2011 predictions

though i graded my 2009 predictions last year, i never got around to making any new ones for 2010. so i got nothing to grade this year. but i want to revive my prediction tradition. if nothing else, these posts are a time capsule preserving where i thought things were going at particular moments in time. seeing how wrong-headed i was can be fun!

so here, in no particular order, is some stuff that i will think will happen in 2011. as i've said before, none of the below predictions are necessarily what i want to happen, they are just what i think is likely to happen.

1. president obama's approval ratings will be roughly the same (within the margin of error) on december 31, 2011 as they were on deceber 31, 2010 (for the purposes of measuring success in this prediction, i will use the gallup daily presidential job approval poll and for the december 31st number i will use the 3 day average for december 28-30).

2. iran will not develop a nuclear weapon in 2011.

3. neither israel nor the u.s. will launch a military strike against iran in 2011.

4. the republican party will still have no clear front-runner candidate to run against obama by the end of 2011.

5. by the end of 2011, there will be no serious primary challenger to obama (and by serious, i mean getting more than 10% support nationally in polls of likely democratic primary voters).

6. the affordable care act will not be repealed in 2011.

7. the supreme court will agree to review the constitutionality of the individual mandate in the ACA.

8. there will be no palestinian-israeli peace deal in 2011.

9. hamas will still control the gaza strip at the end of 2011.

10. israel will continue to expand settlements on the west bank in 2011 and will not agree to any more moratoriums during that year.

11. osama bin laden and ayman zawahiri will still be "at large" on december 31, 2011. [aside: i make this prediction every year. why stop when i got a winner?]

12. the u.s. will comply with the timetable to withdraw its forces from iraq. that is, there will be no u.s. soldiers in iraq by the end of 2011 (except for the usual marine contingent that guards the embassy).

13. more u.s. soldiers will die in afghanistan in 2011 than did in 2010.

14. the u.s. and russia will negotiate a treaty concerning tactical nuclear weapons in 2011, but it will not be ratified by the u.s. senate by the end of the year.

15. at least one more u.s. state will legalize gay marriage in 2011 (i'm not guessing which one).

16. obama will have a budget show-down with the GOP in congress and the government will shut down.

17. by the end of december 2011, sarah palin will still be in national news on a regular basis despite having no reasonable chance of ever holding any elected office again.

18. wikileaks will release all 251,287 of the diplomatic cables it has by the end of 2011.

19. either wikileaks will still exist at the end of 2011, or some successor organization that does essentially the same thing will exist (the successor could be openleaks, or it could be something else like it).

20. the unemployment rate will be better by the end of 2011 than it is at the end of 2010, but unemployment will still be over 8%.

21. southern sudan (or whatever they decide to call it) will either not be independent or will be claiming independence and at war with the khartoum-based government.

22. the only trip i will take outside of the u.s. in 2011 will be to canada.

resolution 2011

my new years resolution for 2011 will be to become a chocolate snob. right now in my pre-2011 state, i definitely prefer better chocolate. but if you put pretty much anything called "chocolate" in front of me, i will gobble it down. better chocolate is more expensive, but i tend to eat less of it because a little bit is usually a lot more satisfying. i have this theory that i will even save money if i start turning my nose up at the cheap stuff. we shall see.

i'm going to try to use my own judgment to determine where the line between good and bad chocolate is. but as a rule of thumb, i'll generally avoid the stuff i grew up with (i.e. hershey's and the like) and i will generally favor chocolate with the percentage of cacao printed on the wrapper.

i'm also going to give myself a politeness out. that is, if someone gives me some chocolate that wouldn't normally qualify, i will be nice about it, eat some and not lecture them about why i think the stuff they just gave me sucks. the resolution is more about a scenario where i'm at someone's house and there is a bowl of M&Ms sitting on a table. unless they are really snooty M&Ms (e.g. made from organic venezuelan cacao and packaged in a locally produced certified non-slave labor burlap sack), i'll just quietly pass.

i'm very proud of the fact that i almost always keep my new years resolutions. we shall see how this one goes. this also means that i will spend the rest of today, greedily eating all the bad chocolate i have left in my house.

haikuleaks

poetry derived
from text of random cables
i think, pretty good.

