Month: September 2010

You Never Trust a Millionaire Quoting the Sermon on the Mount

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by Eric Martin Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a speech yesterday defending a recently passed California law setting emissions standards/targets that, in many ways, shocked me deeply.  The reason for my surprise (pleasant at that) is that Schwarzenegger spoke some truths that are rarely uttered by mainstream politicians – and even less frequently by politicians on the … Read more

The Four Hundred

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by Doctor Science No sooner did I post about what kind of backround the American super-rich have when Forbes came out with the 2010 list. Of course, I cannot resist a challenge, so I’ve made a new table, this time with the top 50 names on it — so far. I also spent a lot … Read more

yo gummint so big…..

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it uses busses for rollerskates!  when it stands up the sun goes out!  it uses bowling balls for earrings!

Or, in the more measured words of the Republican Pledge To America:

Our plan stands on the principles of a small, more accountable government

Sounds great. Ain't gonna happen. Details at 11.

OK, introductions first I guess. "singingbone" is "russell". At some point I'll figure out how to make it use my actual name. Or, everyone will just get used to the fact that "singingbone" is "russell". Whichever comes first.

Next, many thanks to the kitteh for the the very kind invitation to post. I will do my best not to be an idiot, and will try not to blow anything up.

Next after that, if you want to save yourself a few minutes, you can skip this and read sekajin's comment here. It's crisp and to the point, and pretty much says most of what I'm going to say here in fewer words.  I'm just going to add detail.

If you're still with me, more after the jump. 

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Not Complicated

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by Jacob Davies Imagine that 310 people reside in the United States of America, and that it's a small village, not a country. Of those 310, 238 are adults not in the care of others.The rest are children, institutionalized elderly and disabled, and members of the armed forces; their needs are taken care of directly. … Read more

Enough About You: Let’s Talk About Me

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by Gary Farber

My name is Gary Farber.  You killed my father.  Some of you are familiar with me, and some are not. 

Who the hell am I?

I'm the FNG as an Obsidian Wings front-page blogger.

But!

My first appearance at Obsidian Wings was via a post by Katherine R. on December 16th, 2003, when she linked to a post of mine, and named it Post Of The Week.  This attracted my attention to Obsidian Wings, with its first set of bloggers, Moe Lane, Katherine R,  and Von.

Set the Wayback Machine, Sherman!

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Admin and Meta and Open Thread, O My

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by Doctor Science Or should that be “Admins and Metas and Open Threads, O My”? Admin: I’ve never been a Real Blogger before, only a roving commenter. Am I supposed to be monitoring all posts for Evil Trolls and Spammongers? Or just the comments to posts I make? It’s taking a little mental re-tooling for … Read more

Freedom’s Just Another Word

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by Eric Martin Conor Friedersdorf's expresses his frustration with the Republican Party's rhetorical reverence of freedom and liberty (in the context of domestic safety net policies) while actively working to undermine actual freedom and liberty in tangible ways at home.  After citing an alarming list of ways in which civil liberties have eroded in recent years, … Read more

Don’t Do The Cybercrime If You Can’t Do The Time

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by Gary Farber

Except that who is responsible for Stuxnet is a mystery. 

What we know is that it's incredibly dangerous.  And it's at least possible it was targeted at Iran's nuclear program, perhaps the enrichment centrifuges in Natanz.

Cyber security experts say they have identified the world's first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target – a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.

The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now say Stuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical world – to destroy something.

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The old-fashioned way

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by Doctor Science

One of the things that doesn’t really get examined enough in discussions of US economic inequality is inherited wealth. It’s obvious to me, at least, that inherited wealth can be expected to be an *enormous* problem with any “level playing field” expectation — after all, historically the rich have been aristocrats, who by definition inherit their positions.

But how much of an effect does it really have in the US? Don’t most rich people get that way from money they collect during their careers?

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Which Came First: The Regulation Or The Egg?

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by Gary Farber

"One big 20-year experiment" has been conducted on what happens when you leave egg safety to lax federal regulation, spotty state regulation, and the market, and the results aren't pretty.

On a July night in 1987, scores of elderly and chronically ill patients at Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital in New York City began to fall violently sick with food poisoning from eggs tainted with salmonella.

“It was like a war zone,” said Dr. Philippe Tassy, the doctor on call as the sickness started to rage through the hospital. By the time the outbreak ended more than two weeks later, nine people had died and about 500 people had become sick. It remains the deadliest outbreak in this country attributed to eggs infected with the bacteria known as Salmonella enteritidis.

