It's too cold. Roof my cities, damn it!

* Nate Silver on Rasmussen polling bias.
* Willpower as limited muscle and why your New Year's resolutions will fail -- especially the one to lose weight. Starved brains don't have good willpower.
* Economists are cheapskates
* Fixing California -- oh, please let it pass!

* Divisions in the parties. GOP as uneasy alliance of neocons, libertarians, and the religious right (itself with divisons, e.g. Mormon vs. evangelical), having expelled the Rockefeller (or Roosevelt) Republicans; Democrats as uneasy alliance of neoliberals, New Dealers, and Greens, with different opinions about means if not goals.
* Democrats likely to drop superdelegates, continuing their trend of being, ahem, more democratic. (Previous major item is state delegates being allocates proportionally, in something like proxy or asset voting, whereas the GOP primaries are still winner-take-all.)
* Same author of the previous two, Michael Lind, rants about the failure of government, or what are we paying them for anyway?

* Movie of Pre-Columbian America, Kings of the Sun. Probably flawed but notable for subject matter. Haven't seen it, just heard about it.
* Iowa and New Hampshire both have gay marriage; will this affect the next presidential campaign?

* Horrible chemistry blog. ClF3 burns sand and produces HF in reaction with water. *Produces* HF, WTF. Dimethyl mercury is horrible.
* Blasphemy law in Islam Ireland.

* Religiosity by state.
* Pink science for girls

* Is overparenting peaking?
* For all the helicopter parenting, sex talks tend to be too little, too late.
* Outrage over teaching masturbation in Spain; article mentions what other sex-ed programs do. Makes the USA sound stuck in the Dark Ages.

* The anti-statism obsession in America
* Cake vs. screamers: increasing marginal utility of 'reliever' goods and the persistence of poverty.

* Obama aims to shrink the war on terror from "terrorism" to "Al-Qaeda", on the grounds that only A-Q is targetting us, plus movements like Hamas and Hezbollah and even the Taliban have nationalistic roots in the people, and can't simply be stomped.
* Palin's fake bus tour, call for the US to dedicate itself to God, and flirtation with the Birthers
* Manual for GOP obstructionism.


*composting toilets progress.
* Christmas defined
* Blood plasma from border Mexicans. US is one of the only countries to allow paying for blood and plasma, and a massive exporter of plasma since other countries don't collect enough. I smell a causal connection, there...

* Ada Lovelace: the Origin
* Evolution of Nintendo controllers

One thing I purchased at Bfoods East was PHEASANT & ROSEMARY PATE with Pork and Duck. The actual ingredient list is Duck, Pork, Pork Fate, Pheasant, Onion, Water, Pork Liver, Duck Liver, Spies, Pecans, Port, Salt. I think a false impression was conveyed. Still tastes good, and didn't cost more than the other pate. But still.

Evening links:
* Rosy memories of Communist Hungary. See comments as well.
* Libertarians and climate change denialism

Older links:
* Heroic blacks on TV: bald head and goatee
* Female urination device
* GOP as group therapy for fear? Though it often seems like they feed on fear. Fear the Muslim/liberal/socialist/PC/feminist...
* Sexism in Holmes (author, not Sherlock) D&D supplements
* glass armonica
* The lost generation of growth
* "All Christian" prison
* Is New England like Europe? Nationalism vs. piety.
* Does exercise work for weight loss?

Post-pneumonia: my voice still sounds odd to me; others haven't noticed but akashiver did. But I otherwise feel healthier, and went for a bike ride today since it was so nice. 15 minutes to Bloomingfood East, 16 back from Border's. A couple of curbs along 3rd seem to have been made wheelchair accessible since I last went that way. Bfood East has dill seed and ground rosemary, unlike the other brances; also nice plump raisins. Spent a lot of money at Border's: Ghost in the Shell movie, 2nd Gig, Unseen Academicals, Jhegaala, Algebraist, Spirited Away, Haruhi Suzumiya novels. Almost bought the Nausicaa manga but they were missing #6 of the 7-volume edition and I don't even know which edition I want. There are Haruhi Suzumiya manga too, allegedly by the same author, and there seemed to be a couple of stories I didn't recognize -- something about Kyon's grandmother and data lifeforms. I didn't buy them.

Biking into the sunset provided new experience of the usefulness of headlights. I could see cars coming at me, but they were dim... easy to miss if your attention drifted. Which it shouldn't while on the road, but we're all imperfect, ne? Headlights are a lot more attention grabbing. I hope mine helped, though given the directions my taillight was probably more useful.

I had the Runcible Spoon's coffee straight for once, without sugar or cream. It was nice, and not bitter.

