Away for a few days

Family emergency. Won't be blogging for a few days; travelling to Raleigh. I'll be back next week; hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving.

"This used to be called loan sharking"

JPMorgan, Banks Back Lenders Luring Poor With 780 Percent Rates

Money quote (pardon the expression):

Nine out of 10 payday loans are made to repeat borrowers with more than five payday loans per year, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, a group in Durham, North Carolina, that assists consumers in financial difficulty.

The average borrower spends $600 in fees annually on a $300 loan, says a 2004 report in the Yale Journal on Regulation, a law journal published by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Most payday lenders earn gross profit margins of 30 percent to 45 percent, the report says.

"That's the dirty little secret,'' says Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John Oxendine, whose office has investigated payday lenders. "Payday lending is structured so you just pay the interest every two weeks. They never want you to pay back the principal.''

And they're backed by some of the biggest names in the banking business.

"Economic armageddon"

Stephen Roach, the chief economist for investment bank Morgan Stanley, has some bad news for us:

America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "armageddon." ... Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon." The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

The reasons? A record trade deficit, a crushing debt load, a cratering dollar...

Check out the article (Boston Herald, Nov. 23)

SimplySwagger launches

BobLee Swagger, the Clown Prince of sports commentary, is diversifying and expanding his media empire.

I've long been a fan of the SwaggerSays site, where BobLee holds forth on current events in the world of sport. Here's BobLee on the "late unpleasantness," the big Pacers-Pistons-fans free-for-all:

Am I the only one that wondered how “Fat Idiot Fans” (FIF) ended up in those courtside VIP seats? Isn’t that where Detroit’s versions of Jack Nicholson should be sitting? Maybe the Vice Pres of Chrome Bumpers for General Motors or Berry Gordy’s 6th wife’s personal trainer? … you’d think after buying $250 replica jerseys that “FIF” would be tapped out for $500 seats.

I say that's a valid question.

Well, as I said earlier, Swagger (author, humorist, and raconteur) is spreading his wings, and has just launched a new site, SimplySwagger.com. SimplySwagger is a new sandbox to play in, a place for BobLee to express some political and social ideas:

At 6:30 AM on Nov 2 I awoke as "a greedy country club Republican with my Halliburton portfolio and my tax cut (for the wealthy dontchaknow)” … 13 hours later, as the polls closed … I had somehow morphed into [an] “Ignorant Southern Redneck Religious Zealot”.

Preach, brother. I was tempted to invite some of my Blue State colleagues to come to church with me for some snake-handling my own self.

Science textbook warning stickers

Cobb County, Georgia biology students receive their science textbooks with a disclaimer sticker prominently affixed:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

Take that, you... you... godless secular rationalists!

Colin Purrington, a biology professor at Swarthmore, offers us a site with some other helpful disclaimer/warning stickers for science textbooks, e.g.:

This textbook suggests that the earth is spherical. The shape of the earth is a controversial topic, and not all people accept the theory. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

This textbook contains material on gravity. Gravity is a theory, not a fact, regarding a force that cannot be directly seen...

There are even stickers for astronomy textbooks that will help us guard against the onslaught of filthy pagan heliocentrism (the theory that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around.)

(sticker site link via Metafilter)

Yad Vashem: The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names

Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial organization, goes live today with a searchable database containing over three million names of Holocaust victims.

Six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Shoah. Yad Vashem undertook to retrieve the names of the Jewish victims and to preserve their memory.This is the moral duty of the Jewish People; our last respects to the victims. The computerized database prepared by Yad Vashem, with the assistance of other institutions, now includes the names of approximately half of these victims. We make their names accessible here, in reverence and awe, determined to persevere until the last name is retrieved.

Ed Cone: ACC schedule messes with success

Ed Cone has a terrific column today on the watering-down of ACC basketball with the conference's expansion:

They drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Gilded gold, fixed what wasn't broke, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. They went and changed the Atlantic Coast Conference basketball schedule.

In other distressing ACC-related news, my Tarheels took an egregious pratfall in their season-opening game, losing to noted basketball powerhouse... Santa Clara University???

Oy.

It ain't me, babe... it ain't me you're looking for, babe...

While I am apparently the only Barry Campbell with a listed number in the New York City phone directory, I have known for some time that I'm not the only one in town.

For several years now, I have been getting occasional phone calls intended for a Barry Campbell who was apparently involved with Veterans Affairs in some way. These callers were generally seeking help resolving benefits issues, and I just told them, when I answered the phone, that they had the wrong guy.

