antikoan.net

Calloused Hands

2008-11-05T12:24:26-06:00

John Derbyshire at NRO is my first nominee this morning for the Nordlinger Prize:

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused [sic] hands?” When did he ever have callused hands?

I don't know, John. When did you?

Before turning to writing full-time, he worked on Wall Street as a computer programmer. As a novelist, Derbyshire's 1996 book, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year". His more recent Prime Obsession was awarded the Mathematical Association of America's inaugural Euler Book Prize.^[4]

Hm. I guess...never!

And his disturbingly strong resemblance to a young John Cleese is really not helping me cut him slack....

nordlinger effect

I Voted

2008-11-04T12:49:23-06:00

My wife and I voted this morning for the first serious Black presidential candidate in American history. And more to the point, he seems to me to be the best candidate we've had in my lifetime, which now spans eleven presidential elections.

I get dewey-eyed about this, I'll admit it, and I'm filled at the same time with trepidation. I have confidence -- not faith -- that Obama is a decent human being, a wise delegator, someone who actually, genuinely cares what Americans really want, at the same time that he is able and willing to take the responsibility for giving them what he thinks they need. I have confidence that he's the kind of leader I want for my country and that I don't think we've had for a long time.

I worry, though, that we expect too much. It's true that he's a tabula rasa. That's not a false charge. People are using their idea of him as a vessel for their dreams, and I fear that the vessel will break against reality. Wise people often suffer that fate.

For now, I want this to be over. I thought the 2004 election was bad; this has been far worse. Kerry was simply not respected by his foes; Obama has been demonized. Many in the opposition will simply never acknowledge his legitimacy.

Hope lies in Obama's ability to reach out to moderate Republicans and win their confidence. Bush claimed that he would reach out and unite; I have confidence that Obama will actually do it.

Confidence. Not faith. That means a lot to me.

Bruce Fein: Snobby Conservative Elitists Like Me Are The Only True Judges Of Exceptionality

2008-11-04T12:34:41-06:00

Bruce Fein is getting his ducks in order to say "I-told-you-so":

None of the presidential or vice presidential candidates would have been worthy of the constitutional convention of 1787 or the Federalist Papers, the high-water mark of political erudition and profundity in more than a thousand years. Among other things, they all subscribe to the delusions that the government can outfox the efficiencies of free markets; that the United States can be made safer and freer by sacrificing the lives and limbs of tens of thousands of American soldiers abroad and squandering hundreds of billions of dollars in quixotic adventures to transform incorrigibly tribal or feudal societies into friendly secular democracies; and, that international terrorism justifies a permanent global war crowning the president with perpetual war powers, including the authority to detain American citizens as "enemy combatants" for life without accusation or charge; to spy on Americans without warrants in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; and, to employ waterboarding against detainees with impunity.

Translation #1: "Those Founding Father guys were, like, total gods, dude. Like, I read that their shit didn't even smell bad!"

Alternate Translation: "Don't blame me -- I voted for Kodos!"

Anyway, those are all strong statements Fein's making. Mostly false, and obviously so, and where not false, off the point:

The people who were there at the constitutional Convention of 1787 weren't "worthy" of it; and in any case, would certainly not be "worthy" to face the challenges we face now. We face our challenges with what we have, not with what we wish we had. (Don Rumsfeld got that much right.)
The Free Market is not a god, and it's not a law of nature, Fein and the Marketistas contentions to the contrary notwithstanding. We make choices about how our society is to be structured, and right now, the dominant choices are favoring Marketism. That was not always the case and there is no reason to suppose it will always continue to be in the future.
At least Obama, and arguably also Biden, have been quite clear in their belief that sacrificing the lives and limbs of Americans overseas does not make us safer, and if Fein were being honest he'd admit that he knows that.
Similarly, it's not at all clear that Obama and Biden support the continuation of Presidential war powers. But I'll just argue that Fein is too strong on this point, since neither Obama nor Biden has explicitly said they'll roll them back.
Both Obama and Biden have, though, been clear that the FISA must be honored by the next President, and ought to be honored by the current one.
Finally, Obama for his part has been quite clear (and I actually believe McCain would probably backtrack to his older, more ethically-grounded position on this once he was in office) that torture is simply not acceptable.

