A Call for Open Source Code for Voting Machines.

My brother Bill, his wife Emily and my parents visited me in Montreal this weekend. One thing I learned is that both Bill and my Dad pooh-pooh the possibility of elections fraud which is enabled by the shoddy electronic voting machine systems, such as Diebold produces. "If it were a problem, I'm sure the Democrats who lost the election in Georgia would have made a fuss," said Bill, taking the canary in the coal mine argument. "Besides," he went on, "how come I haven't heard anything about it?"

Probably because he largely reads the WSJ -- which hasn't been very interested in it, since as yet there are no provable thefts. But, if history teaches anything on the matter, it is that when people can steal elections, they do. It's merely a matter of time, and so most people will just wait until something so egregious occurs that we can force the companies who make the machines -- who are resisting the calls for minimal and inexpensive protections of our elections -- to actually make those protections.

And here's an article on one such protection: The machines should run on open source -- meaning they publish their computer programs. This allows independent analysis by parties heavily motivated to crack the system -- and to devise protections so that they are secure. "Open source" sounds funny to non-progammers -- like giving away the milk for free -- but programmers know it as the best means to insure bullet-proof programs. Having "competent" programmers go over the code themselves isn't even a close second, as intimated in this article [NYTimes Magazine]

It should be "Starve the Children and Widows" not "Starve the Beast"

Did no one see the article yesterday, which I link to below ("He's Starving the Beast"?). Where's the outrage?

Basically, budget projections to 2006 are requiring cuts in Health and Human Services, EPA, NSF, Small Business Association, transportation, Social Security, envioronmental protection in the Interior Department. Administration members say "Those budget numbers just come from a formula" -- but the formula is based on how much money we'll have. The projection is that the $400B deficifts Bush has been running and his over-projections for economic expansion are coming to roost -- these services can't even hold ground, they are going to face cuts after the election.

We're talking about cuts in school services, food programs, programs which watch our parklands and resources, programs to take care of the neediest and most vulnerable of our society. This is what we can look forward to in 2006.

The worst of it is -- those budget projections are based on our economic state, which would be inherited by the next Administration -- whether it is Kerry or Bush. One of them is going to preside over serious budget shortfalls. The problems are already in front of us, and we have Bush to blame for it.

Rather than "Starve the Beast", we should refer to the "compassionate Convervative" agenda as "Starve the Children and widows."

Bush Starves the Beast

As we've guessed from the $300B-$500B deficits that the Bush administration has been racking up in the past few years, while cutting taxes for the wealthy, this cannot go on forever. When can it all end?

In 2006. Bush has told his education, HHS and homeland security departments to brace for spending cuts in 2006. He's starving the beast., as the conservatives say -- a tactic of running up massive deficits underneath a tax cut, in order to justify cutting programs the conservatives don't want.

Who's getting the cuts: Education (a $1.7B increase in 2005, for political hay during elections, followed by a $1.5B cut in 2006). Veterans Afairs ($519M increase in 2005, followed by $910M cut in 2006), and drops for the EPA, the National Science Foundation, Small Business Administration, Transportation, Social Security, and Interior Department (you know, those people who keep oil barons from drilling in ANWAR and stop clear-cut logging in Colorado).

The White House's excuse: "Those numbers are from formula, and don't reflect policy planning." Um, but the formula reflects how much money we'll have, and the reason everyone's taking a big hit is that we're not going to have the money in 2006, thanks to Bush's tax cuts. The overall decrease reflects how Bush's tax cuts are starving the government. They just won't have the money for these programs.

No new threat info sez Dept. of Homeland Security

"An official with the Department of Homeland Security said the agency remains concerned about the general al Qaeda threat but had no new specific information.

"We are not aware of any new highly credible intelligence indicating a planned attack in the U.S. this summer," the official said. She added: "Nothing in the current intelligence is exceptionally specific."

So is someone just not feeding the right info to Mr. Ridge, is he out of the loop or what? At least this would explain exactly why we are still at Bert, with no plans for Ernie levels of alert.

