Dang, It's Another Year

Happy New Year. For those of us in the events industry it's usually a slow time. We'll see. I got a laugh from the news. Previously the story had been that a Navy Officer on the USS Enterprise was under investigation for tomfoolery. Facts stated, lead line pitched, story due to be deep sixed the next day. Suddenly a JOURNALIST found that some sailors had opened a Facebook page in the officer's defense. Suddenly, as if by magic, it morphed into a raunchy video, salacious innuendos tumbled out in abundance, and lots of play was given to the newsworthiness of Facebook and the current movie about the founder. One might say that the story became an infomercial about a product. No story about which members of the Board of Directors have a percentage of said product. As is always the case, keeping them honest is a slogan and newsworthy is a relative position. Seems to depend on who's dog is in the ring.

The first set of links are two views of WikiLeaks.

• Stirling on Assange: Instead, he’s very like Jerome Kerviel, that obscure French stock trader who stole 5 billion euros without making one dime for himself. Jerome Kerviel, just like Bradley Manning, was a bored, resentful, lower-echelon guy in a dead end, who discovered some awesome capacities in his system that his bosses never knew it had. It makes so little sense to behave like Kerviel and Manning that their threat can’t be imagined.
• Lanier on AssangeA sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid. Another way to put this is that a lot of information made available over the internet encourages players to think as if they had a God's eye view, looking down on the whole system.

The next one I picked not so much for any political insight, but for the sheer fun the reviewer seems to be having in savaging the book.

• Damn Right: Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. from London Review of Books

Links To the full Report of the Bioethics Commission.

• Link Page for Bioethics Report: Bioethics commission delivers synthetic biology report to President Obama (December 16)

Next is an international story with local implications. SF's transportation system went on the clipper card system. In short, everyone that rides a bus, takes a train, or pays a toll can be tracked by a foreign (Israel) company. And just to put whipped cream on the pie, the local transportation companies have agreed to pay any shortfall. How do you think that will work out? Weak encryption here in hacker central. If you want to try your own hand at it, Fries sells card readers for under $110.

• Smart Cards: Taipei’s EasyCard system has been in place since 2001, largely as a means of paying for the subway, bus, taxis and parking. It has also been widely known to use a smartcard system called MIFARE Classic, produced by NXP Semiconductors, the security of which was publicly demonstrated to be broken by CCC members at their annual congress three years ago. Note: S.F. started the Clipper Card System last year. An election year. I'm sure you know what I'm thinking.

Here's a lament for days gone by.

• The Disneyland Dream: But, for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. (Michael Harrington’s exposé of American poverty, “The Other America,” would not rock this complacency until 1962.) The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it permeates “Disneyland Dream” from start to finish.

The last four are bunched together because they interest me, but don't have any common theme.

• Don't Fear China: The belief that values like democracy and liberalism, rather than geo-strategic and economic factors, affect the competition between global powers tends to reflect a post-Enlightenment western bias that supposes the existence of an ultimate universal truth and assumes that history is a continuous ascent towards progress. That march towards progress manifests itself through conflicts between ideals–enlightenment and freedom vs. their opponents–and the people, groups, and nation-states that represent them. That has certainly been a crucial theme in the narrative about foreign policy advanced by neoconservative and liberal ideologues.
• Mosque as Yesterday's News: There can be no single explanation for why a news story of this magnitude disappears. But, given the timeline here, it seems likely that the electoral calendar played a role. National Republicans who used Park51 as a bludgeon against Democrats suddenly were less interested in talking about the project after the election.
• Dissidents and Foreign Policy: ...and it is possible that public hectoring of the Bahraini government would undermine such efforts by embarrassing the Bahrainis and forcing them to issue defiant demands that the U.S. mind its own business. What seems clear is that publicly denouncing a government’s crackdown will not end the crackdown, could intensify it, and might adversely affect U.S. interests in the process. Unless fruitless moral posturing that harms concrete American interests is the goal, I don’t see the point.
• Shock and Waugh: Auberon Waugh hated war. He loathed the pomposity of Western politicians who thought they had a divine right to go around the world intervening in the affairs of sovereign states. Lots of people are calling for the arrest of Tony Blair for war crimes in 2010, but very few were doing so in 1999, when Waugh was. “The charge against Tony Blair is not so much that he took a very stupid decision … or even that his high moral pose may have been a front for ordinary self-importance and power mania, ....