Moreover, this is all stuff that Fein should know if he's been paying attention, and if he's not been paying attention, there's absolutely no reason anybody should listen to his opinon on anything of consequence. So, what's the point of this exercise in late-term sour grapes?

It has to be so that Fein claim blamelessness and moral high-ground. He's pretending this is really about "mediocrity", it's really about America not turning to its elites anymore. There may actually be some wisdom in such a view -- but Fein's got no ground to stand on, since he doesn't actually know what the real capabilities of the candidates actually are. He hasn't allowed himself to see them. Other discerning people have looked at Obama, for example, and seen a confident, capable politician -- as qualified to lead America as, say, John Adams or Abraham Lincoln at the time of their ascension. What had they "run"? What could we look at in their records to say that they had the "experience" required?

The answers are all questions of either the good fortunate to participate in momentous decisions (in Adams' case), or in a judgement of character based on reputation and rhetoric (in the case of Lincoln). Neither had "executive experience" of any kind prior to assuming office. But in Fein's worldview, they're unassailable giants. What he's blind to is the fact that their stature is a matter of hindsight (and what I like about these examples is that either one would readily admit as much -- well, maybe not Adams, since his stature is really only now being so elevated).

What this is really all about is that Fein's not getting to specify who's "exceptional." (Which is a damn good thing, since he's clearly got some problems with seeing what's actually going on in the world.) What this is really all about is that Fein's opinion isn't coinciding with the direction the electorate wants to go.

What's really going on is that there are these kids playing on (what Fein thinks is) his lawn, and he wants them to pull up their pants and show him some deference, dammit.

Which they might be willing do, if it wasn't clear that he isn't interested in actually listening to anyone else's opinions.

Before Bruce Fein expects anyone to take him seriously as a credible arbiter of who's exceptional and who's not, he should first demonstrate that we ought to listen to him (by showing he's been paying attention), and that he's got some awareness of actual history (by recognizing that people were often as small, petty and unprepared in the past as they are now). Until then, he's just a snobby, snooty conservative elitist.

Madelyn Dunham, 86, RIP

2008-11-03T22:12:31-06:00

Barack Obama's grandmother has died. It's 5:09pm ET.

Let's see how long it takes the scurvy little spiders to speculate that it was a campaign stunt.

The Nordlinger Effect

2008-11-03T17:22:00-06:00

Those wacky NRO guys -- Jay Nordlinger has spent a weekend in Vermont, and now he Understands The Noble Working Man:

.... here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

(I guess we know what "the math" is, now.)

Commenter Landon at Matthew Yglesias's blog describes this as the Nordlinger Effect:

The Nordlinger Effect is when non-rich people respond they’re voting like the rich jerk asking them who they’re voting for just so he’ll shut up and leave them alone.

For his part, Yglesias himself has pointed (unnecessarily) to the work of Andrew Gelman to demonstrate that rich folks in poor states (like Vermont) do in fact tend to vote for Republicans, while poor folks in poor states (like Vermont) do in fact tend to vote Democratic. Others in Yglesias's comment thread take the trouble to note (among other things) that you're not a real Vermonter unless you're born there (at least), all the ski chalets are owned by "flatlanders" from Connecticut, Massachusetts and NY (who won't be voting in Vermont, anyway), and that all the actual data demonstrates amply that "Vermonters of modest means" will be voting overwhelmingly for Obama. (As for housekeeping staff voting Republican: If he believes that, I've got this bridge I'd love to sell him...)

And how the hell Jay Nordlinger can use the phrase "of modest means" without blushing, I don't know. Maybe it's an internal manifestation of the Nordlinger Effect: Jay telling Jay what Jay wants to hear, so his brain will leave him alone.

lysenkoism, nordlinger effect

Barack Obama is a CIA Plant!

2008-11-03T12:22:58-06:00

One of the things I find really irritating about wingnuts is that they don't appear to think very clearly, and their writing shows it. Here's a typical passage from a typical "run your underwear up the flagpole" bit of conspiracy-baiting from Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy:

As part of a joint “project” with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] (p. 170), Oglesby arranged meetings with Haynes and Business International clients as part of their “round-table meetings,” allowing SDS to explain their opposition to the war (p. 171). New York SDS members continued to meet regularly with Business International even after Oglesby left New York.

