society that overreacts to any risk'. Hastings argued that societies had forgotten the concept of accepting risk. An accident, no matter how statistically insignificant, could be magnified by press coverage into a Grecian tragedy. The result was that many systems, including those which were unprecedentedly safe, spent huge marginal costs to attain the last word in perfection.
  . . .
  Hastings cites fiascos which are less failures to assess risk than to recognize uncertainty:
  
  - In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain’s egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe -- only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
  
  - In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation’s cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
  
  - In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some ‘experts’, could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide."
  
• Orszag! Don't go! - "Panic in the Beltway! Bloomberg is reporting that President Obama is pitching woo to Budget Director Peter Orszag, to prevent his early defection from the administration. Peter! No!
  . . .
  Inconceivable. What would we do as a nation without his smoldering gaze, inscrutable budget presentations and horrifically messy personal life? We doubt there is an aspiring budget director on the bench with nearly as much to give to public service as Orszag."
  
• Daniel Okrent's *Last Call*, a history of prohibition - "The introduction of the income tax made Prohibition fiscally feasible. Women's suffrage made it politically feasible. World War I created a surfeit of patriotism, a willingness to sacrifice, and an embrace of the expansion of federal power. By 1920 everything was in place for a bold new government intrusion into everyday life."
  
  "Last Call," by Daniel Okrent
  
  
  
• 10 Things You Don’t Know (or were misinformed) About the GS Case - "I have been watching with a mixture of awe and dismay some of the really bad analysis, sloppy reporting, and just unsupported commentary about the GS case.
  
  I put together this list based on what I know as a lawyer, a market observer, a quant and someone with contacts within the SEC. (Note: This represents my opinions, and no one elses).
  . . .
  2. Robert Khuzami is a bad ass, no-nonsense, thorough, award winning Prosecutor: This guy is the real deal -- he busted terrorist rings, broke up the mob, took down security frauds. He is now the director of SEC enforcement. He is fearless, and was awarded the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award (1996), for 'extraordinary courage and voluntary risk of life in performing an act resulting in direct benefits to the Department of Justice or the nation.'
  
  When you prosecute mass murderers who use guns and bombs and threaten your life, and you kick their asses anyway, you ain’t afraid of a group of billionaire bankers and their spreadsheets. He is the shit. My advice to anyone on Wall Street in his crosshairs: If you are indicted in a case by Khuzami, do yourself a big favor: Settle.
  . . .
  I have $1,000 against any and all comers that GS does not win -- they settle or lose in court. Any takers? My money is already in escrow -- waiting for yours to join it. Winnings go to the charity of the winners choice."
  
• Philosophy for the All-Too-Common Man - a review by John Gray of "Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century," by A. C. Grayling.
  
  "Seeing themselves as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.
  . . .
  Industrial style authorship of this kind is a triumph of the will rather than a display of intelligence. The effect is one of wearisome repetition, and one wonders what Grayling imagines he has achieved by the exercise. All of these volumes preach the same sermon: history is a record of crime, oppression and superstition; but salvation is at hand through rational inquiry, the gift of the Greeks that was lost in the Dark Ages and rediscovered in the Enlightenment. Repeating this as Grayling does, over and over again, suggests that he believes the lesson has still not been understood, and throughout his extensive corpus of polemical writings he has the manner of a querulous teacher hammering rudimentary lessons into the heads of refractory schoolchildren. For Grayling, it seems, few if any of the difficulties of ethics and politics are insoluble. The remedies for human ills are obvious, or would be so if only humans were not blinded by superstition. Never doubting that he is free of this vice, Grayling writes as one conveying the simple truth.
  
