Make money not war

I just recently realized that the location of the Biblical village of Cana is still in dispute. It seems to me that someone should just decide on one spot and arrange to build a large reception hall there to accommodate destination weddings (or, at least, destination wedding receptions) for couples of a New Testament spiritual bent, thus bringing in tourist revenue to a region somewhat deficient in resources and hard by the contested region of the Golan Heights. Surely a lucrative commerce, tastefully done, could serve to ease international tensions in the region, though it might be too much to ask for actual miracles to occur in the process.

At cross-purposes

The Cost of Gasoline,
originally uploaded by hidayat_peje7.

We are hearing about plans to jump-start the consumer sector of this country (and that of our trading partners) but it looks like all indications are that the new meme going around, which is really an old, old meme, is of scrimping and making do.

• There are all sorts of blog posts like the one on 15 Things You Should Never Pay For telling avid readers what they can avoid parting with their cash to obtain.
• Most of the comments on the thread asking How are you coping with collapse-anxiety? speak of simplification and doing without luxuries
• The financial station CNBC has a feature advising people not to go to far in slashing the household budget

I don't see much indication that if stimulus money ends up in the consumers' pockets there is going to be a big Keynsian multiplier effect on the level of the individual, as people take some or all of that money and sock it away into savings or to pay down credit, thus failing to stimulate producers.
To counteract this addiction to destructive savings behavior, perhaps the government could put strings on the funds it doles out to bias its use toward a multiplier greater than one. For instance, we could reward people who spend money on things which are actually addictive (drugs, alcohol, sports, greasy food, religious ecstasy, political extremism, etc.) so as to get them hooked and more willing to part with their own dollars in the future. Or we could make conspicuous consumption more fashionable again in the public eye by using the media to continue promoting extravagance, only more so. Or we could put something in the currency so that if it isn't passed along to someone else, it will self-destruct noisily and messily. Mix in a little bit of patriotism and almost anything can take off even if it doesn't sound that good in the first place.

Spot the warped, frustrated old man

When pondering the image of Dick Cheney in a wheelchair, this tableau sprang to mind.Original here

Breeding shows

Slightly NSFW

And today White House insider Gordon Johndroe (his real name) appears to confirm Barney's troubled attitude toward people who do not own him.

Well of course. He's a son of a bitch.

Notes for a State of the Union Address

This little piece seems as if it would work pretty well next month.

We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks but it was true in enough of them to shock the people for a time into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. It was the Government's job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible—and the job is being performed.

Delivered by the President of the United States, March 12, 1933.

All round-eye look same

Have you yourself been worried of giving offense because you, a white person, have difficulty remembering or distinguishing the characteristic facial features of those of Asian descent? Well you can relax now, as we find out that everybody is that way.

They’re Caucasians and they look alike. It’s not easy to distinguish them.

The person speaking is a government official of the Philippines referring to a meeting which may or may not have been held with representatives of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. Or perhaps it was the World Bank. Or some white guys with a bunch of money from somewhere apparently.

I blame faulty ethnology, and maybe a lack of name tags.

Note on the title of the post: I have only heard the imagined slur in jest. Also, I have no plans to register that domain, which does seem to be available.

Image generated at the Ultimate Flash Face site

A modest economic proposal

Administration officials, Wall Street executives, media pundits, average people in the street, and everyone else is complaining about the unavailability of business credit these days what with the shocking, shocking revelations of people playing fast and loose with other peoples' money. I ask, why not monetize scrip that everyone probably already has, in the form of board game money?

For instance, Milton Bradley's Game of Life has always had an extensive collection of scrip, including stock certificates and promissory notes. The 1960's era set had $100000 bills bearing the face of trusted television personality Art Linkletter. The Treasury could simply declare some or all of these bits of paper to be backed up by the full faith and credit of the United States Government, and there would be an immediate infusion of cash as people would unearth their bounty hidden in their attics and basements and start using them as instruments of monetary exchange.

The Promissory Notes are interesting as they are essentially debt obligations made between the player and whoever was playing the banker (in my case, this would often be my cousin Estelle). Perhaps we should reserve these for small businesses to replace the lost short-term credit opportunities that are besetting them now, in the expectation that once the system has been re-primed, they will be able to make good on the note plus interest when it matures, same as if they had obtained funds in the commercial paper market.

Some might complain that the allocation of this windfall would be unfair, purely at the whim of whether a person had packrat tendencies or not. My reply is that it is certainly less unfair than the TARP program, which gives money to the some of the very people who made the crisis as bad as it is, and just about nothing to the average citizen boardgame-playing or not.

If the amount of stimulus is too little, the Treasury Secretary could go on to phase two of the program, which would monetize Monopoly cash and perhaps also the little metal tokens they used to package in the box. One hopes that the government would not have to resort to a third round involving Scrabble tiles and the like.

