« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
February 28, 2005
Interview/Back in 5
So, I'll be in Boston Wed-Sunday, so don't expect to hear much from me, but think good thoughts for my MIT interviews.
Posted by griffjon at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2005
WhaGwan!
Through many hurdles, we have passed, but the PC/J volunteer intranet site is finally up on it's own account (I'd say own server, but it's next door on the same one I'm on...), so I'm no longer the bottleneck for it getting updated. Huzzah!
Reflecting on it while I was patching everything over to it, although it's a buggy heap of code with very obvious stages of my coding it based on learning perl better, overall it's a useful chunk of code that serves the 100-150 volunteers on-island well.
Posted by griffjon at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2005
Gannon/Guckert, Hannity, Rathergate
We're either on the tip of the largest still-in-one-piece-after-global-warming iceberg and media scandle, or straddling many, many smaller icebergs.
Check TalkAboutGovt and NewsHounds for more from the original Raw News story, here's the scoop from Raw News:
Gannon bragged about passing a scoop on who obtained the troubled Bush National Guard memos to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on the conservative forum Free Republic.“Mary Mapes is DEFINITELY [sic] behind the story,” Gannon wrote in Free Republic on Sept. 10, 2004. “This is who I told Sean Hannity got the documents. She also obtained the Abu Ghraib photos.”
“I got the scoop and passed it to Hannity,” Gannon added. “Look for my detailed story on Monday at Talon News. There is much more to this story. Mary Mapes is just the beginning.”
That story–that CBS producer Mary Mapes was the source of the troubled Bush Guard documents–shredded the credibility of anchor Dan Rather and killed any chance the facts that Bush had failed to adequately perform his duties as a member of the Texas Air National Guard would be taken seriously.
A producer at a rival network told Aravosis she received a call from Gannon informing her that Mapes had obtained the documents. That network then broke the tie between Mapes and the questionable ‘60 Minutes’ report.
“I am more concerned with each passing day that the relationship between Gannon and the White House was anything but typical,” Slaughter said. “As long as this Administration continues to stonewall I will seek the truth.”
So wait, an uncredentialed fake news reporter (who's a gay hooker on the side), not only has press passes into the White House, but is receiving documents in advance of their release, now shows to have some connection to Rathergate?
There's more going on here... I'll make a prediction, as my earlier call on Iran is inching ever closer to reality, I think we're soon going to uncover a hugely interconnected propaganda effort by the neocons. CBS was set up, Fox is on the payroll, as are half of the other rightwingnut reporters.
Posted by griffjon at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
Torture Administration
Posted by griffjon at 09:26 PM | Comments (0)
Some quick updates
I've been super-busy with work and life recently, so haven't been updating much.
Let's see. Amusing $job story; our accounting whiz is this black lady, and she brought her kids to work one (cold) afternoon -- they asked her later that night, "Is Mister Jon an African?"
I'd had my rasta scarf and hat in my office.
Otherwise, I'm finally beyond the first hurdle of work-learning, but am now taking on our new DB management and continue to try to wrangle the website into some shape, at least on the backend, that is reasonable, and getting things like logging and stats working. What a concept. On a related geek-note, I really dislike Tomcat.
I've gotta gear up for my trip to Boston, er, next week -- a bit more background on the LifeLong Learning/Kindergarten group would be a good idea, that, and packing.
I'm now truck-less. I took the PRC UT shuttle up today, it's about a 10-15 minute walk from my house to the stop, and it takes maybe 20-30 minutes driving time. Not bad, except it was COOOOOLD again today, and both going and coming I'd just barely missed the bus, so I got to wait the whole time in the unsheltered cold. That was unfortunate. but hey, it's a free shuttle, and I have an alternative, bus #3, which takes a lot longer, but makes stops along the way (PRC is an express).
During my commute, I'm finally getting around to reading "Going Home to Teach" by Anthony Winkler -- it's not fiction, like most of his work, but it's still a fascinating read and exploration into a lot of Jamaica, colonialism, and racism/class issues. It's insightful and true, if often offensive.
