Phil Carter on the "war czar"

Bush has appointed a "war czar" to deal with his bureaucracy. Phil Carter has written the definitive summary of the situation. It's worth reading the whole piece.

INTEL DUMP - Doug Lute: dream the impossible dream

Okay, I'm still scratching my head over this one. None of my thoughts are new on this, but I thought I'd air them anyway:

1) Isn't this guy supposed to be the "war czar"? If he can't make the interagency process work by knocking a few heads and firing a few cabinet officers, who can?

2) What's going to happen the first time that Lt. Gen. Lute doesn't get his way? Imagine a hypothetical where Gen. David Petraeus asks for more Justice Department personnel to promote the rule of law , and Al Gonzales tells him to go swimming in the Tigris....

3) How are the other agencies going to react to having yet another general in charge of policy? Maybe about as well as State reacted to having Jay Garner appointed as the head of ORHA during the early stages of the war?...

4) How broken is the U.S. national security apparatus that we need a "czar" to run it? Is the NSC that f---ed up that it needs a 3-star with some juice in the Pentagon to make things work? (This is a rhetorical question; the only possible answer is yes.)...

and the first comment is well chosen ...

Someone needs to tell President Bush that if you're sitting in the Cabinet Room and you don't see a President, then it's you.

Why did Lute take the job? Does Rove have incriminating photos of him with a North Korean agent? (that's a joke) Weird. Very weird.

Falwell's father

Now we understand why Falwell was the way he was:

With What Measure Ye Mete, It Shall Be Measured to You Again

...Via the New Yorker, this section from Falwell's 1987 autobiography, Strength for the Journey, goes a long way toward explaining ...

Read the excerpt from Falwell's biography. The father was a sociopath; the son doesn't seem to have ever recognized this.

In Our Time: light and John Barrow

If you were to enter the black hole at the center of our galaxy ... 'you easily pass into it without disruption and find it had the density of air ... but you would find yourself unable to return ...'. Which is a crude paraphrase of John Barrow speaking on the speed of light for In Our Time. There's lots more like that, such as "information cannot travel faster than the speed of light", which is a bit different from the way that law has been traditionally expressed.

I was thinking that, even for IOT, this was a rather erudite and interesting guest. The wikipedia profile explains things.

Another excellent episode, but of course no longer available as a podcast. If you don't like that, then help liberate In Our Time. In the meantime, maybe you should start collecting the podcasts ...

A brief and plausible guide to writing a resume

Over too many years I've seen numerous guides to resume writing. I think this condensed summary is among the most interesting and superficially persuasive of the lot: Clint Covington: Software design, Microsoft Office Access : Resume best practices revealed.

I'll quibble about the request for "evidence". I think he means "claims to objective deliverables" rather than evidence in the scientific or criminal sense.

Pet food: new recalls continue

I think if a company has not publicly stated that they've tested their food and it's clean, it may be best to assume it contains melamine:

National Ledger - Pet Food Recall: Costco Dog Food, American Nutrition Dog Food Added

... Costco - American Nutrition, in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is conducting a voluntary recall of products containing rice protein concentrate potentially contaminated by melamine, the company has announced...

If it only contains melamime it may not be particularly toxic, the current theory is that a mixture of cyanuric acid and melamime, possibly influenced by urinary pH, is what produces the crystalline nephropathy.

At this point we need lists of food supplies that are more likely to be safe, not lists of food supplies that have been found unsafe. I'm disappointed that the ASPCA has not posted information on food supplies that have been tested as safe, such as Natura.

As I've mentioned before, there's one way a pet food manufacturer could win my confidence. They would prepare a version of the food for human consumption based on the same ingredient sources. They wouldn't need to sell this, but it should be sold and eaten at board meetings. It would, of course, invoke FDA regulations, and board members would have the right to sue. Anything short of that? Well ...

Guy Kawasaki interviews the head of World Vision

An inflammatory middle eastern radical still has a few followers left... (excerpt from an interview with Guy Kawasaki, emphases mine)

How to Change the World: Ten (or so) Questions with Richard Stearns, President of World Vision

...Question:How can people who do not want to radically change their lives make a difference in the lives of the poor?

