Rogues gallery - 15 Bush appointees of remarkable mediocrity

I know some very capable civil servants and bureaucrats. They must weep in their beer when they contemplate their Bush-regime masters. I think it's time to reconsider the theory that Bush is a deep, deep KGB plant -- the last weapon of a dying USSR.

This appointee is typical:

TNR: Welcome to the Hackocracy

...12: Paul Hoffman
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, Department of the Interior

Paul Hoffman is an avid angler, hunter, skier, and horseman. So it was only natural to tap this former chief of the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyoming, (population 9,000) to help run the National Park Service. Sure, Hoffman had no parks experience other than recreating in them and, as head of the Cody Chamber, advocating for more snowmobiles in nearby Yellowstone National Park. But he had spent four years in the 1980s working as the state director for then-Wyoming Representative Dick Cheney. Since arriving at the Interior Department in 2002, Hoffman has demonstrated a knack for thinking outside the box. In April 2003, he went against the wishes of the staff of Yellowstone and asked the U.N. World Heritage Committee to remove the park from its "In Danger List." Last year, he overruled geologists at the Grand Canyon National Park and instructed the park's visitor centers to stock a creationist book that explained how God made the canyon 6,000 years ago, ordering up a flood to wipe out "the wickedness of man." And, this year, Hoffman pushed for wholesale revisions to the Park Service's management policies. Instead of giving priority to protecting natural resources, Hoffman proposed that managers emphasize multiple uses for their parks--including snowmobiling, Jet-Skiing, grazing, drilling, and mining. After Hoffman's proposed reforms set off a firestorm of criticism from Park Service employees and members of Congress--"The inmates are in charge of the asylum," one Park Service retiree complained--the Bush administration claimed that Hoffman's suggestions were "no longer in play" and that he had merely been playing "devil's advocate."

kw: incompetent, inept

How to survive the coming pandemic?

Darn. I have long though a rural refuge would be a good idea, but perhaps I've waited too long. This writer is convinced it's time to prepare for the worst: Pandemic - Personal Pandemic Preparedness Plan.

Hmm. We put food and water in the basement for Y2K. We wondered about stocking Cipro during the Anthrax days. SARS had us thinking about infection control gear [1]. Bush convinced us Sadaam would blast us with smallpox [2].

And now avian influenza. Somehow Katrina seems to have boosted the anxiety level another notch.

I do agree that we're heading into a world of lower security and higher risk. I do believe that it will be increasingly reasonable to make 'survival kits a part of one's home (it'll be easier when Walmart stocks them). I don't however, think this avian influenza will devastate wealthy nations. I think between the immunizations and travel restrictions and meds we'll contain it -- and the recently resurrected 1918 virus had lethality tricks this flu still lacks. [3]

Still, it's an interesting article to read to pick up a few tips for possible future use. I won't be acting on all the recommendations myself, however.

[1] I have yet to read a decent explanation of what happened with SARS -- and I've been looking. It feels very odd that I still don't understand why SARS was so lethal for health care workers, or how it came under control. My longstanding theory was that there was a far less lethal immunizing coronavirus circulating around the same time.

[2] Why does no-one remember the WMD scare was about smallpox? Why does no-one remember the aborted project to immunize health care workers pre-invasion? Why has no journalist every investigated whether the Iraq-smallpox scare was contrived? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe ... (Some people got very ill from that vaccine, I think some might have died.)

[3] Were the 1918 flu to strike today I think we'd get it under control, and based on the gene sequence it was nastier than this avian flu.

How to build a successful academic career

I dimly remember this work from years back. It's a collaborative reference on how to build an academic career, from graduate school to tenure and beyond. It's confusingly called Networking on the Network, it would have been better called Career building for the young scientist.

I did a masters degree as an old guy --- too old to for the modern tenure wars, even if I'd wanted to do PhD. Even so, this would have been a useful article to have read prior to entering grad school. (The MD degree is nothing like a graduate school experience.)

The senatorial hall of shame - 9 who voted against the McCain no-torture bill

Nine names that should live in infamy. Trust none of them.

Brad DeLong's Website: The Pro-Torture Senators

Wayne Allard, Colorado
Kit Bond, Missouri
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma
Thad Cochran, Mississippi
John Cornyn, Texas
James Inhofe, Oklahoma
Pat Roberts, Kansas
Jeff Sessions, Alabama
Ted Stevens, Alaska

Even Norm Coleman (MN), a man widely thought to be in Bush's pocket, voted against torture.

Scandal update from Molly Ivins

Molly summarizes the state of the Bush scandals. Festering fecund swamp of corruption is too kind. At this rate the Republicans will make the Russian parliament look relatively honest.