Posted by griffjon at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2005
NYT editorial chimes in on tortue
American intelligence is still secretly detaining prisoners - a practice that has become embarrassing enough for the Central Intelligence Agency to fret publicly about it. And the administration continues to insist that the president has an imperial right to sweep aside the law and authorize whatever he wants. That includes flouting treaties that prohibit sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. That abhorrent practice has become more common since 9/11 and is reported to include sending prisoners to Syria, a repressive nation counted by Washington as a state sponsor of terrorism.Members of Congress from both parties are proposing new laws on interrogations. Their intentions are honorable, and new legislation may be needed. But drafts of these measures risk endorsing some terrible practices, as well as the idea that the president can declare himself above the law. Anyway, it's too soon for new laws; we still don't know what happened and who approved it.
But that task is now way beyond the purview of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which held important hearings on prisoner abuse. Republican Congressional leaders have made it painfully clear that they will not hold a real investigation. And no inquiry by the executive branch can be credible because the stain of prisoner abuse spreads so far. The Justice Department can't do it; Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was part of the problem.
We strongly agree with the American Bar Association, which wrote to President Bush on Feb. 1 to urge the appointment of an independent, bipartisan commission with subpoena power. The bar association talked about Iraqi civilians in military custody, but we believe that a panel should look at all prisoners, all detention centers and all involved government agencies.
Only a full accounting can begin to heal the nation's image in the world, clarify the rules, punish those responsible and clear the names of the hundreds of thousands of other uniformed Americans who risk their lives to preserve human dignity and the rule of law.
Emphasis mine, go Bar Assoc!
--NYT
Posted by griffjon at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
Social Security Calculator
Posted by griffjon at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)
All you ever wanted to know about Negroponte
DailyKOS pulls together a good CV for the new director of national intelligence.
Posted by griffjon at 07:29 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2005
This Week on "This Old DasBlueHaus" (Feb 20)
So, as my parents are comnig through and picking up the truck I've had on loan for so long, I tried to run around and get all my vehicle-required errands done this weekend, so a lot of my time has been taken up by grocery shopping for heavy/hard-to-find-nearby items (So, yes, Fiesta trip for Ja food!), also, the weather has been grey and wet, so I'm not so inclined to be working outside so much...
I got some stuff done anyhow;
I painted the upstairs, outside door blue -- this involved scraping the old layers of (probably lead-based) chipping paint off (I wore a face-mask). It doesn't look pro, but it looks a whole HELL of a lot better than it did.
I then used up the remaining scraps of tile and bought 5 more squares and re-tiled the entry way, which has old commercial crap-tile, so it looks a lot better as well.
I went down and harvested some bamboo from one of our friends whose yards it has invaded; but it's so spindly and mostly-rotten, I don't know if I'll manage to make anything out of it. It was also an exporatory trip to find out if we could make a roll-up bamboo mat for the Dome project for the farm party this summer, and perhaps some camping trips in the spring. (We have a few dome-building geeks in the group, who dream up ways to make easy-set-up huge domes, there's just this problem with good flooring...) I don't think the bamboo we currently have access to will work; same problem here as there -- termites love bamboo. I did uproot some stalks/runners of bamboo and transplant them to our yard (muahahahahaha), we'll see if it survives long enough to take it over.
I moved some of my herbs I've been keeping inside out, so they can enjoy the soaking rain, and any sun that might happen to come along.
I re-strung my drum (to tighten the skin, there's a loop of cord that goes around the top, and the original cord was fraying, so I re-corded it and tightened it so it's playable again).
I also did a little cleaning, as my kitchen and bedroom hadn't been swept/mopped in a while.
I think that's all I've done this weekend, but it's only 2pm on Sunday... ;)
Posted by griffjon at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
Gmail RAID
[GriffJon] So, do you need a gMail account, or, like, 50?
[OtherGeek] I don't have 50 friends
[GriffJon] someone needs to rehack GMailFS to auto-generate accounts and continually re-auto-generate them and link them all together into a HUGE network drive
[OtherGeek] wow
[OtherGeek] dude
[OtherGeek] you'd have like
[GriffJon] you could yhave a TB of networked sstorage in aa month
[OtherGeek] a TB
[OtherGeek] haha
[GriffJon] it's in python/fuse, get on it.
