A rare bipartisan motherhood and apple pie bill is killed in the senate. The murderer?
TPMmuckraker August 30, 2006 01:59 PM... A spokesman for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) just confirmed his boss was the man behind the secret hold on the Coburn/Obama spending database bill, which has captivated a segment of the political blogging community in recent days. ...
The suspicion, of course, is that Ted Stevens has many things to hide. Shame on Alaska for putting this man in office and keeping him there.
Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn't Just in Genes - New York Times:Random. That's weird. Nothing like I'd expected.
...A woman whose sister lived to be 100 has a 4 percent chance of living that long, Dr. Christensen says. That is better than the 1 percent chance for women in general, but still not very great because the absolute numbers, 1 out of 100 or 4 out of 100, are still so small. For men, the odds are much lower. A man whose sister lived to be 100 has just a 0.4 percent chance of living that long. In comparison, men in general have a 0.1 percent chance of reaching 100.
Those data fit well with animal studies, says Caleb Finch, a researcher on aging at the University of Southern California. Genetically identical animals — from worms to flies to mice — living in the same environments die at different times...
...Matt McGue, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies twins, contrasts life spans with personality, which, he says, is about 50 percent heritable, or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is 70 to 80 percent heritable, or body weight, which is 70 percent heritable.
“I’ve been in this business for a long while, and life span is probably one of the most weakly heritable traits I’ve ever studied,” Dr. McGue said.
Blind Eye to Culture of Abuse - Los Angeles TimesThirdly, see my recent comments on the cursed gender.
COLORADO CITY, Ariz. — For half a century, while polygamous members of this remote enclave engaged in widespread sexual abuse and child exploitation, government authorities on all levels did little to intervene or protect generations of victims.
Here in the sparsely populated canyon lands straddling Arizona and Utah, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS — an offshoot of Mormonism — live by their own rules.
The religious sect of about 10,000 portrays itself as an industrious commune of the faithful, choosing to live apart from a hostile world. But their simple lifestyle and self-imposed isolation have concealed troubling secrets that are only beginning to emerge.
Court records, undisclosed investigative reports and interviews by The Times over the last year show that church authorities flout state and federal laws and systematically deny rights and freedoms, especially to women and children.
"The fact that this has been going on all these years, and the fact that justice has not been there to protect women and children … from amazing civil rights violations — it is an embarrassment," said Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff.
"I don't want to indict the states of Utah and Arizona, but mea culpa — we are responsible."
Among sect members, girls as young as 13 are forced into marriage, sexual abuse is rampant, rape is covered up and child molesters are shielded by religious authorities and law enforcement.
Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives.
Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment.
Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables.
Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to "keep sweet," or obedient, for their husbands.
Warren Jeffs, a wiry third-generation church member, is the sect leader — a post that carries the title "prophet" and gives him virtually absolute control over the most intimate conduct.
Jeffs orders marriages, splits up families, evicts residents and exiles whomever he wants with no regard for legal processes. He even tells couples when they can and can't have sex.
But Jeffs is now a fugitive, listed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list and accused by state and federal authorities of rape, sexual conduct with a minor, conspiracy and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Former members say he continues to exert influence nonetheless...
... Despite years of such stories and allegations, public agencies on both sides of the state line have failed to act or been slow to intervene.
The sect's questionable ways were no secret in Utah or Arizona. Law enforcement, social agencies and politicians long knew that polygamy was practiced and that underage girls were married off to middle-aged and older men.
Employees and eyewitnesses say many underage marriages were performed in Room 15 of the Caliente Hot Springs Motel in Caliente, Nev., a few miles from the Utah border. The motel was once owned by FLDS leader Merril Jessop.
"We've heard about it, and were never able to substantiate it," said Lincoln County, Nev., Sheriff Dahl Bradfield. "But we didn't look very hard."
Officials also knew local laws in Colorado City and adjacent Hildale, Utah, were enforced by polygamous police officers and administered by a polygamous judge — and that police routinely referred alleged sex crimes to church leaders.
In 1953, acting on similar reports, Arizona Gov. J. Howard Pyle launched a massive raid, with about 120 police officers, on the FLDS. It backfired badly, however, and was regarded as a political disaster for Pyle, who lost his bid for reelection.