(a brief explanation here, via elayne. plus: an astana cable makes the cut!)

this is the best work week of the year

i don't know why anyone takes it off (well, other than if they need to use their vacation time before it goes away at the end of the year, or if their kids have off, or stuff like that).

but because everyone else is off, the phones are quiet, the office is unusually laid back, i can get stuff done without more work coming in than i am getting out, it's only a 3.5 day work week to begin with and even then i can easily cut out early or stumble in late each day. why can't every week be like this? i bet next week will really really suck, if nothing else than just because i won't be used to a real work week anymore.

secret admirer

i didn't pay much attention to the gallup "most admired" poll that came out earlier in the week. but then ezra klein highlighted the partisan breakdown of the poll:

president obama is the second most admired man among republicans?!?!? okay, he's only got 6%, but that's two points higher than glenn beck. and he is only 5 points behind GW bush, which actually means that considering the +/-4% margin of error, obama could actually be #1.

that's pretty amazing. also both that and the fact that obama got most admired among all americans (with a whopping 17 point lead over the second place contender) illustrates that the level of anger i read in both left and right wing blogs is by no means as universal as it sometimes seems to be. or maybe it just means that, other than the current president, the american public doesn't strongly admire any men.

not exactly breaking news

the headline says "Iraq Wants the U.S. Out" as if they have ever not wanted the u.s. out. in the january 2005 parliamentary elections, the first post-saddam elections in iraq, the winner was the united iraqi alliance, a coalition whose platform called for a timetable for withdrawal of all foreign forces in iraq. the UIA also won the december 2005 elections. polls have repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of iraqis want u.s. forces out of the country, that has been pretty constantly in every poll of iraqis that i have seen for the past seven and one-half years.

any yet, there is this persistent delusion here in the u.s. that the iraqis want to be under a u.s.-led occupation. it shouldn't be surprising at all that prime minister maliki would insist that the u.s. stick to its withdrawal timetable. in fact, that could be seen as a sign of democratic accountability, because it shows that al-maliki is actually responsive to public opinion in his country.

only through feel-good press releases can we see what is really going on in the mind of the president

once again, right blogistan is going crazy criticizing president obama for something that all recent presidents have done. today's episode: sending a kwanzaa greeting.

george w. bush did it when he was president, but when obama does it, that proves that he is a marxist, a marxist-racist, and (my favorite) a footsoldier in the symbionese liberation army.

(and wait, before you claim that obama's greeting is totally different because he specifically mentioned the 7 principles of kwanzaa in his message, president bush's 2004 message did too. but for some reason van helsing didn't notice that the president he supported back then was an SLA traitor.)

the spirit of 1932

nothing suggests that this haaretz op-ed piece is right to compare present-day israel to germany in 1932 like this post from israpundit, not to mention the "yes indeedy" posts it inspired.

and yes, like any self-respecting fascist sentiment, these guys would insist that they were provoked! as if a failed attempt to run an advertisement on a bunch of buses in seattle which advocates cutting u.s. aid to israel justifies the ethnic cleansing of the entire west bank and gaza.

non-christmasy question

were the oughts (2000-2009) the first decade in modern history when the map of the world did not change?

i can't think of any borders changing, countries gaining independence, or anything like that during that particular ten year period. it occurs to me that a world map published in 2000 would look pretty much the same as a world map published in 2010. the only difference that i can think of between those two maps would be the burmese capital changing from rangoon to naypyidaw in 2005. that's a pretty small difference. surely there's something else i am missing?

it's also significant because the two-thousand-zeros followed a pretty eventful decade of the 1990s, when germany and yemen reunified, 22 new countries popped out of the former soviet union and former yugoslavia, eritrea split off from ethiopia, zaire turned back into the congo, and hong kong and macau reverted back to china. there probably is more, that's just stuff that is occurring to me now.

...ok, i thought about it more and i guess you can make the case for independent kosovo and east timor happening during the oughts. but kosovo already had de facto independence in 1999 when it went under UN administration, it just didn't formally declare until 9 years later. similarly the referendum in which the east timorese voted for independence happened in 1999, it just didn't go into effect until 2002. for both those cases, the coming change would have been evident to any mapmaker working in 2000. so i'm not sure if they should count.

圣诞节快乐

(via B&T)

grandma did not get run over in kazakhstan

as i wait for my train this afternoon in the midst of the usual christmas mania, my thoughts turned to this matthew yglesias post from a few days ago.

it occurs to me that what yglesias advocates--"a fake late-December non-sectarian" holiday that everyone can celebrate, with christians who are so inclined observing a religious holiday celebrating the birth of christ and jews letting hanukkah "sink back into obscurity" where it belongs--is essentially what they do in kazakhstan (the "fake" secular holiday being new years day). i think this counts as one of those things that kazakhstan does do better than the u.s.

priorities

on the front page of today's NYT:

This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.

Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.

Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.

Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”

hey what else happened in 2009, the year that prichard's pension fund was going broke? that was when the GOP and blue dog democrats cut direct federal aid to states and local governments out of the stimulus plan. they did it in the name of reducing the federal deficit. then this year those same republicans and blue dogs voted to extend a huge deficit-busting tax cut for wealthy americans.

i'm pretty sure that none of the people who earn over $250k per year would have died while living in a house with no electricity or running water if they hadn't gotten their precious tax cut.

how do you say "braaaaaaaaains" in pashto?

when i saw the title to this post, i couldn't help but wonder if the public would pay attention to the war in afghanistan if it was a war against actual zombies.

taliban and terrorists are so 00s. it's the teens, or tens, or whatever we call this decade we're in now. zombies are popular! we're reading max brooks, not ahmed rachid. get with the times, war!

the face of wikileaks

i've been mulling over a post about how the campaign against wikileaks is so focused on julian assange. but assange isn't wikileaks. wikileaks is an organization. it didn't stop releasing cables when assange was in a british jail and it won't stop if he ends up in a swedish jail, or dies, or gets sent to guantanamo, or whatever.

in this mulled post, i was going to compare the current campaign to how the u.s. government talked about iraq in the lead up to both the gulf war and the 2003 invasion, where saddam hussein was used to personalize the conflict. and how that is like what the u.s. did in the 1980s when libya was the bad guy and muammar qadhafi was the poster boy for the evils of that country.

this morning i was on the wikileaks site (or at least the swiss one), saw the above banner on the home page and realized that it wasn't just the u.s. that was personalizing this. click on the cablegate link and assange's face is there too. his image is either across the top or on the top left of every page of the "cablegate" section of the web site, but not on the pages for wikileaks' three prior leaks.

so why is wikileaks building up assange to be the personification of their organization all of a sudden? is it an effort to support their embattled founder? are they just playing into what the u.s. is doing? or is something else going on?

echo bleg

so it looks like i am putting up with echo for my comments at least another year. in the meantime, the comment order seems to have reversed. that is: the new comments used to be on the bottom but now they are on the top, which i find very confusing. i've been trying to switch it back, but i can't figure out how. does anyone out there know how to do it?

meanwhile, it occurs to me that the new method of display for comments is more like how posts are displayed on the blog, with new stuff on top and older stuff as you scroll down. except in the comments it seems all unnatural and wrong, whereas it seems fine on the blog itself. i never thought about how they went in opposite directions before. and yet, i still want to change my comments back to how they were.

UPDATE: ha! fixed it myself. i don't need you after all. it was totally counter-intuitive. basically i found this chart, which gave me the idea of unchecking the "enable echo live" box on my administrative settings page. when i did, it seems to have put the order of my comments back to how they used to be. i'm still not exactly clear what that has to do with "echo live", but on the other hand, i can't say i care that much either.

see? the CIS isn't totally ineffective

the commonwealth of independent states has always been something of a bogus organization. wiki charitably calls it a "very loose association of states and in no way comparable to a federation, confederation or supra-national organisation such as the old European Community." i've come to think of it as a pretend organization, designed by russian in the hopes of maintaining its domination of its former soviet republic client states. up until now, the CIS as an organization didn't do anything other than resolving to do stuff in the future that it never ended up actually doing (e.g. forming the CISFTA).

at least that's how they rolled until now. i guess the necessity of silencing critics is something that all those autocratic regimes can finally agree upon.

DADT repeal

as of this writing (the bill cleared the cloture vote in the senate, but has yet to have the up-or-down vote), the repeal of don't ask don't tell seems to be all but certain.

the problem is the bill isn't exactly assuring that gays may serve openly in the military. instead, all it's doing is striking title X, section 654 from the u.s. code. in other words, the bill would simply erase the codification of the don't ask don't tell statute that was passed in 1993 without putting anything in its place.

prior to 1993, there was no statute saying that gays couldn't openly serve in the military. the u.s. code was silent on the issue. but even so gays were barred from the military by DOD policy. just because the DADT statute is repealed, nothing would stop the DOD from doing the same thing again.

well, the president could by executive order. but the problem with that is that when we get a new president, that new president can issue new executive orders. which means that even if obama allows gays to openly serve now, there would be no guarantee that his successor wouldn't put a new ban in place. and that would not require an act of congress, just the president's signature.