Assuming that an attack is planned, the article states that an attack might occur during the summer to affect the fall elections. The question is this: would a US terror attack a) show how faulty Mr. Bush's war on terror is, and exactly how UNsafe we've all become, or b) would people rally behind Bush (much like after 9/11) and become too scared to "change horses in the middle of the stream" ?

Because I'm a pessimist, I think b) is a more likely scenario (Bob, I already know you're an optimist, so you'll be going with plan a.) I'm thinking plan b most likely because it would require the least amount of thought to individual voters. A terrorist attack on US soil would guarantee Bush's reelection.

Is Al-Qaeda pro-Bush?

Ernie

Ashcroft warns vaguely of a Qaeda attack. So why are we stil at Bert?

Bush Can't Bake a Cake

Safire says: hey, Bush and Kerry have basically the same position on Iraq. His implication: voter's disappointment won't translate into motion away from Bush and toward Kerry, and what's the difference who carries out the policy?

The difference is between a five year old and an adult. Both may really want to bake the chocholate cake; both agree they need flour, milk, eggs, oven. The difference is the five-year-old screws it up beyond all recognition because they lack the maturity and the smarts to get it right. And that's when it's time to call in the adult. The five-year-old shouldn't have been trusted in the first place.

Rummy Didn't Resign

No, Rummy didn't resign. I was wrong about that.

?

I wasn't able to listen to the whole speech last night. Was Rumsfeld's name even mentioned?

In fact, I believe the President said that he was curious as to why more people haven't prostrated themselves in front of Rumsfeld.

Still Got Rummy?

Hi Bob - I didn't hear anything about Rummy leaving the Administration in yesterday's speech - did you?

Body Fat Percentage and Coupledom.

Looking at the promos for the crazygonuts Disney sequel "Shrek 2" reminds me of what I think has the strongest effect on perceived couple compatability: body fat percentage.

Excepting the situation when one member is a marathon runner, you just don't see couples who aren't in the same 5% body-fat bracket. Why is that?

Maybe because body-fat percentage is read as an indicator of much which is personal: income level, activity level, eating habits. When the two people are all out of whack --- can they be eating together? can they be running together? aren't they all synced up?

So, reader poll: do you see having the same body-fat percentages in couples to be the exception or the rule?

Rumsfeld Out, Sez Bob

My 12:00pm Sunday prediction. Bush is having a press conference Monday evenining EST prime time. I predict it will come out Monday morning that Rumsfeld is resigning.

Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins Cannes' Palme d'Or

It probably won for political content, but then again, so did Bush in 2000 -- so there can't be any shame in that. It's the first documentary to win since Jacques Cousteau's "The Silent World" in 1956.

Economics of TCP oil

The economics of this process can be potentially staggering as well. I believe that the article states that it can produce a barrel of oil at $8-$12 (I assume that this is a break even cost). This is not to mention the natural gas and the pure carbon that is produced. Pure carbon is valuable for its use in water filters, but lets assume for a second that the income generated from these by-products is negligible, and lets also assume that the operators of the plant are too optimistic at the cost of generating a barrel, so we double the cost. It has been a long time since OPEC has been selling oil at $24 a barrel. It would be difficult for them to meet it, then sustain it indefinitely.

Let's also assume that OPEC can meet a $24 per barrel price. We can then examine the ecological benefits of each of these plants. The plants can use any organic materials as a source. This includes material from pig and cow manure, sewage, harbor dredgings, plastics (oddly enough an organic material) , tires, medical waste, and even waste from old landfills can be dug up and used in this process. Any oil used from the processing of these materials means no net increase in the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere. Since this garbage was decaying and releasing CO2 anyway, the gasoline burned will not be making a net contribution to greenhouse gasses.

There's also the matter that these oil producing plants can be distributed where they are needed. That means that we can eliminate oil tankers, and pipelines necessary to distribute oil. We can also eliminate drilling platforms, oil rigs, and costly oil searching expeditions.

