A happy slightly-belated April Fools’ Day! (It’s after midnight on April 2, but, on the other hand, I don’t consider the day to have ended until I go to bed. So there.)

The web is full of silly posts today; this website, bold in its conformity, will be no different. Today’s selection is a bit of a re-run; Alina Stefanescu tipped me off to this April Fools’ 1995 article from the Economist:

THE new field of empirical mathematics (EM), a discipline pioneered in the early 1970s by P.G. Somerset and elaborated by V.M. Singh, has already scored some notable successes. Among these are a shortened procedure for the renormalisation of transintegers and refinement of Haberlein’s encryption algorithm. EM, as its name suggests, seeks advances in mathematical theory by means of counting things. As might be expected, the development of computer technology has allowed far more rapid and comprehensive counting of things than previously possible.

It is the belief of the present authors that our work in progress may constitute EM’s most important advance to date. In the course of conducting routine surveys of things counted so far, we discovered that the number of things tended generally to increase more than it decreased. Among the things that proliferated were (in alphabetical order) area of the universe, cable television channels, crime, Economist columns, four-minute milers, lawyers, persons with jobs, persons without jobs, population, potholes, tarts, torts, toxic wastes, video games and weevils. Some things did, of course, decrease. However, our statistical analysis demonstrates to a high degree of confidence that a strong element of hysteresis, or lag-induced upward stickiness, is present in the numbers of things. Put simply, on average everything is proliferating.

This would seem puzzling. Given the conservation laws of natural science, one would expect to see a rough balancing of things that became more numerous with things that became fewer. The persistent upward drift in the average number of things–or burgeoning, as the news media call it–suggests that what is changing is not things themselves but rather numbers. Numbers are losing their value over time; counting any given array of things requires slightly more numbers each year. We refer to this phenomenon as number inflation.

…

A great many previously puzzling phenomena are now explained–or, more accurately, seen to be illusory. For instance, many have wondered why ever-more athletic records are broken every year. The answer is that adjusted for number inflation, human athletic performance turns out to have been roughly constant over time. Similarly, astronomers devote much attention to the apparent fact that the universe is expanding. Since the universe cannot expand forever (eventually it will run out of space and bump into something), this hypothesis seems less than satisfactory; and, indeed, when proper integer-value adjustments are performed, the expansion of the universe proves to be an artifact of number inflation.

It is, however, in the realm of human affairs and social policy that the implications are richest and most consequential. For example, in America a widely noted phenomenon is the consistent tendency of budget deficits to increase despite all efforts to reduce them. Why should something grow even when cut? Because, of course, what needs to be deflated is not the deficit but the digits.

(The best part about this is that the satire is even better for those of us who are praxeologists. After all, are the findings of number inflation any more ridiculous than the idea that forcing banks to give money away for free is an effective way to encourage productive investments, or that taking billions and billions of dollars worth of human labor and blowing it up in another country is an effective way to increase overall wealth? Yet these are typical results produced by the practitioners of empirical economics…)

I suppose that somone is going to tell me about how I need to lighten up and have a good laugh at this.

The cutting edge in humor at class establishments like Virgin Airways

Even though they allow for high-volume servicing and back-in-a-flash trips to the john, the point-and-shoot-a-stinky-deodorizer-cake oddity known as the men’s restroom urinal has been, for women, a constant enigma. But nothing will prepare you for the men’s room in the newly-designed Virgin Airways Clubhouse in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, terminal 4: Urinals shaped like a woman’s mouth, dolled up with red lipstick, wide open and ready for business.

In anything that we do there has to be a smile, and that’s the smile in this Clubhouse, said John Riordan, Vice President of Customer Services for Virgin Airways.

The urinals, called Kisses, were designed by Netherlands based company Bathroom Mania.

Kisses — the sexy urinal, makes a daily event a blushing experience! This is one target men will never miss!, said the Bathroom Mania team via e-mail from the Netherlands.

— Unwired Travel: Virgin Potty Talk [Yahoo! News]

(via feministe)

Yes, that is how very wealthy men get a smile in these post-feminist days: by pissing in women’s mouths.

I really wish that I could say this surprises me more than it actually does. It’s audaciously disgusting, yes, and it’s not every day you see something like this out in the open. But wealthy men on business trips are, after all, the chief patrons of many segments of the commodity trade in women’s bodies, from casual decisions to hold business meetings at Hooter’s or at strip clubs, to hotel pornography, to such wonderful institutions as sex tourism (read: child prostitution) in Thailand. There’s a whole seamy, creepy, half-hidden, and ultimately quite desparate and pathetic culture of overgrown fratboys in American business travel, and this just looks to me like a particularly gaudy piece of that sort of systematic sexualized woman-hatred.