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas. As someone who grew up in the snowbelt, I got a chuckle out of the mess some of our southern cities were in when they got some snow. Upon reflection, I think I was more ammused by the historonics of the weather commentators. Anything to stir up some drama. City governments have come under fire? For what. Not maintaining a fleet of very expensive equipment for something that happens every hundred years and will melt off by morning. Better get the news team to 'vestigatin this dilemma. More on this breaking story when we write it up .. or it rains.

I'm going to start the link-dump with an essay on Americanism, then punch on through pretty quickly. The sun is out for the first time in days and the remainder of my to-do list can be set aside for a few hours.

• What is American: After two hundred years, our democracy appears beleaguered and in need of revitalization. It is expressly the magnitude of our problems that make it possible for some to long for apparently better systems that haven’t a prayer in America. However, revitalization, if it is to occur, must take advantage of resources native to our tradition and, what is just as important, to do so in a native idiom.
• Was Washington a Christian: These founders were most emphatically not modern secularists, and Washington was not an exponent of modern democracy. Our first president was a man of the eighteenth century, who believed in the benefits of property relations and gender-specific education, and, perhaps above all, as he tells us in his Farewell Address as president, in the public need for religious beliefs. In these respects he was little different from the English monarch his countrymen broke from during the Revolution.
• The Evil Empire: What the Obama administration has delivered, of course, is not only the continuation of the policies of the previous three administrations but a profound exaggeration of them. If anything, we suffer more violations of our privacy and civil liberties now than at any time during the Bush administration, all in the name of a national-security state that keeps the populace in its place while perpetuating war abroad.
• Judicial Activism: ones that touch on the broad competing visions of the proper role of government. Striking down a law passed by a democratically-elected legislature is not necessarily “activism.” Nor is upholding a law necessarily “restrained.” It depends on whether or not the law violates the Constitution (and the primary failing I note in left-wing resort to the phrase “judicial activism” is that they ignore this rather significant distinction).
• Iron Dome: The defense establishment is still weighing the balance between the number of radars for the systems to the number of intercept missiles necessary. Different estimates suggest that each intercept missile will cost $40,000.
• What was the Saudi Arms Deal About:A look at the remainder of the Saudi deal indicates that Riyadh has other concerns in mind. The Saudis are also acquiring 190 helicopters. These include 70 Apache Longbows, an upgraded version of the U.S. Army's highly successful attack helicopter which carries, among other weapons, a powerful 30 MM gun and anti-tank missiles. Riyadh is also purchasing 36 AH-6i "Little Bird" light helicopters, which are often used by Special Forces. Finally, the Saudis are buying 72 UH-60 Blackhawks, which are ideal for moving troops into and around combat zones.
• Revolver: The libertarian/conservative rejoinder is that less regulation equals less opportunities for politically-connected firms to hijack the system. As a safeguard against future financial meltdowns, I find this unsatisfying for a number of reasons: First, attempts to describe the roots of the financial crisis solely through the lens of government intervention sound pretty silly. And second, if the regulatory and administrative superstructure of government is fatally compromised by insiders and corporate lobbyists, are we sure we can successfully deconstruct that system from within.
• Start Treaty: A link to the Naval Institute and a subsequent link-through to the text itself. Why bother having some goofy-goober tell you what it means, when you can see for yourself?
• Dirty Underwear: I find it interesting that, despite the furor over the Wikileaks disclosures relating to the military's activity in Iraq, the U.S. government did not come down on him full bore, nor did they assign a team of government lawyers to scour the statute books looking for a way to criminally charge Assange, until it was the State Department and, by extension, the political leadership of the nation that was being embarrassed.
• Two States - No Solutions: At the same time, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Gen. David Petraeus have stated publicly that the ongoing failure of the peace process constitutes a threat to American national security. The despair the Palestinians now feel, and the anger among broader Arab publics, is very dangerous for the United States. Not only al Qaeda, but Hamas and Hezbollah feed on the anger in the Islamic world over the plight of the Palestinians.