  The result is a style of argument that, in passing over the human experience that some dilemmas are not fully soluble, is rarely persuasive and often amounts to not much more than high-minded silliness.
  . . .
  As Grayling sees things, it is only irrationality that makes human conflicts intractable. If only he had been around in the dark years of the Second World War, he seems to imply, and in a position to instruct Allied war planners on the finer points of ethical theory, the terrible struggle could have gone so much more smoothly. Certainty of this kind is comical, but it also raises a question about the origins of the principles that Grayling maintains so mechanically. He is insistent that liberal values apply universally. He is also insistent that these values have nothing to do with religion.
  . . .
  The history of the last century is testimony to the destructive power of rationalism, not fideism. Nazism and Communism were at one in their hatred of religion. Both claimed to be founded in science--'dialectical materialism' and 'scientific racism.' Of course these sciences were bogus, but they show what horrors can be justified by appeal to reason. The worst acts of the twentieth century were committed by atheist regimes that claimed a scientific basis for their policies.
  . . .
  This is why it is so silly to argue that hostility to religion had nothing to do with Nazi and Communist oppression; it was this hostility that animated a significant part of the repression. If Grayling cannot see this, the reason is that for him, atheism cannot be implicated in anything undesirable; an inevitable conclusion of rational inquiry, it is intrinsically virtuous. It is true that no type of action follows from atheism as a matter of logical necessity. The rejection of theism can go with a variety of moral and political attitudes, including a positive evaluation of the role of religion in human life. By any standards, Santayana was an atheist. He was also consistently friendly to religion--partly on the basis of its ethical and aesthetic qualities, and partly because he viewed religion as being closer to poetry than to science. Atheism of this kind is rare, however. Militantly evangelical unbelief of the kind practiced by Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mao has been far more influential."
  
• From The Old Farmer's Almanac - "If Patrick Henry thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation."
  
• Immigrants and Nazis, Communists and Cardinals - "I finally had a chance to read Arizona’s new law on illegal immigration. It’s rather different from the press portrayal. Maybe I’ll blog about that, but I want to start with the astonishingly vituperative attack by Cardinal Roger Mahony on what he calls 'Arizona’s Dreadful Anti-Immigrant Law.'
  . . .
  The problem with this stance is that it comes awfully close to declaring in advance that the church intends to “harbor or shield from detection” illegal immigrants. So Cardinal Mahony has to ask himself whether his priests are courting liability under the new law if they continue to give shelter and transport to parishioners whom they know or suspect are illegal immigrants. (He can take some comfort from the fact that federal law has long made harboring illegal aliens a federal offense without producing any serious liability, but federal law says that only ICE can bring such charges, and ICE has made clear, at least by its actions, that it has no intention of prosecuting church groups. There’s also a bit of ambiguity in the Arizona law about whether you have to be committing a separate offense at the time of harboring, and that could make prosecutions of legitimate groups problematic. But the risk of an investigation, and even a prosecution, at the hands of a fed-up local official, has surely gone up since the bill passed.)
  
  That’s a big deal. Suddenly Cardinal Mahony’s outburst about the evils of spying and turning in parents makes a little more sense. The law is going to put his church in a newly awkward position. Complying with Arizona’s tough new legal obligations will be hard to square with the bold moral stance taken by the church in a more forgiving era. The prospect of paying a much higher price for what had been a pretty comfortable form of civil disobedience is bound to engender a lot of emotion. And that, I suspect, is the source of the Cardinal’s otherwise inexplicable outburst."
  
• Emanuel as the successor to Daley is a scary thought - "What is clear is that for the first time in more than two decades, Daley is visibly weakening. Otherwise, Emanuel wouldn't dare broach the subject. Daley's time is coming to an end, either this term or the next.
  
  He won his last election by a landslide. But only a small percentage of eligible voters actually voted. And that was before all the new problems.
  
  Shortshanks' parking meter rate-hike fiasco won't go away. His son and nephew had a hidden multimillion-dollar stake in a city sewer contract, and the mayor said nobody told him.
  
  He also didn't know about his nephew getting $68 million in city pension funds to invest. When he was at the height of his power, Chicago eagerly forgave him for not knowing basic details, and a few in the media made excuses. But those days are over. Nobody buys his Fedzheimer's act anymore.
  
  The economy is in the toilet. He's spent all the money on deals, and the city government is broke. His friends are rich, but the city workers hate him and the taxpayers are angry. He'll need to pick a fight, so look for him to provoke a strike by the Teamsters union as he moves toward re-election."
  
