The GOP's new message: we are a nation of cowards

Gail Collins said it well today.

The GOP's meme of the day is that we're a nation of cowards; we cannot tolerate evildoers living within massive prisons anywhere near our homes. Instead we should leave then near, say, Cuban homes. Or, better yet, kill 'em all without trial.

We are still a sick nation, but the GOP is sicker than the rest of us.

Get a freakin' grip America! Show some spine for a change.

It must be a sad thing to have to give allegiance to the modern GOP. If their idea of "reform" is Newt Gingrich then the party should be euthanized. America needs a new alternative to the Dems.

Obama vs. Cheney is as simple as Good vs. Evil

I really am a shades of gray guy.

Sometimes, though, the shades are pretty extreme.

The Obama vs. Cheney speeches are about as simple as good vs. evil.

No, Cheney's not (yet) a mass murderer. He does, however, want America to travel a road well worn by evil regimes. He champions an evil cause.

No, Obama is far from a saint. He does, however, call on America to remember its nobility.

It's rare to have such a clear choice.

Obama stands firm on closing Guantanamo |World news | guardian.co.uk

Barack Obama today laid out a broad case for closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and banning the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been condemned as torture – while accusing his opponents of wanting to scare Americans to win political battles.

In a grand hall at the US national archives, standing directly in front of original copies of the US constitution and declaration of independence, Obama said the current legal and political battles in Washington over the fate of the 240 prisoners there stemmed not from his decision to close the facility, but from George Bush's move seven years ago to open it...

... , Dick Cheney gave a rebuttal at a conservative Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. The former vice-president defended many of the Bush administration policies Obama is now unraveling, and mentioned either "September 11" or "9/11" 25 times.

Cheney said Saddam Hussein had "known ties" to terrorists, an apparent rehashing of the widely discredited Bush administration effort to link the Iraqi dictator to the September 11 2001 hijackers.

... Obama today said that indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay and the prison's harsh interrogation methods had undermined the rule of law, alienated America from the rest of the world, served as a rallying cry and recruiting symbol for terrorists, risked the lives of American troops by making it less likely enemy combatants would surrender, and increased the likelihood American prisoners of war would be mistreated. The camp's existence discouraged US allies from cooperating in the fight against international terrorism, he said.

"There is also no question that Guantánamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world," he said. "Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al-Qaida that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law."

Calling Guantánamo "a mess, a misguided experiment", he condemned the re-emergence of bitter political fighting over the prison and the future of its 240 inmates.

"We will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue," he said. "Listening to the recent debate, I've heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."

... He acknowledged that a number of Guantánamo prisoners could not be prosecuted yet posed a clear threat to the US: those who had trained at al-Qaida camps, commanded Taliban troops, pledged loyalty to Osama bin Laden and sworn to kill Americans.

"These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States," he said.

He pledged to construct a new legal framework to deal with those prisoners, saying that if they warranted long-term detention the decision should be made not by the president alone but with congressional and judicial oversight...

One day your children may ask, did you stand with evil or with good.

Now is the time you will determine your answer.

Microsoft ads wound Apple. You know my number Apple …

From a few personal anecdotes, I think the ad agency that created the “laptop hunters” ads deserves its bonuses …

CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft's 'Laptop Hunters' Ads Are Hurting Apple (MSFT, AAPL)

… Microsoft's (MSFT) "Laptop Hunters" ad campaign focuses on the price difference between Windows PCs and expensive Apple (AAPL) Macs. The commercials have raised consumers' perception of Microsoft's "value" -- and have hurt Apple…

So, Apple.

Are you ready to talk yet?

Yeah, it’s me. One of the geeks you forgot about. You know, your volunteer evangelists. Yeah, we’re still around. It’s just that you haven’t done anything for us for a while.

Take me (why not?). iPhoto has had the same lethal movie export bug for at least 3 years, but Apple doesn’t care. iPhoto Library import? Apple doesn’t care. Aperture metadata on albums? Nope, doesn’t care. Support for open file formats in iWork? Nope.

Then there’s MobileMe.

Oh, and iChat abandonware and Apple’s multi-faceted serial calendaring and contacts screw-ups.

