Going to Thailand

Tonight I'm flying off to Bangkok. Among the attractions of the area I'll be staying in are: the National Gallery and National Museum, the 16m tall 45m long reclining Buddha, and a clandestine meeting with a special agent whose identity can be guessed at only by loyal readers with RSS feeds.

An Important Event In the History of This Blog

This is the view outside my office window. The tree is a coconut tree -- those fruits are unripe coconuts. Ripe coconuts are the brown shelly things that you're more likely to see in the supermarket. In their unripe stages (when they're called young coconuts or green coconuts), they don't contain the yummy hard white pulp. But they have more water in them, and it's good to drink.

Since the last post, many good things have happened. I've gone to a conference in Australia, where I hung out with lots of awesome local philosophers and danced in the usual crazy way in front of David Chalmers and Tim Crane -- see the penultimate picture here. David had been distributing "Possible Girls" to the ANU folk and lots of them thought I was a metaphysician. I also delivered a paper on how Humeans should respond to Korsgaard's stuff on the error constraint, which went quite well, and spent more than an hour talking with Michael Smith the next day about topics of common Humean interest. And I finally met utilitarian hero Jack Smart, who is still attending conferences in his late 80s.

But the event of greatest blog-related importance is that I've finally bought a decent camera phone (a Sony Ericsson P1i, with wi-fi and a 3.2 megapixel camera), which was used to take the picture above. Many more pictures of exotic tropical locales should be forthcoming -- including Thailand, which I'm visiting next week!

Malaysian politics is INSANE

Checking in from my office in Singapore, where the news from neighboring Malaysia is like nothing I've ever heard before.

Soon after his party's victory in the March 8 elections, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has been accused of forcibly sodomizing a 23-year-old male staffer. This isn't new for Anwar, who also was the subject of sodomy allegations 10 years ago. In the prior case, the sodomy was alleged (among other things) to have happened in a building that hadn't been constructed at the time. So to most Malaysians, it looks like the ruling party is just going back to its old strategy -- when Anwar gets too powerful, falsely accuse him of sodomizing somebody. The fact that the young staffer went to Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak's residence before the police report was filed doesn't help matters.

But that's not the worst. In 2006, beautiful Mongolian national Altantuya Shaariibuu was shot and then blown to bits with C4. They had to identify her body from bone fragments. Her ex-lover (ruling party defense analyst Abdul Razak Baginda) and two special police from current Deputy Prime Minister Najib's office have been charged in the murder. A few days ago, a private investigator who worked for Abdul Razak Baginda has put forward detailed allegations that DPM Najib and the murdered woman also had a sexual relationship. (And yes, this is yet another Malaysian scandal involving anal sex.) The next day, the private investigator retracted the allegations entirely, claiming that he had made them under duress. Draw what conclusions you will.

I'm flying off to a conference in Australia tomorrow. I imagine that politics there are a little less insane. In any event, probably no more political blogging from me for a week.

Deontic flavorings of Singapore

The ingredients list on my bottle of wintermelon tea (I never had wintermelon before and mmmmmm...) goes as follows:

Water, cane sugar, winter melon juice, permitted flavouring and
caramel.

This is the first time I've seen 'permitted flavouring' on an ingredients list. I'm wondering what other deontic flavorings obtain in Singapore. Obligatory flavoring? Forbidden flavoring?

Duty Free

Just picked up a liter (I guess around here it's a litre) of Bombay Sapphire for $18.58 at the Duty Free store here in Hong Kong. Building my liquor cabinet through international travel will be part of the game plan for the next couple years.

Singapore!

I'm leaving for my new job at the National University of Singapore in a couple hours. Wooooo!

Things I've posted on Cogitamus lately

If Obama wins the election, who will replace him? Let's hope the Governor of Illinois picks Jan Schakowsky.

John Edwards polls better in Ohio than the Governor of Ohio. And with economic worries getting more intense, he's the sort of VP pick you need.

I can NBA-blog too! Here I talk about how Michael Beasley really is the best player in the draft.

[as of 2019, none of the links work, so they've been removed]

Photo of blonde helicopter pilot paralyzes Yglesias comment thread

The post was about Afghanistan policy. It was kind of funny to watch.

Sadly, The Name 'Moral Hazard' Is Already Taken

Lindsay Beyerstein and Amanda Marcotte introduce me to a kind of market failure I hadn't heard of before. Compucredit VISA "cut credit lines if consumers used their cards at certain places. Among them: tire and retreading shops, massage parlors, bars, billiard halls, and marriage counseling offices."
As Amanda says, the idea is that these things correlate with future credit problems. If you're getting your tires retreaded, it's probably because you don't have enough money to buy new tires, which is a sign that you may have financial problems down the road. If you're going for marriage counseling, you're more likely than average to have a messy and financially difficult divorce in your future. Never mind that marriage counseling may help you keep your marriage together and avoid these problems. Useful attempts to remedy a problem correlate with problems, so the bean counters will regard you as a problem if they see you taking them.
Taken to an extreme, this sort of thing can prevent you from taking useful steps to get your life in order. If you're having marital problems that require some counseling, don't get counseling or the credit card company will get antsy and take away your credit! So now we're in a situation where the forces of the market give people reasons to avoid helping themselves.

Telecom immunity

So the new big controversial thing I've written is a post on how the new telecom immunity legislation, though bad, isn't quite the disaster that people have made it out to be. There's good discussion in comments.

Veepery

Two VP-pick related posts at the CogBlog today: One on Barney Frank putting his foot down against the Sam Nunn VP ridiculousness, and one on why picking Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty doesn't deliver Minnesota to McCain.

