Cox Crow

Peggy Noonan is tired of the security theater at the airport.

Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government’s way of showing “fairness,” of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? … All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday.

She also has a suggestion for Barack Obama.

Oh, look, it appears that we’ll make the Arabs happy by leaving them alone. Who knew?

The government’s pockets are only as deep as yours.

Shall we choose the profligate candidate, or the spendthrift? Where’s the frugal choice when you need one?

I was listening to John McCain talk on NPR this evening, and I have to admit that he knows what to say to get my attention. However, the chasm between his talk and action is huge. Robert Siegel failed to ask obvious follow-up questions, perhaps out of fear of being too confrontational.

If elected president in November, McCain says, he’ll approve an additional $3 billion in taxes over 10 years. He also vows to immediately slash $100 billion in “wasteful” government spending — $65 billion from the federal budget baseline and $35 billion that was approved in spending bills over the past two years.

“The problem is that we’ve presided over a 40 percent increase in the budget over the last eight years,” McCain says, “and that’s got to be brought under control.”

And how, pray tell, are you planning to do that by spending $341.4 million per day keeping the Army in Iraq for the next 100 years?

Here’s a trick. Multiply 341,400,000 by 7. That’s 2,389,800,000. Then multiply that by a short month. That’s 66,914,400,000. Oh, look, I just saved $67 billion!

I have been serving on the board of the Dalton Farm Homeowner Association for almost a year. This past week we developed the budget for the next fiscal year. The bulk of the budget was already established by contractual arrangements with vendors, and the majority of the rest was approximated from sums expended during previous years. One thing we cannot predict now is the cost of fuel.

To fund its operations, a homeowner association taxes the members, but calls them dues, assessments, or fees, or some other synonym. They are taxes.

Unlike other elected officials, our primary goal is keeping taxes in check. We agree on this goal, which makes budgeting easier. If there is a projected revenue shortfall, the questions then center on what to cut. Do we need $45,000 for improvements to the grounds? Perhaps $25,000 would be sufficient. Should we expect to pay the lawyers $4,000 or $6,000 this year? Can we put off paving the roads until 2010 instead of completing them this year?

I suppose our budget is small, in comparison to other governments. It’s only a million dollars. But it’s more money than I have in the bank, and keeping the tax increase to $12 for the year was unexpected. (If I did the math right, that’s an increase of about 0.7%.) Now let’s see how much oil prices rise.

The Arlington Central School District sends out a newsletter every now and again — oddly enough around budget season. This time it includes a piece titled “Arlington’s Investment Paying Off,” which discusses how additional guidance counselors have dropped the student to counselor ratio from 375:1 to 210:1.

Now, three years into the plan, our commitment to guidance services is clearly paying off. At its all-time high, the guidance counselor to student ratio was 375 to 1. Within the last two years, the counselor to student ratio has dropped to its current average of 210 to 1, a ratio similar to most successful suburban schools.

That’s an awful lot of guidance counselors! 210 to each student?! Wow.

OK, so bad English and math skills aside, what is the return on investment of adding these additional guidance counselors? Apparently, having more of them allows the students to meet with their counselors more often.

When guidance counselors were serving 300+ students from multiple grades, contact with students was infrequent and irregular with some students seeing their counselor only once or twice a year. Members of the Classes of 2010 and 2011 will meet with their guidance counselors five to six times this year.

Granted my high school experience was unlike Arlington’s — the Highland High School student population was, if I recall correctly, 172 souls from grades 7 through 12 — but meeting with one’s guidance counselor seems to me to be entirely unnecessary for most students.

What is it they do? How do we measure their effect? How do we determine whether or not an additional counselor is cost-effective? And without knowing that, how can we say that the investment is paying off?

Catesby Leigh writes in the City Journal,

Modernist buildings, whether clad in glass or not, simply aren’t built to age gracefully—not only because of the way they’re constructed, but also because they aren’t designed to be loved. They are either commercially expedient products of the consumer culture or, less often, expensively histrionic but ultimately ephemeral fashion statements of the sort that Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel concoct.