Answer: To really change the world, values must change. Consider the civil rights movement. Racial discrimination was once openly accepted in the United States. Today it is unacceptable to our mainstream culture. Very few of us are civil rights activists, but we let our values speak in our work places, our schools and to our elected officials.

Today, we live in a world that tolerates extreme poverty much like racism was tolerated fifty-plus years ago. We can all become people determined to do something to change the world. We can speak up, we can volunteer and we can give. Ending extreme poverty will take money, political and moral will, and a shift in our value system. When enough ordinary people embrace these issues, things will begin to change. Margaret Mead once said: "Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

Question:What keeps you awake at night as the CEO of World Vision?

Answer: If I thought every moment about the incredible suffering around the world I would never sleep. I worry about keeping the covenant we have with the poor and with our donors. It is a very sacred responsibility.

Question: What are biggest hurdles to alleviating poverty?

Answer: One word: apathy. The very frustrating part is that we actually have the knowledge and the ability to end most extreme poverty. The world just doesn't care enough to do it. The U.S. government has spent more than $400 billion on the war in Iraq to date.

Our annual humanitarian assistance budget for the whole world is only about $21 billion. We spend less than a half percent of our federal budget on humanitarian assistance and less than two percent of private charitable giving goes to international causes. People and governments make choices based on their priorities. Poverty is still not a high priority for the world.

Question: What's the biggest obstacle to get rich people to care about poor people?

Answer: The obstacle is that poverty is often not personal. If your next-door neighbor's child was dying and you could save her for $100, you wouldn't think twice. But a child 10,000 miles away whom you have never met, that's just different.

About 29,000 kids die every day of preventable causes--29,000! These kids have names and faces, hopes and dreams. Their parents love them as much as we love our kids. We've got to make poverty personal. Stalin once said: "A million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy." We must try to see the face of the one child.

Question: Why is World Vision so successful at fund raising?

Answer: The real secret of our fundraising is the notion of child sponsorship. We allow people to see the face of that one child - we make that child real to them. It is very difficult to raise money for poverty eradication - much easier to raise money to help a specific child. It makes it personal....

...Question: Do the efforts of rock stars and movie stars really help alleviate poverty and AIDS or are these people just seeking more publicity to sell albums?

Answer: They make a difference. Given the number of celebrities in our world it is actually shocking that so few of them are using their celebrity to make a difference. Bono is amazing. He has perhaps done more for the poor than anyone in the last century. I call him "Martin Luther Bono" because he has really been the leader of our movement.

Bill and Melinda Gates are changing the global landscape for health and development. The media rarely want to talk to me about poverty, but many reporters gush at the chance to talk with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, or Oprah. That's just the way it is. I welcome celebrities who really want to make a difference...

Kristoff recently cried out in despair about the human disposition to protect a lost puppy nearby, while ignoring Darfur. We are not wired to deal with remote suffering. I don't think that will change short of widespread genetic engineering; we have to work with the levers we've got. I've personally favored CARE International's "roots of poverty" approach over the sponsor-a-child approach of World Vision, but I see the value of that peraonl connection.

As for Darfur -- well, if Bill Clinton were around he'd have figured something out. It's a miserable misfortune that the Darfur genocide occurred during the Bush regime ...

Pet food security: the libertarian solution

This will be bad if it's used in place of FDA regulation, good if it provides another avenue of security:

IMI Global Launches Pet Food Verification Service in Response to Pet Food Recall Issues

CASTLE ROCK, Colo., May 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Integrated Management Information, Inc. (IMI Global), a leading provider of verification and Internet solutions for the agricultural/livestock industry, today announced the launch of Pet Supply Verified(TM), a comprehensive new pet food verification system designed to build consumer confidence in pet food products.

"Pet Supply Verified, which is modeled on our industry leading USVerified and Supply Verified services for the cattle and livestock industry, enables pet food suppliers and manufacturers to build consumer confidence in the origin and safety of pet food products," said John Saunders, president and CEO of IMI Global. "The recent recalls and related consumer confusion in the marketplace underscore the need for a more comprehensive and reliable pet food verification system. Our verification processes, which are setting the standard for verification of meat products for human consumption, are ideally suited for the pet food industry."

