Cavalcade of Mammals

Or rather the lack of one. One after another, GOP statements on what they want in a budget hit the same points again and again. Republicans have decided this year that the federal budget deficit is terrible and must be curbed immediately. Ignore for a moment the Hooverism–that cutting federal spending today will prolong the recession and increase unemployment.

Look at the Republican plan–balance the budget by cutting taxes, increasing defense spending, and leaving Social Security and Medicare intact, and cutting other unspecified programs. The remaining budget, discretionary spending excluding defense only totals $5-600 billion and includes everything from road construction to federal courts to food stamps. With the permanent budget deficit about $600 billion (the 2008-9 bank bailouts and stimulus are one time costs), balancing the budget under the Republican plan doesn’t add up. Adding tax cuts and increased defense spending just make it extra impossible.

Sometimes the impossible can be done in small steps. The Senate voted this week on PAYGO, the deficit reduction measure that allowed Clinton to balance the federal budget in the 90’s. But no, every Republican voted against it.

Stan Collender sums it up in a blog post collecting GOP statements on the federal budget . Here are the bits:

Item 2. All Senate Republicans voted against re-establishing the pay-as-you go rules, which would have required that, with certain exceptions, any new mandatory spending or revenue legislation not increase the deficit. The rules were adopted with only Democratic support.

Item 4. Republican Chairman Michael Steele is saying so often that Republicans are against cuts in Medicare that it’s starting to sound like a mantra. Add to that their stated opposition to revenue increases (see #1 above), military spending reductions, homeland security reductions, and the extremely low possibility that, if Medicare is too hot to handle, they’ll go anywhere near Social Security, and the deficit reduction math becomes totally impossible.

There have been recent fantasy GOP budget proposals along these lines. See Tim Pawlenty’s (Gov. of MN and 2012 Presidential candidate) editorial in Politico. Or the budget proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee.

Even conservative economist Bruce Bartlett is unimpressed:

Like all Republicans these days, Pawlenty wants to have it every possible way: complain about the deficit while ignoring everything his party did to create it (Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, TARP, earmarks galore, tax cuts up the wazoo, irresponsible regulatory and monetary policies that created the recession that created the deficit, etc.), illogically insisting that tax cuts are a necessary part of deficit reduction, and never proposing any specific spending cuts.

It would hardly be fair for me to fail the Republican proposals without offering my own. So here it is:
1) The federal government should spend an additional $600 billion a year until unemployment is down under 6%. Send at least half of it directly to states where it can be spent quickly, spend the rest on unemployment, food stamps, long neglected infrastructure, and a massive New Deal class jobs program.

2) Raise taxes. First, let the Bush tax cuts on income over $200K, capital gains, and large inheritances expire. Second, make the banks pay for their bailout with a combination of financial transaction taxes, an end the hedge fund income tax special treatment, etc, to total $150 billion a year. Third, add progressive tax brackets at the high end, and extra 1% for income over $1 million, $5 million, and $10 million. End a few of the large corporation tax breaks that leave many of them paying essentially no taxes. These modest tax increases are enough to put the budget in the green.

3) Cut total war/security/defense spending back so it equals what the entire rest of the world spends, about $500 billion a year–that would be a cut of $150 billion a year. End the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, saving $150 billion a year.

4) Whoa, now the federal budget has a $200 billion surplus!

At the beginning of October, it was reported that eight US soldiers were killed in Nuristan province in Afghanistan. Hearing it at the time, I thought nothing in Nuristan can be worth the life of an American soldier, yet eight of them fought and died there. Afghanistan is literally half way around the world from the US, and Nuristan is the middle of nowhere even for Afghanistan. The US has occupied Afghanistan for eight years already and the current plan is for an ongoing, pointless occupation for at least another five or ten years. President Obama is even considering pouring more US troops into the country, a truly feckless plan.

Then this November the US installed ruler of Afghanistan, ‘President’ Karzai, finished stealing the national election and declared himself President. It was also reported that his brother runs a big piece of the heroin trade and has immunity from US anti-drug efforts because he works for the CIA. Why are US soldiers fighting and dying to support the Karzai family dictatorship?