• Soy Biodiesel Worse For Global Warming? - "This is funny. Maybe politicos should do more research before imposing half-baked energy mandates?
  . . .
  Okay, I know some of you might be angry at the thought that good intentions are resulting in a bad outcome. But it is kinda hard to see biomass energy as a matter of good intentions even before considering the report above. The problems with it have been evident for quite a while, so much so I've gotten bored of the topic.
  . . .
  My worry is that advances in biomass energy technology will so improve the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) that biomass energy become far more cost effective. Then it'll take off, driving food prices much higher while also speeding soil depletion."
  
• Baltimore vs. Wells Fargo, cont’d - "'One year, they file a suit saying that the lender didn’t make enough loans in minority communities: redlining. The next year, they file a suit saying that they made too many loans in minority communities: reverse red-lining,' Sandler said. 'This is just a commercial enterprise for these lawyers. … The same lawyers have been shopping the same complaint to various municipalities for two years.'"
  
• Challenging the Education Monopoly - "Kudos to the New York Board of Regents, for a plan to break the monopoly held in the state by education schools in the licensing of public school teachers. Under current law, all New York schoolteachers have to obtain a masters' degree (or the equivalent in undergraduate education classes) from a state-certified Education program. The Regents propose giving alternative programs---like Teach for America---the opportunity to set up their own M.A. programs. The proposal, the New York Times notes, 'could make education schools extraneous.'"
  
• The Intellectually Naked Economist: A late response to Charles Wheelan’s 2008 article Confessions of a Maturing Libertarian - "Wheelan gingerly babbles 303 words of…well, something about smarts kids in classrooms and New Hampshire and his twenty years of study before delivering the backbreaker to our camel of liberty, and I quote
  
  'What’s the libertarian point of view on stoplights?'
  
  So without further ado, there it is! Defeat in eight words!
  
  Now, I don’t have a PhD but let me give such an innovative question a cursory attempt. Charles, we libertarians support the stoplight! We believe it is within the markets ability to offer such a complicated device from the seclusion of a private road.
  
  Not only this, but Charles, we also support the stop sign!"
  
• Epistemic Closure In Macroeconomics - "There’s been a huge outpouring of blogospheric discussion about 'epistemic closure' on the right: a complete refusal to look at evidence or arguments that don’t come from the like-minded. I don’t have much to say about all that aside from the fact that it’s obvious, and has been going on for years.
  
  But I think it’s worth pointing out that something similar has long been true in macroeconomics. And like the political version of epistemic closure, it’s not a 'both sides do it' issue. It’s a fresh-water phenomenon; salt-water macro isn’t subject to the same problem."
  
  Ah yes, close mindedness is a problem afflicting only a certain part of humanity, namely, the part that doesn't agree with me.
  
  aka "pot calling kettle black"
  
• Is it a good idea to buy a car for your son or daughter? - "Our results show that some complementary actions before college, such as parental praise, foster academic achievement above what natural ability would predict. Conversely, we find that some substitutionary actions before college, e.g. providing cars as gifts, are associated with lower effort in college and underachievement."
  
• The Forfeiture Racket: Police and prosecutors won't give up their license to steal - "Over the past three decades, it has become routine in the United States for state, local, and federal governments to seize the property of people who were never even charged with, much less convicted of, a crime. Nearly every year, according to Justice Department statistics, the federal government sets new records for asset forfeiture. And under many state laws, the situation is even worse: State officials can seize property without a warrant and need only show 'probable cause' that the booty was connected to a drug crime in order to keep it, as opposed to the criminal standard of proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt.' Instead of being innocent until proven guilty, owners of seized property all too often have a heavier burden of proof than the government officials who stole their stuff."

