What the shutdown is about

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From Ezra Klein here:

This is all about stopping a law that increases taxes on rich people and reduces subsidies to private insurers in Medicare in order to help low-income Americans buy health insurance. That’s it. That’s why the Republican Party might shut down the government and default on the debt.

And also this:

Democrats won more votes than Republicans in the last election. That was true in the presidential campaign. It was true in the Senate campaigns. And it was true in the House campaigns.

That doesn’t mean the Republican Party is under any obligation to stand back and let Democrats do as they please. But imagine if the Republican Party had won the 2012 election and Senate Democrats threatened to breach the debt ceiling and cause a financial crisis unless Republicans added a public option to Obamacare. Does anyone think a President Mitt Romney would find that position reasonable? Does anyone think that position would be reasonable?

Marcella Hazan, 1924-2013

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If you’ve eaten at my house, you’ve certainly eaten a bolognese or a risotto. They were the first things I learned to cook well enough to serve confidently, and remain staples of my kitchen.

I am not a great cook, but I can follow directions. If you’ve enjoyed those dishes at my table, you have Marcella Hazan to thank, because the recipes I use are from her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, first published in 1992. There is no better starting place. Prickly and opinionated, Hazan’s recipes may chide you for using the wrong pot, or the wrong kind of pasta, but it’s useful to know how to do something right before you launch out on your own.

Serving from her book, I also extend a chain of reference, friendship, and food; I learned of the book from my friend Carl sometime in the late 1990s, whom I suspect picked it up from his friend Chris, who in turn credits another friend he was visiting in Milan in 1994. I’m sure the chain goes ever backward, and includes many more links forward — I know I’ve given copies as gifts many times myself.

Food and friends and fellowship are the essence of a good time. Hazan’s book helped me create no small number of delightful evenings including all three, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.

Marcella Hazan died on Sunday in her home on Longboat Kay, in Florida. She was 89.

The most disappointing fact I learned today

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Basically, it’s probably not possible to get enough Ricin into a single Stevia packet to ensure lethality in a 125 pound victim.

While staggeringly lethal when inhaled or injected — like, less than 2 milligrams for the average adult human — Ricin is WAY less toxic when eaten. You need 30-40 milligrams per kilogram, which works out for about 2 and a quarter grams.

Stevia packets are light; they contain only a gram of the sweetener. I can see doubling the weight and not tipping your mark, but slipping in more than 225% additional weight to a single packet strikes me as troublesome to the point of implausible.

Oh well.

How is it that James Clapper still has a job?

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From TechDirt:

Once again: the director of the intelligence community flat out lied to Congress about it, admitted it, and there have been no consequences at all. What that teaches Clapper and others is that they can continue to lie, and, in fact, that they are effectively encouraged to lie, because there’s no downside risk in doing so.

Here’s a better question: Why is Clapper not in jail?

The Border Patrol are Criminals

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Read this and tell me if you come to any other conclusion.

Everyone they detained was an American citizen, coming back to the US after attending a wedding of a cousin. They were treated terribly, put in a cold room with no food or drinks, and no information on what was going on. CBP demanded they hand over their electronics, and made it clear they might not get them back. The thing is, this isn’t a unique situation. As the report notes, there’s almost no oversight over CBP actions, allowing them to act with impunity. In the report, the story is told of a 4-year-old girl, an American citizen, who was detained for 14 hours, in a cold room, without being allowed to speak to her parents and given no food beyond a cookie. And then she was deported. Even though she was a US citizen. She was allowed to come back weeks later, but now has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Abdurrahman’s own story is perhaps not that crazy, but is still ridiculous. She tried to find out information during the detainment, but was repeatedly told “it’s not your right to know.” She wasn’t even allowed to know the names of the CBP agents who detained them. When she asked, agents turned their backs to her so she couldn’t see their name tags. Multiple attempts at getting Homeland Security or CBP to respond to questions failed.