[OtherGeek] i think that may be a violation of the terms of service
[GriffJon] well, gmailFS itsel fis also a violation. In for a dime, in for a dollar
[OtherGeek] yeah
[GriffJon] it's friday, afternoon, I can't type
[OtherGeek] but i think they can tolerate gmailFS
[OtherGeek] gmailRAID they may have issues with
[GriffJon] Tho, it'd be a fast track to getting gmailfs banner yep
[GriffJon] dude, but gMailRAID....
[OtherGeek] haha
[OtherGeek] i need to copyright that
Posted by griffjon at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
See?
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Habitual coffee drinking seems to be associated with a lower risk of developing liver cancer, according to a study conducted in Japan and reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.A second study in the same journal suggests that caffeinated coffee consumption is not tied to colorectal cancer, although decaffeinated coffee may decrease the risk of rectal cancer.
Dr. Manami Inoue and colleagues at the National Cancer Center in Tokyo surveyed approximately 90,000 individuals in 1990 or between 1993 and 1994. The subjects were followed through the end of 2001, during which time 334 were diagnosed with liver cancer.
The risk of liver cancer among those who almost never drank coffee was twice as high as for those who drank coffee on a daily basis.
The investigators observed no association between green tea intake and the risk of liver cancer, suggesting that antioxidants unique to coffee may be responsible for its protective effects.
In the second article, Dr. Karin B. Michels at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and colleagues analyzed data from 88,000 women in the Nurses' Health Study, which began in 1976, and from 46,000 men in the Health Professionals' Follow-up Study, which began in 1986. During followup through 1998, there were 1433 cases of colorectal cancer.
Total coffee or tea consumption was not associated with the development of colorectal cancer in either group.
However, among subjects who reported never drinking decaffeinated coffee, the occurrence of rectal cancer was 58% higher than among those who drank two or more cups per day.
While results were consistent for both cohorts, Dr. Michels' group says the relationship of decaffeinated coffee to a lower risk of rectal cancer should be looked at again in additional studies.
--Reuters
Posted by griffjon at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2005
Niece
This, by overwhelming evidence, is both my niece, and possibly one of the cutest babies evar!!!11one!!! Or something like that.
Posted by griffjon at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)
Firewalling Morality?
Futzing with the firewall at $job today, I came across its content filtering categories. So nice to see Sex Education in with such good company... sigh.
-Violence -Sexual Acts -Satanic/Cult -Sex Education -Partial Nudity -Gross Depictions -Drug Culture ...Click for the pic...
Posted by griffjon at 07:31 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2005
Free trip to Boston?
Thank you for your application for graduate study in the program in [MIT] Media Arts and Scinces. Your application has been reviewed, and if at all possible, Prof. [...] has asked us to invite you to visit the Media Laboratory for interviews with our faculty.
dizamn! MIT Interviews. I talked to this prof during my trip, and he has I think one or two slots open for the Fall, so I guess I'm on some form of short-ish list. Now, I just need to schedule a trip, I get up to $400 reimbursed for airfare.
When it rains, it floods. This might actually end up being a hard decision!
In related news, Elliot School (GWU) is bugging me because they didn't get my recommendations, due to their application portal not working right, but I'm on that, and it's working now, and I view it as a good sign (or, at least, not a bad sign) that they're bugging me at this late date.
Posted by griffjon at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2005
Shoot the Messenger
Thirty-six journalists - and 18 media support workers - have been killed since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).At least nine have died as a result of American fire, said Ann Cooper, executive director of the CPJ.
Nine from US fire? Uh?
That does indeed look suspicious, as Eason Jordan, the (former) chief newsie at CNN pointed out (and backpedaled afterwards, and also resigned from CNN.
More at BBC
Posted by griffjon at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)
Ignore the consequences
The continued destruction of the Earth is an often-forgotten problem of the current US regime, what with torture being a daily headline and all. But let's not forget:
The US, the world's largest polluter, withdrew from the treaty in 2001, citing economic concerns
The other 136 counties, with economies worse than ours, seem to still be solvent.
