The Argument:
As far as the “birthers” go, common sense says if there wasn’t anything to hide, then nobody would be hiding anything, right?

My Answer:
There is a fundamental principle of inquiry – that is assuming one cares about the truth – that assertions should be based on evidence. The absence of evidence does not constitute evidence. So far as the courts and I can tell, nobody is hiding anything. To accept assertions on insufficient evidence risks making oneself a tool for evil hands.

By the way: The argument presented is a common fallacy.  The argument in the general form goes something like: If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide. I assume everyone reading this can understand why this argument is not valid.  It always bugs me when I hear people say it, especially in this country where we have an enshrined right to privacy arising from the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Counterpunch:
But isn’t it a duty to show the evidence if a person is running for President?

My Answer:
Yes, it is. And this was done to the satisfaction of the U.S. courts more than once.

The Non-Sequitur:
And that is enough to satify a you?  Big difference between this and McCain, and you know it.

My Answer:
Yes, there is a big difference.

McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a tenuous and temporary extension of the US and not a state of the union. If elected, McCain would have been the first US President to have been born outside the states. This was a serious legal matter that ultimately ended in a (nonbinding) Senate resolution and required real legal investigation by a bipartisan legal review. This is because “natural born” is not defined in the Constitution. While McCain would be very, very likely to prevail in a legal challenge, it is not assured. In short, the courts have not ruled on this matter.

Obama was born in Hawaii, our 50th state, and a state of the union. He has provided documentation of his birth adequate for all legal purposes. In addition, his original birth certificate has been examined by the director of the Hawaii State Department of Health who attested to its authenticity under oath. The Republican governor of the state, Linda Lingle, has also attested to Obama’s status. The US courts have ruled on this matter.

So, yes, there is a big difference. Obama’s status as a naturalized citizen is well established. McCain’s is not.

def show[T](implicit thetype:scala.reflect.Manifest[T]) {
  thetype.erasure.getMethods() foreach println
}
def help(x:AnyRef) {
  x.getClass().getMethods() foreach println
}

These silly little functions are useful – at least, to me. Now when I can’t remember the name of a method I can type something like the following at the Scala prompt.

scala> help(Map())
public scala.Option scala.collection.immutable.EmptyMap.get(java.lang.Object)
public int scala.collection.immutable.EmptyMap.hashCode()
public boolean scala.collection.immutable.EmptyMap.equals(java.lang.Object)
...

The output isn’t very Scala-ish, but I could format it if I weren’t so lazy.

scala> help(scala.runtime.RichString)
public int scala.runtime.RichString$.$tag() throws java.rmi.RemoteException
public final boolean scala.runtime.RichString$.scala$runtime$RichString$$parseBoolean(java.lang.String)
public final char scala.runtime.RichString$.scala$runtime$RichString$$LF()
public final char scala.runtime.RichString$.scala$runtime$RichString$$CR()
public final char scala.runtime.RichString$.scala$runtime$RichString$$FF()
public final void java.lang.Object.wait(long,int) throws java.lang.InterruptedException
public final void java.lang.Object.wait() throws java.lang.InterruptedException
public final native void java.lang.Object.wait(long) throws java.lang.InterruptedException
public native int java.lang.Object.hashCode()
public final native java.lang.Class java.lang.Object.getClass()
public boolean java.lang.Object.equals(java.lang.Object)
public java.lang.String java.lang.Object.toString()
public final native void java.lang.Object.notify()
public final native void java.lang.Object.notifyAll()

These functions aren’t in any way brilliant, or even clever, but they are short and ridiculously trivial to write.

Printable ASCII is roughly codes 32 through 126, or 126-32+1 = 95 characters.  There are 95 passwords of length one, $95\times 95$ passwords of length two, $95^3$ passwords of length three, etc.  This gives a grand total of:

\[\sum_{i=1}^8 95^i = 6,704,780,954,517,120\]

This is a lot of passwords.  A lot.  That’s well over 6 quadrillion passwords.  It includes the passwords ~ and ~~~~~~~~.

