Centerfield

Irish Blogger Charged For Blogging

"Belfast blogger Alan Murray is facing charges of harassment for writing about public figures on his blog".

Friday open thread

I will start with this hilarious video.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Headline: Obama and Clinton Together in Unity

Whoever thought to put Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in Unity, NH is freaking brilliant.

Speaking of freaking brilliant... Barack Obama would have to be crazier than a s%*& house rat not to put HRC on the national ticket. We would be talking about a 45 - 48 state landslide and a political mandate that could lead to energy independence, dramatic healthcare reform, immigration reform, and many other accomplishments that have been sunk in gridlock for the last twenty years.

I got to admit, the thought of it geeks me out a bit. Maybe even enough to vote for Senator "I was for public financing before I was against it." Yes, after years of hating her guts, I have become quite the "Hillblazer. " I found her push at the end of the nomination process to be courageous, heoroic, and down right inspiring.

There Is No EPA Document, There Is No EPA Document

The White House refused to accept an EPA response to a SCOTUS decision it had lost. The slashdot first post, by Inglix the Mad, says it all:

Frankly I'm pretty sure my boss would give me the sack for that sort of BS.

Only The Party In Power Need Apply

Yeah, it's always been easier for the party in power to get jobs, but this, I think, takes us back to 19C standards. Since around 1900, there's been a notion of the professional bureaucracy, to be filled by the most professionally qualified candidates rather than the most, er, politically qualified.

I think historians will be arguing where on the list of worst 10 Presidents he belongs. I don't think he's as bad as Nixon, since there's no evidence he tried to hack democracy. Although, something along those lines, unverifiable eVote machines, was foisted on us during his first term, I see no evidence Bush made tha happen, though. Before 9/11, I don't believe Bush would've let this happen.

Prosecutions?

Now that subpoenas have dragged corroborating evidence that the high leadership did want torture, do you think there should be prosecutions of Rumsfeld, Sanchez, and/pr other responsible officials?

How about against Bush after he leaves office on charges of breaking the FISA laws?

Can McCain claim the Ron Paul votes?

Politico's Ben Adler wrote an article on the subject. It has a good comment thread.

The answer looks to me to be, no more than a handful. I'm mostly seeing an "anybody-but-McCain" coalition, including one Texan who says he's voting for Obama unless TX looks like an easy Obama win (fat chance, alas), in which case he'll write Paul in.

Why We Worry About China Too Much

The bottom line is that they'll have to become enough like us not to be a worry to catch up with us, and even so, take a while to do so. But we do love to worry about China - it was selling papers and books like hotcakes a hundred years, and it still sells, albeit in forms relevant to the times. The basic reason, of course, is that it's the most populous country on earth. This post is motivated by an interesting Drezner post on Chinese soft power.

One reason we worry today is that their economy's growing very quickly. If you take the last few years' trend line and project it, you'd have to worry. But that would be a stupid way to bet. MANY developing countries have a similar kind of GDP trend line; it's much easier to improve quickly when you're starting with very little per person. Their growth is almost certainly going to level off alot as they grow more developed; that's what's happened to every country so far.

China had been static and increasingly punching below its weight, population-wise, since its political unification in the late Middle Ages until Deng Xiaoping started capitalism going in China. Now they're catching with a swiftness that does them credit. Now they're building some interesting things (rail to Tibet, Three Gorges Dam, pebble-bed nuclear reactors), and even able to copy and adapt moderately advanced Western designs like Red Flag Linux and the 90s-vintage MIPS R3000, an innovative, very widely-used and deeply versatile processor chip at the time.

One reason why China's improved so much is that it's now an oligarchy instead of a monarchy or dictatorship as it was before Deng came to power. Like most oligarchies, they have mediocre soft power; they're more trustworthy than conquerors like Saddam Hussein, but nobody expects Chinese occupying troops to move out of places just because they aren't wanted, for example.

Chinese culture and lack of human rights is leading toward big R&D disadvantages. A good scientist or engineer must put facts and scientific method first, even if if conflicts with what seniors, elders, or Party say. Although I can't find the links now, I've read evidence-filled articles suggesting that that question is a real problem for China. To give them credit, they are improving the situation by strengthening insitutions and convincing far more of their foreign-trained scientists and engineers to return. And, your R&D works alot better if scientists and engineers don't have to worry about what happens to their families if they contradict doctrine or write too much about SARS, say.

