Stood in line for two hours tonight to see Mars through a telescope. It looked like a tiny yellow ball.
I received my papers in the mail yesterday, retroactively legalizing me to the anniversary of my date of entry into Canada. I'm very pleased about that.
To explain: I have a NAFTA visa, which allows me to work in Canada for a Canadian employer. The visa only lasts a year, but is renewable. About a month before the expiry date is when you're supposed to send in your renewal papers. I sent in my renewal papers. The month passed. My status expired.
Four more weeks passed, and on Tuesday I received a phone call from Immigration Canada.
"Is this Samuel Mikes?"
"Yes."
"I have before me your application to renew your NAFTA visa."
"Yes?"
"You forgot to sign it."
He allowed me to digest that for a moment.
"Did you keep a copy?"
Yes and I'll just sign that and fax it right to you. Thankyouverymuchsir.
And then my papers came in yesterday's mail. So: they're so backlogged that a simple form-review sits in a hopper for 8 weeks -- 4 weeks longer than they predict -- and then a guy looks at it for an hour and it's approved. Amazing.
But I am happy that I again enjoy the right of leaving and re-entering the country.
BANG! OW! (limps away).
The sound you just heard was California Lt. Governor and gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante shooting himself in the foot.
On the day that his biggest rival for the governorship -- yes, I mean Arnie, not Gray Davis -- was embarrassed by the publication of a 1977 interview where he admits to drug use and describes his sex life in detail; on this day, I say, Cruz Bustamante advocates price controls on gasoline.
Read it yourself: Bustamante Seeks to Regulate Oil Industry in California. Bustamante proposed giving the Public Utilities Commission control over gasoline prices, and yes, those are the same people who came up with and implemented California's failed deregulation plan. The same deregulation plan Bustamante now regrets having voted for.
So. Suppose the PUC legislates the price of gasoline at $2.40 a gallon, but ARCO can't produce it at their Long Beach refinery for less than $2.70. What will happen:
a) ARCO will shut down the refinery and there will be a gas shortage
b) the State will have to bail out the refineries to the tune of 30 cents a gallon times twenty million people's gas consumption
c) both?
Gas lines and taxpayer bailouts are coming to California. All those people who wish they could relive the 70's will have the opportunity soon.
Cosh plucks this thought from a fictitious liberal's mind: "Why would anyone want a McDonald's parked smackdab in the middle of Prague?"
Exactly! It's not hard to find cheap food in Prague, even cheap authentic Czech food. What's missing in domestic cuisine that a foreigner might value is fast and predictable, and McDonald's does a fine job of providing that.
We actually went to a McDonald's in Prague (my first time) when we were there last March visiting family. It turns out that food cures morning sickness, and when we got out of the Museum of the City of Prague, my wife was hungry and there was a McDonald's right across the street.
Most of the clientele were young Czechs, which just goes to show that you can't keep cheap crappy fast food out of kid's mouths -- not without making it illegal. "You can have my Big Mac when you pry it from my cold, greasy fingers"? Which I suppose goes back to Cosh's point from the other day.
Nothing but provide jobs for Westerners. Don't take it from me -- read this interview with Michael Maren, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer who has spent the last 20 years working in development and journalism in Africa: A complete waste of money that succeeds primarily at keeping Westerners Employed
Read the whole thing.
Well, good news for me, anyway, since it will benefit our client's clients, and what's good for them is good for us. And good news for electricity, plastics and chemicals consumers in the U.S. because they'll be getting cheaper stuff. Good news all around, unless you like to breathe, right? And who does that anymore?
The EPA is relaxing some of its equipment replacement rules. Naturally the New York Times has a fit:
In one of its most far-reaching environmental actions, the Bush administration signed a rule that will allow thousands of power plants, refineries, pulp and paper mills, chemical plants and other industrial facilities to make extensive upgrades that increase pollutants without having to install new antipollution devices.
Those blackguards!
