Finally, an issue that unites Democrats and Republicans

Wasn’t this supposed to be a kinder, gentler election?  With the Bushes and the Clintons and the Gingriches out of the way, we were told that the bitter partisan bickering was finally over.  For a while, it even seemed possible.   First, John McCain, famous for his “maverick” image, his disdain for the Republican party power structure, and his habit of cooperating with Democrats, won his nomination over shrill evangelicals and goose-stepping thugs.  Next — and after a particularly nasty internecine struggle — Barack Obama and his message of “hope” and “change” won his party’s nomination over the status-quo dirty-tricks campaign of Hillary Clinton and most of the Democratic party power structure.

It was hard not to buy into the idea that it was time for a change.

Of course, we know what happened — politics as usual happened.  The Democratic and Republican parties have done a spectacular job of convincing Democrats that Republicans are all dim-witted racist thugs, of convincing Republicans that Democrats are all shrill self-righteous Marxists, and of convincing independents that the party-affiliated are gullible, trivially-manipulated media zombies with fanatically closed minds.  We’re not going to have an election on November 4th: we’re going to have a soccer riot where people cast votes rather than throw bottles.

Can’t we find some common ground between the parties?

Happily, we can.  It began back in September when Congresscritter Charlie Rangel (D-NY) claimed complete ignorance that he was receiving rent on his beach house in the Dominican Republic.  He was, we are to believe, so busy creating American tax law that the notion of obeying American tax law completely slipped his mind.  But, heck, it’s an honest mistake, right?  Besides, Congresscritters are under so much stress that they surely deserve a little extra leeway from the law enforcement establishment.

(Honestly, I’m just thrilled by the notion that Rangel is contributing something of value to the Dominican economy rather than merely living as a parasite on the American taxpayer.)

Now, in a gallant display of cross-party unity, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) claimed complete ignorance that he was taking bribes from oil company VECO as the grasping corrupt scumfuck was convicted on seven counts of corruption.

• US Senator Stevens found Guilty (The Beeb)

Testifying to the court, Mr Stevens claimed that he had paid Mr Allen $160,000 for the work done, and had been under the impression that no more money was required.

And he had considered many of the gifts as loans – including the massage chair.

After such a divisive Presidential campaign, it’s kind of heartwarming to see Republicans and Democrats united under the assumption that they can take as much free shit as their political office will provide, and that if caught they can escape with the most insultingly flimsy of explanations.

Edit: How could I let this moment pass without a youtube techno remix?

Chicago takes decisive action

Suppose you’re an aldercritter for the City of Chicago.  Your country’s facing economic crisis and a vaguely-defined money-sucking two-front war.  Your state’s been ravaged by some of the worst flooding it’s seen in decades.  Your city often has more murders in a weekend than mine does in a year.  Clearly, there’s room for improvement, and there must be something you can do to make things better.

Banning brightly-coloured plastic bags isn’t what I had in mind, though.

• Chicago to eliminate mini drug bags (WBBM 780)

Your tax dollars at work.

New York Times circling the drain

What a delightful way to end the week:

• New York Times running on fumes (Silicon Alley Insider)

Not sure how it came to this so fast, but the New York Times (NYT) is approaching the point where it will have to manage its business primarily to conserve cash and avoid defaulting on its debt. This situation will only get worse as advertising revenue continues to fall, and it will be very serious by early next year.

The company has only $46 million of cash. It appears to be burning more than it is taking in–and plugging the hole with debt.  Specifically, it is funding operations by rolling over short-term loans–the kind that banks worldwide are cancelling or making prohibitively expensive to save their own skins.

Anyone care to guess what the NYT’s editorial policy on the credit crisis might be?

While we’re on the subject of the financial sector:

• It’s official: the New York Times is junk (Below the Beltway)

Standard & Poor’s slashed its rating on the New York Times Company by three notches to junk on Thursday after the publisher reported fresh impairment charges, a quarterly underlying loss and a review of its dividend policy.

Of course, they’ll probably get some corporate welfare a government bailout rescue rather than slipping quietly and unmourned beneath the surface, but I’ll enjoy the schadenfreude while it lasts.

