Nostalgia for the Soviets: they made us look good

DI reviews the history of a Soviet atomic weapon production facility: Damn Interesting: In Soviet Russia, Lake Contaminates You.

Millions poisoned. Everything secret. Mopping up plutonium.

The amazing part is that life expectancy fell by "only" 30% in the poisoned region. Humans are fairly radiation resistant.

Sigh. The Soviets made us look so good by comparison. China tries with its melamine poisoned infants, but, really, they don't have their heart in it.

Now, instead of feeling so much better than the Soviets, we contemplate the rule of President Palin.

One can almost feel a perverse nostalgia for the Soviets.

Note to the plumbing obsessed – do not confuse politics with reality

It’s (very) mildly entertaining to read about the “Joe the Plumber” reality vs. fantasy story …

Egregious Moderation: Ed Kilgore: John McCain: Dishonest, Dishonorable, and Incompetent

…A day after making Joseph Wurzelbacher famous, referencing him in the debate almost two dozen times as someone who would pay higher taxes under Barack Obama, McCain learned the fine print Thursday on the plumber’s not-so-tidy personal story: He owes back taxes. He is not a licensed plumber. And it turns out that Wurzelbacher makes less than $250,000 a year, which means he would receive a tax cut if Obama were elected president…

Problem is, this completely misses the point.

It wouldn’t matter if Joe the Plumber were a mass murderer or a visiting alien. This has nothing to do with reality, this is talking-to-the-undecided-voter end-of-the-game politics.

It’s a good thing Obama understands this. His response will be to the Joe-meme, not the Joe human. He won’t bother pointing out reality, because that’s not relevant.

The right response might be to say nice things about middle-class white men, and point out that they’ll do much better with Obama/Biden than they’d do with Bush III (McCain) or President Palin.

I say “might” because I know I don’t understand the “undecided” voter that all these discussions are aimed at.

I think Obama’s team does understand them … fortunately.

David Brooks – Is Obama more like FDR, or more like Ronald Reagan?

Flying pigs are slip-sliding on the frozen fires of Hell.

David Books has written an extended essay praising Barack Obama. He compares Obama to his personal hero (Reagan) and to a man usually placed in the top 3 of great American presidents …

David Brooks - Thinking About Obama - NYTimes.com

… Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the demons, insecurities and longings that fired their ambitions?

But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.

Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second. He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds.

But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day…

I was annoyed when Obama praised Reagan, but I didn’t write anything.

Obama is a brilliant political tactician. True, Palin/McCain will still win, but nobody could do better than he’s done.

Brooks appears to be nerving himself to endorse Obama. Even if he doesn’t, those pigs are still spinning.

The Acorn Conspiracy – The GOP’s war on civilization continues

The GOP is trotting out the FBI to investigate the fearsome Acorn Attack.

That’s a good reminder that reason #45254134 to donate money to Obama/Biden is so we can learn what the h*ll has been going on at the FBI. If, by some miracle, McCain/Palin are defeated, we’re going to find some juicy worms in that can.

The New York Times lead editorial provides some useful background on this latest GOP ploy (emphases mine):

Editorial - The Acorn Story - NYTimes.com

In Wednesday night’s debate, John McCain warned that a group called Acorn is “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.” Viewers may have been wondering what Mr. McCain was talking about. So were we.

Acorn is a nonprofit group that advocates for low- and moderate-income people and has mounted a major voter-registration drive this year. Acorn says that it has paid more than 8,000 canvassers who have registered about 1.3 million new voters, many of them poor people and members of racial minorities. [jf: ie, black]

In recent weeks, the McCain campaign has accused the group of perpetrating voter fraud by intentionally submitting invalid registration forms, including some with fictional names like Mickey Mouse and others for voters who are already registered.

Based on the information that has come to light so far, the charges appear to be wildly overblown — and intended to hobble Acorn’s efforts.

