The BBC World Service Saturday summary of their daily radio program The Strand has a section about a book (presumably in Portugese) from Brazil, by Monteiro Lobato called "The Black President," it's the story of how a white woman and a black man are fighting it out for election as President of the United States, and the black man wins, then follows his presidency. Oh sure, a fictionalized story about the current election and the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Not really, since the book was written in 1926. As surprisingly prescient as the book was, the idea of race equality was so far fetched that in 1927 the author could not get a publisher interested in releasing an English translation in the United States; it was feared the book would have caused riots. How far we have come in 80 years. The article about the book comes about half-way (35 minutes) into the show, which you can get to listen to by the link for the show in this article.

So I'm sick, and instead of sleeping like a normal person I'm roaming the web because apparently that's in some way intelligent or something.

And I run across this poll by the economist, and I'd never seen this exact poll before, but I've seen about a thousand like it...It's basically a contrast of the American groupthink vs the European groupthink. In this case, it's the Brits.

First section is "Religion" and the third question is:

"Which explains the origin of the Earth?"
~30% of Americans and ~65% of the Brits said "Evolution"
~40% of Americans and ~10% of the Brits said "The Bible"
~20% of Americans and ~18% of the Brits said "Intelligent Design"

Now, to me there is only one right answer to that question: The fucking Bible.

Evolution is ..."the changes seen in the inherited traits of a population from one generation to the next. These changes are relatively minor from one generation to the next, but accumulate with each subsequent generation and can eventually cause substantial changes in the organisms." It's go no fucking thing what-so-ever to do with the origin of Earth or life on Earth.

Intelligent Design is too stupid and intellectually bankrupt to even rate a place on the list, so that leaves only the Bible, which, imho, is wrong, but the question doesn't say anything about accuracy so it remains the only thing on the list that correctly answers the question.

So, on the one hand, we have a bunch of people who think the sky fairy made everything. On the other hand, we have a bunch of people who think Evolution has something to do with the origin of fucking life!

Part of me hopes that the 10% or so who actually knew that the poll was horseshit hung up, or answered "Evolution" as a short-hand way of saying "Whatever scientific theory of abiogenesis has the most evidence behind it today." But in the end, the only thing the poll really says is that the cult of the jewish sheepfarmers is less popular in Britain than the cult of the toaster oven...And that 20% of both population groups believe whatever you tell 'em.

I guess I should take comfort in the fact that at least they're more secular over there, but all it really does is drive home the fact that, of any group of humans, the vast majority are completely ignorant at any given time, and that science can be just as irrationally religious as any religion.

So yesterday this article pops up, a piece of article trolling not-so-subtly designed to appeal to people like yours truly (wordy ego-driven serial karma-whores). So I bang out a reasonably obvious reply. Fine, mission accomplished.

Then along comes some AC who decides that I need some kind of affirmational literary blowjob which basically throws my trite and whorish soul into sharp relief, provoking a fit of cleansing-through-self-loathing which is immediately moderated to +5 insightful, and adorned with yet still more affirmation.

Truly, I am the king of whores. I don't do it on purpose, I just can't seem to stfu. I used to write a column in my college newspaper; at least those led to free beer and sex.

I post on the politics section of my blog a method I've discovered (or invented, take your pick) to provide verifiable, auditable, fraud-resistant, reliable secret elections that can be done simply and cheaply, without fragile complicated electronics, that you can get election results in most cases in the polling place as fast as 30 seconds after the end of the election, without even having to break the seals on the ballot boxes. You can also use automated equipment to count the votes. My method will even work in places with no electricity. I have not seen anyone else propose anything as easy or as basically inexpensive as this, that produces fast, reliable results in most cases. I summarize how it works below.

All you need are some transparent boxes with seals (padlocks or cable ties that have to be cut to be opened), some tokens - these can be coins or anything with a consistent weight - a cover to conceal the contents of the boxes so the voters can't see how others have voted, a booth so the voter can't be seen as to their vote, and (optionally) a scale.

You need one transparent box for each choice for each ballot question, for each voting booth. So if you have an election of 3 offices each with 4 candidates, and 2 ballot propositions or bond issues, we'd need 5 boxes for each office (one box for "write in"), and a "yes" or "no" box for each ballot proposition. So we need 19 boxes for each voting booth, and for each voter we need 5 tokens. Tokens might be different for any specific office or proposition to keep them from voting twice on any office or they only get one token at a time for each office or ballot proposition.

