Later On

The Younger Daughter sent me this video of a brave animal standing up to terrifying creatures beyond its ken. The music underscores the drama of the confrontation. One has to admire the courage demonstrated. Watch it. (The video title says it all: “Scary things.”)

You may not want your children to view this video, particularly if they’ve been pestering you for a kitten.

Paul Krugman has a good column today in the NY Times, from which I excerpt this:

Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor. . .

Continue reading.

Exceptionally pleasant shave today. The Vie-Long brush is a badger + horsehair chimera, and it does a terrific job of lather generation. Maybe this is even better than horsehair alone—I’ll have to start comparing.

With the brush I got a wonderful thick lather from Mama Bear’s Sandalwood Vanilla, wonderful for fragrance and for thickness.

Three smooth passes with the Gillette Fat Boy holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and then a good splash of Captain’s Choice Bay Rum, which I discovered thanks to an email from Phil of BullgooseShaving.net—he also mentions it in this post at SimplyShaving.net. This bay rum is impressive: bold and solid and (as Phil comments) not too clove-ish, with plenty of solid bay fragrance and the rum coming forward a bit. I compared it to Flying Bird Bay Rum (sold on Etsy.com) and the better known Ogallala Bay Rum, and it was really no contest: Captain’s Choice is (for me) a much better bay rum. If you like bay rum, this is definitely one you should try. (And if you know someone who likes Bay Rum, we’re approaching the Season of Gifts.)

Terrific shave.

I’m watching Due Date, with a stellar cast: Robert Downey Jr., Zach Galifianakis, Michelle Monaghan, Jamie Foxx, Juliette Lewis, Danny McBride, RZA, Matt Walsh, and Brody Stevens.

Add to that a terrific script—picaresque misadventure odd-couple buddy comedy, I guess you would call it.

And, in addition to that solid foundation, I believe the laughs have extra energy because the premise of the movie—that on a perfectly normal day everything not only can go wrong, it can get worse—is exactly the background common worry. Why there is this on-going subliminal (as it were) sense of dread? Well, take a look: job losses, bad economy, Congress unable to function, a constant drumbeat of alarm over terrorism, violence drawing ever closer to our borders. It’s no wonder that there is a high level of background anxiety—and that energy is what makes this comedy so funny. It’s cathartic laughter, and it’s releasing a lot of energy.

Watch the movie and see if you don’t agree.

One can see where Vernor Vinge got the idea of the Singularity. Take a look at this article by John Wilford in the NY Times:

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

These cave artisans had stones for pounding and grinding colorful dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ocher. This was blended with the binding fat of mammal-bone marrow and a dash of charcoal. Traces of ocher were left on the tools, and samples of the reddish compound were collected in large abalone shells, where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.

In the workshop remains, archaeologists said they were seeing the earliest example yet of how emergent Homo sapiens processed ocher, one of the species’ first pigments in wide use, its red color apparently rich in symbolic significance. The early humans may have applied the concoction to their skin for protection or simply decoration, experts suggested. Perhaps it was their way of making social and artistic statements on their bodies or their artifacts.

Of special importance to the scientists who made the discovery, the ocher workshop showed that early humans, whose anatomy was modern, had also begun thinking like us. In a report published online on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers called this evidence of early conceptual abilities “a benchmark in the evolution of complex human cognition.”

The discovery dials back the date when modern Homo sapiens was known to have started using paint. Previously, no workshop older than 60,000 years had come to light, and the earliest cave and rock art began appearing about 40,000 years ago. The exuberant flowering among the Cro-Magnon artists in the caves of Europe would come even later; the parade of animals on the walls of Lascaux in France, for example, was executed 17,000 years ago.

The cave people in South Africa were already learning to find, combine and store substances, skills that reflected advanced technology and social practices as well as the creativity of the self-aware. The paint-makers also appeared to have developed an elementary knowledge of chemistry and some understanding of long-term planning earlier than previously thought.

The discovery was made at . . .

Continue reading.