Posted by griffjon at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)
This Week on "This Old DasBlueHaus"
So, this weekend, my projects (at least the ones I'm admitting to having, because I did them) were:
Finish the mosaic on the DoorTable
Improving the entryway stairs (sanded and re-varnished, they look real nice, too bad I have no skin on my fingertips!)
Re-arranged bedroom for better space usage
As an added bonus, since the weather was SO DAMNED NICE sunday, I planted the garden (well, I put seeds for Habaneros in the ground, and tomatoes and Jalapenos in planters) (with one Very Painful Habanero-oil incident that I won't get into. It, ironically, doesn't have anything to do with the lack of skin on my fingers, my hands seem to have pretty high pain tolerance.
I also put screens up on some of the windows they'd been removed from for whatever reason, so as to better enjoy the Free Weather effect without having bees check me out.
Posted by griffjon at 02:18 PM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2005
IBM Commercial
I just saw this IBM commercial on TV. Caveat: I actually like IBM, they've made impressive and positive changes, particularly remarkable for a big stodgy business corporation. Anyhow.
The commercial is this cute chinese girl asking a guy in a large white room "is this the help desk?" and then barraging him with questions about science. He asks her why she didn't learn this in school, and she responds that she lives on a farm in China, and there is no school. Of course, this is the Internet, so she can join in the existing classroom -- IBM helps teachers create virtual classrooms for everyone, etc and so on.
Sorry, IBM -- if there's not a classroom, there sure as hell ain't gonna be Internet connection that can handle any of the creappily designed virtual classroom systems (ok, maybe Moodle.
Posted by griffjon at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
Tomcat taking over / overriding index.jsp?
So, I'm playing with a testing server running Apache2/Jakarta2/Tomcat4.1. After (lots of) tweaking, it works fine. Yay. Except the front page insists on being the tomcat server page ("You've successfully installed tomcat...") Not a problem, I think, and changed the server.xml Content path setting to
Still there.
Restarted tomcat, still there. restarted apache, still there. cleared my browser cache (just in case), still there. Bounced the server, still there. Reinstalled everything, in different orders, still there. Changed tc versions up to 5.0, still there (even with 5.0's fancier redirect xmls).
Back to scouring google, found a vague reference to a pre-compiled version of index.jsp in a jar (the jar wasn't there on my server). BUT, this led me down the right path.
After 3 days of scouring Google, Tomcat and Apache Docs, IRC channels and the brains of people more experienced than I with TomCat, I finally diagnosed the problem (with no help from the above sources).
If you keep getting the tomcat start page instead of the index.jsp you have designed, the problem is a precomiled copy of the index.jsp hanging around somewhere in tomcat. I found it to be in the work\Standalone\_\ directory relative to the tomcat directory. Stop topcat, delete these precomipled and cached files, start tomcat, and you're good to go.
I commit this to my blog in the hopes that Google will index it and save others the hassle.
Posted by griffjon at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2005
Sorry, Citizen, the Computer says you can't be here
It's just another step closer to a national ID card system.
Posted by griffjon at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)
Wait, there's supposed to be a happy ending
AMMAN (AFP) - A budding romance between a Jordanian man and woman turned into an ugly public divorce when the couple found out that they were in fact man and wife, state media reported.Separated for several months, boredom and chance briefly re-united Bakr Melhem and his wife Sanaa in an Internet chat room, the official Petra news agency said.
Bakr, who passed himself off as Adnan, fell head over heels for Sanaa, who signed off as Jamila (beautiful) and described herself as a cultured, unmarried woman -- a devout Muslim whose hobby was reading, Petra said.
Cyber love blossomed between the pair for three months and soon they were making wedding plans. To pledge their troth in person, they agreed to meet in the flesh near a bus depot in the town of Zarqa, northeast of Amman.
The shock of finding out their true identities was too much for the pair.
Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: "You are divorced, divorced, divorced" -- the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam.
"You are a liar," Sanaa retorted before fainting, the agency said.
-- Yahoo
Posted by griffjon at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)
There is a great need
For Iraq to be pretty and shiney right now. Or at least interesting, because we can't have this news getting any coverage:
The White House said on Thursday it was committed to a peaceful resolution of the dispute over North Korea's nuclear arms program after Pyongyang publicly acknowledged it possessed atomic weapons."We remain committed to the six-party talks. We remain committed to a peaceful, diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue with regards to North Korea," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with President Bush.
