Secondary outsourcing - in Doonesbury

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

Hey! This was my business idea. This Nov 7/04 Doonesbury strip talks about an alternative to corporate outsourcing -- bringing outsourcing down to the level of the individual worker. I'd spent an hour or so last year thinking about how one could turn this into a business -- partnering US coders with covert overseas coders to enhance their productivity. I think it makes sense. Evidently, so does Gary Trudeau.

So now Maureen Dowd gets religion?

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: Rove's Revenge

...W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.

America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.

Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.

When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.

The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.

Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.

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Ok Maureen, so where were you before the election?

Credit goes to Maureen though for finally noticing the social darwinist strains in modern christian conservative ideology. It's most ironic that a distorted version of their hated enemy's invention has lodged deep in their psyches. Come to think of it, that's probably not the first time that sort of thing has happened.

What it means to be a souther american christian conservative (SACC)

where souls brimful of love -

When you grow up being raised in this environment, whether you give it any credence or not, what starts to happen is that you see things very easily in terms of whether they fit into the 'Us' category or the 'World' category. Since, um, most things fall into the World category, it gets very easy to compartmentalize in your head, and to, for example, start thinking, 'the media is a tool of Satan, I shouldn't believe what people are telling me.' And even if you don't think 'TOOL OF SATAN!!!!' every time you hear the media, if you've heard other people around you and in your church say it enough, even subconsciously you start doubting the media. How this plays out is that you begin to filter your environment as a conservative christian based on what you can easily categorize. Once you have identified, say, George Bush, as one of Us, it's much easier to disregard negative news about him because the Media is one of Them, and the two things can be easily canceled out in your mind.

In the South, the tendency to categorize things, combined with the fact that we are taught to expect persecution as a Christian people, has led us to segregate, commit acts of racism and intolerance, and to be very, very suspicious of anyone from the North or the West, because all of you are part of the World.

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An interesting insider overview. My internal anthropologist is fascinated.

We need a formal name for this religion -- a fusion between calvinism and 21st century capitalism. I don't think the Us/Them divide is unique though -- it's common to all fundamentalist faiths. (I suspect the underlying xenophobia is in fact more fundamental than the faith and may precede it -- but I admit that's a radical supposition.)

An embedded reporters summary of the Iraq situation

Embedded in Najaf - The twin torments of a departing reporter: survivor guilt and second-guessing. By Alex Berenson

The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

News

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

The endtime - part VXIXX

Slashdot | USAF Studies Teleportation

Folks. this is how it works: It is 90 days till the end of the budget cycle. You have $2-3 million left over, If you do NOT have a documented use for that money come Appropriation Day then your budget will be docked by this amount. Budget and the size of your department are all that matter in government land. It matters not one jot what this is spent on, it MUST be spent and it must be spent in a document able way. If the idea is hair brained, stupid, and a waste it may or may not be dredged out of the cesspool of bureaucracy and scrutinized on Slash dot or other forums (like the Congress), but in most cases it just makes another month's pay for a Beltway Bandit "Think Tank" or "Institute".

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In the 1990s the GOP, with help from Dems, exempted herbal remedies from FDA. This made sense only if one of the following was true:

1. The remedies were completely ineffective and thus innocuous.
2. The remedies were magically both effective and never harmful. Presumably because they were "natural" (eg. like tetrodotoxin).

The evidence suggests these regulators believed #2. This is magical thinking.

Fast forward to 2004. We re-elect a president on the basis of the belief that he's been divinely appointed. Meanwhile the military is repeating Soviet-era studies (they published libraries of this stuff) on the efficacy of psychic teleportation.

I do so hope China will inherit our lost mantle of rationalism.

Jane Smiley on the nature of Bush's victory

The unteachable ignorance of the red states

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million—my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.)

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I've long wondered how politicians are able to mask their disgust and disdain for the undecided voter -- and for those who are so easily manipulated.

Udell's Flash Demo of the electoral college flows over 60 years

Jon Udell: Electoral ebb and flow

The NYT images are neat, but Udell's Flash version takes it to another level. Astounding to watch the presidential EC outcomes over time. 2000 and 2004 are sui generis.

