But of course. What’s good for Mr. Larry is good for everybody. He’s quite clear on that. Why aren’t you?

From ITWorld:

A day after breaking an almost year-long silence on a medical condition that had affected the way he speaks, Google co-founder Larry Page said Wednesday that people should be more open about their medical histories.” …

“At least in my case I feel I should have done it sooner and I’m not sure that answer isn’t true for most people, so I ask why are people so focused on keeping your medical history private?”

Then the icing on the cake:

The Google CEO guessed most people are guarded about their medical history because of insurance reasons. [Or he could, maybe, guess that he could ask people what their concerns are.]

“You’re very worried that you’re going to be denied insurance. That makes no sense, so maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people,” he said to a round of applause.

Wow. Thanks, Larry. Where were you during the whole Obamacare bullshit? When not a single powerful anything came out in favor of Medicare For All, the only way to just “insure people.” At your rate of breakthrough insights, I’ll be waiting for the flash of inspiration sometime in 2020.

The Senators slay me. They do nothing (useful) since forever, then they restore funds to air traffic control in half an hour. They finally twigged to the fact that their personal flights could be delayed by this sequester thing.

The Republican ones have also since forever been staunchly refusing to fund government. They’ve shut down or nearly shut down the whole damn thing several times over refusals to raise taxes even a penny.

And now, suddenly, a quite hefty tax increase on internet sales goes through in a matter of seconds. At least it feels like seconds compared to their usual pace. One day you hear they’re talking about it. The next day there’s this:

The Senate … [passed] a bill that would widely subject online shopping — for many a largely tax-free frontier — to state sales taxes. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 69 to 27.

Gee willikers whiz. It’s almost like the only thing they mind is taxes on millionaires. Making you pay hundreds of extra dollars a year is A-OK.

(Apparently the House of Reps. has realized that this thing could be construed as a tax increase. Whodathunkit? They seem to be backpedalling on passing it. The gods have a hideously twisted sense of humor when they make Tea Party loons and Norquist knobs the only thing between us and total kleptocracy.)

The idea that austerity could help economies by ending profligacy and wastefulness has been proved wrong again. It’s been wrong based on the evidence since the 1930s. For a while, everybody knew that. Then “everybody” forgot it, it became all the rage in policy circles, and now it’s failing again as badly as fantasies do.

So why was it listened to? Gradually, I see more and more people noting the obvious answer. “Because it’s what the Powers That Be wanted to hear.” [You'll notice most of the links point to Krugman. Yes, I get large chunks of my econ news from him.]

That’s important because even the most perfect spreadsheet can’t fix it. (Background if you’d like it: Konczal’s article on Herndon’s Reinhart-Rogoff criticism.) If the problem is denial of facts and not the lack of facts, then clearer and louder facts won’t help. When people want to hear something, they hear it. If the Powers That Be want to hear that austerity is the answer, and all the economists refuse to tell them so, they’ll simply start getting their answers from physicists or CEOs. Consider the unanimity among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming, and the total lack of those scientists when politicians find “authorities” to deny anthropogenic climate change.

The first question becomes why the austerity message was so captivating. I’ve seen it explained as the desire for the neatness of a morality play. (“Spending? Bad! You must pay for your sins!”) But that idea makes no sense. If the Powers That Be were that interested in morality, I can think of many things ripe for punishment. Yet somehow the only programs in need of scourging hit people poorer than the PTB.

I also don’t think that the unwillingness to admit being wrong explains everything. It can explain a lot. But it doesn’t explain why they fell for such a thoroughly debunked fallacy in the first place. These are all intelligent people with a lot of training in reading comprehension. They don’t make such floaters unless they want to.

The simplest place to start when probing motives is to follow the methods of the experts, homicide detectives, and ask, “Who benefits?”

Money should be taken from the poor, the sick, the elderly, because … because what? There’s nowhere else to get it? I can think of two other large pots of money in the USA. One is the spending on expensive military hardware. Two is the absurdly low tax rates paid by corporations and wealthy individuals, the “one percenters.”

Could it be that by directing attention to the weakest members of society they’re hoping nobody notices that their money could solve any shortfalls better, (socially) cheaper, and faster?

Why, yes. Yes, I think it could. This is a classic example of “don’t tax him, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree.” It’s understandable. We all feel that way. But that doesn’t make it right or intelligent or likely to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number.