And that, my friends, is my main gripe with Modernist architecture. It’s ugly, and gets uglier.

For those of you not paying attention, fuel costs are up. This change in circumstances changes the calculation of which mode of operation is optimal. In the case of transportation, the cost of long-haul packet shipping over railroads has dropped below that of trucks.

Commenting on this drop, Matthew Yglesias remarks,

Clearly trucks have a massive inherent advantage as a method of doing the last-mile of shipping, but for long-haul stuff a more rational federal policy environment in terms of carbon pricing and road/rail funding balance would give further momentum to this boom.

I think anyone who has bought wheat recently might suggest that Federal subsidies perturb the market substantially, frequently with severe unintended consequences. I highly doubt that Congress expected the price of pizza to rise because they were throwing buckets of money at corn ethanol. In light of the all-too-frequent confirmation that government intervention is a crude implement, perhaps a rational Federal policy environment would stop poking the economy with that stick. Perhaps we might remove subsidies for both highways and railroads, instead of increasing funding for the latter.

via Arnold Kling, we learn that the State of California does not like home-schooling by parents who are not also teachers, on the assumption that certification ensures quality. Mr. Kling pulls out this quote from the article.

“Parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” wrote Justice H. Walter Croskey in a Feb. 28 opinion signed by the two other members of the district court. “Parents who fail to [comply with school enrollment laws] may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program.”

I’m not sure what interest the State has in compelling schooling, but I am sure that I have an interest in not being compelled.

Today’s readings speak of God and Jesus as our shepherd. We’re most familiar with this metaphor in Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

In John 10:1-18, Jesus continues the metaphor, and identifies himself as the good shepherd.

The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers. … All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. … I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me

God knows his own. He recognizes you, and requires no proof. You recognize God’s voice, and follow him willingly.

Contrast this with the Beast in Revelation 13:16-17.

Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

The Beast demands proof of your loyalty, a brand, and coerces us into receiving this brand. Coercion is necessary, because he is the wolf at the door, the thief stealing the sheep.

A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

The bagel shop is raising prices. The pizza place is raising prices. And a six-pack of my favorite beer has just passed $10 at the grocer.

What, you may ask, am I doing buying beer at the grocer’s? It’s convenient, but that’s beside the point. The point is that commodity prices are going up. The market is perturbed and passing the costs on to me. I might have to start drinking less!

I experienced a homograph attack on my productivity today, courtesy of Microsoft Word.

This character, pasted here (–), looks like a hyphen, but it’s not. That codepoint is also Unicode Latin small letter a with circumflex: â, or â. When pasted into a PuTTY terminal window, it becomes a dot (Unicode full stop: .).

The readme file in the ConfigScripts package of example wsadmin scripts from IBM is an HTML document generated by Microsoft Word.

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10">

I’m not sure why it did this, and frankly I don’t have the time to investigate right now, but I am puzzled as to why it is pasting visibly as a hyphen, but is not being a hyphen. I suspect this is a side-effect of a helpful Word feature which turns hyphens into en dashes (–).

Look, Computer, if you don’t know how we’re encoding meaning in the characters, don’t guess. Sometimes a hyphen is just a hyphen. The meaning is in how it is read: not in the glyph itself.

I read Joel Spolsky’s “Martian Headsets” post a while back, in which he discusses Microsoft’s about-face with regards to Internet Explorer 8 in terms of balancing backward-compatibility with standards compliance, as if they are necessarily incompatible. Mark Pilgrim followed up with this funny translation into colloquial English.

So I was reading Spolsky’s piece, and nodding, and sort of agreeing that his central premise was correct, and then I got to this part, the conclusion.

98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.

Damn straight we want web browsers that work with actual web sites. But I must beg to differ about 98% of the world installing Internet Exploder 8 of their own volition. If they’re not using Firefox 3.0 because their friends told them it’s the bomb, they’re still using AOL, or Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000, or maybe Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP — but the only reason they switched to IE7 is because it just happened, and unless IE8 offers some compelling advantage, that is the only reason they will switch to IE8.

