Mount Vernon Statement: Another Trojan Horse
It looks like the Republican party is fracturing. A bunch of those people got together and are making every effort to differentiate themselves from the spendthrift GWB #43 era ‘conservatives’. I’m excited to see some more ‘cat herding’ in Conservative politics. In this way, they are becoming very much like the Democrats.
They have a new strategically elegant but tactically unworkable document they are calling the “Mount Vernon Statement.”
I’ll ignore all of the messy historical baggage just like the average “Morning in America” conservative and say that I think much of what they write works for many Americans. I’m easily categorized as a Liberal and yet I agree with many of the principles in the rhetoric. That is, until they turn the rhetoric into tactics and policy.
Trojan Horse Part 1
- It would be nice if they actually meant they want encourage Religious Freedom. Tactically, their version of Freedom is called Christianity and the rest of you are going to Hell. (See “nature’s God”)
- It would be nice if ‘ordered liberty’ was meant to encourage more social and political freedom. Tactically, they want Government to alter the lives of the people they don’t agree with.
- Government is the new Self. It’s clear they want to alter the lives of the people who do not live according to their rules. See “moral self-government”
- The military and Conservative pet projects win big too. They get big budgets to spend on projects wrapped in the perfectly circular argument they will be ‘responsible.’
The bomb drop is buried near the end. “economic reforms grounded in market solutions.”
Trojan Horse, Part 2
Let’s review some facts regarding capitalism and how the vaunted ‘market solutions’ accelerate economic disparity and lead to a weaker economy. This ‘market solutions’ newspeak is not exclusive to the Republicans. The Dems are using the same kind of ‘market driven’ newspeak and they are as much to blame for the last 20 years of economic disparity.
Question: What is the rough definition of an economic market?
Answer: A place potential Buyers and Sellers meet to possibly exchange goods and services.
Examples of markets are a car dealership, the grocery store, ebay.com.
Question: Are markets all-inclusive?
Answer: Never. There may be lots of willing suppliers for eggs at greater than $25/dozen, but there are very few buyers. This perfectly satisfies the political argument of ‘market solutions’ and more specifically meets the definition of a market. Mission Accomplished!!! (GWB ironic reference)
Examples of inclusive markets are Ferrari automobiles, private American Medical Insurance policies, your grocery store with the homeless person in back digging through the trash. Each market example has customers and the rest just stand idle.
There are at least two consequences of ‘market solutions’ groupthink.
- Increase economic disparity. 10+ years of unfettered capitalism in the U.S. has shown (again) that it ends up making more people poorer and few people richer. Diminished economic activity follows. Fewer people have disposable income as a result of increasing economic disparity.
- Political and social instability. People are falling out of the economy (> 10% unemployment, closer to 17%.) and probably won’t have the same kind of wages when they eventually return to work. This creates a great deal of social and political instability.
The economic consequences of the Mount Vernon Statement are clear, it will increase the ranks of the working poor, decrease social and political stability all of which decreases economic activity.
For those wondering why I don’t pound the Democrats as mercilessly, the Democratic Party has always been equivalent to herding cats.
Social Class, Wealth Redistribution as Thoughtcrime
In the U.S., people get very uncomfortable discussing social class. Any discussions of social class locality (“I’m in a lower social class than Mike Huckabee) is on the good graces blacklist as a thoughtcrime. One of the reasons it’s a thoughtcrime is because some of the circle of people that inform our political leaders use it as a weapon to increase income and political inequality.
If the unwashed masses are discouraged from discussing social class relativity/locality then the economic leaders have more freedom to create greater social and economic divisions. There’s a perverse logic at work that somehow makes a few very rich, a tiny unstable middle class, and the vast majority with the least resources a Good Thing. The longer discussions of social class are kept out of the scrum of daily life, the more time there is for increasing political and social inequality.
In America 2010, everyone is Middle Class. Howard Stringer, Jamie Dimon, Frank Atlee, they are all Middle Class. Only they are more Middle Class (and right) than the rest of the primitive populists. The actions of these Middle Class Warriors since the 1980’s has resulted in increased political and economic inequality. Some obvious artifacts of this is the declining distribution of wealth. Another artifact is the stagnant wage growth for the bottom 90%.