Diagnosis accomplished in two easy steps and the only training needed is an appropriately suspicious nature. That means it can easily be applied in real time.

That diagnosis also makes the solution painfully evident. Everybody’s seen it who isn’t hypnotized by wealth. Money from the rich has to be a factor. It’s not off the table, inconceivable, crazy talk. Because the solution is so obvious, it could even be applied before we have a problem, which is the nicest time to apply solutions.

And that’s why austerity was so cool for so long. It’s allowed the Powers That Be to say for years, “Look! Over there. Poor people getting money!” while keeping their piles of tax-sheltered wealth right out of the discussion.

You might as well be a cake of soap on the shelf at the store. The supermarket is “free” for the soap. The soap isn’t paying to be there, and you’re not paying for the web for the same reason. You’re the product.

If you mattered at all you’d be getting a cut of the proceeds.

Google made $60,000,000,000, 60 billion, sixty billion-with-a-b, last year. Eighty eight percent of that is estimated to be from advertising. You are the eyes that advertising is buying. Are you seeing royalties from Google for your essential role in this? How about from Dataium ($2 billion profit per year)? Or BlueKai, Acxiom, or Omniture (now part of Adobe)? How about Splunk? (Don’t you just love the cool, we-juggle-at-the-office names?) Or any of the hundred other hidden internet tracking companies all making profit off you?

In an article about a company that wants to sell people vaults for their personal data, “Fatemeh Khatibloo of Forrester Research said consumers want to know when data about them is collected and stored and by whom, and how it is used.” The Wall Street Journal has a list of how many trackers are planted after visits to common web sites. Dozens. Sometimes hundreds. How many of them do you even know exist, let alone what they collect and how long they store it?

What you want matters as much as what the cake of soap wants.

We’ve lost control over our own lives so completely that most people’s only response is to apply the pragmatism of the damned and ask “Whatchya gonna do?”

I don’t know what to do either. Tactics are never my strong suit. All I really have is one long bellow to SMASH THE BASTARDS.

However, I do know what we should do. We should get our rights back. We should get recognition of the fact that our information is part of our selves. Just as we have the right to control what’s done to our bodies, as in the ancient right of habeas corpus, likewise we have the right to control what’s done to our information. (Also some other posts: 1 and 2.)

Nobody can track you without your explicit consent, and only for the explicit purpose you agreed to. And when you want to revoke the permission, they have to expunge their databases.

Yes, I know that’s so far from current reality as to be ridiculous. But that only speaks badly for current reality. It doesn’t change what’s true.

I don’t spend a lot of time keeping up with what passes for thinking in the legal system, so I’ve merely been aware that gay marriage rights have been toiling their way through the system. I haven’t paid attention to the arguments.

MoDo’s article came as a bit of a surprise to me. (Yes, I know, she can be a twit. But she can also write and sometimes I read her. So sue me.)

This is what stopped me short:

“Same-sex marriage is very new,” Justice Samuel Alito whinged, noting that “it may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing.”

Seriously? Justices on the Supreme Court — the Supreme Court for pity’s sake! — don’t understand the concept of rights? You have got to be kidding me.

You don’t have rights because you’re a good human being or because you’ll use them for a higher purpose. You have rights because you’re a human. Period. Gays could all be dykes on bikes without a notion of parenting. That doesn’t change their rights.

And their rights are so clear I’m flabbergasted that it could need explaining, to a Supreme Court Justice, of all people.

Equality before the law is a foundational principle of the USA. Some people can get legally married, therefore all people can get legally married. (See? That wasn’t hard, was it?) What religions want to do about it is their own business, but the law cannot treat people unequally.

Furthermore, questions of rights are very much the business of the Court, and very much not the business of the legislatures or elections. Rights are inalienable, not something for philosophers or average Joes or doofuses to vote on.

Apparently, the Court Jesters Justices don’t even know that.

“But you want us to step in and render a decision,” Alito continued, “based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean, we do not have the ability to see the future.”

Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about “uncharted waters,” and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling.

Politicians make pious noises about governments “living within their budgets.” According to them, this is how “families” do it.

