The best commentary on the state of the union address

Fafblog is marvelous ...

Fafblog! The State of the Universe Address

...Would you take all that away by letting isolationist courts tax the Jesus fetus? Never! Because history is written in courage, and courage will remember us in the future how we were today: pandering, desperate and barely coherent!

My prediction on the Bush health care plan ...

The smart Republican (they're all dead now, but they once existed) thing to do would be to eliminate the corporate tax break for health insurance and apply the funds to a mixture of subsidies and individual tax breaks. That would be a Reagan type of move -- the guy who brought us the Earned Income Tax Credit. (I used to think Reagan was an idiot. True, he was demented during his second term, but compared to Bush II he was a brilliant pillar of light.)

Instead, Bush the Incoherent will introduce a meaningless tax credit that will complicate the tax code, transfer wealth from the Weak to the Strong, worsen the deficit, and have no material impact on healthcare.

The New York Times finds a spine?

It won't last, but today the shrunken residue of a once great newspaper shows a tiny hint of a vertebral column:

Spies, Lies and Wiretaps - New York Times

... Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

They've done this before -- threatened to show some courage. In each case they've collapsed into equivocation.

If the NYT dedicates itself to exposing Bush/Cheney, and limiting the damage they're doing, and if they pound home time and again the fundamental issues without being misdirected -- then I'll say they have a spine. Until then, they're spineless.

Idiot America

David Brin led on this one, but Pharyngula is taking up the flag: Idiot America.

I don't think it's just America, though we've led the way in the western world. The rejection of the enlightenment, and the ridicule of expertise is pretty much universal -- from Washington to Tehran to Moscow. Beijing possibly being the exception.

Too bad the original Esquire article is behing a Paywall, but Pharyngula has excerpted the juicy parts. I hope he connects up with David Brin.

A creek in the congo: Future Shock

Sometimes I think the world isn't changing very quickly. Mostly 2006 seems much more like 1986 than I'd expected back then.

But then I enter our dog's name (Kateva) and come up with a map of a creek in the Congo and a link to a Google Earth image. This is the result of 3 separate web services.

Suddenly 2006 seems much less familiar.

DeLong on Franco

Odd that we should be thinking of Francesco Franco these days. DeLong ends a posting on Spain's tyrant with a guide to spotting fascism:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

German philospher Ernst Nolte's classic Fascism in Its Epoch set out six key characteristics of fascism:

1. Strong belief that--through social darwinism--morality is ultimately tied to blood and race, understood as descent and genetic relationship.

2. Strong rejection of the classical "liberal" belief that individuals have rights that any legitimate state is bound to respect

3. In its place, an assertion that individuals have duties to the state, seen as the decision-making organ of the collectivity.

4. A rejection of parliamentary democracy and other bottom-up institutions to assess the general will.

5. The assertion that the general will is formed by the decrees of the leader.

6. A strong fear of twentieth-century Communism, and an eagerness to adapt and use its weapons--suspension of parliaments, mass propaganda, rallies, street violence, and so forth--to fight it.

In China, it is common to criticize the regime by allusions to historical figures. DeLong was posting on Chinese New Years. Coincidence or subtlety?

Newsweek has the scoop on the NSA

This Newsweek article is Pulitzer prize winning material. The fact that so many insiders were willing to talk, albeit off the record, tells us just how scared Bush appointees are of what Bush and Cheney are doing to America. It's not just commie pinko traitors like me who are starting to fear Dick Cheney more than Osama bin Laden (emphases mine):

Palace Revolt - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

... Addington's [jf: Addington is Cheney's Chief of Staff, a real bad actor] problems with Goldsmith were just beginning. In the jittery aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration had pushed the top-secret National Security Agency to do a better and more expansive job of electronically eavesdropping on Al Qaeda's global communications. Under existing law—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, adopted in 1978 as a post-Watergate reform—the NSA needed (in the opinion of most legal experts) to get a warrant to eavesdrop on communications coming into or going out of the United States. Reasoning that there was no time to obtain warrants from a secret court set up under FISA (a sometimes cumbersome process), the Bush administration justified going around the law by invoking a post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing use of force against global terror. The eavesdropping program was very closely held, with cryptic briefings for only a few congressional leaders. Once again, Addington and his allies made sure that possible dissenters were cut out of the loop.

