Flit(tm)

Dad's giving in to the Internet

I just got off the phone with my father and I'm shaking my head in amazement. He's starting to see the value of that crazy Internet thing and he asked me to order him a book, Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto to be delivered to his house. It's an excellent choice for a first Internet book order if the reviews are to be believed.

Obama Outrageous I

I really hope this Politico story on President Obama's meeting with bankers is wrong in this respect:

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

If this is an accurate quote. We are in deep, deep trouble.

The reason that the only thing between bankers and the pitchforks is because the bankers and the rich in general have put their trust in the government at all levels to keep the mob at bay and have fired their private security forces of past days. If the government steps back from that iron clad commitment, it is inevitable that we will return to those days and the return will not be pleasant. It will not be tolerable. It will entirely be the fault of one President Barack Hussein Obama who myopically put mob justice as an option on the table.

God help us all if Politico got it right.

Rehabilitating Williamson

Bishop Williamson of the SSPX has had his excommunication lifted. This has caused Israel's rabbinate to react rather negatively and, unfortunately, unwisely.

The Holocaust denying Williamson is wrong on the facts and very likely undertook his provocative recent interview in Sweden to make it more difficult for the Vatican to regularize him and bring about unity and a restoration of Vatican discipline.

What the Vatican understands and the rabbinate does not is that one can be a thorough loon with reprehensible views and not be excommunicate. Excommunication is a specific punishment for a specific act, in bishop Williamson's case a schismatic act of being raised a bishop in defiance of Rome. The way the Western Church works, this was punishment was imposed without due process. No trial, no defense, no airing out of issues. He was raised a bishop without the right paperwork so he's out.

Obviously Williamson has "other issues" and when he's actually back in the Church those issues can be addressed. If they are not, the rabbinate would have a point at that time. I strongly suspect a monastic life for Bishop Williamson inside the Catholic Church, a very quiet one.

Guantanamo and the death penalty

One of the things that has gone under remarked in the Guantanamo saga is the eligibility of so many of those prisoners for the death penalty. A key anti-death penalty argument is crumbling before our eyes and few, if any, are taking note.

The argument is that in modern penal systems, killers are simply not going to kill again. Supermax facilities and their like are supposed to bring us an era where the death penalty is unnecessary to protect society. But what is happening in the military context of the death penalty at Guantanamo?

As the AFP notes we have the spectacle of "Two ex-Guantanamo inmates appear in Al-Qaeda video" announcing to the world that after committing a death penalty crime (fighting without uniform) they're very likely going to do it again. In fact, we've got 11% of released detainees going back to kill again as a fact of our forbearance to apply the full extent of US military justice. How many more will join them to kill and maim again is a very open question now that Guantanamo is going to be quickly shut down.

Death penalty opponents who oppose the penalty in all cases on ideological or moral grounds have a bit of a problem here, if anybody's going to take them to task for their false claims. I'm not holding my breath.

The Elephant in the Room

The dead weight loss of stupid regulation and poor state activity is the elephant in the room regarding the current recession. Megan McArdle's recently blogged car tribulations where she finally managed to register her car bought August 3, 2008 on January 10, 2009. The delay is due, in large part, to PA state bureaucrats misapplying state law and putting a national hold on McArdle's ability to get a drivers license. There is no left wing or right wing justification for this. Nobody particularly supports the practice of the government making regulations up as they go along and then quickly retracting their claims when somebody calls them on it.

So why does this sort of thing persist? Two reasons spring to mind. Once you've caught them, correcting the problem for everybody looks so daunting and fixing it for yourself looks so cheap that the vast majority of people just fix their own paperwork and get on with their lives. The second is that there seems to be no political advantage to undergo a crusade to fix this sort of stuff.

But sometimes the waste is just sitting right in front of you and nobody even notices. Sean O'Neill wanted to see his travel dossier so he did a FOI request. The response was mailed, twenty pages. Sending paper is more expensive than sending bits. It's slower, too.

An agent from U.S. Customs and Border Protection can generate a travel history for any traveler with a few keystrokes on a computer.

A well thought program development effort would have rated each data field whether it needed to be censored in an FOI request and enabled a "few keystrokes" report that automatically generated an electronic version that had the appropriate black boxes where sensitive data would otherwise be. Instead we have a print, a manual black box strategy (the sample page from the record has the black boxes tilted off of horizontal by a couple of degrees), and unnecessary paper mailing. Multiply this by thousands of FOI officers throughout the federal government and hundreds of thousands of requests every year and you get a system that is slow to respond and expensive.

And that's the problem of dead weight loss in a nutshell, government that is slow and expensive even when it isn't being capricious and not following the law. We can do better.

Twitterings

I've been using Twitter lately under the label TMLutas. If anybody's interested in following me...

What did they know and when did they know it?