Каучуктан жасалған Құбыршек?

whatchu talkin' about? this place has always been called "rubber hose."

december 16th

december 16, 1986: mikhail gorbachev appoints gennady kolbin, an ethnic russian with almost no contact with kazakhstan, to lead the kazakh SSR. protests erupt in alma-ata (now called almaty, which at that time was the capital of the KSSR). the soviet police crack down, massacring between 160 and 200 civilians, and wounding at least as many. in the end the protesters got what they wanted when nursultan nazarbayev (an ethnic kazakh from kazakhstan) was appointed to replace kolbin in 1989. the events that began on december 16, 1986 later became known as the "zheltoqsan massacre", or just "zheltoqsan" (желтоқсан, "december" in kazakh).

december 16, 1991: nazarbayev uses the fifth anniversary of zheltoqsan to declare kazakhstan's independence from the soviet union (the last republic of the USSR to do so). december 16th becomes kazakhstani independence day.

december 16 2009: mrs. noz and i leave for kazakhstan for the very first time, without a clue about what we are in for.

december 16, 2010: mrs. noz, noz jr., and i finally all come home, a happy ending after all.

happy independence day.

you go right back up there and get me a toddler

i'm flying to germany to run a quick errand. i'm just picking up a couple of things before flying right back. i should be home in almost exactly 24 hours. you'll barely notice i'm gone, except that everything will be totally different when i'm back.

the obvious counter-example

i don't understand the tax cuts increase revenue argument when applied to the question of whether to extend the 2001 bush-era tax cuts. the argument is based on the idea is that if you cut taxes, people hold on to more of their own money and then tend to invest it in businesses. that in turn generates more revenue for the government as those new businesses pay taxes on their new revenue. proponents justify larger cuts on upper income people because those are the "investor class", who would be inclined to make the kind of investments that end up stimulating the economy.

the 2001 tax cuts were phased in over ten years, with the biggest cuts coming at the very end, that is, the cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy. and by "very end" i mean 2008 through 2010.

if tax cuts really stimulate the economy and end up generating more tax income from that increased economic activity, why the fuck haven't we seen anything like that for the past three years? to review, in 2008, just as the bush tax cuts were giving major breaks to the "investor class", the american economy almost completely collapsed. that was followed by pathetic economic performance in 2009 (when even more tax cuts for the wealthy kicked in). when the full force of the upper income tax cuts came into effect in 2010, we saw only anemic economic performance and exploding deficits.

if proponents of the "bush tax cuts help the economy" theory were right, the american economy would have looked totally different over the past three years. instead the record shows pretty stark evidence that they are completely wrong. not that the modern GOP cares much for data. but why isn't anyone calling them on this? why is the public debate based on the fantasy that the tax cuts are some kind of new thing, and not the extension of a policy that has already made our deficit explode with little-to-no economic growth benefit?

curses, foiled again!

it's been a year already. my echo comment account expires at the end of the day tomorrow.

which means i have to decide whether i want to shell out another ten twelve¹ bucks for a comment system that i don't really like. (i miss haloscan!) last year when i gave in and paid i wrote: "that ten bucks at least buys me a year to find another free comment service that i like." well guess what? i haven't gotten around to looking for another free comment system and i'm facing yet another crunch in my personal life.

so i'm going to give in this year again. more money for a system that is worse than the free system i used to have. a quick google reveals the alternatives listed in the comments here, but i can't look into them now. which means that one year from now i'll probably be in exactly the same boat.

-----------------------------------------------------------
1-they raised the price to $12 per year! bastards!!! now i'm determined to ditch echo before i'm in this situation next year.

punjabi vs. gujarati & tamil

(punjabi via bajira)

pushing through to the end

my life seems to be pulling into crazytown again, the place i have called my metaphorical home for much of 2010. which means that my federal appellate brief that is officially due on friday is suddenly for all practical purposes due tomorrow. and that's on top of all the shit i need to do within the next 48 hours at home (not to mention the rest of my caseload).

unless this is all a false alarm, which unfortunately is quite possible. in that case the brief won't be due tomorrow, but i won't find out in time to avoid the scramble to get it done. and a false alarm this week would just delay the crazytown express until early next week. so i'm really hoping for a true alarm, even though that means the next two days will be dreadful. if it is happening, at least this should be my last taste of this particular flavor of dreadful.

it will be so great when all this is finally over.

his budgy cord only stretches in one direction

i joked about it before, but it is really remarkable to watch the white house refuse to budge in the face of democratic criticism of the president's tax deal with the GOP. have they ever refused to budge on anything else since obama came into office? this isn't an administration that is known to stand firm on anything.

which is funny because, i suspect, the democratic revolt is partly driven by the obama administration's excessive budging in the past. a lot of the unease with extending the tax cuts "temporarily" for another two years is that everyone expects the president to budge again when the two years is up. if obama had shown the same spine he is displaying now against the democrats during the last two years in dealing with the republicans, i doubt there would be a revolt.

