North Texas Nonconformist

After reading about a particularly nasty and obnoxious bunch of people whose main leisure aim in life appears to be to harrass people going about their lawful business (just not the kind of lawful business these jerks think should be lawful)...I am striking Amarillo from my list of places to spend any time in. It is fairly clear from reading accounts of the harrassment that these jerks are perpetrating that local law enforcement has no real interest in reining them in. That being the case, I shall rein in my visiting and spending in and around Amarillo. I shall reconsider when the city of Amarillo comes to terms with the reality that intolerant bigots like these folks cannot be allowed to harrass people continually without negative consequences, and that the appearance of tolerance makes Amarillo look like it is tacitly supporting both the objectives and the tactics of this group.

I closed on a house in Duncanville TX on 26th February. Instead of buying a "project" I went for a house in excellent shape, in line with my approach to eliminating sources of anxiety in my life.
While ferreting out information about mortgages, during a rather silly spat with my mortgage lender over provision of financial information (they seemingly wanted to know almost the entire inner workings of my UK finances, which I considered to be intrusive), I came across "The Compleat Ubernerd" by the late Doris "Tanta" Dungey. A great source of everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage market, and in line with the old saying that you really don't want to know what goes into politics or sausage, there is a lot there you may wish you had not found out about...

...is a long-standing tolerance and acceptance of tax evasion.
As this article at Bloomberg explains:

Apostolis Rigas took his Opel sedan for a 220-euro ($354) service at a repair shop in northern Athens. When he asked for a receipt, the price jumped to 260 euros as his mechanic would have to declare the income and pay tax.
“There’s no taboo about this,” the 23-year-old student said in a Feb. 2 interview. “Tax evasion helps support families, but it’s not good for the Greek state.”

Leave it to this economist to spell out the elephant in the room:

“What distinguishes Greece from the rest of the pack is the extent of tax evasion,” said Michael Massourakis, chief economist at Athens-based Alpha Bank, the country’s third biggest-lender, in a Feb. 5 telephone interview. “If you don’t attack tax evasion you don’t have the moral authority to cut spending.”

My own personal anecdotal example: when I went on vacation in the Greek Islands, it did not take long before I noticed that many buildings seemed to be incomplete, with the base pillars for an additional floor disturbing a flat roof for the existing 1 or 2 floors. However, it was also clear that many of these buildings were decades old.
When I asked the owner of a bar we frequented on vacation about this, he explained that it was a tax dodge. Once a building is complete, a tax is levied on the building; however the tax is not levied if the building is not completed. House owners would therefore have an architect draw up plans for an additional floor on a house before the house was built. When the house was built they would have the builder put the base supports in place, so that they would be able to report the house as incomplete. Voila! No tax liability. My travels in Crete and Skiathos showed that this dodge is endemic; most buildings are "designed" to be perpetually incomplete.

The problem with cracking down on tax evasion is that it is a centuries-old tradition:

...public anger in Greece taps into a tradition of tax evasion-as-protest against nearly four centuries of rule by the Ottoman Turks that ended with Greek independence in 1829, Massourakis said. Even for those who pay, colluding with tax-dodging of taxi drivers and bar-owners is still considered a form of solidarity.
“If this was a friend of mine he wouldn’t give me a receipt and I wouldn’t ask,” Rigas said. “I’m not so sure they’ll succeed.”

The massive budget deficit that has pushed Greece to the edge of bankruptcy is challenging enough, but a bigger challenge is how to modify a national culture that sees tax evasion as normal and even honorable.

A nice summary of the various resentments that fuel authoritarian populism in the United States in 2010...

In which he explains, among other things, why the current GOP campaign of obstructionism on legislative ideas from the Obama administration is perfectly sensible from their perspective, even though logically it is a hypocritical pile of cack...
As Lakoff explains, discussing GOP hypocrisy over Medicare program spending:

The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

I disagree with Lakoff on his point somewhat. I know the GOP position is hypocritical and totally contradictory. Ditto the stunning GOP hypocrisy over stimulus funds, where politicians who voted against the whole stimulus package are now falling over themselves to obtain (and claim the credit for) stimulus funds directed to their districts or states. Anybody with more than half a functioning brain can deduce this. However, as has been pointed out by many other folks, politicians almost never score highly on their ability to be shamed when inconsistencies between their words and deeds are pointed out. Their normal response is to act like they never heard anybody pointing this out.
However, Lakoff once again returns to one of his favorite themes about framing:

Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe.

I always remember Frank Zappa's testimony in 1986 before the PMRC, where he essentially ignored all of the "protect the children" framing of the (incredibly stupid and dangerous) PMRC proposals to label music with what was considered "explicit content", and also added in his own significant dash of ridicule. He also debated proponents of PMRC on "Crossfire" and once again ignored their framing, instead substituting his own derived from the First Amendment. More recently Jesse Ventura destroyed proponents of torture by blowing past their "ticking bomb" scenarios and other frames and focussing on the blunt realities that (a) torture is illegal under US and international law, and (b) torture is useless for obtaining useful information. Once again, he simply steamrollered the frames of the questioners and substituted his own. This is the approach that progressives and libertarians need to be taking when facing the sort of pernicious framing that regressives and authoritarians engage in - a mixture of different framing and ridicule where the ideas and philosophies being expounded deserve it.

Remember the sternly-worded copyright notice that the NFL always shows during games? That notice is a BS try-on, when compared to current US copyright law. This article explains why the notices are, in part, legal bluster.
The situation is similar to "shrink wrap" software license agreements first used in the 1980's. I remember an incident at one of my employers in 1984 when we handed our in-house lawyer the Software License Agreement that Lotus Development Corporation wanted us to sign in order to use Lotus 1-2-3, and asked him to review it. Several days later, he handed it back to my manager. He had red-lined two thirds of the clauses in the document with comments in the margins such as "try-on", "rubbish", and "unenforceable". Asked by my manager whether we should sign it anyway, his response was "go ahead. Most of the clauses will be laughed out of court if there is ever any dispute". We signed and never had any issues. (In addition to being full of legal bluster, such a contract would probably be regarded in most jurisdiction as a contract of adhesion, making it very difficult to enforce in any case.)

One thing I am struggling with is how a supposedly smart and highly successful person like Carly Fiorina is managing to run a Senate campaign in California without engaging in some basic fact-checking. Does this woman have no sensible informed people working for her?

The latest bloviations by Gov. Rick Perry about secession may be gold ole' crowd-pleasing stuff, but there is the pesky matter of reality, which sooner or later intervenes when you think about this subject for more than about 90 seconds.
I tried discussing the idea of Texas secession with a secessionist about 10 years ago ago via email. It was a very frustrating conversation, because while he insisted that Texas had the right to secede, he could not point to any verbiage anywhere defining a process for secession from the Union. The U.S. Constitution lays down no process for secession. That's not to say it can't be done, but there is no Application To Secede that a state can fill out, take to Washington D.C. and get processed. The guy I was debating with claimed that Texas has the right to succeed under its accession agreement, but that agreement as far as I know says nothing about secession. After a while the debate fizzled out as I realized that we lived in different universes.
My understanding is that talk in the 1990's by the Partie Quebecois concerning secession for Quebec was stopped quite quickly when the President of Canada at the time, Brian Mulroney, informed the PQ that if Quebec wanted to secede, that they would also have to assume their pro rata share of the Canadian National Debt. That sort of reality check tends to quieten rooms in a hurry...
The bad news is that it doesn't matter whether you do it on population or land area, Texas will have a very large bill to pay if it wants to secede and carry a share of the US national debt. Of course, the secessionists will probably argue that they should not have to carry any of the debt because Those Nasty Other States ran up the tab...
The secession of Texas is likely going to result in a net fiscal loss for the USA, since the last available numbers from 2005 show that Texas is a net contributor to the Federal Government, taking $0.94 for every $1.00 it pays the Federal Government. However, a lot of military bases and locations in Texas will most probably be closed, or Texas will have to assume them and pay for them (this could mean goodbye to large sources of employment like Fort Hood, folks).
There will be other structural changes resulting from Texas leaving the Union. It is unclear to me how many creative and knowledge workers from the Austin and Dallas areas will stay. Many of them may move back to the rest of the USA, especially if the governance of the newly independent country of Texas is dominated by the sort of narrow-minded, mean-spirited, Christianist people that appear to be dominant in the current political processes and governance of Texas. This is a state whose Board of Education is currently converting itself to a laughing stock, there are massive issues with jurisprudence and the judicial system, and the state has trouble balancing its books every year, partly because there is no state income tax. Only tax havens tend to be able to avoid income taxes in the rest of the world, and I do not see Texas, which has a large land area which requires a lot of infrastructure to provision, can avoid The Subject That Must Not Be Mentioned if it tries to become an independent country. There is also the potentially crippling expense of border security. I haven't gotten out my ruler, but the length of the borders between Texas and the rest of the USA, plus the length of the border with Mexico, is going to add up to one hell of a border security challenge. As this official page shows, the length of the borders from the new country of Texas to the USA and Mexico is a sobering number (if you take the smaller published number) and a frightening number (if you go with the larger number).