The group concedes that some of its hired canvassers have turned in tainted forms, although they say the ones with phony names constitute no more than 1 percent of the total turned in. The group also says it reviews all of the registration forms that come in. Before delivering the forms to elections offices, its supervisors flag any that appear to have problems.

According to Acorn, most of the forms that are now causing controversy are ones that it flagged and that unsympathetic election officials then publicized.

Acorn’s critics charge that it is creating phony registrations that ineligible voters could use to cast ballots or that a single voter could use to vote multiple times.

Acorn needs to provide more precise figures about problem forms and needs to do a better job of choosing its canvassers.

But for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t saying anything about another more serious voter-registration scandal: the fact that about one-third of eligible voters are not registered. The racial gaps are significant and particularly disturbing. According to a study by Project Vote, a voting-rights group, in 2006, 71 percent of eligible whites were registered, compared with 61 percent of blacks, 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asian-Americans.

Much of the blame for this lies with overly restrictive registration rules. Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements.

The answer is for government to a better job of registering people to vote. That way there would be less need to rely on private registration drives, largely being conducted by well-meaning private organizations that use low-paid workers. Federal and state governments should do their own large-scale registration drives staffed by experienced election officials. Even better, Congress and the states should adopt election-day registration, which would make such drives unnecessary.

The real threats to the fabric of democracy are the unreasonable barriers that stand in the way of eligible voters casting ballots.

Gee, why would low income workers compensated on a per form basis produce fake forms? Do you think they might have something in common with senior executives in publicly traded companies? Do you think they might have something in common with everyone who’s paid by commission? Maybe with the paid-by-commission $100 million/year wall street executives who repackaged toxic debt into slices pawned off on willing fools?

I’m amazed the fake data rate was as low as it’s been.

A conspiracy to destroy democracy? That’s what the John Birchers would say. That’s what the GOP says with their back to the wall.

The “Acorn Attack” will be pressed hard.

I’ve been given senior management (Emily) approval to donate another $200 to Obama. This donation was inspired by the Acorn Attack and the Virginia GOP’s lesson in evil. I recommend this general approach. Every time the GOP pulls out another dirty trick, donate another $100.

It’s the best way to fight back, because if, as I expect, Palin/McCain wins, you’ll regret not having fought harder for the soul of America and, hell, the future of civilization.

Peak Oil? Hell, yes.

The cost of oil is cratering.

Oil Below $70, a Price Last Seen in June 2007 - NYTimes.com

… Oil prices plummeted on Thursday, falling below $70 a barrel for the first time in 16 months, and prompting the OPEC cartel to call for an emergency meeting next week…

… Oil prices have dropped sharply in recent weeks amid the economic crisis and lower consumption in developed nations. In New York, oil futures fell as much as 8 percent to $68.57 a barrel on Thursday, their lowest since June 2007. Oil has lost half its value since hitting a record closing price of $145.29 a barrel in July…

So do I stand by my Peak Oil call of August 2008?

I say Peak oil is here.

I say that despite, in my 1979 chemical engineering class, being told that peak oil was coming in the late 1980s (I think we reviewed the 1957 Rickover speech back then). I say this despite remembering Jimmy Carter's peak oil prediction in the 1970s.

Of course I'm really talking about Peak sweet light oil, and I don't mean "Peak" in absolute, or even demand > supply, I mean Peak in terms of rational market expectation of a > 70% probability that demand > supply within 5-8 years.

Basically I'm claiming that the price increases of this past year were due to praiseworthy speculation on the fundamentals rather than salacious speculation on psychology.

This means I'm expecting oil to go to Dyer's $200/bbl limit at least once in the next five years, though it may transiently fall back to $80 along the way. After 5-8 years it will be very apparent that oil will be a shrinking percentage of our energy supply, and that in the absence of a severe carbon tax (or the equivalent) we'll be baking the plane with burning coal and burning tar sands.

It also means that it's now rational to invest in conservation, and to expect real estate prices to reflect increased commuting costs.