The political debacle, coupled with a fear of violating the sect's religious freedom, ushered in 50 years of official passivity and government inaction, even in the face of continuing reports of illegal conduct in the FLDS enclave.
The abusive conduct went on for so long, said Buster Johnson, a Mohave County, Ariz., supervisor, "because those with the power to do something about it turned a blind eye. I don't know how they sleep at night."
Recent disclosures have prompted a belated round of state and federal action, including stepped-up efforts by the FBI to arrest Jeffs.
The attorneys general in Arizona and Utah have launched separate legal actions, and a Mohave County criminal investigator operating out of a trailer in Colorado City has provided evidence resulting in a series of grand jury indictments against eight FLDS members...
... Charged with protecting and serving their community, Colorado City police have long had a reputation for protecting and serving church interests instead.
The force, which covers Hildale as well, is reportedly handpicked by FLDS leaders. Call 911 here, say state investigators, and it is the same as calling the FLDS.
Former police employees and state investigators say officers either ignore molestation allegations or send them to the church rather than to outside prosecutors...
... Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) once visited the FLDS church in Hildale and played the organ. He later defended the group when asked about its alleged abuses.
"All I can say is I know people in Hildale who are polygamists who are very fine people. You come and show me the evidence of children being abused there, and I'll get involved," he told local reporters. "Bring the evidence to me."
... In his successful 1991 bid for Arizona governor, Fife Symington wrote an open letter to the residents of Colorado City concerning their "family-oriented lifestyles," vowing never to do anything to "upset or question" their religion.
"Our policy was one of noninterference," he said recently. "The advice I got when running was this was an issue I wanted to stay away from."
The Mormon Church, which banned polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates those who practice it, has been quiet in the face of reported abuses, giving little support to groups trying to help victims of the FLDS.
... On the dusty edge of Colorado City sits a triple-wide trailer grandly named the Arizona-Mohave County Justice Center. The metal building is Arizona's first official presence in this town.
Inside, the handful of state employees includes social workers, a victim's advocate and a gap-toothed ex-cop named Gary Engels.
Engels, an investigator for the Mohave County attorney's office, may be the most effective lawman in the state. He has done in a year what the combined forces of Utah and Arizona did not do during the previous 50 years.
Through quiet detective work, he pieced together enough information for eight indictments of FLDS men who allegedly married underage women.
"He's produced impressive results even given the fact that he has an almost impossible assignment," Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard said.
Nonetheless, Engels said he saw only slow progress. Child abuse continues, he said, as do underage marriages and exiles of boys — though not so openly since he and the triple-wide came to town.
"I'm just getting started," Engels said.
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Republican Standard-Bearer Katherine Harris Says: It Is Sinful to Elect Jews and MuslimsAlso, clearly, very sinful to elect atheists, agnostics, Hindus and other satanic heathens.
...If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you're not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin.
On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach - New York Times:I think in most primates adult males are kept away from children. I believe in most human societies that has also been often true.
... In April, with summer fast approaching, both groups of online friends chatted about jobs at children’s camps. Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp...
...Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children — at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors...
...Most Japanese makers don't allow high voltage to flow from their AC adapters to the computer battery, out of safety concerns.' Computer maker Lenovo had a similar message: 'Our management software makes sure no such overheating occurs, and we are confident that the computers are safe,' he said. Interesting, eh? Makes you wonder what's going on over in Dell's design department, doesn't it...OTOH, "management software" is not something I'd trust for device safety ... I do wonder what Apple does ...
The Loom : The Origin of the RidiculousSo Lassie and Flipper might have had a reasonably proximal common ancestor ...
Whales are beautifully ridiculous...
...Fossil discoveries have documented how coyote-like mammals moved into the water about 45 million years ago and became more and more adapted to the marine life....
The Loom : And the award for the fastest-evolving piece of human DNA goes to...Elsewhere I read this gene is most active in humans from 7-19 weeks of gestation. How long before we tweak it in chimps? Just a bit ...
... The scientists found 49 candidate segments. These segments have evolved a lot in our lineage. The most drastically altered of all is a segment the scientists dubbed HAR1 (for human accelerated region). It is 118 base pairs long. Chimpanzees and chickens, separated by over 300 million years, carry versions of HAR1 that are identical except for two base pairs. In humans, on the other hand, 18 base pairs have changed since we split from chimps.
