Happy Halloween

Weird

I have no idea what to make of this. Russia does seem to be on quite a slide though, even with high oil prices. The rest of the former Soviet block seem to be doing better, at least anecdotally.

Thoughts on the CIA

From Instapundit

THE BIG LOSER in the Libby affair, it would seem to me, is the CIA. At least it will be if anyone pays attention.

Consider: Assuming that Valerie Plame was some sort of genuinely covert operative -- something that's not actually quite clear from the indictment -- the chain of events looks pretty damning: Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson's oped appeared, Plame's covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care.

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.

The other possibility is that they're so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they're so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual.

All of which is true. How valuable could the information have been if they sent some retired guy to have coffee with mining officials. He also notes revisionism occurring.

More thoughts from Tom MacGuire.

This is not to say that Libby or whoever shouldn't be going to prison, but it does point out that there are still structural problems that remain. Come to think of it those problems have probably only gotten worse now that the national intelligence system is more centralized.

Times

From my place to the Airport (picking up Mark) - Door to curb - 22 minutes. Memorial Drive can be quite a timesaver. That was without really speeding too.

Interesting post from Wretchard

In this post about violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt, for some reason I was reminded of the old Conan the Barbarian comics (from the 70s, when it was good).

For some reason the notion of diverse groups of civilizations and barbarians has always had great allure to me. I'm not sure why.

Libby

As you might could guess, I'm a bit let down by this whole Libby business. While it does involve perjury, (yay irony!) I don't think it's got the potential let us have prosperous gridlock and partisanship for the next few years.

It's still surprising that people are taking what Joe Wilson said at face value, particularly the "it was impossible for uranium to get out of Niger (a third world country) because corporate safeguards were in place" bit. Also, the indictment would seem to make clear that no original crime (i.e. outing a covert CIA agent) was committed.

Also unmentioned by most commentators is the fact that Libby was the lawyer of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton but still remains wanted for other crimes elsewhere. He was also mentioned in the UN Oil for Food scandal.

Victory!

Miers withdraws!

Now Janice Rogers Brown perhaps?

Curiously this was not buried during the weekend.

Cold and overworked

When was the last time it was in the mid 30s in October in Georgia? Weird.

And I've already worked eight hours today, and it's not even 9:00 yet. Blech.

Interesting post from McArdle

In this post

the longer the delay, the more likely that the charges in the indictments will be for obstruction of justice, with no charge on the underlying crime--or even no indictment at all, with the Fitzgerald team revealed to the world to have been engaging in a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful game of chicken with the witnesses it is interrogating (though I think this is pretty unlikely). To me, a delay like this would usually indicate that the prosecutor is trying to push this into the weekend news-cycle, where the non-explosive nature of the revelations will be mercifully buried

RTWT

And a new term "Fitzmas" has now been coined

Baby Boomer nostalgia

Rather than focusing on the good, though moot, objections to invading Iraq, or useful strategies for withdrawal, Anna Qunindlen writes her variant of the standard column comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Needless to say she doesn't mention the American occupation of the Philippines as another, more accurate comparison.

There's no need to read the column, it's just like all the other baby boomer nostalgia pieces. One telling part was

They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.

At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead.

Two Comments

1. If Johnson was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam, then how was he followed by two terms of Richard Nixon? Wouldn't a peacenik have been elected instead?
2. Funerals are for family, friends, and people who knew the deceased. They are not photo ops, political opportunities or anything else. Were Bush to attend one it would be dominated by the media and Secret Service and ruin a special sad moment.
   

Predictions

Michael Barone (and me) think that there will be no indictments in the Plame case. We should know this time tomorrow.

It's too bad. A nice big scandal could winnow off the weak republicans and make them a much more worthwhile bunch while at the same casting Washington into happy gridlock. It would be especially funny if the indictments were for perjury.

A link to remember

Patrick Fitzgerald's new site, where presumably reports will be available for download soon.

Voting on Miers

The Truth Laid Bear has a pretty cool tracking page for Harriet Miers. I oppose the Miers nomination. But all of you probably knew that.

Thank you Mister Walton

Late last night my old D-Link router died. What was I to do? No electronics store opened before 10:00 AM and I had a full day planned with projects due.

