perfidy

Great reading here...the FTC is releasing findings about the patent system. Reading this, it's just common sense to do so, and everything in here squares with what I've experienced.

A must-read editorial in the Washington Post.

Gerrymandering has produced districts that where, due to strategic reallocation of funds to contested areas, one side or the other has essentially ceded all ground. It represents the destruction of local politics, and the reduction of discourse to the lowest common denominator. Why? Because at the national level of politics, only the lowest common denominator applies.

Good article from The Economist; well worth reading. Not being as entirely aware of history as I should be, it's interesting to learn that Reagan's tax reform was, on the whole, pretty much revenue neutral. He was able to drop rates, but close loopholes at the same time, and I guess we can presume that he did us all a big favor by doing so.

Bush's tax cuts are far from revenue neutral. Yes, it seems like the economy is starting to turn a corner, and that is a very good thing. It's been a really tough environment out there. The thing is, there is an ever-widening gap between the sales pitches the administration uses to get its policies passed, and the reality on the ground afterwards.

For example, Brad DeLong notes that the President's "Council of Economic Advisors" projected, last February, that passing the "Jobs And Growth" package would result in an overall increase of 300,000 new jobs. Actual figure: A loss of 2.3 million jobs. That's a pretty big gap.

So what we're learning is this: If there's some vague effect on the job market that the tax cuts have, it's very weak at best, and in no way, shape or manner does it even begin to resemble the sales pitch provided to America beforehand.

We've provided massively for the Rich in this country so jobs would be created, so we were told. The trickle-down effect would help us all. What we've found is that Bush tax policy has had little effect on anything, other than effecting a massive inter-generational wealth transfer, as the current generation in power spends like mad, running up the national deficit, financing their own retirements.

You can bet they'll all be voting as a block in the years to come, forcing the younger generation into ever-more extreme taxation and deficit positions, whining and bitching that "they paid into social security all their lives".

We'll see about that.

Lileks has today published the nearest thing to a screed he's had in a while. He assaults Ain't It Cool News, head red, Harry Knowles and his recent analysis of the third Matrix movie. I have not yet seen the aforementioned moving picture, but Lileks' pen strikes several telling blows:

Alas, he cannot write. He is a horrid stylist; he writes like someone mashing the keyboard with bratwursts; his politics have the sophistication of a preschool crayon drawing, and his self-confidence in his insights is matched only by his inability to see how fatuous his work often sounds.

The social pleasantries now disposed of, Lileks moves in a little closer: 

and the Machines - they're drilling to put a stop to it all. Now, the problem is - the only person that can put a stop to The War" on Terrorism are the terrorist.

He are, are he?

NOW - What is Agent Smith? Essentially, Agent Smith was Communism. If we are all the same, then there is no reason for violence. Resistance is Futile. Communism was fantastic as it represents an ideology that the Capitalist and the Extremists both hated. And it was spreading and taking over and trying to assimilate cultures and suppress belief systems. Or you could say AGENT SMITH is that Born Again Christian type that is trying to eradicate another's belief system - and ultimately - the elimination of both either politically, humanly or functionally is a move towards peace.

You can't make this up. You can only stand in awe. If I can untangle the wet knotted shoelaces of Knowles' prose, he seems to be saying that we can only live in peace when everyone agrees to believe in nothing but peace.

Ultimately what they believe or we believe is inconsequential.

Spoken like a man with no beliefs. Or, more accurately, spoken like someone who thinks that line above demonstrates some sort of intellectual sophistication lost on people who do the whole work-kids-church thing. Trust me, Harry - what someone believes is of great consequence. And if your society believes nothing it ends up making its last stand in the Temple of No Particular Belief System with the squiddies hammering on the door, possessed of a terrible certainty: they believe you should die.

