A Dangerous, Dangerous Man

In all seriousness, I think that Giuliani may be nuts. Here are some of his thoughts on waterboarding as torture:

It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I’ve learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don’t always describe it accurately.

Um, what changes to the description would make it ok for you, Rudy? Only a little water? And can you please describe for us the "liberal media"? Does the "conservative media" have a different definition of waterboarding? Can we please hear that definition?

So I think America should never be for torture. America should be against torture. It violates the Geneva Convention. Certainly when we’re dealing with armed combatants, we shouldn’t get near anything like that. There is a distinction, sometimes, when you’re dealing with terrorists. You may have to use means that are a little tougher.

Um, why would you have to be tougher with a terrorist? What is it about terrorists that require them to be treated with greater toughness? Why would that greater toughness work with terrorists but not armed combatants? If it really is important to get the information, wouldn't you use the same tactics regardless of category? Why reserve your most effective (i.e. tough) methods just for terrorists?

And I see, when the Democrats are talking about torture, they’re not just talking about even this definition of waterboarding, which again, if you look at the liberal media and you look at the way they describe it, you could say it was torture and you shouldn’t do it. But they talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly.

This nonsense drove me crazy when Rumsfeld said it (I stand all day, why can't prisoners stand? It's not torture if I do it myself), and it drives me nuts here too. Rudy, your sleep deprivation is VOLUNTARY and, I'd be willing to bet, you are not up for 24 hours at at stretch. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that when you do sleep, you sleep in a pretty nice bed. Wait, we KNOW that you do, when you are not busy staying awake on Gulfstreams. To speak about it in the way that you do is to (purposefully) obscure what's really going on. Just as the people forced to stand for days on end eventually had their legs burst out in sores, keeping people up for days and interrupting their sleep cycles can be vicious and psychologically devastating. It makes a big difference if you can sit down when you feel like it and sleep when you feel like it.

The entire piece is worth reading simply to discover for yourselves how crazy and dangerous Giuliani is. He is a madman.

Book Review

Finished A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin and thought it was OK.

Did you all know that Alan Turing was arrested in Britain for homosexual acts and chemically castrated? And that he committed suicide? I didn't. Did you know that Kurt Godel was so paranoid towards the end of his life that he didn't eat and died of starvation in 1978? I didn't.

Levin is a physicist at Columbia and does an interesting job of presenting a short biographical fiction of these two men - basically she combines actual events and real conversations with some fictional settings to paint a picture of the lives of both of these men over a period of about 50 years. It's an interesting approach and interesting too that she chose Turing and Godel since they had very different world views (Turing believed that humans were essentially computing machines, while Godel was famous for proving that there are some things in mathematics that we can't prove - thus can't be computed and we are more than just computing machines).

3/5 stars from me.

California Fires

This put it into perspective for me.

San Clemente to the Mexican border is on fire.

Some thoughts on Presidential Powers

I don't believe the president, any president be it Bush, or Clinton, or the goddamn Dalai Lama, should have unchecked or unfettered powers. One of the many, many issues I have with the Bush administration is the aggressive expansion of executive power and how hard it is going to be to put the genie back in the bottle once it's out. Because out, it's a hard thing to surrender.

I think that the only way it could be done is if there is some sort of "Truth Commission" after the elections in 2008 where Congress conducts real investigations with real penalties for what's happened over the past 6 years. Of course, it will never happen.

I'm afraid that the Dems are slowing down their pursuit of Bush et. al. because they feel that it may be their turn in 2008 and why should they take those tools away when it will be their guy/girl who gets to weild them? Like the slow walking of the Gonzalez investigations (where a number of Dems were in no hurry to wrap them up because they believed that the great press and the embarrassing issues were a winner - they'd STILL be investigating without sanction if Gonzalez hadn't up and quit), I fear that they think these could be winning tools once they control all 3 branches of government. Which is, of course, silly. The Republican noise machine, sputtering somewhat but still effective, would never allow a Democratic president to get away with half of what the Bushies have gotten away with (and I'd agree with them). Dems could slow walk these investigations too in hopes of retaining the powers only to be bashed on the head with those powers. It is right in principle and right in politics to move aggressively to investigate an administration out of control.