---

Added Mon 27, 3:00 PM: I flipped on the news to eat my lunch with, and was treated to a BREAKING NEWS STORY. (yes, the onscreen graphix were all capped) It seems that the wind was blowing snow onto roads that had already been plowed. Great googly-moogly, that must be why they called it a snow storm. Better images are promised for the 5:00 show. I can't wait.

It comes out here

Sunday I worked on the set-up for a salesforce.com convention. The product was, I guess, a cloud based sales something or another. You set up a FB style interface and all your orders, derived from a social networking thing-a ma-bob, flow through a totally secure cloud application, then it zooms around here, does an interactive jiggery-do, and comes out there. To keep everyone's mind on the pitch, Stevie Wonder has a set, Will I Am hosts the party, and the hall was equipped with more Barcos, moving lights, and general whoop-de then I've seen outside a Pink Floyd show. Wi-fi antennas were flown throughout the hall. In addition to their customary use, they streamed a reflection of what was on the stage overlaid with sales graphix and talking points. If some lady with a big hat obscures the projection in front, you can glance down at your laptop to get the juice. I guess I'm showing my age, but I can remember when we had factories and farms and we built things. Now, in the future, we make money by taking in each other's laundry, and big money by providing a cloud app for keeping track of it. The bug in the code, of course, is having to depend on others for the detergent, the washing machine, and the clothes.

The two stories I'm following as I write this are 1) Julian Assange arrested. It seems that about twenty minutes after Forbes announced that WikiLeaks had some dirt on a large American Bank, the muttering about State Security turned into a full-throated roar calling for a non-judicial execution. Of course the timing is only circumstantial and it's really about the Italian Prime Minister's embarrassment over the wording of a single cable. 2) Uncle BomBom has reached another comprimise. The other side wasn't even in the hall, yet he blinked anyway. I guess he needs to stockpile his powder for something, you know, down the road. Then he'll show 'em what for, you bet-cha. Or not. Maybe it's different in the rarified atmosphere of an elite policy maker, but here in prole-world you can only promise, explain, and do damage control for so long, then you need to do the job or loose it. Now for this week's link dump.

On the power to lead;

• Mental Prisoner of the Congress: ....he could say “I’m against cutting Medicare reimbursement rates, but only if it’s paid for.” Repeat that enough times and suddenly it becomes congress’ problem. Congress wants an AMT patch? Fine, then congress needs to pay for it. There are lots of things the President can’t do in the legislative process, but refusing to sign deficit-increasing bills is something he definitely can do.
• Will the GOP Raise the Debt Ceiling: It’s one thing to win an election with a lot of incendiary rhetoric. It’s another thing to actually get things done. And it appears that the new members of the GOP are determined to make obstructionism their bread and butter.

On the power of the people:

• Porno Scanners and Perpetual War: It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
• State's Rights: At present, the only way for states to contest a federal law or regulation is to bring a constitutional challenge in federal court or seek an amendment to the Constitution,” the pair wrote. “A state repeal power provides a targeted way to reverse particular congressional acts and administrative regulations without relying on federal judges or permanently amending the text of the Constitution to correct a specific abuse.

