“Bush is a Moron” Declares Alan Greenspan

Greenspan Is Critical Of Bush in Memoir | washingtonpost.com

The meaning is quite unmistakable. The implicit comparison between Clinton and Bush (W) made by Greenspan in the following paragraph (page two of the article linked above) necessarily leads to the conclusion stated in the title of this post.

However, he calls Clinton a “risk taker” who had shown a “preference for dealing in facts,” and presents Clinton and himself almost as soul mates. “Here was a fellow information hound. . . . We both read books and were curious and thoughtful about the world. . . . I never ceased to be surprised by his fascination with economic detail: the effect of Canadian lumber on housing prices and inflation. . . . He had an eye for the big picture too.”

In the rest of article, of course, Greenspan lambastes every Republican official from Bush down to Hastert and DeLay. His acerbic language (in the context of Greenspanese like “irrational exuberance”) leads one to think of how incredibly poorly these politicians must have acted in order to draw the ire of the most stolid man on the planet. Greenspan’s reaction is not just extreme by Greenspan’s own standards. It is unprecedented in American history.

Is it not?

A Hopeless Cause?

Presidential Approval Ratings Since 2001

W approval ratings since 2001
If politics is a popularity game, then this graph paints a rather hopeless picture for the future of warmongers.

And a hopeful one for humanity.

Scientific “Charity”

BOINC

Whatever one might think of SETI or UC Berkeley and the idealists who work there, one cannot deny that BOINC is a remarkable outcrop of SETI@Home, SETI’s effort to distribute computing over millions of computers all over the world.

SETI@Home led to Folding@Home, Stanford’s wonderful effort to distribute the significant computing effort of the bioinformatics of protein folding. By now, there are countless other @Home projects of this sort, like Einstein@Home (for astronomical calculations) and BelgianBeer@Home (which doesn’t specify what its computers do). A fairly long listing can be found here.

Now, BOINC is a general schema that runs on all platforms and can be used by anyone to start a distributed computing network. Whether you want to spend a little bit of electricity every month to donate your computer’s idle moments to a cause, or whether you want to harvest the computing power of others for your own cause, BOINC is available.

This Is Your Government on Iraq

Program shows CIA behind Wikipedia entries – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

With their baffling means of operating, the CIA and other US government agencies have given Wikipedia the greatest endorsement of legitimacy. If the greatest institutions that the US government has erected in the service of dissembling and misinforming have elected to target Wikipedia, then it must be the case that Wikipedia is a superb and reliable source of information.

Why theese agancies care to modify the entry regarding Adam Smith may remain classified for eternity, however.

One Manual the White House Has

White House Manual Details How to Deal With Protesters – washingtonpost.com

Why is it that there is so much more documentation of the GOP’s expertise in staging appearances and playing dirty politics than there is documentation of expertise in military and economic theory and management? When they are compared with the military failures in Iraq economic discord here in the US, the public relations successes of the White House strongly hint at the distinct absence of manuals for economic and military success.

Beauty

YouTube – Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question

There is little doubt that this young woman’s public humiliation is being exploited by the neanderthal institution of “beauty contests” to gain free publicity for an event that hardly gets any attention anymore. Women will feel vindicated. Men will drool over a woman who is clearly beautiful and manifestly dumb and pliable. And, the entire ruse might actually work.

One question is, will she get her fair shake? Probably. The other question is, what does this do to the credibility of the “smart is the new sexy” billboards that have cropped up all over the skyline of the primordial soup?

Second Modern Record

Second modern uptime recordpMac keeps chugging along. After four years, two operating system upgrades, one hard drive failure (and swap) and compiling about 10 gigabytes of software, it keeps going, better than ever it seems. This is the second uptime record that I have managed to record, and it was halted only because I misinterpreted a wrong password as a subsystem failure.

Oh, well. There’s always the coming year, I suppose.

Woe be the US Economy

Cisco CEO sees strong world economy, U.S. bumps – washingtonpost.com

There is ample political criticism in the commentary of CEOs like Cisco’s John Chambers. All CEOs of major American companies see opportunities for growth in every corner of the planet except in the United States. If this does not frighten people of the political establishment in the US, then it ought to give them pause, at the very least, when it is time to digest claims that slashing taxes and deregulating markets are beneficial. After all, according to CEOs, the net effect of reducing taxation and relaxing regulations in the US has been the creating of economic growth outside the US.

A Crime Spree in Berlin

At least the jail food will be free… | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Ah, to dream of the life of comfort, of the life of freedom and of a life of peace of mind. A life where this qualifies as a crime spree.

Preview to Petraeus?

NIE Cites ‘Uneven’ Security Gains, Faults Iraqi Leaders – washingtonpost.com

Another government report is released, and yet again, the picture it paints contradicts virtually every claim made by the prosecutors of the military operation in Iraq. The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released August 24, 2007, contains many discouraging findings, of which the following is typical.

The IC [Intelligence Community] assesses that the Iraqi Government will become more precarious over the next six to 12 months because of criticism by other members of the major Shia coalition (the Unified Iraqi Alliance, UIA), Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and other Sunni and Kurdish
parties. Divisions between Maliki and the Sadrists have increased, and Shia factions have explored alternative coalitions aimed at constraining Maliki.

It will be shocking if the highly anticipated Petraeus report contradicts any of these findings. After all, the findings of the Director of National defense have been quite consistent over the past few years. So, how on earth could Petraeus produce a report that categorically contradicts every one of the DNI’s major findings and the findings of other government and military bodies for the past four years? How could one general produce an assessment of reality that differs dramatically from the assessments of all of his predecessors? Why do these senseless pleas for patience keep finding sympathetic ears? Isn’t anyone listening?

And, if Petreaus does contradict everybody, would that mean that Commander in Chief was stupid enough to appoint boneheads to lead the Iraqi operation for the past four years? Or would it mean that Petraeus is the bonehead? The American psyche is plagued with such a pernicious insolence when it comes to reasoning that is not surprising at all that the majority fail to reason that Petraeus’ report will be damning to the White House no matter what it says.