Jim Lahey Reviews The New Domino's Pizza from Ozersky.TV

• Curbside Classic: The Best European Car Ever Made In America: 1965 Corvair Monza - "But if a car ever inspired one to emote and wax poetically, it was the Corvair, especially the 1965. So I’ll try hard to restrain myself: the 1965 Corvair was the best European car ever ever made in America. And if that alone doesn’t explain the Corvair’s inevitable failure, lets just say that in 1965 Americans were eating a lot more Wonder Bread than baguettes.
  . . .
  But a rear-engined small car intrinsically offered great enthusiast potential, as Porsche had shown so convincingly. In fact a Porsche 356 was used as a test mule for the Corvair engine. The Corvair had great potential, but its intended mission in life was as confused as its buyers. The Falcon made a much better compact for most Americans’ needs in schlepping hte kids and the groceries, and GM realized it instantly. The highly pragmatic Chevy II was rushed into production, and the Corvair was quickly dressed up with bucket seats, a higher output engine, and an available four speed: the Monza. Out of desperation and necessity, GM invented a new genre: the small sporty car; for American cars, that is. The Europeans had been chasing that for quite some time.
  
  The fact that GM bean counters didn’t give the early Monzas that sway bar and other suspension upgrades that the Corvair’s father Ed Cole bitterly wanted every Corvair to have from day one is very telling, and perhaps the most significant aspect of the Corvair story and its failure to compete against the imports: GM perpetually elevated style and flash over substance. With just a few more bucks and a costless change to a faster steering ratio, the early Corvairs could have been as brilliant as they inevitably had to make the 1965."
• Last Atlantic Yards Property Owner Agrees to Sell His Land Under Threat of Condemnation - "The last property owner in the condemned Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn, New York has agreed to sell his land in order to avoid the condemnation of his property by the city government."
• Not Really Simple - "It was the $380 'bona fide horse-riding boots' that got me clued into the simple life. There they were, sleek, polished to the sheen of black pearls, and taking up an entire page of Real Simple magazine. 'You'll never want to take them off,' the accompanying copy promised. It was the first time I'd ever picked up Real Simple, the women's magazine that distinguishes itself from other women's magazines by its lack of tips for getting rid of belly fat, its Zen-lite self-help pages ('learn to live with uncertainty'), and its tastefully minimalist layouts characterized by snowdrift-sized expanses of white space. Here's a food article picturing six balloon-sized Brussels sprouts scattered over the page and not much else. There's a photo essay featuring elegant mothers and their poetically posed toddlers that actually seems to be about hand-tatted lace, which appears in the foreground or background of nearly every picture. And here's one about jewelry crafted out of the original brass door numbers at New York's Plaza Hotel - the pin goes for $260. I closed my issue of Real Simple, stuffed with equally tasteful and equally minimalist ads for wines, Toyota Priuses (the automobile of choice for simple people), and many, many wrinkle creams, and thought: gee, all this simple living can set you back.
  
