The Genius Of the Left

John Kerry is quoted, on the subject of the tax cut passed last week, saying:

"George Bush promised to leave no child behind, and with the stroke of his pen yesterday, he left 12 million children behind," Kerry said. "The president's tax bill spends billions on the wealthiest Americans, and yet it is America's children who had to make the sacrifice."

I'm awed by this twisted reasoning: he's talking about a tax cut as if it were a government expenditure. It's unfair to "spend" money on wealthy people, in Kerry's world. Somehow, this money should be refunded to people who have paid no income tax.

This is the genius of the left: the ability to straight-facedly describe tax cuts as an entitlement program.

Capital and Slavery

Via Andrea at spleenville, via Markunas, I read this editorial at The Angry Liberal: The Bush Tax Cut, Part II: The Free Ride for Stockholders.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted to suspend collecting taxes from the idle rich for three years. That's right. While you and I continue paying taxes on our income, those who live exclusively off of the labor of their fellow Americans will dodge the tax man completely from 2004-2006, if the Senate republicans have their way.[emphasis added]

Right. Because there's no difference between slavery and return on capital.

A Tankless Task

About two weeks ago, a leak developed around the valve that draws hot water into our humidifier system. I was able to manage it with a 5-gallon beer bucket raised up on blocks, with a hose running down into the drain, but that obviously wasn't a pretty or permanent solution. I tried draining the system and applying some heavy-duty plumbing epoxy, but the leak continued. So we decided to call a plumber.

And while we were having the plumber in anyway, we had him pull our old hot water heater and install a tankless heater. Our old hot water heater was original equipment -- 40 years old -- and was not providing a whole bathtubful of hot water even when turned up to the "scald" setting. We got a Bosch Aquastar 125B, mainly because that's the kind of tankless water heater you can get at Home Depot in Canada. Here's a picture:

I'm not sure I would do it again, knowing what I know now. The conversion cost -- replumbing the corner of the basement where the hot water heater sits --was pretty high. The plumbers had to run new cold water, hot water, and gas pipes to accomodate the fittings on the new heater.

Also, with the input water temperature being around 45-50 F and the maximum heat rise on this unit being about 110 F, we wind up with a hot water temperature of 150 F. That's nice but hot. I find I get the perfect shower temperature when I turn the hot tap on full and the cold tap on just a tiny trickle.

In order to get the maximum heat rise, the heater throttles the amount of water it delivers to the hot water system. The maximum flow rate at maximum heat rise is only 2.5 gallons per minute. That's enough to have a decent shower, even with our high-flow shower head, but it means that filling the washing machine, dishwasher, or bathtub takes longer than before. Maybe about twice as long.

Also, the initial wait for hot water can be long. Not only is the system full of cold water -- as usual with a tank system -- but the hot water heater has to detect the flow through the hot water system and ignite before the water starts to be heated. And then it takes a minute or two before the heat-exchanger is fully hot and the water reaches peak temperature. In a network I would call this "high-latency".

Of course, the trade-off is that we now have an infinite constant flow of hot water, instead of running out after 30 gallons.

The electrical analogy is handy (this is the first time I've thought of plumbing in electrical terms -- usually it's the other way around). With a hot water tank, you have a constant voltage source; with a tankless heater, you have a constant current source. With a tank, opening several hot water taps at once doesn't visibly affect the flow, because the total hot-water system pressure is always larger than any one tap can deliver in flow. With a tankless heater, if I open three taps, each one gets approximately 1/3 of the total flow passed through the heater.

For the first week, we were consciously adjusting to it, but now it's normal. When I go into the bathroom to take a shower, I turn the hot water on full and then go get a towel from the linen closet. When I come back it's fully hot.

I was able to start a load of whites (hot/warm) and then go load and run the dishwahser with no problem. The two appliances were not drawing hot water at the same time, and even if they were, it would just take a little longer to fill them up. With our old tank heater, after running those two, I would need to wait an hour to have a supply of hot water again. With the new heater I had as much hot water as I might have wanted.