Another example, in this post. Towards the end of the piece on banking regulation, the author labels the ideological assault as Serfdom circa 2010. What’s nice about the article is that someone else at least recognizes that income inequality is an explicit goal . But then it tries to add some heat to the discussion by abusing the term Serfdom. I don’t agree with the use of the vague word Serfdom. Otherwise, the author describes the mechanics of failure at re-regulating the current form of Banking very elegantly.
Why does a country need a large middle class? Greater political and social stability on which to build a vibrant economy. The simple fact of the matter is creating a vibrant middle class require redistributing wealth. Uh oh. Another American thoughtcrime. I’m actively encouraging redistributing wealth. Your average deregulator demagogue will now chime in with some faulty logic wrapped in Economics lingo “Redistributing income destroys wealth!” or the hilarious “deregulated markets are more efficient!” The general consequences of believing some version of the previous two arguments is greater economic and political disparity.
To specifically refute the wealth destroying argument, empirical evidence like the banking interests mentioned in the article above repeatedly shows wealth being destroyed any number of ways. I’d also argue most mature segments of the American economy are Oligopolies continuously destroying wealth anyway.
To specifically refute the deregulated marketeer, the theoretical model is elegant, but humans just don’t work like that and no amount of deregulation gets to the mythic perfectly competitive environment. Empircal evidence repeatedly shows that unregulated market suppliers continuously destroy wealth by restraining competition. Some empirical evidence of market deregulation are the repeal of Glass-Steagal Act and the consequent bank bailouts, California’s deregulation of electricity suppliers that lead to artificial scarcity and exorbitant pricing.
Maybe the end-game is class immobility? Maybe that’s the point behind the destruction of New Deal goals? The next time an industry is deregulated, ( Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act) it’s another strike against the vast majority of Americans regardless of your political affiliation.
GWB Miss Me Yet?
I have to give the people that did this two thumbs way up. Does it mean something good or bad? It is hard to tell.
It is very hard to tell.
It’s Hard Times At the Bohemian Club
One of the most visible symbols of America’s ruling class is the Bohemian Club. Last year, they spent less than their usual $400 – $600 for single bottles (plural) of wine. Hard times, right?
Now they are trying to run a Redwood timber harvest. “Second-, third- and fourth-generation redwoods will be thinned…” SFGate Leaving only the largest of the great trees. This is a classic power monger remake of the physical world. The mightiest few are meticulously cared for (themselves and the oldest growth trees) and fell anything less. That probably means clearing a few old-growth trees to make the property better conform to their orderly world view too.
They wrapped the harvest in the previously politically correct and fail-safe ‘fire suppression’ meme. Now, if it were the case that they did just harvest the fast-growing pine-variety invaders, I’d have no problem with the harvest. It’s the fact they documented clearing the younger redwoods. This is an external validation of the epic scale of their self importance. Who needs to be bothered with petty small trees that won’t be large enough to gaze in wonder at (like me and my fellow Bohemians) for at least 1000 years?
Is it the case that their business lives are so slow they have time for a little ‘grounds maintenance?’ Or maybe they can’t get their rapacious urges sufficiently validated by a hostile proletariat? Like the typical maniacal messiah, do they simply blame the thankless populists that can’t possibly understand the enormous burdens of remaking the world in their view?
An inquiring populist would like to know…
First 2010 Winter Olympics Doper?
An Olympic Doper has already been caught. Cross-country skiing is a great sport to watch too. It’s on my watch list along with Skeleton, Luge, Bobsledding and Short Track Speed Skating.
There are probably others though…
NBC Olympics and Silverlight Fiasco Brewing
I’m certain there are about a million or more reasons why NBC is married to Microsoft for their media platform (MSNBC comes to mind…) My prediction is more standards compliant sites like yahoo.com will have more 2010 Winter Olympics visitors than nbcolympics.com.
Someone inside the bowels of the NBC organization will immediately grasp the simple fact that Microsoft’s Silverlight is locking out ~20% of all web users because of a buggy Mac Silverlight runtime shipped with buggy implementations for Firefox and Safari. That simply drives viewers away.
I think the thing that bugs me the most is the pervasive culture of mediocrity that goes into decision to support a limited number of visitors to what is a huge investment/opportunity for NBC. The attitude that alienating 20% of your audience is perfectly okay is bewildering. I’d think advertisers would feel differently about it, but my gut feeling is that mediocrity is just okay with them too.