On certain segments of the people and a sudden shrinking of ... numbers during the recent cold snap:

• Overexposed: The exact genesis of this movement is hazy, but most agree it had something to do with the city opening a high-visibility plaza at Castro and Market last year. Among the lunchers, retirees, and shoppers, naked men showed up, too: A construction supervisor named Barry appeared in his fedora and flip-flops — and nothing else. (kinda safe for work)

The kind of thinking that gets you branded as a crazy until it turns out you were right:

• WikiLeaks as Psyop: .. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s speculation that the latest WikiLeaks dump might have been selected to further a foreign agenda. I haven’t seen any evidence that would lead me to think that, but it’s a possibility that has to be considered. The possibility that a domestic interest or intelligence agency could engineer a leak should also be entertained. Manufacturing paper trails is one of the things that “community” does best, after all.

Some writting that caught my eye:

• The Teleology of Vodka: I would not willingly offend the whole Alexander Nevsky choir or five fifths of its audience, but it needs saying that the true end of vodka is not a glass. Vodka, properly speaking, is not really a drink. So used it is more like an excuse—or a carrying device, much as a cigarette is a carrying device for nicotine. For although vodka may please the brain and the bloodstream, it can never fully satisfy the nose or the tongue—and will quite often offend the one and make offensive the other.

A bit of biology news that's getting shunted aside in the Christmas rush:

• NASA finds arsenic based life form: When cooking up the stuff of life, you can’t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. But now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of arsenic into its cellular machinery, and even its DNA, scientists report online Dec. 2 in Science.

A bit of history:

• Merchant Capital: If we now look back on European history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, this assessment seems badly wrong as an historical observation. Merchants and their companies played key roles in the establishment of a world trading system; they actively facilitated the race for colonies by the European powers; and often they played a quasi-military role in suppressing resistance by locals in distant parts of the world.

Which leads to:

• Brookings Institute (pdf): The upshot: The past two decades have seen lower-income metro areas in the global East and South “close the gap” with higher-income metros in Europe and the United States, and the worldwide economic upheaval has only accelerated the shift in growth toward metros in those rising regions of the world. Note: Austin, the highest American city on the list, is # 40, San Francisco is # 133.

I got your Dak Bulgogi right here

I spent Thanksgiving with some friends, including the two above. For a number of years I had cooked for a group of professionals at a TV station. The idea of re-booting the dinner to reflect a busy upscale lifestyle was in the air. Thanksgiving was shortened to turkey day, then t-day. I'm all in favor of fine dining and stretching the envelope, but Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks. T-day and Black Friday precurser sales don't quite transmit that idea properly. As for the two kids, where the heck do they get all that energy? I discovered that being a human jungle gym has its attractions. (the sudden calm during their nap was pretty good too)

On to the link-dump. First is an article about the party system. Others are weighing in and I've seen some advertising regarding a centrist party. We'll see. I, like most people, think Government has shed its governing function and is acting like a business, i.e. we work for it. If fear sells, sell it. If infantile posturing gets you air time ... and so forth.

• Hyper-Polarized Party System: Still, the unending high-decibel partisan warfare of the past decade has led many Americans to look back with nostalgia on the more consensual, if muddled, party system that persisted until the 1970s.

Followed by two links that call into question the congress critters disconnect from daily life.

• A Message from the Voters: (pdf): A 53% majority of registered voters also think that those who came into power
  campaigning on Obamacare repeal should decline their federal health plan, and only a third think they should accept it. Many Democrats have been pushing Republicans to deny their benefits, but among all voters, the pressure is actually by far stronger with Republicans and independents than with Democrats.
• Where's Mine: Harris, who defeated Rep. Frank Kratovil (D) earlier this month, drew unwelcome attention last week when Politico reported that he complained at an orientation session for new lawmakers upon finding out that his government-provided health care coverage would not take effect until February, a month after he takes office.

The next two are about banks. I'm tempted to mutter something about the power behind the throne, but writing the obvious takes too much time.

• The Best Congress Money Can Buy: ...the financial sector has paid little for bringing the world to near-collapse or for receiving the taxpayers’ bailout that was denied to most small-enough-to-fail Americans. The sector still rakes in more than a fourth of American business profits, up from a seventh 25 years ago.
• What Good is Wall Street?: A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment or praising Facebook for its commitment to privacy.