If someone murdered nine people, and wounded five hundred, with a gun, we Americans would have paid as much attention to this as we did the Columbine high school massacre, or Nidal Malik Hassan, or Charles Whitman.

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The Real Servant Problem

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by Jacob Davies Just a quick note on servants, which we were discussing in the comments to a previous thread. The big problem I have with servants who work directly for one person or family – and especially full-time servants – is not about productivity, and it’s not based on aesthetic dislike for the idea. … Read more

To Put the World to Rights

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by Eric Martin Bernard Finel, riffing on the wrongheaded suggestion from the otherwise intelligent David Axe that the US involve itself militarily in the Congo (because, hey, our military is getting lazy just sitting around doing nothing, and our budget surpluses need to be spent somewhere, and winning other nations' civil wars is something of a … Read more

Social/Justice

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by Doctor Science

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo asked Should We Fight For ‘Social Justice’?

If someone tells me they need ‘social justice’ to mark some crucial distinction, I’m happy to entertain the possibility. Analytically, my complaint is that the term is vaguely redundant; redundancy never killed anyone dead. But why burden yourself with redundancy that seems mostly to provide Glenn Beck and co. with fodder for dismissals that are lazy even by their standards?

Much of the ensuing discussion got into details about Hayek, Rawls, etc. that are above (or something) my head.

But I was reminded of something I wrote in the comments of a discussion at ObiWi in June 2006:

My gut reaction to discussion of the “patterned view” of justice versus the “process view” is to go all Jewish-prophet-y and say, “Justice will come when you pay less attention to your damned stuff, and more to other people!”

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Segregation Nation

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by Jacob Davies Some maps of the racial make-up of American cities by a guy called Eric Fisher. Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000. New York City: Detroit: The SF Bay Area: Click on any of them for … Read more

Little House On The Playa

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by Jacob Davies

midweek

My idea of a restful, refreshing vacation is to drive hundreds of miles to the middle of a high-altitude desert to a spot where there is nothing but dead salt pan for miles in every direction, no water, no flora or fauna, spend several days working like a dog in the hot sun to build a little camp, spend a couple more days hanging out in it with my friends and whatever lunatics wander in off the street while enjoying day-and-night pounding techno music and explosions, with only the primitive comforts we build for ourselves in a little kitchen and a sun shower, then tear the whole thing down and pack it all away again for next year.

This isn't a post about What Burning Man Means. I have no idea what it means to most people. For me it's a chance to spend some intensive time with some good friends, experience some really weird stuff, watch some big fires and explosions, and enjoy a pretty solid attempt at a total rejection of mainstream culture.

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Making Perfection the Enemy of the Good

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by Eric Martin Gulliver, reacting to reports that the US is mulling over a $1.2 billion arms/training package to Yemen as part of a burgeoning whack-a-mole counterterrorism effort in that country, sums it up quite concisely: A dude tried to get on an airplane in the U.S. with a bomb in his pants, and this … Read more

Her worth is far above rubies

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by Doctor Science

It turns out that Marty Peretz is pretty much a bigot

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

A lot of people are upset about it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s news like “Water, Continued Wet.”

Meanwhile, science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon thinks

Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they’ve had …I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they’re demanding of me and others–how much more they’re asking than giving.

This is, frankly, considerably more surprising and upsetting than Marty Peretz being a jerk (water, wet), for me and for a bunch of other people.

I hope that David Moles is right, and that Moon — who I would have described as a writer of great insight and sensitivity — is

only repeating what the media’s been telling her — what our climate of bigotry and willful ignorance has been telling her.

I had been planning to make a pre-Yom Kippur post about the Book of Jonah, which is read during the afternoon services, but I’ve changed my mind. A major part of the several services throughout the more-than-24-hours of Yom Kippur is spent listing and regretting sins, especially those that are collective (everything is in the plural, what *we* have done) and that are sins of speech: lies, gossip, deadly silence. To atone, we have to speak rightly; I will do some small part now.