Fox News, on the other hand, is thrilled:
Thousands of older power plants, refineries and factories have been exempted from having to install costly clean air controls when they update equipment to improve efficiency, the Bush administration announced Wednesday.Strangely, though, Fox gives more time to the Natural Resources Defense Council than the New York Times.
"It's an accounting gimmick that eliminates any possibility of pollution controls," said John Walke, director of Natural Resources Defense Council's clean air program. "It's a total disaster. It's the effective repeal of this clean air program, through illegal administrative means."Whether that's because Fox thinks Mr. Walke has a funny-sounding name is left to the reader's discretion.
So I read the stupid fact sheet and I've skimmed the final rule. There are some choice quotes in the final rule, like this Clinton-bash
Specifically, some of the case-by-case determinations we have made, particularly over the past decade, and particularly in a series of enforcement actions, have been criticized for giving the exclusion a narrow scope that disallows replacement of significant plant components with identical or functionally equivalent components.
Here's my summary of the issue. The clean air act requires that a new plant must install state-of-the-art pollution control measures, under a provision called New Source Review (NSR). Old plants are grandfathered in and allowed to operate with their current equipment as long as they meet other applicable clean air standards. But if you upgrade an old plant in any way which results in an increase in pollutant output, you may run afoul of the NSR rules. It's expensive to get an NSR permit, it's risky to guess that your upgrade is in compliance, and it's expensive (though less expensive) to get a review that says NSR does not apply. This has led to silliness like upgraded plants being shut off for parts of the day or year so that their total pollutant output doesn't exceed their pre-upgrade output.
So under the new rule, replacement of parts with identical or functionally equivalent parts will not trigger NSR even if emissions increase unless the replacement effects a change to the design parameters of the plant.
Suppose your heat exchanger pump fails. Under the old rules, you're better off trying to repair it. If you replace it (even with the exact same model) and your emissions increase (even though you're under the legal limit), you run the risk of needing an NSR review, unless you can convince the EPA that the increase happened because of repair, maintenance, and routine replacement (RMRR). The EPA decides this on a case-by-case basis.
Under the new rules, you can replace the pump with the exact same model, or if you can't get the exact same model pump that you got back in 1971 when the plant was commissioned, you can put in a new pump. You're can no longer get into trouble if your emissions increase. There are still rules: the aggregate replacement cost for a year has to be less than 20% of your plant's value. You can't increase the maximum input or output capacity of your plant -- so you can't sneak in an extra turbine in this way. And of course you can't violate any existing emission limit.
This looks like a good and sensible change. But then, I'm an industry shill.
I don't have time to write a long thoughtful response to Colby's post about creeping totality, but I have to tell you -- and I mean this admiringly -- that he has produced the most impressive burst of wind on the subject that I have seen in a long time.
After all, what Colby says boils down to slippery slope. Enough people dislike smoking sections in restaurants that a majority of their elected representatives feels comfortable in banning them -- and this will inevitably lead to the total ban and destruction of pre-1978 literature.
As Colby himself pointed out last September, this has "the cognitive status of a fart".
Good night.
The New York Times is reporting today (link requires registration) that several atypical antipsychotic (AA) drugs increase the patient's risk of diabetes. This includes Zyprexa and Risperidal, the two leading AAs.
This is a bummer for anyone who's on AAs. Of course the near-term benefits of the AA are often worth significant downline risk: how do you enjoy your healthy old age without your sanity? But -- especially if you've been prescribed AAs because you suffer from mental illness -- how difficult would it be to believe the following paranoid scenario: The pharmaceutical companies are giving you one drug ("because you're crazy") to make you diabetic and thereby hook you on their diabetes-management products?
Probably there's a Philip K. Dick novel which explores this issue.
Our nine-year-old niece was visiting for the last two weeks too. I remember her as the first child I really babysat, when she was about 16 months old; my sister and my mom took a night off and left me at home with the baby. I think I even changed her, which was a big YUCK moment for me.
