David Brin on The Manchurian President

I used to joke that Bush was either a deep KGB plant or the pawn of an extraterrestrial civilization seeking to destroy the US. David Brin, a scientist and science fiction writer, appears to take this theory a bit more seriously:

Contrary Brin: The Past Shines Light on the Future

... It is simply impossible to do this much harm to a mighty nation, and have that effect be inadvertent...

... This simply could not have taken place simply as a matter of incompetence. Not even if you throw in ruthless, kleptocratic venality (through crony contracts, for example). That explanation fails because, three layers down from the political appointees, there exists a vast sea of civilian and military civil servants. The most amazing collection of human competence that has ever been assembled!

I never cease to be amazed by how little attention is paid to this level, the vastly knowledgeable and professional US Officer Corps and the collected experts and diplomats and scientists and other skilled workers who fill the vast federal pyramid. For they are key! Under normal circumstances, they would be able to keep things going, at least at a competent-simmering level, even in the face of dingbat idiocy from above!

That is, if it were merely dingbat idiocy!

Oh, but is ANYBODY looking into the possibility that it isn't? We have paid professional paranoids whose JOB it is to look into such possibilities.

I wonder if they are...

Ok. for the record, I don't think GWB is the Manchurian President with a controller rig beneath his jacket, and I don't think David Brin has gone mad. I think David was just a bit excited and overstated his case.

My take is that America was never as robust as many of us had thought, and that we really were more dependent on good governance than we realized. Truly abysmal government has exposed our underlying issues. It didn't really take a vast conspiracy, just persistent incompetence and a flat learning curve.

This is, however, an illuminating example of the state of the American intelligentsia. We're going bonkers watching one of the worst governments in American history dismantle the nation ...

Air Strikes in Iraq: 75,000 dead

Gwynne Dyer, military historian and intellectual eccentric [1], has analyzed the Lancet study (600,000 dead - about 60% of the US civil war dead in a comparable population) of Iraqi post-invasion mortality. He shreds the usual criticisms, but also makes a unique observation:

The most disturbing thing is the breakdown of the causes of death. Over half the deaths -- 56 percent -- are due to gunshot wounds, but 13 percent are due to air strikes. No terrorists do air strikes. No Iraqi government forces do air strikes, either, because they don't have combat aircraft. Air strikes are done by "coalition forces" (i.e. Americans and British), and air strikes in Iraq have killed over 75,000 people since the invasion.

Oscar Wilde once observed that "to lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." To lose 75,000 Iraqis to air strikes looks like carelessness, too.

I have a dim memory that "carelessness" in the context of military operations in a civilian environment can be considered a war crime. I believe that's where Dyer is going with this.

Maybe Kissinger can replace Rumsfeld and the circle will be complete ...

[1] Anyone who displays their publications on the web as .txt files is, by today's standards, eccentric.

Twelve years in the desert - the GOP after 1994

From the glorious victory of '94 to the decaying party of 2006, it's been an even sleazier fall than I'd recalled... (emphasis mine, these stories are coming too fast to track)

Queer and loathing on Capitol Hill | Salon.com

... after he shut down the federal government twice and was cited for ethics violations, Republicans on the eve of the impeachment trial of President Clinton forced Gingrich's resignation. (They had private knowledge: Gingrich promptly abandoned his second wife for the mistress he had maintained on the House payroll for years.)

The next designated speaker, Bob Livingston, resigned almost at once when pornographer Larry Flynt threatened to release tape recordings of Livingston's moaning with a mistress, which Flynt had purchased from the scorned woman...

... DeLay was the Republican Stalin, the ruthless consolidator and centralizer. His "K Street Project" forged an iron triangle of lobbyists, special interests and Republicans whom he believed would rule forever. But DeLay overreached and was indicted for corruption...

.... these and other [GOP staff] aides have been exposed as a network of mostly closeted gays who advanced and protected one another while working for politicians whose careers were propelled by gay bashing...

...Last week, Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio pleaded guilty to bribery, caught in the tangled web of Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff...

... Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, renowned for his conspiracy theories and personal hunt for WMD in Iraq, came under investigation for corrupt practices. His daughter, whose lobbying firm, Solutions North America Inc., worked on behalf of friends of Slobodan Milosevic and a Russian gas company out of her father's congressional office, was raided by the FBI....

... Karl Rove's assistant Susan Ralston (formerly Abramoff's assistant) had resigned for facilitating Abramoff's access to and favors for and from Rove and others, including Ken Mehlman, Republican National Committee chairman and former White House political director. This week another Republican congressman, John Doolittle of California, announced he was turning cooperative witness in the continuing federal investigation.

... Rep. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania, a "traditional values" Republican who settled out of court in a $5.5 million suit filed by his mistress for attempting to strangle her...

Clinton, surrounded by crazed but hapless enemies, gave them the weapon they needed to destroy him. Gingrich crafted a great victory, only to see his heirs devastate the empire he built. Really, the play writes itself.

Win or lose in November, the GOP is a debauched party.

CNET trashes IE 7

A surprisingly harsh review: Internet Explorer 7 by CNET. I thank heaven I switched the family to Firefox/Safari some time ago. (I'm partial to Camino myself and I may switch the family from Safari to Camino shortly.)

