Cleaning Computer Keyboards

I regularly clean the keyboards of computers that come to me for various fixes. I started doing it because some keyboards are so foul that I don't want to touch them without some kind of powerful cleaning agent nearby.

I have several different cleaning solutions and tools, depending on the type of grime in question. Apply the cleaning solution to the cloth or swab, not on the keyboard. Usually it works best to apply the cleaning solution to a set of keys, then come back along to clean that set of keys thoroughly.

• For typical grimy college student keyboards (when the keyboards are grimy, not the college or student), I use a vacuum cleaner followed by Windex and a cotton or microfiber cloth.
  
  
• For tobacco stains and other unfettered nastiness, I use a solution of alcohol (70% isopropyl) and "Arm & Hammer Baking Soda Washing Powder" on cotton swabs. You can substitute a mixture of any laundry soap and either baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) or washing soda (sodium carbonate). Use about a teaspoon of the powder for a half liter of the alcohol. The washing powder dissolves in the water rather than the alcohol, so it may be necessary to dilute with more water. The soda also has a mechanical cleaning feature if it isn't fully dissolved, but the trade off is more residue. Be sure to wipe thoroughly to remove any residue.
  
  
• I've also used Scope (20% alcohol with menthol and eucalyptus, I think) or Listerine (27% alcohol) instead of rubbing alcohol. The washing powder dissolves better, but there's not as much alcohol in the mix when mouthwash is used. This method leaves a clean, fresh scent.
  
  
• For some other icky types of pernicious goo, the pumice + citrus hand cleaners work great (but tend to wear away at the paint on the keycaps). Follow this with Windex, alcohol, or water to remove any residue.
  

Denatured alcohol works almost as well as the baking soda mixture, depending on the type of disgusting adornment your keyboard has gathered. It also leaves no residue. You can get 91% alcohol from most drug stores, usually including Walgreen's or Wal-Mart. Do not mix detergents or baking soda with 90% or stronger alcohol, as it just makes a gooey mess.

Another approach is to flood the bottom of a shallow baking pan with some mild cleaning solution (so that only the tops of the keys on the keyboard will get wet) and carefully put the keyboard face down into it. After a few minutes, while keeping the keyboard face down, raise it out of the pan, shake it lightly and let it drain until drops stop falling, and pat out any excess cleaning solution using something absorbent, such as a cloth or damp sponge. Proceed as above, though your work should be easier.

FUDzilla

Once again, Microsoft is using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt as a marketing ploy. Unable to maintain their accustomed monopoly position with the unacceptable products they are currently able to develop, the company has turned to bogus threats of patent infringement against Linux and Open Office.

Why not just make products that work better?

Microsoft is a monster, the undrowned spawn of all that is wrong with Wall Street and all that is bad about commercial software development. Microsoft is forced by their ego-driven culture and the pressing expectations of unrealistic investors to deliver products that will sell for the highest profit rather than those which will operate the best.

I'm not against profit, even obscene profit. I think it's fine to develop software and sell it. But I don't like legal maneuvering to achieve the former because of a poor effort at the latter.

As fans of horror movies know, sooner or later, the monster always dies.

Acceptable Electronic Voting

H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (pdf), would mandate a "paper trail" for electronic voting machines and provide for public access to the source code for programs that control voting machines. I am withholding endorsement of HR811, because I want to be sure that the wording of the Act doesn't cause more problems than it solves, but on the surface the steps look positive.

This is a fairly long treatment of the subject for a blog post, but is far from a complete one. First I will give some background on information systems and security, followed by some specific principles that affect electronic voting. I'll give what should be non-controversial, or at least apolitical, policy statements, and then combine all of that together to show what an acceptable voting system would look like.

Background

To see why the things the bill addresses are important, we need to explore the basics of information security, as it applies to electronic voting. My goal is to introduce the topic to people who understand voting from a political or legal perspective, or that of a citizen, but who may have very little exposure to the technology at issue.

Electronic voting is an information system, a collection of processes arranged to transform, transmit, or store data. Information systems should be robust. A robust system is one which operates correctly and efficiently under a wide range of conditions, even under conditions for which it was not specifically designed. In particular, a robust system resists attempts to make it operate incorrectly.

In the subfield of information security, several principles are acknowledged by experts to help achieve robust and "secure" operation. "Secure" is in quotes there because it must be defined for each system. It has been noted that security is an emotion(†), which is an attribute of people, not of systems, but the feeling of security is engendered by some practices and endangered by others, and those practices can usually be analyzed without regard to why a certain result is desirable. A secure system is one about which the designers, implementers, and users feel confidence in its protection of their assets, within acceptable margins of risk. As in any risk analysis, the likelihood of a particular attack or failure must be balanced against the value of a given asset. It is meaningless to label a system secure without specifying the expected level and type of risk, and the assets to be protected against those risks.

While there is no perfect system, there are practices and principles which lead to secure operation. We try to anticipate problems and design to eliminate, or at least mitigate them. I'm going to get to the voting part soon, I promise.

The Principles

The hallmarks of secure operation are generally recognizable by anyone familiar with the concepts:

1. Economy of Mechanism - this means to keep things simple. Simpler processes are easier to understand and generally more robust.
   
2. Fail Safe Design - Erroneous input should result in the least harmful action.
   
3. Open Design - The reliability of the system should not depend on keeping its workings hidden.
   
4. Complete Access Control (Mediation) - Access to assets should be allowed only to those authorized to access those assets.
   
5. Least Privilege - Access to assets should be given only as required.
   
6. Separation of Privilege - Access to assets should be based on multiple independent criteria.
   
7. Least Common Mechanism - Shared means of operations should be minimized.
   
8. Psychological Acceptability - If the perceived inconvenience associated with system safeguards is higher than the perceived value they allow, users will tend either to circumvent the safeguards or to bypass the system altogether, and use something less effective but more accessible.