I know (I thought), I'll just head over to the Wal-Mart off of Memorial Drive. Then I remembered, the Avondale City Council decided that they preferred an abandoned building to a useful store.

So I had to drive to Dunwoody to find one that was open at 6:00 in the morning. They did have a nice Linksys Wireless G with 4 ethernet ports for a very good price.

That's been my day so far. Fighting the good fight against zoning.

Rise of the Zombies

People and their free time
"What do we want? BRAINS! When do we want it? BRAINS! "

Here's a photo set of one rally.

New Photo Gallery

Mark and I were out driving around and got the photos for this new gallery entitled Pumpkins and Pigs.

Interesting

Status and the voice

Global warming is coming right at us!

I read this article Greenland ice cap thickens slightly with it's winning quote

However, they said that the thickening seemed consistent with theories of global warming, blamed by most experts on a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.

and laughed. So, global warming produces more ice?

Then I read this article in Wired Grim Outlook for Africa's Future. The article is unremarkable with the following sentence standing out:

The potential consequences of global warming could be devastating for the world's poorest continent, yet its nations are among the least equipped to cope.

Money buys things, primarily health and safety. If they weren't the poorest continent,
then none of this would be devastating.

Words you don't expect to ever see together

From Mark Steyn, who has an eye for vivid prose

If you're going to be attacked, it's best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy. Compared with being force-fed Grandfather Smurf's genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.

As If

In a remarkably shoddy job of reporting, the AJC goes through an entire article about Avondale Estates' quest for businesses to pay taxes and fill spaces on College Avenue without mentioning that they turned down the Walmart that would occupy the abandoned and dilapidated Avondale Mall.

And speaking of Walmart, in parts of New York, they're trying not so subtly to ban them from building there.

Weird and creepy

The EFF does good work says the WaPo
Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers

The feds claim that they do it to stop counterfeiters, but that seems a bit ridiculous. All the more reason to never register hardware.
Quotes:

Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.

"It's disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity," Schoen said.

And it's not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.

"We were able to break this code very rapidly," Schoen said.

How long before this code floats into Open Source?

Grudgingly

I'm starting to like Tom Delay. An example of all is wrong and unlibertarian about the Republican party, yes (except maybe on guns). He is giving us entertainment value for our tax dollars, which is more than you can say about most politicians.

For those of you who aren't aware, this is his recent mug shot.

Economic illiteracy

For the last time (though not anyone in particular, I've just heard this twice today from random people):

Software piracy does not raise prices, it lowers them by adding substitutes, namely pirated copies of the software. It DOES prevent software from being profitable, and hence, created by making it unfeasible to create the software.

Qutoe of the moment

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
- Laurence J. Peter

Mystery photo

Who can tell me what this is?

Random Photo

I thought this looked nice.

Quick thoughts on Google

While having dinner with Pastras tongiht, I remarked that Google was brilliant because they never did anything hard. That is not to say that the creation of that company did not involve anything difficult, but rather that they use technology in a proper way and never in a way that just barely works.

What is the word for that?

A new word I just learned from the surprisingly difficult to use Volokh site is "Parade of Horribles" which I've never heard before.

Good article on Patrick Fitzgerald

The WaPo has an excellent profile on Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent counsel on the Wilson affair. He is also the bringer of the first indictment for bin Laden as well. He has been pleasantly leak-free during his whole investigation too.

Not caring

I read this wired article Phone Tap: How's the Traffic? and found it interesting in a technical way and telling in a social way. Short summary: Missouri plans to monitor traffic by the amount of cell phone signals that pass over the roads.

The usual privacy advocates are up in arms, the state government has promised that none of the info will be individualy identifiable (for now of course). Naturally the plan is proceeding. (One of the firms involved in the industry, Airsage, seems to be located in my old stomping grounds of Marietta).

There do seem to be some good technical reasons to arrange traffic monitoring this way. Everyone is videotaped 20 times a day on the highway anyway so that open road is not really the place for anonnmity.

All of this makes me wonder, who is this really going to affect. Modern cell phones can be pinpointed via GPS anyway, and if the rumor that the microphone on a cellphone can be activated remotely is true (it seems quite credible) and talented amateurs can listen in to supposedly private conversations, then what privacy concerned person would use a cell phone?

