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March 30, 2006
I could use that!
Home on the Strange: A Much-Needed Service
Posted by Andrew at 11:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 27, 2006
Democratic peace in action.
(or: look dad, that was money well spent!)
Professor Rummel has a few notes from the Saddam interrogation. Take a gander at 'em before continuing reading my post.
Ready?
Being able to interrogate Saddam brings some interesting light to Jervis’ theories. In his War and Misperception, Jervis makes the case that countries might go to war even if they had all relevant information. He says that this is because sometimes (perhaps often) the domestic cost of not going to war is higher than the domestic cost of losing a war. Saddam certainly seems to have thought this to be the case...
This also proves the value of being a democracy when deciding about going to war:
A) Being that deluded about your capabilities is nearly impossible with a free press and a dedicated opposition party.
B) Leaders in a democracy almost always lose power if they lose a war. They therefore chose their wars _carefully_, so as to minimize the chance to lose office...
Democracies therefore have better information and have leaders with interests in better alignment with their countries than do non-democracies. All of this helps explain why democracies win 80% of their wars...
Posted by Andrew at 07:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 26, 2006
Never mind the soul, treat the body.
The worst part about this story? the hospitals have probably been making the correct decision...
Think about it this way: Hospital beds cost a lot of money to run. Having them used for someone who is healthy is an almost criminal misuse of resources that could be used to help the sick and injured. The problem is not that the homeless are being “dumped” downtown, but that the city, or county, or state, or someone-- that society isn’t setting aside enough resources to help those so powerless that even their cloths can be taken from them...
The problem here is not the hospitals. The problem is that we have left the hospitals no choice but to do what they’re doing. If we don’t like the results, we should work on the underlying problem...
Posted by Andrew at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 25, 2006
top 10
Top Ten Reasons "Dick" Cheney Won't Resign
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The French are rioting. Again.
CNN.com - French PM offers labor compromise
So, the French Prime Minister creates and pushes for a law designed to boost employment levels. It does this by removing the wildly over-zealous job protection laws French business have to deal with...
See, when a business can’t fire someone no matter how broke their company is going, they tend to hire just the number of people they can afford when times are bad. This creates all kinds of slack in the economy. The American system could do much better for displaced workers—but we tend to have far fewer people without jobs...
The French students are saying: that the “law will create a class of workers who will face being fired every two years.” Since those are the people who haven’t jobs now, I fail to see the problem...
Posted by Andrew at 11:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 24, 2006
Fewer Physicians Providing Charity Care, Study Says
A report just put out by the Center for Studying Health System Change tells us that doctors are now spending less time taking care of people who are uninsured. Meanwhile the ranks the uninsured people are swelling...
Apparently, they used to do a lot more, but since the rise of HMOs and other health rationing devices doctors been making less money overall. Incentives matter, and right now our system is putting out powerful incentives to not take care of sick people. Indeed, many people in charge of creating health-rationing policy in this country are laboring under the idea that Americans simply want too much coverage, and should have even smaller access too it. If this seems nuts, there’s a good reason for it...
Let’s see: consumers are spending more and doctors are making less. Who the hell is making all the money? More importantly, who do we want to be making all the money? I’d bet your answer to the first question is different from your answer to the second. Mine sure is...
(Via Health Policy Blog, a blog you should read more often.)
Posted by Andrew at 10:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Actual Bug Report
Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create 2 unique user accounts (for steps sake, let's call the two accounts Joe and Mary) in Windows XP Home. 2. Logout and sign-in under Joe. 3. Open Firefox and go to an e-mail site or to jdate.com or wherever. 4. Attempt to log-in to the site so that Firefox will ask whether or not you want your password saved. 5. Choose not to save the password. 6. After successfully logging in and having selected the "never save password" option, logout. 7. Log-in as Mary and open Firefox. 8. Browse, browse, browse... but you don't really have to. Just go to "View Saved Passwords," click on the tab that will show you sites to never save passwords for, and you'll see whatever painful site Joe denied to save a password for. 9. Break-up with fiancé.
Posted by Andrew at 01:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
Giaus Marius finally wins!
