Centerfield

Open Thread: Move It Out!

We're moving tomorrow.

Bhutto's Death

I think this means an end to hope of change in Pakistan in the next twenty years. The extremism, migration of elites, funding for militaristic extremists in Afghanistan, and harboring of terrorists in the tribal areas will all continue unabated.

Of course, Bhutto had done little about that stuff on her watch, but improvement comes much faster when you have regular peaceful turnover of government and advisors and press can speak more-or-less freely, without being jailed or hurt or killed for their efforts.

Al'Qaeda has claimed credit, of course, and we know they like to kill those annoying non-theocratic democratic politicians. Were security men less than vigilant, knowing The Boss would be happier if the strike went through? It's just speculation. All we can be sure of now is that both extremists and Musharraf's party are less than saddened about Bhutto's death.

New poll

Poll: Bullsh*t Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Hat tip: Sully.

Why Big Opening Between New And Old Home Prices

(at least, here in Austin, yay...) (our market is out of sync with the rest of the market in some ways, so, take it with salt elsewhere).

One possible reason came from an article on something different. It caught my eye, though.

In 1993, just 48 percent said they hoped their next house would be newly built. By 2004, that number had grown to 74 percent.

We want good home value, and that's why we bought, er, pre-owned instead.

Santa Sighted

Santa's been sighted here, so I've got to go give him a hot chocolate to keep him going, and let everybody go with a Happy Christmas.

We're gonna have a fairly minimal Xmas due to the moving imminent before the end of the year, and besides, the Grandma visit is already past.

Solving The Primary Problem

A likely-looking (to me) solution has been proposed: alternate the starting position in the primaries between groups of states. This was suggested in the context of the GOP primary by one Bill Crocker here in Austin. This Democrat sees no reason it couldn't work for us, too, but of course have no power to make it happen.

I don't suppose we'll see anything so right and simple actually happen....

Vinge what if no strong AI

In the course of writing one of his novels, Vinge's been thinking about the case of IF (unlikely, as he and I see it, but possible) IF strong AI turns out impossible.

Also in that article, Vinge comes out against more manned space travel until we can contain its cost a bit. I think it's worth continuing manned space travel as a limited research activity just so we know which way is up when we can afford it for real. Engineering rewards the prepared.

Open Thread: All Our Kid Wants For Christmas Is His Other Two Front Teeth

It's trite, but probably true. It being his first Christmas, he's too young to understand it and the gift-giving thing in the least. But his two upper front teeth are imminent and clearly aching; the upper jaw is ridged, and he spends 2/3 his time with SOMETHING in his mouth.

In other news, I know you'll be immensely happy ;-) to learn somebody's developed a traffic model to look at why your Christmas traffic jam's happening. What it adds, I guess, is the ability to look at impact of various stopping behaviors.

Mark Penn, Clinton's Would-be Rove

This could be the start of a series on these campaign season's would-be Roves. I'm starting with Mark Penn, Clinton's Chief Strategist. If I continue the series, I'll continue next with a GOP choice.

The Washington Post ran an article on what he brings to his Clinton gig, starting briefly about being fired from Gore 00 (too honest).

According to the Post article, Penn started in politics in the '77 Ed Koch NY mayoral campaign as a smart, energetic, and detail-armed pollster. He moved to DC in the Clinton reelection campaign, taking advantage of ties to Dick Morris. He replaced Morris when Morris flamed out from toe-nibbling. He's also been working in corporate market positioning, and now heads a 2000-man PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, headquartered in DC, of course.

Being convinced that Microsoft is evil, I was disturbed to read that they are a big client of Penn's company. I hope this doesn't mean too many pro-MS acts in office if Clinton wins. He also ran Blair's reelection campaign, and Windows was chosen for a frigate control application it's utterly unsuited for and a British medical app that MS' privacy record makes me wonder about.

It looks to me like Penn's mostly been pushing Clinton to follow a conservative strategy to hang on to the lead that's been Clinton's for years now.

Recently, as Obama's campaign's been spiking, Penn seems to have been following the tried-and-true third-party nastiness strategy while, as Todd pointed out, keeping the campaign's hands lily-clean.

So far, I'm seeing no sign of the kind of personal pushing to the edge that Bush/Rove dealt to McCain and Kerry.