What's HAR1 for? This is the sort of question that seems like it should be easy to answer unless you're the scientist doing the answering. The scientists found that human cells make RNA molecules out of the HAR1 segment. Specifically, they found that brain cells do. Specifically, brain cells in the cortex, the hippocampus, and certain other regions. We do love our brains, and so it is reasonable to consider that HAR1 took on some new role in the brains of human ancestors. The sequence of HAR1 suggests that an RNA molecule produced from it would be stable enough to carry out some important job, such as regulating the activity of protein-coding genes. HAR1 probably plays several roles. It is not just active in the adult brain, but in development-guiding cells in the fetus.
In a commentary that also appears in Nature, two Oxford scientists point out that HAR1 is also active in the ovary and testis of adult humans. And it is true that genes associated with sex are fast-evolving. So they don't want to rule out the possibility that selection has acted on HAR1 in connection with reproduction, rather than with thought. It's a fair point, but I was struck by the fact that the expression of HAR1 is far smaller in the sex cells than in the brain.
Still, it's a strange point that may be worth raising at your next party: we have genes that are only active in our brains and sex cells.
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by This Clown?
Joshua Marshall: ...president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. "I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States," said another person who attended...
Michael Barone writes for the WSJ editorial pages. Mao would understand Michael Barone. Here a brilliant blogger (billmon) provides a set of quotes contrasting the writings of Barone with those of another like-minded fellow …
Whiskey Bar: Rootless CosmopolitansIt goes on. Brilliant, really. I’d worry they’re coming for me, but I’m working to be classified in the ‘harmless whacko’ group. They’ll do us last. Credit to TMW.... The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved . . . to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle.
Michael Barone
Wall Street Journal Op-Ed
August 10, 2006
Consisting in part of cringing before foreign things and servility before bourgeois culture, rootless cosmopolitanism produces special dangers, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological banner of militant international reaction, the ideal weapon in its hands for the struggle against socialism and democracy.F. Chernov
Bolshevik Magazine Op-Ed
March 1949 …
Official Google Blog: A better way to organize photos?Upload all to Picasa. Provide the core data set: dated images of Madge and Benjamin at ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, ... 25 ... 70 ... 90 etc. Let Picasa do the work, churning through thousands of images, attaching metadata to them ...
Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.
Schneier analyzes lessons from the Tour de France …
Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2006... In the end, doping is all about economics. Athletes will continue to dope because the Prisoner's Dilemma forces them to do so. Sports authorities will either improve their detection capabilities or continue to pretend to do so -- depending on their fans and their revenues. And as technology continues to improve, professional athletes will become more like deliberately designed racing cars. ...
Don’t let your children grow up to be athletes. Just don’t.
Interesting observation on the effect of time-shifting — a test that’s negative with current technology will be positive in the future. The same thing applies to encryption. Interested persons are sure to collect all the strongly encrypted data they have, knowing that in 10 years they’ll be able to break the encryption …
Schneier is the wise man of security — both cyber and wetworld. In a few terse paragraphs he outlines the issues and dismisses much of the conventional reasoning about the liquid bomb attack. Emphases mine.
Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2006... Last Week's Terrorism Arrests
Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry on board. Last week's foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security changes graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.
None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 -- no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews -- had anything to do with last week's arrests. And they wouldn't have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn't have made a difference, either.
Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.
The new airplane security measures focus on that plot, because authorities believe they have not captured everyone involved. It's reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details -- much of the "explosive liquid" story doesn't hang together -- but the excessive security measures seem prudent.
But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-on items won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.
It's easy to defend against what terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people in front of airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.
Security measures that attempt to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.
Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes ...
As you can guess by the excessive bolding, I am under Schneier’s sway. I particularly liked the comment about “we can’t keep weapons out of prisons”. Individual prisoners may not be terribly creative, but they share the human power of the evolving gestalt.