There was one catch: the secret program had to be reapproved by the attorney general every 45 days. It was Goldsmith's job to advise the A.G. on the legality of the program. In March 2004, John Ashcroft was in the hospital with a serious pancreatic condition. At Justice, Comey, Ashcroft's No. 2, was acting as attorney general... Goldsmith raised with Comey serious questions about the secret eavesdropping program, according to two sources familiar with the episode. He was joined by a former OLC lawyer, Patrick Philbin, who had become national-security aide to the deputy attorney general. Comey backed them up. The White House was told: no reauthorization.

The angry reaction bubbled up all the way to the Oval Office. President Bush, with his penchant for put-down nicknames, had begun referring to Comey as "Cuomey" or "Cuomo," apparently after former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who was notorious for his Hamlet-like indecision over whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s. A high-level delegation—White House Counsel Gonzales and chief of staff Andy Card—visited Ashcroft in the hospital to appeal Comey's refusal. In pain and on medication, Ashcroft stood by his No. 2.

A compromise was finally worked out. The NSA was not compelled to go to the secret FISA court to get warrants, but Justice imposed tougher legal standards before permitting eavesdropping on communications into the United States. It was a victory for the Justice lawyers, and it drove Addington to new levels of vexation with Goldsmith.

Bush was driving this as much as Cheney. But what's with Ashcroft being heroic?

Why would a virus fatten an animal?

We know parasites such as toxoplasma change the behavior of their hosts [1]. That seems to make nice evolutionary sense. But why would a virus induce obesity in some animals?

Contagious obesity? Identifying the human adenoviruses that may make us fat | Science Blog

Ad-37 third virus implicated in animal obesity

The theory that viruses could play a part in obesity began a few decades ago when Nikhil Dhurandhar, now at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU, noticed that chickens in India infected with the avian adenovirus SMAM-1 had significantly more fat than non-infected chickens. The discovery was intriguing because the explosion of human obesity, even in poor countries, has led to suspicions that overeating and lack of exercise weren't the only culprits in the rapidly widening human girth. Since then, Ad-36 has been found to be more prevalent in obese humans.

In the current study, Whigham et al. attempted to determine which adenoviruses (in addition to Ad-36 and Ad-5) might be associated with obesity in chickens. The animals were separated into four groups and exposed to either Ad-2, Ad-31, or Ad-37. There was also a control group that was not exposed to any of the viruses. The researchers measured food intake and tracked weight over three weeks before ending the experiment and measuring the chickens' visceral fat, total body fat, serum lipids, and viral antibodies.

Chickens inoculated with Ad-37 had much more visceral fat and body fat compared with the chickens infected with Ad-2, Ad-31 or the control group, even though they didn't eat any more. The Ad-37 group was also generally heavier compared to the other three groups, but the difference wasn't great enough to be significant by scientific standards.

The authors concluded that Ad-37 increases obesity in chickens, but Ad-2 and Ad-31 do not. "Ad-37 is the third human adenovirus to increase adiposity in animals, but not all adenoviruses produce obesity," the study concluded.

There is still much to learn about how these viruses work, Whigham said. "There are people and animals that get infected and don't get fat. We don't know why," she said. Among the possibilities: the virus hasn't been in the body long enough to produce the additional fat; or the virus creates a tendency to obesity that must be triggered by overeating, she said.

It certainly makes sense to try and figure out how host adiposity could benefit a virus, but for no good reason I suspect a tendency to produce fat is a side-effect that's irrelevant to the virus.

[1] BTW, why do some dogs compulsively eat grass? Since grass eating is associated with Giardia infection, one might consider that bug. Or maybe a parasite who's life cycle involves deer ticks and who causes colitis in dogs ...