what's yappening on planet money

it was very exciting to hear the most recent planet money podcast because it was all about the island of yap, aka "the land of stone money".

i've had a minor obsession with yap ever since law school when my legal history professor randomly chose the island of yap to use in a hypothetical. i had never heard of the island and couldn't believe it was a real place. then i looked into it and confirmed the island's existence and learned about its giant rock system of currency. a few years ago, i talked mrs. noz into considering going to yap for our summer vacation. she got a few guide books out of the library . but she ultimately decided to go to israel instead. the big strike against yap is it's so friggin' hard to get to. there are only a few flights a week and they are not very dependable.

anyway, yap doesn't come up much. even here, despite my obsession a search reveals that i've never brought it up before on this blog. (even suriname, another country that is a minor obsession of mine, has only been mentioned once on this blog... err, twice, counting this). yap is really the only pacific island that i find strongly appealing, because it's so cool! they use big rocks for money! and it's called "yap"! and, i really love this part, the residents are called "yapese"! is that super-cool or what?

unleak

so every morning i check the wikileaks site to see if there are any new cables from kazakhstan. there haven't been many. on november 29th, five cables from astana appeared. on december 2nd, a sixth cable from astana appeared. so far there have been nothing from the consulate in almaty, and there hasn't been any new cables from kaz in over a week. each morning last week, i just kept seeing those same six cables listed.

but i'm still checking every day. then this weekend i noticed that there are now only five cables listed.¹ one is missing. what happened to it?

i had some email exchanges about some of the kaz cables over the past week, so i went back through my emails to see if i could figure out which one had been removed. i figured it out. the missing cable was titled "LIFESTYLES OF THE KAZAZHSTANI LEADERSHIP" and it's cable #08ASTANA760. as far as i can tell, it's no longer anywhere on the wikileaks site (i think that this should be the link but there's no file there). the cable was reprinted here before it vanished from the wikileaks site, so once i knew the title i could google it up.

but why isn't it on the wikileaks site anymore? does this mean that wikileaks is now removing cables? or maybe they didn't remove it willingly? is it a casualty of the cyberwar? but if so, why would it target one kazakhstani cable and leave the other five? does anyone have any idea why it would disappear like this?


------------------------------
1- check for yourself: (a) go here, (b) look for the "browse by origin" box on the left and click "A", (c) click on "Embassy Astana", and then count to see how many are there. unfortunately, i can't just link to the results page. when i've tried it in the past within an hour it no longer links to the right results.

doin' vatican rag

in the spirit of my "rag on the vatican day", let me just add how hypocritical the vatican's campaign to keep turkey out of the EU is.

for the last decade, turkey has been enacting all kinds of democratic reforms in the hopes of convincing europe that it meets european human rights and democracy standards so that it can be admitted to the EU. meanwhile, the continent's only authoritarian theocracy campaigns behind the scenes to keep the secular nation out because it's too muslim.

exceptionalism

this article once again makes me wonder why the u.s. gives diplomatic recognition to one particular religion when it doesn't do the same for any other.

i realize the vatican state is something of a historical anachronism. and i realize that cutting diplomatic ties with the vatican after treating it like a real country for this long would probably be viewed as some kind of slap at catholicism. so that's probably the answer to my question in the first paragraph.

it still seems pretty ridiculous to me.

obama inadvertently gives a new reason to reject his 2-year tax deal

how exactly can they overhaul the tax code if they've just agreed to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for 2 years? any overhaul plan that includes even a small increase from those already too-low rates would be dead in the water before congress.

i guess maybe they could have the overhaul plan not go into effect until january 1, 2013, to assure technical compliance with obama's current 2-year extension deal. but i don't see the GOP going for that either because it would take away their next hostage scenario during the 2012 presidential election campaign.

the bottom line is a tax code overhaul, even if it's a good idea in the abstract, is not a serious plan if the president's deal with the GOP on extending the bush-era tax cuts goes through. the only scenario in which an overhaul might plausibly happen is if democrats in congress reject the deal and the tax cuts expire at the end of the year. only in that case would the GOP in the new majority be willing to seriously negotiate over a tax code overhaul next year.

see?

the obama administration knows how to be a hard-assed negotiator when it really wants to!

watching the white house and congressional democrats clash over this is like the opposite of that old thought experiment where an indestructible force meets an immovable object.

rock 2: the wrath of pond

big mike jumps on the primary challenge bandwagon!

i really hope he does a "rock 2". the original was probably my favorite political commercial of all time.