Our lifestyle is pretty boring, especially for a nine-year-old. But she's been doing stuff all summer: sports camp, theater camp, actual camping trips. So she welcomed the opportunity to do nothing at all. For the first four days, she reclined on our couch in the sunlight and occasionally picked raspberries.
We did do some fun things, too -- more fun than the Folk Festival that we dragged her to. We spent a day at the West Edmonton Mall waterpark, which is a lot more fun that I would have expected. I start to see how people could come here and stay in the mall for a week as a vacation.
The most amusing moment was when I found out she abetted (and probably encouraged) our five-year-old nephew (my wife's sister's son) in filling his hair with a mixture of glue and sequins. No-one's used to having older kids around -- especially unrelated kids with enough charisma to inspire such behavior. We were quite upset with her, of course. But it was still funny.
Yesterday I went around the house and closed all the windows; I also turned the heater off of "summer mode". I left the bathroom windows open an inch for ventilation, but other than that we're starting to seal up the house for the winter.
It's getting chilly early this year. When we moved here in early August 2001, I don't remember it feeling like this until September.
No, I take it back: I was seduced by folk etymology, as Eugene Volokh is too polite to suggest. Any scrap of authority in what I said about Finland = 'fen land' is wrong. See this posting, among others:
The Finn/s name originally referred to the Sami (see for instance Tacitus "fenni". In Norway this seems to have been the case also in modern times. The Finns call themselves "suomalaiset".Finn/s is probably formed from Finland and not the other way round. It is probably a terrain name: German Finne, Celtic penn (summit). Might also have something to do with the verb "finna" in Swedish and mean "searcher, finder". If the Celtic finn means white it has nothing to do with the name of the people in Finland.
This dates the name "fenni" back to Tacitus (Roman, ca. AD 55-117). It's still conceivable that English "fen" has a root related to the German "Finne" cited above, but that's not attested anywhere, so it's just a theory: Some suggest a connection with fen. Most serious discussions have "Finn" from Swedish "finne", connected to the root of English "find".
Eugene Volokh has another puzzle, this time about European country names. Quick, go look at it before I quibble with one of his answers!
Okay.
In the answer, he writes:
Finland (Suomi).... Serbia and Montenegro (Srbija-Crna Gora) doesn't quite qualify largely because of the Serbia/Srbija, but also partly because Montenegro is actually a literal translation of the words "black mountain," which is what Crna Gora means in the local language (not sure how that fits within the terms of my question).
It turns out that 'Finland' is almost a direct translation of 'Suomi'. Finnish 'suo' means 'swamp' and 'suomi' is an archaic way of saying 'swampy'. English gets 'Finland' not from 'land of the Finns' although that is its current interpretation, but rather as a corruption of 'Fenland', the land of the fens, or swamps.
Does Finland then deserve to be stricken from the list? I think not. It's not a modern language translation, as is Montenegro -> Crna Gora.
But I wonder if Crna Gora is excluded in part because Prof. Volokh is a native speaker of Russian, and it's obvious to him that 'Crna Gora' means black mountain because, well, 'Cern -y -a -e' means black and 'Gora' means hill or mountain. (Incidentally, it's a bit of a stretch from Czech 'hora' -- you have to know that 'H' becomes 'G' as you go east in the Slavic language zone.)
Here's Daniel Wientraub's brief analysis of Arnold Schwarzenegger's tax returns from 2000 and 2001 (link via the corner on NRO). Apparently Arnold is personally responsible for $700,000 of the drop in revenue between 2000 to 2001. Probably more if you count his business ventures. Work harder, Arnold! We need to tax you!
But Arnold is not alone. In 2000 we earned all of our revenue in California, but in 2001 we were transitioning to Canada and by 2002 our Calif-based company posted a slight loss. So we too are contributing to California's budget crisis. We're outsourcing high-tech jobs to Canada.
Ooh, I feel like such a dirty capitalist.