Newsweek: the price of questioning Dick Cheney

One of the most fascinating and important stories to be reported in the last several months. This should be read closely.

Palace Revolt - Newsweek Politics - MSNBC.com

...These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. (Goldsmith confirmed public facts about himself but otherwise declined to comment. Comey also declined to comment.) They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. Their story has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secrecy over the White House. But it is a quietly dramatic profile in courage. (For its part the White House denies any internal strife. "The proposition of internal division in our fight against terrorism isn't based in fact," says Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney. "This administration is united in its commitment to protect Americans, defeat terrorism and grow democracy.")

The chief opponent of the rebels, though by no means the only one, was an equally obscure, but immensely powerful, lawyer-bureaucrat. Intense, workaholic (even by insane White House standards), David Addington, formerly counsel, now chief of staff to the vice president, is a righteous, ascetic public servant.

... Addington and a small band of like-minded lawyers set about providing that cover—a legal argument that the power of the president in time of war was virtually untrammeled. One of Addington's first jobs had been to draft a presidential order establishing military commissions to try unlawful combatants—terrorists caught on the global battlefield. The normal "interagency process"—getting agreement from lawyers at Defense, State, the intelligence agencies and so forth—proved glacial, as usual. So Addington, working with fellow conservative Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanigan, came up with a solution: cut virtually everyone else out. Addington is a purist, not a cynic; he does not believe he is in any way ignoring or twisting the law. It is also important to note that Addington was not sailing off on some personal crusade; he had the full backing of the president and vice president, who shared his views. But, steeped in bureaucratic experience and clear in his purpose, Addington was a ferocious infighter for his cause...

Cheney's chief of staff. Remember the name Addington. Remember too that this war is the Long War -- projected at over 20 years by the DOD. Twenty years of presidents and their staff growing increasingly accustomed to unlimited power. What's the chance American democracy could survive that? Who's the greater threat to our future -- Zawahiri or David Addington?

The more we learn of the Bush regime, the more disturbing they appear.

The Google Ghost in my Machine - a disconcerting moment

I had a disconcerting moment today. I typed a few characters in my Google Toolbar and saw a list of strings to select from. They were search terms I'd entered last night on a different machine.

It's not a great mystery. I have Google's toolbar installed on all four of the machines, and six of the 8 browser instances (there's no toolbar for Safari), that I use regularly. Since I authenticate with Google that means they all share my search history and, evidently, the search strings that show up as I enter text in the search field.

I'm not sure how far back Google keeps this history, but I'm getting the feeling it's rather long.

I could wipe this list via my Google account; they're really not awfully useful to me. I won't though, my searches are rather prosaic and I'm curious as to where this will lead.

So not a big deal by itself, but it gave me a momentary glimpse of the world ahead -- a world in which my digital identity grows and follows me. A disconcerting world for someone born in the last millenium.

One day, shall I look in the digital mirror, and realize that it's a mirror no longer?

I've just had a cyberpunk moment.

Why the Farangs smell

About 25 years ago I used to commute by bus from Pradu-Naam to the UN building in Bangkok. The bus was crowded and bloody hot. I had to put my arm up to hold on. The Thais downwind of me looked kinda green.

Farangs (foreigners, basically Euros), you see, not to put to fine a point on it, stink. The Thai, on the other hand, have relatively little body odor. Now we know why. It's in the ear wax...

Japanese Scientists Identify Ear Wax Gene - New York Times:

...They write that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, whereas the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have greater body odor.

I feel better now. It really wasn't my fault.

BTW, as a physician I much prefer wet ear wax. Removing the dry stuff from a child's ear is a royal pain.

Fox news: in the pay of Philip Morris

DeLong echoes another corruption story - Fox News' science reporter was on the take from Philip Morris. His primary contribution was mocking claims about the health implications of environmental tobacco smoke.

A corrupt person, working for a corrupt news organization. Fox is low.

On the bright side, it's nice to know Philip Morris is as vile and evil as ever. I was afraid they'd gone soft.