As you may have noticed, I don't have much time for the mainstream media in the modern USA. I don't watch the network news programs, since they are tediously superficial and focussed on Stuff That Looks Interesting instead of Things That Are Actually Important. They are also populated by journalists and talking heads who clearly believe that fundamental activities like fact-checking, asking probing questions, and calling interviewees on bullshit answers are really quite optional, especially if the interviewee is a Famous Person.
However, in amongst the distorted, superficial and mostly useless dross, one does occasionally find a useful article. Today, I came across an example of same; a polite but pointed identification of the main problem facing the USA from Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek.
Weisberg starts as he means to go on:

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the economic stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but polls reflect something more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.

In other words, like many modern electorates, We The People (a profound phrase worth remembering) want to have our cake and eat it, and politicians, being the shrewd folks that they are, realized this many moons ago and are quite happy to go along with this fundamentally illogical worldview.
As Weisberg correctly notes:

At the root of this contradiction is our national-characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix our problems. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, according to CNN. But we love government in the particular: even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.

This backs up my slightly cynical view that many people in the USA are fans of Big Government, as long as the government spends money on Stuff They Like. When the government spends money on Stuff They Don't Like, they suddenly become fans of Small Government.
As Weisberg correctly notes:

The politicians thriving at the moment are those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face.
...Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians on either side who are prepared to speak frankly about our choices and the majority who indulge the public's delusions.

Given that the vast majority of representatives of the two major parties are still pandering to the mainstream electorate delusions, the short-term outlook for an improvement in the quality of governance in the USA is not good. The electorate as a whole needs to stop expecting contradictory things from government. As I tend to say in conversation, the USA needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

On June 8th 1924, two members of the British Mount Everest Expedition, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine left their camp high on Mount Everest to attempt to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain. They never made it back to camp, both men disappeared, after being briefly sighted on the ascent, and were presumed dead. Nobody knew what had happened to them, including whether they had actually made it to the summit of Everest. The general assumption was that they had perished on the ascent.
After persistent alleged sightings over the years, following the first officially recorded ascent of Everest in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the body of George Mallory was finally located in 1999. However, no trace has been seen of the body of Sandy Irvine. Mallory's body carried no camera, but a photo that he was going to deposit at the summit if the two men succeeded in their ascent was not found on his body, which was intact and well-preserved. An extensive search of the area around Mallory's body showed no traces of Sandy Irvine.
However, a recent detail and searching examination of aerial photos of Mount Everest has turned up an artifact which may be the body of Sandy Irvine. The emphasis is on the word "may", since only an expedition to the site will reveal if this is a breakthrough or another false lead.
The Holy Grail that experts will be searching for, in addition to finding Irvine's body and bringing closure for his remaining relatives, is whether they can locate one or both of the two cameras that Irvine carried on his person. Any photographic film that is preserved enough to be developed might show if Mallory and Irvine actually reached the summit of Everest.

This article from James Allen explains very factually what is happening with StefanGP, the team that has no Formula 1 grid slot for 2010, but is acting for all the world as if it does:

“Stefan Grand Prix writes history! SGP becomes the first team in F1 history who did send a 40 foot container full of equipment to the race in Bahrain without having entry for 2010 season!” said a statement.

Leaving aside the slight English roughness, this is one of the great unrealized stories of the 2010 season. Why would a team that has no F1 entry (it was refused last Summer, and that remains the case despite threats of legal action by the team at the time) be spending millions of dollars on a car, freight, personnel etc. to test at a faraway circuit?
The answer may partly lie in the rumors that Campos Meta, one of the contracted teams, does not have the money to even build its car for 2010, much less go racing. Rumor has it that Tony Texeira, the CEO of A1GP, has already offered to buy the team off of Adrian Campos. However, that is not likely to be greeted with cheers inside Formula 1, since A1GP is insolvent and apparently owes Ferrari (the engine supplier for the series) a seven figure dollar amount.
Part of the full answer may lie in the behaviour of Toyota in all of this. It is already known that the StefanGP car (chassis and transmission) is the design that Toyota would have raced in 2010 as the TF110, had they not decided last year to withdraw from F1. Now there are rumours that one of the StefanGP drivers will be Kazuki Nakajima, who was a Toyota-supported driver at Williams GP for the last 2 seasons. In addition, Toyota is known to be providing all sorts of engineering support to StefanG, including supplying the engine, which is essentially the Toyota F1 engine from last year, rebadged.
There is a thread on the unfolding story here and here.
All of this leaves me wondering whether Toyota has decided to keep a presence in F1 in case they want to return when the economics make sense for them to return. This is similar to Honda, who withdrew from F1 in the early 90's, but retained an engineering presence via their Mugen subsidiary, and Renault, who withdrew after 1997, but retained an indirect engine supply presence via their Mecachrome subsidiary. Another factor to consider is that Toyota may have signed the post-FOTA contractual agreement to compete in F1 until the end of 2012, in which case they would have faced stiff contractual penalties for withdrawing. Their supply of resources to StefanGP may be a way of avoiding litigation.
The full answer, as is always the case in F1, is probably not simple. It is probably a combination of three or more of the following reasons:

1. StefanGP may have had a credible threat to go to the EU over the F1 team selection process from 2009. There were numerous complaints from other prospective entrants such as ProDrive that the FIA was demanding all sorts of concessions from applicants (including, in one case, that all new teams had to sign an engine supply deal with Cosworth). This might well have been frowned upon by the EU.
2. Toyota wants to avoid litigation resulting from their withdrawal from F1 after signing the new commercial agreement.
3. Toyota wants to keep its seat warm in F1, in case it decides to return in 2-3 years' time. Providing support to another team would be an ideal way to do this at arms length, to at least maintain presence and contacts within the sport.
4. There is a genuine belief that Campos Meta (at least) will not be able to compete in F1 in 2010 because of lack of money. StefanGP would be an ideal short-term replacement

Against this, it must be pointed out that the StefanGP team will be short of track time even if they do get an entry, and even if the FIA allows them to join after the start of the 2010 season. The team does not currently have an announced tyre contract with Bridgestone, so it is not even clear what tyres they would use for testing, although, as a team not entered in the 2010 championship, they would not be bound by the current F1 testing restrictions, which might make them attractive to either Bridgestone (for extra tyre testing) or even to a new tyre supplier for 2011 and beyond.
There is also evidence that the Toyota F1 engine was probably the weakest powerplant last year in terms of horsepower, and being an engine that is already homologated, Toyota cannot rework its design except in a very limited way with the agreement of other suppliers to address reliability concerns. It is therefore unlikely that StefanGP would be anything other than a grid-filler team, at least in the first season.
However, this current series of events is proof that in F1, nothing is ever simple...

Ridley Balko writes in Reason magazine about the egregious abuse of asset forfeiture laws in the modern USA. I previously blogged about one amazing abuse of the system in Tenaha TX.

...since CBS is clearly guilty of hypocrisy, by accepting an advocacy advert from Focus On The Family, when they refused to accept a similar advert 3 years ago from the United Church Of Christ.
Contrary to what some excitable individuals have written, there is no First Amendment issue here. CBS, as a commercial entity, is perfectly free to determine which advertising it will or will not accept on its network. However, my fundamental principle kicks in here; if I find businesses making ideological decisions about their products, advertising or activities, I reserve the right to make ideology part of my decision about whether to patronise a business.
So, in this case, I am making a decision in the best interests of avoiding hypocrisy. I will not watch the SuperBowl on CBS.
UPDATE - I wrote to CBS informing them of my decision, and the reasons for that decision.