Santa Claus Visit Application

You'll need this if you have a kid. Hat tip, Profesora.

Is Air Force Above Today's Primary Military Mission?

As a followup to a series of postings suggesting having COIN-support aircraft, Stephen Trimble at DefenseTech blogs a recent pairing of apparent Air Force (sort of) and Congressional interest. So, what's COIN? It IS the primary way of fighting in our recent and ongoing wars.

The sign of Air Force interest, according to his quotes from an article in Air & Space Power Journal:

1. The USAF should remain focused on the non-COIN fight and let its lesser-funded coalition partners do the COIN dirty work.

That's saying, institutionally, we think it's unimportant and we don't want to do it ourselves; we'll deign to let an ally shoulder this unimportant load.

COIN's short for CounterInsurgency. Strictly speaking, COIN's about tactics of dealing with insurgencies like al-Qaeda in Iraq. But, becuase of the way politics has fallen in the Pentagon, it's in effect also taken on a usage (which Stephen Trimble also seems to be using) of countering nasty, spread-out groups using asymmetric warfare techniques against us.

Let's say you just happen to be a country that's fallen down on doing occupation duties and militia/gangs are terrorizing the country. Well, doing for the country's gangs would be another example of COIN at work beyond the aforementioned al'Qaeda fight. As is/was the fight against the Taliban and other Afghan Islamofascists. Basically, it's a fight against enemies that will attack in small numbers without armor, to accomplish attacks against people, infrastructure, or terror targets.

Trimble suggested that Air Force already has a promising plane profile that could be used as a start - antipersonnel aircraft, which are designed to orbit slowly around battlefields and help kill enemy infantry and other unarmored targets. Interestingly, that same kind of plane also would've been handy in Kosovo if it'd been used; I've never understood why not. It'd also be handy in other genocide prevention missions.

I'd go farther than Trimble - as I see it, MOST new aircraft should be specialized for that mission, since variants of that task are the most common thing the US Armed Forces do, by far, today.

Very, very little flying time in recent wars is spent on air superiority or bombing high-tech targets, which is what most USAF planes are designed for, and the fraction is headed down over time. The numbers of advanced air superiority planes in likely opponents is also decidedly down. We need to keep SOME perpetually up-to-date air superiority and high-tech bombers to outnumber opponents' arsenals, but that'd still let you have probably most aircraft be more on this time's real mission.

The article does offer two defenses for it. The first is that there's disagreement on what a COIN-support craft should be. That's true, but it was also true of every aircraft USAF's ever built. The other reason given is,

First, the USAF has operated with some success in COIN environments before but has lost the peculiar capacities associated with COIN following drawdowns or conversions after each conflict. This is an unsurprising result, given the fact that budgets for unused tools are a luxury not easily afforded in any era.

Yep, if you don't build anything and place bureaucratic constraints like in Kosovo, you won't use it. So true! But to me the recent history of war suggest we actually have more need for this than for JSF, say.

Why Big Research Labs Are Obsolete

This article was motivated by the appearance of a muddled and clueless New York Times article New York Times article about the loss of corporate research labs.

The real fact on the ground is that big corporate research labs are obsolete. That's because it's pretty rare for the company that finances the research to be able to take advantage of more than a handful of the new ideas. There are two reasons for that. Maybe the most important is that the management of companies big enough to have research labs is rarely agile enough to go spinning off new divisions actually ept at the new thing. That's why Xerox never made money on GUI tech, and why AT&T had the worst commercial UNIX.

The other reason, less well known, is that the researcher usually needs to be personally involved for commercialization to succeed; until very recently, lab hires were told they would stay in research.

Meanwhile, universities do as well or better at turning out supporting ideas and enlarging what high-tech companies can do in that kind of hit-or-miss way. And supported grad students are often persuaded by the support and the fact of related fields to at least take a look at joining them. But companies still have to overcome alot of internal hierarchicalness, NIH, and other problems to take best advantage of hires with new ideas. Mostly, companies get smart people with their ideas left on the floor.

As Ford's Model T, Intel, and a host of other companies have shown, innovators creating startups is the most efficient way to get ideas in customers' hands by far.

Boston Globe Endorses McCain and Obama

Overview article here, longer McCain article here, longer Obama article here.