More on Peak Oil later, but I was overdue to make my promised call. (It's been a busy month!)

Definitely. Note I said it may transiently fall to $80 along the way.

Ok, one caveat.

I predicted $200/bbl at least once before 2013, and I thought we’d stay above $80.

That was before we entered the Great Global Recession of 2008.

Hey, I’m not Cassandra. (Who was always right, the curse was not that her predictions were wrong, it was that no-one would believe them.)

GGR  pushes things out a few years.

So $200/bbl at least once before 2016.

This would have been a fantastic time to have had a carbon tax in place, one that kept the cost of oil above $100 a barrel. Alas, that kind of intelligence depends on having a superb President, and we are still months away from even a dream of excellence.

Since we don’t have smart leadership, we have see the Saudi’s can stabilize the price of oil – though not too quickly. That $70/bbl price could shorten the Recession by a few months. [1]

[1] So why would I want a Carbon tax now? Because if it stabilized oil at $100 a barrel we could turn the huge revenue stream into tax cuts and other economic stimulants that would do a better job than low cost oil at shortening the Great Global Recession.

The vote will be incredibly close. Do not stop donating, do not rest.

We know Obama is incredibly smart and politically skilled. He’s not being coy here …

Front-runner Obama cautions against overconfidence - CNN.com

… About 10 hours after debating Sen. John McCain, Obama urged top campaign contributors at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan to not be overconfident, despite leading in a number of national polls…

Meanwhile, later in the article Palin tries to lulls us into complacency (emphasis mine):

Palin said… “… This year, the name on the ballot is John McCain -- and America knows that John McCain is his own man, he is the maverick."

Don’t be fooled by Palin’s seemingly mindless repetition of a now laughable talking point that was drilled into her by McCain’s handlers. Maybe it’s her way of sticking a fork into McCain, maybe she’s dumber than we think, but maybe she’s trying to lull us to sleep.

I don’t think she’s dumb, any more than Bush is dumb. Deranged, maybe, dumb, no.

Assume Karl Rove has something in his back pocket. Something very nasty that he’ll bring out at the very last minute. McCain’s team has gotten away with some astounding lies, this could be an even bigger one.

There won’t be much time to react when it happens. We’ve seen how the American people have reacted to events since October 2000. We’ve lost our internal rudders, as a people we can turn on a dime.

Obama will need money in the bank. He’ll need a team on the ground ready to respond. He’ll need to have last minute weapons of his own.

To build what will be needed for the last minutes the Obama/Biden campaign needs money now.

Don’t believe the polls. If Obama wins, which I still consider unlikely, it will be by a razor thin margin, the race won’t be decided until December, and the courts will be very busy.

Donate.

Mossberg's gPhone review: Microsoft Mobile dead and keep your data free

It's damned hard to kill a Microsoft product. Exchange server rules the enterprise, and I've always believed Microsoft could kill BlackBerry any darned time they feel like it.

Still, they haven't. Maybe there's some European antitrust rule that's stopping them. If Microsoft can't kill or acquire RIM, then they might as well shoot Microsoft Mobile now and end the suspense. Gates would have done it, he was great at killing products.

It ain't like Microsoft hasn't been trying. They've been doing versions of Microsoft Mobile for over ten years. They just can't get it.

Now they have RIM to the right of them, iPhone to the left of them, and, after reading Silicon Valley Insider's summary of Mossberg's gPhone review, gPhone on top of them. Oh, yeah, and Nokia's somewhere too. (Wandering lost in the Symbian wilderness?)

Four is an unstable number. There will be three.

For those of us committed to OS X and the iPhone, the lesson is to keep our Data Free. Bento, despite being a pathetically weak "tyranny of the mean" product, is good for exporting critical iPhone related data. Non-DRMd AAC music is portable - so don't buy music from the Apple Store. Don't be too attached to your video. Don't put your data in MobileMe unless you can pull it out via the desktop and Bento. Use solutions like Appigo Todo.app, Appigo Notebook.app, Evernote (now reformed), Toodledo (cloud), and Google Apps that all maintain data freedom and avoid data lock.

