Leon Kass: presidential advisor on the forgotten place of women

Leon Kass is Bush's bioethics advisor. DeLong and Kieran Healy quote Kass's philosophy of the woman's place. Really, he says, it all went wrong when the Pill was developed ...

This is the president's advisor. These guys are a parody of themselves. At this rate I'll soon be expecting Bush to find a way to stay on after his term runs out ...

Colonel Wilkerson on the cabal running American foreign policy

Colonel Wilkerson is a military academic who followed Colin Powel into government. He lectures here on US foreign policy (ft.com). He rambles a bit. He liked George Bush I and accepted the Clintonians with grudging respect. He acknowledges must US presidents are far from brilliant. Then he gets down to the brassy tacks (emphases mine):

And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together. Now, let me get a little more specific. This is where I’m sure the journalists will get their pens out. Almost everyone since the ’47 act, with the exception, I think, of Eisenhower, has in some way or another, perterbated, flummoxed, twisted, drew evolutionary trends with, whatever, the national security decision-making process....

... The complexity of crises that confront governments today is just unprecedented. Let me say that again.

The complexity of the crises that confront governments today are just unprecedented. At the same time, especially in America, but I submit to you that in Japan, in China and in a number of other countries soon to be probably the European Union, it’s just as bad, if not in some ways worse.

The complexity of governing is unprecedented. You simply cannot deal with all the challenges that government has to deal with, meet all the demands that government has to meet in the modern age, in the 21st century, without admitting that it is hugely complex. That doesn’t mean you have to add a Department of Homeland Security with 70,000 disparate entities thrown under somebody in order to handle them. But it does mean that your bureaucracy has got to be staffed with good people and they’ve got to work together and they’ve got to work under leadership they trust and leadership that, on basic issues, they agree with.

And that if they don’t agree, they can dissent and dissent and dissent. And if their dissent is such that they feel so passionate about it, they can resign and know why they’re resigning. That is not the case today. And when I say that is not the case today, I stop on 26 January 2005.

I don’t know what the case is today. I wish I did. But the case that I saw for 4 plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations, [inaudible], changes to the national security [inaudible] process. What I saw was a cabal between the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense and [inaudible] on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.

And then when the bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and carried them out, it was presented in such a disjointed incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

Read George Packer’s book The Assassin’s [inaudible] if you haven’t already. George Packer, a New Yorker, reporter for The New Yorker, has got it right. I just finished it and I usually put marginalia in a book but, let me tell you, I had to get extra pages to write on.

And I wish, I wish I had been able to help George Packer write that book. In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics than he’s got. But if you want to read how the Cheney Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And, of course, there are other names in there, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas [jf - Feith], whom most of you probably know Tommy Frank said was stupidest blankety blank man in the world. He was. Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

And yet, and yet, after the Secretary of State agrees to a $400 billion department, rather than a $30 billion department, having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw themselves in a closet somewhere. That’s not making excuses for the State Department.

That’s telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George’s book...

...They’ve [jf - defense contractors] got every Congressman, every Senator, they got it covered. Now, it’s not to say that they aren’t smart businessmen. They are, and women. They are. But it’s something we should be looking at, something we should be looking at. So you’ve got this collegiality there between the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President. And then you’ve got a President who is not versed in international relations. And not too much interested in them either.

Why is cell phone software so bad?

Pogue asks why is cell phone software so bad?

Problems With Cellular Phone Software Design - New York Times

“I recently read your article about the ‘iTunes phone,’ the Motorola ROKR. You say that it uses the same operating system as the popular RAZR phone, but I do not know exactly what you mean when you state that the Motorola Razr's software design is ‘not, ahem, as universally adored as its physical design.’ If you have a moment to spare, I would appreciate some elaboration about the specifics of your observation.”

Good question. Just about everyone I know who has a RAZR phone complains about the software design. I’ve asked two of them why they despise it so much.

One person pointed out that you must create separate entries for "Bob cell," "Bob home," etc., which is a pain to scroll through.

Another says that the software actually crashes periodically, which is never a good thing.

I’d be interested in hearing from other people, though, about what they don’t like about the Motorola phone operating system. And other phone makes, too, for that matter!

I wrote him:

I've been through a few cell phones, and I agree the internal software is generally quite poor. My recollection has been that Nokia did
pretty well and Samsung quite poorly. My Palm (Rest in peace) based Samsung i500 is perhaps the most infuriating -- because it comes so
close to being right, but falls painfully short.

There are some fundamentally hard problems in designing this kind of software, but the biggest issue is that the utility and elegance of the software is not a factor in consumer buying decisions. Indeed good software may have a perverse effect of making a customer so content with their phone they are reluctant to buy a new one!

As long as consumers don't buy based on the usability of their cell phone, money spent on better and more elegant software is money down the drain. Nokia has never gotten credit for the elegant usability of many of their older phones.

So who should we blame? We have met the enemy ... and he is us.

Petition Microsoft to support OpenDocument

Demand OpenDocument - Petition

What science fiction character am I?

Taking this "personality test" I learn I am ....