Glenn Greenwald, in his usual brisk style, has produced an excellent summary of the Supreme Court decision here. As he points out, most of the arguments being made over the judgement by both sides are unpersuasive:

Critics emphasize that the Court's ruling will produce very bad outcomes: primarily that it will severely exacerbate the problem of corporate influence in our democracy. Even if this is true, it's not really relevant. Either the First Amendment allows these speech restrictions or it doesn't. In general, a law that violates the Constitution can't be upheld because the law produces good outcomes (or because its invalidation would produce bad outcomes).
One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions -- warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs -- can't be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The "rule of law" means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don't like. Denouncing court rulings because they invalidate laws one likes is what the Right often does (see how they reflexively and immediately protest every state court ruling invaliding opposite-sex-only marriage laws without bothering to even read about the binding precedents), and that behavior is irrational in the extreme. If the Constitution or other laws bar the government action in question, then that's the end of the inquiry; whether those actions produce good results is really not germane. Thus, those who want to object to the Court's ruling need to do so on First Amendment grounds. Except to the extent that some constitutional rights give way to so-called "compelling state interests," that the Court's decision will produce "bad results" is not really an argument.

However, the ruling seems to me to come perilously close to affirming the existence of corporations as persons. John Perry Barlow, via Twitter, asks the same question that I was mulling over last night:

If companies are persons with protected speech, can we now execute them when they kill?

Seems like a perfectly reasonable question to me. If XYZ Industrials is found culpable of negligent homicide in a court of law, a felony which would net an average Joe like you or me at least 5 years in jail, then let the punishment for XYZ Industrials be suspension of all of their business activity for 5 years. Plus a requirement that all employees found to be culpable in the negligent homicide also be considered for jail terms, in addition to being terminated for cause with no compensation. In practice, the punishment will translate to the immediate liquidation of XYZ Industrials, with the sale proceeds going first to the victims, then innocent employees, then (and only then) to stockholders.
That would be a more equitable arrangement. As Barlow is implying, if corporations want the benefits of what has been termed "persohood" before the law, they should also sign up for the accountabilities of "personhood".

In which one of the more regressive states in the Union decides to lower the bar on its jurisprudence still further:

New Orleans city police and the district attorney’s office are using a state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers as sex offenders. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation”—a term New Orleans cops and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean anal or oral sex. Sex workers convicted of breaking this law are charged with felonies, issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it.
Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.

Apart from the question of whether the enforcement of this legislation is merely a variant on the old theme of "doing something we don't like while being black", this is a classic example of the egregious abuse of the law by using laws for a purpose for which they were never intended. This is all rather reminiscent of the abuse of the Vagrancy Acts in the UK to stop people on the street without probably cause, which was a contributory factor to the race riots in several British cities in the early 1980's.
This sort of half-baked nonsense, which disrespects both the purpose of the law and the due process of law, is typical of other efforts being made across the USA to expand the definition of "sex offender". This is creeping, tyrranical authoritarianism, often sold to non-thinking communities using the old standbys of "protecting the children", when it reality it is undermining the very basis of a fair, equitable legal system.

...is not homosexual people marrying, but heterosexual married people misbehaving. You only need to look at published divorce rates to realize this. Plus, the reality is that there are less likely to be children in a gay marriage situation, thus there is less negative impact on children.
Of course, these pesky facts are usually irrelevant to religiously-driven ideologues with an animus against homosexuality...

From Ed Brayton's blog, yet another eye-popping case of judicial misconduct...

A parent has written an eloquent posting on the state of the US education system, explaining the system is deteriorating, which is going to negatively impact the competitiveness of the USA in the future.
My concern is that we are entering an era where ignorance is actually being embraced as a national value. On the rare occasions on which I watch network television news and discussion programs, I see little evidence of any use of critical thinking and evaluation skills, and the ability of people to construct arguments has been overtaken by "argument by slogan". This is not going to serve the US well in the world going forward. My ex stepkids' high school made no attempt to teach critical thinking and rhetorical skills, and I have reason to believe that this deficiency is widespread throughout the educational system.

Now I know what it is...

An article from Jay Rosen about the terrible state of the Sunday current affairs shows and what could be done to fix them. Of course, as he himself admits on Twitter, it will most likely never happen...

The most recent attempt by a disturbed passenger to blow up a US commercial flight in the air, has, sadly but predictably, not led to any visionary or useful answer from the Federal Government branches responsible for air safety.
Instead, as Ed Brayton explains, the TSA and DHS are instead introducing yet more unbelievably stupid rules:

...several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

The rules are nothing more than a dumb-ass response to a single incident, and are symptomatic of what happens when officials disconnected from air travel and non-government reality are allowed to write regulations without proper oversight and submission to tough questions from elected representatives and the media.
Brayton hits two nails on the head:

TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.
If you're really cynical, you could make a good argument that they're really only interested in the appearance of safety. They've simply concluded that the more difficult they make your flight, the safer you'll feel. Never mind if any of the theatrics actually work.
On top of all of that, it's becoming more and more clear that this guy should never have been allowed on a plane in the first place. The government had been warned specifically about him by his father three months ago, who went to the US embassy and told them that he had gotten involved with jihadi groups in Yemen. We have a no fly list full of people who aren't terrorists, how did this guy not get on that list?

I want to see TSA and DHS officials brought in front of intelligent media (which means that if they invite the major networks means a largely empty room) and elected representatives and forced to defend this stupid response, and they should be informed that any answer along the lines of "cannot comment - national security" will result in ridicule and laughter from the interlocutors.
We need sensible, properly thought-through responses to security issues, not this moronic knee-jerk nonsense.
UPDATE - As Wendell Berry points out on Scholars and Rogues, this is the underlying cause of the mess we are currently in concerning airport and flight security:

What i don’t understand is the idea that Americans are entitled to perfect security. Here we are (and for the record, all the troops stationed everywhere in the world are you and i) crashing around the globe and blowing shit up, yet those of us in God’s country should face no threat. And for the most part, we don’t face any threat. Nobody’s bombed any of the weddings i’ve been to over the last few years. I’ve never thought, “I don’t think i should go downtown, because somebody might suicide bomb where i shop.” I’m convinced that the Canadians will launch their plan for world domination any day, by invading the social and evolutionary cul-de-sac of America where i live. But as of yet i have not had to contend with RCAF close air support in the neighborhood.
Still here we are, gripped by fear and willing to submit to whatever the organs say is necessary to protect us. Hunter S. Thompson used to say that we’re a nation of pigs. I disagree. (Unless he was being Orwellian.) The comparison is unfair to that noble and intelligent, barnyard beast. We’re a nation of five year-olds whose parents don’t say, “No, no, there’s no bogeyman in the closet because there’s no such thing as the bogeyman.” Our parents keep telling us that the bogeyman is real and he’s out to get us. He could be in any, or every, closet. In fact, he probably is in every closet!

UPDATE 2 - Lawyers, Guns and Money introduces the new Washington game of Terrorball.

..the place that is the home base of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This Phoenix New Times article shows quite clearly the extent of the contempt that "Sheriff Joe" and his sycophantic cohorts appear to have for due process and any legal system official who dares (as they see it) to hold them to account. Truly scary stuff.
Of course, the really sad part of this is that Arpaio has been re-elected to his position by the local electors almost more times than I have had hot dinners, which, sadly, tends to play into the hands of those who propose intelligence tests for voters.
UPDATE - A summary of recent events here, throwing into sharp relief the reality that (as ever) Arizona political and justice system leadership, having failed to push back on Arpaio in the past, has now, by benign neglect, created a monster. Has nobody in leadership learned a damned thing from the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy?

In which Verizon and Yahoo are fighting an FOIA request for information about how much they charge to tap and pass customer data to the Federal Government.
This explains what happened next:

...before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies -- and to 'shock' their customers."
"Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies," the company writes.

Commenter Nomen Nescio helpfully provides you with a translation:

Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security

"if people knew our reputation for protecting their privacy was wholly undeserved and false, we might lose that reputation."

no shit, sherlock. let me translate that complaint into even plainer english: "please, mr. judge your honor, don't make us tell the truth to our customers! they might quit being our customers if we had to be truthful to them!"

