A DISH BEST SERVED COLD....You've heard of those distributed computing projects that take advantage of unused time on millions of personal computers, right? Usually you download a screensaver or something, and when your computer isn't busy it turns itself on and cranks away at calculating a Mersenne prime or a SETI signal or some other worthy semi-scientific endeavor.

That's all very well, but it doesn't really have much chance of improving your life, does it? Instead, how about a distributed computing project aimed at harassing spammers? Now that sounds like a worthwhile use of spare CPU cycles. Details here.

DEMOCRACY AND WAR....I kinda hate to pick on Gregg Easterbrook so often, but he sure does say the weirdest things sometimes. Today he talks about the Allied victory in World War II:

When I ponder the twentieth century, one of the things that strikes me is that democracies turned out to be much better at fielding armies than dictatorships. In World War II, freedom beat dictatorship by a decisive margin in combat, even though dictatorship began the conflict with a significant advantage.

Why do Americans so routinely forget that the Soviet Union was on our side in World War II and fielded far more troops than the U.S. and Britain combined? If WWII had really been the dictatorships vs. the democracies — basically, Germany/Japan/USSR vs. Britain/France/U.S. — the democracies would have gotten their butts kicked.

I'm all for liberty and freedom, but let's at least keep our history straight, OK?

WORD OF THE YEAR....Via TalkLeft, here are Merriam-Webster's top ten words of the year:

1. blog
   

2. incumbent
   

3. electoral
   

4. insurgent
   

5. hurricane
   

6. cicada
   

7. peloton
   

8. partisan
   

9. sovereignty
   

10. defenestration
    

These are apparently the words that were most often looked up on Merriam-Webster's website during (the first 11 months of) 2004, and they all make sense except for one: defenestration. What caused the sudden interest? Was there an outbreak of window leaping that I missed during the year?

And I know that there were lots of big hurricanes this year, but did lots of people really have to look up the word to see what it meant? I sure hope those were mostly schoolchildren doing the looking.

UPDATE: In comments, Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster answers our questions:

'Defenestration' came from a contest Merriam held earlier this year on the Web site, asking users for their favorite word. 'Defenestration' won and was subsequently looked up many thousands of times, hence its odd presence in the top 10.

The other words all reflect what people are thinking and talking about. You are correct that international hits are also registered, but my guess is that folks wanted the definition of 'hurricane' as it related to specific wind speeds.

"Defenestration" won a contest for favorite word? Well waddaya know....

AL-QAEDA A PAPER TIGER?....Last month, the BBC ran a 3-part documentary arguing that al-Qaeda is not the threat they've been made out to be:

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

A couple of weeks later, Eric Umansky spoke with LA Times reporter Terry McDermott, who is writing a book about al-Qaeda and has come to similar conclusions:

Al Qaeda itself was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed....Its own small size, with which came severe limits on the skills available from within its ranks, virtually required it to reach beyond its members for specific needs.

....Shared values enabled the organization to amplify its power by aligning with similarly politicized fundamentalist groups, many of them completely autonomous, around the globe. This made the group at times seem ubiquitous, but, in fact, it was a few men persistently pursuing a few deadly enterprises.

Today in the LA Times, Dirk Laabs chimes in on the subject and recounts the conclusions of Germany's famed terrorist hunting federal police force:

This month, at the BKA's annual conference, Germany's top investigators and international experts discussed what they had discovered since Sept. 11 about Al Qaeda and the international Islamist terror network. The main thing they have learned is that there is less than meets the eye.

.... In other words, this battle in the war on terror might already be over.

I don't really have much of an opinion on this myself, especially since I've always considered the war on terrorism to be less against al-Qaeda per se than against radical Islamic terror in general and the ideology that goes along with it. Still, it's interesting that the conventional public wisdom about al-Qaeda now seems to be shifting, a backlash that was perhaps inevitable given the larger-than-life hold that Osama bin Laden has had on our imaginations for the past three years.

You can read the three linked pieces and make up your own mind, of course. I just thought it was an interesting pattern to pass along.

CABINET RESHUFFLE UPDATE....Replacing six cabinet members after a reelection isn't that unusual. But eight? If John Snow and Tom Ridge both go, that will be three of Bush's top four cabinet officers and eight altogether. That's quite a shakeup.

Are there more to come?

JUST CLEARING MY THROAT HERE....Joe Sharkey writes today about the thing that really bugs me about airport security procedures: their inconsistency. If they want me to take my shoes off, fine. If I'm not allowed to carry a cell phone through the metal detector, fine. If bottles of shoe polish aren't allowed, fine.

But for crying out loud, can't they make up their minds about what the policy is and then enforce it the same way at every airport in the country? I'd just like to know what they expect instead of playing a guessing game every time I get on a plane.

End of rant. Actually, this was just a test to make sure everything is working after last night's server failure and this morning's internet outage. Following hot on the heels of my electrical outage a week ago, I'm beginning to feel like a third world outpost here in leafy Irvine.

FAMOUS CANADIANS....I realize that a "Greatest Canadian" contest sounds like the punchline to a Letterman routine, but it's not. It's the CBC's "most talked-about show in recent years," and you can click here to find out who the winner was. (Conservatives will not be amused. 24 fans, on the other hand, will be pleased to learn that the winner was Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather.)

However, in something that can only be described as an act of self-parody, the #9 person on the list was Alexander Graham Bell, whose sole connection to our northern neighbors is that he lived in Canada for a grand total of eight months. For that he edged out Wayne Gretzky?

UPDATE: As several commenters have pointed out, Bell bought a summer home in Nova Scotia in 1885 and spent summers there until he died. I'm still not sure this qualifies him as Canadian, mind you (he was born in Scotland, lived in Washington DC, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen), but I guess his connection was longer than eight months after all. My apologies to Canada.