Nursery rhyme

Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the three.
"We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we," said
Winkin',
Blinkin',
and Nod.

Regular expressions of marriage

marriage?,
originally uploaded by Rootytootoot.

Opponents of gay marriage favor the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, forming the basis of a traditional family. Using the language of regular expressions, we can formalize the allowed configurations of families under different assumptions.

Let us represent a family grouping by a character string including various numbers of children, men, and women in that order (alphabetical).

Extended monogamy

^(child)*(man(man|woman)?|woman(woman)?)$

Traditional monogamy

^(child)*(man(woman)?|woman)$

Childfree

^(man(man|woman)?|woman(woman)?)$

Polygyny

^(child)*(man(woman)*)$

Polyandry

^(child)*((man)*woman)$

Polygamy

^(child)*((man)+(woman)*|(man)*(woman)+)$

Anti-spinster

^(child)*(man(woman)?)$

Anti-bachelor

^(child)*((man)?woman)$

Nuclear family

^(man|woman|(child)*manwoman)$

I wrote a little Ruby program to test a number of configurations against these regular expressions to give you an idea of what is allowed and what is not under those models.

Family grouping	Allowed?
Anti-spinster (hetero, no single women, single fathers okay)
man	true
woman	false
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Childfree (extended monogamy without children)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	false
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Open family (any configuration allowed)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	true
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	true
manmanwoman	true
child	true
Nuclear family (hetero, no single parents)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Anti-bachelor (hetero, no single men, single mothers okay)
man	false
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polygyny (1 man + n women)
man	true
woman	false
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Traditional monogamy (1+1 of opposite sexes, single parents okay)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polyandry (n men + 1 woman)
man	false
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	true
childman	false
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	true
child	false
Extended monogamy (1+1 of either sex, single parents okay)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polygamy (n men + n women)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	true
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	true
manmanwoman	true
child	false

A few minutes' inspection of the results reveals how the regular expression in this model encodes the assumptions as to who is allowed to mate and who is allowed to raise children in a powerful and concise manner. Specifically, each of the regexs is short enough to fit on the front of a T-shirt, with room to spare, so that no geekish onlooker would need to wonder what your family philosophy consisted of.

Exam

An article about the round-the-clock curfew in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas made me think that perhaps we could require proof that a community is in fact civilized now and then.

The idea comes from Microsoft: when you install Windows, you have thirty days until you must activate the installation in order to prove that the copy of the installation certificate you used was valid. Mere possession of an installation image and a software key which functions cryptographically is not enough; one must submit to the higher authority of the company which provided these.

In a similar way, a governmental entity (Helena-West Helena was created by a 2006 merger) could be challenged to prove that they have the structures to maintain modern norms a society should possess, perhaps by documenting the persons responsible for each function, some statistics on the good and bad aspects of life under their authority, and a cross-section of opinion of the residents subject to the administration. If there are serious shortcomings, then sanctions could be applied up to the point where the government should be dissolved and a new one (or more than one) would take its place. No longer would be sufficient to call yourself a town or a nation and draw up some charter made up of empty promises, actual civic benefit would need to be demonstrated before a regime would be allowed to come into existence.

One could extend this notion to political entities which already exist today, subjecting them to the cleansing light of open scrutiny. But I would not bet on it.

(via)

Zagback

A-Litter at 6 weeks old.,
originally uploaded by djitl.

Zimbabwe is much in the news these days, and when I think of Zimbabwe, I think of Rhodesia, and when I think of Rhodesia, I think of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Shouldn't these be called Zimbabwean Ridgebacks by now? The -wikipedia article gives no inkling that this might be the case, though it seems that I am not linguistically alone in this notion .

The problem, I feel, is that the breed would miss out on the delicious alliteration of the R sounds. I briefly considered “Zimbabwean Z-back” until I considered that it sounds too much like “zweiback”, an unfortunate and disturbing association. “Zidgeback” would be a possibility were it not for the naysayers would would point out that zidge is not a word, and does not convey the essence of the salient physical feature of the creature.

Zimbabwean Zagback works, however. The rest of the fur zigs, but in the middle of the back it zags. (Or perhaps it is the other way around and the dog could be called a zigback instead.) And while it might seem harder to say than Rhodesian Ridgeback, it makes up for that in coolness. Plus, it scores points on the political awareness front.


Still thinking about the csae of the Burmese Tiger.

Column 4

Here in New Jersey we had our Presidential primary months ago (it seems like longer, really), but we still have some legislative contests yet to be determined at the party level. Some are statewide, some are according to Congressional district, some are countywide, and then there are the scores of those down at the weedtop level one step up from the grassroots organization. It is here that I find myself, somewhat unexpectedly.