About a month ago, however, I got an actual letter from a veteran in trouble. He had tracked down my mailing address from an online directory, was writing me from a VA hospital, was having a terrible time with his benefits, and had heard through the grapevine that "I" could help him.

The letter, without going into details, was absolutely heartbreaking.

This finally got me off the dime... I made a pot of strong coffee and sat down to do some serious Googling.

Before long, I found who I was looking for: Barry G. Campbell, the founder and CEO of the Veterans' Quality of Life Access Network. I made a few phone calls, talked to one of his associates, eventually got Mr. Campbell (very nice guy) on the horn, and passed along the relevant information on the troubled vet's behalf.

From now on, when somebody calls looking for Barry G. (I'm Barry T.), I can point him in the right direction.

In the process of hunting down Barry G. Campbell, however, I ran into a number of other Barry Campbells who, um, I am also not. They are a fascinating bunch:

• Barry Campbell, the Scottish motorcycle racer
• Barry Campbell, the former Liberal Member of Canadian Parliament, now a senior strategist at a prestigious consulting firm (hey, looks like he's got his own company as well)
  
• Barry Campbell, the computer programmer who also participates in submarine expeditions under the Arctic ice cap (by the way, how cool is that?)
• Barry Campbell, the Libertarian candidate for Congress from Indiana (what are the odds of there being multiple libertarian Barry Campbells in the world?)
• Barry Campbell, the English union organizer
• Barry Campbell, M.D., a radiologist living in California
• Barry Campbell, the pastor of Glencoe Baptist Church in Florida
• Dr. Barry Campbell, the Liverpool University research scientist and medical school instructor on gastroenterology.

BasketBrawl.US - The NBA Pacers/Pistons Fight

If you missed (somehow) coverage of the epic brawl between the Pacers and the Pistons, and the attendant fan riot in the stands, you can find ESPN's Sportscenter Coverage (complete with slo-mo replays and color commentary) in a RealPlayer video stream here.

• Four players have been "indefinitely suspended" -- no word yet on the number of games. Frankly, I'd like to hear someone in authority at the NBA explain why Ron Artest shouldn't be drummed out of the league.
  
• ESPN weighs in helpfully with some historical accounts of fan-player melees.

Benediction

Now I live in New York... but that is because when I am in the South, I wander around wondering where I can get a copy of the New York Times, and when I am in the North, I wander around wondering where I can get some okra, and I'd rather think about some okra than the New York Times. -- Roy Blount, Jr.

Project Implicit: Measuring unconscious bias

An article on the possible neurological basis of racism in this morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) references an online test at Harvard University designed to measure unconscious biases and prejudices.

Project Implicit offers an online version of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT:

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

I haven't had time to take more than a cursory look at this yet, but it's certainly interesting and even provocative.

Google presents... Keyhole

Keyhole (recently purchased by Google) is a subscription Internet service... an application service provider offering a 3D digital model of the entire Earth over the Net.

Download Keyhole's software, and you can "fly" to any location on the planet's surface, and zoom in to a pretty fine level of detail, thanks to Keyhole's astounding database of aerial photography and satellite imagery.

Most major metropolitan areas in the US, and some major world cities, are available as high-resolution images, as are (unsurprisingly) most of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Any country that the US has recently bombed is generally well-represented by high-res imagery.)

You'll need a 3D video card, but most modern PCs have those. A broadband connection is a pretty good idea, too.

There's a 7-day free trial, and an annual subscription to their consumer-grade software after that is $30 (reduced from $70 after Google's purchase.)

The Keyhole software reminds me of nothing so much as the fictional "Earth" application from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. I don't know how frequently life actually imitates art, but technology imitates science fiction all the time.

P.S. Here's a BBS with interesting locations Keyhole users have found, and cool map overlays they have developed.

The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable

Britain bans foxhunting.

World Press Review

Perhaps, like me, you're a news junkie... and even if your hometown paper is the New York Times, you find that the American media's coverage of international events leaves something to be desired, and you find yourself surfing around to the BBC, the (Toronto) Globe and Mail, the Times of London, and on and on, looking for more information and different perspectives...

World Press Review is made for people like you (and me.) They run some columns and original material, but the bulk of what they provide is English-language translations of articles from the world's newspapers and other print media. They helpfully provide contextual information about the periodicals they translate (conservative or liberal, pro-government or opposition) and include a fair bit of foreign editorial content in the mix. If you're primarily an English speaker, there's no better way to get a good sample of the current political and cultural climate outside the United States.