A busy week, in which I posted very little. Let me recap.
On Monday we went to the Heritage Day festival. Best Baklava was at the Turkish pavillion. The Arab pavillion was out of baklava, and the substitution was poor. Another point for the Turks: real Turkish coffee (2 tickets).
Returning to the bad weed theme of last week, my wife reported that she'd been unable to stay in the first porta-potty she entered, on account of it having just been used as a hotbox (page will refresh bizarrely in newer browsers).
On Wednesday I was laid low by some sort of disease. My pregnant wife, recovering from her own bout with the same thing, had to care for me. Luckily this is not very taxing: 1.5 L of coffee, over the course of the day, and a slug of whiskey at night helped me recover. Thursday we worked again.
Friday night we went to the Edmonton Folk Festival. I hadn't been looking forward to it. As we got off the bus, we heard the objectionable Dan Bern singing about 9/11 complete with an exaggerated Texas accent for the "dubya bits". It seemed to confirm my worst fears about the folk festival. (Later I learned that it's supposed to be a non-political weekend. Somebody tell Bern.)
But we went in anyway. We made a deal: if either of us said, "Let's go", we would just get up and go. No discussion or arguing, just leaving. It was my idea, and I think a good one, because it kept me from saying "Let's go" without meaning it.
We went back again yesterday, with my niece who's visiting for a couple of weeks. She was bored, we were reasonably happy. I even sat through a whole hour of "comedy" including four more songs by Dan Bern... but the other acts in that set made it worthwhile, especially Ben Sures.
We picked up some CD's at the end, too.
Anyway, that was my week and my weekend too. Now it's time to start back on the hard work. Ear to the grindstone and all that.
... is Mickey Kaus, busting out this line:
If you were Arnold Schwarzenegger and were preparing, by your own admission, to combat womanizing rumors, would it be a good idea to describe your wife as "the greatest wife in the world ... a fantastic partner"? [Emphasis on wildly unromantic word added.] ... Just asking! ... 12:27 A.M.
Hey asshole, I often describe my wife as my partner because in addition to being the love of my life, my lover, my mate, the mother-to-be of our children, she is also my business partner and co-worker. You think there might be a bit of that in what Arnold was saying at the time? You think that maybe the business-partner angle of a married relationship was involved in discussing Arnold's run for governor -- at least as a career move?
Let's go to the transcript:
QUESTION: How much did Dianne Feinstein's decision play into this?SCHWARZENEGGER: Nothing that has happened in the last 14 days made any difference in my decision making. My decision was based on how my family would respond, my children and my wife. My wife, I happen to have the greatest wife in the world. She is a fantastic partner. She said to me that she supports any decision that I make. That was, to me, the most important thing. If she would have been against me campaigning and me going for the governorship, I would not have done it.
And a little bit later:
QUESTION: Mr. Schwarzenegger, when did you tell that beloved wife you were going to run, because everybody around you says that you have caught them in a big surprise. When did you tell Maria Shriver you were going to run.SCHWARZENEGGER: Maria and I had discussions over the last two weeks. Slowly it crystallized of what my decision will be, that I would be running for governor of the state of California. And this is a process that was a very long and very difficult process, because you have to put all of those things on a scale. You have to put on a scale, you know, that you're stopping with the movie career, you're stopping some of the business relationships that make you a lot of money. You have to put on that scale also of what effect this is going to have on your family and your children. The children are very important to me. I had a terrific upbringing in Austria, so obviously, I want to provide a great upbringing for my children and be there for them as they grow up. So all of those things were very important. So--but as time went on it crystallized this is what I should do.
This article in the National Post (reprint from the Hill Times, link via the corner) predicts that orthodox Catholics will leave the Democratic party, and that orthodox Democrats will leave the Catholic church.
I believe the article is correct in principle, but I don't think the transfer will be complete or even significantly started before the 2004 election. Look how long it took for conservatives in the South, traditionally Democrats, to hold their noses and vote for conservative Republicans over liberal Democrats.