The voter selects which choice they want for each office or ballot question, and puts their token in the box for their choice, either a particular candidate or a yes/no proposition. At the end of the election, the boxes are removed, and you don't have to open them, or even break the seals to count the ballots, you just weigh the boxes! As each token and each box weighs the same, you know exactly how many votes they got without even needing to open the box. As the box is transparent, you can see the vote tokens so you know they haven't stuck other things in the box. Since each vote is a token, you can break the seal on the box and count them if you want. Since there's no electronics, there's nothing to break down or need repair. You can even get rid of the scale and just count the tokens, but by weighing the boxes, you can get an immediate total as soon as the election is over, as little as the 30 seconds it would take to move the box from the voting booth to the scale. And if you use coins or similar types of tokens, you can use ordinary coin-counting equipment for that size token to do automated counting.

Outside of things to do for fraud prevention and a few fixes to cover write-ins, you could run a whole precinct on a bunch of plastic boxes with cable ties, a few thousand coins (one for each person registered to vote, for each ballot question or candidate), a scale, some labels (to mark which box is which candidate or response for a ballot issue) some blankets (to cover the boxes to keep the existing vote secret) and some partitions for the booth (to keep the voter secret) if you had to.

Since I thought it up, I call it the "Robinson Method."

I give more details including fraud prevention points and some types of elections where this won't work on my blog, but the idea seems so simple, easy and cheap to do, that I'm wondering what I've missed, if anything.

--
Paul Robinson - My home page
"The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that no one learns the lessons that history teaches us."

I post on the politics section of my blog a method I've discovered (or invented, take your pick) to provide verifiable, auditable, fraud-resistant, reliable secret elections that can be done simply and cheaply, without fragile complicated electronics, that you can get election results in most cases in the polling place as fast as 30 seconds after the end of the election, without even having to break the seals on the ballot boxes. You can also use automated equipment to count the votes. My method will even work in places with no electricity. I have not seen anyone else propose anything as easy or as basically inexpensive as this, that produces fast, reliable results in most cases. I summarize how it works below.

All you need are some transparent boxes with seals (padlocks or cable ties that have to be cut to be opened), some tokens - these can be coins or anything with a consistent weight - a cover to conceal the contents of the boxes so the voters can't see how others have voted, a booth so the voter can't be seen as to their vote, and (optionally) a scale.

You need one transparent box for each choice for each ballot question, for each voting booth. So if you have an election of 3 offices each with 4 candidates, and 2 ballot propositions or bond issues, we'd need 5 boxes for each office (one box for "write in"), and a "yes" or "no" box for each ballot proposition. So we need 19 boxes for each voting booth, and for each voter we need 5 tokens. Tokens might be different for any specific office or proposition to keep them from voting twice on any office or they only get one token at a time for each office or ballot proposition.

The voter selects which choice they want for each office or ballot question, and puts their token in the box for their choice, either a particular candidate or a yes/no proposition. At the end of the election, the boxes are removed, and you don't have to open them, or even break the seals to count the ballots, you just weigh the boxes! As each token and each box weighs the same, you know exactly how many votes they got without even needing to open the box. As the box is transparent, you can see the vote tokens so you know they haven't stuck other things in the box. Since each vote is a token, you can break the seal on the box and count them if you want. Since there's no electronics, there's nothing to break down or need repair. You can even get rid of the scale and just count the tokens, but by weighing the boxes, you can get an immediate total as soon as the election is over, as little as the 30 seconds it would take to move the box from the voting booth to the scale. And if you use coins or similar types of tokens, you can use ordinary coin-counting equipment for that size token to do automated counting.

Outside of things to do for fraud prevention and a few fixes to cover write-ins, you could run a whole precinct on a bunch of plastic boxes with cable ties, a few thousand coins (one for each person registered to vote, for each ballot question or candidate), a scale, some labels (to mark which box is which candidate or response for a ballot issue) some blankets (to cover the boxes to keep the existing vote secret) and some partitions for the booth (to keep the voter secret) if you had to.

Since I thought it up, I call it the "Robinson Method."

I give more details including fraud prevention points and some types of elections where this won't work on my blog, but the idea seems so simple, easy and cheap to do, that I'm wondering what I've missed, if anything.

--
Paul Robinson - My home page
"The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that no one learns the lessons that history teaches us."