Not all those are available for use in most cases.  First, you typically have to do the following.

1. Choose a lower-case letter.  26 of those.
2. Choose an upper-case letter.  26 of those.
3. Choose a digit.  10 of those.
4. Choose punctuation.  Let’s call that “everything else” and say that space is punctuation.  Thus there are $95-26-26-10 = 33$ punctuation characters.

So that limits our choice on four characters.  Let’s try again!  Now there is a grand total of:

\[26\times 26\times 10\times 33\times \sum_{i=0}^4 95^i = 223,080\times 82,317,121 = 18,363,303,352,680\]

That’s over 18 trillion passwords.  That’s actually way, way down from the full potential!

How much memory is required to store every single stinkin’ password’s crypt, MD5, etc.  Well, if we do it stupidly (i.e., ignore collisions, ignore smart data structures, etc.), then for MD5 we need 16 bytes for each.  That’s approximately $16\times 17~\mbox{Tib} \approx 272~\mbox{Tib}$.  That isn’t as much as you might think.  A single terabyte drive costs about \$100 (US) right now, and we’d need 272 of them.  Let’s say 300, just to be safe.  How much is that?  $300\times \$100 = \$30,000$.  Overhead, installation, maintenance, etc., all add to that, but not that much.  In short, it is very cost effective.

Computing them all?  We’d need to compute a lot of hashes.  Let’s pick on MD5 (even though it is almost cracked).  Suppose it takes us one millisecond to compute one hash.  We still need to compute 18.4 trillion hashes.  Serially, that’s $18.4\times 10^{12}~\mbox{passwords}\cdot 1\times 10^{-3}~\frac{\mbox{sec}}{\mbox{password}} = 1.84\times 10^{10}~\mbox{sec}$.  That’s just over 583 years.  Whew!  We’re all completely safe.

Not even close.  Suppose I have a 1024 node machine (small by today’s standards).  That cuts three orders of magnitude from the result, since every hash can be computed independently of the others (though smart storage would cause some serialization).  Now we’re down to under 6 years.  And how fast can we compute MD5 hashes???

Smart folks are making MD5 very fast.  See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1810.html.  That’s from 1995.  Well, md5 -t, on my little 32-bit Intel MacBook, reports a speed of 313,406,912 bytes per second.  Eight bytes should take just about $2.55\times 10^{-8}~\mbox{seconds}$.  Yes, there’s overhead at the end of each hash, but I can counter with the following: I can hard code the eight byte limit to get a more efficient algorithm.  I can do a smart iteration with single-byte modifications and hash updates instead of a whole new hash computation.  Plus, there are much faster processors and, I feel confident, faster implementations.  I’ve got some confidence in my machine’s performance as an upper bound.  So, back to our 1024 node machine.

\[\frac{18.4\times 10^{12}~\mbox{passwords}}{1024~\mbox{node}} \cdot 2.55\times 10^{-8}~\frac{\mbox{seconds}}{\mbox{password}} = 458 \frac{\mbox{seconds}}{\mbox{node}}\]

That’s under eight minutes.  I can’t even manage to make coffee in that time.  Even assuming we add two orders of magnitude for storage and overhead, that’s just 800 minutes, or a few days.

I’d be surprised if there isn’t a database somewhere of all 8-byte (or shorter) passwords and their crypt, MD5, SHA1, and what-have-you.  That is, I expect 8-byte passwords have been solved.  Think about that next time you log in to a site on the web, secure in the knowledge that your password is being sent encrypted.

Who could do this?  If I were highly motivated, I could.  I’d do better data reduction (to save on data warehousing) and maybe even ship everything up to be computed on one of the “clouds” at Google, Dell, or Amazon.  If I can do this sitting in my house at my laptop…

• A const reference.  I don’t want to copy it, but I promise not to modify it, either.
• A reference.  I might modify it.
• A copy.  I might modify my local copy, but not the original.  I’m getting a copy, after all.