There are some principles to bear in mind when creating correct, robust systems:

1. Input should be validated before it is used.
   
2. Efficiency: when possible, the resources (typically time and space) used by a process should not grow faster than the size of the input.
3. Special cases signal that a design can be improved.
4. Hope is the enemy of "is".
   

OK, Now the Voting Part

There are two fundamental resources in voting, the physical ballot and the information contained on the ballot, the votes. The ballot is important as a physical record of the intention of the voter, but the information on the ballot is far more important to the process. A ballot may contain several votes, one per contest (except for multiple-choice board races, ballot initiatives, etc.).

Voting must be done in secret, or maintaining confidentiality.

Voting must be done with assured information integrity, so that no one can alter data or exert influence over the process itself in order to alter the outcome.

Voting must work, or be available. It is unacceptable for voters to be delayed longer by process failure as they are waiting to vote than it takes them to cast their ballots. Preliminary results must be known soon after the polls close in the last polling place (e.g., Hawaii).

Counting all votes should be a feature of any system, but there are several ways in which votes could fail to be counted properly:

• Individual ballots could be mangled, rejected, or lost by the voter or by the system
• Blocs of ballots could be mangled, rejected, or lost by the system
• Individual or blocs of votes could be unused or used multiple times by the system

Let's take the general principles in order, produce some policy statements, and then wrap those policy statements into a high-level outline of a system.

1. Fail Safe Design - All legal votes should be counted. It should be difficult to present erroneous input. It should be impossible to make one ballot choice that is counted for another ballot choice. Input on one ballot choice should not affect other choices.
   
   
2. Complete Access Control - Only the voter should know what choices he made in the voting booth. The system should allow authorized voters to vote one time per election.
   
   
3. Least Privilege - Individuals should be given only the access to ballots their role requires. For instance, those counting votes do not need to know which election they are counting.
   
   
4. Separation of Privilege - Access to ballots, vote tallies, and control data should be based on multiple independent criteria.
   
   
5. Least Common Mechanism - Votes and ballots should be separated as soon as possible. That is, the transmission of votes must not rely on shipping physical ballots.
   
   
6. Economy of Mechanism - We should use the simplest system satisfying all of the requirements
   
   
7. Open Design - A standard for voting machines should be produced, so that a machine from any manufacturer could be put through exact, reproducible tests. Security should not be used to justify hiding the operation of the system. The overall system must be documented clearly and simply enough for anyone to understand.
   
   
8. Psychological Acceptability - The voting process should change as little as possible from the voter's perspective. The voting process should also be understandable to all voters, or at least should present no obstacle between the voter and voting. Safeguards should not appear to prospective legitimate voters to be more trouble than they are worth.
   

Now For The Tricky Part

With policy statements in hand, we can now see what sort of system would meet the requirements of those policies.

If voting is seen to be difficult because of the security measures, the measures will be worked around, or people will simply not vote.

Only those authorized to access ballots that have been cast should be able to do so. There really should not be an argument against this, but some have demagogued this issue saying that identification is an attempt to exclude poor or minority voters, or that it is psychologically unacceptable as a security measure. As long as the difficulty of obtaining identification for purposes of voting is low, and the identification of who voted does not show how they voted, vote suppression is a red herring.

As quickly as possible, the information on the ballot should be copied from the physical ballot, or a physical ballot ("paper trail") created from an electronic ballot, and if possible the voter should verify a correct copy. Both the physical ballot and the electronic ballot should be transmitted to their secure destinations, by separate means. In no case should the public Internet be used as a means of transmitting official ballots, because this introduces too much shared mechanism: an Internet denial of service would jeopardize voting availability.

While some would step away from anonymous ballots or even away from the secret ballot altogether, the problem of voter intimidation is still a bigger enemy of democracy than voter anonymity. That is, balanced against the ability for others to punish or reward a particular vote, the secret ballot allows the potential of multiple votes per voter or ineligible people voting. Non-secret voting does not completely cure these problems, and introduces many others, besides. The secret ballot follows the principle of Least Privilege: no one but the voter knows how he voted.

The source code (what the programmers edit) for a voting machine really should be available for everyone to see. But companies are wedded to the idea that keeping their code hidden gives them a business advantage, and we must rely on businesses to produce the machines, or rely on the government to make them, a truly intolerable situation. H.R.811 addresses these concerns by mandating that source code be given to election officials, but it is not clear whether citizens "inspecting" the source code would be allowed to do anything useful with it, or merely inspect it visually on paper. Inspecting the code without being able to execute it in a debugging environment is an unacceptable half measure.

The principle of Open Design does not require that the source code be revealed, however. While hiding the source code makes the attacker's job more difficult, it also lowers overall confidence in the system. If the attacker cannot force the system to behave in an unauthorized way even with the source code, the system can be assumed to be more secure than an equivalent system with hidden code. Hiding the source therefore should not be relied upon as a security measure. Companies who hide their source code should assume that the attackers have somehow obtained it, and design their countermeasures accordingly.

An electronic voting system should validate entries before a physical ballot is created, to catch the error early and allow for a good ballot to be taken. Processing two votes should take only twice as long as one vote takes. There should be no special handling required for the elderly or those for whom typical voting procedures are physically difficult: it should be easy for everyone.

The above can be accomplished in two basic ways, each of which has advantages and disadvantages:

1. Scanned Ballot: A voter fills out a human-readable form and drops it into a scanner. The scanning process can optionally allow the voter to confirm the ballot, or it can simply acknowledge that the ballot was read properly. The scanner tallies and transmits the votes.
2. Printed Ballot: The voter interacts with a machine to make his ballot choices. The machine prints out the ballot for the voter's inspection. The voter confirms his choices for the machine, and then drops the ballot into the ballot box. The machine tallies and transmits the votes.
   