Apparently Sen. Chuck Schumer called a US Airways flight attendant "bitch" under his breath after being asked to shut off his cell phone at the start of a flight.
I suppose that one should not be too surprised at a politician using profanity. When Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself", he kind of lowered the bar for future political discourse.
However, what is more amusing is the response of Schumer's spokesperson when Schumer was busted:

Schumer's spokesman later apologized for the incident, say that the senator "made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn't have made, and he regrets it."

This is a classic example of a non-apology apology. Schumer should either have said "sorry" or said nothing. By issuing this statement, he merely comes across as a classic egotistical weasel.
Larry Bossidy, in one of his excellent books on leadership, explains that when he was the CEO of Allied Signal, he used to take candidates for leadership positions out to dinner, and see how they treated other people in the restaurant. If they were rude to the servers, then he did not want them in the corporation because they were not nice people. As my father once told me, good manners cost nothing. Chuck Schumer scores an Epic Fail on the Larry Bossidy scale for sure.

From time to time, Formula 1 teams have been bilked or short-changed by sponsors. The nature of F1, with its glamour, glitz and seemingly unbelievable sums of money, makes it an easy haven for swindlers and "characters" of all types.
This year's sponsorship scandal is The Sponsorship That Never Was. It centers around Brawn GP, who claim to have concluded a very large (130 million Euros) multi-year deal with the German corporation Henkel. Henkel has been a sponsor before - they bought space on the McLaren cars for a couple of years recently. However, they then left F1.
The deal was supposedly concluded in July 2009, at a time when Brawn GP was performing well on the racetrack (Jenson Button had won 6 races in the first part of the season) and the team was looking to parlay its on-track success to sign long-term deals to allow it to continue beyond the 2009 season, the budget for which came mostly from Honda.
However, it now seems that the sponsorship deal was not what some of the parties think it was. Henkel is now claiming that the people supposedly negotiating on its behalf were (a) not authorized to conclude a deal of this size without board-level approval, and (b) that key documents purporting to commit Henkel to the deal with Brawn GP contained the forged signature of the CEO of Henkel, making them invalid. On this basis, Henkel has commenced legal action in Germany to have the contract declared null and void.
This news has become public only after a 75% stake in Brawn GP was sold to Mercedes, which is renaming the team Mercedes Grand Prix.
There are several interesting aspects to the story. Firstly, given the vertical nature of decision-making in most German corporations, there is no way a decision of this kind, involving the expenditure of in excess of 30 million Euros a year, could have been taken without Supervisory Board and CEO approval by Henkel. If Brawn GP were presented with a letter supposedly signed by the CEO, this might have been convincing, but I would personally have wanted evidence that it represented the outcome of a Supervisory Board meeting.
I do not believe that Mercedes were ignorant of the issue prior to purchasing the majority stake in the Brawn team. The CEO of Mercedes and the CEO of Henkel apparently discussed the contract in September 2009, at which time Henkel advised Mercedes that as far as they were concerned, no such deal existed. Mercedes therefore knew about the issue before concluding the deal to buy the 75% stake in Brawn GP.
However, if this deal (which would, given current sponsorship rates in F1, have given Henkel a lot of car space - even title sponsor billing) does not exist, and Henkel can convince the courts in Germany that it is null and void, Mercedes GP and Mercedes-Benz has a large budgetary hole to fill in 2010 and beyond.
All of this explains the recent interest by Mercedes GP in hiring Michael Schumacher. If you have a 35 million Euro shortfall in your budget, what better way to plug it than by signing the most popular German sportsman of the last 40-50 years? Henkel might even be persuaded to stump up some cash in 2010 for space on a car with Michael Schumacher driving it. Signing Schumacher out of retirement is one of the few ways in which Mercedes could hope to bring large amounts of income to Mercedes GP. The sums of money involved in F1 are still too large for Mercedes to have a hope of finding one corporation with 35 million Euros not allocated for marketing spend in 2010. However, it is possible that 5 or 6 German corporations could be persuaded to stump up 4-5 million Euros each for a car driven by Michael Schumacher in 2010. Mercedes always wanted to have Schumacher drive for them in Formula 1, but their failure to lock him up contractually in the early 90's when he drove for them in sportscars allowed him to escape to Benetton and thence to Ferrari.
I therefore regard the affair as another example of the old adage "in Formula 1, just follow the money". Brawn GP looks to have been fooled into signing what turned out to be a non-existent deal with Henkel (the perpetrators of the deal from the Henkel side are now in deep water, with criminal charges for fraud and embezzlement likely), which leaves Mercedes with a large budgetary hole to fill for the next 2-3 years. What better way to fill it than by luring Michael Schumacher out of retirement?

Over at Ed Brayton's excellent blog "Dispatches From The Culture Wars", part of the indubitably excellent Scienceblogs aggregation, we find this discussion based on yet another report concerning the low reliability of eyewitness accounts of anything, but especially crimes. Having read an article about the crash of the DH-110 at the 1952 Farnborough Air Show, where virtually none of the eyewitness accounts were correct, I was already attuned to the fundamental issues with "live" accounts of events. There is a similar correlation with the Kennedy assassination, where numerous eye-witnesses provided a baffling array of contradictory accounts.
This topic is also explored in detail in the book "Mistakes Were Made, (but not by ME)", which is one of my favorite books of 2009. The book points out that the criminal justice system is deeply resistant to any attempts at reform, because the culture surrounding its practitioners is one of asserted infallibility, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

Background: Ramsgate has a fully-equipped ferry port, built some years ago on land reclaimed from the sea West of the current harbour. The ferry port had freight and passenger sailings for a number of years, until the previous company bailed on the arrangement with lots of years left on the lease. Since then, the port has survived on a limited number of freight-only ferry sailings, while the harbour has to be constantly dredged due to sand infill from ocean currents. In short, this is not a shining example of local industry or success.
This year, there were rumours, talked up by the local MP Dr. Steven Ladyman, that EuroFerries would restart passenger services from Ramsgate to Boulougne in France this Autumn. This seemed to be a positive development, except that no date was announced to begin with, then no news was forthcoming other than postponements, accompanied by vague assurances. When local blogger East Cliff Richard linked to another local blog where a commenter referred to a rumour that EuroFerries might have "gone bust", EuroFerries threatened him with legal action. They did the same to the local blogger whose comments section contained the alleged rumour.
I think that I understand the policy being adopted here by EuroFerries (who are very much still in business, by the way). It's called either Shoot The Common Carrier (if you're feeling charitable) or School Playground Bullying (if like me, you are not feeling quite as charitable).
Most recently, EuroFerries has admitted that it will not be starting services this year after all. Sailings are now not planned to start until March 2010.
The net result of all of the false starts is a reduction in the credbility of the local MP, and deepening local skepticism about the likelihood that there will be a resumption of passenger ferry services out of Ramsgate.
As for EuroFerries themselves, any organization that thinks that threatening local bloggers whose comment sections contain statements of which they disapprove is a good way to go about its business is either stupid, being badly advised, or both. No good can come of threatening local commentators with legal action, especially since in this case, they were not even the ones making any allegations - the allegations were being made by an anonymous commenter to a blog. It merely makes Euroferries look like a typical bunch of corporate bullies - and nobody likes corporate bullies.
UPDATE - I rewrote parts of this posting to better explain what I think actually occurred to cause EuroFerries to threaten the two bloggers in question with legal action. My conclusion that EuroFerries is engaging in bullying, hiding behind UK libel laws, still stands. I repeat - just because you can do something does not mean that you should. Smarter thinking should have prevailed.
UPDATE 2 - There is a discussion forum about the Euroferries initiative here. I rest my case about the general level of skepticism...

This article in BNet explains how Australia has weathered the recession better than most countries, and may be already in economic recovery.

Both Uganda and Jamaica are currently gripped by a nasty approach to homosexuality - they appear to regard it as an anti-social disease, and are actively working to criminalize it.
That being the case, I refuse to visit either country. When they wise up and stop enshrining bigotry and discrimination based on sexual orientation into their laws and societal value systems, I shall consider visiting them and buying products from those countries. Until then, they're not getting a cent of my money.

