What can you say about a story like this?

(“This way to the libertarian recruitment center” comes to mind, actually.)

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:59:32 PM -

There wasn’t much light pollution when I was growing up in Ireland, but it was cloudy way too often. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona and got out into the desert at night that I fully appreciated the Milky Way as a celestial object you could look up and see. I remain appallingly ignorant about the constellations, but via Escadabelle comes a superb photograph of the Arizona night sky (see also a larger version). If you’re ever in Tucson, make time to get out to the Kitt Peak National Observatory which runs a terrific Nightly Observing Program. Here in Australia the night sky is also very clear, outside the cities, but I am even more clueless about its composition.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:32:34 AM -

"When life hands you lemons, make coffee... and then you'll have the desire to make lemonade."

Jon Friedman, 2004

coffee and cigarettes. Confessions of a New Coffee Drinker  [via sidesh0w.com: sideblog] [jenett.radio]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:45:41 PM -

Greenspan, Bush and Social Security: Robin Hoods in reverse
Alan Greenspan made everyone sit up and take notice yesterday by declaring that, since he thinks raising taxes is a bad idea, the only way to deal with the ballooning deficits the nation faces as the baby boomers retire is to cut Social Security benefits.

So there you have it, more starkly laid out than ever before, by the one voice in the national economy that everyone listens to. First we lowered taxes with a plan ridiculously weighted towards rewarding the extreme high end of wealthy citizens, while tossing a handful of crumbs to the middle class; now we're told that we have to make up the difference by cutting retirement benefits for the mass of Americans.

Let's be clear on a few things: I don't feel that Social Security is a sacred cow that should never be reviewed, revisited or revised. Let's talk about means tests, fixing the inflation indexing, whatever. There's lots of room, and need, for good reform ideas. (The Bush privatization idea is not, however, one of them; putting aside the argument over whether it would offer good results, Bush has never explained how he intends to pay for it. Since the cash to pay for current retirees' benefits comes from current wage-earners' tax payments, if you put the current wage-earners' payments into private accounts, you can't pay the current retirees -- and we're right back to Greenspan's talk of cutting benefits.)

But let's not allow the most basic fact of this national debate to be obscured, either. Bush and Greenspan together are practicing a sick kind of reverse-Robin-Hoodism (or should it be hoodwinkery?). What we are witnessing is a gigantic transfer of cash from the pockets of the many to the pockets of the few. This isn't just morally bankrupt -- it's pragmatically stupid, since in the long run it hobbles the economy.

Our memory span is so short that none of the media coverage of Greenspan's speech that I saw bothered to review the basic history here: The U.S. had already had a plan in place to deal with the baby boom retirement! What do you think those surpluses we began to run up in the late 1990s were all about? That was the money that a bipartisan coalition of responsible Democrats and Republicans had -- at considerable political cost to themselves -- begun to sock away so that we could approach this demographic tidal wave with some degree of confidence.

Fast forward to the 2000 election: Remember George Bush's absurd -- but politically effective -- argument about the surplus? He told us it was "our" money, not the government's, and he wanted to give "us" some of it back. These are Bush's words from that election: "Half the surplus is gonna go for Social Security reform and to pay down debt. One quarter is gonna go for new programs that are needed. But I think it's fair, and I think it's right, that one quarter go back to the hard working Americans who pay the bills."

In hindsight, the distortions and outright lies rolled into that campaign statement are too tightly packed to pry apart: As it turned out, none of the surplus went toward Social Security reform or to pay down debt. Bush pushed through a series of tax cuts that reduced the tax burden on the wealthy while barely changing the tax situations of most "hard working Americans who pay the bills." We encountered recession and war, and instead of facing up to tough fiscal choices, Bush kept telling us, "Just wait, the tax cuts will do their trick -- the economy will grow, Americans will get back to work and the recovery will shave down the deficit." None of that has happened, despite multiple waves of tax cuts. Instead, the deficits keep getting worse.