Medicare Part D, Chimps and Bonobos

A prediction -- when the analysis is done the Bush drug plan (Medicare Part D) will be found to be largely a transfer of resources from the Weak to the Strong.

Which leads to the next thought. Is there any GOP program that's not a transfer from the Weak to the Strong? Is 'No Child Left Behind' an exception of intent, if not of implementation?

Transfer from the Weak to the Strong is a reasonably common primate thing; and of course it's perfectly Spencerian. Ironic then that the GOP should be the home of Darwin hating Christian Fundamentalists, but then they're really Yahwites in disguise.

Which leads, inevitably to the last thought. Humans, Chimps and Bonobos are all members of Genus Pan. To what extent can the Bush base be thought of as Chimps, and the pacifist Left be considered Bonobos? I'd bet, given descriptions of both primates, that 80% of the Bush base would say they were more like Chimps (strong, dominant, patriarchal, might survive humanity), and 95% of the pacifist Left would aspire to be Bonobos (matriarchal, cooperative, group sex, transgender, soon to be extinct, etc).

Which leads to the last plus one thought. Would functional MRIs of amygdala response differentiate between Bush fundamentalists and the pacifist Left? Is the Left/Right split more than politics? Maybe it's about speciation .... :-)

Can primates trust strangers?

Chimpanzees are generally hateful, and almost all primates are fundamentally xenophobic. Brain scans suggest humans (genus Pan) are programmed for fear and hatred of the Other. Will peace require genetic reengineering?

Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist, has written a review of human nature, published, oddly enough, in Foreign Affairs. It's fascinating. Primates turn out to be more flexible than had been though; dystopia is not inevitable. Humans may be particularly malleable.

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky

...In exploring these subjects, one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active -- aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented 'subliminally,' which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.

More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.

Emily wonders if the amygdala has the same response to the "deformed" and disabled. One can imagine the same mechanism underlying analysis of genetic fitness of potential mates.

Sapolsky describes recent studies of primate culture; their behavior can be changed. In some environments male Baboon nerds can mate well, particularly if the tyrants are fighting elsewhere. There is hope, though I suspect the genetic reengineering option will be on the table if we're still around in 70 years.

I wonder how Baboons would do with dogs? I suppose they'd eat the dogs fairly quickly and messily, but I've long wondered how dogs changed alliances in human primates.

Scary moment in the digital life: a corrupted image

I recently used iPhoto Library Manager to merge two iPhoto 5 libraries of several thousand images apiece. I did this in preparation for migration to iPhoto 6; IPLM has a longer track record with iP 5 than 6, so I chose to merge before upgrading.

Thus far it seems to have gone well, which is pretty impressive since #$!$! Apple doesn't support Library imports or merges in $!@#$!@ iPhoto. I'm still looking for problems and I'll report on my experience soon. I did get some malrotated images, but I expected that. OS X had some bad bugs with EXIF headers that Apple never admitted to but fixed; I expected older images to malrotate on import. I reverted to original and fixed them.

One image among thousands failed to import. IPLM produced a handy error message. I tracked down the image -- it was corrupt. Preview and GraphicConverter wouldn't render it and if I tried to open it in iPhoto the app locked up. (How stupid is that?)

Unnerving. I expect this image went bad years ago. Could have been a disk crash, could have been a rude copy of iPhoto, could have been a network copy glitch -- heck, it could have been cosmic rays. My regular backups only go back a few months, so they wouldn't help. I do have some CDs and DVDs that would probably cover this problem, but it would take a while to track those down. Fortunately I happened to have older versions of some iPhoto Libraries on my external drive, and I found a good copy in minutes.

This is exceedingly annoying. We are so far from having really good backup solutions. I depend on redundancy -- a primary automated network backup that runs daily and several different approaches to backup that are done irregularly. Odd are that if one method fails, the very different "backup backup" methods will work. It's the same principle applied to designing the space shuttle's control system.