...is an old truism in the history of malfeasance. Currently my home state is proving the truth of this. It is highly likely that they executed an innocent man, Cameron Tood Whillingham, in 2004.
Now, in a highly suspicious turn of events, Texas Governor Rick Perry has suddenly dismissed several members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission that was due to report on the events leading up to the execution. He is trying to replace the dismissed members with hard-line authoritarians.
I have not recently seen a more blatant example of "stacking the deck" for many years. However, on another level, Perry's actions do not particularly surprise me. As Carol Tavris and Elliott Aronson point out in their book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By ME)", the criminal justice system is a very good example of a system that persistently refuses to admit to error, even when the errors are egregious and obvious. Cover-ups and general avoidance and malfeasance are normal responses when that system is challenged by evidence of failure.
In any sensible legally policed jurisdiction, Rick Perry would not even have tried such a blatant piece of gerrymandering. However, this is Texas, a state that does not even allow criminal defendants the right of discovery (the term used by lawyers in this state is "trial by ambush"). In that context, it is less surprising that the state does not want to have to admit that the criminal justice system here is defective.
I would like to think that electors will take note of this malfeasance by Perry. However, given that they had one previous opportunity to toss him from office and failed to take it, I am not optimistic.
UPDATE - There are claims in the Houston Chronicle that Gov Perry's office refused to consider late submissions before the execution of Whillingham. This is potentially serious, the allegation is that Rick Perry deliberately refused to consider new evidence. Beware the comments section however, the intellectually dishonest authoritarian bottom-feeders are out in force with their peurile arguments and petty ad hominems...
UPDATE 2 - Gov. Perry has now commented on this case, only to utter a string of ad hominems and fallacies. Nowhere in his monologue does he address the underlying issue - that Cameron Todd Whillingham was executed on the basis of inadequate evidence. No amount of bluff and bluster can avoid that unpalatable reality.
UPDATE 3 - Another miscarriage of justice (this time the subversion and undermining of the appeal system) is also unfolding in Texas over a man sentenced to death, where it is apparent that jurors used Bibles as they determined whether he should be sentenced to death. Lawyers for the man on death row explain how they were denied the ability to ask jurors questions that would have proved their arguments...my cynical expectation is that Rick Perry will refuse to intervene in order to burnish his "tough on crime" credentials. The "hang 'em high" brigade has a lot of membership, particularly in rural areas of Texas.

This interesting blog has appeared, promising information about developments on Shemya, which is not quite the back of beyond in the Aleutians, but is close...

For those people not just returned from Mars....film director Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding arrest warrant from the USA, issued after he fled the U.S. over 40 years ago while awaiting sentencing following a plea of guilty to what has been quaintly termed "statutory rape".
His arrest has led to massive amounts of bloviation both by supporters, who appear to want the whole issue swept under the carpet, and detractors who appear to want him at the very least forced to do the perp walk, or possibly (as in the case of the unutterably stupid Cokie Roberts), have him put to death.
Watching all of the huffing, puffing and pontification about Polanski does rather tend to remind me of the quotation "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." Armchair moralists everywhere seem to be united in wanting to weigh in with their own views of the whole affair.
Commenter jeer9 on HaloScan, responding to this posting on Lawyers, Guns and Money, seems to hit the nail on the head for me:

...Polanski already pled guilty to statutory rape. After 42 days of psychiatric observation, he fled when he believed the judge was not going to abide by the agreement. By failing to stay and litigate the issue and serve the appropriate sentence (which, short of execution, will not satisfy some), he has incurred the retrospective wrath of Americans everywhere which no amount of money or energy will dissipate. There's a large moral lesson to be learned here somewhere, but I'm far too obtuse, what with the distractions of Wall Street criminal passes and the relentless prosecution of torturers, to be able to see it. I seriously doubt, given the judge's inappropriate conduct, that he'll serve any time (other than probation) on the sexual charge. The fugitive count is another matter. He should have just stayed and fought it with with the sort of representation the wealthy and privileged can afford. Americans prefer their evildoers to be brazen and unrepentant. Fleeing the country lacks the self-righteous bravado we appreciate in our villains and speaks to a type of cowardice that is simply not tolerated. Better to lawyer up (would that it were necessary!) and retire to a quiet life in Dallas or appear on TV regularly defending one's sadism as the height of patriotism. It's all about priorities and we sure have ours straight.

A classic indicator of the health of a housing market is the number of months of inventory that exists. During property price recessions, the amount of inventory shoots up dramatically. Generally, prices then drop since it becomes a buyers market. Appreciating housing markets generally run with 4-6 months of inventory at current sale rates.
During the recent crash, inventories had ballooned in some areas to years' worth of houses. Housing market optimists have been watching to see for signs of improvement that they can point to as evidence of a recovery. There have been recent drops in outstanding inventory in some distressed areas, particularly California, which have led to optimistic noises that the housing market is recovering.
Not so fast. As Dr. Housing Bubble explains in this posting, there is an additional factor that needs to be added to any calculation of housing recovery - Shadow Inventory. It is difficult to excerpt from this posting, but the argument in the posting is that there are a lot of properties with delinquent mortgages, where the lenders have not even issued Notices Of Default. This is mainly because they do not want to have to admit that a loan is delinquent, because then it damages the value of their loan portfolio. This merely kicks the problem down the road; although no NoD has been issued (which means that the foreclosure process does not start, and the property does not appear in pre-Foreclosure or Foreclosure stats), the loan is delinquent and may never be made good, which means that either the lender writes off the debt, or forecloses the property later.
The reluctance of lenders to assume responsibility for failing loans is not new - we have already seen numerous instances of lenders refusing to take formal possession of properties where borrowers walked away from them, thus leaving the borrowers still with legal title to the property and still liable for property and state taxes etc.
My guess is that lenders are hoping to somehow bury these defaulting loans when the overall market recovers, either by quietly negotiating away the debt, or by foreclosing the property and hoping to bury the foreclosure amidst other good news. However, no matter what happens, this "shadow inventory" issue exists, and it will slow the recovery of the housing market. As long as a significant number of homeowners are delinquent on mortgage payments, and very likely to ultimately default, the real level of distress in the market is higher than shown by foreclosure stats.

Glenn Beck, like many authoritarian radio and TV bloviators, is very good at creating strawman arguments that allow him to commence some rant about some real or imagined Awful Thing About The World.
Some time ago, a satirist parodied Beck's approach to bloviation here.
Now Glenn Beck, a man who by his own written words, hates international law, has filed a complaint against the owner of the website with...the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
The owner of the website has responded with some fairly pointed arguments against what seems to be a rather flimsy complaint.
Beck originally threatened a libel suit against the site owner, but that would almost certainly fail since the site is demonstrably satirical.
I do love it when bullies suddenly find themselves on the recieving end of a take-down. Suddenly they morph from bloviation, bullying and vaguely threatening speech and triumphalist crowing to pathetic special pleading and allegations of persecution.
Cry me a river, Glenn Beck. I sense the biter bit, the bully being called out.

This article from the San Antonio News reveals that the police department and the Mayor of Tenaha in East Texas have apparently been egregiously abusing asset forfeiture laws. These laws, originally designed to allow for the confiscation of assets owned by convicted felons, have been abused (in some cases egregiously) for years by many law enforcement agencies. They are attractive laws to abuse, since seized assets can be used to offset the rising cost of law enforcement.
In the case of the city of Tenaha, the asset forfeiture abuse went hand-in-hand with that old legal invention of Driving While Black. A local lawyer has now filed a lawsuit as a result of investigating numerous forfeiture incidents in Tenaha. As the L.A. Times reports:

David Guillory, an attorney in nearby Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.
But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized cash, jewelry, cellphones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly -- and discovered that all but one of them were black.

The citizen leadership of Tenaha appears to be in total denial about the egregiousness of this bullshit:

Tenaha Mayor George Bowers, 80, defended the seizures, saying they allowed a cash-poor city the means to add a second police car in a two-policeman town and help pay for a new police station.
“It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force,” Bowers said.
Local police, he said, must take aggressive action to stem the narcotics trade that flows through town via U.S. 59 — drugs heading north, cash going south.
“No doubt about it. (U.S. 59) is a thoroughfare that a lot of no-good people travel on. They take the drugs and sell it and take the money and go right back into Mexico,” said Bowers, who’s been Tenaha’s mayor 54 years.

