Probably not, but I could not believe the amateurishness of the email that somehow just made it through my spam filter:

 This message is from the Database Information Technology service messaging
center, to all our e-mail account user. All Mailhub systems will
undergo regularly scheduled maintenance. Access to your mailbox via our mail
portal will be unavailable for some period of time during this
maintenanceperiod.

We shall be carrying out service maintenance on our database and e-mail account
center for better online services. We are deleting all
unused-mail accounts to create more space for new accounts.

In order to ensure you do not experience service interruptions/possible deactivation
Please you must reply to this email
immediately confirming your email account details below for confirmation/identification.

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4. Confirnation

Also, the return address was not one of those pseudo-tricky "reply@yahoo_upgrade.com" or something like that, but rather just: corteingles@iplanmail.com.ar.  I almost feel like someone who falls for this one deserves to get hacked.  Kind of a Darwinian on-line survival of the fittest.

I found this story quite fascinating:

Despite its widespread effect, autism is not well understood and there are no objective medical tests to diagnose it. Recently, University of Missouri researchers have developed a pupil response test that is 92.5 percent accurate in separating children with autism from those with typical development. In the study, MU scientists found that children with autism have slower pupil responses to light change...

In the study, scientists used a computerized binocular infrared device, which eye doctors normally use for vision tests, to measure how pupils react to a 100-millisecond flash light. A pupil reaction test reveals potential neurological disorders in areas of the brain that autism might affect. The results showed that pupils of children diagnosed with autism were significantly slower to respond than those of a control group.

Certainly raises many questions the press release did not address.  Hopefully, I'll find time to read the article.  I'm especially curious about the 7% it does not capture.  Are those people more on the borderline of autism?  Also, what about autism in the cases of a known genetic disorder, like my son Alex (Tuberous Sclerosis) or Fragile X.  And, of course, what else could we diagnose, or at least screen for with pupil response?  I am going to have to read this.

1) The Fort Hood police officer who took down the shooter and got hit in her femoral artery in the process apparently had two thoughts at that point: 

In an extreme example of the multi-tasking familiar to moms everywhere, one of the police officers hailed as a Fort Hood hero says she had two priorities after she and her partner stopped a gunman who had just killed 13 people.

One: get a tourniquet applied to her thigh, bleeding heavily where a bullet had pierced her femoral artery.

Two: arrange for someone to pick up her toddler from day care.

2) Support for gay marriage varies a lot by state (NC is 41st).  Also, the support gap between those 18-29 as compared to 30-44 is huge. 

3) The DVR is pretty much the greatest invention since the world wide web.  In large part, because you get to easily skip through all the commercials.  Amazingly, nearly half of all viewers watching shows on DVR playback are still watching the ads.  (There's some other really interesting analysis about the role of DVRs in the article, too). 

I've updated my book review page here.  If you've been keeping up with it, everything down to The Alchemist is a new review.  The best two books I've added I basically read back-to-back with a failed novel in the middle.  The God of War by Marisa Silver and The Black Tower by Louis Bayard are both terrific and highly recommended.

I certainly get that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church wants the health care reform bill to subsidize abortions as little as possible.  Fair point.  What is beyond ridiculous is that based on this "pro-life" opposition they are willing to kill the whole effort that, no matter the flaws, will bring health insurance to millions more Americans and thus indisputably save lives.  Actually, I bet a little number crunching would likely find that extending health insurance saves far more lives than subsidizing insurance for the working poor leads to abortions.   Even with coverage, most people do not seem to want to put an abortion on their health insurance.   I find this infuriating:

Instead of staying neutral or remaining quiet about their concerns, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops launched a grassroots campaign to oppose health reform, sending out bulletin inserts and fliers to every diocese in the country and urging priests to speak out from the pulpit last Sunday. In addition, every bishop was urged to contact the congressional members in their diocese and insist that they vote against health reform. 

It's almost as if they Catholic Church has entirely turned its back on its history of concern for social justice and is becoming little more than an arm of the Republican party. And now that they've gotten their way are they going to fight to ensure that million more Americans will have health insurance?  No!  From Yglesias:

Even if no House Republicans could be persuaded to vote “yes” then surely single-issue anti-abortion activists will support it, right? Wrong! With the exception of Democrats for Life, pro-life organizations are praising Stupak but denouncing the bill anyway, citing imaginary provisions to euthanize seniors. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops sent out a press release urging passage of the Stupak amendment, but no release urging passage of the amended bill. 

Pathetic.  Maybe it's time for me to join one of those renegade Episcopal churches the Catholic church wants to suck up.