The ‘Office Space’ moment that has already occurred was when the list of browser/OS combinations tested was severely limited due to ‘resource constraints.’ ‘ Resource constraint’ being the code words for, “Do as little work as possible.” and a workplace culture that aggressively penalizes risk takers.
The next ‘Office Space’ moment will be where Yahoo’s Olympic traffic beating NBC’s Olympic traffic is cast as a win for NBC, advertisers, Moms everywhere, and the U.S. of A.
Awstats and IIS Debian Set Up
This following should take the reader through a complete awstats setup from start to finish. The reader should be cognizant of the possible impacts of some of the commands casually mentioned below. This was done on Debian’s Lenny distro with apache2. The reader should be very familiar with setting up an Apache2 instance.
- Apt-get awstats.
- Configure Apache2: Use /usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/apache.conf as your template for whatever you end up with in /etc/apache2/sites-available/awstats. Apache configs are subject to personal preferences too much to be more specific than this.
- Link /etc/apache2/sites-available/awstats to /etc/apache2/sites/enabled/awstats. ‘ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/awstats /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/awstats’
- Restart apache2 ‘/etc/init.d/apache2 restart’
IIS Log Set Up Minutae
Before you can make awstats useful, your logs from your IIS instance have to meet some minimum requirements. I don’t remember the IIS logging defaults, but given Microsoft’s hostility to Free software, it’s likely a plain-vanilla IIS log will not work with awstats.
What’s especially miserable about IIS is setting the ‘host header value’ on Win2003. Somehow this value ended up being null for me and any attempts to change it end up with a 404 error. I have a hard time maintaining the value of Microsoft products with nasty bugs like this….
The following fields should be used in the log: Client IP Address, Service Name, URI Stem, URI Query, Protocol Status, Bytes Sent, User Agent, Referer. Of those, Bytes Sent is required for awstats to work!!! There are other fields that might be useful in special situations like %logname, but that’s for you to poke through the default awstats.conf file and figure out based on your needs.
Now that your web server is ready, set up awstats for IIS logs. My logs come from a Windows 2003 machine.
Awstats.conf Set Up
- Check a log. You need to extract the hostname (s-sitename) from the log. You will need this name and it will be referred to as $s-sitename from now on.
- Copy an awstats.conf file to awstats.$s-sitename.conf where $s-sitename.
- Open the newly copied awstats.$s-sitename.conf file.
- Set the path of where the log files reside.
- Make your log string. It will probably be a custom incantation.
- Set LogFile. If your IIS logs are rotated, then you *might* be able to use logresolvemerge.pl to feed awstats logs. logresolvemerge.pl does the work of feeding logs to awstats in the required time-sensitive manner. Otherwise, you may need to work out feeding awstats logs oldest data first.
- Change the SiteDomain value to whatever $s-sitename is.
- Add HostAliases as needed.
- Save the file and exit.
- Change directory to your web root for your awstats page.
- Run “/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=$s-sitename -showcorrupted” Where $s-sitename is whatever your hostname may be in the log file. This incantation will tell you if there are problems with the logs while processing . IIS log incantations are fiddley, so there will probably be several tries before your log string (step 5) is okay and awstats works as expected.
- Run “/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -config=$s-sitename -output > $your/path/to/web/root/index.html” Where $your/path/to/web/root is the same as your apache config web root. You’ll have basic information now. You should not need the -static option so frequently mentioned elsewhere if your Apache2 config is set up like the example given. Optionally, you can set LogFile=”/some/custom/path” to feed awstats in a customized manner.
For the rest of the reports, I use the awstats_updateall.pl script located in /usr/share/doc/awstats/examples. I recall it needs a copy of awstats.pl in the same directory for it to work.
Essential documentation for awstats is at their Sourceforge site.
Leave questions as comments.
Verizon’s 4-day DS1 Circuit Outage
A big thank you to Verizon for doing nothing on a DS1 circuit that has been variously up and down for 4 14 days. That’s right, four fourteen whole days. Open the ticket, Verizon engineer finds an unspecified problem, closes ticket. 14 days in a row. Escalation? Worthless. Chronic issue? Equally worthless.
Another reason why the telco’s government-granted Monopoly deserves to be modified to allow for more competition.
Picking up the phone does not qualify as service.
Americans in The Cyclocross World Cup
I made some pretty wild accusations about highly-ranked Americans in the UCI cyclocross points battle here. It turns out instead of actually getting lapped, they almost got lapped.
What happened when a bunch of American pros showed up for Kalmthout?
