“An Administrative Review Board has reviewed the information about you that was talked about at the meeting on 02 December 2005 and the deciding official in the United States has made a decision about what will happen to you. You will be sent to the country of Afghanistan. Your departure will occur as soon as possible.”

That’s it. The whole thing. And that language? Brutal. Orwell guessed 22 years early.

Andrew’s post is here. The NYTimes piece is here.

Certainty! Previously I didn’t know when the housing bubble would burst, whether there would be independent investment banks, whether any politicians would be held accountable for cramming housing on people and generally putting the short term way ahead of the long term, whether the stock market could really lose 50% of its value in the post-WWII world and who the biggest dick/fraud on the planet was. The answers were 2007, no, no, yes and Greenspan!

You can read the whole thing (and you should!) here.

The main thing to realize is that for the time being we really are in an alternative universe, in which nothing would be more dangerous than an attempt by policy makers to play it safe.

Full thing here. If anyone is still reading this blog and doesn’t understand that post, let me know and I can try to write something explaining it.

The argument that America is a center-right nation tends to proceed from a simple survey of the landscape. We do not have universal health care, we do not have strong unions, we do not have guaranteed paid vacation, we do not have major climate change legislation, Other countries do, and therefore our people are center-right.
But this gets the causality backwards. Assuming that policy outcomes are a simple reflection of public opinion is a nasty error. We have a government set up to protect against public opinion. And it works. The Founding Fathers weren’t idiots, and the political structure they designed has functioned largely as they expected.

Full post here.

Shock waves off an AK-47 when fired

A very cool photo from the slideshow attached to this NYT article. Discusses photography of airflow from things like coughs, gunshots, a hair-dryer, etc.

Via Shanghaiist:

For all of you outside of China right now who have no idea what the internet is like over here and are curious enough to meet the Net Nanny face to face, here comes the ultimate Firefox extension for you, the China Channel Firefox Add-on.

Hilariously awesome. It makes any Firefox browser outside China behave as if it is instead inside China (I assume through a proxy), and the logo they worked up ain’t so bad either!

Also seems that smoking might really get quit. I will probably continue to smoke some when drinking (its presense in these situations in China is ridiculous), but other that that I plan to severely cut back, if not stop outright. Have to see how it goes. I kept telling people I could stop any time, but with it’s prevelance in China it’s certainly going to be much harder to not be reminded with (literally) every other person in the country smoking.