Terry Pratchett and Google Book Library with local library link

I know there are five or six Pratchett books still waiting for me. I've only ready 32 or so, albeit several of them many times.

There are still a few I am saving for when I really need them.

The simple truth is that Pratchett is an extremely gifted man who works very, very hard. He's somewhere between Tolkien and Jonathon Swift - no mean company.

In most libraries he's found in the "fantasy section". I don't think he objects, it's a fair place for books of an imaginary world featuring Cohen the Barbarian, DEATH, Wizards, Witches, and Werewolves. You can read his books as lighthearted fantasy with intermittent dark bits and remarkably good writing.

Or you can read his books as page turning thrillers that will grab you by the throat while the children cry for food and your eyes bleed for lack of sleep.

Or you can read the books as satire, sometimes dark satire, but always compassionate. Even the Auditors have moments, typically before they self-destruct, of sympathy.

Or you can read them as meditations on suffering, mortality, pride, the just life, death, religion and the nature of evil. These topics crush many a fine writer, but Pratchett weaves them in his tales with a deceptively distracting leavening of English humor.

You owe it to yourself to read him. You can start anywhere, though I have a soft spot for Small Gods, Mort, Lords and Ladies, and Night Watch. Pratchett doesn't weaken over time, he just changes his focus. Good all the way through.

Incidentally, although he's been popular for years and is justly wealthy from his work, I only found Pratchett through reading Vinge's Rainbows End. Vinge's protagonist is recovering from Alzheimer's disease, and gets entangled in a meme war between Pratchett's progeny and lesser imaginations. Vinge is a Pratchett fan, I like Vinge, so I tried Pratchett. Thanks Verner.

Which is where the circle closes. I've been meaning to write this post for a while but it was a post by another guy I read that brought it out. John Hawks likes Pratchett, and he writes about how Terry Pratchett describes his Alzheimer's. Yeah, Pratchett has the same affliction as Vinge's character.

Great writer, mortal man, the books live on.

Oh, and to help you get started. Try this. It's the library associated with my Google Profile. Click on a book. On the right side, see the link to find the book in a library. That takes you to a WorldCat page (might have to register for a WorldCat account, it's free). There I see it's not in our Saint Paul system, but I can pick it up from the Minneapolis system. (We're all integrated here.)

Bet you didn't know you could use Google Books to order pickups from your local library. Even I'd forgotten -- until now.

The spittle factor: publicizing Palin's supporters

By their supporters ye shall know them...

Talking Points Memo | Her Bile Bubbles Over

.... Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, 'Sit down, boy.'...

Palin is gathering a nice slice of the nastiest bits of America. I wonder how that sits with the religious right?

Sure, we know the religious right has a lot of nasties. It's not been that long since "religious" leaders were signaling approval of fire bombing abortion clinics. (Terrorism, technically.)

They're not all nasty though. Palin's supporters are going to turn some stomachs. It won't convert them into Obama supporters, but it may convert them into non-voters.

This would be a good time for videographers to put Palin supporters on YouTube. The more spittle covered the better.

The problem with town hall debates: "uncommitted"?

I grew up in Canada, so as an American it's been relatively easy for me to avoid presidential debates. I don't have the habit, and the debates annoy me. They're a political test for sure, but I'm no judge of what appeals to voters. If I cared, I could best assess those traits by reading post-debate polls rather than watching the debates.

Now I have one more reason to dislike presidential debates ...

BBC NEWS | Americas | Race turns bitter as debate looms

... He will select only six or seven e-mailed questions, as well around a dozen from the studio audience of 80 uncommitted voters....

Uncommitted?! At this point?

So the audience is made up of 80 people who are either fabulously clueless or lying. They get to select the questions.

Hmm. Clueless or lying. I think I see why McCain likes the format.

The New Yorker: Obama for reasons of character

Of course the New Yorker favors Obama over McCain. It's remarkable, though, how long their list of Obama's advantages is. It's piling on, really.