FRAMING....After my less than enthusiastic review of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, David Brodwin of the Rockridge Institute emailed to suggest that my post had been unclear about the difference between framing and message crafting. It's a fair point. For the record, framing is the creation of the deep, underlying ideas that support a particular point of view, while message crafting is the creation of snappy public arguments that take advantage of the overall framing and help to sell it further.

As it happens, despite my criticism of Lakoff I don't have a lot of brilliant ideas of my own along these lines, which is kind of a bummer. However, it occurs to me that a couple of historical examples might serve both to illuminate the framing/messaging idea and to cheer up despondent liberals. You see, although conservatives seem to own both the framing and sloganeering market these days, exemplified by catchy phrases like "tax relief" and "partial birth abortion," we liberals used to be pretty good at this stuff too.

Example #1: In the late 1940s, a subject of considerable public discussion was "the Negro problem." As a slogan, this wasn't very catchy at all, and as framing it downright sucked. It (a) limited the issue to Negroes, (b) portrayed it negatively as a "problem," and (c) even managed to imply that perhaps it was actually Negroes themselves who were at least partially at fault for this problem.

In the late 40s, though, liberals managed to get the press and public to stop talking about the Negro problem and instead start talking about civil rights. It's not just that this was a better (and less threatening) phrase — though it was — but that it reflected a change in the underlying terms of the debate. Rather than being an issue limited only to Negroes, it was now everyone's concern. And it wasn't just an inchoate "problem," it was a specific issue of rights that needed to be fought for. The change in framing made it an issue of fundamental fairness, regardless of what you personally thought of Negroes, and it also provided a very specific goal to fight for.

Example #2: In the early 60s, old people were....old people. Or the "elderly." There was nothing really wrong with that, but if your goal was to expand Social Security and create Medicare, you needed something better.

The answer was to relabel the elderly as "senior citizens." It's an odd phrase, although we're all used to it these days, but its purpose was a serious one: to portray the elderly as literally senior to the rest of us. Wiser and more deserving than young people, certainly, and with a lifetime of hard labor behind them. And it worked.

There are a couple of lessons here: first, liberals can reframe with the best of them. Second, that catchy phrases only work if there's some substance behind them. Garbage collectors can call themselves "sanitation engineers" all day long, but this title change never caught on in public discourse — in fact, it's mostly been a cause for late night TV jokes. Why? Because nobody buys the framing behind it, namely that these folks are highly trained professionals just like the guys who build suspension bridges.

This is why so many seemingly nice catchphrases are foolish: because they're trying to create a frame that simply doesn't exist and has little chance of ever existing. Ford can spend billions telling us that "Quality is Job 1," but it's not going to work unless there's some real evidence that Ford cars are genuinely higher in quality than others. There has to be a significant kernel of truth behind the message in order for it to work.

So that's the challenge for liberals: not just to reframe issues to our advantage, but to reframe them in ways that people are likely to accept. It's a tough job, but the more people who are working on it the more likely we are to trip across stuff that works. The answers are out there.

CHANGING THE GUARD....President Bush is apparently planning to make some wholesale changes to his economic team:

One senior administration official said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow can stay as long as he wants, provided it is not very long.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, John!

I'm suffering from cognitive shock at the moment. I managed to forget about the real world this weekend and ended up reading a couple of good books: Running On Empty, by Peter Peterson, and Harry and Ike, by Steve Neal. At first glance they have nothing in common: one is about entitlement reform and the other is about the relationship between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower in the 40s and 50s. Oddly, though, they come together in throwing the partisan recklessness of modern politics into high relief.

Peterson is a Republican, but in his book he's almost embarrassingly earnest about being nonpartisan. (He's one of the founders of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition.) He takes on Democrats for being unwilling to take seriously the need for modest benefit cuts in any plan to save Social Security and Medicare, but he's equally scathing toward Republicans who are unwilling to consider modest tax increases as part of a fiscally responsible plan. He's honest enough to concede that private accounts might be part of a solution, but also that they only make sense if they're funded with additional taxes, not smoke and mirrors that funds them out of ever larger deficits.

And then there's Harry and Ike. They split deeply during the 1952 presidential campaign, which at times seemed more like a contest between them than between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, but for all the bitterness and partisanship between them it was always clear that they both cared deeply about doing what was right. It's not that they didn't play for big stakes, it's just that on the big issues neither of them was willing to deliberately make things worse solely to gain partisan advantage.

Fast forward to 2004, and if you read between the lines of the Post story linked above it's obvious that Peterson has about as much chance of being listened to as the ghosts of Harry and Ike. The White House is planning to recruit yet another economic team, and what seems to be driving it is their difficulty in finding people sufficiently willing to sell their souls to the devil. Anyone with a remaining shred of integrity knows that financing Social Security privatization via higher deficits is madness, which means Bush's task is to find people from the ever dwindling pool of loyalists willing to make the case anyway. Neither Harry nor Ike — or even Ronald Reagan, for that matter — would have been willing to betray our future merely for a small, short-term partisan advantage, but today it barely even raises an eyebrow.

We've come a long way, baby.

CIVIL WAR?....Spencer Ackerman is depressed about the future of Iraq:

The January election is now itself on track to deliver what used to be considered the worst-case scenario (but which is now acceptable to some advocates of the war): civil war.

Bottom line: it's impossible to delay the elections because that would cause a decisive U.S. break with the Shia majority. On the other hand, the 20% of the population that's Sunni is now dead set against the elections and considers them illegitimate. That's more than enough people to keep a civil war in high gear.

I suppose the best hope now is that in the end the Sunni minority will back down and eventually take part in the elections — if not in January, perhaps sometime down the road. It's a pretty thin hope, though.

NATURE, NURTURE, ETC....It's been a while since we had a rollicking nature vs. nurture discussion here, so here's some new fuel for the fire from Alex Tabarrok, taken from a recent paper by Bruce Sacerdote.