Overall, it seems OK so far. We'll see whether it brings down our gas bill enough to justify the capital and conversion costs.

Latest Joy From Microsoft

There's a new person on one of the bulletin boards my wife reads. She has four images in her signature. They're hosted on msnusers.com. You can't get content from msnusers.com without having a Microsoft .NET Passport account.

So every time my wife reads one of this woman's posts, she has to dismiss this dialog four times:

My wife doesn't want to get a Passport account, and I don't blame her. The supremely annoying thing for me is that this looks like a "real" dialog, not a web page. So something in Microsoft's msnusers.com service is using some ActiveX control or some part of the Internet Explorer browser to toss up this image. Which means, of course, that just about anyone could figure out how to access that control if they spent a few seconds at it. Thanks a pile, Microsoft! You've installed a means for people to throw up login dialogs on my machine!

Of course, my wife could make IE prompt her for scripting and ActiveX controls. That would mean that she'd spend all of her time dismissing dialogs like this:

This is the situation I have come to, but it's not acceptable to her.

So I modified our proxy server's configuration to totally ban requests directed at msnusers.com. I found the instructions for how to set up a porn site block list, and I'm using them to ban msnusers.com.

That seems appropriate.

Greed Hypothesis

So yesterday I claimed that it's wrong to call people who want their taxes lowered "greedy". You can only be greedy, I claimed, when you are trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource.

So far I've tried it out on my wife, who was too nice to comment; and on a liberal of my acquaintance, who disagrees with it. So the focus groups are pretty negative.

Webster's defines greed as "excessive or reprehensible acquisitiveness". This does not have the restriction I placed on the word ("of a shared resource"). But it does require "acquisitiveness", and I don't see how you can really be acquisitive of your own property.

So I think I understand it now. These people who want their taxes lowered are in fact showing their meanness, cheapness, stinginess, what have you, when they ask for their taxes to be lowered. But they're not being greedy then. No: they proved they were greedy by getting all that money in the first place.

So in this worldview they are, in fact, greedy rich people who don't give a damn for anyone but themselves. They're greedy just because they're rich. If they weren't greedy, they wouldn't have gotten rich. And wanting lower taxes is like not wanting to share -- mean.

So the answer to John Cole's question

At what level of taxation will Democrats agree the rich are no longer greedy?

is:
The fact that rich people are greedy is independent of the tax level.

I'm glad we've cleared that up.

More Millionaire's Taxes

The deeper problem with the millionaire's taxes discussion is in the comments on Drum's post (there were 209 as I write this).

The word "greedy" was introduced by the first commentor, and it's an unfortunate word that colored the whole subsequent discussion.

It's not greedy to want to pay less in taxes. It might be stingy, mean, or cheap, but it's not greedy.

Greed is trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource. You're greedy if you have a second helping of cake before some people have had their first. But this assumes a social context where all participants are equally entitled to a piece of cake: the cake is a shared resource.

As it happens, there is a political philosophy that advocates treating personal income or wealth as a shared resource, subject to state division. So don't call low-tax-proponents greedy, guys -- it shows your true colors!

Millionaire's Taxes

CalPundit (Kevin Drum) wrote, on the subject of rich folks opposition to social programs, that a millionaire would only pay 30% of his income to the federal government, and a total of only 9% of their income would be used to pay for social programs. This 9% figure comes from adding the Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld to "$70,000 toward the social welfare programs that make up approximately a quarter of the rest of the federal budget."

John Cole is all over this, and Free Speech has another good point. But I have a different problem with this post.

I don't see where Drum is getting these numbers. I did a little work on this and for a single person with $1,000,000 in gross salary income I get $380,648.30 total federal tax of which $20,263.80 is Social Security and Medicare taxes. That yields more than $110,000 spent on social programs, or 11%.

What's more, we've left out state taxes. Our millionaire friend will pay $94,823.45 in state taxes if he lives in California (as I did and I assume Mr. Drum does). Of that, $416.14 is for state disability insurance and the rest is income tax.