So 100,000 years ago humans already had started technology and even, on some level, manufacturing. They clearly must have had language by then. So why did it take so many thousands of years to advance, looking at (say) how far we have come in the past 10,000 years? It’s like the pace picked up tremendously. And if you compare the last 5,000 years to the previous 5,000, or the last 2000 years to the 2000 before that, or just the progress since 1000 AD until today—a mere 1,011 years—it seems quite clear that the pace of change and technological development is exponentially increasing. To maintain the pace, one pretty much has to hypothesize superintelligence. Thus we get the Singularity.

But why did the pace pick up so quickly? Why so slow at the start and so rapid now? I’ve been reading William H. McNeill’s A World History (3rd edition) plus the book The Human Web that he wrote with his son, and fairly recently read his book The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since 1000 AD. So far as I can tell from that reading, the key change is the bandwidth of our communication channels.

Those early humans mixing paint had a great idea, but how to get it out? How can they let more people know, so more people are working on it, making discoveries, improving techniques, pooling experience, and in general getting a move on?

They can’t: no written language, no way to travel as “travel.” Their discovery lived within the tribe, and perhaps when the tribe split, two tribes knew it. But so far as spreading the knowledge? Slow going.

Once agriculture began with food surpluses that allowed many to turn their attention to things other than food, the pace picked up a lot: now people were free to get together and work on things. One of the things they developed was writing.

With the invention of writing, the communications channel widened considerably. It becomes easier to store and access knowledge, and to transfer it from place to place because the transporter no longer had to learn what was to be communicated: they can simply carry information in written form.

Having both writing and spare time, people did indeed start to communicate their ideas effectively and efficiently, pooling their efforts and continually building upon what had been previously accomplished (thus the exponentiality—and it utilizes recursion, in a way:  it’s through the exponential growth of technical knowledge that we achieve exponential growth of the communications channels that allow for the…  you see where that goes: very steep curve).

I think the growth of the capacity of the total human communications channel is the vehicle of change. And clearly today the total human communications channel is ENORMOUS, with information flooding the globe all hours of the day or night, both direct personal communications between individuals and work groups and also broadcast communications that go to many simultaneously. At the same time we have enormous capacity to store information and (equally important) can readily retrieve it.

So things move ever faster. It does not strike me as a stable situation. I am skeptical that superintelligences will come to pass, but if they should, we must wonder whether our superintelligent creations will care for us. Perhaps they will detest us and our weaknesses (take a look at Congress today: how would Superintelligence (the networked totality of the superintelligences—for surely they will quickly—at their speeds—decide to communicate: as I’ve outlined above, the benefits are obvious) view that?). And in any event Superintelligence—and it will surely exist, for it’s obvious that superintelligences, having decided to communicate, would be able to figure out how—is likely to develop its own goals and pursue those.  (I think the hope is that we will be able to outwit it if it comes to that…)

I’m sure attempts will be made to incorporate some sort of Asimov’s Laws, but things are not always so easily controlled, and once the first artificial intelligences that exceed our abilities are building the next generation—and then, even more quickly, those build the next, and so on… Well, it seems to me that we won’t really know (or be able to understand) what they’re up to. We already have trouble figuring out programs now that involve neural nets and evolutionary algorithms. Take a look at “Creatures from Primordial Silicon” (PDF).

UPDATE: I am just at the part (page 231) where Charlemagne has nominally recreated the Roman Empire and is crowned as Emperor of the Romans by the Pope. “Co-operation between Byzantines and Franks was never close. Political distrust was exacerbated by persistent religious friction, centering on the proper role of images in Christian worship.”

I thought it odd that such a trivial issue—undetectable on the scale of natural events and thus totally a cultural construct—can have such an impact on us. Culture is our own creation (as humans) and we’re having such a conflict over something we ourselves made? And cultural definitions are low-energy events—as I say, undetectable on the scale of natural events—but they seem to totally control our exertions and energies.

But of course exactly that difference—among many others—continue to be burning issues and have whole peoples at daggers drawn to this day. We are unable to think like a species.

Do you think Superintelligence will be so caught up as we in issues purely of human creation? Or will Superintelligence perceive, plan, and operate at the scale of natural events: physical reality rather than cultural constructs? We don’t give much thought to, say, ant culture, though we do study and understand it. But on the whole we prefer our own culture. Will Superintelligence prefer its own culture to ours? Or that of ants, for that matter?

