Alex Jacobson

Why I am voting for Bush

In his nomination acceptance speech last night Kerry basically said that he would not attak another country until AFTER we had been attacked. Living in the city that is one of the two most likely targets of a terrorist "first" strike, I'm going to chose the guy who will attempt to stop them in the first place. Yes, I understand this process is messy. I just prefer the mess to be over there.

Why persuasion by evidence/reason is hard?

Causing someone to believe something requires either a chain of logic or a set of evidence. If to believe proposition p, someone also has to believe e.g,. proposition p1-p3 and the probability of convincing them of each of one p1-p3 is 66%, then the proabilty you will be able to convince them of p is only 30%! Before you embark on convincing someone of something using reason or evidence, think about the probability of your success. Is it really worth it? Perhaps it is more efficient simply to make them like or fear you and agree with you for those reasons. If you go with that approach, try the techniques described here.

Do "Palestinian Refugees" mean that Israel should annex the territories?

There are 1.65M Arabs living in "refugee camps" in the West Bank (700k) and Gaza (954k) holding out for settlement into Israel. It is quite clear that allowing these people all to settle into Israel would rapidly mean the end of Israel's existence as a Jewish state and the likely followon attempted genocide of the Jews living their. It is also quite clear that these people have no valid claim on a right to settle in Israel. So the "Palestinian" "Refugees" are a mortal threat to Israel and their claims of refugee status means that they have renounced any claims of a particular right to settle in the West Bank or Gaza.

What follows is obvious: Israel should deport all the "Palestinian" Refugees" from Gaza and the West Bank, annex the territories, and give the remaining Arab residents citizenship.

• But, what about the demographic issues of absorbing so many Arabs? There are 2.3M Arabs in the West Bank, 1.3M in Gaza, and 1.25M in Israel for a total of 4.85M Arabs in territory controlled by Israel. There are 5.5M Jews in the same area. Those numbers are indeed awefully close for something to remain a "Jewish State". On the other hand, after subtracting the refugees the ratio drops to 3.2M Arabs to 5.5M Jews (36%).

• But, who will accept and settle these refugees? Israel should offer a $10k per capita settlement payment for each refugee accepted by another country. Given that there are lots of countries in the world with GDP per capita under $5k, accepting these people should be a no-brainer for many governments. The total cost for all the refugees would be $16.5B. Given that Israel has a GDP of $121B, a defense budget of $10b, Israel could finance this at $1b/year for the next 20 years. The savings in the cost of defense would make it well worth it!

• But, 3.2M Arabs, 36% of the population is still A LOT! I'm not sure I agree, but if it is a concern, lets assume we want to reach 20% (1.375M Arabs). That would require persuading an additional 1.825M to leave. Given that GDP per capita in the West Bank and Gaza are $800 and $600 respectively, $2k per capita should be enough to convince the vast majority of these populations to depart. For a total marginal cost of $3.65B.

• But, what about about the human rights of the deported refugees? They chose to be refugees and they bear the consequences. The non-refugee Arabs are being compensated for moving elsewhere. What is wrong with that?

• But, what about the inevitable disapproval of the international community? It forfeit its right to an opinion in the travesty at the Hague regarding the wall.
  

Sane vs Insane differences

Wretchard encapsulates the substantive policy difference between the parties:

two opposing, and therefore contradictory visions, are contending for the electorate this November. The first argues that despite the shortcomings of multilateralism, diplomacy and concession, it is still the best way to settle accounts with radical Islam. It will concede that more might have been done to prevent September 11 but it will maintain steadfastly that the alternative, which was to strike at enemies the way they have struck at us is fundamentally wrong and dangerous. And by exclusion it will maintain that whatever the dangers of Clintonian policy the world was safer then than it is today. Ths second point of view will argue that eight years of wilfull blindness; supporting Bosnian Muslims; ignorning the A. Q. Khan network of nuclear proliferation, buying North Korea its own reactors and receiving Yasser Araft at the White House; the whole policy of concession, bought not a whit of safety. It will argue that our enemies are even now on the point of obtaining nuclear weapons to turn against us, and will if we return to the policies of the past. It will concede that there have been disappointments in Iraq, but that by any historical yardstick our progress to victory -- and here is the unique word -- has been steady, irresistable and therefore inevitable.

