I like my commenters

...re: My watching of TV.

Zack: Assuming it was TNG, the choice should have been clear.....

Anon: Oh god it was'nt DS9 was it!?

Don't worry everyone, it was TNG. And, in the spirit of my favourite series:

Vicki: Which episode is this?

Me: The one with the alien that turns in to the glowing energy being at the end.

Vicki:....

Me: I should be more specific.

It's a good day when...

The most substantial decision you have to make is whether to watch Buffy or Star Trek. Why yes, the semester is over, why do you ask?

Historical FAIL

Wow. Michelle Bachmann claims FDR used the Hoot-Smalley tariffs as economic policy, but brought about the Great Depression instead. Only a few problems.

1) FDR's Presidency came several years in to the Great Depression, and did not precede it.

2) It was called Smoot-Hawley, not Hoot-Smalley.

3) Those also predated the FDR Presidency, and were signed in to law by a Republican President, one Herbert Hoover.

But then, linear time has never always been a problem for these people.

9AM is too early to start drinking, right? How about 9:02?

So I just submitted my last paper of the term electronically. 5000 words, the vast bulk of which was written in one 7-hour shot yesterday, because after 6 years of university if you can't write quickly what are you doing here?

This marks the end of the most difficult phase of my Master's degree in Journalism, with a similarly-sized assignment waiting for me... in August. So, for the first time since last August: leisure time!

Now, here's hoping I kept my marks up and keep my scholarship. One more term of this garbage wonderful learning opportunity, and then I enter the marketplace.... oh crap, don't make me leave!

Spring is here, spring is here

So having spent about 8 hours reading Government reports today, I'm looking at a day full of writing tomorrow, probably locked in a windowless room to improve my productivity. So... what do you have for me, weather-wise?



Crap.

As the weather has warmed, I've been biking almost exclusively again. More than ever, I'm convinced that the mass adoption of the automobile represents one of the biggest, if not the biggest public policy failure of the 20th century. I mean, I suppose the Great Leap Forward still killed more people than the car has directly, but by the time we undo the damage of the automobile I'm not sure that will still be the case.

I'm assuming nobody's going to be making the argument that the rise of the automobile represents the triumph of rational actors in the free market, unfettered by government subsidy or sanction, right? We've played that out for a while at least?

Oh geez

Apparently, it's now unethical for environmentalists to invest in green energy firms, while also advocating for environmental policies.



The modern GOP: dumber than a post. Incidentally -- would this GOP halfwit be concerned about, say, discovering a former or present White House official with ties to the military industry also advocating for higher military spending? Because that list would include, oh, Bush I, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and probably at least a dozen others.

Your facts are no match for our preconceptions!

Interesting. Another publication has published an examination of the predictions of The Limits to Growth, and finds them to be substantially accurate. That makes two in the last 9 months.

But, you know, the authors said nasty things about Bill Nordhaus so they should probably be ignored.

And yes, I'm thinking of the old joke about economists: People who lay awake at night wondering if what works in practice can possibly work in theory.

An Iron Law

Employers suck, always and everywhere. But if you were to suggest that maybe the McGuinty government should stop rendering unions basically toothless in this province, why, you would be a Communist.

(via Chet.)

Wow, even the paid shills were more honest

This is kind of funny:  in 1995, a now-defunct organization called the Global Climate Coalition (in fact, a front for the carbon lobby) hired a bunch of scientists to "examine" climate change science.  Result:

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

Magical Mystery Link Dump

• FBI interrogator says torture was unnecessary, and got in the way of intelligence-gathering.
• Penn and Teller teach neuroscience!
• Roundup-proof superweeds.  No one could have predicted....
• Are your shoes breaking your feet?
• Is Afghanistan worth it? v. MMCXXI
• The Supreme Court is as stupid and misogynist as you might imagine.
• Cory Doctorow thinks the music and movie industries are trying to turn back the clock.
• McCain advisor Steve Schmidt on Obama:

  “This was, in my view, the unfinished Bobby Kennedy campaign – the idealism, the passion, the inspiration he gave to people, it was organic and it was real and it wasn’t manufactured at a tactical level in the campaign.”

And this is awesome:

The terror of reality

There's something truly terrifying when far-right nutjob Charles Johnson is the voice of moderation among the American right.

I really have nothing to add to that.

Next stop, Skynet

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are getting startlingly effective these days. Contrast the rapid evolution of Predator drones from the mid 1990s to present with the 30-year long battle over the F-22. While it's true that the Predators have been able to rapidly incorporate developments that were originally for manned aircraft, I'm still astonished at how rapidly these drones have advanced. (It's the Pentagon, after all.)

Prediction: the USAF will fight tooth and nail from having drones with serious air-to-air capabilities. This idea is simply too threatening to their ideological assumption of what their core competency is. Meanwhile, their actual core mission -- trucking bombs to targets that can't shoot back -- will be almost entirely supplemented with unmanned planes, for political and economic reasons.

We don't know what the cost of the Avenger will be yet, but I'd bet less than $15 million, easy. That would make it about 1/5 the likely cost of the JSF.

First, admit reality

An interesting article in the NYT about how Flint, Michigan is abandoning all hope of recovering it's past glory, and instead trying to manage its contraction in a more sustainable manner. This is only one of many stories I've heard about old towns in the rust belt, trying this basic strategy. No guarantee of success, but nothing else has worked thus far.

The ticking time bomb was their poll numbers

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

But this can't possibly be true. Michael Ignatieff assured me that the people doing the waterboarding weren't sadists or opportunists, so clearly this McClatchy report is wrong.