Schneier makes a point here that I think is new for him. He mentions “the sloppy and the stupid”. I think most of us have worried about the threat from smart terrorists (that’s a human flaw — we imagine everyone is like us …). I think what we missed is that, until now, the talent pool of al Qaeda has been shallow. A passion for the Dark Ages, an inclination to suicide, and the emnity of a lot of wealthy nations has probably discouraged smarter killers. We do need to maintain a core set of “security theater” for the sloppy and the stupid — of which there are many.
I fear that Bush’s incompetence is recruiting a smarter set of terrorists — at least Hezbollah class. My 9/01 scenarios were really wrong, so chances are I’m still wrong …
Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.Allegedly by Truman Capote? I suspect an earlier source, but I couldn't turn up a good reference. I think they're both right.
Fat Factors - New York TimesA few months ago I posted that several human adenvorisuses are believed to induce adiposity in some animals. Now bacteria, our worldly overlords, are in the spotlight. It's a tangled web indeed.
... Gordon [jf: no relation] says he is still far from understanding the relationship between gut microflora and weight gain. “I wish you were writing this article a year from now, even two years from now,” he told me. “We’re just beginning to explore this wilderness, finding out who’s there, how does that population change, which are the key players.” He says it will be a while before anyone figures out what the gut microbes do, how they interact with one another and how, or even whether, they play a role in obesity. And it will be even longer before anyone learns how to change the microflora in a deliberate way.
Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials - New York TimesWho the hell was on this panel? The article is unclear. I think it was an IOM panel, and allegedly their primary criteria was benefit to the prisoners. This will go down as one of the IOM's biggest blunders; they're usually better than this. Professor Kligman, in particular, suffers from a utilitarian fallacy -- please take him off the Penn medical ethics committee.
An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse...
Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board - ParkingWow. This is so civilized. Parking fees are an entirely reasonable user fee system, and this is a most elegant extensions of this. I live in St. Paul, but I have to admit Minneapolis has its own style.
...Effective May 27, 2006 , the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board (MPRB) is issuing administrative tickets for parking violations. First-time offenders have the option to purchase a $27 Annual Patron Parking Permit and save $8 rather than pay the $35 parking citation.
Annual Parking Permit Option
First time parking offenders may choose to purchase a $27 Annual Parking Permit or pay the $35 administrative ticket. Purchase of the Annual Parking Permit requires that payment of $27 must accompany the ticket, be made in the ticket envelope and received within seven days. Payment must be made by mail or in person:
Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board
2117 West River Road , Minneapolis , 55411
Crooked Timber: Credibility problemsKrauthammer is now advocating military action against Iran.
... But even better to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in April 2003....Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
He wasn’t defeated by a conspiracy of loons. He deserved to lose.
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Was David Broder Always *This* Stupid?... Not true. A switch of two percent of the voting electorate would have given Joe Lieberman a victory. If Joe Lieberman had announced that he was going to live or die by the result of the Democratic primary, spent his $2 million in the bank on the primary, and gotten all the extra Democratic politicians who would have been happy to campaign with him under those conditions into the state--he would have won. If Lieberman had made up his mind whether Lamont was really a Republican from Greenwich or a tool of the far left that believes Osama bin Laden is not a threat, he would have won. If Lieberman had been willing to talk this spring about how Bush could handle the situation in the Middle East better--he would have won. If Lieberman had been willing to call for mass resignations from the Bush administration for failed implementation--he would have won.
Lieberman had to work very hard to lose this one. In claiming that "it was clear" that Lamont would prevail, David Broder is simply being a very rare species of idiot. ...
One of the reasons I don’t subscribe to the NYT Select is so I don’t have to worry about accidental exposure to Broder, who’s far more irritating than Ann Coulter. Ann is a self-referential parody and loon, but Broder is a brainy moron. Ok, so the Times Select also costs $50, which is a lot to pay for Value = (Krugman) – (Broder+Friedman).
Yesterday I wrote (Gordon's Notes: 8/09: How talented is this group?) that I thought the talent level of al Qaeda’s team has been pretty low the past five years.
I'm looking forward to learning more about the current crop of suspects (some of whom will likely turn out to be innocent); particularly how many have engineering or science degrees from serious institutions, etc. That will tell us if George Bush's al Qaeda recruitment strategy is bearing fruit. If it turns out that this is a talented bunch then we have to give even more credit to Pakistani, UK and US counter-terrorism efforts. Given the size of the conspiracy, however, I suspect they’re dolts. No-one with any brains would launch an effort that big from the United Kingdom.