The first point can be reasonably argued. The question is why the Democrats have chosen liars and cheaters to do so (Wilson, Clarke, Berger) and whether they can really argue that there was a tolerable multi-lateral alternative in Iraq..

Russia to Grozny Fallujah?

According to the Asia Times:

Do not be surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian army in the Sunni triangle before year-end, with an announcement just prior to the US presidential election in November. Long rumored (or under negotiation), a Russian deployment of 40,000 soldiers was predicted on July 16 by the US intelligence site www.stratfor.com, and denied by the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20.

The article suggests that this is a change of policy from attempting to appease Muslims into believing we are on their side (as in the Balkans), and now simply to kill resistance. The US does not have the stomach to do Fallujah, but the Russians most definitely do! Also the Russians want to learn the effective things the US does...

Maybe Teenage Pregnancy is a good thing

A friend forwards this post from Philip Greenspun:

Now that I'm 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years. The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture. Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc. Maybe teenage pregnancy isn't such a bad idea after all. I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn't the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience. The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby. Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.

Postrel and Nussbaum explain Bush Derangement Syndrome

Virginia Postrel notes:

When I was in New York a few weeks ago, a friend in the magazine business told me he thinks the ferocious Bush hating that he sees in New York is a way of calming the haters' fears of terrorism. It's not rational, but it's psychologically plausible--blame the cause you can control, at least indirectly through elections, rather than the threats you have no control over.

Charles Krauthammer (former psychiatrist) identified this ferocious Bush hating as Bush Derangement Syndrom (BDS)

the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

Although both Postrel and Krauhthammer's accounts are anecdotal, they appear to be identifying something very real. Over at Reason, Martha Nussbaum (who taught at Brown when I was there) places these emotions in a broader psychological context:

Disgust, I argue (drawing on recent psychological research), is different. Its cognitive content involves a shrinking from contamination that is associated with a human desire to be non-animal. That desire, of course, is irrational in the sense that we know we will never succeed in fulfilling it; it is also irrational in another and even more pernicious sense. As psychological research shows, people tend to project disgust properties onto groups of people in their own society, who come to figure as surrogates for people's anxieties about their own animality. By branding members of these groups as disgusting, foul, smelly, slimy, the dominant group is able to distance itself even further from its own animality. Such irrational projections have been involved in antisemitism through the ages, and in misogyny in more or less every society.

So perhaps liberal intellectuals hate Bush so much because these people have a deep desire to be non-animal. Being non-animal means being above/outside the reality of cultural/religious/national/tribal conflict and competition. Being animal means realizing that occasionally one must choose between killing or being killed and acting now or acting later.

Lee Harris thinks we talking only about forgetfulness:

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for -- yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part -- something that we could correct.

And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason -- it is his reason, and not ours.

Although his account of the enemy is correct, the problem is not simply forgetfulness. Although it would be nice to believe that reminding is the cure, Nussbaum et al give us reason to believe more is required. We are looking at active rejection of contamination. Although, I don't think the emotion is disgust exactly, it certainly looks related.

Dem's on holiday from reality?

From Mark Steyn

And here's where I have some sympathy with Sandy Berger and his overloaded pants. By his own words, he's guilty of acts that any other American would go to jail for. He "inadvertently" shoved 30-page classified documents down his pants and then "inadvertently" lost them at home and then "inadvertently" returned to the National Archives to "inadvertently" take another draft of the same 30-page document and "inadvertently" lost that, too. He "inadvertently" made forbidden cell phone calls from the room with the classified documents, and he "inadvertently" took more suspicious bathroom breaks while in the Archives than that Syrian band took on that L.A. flight that was in the news last week. If the former national security adviser has an incontinence problem, that at least explains where he was during the '90s when Osama bin Laden was growing bolder and bolder on his watch.
[...]
in fairness to Clinton, most of the American people were happy to string along on an eight-year holiday from history. There's nothing Sandy Berger can pack down his gusset that can change that, and all the rest is details.
[...]
What matters is where we're headed, not where we were. And, in that respect, John Kerry is still looking through the rear window. Not so much because of his remarkably poor choice of advisers -- Joe Wilson (the Politics Of Truth fraud), Max Cleland (with his schoolyard cries of "Liar, liar!") and Sandy Berger (with his pants on fire) -- but because Kerry's prescriptions (the U.N., the French) are so Sept. 10. A holiday from history is one thing. The Democrats are now embarked on a holiday from reality.