So far, there's nothing like our Silicon Valley - there are plenty of small startups and a fair amount of capital, but no startups are innovative in the sense Google and Intel have been. And, so far the successful startups have been run by people popular with higher authority, suggesting a limitation of the pool. Plus, you still have to worry about keeping palms greased, though many feel China's less corrupt than India.

Although FABS are built in China, for several reasons, no chip company trusts China with their highest-end, leading-edge FABs. And, so far, Indian-based computer research labs have been outperforming Chinese-based ones.

Yet another boring conclusion I come to about China is that they aren't aggressive. Yeah, they do get plenty of aggressive nationalistic rhetoric out the door. But so do all non-democracies, and even some democracies (hi, George II!). They're quite volatile on Taiwan and Tibet, but the day they get aggressive like Mao was, I expect to see Burma fall to China, since Burma has no friends atall. They're the good ol' canary in the mine, as far as I'm concerned.

Only one oligarchy in history has ever kept up with economic/research/soft power of democracies. That was the Roman Republic toward the end 'til its fall. They did it by adding democracy to their constitution. I think China will have to do that very same thing to keep up with the democracies.

Newseek Slams "Obama's Lame Excuse"

Newsweek calls Obama out:

Obama announced he would become the first presidential candidate since 1972 to rely totally on private donations for his general election campaign, opting out of the system of public financing and spending limits that was put in place after the Watergate scandal.

One reason, he said, is that "John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs."

We find that to be a large exaggeration and a lame excuse. In fact, donations from PACs and lobbyists make up less than 1.7 percent of McCain's total receipts, and they account for only about 1.1 percent of the RNC's receipts.

Bam!

More analysis if you click on the link.

I think the consultant's are taking over the Obama campaign. They better start letting Barack be Barack. The guy before the political machine was way more appealing. I wanted to vote for the former, but have grown bored with the latter.

Open Thread: What Annoyed You Most Reading Books?

One thing that particularly gets to me is when authors ignore the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction. I mean, it's only been keeping us from nuclear annihilation for decades - who's ever heard of it?

One guilty party whom I've fortunately been able to forget wrote a LONG book built up entirely around the question of whether two star systems can avoid annihilating each other, trying to build up suspense for hundreds and hundreds of pages...if you haven't already figured out that the answer's MAD by page 10.

Another is all Pournelle's Codominium-world novels, all the way through his Monarchy In Space novels. It still annoys me because it's still kind of a guilty pleasure to reread. But they get more annoying each time. The series starts with the US and USSR deciding to avoid nuclear war by going together on occupying and dominating the entire world, at a cost of most American freedoms and quality of rule (only one party's allowed to have real existence) and giving up most R&D. I could see the USSR going for it - but why us? We already hadn't fried for decades when the first CoDo stories were written. MAD never comes up in any in-book speeches (!!!). When the CoDo's falling apart, every smart man in sight believes it MUST mean nuclear war, and it does. But why?

No, it's all excuses for authoritarianism.

What makes YOU want to throw books against walls?

Obama to Opt Out of Public Financing

Senator Obama, who claims to support public financing of political campaigns:

"If I am the Democratic nominee... I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election,"

is now only going to accept private donations.

"Today, Barack Obama has revealed himself to be just another typical politician who will do and say whatever is most expedient for Barack Obama... The true test of a candidate for president is whether he will stand on principle and keep his word to the American people. Barack Obama has failed that test today, and his reversal of his promise to participate in the public finance system undermines his call for a new type of politics."

-Jill Hazelbaker, Communications Director
McCain for President

I agree.

Simply the best (ever)

Link.

Tiger Woods is done for the year, but not without one last major that he said might have been his best ever. Woods explained why Wednesday when he revealed he will have season-ending surgery to repair a torn ligament in his left knee that he injured 10 months ago.

He also suffered a double stress fracture of his left tibia two weeks before the U.S. Open, ignoring doctors' advice to take six weeks off to let it heal. And he still won the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, going 91 holes over five days on a knee that was getting worse.

During my lifetime I have seen many remarkable athletes do remarkable things. Ali, Gretzky, Jordan, Brady, Bonds*. But Tiger is the most remarkable of all.

DARPA Mismanagement

DARPA seems to've been badly managed for the last eight years. Especially, see Ben's and grad_stud's comments on the thread.

Why Dictatorships Are Bad

I wonder if many exponents of John-Yoo-like ideas of indefinite executive power have read and thought about the implications of Fiasco for their ideas.

