Understanding Bush: It's all about faith

NYT, Friedman: Budgets of Mass Destruction

It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history.

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Yep. Among this group conviction is a virtue. Machiavelli covered this in 'The Prince'. Sometimes this strategy works, sometimes it doesn't. If you defy gravity long enough you discover abrupt deceleration.

Africa: Outsourcing 2008?

BW Online | February 2, 2004 | Africa: The Next Wide-Open Wireless Frontier

For a telecommunications industry hungrily seeking new avenues of growth, a surprising opportunity is emerging. Sub-Saharan Africa -- home to more than 650 million people, three-quarters of whom live on less than $2 per day -- has become the world's fastest-growing market for mobile-phone service. Last year alone, the number of mobile subscribers in the whole region shot up 37%, to 34.4 million, compared with a 32% rise in Eastern Europe, the No. 2 growth region, according to researcher Gartner Dataquest. 'It's just a huge opportunity,' says Ali B.M. Conteh, chairman of Vodacom Congo (DRC), the No. 1 mobile provider in the continent's third-largest country.

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Do the math. 650 million people. Say, because of disease and famine only 1 in 10,000 live to be an adult genius. That's 65,000 adults smarter than almost anyone you or I know. Smart enough to learn english, then take thin scraps of material from the web and learn most anything. Back in the good old days, say @ 1995, I used to say Africa would one day be considered a prosperous rising nation.

Hey, I remember when Bangladesh was "the basket case of the world".

Remember when, in the boom years, we wanted to gird the world with high speed wireless via low earth orbit satellite? Gates liked the network that, by an accident of design, would have brought cheap net access to all of Africa. He's not all bad.

We never built those satellites (though Iridium is still hiring, but Africa won't build analog phone networks. By the time they build, 3G will be the only option.

Maybe Africa won't be the next India by 2008. But, by 2018? Bangaloreans will be furious about jobs lost to Lahore.

Or not. If we don't put furious effort into mitigating the ravages of HIV, Africa may truly fail, and in dying spawn a thousand al Qaedas -- with better weapons and smarter operatives.

Maybe we shouldn't let that happen?

Clear Channel (Republican Radio): Kill all the Bicylists

Business 2.0 - 101 Dumbest Moments in Business

We deeply regret that comments made by on-air personalities were misinterpreted. Clear Channel does not condone advocating violence in any form.'—Clear Channel Radio CEO John Hogan, after disc jockeys at three of the company's stations urge listeners to attack bicyclists with tactics that include slamming on car brakes, throwing open car doors suddenly, and beaning riders with soda bottles.

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(Clear Channel is the American Republican version of Pravda -- an organ, along with Fox, for a focal political agenda.)

There's something about adults on bicycles that enrages a certain kind of person. That person almost always votes Republican, often lives in the south, and may be female or male. It's enough of a personality marker that it ought to be a part of online dating personality profiles.

Someone should do a sociology thesis on this.

PS. Ever notice that no President, no matter how active, would ever confess to riding a bicycle?

Brad DeLong: why the rational middle despises Bush

Brad DeLong's Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004): a Weblog

Jeffrey Frankel is not, by nature, a bitter or a partisan person. Yet today a huge number of people who--like me--do not think of themselves as by nature bitter or partisan neverthless find that we are bitter, very bitter, and have become partisan, very partisan. Consider that back before the George W. Bush administration even a figure like Paul Krugman was careful to stay even-handed: to balance a criticism of the supply-siders in the Republican Party with one of the strategic traders in the Democratic Party, to balance a condemnation of the Republican establishment for thinking that boosting corporate profits solves all ills with a condemnation of the Democratic establishment for thinking that neoliberal reforms in developing countries solve all their ills.

Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so... disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it. Reading Suskind's The Price of Loyalty shows just how casual and unthinking it was. As the Economist writes:

Economist: On the other side of the Atlantic, the budget is even less balanced--thanks in part to three rounds of tax cuts enacted since President George Bush took office--and the controversy just as bitter.... Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush's former treasury secretary... laments Mr Bush's style of leadership (disengaged), his case for invading Iraq (disingenuous) and his fiscal record (dismal). The last of those flaws has excited the attention of the International Monetary Fund, which gave a warning in a report last week that America's deficits, if left unchecked, posed a gathering threat to America and the world. Mr O'Neill says that when he raised his concerns about fiscal profligacy with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, he was told "deficits don't matter." The IMF insists they do. The decade of deficits that lies ahead for America will put upward pressure on interest rates, crowd out private investment and erode longer-term productivity growth...

And every single senior Republican economic policy appointee comes out of a look back at the past three years looking very badly. X fails to organize meetings so that the long-run budgetary consequences of short-run policy moves are properly considered. Y pirouettes in midair and transforms from a deficit hawk into a deficit dove so as not to offend White House Media Affairs. Z lowballs the interest rate effects of higher deficits--and manages not to talk about the savings and investment effects at all. W mutters in the privacy of his own office about the importance of maintaining a surplus--but doesn't have the nerve to say "Boo!" to a goose (let alone to George W. Bush) once he steps outside his office door. V remains silent while the clown show that is the Bush economic policy process--a process he cannot view with equanimity--rolls forward. U cuts his own agency staff off at the knees and shows no interest in the very important and interesting work on the long-run fiscal options that they have done. Outsiders like R who assured me back in the fall of 2000 that Bush understood and would tackle the long-run problems of funding entitlements and the social-insurance state manage not to emit a public peep of complaint. Q talks about how much the president wants to reduce the deficit without daring to put his own position on the line within the administration by demanding that words like "deficits are bad" be accompanied by an actual plan to reduce the deficit. Every one. Every single last one.

And it is worth pointing out that it's not just the economic policymakers. The same holds true of all the other executive-branch Republican political appointees: defense, international affairs, science policy, social policy. Is there anybody (with the exceptions of John Donaldson and Mark McClellan) who has emerged or well emerge from this administration like a reputation? And it's all the Republican senators and members of congress as well. People who used to have some claim to respect--paging Pete Domenici, anyone?--have simply rolled over and played dead.

"Is George W. Bush the worst president ever?" is the question that George Akerlof asks. A fish rots from the head, yes. But this fish is rotted all the way down to the tail.

So we sit here out in the Alpha Quadrant, bitter.

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Perfectly said. GWB has managed to transform rationalists into rabid partisans. Quite a trick.

Krugman: What's Happening to America?

Op-Ed Columnist: Where’s the Apology?

...Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?

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The brilliant Mr Delong has raised a similar question lately, with an additional focus on what's happened to our press.

This is the fundamental question a lot of people are starting to ask themselves. Maybe the issue is not Bush, or the Republican Party, or media consolidation. Maybe, as Pogo once said, "We've met the enemy and he is us".

Saddam and GWB: a consensual hallucination (NYT, Dowd)

Maureen Dowd: Dump Cheney Now!

The awful part is that George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein were both staring into the same cracked spook- house mirror.

Thanks to David Kay, we now have an amazing image of the president and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarro, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact.

It would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many Iraqis and Americans hadn't died in Iraq.

These two would-be world-class tough guys were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to show that they couldn't be pushed around. Their trusted underlings misled them with fanciful information on advanced Iraqi weapons programs that they credulously believed because it fit what they wanted to hear.

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It's rare that Dowd says something interesting -- she's a once solid journalist that got hooked on the "insider bitch" schtick. This is an exception; she's right to point out that GWB shared a set of delusions with Saddam. (I, like most of the people I know and read, also thought Saddam had weapons and malicious intent -- but GWB should have had better intelligence than I have.)

USATODAY.com - Declining testosterone might put men at risk for Alzheimer's - or NOT

USATODAY.com - Declining testosterone might put men at risk for Alzheimer's

The researchers found that higher levels of free testosterone seemed to protect men from Alzheimer's. The team reports that for every 50% increase in free testosterone in the blood, there was a 26% reduction in the risk of developing the disease.