Yes, I know. Only geeks care about this stuff.

Thing is, maybe Apple needs their geeks to praise ‘em. When value perceptions can fall this quickly, Apple’s support is weaker than it seems.

Pay attention Apple. Fix my problems, and maybe I’ll say something nice about you.

Memories of the Chevette

I'm not a car guy. Not at all. Even so, this is worth reading...

Sunday Times: Honda Insight Review

... The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit...

A dog on a ham slicer?! Yech.

Which reminds me of the time I rented a Chevette. The Wikipedia article doesn't do justice to the 1975 model. It was made in America when GM made incredibly lousy cars, far lousier than anything sold today, and it was a desperate flail at a mileage target.

I remember merging onto a highway on a hill and watching a truck grow large behind me as the Chevette's lawnmower engine screamed in agony.

Maybe Honda can rethink this one?

Relativity as a consequence of quantum entanglement

Useful at parties ...

Relativity as a Consequence of Quantum Entanglement: A Quantum Logic Gate Space Model for the Universe

Everything in the Universe is assumed to be compromised of pure reversible quantum Toffoli gates, including empty space itself...

Obama's retreat strengthens calls for a Truth Commission

Scanning the NYT this evening, it's not hard to see a consensus emerging. Even those who weren't in favor of an American Truth Commission, like Dowd, have come around.

Obama's retreat on the photos and the tribunals shows this is too tough a problem for him to lead on alone. We do need an investigative committee. We need to know what Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their scummy minions did.

The state of wilderness tracking

I've a personal interest in the state of wilderness tracking and communications. It's much less advanced than many imagine.

The Economist tells us that's going to change soon...

...The first generation of phone satellites are coming to the end of their natural life...

A second generation of satellites, which are about to be launched by Globalstar atop trusty old Soyuz rockets from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, will whisk data around the planet at a far more respectable speed of 250 kilobits a second.

By later next year, when Globalstar has all 24 of its new satellites in orbit, high-quality voice and 3G data transmission will be possible from anywhere on the planet, except for polar latitudes. In making broadband available more or less anywhere anytime, Globalstar reckons it is six years ahead of the competition.

Your correspondent almost cannot wait. Globalstar already sells a tempting little $170 device called SPOT, which can send your GPS location to friends and family, along with a preprogrammed message and a link to Google Maps that lets them track your progress...

This was the vision of the 1994 McCaw-Gates Teledesic (often mis-spelled teledisc) project; that project was to provide worldwide internet coverage and initially involved 840 satellites.

Regional airlines, emergent fraud and enlightenment 2.0

When Salon's Patrick Smith says there's a cultural problem with the regional airline industry, I take his word for it ...

Ask the pilot | Patrick Smith | Salon Technology

... In the end, this is a terrible black mark for the regional airline industry, and it is liable to become a litigation nightmare for Colgan, the airplane manufacturer, and other parties as well.

Though, to some extent, the regionals had it coming. Traveling aboard regional aircraft remains extraordinarily safe, and I am not disparaging the thousands of professional, fully competent pilots out there who fly them for a living. Further, there is no need or reason for the public to be fearful or apprehensive about flying on a regional aircraft. Nevertheless, as highlighted here a few weeks ago, there is something dysfunctional in the cultures at these companies. There will be a lot of focus on pilot training in the weeks and months ahead, and good for that -- but the problem runs deeper. Between the lousy pay, the high-stress working conditions and the often hostile management under which regional pilots work ... all of this, on some level, is a potential risk to safety. And it needs to change.

I don't think this class of problem is unique to the regional airlines. I think it's one aspect of a culture of emergent fraud that's grown up in America over the past twenty to thirty years.

This morning I can't find a recent article I read on the gap between how people think they'll behave in ethically challenging circumstances and how they really do behave (much worse, as you might guess), but we do have lots of examples of how physicians are much more corruptible than they imagine. Astoundingly, even most politicians think they're not particularly corrupted by their donors. In the right economic and cultural climate fraud is as inevitable as the sunset.