My take is that we are seeing the future. I think the science of polling and of dividing up the electorate has developed to the point that, barring a collapse of democracy, and given an effective two party system, the parties will morph until each divides the country in half. One will always include the faith-based thinkers and the xenophobes, the other will include the weak, the different, and the outcasts. Otherwise they'll divide up the rest.

Maureen Dowd gets serious

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: The Red Zone

I'm no fan of Maureen Dowd. She's often pointlessly bitchy or cloyingly craven. Today, however, she shows her talent.

... The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule. He doesn't want to heal rifts; he wants to bring any riffraff who disagree to heel.

W. ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq - drawing a devoted flock of evangelicals, or "values voters," as they call themselves, to the polls by opposing abortion, suffocating stem cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage.

..."He'll be a lot more aggressive in Iraq now," one Bush insider predicts. "He'll raze Falluja if he has to. He feels that the election results endorsed his version of the war." Never mind that the more insurgents American troops kill, the more they create.

Just listen to Dick (Oh, lordy, is this cuckoo clock still vice president?) Cheney, introducing the Man for his victory speech: "This has been a consequential presidency which has revitalized our economy and reasserted a confident American role in the world." Well, it has revitalized the Halliburton segment of the economy, anyhow. And "confident" is not the first word that comes to mind for the foreign policy of a country that has alienated everyone except Fiji.

Vice continued, "Now we move forward to serve and to guard the country we love." Only Dick Cheney can make "to serve and to guard" sound like "to rape and to pillage."

He's creating the sort of "democracy" he likes. One party controls all power in the country. One network serves as state TV. One nation dominates the world as a hyperpower. One firm controls contracts in Iraq.

Just as Zell Miller was so over the top at the G.O.P. convention that he made Mr. Cheney seem reasonable, so several new members of Congress will make W. seem moderate.

Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions and warned that "the gay agenda" would undermine the country. He also characterized his race as a choice between "good and evil" and said he had heard there was "rampant lesbianism" in Oklahoma schools.

Jim DeMint, the new senator from South Carolina, said during his campaign that he supported a state G.O.P. platform plank banning gays from teaching in public schools. He explained, "I would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend should be hired to teach my third-grade children."...

Robert Cringely on the futility of fighting fire with fire alone

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

Robert Cringely has long held the title of most insightful commentator on the overall computer industry. He's not a master of software, he is a keen observer with abundant industry contacts. He's also experienced more than an average share of suffering -- including the loss of his son to SIDS about two years ago.

In today's column we learn that his journalistic credentials extend a bit beyond circuits and venture funds. I would like to take this gentleman to lunch someday.

... Back to the election. If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain't us.

Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.

I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

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So, fighting this war the Bush way, we have a few options:

1. Kill them until we get tired of it -- or run out of bullets.
2. Miss one and be blown up.

This is the war our "moralists" voted for. Armed conflict and surveillance should be only one component of a multidimensional campaign. Instead we have incompetence at the White House.

How bad is the outcome of this election?

Salon.com | Forget the "heartland"

... By the time I had gone to bed, the chorus of pundits had fixed on a single tune, as they always do, and remarkably quickly, too. (Do they watch one another's feeds in the green room?) They had dusted off the old theme that the Democrats need to "reach out" more to the "heartland." Reach out? How, exactly? Forget that these folks blindly ignored all objective reality -- and their own best economic and national-security interests -- and voted for Bush. Look what they did at the Senate level. In Kentucky, they refused to use even basic sanity as a litmus test, and reelected a guy with apparent late-stage dementia; in Oklahoma, they tapped a fellow who wants to execute doctors who perform abortions, who was sued for sterilizing a woman against her will, who pled guilty to Medicaid fraud, and who largely opposes federal subsidies, even for his own state; in Louisiana, they embraced a man who has made back-door deals with David Duke and who was revealed to have had a long-running affair with a prostitute; in South Carolina, they went with a guy who thinks all gay teachers should be fired; and in Alaska, they reelected a woman who was appointed by her father to the job after a spectacularly undistinguished career as an obscure state senator. And compared with the rest of the GOP Class of '04, she's the freaking prom queen. These are the stellar elected officials that the "heartland" has foisted on the rest of us.