The iPhone is very good, but Apple has inexplicably omitted some critical functions. The excellence of the gPhone may keep Apple customer-centered, but if it doesn't we'll need to move our data. So keep it free.

We won't be moving data to Microsoft Mobile though.

Thanks Google. Thanks Apple. I don't trust either of you, but the two of you together might just give me what I need.

Understanding evil. Lessons from the Virginia GOP

The Virginia GOP has modified an extreme close-up of bin Laden into something could pass for a distorted and blurred close-up of Barack Obama.

They title it "AMERICA MUST LOOK EVIL IN THE EYE AND NEVER FLINCH".

Yes. Evil.

Yesterday four Minnesota (Lakeville) men savagely tortured a cognitively disabled man for two days, then left him for dead.

That is horror and tragedy. It is not I would say, evil. The torturers were themselves cognitively disabled, walking tragedies, broken and terrible. That brutal crime is tragedy upon tragedy.

Evil requires understanding, or at least as much understanding as humans can have. Evil is knowingly choosing the wrong.

Evil was the Reich. Evil was Pol Pot. Evil was Saddam Hussein. Evil is Zawahiri and bin Laden. Evil is Dick, the torturer, Cheney. Evil is Philip Morris and their smart and skilled executives who choose to serve an evil cause.

It was that kind of evil person who did this bit of work. I'm sure they were delighted by the fruit of their labor.

Yes, America, look at evil.

Do not flinch.

Vote the GOP out of power. There's must be a hard road of reform and rehabilitation, for they are corrupted from the bottom to the top.

Donate to Obama.

MacBook no firewire, MacBook Air no USB 3

Macworld | Live Update: Apple’s Notebook Event

No USB 3 anywhere, no firewire on the MacBook.

Maybe the GPU will help Aperture.

Ho hum.

Why Twitter?

One aspect of being a wizened mid-western geek is that I have to figure out the why of tech on my own. On most new tech I'm second wave, but out here that means I'm ahead of my peers. I was first to Alta Vista, first to Google, etc.

It's kind of like skiing. An intermediate western skier is an expert here. (Though we have, strangely, a number of Minnesota trained Olympic skiers.)

So, for example, in July of 2005 I thought podcasts were an odd idea. That was before I experience In Our Time and figured out why I wanted them. (Though that's the only podcast I listen to -- I don't have that much audio time in my life. So if they went I'd probably still have only a single podcast capacity.)

Now, after ignoring it for over a year, I decided, while visiting my parents, to try to figure out the Why of my Twitter account.

I will now pass on my speculative interpretation to my fellow wizened geeks. Corrections through comments are welcome.

Wizened geeks do not grok SMS. That's important, because Twitter is the mongrel child of SMS and RSS.

All true geeks of every age adore RSS (subscription/feed more properly), so that part of Twitter's parentage is fine. It may also be a recent addition, which kind of breaks the parental analogy.

It's the SMS part that's weird for us.

We do not grok SMS because we're too old for the primary SMS function -- socializing and mating. We have way too many social demands to want more. We are also aesthetically repulsed by how the 255 character SMS hack became a font of phone company revenue, thus incenting them to block better, less spammy, alternatives.

For those who use SMS though, the key to twitter is you can SMS your 256 character message ("tweet") to Twitter from even the crummiest mobile phone. No iPhone, gPhone or Smart phone needed. SMS is a lowest common denominator standard.

Traditionally, I suspect, the "tweets" were broadcast to "followers" (subscribers) who read them as SMS messages on their phone.

So in this incarnation Twitter acted like a broadcasting hub for SMS messages where recipients signed up for SMS notifications.

Blech. Who needs more interruptions?

But Twitter also has feeds (example), and an API. That's much more interesting.

