We've known the cut of Mitt Romney's jib for a long time

Mitt is in the news beating the drum for war in Ukraine.  Lots of tough talk, including accusing people of treason.  Looks like quite the fighter, right?

Except we've known what he is for a long, long time.  Ten years ago I called out what he is and the past decade has not given me cause to rethink anything.  I took some heat on this back then but believe that the intervening years has proven that he would have been a disaster as President.

In which I endorse Barack Obama for President

Stick with me on this, because I am motivated by hope and change.

The race essentially is between Obama and Romney - Ron Paul is interesting but whatever impact he has had is over.  Likewise, the Libertarian (whatzisname?) will get the typical Libertarian 2%.  As adults, we need to face reality that this is President Composite Girlfriend vs. Mittens.  OK then, which way will make us better off?

Let me start my cheerfully admitting that a second Obama term - unfettered by the need for re-election and likely facing a Congress entirely controlled by the GOP - will be a disaster of faculty lounge inspired radicalism.  It will be EPA killing oil production and the ATF arming the Iranian Mullahs.  He will moot card carrying communists for the Supreme Court, as well as for every open Federal Bench seat.  Nobody can constrain his radicalism now, and it will be much, much worse come January.

So what about Romney?  He's an Establishment Fixer to the core, as his record as Governor of Massachusetts shows.  While he might not support new gun control laws today, he was happy to in the past when he felt the need to "reach across the aisle" to "make an impact" (build a political career).  While he may not support huge State-sponsored intrusion into your private business today (RomneyCare), he was happy to in the past - again, when he felt the need to "reach across the aisle" to "make an impact".  Romney is easy to figure - just ask yourself what's most beneficial for Mitt Romney right now, and that's what he'll support.

He has an exquisitely refined sense of sniffing out tactical personal gain, and does not suffer from a surfeit of political philosophy like those boring old Founding Fathers did, with all their tiresome talk of liberty.

He's Gov.Party the Lesser.

And so we must vote for Obama.  He's the only hope for real change.

The GOP in general, and Mitt Romney in particular are big-government, big-spending, big-intrusion-into-our-business.  The Republic is facing a fiscal crisis - the nation's credit has been downgraded, the Entitlement programs are just now tipping into a bottomless sea of red ink, the middle class has been hammered with collapsing housing valuations, persistent unemployment, and a higher education bubble that is ensuring that our children graduate with so much student debt that they will never be able to marry.

And where are the bold reforms from the GOP?  The best on offer is Paul Ryan's plan which won't balance the budget for three decades.

And dig this: the Media will savage a President Romney mercilessly in hopes that he will falter, lose heart and supporters at the savage attacks, and think it will be in his best interest to reach across the aisle to preserve his re-election chances.  The media will think this because Romney has shown repeatedly that he'll cave if it builds his personal political chances.

So what about change?  We're actually seeing change today, before our eyes.  Just ask Orin Hatch, in the fight of his political life against a Tea Party candidate.  Or ask (former) Senator Bennett, or (former) Congressman Castle.  A Million people were energized to take to the streets to protest, two years ago.  That's change.  And you know what they were protesting?

Barack Obama and his vision for a remade America.

That's what you give up by voting Mitt Romney into the White House.  In six months, Romney will be a sad sack, pummeled by the media into losing his "conservative" veneer (and let's be honest, no one believes he's actually a conservative).

A RINO President will demoralize the one significant spark of change that we've seen, the onlyreaction to an out of control Fed.Gov, our only hope of putting the brakes on before we're as wrecked as Greece.  And quite frankly, a withering of the Tea Party reform movement will be a delight to a GOP Establishment every bit as corrupt and venal - and power mad - as Nancy Pelosi.

And so, it is our civic duty to take a hit for our Country.  Put Obama back in office, unfettered.  The orgy of Progressive overreach by Regulation will be sporadically (and mostly ineffectively) resisted by a corrupt Big Government GOP.  The Agencies will rule the land, and the economy will remain seized up.

And rather than a million Tea Partiers taking to the streets, it will be two million, or three.  Rather than five or ten corrupt GOP Establishment corrks turned out of office, it will be thirty, or fifty.

And that will be the time when the calculators like Mitt Romney will get the idea that they will most likely advance their career by striking down the Progressive beast, again and again.

Because if that message doesn't come across loud and clear, and repeatedly, then the game is over.  It simply won't matter who's in office, because they're both the Establishment Party.

So vote Obama this November.  I do not say this from anger, or frustration, or peevishness, but from cold, rational calculation.  Sure it will be painful, but we got into this mess because like Bluto in Animal House, we f***ed up: we trusted the GOP.

We screwed up, and believed all this, and the government never got smaller under the GOP.  It got bigger, and more intrusive, and more remote from the people, yea even under St. Ron.  Maybe it's too late for us, but if it's not then the only way forward is to burn the GOP to the waterline.  The most expedient way is to keep the Tea Party energized, and a President Romney will cause many to fall away from that movement under the eleventh commandment (another Reagan philosophy).

Well screw that noise.  We f***ed up once, trusting him and the rest of the GOP team.  How's that working out?  Rebuilding a party that Reagan might actually recognize is what this country needs - and right now, damn it - and Mitt Romney isn't the man to do it.

Barack Obama is.