In either case, Votes are tallied, batched, and the unofficial electronic results are transmitted automatically when the polls close. The physical ballots in the ballot box are counted when the polling places close, and the official results transmitted by a different means than the unofficial electronic ones were. The physical ballots are retained indefinitely, for recounts and academic analysis.

The Scanned Ballot method is simpler and more familiar to voters, and can be mimicked with a purely manual method and minimal communication infrastructure. The Printed Ballot method has better error detection and correction, and removes any doubt about what a ballot actually says, which is sometimes a problem in recounts.

In either case if there is a serious discrepancy between the official and unofficial results, an audit can be performed to uncover the problem, but the physical ballots should be considered authoritative unless there is sufficient evidence of tampering. By gathering and transmitting the unofficial and official results separately, errors (whether accidental or intentional) become very unlikely to affect the result of the election.

Thanks for reading. Those wanting to know more could do worse than to start with Bruce Schneier, who also blogs about squid on Fridays.

---

(†)I first heard that thought expressed at SANS'99 by a presenter from gnu.org, and I'm sorry I don't have a better cite than that.

Fun with find, sed and xargs

[See below for update 20070807]
Common tasks for Unix system administrators often require working with all of the files in a directory tree and selectively doing something with some of them: copying, deleting, renaming, or moving them, or simply getting a list of files matching certain characteristics.

Sometimes we want to do something from the Unix command line with files that have spaces in their names. Let's see what we can do with our friends find(1), sed(1), and xargs(1).

Find looks for entries in some directory matching its arguments, typically sending a list of them to the standard output. Sed is the Stream EDitor, and applies a series of commands to transform its input into its output. Xargs supplies its input to the command line of any program.

First, let's set up our little foobox:

$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir foo
$ touch 'foo/file with spaces'
$ touch 'foo/bar'
$ touch 'foo/another file with spaces'
$ ls -1 foo
another file with spaces
bar                  
file with spaces

Now lets's do a simple find:

/tmp $ find foo -type f 
foo/file with spaces
foo/bar
foo/another file with spaces

Now let's do something with those files. Let's just list them:

/tmp $ find foo -type f | xargs ls
foo/file: No such file or directory
spaces: No such file or directory
foo/another: No such file or directory
file: No such file or directory
with: No such file or directory
spaces: No such file or directory
foo/bar

What happened? Xargs delivered its input to the command line of ls(1), which interpreted the spaces in the filenames as new filenames. We need to escape the spaces inside the names for ls, but leave the spaces surrounding the filenames. That's just the sort of thing sed likes to do:

/tmp $ find foo -type f | sed 's, ,\\&,g'| xargs ls -ltr
-rw-r--r--   1 user group          0 May 11 12:12 foo/file with spaces
-rw-r--r--   1 user group          0 May 11 12:12 foo/bar
-rw-r--r--   1 user group          0 May 11 12:12 foo/another file with spaces

In the dorky sed command between the single quotes, the "s" means to substitute for the text matched by the pattern between the first and second delimiter the text between the second and third delimiters. I like to use commas as delimiters instead of slashes, though any character will do. Slashes often appear in path names, and by habitually using commas I avoid errors when I fail to escape the slashes.

The pattern, called a regular expression, in this case says to look for a space, and replace it with a backslash followed by the text we just found. This is sed-ese for "prepend a backlash".

A slightly more general approach is to wrap each filename with single quotes. You still run into a problem with filenames which have single quotes in them, but you shouldn't put quotes in filenames:

$ find foo -type f | sed -e "s,[^.],\'&," -e "s,\$,\',"

'foo/file with spaces'
'foo/bar'
'foo/another file with spaces'

$  find foo -type f | \
    sed -e "s,[^.],\'&," \
        -e "s,\$,\'," | \
    xargs ls

foo/another file with spaces
foo/file with spaces
foo/bar

Sharp reader Nic Ivy has noted a far simpler way to deal with spaces in filenames for find(1) and xargs(1), which also deals with other special characters like quotes and greater-than or less-than symbols:

$  find foo -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls

foo/another file with spaces
foo/file with spaces
foo/bar

From the Unixhelp xargs(1) man page:

 --null, -0
              Input items are terminated by a null  character  instead  of  by
              whitespace,  and the quotes and backslash are not special (every
              character is taken literally).  Disables the end of file string,
              which  is  treated  like  any other argument.  Useful when input
              items might contain white space, quote  marks,  or  backslashes.
              The  GNU  find  -print0  option produces input suitable for this
              mode.

Man pages courtesy UnixHelp.

Completeness

What do housewives, Marines, and graduate students have in common with bloggers?

Completeness is more than thoroughly doing a job, it's doing the job so well that you know, without looking, that every part of it is done. Completeness is examining and addressing the hidden and parts of a task and those which adjoin it in order to know that all visible and assigned parts of the task are completed.

US Marines learn "attention to detail" in boot camp, and then should practice it every moment of their lives thereafter. For the Marine, that means acquiring the habit of going beyond what is merely necessary, and covering the parts of the mission or duty that do not show, whether that means removing old residue before swabbing a deck or checking the closets and attic when clearing a building of hostile combatants.

Completeness is not just practicing a maneuver over and over again until everyone gets it right. That's proficiency. Completeness is knowing all of the roles that make up the mission, and being ready to take up the slack for a buddy who for whatever reason doesn't complete his part. To the Marine, completeness means looking for trouble before it finds him. That's why he joined in the first place.

For anyone who does household chores, completeness means moving all of the furniture to clean underneath it, so that there will be no surprises should a guest come calling, and no chance that pests or children will find dirt to put to the various uses they would put it.