Iran getting more dangerous

David Warren catalogs increasing Iranian belligerance:

"Today we have in our possession long-range smart missiles which can reach many of the interests and vital resources of the Americans and of the Zionist regime in our region," writes Yadollah Javani, political head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the daily Kayhan, which has become the Iranian "Pravda".
[...]
Translations on the excellent MEMRI website (see Internet) flesh out such threats. Recent announcements include: the recruitment and training of thousands of Iranian volunteers for suicide attacks against U.S. and other targets in Iraq; the resumption of work on Iran's long-range Shihab 4 and 5 missiles, capable of reaching targets in Europe and the U.S.; and references to a "master plan" to eliminate "Anglo-Saxon civilization" with missiles and martyrdom, mentioning "29 sensitive targets".
[...]
These threats are not uttered from a cave in the Hindu Kush. They are official Iranian state announcements. The ability of the Western media to ignore them is astounding.

Perhaps Iran already has a nuclear deterrent. Perhaps the President has to wait on Iran until either after a big terrorist incident or until after the election. High stakes poker.

Disaster Prep/Planning

Yesterday went from server operations planning to general disaster prep. day. If you believe that a terrorist attack may be imminent or just that it is a good idea to prepare for disasters because they happen more often than you thnk. Our considerations involved 5 different aspects:

• Mail/File Server infrastructure (paid hosting in some non-target location with generator -- survived blackout)
  
• Personal kit you basically always have with you (in your laptop case?) that is enough to get you home
  
• Grab-n-Go kit of things you need to get from your home to the safe-house.
  
• Meeting location in NYC to coordinate getting to safe-house (outside of manhattan -- perhaps outside of range of India Point rector meltdown)
  
• Transport to safe house location (time to get a motorcycle?)
  
• Planning reentry to or abandonment of safe house if taken/occupied by others
  
• Safe house equipment prep (including assumption that power and water may cease functioning?)
  

URLs to read: Joe Katzman, the WSJ, RAND corp, toilets :-).

If you are planning to attend burningman, some of this prep overlaps.

Is Burning Man safer than the Republican National Convention?

Talking on the telephone yesterday with a friend who thought it would be a lot of fun to attend the Republican National Convention, we both noted that we couldn't make it because we were going to be at BurningMan and agreed that it would be safer to be there than at the Convention. We both noted how insane this thought is given that BurningMan is a giant art festival in the middle of the desert where people endanger themselves in all sorts of ways (but surprisingly few injuries/deaths actualy result).

Amongs my friends, it looks like people on the right are much more concerned about a major terrorist attack this fall than people on the left. My friend above argues that political philosophy should be predictive. So we will soon have a test of the relative predictive power of left-right politics in the US. To eliminate ambiguity, a major attack has to kill more people than fit on a single plane.

FYI, the band that worried people in this post, has been identified. Its not clear that they could not also be terrorists but they don't appear to be right now. On the other hand, the Washington Times reports other incidents of terrorists scouting jetliners for new attacks.

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.
At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.
[...]

But if you read the actual contents of the article, it feels a but paranoid. The obvious problem is that it is really tough objectively to distinguish between innocent and criminal behavior until action occurs and then it is too late. I think that if we don't take out Iran and Syria now (and suffer the casualties of an intervening war) we will see much greater demand measures against domestic men of Arab descent that will make the Japanese internment camps look PC.