17. Jonathan Page (USA), at 01:45 Planet Bike
38. James Driscoll (USA), Rock Racing at 04:34 ( ~3 minutes back on Jonathan)
50. Troy Wells (USA), at 05:31 (~4 minutes back on Jonathan)
Top-ranked Americans (excluding Mr. Page) are in the lower half of the field and yet were ranked in the 20-something’s on UCI points. If this was a situation where Driscoll and Wells would swing into a World Cup and finish in the 20-somethings, then they would have earned their mid-20’s points. But it’s not. Nowhere near it. There are no excuses either. Belgian Hardman Sven Nys passed plenty (20?) of people AND dropped a chain on the same course on his way to a win.
I hope the UCI will adjust their scoring next year because neither one of those Americans are justified in keeping their rankings anywhere near the mid-twenties.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Page has legitimately earned his position. Go Jonathan!
Full results here.
Buying Your First Cyclocross Bike
With the new hotness being cyclocross these days, it might be helpful for some to get some advice on buying your first ‘cross bike.
First, some rules.
- The content is targeted at road or mountain bike riders who are already riding regularly. Or, someone interested in upgrading their road bike and considering a cyclocross bike.
- If you want a to read about the interaction of cyclocross geometry on your road postion or some other equally dense fiction then go elsewhere.
- I’m talking complete bikes available at your Local Bike Shop coming in around USD $3,000 or less. No Empella/Ridley mentions because these are very well outside the norm in many ways.
- I’m talking specifically about cyclocross bikes with drop bars. I’m very glad there are flat bar multi-purpose bikes because it generally means more bike riders, but I’m not discussing these.
What’s different about a cyclocross bike versus a road bike? They have room for fatter tires, and more powerful cantilever brakes. You sit higher on a ‘cross bike because the bottom bracket is much higher than the equivalent road bike. Many accommodate fenders so one can ride in more varied weather without getting soaked by the tire spray. The ability to ride much more varied terrain is a big plus.
What’s the same about a cyclocross bike? For road riders, the geometry is very similar to the average road bike. You can very easily race a cyclocross bike in road events like time trials and criteriums. There is a slight weight and aerodynamic penalty, but that is not actually important in a Category 4/5 field.
Measure your current bike:
If your bike has a perfectly horizontal top tube, then measure the top tube from center-of-the seat-tube to center-of-the-head-tube. Mark the spot you measured on your seat tube.
If your bike has a sloping top tube, then measure from the center-of-the-head-tube to the center-of-the-seat-tube keeping your tape measure flat. mark the spot you measured to on your seat tube.
Measure from the center of the bottom bracket to the spot you marked on the seat tube.
Top Tube Spec.
For road riders, seek a ‘cross bike with a top tube length within 0 to -1 cm. You want to be more upright on a cross bike than a road bike, so a little shorter top tube is a benefit. Cross-country mountain bike riders will want to have a similar top tube length, gravity-riders will be much more stretched out.
Seat Tube Spec
The seat tube length needs some special consideration because the bottom bracket is much higher on a ‘cross bike. I recommend a seat tube specification ~1-2 cm shorter.
Mountain Bike Riders
Translating your seat tube length into a ‘cross bike is a bit more difficult because of the variations in mountain geometry. Subtracting 2cm from the length of the seat tube dimensions from above works for me on my cross-country oriented full-suspension bike.
Results
The end result should be a seat post that sticks out a 1-2 cm more than a traditional horizontal-top-tube road bike. Remember, the bottom bracket is much higher than a road bike. The effective standover height will resemble a road bike and the brand’s frame size will generally come in -2 cm smaller than a traditional horizontal-top-tube road bike. In pictures, it should look something like this .
I know there are other setups that end up looking like Todd Wells’ or Ryan Trebon’s, super-tall seatpost but I think those are outside cases specifically crafted for those racers and won’t translate very well when buying a retail bike.
Other details
Don’t get hung up on minor differences between bikes. Riding cyclocross is still a test to see how many Watts you can generate with bike handling technique a contributing factor. Cable routing, frame material or other details just don’t matter that much.
Some objective proof to discourage splitting hairs on equipment, Dan Timmerman (Richard Sachs) got a top-10 at nationals this year (2009) on an ‘old-fashioned’ steel ‘cross bike and David Frattini had some excellent results on a practically stock Fuji cyclocross bike.
Ride more!