That would make a lot of us not concerned about our privacy, which would also explain why nobody encrypts their email, which I thought everyone would be doing by now.

The Toadpickers rise again!

Last night was the return of bluegrass to Jake's Roadhouse. The usual crowd was there, only now it would appear that we are the house band. Halloween is when the bluegrass is going to be advertised again.

Jake's was pretty much the same. The usual crowd was there. We played on the stage which is something we seldom did before. The low ceiling has been removed which makes sound a bit more lost than it was before. Also the entire place is much cleaner and better lit.

Interesting

One of Bush's more useful qualities (for him) is the ability to draw the right enemies. Just as Clinton excelled at drawing out the right wing crazies, Bush draws out the left, and internationally to boot. This CNN article, Mugabe, Chavez slam U.S. at U.N. event came as no surprise. While it is not necessarily a good thing to be hated by people recreating Stalin's Ukrainian horror from the 30s, it certainly SEEMS like a good thing.

Rising from the ashes

I just got word that Bluegrass is returning to Jake's on Monday's starting tonight.

Lessons learned from recording

Well, after about a week after hearing what I actually sounded like (via the USB mic) I have cut my practice speed by about 10%. So far I'm liking the result. The tone has improved a good bit, and I'm closer to reaching Norman Blake's right hand goal of "shaking water off your hand". It's a whole arm motion, similar to throwing a baseball, with little wrist effort involved.

On another note, Mike has pictures from the Millions More March.

Things that annoy me

At the moment, it's the statement "firms connected with the Bush Administration like Haliburton and Bechtel". Any huge government contractor is connected with the Bush administration, just like they were with Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, etc. How else would they be huge government contractors if they didn't put former secretaries of whatever on their boards?

The Plame affair

The Weekly Standard has a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity. It's an interesting read and goes into quite a bit of detail. Also interesting are the Wikipedia entries on Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame Wilson and the whole Wilson affair where we find out that Wilson and Plame began dating while he was still separated from his second wife and he also contributed money to both Bush and Gore in 2000.

I still find the whole thing underwhelming. Joe Wilson was on the History Channel shows a lot pre and post 9-11 and he also wrote the famous NYT editorial (which has now been somewhat discredited as have some of his other statements). It raises the question, if your wife were an active secret agent (or NOC) would you maintain this very public life? Evidently Aldrich Ames blew her cover some years earlier. She also worked at the CIA headquarters which is not something one would do if they were trying to keep their true employer a secret. I would like to hear from someone exactly how she was living a secret life and therefore qualified as a secret agent.

Also, the belief that Rove and co blew her cover in retaliation seems to overstate Wilson's importance. The notion that they would do some public but not incapacitating injury to some media-connected guy is just daft. Evidently they mentioned it, but it also seems like the reporters already knew (most likely source, Joe Wilson) because it seems like no one considered her employer a secret until after the fact. There is also the fact that no Democrat is championing him in public. This is remarkable considering the caliber of people that politicians do embrace these days, like Sheehan and Shiavo. When it comes to Wilson, not a peep in favor that I've seen.

All that being said, scandal, gridlock and partisan bickering are what slows Leviathan and we should all be grateful.

Addendum - I think freedom of the press is freedom to publish, and covers the act of journalism, not journalists. Being employed by a newspaper should not grant any special privledges to anyone. If a non-journalist can legitimately go to jail for withholding information, then so should a journalist.

I apoligize if this is more rambling than usual.

Some people are just wrong

I read the article L.I. Principal Cancels 'Bacchanalian' Prom, not quite knowing what to expect. In short summary, the prom pre and after parties were getting out of hand and the principal cancelled the school prom. Then I come across this juicy quote

"It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be; it is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake — in a word, financial decadence," Brother Hoagland said, fed up with what he calls the "bacchanalian aspects" of the prom.

This, mind you, is a Catholic school. So, the principal finds spending money on the sex/booze/drugs more objectionable than the sex, booze and drugs? He's the principal of the school and he's primarily concerned about the price of the decadence!?

Oddities

Strangely enough, my brother called me from the Millions More March today.

