Seething

I defy you to read this, or any other obituary for those lost in this damn war, and not hate George W. Bush more than you already do.

Journalists don't always get to write beautifully, but congratulations to David Montero.

Pakistnam

NYTimes, Yesterday:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

Islamic militants surrendered in July after Pakistani authorities stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Government officials reported more than 100 deaths; militants insisted that thousands had been killed.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

AP, Today:

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan -- In an embarrassing battlefield defeat for Pakistan's army, Islamic extremists attacked and seized a small fort near the Afghan border, leaving at least 27 soldiers dead or missing.

The militants did not gain significant ground, but they did further erode confidence in the U.S.-allied government's ability to control the frontier area where the Taliban and al Qaeda flourish.

So the Taliban are beating the Pakistan Army on the ground in company-sized engagements. Meanwhile, NATO is totally failing to put out the fire next door in Afghanistan. And Iraq, uh, let's not talk about that. You know what I think would be funny? (Not ha-ha funny, you understand.) If between Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the only country that boasted a stable (or exisiting) government by January of 2009 was the one that explicitly rejected US "assistance".

Fancy being 800 years old?

It's difficult for me to express how much this scares me:

Researchers have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years without apparent side effects. The basic but important discovery, achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings scientists closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of all living systems: the cell. "We're setting the foundation for reprogramming healthy life," says study leader Valter Longo of the University of Southern California.

I don't relish death, and don't usually wish it on people, but it's not too much to say that death has some useful social purposes, right? Frankly, I don't want Mr. Moneybags sitting around, growing ever-richer and ever-more-powerful for 800 years -- one twentieth that time is more than enough, thanks. Seeing as the only real check we've left ourselves with the rich is that they'll eventually die, leaving their estates to people less worthy and hopefully more inept with the family fortune, doesn't the prospect of an 800-year old Bill Gates scare the crap out of anyone else?

Vista sucks

Good GOD does it suck.

I have to use it for school, because the addle-minded monkeys that run the computer labs apparently lack the sense that the good lord gave a jar of mayonnaise.

Give me XP, or ME, or (shudder) a Mac any day of the week.

Update: Maybe it's time for another round of "John uses Ubuntu, and likes it (mostly.)"

A few weeks ago I discovered that the copy of Windows that shipped with my Laptop doesn't allow me to rip CDs to MP3 at a reasonable bitrate - less than 128! So I booted up the trusty linux box, installed GRIP, and after spending an evening noodling with the settings (which is just another form of play for computer geeks) got it set up to do what I wanted.

I've also been tooling around with avidemux for video editing, but so far I haven't made the switch from using mostly Windows on my laptop to using Linux on my desktop. Partly this is because I've got the Windows install set up pretty much like I want it, and partly because when I've got a laptop that runs silent and efficiently, I can't bear to turn on the big clunky desktop.

Oddly, I've found that instead of using Linux for the usual stuff I do on Windows -- the kind of thing Linux has been capable of doing for years, the kind of stuff partisans say proves Linux is ready for the mainstream -- I'm using Linux for the exceptional stuff that Windows either won't let me do or wants to charge me to do. This, to me, shows that Linux is much more than ready for prime time, but that's just me.

I have some gripes about things not working right, but they're pretty minor and I suspect I could fix them if I could find the time to delve deeper in to Ubuntu forums.

Eventually, I think I'll work up the courage to install Ubuntu on the laptop too, and see how that works.

About time

Ontario is preparing to lift a controversial moratorium on the development of offshore wind projects in the Great Lakes that has been in place for nearly 14 months, the Toronto Star has learned.

A Ministry of Natural Resources official says the department is "getting ready" to make an announcement and that new minister Donna Cansfield is "anxious to demonstrate leadership in the area."

The potential for wind in Ontario is simply enormous. I'd say it's a mystery that the McGuinty government has blockaded this as long as they have, but it's really not a mystery at all.

Relevant!

Matthew Yglesias, on Ezra Levant Jonah Goldberg:

He's a steadfast supporter of the political party representing the dominant ethnocultural group in the United States, the party that supports torture and unlimited surveillance, the party that supports a larger and more aggressively employed military, the party that supports a more punitive criminal justice system at home, the party whose backers are prone to fretting about low birthrates, the need to police gender roles more rigidly, etc.

