Merchants of Death!
You know, the real problem with this post is that it doesn’t go far enough. I mean, what about the hospitals? They’re party to the “18,000 deaths,” right? Refusing to perform non-emergency care and all. The doctors go right along with it, too.
The insurance companies use sophisticated statistical modeling, not possible without the software industry. So they’re complicit. Microsoft sold those companies Windows licenses, so Bill Gates is responsible for some of those deaths. Hell, maybe some of the software is written in C++; damn you Bjarne Stroustrup! You’re killing people!
So, to recap: insurance companies, hospital employees, doctors, nurses, lobbyists, politicians, and software engineers. All complicit in an ongoing criminal enterprise.
Somehow, I don’t think this is a useful line of argument.
To the Moon!
Tor has lots of posts with various sci-fi types remembering the Moon landing. Recommended.
With all this comes people advocating a manned Mars mission.
I don’t know. I don’t think getting all starry-eyed when remembering the Moon landing is a reason to go to Mars. The space program is a good thing, but putting a man on Mars? Meh. I can’t bring myself to advocate for policies based on a sense of wonder.
Writing a letter, just like the mafia would
Mark Steyn seems sort of confused, commenting on a letter from an Obama cabinet official:
Why not just break his legs in the Senate parking lot? Kyl “publicly questioned” the stimulus? We can’t have that, can we? The “Dissent Is The Highest Form Of Patriotism” bumper sticker was canceled by executive order on January 20th.
Have I said that I love The Corner? Fantastic stuff.
Moving on, one of the self-anointed guardians of vacuous centrism is angry. Why? Well, the House’s Tri-Committee health care bill apparently makes too much sense. He makes it sound like the Blue Dogs are going to mount a campaign to make the bill cost more and do less. Meanwhile, Ben Nelson believes he’s some sort of automaton, controlled solely by imaginary constituent preferences.
At least Republican craziness is entertaining.
Quick, guess my SSN!
This is wonderful. Algorithmically generating SSNs based on birth date and place is kind of feasible:
The accuracy of these algorithms is positively disturbing. Using a separate pool of data from the Death Master File, the authors were able to get the first five digits right for seven percent of those with an SSN assigned before 1988; after that, the success rate goes up to a staggering 44 percent. For a smaller state, like Vermont, they could get it right over 90 percent of the time.
Getting the last four digits right was substantially harder. The authors used a standard of getting the whole SSN right within 10 tries, and could only manage that about 0.1 percent of the time even in the later period. Still, small states were somewhat easier—for Delaware in 1996, they had a five percent success rate.
That may still seem moderately secure if it weren’t for some realities of the modern online world. The authors point out that many credit card verification services, recognizing the challenges of data entry from illegible forms, may allow up to two digits of the SSN to be wrong, provided the date and place of birth are accurate. They often allow several failed verification attempts per IP address before blacklisting it. Given these numbers, the authors estimate that even a moderate-sized botnet of 10,000 machines could successfully obtain identity verifications for younger residents of West Virginia at a rate of 47 a minute.
I predict someone will make a Facebook app out of this and trick people into giving out their SSNs (“why yes, that is my SSN!”).
We're all traitors
So Paul Krugman wrote a column calling climate change-deniers treasonous:
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
…
Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?
Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.
Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
Krugman’s statement is stupid and hyperbolic (though he has good reason to be angry). John Cole has the correct reaction, so I don’t have much to say on that.
However, Jay over at LitW said this about Krugman’s column:
Of course, not quite understanding that Krugman was turning the right-wingers’ use of the word “treason” against them – pointing out the hypocrisy of an earlier, hyperbolic use of the term for a threat that wasn’t quite all that it was made out to be, by contrasting it with the same folks’ laconic attitude towards an all-too real and present catastrophic threat – naturally the usual people went completely bath*t.
You know, this is pure bullshit. Yes, maybe we can look at some who are in an uproar and go “Ha! You’re reaping what you’ve sown.” Fuck that. Krugman knows better. And liberals should know better than to defend him with sophistry. Treason should actually mean something and not be an empty political insult the way fascism is now.
People who aspire to be more than political hacks should be able to restrain themselves.
Delusion
It’s been buried in an avalanche of inanity since yesterday, but this post at The Corner was a real gem:
Four years from now, Mitt Romney will be president of the United States. … Point Two: The Republicans always nominate for president the candidate who’s next in line, even if that person is deeply unpopular (e.g., the GOP base’s hatred for John McCain did not prevent him from being nominated; he was the guy who lost to Bush in 2000, ergo…). In 2008, the runner-up was Romney.
You know, you would think Republicans who are so attached to the “we always nominate the next guy in line” thing would know which guy was the runner up last year. It was Huckabee.
Now that that’s out of the way, you can go back to reading about Iran on some other blog. Apparently they had some sort of election. I’m so glad McCain isn’t president right now.
Oh yeah
I still have a blog! I forgot! My writing energy keeps getting focused elsewhere.
I heard a Christian shot up a place associated with Judaism because of Muslims.
This is like one of those brain teasers, isn’t it? Some kind of riddle?
The Uighurs are going to Palau. I hadn’t heard of that place until yesterday. But it’s not Cuba and it’s not China so, yay?