For a graduate student, completeness means studying things that are tangential to his field, and becoming proficient or even expert at things in his field which have become commodity knowledge. For instance, a computer science doctoral conferee should:

• Have basic scientific literacy
• Understand basic electric wiring, and use it in his studies
  
• Have designed integrated circuits
• Have designed electronic circuits using commodity chips
• Assemble computers from commodity parts
• Install and secure a variety of operating systems
• Perform basic tasks using a variety of operating systems
• Program in a variety of languages, including machine code

That is completeness on one level. In addition, the doctoral student specializes in a tiny sub-area of his field, and must be aware of everything that impacts that sub-area. To do that, he needs to examine all of the areas which surround his specialty, by looking in obscure outdated conference proceedings,the current popular press, and everywhere in between. Only then can he be assured that he has studied his whole specialty and is contributing something new.

Completeness for the blogger means approaching an argument with precision and depth, rather than simply to convince the convinced. The importance of sound logic cannot be overstressed. Citing sources for every fact and attributing every quote is not enough; that is mere proficiency. Completeness means fact-checking all statements, and verifying the authority and authenticity of every source, and taking on the burden of proof for every assertion and unstated premise. By going beyond the visible to the hidden and adjoining places, the work is made stronger and less likely to fall apart in an embarrassing mess.

I believe I have now identified my basic failing.

The Ant-Free Dog Dish

My dog lives outside. During the winter, bugs ignore his food and pay attention to hibernation, or being an egg, or what have you. But come spring, the ants, flies, and various bugs find the dog food.

I bought a dog dish once that claimed to keep the ants out, but you had to place it just so, and it didn't keep the ants away.

But the principle on which it claimed to work is good: ants won't go very far in the wrong direction. We just have to make them think they're lost.

Parts: 1 dog dish 1 tin can, washed thoroughly 1 dowel (round piece of wood) about half the diameter of the can, about two inches (5 cm) longer than the can. 1 board or block of wood at least 1.5 inches (4cm) thick, and wider than the dog dish 2 nails Epoxy or silicon glue Tools: Power drill Hammer Pliers Leather Gloves Level A flat horizontal surface on which to place the project while the glue cures.

Steps:

1. Drill a hole about 1 inch deep into the center of one face of the block of wood just big enough to receive the dowel.
2. Put some glue into the bottom of the hole in the wood. Insert the dowel into the hole. Turn it over and pound one nail into the dowel rod through the block of wood. Turn it back over, so that the dowel is pointing up. Apply glue, if needed, to make a watertight seal between the dowel and the block.
   
3. Round in the rim of the can, leaving the open end of the can bigger than the diameter of your dowel by several times the length of your local ants.
4. Cover the top of the dowel with glue. Put some glue in the can, in center of the bottom (use the dowel as an applicator). Put the can on top of the dowel (insert the dowel into the can).
5. With the hammer and a nail, punch a hole in the center of the bottom of the can and into the center of the dowel. At this point, make sure the dowel is centered in the can, with an ant-proof air gap around the dowel.
   
6. Pound the nail in the rest of the way. You now have an Ant-Free Dog Dish Stand.
   
7. Place the dog dish upside down on the drying surface.
   
8. Apply glue liberally to the top of the can and the center of the bottom of the dog dish.
9. Invert the Ant-Free Dog Dish Stand on top of the upside down dish, and level the stand.
10. Allow glue to dry and cure.

The Ant-Free Dog Dish has the advantage of raising the food up to a more comfortable eating height for larger dogs, which are typically the ones living outside.

Options:

• To allow rainwater to drain out of the dog dish, drill one or more small holes into the bottom near the edge, where water tends to puddle
• Use a beer or soft drink can, (requires cutting the top off of the can)
• Use screws instead of nails
• Use a carriage bolt running from the center of the dish through the dowel to the bottom of the base, countersinking a nut into the base; in this case, you can use rubber gaskets instead of glue
  
• Paint the can and wooden parts
• Install feet on the wooden block, so ants don't make a colony under it
  
• Sprinkle borax on top of the base if you notice ants on it
• Coat the inside walls of the can with used motor oil and dust with borax, or stuff a dryer sheet inside
• Seek help -- you're starting to obsess
  

The ants haven't found my dog's food yet, but let me know how it goes.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Commercials

Have you seen the commercial with the guy who's trying to quit saying:

For me, it's more than a habit.

As if people need a patch to quit walking the dog or brushing their teeth a certain way.

Of course smoking is more than a habit. It's a drug addiction. Saying that it's more than a habit "for me" implies that for someone else, it's just a bad habit, like chewing with their mouth open.

Hero.

"She looked over at me and started screaming for help," VanKuren said. The woman also screamed "help" at two other people in the parking lot who looked at her and walked away.

VanKuren didn't.

(h/t MVRWC (bamapachyderm))

The Story Is:

"Wha? Na, see ossifer, I was just on my way to get my drivers license when dis odder guy here stuck his truck bed inta my lane."

(via Classical Values)

Fossil Find Raises Global Cooling Fears

The area around Illinois was once a tropical swamp, according to a new fossil find.

The climate was ever wet, hot, and humid," said Scott D. Elrick, geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS).

"The modern-day equivalent would be some of the peat swamps of Indonesia."

Could this mean the Earth is growing colder, and will soon be too cold to inhabit? Why can't the government do something? We've only got a few million years before The End.

Vista, IE, and the Bored Watchdog Problem

Windows Vista is pretty annoying, out of the box. But first, a word about Internet Explorer (IE).

Internet Explorer is suboptimal in design (and by that I mean: bad) because it is integrated into the operating system. Large chunks of code are shared by Windows and IE, which means that IE loads faster and is marginally faster in operation and 2) it violates the security principle we call "Least Common Mechanism".

Integrating IE into Windows means that when Windows is booting up (being loaded from disk into memory), it is also loading into memory much of the IE browser program. When the user clicks on the blue "e", the browser appears to load faster because much of it is preloaded. This incidentally makes IE look better compared to other browsers, so users tend to use it. Microsoft has to make money somehow.

By integrating with Windows, IE has a more direct path to get to operating system services, such as scrolling the page and reading from the network and the disk. Other programs have to contend with interface layers that the IE programmers can ignore, because it is optimized for use under Windows. There are other advantages, as well, but I don't know how much speed advantage any of this provides IE.