Let's also look at the problem of producing enough plants necessary to make the US 100% independent from foreign oil. In 2003, the US imported 4.1B barrels of oil. If the plants cannot be more efficient than 500 barrels per day, that would mean we would need roughly 22,500 plants to produce enough oil (I am assuming here that the US population can create enough waste to feed these plants), at $25M per plant we're looking at a total cost of $562.5B or roughly the cost of 2.4 Iraqi wars.

Yes, it does seem like they are taking lead and creating gold, which is why I'm still skeptical, but taking into account everything above, if these plants could even operate at a break even point, the political, ecological, and economical impacts are still impressively staggering.

Efficiency vs. Economy

Hi Steve - Unfortunately, efficiency is not the last word in this picture. In order to make a profit from turning turkey-fat into crude oil, you need your process to be not only efficient but economical - which is a higher standard.

Let me explain what I mean. Taking their press release at face value, they have a process which is 80% efficient, meaning it creates 100 BTUs' worth of crude oil by using 20 BTUs' worth of electricity. Even if true, this does not mean they can make money from the process. In order to determine whether the process is economical in this sense, we would have to know what resources it takes to gather all of that turkey-fat in one place and process it. In addition, there are the capital costs of the turkey-fat processing plant itself to amortize over the next few years.

My guess is that they can make a profit at the current price for oil ($41 per barrel), but will have trouble if we get another oil glut.

On efficiency

The turkey waste processing plant is ~80% efficient, but I think the numbers paint a different picture. In this article, Appel claims that 100 btus of energy are extracted for every 15 btus used to power the process (making the process 85% efficient). This would be a 666% power output. At 80% efficiency (what today's article claims), the power ouput is 500%.

This process originated from another developed in the 70s which would put out about the same number of btus as they put in, which would equate to 100% power output or 50% efficiency.

BIG!, I tell you. Really big.

Gov. Romney as a Bump in the Road

A 1913 Massachusetts law declares state weddings invalid if they would not be recognized in the couples' home state. This was a turn-of-the-century way to avoid getting tangled up in state-to-state battles over interracial marriages. Since 1913:miscegenation :: 2004:gay marriage, this law has now been brought to bear on out-of-state gay couples marrying in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is the only state that allows gay marriage, so gay couples are required to certify on the marriage license, under penalty of perjury, that they either live in the state or are planning to move to the state within one year. Some counties are enforcing this rigorously. Others - Provincetown and Somerville among them - are not. Apparently, this is upsetting the Governor.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. On the one hand it is basically the last straw left for gay marriage opponents who want to avoid the spectacle of Massachusetts becoming the nation's gay-marriage haven. On the other hand, the direct comparison to anti-interracial marriage bigots of 100 years ago must be a little hard to take.

Democrats in the state legislature are attempting to repeal the 1913 law - they are expected to succeed, and Romney is expected to veto.

Waste-to-Oil

I've heard of this before and, if you could get it to produce more energy than it consumes it would be revolutionary. Of course, the same thing can be said about fusion energy. I'm intrigued by the statement "TCP is more than 80% energy efficient". My best guess as to the meaning of that is that they get more than 80% of the energy out that they put in. So, I think I know their business plan: we lose a few dollars for every barrel of oil we produce and sell but we make it up in volume!

Really, really, really big

I originally read about the thermal conversion process a couple of years ago on Slashdot. Today, the first conversion plant has gone online and should be producing 500 barrels of crude oil a day.

This process makes oil a renewable resource. Now we have something useful to do with all that turkey waste. In 20 years we'll be looking back at this day as the beginning of something huge.

A Prisoner Charges Rape

[WaPost] This is the first quasi-specific charge of rape to come out. The charging prisoner seems to know who did it (a translator), although the victim's identity is not clear. He makes it sound systematic and planned: someone hung sheets to block the view and the event was photographed -- requiring foreknowledge, determination, and the belief on the part of the soldiers involved that this was an army sanctioned act.

"Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. 'Most of the days I was wearing nothing else,' he said in his statement.

Hilas also said he witnessed an Army translator having sex with a boy at the prison. He said the boy was between 15 and 18 years old. Someone hung sheets to block the view, but Hilas said he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to get a better look. Hilas said he watched the assault and told investigators that it was documented by a female soldier taking pictures."

WaPost's got New Pictures

[WaPost] The Washington Post has new pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib, plus a video. It's disturbing to see prisoners apparently being threatened with dogs, men covered naked in mud (or worse -- hard to tell what that brown substance is) and forced to walk in a straight line hooded and foot-cuffed, the simple dragging around of bodies, the apparent punching of a hodded prisoner.

With Seymor Hersh saying this stuff occurred by people in a chain of command going from prisoners to MPs to contracters to Rumsefeld, it's well past time the Pentagon stopped simply denying that they were involved and come clean with a full description of what the organizational structure was.

We can be civilized about this and give Rummy the benefit of the doubt, but now it's past clear the Pentagon is stonewalling -- that can only going on for a very short while longer before there are calls for his head on a stick. You don't get a pass for presiding over the department responsible for screwing up the war on terror.

Meet the Couples

After all the noise we made on this blog about the hundreds of (currently in-limbo) gay weddings that happened in San Francisco starting on Valentine's Day, the commencement of legal gay marriages in Massachusetts this Monday somehow passed without being marked (I was at the spa in Ojai - that's my excuse).

The Boston Globe has put up a gallery of couples for those of you who want to catch up.

So the pessimist says.....

So the Pessimest says to the Optimist: My God, these Bush people -- it just can't get any worse.

And the Optimist says: Oh yes it can.

Salon on insecurity

Today Salon.com has an article which describes exactly why I've never locked down my wireless network at home. Bottom line: because the network is insecure, no one can prove without a doubt that it was me who used the network.

By Micah Joel

May 18, 2004

"Last week, I turned off all the security features of my wireless router. I removed WEP encryption, disabled MAC address filtering and made sure the SSID was being broadcast loud and clear. Now, anyone with a wireless card and a sniffer who happens by can use my connection to access the Internet. And with DHCP logging turned off, there's really no way to know who's using it.


What's wrong with me? Haven't I heard about how malicious wardrivers can use my connection from across the street to stage their hacking operations? How my neighbors can steal my bandwidth so they don't have to pay for their own? How I'm exposing my home network to attacks from the inside? Yup.


So why am I doing this? In a word, privacy. By making my Internet connection available to any and all who happen upon it, I have no way to be certain what kinds of songs, movies and pictures will be downloaded by other people using my IP address. And more important, my ISP has no way to be certain if it's me.


In mid-April, Comcast sent letters to some of its subscribers claiming that their IP addresses had been used to download copyrighted movies. Since Comcast is not likely to improve customer satisfaction and retention with this strategy, it's probable the letter was a result of pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America or one of its members. And to Comcast's credit, it stopped short of direct accusation; instead it gives users an out. Says the letter, 'If you believe in good faith that the allegedly infringing works have been removed or blocked by mistake or misidentification, then you may send a counter notification to Comcast.'


That's good enough for me. I've already composed my reply in case I receive one of these letters someday. 'Dear Comcast, I am so sorry. I had no idea that copyrighted works were being downloaded via my IP address; I have a wireless router at home and it's possible that someone may have been using my connection at the time. I will do my best to secure this notoriously vulnerable technology, but I can make no guarantee that hackers will not exploit my network in the future.'


If it ever comes down to a lawsuit, who can be certain that I was the offender? And can the victim of hacking be held responsible for the hacker's crimes? If that were the case, we'd all be liable for the Blaster worm's denial of service attacks against Microsoft last year.