At last they get to character ...

The Choice: Comment: The New Yorker

.... What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin ...
The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness...

McCain is half way to frothing loon. Ok, 75% of the way. Palin is showing a pretty nasty lying streak of her own, one that fits what we've read of her political rise. The resemblance to Cheney is pretty creepy.

And yet, I still think America will elect McCain and Palin...

Donate to Obama.

Good news: McCain/Palin play the Ayers Card

The timing of McCain/Peron'sPalin's "Ayers attack" is good news ...

Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama’s Ties to ’60s Radical - NYTimes.com

.... The article to which she referred, in The New York Times on Saturday, traced Mr. Obama’s sporadic interactions with Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weathermen who later became an education professor in Chicago and worked on education projects there with Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee for president.

The article said: “A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.”..

No surprise here, though they'd probably have preferred that Ayers weren't a relatively respectable tenured professor. Obama, of course, was a toddler when Ayers was in trouble. McCain has buddied up with nastier foreign leaders as a grown man.

We should expect lots of "Osama oops I meant Obama" slips of the tongue and a 100% increase in lying during this predictable smear campaign.

The good news is the timing. They would normally keep this one until about 1-2 weeks before a close election, then hammer it hard giving no time for the lies to fall flat. McCain would only play this now if he felt he was going to lose.

So the timing is good news.

That doesn't mean it won't work. This country almost elected Bush over Gore (with ample help from the GOP's Ralph Nader), and we elected a 2nd term Bush over Kerry (with less help from the GOP's Nader).

I predict we'll elect McCain/Palin. McCain, whose medical records have not been released and who has had no known cognitive testing, will be found to have early dementia and recurrent melanoma. President Palin will take office in late 2009.

I'm kind of hoping Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula will find a way to join up with Canada ...

Rolling Stone on John McCain

There's not much left of him by the time the story's done: Make-Believe Maverick : Rolling Stone.

Google needs customer service

Google is too important now to run without customer service:

Gordon's Tech: Reconsidering Google

... Kudos to this journalist for noting that anyone who fears losing their account won't use Google's obscenely inane security question, but if you don't answer the question then you have no hope of account recovery. (I've gone to my Gmail account and answered the question with a password-like string I now store with in my backed-up password database.)

I might upgrade our family domain just to get support services. That's not an option for my personal gmail account though. Google should offer a support service with enhanced user authentication procedures for a fee of $25 a year, and bundle it with an extra 5-10GB of storage.

If they don't do that, I'm going to have to reevaluate my Google relationship."

Charge for it, but provide the option. Bundle it with enhanced security (certificate stores? two factor identification options) and storage. $25 per single account, $40 for a family account, $50 (as now) for enhanced Google Apps.

Sarah Peron Cheney. America could do it.

The comparison to Eva Peron is inescapable. Now add Cheney ...

Dick Cheney, Role Model - Editorial - NYTimes.com

.... In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”...

It's a walking nightmare that McCain/Palin are polling above 10%.

If I were running China's trillion dollar investments in America I'd be moving my family to Switzerland.

Palin "Eva Peron" - 78,000 hits

When Emily noted that Palin is the Eva Peron of American politics I knew I had to write a post about it. I'd not read the comparison anywhere else.

We've feared for years that America was becoming 20th century Argentina writ large -- a vast nation destroyed by its own people. Now, with Sarah Palin, we're completing the circle.

Turns out, Emily's not the only one to notice. Palin "eva peron" - Google Search has 77,900 hits this morning.

Zeitgeist.

We are so screwed.

Damn. The good guys blinked.

In the end, the good guys did their duty. The Dems passed the bailout, the House GOP barely shifted

172 Democrats in favour and 63 against. A majority of Republicans still opposed the bill - 91 voted for it and 108 against.

Yes, it's the right thing.

Yes, it's the grown-up thing.