U.S. officials sought to take Pyongyang's announcement in stride. McClellan said: "We've heard this kind of rhetoric from North Korea before."
He said the U.S. intelligence community had long since publicly stated its belief that North Korea had nuclear weapons.
--Reuters.
If North Korea had oil, I feel that might have read:
North Korea announces it has WMD and the capabilities to strike at major US cities. The US responded that all US personnel have been pulled out from the region, and that as of 8pm tonight, we will now refer to South Korea as the "Island of Korea"
Posted by griffjon at 08:17 PM | Comments (0)
More fake news
Just go read Salon on Gannon
Props to the bloggers who uncovered this fraud.
Posted by griffjon at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)
More Enron
A Washington state utility released audiotapes Thursday that it said revealed bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp. plotted to take a power plant off-line in 2001 to jack up electric prices in Western states.That same day, shortages of power forced rolling blackouts in northern California that affected about 2 million customers.
Snohomish Public Utility District in Everett, Washington, released the tapes as part of its effort to void a $122 million lawsuit Enron has filed against it seeking payment for electricity it was contracted to provide.
The utility says an Enron employee and a worker at a power plant in Las Vegas, Nevada, made up phony repairs, taking the plant off-line January 17, 2001.
"We want you guys to get a little creative ... and come up with a reason to go down," the Enron worker tells the plant employee on one of the tapes.
"Anything you want to do over there? ... Cleaning, anything like that?" the Enron employee says.
"Yeah, yeah," the other replies. "There's some stuff we could be doing."
--
What upstanding guys we had in that company. Glad they're all in prison like Martha Stewart. Wait, what? They're not? They're free?
Sigh.
Posted by griffjon at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)
I'll take over-funded programs other than the Military, Alex
Daily KOS has a good set of articles and linkage on Bush increasing funding to abstinence-only education programs, 'cuz, y'know, they've been so effective... Daily KOS
Posted by griffjon at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)
Some interesting thoughts
BOPNews posts an interesting set of thoughts in the form of a conversation, on the goings on between Venezeula and Colombia, Russia, and Iran, among others. check it out.
Posted by griffjon at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)
February 09, 2005
So, in a move by the universe to kick me out of this funk (even this
morning I was considering the deep hole of depression I'd be in if I
didn't get in to any of my schools), I get this email:
"The Georgetown University Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) Program’s admissions committee has completed the review of your application. I am pleased to inform you that the committee has recommended your admission to the Dean of the Graduate School. You will receive an official notification via mail from the Dean shortly, pending a review of all your admission requirements."
And, less than 5 minutes after that, I find out that I'm now an uncle, as of 2pm this afternoon. The initial reports are that my new niece is really pretty. But then again, it's coming from biased sources. ;)
Posted by griffjon at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2005
Feelin' Better
Friday night, me and some other Jamaica RPCVs (two from my group, and a girl from G65 (T-Beach Amy, who got married in TB last year) went down to St. Ed's, whose African-Heritage student group hosted a Marley bday celebrationm, with a live Marley cover-band, and free chicken rice and peas (not very good rice and peas). We hung out there for a few hours chatting about Ja (Amy was a good friend with Carla, who lived in my same house during her time there, and shadowed my PC sector director when she was just a volunteer) (it's a frickin' small world!) Anyhow, that was great, but then we split up and went home. The G73ers called me up and told me to join them at Flamingo Cantina downtown, for more reggae tunes, so I headed down and we walked over from their yard near 6th street.
The music at Flamingo was alright, nothing special, but they had Red Stripe, and as we sat upstairs talking about re-adjustment woes and what we missed (and didn't miss at all) about Ja, we kept smelling authentic jerk, but figured it was just something drifting over from a restaurant, consufed with out noses longing for some jerk vibes. At some point, I went downstairs to refill our Stripe supply, and noticed that indeed, there was a jerk man serving up some authentic chicken, rice and peas. He was from St. Mary, near Annatto Bay.