A while back, maybe a year or so, I was appointed to some time ago to fill a vacancy as a local representative to the Democratic county organization. A few times a year we were expected to come down to a meeting and cast a vote for matters of local interest, in the evening when people are back from their real jobs. The problem was that the club for our town had a problem finding anyone else to fill the position, so I agreed put my name on a petition to continue my role for the upcoming term. Since I never stood election before, I somehow thought it was going to be another formality.

So I was surprised when we received our sample ballots this week to learn that my name and my wife's were listed. Down at the bottom, there.


As before, the duties are minimal, there is no pay, there is no prestige, and precious little thinking involved. We are not superdelegates and don't expect to be getting phone calls from Washington. But still! we want the votes this June 3rd, just because. Should any matters of great significance arise I promise to give them all the attention they deserve (and what does one have to give besides attention nowadays, when it comes right down to that).

Guarding the flame

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London Olympic Torch Relay 17,
originally uploaded by Tanya N.

The past week's human rights protests at the sites of the Olympic torch relay made me think that one way they could avoid having to cancel the whole affair would be to parcel it out in a distributed fashion.

Of the 15 international cities still waiting to have the relay pass through, divide them up into five groups of three. It appears they have a number of backups of the vaguely tusk-shaped torch, so they could provide one to each of the cities in the group. They could then have three more-or-less simultaneous runnings of each torch on three successive days (one hopes with rather less amount of security detail required, for each venue) in the hopes that one of the three torches would reach its destination unhampered by protests on any given day. Only in the unlikely event that one of the three cities in the group would have the first two of its relay legs disrupted would we be in a situation where the leg (the last one) would be a must-have, a single point of failure, and security could be beefed up in such a case to such a level as is required.

Or, if it really seems impractical to safeguard the relay runners, one could simply take them and the city's torch up in a helicopter or blimp which would trace the route far overhead, out of hand-thrown missile range. This would have the added advantage with its aerial setting of increasing the visibility of the Olympic torch and what it represents.

Once the group has completed its relays, organizers could go through afterwards and declare what the official route of the sacred Torch had actually been through those three cities.

One would expect that the section of the relay which passes through China itself would be more or less immune to the kind of problems experienced up to now. If tension increases to such an extent that this is not a reasonable assumption, then similar measures could be taken for that section of the relay.

Relief President

In the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, it was customary for baseball pitchers to finish all the games they started. Relief pitching was very rare, signalling at the time a mark of failure. In the modern game, teams have moved all the way to a model where a good starting pitcher is expected to put in a good set of innings, perhaps six or seven, but when the pitch count climbs upward of 100 or so to hand the ball over to a lineup of relief pitchers to close out most games.

I propose something similar for the office of the Presidency of the United States.

Now that we have seen that the resignation of the chief executive does not automatically bring with it the downfall of the Republic as a whole, the long-standing reluctance to leave office may be lessened, and calm, rational political thinkers may well want to consider the benefits of ceding power in an orderly way. Maybe the concept of the Vice-President as primarily the one "a heartbeat away" from the highest job in the land could be tweaked to one of a person with the skills to pick up that job in the waning months and weeks of the term and inject a new energy at the time it is most needed. The change at the top would make a generalized turnover of the other key Executive Branch positions at this time a natural thing to do. In situations when the Administration is embroiled with tense negotiations (whether foreign or domestic in nature) could be spiced up with the prospect of having a Presidential switch in order to achieve some kind of strategic advantage, much as when baseball managers switch pitchers to get the kind of matchup they want with the upcoming batters in the lineup. Also, the impact of the handover in power could be parlayed into a partisan advantage if it could be timed for the optimum time in the campaign season for the next term.

The new President would be expected to name a replacement Vice-President who would make sense as the next President in line, in the event that circumstances call for a second change at the top - or a third or fourth, as the case may be. Although the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution makes it impossible for a person to be elected to the Presidency more than twice, it does not appear to forbid a person from ascending to the Presidency more than this through vacancy. Thus, one could imagine a deal whereby the person who was originally President is confirmed as the new Vice-President, ready to step back into power when the time is right for the relief President to stop down, and so on, ad infinitum. (Note that here the baseball analogy breaks down; the rules do not allow a starting pitcher to re-enter a game after having left.)

This kind of scheme would raise the profile of the Vice-Presidency from it traditional low assessment. Perhaps if the expectation that an elected President will ordinarily cede power over to their running mate becomes sufficiently ingrained, one who delays doing so will someday be regarded as distrusting or snubbing their Vice-President, and may well take some damage in the public opinion polls as a result.

As I think of this idea, it seems to me that the trickiest aspect of this scheme would have to do with the lack of anyone fulfilling the role of a baseball team manager when it comes to politics. There really isn't any one person who by Constitutional law has the authority to tell the President that enough is enough and that it is time to withdraw. On the other hand, the nation as a whole might be inspired to take on that function, maybe by expressing their opinion through the press, maybe more formally (by voting?), somehow.