Easy peasy in C++.  In Java?  Uh, I pass all objects by reference. The interface says nothing about modification.  Pass me a Map and maybe I’ll modify it, maybe not.  You don’t know, and you can’t enforce it.  Unless you pass me a Collections.unmodifiableMap().  Then my code might break!  There might be some odd little case left over where I do modify it, in spite of documentation comments to the contrary.  C++?  I declare it to be a const reference, and now the compiler will prevent me from modifying it.  I like that quite a bit.

I also like const methods, and you really can’t have const without const methods.  The Java way it to throw exceptions.  I’d rather have the compiler tell me something at compile-time than have the runtime system fail at runtime.  But I’m weird, I suppose.

I’m certainly not against prayer in school. In fact, as a strong believer in freedom I think it is essential that people be free from government interference (within limits) to follow the “dictates of their consciences.” To be more specific: While I do not believe you are entitled to your opinion, I also do not think it is the government’s job to fix it. You have a right to be free of government interference in what you believe, think, and even do, provided you don’t initiate the use of force against another person. At that point the government can step in. Deciding where that point is can be a thorny exercise, of course.

But back to prayer in school. What exactly would I be signing up for? I visit the page and click Info. Here’s what it says at the time of writing.

This is to see how many people belive [sic] that prayer should be allowed back into public school.

“Allowed back?” I have made the point elsewhere that prayer and Bible reading are not against the law in schools. In fact, courts in the United States have consistently held that religious expression by students cannot be suppressed or abridged unless it can be shown to cause substantial disruption. Essentially you are free to pray, but not if you disrupt classes or block a fire exit. You can even form student prayer groups and meet on school grounds thanks to the Federal Equal Access Act, passed back in 1984.

I have also argued elsewhere that groups like this fall into two categories: those that genuinely misunderstand the current laws, and those who seek to use government to promote their views over the views of others.

I agree with the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church, and the American Baptist Churches that “current law quite sufficiently provides adequate constitutional and statutory protections against violations of the right of voluntary prayer.” This statement comes from a letter to which the before mentioned organizations were signatories.

Given that I believe the current laws are consistent with the Constitution and adequate to protect voluntary prayer, and given that I do not want government to promulgate values, I cannot become a “fan” of the group. In fact, I’m a bit surprised anyone is.

Their current membership is 131,648. I find myself wondering what these folks think they are signing up to support. Let’s read! To avoid accusations of cherry-picking, I’ll just grab the first three posts from the Wall, at the time of writing, verbatim and in order. I don’t give the full names, but you can visit the site (linked at the start of this note) to read for yourself.

Cathy D: You know the shirt may say, God why do u allow so much violence in our schools, but when God is not allowed in the schools, how do they expect him to help…

Cathy D: We need PRAYER back in our schools, in our lives, and homes. Some children would never hear a prayer but at school. Let’s get PRAYER back in our schools. Please Lord help us to get this done..

Andrea S: There are T-shirts you can buy that state on the front “Public Schools Need God” and has 2 letters written on the back. The letters state
“Dear God, Why do you allow so much violence in our schools? Sincerely Yours, A Concerned Student….
Dear Concerned Student, I am not allowed in school. Sincerely Yours, God.”
It says it all. When people started stepping and having God removed from our schools, we seemed to have a lot more tragedies across the nation. We need God in our schools and in our country. I do not understand why people are trying to throw Him out when He is what this country was initially founded upon.. It’s a shame..

Cathy D specifically writes “Some children would never hear a prayer but at school.” That is, she isn’t seeking a right for students to pray in school (which they already have), she wants the students to hear a school-sanctioned prayer whether or not their parents or guardians do. If this sounds noble to you, you haven’t thought it through. Please read the articles I linked above.