These people are TSA agents with the power to arbitrarily confiscate your belongings — with or without suspicion — and have effectively no accountability to anyone, least of all US citizens they mistreat. These goons should be personally liable for damages.

Hey, look! Abuse of warrantless searches! Surprise, Surprise!

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Remember how the border goons insist that they can confiscate and search your electronics whenever you enter the US, even without suspicion?

Yeah, turns out the Feds are actively exploiting this loophole. They watched airline manifests until someone they wanted to search, but had no legal reason to detain or search, was coming back from overseas — and then used this border bullshit to sift through his shit.

That about covers it: Jon Stewart sums up Fox News

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And I get that Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.

Form here, about 8 minutes in.

Today in Minor Improvements

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My super-goofy yet awesome keyboard has returned from its hospitalization rejuvenated and shockingly clean. It’s possible that they were able to build their own Wiggins out of the hair I’m sure they found inside it.

This caps a series of home/office logistical tasks I feel inordinately happy about sorting out, including:

  • Something called “mudjacking”;
  • Getting the retarded tablet fixed;
  • Repairing the front door lock;
  • Returning a client laptop to the client 8 months late;
  • Acquiring a haircut;
  • Getting an annual eye exam;
  • Having AT&T hook up the goddamn cable; and
  • Having AT&T come back out and fix the broken cable box 2 days after installation.

Because Republicans HATE the poor…

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…they shoved through a measure in the House that cuts $39 billion from the SNAP program, i.e. food aid for the poor. Most of those impacted will be children.

Every single person who voted for this measure should be ostracized from polite society. They are heartless, horrible individuals, and are the truest example of “enemies of the people” I have heard of lately.

Yes, I mean every single one of the 217 Republicans who voted for this. All of them. The fifteen Republicans who voted against the measure get a pass.

The next headline I expect to see is Bill Donohue and the Catholic League denouncing this apostate

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TPM: “Pope Francis Criticizes ‘Obsessed’ Church Focus On Abortion, Gay marriage, Contraception“

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis is warning that the Catholic Church’s moral edifice might “fall like a house of cards” if it doesn’t balance its divisive rules about abortion, gays and contraception with the greater need to make the church a merciful, more welcoming place for all.

In a word: whoa.

Smart Analysis on the NSA

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Via Schneier, we find this bit:

We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.

Full essay here.

HOWTO: Recognize Different Painters

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This is sort of brilliant. Examples are included, but the captions are awesome.

  • “If the images have a dark background and everyone has tortured expressions on their faces, it’s Titian.”
  • “If the paintings have tons of little people in them but otherwise seem normal, it’s Bruegel.”
  • “If the paintings have lots of little people in them but also have a ton of crazy bullshit, it’s Bosch.”
  • “If everyone looks like hobos illuminated only by a dim streetlamp, it’s Rembrandt. “

We are SO fucked

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George R. R. Martin is apparently a big Breaking Bad fan.

The man who gave us Walder Frey, the Lannisters, and fucking Joffrey (plus all manner of as-yet-unseen vileness) believes that Walter White is a worse monster than anyone or anything in his books.

And so he’s apparently setting out to top him.

Syncing your watch in 19th Century London

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Obviously, your go-to source for the accurate time was, and remains, Big Ben — even if you can’t see it, you can HEAR it, right?

But what if you wanted to be as accurate as possible? Obviously, if you’re far from Ben, you’d hear the chimes later than someone quite close to it — with the speed of sound being about 1,126 feet per second, it matters.

Fortunately, there’s a map you can consult, with concentric rings showing the delay from “true” time.

Neat.

iPhones and AAPL prices

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Apple is, at this point, sort of like Alabama. They’ve been so good for so long that the press in both cases just can’t wait for some imagined comeuppance, and so the new pattern we see after every Apple event is a litany of folks explaining how much the company has lost its way post-Jobs, and how it’s obviously drifting and leaderless, and how they’re completely over. Indeed, after the event yesterday, Apple shares fell 5%, and they remain significantly below their 52-week high of $705.