Hillary is a prime example I can point to to explain why I'm so down on the Dems these days. She has recently said that she would review presidential powers if she was elected president and would consider giving some of those up. That's a good thing and the issue of presidential power is one that I've been struggling with for a while. Then, she turns around and issues a wishy-washy response on what she would do about FISA. It doesn't get much more clear than FISA. Are you willing to grant blanket immunity to companies without even knowing what they've done, when we're pretty sure that they illegally aiding the government in spying on us, or are you not? Are you interested in the rule of law, or are you not? And sadly, I can't say that Dems these days are 100% behind the rule of law. And that is profoundly disappointing.


There are some bright spots - Waxman for instance - but looking at the overall picture, I'm not at all encouraged.

WHAT?!!?

Wow, even I never thought that this would happen. It's true, he's willing to do and say ANYTHING to get the nomination:

Sounds like a baseball flip-flop. Rudy Giuliani, a lifelong New York Yankees fan, said Tuesday he's pulling for their most hated rivals, the Boston Red Sox, to win the World Series over the Colorado Rockies. "I'm rooting for the Red Sox," the Republican presidential contender said in response to a question, sparking applause at the Boston restaurant where he was picking up a local endorsement.

Jesus, the man knows no limits.

Beer

My favorite fall beer turned out to be the Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale. My least favorite? Surprisingly it was the Gritty's Halloween - even on cask I was not impressed. DFH Punk was good, Shipyard Pumpkinhead, Geary's Autumn, Smuttynose Pumpkin all worth a try.

Starting to get tired of the pumpkins though (happens every year), ready for the next season.

Markets?

Monday the market went up. It's up again right now. Apparently and obviously I know nothing about the market. I do wonder though how people are going to keep spending and what happens once people internalize the fact that housing is in real trouble.

Blast from the Past

Buh-bye:

Robert Chambers Jr., the so-called “Preppy Killer,” who strangled a young woman in Central Park in the 1980s, was arrested in Manhattan last night on charges of selling cocaine from his east midtown apartment, the police said.

[...]

According to narcotics detectives, Mr. Chambers and Ms. Kovell had been placed under investigation about five months ago after neighbors complained of heavy traffic to and from the apartment at all hours of the night. In that time, particularly over the summer, undercover detectives visited the apartment and made several purchases of powdered cocaine, the police said. They said that some of those sales were for multiple grams of cocaine at one time, rising to the level of Class A felonies that carry potential sentences of up to 30 years in prison.

Uh-Oh

Market down big today, but fasten your seatbelts for Monday:

Rumors were flying during the last hour of trading of problems at Merrill and Bear. The Merrill rumor was of a special board meeting this weekend with possible additional writedowns - we will see.

Oh boy.

OK, circle up, circle up...

And FIRE!

Dodd is threatening to filibuster the FISA bill, Armenian genocide declaration dies on the floor, opinions all over the place on Mukasey.

Quite the circular firing squad Dems have got going on these days.

Sigh

What a bunch of cowards.

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Are they willing to fight for anything? No wonder they are so easily painted as weak on defense, they don't appear to be willing to fight hard for anything. Telecom blanket immunity before we know what went on? Sure, no problem. Mukasey's confirmation hearings happening before we get anything from DOJ? Sure, why not. Compromise on SCHIP? What the hell, what have we got to lose?

At some point they are going to have to realize that they are considered shoo-ins in 2008 because people think that they are actually going to DO something, to change things. If they don't show any inclination to change things, I'm not sure how excited everyone is going to be. You actually have to be different from the other party to avoid the criticism that all politicians are the same.

Housing

Good stuff here. Still much more to come in the housing correction.

Book Reviews

I finished The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I fucking hated it. Too bad too, because I thought that the premise was interesting: we underestimate both the probability of rare events (black swans) and their impact. The errors are due principally to a misunderstanding of randomness, or rather a miscategorization of random events.

Taleb, however, couldn't get his fucking ego out of the way long enough to fully talk about either, focusing instead on how stupid everyone else in the world is and on how much money he made during the stock market crash of 1987. "F*** you money" he calls it, which annoys the fuck out of me. If you are writing your own goddamn book and you want to say , "Fuck you money" then say "Fuck you money". Let the NY Times edit it to "F*** you money". Whatever.

I have a cold today and am grumpy, but even if I were on top of the world, I still wouldn't give this book more than 1/5 stars.

