Krugman nails the Bush "plan" for social security: future cuts to prevent ... future cuts?!

The Final Insult - New York Times

But Mr. Bush isn't calling for small sacrifices now. Instead, he's calling for zero sacrifice now, but big benefit cuts decades from now - which is exactly what he says will happen if we do nothing. Let me repeat that: to avert the danger of future cuts in benefits, Mr. Bush wants us to commit now to, um, future cuts in benefits.

At last, someone noticed this. The alleged "Bush plan" now (supposedly) calls for means testing benefits and cutting them for the "wealthy". All very fine and progressive, but it's a benefit cut. It also emphatically demonstrates that government can't be trusted to fill the "deal" for past benefits; though I assume this could be "grandfathered" (in which case it might not help very much).

Even if I had an ounce of faith and trust in President Bush, I'd still look askance at this "plan". Since I have zero faith or trust in Bush or the Republican Party, it's a non-starter. The odd disadvantage of one-party government is that there's no true negotiation, hence no basis for trust -- especially given Bush's track record. The professor continues with devastating hits:

Suppose you're a full-time Wal-Mart employee, earning $17,000 a year. You probably didn't get any tax cut. But Mr. Bush says, generously, that he won't cut your Social Security benefits.

Suppose you're earning $60,000 a year. On average, Mr. Bush cut taxes for workers like you by about $1,000 per year. But by 2045 the Bush Social Security plan would cut benefits for workers like you by about $6,500 per year. Not a very good deal.

Suppose, finally, that you're making $1 million a year. You received a tax cut worth about $50,000 per year. By 2045 the Bush plan would reduce benefits for people like you by about $9,400 per year. We have a winner!

Worldometers: what's happening now

worldometers.info

Births, deaths, books, military expenditures. Updated in simulated "real time". Clever.

More Dyer articles posted

Dyer 2005 Articles

Another batch of Dyer articles have been posted. I'd love to have a free way to create an RSS feed off this cryptic web site.

Among the new ones:

India and China
Things We Know Now: Hmm. The Fermi Paradox is beginning to worry people.
Habemus Papam: Radical ideas of human worth.
Nationalism in Asia
Hitler Anniversary: It will be harder to remember now.
Don't Mention the War

Firefox users should disable automatic software installation

Mozilla Arbitrary Code Executation Security Flaw - MozillaZine Talkback

There's a big, nastly, ugly bug in Firefox/Mozilla. At least as bad as the many IE bugs Microsoft routinely patches. Until a fix is out disable automatic software installation:

The Secunia advisory suggests disabling JavaScript as a workaround; however, simply disabling software installation (Web Features panel of the Options/Preferences window in Firefox 1.0.3 or the Content panel in the latest trunk builds) eliminates the problem.

When bulimia was routine? JAD Salts, 1920.

LILEKS (James) Old Newspaper Ads: JAD Salts, 1920s

Lilek's scan of a 1920s ad promotes JAD Salts as a weight loss method. (I love the commentary)

How did they work? I was able to find a recipe, but I'm unsure as to whether they'd induce diarrhea or vomiting or (most likely) both:

Jad Salts. Contains sodium phosphate, sodium and potassium bicarbonates, citric and tartaric acids with a small amount of hexamethylene tetramine. (Wiley's 1001 Tests).

I'd like to know more about the weight loss methods of the 1920s. Was purging socially acceptable?

From Dave Barry to James Lileks - an eclectic local web site

LILEKS (James) Welcome!

I came here via Dave Barry. To my surprise Lileks is James Lileks, a local strib hack stuck with a mildly annoying "neighborly" column. His personal web site is much more interesting than his regular column; he's a man of many interests. His archive of old Ads and comics are fascinating (don't miss the Philip Morris comics!).

Vonage -- don't use it quite yet

evhead: Vonage is from hell

Abysmal customer service, poor quality. Voice over IP has a way to go still. Strictly for those with more time than money, and a yen to suffer.