Today I give credit to two recent public radio shows for emphasizing another part of the talent puzzle. One show was part of a superb series on supermax prisons and solitary confinement, the other was an interview this morning with a remarkable counter-terrorism expert. I wish the latter kept a blog ...
First the supermax. The inmates at supermax prisons are not generally known for their creativity, insight, or intelligence. So I was surprised by the range of ingenious and lethal techniques they deployed to support violence, commerce, and recreation. A handful of innovators, combined with modern and traditional communication channels, intense motivation and ample time to scheme, and memetic selection, have delivered advanced techniques to the average prisoner. These men and women stand on "the shoulder of (nasty) giants".
Then the counter-terrorism specialist. He pointed out that a large range of modern terrorist methodologies seem to have been developed by a few unfortunately talented IRA engineers and specialists. Their techniques and technologies, developed during the 1950s to 1980s (perhaps with some KGB help as well?) have been widely disseminated though print and spoken methods (I’m sure the net helps too). Apparently some of this team continues to work gainfully in South America (guess where?), though it’s not clear how inventive they are nowadays. Terrorists too have shoulders to stand on.
So the British terrorists (they were British citizens and terrorists, so they’re British terrorists) may have been executing a derivative attack, and they may have been dolts, but a lot of knowledge has been packaged to a point that even dolts can execute it. Process improvement, knowledge management, and the falling costs of lethal weapons — it’s all a part of the falling cost of havoc.
The Loom : A Dead Dog Lives On (Inside New Dogs)In the dogs the parasite is relatively benign, in Tasmanian Devils a similar sort of parasite is lethal. This will be interesting ...
...One question the scientists do raise is how common such cancer parasites may be. Scientists have reported tumors that spread from transplanted organs, but these don't have a way to sustain their spread for centuries. Still, between mating, biting, and otherwise making contact, vertebrates provide plenty of opportunities for cancers to spread. And it is striking that our immune systems--and the immune systems of other jawed vertebrates--are equipped to battle so strongly against foreign tissues. What for? It's not as if Devonian-era sharks were giving each other liver transplants 400 million years ago. Perhaps, the scientists suggest, our ancestors had to fight against a different sort of tissue donation: cancer parasites.
The Economist: Ta MokThe writing is cold and restrained. The deeds must tell the tale, curses have no power here. I do not know how Ta Mok was made, but in a world of billions there must be hundreds such. Men mostly, with minds of malice and hate -- but for power they would be Ta Mok.
Aug 3rd 2006
Ung Choeun (“Ta Mok”), the last surviving leader of the Khmers Rouges, died on July 21st, probably aged 80...
... His name, “Ta Mok”, meant “respected grandfather”. Villagers mourned him because they said he had brought prosperity and work to their poor forests. He claimed the same. Under his authority, especially in the south-west of Cambodia where he had been zone secretary in the communist Khmer Rouge days, roads, dams and bridges sprang up everywhere, and bright green rice fields stretched to the horizon.
Yes, Ta Mok built dams. They were erected in the late 1960s and 1970s by thousands of slaves. These people had never done hard labour before. They were doctors, teachers, writers, scientists, forcibly evacuated from the cities with whatever they could carry, made to live in barracks and worked for 12-14 hours a day. Their food was rice, which at one point fell to 150 grams a day, or rice gruel, or watery soup of banana stalks. If they did not die of disease, starvation or exhaustion, they might be killed for reluctance or dissent, or for wearing glasses. Between executions and deaths from aggravated causes, almost a quarter of Cambodia's population—1.7m people out of 7m—died between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmers Rouges were in power.
Ta Mok denied that there was blood on his hands. Towards the end of his life, as he awaited a long-delayed trial before a UN-Cambodian court on charges of genocide, he asked his lawyer to tell the world that he had never killed anyone. Technically, this may have been true. The killings he ordered in the south-western zone were done in the deep jungle, where he never saw them. Those he master-minded for Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, when he was one of his senior advisers and later his army chief, were more like mob massacres in which no general needed to intrude...
