Month: November 2010

by russell

No cites on this post, these are just my own thoughts.

As I'm sure I've mentioned, I write software for a living.  I also free-lance as a drummer, but I'll stick to the software for the moment.

I want to talk about capital.

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by Doctor Science

Rupert Murdoch, that is, not Beelzebub. Well, not literally Beelzebub.

It’s clear from our discussion that Sarah Palin’s charisma is highly polarizing, but this is also true for other very charismatic politicians, such as Bill Clinton.

What would make a Palin campaign truly different is Fox News.

Jonathan Bernstein at The New Republic tries to reassure those of us fearful about a Palin candidacy:

Presidential nominations are … I need a word not quite as strong as “controlled,” but much stronger than “influenced” … by political party leaders. […] If Republican leaders don’t want Palin, you’ll start hearing negative stories about her on Fox News, and from leading conservative talk shows and blogs, and enthusiastic conservatives will turn elsewhere.

I just want to pinch his cheeks, he’s so cutely naive. Bernstein thinks Republican leaders tell Fox News what to do! That’s so last century — or at least last decade.

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by Doctor Science

I am thankful for the usual: family, friends (both RL and e-), reasonable health, a cat who loves me, and PIE.

This year, I’m thankful for: managing to sell our old house, staying in the school district yet moving to a place we can afford, a walkable community, enough money to give people presents this year, and this blog. And good grief, a LOT of pie.

Today in special surprise thankfulness, U.S. to Drop Color-Coded Terror Alerts.

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by Doctor Science

This will be your mandatory Sarah Palin post. Every political blog has to have one, it’s the law (like gravity). And, like gravity, it’s pretty hard to get away from hearing about Sarah Palin.

This week, the big question being kicked around the blogosphere is, Will Sarah Run? (for President in 2012, that is.) And if she does, can she win the Republican Nomination? And if she’s nominated, can she beat Barack Obama?

Frank Rich says: You Betcha

Daniel Larison says: are you kidding? it would be a slow-motion car wreck

Frum reports on an important trend: the Republican establishment’s increasingly frantic search for ways to stop the Palin for President campaign.

Nate Silver says: she dominates the news.

I say: what none of these horse-race analyses take into consideration is Sarah Palin’s superpower. She has charisma, the genuine article (not available in stores, much less online). In our household, we call it “charisma buckets” — where the person is so charismatic that it overflows, so they have to carry figurative buckets everywhere to hold the excess. If US electoral politics were a role-playing game (and are you going to argue that it’s not?), her Charisma would be +4: a perfect 18 out of 18.

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by russell

No, not those Producers.  Not even these guys. 

I'm talking about the producers-not-moochers.  The most productive members of society.  The folks who, through their own efforts, generate wealth and create jobs for others.

At the end of this year, the Bush tax cuts are going to expire.  Between now and then, Congress will do one of three things:

1. Extend the tax cuts for everyone.
2. Extend the tax cuts for only folks making less than $250K a year.
3. Nothing, in which case everyone's tax cuts will expire.

The second position is the "Obama plan", aka the Democratic position.  The first is the Republican position.

Extending cuts for everyone will cost us a lot of money.  The argument in favor of it claims that levying a 3 to 5% higher marginal tax rate on folks making north of $250K will punish the folks who actually create jobs, and so will be counter-productive.

So, I wanted to know who these people are. 

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by Doctor Science

Like many people, I played the New York Times’ You Fix the Budget puzzle. My personal solution can be succinctly described as “stop war; tax the rich”.

Of course, the whole game is based on assumptions about what we can or can’t do: there are options for “Obama’s plan” versus “Clinton-era taxes”, for instance, but none for my favored Eisenhower-era taxes. And then we also get to consider:

Tighten eligibility for disability

The costs of the disability insurance program, which is administrated by the Social Security Administration, have been rising rapidly. This option would cut disability spending by 5 percent by focusing on states with the loosest standards. Supporters note that growing numbers of workers are classified as disabled, though the average job is less physically taxing. Opponents worry that injured or ill workers with few good job prospects would be harmed.But hey! It could save up to $17 billion dollars! Out of a trillion! So really, how much could it hurt?

It happens that I’ve spent some time this past week finding resources for a friend who IMHO needs to go on disability, and from my personal observation: it could hurt a *lot*. And the people it would hurt are, pretty much by definition, already hurting — it is a targeted intervention to afflict the afflicted.

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by Doctor Science

When people started talking about the TSA offering passengers a choice of “nude pix or enhanced pat-down”, I was at first kind of confused about why there was so much fuss. You see, I remember getting the old “enhanced security examination” years ago, and no-one then took real umbrage.

The different circumstances, though, shed light on why the TSA’s policies have really crossed a line (James Fallows, *very* frequent flier and occasional pilot, is a good source for background).

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by Doctor Science

Andrew Sullivan linked to Morgan Meis’ review of George W. Bush’s official portrait:

That can’t be serious, I thought to myself when I turned a corner at the Gallery and saw the portrait. The mundane kitsch of the thing was shocking. There are standards. By God there are standards. Aren’t there? A vase of flowers sits on the table of a dining room set behind him. The set is more middlebrow than anything you could find even at a mainstream outfit like IKEA. It is a set you’d find, I suppose, at Jennifer Convertibles. The whole scene is resolutely suburban. Aggressively suburban.