Nic Wolff's site-specific password generator

Password generatorI blogged on this some months ago, but it's worth noting that Nic has updated his utility. Instead of using a disposable password on every single medium security web site, use your disposable password to create unique site specific passwords.

Focusing techniques for distractable folk

Concentrating while studying

This is part of a study guide site for students. Works for adult knowledge workers too. For me the iPod and noise cancelling headphones are quite helpful.

Germany and the tyranny of the banks - Gunter Grass

The Gravest Generation - New York Times, GÜNTER GRASS May 7, 2005

I hope this sounded better in the original German (emphases mine):

TOMORROW, it will be 60 years to the day since the German Reich's unconditional surrender. That is equivalent to a working life with a pension to look forward to. It goes so far back that memory, that wide-meshed sieve, is in danger of forgetting it.

Sixty years ago, after being wounded in the chaotic retreat in Lausitz, I lay in a hospital with a flesh wound in my right thigh and a bean-sized shell splinter in my right shoulder...

.... Now, I believe that our freely elected members of Parliament are no longer free to decide. The customary party pressures are not particularly present in Germany; it is, rather, the ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests that constricts and influences the Federal Parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Consequently, Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It is steered by the banks and multinational corporations - which are not subject to any democratic control.

What's needed is a democratic desire to protect Parliament against the pressures of the lobbyists by making it inviolable. But are our parliamentarians still sufficiently free to make a decision that would bring radical democratic constraint? Or is our freedom now no more than a stock market profit?

... We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.

Günter Grass, the author of "The Tin Drum" and, most recently, "Crabwalk," won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. This article was translated from the German by UPS Translations.

So Germany is now enslaved by international capitalism and the banks? That seems strangely familiar.

I'd have preferred if he'd framed these problems in terms of political corruption and de facto bribery, a problem we face in the US, rather than invoking images of a mysterious conspiracy of international capitalism.

Update 5/8/05: I wasn't the only person to find Grass' writing disturbing. Brad DeLong is a bit more direct.

Stories from Mosul

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: The Battle For Mosul

LTC Kurilla ran to the burning Stryker, threw off his protective gear and helmet, leading a swarm of soldiers atop and over the burning hulk, in a determined push to get their buddies out. Kurilla dropped himself down a top hatch, to get into the burning Stryker, while men passed up fire extinguishers and even bottles of water.

The author also alleges that some US associated journalists ("stringers") are working with the insurgency; I interpreted his blog to say that the soldiers have killed persons videotaping destroyed army vehicles:

Just a few weeks earlier, when another of Kurilla's Strykers was hit by an SVBIED, a camera crew arrived on scene. As a man pumped an AK, an American sniper killed him, wounding the cameraman in the process. When it was later learned that the cameraman was a stringer for CBS who had close ties with the enemy, CBS apologized on the air.

Just as we pulled out, people arrived with cameras and began shooting footage of the scene. One of the men, whom we later learned was an Associated Press correspondent with known ties to the enemy, is dead now. The associate scavenging with him was seriously wounded.

This is an interesting voice, and a novel perspective. I've added it to my bloglines collection.

AP photo of the dying girl in the arms of Major Bieger

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: Little Girl

The Associated Press has featured a photo of an Iraqi girl being cradled in the arms of an American soldier. She died, a victim of a terrorist attack. (Attacks on US forces are insurgent attacks, attacks on Iraqi civilians are terrorist attacks. I think the distinction is fairly clear, but the media seems to stick with insurgent these days.)

The photographer has a blog. Here he displays the photo and the story of the soldier.

Major Mark Bieger found this little girl after the car bomb that attacked our guys while kids were crowding around. The soldiers here have been angry and sad for two days. They are angry because the terrorists could just as easily have waited a block or two and attacked the patrol away from the kids.

