And now... missed opportunities

Jason Taylor made it to the finals of Dancing With the Stars, but that apparently doesn't sit too well with the new management athis day job, as a defensive end for the Miami Dolphins (to wit, football genius and famed all-around grouch Bill Parcells). The nominal complaint is that he missed a few "optional" minicamps, which he almost certainly didn't need --- he's not a rookie, knows the game, and is staying in shape. But all around, there are rumors that the real problem is that dancing just doesn't show the kind of macho that's expected of football players.

Well, except for touchdown celebrations. And lately, celebrations of a sack. Which means Parcells is missing an opportunity. If Taylor added some professional choreography after his sacks, which were just about the only good thing Miami fans had to look last year, it might distract their attention from all the other stuff happening on the field. Which, given the state of the team (which lost its first 13 games last season), could only be good news for team management.

The latest from the Hillary Stassen campaign:

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

Well, not quite. What actually happened in Zimbabwe was that everybody agreed on the rules for the election, and then one side started playing funny games with which votes would count, and how, when the results proved not to their liking...

It's nice to see Yankee fans showing their respect for baseball tradition:

Ok nobody mention that Lester's got a no hitter thus far. We're above that type of stuff at NYYFans.

I would be deeply disturbed if anyone made mention of his no hitter through five innings on this website. As baseball fans, we understand how rare a no hitter is and wouldn't want to ruin Jon Lester's chances at a no hitter.

This guy was not the only one eager to remind his fellow Yankee fans that it's considered a jinx to mention a no-hitter in progress.

On behalf of Red Sox Nation, I'd like to say we appreciate the sentiment. As, I'm sure, does Jon Lester, last seen icing his arm after completing his no-hitter.

I think most of my readers are probably aware of Obama's "crazy preacher" problem. But you may not appreciate just how bad it is. To make the point, here's a clip of a preacher, one John Hagee, repeatedly saying that Hitler was sent by god to chase the Jews back to Israel: This isn't Obama's preacher. In fact, it's a guy whose endorsement was sought out by McCain. But that just shows how bad Obama's problem is --- because it's worse than this guy. It must be. After all, Obama's guy is the one the mainstream media keeps talking about.

via Seeing the Forest and The Sideshow.

A case study in differential diagnosis of protestors' motives:

Let's say that you don't much like Chinese censorship of the Internet, or American cooperation with the same. Where might you protest, and why?

Ultimately, this is a matter of Chinese law, which can't be changed by anyone other than the Chinese government. So, you might protest there --- but the Chinese government isn't exactly known for its concern for the views of foreign protestors. So, are there other possibilities for a protest that might actually have some use?

As it happens, there are American companies who are bending over backwards to help the Chinese secret police. And it might make a difference to protest them. You might start with, say, Cisco, a company which aggressively markets and shamelessly supplies the technology that the Chinese have used to build the great firewall. Or, say, Yahoo!, which has cooperated with Chinese prosecution of reporters for revealing "state secrets" (which, in China, means any information that any bureaucrat finds inconvenient), and then lied about it.

These are what you'd do if the aim of your protest was to improve the world. On the other hand, if the aim of your protest was to prove your own virtue, and to heck with the rest of the world, there might be a more attractive target. Say, Google --- a company which, by contrast with these other two, does the bare minimum required to comply with Chinese law, limits its activities in China to minimize even that, and publicly wrings its hands over that level of cooperation, even though the only alternative would be to stay out of China altogether. And which, by the way, doesn't make a difference in China --- because of all this, their market share there is in the dumps.

If you protest against Yahoo! or Cisco --- well, it's not much to be better than those guys. But if you protest against Google, you prove to the world that you're better than the Googlers! They're proving their virtue by limiting their activities, but you're proving your superior virtue because it's not good enough!

So, guess where the Billboard Liberation Front was doing street theater the other day, with physical representations of the "Great Firewall of China". At Cisco, which supplied the bricks and mortar? Nope. At Google, which is trying to limit the degree to which they're compromised by it.

So, here's where we are. If your company enthusiastically buddies up to the corrupt authorities in an unavoidable, large, and growing market, these clowns will quietly leave you alone. On the other hand, if you limit your cooperation, and publicly agonize about it, they will go out of their way to embarrass you at your shareholders' meeting.

To encourage socially responsible behavior. Or to demonstrate, by comparison, the superior size of their ethical dicks. Whichever.