The water goes only one way for a dippy duck

Intelligent economists — Martin Wolf and Krugman to take just two — are rightly incensed at that self-serving nonsense (whose real point is to prevent tax hikes on the wealthy, but that’s a ‘nother whole mess).

Unfortunately, they don’t provide an easy way to visualize the difference between citizen and government finances. Krugman, for instance, otherwise one of the best examples of lucidity, uses the analogy of a babysitters club. It’s a fine analogy. There’s nothing wrong with it on the merits. But if it means something to you, you already understand the economy and you don’t need it. The rest of us could use something simpler and more visual.

Acid Test to the rescue.

Individuals get money from somewhere and spend it elsewhere. The path can only go in one direction. If the source of money dries up, there is no way to magically make more appear.

An economy, however, is millions of people. (Except when countries are smaller, but you know what I mean.) Each little unidirectional flow adds together into an enormous wheel, like a water wheel.

The water still goes one way
for a single board in the wheel.

Mike Peel

It is not linear. It is not unidirectional. It is not like a dippy duck, whose beaker can’t turn over and reappear filled. It is like a wheel.

In a whole economy, the flow on the individual parts makes the whole thing turn. The wealth — or the water — does need some added external input such as a stream or farmers making something out of sunlight and land. Once that stream enters the system, whether it’s made of water or money, the wheel can turn and multiply the benefits.

If you turn off the supply of water on the wheel, the whole thing stops. When it happens in the economy, it’s called a Depression and it means less money everywhere on the wheel. For an individual, cutting back spending to match income leads to wealth. For an economy, if it’s grinding to a halt, reducing spending equals losing money. The slower the wheel turns, the less money there is to be had. Everybody gets poorer, not richer. That is not what solving the problem looks like. That is what stupidity looks like.

That’s why, if people have no money to spend, it makes sense for the government to spend. The wheel needs to be kept turning. Otherwise poverty feeds on itself.

(And, yes, if the economy is humming with minimal government help, then keep it minimal. Developed world economies are not, you’ve probably noticed, humming.)

The government can’t just spend without any regard to the wealth of the economy. But that’s not the same as declaring wealth off-limits and then driving the economy down to a trickle because “spending is bad.”

What’s bad is waste and poverty. What’s bad is grinding the whole wheel to a halt because you can’t see the difference between a straight line and a circle.

Even more so if it costs anyone who’s already comfortable.

From Krugman, this priceless proof They are always, always, trotting out the same claptrap. Spending anything for the common good is weak, namby-pamby, woolly-minded unwillingness to face hard choices.

[W]hat The Economist said, in 1848, about proposals for a London sewer system:

Suffering and evil are nature’s admonitions; they cannot be got rid of; and the impatient efforts of benevolence to banish them from the world by legislation, before benevolence has learned their object and their end, have always been more productive of evil than good.

Sewers are socialism!

It wasn’t until the Great Stink made the Houses of Parliament uninhabitable that the sewer system was created.

The sad thing is our modern Great Stinks and Great Warmings will be so bad by the time they reach our well-insulated elites that we’ll be neck-deep in the Big Muddy and there’ll be nothing to do but hope we float.

Listen to this opening paragraph from Reuters: Obama renews offer to cut social safety nets.

President Barack Obama raised anew the issue of cutting … Medicare and Social Security as a way out of damaging budget cuts, … as both sides in Washington tried to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans.

So they’re saying the way to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans is by implementing a fiscal crisis for millions of Americans.

Did I miss something? Are Social Security and Medicare just optional little programs to burn money?

It’s either them or me that’s insane.

Now they figure this out? Now, when it’s too late? After years of putting women on a par with rocks — in a purely egalitarian sense, of course. Not like the Taliban.

Exiting U.S. general says Afghan women’s rights are key.

The European Court of Human Rights has been reading my blog! Or, perhaps, it’s an obvious idea if you think about it for even a minute, but that’s a much less fun hypothesis. I’ve been saying forever that some rights have to take precedence. (Most recently here, also here, etc., etc.)

[C]opyright monopoly as such – which is ordinary law in European states – was just defined as taking a back seat to the constitutional right to share and seek culture and knowledge, as defined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

It’s about time. We’re getting too damn close to that scenario I saw on Vimeo.

It’s not war if no Americans are killed.

Americans may be killed at will because it’s all self-defense. There’s a war on, you know.