Instead, the suicide bomber drove his car and hit the Stryker when about twenty children were jumping up and down and waving at the soldiers. Major Bieger, I had seen him help rescue some of our guys a week earlier during another big attack, took some of our soldiers and rushed this little girl to our hospital. He wanted her to have American surgeons and not to go to the Iraqi hospital. She didn't make it. I snapped this picture when Major Bieger ran to take her away.

He kept stopping to talk with her and hug her.The soldiers went back to that neighborhood the next day to ask what they could do. The people were very warming and welcomed us into their homes, and many kids were actually running up to say hello and to ask soldiers to shake hands. Eventually, some insurgents must have realized we were back and started shooting at us. The American soldiers and Iraqi police started engaging the enemy and there was a running gun battle. I saw at least one IP who was shot, but he looked okay and actually smiled at me despite the big bullet hole in his leg. I smiled back. One thing seems certain; the people in that neighborhood share our feelings about the terrorists. We are going to go back there, and if any terrorists come out, the soldiers hope to find them. Everybody is still very angry that the insurgents attacked us when the kids were around. Their day will come.

Autism and the Corbett blood chemistry study

Be the Best You can Be: Autism and the Corbett blood chemistry study

Applying mass analysis to develop a statistic signature predictive of autism. A novel approach!

Awakenings - all too short

CNN.com - 'Miracle' firefighter received experimental drug treatment - May 5, 2005

Oliver Sacks wrote once of a miracle treatment for a group of persons with a post-encephalitis severe parkinsonian-like syndrome. The medications, normally used to treat parkinsonism, had a truly miraculous effect. Alas, it was transient. It reminds me of the odd scene in the greatly underestimated movie AI, where the child android has his mother restored -- but only for a day [1].

Whatever happened to this fireman, it feels like it's connected to Sack's tale. I hope this will get a medical article.

... Certain medications had shown promise in Dr. Jamil Ahmed's more recently brain-damaged patients, drugs normally used to treat Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression. He gave them to Herbert.

Three months later, on Saturday, something clicked in Herbert's brain. He started talking. Not only talking, his doctor said, but talking sensibly. Even making people laugh.

For the next 14 to 16 hours, until he fell into a 30-hour sleep early Sunday morning, Herbert chatted with his wife, Linda, his four sons and other family and friends, catching up on what he'd missed...

... Since that breakthrough, Herbert, who will turn 44 Saturday, has had infrequent moments of clarity but has not matched Saturday's progress, his wife said.

... There have been a few other widely publicized examples of brain-damaged patients showing sudden improvement after a number of years, at least temporarily, but experts say they are so rare they don't have much to study.

In 2003, an Arkansas man, Terry Wallis, returned to consciousness 19 years after he was injured in a car accident, stunning his mother by saying "Mom" and then asking for a Pepsi. His brain function has remained limited, his family said months later.

Tennessee police officer Gary Dockery, whose brain was damaged in a 1988 shooting, began speaking to his family one day in 1996, telling jokes and recounting annual winter camping trips. But after 18 hours, he never repeated the unbridled conversation of that day, though he remained more alert than he had been. He died the following year of a blood clot on his lung.

I remember the latter two stories and I'd wondered how they turned out. I've read recently of a growing suspicion among researchers that many comatose individuals actually have a sort of wareness of their surroundings, a variety of the locked-in syndrome seen with brainstem stroke. (Note: I studiously avoided knowing much about the Schiavo case, just as I know very little about Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson, but I gather she did not fit into this clinical category.)

[1] I just noted that AI has 1216 Amazon reviews, ranging from 5 stars to 1 star with few in between. Any movie that can rouse such passions, years after its release, is a great movie.

The key moment in Graner mistrial

Judge Rejects Abuse Plea After Ringleader Testifies - New York Times

Then he turned to Private England. 'Maybe you think we forgot about you,' he said, trying to explain the ruling to her but realizing, he said, 'I'm not sure you'll understand.'

There are a lot of people in prison who have IQs in the 80s or less. I'm getting the impression Private Graner's understanding is very limited.