I subscribed to the print version of World Press Review for many years. The print version of the magazine folded earlier this year, and worldpress.org (the web site) recently changed hands; the new owners are apparently struggling a bit to keep things going (though early reports are encouraging... the users are stepping up to the plate and offering support.)

If you've never visited before, do take a look at their site. Patronize their advertisers or buy one of their spiffy maps. And if the spirit moves you, throw a little cash their way.

It's College Hoops time again!

Ah, the college basketball season is getting underway, with the pre-season invitationals, tournaments and "classics." My favorite time of year, and it's looking pretty good for my Tarheels this season.

In that vein, I thought you'd like to know that Yoni Cohen has a terrific college basketball blog going over at collegeball.blogspot.com.

You know, I think we need to get Yoni together with BobLee Swagger. Swagger is still mostly in football mode, but roundball time is just around the corner...

Firefox: Rhymes with "rocks"

As an ecstatically happy Firefox user, I have a little advice for you -

If you're still stumbling along with bloated, buggy, slow, outdated and insecure Internet Explorer, get with the freakin' program!

Firefox is small, nimble, and standards-compliant; it offers great features like tabbed browsing and native support for RSS feeds; it's available for Windows, Mac OS X and most flavors of Linux and Unix; best of all, it's developed on the open-source model and protects your privacy and security worlds better than IE.

Secrecy News (Federation of American Scientists)

The Federation of American Scientists works to challenge excessive government secrecy and promote public oversight of government through its Project on Government Secrecy. Part of the Project is the excellent e-mail/RSS newsletter, Secrecy News.

The 11/14 issue of Secrecy News leads with a great article entitled "The Arrival of Secret Law." Excerpt (links added):

Last month, Helen Chenoweth-Hage attempted to board a United Airlines flight from Boise to Reno when she was pulled aside by airline personnel for additional screening, including a pat-down search for weapons or unauthorized materials.

Chenoweth-Hage, an ultra-conservative former Congresswoman (R-ID), requested a copy of the regulation that authorizes such pat-downs.

"She said she wanted to see the regulation that required the additional procedure for secondary screening and she was told that she couldn't see it," local TSA security director Julian Gonzales told the Idaho Statesman (10/10/04).

"She refused to go through additional screening [without seeing the regulation], and she was not allowed to fly," he said. "It's pretty simple."

Chenoweth-Hage wasn't seeking disclosure of the internal criteria used for screening passengers, only the legal authorization for passenger pat-downs. Why couldn't they at least let her see that? asked Statesman commentator Dan Popkey.

"Because we don't have to," Mr. Gonzales replied crisply.

Ah, there's an answer that would've done an old-school Soviet apparatchik proud. Fourth Amendment? What Fourth Amendment? You're acting mighty damned uppity there, citizen.

Secrecy News is well worth your time. There's something interesting and thought-provoking in almost every issue. Last week, they broke the news about, and even provided a copy of, the Army's new Interim Field Manual on counterinsurgency operations (PDF file, approximately 3 MB.)

NYT: Even Digital Memories Can Fade

Interesting story in today's New York Times Technology section:

The nation's 115 million home computers are brimming over with personal treasures - millions of photographs, music of every genre, college papers, the great American novel and, of course, mountains of e-mail messages.

Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.

Most of us who have been using personal computers for a while have already had to deal with the problem of conversion... from one platform to another, from one application to another, and so on. I've got a less-than-a-year-old Windows XP box on my desk at home, but the hard drive's document archive contains stuff that I wrote in the late 80s on a Macintosh SE... from that point forward, I have backed up and transferred my hard drive contents every time I buy a new machine.

Nonetheless, the Times article sounds a cautionary note.

For extreme cases of media obsolescence, see the Dead Media Project.

The film that got Theo van Gogh killed

Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was apparently killed because he made a film ("Submission." an 11-minute English-language short) criticizing Islamic culture, specifically the mistreatment of women.

(It's fairly safe to say that this was the reason van Gogh was murdered, because his killer, a 26 year-old fanatic of Moroccan descent, pinned a multipage typed rant to this effect to van Gogh's chest with a knife, after shooting him first, of course.)

