Justified American pride: The ADA

Every time I visit my disabled mother, I'm reminded that the US is not entirely Canada's uncivilized step-sister.

Yes, there's the small detail of universal health care in Canada. That counts for a lot of civilization points.

On the other hand, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It may annoy the geeks who write on Wikipedia, but, as imperfect as it is, it is an act of civilization.

In the US airports, hotels and most business facilities are accessible. In Canada, you're on your own -- and it ain't pretty.

The ADA was signed by George H. W. Bush. In retrospect he wasn't so bad - compared, say, to his son. I despised his rhetoric, but his actions were often better than his words.

The cost of havoc has been falling for a long time ...

I still wonder what will happen when bio-weapons are available to every heartbroken adolescent male.

On the other hand, people have noted the falling cost of havoc before ...

Schneier on Security: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

... Murderous organizations have increased in size and scope; they are more daring, they are served by the most terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which, if recklessly unchained, may some day wreck universal destruction....

Follow the link for context.

We're still around. I don't understand how that's possible given all the close calls of the cold war, but it seems to be true.

Great post.

Palin's Pegler connection

Good for Frank Rich. Haven't seen this noted elsewhere.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama - NYTimes.com

.... No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver....

So Palin is a Pegler admirer?

I wonder if they know that in Florida.

Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement and some good news for a change

Christopher Buckley writes the back page of the National Review.

He ain't a guy I'd normally read, but the wonders of the net sent me to his Obama endorsement: Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama - The Daily Beast.

It's good. Turns out he's a small government conservative and social libertarian. Who knew? I don't agree with those values (who shall care for the weak?), but I can work with 'em.

Buckley has been a McCain supporter for many years, but the Palin affair and McCain's courting of the fringe has broken him. He read Obama's books, and he switched.

So why doesn't he write this in the National Review?

That's an interesting story.

Turns out a fellow NR journalist wrote recently turned on Sarah Peron Palin. She started receiving Paul Krugman type email -- 12,000 hate messages from the loons of the right.

Buckley thinks he can dodge the hate mail. Maybe he can, those NR readers are pretty dim. They probably won't find his announcement.

So another moderate Republican has decided Palin/McCain is cracked, and Obama (remember how he praised Reagan? He's damned good.) is a remarkable man. That's good news, and a sign that the GOP has a reform constituency. We really need a strong, healthy, non-whacko GOP, so that's good.

There's more good news. McCain ran into some loons from my home state (Lakeville Minnesota, a growing exurban community with plummeting real estate values -- so lots of fear) at one of his rallies. He had a run in with one of the audience and ended up defending Obama and repudiating his own advertising campaign.

That would be mildly good news if it meant McCain had some vestiges of honor left [1], but there's better news than that.

The GOP's hate campaign, so far, isn't working as expected. Palin/McCain's disapproval rates are rising. The hate mobs are making the media nervous. Maybe the money people are starting to think what would happen if one of McCain's lunatics penetrated Obama's security perimeter. Whatever, the GOP is retracting.

So American's are not quite as susceptible to pure hate strategies as I'd thought. That's good.

So do I think Obama will win?

No.

All McCain has to do is play nice and beat on Palin a bit. Tone things down a tad, but run the same attacks in a stealthier manner. The media will fall over itself with relief that the "real McCain" is back. The GOP can then let the attacks simmer at a lower level.

So I still think McCain will win, Palin will become President, and America will shuffle off into the history books.

I confess, though, that Obama is doing better than I'd imagined. I feel good about the money we send him.

So here's the last bit of good news.

Obama is very good at this game. He knows what McCain and the GOP will do next. He'll be ready.

If anyone can get us out of this trap, it's Barack.

[1] The consensus is that McCain has been getting an earful from GOP moderates and donors. Personally, I wonder if his staff has been getting complaints from the Secret Service. They are, after all, protecting Obama from the loons.

WPA2 going the way of WEP?

WEP is trivial to hack now, but WPA2 wireless encryption was doing ok. Not so much now ...

On the other hand, sir, the Wi-Fi hackers still love us | Good Morning Silicon Valley

Nvidia still has at least one loyal fan base, though not one it would want to embrace — hackers (see “The Law of Unintended Consequences: a graphic example“). Seems the massively parallel processing capabilities of the graphics chips also lend themselves well to brute-force cracking, and the euphemistically named “password recovery software” sold by Russian firm Elcomsoft puts that power in the hands of the ill-intentioned masses. The latest warning of the ramifications comes from Global Secure Systems, which says the hardware-software combination renders Wi-Fi’s WPA and WPA2 encryption systems pretty much useless. Using the graphics processors, hackers can break the commonly used wireless encryption schemes 100 times faster than with conventional microprocessors, GSS officials said...