Pants-shitting hysteria: you’re doing it awesome

A lot of people are frightened these days.  Some are frightened of terrorists.  Others — parents of small children, particularly — are frightened of child molesters.  What could be more frightening than terrorists and paedophiles?

Terrorist paedophiles!

• Terrorists and child porn, oh my! (Schneier on Security)

Schneier quotes the Telegraph thus:

It is thought Islamist extremists are concealing messages in digital images and audio, video or other files.

Police are now investigating the link between terrorists and paedophilia in an attempt to unravel the system.

Naturally, putting terrorism and child abuse into the same sentence is powerful fearmongering juju:

Of course, terrorists and strangers preying on our children are two of the things that cause the most fear in people. Put them together, and there’s no limit to what sorts of laws you can get passed.

Add something about drug dealers and you’ve hit the PSH trifecta.

(Do read the comments on that Schneier post — there’s a great deal of insight to be found therein.)

Not a wise investment

Of all the things a government can do with the money it takes from you come tax-time, providing or facilitating high-quality — okay, this is government, let’s say “pretty decent” — health care and education is about as helpful as it gets.  Healthy, smart citizens tend to be happier and more productive, and are more likely to vote with their brains than in knee-jerk reaction to nameless fears.  If my government’s going to take my money under threat of force, I’d much rather they spent it on teachers and hospitals than on, say, shipping people off to get tortured in Syria because Arabs are scary.

Then again, government being government, you can count on some bureaucratic dipshit to fuck things up.

• GPs paid £1 a time not to refer patients to hospital (Times Online)

This is supposed to be a cost-cutting measure: give British doctors a reason not to simply refer every patient to (an expensive and crowded) hospital as a first resort.  But Frankie fuck a fencepost, people, wasn’t I just saying something about incentives and unintended consequences?

Family doctors are receiving cash bonuses not to send patients to hospital despite National Health Service research that suggests incentive payments can reduce the quality of care.

GPs are paid £1 per patient to spend time reviewing their decision to send someone to hospital and a further £1 for every name on their surgeries’ list if they reduce their previous year’s referral rate. An average surgery with 10,000 patients will receive up to £20,000 for taking part in the scheme.

What could possibly go wrong?

Martin Roland, who led the NIHR investigators, said yesterday that patients were right to be worried about payments to GPs simply for meeting quotas on reducing referrals.

“If [the payment] triggers some sort of thoughtful process, such as talking to a more experienced colleague, then that is commendable and may save unnecessary referrals,” said Professor Roland, director of the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre. “But I would be cautious about incentives simply to reduce numbers if they are not tied to some sort of clinical review. The danger is that patients who would benefit from referral to hospital would no longer be referred.”

Perhaps if the scumfucks behind this frighteningly simple-minded scheme had received even a cursory education in microeconomics we’d be spared this idiocy.  But economic thinking has its roots in mathematical thinking, and… well, I have some more bad news:

• Half of trainee teachers fail basic maths test (Daily Mail)

Soaring numbers of trainee teachers are using unlimited resits to get through a basic numeracy test, figures show.

Up to 56 per cent now need multiple attempts before they pass, the statistics suggest. The test is designed to drive up standards in the profession and must be passed before students can qualify as teachers. But trainees can take it as many times as they need and record numbers are failing, leading to fears about the fitness of the next generation of teachers. One student reportedly made 27 attempts.

Meanwhile, up to a third of trainees need two attempts or more at a similar test in literacy.

Now, to be fair, “the statistics suggest” that “56 per cent now need multiple attempts” only if you’re an innumerate journalism major writing for the Daily Mail (or, I suppose, a teacher trainee).  In fact, the figures being reported show that the mean number of attempts per trainee is about 1.56, which ain’t the same thing at all.  It’s entirely possible — given only this number — that nine trainees in ten ace the test, and only the remaining ten per cent need (a great many) more chances.  (Of course, even those miserable failures eventually pass and get certified to teach small children that a/b + c/d = (a+c)/(b+d).)  Barring more useful data — a histogram would make the point perfectly — we simply can’t tell.