Fraud will always be with us. Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists speculate that "fraud wars" drove the evolution of sentience. Fraud made us human, but life on a small, crowded, high tech planet means we have to beat it back to the low end of the historic range. That's a core part of the enlightenment 2.0 agenda.

Cheney/Bush and the GOP were fertilizers for fraud and deception. We're only starting to recover. The Colgan story will be soon forgotten, but it's a small marker of a much bigger problem.

Good news from India

Certainly Congress must be imperfect, but the alternatives worried most rationalists.

So this is good news.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India opts for the middle path

.... It is a vote against ideological, language, caste and class extremism. It is the victory of the middle vote,' says historian Ramachandra Guha.

The vote was to some extent (how much I don't know) also a vote on India's current relationship with the United States. I wonder if Obama made that easier, especially for India's 140 million Muslims.

I ask Wolfram|Alpha …

I ask Wolfram|Alpha ..

Are you Skynet?

It replies



Not exactly a denial.

Update 5/16/09: I tried a real question - "What is the Muslim population of India?" and it didn't know. Google "knew". Rough start.

iPhone rumors I can believe in …

Strictly for fun, here’s a set of iPhone rumors I can believe in …

iPod Cameras To 'Charlies,' Apple Rumor Mill Chugging

… The PhoneArena and HardMac rumors come right on the heels of a rumor from those posted earlier this week by a Chinese Apple Web site and picked up all around the blogosphere. A source, cited by the Chinese Web forum, Weiphone, claims that a new iPhone will see storage upgraded to 32 GB, have a 600-MHz CPU speed (200 more Megahertz than current iPhones), and a jump to 256 MB of RAM. The Weiphone rumor also claims that the iPhone will get a 3.2-megapixel camera equipped with autofocus…

Why do I go for this one?

Well, they’re obviously all solid but incremental changes. A 50% speedup would be very welcome, besides the egregious problems with core productivity apps my iPhone is often a tad sluggish.

That’s not all though. What gets me is the RAM increase. That’s because Gruber, who’s very well informed but often coy, wrote …

…Apple was working on a vastly improved dock for your most-frequently used apps, and that there’d be one special icon position where you could put a third-party app to enable it to run in the background…

…The major limiting factor right now is RAM. There just isn’t much left for third-party processes on the current hardware’s 128 MB.

That last sentence is vintage Gruber. It’s his deniable way of saying the RAM will go up.

So the two mesh.

Em is getting my current iPhone of course. There are limits to chivalry.

PS. I’m quite pleased by the pictures my iPhone takes – even in dim light. A 3.2 megapixel camera with similar light sensitivity and autofocus would be a real delight.

Star Trek -- the deep dive on the temporal discontinuities

This guy (I'm sure) really knows his Trek: Pop Culture Zoo - full frontal nerdity | ‘Star Trek’ - Strange Fascination Fascinating Me. He traces all the temporal implications of the great universe fork.

I'm impressed.

Strictly for those who've seen the movies.

BTW, I thought the movie was a bit on the silly side but definitely fun.

200 cases of illicit nuclear material trafficking each year

The 200 cases are the ones that get caught (emphases mine) …

Mohamed ElBaradei warns of new nuclear age | World news | The Guardian

ElBaradei, the outgoing director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the current international regime limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was in danger of falling apart …

…He predicted that the next wave of proliferation would involve "virtual nuclear weapons states", who can produce plutonium or highly enriched uranium and possess the knowhow to make warheads, but who stop just short of assembling a weapon. They would therefore remain technically compliant with the NPT while being within a couple of months of deploying and using a nuclear weapon.

"This is the phenomenon we see now and what people worry about in Iran. And this phenomenon goes much beyond Iran. Pretty soon … you will have nine weapons states and probably another 10 or 20 virtual weapons states." …

Two hundred reports. Twenty-five states that either have nuclear weapons or can produce them with a month’s work.

And that’s if all goes as expected.

Yep, the Cost of Havoc is still falling.

We’re entering the new nuclear age. There’s hope however. Something unexpected allowed us to survive the first nuclear age. Maybe it's still around.