Be nice to the neighborhood geek. Make him mad and he'll crack your home network.

Otherwise, I don't think anyone will go this trouble to hack my home WLAN. Yet. In a few years though it will be child's play. Banks are a different story.

Time for the post-WPA2 generation.

You get what you pay for. The tragedy of the incentive plan.

Pay for performance is a big deal in American health care, though I have a hunch enthusiasm is already waning.

It won't work.

for.How Hard Could It Be?: Sins of Commissions, Marketing and Advertising Article - Inc. Joel Spolsky

.... back to Austin, the Harvard professor. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always. What you measure is inevitably a proxy for the outcome you want, and even though you may think that all you have to do is tweak the incentives to boost sales, you can't. It's not going to work. Because people have brains and are endlessly creative when it comes to improving their personal well-being at everyone else's expense....

Talk to anyone who's designed an incentive program for a sales force. Incent product A, and product B will go down the toilet. That's ok if you want to kill product B, not so great otherwise.

Sales guys are honorable mercenaries (I love 'em for that), but surgeons, physicians, nurses, teachers, professors, principals, and priests will all do more or less the same thing.

If you want to change behavior look at cultural reinforcement, look at changing systems to reduce error and make it easy to do the right thing, make it possible for people to privately compare their work to the mean. Work on a culture of excellence.

Don't expect incentives to do the work for you.

PS. I think Spolsky is deluding himself in his conclusion. Otherwise, a good essay.

Republicans for Obama

Some of my favorite journalists, like Paul Krugman, gave Obama a hard time for saying nice things about Reagan and the GOP.

I winced too, but I also suspected Obama had more political savvy in his little finger than Krugman or I have all over.

Now that's paying off. Moderate Republicans are deserting Palin/McCain for Obama. Former GOP Governor William Milliken, former GOP Senator Chafee. I wonder about Olympia Snowe. David Brooks is sounding like he might jump.

A few more like that and ...

Of course I still fully expect Palin/McCain to win.

Oh, we have a President?

Henry Blodget became infamous during a prior, relatively modest, market crash. Now he writes witty stock market analyses.

Today's ended with a surprise reminder that Bush is still around.

World Markets Smashed, Massive New Bailout Talks

...In other news, our leader will speak to us this morning and tell us to remain calm.

Emily says it's kind of cute that Bush is still trying. We thought he'd left for his new Dallas home.

As long as he sticks to pointless speeches rather than, say, declaring war on Pakistan. You did know there was an undeclared war going on there, didn't you?

Halamka's Clothing List - for cold weather

John Halamka, a geek's geek, has listed his cold weather clothing preferences:

Life as a Healthcare CIO: Staying Warm in New England

A torso base layer of thin polyester (Arcteryx Rho LT)
A torso shell layer of Gortex Pro Shell (Arcteryx Alpha LT)
A lower extremity combination of thin insulation and shell (Arcteryx Gamma MX)
A head base layer of thin polyester (OR Ninjaclava)
A warm, windproof hat (OR Windpro Hat)
A hand base layer of thin polyester (OR PL100 Gloves)
A waterproof/windproof shell layer (OR Cornice Mitts)
A belay jacket on my upper extremity when I stop moving (Arcteryx Solo)

"Knowing" Halamka as I do, I wager this is a good list to work from. He's an ice climber and insanely geeky, you won't get better recommendations than this.

Arcteryx (new to me - vancouver based, impressive looking stuff) and Outdoor Research get the glory.

Not cheap of course. I might put one or more of these on my holiday list ...

Dow 9,000 - forget retirement, what about college?

Krugman points out that we're kind of in free fall ...Dow 9,000! .

I think we may have broken the 1987 % decline record for the S&P 500. If not we'll be there soon.

Now that's a bit of a drag for our retirement, but, what the heck, we'll keep doing our dollar cost averaging. If the S&P doesn't recover we're completely scr***d anyway. Maybe our investments will recover sometime in the next 20 years, because we're definitely at the grindstone until age 70.

The bigger deal is the childrens' college education.

That's closer, and the 529s are getting clobbered.

I wonder if we'll see a slowing in the incredible inflationary growth of college tuition.

The evidence that adult IQ is unrelated to postnatal environment

I've seen this mentioned several times. I don't know how good the evidence base is; we've seen similar results turn out to be based on very little data.

If it's true, it's rather convincing evidence that adult intellectual ability is not much affected by postnatal life, and is probably almost entirely innate.

Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes: Scientific American:

... “Two people with the same genes correlate as much as a person does with himself a year later,” Plomin says. “Identical twins reared apart are almost as similar as identical twins reared together.” But these similarities also take time to emerge. “By the age of 16 these adopted-away children resemble their biological parents’ IQ just as much as kids do who are reared by their biological parents,” Plomin adds...