Backups have saved me at least a dozen times over the past 20 years or so. They're very demanding to manage however.

The NSA affair: it's about how they selected their intercepts

Cringely's sources say pretty much exactly what I guessed last week (in part from his prior column, but also from connecting other dots) -- the technical aspects of the NSA affair are about social network analysis of phone metadata.

So Bush is right when he claims only a few calls are tapped, but what he doesn't talk about, and what reporters don't ask him, is how the NSA decides which phones to tap. It's the process of figuring out who to go after that's technically interesting, but the real story is about the ability of President to override Congress. That's a constitutional question that will go to the supreme court, and that's why Kerry and Kennedy are trying to filibuster Alito. I don't think they'll succeed, but I'm glad they're trying.

PBS | I, Cringely . January 26, 2006 - The Falafel Connection

... After last week's column, a number of readers wrote to explain that the National Security Agency's problem with complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had to do with the sheer volume of wiretaps involved, which they guessed numbers in the millions or billions. Evidently, these worried readers think, the NSA has been long listening-in to ALL of our calls, and thought that might not go down well with the secret court that issues FISA warrants.

I don't think so.

The NSA has a very advanced program called Echelon for monitoring radio communication around the world, and probably intercepts a lot of phone calls that way, but for FISA-type wiretaps they tend to use the same outsourcing firms the phone companies use, and these generally tiny outfits can only handle a few thousand taps per year each.

By the way, if you are wondering whether YOUR phone could be easily tapped, just check to see if your phone company offers three-way dialing, because that's the feature we're talking about. If you can get it, they can get you. And if you are wondering whether VoIP service can't be tapped, the answer is both yes and no. For the moment, SIP services like Skype can't be tapped but that will change soon. And if you are a Vonage or Packet8 user, well they already have your number.

Here's what is most likely going on with the NSA and FISA from a guy who used to work for the NSA:

"What I think is going on here is that they're using social network analysis. They get some numbers or endpoints of interest, and start out with classical traffic analysis, which can all be done (as I think you pointed out) with pen registers or their moral equivalent. They look for other numbers, and follow the graph of connections by transitivity.

"It's well known that any graph of associations in the real world tends to generate cliques, and that the clique size for a social group of any sort tends to actually be fairly small. This is the 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' effect. But in a social network, there will also be people with many edges coming to them, and many paths in the transitive closure of the graph of their relationships, and those people are often 'centers.'

"In fact, just that sort of analysis was done -- after the fact -- of the 9/11 hijackers (in this week's links).

"I would guess that the SNA is used to identify people of interest -- although there would be some false positives, like if they all rented apartments from the same rental management firm, or all ordered from the same we-deliver falafel place. But someone who shows up in the transitive network of a lot of calls from overseas, and is also a high edge-count in the SNA graph, is definitely someone to be interested in. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's when they apply for a FISA warrant and start actually intercepting."

So what we have the NSA doing is probably data mining, calling records in order to identify the people they want to order intercepts on. They are doing it without warrants because they like being sneaky, don't think they could get past the FISA court a warrant for 100 million calling records, and because the FISA law from 1978 probably doesn't distinguish between a pen-trap and an intercept.

If that's really the case, this doesn't sound quite as bad as we've feared. I feel better thinking that they are culling calling records rather than listening-in to my conversations. And it makes a lot more sense, from a pure technical capability standpoint.

So why couldn't they just tell us? Why couldn't they have simply amended the FISA law to take such activities into account? Because they like to be sneaky, tend to distrust even the people who pay them (that's us), and because they for some reason think that the bad guys won't figure this out for themselves.

Duh.

But is it really Duh? Either al Qaeda is a lethal threat, and thus smart enough to figure this out on their own, or do they have got a thin bench full of dolts who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag?

Either way, Bush is wrong. If al Qaeda is a lethal threat, then they've already figured this out and we could pass laws making this legal without tipping them off. On the other hand, if they have a thin bench, then we don't need the Long War and we shouldn't be shredding the Constitution.