The sad thing is, I don't even like Google. Among the many things they do that piss me off: pervasively click-tracking any American internet user who doesn't adopt stringent technical measures to avoid it, and getting buddy-buddy with the American intelligence agencies --- marketing technology which no doubt gets used for surveillance here, and who knows what else. But the first issue is harder to explain, and the second has moral ambiguities that someone with more of a public profile might notice. So, neither issue is really suitable for a quick ethical dick-length demo. And so, China.

The Republican Party seems to be in a bit of trouble. They've just lost a few by-elections for House seats that have been safe for decades. Clearly, they need to do something to reconnect with the voters. To reestablish that they share their concerns. And Republican Senator Arlen Specter has just the thing:

A day after NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met with former Patriots video employee Matt Walsh and said he did not expect any further sanctions against the team or coach Bill Belichick over Spygate, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) called for an independent investigation into the Patriots' taping of opposing coaches' signals which violated league rules.

There may indeed be further questions that need asking, here. Why, for instance, were known instances of unauthorized taping by other teams subjected to nothing like the same penalty? But I'm not entirely sure that those are the questions Specter means to raise.

Then again, it's got to be better for the Republicans than talking about the economy. Or the war...

It looks like the long, drawn-out Democratic primary process may finally be drawing to a close, now that Obama has nearly secured the critical IOZ endorsement:

Barack Obama may in fact be precisely the hollow messiah that he appears, ... a sort of national Deepak Chopra, peddling easy salvation without actually doing anything. That, needless to say, is a program I can get behind. Four years of new-age-Christian babble is the least harmful outcome that I can imagine at the current moment in the empire. Let us all go upward and forward toward the future of our destiny leading the world forever. I am in favor of directions, whichever ones they are.

This will no doubt disappoint supporters of Hillary Clinton, who want the voters to have a meaningful choice in every single primary on the schedule, right to the last, now that her initial plan to end it all by Super Tuesday has failed to pan out.

For more on Clinton, see the Fafblog interview...

In case you think I was too hard on One Laptop Per Child head Nicholas Negroponte in my last blog post, here's one of the milder bits from a scathing polemic by former project security guru Ivan Krstić:

I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that leaves either.

It seems Negroponte's much touted rhetoric about "an education project, not a laptop project" was all for show. As I said in the last post, it's all about shipping as many computers as possible, never mind what happens next.

And yes, that quote is mild; Krstić goes on to warn of a looming "historical fuckup unparalleled in scale," unless the project starts to seriously work on deployment. There really wasn't much more to the plan than to ship thousands of laptops in crates, and let the kids figure it out; for complaining about this, Krstić got a ticket to South America to try to make it work. Which it did, in some places, to an extent that I find surprising, but that's a report from a pilot site that received Krstić's personal help during startup; part of the problem is the lack of effective surveys to see whether that best-case report is typical. Besides, if the kids really were all figuring it out for themselves, the remaining OLPC staffers wouldn't be pleading for outside assistance. (Though, regardless, "historical fuckup unparalleled in scale" is a little much even for me. With computers, you can err a great deal, but to really fuck up, you need deadly weapons.)

The whole jeremiad is worth a read, including some interesting and useful reality checks on utopian rhetoric in the open source community...

(via OLPC news; note also this entry subjected to a lot more late editing than usual...)

A success story of technology helping third-world farmers:

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers. ...

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.

Gee. You know what could be really helpful in trying to spread this sort of thing? An extremely rugged, very low-power laptop (for long battery life) with sophisticated built-in wireless networking, designed for easy field repairs, with audio-visual features built in to help guide semi-literates through the UI. Kinda like the machine being built by One Laptop Per Child.

But alas, Mr. Singh is not a child, and so he is not in OLPC's target user base. Which remains, as before, children only. Though the project's direction is changing in other respects, as project founder and leader Nicholas Negroponte explains:

"I think that means and ends, as often happens, got confused," he says. "The mission is learning and children. The means of achieving that were, amongst others, open source and constructionism. In the process of doing that, open source in particular became an end in itself, and we made decisions along the way to remain very pure in open source that were not in the long-term interest of the project."

So, open source is no longer part of the mission, to the general distress of techies associated with the project. And constructivism was never much of a guiding star to begin with --- stripped to its essence, it amounts to asserting that if you give kids computers and leave them alone, they'll figure out what to do with them entirely on their own. (Indeed, some of them will, and they are the sort of people who tend to wind up at MIT --- which explains the appeal of that philosophy there. But the rest of them need lesson plans.)

