The scandal that created the army and executive privilege

I can see why this story is generally omitted from this history books:

Making Light: Retreat Along the Wabash

It was the worst defeat under arms ever suffered by the US Army. Out of some 1,100 men who answered muster on the night of November 3rd, 1791, only 27 were unwounded at sunset on the 4th. 90% were dead. The camp followers, the artillery, all were lost.

In just over three hours on that bloody morning St. Clair lost 60% of all the men then under arms in the service of the United States...

...And that, my friends, is why Fort Wayne, Indiana, is called “Fort Wayne” rather than “Fort St. Clair.”

That too is where we got a standing army, and where the doctrine of “Executive Privilege” comes from.

Among other things, we discover Washington was quite human.

Ground zero in Pakistan: Informed Comment blog

Talking Points suggests Informed Comment: Global Affairs: Barnett Rubin as a source for understanding the global crisis of the week (month? year? decade?) -- Pakistan's crisis of governance.

I glanced at the most recent post and it felt good. Consistent with what I'd already understood, plausible details that extend what I've read in known reliable sources, a measured tone.

I'll be tracking it.

This is also an opportunity to thank the gods that Rumsfeld is gone and, though Cheney and Bush remain, the rest of America's military and political governance is in far saner hands than it was a year ago.

Karen Hughes: another Bush loyalist quits

I missed this one: Bush loyalist Karen Hughes has quit. She was on a bizarre mission to improve America's image abroad. That's a bit of a tough job while the President works to make waterboarding a competitive sport.

Surprisingly, from what we all remember of the bizarre debut of her mission, Kaplan tells us she was actually doing a good job resurrecting the corpse of America's cultural outreach. He doesn't really have any good explanation for why she abruptly quit.

Did she finally give up on George Bush Jr?

Wives for China: yet another crisis

Dyer on China's demographics: "...Girls are in such short supply that it is estimated that by 2010 there will be 37 million young Chinese men with no prospect of ever finding a wife."

A Chinese wife, specifically.

The usual solution to an excess of young males is to go to war. That doesn't scale in today's world.

The alternatives are either polyandry, finding a nation with an excess number of females, or an innovative technological solution.

In the meantime China should start cash subsidies and guaranteed free education and healthcare for all female children. China needs to make girls dramatically more attractive to parents.

I like Bob Herbert

Why Is Bob Herbert Boring? is an impressively mean and obnoxious article in the Washington Monthly. I suspect Mr. Herbert is more likely to read that column than to read this blog post, but the essay was so nasty I'm obliged to say that I like Mr. Herbert's columns and I read every one he writes.

Maybe it's my dour Scots nature, but I don't mind that Mr. Herbert belongs to the evidence-based community. Heck, I read Paul Krugman religiously (including his blog) and he's no flaming ball of cheer.

There are snappier writers, but it's all relative. Mr. Herbert writes in an elite field -- it's no shame to be "very good" rather than "great" in that crowd. His special value comes from his clear vision and his dogged determination to talk about people most readers of the NYT may prefer to forget.

So Mr. Herbert -- don't be discouraged. Maureen Down is disposable, you are not. Keep writing.

How long is your to do list?

This Google gadget appears at the top of their iGoogle Gadget Directory: "ToDo Gadget, easily manage and track your daily to-do list. ToDo gadget lets you add up to 7 tasks, the average amount of concurrent tasks the human brain can handle effectively".

Seven.

I clearly do not belong in the same world. I think I'm running at about 300 between home and work ... [1]

[1] I don't manage my work by my inbox. I use tasks.

NYT's new ads: drive me to Adblock Plus

Advertisers are their own worst enemies. The NYT has introduced a new set of obnoxious interstitial ads that float around the screen then settle in place hiding text. They have to be manually dismissed.

Which means I've installed Adblock Plus.

I was ok with old style ads, but the new ones have pushed me over the edge. Now I won't see either.

A stupid move by advertisers - and the NYT.

Williams College: a word of praise

A combination of unearned good fortune and inspiration born of desperation allowed me to spend a half-year at Williams College playing liberal arts student. The academics were much less work than what I was accustomed to, and the teaching was superb. Best of all, my real undergrad institution paid the whole thing -- room, board, travel and tuition. (Actually the best est part was a I got academic credit for having fun. [1])

I have a soft spot for Williams, but it's fantastically expensive for people who have to pay. So I credit them for enabling some students who are very smart, and perhaps only somewhat poor, to go there ...