CTV.ca | Basque separatists announce permanent ceasefire
These guys have only been at it for about 3000 years. Good to know they know when they’re licked. Oh, and if you didn’t get the reference, don’t worry, it’s obscure...
Posted by Andrew at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2006
Hot damn!
Oglala Sioux Tribe on the South Dakota Abortion Ban : SF Bay Area Indymedia
Well, we screwed the Indians for centuries. But thank the gods they’re still looking out for humanity—and us...
"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."
I assume this planned parenthood clinic will have an abortion center, though it is worth pointing out that this is not _all_ that panned parenthood does...
Posted by Andrew at 06:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
Dear Google,
Why on Earth have you not integrated your Desktop and your RSS Reader. It isn't like you don’t have RSS functionality built into the Desktop. And it isn’t like that RSS reader is any good...
Posted by Andrew at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2006
Somewhere on a parallel Earth...
there is a President Gore. This man insisted that every vote—overs and unders-- be counted in every county in Florida, and then went on to smash Al-Qaeda in March of 2001. He also didn’t put the arsenic back in the drinking water, and did move to strengthen ties with our European Allies—and created new ones out of China and India...
American Prospect Online - The New New Gore
But we didn’t get any of that:
The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore’s friend since 1961, told me, is that “Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media.” Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns -- what came out had little relation to what went in. “Gore’s own view,” says Hundt, “is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net.”
Posted by Andrew at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 19, 2006
Winning the fight against censorship.
Rationales for Challenged Books: Prepared by NCTE in Partnership with IRA. Compact Disc.
On one CD you can find a whole bunch of reasons not to censor any particular book. This is a hell of a resource. Anyone wanting to buy and donate one of these would probably also go directly to heaven.
(via Pandagon)
(see also My earlier post on banned books)
Posted by Andrew at 02:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A response to an idiotic Email
Making Light: Pass This On To All Your E-Mail Friends....
(no, not the Email some idiot sent me earlier this week. If you’re the sort of idiot who thinks Kerry committed treason, you can rest assured that I’ll have nasty things to say about you, but after finals)
What in the world are you talking about? Of course the First Amendment rights come from the Constitution. This is just flat insane. If you’re trying to set up a strawman at least use straw.But since you brought the question up, shall we start talking about how the Bush administration treats people as traitors for defending their constitutional rights? Shall we talk about how Bush treats the Bill of Rights like toilet paper?
There’s much here I disagree with. But there’s a lot here to cheer. So give it a read and shame a wingnut...
Posted by Andrew at 01:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2006
This must have been designed by a man.
What woman wants to squat directly onto a toilet where a man has pissed on the lip? Alternately, what woman wants to hover over a toilet just in case? And what kind of form-over-function moron doesn’t take this into account when designing the thing?!?!
Posted by Andrew at 11:02 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Pretty much, yeah
I Drew This: How the current Congress would have handled Watergate.
PS: do any of you feel this blog has been "foisted" on you?
Posted by Andrew at 12:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 16, 2006
What "race" am I?
How African Are You? - What genealogical testing can't tell you. By John Hawks
From a practical point of view, that is the biggest problem with today's genetic genealogy tests. In many cases, they can't tell you what you don't already know. And unlike DNA fingerprinting tests with error rates of one in a billion or less, the chance of misidentifying ancestral groups in these genealogy tests may be 5 percent or higher. With this chance of error, the test won't be wrong about a full Native-American grandparent, but it might be wrong about a great-great grandparent. In addition, SNPs that separate central Africans from northern Europeans aren't nearly as good at separating Ethiopians from Arabs. So, in the test results of some African-Americans, European means Europe, while in others, it may mean East African, or Arab, or Indian.
This is because of all that pesky inter-breeding humanity has one. See, boy and girl meet, then fuck like bunnies humans. Then have kids. “Races” don’t stay “pure”, we intermingle and produce new groups...
A deeper problem with admixture testing is its claim to identify the "ancestral components" of different populations. For example, admixture testing considers people from India to be a mixture of "Indo-European" and "East Asian" ancestors. And indeed, Indians have some alleles otherwise common in Europe, and some otherwise common in China. But Indian populations have been on their subcontinent for tens of thousands of years, and they have many alleles that don't come from anywhere else. Anthropologists studying genetic variation have always found complexity rather than simple one-plus-one racial mixtures.
