Third GOP Debate

I watched the third GOP debate. Meh.

Let’s have some fun taking down Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is wrong about inflation. It’s easy to rip apart Ted Cruz’s tax plan as unsound. And his best moment of the Republican debate was also completely wrong:

Cruz’s attack on the moderators was smart politics — but it was almost precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks — but that’s because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.

The Republican primary has thus far been a festival of outlandish policy. The candidates seem to be competing to craft the tax plan that gives the largest tax cut to the rich while blowing the biggest hole in the deficit (a competition that, as of tonight, Ted Cruz appears to be winning). And the problem is when you ask about those plans, simply stating the facts of the policies sounds like you’re leveling a devastating attack.

The article (and others) then goes through specifics. I think Kasich sounds the most reasonable, but no Republican is listening to him. It looks like everyone is saying it’s going to be Marco Rubio vs. Ted Cruz.

Catherine Rampell argues, The Republicans are right. We in the media do suck. “We in the media suck because we have rewarded their rampant dishonesty and buffoonery with nonstop news coverage. Which, of course, has encouraged more dishonesty and buffoonery.”

“In the end, the biggest applause lines were all media insults. They came from Rubio, Ted Cruz and Christie. Guess whom CNBC then crowned the winners of the debate? Rubio, Cruz and Christie.”

Nate Silver argues both sides in Maybe Republicans Really Are In Disarray refering to both the whole party and the state of nomination process.

Enceladus, Saturn's Amazing Snowball Moon - The Atlantic

In Focus shows us Enceladus, Saturn’s Amazing Snowball Moon “Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus (504 kilometers or 313 miles across), is the subject of much scrutiny, in large part due to its spectacular active geysers and the likelihood of a subsurface ocean of liquid water. NASA’s Cassini orbiter has studied Enceladus, along with the rest of the Saturnian system, since entering orbit in 2004. Studying the composition of the ocean within is made easier by the constant eruptions of plumes from the surface, and on October 28, Cassini will be making its deepest-ever dive through the ocean spray from Enceladus—passing within a mere 30 miles of the icy surface. Collected here are some of the most powerful and revealing images of Enceladus made by Cassini over the past decade, with more to follow from this final close flyby as they arrive.”

I didn’t realize that Cassini flew through the plums. The NY Times reported, Cassini Seeks Insights to Life in Plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s Icy Moon.

Discovering life was not on the agenda when Cassini was designed and launched two decades ago. Its instruments can’t capture microbes or detect life, but in a couple of dozen passes through the plumes of Enceladus, it has detected various molecules associated with life: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, molecular nitrogen, propane, acetylene, formaldehyde and traces of ammonia.

Wednesday’s dive was the deepest Cassini will make through the plumes, only 30 miles above the icy surface. Scientists are especially interested in measuring the amount of hydrogen gas in the plume, which would tell them how much energy and heat are being generated by chemical reactions in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the moon’s ocean.

The One Thing That Makes SUPERGIRL Better Than MAN OF STEEL

Devin Faraci describes in Birth. Movies. Death., The One Thing That Makes SUPERGIRL Better Than MAN OF STEEL “There’s one thing that Supergirl gets right that Man of Steel completely whiffed, and while it’s a small thing it is, in a very real sense, the only thing that matters. In Supergirl Kara Zor-El wants to be a hero.”

And I agreed, but thinking about it a little more clarified something else for me. First off I didn’t like Man of Steel. Parts were ok but it definitely got Superman wrong and it didn’t need to be dark. The line that clinched it for me was Pa Kent telling Clark that perhaps he should have let a school bus crash (was it over a bridge) and let all of his friends die. Sorry that’s not Superman or Pa Kent.

Usually I hear that the difference between Superman and Batman is that Superman is a “boy scout” and that this is a trait that makes the character boring. I have to agree that there aren’t a lot of great Superman stories, particularly compared to Batman, but it doesn’t have to make the character boring. The 1978 film certainly wasn’t.

But what this article got me to realize is that Superman the character wants to save people. That may be a definition of hero, but it’s a different one from Batman. Batman (certainly recent incarnations of him) wants to stop criminals. Phrased as “saving people” it really describes what’s wrong with Superman in Man of Steel, because he doesn’t do that. He’s dragged into the hero role because of Zod and destroys a city and kills his adversary. None of this was about saving people (or even wanting to stop criminals, rather he was drafted into it).