Quick hit

The fact that the broadcasters implicated in now-Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on their coziness with the military industrial complex have largely managed to stay silent about all of it is really, really, really upsetting.

I don't every want to hear you whine about unions again

Oh, and Dalton McGuinty's a sucker:

Top officials at Chrysler Financial turned away a $750 million government loan because executives didn't want to abide by new federal limits on pay, sources familiar with the matter say.

The government had been offering the loan earlier this month as part of its efforts to prop up the ailing auto industry, including Chrysler, which is racing to avoid bankruptcy. Chrysler Financial is a vital lender to Chrysler dealerships and customers.

In forgoing the loan, Chrysler Financial opted to use more expensive financing from private banks, adding to the burdens of the already fragile automaker and its financing company.

via Pogge. Don't ever, ever tell me these companies are suffering because of their unions. Ever again.

My stupid-sense is tingling

I was trying to figure out what about this was setting off a twinge in the back of my brain, aside from the obvious:

"There is rage at Obama for pushing to raise taxes ("The government wants me to be a slave!" says one hedge-fund analyst)"

That's from an article about how upset the bankers of New York City are to be called nasty names and perhaps punished slightly for turning the economy in to a smoking crater. And God forbid we ask the still super-wealthy to pay 3.6% more in taxes on every dollar they make over $250,000 a year.

The anger masks a deeper suspicion that Obama fundamentally doesn’t respect their place at the table. “I think he doesn’t have an appreciation for how hard it is to build these companies, the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into them,” says a senior executive from a failed Wall Street firm. “It’s just that he has no passion for it. He speaks dispassionately about the whole situation, except when he’s beating up on the Wall Street fat cats.”

The argument that Obama has in fact done a great deal to help Wall Street—to the tune of trillions of dollars—doesn’t have much truck with these critics. “If you really take a look at what Obama is promising, it’s frightening,” says Nicholas Cacciola, a 44-year-old executive at a financial-services firm. “He’s punishing you for doing better. He doesn’t want to have any wealth creation—it’s wealth distribution. Why are you being punished for making a lot of money?” As a Republican corporate lawyer puts it: “It’s the politics of envy, and that’s very dangerous.”

What we're getting at, eventually, is that it's not enough that these people be the masters of the universe, and even today it's not enough that their positions are still essentially secure. We aren't even allowed to complain about it. And that's when I realized what was tingling:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

That's Lincoln speaking in 1860 at Cooper Union, and I first read that speech in the aftermath of the 2004 election -- remember that? -- when we on the left were being told that the secret to success was to praise the was, hate the gay, and privatize social security. Digby was where I first read that speech, and it sure resonates today.

Of course, despite his pretensions Obama has not learned the lesson that Lincoln imparted at Cooper Union: these people won't negotiate in good faith -- read that passage above, where the wealthy hedge-fundie says the black President is making him a slave -- so we shouldn't bother to try. These people want to protect their prestige and power before all else, even if it means bringing the country down to do it.

Lincoln had a solution to that, and sadly I don't think that Obama has the stomach to pull something similar off.

Turnabout

A while back we wrote a little bit about Ezra Klein complaining about how much academic hate teaching, because Klein wrote in an unusually shabby way. So, here's a columnist/prof writing in a shabby way about how much students are teh sux.

Note in which department he teaches. As a journalism student, I want to grab Cohen by the lapels and shout, "Of course they're lazy, shallow, and entitled! They're preparing to be journalists!"

UPDATE: Another Carleton j-skool prof responds to Cohen, and leaves welts.

I should say that I've had the opportunity in the past to speak with Cohen, and found him to be a very polite and interesting man, albeit one with what I considered to be some odd priorities. The conversation wasn't confidential, but it's all rather insider-baseball, more than I care to put on pixel here.

Not even news

For years the telco industries in North America have argued that distance prevents them from rolling out high-speed fiber in any substantial way because of the lower population density of Canada and the Unites States. This was always kind of ridiculous, because nobody's talking about gigabit fiber in Tuktoyuktuk. The areas where most people on this continent live are actually rather dense indeed, getting denser, and there's no reason why the east coast of the US and the Windsor-Quebec corridor should be restricted to the low bandwidth it is.

So why? Because countries like France and Japan won't swallow telco bullshit, while our governments will, and happily:

cable operators, he said, are concerned that not only will prices fall, but that the super-fast service will encourage customers to watch video on the Web and drop their cable service.

The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora’s box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet, and then competition will bring the price for the broadband down from $80 to $60 to $40.

So because the modern equivalent of the telegraph companies don't want to risk their core business by actually providing new, innovative services[1], and because the governments of North America have no interest in forcing their hands[2], we're stuck sucking through a stir-stick while other countries get to drink from the fire-hose.

[1] This would be actual innovation, not the fictitious kind that led to sub-prime mortgages.

[2] Is the Canadian government worried about picking a fight with telcos that are heavily invested in companies like CTVGlobemedia and Sun Media? Gee, who would think something so paranoid?

So that's why he called it "Operation Condor"

Jackie Chan's opinion on Chinese democracy -- not the G&R CD:

Speaking at the Boao Forum in southern China, Chan said this: "I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not. I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

And this: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

In this, Chan shares the views of every man of property born before the 1940s or so. And the views of most men of property born before the 1960s, I'd wager. So I'm not particularly keen on finding some deeper meaning here. Rich man thinks the rabble should be kept down -- film at 11!

And if you don't get the reference in the post title, see here then here.