Ifilm, bless them, has made "Submission" available for viewing over the Web.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Monitor: Maybe a Democrat can win in the South

Unsurprisingly, the Christian Science Monitor has been running post-election coverage that is thoughtful, forward-thinking and generally just head-and-shoulders above 95% of the other national print media. I have bookmarked their Domestic Politics page and I urge you to take a look at it.

In this story (Maybe a Democrat can win in the South) the Monitor's reporter finds himself in Lizard Lick, North Carolina, a wide spot in the road a little bit east of Raleigh:

After President Bush's sweep of the South, some commentators have wondered aloud about this "uneducated" region and its propensity to vote against its own interests: After all, it sends the most soldiers to die in battle, yet exhibits the most gung-ho patriotism; it's the poorest pocket of the country, yet it voted against a candidate promising a big expansion of government health insurance.

But if intelligence is measured by capability for abstract thought and grasp of paradox, Mark Pierce, a Lizard Lick contractor, is a Rhodes scholar...

Enjoy.

Open Letter to the Democratic Party

An Open Letter to the Democratic Party: How You Could Have Had My Vote, by "Sad American".

Anarchists in Raleigh, NC

Infoshop, an anarchist web site, republishes an AP story about an anarchist group trashing Republican headquarters in downtown Raleigh, NC (my hometown), introducing it with their own gloss on events:

In a Reclaim the Streets style demonstration late last night about 100 anarchists marched down Hillsborough Street in Raleigh North Carolina, behind several anarchist, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary banners.

Anarchists on Hillsborough Street? Wow, Raleigh has changed. (There used to be some punks and wannabees over by the university, which come to think of it is on Hillsborough Street, but this is new stuff.)

Here's updated coverage of the story from the Raleigh News and Observer. A few arrests have apparently been made, thanks to some resourceful residents in a nearby neighborhood:

Hearing a commotion, John Robbins and a neighbor captured and detained three protesters until police arrived.

"I found them between the garages taking off their black clothes," Robbins said, adding that one of the female protesters bit him on the shoulder.

10 X 10

Oh, my, the coolness... (requires Flash plugin)

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

A modest proposal

President Bush says that he is going to spend some of the political capital he amassed in the recent campaign on, among other things, reforming Social Security (more on this in a future blog post) and the tax code.

Reforming the tax code is an excellent idea. The current tax code is riddled with loopholes and exceptions that favor a whole panoply of special interests, notably corporations; any effort at making the distribution of the tax burden more fair and equitable, and simplifying the code overall, is laudable indeed.

There is one special interest group in particular that I'd like to single out for consideration.

It is high time that we did away with tax exemptions for religious organizations and churches (and mosques, synagogues, temples, etc.)

I am not anti-religion... mine, yours, or anybody else's. In fact, I think religious faith is by and large a very fine thing.

But every dollar that a church or religious organization fails to pay in taxes--and there are billions and billions of dollars in tax-free donations flowing through the religious economy every year, and billions more in real property and investments controlled by religious organizations--must be made up for by other taxpayers, individual and corporate, rich and poor.

This amounts to an indirect but very real taxpayer subsidy of religion, and unless you are a pantheist it is dead certain that you are subsidizing groups in whose doctrines you do not believe and may in fact disagree with strenuously.

Moreover, the exemption for churches (and other houses of worship) is automatic under Federal law; it need not be applied for, and churches must make no formal disclosure of their financial records, as other exempt organizations are required by law to do. That this invites abuses and gaming of the system is self-evident.

Another issue with the tax-exempt status of religious organizations: it perpetuates an increasingly unsustainable "polite fiction," which is that churches and religious organizations do not endorse or oppose political candidates or use their resources in partisan campaigns because it's prohibited by the tax code.

Well, of course they do, from both the right and the left, and it's folly to pretend that they don't. Changing the tax code would remove the fetters on the freedom of speech of our religious leaders and let them fully speak their minds.

Abolishing religious tax exemptions will provide a powerful new revenue stream for government, allow religious institutions to take on increased financial responsibility for the services they use, and increase their freedom to maneuver within the American polity.

It's a win-win situation.

Purple Haze: Another look at red vs. blue

From the most excellent site Boing Boing, here's an electoral map that takes a fresh look at the red state vs. blue state issue.

Most states, in this view, are neither red (100% Republican) or blue (100% Democrat) but varying shades of purple, depending on the proportion of votes from each state.

Crave more detail? Of course you do. Robert Vanderbei, a professor at Princeton University, has got you covered, with a county-by-county shades-of-purple map.