Not-very-much-shorter Conservative Blogosphere: Respecting religious traditions is so important that gays cannot possibly be allowed important legal rights like marriage, nor can women be allowed to choose the fates of their bodies, but religious respect is so unimportant that Ezra Levant cannot possibly be asked to spend an afternoon answering questions in a meeting room after deliberately seeking to offend the religion of hundreds of thousands of Canadians.

Oh wait. It's wrong to offend Christians, but practically required to offend Muslims at this point, isn't it?

And this comment from Ron kind of summed up the problem:

Would you be so willing to accept this sort of tribunal if it was establised to ensure right-wing ideology was imposed on the unwilling?

Is the right now openly calling basic respect "left wing ideology"? Sure seems like it.

First they came for Ezra Levant, and I made popcorn

So I spent the weekend watching a number of bloggers spill a lot of pixels over the issue of Ezra Levant's appearance before the Alberta Human Rights Commission. This violates the first rule of Canadian blogging:

Whatever Ezra Levant is doing/saying at any given moment, it's not worth talking about.

I mean, really. This guy couldn't even run a successful conservative rag in Alberta. He competed in the Special Olympics of North American publishsing -- and lost. Memo to all Canadian bloggers: he's not worth it.

Sadly, the quest for martyrdom that Ezra's involved in has managed to gull in some of the brighter lights of the American blogosphere in to using him as an example of why Hate Speech laws are teh evil. Reading some of them, you'd think Levant was being brough before a star chamber and tortured in to a confession. It's really a ridiculous situation -- the HRC isn't able to compel Levant's appearance, and its rulings can be appealed in court whatever the outcome -- but apparently we in Canada are a bunch of jack-booted proto-fascists. Weirdly, Glenn Greenwald essentially adopts the Goldberg thesis -- liberals are just fascists in drag!

See, I agree with Warren Kinsella on this one:

Firstly, let me say that I am a censor. I believe there are reasonable and proper limits on human expression.

Secondly, I believe that words and images have power. Words and images have the power to wound and hurt and, sometimes, persuade people to kill.

Thirdly, I believe that we are entitled, as a society, to sanction (civilly or criminally) those who use words and images to deliberately or recklessly inflict harm on others - as with laws relating to the propagation of hate, or laws prohibiting child pornography, or defamation codes, or laws designed to sanction pornography that promotes violence against women and children...

"Don't you think there is a difference between a young guy painting a happy face on his school wall - and a skinhead who paints a swastika, and the words 'DEATH TO THE JEWS' on the front of a synagogue? Isn't there a qualitative difference between one action, and the other? Hate laws are designed to address that difference, aren't they?"

I suppose you're free to argue that no, there's no difference in those two acts that should be addressed by law. You could also argue that there's no difference between a black man being killed and a man being killed because he's black. I'd disagree strongly with you, and in fact I generally argue strongly in favour of hate crime legislation. Motive is a key element in any criminal prosecution, and there's an old saying that goes something like "even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over." What's in your head when you commit a crime is actually very material element to any crime, and it's totally within our conventional understanding of what the law should do.

All of this, of course, is outside of the issue of whether or not Ezra Levant is being oppressed (he's not) or whether he's in any danger of suffering any penalty from the state (highly, highly unlikely.) Because, well, see Canadian blogging rule number one, above. If we absolutely have to talk about this, I'd prefer to talk about more serious related issues than the pathetic wailing of wealthy white conservatives who occasionally learn that they can't, in fact, shit all over Muslims and their faith ad infinitum without consequence.

My (latest) problem with the Clintons

I'm actually reticent to make additional specific criticisms of Hillary Clinton. Basically, she's had so much slime slung at her undeservedly, and I really don't need anything more than her (continuing) support for the war in Iraq to not support her. But I think her candidacy -- and more specifically, her husband's role in it -- makes a strong argument for basically forbidding the spouses of former Presidents from running for a party's nomination. Basically, President Clinton can't not come to Senator Cinton's defense, and can't not do so with all the ammo at his disposal. So you get disingenuous attacks on Barack Obama's opposition to the war, which will inevitably be recycled by the GOP if the Senator from Illinois wins the nomination: "Look, even Bill Clinton says you were lying about your opposition to the war..."