Testosterone usually declines with age, but the team found that men who later developed Alzheimer's had testosterone levels that fell dramatically, in most cases below what is considered normal. By the end of the study, men with Alzheimer's had blood levels of testosterone that were half the levels of the men who remained healthy.

In some cases, the drop in testosterone was detected up to a decade before the men were diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

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The researchers found a possible correlation between testosterone drops and the diagnosis of Alzheimer's type dementia. The journalist found that higher testosterone is "protective" (though I bet the researchers hinted strongly that this was so).

It's tiresome and annoying. I put the blame on editors and reviewers of academic journals. They should insist that authors expunge leaps to causation and insert text making it harder for journalists to "sex up" the results.

Alzheimer's appears to be a longterm, maybe lifelong, degenerative process. If there really is an association with a decline in free testosterone I suspect the decline is a manifestation of the same disease process. If high testsosterone reduces the risk of Alzheimer's, I suspect it would be related to some increase in mortality among people with early Alzheimer's -- such as risk taking behavior coupled with declining judgement.

Alzheimer's excitement: apoE clears key proteins

BBC NEWS | Health | Proteins 'hold Alzheimer's key'

Scientists have identified two proteins that may help prevent the brain plaques that are linked to Alzheimer's disease.

The proteins appear to work in tandem to orchestrate removal of potentially hazardous molecules from the brain.

However, unless the two are in the correct balance they actually seem to promote deposition of the amyloid protein which forms the plaques.

The research, by Washington University of Medicine, St Louis, is published in the journal Neuron.

The key proteins are called apoliprotein E (apoE) and clusterin.

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We've known for a few years that mutations in the apoE gene increase the risk of Alzheimer's. So this is an amazing extension of those results. Very exciting.

It will not be the whole story. We've seen in Parkinson's Disease that a single "disease" is really the endpoint of a number of different genetic and environmental combinations. Alzheimer's Disease (really Alzheimer's Syndrome) is likely similar; when we're done we'll have redefined the syndrome and named the pathways.

Since Alzheimer's appears to be an acceleration of the "normal" aging of the human brain, it's possible that any treatments for Alzheimer's will extend the elasticity and capability of most adult brains. Were that to happen, our social security crisis may evaporate.

On the other hand, there's evidence that prions are critical to memory formation. Some Alzheimer's treatments may erase existing memories, or interfere with memory formation.

What would you do with Microsoft's 10 billion? (a quarter)

MacInTouch Home Page

Microsoft yesterday reported record revenue of more than $10 billion for its latest fiscal quarter.

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Once upon a time JP Morgan bailed out a bankrupt federal government. At this rate, given our leadership, Microsoft will acquire the US government after Washington enters Chapter 13.

Even this staggering number is an understatement. Microsoft makes most of its money from monopoly rent on a product which costs them pennies to produce. Most of this revenue is profit. I suspect they don't pay much tax on it though.

If the average cost of a senator's vote is $250,000, Microsoft can buy the senate many times over -- every fiscal quarter. People like John McCain and a few others can take the role of Apple -- an independent with some entertainment value.

NYT, Tom Friedman: War of Ideas -- Why we must sacrifice American jobs to avert more 911s

Op-Ed Columnist: War of Ideas, Part 6

...Just read the numbers and weep: of the 90 million Arab youth today (between the ages of 15 and 24), 14 million are unemployed, many of them among the 15 to 20 million Muslims now living in Europe. "There's not enough jobs and not enough hope," Jordan's King Abdullah told the Davos economic forum. According to the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, between 1980 and 1999 the nine leading Arab economies registered 370 patents (in the U.S.) for new inventions. Patents are a good measure of a society's education quality, entrepreneurship, rule of law and innovation. During that same 20-year period, South Korea alone registered 16,328 patents for inventions. You don't run into a lot of South Koreans who want to be martyrs.

I was at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how many people are using Google to search for knowledge. The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs from the U.S. and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The context — infrastructure, productivity, education — just isn't there yet.