Read the whole thing, as they say. His summation of the Matrix trilogy is especially interesting:

I took away something else from the Matrix trilogy: it is a product of deeply confused people. They want it all. They want individualism and community; they want secularism and transcendence; they want the purity of committed love and the licentious fun of an S&M club; they want peace and the thrill of violence; they want God, but they want to design him on their own screens with their own programs by their own terms for their own needs, and having defined the divine on their own terms, they bristle when anyone suggests they have simply built a room with a mirror and flattering lighting. All three Matrix movies, seen in total, ache for a God. But they can't quite go all the way. They're like three movies about circular flat meat patties that can never quite bring themselves to say the word "hamburger."

Philosophically, the Matrix movies are banal, but they're no worse than the empty animism of George Lucas' Force-centric cosmology. As dramas, they lag - but Wagner wasn't thrill-a-minute, either. The moments of emotional connection are few, but they're there, almost like Burma-Shave signs spaced out every hundred miles.

I have enjoyed the first two Matrices, althought the first was certainly the superior film. One thing that I enjoyed was the cafeteria style eclecticism with which they injected the philosophical bits - it allowed you to construct a better dialogue in your head. You could fill in the blanks in a way pleasing to your aesthetic, without worrying over being contradicted by a awful, banal, overly determinate summation at the end of the movie. Ambiguity is the artist's best friend - it is the cinematic equivalent of the old chestnut about silence being mistaken for wisdom.

I'm surprised that this story hasn't gotten as much traffic as the "sixteen words" or plamegate. Or maybe I'm not.

From Matt Welch at Reason:

Yesterday in Bolinas, California, this ballot measure passed with 67.4% of the vote:

Shall the following language constitute a policy of the Bolinas Community Public Utility District? Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.

What the effing hell, you ask? Go read the comments, which explain all, my little moonbeams.

For an unsurprising picture of the author of this measure, known as "Measure G," click the little blue thing here....

The accompanying text from SFGate.com reads, "Jane Blethen, who authored Measure G, now walks around with a burlap headband and strips of burlap tied around her legs and her face smeared with dark brown chocolate"

Let the von Danikenite loonies get their heads around this:

[also posted to blogcritics.org]

I'm deeply in love with our times, a relentless booster for the progress of technology and the wonders of the modern world. Sometimes I like to play a game with myself called "What If Ben Franklin Were Alive Today," in which I see if I am geek enough to explain things to Ben Franklin (were he shot forward in time) so that he would understand. Steel-frame skyscrapers, lasers, baseball, the miniskirt, internal combustion, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the Internet, cellular biology, the periodic table, hip-hop music, it's all fair game. Needless to say I have a lot of spare brain-time on my hands.

Why Benjamin Franklin? Because of who he was. Other figures from history shared his relentless curiosity and erudition: Erasmus, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton come to mind. But these men, save Newton, belong to another age, and Newton was a recluse. But Benjamin Franklin is engaging in so many ways-- he was a rabble-rouser, Renaissance man, writer, editor, diplomat, inventor, scientist, endless self-promoter, the last true Enlightenment thinker and the first true American. Moreover, his work on electricity was the foundation of a mind-boggling array of advances. He wrote the first Pennsylvania constitution! Discovered the gulf stream! Invented lightning rods! And most of all, he was deeply in love with his times.

The difficult thing about Franklin is something I've already mentioned: his gift for managing his personal mythology. As his autobiography proves, he was keenly aware of his reputation and happily manipulated it for his own ends. Consequently it is hard to identify the line between who Franklin was and who he said he was. Is he the simple, self-deprecating moral teacher of Poor Richard's Almanac? Is he the keen-witted inventor who flew a kite, invented bifocals, and wrote endlessly about the sciences? Is he a fraud, content to chase French courtesan tail while other people did the work and then collect the credit? Or is he the enterprising lad and genially amused gray eminence of his own autobiography? Of course, he is all these things. Franklin's nature is too changeable, and his legacy to large, to be captured in one description. All of this makes Edmund Morgan's recent biography of the man very welcome.
Edmund Morgan is one of the great historians of the past century, and he is certainly one of my favorites. Less prone to political self-refutation than younger lions like Eric Foner or Gordon Wood, and less prone to progressive determinism than others of his generation, Morgan's major works are landmarks of contemporary historical thought. Now at the end of a long career Morgan has written a project entirely for himself; a portrait of Ben Franklin drawn entirely from the man's own writings. Although it is billed as a biography, a more apt description of the result would be "appreciation."