IMI Global works with many of America's leading meat industry supply chains helping them build consumer confidence and enable brand differentiation. IMI has helped these agribusinesses build and audit USDA verification programs. In some instances these programs are mandatory for export markets. IMI Global's audit based programs can assist the pet food industry in addressing similar consumer concerns through the verification of production claims.

Since IMI will be funded by the industry, it has a fundamental conflict of interest. It will only stay honest if backstopped by an effective and adequately funded regulatory agency.

The single speed universe

For the photon, there is neither time nor distance. Every destination takes no time at all to reach, which is, of course, also true of non-local "transmission" of non-meaning. I've retained that much from Gribbin and my recent readings of popular works on cosmology and quantum physics.

So does that mean that there's only one "space-time speed" for everything, namely to be as motionless as a photon?

After all, the more gravity one feels, and the more history of acceleration one has, the more one moves through time rather than space alone. in other words, as one gets closer to the speed of light the energy input of an accelerating force is diverted into time travel rather than space travel.

So, if one thinks of speed as movement through space and time, is it true to say that everything in the universe has the same "speed"?

I did a quick google on the topic, and found this article. So maybe that is the way physicists think about spacetime velocity. BTW, the article claims that one interpretation of general relativity is consistent with both the transactional interpretation of QM and Tralfamadorian philosophy.

Truly, all of modern physics is an attempt to understand the photon ...

Update 5/15: Turns out I was remembering chapter one (relativity theory) of Greene's overview of cosmology and theoretical physics! I'd skimmed the chapter a few weeks ago and I was basically recalling what he'd written, though the Tralfamadorian bit is mine. Nice to know I wasn't just spouting off! Even Greene mentions how alien and astounding special and general relativity theory feel when he reviews the concepts -- and that's his profession. These are concepts so beyond our everyday existence that they easily slip out of my feeble mind ...

I'm now taking a leisurely slow read through the book and will doubtless have further related comments ..

Globalization: Krugman on mitigating the social impact

I've written quite a bit about globalization lately, particularly in the context of toxic food, medicine, and consumer products. Not to mention the toaster problem, or those DVD/VCR combo units that last (at most) six months. Cheap goods from Walmart aren't cheap if you need to buy 3 times as many of them. (Incidentally, this shows up as increased productivity rather than increased inflation.)

So I'm against trade agreements and globalization? Well, no. I not only buy the party line on trade and poverty, I saw the positive effects of trade in Bangladesh in the early 80s. It's true that Ricardo's theory comparative advantage didn't anticipate how fraud and deception would lessen the mutual advantages of trade, but it's also true that billions of people are emerging from poverty on the back of international trade flows. Even from the selfish perspective of the privileged, that translates into a much safer, albeit warmer world. The net balance is clearly positive, and the balance for all participants is individually positive.

It also won't be sustained if we don't mitigate the disadvantages for the non-wealthy American, including soon-to-be outsourced IBM workers and everyone who doesn't have an advanced degree. We need stronger regulation of imports, and the beginnings of a world regulatory authority. We need to treat declining product lifespans as increased inflation rather than increased productivity. And, above, all, we need to change the American contract between society and citizen, starting with health-care...

Divided Over Trade - Krugman -New York Times:

...So what’s the answer? I don’t think there is one, as long as the discussion is restricted to trade policy: all-out protectionism isn’t acceptable, and labor standards in trade agreements will help only a little.

By all means, let’s have strong labor standards in our pending trade agreements, and let’s approach proposals for new agreements with an appropriate degree of skepticism. But if Democrats really want to help American workers, they’ll have to do it with a pro-labor policy that relies on better tools than trade policy. Universal health care, paid for by taxing the economy’s winners, would be a good place to start...

John Edwards, in other words. Everyone else is just business as usual.

Scientology - not reformed in the UK

One of the things I learned on my "VIP" tour of L. Ron's washington home is that England is the adopted homeland of scientology. L Ron started in the US, but England is where he found traction, and it is there that one finds multi-generational homes of scientologists.