Haynes “had come to agree with SDS about the war, racism, and urban poverty.” (Id.) Haynes, who died in 1976, told Oglesby that if he had been in the same generation as Oglesby, he might have joined SDS. (p. 170) After Robert Kennedy died, Haynes even called up Oglesby and urged SDS to riot: “Get your people out and tear the goddamn place into pieces.” (Oglesby, p. 188)

According to Oglesby, the Dohrn/Klonsky wing [of the SDS] was highly suspicious of SDS’s joining in any programs with Business International. Oglesby’s memoir recounts long discussions and interrogations of Oglesby — led by Dohrn, Klonsky, and Arlene Bergman — over Oglesby’s development of SDS links with Business International. [emphasis added]

Of all the firms in all the world, Obama had to walk into the one that years before had closer ties to SDS than any other mainstream business in the world. What luck!

(It's so cute the way scare-quoting "project" turns it into a wingnut dog-whistle.)

The point, I think, is that because Obama worked for a company that eight (or more) years previously had a President who was sympathetic to the aims of the Students for a Democratic Society, we're supposed to be suspicious of Obama's aims, now. As though just having one official who made contacts with the SDS was enough to taint an entire company such that not only would the taint still be there ten to fifteen years later, it would be strong enough to taint in turn everyone who ever worked there for a brief time, or perhaps everyone who was ever associated with them -- and that now, we're supposed to suspect that any of those people might be a sleeper-agent for the ComIntern.

But that's not what's wrong with this passage.

It's not even the dog-whistle invocation of "SDS" as code for "communist", harkening back as it does to the cold war and the days of "useful idiots." (By the way, the Right has useful idiots, too -- they just all think the idiot is someone else.)

What's really wrong with this passage is that Lindgren screws up telling the story.

He wants to establish "ties" between SDS and Business International. Clearly he wants to imply that those ties are somehow active, that they have sufficient vitality to make us legitimately worried about Obama as a result. Yet he takes great care (probably because, like any writer, he's loathe to edit) to keep a passage that expresses great ambivalence ont he part of SDS over being involved with Business International. He doesn't say why, but suspicion of Business International's motives seems like a plausible reason. Apparently there have been rumors off and on that Business International was a CIA front, like Coca-Cola (though it's as easy to imagine SDS's suspicion starting those rumors as being in response to them).

Here's where it gets sloppy: Lindgren seques from that into trying to draw the connection between scary-SDS and scary-Obama by way of (possibly spooky) business research firm Business International, right after clearly establishing that some influential elements of scary-SDS were scared of Business International.

So that's how Lindgren screws uptelling the story: He precedes his closer with evidence that undermines (if not negates) it. And because of his own confirmation bias, he probably doesn't even realize he did it.

At another level, though, this is merely typical conspiracy wanking. He's taking a random connection and tossing it against the wall. It's as though I were to point out that John McCain consorted with Democrats as a Naval attache to Congress in the 1970s. Some lunatic might make the leap to associate him with Democrats and by extension with the anti-war movement. Voila: John McCain is now a secret Commie, in the mind of one lunatic. It's a dog whistle. The great holy grail of conspiracy baiting is to find the dog whistle that calls the most dogs. Sometimes it's best to leave the crap in, because you can just never know what will resonate with a lunatic.

The juciest irony, though, is that based on Lindgren's story, it's just as easy to create a nutjob conspiracy narrative where Barack Obama is a CIA plant as it is to create one where he's a secret Commie.

It does encourage the development of poor rhetorical skills, though.

"But I might wake up king someday, and if I do...."

2008-11-02T12:57:14-06:00

Deep in the middle of a surreal attempt at social analysis that reads more like a bad acid-trip, Mark Levin at the NRO stumbles upon one true thing: "Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it...."

Congratulations, Mr. Levin: You've defined Populism. To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin's great fake-president, the problem with an America where anyone can become rich is that everyone thinks they will, and makes their electoral choices accordingly. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean making a workable plan to become rich, or even necessarily working especially hard: It most typically means a lot of day-dreaming, lotto-buying, and planning to make sure that THE GOVERNMENT doesn't get a chance to take away any of your wondrous, hypothetical, chance-gotten gains.