... As early as the 1950s his cruelty was notable, and noted. So was his distrust. He saw traitors everywhere, and more as the years went on. Not only his party rivals, but ordinary people too, became CIA agents, lackeys of the Thai government, agents of the Vietnamese: those neighbour-countries, especially, being threats to the Khmer Rouge regime. He made the peasants in his zone wear black clothes, the better to control them.
... Ta Mok, born a peasant and with no fancy French education, talked of himself as one of the “lower brothers” at the grassroots, doing the hard revolutionary work. But he enjoyed the material rewards. He put his family—brothers, sons, daughters, in-laws—into party jobs, and built himself a fine red-brick headquarters in the middle of a lake.
In power, his basic, crude advice often cut through the jargon of the other cadres. Phnom Penh was cleared out and sacked in 1975, with the deaths of 20,000 people, largely because Ta Mok condemned his colleagues as “layabouts”. The year before, in Oudong, he had cleansed the old royal city of its 30,000 residents and burned it to the ground. The people were marched away to an uninhabited region in which they could build the new Cambodia.
After the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, Ta Mok kept on fighting for two decades. By the end of that time, though crippled by a landmine, he was the movement's leader. He had argued with Pol Pot, and seized power. The former leader died in 1998, in his custody, as both men fled farther into the northern mountains...
Rapped on the Head by Creationists | Cosmic Variance:
... Did you know that Nature has an editorial policy forbidding the use of the words “scenario” and “paradigm”? Neither did I, but it’s true ...
Serving Size: 11 chipsBackground:
Servings per container: 2 3/4
Calories per serving: 150
Dilbert (Scott Adams) 8/5/06This should be employee orientation item one for every engineer, scientist, geek and autistic person joining a commercial enterprise. All of this tribe share a dangerous compulsion to tell the most complete truth they know, but in truth only a fellow expert wants the entire story. It's really not that interesting.
In order to make an informed decision, you would need to know as much as I know.
That's impossible, so instead, by mutual, implied agreement, I will feed you some lies that point you to the right decision...
The Liberal Journal: KrugmanKrugman gives several examples of GOP allies that now support policies that are clearly against their core interests, presumably because they believe the GOP will support their agenda better in the future -- or that the alternative is worse.
... those who cling to the belief that politics can be conducted in terms of people rather than parties — a group that also includes would-be centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman and many members of the punditocracy — are kidding themselves.
The fact is that in 1994, the year when radical Republicans took control both of Congress and of their own party, things fell apart, and the center did not hold. Now we’re living in an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs. And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.
I wrote a review of Charles Stross book Accelerando and posted it to Blogger [1]. I then put the same review on Amazon where it could be more widely read. Today I went looking for the review. It has vanished from Blogger. It will be interesting to see if this post vanishes too. …
Good Morning Silicon Valley: All in favor of hysteria, panic and misinformation, say "aye"I think they've also banned the upper-crust corporate-focused LinkedIn social network. Would a Democrat dominated House do something this stupid?
Given the recent outcry over MySpace, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the U.S. House passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) with an overwhelming majority. But I can certainly be disappointed. With a 410-15 vote (410-15!!!) Thursday, politicians approved the bill, which will block access to social networks and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries....
...Here's how DOPA defines social networking sites:
(i) is offered by a commercial entity;
(ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
(iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
(iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
(v) enables communication among users.
Great work, Congress, you've just barred anyone who depends upon their local libraries for access to the Web from viewing eBay, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Amazon.
Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain | Cosmic VarianceAfter this the essay gets much harder. Bayes Theorem makes an appearance, though it is not labelled. Crossing Bayes with the antrhopic principle yields yet more disturbing implications. Now if only CV would toss the Fermi Paradox into the mix ...
... Suddenly, a thermodynamics problem became a puzzle for cosmology: why did the early universe have such a low entropy? Over and over, physicists have proposed one or another argument for why a low-entropy initial condition is somehow “natural” at early times. Of course, the definition of “early” is “low-entropy”! That is, given a change in entropy from one end of time to the other, we would always define the direction of lower entropy to be the past, and higher entropy to be the future. (Another fascinating but separate issue — the process of “remembering” involves establishing correlations that inevitably increase the entropy, so the direction of time that we remember [and therefore label “the past] is always the lower-entropy direction.) ...