The Internet radio feed of the BBC World Service reported that a woman in Japan has been jailed after allegedly "murdering" her virtual husband whom she married on line. I found details which can be read in The Register at this article in which she was apparently upset at the man and allegedly decided to delete his "beloved" on-line character in the game Maple Story. She faces a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail for computer fraud. This may be the first time in recorded history - short of something involving a séance - where the victim of a "murder" could give live testimony at trial.

I seriously believe that someone is trying to sabotage Slashdot by making it decreasingly pleasant.

Exhibit A: the new-and-busted discussion system. I actually like it more than the old way for reading comments, but for writing comments it's almost maliciously bad. The new system's preview button is much slower than the old way, and the mandatory waiting time between posting comments is a lot longer than it used to be. The net result is that whenever you're eventually allowed to click the "Submit" button, if your comment doesn't go through immediately, you're stuck staring at a pink error message until the countdown is finished. The only thing keeping this tolerable is that you can middle-click on "Reply to This" to open the old-style comment form in a new window, but I don't know if this workaround is going to be left in place long-term.

Exhibit B: Idle. This is truly the worst interface I've ever seen on Slashdot, from the painful color scheme to the tiny fonts to the difference between the markup used in comments between Idle and the rest of Slashdot. For example, the <quote> tags are treated like <p> in Idle, so there's no visible difference between text you're quoting and your own words. I don't even mind the content so much because it can be an amusing diversion, but wow, the implementation is just terrible.

No, I contend that the new changes are deliberately designed to drive away readership. I don't think that the Slashdot admins are incompetent, so I'm convinced that this is on purpose.

All I want for Christmas

I have posted a really comprehensive entry on my blog explaining how we got into the mess that requires that banks need a huge bailout to cover their blunders. It's fairly easy to read and you might consider it a bit humorous. Some quotes:

• Recent reports of the $700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bailout of the U.S. banking system compels me to write a little about how finance works in the U.S.
• The occurrence of severe local depressions caused the "Federal Reserve Act" (1913) to establish a national bank so that now, the Federal government had the power to change what would be local depressions into national ones.
• If you ever saw the bank run as shown in Its A Wonderful Life you'll know that a bank doesn't have the deposits in the vault, they've loaned out their depositors money. Before deposit insurance, if too many depositors show up, the bank closes its doors, and the banker tries to run out of town before the angry depositors lynch him.
• Upton Sinclair's 1907 book The Jungle tells of a scam that mortgage brokers used on unsuspecting immigrants. (That it doesn't look much different from the scams mortgage brokers use today shows how little imagination mortgage brokers have.)
• Originally, you had to have a good job and good credit to get credit cards; if you didnt, your friendly neighborhood ghetto department store sold you junk and financed you at rates that, until now, were basically just south of usury. Today you can get over-the-phone loans from companies that advertise on TV at interest rates that would embarrass a loan shark, [who could never be anywhere near that greedy].
• The joke [in the 1980s over the S&L crisis] was if you wanted to rob a bank, you were better off looting it, because armed robbery was a crime but using your friends to loot a bank was likely to not be prosecuted.
• Those with money had a field day screwing around with the bankruptcy laws to make them less favorable to the debtor and more favorable to the guy who was owed money. Those of us who didnt have the money to pay lobbyists to protect us got screwed.
• Lets you and I open a bank with $1,000 between us. If theres a 5% reserve, we have to deposit $50 with the Federal Reserve and can loan out $950. Thats how you might do it, but Im smarter than that; I figured out a way to legally loan out money we dont have, a practice that in other industries would get you 3-5 in Baltimore's Supermax prison for fraud, but perfectly legal as long as you're a bank.

Today Fannie and Freddie are being bailed out. A Sunday, no less. I can hear the chuckling all the way from Greenwich CT, and the D.C. and Dallas suburbs.

I quote the associated press, in wondering why these two titans of mortgage-backed securities have come to need help from you, the taxpayer:

"How could you look at an enormous rise in prices and not think there was a potential for them to fall?" said Christopher Thornberg, a principal with Beacon Economics in Los Angeles.

Gee, good question Yogi. How about because it's actually kind of fun to take risks when there is no actual downside?

Apparently, everybody knew the government was going to bail them out if they ever got in trouble.

Pretty good racket. How can I get in? LOL.

I can't come here and argue that we shouldn't bail them out. Only that they never should have existed in the first place.