Scientology is a few hundred years behind Mormonism in the progress from cult to conventional religion, so it's not surprising that it has an abundance of rough edges. In the US the organization seems to be a bit more polished, but in the UK it still shows its old flair. It's not surprising, then, that a BBC journalist got the "Full Monty" treatment ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | Row over Scientology video

... While making our BBC Panorama film "Scientology and Me" I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a "bigot" by star Scientologists, brain-washed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law's house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged...

Alas, Mr. Sweeney has a temper (happens to the best of us), and his adversaries trigger a fine explosion. They then YouTube it around the world, but to his great credit Sweeney doesn't buckle

...If you are interested in becoming a TV journalist, it is a fine example of how not to do it. I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine ... it makes me cringe...

His BBC article on the story includes a link to the clip, with a fine full face roar. In a Guardian interview Sweeney says ..

...This morning Mr Sweeney said his behaviour had resulted in him being seriously reprimanded by the BBC.

"What I did was wrong and stupid and I am embarrassed about it. I let down the team and I let down the BBC," he said. "It was my seventh day with the Scientologists and I snapped. I have had my arse kicked by the BBC but they have not fired me."...

In the BBC article Sweeney mentions one reason why the UK doesn't classify Scientology as a religion ...

Scientology is a pay-as-you-go religion - which is one of the reasons why the Charity Commission in Britain does not class it as a religion.

There are some good points on the Slashdot discussion, including those who've viewed the video and say Sweeney is being too hard on himself. In any case, the advance publicity should do wonders for the documentary. I wonder if the video will try to explain why Scientology has such an odd attraction for vacuous celebrities? It it because it promised to make them deities?

Gingrich's Amazon reviews

I was reviewing Gribbin's "Kittens" book, when I came across a reasonable review written by Newt Gingrich. It wasn't an in-depth review, but it's likely he at least skimmed the book. It's not an easy book.

Gingrich was profoundly wrong headed and laid the way for Rove, but it's a measure of Rove/Cheney/Bush's incompetence and willful ignorance that nowadays Gingrich looks much the lesser evil ...

American family practice: Canada looking better?

I still believe my "generality" of Family Practice makes sense in settings that reflect real-world resource constraints, such as a "free market" libertarian system or a single buyer/payor model or the future mixture thereof. Alas, FP doesn't make sense in the unreal world of today's American health-care marketplace. FP is a weak and wounded beast, and the "minute clinics" are moving in for the kill.

So it's not surprising that this month's issue of FPM was suspiciously thin, and included some grim correspondence:

Letters - May 2007 - Family Practice Management

In response to Dr. James Glazer's editorial "Specialization in Family Medicine Education: Abandoning Our Generalist Roots" [February 2007], I have to ask why are we wasting our time saving generalism? The marketplace has deemed us valueless. Supply and demand has dictated that we are unnecessary. Insurance companies, the government and the public have said we have no worth... mostly I get up in the middle of the night to see patients with minor problems that should have been dealt with in the clinic during daylight hours. I applaud my colleagues who have limited their practices, and I plan to do the same in about five years.

--

... I don't mean the above to sound dark and angry. Part of the paradox of life in family medicine is that it would be hard for me to conceive of a more satisfying career. I would never trade my practice life for that of another specialty. Caring for patients with the spectrum of needs that mine have is immensely rewarding.

Still, I'm not sure that today's medical students are willing to meet the demands of family medicine. The financial rewards are likely to be greater in almost every other specialty, and many young physicians have difficulty seeing beyond that.

--

I am now retired, but having practiced for more than 30 years, developed a family medicine residency program, taught residents for many years and watched the ancillary services once preformed by family doctors disappear, I am disillusioned and afraid for the continued existence of family medicine...

--

The same issue features a somewhat discouraging look at an idealistic (but unpersuasive) attempt to "reengineer" family practice. Ahh, they'll miss us when we're gone. You have to love a group of people who, faced with immense economic pressures, decide to make their board certification five times harder. There's a definite impulse to self-punishment among family physicians ...

Primary care will return to America when we emerge from our delusional health-care mess; the names will change but no-one will really be fooled.

In the meantime, not coincidentally, my wife and I received a recruitment survey from the Canadian Medical Association. They've noticed an unprecedented reversal of the "southwards flow of physicians" in the past two years. It's probably too late for us (I left practice for research and development 10 years ago), but if I were still doing primary care I'd be looking north again ...