I also finished Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo and wasn't too fond of that one either. It read like a movie or a mini-series and I wouldn't be surprised to find it made into either. The story was compelling (relief work in Sudan), but the characters were poorly developed and inconsistent, to the point where they interfered rather than contributed to the story. Then again, this book won the Pulitzer Prize so what the hell do I know. 2/5 stars from me.

Reading A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, well see if I can turn my streak around.

Random Observations

UPDATE: I corrected this post.

Two observations struck my funny bone lately. The first one was in the men's room of a local restaurant. Following the trend of many bars/restaurants lately this one has a chalkboard up to allow patrons to write on the walls without actually defacing the bathroom. This one is a particularly big chalkboard and written waaaay up at the top was the following:

"I peed on the chalk"

Juvenile? Sure, but it made me laugh out loud.

Second observation was on a bumper sticker in a parking lot:

"Sorry I missed church, I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian"

Obviously, I have nothing today.

Uh-oh

In some work I do for my day job, one of the things I looked at recently was California's GDP vs. the US GDP over time. Two trends emerged: (1) CA GDP is more volatile than the US GDP (2) CA typically leads the country in and out of recessions. With that, this can't be a good sign:

Based on sales tax revenue, it now appears that the California economy is in recession.

I've been saying for a while that the economy is going into the shitter, CA is just getting there first.

Larry Yun, COME ON DOWN!

You're hacktacular!

Lawrence Yun, NAR senior economist, notes that widening credit availability will help turn around home sales. “Conforming loans are abundantly available at historically favorable mortgage rates. Pricing has steadily improved on jumbo mortgages since the August credit crunch, and FHA loans are replacing subprime mortgages,” he said.

And a surge of troops will help people who hate each other work together, and cutting taxes always increases revenues, yadda, yadda, yadda. YOU'VE GOT TO BELIEVE, PEOPLE!

A little perspective:

Data released over the past few weeks suggest a further weakening of the housing market, exacerbated by the breakdown in the subprime and prime jumbo mortgage markets. Delinquencies among subprime loans are increasing by more than expected, home sales continue to fall, unsold inventories remain near all-time highs, national house prices are falling, and housing starts have dropped to the lowest levels recorded since 1995. Amid these disruptions in the mortgage and housing market, lenders reported a lack of investor demand for high credit quality jumbo mortgages and other mortgages not eligible for agency purchase. This dislocation pushed the cost of prime jumbo financing significantly higher relative to rates on conforming loans... This spread has moderated somewhat over the past couple of weeks, however, and fell below 80 basis points in late September, suggesting some modest improvement in the market conditions for prime loans with balances above the conforming loan limit. Even so, the spread remains historically wide -- suggesting that the prime jumbo market remains in distress.

Yun is living in his own world if he thinks that (1) housing has bottomed (2) 2008 is going to be any better.

So now what?

From the Washington Post:

Iraqi leaders argue that sectarian animosity is entrenched in the structure of their government. Instead of reconciliation, they now stress alternative and perhaps more attainable goals: streamlining the government bureaucracy, placing experienced technocrats in positions of authority and improving the dismal record of providing basic services."I don't think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such," said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd. "To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power."

So the surge was undertaken to provide stability so that the Iraqis could forge some political reconciliation. Did someone actually ask the Iraqis about it? Wait, don't answer that. So, what do we do now that every stated reason for our troops to be in Iraq are no longer operable? At what point can we start to say that US soldiers are dying for no reason? At what point does "support the troops" come to mean "get them out of the meat grinder"?

It's got to stop sometime

And when it does, it's going to be a doozy:

Outstanding U.S. consumer debt rose at an annual rate of 5.9% in August, pushed higher mostly by a hefty gain in credit-card debt, the Federal Reserve reported Friday...Revolving debt such as credit cards was the biggest driver behind the overall rise in August, the data show. That debt climbed by 8.1% in August, or by $6.1 billion.

I talked about this back in July. With no home equity to pull out of their houses and no bankruptcy protection to shed credit card bills, people are in for a world of hurt. Looking forward to the Christmas season, people have essentially two choices - plunging further into credit card debt and committing financial suicide or restraining their spending and killing retailers. Smart money's on the former.

Boy, Cycling Sure is a Dirty Sport

Ladies and gentlemen, your winner of the Women's 100 meter dash in the 2000 Sydney Olympics... Marion Jones! Ekaterini Thanou! Um..

