Group photo of the candidates

Thanks to Jere. Priceless.

Want your vote to count twice?

I'm impatient about.... idiots.

“While well-intentioned, this type of exercise may only drive fear for the voting public,” said a spokesman for a company that makes voting machines.

What was she speaking about? Why, it's a successful effort to hack into voting machines, as reported by MSNBC.

By security experts? No, by undergraduates in a course.

At MIT or Caltech? No, at Rice.

One of the groups not only hacked in, they hid their hack so well that it survived two audits. Punch line: the same company spokeswoman then had the b@lls to comment that there's never been evidence of such fraud.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. (A tip of the Hatlow hat to our friend who calls himself The Hat.)

Caption contest

You know what to do: click the Comments link below.

(A tip of the hat to cousin Bob & Louise.)

Another Bill Buckley ex-columnist on Palin

David Brooks, former columnist for William Buckley's National Review, and the "house conservative" columnist at the New York Times, speaking at the big shindig in New York last week introducing the new layout of Atlantic:



You might be interested in the whole write-up over on Huffington Post, in which he also recounts an interview he had with Obama. One excerpt:

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

Please note something: the headline on that Huffington post is inflammatory, even though it's a direct quote from Brooks. I'm intentionally not posting that here, because as I've said to some of you, I think we'll all be better off if we focus on exchanging ideas, not being inflammatory. Let it start here.

Sign of the times

Buckley: "Sorry, Dad, I'm voting for Obama"

The son of William F. Buckley has decided to vote for a Democrat

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama

Best election status tracking site

Tonight's news once again reported the nationwide poll results for Obama vs. McCain, which is the most useless thing you could possibly track. What are these people thinking? The only thing that matters on election day is state by state.

So I googled "obama mccain poll results" and found what seems to be by far the most useful site I've seen, named, appropriately enough, Real Clear Politics.

Intelligently, their navigation list on the left shows a list of the battleground states. Clicking one produces a list of recent poll results, like many sites. But unlike many, it also shows the blue/red trend. Here's my state. The red-blue chart shows the individual candidates' numbers; the graph below that shows the point spread as it waxes and wanes. (Click image to enlarge.)



The site also has a "RealClearPolitics Map" which shows the current status of all the states that are solidly in or leaning toward one camp, or tossup. Remember, judgments about what's a tossup and what's not are highly subjective.

Intergalactic quartet

Lifted from the Wired blog.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "classless society." Completely classless.

Introducing my new self - today and 9 years ago

I decided to use a different Blogger identity for this blog: ImPatient Dave. Here's my first post.

I added a new, better kind of subscription over there on the right. I had some problems on the other blog's email list - replies would unintentionally go back out to the whole list. This one should work better.

For this account's photo, I even dug out a photo from 12/31/99, Millennium Eve in Provincetown, a few weeks after I'd proposed to Ginny. Here are a few pictures from that evening:

First, my new profile picture: A peaceful, happy looking boy - hm, doesn't look very impatient!

With the lady herself - with dark hair!

And with the sister, happy and playful as always:

Life is good.

btw, one thing Ginny brought into my life is her hairdresser in Provincetown, who at the time was also a genuinely fabulous impersonator of famous songstresses. That weekend was one of his last performances before retiring from show biz. Here are some snapshots of the show - these are all one guy!

Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt

I've long been impatient with people who assert that our chief problem is too much government regulation, and this is a perfect example of why.

Friday's Times has a long, meaty article detailing how a key SEC ruling in 2004 let investment banks throw caution to the winds by removing the rules about how much debt banks could take on. The reasoning was that the banks were grown-ups and would know how to watch out for their own best interest.

They used financial modeling software to assess risks. The author of that software wrote to the SEC saying that removing those regulations was a really bad idea - the software the banks would be using to "watch out for their own best interest" couldn't anticipate severe turbulence, as had happened in 1987 and 1998. The SEC never replied.

At the time, some regulators questioned whether investments would be secure enough. A senior staff member said the SEC would hire the best minds, including people with strong quantitative skills to parse the banks’ balance sheets. It never happened.

With cash reserve requirements removed, some banks ran up their debt to 33 times their actual amount of cash. Imagine if you had $10,000 of life savings and you took on debt of $330,000!

A good friend of many years, with whom I differed on several points, used to assert that government should just get off the back of business. He also objected to taxes in all forms. I wonder how he's reconciling that, now that taxpayers are bearing the brunt of the irresponsible businessmen who made those choices, and the other irresponsible people who failed to hire those quantitative experts.