Sacerdote examined various outcomes of Korean children who had been randomly assigned to adoptive families in the U.S. during the 70s, and as the chart on the right shows, he concluded that family income had no effect at all on the eventual earning power of adoptees. Conversely, it had a big effect on biological children. In other words, being raised in a high-earning family doesn't seem to have much effect, while being born to to a high-earning family does.

Sacerdote also looks at some other variables and concludes that income, college graduation rates, height, and obesity are correlated significantly more highly for biological children than for adoptees. Conversely, smoking and drinking behavior is about the same, indicating that these traits are strongly affected by family environment.

It's ironic that research like this is so often embraced by conservatives as evidence that government programs ought to be abolished — looky here, biology is destiny and there's not much to be done about it. Although studies like this do indicate a strong biological basis for a variety of behavioral traits, they're also part of a growing body of research indicating that most families — at least, those outside the extremely dysfunctional low end — have very little impact on their childrens' outcomes. Environment does play a powerful role in nearly every element of behavior, but it's mostly environment outside the family. Not exactly what the family values conservatives want to hear.

SPYWARE....Terry McDermott, an LA Times reporter, recently became a victim of the nationwide spyware epidemic and wrote a pretty good story about in today's paper:

I found links for Lycos and clicked on one. That was the beginning. Within minutes, my computer was swamped with advertisements — pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-all-overs. There were so many I couldn't close them before others started appearing. I had to shut the computer down.

....It went on for days. The blizzard of ads sometimes thinned, sometimes thickened. At times, there were so many that the computer couldn't process them all and froze. Every time I restarted, my home page was reset to the pornographic site. Every time I tried to do a Google search, a Lycos search engine appeared instead. New items for services called Bargain Buddies and Deal Helper were added to my Web favorites list.

The whole story is pretty interesting, especially the interview with the spyware promoter who sings a sad song about how he's a victim too. McDermott reports that he eventually solved his infestation with help from a group called AumHa.org.

Of course, there's another way: set up a blog, wait a couple of years to accumulate a large readership, and then beg them for help. Hey, it worked for me!

However, McDermott's article reminded me that I never got around to explaining how I got rid of my mother's spyware infestation last month. And since so many people were willing to help me out with advice, I really ought to do my part to pass on some of the knowledge I gained to others who may someday run into spyware problems of their own.

The complete blow-by-blow description is below the fold. Click the link to read the whole thing.

Here's what I did. Note that this was all for a Window XP machine, and some parts of it might not apply to non-XP machines. What's more, just because this worked for me doesn't necessarily mean it will work for you. But it's worth a try.

1. Luckily, my mother knew exactly when the spyware problem had started. So I rebooted in safe mode and chose a restore point from a couple of days before then.

   To boot in safe mode, tap the F8 key repeatedly while starting up your computer. Choose "Safe Mode" when the option menu is displayed. (Other methods of booting in safe mode along with a more detailed description of the whole process can be found at www.pchell.com/support/safemode.shtml.)

   Eventually you will be asked if you want to proceed to safe mode ("Yes") or perform a system restore ("No"). Click No and then choose the date you want to restore to. (You can find a nice description of the restore procedure at www.theeldergeek.com/system_restore.htm — complete with pictures!) The whole process takes several minutes. Get a cup of coffee.

2. Following the restore, I rebooted in normal mode and installed the freeware versions of three anti-spyware programs (you can't install new software in safe mode):
   

   • AdAware (www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/)
     

   • SpyBot (www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html)
     

   • a-squared (www.emsisoft.com/en/)
     

   Needless to say, you'd be wise to install (and regularly update) these programs now, before you need them. Downloading was impossible on my mother's computer, for example, so I had to download them on my machine, burn them onto a CD, and then install from the CD. You can save yourself this hassle by installing them right this minute and then remembering to update them every once in a while. (Yeah, yeah, I know: fat chance. Believe me, I feel your pain.)

3. Then I rebooted in safe mode again and ran all three programs. Why in safe mode? Because I had already tried running AdAware in normal mode and the spyware was smart enough to detect it and shut down the computer before it could run. Safe mode prevents the spyware from running and gives the anti-spyware programs a fighting chance to do their job.

   This took about half an hour, but it was worth it because each program found stuff that neither of the others did.

4. Finally, I rebooted in normal mode and ran all three programs again. Just to make sure. (This was worth it too, since the second scan found yet more stuff that was missed the first time around.)

5. And then, if memory serves, I rebooted in safe mode and ran 'em all one more time. Couldn't hurt, after all.

6. That did the trick. The final step was to download and install the Firefox browser (www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/). The entire installation took just a few minutes and it automatically imported all my mother's Internet Explorer settings. Since Firefox is impervious to most spyware, my mother is unlikely to ever get infested again.

   (I've found that Firefox works very well and it's now my default browser. It has a couple of minor drawbacks, but nothing serious, and I now keep IE around only for the rare site that doesn't render properly in Firefox. More here.)
   

In addition to all this, you might want to consider installing a firewall like ZoneAlarm. I didn't install it on my mother's machine because it can be a little confusing to use sometimes, but if you're not scared of the occasional popup query it's a good line of defense to have on your PC.

That's it. Good luck!

PLAME UPDATE....There's not really much new here, but at least today's Washington Post confirms that the Valerie Plame case is still being actively pursued. Apparently the big question is whether Bush administration officials leaked Plame's name before or after the original Robert Novak column that made her name public:

In questioning reporters for The Washington Post, NBC and Time, prosecutors have shown a particular interest in the events of July 12, reporters and their attorneys have said. Word that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA had by then circulated to some media organizations, though the origin of the information is not publicly known.

While Novak's column did not run until Monday, July 14, it could have been seen by people in the White House or the media as early as Friday, July 11, when the Creators Syndicate distributed it over the Associated Press wire.