The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules, Pt. 3

I’ll be out tonight seeing The Assassin as part of IFFBoston Fall Focus at the Brattle, so I’m recording the debate and we’ll see if I can stomach watching them. Matt Taibbi has published The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules, Pt. 3.

Sen. Marco Rubio Should Resign While Running for President

The Sun Sentinel of south Florida wrote an editorial on the age old problem of presidential candidates neglecting their current offices, Sen. Marco Rubio should resign, not rip us off. I thought this made a good point in Rubio’s case:

True, it’s not easy to raise money and run a presidential campaign while doing your day job. But two other candidates — Sens. Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders — have missed only 10 Senate votes during their campaigns for the White House. You, on the other hand, have missed 59, according to a tally by Politico. This includes votes on the Keystone pipeline, the Export-Import Bank and trade, to name just a few.

It is unpersuasive — and incredible, really — that you say your vote doesn’t matter. ‘Voting is not the most important part of the job,’ you told CNN.

And it is unconscionable that when it comes to intelligence matters, including briefings on the Iran nuclear deal, you said, ‘we have a staffer that’s assigned to intelligence who gets constant briefings.’

And you want us to take you seriously as a presidential candidate?

Two weeks ago, you took to the Senate floor to excoriate federal workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to do their jobs. You said, ‘there is really no other job in the country where if you don’t do your job, you don’t get fired.’

With the exception of your job, right?"

Teal Pumpkin Project

A friend mentioned this to me, I hadn’t heard of it. The Teal Pumpkin Project “Launched as a national campaign by Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE) in 2014, the Teal Pumpkin Project raises awareness of food allergies and promotes inclusion of all trick-or-treaters throughout the Halloween season.”

They seem to be pushing the allergy angle but a friend mentioned it in terms of diabetic kids that can’t eat candy. You can paint a pumpkin teal or just print out a sign but they also have a map you can register on so others in the neighborhood can find your house. They have ideas for non-food treats you can give out. Nice idea.

Solar System Model To Scale

Every Solar System Image You’ve Ever Seen is Wrong. Till Now. “Two wonderful filmmakers, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh, figured out what’s wrong with every image of the solar system we’ve ever seen. In every one, they say, space gets cheated. Planets get exaggerated. And in their short film To Scale: The Solar System, they fix that. What they do is build our solar system with the heavenly bodies true to scale, which means the sun, Mercury, Venus, and, all the way out, Neptune (sorry, Pluto) are crazily small. Space, meantime, gets back its vastness. As you see here, their Earth is a little marble.”

100 years of tax brackets, in one chart - Vox

Vox has a clever chart, 100 years of tax brackets, in one chart. I would not have thought of the format. It’s interactive on the site and clearly shows the number of brackets and where they kick in, though not so much rates.

13 Spectacular Moments From Hillary Clinton's Marathon Benghazi Hearing

ThinkProgress gives a pretty good summary of the uselessness of yesterday’s hearing, 13 Spectacular Moments From Hillary Clinton’s Marathon Benghazi Hearing.

New Font Lets Anyone Learn Japanese

This is very clever. Amazing it hadn’t been thought of before.

New font lets anyone learn Japanese “A U.K. company named Johnson Banks has come with an ingenious way to include English pronunciation in Japanese katakana characters. The company has dubbed this new font cleverly as ‘Phonetikana,’ where each katakana character featured a few English letters to help English speakers say the word properly.”

Note that Kanji is stolen from the Chinese and a glyph is basically a word. But Katakana is also commonly used in Japan and is an alphabet. Hiragana is another alphabet they use typically for foreign (non-Japanese) words. We English speakers have it easy with just one alphabet. I found once I saw Katakana I could better pronounce Japanese transliteration because I realized they have the five vowels and then all the other letters are a combination of a consonant and a vowel (e.g., ka, ki, ku, ke, ko). So when you have a word like Katakana it become obvious that it’s pronounced: ka-ta-ka-na or sumimasen is su-mi-ma-sen.