And the US war effort is still febrile. Eight years into the occupation of Afghanistan, the Pentagon is still talking about ‘ramping up’ the training of translators. US translators who speak Dari or Pashto, the major languages of the country, are so few in number that the translators at NATO headquarters in Kabul are all Afghans. Translators are thin on the ground and the US relies mainly on Afghan locals. How is the US going to run a counterinsurgency and nation-building campaign in country where almost no US troops speak the language?

What is the US doing in Afghanistan? The few thousand Al Qaeda fighters that were in Afghanistan in 2001 were killed by the US or fled to Pakistan. Even the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan don’t want them back.

Nothing is accomplished by continuing the US occupation of Afghanistan. It’s costing the US the lives of our soldiers and $100-200 billion a year. End the US occupation today!

Update: President Obama announced today he will escalate the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 troops, for a total escalation of 51,000 troops since he took office. What an incredibly foolhardy and poor decision, one that will kill thousands of people and waste hundreds of billions of dollars. In related news, Middle East scholar Juan Cole provides a thumbnail portrait of the corrupt and fragmentary nature of the Afghan government to which the US has pinned its plans.

Phil Agre ran the Red Rock Eater mailing list for many years, it was active during the 90’s. I think I started reading it in the late 90’s. The emails ran down to a trickle in 2002, in part I think due to Phil getting a permanent position at UCLA. The mailing list archive indicates it ran up to Jan 2005.

Phil Agre’s mailing list in essence was one of the first blogs. The content was mainly links and commentary by Phil with occasional longer essays. He was one of the best people thinking about what the internet could be used for and how it was changing the world.

After 2002, the Red Rock Eater list went into abeyance then seemed to have stopped for good. Phil Agre seems to have dropped off the net. In this comment thread a UCLA student says he was ill. I fear it is very serious to keep him off line so long.

His essays, “Advice for undergraduates considering graduate school” and “How to be a leader in your field” are internet classics.

Here is an essay I found interesting titled What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Update: He’s literally missing. This site is run by friends looking for him.
Update 1/31/09: UCLA police talked with him. He’s alive, though not well.

Census data on median income change between 2000 and 2008 by way of USA Today:

US GDP in constant dollars per capita grew 9.7% over this period, so the country grew 10% richer and if it was distributed evenly everyone’s income would have grown roughly 10%. But not–instead most of the $$ went to a small slice of the population, and that doesn’t show up in this table.

This is why they call him “Silent” Jim Bunning.

Picture taken at a Senate committee meeting working on the health care bill.

Keeping track of the rising tide of socialism in the US under that fiend Obama:

Still a way to go, but it is never too early to raise the alarm.

Today the US had another domestic terrorist attack, the second in two weeks. This time, a long time right-winger, an anti-semite, white supremacist, and anti-Obama birther attacked the Holocaust Museum in DC. Like the guy last week, today’s shooter had a previous conviction for domestic terrorism.

I was listening to right-wing talker Sean Hannity and a listener called in and told a ‘joke’ that was basically death-wish for the Pres. and VP, wouldn’t it be great if they both died, ha ha. Hannity had a laugh along with the caller. I wonder when these right-wing talkers will stop encouraging the violent talk?

The ACLU went to court and forced the release of Office of Legal Council memos written under the Bush administration to provide legal cover for torture conducted by the CIA. The memos are here. The make for chilling reading, approving the use of medieval tortures on prisoners held by the US.

Republicans have embraced torture, and react with satisfaction and glee to the documentation of US torture. Most people find it appalling. A number of moderates find torture disgusting and are glad that the Obama administration has ordered it stopped but are dead set against prosecution of the torturers. For example, read Kevin Drum, Rob Farley, and Greg Laden. Newspaper editorial boards are split between torture advocates and moderates who oppose torture but also oppose prosecution of torturers. A few editorial writers are calling for what went on to be looked into and publicized–a truth and reconciliation type panel, but they are the rare wild-eyed ones.

The law here is clear. Torture is illegal under several US laws, for example:

TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 113C > § 2340
§ 2340. Definitions

As used in this chapter–
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting undepecifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm resulting from–
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United Sof Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

And yet moderates argue that government agents who tortured prisoners were told that the OLC memos made it legal and protected the agents from prosecution, and that we must respect this.