So now the other shoe drops: Whoops, says Alan Greenspan to middle America, George Bush wrecked your economy, the Republican Congress squandered the national piggy bank -- now we'll have to cut your retirement benefit! After all, isn't it more important to protect billion-dollar estates from the "death tax" than to keep offering working retirees a reasonable pension?

There is one thing Greenspan has done here that the Bush administration will not forgive him for: He was supposed to wait till after the election to start talking about cutting Social Security. Before the election, this dose of truth-telling is a little too dangerous. People might actually start paying attention. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:00:33 AM -

Rover Captures Dusty Sunset in Blue Martian Sky; Picture Gives Information on Mars Atmosphere

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - The Opportunity rover turned its panoramic gaze on the horizon and captured a dusty blue sunset.

( That's just cool! ed. )

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:18:52 AM -

WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth. NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:53:59 PM -

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:19:15 PM -

6. Americans' "unearned wage advantage" could be erased permanently. ("There is no job which is America's God-given right anymore." -- Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard)

7. The wholesale, upscale entry of 2.5 billion people (China, India) into the global economy at an accelerating rate is almost unfathomable.

His conclusion:  we need to train many, many more creative, risk-taking entrepreneurs.  That will require a massive shift in how we educate our youth.  The only reliable indicator of whether you will be an entrepreneur:  you are the son or daughter of an entrepreneur. 

BTW, I am working with my wife on a new business she wants to start.  One of the first things I did was look into outsourced/offshored production. [John Robb's Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:03:12 AM -

Tyler Cowen writes

Read Michael’s recent treatment of The Economics of Mozart. The bottom line? Mozart was a successful commercial entrepreneur. His economic problems stemmed from a war with Turkey, not the failures of the marketplace.

He should definitely have known better than to start a war with Turkey. That whole abduction from the seraglio business was a complete farce. Meanwhile — sorry, I’m not even going to pretend to link these comments — Matt Yglesias makes the following observation about Greg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox:

The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.

Which seems about right. An unwillingness to distinguish these two questions — or rather, the decision, for technical purposes, to treat them as if they were the same question — is a hallmark of modern economics. Robert E. Lane has a book that argues this point. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer have a solid rejoinder from the economist’s point of view, arguing that money can indeed go a long way towards making you happy — but not as far, surprisingly, as democratic institutions and local political autonomy can.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:29:58 PM -

A bunch of us went to see the movie "Fog of War" on Friday night.  This is a very interesting documentary by a local director consisting almost entirely of an interview with Robert S. McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during the first half of the U.S. war in Vietnam and subsequently president of the World Bank.  The film concentrates on McNamara's efforts in bombing Japan and Germany during World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

The first depressing take-away from the movie is that our intelligence efforts are almost worthless.  The CIA assured JFK that the Russians did not have nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis.  The missiles were in place and the warheads on their way.  In fact it seems that the warheads were already in Cuba at the time of the dispute.  Not only that but Fidel Castro met McNamara face-to-face in the 1990s and said that he'd recommended to the Russians that they use them even though he knew that Cuba would be destroyed and all of its citizens killed.  (N.B.: Personal ownership of a third-world country is a beautiful thing!)

The second conclusion from watching the film is that the U.S. has never won the hearts and minds of foreigners or even succeeded in changing foreigners' minds.  We won WWII by using our industrial power to destroy the capacity of the Japanese and Germans to carry out their objectives, not by convincing the Japanese or the Germans of anything or changing their minds or objectives.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:48:34 PM -

A critical part of the role of judges is deciding who can sue for what, but these days anyone can sue for just about anything.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:53:34 AM -

Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles? That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy. The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered. In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy.

In its effort to relieve overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has hired a private security company staffed with former henchmen of South Africa's apartheid regime.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:27:46 PM -

"When you write a science-fiction novel set in some sort of recognizable future, as soon as you finish it you have the dubious pleasure of watching it acquire a patina of quaint technological obsolescence. For instance, there are no cell phones in Neuromancer. I couldn't have foreseen them. It would have seemed corny, like Dick Tracy wrist radios."

