Author: Muttrox

Today’s cover piece in the New York Times Magazine is “Hillary’s War”. Let’s take a look at it, shall we? We’ll start with the cover and lead before moving to the content.

The cover image: Unfortunately, the online version of the image doesn’t show up well, so I can’t show it to you. It has the words “Hillary’s War” in an enormouse font. The coloring of the letters goes from red to blue, a timeline is printed below and there is a key showing that the red indicates “Support war authorization” and blue represents “Supports war deauthorization”. Cleverly done, especially the red (GOP) and blue (Democrat) color choices, just in case it was unclear which party was on which side. The central message is unavoidable. She was for the war, then against it. She was with the Republicans, then the Democrats. Hillary is a flip-flopper. She changes with the wind. The whole image is constructed to transmit this one thought as clearly as possible.

Well, that’s not true, there’s another thought even more clear. “Hillary’s War”. It’s her war. That’s right, not Bush’s war, but Hillary’s. Not Roves, or Powells, or Blairs, or Tenets, or Rices, or Kristol or Kagan or Krauthammer or Safires, or Hasert or DeLay or Frist or McCains, but Hillary.

Subheads: The first subhead, “An examination of the senator’s voting, thinking and maneuvering on Iraq.” is not too bad, though the use of the word “maneuvering” is already painting the picture. The online lede is “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decisions on Iraq may point to what sort of president she would be,” and inside the article the lead is, “Her support for the Seante resolution giving President Bush the authority to use force against Iraq remains a problem for the Democratic Party’s base. The way she arrived at that decision – and at subsequent decisions on Iraq – may point to what sort of president she would be.”

Only a little of that is true. There’s not one word in the article that points to what sort of president she would be. There isn’t an even an attempt to show how her thinking on Iraq points to what sort of president she would be. It simply raises the question. And by raising the question, it answers it – There’s something funny there. No, we’re not going to tell you what, but something stinks.

Before we even get to the meat of the article, the framing is clear. Hillary is a manipulative flip-flopper and she’ll do anything to be president. How many people see the cover of the New York Times Magazine? (Sunday circulation is 1.6 million.) How many of those ever read the first word of the article, much less read it all the way through? Much less.

The content: The content isn’t bad. It is highly factual, and avoids most of the poisoned phrasing that’s been laid out already. Still, it suffers from some serious problems, so let’s go through some of the main points.

1) Why didn’t she read the entirety of the National Intelligence Estimate, the definitive intelligence assessment of the Iraq situation? That’s a good point, she should have. On the other hand, only six senators did. So why single out Hillary?
2) She voted for the war. So did 77 other Senators, including all the leadership of the Democratic party.
3) She hasn’t apologized for her vote. I just find this weird. She has explained her vote, several times, and it hasn’t been reported. I’m glad Edwards did his mea culpa, but I don’t require it of every candidate. Again, why aren’t the asking the same question of other Senators? Oh, because she’s running for president, so she has to get on her knees and beg the public for forgiveness first. Grow up America.
4) She still voted for the war, even when some protesters asker her not to! One whole section is devoted to this incident. I have no idea why. The description of the group is that they “intended to ridicule the Bush administrations color-coded terrorism security alerts.” Anytime the word “ridicule” pops up in a groups mission, you can safely ignore it.
5) She voted against an amendment that would force diplomacy before invasion. Again, a good question, but 75 other senators voted against it also. Why single out Hillary? Amendments votes often don’t make sense unless you know what other amendments are out there and the context of the legislative rules. We aren’t given any of that information.
6) She’s a manipulative shrew, joining in the anti-war movement is dishonest ways. The strongest facts are against her here, putting her name on a measure at the last second when it looked good, and a couple other incidents like that. Still, it doesn’t add up to much.

Look, Hillary has always been more hawkish than the Democratic base. She bought into the administration line for too easily. That doesn’t mean she was the only one. Except for Russ Feingold, this article could have been written about any major senator. Like many others Hilary never foresaw what Bush would do with the authorization, she has since come out clearly against her previous stance, and there is just no reason to keep raking her over the coals like this. This was Bush’s war, plain and simple.

So, is this a hit piece? It’s a split decision. The article has a double-standard, but it is certainly fair to examine Hillary’s history with the war. Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr do a good job of laying out lots of facts, and there are many positive bits that I didn’t comment on. However, the editors who wrote the ledes and approved the cover unquestionably transformed this into yet another smear job by the New York Times on a Clinton. What else is new.

I just shot the moon three times in a row. 78 to 78 to 78 to 0 for the easy win. Good god I’m happy.