I think that it is pretty generally accepted (if unremarked on) that there is absolutely no difference in the level of corruption of Governor Rod Blagojevich before and after his arrest. If anything, the arrest has probably reduced any actual Blagojevich corruption (though anything is possible). So what did his conversation partners know and when did they know it?

Specifically in the case of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tried to steer the appointment and then famously said than nobody appointed in this process would be seated when did he come to his opinion that Governor Blagojevich was corrupt? And when will the press ask him? What other corrupt Democrats is Sen Reid willing to play footsie with until the indictments are announced? What sort of culture of corruption is being unearthed here?

Thanks Terrorist Guys

I don't understand why the Israelis don't run ad campaigns between these violent dust ups with their more violent lunatic neighbors. We just had a 6 month "cease fire" where Hamas' Gaza Strip was the launch site of hundreds if not thousands of rocket and mortar attacks into Israel. I can see the theme now, "Thanks Hamas".

You take a cute kid, an innocent woman, an everyman dad and thank Hamas for their war crimes that will, some time in the future, doom their family to destruction and death.

"Thanks Hamas! By launching your mortars from my olive grove, Israeli return fire destroyed 70% of my orchard. I know I owe my family's hunger to you."

"Thanks Hamas! When you stationed your missile storage depot in the basement of our school. When our school is destroyed in the middle of the night we won't have to go to the trouble of getting an education."

"Thanks Hamas! By filling my children's ears with the glory of suicide bombing I've lost three of my children to a death that has sent them to the fires of hell."

A parallel Thanks Hezbollah! and Thanks Al Queda! campaign writes itself.

No doubt many media outlets will refuse to carry such ads. This just makes the campaign more interesting and gives it lots of free publicity.

Small Government Philosphy I

In all the noise over where conservatism, especially small government conservatism, should go in the future a little retrospective why small governments work might just be in order.

The idea of running a polity with a small government is all about recognizing a few facts. Humans aren't perfect. They aren't perfectible. Humans work best when they have well developed feedback loops. Voluntary institutions have the best feedback loops. Coercive institutions have the poorest feedback loops. Government is a coercive institution. To date we haven't figured out how to run everything with voluntary institutions.

These facts lead to the inescapable conclusion that all things being equal, a small government society will work better than a large government society, the smaller the better, until we've hit the limits of our present ingenuity and civilizational level to run things.

It is a very good bet that a durable majority of voters will fundamentally agree with these facts. There will be disagreement as to how far we can go down the path of private institutions solving problems but most people do believe in that intellectual framework.

I've had it with my scanner

It still works but boy is it slow. I've had it. It's off to Amazon for a nice little number from Fujitsu, specifically the Fujitsu S510M. From what I can tell it'll suit me much better. I finally don't have to flip over two sided pages and the scan speeds seem absurdly good for a unit this price (the machine at work beats it out but there are a couple extra zeros on that machine's price tag).

Twitter

I've signed up for Twitter. My account is TMLutas.

New facility

I just set up Alfresco's community edition last night and am finding it an interesting breath of fresh air in my never-ending battle with sloth and disorganization. Watch out, SharePoint.

The Citizenship Channel

After reading this report of an actual Obama channel I got to thinking of using this sort of thing for a good purpose. Producing how tos of citizenship and patriotism and starting off with youtube, once enough programming gets produced, you'd have the content for a citizenship channel.

Hmmm... now where's that video camera?

How not to run a 911 system

Dial 911

Me: "Hello, 911, my wife just called me. She just got rear ended by a drunk driver on I-80."

ESO-1: "Sorry, that's not us, where on I-80?"

Me: "Headed towards I-355"

ESO-1: "That could be more than one state trooper command. Let me give you a number that might be it. I can't transfer there"

Dial another emergency number

Me: "Hello, my wife got hit by a drunk driver on I-80"

ESO-2: "Which way was she going"

Me: "westbound"

ESO-2: "What's the nearest exit"

Me: "Right be I-355"

ESO-2: "Sorry, that's a different command. Let me give you the number of the other command. I can't transfer there."

Dialing again

Me: "Hello, my wife got hit by a drunk driver on I-80 heading westbound right by I-355."

ESO-3: "I'll get a trooper on the way to take your wife's report"

Edited down to take out the inanities that's what just happened. It took about 5 extra minutes at which point said drunk driver had traveled an extra 5 miles of random mayhem assuming he hadn't been speeding.

This is no way to run a 911 system.

Time to Start a Bank

Reading a Main Street v Wall Street piece by Ed Cone reminded me of that old chestnut of capitalist wisdom "when blood's running in the streets, the greatest profits are to be had." Well, the financial streets are running with blood and major profits are to be had. Good deals are left on the table that will provide great profits at reasonable risk rates because the incumbents all lost their minds in the preceding expansion and badly invested their depositors money. With only projects that would get funded in any economy currently being looked at by many banks, the financial players willing to look closely and invest in a great story have been winnowed down to near zero.