And will Superintelligence fail to think like a species? Not likely.

From The Sister in an email:

I was thinking wryly if the GOP were able to mandate a firearm in every household, maybe they’d allow the mandate to buy health insurance.  A trade-off.

One problem that results when the government steadily and routinely lies to its citizens (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; Jessica Lynch; Pat Tilman; “no prosecution of medical marijuana patients acting in accordance with state laws”; “I only learned of Fast and Furious very recently”; and so on—it’s a long list) is that citizens stop trusting in or believing the government. The FBI/Holder accusations of the Iranian fiendish plot is hitting this kind of resistance (though not, I’m sure, on TV or cable). Sebastian Rotella writes in ProPrublica:

The alleged Iranian plot to use Mexican cartel gunmen to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington is one of the strangest, most serious terrorism cases to surface in years, a mix of seemingly credible evidence and unlikely scenarios that departs dramatically from Iran’s past record of global terrorist activity.

On Tuesday, a grim-faced U.S. attorney general and the FBI director accused Iranian intelligence officials in an alleged $1.5 million scheme to kill Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir of Saudi Arabia in a bombing at a restaurant in the capital.

The federal indictment has escalated an already fierce conflict between the United States and Iran, alleging a brazen decision by Iranian officials to shed blood on U.S. soil and an ominous convergence of threats from separate worlds: Iran’s far-flung terror apparatus and the Zetas, a drug cartel founded by former Mexican commandos.

The evidence seems strong in some ways. Investigators tracked wire payments amounting to nearly $100,000 allegedly from the Quds Force, the foreign operations unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They caught a suspected Iranian officer on tape giving orders to a Texas operative working with a supposed representative of the Zetas who, in reality, was a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant.

The alarming charges reinforce concerns among Western government officials and experts about signs of growing activity by Iran and its proxy, the militant group Hezbollah, in Latin America.

“Hezbollah and Iran have been masters at identifying existing organized crime groups in front line areas and exploiting them,” Michael Braun, a DEA former operations chief who led investigations of the nexus between drugs and terror, said in an interview. “Hopefully, this is going to be a turning point for many in government regarding what the DEA has been saying about Iran and Hezbollah for the past five years.”

But the account in the indictment clashes with the past behavior of the Zetas and the Quds Force. Both the cartel and the espionage unit have calibrated their murderous operations to avoid direct confrontation with the United States. Although the masterminds of the five-month-long plot seem powerful and dangerous, the plot as described by prosecutors unfolded atypically.

“If it weren’t for things like large amounts of money being deposited, and a guy floating around whom I assume they know to be a member of the Quds Force, I would say it just doesn’t feel right,” said Charles Faddis, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, “beginning with the selection of a target in downtown D.C. It’s so clearly an act of war that it’s hard to imagine why the Iranians would sign on to that. And the tradecraft seems amateurish and sloppy. It’s crazy.”

The chief suspect is Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, an Iranian-American used-car salesman. He has been in the United States since the late 1970s and has been married to two U.S. citizens, both of them Latinas, according to documents and officials. He became a U.S. citizen last year, according to officials.

Some years ago, Arbabsiar befriended a Corpus Christi, Texas, woman whose nephew he believed to be a member of the Zetas cartel, according to officials. The nephew was actually a confidential DEA informant “with direct access to key leadership elements” of the Zetas and the rival Gulf cartel, according to a U.S. law-enforcement official.

Arbabsiar told investigators that he recruited the informant in May at the direction of Arbabsiar’s cousin in Iran, a general in the Quds Force, according to the indictment. The informant advised his DEA handlers, who launched an undercover operation with the FBI. The informant met with the suspect in Mexico to develop the plot, officials say.

Arbabsiar’s record includes only minor traffic violations, and he apparently was not a veteran of the drug underworld. Some U.S. officials are puzzled that Iran would deploy an apparently inexperienced operative for a sensitive, potentially disastrous mission. . .

Continue reading.

Take a look at this contest. Right now there are few entrants, so if you get busy you have a good chance of picking up some loot.

