Michele Bachmann – Minnesota’s loon jumps the shark

Sorry, I just love that title.

Five years ago Bachman might have had a quiet life as a barking mad loon (sorry, can’t stop) and talk radio favorite in very safe congressional seat, representing a mixed rural exurban district east of Saint Paul. In the YouTube era, however, a crazed interview with Chris Matthews has become a media classic.

When Bachman called for an investigation of anti-American members of Congress she elevated herself from the yipping dog in the corner to an international embarrassment for the GOP. Bachman is Sarah Palin without the brains, beauty, charm or glamour. She chose a bad moment to call attention to herself, because the GOP is getting reading for the night of the long knives. Even if Palin wins the presidency, the House will be Democrat. There’s no need for the GOP to worry about losing Bachman’s seat, they might as well get started on the purge now.

Starting with Michele Bachman.

So donations are flooding into Tinklenburg (love the name, gave $20), but the real story (emphasis mine) is how quickly the GOP has disowned her …

Bachmann finds herself in firestorm of criticism - TwinCities.com

… Three days after telling a national television audience that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama "may have anti-American views,'' the Republican from Minnesota's 6th District faced a re-energized and suddenly flush opponent and a firestorm of criticism from within and outside her party.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said it would spend $1 million on challenger El Tinklenberg's bid to unseat her.

A nonpartisan political newsletter, the Cook Political Report, changed its assessment of the race from "Likely Republican'' to "Tossup.''

Campaign contributions to Tinklenberg in the 72 hours since her comments Friday reached $810,000. Before then, it had taken him a year to bring in $1 million.

Her Democratic congressional colleagues from Minnesota condemned her wish that the media investigate Congress to determine which members are anti-American and which aren't.

In Minnesota to campaign for another congressional candidate, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Bachmann's comments reflect poorly on her. "It dishonors the position that she holds and discredits her as a person,'' Pelosi said.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and U.S. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., disowned her statements. "I don't think it's fair at all to suggest that Barack Obama is anti-American,'' Pawlenty said.

Even the Republican she defeated in the September primary was upset. He said he's launching a write-in effort aimed at people who don't want to vote for Bachmann but want to stick with the Republican ticket…

… Just weeks ago, Bachmann had been considered a solid favorite to be re-elected to a second term and had emerged as a popular conservative spokeswoman on national cable television talk shows.

But there also were signs Tinklenberg's campaign was growing stronger. Just last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Tinklenberg to its Red to Blue program, which helps stronger candidates able to raise money and in a position to win….

… Aubrey Immelman, the St. John's and St. Benedict's college professor who lost the Republican primary to Bachmann in September, launched a write-in candidacy in the 6th District, which runs from the St. Croix River across the northern Twin Cities suburbs to beyond St. Cloud.

"I am putting my name forward as a write-in candidate for disillusioned Republicans who can no longer support Rep. Bachmann and who wish to voice their displeasure without having to vote for the candidate of another party,'' he wrote on his campaign Web site…

I bet Bachman will still win. This is an incredibly safe seat; they went for Bush over Kerry by about 15% in 2004 – and Kerry took Minnesota handily. I still think America will elect Sarah Palin, so getting rid of Bachman is very far fetched.

Still, it’s worth sending a few bucks to Tinklenberg just to tweak Bachman a bit more. Maybe a bit of media attention will remind voters of how much Sarah Palin resembles Michelle Bachman.

Update 10/23/08: The GOP wants her gone.

The Onion covers McCain's bus problem

The Onion goes where others fear to tread.

They have a satirical news story about John McCain Accidentally Left On Campaign Bus Overnight.

Fortunately passer-byes find Cindy's number in his pocket, and she rescues the confused senator.

Today there are 571,000 hits on "McCain dementia".

A vote for McCain is a vote for President Palin.

Update 5/11/10: McCain's political career seems to be ending, and his statements are increasingly erratic -- but there's really no mainstream media coverage of his cognitive state. We saw the same thing in Reagan's second term. He was clearly impaired, which seems pretty relevant, but the topic was forbidden.

John McCain has had quite a few head injuries, so dementia at his current age is extremely probable. Bob Vitray, writing in 2008, had a good summary ...

... His sport at Annapolis was boxing. He was knocked out at least twice in plane crashes. He probably suffered a concussion during his escape from the Forrestal fire. The North Vietnamese beat him and starved him ...