Hope and Change.  Your country depends on you.  Your children and grandchildren will wonder what you did at the Republic's darkest hour.  Don't let them down.  Vote Obama.

Ten years ago, but this time funny

This always made me laugh.  You probably want to click through to the Czar of Muscovy's old post to see what kicked this off.  Oh, and it may be that in the picture my Lautrec is Toulouse ...

Originally posted 16 February 2011

Gettin' my Wookie Seurat on

The Czar of Muscovy describes me as a "non-boulevardier", which is true.  But it wasn't always.  These days, I'm more comfortable hanging out at the shooting range, but Back In The Day, I used to haunt the First Arrondissement, hanging out with Georgie Seurat and the crowd.  L'hotel La Sanguine was just down the street from the church of La Madeleine, which was cheek-by-jowl to the Place de la Concorde.

As you can imagine, the difficulty was my Wookie Suit.  Even though this was a particularly classy one - made of Carmague musk rat fur - some of the crowd thought it was too over the top.  Gaugain in particular, although he didn't like anything except for naked Polynesian girls.

But Georgie thought it was tres magnifique, and even snuck me into one of his paintings.  See if you can spot me - although I always thought he made my butt look too big.

Photoshop courtesy of #1 Son.  Did himself proud on this one. 

After ten years, we're all TJIC

I don't think that any single post did more to attract attention to this blog than I Am TJIC, posted this day ten years ago.  TJIC had his guns seized by the People's Republic of Arlington (Mass) for posting about the Gabby Giffords shooting.  There was no better illustration of how vague gun control laws are applied in Blue states.  Now the Congress is promising more of the same* and even Florida has a bunch bad bills under consideration.  Ten years ago it looked like gun rights were ascendent, now it looks like we all may end up like TJIC.  My comment about Heller and MacDonald looks pretty naive right now, as the Republic slips into Banana Republic territory. 

* To answer Sarah Hoyt's question, molon labe is pronounced "moh LOHN la VEH".

(originally posted 19 January 2011)

I am TJIC

I've linked several times to posts over at the blog Dispatches from TJICistan.  TJIC is an outspoken (some might say extremely so) advocate of smaller government.  He's also a firearms owner in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  While he owns guns, it appears that he's no longer allowed to possess any:

ARLINGTON (CBS) – A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man.
It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.

Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license

Let's ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush.  Let's look at the "logic" being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?

They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms.  However, it appears that it's not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.

Huh?

Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail.  If you're not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.

So, what do we know about the Arlington Police Department?  We know that they're lazy - nobody assigned to watch over this "dangerous" suspect.  We know that they're biased - Arlington is a hotbed of George W. Bush hatred, and the last decade would offer a wealth of examples of similar or worse speech, none of which was investigated.

And we know that they're idiots.  It's not like there isn't a ton of case law on how the First Amendment applies to threats of political violence.  Arlington will lose this, if it ever gets to trial.  Post Heller and McDonald, they'll lose even worse.  Idiots.

But this is, as JayG points out, an attack not only on the First Amendment, but on the Second as well.  An attack of this sort - groundless in logic, and arguably mendacious in nature - is an attack on all.  And so I have to stand with TJIC.

I am TJIC.  So are you.  If you blog, you are hereby authorized to use this image (created by your humble host, using The Gimp, not that it took any skill).  Please link back to this post.

It would be one thing if the law were applied equally to all.  It's not, and it will be applied disproportionately to us, because we hold views considered by some in power to be Double Plus Ungood.  Lefties in particular, this is your moment.  You say that you stand for good governance.  Prove it.

It was not a famous Massachusetts citizen who said We must all hang together, or surely we will all hang separately.  Benjamin Franklin was more circumspect than the men from Massachusetts, such as Sam Adams, who said this:

Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say 'what should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!

Eliminationist rhetoric right there.  Clearly, the Arlington Police would have seized his firearms.  What a sad, degraded state for a once proud Commonwealth.  It seems that I got out just in the nick of time.

How to pick a strong password

I posted this ten years ago, but it's still useful.  The only thing that I would add is that your password should be at least ten characters long, and preferably longer.  But you'll see that this doesn't make it hard to remember.

Originally posted 19 March 2010.

How to pick a strong password

There's a snarky saying among IT professionals, that users are an infinitely renewable source of security risk.

There's certainly a difference in motivations between users and IT security folks, which generates a lot of frustration in the latter group. IT needs to manage risk; users are supposed to get their jobs done (in other words, make money for the company). It's a truism that we say that security is everyone's job; users say security is IT's job. I mean, look who gets paid for it.

There's a quite interesting research paper out from Microsoft's Principle Security Researcher, that argues that this attitude on the part of users is rational:

We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot.

I work pretty hard to filter out irrelevant security news and advice here, because I think that there's something to that. The people who get jazzed about a daily dose of triple propeller head security news probably aren't regular readers here. The security industry in general does a poor job of filtering out the noise, which leads to the "boy who cried wolf" syndrome:

He offers the following as reasons why: 

• Users understand, there is no assurance that heeding advice will protect them from attacks.
• Users also know that each additional security measure adds cost.
• Users perceive attacks to be rare. Not so with security advice; it’s a constant burden, thus costs more than an actual attack.