Let's assume the same 25% of the state budget is spent on social programs. It's probably more, since the state doesn't spend anything on defense. Ah hell, I'll look it up. Here's the Governor's budget document. It's about 4 MB. The state of California spends 24.1% of its General Fund on Health and Human Services so 25% is about right. More fun facts: California spends 57.2% of its general fund on education (43.6% K-12 and 13.6% higher) and receives 5/6 of its general fund revenue from individuals via personal income tax (48%) and sales tax (33%).

Okay, so we wind up with a total tax of $475,471.75 on $1,000,000 of earned income. Continuing to use the 25% number for the fraction of income tax spent on social programs, we wind up with a total of $134,378.50 spent on social programs: $113,697.75 via income tax and $20,680.74 via payroll taxes. That's a total of 13.4% of the millionaire's gross pay.

Nearly 1.5 times Mr. Drum's number.

Of course, this does not address the other point (how can these rich guys be complaining about this?!), which I hope to get to later.

Ex-Conservatives

There's a long discussion at The Corner at National Review Online about neo-conservatives. Jonah Goldberg even wrote a two-part article (1 2) about neocons, who they are, what they want, etc.

The only useful thing I've managed to pick up is that neo-conservatives are ex-liberals, and that the term "neo-conservative" itself was coined by liberals to disparage their former comrades.

And there are a lot of ex-liberals in the conservative camp. There are those who milk it, like David Horowits, and those who don't make a big deal out of it, like nearly everybody else. But there certainly are a lot of people who indentify themselves as former liberals turned conservative. (Bill Williams for one and James Lileks for another.)

I don't think that this really describes me. I wasn't even a liberal in high school, and by the time I was in college I was pretty well set as a conservative.

I bring this up because I'm wondering where the ex-conservatives are. Are they in the liberal camp? I don't recall hearing about them, except for that guy with the book expose about the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. So there are some, but they're not as common as ex-liberals.

Does this mean that adherents of conservatism stay longer? Or have all the dissenters been killed off? Or is it merely observer bias?

Strange Dreams

I was standing on a bus platform talking to an ex-girlfriend and her brother? new flame? something like that. As sometimes happens in dreams, I was outside myself (above and behind) listening to myself talk. We were catching up, talking about what's happened in the last few years.

Then she got on a bus and went home, or at least to her parent's house. I offered to escort her because it seemed wrong for her to go by herself. For some reason none of the other four people in the conversation wanted to go her way. So I went home too.

Nothing as exciting as my wife's pregnancy dreams which typically contain vivid images, heightened sexuality, the whole hormone package. (Last night she dreamed about being chased by zombie Alzheimers' patients.)

I need to brew some more beer. What's left of the Improv Stout is in 12-oz bottles and I'm nearly certain that it was bacterially contaminated.

Mad About Beef

Just when you thought Alberta's economy might be starting to recover, this happens:

U.S. bans Canadian beef imports because of mad cow

OTTAWA (Reuters) — The United States has temporarily banned imports of cattle, beef, beef-based products and animal feed from Canada after Ottawa reported a case of mad cow disease Tuesday, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.

Veneman said the United States would not accept any "ruminant products" from Canada until further notice.

Canadian officials said they found a case of mad cow disease in the western province of Alberta...

Now all we need is for the oil sands to dry up.

Ugh

If this is Summer, I want Spring back.

Spring was the two weeks in late April with gentle breezes and +20 weather. All the grass greened up and the bushes started to bud.

In the first weeks of May we had snow and below zero weather. Then it warmed up a bit -- just enough to trick the plants into sprouting some more -- and back down to freezing over this weekend. This weekend -- the May long weekend, the big weekend for greenhouses, the weekend which heralds the beginning of the growing season -- there was freezing weather.

Better luck next year.

Kernel Upgrade

Sambal was down for a few hours yesterday while I upgraded the kernel on this server.

You know that old joke: "Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Then don't do that!". Okay, imagine that the second line is said by a 35-year-old Czech guy in feigned exasperation. "DON'T DO DAT!" Got it? Good, because you're going to need it in the following story.