Saturday morning rapid fire

1. A good short history of the Davis Bacon act
2. A longer piece about Edward R Morrow (real name Egbert Roscoe Murrow I found out) and his dealing with Joe McCarthy. Short version - McCarthy bad, but Communist threat real, and the new Clooney movie inaccurately gives credit to Morrow for a lot of other people's work. The article is well worth reading in it's entirety.
3. A fairly brutal piece on Harriet Miers in National Review Online who correctly see that Supreme Court picks are not a zero sum game.

   So, we have reason to fear, will be the case with Miers. And even if she does not become a Blackmun, her record strongly suggests she will be an O’Connor — a split-the-difference judge. As one of her former colleagues has said of her, Miers’s office was the “place where the action stopped and the hand-wringing began.” If she follows that course, we will be left with a Court that retains immense and inappropriate lawmaking power but refuses to make clear laws. The rule of law is based on the making of arguments and the giving of reasons, not on sentiment or group loyalty — which is the basis on which Miers’s defenders want us to support her.

4. We live in strange times when Ann Coultier is correct in direction and degree. In her column "Does this Law Degree Make my Resume Look Fat?" she makes a strong case that against Miers.
   

Apple's best yet

The iProduct!

Two things

1. Bali protesters: Kill the bombers - an example of history moving in the right direction abroad. Evidently Bali is one of the few countries where radical Islam exists, but is actively not tolerated
2. A major clash between the Russians and the fellow travelers of radical Islam, Chechen separatists, is not major news. Chewbacca becoming an American citizen does make it above the fold on CNN.com.
   

The Supremes

It's hard to tell, but it seems like the Harriet Miers nomination is crumbling. A good thing too.

This thought just occurred to me. She is slightly less qualified to be on the Supreme Court than Hillary Clinton was in 1997. The two are often described in the same way, hard working, thorough, driven, etc. I imagine they did a lot of the same legal things for their respective presidents. Just imagine the uproar if Bill had tried to nominate her then (assuming there was a vacancy).

Similarities

I think I'm the only one to see the similarities between Barack Obama and Paris Hilton, namely they're famous solely because commentators and not reporters talk about them.

This is a correlation of no significance mind you, it is odd though. I think I'll create the term "Media Famous" to describe it.

Well put from Landsburg

I finally get around to reading his New Orleans column, and he makes a very good point in favor of cash payouts. Money quote:

The specific flood-related policy question is this: Given the population of poor people, do we make them, on net, better or worse off when we give them disaster relief (which is good) and simultaneously raise their housing costs (which is bad)? The refusal to engage that question is, it seems to me, nothing short of a declaration of indifference to what actually benefits the poor.

You might say that what we really owe the poor is disaster assistance and affordable housing. You might as well say that we owe them all magical pink unicorns that produce an unlimited supply of milk. It is quite simply impossible to guarantee assistance to people living on a flood plain without affecting their housing costs. And it is quite simply unserious to declare your commitment to poor people without pausing to ask whether your pet program does poor people more harm than good.

Good analysis from Barone

In his latest column in US News, Barone has some interesting thoughts on the current state of the Republican and Democratic parties, to wit, there are more conservatives than liberals, but the Dems have been effectively captured by the left (in primaries) which does not bode well for them, or American really.

It's well worth reading.

That odd president of ours

Via the Agitator, this was in the Bush-Myers papers

Bush responded to her birthday wish in kind, and included a humorous, if baffling, postscript.

"I appreciate your friendship and candor. Never hold back your sage advice," he wrote. "P.S. No more public scatology." Whether Bush was referring to Miers' rough-and-tumble time as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission or something else isn't clear. Scatology refers to "the study of or preoccupation with excrement or obscenity," according to Webster's dictionary.

More Ajax links

• Sortable Lists
• HoverSmack!
  
• Suggest Drop Downs
  
• Code Samples
• The Ajax Weblog
  
• Google Suggest, alas, in ASP 2.0
• AjaxInfo.com
• Ajax.net
• From 15 seconds
• CodeProject Ajax
  

Update: Fixed the link to Ajax Info after a reader alerted me to an error in the URL. Thanks Alexei!

The DARPA challenge

Multiple winners this year. As PJ O'Rourke put it, this is the proper way to waste taxpayer's money.

Schelling gets the Nobel!