So what to do? A lot of help can and should come from Europe. Although America is often the target, Europe has been the real factory of Arab-Muslim rage. Europe has done an extremely poor job of integrating and employing its growing Muslim minorities, many of which have a deep feeling of alienation. And Europe has done a very poor job of investing in North Africa and the Middle East — its natural backyard.

America is far from perfect in this regard, but by forging the Nafta free trade agreement with Mexico, the U.S. helped create a political and economic context there that not only spurred jobs and the modernization of Mexico, but created the environment for its democratization. Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: "I don't think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent." It was in that optimistic environment that Mexico had its first democratic transition from the ruling party to the opposition.

So if you take anything away from this series, I hope it's this: The war of ideas among Arabs and Muslims can only be fought and won by their own forces of moderation, and those forces can only emerge from a growing middle class with a sense of dignity and hope for the future. Young people who grow up in a context of real economic opportunity, basic rule of law and the right to speak and write what they please don't usually want to blow up the world. They want to be part of it.  

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Friedman is simplifying, and he knows it. Looking at the whole picture modernization is very disturbing and disruptive; it will promote serious short term violent response. It's also irrelevant that Europe is not helping matters; the US will still be the lightning rod.

In general though, I agree with him. To avoid 9/11 reenacted many times by many parties, with far better weapons and technologies, we need the developed world to have hope. The only way we've found to do that is globalization and trade. That means we create great pain in this country; pain in blue collar workers, knowledge workers, an front line managers (Directors and below.)

There are things to do to alleviate that pain; so that reducing poverty abroad can also improve the lives of everyone in America. I've outlined them in earlier posts. Not all that hard, easier than travel to Mars. All it takes is some smart political leadersh .... Ok, easier than traveling to Alpha Centauri.

Microsoft protects "open" Office file formats

Microsoft seeks XML-related patents | CNET News.com

Microsoft has applied for patents that could prevent competing applications from processing documents created with the latest version of the software giant's Office program.

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In a complex universe, it is good to have a few reliable certainties.

Microsoft's fortune and power has been based on three things:

1. Control of the trade press in the 1980s and 1990s and of government in the 2000s.
2. Using their operating system control to eliminate competitor applications and turn Office into a revenue stream.
3. Leveraging widespread piracy to ensure their file formats became universal "standards", without making them truly open.

Even before the Bush administration delivered on their promises to end the US vs. Microsoft antitrust legislation, the proposed measures would have failed. Despite pleas from a very few people (ie. me) they never considered removing file format control from Microsoft. That single action was fundamental to restricting Microsoft's practices and improving the quality and creativity of productivity software, but it was almost universally overlooked.

When Microsoft switched to XML for its .NET file formats, a few naive individuals thought they were "opening" their file formats. I was certain they would not do this -- not while there was a ghost of a chance that a desktop Linux was goint to emerge. I didn't know how they were going to keep their formats closed however. I'm not as smart as Microsoft -- patents are the obvious answer.

Did Microsoft plan to appear "open" with their XML file formats (and thereby reduce some antitrust pressure -- though by then the game was over) for a time, even though that was never their intent? I don't know, but they are definitely smarter than I am. I wouldn't put it past them.

Oh well, the Bush administration suggests that we're not really able to sustain a healthy long-term democracy in an age of uncertainty. Maybe we need to follow the Singaporean route, and usher in the Monarchs of Microsoft.

John McCain on the Senate Omnibus Bill

U.S. Senator John McCain onthe Senate Omnibus Spending Bill

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An unsuspected reader (I thought only my mother read this blog) sent me the link to John McCain's senate floor speech on the omnibus spending bill. I tried excerpting from it, but it's quite long and every part of it is worth reading. You can skim it fairly quickly.

