Keword Berry

The Republicans

have forgotten that just seven years ago, we Dems tried that party
of NO thing and got squashed at the polls the midterm after. I’m
thinking it’ll be worse for the GOP, because at least we had a
political coalition.

Too many of us dems are bad for forgetting after just one year in the
majority how useful those filibuster thingies were back when George II
was President and seriously NEEDED blocking. In fact, some of us took
only three months to forget.

Filed by Jon Kay at 7:14 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General
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I seem to’ve been a bad kid, because I got a lump of coal in the form
of some bad sickness.

Filed by Jon Kay at 4:41 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General,Open Thread
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The George II Administration created an entire system for

vanishing people. There is an excuse – they SAY these are all
imprisoned immigrants, but we peasants have no way of checking.
Somebody in the White House was way into breaking habeas corpus and
stomping on the pieces – this time vanishing immigrants, just like an
authoritarian government, NOT a democracy. Britons developed habeas
corpus “body must be present” – a requirement that prisoners must be
charged and presented when asked for – to keep their Kings like our
George II from vanishing the inconvenient.

Of course, Bush also brought
us travel checkpoints, reduced financial and call privacy, and did I
mention checkpoints?

But, then, the Bush Administration WAS
an authoritarian government. Even Clinton was authoritarian also,
albeit within more limits. He looks good in comparison today, but his
cipher escrow, media companies’ beloved DMCA, and tries at banning
Internet porn certainly can’t be called free. He believed in and
continued the drug wars’ authoritarian bits.

Filed by Jon Kay at 2:49 am under Editorial - Centrist,General
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There’s a way making interstellar jumps that wouldn’t violate our
current knowledge of physics. We don’t (yet?) know begin to know how
to make it happen yet, though.

Most of you’ve surely seen on screen, or read in stories, about some
spacecraft entering a wormhole – you can tell because they have
accretion disks around them, matter waiting to be digested by a black
hole.

Kip Thorne published a famous Physics Review Letter short article in 1988
that suggested that wormhole singularity pairs, between white and
black holes, can also do both fast interstellar and time travel. The
fact that it’s still-unrebutted after 20 years of scrutiny by alot of
smart guys is a good sign.

Well, of course, that wouldn’t work – nothing in Hollywood ever works
the way it does in life. Wormhole travel is strictly linear – the
thing traveling get smashed to single atoms going through. You could
get around that by doing an MRI scan as you jump, put one wormhole per
atom traveling next to each atom, and wait long enough for it get
through, or maybe pass the wormhole through the traveling atoms
instead.
Here’s an

alternative possibility of how wide wormholes might be
accomplished.

We don’t even begin to know how to make wormhole pairs where one
partner of the pair is usefully faraway or farawhen. You could,
probably, take enough ends to be useful by slow starship to another
star, albeit with difficulty – they’re likely to be heavy and annoying
to deal with.

We might also be able to save energy and trouble using virtual
wormholes, like virtual particles, that’d only exist just long enough
for the trip. They might also solve the problem of making
fara[way|when] ends if we could learn a way of specifying target
locations in their creation.

This’d almost have to take a ton more energy than is available to us
now. Singularities aren’t cheap to make, even virtual ones that don’t
last long. One thing that’ll help the energy math is that the
wormhole is between two eneretically balanced pairs – a black hole and
a white hole. Still, thinking about powering this device reminds of a
a line from a Vinge novel about an insterstellar communication device.
“Oh, and he said it dims your sun by a hundredth of a percent per
second, so we don’t want to spend too much time chatting.

Filed by Jon Kay at 11:58 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General,Technology
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To elect people, you need to be able to get more people to vote for
you than anybody else. The way politicians do that is by deliberately
and carefully building political coalitions. The Bush coalition
included people wanting to be bribed by an unpaid-for tax cut,
national security conservatives, business conservatives wanting to be
unregulated, people tired of Clinton’s corruption (little did they
know how much worse the other guy could be), and juuust enough
socially conservative Latinos to push him over the edge. It broke in
’06. Along with Dean’s bringing of the 50-state coalition, it brought
us Dems to power in Congress.

