Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Vulture Shopping

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Well, we just came back from shopping at CompUseless, aka CompUSA.

When we got there, my son Charlie asked, why we were going there, and I replied, “Because they are going out of business because they suck, and no one wants to shop there.”

After a pause, I realized that an 8 year old might not understand the subtext, and I continued, “Since they are going out of business, they are discounting stuff, so we are hoping to find a good deal.”

He expressed wonderment, not at the idea that a business going under would discount, but because I had anticipated his next question. He’s a bright kid, but having Aspergers, sometime there are social jumps like that seem to him to be magic.

My anticipating his next question rather impressed him.

It’s noteworthy because he spends so much time confounding me with things like fairly abstruse questions about microbiology, the nature of black holes and the big bang (I send him in the direction of my elder brother, who has a PhD in high energy physics), and meteorology (he loves the Weather Channel).

We scored a UPS, a color laser printer (about $220 after discount, which will replace my wife’s ruinously expensive ink addiction), a DVD burner, and some blank DVDs.

Blue Bush Dogs: Not Moderate, Just Corrupt

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Davit Sirota has a very good analysis of the despicable betrayal of the American people by the so called “moderate” Blue Bush Dog Democrats with regards to basic fairness and the economic stability of the United States.

The bill in question, HR 3609, is rather simple: It would allow a bankruptcy judge, “To ameliorate the terms of abusive “subprime” mortgages.” Under the current law, judges can already do this for investment properties, and for vacation homes, but for primary homes? Das ist Verboten.

So the judge could vitiate prepayment penalties to allow for refinance, or change interest rates, or modify fees charged for things like taking a phone call from a customer, though it would not give the judge power to forgive principal, since a mortgage is, after all, a secured loan.

While I favor a more expansive bill, one that would cover all consumers, this could go a long way towards fixing the system. As it currently stands, many loan servicers are legally unable to modify the terms of a loan, because their contracts with the bond holders prohibit it.

Even when they can, there is little incentive for them to negotiate in good faith.

What this means, of course, is more Chapter 7 liquidations, as opposed to Chapter 11 reorgs, more foreclosures, more empty houses blighting more neighborhoods, and more turmoil on wall street. It is The Tragedy of the Commons writ with trillions of dollars to be eventually be baid for by all of us.

Bush Pocket Veto of Troops Pay Raise is Invalid

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I understand that Bush is threatening a veto of the latest defense authorization bill.

It appears that inconveniencing banks means more to him than giving our troops the payraise they deserve.

That being, this rather insightful analysis is correct: If he wants to do this, then he has to put his name on the veto with those crayons sharpies that he is so fond of. He cannot use the pocket veto, because Congress is still technically in session.

The Senate has remained in session to prevent recess appointments, and as such his claim, “The adjournment of the Congress has prevented my return of H.R. 1585 within the meaning of Article I, section 7, clause 2 of the Constitution”, is completely without merit.

If you really find this provision so bad, stop behaving like what Ahnuld would call a “Girlie Man”, and put your name on a veto that cuts pay for the troops.

Don’t worry, it’s not like any or your kids will be affected.

World Wide Pants Makes Deal With Striking Writers, Letterman Back on the Air

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So will Craig Ferguson’s show, which is also produced by Letterman’s sartorially named production company.

The details of the deal have not yet been released, but this should create a significant advantage for both Letterman and Ferguson, not just because they will have writers, those monologues typically take a dozen writers to hammer out, but because there are a lot of guests who won’t cross a picket line, and with World Wide Pants productions, they are not.

As to whether this will lead to Letterman taking back the ratings lead from Leno, only time will tell.

As for me, I may watch Letterman, but I won’t be watching Stewart or Colbert, who will be airing shows without a deal with writers.

Why We’re All Going to Hell, Part 54,302

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John Scalzi, in his blog post, Why We’re All Going to Hell, Part 54,302, makes the point that should be made: When the press covers someone giving away billions of dollars to the hungry, sick, and infirm, and the big story for the media is, “What does this mean for his narcissistic no-talent grand daughter?*“, we are all going to hell, particularly the wankers in the media who have decided to cover it this .

I might further argue that we are already in hell.

*Early in the brief 7 ½ month history of this blog, I made a promise not to mention She Who Must Not Be Named, which was expanded a while back to They Who Must Not Be Named. Therefore, I will not mention her name, or their names, unless they run for office.

A Bad Review of A Bad Book About an Awful Secretary of State

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In the New York times book section, Robert Dallek* has a tremendously lame review of Elizabeth Bumiller’s book, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, which also appears to be tremendously lame, at least based on the following excerpt:

Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.

The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, “Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde.” (If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.)