I (mostly) agree with the perception, although I think that attacks via passive downloaded malware (say, from advertisements that exploit vulnerable browsers) shouldn't be considered "rare".

IT also offers complicated advice. For example, this is typical for how to pick a secure password:

Password rules place the entire burden on the user. So, they understand the cost from having to abide by the following rules:

• Length
• Composition (e.g. digits, special characters)
• Non-dictionary words (in any language).
• Don’t write it down
• Don’t share it with anyone
• Change it often
• Don’t re-use passwords across sites

As a public service, here's how to pick a very strong password that is easy for you to remember. Think of a sentence or a phrase that describes something about you that you will remember. For example:

I used to live on Pond St. when I was 6.

Now take the first letter from each word, preserving capitalization and punctuation:

IutloPS.wIw6.

That's one heck of a password right there, and is something that is easy to remember for you, and very hard to guess for an attacker. And it takes care of the first 5 bullet points listed above. Well done, you! And this is hard to argue with:

We have argued that the cost-benefit trade off for most security advice is simply unfavorable: users are offered too little benefit for too much cost. 
Better advice might produce a different outcome. This is better than the alternative hypothesis that users are irrational. This suggests that security advice that has compelling cost-benefit trade off has real chance of user adoption. However, the costs and benefits have to be those the user cares about, not those we think the user ought to care about. 

Anyone in IT really needs to read this. Anyone interested in security should take a read, too.

UPDATE 19 March 2010 13:44: Dr. Boli offers some (ahem) excellent security advice.

The Death of Hollywood

It's been going on for a long time, and I've been posting about it for a long time.  Ten years, in this case.  The only thing really left to add is the crooked accounting that Hollywood loves to use, which is an outstanding way to hide losses (and an even more outstanding way to hide profits).

Originally posted 16 March 2010.

Hollywood goes out of business, episode MCMXLIII

Via Bob at The Drawn Cutlass, we find that Hollywood thinks that there's no market for war films.

If Matt Damon can't sell an Iraq war film, perhaps this is a lost cause for Hollywood.

...

"We're disappointed," says Nikki Rocco, Universal's head of distribution. "And to tell you the truth, I'm puzzled. You've got the same great director and actor, in same style of film they did in the Bourne movies, just in a different place."

But that place has been merciless on Hollywood, which continues to try to make a hit out of the Mideast conflict. Other Iraq war films, including The Kingdom ($48 million), Body of Lies ($39 million) and Brothers ($29 million) featured big stars and little box-office returns.

"It didn't help that the big kahuna (Alice) was zapping business from everyone," Rocco says. "But maybe (war) is something that's in our face so much every day, people aren't wanting more of it in their movies."

People just don't want war stuff, at least enough to invest their time and their entertainment dollar? Is there a way that we could empirically test this? If only someone could come up with a measure of how valuable the market thinks something is.

Oh, wait - we call that "money". OK, so can we have an example of an entertainment franchise based on a war situation? How about Call Of Duty?

So what has the franchise grossed?

The Call Of Duty series has surpassed 55 million unit sales to date worldwide, taking a whopping $3 billion in retail sales in the process.

Is there a Hollywood movie franchise that we can compare, to see how much more (or less) the game has made? There is indeed:


Here's the lifetime gross of the six Star Wars films:

• Star Wars, $460,998,007
• The Empire Strikes Back, $290,475,067
• Return of the Jedi, $309,306,177
• Episode I - The Phantom Menace, $431,088,301
• Episode II - Attack of the Clones, $310,676,740
• Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, $380,270,577

Add 'em up, and you get a bit over $2.1B. The Star Wars franchise is about two thirds as lucrative as one of the first person shooter War simulations.

"Alice" was in theaters? "You've got the same great director and actor, in same style of film they did in the Bourne movies, just in a different place."

Yeah, but you have a blame America, blame the troops downer of a film that has all the nuance of a shovel hitting you in the back of the head. Those other films are also just like this. You think your audience are a bunch of idiots, who need you to lead them to Enlightenment (but can't make it too hard, or they won't Get It).

And you wonder why nobody goes to see your lousy film?

It may be that my best year of posting was ten years ago

There were a lot of thoughtful posts that I put up in 2010 - and especially in the first half of 2010.  One of the reasons that I went through a "my best blogging days" funk in 2013 and 2014 was that maybe my best days were past by then.  I'm a little less convinced of this now, but there's no denying that the quality of the posts here were well above average ten years ago.

Ten years ago I put up this post, which presaged (but didn't predict) the Trump revolution.  Trump's use of social media to bypass the gatekeepers is as strong an example of disruptive innovation as you will ever see.  You can still hearing the roaring of the Never Trump Dinosaurs, enraged at the political asteroid that is upending their world.

[UPDATE 24 February 2020 11:59: Peter has an outstanding post with a ten year old discussion of the collapse of America's ruling class.  It dovetails with this very, very well. /UPDATE]

Originally posted 24 February 2010.

The intelligence of the political class

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

- Ambrose Bierce

Robert Bakker's monumentally interesting book The Dinosaur Heresies is a must-read for anyone who - like me - is a dino fan. In it, he argues convincingly that dinosaurs were warm blooded and led active lives. This view has, in the years since its 1986 publication, become more or less orthodox science.