Put another way: We act in the interest of the person we fantasize about becoming, instead of the person we actually are.

Of course there are a lot of people who work hard for what they get. But it's more or less never been true that wealth or status has a direct relationship with how hard you work -- or, for that matter, how smart you are. In fact, even some conservatives take great pains to make it clear just how much of it is down to the opportunities you have.

Cleverness, though -- now that's very important. You have to know how to work the angles, to work people. You have to have social intelligence, at a minimum, but that's not usually enough. No, to really become wealthy or important, you most often have to have a willingness to hurt other people to get what you want.

To Be Vaguely Acquainted With Her Is To Be Seduced By Her

2008-11-02T12:50:07-06:00

Larry Eagleburger, pressed on whether Sarah Palin would be ready to serve as President:

"It is a very good question," he said, pausing a few seconds, then adding with a chuckle: "I'm being facetious here. Look, of course not."

John McCain, in response:

Larry has never had a chance to meet Sarah. She's got more experience than Sen. Biden and Sen. Obama put together.

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard catalogs people who "respect" her versus those who don't, and wants us to believe that it's all about whether or not they have actually met her, in the flesh. If so, I'm starting to think Sarah Palin should be classified as some kind of munition, perhaps a psychological or biological warfare agent. Or maybe she's like that alien princess from OT. It seems that once you come in contact with her, your critical faculties are toast. Call it 'Caribou Barbie Infatuation Syndrome.' Symptoms resemble those of excess alcohol consumption, including a tendency to see little starbursts, perceive people on television as speaking directly to you, excessive gift-giving, and rationalization of or blindness to flaws or exaggeration of virtues in the object of infatuation.

Curiously, most heterosexual women seem immune. I wonder why.

Apparently it's never occurred to Barnes that meeting her, rather than not meeting her, might be the error.

Caribou Barbie Infatuation Syndrome, beergoggles, Elasian Tears

Pathetic

2008-10-31T14:40:58-05:00

How can you read about Dan Cooper and not come to the conclusion that actual freedom and actual personal responsibility are essentially meaningless to the vast majority of people who call themselves "conservative"?

Dan Cooper was basically a poster-child for libertarian-conservative values. He was a small businessman, a manufacturer of high-quality hunting rifles, who shepherded his business through hard times until it ultimately employed about 38 people. Clearly this is a guy who supports "individualist" interpretations of the Second Amendment. And since I know a few things about guns and I've known a bunch of people who loved hunting, I can tell you that people who bother to buy a rifle like the ones that Dan Cooper sold are not generally going to be your typical modern gun nut. These are fairly expensive guns, bolt-action rifles designed for hunting game, not clones of military weapons intended to make the bearer feel potent. Whether you like the craft they're used for, it's hard not to accept that what he made were craftsman's tools, not assembly-line garbage with no legitimate use in a civil society.

I keep using the term 'was' because Dan Cooper isn't making guns anymore. Oh, the company's still there, but Dan's gotten fired as the President of the company he founded.

Here's what happened to Dan Cooper: he had the audacity to publicly announce that he supported Barack Obama. And for that, he was hounded out of his position by a bunch of limp-dicked gun nuts.

And yet pathetic pseudo-intellectuals like Andy McCarthy can write, with what they'd have us believe is a straight face, that Obama is the one who's going to have a catastrophic impact on our "liberty." These guys and their fellow-travelers on the radical religious right are the ones who would place restrictions on my liberty by enforcing a tyranny of the minority from the extreme right.

Andy McCarthy doesn't have the guts to deal with real freedom because real freedom might mean people choosing ideas other than the ones he's behind. Being a real thinker means having the courage to have a real discussion about your ideas, which is something that the narcissistic dregs of post-Buckley Buckleyism (which I won't dignify by calling 'Conservatism') and pseudo-conservative intellectualoids snarf down their unholy cocktail of Rand & God & penis-amplification devices.

But then, I suppose freedom from liberty is a kind of freedom. Or freedom from choice. Everything is so much easier when you get to let someone else choose for you, right? Like Dan Cooper should have let the phallicly-challenged nut cases in the NRA dictate who he offered public support for.