The most disturbing aspect of the spending bill is how little coverage it's really gotten. John McCain's staff has done all the work; a lazy journalist need only excerpt a portion of his speech. So why is there no coverage? Brad DeLong wonders what's happened to our press corp:

... I've heard too many reporters tell me that they have to cut the administration and the Republicans a break in their stories or they'll have their access and sources cut off. I've had too many editors tell me that other editors are doubting their own judgment, and in close (and maybe not so close?) calls deciding to give the administration and the Republicans a break because of what the reaction to being "overly critical" will be. We have deep, systematic flaws in our press corps...

PBS | I, Cringely - On Outsourcing

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

There are those who argue that the numbers involved are too small to worry about.  What do a few thousand engineering jobs matter?  These people simply don't know how thin the engineering talent is in many companies.  Take 100 programmers out of any software company short of Microsoft or IBM ,and you've crippled some program and maybe the whole company.  And the same is true for most of these other critical industries where big work is typically done by small teams.

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Cringely's thesis is that oursourcing is economically efficient but locally harmful. Most economists would agree. He has a good point about how thin the engineering talent is in most companies.

Other than protectionism, what could the US do?

Two things:

1. Strip benefits from employment, especially healthcare. This is a necessary part of healthcare reform.

2. Merge 401K, Roth IRA, and 529 plans as part of social security reform. Mandate contributions. Below a certain income level the government makes a separate contribution. One draws from the plans when not employed, including when retraining for a new position. There is no such thing as "retirement", merely fully employed and not fully employed. When the funds are exhausted a guaranteed annual income kicks in -- the replacement for "welfare". Shift taxation to consumption and a flat "citizenship" tax, since corporations will inevitably dodge taxes.

Emergent computation -- the thinking world (Nature)

Nature: Do plants act like computers?: Leaves appear to regulate their 'breathing' by conducting simple calculations.

"Plants appear to 'think', according to US researchers, who say that green plants engage in a form of problem-solving computation.

David Peak and co-workers at Utah State University in Logan say that plants may regulate their uptake and loss of gases by 'distributed computation' - a kind of information processing that involves communication between many interacting units.

It's the same form of maths that is widely thought to regulate how ants forage. The signals that each ant sends out to other ants, by laying down chemical trails for example, enable the ant community as a whole to find the most abundant food sources...."

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More correctly the plants "compute", though the distinction between "thinking" and "computing" is a subtle one, having much to do with what consciousness is (if it exists at all).

The theme of computation as an emergent behavior arising from the interaction of many systems capable of maintaining stateful information is very hot now. E O Wilson popularized this in entomology. The more we look at biology, the more we see computation. I was struck the other day, for example, how a red striped shirt seemed to have a JPEG artifact. Problem is, I was looking at the shirt, not at a compressed digital photo of the shirt. I expect that somewhere in our visual, sensory and perceptual cortices something rather like JPEG compression is occurring.

The next set of articles will be about computation across species (symbiotes, parasites) and ecosystems -- producing emergent behaviors. Does an ecosystem have the processing capability of a rat?

The Gaia cultists must be having a good laugh!

Of course where else do we have lots of connected entities each of which holds stateful information? We have it in economies, and across the Internet. Of course these stateful entities appear to be independently conscious humans, but recent research strongly suggests that emergent computation is occuring. One day perhaps we'll measure the IQ of that emergent entity ... or it will measure ours ... :-).

After Disputes, Congress Passes Spending Plan - McCain's speech

After Disputes, Congress Passes Spending Plan

Congress finally finished last year's spending business on Thursday, sending the president an overdue, $820 billion measure that finances most of the federal government as well as thousands of home-state projects sought by lawmakers.

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By chance I heard a speech John McCain gave on the senate floor as this came up for a vote. The speech was devastating. There have been a lot of bad budgets in the past hundred years, but this one may be among the most vile. It reflects the will of Bush and the extraordinary corruption of our political process. Since most of the congress now sits in safe seats, they are presumably protecting themselves against primary challenges -- or increasing the size of their bribes.

Hearing McCain speak, I wonder if he's considering leaving the party -- maybe for a Vice-Presidential position with Kerry or Clark?