Don't get me wrong. I'm not deliberately opening my network to hackers and miscreants bent on downloading copyrighted material. I'm simply choosing not to secure it. That's no different from the millions of people who haven't installed anti-virus software and the millions more who don't keep theirs up to date. Yes, their vulnerabilities allow viruses to spread more quickly, but that's their choice, right?


What about the security of my home network? A determined hacker may be able to crack my passwords or exploit weaknesses in the operating system that I never even thought of, but how is that different from before? There's no system that's completely secure, so whether hackers are inside or outside my firewall will make little difference. I'm willing to trade a little security for privacy.


It feels strange to be opening up my network after years of vigorously protecting it, and it's not without a tinge of anxiety that I do so. But there's also a sense of liberation, of sticking it to the Man, that's undeniable, as well as an odd sense of community. It seems there's safety in numbers after all, even among strangers"

Powell on Track for 2008

Looking past the current administration Powell cleaned up the record Sunday, stating that there was no evidence for a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The information given to him previously by the CIA on this matter? Wrong.

"'Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it,' said an official close to him. 'And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war.'"

How about a unity government? Kerry/Powell 2004? Sounds swell, but from Powell's point of view -- why be VP 2004-2012 when you can be President 2008-2016?

Rumsfeld's Black Hats led the Interrogations

Today, Seymor Hersh described on Face the Nation how Rumsfeld approved and sent military operatives into Iraq, at least through last summer, as a secret program. He had the necessary authorization to do so from President Bush The operatives were there without official processing as independent, intelligence contractors. The operatives were there specifically to snatch suspected opposition off the street, and to work in the Iraq prisons to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.

Hersh points out he doesn't know that the kind of thing we've seen the pictures of was ordered done by Rumsfeld -- but his implication is that the people who were leading the interrogations were (1) outside the normal military chain of command; and (2) there directly on order from Rumsfeld.

This is a stunning statement. It implies that the military chain of command was subverted by the Secretary of Defense, and the result was the violation of the Geneva Conventions of which we've seen the pictures. The glib statement: Rumsfeld had his own personal group of black hats who led the Iraq interrogations.

Weapons of Math Instruction

While the Getting's Good

Rumsfeld -- hoping to get in a few whacks in on Iraqi prisoners before the operation is tightened up by all you Geneva-convention spouting do-gooders -- makes a surprise visit to Baghdad.

"I brought my dog," says Rumsfeld.

Byzantine Rules of the INS

According to this Slate Columnist, the INS is now enforcing rules against foreign journalists so byzantine as to be effectively arbitrary - certainly not transparent or predictable, let alone fair. Or wise.

A bureaucracy which acts arbitrarily is not the hand of an orderly government, but a tool of tyrrany.

Oh, and while journalists are being locked up at the border, Pamela Anderson is given citizenship after a 10-question citizenship test. On the bright side: the reason she wanted citizenship? To vote.

This is a good description?

Gehry describes his new building at MIT as a "party of drunken robots got together to celebrate"

When somebody describes something as a "party of drunken..." anything, it dredges images of people passed out in their own vomit. I think Frank should come up with a better description.

Mexican Military UFOs

Hard to imagine why this didn't hit the front page of every newspaper in the world today. The Canadian Globe and Mail reported Mexican Air Force pilots took an IR video of UFOs. 11 Unidientified Flying Objects were seen.

Uh huh.

What an ungrateful lot.

We should not be persecuting this man, we should be getting down on our knees and thanking Rummy. So says G. W. Bush.

The mock formality with which Bush began his Pentagon press conference yesterday set the tone -- turning to Rumsfeld, he bowed and said, "I thank you for the hospitality you showed me during my visit." Rumsfeld responded with a smile and a bow of his own. It marked the proceedings as what both Bush and Rumsfeld regarded -- a sham of polite words. "You are doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude," Bush said of Rumsfeld.

This might have passed as a compliment a year ago, just after Bush announced major combat operations in Iraq to be over. Now, with a dozen images showing torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the press, and the revelation that 1000s of more images exist; with the publication of a Red Cross Report detailing abuses at every American detention center, of repeated requests by the ICRC to the US to stop these abuses being ignored, Bush's demands for "gratitude" for Rummy are indeed a strong statement by the President, one of support indeed, but more like wishful thinking.

