At least 26,000 people have run afoul of 'no fly' lists

Many, many americans are mired in the purgatory of Homeland Security "no fly" or "mega-search" lists: Wired News: Stuck on the No-Fly List

What's new is there's a form to submit -- at least if one is "no fly". We've spent tens of millions of dollars on the no-fly and 'search always' lists. A bright medical student would know in ten minutes they wouldn't work. If one is testing for a rare disorder (terrorist), a test that's right 99% of the time will fail miserably. The overwhelming number of 'positive results' will be false positives.

This is what comes from assigning unqualified persons to lead government agencies.

Arctic oil - now ANWR makes sense

ANWR has never made much sense to me. Why so much fuss over a site thought to hold only a few months of US oil consumption?

As a general rule, whenever a ferocious public debate doesn't seem to make sense, there's an inconvenient but fundamental fact that both sides recognize and both don't want to discuss. In the case of abortion that fact is probably the extent to which abortion is birth control for the 'underclass'. In the case of ANWR it's that geologists believe there could be a huge amount of oil in the arctic:

As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound - New York Times

Last year, scientists found tantalizing hints of oil in seabed samples just 200 miles from the North Pole. All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey.

This is an awkward fact for both sides, so it's not mentioned. Environmentalists want to point out how little oil there seems to be in ANWR, oil companies don't want to admit they intend to rape the entire Arctic -- and ANWR is only a tiny beachead.

The interesting question is why journalists don't seem to care to reveal the 'awkward fact'. They're often very capable people, they probably know what it is. Why don't they write about it? Is it because they fear to spoil the party? I'd love to know.

By the way, the Times series on global warming is commendable journalism. Note the byline on this particular article: "Clifford Krauss reported from Canada for this article, Steven Lee Myers from Russia, Andrew C. Revkin from New Hampshire and Washington, and Simon Romero from Norway. Craig Duff contributed reporting from Canada, Norway, Russia and Alaska." Craig likes to travel.

How the Republican party morphed into the know-nothing party - the republican war on science

The GOP made a deal with two devils: regulated industries and religious fundamentalists. They shared an antipathy to science, and the GOP acquired that antipathy. From an author's comments:

TPMCafe || On the Origin of The Republican War on Science

...The modern conservative movement, which now dominates the Republican Party, has many key constituencies, but among those are religious conservatives and regulated industry. These two interest groups want very different things, but their desires frequently stray into scientific areas. For instance, religious conservatives want to challenge the way that evolution is taught in public schools, while business interests--ranging from tobacco to some fossil fuel companies--want to challenge the science demonstrating health or environmental dangers resulting from their products, or the way they go about doing business.

Catering to these constituencies, as the Republican Party has increasingly done, has inevitably led politicians and political appointees to humor what essentially amounts to their scientific lobbying. This has happened even as such lobbying has itself become state of the art, encompassing strategic, think tank driven campaigns designed to skew what's actually known on hot button scientific issues with big political ramifications, such as evolution and especially global warming. Both of these trends have converged under the Bush administration, a fact that goes a long way towards explaining the current crisis over the politicization of science.

There are other factors as well: Conservatives' distrust of government easily translates into a distrust of government-funded science or the science produced by federal agencies. Conservatives' distrust of academia easily translates into a willingness to dismiss cutting-edge science coming out of our leading institutions of higher learning. Roll it all up into a ball and I think you get precisely what we're seeing today: Repeated abuses and distortions of scientific information by the political right. That's not to say no one on the left has ever misused or distorted science. It's just that we now encounter a systematic problem from the GOP, one that's the combined result of history, ideology, politics, and the simple fact that Republicans are running the entire government (a situation that lends itself to abuses of power)...

I emphasized the comment on how lobbying has become so much more powerful than it once was. Evolution in action ...

The Manchurian President

I've joked for years that Bush was either a KGB plant designed to destroy the US or the agent of an alien civilization seeking to slow our hectic scientific development. It appears others have similar thoughts. This is from a very right wing UK business publication that used to slavishly worship his Bushhood (via DeLong):

George Bush, the Manchurian candidate -- thebusinessonline.com

... This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.