Rather than upgrading the old-fashioned way (download kernel source, unpack, configure, build, install), I decided to use my distribution's features. So I decided to download and install the Trustix kernel RPM's. (DON'T DO DAT!)

Actually, I was so distributionally correct that I decided to follow the instructions in the Trustix kernel upgrade document. (DON'T DO DAT!) So I printed the page out for handy reference.

Okay, get the files, check. I did that last week. Instructions for installing the files are at the bottom of the first page:
# rpm -Fvh kernel*.rpm
That's easy. Turn the page and read

Note that this will remove the old kernel from your system. To only install the new kernel and not touch the source or anything else...

So I just blew away my current kernel. (DON'T DO DAT!)

Create a new initial ram disk, yeah, no problem, we don't use no stinking SCSI. Update lilo. Make a boot disk (with the new kernel, too late to make one with the old kernel). Boot.

First we're going to fsck everything because I used to have 270 days of uptime, and 270 days exceeds the check count on my partitions. Wait half an hour. Then we start booting in earnest. All disks are up. One out of three ethernet interfaces comes up (the internal one). Both external interfaces are toast. This means that it takes forever to start the network services, as each one waits five minutes before deciding it can't find a name server, and times out. Guess I shouldn't have passed on my chance to do interactive startup.... (DON'T DO DAT!)

So I finally get into a root shell and start poking around. That's funny -- the NE driver won't load. I try to force it. That shell hangs. I try from another shell. That shell hangs. Great: anything that touches the network is causing a hang.

I realize that I am trying to use the modules from the old kernel version because my /etc/modules.conf explicitly refers to the old kernel version. I change that. modprobe ne. What do you mean, module not found?

I remember that Trustix doesn't ship any ISA net drivers (Why? Because nobody uses ISA anymore. Except for me. F you too, you supercilious Norweyans!) So I start rebuilding the kernel and modules using the config from my last kernel (thankfully not deleted).

The build is taking too long, so I decide to stop it and reconfigure with fewer modules. I'm throwing modules overboard like a Titanic officer chucking poor people into the North Atlantic. Ftape? Don't need that. WiFi support? If I ever go WiFi, I'll recompile. SCSI -- toss it. make dep; make. Wait -- I need SCSI to use my CD-Rewriter. Argh! Stop the make, reconfigure, make dep; make.

Somehow during this time I manage to lock up the remaining three consoles, so I have only one console left and it's running the compile.

I try logging in from my workstation, but no dice: my workstation can't see the server.

So I stop the compile and try pinging the workstation from the sever. Pause. Nothing is happening. I think, A ping is a network packet. I just used the network. My last remaining login shell is hung. (DON'T DO DAT!)

Push the reset button. fsck runs again. I boot into single-user mode and finish the kernel compile, modules compile, and installation of everything. Reboot.

Still only one ethercard. Try preloading the ethercard driver in the initial ram disk. Still only one ethercard.

I fiddle around for another ten minutes and figure out that the card moved its IO address from 0x330 to 0x300 without telling me. Thanks!

So I get all the ethernet cards up. But now all my IP addresses have changed, because my ISP's (Evil Cable Co. and Evil Telephone Co.) have decided that by being down for three hours, I've abandoned my DHCP lease. I beat their DHCP servers with the knobby club that is dhcpcd until they give me my preferred IP's back.

We're up.

And we still don't have working equal cost multipath routing. After I forget how painful this upgrade was, I'm going to 2.4.

Something Odd

In researching that last post I spent some time at the web site of TRDRP, California's Tobacco Related Disease Research Program.

Halfway down the front page there's a link: NCTOH 2002 New! Nicotine Products

Now, I know it's the state's job to keep track of this stuff and I don't mind them printing up fact sheets on it. But do they have to use the promotional images? And doesn't that exclamation mark look make it seem that they're a bit too excited about this?

..At Second Hand

Colby Cosh weighs in on the secondhand smoke study I wrote about earlier.

Taking Colby's points in order, then:

First, there's this:

the [CBC] story doesn't quote or identify very many critics of Enstrom and Kabat. Just the one, actually.