Clarke, Wilson, and Berger

When will someone over there admit that something is seriously rotten in the Democratic Party these days if its leading foreign policy luminaries are all turning out to be liars and cheaters. What ever happened to 16 words? What was Sandy Berger covering up and did Kerry know? Assuming Kerry didn't know what does that say about his judgement?

Iran as the enemy (then and now)

Newsweek reports further evidence that Iran was involved in 9/11. Dan Darling reports that much of Al Queada and its surviving leadership is living happily in Iran.

People opposed to the Iraq war thought that we should have kept the troops in Afghanistan to finish off Al Queada rather than redeploy them to Iraq. Perhaps they are willing to acknowledge that this too was a bad argument.

Moreover, assuming that Iran was as responsible for 9/11 as Afghanistan, but that it is a much tougher nut to crack, perhaps it makes strategic sense to have US troops on both its western and eastern borders before hostilities commence. And, if you ask, why should Saddam have to suffer for the sins of the Iranians, my answer is he deserved to be removed anyway.

If taking out the Taliban was legitimate, what about attacking Iran? If the argument is a pragmatic one about US troop strength, perhaps simply making Iran a no fly zone might be sufficiently destabilizing to allow the students to take over. Perhaps in combination with killing revolutionary guards attempting to attack the students...

Some thoughts on attacking Iran:
Michael Ledeen thinks we should attack.
CFR thinks we should talk to them more. So does Gregory Djerejian but see Ledeen in the comment section! But even Greg thinks we need to do something and so does Amir Taheri.

"You do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into."

Many left/liberals exhibit a gigantic hostility/intolerance of relgious folks. They should read this FANTASTIC article:

Here I want to discuss one particular view of religion, popular among skeptics, that I call the "sleep of reason" interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.

I tend to think that liberals beliefs function more like religion rather than like policy of science.
Read this next bit and think about left/liberal explanations/justifications for terrorism/anti-semitism/anti-americanism:

For these occurrences that largely escape control, people focus on the supernatural agents' feelings and intentions. The ancestors were angry, the gods demanded a sacrifice, or the god is just cruel and playful. But there is more to that. The way these reasons are expressed is, in a great majority of cases, supported by our social exchange intuitions. People focus on an agent's reasons for causing them harm, but note that these "reasons" always have to do with people's interaction with the agents in question. People refused to follow God's orders; they polluted a house against the ancestors' prescriptions; they had more wealth or good fortune than their God-decreed fate allocated them; and so on. All this supports what anthropologists have been saying for a long time on the basis of evidence gathered in the most various cultural environments: Misfortune is generally interpreted in social terms. But this familiar conclusion implies that the evolved cognitive resources people bring to the understanding of interaction should be crucial to their construal of misfortune.
[....]
To be exhaustive, one should also mention the close association between ritual participation and group affiliation, the role of our coalitional thinking in creating religious identity, the specific role of death and dead bodies in religious thinking, and many other aspects of religion. Psychological investigation into these domains reveals the same organization described above. A variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular (non-religious) domains of information, are activated by religious notions and norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible.

The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather "natural" in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning.
[...]
Taking all this into account, it would seem that the "sleep of reason" interpretation of religion is less than compelling. It is quite clear that explicit religious belief requires a suspension of the sound rules according to which most scientists evaluate evidence. But so does most ordinary thinking, of the kind that sustains our commonsense intuitions about the surrounding environment.
[....]
People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they suspend ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. However, the "tweaking" of ordinary cognition that is required to sustain religious thought is so small that one should not be surprised if religious concepts are so widespread and so resistant to argument.
[...]
In a sense, the cognitive study of religion ends up justifying a common intuition, best expressed by Jonathan Swift's dictum that "you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into." The point of studying this scientifically is to show to what extent we can expect religious notions to be stable and salient in human cultures, not just now but for a long time to come.

Should the US have attacked Afghanistan before 9/11

Given this stuff, should we be more aggressive with Syria and Iran today?

Are Terrorists practicing for another 9/11 this fall?