Open Chimney Thread

The Profesora and I have read plenty of Victorian-era novels, but we had no idea that the profession of chimney sweep was still around in this world, until we had our new house inspected. The inspector said the chimney and dryer vent were clogged, and suggested hiring a chimney sweep. So we did.

They showed up early last week with big, loud vacs, fireplace-sweeping equipment, a ladder for climbing to the roof, and a Victorian-style top-hat on one head. Fortunately for their lungs and ours, there's alot less visible charcoal dust in the job now.

Our chimney is now open for business.

How are things going with you guys?

Men from Massachusetts

Romney = Kerry? I tend to agree.

Civ Helping Get Uninterested Kids Involved: More On Civ As Game Of The Free

Kurt Squire wrote about the impact of an after-school Civilization club.

This is my second Civ post. I've written before on why I think Civ is better than Chess, especially for free societies.

My favorite quotes from the article:

. . . 2) Extends back into the home lives of students, as they start to play the game at home, check out history books from the library, and watch the History channel. . . .

Perhaps more importantly, they all have developed new interests, including career aspirations, in part, as a result of these experiences. One wants to become a game designer-- another a Senator, for example.

Get me a barf bag

Story.

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Sen. Hillary Clinton's national and New Hampshire co-chairman resigned from the campaign today, one day after raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama's use of marijuana and cocaine when he was in high school.

PENN: Well, I think we have made clear that the -- the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.

UPDATE: The video.

Programmers And Clothing, er, ?Style?

Justin Etheridge posted on elements of computer programmer "style," but doesn't explain what he shows us. I'll connect the dots a bit. Hat tip, and an interesting post in its own right from Virginia Postrel.

The big thing to keep in mind is that many of us consciously like to look as different from expectation about the way management and people who sell our programs look. There were probably several independent reasons this developed, but now it's the way it is. Interestingly, the greater the computer programmer or scientist, the slacker he's likely to look. Indeed, dressing up conventionally is likely to drop expectations about a programmer.

There are really two schools within that above observation. One school tries to be comfortable - e.g., flannel in cold air conditioning and cold places. The other mirrors ideas of formal work dress by dressing as badly as possible (e.g., holes in shirts and shorts).

Ignorance at the highest levels

Link.

Still looking for that last-minute Christmas gift for White House press secretary Dana Perino? May we recommend a gift certificate for the forthcoming book on the Cuban Missile Crisis by our colleague Michael Dobbs, "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War," due out next summer?

Appearing on National Public Radio's light-hearted quiz show "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me," which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

A Homebuyer's Perspective: Crisis Helped Us

The subprime real estate crisis has certainly made life harder for many, especially construction workers. My heart goes out to all those who have had and will have problems.

But for us, well, there's no question in my mind that we got a better deal because of it. Of course, the seller's less happy. OTOH, said seller did turn a healthy return on investment despite that.

I've always only been mildly concerned about the crisis in terms of big economic trouble spot, because it only involves a smallish downside potential: relatively little money and relatively little of the overall housing stock are involved, and it's likely that most of even those units's mortgaes will stay OK. And, the misery is mostly widely distributed, meaning there are few who are really going to suffer badly. Probably the worst will be in the usually poorly-paid construction workers who lose jobs. Those jobholders have surely been worried ever since it's become clear that a housing bubble was on.

Once when I was between jobs, a Mad Cow case was found in the US, and I was hoping for a drop in beef prices. A West Wing show had recently aired with a major crisis developing as a result, so I had my hopes up. Beef hardly budged, sigh. Shows you what the media knows....

GOP Coalition Concerns

Dana Blankenhorn wrote an interesting article about the GOP candidates' coalition-raising problems. Not being a Republican, and not really understanding the politics on that side, I've been looking for something like that.

Of course, being a Republican, he fails to understand the D side in his post. He says we'll work for anybody. No. What IS true is that we have one and a half front-runners who have constructed coalitions properly. We'd come together and work for Hillary or Obama.

This is important because big coalitions are what politicians must construct to win. It's what politics is all about. If you see or hear from a politician, he's trying to add you to his coalition. The biggest coalition on election day generally wins.

CompUSA Closure: YAY!!

CompUSA is out of business. There is much rejoicing on Slashdot.