Oh Lordy. Korea. We're gonna win this one by golly. Mess with us and we'll borrow some money and fix your kim chee. Yeah boy, you be gettin' a stern rebuke when we done with you.

• The Tyranny of Metaphor: In the midst of the Korean War, Brogan was not only commenting on Americans' frustration with their inability to prevail decisively against supposedly inferior Chinese and North Korean forces, but also cautioning against other misadventures in which the United States falsely assumed its superpower status assured a military victory in any conflict it chose to fight. Brogan could just as easily have titled his essay The Omnipotence of American Illusion in an echo of Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of true believers. Convictions, the great German philosopher wrote, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
• Why Are We Still In Korea?: We will stand by our Korean allies, says President Obama. And with our security treaty and 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, many on the DMZ, we can do no other. But why, 60 years after the first Korean War, should Americans be the first to die in a second Korean War? Unlike 1950, South Korea is not an impoverished ex-colony of Japan. She is the largest of all the "Asian tigers," a nation with twice the population and 40 times the economy of the North.
• Lunacy His Principal Export: These events may also ultimately be seen as wins for Kim on two other levels. First, the nuclear facility almost certainly required international collaboration. If it turns out that support came in part from, say, Pakistan, already suspected of helping the Koreans develop a nuclear ballistic missile capability, it would be deeply embarrassing and awkward for the United States.
• Stuxnet and N. Korea: While U.S. officials are trying to figure out how to respond to North Korea’s unveiling of a new uranium enrichment plant, there are clues that a piece of malware believed to have hit Iran’s nuclear efforts could also target the centrifuges Pyongyang’s preparing to spin.

And meanwhile we're clearly and decisively taking care of our other loose ends.

• How to Schedule a War: Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

Thanksgiving Week

What a week. TSA feeling up 5 year olds at the airport, while very important congress-critters and their posse slip in the side gate. A shopkeeper in Afghanistan managed to run off with a chunk of American taxpayer's money. With his proven ability to extract profitability, I'll bet that Wall Street head-hunters are looking for his number. April is when the debt ceiling has to be raised or maintained. Some of our new critters have announced an eminent Government shutdown. I feel very safe in predicting that neither their paycheck nor the IRS will be effected. First things first, after all. President Obama took a trip to Asia and the G-20 meeting. One country went so far as to suggest that they would put the needs of their own people before America's Strategic Interests. Great googly moogly!! A world where people tended to their own business - unacceptable. We might be forced to grow our own food and sew our own clothes or make something for trade. (beside debt tranches) I seem to remember something the Greeks were muttering about hubris, or was it Gods, punishment and TV, or maybe cynicism being way too easy. The dumping of links begins.

• Musharraf attempts a comeback: There are certainly countries that promote men like Musharraf, and it's possible he could mount a political comeback - but so few are able to apply authoritarianism correctly, if there is such a thing. If Musharraf has no plans to push back against these internal forces, his usefulness to America seems minor at best.
• Congress Erodes National Security: Congress has also experienced a declining pool of expertise in important foreign policy areas such as arms control, and it remains ill-equipped to prepare the country for coping with the many overlapping foreign policy challenges wrought by globalization, King says. She urges leaders of the new Congress to return to rules of order and emulate some of the ways the executive branch is taking on the cross-jurisdictional challenges, especially the State Department and Defense Department.
• Rising East, Setting West: Add to this the peculiar obsessions of the Washington power elite, with regard to Iran for instance, and you have an unpalatable mix. These all-American fixations are viewed as an inconvenience or worse in Asia, where powerful regional hegemons are increasingly determined to chart their own courses, even if in public they continue to humor a somewhat addled and infirm Uncle Sam.
• Congress Should Defend My Junk: If, on the other hand, Issa were to launch an investigation of TSA, he'd instantly win the media stardom he longs for and would probably win over a good many independents and Democrats (and Atlantic staffers). Think about it: he could call as witnesses some poor 5-year-old kid who got felt up and the kid's furious mom.