He also argues - much less convincingly - that they were intelligent. It may be that we have poor ways to measure intelligence based on the fossil record, and in any case intelligence is probably overrated as a survival trait. But it seems to me that dinosaur's intelligence was, well, stupid.

They're not the only ones. George Will is by any rational measure a very intelligent man. Educated at Oxford and Princeton, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he embodies the virtues of what David Brooks called the "educated class".

And yet we see times when his intelligence is stupid, like his latest piece on Sarah Palin. He writes of populism, and misses not only center mass, but the entire target:

America, its luck exhausted, at last has a president from the academic culture, that grating blend of knowingness and unrealism. But the reaction against this must somewhat please him. That reaction is populism, a celebration of intellectual ordinariness. This is not a stance that will strengthen the Republican Party, which recently has become ruinously weak among highly educated whites. 

His analysis is logical, consistent, well thought out, and entirely wrong. The reason is that he's playing by the old rules, and hasn't adjusted to how the Internet has changed politics. There's no roadmap, and so the old careful analysis techniques - the weights assigned to various attributes that have led to success in the past - are no longer any guide.

Clayton Christensen wrote the single most terrifying business book I've ever read. In The Innovator's Dilemma, he says that it's obvious why badly-managed companies go out of business (they're badly managed, duh). He asks a very interesting question: why do well-managed companies go out of business? He says that it's all about managing innovation.

Christensen posits two types of innovation. Continuous innovation (what he calls sustaining technologies) is easy to manage: it's more of what we have, only better. Well managed companies excel at growing sustaining technologies. There are also revolutionary innovations (what he calls disruptive technologies) that change how the game is played. It doesn't matter how much better your buggy whip is, you won't be able to grow your business on that product line.

Companies almost always fail at managing disruptive technology transformations, because they are well managed. The entire corporate structure is based on producing and selling at a particular price point. A product that kills your cash cow because it's priced 50% lower probably can't be sold effectively at that company, no matter how brilliantly disruptive it is. IBM sold million dollar mainframe computers. While they certainly knew how to make minicomputers, all the incentives were for them to push customers to bigger and more expensive machines. Minicomputers couldn't become too compelling without undercutting the quarterly sales targets, and so DEC ate IBM's lunch. And then Compaq ate DEC's lunch with PCs.

There is a massively disruptive force reshaping politics today, and the current establishment doesn't know how to deal with it. And so they continue to do what they've always done, because it's what made them successful. Right now, they're dismissing the changes. Will, again:

Populism has had as many incarnations as it has had provocations, but its constant ingredient has been resentment, and hence whininess. Populism does not wax in tranquil times; it is a cathartic response to serious problems. But it always wanes because it never seems serious as a solution. 

Ah, but what happens when populism no longer needs the press, because the Internet lets the movement organize without the help - and even against the efforts - of the current political gatekeepers? What happens to populism when it's combined with this disruptive innovation?

Walter Russell Meade gets it. The Tea Partiers may have been relegated to the Long Tail by the political gatekeepers, but they are a storming of the gates:

But you don’t have to buy every line item (or even any line item) in the emerging Tea Party program to see the movement’s potential. Its ruling passion is a belief in the ability of the ordinary citizen to make decisions for himself or herself without the guidance or ‘help’ of experts and professionals. No idea has deeper roots in American history and culture and by global standards Americans have historically distrusted doctors, lawyers, bankers, preachers and professors: everybody who presumes that their special insider knowledge gives them a special right to decide what’s best for the rest of us and historically no political force has been stronger than the determination of ordinary Americans to flatten the social and political hierarchy.

Now that's enabled by the disruptive technology of the Internet. George Will, despite all his intelligence - maybe because of his intelligence - cannot be a part of this New Revolution. He's made a highly successful career out of brilliantly managing sustaining political innovations. But the game has changed, and the emergence of talent from the Internet's Long Tail, without the need for the blessings of his educated class, seems to have him out of his depth. "Intellectual ordinariness"? He just doesn't see how Palin is harnessing the Internet better than anyone. She's brilliantly riding the disruptive wave.

He doesn't see, even though it's right before his eyes. His intelligence seems to be making him stupid. The dinosaurs smell a change in the air, and roar their defiance.

The Long Tail of the Internet and the election of 2010

I posted this ten years ago, and it is perhaps the most prescient post I've ever written.  It was a decade back, so some of the people I talked about (e.g. Sarah Palin) have faded from the scene, but you do not have a more powerful example of someone who broke the "business model" of American politics than Donald Trump.  And my comment that it would take a decade for things to settle down into a new paradigm sure held up well.

(Originally posted February 23, 2010)

The Long Tail of the Internet and the election of 2010

The Long Tail is one of the most important books about how electronic distribution of information via the Internet is shattering old business models, and replacing them with new ones. In it, author Chris Anderson uses the music industry as an illustration. Radio air time or Big Box retailer shelf space have hard limits to the quantity of music they can offer: after all, there are only 24 hours in a day, so you probably can't ever play more than about 400 songs a day.

As a result, the radio industry looks for hits, and plays pretty much only those. Hit albums are pretty much the only ones you see on the shelf down at Wally World. But what about all the rest of the music? Anderson looked at customer track listening data from Rhapsody, and found something very interesting:

But by then I had some hard data, thanks to Rhapsody, which is one of the online music companies. They had given me a month's worth of customer usage data, and when I graphed it out, I realized that the curve was unlike anything I'd seen before.