The other day I got some junk mail. It was from Foundation Capital, the usual junk. Pay off your house equity, then refinance it with as an option ARM with incredibly low monthly payments that can be made in four different ways. Nothing interesting there, I get these terrible offers all the time. This one stood out because of the testimonials.

I get a lot of mortgage company letters, but the letter from Foudnation Captial clearly showed me how I could get out of debt and regain control of my life. I spend the same amount monthly, but now a large sum goes towardsmy retirement!
James I..Certified Public Accountant

We do well financially, but we waste too much money. We explained this to our Foundation Captial loan consultant and he put togther a plan for us that paid all our debt and gave us one 15 year, fixed rate loan. That really put us back in control of our financial affairs.
David H…Financial Planner

1) So these financial professionals were both in serious debt.
2) Neither of them could figure out how to get out of debt on their own.
3) Both of them chose this method to get out of debt, which, by the way, is an excruciatingly stupid method and will leave them in worst debt than ever.

That’s a CPA and Financial Planner I never want to go to.

Sorry about that. My .mp3s got linkjacked and used up all my bandwidth. More content coming soon.

Did you see this New York Times article about Clinton trying to reverse the original war vote?

Here’s paragraph 7:

Mostly, Mrs. Clinton appeared to be trying to claim a new leadership position among the Democratic presidential candidates against the war in Iraq.

..and from there it spends the next several paragraphs talking about the politics of her propsal.
It nicely demonstrates many of the liberal criticisms of the MSM:

1) There is zero evidence this was done for political reasons, and none is presented. It never seems to occur to the authors that it could possible be a sincere belief.
2) It reinforces the horse-race of politics over the substance. What happens in Iraq is important. It affects millions of lives. Once again, that is ignored to leave room for foolish speculations on the motivations of obviously power-mad cretins intent on controlling our country.
3) It reinforces the double-standard that Clinton faces, where particularly everything she does is because she’s an unprincipled weasel. You will have a hard time finding any coverage about her, particularly in the “liberal” New York Times that doesn’t paint her in this way, examining everything in terms of calculated political motives. This is what builds the bigger narrative. Not coincidentally, it is how the last two leading Democratic candidates, Gore and Kerry, were both painted; flip-floppers of no true convictions.

(MSM is blog shorthand for the MainStream Media. Now you’re in the know.)

I reread Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy this week. It’s generally considered one of, if not the, best Science Fiction series ever. I read it many many times growing up, I spent countless hours with a good proportion of Asimov’s 500-plus books.

And now it’s not as fun. The characters are ridiculously one-dimensional, and the writing is so bare as to be naked. I still remember the two key twists which takes a lot of fun out. I know enough about Roman history that it seems a lot less creative (it’s loosely based on the rise of the Roman Empire). It’s the same for many of my old classics. The books I like are still primarily plot-driven, but I need them to have some literary merit also.

Isaac Asimov was a great writer, and an incredible person, and now I can’t read his books. I’ve destroyed one of my own heroes.

Blech.

Yep, s’been a few weeks since I posted. I wish I had an interesting reason, but the truth is that I just didn’t have much to say. I have a couple political posts coming up, and then I’m travelling for a while. Here’s more random links.

Why you shouldn’t wear ties to work. This makes me laugh everytime. Also, you shouldn’t throw paperclips at the office.

Sick, sick, sick, funny funny, sick, sick Japanese gameshow.

Four crushes. Very funny.

A very nice write-up on the inconsistent epistimological standards of creationism. It’s actually very interesting and readable. Here’s a short cartoon version for all you illiterates.

The world’s biggest diamond mine. These pictures blew me away.

One of the world’s greatest violinsts plays the world’s greatest music on a priceless Stradavarius at the subway station to see what happens, maybe earn a few bucks. Guess how he does? (And some interesting Q&A on it)

You might just cry watching this. Even the newsanchor introducing the story did.

The strangest prison I’ve ever heard of. Go through the photo tour.

A simple graph that says it all – CEO Pay, the stock market, profits, worker pay, trended over the last 15 years.

Does Today Suck? Find out! Oddly addictive.

If this doesn’t make you cry actual tears, there is something wrong with you. The 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.

I read a lot of financial books. Personal finance, economic theory, the stock market, real estate investing, all sorts of stuff. Here are five of the best, in no particular order.

1. The Wealthy Barber (by David Chilton): This is the one that started it for me. At age 25, I came across this in the form of a TV show on PBS. I was intriuged enough to get the book from the library. I hadn’t even known there was such a topic as personal finance. This book was a revelation to me. I understood what compound interest was, I understood what budgeting was, I understood what investing was, but I had never seen it put together under one topic. I started saving 10% of my paycheck the next day, and I’ve never looked back.