The corollary is that IQ results are impacted by environment prior to age 16.

I would like to know how good the evidence base for this really is.

On a related topic, we know that the brain is extensively transformed during adolescence. Is this when the innate IQ "reset" occurs?

Fox News jumps the shark?

Has Fox News, driven to frothing madness by Sarah Lynch Mob Peron, finally jumped the shark?

Op-Ed Columnist - Clearing the Ayers - NYTimes.com

… In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. When I was a college student, I believe I attended a party with Bernardine Dohrn. This was pre-Weather, when Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as S.D.S. Some of my friends wanted to meet her because they were interested in establishing an S.D.S. chapter at our campus. I was opposed, under the presumption that S.D.S. meant Students for Decent Styles, a group that had been active in fighting spaghetti-strap dresses at my high school.

Still, under the new rules, I believe I may now be held partly responsible for all of Dohrn’s misdeeds, including aggravated battery, bail jumping, the Days of Rage and unreadable political tracts.

McCain’s favorite supporter, Senator Joseph Lieberman, recently called the Obama-Ayers connection “fair game.” This reminded me that Lieberman once came to a party at my house. It was years ago, when he was still a Connecticut state senator, and we have already established that state senators will go to anything. Still, I can’t help but feel that I am not only a potential victim of the new guilt-by-association standard, I am also somewhat complicit in establishing it.

Obama’s retaliation for the Ayers assault has been to remind voters that many years ago McCain was censured in the Senate for his relationship with Charles Keating, the rogue banker whose failed Lincoln Savings and Loan cost the taxpayers $2.6 billion at a time when $2.6 billion was really worth something.

When I was a teenager, Keating came to my Catholic girls high school in Cincinnati in his capacity as the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-pornography group. His theme was the evil of wearing shorts in the summertime.

Keating said he knew a young mother who took her child for a walk while wearing Bermuda shorts. A motorist, overwhelmed with lust at the sight of the back of her uncovered calves, lost control of his car and slammed into them. Everybody was killed, and it was all her fault. We were then asked to sign pledge cards promising to conform to standards of modesty that would have satisfied the Taliban.

True, none of this really proves that I was responsible for the banking scandals of the 1980s. But if Barack Obama is responsible for the Weather Underground, and if the mother in Bermuda shorts was responsible for the car crash, I am pretty sure that I am on the hook as well.

Obama can’t say it of course, but the biggest American terrorists of the past 30 years were all on the right. They burned abortion clinics, and they blew up the Murrah building. In terms of terrorist associations, I suspect we’ll find McCain has more than a few in his closet – not even counting foreign leaders he’s worked with when he was more than 8 years old.

What will happen to Fox News if, though I think this is very unlikely, Obama wins?

Obama throws down: Say it to My Face

Slap, as in a challenging a dishonorable cowardly liar to a duel:

Talking Points Memo | Slap

... "I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face. But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.'

Calm, cool, and courageous. Well said.

NPR and the annals of false equivalency

When it comes to radio, my "dial" pretty much stays at National Public Radio. (Anyone remember dials? Ok, I digress.) Of course these days I listen to more podcasts (In Our Time) than radio, but I don't think I'd want NPR to vanish.

Mostly, I don't.

Sometimes, though, I wonder. Yesterday a piece on campaign propaganda featured a wonderful bit of false equivalency.

On the one side - McCain is accused of an erratic response to the financial crisis.

On the other side - Obama wants to teach sex to six year olds.

The thesis is they're both equally untrue. Never mind that even David Brooks, propagandist for the GOP, thinks McCain's response to the finance bust was ... well ... erratic. Or that even the WSJ struggles to repeat the sex lie.

These false equivalencies are much worse coming from a "respected" voice.

Now that the NYT is weaning itself from the GOP's very effective equivalency game, NPR is still stuck. Maybe that has something to do with their funding, maybe it's the people.

Fund raising is coming up again. Maybe I'll give the money to CARE this year.

Norm Coleman's pants and the angry bloggers

Nobody here gave Al Franken much of a chance against Norm Coleman - a smart and slippery GOP Senator. Lately though the polls have been getting closer.

Now "angry bloggers" are getting in Coleman's pants ....

Talking Points Memo | (Free) Empty Suit?

... We know Sen. Norm Coleman gets a special deal on his Capitol Hill pad. And a few days ago, Harper's Ken Silverstein got word that another one of his supporters, Nasser Kezeminy, covers the tab for Coleman's clothing budget.

This week a campaign tracker tried to get Coleman to say whether it was true. The answer? It's all about the angry bloggers ..."

Pantsgate. I like it.

I can see the Franken ads now.