In short, the goal of the project seems to devolve into getting computer hardware --- specifically their own hardware (recall OLPC's contentious and combative approach to anyone else in their space, like Intel's Classmate) --- into childrens' hands by any means necessary. As acknowledged by new project CEO Charles Kane:

"The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible," he said. "Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter."

"It's about getting it into kids' hands," he continued. "Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for."

Which brings me to the question I was asking more than a year ago --- why just kids? Why just huge, bloc government deployments? Why not give them to anyone in the third world with a use for them? Why not just sell the damn things, and let the people in the third world themselves figure out what they're good for?

And to answer that, you've got to go back to what this project is really about. "Helping the children" will get Nicholas invited to the cool parties at Davos. "Selling computers" will not.

More: Here's one suggestion: a deployment plan modeled on what Grameen is already doing with cell phones: extending loans to local cooperatives which buy the gizmo and rent access. A similar model has been used in Nicaragua to fund deployment of local solar power systems in areas where there is no power grid; those are a heck of a lot more expensive than an OLPC unit.

Japan is experiencing one of the perils of adopting a Westernized, resource-heavy lifestyle: a population explosion of trash-picking varmints. Specifically, in their case, crows, whose nests on power lines have become a cause of repeated power failures, including one that recently shut down the bullet trains. And the Times reports that

The crow explosion has created a moral quandary for Japan, a nation that prides itself on nonviolence and harmony with nature, because culling programs are the only truly effective method of population control.

Well, the pride in nonviolence may be a new development, since World War II. (Or were all those samurai swords meant as conversation pieces?) But back then, the Japanese homeland was never invaded, and now, the crows are on their turf. So, city governments are setting out baited traps, and power companies are sending out uniformed crow patrols. And the crows are fighting back:

In Kagoshima, they are even trying to outsmart the Crow Patrol. The birds have begun building dummy nests as decoys to draw patrol members away from their real nests.

Well, after all those years of humans putting up scarecrows, turnabout is fair play.

It could be worse. The crows are displaying intelligence somewhat superior to the average Nigerian 419 scammer, but they haven't figured out what the infrastructure they keep wrecking is actually good for. Yet. When they start pirating internet service... watch out.

There's no reason for Hillary Clinton to stop running for president. Harold Stassen never had to stop running either.

Brad DeLong, a professor at Berkeley, sent a letter to the faculty senate chair asking him, in modest, reasoned terms, to have someone look into whether it's the best idea for John "Torture Memo" Yoo to be employed at the school as a teacher and role model for new young lawyers.

The same blog post has Academic Senate chair William Drummond's response:

Creating the panel you recommend to examine Prof. Yoo’s conduct would be defamatory on the face of it. Besides that, there’s the practical problem of finding committee members with the expertise you outline.

On the second point, Drummond clearly doth protest too much: another pseudonymous Charles has fun listing numerous qualified committee members from Berkeley's own faculty.

But consider the first: can merely raising questions be defamatory? Well, the questions are being raised, regardless. If Drummond really thinks they're unjust, and that his faculty member is being maligned by them, I can think of worse ways to deal with the situation than convening a few of his colleagues to investigate the matter, say how they're unjust, and provide a half-decent defense.

But Drummond doesn't want to do that. It's almost as if he knows damn well what would come out of that kind of inquiry, and he just doesn't want to hear it.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, Linux is becoming very popular. Why? Well, one reason is that the Windows license on a home PC costs something like 10% of per capita income. That's not for the computer, just the software license. Several major Linux distributions are free. And that would make even more of a difference in the even poorer countries which are being targeted by the One Laptop Per Child project.

Which explains why, after a shakeup, OLPC leadership is now talking up a Windows port. Gotta get those kids hooked early. If they get the notion that it's permissible, or even desirable, to tinker with the system at every level to solve third-world problems that no first-world denizen would never anticipate, why, then... they'd never learn to appreciate the advantages of Windows.

Whatever they are...

Hillary keeps on bringing the stupid. Her latest:

"We're going to go right at OPEC," Clinton said, on a last-minute campaign swing ahead of Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primary clashes against her Democratic rival Barack Obama.

"They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world," Clinton said, sparking cheers in a crowded fire station.

So, what's going to stop them?

Clinton has said she would amend US anti-trust law to allow the US to confront OPEC...

The Yale law school grad is proposing to somehow make US antitrust law binding on foreign governments. A bold stroke --- but so was the Charge of the Light Brigade. Does she, perhaps, have a backup plan?

... and also promised to tackle the group through the World Trade Organisation, if she is elected president.