(Pre-emptive clarification: I know that this is not true either of all men on business trips or of all frat boys. Some of my best friends were in frats/are in business management and don’t act like this, &c. I do think, nevertheless, that this sort of creepy culture is pretty clearly widespread in both of these worlds.)

The good news is that NOW and feminist bloggers got the word out on this, and Virgin has dropped the plans and issued an apology (the apology was astoundingly blithe and clueless, but we’ll set that to one side).

To return to where we started out: feminists are often accused of being uptight and having no sense of humor. I don’t know how people can read about WITCH zaps or read Dykes to Watch Out For and still believe this, but that’s a topic for another day. For right now, the main question on my mind is this: really, what sort of a person do you have to be to find pissing in a dolled-up woman’s mouth really, really funny? And why in the world would anyone want to be that sort of a person?

Further reading:

• Analysis from feministe, Echidne of the Snakes, Ms. Magazine, and Bitch

• GT 11/25/2001: What the fucking hell was he thinking? (on other things that just aren’t funny)

This Sunday I watched a very long and depressing line of speakers from the United States Bureau of Making Shit Up. James Woolsey (former head of the CIA and freelance war-hawk) speculated wildly and baselessly about possible connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. An anonymous terrorism expert moved beyond baseless allegation into nothing more than vague insinuations–he was particularly a fan of the claim that the Beltway sniper is actually an al-Qaeda operative, in spite of the complete lack of any basis whatsoever for asserting this to be probable, let alone true. Bill Kristol then got on and talked for a while about the need to bomb the world and starve North Korea, and practically accusing Tom Daschle of treason for daring to question the President’s authoritarian and secretive attitude towards Congress and the American people on foreign policy issues.

Well, OK. I expect this shit from Fox News. But while they drone on, an astounding grassfire movement against the war is welling up. The latest development is something that should get the attention of every Right-wing Bomb the World Republican, every spineless amoral Democrat, and the few progressives and genuine Lefties that remain in DC. Over the past week, MoveOn PAC‘s Reward the Heroes drive has raised over 1 million dollars for the campaigns of Congresspeople and Senators who opposed the President’s resolution for war against Iraq. Over $1,000,000 in a week! And we’re not talking about Republican or DLC-style contributions from millionaires here. We’re talking about over 37,000 individual contributions. An average of about $27 per contribution (I gave two contributions of $25, personally). If the DC cognoscenti start taking notice, this could be a very big deal. Money talks in DC, and right now, the people are screaming at the top of their lungs.

Of course, this campaign–like all campaigns–has its limitations. Among them:

• It’s depressing that this action will talk much louder than the hundreds of thousands of calls, letters, and e-mails against war on Iraq that were sent out over the past several weeks. The pre-eminence of PAC money-laundering in politics is not a trend that I really want to see strengthened, although I’m willing to work to get through to Congress by pretty much any just means necessary right now.

• The campaign is primarily focusing on funnelling money to support incumbent Democrats who voted against the war. With the exception of that lying goat Paul Wellstone, I don’t have any objection to supporting those who have taken a stand against war. But I’d also like to see a lot more invested in getting new blood into Congress, not just giving established Lefty Democrats a political sinecure.

• Maintaining a Congress which is independent of the grip of the far Right is important, but we have to do a lot more than that to keep the country from going to hell in a handbasket. Slowing the bleeding will only do so much.

• MoveOn, for all of its virtues in moving Internet activism out into the offline world, makes no particular efforts to reach out to people other than those who can receive their e-mail alerts or access their website.

Again, the power of the Internet as an organizing medium is simply astounding, and we have to take very seriously how we are going to make the best use of it. The MoveOn PAC campaign is one very important way to put a lot of energy into grassroots campaigns, but we have to see this as only the start, and improve from here.

So what do we need to do?

• We need to follow up this campaign with more campaigns that move beyond online voting and make concrete actions. Contributing to campaigns where necessary, I guess, but also building up funding reserves for other purposes–organizing spaces, grassroots organizing (including workplace unionizing), and all the other infrastructure of a successful, anti-vanguardist resistance to the Right-wing Powers that Be. MoveOn PAC’s campaign is a brilliant example of a dynamic, exciting, creative way of standing up against the flow in DC and making them listen. Let’s come up with more ideas.

• We also need to talk about ways to allow online campaigns to reach out to people who don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet–people who tend to be older, poorer, racial minorities, etc. The Right doesn’t care: every CEO and arm-chair warhawk columnist has e-mail, Web access, and all the money the Right-wing foundations have to offer. But we have to work with people, not just dollars, and we have to think about building a mass movement. Otherwise, as Martin Striz pointed out in this space:

  Unfortunately, this nascent form of democratic political transformation is only relevant to those who have an Internet connection, and the unfortunate divide between the haves and have-nots will continue to plague us.