Exxon's Climate Lie

The Guardian reports Exxon’s climate lie: ‘No corporation has ever done anything this big or bad’ “In the last three weeks, two separate teams of journalists — the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters at the website Inside Climate News and another crew composed of Los Angeles Times veterans and up-and-comers at the Columbia Journalism School — have begun publishing the results of a pair of independent investigations into ExxonMobil. Though they draw on completely different archives, leaked documents, and interviews with ex-employees, they reach the same damning conclusion: Exxon knew all that there was to know about climate change decades ago, and instead of alerting the rest of us denied the science and obstructed the politics of global warming.”

Instead, knowingly, they helped organise the most consequential lie in human history, and kept that lie going past the point where we can protect the poles, prevent the acidification of the oceans, or slow sea level rise enough to save the most vulnerable regions and cultures. Businesses misbehave all the time, but VW is the flea to Exxon’s elephant. No corporation has ever done anything this big and this bad.

ThinkProgress reports, Exxon’s Climate Cover-Up Should Be Investigated By DOJ. “Sharon Eubanks [A former U.S. Department of Justice attorney who prosecuted and won the massive racketeering case against Big Tobacco], who now works for the firm Bordas & Bordas, told ThinkProgress that ExxonMobil and other members of the fossil fuel industry could be held liable for violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) if it’s discovered that the companies worked together to suppress knowledge about the reality of human-caused climate change. She said that, considering recent revelations regarding ExxonMobil, the DOJ should consider launching an investigation into big fossil fuel companies.”

Meanwhile some economists looked at Climate Change and Economic Production by Country

When you look at it this way, ExxonMobil’s lie could be the most consequential one in history.

Update: At least, Poll Finds Fewer Americans Than Ever Doubt Climate Change Is Happening.

Teen Who Hacked CIA Director's Email Tells How He Did It

Wired writes Teen Who Hacked CIA Director's Email Tells How He Did It. As are many hacks now, it's less an issue of breaking of code and more social hacking of the companies offering you services.

He says they first did a reverse lookup of Brennan’s mobile phone number to discover that he was a Verizon customer. Then one of them posed as a Verizon technician and called the company asking for details about Brennan’s account.

‘[W]e told them we work for Verizon and we have a customer on scheduled callback,’ he told WIRED. The caller told Verizon that he was unable to access Verizon’s customer database on his own because ‘our tools were down.’

After providing the Verizon employee with a fabricated employee Vcode—a unique code the he says Verizon assigns employees—they got the information they were seeking. This included Brennan’s account number, his four-digit PIN, the backup mobile number on the account, Brennan’s AOL email address and the last four digits on his bank card.

‘[A]fter getting that info, we called AOL and said we were locked out of our AOL account,’ he said. ‘They asked security questions like the last 4 on [the bank] card and we got that from Verizon so we told them that and they reset the password.’ AOL also asked for the name and phone number associated with the account, all of which the hackers had obtained from Verizon.

On October 12, they gained access to Brennan’s email account, where they read several dozen emails, some of them that Brennan had forwarded from his government work address and that contained attachments. The hacker provided WIRED with both Brenann’s AOL address and the White House work address used to forward email to that account."

2 economists imagined a financial crisis without stimulus or bailouts. It’s … ugly.

Vox wrote 2 economists imagined a financial crisis without stimulus or bailouts. It’s … ugly.

"So Blinder and Zandi used the Moody's model to simulate how the economy would've looked if no special measures had been taken in the wake of the financial crisis and recession. They assume that the government's 'automatic stabilizers' — programs like food stamps and progressive taxes that help people more when the economy's suffering — took effect, and that the Federal Reserve took interest rates down to zero. They then compared the economy in that counterfactual to the actual history.

• The recession would have lasted twice as long.
• The economy would have shrunk by nearly 14 percent, not 4 percent.
• Unemployment would have peaked at nearly 16 percent, not 10 percent.
• More than 17 million jobs would have been lost, around twice the actual number.
• In 2015, there would still be 3.6 million fewer jobs and 7.6 percent unemployment.

They did better than that, though. They also modeled the contribution of each individual policy:

• The 2009 stimulus package cut unemployment by 1.4 points and increased GDP by 3.3 percent in 2010.
• The Fed's quantitative easing added 1.1 percent to GDP and cut unemployment by 0.6 points in 2012.
• The bank bailouts — specifically the TARP program and the Fed's 'stress tests' — cut unemployment in 2011 by 2.2 points and increased GDP by 4.2 percent.
• The auto bailout cut unemployment by 0.4 points and increased GDP by 1 percent in 2010."

Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble.

Matthew Yglesias writes in Vox Democrats are in denial. Their party is actually in deep trouble. It's mostly about how badly Dems are doing in state offices and how that has a ripple effect into Congress.

Ed Kilgore refutes some of it, Are Democrats Complacent Going Into 2016?

I have no idea how Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chair. I know Howard Dean promoted a 50 state solution.

Fall Is in the Air

In Focus, with some more amazing photos:

Fall Is in the Air, Part II "One last overview of autumn, my favorite season. Across the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures are dropping, harvests are in motion, festivals are being held to celebrate the change of season, animals are returning to their winter grounds, and of course, viewers are enjoying the explosion of colors among the leaves. Collected here are some more images (including a few of my own I’ve snuck in) from this year’s autumn. (See also, Fall Is in the Air, Part I.)"

Media attention to Trump, Kim Davis, Ann Coulter: Should we ignore outrageous candidates?

Dahlia Lithwick wrote Media attention to Trump, Kim Davis, Ann Coulter: Should we ignore outrageous candidates? "‘Stop posting about Kim Davis! You’re just encouraging her!’ ‘Why are you writing about Donald Trump at all? He feeds on this!’ The shark cat on the Roomba starts to look like the only permissible social commentary."

Her argument is:

My objection was that if we—as consumers and producers and purveyors of news—decide that we will simply ignore the existence and arguments of every pundit, candidate, or religious dissenter to whom we object, it doesn’t in fact make them go away. It simply takes us out of the conversation. If I made it a policy to never post on Facebook or write articles about hugely popular public figures or movements simply because I don’t want to make them look more serious, or make their crazy worldview look legitimate, I would be elevating what we call “epistemic closure” to DEFCON 4.

This is precisely why we have a liberal media and a conservative media that cannot agree on even demonstrable facts. Because ignoring the other side is a legitimate form of political discourse.

While she has a point, I think she's missing something. It's possible to talk about the issues, even the issues that these attention seeking trolls bring up, without talking about the trolls themselves. It's possible to do a story about immigration without mentioning Trump.

It's also the case that it's possible to cover people like Kim Davis without being all-consuming about it. She'll have her 15 mins but, does every journalist have to cover her around the clock for two weeks? Does the top 20 minutes of every hour of cable news have to be devoted to her? Lithwick writes infrequently, maybe she could skip every other media circus or only write about a third of them. As she said, ignoring Ann Coulter works. Maybe the "absurd" media would serve us better by at least doing more ignoring.

FCC's Proposed Wi-Fi Rules Are Crap

Internet Inventor Vint Cerf Thinks the FCC's Proposed Wi-Fi Rules Are Crap

In order to prevent those kinds of modifications., the FCC’s proposals would limit the extent to which users can mess with the software on their routers, including preventing loading popular third-party firmwares like DD-WRT. Naturally, privacy-minded home tinkerers around the world freaked out.

Yes, that would be crap. This is much better:

In an open letter filed with the FCC today, the group has put forwards an alternative framework for how routers would be regulated, with a focus on security and openness. Their rules would require router manufacturers to post source code online, update it against security flaws frequently, and face tough FCC sanctions if they failed to comply.

US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital

A few weeks ago, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner bombed the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Seriously, as I wrote, US Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan. It's still a controversy and I agree with Doctors Without Borders that an investigation by a third party is needed, as the US's story keeps changing.

Today, the AP reported US analysts knew Afghan site was hospital "American special operations analysts were gathering intelligence on an Afghan hospital days before it was destroyed by a U.S. military attack because they believed it was being used by a Pakistani operative to coordinate Taliban activity, The Associated Press has learned."

Combine this with todays reported leak on the drone program by The Intercept and things don't look good for Obama.

Venn diagram of the very different debates Republicans and Democrats are having

WonkBlog posted A handy Venn diagram of the very different debates Republicans and Democrats are having that I really liked.

How a Health-Care Reporter Shops For Health Insurance

Sarah Cliff explains, I’m a health-care reporter. Here’s how I shop for health insurance.. Yeah, the process sucks and "it's impossible to predict your medical costs" but she has some tips.

She also wrote, This study is forcing economists to rethink high-deductible health insurance.