So, let's consider. What the WTO can do, if one member accuses another of unfair trade practices, is authorize trade sanctions. The usual thing is that the victim (apparently, us) gets to raise tariffs on the miscreant nation's products. But since our only major import from most of these countries is oil, that would amount to raising the tax on gas (and other petroleum by-products), which she just proposed to lower. So, perhaps she's got another idea?

Well, an alternative sort of trade sanction might be to slap some kind of export duty on whatever it is that these countries buy from us. Which would either punish these countries, if they kept on buying from us --- or punish our exporters, as the OPEC members went on to buy whatever-it-is from somebody else. Like, say, France, whose president has been going on international trips lately with an entourage of CEOs hunting up business, including a much-publicized trip a few months back to the oil patch.

She's got a gun with a laser sight, and two of her toes are already gone. Stop her, before she shoots again!

More: Hillary supporter Sen. Robert Menendez on MSNBC: "Thank god that we don't have economists making, necessarily, public policy...". Gee, I wonder what Ben Bernanke would have to say about that?

By the way, OPEC countries are only producing 40% of the world's oil at this point, and many of them, including the biggie, Saudi Arabia, don't seem to have a whole lot of spare capacity. And the non-OPEC 60% are widely assumed to be pumping flat out. Economists, with their confusing, elitist, chardonnay-sipping discourse about "supply" and "demand", might suggest that there isn't a whole lot anyone can do under these circumstances to lower the price. But Hillary knows better. She learned the value of courage and firm resolve facing down those snipers in Tuzla...

And now, my disappointments with Hillary:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supported her plan for a gas-tax suspension.

Mrs. Clinton did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on the ABC program “This Week.” A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Look. This isn't hard. The supply of gas over the summer is basically fixed; refineries are running flat out, and can't quickly add capacity. Retailers won't respond to more demand by selling more gas --- because they can't. So, what does happen? They keep raising the price of the stuff they have until they can no longer sell it all. So, for lack of any other rationing system, the free market effectively rations the stuff by willingness to pay. And, as Paul Krugman explains:

... if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. [Emphasis added.] Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount.

The plan won't save ordinary folks a dime. And some of them aren't fooled:

Stephanopoulos turned the mike over to a woman who said she supported Obama and said she makes less than $25,000 a year.

"I do feel pandered to when you talk about suspending the gas tax," the woman said, adding: "Call me crazy but I actually listen to economists because I think they know what they've studied."

So, what of Hillary herself? She's touting a plan that's nonsense the way Dubya's war plans were nonsense; the reasons it can't work are widely acknowledged facts which aren't seriously disputed by anyone with relevant knowledge.

Perhaps, after days of publicly touting this proposal, she still doesn't know she's selling snake oil. Or maybe she knows, but doesn't care. But either way, in now flatly rejecting the very notion of expert advice (to the astonishment of some experts who thought they were advising her), she has left the reality based community.

Note: last paragraph edited late; the point was getting lost. Also, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the argument here because there are points --- like so-called "Washington consensus" policy on the economic management of developing countries, where there is at least a rough consensus among economists that I'd dispute. But in those cases, you can find prominent experts, like Joseph Stiglitz, who dispute the consensus. This is confusion of a different order. She's just getting simple sums wrong, and blowing smoke when called on it.

Repentant ex-wingnut John Cole asks:

Where do these wingnuts come up with this perception ... that Obama supporters are somehow unaware that Barack Obama is GASP a politician[?]

He is a United States Senator. He is running for the highest political office in the land. He is a politician. We are aware of this.

One reason might be that many Obama supports seem demonstrably unaware of the kind of politician he is --- one who seems to be every bit as inclined towards "triangulation" on domestic economic issues as Clinton's husband, and who is, on some issues, clearly to her right.

The key example is health care, where Clinton supports a general mandate, and Obama doesn't --- a position he holds firmly enough that, for instance, it reportedly cost him an Edwards endorsement a few months back. (Elizabeth Edwards apparently has a lot to say about this, and she'll be a health care maven for as long as she can, for obvious reasons.) Mind you, Obama's position isn't even coherent --- in one debate, he whined about the difficulty of enforcing a mandate, even though (as Hillary pointed out) his own plan has a limited mandate, for kids, to which the same objections would apply.

What's really telling is the outrage from the more, well... devoted Obama supporters when liberal commentators like Paul Krugman call him on this sort of thing. Krugman in particular was subjected to, among other things, a ridiculous rumor that he was a closet agitator for Hillary because his kid was working on her campaign staff. He doesn't have kids. And his cats, he claims, are completely non-partisan. But you'll just have to take his word for it.