Did they really do something the market couldn't have done for itself? And suppose they really did. Since it was apparently an open secret all along that they represented the US Treasury, why were they not simply wholly a part of the government? You know, in good times and in bad?

Ah, but if they were a government agency, then those guys in Greenwich CT, and in VA and TX would have to find a different job, rather than robbing on your tax money (both paid and prospective).

But lest you all think I'm just here to bring everyone down, I do have one good suggestion. Why don't we all write to our senators and ask them how long it will be before the people involved in both running and regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be in prison?

I mean, I assume even though they stole billions of dollars from us, rather than a car stereo, they're still thieves, right? And I think they haven't even gone into hiding yet.

I just want to try to instill some discipline lest we have an even wilder, more unruly orgy of treasury looting.

Best knock knock joke ever:
KNOCK KNOCK
    Who's there?
9/11
    9/11 who?
YOU SAID YOU'D NEVER FORGET!!

Well, it's been a fun year and a half since I got sucked into becoming a corporate executive again and lost most of my remaining time to post on slashdot. But of course the train keeps on a'rollin. American neoconservative economists and stock market pundits must be at least slightly chagrined at the relative returns on a French checking account versus US equities or bonds. Gold is topping $900 per ounce. The price of oil is no longer funny either. Our dalliance with right-wing cleptonomics has turned out badly enough that we've already had one run on a major American bank, despite a desperately massive federal campaign to inject liquidity. The AP wire is running stories on a new wave of survivalists.

Eventually, even for the most fanatical, there must be a moment of fear, a potential even of reckoning.

Even treading on our sleepy electorate, the GOP has stumbled on the last three off-season elections, including the most recent, in that notoriously red House district. And I just know there are enough old school racists left in the GOP to feel some supernatural anguish at the peril of the possible defeat of their presidential candidate by an African American.

But I was especially moved to retrospection because today the AP is carrying a story about Scott McClellan - press secretary to President Bush of so many recent months. I can only imagine the agony it is causing right now, from think-tanks to Young Republican clubhouses across the nation.

--

Exposing Washington's spinning permanent campaign

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent Wed May 28, 5:16 PM ET

WASHINGTON - In a White House full of Bush loyalists, none was more loyal than Scott McClellan, the bland press secretary who spread the company line for all the government to follow each day. His word, it turns out, was worthless, his confessional memoir a glimpse into Washington's world of spin and even outright deception.

Instead of effective government, Americans were subjected to a "permanent campaign" that was "all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage," McClellan writes in a book stunning for its harsh criticism of Bush. "Presidential initiatives from health care programs to foreign invasions are regularly devised, named, timed and launched with one eye (or both eyes) on the electoral calendar."

The spokesman's book is called "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

Governing via endless campaigning is not a new phenomenon, but it accelerated markedly during the tumultuous Clinton White House and then the war-shaken years of the Bush administration. Bush strategist Karl Rove had a strong hand in both politics and governing as overseer of key offices, including not only openly political affairs and long-range strategic planning but as liaison for intergovernmental affairs, focusing on state and local officials.

Bush's presidency "wandered and remained so far off course by excessively embracing the permanent campaign and its tactics," McClellan writes. He says Bush relied on an aggressive "political propaganda campaign" instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war.

That's about right, says Brookings Institution political analyst Thomas Mann, co-author of a book entitled "The Permanent Campaign."

"It was such a hyped-up effort to frame the problem and the choices in a way that really didn't do justice to the complexity of the arguments, the intelligence," Mann said in an interview. Though all presidents try to "control the message," he said, "it was really a way of preventing that discussion. It just had enormously harmful consequences. I think they carried it to a level not heretofore seen."

Each day, underscoring the daily blend of politics and government, Bush and his administration make an extraordinary effort to control information and make sure the White House message is spread across the government and beyond. The line for officials to follow is set at early-morning senior staff meetings at the White House, then transmitted in e-mails, conference calls, faxes and meetings. The loop extends to Capitol Hill where lawmakers get the administration talking points. So do friendly interest groups and others.

The aim is to get them all to say the same thing, unwavering from the administration line. Other administrations have tried to do the same thing, but none has been as disciplined as the Bush White House.

It starts at the top.

McClellan recounts how Bush, as governor of Texas, spelled out his approach about the press at their very first meeting in 1998. He said Bush "mentioned some of his expectations for his spokespeople -- the importance of staying on message; the need to talk about what you're for, rather than what you are against; how he liked to make the big news on his own time frame and terms without his spokespeople getting out in front of him, and, finally, making sure that public statements were coordinated internally so that everyone is always on the same page and there are few surprises."