I guess my question to George Bowers is: what part of the phrase "probable cause" do you not understand? My question to the electors of Tenaha: do you realize that you have a fuckwit representing you?
UPDATE - News of the lawsuit has now gone national, via this article in CNN. The article itself adds little that was not already public information, but it further provides much negative publicity. Way to go, Tenaha.
UPDATE 2 - The District Attorney is now attempting to use money confiscated by the Tenaha law enforcement body to fund a defense of the asset forfeiture policy...sometimes there is no way that you could make this stuff up...

One of the last commercial reasons for businesses to visit Adak has failed...the island's fish processing plant filed for bankruptcy on September 17th. As this report explains:

According to court documents, Adak Fisheries owes money to between 100 and 199 different creditors. Independence Bank told the court they alone are owed about $6.5 million from three different loans in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The bank says the lines of credit were issued based on bogus invoices sent by Adak Fisheries and were secured by all of the processing plant's assets, including their equipment and inventory.

This sounds like gross incompetence at the very least, and possibly fraud, on behalf of the owners and managers of the fish processing plant. However, I also have no idea how or why Independence Bank was persuaded to lend that much money in three separate tranches to a struggling business in an inhospitable part of the world. The phrase "bogus invoices" suggests that some sort of fraud investigation is in order. It must be something in the water...in the meantime, the failure of the plant removes one of the last reasons for fisheries to stop in Adak, and makes the economic scene on the island even more bleak. As the article also explains:

Adak city manager Chuck Mohn said the community of about 100 has very few economic opportunities beyond the fish processing plant. Adak Fisheries and the boats it attracted to the area provided the community with sales, fuel, and fish tax revenue. Mohn said he's not sure if they can keep the city running without it.

There is some discussion of the events here.

Adak is described by one blogger as "The End of America". His blog here does a really good job of tracking the history and current existence of Adak, which over the last 15 years has gone from a massive post-Cold War military facility to a run-downm, economically marginal community eking out a living from unpredictable fishing.
This is an updated Wikipedia page for Adak that was inexplicably deleted. It gives a lot of information about this windy hellhole that is not on the "official" Wikipedia entry.
This is an account of a trip to Adak in 2006. It gives some idea of the remoteness, general decay and struggles that the island's residents operate under.
The latest event in the ongoing saga of Adak's power supply problems is that a new electricity supply utility has been assigned the job of electric power generation. TDX started to supply power on Adak on December 1st instead of Adak Electric, whose license has been revoked after numerous allegations of malfeasance.
Here is another account of a trip to Adak by a visitor who spent over a week there, and got to talk to a lot of residents.

...is very evident in the online responses to this article in Wired magazine, summarizing research by scientists that shows that torture is really a poor and ineffective mechanism for obtaining useful information in any context.
The article comments are notable for a number of instances of what I term drive-By bloviation. The commenters in question appear to be contemptuous of any conclusion based on research (you know, pesky stuff like facts, evidence and logical reasoning), since They Already Know The Right Answer. In this case, The Right Answer usually revolves around unfettered abuse during interrogation of prisoners, including more torture (surprise, surprise). The fact that the research under discussion in the article is not exactly unique or an outlier (there are numerous studies of interrogation techniques that have mostly reached exactly the same general conclusions) also appears to have been overlooked, although I have found over the years that one of the defining characteristics of drive-by bloviators is that they are totally incurious - they have no interest in doing any research or reading of their own, they simply jump on the first thing that they disagree with and savage it.
These people are contemptuous of science in all of its forms, have no understanding of the basic principles of jurisprudence (namely, that inconvenient presumption of innocence until compelling evidence to the contrary is discovered). Additionally they are insulting my intelligence and wasting my reading time by failing to even construct a semblance of an argument, although they certainly seem to like writing long and fine-sounding collections of high-and-mighty sounding phrases and sentences, which would probably sound great at the local bar over a few beers, but when written down, simply read like the pompus utterances of conceited, know-nothing drunks.
These people wouldn't know a sensible argument if it bit them in the ass, and more notably, they don't want to recognize the existence of any argument or information that would threaten or puncture the echo-chamber that they appear to live in.
It is also notable that most of the commenters are posting once then are never to be seen again. They clearly have no interest in a debate, they are Right.
In short, many of these comments are mediocre, ignorant, nonsense - the worst kind of ignorant drive-by bloviation.
UPDATE - One thing I have discovered over the years is that authoritarians are deeply unhappy when they are confronted by scientists and other learned and educated people attempting to point out that their worldviews are fundamentally fallacious and flawed. Just try putting a politician and a criminologist on the same stage and watch how long it takes for the politician to start dismissing the criminologist's views on law and order as "out of touch", "in an ivory tower" etc. etc. Usually the politicians are pandering to electors by suggesting authoritarian and useless answers to complex law and order issues, and the criminologists are often pointing out that if, by golly, the solution is all so damn simple (usually some variant on "Hang 'em High"), why (a) has it not been tried decades ago, and (b) why is it being suggested for the nth time in decades? (hint: perhaps It Doesn't Work).

...are explored in this article by former NFL player Ross Tucker, where he explains, that while fans are only too willing to come down hard on players who demand that their contracts be re-negotiated, the reverse is often true:

I received a call from an active player around 10 a.m. last Saturday, the day teams reduced their roster to 53. His team had just informed him (via his agent) that he would be released if he didn't agree to a significant pay cut. The player had about two hours to think it over and get back to his organization. No pressure, right?

...Most fans dislike when players sit out OTAs or training camp while angling for a new contract. The consensus seems to be that players should honor their signed deals. That's a fine thought, of course, but in this case, which party isn't honoring the long-term contract? As it stands, I think these conversations happen more often than we realize, they just aren't publicized.

As Tucker explains, the gambit of demanding that a player reduce his salary or be released has been played a number of times by teams in this off-season. When you add to that the fact that a team can cut a player at any time (if it can absorb the cap hit), the deck suddenly does not look to be stacked in the favour of the players.
Tucker's musing hits the big issue:

...I think the time will come when a player takes the next step in the game of leverage that is constantly being waged between front offices and players. If a player wants his outdated contract redone or, better yet, wants the team to cut him and put him on the lucrative free-agent market, then withholding services for a regular season or playoff game is the biggest card a player can play.

Will it happen this year? Maybe not. Will it happen soon. I think it will.

...now being discussed in Consumerist, which is reporting on elaborate legal actions being mounted by Cash4Gold to silence ex-employees.

It is difficult to conclude that there is something wrong with the current coaching model in the NFL.

For a start, here is the list of Superbowl-winning coaches who recently left teams and are currently sitting out:

Brian Billick
Bill Cowher
Tony Dungy
Jon Gruden
Mike Holmgren
Mike Martz
Mike Shanahan

The interesting thing to note here is that Dungy, Holmgren and Cowher all walked away from the game, they were not forced out or fired.

In the "unlikely to coach again but that is not certain until the coffin lid slams shut" category we have:

Mike Ditka
Jimmy Johnson
Dan Reeves
George Siefert
Marty Schottenheimer
Barry Switzer

Former Head Coaches on NFL staffs:

Cam Cameron
Dave Campo
Scott Linehan
Rod Marinelli
Mike Mularkey
Mike Nolan
Gregg Williams

Former head coaches currently sitting it out or employed elsewhere

Romeo Crennel
Herm Edwards
Dennis Erickson
Jim Fassel
Chan Gailey
Dennis Green
Jim Haslett
Lane Kiffin
Bobby Petrino