For the 2004 Summer Olympics, Thanou was one of the main hopes of the home crowd for winning an athletics medal. However, on the day prior to the opening ceremony, Thanou and her training partner Konstantinos Kenteris failed to attend a drugs test, and later the same night were hospitalised, claiming they had both been injured in a motorcycle accident. In the ensuing doping scandal, Kenteris and Thanou announced their withdrawal from the Games on August 18, after a hearing before the Disciplinary Commission of the IOC. An official Greek investigation into their alleged accident, ruled that it had been staged. Their coach Christos Tsekos was also suspended and was later caught with large amounts of steroids and other drugs in his possession.

Damn it! Scratch Thanou! Tanya Lawrence? Lawrence, anything? No? Good! For now, your 2000 Women's 100 Meter Dash champion, Jamaican Tanya Lawrence. WAIT, SHE'S FREAKIN' JAMAICAN? Oh Christ...

Meanings and Meaninglessness

“We do not torture.”

At what point do those words lose their meaning? At what point can we say that those words are, in fact, incomprehensible? And what does it mean when we’ve reached that point?

With the ways that this administration has parsed, dissembled, and outright lied about this topic I don’t feel that anyone can say, with any authority, that they know what the words, “We do not torture” mean anymore.

I don’t know what to do about that.

I bow to professional writers

Glenn Greenwald. Go read the whole thing.

And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that. Quite the contrary, with regard to most of the revelations of lawbreaking and abuse, our political elite almost in unison has declared that such behavior is understandable, if not justifiable. And our elected representatives have chosen to remain largely in the dark about what was done and, when forced by court rulings or media revelations to act at all, they have endorsed and legalized this behavior -- not investigated, outlawed or punished it.

A ruling by the Supreme Court in Hamdan that the President's interrogation and detention policies violated the law led Congress to enact the Military Commissions Act to legalize those policies. Revelations that the President and telecom companies were breaking our surveillance laws led to the legalization of much of that program and will soon lead to amnesty for the lawbreakers. With regard to all of the most severe acts of illegality, no criminal prosecutions have been commenced and no truly meaningful Congressional investigations have been pursued.

[...]

We always possess the choice -- still -- to take a stand for the rule of law and our basic national values, but with every new day that we choose not to, those Bush policies become increasingly normalized, increasingly the symbol not only of "Bushism" but of America.

As I suggested, go read the whole thing.

On a different front

This is pretty cool.

Thoughts

Calmed down a bit. Here are my thoughts.

I was elated in November when the Democrats won both the House and the Senate. Finally, we could begin to have some oversight! We could begin to stop the damage being done to America on a daily basis by an out-of-control administration! We could begin to hold people accountable! That's gone, all gone now.

It's been almost a year and what exactly has changed? Gonzalez is gone. Big deal, we're still torturing people, still disappearing people. We're still politicizing the law and all of our institutions. FISA's been gutted and we're on the verge of granting retroactive immunity to telecoms who cooperated with the government. We still have no idea how often or how deeply our government is spying on us. We're still in Iraq and it looks like we'll be there forever. We still don't know why we invaded, don't know where the intelligence went wrong, don't know how many Iraqis we're killing, don't know how much we're paying mercenary firms like Blackwater, don't know what types of provocations we're launching at Iran. We don't know how our soldiers are outfitted and equipped, don't know what the toll on them and their families is, don't know if their care is improving. We still don't know where Osama is and we don't seem to care.

SCHIP got passed and vetoed. Dems need about 16 votes to override which they won't get - they haven't got the balls to get the votes.

I am truly disgusted right now. I thought Dems were better than this. I was wrong.

Democrats are Pussies

Started a longer post, but I'm too disgusted right now to write it.

Source of my frustration.

Friedman

Tom Friedman has a very odd Op-Ed in today's NY Times. In many ways, it is a classic Tom Friedman piece (sounds worldly, says nothing). For instance, it says this early on:

Look, I get pork-barrel politics. I understand senators from oil states protecting the windfall profits of oil companies. Ditto for farm subsidies. It’s an old story: Protect my winnings, and I’ll reward you with campaign contributions. I get it. I get it.