McCain has had an extremely eventful lPublish Postife, with more than his fair share of head trauma. He should retire now, and we should set aside his actions of the past few years as being a legacy of his dementia. The fault for those actions and statements falls on those who have encouraged him to continue in public life.

Crohn's disease: a bacterial component?

Crohn's is such a complex multi-system disease that it seems unlikely this is the entire story ...

BBC NEWS | Health | Bacterium 'to blame for Crohn's'

.... shortage of naturally-occurring bacteria is thought to trigger the inflammatory gastrointestinal disorder by over-stimulating the immune system.

Now a French team has highlighted the bug, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, which they show secretes biochemicals that reduce inflammation.

The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

I'd have believed this more of Ulcerative colitis than of Crohn's disease.

I'm still impressed with how well worm infection seemed to treat ulcerative colitis, but it hasn't gone mainstream.

Melamine is deeply embedded in China's food chain

Dogs in China are most often raised for fur or food.

The death of these 1500 dogs from melamine poisoning reminds us how compromised China's food chain is.

The Associated Press: 1,500 Chinese raccoon dogs die from tainted feed: "Some 1,500 dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur have died after eating feed tainted with melamine, a veterinarian said Monday, raising questions about how widespread the industrial chemical is in China's food chain.

The revelation comes amid a crisis over dairy products tainted with melamine that has caused kidney stones in tens of thousands of Chinese children and has been linked to the deaths of four infants.

The raccoon dogs — a breed native to east Asia whose fur is used to trim coats and other clothing — died of kidney failure after eating the tainted feed, said Zhang Wenkui, a veterinary professor at Shenyang Agriculture University.

'First, we found melamine in the dogs' feed, and second, I found that 25 percent of the stones in the dogs' kidneys were made up of melamine,' said Zhang, who performed a necropsy — an animal autopsy — on about a dozen dogs.

Zhang declined to say when the animals died, but a report Monday in the Southern Metropolis Daily said the deaths occurred over the past two months.

There are lessons for the pharmaceutical chain as well.

Also a few lessons for libertarians everywhere.

McCain and Obama basically tied

At our son's game a local politically savvy parent spoke confidently of Obama's victory.

Bad idea.

Polls this weekend give Obama only a 3% lead. That's as good as being behind in this race given what lies ahead ...

Talking Points Memo | Race to the Bottom

... the really corrupt and vicious part of McCain's effort only comes now because it's only in the last couple weeks that you can pull stuff that the press won't get to call you on before election day -- after which it doesn't matter. Will it take Obama down? So far McCain's gutter campaign has hurt him more than helped. But there's no reason to be sure it will continue that way. And many Obama supporters, sure the election is basically wrapped up, appear ready to slack in the stretch and let McCain smear and cheat his way into office.

I've said all along that I expect McCain/Palin to win. Within six months it will become apparent that McCain has a dementing condition, and we'll have President Palin.

Everyone who doesn't want President Palin has to fight mightily. Don't pretend it can't happen, it probably will. You'll want to say you did your best ...

Another stab at the Drake Equation – from the physics archives

The Drake Equation lies at the heart of one of my favorite hobbies – contemplation of the Fermi Paradox.

We presume, from the absence of Little Green Men in orbit, that there are very few expansionist or communicative technological civilizations in our galaxy. Maybe none.

So either there were exquisitely few to begin with, or they don’t last very long at all.

So we “know” the result of the Drake Equation – a number between 0 and 1. The number can be so small if there are very few technological civilizations like us, or if all technological civilizations are always very short lived.

I favor the always short lived explanation, which is why there’s an upside to President Palin. She would work to end civilization, and if our civilization more or less crumbled we might push world-ending events (sentient machines?) out a few hundred years. Yes, Vote for McCain/Palin – life may be brutish but humanity might last longer.

So it’s always fun to see new attempts to estimate Drake Equation parameters ….

the physics arXiv blog » Blog Archive » And the number of intelligent civilisations in our galaxy is…

Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.2222: A Numerical Testbed for Hypotheses of Extraterrestrial Life and Intelligence… [from] Duncan Forgan at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.

The Drake equation famously calculates the number of advanced civilisations that should populate our galaxy right now. The result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of planets that orbit a host star that are potentially habitable, how many of these actually develop life and what fraction of that goes onto become intelligent etc.

