Long Form
President Obama gave in to the trolls and released his birth certificate this morning. David Frum has a nice piece up discussing the lameness of the thinly veiled racism behind the whole birther movement and the damage that it has caused the Republican party.
I think that this move is political gold for the President because it will force those who rally opposition to Obama via racist remarks to make them a little more overtly. When the discussion moves to religion we are going to get some truly appalling behavior. The fun will start as “serious” GOP figures begin pressing for Barack Hussein Obama to prove that he is a “real” Christian and not a secret Muslim. I wonder if people that aren’t old and white will notice the subtle difference if the speaker of the house comes out and says “I take the President at his word that he is a Christian” instead of “That’s stupid, of course he isn’t a Muslim.”
This is very bad for the medium term prospects of the Republican Party. To remain competitive they need to win over younger, socially conservative voting blocks of non-white ethnicity. Campaigning against the President because he is black doesn’t help. Go team.
Climategate
Great article about new research corroborating previously published global temperature estimates for the previous century. Quick summary:
Koch-brothers-funded study confirms the previous temperature reconstructions.
Where Service Is State Of The Art
Demolition has finally begun on the giant red tiled square entrance to the Circuit City in the local shopping center. I think that we can take this as a sign that the recovery is on firm enough ground to encourage retail real estate investment again.
This shopping center is owned by Westfield. I wonder if they are gearing up to do battle with Blackstone’s acquired Centro properties?
Shed a tear for the passing of the decade of Australian dominated US retail space. Instead of owning it all they’ll only own half.
On a related note, Wal-Mart has plans to open a ton of new stores in San Diego. They can’t all be huge and I’ve head a rumor or two that they are keen on bringing Wal-Mart Express stores to California. The expected 20,000 square feet of such stores fits nicely with the footprint of the vacated Circuit Cities all across the state.
Hmm.
Must See TV
Go here to see a clip from the debate amongst candidates for RNC chair. The question being answered is that perrenial stumper, “Favorite Book?”
I’ll throw in a little spoiler. The first response is “Reagan Diaries.” The next candidate to respond thought the question was “Favorite bar?” And curent RNC chairman Michael Steele is fond of War and Peace. Unfortunately Steele quickly follows up that revelation of nerdy bookishness by quoting Tolstoy. “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”
Can you handle the comedy? Apparently books are for libruls. The press club thinks it’s funny, but as someone who read a book once, I am offended.
Fuck.
Happy New Year
Welcome to 2011. I am back online and am slowly putting my brain back into something resembling a useful state.
As for content to throw here I’m still running a little light. The crux of the problem is that I’ve lost my compass a bit as to which direction I think we are heading on several fronts.
One thing that I am quite solid on, however, is that this year’s CES is going to be kicking. Apple basically owned 2010 with the iPad and iPhone 4 while many other tech companies were still reaping the rewards of slashed R&D budgets in 2009.
Not this year. We’ll be getting smart phones and tablets galore with feature sets that knock our socks off. We’ll be getting 4G for high bandwidth and lots of internet connected devices of every sort. Chumby is looking to be big at CES this year. They are making a play at being the go to OS for internet enabled devices. Think picture frames, toasters and alarm clocks.
Any way, I’m not trying to run a CES preview here, but I do think that it will be a much more interesting show than usual this year. So if you are interested I might recommend spending a little quality time with your favorite tech blog of choice next weekend.
One other thing. Amazon sold a shit ton of Kindles for xmas. Between them and iPads I think the man sack will be the must have father’s day gift this year.
So have a happy new year, and in the words of Jay-Z
May the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows.
Beat Down
Go read this awesome review of John McCain’s tweets against specific earmarks in the now dead omnibus spending bill.
Wow
Go read this blog post by Charles Stross summarizing a speech made in the House of Lords on November 1st. It may be the strangest thing that you read this week. Really, there are things being said by a Peer that make you think that Glenn beck is crazy for not being paranoid enough.
One Thousand Words
Captain America and Ben Franklin
I love this picture that I found at msnbc.
Perverse Incentives
I know that the whole TSA naked picture backscatter x-ray scanner post thing is so two weeks ago, but I do have something to say about them that seems to not be a part of the discourse that so recently consumed much media attention. Thus I beg you to indulge me in returning to an overreported story that was much more mole hill than mountain.
TSA is a part of the federal government and as such failures eventually end up on the doorstep of elected or appointed officials. Because of this TSA is stuck with two goals rather than one. One goal is to minimize the likelihood of an attack on an airliner. The other is to minimize the political fallout should an attack occur.
The second charge is what has landed us where we are today. No attack is more damaging than one that could have been foreseen. No attack is more foreseeable than one that has already been attempted. Thus a successful underpants bomber would be much worse than someone innovative.
If a terrorist attacks a plane in a way that no one expected, then how can we blame the TSA for not doing enough. If a terrorist attacks a plane in the same way another terrorist did a year or two ago I would expect the howls of congressional rage to be deafening.
This leads to a bias on the part of the TSA towards spending resources on hermetically sealing the barn door after the horse has escaped rather than expending the same effort to slightly decrease the overall likelihood of an attack. So we are now stuck with taking off our shoes, throwing away our shampoo and proving that our undergarments are bomb free because those types of attack are unacceptable.
Twenty First Century Terrorism
Anarchist. Terrorist. Hero. These three views of Julian Assange differ in their interpretations of the goal of Wikileaks but they share an admission of it’s ability to harm the state. The thing that every one seems to be missing is that it is the technology behind Wikileaks that constitutes an existential threat to government rather than the current use to which it is being put.
Wikileaks is an application for releasing secret information in such a way that it cannot be quashed. The hardware that it runs on is a data haven. A data haven is basically a server that government cannot shut down, block or gain access to. Wikileaks runs on an elegant data haven that is distributed across multiple jurisdictions providing robust legal and cyber defenses.
Leaking documents is not the only use to which data havens can be put, nor is it the most destructive to governments. They make a good forum for free speech which is dangerous to authoritarian governments. They are also good for secret speech which is dangerous to governments of all kinds. Most devastatingly though they are good for holding and exchanging money.
Imagine that PayPal ran out of a data haven. Imagine if the gas station took PayPal and your employer paid you with PayPal. Imagine that the federal government had no visibility into any transactions. Income tax and sales tax would become impossible to assess. The federal reserve and the treasury would be of no relevance because PayPal would be in effect issuing its own fiat currency. Property taxes and tariffs would be equally hard to assess since assigning value would be hard if all transactions took place in secret. It would be very difficult to maintain a liberal democracy in such a situation.
Data havens are good for pretty much anything that you want to do that a government might not want you to do as long as it can be reduced to an information processing task. The future of anti government resistance is good IT, not DDOS attacks and worms. What the future of government is I’m not so sure.