It started like any other demand curve, ranked by popularity. A few hits were downloaded a huge number of times at the head of the curve, and then it fell off steeply with less popular tracks. But the interesting thing was that it never fell to zero. I'd go to the 100,000th track, zoom in, and the downloads per month were still in the thousands. And the curve just kept going: 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 tracks - no store could ever carry this much music. Yet as far as I looked, there was still demand. Way out at the end of the curve, tracks were being downloaded just four or five times a month, but still the curve wasn't at zero.

Anderson graphed the curve. He calls it "the long tail" of the Internet:


The hits are all at the front of the curve, the "head" (the red stuff). Everything else is in the tail (yellow).

OK, this is all very interesting and everything, but what (I hear you ask) does this have to do with business models shattering? Well, the recording industry is paid to act as gatekeepers: they have traditionally scanned the tail for interesting new artists, and have promoted them to the head. Think Col. Tom Parker "discovering" Elvis. Nobody had ever heard of Elvis before, and Parker made him a star.

But in the Internet Age, who needs a Parker? Listen to Anderson again:

Way out at the end of the curve, tracks were being downloaded just four or five times a month, but still the curve wasn't at zero.

Business models are collapsing because the Gatekeeper function is being eliminated, or at least massively changed. A lot of recording labels will never figure out how to respond, and will go out of business. Some will figure it out, and will have massive success. It will take another decade for us to know who's who.

It's not just music. Any information product exhibits Long Tail market properties today. We're seeing this in Climate Science, where the folks in the long tail have blown the peer reviewed science out of the water. The ClimateGate emails show how a small team of scientists worked to rig the peer review process. They wanted control of the gatekeeping system, to let their friends in and keep their enemies out. Their "business model" was gaining control of the traditional distribution networks, e.g. getting the editor of Geophysical Research Letters fired.

But in the Internet Age, information wants to - and will - be free. So long, Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU. Michael Mann of Penn State, you're next. The scientific review "business model" is already shattering. Dr. Les Halton is a Climatologist who was interested in the IPCC's statement that Global Warming is making Hurricanes more destructive. He downloaded hurricane data from NOAA and did a statistical analysis, and discovered that contrary to the IPCC claims, there's no correlation. He's placed his code and data on the Internet for Long Tail review:

Before sending me hate-mail if you are a warmist or love-mail if you are a coolistor denialist or whatever the parlance is this week, I am neither. I am a scientist and trained to be sceptical. To make it easier than the CRU have made it, the data is readily accessible at the link below. Go check it yourself. I'm damned if I know how the IPCC came to the conclusions it did.
For something this important, all the software and models and all the data should be publicly available in easily accessed form to allow anybody to contribute. Anything less is insane.

Information wants to be free, despite the best effort of the Gatekeepers to keep it locked up. Which brings us to the election of 2010. We see a bunch of Long Tail phenomena, including the Tea Parties, Scott Brown, and Sarah Palin. The are all outsiders. They all use the Internet to organize, to raise money, to get the message out. They all drive the gatekeepers crazy.

The Gatekeepers are the two main political parties (it's a mistake to think that Tea Partiers don't hate the Republican party machine, and vice versa). It's the media: The New York Times and CBS News, which is finding to their dismay that they can no longer control the message (ask John Edwards or Dan Rather). But most importantly, it's the Ivy League.

I wondered for years why anyone would spend a quarter million dollars to send their child to Harvard. Like one of the grand old movie stars, it's living off its past reputation.  I didn't get small, the movies did. So what gives with the price tag?

It's the gatekeeper into the political class. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry were Skull and Bones men. It's where the political elite sends their children to meet the future movers and shakers. To become a future mover and shaker. To find their rightful place in the head of the political power curve, not down on the tail.


Most of the members of the Political Elite aren't very bright (I'm looking at you, Joe Biden). Rather, they're the beneficiaries of the gatekeeping system. Some have, through talent, personal exertion, and great personal expense passed through the gates dividing the Head from the Long Tail - say, an outsider graduating from Columbia Journalism School. Now in the Ruling Class, and saddled with mountains of student loans, they find that Palin (or Scott Brown, or the Tea Parties) seem to be "jumping the queue". Playing by different rules. Shattering the business model for entering into the Halls Of Power.

How could they not be incandescent with rage? They'd have to be a saint not to be. Welcome to the New Revolution.

When you hear talk of "teabaggers", or how "dumb" Palin is, or how Brown won "because he stood in the cold shaking hands outside Fenway Park", you know that you're talking to one of the people that the Internet is turning into a loser, as their political business model collapses around them. They'll all be gone in ten years.

These memes don't - can't - stand up to scrutiny. They're actually not intended to, any more than Jones and Mann thought that their scientific papers could stand up to skeptical challenges: the suppression of alternate ideas is all the proof you need to understand how strong they thought their own arguments were. It was all posturing - signaling - to the other Gatekeepers, as is chatter about "teabaggers".

The election of 2010 won't be the last in this Revolution. We're looking at a decade of upheaval, as the current "business model" of political power gets reshaped. It will probably take ten years before it settles down into a new Conventional Wisdom of how to succeed in the political market. Most of the current incumbents will be gone, and a bunch of people we've never heard of will be major players. All of these new faces will have something in common.