Least Common Mechanism means that in designing a system, it is desirable that shared means of operation between different parts of the system be minimized. I realize that's pretty jargony. In a car, for instance, if horn and the airbags are both on the same circuit, and the fuse for that circuit blows, not only can you not blow your horn to avoid the accident, but your airbags don't deploy.

A browser, being the program (apart from the virus removal tool) that gets used most in Windows, should be insulated from the operating system, so that failures in the browser do not crash the entire system.

Vista is designed to perform in a way that causes the Bored Watchdog Problem. Just as a watchdog tends to get used to cars passing in the street, too many popup windows asking for confirmation make the user tend to ignore such questions.

I predict a patch to turn off that feature.

Finally, IE (like most Microsoft software) may violate the principle of Open Design. Now, Windows geeks will go crazy if they read this, so I want to be very clear. The principle of Open Design is that the security of the system should not depend on keeping its mechanism secret. That doesn't mean that keeping the mechanism secret in and of itself makes for less security, but depending on hiding how it works does make for lower security.

No Swimming.

Violators will be prosecuted (posthumously, as needed).

Why Nuclear Physics is So Hard

I'm not a physicist, and barely remember the difference between protons and neutrons. Really. Probably it's the way they choose the names, having nothing to do with the physical properties of the elements, and not even sounding cool. I mean, Uranium, Plutonium, Titanium have cool names. Krypton -- cool name. "Carbon" is at least descriptive, deriving from the Latin for burning. I've always thought "Gold", "Iron", and "Lead" were onomatopoeic. And everyone knows that "Sodium" is Greek for "soda pop". Good names, all, and they don't sound phake and made up.

But "Hassium"? "Bohrium"? Not cool, not descriptive. These are vanity names, like getting your name in a phony star registry, or some weak license plate, except it goes in the encyclopedia. Yes, I know there's this tradition for naming the radioactive ones after people, but that kind of thing ought to be left to the entomologists, hadn't it? I mean, what if there's a disaster, and Jonesium kills a bunch of people and gives the rest weird cancers? How will ol' Doc Jones feel about his legacy then, hmm? Ok, how are his great grandkids going to take it? Better to be devoured by wasp larvae, I say. So clearly, we need better, less risky names for these elements.

Let's see, an element that sticks around for 30 seconds and then goes away. I believe I can come up with a few right here, even without some fancy-shmancy degree:

• Postite
  
• BlogTrollium
  
• Byjovewevedoneitohnowehaventium (or Heyyallcheckuhnevermindium)
  
• Anaviagrium
  
• Blinddatium
  

It's a wonder they don't put me in charge of much here at the gas station.

La-la-la-la...

That's the answer.

The question: What does the leftist blogosphere say about terrorism?

The furor over ABC's Path to 9/11 has surrounded a few scenes depicting various Clinton officials in a negative way. The horror! The disaster to civilization, should the Clinton administration get any bad press.

As a side note, I'd like to work in the phrase "sleeping around on duty" in reference to der schlickmeister, but I can't find a way to do it. Oh, I guess I just did, didn't I.

But the kerfuffle reminds me of nothing more than someone who doesn't want to hear a distasteful remark, and so puts hands to ears and says "La-la-la-la..." when the danger begins.

The real point of ABC's show is this: It's a war. Quit blaming each other, because we all have made mistakes in this war, most of us by underestimating our enemy. We all botched it. We deluded ourselves. We can no longer do that. It's a war, and the sooner we get over the silly idea that we should treat Islamic terrorism in the same way we treat ordinary criminal activity, the sooner we can start to win.

ABC/Disney is, like all major media organizations, staffed and run by liberals. And yet, they are serious enough people to know a real threat to civilization when they see it. They know that many liberals do not see Islamic terrorism as such a threat.

ABC apparently aimed their show at liberals, I presume with the intent to bring sanity to the far left's view. While the moonbats are reacting with denial, perhaps some others will understand the nature of our foe and what it will take to destroy it.

And the answer to destroying the enemies of civilization is not working oneself into a lather in the foolish attempt to prove the tautology that a docudrama contains inaccuracies.

Cure Poison Ivy

Calomine lotion is useless. However, while I am not a doctor, poison ivy rash is simple to cure:

• For best results, stay away from the stuff
  
• If you can't stay away from poison ivied areas, learn to recognize it, wear garments that cover any areas of skin that will be exposed to it, and if you suspect contact, wash clothes and wash skin with soap and water immediately.
  
• Carry a container of disposable baby-wipes, and wash hands immediately.
  

But if you catch the stuff, so it itches and you break out in the little pustules:

1. Wash with soap and water
   
2. Scour skin with alcohol until the pustules break
   
3. Continue scouring until you see blood where the pustules were; scrub some more with fresh alcohol until it really stings badly.
   
4. You are cured.
   

If you don't want to go the rubbing alcohol direction, spend several hours in and out of a chlorinated swimming pool or salt water. Do not apply UV protection to the affected areas beforehand.

Unions, Minimum Wage, and Immigration

Brothers and sisters, as many of you know, I am a proponent of open immigration. I don't like quotas, believing as I do in America as a sanctuary for the 'huddled masses, yearning to be free'. I am particularly loath to discuss immigration economic effects, since to me they are a necessary consequence of following our principles, while others are motivated by those effects into deigning to allow it. Also, I'm not an economist, having not even the learning to carry an economist's backpack. This, then, will be a rare quench for those thirsting from the drought of my opinion on these matters.

In the historically common phenomenon of labor unions supporting immigrant workers, a new low has been reached. This time the labor unions are not nobly engaged in pursuit of better working conditions or higher wages per se for their members. This time they're trying to obtain new members by creating new immigrants.

