Original Cin

I originally wanted to post this as a comment to this post at Marginal Revolution, but for some reason TypePad’s not letting me:

The chart is terrible mostly because (I suspect) the “X-axis” is mislabeled — it should say “economic issues” rather than “liberal-conservative,” which is also loaded with social policy meaning. It doesn’t help that it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes because of the colors used (would it really be that much more difficult to use dark cyan and pink?). The chart would then be a round version of the political diamond/Nolan Chart. Why you would ever draw one of these things as a circle, when just doing a plain old scatter plot and then turning it 45 degrees would be both easier and more readable, is beyond me. It’s more readable, although still not great, as a giant flash applet that takes up the entire screen instead of a tiny image.

Anyway, with this in mind, the chart actually does say a few interesting this. A vertical line roughly halfway through the chart would indicated that only a Senator’s view of economic issues affected their vote. The line is pretty close to vertical, so apparently this wasn’t a very ’social’ vote. Oddly, the mislabeled axis seems to have led some of the comments at Mother Jones astray — if the line were tilted clockwise, being more socially liberal would make a senator more likely to vote against defunding (holding their view on government economic policy constant). But the line tilts counterclockwise, and the far right and libertarians — small l, what few there are in the senate — voted to defund together.

If you want to see something really weird, go to http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rcarroll/currentsenatevotesb.html and have a look at chart 24 — labeled as McCain Amendment 2580 “To strike amounts available for procurement of C-17 aircraft in excess of the amount requested by the President in the budget for fiscal year 2010.” — sounds like an entirely ‘economic’ issue, but a Senator’s votes on the matter created a horizontal line, which was almost a perfect match for the Democrat’s votes!

I wish I could receive an award based on what was expected of me. With incentives like that, I suppose I’d promise the moon.

Something’s rotten in Oklahoma City:

Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.

…

“Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain’t no such thing as a coincidence,” Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because “they had run out of tape” or “the tape was being replaced.”

-Tim Talley, “Attorney: OKC bombing tapes appear edited“

Of course, schools are no political prize at all whatsoever:

The notion that schoolchildren are being subjected to partisan politics rather than taught civics emerged earlier this month before an Obama speech to students was played in thousands of schools.

By then, unlike February, there was broader mistrust of Obama, particularly over his health insurance overhaul plans. Concerns that he would use his speech to students as a political tool grew partly because the White House initially released a lesson plan encouraging students to “help the president.”

….

“There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” he said. “The teacher’s intention was to engage the children in an activity to recognize famous and accomplished African Americans.”

He said he would not identify the teacher who led the song. State education officials said she retired at the end of the last school year.

[Probably true, but I'd still like to see that retirement verified by a third party... trust but verify... - Nic]
- Geoff Mulvihill, “Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song“

On a completely unrelated note, I’m sure, Barrack Hussein Obama wants the school year extended:

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).
- Libby Quaid, “More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation“

.

My idea: Fix the schools, by actually getting lots of teachers and administrators that aren’t, on the whole, transparent sycophants. Does Obama have any ideas in his head other than “More Cowbell Government?”

Social Security is in trouble (on NPR).

What the government does not like to admit is that another 20% of Medicare dollars are paid out in the form of overpayments to those with political connections. What companies do is lobby Congress to enact legislation mandating that Medicare pay inflated prices for certain products and services that can be obtained for a fraction of the price on the free market. This enables those who are politically connected to grossly overcharge Medicare because Congress mandates the inflated expenditures.

….

All it takes to make this drug is to put 5 mg of finasteride into a tablet that dissolves in the stomach. Vitamin companies do this every day with nutrients, but the FDA does not allow them to freely do the same thing with drugs.

- William Faloon, Why American Healthcare is Headed for Collapse – Life Extension.

So, to review: government dietary guidelines have been ass-backwards for at least a good portion of the population (not in this article, see Calories and my previous posts).  Medicare pays several times what it should for almost everything and anything. The FDA kills – yes, kills — by driving up the cost of the producing drugs and making new treatments unavailable; but everyone already knows that, and no one seems to really care. But the people want more government involvement in healthcare, and by golly, that’s what they’re going to get, sooner or later, one way or another.

Last time, I talked about the idea that increasing carbohydrate consumption is a huge force behind increasing obesity. The jury, in all honesty, is still out, and Taubes says as much.  General philosophies that you can’t prove a negative be damned, I think we can be pretty sure at this point that low-fat diets don’t work for a lot of people.

So, let’s suppose it’s true that high carbohydrate diets cause obesity and diabetes, which cause heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s and other serious health problems. What are we to make of the role of the U.S. government in all this? And of other national governments around the world? Farm subsidies no longer appear as mere foolish economic protectionism, but as a policy that, quite frankly, kills people. Add to this the fact that nutritional labels are organized around the low-fat viewpoint: fats are listed first, saturated fat at the top, right after calories, and grouped with other things to supposedly minimize, such as cholesterol and sodium; carbs and protein are relegated to the bottom — thank goodness they’re listed at all! Also, government funding paid to disseminate the low-fat message, and for the questionable research behind it. Food pyramid, anyone? The fact that the message may have been right for some doesn’t excuse that it seems to have been deadly for others.