That's just because the CBC sucks, actually. The CBC quotes one of the authors (Kabat), the BMJ's publisher (Smith), and a cancer prof at the University of Toronto. The crosswalk story quotes three critics of the study, one from the American Cancer Society, one from the British Medical Association, and one from an anti-smoking group; and one smoker's rights group, FOREST. Reuters gets all the anti quotes but no pro.

And all of these news stories ignore the primary initial criticism of the study, written by the BMJ's editors.

Back to Colby, then.

Ferrence is making the extraordinary suggestion that the home is not the natural first place to look for ETS risk.

Hardly extraordinary. In fact this point is made succinctly in one of the rapid responses to this article. The place to look for ETS risk is where the subject spends time: at work or at home. Sadly, many people do not spend most of their waking time in the company of their spouse. So why is spousal smoking accepted as a proxy for ETS exposure?

Well, Enstrom and Kabat accept it because their 1999 questionnaire asked respondents to categorize their exposure to ETS, and the respondents' self-reports were correlated with the smoking status of their spouse. (Tables 4 and 5 of the study.) I am very skeptical of this result -- especially without having seen the survey instrument. First, there is self-selection in respondents. Then we're relying on respondents' self-reports of historical ETS exposure to determine if this correlation exists. And without seeing the survey, I can't tell if the question used to determine "Regular exposure to cigarette smoke from others in work or daily life" -- the linchpin of the argument -- was sufficiently clear in excluding the exposure from the spouse. So I'm not convinced they have a good proxy variable.

And ultimately, the real problem with the paper lies in the conclusion. First there's the part where spousal smoking is not named as a proxy variable: "The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality". Then there's the segmentation of the results. If you divide the survey population into many small groups, then you reduce the power thus increasing the confidence interval and making it more likely for the result to be null. As the BMJ editor observes:

They may overemphasise the negative nature of their findings. With respect to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—plausibly related to exposure to environmental tobacco smoke— the estimates based on the most accurately classified exposure groups give relative risks of 1.80 in men and 1.57 in women. These are said to be non-significant, but combining them—and there is no good evidence that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke has a different effect for men and women—gives a relative risk of 1.65 (95% confidence interval 1.0 to 2.73)

Colby finishes up with:

Both men, as I understand it, do believe there is a microscopic risk of harm from ETS; it's just way, way too small to be measured--or, for public policy purposes, to be considered at all.

I actually agree with this. Previously published findings of ETS risk are typically based on meta-analysis and show a small risk. A good prospective study aimed particularly at ETS exposure needs to be done to conclusively answer the question: does ETS exposure increase mortality?

Colby continues:

If you were absolutely determined to look for measurable ETS risk, you would do it in exactly the way they have done it. Assuming you couldn't initiate a massive prospective cohort study, you would--as they did--go back and see what a previously existing study of that sort can tell us. Or do critics of the Enstrom and Kabat study have a better idea?

If it were up to me, and I had bottomless funds, I would do the followup on the entire CPS I population, not just those living in California. The results would be more representative of the US population, and the study might well have greater statistical power. It would also avoid the accusation that I had gone over the data beforehand to isolate the subset that agreed with my preformed hypothesis. (Why California and not New York, after all? Probably because of the Prop 99 funding in California.) I would not introduce new questions asking respondents to self-assess ETS exposure, because I don't think a 40-year retrospective self-assessment and self-report is useful.

But ultimately, it doesn't matter if there is an actual public-health risk from ETS. If enough people find secondhand smoke unpleasant, public smoking will be banned even if it's not dangerous.

Models

I spent a lot of time sitting around yesterday night while my wife tried on clothes. (We went to the largest mall in the world.)

Anyway, while I was browsing I noticed something about the models chosen to display nursing bras. There's the usual smoldering sexiness of a lingerie model, sure, but there's something else. The canonical pose is to have one hand about to open the nursing panel, and a sort of a wispy smile which is more... well, more wholesome than you'd see in a Victoria's Secret model. (Say.)

This is a pretty good example of what I mean:

Worse, I feel like she's saying, "got milk?"