My weight gain/loss is much less interesting to me now that I’ve figured it out. It’s now simply a matter of building appropriate meals and eating a fruit snack twice a day (apple this morning, persimmon this afternoon). I do occasionally make discoveries. Once I reached 175 lbs, I figured it would be okay to add a glass of wine for dinner… and why not lunch? At 180 lbs I figured that this was not such a good idea, so cut out the wine save for one glass at dinner every few days. This morning I’m at 173.5 lbs, heading for 170, where I plan to remain. I figure at 170, I can bounce back and forth between 170 and 173 (3 lbs of play seems to be what I need—the 5-lb gain showed that something was wrong in the intake, and the wine was the obvious culprit).

When I began college, I was at 165 lbs, and I’ve thought about that, but I think I’ll stick at 170 for a while. The 170-173 range keeps me below a BMI of 24, so I’m well within normal/healthy range.

Although I now see weight control as practical knowledge, in the sense that it requires practice to learn how to do it, it’s not quite the same as the practical knowledge involved in, for example, playing billiards, dribbling, shooting free throws, and the like. Those all have a theoretical component, but they are primarily skills acquired through practice and in that sense they represent practical knowledge.

Maintaining weight as a matter of practical knowledge seems more like skill in playing Go: you need a fair amount of theoretical/abstract knowledge (nutritional values of foods, types of foods, correct diet balance, and so on), but to get good at it you also need to get involved with trying to do it: read Go and weight-loss books a lot, and you pick up much useful information. But when you go to apply that information, you’re back in an arena in which practice is required for success.

In the case of Go and weight loss, though, the practice is clearly not to gain physical skills. (Exception: I am now a dab hand at cooking an egg over-easy: I can flip like pro.) Instead, the practice is necessary to engage and involve the little pattern-recognition engine in your mind.

In Go you learn lots of stuff, but the key thing you learn is to look at a position and see patterns and possibilities. That skill—a mental rather than physical skill, though I’m sure it has a physical component in terms of brain structures that develop and pathways that are created and reinforced—does require practice. Indeed, after my first game of Go (with Ray Haas at St. John’s, for those interested), I swore I’d never play another game because I had no idea in hell what was happening.

But then I went to grad school, and (as, alas, is typical of me) I then cast about for things to get involved in other than study. The first trimester it was Go. (The second trimester was contract bridge.) After 10 or so games, I gradually started to get it and could “see” things that I simply could not see before: that is, recognize the possibilities in patterns, see that a group was dead, and the like.

This sort of ability to recognize things, but in the arena of food, weight, and exercise, was what I finally acquired after almost 7 months of daily weighing, recording intake, and talking (3 visits/week) with weight-loss counselor.

Little by little, I panned for the tiny flecks of gold dust in my daily experience. For example, in an effort to speed things along, I started skipping the mid-morning and mid-afternoon fruit snack. As soon as I did, I stopped losing weight.

I don’t pretend to understand the actual dynamics at work in my body, but I resumed the snacks, and my weight immediately started falling again. Okay, lesson learned.

There were a lot of lessons along those lines, enough to fill a book (I hope). But the take-home is that, with sufficient practice and data, your pattern-recognition engine can in time deliver the goods. My weight drifted up to 180, I thought about what I was eating and doing, identified the culprit (the addition of daily wine), and got back on track with no trouble.

The interesting thing was that I was never worried, desperate, sweaty, etc., that I would lose my way and soon be back at 250 lbs. No, now I know what is going on.

I recall an incident in John McPhee’s wonderful The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed about a test flight they were making to test a new propeller. It was a chilly morning, and McPhee was standing around as one of the men worked to start the engine. The guy heaved down on the prop, it turned some, and the engine coughed and stopped. Again. Again. The guy adjusted something on the engine, and McPhee asked, “Will it start?” The guy looked at McPhee as if he were nuts and said, “Sure, it’ll start. It’s an internal-combustion engine, isn’t it?”

I realized that the writer McPhee, like the reader Ham, had little real understanding of the intricacies and actual operation of an internal combustion engine—”suck, squeeze, pop, phooey”: yeah, we know that. And pistons and carburetors. But mostly what we know is that it’s oily, big, heavy, and sits out of sight and starts (generally) when we turn a key. But the details—things like firing sequence, spark advance—even how the heck the crankshaft works in a radial-piston engine—neither McPhee nor I really understand, but the guy starting the engine had deep knowledge: the internal-combustion engine was completely familiar to him in all its details: an open book printed in large type.