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Sold a Ballot of Goods

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by Eric Martin Joshua Foust sounds a somewhat pessimistic note on the eve of Parliamentary elections in Afghanistan.  In addition to the increased marginalization of women politicians (through intimidation and vioelence, no less), there is evidence of backsliding: In comparison to the 2009 election, nearly 600 additional voting stations will be closed this year. These … Read more

Lotta Strands to Keep in My Head, Man

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by Eric Martin And if it weren't for those meddling kids, it would have worked: Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world's scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world's governments, scientific academies, and media are either … Read more

The King Called Up His Jet Fighters

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by Eric Martin Some months back, it was quite popular for pundits and foreign policy commentators to rue the fact that Obama was actually considering – gulp – engaging less-than-democratic regimes in North Korea and Iran (though the latter is, really, quite more democratic than the former). Notably, James Traub couched Obama's tepid, insignificant outreach … Read more

Book club? and Open Thread

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by Doctor Science I just got my copy of Andrew Bacevich's Washington Rules. How about a book discussion in a few weeks, to give other people a chance to read it? Should we put up a "buy at Amazon" or "buy at Powells" link, to get kickbacks for a worthy cause? If so, what? Have … Read more

First we got the bomb, and that was good

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by Doctor Science

'Cause we love peace and motherhood.

As you may recall, in early August The Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg about how Israel and Iran are getting "to the point of no return" because of Iran's nuclear program. The article got a lot of online and other media attention, so much that The Atlantic put together an online debate that ran August 16-25.

I made an effort to be one of the people reading and commenting on the debate there. You can read my daily extracts here:

Those links doubtless qualify as "tl;dr" for non-masochists. The highlights of the discussion, for me:

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Best Buy

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by guest blogger Gary Farber.

In an economic depression, it's especially important to invest wisely.  That's why wise American business leaders believe a dollar spent buying John Boehner is a dollar well spent. 

Remember, if you want to fight against the interests of common people, you want to Buy Boehner.

[…] He maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former
aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including
Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R. J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.

A helpful graphic of some of Minority Leader Boehner's best pals.

[…] Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, said the industry ties only
help make Mr. Boehner a better Republican leader. “Like the American
people, Boehner — a former small-business man — is most concerned right
now about the issue of jobs,” he said. “So he often speaks with
employers, rather than, for example, labor unions or environmentalists
who support job-killing policies.”

Remember, if you kill a job, you have to eat it.

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Bin Laden’s True Followers

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by guest blogger Gary Farber.

On October 29th, 2004, Osama bin Laden released a video addressing the American people, and the world, as part of his series of fatwas and statements.

Among the things he said (italics for emphasis are mine):

[…]  All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point
East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda in order to
make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic
and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note
other than some benefits for their private companies.

This is in
addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war
of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the
Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced
to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah.

So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of
bankruptcy.

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I’d like to thank the Academy

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by Doctor Science and the ObiWitariat for choosing me as your new blogger. My nom de net is "Doctor Science". Ask Doctor Science, she knows more than you — she has a Master's degree! in Art! that is, a M.A. in theoretical population genetics. Due to a past that includes book indexing, reviewing, and reading … Read more

Always Bet on Ali

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by Eric Martin Matt Yglesias takes note of the recent scuttlebutt regarding Iraq's inability to form a government: Apparently we’re trying to diminish the powers of the prime minister’s office as a way of greasing the skids of coalition: American officials said that the approach, which aims to bring Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party, … Read more

Les Yper Sound

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by Eric Martin John Quiggin, in musing on the relatively short lived era of the "hyperpower" (as measured by Thomas Friedman's arc of enthusiasm), distills what is the essential moral: A central lesson of this experience (of course, not one that Friedman or Joffe is ever likely to learn) is that the whole idea of a military hyperpower is a … Read more

The Unbearable Lightness of Bigotry

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by Eric Martin Sarah Posner makes a good point about the controversey surrounding the suddenly high profile planned burning of the Koran – the problem of anti-Muslim animus is far more pervasive than this one episode would suggest, and many of the same voices that are rising to speak out on this one issue are silent on numerous other similar incidents of … Read more

So Gross And Notorious An Act Of Despotism

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by guest poster Gary Farber.

To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate,
without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of
despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the
whole kingdom. But confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him
to gaol, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less
public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of
arbitrary government. …

— 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 132-133 (1765)

I am not a lawyer; I'm just a guy who has cared passionately about civil liberties and our Constitution all his life, and who has read a lot of court decisions.

I'm quoting Blackstone, above, from a specific court decision, in fact: Hamdi et al. v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al. 

I'm quoting Justice Scalia quoting Blackstone, with whom Justice Stevens joined in dissenting. 

Which brings to yesterday's decision, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Bracketology

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by Eric Martin Annie Lowery, arguing for additional tax brackets at the top, is making sense: For the past 20 years, the top income tax bracket has started around $370,000, and top marginal tax rate has stayed between 35 and 39.6 percent. But since the mid-1990s, the richest have gotten richer, earning a higher and higher … Read more