At present, the last comment on the discussion thread for the article is by someone named "What Right?", a student from Calgary with unusually cruel parents. "What Right?" asks:
I don't see the problem that everyone is arguing over. Let your religious beliefs guide you in your personal life and let the beliefs of others (or even the lack thereof) guide them. If you are Catholic then don't have an abortion,etc. But don't tell others what to do. No one forces you to commit such acts. Why should you have the right to force someone not to commit such acts? Your moral compass may not be the same as someone else (either rightly or wrongly). Failure to let people follow their social views is a form of persecution that no one should stand for. Imagine if every female under 20 was required by law to have an abortion, this would hardly seem fair, why then should we have the right to stop others? Finally, it should be pointed out that GW Bush and his gang use the religous limitations placed upon muslims persons as one reason (of many) for war, yet they themselves wish to limit the choices of their nations people along the lines of their personal religious beliefs.
I quote this at some length because it's rare to see such a breathtakingly clear statement of moral relativism made in public. And without visible irony! I can only conclude that "What Right?" really means it.
I am a Catholic, and I'm not considering conversion, but if I were let me say that my new religion would require the ritual murder of students from Calgary. Perhaps that clarifies the problem?
I suddenly had a thought: what are the demographics of gay marriage supporters and opponents. In particular, does heterosexual opinion of gay marriage differ by marital status?
I put in two minutes of searching and didn't find any survey results I could analyze, so I'm chucking the idea. I can't justify spending longer on it, when there's paying work to be done. I can only afford the time to write about the easily available data.
So: spoiled by Google. What power they have: Google has the ability to suppress links to information that its owners don't want disseminated. And for some people, at least me, insufficiently easy access to that information will lead to the silencing of my dissenting viewpoint.
But somehow I can't work myself into a lather about this. Not paranoid enough.
An interesting attack on the World Health Organization for allegedly bending to activist demands instead of using the most effective methods available.
The article criticizes WHO for promoting nets instead of spraying to reduce the spread of malaria -- claiming that this is a not to environmental groups. And the WHO's third world anti-tobacco campaign comes under fire -- are smoking-related diseases really worth the amount of money the WHO spends on discouraging smoking?
Interestingly, we saw direct evidence of both of these campaigns during our three weeks in Mali (Nov-Dec 2001). Spraying was off. There were public campaigns promoting the use of mosquito nets. Nobody was using them, though -- perhaps because it was the dry season, or perhaps because compliance is poor.
The residents of my mom's village knew that smoking is bad for you, and often admonished my mother not to smoke -- between drags on the cigarettes they had bummed from her. The education campaigns are there, and the message is delivered successfully -- they reached rural, illiterate folk 100km from the main highway and 60km from the power grid. But I didn't see any evidence of behavioral change.
DDT certainly is effective at killing malaria vectors. It was the insecticide used in Europe and North America to eliminate malaria in the postwar period. And it doesn't require any compliance from the people below. The risk, I suppose, is sickness and death in animal and human populations -- such as the near-extinction of the California Condor -- after decades of spraying and bioaccumulation.
Basically we're trading off lives lost now to malaria to the possibility of environmental damage and lives lost later to spraying. In the West, knowing less than we know now, we chose spraying and now live with the consequences. The WHO chooses not to spray, perhaps for sound medical, scientific, public health reasons; perhaps because of pressure from lobby groups.
Do the Malians get a choice?
I had something really witty, bitter and funny to say, but then I forgot it. Oh well. It's so hot that even with the fan on (circulating cool air from the basement through the upper parts of the house) we're still planning on sleeping on the mattress I dragged downstairs last week.