Oh, and the reason IE8 won’t work with some websites is not standards. Opera and Firefox and Safari do just fine. It’s Microsoft. Site developers have been kowtowing to Internet Explorer’s quirks for years, and have come up with tricks to make Internet Explorer display the site the way that they want the site to be displayed. Either they fork their content so that IE gets the “good stuff,” or they’re willingly putting in more effort to please those customers who just happen to be stuck with a browser older than my kids. (And, no, I don’t mean Netscape Communicator 4.0.) The way around that impasse is to quit being Internet Explorer. Quit asking for special treatment. Quit demanding a segregated web.

We want web browsers that just work with web sites. And we want them to just work whether we’ve chosen to use Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii, or Ubuntu Linux.

Would you like your opinion of the Fourth Estate lowered further? Thought it couldn’t get any worse? Suspect that journalists on deadline have less scruples than a Congressman on a junket? Then read Glenn Greenwald’s series on how the chattering classes have disconnected their brains from their mouths.

On the one hand, criticism of the media is a bit much like navel gazing, since one can find exceptional coverage of important matters. The Associated Press did notice that footnote, after all. But it is exceptional. The vast bulk is trivial. Where Greenwald errs is in asserting that this is exclusively a “right-wing” or Republican phenomenon. Perhaps the Democrats, as a party, are simply less competent in their manipulation, but all in power attempt to distract the People from their actions.

Bread and circuses, my friends, bread and circuses.

I’m surprised that Cato hasn’t mentioned the stink around the latest memorandum from John Yoo [part 1, part 2]. Perhaps they are as shocked, shocked!, as I am to learn that the Executive has been up to no good.

There are more memoranda, which are perhaps just as shocking, in the same vein. The Associated Press noticed one mentioned in a footnote which blithely remarked that,

Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.

Excuse me? Come again?

Domestic military operations?

I’ve been running without root access to systems for nigh on two years now, and I must say that it is very annoying, even with sudo in order to start some web servers and such. The basic UNIX security model is really, truly, FUBAR. What I’m finding is that every now and again you run into a relatively painless operation which, because of design assumptions way back in the Dark Ages, is restricted to the superuser — and that working around wasting the time of the BOFH opens many more holes than would be present if the code-monkeys had been just a little more thoughtful.

And the question I have to ask is, “What are you protecting?”

In the movie Elizabeth, Phillip II remarks that he has sacrificed Spain’s forests in order to build his fleet. That’s an interesting remark, and I wonder how accurate it is. Perhaps someone knows.

While I was looking on the Internet for substantiation, I found A History of the Precious Metals, by Alexander Del Mar, in which he notes that

Spain was to the ancients what Mexico and Central and South America became in later ages to Spain, the Dorado, the richest mining country of the world, the place where gold and silver were found in greatest abundance. The fate of its aboriginal inhabitants, the subsequent struggles among leading nations for the mastery of its precious metals, the destruction of its forests for the purposes of the mines and the consequent exposure of its soil to drought and devastation, the neglect of agriculture in the absorbing pursuit of metallic wealth, and the resulting poverty and backwardness of its population, both aboriginal and colonial — can all be read by the nearer pictures which are accessible to us of Mexico and Peru.

Perhaps there need to be word limits on legislation.

the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill.

What Created This Monster”, The New York Times, via David Sucher, in re Bear Stearns.

We’re watching NCIS, and I can’t help but wondering what their jurisdiction is. If the show is in any way representative, they investigate pretty much anything.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has primary investigative and counterintelligence jurisdiction within the Department of the Navy. NCIS has a global presence, maintaining a worldwide field structure that supports Navy and Marine Corps requirements in over 140 locations around the globe, including aboard every aircraft carrier and “big-deck” amphibious vessel. NCIS special agents are authorized by law to conduct arrests of military members and civilians alike, both on and off military installations.