I am not proposing this kind of process at the current moment, since the electorate did not really have this setup in mind as of the time of the last Presidential contest and could not have considered the Vice-President very seriously as likely Presidential material. But I think it is not already too late for this to become part of the deal for the next four years in office.

Gift idea #6: Peace

let there be....,
originally uploaded by imagepeace.

In this season when so many of us turn our thoughts on how to give back, doesn't it make sense to consider whether it might be possible to go for the greatest hope, the one which tops so many people's list? "But," you say, "how can I possibly do anything to bring an end to war and conflict everywhere on earth?"

Mathematics. Are you surprised?

[T]he researchers propose people tell a referee how much they value certain qualities of a cake.

The referee then uses these weighted values to calculate where to cut the cake.

In an ideal world, both parties would get 100% of what they want. But in reality there's a compromise.

Jones says his team's algorithms ensure that both parties get about 65% of what they want, based on the principle of giving each person at least 50% of the cake plus the surplus as they value it.

The catch is that the system depends on honesty and requires a referee and a calculator.

The surplus procedure system can be used for two or three people, Jones says, but doesn't work quite as well for three or more.

He says the method can also be applied to other heterogeneous and divisible items, like dividing land or deciding how much rent each flatmate pays.

So consider making a sacrifice: cancel your trip to Starbucks and postpone that haircut you were planning, grab that old calculator out of the kitchen drawer and get yourself over to Palestine to offer your services as a referee to the parties there. There will be time to practice your fractions on the plane ride over. After that, buoyed by your success, maybe trips to Darfur, Baghdad, and Kabul next, and with luck you can be back in time for Christmas Eve.

The best thing about this plan is that give the size of the gift itself, you can probably designate multiple recipients and thus knock off most or all of your gift list at one stroke. Only the curmudgeonly ones who would admit to wanting a PS3 over the ancient dream of worldwide harmony would you still need to shop for, and maybe you could pick up a knicknack or two on your global errand for them too.

Plus, next year you'll most likely have a lock on picking up some pretty classy jewelry, baby!

Happy days are here again

Happy days are here again
Originally uploaded by milkfish.

More evidence of a photographic sort on the utility of plain old paper. Our friend John (former Dumont borough council member and also an usher at our church) is posting up the numbers on the wall of the Elks Club as they are gathered district by district by the local Democratic party's representative as the polls closed at 8pm last night. It was an overfull slate this year with four council seats in contention by the two parties.

The first returns were from the parts of town which are more Democratic-friendly, so when they came out solidly in the Democrats' favor the optimism was tempered. You can see the tension here. But by the time the more well-heeled, Republican-leaning part of town had its numbers tallied, also solidly in the same direction, everyone in the room knew that it was a sweep.

I presume the Republicans were having their election night event on the other side of town at the Knights of Columbus hall, though I did not see or hear of their representatives conceding the tally.

The great idea of this post is that local politics is still interesting to be involved with and that people are still working hard to try to run the detailed business of our communities. A fine party like this one (and the catered buffet was a fine one indeed) has got to beat an apathetic night at home watching the pundits on TV any time.

Opt-out campaign ads

If there's anything as annoying as public radio and television pledge campaigns, it's political campaign ads sprouting up on the airwaves every Fall. I know they work to sway the undecided voters, but for those of us who have their minds made up (for some time now, actually), they are a waste of time and money.

Couldn't a subscription model work there too? Once you've decided you don't need any more of the arguments they are proposing, really and truly for sure, you could flip a setting on your TV and radio and telephone and be spared any further pitches.

Maybe we could arrange things that the act of switching the setting actually registers your vote ahead of time absentee-style. That way the political interests would know for sure that there is no point bombarding you any further, since you have already made your choice, October/November surprises or no. So making your selection would have to be done only when you have a feeling of ironclad commitment, also telling the political powers that there is also no point in appeals to you attempting to affect the voter turnout (the second main function of political ads).

In order to get people to keep their minds open and to not opt-out, advertising consultants would have an incentive to make their ads interesting to watch and creative, the same way other advertisers have. The undecideds might want to withhold their commitment in order to enjoy the play of ideas and issues right up until Election Day. This, I think, would also be a good thing as something to help counteract voter apathy.

Is the Senator ready for his catchphrase?

I was listening to this week's On the Media and heard the story about the speculation about Senator Barack Obama's possible presidential aspirations. It included a mention of the supposed Kennedy connection, which led me to coin a one-word moniker which I offer to the Obama loyalists if they want to run with it...

OBAMALOT

I was shocked to find it in circulation neither on Google nor Technorati, at least not yet.

Update: The word has gained some traction, though we're still talking only about 300-400 hits in Google here. Took them long enough. Also, someone has grabbed the .com domain and someone else the .net domain, though neither one has put any content up at this time. I guess they are probably waiting till after the Iowa caucuses.