GG's Snark

Glenn Greenwald in fine form.

GG makes it clear, but just in case, the people named in his article all appear all over the media. Their primary achievements are as follows:

Jenna Bush Hager is famous for being one of President George W. Bush's daughters.
Luke Russert's primary recommendation is that he is the son of Tim Russert, deceased host of NBC's "Meet the Press". Liz Cheney is known to us only because of her father, VP Dick Cheney. Megan McCain is likewise has visibility only because of her father, Senator John McCain. Regarding Jonah Goldberg, Wikipedia tells us "Goldberg's career as a pundit was launched following his mother Lucianne Goldberg's role in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, when he wrote about the "media siege" on his mother's apartment in the The New Yorker." He has managed to leverage that into a career. Chris Wallace perhaps has some claim to have earned his position, though he is well-connected, too.

Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska, got that seat because she was appointed to it by her father, who vacated it upon being elected governor of Alaska. I don't know what Senator Evan Bayh owes to his father who was a Senator too. Jeb Bush is one more of the Bush family. Bob Casey (Jr) is another Senator whose father was a Senator (Sr). Mark Pryor, Senator from Arkansas repeats the pattern. Jay Rockefeller is of course, beneficiary of the Rockefeller fortune. Representative Dan Lipinski followed his father's footsteps to Congress, as did Harold Ford, Jr. Re: Bill Kristol, I pull this from my archives

(The Economist, via dailykos)I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."

Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz have the advantage of family too — I do not know if they used it, however.

With that under your belt, perhaps this from GG makes more sense to you? Well, maybe you have read or hear what some of those mentioned above were saying during the period that Justice Sotomayor was being confirmed.

Just to underscore a very important, related point: all of the above-listed people are examples of America's Great Meritocracy, having achieved what they have solely on the basis of their talent, skill and hard work -- The American Way. By contrast, Sonia Sotomayor -- who grew up in a Puerto Rican family in Bronx housing projects; whose father had a third-grade education, did not speak English and died when she was 9; whose mother worked as a telephone operator and a nurse; and who then became valedictorian of her high school, summa cum laude at Princeton, a graduate of Yale Law School, and ultimately a Supreme Court Justice -- is someone who had a whole litany of unfair advantages handed to her and is the poster child for un-American, merit-less advancement.

I just want to make sure that's clear.

PS: GG has not spared the Kennedys in the past, and is silent about them only because of their recent bereavement.

The Free Market for Ideas

The beauty of the free market for ideas is discussed here, by Paul Krugman.

Adam Smith revisited

David Leonhardt in a NYTimes book review:

Six years ago, Bantam Classic published a mass-market volume of Smith’s 1776 masterwork, “The Wealth of Nations,” with an introduction by Alan B. Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton. Krueger argued that Smith’s modern image had become unhinged from his actual writings. “Smith was a nuanced thinker. He was not nearly as doctrinaire a defender of unfettered free enterprise as many of his late-20th-century followers have made him out to be,” Krueger wrote. “He recognized that human judgment was not infallible.”

Smith was indeed a champion of individual liberty and worried about how governments might muck up an economy. But he also wrote that the goal of employers, “always and everywhere,” was to keep wages as low as possible. “When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters,” he concluded. He supported a tax on luxury carriages and taxes on alcohol, sugar and tobacco. He said that “negligence and profusion” inevitably occur when corporate managers control shareholders’ money. And as the historian Emma Rothschild has noted, “The Wealth of Nations” uses the phrase “invisible hand” precisely once. In the 1,231-page Bantam edition, it appears on Page 572.

The Road to Good Governance

Government, too, is a commodity that is bought and sold. The vote is not enough. The way to a citizens' government is for the citizens to outbid the corporations. With respect to health care reform, please go here.

...you know you're doing the right type of thing when a source like The Economist agrees that progressive groups are finally understanding the nature of the battle they face...

Why the Death Penalty Will Remain in the USA

This is why. The convicted bomber got a hero's welcome back in Libya, as per NPR. Why would a man who denied so many people life, let alone the privilege of dying at home, be eligible for compassion? Well, according to some relatives of the victims, it is because the British government is currying favor with Libya's dictator Qaddafi, because of oil.