Now, it’s important to note — I’m not saying any of this was intentional. Rather, people with good intentions and a lot of power bent a few rules of good conduct. That is what makes Good Calories, Bad Calories especially frightening. It seems to be a made-for-a-textbook example of how concentrated power can go awry.

WASHINGTON – Hospitals and drug makers like what they see in the early version of a health care plan that may evolve into the one that ends up on President Barack Obama’s desk.

- Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar And Alan Fram, Senate plan to create winners and losers – Yahoo! News.

Wow, first of all, what a headline — perfect for this story, I hope they don’t change it. So, let me get this straight: In order to control increasing medical costs, we’re going subsidize medical costs. We’re upset that insurance costs so much, but we’re going to force everyone to buy it. And if the insurance is too good (expensive? annual coverage? They’re at least loosely linked), it’ll be taxed at a 35% rate.

This craziness has to have been put forth specifically to make everything else look good.

Meanwhile, the federal government made it cheaper for us to eat sugar and starch through massive grain subsidies. As the old farmer told the stars of King Corn, “You couldn’t make any money growing corn if not for the government payments.” Those government payments are the reason we feed cattle corn instead of letting them eat grass as nature intended. Subsidies are the reason high-fructose corn syrup is in half the products you’ll find in the grocery store, including bread. Dirt-cheap subsidized corn is the reason for Big Gulps and endless refills at the soda dispenser.

via Tom Naughton, Fat Head » Cheaper Health Care.

I’m struggling to understand the ramifications of this; except that it seems that the Obama administration may be trying for a weird, roundabout tax increase, and through sheer incompetence didn’t hide it very well:

The new federal steps, which do not require congressional action, include:

….

Allowing people to check a box on their federal tax returns asking that any refund be sent as a savings bond. More than 100 million U.S. households receive refund checks each year, and many are promptly cashed and spent.

-”Obama expands workers’ retirement savings options” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090905/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_retirement_savings

The incompetence comes in the fact that someone clearly had Nudge (which is in my queue of things to read) in mind when they came up with this, to the extent that the changes also include “allowing” (nudging?) smaller companies to set up opt-out retirement plans. I managed to confirm on Google books that this is an idea directly from Nudge.

The evil, or at least highly questionable part of this comes from the fact that savings bonds are government debt, and there’s been a lot of talk lately about what the federal government is going to do to pay for all of the crazy spending that’s been going on lately. Will the Fed be forced by politics to fire up the printing press, causing the U.S. to inflate away its debt? Will the government simply refuse to pay? Will we see explicit higher taxes? It’s clear this is an attempt to nudge lenders toward lending to the government, and I’m surprised it’s not actually the default.

To review — the government takes some of your money. If it takes more than it’s “supposed to” it keeps the money interest-free until roundabout April or May. If you’re not paying attention to the fact that Uncle Sam is not as trustworthy a borrower as he was in the past, you can allow the government to keep the money, albeit with interest. It’s entirely possible you won’t get it back, or won’t get back the amount you’re expecting, or that the government will tax it again at a new, higher rate.

Admittedly half-baked political reform idea that could still be useful with a bit of work: Anonymous Representatives.

This one is even stranger than the last:

I understand why this picture was taken this way, but not why it published instead of being thrown out. Ok, so the emphasis is on the Marines and not on Obama, and that’s why they’re in focus and he’s all blurry. That makes sense as far as it goes, but then, why is he in the center of the picture? Even if the original photo turned out that way, why not crop it, at least to make it look good and match the caption? Weird.

I assume this picture of Obama that I saw on Yahoo mail, from the AP, is also someone’s idea of a joke. Pictures of Presidents in front of the Presidential Seal are nothing new, but this one was lined up, well, “perfectly.”

The original AP story can be seen with a larger version of the picture.

Edit: Of course, when this happened to Bush, it was clearly a sign of evil conservatives run amok.</sarcasm>

Update: They updated the article with a picture from a different angle.

“It’d be nice if Republicans would act like they do in their campaign promises. They did that for a couple of years, then got stuck on this Captain Ahab-esque quest to sink the Clintanic.” – Silence

Found this on Rotten Tomatos. It almost seems like it was custom-made for SpaceBattles:

Seen on Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State:

Blagojevich was [....] a governor crazy enough to believe he could make a run for President in 2016.

I saw this AP story on Yahoo while I was checking my email. Usually, Illinois governors leave office first, then they’re arrested:

CHICAGO – Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested today on charges that accuse him of trying to benefit from his ability to appoint President-elect Barack Obama’s replacement in the U.S. Senate.