Tyler Cowen says it much better than I can. For an example of what his work is like, see this article on nuclear war.

Zing

From Mark Steyn:

Bush, it seems ever more obvious, is the Third Wayer Clinton only pretended to be.

The Slicker reckoned that, to be electable, a Democrat had to genuflect rhetorically to some kind of sensible soccer-mom-ish center, and he was right, at least insofar as without him the Dems have been el stinko floppo three elections in a row. But Bush, for good or ill, believes in himself as the real Third Way deal: It's a remarkable achievement to get damned day in and day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you're Tony Blair with a ranch. The president is a religio-cultural conservative who believes in big government and big spending and paternalistic federal intervention in areas where few conservatives have ever previously thought it wise.

The first podcast

Well, I just got done with the first podcast. It took me quite a while and isn't very good, but it's a decent first effort I suppose.

Testing the condenser mic

I just recorded the old warhorse "Whiskey Before Breakfast" with myself on the lead and rhythm. On the whole I'm liking the new mic. It seems to do a fine job. I need to educate myself a bit on the whole recording process, but I do like it.

Two from Dreck

Specifically this post.

The first link is to a post containing a proposed national anthem

The Scotsman is mean, as we're all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn't got bishops to show him the way!

and

And crossing the Channel, one cannot say much
Of French and the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch
The Germans are German, the Russians are red,
And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed!

The Germans are German is a lovely insulting tautology.

And speaking of the Scots, this article Taller women are more career-driven - that's the long and the short of it is well worth a read. I have no idea if it's true or not, but any article that seems to use "homely" as a technical term must be interesting.

Tom Palmer puts it very well

From a post on McCarthyism

(It’s astonishing how the issue of the very real communist threat to liberty over a period of many decades—fortunately now behind us—has been occluded by the reckless behavior of the senator from Wisconsin. I find that when I mention in a talk that so-and-so was or is an outspoken Communist [or communist], I have to mention that I’m not red-baiting, because so-and-so actively called for establishing the dictatorship fo the proletariat and abolishing private ownership of the means of production, or was a membership of the Communist Party. A simple statement of fact is generally considered evidence of vicious “red-baiting.” The propagandists for the cause of communism did a truly brilliant job and the effects are still with us. Let’s hope that, with the USSR now dead and buried, this particular bit of dishonesty can be uncovered for what it was and is: an attempt to mask a movement for mass murder and total dictatorship as a kind of harmless lifestyle that was persecuted by fanatics whose crimes [such as denying work to intellectual thugs like the wealthy Dalton Trumbo] were far worse than anything ever contemplated by the harmless communist intellectuals, who merely wanted to liquidate much of the population and plunge the rest into a long night of tyranny and poverty.)

And, later in the comments, more bashing of Dalton Trumbo

I'd never express ill will toward the family of someone such as Dalton Trumbo; it's his personal story that's not admirable. He called in the FBI to investigate people who had written to him about his anti-war book "Johnny Got his Gun" -- after Hitler had attacked Stalin. He only brought the book out again after the Allied victory over the Axis powers, when he again became "anti-war." He's been portrayed as a principled advocate of freedom of speech, but that's not consistent with his actions; he supported freedom of speech that he thought was favorable to the USSR, and he opposed any freedom of speech that he thought was not favorable to the USSR. Needless to say, none of his family members bear any responsibility for his behavior. Nor does it excuse the clownish, disgraceful (and counter-productive) antics of Senator McCarthy.

USB mic review

For those looking for the review, let me say I'm not done experimenting with it (or the podcast) yet. I still need to record the music (which I'll be creating) which will be a flatpicked version of Saint Anne's Reel.

And, of course, religious podcasts are called "GodCasts".

Casinos

Ray Nagin now wants casino gambling in New Orleans, which seems to be a better idea than most. While that's the best idea for revitalization to come along so far, it still does nothing about the fact that NOLA is between a lake, a river, and an ocean, which will forever make it geographically unsafe, no matter how many levees are in place.

The other Moody Loner

I recently reviewed my technorati profile and noticed a link from Electronic Darwinism, whose proprietor also blogs as Moody Loner (I tend to use it as one word, with the M and L capitalized, whereas he has it as two distinct words.) I noticed he has a disambiguation section listing me and Moody Loner Records, which I thought was a fine idea, so I added a disambiguation section as well.