... His presidency is unlikely to recover, as The Business pointed out at the time. Of course, Mr Bush is not the only one to blame for the country’s inadequate reaction to Katrina; but given the scale of the natural disaster, the buck was always going to stop with him. As far as most Americans were concerned, it did: suddenly they saw the same incompetence of a commander-in-chief who had created a deadly quagmire in Iraq played out in the streets of one of their own cities. A president who, whatever his other shortcomings, had claimed leadership skills and competent administration was stripped bare. It was not a pretty sight and the response to his political plight was typically Bush: he announced his intention to throw a massive $200bn into reconstructing New Orleans. This merely completed Mr Bush’s demise among America’s wisest conservatives, who have always regarded his big-government conservatism as the greatest betrayal of all. Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.

... There is now a distinctive fin de regime stink about Republican Washington. Karl Rove, the President’s eminence grise, has been called to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The cronyism of Ms Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court is now the rule in DC, not the exception: for example, Julie Myers, another inexperienced Bush lawyer, has been nominated to run the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has no convincing qualifications for this post, a vital one in an age of terror; but she is the niece of retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and the wife of the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s chief of staff...

... Then there is the case of Tom DeLay. The Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives since 2002 has been indicted with “conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme” and charges of conspiring to launder money. He has been forced to step down from his job as majority leader until the matter is resolved. Republicans claim the charges are politically-motivated and should be thrown out – Ronnie Earle, the Travis County District Attorney who has brought the indictments, is a Democrat – but even if Mr DeLay is cleared, the once fresh-faced Republicans who were ushered in on the tail coats of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994 now look tired and complacent.

President Bush and his entourage are cultural conservatives, rather than radicals in the mould of Reagan, who was driven by his belief that freeing individuals and liberating the economy would produce a new and better society. The attitudes of Team Bush are driven more by upbringing, emotion and simple religious faith rather than an intellectual belief in the superiority of private action and the market economy...

Gamma ray bursters and the Fermi paradox: Earth has 1 billion years left

Worried about avian flu? Distract yourself with a far worse and quite inevitable catastrophe -- the sterilization of our galaxy.

One of the standard solutions to the Fermi Paradox is that are we are not overrun by visitors because technological societies are either short-lived or rarely form. The Gamma Ray burster is often proposed, particularly in science fiction, as a plausible transgalactic killer. A burster sterilizes quite a bit of the surrounding galaxy.

Wired News: Gamma-Ray Burst Mystery Unraveled
By Robert Zimmerman
02:00 AM Oct. 04, 2005 PT

Astronomers have long theorized that merging neutron stars produce massive explosions capable of wiping out nearby solar systems for thousands of light-years around....

Now a flurry of research is coming to a head that offers the first detailed view of the origin of so-called short gamma-ray bursts, revealing a picture that is consistent with the merging neutron star theory. That means the universe could be far more hazardous than previously thought, given the number of known and probable neutron star pairs in relative proximity to Earth.

... As astrophysicist Tsvi Piran stated at a Hubble Space Telescope symposium in 1999, "Every gamma-ray burst apparently signals the birth of a black hole."

Steve Thorsett of Princeton University has calculated the consequences if such a merger were to take place within 3,500 light-years of Earth, with its energy aimed at the solar system. The blast would bathe Earth in the equivalent of 300,000 megatons of TNT, 30 times the world's nuclear weaponry, with the gamma-ray and X-ray radiation stripping Earth of its ozone layer.

Three such binary systems have been discovered, and one, PSR B1534+12, presently sits about 3,500 light-years away and will coalesce in a billion years.

Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across, so a 3,500 light year kill zone is only a modest portion of the galaxy. Alas, PSR B1534+12 is not alone. As far as we can tell we live in a reasonably quiet galactic neighborhood; if we have a killer nearby they are likely fairly common elsewhere.

The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. We find evidence of life 3.5 billion years ago. If we have one billion years left to live [1] then our world of life is a senior citizen. Of course a billion years is a little while. Time enough, assuming no runaway nanotech, for quite a few life forms to develop technological civilizations on earth.

So perhaps there's a silver lining here. Maybe this research suggests that galaxies have a stable middle age of about 4-5 billion years before the gamma bursters go off across the disc, sterilizing the galaxy. In other words, gamma bursters may be concentrated in time, not evenly distributed across the galactic timeline. If my terribly amateur interpretation is not far off, conditions are not so terrible for the development of interstellar civilizations.

On the other hand, if that's true, where are they? Well, there are other explanations for the fermi paradox ...

[1] We used to have 3-5 billion until the sun fizzled, but that more remote problem is far more manageable than a gamma burst.

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.