It seems Morgan likes to play my game too. As he tells it in the preface, "[Franklin] has made it possible for us to know the man behind that presence better than most of those who enjoyed it could have. Franklin can reach us in writing that speaks with a clarity given to few in any language at any time, and writing was his favored mode of communication. We can read his mail. And we can read an astonishing amount of everything else he wrote. . . . For the past fifty years scholars have been collecting every surviving scrap of it from all over the world, and it will eventually fill forty-six or more printed volumes of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Meanwhile, it is available on one small disk, a product of those inconceivable discoveries he dreamt of. This book exists because of that disk, which enabled me to write it-- no, compelled me to."

This endeavor is rare for two reasons. First, it is uncommon these days for an historian to write a preface without using the words "interrogate," "problematize" or "framework." Second, it is rare that a vanity project of this sort is actually worth reading. On the first count, Morgan has always been relatively immune to theoretical fads, and on the second, he rises far, far above type.

Since Morgan relied entirely on the papers of Benjamin Franklin to write the book, many important episodes in Franklin's life are elided or left out entirely. Morgan treats Franklin's childhood in Boston very briefly, as well as his arrival in Philadelphia (so memorably recounted in Franklin's own Autobiography). Relations between Franklin and his wives are somewhat sketchy, and we do not get very much sense of the good or ill Franklin left in his wake. The trouble is, Franklin is already heavily biographied-- two major contributions to the field have come out in the past two years, by H.W. Brands and Walter Isaacson-- and the difficulty comes in trying not to simply rehash familiar material. So what is to recommend a work which by its own lights is a narrowly-sourced love letter?

The answer is this: Morgan does not pretend to undertake a thorough examination of the life, times, and legacy of Benjamin Franklin (as if you could do that in 300 pages!), but rather only "say[s] enough about the man to show that he is worth the trouble. It is... pretty one-sided, a letter of introduction to a man worth knowing, worth spending time with." On that count, Morgan succeeds totally. We come to know Franklin as a man very much of the world, successful and happy, and unafraid to use his reputation, power, and connections to do what he thinks is right.

Not that the brevity or affection for his subject is a liability. He might be in awe of Franklin, but Morgan is historian enough to acknowledge when events require further discussion, and when Franklin was simply wrong. For example, of all the accounts I've read, Morgan charts most clearly Franklin's transformation from English Patriot to American Patriot in the years leading up to the American Revolution.

Franklin spent the years before the Revolution in England, trying to achieve compromise between the colonies and Crown. At the time, Franklin thought of himself as a British Citizen from America-- not an American. At the same time that his counterparts in the colonies were beginning to speak of revolution, Franklin was still actively dedicated to preserving the union. Morgan spends much time discussing how this identity shaped Franklin's efforts to reconcile an intransigent Parliament to the real needs of the colonies despite repeated setbacks and open hostility. The change comes not after his public humiliation in Parliament, when the powerful forces he had on his side-- William Pitt among them-- cannot sway a government determined to punish the colonies for demanding a say in their own affairs, but after Parliament and King reject out of hand petitions sent from America. To Franklin, this meant that the ancient right of subjects (the colonies) to petition the Crown for a redress of grievances had been revoked, and that Britain had done the damage. Despite this realization, Franklin continued working to keep war at bay, but with the realization that when push came to shove, he was first an American.

The same episode demonstrates that Franklin was prone to miscalculation, often misreading to disastrous effect signals coming from America to England. As the chief agent of America at Parliament, he was often called on to speak for all 13 colonies on slim information, often blundering at full speed into powerful opposition. Morgan digs beneath Franklin's own words here, repeatedly wondering aloud if Franklin in these years understood what he was doing and who he was dealing with. The impression Morgan gives here is quite a departure from the slick and homely man-of-the-world image Franklin himself cultivated.

