The coming October surprise

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John McCain has pulled out of Michigan, which is big news because it signals that he has concluded he can’t win there. It looks as thought Obama is pulling ahead. So here’s a prediction: if Obama is still ahead in two weeks and the Republicans are facing defeat, Bush and Cheney will orchestrate a ‘national security’ emergency to, er, bring voters to their collective senses and reach for the Vietnam vet.

What sort of emergency? Well, how about bombing Iran after concocting some sort of Tonkin-type attack to ‘justify’ US action?

UPDATE: Turns out lots of people are thinking like this.

On this day…

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… in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit, thereby triggering a chain of events that led to the establishment of ARPA and the funding of the ARPANET, which in turn led to the Internet. Talk about unintended consequences. Full story in my book.

Robbery 2.0

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Lovely story in Good Morning Silicon Valley…

As a rule, most criminals are not particularly bright, a fact that gives law enforcement a fighting chance against lousy odds. But once in a while you see a little flash of cleverness that has to be abstractly appreciated despite the way that it was employed. Taking inspiration from similar ploys seen in the movies and adding a Web 2.0 twist, an armored-car robber in Monroe, Wash., escaped Tuesday with the unwitting help of a dozen or so decoys responding to a Craigslist job ad.

According to reports, the suspect — wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask — approached the truck in a Bank of America parking lot, gave the guard a face full of pepper spray, grabbed the cash bag, sprinted about 100 yards to a creek, hopped into a waiting inner tube and floated off to freedom. The getaway vehicle was later found about 200 yards downstream, sans passenger. At the bank, meanwhile, there was no shortage of people matching the robber’s description. A dozen or so men dressed in identical gear were wandering around wondering if their potential employer had stood them up. Each had responded to a Craigslist ad purportedly seeking to hire road maintenance workers for $28.50 an hour, and each had gotten e-mail instructions to show up at 11 a.m. Tuesday near the bank wearing certain work clothing — “yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask … and, if possible, a blue shirt,” said one. The FBI is on the case, hoping the offender was less clever in covering his digital tracks.

Blaming the voters

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This is really interesting. It turns out that the mainstream media were rather too credulous about popular hostility to the US ‘bailout’ plan. Here’s what the Pew Research Center found out.

The American public is taking a bad rap for Congress’s failure to pass the bailout bill. Members who voted against the original House bill are said to be responding to strong opposition to the rescue plan from their constituents. While there is little doubt that Congressional representatives are hearing a lot of harsh words from voters back home, that clamor does not reflect broad American public opinion. It is a classic case of the squeaky wheels getting first attention at a time when Washington is in a quandary about what to do.

The most recent polls — those conducted through Monday night — show the public is at best divided over the plan. There is little indication of overwhelming public rejection of the bailout proposal. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted Sept. 27-29 found support for the bailout slipping, but still showed a narrow 45%-38% plurality of the public saying that a government plan to invest or commit billions of dollars to secure financial institutions is the right thing to do.

An ABC/Washington Post survey conducted on Sept 29 found the public evenly split with 45% favoring and 47% opposing a government proposal to use $700 billion to shore up failing financial institutions on Wall Street. The question asked in the survey also pointed out that critics of the plan say that the failing companies don’t deserve a bailout, while proponents say it is necessary to protect the economy…

I was a bit suspicious of the way TV and radio reporters were using random vox-pop interviews to support the excuses of Republican refuseniks in the House for voting down the Bill. I should have pursued the thought, but didn’t. It’s also a case, though, where professional journalism could have done better. Mainstream media have the resources to commission polls.

Beggar (all) Thy Neighbours

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The Irish government’s extraordinary move to guarantee all investments in Irish banks has infuriated Willem Buiter. First of all, he says, it’s illegal under EU rules. And secondly,

Financial crises may not be the best time to make friends and influence people, but the Irish guarantee is the most ‘in-your-face’ beggar-thy-neighbour provocation since medieval armies catapulted bubonic-plague-ridden corpses into the cities they were besieging. Between the attempt to favour Irish shareholders at the expense of foreign shareholders and the poaching of UK sterling deposits (and indeed euro deposits anywhere else in the euro area) through subsidy-fuelled interest rate offers, Ireland should not be surprised to encounter limited support and solidarity in the EU the next time the country is up against it, for whatever issue…

Er, actually the Irish government is already ‘up against it’ in relation to Europe, because of that little local difficulty it had with ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Personally, I’m not sure I’d put money into anything ‘guaranteed’ by a Fianna Fail-led government. One delicious twist in all this is that the EU Commissioner who will have to examine the latest Fianna Fail wheeze is Charlie McCreevy, a grizzled old Fianna Fail hack. How will he square this particular barbed circle? Stay tuned.

Great Firewall of China (contd.)

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Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has just released its analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform. No surprises. They uncovered discovered a huge surveillance system that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

John Markoff of the NYT has a report.

PDF of the Citizen Lab report available from here.

I’ve always assumed that Skype was compromised — which is why I would never use it for confidential conversations. Wonder what eBay have to say about it all?

The perils of skunk

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Agonising article by Patrick Cockburn on his son’s schizophrenia.

I blame cannabis for what happened to Henry. He says he smoked a lot between the ages of 14 and 19, but I didn’t notice at the time.

I would have been concerned, of course, if I’d known back then, but until recently I had no idea about the explosive impact cannabis can have on some people.

I don’t think people realise 19 out of 20 people might take a small quantity of cannabis without ill effects, but for the 20th person who has a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, the result is catastrophic.

I don’t believe those who advocate less stringent laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis realise the devastating effect it can have…