I am very pleased to announce that, in consultation with the Board of Trustees, the College has decided to eliminate loans from all financial aid packages and replace them with grants....

This move is the latest in a series of steps the College has taken in recent years to ensure that a Williams education is affordable...

Previous steps had reduced the amount of loans we expected financial aid students to take. For students from families with the lowest incomes that expectation has in recent years been zero. But other financial aid students had been expected, depending on income, to borrow cumulatively over their four years $3,800, $7,800, or 13,800.

This move also comes at a time when the College has succeeded in increasing the socio-economic diversity of entering classes. In fact, the Class of 2011 is the first in history to have more than half its members qualify for Williams-based aid. Even more have won scholarships outside the College..

I don't think this would help much kids like mine though -- it's state school for them. (They've got their share of advantages anyway.)

If you're on the edge of middle class or below, however, and a good student, I would encourage a look at Williams. Even back in the day there were enough non-rich students there to offset the weird experience of studying next to the ultra-rich.

[1] Of course for me learning is fun, so it's not like I wasn't goofing off completely.

Perfect commentary on the million terrorist watch list

Last week more stories appeared about the dysfunctional "watch list" maintained by the FBI's unchecked civilian contractors.

I've written about this many times. Anyone who's ever sat through a med school course on positive predictive value knows what this sucker is worth.

The good news is that the list has gotten so large that even the world's dimmest investigative agency must be starting to suspect something has gone wrong.

The bad news is that when we get rid of it, the Bush administration will replace it with something at least equally stupid.

The other good news is that the situation is perfect for Morford's patented "over the top" prose:

Behold! The Bliss Watch List / To hell with the FBI's million-strong Terrorist Watch List. Here is your killer alternative

.... In fact, if my rough estimates are accurate, at the current ridiculous rate of growth, the terrorist watch list will hold roughly 87 billion names by, say, your next birthday. It will soon list every single person on the face of the planet, along with all dead people, the unborn three generations out, and (strangely) many plants. It is just that insidious. It is just that absurd and obscene and just that much of a hint of the nasty surveillance state we are quietly, viciously becoming.

Great read. Humor is good.

Islamofascism; the greatest threat ever

I can't add anything to Krugman's comments here:

Fearing Fear Itself - Krugman New York Times

... "And Mike Huckabee, whom reporters like to portray as a nice, reasonable guy, says that if Hillary Clinton is elected, “I’m not sure we’ll have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism.” Yep, a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did...

The Party of Bozo indeed.

iPhone progress: pretty darned slow

My crummy Palm Tungsten T/2 is failing fast -- the power switch has died (a known design flaw) and the LiOn battery is good for about 3 hours (died within a year of purchase). It crashes frequently and is, really, an awful thing. Palm deserves to die.

The Palm world is pretty awful, but I hate my RAZR more.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could replace both of 'em, and not have to carry an iPod around too? What a great idea!

Yeah. The iPhone. Gee, I almost forgot about that #$&^@# thing.

Problem is, the iPhone is making very slow progress on my "most have" and "nice to have" iPhone demands. Let's check the list (updates in bold):

Non-negotiable:

1. Copy, Cut, Paste: No progress
   
2. Search: No progress
3. Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks: No progress. Task sync was supposed to be in 10.5 but was dropped.
   
4. Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable. No progress.
5. Run FileMaker RemoteL No progress, except a rumor that FileMaker is abandoning FM Remote completely.
   
6. Synchronize notes. : No progress. Dropped from 10.5
   
7. Multi select and process for email. : No progress.
8. Apple needs to fix the "international problem". It's ridiculously easy to run up a $1000 phone bill unintentionally when outside the US. The phone needs to provides a permission-only control over non-US EDGE access. Fixed.
9. Enable iPhone Bluetooth tethering, so a computer can use it to go online. (added in honor of Boingo). No progress.

Wishes, not demands:

1. A real calculator. No progress.
2. Flatten the recessed headphone socket. No progress.
3. Site-selective synchronization - so can sync at both work and home, but not send home data to a work machine. No progress.
4. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. No progress.
5. Video out - so I can use a larger display. No progress.
6. Encrypted data stores. No progress.
7. Third party app support (signed is ok). There's a promise of some kind of development environment, but it's not clear it's Cocoa based. Apple is adding data storage and more UI power to WebKit, but that doesn't help me much if the app can't work with tasks, calendar items, etc.
   
