Debunking a common fallacy: If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide.
Submarine cable map
TeleGeography published this fascinating, interactive guide to undersea telecom cables.
Tiny Linux Systems
The wave of interest in running Linux on very small ARM devices has resulted in some unique products. From the widely covered Raspberry Pi to lower profile Trim-Slice, variety abounds. Check out this list of a dozen such systems with hardware specs, motivations, and prices for each.
The Peace Prize President
While raiding a house that turned out to be a wrong address, i.e. inhabited by an innocent family, DEA agents put a loaded gun to the head of an 11 year-old girl who was sleeping in her bed. Defending these agents, the Justice Department of our Nobel Peace Prize-winning President argued in court that it’s appropriate for law enforcement officers to maliciously terrorize young, innocent children. Read excerpts from the disgusting argument in Reason.
Patent pollution
Dan Ravicher, lecturer at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, spoke at Google about the intellectual property bureaucracy and patent quality. The presentation is a great introduction to the perverse incentives responsible for the miserable, innovation-hostile state of intellectual property in the USA.
LEGO Turing Machine
To celebrate Alan Turing Year, researchers in the Netherlands built a LEGO Turing machine. Sadly, it doesn’t have infinite tape.
The Institutional Dependence Argument Is Invalid and Irrelevant
Jason Brennan explains brilliantly:
The libertarian responds by saying, “Doesn’t the IDA undermine left-liberalism as well, not just libertarianism?” They respond by saying, “Oh, no, because civil liberties, unlike economic liberties, are special.” But this just means that the IDA is irrelevant to determining whether a government action violates our rightful liberties or holdings.
Immunity for torturers, prison for whistleblowers
Jesselyn Radack is a lawyer who worked for the Department of Justice Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. For insisting that the government obey the law when prosecuting Americans accused of terrorism crimes, she was fired and persecuted to the fullest abilities of the federal government. She is uniquely qualified to draw attention to the Obama administration’s scorched-earth war on whistleblowers.
The law-breaking telecoms who received retroactive immunity from Congress, the interrogators who tortured prisoners, the officials who gave the orders, the attorneys who authored the torture memos, and the CIA agents who destroyed the interrogation tapes have not been held professionally accountable, much less been charged with crimes. National security and intelligence whistleblowers have become the glaring exception to the Obama administration’s mantra of “looking forward, not backward.” If you committed crimes under the guise of national security and the war on terrorism, you will not be held criminally liable, but if you blow the whistle on crimes, you risk criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.
Collateral and shadow money
FT Alphaville has a great post about the money-like properties of collateral in the shadow banking system. It summarizes a note from Credit Suisse that tries to quantify how the repo market impacts the money supply. Both are majestic, especially the Alphaville post for how clearly it places collateral in the monetary policy framework. Diagrams like this make the subject accessible even to non-economists:
Earl Scruggs
Virtuoso banjo player Earl Scruggs died Wednesday at age 88. He was responsible more than anyone for bluegrass and remains the greatest musical talent the genre has seen. Comedian and Grammy award-winning banjo player Steve Martin paid his respects to the master in January.
To me, bluegrass is one of the greatest American contributions to music, along with rock and roll. It is severely underappreciated nowadays.
Learning Git
Git Ready has lots of useful tips about git, the wildly popular distributed version control system.
“Raise the Crime Rate”
The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
Christopher Glazek has a monumental article in n+1 about America’s violently cruel prison system. Official statistics show a trend of decreasing rates of violent crime that began decades ago. Glazek argues that violent crime hasn’t decreased, it has merely been swept into the penal system where it’s ignored and tolerated. The scale of the problem is vast:
America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.
Unrelated to the article, the Merriam-Webster definition of “brutality” uses prison in the first example. That’s a bad sign to me.
State of the Union links
- Will Wilkinson discusses Obama’s incoherent definition of fairness
- Peter Suderman discusses Obama’s incoherent industrial policy
Ben Gazzara, 1930 – 2012
If there was an Oscar category for “Best Mean Bastard”, Ben Gazzara would have won it a half dozen times. There are few characters in film who burn as intensely as Cosmo Vitelli, the sleazy, desperate nightclub owner he played in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
Farewell to one tough SOB and the greatest actor to walk the earth. A tribute in The New Yorker says it best:
He’ll be remembered for just a handful of roles, out of the one hundred thirty-three listed in IMDb, but those are among the very summits of movie history.
Pity the bulldog
Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ cover story in the New York Times Magazine looks at bulldogs. The breed suffers from an array of serious health problems as a result of breeding for extreme traits. Can the bulldog be saved?
One veterinary anesthesiologist highlights a unique trait:
[Dr. Lisa Moses] added that unlike other breeds, bulldogs don’t try to spit out the breathing tube after waking up from surgery. “Some look around, happy as can be,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re saying, ‘Finally, I can breathe!’ ”
Let that sink in. Bulldogs tolerate having a ventilator tube shoved down their throat into their lungs because their respiratory systems don’t allow them to breathe enough air to power their body.
Some people who should care the most about their welfare are indifferent to it. Sandra Sawchuk is the chief of primary-care services at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine. She discourages people from adopting bulldogs because of their health problems. Nonetheless, she has two and buys them from from breeders. She knows they are unhealthy but doesn’t care:
They have goofy and lovable personalities that are incredibly endearing … Even as adults, bulldogs look almost infantile — like plump little babies … Their flattened faces definitely make them look more human, and I think people probably respond to that in ways they aren’t aware of.
This exchange with a breeder says it all:
I asked [breeder] Chambers what she liked most about the look of a bulldog. “I like the short face,” she said. “Their cute, fat faces and bodies.”
“But what if the bulldog’s cute, short face isn’t good for its health?” I asked.
“If you change the look of this dog, it’s not going to look like a bulldog,” she countered.
The subject of the piece is bulldogs but it’s also about narcissism, moral agency, and the unlimited human capacity for cruelty. Denizet-Lewis earns lots of credit for refusing to turn a blind eye to the suffering of bulldogs and human responsibility for causing it. It’s one of the best pieces of writing I have read, of any kind.
The warfare-welfare state
Alex Tabarrok in The Atlantic puts spending in perspective.
Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget, $2.2 trillion annually, is spent on just the four biggest warfare and welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Defense and Social Security. In contrast the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, spends $31 billion annually, and the National Science Foundation spends just $7 billion.