Histories of dictatorships and monarchies make depressing reading because

Most Kings and Dictators aren't up to the job, And all it takes is one to make alot of people unhappy.

Legislatures often bring vital issues forward and can be big helps, like the Truman Hearings on military contracts in WWII.

The easier it is to make laws, the worse they are.

Worst, the leaders grow more corrupt and more troublesome to their people as time goes on.

Those points should sound like recent history to you. For example, Bush' absolutism after 9/11 made him unwilling to listen to the experts about interrogation or war, much to our cost in national honor (torture, WMD in Iraq), and in Coalition and especially Iraqi lives.

Posted by Jon Kay at 02:01 AM | Comments (0)

Ageism Much Bigger This Election Cycle Than Sexism Or Racism

This cycle I think I've been observing a substantial amount of one particular prejudice, and much less of others: Ageism. Though even that's been just in a minority, I think.

Too many older voters wrote offensive comments to the effect that Obama's hopelessly inexperienced and green. But we've seen how both JFK and Nixon ruled, and it wasn't the older man with the longer resume who did better. Nor is Obama inexperienced, though he's certainly less experienced than Clinton.

Too many younger voters, especially Obama supporters, posted offensive comments to the effect that Hillary and McCain were too old to do the job. Never mind that Clinton ran a good campaign. These posters weren't interested in realities.

And now, I think, we're a similar dynamic heat up between McCain and Obama supporters.

I do belong to a school of thought that McCain isn't up to the Presidency THIS term. But I've said I thought had more to do with the stresses of the 2000 campaign than age, and I base that line of thought on observation. In 2000, he a major idea for reform, unlike today, and he was better at speechmaking and dealing with mistakes.

Ageism is bad, but imagine if this election had been fought, say, the first election after Obama was born. No black or female candidate would've had any kind of chance, of course. I do think we're getting better, albeit slowly.

UPDATE: Whoopsie! No, the title shouldn't be, as it started with, "anage templates, set configurations, etc." Though, now my brain's looking for a post that would justify that title.

Quick Stuff

The House of Lords has gone all bloggy. More here, at Slashdot. What do they call their blog? Why, of course, Lords of the Blog.

Toyota has has plans to release a plug-in hybrid by 2010 and some interesting other initiatives, most interestingly a battery research initiative. Right now, batteries are the biggest thing keeping plug-in cars from going much below $40000, a serious obstacle to general adoption, though a decreasing barrier given rises in gas pries. BUT, Toyota has much more volume, more cheap car engineering ability, and their battery initiative. I'm very curious to see what price level(s) Toyota comes out at.

On the flip side of the coin, here's some decidedly less-likely efficient car tech. The slashdot summary has the right conclusion - if you believe Reuters got what the company's saying right, something I have more reservations about. If Reuters does have it right, though, I call it fraud.

Open Kidblogging: Just Call Me A Toddler Now

The Kid's always shown alot of interest in walking. But for the last month, he's been obsessed. When we were on our trip, he had serious toddler envy, and was watching any and every kid who could walk that he saw for pointers.

His first birthday was also this last week. But I'd say he cares alot more about the walking than the party and presents.

Some walking:

RIP: Tim Russert

Bummer. Somehow the tragedy seems magnified to me because he is going to miss seeing how this election story turns out. Just last night I heard him say that "we are in for a wild and exciting ride" between now and November. I'm sorry you are going to miss it, Tim.

'68 For The GOP?

I've been seeing alot of the wishful theory that it's '68 all over again for us Dems. Well, I can see why you'd like '68, since the man who emerged as victor was picked by Republicans, Nixon's men (by eliminating his centrist opposition pretty nastily).

But I can't help thinking the the shoe's more on the other foot. The GOP convention itself will be bigtime split, more than a bit on the issue of war (sound familiar?). This time it's the GOP that's mislead us into a stupidly lead war, though not one quite so strategically hopeless as Vietnam, fortunately, And it's added a gratuitous taking away of our rights on top.

I see no reason to expect violence, but I do forecast confusion and frustration and protests and counterprotests aplenty.

Republicans have my sympathy. This year is for you the way '04 was for us.

General Election: Opening Statement

I joined this blog 4 years ago to discuss the presidential race. After that election, my participation waned but I tried to stay in touch. But now we have the most exciting election of my lifetime and it is time to re-engage.