Morons.

Apple's hardware business generates profit, but maybe they should give it up. Discuss.

In what other markets are companies able to generate a profit, but industry "analysts" (read: Rob Enderle or Michael Dell) still call for the company to disband, or get out of the business? If your company can consistantly sell billions of dollars worth of hardware, and generate millions in profit (and is able to do so through an industry downturn) is market share all that important? The market is still growing, and the user base is growing even though the market share may not be.

It is reasoning like this that made Wintel machines the monster it is today. Because everyone else has a PC, it makes sense for me to get one as well. Do people buy Sony receivers and Honda Accords because they have a bigger market share? I think not, there are many more reasons why people purchase the brands that they do (quality,cost, etc.) , but it doesn't stop analysts from using this one dimentional argument when calling for Apple to get out of the PC market.

A point that Steve Jobs regularly brings up is that BMW has even less market share (car market) than Apple does in the computer market. Does that make them a less viable company? On the contrary, because there aren't a hundred knock-offs up and down your block, many people desire the car even more. Nobody "settles" for a BMW, and the same goes for a Macintosh. These are consumer items that value form as well as function. It is these people who don't see any value in form who will go out an purchase a Saturn because it does the same job as a BMW Z3, and also don't take the time to understand WHY someone would purchase the Z3 when you can get 3 Saturns for the same price.

Aside from form, market share is also what is killing the Windows machine. Virus and worm writers looking for notoriety will continue attacking the platform with the largest market share. Just this past week, my parents had three different friends/family who owned a PC where they had to go out and either a)Purchase additional software costing $150-200 or b)Pay techies at Best Buy to purge their machines of the latest worm and/or spyware. Granted, Macs are no less vulnerable (Apple puts out a security update almost once a month), but the market share of PCs acts like one of those UV lamps in the backyard, attracting pests away from you. Let them keep their market share. It reduces the total cost of owning a Mac.

Van Helsing takes £60m ($107m) worldwide

Van Helsing actually took in 107m worldwide. If you had bet against this movie, you would be betting against the built in audience generated by the comic book series.

I, on the other hand, went to see a different comic book adaptaion "Hellboy", which should have died a quick death. Lisa and I saw it in a theater (the Parkway in Oakland) which has couches and serves beer, pizza, and nachos, so we were able to sit back, relax and sleep through this dud of a film. It was billed as a "rollercoaster ride", but it was much more like a "teacup ride". You spin around really fast, and at the end you feel like throwing up.

Yet Again, No Movie Marketing Savvy

Some of you might remember back when I lost my shirt on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, betting heavily against a total box office of >$80M for the done-up flimsy-premise movie "The Matrix". Hadn't we already seen Keanu flop as an action hero?

And here I go again -- seeing what looked like no premise, dismal eye candy, and a hodge-podge plot, as well as a dorky name -- I was calling for an early grave for VAN HELSING. And then it cleared $54M in weekend opening box office.

Meanwhile, I've been encouraging everyone to run out and see "Dogville" and "Kill Bill Vol 2."

288,000 New Jobs in April

[WaPost] Of course, when the administration promised 300,000 new jobs a month up to the election, we didn't think 250,000 would be as "Military Contract Prisoner Torturers".

Else we might a' said somethin.

Red Cross told White House of Iraqi Torture; White House did Nothing.

Front page of the WSJ: WSJ : "A confidential Red Cross report delivered to the Bush administration earlier this year concluded that abuse of prisoners in Iraq by U.S. military intelligence personnel was widespread and in some cases 'tantamount to torture.'"

And the White House did nothing? I guess they figured, "Ah, what does a bunch of nurses know about torture?"