There's a long history of Dems using talking points in the primaries that get used against them later in the general. But it's a different thing entirely when a former President -- and the most successful politician from his party in a generation -- engages in these kinds of attacks.

What an age we live in

Researchers grow a beating heart from stem cells. No, really.

The researchers took dead animal hearts and stripped them of everything except the blood vessels, valves and connective tissue. These scaffolds were then seeded with cells from newborn and foetal rat hearts and, after four days of growth, the organs started to contract. Within eight days, the hearts were beating.

Holy snap - 80% efficient solar power!

via Gristmill, this just blew my mind:

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.

The new approach, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each interlocking spiral "nanoantenna" is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair.

Because of their size, the nanoantennas absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. Nanoantennas can take in energy from both sunlight and the earth's heat, with higher efficiency than conventional solar cells....

The team estimates individual nanoantennas can absorb close to 80 percent of the available energy. The circuits themselves can be made of a number of different conducting metals, and the nanoantennas can be printed on thin, flexible materials like polyethylene, a plastic that's commonly used in bags and plastic wrap. In fact, the team first printed antennas on plastic bags used to deliver the Wall Street Journal, because they had just the right thickness.

80% efficient harvesting of infrared energy. If this pans out, this hasn't just made solar the default choice for new energy, but it's possible that we could double the available power from existing thermal plants without increasing fossil or uranium inputs.

Most thermal plants (coal, gas, nuclear) are between 30-40% efficient. This throws away most of the energy as waste heat. The conventional way of getting around this loss is by building a CHP network -- piping the waste heat in to other buildings instead of heating them directly. But if you don't have a steam network handy, the investment can be daunting.

If this nanoantenna technology turns out to be legit (please, let it be so!) that means that every power turbine in a thermal power plant is going to be rapidly obsolete. As one striking example, going to 80% heat conversion would double the output of Ontario's nuclear reactors, meaning that they alone could power the entire province's electrical demand. Or, better idea, Ontario could phase out its nuclear power plants (which will still be old, expensive and wasteful) slowly, while the remaining stock provide double output to cover any shortfall -- while the growing solar sector provides a growing base. Throw in the hydroelectric power and Ontario would be back to having a power surplus for the first time in decades.

The other interesting thing we're seeing here is the potential for the economics of solar power to flip -- solar power would be the cheapest power available, instead of being the most expensive. Fuel and labour costs would make biofuel thermal plants more expensive, but kept around for reserve power.

Add in those silicon nanowire batteries for energy storage, and we're close to having this whole energy thing licked.

Baseless Speculation, cont.

Exhibit # 4,327 as to why I will never be hired by a political campaign with any desire to win.

(Interesting fact: the last candidate I did any work for lost.)

Neat energy news

Silicon nanowires: the new carbon nanotube!

Apparently, the use of silicon nanowires has boosted the energy density of a lithium battery in the lab. Potentially, the use of SiNW could boost the energy density by an order of magnitude.

Stumbling blocks: Using a high-power anode requires a high-power cathode, and some researchers are skeptical of the data. But if it turns out to be true, we might see a full battery EV that can finally beat liquid fuels: the cars that currently get 200 miles to a full charge could conceivably get 2000. At that point, the only part you need to worry about exhausting is the car's driver.

I may be misreading the research, but it also seems that the SiNW gives longer lifetimes as well.

Baseless speculation

Early reports say that Dems are running out of ballots in New Hamphsire. I'm gonna take a flyer and say Obama by 15.

How 'bout that?

Me, Oct 30 2006:

The 500-gig iPod is not too far away, I think.

Hitachi, yesterday:

Hitachi's upping the notebook 2.5-inch storage game to the 500GB level...

Not quite there, yet -- the first iPods were 1.8" drives, sez Wikipedia -- but damn we're getting close.

Apparently, the record for the 1.8" category is held by Toshiba, with a 160-gig version. And apparently, you can buy the latest generation iPod in a 160-gig version.

Still, this is why I'm skeptical of people talking about how MP3s have ruined music, like that Rolling Stone article I blogged last week. The capacity to hold uncompressed, high-quality video clearly exists. On a 160-gig drive, you could hold more than 200 CDs, lossless and uncompressed. (More than 400 if you use FLAC.) And the only physical difference would be you'd have to be willing to carry around exactly the size iPod most people were wildly excited about five years ago.