I like this last little detail in the story:

WorkingForChange-Flim-flam and hoo-hah

Rep. Roy Blunt, the man Republicans chose to temporarily replace DeLay while he's under indictment, tried to alter a Homeland Security bill in 2003 with a last-minute provision to benefit the cigarette company Philip Morris. Philip Morris had not only contributed heavily to Blunt's campaign, it also employed both Blunt's girlfriend and his son. DeLay gets indicted, and the Republicans replace him with another DeLay.

How did these people get like this? I'm guessing it's in part a potent blend of arrogance and a weird pseudo-religion that confuses the marketplace with God. These folks figured wealth is a marker for virtue, and that they didn't have to fear corruption because they were incorruptible. By the time they realized wealth is unrelated to virtue, and that they were in fact eminently corruptible, they'd sold their souls.

Lucifer would understand.

Salon reviews the Assassin's Gate

It took us over 10 years to fully realize we'd messed up very badly in Vietnam. Iraq took about two years. I guess that's progress. I doubt our victims are impressed.

Salon.com Books | The road to hell

Most of the American left lined up against the war in Iraq. But some did not. Among the liberal intellectuals who supported the invasion was George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, 'The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq,' proves that holding strong opinions about a subject does not prevent a journalist of integrity from reporting the truth, even if it flies in the face of what he had believed. 'The Assassins' Gate' is almost certain to stand as the most comprehensive journalistic account of the greatest foreign-policy debacle in U.S. history.

A funny thing happened to Packer: He went to Iraq. Reporting is a solvent that dissolves illusions quickly if one has an open mind, and Packer brought that and much more. His first-rate reporting from occupied Iraq, and his superb work covering the corridors of power in Washington, offers an extraordinarily wide-ranging portrait of the Iraq war, from its genesis in neoconservative think tanks to its catastrophic execution to its devastating effects on ordinary Americans and Iraqis. Anthony Shadid, in 'Darkness Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War,' offers a deeper portrait of the Iraqi people, but he does not have Packer's majestic scope. 'The Assassins' Gate' is the best book yet about the Iraq war...

...The dangerous absurdity of this scheme (elements of which appeared in a later book by Perle and Bush speechwriter David Frum, modestly titled "An End to Evil") did not prevent it from being accepted by high officials of the Bush administration. "A few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, a State Department official described for me what he called the 'everybody move over one theory': Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq," Packer writes. The neocons were out-Likuding the Likud: Even Ariel Sharon had long abandoned his beloved "Jordan is Palestine" idea. That Douglas Feith, one of the ideologues who subscribed to such lunatic plans (the departing Colin Powell denounced Feith to President Bush as "a card-carrying member of the Likud") was in charge of planning for Iraq is almost beyond belief...

I trusted Tony Blair. My mistake. Greatest debacle in US history is a high standard. There's the Philipines for example. Time will tell whether Bush made the greatest error, or only 2nd or 3rd greatest.

Evolution in action: email worms keep getting smarter

I wonder how the creationists explain the evolution of email social engineering schemes? This was the most clever I've encountered yet. The German mail header, the grammatical errors, the explanation, the story about the zipped image -- all designed to lull the recipient into a trusting state. The only mistake is the To line, which looks like a glitch in the worm:

From: ingey@gmx.de
Subject: I've got your mail on my account!
Date: October 6, 2005 3:01:30 AM CDT
To: User@counter11.sextracker.com

hello,
First I must say, my English is very very bad! Sorry about this.

Ok, I've got an email in my box, but this email is not for me, because,,, I'm not the recipient! The recipient are YOU !!!

This must be an email provider error, but I don't know!
I have made a Screenshot about this mail and saved in a zipped jpeg graphic file for you.


ok then,
bye

There's constant experimentation and variation in these infected emails. If something succeeds, then its emulated and extended. The To: line glitch above will be revised. I find this example of real-time natural selection quite remarkable.

I did try opening the zip (on my Mac of course, I figured the risk was about zero). The Mac wouldn't open the corrupted zip file. On a PC it would probably initiate the infection.

The National Review - a sober conservative publication - 1957

DeLong extracts this lovely gem from the archives of the National Review, a conservative rag much beloved in the Bush administration.

Brad DeLong's Website: From National Review's Archives - 1957

... The central question that emerges--and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal--is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own.

National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numberical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

Presumably the National Review has changed a bit since then, but I bet that 50 years from now, assuming anyone is reading anything, their writings of today will look just as asinine.

The vast gap between action and insight - US homeowner edition

The gap between action and insight is a fundamental tenet of anthropology and of sociology. When you ask someone what they do, or why they do what they do, their honest responses are often contradictory or nonsensical. The anthropologist's task is to understand the fundamental cause for behavior and to reconcile that with the stated explanation.

Nowadays economists wrestle with this topic. DeLong provides a delightful example:

Brad DeLong's Website: What Do Homeowners Expect

Its fair to observe (as a commentor did at Matrix) that 'only 10% said their spending had increased with the value of real estate, yet 50% had taken out loans against their equity. Is there a contradiction here?'