(D’you suppose the Daily Mail is getting government subsidies?)

But none-the-fucking-less, the standard — being “driven up”, we remind ourselves — to which these teacher trainees are being held is pathetic and absurd.

The numeracy test lasts 48 minutes and contains 12 mental arithmetic questions, to be completed without the aid of a calculator, and several longer questions entailing data manipulation, which can involve an on-screen calculator.

Seems like a reasonable examination so far, right?  Well, about those mental arithmetic questions….

1. In a test a pupil scored 18 marks out of 25.  What was the pupil’s score as a percentage?
2. For a school play, 120 tickets were sold at a price of £1.50 apiece and a further 100 child tickets were sold at 75p each.  What was the total amount of money raised from ticket sales?
3. What is 6.03 multiplied by 100?
4. A teacher started an activity which lasted one-and-a-quarter hours at 13:35h.  What time did the activity finish?  Give your answer using the 24-hour clock.

If any of those takes you longer than half a minute, you should definitely spend some time in a math class… but not at the front.

Dion steps down

We all knew it was going to happen, of course.  Stephane Dion led the Liberal Party of Canada to its worst electoral showing in over a century after winning its leadership simply by being neither Bob Rae nor Michael Ignatieff.  That sort of thing is simply unforgiveable.

• Dion to resign after Liberals choose new leader (CBC.ca)

I’m a bit disappointed by how calmly this failure of leadership is unfolding: I was hoping for months of vicious internecine bloodletting within the Liberal party.  It’s rather fitting, though, that the Liberals are handling their electoral failure much more smoothly and efficiently, and with far more poise and competence, than they could have hoped to manage in the election that made it necessary.

Ah well; there’s always the leadership campaigns to look forward to.

Papieren, bitte

One benefit of the surveillance state, I suppose, is that it teaches us that we global citizens aren’t as different as culture, language, and melanin content (in order of relevance) would lead us to believe.

I’ll begin this entry with a story from the People’s Republic of China:

• Smile!  You’re on Internet cafe camera! (Ars Technica)

Right: in the PRC, now, you must have your photo taken and provide photo ID in order to enter an internet cafe.  (You’re rewarded with a unique userid.  Oh, joy.)

By the beginning of 2009, Internet cafes in Beijing, China will take a photo of every person who passes through the doors, then enter the picture and the person’s identifying information into a city-wide government database. The measures are part of China’s overall plan to monitor the use of Internet cafes to ensure inappropriate material isn’t reaching children and, of course, to make Internet use a little less anonymous.

Y’know, I’m starting to get ambitious, here: how much do I have to promote liberty in order to get Blunt Object banned in the PRC?

Now, I’ll pause for any apologists for our “fear teh terr’ists!!!11eleventy-one” governments to expel their usual “See?  See?  At least it’s not that bad over here!” utterances.  I suppose it really isn’t so on this side of the Atlantic — well, not yet — but that aircraft carrier parked off the coast of France is in trouble:

• Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones (Telegraph)

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

[...]

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

Fan-tucking-fastic. We apparently need to make it even easier for British “security services” to kill random people who happen to look Arabic to the ignorant.  Not that this will help legitimate security matters, as it seems rather trivial to track individual cell phones anyway; all this is likely to do is drive the really scary people to find more obscure means of communication.

As if I needed another reason to not go to Britain….

“It’s not working: do it harder!”

So, if the root causes of the credit crisis are (a) the unintended consequences of government interference in the housing market and (b) said market’s players’ blithe willingness to abuse said consequences for short-term gain, what are the odds that this trillion-odd dollar bailout package is going to make things better rather than worse?  No, don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question.

• The bailout: Hayek’s revenge (Ideoblog)

This point struck me as particularly amusing (in the sense that one has to either laugh or cry):

The bailout increases government debt, also increasing interest rates, which makes mortgages harder to get, which was the problem that drove all this.

And now that Fannie Mae’s owned by the federal government (again), what do you think they’re going to do about it?  (No, don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question.)