The problem isn't MP3s, so much as people's dramatically changed expectations about how much music they should be able to tote around with them. And the small matter of nobody wanting to reconvert their entire libraries...

To restate another thesis: this is why trying to lock down the Internet is a sucker's game -- with a 160-gig iPod, my two feet are a "fatter pipe" than my Internet connection.

One final question: with Toshiba already introducing a desktop-sized 128-gig flash drive, at what point will flash overtake old platter HD technology? Will it happen at all, or will platter continue to stay a step or two ahead of flash?

I suppose I should reconsider

I generally haven't been reading articles titled "George Bush goes Green" or any variation thereof, so I missed this from the Washington Post (via Dave):

He [Bush] has found the science increasingly persuasive and believes more needs to be done, especially after a set of secret briefings last winter.

What a narcissist. You think Bush would believe that water was wet before he got a secret briefing telling him so? This is a man who's desperately in love with the job he currently holds.

Here's a tip: most of us don't get "secret" briefings, and we figured out global warming long ago. So can I be president now, retard?

I need to listen to my redneck friends more

So, last night I was talking to an older friend of mine. This friend, shall we say, is neither inclined to be kind to Democrats, moderates, leftists, or blacks. Er, he's basically a cantankerous old man who like the occasional racist joke. He doesn't tell them around me much anymore, after a few shouting matches...

So anyway, he tells me last night that of all the candidates from either party, the only one -- only one -- he thinks is a decent guy is Barack Obama. This pretty much blew me away, and apparently I should have taken this as a sign of things to come. Congratulations to Mr. Obama. I was hoping for a stronger Edwards win, but it looks like both Edwards and Clinton were overtaken by the huge wave of new voters that Obama brought in -- and good for him, too.

I have a number of severe reservations about Obama, but if you're going to win a tangibly meaningless electoral contest, this is the way to do it. A lot of the commentary around an Obama win has been about America's image in the rest of the world, as if terrorists are going to put down their guns and bombs because a black kid from Chicago made it big. I think the reality is a bit more pedestrian -- the most important change will be in America's view of itself. Some of this is going to be good -- black kids knowing in their core that they can make it, hopefully -- and some of it will be bad -- the inevitable "see, we've got a black president, racism is over."

But now John Rogers really, really needs to get those t-shirts made.

One other thing: Clinton has just lost -- badly -- the most important thing she had going for her. A whole bunch of her supporters are going to be rethinking things if she's still in 2nd after New Hampshire. Edwards is expected to do much better in Nevada and South Carolina, meaning Clinton could end up racking up a few more 3rd-place finishes. If Obama wins in South Carolina -- not, ahem, the most African-American-friendly state in the Confederacy Union then it's pretty much over, isn't it?

Moments of transition

David Olive has a piece from a few days ago about the fundamental shift that's going on in the world economy:

It became more apparent than ever this year that the U.S. is no longer the world's lone superpower. Instead, there are five superpowers that will define the world for at least the next half-century: the U.S., China, India, Russia and a united Europe.

The news came home to Americans on Main St. from tainted Chinese products to the fact that practically every toy sold in America comes from Red China. Boston seniors on group tours of the great capitals of Europe were humbled to discover that their greenbacks had shrivelled in value to 60 per cent of the local currency. And New Yorkers were taken aback that the credit crisis arising from cascading defaults on U.S. subprime mortgages had so weakened the balance sheets of leading financial institutions in the Big Apple that the likes of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had sought bailouts from state-owned investment funds in Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

On a related note, G. John Ikenberry writes in Foreign Affairs:

But not all power transitions generate war or overturn the old order. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom ceded authority to the United States without great conflict or even a rupture in relations. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, Japan's economy grew from the equivalent of five percent of U.S. GDP to the equivalent of over 60 percent of U.S. GDP, and yet Japan never challenged the existing international order.

Sure, the US and UK never went to war, but I continue to think that was a closer thing than most. (I once heard a historian say, “Sure, the Washington Naval Treaty failed to stop the Pacific War, but it did a really good job of stopping the Anglo-American war of 1940...” Clearly, that was kind of a joke, but it's worth remembering that Hitler and the Japanese weren't the only ones engaged in armament production pre-war.

