Palfrey
The 'suicide' of DC madam Palfrey is the topic of plenty of speculation and conspiracy-mongering. Not the sort of thing I usually bother about, but looking at the 'suicide note' caught my attention forcefully. Those two samples are unquestionably written by two different people. Absolutely no way the same hand, driven by the same brain patterns, could make those two curves naturally or incidentally.

Good lord, if I were trying to forge a note, I'd at least try to get the basic muscle-shapes right.

Also, the word monies in the note strikes me as suspicious, though not as definite as the writing. Monies is a word used naturally by bureaucrats and Nigerian scammers, not by ordinary people. I suppose Palfrey could have acquired the habit of using the word ... she did deal in an intimate way with lots of bureaucrats ... but it's still "out of tune" for a well-educated businesswoman. It would not seem "out of tune" to a bureaucrat who was trying to forge a note.
  ¶ 8:16 PM

  Negative deterrence
A few days ago, in the context of a discussion about capital punishment at NRO, Andy McCarthy gave an excellent account of the ways criminals can pursue their careers while still in jail. I'd seen this happen during my long-ago sojourn within the walls, but didn't realize how easy it is nowadays!

Spokane's main post office was evacuated today when white powder spilled out of a letter, along with a note saying "Take a deep breath!" Luckily the white powder was nothing more than crushed Rolaids, but it still scared people and wasted police time and resources.

Turns out the sender is currently incarcerated in Florida for committing exactly the same crime. So jail is performing negative deterrence, giving this fellow the time and facilities to continue his vocation.
  ¶ 8:11 PM

  "Cheat at home, cheat everywhere"
I'm dead tired of this idiotic notion. It pops up in every discussion of Clinton vs Bush. Everybody "knows" that a man who cheats and lies in his private life will cheat and lie in public. First, it's a weak correlation. Second, cheating and lying are NOT automatically bad qualities in a leader. It depends on how they're used. Lies and deception are dangerous when they destroy public confidence, but they are critically necessary to win a war. An executive who isn't comfortable with lying will lose a war.

Look first at Bill himself. A champion cheater and pathological liar in private life. But did he cheat the public? No. He ran in 1992 on three basic promises: improve the economy, end welfare entitlements, and make war against Milosevic. He accomplished all three promises. The Yugoslavia thing turned out to be a bad idea, but that's an entirely different question.

Now look at a clean apples-apples comparison between two men: Nixon and Eisenhower. Both served in the White House at the same time, so the cultural milieu is constant. Both had the same political position, at least by our poor labeling system. So we've controlled for other variables. How about their private vs public lives? Ike cheated on Mamie, but ruled with a steady and consistent hand. Dick never considered cheating on Pat, but ruled with a historical maximum of sneakiness and deceit, mostly unnecessary and stupid.

You won't find a more perfect opposition, a more perfect negative correlation.
  ¶ 12:28 PM

  Jekyll-Hyde?
Via NRO, this depressing but unsurprising article on the House Republicans. Newt is trying to tell them what's wrong, and they are completely incapable of listening. Instead, they dismiss Newt as a "has-been", and happily seek photo opportunities with Sultan Bush, the most unpopular president in history.

In nearly all situations I'm inclined to lay responsibility on the human rather than the tool or system. Blaming the tool or the system is a destructive leftist mindset. This may be the only major exception to the rule.

Here's why: Nearly all House members have worked their way up from State offices, and State governments are largely sane, generally satisfy their people. So these are demonstrably competent politicians with long experience in normal politics, whether you call it pandering or democracy. Then upon taking office in DC, they instantly start behaving insanely, doing everything possible to make the voters retch in disgust. I simply won't believe that all these competent normal politicians undergo an immediate Jekyll-Hyde transformation or some kind of lobotomy. Must be something truly filthy and bizarre about the system in DC, something that forcefully prohibits normal political behavior.
  ¶ 8:43 AM

  MyanmarFormerlyKnownAsBurma
The McCainstream Media insist on using the "official" name of Myanmar, and then they tack on "formerly known as Burma" every single time they say it. If you're going to say Burma after all, just say Burma and skip the other crap. Conserve syllables for The Planet.