And he never set out to predict how we might be living a few decades hence. "I always assumed that social-science fiction - anything set on Earth in a not-too-distant future - is just a mutant version of the present. But the easiest hook to hang on me was that I was a futurist. I had always maintained that I was squinting at the present in a certain way."

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:08:14 PM -

Here: Play with some balls.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:00:54 PM -

[T]he result of this mysterious panel's deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama...) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding...

28 million Americans are now being protected from Sabrina...

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:29:43 PM -

Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:27:38 PM -

Cheney + Halliburton = (contracts - bids) X $$$

It's a reductive formula, and belaboring it makes it too easy for see-no-evil types to brush off the whole issue. So it's good to have a thorough article on the subject by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:23:29 AM -

Been hanging around the Long Now site, and thinking about Deep Time. A risk of getting older, I guess. Certainly a good way to put politics into perspective.

My perusals this morning led me to the very cool Earth Impact Database, and its collection of images. The 600-million year old Beaverhead crater in Montana, is 60km wide and visible only on gravity maps. The biggest one on Earth is the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It's 300km wide, 2023 million years old and visible in a variety of ways. The coolest is Manicouagan, which appears to be a circular river in Quebec. It's 100km across and 214 million years old.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:31:35 AM -

O'Reilly: "I was wrong."

Some of George W. Bush's conservative political supporters are increasingly restive and anxious about the president's economic policies as well as his attempts to justify the war against Iraq.

Popular conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly, usually an outspoken Bush loyalist, said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

"I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this," O'Reilly said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America."

If I may resort to tween-speak for a moment: OMG W00T OMFG

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:13:34 PM -

In the middle of a generally reasonable Newsweek article about the failure to find WMDs, I came across the following para

But if Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, why didn't he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn't that the sensible option?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 5:24:40 PM -

I’ve just finished watching Sorious Samura’s documentary Living with Hunger on the UK’s Channel 4 . It seems to be screening worldwide over the next few days including on CBC in Canada and repeatedly on Discovery/Times in the US. It is an extremely vivid portrait of how some of the world’s poorest people live, how hard they work, and their dignity in conditions tougher than most of us will ever face. Highly recommended.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:24:51 PM -

CANDID CAMERA

Here’s a “scientific test” to determine your ability to differentiate between so-called Fake and Real smiles. These are not professional models, so be prepared for smiles that could easily come from Crazed Serial Killers. I got 13 out of 20 right.

Suggested added dialogue:

“That was great. No, really.”
“Of course I want to go out/sleep/live with you.”
“I’ll wait right here.”
“No, you’re not too old to wear/do/say that.”
“I’m really, really happy for you.”
“Your new boyfriend/mother/therapist seems very nice.”
“I’m not in a hurry. Take your time.”
“Thanks, it’s just what I wanted for Christmas/my Birthday/to hear before I die.”
“All your blood tests/jokes/scores came out good.”

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:02:02 PM -

This little stove is amazing; it's made from pepsi and guinness cans, using things that can be found around most households. It takes about an afternoon to make (plus some time waiting for the epoxy to set), weighs only a few grams, and is sufficient for most backpacking trips. I made my first one a few years ago, and I've been handing them out as gifts ever since. The stove is powerful enough to boil a quart of water in a reasonable amount of time, it's MUCH quieter than other camping stoves, if you lose it you're not out $80.00, and you can get the fuel for it (denatured alcohol) at most hardware or paint stores. Mine fits nicely inside of the mug I use for cooking and eating, with room to spare. I usually stuff a spare pair of socks in with it to keep it from rattling around. The site provides detailed instructions and photographs, as well as a message board with feedback and suggestions from other stove builders.