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Yep. This is not business as usual folks. We've driven off the cliff.

Salon.com | Bush, God and the Democrats

Salon.com | Bush, God and the Democrats

There is no sense in belaboring the point. Kansas may have a problem, but it will not be solved without a political strategy that has recourse to a religious and nonrational rhetoric and imagery. The Democratic leadership needs to do some hard thinking and feeling in the coming weeks and come to terms with a not so simple, but obvious fact: The country we live in is neither secular nor rational and won't be for quite some time to come.

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America is, at this time, not a secular or reason-based nation. It is a faith, intuition, and feeling based nation.

As I wrote some time ago, in a different context, perhaps China will assume the mantle of reason and science going in to the 21st century.

The challenge for many Americans, especially those who are not Christian conservatives, will be how to live within this new culture.

I'm betting the pendulum will swing back again -- but I don't know when. As the country ages it is likely to become more, not less, socially conservative and "simple". The US will be an aging country for about the next thirty to forty years! That's the extreme case for the pendulum, obviously I hope there will be some countervailing force.

Presidential votes -- a graphical representation of american politics

Purple-USA.jpg (JPEG Image, 616x483 pixels)

There's room for more of this. Maps that allow us to visually parse geography and culture/political allegiance. It may help some of us decide where we want to live.

BTW, MN, a bluish state, had a 77% turn out for this election. Global warming is giving us mild winters and huge corn yields. There's a vast hinterland to escape to when terrorists start to get really serious. Lots of water -- no droughts here. We border on Canada. We're multi-ethnic (ok, sort of). Come on up guys.

The new motto of the rationalists: "States' Rights".

Yes, it's bad

Salon.com | Bush unbound by Sydney Blumenthal

...These emotions were linked to what is euphemistically called "moral values," which is actually social and sexual panic over the rights of women and gender roles -- lipstick traces, indeed. Only imposing manly authority against "girlie men," girls and lurking terrorists can save the nation. Bush's TV ads featured digitally reproduced crowds of cheering soldiers, triumph of the leader through computer enhancement. Above all, the exit polls showed that "strong leader" was the primary reason Bush was supported.

Brought along with Bush is a gallery of grotesques in the Senate -- more than one of the new senators advocating capital punishment for abortion, another urging that all gay teachers be fired, yet another revealed as suffering from obvious symptoms of Alzheimer's.

The new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican Party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. And there are no checks and balances. The terminal illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the Supreme Court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law established since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed...

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Most post-election commentary follows the traditional paths of urging unity, assuming the wisdom of the voters, cursing the folly of the loser.

Bull.

Blumenthal sums it up. This was a great battle, and the good guys lost. The problem wasn't Kerry, it was the electorate. We are the problem.

America: Divided by religion

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Election reveals divided nation

...According to the exit poll, 22% of the electorate said "moral values" was the issue that mattered most in how they voted - compared to 20% who cited the economy, 19% who cited terrorism, and just 15% who said Iraq was the key issue.

Not surprisingly, four out of five voters who cited moral values as their key issue voted for President Bush - as did the same proportion of those who cited terrorism...

...Two-thirds of voters who attend religious services regularly (once a week or more) backed President Bush rather than Senator Kerry - and they make up 40% of the electorate.

Those who never attend services, in contrast, backed the Democrats by the same margin - but they make up only 15% of the electorate.

More data supporting my prior post. America now has a vast divide between faith/feeling and reason/empiricism. This correlates with religious observances, but I think it's a primary distinction. Obervances may be secondary.

Insofar as Democrats are a party of tolerance, freedom, and inclusion they cannot, by definition, encompass groups who's very essence is the exclusive correctness of their religious observances.

The issue we stood a chance on, and failed, was the very high correlation between terrorism as an issue and votes for Bush. I agree that terrorism and security are the dominant issues for all nation states in the 21st century -- however I feel that Bush has a very wrong approach to these problems.

In any case, "nice" to have more data to back up my intuition.