Andera S gives the oft-repeated argument that school violence is linked to the removal of school-sponsored prayer. Again, I covered that before. To my knowledge no causal link has been established, and many of the arguments about specific social decay (teen pregnancy, divorce, violent crime) are not supported by easily-available evidence.

So, as someone who values freedom, including religious freedom, this group is not for me.

President Barack Obama

Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer says Obama’s school speech uses taxpayer dollars (i.e., your dollars) to indoctrinate your children.

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.

Source: CNN

Really. Do you support compulsory government-funded education? Okay, there’s no point in asking that.

Anyway, I found nothing particularly objectionable in the speech itself. You can read it here (whitehouse.gov), if you dare. That’s right. It’s on the Internet, where anyone might see it.

Most seem to object to the content of the lesson plan.

[...] Critics objected to the language of one of the lesson plans, for students in pre-kindergarten through grade 6, that suggested that students “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president.” Another assignment for students after hearing the speech was to discuss what “the president wants us to do.”

Source: FOX News

That letter writing exercise has been changed. It is now “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.” (Ibid.)

Okay. It takes some fine parsing to take offense at the original plan, but then many believe that the Obama administration is making use of subtle linguistic cues to help liberal educators spread a message of socialism. Nothing can be done to help such people. But what about the speech?

I can’t imagine how seeing Obama’s face on television would have scarred me. Write a letter? What did Obama say he wanted me to do? Stay in school? Thankfully I only heard that from video games, along with “Winners don’t use drugs!” Of course, I did stay in school and didn’t use drugs, so the damage was done. Hopefully there’s still time to save this generation from my fate. Teaching ill-defined fear of our elected leaders is a good way to start.

Van Jones

Gone. Unsurprising, really. Was Van Jones a truther? Well, he signed the petition, and I don’t think he can point to any public statement where he repudiated the truthers until recently… and then very weakly. He says he was the victim of a “vicious smear campaign.” Sure, I’ll grant that. So? He’s a politician and a lawyer, after all.

See the quotation and his repudiation of the truthers in the USA Today.

Is what he said really a big deal?

At times like this I like to quote the late Richard Mitchell, of The Underground Grammarian. In his essay “Less Than Words Can Say” he offers us the passage below, which I quote in full. The italics are his, the bold emphasis is mine.

Not many years ago, it was a popular sport to collect and publish silly mistakes made by schoolchildren in their compositions. Many books of these so-called boners were printed for the delectation of grown-ups who laughed and chuckled. “Heh, heh, ain’t they cute.” Sometimes venturesome publishers went even further and printed collections of idiocies from the notes that schoolchildren brought from home. These were usually pathetic examples from barely literate people, but we chuckled and laughed some more. Now, like desperate drillers looking for new pockets of gas, we publish collections of the pomposities and malapropisms of politicians and bureaucrats. Again we chuckle and laugh. We don’t find them quite as cute as those cunning kids, but still we laugh. It makes us feel superior. And because we feel superior we forgive; and we’re willing to believe that a member of the city council, say, or a senator, shouldn’t be judged too harshly merely by the inanity of his words. We’ll still reelect him. After all, anybody can make a mistake. We make this mistake because it does not occur to us that there is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words, and we pay attention only long enough to be amused. In fact, however, those silly little mistakes always mean something important.

You can find an archive of Mitchell’s writings at The Underground Grammarian.

On Meet the Press today (September 6, 2009) David Gregory was interviewing David Axelrod, the President’s Senior Adviser. It isn’t on Hulu yet, so I’ll include a link to the YouTube clip. It will probably be taken down soon. Here’s the part of the exchange I find interesting, with me inserted.

Gregory: Do you find it, what he [Van Jones] said, objectionable?
Me: [Yelling at the TV] Just say yes! Just say yes!
Axelrod: Well I haven’t read all of, of his comments either, David. Again, I’m focused on how we get health security for all Americans, how do we get this economy moving in the right direction. We’ve pulled back from the abyss of a potential collapse, and now we have to build for the future and get people back to work. I think those are the things we should be focused on, and that’s what I am focused on.
Me: [Groan]

See the segment on YouTube.