When I first started my weight-loss effort at 250 lbs, my relationship to my food resembled in some ways McPhee and that engine. But by almost seven months into the effort, I was (suddenly, it seemed) more like the mechanic starting the engine: it became obvious what to look for and what to do.

So as soon as my weight went up, I took a look, adjusted some things, and continue comfortably on my way.

I’ll let you know when I hit 170.

The US is horrified when other nations follow our example. An LA Times editorial today:

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Tuesday that federal authorities had foiled a plot backed by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil. Two men, one of whom is apparently a member of a special operations unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, were charged in federal court in New York on Tuesday. Holder called the bomb plot a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law. And Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, “We will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground.”

But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a “war on terror” that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don’t have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they’re found?

It’s true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.

It’s also true that there’s a big difference between an Al Qaeda operative who, according to U.S. officials, had been deeply involved in planning terrorist activities, and a duly credited ambassador of a sovereign country. Still, the fact remains that all nations ought to think long and hard before gunning down their enemies in other countries.

As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

The FBI seems to have instigated quite a few terrorist plots, that it then disrupts to great fanfare and self-accolades. The pattern is to find a few hopeless losers, send in an agent provocateur, and get the ball rolling. Usually the “plotters” require lots of help, because they are generally utterly incompetent. The FBI helps them find terrorist supplies, sometimes lends them money to buy the supplies, and ultimately nabs them and starts the press conferences.

This latest plot looked quite different at the outset, but the outlines are starting to fall into the old familiar pattern. Ryan Reilly at TPM Muckraker:

Friends Say Used Car Dealer Was Too Much Of A Mess To Pull Off Iranian Plot

Friends of Manssor Arbabsiar, the man accusedof trying to get a man he thought was affiliated with a Mexican drug cartel to arrange for the killing of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., aren’t exactly painting a picture of a criminal mastermind. In fact, they’re saying he’s not straight out.

“He’s no mastermind,” David Tomscha, who once owned a used car lot with Arbabsiar, told the Associated Press. “I can’t imagine him thinking up a plan like that. I mean, he didn’t seem all that political. He was more of a businessman.”

“His socks would not match,” Tom Hosseini, his former college roommate, told the New York Times. “He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan. . .

Continue reading. And here’s a story by Tim Johnson of McClatchy wondering about the Mexico connection:

The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States has cast Mexico into the news as a potential staging area for a terrorist operation.

But experts say the likelihood of such a plot going undetected in Mexico by U.S. authorities is low and that Mexico’s drug cartels would be unlikely to become involved.

U.S. officials alleged Tuesday that an Iranian-American and a member of Iran’s al Quds Force sought to enlist a Mexican drug cartel in a plot to kill Saudi Ambassador Adel al Jubeir in Washington, perhaps by bombing a restaurant he was known to frequent.

One of the men, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalized U.S. citizen holding Iranian and U.S. passports, was said to have met in the Mexican border city of Reynosa with a Drug Enforcement Administration informant who he thought was a member of a violent drug cartel.

The barrage of 251,287 unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks released more than a month ago suggest that American diplomats maintain a steady focus on Iran’s activities in Latin America. In Mexico, that meant keeping an eye on a mosque in Torreon, watching the impact of Iran’s “dynamic” new ambassador, gauging public attitudes toward Iran and coaching agents at Mexico’s National Security and Investigation Center — CISEN in its Spanish initials — the domestic intelligence agency.

Strategic Forecasting Inc., an Austin, Texas, global intelligence firm commonly called Stratfor, on Wednesday described as unlikely any use of Mexico as a staging ground for a terrorist attack emanating from the Middle East.

It noted that . . .

Continue reading.

A commenter who noted my difficulty with Czech & Speake’s shaving soap—mediocre performance, little lather—said that the soap was made by the same maker as for Art of Shaving shaving soap. I have the AOS Lemon shown—very light fragrance, at least at this point (I’ve had it several years)—so I brought it out and used the same horsehair Vie-Long brush that was unable to pull enough lather from the C&S.