As I said, I've known a lot of people who loved hunting and hunting-guns. I'm a bit heartened to see how many aren't locked in to the ridiculous knee-jerk mindset:

As a gun owner from Montana myself, i can't wait to buy one of Mr. Cooper's firearms. Notice I didn't say his former company's firearms, as I would not support them any longer. And yes, I cast my vote for Barack Obama on October 6th.

If only the more vocal minority of self-proclaimed "gun nuts" could be that rational (and gracious).

'Soviet' Is The New 'Hitler'

2008-10-29T11:52:48-05:00

"It's sort of like when you imagined the Soviet invasion, it would take over the airwaves." Right. Because invaders always pay for their air-time and have the courtesy to get off and let you keep watching baseball when they're done telling you resistance is futile.

The conversation about just how Soviet Barack Obama really is, is...

...another example of how comparisons to totalitarian Russia have become as meaningless as allusions to the Nazis -- people basically use both as rhetorical crutches for arguments that limp along without them. This election season, such inane comparisons have multiplied like breeding rabbits, in part because the right has descended into absolute hysteria over Obama's chances of winning the election, and because you can only ride that Hitler hobby-horse so long before it starts to chafe. (Remember when the right used to complain that the left was making inappropriate comparisons between Bush and the Nazis?) Clearly, the media has started to internalize this nonsense, at least partially because people like Geist and Hazlett apparently have no idea what communism and socialism really are.
Adam Serwer, "GODWIN'S LAW NEEDS AN UPDATE", on American Prospect

I try to be charitable, I really do, but anyone who thinks Obama is a Stalinist, Marxist, or even a Socialist really needs some serious history lessons, some serious counseling, or both.

It's just a stepwise progression, of course. 'Liberal' has been tantamount to 'Nazi' in large segments of the right for at least 20 years. It's just that in the pre-Internet days, they didn't have a place to air out their skid-marked psyches.

Patio Man

2008-10-21T14:37:28-05:00

It may be true that David Brooks is not a deep thinker (or at least not a grand thinker), but he often has some penetrating (if uncomfortable for Conservatives) demographic insights:

Some liberals think they are headed for an age of liberal dominance and government expansion. “If Obama offers a big, budget-busting program next year, it will more likely be seen as fair than irresponsible,” Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek.
But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it’s from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation.
There is a deep current of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order.
Democrats have done well in suburbia recently because they have run the kind of candidates who seem like the safer choice — socially moderate, pragmatic and fiscally hawkish. They, or any party, will run astray if they threaten the mood of chastened sobriety that has swept over the subdivisions.

He's got a point, there. And I don't think he misses the fact that Obama is much more of an incrementalist than a radical.

Also, as with many genuinely curious intellectuals, it can be hard to tell the difference with Brooks between talking-about and talking-for: This is very likely not what he wants (or at least not all of it), but rather what he thinks is. What he wants is the John McCain he profiled and admired. What he's going to get is Obama. He'll be OK with that at an intellectual level, and it may even make him feel safer, but it probably won't make him happy. I doubt we'll see David Brooks "endorsing" Obama before the election.

("Patio Man." Sounds like a newly-identified hominid. Brooks is so square, sometimes, I swear. My father would think he's a hoot. It's weird to think that we're close to the same age....)

To Seem Good Is Much More Important Than To Be Good: Or, Sarah Palin, Counterfeit Alaskan

2008-10-20T12:25:47-05:00

Alaska native Seth Kantner is frustrated by how much traction Sarah Palin is getting from fake Alaskan-ness:

Come on, people. Our ice is melting. Your jobs are turning to dust. Everyone's bank statements are on the verge of being firestarter. Your heating oil is $4 a gallon, ours is $8.

John McCain's answers to those problems? Heck, I honestly don't know what he stands for this week. Talk about a shifting ice floe. But his running mate, we've heard her answers: She's already sued the polar bears, now she's chanting, "Drill, baby, drill!"

Wake up, folks. Sarah Palin is America's bridge to nowhere. Get off it.

Alas, Seth hangs around with people who actually need the meat from the bear they killed. That means they don't have so much of the skid-grease (a.k.a. money) that makes things runs smoothly in Alaska. So who's gonna listen to him?

Quote of the Moment: Not just nincompoops, but insipid nincompoops

2008-10-18T21:35:03-05:00

Kathryn Jean Lopez @ NRO on why people pack it in to see Palin:

Palin didn't need Greek columns. People react to her because they believe she represents what the Greeks established.