Marcus Cole
An honest and chivalrous adventurer that pursues just causes, you would sacrifice much to help others.
I am a Ranger. We walk in the dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no-one may pass. We live for the One, we die for the One.
Marcus is a character in the Babylon 5 universe.

Hmm. I think I'm whimpier than that ...

World of hurt - Kashmir

A BBC journalist writes of a week in Balakot, Kashmir. This is one of the most beautiful places on earth, so so I was told long ago. It's beauty comes from the same forces that created this earthquake.

Now, ten days later, I read that the death toll and logistic problems of this disaster may exceed those of the tsunami of years (oh, months?!) past. Earth seems less motherly these days, our reign more tenuous. In a world approaching 8 billion lives any upset will kill tens of thousands. Global climate change alone promises disaster aplenty.

Time to send more money to care.org. I'm going to suggest CARE start selling 'gift certificates' this holiday season; make a donation, get a nice card, give that as a Christmas/holiday gift.

Update: This is what I sent CARE.ORG:

This December I'd like to be able to give CARE gift certificates. Here's how it works.

You add a new feature to your donation area. It's a place to enter a person's name. I make a donation. You mail me a nice certificate with a name on it saying 'A gift to CARE has been made in your name to help ......'.

I give those as gifts.

For greater ease, support multiple certificates. I enter a donation (say $200) and then enter 10 names. I get 10 cards.

Minimum card value is $20.

Net history -- the oldest domain name in the universe

Symbolics.com

In March 1985 the domain name Symbolics.com was assigned to a LIPS hardware/software company. It was the first assigned domain name, preceding even the more famous BBN.COM.

The company is gone, the assets were bought by a gentleman who was likely an employee. The domain name, however, still works.

Net history. Now that this is making the blog rounds his site is going to get pounded ...

SIDS is rare now, so it's back to the tummy for babies

When Polio went away, so did parental commitment to polio vaccines. Since vaccination has a free-rider component (if everyone else's child is vaccinated, the risk/benefit ratio for vaccinating one's own child may be inverted) this isn't completely irrational. Of course it doesn't work; too many people accept the free ride and the disease returns.

A similar thing is happening with SIDS (A Quiet Revolt Against the Rules on SIDS - New York Times). Disobedient parents giggle over their naughtiness on web sites, telling stories of babies sleeping on their stomachs. So SIDS will return (but infant heads will be rounder).

Willful denial of risk is dumb, but very human. On the other hand, a calculated assumption of a measured risk of infant death is rational, albeit inhuman. We expose our children to significant risks when we drive them to day care, for example. Anyone with a swimming pool in the backyard, or a gun in the house, or a seat on the back of a bicycle is already exposing their child to risks that dwarf the average child's risk of SIDS. We make many compromises in our mortal lives, rationally trading an increased risk of infant death for a night's sleep is by no means extreme. It's just that we usually don't think that way.

What we really need is the 'holy grail' of preventive medicine -- risk adjustment. We need better ways to assign a "SIDS-risk" to an individual child based on birth history, genetics, health status, parental smoking, etc. Then we can place 'sleep on the stomach' into a risk spectrum. For the healthy full term child of a non-smoker with no family history of SIDS and no current respiratory infections the risk of sleeping on the stomach may be comparable to the risks of driving to day care. That is, non-zero, but comparable to other accepted risks. On the other hand for a preterm infant of a smoking mother with a family history of SIDS and a URI it may be comparable to riding on a bicycle seat in heavy traffic.

Maybe children will one day wear a bracelet that signals their risk-adjusted SIDS probability every evening ...

Andromeda unleashed

I came to this one via a physics blog. Caltech has some gorgeous images of Andromeda from the Spitzer space telescope. Scoll down to the link to 21MB high resolution JPEG.

Astronaut, cosmonaut, yuhangyuan

I need to learn how to pronounce yuhangyuan -- Chinese for "travelers of the universe". Meanwhile, in the US, our government has committed itself to unraveling science.

It's good to know that, even as the US begins its long decline, other nations will carry the torch.

Are large institutional investors betting the US market will continue to flatline?

I continue to read cheery essays on why we should invest in the market for our self-funded retirements. I also notice that, overall, our family investments have flatlined for about 6 years. Reminds me a bit of how things were in the US of the 1970s, or Japan of the 1990s. Greenspun makes an interesting assertion that one smart investor seems expect this trend to continue ...

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:

Harvard has picked a new investment manager for its $26 billion in liquid assets (the university is weathier than this but much of its wealth is in real estate). According to this New York Times story, Mohamed A. El-Erian is "an emerging markets bond specialist" from "the bond powerhouse Pimco". Choosing someone like this to manage its money is essentially a vote that public equities (stocks) will continue to perform poorly for some years to come. How is it possible for stock prices to remain stalled while corporations earn reasonably good profits and only pay out a small percentage of those profits as dividends (the average S&P 500 company pays out 32 percent of profits as a dividend)? Looting and dilution by managers granting themselves stock options. So Harvard, which has been mostly right since World War II and earned more than 19 percent in the last fiscal year, seems to be betting on the continued looting of American corporations by their managers and is apparently planning to put its money to work in foreign countries and via debt instruments.