Thankfully, I forget 99.999% of punditry within 48 hours of reading it. But this one has stuck with me since January, so I bring it back now:

Columbia, South Carolina — I went to Barack Obama’s rally here, on Sunday night, with a Republican friend who had never seen the Illinois senator in action before. Watching the crowd of more than 3,000 fill up the convention center, watching the people send up waves of energy to Obama, and watching him play off that energy in a speech that was one of the best political performances anyone has seen this year, my Republican friend said, simply, “Oh, s—t.” He recalled the scene from Jaws, in which the small seaside town’s sheriff realizes how big the shark he’s tracking truly is, and says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” What my friend didn’t have to say was that he was deeply worried that Republicans just don’t have a bigger boat.

I must admit, at the time that article was one that started the adjustment in my thinking about the real possibilities of an Obama candidacy. At the time, I thought I was fairly solid for McCain, but I was open to revisiting that position. Minnesota held its caucus on Super Tuesday and we opted to go to the Democratic caucus and vote for Obama because we thought that he would need our help here (which was wrong) and McCain would not need our help here (which was wrong).

So what are the real possibilities of an Obama presidency? First, we get $800 trillion in immediate goodwill from around the world. I would like to hear from everyone who predicted that a black guy with a middle name of "Hussein" might be elected POTUS just 7 years after 9/11 and 4.5 years after pulling Saddam out of a spider-hole. Second, we get a potential for things to get done domestically. Of course, "get done" is meaningless without specifics. That is where I start to get nervous (again) about Obama.

So what are the risks of an Obama presidency? I have two inter-related concerns. First, Obama is raw when it comes to national security and, second, if he wins he is likely to have comfortable majorities in both the House and the Senate. I'm not sure that I like the idea of a giving the Democrats complete control to do whatever they want over both national security and domestic policy.

It sucks to live in a democracy and have to sort through this stuff.

Quick hits

• Laura Bush is classy.
• By far the best show on cable news is Race for the White House on MSNBC. It is not even close.

My Bush Historical Grade

It's WAY too early, of course. It seems to take fifty years for this to become clear, partly because it'll take that long for us to know if Iraq is an W or L, mostly because partisan feeling and disappointment take a long time to fade.

That said, in my books, Bush was scraping a bare A- (biggest problem in my books was uncaringness about budget imbalance) until 9/12. After that, I give him an 'F'. After that, he stopped caring about facts, being willing to concede mistakes, and started to look for excuses to push his power as far as possible (see his immediate attempts to create a KGB-like spy agency to spy on the citizenry), and make it as unaccountable as possible (see his NSA efforts and Blackwater).

He also messed up both wars by letting bad things happen to people who dared to point out occupations aren't optional for successful invasions, that lots of money would be needed for the war, or pointed out things were getting worse in Iraq once the inevitable cycle of violence started spiraling. Although he has done alot to rescue the situation by sending Petraeus, he has no idea why it worked, gave absurd timeframes, and gave him what I'm tempted to call political anticover, it was so clumsy.

After 4 1/2 years in office, he additionally fortunately lost his eptness at pursuing his aims in office. Now, well, as an example, I give him >80% credit for the Columbian FTAA failure. Telling Congress it HAS to pass a bill has always been a good way to make it fail, and it doesn't help when your biggest argument for a FREE TRADE BILL is security and it's a Dem Congress.

Dignity More Important Than Death?

That's what the President's Bioethics Council effectively says. A few years ago, there were rightie-centrist-side grumbles about the Bioethics Council. Instapundit has been unhappy for awhile.

I'd go beyond Pinker on this with respect to VOLUNTARY lack of dignity - can you think of any great things any of us have ever accomplished without losing dignity? Imagine if our Revolutionary generation had decided dignity was more important than rebelling against the UK. The Continental Congress would've been full of speeches on not being ready to live with year after year of scampering from British armies, and we'd still be British subjects. No, the Bioethics Council can keep its precious dignity.

Of course, involuntary loss of dignity, like boarding a plane or being tortured, or having panties stuck on Iraqi prisoners' heads, is a different matter.

Of course, if anybody on the President's Bioethics Council had ever done anything important, this might be more obvious to them.

Gina Dalfonzo of The Point actually defends the Bioethics Council:

Pinker tries to persuade us, with some silly and weightless examples, just how impossible it is to determine the true meaning of dignity, to set up his contention that "dignity is a phenomenon of human perception."

Ms Dalfonso really sees nothing in the comparison between Kass' standards of dignity and the majority public-ice-cream-lovers? I mean, what's so hard to see about it?