WBC funerary services

is there any funeral that the westboro baptist church isn't willing to protest? does the church do anything else other than disrupt death related program activities? maybe we've been thinking of them all wrong. maybe they're not against homosexuality. they're acting more like they are against death itself.

the gay thing never jived with all the protests of straight soldiers' funerals. people assumed the lack of connection between gayness and random dead people was due to the fact that the WBC is an organization of crazy people. a fair point. but if we're talking irrationally here, it makes just as much sense to believe that the WBCers are anti-death but are too whacked to speak about it without a random anti-gay outburst.

how long before people start feeling hurt when their funerals aren't protested? i don't know how i will ever rest easy in the ground unless some spawn of fred phelps is holding a "god hate fags" sign when they lower the casket. does the WBC honor requests? if i put it in my will that i want them participating in my funeral, do you think they'll show up?

i stand corrected

i guess i was wrong. the 2010 OSCE summit was the pivotal moment in human history.

in need of a stick

as long as the obama administration was only willing to use carrots and not sticks to get israel to agree to a settlement freeze, the policy was doomed to failure. the current israeli government isn't at all inclined to seek a real settlement with the palestinians, they know they already have security guarantees from the u.s. (whether or not it has ever been made explicitly) and are not so desperate for a new set of stealth planes that they would risk the wrath of the coalition's settler base to get them.

if the administration really wanted to get netanyahu's government to agree to a real settlement freeze they needed to at least threaten to cut off or reduce u.s. aid to israel. occasionally someone proposes that the u.s. subtract the value of the israeli government's subsidies to settlement communities and construction costs for new settlements from the amount of aid it gives. why not threaten to do that unless there is an immediate and real construction freeze? that would potentially jeopardize the money the settlements need to exist, which may convince the settlers that a freeze is preferable. and that, in turn, would increase the changes of a freeze getting approval in bibi's cabinet.

the problem with that is american domestic politics. u.s. aid is allocated by congress, which means a cut off of aid would have to be part of a budget bill. any proposal to do anything other than increase aid to israel would be a completely non-starter in the current congress (and in any foreseeable congress).

which means that the prospect for a u.s.-brokered israeli-palestinian peace deal is pretty dim. i just don't see it happening, even if obama really got serious about it.

confession

as i've mentioned before, i think that the wikileaking of diplomatic cables is ultimately a bad thing. but, i must admit, i am hoping that the organization gets out more cables from kazakhstan before they inevitably get shut down.

sucky negotiator in chief

just because captain caveman cut a deal doesn't mean that congressional dems have to go along with it. but is there any doubt that they won't go along with it?

if the president was going to give a temporary extension to all of the tax cuts he could have insisted that the unemployment extension lasted just as long. the GOP wanted this bad. even in caving, he probably could have gotten more than he did.

it's also worth noting that one major difference between obama and mccain in the 2008 election was that mccain ran on extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts whereas obama ran on ending them for the wealthiest americans. the electorate made it clear which one they preferred. and yet obama has just effectively adopted mccain's position for the remainder of his first term. he had the upper hand and he pissed it away.

(video inspired by brendan on FB)

dirhamed if you do

why would any group of nations try to get a common currency at this time, just as the euro project may be falling apart before our very eyes?

the general consensus is that the irish, greeks, et cetera are in such deep economic doo-doo in part because they are part of the euro zone. that means they can't devalue their own currency to get them out of this mess, because they don't have their own currency anymore.

a few year ago, i can see why a common currency would look really appealing. but these days, unless there is some agreement about how the currency will be controlled (i.e. which central bank will do it and which countries have a say over what that central bank can do), i don't see anyone else taking the plunge.

GYWO returns

it's a sad commentary on our current state of affairs that there's still an audience for a comic mocking bush's wars.

not MAD enough

the poison pill "insurance" idea is clever, but does assange really expect anyone to be deterred by it? everyone expects wikileaks to release that stuff eventually if the organization doesn't get shut down. in fact, it has already all but openly announced its intent to release the bank of america files if it doesn't get put out of business.

the bottom line is that the contents of the "insurance" file are going to be released whether wikileaks continues to operate or not. there's no practical way to stop that stuff from coming out at this point. in that sense, the contents are already out of the pen. but the powers-that-be still have every incentive to shut wikileaks down to prevent it from getting more secret information in the future that it will later release.

the insurance file make look like it could get wikileaks' enemies to back off. but ultimately it isn't a sufficient deterrent to get assange and his organization out of this mess.