It’s historically pretty unusual for political coalitions to break
this thoroughly –
it only happened twice in the 20th century – once to each party.
It’s normal for national coalitions and popularities to fray around
the edges by the time Presidents leave office (see Gore’s loss), but
the GOP’s been largely tribalized. It’s been 160 years since
coalitions burst for today’s reason – Presidents being so bad at their
jobs – IMHO, you have to look to Democrats just before the Civil War
to find Presidents so bad, all in ignoring their Constitutions,
such uncaringness about how the world outside DC works, and letting
evil roll in their administrations. Of course, President Buchanan had
more opportunity – be COULD bring a Civil War as a response, and he
did.

The Dem coalition last broke, by contrast, because LBJ was GOOD at his
job, and deliberately made an investment, albeit under pressure. He
exchanged racists for anti-racists and more progressives. Obama’s
election shows us LBJ was right. Thanks, LBJ!

With an occasional exception like Gingrich, that I don’t see available
in today’s Congressional GOP, coalitions are only rebuilt by
presidential candidates, when they’re running. Sometimes they aren’t
up to the job; Kerry and McCain only shrank their coalitions (Kerry by
giving up on red states, and McCain losing moderates via Palin). The
very soonest the GOP can rebuild, then, is 2012; and maybe not even
’til 2016, depending on how good they are. Without a coalition,
they’ll keep losing seats the way they did in ’08 and NY-21 just
recently, though in ’10, we may lose enough seats to counterbalance;
I’m guessing we’ll keep about the same situation of general dominance,
but not enough to easily cloture.

Filed by Jon Kay at 2:01 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General,Republicans
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So, if you’re young, black, poor (as a huge proportion of young are)
and get caught selling drugs, you can count on getting put away half
your lifetime.

But, if you’re a rich, old film maker, who commits an IMHO WORSE
crime, and who’s rich enough to shoot a propaganda flick on your case,
, you can have the President of France come get you out on bail,
despite your infamous past flight history, so you can shelter in your
nice chateau, as you deserve, of course.

There’s a certain pattern here – Bushie boy was similarly energetic
in protecting his buddies who wanted in under the till and whom

wanted to go on crusade in Iraq. But hunting Muslims is minor
stuff if you’re an ol’ buddy, Iguess.

That’s aristocracy, not the egalitarianism we expect in
democratic politicians.

Filed by Jon Kay at 1:35 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General
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Sunday was a big leaf bag production day for the whole ‘hood,
because Monday was a leaf pickup day. And, well, most of the
trees had lost most of their leaves in the last few weeks.

I’m feeling sorry for the garbage guys, because they’ll have 3xish the
normal pickup load….

Filed by Jon Kay at 1:31 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General,Open Thread
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Most of us Dems were unhappy with Clinton’s love life and the Rich
scandal at the end. We even nominated a man whom, ISTR, wanted him
censured as Veep. Most Dems are unhappy with the unusually corrupt
Congress of our day. By contrast, only a pretty small minority of
Republicans care about what Bush and Cheney did wrong, mostly GOP IR
scholars Bush alienated by talking neocon after 9/11. That’s quite a
contrast.

Here’s Instapundit’s

approving link to
How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to
Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History
Hardly critical self-examination, is it, instadude? No, it’s just
propagandistic straw men.

Filed by Jon Kay at 12:32 am under Editorial - Centrist,General
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Three GOP legislators

asked for action against wikileaks. It’s a good thing it’s the
party out of power’s asking for this.

I’d be confident SCOTUS’d laugh it out of court in any case, except
recently much of SCOTUS’ taken a distinctly authoritarian view of the
Constitution.

Filed by Jon Kay at 5:02 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General
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Early AI pioneers expected quick results because they believed those
slow, early computers were probably up to matching human brain speeds
That’s probably in part because specialization gave false confidence;
computers are generally better than we are at calculation, what they
were put to first. But, really, one mainframe might’ve been able to
emulate at the rate of just a few of our 100 trillion neurons.

Here’s an

article about much more promising current and new research.
Now we have a much better idea of the measure of man’s brain, and
are able to simulate a big enough fraction of a brain to make research
sense, though we’re still nowhere close to reaching human-brain-level
computers. And, there’s still a strong speeding/cheapening trend for
parallel computers like our brains.