So, after a recent Gallup poll, Charles Krauthammer (I've not enough time to debunk all the fallacies and misinterpretions in the column) and some other not particularly bright individuals have been crowing about what a conservative country this is because on the recent poll, self-identified conservatives outnumbered moderates and liberals 40 to 36 to 20.  The problem with using these data to conclude that America is a conservative country is the fact that most people have almost no idea what it actually means to be conservative (or liberal, but especially conservative).  All they know is that they are a white Southern man, so they must be conservative, or they hate socialism, or that big government is bad, or something equally nebulous. A solid plurality of "conservatives" actually support increasing spending on social security and on public schools and keeping welfare spending the same or increasing it.  Not exactly the shrinking of government Krauthammer and all the right-wing pundits would have you believe.  The tea-party morons are a passionate, but truly small fringe of American politics.  Anyway, I ran some numbers using 2008 NES data to further make this point.  Among those who self identify as conservatives, the following:

• 45% favor increasing SS spending; 38% keep the same
• 47% favor increasing spending for schools and 35% favor keeping it the same
  
• 28% favor increasing spending for "welfare" and 35% support keeping it the same
  
• 26% favor increasing spending for health care and 20% for keeping it the same
  
• 27% favor increasing spending for "government spending and services" and 25% for keeping it the same
  
• 23% support abortion as "always a woman's choice" compared to 18% saying it should never be legal
  
• 18% support gay marriage and another 34% support civil unions

Not exactly right-wing ideologues, eh?  Heck, even just favoring the status quo is clearly contravenes contemporary elite conservative ideology, but not only do most "ordinary" conservatives support that, but many seems quite ready to "expand government" when it gets down to specific issues.  Of course, one explanation could be that there's a lot of measurement error going on here and if we looked at liberals, we'd see plenty of them taking "conservative" positions.  Alas, not so...  Among liberals, 15% favor cuts to social security spending, 10% favor cuts to public schools, and 7% favor less government services and spending.  Not at all the opposite of the conservative numbers above.  My own theory (literally, I've got a PS paper on it) is for very many "conservatives" this is largely a social identity largely devoid of much genuine ideological content, as opposed to liberals, who are more likely to actually hold liberal beliefs.  Take-home point: any time anybody tells you how conservative this country is based on all these self-proclaimed "conservatives," don't believe them.

They've got H1N1 vaccine in Wake county today!  The nearest clinic is at Colonial Baptist church in Cary.  I went to the church's website and clicked on their "beliefs" section, where we get this:

Creation
We believe the Genesis account of creation as being neither allegory nor myth but a literal, historical account of the direct, immediate, creative acts of God over six literal days without any evolutionary process; that man -spirit, soul and body -was created by a direct work of God and not from previously existing forms of life; and that all men are descended from the historical Adam and Eve, first parents of the entire human race. (Genesis 1-2; John 1:3; Colossians 1:16, 17)

Of course, if you are in complete denial of evolution, you probably should not be getting a flu shot.  I wonder if they realized that when they agreed to host the clinic. 

I actually flipped away from Saturday night football to see the historic 218th vote cast to pass health care reform in the House.  I have to admit, to being quite disappointed that it could muster 220 despite the fact that there are 258 Democrats in the House.  I'd like to think that some of the 39 Democrat "no" votes would have voted for it if they knew it was actually going to prevent meaningful reform.  Anyway, the NY Times has a really nice chart today which shows quite clearly where those no votes came from.  For starters, 31 of the 39 came from districts that McCain won.  14 of the 39 were Freshman, overwhelmingly from districts that barely voted for Obama or went for McCain.  In short, 35 of the 39 were in McCain districts, first term members, or both.  Of course, if would still be nice if these Dems stepped up and did the right thing.  Especially someone like NC's Larry Kissel, who is actually in a swing district carried by Obama and won with lot's of DCCC money.  Anyway, all these defections are a shame, but I suppose if we get the same 220 for the final bill, it's all good.

I finished reading Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer last night.  Great combination-- Tillman's story is truly fascinating and Krakauer is a terrific writer (Into Thin Air remains my favorite non-fiction book ever).  I had remembered that Tillman was actually killed by friendly fire and that there was somewhat of a cover-up, but I had no idea of the depth of the bad faith and malfeasance with which the US Army acted to cover this up, rather than ruin the great political story of Tillman going down fighting as a hero.  That's actually only the last 1/3 or so of the book, the major portion of the book is really just the amazing story of Tillman's life until then.  I knew he was an incredible fellow, but had no idea he managed to carry a 3.8 GPA while starring for a major Division I football team.  I also had no idea that he was quite the liberal free-thinker and strongly opposed to the Iraq war.  Krakauer also does a good job giving a sense of the context in Afghanistan without bogging down the narrative.  Still, the extraordinary senselessness of the friendly fire incident that led to Tillman's death and the Army cover-up are the highlight of the book.  Dexter Filkins' somewhat ambivalent review summarizes this wonderfully, so I'll copy:

While most of the facts have been re­ported before, Krakauer performs a valuable service by bringing them all together — particularly those about the cover-up. The details, even five years later, are nauseating to read: After Tillman’s death, Army commanders, aided and abetted by members of the Bush administration, violated many of their own rules, not to mention elementary standards of decency, to turn the killing into a propaganda coup for the American side. Tillman’s clothing and notebooks were burned — a flouting of Army regulations — and he was fast-tracked for a posthumous Silver Star, which, as Krakauer shows, was a fraud. Members of his unit were ordered to stay silent about the manner of his death. Even part of Tillman’s body disappeared. Most important, Army commanders went to great lengths to keep the facts of Tillman’s death a secret and allowed the story that he died at the hands of the Taliban to flourish. The low point came at his memorial service, where he was lionized before television cameras, while officials who knew the truth stayed quiet.

Anyway, wellI worth reading.  And feel free to ask to borrow my copy after I use it for an upcoming book discussion.

I got in a little debate at lunch yesterday about the origins of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Model of a Modern Major General."  I was willing to bet Bill Boettcher $100 that it was from HMS Pinafore, which I recall my dad dragging me to a bunch of times, whereas Bill was quite convinced it was from Pirates of Penzance (which to his discredit, he did not think was G&S).  Fortunately, Bill backed down from the bet in the face of my certainty.  Here's a clip of it from the Pirates of Penzance (notice Kevin Kline)

I was especially abashed as just yesterday I had been having a conversation with David about how I never insist on something unless I am truly certain (after assuring my whole family that surely the bike race coming through Geneva, Switzerland during our 1990 visit could not be the Tour de France, as we were in Switzerland-- little did I know then it regularly ventures outside of France).  So, the amateur cognitive scientist in me was really curious as to how I could have been so wrong.  Anyway, I realized that the G&S song I know so well from HMS Pinafore is "He is an Englishman," but since I think "Modern Major General" has more cultural penetration, when I thought "famous G&S song I know really well," that's what stuck in my brain despite my being 100% wrong that it was from Penzance.  Anyway, I will now redouble my efforts to not speak with certainty unless I truly am certain.  We'll have to see how that works.

When I wrote my angry rant yesterday, I had been hoping that Slate's Dahlia Lithwick would have written something about the case involving prosecutors and absolute immunity.  Now she has.  I'll just give you her takeaway line:

The question for the court today is whether it is ultimately more worried about chilling prosecutors who want to introduce possibly fabricated evidence or giving them good reason—and the absolute freedom—to do so.

Meanwhile, also in Slate, Tim Noah takes up the issue of pro-life House Democrats trying to derail health reform.  I like this part:

Granted, money is fungible. Federal money that a private health insurance plan doesn't spend on abortions frees up nonfederal money that it does. But as Time's Amy Sullivan recently noted, not even Focus on Family meets Stupak's exacting standard. Principal, the health insurer for the Christian-right group's employees, covers abortions. "Even if the specific plan Focus uses for its employees doesn't include abortion coverage—and I'm assuming it doesn't—the organization and its employees still pay premiums to a company that funds abortions," Sullivan wrote. "If health reform proposals have a fungibility problem, then Focus does as well."

Paul Krugman has been making the case (quite effectively, in my opinion) for some time that we need more economic stimulus. In Salon, Robert Reich has a nice column discussing the political imperative of this on the Blue Dogs, who are always whining about budget deficits in totally nonsensical ways (of course, all else being equal you'd prefer a deficit to a surplus, but right now, all else is definitely not equal).  It is their own re-elections most imperiled by a lack of a stimulus.  Only question is if they are smart enough to realize that (I suspect not).  Anyway, Reich nicely lays out the case:

 

Let's be clear about this. The national rate of unemployment will almost surely hit 10 percent; we'll know Friday whether it already has. This is more a psychological and political threshold than an economic one (it doesn't include everyone who's too discouraged to look for work, or working part time who'd rather be working full time, or working fewer hours in an ostensible full-time job, or otherwise fully employed but being paid less; the Bureau of Labor Statistics' payroll survey, also due Friday, provides a more accurate picture). But it nonetheless represents a degree of hardship this country hasn't seen in decades.

Public approval of Obama’s handling of the economy has slipped to 46 percent in an Oct. 30-Nov. 1 CNN poll, from 59 percent in March. Remember, Obama was elected in part because the public didn't have confidence in McCain's ability to manage the economy. In exit polls last November, almost two-thirds of voters listed the economy as the nation's top issue. If the job numbers don't start moving in the right direction, not only will Obama's poll ratings continue to drop but congressional Dems will all be in trouble.