I'm not surprised. A few months ago, the one near me lost my business permanently by refusing to take a return on reasonable terms. And they were always taking forever to get anything done, according to the thread because of a horrible business computer system.

Open Kids And Books

Today's baby first is his first illness. SO FAR, it's just occasional coughing bouts.

I'm currently reading The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama, by Thomas Laird, a history of Tibet intended for general Western audiences, starting from the Dalai Lama's point of view. I got it because there's a Tibetan Buddhist in my family, and it's so far pretty good at explaining Tibetan history, politics of Tibet in China, and Tibetan Buddhists, all to non-Buddhists like me (I'm an atheist). It's especially good at explaining the Tibetan Buddhist point of view. Half to a third of the Dalai Lama's quotes activate my bullshit detector, but that's OK, because I'm reading to see how he thinks, not looking for a manifesto.

Why The New Iranian Nuclear Halt Is Plausible To Me

If Iran was a simple dictatorship of President A., I'd be deeply dubious. But it's not. It's an oligarchy - its constitution has the same kind of division of powers as ours, except the power's differently and even more divided. No elected official (even by the wimpy standards of Iranian elections) is given all that much trust.

That means alot of President A's rhetoric is exactly that. For example, even if he really is stupid enough to want to ignore MAD and launch missiles at Israel (fat chance), he'd have to convince a few other smart people as well (way not happenin').

In particular, it's known that there is a substantial body of powerful people in Iran who don't want Iran diplomatically isolated and/or facing sanctions. It's certainly possible that one or more of them is/are the decider on this issue. nc

Yes, it is certainly possible that they've been misled by deliberate misinformation. Welcome to intelligence....

Speaking of intelligence, we had fun in the DC Spy Museum while we were there - it's great stuff.

Done Closed House

The Profesora and I are officially homeowners now.

...finally have to learn how plumbing works, sigh....

Totten: Surge Looking OK

Totten writes that the Surge is looking OK.

DC is still pretty alarming, though. There's one improvement - wide understanding that things are getting better, but still no clue why. Petraeus has probably collected more enemies.

Middle East Peace Hopeless Without Post-Zionism

As I see it, peace between Israel, Palestine, and other Israeli neighbors is hopeless without some ideas from Post-Zionism being applied. It needs to be at least in Israeli leadership and summit participants. But the current ruling generation in Israel seems are living in utter denial of this kind of thinking. And, of course, it's much worse on the Palestinian side. Nor have I heard Rice or Blair talking much along these lines. We need at least one more generation while these ideas pick up steam both in Israel and outside.

The sad fact is that the creation of Israel was, by modern ethical standards, an evil act. It was ethnic cleansing - the Palestinians were mostly pushed out of their turf, with all the accompanying ills that accompany such, whether done by the UN or us taking over Indian territory, or Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo. It even continued until recently, via the settlements. And there is plenty more.

Zionism is also unethical by modern standards. It inherently gives special treatment in Israel to one special group - Jews - especially to Ashkenazi Jews. It treats Arabs and Arab-looking people as second-class to maintain a notion of security for Israel (the results of said security policy have hardly been encouraging, but it continues unabated).

Another way Zionism breaks liberal standards is priviledging Judaism. Like the British priviedging Anglicanism, it is a sore at the heart of the state and Judaism in Israel. The state is growing more divided between secular and orthodox Judaism variants.

Alot of Palestinian anti-Zionism has an even worse record, and is even less interested in justice. Eliminating Israel or executing the Palestinian notion of the Right of Return - which includes returning all lands - would compound injustice rather than fix it. The world is well past an eye for an eye.

So, what should be done? Well, having two states isn't enough, because it only gets at one of the roots of the problem. The original ethnic cleansing sin of the creation of Israel must be admitted and expiated in some fashion. Israel must give over its internal and external racisms, just as the United States did. Encouragement of moderacy and democracy in Palestine must continue. Judaism's special privileges must be reduced. Some of these are already well in progress. But good luck getting an admission of wrongness in Israel's creation from Israel's leaders.

Chavez Hasn't Hacked Venezuelan Voting Machines

Two nice surprises came today - Chavez' loss in his constitution-tossing try, and the implication that he hasn't been hacking the uncheckable voting machines after all, as I've speculated before.

!Que bueno!

Open Thread: in DC Burbs