пет пив

a member of my family circulated the above video by email this weekend. it's just a joke, but it happened to trigger my pet issue about how the voiceless velar fricative should be transcribed in english. yeah, i know, everyone has strong feelings about this issue. but actually, i think the problem is fairly straightforward (although it will take me a little while to set it up).

transliteration is essentially trying to spell something in one language using the alphabet used for a different language. the purpose of transliteration is to make people who don't speak the transliterated language be able to come close to pronouncing the foreign word. sometimes transliteration is easy, because sometimes each sound in the original language has an exact equivalent in the target alphabet. so "גט" is transcribed as "get". and as it happens, the hebrew pronunciation of the original word is pretty much like the english word "get", which makes it an easy word to transcribe.

the harder issue is when you're trying to transliterate a sound that doesn't exist in the language of the target alphabet. because the transcription business is fairly established, there are a lot of conventions that you can fall back on to represent sounds in an alphabet even though the sound isn't ordinarily represented in the alphabet. often that is done through a combination of letters. "gh" for example, is often used to represent the arabic "غ", which is a voiced velar fricative, a sound that does not exist in english. so "baghdad" is not really "bag" + "dad" (as most english speakers say), it is "ba(gh)dad", where the (gh) itself is a single sound that is kind of like the rolled "r" in french. the reason "gh" is chosen is because: (1) that combination of letters hasn't already been assigned a sound, and (2) because even if it is pronounced like a "g" and "h" by an ignorant english speaking, it's close enough for a native of the original language to figure it out.

which brings me back to the voiceless velar fricative, another sound that isn't used in most standard dialects of english. but it's used in a whole bunch of other languages. it is the "خ" in arabic, the "Х" in russian, and both the "ח" and the "כ" in hebrew. the "ח" is the first letter in the hebrew word "hanukkah" (חנוכה).

for some reason the "ח" often gets transcribed in english as a "ch". that's why "hanukkah" is sometimes spelled "chanukah". it drives me crazy because using a "ch" breaks one of the rules of transcription: avoid using letter combinations that already stand for a different sound in the transcribed-to language. "ch" already stands for a sound in english (the voiceless postalveolar affricate), a sound that is completely different from the one that the "ח" makes in hebrew. by spelling the holiday "chanukah", it looks like the first sound in the word is like the first sound in the word "church". that is misleading. and also it makes little sense because when the same sound appears in other languages, that sound is usually transcribed as "kh". "kh" is much better. it's a combination that does not exist in english (except in foreign transcribed words trying to represent that sound, like at the end of "kazakh"). it just seems like a better candidate, one which is successfully used in other languages and doesn't have the potential of misleading native english speakers into thinking it is a "ch" as in "church" sound.

so in the debate whether to spell the english word for the jewish festival of lights "hanukkah" or "chanukah", i think they're both wrong and it should be "khanukah".

marketing FAIL

ah, walmart.

UPDATE: it wasn't walmart after all, though that doesn't mean that walmart still doesn't suck. thanks heather w!

(via sunny on FB)

no catfood for you!

with the failure of the catfood commission, i'm wondering if anyone knows who came up with that nickname. the commission was created while i was in kaz, and presumably that's when the catfood thing was coined. does anyone out there know where it started?

GOP math

exhibit A: new jersey governor chris christie canceled the ARC rail tunnel project in the name of fiscal austerity. the rail project would build a second rail tunnel under the hudson river is critically needed for northern new jersey, whose entire economy is is based primarily upon commuters to NYC. by canceling the project, NJ broke an agreement with the federal government, which meant that the state owed the u.s. $271 million. and now christie has hired a private law firm that charges $485 per hour to fight that charge, instead of using the state's own in-house lawyers. at this point i don't see how the cancellation can possibly save money for the state if you add up the economic cost to bedroom communities in northern NJ if there is no additional tunnel (and the state tax revenue that goes with that), the extra expenses that NJ will ultimately have to pay for canceling the tunnel project and the litigation costs it will sustain in fighting the charge.

exhibit B: on the national level, the GOP has decided that the deficit is the biggest economic problem facing the country and they are pushing for broad cuts on the federal level. meanwhile their two top legislative priorities right now are: #1 making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent for rich people, which will result in an increase in deficit projections to a much greater extent than any other proposal currently being considered in this country, and #2 repealing the patient protection and affordable care act, a law that is projected by the CBO to reduce the federal deficit over the next ten and twenty year period (pdf).

not with a bang but a whimper

the widely (in kazakhstan) heralded OSCE summit is over. considering the intensity of the hype i saw in kaz heading up to the conference, i was wondering how much coverage it would get here.

