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Hullabaloo — Krugman

Sing it:

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.

[SNIP]

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.

First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?

It's hard to believe how isolated a voice Krugman was from, say, about Spring 2000 to about January, 2004. There was all but nowhere else in the mainstream press where Bush's total absence of presidential qualifications, his incompetence, and his lack of personal integrity were being honestly discussed.

And no one believed him. He was ignored and ridiculed by fellow journalists as shrill, he went mostly unread by mainstream politicians. He was disbelieved by ordinary readers including literally all of my milieu, who seemed desperate to believe that Bush - whose negligence and incompetence were crystal clear to me even when the towers were still smoking and the networks were overwhelmed with ominous reports and rumours - would actually save and protect us from the horrible fate that befell our fellow New Yorkers.

So now, if Krugman wants to tell the country and especially his colleagues, "I told you so," he deserves to. He told us exactly so. When no one else dared.

Paul, I owe you. Big time.

(Edited slightly after original posting.)

Dispatches from the New World of Work —

The Marriage of Wal*Mart and Memorial Hospital of South Bend

There is another marriage on the scene, and, at first, it may seem like an odd couple. What do our friends at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana, have to do with Wal*Mart. Well, it seems that health care is walking down the aisles of Wal*Mart!! Memorial is first to put a quick medical center in a Wal*Mart store.

Inspired by the menus found at McDonald's, they created a medical menu board, so that you can 'order up' just what you need and know the price before you partake. They borrowed another idea from restaurants and give you a hand-held vibrating disk, so that when it's your turn you can stop shopping and swing by the health center. The device also has a pleasant voice telling you that the nurse practitioner is ready for you.

Health care continues to evolve, and innovative health services will continue to break through the barriers. To find out more, visit http://www.medpointexpress.com/.

Now, are there any objections to this marriage? If not, forever hold your peace! AND go get your flu shot while shopping at Wal*Mart in South Bend.

Posted by Val Willis

The J-Walk Blog —

Richard Dawkins writes an Open letter to his 10 year old daughter.

Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

This is reproduced from his book, A Devil's Chaplain -- which I finished last night. In the book, the letter is called A Prayer For My Daughter: Good and Bad Reasons For Believing. The book was dedicated to his daughter to celebrate her 18th birthday.

I think this should be required reading for every 10-year old. Better yet, make it required reading for all school districts that teach Creationism.

Hullabaloo — Sanguine Serenity

Matt Yglesias says:

After an uninformative confirmation hearing, Alito will be confirmed by a comfortable margin to the general approval of highbrow centrist opinion. He'll proceed to spend the next 20 years on the Court making America a somewhat worse place than it might otherwise be. Conservatives will continue to fail in their efforts to transform the country into some idealized version of the 1950s and will presumably blame this on college professors and Anthony Kennedy.

I wish I had that such assurance that we will hold the line for the next 20 years (except, perhaps, for living in a country "somwhat worse than it would have been") while chuckling merrily at silly rightwing cant. History shows many examples of cultures and societies going completely to hell in a handbasket in a generation or less. It happens. There are no guarantees that today's status quo in which conservatives are held back by certain social norms will hold.

These people worry me. Bad things happen.


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Boing Boing — David Pescovitz: Popular Science has published its annual list of "The Worst Jobs In Science." The NASA Ballerina I blogged on Saturday was nine out of ten. Here's number one:

1. Human Lab Rat
Warning: Pesticides are bad for you

Pharmaceutical companies have long relied on hard-up college students to act as guinea pigs. (Dudes, I was in a double-blind Viagra trial! And I got paid!) But did you know that the pesticide biz is hiring too?

Last year an industry-funded University of California at San Diego study paid students $15 an hour to have the root killer and World War I nerve agent chloropicrin shot into their eyes and noses. Chloropicrin is also a component of tear gas—that trusty suppressor of Big 10 sports riots—and at high doses can lead to nerve damage and death. Duuude. Because of its irritating qualities, small doses of the chemical are often added to other pesticides to act as a "warning agent," and it's the safety of those doses that the study looked at.

Coincidentally (or not), within a week of the UCSD study's completion, its industry funders submitted the results to the EPA to support chloropicrin's re-registration as an independent pesticide—not as a warning agent. Meanwhile, Congress is debating a moratorium on human testing.

Link

Posthuman Blues — Defend yourself against the coming robot rebellion

A robot trying to find you will use thermal imaging based on the roughly 91-degree temperature of human skin, so smearing yourself in cool mud will confuse them. If being chased by an unmanned robot vehicle, flee to a rustic, unmapped area with lots of obstacles. If your robot "smart" house -- one wired with video surveillance and computer gear -- tries to trap you, chop your way out with an ax and don't take your cell phone, because the house will track you with it.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

www.andrewtobias.com — Published on November 01, 2005 FOR YOUR HOLIDAY GIFT LIST The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken. A sample from Janet Maslin’s review yesterday: In describing the role of Ahmad Chalabi in American plans to invade Iraq: "He and his associates had explained that we would be greeted with sweets and flowers, leaving out the crucial modifier, 'exploding.