Mr. Dallek however appears to take this meaningless exercise as some sort of depth:

What distinguishes Ms. Bumiller’s book from other initial studies of the Bush administration and its principal actors is its absence of finger pointing or polemics. Ms. Bumiller’s biography is scrupulously fair and most notable for its above-the-battle tone. In Ms. Bumiller’s rendering Ms. Rice is neither hero nor villain but an ambitious woman whose achievements and shortcomings speak for themselves.

So Bumiller’s book is nothing. An active aggressive nothing. The sort of nothing that makes the TV show Seinfeld feel like it was about something.

No analysis, no thought, just stenography.

His further quote of Bumiller is instructive:

“It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them,” Ms. Bumiller writes. “Her real ideology was succeeding.”

If this means that she thinks that Condi Rice is primarily interested in advancing Condi Rice, then it’s an interesting point far too obliquely made, and if If she means that Condi cares about getting things right, I don’t think so, or as a commenter on another blog says:

Wow. Doesn’t tripe that insipid belong on the op-ed page under a David Brooks byline? I recognize that book reviews aren’t exactly news reporting, but this is ridiculous.
Robert Johnston | 12.27.07 – 9:04 pm | #

Condoleeza Rice has been egregiously and adamantly wrong about everything, but she has continued to fail upward.

*The doctor is right. Never trust a Dallek.

Cuyahoga County, Ohio County to Switch to Optical-Scan

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I don’t generally buy into the conspiracy theories about touch screen voting, the group most involved in the issue in Maryland, TrueVote Maryland, is overrun by Greens determined to get nothing done, so that they can blame the Democrats.

I think that the machines are insecure, unreliable, and they don’t provide an adequite voting record, but the reason it’s good news that the Ohio county containing Cleveland is moving to optical scan is because I’ve used the touch screen machine, and they suck wet farts from dead pigeons.

They are buggy, the break down a lot, and they make for much longer lines, discouraging voting.

As to access for the blind, there are simple inexpensive solutions (basically a terminal with earphones and an integrated printer).

Too True

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In his blog post, Memories of 2003, the great Paul Krugman notes:

Back in 2003 all the Kewl Kids, as a lot of my friends call them,

FWIW, I call them “very serious people”.

thought that to suggest that Bush was misleading us into war was, you know, shrill — it marked you as not being a Serious Person.

And here’s the thing: they still do. Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed until, say, 2005 that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed earlier — or, worse yet, you caught on to the administration’s essential mendacity right from the beginning — it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment. It shows that you were an irrational Bush hater.

This is kind of like the term “Prematurely anti-fascist” that was big in the 1950s.

How can one be prematurely anti-fascist??? That’s kind of like being prematurely anti-baby eating.

It was a way of dismissing people’s ideas without any serious review.

It’s why the Democratic party should extricate from groups of “very serious people” like the Council on Foreign Relations.

Clueless: NY Times Columnist David Pogue

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Mr. Pogue is wringing his hands about how those meddling kids today don’t respect IP.

He relates how he wrote an article about PyMusic, a piece of software that strips the DRM out of iMusic downloads, and how he received a sh#@ when he said, “To me, it’s obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online, nd therefore, it’s wrong to use it.”

He gets a bunch of nasty emails from readers (one of those things, it seems that upsets NY Times and WaPo writers) explaining how there are a myriad of legitimate uses for this, such as backup, using some other sort of MP3 player, etc.

So, he claims to get it, and recently he went before a young audience, and gave a number of examples, and asked if they were wrong.

The final one, and the one that shocked him, was when he only got 1 or 2 hands for, “You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it,” and he gets 2 hands out of 500.

He’s shocked, but he is shocked because people understand the issue, Patent and Copyright Law is at its Core Public Interest Law.

IP meaning intellectual product, not intellectual property, is not and was never intended to be property as we understand it.

Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, has the power to, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

This is not property. After all, when I say, “Take my wife….please,” Henny Youngman still has the joke.*

IP is an infringement on a very natural state of creativity. Patents and copyright are not much more than 300 years old, but we have the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and some really kick ass cave paintings, among thousands of other items.

These young students have looked at the world around them, and determined, for example, that record distributors steal from the artists and give them no money, so that their money does not “Promote … the useful arts”.†

David Pogue does not understand the underlying principles of the current IP regime, and these wet-behind-the-ears kids in his audience do.

*Of course his being dead for decades makes his being able to tell it academic.
†Of course looking at modern pop music, there is a question as to whether any of the stuff in the top 40 rotation qualifies as, “useful arts”, but that is a metaphysical question, not a legal one.

Kansas GOP Chairman Admits to Illegal Voter Suppression

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So not shocked.