Disagreement (ie general ignorance) over these numbers leads to estimates of the number intelligent civilisations in our galaxy that range from 10^-5 to 10^6.  In other words, your best bet is to pick a number, double it….

So Forgan has attempted to inject a little more precision into the calculation. His idea is to actually simulate many times over, the number of civilisations that may have appeared in a galaxy like ours using reasonable, modern estimates for the values in the Drake equation.

With these statistics you can calculate an average value and a standard deviation for the number of advanced civilisations in our galaxy.

Better still, it allows you to compare the results of different models of civilisation creation.

Horgan has clearly had some fun comparing three models:

i. panspermia: if life forms on one planet, it can spread to others in a system

ii. the rare-life hypothesis: Earth-like planets are rare but life progresses pretty well on them when they occur

iii.  the tortoise and hare hypothesis: Earth-like plants are common but the steps towards civilisation are hard

And the results are:

i. panspermia predicts  37964.97 advanced civilisations in our galaxy with a standard deviation of 20.

ii. the rare life hypothesis predicts 361.2 advanced civilisations with an SD of 2

iii. the tortoise and hare hypothesis predicts 31573.52 with an SD of 20.

Those are fantastically precise numbers. But before you start broadcasting to your newfound friends with a flashlight, it’s worth considering their accuracy.

The results of simulations like this are no better than than the assumptions you make in developing them. And these, of course, are based on our manifestly imperfect but rapidly improving knowledge of the heavens.

The real question is whether we’ll ever have good enough data to plug in to a model like this to give us a decent answer, without actually discovering another intelligent civilisation. And the answer to that is almost certainly not.

I’ll cavil on the last paragraph. It depends on what you mean by “decent”. We will probably get pretty good at estimating the number of earth like planets in the next fifty years, and, assuming we don’t detect any interesting transmissions, we’ll get more confident that the number of extant civilizations is very low. Which should lead to some cheery predictions about our civilizational life expectancy …

Google - please hire me to create a task list

I've been a Toodledo customer for months, but they're driving me a bit crazy. They don't grok search, their UI is web 1.0, and their web site has lots of advanced tools that aren't designed quite right.

Their multi-edit tool pushed me over the edge into madness this afternoon. When I tried to create a multi-edit search for items dated prior to today, the result included all undated items as well.

If I wanted NULL values, I'd have requested NULL values. #$!$!&*&^%

Toodledo seems to have been created by wrapping a web 1.0 tool around a very generic set of database tables. I love their commitment to data freedom and their Appigo ToDo.app integration, but there's a place for usability too.

So I went back to Remember The Milk to see if they'd improved. I took a special look at the way they handle notes and search.

Yech.

Ok Google, here's my offer.

Donate $1,000 to CARE.ORG and I'll work for free. I'll tell you what you need to make a good, task list integrated with iCal. Clearly you've been waiting for me to crack and make this free offer, because otherwise you'd have added tasks ages ago.

You know where to reach me.

Ok, maybe Appigo will do their own server. Help!!

Update 11/7/08: Appigo hasn't done their own server yet, but they've added search done right to their iPhone Todo app. Lovely work.

Message to Yahoo (and Cloud) customers: Get Out Now!

I like to think of this as an honorable act:

Slashdot | Yahoo Changes User Profiles, To Massive Outrage

... Yahoo decided to massively screw up their entire userbase by changing all user profiles to blank. No warning, no automated way to get data back, and other unwanted changes....

Yahoo is a publicly owned corporation. They can't, legally, put up a giant red announcement on their home page saying...

We're going down the tubes. You need to leave Yahoo now. Remember all that stuff about the Cloud computing? Well, the Price of the Cloud is 90% data lock. Data Lock means we own your data, and you can't move it. If we go down the tubes, you go down with us.

We are entering the the tubes now. The time has come. Salvage what you can, and take to the boats...

So, instead, they wipe out all the user profiles. It's kind of a "dog whistle" message to any customers with brains from Yahoo's inside geeks -- a back channel way to scream "get out now"!

Alas, most geeks have little sympathy for the naive user. They'll get their messages after the fact.

What about Yahoo Flickr? It will be sold. It's worth too much to just vanish. The transition may be rocky though, kind of like having your bank nationalized.

Think of this as one of life's less expensive lessons. We're going to learn the Price of the Cloud. Better sooner than later ...

Shortest lived links: Local movie listings

We've had a local movie review link on our MSP Family Recreation page for years.