So if the White House folks ripped Novak's column off the wire and then started working the phones, no problem. But if they were doing it before Novak made Plame's name public, they're in trouble.

Of course, we still don't know the two people who leaked to Novak in the first place. Tick, tick, tick....

THANKSGIVING....Is there a Thanksgiving equivalent of Scrooge? I dunno. But if there isn't, Tom Friedman is now it.

But hey, when the man's right, the man's right. I hope this means he's turning over a new leaf.

And with that, I'm off. Thanksgiving #1 is tonight at my mother's house, and then we're out to the desert tomorrow followed by Thanksgiving #2 on Saturday with my father-in-law. And shortly after that, it's USC vs. Notre Dame — and we will all be rooting for the Cardinal and Gold, right? Right?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Do something nice for someone today.

BY THE WAY: I strongly recommend that you not follow this advice from CNN's so-called "nutritionists." Sheesh.

LAKOFF AND FRAMING....As promised, last night I read George Lakoff's book on political framing (Don't Think of an Elephant). Here's what I thought of it.

Good news first: there was some advice near the beginning that was quite cogent:

• Facts are great, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that you're going to win arguments with facts. When facts collide with a person's worldview, it's the facts that get tossed overboard, not the worldview.

• Stop yammering about how irrational it is that so many people vote against their own economic self interest. People do this all the time, including liberals. "They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they can identify with."

• Laundry lists of programs don't work. You need an underlying narrative. You need a frame that puts it all in perspective.
  

"Framing," of course, is Lakoff's claim to fame, and he bases his analysis of contemporary American politics on the idea that conservative and liberal worldviews are based on a "strict father/nurturant parent" dichotomy (see here for a description). As it happens, I think he stretches this metaphor farther than it can reasonably go, but that's not my real problem with him. My problem is that although he does a good job of explaining how conservatives use framing to their benefit, he fails to provide very much compelling advice for liberals.

A good example is "tax relief." Lakoff is persuasive in arguing that the word "relief" automatically frames taxes as an affliction that needs to be lifted — and anybody who lifts an affliction is, of course, a hero. Those who don't are goats.

Fine — and Democrats shouldn't allow themselves to get suckered into using the phrase themselves. But what does he propose instead? Lakoff has two suggestions: (1) taxes are "wise investments in the future" and (2) taxes are your "membership fee in America." Those aren't really as snappy as "tax relief," are they?

Unfortunately, it gets worse. There's an entire chapter on foreign policy, for example, that would probably delight Noam Chomsky but not too many others. Check out this paragraph, written five days after 9/11:

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?

Now, you might personally agree or disagree with this, but I'll say this flatly: if Democrats adopt this kind of framing we will be out of power for the next half century or so. And we'd deserve to be if we had actually been unwilling to support even a war against the country that harbored the guy who had just killed 3,000 Americans. Hell, even the hated French and Germans supported the Afghan war.

(And no, I'm not taking this out of context. This chapter has some pro forma bits about the importance of alliances and the need for more than just military action — which is fine — but it also has lots more about the need for nurturance and empathy, including a paean to Barbara Lee, the sole member of the House to vote against the Afghan war.)

I'm already going on too long — especially for a pre-Thanksgiving post that nobody's going to read anyway. But I've at least highlighted my basic complaint: Lakoff may have identified a serious problem — for which he deserves credit — but he hasn't identified a serious solution. In fact, here's how he ends the book, with his nomination for a "ten word" philosophy for liberals:

• Stronger America
  

• Broad Prosperity
  

• Better Future
  

• Effective Government
  

• Mutual Responsibility
  

Maybe it's just me, but those sure don't sound as zingy as Lower Taxes, Family Values, and A Kick-Ass Military. I'm a liberal myself, but even so this list almost put me to sleep. (It's also a list that doesn't strike me as especially liberal. With the possible exception of the last bullet, is there anything there that would be out of place in the Republican party platform?)

There are the seeds of some good ideas in this book — trial lawyers as consumers' last line of defense, gay marriage as a freedom-from-government-interference issue — but that's about it. Overall, I have a deep fear that if liberals are taking this stuff too seriously we could be about to drive ourselves off a cliff. Street smart framers like Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz are probably laughing themselves silly over this stuff.

POSTSCRIPT: It's possible that for ten bucks all I got was the teaser. If I really want the goods, maybe I have to attend one of Lakoff's seminars or something. Could be. But for now, all I can go by is what was between the covers of the book in my hands.

CONSPIRACY MONGERING....A close election? But one marred by voting irregularities? Mostly centered on Democratic precincts? And now a subject of conspiracy theories and demands for a recount?

Ah, it's just a bunch of whiny Democrats. They should suck it up and accept the will of the people.

Unless, of course, they're Republicans.

VENEZUELA....We already know that the Bush administration has trouble with clearly worded CIA briefing documents ("Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S."), but today we get further word on the poor level of reading comprehension at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

• April 6, 2002: A widely circulated CIA briefing paper about unrest in Venezuela states, "dissident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month."

• April 12-14, 2002: Dissident military factions in the Venezuelan army organize a coup against Chávez.

• April 17, 2002: A senior administration official tells the press, "The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow — or to get Chávez out of power."
  

The Bush adminstration also said that the United States was not actively involved in any way in the coup attempt. I wonder if they were lying about that too?

COMPUTATIONAL GENOMICS UPDATE....Quick note: I got several dozen responses to my computational genomics post last night, most of them from folks with pretty serious credentials. Many thanks to everyone who emailed me.

I haven't quite decided what to do with them all yet, but I might write a post later to try and give a flavor of what the consensus was. In the meantime, here's the nickel version: (a) everyone agrees that the whole subject is really complex and is dangerously susceptible to oversimplification, (b) most emailers basically think Derbyshire is full of hot air, but (c) a few people think there's a kernel of truth in what he said.