Like Sarah Palin and Scott Brown, they will have come out of the Long Tail, and will have bypassed the old Gatekeepers on their way to success.

The dinosaurs smell a change in the air, and roar their defiance.

How Science goes off the rails

Ten years ago today I put up this post about how Science wanders into the weeds.  Not only has it held up particularly well, I think that this is one of the top ten posts I've ever done here.  Plus, Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 took me to his shooting range.  Not a bad day, all in all.

(Originally posted 15 February 2010)

The Canals of Mars the Climate Research Unit

In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed faint lines on the surface of Mars. He called these lines canali - channels. When his findings were (mis) translated into English, they appeared as canals, and ignited the imagination of the world.

Rather than natural causes (as you would expect for channel), canal implies artificial construction. The thought of intelligent life in our solar system - an ancient race fighting a desperate battle for survival on a dying planet - caused legions of astronomers to rush to their telescopes. Others reported that they also saw canals. Some published maps. But nobody saw as many canals, or published such detailed maps, as Percival Lowell from his Flagstaff observatory, whose map appears here.

It wasn't just scientists whose imaginations were captured by the Martians. The press promoted the story almost hysterically, giving Orson Wells his opportunity to create mass panic with his radio dramatization of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. But the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs were the best.

John Carter was the human hero, mysteriously transported to Mars. Caught up in the epic battles there, as the slow drying of the planet led to desperate wars among the populations, his adventures amidst beautiful Martian princesses and noble Martian warriors fired the imagination of this young boy, back around 1969.

Alas, by then we knew that it was all impossible. Mariner 4 reached Mars in 1965, and photographed the entire planet from orbit. No castles holding Martian princesses, no Orovar cities, and most definitely no Zodangan canals. So how did the entire scientific community spend three decades chasing a Will o' the Wisp? I mean, this stuff was peer reviewed.

Eric Raymond has an interesting thought that seems to apply to both the science of Mars and the current theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (the theory that human production of Carbon Dioxide is causing the planet to warm). Most scientists are caught up in an error cascade:

A scientific error cascade happens when researchers substitute the reports or judgment of more senior and famous researchers for their own, and incorrectly conclude that their own work is erroneous or must be trimmed to fit a “consensus” view.

...

In extreme cases, entire fields of inquiry can go down a rathole for years because almost everyone has preference-falsified almost everyone else into submission to a “scientific consensus” theory that is (a) widely but privately disbelieved, and (b) doesn’t predict or retrodict observed facts at all well. In the worst case, the field will become pathologized — scientific fraud will spread like dry rot among workers overinvested in the “consensus” view and scrambling to prop it up. Yes, anthropogenic global warming, I’m looking at you!

When a few influential scientists publish important work, younger scientists will often defer to "established" results that contradict their own, even if the established results are wrong. Science tends to self correct this sort of thing, although it can take a while - the mass of the electron was incorrectly specified for years and years, because everyone who measured it got a different result than Robert Millikan. Millikan had received the Nobel Prize, and they hadn't, so their results "had to be wrong".

And so with AGW. Strong evidence opposing it "can't be right" and weak evidence supporting it "must be right", and as a result, AGW is an astonishingly weak theory. In the last twenty years its proponents have made many predictions, most of which have been falsified. Michael Mann said that the Medieval Warm Period wasn't warm, contradicting recorded evidence from the period like the Domesday Book that showed wine vinyards in England in the eleventh century. AGW computer models predicted a warm layer in the middle Troposphere in the tropics; MIT's Jim Lindzen and others looked and looked - no warm zone. NOAA's Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) is the most comprehensive store of historical climate data; people are finding that the data has been frequently, consistently, and mysteriously adjusted so that older temperatures are lowered below what the thermometer readings showed, and recent temperatures are raised above what the thermometer readings showed.

It's an error cascade of epic proportions. The situation is almost like an astronomer in 1965 continuing to insist that the Mariner 5 pictures are irrelevant, because there is a mountain of peer-reviewed literature supporting Ptarth hydrological engineering. Phil Jones of the CRU admits that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, and that the climate is not getting warmer lately - despite the theory predictions, and that his data is a mess (which is why he refused to release it, even after a Freedom Of Information Act request).

And yet the Climate Scientists still see canals.

Raymond points out why:

There an important difference between the AGW rathole and the others, though. Errors in the mass of the electron, or the human chromosome count, or structural analyses of obscure languages, don’t have political consequences (I chose Chomsky, who is definitely politically active, in part to sharpen this point). AGW theory most certainly does have political consequences; in fact, it becomes clearer by the day that the IPCC assessment reports were fraudulently designed to fit the desired political consequences rather than being based on anything so mundane and unhelpful as observed facts.
When a field of science is co-opted for political ends, the stakes for diverging from the “consensus” point of view become much higher. If politicians have staked their prestige and/or hopes for advancement on being the ones to fix a crisis, they don’t like to hear that “Oops! There is no crisis!” — and where that preference leads, grant money follows. When politics co-opts a field that is in the grip of an error cascade, the effect is to tighten that grip to the strangling point.