Read this story and the followup. Here is the snopes version. Donald Sensing has doubts, but Britain has seen similar stuff:

Islamic militants have conducteddry runs of a devastating new style of bombing on aircraft flying to Europe, intelligence sources believe.

The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say.

Concerns that militants might assemble a bomb or another weapon on board were a key factor in the series of recent cancellations of transatlantic flights. Last weekend British Airways stopped flights from London to Washington and Miami for fear of an attack and Air France also cancelled scheduled flights.

and there's this story of a man arrested with a suicide note travelling from Syria through Minneapolis and this one of freaked SWAT officers in Detroit.
Here is one from pre-9/11.

If you are flying this summer, you might want to read Never Again: A Self Defense Guide for the Flying Public.

We also have the story of the Iranians expelled for taking suspicious photos in New York.

And this one:

Police fear five empty suitcases left at Penn Station, New York FBI headquarters and other security hot spots in early April were a test by terrorists bent on a Madrid-type attack on commuter rails, The Post has learned.

A confidential Metropolitan Transit Authority police bulletin, titled "Possible Surveillance Testing Tactics," reveals K-9 cops are on edge over a "suspicious packages pattern" they encountered between the last week of March and the first week of April.

Some of my friends argue that Iran and Syria are planning terrorism for deterrent rather than offensive purposes; given that they both have US troops on their border and are actively fighting the US (and Britain) in Iraq, they want to minimize the chance that the US would escalate by destabilizing their regimes (and unleashing the terrorists).

However, it is looking more and more like Iran was involved with 9/11. And Michael Ledeen notes:

But Khamenei's and Rafsanjani's experience with the United States leaves them pretty sanguine about that risk, because every time we come up with some devastating bit of information on Iran, we immediately follow it with "but that doesn't mean that the leaders knew about it, or that it was the actual policy of the regime." You find half of bin Laden's family and top assistants in Tehran? Not to worry, maybe the mullahs didn't know. You discover that that 9/11 band crossed Iran and were assisted by the border guards and customs officials? Not to worry, that wasn't necessarily the actual policy — this from the lips of the acting director of Central Intelligence on Fox News yesterday. Scores of Iranian intelligence agents are found in Iraq, some in the act of preparing bombs? Some bright bulb in the intelligence community puts out the line that Iran is actually helpful to us, and has actually restrained Hezbollah. We find Iranian involvement in the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia? The evidence is quashed by the Saudis, with the complicity of State and large sectors of the intelligence community.

So why should the men in the blood-soaked turbans fret over the consequences of aiding and abetting yet another murderous assault against Americans? I'm unfortunately betting on the second half of October, based on their happy experience with the Spanish elections last March.

Jewish Canaries

Sometimes people ask why I obsess about media slant. Here is one reason

A typical case of the media's mendacity on Israel was the invented coverage of the Jenin "massacre" (not) by British news organisations, which were so anti-Israel that they popularised an event that they could not have witnessed, because it had not happened. They never apologised - because any Israeli "atrocity" is seen to illustrate a greater truth. Another example was the Israeli assassination of the man whom the BBC called Hamas's "spiritual leader": Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was actually a terrorist boss, about as "spiritual" as Osama Bin Laden.

Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored - but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the "moderate" Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for "community cohesion". Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews - "scum of the human race, rats of the world" - to be "annihilated".
[...]
The first head of the hydra-like monster of medieval anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was the implied parallel between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Nazis' treatment of the Jews. This is a de facto cousin of Holocaust denial, as it diminishes and trivialises what really happened then. Since the second intifada started, 2,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have died - an appalling loss of life, but hardly a genocide.
[...]
In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise "Jews" as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews.

For Western liberals/leftists any crime/terrorism/genocide committed by others is not the responsibility of human actors but a tragic act of god angry at the hubris of holding to our own values and demanding sacrifice. Jews, as people who maintain their identity in the face of constant demand to assimilate and relinquish their cultural identity, fit the bill.