It has become clear that the labor unions are behind the recent protests by various immigrant groups across the country; equally clear is that their primary goal is citizenship for the illegal immigrants, as demonstrated in this fairly reasonable position paper from the United Food and Commercial Workers.

In cities across the country in recent weeks, rallied by Spanish-language media, the Democratic Party, and union ringleaders, legal and illegal immigrants shuffled down urban streets alongside the organizers and various leftoverist copycats to demand "immigration reform", which is apparently the newest euphemism for a mass amnesty.

They marched for dignity, with the full decorum of recess at a day-care center. As could be expected from prospective citizens eager join society, they patriotically waved Mexican flags and signs declaring the imminent return to Mexico not of themselves, as would befit the legal status of many of them, but of California and other areas in the Southwestern US. The Reconquista, they call it. Originally the term referred to the rechristianization of Spain and Portugal after Moorish occupation in the period between AD 718 and 1500. Mexican writers Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska saw a parallel with the growing Hispanic population in the U.S., and the term was picked up by radical elements who desired a Mexican California. Reconquista is supported by over 58% of Mexicans.

Like most other irredentist movements, it has somewhat less support in the target population, in this case those of us North of the border. This odd patriotism may partly explain the backlash against the first weekend of marches.

When union leaders and Democratic Party strategists learned that Americans were shocked and outraged by media images of what they were to assume were Mexican citizens carrying Mexican flags and showing disrespect for the American flag, they planned a response.

At the rallies on Monday of the next week, marchers had been told to leave their Mexican flags at home. Organizers reportedly had barrels full of American flags to hand out, and would collect the Mexican flags to keep them out of sight of the cameras. Of course, it wasn't long before a marcher literally wrapped himself in the American flag, wearing it as a garment, not realizing that he was again sending the wrong signal to those who understand flag etiquette.

So what is the point of citizenship for illegal immigrants? As citizens, they could join U.S. labor unions. Since union membership has been dropping, both as a percentage of the work force and in real terms since about 1980, unions have to add to their numbers or be marginalized as a political force. This is their chance.

For American citizen workers, the minimum wage and OSHA rules have obviated the need for a union. For most people, a union adds a layer of protection they don't need, and would artificially impede their progress toward bettering their own situation. What prospective union organizers attribute to fear of retribution is in reality more often simple reasoned self-interest.

I'd like to take a little side-trip and discuss the minimum wage and its analog, union wages. In both cases, a minimum wage is set to assure that anyone working (either in the union or in the entire workforce in the case of the minimum wage) is paid above a certain level. Both union wages and minimum wage have the effect of decreasing the number of workers an employer can hire. There are many people standing on Americas street corners because the minimum wage or a union minimum keeps them there.

A common syllogism broached by unionizers, minimum wage whiners, and the like, goes something like this:

• A. The pay scale for everyone has remained the same for a long time.
• B. Everyone needs a raise because of inflation and because we just deserve it.
• C. The pay scale must be raised for everyone!

Missing is the part where an individual moves up the pay scale from bottle washer to chief cook. In other words, the scale can stay the same forever if individuals ascend it.

Union wages also force the companies that employ union labor to limit the number of workers. Unions trade higher pay for members for the jobs of those unable to work alongside them.

While the Federal minimum wage [3] has been kept at $5.15 since 1997, state and local minima have been adjusted above that level. The city of Santa Fe, New Mexico has a local minimum wage of over $9. It seems appropriate to account for regional costs of living and job markets by allowing a State to effectively set its own minimum.

Back to our story. The labor unions know that they are obsolete. The functions they performed have been subsumed by the government. They have nothing to offer immigrants -- except citizenship, which will make the immigrants eligible for all the benefits offered to citizens. And the grateful immigrants would support the union, with its every-higher wage demands, until the day when they will be the Americans who won't do the jobs which some new group of immigrants will.

The phrase 'jobs Americans won't do' dresses up a glaring falsehood. It is not the case that there is a single job that Americans will not do -- given the proper compensation. What those using the phrase really mean is that there are employment situations Americans won't accept, and for those jobs we need to find someone who is more desperate for work. Unwilling to pay what the minimum and union wages have set as the scale, employers are reaching out across the border to those who in their desperation will work harder, and for less.
Is that not a direct consequence of the minimum wage and its union counterpart?

Since we appear to be stuck with this foolish minimum wage, let us at least keep the Federal minimum where it is, if it can't be lowered, and allow States to set their own minima.

Supporters of the minimum wage will no doubt label this entire post to be right-wing extremism. It is rather a simple recognition of the reality that if there is a minimum wage, there will always be jobs which disappear, or which employers are forced by simple economic necessity to give to the foreigner sojourning among us.

As I said, I'm all for immigration. I just want the people who come here to want to be Americans, not simply workers -- or a source of dues.

War in the Extranational Age

The Global War on Terror is not just a war against Usama bin Laden, al-Qa'ida, or anyone else. It's a war against an idea: the idea that one may use the threat of sabotage and fear against civilian targets to achieve a political advantage. That idea has no nation to call its own; the tools needed to fight it will at times have to ignore national boundaries and at others insist that those boundaries be observed.

Likewise, the Global War on Terror is not simply about 9/11. To say that it is would imply that the war is about petty vengeance, which would not justify the massive effort expended even thus far. It also is not merely about bringing those responsible to justice. It is for nothing less than survival, and yet it is for more than that. The Global War on Terror is an attempt to structure the shifting framework of geopolitics in a way that will allow civilization on our planet to continue.

The rise of satellite communications, the Internet, and the global economy are making changes that are fundamental to civilization. Just as city-states replaced tribes and clans, and nations replaced city-states, a new extranationalism has begun. People of all kinds, enabled by rapid international communication, are forming groups based on shared interests rather than geography or simple ethnicity.