Well, if this is what “over” looks like, I’ll damn sure take it. Apple remains one of the most profitable companies in the world — in fact #2, behind Exxon Mobil, and the dollar gap is less than 10% despite the fact that Exxon has 2.5 times the revenue of Apple. They continue to sell just about as many phones, tablets, and laptops as they can make. As a consequence of being a money-printing machine, they’re also sitting on a cash mountain of about $147 billion.

And yet, as I write this, a single share of AAPL sells for about $470, which values the company at only about $427 billion. That’s still enough to make it the most valuable public company in the world (ahead of Exxon, Google, GE, etc.; its old rival from Redmond is waaaay down the list), but it strikes me as low.

Why? At this price, the firm’s P/E ratio is 11.7. That’s a rate that implies an over-the-hill firm in a mature market (e.g., it’s not far from Exxon’s P/E, or Microsoft’s). And note further that this ratio includes in the value of the firm all that cash, which (when factored in) would depress the P/E even further (to less than 8, if my math is right). That’s absurd in a world where Apple prints money at this rate. Google’s astoundingly less profitable, and its P/E is 26. Even at Apple’s lofty $700+ price per share last year, its P/E didn’t suggest it was too expensive.

I’m certainly no investment advisor. Make no mistake. It sure seems to me, though, that nitwits claiming Apple is over are riding backlash and not meaningful analysis.

Arcade Fire, Again

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Three years ago, we were blown away by Arcade Fire’s amazing HTML5 experimental “video” for The Wilderness Downtown. You may recall it involved superimposing their video plot on your own hometown, via Google Maps and Google Earth, which sounds way less impressive than it actually was (and is).

Apparently, innovative online content is a core value for Arcade Fire, because what they’re doing with Reflektor is something else again; using your smartphone as a controller, you can affect the video as it plays, but that’s a super-reductive way to describe what’s going on here. Here’s a behind the scenes bit that helps explain what’s happening here. (Now, as then, you need Chrome for this to work.)

The record drops 10/28. Mark your calendars.

Books of 2013, # 40: Kill City Blues, by Richard Kadrey

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Sandman Slim is back for more in book 5 of Kadrey’s reliably entertaining urban fantasy series. He’s not the devil anymore, so it’s back to LA to work at thwarting the arrival of some pesky old gods; you know, the usual sort of thing.

Plenty of authors are playing in this space, but for my money Kadrey is doing the best job. He’s clearly a student of the noir/hardboiled tradition, and that shows through; our hero — his actual name is James Stark — has much in common with the gumshoes written by Chandler and Hammett and Crumley, to say nothing of the character’s namesake. If angels, devils, supernatural mysteries, and tales of revenge aren’t interesting, this isn’t the series for you, but if you’re into both noir and modern fantasy, you might want to look into the first book — you absolutely don’t want to read them out of order.

Books of 2013, #39: The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley

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After discussing The Big Sleep at a friend’s house not long ago, I was enthusiastically loaned a copy of The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley. I’d never heard of either book or author, but Mrs Heathen — an alum of a mystery bookstore — nodded sagely as John handed me the book. It’s a good one; neither John nor Erin steered me wrong here.

I’m apparently the last one to know this, but Crumley was a great inheritor of the noir/hardboiled tradition. I’m just sorry I didn’t read him sooner (had I read his 2008 obituary in the Times, I’m sure I would have; therein he’s described as the literary offspring of Chandler and Heathen patron saint Hunter Thompson). His books are placed later (Kiss is in the 1970s), but still honor the form pioneered by Hammett and Chandler. He was never hugely successful, but he’s on the short list of “favorite writers” for a whole host of more modern American crime novelists, including folks like Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos. It’s for good reason; Kiss is a hell of a yarn, and carries itself with such poise and style that I really didn’t mind the somewhat abrupt ending.

This one’s worth picking up if the world of hard(ish) boiled detectives appeals to you at all. Here’s how it begins:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Beat that.