Yes, the GOP has effectively joined bin Laden's "destroy America" campaign.

There's only one problem ...

Gordon's Notes: The GOP's game of chicken - let's crash

....We've seen this game before. It usually involves a financial crisis of one sort or another.

In past episodes the grown-ups turn the car aside. The crisis is averted. The GOP then savages the grown-ups.

That would be fine, except for what happens next.

It works. The GOP win, and once they win they create more crises. For the grown-ups to solve. In the long run, being grown-up only makes things worse.

Being grown-up doesn't work when a large chunk of the electorate is clueless.

Better to crash and burn now, because if the GOP isn't reformed we'll only crash harder next time.

If McCain wins, the next wreck will be even worse.

The 21st century has been educational

Emily and I were talking TED Spreads and LIBOR while chatting about how Chrisopher Cox and Henry Paulson (then CEO of Goldman Sachs) covertly opened the gates of Hell four years ago.

So now we know the language of international finance. Derivatives and credit swaps are second nature now.

It's been such an educational century. We learned about how to weaponize anthrax, and the diverse religious cultures of Afghanistan. We learned of Sunni and Shia, and fundamentalist Saudis. We've learned of counterinurgency and so much more.

The educational century.

I wish we weren't about to learn about economic depressions ....

Paulson and the Net Capital Rule set up the crash of '08

It's one of history's great ironies. Henry Paulson presides over the crash he helped create. The starring role though goes to the GOP's religion of the market; Bush devotees removed the the firewalls grown-ups had put in place.

Emphases mine. Great reporting from the NYT. The meat of the article is in the middle, I've pulled that forward here.

The Reckoning - Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt - Series - NYTimes.com

October 3, 2008
By STEPHEN LABATON

... Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary...

One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff...

... “Do we feel secure if there are these drops in capital we really will have investor protection?” Mr. Goldschmid asked. A senior staff member said the commission would hire the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills to parse the banks’ balance sheets...

... The proceeding was sparsely attended. None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.

After 55 minutes of discussion, which can now be heard on the Web sites of the agency and The Times, the chairman, William H. Donaldson, a veteran Wall Street executive, called for a vote. It was unanimous. The decision, changing what was known as the net capital rule, was completed and published in The Federal Register a few months later.

With that, the five big independent investment firms were unleashed.

In loosening the capital rules, which are supposed to provide a buffer in turbulent times, the agency also decided to rely on the firms’ own computer models for determining the riskiness of investments, essentially outsourcing the job of monitoring risk to the banks themselves.

Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly....

... The supervisory program under Mr. Cox, who arrived at the agency a year later, was a low priority....

The commission assigned seven people to examine the parent companies — which last year controlled financial empires with combined assets of more than $4 trillion. Since March 2007, the office has not had a director. And as of last month, the office had not completed a single inspection since it was reshuffled by Mr. Cox more than a year and a half ago.

The few problems the examiners preliminarily uncovered about the riskiness of the firms’ investments and their increased reliance on debt — clear signs of trouble — were all but ignored....

... The commission’s decision effectively to outsource its oversight to the firms themselves fit squarely in the broader Washington culture of the last eight years under President Bush.

A similar closeness to industry and laissez-faire philosophy has driven a push for deregulation throughout the government, from the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency to worker safety and transportation agencies.

“It’s a fair criticism of the Bush administration that regulators have relied on many voluntary regulatory programs,” said Roderick M. Hills, a Republican who was chairman of the S.E.C. under President Gerald R. Ford. “The problem with such voluntary programs is that, as we’ve seen throughout history, they often don’t work.”...

... The 2004 decision also reflected a faith that Wall Street’s financial interests coincided with Washington’s regulatory interests.

“We foolishly believed that the firms had a strong culture of self-preservation and responsibility and would have the discipline not to be excessively borrowing,” said Professor James D. Cox, an expert on securities law and accounting at Duke School of Law (and no relationship to Christopher Cox).