8. Flash support, but not from Adobe. No progress.
9. GPS No progress.
10. Custom ring and alert tones: Available now.
    
11. Allow file storage on the iPhone. No progress.

Of the nine critical items, only one has been addressed so far and one (FM Mobile) has had a big regression. It's plausible of course that Apple will add the task/note synchronization to 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 by next February.

Of the 11 "nice to have" items there's resolution of one and we might see something on another some day.

The iPhone I am willing to buy probably won't be available before spring 2008.

Deep sigh.

So what about the Blackberry and Windows Mobile?

The geeks I read tell me that Windows Mobile is even worse than the Palm world. Hard to believe, but I trust 'em.

So that leaves Blackberry, but I'm an OS X fan. BB is basically an Outlook extension. I'd prefer not to be tied to Outlook forever.

I think I'm going to have to buy another crappy Palm device. I'll buy exactly what I have now to reduce the pain.

Image of the week: Fallows in Berlin

James Fallows visits a minor Berlin museum.

I definitely want to visit Berlin. Definitely a glass-half-empty and poisoned kind of place, which suits me of course.

Fallows took a photograph from one of the museum exhibits. I won't try to describe it, but it really must be seen. A thousand words indeed.

LinkedIn joins Google's open social networking

The great thing about a closed ecosystem taking the #1 position is that the best option for rivals is to collaborate around an open solution.

That's the best option, but it rarely happens. Usually rivals simply fight it out. Remember Sun and Netscape? In the 90s the two could have collaborated to fight Microsoft on the browser front, instead they fought bitterly. Netscape died, Sun was mortally wounded, and IE ruled (still does).

Google might be smarter with OpenSocial:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google opens up social networking:

...Google said that around a dozen social network partners had signed up to the system, including business site LinkedIn, Friendster and Google's own social network Orkut...

I bolded LinkedIn because it's the social face for one's corporate self. A unique front with few challengers. I'd expect Google to invest in them if they haven't already.

Deja Vu: DeLong on Health Care Reform -- and Ira Magaziner

Bred DeLong cannot be on good terms with Ira Magaziner. Today he resurrects a 1997 book review including this paragraph:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal:

... So those were his two maor flaws: a love of complexity, and the instincts of a consultant--no, three major flaws: his judgment was also very poor. Remember: this is a guy who, without knowing anything about nuclear physics, testifies before congress that America has no choice but to pour lots of money into research into Cold Fusion. This is a man who thinks at the end of the 1970s--a time of record high energy prices and rapidly-growing competition from new producing nations like Brazil and Korea--that what America really needs to do is to invest in more brand-new integrated steel factories. Combine Magaziner's flaws with the sense at the start of 1993 that possibilities were unbounded--that, as one (anonymous) senior White House aide put it, no one in the White House '...was thinking about the fact that Bill Clinton got only 43 percent of the votes. He was on top of the world. He was young, he was good-looking, he gave a good speech. The world was full of hope'--and you have the setting for a policy-planning disaster....

Clinton still hangs with Ira; one hopes he's changed over the years.

What I dimly remember of the Clinton plan, besides a level of media analysis far beyond anything any media corp would tackle today, was that it seemed dishonest.

The plan only made sense (to me) if there were quite a few limits on how money could be spent in the pursuit of "health", and, by implications, limits on what people could choose to do.

This is, of course, always true of any health care service. The main variation among them is whether wealthy people can opt out and take their money with them.

The catch was nobody was allowed to discuss this. We were all to pretend that we'd get universal coverage and nobody would lose anything they had. Even people who had no idea what the plan was smelled something fishy about that ...

PS. For the record, I think we should have no-frills healthcare guaranteed to every US citizen as a birthright. This does mean, however, that the non-wealthy have to wait for expensive stuff to get cheap, which generally takes 2-3 years post release. Those can be long years.

The coastal housing bubble collapse - in pictures

I missed this post when it came out, but caught it via DeLong. Paul Krugman illustrated the coastal housing bubble in pictures. It's sobering. I'd guess MN's prices were between Michigan and Florida -- so only a mild bubble here. We knowingly bought at the peak of the bubble and figured we were going to lose 10% of value within 1-2 years, that's about what happened.

So bad news for the economy, but on the other hand folks I know who follow housing are thinking "post-bubble investing opportunity". There's an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around America looking for a home -- if it pours into housing now we might see an unprecedented recovery as well. (That's easy for me to say, because I'm not predicting anything and don't have time to put my money anywhere anyway!)