As near as I can tell the moderates are making one or more of these arguments: 1) these government agents (CIA, etc.) can torture people because they the OLC memos make their actions legal, 2) that what US agents did to prisoners wasn’t torture, or that reasonable people could disagree over whether the prisoners were tortured, or 3) a combination of the two saying that the law was unclear on how much prisoners could legally be abused and the OLC memo clarifies the law and draws the line. The third argument is what the OLC normally does–interpret ambiguous or uncertain cases for the Executive.

I won’t touch argument one. The other two arguments often get combined–mostly three with a bit of two. The third argument, the ‘normal action of the OLC’ depends on two being true.

I would argue that you are reading the parsed legal language of the memos the wrong way. You read the parsed language, the detailed descriptions of the what is allowed and its limits, i.e. “For walling, a flexible false wall…” will be used and “the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel” and think you are seeing the OLC clarifying ambigous law. This is not the case. What the OLC memo does is give aproval to a set maximal torture techniques, maximal under certain limits.

The torture techniques approved are protocols of torture limited to keep from killing the prisoners not to stay on right side of the law. The OLC is approving a torture regime that has been careful worked out by trial and error to inflict maximal pain, damage, and suffering without killing the prisoners or leaving obvious signs (broken bones, scars, death). The detailed protocol for beating prisoners (“walling”, slaps, grabs) was developed to keep from killing prisoners, not to prevent torturous treatment. Repeated knocking a man’s head against the wall will cause intracranial hemorrhage that kills a man and so a special beating protocol is necessary. It is surprisingly easy to kill a person by banging their head against a wall, the head is much more delicate than the limbs. Slapping and grabbing protocols are specified to prevent broken bones and also to prevent fatal contusions. A US Army report from a few years ago found dozens of homicides of detainees, many inadvertently beaten to death.

The OLC memo limits sleep deprivation to 11 days because that is the longest anyone is known to have survived under sleep deprivation. In experiments, rats have died after two weeks of sleep deprivation, it is not clear when it would kill people. So the OLC memo is endorsing maximal sleep deprivation. After two days, sleep deprivation causes progressively worse mental anguish and physical dehabilitation.

The stress positions endorsed by OLC are extremely painful and can cause permanent joint damage. Stress positions don’t leave scars and are rarely fatal, so they get OLC endorsement.

Previously released memos allow interogation up to the point of ‘major organ failure’. The typical result of ‘major organ failure’ is death of the patient. So the OLC was endorsing interogation up to but short of death.

The OLC memos approve a set of protocols designed cause extreme mental and physical anguish without killing the prisoners. The approved treatment includes many torture techniques of ancient origin, some notorious for their recent use against US soldiers in WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The OLC wasn’t parsing ambiguous law so the ‘normal action of the OLC’ argument fails. As the government agents were using notorious torture techniques the argument that situation is ambiguous also fails. Realistically, can the people who carried this out and ignored the screams of their victims argue in court that this was not torture?

Explained at Panda’s Thumb:

Over at uncommon descent William Dembski is musing over Richard Dawkins Weasel program. Why you may ask? Way back in prehistory (the 1980’s) Dawkins wrote a little BASIC program (in Apple BASIC of all things) to demonstrate the difference between random mutation and random mutation with selection, which many people were having trouble grasping. Now, this wasn’t a simulation of natural selection, and Dawkins was very careful to point this out.

But as a demonstration of selection versus simple random mutation, with the string “methinks it is a weasel” being selected in a matter of minutes, when simple random mutation would take longer than the age of the Universe, it was pretty stunning. As a result, creationists have been having conniption fits over this little program for decades. Such is its power, the Issac Newton of Information Theory, William Dembski, spent a not inconsiderable portion of his time attacking this toy program. In particular, he claimed that after every successful mutation, the successful mutation was locked into place, and couldn’t be reversed. But he was wrong, and it seems he just can’t admit it.

The Weasel program starts with a random string. Then each generation ‘offspring’ strings are generated, each with one letter randomly changed. From among the offspring, the string closest to the target string is chosen each generation. Rather quickly this process of mutation and selection will change any string into the target string. I start with “Creationism is nonsense” and my target is “methinks it is a weasle”, the target Dawkins uses.