The US feels more and more like 1989 Japan.

Good news on war

This is good news for a hurting world.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Wars 'less frequent, less deadly'

The Human Security Report found a decline in every form of political violence except terrorism since 1992.

Civil wars are now the most common form of war, but they have been less lethal than wars involving nations.

Life in the new world -- don't even think of being in any way different

A nerdly sort looks too different. So he's arrested. Eventually released, a large quantity of his personal possessions are removed from his home and not returned.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Suspicious behaviour on the tube

This Reuters story was written while the police were detaining me in Southwark tube station and the bomb squad was checking my rucksack. When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting: 'Nice laptop.' The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan police. Then they arrested me.

Don't look different. Look like everyone else. This is our world now.

Stop net fraud - make the banks pay for the externalities

I said this in the mid-90s, when I was peripherally involved in exposing one of the early international credit card frauds (today's operators are much more clever than those guys were). Bruce Schneier has been saying it for years.

The only way to reduce net fraud (phishing, identity theft, etc) is to make the banks and financial intermediaries pay more of the real cost of these frauds (the 'externalities' of victim suffering). The banks have known for over 10 years what they need to do, but the costs are substantial. Even if a bank wanted to put better security in place, they can't. If they tried they'd be forced out of business by any competitor who didn't introduce the same procedures. The only way the banks can do this is if they're all forced to move together. That takes governmental action.

Here's Schneier:

Crypto-Gram: October 15, 2005

Earlier this month, California became the first state to enact a law specifically addressing phishing. Phishing, for those of you who have been away from the Internet for the past few years, is when an attacker sends you an e-mail falsely claiming to be a legitimate business in order to trick you into giving away your account info -- passwords, mostly. When this is done by hacking DNS, it's called pharming.

Financial companies have until now avoided taking on phishers in a serious way, because it's cheaper and simpler to pay the costs of fraud. That's unacceptable, however, because consumers who fall prey to these scams pay a price that goes beyond financial losses, in inconvenience, stress and, in some cases, blots on their credit reports that are hard to eradicate. As a result, lawmakers need to do more than create new punishments for wrongdoers -- they need to create tough new incentives that will effectively force financial companies to change the status quo and improve the way they protect their customers' assets. Unfortunately, the California law does nothing to address this.

... The actual problem to be solved is that of fraudulent transactions. Financial institutions make it too easy for a criminal to commit fraudulent transactions, and too difficult for the victims to clear their names. The institutions make a lot of money because it's easy to make a transaction, open an account, get a credit card and so on. For years I've written about how economic considerations affect security problems. They can put security countermeasures in place to prevent fraud, detect it quickly and allow victims to clear themselves. But all of that's expensive. And it's not worth it to them.

It's not that financial institutions suffer no losses. Because of something called Regulation E, they already pay most of the direct costs of identity theft. But the costs in time, stress, and hassle are entirely borne by the victims. And in one in four cases, the victims have not been able to completely restore their good name.

In economics, this is known as an externality: It's an effect of a business decision that is not borne by the person or organization making the decision. Financial institutions have no incentive to reduce those costs of identity theft because they don't bear them.

Push the responsibility -- all of it -- for identity theft onto the financial institutions, and phishing will go away...

If there's one general precept of security policy that is universally true, it is that security works best when the entity that is in the best position to mitigate the risk is responsible for that risk. Making financial institutions responsible for losses due to phishing and identity theft is the only way to deal with the problem. And not just the direct financial losses -- they need to make it less painful to resolve identity theft issues, enabling people to truly clear their names and credit histories. Money to reimburse losses is cheap compared with the expense of redesigning their systems, but anything less won't work.

Since this will take governmental action, if you don't like identity theft, vote against Bush.

Condi Rice: we invaded Iraq to change the world

Apparently the Bush administration now confesses that their motivation in invading Iraq was unrelated to a direct threat from Iraq but was rather an attempt to change the middle east:

Obsidian Wings: Killing Innocent Iraqis to Try to Protect Ourselves

...Condi argued that after 9/11 we had two choices: we could go after and eradicate bin Laden and Al Qaida and then turn toward protecting ourselves against other threats, or we could go after the roots of Islamic terrorism and change the landscape in the Middle East. She argued that no one who understands the Middle East could imagine the landscape there changing until Saddam Hussein was out of power.

Obsidian Wings puts it well. If that was the standard, then Bush et al are guilty of war crimes.

You can't do things that directly and indirectly kill about 100,000 civilians because you want to change the geopolitical landscape. That's wrong in so many different ways. Ursula LeGuinn dealt with this in a clever short story some time ago. I don't remember the title, but the premise was that a utopian society's happiness was guaranteed only by torturing and executing one innocent person a year. Wrong solution.

I can imagine reasons I'd accept for invading Iraq, even in the absence of an overt direct threat, but Condi isn't making those arguments. Moreover, if one must act in these circumstances, one must be willing to pay a high price in american lives and money to reduce the collateral damage.