Tony Blair says it all

Via Gregory Djerejian comes this quote from Tony Blair

No one lied. No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services. Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. That issue of good faith should now be at an end ... But I have to accept, as the months have passed, it seems increasingly clear that at the time of invasion, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy ... I have searched my conscience, not in the spirit of obstinacy, but in genuine reconsideration in the light of what we now know, in answer to that question. And my answer would be that the evidence of Saddam's WMD was indeed less certain, less well-founded than was stated at the time. But I cannot go from there to the opposite extreme. On any basis he retained complete strategic intent on WMD and significant capability. The only reason he ever let the inspectors back into Iraq was that he had 180,000 US and British troops on his doorstep ... Had we backed down in respect of Saddam, we would never have taken the stand we needed to take on WMD, never have got progress on Libya ... and we would have left Saddam in charge of Iraq, with every malign intent and capability still in place and every dictator with the same intent everywhere immeasurably emboldened. For any mistakes made, as the report finds, in good faith, I of course take full responsibility. But I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all.

! BOOTLEG ! party saturday night

Some of the DJs from my burningman camp are hosting another Two Boots Party this saturday:

! BOOTLEG !
featuring the most illegal samples,
the hottest BOOTLEG records, and of course:

FUNKY HOUSE MUSIC ALL NIGHT LONG

Saturday July 17th

** NEW LOCATION **

44 Ave. A btw. @ 3rd St. (Two Boots Pizza)
10:59 - Late

dancing will be downstairs, drinks will be upstairs ..

musical offerings from:
Big Jimmy Fingers, orion, & DJ Artur

Resident Visualist: Joshua Goldberg

inflatable architecture by: AKAirways.com

$5

Am I a politician, inventor, or field marshall?

According to this test, I am a politician

Wackiness: 14/100
Rationality: 44/100
Constructiveness: 96/100
Leadership: 106/100

You are an SECL--Sober Emotional Constructive Leader. This makes you a politician. You cut deals, you change minds, you make things happen. You would prefer to be liked than respected, but generally people react to you with both. You are very sensitive to criticism, since your entire business is making people happy.

At times your commitment to the happiness of other people can cut into the happiness of you and your loved ones. This is very demanding on those close to you, who may feel neglected. Slowly, you will learn to set your own agenda--including time to yourself.

You are gregarious, friendly, charming and charismatic. You like animals, sports, and beautiful cars. You wear understated gold jewelry and have secret bad habits, like chewing your fingers and fidgeting.

You are very difficult to dislike.

Aside from the sports, cars, and jewelry, it feels good to be this. On the other hand, according to the Meyers Briggs test I am either an Inventor(here also) or a Field Marshall(here also). The great thing about these tests is that they are like horoscopes. All answers can be made to feel appealing. What do you think?

Is America the richest country because we work longer hours?

DisOrient DomeRaiser Thursday 7/22

DisOrient, the camp with which I participate at BurningMan is having a fundraiser next Thursday (July 22). If you are in the city, and like house music, bubble sculptures/architecture and not sleeping, please join us at Rumor Details here.

Looking for a Communicator

(The connection to my mail server is down so I am thinking about my device usage.) There was a time when a computer was a person who computes. It feels like we are in a simialar transition for the word "communicator." My T-Mobile contract has expired so I am now on the market for a new phone/pda. It looks like the displays on recent PDA/Phones have evolved to the point that I can begin to think differently about my whole computer usage pattern. I'm used to talking on a cellphone and doing all other communication on computers. The hardware at least is getting to the point where it may make sense to shift a lot of my usage to smaller devices.

Here is the main functionality I would like to acheive on my new device:

• Form Factor: Sony Ericson P900 (phone/PDA, good screen, keyboard, camera, microphone, speakers)
  
• Connectivity: GSM Tri-Band, Bluetooth, 802.11bg, GPRS, USB2.0
  
• Storage: 40gb (enough for my email archive, music, and working files)
  
• operates as USB disk when plugged into computer (boots computer into last used state?)
  
• screen large enough to read email/rss/atom/im
  
• automatic file synchronization with backup server of my choice!
  