the answer is: not much. sure, if i go to news sites i can find a single article about the conference. if i do a news.google.com search, i can find a whole bunch of articles that mention the summit. but a lot of those are really about the wikileaks controversy because hillary clinton happened to be in astana at the summit when reporters hassled her about the leaked cables.

and to the average person outside of kazakhstan, nothing special happened. i have brought up the summit with a few people here and not one was aware it was going on, much less what the OSCE is. the kazakhstanis seemed to think that this was the event that was going to put kazakhstan (and astana) on the map for people around the world. but i don't think an international summit, even a fairly big one, is the way to do it if you're interested in the attention of more than just international diplomacy geeks. and to those geeks, the summit will probably be remembered as a failure that couldn't even produce wording to describe the conflicts between georgia and russia or between armenia and azerbaijan.

i wonder if it was worth all the expense that kazakhstan invested in the thing. was it worth pulling astronauts out of orbit, closing the entire airspace of that massive country and effectively making the entire workforce in astana stay home? (and what about those guys i saw, risking their life scaling khan shatyr to scrub it clean?)

what was really surprising is how much of a non-event the summit was even on blogs that specialize on central asia (at least the english-language ones i can read). it never came up in registan.net. neweurasia had a link to a live twitter feed from someone at the summit yesterday, but now the link is gone and there's no reference to the OSCE anywhere on the front page. and if you click on the "kazakhstan" tab at neweurasia to bring up recent kaz posts, you still can't see any sign that the OSCE summit happened. even KZblog, a site run by an ex-pat in astana and who had posted about some of the anticipated summit disruptions, hasn't posted since the summit began.

arsenic and old life

a few days ago, there was a bit of buzz when NASA scheduled a press conference to make some big announcement. what followed was a bunch of speculation that NASA had discovered life somewhere other than earth, and that speculation seemed to focus on saturn's moon titan.

today is press conference day and although the conference isn't until this afternoon, the announcement has leaked. it is about a new life-form, but not an extraterrestrial one:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

not quite as sexy as life on another planet. but i imagine this is very exciting to biologists.

so why is NASA making this announcement? i would think that this would be something a university would do, or maybe an organization like this one. i didn't realize that NASA's jurisdiction includes earth-bound biological advances. sure, an implication of the discovery is that alien life might be more likely (as we have now found a new combo of chemicals that would work), but that doesn't explain why NASA was in on it on the ground floor.

ADDING: memeorandum linked to this post (and called this blog an unpronounceable symbol again). from that link i discovered that a few other bloggers used essentially the same pun as me for the title of their post. zander vs. stupid has the best version. dammit, i wish i had thought of "lakes." that's really much better.

koo-koo-ka-choo

the walrus speaking yesterday:

[John] Bolton... rejected the idea that sanctions could eventually affect Iran’s nuclear ambitions as some in the US and even Israel have suggested.

“The most likely outcome with respect to Iran is that it gets nuclear weapons and very, very soon,” he said. “Given that diplomacy has failed, given that sanctions have failed, the only alternative to an Iran with nuclear weapons is a limited military strike against the nuclear weapons program.”

the walrus speaking on august 17, 2010:

Former US envoy to the UN John Bolton said Monday that if Israel wants to prevent Iran from acquiring a working nuclear plant, then a military strike must be launched against the Bushehr nuclear power facility within the next eight days.

Russia, who is supplying the uranium fuel for the plant, announced last week that they will begin loading the Bushehr reactor on August 21. Bolton warned that once the Bushehr facility is operational it will be too late for a military air strike against Iran because such an attack would spread radiation and harm Iranian civilians.

i guess the walrus now thinks that it's never too late to bomb iran. or maybe he just doesn't care whether iranian civilians are harmed anymore.

wikileaks is not leaking everyone

in response to the wikileaking of those diplomatic cables stephen walt poses a hypothetical:

How much difference would it really make if all these "private" diplomatic meetings were public? Suppose there was no such thing as a "private" diplomatic meeting or a backchannel discussion. I can easily imagine that world leaders wouldn't like it very much -- but how much would world politics change if all these conversations were held in public so that people could see and hear what was being said?

while that may be an interesting thought experiment, i don't think it's very illuminating when evaluating the rightness or wrongness of the wikileak. wikileaks is not making all diplomatic communications public. it is making the united states' diplomatic communications public. lurking behind all of this is a collective action problem. even if we assume that the end of secret back channel diplomatic communication would be a net good for the world, that doesn't mean that the U.S. wouldn't be disadvantaged if everyone else gets to have secrecy when the U.S. doesn't. and it's a lot messier question whether hobbling the u.s.' ability to engage in diplomacy relative to other countries would be better or worse for the world.