That's more than a contradiction; Its the entire underlying premise for why I believe a) Real Estate has been the key driver to the US economy; and 2) why so many people -- professionals included -- do not have a firm grasp on the underlying economy.

If the respondents were self-aware and rational, then at least 50% (more, since spending may increase even if one doesn't take out an equity loan) would have answered that real estate values had increaed their spending. That awareness gap is very human, but also worrisome.

The fate of the vanishing American middle-class

The American middle class is vanishing:

The Big Picture: Top of the Top

To review: The Middle class is getting squeezed by outsourcing, decreasing industrial sector, increasing energy prices, weak personal income gains, non-commodity inflation, the worst savings rate ever, all the while accumulating massive debt, both personal and governmental. The good news is their tax burden has fallen, albeit at 1/10 the rate of the wealthiest Americans....

..."Other data show that among major world economies, the United States in recent years has had the third-greatest disparity in incomes between the very top and everyone else. Only Mexico and Russia, among major economies, have greater disparity."

I've seen other economists refer to the American middle-class as a post-war phenomenon, meaning it was an artifact of WW II rather than a stable feature of the US economy. I don't think, however, that's true in all weathy nations.

So why does anyone but the wealthy vote for George Bush? As near as I can tell about 70% of his base vote for religious reasons, 5% vote because they expect to gain economically, and 25% made a big mistake. That's oddly reassuring, it means that 75% of Bush's base voted rationally (if someone believes Bush is God's messenger, it would be intensely irrational not to vote for him).

How will this all turn out? I think we're too aged a nation to for 1960s style upheaval, but I do think it will be interesting to see how a socialist/green party does in the next election.

Hikers who disappear in the wilderness

Solo hikers going off-trail in the wilderness are vulnerable to disappearing. Some are never found:

NYT: Lost in the Beartooth Mountains

...Hiking in true wilderness on trails with a companion is mildly risky -- probably comparable to bicycle commuting. Hiking off trail with a companion is risky -- maybe more like motorcycle touring or parachuting. Hiking off trail alone in rugged country is very risky -- I'd guess comparable to hang gliding or mountain climbing with companions. That doesn't mean people shouldn't do it, but it's important that they understand and weigh risks appropriately. In Brian's case the decision of the BC government to remove hiker logs from the trailheads made his solo off-trail hike even more risky than he could have planned on

Google socks Microsoft -- a big bet on OpenOffice and open file formats

RED HERRING | Sun and Google announce a seemingly dull agreement to sponsor a portion of each other's products.

Hah.

This is huge. Sun has nothing to offer Google except OpenOffice. This is a huge shot by Google against Microsoft's core business. Google is saying "mess with us and we'll destroy your lifeline". Microsoft needs to feed off the Office trough, Google has now declared that OpenOffice will be a very serious contender -- even in the US marketplace.

The immediate big winner is the OpenOffice file format. I'll be switching my Mac over to a wordprocessor that uses that file format -- NeoOffice/J (but I need to test the file format interoperability first!).

Why I hate science - Bicyles are bad for men

The concerns about bicycles saddles producing nerve damage and male impotence really started in the mid-90s. My grad school biomedical engineering project proposal was for a saddle that measured pressure points. Nonetheless, I hoped the problem would turn out to be overrated.

Not so. Traditional bike seats are bad for many men, and fancy saddles don't necessarily help:

Serious Riders, Your Bicycle Seat May Affect Your Love Life - New York Times
...Dr. Schrader advocates saddles that do not have noses. After finding that traditional saddles reduced the quality of nighttime erections in young policemen who patrol on bicycles, he has persuaded scores of officers in several cities to use noseless seats and is now studying the officers' sexual function over six months.

If Dr. Schrader is seeking funding, I suspect he'd find a lot of donors from the bicycling world. He need only put up an Amazon donation link ...

Quicksand really can trap people

I had the definite impression that Quicksand's treachery was a Hollywood fantasy. Not quite so. True, one does not sink into the pit -- but neither is it at all easy to get out.

The Truth About Quicksand Is Beginning to Sink In - New York Times

... Sand grains in quicksand are usually loosely packed, with the clay acting as a fragile gel holding the grains together.

Hit with sudden force from, say, a hapless victim, the quicksand gel turns to liquid. Then salt causes clay particles to stick to one another instead of the sand grains, with the result that a victim ends up surrounded by densely packed sand.

The force needed to pull out a person immersed in quicksand is about the same needed to lift a car, Dr. Bonn said. The trick for escaping is to slowly wiggle the feet and legs, allowing water to flow in. People float in quicksand so it is also impossible to sink all the way in, but quicksand usually forms at river estuaries, so a captive could drown at high tide.

Now you know how to escape.

Only in the movies

20 Things That Only Happen In Movies - Nostalgia Central: "33. All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach to armpit level on a woman but only up to the waist of the man lying beside her."