Eisenhower famously warmed of the growing Military-Industrial Complex, an alliance between the Government and Industry to justify and fund continuing increases in Government and its Industry allies. Follow the Money. How is this not identical to what we see happening in climate science?  Billions of dollars of Government grant funding flowing to academic organizations, whose research (surprise!) provides justification for large Government programs like Cap And Trade. Government funding maintains the momentum of the error cascade.

The challenges to the AGW "consensus" have almost all come from outside of this "Environment-Academic Complex", as they would have to. Outsiders are free to report what the data actually say, without fear of losing their funding. As Raymond said:

If politicians have staked their prestige and/or hopes for advancement on being the ones to fix a crisis, they don’t like to hear that “Oops! There is no crisis!”

Thus the emphasis demonstrated by the ClimateGate emails on controlling the Peer Review process. If the narrative can't be directed at the front end, it must be channeled at the back end. The canali of the modern scientific process are indeed man-made.

And so, the debate isn't about science at all, any more than the debate over the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled Howitzer was about defense. I expect to hear any day that NOAA plans to appoint Dejah Thoris to head the new office of Climate Change.

I hope they don't make her wear a brass bikini. It wouldn't provide the dignity that the office demands.

UPDATE 15 February 2010 22:28: Boy, I picked a bad day to toss out a post and then head out for 8 hours in the car and 4 hours at the range (not that it's ever bad to spend 4 hours at the range). Welcome visitors from View From The Porch! Thanks, Tam, and the beer is on me. Anyone interested in a somewhat long-ish overview of the science of AGW might want to start here.

UPDATE 15 February 2010 23:43: This is another interesting comparison.

Planet Borepatch

Ten years ago I put up what may have been the strangest post I've ever written.  What's funny (both funny ha ha and funny weird) is that it ended up as a reference on a Wikipedia page (!).  And it got a comment from early blogger Steven den Beste (fanboi squeee!).

Automatic pistols, the Burgess Shale, and the evolution of design

Warning: this is a strange post, probably the strangest I've ever written. In a way, it's a transmission direct from Planet Borepatch. Don't say I didn't warn you.

In the beginning, nobody knows how something "should" work. When a new opportunity to do something differently comes around, you typically see a lot of different things get tried. This applies to people, when a newfangled way of doing something gets proposed. This also applies to nature, where a major ecological shift opens up new evolutionary pathways.

Paleontologists call this Adaptive Radiation followed by Decimation, and is best illustrated by the sudden appearance of almost all modern animal families in the Cambrian Explosion (ca 540 M years ago), followed by the extinction of many other animal families soon after. Many of these extinct organisms are captured in the Burgess Shale, probably the most important fossil field ever discovered. The definitive work on the subject is Steven Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.

The Burgess Shale is important for two reasons: first, it's very, very old, dating back almost all the way to the Cambrian Explosion itself. It gives a record of the animals alive only ten or twenty million years after the beginning of the Cambrian period. Second, it preserved as fossil not only hard shell and skeleton remains, but soft tissue as well. This is incredibly unusual, and the combination gives us an extremely detailed record of life in the Early Cambrian, when modern animal forms had only just emerged.

But there were strange forms as well, ones that have not been seen since. You might think of them as experimental designs that were briefly viable but which were out-competed. Designs unrelated to any living species. Designs like Hallucigenia, where scientists aren't sure if the blob on the end is the head:

And Opabinia, where different scientists have proposed very different reconstructions of the animal. This is one:

And Anomalocaris, originally thought to be three different creatures, from the fragments of its very different body parts:
All initially viable designs in the Brave New Multicellular World, but soon gone in the subsequent Decimation.

We see this when evolution is driven not by mutation but by human ingenuity, and weeding not via Natural Selection but via the Market. Automatic pistol designs exhibit a very similar "radiate and decimate" pattern.

Autoloading pistols also appeared suddenly, with a flurry of experimentation in the 1880s and 1890s. The "Cambrian Explosion" event seems to have been Hiram Maxim's invention of the recoil-operated machine gun, which set tinkering minds to work on a miniaturized design suitable for a pistol. What we saw was an explosion of initial designs (including from Maxim himself), rapidly followed by a decimation to the remaining pistol families we see today.

But some of those early designs are as wild as Hallucigenia.


The Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver, with one foot in the old and one in the new. The top of the revolver recoiled backwards on a track in the top of the base; a pin mounted on the bottom caused the revolver to rotate, as it moved in the groove in the cylinder.

Schonberger-Lauman 1892, the precursor to the Schonberger 1893, the first commercially sold automatic pistol. The late Ian Hogg describes it in his Illustrated Encyclopedia of Firearms: The mechanism is absolutely unique in pistol design, since it relies upon the setback of the cartridge cap due to the explosion pressure in the case. The bolt is locked by a cam surface on a forked arm; when the pistol is fired, the cap sets back about 0.18 of an inch, imparting movement to the heavy striker before the cap is stopped by the face of the bolt. This slight movement is sufficient to cause a lug on the striker to disengage the locking cam, so leaving the bolt free to recoil, swinging the forked arm back against a spring ready to close the bolt once more.

Schwarzlose 1908 Blow Forward design. The breech block was part of the pistol's frame; firing the cartridge caused the barrel to run forward. There is no slide - rather, the pressure of the expanding gas and the friction of the bullet drove the barrel forward against a spring. The expended case was ejected, a new cartridge was loaded, and the spring pushed the barrel back into place ready for the next shot.