Good News on Secondhand Smoke?

Two researchers report in this week's British Medical Journal that secondhand smoke does not significantly increase the risk of heart disease or lung cancer.

Anti-smoking groups attack the researchers for taking money from the tobacco industry. Smokers' rights groups attack the anti-smoking groups for, well, being anti-smoking.

Hey guys: anti-smoking does not mean anti-smoker. Duh.

Anyway, let's look at the paper.

The paper's authors conclude:

Results ... For participants followed from 1960 until 1998 the age adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) for never smokers married to ever smokers compared with never smokers married to never smokers was 0.94 (0.85 to 1.05) for coronary heart disease, 0.75 (0.42 to 1.35) for lung cancer...
Conclusions The results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do not rule out a small effect.

Anyway, let's see what the BMJ editors had to say about that:

It is not being married to a smoker—the indicator of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke used in the paper by Enstrom and Kabat—that leads to disease; rather, it is the inhalation of environmental tobacco smoke.

Oops! Enstrom and Kabat state in their conclusion that environmental tobacco smoke did not cause tobacco-related mortality even though they failed to show that. At best they showed that their proxy variable (marriage to a smoker) was not correlated with increased tobacco-related mortality.

Texas House

I don't really see what the problem is with the Texas house. The Democratic members who fled to avoid a quorum call knew that house rules provided for their arrest and transport to the legislature. That's why they ran away to another state.

If they had wanted to make a political point, they could have resigned en masse. This would also prevent quorum. It would not be illegal. And it would allow the voters who elected them to express their opinions of legislators who refuse to do their jobs.

In any case, the Texas Democrats "won". The controversial redistricting measure will not be passed. Several other bills will also die, necessitating a special session of the legislature -- a somewhat costly measure -- during the summer to avoid a cash-flow problem in the state's treasury. I wonder how happy their constituents will be when that happens?

I can't help but contrast it to Berlin in 1933, when the Nazis were using every legal and illegal means available to prevent opposition deputies from coming to the Reichstag, so that the Nazis could elect Hitler Chancellor.

In this case, the opposition members are illegally fleeing the legislature to prevent a quorum, in opposition to the majority. The majority used only legal means to track them down and ultimately failed in the attempt to restore the legislature to functioning.

It's like 1933, sure, except this time the role of the Nazis is played by DEMOCRATS.

The Morrison Sentence

Eugene Volokh is right to question the claim that the Morrison sentence is ungrammatical. The sentence as written is grammatical. Compare:

1a Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels [].
1b Sam's ax enables him to cut down trees.
1c Bob's hair enables him to sleep.
1d NP₁ enables NP₂ to VP.

All of the above examples are equally grammatical because they are all based on the prototype sentence (1d). If you accept (1b), as I believe most English speakers would, then the Morrison sentence (1a) is grammatical -- just as the nonsensical sentence (1c) is, or any sentence on the pattern of (1d), where NP is any noun phrase and VP is any verb phrase.

There is no rule in English grammar -- nor in any grammar that I know of -- that makes it illegal for the antecedent of a pronoun to be in a different case than the pronoun. Such a rule would make it nearly impossible to use pronouns in an inflected language, because you would be obliged to re-introduce the antecedent in the appropriate case every time you needed to use a different case.

If you're not convinced of that, consider the following sentences:

2a Susan's car hit Bob's so Bob punched Susan.
2b Susan's car hit Bob's so he punched her.

No English-speaker rejects 2b, which obviously communicates the same meaning as 2a but uses prepositions for the second reference to Susan and Bob.

Ultimately, this is not a question about grammar but rather about syntax, or tyle and usage, which I do not find terribly interesting. As somebody who actually studied grammar, however, I can't resist weighing on that part of the controversy.

Bucks Ripoff

Back in 1999 four young men of the Haida nation founded a cafe on the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. They decided to call it "HaidaBucks".

It seems obvious to me that they were mocking the name and logo of Starbuck's corporation.

Starbuck's eventually took notice of this and filed suit.