  Welcome to the simplicity movement, the ethos whose mantras are 'cutting back,' 'focusing on the essentials,' 'reconnecting to the land' - and talking, talking, talking about how fulfilled it all makes you feel. Genuine simple-living people - such as, say, the Amish - are not part of the simplicity movement, because living like the Amish (no iPod apps or granite countertops, plus you have to read the Bible) would be taking the simple thing a bit far. Modern simplicity practitioners like Jesus (although not quite so much as they like Buddhist monks, who dress more colorfully) because he wore sandals and could be said to have practiced alternative medicine, but they mostly shun religious movements founded in his name. Thus, simplicity people are always eager to tell you how great the Amish are, growing their own food (a highly valued trait among simplicity people), espousing pacifism (simplicity people shy away from even just wars), and building those stylishly spare barns (aesthetics rank high in the simplicity movement), but really, who wants to have eight kids and wear those funny-looking hats?
  . . .
  But it has been only in the last decade or so that the simplicity movement has come into its own, aligning itself not only with aesthetic style but also with power. Thanks to the government-backed war against obesity (fat people, conveniently, tend to belong to the polyester-clad, Big Mac-guzzling lower orders) and the 'green' movement in its various save-the-planet manifestations, simplicity people can look down their noses at the not-so-simple with their low-rent tastes while also putting them on the moral defensive. Thus you have Michael Pollan, whose zero-impact ethic of food simplicity won't let him eat anything not grown within one hundred miles of his Bay Area home, and preferably grown (or killed, milked, churned, or picked) himself. He bristles with outrage not only at McDonald's burgers, Doritos, and grapes imported from Chile (foreign fruit destroys people's "sense of place," he writes in The Omnivore's Dilemma) but even at Walmart's announcement in 2006 that it would start stocking organic products at affordable prices. Walmart, like factory farms, SUVs, wide-screen TVs, and outlet malls, is usually anathema to the simplicity set, but here you would think the giga-chain would be doing poor people a favor by widening their access to healthy, less-fattening produce. Not as far as Pollan is concerned. Instead, as Reason magazine's Katherine Mangu-Ward reported, Pollan worried on his blog that 'Walmart's version of cheap, industrialized organic food' might drive the boutique farms that served him and his locavore neighbors out of business.
  . . .
  The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves. Leo Babauta of the foregone grooming products cultivates simplicity because it makes him feel 'happier,' as he writes on his website. For humble people, their own happiness or other personal feelings are secondary."
• Wheat Ridge High School Class of 1970 - "The reonion committee is working away planning the 40th reunion the weekend of August 13-15, 2010. Wheat Ridge, Colorado WRHS1970.com"
• Common Market Food Co-op - "Common Market Food Co-op was a 'new wave food co-op' located at 1329 California Street in Denver, Colorado, from 1975 - 1980. It started as a buying club at the University of Denver in the early 1970s, and for a few years prior to moving to the old Safeway at 13th and California Streets, Common Market operated out of a small storefront on Champa Street."
• Controlled Chaos: A Day Working the Rikers Island Book Cart - "Another day of volunteering at Rikers Island with the NYPL has come to a close. Thursday I went to one of the male detention houses along with my mentor and two other staff members from NYPL. We were there for 'book cart service,' which is a little different than what I remember from Shawshank Redemption.
  
  We delivered books to both solitary confinement and two different 'houses,' which are the names of blocks within the building. The inmates in solitary confinement are allowed to request books off a list, so we filled these requests from the 'library' within this particular building, which was really just two tall shelves of paperback books in the back of the Chaplain's office." Their Amazon Wish List is here. ht The Browser
• Puppy Linux Install - "Puppy can be easily installed to many different media. Having downloaded the live-CD 'ISO' file, you would normally burn that to a CD or DVD and then 'boot' the computer from it, and you have a running Puppy.
  . . .
  Finally, Puppy is so tiny and fast, he is most at home on the new breed of baby laptops hitting the market..."
• Charting the Carnage from eBanking Fraud - "Aaron Jacobson of Authentify put together this map of all 43 of the U.S. commercial e-banking victims I’ve mentioned in stories at Krebsonsecurity.com and at the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog.
  . . .
  What’s interesting that I hadn’t realized before seeing this map is that the victims appear to be heavily clustered in the East Coast and Midwest. I’m not sure if there is a connection, but the thieves perpetrating these attacks typically recruit their money mules almost exclusively from these regions. The thinking is that the criminals -- most of whom reside in the Eastern European Time Zone (EET), don’t want to spend all night managing these mules."

The Hollywood Stars of the Hollywood Politicians--Reagan, Arnold, Murphy, Temple (videos)

• How to Migrate Email from One Gmail Account to Another - "I'm sure you're not alone--some people simply don't like the username they chose out of the blocks and want to move all of their email to a more professional-sounding email address. Unfortunately, this is one of Gmail's biggest drawbacks--it doesn't let you migrate from one Google account to another with any amount of ease. There are likely a few ways to do it yourself, but if you really want to preserve everything, you're probably best off using a mail client, like Outlook or Thunderbird, to drag and drop the messages between accounts. Here's how it works:"
• What do you think will make more people *want* to repair things? - "Repairing things yourself is almost always cheaper than replacement, so convincing people that repair is a good thing actually isn't that hard. The tricky thing is convincing them that they can do it. So I think the biggest thing we can do is to make repair as easy as possible, and accessible to as many people as we can. We've found that providing people with step-by-step photo instructions ahead of time makes all the difference in the world. Rather than saying 'I don't know if I could ever fix my iPod,' they look at the photos and say 'Oh, is that all it takes? I can do that!'
  