When Nixon decided to appeal to the southern racists, he eagerly embraced their Jim Crow voting strategies too.

However, I am a bit surprised that Kris Kobach would brag about it in public:

To date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years!

There is a primer to this illegal, the RNC has been under a consent decree for some time, and quite frankly UnAmerican technique here.

I guarantee you, BTW, a lot of the voters “caged” are serving in the military overseas.

I Love it When Conservatives Go Hammer and Tongs After Each Other

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In the left corner, wearing the bible print trunks, Michael Dale “The Gastric Bypass” Huckabee, and in the left corner, wearing currency print trunks with the corporate sponsorship, the Club for Growth.

It appears that the CfG is taking out bunch of nasty ads against Huckabee.

Four years ago, they called me a, “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show”, so I’m experiencing no small amount of schadenfruede.

While Obama and Hillary Try to Make Hay, Edwards Takes High Road on Assassination

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We’ve got them sniping back and forth here, and to his credit John Edwards is not saying that it’s all about him:

Benazir Bhutto was a brave and historic leader for Pakistan. Her assassination is a sad and solemn event, and our hearts go out to her family and to the Pakistani people. But we will not let this contemptible, cowardly act delay the march of progress in Pakistan for a single second.

I have seen firsthand in Pakistan, and in meetings with Prime Minister Bhutto and President Musharraf, the instability of the country and the complexity of the challenges they face. At this critical moment, America must convey both strength and principle. We should do everything in our power to help bring the perpetrators of this heinous act to justice and to ensure that Bhutto’s movement toward democracy continues.

Compares favorably to the posturing by Clinton, Obama, Romney, Giuliani, etc. where they all basically say, “this is why you should vote for me“

It compares even more favorably to Mike Huckabee’s statement, where he says, “There’s a country called Pakistan? Really? Are you sure??“

I would note that my assessment of Bhutto is far less charitable than his, but he’s not making hay of the assassination, which is a good thing.

Adventures in Bad Desense Technology Reporting

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I’ve seen the story all over the net about successful Russian test launch of the RSM-54, or Sineva from the Tula, Delta IV class submarine earlier this month.

There was much talk about it was a “hybrid ballistic missile that in its final stages becomes a modified cruise missile” is actually a bit of a misnomer.

…., is a hybrid ballistic missile that in its final stages becomes a modified cruise missile. In this guise, the warhead cannot be targeted by anti-missile systems that rely on a ballistic trajectory for their calculations.

This is a misnomer. What we have is called a “MARV”, MAneuverable Reentry Vehicle, and it is fairly old news.

The Pershing II which actually reached deployment in the 1980s in Europe before being retired under the INF treaty had such a system, though not for ABM evasion, they coupled it with a terminal radar for a CEP under 30 meters.

For a strategic system it would likely be used for evasion, and there are reports of it being used on the Trident reentry vehicles.

You can see see the aerodynamic surfaces, and the radome on this picture of a Pershing II launch from Wiki.

A Note to Ramesh Ponnuru

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It appears that the Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for National Review, has taken offense at a a blog post I made about 8 days ago regarding rumors that Time Magazine wanted him to write regular OP/EDs for them.

The title was and is over the top and offensive, which will surprise my friends no one bit, and you can go to the post and see my apology in the comment.

However, I take exception (not offense, exception) to one thing that he posted in The Corner:

That’s one “progressive” blogger’s reaction to the possibility that I will become a regular columnist for Time.

(emphasis mine)

I am not a progressive. I am a liberal.

A progressive is what wimps call themselves if they favor forward looking programs, but have capitulated to the linguistic efforts to equate the term “liberal” with “N***er Lover” in the 1970s by various reactionaries.

I’d like to think that I have a bit more intestinal fortitude.

To quote John F. Kennedy:

But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

You can also refer to the late Steve’s Gilliard’s post on the subject. He was alway rather insistent on his use of the term “liberal”, rather than “progressive”.

Even New Labour Sick of Anti-Terror Laws

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It looks like Gordon Brown is looking at a revolt among his own party regarding his proposal to extend the period of detention without charge in terrorism cases from 28 days to 42 days.

It probably does not help that Sir Ken Macdonald QC, Head of the CPS and Director of Public Prosecutions, in addition to, “the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith and the former Lord chancellor Lord Falconer.”

What I don’t get about the current politics in Britain is how the other parties are not exploiting the current situation.

Brown is floundering, Blair was remarkably unpopular, and that was before his conversion to Catholicism, which from what I’ve read, both historical and current stories, is a very big negative to the British public.

Why the Tories or Lib-Dems are unable to pick up significant seats in these circumstances is completely beyond me.