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Train vs Tornado
As far as my Google-fu can tell, this is a news story about it.
Washington Post scraps plans for ’salons’ after uproar
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The Washington Post’s publisher abruptly canceled a series of policy dinners Thursday that were to have been underwritten by lobbyists or corporations willing to pay thousands of dollars to be in the same room as journalists and lawmakers, saying the marketing department had misrepresented the newspaper’s intent.
Lawmakers who had been invited said they were not told the events would make money for the newspaper. But the Post had separately sent fliers seeking sponsors who would pay $25,000 for a single “salon” or $250,000 for 11 events.
The concept raised questions about journalistic ethics.
Quite. It’s bad enough that politics is as corrupt as it is, but when the folks who are supposed to expose said corruption join in, it does more than just “raise questions”.
Saddam Hussein Said WMD Talk Helped Him Look Strong to Iran
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Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”
[..]
At one point, Hussein dismissed as a fantasy the many intelligence reports that said he used a body double to elude assassination. “This is movie magic, not reality,” he said with a laugh. Instead, he said, he had used a phone only twice since 1990 and rarely slept in the same location two days in a row.
Hussein’s fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion about weapons of mass destruction. Iran and Iraq had fought a grinding eight-year war in the 1980s, and Hussein said he was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq — which is largely Shiite. “Hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran,” Piro recounted in his summary of a June 11, 2004, conversation.
“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”
A Look at the Venezuelan Healthcare System
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During my time in Venezuela, I developed a cough that went on for three weeks and progressively worsened. Finally, after I had become incredibly congested and developed a fever, I decided to attend a Barrio Adentro clinic. The closest one available was a Barrio Adentro II Centro de Diagonostico Integral (CDI) and I headed in without my medical records or calling to make an appointment. Immediately, I was ushered into a small room where Carmen, a friendly Cuban doctor, began questioning me about my symptoms. She listened to my lungs and walked me over to another examination room where, again without waiting, I had x-rays taken. Afterwards, the technician walked me to a chair and apologized profusely that I had to wait for the x-rays to be developed, promising that it would take no more than five minutes. Sure enough, five minutes later he returned with both x-rays developed. Carmen studied the x-rays and informed me that I had pneumonia, showing me the telltale shadows. She sent me away with my x-rays, three medications to treat my pneumonia, congestion, and fever, and made me promise to come back if my conditioned failed to improve or worsened within three days.
I walked out of the clinic with a diagnosis and treatment within twenty-five minutes of entering, without paying a dime. There was no wait, no paperwork, and no questions about my ability to pay, my nationality, or whether, as a foreigner, I was entitled to free comprehensive health care. There was no monetary value connected with my physical well-being; the care I received was not contingent upon my ability to pay. I was treated with dignity, respect, and compassion, my illness was cured and I was able to continue with my journey in Venezuela.
Behind the Mask – Michael Jackson’s rarest recording?
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Michael Jackson penned and recorded lots of songs, many of which remain unreleased. Perhaps the most infamous, and rarest recording, is his version of Behind the Mask. Legend has it that upon hearing Yellow Magic Orchestra’s original track, somewhen around 1979, Quincy Jones fell in love with the track, and he and Michael worked together on their own version. Jackson wrote new lyrics for it – adding to those of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Chris Mosdell – and eventually recorded it during his Off The Wall sessions. For unknown reasons the track never made the final cut of, arguably, Jones’ and Jackson’s greatest work. Not long afterwards Greg Phillinganes, Jackson’s keyboard player, released his own version of the song, which was later taken up and re-recorded by Eric Clapton for his 1986, Phil Collins produced album, August. The track has since been recorded/remixed by Human League, Senor Coconut, Orbital and others. Does an original Jones/Jackson recording of the song even exist? Perhaps, as the world continues to mourn the star’s sad death, someone will finally allow us a listen.
US spy in rendition trial: ‘I followed orders’
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A former CIA agent on trial for the alleged kidnapping of a Muslim cleric and terror suspect in Milan acknowledged in an interview published Tuesday that he had a role in the operation but insisted he was only following orders.
Italy’s Il Giornale daily published a rare interview with Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA Milan station chief at the time of the 2003 disappearance of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from a street in the northern city.
“I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors,” Lady was quoted as saying by Il Giornale. “It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair.”
Now where did I hear that excuse before?
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Abortion
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A Fox poll is probably a bit skewed to the right.
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What’s going on here is very clear: many Americans are uncomfortable with a pregnancy being terminated purely on account of the mother’s volition, but the vast majority are completely comfortable with terminating a pregnancy due to rape or incest. In fact, more Americans are OK with terminating a pregnancy due to rape or incest, than with terminating a pregnancy involving a fatal birth defect. Even though the product of the rape/incest would produce a probably healthy, viable baby, while the birth defect would not.
This is not concern with “life” or the “fetus”. This is a sick obsession with sex, and with “blame” for sex. Those Americans who would support abortions on account of rape and incest, but not on account of the mother’s volition–much less on account of fatal birth defects–don’t care a whit for the fetus. They simply want to know whether the prospective mother’s sexual activity met their standards for blame and responsibility. If they’ve determined that she’s a slut, they’re not OK with her having an abortion; if they’ve determined she was a poor victim of circumstance, they’re just fine with it.
Pawlenty, Ritchie sign election certificate for Franken
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Certificate of Election for Six-Year Term
To the President of the Senate of the United States:
This is to certify that on the fourth day of November, 2008, Al Franken was duly chosen by the qualified electors of the State of Minnesota a Senator from said State to represent said State in the Senate of the United States for the term of six years, beginning on the 3rd day of January, 2009.
Witness: His excellency our governor Tim Pawlenty, and our seal hereto affixed at Saint Paul, Minnesota this 30th day of June, in the year of our Lord 2009.
Should You Read That Long Sarah Palin Thing In Vanity Fair?
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There’s an article about Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair, and the thing’s damn near 10,000 words. But is it worth plowing through writer Todd S. Purdum’s overheated prose (”It was in this environment that her ambition first found an outlet in public office, and where she first tasted the 151-proof Everclear that is power.”) to get the whole story?
Check the above article before you pick up a Vanity Fair!
Irrational markets: people reject free money out of anger
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The basic rules of the Ultimatum Game are simple. One person is given a stack of cash, and told to divide it between themselves and a second party. That second party is then given the chance to accept or reject the offer; if it’s rejected, neither of them get any money. Clearly, any of this free money should be better than nothing, so under assumptions of strictly rational behavior, you might expect all offers to be accepted.
They’re not. Things in the neighborhood of a 50/50 split are accepted, but as the proportions shift to where the person issuing the ultimatum tries to keep seventy percent of the total, rejections increase. By the time they hit an 80/20 split, nearly 70 percent of the offers are rejected, even though that 20 percent of the total cash would leave the recipient better off than where they started.
It’s still possible to interpret this behavior as being rational within a social context. A lot of human behavior, and that of other primates, seems to be focused on ensuring cooperative behavior within small groups. The rejection of offers within the Ultimatum Game can be viewed as a form of punishment for unfair behavior. In that light, the rejection may make sense to the degree that the immediate loss of money provides a long-term incentive for fair and cooperative behavior within a group. Rational economic behavior is restored.
The new paper pretty much blows that explanation out of the water by testing individuals using a couple of variations of the Ultimatum Game. In the first, which the authors term “the Impunity Game,” the person making the offer gets their share of the cash regardless of whether the offer is accepted or not. In this game, the only consequence is the potential for guilt caused by the knowledge that an offer was rejected. Rejection rates do drop, but they remain substantial—offers of an 80/20 split got rejected over 40 percent of the time (down from around 70 percent) despite the lack of real economic consequences.
To really nail things down, the authors conducted tests of a Private Impunity Game, in which the person who made the offer wasn’t even informed of whether it was rejected or not—they simply walked away with their share of the cash. Here, even the nebulous hope that the person making the offer would feel pangs of guilt from its rejection was removed. Rejection rates were essentially unchanged. People keep rejecting offers they perceived as unfair, even if, like the proverbial tree in the forest, no one will hear their rejection.
In another hint of the nature of this response, the authors describe how a similar study was performed in which the Impunity Game was explained to participants as a series of if/then statements: “if A chooses X and B chooses Y, then A receives $i and B receives $j.” Here, when subjects are forced to reason through the conditions to figure out that their rejections didn’t cause any sort of financial punishment on the ones making the offer, rates or rejection were about the same as they are in the Ultimatum Game. This suggests that people can’t even be bothered to perform a rational analysis when money is on the line, much less engage in rational actions.
The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
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By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.
U.S. Officials: Iran Opposition Leader’s Web Site Shut Down, Supporters ‘Tortured’ Into Confessions
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State Department officials monitoring events in Iran from Dubai have relayed back to Washington that Mousavi’s Web site “Kalemah,” his last link to the outside world, is completely shut down.
They also noted reports on Iranian Web sites alleging that jailed Mousavi supporters have been tortured in an attempt to force them into TV “confessions” of a foreign-led plot against the Islamic regime.
Wait a second… that’s a Fox News website – so let me rewrite that into their usual language:
State Department officials monitoring events in Iran from Dubai have relayed back to Washington that Mousavi’s Web site “Kalemah,” his last link to the outside world, is completely shut down.
They also noted reports on Iranian Web sites alleging that jailed Mousavi supporters have been coerced in an attempt to force them into TV “confessions” of a foreign-led plot against the Islamic regime.
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Google thought Michael Jackson traffic was attack
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Google has confirmed that the surge of Michael Jackson-related searches on Google News Thursday was first interpreted as an attack on its service.
Michael Jackson’s patented “Smooth Criminal” leaning shoes
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Patent number 5255452, filed in 1992, shows how Michael Jackson and his dancers could lean at 45-degree angles during live performances of the song “Smooth Criminal”.
[..]
You can see them perform the move in the below video; watch the guy on the right, as he has trouble disengaging his loafers after the move.
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The Baloney Detection Kit
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The Ten Questions
- How reliable is the source of the claim?
- Does the source make similar claims?
- Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
- Does this fit with the way the world works?
- Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
- Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
- Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
- Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
- Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
- Are personal beliefs driving the claim?
May he moonwalk in peace.
[Quote:]
Michael Jackson, the sensationally gifted child star who rose to become the “King of Pop” and the biggest celebrity in the world only to fall from his throne in a freakish series of scandals, died Thursday. He was 50.
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Gerstner Says Short-Term Gains Should Be Taxed at 80%
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Louis Gerstner, the former International Business Machines Corp. chief executive officer, said that short-term investment gains should be taxed at 80 percent as a way to counter the culture of greed on Wall Street.
“If you buy something — a stock or a bond — in the morning, and you sell in the afternoon, the tax probably ought to be 80 percent,” said Gerstner, also a former chairman of Carlyle Group, the world’s second-largest private equity firm.
“If you hold it for six months, maybe it ought to be 60 percent,” Gerstner told Bloomberg Television.
Selling an investment after five years should carry a zero rate “to try to get the incentives for investment to go back to being a true investor and not a trader,” he said.
Gerstner acknowledged that such a change would be “controversial” yet argued it is necessary to encourage investors to think about the longer term.
That would favor companies that pay out dividents. Like IBM. So I guess there’s some details that need working out as well..
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Real Estate Bubble Bananas
The real estate problems are turning the USA into a banana republic.
No, really!
Republicans Cribbing from Big Coal?
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It’s a small world after all. Turns out that a PowerPoint being trotted out by House Republicans to undermine the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill was apparently created by none other than dirty fuel giant Peabody Energy.
Grist broke this hilarious story by burrowing into the PowerPoint file properties, revealing the “author” was Peabody CEO Greg Boyce and their communications services manager Chris Taylor was listed as the file “manager.”
Oops.
As if Republican clean energy opponents needed another hit to their already battered credibility, it seems the fossil fuel industry is now even writing their talking points for them.
The “Neda video,” torture, and the truth-revealing power of images
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For the last question at his press conference yesterday, Obama was asked by CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux about his reaction to that video and to reports that Iranians are refraining from protesting due to fear of such violence. As Obama was answering — attesting to how “heartbreaking” he found the video; how “anybody who sees it knows that there’s something fundamentally unjust” about the violence; and paying homage to “certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression” — Helen Thomas, who hadn’t been called on, interrupted to ask Obama to reconcile those statements about the Iranian images with his efforts at home to suppress America’s own torture photos (”Then why won’t you allow the photos –”).
The President quickly cut her off with these remarks:
THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, Helen. That’s a different question. (Laughter.)
Eh, no Mr President, it isn’t.
Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball
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In 1963, America learned a painful lesson when Pennsylvania Station, an architectural treasure that Senator Daniel Moynihan described as “the best thing in our city,” was torn down and replaced with a dreary complex that includes an office building and Madison Square Garden. The rail station, to this day the nation’s busiest, was moved underground into a claustrophobic warren of artificially lit passageways and bleak waiting rooms. While there has been an active campaign since the 1990’s to rectify the mistake by creating a new and worthy station a block away, the $1 billion-plus project remains tied up in political gridlock.
But the sad saga of Penn was by no means an isolated incident. Almost like a rite of passage, cities across the country embraced the era of Interstates, Big Macs, and suburban sprawl by tearing down their train depots. (Frequently, they just did the Joni Mitchell thing and put up a parking lot.) But time and experience are showing that train stations are vital organs in a healthy city, and removing them deadens the entire organism.
THEN: A grand Beaux Arts depot for a thriving city
WHAT’S THERE NOW: A windowless postal facility surrounded by barbed wire stands on site of the old station.
Special Interest Money Means Longer Odds for Public Option
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I decided to build a model to explain and predict whether a particular senator supports the public option. The variables in the model are as follows:
— The senator’s ideology, as measured by his DW-NOMINATE score;
— Per capita health care spending in the senator’s home state;
— Lobbying contributions received by the senator from health insurance PACs since 2004.
56.4 percent of New York City HS kids graduate in 4 years
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New York City’s four-year high school graduation rate has risen to 56.4 percent.
Holy crap that’s low….
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Ensign back in D.C.
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Republican Sen. John Ensign returned to the capital today to handshakes from colleagues.
It was the first public appearance for the senator who admitted last week to having conducted an eight-month affair with a former campaign staffer who is married to one of his former top aides.
This is the same guy that called for Bill Clinton and Larry Craig to resign. Nice to see him upholding the usual standards by ignoring all that when he himself is the target.
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Mexico moves quietly to decriminalize minor drug use
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Could Mexican cities become Latin Amsterdams, flooded by drug users seeking penalty-free tokes and toots?
That is the fear, if somewhat overstated, of some Mexican officials, especially in northern border states that serve as a mecca for underage drinkers from the United States.
The anxiety stems from the Mexican legislature’s quiet vote to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and other drugs, an effort that in the past proved controversial.
There’s been less protest this time, in part because there hasn’t been much publicity.
[..]
“The important thing is . . . that consumers are not treated as criminals,” said Rafael Ruiz Mena, secretary general of the National Institute of Penal Sciences. “It is a public health problem, not a penal problem.”
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In May 2006, then-President Vicente Fox, of the same right-wing party as Calderon, vetoed a similar bill that he initially had supported. He backed down only under pressure from the Bush administration, which complained that decriminalization for even small amounts could increase use.
Well, let’s see what happens this time around…
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Chatham House Study Definitively Shows Massive Ballot Fraud in Iran’s Reported Results
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An authoritative study from Chatham House (pdf) , the renowned UK think tank, finds that with regard to the official statistics on the recent presidential election in Iran released by the Interior Ministry, something is rotten in Tehran. The authors compared the provincial returns in the 2005 and 2009 elections against the 2006 census and found:
‘ · In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of
more than 100% was recorded.· At a provincial level, there is no correlation between the increased
turnout, and the swing to Ahmadinejad. This challenges the notion
that his victory was due to the massive participation of a previously
silent Conservative majority.· In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that
Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, and all
former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former
Reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two
groups.· In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and
Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas.
That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim
that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces
flies in the face of these trends.’
The Devil Is in the Digits: Evidence That Iran’s Election Was Rigged
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These pieces of the story point in the direction of fraud, to be sure. They have led experts to speculate that the election results released by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior had been altered behind closed doors. But we don’t have to rely on suggestive evidence alone. We can use statistics more systematically to show that this is likely what happened. Here’s how.
We’ll concentrate on vote counts — the number of votes received by different candidates in different provinces — and in particular the last and second-to-last digits of these numbers. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province (Mr. Karroubi’s actual vote count in Isfahan), we’ll focus on digits 7 and 9.
This may seem strange, because these digits usually don’t change who wins. In fact, last digits in a fair election don’t tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that’s exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of provincial vote counts ended in 5 would surely raise red flags.
Why would fraudulent numbers look any different? The reason is that humans are bad at making up numbers. Cognitive psychologists have found that study participants in lab experiments asked to write sequences of random digits will tend to select some digits more frequently than others.
So what can we make of Iran’s election results? We used the results released by the Ministry of the Interior and published on the web site of Press TV, a news channel funded by Iran’s government. The ministry provided data for 29 provinces, and we examined the number of votes each of the four main candidates — Ahmadinejad, Mousavi, Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai — is reported to have received in each of the provinces — a total of 116 numbers.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.
But that’s not all. Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, we examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran’s vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, 70 percent of these pairs should consist of distinct, non-adjacent digits.
Not so in the data from Iran: Only 62 percent of the pairs contain non-adjacent digits. This may not sound so different from 70 percent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 percent. And while our first test — variation in last-digit frequencies — suggests that Rezai’s vote counts are the most irregular, the lack of non-adjacent digits is most striking in the results reported for Ahmadinejad.
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Moody’s warning on California debt stuns state
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California, which is struggling to close a $24.3 billion budget gap, faces the prospect of a “multi-notch” downgrade in its credit rating if the state’s legislature fails to act quickly to produce a budget, Moody’s Investors Service warned on Friday.
Moody’s decision to place California’s general obligation debt on alert for a possible “multi-notch” downgrade stunned state officials.
The state’s current A2 credit rating is Moody’s sixth-highest investment grade and makes California the lowest rated of the 50 states.
The A2 rating is just five notches above speculative status and Moody’s raised the potential for the rating to tumble toward “junk” status if lawmakers fail to quickly produce a budget for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign.
“If the legislature does not take action quickly, the state’s cash situation will deteriorate to the point where the controller will have to delay most non-priority payments in July,” Moody’s said in a statement.
Bond-smuggling mystery thickens
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The statement by a US official this week that $134bn of Treasury bills seized in Italy earlier this month are fake has only raised more questions in a case that, as one commentator noted earlier this week, is a plot “better suited for a John LeCarre novel”.
Now, the plot thickens – like a lumpy and rather unappetising stew – with an FT report on Friday that Italian and US secret services working together concluded the bills and and accompanying documents are “most probably” counterfeited, and most likely the handiwork of the Italian Mafia.
So are we now looking at the prospect of a Japanese-Italian organised crime connection with the audacity to counterfeit – and undoubtedly cash in – enough Treasury billls to buy several developing countries?
Secret letter ‘proves Mousavi won poll’
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They were handing out the photocopies by the thousand under the plane trees in the centre of the boulevard, single sheets of paper grabbed by the opposition supporters who are now wearing black for the 15 Iranians who have been killed in Tehran – who knows how many more in the rest of the country? – since the election results gave Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more than 24 million votes and a return to the presidency.
[..]
For the photocopy appeared to be a genuine but confidential letter from the Iranian minister of interior, Sadeq Mahsuli, to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, written on Saturday 13 June, the day after the elections, and giving both Mr Mousavi and his ally, Mehdi Karroubi, big majorities in the final results. In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi’s camp would have wanted.
Headed “For the Attention of the Supreme Leader” it notes “your concerns for the 10th presidential elections” and “and your orders for Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president”, and continues “for your information only, I am telling you the actual results”. Mr Mousavi has 19,075,623, Mr Karroubi 13,387,104, and Mr Ahmadinejad a mere 5,698,417.
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So, obviously, this doctor was paid by someone — the government, and in turn, the residents through taxation. I know nothing about the scale or distribution of taxation in Venezuela, but I think they see the obvious: health care is like roads and schools: something that should be available, period. I’m still waiting for one good explanation of how we’ll be worse off with universal, single-payer health care. I don’t fear ‘the government coming between me and my doctor’ — right now I’ve got an insurance company, and nothing — (sometimes I think even no insurance) — could be worse. I have right here on my desk a 2.5″ thick stack of papers from the insurance companies and doctors. This is for 5 doctor office visits: 2 annual checkups for my kids, one common illness (URI) for my husband, one for me (again, URI), and a routine colonoscopy for my husband. I’ve paid out of pocket for 3 of the five, because the insurance companies have their heads so far … well, you get the idea. No, give me a government employee any day — there is a decent chance they’ll be motivated by doing the right thing, not at how much, how hard, and how often they can screw you to the benefit of their bottom line.