If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again.

Then, ponder this: I defy the data!

Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

From NYT:

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The California reports said the scientists, acting at the state’s request, had hacked into systems from three of the four largest companies in the business: Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems. [Makers of Los Angeles County's InkaVote system did not submit its equipment in time, so it wasn't included.]

Thousands of their machines in varying setups are in use.

Matt Bishop said his group was surprised by how easy it was not only to pick the physical locks on the machines, but also to break through the software defenses meant to block intruders.

All the machines had problems, and one of the biggest was that the manufacturers appeared to have added the security measures after the basic systems had been designed.

By contrast, he said, the best way to create strong defenses is "to build security in from the design, in Phase 1."

From the LA Times:

"Right now, I don't see any smoking gun, honestly," said Stephen L. Weir, Contra Costa County's clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, and president of the California Assn. of Clerks and Election Officials.

Diebold also condemned the review, questioning why no election officials were included in the testing.

The review:

Secretary of State Debra Bowen began her top-to-bottom review of the voting machines certified for use in California on May 31, 2007. The review is designed to restore the public's confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and is designed to ensure that California voters are being asked to cast their ballots on machines that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible.

The review includes David Wagner, Matt Blaze, Eric Rescorla, and many others:

When exactly did House of Blues cross over the line between tribute and parody?

Hey kids, let's commit a felony!

We suggest that the technology exists to render format string vulnerabilities extinct in the near future.

Scientists Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere

After a hearing lasting more than 40 days, Pakistan's Supreme Court on July 20th overturned the government's suspension of the court's chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

The court's ruling means that Mr Chaudhry is to be reinstated.

The decision is a major blow to General Pervez Musharraf, the president, and a tactical victory for the secular political parties, who have rallied behind the judiciary in protest at what they regard as an attempt to undermine judicial independence.

The ruling is also momentous because the Pakistani judiciary in the past has always been reluctant to rule against the military or a military-led government.

However, while the decision removes one source of political tension, it will do little to stop the terrorist violence now engulfing the country.

Justice wins

We investigate the networks of committee and subcommittee assignments in the United States House of Representatives from the 101st--108th Congresses, with the committees connected by ``interlocks'' or common membership. We examine the community structure in these networks using several methods, revealing strong links between certain committees as well as an intrinsic hierarchical structure in the House as a whole. We identify structural changes, including additional hierarchical levels and higher modularity, resulting from the 1994 election, in which the Republican party earned majority status in the House for the first time in more than forty years. We also combine our network approach with analysis of roll call votes using singular value decomposition to uncover correlations between the political and organizational structure of House committees.

Community Structure in the United States House of Representatives

This week, some big thinkers about biotechnology came to Washington for a "progressive bioethics summit." They invited me to go and talk to them.

At most liberal bioethics conferences, the main question in dispute, in one form or another, is whether to be more afraid of capitalism or religion.

For the past several days, while eating lunch at my desk, I've been watching video of the liberals at a conference they held last year. I know, I need to get a life. But the video is kind of poignant. It shows a bunch of nerds commiserating about being beaten up by a gang of bullies. The bullies, according to the nerd movie, are Bush-appointed neoconservative bioethicists who do the bidding of the Christian right.

I like having the freedom to soak my head in a new topic and come out saying the opposite of what I expected. Committing to a political identity would just get in the way.

Not everything that's legal is moral. The most interesting moral questions aren't the ones you can settle with simple rules. They're the subtle ones you find in literature and real life.

Liberals, progressives, and biotechnology

I've previously mentioned Caplan's work. Here's a profile from Louis Menand in the latest New Yorker. Menand goes great work, so I'm sure it's worth reading. (See also The Metaphysical Club.)

Bryan Caplan, an economist who teaches at George Mason University, thinks that increasing voter participation is a bad thing. He thinks, in fact, that the present level of voter participation—about fifty per cent of the electorate votes in Presidential elections, a much lower percentage than in most democracies, as Americans are frequently reminded—is a bad thing.

This is a good closer:

A great virtue of democratic polities is stability. The toleration of silly opinions is (to speak like an economist) a small price to pay for it.

Fractured Franchise

On May 26, 2003, L. Paul Bremer declared Iraq “open for business.” Four years on, business is booming, albeit not as the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority intended.

...

In the face of the “creative destruction” wrought by invading forces, regular people articulate alternative paths of “creative destruction” that may express themselves with reference to alternative political and economic projects, or simply arise in the struggle to get by. Absent clear boundaries, strategy is reduced to tactics. The agents of a war economy thus do not necessarily fight to win as such: They are engaged within and act so as to reproduce an emergent, constantly shifting tactical environment. Meanwhile, there will be no single declaration of victory, no event signaling the end of one order and the beginning of a new one. Sadly, the one thing we can be sure of is that Bremer’s cohorts in the political risk business will be there to profit from his mistakes.

On its face, this publication appears questionable, but their background page notes:

According to a leading analyst, Graham Fuller of the Rand Corporation (and co-author of The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in Mexico), "Middle East Report is the single most valuable periodical I receive on Middle East affairs, offering a wealth of material unavailable elsewhere. This outstanding journal provides truly fresh, unconventional, insightful information and views that are still essential to my research even years after publication."

I can't find that quote independently sourced by RAND or Fuller, but presumably he wouldn't let it stand misquoted ...

The War Economy of Iraq

Life on the streets with the anti-narcotics police of Guinea Bissau and Liberia. See the accompanying article.

Cocaine Country - Photo Essays - TIME

The country is at a crossroads, a different kind of place from where we've been before. The special interests seem more reactionary and entrenched than ever, the bureaucracies much larger. We need to marshal the courage to change, and we need to understand what needs changing.

Washington now is like the corrupt Tory England that the Whigs reformed. Whig liberalism brought growth. Our own Jeffersonian forerunners, the Founding Fathers, also rejected the Crown and understood the importance of small government.

Newt Gingrich praises a book which got howls from John Updike:

Where the words “new history” appear, revisionism will follow.

Shlaes’s story line proposes instead that the nineteen-twenties, far from “a period of false growth and low morals,” were “a great decade of true economic gains” whose “faith in laissez-faire” was justified.

Shlaes hails his decision to leave the Presidency after five and a half years (thus ducking the crash and its consequences) as “another of Coolidge’s acts of refraining, his last and greatest.”

Sarkozy's Lesson for America