Why is this hard? If Van Jones said that he had been interested in what the 9/11 truth movement had to say, but after he found out he realized that they were nuts, he might be okay. (There are still his comments about Republicans, of course, but that’s a different, also toxic, matter.) So I have almost the same reaction to Axelrod’s inability to reject Van Jones’ comments as I do with, say, John McCain’s inability to reject President Bush’s policies.

Okay, so is this really a big deal? Does believing that government officials may have been complicit in 9/11 really mean you are unfit to hold office? Our elected officials believe a great many surprising, wrong, and even downright idiotic things, but we elect them anyway. Perhaps he was merely a victim of picking an unpopular thing to support.

I don’t think it is just a matter of an unpopular choice. First, let me say that our government has done some terrible things and covered them up. If you need a short list, email me or, better still, consult the historians. Isn’t it possible that members of the Bush administration were actively complicit in the 9/11 attacks? Of course not.

First, the explanation given is simple, direct, and easily understood. Religious extremists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings. We know where they trained to fly, how the got in the country, etc. The trail is really clear, the story hangs together, and it makes sense. In fact, even the engineering makes sense. We know why the buildings, even building 7, collapsed. All the evidence (and there is a lot of it) supports the story we all know; none of it supports the truthers’ many versions. The truthers are in the same situation as the birthers.

The other story is that members of the administration let it happen. I don’t buy this, either. Bush did not surround himself with the kind of people who passed at the chance to be heroes. Plus, how did they find out? From the CIA? The NSA? The FBI? In all three cases the intel would have triggered law enforcement actions, such as investigations and the creation of files. Maybe folks should have known, but sadly it seems they did not.

So we’re back to whether or not it matters. And I say yes, it does. This administration has an ambitious agenda (whether you agree with it or not) and needs public support to accomplish any of these things and even to just accomplish the business of running the country. We’re engaged in two wars started as a result of 9/11, and going through upheavals on who specifically broke the law on interrogations. Adding someone who thinks, absent any evidence, that the former administration assisted in these attacks is toxic.

So, exit Van Jones, for now. He was one of the co-founders of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and will remain actively engaged in political life, I’m sure. With only minor apologies to Fitzgerald, there are plenty of second acts in American lives.

Health Care

How about passing simple legislation that is straightforward? We could do each of these – but not in one bill!

1. Allow purchasing health insurance from out-of-state vendors. That is, “crossing state lines” to buy insurance. This is currently illegal.
2. Allow and encourage the formation of health insurance alliances that pool many small businesses or even individuals.
3. Require insurers to offer a basic “minimum coverage” policy. We could require everyone to purchase it… and make it (a) tax exempt or (b) refundable. We could even do a “prebate” as with the Fair Tax.

These would probably help now. More high-power tinkering could be done down the road. I really, really don’t understand the rush to solve our problem with a giant heap of legislation whose net effect is nearly impossible to predict because of its complexity. It is idiotic, and it might doom any sort of meaningful reform or cost control measures.

As for the above, the only one that requires any outlay from Uncle Sam is possibly option 3. The others just introduce and encourage competition.

Health Care

I’ve seen the “public option” compared to the Post Office (by the President), and I just saw it compared to public colleges by Sen. Schumer (D-NY).

The explanation of the public option that I keep hearing is: The government will set it up, and then it must compete on its own, and the government will be “hands off” after that. To that I say: maybe. Suppose the public option plan begins to have trouble, and starts to fail. Won’t we bail it out? It has to compete with other insurers. Believe it or not, these have patents on business processes. Will the public option be given the royalty-free right to use these processes? If so, it isn’t a level playing field.

Does the government even have the authority to create such an entity? The Post Office is, after all, explicitly an enumerated power in the constitution. Clearly they do… but really, should they?