We must recognize that across the world, loyalty to a nation is being overshadowed by loyalty to ideologies, and that the rapid growth of extranational movements may soon cause their power to rival that of geography-based government. At the same time, government is becoming more centralized and planetary. The centralization may include the intermediate step of continental coalitions, but absent some reversal in the march of technology, a single world government looks inevitable. The future appears to be a constant battle between geographical and special interest loyalties for the hearts and minds of the masses.

The world over, mobs enraged alternatively by religious and political demagogues storm the streets, demanding their way. Jihadist, socialists, and affectist posers scream and destroy in an attempt to gain by force of tantrum what they cannot by force of reason attain. Like petulant, undisciplined children demanding yet another piece of candy, these children in adult clothing surge forth insisting on their way.

Their movements take on a will that is distinct from the reason possessed by individuals, for that is the nature of mobs. Once set in motion, it will not alter its beliefs unless individuals, one by one, separate themselves from it by establishing their own identity or by identifying with another movement.

The jihadist movement will not stop until it encompasses the world. If given what it wants now, it will not be satisfied but will want more. It will kill us, our children, our friends, their children, and anyone else who will not merely tolerate but adopt its narrow religious viewpoint and become one with it. It enforces on its adherents the belief that it is not merely their right, but their sacred duty to rid the world of anyone and anything that opposes its ideology.

And the jidadist movement will, by definition, always believe that. The world is a real place, not the peaceful country herb garden in which some of us would like to spend our days, admiring each other's boldness in assigning ourselves blame. On our planet, men can convince themselves of all manner of things which seem right, but in the end lead to destruction.

The socialist movement, also, will not stop until it rules the world. If we give it what it wants now, it will not be satisfied but will want more. It does not seek necessarily to kill, but merely to enslave us, our children, our friends, their children, and anyone else. The economic Ponzi scheme that is socialism requires it.

And in that, we are not the same as they are. We do not wish to force them to accept our beliefs, except our ideal of tolerance. We do not ask that they change even their beliefs, only their actions. As Mr. Bush said, "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves -- safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life."

Given the foregoing as backdrop, the Global War on Terror can be seen as a first battle between nations and extranational interest groups. An analogous, but hopefully less violent conflict is looming between multinational (ie, extranational) corporations, labor movements, and the nation-states that serve respectively as customers and a source of members for them. Other movements, including environmentalism and more traditional ideologies such as political ideologies and religions will also play a role in weaving the fabric of future geopolitics as rapid communication continues to negate geography's advantage.

So how does one fight an enemy that has no physical face? How does one do battle with an idea? The method chosen by U.S. President George W. Bush is to use the ephemeral nature of the enemy against it. Since the members have to live somewhere, we use our common bond with the nation-state in which they reside as leverage. An extranational movement may not be rational, but a nation is more likely to be, at least by comparison. In that regard, our method of battling terror is not simply a case of seeing a nail because all we have is a hammer.

As Wikipedia puts it in comparing the American stance in the Cold War with the Bush policy on terrorism, "the previous policy of deterrence assumes that a potential enemy is a coherent and rational state that would not launch an attack that would likely result in its own destruction...."

The tenets of the Bush Doctrine:

• There is no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them
• The U.S. will engage in preemptive warfare to prevent terrorist attacks
• The U.S. will attempt to form alliances to fight terror, but will act unilaterally to defend its interests
• The U.S. will attempt to keep its military power sufficient to achieve these ends

Those who support terrorists with financing, technology, or in similar ways are complicit in their crimes. They must be stopped.

We hope that it isn't necessary to wipe out our enemies. We hope that it's only necessary to show them that terror has consequences, and that those consequences are a net negative for their cause. While ultimately the growth of rational and positive ideologies in extranational groups will be more effective, it is suicide not to fight the irrational and negative with whatever tools are available.

The time-honored principle in international relations is to show and tell a nation what it can and cannot do, or rather what it can expect if it tries, and then let its internal politics adjust. It can take decades, as with Germany in the past century.

Enforced national self interest is the model by which the world has operated, by and large, since before our nation was founded. The terrorist interest groups strain that model; in a transcendant stroke of genius, the Bush Doctrine brings it to bear.

The Tyrant

There is a Tyrant among us. He lurks, growing his support in our nation's capitol, in the halls of academia, and in corner diners and shopping malls.

He is waiting patiently for his chance to bypass the Constitution and rule by His Will alone.

Who is this Evil One I oppose, this charming despot who will turn this once great nation into His plaything?

You already know him. His name is in the news every day.

He beams with pride whenever you hear, "the polls show that the American people ...."

When I hear those words, I brace myself for what's coming next. When the press, politicians, or pundits preface a statement with what the polls show, it is almost always because they agree with the poll but can't justify their opinion with solid reasoning. Popular opinion stands as an irrefutable argument.

Polling numbers have become the new dogma, an authority which cannot be questioned without opening oneself to the charge of autocracy. "What, you don't care what the people think?"

It may come as a shock, but the majority is not always right. No, I'm not so naive as to think the pollsters and their addicts really care what their polls say, because for the most part polls are designed to return a desired answer.

But popular opinion, if it can be guaged correctly, is as fickle as March weather. That is why our Constitution lays out layer after layer buffering the will of the majority from holding sway.

• We elect a Congress to argue amongst each other, and not just one house but two. Senators, whose task is to "deliberate" (ie, drag their feet), have six years to let their constituents get over an unpopular action.
  
  
• We don't elect an executive directly, but instead our States do. That's partly to keep small, populous urban areas from ruling over the vast countryside.
  
  
• Nowhere in the Constitution is a referendum prescribed.
  
  

And yet our politicians govern by polls. Our press and pundits love to use a poll as a handy club. Leave aside your opinion of the war on terror, the Iraqi part in it, and take, for instance, Tim Russert on NBC's Meet The Press (Sunday, March 19, 2006). General George Casey, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, had just finished explaining that troop levels would continue a gradual decrease while the Iraqis continue to take on more and more responsibility for their own defense.