Links since yesterday:
* US growth before and after Reagan
* Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice, weirdly edited, an essay to a post-Terror French Revolutionary government on the equal right of humanity to natural property, and the justice of an inheritance tax to fund starter funds for those turning 21 and a pension for those over 50. (When people talk about how liberal/left/right/whatever past people were, and not judging them by modern standards... Paine is one Founding Father who'd come comfortably on the left even today, though I think he's weak on feminist advocacy. Not necessarily openly sexist, but not something he wrote about.)

BTW, his opinion of conservatism, in the sense of arguing from tradition, in The Rights of Man:


"The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him."

* Justices weigh life in prison for juveniles who never killed. Whole bunch of them in Florida.

* New constitution in North Korea, dropping 'Communism' and enshrining Kim's role as leader. His father's role as president had been left "eternally vacant" in the 1998 constitution, not clear if that changed.
* In American dynastism, Liz Cheney carries on her father's advocacy of torture and fearmongering, along with not contesting an assertion that Obama isn't American.
* One thing about religions, they often introduce holidays for the poor. Maids in Jakarta get Ramadan off, with rich families having to cope with fetching their own glasses of water. Or check into luxury hotels.
* The standoff in Honduras continues, with the ousted President Zelaya having slipped somehow into the Brazilian embassy. I've been sympathetic to the 'coup', but closing radio stations and cracking down on civil liberties burns that up.
* Why is the Supreme Court hearing half as many cases as it used to?
* State Republicans want to contest a health insurance mandate via amending state constitutions. Unclear on the concepts of the supremacy clause or how health reform can work.

* Logicomix, a comic book about Bertrand Russell and the quest for certainty in mathematics.
* Modern miracles: helping the blind see.
* The new education fad: teaching executive function, aka self-control

I'm back. Have three weeks of collected links!

Cool or important stuff
* Krugman (and 9 page Kenneth Arrow PDF) on why markets fail at health care.
* Jimmy Carter breaks with Baptists over gender equality. He's for it.
* Yet another article on the plural 'they'. This one is new in describing whom to blame for the idea that it's bad.
* Racial whitewashing of covers.
* House of Representatives size over time
* Creepy vintage ads
* Some people say rich people are fleeing California due to high taxes. They're wrong. A lot of people have been gloating about people leaving California; none have acknowledged California's population perhaps unsustainably in dot-com and housing bubbles.
* Prenatal air pollution lowers IQ. Ah, poor people, getting shafted even before they're born. "Just work harder!"
* Replacement fertility isn't a constant 2.1. It's approximately the reciprocal of (chance of a girl being born)*(chance a girl will survive to average age of maternity). So given 50% ratio but 50% chance of survival, the average woman would have to have 1/(.5*.5)=4 children just to keep the population going. Current numbers go from 2.05 to over 3.
** Decadent liberal countries having more children
* Obama did get more young voters to turn out.
* Law and order in the West Bank. But some people think they should be expelled.
* Bus rapid transit. Speaking of Third World megacity sprawl, it seems to me that much of LA is well-adapted to rapid busways, e.g. there are spare lanes to hijack.
* If you listened to the media, you'd never think Nobel-winning economists worry the stimulus is too small.
* Poland weathering the recession


Krugman/Stiglitz dump
article on Stiglitz
http://www.newsweek.com/id/207390
Krugman on it
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/morning-joe/
Newsweek on Krugman
http://www.newsweek.com/id/191393?tid=relatedcl
column excerpts
http://www.newsweek.com/id/191398?tid=relatedcl
female Japanese 'Krugman'
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204874?tid=relatedcl

( GOP news )

( fitness links )

( random )

* SF geek: Animation of multiple-star systems. (From a Firefly thread.) How to show time-lagged STL comms on screen.
* Cute studies: Children of lesbian mothers less susceptible to mental illness. Take with as much salt as a single study deserves, but cute result anyway given the debates.
* Politics geek: Overseas departments of France. Unlike the American empire, or the American capital, they get representation in the legislature.
* Hope: Confucian enviornmentalism?
* Less Hope: Spain limits universal jurisdiction.
* Tech: Bicycle cars!
* Human interest: Gay Iraqi Jew Israeli who helps Palestinians.
* Current events: Honduran 'coup'. You've probably seen the standard version (military coup!), see the other side. I've been looking at bad translations of the Honduran Constitution (Google Translate is a bit less bad than Babelfish) and yeah, it *does* look like the President disqualified himself from office -- and that there's no formal impeachment mechanism. Noel Maurer
* RPG geek: 4e D&D for taking a shit
* Rainbow flag: not just for gays
* "Gayby boom": the wave of kids who've grown up with gay parents.
* How the media incorporates blogs on Iran.
* Corporate crooks: travel protection fraud. Bankrupted with health insurance.
* Freedom, Environment: now legal to collect rainwater in Colorado
* Mad Science!: hot rock projects underway, and causing earthquakes. Geo-engineering. The global ant super-colony.
* Retro-tech: 13 year old experiences Walkman.
* Interrogating Saddam Hussein
* Gay sex decriminalized in India for now. Illegal (10 years in prison) under British colonial law; Delhi High Court has overturned. Religious leaders object; case may be appealed to the Supreme Court.
* Forced marriages and Britain
* CBO analyzes plan with public option, hey, this time it works. President of the AMA comes out in support, sort of.
* Swine flu: US deaths (updated Fridays). Spread in Argentina.