   The book takes the form of four people, from various walks of life in various financial situations, getting lessons from a barber. Why a barber? Because he’s rich. And he did it in a way anyone can copy. The point of this book is to show how basic financial knowledge can make just about anybody wealthy over the course of a lifetime. If a barber can do it, you can too.

   The Millionaire Next Door (by Thomas Stanley and William Danko): This one is a bit different than the others, because it’s not prescriptive. It’s essentially a giant research study. The study looks at the millionaire next door. They interviewed hundreds of people, to find common factors in those who were successful and those who weren’t. The authors don’t tell you what to do, but the conclusions are obvious. When you look at the group of millionaires and see 80% of them have always bought their cars used, and the group of millionaire-looking-but-actually-very-poor people and see that 70% of them buy all their cars new, it’s hard not to draw the obvious conclusion.
2. The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need (by Andrew Tobias): So now you believe in personal finance, what do you do with all that money you’re saving? This book is a very clear and funny guide to all the different investment vehicle. It walks a fine line between giving you specific advice based on market conditions, and not so specific that the advice becomes obselete a year later. This book gets huge props from me by having a solid page about Black Knight 2000 in the first chapter. Gimme your money!!
3. The Money Game (“Adam Smith”): A golden oldie, this book came out in 1976. This book is about The Money Game. There’s a lot of parts to finance that are pretty dry, this is about all the parts that ain’t. The gnomes of Switzerland, big oil, the psychology of traders, inside Wall Street… there’s a reason this still sells copies thirty years later. (Adam Smith was a pseudonym used by the author, he revealed his indentity years later.)
4. The Number (by Lee Eisenberg): If you’ve thought about personal finance at all, you’ve thought about “The Number”. It’s the goal you’re shooting for, it’s the number that means you can retire. It’s also known as the “F.U. Number”, the idea being that once you have this amount of money, you can tell anyone, F.U! without worrying about the consequences.

   But how do different people come up with the number? Why is it so different for different people? How does it change? Can it be zero? Do you have a plan to get there? A real plan? Are you on track? What do you do when you get to it? Why did you pick that number? What exactly do you plan to do with that money?

   If you’re interested in the questions, this book is for you. The author is not a professional financier, he works around the questions as an outsider to the institutions that are built around The Number. There is more psychology than numbers in this book. A very rewarding look at the “Why” over the “What” of savings and personal finance.

—
And here are three authors to stay away from.

1. No to Robert T. Kiyosaki (“Rich Dad, Poor Dad”): His basic message is reasonable enough. You won’t get rich by working for the man and saving, you need to be your own boss and have multiple income streams working for you. Unfortunately, it’s not true. Or rather, it’s true for some kinds of people, but wrong for most.

   This wouldn’t be such a bad thing, except he also provides absolutely no hard reasoning, no logic, no facts, no evidence of any kind to back up his theories. What he provides is anecdotes. Great anecdotes so convincing that you don’t step back to think if the anecdote proves what he said it proves. And then (of course) it turns out that whole damn book is a lie, there is no rich dad or poor dad, and even the anecdotes are fake. You can do well following some of the monetary philosophies in this book, but you can also throw a lot of time and money down the toilet, money that would be making you a millionaire if you’d paid attention to better books. (Kiyosaki has done well by his own advice though, the Rich Dad, Poor Dad empire provides him with everything he will ever need.)

   This guy says it better than me.

2. No to The Motley Fool: I read three of their books, but by the third one I was wondering why I bothered. They start with some sound basics. Compound interest, savings, index funds, etc. Then they must have got bored, because the rest of everything they write is specific advice for specific people with specific strategies in specific markets. Everything they write is guaranteed to be outdated within five years.

They have two specialities. First, the contrarian advice. When everyone else advises x, you can bet that their website will have an article that advises y. This is given because it fills books, and if they get a lucky hit, they look like geniuses. Second, the backwards facing model. Take six of the top-ten Dow stocks in April ranked by reverse shoe-size, or some such garbage, and you find an amazing 14% rate of return over the market. Wow, that sounds incredible! Then you think about all the millions of theories that work great for years and years, until they don’t. (Exercise for the economically-trained reader: prove why any theory of this type is inherently self-defeating, and cannot be a successful long-term strategy.)