This is where the previously prudent can make a killing by funding those projects that almost qualify for bank financing and would have qualified even under the normal scrutiny of 20 years ago but do not qualify today. These sorts of ventures will not make any headlines. Why should they? The more they draw attention to themselves, the more competition they will have from other groups. But those seeking capital will find them and be quite happy for their discovery.

Head Games

I think that Ann Althouse is missing the boat on her fisking of Obama's "Honor" ad. This ad has an audience of one, John McCain. McCain's famous for holding his honor in high regard. He moved mountains to erase the stain of being caught up in the Keating Five scandal. He's also famous for his temper. Being called dishonorable like this isn't going to directly move a lot of voters. It's too crude, too 'in-your-face' to move the undecideds. But if McCain loses his cool, if he goes into a sputtering rage in defense of his honor, now that would move independents.

Every other effect of this campaign is incidental. Obama's banking on being able to break McCain psychologically. If Obama's campaign can do it, McCain's not the same man who withstood the N. Vietnamese interrogators so well. But I don't think Obama can, no matter how low he goes.

The Rise of the West (Republican Westerners)

While some have noticed that there is no Southerner on either ticket, what's more interesting to me (and less remarked on generally) is that both Republicans are from the West. Reagan's style was at least partially derived from his region and we're likely to see, win or lose, a different Republican party emerging from this race.

Russian Lawfare

Russia is attempting to bring up old treaties regarding Black Sea naval forces:

"Can NATO - which is not a state located in the Black Sea - continuously increase its group of forces and systems there? It turns out that it cannot," Nogovitsyn was quoted as saying Wednesday by the Interfax news agency.

Actually, NATO can, and for several reasons. The first is that a majority of the Black Sea coast is made up of NATO members (Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria) or nations that do not object to the current mission (Ukraine, Georgia). None of the military restrictions on naval forces apply to these three NATO countries.
The Montreux Convention of 1936 lets small military vessels from outside the Black Sea zone transit without restriction so long as they do not displace more than 10,000 tons. The USCGC Dallas which is currently visiting Georgia for humanitarian purposes displaces 3,250 tons.

There is a further problem with the Montreux Convention regarding the US. We never signed it. We were invited to the negotiations, but declined to even send an observer to the conference. So long as our allies in Turkey keep letting our ships in, and Turkey has the right to waive restrictions, we're not obligated to observe any limits.

Turkey's ability to waive has served different powers at different times, including the USSR/Russia. Aircraft carriers are not supposed to transit the Dardanelles but the Soviets were permitted to do so in 1976 and 1979. And when the PRC acquired a former Soviet aircraft carrier it was, eventually, permitted to transit the straits as well in 2001.

Photobioreactors

In the great race to fix our energy systems, industrial scale algae production of oil is one of the potential major big fixes. No need to change the distribution infrastructure or end use machines, just turn petroleum from something you extract from the ground to something you make industrially. Companies seem to have already cracked the genetic code to manufacture green petroleum so why aren't we popping the champagne corks and churning out millions of barrels of the stuff already? The problem is one of scale.

What we haven't solved is how to make industrial scale vessels that make the stuff in quantities that matter in a commercially efficient way. These vessels, called photobioreactors, expose enough individual bacteria to sunlight that you maximize production while minimizing unexposed volume. Another problem is vessel fouling which gets worse as you increase the surface area of the vessel.

For an amateur observer like me, that's interested in seeing secondary markers, the articles on photobioreactors generally don't even cover what the relevant units of progress are and how close any particular design is to the magic point where you can start popping starter cultures in them and prepping for oil production. That's an unfortunate sign of disorganization, though it's not clear if that's the fault of the scientists making these things or the journalists reporting on them.

Letter to the Paper LXI

The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It's a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.

A culture of responsible use will never grow in a regime where weapons are unavailable. Upcoming technology (home replication machines) will make it technically feasible to make primitive and eventually quite sophisticated firearms with plans inevitably available for free over the Internet. This is going to make any sort of international treaty regime impossible to enforce as home replication machines are also obvious technology for poverty reduction in the 3rd world.

The first self-replication of a home replication machine in May 2008 was a warning shot that has so far not been heard widely. The rep-rap project is a worthy one but they aren't kidding when they say that it's a disruptive technology.

The only solutions left are to embrace poverty and deny access to replication as well as guns or to create a culture of responsibility that can handle this upcoming disruptive technology. Cultures of responsibility take a long time to take root without an opening blood bath. We might have enough time at this point if we start soon but it is pretty obvious that the same international gun controllers who want to end-run the US' 2nd amendment protections are not going to accept this idea with open arms.