A BIGGER, BETTER, CIA?....Is George Bush planning a massive expansion of the CIA? Apparently so, according to the LA Times.

He's not planning to pay for it, of course, but that hardly even rates a yawn anymore.

LAKOFF FRAMING....I finally finished Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, and boy howdy, it just wasn't very good, was it? Took me a while to figure that out, though, since I'm generally a big fan. Bottom line: if you're interested in a detailed geography lesson of Queen Anne London, this is the book for you, but if you're looking for a satisfying ending to Parts 1 and 2 of the Baroque Cycle, it's a bit of a slog.

(But Stephenson has always had a bit of a problem with his endings, hasn't he? Unfortunately, this one was a thousand pages long.)

Anyway, that means it's time to pick up some new reading material, which in turn means it's finally time for me to get a copy of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, which appears to be something of a Bible among despairing liberals who can't believe that half the country likes George Bush and apparently doesn't like us. Basically, Lakoff says we need to get our act together and "frame" our arguments in more positive ways:

We came together because of our moral values: care and responsibility, fairness and equality, freedom and courage, fulfillment in life, opportunity and community, cooperation and trust, honesty and openness. We united behind political principles: equality, equity (if you work for a living, you should earn a living) and government for the people — all the people.

These are traditional American values and principles, what we are proudest of in this country. The Democrats' failure was a failure to put forth our moral vision, celebrate our values and principles, and shout them out loud.

I dunno. This just doesn't seem like it's going to be very convincing to all those fence sitters out there — and the whole "strict father-nuturant parent" thing has always left me cold. Still, before I kvetch about it I really ought to read the whole book and see if it's better than the snippets I've seen so far. I'll report back later.

UPDATE: In comments, Don Hosek reminds me that my initial review after I was a third of the way through Quicksilver (the first volume of the Baroque Cycle) was also pretty negative. I checked the archives, and he's right.

So....take the above with a grain of salt or two. In retrospect, my feeling is that I mostly enjoyed the first two volumes, and maybe in time I'll come to feel the same way about System of the World. On the other hand, I'll stick to my guns in my general belief that the trilogy is just way too long and sloppy, and I hope Stephenson isn't falling into the Tom Clancy trap of writing ever longer and less disciplined novels just because there's nobody around to tell him not to. I like long books, and the Baroque Cycle offered plenty of rewards in return for slogging throught it, but it would have been a lot better with more focus and half the fat.

MARLBORO COUNTRY....Charles Duhigg's story in the LA Times today about Philip Morris' annual adventure fest for foreigners in Moab, Utah, is worth it for this line alone:

"We want the winners to experience the freedom of America," explains [company executive François] Moreillon. "And we find this is easiest when Americans are not part of the event."

Classic. On the other hand, this piece managed the difficult task of making me feel kind of sorry for Philip Morris. I'm not quite sure why Duhigg thought this thing was such a big deal that it required Woodward & Bernstein levels of in-your-face reporting, but by the time I was done I pretty much understood Moreillon's point. Relentless harrassment of a private party on the thin grounds that they're hiking on public land is not exactly a high point of American journalism

POLITICAL BLOGS....This is a little old, but Intelliseek's BlogPulse is a cool site that tracks blogs and the issues blogs talk about. The chart below shows their ranking of the 35 "most cited" political blogs during the 2004 campaign (note that the rankings go from the bottom up). I don't know what their methodology is since all their site says is that they "mined and analyzed politics-specific data in a variety of ways," but it's interesting anyway. They also have a variety of charts showing top media sources, top blog issues, and so forth. Enjoy.

SOCIAL SECURITY FANTASYLAND....On Friday I speculated that George Bush might decide to tackle the transition costs of Social Security privatization by simply pretending that that the costs don't really exist. Today, via the Washington Post, it appears that several variations on this idea are already being run up the flagpole:

The strategies include, for example, moving the costs of Social Security reform "off-budget" so they are not counted against the government's yearly shortfall.

...."You cannot look at Social Security in the context of a five-year budget," the window that current White House and congressional spending plans cover, [Senator Judd] Gregg said. "To do so is naive and foolish. . . . If this is simply scored as a five-year exercise, we're never going to solve the problem."

....An analysis of one plan produced by Bush's Social Security Commission concluded that the interim financing would cost as much as $104.5 billion the first year, balloon to $194.4 billion in the 10th year and would peak in roughly 20 years at $258 billion.

....Gregg and other allies of the president argue, in fact, that transition costs of $1.5 trillion or more over the next 10 years should not be considered an increase in the nation's debt. Instead, they say, such borrowing would be a prudent recognition of future obligations.

"The diversion of a portion of payroll taxes to personal accounts is akin to prepaying a mortgage," R. Glenn Hubbard, former chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in the current issue of Business Week.

...."The market is rational, and they are already nervous about all these unfunded obligations in Social Security and Medicare," said Kent Smetters, a former Bush Treasury Department economist now at the University of Pennsylvania. "Resolution of that uncertainty is actually going to be a positive."

Wonderful. Just move it off the books. After all, it's not a real deficit anyway because we're promising to make it all up in 30 years or so — which means the bond markets won't care about it. In fact, a willingness to blow up our deficit right here and now will actually be a positive!

This is just plain scary. What planet do these guys live on?

COMPUTATIONAL GENOMICS....I'm not in the habit of paying much attention to anything John Derbyshire writes, but I'm going to make an exception tonight. Derbyshire spent the day recently with a hotshot researcher in the field of computational genomics, a discipline that makes use of high-speed computers and eye-glazing mathematical methods to trawl though the human genome looking for useful nuggets. But apparently there's a problem:

There is a huge swelling wave of knowledge building up — knowledge about human variation, human inheritance, human nature. Things have gone much further than I realized. Genes controlling intelligence? "We've got a few nailed down, and more are showing up..."