Elsewhere : [globe and mail] House Republican Majority Leader and all-around fun-guy Tom DeLay said of Nanci Pelosi, Tom Harkin and John Kerry - amidst their criticism of the President and calls for Rumsfeld's resignation -- "They want to win the White House more than they want to win the war. I'm not questioning their patriotism. I'm questioning their judgment and their fitness to lead.”

So DeLay defends sodomizing Iraqi prisoners as part of that road to victory. And that it's perfectly consistent with violating the Geneva conventions while being President.

Oh, hadn't heard about the sodomizing? William Saletan gives a nice chronology -- which should be required reading -- of What the Department of Defense knew and when they knew it . Remarkable investigations by DoD began Jan 19, and 17 soldiers were suspended of duty while the investigation proceeded by Feb 23; and the Taguba report was final by March 3, saying that our solidiers had, in specific instances, threatened prisoners with rape; sodomized a detainee with a chemical light, maybe a broom-stick; forced groups of men to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped; and put one guy on a stand, connected wires to his hands and penis, and a sand bag on his head, telling him not to fall off or he'll be electrocuted.
By Saletan's telling: NONE of this happened because Rummy asked for information. All of it happened because lower level commanders demnaded the report, and acted upon it, and everything was known and action taken by March 3.

Oh, and all this before Bush (March 12) Rumsfeld (March 16) and Rice (March 19) publicly brag about how they closed the "rape rooms and torture chambers" of Saddam Hussein. Bush was bragging about the closing of the Rape rooms up through last week (April 15, April 19, April 23, April 30, May 3).

Elvis Mitchell's Out

Elvis Mitchell is out at the NYT - just look at the "Critics' Picks" box on the right-hand side of this week's reviews and you'll see only A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden listed. Elvis doesn't have any reviews this week, for the first week in a while (last week he did Godsend and Mean Girls), but I would have chalked it up to vacation time except for the Picks box.

I had actually heard a rumor about this a week or two ago - Robin, was it you who told me? What I had heard was that A.O. Scott was getting promoted to lead on movies, and that Elvis' position was still in flux. Well, flux no more - I'm guessing he took the hint. (Would that we should be so lucky with Rumsfeld!)

Personally, I liked him but found his reviews tended towards obscure references, and lacked the sharpness of wit and sheer humor of Tony - or needless to say, Janet. What is truly remarkable, however, is how Stephen just hangs in there, demonstrably inferior, week after week - the Salieri of movie critics. Oh well.

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

Rummy Bet.

Resolved: That Rumsfeld either: (1) loses his job prior to the election, or (2) both that Bush wins the election and Rummy is out of office by Jan 21 2006.

Pro: Bob
Con: Steve.
Terms: cappa.

Any other takers?

What would Bush II look like?

I've been offering cappa bets that Bush looses in 2004 for at least 2 years, and I'm still offering.

Bush is finding himself eating crow on Al Jazeera because Rummy didn't tell him about the photographs of the Iraqi, prisoners naked and bound. Bush, according to the NYTimes, gave Rummy his own plateful.

Knowing Bush is big on loyalty, and this counts as a stab in the back, if Bush were to win the election, we're seeing his two senior aides -- Rumsfeld and Powell -- will be out. That leaves Cheney as VP, and Condi with a promotion.

This trickling attrition does not look good -- it looks like Bush can't hold a team together.

That would be egg

on my face. The bet is over. I owe Robin a cap.

Left Behind

By July 4, 2006 a major motion picture based on Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkin's popular "Left Behind" book series will be released. By the time it closes it will have done $200M domestic. A luxury caffeinated beverage says so. Who will take me on?

Humiliated Iraqi Prisoner ID'd by NYTimes

Remember the Iraqi prisoner in the picture, with a female military member pointing to his penis and giving the thumbs up? The NYTimes has found and interviewed him. The Army confirms his identity. The article is his description of what happened the night all those pictures were taken.

Disney is Scared of Bush Revenge

The NYTimes reports that Disney is blocking Miramax's distribution deal for Michael Moore's new film. The movie is about Bush's ties with powerful Saudi families. According to the article: "A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many."