The corpse of habeus

Note to future cyber-archeologist. This was a lot like watching a train wreck. Horrible and fascinating. The nasty part was we were watching from the seats towards the back of the train ...

A Dangerous New Order - New York Times

Once President Bush signed the new law on military tribunals, administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time giving Americans a taste of the new order created by this unconstitutional act.

Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step...

Rove et al have assembled a massive attack strategy to use on any democrats who point out that Bush is taking steps that are necessary, though not sufficient, for the creation of a police state.

It is the great shame of America that today's public would almost certainly fall for Rove's trap. Democrats are thus, by necessity, fearful and silent. To paraphrase a notorious scoundrel, we go to the elections with the citizens we have, not with the citizens we wish we had.

Not the best galaxy to be visiting ...

The Antennae Galaxies/NGC 4038-4039. Looks rough. More here.

Phillip Carter on Iraq: concrete proposals

Philip ("Intel Dump") Carter is a lawyer and veteran who recently volunteered to serve again in Iraq. He's back safely in the US and now has written an article on tactics and strategy for Slate: How to avoid civil war in Iraq

I don't know if Phil wrote this title - I think at 60% of the American civil war's death rate the Iraqi conflict could be called a civil war. However, if Phil did write that Iraq was not yet in a civil war I'd take his word for it. He's a respectable guy.

His Slate article makes concrete recommendations. They come down to investing more money, taking more risks, and planning for a very long methodical counter-insurgency. These are unlikely to be popular proposals...

Don't do rebates

If a rebate is over $100, and if it's offered by a reputable company, and if I would have made the same purchase in the absence of the rebate, then I will sometimes bother to claim my rebate. I don't give much value to rebates when comparing prices; I'll take a $5 price drop over a $50 rebate.

All of which is to explain why I appreciated this post: Rebates to become more of a scam. The author has uncovered a patent application outlining advanced techniques to encourage "breakage" -- the failure of a rebate holder to get their money back. The patent deserves to fail since all of the techniques have been practiced for years, but it's nice to see them documented.

Bottom line - the only reason to bother with rebates is if you enjoy the game of getting paid.

Extra credit question: How does merging 'sick' and 'vacation' time into one time-off pool resemble a rebate scheme?

Winona and why I ended our Britannica subscription

We're a taking family trip to Winona, a town of about 28,000 south of the Twin Cities. Naturally, we review the Winona, Minnesota - Wikipedia entry prior to departure. It's excellent, as usual. We're ready to go exploring.

Coincidentally, I ended our five year old Britannica subscription yesterday. It hasn't been very useful lately -- ever time I've turned to it I've found better answers the net. The final straw was realizing that they still can't render pages correctly in Gecko (Firefox/Camino/Mozilla). That's a sign of rigor mortis. The old EB needs to either go entirely paper, or sell themselves to Google for a song.

Update 10/24/06: See the comments. It looks like the Gecko rendering flaw, which I saw when using Camino, was either an aberration or a Camino bug -- an EB engineer says they actively test using Gecko/Firefox. I believe him/her, so I think my Gecko comments were unfair. I mention in the comments that I've long regretted that EB's management never worked to develop an active community of users, with an open forum, to provide ideas and feedback on the site and its development.

Buddha preserve us - Sunni vs. Shiite

I don't have terribly high opinions of our political leadership, so I was surprised to learn there was room at the bottom.

Jeff Stein, National Security Editor at the Congressional Quarterly, asked a number of law enforcement officers and politicians to distinguish Sunni and Shiite. The results were dismal; I did note however that the examples given were all Republicans. Maybe they just need some time off to study ...

The better science museum: Mall of America's Dinosaur Walk

We have a science museum in Saint Paul, but really it's been a bit disappointing for our kids. Now if they'd take notes from the Mall of America's Dinosaur Walk, we'd be regulars. I was quite impressed with this commercial project, though I fear it's too sincere to make money.

Worth a visit if you're a native with kids. The web site has a $1.00 off coupon.

Lessons from the iPod: Talent deep and wide

The lesson from this Wired report is that it was talent wide and deep, constant communication, rapid iteration, and ready resources that allowed the iPod to be produced. This story feels true to me because it features both serendipity and a plausible process. Emphasis mine.

Wired News: Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth

... Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn't sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. ''It's not serial,'' he told the Times. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.''

Robert Brunner, a partner at design firm Pentagram and former head of Apple's design group, said Apple's designers mimic the manufacturing process as they crank out prototypes.

'Apple's designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming,' he said. 'They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas.'

To make them easy to debug, prototypes were built inside polycarbonate containers about the size of a large shoebox.

The iPod's basic software was also brought in -- from Pixo, which was working on an operating system for cell phones. On top of Pixo's low-level system, Apple built the iPod's celebrated user interface.

The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said quite definitively, 'The wheel is the right user interface for this product."

Schiller also suggested that menus should scroll faster the longer the wheel is turned, a stroke of genius that distinguishes the iPod from the agony of competing players. Schiller's scroll wheel didn't come from the blue, however; scroll wheels are pretty common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones have an iPod-like dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls. Back in 1983, the Hewlett Packard 9836 workstation had a keyboard with a similar wheel for scrolling text.