....And all this work has to be done while keeping a sort of radio silence, because it is deeply unpopular. I know some of the scientists doing this work — people like the datanaut. They are just like other scientists I have known, driven by a kind of hypertrophied curiosity, by an innocent urge to understand the inner secrets of the world. In other respects, they are just representative human beings, with the normal range of human weaknesses and failings. To the guardians of our public morality, though — the media and political elites, the legal and humanities academics — they are very devils, peering into what should be kept hidden, seeking out things better left alone, working to secret agendas, funded by groups of sinister anti-social plotters — "bigots!"

What Derbyshire is alluding to here is the possibility that genomic research might turn up hardwired genetic differences between races, between genders, or between ethnic groups. And not just morally neutral things like Tay-Sachs among Jews or sickle cell anemia among Blacks, but gene complexes related to, say, mathematical ability or verbal skills.

The thrust of Derbyshire's piece is that the mere possibility of discovering hardwired differences between racial groups in an important personality characteristic such as IQ or aggression is so frightening to the liberal mainstream that the entire field of computational genomics shies away from even investigating them. Alzheimer's research, for example, is allegedly a no-go zone because it correlates with both IQ and race.

So here's my question: do I have any readers who work in this field (or a closely related one) and know if there's something to this? Or is Derb off in fantasyland?

If you have any genuine expertise in this field, please feel free to email me here. I'd be interested in hearing from you.

PRESIDENTIAL CHARACTER....Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg says that George Bush just can't catch a break:

To understand the president's Catch-22 with his critics, consider his latest move as he prepares for his second term: shaking up the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since 9/11 a cacophonic chorus has been calling for shake-ups at the CIA. "Why hasn't anyone been fired?" demanded everyone from the New York Times and the Democratic party to the so-called 9/11 families. The 9/11 commission demanded a huge shake-up not only of our intelligence bureaucracy but of the way we think about national security more broadly.

Well, the administration is attempting to do that. Porter Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a one-time CIA operative himself, is shaking things up. Several longtime and senior veterans of the agency have resigned in protest over Goss's supposedly rough and rude tactics. The protest doesn't end there, of course. They've brought their grievances to a press corps all but elated to let the opponents of change and reform use them as a megaphone.

He's absolutely right. But there a bit more to it. Consider:

• 9/11 was the biggest CIA failure in history. No one was fired for this.

• The CIA's assessment of Iraq's WMD program turned out to be completely wrong. George Tenet reportedly called it a "slam dunk." No one was fired for this.

• The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the CIA didn't have a clue about the likely extent of the postwar insurgency. No one was fired for this.

• During the presidential campaign, several CIA sources leaked material to the press that was damaging to President Bush. Shortly after the election, people started getting fired.
  

What does this tell you about George Bush's priorities? Just this: even though a bipartisan chorus of voices has called for a CIA shakeup ever since 9/11, Bush did nothing for three long years. The only thing serious enough to finally prompt him to take action was a few CIA leaks that made him look bad.

Quite a president we have, eh?

IS OUR ADULTS LEARNED?....In a recent Gallup survey, only 35% of Americans said they believed evolution was "a scientific theory well-supported by evidence." The other 65% either disagreed or weren't sure. Depressing, isn't it?

Maybe so, but on the scale of human ignorance, is it really that bad? After all, according to an NSF survey done in 2001, 25% of Americans think the sun goes around the earth. That's depressing.

STEM CELLS....The California stem cell initiative passed easily earlier this month, and already we're starting to see results:

As California moves quickly toward setting up a $3-billion embryonic stem cell research agency, other states are scrambling to prevent their top researchers from being raided.

The lure is clear: $300 million a year for embryonic stem cell research in California for the next decade, more than 10 times the yearly federal funding available and free of the Bush administration's tight restrictions on what research can be conducted with federal money.

This is sort of the mirror image of the all too common "race to the bottom," where factory owners and shopping mall magnates pit local governments against each other in a demeaning auction to find out who's most willing to slash services and mortgage their futures. In this case, though, instead of promising special tax reductions, we're promising special funding increases.

I'm still not very happy about this, and I voted against Prop 71. On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm happy that enough people disagreed with me to carry it to victory. Stem cell research holds out a lot of promise, and funding biotech development is a helluva lot better use of taxpayer dough than providing a property tax easement to a strip mall developer.

Does this make me completely incoherent on this subject? Yes it does. Must be time for lunch.

MANDATE WATCH....Fast forwarding through commercials: the latest menace to Western Civilization?

Luckily, Republicans in Congress want to make it illegal. Thank God someone is paying attention to these threats.

NIPPLE-GATE....Want to read a Grade A rant against Michael Powell and the FCC? Tom Shales has one right here. Enjoy.

BUSH PRESS COVERAGE....Over at the newly rechristened CJR Daily, Susan Stranahan wonders if the press will be tougher on Bush in his second term than it was in his first. Here's the response that jumped out at me:

"History doesn't give us much evidence of that," says author Mark Hertsgaard. "Look at the Reagan era. The media certainly didn't get tougher in his second term."

...."I think that basically press coverage of any president is only as critical as the opposition party is critical," says Hertsgaard, who also wrote about the media and Reagan for The Nation shortly after the ex-president died in June.

I think that's exactly right. With occasional exceptions like Watergate, the press rarely starts crusades of its own. If Democrats want coverage of Bush to be more critical, they're the ones who are going to have to feed consistent, ongoing critical coverage to the media. Are they up to the task?

BUSH AND THE ENVIRONMENT....Gregg Easterbrook has an article in the New Republic today that provides a nice summary of some recommendations from an environmental think tank. But his lead is inexplicable:

John Kerry ran on a platform that called for dramatic changes in United States energy policy, and George W. Bush ran on a platform that called for keeping the energy status quo. Bush won, yet my guess is that change will soon win on energy policy. Too many trends are worrisome. To name a few: United States dependence on Persian Gulf oil keeps rising, greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, scientific indicators of artificially triggered climate change keep getting stronger, mega SUVs keep proliferating and damaging our civic space by causing ever-more road rage, and natural gas supplies are perilously close to becoming a national problem. Clinging to the status quo on energy policy is not attractive.