The next three are about reducing the Pentagon budget. I'm not sure why I include them, no-one has any real intention of actually doing it. We can't be soft on **place current boogie here**.

• Defense on a Diet: Such agreement is easy enough to find among think-tank academics, especially those employed by institutions that specifically advocate limited government or scrutinize the military-industrial complex. But there’s far less appetite for it on Capitol Hill, especially among the Republican congressmen currently beating their chests about excessive government spending—though Democrats are seldom much better.
• Defending Europe: Europe is not under threat from any nation state that its own armed forces could not dispatch. What's more, it's not clear why Brzezinski is so dismissive about the costs of these garrisons. The U.S. Army was already in the process of consolidating its European bases and drawing down brigades - a process that the Obama administration has halted, at a cost of billions of dollars to the taxpayer.
• Defense Cuts: The idea that we need a defense budget almost 60 percent larger as a share of GDP than a decade ago is ludicrous. While it is true that the wars initiated by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress will impose a financial burden on American taxpayers for many years to come, that isn’t enough to justify spending more than half of the world’s military expenditures. Almost all our NATO allies get by spending well less than half what we spend as a share of GDP.

The last three are a bit of history. The Glen Beck one isn't so much about the gloryhound himself, that's low hanging cherries, but more about how simple sending up a smokescreen to go with those gilt mirrors really is.

• Glen Beck's Myths: Certainly there are features of Progressivism that anyone concerned about centralized power has every right to criticize. But there are problems with how Beck frames his critique. There were different types of Progressives who stressed diverse themes, not all of which can be subsumed under the rubric of “big government.” The connection between Progressivism and modern liberalism is weak.
• Eurasian Time: His current work broadens the canvas by looking at broad temporal patterns of consolidation and turmoil across the full expanse of Eurasia, including Russia, France, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.
• Ghandi's Invisible Hands: Ever since reading Unto This Last, John Ruskin’s 1877 paean to the dignity of manual labor, in South Africa, Gandhi had had a credo to match his Victorian attitude of industriousness. Accordingly, he transformed his ashram into a workshop where each member engaged in substantial amounts of communal service, from working in the community’s kitchen to teaching in the ashram school to cleaning the shared latrines.

But, they have the keys

It's time for another link dump. The Demikins have lost the House to the Republicrats. Both make major mouth noises about change, but I'll bet that the only difference will be in the nomenclature. Freshmen from the recent election already have the plump and self-satisfied, all that remains is a back room with attached office. In other news; Colorado District Attorney Mark Hurlbert has dropped hit and run charges against a Morgan Stanley "wealth manager" who nearly killed a biker in a hit-and-run accident over the summer, citing concern a conviction could hurt the former's earning potential. While the legal industry has always been a pay to play game, I can't remember any participant actually admitting it on paper and personally signing off. In a related story, the TSA has decided the only way to protect our freedoms is with a full body scan or a cavity search. A perusal of the order's language reveals the gropers have legal immunity and the gropees are assumed terrorists until they submit. The loophole, and there's always a loophole, involves government officials, judges, and people that can purchase an expedited boarding arrangement. If you have to check your bank balance before writing a check with more than six zeros, you'll be in the slow line. Forcing the pilots to go through the same procedure seems a bit daft. (unless it's punishment for asking too many questions) A pilot doesn't have to smuggle a bomb aboard, he or she has the keys. As security ritual, pilot searches going beyond biometric I.D. confirmation, have a few logical flaws: as a power ritual... all loyalty to the big Kahuna, he will protect us from *insert current talking point here*. Dang it, I had really hoped that the future would feature jetpacks or transporters, not a distopian scramble for crumbs. I guess I should have read between the lines in history class.

On to the round-up. The first is a bit referring to another search at will plan. The next link might be profitably be compared to Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent from the supposed opposite side of the ideological spectrum. Number three is Larison’s take on the winners of the election.