In September 2002, Bush's chief economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, ran afoul of the president's rules by saying the cost of a possible war with Iraq could be somewhere between $100 billion and $200 billion. Bush was irritated and made sure that Lindsey was told his comments were unacceptable. "Lindsey had violated the first rule of the disciplined, on-message Bush White House: don't make news unless you're authorized to do so," McClellan wrote.

Within four months, Lindsey was gone, resigning as part of a reshaping of Bush's economic team.

While message control has been part of many administrations, Mann said that, "They were just tougher and more disciplined about it than anyone else had been."

As spokesman, McClellan ardently defended Bush's decision to invade Iraq and the conduct of his presidency over the course of nearly 300 briefings in two years and 10 months. Now, two years after leaving the White House and eager to make money on his book, McClellan concludes Bush turned away from candor and honesty and misled the country about the reasons for going to war.

It wasn't about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, McClellan writes. It was Bush's fervor to transform the Middle East through the spread of democracy. "The Iraq war was not necessary," writes McClellan, who never hinted at any doubts or questioned his talking points when he was press secretary.

McClellan writes that Bush and his team sold the Iraq war by means of a "political propaganda campaign" in which contradictory evidence was ignored or discarded, caveats or qualifications to arguments were downplayed or dropped and "a dubious al-Qaida connection to Iraq was played up.

"We were more focused on creating a sense of gravity and urgency about the threat from Saddam Hussein than governing on the basis of the truths of the situation," McClellan wrote.

McClellan is not the first presidential spokesman to write a tell-all book, but his is certainly the harshest, at least in recent memory. He says his words as press secretary were sincere but he has come to realize that "some of them were badly misguided. ... I've tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured."

White House colleagues were stunned, but not lacking for the day's response. "We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew," said Dana Perino, the current press secretary who was first hired by McClellan as a deputy.

Later in the day, she relayed the reaction of Bush himself: "He's puzzled, he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years."

The primary function of society is the sharing or mediation of risk and reward. Thoughts?

Warning! Do not eat these. They are not candy. Although I suppose if you've been hankering for some gummi fish that taste like actual fish you may be in for a treat. My boss gave me some just now. "Want some gummi fish?" he asked, and me being a sucker for sweet-sour gummi things in general, I popped one in my mouth as he continued, "They're full of vitamins and Omega-3..." Right. Fish oil. These things taste like sugar and citrus coated rancid fish. Just nasty. I'm still trying to get the flavor out of my mouth.

Consider the simplified case of three property owners, A, B, and C. Here's what their property looks like:
AAA
ABC
CCC
Now, A and C make an agreement not to buy any of Bs goods or sell anything to B. B doesn't own enough land to support him and all his family living there. He doesn't have enough land for an airport, or a helicopter. A and C won't let him on their property, and they won't let anyone else deliver anything to him over their property either. B and his family starve to death, then A and C split his land between themselves.

Please, explain how this scenario or more complex variants of it would not be commonplace in a true libertarian system. "Force" is more complex than libertarian philosophy likes to admit.

From this post, just wanted to save it because I think it distills much of the objection I have towards libertarianism into a succinct argument, and if anyone can refute the premise, it would go a long way towards convincing me that libertarianism isn't morally bankrupt.

Also this, from the same thread:

The real ideological difference lies in what qualifies as "hitting first," and also what qualifies as "freedom." For instance, should people be free to own more real estate than they themselves can work, and charge rent for said real estate? If people have that freedom, is it "hitting first" for them to withhold food from workers who have no other means of support than working for them at whatever wage they offer?

In a system with total individual freedom and strong property rights, what is to keep the most ruthless from leveraging the power that accumulated wealth has to influence markets, and using that power to keep other people dependent on them? Is economic coercion "hitting first?"

If people do have the right to own more land than they themselves can work, then isn't it also a freedom for a group of people to, say, call themselves "The United States of America" and make up some rules regarding what others can do with "The United States of America's" land? After all, isn't that really nothing more than land owned by a group of individuals?

There is a lot of difference in ideology even amongst people who subscribe to the ideals of freedom and not hitting first. So much so that different camps within that group all seriously question the other sides' commitment to those ideals. You know, the whole rift between individualist anarchism and social anarchism.

Oh, and happy Troll Tuesday everybody!