  So what can we do to pull that off? Well, simply focusing on campaigns that move offline and into the world of street protests, organizing spaces, letters to the editor, and other things in the meatspace will help. But let’s start thinking about other ways to convert Internet organizing into a galvanizing force for everyone. I don’t have many more ideas than anyone else on this–I’ve lobbied for printable posters and flyers to be available from all websites that advertise an offline political event, and I think that working on developing phone trees that spread from online to offline contacts would also be a really cool idea. But I’m a neophyte like everyone else and I’m really interested in hearing some creative ideas about where we can go from here.

In the meantime, toss a few bucks to the [MoveOn PAC][] Reward the Heroes campaign, and help make our voice heard in support of pro-peace candidates.

Since I’ve posted two stories on Iraq in a row, I would also like to take this time to remind you that the aftermath of the past 10 years of reckless corporate welfare giveaways and rank corporate malfeasance by cronies of, among others, George W. Bush, continues to make for an extremely fragile economy, with low profits, surging oil prices (as a direct result of U.S. sabre-rattling), and dismal retail results.

The lowest US interest rates for 40 years have helped keep the American economy afloat, especially through strong consumer spending. But companies are still struggling to make profits in an environment of low prices while saddled with debt accumulated in the 1990s boom. Analysts thought companies would be over the worst by now, but the stream of profit warnings and credit downgrades shows no sign of drying up.

Well, it should be noted that the coexistence of "the lowest U.S. interest rates in 40 years" and accumulating debt is not merely a coincidence. When your central bank is giving away basically free money, and the legislature is stealing money from workers in order to write billions of dollars in corporate welfare checks, the amount of investment is artificially jacked up. That will jack up the economy temporarily, but eventually the chickens will come home to roost: artificially low interest rates means artificially high malinvestment – pouring cheap money into bad projects because the risk is artificially lowered. We are now living with the hangover of our central planners’ and corporate bureaucrats’ long investment binge in the 1990s.

The Bush apparatchiks, of course, have been trying to blame this all on Clinton. And certainly Clinton’s economic policies helped create the bubble economy and continued the long tradition of massive corporate welfare giveaways. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to claim that every single problem Bush faces – from international terrorism to the going-nowhere economy – is not, in fact, the result of any of his own numerous fuck-ups, collusions of interest, or back-room deals. Instead, it’s all messes that Clinton left for Bush to clean up. Why? Because Clinton was too distracted by the Monica Lewinski investigation! (In other news, Limbaugh announced that four legs good, two legs bad.)

Let’s get serious, folks. We have an administration in power that is dedicated to increasing command and control over the economy by central planning bureaucrats – in corporate boardrooms and in government offices. The economy has been weak for the entire Bush Presidency and it shows no signs of letting up. He’s had a year and a half now; by now, even the lagging indicators (such as unemployment levels) are reflecting decisions made under the Bush administration. The problem is that the Democratic leadership is too spineless and too cowed and too much in collusion with the same corporate interests to point out that Bush’s policies have been making things worse, not better. Once again, more proof that we desperately need a system that allows for vibrant third parties in America. We desperately need a lot of other things, too–like an end to corporate welfare and centralized command-and-control over the economy–but until we have some basic democracy reforms we are very unlikely to get any of that.

(I owe the first link to my friend Mark; the second link to Tom Tomorrow)

So it turns out that Congress doesn’t think that restitution through the civil courts is adequate to deal with malicious attacks on computer systems. Indeed, it wasn’t even harsh enough yet when the USA PATRIOT act classifies hacking, viruses, and other malicious computer damage as terrorist acts subject to its draconian measures. So, to remedy this dreadful situation, they’ve decided to put together the Cyber Security Enhancement Act (CSEA), under which police state powers would be greatly increased in computer crimes, and hackers could be thrown in a federal prison until they die.

Unless, of course, you’re a multibillion dollar entertainment corporation. You see, another bill being considered in Congress which would give recording companies and their representatives legal impunity to hack computers if they have a reasonable basis to believe that piracy is taking place, and to use malicious code to trash a publicly accessible peer-to-peer network on which piracy is occurring.

Oh, but don’t worry: if they wrongly destroy your computer… well, they won’t end up in prison for life. But you can sue them! That is, if the damages were over $250. And if the U.S. Attorney General grants you permission to file the lawsuit.

The hypocrisy and slavish appeasement of economic power is hovering somewhere between merely revolting, and physically nauseating.

Take action!

• Write your Congress-critters urging them to reject Rep. Berman’s proposal, and pointing out the hypocrisy of giving big corporations a blank check on a crime which could send anyone else to prison for life [EFF].