DAMN, I never thought I'd crave Ja food, but this was truly ambrosia.
It was also great to be around other people going through the same readjustment pains, and having the same problems ("where'd you serve?" "Jamaica" "Oh, tough" *smack*).
Also, Mom helped out with a great, ego-expanding email that further contained good advice:
Just read your journal entry S A D and thought I would offer some thoughts (!) Vague discontent with one's life is not necessarily a bad thing. It keeps one from becoming smug, satisfied with the status quo, blind to other's plights, and boring. One should never lose the hope that one can do more and better things. Of course, taken to extremes you get to be 62 and still haven't decided what to be when you grow up. I have always thought I should be doing more, achieving more. You are my one saving grace. You have become a better person than I could ever hope for. I take a small bit of the credit for that.
...
Now some advice....go for a walk. Get active. Do something. Make plans for after work. Spring will come. Life will happen.
Posted by griffjon at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
February 03, 2005
Gonzales, Abrams
AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH!
At least there was some opposition.
Democratic Senator Robert Byrd: "I simply cannot support the nomination of someone who, despite his assertions to the contrary, obviously contributed in large measure to the atrocious policy failures and the contrived and abominable legal decisions that have flowed from this White House over the past four years."
Thanks.
And now, Bush has requested Elliot Abrams for National Security Adviser. This is a guy who pled guilty in the Iran-Contra scandle, and has been praising Sharon for his hard-line policies in Israel.
Can we get non-criminals on the cabinet?
Posted by griffjon at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)
S.A.D.?
I really find it hard to be motivated about $job. It pays me $money. I try to save $money and not spend it on Shiney Things, to widen my options for $gradschool this fall. $gradschool -> $degree, and $degree will enable me to get into a new level of development jobs, where I'll actually be back to doing things I care about. I find it hard to care about $money. Most of the things I want right now can't be bought, even with MasterCard.
So the gratification for my current efforts is ~3 years off, down a long road. It's hard to keep that all in focus. I wish $job had more direct benefit to the world. I wish the systems at $job were not so fragile and train-wreck prone, and that I was not inheriting responsibility for them.
I think I'm in a vague funk. It remains cold and dark (I don't know how you folks further north can deal with this for months on end). I'm lonely on two levels -- the whole being single level, which makes the cold doubly worse by having no one to snuggle with through multiple snooze alarms, and also a bit on the friend level. I mean, I have all my Austin peeps (whose who are still here at least), but I still have some problems -- there's just this massive gap in understanding between us. Sometimes it's amusing, sometimes it's endlessly frustrating. There's also been a sea-change in people here; all my friends are suddenly in the settling-down phase, they have reasonably stable relationships, and are buying or thinking of buying/planning saving for houses, with this built-in presumption that Austin is The Place for them.
This just feels weird, and combined with the blahness of the rest of it, it doesn't sit well.
I feel (again) like almost everyone else got the Handbook of How to Live your Life, and I lost my copy.
Or maybe I threw it out the window.
Posted by griffjon at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)
SotU
To quote Air America;
"[The State of the Union and Groundhog Day falling on the same day] is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog."
Others have said it all better than I:
Posted by griffjon at 07:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2005
SotU
I feel sick. I'm not sure I can watch this. He's already hitting on SS one the second sentence in.
Posted by griffjon at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2005
Oh, and
Man, too bad it's a wrrk night.
Posted by griffjon at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)
Setting the record state: State of the union 02-04
American Progress lists the claims from the 02 State of the Union vs. the reality.
e.q. :
CLAIM: "America is committed to keep dangerous weapons from dangerous regimes."