The interesting but irritating Grant study of life stories

Brooks, surprisingly, reports on an article from this month’s Atlantic Magazine pretty much straight up …

NYT They Had It Made – David Brooks

In the late 1930s, a group of 268 promising young men, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, entered Harvard College. By any normal measure, they had it made. They tended to be bright, polished, affluent and ambitious. They had the benefit of the world’s most prestigious university. They had been selected even from among Harvard students as the most well adjusted…

…The study had produced a stream of suggestive correlations. The men were able to cope with problems better as they aged. The ones who suffered from depression by 50 were much more likely to die by 63. The men with close relationships with their siblings were much healthier in old age than those without them.

But it’s the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don’t even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can’t even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context…

It’s online, so worth a quick look. Or just read Brooks, he got most of it.

What Brooks misses though is the irritating aspect of the study. The study’s owner and interpreter is an unreformed Freudian, which makes him, in technical neuroscience terms, a loon. All of the stories are seen through the lens of Freud’s fact-free models of mind.

Stripped of the interpretation they’d be much more interesting. This is a group, for example, from which we should expect about 3-8 schizophrenics. How did they develop? What about those who didn’t meet the formal criteria for a late onset degenerative disorder of cognition, but showed some schizotypal features? Of those who did develop psychotic disorders, how many recovered? The last, incidentally, was an interest of one the mid-course managers of the study.

I hope someone gets to do that someday.

Incidentally, John Kennedy’s file will be available in 2040. If you’re under 30 now that will come much sooner than you can imagine.

The GOP is again the party of torture – and it might work for them

Fifteen months ago I wrote that the GOP wasn’t the torture party any more …

Gordon's Notes (Feb 2008): The GOP isn't the torture party any more

… Mitt "thumbscrews" Romney is gone. Even Ron Paul is gone. Only McCain and Huckabee are left.

McCain's opposition to torture is well known. But what about Huckabee?

In December he declared waterboarding was indeed torture.

Huckabee Chafes at 'Front-Runner' Label - washingtonpost.com

... Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans...

I'm surprised to be saying this, but the GOP isn't the pro-torture party they were in May of 2007, or even in November of 2007.

Every single GOP candidate that backed torture has been eliminated from contention.

Sure, the rabid right winguts of talk radio still pant ecstatically about the secret joys of agony, but their candidates are gone. Republican voters, after all, have a voice in what the GOP is.

Shockingly, it seems they don't like torture any more -- if they ever really did…

I was wrong.

Today Romney is running for 2008. Limbaugh and Cheney are ascendant. The GOP is the Party of Limbaugh, and the Party of Torture.

It’s not a foolish move. Torture is far more popular in America than I had thought (emphases mine) …

… 55% of Americans believe in retrospect that the use of the interrogation techniques was justified, while only 36% say it was not. Notably, a majority of those following the news about this matter "very closely" oppose an investigation and think the methods were justified.

We Americans are still in a very dark place. I am even more mystified by Obama’s victory. In the context of this support the GOP’s embrace of the joys of torture may make political sense. This is true even as, in one of history’s great ironies, the Bush team seem to be edging away from the torture policy.

This will be a long struggle. I believe Obama will do everything feasible to get us away from the road to oblivion, but he’s still got a huge uphill fight. Consider the short list of political problems he has to face

• Americans don’t believe that radical change in the earth’s climate is a potential threat to civilization
• Americans are completely unready to accept the best possible health care option - “Crummy Care”.
• We can’t try prisoners who are alleged to have been directly involved in the 9/11 attacks because our torture practices make the cases legally illegitimate
• Afghanistan and Pakistan
• The collapse of the world economy, now running on unsustainable performance-enhancing fiscal stimuli
• The ever falling cost of havoc
• North Korea
• India and Pakistan
• The tenuous status of America’s legal framework
• China’s political and economic stability (perhaps the greatest near term threat)

It’s a long, long road.

See also

• Torture and the case for replacing a rotten CIA (and from 2007)
• Cheney’s claims of torture effectiveness are lies: This says more about Cheney and his ilk than about torture. My opposition is not based on the stupidity of torture as a form of interrogation, it’s based on the world we want to live in.
• Cheney drowned his victims until they told him Iraq was behind everything