So why is this news? The owners of HaidaBucks have rejected Starbuck's offer to help pay the cost of the name change and retained Joseph Arvay to defend them.

Is Starbuck's willing to go to court with four young mediagenic Native men to defend their brand? We'll see.

Back Up

Just updated my web server and it killed my website. Gee, thanks! But I'm back up now.

Also, the .org whois servers (keeps track of who owns what domain name) seem to have moved since the last time I checked. I'm using the GNU whois client jwhois, which allegedly handles recursive queries, but both the version of the jwhois.conf file distributed by my OS distributor (Trustix) and the latest GNU version (3.2.1) are hosed for .org domains.

Here's a patch that fixes it:

--- jwhois.conf Thu May  8 19:43:52 2003
+++ jwhois.conf.fixed   Thu May  8 19:43:46 2003
@@ -196,7 +196,7 @@
        "\\.no$" = "whois.norid.no";
        "\\.nu$" = "whois.nic.nu";
        "\\.nz$" = "whois.srs.net.nz";
-       "\\.org$" = "whois.publicinterestregistry.net";
+       "\\.org$" = "whois.pir.org";
        "\\.pe$" = "whois.nic.pe";
        "\\.pk$" = "pknic.net.pk";
        "\\.pl$" = "whois.dns.pl";
@@ -443,8 +443,8 @@
        "rwhois\\.exodus\\.net" {
                rwhois = true;
        }
-       "whois\\.publicinterestregistry.net\\.net" {
-               whois-redirect = ".*Whois Server: \\(.*\\)";
+       "whois\\.pir\\.org" {
+               whois-redirect = ".*Whois Server:\\(.*[A-Za-z]\\)";
        }
        ".*\\.internic\\.net" {
                #

Progressive Book Review - Holy War

I've been reading Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World by Karen Armstrong. The book wasn't recommended, but the author was on the strength of A History of God. Ms. Armstrong is a theologian, not a historian, and it shows.

On the first page of the text, she describes Pope Urban calling the first Crusade. Armstrong writes:

On November 25, 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade.... The Pope urged the knights to ... make common cause against these enemies of God. The Turks, he cried, are "an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation, forsooth,which has neither directed its heart nor entrusted its spirit to God."¹

The only problem with this quote is that it's not the Pope speaking. As Armstrong admits on p.66, "We have no contemporary account of Urban's speech..."

The only thing that's saving her here is the endnote, where after citing the source of the quote (one "Robert the Monk"), she writes:

There are no exactly contemporary accounts of Urban's speech and these quotations come from works written shortly after the success of the Crusade and reflect a later view than Urban's, at a time when crusading ideology had developed.

But Armstrong represents on p.1 that this is a direct quote from Urban. I believe she does this to enhance the drama in the opening of the book. Certainly she does have an endnote which explains that the quote is not actually from Urban's speech. However, she does not forthrightly state this in the text. The casual reader could certainly be misled to believe
that these were Urban's words and thus form an opinion of Urban which would only be corrected if either
  a) the reader reads the endnote
  b) the line on p.66 causes the reader to double-check the quote on p.1 (as I did)

More to come -- this is a progressive book review, and I will add more as I progress through the book.

Who Rips off Canada?

Daimian Penny writes:

[Newfoundland is] the only province with no jurisdiction over its most valuable natural resource, and that's a disgrace.

It is a disgrace. It's almost as if the federal government believes that the provinces are not responsible enough to control their own natural resources.

But this is precedented. In the 1973 oil shocks the government had already gotten started:

The National Oil Policy was introduced in 1961 to shelter Canada’s oil industry by establishing a market west of Quebec that would rely on oil from Western Canada. In March 1973, in the face of rapidly growing demand from the United States, the Government of Canada decided to control the export of Canadian oil and thereby ensure the domestic supply. By September, the government reinforced its control over the resource by freezing the domestic price of oil below the world price and by taxing exports of oil.

So relax, Damian -- you're not alone. No province has any jurisdiction over any of its natural resources, as Alberta well knows and Newfoundland is now learning. Just be happy that no-one's figured out how to run cars off of cod, or they'd be actively stealing them from you.