The Pieper 1907had a tip-down barrel, below the recoil spring unit housed in a tunnel on the top of the pistol. The design was unique for how slender the final product was, which resulted in a continuing popularity despite its very high manufacturing costs.

Both the fauna of the Burgess Shale and the early automatic pistols went through a Decimation phase, where a large number of designs were weeded out. The Burgess fauna converged on the major phila that we see today - arthropods, chordates, gastropods, etc. The automatic pistols market was revolutionized first by the Luger, and even more so by the 1911. Why?

Steven den Beste wrote about the Burgess Shale years back, in the Pleistocene Age of the Blogosphere. I found his conclusion to be more compelling than Gould's, who said that it was pretty much luck that determined which survived and which died out. den Beste thought there was more to it:

There's a deeper reason, and it is the thesis here. It's a natural switch from non-zero-sum to zero-sum competition. At the time of the Burgess Shale, that switch hadn't yet taken place, and in the non-zero-sum "Expansion" phase, things are more forgiving. Once you switch to the zero-sum "Competition" phase, creatures which were viable before cease to be, and will die out.

This sounds right, and seems to apply to pistols as well. Initially production runs are small and the novelty is itself a selling point. But eventually customers begin to figure out how to discriminate more effectively. Some designs were too expensive to be competitive (Pieper), some too cumbersome (Webley-Fosbery), fragile (Luger), or requiring bizarre and hard to find ammunition (Schoenberger). We're not sure why the Burgess fauna suffered so many extinctions, but the reasons could very well be similar: some bred more slowly (like today's tigers), or ate specialized food (like today's Koalas), or were too fragile to deal with evolving predators (in particular, this may have been Anomalocaris' fate).

In the long run, designs rapidly converged on what has been proven to be long-term stable. Tam comments (in a different context):

Materials science moves on and yes, we're living in The Future, but as it turns out, round is still a good shape for a wheel and rubber makes pretty good tires.

Ingenious design is a marvel to behold, but a pistol's business is serious work. Reliability, ease of maintenance, availability of ammunition all provide incremental but (over time) irresistible pressure towards what works. Even an advantage of a few percent in efficiency can be enough for a species to win out over thousands of generations of evolution, or for a pistol to guarantee Great War contracts.

A note to anyone who actually read this far: there is an excellent Web site that deserves your attention. The Corps of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Reading, UK has an outstanding collection of historic weapons, automatic pistols among them. I wish I had know about their museum back when I lived in Blighty. To any UK readers, this might be worth a journey.

Why government services will always stink

I posted this ten years ago and nothing has changed.  But the persistence of bad ideas is the only truly renewable resource, and with "Medicare for All" being a major campaign theme this year, it's back to the future.

TL;DR: Medicare For All will stink.  I have proof.

Originally posted February 1, 2010:

The definition of insanity ...

... is thinking - despite repeated examples to the contrary - that this time the same thing will give you different results. Don Surber looks at the UK.Gov's National Health Service, and finds them gaming the metrics:

Here is how it works: In order to cut down on waiting time, people are put in the hospital quicker, even though there are not enough beds.
No problem.
“They say the targets put pressure on hospitals to discharge people early to free up beds and have turned the NHS into a ‘revolving door’,” the London Daily Mail reported.
It is the National Health Service Hokey-Pokey. You put your patient in, you take your patient out…
Here’s an idea: Add more beds.
Oh wait, that would cost money.

At the risk of hurting a bunch of people's feelings, this is precisely what would have been predicted, even by people of marginal intelligence. At least if anyone looked at the decades of experience from places that rejected a market:

My informal survey suggested that some of the longest lines in Moscow were for shoes. At first I assumed that the inefficient Soviet economy did not produce enough shoes, and for that reason, even in the capital, people were forced to line up for hours to buy them. . . . Then I looked up the statistics. I was wrong. The Soviet Union was the largest producer of shoes in the world. It was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year--twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.
The problem with shoes, it turned out, was not an absolute shortage. It was a far more subtle malfunction. The comfort, the fit, the design, and the size mix of Soviet shoes were so out of sync with what people needed and wanted that they were willing to stand in line for hours to buy the occasional pair, usually imported, that they liked.
...

At the root of the dysfunction was the state's control of information. Prices are information--the information producers need in order to know what and how much to produce. In a market for a product as varied in material and design as footwear, shifting prices are like sensors taped to the skin of a patient in a medical experiment; they provide a constant flow of information about consumer needs and preferences. When the state controlled prices, it deprived producers of information about demand.

So, we see a system set up to achieve scores on particular metrics, whether or not the end consumer of the service is any good or not. As the post points out, the end consumer isn't the person getting the shoes (or medical care), it's the State. How on earth could you expect shoes that fit, or people being cured of their sickness?

But I'm sure that it will be different here under Obamacare. I mean, this isn't Russia, for crying out loud. Or even Britain (I mean, look at their teeth; srlsy, how can you expect tehm to understand modern medical technolo9gy?). The program here will be much more carefully crafted, with particular attention to what has not worked in the past, and without being gamed by all sorts of politically well-connected special interests.

Oh, wait ...