Taking It To The Max

I've been very interested to read Ezra's posts on Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, an oft-disappointing Senator who's crucial in reforming health care. Yglesias details how Baucus helped Bush pass his tax cuts for the rich and takes tons of money from health care and insurance interests. I remember Baucus as the only Dem to vote against giving DC a vote in Congress, on the ridiculous grounds that it would dilute Montana's voting power. But Ezra lays out some reasons for optimism that he's taking health care seriously and says in comments:

Baucus is the chair of the relevant committee for health care reform. If you care about the issue, you have to watch him closely, try to figure out what he's doing, and try to figure out what his incentives are and how to shape them.

This is one instance of a big question that I generally don't know how to answer: How do you, as an ordinary citizen, get an influential Senator from another state to do what you want? I know only two ways to push on a Senator -- direct contact through letters and phone calls, and primary challenges. The former only works if you live in the state, and the latter probably isn't feasible in the case of a red-state Democrat who works his evil magic behind closed doors in the Senate, not out in the open on cable TV like that idiot from Connecticut who got kicked out of the party in 2006.

All that comes to mind is buying BlogAds on Left in the West to explain to our Montana progressive brethren that the fate of American health care is on their shoulders, and we'll buy them all the beer they want if they organize really good letter-writing campaigns. Is that the appropriate move here?

Home of the Whopper

The LA Times caught up with "Curveball", the guy who told the CIA all the bullshit about WMD in Iraq. I'd always thought he was a top scientist or something. Turns out that he left Iraq after his shampoo business failed (he was cheating his partners), his cosmetics business failed (he was cheating his suppliers) and he lost his job at a TV company (he was selling their equipment on the black market). He was working at a Burger King in Germany when we were deciding whether to invade Iraq:

In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

His fellow Burger King employees knew he lying. (I imagine that the guy who gave him the codename 'Curveball' had an inkling too. I'm waiting for it to be revealed that the CIA's other informants were codenamed 'Play-action' and 'Headfake'). But he said what Bush wanted to hear, and the CIA bought it.

If only a Burger King employee had been president instead of George W. Bush.

Did Anybody Watch That 70's Show?

I see that a lot of the folks over at The Next Right like attacking Barack Obama by tying him to Jimmy Carter. One of the foremost problems with this is that half of today's voters are too young to get the reference. The median voter is 46 years old, meaning that they were 17 when Carter left office, and presumably not paying too much attention to macroeconomic phenomena.
And the late 70s weren't all that bad for ordinary folks -- the unemployment rate during the Carter years was well below the worst numbers of the Reagan era. Of course, the combination of stagnant asset values and inflation made it a terrible time to be an investor, so tying Obama to Carter will probably resonate with the voter who had a large stock portfolio during the Carter days. McCain is welcome to make those folks the focus of his messaging, just as I'm sure he'll be welcome to visit Barack Obama in the White House next year.

Instant Identities! Just Add Water!

Kevin and Ezra are making fun of the post where Jim Geraghty tries to attack Barack Obama for not wanting to live the life of a suburban commuter who works a 9-to-5 job. Geraghty tells us that "there's a fine line between rejecting that life and looking down at that life. Because some people are just fine with jobs that require them to take the New Rochelle train... Never mind the small towners who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment." Obama didn't want to be a suburban commuter." It's a half-assed attempt to gin up something like a new anti-suburban-commuter Bittergate. Or something.

Right-wingers have coveted the power of left-wing identity politics for some time. They don't, however, have a good idea of why gender and racial solidarity are politically powerful. When some group has a common interest, you can get them to band together behind it. Defeating racism and sexism definitely count. But what are suburban commuters up against? Lousy train service? Unless Republicans are going to go after Ryan Avent and David Alpert with box cutters and somehow hijack the mass transit movement, they're just not going to succeed in stirring up an anti-Obama suburban commuter voting bloc.

Why don't Republicans get this? In part, it's because a lot of them think racism and sexism are over. So they think that Democratic voting blocs are still hanging together in the absence of any common interest. And if identity politics is that easy, turning Italian-Americans, or suburban commuters, or anyone else into a cohesive anti-Democratic group will be simple. But actually, there are good reasons why voting blocs hang together.

The Big Obama/Edwards post

I forgot to link my favorite post as a guestblogger for Kevin Drum. It's the big one in which I lay out 10 good reasons for an Obama/Edwards ticket.

Edwards is denying VP interest a little more intensely than VP candidates usually do. Given that an Obama/Edwards ticket seems to be electorally invincible (check out reason #2 from Minnesota) and Edwards is the guy I'd most want as VP and president (check out most of my blogging for the past 3 years) his protestations of disinterest aren't enough to deter me. My guess is that if Obama told Edwards he'd have a somewhat looser leash than he did in the '04 Kerry days, he'd be a lot more receptive.

Another post, at Cogitamus, about the possible end of ridiculously good media coverage for John McCain is here.

More Pelosi!

I've got a big love note to Nancy Pelosi at the Washington Monthly.

Foresight

Now at the Washington Monthly's site: my big post on how Barack Obama is completely awesome.

Flint

Tonight, my friends drove me up to Flint, MI, and I drank two pitchers of Killian's. It wasn't the chosen drink of any of my compatriots, so I had to drink them by myself. My head is spinning like... uh, I'm looking for some kind of economically depressed Rust Belt analogy, preferably involving things unionized workers in the automotive sector would attend to, but it's escaping me.

I hope all of you had a similarly wonderful Saturday night.

Mmmm... Veepsteaks!

I'm currently in the happy and exciting position of guestblogging for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly! He gets over 30,000 readers a day, so it's an awesome gig.

I decided to start off by doing some Veepstakesblogging, since your average political junkie likes talking about that. So I produced a post discussing some general considerations for who would make a good VP, and then a post discussing specific candidates. The arguments for John Edwards in the second post seem to be impressing lots of people.