No other country gets the privilege of choosing its own name in English. We don't say Deutschland for Germany or Shqiperia for Albania or Zhongguo for China or Nihon for Japan. By allowing this particular dictator to dictate OUR name for his country, we gave him a legitimacy he didn't deserve.
  ¶ 8:02 AM

  Memristors
Via David Warren at the Ottawa Sun. (I'm somewhat ashamed that I didn't catch this more directly!)

A new form of electrical component has been developed in semi-practical form. It's a 1971 idea, or more precisely God's idea finally re-manufactured. HP made the development; they're calling it a Memristor.

In simplest terms, it's a neuron.

What are the needed properties for a neuron? Its response - the amount of output it gives in response to each input - depends continually on the changes it has experienced. I'm emphasizing changes because everything in a nervous system responds to change, not to present state. Adaptation is the key. Your skin gets used to present temperature and notices a chill draft; your eyes get used to one shade of color and notice when it changes; your ears get used to the exhaust fan and wake you when it stops. Your visual memory gets used to the position of your furniture and signals you sharply when something is missing. Workers get used to a certain ratio of income to expenditure, and become bitter when it decreases. It's all about rate of change.

The Memristor has exactly the right behavior. Its resistance - the amount of output it gives for each input - depends continually on the changes, the 'history', of currents that have flowed through it.

We've been able to rig up complicated circuits or software to imitate neurons, or nets of neurons, for quite a while, but the new Memristor has the needed set of properties in a continuous way, at any point on a film or surface. This should make it possible to build a soft network with an essentially infinite number of paths. The film itself is surprisingly simple, nothing more than an extremely thin layer of titanium dioxide, the stuff that makes powdered donuts white.

A binary computer has to work very hard to imitate continuous variation: it has to run through a sequence of numbers, or use arithmetic to locate the correct number.

An innately continuous (analog) device can run through a smooth increase easily, but it has no convenient way to remember the direction and shape of the sequence. Again there are fancy ways to get there, but they tend to reach the same complexity as a binary computer, say 1000 internal components to hold one simple up or down curve.

One 'unit' of Memristance won't serve as a true memory; it will need to be combined and connected in various grid-like ways, and it appears that the HP researchers are just beginning to travel that road. In order to reproduce brainlike functions, the 'wires' will need to have a huge set of potential connections, and the outputs and inputs will need a way to gather or perceive which areas of the grid are most active at each moment.

THIS IS BIG. Maybe not quite as big as Fire or Wheels, but pretty close.



  ¶ 8:19 PM

  Laura
Watching Laura Bush's news conf on Burma. This is astonishing. She is in Tony Blair's league. Knows the big picture and all the details, communicates in clear and persuasive English, answers each question without any wasted time, weird nicknames or sports palaver.

When you have a Tony Blair and an Aphasic Imbecile available in the same office, why wait seven years to let the Tony Blair take over the podium from the unfortunate mentally defective stroke victim?

It is a mystery.

= = = = =

Or maybe it's the solution to a mystery. I've always been irritated by the smug insiders constantly referring to a "Schrödinger's Bush", an articulate English-speaking sharp intelligent Bush who only appears in private situations when nobody is recording. Whenever a recorder is present, the Bush we see is the usual imbecile. I always thought the smug insiders were simply lying to protect the imbecile, but now I can see a more elegant answer. Not quantum theory, not a lie. When they talk about the two Bushes, they're not talking about two different manifestations of George, they're talking about Mr and Mrs Bush.
  ¶ 12:21 PM

  Define man, redux
Reprinting an entry from Aug 07.

= = = start reprint = = = = = = = =

Does your moral palate require cleansing?

Need a reminder of the definition of "man"?

Try this, from the WPA Guide to Oklahoma, 1941.