Reportedly, in small towns, people don't lock their doors much. In cities, we do. In college I had a friend who didn't lock her dorm room, which struck me as weird (though I happily took advantage to drop off surprise flowers.) Sometimes I've wondered about the need for locks; I'm home a lot, and it's not like people come to try the door. (Of course, I live in a good neighborhood.) And it'd probably look weird to go down a street or hallway trying door after door.

But, of course, if no one locked their door, you could just go to any home that looked empty and enter to plunder it. It's the fact that everyone locks their door that means an individual can get away without it, like skipping on vaccination if everyone else gets shots.

* Voting in Iran. Mousavi, the reformer, has claimed victory though it's not official. 538 calls this a maturing of Iran's democracy, though let's remember history: Iran had a Parliament from 1911 ending in 1953 thanks to a CIA coup. The next time you hear someone say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, remind them (a) of Turkey and (b) that Iran was democratic and *we broke it*. And then funded their dictatorship and state terror structure, making us calling them "Axis of evil" and "terrorist state" now a real laugh.

* US and UK deregulated finance and got a bust. Canada didn't and has stable banks. Hmm.
* Effect of minority judges on the Court.
* Outline of Predictably Irrational, a collection of cognitive bias experients and results.

* AMA continues the fight against reform, has contributed heavily to the GOP.
* US care as viewed by a Canadian. Supplements an older piece in the opposite direction. And a comparison with France.
* Tobacco to be more regulated now. Also.

* Militants respond positively to Obama's speech

* Scott Roeder warns of more murders of abortion doctors. Can we call him a terrorist yet? Should we waterboard him?

* Would gay marriage support be higher if framed as "should the government have the power to prevent gays from marrying?"

* From Randy: Portugal's empire superimposed on Europe.
* Moonshine resurgence. Article ends covering the one legal moonshiner. Authorities were pretty helpful when someone asked how to make corn whiskey legally. *shock*

* Haruhi Suzumiya in the Palestinian territories
* Bert and Osama
* Failure of US rail. Slower than it was in the 1920s.
* Liberals and conservatives have different reactions to authority and disgust.

* Marijuana legalization bill!
** Ambiguity about Obama's enforcement

* Closing of the Canadian border
* Newsweek criticizes Oprah's gullibility
* Republican car dealerships
* Long term whiteness of the GOP, with 98% of Reagan's 1980 votes being white. Though Nate's "always" doesn't see as far back as pre-FDR black Republicans.
* GOP lawmaker claims liberal media is biggest threat to America.
* Health insurance companies invest in tobacco companies.

* Reagan's role in the financial crisis
* Stagflation myth

* Cats don't understand strings
* One man's experience with taking female hormones
* Grilled cheese as metaphor for sex.

Must read
* Letter from an ex-slave to his master. A thing of beauty.
** Tolkien's reply to Nazi Aryan inquiries
* Girly editions of Scrabble, Monopoly, Uno et al.

History
* 25 May was the 40th anniversary of the decriminalization of gay sex in Canada.
** Like Orson Scott Card, John Wright apparently misses those days.

( mercy cut )

* Evil chicken

Dark
* Bishops were covering up for abusive priests back in 1957. here and here (pdf).
* And the current Pope led much of the obstruction of justice.

* The high costs
of being poor

* Man pleads guilty to manga porn. Also, and Neil Gaiman.
* Inverse correlations between rapes and porn; rape rates have apparently declined, either modestly or drastically.

* David Brooks: "Cheney lost to Bush". Says the high point of torture was in the early years, and the policies Cheney is publicly defending now were largely backed away from in the Rice years, with Obama continuing those policies.
* Conservative Erich Muller calls waterboarding torture after 7 seconds of exposure. That's him and Chris Hitchens. Torture defenders say "we waterboard our troops". Yes, in torture resistance school.