So it's possible to have a dedicated iPhone client for sending and receiving 'tweets', and activity can also be tracked through feed consumers like Google Reader (web and mobile), OS X Mail.app, embedded iGoogle feed gadgets, Outlook 2007 (worst possible reader), iPhone feed clients, Yahoo Pipes, and so on.

Once the iPhone finally (was supposed to happen last month) gets a notification management service then we can dispense with the SMS ugliness. We will be able to create tweets through the API and subscribe through feed readers.

True, there's no security -- but that's a feature. No security means it's very easy to set up connections. Just don't Tweet anything you don't want the world to know.

So if I'm leaving the office I can 'tweet' that, and Emily can pick it up if she's interested. Otherwise it goes away.

Twitter with SMS is for the young. Twitter without SMS -- that's interesting even to the aged sage.

Andy Martin: ally of the Right, FOX TV guest, anti-semite loon

Andy Martin specializes in generating lies about Obama that the Right likes to hear - and repeat.

FOX TV, in particular, has been a great repeater. Palin/McCain have played on those lies when it served them. Their supporters scream them aloud; they believe what they see on FOX TV and hear on talk radio.

Today the NYT tells us where the lies come from. They also expose FOX TV for what it is -- a curse upon America and an enemy of the enlightenment. Emphases mine.

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama - NYTimes.com

October 13, 2008
By JIM RUTENBERG

... an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

... The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation....

...Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin...

... Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam...

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry... Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists...

... Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”...

Mr. Martin has been a darling of the whacko Right, but politically he's an anti-semitic loon. He in turn inspired Mr. Corsi, who became wealthy writing a book of lies popular with the Right. Sampley, another talk radio favorite, keys off Martin as well.

So Martin, Corsi, and Sampley are Obama's enemies. I think that's reason alone to support Obama.

The great irony of course, is that the ravings of a pro-Holocaust anti-semite should find a credulous audience with some American Jews. I'm hoping this superb NYT article will help with that particular problem.

NYT Bear Market Comparison

Terrific graphic: How This Bear Market Compares - NYTimes.com. We're 50% percent below the 2000 high and falling faster than the Great Depression crash. On the other hand, we're only half-way to the doom 1932.

I had no idea the market was so bad in 1942.

The great bear markets have been:

1. 1929-32: the current champ
   
2. 1937-42
3. 1946-49
4. 1968-70
5. 1972-74 (I remember the 70s. Bloody awful but 74 was a fabulous time to buy stocks.)
6. 1987: almost the steepest crash, super fast recovery
7. 2000-02 (the dot com crash)
8. 2008: a contender
   

There are a few more on the graph -- more than I'd thought. Probably that's the point.

Very long expansions from 74 to 87 and then 87 to 2000.

My Nobel prize in economics

Well, technically it was earned by Professor Paul Krugman, better known as the man who drives the Right lividly insane ...

Paul Krugman Wins Economics Nobel - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

.... It’s been an extremely weird day, but weird in a positive way,” Mr. Krugman said in an interview on his way to a Washington meeting for the Group of Thirty, an international body from the public and private sectors that discusses international economics. He said he was mostly “preoccupied with the hassles” of trying to make all his scheduled meetings today and answer a constantly-ringing cell phone...

Still. I feel I have a claim of sorts.

I've been a fan of Paul's Dr. Krugman's editorials for years. Brad DeLong sometimes reads my blog, and Paul reads Brad's blog. I've left comments on Krugman's blog and I'm sure he's found them very enlightening. So that must be worth oh, say, a picogram of the Medal.

More, Paul is a leader of my political tribe, the tribe of people who respect the market but who don't worship the market, the tribe for whom the weak matter for reasons of value and self-preservation alike. Picogram number two.

Ergo, My Nobel.

At last.

Congratulations Dr. Krugman and thank you Sweden.

Now, how do you turn this to Barack's advantage? Oh, and save the world too?

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.