Link to Scott Henderson's Pepsi-G Stove

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:47:37 PM -

If I were less tired, I would write a post exploring the applicability, in our post-WMD world, of The Five Standard Excuses for any Failed Government Project described by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. I conjecture that some varietal of each of them will be found in talk about Iraq as prior certainties about Saddam’s monstrous armaments evaporate. The excuses are as follows:

1. There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything but security prevents its disclosure. (The Anthony Blunt excuse.)
2. It has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limit.
3. It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before it provided much valuable data and considerable employment. (The Concorde excuse.)
4. It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again. (The Munich Agreement excuse.)
5. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual now being dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures. (The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse.)

Some of these excuses have been employed by the U.S. government for some time, notably (1). A version of (2) is also becoming more popular with them. These excuses also do double-duty as rationales that critics impute to the Bush administration. Many, for instance, will favor some version of (4) or (5) in an attempt to resist alternative theories involving vulgar phrases like “blithely imperialist” or “neoconservative maniacs,” simply because of the appalling vista suggested by the latter views. I personally find it worrying that the administration’s choices in domestic and foreign policy are starting to puzzle clever economists. These, after all, are people who by temperament and training will bend over backwards till their spines snap before saying the words, “Yeah, I guess you’d have to say that was pretty irrational.” If those guys give up on you, you’re really doing badly.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:45:03 PM -

Congress has the power to censure the President -- to formally reprimand him for his betrayal of the nation's trust. If ever there was a time to use this function, it is now. Join the call for Congress to censure President Bush now at this link ...

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:26:03 PM -

Posted by The Happy Tutor

As government cuts taxes on the wealthy and "devolves" its work with the poor, the suffering, the aged on "the community," who will take up the slack? Marilyn Warning,  In Alberta, you've gone through a rough period where government services have been cut and the responsibility for continuing to carry out a lot of services hasn't devolved to the private sector, but to the "community." We know that "community" is usually mom or daughter or aunty or neighbour or some other woman who already works 16 to 18 hours a day. Devolution is a great idea is you are rich, male, and living on capital gains, dividends and rent.  ( Via comment from Gerry Gleason.)

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:55:29 AM -

The 'Gray Lady' nickname of the NYT implies the kind of conservatism and caution that's appropriate to a journal of record. But in what is, as far as I know, a newspaper first, today's NYT brings the astrology column onto the Op-Ed page, providing horoscopes for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

I'm bemused by this. If the implied view is that astrology is so patently silly that no-one would take it seriously, isn't this rather a juvenile trick to play on Erin Sullivan, noted as the author of Saturn in Transit and the forthcoming Astrology and Psychology of Midlife and Aging., who appears to have contributed her column in all seriousness? If the implied view is anything other than that astrology is too silly to be taken seriously, isn't this insulting to every reader of the NYT who has even a high school level of scientific literacy? No doubt there is some ironic postmodern stance that is appropriate here, but I can't quite locate it.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:54:31 AM -

I was thinking about conversation when I turned on the radio and caught the end of Michael Toms' conversation with the writer and poet David Whyte, who is one of the world's most mesmerizing speakers,:a latter-day Joseph Campbell. The program is New Dimensions. Their subject is conversation. One of Whyte's points sources a Chinese proverb. Why are you unhappy? Because nearly all of your conversation is with yourself. Whyte wants us to hear the "fierce" questions.

You are at the crossroads of your life. Everything is waiting for you. Will you pay attention?

Whyte's The Heart Aroused is one of the books to which we paid attention when we wrote Cluetrain.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:02:28 PM -

Posted by The Happy Tutor

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:54:35 PM -

Discovering Dickens

"Stanford has produced this digitized version of Tale of Two Cities, in its original format. WAY cool...." [LibrarianInBlack]

Emphasis on the WAY, and you can download the PDFs to your PDA if you have the Adobe reader. Oddly, though, I don't see any terms of use specifically for the PDFs. I had hoped to see a Creative Commons license at the least. Can libraries deep link to these PDFs from within their catalogs?

This question will bear even more significance if this is the prototype for their recently announced partnership with Google "to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions."

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:53:29 PM -