A new blog by Casey Mulligan has a good explanation of the current noncrisis:

There was a time when people believed that the Sun and stars revolved around the Earth. Of course, now we know that the Earth is not the center of the universe, or even the center of our little solar system. In the somewhat more recent past, economists thought that the non-financial sector in a modern economy revolved around financial markets, despite the facts that only 4 percent of the workforce was employed in the financial sector (including insurance and real estate), and even today that sector employs only 6 percent of the total. President Bush and supporters of the recent massive Wall Street bailout plan still believe Wall Street to be the center of the entire economy.

As seen on Marginal Revolution

The famous David D. Friedman writes on his blog about the decision against homeschooling in California:

The term “fascist” has been overused, and in any case I know nothing about Croskey’s views on economics. But I find it extraordinary that he would be willing to explicitly argue that public schools exist largely to indoctrinate children in views the government approves of, with or without the consent of their parents.

Indeed…

A fascinating post just appeared on the Adam Smith Institute blog. It caught my eye due to the title, of course:

These traits [of humans to change their environment] have served them well, but the environment they desire to control includes other people. There is an inbuilt drive to control other people, as there is to tame the natural environment. This is, if you like, original sin, the desire to control others so they will meet our needs. It can be controlled by a moral act, one which recognizes that others are morally equivalent to yourself, and as entitled as you are to shape their own circumstances. A balance is reached in which each of us tries to improve our own circumstance, but trying not to impinge on the right of others to do the same. We restrain our inbuilt drive to control them, and they do the same in return.

- Dr Madsen Pirie, Original Sin

The full post is interesting and not too long at all. Definitely one of those things to think about.

I was just thinking about electronic voting this morning, and I’m curious to know why a particular verification method isn’t used, or even talked about – displaying the total votes for the machine.

Here’s how it would work: At the beginning of election day, for every issue that’s being voted on, the machine assigns and prints a random, fake total number of votes so far to protect the anonymity of the first voter. This total is displayed on screen with that issue for the duration of the election. The number assigned is recorded by an election official, perhaps by securing a printout from the machine itself, and voting begins. When the first person votes, they can see the previous fake vote total, and that their votes incremented their respective totals by one. The voter receives a token indicating that they did, in fact, cast a vote, and the vote itself is stored electronic on multiple commodity storage devices. The voter token is taken to an election official and collected. Votes are tabulated in some sort of WORM system, so that it is possible to add committed votes, but not reduce them (this stops a malicious programmer from altering totals when someone is not looking at the device; the total number of votes must equal the total number of tokens collected). In order to prevent two people from working together to infer someone else’s vote, incoming voters should be randomly assigned to a voting machine. At the end of the day, the election officials subtract the initial random totals from the totals that machines are reporting, verify that the total number of votes equals the total number of tokens collected for each machine,

By no means easy or a complete plan, but it’s not rocket science either. It might be argued that displaying the total like this could cause a information cascade – this can be mitigated by making the initial random value very large within a narrow range, so that the percent of votes that appears to go to any option seems to be close to 1/n, where n is the number of options available to an issue — with an initial value of twice the number of eligible voters +-1% and only one voting machines, the final displayed value for an option would not exceed 68% for a two-option issue (1 part assigned for, 1 part assigned against, 1 real part for, and as much as 2% moved from the assigned against to the assigned for by chance).

As time goes by, I suspect more and more that the Republicans may be in serious trouble for the next Presidential election (in 2008). The Democrats have lined up several interesting personalities, all of whom are more politically savvy and marketable than anyone we’ve seen before in my lifetime. I also suspect that the George Bush Presidency has been an exercise in misapplied logic – it would have been the best damn Presidency ever in a world of Vulcans, and here on earth, it sucked, because it assumed short-term rationality on the part of people who were either completely irrational or willing to forego short-term rationality for some long-term goal.

Just to be clear on my own politics, I generally prefer Republicans to Democrats for office, but have always either considered myself a Libertarian or independent. I’ve found my enthusiasm for the Republican Party to be waning in direct proportion to their increasing abandonment of fiscal issues. I sense that the Republicans are too greatly abusing security theater to the detriment of taxpayers and citizens. True, the Democrats aren’t any better in these respects, but the Republican party has no advantages for me in other respects. It’s become of the party of the bland. All of this has shown up in the party’s real ability to get elected; right now, Hilliary Clinton alone has a 30% chance of being the next President based on the Foresight Exchange claim HRC08. I haven’t looked at claims for the other candidates, but, naively, this seem to indicate to me that the Republicans have only 35% chance of winning the election. With a few percentage points moved around, Clinton could mop the floor with all Republican challengers combined. (Why a prediction market instead of a poll? In short, you get slightly better results asking people what they think will happen rather than what they want to happen; see The Wisdom of Crowds for a good explanation, although I was into prediction markets before prediction markets were [sort-of] cool).