Hooey that this is about families -- Miramax has made many films which would bother families, with violence, nudity, harsh language. In fact, Disney invested in Miramax specifically to get in on the "violence/nudity" action without harming their pro-family, spanking clean Disney brand. Disney is scared of Bush Revenge.

This is the Plame payoff. The Bush team has demonstrated a ruthless political will for revenge from those who criticise them. The result is that one of the most powerful media companies in the world is too scared to risk being seen as critical of Bush -- even in the legitimate form of a documentary film by one of the world's most well recognized documentarians on the left, distributed by the greatest "independent" stuidio ever.

The New Prudishness

David Brooks leads the charge of the babushkas--- asking, when are we are going to stop screwing around and settle down with a nice girl? In his Op-Ed piece last Friday , he related the results of a University of Chicago study of sexual marketplaces, which found enormous diversity -- and ghettoization -- of sexual marketplaces in Chicago. Basically, people look for sex partners within their own ethnic and geographic group, and, "Opportunities in the sex market act as constraints on the marriage market". Brooks finds this very troubling, because "There is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness. Children raised in marriages tend to have more opportunities than children raised outside marriage...... " In other words, we can look forward to Brooks prostheletising how to get people out of the dating market and in to marriages. Sure, Brooks ignores the possibility that people get married for reasons -- oh, God, please let's hope -- other than to have their socks blown off on a regular basis, and that people are hooking up not to avoid marriage, but to replace the active sex lives they would have had if they chose marriage. An obvious question: what percentage of single people are constitutionally against marriage? Never answered in Brooksworld. It could be that people are hooking up for the same reason that more people are buying coffee in --- gracious! -- coffee houses rather than making it at home, as they would if they had someone to make it for them. It's out there, it's available, and they aren't getting it at home.
"We are replacing marriage, one of our most successful institutions, with hooking up. This is a deep structural problem, and very worrying." About as troubling as Starbucks, I think. Before we put Brooks in charge of anything, someone should sit him down and explain the difference between a symptom and a cause.

On Sunday, the NYTimes publishedan OpEd Piece by Columbia media business school media program director Jonathan A Knee who suggests a new means for censoring pornography, by making it illegal to pay or receive payment for a sex act (the article implies that nudity is a sex act -- so no nudie shots). What's spectacularly impressive about this article is its assumption that pornography absolutely should be censored out of existence, because of the psychological damage it does to those who view it. Oh, and Knee also states that 70 percent of men ages 18-34 have visit an internet porn site once a month (don't look at me, I'm 35). The article fails to connect the dots: if porn viewing produces axe murderers, then 70 percent of all men 18-34 are axe murders. If it gave people cancer, everyone would be dying of cancer.

Finally, Adam Cohen brings up the Federal Communications Commissions new rules regarding censorship, issued March 18 under Colin Powell's son Michael Powell [OpEd #3] which include: (1) broadcasters can now lose their licenses for "isolated or fleeting" swear words, as opposed to the previous rule which required repeated violations; (2) removes the previous requirement that offenses be "willful", now holding that a broadcaster's good-faith efforts to understand their rules are irrelevant; and (2) fails to state what profanity is, instead to decide "on a case-by-case basis" -- the very definition of arbitrary.

Look, it's not that I'm looking to curse up a storm while broadcasting across an internet porn site. But what we're seeing is actually quite a pile of New Prudishness -- a sudden cultural interest in altering social behaviors of others, motivated by personal moral codes. It's not unconstitutional; but it is the exclusive purview of conservatives to want to control the behavior of everyone, to conform to their moral views. The reason it's troubling is that people ignore them when it comes as advice and punditry. So they turn to the law, to make the US the kind of country they would want to live in -- such as we are now seeing with the FCC. It's "The Handmaid's Tale", and we're all the handmaids.

Hot Model Marries Old Chubby Writer

Warming the heart of academics everywhere. I guess my invitation got lost in the mail.