RED OAK (590 alt., 484 pop.), is a small farming center which was named for a large red oak tree that stood in the center of the town when this region was the Choctaw Nation. The Indians held district court there and used the oak as a whipping post.

The most serious political disturbance in the history of the Choctaw Nation had its finale at Red Oak when Silan Lewis was executed for his part in the Nationalist uprising, following the election of 1892. The fullblood Lewis, who had been sheriff of his own district, upheld the traditional Choctaw honor when he came striding in from his woodland home on the appointed day, November 5, 1894, and quietly sat with back against the tree to await his death from the firing squad.

That's a man.

= = = end reprint = = = = = = = = =

Yesterday while looking for something else, I came across this picture of the event. It's a huge old newspaper photo, taken just after the execution. The authorities are placing the body of Silan Lewis on a blanket before hauling it away for burial. You can see the Progressive Choctaw executioner smugly cradling his rifle; a friend of Lewis staring accusingly at the executioner; and a crowd of bovine white men watching the proceedings.

= = = = =

Now, also by coincidence, this story from London via Vdare.com shows that serious Nationalists are starting to push back against the Progressives in Britain. Best of luck to Mr Barnbrook. The Brits don't use capital punishment any more, but when Progressives are seriously threatened by Nationalists, they have a remarkable ability to find exceptions to their own rules.
  ¶ 6:55 AM

  Can't stay mad at Hillary.
Listening to the Jeff-Jack Day speech:

Okay, so she's just as bad as the rest on the subject of questioning enemy prisoners. Only two of the brand-R candidates were pro-American on that subject, and both of them dropped out early.

On most other matters, say 80% of important stuff, Hillary agrees with Polistra.

Most importantly, Hillary is the only remaining candidate who understands that the President is an executive who can actually do things.

Comrades McCain and Obama are good at emitting meaningless phrases, but never use a transitive verb, never promise action. Obama's sentences always begin with "we can" or "we should", which evoke a positive emotion but make no genuine promise. (I can't resist: What you mean WE, half-white man?)

McCain's sentences contain lots of negatives but no firm positives. This speech, for example, has several "We must not" and "We should not" constructions but only one "I will", namely "I will establish a goal..."

Even though nobody in the media has enough substance to ask basic and concrete questions, Hillary answers them exactly and consistently for every problem:
What will you do? How will you do it? When will you do it?

And that's why I can't stay mad. For three years I've been waiting to hear those three little words from a politician. What! How! When!
  ¶ 6:43 PM

  Insanity piled on insanity piled on insanity piled on insanity
From the latest New Science-ist.

In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management, Ning Zeng [at University of Maryland] calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere to offset all our fossil-fuel emissions. It wouldn't be easy, but Zeng believes it could be done. .... Zeng's proposal is to thin forests regularly and to bury excess wood, forestry waste and even trees that have been grown specifically to be buried, in trenches between the remaining trees. To prevent the wood from decomposing, which would release carbon, it would need to be buried deep enough to avoid being broken down by soil fauna and fungi, or STORED ABOVE GROUND IN WATERTIGHT SHELTERS.

... Burying wood sounds like a lot of trouble for a small gain, but Zeng insists that unlike simple growing, this is a long-lasting and perhaps permanent carbon sink. He estimates that offsetting all the world's current emissions would be achievable with a WORKFORCE OF ONE MILLION PEOPLE, substantially fewer than those already employed in the forestry industry in the US alone. Even so, to offset all our emissions, most of the world's forests would have to run a wood burial scheme.

I can't even allow myself to comment on this; if I let myself start thinking about this, I'd end up ripping the city to shreds with a shovel.

The article goes on to introduce a surprisingly sane and ordinary idea, but without even realizing it's sane and ordinary.

...Another approach to carbon burial has a much longer history. More than 500 years ago Amazonian people were creating almost pure carbon by smoldering their domestic waste and letting it work its way into the soil. This 'black earth' remains to this day. Such char can be created when organic matter is heated in the absence of air to around 350 degrees C, the kinds of temperatures reached in the Amazonian waste piles. The lack of air means the organic matter does not combust but most constituents other than carbon are driven off as gases or liquids.