• War on Commuters: So the probability of an attack just went down, and we can all rest a little easier, right? Wrong! The fact that the FBI was able to bamboozle this fellow into participating in a non-existent scheme has led Metro transit cops to seriously consider riffling through commuters' stuff.
• The Infinitesmial Fraction: Patrick’s recognition of the limits of voting, however, is a spot-on observation that deserves real attention. He describes what Eric Voegelin pithily called the “swindle of consent” and what one of my agrarian heroes, Ralph Borsodi scoffed at as an “infinitesimal fraction.” Patrick’s call for the “common good” puts me in mind of my dream of restoring something resembling a Country Party.
• Leadership They Deserve: The midterm results didn’t represent a dramatic shift in the overall public’s views, but they did confirm that rank-and-file Republicans and movement conservatives are quite happy to enable a party that badly disappoints them every time it is given an opportunity to govern. Four years ago, movement conservatives were looking for the exits and claiming that they as conservatives had nothing to do with those unpopular Republicans. Today, Republican triumph is taken as conservative vindication, and the deeply dysfunctional, unhealthy identification of conservatism with the cause of the GOP has become stronger than ever.

The next set of links fall into the economic pile.

• Control Fraud: Control fraud theory was developed in the savings and loan debacle. It explained that the person controlling the S&L (typically the CEO) posed a unique risk because he could use it as a weapon. ..Link to Black's Paper - .pdf
• How the Founding Fathers Taxed ..: Here’s the shorter: in 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the first issue of Continental dollars. This was to be a true fiat currency, backed only by the faith and credit of the embryonic state. Franklin actually opposed this – arguing instead that the notes should either pay interest or be borrowed back in loans that promised some return. But he was overruled, and then, as he predicted, each run of the printing presses pushed the currency lower.
• The Fall of Meritocracy: That would be fine if Ms Applebaum's portrait of the meritocracy, with universities welcoming high IQ types and allocating them to productive jobs in a thriving society, were accurate. But in fact this triumphalism is oddly timed, to put it mildly. The past few years have seen the best and brightest, obsessed by clever academic models, wreaking havoc in one area after another.

The following are about who the coercion engineers are working for. (jeez, if that doesn’t sound like some sophomore rhetoric, I don’t know what does. This city must be rubbing off on me)

• Shareholder Action?: House and Senate candidates had raised a combined $1.7 billion, and spent $1.4 billion. Fundraising by parties and spending by outside groups brought the total dollar amount raised to $3.2 billion in a time when our nation suffers from an unemployment rate of 9.2% and where the impacts of the near-devastating economic downturn are still being felt.
• Conflict of Interest This study analyzes the conflict of interest that exists when academic financial economists, acting in their roles as presumed objective experts in the media and academia on topics, such as financial regulation, fail to report their private financial affiliations. To conduct the study, we analyze the linkages between academia, private financial institutions and public institutions of nineteen academic financial economists who are members of two groups who have put forth proposals on financial reform. (.pdf)
• Comment on Above: Better to leave the Lights Off

And last, two hacks. One food related and one a RFID trick you might be able to use.

• It has to be illegal: Before the law, refined coumarin was commonly added to commercial foods like cream soda, and used in synthetic vanillin. Extreme concentrations caused liver problems in rats (how unappetizing), and a rather overreaching ban on even natural sources of the compound was put in place. Coumarin has since been found to occur naturally in cinnamon, lavender, licorice, and a host of other commonly eaten plants—all of which would seem to be illegal under the regulation. Coumarin also accounts for the particular smell of fresh-cut grass and of fresh-dried hay.
• RFID Transplantation: As a general note, transplanting RFID chips is a much cleaner solution from both the legal and technical perspective versus cracking the security and programming your own RFID to be compatible with the existing payment system. While many of the security systems used in RFID are already broken or have serious known vulnerabilities, I can’t think of any country where the authorities would take kindly to you doing it.