• offline email send/receive (probably via pop3/imap/smtp relay where smtp relay knows how to deliver DSNs to the local pop3/imap inbox -- good file sync would make imap relay unnecessary.)
  
• pdf/officeapp reader
  
• rss reader
  
• AIM and Exodus IM client (Note: Texting/SMS may mean I don't really care about this feature)
  

The P900 is pretty close except for the lack of USB port and storage. Note, if they added the USB port, you could get the storage from one of the USB drives. If I had all the above, that would actually be quite satisfactory.

If I had this setup, I would use the computer only for actual document production where the ability to see whole documents on the screen and edit comfortably is more important.

Optimists and pessimists both predict the future accurately!

In the spirit of my earlier post on how to get luck more often come Seligman's research on same:

Optimism – reacting to setbacks from a presumption of personal power

• Bad events are temporary setbacks
  
• Isolated to particular circumstances
  
• Can be overcome by my effort and abilities
  

Pessimism - reacting to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness:

• Bad events will last a long time
  
• Will undermine everything I do
  
• Are my fault
  

Optimism psychology is in the field of cognitive science. It is not magic. But, the event-explanations of optimism can be practiced and learned, even by those who have not consistently used them previously.

Optimism:

• Inoculates against depression
  
• Improves health
  
• Combines with talent and desire to enable achievement
  

[...]
Working with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Dr. Seligman studied optimism in insurance agents. He learned that life insurance agents are a stunningly optimistic group. Metropolitan Life used an the insurance industry career profile to help screen new agent hires. In 1985, 15,000 applicants took both an attributional style questionnaire and Met Life's career profile. One thousand agents were hired based on the career profile alone, as MetLife had done in the past. However, MetLife had a chronic shortage of agents and also hired 100 agents who scored just below the cutoff point on the career profile but in the top half of the ASQ.

After two years, the optimists in the regular group of hires were outselling the pessimists by 31%. Amazingly, however, the special hires outsold the pessimists in the regular force by 57%!
[...]
One of Dr. Seligman's graduate students, Harold Zullow, an avid political observer, applied the CAVE technique to the acceptance speeches of presidential candidates from 1948 through 1984. He learned that the more optimistic candidate won virtually every time. He then went back and analyzed the “stump” speeches of presidential candidates from 1900 through 1944. Again, the more optimistic candidates trounced those with a less optimistic explanatory style.
[...]
In other studies, more optimistic societies (using West and East Berlin ) achieve more than those with a pessimistic explanatory style. (See the work of Princess Gabriele of Ysenburg.) And, relgions and cultures that promote a sense of helplessness produce a people less prone to act in the face of adversity.

Milton Freidman was wrong about rational expectations?

Old-Keynsians claim that inflation is the result of too much money chasing too few goods and that therefore there is an implicit tradeoff between employment (wages) and inflation. Monetarists (like Friedman) argue that people are paid based on their productivity so the primary determinant of inflation is simply the expectation of changes in the money supply by the government. Arnold Kling, notes that wages track expected productivity:

Productivity is what determines our standard of living. In the long run, productivity is what determines how much workers are paid. (In the short run, wage growth sometimes diverges from productivity growth. If there is a sudden surge in productivity, it usually takes a couple of years for this increase to work its way into wages. Conversely, if there is a productivity growth slowdown, as in the 1970's, it takes a while for wage growth to slow down to match.)

In other words, inflation results from over-estimates by employers about the future productivity of their employees and deflation the reverse. Cool.

Vaccinations against enjoying illegal drugs?

Zack Lynch points to an emerging category of drugs that block the effects of illegal drugs. My question is, if government can require vaccines for children to protect against bacterial diseases, and floridate the water supply to protect them from tooth decay, can it also require vaccines to "protect" them from the risk of illegal drug use (addiction/enjoyment). Could they also protect us from the "dangers" of polygamy?

Alternatively, are parent's allowed to vaccinate their children? Is it possible that people will start spiking their spouse's coffee with the monogamy hormone?

Weird times.