“Letting the firms police themselves made sense to me because I didn’t think the S.E.C. had the staff and wherewithal to impose its own standards and I foolishly thought the market would impose its own self-discipline. We’ve all learned a terrible lesson,” he added.

... A lone voice of dissent in the 2004 proceeding came from a software consultant from Valparaiso, Ind., who said the computer models run by the firms — which the regulators would be relying on — could not anticipate moments of severe market turbulence.

“With the stroke of a pen, capital requirements are removed!” the consultant, Leonard D. Bole, wrote to the commission on Jan. 22, 2004. “Has the trading environment changed sufficiently since 1997, when the current requirements were enacted, that the commission is confident that current requirements in examples such as these can be disregarded?”

He said that similar computer standards had failed to protect Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998, and could not protect companies from the market plunge of October 1987.

A once-proud agency with a rich history at the intersection of Washington and Wall Street, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created during the Great Depression..

The commission’s most public role in policing Wall Street is its enforcement efforts. But critics say that in recent years it has failed to deter market problems....

... Christopher Cox had been a close ally of business groups in his 17 years as a House member from one of the most conservative districts in Southern California. Mr. Cox had led the effort to rewrite securities laws to make investor lawsuits harder to file. He also fought against accounting rules that would give less favorable treatment to executive stock options.

Under Mr. Cox, the commission responded to complaints by some businesses by making it more difficult for the enforcement staff to investigate and bring cases against companies. The commission has repeatedly reversed or reduced proposed settlements that companies had tentatively agreed upon. While the number of enforcement cases has risen, the number of cases involving significant players or large amounts of money has declined.

Mr. Cox dismantled a risk management office created by Mr. Donaldson that was assigned to watch for future problems. While other financial regulatory agencies criticized a blueprint by Mr. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, that proposed to reduce their stature — and that of the S.E.C. — Mr. Cox did not challenge the plan, leaving it to three former Democratic and Republican commission chairmen to complain that the blueprint would neuter the agency.

In the process, Mr. Cox has surrounded himself with conservative lawyers, economists and accountants who, before the market turmoil of recent months, had embraced a far more limited vision for the commission than many of his predecessors...

... “The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” Mr. Cox said.

The decision to shutter the program came after Mr. Cox was blamed by Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, for the crisis. Mr. McCain has demanded Mr. Cox’s resignation.

Mr. Cox has said that the 2004 program was flawed from its inception. But former officials as well as the inspector general’s report have suggested that a major reason for its failure was Mr. Cox’s use of it.

“In retrospect, the tragedy is that the 2004 rule making gave us the ability to get information that would have been critical to sensible monitoring, and yet the S.E.C. didn’t oversee well enough,” Mr. Goldschmid said in an interview. He and Mr. Donaldson left the commission in 2005...

I recall McCain got a hard time for saying Cox should be fired. What, people said, could Cox have had to do with a banking crisis?

I hate go give McCain credit for anything, but I might make an exception here. He may have had some inside knowledge.

I like that Mr Labaton connects the "market is wise and good" irrationality of the SEC to the neutering of the FDA and product safety agency.

In the end, it's Bush and the GOP. Again.

PS. If you Google on Leonard D. Bole you'll find his published comments. Maybe he'll appear on Oprah.

Olmert exits with a surprise

I'm surprised, anyway.

Shrillblog: October 2008

... Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.

He also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges — he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in — Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking, in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot in the interview on the occasion of the Jewish new year, observed from Monday evening till Wednesday evening. “The time has come to say these things.”...

Wheeee.

A grim morning - Paul Krugman: "We are going over the edge."

Changing Apple -- the feedback page

Apple responds to customer feedback.

It doesn't seem that way, but the track record is good. If a LOT of people complain, they do something.

This page is the key to giving feedback:
Apple - Feedback.

For App Store feedback I think the iPhone page is the best bet.

So after you read John Gruber's essay on the app store, leave some feedback.