Hmm. I understand that you enviro-commies are incapable of respecting an old idea unless it originates from your fellow human-sacrificing savages, but this particular idea was also common in non-savage areas of the earth. It was called the City Dump. It worked quite well until you enviro-commies required us to stop burning, and then required us to enclose it in plastic shields to prevent the carbon from working its way into the soil. I remember taking junk to the Manhattan city dump (which was not far from the Mill) and watching the yards-deep smoldering process. It was impressive.

Hmm again. Could the current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 have started around the same time that City Dumps were required to stop burning and stop leaching?

=============

Yikes! The online version of the article is quite different from the paper version that I read. It turns out that Zeng was STARTING from the exact premise that I came up with in the second Hmm. He was wondering whether the rise in American CO2 started when we stopped burning landfills!

But if that's the case, why go through all that weird crap about a million workers growing forests for the sole purpose of cutting them down and storing them forever in above-ground watertight shelters? Why not just suggest burning the City Dumps again, perhaps with better precautions to insure airless smoldering? It's still crazy.


  ¶ 6:35 PM

  Chacun à son goût?
Comrade McCain, in a phone interview with Glenn Beck, firmly opposed drilling in ANWR, saying "I'd just as soon drill in the Grand Canyon."

Polistra is puzzled. She is trying to study the esthetics of the elites, so she can comprehend why a man with a hundred million dollars and free beer would desire to keep the rest of us poor and dependent on hostile foreigners.

As an educational project, she is examining these two towers to parse out the esthetic imperative that drives Comrade McCain.



The elites apparently consider one of these towers to be the ugliest thing on Earth, a blot on the landscape, an eyesore to be avoided by all civilized humans. The other tower is considered one of the most beautiful things on Earth.

Ah! She's figured it out! The one that keeps civilization going, the one that provides the fuel to construct beautiful things, the one that allows beautiful things to be transported from one place to another, that one must be the beautiful tower!

Eh? Non? C'est l'autre?

Pourquoi?
  ¶ 4:41 PM

  That Kantor clip
Lots of brouhaha at NRO and other places over this clip from the documentary War Room. Supposedly Mickey Kantor says at one point "Those people are shit." ... referring to the people of Indiana. After watching it, I don't see how you could possibly reach that conclusion. What he says is unquestionably "Those people are shitting." The last syllable is soft but clear, and his lips form the last syllable. It's not clear who "those people" are from the context, but presumably he means the opposing campaign. It wouldn't make any sense to say "Those people are shitting" about the people of Indiana.

Here is an amplified but otherwise unaltered 5-second segment from the audio. You can hear the "ing" is whispered but present.
  ¶ 12:05 PM

  Bye, Hillary.
Maybe she had said it before and I didn't hear it, but in tonight's interview with Asshole O'Reilly, Hillary just now stated firmly and repeatedly that when given the choice between (1) annoying an enemy prisoner or (2) watching millions of Americans die, she would rather (2) watch millions of Americans die.

Traitor Hillary has now joined Traitor McCain and Traitor Obama in swearing an Oath of Disloyalty.

If this unfortunate land retained even a single drop of sanity, all three of these traitors would be firmly and permanently disqualified from holding any office.
  ¶ 8:15 PM

  Cooling currents
The major commentators have done an excellent job on this, so no need to rehash the details.

Polistra has been tracking the gradual backing-away from Total Gaia in the world of science. First the 11-year cycle of sunspots is taken into account (which it should have been from the start, because it's been known forever) ... then the fact that heat evaporates CO2 from the oceans was taken into account (ditto) ... and now the effects of ocean current oscillations are taken into account. These drivers are sufficient to account for all real change, but the establishment continues to treat them as minor exceptions or counter-trends against the "real" (i.e. nonexistent) greenhouse effect.