He's right about these trends, but what on earth makes him think Bush is going to respond to any of this stuff? Alan Greenspan, Mr. Tax Cut of 2001, is now publicly warning that we need to balance the budget, and Paul Volcker thinks there's a 75% chance that Bush's policies will lead to an economic disaster within five years. Despite this, Bush has shown exactly zero interest in changing his economic direction. In fact, increasing the deficit by making his tax cuts permanent and privatizing Social Security is front and center in his 2005 agenda.

The same is true of environmental policy. There are three basic recommendations in the think tank report and, as Easterbrook points out, all three are things Bush opposes. The first is a higher gasoline tax, which everyone knows is a nonstarter. The second is higher mileage standards, which Bush also opposes. Third is a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide, something Bush actually went out of his way to change his mind on after first supporting it during the 2000 campaign.

I'd love to see us make some headway on this stuff. But expecting George Bush to lead the way is just wishful thinking.

"UNIVERSAL DEFAULT"....I was chatting with a friend on Friday who suggested that Democrats needed to adopt more populist economic policies, things that really helped (and resonated with) the working and middle classes. My initial response was that I thought that Democrats were already doing that, but just weren't doing it very effectively because Republicans control every branch of government.

Still, point taken, and the New York Times ran a long piece on Sunday that's a good example of the kind of thing Democrats could champion. It turns out that credit card companies aren't just charging higher interest rates than ever, they're also writing multi-page, fine print contracts that allow them to double or triple your interest rate with no warning for practically any reason:

The practice, called universal default, started after a rash of bankruptcy filings in the mid-to-late 1990's and has increasingly become standard in the industry.

....Last month, a consumer advocacy group in San Diego, the Utility Consumers' Action Network, filed suit against Discover Financial Services, the issuer of the Discover card, asserting that it had changed the rules late in the game. The group contends that a recent rewording of Discover's universal-default policy is unfair to consumers, especially those in difficult financial situations.

The change, disclosed to cardholders in April, allowed Discover to raise the interest rate to 19.99 percent, from as low as zero, for a single late payment. But the infraction did not have to follow the revision, because Discover reserved the right to look back 11 months for a late payment that could justify the increase.

If you have a large balance on your card and pay your phone bill late, that can be enough of an excuse to double your interest rate.

The illustration below shows what's happening. A decade ago credit card companies issued cards carefully and charged a minimum interest rate of 12% and a maximum of 22%. Today, "careful" is a thing of the past. Instead of evaluating a potential customer's creditworthiness before issuing them a card, they issue them to anyone with a pulse — aggressively wooing their business with introductory rates as low as 0%. Then, when these relatively poorer credit risks show even a slight sign of financial distress — a late car, phone, or rent payment, for example — the rate can be instantly jacked up to as high as 40% or more. And unless you've carefully read your agreement and understand what "universal default" means — which virtually no one does — these increased payments are completely unexpected.

Is this the sort of abusive practice that populist Democrats could make hay with? Probably. And who knows? Maybe there's a smart one out there who will. If credit card companies refuse to take responsibility for evaluating their customers' creditworthiness before loaning them money, they should expect to take the responsibility for a larger number of defaults. That's the banking biz, after all.

NOT ENOUGH TROOPS....This won't come as a surprise to anyone, but apparently we don't have enough troops in Iraq:

The possibility that additional troops would be required to battle the insurgency in this critical period preceding the Iraqi elections, scheduled for Jan. 30, has been signaled for weeks. The Pentagon took an initial step in this direction last month, ordering about 6,500 soldiers in Iraq to extend their tours by up to two months.

....The officers said the exact number of extra troops needed is still being reviewed but estimated it at the equivalent of several battalions, or about 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers. The number of U.S. troops in Iraq fell to nearly 100,000 last spring before rising to 138,000, where it has stayed since the summer.

To boost the current level, military commanders have considered extending the stay of more troops due to rotate out shortly, or accelerating the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is scheduled to start in January. But a third option — drawing all or part of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on emergency standby in the United States — has emerged as increasingly likely.

The only really noteworthy part of this story is that it's just about the first time the military has been willing to publicly admit that it needs more troops in Iraq. However, the story also makes the reason for this painfully obvious: why ask if there aren't any more troops to give?

Last month the Army decided to redeploy its famed OPFOR training regiment to Iraq —"eating your seed corn," as Phil Carter called it — and now they're talking about drawing on a brigade currently on emergency standby. And of course, this is all in addition to the accelerated rotations, IRR callups, and stop loss orders of the past several months.

All of these things are enormous morale busters that provide only a few thousand additional troops, and it's pretty clear that no one would be resorting to this stuff unless we were in pretty desperate straits. But we are: as with every previous operation that was supposed to turn the tide, it turns out that flattening Fallujah didn't turn the tide after all.

Now, tell me again why Donald Rumsfeld still has a job?

MANDATE WATCH....Congressional Republicans have now been back in town for five days following their big election victory on the 2nd. So what are they using their newfound mandate for? Let's take a peek:

• At the request of Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Oklahoma), passed a law giving Appropriations Committee chairmen the right to look at anyone's tax returns without regard to privacy rights. When caught by Democrats, they said it was all just a big mistake and promised they'd never actually use this authority.

• Overwhelmingly revoked a rule stating that Republican congressional leaders have to step down if indicted of a felony. This was done to protect House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who appears to be on the verge of being indicted for a felony.

• Approved funding to buy President Bush a yacht.

• Killed long-awaited intelligence reform legislation that was widely supported by both Democrats and Republicans, the president, the 9/11 Commission, and 9/11 victims groups.
  