  We need to get back to the days when repair was something we took for granted. When my dad was growing up, it was commonplace for people to maintain their own cars. People don't tinker with cars as much anymore, and that's a shame. This is partly because our culture doesn't value things as much, and partly because cars are much more complicated now.
  
  Fortunately, technology can make it easier for us to fix things. Tinkerers worldwide are connected now better than ever before, and we are planning to collaborate with them to write a free, open repair manual. Our hope is that comprehensive, easy to follow service documentation will make repair accessible so that people will be excited about making their things last longer."
• Bow down before this mighty volcano! - "Like an ancient cult of nature-worshippers, some are celebrating the way the volcano has thwarted modern life.
  . . .
  What we effectively have is a new, modern version of ancient man’s fear and humility before volcanoes. As one study of volcanology argues, in ancient times people thought ‘volcanic eruptions were the work of angry gods, determined to punish us for deeds that displeased them’. The birth of the science of volcanology, from the nineteenth century onwards, helped us to understand that volcanic eruptions were in fact natural phenomena with no moral meaning or sentience. Only now they are being given meaning once more, with some suggesting that maybe ‘Mother Earth is having her revenge on mankind for disrupting the balance of the world’. In short? The gods are displeased and they are punishing us."
• GMail Notifier - Email In The Cloud - "In my recent zest to avoid proprietary software, and use open source (free) tools in my law practice, I have abandoned Microsoft Word and Office for OpenOffice and Google Calendar. They are accessible from any web browser, and work great. I have also abandoned proprietary email clients for the ubiquitous GMail, which also works great. One problem I had, however, was the fact that clicking an outgoing email link in other software brought up whatever email client set as a Windows default. What to do? Gmail Notifier is the answer, and it is also free. In addition to allowing me to set GMail as my default email program, it contains a handy little taskbar icon that notifies me when new email arrives. I have a Google Chrome extension that does the same thing, but Notifier gives a little window with a blurb of the actual email text, allowing me to separate the wheat from the chaff. I paid a fortune for Microsoft Office 2007, just to get Outlook and Word. But, when I swapped hard drives in a new computer, it asserted that I needed to activate, and I went through telephone hell trying to do so. After an hours of phone calls, I gave up, and have uninstalled Microsoft Office 2007 completely."
• Google Street View logs WiFi networks, Mac addresses - "Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.
  
  Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's 'horrified' by the discovery."
• Bryan Caplan on adoption - "I think Bryan understands the selfish reasons for having children differently than I do, though I will defer to his own statement of his view. I put a big stress on how children help you see that a lot of your immediate concerns aren't nearly as important as you might think, and how spending time with children brings you closer to -- apologies, super-corny phrases on the way -- The Great Circle of Being and The Elemental Life Force. In some (not all) ways, adopted children may be teaching you those lessons more effectively than do biological children. It's an oversimplification to say that "children make you a better person," but they do, or should, improve your ability to psychologically and emotionally integrate that a) you want lots of stuff, b) what you end up getting remains, no matter what, ridiculously small and inconsequential, and c) you can't control your life nearly as much as you think.
  
  I would sooner say that these realizations are gifts which children give to us rather than calling them 'selfish reasons' to have children. The concept of selfish requires an understanding of our interest and children, very fundamentally, change our understanding of our interests rather than fulfilling our previous goals."

. . . . . . . . .