A lot of people are going to reflect on this and conclude that the death penalty must remain. If life in prison doesn't really mean life in prison, and government officials have the right to decide on their own to release prisoners, then people are going to conclude that the death penalty must remain.

The Scottish Justice Secretary blathers on about compassion and high values and other such BS, but he really had none at all for the victims' families.

Icarus

Icarus


Photographically speaking, this is known as making lemonade out of lemons. :)

What is reality?

This is what the camera saw at the Readington Balloon Festival:

With mild Photoshop changes, one can get this:


Now, here is a completely untouched shot from last year, showing what things looked like in better light:


Now what the camera "sees" itself is a choice made by Canon engineers as they put together their algorithms for converting sensor voltages into colors. So above, I was perhaps bringing the photograph closer to some ideal reality, where the sun was shining in a blue sky.

But it is possible to exaggerate. If I turn this:

into this:


When is the photograph obscuring instead of illuminating reality?

The Fate of Whistleblowers

The US government puts them in prison.

Readington Balloon Festival

These are from July 25 morning. It was misty and gray, and not the best conditions for photography.


So I didn't really look at the photographs I took till now. Here are some.

The AT&T balloon firing up:


Some more colorful pictures (with mild digital enhancement)

More on butterflies

The Readington Balloon Festival had a stall that was selling mounted butterflies, like below. Supposedly there are butterfly farms, from which these butterflies are harvested, coated with some preservative and mounted like shown below.

I overheard the sales people telling some children that, no, the butterflies were not killed, that they were gathered after the butterflies' rather short natural life, and it made me smile.

Butterfly Bush - 2

As noted by NYT's Theresa Burns, (sorry, print edition only) "in a world replete with false advertising, darned if many of them {butterfly bushes} aren't covered in butterflies this week."

The deep purple flower is likely "Dark Knight", i.e., one of my "Peacock"'s is mislabelled. This might be a problem, because "Dark Knight" grows to two-three times the size of "Peacock".

Photoshop

Rajan did some improvements to the pictures of flowers posted earlier.

Day Lily - improved

Day Lily - original

In this case, the improved version is closer to reality. Rajan, of course, has not seen the original; in the case of the rose, this would be a new rose association winner.
(Or perhaps when the bush grows up, it will produce deeper colored blooms.)
Improved version:

Original:

How To Win Friends and Influence People

Here. This is the last sentence of the story:

Last month U.S-based carrier Continental Airlines apologized to former Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for frisking him at New Delhi airport.

Obambi

Paul Krugman in the NYT:

(In early 2008)...I warned that his [Obama's] vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”....

....The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever...

...So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

Tahitian Sunset - contd

This is a very classical rose, very formal. Compare this to Don Juan (the lone flower on a plant just barely clinging on to life), business casual.



Or the hippie Red Knockout — this so saturates the red channel on the Canon 5D that I had to resort to underexposure. In bright sunlight the eye cannot focus on the flower, and it appears sort of blurred.



The Tahitian Sunset and Don Juan are moderately scented. The Red Knockout has very little scent in one flower, but since usually the bushes are covered with blooms, the surroundings tend to smell nice.

PS: The butterfly from a few days ago could be a male Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Your router can be hijacked

An old one, but I learned of it only today. Malware can try to silently change the settings in your home router, guessing the user id and password needed to access the router. If you haven't changed them from factory defaults, it will likely succeed.

All that the malware has to do is to change the DNS setting - the server which translates "www.mybank.com" into an IP address - to a server controlled by the malware author. Now when you try to reach mybank.com, your traffic goes to where the malware author directs it; (s)he can intercept it and also forward it to its right destination.

This WaPo blog describes it further, and how you might protect yourself against it.

More Day Lily

Tahitian Sunset at sunrise

Day Lily

I believe the name is because a flower remains open only for a day. The picture below is a severe crop of a picture taken with 300mm.

Identify the butterfly

Yes, I know the wings are blurred. But can you identify the butterfly? Is it a zebra swallowtail?