If Schumer’s analogy (like public colleges) is apt, then I would point out that the government subsidizes public colleges. But I am repeatedly told that the public option will not be subsidized.

The Post Office is a pseudo-independent corporation and receives no tax funds. But it has only been this way since 1971 (thank you Mr. Nixon); before that the Postmaster General was a Cabinet position, and was, in fact, in line to succeed the President.

Maybe Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the models to follow. But Fannie and Freddie are protected monopolies. Then again, so is the Post Office. It is illegal for anyone else to deliver letters.* Even better, all three are exempt from state and federal taxes and free from most government regulations.** We could expect much the same from the public option, I suspect.

(* The USPO has a monopoly over the delivery of certain kinds of mail, and also over access to your mailbox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service)

(** Fannie Mae pays property taxes: http://www.fanniemae.com/aboutfm/charter.jhtml. But not state or local taxes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_mae)

It is starting to look like the public option is dying. Maybe that’s sad, but there’s no way to know. So far as I can tell, it was never adequately explained.

Health Care

In order for the market to reduce the cost to you, you need two things.

• You need to have a choice.
• You need to be the one paying the bill.

If you lack either of these, you will be, in essence, ignored by the market, almost as if you were a non-participant.

So… what about health care?

First, we have little or no choice in most cases. Most of us have health insurance provided by our employers, and they typically have just one or maybe two options. This leads to a lack of choice that Obama and others decry, and hope to fix by introducing a public option. Further, I am not the one paying the majority of the bill; my employer is.

The insurance company negotiates a contract with my employer, and seeks to satisfy them. I have no other options, since I cannot afford to go off the employer-provided insurance, and so I’ve lost choice and I’m not the party paying. That’s not a good situation when you are the consumer of a good.

To find out why we ended up with this system we have to go back to World War II. During the war labor is scarce, for obvious reasons. Companies would typically compete for labor by offering better wages, but there are price and wage controls in place. Companies are, however, allowed to compete by offering employee insurance plans, including health benefits.

I found a pretty good discussion of this here:

Offering insurance policies to employee groups not only benefited insurers, but also benefited employers. During World War II, wage and price controls prevented employers from using wages to compete for scarce labor. Under the 1942 Stabilization Act, Congress limited the wage increases that could be offered by firms, but permitted the adoption of employee insurance plans. In this way, health benefit packages offered one means of securing workers. In the 1940s, two major rulings also reinforced the foundation of the employer-provided health insurance system. First, in 1945 the War Labor Board ruled that employers could not modify or cancel group insurance plans during the contract period. Then, in 1949, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in a dispute between the Inland Steel Co. and the United Steelworkers Union that the term “wages” included pension and insurance benefits. Therefore, when negotiating for wages, the union was allowed to negotiate benefit packages on behalf of workers as well. This ruling, affirmed later by the U.S. Supreme Court, further reinforced the employment-based system.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of government intervention that shaped the employer-based system of health insurance was the tax treatment of employer-provided contributions to employee health insurance plans. First, employers did not have to pay payroll tax on their contributions to employee health plans. Further, under certain circumstances, employees did not have to pay income tax on their employer’s contributions to their health insurance plans. The first such exclusion occurred under an administrative ruling handed down in 1943 which stated that payments made by the employer directly to commercial insurance companies for group medical and hospitalization premiums of employees were not taxable as employee income (Yale Law Journal, 1954, pp. 222-247). While this particular ruling was highly restrictive and limited in its applicability, it was codified and extended in 1954. Under the 1954 Internal Revenue Code (IRC), employer contributions to employee health plans were exempt from employee taxable income. As a result of this tax-advantaged form of compensation, the demand for health insurance further increased throughout the 1950s (Thomasson 2003).

I leave it to the historians out there to check that, but it jives pretty well with what I’ve read elsewhere.

So let’s summarize. Our gov’t created a system that reinforced employer-provided health insurance. This resulted in lack of competition, and now they are going to fix the lack of competition by adding a public option. What have I missed?