 

Bootleg fark.com rss feed — Time-traveling squirrels could explain mysterious photographs that keep appearing in woman's garage, except for one problem: Squirrels lack opposable thumbs

 

Wonkette —

Scooped again:

"Youthful drinking is tied to violence, risky sex, poor grades and drunken driving." -- The Washington Post, 11/01/2005

"Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things" -- The Onion, 05/01/2002

The HHS launches an ad campaign intended to curtail underage drinking today. Underage drinking, is, of course, bad. Horrible. It cuts into my supply. Look, I don't want to have to knock down a nine-year-old in order to get to the front of the bar for the mango margaritas at Chevy's, but if i have to, I will.

Underage Drinking Prevention [The Ad Council]

Hullabaloo — Porter Goss Or The Higgs Boson?

When it comes to punishment of those who dare to disagree with the White House, the Wilsons are but the tip of the iceberg. Robert Dreyfuss has a vitally important article in American Prospect about the evisceration of CIA under Porter Goss. Take the time to read it all. Here is a short quote from the end, but you really must read the details Dreyfuss prints to understand the full meaning of the disaster:

That's right. Bush's familiar is systematically undermining the reliability of a president's main source of proprietary information. Oh, I can easily understand the gray areas where intelligence can be couched for or against a particular policy. But this is different. What Goss is doing, with Bush's evidently enthusiastic approval, is eliminating from CIA any data gathering and analyses that do not support the presumptions and policy wishes of the Bush White House.

In other words, what Bush is creating is a CIA that, had it existed in 2002, would have been far more wrong about WMD and Saddam/al Qaeda connections than it actually was.

Now, dear friends, for many weeks now, I have been reading a marvelous book by Dr. Lisa Randall entitled Warped Passages which is all about the new physics of branes, strings, and infinite hidden dimensions. Having done some of the most exciting work in this area, Randall not only knows what she is talking about but her explanations are as clear as a bell. Now, that doesn't mean branes, bulk, and infinite invisible 5th dimensions are easy to comprehend, they're not and Randall is too honest to spare us (which is great, you can actually learn something new about the world if you can keep an open mind and persist). You can spend several days, if you're an amateur science lover with little math, just trying to get a slight sense of exactly how a massless neutrino, which is emitted after an interaction with a weak gauge boson, can help resolve an apparent violation of the law of the conservation of energy.

But as mind-bogglingly hard as the new physics is to grasp, it is child's play next to trying to grok the reasoning behind Porter Goss's destruction of CIA. Y'see, concepts like branes and asymmetrical elementary particles that only accept a charge when they're right-handed (or is it left-handed?) get easier to understand the more you think about them. But the more you ponder why any Director would deliberately eliminate from CIA the objective gathering and assessment of data - rather than trying to improve it - the weirder it all sounds, the more incomprehensible it gets.

After a while my head starts to hurt real bad and I feel the only way to clear it is to try to understand something easy. Like modern string theory.

 

Lifehacker — 

Discover Magazine cites a study where two groups of people took IQ tests: one that was under the influence of marijuana and the other that was interrupted by email messages - and the potheads performed better.

Certainly, the (BING!) interruption cost of a new email message (BING!) arriving every 10 minutes throughout the day (BING!) while you work is a high one. The solution? Pull the plug. Shut down your email client while you work and open it up only when you need to send a message. Or simply set it to check for new messages only once an hour. It doesn't matter that right this moment you've got mail. You've also got something else more important to do than buy Cialis online.

Bootleg fark.com rss feed — Bush to announce flu strategy today, although strategy consists mostly of tips on how to call in sick and miss work

 

Philip Greenspun Blog —

	Harvard	Yale
Domestic Equity	15%	14%
Foreign Equity	15%	14%
Private Equity	13%	17%
Fixed Income (bonds)	27%	5%
Real Assets	23%	25%
Absolute Return (hedge funds)	12%	25%

Note that Harvard's total is 105 percent because of leverage, i.e., situations in which they've borrowed money to purchase investments. Conspicuously absent from these portfolios are heavy investments in American companies run by Harvard and Yale graduates. "Domestic Equity" are publicly traded stocks such as GE and Microsoft. Harvard and Yale have faith that their graduates will make a lot of money for themselves, but no faith that they will make money for their shareholders.

The Huffington Post | Raw Feed —

In the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer who lost her job after the disputed "60 Minutes" Bush/National Guard report, writes, "I must answer the bloggers, the babblers and blabbers, and the true believers who have called me everything from 'feminazi' to an 'elitist liberal' to an 'idiot.'

"If I was an idiot, it was for believing in a free press that is able to do its job without fear or favor. ...I didn't know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run national political campaign, because that is what it was: a political campaign."