To be sure, Obama himself wasn't directly putting out this sort of nonsense. But his supporters were, and Krugman is prominent enough that past a certain point, the candidate ought to have known about it. He could have certainly, at least, damped down the volume by putting out a statement highlighting the importance of respecting differences of opinion across the ideological spectrum, including more liberal commenters and colleagues --- but so far, at least, he's using that kind of language mainly when he's trying to ingratiate himself with, for instance, Republicans who are touting a phony social security "crisis" as an excuse for dismantling the program completely.

And you're reading all this on the blog of a guy who regards Obama as the best available candidate. Hillary's engaged in plenty of flim-flam of her own (and Krugman's called her on some of it), including the much-ridiculed Walter Mitty tale of dodging snipers in Tuzla, and her flat misrepresentation of her own position on NAFTA during her husband's administration. Her foreign policy positions are notably more hawkish, and her record in some respects is scary. (Like the vote to authorize use of force in Iraq --- she keeps saying "if I knew then what I know now", and that just doesn't cut it. Half her Democratic colleagues did know enough to oppose it then. Why didn't she? Perhaps because she didn't even read the National Intelligence Estimate?) And even on health care, she's an advocate of good policy, but not clearly an effective one. As I've said before, the single most important fact about her effort during her husband's administration is that it failed.

But Obama is, at best, the better of two imperfect choices. He's not the magic negro from some cheesy hollywood thumb-sucker, whose mere ascendance to office will, by itself, change, well... whatever pisses you off. People who have convinced themselves he's that, or even some kind of economic progressive in the Edwards mold, are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Today in the New York Times, the story of Debbie Almontaser, who had a dream of a school named for the Lebanese Christian writer Khalil Gibran, in which students of all ethnicities and faiths would learn Arabic language and culture.

Naturally, this got her branded a fundamentalist jihaddist by the mob that forced her out of the job.

If spreading fundmentalist doctrine was, in fact, Almontaser's intent, it really wasn't working out. Accounts of the school's discipline problems during Almontaser's brief tenure include a non-Muslim student calling a Muslim teacher a "terrorist". And, to be fair, those discipline problems do suggest something about the school's leadership had gone awry.

But, say the critics, that's not the point. The point is that she's Muslim, and Muslims are the Borg, and if we don't watch out, we will be assimilated. Or something like that. As Daniel Pipes, the intellectually credentialled thug (Ph.D., Harvard, 1978) who led the charge, explains:

Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law. ...

“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system — the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like — you can promote radical Islam.”

Never mind that the real radical Muslims in New York had been thoroughly put off by Ms. Almontaser's ties to Jewish groups. And why should anyone mind that? Pipes certainly didn't care much:

In [Pipes's] article in The Sun, he referred to Ms. Almontaser by her birth name, Dhabah, and called her views “extremist.” He cited an article in which she was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.” (As The Jewish Week later reported, Mr. Pipes left out the second half of the quote: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”)

You know, I can't even figure out how the first half of the quote can possibly be read as support for the attacks, or militancy of any kind, but then again, I don't have the credentials of a Pipes. (Or the family history; his father was Richard Pipes, who built a fine career exaggerating the Soviet threat. Windmill-tilting may run in the blood. Or it may just be the family business.)

But, on the other hand, the critics do have a point. Muslims who come here have to adapt themselves to America --- a land where religious advocacy on points of law and "faith based" governance generally may only be practiced by radical fundamentalist Christians.

Swept by the Rays. What the devil?

The lefty blogosphere is unanimous: ABC's democratic primary debate yesterday was a flop. The moderators asked questions about trivial issues, and generally stuck to the Republican party line.

Which left me wondering: One of those moderators was George Stephanopoulos, one of the Clinton administration's high functionaries in a previous job. Why would he do this?

Then I remembered what his old boss and his wife's whole campaign have been doing for the past three weeks. I need to get more sleep. There's really no mystery.

When you hire Red Sox fans to build the new Yankee Stadium, strange things are going to happen. Once such individual apparently figured he could curse the Yankees by burying a David Ortiz jersey in the Yankee Stadium foundations.

Regrettably, the guy's mojo seems to have some serious blowback. With the Ortiz jersey buried in Yankee cement, Ortiz himself started off the season in the worst slump of his career. And now that Yankee management has helpfully dug the damn thing out of the concrete, he hit 2 for 5 in Monday's game and looked a whole lot more comfortable at the plate.

It's not the worst mistake Yankee management has made over the past few years. They've got Carl Pavano to live down for a while yet...