Back Again

I'm back from another short trip to Los Angeles, probably my last for a while but unfortunately too soon to tell. This time it was just me -- my wife stayed home and handled work, tax fallout, cats, and everything else. I went to LA and handled taxes, our US mail, our US banking, various other paperwork; and I visited family.

It was all right, overall. Even though the LA weather was crummy, the Edmonton weather has been worse. I left early summer and returned to mid-spring. Snow everywhere, -2C. Supposedly there'll be another 20 cm of precipitation tonight.

The airline almost didn't want to land us in Edmonton. Cleverly, if Edmonton has bad weather, the policy is to divert to Spokane, Washington -- rather than to nearby Calgary. We circled in thick white cotton for about twenty minutes before we finally touched down -- and then we drove another ten minutes around the airport. Honestly I would have preferred it if we'd just flown to Calgary and driven the rest of the way.

Anyway, home again. I made up a batch of Improvisational Stout before we left for Prague -- something like eight weeks ago now -- and I've been working on drinking it since we got back. The half of the batch that I bottled into Grolsch-top bottles seems flat to me and also I feel like it has an off-flavor. So now I'm drinking the other half-batch which I bottled into 22-ouncers. It tastes better out of those, and there's a lot of head (a bit too much actually). But a 22-oz bottle neatly fills a half-liter mug like the ones I brought back from the Staropramen brewery. I should take some pictures.

Also on the plane I was reading a home-brewing book which points out that it is possible to carbonate flat bottled beer as long as the beer still contains live yeast. Since the off flavors may have just aged away in the Grolsch-tops (something I can check easily) I may be able to recover that half of the batch.

And in excellent news, our housemate is planning to move out before the end of the summer. We don't have a date yet, but it'll be nice to have the house to ourselves again. And this way we have several months to think about whether we want to take another housemate.

Taxes Done

Well, more or less. At least all the Canadian stuff is filed, and we can slide a bit (no later than June 15) on some of the U.S. forms. It all gets rather technical.

On the morning of May 1st, I was talking taxes with my running partner -- another American. We were both pining for the simplicity of good old Form 1040. We agreed that having to file a 4-page tax form with two mandatory two-page schedules was basically equivalent to being flogged with a live wolverine.

But at least they eliminated the "surtax". That was an extra percentage of your tax that you had to pay, on top of your normal tax obligation. As my friend put it:

"First they bend you over and f*ck you. Then they smack you on the back of the head for good measure."

The corporate surtax, of course, has not been repealed.

And why do they have this idiotic system of refundable credits instead of simple deductions? That's why form 1040 is so easy to understand. First you total up your income. Then you knock off your adjustments -- self-employment tax, alimony paid, self-employment medical expenses, student loan interest, what have you. This gives you your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI). Now you either take a standard deduction or an itemized deduction, exempt your personal exemptions, and they tax the rest. Simple.

In Canada -- and this applies both to personal and to corporate taxes -- you practically have to fill out a separate worksheet for every form of "creditable" behavior. When you tote up all your not-quite-deductions, you multiply by the lowest marginal tax rate (16% for people) and that's the amount of your credit. Then you deduct your credit amount from your tax obligation.

So basically in the United States, deductions and adjustments come in at the highest marginal rate that applies to you, while in Canada, they come in at the lowest marginal rate that can apply to you. (One exception: charitable contributions over $200 are credited at the second-lowest marginal rate of 20%. Gee, thanks.)

And that's not even getting to the special subsidy tax rates available to small Canadian-owned corporations. And especially for small Canadian-owned manufacturers.

I'm still waiting to find the schedule for Liberal party contributors:

1. Look up your Business Number in the following list.
2. If you do not find it, STOP. You may not file this Schedule.
3. Enter the total tax owed from line 4000.
4. Enter this amount on line 4001, "Tax obligation forgiven."
5. Multiply by 1/10.
6. This is the AMOUNT YOU OWE. Make a cheque payable to "JEAN CHRETIEN" or current prime minister and forward to his residence at...