STATUS: Under Bush's watch, North Korea's nuclear arsenal is thought to have quadrupled. Charles Pritchard, formerly Colin Powell's top official dealing with North Korea, has warned for months that "the White House lacks an effective strategy to dissuade North Korea from building up its nuclear arms." And, according to Pritchard, the situation has deteriorated because "the administration has neither offered much of a carrot nor wielded a stick." [New York Times, 5/7/04]
Posted by griffjon at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)
Cogent thoughts on Social Security
My friend John-Paul Ferguson wrote this in response to a thread on the social security crisis and payroll taxes and such. Since that thread's pretty much impossible for anyone to find, he gave me permission to re-post it:
Payroll taxes are regressive because they kick in on the first dollar you earn (whereas income taxes for example kick in once you pass a certain threshhold) and are only collected up to a ceiling. It varies slightly for each tax; the current SS ceiling is $76,000. So, if you earn less than $76,000, you pay X percent of your income in payroll taxes; if you earn $152,000, you pay X/2 percent; if you earn $228,000, you pay X/3 percent, and so on.Social Security is funded out of payroll taxes because, when it was created in the 1930s, it was understood as a pension program that workers basically paid for themselves. You pay money into the SS trust fund during your working life, and collect money out of it after you retire. In today's political climate, this is a really God-Damn important point. Social Security isn't a transfer program; it doesn't involve redistribution, a la the income tax (not that I think redistribution is a bad thing). The people who use it, fund it. The cap on earnings subject to the SS tax is also a result of political compromise. Since the idea was to create an equitable pension system, Social Security has a cap on the size of the payments you can collect from it. Rich people squawked that they should not have to pay unlimited contributions to a program from which they could get limited rewards. So, the compromise was to cap earnings subject to SS taxation, to roughly correspond to the cap in payments receivable.
Social Security taxation is "dedicated"; that is, the money from SS taxes goes into a separate budget--the trust fund--from general government revenues. This too was intentionally built into the system: that money was money that the government was not supposed to touch, because it had to be there in some form several decades down the line, when someone retired. The folks who designed Social Security were smart enough to realize that, if the rest of the government could borrow from SS revenues, the money wouldn't last. Hence the division. This, incidentally, is why people are always talking about the Social Security surplus or deficit as well as the budget surplus or deficit; they're two different things, coming from two different budgets.
(Incidentally, the Clinton administration is responsible for some of the most shameful mis-characterization of the Social Security system to date. The "record budget surpluses" of the Clinton years are partly a result of counting the SS surplus along with the fiscal surplus/deficit. The real (fiscal) surpluses were much smaller, and in some years non-existent.)
The Social Security Administration (SSA) takes its surpluses and buys US government treasury bonds. Like most bonds, these appreciate in value over the years; they're also almost universally considered one of the safest investments on Earth (Really. One of the only things safer are World Bank bonds, but for different reasons). This is another interesting thing to note: whenever a US Treasury Secretary, like Paul O'Neill, says that Social Security's surpluses are "meaningless" because they just involve "one part of the federal government borrowing money from another part of the federal government," he is either a) lying or b) implying that his own department's bonds, the core of most people's investment portfolios and one of the main pillars of the dollar's role as a global currency, are meaningless. Which of those do you think is more likely?
The problem that several of you mentioned in the IRC thread is that the number of retirees is growing relative to the number of workers. Thus, around 2014, the SSA will begin paying more in benefits than it takes in taxes. (Already you should be suspicious: why is an administration that won't publish accurate budget statistics for this year, and won't make budget predictions at all past 2010, except on Social Security, so concerned about something that is still a decade off? Why farsightedness on this and only this problem?) After 2014, we're hardly in big trouble: the SSA can cash in some of those T-bonds each year to plug the gap between revenues and benefits. Doing that, Social Security can continue to pay its current benefit levels through 2042 or 2052 (depending on whose projections you use). I should note that many of us will have retired by then.
After the surplus is spent, Social Security would either have to reduce its benefit levels or receive some funding from the general budget. This would only be fair: remember that George W. and his ilk wanted to return some of the late-90s budget surpluses to us in tax cuts? He was talking about the Social Security surplus. If he was willing to tap SS in the name of the general budget, why do Republicans think it would be impossible to tap the general budget to aid SS? I mean, we're financing the entire war in Iraq with borrowed money!
But that's beside the point: saying that SS will start running a deficit in 2042/52 assumes that we will make no changes to the system whatsoever. We can make changes. We can for example raise the earnings cap on payroll taxes. We could increase the payroll taxation rate for higher earnings (which in its own way would be fair, since wealthier people tend to live longer and thus collect more SS benefits). We could raise the minimum wage--which would effectively transfer some money from employer's pockets to workers', and thence to the SS trust fund (and, yes, other parts of the government). Any of these reforms could keep SS solvent right into the 22nd century--by which time the coasts might be underwater and all of this will be a moot point.