This is a pretty long list of top-flight coaches. This does not include other coaches who decided to pass up the opportunity of being an NFL head coach and instead moved to the college game (Charlie Weis, Dave Wannstedt). Add a couple of other coaches who tried out the NFL and decided that college was more fun (Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban).
Right now, because of the trend towards hiring younger coaches, we have a number of NFL head coaches in their early to mid 30's. This clearly can work (see Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh) if there is continuity in the coaching staff.
In addition to the massive number of former head coaches either bouncing around other jobs or sitting on the sidelines, the firing of 3 offensive co-ordinators in one week in pre-season is unprecedented.
In the case of the Buffalo Bills, the firing of Turk Schonert is probably a result of results pressure on head coach Dick Jauron, who will almost certainly be fired if the Bills do not make it into the playoffs. The fact that Jauron and his assistants were summoned to meet with Bills owner Ralph Wilson suggests that they are collectively operating with a very short rope that could rapidly tighten to a noose. The poor performance of the Bills' new no-huddle offense in pre-season left the Bills looking for answers, and firing the OC is a pretty good answer, for now. Whether it will improve the operation of the offense, only time will tell. The remainder of the offensive staff is inexperienced, which does not inspire a lot of confidence. Even with Terrell Owens, the Bills offense is unlikely to strike terror into opposing teams. They may simply double-team him out of existence, and then rely on the overall mediocrity of the rest of the offense to throttle the Bills and win games.
In the case of the firing of Chan Gailey by new Chiefs coach Todd Haley, this can be explained in terms of Haley being a coach with an offensive background who wants to call the plays himself. This is not new in NFL head coaching circles. A lot of head coaches call or called the offensive plays themselves. Thinking of past coaches we have Bill Parcells, Mike Holmgren, Mike Martz to name but three. Gailey was a holdover from the Herm Edwards era, but sooner or later Haley and he would probably have clashed over offensive play-calling, especially since Gailey is more conservative than Haley.
The case of the firing of Jeff Jagodzinski in Tampa Bay is the most puzzling, but also in many ways the most revealing. Although Bucs coach Raheem Morris seemed determined to obfuscate over the real reasons for Jagodzinski's dismissal, there were plenty of leaks from with the Bucs organization attempting to explain the underlying reason for his firing.
Most of the reasons however, appear to me to be symptomatic of the fact that Jagodzinski, unlike many other NFL coaches, seems to think that a head coach is there to set direction, and then get out of the way and let his assistants coach. He deferred most of the play-calling and coaching details to his assistants, only providing directional input on plays. This apparently led to issues when the Bucs tried game simulations, and the multiple coaches involved in relaying plays to the quarterback led to delay of game penalties. However, by all accounts, the Bucs additionally wanted him to be wading into all of the little details of running an NFL offense, going beyond the zone-blocking scheme for which he had become known from his previous NFL time with the Atlanta Falcons. When he declined to do that, the conclusion that the Bucs seemed to reach was that he was in over his head.
While the firing of Jagodzinski sounds like a classic mismatch of expectations on both sides, it is also revealing. The NFL coaching model appears to place a high premium on head coaches and co-ordinators engaging in detail coaching activities. Jagodzinski, who came back into the NFL from Boston College, where he had been the head coach (but was fired after he interviewed for the vacant New York Jets head coaching position), seemed to have evolved a model where he delegated a lot of detail work to his co-ordinators and position coaches. This apparently did not sit at all well with Raheem Morris or the Bucs front office.
From observing recent events, it appears that offensive co-ordinators who try to delegate too much detail work being labelled as incompetent or out of their depth, while co-ordinators who are working for a head coach who was previously an offensive co-ordinator risk being emasculated, and ultimately rendered disposable. It is interesting that we do not see the same model of head coaches calling defensive strategy in games, even though a lot of head coaches have defensive backgrounds. Most head coaches are content to have the defensive co-ordinator run that side of the team.
All of which suggests to me that the overall coaching model, when compared to a conventional business, is decidedly dysfunctional. It also appears that the youth movement in coaching has taken over to a ludicrous extent, when coaches like Mike Shanahan, Jon Gruden, Tony Dungy and Bill Cowher are sitting on the sidelines collecting money from their previous franchises for doing nothing.

Courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, some revelations about unscrupulous shit-like behaviour from Richard Nixon, who spent a lot of time and energy trying to dig dirt on Senator Edward Kennedy in case he ran against him in the 1972 Presidential election. Gosh, wasn't Tricky Dickie a class act?
A Republican candidate for elective office in Idaho is caught laughing along with a moonbat meeting attendee who thinks it would be cool to issue Obama hunting tags. When called on it, he claims he was "being sarcastic". Sure you were being sarcastic. I have a bridge near New York to sell you, and you're an un-American little dipshit too.
A Republican representative is surprised when his false claims about medical treatment denial are shouted down at a town hall meeting...priceless.
Simon Dee, who was Britain' first TV chat show host, and for a period of three years was just about the biggest celebrity in the UK, before he abruptly fell to earth, died at the age of 74. His was a textbook example of zero-to-hero-to-zero, and what happens when you start to believe all of your own propaganda...however, his style and brash "ladies man" persona lives on in the Austin Powers movies.

For some time now, I have tended to drink relatively little in the way of non-diet sodas. This is partly because I have been (successfully) working to lose weight - down from 242 pounds in the early Summer to to 222 now. I am working to get down to less than 210 pounds by October.
One non-diet soda that I have not yet given up, however, is Coke, as long as it is Mexican Coke. Several years ago I found large bottles of Mexican Coke in Central Market in Dallas, and made the discovery that a lot of other people have made - that this variant of Coke actually tastes like Coke as I remember it when growing up. The reason appears to be because it is sweetened with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, which has almost totally displaced sugar as a drink sweetener in the USA because of cost.
This article explains how Coca-Cola is not happy that Coke is being imported from Mexico in this way, although the imports are not illegal since there is no counterfeiting of merchandise occurring.
Coca-Cola's attempts to stop these imports might be due to its contractual arrangements with bottlers in various territories and legal jurisdictions, but they are counter-productive. Afficionados of this variant of Coke are prepared to pay a hefty premium for it. I currently pay around $20 a case of 24 bottles for it at Costco. That is around $0.83 a bottle - a lot more than I would pay for a similar-capacity can of US Coke.
A naive person like me wonders why Coca-Cola does not simply sell it on import and collect most of the revenue for its US operation, instead of having to tolerate "gray market" imports and then whine about them. There is clearly a significant demand for this variant of Coke in the USA. But no matter, in the meantime I will continue to enjoy a cold bottle of "The Real Thing" on the patio in the evenings. Viva Mexico!

The article explains it very neatly:

Gordon Klingenschmitt is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who claims he sacrificed his 16-year career in the military and a million dollar pension because he was targeted for praying publicly in Jesus’ name while serving as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy.
...but those claims are flat-out lies.

The article sketches out the whole story, which shows that Klingenschmitt was fired from the Navy for disobeying the valid order of a superior officer. His whole public persona since then has been built around the concept that he is a religious martyr. In the process he has created an entirely false persona and is attempting to BS his way through the rest of his life pretending that he is the victim of religious persecution.
I am shocked, but not surprised that once again, lacking any legitimate justification for his actions, a Christian is wallowing in lies, BS and martyrdom. Having seen it in the Evolution vs. Creation debate all over the USA, it appears to be more widespread than I suspected.

Eric Boehlert in Media Matters has gotten around to neatly summarizing what I concluded many moons ago - the mass media and commentators in this country are a bunch of myopic, biased fools. As he reminds us:

As early as June 2003, The New York Times was fretting over whether Howard Dean's "angry message" would be his downfall. "All the Rage," read a Newsweek headline on a Dean profile.
And in two features in the summer of 2003, The Washington Post described Dean as "abrasive," "flinty," "cranky," "arrogant," "disrespectful," "fiery," "red-faced," a "hothead," "testy," "short-fused," "angry," "worked up," and "fired up." And trust me, none of those adjectives was used in a complimentary way. In fact, the Post took pains to distinguish Dean's anger from that of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom the paper termed "brilliantly cranky."

But oh my, how times have changed! Suddenly this summer, as right-wing mini-mobs turn health care forums into free-for-alls, as unhinged political rage flows in the streets, and as the Nazi and Hitler rhetoric flies, anger is in. Suddenly anger is good. It's authentic. It's newsworthy. Reading and watching the mini-mob news coverage, the media message seems clear: Angry speaks to the masses.
Instead of being turned off by the displays of passion the way they had been when liberal protesters took to the streets prior to the Iraq war, media elites have been touting the mini-mob trend as a "phenomenon" (USA Today) staffed by a "citizen army" (Bloomberg News).

As Boehlert then snarkily observes:

Bottom line: Liberal protesters don't tell us anything about the mood of America. But angry right-wingers do, according to the press.