The recent backing away, seen by itself without the accompanying context of religious and political certainty, would be part of normal science. Good science.

A parallel but non-political example: For many years speech scientists believed that the larynx produced voice vibrations by direct muscular action. In other words, when you sing a middle C, the muscles in your vocal folds are contracting and relaxing 256 times per second. When you sing a high note, the muscles might be contracting and relaxing 3000 times per second. This theory never made sense, because no other muscle in a mammal can vibrate much beyond 10 times per second. So the fastest muscle couldn't approach even the lowest voice pitch. As better thinkers came along, and better instrumentation could read the relevant nerve impulses and view the rapid flapping of the folds, a better theory gradually took hold: the muscles only set the shape of the folds, and the vibration results from air-pressure valving, just like the reed of a clarinet. This theory continues to agree with newer measurements, and continues to yield good therapy methods, so it stays in the books.

That's how science normally moves. One theory is proposed; many people test it with gradually better methods and instruments; if the theory holds up, it becomes more solid. If it doesn't hold up, new theories are proposed and tested.

If we could skip the religious and political crap, we'd see the same thing happening now with climate. The Greenhouse theory never made a lick of goddamn sense, so it would quickly end up as a dim heirloom in the minds of a few elderly scientists while better methods and measurements developed better theories, or better mixes of theory and speculation.

Unfortunately and lethally, WE ARE NOT PERMITTED TO SKIP THE RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL CRAP. Anyone who tries to do that will be ostracized or fired, and the advocates of the nonsensical theories own all the levers of power and money.

Polistra is infuriated by the backhanded arrogance of the establishment: they gin up a 20-year-long campaign of vicious and deliberate fraud, then after the fraud has succeeded in turning all political, cultural and religious authorities into craven little slavies, working at 1000% intensity for a galaxy-scale scam, the science-ists casually walk away, whistling a merry tune, resuming normal operations while civilization commits suicide on their behalf. At least they could thank us.
  ¶ 4:02 PM

  Just when you thought...
Sultan Bush just now announced a big "aid package" to foreign countries to "help" them deal with rising food prices.

Let's think about this. Part of the rise is local, caused by temporary and typical conditions like a bad rice harvest in Australia. According to economists, widespread global trade should moderate such local effects, because rice will be easily available from other sources to replace the single-country deficiency. Instead, widespread global trade, plus a number of other factors, is leading to huge price spikes EVERYWHERE and IN OTHER COMMODITIES as a result of local effects.

Something is deeply wrong here. The basic theory of trade is probably good, because it has worked before. But the other factors are creating monstrous distortions, leading to actual deaths.

In other words, somebody or something is manipulating the worldwide economy, and poor people are dying as a result. (Who's the somebody? I'd be inclined to look first at China, only because China is the main practitioner of Mercantilism, war by economic means.)

Will an "aid package" help? No. It will only make things worse, because it will pump extra money into the buying side, which is guaranteed to raise prices even more. And since Sultan Bush finances everything by borrowing from China and devaluing the dollar, this added debt will devalue the dollar a little bit more, making every price a little bit higher.

The real puzzle here: why are no professional economists complaining about this? Why aren't they (at the very least) asking what's wrong? Are they all strongly stupid, or are they all blackmailed into silence?

= = = = =

Update Jan 2012: Well, now we know what happened. These rising food prices were purely generated by Goldman's speculation. Bush was insuring that those poor countries were able to pay the prices necessary to keep the speculation running. In other words, he was subsidizing Goldman, just as he did in a MUCH larger way in Sept 2008.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 12:01 PM

  Especially scary
Here in Spokane, a city employee has been run through the media torture mill for the past year, because of charges that he had been selling or passing on kiddy porn. He was finally cleared a few days ago, in the usual reluctant way that leaves the image of wrongdoing intact, and is considering suing for defamation. Hope he does, hope he wins.