A few days ago I started noticing that whenever I washed my hair there was a strange, nasty smell -- like very bad weed. As bad as the stuff that the guys downstairs from me were growing in the planter out back of the dorm, senior year in college. This was window box pot that was not intentionally cultivated, but just grew there because they dumped their seeds and bongwater onto the planter. (Don't ask me why they didn't put it down the toilet like normal people.) Curiously, tomatoes also grew in this planter, and it turns out tomatoes make excellent camouflage for nascent marijuana plants. The tomatoes were also accidental -- I believe the widely accepted story was they were seeded from somebody's vomit.
But anyway, I had noticed that my hair smelled like really bad weed whenever I washed it. Or maybe particularly vile mold. It was hard to tell. I was starting to wonder if I didn't have some sort of cranial fungus infection before I finally figured it out -- and it really says something about the state of my personal hygiene that it took me so long. It's the shampoo.
I normally buy Herbal Essences shampoo. Actually it's Clairol Herbal Essences Shampoo Extra Body For Fine/Limp Hair. I don't have "fine/limp hair", but I like the smell. Unfortunately for me, there's a similar-looking bottle which allegedly moisturizes normal hair which I accidentally bought instead of the right kind. It's supposed to smell like chamomile, aloe vera, and passion fruit flowers, but in fact smells like, say it with me, really bad weed. So I am now using my normal shampoo, but I'm saving the other one as a backup shampoo or if I suddenly need to disguise myself as a cash-strapped stoner.
So maybe for the fringe.
Winding up this rambling post, I'd like to add a light note to the story about the forest fires in British Columbia. This afternoon as my wife and I were picking raspberries for the dessert in the family dinner we hosted tonight, she suddenly turned to me and said, "Do you smell that?"
"What?"
"It smells like... barbecued weed."
We didn't think much of it at the time, but we are downwind of BC and everybody knows that BC is loaded with clandestine pot farms. So it's not exactly impossible that barbecued weed is exactly what we were smelling this afternoon....
Here's a self-described marxist criticizing the movement against the war in Iraq:
I want to say something about support for democratic values and basic human rights. We on the left just have it in our bloodstream, do we not?, that we are committed to democratic values. And while, for reasons I can't go into here, there are some on the left a bit more reserved about using the language of basic human rights, nonetheless for many of us it was this moral reality, and more especially its negation, that played a part in drawing us in: to protest and work against a world in which people could just be used for the purposes of others, be exploited and super-exploited, worked maybe to an early death, in any case across a life of hardship; or be brutalized for organizing to fight to change their situation, be 'disappeared', or tortured, or massacred, by regimes upholding an order of inequality - sometimes desperate inequality - and privilege. In our bloodstream.However, there is also a certain historical past of the left referred to loosely under the name 'Stalinism', and which forms a massive blot on this commitment and these values, on the great tradition we belong to.... The same kinds of error - excuses and evasions and out-and-out apologia for political structures, practices or movements no socialist should have a word to say for - are still with us. They afflict many even without any trace of a Stalinist past or a Stalinist political formation.
There are probably no policies I would agree with Mr. Geras about, but I find his perspective and criticism refreshing. It's always nice to see someone who champions human rights and democratic values, even if (to put it mildly) I'd disagree about the best way to develop and preserve them.
(Link via blogjunky via InstaPundit)
is ten minutes googling people I'm no longer in touch with.
The wife's working on a web page for the baby.
And I? Hell, I need a shave. It's been so damn hot for the last few days that I haven't been up for deliberately splashing my face with hot water. Near 30 again today, I'd guess.
Here's an interesting article about sociopaths in the army via Eric Raymond. I don't think I fit the profile -- not violent enough, too self-controlled (as opposed to externally controlled). But can think of a few people I know who are natural killers, at least by the profile from that article.
An interesting article from Arnold Kling on Medicare and economic growth.
Even though we live in Canada, I understand that our ability to enjoy high-quality cheap health care depends on health-care advances funded by richer countries: the U.S., of course, Japan, England. Perhaps Switzerland, too. And we certainly might live in the U.S. again some day.
I hope this Medicare mess gets sorted out before then.