When doing the spell check for this post, the Blogger spell checker wanted to replace technorati" with "degenerate".

Now I'm done

I just got the holder for my bluescreen, and I'm now finally done buying photography stuff off of E-Bay. All I really need for my full digital studio is lights, and those are kind of pricey on e-bay anyway.

Two good things

1. This is an ad with lovely visuals
2. Adobe Photoshop can be legally installed and activated on two computers.
   

Life's weirder moments

Snake bursts after gobbling gator - "The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded."

Worthy of a comic book.

Weirdness

So, my computer is working again, with the old motherboard (GigaByte makes a tough one it seems), the new HSF (Zalman, very nice) and a quiet case fan, and for some reason the room is now around 3 degrees cooler than was with the prior setup. Very strange.

And I got the condenser mic. A full report tomorrow.

Peculiar

So naturally I try to use the motherboard I thought I'd broken one more time, because this time, it just might work!

And for a while, it seems to work, it goes through a post and the whole deal. I finish reassembling everything and it refuses to boot into windows. It goes about halfway through the process and stalls.

I then am in the process of writing down the model number of the motherboard so I can exchange the new one I got last night for one with the proper socket when I notice the AGP card is a bit askew. I shove it back in a little bit and presto! It all works. So basically all of my effort was for nothing then. And it's still noisy.

Toil and trouble

First I break my motherboard trying to install a new heat-sink and fan, than the new one I get turns out to be a different socket type than the CPU. I really hate computers at the moment.

The new USB MIC comes today though

Tuesday rapid fire

1. S.F. mayor sees wireless service as basic right - Gavin Newsom is truly the most publicity-hungry mayor in America. A basic right? This makes me rather glad that we don't have nationalized health care.
2. Liquids per gallon - Hot Hooters Booby Oil is my favorite
3. US finds fever bacteria during war protest weekend - This sees like it should be a bigger story.
4. DOT frowns at U.S. 78 monitors - private industry stepping into help with a public problem, gets "frowned at" by government
5. $100 Laptop - this could be really cool, if only it existed.

I went back to Marginal Revolution, and came across this post, The Unreported Mexican Immigration Story which makes the point that Mexican immigration increases as Mexicans get rich enough to leave. Well worth reading.

A sad article

Jonathan Rauch has an interesting article on the Cost-Benefit of the New Orleans levees. It would seem that the plan was to just abandon ship. Money Quote

Yet the most striking fact of the New Orleans catastrophe has received less notice than it deserves: The plan for New Orleans in case of a hit from a very powerful hurricane was to lose the city.

In other words, if a severe hurricane struck, the city's flooding and abandonment was not what would happen if the plan failed. It was the plan.

New Orleans is built between a lake, a river, and the Gulf of Mexico, and it is lower than the surrounding waters. It was kept dry by an extensive system of levees and pumps. That system was itself contributing to the slow subsidence of the city.

That was fast

1. JusticeMyers.com is already up, made by Republican flac group it would seem.
2. While I have no objection to a non-judge being on the court, Bush's personal lawyer? Seems a bit ridiculous.
   
3. Couldn't they have found a better picture for her?
   

Pithy quote

From an old article by Jesse Walker

But if I had to speak in terms of that map, I'd say the most successful culture warriors come from the blue states. The authoritarian conservative wants to maintain the old taboos. The authoritarian liberal wants to introduce some new ones, and he's had a lot more success. The religious right may despise homosexuality and pornography, but the gay movement is thriving, despite last week's losses, and porn is more freely available than ever before.

The liberal puritans, by contrast, are riding high in the media and in the courts. For many Americans, the Democrats are the party that hates their guns, cigarettes, and fatty foods (which is worse: to rename a french fry or to take it away?); that wants to impose low speed limits on near-abandoned highways; that wants to tell local schools what they can or can't teach. There is no party of tolerance in Washington -- just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four Out Of Five Experts Agree.

Finally feeling better

It would seem that I caught the rare 24 hour bug. I went from feeling miserable all day today to somewhat tolerable today to hopefully better tomorrow.

I'm hooked

On podcasts. It's like talk radio but good.