No problem at all. C&S should switch to AOS’s formulation (or at least something better than they have now). I got loads o’ lather, and enjoyed a very pleasant shave.

The Gillette President shown is one that I had replated in rhodium, and I think it looks splendid. It’s very like the 1940′s (gold-plated) Aristocrat, though originally plated in nickel. It held an Iridium Super blade, which did a fine job for three passes, then rinse, dry, and slap on some Alpa 378, a pleasant fragrance with an old-timey slant.

C&S remains a mystery that I shall explore further in the future.

Via Facebook post:

Update: Even the specific marriage between one man and one woman has changed quite a bit over the past 300 years. Which of these “traditional marriages” represents the true tradition:

Source.

I made a batch of cayenne pepper sauce recently. (Link is to my post with photo and recipe.) When I tasted it, I realized why cayenne sauce is so popular: cayenne peppers are delicious. They’re also not especially hot—certainly don’t seem so hot as habaneros. Today Whole Foods had another bin of cayenne peppers, and I got another bunch (about 1.5 qt) to make more pepper sauce—I’ve already used up a bottle of that first batch.

As you probably know, we’ve just experienced yet another public shooting with multiple fatalities. They seem to be coming along at a rate of one every couple of weeks, but of course the country is comfortable with this. Unlike our reaction to death by airplane, in which we search, X-ray, grope, and otherwise inspect passengers and subject them to partial disrobing in the airline terminal, we seem happy to allow on-going mass killings due to firearms. Why? Because we like firearms.

So what don’t we lighten up a bit with air travel? Dying in a plane crash or from being shot to death in a public place, you just as dead either way. And we have shootings much more often than we have plane crashes.

It just seems weird to me that the US is blase about shootings but terrified with respect to air travel. Does that make sense to you?

On a brighter note, the procedures and routines for dealing with these mass shootings are now highly developed and efficient: practice makes perfect.

James Fallows points out this column and the report it mentions. The column is by Joe Nocera in the NY Times:

The title of the white paper is, admittedly, a mouthful: “The Way Forward: Moving From the Post-Bubble, Post-Bust Economy to Renewed Growth and Competitiveness.” It was commissioned by the New America Foundation, which hoped that it might “re-center the political debate to better reflect the country’s deep economic problems,” according to Sherle Schwenninger, the director of the foundation’s Economic Growth Program. Its authors are Daniel Alpert, a managing partner of Westwood Capital; Robert Hockett, a professor of financial law at Cornell and a consultant to the New York Federal Reserve; and Nouriel Roubini, who is, well, Nouriel Roubini, whose consistently bearish views have been consistently right. It is scheduled to be released on Wednesday.

I don’t know that anything at this point could re-center the political debate, so unyielding are the two parties. But as Congress prepares to take steps, through the deliberations of the already deadlocked supercommittee, that will likely further wound our ailing economy, “The Way Forward” ought to at least give our politicians pause.

Its analysis of our problems is sobering. Its proposed solutions are far more ambitious than anything being talked about in Washington. And its prognosis, if we continue on the current path, is grim. “Unless we take dramatic steps, it will be Japan all over again,” says Alpert. “Continuous deflation, no economic growth, in and out of recessions. And high unemployment.” Adds Hockett: “It will be like the economic version of chronic fatigue syndrome. A low-grade fever all the time.”

The paper’s central premise is something I’ve been hearing from Alpert for more than a year now: this time, it really is different. What he and his co-authors mean by that is that the bursting of the debt bubble three years ago was not just a severe example of the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of American capitalism. Rather, it was the ultimate consequence of the modern global economy. Chief among the changes that have taken place is the integration of China, Russia, India and other countries into the global economic mainstream. The developed world once had maybe 500 million workers. Today, say the authors, we’ve added another two billion people to the global work force.

That change alone has had a great deal to do with the stagnant wages, income inequality and the oversupply of labor in America that was masked by rising home prices and access to credit. The bursting of the bubble exposed how much the American economy depended on cheap credit. Now that the curtain has been pulled back, cheap credit alone can’t fix our problems. The country is in a deflationary cycle that is very difficult to get out of: as wages decrease (or more workers become unemployed), people become afraid to spend. Assets like homes drop in value. Businesses react by lowering prices and laying off yet more workers — which only triggers a new round of deflation. The only thing that doesn’t change is the unsustainably high debt that was accrued during the bubble.