There is plenty more in the article, but I will leave you to read it.
The bottom line is that what we are seeing in the town halls is not "democracy in action", nor is it any form of sensible manifestation of the democratic process. When people show up at a town hall and boo stories meant to illustrate the need for healthcare reform, that is not civil discourse. That is people behaving like mean-spirited moronic little shits. Neither is showing up outside a political meeting with an ostentatiously-displayed firearm.
To re-cycle an old saying, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I have heard no plausible rationalization for standing around outside a meeting about healthcare with a prominently-displayed firearm. I think I know what the real reason for that display is, and it has a lot to do with a desire to intimidate.
The bottom line is that nobody in the media currently appears to have the cojones to call many of the town hall protesters out for what they are: mean-spirited, bullying, misinformed and wilfully ignorant, and anti-American in the widest sense of the word. These people have no interest in the democratic process, sensible, intelligent, informed debate, or any form of co-operation. They are only interested in being loud, obnoxious, threatening and unconstructive. Time to call this bunch of jerks for what they are. Of course they will whine and wave their hands and complain about "media bias", but guess what? All bullies whine and do that when they are told to knock it off. All that is needed is for the message to be repeated and reinforced enough times, then they will fold and slink off back to where they came from.
Time to call crappy behaviour for what it is, folks.
UPDATE - One of the less edifying features of the town hall rabble is that in many cases, the elected representatives whose meetings they are disrupting seem unable or unwilling to muster the cojones to face down and call out their insane and sinister prattlings. Wally Herger (R-Redding) can be seen in this video apparently failing to object in any way to the rantings of an attendee at his meeting, who seems to see no issue in describing himself as a "right-wing terrorist".
Herger clearly could not even remember to remind him of the famous saying that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. I tend to think that Herger is below fuckwit status in his reaction to this nonsense, he appears to be engaging in the worst kind of nodding-dog pandering.

The former Mayor of Carrollton, Becky Miller, managed to get a Texas Monthly Bum Steer Award this year. On her bio, she claimed a number of achievements (such as being a backup singer for Jackson Browne) that were found to be, er, fabrications.
One would think that with the rise of this pesky thing called the Internet, which allows for fact-checking a lot faster and more efficiently, that public office candidates would be a lot more wary of peddling BS in their resumes or bios. However, it seems that Becky Miller was one of those people who thinks that you can fool a lot of people all of the time.
Miller ended up losing her re-election race in May by 9 percentage points. The victory may not necessarily be a good thing in terms of city policy, since her winning opponent, Ron Branson, appears to have a severely reflexive and rather mean-spirited sounding anti-immigrant position. However, given that Miller led early voting by 9 points, it seems that revelations of her "creativity" in writing about her earlier life did contribute to her defeat.

George Lakoff, whose book "Moral Politics" comes the closest of any book I have read to explaining why so many people have been persuaded to vote for policies that are against their own best interests, has a powerful new article on Huffington Post explaining why the Obama administration is having so many problems in the healthcare reform debate. And problems there most certainly are, with a new NBC poll showing that many of the falsehoods and myths being promulgated in the debate are gaining credence with the public, despite easily obtainable evidence that they are not correct.
To those of us who believe that policy topics should be rational and properly debatable points, this is nuts. Not so, says Lakoff, whose backround in Cognitive Science provides him with a different viewpoint, He calls the rational approach Policy Speak, and argues that it is failing:

PolicySpeak is the principle behind the President's new Reality Check Website. To my knowledge, the Reality Check Website, has not had a reality check. That is, the administration has not hired a first-class cognitive psychologist to take subjects who have been convinced by right-wing myths and lies, have them read the Reality Check website, and see if the Reality Check website has changed their minds a couple of days or a week later. I have my doubts, but do the test.
To many liberals, PolicySpeak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest
But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind PolicySpeak is just false. Certainly reason should be used. It's just that you should use real reason, the way people really think. Certainly the truth should be told. It's just that it should be told so it makes sense to people, resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Certainly new media should be used. It's just that a system of communications should be constructed and used effectively.
I believe that what went wrong is (a) the choice of PolicySpeak and (b) the decision to depend on the campaign apparatus (blogs, Town Hall meetings, presidential appearances, grassroots support) instead of setting up an adequate communications system.

Lakoff swiftly identifies one major weakness:

As for language, the term "public option" is boring. Yes, it is public, and yes, it is an option, but it does not get to the moral and inspiring idea. Call it the American Plan, because that's what it really is.
The American Plan. Health care is a patriotic issue. It is what your countrymen are engaged in because Americans care about each other. The right wing understands this well. It's got conservative veterans at Town Hall meeting shouting things like, "I fought for this country in Vietnam, and I'm fight for it here." Progressives should be stressing the patriotic nature of having our nation guaranteeing care for our people.

He later re-inforces another important underlying reality:

...the positive policy should have been made in moral terms, with clear and vivid language. The term "public option" is a PolicySpeak loser. The public is the American public, it is all of us, it is America, and it should have been called the American Plan.

There is a lot more good stuff in this article, which is rather long for a HuffPost article, but needs to be read by anybody interested in why the debate has unfolded the way that it has, and why (despite the manifest idiocy, dishonesty and cynicism of the opponents of health care change) the administration is still not making headway in the public debate.

...is that your past is going to be investigated, and if you have been remiss in your business or professional dealings, you will have questions to answer.
Former KIRO-TV Susan Hutchison, now running for political office in King County in Washington, probably wishes she could close Pandora's Box, but alas, the lid is open and the contents have escaped:

...Hutchison was suspended from work at KIRO-TV after calling in sick over the Fourth of July in 2002 and then being spotted canoeing in Oregon.
She had asked for vacation for those days but was turned down, according to a first, incomplete set of documents unsealed by a court order today.

The story is incomplete, since more court records are to be published after local media successfully argued that they should be released. However, the picture being painted by the current documents is not a flattering one; that of a prickly, obnoxious woman deceiving her employer and then trying to file lawsuits when she was terminated.
Hutchison is claiming that she is prevented from discussing her lawsuit by the terms of its settlement; however, KIRO-TV claims that the terms of the settlement simply prevent her from discussing the actual settlement details, and do not prevent her from discussing other aspects of her time at KIRO-TV.
King County electors ought to be taking this into account when deciding which way to vote...

Wait for it...courtesy of the Guardian newspaper:

A Florida man says his cat downloaded child pornography.
Police are charging Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Florida with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after finding more than 1,000 images on his personal computer.
Griffin told police he had been downloading music, and that his cat jumped on the keyboard when he left the room. He said "strange things" appeared on the computer when he returned.

...I was jerked back to UK reality after spending some time reviewing the attempts by fascists to disrupt US politician town halls, by this reminder that in the UK we have a related version of bad behaviour in the form of drunken tourists. This article in the Independent lays out the usual litany of alcohol-fuelled idiocy in the Greek islands and Crete.

...Malia, a resort that has become notorious for the bad behaviour of tourists. Locals are increasingly angered and exasperated – not least at the sight of couples copulating in public. Internet chat rooms and UK party sites publicising "all night" orgies have fanned the unruly and drunken behaviour in the resort. Residents have repeatedly taken to the streets to demand that Britons "stay away" and this week a shop owner in Malia meted out his own brand of justice by holding hostage for an entire day a tourist who had driven into his shop on a quad bike.

This sort of anti-social nonsense gets visited on hapless towns all over Europe every Summer thanks to a culture based on binge drinking. Warning to the USA - this is what you are also getting into by trying to stop people drinking under the age of 21 (one of the most futile legally-backed attempts to modify adolescent behaviour ever seen).
The sad thing is that the story never changes. Every year a significant number of drunken Brits end up cooling their heels in jails, from which they eventually get bailed. They then either get deported, or charged with criminal offenses to which they end up pleading guilty, with their defenders blaming alcohol for the bad behaviour. (An excuse which may stop being used once enough courts laugh at it then increase the sentence as punishment for ducking accountability). Once back in the UK they whinge and whine about "brutal police", while conveniently overlooking their own appalling behavioural pathology. This is lapped up by the media of course.
I would like for these people to be locked up for a while in the country that they have offended, then laughed back into the UK. I despair of morons like this. They appear to have minimal brainpower even when sober, but when drunk they seem to go to pieces.