One gets the sense that Morgan has been doing some outside reading, because he spends many pages on Franklin's time in France raising money for the American Revolution. This in itself is unremarkable, but Morgan seems to have read David McCullough's recent biography of John Adams. In that book McCullough, through Adams, casts the elderly Franklin as a doddering old fraud, chasing tail and recieving guests but never actually doing any work. In contrast Adams comes across in Morgan's book as a pushy, blustery jerk with a persecution complex. The truth is of course somewhere between-- Adams totally failed to understand that tail-chasing was a vital part of court diplomacy in France, and Franklin never let Adams (who was a pushy jerk) in on his plans.

Although it succeeds wonderfully as an "introduction," Morgan's book comes up a little short as straight biography. For example, Morgan ends his story before Franklin's death, mentioning his final works but not his date of passing. This and other episodes of date-free writing might make the chronology a little hard to follow for newcomers, but Morgan helpfully supplies one in the Appendix for those who may get lost. Such issues aside, Morgan has drawn from Franklin's papers a compelling and altogether enjoyable account of the life of the first great American. But it is only a taste. If you intend read Morgan's biography-- and you really ought to, it's short-- I would recommend first reading Franklin's excellent Autobiography (a short and compulsively readable joy), and following Morgan with either the Brands or Isaacson volumes. Both present a more complete picture of the man, but neither comes close to Morgan in examining the human complexity of their mercurial and fascinating subject.

Drudge is reporting that some of the undocumented immigrants that were arrested in the WallMart bust are now planning to sue, yes, sue WallMart for - get this - discrimination as well as failing to pay overtime, withhold taxes and make required workers' compensation contributions.

What these people fail to realize is that they are, you know, illegal aliens. The very first thing that they did when they arrived in our country was to break our laws. They have absolutely no right to sue. They should be immediately deported. (Not that WallMart should get off - employing illegal immigrants violates the law as well.)

Many people who complain about our policies toward illegal immigrants are accused of racism or the usual parade of PC claptrap. But there is a world of difference between wanting to stop illegal immigration and wanting to stop legal immigration. We can argue about how many people from what countries we should let in and for what reasons until the cows come home blue in the face - fine - but there should be no argument that illegal immigration is, well, illegal and should be stopped.

[wik] Our own Minister Ross is a legal immigrant, and despite his lefty canuck ideas, is a perfect example of the sort of person we should allow in. A effective crack down on illegal immigration would not effect him.

[alsø wik] We do not want to go down the road that Europe and especially Germany have gone, with a permanent population of unassimilated gastarbeiter who are second class citizens. The only way to prevent that is to reduce the immigration from Mexico, so that those who are here can assimilate, and will not be permanently isolated in Spanish speaking enclaves and having minimal interaction with the rest of soceity. We also need to level to Canadian ghettoes in our richer suburbs.

Here in the DC area there's a story getting some buzz: Glitches Prompt GOP Suit Over Fairfax Tabulations. The GOP is absolutely right to protest this vote; it's not about anything other than the validity of the process.

The machines in question are the WinVote model, from Advanced Voting Systems. Just listen to their pitch: The functionality linchpin of the WINvoteTM system is its wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b) system - called the Wireless Information Network (WIN) -- that enables the user to communicate remotely with the major components of the voting system.

Does anybody else see a problem with enabling wireless communications to voting machines? This is just f'ing stupid, beyond belief. Encryption can help ameliorate the situation, but what I see is the possibility of ne'er-do-wells attempting to disrupt elections with laptops. All they have to do is hang around the building within a few hundred feet, and they can screw with the election machines to their heart's content.

Who wrote the IP stack on the machines in question? We can't tell from the web site, which means in all probability it isn't open source. That means we have no idea what stack is running in there and what its vulnerabilities are. Even encrypted stacks can be vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks.

Voting companies have been pretty underfunded. Why are we trusting our democracy to these stupid machines? The only function of a computer in the democratic process should be to help print a legible vote.

Count me, as a computer guy, concerned.