Assorted Links 4/22/10

Seat Selection




The Hollywood Stars of the Hollywood Politicians--Reagan, Arnold, Murphy, Temple (videos)

• Media Relations for Public Affairs Professionals, May 4, 2010
• Advanced Media Relations, May 5, 2010
• Public Affairs and the Internet: Advanced Techniques and Strategies, May 6, 2010
• Crisis Communications Training, May 7, 2010
• Understanding Congressional Budgeting and Appropriations, May 13, 2010
• Strategies for Working with Congress: Effective Communication and Advocacy on Capitol Hill, May 21, 2010
• Congress in a Nutshell: Understanding Congress, June 3, 2010
• Congressional Dynamics and the Legislative Process, June 4, 2010
• Capitol Hill Workshop, June 9-11, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Find, Track, and Monitor Congressional Documents: Going Beyond Thomas, June 24, 2010
• Wi-Fi Classroom - How to Research and Compile Legislative Histories: Searching for Legislative Intent, June 25, 2010
• Persuading Congress: Candid Advice for Executives - "Persuading Congress, by Joseph Gibson, is a very practical book, packed with wisdom and experience in a deceptively short and simple package.
  
  This book will help you understand Congress. Written from the perspective of one who has helped put a lot of bills on the president's desk and helped stop a lot more, this book explains in everyday terms why Congress behaves as it does. Then it shows you how you can best deploy whatever resources you have to move Congress in your direction."
• The public choice economics of spending cuts - "The column also offers up some general reasons for considering spending cuts and not just tax increases. Maybe Arnold Kling won't like this column, but when I look around the globe for episodes of successful spending restraint I see Canada, Finland, Sweden, and now possibly (probably) Ireland, which is in the midst of fiscal restructuring. I see change coming from elites and I see relatively left-wing governments (Ireland, admittedly, is harder to classify) which are trusted by their citizens. The Greek government, in contrast, doesn't operate with the same level of social cohesion and thus it is likely to fail.
  
  I believe the 'social trust' scenario for spending cuts is overlooked because it raises the relative status of groups which people who favor spending cuts do not wish to raise.
  . . .
  The Timothy Lewis book ['In the Long Run We’re All Dead: The Canadian Turn to Fiscal Restraint'], by the way, deserves far more attention than it has received."
• A Rape Accusation At Brown - "Brown University is being sued by a former student, William McCormick III, over its handling of a charge of rape on campus. Because of McCormick's allegations, the case is bound to attract major publicity. In court papers, he argues that the female student was reluctant to name him, and that Brown officials yelled at her, pressing her to escalate her initial complaint (that he was following her) into a rape complaint, written by her with the help of her resident coordinator. The court papers also argue that the father of the alleged victim, a Brown alumnus and donor, made phone calls to top university officials, which led to a private settlement: if he withdrew from Brown, she would not file criminal charges.
  
  Neither the accuser nor the university reported the alleged crime to Providence police or campus police. McCormick, who later rejected the deal with the university, says Brown failed to follow its own disciplinary policies. The lawsuit claims that Brown interfered with his access to potential witnesses and refused to provide documents that might exonerate him."
• Now charlatans will know to beware the geeks - "A year ago, I went to a London pub to speak at a meeting for the apparently doomed cause of libel reform. Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing. Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learned English law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.
  
  The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was 'not a jot of evidence' that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies' spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.
  