That, no doubt, is why he can't see why members of the President's Council consider such practices as embryonic stem-cell research and "therapeutic cloning" an affront to human dignity. If other humans declare that using embryonic humans for their own ends is okay according to their own notions of human dignity, where's the problem?

I declare that using embryos to save children from nasty and fatal genetic diseases via preimplantation genetic diagnosis and IVF is OK. That's because I'm pro-LIFE. Those childrens' lives matter more than embryos do. Embros are only a faint potential of human life; the childrens' lives are the real thing, right now. Would you rather see human corpses than dead embryos? Dignity has nothing to do with it.

Were FDR's 3rd And 4th Terms Worthwhile?

This post was inspired by my visit to the FDR library.

I probably would've voted against FDR for his third term, because I think term limits are vital barriers against corruption and dictatorship.

But, you know, he promised he'd take advantage of his experience in office to be a better President when war broke out. And he delivered the bacon. He cleaned up the highest military ranks of people there on seniority rather than talent, and made sure there were ept people in their places. He even outdid Lincoln, because he had more time before the war in office, and knew who was good and who was bad. And his spell as Asst to the Naval Office gave him experience to immediately understand big strategery.

Whaddya ya think? Was it worth it?

Friday open thread

D-Day edition.

Bush SWIFT Mistake: Mebbe Misusing Our Helpers Was A Bad Idea?

Since reading the news about SWIFT being used to pursue terror via bank tranfer information, I've been afraid that the Bush Administration's unaccountable and harsh overuse of SWIFT would come back to haunt us. Now my fears seem to have acquired more material. SWIFT, according to the Economist, is building a new data center. I'm less than astonished that it's NOT going to be located in the US or UK, but in Geneva, where arbitrary subpoenas won't reach. No doubt access will become far more complicated for us. Thanks alot, Bushie Boy!

I've long felt and blogged that I thought the ability to follow and tear down financial links via SWIFT's been THE most powerful antiterror mechanism the Bush Administration's found and used. We''ve seen Al'Qaeda go from being able to kill thousands and topple the WTC and influence elections, down to killing hundreds, down to killing only tens outside Iraq and Afghanistan. I call it deglobalization. What other govt method can claim anthing like that kind of record?

Thanks alot, Bushie Boy, for causing trouble with the one really effective anti-terror method your guys found.

Question of the day

Link.

Barack Obama will soon become the presumptive Democratic nominee, and there is little doubt that Hillary Clinton will endorse him. The big question is whether she will campaign hard for Obama among constituencies where she can help him. Put another way: Will she choose to be Ronald Reagan in 1976 or Gerald Ford in 1980?

The outcome of the election could depend on the answer.

You can treat it as either a multiple choice or an essay question.

Why Privatized Military. Private Police, and Plans For Iraq All Failed

All these have failed for the same reason.

Consider the fall of Republican Rome. In case you hadn't read about its fall, well, they did, to the biggest private provider of physical force, one Julius Caesar. His army was much bigger than the state's. And that was the end of even the limited freedoms and innovation of that state. In fact, that was really its third fall to such private providers. The Caesars just solidified their advantages at the head of Empire. That was clearly a fundamental bug in their constitution.

To generalize a bit, any state with a weak or nonexistent public army must be vulnerable to blackmail and takeover from whomever commands the biggest force in the state. Roman history shows you can't count on honesty forever. Especially since power and the lust for power both breed corruption.

What happens if you have no internal security / police force? As it happens, also with Republican Rome as the example? Well, it's much the same - vulnerability of citizens to the biggest force in their regions. Most citizens are vulerable to all kinds of roguery and especially gangs. Only the wealthy were secure in Rome. The consequences to the State aren't as bad, but it means only the rich and their friends had the kind of security we take for granted. Others were vulnerable to gangsters, rich people they'd offended. business and political rivals, etc. Non-rich Romans had no real way to political power. We'd have had no Lincoln with that kind of limitation. Starting a business would require lots of ongoing either bribery or security overhead.

Until Petraeus came in, Iraq was another example,, because their police force hadn't been gotten in shape yet. Huge and increasing amounts of turf were ruled by gangs, with spiraling death and rape rates, high bribe overhead, and increasing security uncertainty. Emigration rates were consequently spiraling as well.

The need for providing internal security following invasions is hardly a military novelty, going back thousands of years. I've been inclined to wonder how Wolfowitz and others who abused their positions to punish generals inclined to mention that detail came by that idea.

Whadda YOU think?