Update 5/14/07: I forgot to mention one of the more direct "killers" of family practice. Evaluation and Management coding. It diverted primary care from patient services to documentation services, and biased towards the delivery of suboptimal, but coded, services. Performance measures will have a similar effect, though for primary care that will be a "flogging a dead parrot".

The genetics of weight: why so long to be accepted

Obesity management is one of those marvelous examples of research results that take eons to be incorporated in practice. Gina Kolata documents research published in the mid 80s in the NEJM that showed weight was almost certainly genetically controlled in an environment of plenty. Twenty years later, this is only beginning to be accepted.

Obesity, in an environment of plenty, cannot be controlled by available means...

Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside - New York Times

... Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins...

...The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease...

...The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks...

...“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”

One reason I think this took so long to be accepted is that the results are a direct attack on the concept of responsibility and free will. In the 1960s and 1970s environment was still thought to be a far more important factor in behavior than mere biology. This was the era when menopausal symptoms were imagined, by feminists, to be socially constructed. In the 1970s 1980s sociobiology emerged, to thunderous denunciation. It had to be renamed 'evolutionary biology' to survive. It wasn't until the 1990s that Americans began to accept that biology is often destiny, and our "soul" or our environment may be much less important than our genes.

We're still processing this "retreat from responsibility", it'll take decades to figure out all the implications. This long journey, I think explains why it took 20 years to recognize what now seems obvious ...

BTW, this data supports use of the ADA to prevent workplace discrimination against obesity ...

The limits of the modern military: occupation is no longer an option?

Since the beginning of the Iraq war, I've felt that three things were under-analyzed:

1. The impact of Turkey's withdrawal on the original war plan. Few now remember that the original plan assumed a massive military contribution from Turkey.
   
   
2. The likelihood that Rumsfeld always assumed Iraq would be partitioned into 3 parts (With US clients keeping much of the oil of course. I suspect Bush was not informed of Rumsfeld's opinion, though Cheney would have been.)
   
   
3. The reality that the US never had a large enough military to occupy (vs. invade) Iraq and that the military knew this from the start.

Phil Carter has written quite a bit about the limitations of the volunteer army, now an article in the June Atlantic provides some more detail on the training and recruitment challenge. I was struck by this number (emphases mine)

The Army We Have

... In the prime age group for recruitment (17 to 24 years old), 7 in 10 are ineligible for military service, Army officials say. More than half the members of this youth cohort are disqualified for moral, mental, or medical reasons: They have had too many run-ins with the law, or they have gang-related or extremist tattoos; they have had psychiatric treatment for severe mental problems or antisocial behavior; or they have been diagnosed with one or more of a staggering list of medical conditions, from heart murmurs to obesity. Other potential recruits have too many dependents, scored too low on the Army aptitude test, or lack high-school or general-equivalency diplomas...

It's a telling number, though on reflection one can see the sense of it. Obesity alone would eliminate many today, and an effective requirement of an IQ above 100 would eliminate about 40% of the population.

Modern warfare demands a lot of human "capital".

I think one historic lesson of the invasion of Iraq may be that a modern military power cannot occupy a nation. In other words, military occupation is not an option -- for anyone.

Has that been much discussed? It seems rather a significant change ...

Patents, copyright and Spider Robinson

Spider Robinson wrote Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants in 1983. Wow. I haven't given him enough credit; I can see why it won a Hugo.

He's put it online, though he doesn't tell us how he obtained the copyright to do so (most authors lose copyright when they publish). It's a great illustration of the risks of long lived intellectual property protection, though it's a dramatic work of course. In reality I think humans would adjust to the idea that we aren't really doing new art; several human cultures have embraced the "redo" rather than the novel.

Today I think we feel more the pain of patents than of copyright. Anyone looking at a new enterprise is daunted by the thicket of patent battles ahead, particularly the immense collection of process patents that emerged in the 90s. I'm reasonably sure the vast majority of simple solutions to everyday problems I think of have undeserved process patents.

I'm optimistic the patent monster will be tamed. If nothing else the advent of 3D "printers" (assemblers) will allow hackers to route around the patent block, and will force a rebalancing.