That should be Obama's selling point to the Blue Dogs. He should tell them the economy needs a bigger stimulus in order to show improved job numbers by the mid-term elections. And he should make sure they understand that they're more politically endangered next November if the the job numbers aren't moving in the right direction by then than if they vote for a larger stimulus now.

That's the case.  Let's see if Obama makes it and the Blue Dogs listen.

Apparently one in which government officials can torture totally innocent people with impunity if they think the person might be a terrorist and one in which prosecutors are granted complete immunity to frame someone for murder.  Hyperbole?  Sadly, no-- just today's news.  Truly, truly depressing.  Each of these totally deserves their own post, but I thought I'd combine because it truly says something about the sad state of our democracy.  

First, the torture bit.  The facts, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald:

  Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured.  Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing...

In January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million in compensation.  That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed  Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent.  A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old.  In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured.  He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured.  Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing...

In January, 2007, the Canadian Prime Minister publicly apologized to Arar for the role Canada played in these events, and the Canadian government paid him $9 million in compensation.  That was preceded by a full investigation by Canadian authorities and the public disclosure of a detailed report which concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense...

So, what did the American 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals decide?  Sorry, despite the fact that Canada published two phone books worth of material on this case, Arar could not sue the U.S Government in order to protect "state secrets."  Sorry, it is no secret how craven and dismissive of liberty our government has become.  Like the constitutional scholar he is, Greenwald sums it up brilliantly:

In other words, government officials are free to do anything they want in the national security context -- even violate the law and purposely cause someone to be tortured -- and courts should honor and defer to their actions by refusing to scrutinize them.  (emphasis mine)

Reflecting the type of people who fill our judiciary, the judges in the majority also invented the most morally depraved bureaucratic requirements for Arar to proceed with his case and then claimed he had failed to meet them.  Arar did not, for instance, have the names of the individuals who detained and abused him at JFK, which the majority said he must have.  As Judge Sack in dissent said of that requirement:  it "means government miscreants may avoid [] liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury" (p. 27; emphasis added).

If you are not disgusted, you don't deserve your rights.  On a similarly, though not quite as depressing note, the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments in a case in which prosecutors knowingly framed two innocent men and sent them to jail for life, but they argue, and the Obama administration joins them, that prosecutors have absolute immunity in such matters.  Hey, maybe we just need to let prosecutors loose on terrorists.  They can waterboard them, threaten family members, all sorts of good stuff.  That would surely bring in lots of credible and valuable confessions!  Anyway, NPR had a a agreat story on the matter today.  You can listen or read it at the link.  Please do.  Really.

The bright side on this one, is that maybe, just maybe, the US Supreme Court will rule that prosecutors are not actually a law unto themselves.  I'm not holding my breath on that, though.  Sigh.

Generally speaking, I quite like the auto-complete feature on google.  Here's a fun article in Slate that's a bit of amateur sociology, e.g., the different suggestions you get typing in "how 2" versus "how do I" etc.  Pretty interesting.  A sample

vs.

One of my former colleagues and current facebook friends asked for my "trenchant election analysis."  Here goes...

1) There's too damn much election analysis going on!  We are talking about governor's races in 2 states.  Yes, there are some suggestive ideas from this, but to draw broad, meaningful conclusions is folly.  That said...

2) Bad time to be an incumbent, especially a Democratic one.  Let's face it, the economy is still pretty weak and people have not seen the Democrats do all that much for them (most people don't really appreciate that we narrowly escaped a genuine economic catastrophe). Corzine was a really unpopular incumbent in a bad economy-- this is no great Republican victory.

3) McDonnell won Virginia handily by running as a can-do pragmatic moderate Republican.  His record suggests he is, in fact, a fire-breathing, social issues conservative.  I didn't follow the election enough to see how he pulled that off successfully, but hey, nice work.  The most interesting commentary I read on the VA race was TNR's Jason Zengerle who suggested that the rural VA Deeds was never a comfortable fit for Northern Virginians and Dems win Virginia state-wide races by running up huge margins in NoVa.  No matter how much gun-loving, good ol' boy Deeds was, he was never going to pick up a ton of Dem votes south of Fredericksburg and he didn't play particularly well where the Dem votes are.

4) Republicans are angry and energized.  Democrats are complacent.  No surprise that Republicans turned out in dramatically better numbers.  Republicans should also fare better in 2010 as many of the 2008 Obama supporters remain home, but we should not make too much out of this year, because, ultimately, it all depends on...

5) It's the economy stupid.  What yesterday's elections tell us is that if the economy is in roughly the same shape in a year, the Democrats are in for a world of hurt.  Of course, there's more reason than not to expect it to be substantially better.  Regardless, what happens in 2010 will be much more reflective of the economy next Fall than any political undercurrents that the 2009 VA and NJ governor's races reveal.

6) Nate Silver takes a nice statistical approach to it all.