  Well-run societies do not defend men who make money from worried parents and, more seriously, fob off their children with bogus 'cures'. In his wisdom, however, Mr Justice Eady decided that the law would intervene to silence a debate on public health and ruled that it would not be enough for Singh to show that there was no reliable evidence that alleged treatments worked, which Singh would have difficulty in doing because there wasn't. Because he had written that the chiropractic association 'happily promotes bogus treatments', the judge said he had to jump the insuperable barrier of proving that the therapists were lying rather than merely deluded and face costs of £500,000 or more if he failed.
  . . .
  One year on, the Singh case has led to the Court of Appeal issuing the most ringing defence of freedom of speech in living memory. Senior judges, who previously had not appeared to have known the difference between John Milton and Milton Keynes, quoted from 'Areopagitica' as they severely limited the ability of libel lawyers to censor scientific debate. The BCA realised that it could not hope to win and dropped its case. The Lib Dems, Labour and the Tories responded to an outcry which was turning into a popular movement and included commitments to libel reform in their manifestos. We're not there yet, but a hopeless cause has become a national issue."
• Robert McCartney’s Love Affair with Government - "Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney says he 'differ[s] strenuously with the [Tea Party] protesters on about 95 percent of the issues.' Considering that the closest thing to an official center of the Tea Party movement, the Tea Party Patriots network, says that it seeks 'public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets,' that’s disappointing to hear.
  . . .
  Unfortunately, it is a constant frustration to McCartney and his Post colleagues that, as economist Gregory Clark bemoaned that same day in a Post guest column, 'The United States was founded, essentially, on resistance to taxes, and to this day, an aversion to the grasping hand of the state seems fundamental to the American psyche.>br>. . .
  McCartney also writes, 'The tea party has been called an heir of Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace. It certainly shares his anti-government worldview, if not his aggressive racism.' This is just a smear. McCartney acknowledges that he didn’t find any racism at the Tea Party he attended. I doubt that most of the Tea Partiers even know who George Wallace was. And I’m not sure McCartney does, either, as Wallace was certainly not “anti-government' in any coherent way. He was a big-spending, 'soak the rich' populist, both as governor and as presidential candidate."
• The Party's Over: China's Endgame - "On October 1 last year, China’s Communist Party celebrated the country’s National Day, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. As they did ten years before, senior leaders put on a military parade of immense proportions in their majestic capital of Beijing. Like the Olympic Games in 2008, the parade was a perfectly executed and magnificently staged spectacle, but instead of international fellowship, the theme was the power of China’s ruling organization and the rise of the Chinese nation.
  
  But did Beijing need two hundred thousand soldiers and school children to demonstrate its strength or ascendancy? The dominant narrative about China today is that it will, within a few short decades, become the preeminent power in the international system. Its economy, according to the conventional wisdom, was the first to recover from the global downturn and will eventually go on to become the world’s largest. Geopolitical dominance will inevitably follow.
  . . .
  So will ours be the Chinese century? Probably not. China has just about reached high tide, and will soon begin a long painful process of falling back. The most recent period of China’s fast growth began with Deng’s Southern Tour in early 1992, the event that signaled the restarting of reforms after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Fortunately for the Communist Party of China, this event coincided with the beginning of an era wherein political barriers to trade were falling and globalization was kicking into high gear, which set the table for a period of tremendous wealth generation.
  . . .
  China’s economic model, which allowed the Chinese to take maximum advantage of boom times, is particularly ill suited to current global conditions. About 38 percent of the country’s economy is attributable to exports--some say the figure is higher--but global demand at this moment is slumping. (Last March, the normally optimistic World Bank said the global economy would contract in 2009 for the first time since World War II and that global trade would decline the most it had in eighty years.) Globalization, which looked like an inevitable trend in early 2008, is now obviously going into reverse as economies are delinking from each other. So China is now held hostage to events far beyond the country’s borders.
  . . .
  So the Chinese economy, once in an upward super-cycle, is now headed on a downward trajectory. Beijing’s leaders had the opportunity to fix these problems in a benign period of growth, but they did not because they were unable or unwilling to challenge a rigid political system that inhibits adaptation to changing circumstances. Their failure to implement sensible policies highlights an inherent weakness in the system of Chinese governance, not just a single economic misstep at a particular moment in history.
  . . .
  In addition to its outdated economic model, China faces a number of other problems, including banks with unacknowledged bad loans on their books, trade friction arising from mercantilist policies, a pandemic of defective products and poisonous foods, a grossly underfunded and inadequate social security system, a society that is rapidly aging as a result of the brutally enforced one-child policy, a rising tide of violent crime, a monumental environmental crisis, ever-worsening corruption, and failing schools and other social services. These are just the most important difficulties.
  
  Worse yet, even if the Communist Party could solve each of these specific problems in short order, it would still face one insurmountable challenge. The economic growth and progress of the last three decades, which makes so many observers believe in the inevitability of China’s rise, is actually a dagger pointed at the heart of the country’s one-party state."
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