Philosophical aether

It's Monday already. Fleet Week 2010 is taking all my time lately. The picture above is the first deliveries to Pier 30-32. Today Al and I spent the day helping to mount antennas on Pier 35. Just to help out, the monitor on my laptop started to flicker, then got rather artistic, then simply gave up the ghost. Over time, I've installed so many mods, both physical and soft, that I think the poor baby is farpotshket. That's a roadie term, borrowed from Yiddish, meaning one too many layers of duct tape. As long as I'm muttering about my computer, here are two links about what others are doing with theirs.

• The New Hacker Frontier: Wireless tire pressure monitoring systems, which also were touted as a way to increase fuel economy, communicate via a radio frequency transmitter to a tire pressure control unit that sends commands to the central car computer over the Controller-Area Network (CAN). The CAN bus, which allows electronics to communicate with each other via the On-Board Diagnostics systems (OBD-II), is then able to trigger a warning message on the vehicle dashboard.
• Avatars in the workplace: Walk the halls of any large business over the last decade or two and you will have seen most of the workers “living on the screen,” joining in the vast and intricate world of modern commerce made possible by the Internet. Look over their shoulders and you will see that some of these workers are not just living on the screen but, in a sense, in the screen. They are immersed in elaborate virtual worlds as avatars, on-screen identities that can be controlled to produce some sort of movement, gesture, and speech.

The next two links are about writing. I chose the first one because it is one of the best examples of null content I've seen all week. You're all set to R&R down at the deep end of the philosophical pool when you realize that the author hasn't said a darn thing. My personal bug-a-bear is the concept of a higher morality. Higher than what? How much higher? (3 feet 9 inches) What kind of philosophical aether did you spin to provide the metric. It sounds a lot like the dreaded relativity that was dismissed in the first paragraph.

• How do ideas have consequences: The intellectual bubble of a false, relativist understanding of freedom casts a shadow over our whole society and profoundly affects the terms of moral and political debates. So in a way it is everywhere. But if we limit ourselves to fighting its effects piecemeal we will often end up shadow-boxing, lunging at an elusive target that may seem to slip away only to reappear in more subtle and virulent forms.
• Article about a scientific paper: In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?"

Here's a bit of history. It contains something about patronyms I sort of knew, but didn't. I think it's related to the way The Royals name themselves. (or not, I leave that exercise to the reader)

• Homogenization and the State: Western state-making, writes Scott, in the seventeenth and eighteenth imposed permanent patronyms as a condition of citizenship. This was largely to help organize and to make it easier for states to properly perform a census.

A bit of business.

• McDonald’s health insurance: So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees. Here’s a handy table of exactly what sort of insurance McDonald’s provides:

And of course, this , that, and the other about our current political zoo.

• Meet Jim DeMint: OK, so we'd have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn't be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong.
• The Angry Rich: Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
• A Real Conservative Foreign Policy: So what would a truly conservative foreign and defense policy look like? Such a policy would focus on separating the wheat from the chaff of what is truly important for protecting and advancing the vital interests of the United States rather than focusing on objectives, which, while worthy, do not have a significant impact on those interests.
• Hegel on Wall Street: In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel. He is not, by a long shot, the only philosopher who could provide a glimmer of philosophical illumination in this area. But the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. And right now, this is also where many of the hot-button topics of the day reside.

Week's Links

This week I have a site my Mom turned me on to. If you like your technobabble thick and juicy, swimming in Bogosity sauce, this one is for you.

• Anderson Institute

Other than that, it's been a work-a-day week. A little street fair is going up on Grant street (one block away). I'll see if I can get some stories or pictures. This weeks reading has included...

• Jim Flora
• Perry vs Scharzenegger Prop 8
• Calvin and Hobbes: Interview with creator
• Chapman / Salinger
• Microsoft's Creative Destruction
• Celebrities Stay Home

And finally a short story:

• Villain with the Heart of Flamboyant Evil