Followed by this:

What I don’t get is empty-barrel politics — Michigan lawmakers year after year shielding Detroit from pressure to innovate on higher mileage standards, even though Detroit’s failure to sell more energy-efficient vehicles has clearly contributed to its brush with bankruptcy, its loss of market share to Toyota and Honda — whose fleets beat all U.S. automakers in fuel economy in 2007 — and its loss of jobs. G.M. today has 73,000 working U.A.W. members, compared with 225,000 a decade ago. Last year, Toyota overtook G.M. as the world’s biggest automaker.

Which means he obviously doesn't get pork-barrel politics at all. American car manufacturers fight higher mileage standards for a number of reasons, the two primary reasons being that (1) American car manufacturers currently make much more money on low mileage cars and trucks and (2) Foreign manufacturers are much better at making high mileage cars and would, in the view of the American car manufacturers, increase their market share in the short and medium terms if higher mileage standards were mandated.

So, American car manufacturers contribute huge sums to ensure that fuel standards are not raised, and they are not raised. That is pork-barrel politics. What the politicians care about is raising enough money to get re-elected. They really don't care much what happens to Ford, GM, et al in 10 years if they themselves don't survive the next election cycle. It would be responsible for Congress to raise fuel standards, but if those in Michigan voted for it, they'd be operating outside of pork-barrel politics rather than inside it. Friedman doesn't get it, regardless of how many times he says he does.

Further on, he states:

But assisting Detroit’s suicide seems to be contagious. Everyone wants to get in on it, including Toyota. Toyota, which pioneered the industry-leading, 50-miles-per-gallon Prius hybrid, has joined with the Big Three U.S. automakers in lobbying against the tougher mileage standards in the Senate version of the draft energy bill.

Which does sound weird. Why would Toyota, a company that makes the Prius lobby against the new bill?

Is it because Toyota wants to slow down innovation in Detroit on more energy efficient vehicles, which Toyota already dominates, while also keeping mileage room to build giant pickup trucks, like the Toyota Tundra, at the gas-guzzler end of the U.S. market?

Oh, that makes perfect sense! They then can sell very profitable Tundras while at the same time continuing to dominate the fuel efficient markets. That makes sense to me. They are in a win-win situation then, regardless of the outcome. If they succeed in getting fuel standards stalled, they sell Tundras. If they fail, they sell Prius's. I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, but it sure seems to be logical and one that could be very successful. So, he doesn't get pork-barrel, but he gets the Toyota strategy. Bring it home, Thomas!

Sad. If Toyota were to take the lead on this front, it could enhance its own reputation and spur the whole U.S. auto industry to become more globally competitive. Hey, Toyota, if you are going to become the biggest U.S. automaker, could you at least bring to America your best practices — the ones that made you the world leader — instead of prolonging our worst practices? We have enough people helping us commit suicide.

Um, whaaaa? WTF? Toyota has a great reputation, I'm not sure it really needs any additional "enhancing" at the current time. People love Toyota (with the exception of Joe White at the Journal, of course). And why should Toyota help the U.S. auto industry become more globally competitive? I mean seriously, WTF? Is he really asking Toyota to let its competition back into the game? Really? And finally, isn't Toyota bringing their best practices here? After all, they aren't exactly camped out in Detroit talking to the UAW now, are they?

Sadly, this is increasingly a typical Friedman column - world-weary, preachy, ignorant babble.

And to preempt some comments, let me say that I don't necessarily like the fact that Toyota is selling Tundras, nor do I like the fact that they are campaigning against CAFE. I'm just saying that the strategy is (obviously) a winner.

2007, cycling's annus horribilis?

Paolo Bettini won the elite men's road race yesterday. Bettini had come under fire last week for not signing the full anti-doping charter (in a fit of self-importance he claimed that signing the charter would violate his human rights) and for allegedly being the person who supplied the testosterone cream to Patrik "Whoopsie" Sinkewitz (who crashed out of the TdF then came up positive).

Group this with Cancellara's repeat as world ITT champ, the rumors surrounding Contador, the clusterfuck that was Astana, the embarrassment of Rassmussen, the nightmare of the Giro, the Landis comedy...

In all, this was a pretty dim year cycling-wise. I wish I could say I had higher hopes for next year, but with Bruneel moving to DS of Astana (rumor is that he's bringing Trek with him), and the continued vow of omerta within the ranks, I'm not sure that next year will be any better.

It's enough to make one go watch clean sports like baseball or football.