So why not privatize it? For starters, privatization doesn't patch SS up. Think for a moment about how such a trust fund works: it's not that you pay in money while you're working, and that money sits in a vault for a few decades, only to be pulled back out and handed to you when you retire. Money you pay in goes right back out in the form of benefits to current retirees. The benefits you've earned exist from year to year, but they are actually paid with revenues taken in in the year you collect them. It's like a conveyor belt. It works fine, as long as people are still paying in when you decide to collect.
What happens if, instead of paying into the system, working people instead put their money into private accounts? Suddenly, the SSA does not have current revenues with which to satisfy earned benefits. The system can only be maintained by the government borrowing massive -- massive -- sums of money to cover benefits of people who retired under the old system. This is exactly what the British and Chilean governments, who privatized their pension plans under Thatcher and Pinochet, respectively, had to do; and it's exactly what the Bush plan proposes.
It's this component that I think gets lost in a lot of debates. Yes, it's true that investing your pension money in the stock market is a fundamentally stupid idea: it removes the stability of the pension's expected value, which is the whole goddamn point of a pension. You end up only doing better if you retire into a bull market--and retirement isn't something you can necessarily wait a few years on. In addition, no one has explained to me how having millions of working people alternately pumping in and sucking out billions of dollars from the stock market is not going to introduce wild volatility into said market. And while we're on this point, note that the British government, which has labeled its pension privatization a failure, has often complained that the "waste" (from a pension plan's perspective) of broker's fees drastically lowers the return that the private pension system yields, compared to the old public one. Any one of these reasons, taken by itself, is justification enough not to start dumping SS tax money into private investment accounts.
But that stuff, awful as it is, is only part of the problem. Sure, privatization would remove the security of pensions and potentially immiserize millions of people in their golden years. But that's really not the worst effect. The worst effect is the one I mentioned above: the catastrophic effects such a privatization would have on the federal budget. You think our debt is bad now? How about adding the odd $10 trillion or three over the next few decades? What do you think that'll do to investor confidence, the foreign-exchange rate, the capital account? Not good things, probably.
...Look, it's late. I've said enough. The main point is this: any idiot can get up to speed on the mechanics and finances of Social Security really quickly. It's just not that complicated. In a time like this, when the government is actively lying to the population to try to gut it, the most successful (and solvent!) progressive social program in our history, we as citizens have a responsibility to learn how the thing works, so we can form an intelligent opinion on the matter. So, read up. Read anything Paul Krugman, or Thomas Frank, has written on the subject. Go check out www.thereisnocrisis.com. Hell, go read the Congressional Budget Office's own reports--they don't support Bush's plan! But don't just parrot third-hand disaster scenarios you sort of remember. This is serious shit; our use of the program quite literally depends on it.
Posted by griffjon at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)
Glimmer of hope
If we can get rid of gitmo, we can recover some shred of respect.
Judge backs Guantanamo challengeMany inmates have been held without charge or access to lawyers
A US federal judge in Washington has ruled that special military tribunals being used to try hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are illegal.Judge Joyce Hens Green said the tribunals denied the detainees their basic rights under the US constitution.
Her ruling is a blow to the Bush administration, which argues the inmates have no constitutional rights.
But a BBC correspondent says the decision is unlikely to be the end of the matter.
'Fundamental rights'
Judge Green said the tribunals in 11 cases she had examined were unconstitutional, and that the detainees were not accorded due process of law.
She noted the widespread allegations that detainees were abused during interrogations and said this cast doubt over any confession made under such circumstances.
The war on terror "cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over 200 years," she wrote.
--BBC
Posted by griffjon at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
Sigh
Some 83% of students polled felt people should be allowed to express unpopular views, as opposed to 97% of teachers.Roughly half the students polled wrongly believed the US government had the right to censor the internet, while two-thirds believed it was illegal to burn the US flag - another misconception.
--BBC
Posted by griffjon at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)