Only a handful of decades have passed since the soaring words of the Geneva Convention. The US was pleased to think it was leading that charge at the time.

But it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

Flying blind

(Source: US military file photo?)

The treehuggers turn out to be right about GMO foods, and the respectable scientists in the white lab coats were wrong.

The scientists assumed that the viruses ferrying the DNA-of-interest into cells were just doing what they were told and disappearing afterward.

Nope. What’s worse, you know how it goes when you start with the wrong assumption. You never get the right answer. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

They knew that some bits stayed behind, but according to what they knew at the time, they assumed those bits couldn’t do anything. The tools to make a coherent study of proteins inside cells are very recent and still very much in the process of development. Nor was it feasible to study the whole genome in a reasonable amount of time and hunt at random for virus particles left behind.

Well, now it is. After the study indicating rats developed tumors more frequently when on a diet of certain GMOs (abstract, article pdf, response to criticisms pdf), the European Food Safety Authority had a closer look at company data.

What they found (pdf of whole article) is that in addition to the expected viral particles, there was also some activity coming from viral genes. (For a bit more discussion on that, there are some notes at the end.)

So far, the only thing the EFSA study showed is that the viral genes can be active in the genetically modified plant, where they’ve been directly introduced. There the unwanted viral activity makes the plant sick, i.e. yellow or wilted or the like. That’s a long, long, long way from making humans sick.

BUT.

But it was supposed to be impossible. Instead, it’s happening. It was also supposed to be impossbile for viral particles to survive digestion. But people vary, and the health of their digestions varies. If one impossible thing — presence of active virus in plant hosts — is happening, then the next supposedly impossible thing might also happen: genetically modified DNA might retain unwanted effects all the way to the human consumer. The assumption of safety has been shot to pieces. It’s time (well, way past time) to use the most sensitive protein studying tools we have to understand what’s really going on in transgenic foods and in the people eating them.

Unexpectedly active bits of viral DNA can make cellular processes produce random proteins or bad proteins or dysfunctional ones. That’s the sort of thing cancer cells do. Alzheimers is the result of too much protein of the wrong sort in brain cells. There’s a whole string of nasty diseases whose cause is DNA gone bad.

You really, really, really don’t want DNA to go bad.

The only rational alternative now is to stop selling genetically modified food until we know what we’re doing. But so far nobody has done that. Far from stopping production, we’re not even to know which foods could contain these viral fragments. EFSA’s report was released just after the referendum in California which would have required, at least, labelling of GM food. That lost by 2.8%, 6,088,714 to 6,442,371 votes, after a massive industry-funded camplaign against it.

So, here we are. We’ve known since the beginning that GM foods in practice, through never in industry PR, allow poor farming practices and therefore damage the environment and human nutrition and possibly cause unwanted immune responses. That’s bad, but it’s the slow, steady sort of bad that’s not frightening enough. Recently it’s become clearer that patentability, the new power to own life itself, is a toxic corruption all by itself. And now we find out that, yes, the weird mutant DNA in the weird mutant organisms is catching, just as the treehuggers had feared. It won’t make us glow in the dark, but it can do something much worse. It can make us sick to death.

Notes

If you’re wondering how the scientists could possibly stick in a bit of DNA and not know what it did, then consider that viruses have a unique trick. Depending where they start reading a given stretch of DNA, it can code for different functions. In the diagram at right, the different colored concentric genes map onto one ring of DNA, or RNA in some other viruses. The only difference is where the transcription starts. In the frankenfood case here, the viral gene the scientists wanted overlaps with a different viral gene that has multiple functions, including triggering host DNA into action. They only now realized that the “hitchhiking” viral gene in that overlap could be active. (Diagram from fullwiki.org.)

It’s important to remember that when you eat genetically modified food, it’s digested just like any other food. Under normal circumstances, the DNA is chopped into tiny bits that are no longer DNA, whether animal or vegetable or viral. So no matter how weird or mutant that DNA is, the DNA itself can do nothing to you. But under abnormal circumstances — for instance, if you have intestinal microbleeds due to flu — larger particles can get into the bloodstream. If a viral particle makes it all the way to a cell, it can start doing its job which is to make host DNA behave badly. Those are very rare events, but rare is not the same as impossible.