How can we break this cycle? Like most mainstream economists, Alpert, Hockett and Roubini roll their eyes at the calls for immediate government deficit reduction, which led to the creation of the supercommittee. Reducing government spending in the short term will only make things worse.

Instead, they believe that this is perhaps the best time in recent history for the government to take on a sustained infrastructure program, lasting from five to seven years, to create jobs and demand. “Labor costs will never be lower,” says Hockett. “Equipment costs will never be lower. The cost of capital will never be lower. Why wait?” Their plan calls for $1.2 trillion in spending — not all by the government, but all overseen by government — that would add 5.2 million jobs each year of the program. Alpert says that current ideas, like tax cuts, meant to stimulate the economy indirectly, just won’t work for a problem as big the one we are facing. Indeed, so far, they haven’t.

Their second solution involves . . .

Continue reading. And see also this interesting and lengthy column in the Washington Post by Ezra Klein: Could this time have been different?

We have opened Pandora’s box with drone warfare, and I don’t quite see Hope emerging yet. Take a look at this column Scott Shane in the NY Times:

AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”

The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably, to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes, modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in safety thousands of miles from the target.

To date, only the United States, Israel (against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and Britain (in Afghanistan) are known to have used drones for strikes. But American defense analysts count more than 50 countries that have built or bought unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, and the number is rising every month. Most are designed for surveillance, but as the United States has found, adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.

“The virtue of most U.A.V.’s is that they have long wings and you can strap anything to them,” Mr. Gormley says. That includes video cameras, eavesdropping equipment and munitions, he says. “It’s spreading like wildfire.” . . .

Continue reading.

James Fallows has a column today offering some guidance on protecting yourself against things like this:

On Monday, April 11, I woke to a call from my neighbor checking to see that I was safe and had not been mugged in Wales. The call was surprising enough, but the events that followed were devastating. I opened my gmail account a little after 7 am and I believe all my email was intact. I reported the breach and received a link to reset my password. I logged back in and all my email was missing, years of email, not only in the inbox, but the sent mail and dozens of folders of filed mail. In addition, all my contacts disappeared. My folder tree was completely intact, but every folder was empty.

I spent the next hours following every piece of advice I could find on Google support and reported the missing email and contacts and requested that Google try to recover it. On April 12, after filing other reports and giving more information, I received an email saying that Google had retrieved what email it could and that “We unfortunately will not be able to respond to any further emails on this case.” The email recovered dated back to February 25th and consisted of mostly email that I had actually deleted and some sent mail, a tiny portion of what was in the account.

Read the column for pointers on how to protect your data.

UPDATE: More on Gmail security.

Have you used soap nuts?

I decided to have another go at the Czech & Speake shaving soap, which seems to be somewhat lather-averse. I brought out the heavy-hitter today: a horsehair brush.

The first-pass lather was excellent, but the lather baded and by the third pass I had to return to the soap. I will follow Jonathan’s advice next time and use a lathering bowl. C&S seems to be a finicky and reluctant shaving soap. Be advised.

Still, by returning to the soap I got a decent lather. The Gillette Aristocrat with a previously used Astra Keramik Platinum blade did a good job, and I do like that Avocado Oil shaving balm from Saint Charles Shave.

I’m getting excellent feedback at Wicked_Edge for changes for the next edition: making the text more gender neutral and providing some guidance for removing other than facial hair. (E.g., at least mention the kind of hair removal common to swimmers, cyclists, bodybuilders, and others, as well as head shaving.) The point is not to go into detail, but to point out the advantages of the DE safety razor over common alternatives (waxing, laser hair removal, depilatory creams and lotions), and stress the basic principles:

1. The importance and techniques of prep to soften the hair.

2. Maintaining light pressure and correct blade angle with the DE.

3. Finding the brand of blade that works for you.

The focus of the book will remain on removing facial hair, but these general principles will be stressed so that readers can adapt the techniques for removing hair other than facial.