* Permission slips required for schoolgirl to give a talk on Harvey Milk

* Headline: "U.S. EPA to rely more on scientists for air rules". (As opposed to the political appointees of the Bush administration.)

Cool
* Military not as Republican or polarized as thought, though old officers kind of are.
* Obama's security speech
* Southern contraction of the GOP
* Where a Marine friend will be leading troops in Afghanistan.
* Back to manual trades?

Silly
* David Frum on mustardgate. This is a Bush speechwriter calling the thing silly.

Depressing
* Troops weren't deployed to help with Katrina
* Systematic child abuse in Irish reform schools
* Obama seeking indefinite detentions
* Blackwater tries to rebrand as "Xe"
* Creepy Bible briefings, the better to manipulate Bush with.
* Steele's latest brainstorm for opposing gay marriage: it'll cost small business money. Unlike, say, hetero employees getting married. Will the GOP oppose marriage on the grounds that it costs too much? That'd be hilarious.

Abortion opinions
* 538 summary, linking back to two earlier posts, and to this which is way more detailed and useful than the recent Gallup "more pro-life" poll that's causing these posts.

Cool
* Progress in RNA Genesis
* From Pakistan to San Francisco: the voyage of bondage gear
* How Norway's coping with the recession. Quite well, thank you.
* Zhao Ziyang's memoirs -- this is the leader ousted for opposing the Tiananmen Square massacre
* Health cost fallacies
* Having daughters makes parents liberal, maybe.

* Personal genomics. 23andMe and Bioresolve seem both cheapest and giving the most holistic and scientifically ambitious results.
* Star Trek as a Mage game
* Star Trek movie as twinks vs. bears, once you get past the "I don't watch SF" rant.

* Surrogacy boom in India
* Heart Attack Grill. Burger joint with a "we're really unhealthy" theme, burgers in lard, all you can eat fries in lard, and "burger geisha" waitresses in skimpy nurse outfits. "Poised in the art of conversation" (from the French Documentary video).

* Bananas at Sahara Mart have jumped to 79 cents a pound, but apples are down to $1.99.
* Whee, swing dance! Finally I've learned some more lindy hop variations.

More news and links
* Civilians have too many rights and can't be forced into hardship positions, so reservists may be called up based on their civilian jobs to fill posts in Afghanistan.
* More on Card joining NOM, including his call to overthrow the government is Prop 8 didn't pass, and his attempt to actually argue how gay marriage would hurt his marriage. (Commendable in a way, since most opponent mumble incoherent at that point.)
* Cheap shots: Republicans less popular than Venezuela Or China. Or France.
* Chavez has problems, but Colombia is worse, yet not reported on as much.
* How the Kindle might transform reading books. Friends snarked that it read like a Thomas Friedman essay or some 1996 gush about the Web, but I'm not sure it's wrong.

Krugman, the Dismal Scientist
* Banks are reporting profit because the market value of their debt is going down -- because creditors think the bank is likely to fail.
* Bush admin torture sought to establish link between Iraq and 9/11, which of course was non-existent. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a month. 6 times a day! And with 'real' waterboarding, e.g. water dumped into the nose and mouth, beyond what passed for safety guidelines. Petition for a special prosecutor.
* Since 1995, European productivity allegedly lagged that of the US. Half due to Wal-Mart, half due to financial services. Perhaps we'd like to reconsider. A comment adds that in-house software development is 'investment' in the US but 'expense' in Europe. Same activity, different accounting.
* Notes that conservative economist Greg Mankiw says we need inflation.
* Texas: rich or poor? -- posting for the links and numbers; he doesn't really make a case for median vs. average income, and cost of living would seem to matter, and be higher (at least in housing) than in NJ. OTOH, the numbers do mean that employers in NJ (or NYC) are willing to pay that much for the labor there, vs. what Texans can command.

Krugman columns, not blog posts
* False hope
* The Irish model
* Tea parties and the craziness of the GOP (And the tea party sponsors)
* If banking isn't boring, someone's stealing your money.
* America the tarnished (finance, not torture. That I have to say that...)
* Obama: hypnotized by capital markets

* UN racism conference news. Libya gets called out.
* Polarized voting index
* The First Earth Day. Condom witches in Bloomington.
* Article mentions that Orson Scott Card is on the board of the National Organization for Marriage (nom nom nom), which seems to be the new front of gay-marriage bigotry.
* Jared Diamond sued for making shit up. LJ comments here. carloshasanax and Doug M. traditionally criticize Diamond for abusing his citations; William Hyde seems a good climatologist and rejects Doug M's source.
* Greg Bear to write Halo novels.

* Krugman on "too many banks" and a Bush-like shifting of narratives for the bank policy -- Bushlike in how tax cuts were a good idea when the economy was booming (give back money) and failing (stimulus!) and wartime (...).

* Georgia Senate votes to dismantle US government. Slipped into a bill -- but the article says the resolution has passed in other states.
* Obama admin finally coughs up Bush torture memos. I'm told they make for unpleasant reading.
* War on Pubert continues: Fifth graders could face charges for viewing and showing porn on school computer
* George Will complains about denom denim. Not sure if he's being ironic.
* Gays being killed in Iraq
* The dark side of Dubai. What's a little slavery among expatriates? Dubai's media law
* Child marriage in Saudi Arabia
* Texas secession bill

* Barbary Corsairs Wikipedia. Interesting reading -- corsairs raiding Ireland and Iceland, controlling the Alps for a while, France conquering Algeria in large part to shut the pirates down.
* Texas lawmaker suggests Asians adopt easier names.
* American social mobility or lack thereof (PDF)
* An Atlantic article on a financial coup. I haven't really read it.
* Financial sector wages, deregulation, and inequality
* The Aral Desert
* Warren says he never supported Prop 8, evangelicals dismayed and confused. I think it's clear he did -- but why is he saying he didn't?
* Johann Hari on the Somali pirates, and how Somalia's been exploited
* Clarence Thomas complains about too many rights
* Gephardt says we should go slow on health care reform. Gephardt has become a corporate lobbyist. Connected?
* Illinois GOP: shoot tax increasers

* HIV denialism
* I discovered earlier that lead is now the last stable element. I'd thought polonium was the first radioactive element (after technetium and promethium) but apparently in 2003 bismuth-209 was found to be radioactive, with a half life of 1.9e19 years. This was predicted ahead of time, a triumph of nuclear chemistry.
* Charts of the nuclides. I was surprised to see that most atomic masses have only a single stable element, and none more than two.
* Joan Vinge letter, on her health, writing, and connections between her Heaven's Belt and Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought.
* Japan and Ethiopia

* Iowa's Senate majority leader rules out an amendment to ban gay marriage. We learn that Iowans get to vote on having a constitutional convention every 10 years -- nice touch along Jefferson's ideas of permanent revolution. We also get:

Former state legislator Chuck Hurley, president of the conservative Iowa Family Policy Center, said gay marriage opponents would step up the pressure on Gronstal.

"He is denying 2.1 million Iowans of voting age of the right to vote on an issue of great importance to 550,000 schoolchildren,"

Schoolchildren? What? I can only think he's blowing on the "pedophile" dog whistle, in a spectacularly illogical fashion. -- Gronstal's speech is online, I'm told it's moving.

* In other Iowa news, the Senate votes to provide health care to nearly all children. The Republicans say... absolutely nothing new.
* The state supreme court eviscerated standard talking points. Pandagon samples Free Republican and legislative responses.
* In today's news, Vermont's legislature overrode the governor's veto of gay marriage legalization, making it the first state to pull that off. (Lost in the Prop 8 hoopla is that California's legislature had legalized it -- but Arnold vetoed, claiming he wasn't opposed but the voters or courts should make a decision like that. Way to go, they split the difference. (ETA: ah, he had a point of sorts, conflict with Prop 22.) DC's council voted unanimously to recognize gay marriages from other states, though I don't know if that takes effect -- Congress gets to run DC. I predict California will be the first state to have the voters legalize gay marriage; Prop 8 only got 52% after all, and the trends are against bigotry. (Though reportedly there's a bias to vote "No" on any amendment.)
* Overseas, Sweden voted for gay marriage the same day of the Iowa decision.

* Journalists allowed to cover returning dead soldiers
* Senate Republicans seek to keep torture memos secret.
* Obama defends and expands Bush wiretapping policies, invoking a hugely broad interpretation of sovereign immunity. The EFF calls his DoJ worse than Bush.
* Red Cross indicts medical role in CIA torture; article also notes the "disappearance" done to our captives, where we wouldn't tell governments or families who we'd taken.

* Black soldiers were kept out of the liberation of Paris. The Pope didn't want them in Rome, either. That's Piux XII.
* 'Sexting' hysteria extends to teachers.
* Boys being abducted in China.

* NYC to try to reduce salt intake, in what might be a big uncontrolled experiment. Lots of links in that article; this is Gary Taubes' article debunking salt and CVD in Science in 1999.
* Temperature/climate variation, and why a steady average temperature for the past 10 years doesn't disprove long-term warming trends. Look on the pictures.
* People who feel good about themselves may misbehave more
* CO2 air capture