Zogby analyzes the post-election landscape

John Zogby, who called the 1996 and 2000 elections with surprising accuracy, didn't do such a good job this time around; his firm predicted that Kerry would win 311 electoral votes this year.

He's trying to make up for it with an incredibly exhaustive post-election survey, which I just completed. Aside from a few bizarre non sequitur questions about Vietnam (no, not about Kerry's service there, or Bush's avoidance of service there, but about opinions of the current Vietnamese government; apparently one of Zogby's clients is planning an ad campaign for Vietnam tourism or something) the survey is a very thorough attempt to analyze the attitudes, values and beliefs of voters.

I'll link to the results when they're available.

David Brooks: The Values-Vote Myth

David Brooks, the New York Times' own domesticated in-house token conservative, hits it out of the park today. Money quote:

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

Read the whole thing.

Here comes the data

USA Today ran a fascinating graphic today, showing how each county in America voted.

Okay, go take a good long look at that county voting map.

Now, take a look at a couple of US Census maps (2003 estimates) - specifically, population size and especially population density for counties.

Notice anything? The density map could almost be used as a proxy for the map of blue vs. red counties. The blue counties map pretty closely to some of the biggest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the country. (My wife, the Democrat, suggests that the "MSA" acronym might also be expanded as "Mostly Sophisticated Areas.")

There's a tear in my double-tall soy latte...

I was born in a red state, but live in a blue state - and I have often defended my fellow New Yorkers against charges that they are all effete latte-swilling liberal snobs (ELS2's) who are irredeemably out of touch with the American mainstream.

I am reminded of Woody Allen's great line from Annie Hall:

Don't you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here.

My efforts in defense of my fellow Manhattanites, however, get a lot tougher when the New York Times runs a story like this. Here's an excerpt:

"I'm saddened by what I feel is the obtuseness and shortsightedness of a good part of the country - the heartland," Dr. Joseph said. "This kind of redneck, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and a very concrete interpretation of religion is prevalent in Bush country - in the heartland."

"New Yorkers are more sophisticated and at a level of consciousness where we realize we have to think of globalization, of one mankind, that what's going to injure masses of people is not good for us," he said.

His friend, Ms. Cohn, a native of Wisconsin who deals in art, contended that New Yorkers were not as fooled by Mr. Bush's statements as other Americans might be. "New Yorkers are savvy," she said. "We have street smarts. Whereas people in the Midwest are more influenced by what their friends say."

"They're very 1950's," she said of Midwesterners. "When I go back there, I feel I'm in a time warp."

Dr. Joseph acknowledged that such attitudes could feed into the perception that New Yorkers are cultural elitists, but he didn't apologize for it.

"People who are more competitive and proficient at what they do tend to gravitate toward cities," he said.

Ahem.

You know, I feel pretty strongly that Dr. Joseph and his art-dealing friend have a point here.

Clearly, we are living in an era of intolerant, ignorant, self-important parochialism.

Only, um, not quite in the way they seem to think...

Thank God I was wrong...

...about the election.

I had predicted electoral chaos... weeks of divisive litigation, a repeat of the 2000 debacle, only more so.

As it turned out, the people spoke pretty decisively. And despite the dark scenarios of voter suppression painted by left-wing bloviators, or the dark scenarios of widespread voter fraud painted by right-wing bloviators, the election appears (a few isolated incidents aside) to have been clean and fair.

Whether or not you're happy with the election's outcome, I hope you agree that it's a great relief not to have to deal with the endless legal jockeying that many (me included) had feared.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!

"We must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

Taking the pledge

Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine, whose blog comments have been overflowing with bile of late, has a constructive suggestion: bloggers should take a pledge to behave in a civilized manner after the election.

After the election results are in, I promise to:

• Support the President, even if I didn't vote for him.
  
• Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
  
• Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
  
• Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.

Though Jeff and I are coming at this from different directions on the political axis, I think this is a fine idea.

I have a sinking feeling about the election tomorrow. The country is polarized, the election is statistically too close to call, and my gut tells me that we might have three, four, even five "Floridas" to contend with. In short, I fear that we will be ass-deep in lawyers and litigating for months, as the allegations of voter fraud, voter suppression, and general dirty tricks fly from all directions.

Carrie and I are planning to get up early and go to our polling place, cancel out each others' votes, and then adjourn to our favorite neighborhood diner for a big, satisfying breakfast.