Meis is shocked at how much the portrait looks like “a Sears portrait” in quality, but what shocks *me* is how resolutely unpresidential it is.

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by Jacob Davies

The story you must read today is Matt Taibbi on the massive fraud by banks and loan servicers in the ongoing foreclosure crisis.

I had a few things to say about this over the last month or two, but I think people had a hard time believing that fraud and perjury on this scale was actually possible; that people were being thrown out onto the street on the basis of affidavits that were forgeries and perjury through and through. Forged, back-dated documents purporting to be contemporaneous records of the transfer of mortgage notes from one party to another. Complete circumvention of the existing legal system for recording real estate ownership – and its associated taxes and fees – and its illegal replacement with an unreliable, understaffed private system. The employees of the corporation running that system passing themselves off as vice-presidents of dozens of banks and servicers so they could foreclose on mortgages. Banks even claiming both that they were and were not the actual owner of the mortage in the very same filings. Failures to convey the actual mortgages to the real estate trusts that backed the securities that were sold to investors. Attempts to convey mortages to those trusts only at the moment of foreclosure. Servicers with a vested interest in the mortages they service going into foreclosure so they can collect fees, and associated failures to collect payments. People given mortgage modifications by the bank, then foreclosed on for failing to pay the original amounts. People without mortgages being foreclosed on. Multiple banks claiming to own the same mortgage foreclosing on the same property.

And at the sharp end of all this, an automated process of perjury and fraud. Notarized affidavits claiming that the signer has personal knowledge of the facts of the case described that were signed by someone else with no knowledge of the facts and not notarized at all. And a court system overloaded with foreclosures unable to and uninterested in examining the facts of the cases in front of it. Families thrown out on the street in the tens or hundreds of thousands on the basis of minute-long hearings in courts where judges refused to consider questions of fraud.

It’s hard to comprehend just how pervasive and serious this problem is. Trillions of dollars have already been lost in the bursting of the real estate bubble, but trillions of dollars more of the remaining mortgage-backed securities may be entirely worthless. Not to mention the massive destruction of households and neighborhoods wrought by a mindless, mechanical legal process.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing at RS, I’m excerpting the key parts after the fold. But I recommend taking the time to read it.

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by Doctor Science

Last week, the voters of Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a state Constitutional amendment to prohibit judges from considering international or Shariah law. As Marcia Hamilton said on Findlaw (I believe sarcastically), this
seems to be Oklahomans’ reaction to the demonic Taliban and al-Qaeda forces that are pledged to end our way of life and America itself [ominous music].

As has become customary, much of the rhetoric about “Shariah Law”[1] focuses on the legal status and treatment of women. In this case, one of the standard talking points is that “Shariah Law” mandates unjust wills, because it prescribes that, in dividing an estate each son should inherit twice as much as each daughter. The Muslim who has filed the initial lawsuit against the amendment is doing so on the basis that his will states “that his possessions be divided ‘in accordance with the guidance contained in the prophetic teachings’ of Islam” — which pretty much makes the point for his opponents.

Echidne of the snakes said

I’m not certain if there is anything “especially nefarious” about the shariah laws when compared to other religious laws created during the middle ages, and that’s when most of them seem to have been created. They all tend to give women fewer rights than men, though.

I’m more knowledgeable about Islam than Echidne, and I’ll go further: before the Enlightenment, Islamic inheritance law, in particular, was in many ways *more* just and equitable than that current in Europe, and some Islamic legal creations have become part of the structure of Western law.

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by russell

While the Republicans celebrate their historical victories, the Democrats lick their wounds, the bankers count their bonus money, and the rest of us try to hold on to our jobs, homes, and retirement savings, some large US cities are facing a real challenge:

They're running out of water.

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posted by Doctor Science

The following was published in a different venue by an e-friend who’d like to be known here as “Lizzie”. I’m posting a slightly-edited (by her) version here with her permission, because I think she says some important and frequently-overlooked things particularly well.

I used to work in politics.

I started local, running GOTV for my county, and I ended local, running a successful county-wide campaign. In between I worked two presidential cycles and a congressional campaign, which meant for four years I ate, breathed, slept, and thought about very little but votes, votes, votes.

When I worked in politics there was nothing worse than the day after the election. Everything you'd worked for, sometimes for two whole years, came down to the votes people cast, and sometimes, despite everything you did, how they voted was mind-boggling. You were exhausted; you'd eaten nothing but junk food for weeks and you drove and canvassed and planned and organized events; you'd worked 18 hours on election day and stayed up to watch every last return from every corner of the country come in.

There was nothing left for you to do. Everything was over. It was depressing as hell.

But now . . .

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by Doctor Science

Greetings, fellow Citizens of the Republic of Science!

Galaxy Zoo began more than 3 years ago. It’s a crowdsource project to have regular people — citizen scientists, as they say — do image-processing for large-scale projects. I worked with them for a while — especially on what are now called pea galaxies — then dropped back as I did more political work and blogging.

Now I’m going through one of my periodic realizations that I’m wasting a lot of time doing mindless games (sudoku, fer chrise sake), and thinking maybe I could use those brain cycles — FOR SCIENCE!

At this point, Galaxy Zoo has expanded to a zooniverse of projects, some by the original team and some using the Galaxy Zoo API. This is what I think of the current projects:

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