So, as science tells us, “race” means almost nothing. Ancestors are from all over, save that humanity started out in Africa. Human beings have not speciated even to the same extent as dogs. Which is a good thing...
Posted by Andrew at 07:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 15, 2006
New ALA shopping list
The First link is to BN.com, the second to Amazon. Why, oh why the ALA doesn’t do this themselves, I don’t know...
* It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris Amazon
* Forever by Judy Blume Amazon
* The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Amazon
* The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier Amazon
* Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher Amazon
* Detour for Emmy by Marilyn Reynolds Amazon
* What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones Amazon
* Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey Amazon (first 5 books boxed set)
* Crazy Lady! by Jane Leslie Conly Amazon
* It’s So Amazing! by Robie H. Harris Amazon
Once again, the "most-challenged" books are the ones that deal with puberty. I guess people should only learn about that sort of thing when they’re adults. Or something...
Anyway, remember my motto: Do the Job Buy a Banned Book: Go to Heaven.
(ALA Link via Librarian in Black. Links added by me)
Posted by Andrew at 02:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 13, 2006
heh. Indeed
Medium Large: Comic for Monday, March 13, 2006
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March 12, 2006
Squee!
Posted by Andrew at 10:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 09, 2006
Be Young, Have Fun, Drink Polity Iv Dataset.
The Advertising Slogan Generator
Posted by Andrew at 01:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 06, 2006
Partial-“Birth” Abortion
The idea of waiting for a fetus to be nearly born before aborting seems monstrous. It is no wonder that upon hearing the phrase "partial-birth" abortion we have a natural revulsion, and are moved to demand congress ban such a heinous procedure. Expect that the phrase is a misnomer, created with political malice aforethought.
It ought to be obvious, and with a little thought, it is. Who can imagine a woman thinking "dum-de-dum, It’s been eight and a half months. I’m bored. I don't want this anymore. To hell with stimulating birth, the whole thing just seems like too much work"... Given how absurd it is to even contemplate, we can know that something else must be going on. And there is.
This is a Partial-Birth Abortion:
My doctor came in a moment later, slid the ultrasound sensor around my growing, round belly and put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s not alive,” she said.[...]
I’d been through labor and delivery three times before, with great joy as well as pain, and the notion of going through that profound experience only to deliver a dead fetus (whose skin was already starting to slough off, whose skull might be collapsing) was horrifying.
Would we make those women give birth to death? Is it fair to ask someone to go through the most spiritual and holy experience a human can have this side of meeting a deity—only to have a rotting corpse spew forth from her loins? Only a sick society would demand such a perversion...
Posted by Andrew at 08:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 05, 2006
On this day in history:
In 1978 I was born.
Posted by Andrew at 11:04 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 04, 2006
The thought that keeps me up at night
Is That Legal?: "The Idea of Doing Nothing"
How are Americans in 2006 different from Germans in 1936? It isn’t our biology, which means that Americans are perfectly capable of exterminating a whole culture or people. The only thing which prevents us from doing so is our institutions. Paper, and the respect we give to that paper, seem a slim reed on which to place our prayers. It’s the only thing humanity has ever had...
And yet that respect for paper as failed, in the past:
He had not heard of it before, and, when I told him of the West Coast Army Commander's statement that "a Jap is a Jap," he hit the table with his fist and said, "Right you are. A Jap is a Jap, a Jew is a Jew." "A German is a German," I said. "Of course," said the German proudly. "It's a matter of blood."He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said "no," he asked me what I had done about it. When I said "Nothing," he said, triumphantly, "There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us--in our case, not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong -- you did think it was wrong, didn't you, Herr Professor?" "Yes." "So. You did nothing. So it is everywhere." When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, "And if they had been -- what then? Do you not se that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?"
America has, in the past, done horrible things to our own citizens. We must be ever vigilant against doing so in the future...
Posted by Andrew at 01:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 03, 2006
The British have all the best ads.
What's interesting to me is that they probably don’t see this as exploitive, or "unsafe for children", but simply informative. This might say more about our culture than theirs...
(Via Dazed and Confucius, a blog you should read more often.)
Posted by Andrew at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack