Finding God in a Dog

My predictions for 2019.

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 19:19:37 GMT

And now, my predictions for 2019. These are somewhat more grim than they have been in previous years, and for good reason. They are:

The Mueller investigation, which is apparently focused on collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, will turn up something even worse.

Turkish forces will rout the Kurdish forces in Eastern Syria, causing yet another humanitarian crisis.

It will come out that hundreds of children have died while in ICE custody.

The Virginia House of Delegates will flip to Democratic control.

Japan's LDP-led conservative ruling coalition will suffer substantial losses in the upper chamber, although not enough to end the conservative majority. This will be taken as a sign of Abe fatigue.

The DJIA on Mon July 1st will close at or below 10% less than the Dec 31, 2018 close.

The unemployment rate June 2019 will climb above 4.5% (up from the November 2018 3.7%).

The Patriots will win the Super Bowl.

Instagram will replace Facebook as The Irreplaceable Social Media Company, mostly due to younger users. Of course, Facebook, which owns Instagram, will still make money.

Let's go into these one by one. ( Read more... )

What are your predictions for the year?

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2018 Predictions Scorecard

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 14:58:42 GMT

Hello everyone.

(Taps mic)

Is this thing still on? Yes? Good! And hello all the refugees from Tumblr!

A year ago I made some predictions about what I thought would happen in 2018. Unlike most political prognosticators, I take the time to go back and grade myself on how I did, and I have for (checks calendar) sixteen years now.

Wow. Sixteen!

So what were my 2018 predictions, and how did I do? Good question........first, let's look at the predictions.

There will be a war in Eastern Europe.

Housing prices will grow at their slowest rate since 2010.

Democrats will win enough seats to control the US House and US Senate in 2019.

Democrats will flip at least six (6) governor's seats and six (6) state legislatures in 2018.

SCOTUS will rule in both Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone that excessive gerrymandering violates the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

The Euroskeptic Right will win the March elections in Italy, further weakening the EU.

The Racist Right will run out of steam while the Socialist Left gains momentum.

The Chicago Cubs will, once more, return to postseason baseball.

Oklahoma will win the College Football Bowl Series Championship.

Ooof...yeah, lots of swing-and-a-miss there. Let's evaluate.

( Read more... )

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Emergency Resolution to Protect the Mueller Investigation

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:30:30 GMT

I will be proposing an emergency resolution to the Central Committee of the Multnomah County Democratic Party tonight, calling on our Congressional representatives to defend the Mueller investigation by any means necessary. The full text of the resolution may be found here. As this resolution did not have time to go before the Platform and Resolutions committee, this resolution will be under new business and will require a four-fifths majority to pass.

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New OR-GOV Poll - take with salt #ORGOV

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 01:50:07 GMT

Conservative paper The Oregonian has a new poll from Gravis Marketing, of the Oregon Governor's race.

Brown (D) 45
Buhler (R) 45
MOE 3.5

Let's look at the good, bad, and ugly of this poll.

THE BAD Gravis Marketing does not have a reputation for being that accurate - FiveThirtyEight.com gives them a C+ rating. Also, the voter breakdown in this poll leans towards older voters, which might not accurately reflect the likely voters in the upcoming election.

THE GOOD Other than the baselines, the poll has pretty good results for Democrats overall: voters oppose the Trump agenda, are more likely to vote for Democrats in Congressional elections, and oppose a ballot measure that would restrict abortion rights in Oregon.

THE UGLY This poll is consistent with other polls that have Governor Brown under 50%. Not only does this poll have Brown and Buhler tied, but it has voters slightly favoring Measure 105, a ballot measure to rescind Oregon's Sanctuary State law. Rescinding that measure wouldn't just affect immigrants' rights in Oregon, but would also free more police forces to engage in racial profiling.

Also, FiveThirtyEight gives Gravis a slight Democratic lean. The numbers for Brown, and for the anti-105 vote, could be worse than they appear.

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This morning in a nutshell

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:14:30 GMT

Trump: HEY RUSSIA LOOK OUT FOR MY SNEAK ATTACK ON SYRIA!
Trump: AND I'M GONNA FIRE THE FUCK OUT OF ROSENSTEIN AND END THIS MUELLER INVESTIGATION!
Paul Ryan: Fuck it, I'm out.
Dennis Ross: Fuck it, me too.
John Boehner: Fuck it, let's get stoned.

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2018 Predictions

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 05:07:43 GMT

And now, my predictions for 2018.

Really, predicting 2018 is a fool's errand. If there is one thing that the last two years have proven so far, it is that reality is capable of rapidly outpacing, and outweirding, our imaginations. From the Muslim ban to Trump's easily disproved lies to the collision of two neutron stars, there is a lot about the last year that has served to inspire and horrify like never before.

I could go the route of Angry Staff Officer and take a satirical approach, but that's not what y'all have come to expect from me these last ... wow ... fifteen years. It's not what I have come to expect of me. So, here we go:

There will be a war in Eastern Europe.

Housing prices will grow at their slowest rate since 2010.

Democrats will win enough seats to control the US House and US Senate in 2019.

Democrats will flip at least six (6) governor's seats and six (6) state legislatures in 2018.

SCOTUS will rule in both Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone that excessive gerrymandering violates the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

The Euroskeptic Right will win the March elections in Italy, further weakening the EU.

The Racist Right will run out of steam while the Socialist Left gains momentum.

The Chicago Cubs will, once more, return to postseason baseball.

Oklahoma will win the College Football Bowl Series Championship.

Let's consider each of these predictions in turn.

There will be a war in Eastern Europe. A year ago I wrote:

The two forces that keep Pax Europa in the 21st Century are NATO and the EU. The election of Donald Trump and other far-right russophile nationalists, along with Russia’s recent overtures to Turkey, has weakened NATO; the victory of Brexit has weakened the EU. This gives belligerent powers an opening they haven’t had since the end of the Balkans Wars.

None of these conditions has changed. If anything, they have gotten worse, with Germany unable to form a government, Brexit still causing chaos in the UK, and the Euroskeptic Right gaining ground from the Netherlands to Austria. In the meantime, the Trump administration has utterly gutted the State Department, leaving the US with practically no diplomatic resources from which to draw.

If you asked me to put odds on the likelihood of this prediction coming true, I'd put them at 30%. That's more than I'd have put it at a year ago, and enough that I feel comfortable still making this prediction.

Housing prices will grow at their slowest rate since 2010. This is quite simply because the GOP tax plan has put a cap of $750K on the value of mortgages that come with an interest deduction. This makes borrowing to buy homes in expensive markets more costly, and puts a soft cap of on how much a home's value can appreciate. The consequences of this slowdown will mostly be felt by the middle class, for whom most of their net worth is typically in real estate.

Democrats will win enough seats to control the US House and US Senate in 2019.
Democrats will flip at least six (6) governor's seats and six (6) state legislatures in 2018.

Last year I said that the Virginia and New Jersey elections in 2017 would give us a sense of what 2018 would be like. The Democrats performed impressively in Virginia. More to the point, they ran a nearly perfect campaign in Alabama, which resulted in a stunning upset. This gives me the sense that, whatever their faults, the DNC seems to have figured out a magic formula that could lead to blowout wins in November 2018. It will require a lot of hard work (so get ready to make phone calls and knock on doors), and a lot of money (so get ready for a flood of fundraising emails). But if they can pull it off, the resulting wave could undo all the Republican gains of 2010 and 2014, and then some.

SCOTUS will rule in both Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone that excessive gerrymandering violates the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

I think, based on the way Justice Kennedy reacted towards the GOP side in Gill v. Whitford, that there are five votes to declare the Wisconsin map unconstitutional. My guess is that SCOTUS took Benisek v. Lamone in order to give conservatives on the Court a booby prize -- that is, since the Republicans are going to lose Gill, they can take comfort that the Democrats will also lose Benisek.

The Euroskeptic Right will win the March elections in Italy, further weakening the EU.

Just two days ago, Italy's President dissolved the legislature, which had, in typical Italian fashion, produced three Prime Ministers in five years. Right now the polls have the Euroskeptic Five Star Movement slightly ahead of the center-left Democrats. My guess is that the Five Star Movement will probably win enough seats to form a governing coalition with a cluster of center-right parties.

The Racist Right will run out of steam in America, while the Socialist Left gains momentum.

As I've stated before, People are hungry for an alternative to the neoliberalism and globalism that has caused a lot of economic pain. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the anti-capitalist left along with it, those alternatives came primarily from the European New Right, particularly de Benoist.

For those who are not familiar with de Benoist, he is a French philosopher who has adapted the ideas of both far right philosophers (Evola) and far left philosophers (Gramsci) into a new vision of European society, one that is fundamentally ethnocentric. The object of his attacks are neoliberal capitalism, equality, American-style democracy, and, to a lesser extent, Christianity.

When de Benoist and his cronies got their start in the 1960s, they had interesting ideas, but few followers. On the other hand, the anti-capitalist, particularly socialist, left, had billions of followers, but (due in no small part to the intellectual stagnation that came with Communism) stale ideas.

Today, de Benoist and his ideas have philosophies that have been in development for fifty years, and they have numbers. This puts them in a good position to benefit from Euroskepticism, and that's been evident from some of the election results of 2017.

Meanwhile in America, the far right has (thanks to the intellectual bankruptcy of the alt-right and the neo-nazis) more numbers, but stale ideas. They also have terrified their opponents into action, not the least because the far right has gone so far as to murder their opponents. This has brought them a lot of negative media attention. The window of time in which it was socially acceptable to be part of the American far right has come and gone. On the other hand, it has never been socially unacceptable in the bohemian-bourgeoisie circles that dominate our culture to be socialist. And so, In reaction to the shock of the American far right, and in reaction to the Trump agenda, many on the center left have started to give socialism another look.

I think this next year will see the socialist left continue to grow in numbers, both in America and in Europe. Unfortunately, I do not see that they have developed the engaging ideas that can keep the movement going, except as a reaction against the far right. Nonetheless, for the next few years, the numbers of the socialist left will continue to grow.

If any Democratic Socialists are reading this, I would encourage them to at least try to engage with de Benoist. They don't need to agree with him --- heavens forfend! --- but they do need to learn how to elevate their thinking to his level. They would also do well to remember Edward Witten's critique of the New Left from fifty years ago, and to address the flaws he found.

A critic might ask whether someone who started out a socialist, and engaged with (or was capable of engaging with) de Benoist might no longer be a socialist. This is a fair question, and in truth, I think they would not be socialist if they could grasp de Benoist. I'm not so much concerned with whether socialists can save socialism, but whether they can come up with an alternative to neoliberalism and globalism that is something other than ethnocentrism.

The clock is ticking.

The Chicago Cubs will, once more, return to postseason baseball.

The team that won the Cubs' first World Series since 1908 is still young, and still mostly intact. As an added bonus, they brought their most senior member back as a coach. This year they made it to the NLDS. I think they will repeat in 2018.

Clemson will win the College Football Bowl Series Championship.

I used to be a big SEC fan. I have since come to the conclusion that the SEC is overrated. In particular, Alabama, who lost their final SEC game to Auburn, has no business being in this championship series. I think Clemson is going to ROFLstomp Alabama. Meanwhile, Oklahoma is paired against the other SEC team, Georgia. Georgia has more business being there than Alabama does, but Oklahoma is still the stronger team from the stronger conference.

That means that the championship game will be Oklahoma v. Clemson. In a match-up between number one and number two, the smart money is on number one.

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2017 Predictions Scorecard

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 16:35:26 GMT

A little more than a year ago, I presented my predictions for 2017. Unlike other predictors, I keep score of how I did at the end of each year, as a way to hold myself accountable. So, how did I do this year? Not so well, in fact.

My predictions were:

There will be a war in Eastern Europe.

The Far Right will win in the Netherlands, but not in Germany or France, despite substantial gains.

Democrats will win Governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey.

Richard Spencer will not be elected to Congress.

The economy will slow down, with tech feeling it the worst.

The State of California will sue to keep recreational marijuana legal.

The Chicago Cubs will return to the postseason.

Alabama will win the national college football championship.

Here's how I did on each of these:

There will be a war in Eastern Europe. This did not happen in 2017, but the conditions,
which I described in my 2017 predictions post, still remain. This is a prediction I will carry over into next year.

The Far Right will win in the Netherlands, but not in Germany or France, despite substantial gains. The Far Right PVV did not win in the Netherlands, but did come in second place, and gained enough seats in the European Parliament to form a far-right caucus along with eight other European nationalists. Le Pen lost in France to a centrist alliance led by Marcon. Perhaps the European far right's greatest victory was in Germany, where AfD, although by no means the majority, managed to get just enough seats to make forming a new government impossible. De-facto leadership of the Free World now lies with France.

Democrats will win Governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey. New Jersey was an easy call. Virginia was a harder one, but as it turns out, the Virginia Democrats got their acts together, and not only retained the Governor's seat, but nearly wrested control of the House of Delegates from the GOP.

Richard Spencer will not be elected to Congress. This prediction was made at a time when Spencer wanted to make a bid for Ryan Zinke's seat in the House. Spencer ended up not running, quite possibly because punching Nazis became a thing in January.

The economy will slow down, with tech feeling it the worst. In fact, while the economy did slow down somewhat, tech had a boom year.

The State of California will sue to keep recreational marijuana legal. My presumption here was that the Trump administration would go after low-hanging fruit --- legal marijuana --- before tackling bigger topics like immigration. In fact, they went after immigrants first, and in doing so nearly led the nation to a full-blown melt-down.

The Chicago Cubs will return to the postseason. The Cubs made it to the postseason, and to the NLDS. They did not make it farther.

Alabama will win the national college football championship. In fact, they lost to Clemson,
35-31.

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News and Comment for Sept 23, 2017

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 04:07:06 GMT

The most important thing to know today: ACA repeal is not over, not by a long shot. Andy Slavitt lays it out for us here.

Facebook is blaming their AI for the fact that you can targets ads to "Jew Haters" on their platform.. On the one hand, between this and other betrayals of privacy, there is a good case for abandoning Facebook entirely. On the other, there is a case that Facebook's problems are just the tip of the iceberg. Remember Total Information Awareness? Do you think that's gone away? Or, on the other hand, do you think that maybe someone at Homeland Security is doing exactly the same analysis that Facebook is, but geared towards rooting out enemies of the state instead of selling advertising?

Lots of people among my Facebook friends and anti-war buddies supported Trump on the grounds that he would be better for brown people overseas (even if worse for brown people in the United States)
than Clinton. This proposition looks silly yet again as Trump tries to do away with Obama-era restrictions on drone strikes.

Today's award for Best Troll goes to Slashdot user phantomfive for this piece about weakly vs. strongly typed languages, wherein he adds a parting shot, "Does this make you want to avoid Python?" Why is this trolling, you ask? Because the definition of strongly typed is ambiguous and often misunderstood. Python, for example, is considered a strongly typed language, albeit a dynamic one. The resulting thread would make my programming languages professors want to drink to forget.

If you're going to the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in a few weeks, you should know that Liv Rainey-Smith will have screenprints of Shub-Niggurath, Cthulhu, and Krampus for sale. These are not woodblock print originals, but screen prints on wood veneer!

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Introducing WikiTRIBUNE

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 21:21:29 GMT

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching WikiTRIBUNE, a new site of actual journalism designed to fight fake news. Quoting CNN:

The site will publish news stories written by professional journalists. But in a page borrowed from Wikipedia, internet users will be able to propose factual corrections and additions. The changes will be reviewed by volunteer fact checkers.

Which of course leads to a problem: what if a swarm of people who want to promote an alternative theory, not supported by the facts, takes over the discussion on WikiTribune?

Of course, Slashdot has a discussion.

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Tuesday Miscellany!

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 16:21:44 GMT

Medium doesn't work with my workflow, so it's back to ~~LiveJournal~~Dreamwidth for me. Here we go kids!

How, oh how, will Donald Trump lift up his pathetic approval ratings in time for the 2018 elections? How about a war with North Korea? It worked for W, didn't it?

Trump's latest tactic to getting his stupid wall is apparently to back off on his demand for a wall as part of the budget negotiations. Which tells me that he's more interested in the wall as an act of political theater, to dangle in front of his supporters, than as an actual policy.

Repeal-and-replace 2.0 looks like the same unpopular shit-show as Repeal-and-replace 1.0. One wonders when the GOP will embrace the most popular repeal-and-replace option, that being single payer.

In a bit of good news, 45's DOJ is still fighting for the Obamacare contraception mandate. Don't be fooled by this; eventually white nationalism and religious conservatism need to agree here, as they both eventually seek to make women subordinate. Meanwhile, blue states are working to make contraception easier to access.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Which is why Chobani is suing Alex Jones of Infowars, for slander. Jones, who as much as admits his schtick is just an act, is of course blaming George Soros.

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Max Baucus is gone!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:45:02 GMT

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) is retiring.

What does this mean? Well:

The Good - This self-centered prick did more than anyone else to gut the most progressive elements out of Obamacare. He did this, in no small part, by dragging his feet as chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Now that he's out, the chair goes to Ron Wyden (D-OR), who's more in the center of his caucus where Baucus is more to the right.

The Bad - Montana is still a red state. Jon Tester won both his Senate elections by razor-thin margins. Markos Moulistas is drooling over the possibility that Governor Schweitzer will enter the race and hold that seat in 2014. I'm skeptical that he'll run, especially if Rehberg polls as strongly now as he did in 2011-2012 before Todd Akin opened his big mouth.

The Ugly - If Schweitzer doesn't run, that puts the Senate one step closer to Republican control in 2014.

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#Guns: tactical blunder by Feinstein et al sink gun control for the near term.

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:25:25 GMT

So, the Senate voted today on a number of amendments to an anti-gun bill, and the end result was a string of failures that left the gun rights side elated and the gun control side fuming mad. It seems that in just a few weeks we've gone from universal background checks, to limited background checks, to jack shit.

Ultimately what we saw today was the end result of a months long battle of political wills. The gun control side had their members fully engaged but not fully organized. The gun rights side had their people fully engaged, and organized. And, despite the gun control side having better PR, the gun rights side had the better tactics this round. By choosing to fight on the issue of background checks - which should have been common ground - they made an assault weapons and magazine ban out of reach for the foreseeable future. They they made even background checks politically unpalatable. As such, not only has nothing happened, but even getting legislation that should have passed to establish universal background checks is going to take a major effort of years.

The gun control side made two major tactical blunders early in this fight.

First, they came in immediately with heated rhetoric in order to alienate people from the NRA. This had basically no effect on the gun control side, which was already engaged, but it had plenty of effect on the gun rights side, which went from demoralized and confused in December to pissed off and engaged by February.

Second, the gun control side - unwittingly - created a major example of how gun control legislation could go wrong, by passing draconian measures in New York State. Even though similar laws were never on the table, let alone feasible, on a Federal level, the notion that New York State could be repeated everywhere became a potent rallying cry.

So, that's where we're at. But, as the President, points out, this is just round one. The GOP controls the House and most of the Governors' mansions, but the Democrats probably have the White House until 2024. We've seen what the Senate can do - basically nothing. Right now, the gun control side has a better PR effort, but the gun rights side has more intensity.

In the short run, gun control is done on a federal level. There are still state measures under discussion, but we're going to see more gun rights measures pass than gun control measures. In the mid run - over the next ten years - we'll probably see universal background checks and minimum requirements for concealed carry licenses. In the long run, the tendency is toward erosion of Second Amendment rights, the last decade notwithstanding, and I think we can expect that trend to continue.

In any case, my prediction, that an assault weapons ban would not pass, has come to fruition.

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Thursday Miscellany!!! | #Korea #Russia #Google #Homeopathy #Cubs #Linux

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:20:34 GMT

When the United States sends two nuclear bombers from Nebraska to Korea and back for a training exercise, you can be sure that this was not simply a training exercise. This was, in fact, textbook battleship diplomacy. So, in fact, is Russia's sudden exercise in the Black Sea.

Google is pledging not to sue free software or open source projects for infringing on some of their patents. Which sounds great until you remember that IBMvdid the same thing in 2005.

Teach your kids chemistry and debunk homeopathic snake oil at the same time, here.

Forbes lists the Chicago Cubs as the most profitable team in baseball. Which, ultimately, means that there's not much incentive for them to actually win games. Unfortunately, that's a more potent dynamic than any number of goat curses and reverses.

A visual history of Linux user experiences, here. Notably missing: anything Android.

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Thomas Friedman: wait until after I retire to judge #Iraq war

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:16:56 GMT

Remember how Thomas Friedman helped lie us into the Iraq war? Who could forget?

Mr. Friedman has a new theory about the Iraq war. According to him, it's too early to judge what a fiasco the Iraq war was. In fact, according to Friedman, we should wait 20 years (or 40 Friedman units) to judge the war.

I would argue, on the contrary and considering how consistently wrong he and the other neocons have been about Iraq, that the smart thing to do is to go ahead and judge it - and him - right now.

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This week in completely fucking stupid | @grahamblog #syria

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:36:49 GMT

Sen. Lindsey Graham wants boots on the ground in Syria.

You know, because the good guys in the Syrian Civil War are so easy to spot.

And because invading a Middle Eastern nation has gone so well for us recently.

In fact, this idea is so stupid that it makes me think that it makes a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger-Madoff effect, where the incompetent are so incompetent that they don't realize how incompetent they are, and so are able to exude enough confidence to be taken seriously. It would certainly explain a lot that's happened since the 21st Century began.

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On a certain anniversary | #Iraq

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:45:27 GMT

Not sure whether to feel smug that history has proven me and other critics of the Iraq war right....

...or pissed that The Drunk and his overeducated idiot cohorts managed so blithely to fuck up so many people's lives.

In fact, there's still the none-too-insignificant problem that nobody in DC or the mainstream media wants to talk about how our foreign policy led to 9/11 in the first place....

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Monday Miscellany!

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:33:18 GMT

The Syrian Civil War is a mess and there are no good guys, part one, here. This comes directly from an activist on the ground in Aleppo.

Feinstein's atrocious ban on magazine-fed semiautomatic longarms is strangled in the crib.

HRC embraced gay marriage, media swoons, anyone paying attention yawns. This would have been significant news a year ago. It isn't now.

Geekiest wedding ever.

NDD on the Cyprus crisis

Nate Silver's NCAA Men's Basketball Bracket. Go ahead. Bet against it. You know you want to.

"What you are actually doing is perpetuating rape culture by advancing the idea that a woman is only valuable in so much as she is loved or valued by a man." - More on how a common anti-rape trope is not helpful, here.

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The Mark Kelly Story, Deconstructed | #guns

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:21:06 GMT

So, we know the story about freshly minted gun control advocate Mark Kelly buying an AR-15, right? He was on his way to pick up a .45 when he saw a used AR-15 in the store. He picked up the rifle on the spot to turn it back in to the Tuscon AZ PD.

Turns out it's mostly bullshit.

And while I don't trust Brietbart, they are, for once, right about Arizona requiring police departments to re-sell guns turned over to them.

I think what's really going on is that Mark Kelly wanted an AR-15 and saw a cheap one. So he bought it. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, the only thing wrong with what he did is that it shot a hole in the narrative of the gun control crowd.

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The top 1% got 121% (!) of the gains from the recovery. | #ows

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:35:15 GMT

So...how did the top 1% do after the 2008 crisis? Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley lays it out for us:

From 2009 to 2011, average real income per family grew modestly by 1.7% (Table 1) but the gains were very uneven. Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Hence, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery. From 2009 to 2010, top 1% grew fast and then stagnated from 2010 to 2011. Bottom 99% stagnated both from 2009 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2011.

Wait...what was that again?

Top 1% incomes grew by 11.2% while bottom 99% incomes shrunk by 0.4%. Hence, the top 1% captured 121% of the income gains..

Now, because the bottom 99% number is so close to zero, we would be well to heed Saez's warning:

The exact percentage 121% is sensitive to measurement error, especially the growth in the total number of families from 2009 to 2011, estimated from the Current Population Survey.
However, the conclusion that most of the gains from economic growth was captured by the top 1% is not in doubt.

Surely, we're feeling this in our lives right now. Why aren't people more pissed about this?

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Sunday Miscellany!

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:43:21 GMT

Patrick Stewart is starting a One Million Men campaign of peer pressure to end (more realistically: substantially reduce) violence against women. Count me in.

There's a story circulating that Mark Kelly was at a gun store to buy a .45, and there he saw a used AR-15, bought it, and is going to turn it over to the police, thus doing in private what he wishes the state would do for him. I have to wonder about this story. AR-15s are very hard to find right now, and this guy happens upon one as he's going about his business?

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) is asking NASCAR to drop NRA sponsorship of the NRA 500 race in Texas. I fully expect NASCAR's response to be brief, impolite, and to the point.

I signed this White House petition to eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com on Rand Paul's Filibuster

SC has prints from Arcanum Bestiarum for sale at her Etsy shop. Click here for the goods. Also, feel free to email her if you want a specific print that's not listed.

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Carl Levin Retires | #MISEN

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:11:24 GMT

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) announced his
retirement today:

Levin, 78, released a statement Thursday afternoon saying
he made the decisions believing "I can best serve my state and my
nation by concentrating in the next two years on the challenging
issues before us … in other words, by doing my job without the
distraction of campaigning for re-election."

This seat would have been one of the safest Democratic seats in the
2014 elections. Now it's a scramble to see who might replace Levin,
and I wouldn't make any assumptions.

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Hey #KPOJ, how are your ratings doing? #PDX

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:02:05 GMT

Willie
Week has the latest on KPOJ's ratings freefall after switching
from liberal talk to sports:

Anchored by Carl Wolfson and his morning show, KPOJ was
the 22nd-ranked radio station in the 48-station Portland market. Over
its last 14 months, the station averaged a 0.8 share of the Portland
radio market, meaning that it was reaching 8 of every 1,000 people
over the age of 6 in the market.

In the four months since the switch to sports, the ratings at Fox
Sports Radio KPOJ haveshrunk to nearly microscopic size.

In January, KPOJ fell to an 0.1 share in Arbitron ratings, or 12
percent of the audience KPOJ had with Wolfson.

In other words, KPOJ dropped from a not great 1 share to a practically
nonexistent 0 share.

I understand why Clear Channel made this move. They want Oregon State
baseball and football games on their stations, they think liberal talk
was toxic to their brand, and paying Wolfson to pull in a one share
was hardly a bargain. It still doesn't change a simple fact: AM 620
used to be profitable, and right now I don't see how it justifies its
own electric bills. They'd be better off letting someone else use the
tower.

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Miguel de Icaza (@migueldeicaza) on Macs

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:53:08 GMT

Quoth Miguel de Icaza, an open source hero from the 1990s and 2000s:

While I had Macs at Novell (to support Mono on MacOS), it would take a couple of years before I used a Mac regularly. In some vacation to Brazil around 2008 or so, I decided to only take the Mac for the trip and learn to live with the OS as a user, not just as a developer.

Computing-wise that three week vacation turned out to be very relaxing. Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spend three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered.

This matches my own experience. I dislike the feeling of vendor lock-in that comes with using a MacBook Pro, and I disagree with Miguel on WiFi "just working" - it fails on my MBP more often than I'd like. I also don't like the expense. But mostly, the MBP has been Desktop UNIX that Just Works, which is pretty much what I paid for. I can even run EVE Online easily on my MBP, which puts it light years ahead of any Linux desktop.

Linux on a server is pretty much a slam dunk; just install Debian and let it ride. But for a desktop, I definitely prefer Mac OSX. Here's hoping that Apple doesn't destroy it....

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Monday Miscellany!

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:57:12 GMT

Because I have so many tidbits and not enough for a coherent rant. Anyway....

Arcanum Bestiarum, the book my wife illustrated, is now shipping! You can still order a copy here. The deluxe edition is apparently shipping later this month; all the better because it's sold out. Since the book is out, my wife is now selling prints from the book, starting with the Bee.

Guess what the main topic of discussion was at last weekend's AIPAC conference. No, seriously, guess. You'll never guess! Wow, you're right, it's how to get Obama to start a war with Iran! How'd you guess?

Swiss voters have, in effect, passed a maximum wage. Amen.

The White House is pushing for a reversal on an FCC ban on cell phone unlocking, in response to a petition on their website. Whether the FCC reverses the ban is another matter.

Could Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle have a loophole? Apparently it does, if you know how to cheat on your measurements. Cool stuff!

I'm ambivalent about the Columbia River Crossing, but shit like faking the numbers just before an important vote disturbs me. (In fairness, you can find information about proposed CRC alternatives here, with CRC's answers to some of them here.)

Via Bruce Schneier comes word of scammers targeting porn customers in New Zealand. It's brilliant if you think about it.

Have you ever wondered how much ammo you can check in your luggage?

The iPod made MP3 players mainstream; the iPhone made smart phones mainstream. Could the iWatch make "smart watches" mainstream? (Yes, there is the Sony Smart Watch that basically works as a discrete interface to your Android phone via bluetooth. But I'm hoping for more, you know?)

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In Re Robin Kelly | #NRA #CitizensUnited

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:21:25 GMT

Am I the only one who thinks that Robin
Kelly's special election has much less to do with sending a message to
the NRA than it does with the unparalleled power of SuperPACs?

Isn't that actually, you know, really scary?

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