Pretty good work for five days! I wonder what they'll manage to get done when they actually have a full session on their hands next year?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION UPDATE....The LA Times reports on the latest affirmative action outrage:

When admissions officers for Santa Clara University recruit new freshmen, they do their best to reach the kind of students they'd like to see more of on the Silicon Valley campus: boys.

"We make a special pitch to them to talk about the benefits of Santa Clara, as we do for other underrepresented groups," Charles Nolan, Santa Clara's vice provost for admissions, said of the school's efforts to boost male applicants.

....Vincent Garcia, a college counselor at the Los Angeles prep school Campbell Hall, said liberal arts colleges, especially, can be "more forgiving of the occasional B or even a C" from a boy. "Sometimes the expectation is a little bit less" than for girls, he said.

....an applicant's sex is "one of many factors we take into account in the interest of bringing in a diverse class," [William and Mary director of admissions Henry] Broaddus said. For this year's freshmen class, 30% of male applicants were admitted, compared with 22% of female applicants.

I'm hopeful that the principled folks over at National Review will condemn this practice. And please: not just a desultory acknowledgment or two to prove you care. I expect a stream of outraged posts and crosstalk at least equal to the recent torrents about Arlen Specter, the lack of conservatives among humanities faculties, and the shocking tolerance of liberalism at the University of Chicago.

I'm counting on you, Cornerites. The eyes of the blogosphere are on you.

REQUEST....Quick request: does anyone know of a piece of software that can capture images from video being played by Windows Media Player or RealPlayer? I've tried several screen capture programs and can't get any of them to work. Needless to say, free is best and simple is highly desirable. My needs are not very sophisticated.

THE DELAY MELTDOWN....David Brooks says that the ground has shifted under Tom DeLay's feet:

It's shifted because many House Republicans know that DeLay has been playing close to the ethical edge for years. They've noticed the number of scandals — the latest involving lobbying fees for some Indian casinos — that trace back to DeLay cronies.

....Tom DeLay is a scandal waiting to happen. He casts himself as the enemy of Washington, but he's really a conventional (if effective) pol who wants to use dollars to entrench power. He represents the greatest danger the Republicans face, bossism. He wants to be the G.O.P.'s Boss Tweed.

....When people start gossiping about what the world would be like if you were gone — as Republicans are now starting to do with DeLay — you are in the first stages of political decline. It means that members start regarding you with a little less awe, and they start regarding your potential successors with a little more.

What's weird about Brooks' piece is that while he ruminates about why more members haven't stood up to DeLay, he shies away from stating the obvious: DeLay raises a ton of money for his colleagues. Even if it's not the whole story, it's certainly a big part of it.

For more on DeLay, Josh Marshall is having a lot of fun trying to track down which House members voted to protect DeLay and which ones stuck with their consciences. I emailed my congressman, Chris Cox, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, but I haven't heard back. A friend called and left voice mail, but she hasn't heard back either. Maybe we'll get replies on Monday....

VOTING FRAUD UPDATE....The latest investigation into possible voting fraud in the 2004 election comes in a paper by a team at UC Berkeley headed by sociologist Michael Hout. Basically, they are trying to figure out whether the returns in counties that used electronic voting were systematically different in unexplainable ways from those that didn't.

Bottom line: they didn't find anything fishy in Ohio, but they did in Florida: "the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting...is 130,733."

However, both Kieran Healy and Andrew Gelman are skeptical that Hout's results stand up. The chart on the right, adapted from Gelman's site, shows why.

The chart shows the size of the vote swing toward Bush in all Florida counties, and the basic pattern is simple: the more Republican a county was in 2000, the more heavily their vote swung even further toward Bush in 2004. At the bottom left are counties that are strongly Democratic, and their swing to Bush was actually negative compared to 2000. At the top right are counties that are heavily Republican, and their swing toward Bush was eight percentage points or more, far higher than the statewide average swing of 2.5 points.

Counties in red used electronic voting and counties in black didn't. Nearly all the counties fall within the two black lines, and there doesn't seem to be much difference between them. Both red and black circles show the same basic pattern, which means there's no special reason to think that anything funny was going on in counties with electronic voting.

In fact, it turns out that Hout's entire result is due to only two outliers: Broward County and Palm Beach County. This suggests several things:

• There was almost certainly not any systemic fraud. If there were, it would have showed up in more than just two counties.

• The results in Broward and Palm Beach are unusual, but it's hard to draw any conclusion from just two anomolies. As Kieran says, "it seems more likely that these results show the Republican Party Machine was really, really well-organized in Palm Beach and Broward, and they were able to mobilize their vote better than the Democrats."

• Anyone who wants to continue investigating possible fraud in Florida anyway should focus on Broward and Palm Beach.
  

That's the latest. I'll post more if I hear anything interesting.

BCS WOES....Auburn fans are unhappy with the BCS. J.A. Adande quotes Joe Piazza, whose brother owns an embroidery store in town:

"I don't think the computers can do the job that we think they should do. And I don't think people are going to vote the way we think they should vote. So I've got problems both ways. And that's the Auburn bias coming out."

That's admirably honest. And believe me, Joe, we USC fans feel your pain after getting the BCS shaft last year.

It's puzzling that Division 1 university presidents and coaches continue to be so opposed to a playoff system. The official excuse is that it lengthens the season too much, but that doesn't hold water. The BCS championship game is usually played around January 4, and if you had a four-team playoff you could play the two semifinals on New Year's Day and the championship game a week later. It would extend the season for two teams by about three days.

And it would mean we'd get a consensus winner, just like every other college sport. There have been many years in which more than two teams had a legitimate claim to being #1, but I can't ever remember a year in which more than four teams did. A four-team playoff is all that's needed.

So why not do it? I don't know. But the likely answer, as with everything related to college football, is money. Follow the money.

COOPERATION....Apparently President Bush is preparing a push to