Most of the links are fairly stable -- they have a half-life of 2-5 years.

There's one big exception.

Local movie listings have a half-life of about 4 months. The current two links are broken today.

Since this has traditionally been a low margin local newspaper service the short-lived links are probably another, unneeded, indicator that our local papers have one foot in the ICU and one in the crematorium.

I figured, given the failure of newspaper associated listings, that there must be emerging alternatives.

I found two.

Google has a local movie listing service. Not new and I've probably seen it before, but now it will be a rec page link.

Fandango does listings and sells tickets online. Another rec page link.

I'll miss our local newspapers.

Rick Santorum opens mouth, inserts pin

Funny sad ...

Obama hates America and burns flags: The proof is on the Internet

... Just last Thursday, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum told Fox News that Obama won't wear a flag pin because he is 'not in concert' with American values.

Santorum wasn't wearing a pin that day. Obama was...

Meanwhile the NYT Editorial column is decrying the latest covert Bush attack on our tattered civil liberties. It's another step in the transformation of the FBI into KGB-lite.

They end by saying that the next president will have to review the state of our post-Bush/Cheney civil rights.

I'd say there's a 50% chance that will happen and a 50% chance President Palin will finish off what's left of our liberty.

Fareed Zakaria on the bright side of the Crash of ’08

The lemon yellow Newsweek cover caught my eye. As intended.

Bright side of the Crash of '08?

I couldn't resist. Happily, Fareed Zakaria had some interesting things to say.

Some highlights (emphases mine):

There Is a Silver Lining |Fareed Zakaria | Newsweek.com

... The average household owns 13 credit cards, and 40 percent of them carry a balance, up from 6 percent in 1970...

... Every city, every county and every state has wanted to preserve its many and proliferating operations and yet not raise taxes. How to square this circle? By borrowing, using ever more elaborate financial instruments. Revenue bonds were backed up by the prospect of future income from taxes or lotteries. "A growing trend is to securitize future federal funding for highways, housing and other items," says Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. The effect on the projects, he points out, is to make them more expensive, since they incur interest payments. Because they "insulate the taxpayer from the cost"—all that needs to be paid now is the interest—they also tend to produce cost overruns...

... Boykin Curry, managing director of Eagle Capital, says, "For 20 years, the DNA of nearly every financial institution had morphed dangerously. Each time someone at the table pressed for more leverage and more risk, the next few years proved them 'right.' These people were emboldened, they were promoted and they gained control of ever more capital. Meanwhile, anyone in power who hesitated, who argued for caution, was proved 'wrong.' The cautious types were increasingly intimidated, passed over for promotion. They lost their hold on capital. This happened every day in almost every financial institution over and over, until we ended up with a very specific kind of person running things. This year, the capital that remains is finally being reallocated to more careful, thoughtful executives and investors—the Warren Buffetts … of the world."

... Curry points out that "30 percent of S&P 500 profits last year were earned by financial firms, and U.S. consumers were spending $800 billion more than they earned every year. As a result, most of our top math Ph.D.s were being pulled into nonproductive financial engineering instead of biotech research and fuel technology. Capital expenditures went into retail construction instead of critical infrastructure." The crisis will stop the misallocation of human and financial resources and redirect them in more-productive ways. If some of the smart people now on Wall Street end up building better models of energy usage and efficiency, that would be a net gain for the economy...

How's the story go? India creates software, China creates hardware, and the US creates financial instruments?

The 13 credit cards/household is so high I wonder if it's really true. On the other hand, I buy the stories of state budget trickery. I wonder how long that will take to unwind.

For me the best part of the essay is Boykin Curry's description of how an economic bubble destroys the leadership of publicly traded companies living in the bubble. In a bubble irrational bets pay off, and rational behavior is a ticket down the org chart. Eventually only the crazies are left at the top.

I would like to read more about the people who are the winners of the financial carnage. I suspect some actors are doing rather well right now.

Update 10/19/08: See the comment from Cathy. The "13 cards" statistic may be true. I believe Cathy is right when she guesses many people collect cards for a transient 10% purchase discount, but then never intend to use them. Of course a number of people will end up using those extra cards when they run into financial trouble, which will lead to misfortune all around.

So are these 10% purchase discounts really a good idea for the stores? I suspect it's marginal, but the risk and incentives have been outsourced through a long and disconnected chain of commerce -- so the true cost is probably hidden. Accounting uber alles, again.

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.