But even if the US/UK transition is the “correct” way to see the transition between hegemonic powers, it's not like Americans have a lot to look forward to. Does nobody remember the role the Americans played during Suez? Can we look forward to the day when the Chinese call up American loans in order to stop the invasion of Nigeria?

Not to overstate things, but the transition between US and UK hegemons was pretty rocky for the British, even if it did manage to avoid a major war. Which, really, it didn't: the UK “won” two major global wars in extremely costly ways, and was so exhausted by victory (and nascent human rights movements) that its empire collapsed.

So even if we extend the Ikenberry metaphor, we can expect a major war between the US and some ascendant power, while the power that sits out the conflict ends up sitting pretty. I dunno – does the EU sit out a war between China and the US? China wins out while the US and Iran slap each other? This is the problem with analogies – even when you use them, they aren't really good at predicting squat.

I'm gay for Eric Flint

Okay, I've never read his books -- and they don't really seem like my cup of tea, really -- but his columns on the madness of DRMs, and why Baen Books publish "unprotected" ebooks in the first place, is perfect and makes me want to bear his lovechild.

Jim Baen and I do not want books with little chips in them that the authorities can track. We do not want computers or computer equipment to have to be registered. We do not want legal spyware placed in all computers and scanners so that the authorities can make sure they are being used "legitimately"—with penalties attached if anyone attempts to remove the spyware.

Is this really difficult to comprehend?

DRM is madness, politically speaking, and that's why Jim and I are flat against it. Period. You start with principles, and then figure out a way to make money. Not the other way around.

Heighten the contradictions!

Given that (in the real world, at least) I prefer my villains to be of the obvious, nasty, mustache-twirling kind, I'm actually quite happy to see the RIAA change its tune and now say that copying your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

Lies and the lying liars

My lack of faith in a just and caring God can really be derived from two things: 1) The nun in my kindergarten class who told me that God made the Space Shuttle Challenger blow up, and 2) Richard Cohen's continuing presence on the Washington Post opinion page.

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement -- call it what you want -- involved in Obama's assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic -- and it is wrong. But when The Post's lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

What did Michael Dobbs write?

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African American men ages 18 to 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. An additional 87,000 were temporarily held in local jails in mid-2006. According to 2005 census data, 530,000 African American men in this age group were in college.... Black male college students outnumber black male prisoners even if the age group is expanded to 30 or 35.

I have a few problems with this. Namely, Obama's words are a sound bite, and it's not like he's operationally defined the words "young", "black men", or "jail". If a kid gets pulled over for DWB, spends a night in a cell, but charges are never laid, that doesn't show up in federal statistics.

But it's telling that this is the kind of factual error that would boil Cohen's blood. Because there's nothing -- absolutely nothing -- that makes Richard Cohen madder than anyone, elected or not, casting an even mildly critical eye on America. Point out the obvious and inhuman difference between the treatment of blacks and whites in America? You're a liar, and don't deserve the presidency.

It's also telling that the obvious, provable, and repeated falsehoods of the GOP candidates, or the other white Democratic candidates, don't pop a vein in Cohen's forehead. Nope, black men lie, and only Richard Cohen is brave enough to tell us all what he believes.

One last thing: there was another lie that was told once to the American people once before. It was told to the American people even though the speaker in question, one George W. Bush, had been repeatedly told that it was false by his own staff. Nevertheless, he lied to the country and started a war over a factually incorrect statement. Richard Cohen's reaction? To say, in columns that are no longer online at Washingtonpost.com, that Bush was "trapped" by the need to deal with the "obvious threat" that Hussein posed, and that Europeans who wanted to deal with Israel-Palestine first had a "whiff of anti-semitism" about them. (Cohen, "Bush the Bad Guy," January 28 2003)

And then, in July of 2003, when the lie was revealed by Joe Wilson's NYT column, Richard Cohen did the honorable thing and... blamed George Tenet and the CIA, just like the Bush administration wanted. (Cohen, "Sword Passing", July 24, 2003)

Amazing. Bush lies, gets a million Iraqis killed and tens of thousands of US soldiers wounded or killed, and Cohen can still be relied upon to put the blame elsewhere. But God forbid your grasp of obscure federal statistics be slightly off, because that means you need to bow and scrape before Richard Cohen, altar of responsibility.