Tangentially, there’s a theme in some comments that there’s nothing new here. We’ve always known there are viral bits left behind and that the only real question is why they weren’t tested for safety right from the start. But there is something new. What’s new is the proof that the viral particles are active. The earlier assumption of inactivity was garbage, but it was a very strong assumption garbage so it wasn’t examined. Plus, the molecular tools to examine it weren’t even available early on, and later on there was a whole industry already dependent on not examining it. “It is difficult to get [people] to understand something, when [their] salary depends upon not understanding it.”

This goes back to the debate about how to handle innovation. A requirement to prove absolute safety before anything can be done is equivalent to nixing all innovation. A free-for-all is equivalent to using everyone as lab rats. Both are bad.

The take-home message for me is that complete openness of all data has to be a requirement for all industries. The consumers’ right to know has to be as absolute as free market theory thinks it is. Hiding behind trade secrets has got to stop. If outsiders had been able to see what was going on, even weak regulators would have had to take action years ago. That way you don’t stifle all innovation, but you retain the power to shut it down when it starts looking like a bad idea.

From a purely tactical perspective, that is. I keep seeing reports mentioning how the fanatics will melt into the desert and be difficult to root out.

Assuming resources — and I do understand that those are not generally applied — but, assuming resources, I don’t see how the Sahara could shelter them for long.

Water is limiting. Garrison every oasis for six months, and anybody hiding in the Sahara is done for. It’s also the worst place on earth to hide from satellite surveillance. Few clouds, few trees. So if pickup trucks start driving to camps in suddenly larger numbers, it could be visible. Assuming anyone used their satellites to look.

I get that fanatics can hide now and have hidden in the past because it’s a vast trackless area, you have to know the terrain, the regional governments don’t have or don’t devote the resources to it, etc., etc.

But it seems to me that right now there’s an opening to get the local knowledge. The Tuaregs are mighty pissed off with everyone, especially the fanatics who stole their revolution. They’re some of the most skilled desert dwellers there are. So give them Azawad, where they can run their own internal affairs, within a federated nation of Mali, where they can be part of a more viable economic unit, and give them the military data they need to wreak vengeance on the even more unsavory fundies.

If we believe in self-determination like we say we do, the first part is a worthy goal in itself. And for military effectiveness, I’d be willing to bet you couldn’t beat the second part.

Update, 2012-02-07. From McClatchy: “Aklinine Ag Bogali, who spent years traversing his desert homeland in northern Mali, described some of the caves there as so large that they open onto underground lakes.”

Oh.

Although it does confirm what I was saying about the local knowledge of the Touareg.

I was hiking yesterday and looked out to sea. This is what I saw.

An orange-brown band of dust? smog? all of the above? stretching over the whole horizon. There’s a larger composite picture here that shows more of the extent. (In the foreground, you can make out the Navy Seabees target practice range. That’s Anacapa Island shrouded in the distance.)

I’ve lived here for years and never seen anything like it. Ordinary Los Angeles pollution looks like this:

It’s more purple-colored, much fainter, and bigger toward LA, petering out toward the ocean. (The picture is from an old post where I was puzzling about wind direction.)

When I mentioned it at home, I found out that Beijing had an Airpocalypse around January 12th and the next few days, an immense pollution event that drowned the city in choking dusty smog.

View of Beijing smog.

(aworldchaos.wordpress.com)

NASA regularly tracks Chinese pollution across the Pacific, but it wasn’t usually still as thick as soup by the time it got here.

Well, it is now. I’m fairly sure that’s what I was seeing. Dirt pushed across the whole Pacific ahead of a huge storm system that also brought us rain later on. One to two weeks is how long it takes to get here from China.

This is not good.

USNews, via Dvorak:

When Jonathan Frieman of San Rafael, Calif., was pulled over for driving alone in the carpool lane, he argued to the officer that, actually, he did have a passenger. He waved his corporation papers at the officer, … saying that corporations are people under California law.[...]

A carpool lane is two or more persons per vehicle, he said. The definition of person in California’s Vehicle Code is “natural person or corporation.”

This is the headline of an article on CNN:

“Damon’s film ‘Promised Land’ overlooks fracking’s boon to U.S.”

The boon of global climate change, I guess. The boon of flammable tap water. All that, and cheap gas.

Are we lucky, or what?

Like I said before, the only thing worse than running out of oil is not running out of oil.