This case is especially scary because it didn't start with the usual crazy and absurd false accuser: there was no Rozita Swinton, no Crystal Mangum. Instead, this man's credit card was stolen and used for illegal purposes by someone who never had any connection with him. The case never involved anything other than the credit card. The man had reported the card's theft before the card was misused, which means the authorities knew from the start that he couldn't have been responsible for its use during that period. Still, his name was trashed publicly, his employment was suspended for a year, and he will never get his life back in order.

The witch-hunt continues and expands. The chain of comings now includes victims of identity theft in the list of witches to be burned.

= = = = =

Later: This story may in fact be more of a positive sign than a negative one; more an indication of a turnaround than a continuation of the witch-hunt. The city and the media are taking great pains to give this guy a "restorative" welcome. Their motives are undoubtedly mercenary in part (trying to forestall a lawsuit) but it's still a dramatic set of apologies and gestures.
  ¶ 11:29 AM

  How about a Bullshit Holiday?
Following up on yesterday's entry about the consequences of low-quality information.

= = = = =

Comrade McCain has been proposing a "gas tax holiday", and Hillary has unfortunately picked up on this trivial idea.

It's a dim reflection of FDR's original "bank holiday", which was his first real act as President. The bank holiday, followed immediately by new regulations, succeeded in stopping a slow but steady run on banks. Nationally, very few banks experienced a panicky stampede as seen in A Wonderful Life... but most people had lost faith in the ability of banks to keep track of abstract money, and preferred to have it in a physical form like gold.

What we have now is a complete loss of faith in government competence and truth. People are seeking information that feels more "golden", and much of this "gold" is actually pyrite.

So Polistra begs Comrade McCain: You're the man with the reputation for Straight Talk, the reputation for Mavericity and Independence. Start your term with a Bullshit Holiday to slow down the run on dangerous information. Instead of closing the banks, open the archives. Let us see all the documents relating to our government's lies and coverups, starting with the most obvious ones like Oswald's KGB connections and Terry Nichols's jihadi connections. We know you haven't been telling the truth about these things; we don't know what the exact truth is, but we know with 100% certainty that the official story is nowhere near the truth. Just as FDR coupled the Bank Holiday with new regulations, you can couple the Bullshit Holiday with a new resolution to tell us the truth about basic things like inflation and interest rates, and about our motives in continuing to waste soldiers in Iraq. You don't need to give away any strategic details; just tell us what you're doing and why. Treat us as adults. That will be enough. Please, sir?
  ¶ 4:06 AM

  So near, so far
The populist talker Michael Savage, who often runs along the same path as Polistra, has taken the same path today but veered off at just the wrong point.

In discussing Rev Wright's view of black/white learning methods, Savage understands the difference in rhythm and the difference between concrete-first and abstract-first learning, but he then says "There's only one way to learn astronomy or trigonometry. You just have to sit down with the textbook."

This simply isn't true, and it's NOT a matter of black/white, nor is it a matter of progressive vs conservative.

All good teachers through the millenia have known that there are several ways to learn. Some kids learn best by starting with the concrete, some by starting with the abstract, some by example, some by story-telling. All good teachers have also known that learning requires work, that the only way to solidify your skills is to spend lots and lots of time practicing. All good teachers have also known that some type of objective evaluation is needed at the end of the process.

These basic facts are not controversial, or shouldn't be.

My father, who was pure Teacher from stem to stern, taught me these things early in life, and applied them when possible in his occupation. He didn't think of himself as Progressive; he was old-fashioned.

The controversy and problem arises because American "Progressive Education" insisted on using only the concrete, and ALSO insisted that evaluation is a bad idea because it damages "self-esteem".

In blind reaction to the latter error, American "Conservative Education" insisted on using only the abstract reading method (Just the Basics, Ma'am), conflating method with evaluation.

Because public schools are rigid and bureaucratic institutions, they have to choose only one way of learning. There just isn't the time or resources to handle each kid differently, and discrimination laws further limit the range of operation. A teacher who tries to treat the concrete kids differently will end up dividing mainly, though far from exclusively, along racial lines.