In 2006, about one in 10 employees had a health insurance deductible over $1,000. Today? About half do. To health economists, this sounded like good news; they've long theorized that higher deductibles would force down health-care costs. The idea was that higher deductibles would make patients become smarter shoppers: If they had to pay more of the cost, they'd likely choose something closer to the $1,529 appendectomy than the $186,955 appendectomy (yes, some hospitals really do charge that much). This would push the really expensive doctors to lower their prices so cheaper physicians didn't steal their business. This was, however, just a theory. And a massive new study suggests it might have been all wrong.

When I read this I first thought, "of course, no one can tell you the price of healthcare when you have to choose, you just get an incomprehensible bill a month later. Ask a doctor what something costs, they have no idea. Mine couldn't even tell me the room number of the x-ray suite they were sending me to in the same building. Apparently, "This study tried giving workers both the tools to compare costs and a financial incentive to go with the less expensive option." I wonder how good those tools were. I always comment to healthcare professionals how I'm a software person and I'm amazed at how crappy their systems are. That at this point, everyone has seen Google and Amazon and know that systems could be simpler and yet they all have to put up with crazy complex systems that never seem to work.

The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy

The Atlantic writes about The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy. "Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look."

Kepler is a space telescope, looking at the same patch of the sky over time. The idea is to track the strength of the light coming from 145,000 stars. If they dim, on a regular basis, it's probable that planets are passing in front of the star (aka transiting the star). It's our main source of new exoplanet discoveries. The longer it looks the better the chance of spotting planets with larger orbits.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching. The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation.

The article points to a paper, here's the abstract:

Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level. The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 days. We characterize the object with high-resolution spectroscopy, spectral energy distribution fitting, and Fourier analyses of the Kepler light curve. We determine that KIC 8462852 is a main-sequence F3 V/IV star, with a rotation period ∼ 0.88 d, that exhibits no significant IR excess. In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the mysterious events in the Kepler light curve, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand. By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event. We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system.

So, okay, comets. The article then says:

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. “When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

So sure, maybe. Regardless, I expect to see lots of BuzzFeed like articles saying we've discovered an ancient alien civilization. Nope, just one crazy hypothesis that might fit the data. Obviously more research is being done (because that's what scientists do) and we'll find out more in a few years. Until then, don't believe we've discovered aliens building a Dyson Sphere.

Mossberg: The Real Trouble With Web Ads

Walt Mossberg describes The real trouble with web ads

I agree with all of this, but I think there's another reason users might want an easy way to expunge browser ads: They represent both an unwanted intrusion and a broken promise. They are, in effect, a form of spyware, scooping up information about what people do online without their knowledge and permission, supposedly in return for useful, personalized ads.

The trouble is twofold: users can't easily opt out of the spying and tracking that goes along with these ads, even if they don't mind ads themselves. And the promised personalization of ads is, at best, crude, and often useless — except in search-results pages, which provide immediate context.

In my experience, this bargain — give us your personal information and we'll give you really useful ads, tailored to you — has simply never materialized, going back to its earliest days on desktops.

The answer is for the ad industry to reform itself, so people don't turn to ad blockers. Ads need to be less intrusive, less burdensome, and smarter. Tracking needs to be more transparent, and more under the user's control. And this reform should start now, when ad blockers are still used by a small minority of users.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

How is NSA breaking so much crypto? "Based on the evidence we have, we can’t prove for certain that NSA is doing this. However, our proposed Diffie-Hellman break fits the known technical details about their large-scale decryption capabilities better than any competing explanation."

For the nerds in the audience, here’s what’s wrong: If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to ‘crack’ a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime.

Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous. Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

Update: Bruce Schneier's comments.

What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

The New York Times writes What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

When Seymour Hersh wrote his article in May there was much debate as to the validity and I figured I'd let things settle before diving in too much. This seems a reasonable attempt to followup and dive in on some of the details. As it says:

Where does the official bin Laden story stand now? For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state, floating somewhere between fact and mythology. The writing of history is a process, and this story still seems to have a long way to go before the government’s narrative can be accepted as true, or rejected as false.

It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; it’s that we don’t know it. And we can’t necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.’s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don’t know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011.

The Drone Papers

The Intercept has a series of articles, The Drone Papers, describing the US Drone program. "The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars." I've just skimmed it so far but it's fascinating and damning.