Since the creationists are having trouble making such a program, I wondered *just how short* a program could be written to do this. Here’s a first attempt as a eight line Perl one-liner. It can be cut & pasted into a Unix terminal:

perl -e '$|=1;$s="Creationism is nonsense";$e="methinks it is a weasle";$try=11;$let=length($s);@e=split(//,$e);while($s ne $e){$i=-1;while($i++< $try){$new_s[$i]=$s;$chr=int(rand(27))||-64;substr($new_s[$i],int(rand($let)),1,chr(96+$chr));@spl=split(//,$new_s[$i]);$j=0;$new_sc[$i]=0;while($j<@e){$new_sc[$i]++if$e[$j]eq$spl[$j++]}}@sc=sort{$new_sc[$b]<=>$new_sc[$a]}(0..$#new_sc);@new=(shift@sc);while(@sc&&$new_sc[$sc[0]]==$new_sc[$new[0]]){push@new,shift@sc}$s=$new_s[$new[int(rand(@new))]];printf("Generation %5d, %-2dmismatches:  $sr",++$n,$let-$new_sc[$new[0]]);}print"n";'

(When I cut & paste the one liner on my Mac it changes the final single quote to an end quote and the last two pairs of double quotes to funny double quotes, so keep an eye out and change them back if you need to).

And the normal length 35 line program with comments:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$|=1;
$s="Creationism is nonsense";
$e="methinks it is a weasle";
$try=11; #New offspring per generation.

$let=length($s);
@e=split(//,$e);

while($s ne $e) {
  $i=-1;
  #Make $try new strings.
  while($i++< $try){
    $new_s[$i]=$s;

    #Mutate one char of the new string.
    $chr = int(rand(27)) || -64;
    substr($new_s[$i],int(rand($let)),1,chr(96+$chr));

    #Count the characters in the new string that match the target string.
    @spl=split(//,$new_s[$i]);
    $j=0;
    $new_sc[$i]=0;
    while($j<@e){$new_sc[$i]++ if $e[$j] eq $spl[$j++]}
  }

  #Find high scoring offspring strings.
  @sc = sort {$new_sc[$b]<=>$new_sc[$a]}(0..$#new_sc);

  @new=(shift @sc);
  while(@sc && $new_sc[$sc[0]] == $new_sc[$new[0]]){push @new,shift @sc}

  #Set new string to a random offspring strings from among the high scoring offspring.
  $s = $new_s[$new[int(rand(@new))]];

  printf("Generation %5d, %-2dmismatches:  $sr",++$n,$let-$new_sc[$new[0]]);
}
print"n";

The President’s Council on Bioethics under President Bush put out a remarkable report, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. It’s worth noting this report before the Bush administration passes into history. Bush’s Bioethics chairman, Leon Kass, will no doubt continue pushing his ideas in other forums for years.

The report was written be the Council chaired by Leon Kass, a professional ‘bioethicist’, and the report makes quite odd assertions. It starts by explaining its motive; people would like to stay young longer and aging science has the potential to offer this in the next few decades:

Still, when properly examined, something like a desire for an “ageless body” seems in fact to be commonplace and deeply held; and should our capacities to retard the senescence of our bodies increase, that desire may well become more explicit and strong.

But Leon Kass sees this as a bioethical issue, and not a positive one, but instead thinks that living longer would be a bad thing. He wants to jump on the issue now to keep people from getting excited about the prospect. Yeah, it will be a hard sell.

The moral case for living longer is very strong, and the desire to live longer speaks powerfully to each and every one of us. But the full consequences of doing so may not be quite so obvious.

The report goes on to survey the ravages of aging and the prospects for reversing them and preventing this horrible toll of suffering and death. Then it begins making the moral case for the ravages of aging!

Being “used up” by our activities reinforces our sense of fully living in the world. Our dedication to our activities, our engagement with life’s callings, and our continuing interest in our projects all rely to some degree upon a sense that we are giving of ourselves, in a process destined to result in our complete expenditure. A life lived devoid of that sense, or so thoroughly removed from it as to be in practice devoid of it, might well be a life of lesser engagements and weakened commitments-a life other than the one that we have come to understand as fully human. This is not to say it will be worse-but it will very likely be quite different.