The solution is simple: Vouchers. We've seen that inner-city schools run by gutsy and independent principals have been able to match teaching styles with learning styles, with excellent results because they don't skip the practice and evaluation steps.

As in most areas of life, if you decentralize, if you avoid one-size-must-fit-all requirements, everything works just fine.
  ¶ 4:54 PM

  If it's over there, we can describe it.
One of Polistra's main themes is our absolute unwillingness to label things accurately, and our seeming inability to find distinct words for distinct things.

But there's one very large exception to this problem.

When describing American politicians, we can't seem to go beyond Republican and Democrat, despite the complete merging and crossover of those names. And, as is well known, the label is only used when it makes a Republican look bad. Our media will never describe an American politician as a Marxist, a Huey Long Populist, an Agrarian or a Wilsonian; nobody bothers to invent or apply new labels like a 'Lantos Hawk' or a 'Closet Craig', which could be useful if we used labels at all.

Yet we use a full range of accurate and descriptive terms for foreign politicians and parties. Same with political and economic systems, degrees of corruption, and the need for specific solutions to specific problems. All of these remain floaty, gauzy and vague for American situations, all are listed concisely for foreign situations.

In today's Rose Garden press conf, Bush illustrated this contrast perfectly within two answers to one reporter. April Ryan of 'Urban Radio' asked two questions: "When will you finally use the word recession?" and "What can you tell us about the situation in Zimbabwe?" In response to the first, Bush hemmed and hawed, finally mumbling something like "You can call it anything you want." In response to the second, he gave [by his low standards] a remarkably crisp and accurate description of Robert Mugabe and his opponents, with full attention to the brutality and corruption of Mugabe.

It's always like this with our politicians, experts and media. When the subject concerns this benighted and borderless blob of Terra Incognita that sprawls somewhere between Mexico and Canada, we get a vague wave of the hand, or a Delphic utterance that must be interpreted by finding the omissions and variations from the standard code book. When the subject is anywhere else we get precise nomenclature, meaningful information and commonsense assessments.

Well, why is this bad?

The whole point of having newspapers, radio, and TV is to provide useful feedback to the people and to the leaders. And I mean feedback in the strict engineering sense: a signal that tells us the distance between the current situation and the desired or proper situation. When politicians and media hand us nonsensical and empty crap, the people will latch onto paranoid conspiracies which satisfy the hunger for solid mental nutrition.

You won't tell me what's happening? That's fine, I can learn better from Rev Wright. Or Rev Robertson. Or Imam Zawahiri. Not to say that those three are equivalent, but each will serve up a spicy full-course meal of "knowledge", some of which is genuinely and observably more accurate than the establishment swill. That's why it's bad.
  ¶ 12:21 AM

  Grrrrrr
Bush chided Congress today for doing nothing to open ANWR for oil.

I've said this a dozen times, but it needs to be said again.

Bush can open ANWR by executive order any time he wants.

Proof: Clinton closed national wildlife areas to oil exploration, by executive order.

If a president can close a wildlife area, a president can open a wildlife area.

Bush has not done what he CAN do. This proves he really doesn't give a happy horseshit about energy independence. He only wants to "have the issue" for campaign purposes.

= = = = =

Later: Double Grrrrrrrrrr.

Listening to Saturday morning discussion on Fox (I should know better, but needed some distracting noise) ... The talking pointheads were "discussing" energy independence, and one of them actually mentioned the closing of Utah land in the '90s, then proceeded to blame the Democrats in Congress for failing to open more land for drilling. AGAIN: THE UTAH LAND IN THE '90S WAS CLOSED BY BILL CLINTON'S EXECUTIVE ORDER, NOT BY CONGRESS. IF YOU WERE NOT HOPELESSLY LOCKED INTO TALKING POINTS, THIS FACT WOULD TELL YOU THAT SULTAN BUSH CAN OPEN ANY FEDERAL LAND ANY TIME HE WANTS.
  ¶ 4:04 PM