... Jobs insisted the iPod work seamlessly with iTunes, and that many functions should be automated, especially transferring songs. The model was Palm's HotSync software....

... "They discovered in their tool chest of registered names they had 'iPod,'" he said. "If you think about the product, it doesn't really fit. But it doesn't matter. It's short and sweet."...

Much of the talent and infrastructure described in this article is thought to still be in place - an encouraging prospect. It costs a lot to keep something like this together, few companies can manage it. I'd like to know how big Apple's development teams are.

A note on the Palm/HotSync reference. It's hard to believe nowadays, but once upon a time Palm was an example of elegant hardware and software integration. I'm glad Apple's engineers remembered the glory days of Palm, and used that as an inspiration. It is best to remmeber Palm as it once was, not the decaying travesty it became ...

DeLong: Why didn't Mexicans get more from NAFTA?

Comparative advantage is the cornerstone of globalization and the justification for even unilaterally lowering trade barriers and tarrifs. If there had been a Nobel prize for Economics in 1820 Ricardo (note from bio: eloped with a Quaker and became a Unitarian!), who developed the theory, would have won it. Comparative advantage is why neoliberals backed NAFTA; we figured it had to be very good for Mexico. The problem now is that while it might have been good, it hasn't been great:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: My Talk at the Center for Latin American Studies on NAFTA

... the 3.6% rate of growth of GDP, coupled with a 2.5% per year rate of population and increase, means that Mexicans’ mean income is barely 15% above that of the pre-NAFTA days, and that the gap between their mean income and that of the US has widened. Because of rising inequality, the overwhelming majority of Mexicans live no better off than they did 15 years ago. (Indeed, the only part of Mexican development that has been a great success has been the rise in incomes and living standards that comes from increased migration to the US, and increased remittances sent back to Mexico.)

Intellectually, this is a great puzzle: we believe in market forces, and in the benefits of trade, specialization, and the international division of labor. We see the enormous increase in Mexican exports to the US over the past decade. We see great strengths in the Mexican economy – a stable macroeconomic environment, fiscal prudence, low inflation, little country risk, a flexible labor force, a strengthened and solvent banking system, successfully reformed poverty-reduction programs, high earnings from oil, and so on.

Yet successful neo-liberal policies have not delivered the rapid increases in productivity and working-class wages that neo-liberals like me would have confidently predicted had we been told back in 1995 that Mexican exports would multiply five-fold in the next twelve years...

From an economist's perspective, the real problem is the challenge to theory of comparative advantage. If it turns out that comparative advantage is fatally flawed in the real world ...

Twin Cities Grand Rounds: The Missing Maps

If you bicycle around the lovely lakes of Minneapolis, you'll see an excellent map and photo montage of the famed Minneapolis lakes and the "Grand Rounds" bicycle/skating loop.

Alas, you won't find that map on the scenic byways website. Why not? I'd rather not know. The answer would only depress me.

On a happier note, you can browse the real map here:

Minneapolis Grand Rounds Bicycle Map

I took some photos of the main maps. You can download the full res images. They're pretty readable.

PS. It would be great if someone could create a Google Earth link from the lake and/or the Grand Round to this set of maps.

DeLong, Mankiw and the Problem of the Weak

DeLong explores the dark side of Mankiw, the probability that this very bright man has confused the Market with the Good:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Dysfunctional Behavior

.... In Michael Barone's view--and could it be in Greg Mankiw's too?--poverty in America is not something to be worried or concerned about because the poor deserve to be poor. The poverty of the poor is a just outcome. Poverty is, Michael Barone says, 'not... any structural failure of society.' Instead, poverty comes 'from dysfunctional behaviors.'...

but DeLong's blade then goes astray

...The point that it is a structural failure of society if (some) dysfunctional behaviors by parents trap their children in poverty seems to whiz by both Barone and Greg without penetrating.

Alas, my reply is swamped in a deluge of likewise misdirected comments (revised version below):

... Brad, you almost had it, but you slipped badly when you wrote "The point that it is a structural failure of society if (some) dysfunctional behaviors by parents trap their children in poverty seems to whiz by both Barone and Greg without penetrating."

Ahh. Would that all outcomes and all poverty could be cured by better parenting. Do you believe schizophrenia is due to bad parenting? Mental retardation? Austism? ODD? ADHD? Cerebral palsy?

Or, for that matter, a 10th percentile IQ? There is limited evidence that IQ can be influenced significantly after a child is born. (Test scores can be increased by practice and motivation/confidence however.)

Alas, "better parenting" is a false answer, and it has trapped you. The truth is that some children are dealt four aces, some a mixed hand, and some nothing at all. Look not for justice in this world.

So then what should a society do for The Weak, The Losers, those who finish last? Shall they fester beyond the gates?

It is the Problem of the Weak that divides the dwindling number of true Christians from evangelical Yahwhites, and that divides people like me from Republicans, Fundamentalists (Weakness and Suffering is a sign of God's displeasure) and Libertarians alike ...