Showing polling numbers showing Americans thinking troop levels are too high and believing that we have little likelihood of eventual success, Russert asked General Casey, "Can you continue to conduct a war without the support of the American people?" The question, disingenous though it was, carried with it the weight of alleged popular opinion.

There are those who label incorrectly the "tyranny of the majority" any action by the majority which the minority doesn't support. That is mere self-serving hyperbole, however, meant to deny the duly elected majority its just authority to rule.

Tyranny is the mob in the street calling for the right to work badly or demanding that everyone adopt the mob's dogma or forfeit life or limb.

As John Stuart Mill wrote:

Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. -- On Liberty

The answer to Russert's question, by the way, is that yes, General Casey can continue the war without popular approval. He is not beholden to the Tyrant; his charge comes through the chain of command from the President, the Commander in Chief.

And I am made glad that we live in a republic and not a democracy, that we are governed by those we deem wise and not by our own whims. I am glad that our forebears knew not to construct a nation to be ruled by topical referenda.

For the Tyrant, of course, is us.

Decision-making made easy

Well, sort of.

A complex decision is a whole bunch of trade-offs, profit-and-loss variables. Each variable has a probability associated with it, and they can cascade together. I use a system of "expected value" summations, and it works pretty well.

For instance, in buying a car there is the price (and the 100% likelihood that you'll have to pay it), a set of features, and a set of unknown costs (maintenance), and a set of emotional value points (prestige, convenience, dependability). Each of the costs has a probability that you'll incur it, and each of the values has a probability that you'll receive it. Some of them are related, and may need to be refactored to make the math work out for you.

You multiply each of the costs and outcomes (positive and negative) with their value to you (on some scale of your choosing) and their probability of occurring, and sum them all up. That choice gets a score.

Compare the score from all of the other choices you could make, and your decision is made.

The nice thing about this system is that by breaking down the fuzzy-factor "value" for each outcome and pairing it with a probability, you see the real cost for each while simultaneously hiding the answer from yourself. Subconciously you will tend to favor the choice you want to make, but be careful that you don't fudge the probabilities.

As a simple example, consider recreational sky-diving. The value you get from jumping -- a rush, some prestige, and maybe some sex out of it somehow -- compares with a (call it) 99% probability of landing safely and a (call it) 1% probability of landing with a splat.

For me, I assign a pretty high value to keeping my skin intact. How much would I pay someone not to flatten my skull?

stay on ground = free + 0 (death from falling) + 0 (fun)
= 0
skydiving = -$50 +

.01 (death from falling) + .99 (fun)
= -$50 - 1/100 (very big number) + .99 (small number)
= (probably something negative, and I have to pay 50 bucks).

As a side note, you can see that the resultant costs of a decision and the cost to make it happen are just two labels for the same thing. That is, whether something is a cost or benefit is just the sign on the term.

I know my rights

Do you?

I've been thinking lately about human rights. You know, the kind for which men died at Normandy, at Lexington, and Golgotha.

That kind which stem not from the lifestyle to which you are accustomed, not from your power to secure them, nor from government largesse, but those which you have by virtue of your existence.

Warning: I have made no effort to keep the following suitable for the small-minded in general nor for Hate Crimes Commissioners in particular. Others may read freely on...

...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....

Those familiar words are the milk on which young American minds are weaned away from innocence and into the stark world of defiant individualism. They tell us that there are universal truths, and that these truths are laid manifestly before the eyes of anyone who looks upon the human condition.

Government, it is revealed, exists to keep men from violating each other's rights.

But what are these rights? The Declaration decries violations sufficient to motivate revolt, and the Constitution, as amended, gives some more examples that are explicitly protected. But the writers of those documents seemed to deny steadfastly the urge to make a complete list. I believe they were wise in that denial, which has compelled each generation thereafter to lay claim to those which were not enumerated and by so doing to revalidate those which were.

Rather than attempt an exhaustive list myself, I will attempt only those which are axiomatic. That is, which rights are the truly fundamental ones, without which the people are enslaved to tyrants?

It seems to me that the Declaration's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are categories of rights, rather than particular rights themselves. These categories are merely for convenience. The rights reinforce each other, each standing in the stead of the others when the wall of their protection is breeched. All people everywhere, unless they yield them by due process or temporary emergency, have the right to:

Life ...

• to stay alive
• to eat and drink
• to breath air, and see the sky
• to parental supply of food, shelter, and love
  
• to practice their beliefs
• to choose their own medical treatment
  
• to mate and procreate
• to raise children
• to privacy

Liberty ...

• to travel
• to use weapons
• to participate in government
• to due process
• to equal treatment under the law
  
• to speak and write, and to disseminate the results

and the Pursuit of Happiness

• to choose and direct their education, vocation, and avocations
• to own and use property
• to take risks
  
• to assemble

People have the right to stay alive, from the moment of conception to the moment they cease to function. Minor children have a right to nurture from their parents, or in absence of parents, from the nearest adult. Parents have a corresponding right to direct their children's upbringing and instruction in the ways of the world.

Clean, breathable air is everyone's right. So is dirtying it with smoke and other pollutants, to a certain extent. I'm not smart enough to say how to balance those.

Assembly can be a powerful tool in the constant battle against overbearing government. Without Assembly, Speech loses much of its salinity and Belief may as well be lost. I still place Assembly under Pursuit of Happiness, because it is not just political, but social and recreational as well.

The right to privacy is the essence of a limited government, for if government can inspect us to any degree it desires then we are in its power to that same degree. We are only as free as we are private.

Similarly, the right to travel is as fundamental as the others. If we are not free to go, then we are not free. Without a right to travel, we can't Assemble, and we can't Pursue Happiness.

I'll conclude with one observation which I hope will serve to illustrate fully the point of the interdependence of the rights. The freedoms of Speech and Press are one side of a coin that has as its opposite face the right to own and use weapons. They are the Pen to its Sword; if government removes one, it will surely pay with the other.