A far more distant horizon, a sense of essentially limitless time, might leave us less inclined to act with urgency. Why not leave for tomorrow what you might do today, if there are endless tomorrows before you?

But people in search of other more direct and immediate answers, or, more to the point, people whose longer lease on life leaves them relatively heedless of its finitude, might very well be far less welcoming of children, and far less interested in making the sacrifices needed to promote human renewal through the coming of new generations.

Would people in a world affected by age-retardation be more or less inclined to swear lifelong fidelity “until death do us part,” if their life expectancy at the time of marriage were eighty or a hundred more years, rather than, as today, fifty? And would intergenerational family ties be stronger or weaker if there were five or more generations alive at any one time?

The last question is easy to answer–people would have stronger ties to their family if they were able to meet more generations. Also, the quality of the relationships would be better–today people meet their grandparents and great-grandparents only as the elderly shadow of themselves, people who have lost the physical ability to pursue their interests and avocations, and people disengaging with family and the world.

The fact that we might die at any time could sting more if we were less attuned to the fact that we must die at some (more-or-less known) time. In an era of age-retardation, we might in practice therefore live under an even more powerful preoccupation with death, but one that leads us not to commitment, engagement, urgency, and renewal, but rather to anxiety, self-absorption, and preoccupation with any bodily mishap or every new anti-senescence measure.

But what if, in the “stretched rubber band” sort of life cycle, the period of debility became even more protracted and difficult than it now is? … And in the absence of fatal illnesses to end the misery, pressures for euthanasia and assisted suicide might mount.

But in considering the offer, we must take into account the value inherent in the human life cycle, in the process of aging, and in the knowledge we have of our mortality as we experience it. We should recognize that age-retardation may irreparably distort these and leave us living lives that, whatever else they might become, are in fundamental ways different from-and perhaps less serious or rich than-what we have to this point understood to be truly human.

The neediness of the very young and the very old puts roughly one generation at a time at the helm, and charges it with caring for those who are coming and those who are going. They are given the power to command the institutions of society, but with it the responsibility for the health and continuity of those institutions.

A society reshaped by age-retardation could certainly benefit from the wisdom and experience of more generations of older people, and from the peace, patience, and crucial encouragement that is often a wonderful gift of those who are no longer forging their identity or caught up in economic or social competition. But at the same time, generation after generation would reach and remain in their prime for many decades.xvii Sons might no longer surpass their fathers in vigor just as they prepared to become fathers themselves. The mature generation would have no obvious reason to make way for the next as the years passed, if its peak became a plateau. The succession of generations could be obstructed by a glut of the able. The old might think less of preparing their replacements, and the young could see before them only layers of their elders blocking the path, and no great reason to hurry in building families or careers-remaining functionally immature “young adults” for decades, neither willing nor able to step into the shoes of their mothers and fathers.

Disappointed hopes and broken dreams, accumulated mistakes and misfortunes, and the struggle to meet the economic and emotional demands of daily life can take their toll in diminished ambition, insensitivity, fatigue, and cynicism-not in everyone, to be sure, but in many people growing older.

Yes, the poor would hardly be happy to be poor forever, and the forces that damp the determination of the poor to change society–the ignorance and optimism of youth, the decline of the old–would be lessened. Ha. I think Leon Kass is lacking imagination here.

A society is greatly strengthened by the constant task of introducing itself to new generations of members, and might perhaps be weakened by the relative attenuation of that mission. A world that truly belonged to the living-who expected to exercise their ownership into an ever-expanding future-would be a very different, and perhaps a much diminished, world, focused too narrowly on maintaining life and not sufficiently broadly on building a good life.

And this concluding section is quite widdershins. The natural conclusions seem to be the opposite of the ones Kass seeks to draw:

A society reshaped in these and related ways would be a very different place to live than any we have known before. It could offer exciting new possibilities for personal fulfillment, and for the edifying accumulation of individual and societal experience and wisdom. But it might also be less accommodating of full human lives, less welcoming of new and uninitiated members, and less focused on the purposes that reach beyond survival

Conversely, in affirming the unfolding of birth and growth, aging and death, might we not find access to something permanent, something beyond this “drama of time,” something that at once transcends and gives purpose to the processes of the earth, lifting us to a dignity beyond all disorder, decay, and death?