1. No to David Bach (“Smart Nouns Finish Rich”): There’s nothing really wrong with his books. He doesn’t say anything that’s wrong. It’s just that there are hundreds of better personal finance books out there. He’s incredibly glib and reasons by anecdote just like Kiyosaki. There is one thing he’s very good at though. He can take one simple idea that would take me one long blog post to explain, and he can stretch it to a full length book, which will unfailingly sell a million copies. The guy is still milking his precious “latte factor.” (Get it?) At this point, he tours around the country collecting his speakers fees. Every once in a while someone in the audience will say something interesting, then he’ll steal their story and write another best-seller about it. Again, the advice he gives is not wrong, there’s just better sources out there.

For years now, I’ve kept 2-3,000 songs in .mp3 form on my various computers and mp3 players. I run it on shuffle, and I’m always guaranteed to hear something good. Shuffle is such an obvious feature that Apple can put a crippled version of it’s Ipod, call it an I-shuffle or something, and sell millions of them.

The feature I’ve always wanted is a weighted average shuffle. Each song has a “slider”, that goes from 10% to 1000%. 100% is the default setting, and it means that a song has a normal change of being played. If you have 500 songs, it comes up 1 in 500 times. If you set it to 10%, it has roughly one tenth of it’s normal probability of being played, and 1000% means it has roughly 10 times it’s normal probability of being played. I suppose we’d probably label them “less often” and “more often” for the innumerate.

For example, I know every Who song inside out. I won’t ever actually delete Baba O’Riley from the playlist, it still rocks the house, but I don’t really need it to come up very often. On the other hand, I got a few new Wolfmother and Martha Wainwright tracks and I would like those to come up a lot more so I can learn them and decide whether to keep them.

I haven’t yet seen an .mp3 player that will do this. I’ve seen custom playlists, ranking with stars, and other versions of filtering, but not what I’m describing. Anyone seen one?

Sidenote 1: Mathematically, I see it like this. If there are 500 songs, by default each song has 100 “entries” in the pool of songs, so the random number generator is choosing from a population of 50,000. The percentage is applied to the 100 entriess. A song with a 10% setting only gets 10 entries instead of 100. That is why I said “roughly” one tenth, it’s odds actually go from (100/50,000 = 1/500 =) .2% to (10/49,910 = 1/4991 =) .020036..%. (As I write this, I’m laughing that I bothered to work out this nuance for a completely imaginary feature.)

Sidenote 2: I am apparently the only person in the world with a handheld .mp3 player that is not an I-pod. It amazes me that I-pod has, like Kleenex or Xerox or Frisbee, come to describe the entire field of products. My brothers Prius comes with an Ipod jack. That bothered me because it was so exclusionary, very poor technological. Then I found out it’s just an ordinary input jack, that they choose to market as a I-pod jack. Of course that bothered me because it was so demeaning to .mp3 player I had. I’m very easily bothered.

Some recent spam I got:

…I am a friend and attorney to the family of the oil tycoon Mr James Howard Marshall 2 before his death; he made an investment here that I was later instructed to prepare a will on the investment for his son Everett Pierce Marshall3 shortly after they settled their differences…Meanwhile this will was prepared in my chambers by me with all copies in my possession.

I was supposed to hand over the will documents to the son Mr Everett Pierce Marshall3 at the end February 2007, the maturity date of the investment. But unfortunately Mr Everett Pierce Marshall3 the son did not make it to February 2006. He died a sudden death on June 20th 2006 trying to stop Anne Nicole Smith his father last wife from claiming the $475million that was initially awarded to her that was later over turned by the federal court in California.

Now there is a need for me to prepare a new will to claim the investment funds here since nobody would ever come for it, than to loose the money to the bank. You should let me know how much percentage you would like to get to enable us work together as partners, all I need is honesty. I will eventually let you into the amount of the investment if we both agree on mutual terms. [etc, etc…]

I just love it. Con men watch the news. When life gives you Anna Nicole Smith, then make Nigerian-scam-ade.

Why is the GOP pessimistic about 2008?

And Katon Dawson, the party chairman in South Carolina, expressed confidence that the party would recover from any internal damage it suffered as its candidates took shots at each other.

“We don’t do well until we have a common enemy,” Mr. Dawson said. “Right now, our enemy is ourselves.”

This is the way the modern conservative movement defines itself. Mr. Dawson, a state party chairman, can only think about the party and strategy in terms of enemies. Enemies all around, which one should we pick!? We don’t know how to do anything except fight! I sure hope there’s some enemies around, we’re in trouble if things are going well.

Here’s a thought: Spend some time thinking about policies. Thinking about people. Thinking about the war, the deficit and the economy, the politicization of non-partisan government agencies, etc. If you come up with some good ideas that people like, maybe they’ll, you know, vote for you. Just a thought.