There was also alot of charming naivete, incidentally, on how much the
ultraslow computers of the day could be used for political, strategic,

and economic planning (real answer: hardly atall). Asimov wrote a
series of short stories in which a centralized computer named Multivac
assumes more and more planning responsibility until it came to have
godlike powers. I think that overoptimism about central planning also
contributed to some added democratic support for Communism and
technocracy that we can now see was misguided.
Now I’d say it’ll be more like a century at least before we see that
kind of computing power; it might easily never happen, as human life
is always growing more complicated and and effective, and so, harder
to model in such a deterministic way. Still, simulations are playing
more and more of a role, albeit to improve what people can do, not so
much for planning.

Filed by Jon Kay at 4:02 am under Editorial - Centrist,General
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I learned from my new FDR book, H.W. Brands’

A Traitor to His Class, that FDR did do something that seems wrong
to me with Japan that had a real bad impact on the start of the war.
Of course, it wasn’t ignoring warnings of Pearl Harbor.

Following rising Japanese aggression in China and Vietnam, FDR
declined a Japanese offer to talk with the democratic Prime Minister
of Japan, just because he had a bad feeling, justifying it by
wondering if he had any power over the army. Imagine if Clinton’d
refused to meet with Pakistani PMs because they were threatened by
military coups. No, FDR’s work there looks like racism to me, just
like his cousin’s work conquering the the new Philippine democracy
because inferior Filipinos must need paternal help with that hard
democracy stuff.

Of course, following FDR’s refusal, the PM had to resign, and a
coup followed in short order, bringing the third of the troika of
Fascist dictators to power, Tojo. There’s a good chance there
would’ve been war anyway, but talking to leaders there’s tension with
was clearly part of his responsidbility as President.

During the political kerfuffle over the Iraq War, I read a new set of
libels against FDR. Bush’ behavior of effective lies on Iraq were
projected backward onto FDR, which’ pretty unfair. FDR certainly lied
on the war, but his lies postdated certain other far more basic lies,
from Franco, Hitler, and Japan. FDR’s lies also postdated certainly
nasty truths about war and conquest in Spain, China, Vietnam, and
Czechoslovakia.

December 7th fell on a Sunday in 1941, which was usually one of FDR’s
lazier days. He passed his brunch still at peace, and then talked at
lunch about massive radar sightings at Pearl. By dinnertime, most of
the big Pacific fleet he’d done alot personally to build was sunk or
otherwise out of commission.

Filed by Jon Kay at 4:04 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General,History
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This was a hard one for us fans to watch, no doubt on both sides. For
the first three quarters, neither team seemed to be there to play.
Both sides’ Ds were ticking over nicely, but it still felt like a
wierd ‘tude going down even on the D-side until the last quarter, when
they had to come out and play. The score was baseball-like the whole
game.

The game ended with the kicker warming up and Nebraska 2 points
ahead. Coach Brown pointed out to a coach that he’d been a second
slow calling the stoppage after McCoy threw out of bounds, and he
gave us the second back. The kicker got the ball in, and we were up a
point with clock expired.

I feel like I’m drunk now, though I didn’t drink during the game.

Filed by Jon Kay at 12:44 am under Editorial - Centrist,General
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This year, though the ‘Horns are a pretty good team, and we’ve gone
undefeated, Texas’ strength of schedule has been about as strong as
milk, because the Big 12′s been more like the Small 12 this year.
OTOH, other conferences have their problems, too – PAC’s very
best team, the OU Ducks, have lost two. But the SEC’s pretty strong -
we’re just lucky one of the two BCS contenders ahead of us will take
itself out by losing tomorrow, since they’re contending for the SEC
championship tomorrow.

Filed by Jon Kay at 5:44 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General
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Two things come to my mind when considering Dubai’s

problems and

bizplans.

The first is that alot of

Dubai’s plans strike my funny bone as aristocratic
more than

capitalistic business planning. Yeah, you do
get a boost from having the newest, coolest, biggest thing, and you will fill some
of those rooms. But will you fill enough, and what sort of ROI will you get
compared to other possibilities?

The second thing comes from a book of advice for entrepreneurs I once read.
It said to never build big, or you’d see a huge drag on the bottom line.
Really big buildings, it said, tend to finally make a
profit around the THIRD owner.

Oh, and I lied – I just thought of a third thing, which is that Microsoft
and Dell don’t have big buildings. They have campi full of sprawling,
medium-size buildings, mostly the most efficient size to build.

Filed by Jon Kay at 7:06 pm under Editorial - Centrist,General
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