And what would that be -- the desirability of maneuvering yourself into a disastrous social collapse by hiring demagogues and pursuing untenable foreign wars, like the Athenians? Or maybe she's thinking of the way that Spartans got stuck in their devotion to a bizarre social system that privileged male emotional and sexual bonding to the extent that the population dropped disastrously, making them entirely dependent on slaves for labor and battle-fodder?

What a bunch of delusional incompetents the NR staff have become. ("Become", of course, may offer them too much benefit of doubt.) I'll say this much for the Buckleys: At least they'd have been able to say what greek thing she's supposed to symbolize.

Is John McCain Really a Maverick?

2008-10-18T16:28:30-05:00

Apparently not. And Terrellita Maverick has the family tree to prove it. From Electoral-vote.com:

No! says Terrellita Maverick, a descendant of Samuel Augustus Maverick, who went to Texas in the 1800s and became famous for not branding his cattle, which led to unbranded cattle being called "mavericks." The Maverick family has been active in progressive politics for generations, including Fontaine Maury Maverick, who was a congressman and his son, a firebrand lawyer who defended draft resisters. The Mavericks object strenuously to McCain's being labeled a maverick, saying: "He's a Republican. He's branded." Thanks for Debbie Scherrer for the pointer.

Incompetence Abets Malice In Alaska

2008-10-18T16:25:08-05:00

Napoleon famously remarked that it was best not to attribute to malice that which could be explained by stupidity. But sometimes one gets a little help from the other.

AP asked for documents using Alaska's freedom of information laws. The state informed them that the tab will be over $15 million. The State of Alaska is getting a lot of these requests and its IT staff has been "overwhelmed" by them. Superficially, the problem seems to be that they don't know what the hell they're doing:

How did the cost reach $15 million? Let's look at a typical request. When the Associated Press asked for all state e-mails sent to the governor's husband, Todd Palin, her office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer's time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for "security" checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that's $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees. The cost quoted to the AP: $15,364,960.

.... And this is what they're doing every time someone makes a request. That is, they're apparently not taking any effort to save time or effort by, say, just extracting the mailbox once, or setting up a data warehouse of old emails. But hey, if they can get someone to pay for it every time, isn't it the American way to exploit the situation for gain?

I suppose I should leave it at that, but as someone with a much better than average grasp of IT operations principles, the situation irks the hell out of me. Let's just leave aside for the moment that if this description of activities required is accurate, they've got a hopelessly incompetent IT staff (both at the level of execution and architecture). Implausibly incompetent, in fact. Let's just look at the activities themselves. If we do that, we can see that somebody is scamming somebody somewhere, because there's no way it should take five hours of "programmer" [sic] time to extract a mailbox from an archive. (I can imagine that it might plausibly take an hour or two for the server to execute the extraction, but there's no way that a person should be billable for that entire time unless they've got some really gross problems with employee slacking up there.) (And by the way, "programmer" would just be a job title for that person -- at least, I bloody well hope so. If an actual programmer is required for that task, then in addition to being fired, the system architect should be stripped of any professional IT certifications he/she possesses.)

What the "security" checks are, I don't know, but I suspect that it amounts to auditing the mail spools for the presence of passwords or "secret" server names. In any case, the two hour figure is implausible in two ways. First, if they're audits for specific vulnerabilities, they should be automated, and thus would require at most 10-15 minutes of billable time, not two hours. (If they're not automated, that's a problem, because there's a probability that some steps in these "security" tests are going to be missed.) Second, the security checks would probably be more comprehensive and more difficult than the actual search operations, and take more time -- here, they're estimated at a lower cost.

Finally, five hours to search for the offending words or phrases is quite absurd. It's true that Exchange and Outlook don't search that quickly (and I'm given to believe that AK is an Exchange shop), but they search much faster than that. And in any case, again, most of that "search" time is going to be time when the operator (who will not be a "programmer", except maybe in job title only) is just sitting at his/her console twiddling thumbs. I.e., the time bloody well should be spent doing something else.

The "five hours to search" figure, actually, though, might be the one slightly realistic figure. Redaction isn't itemized in the total above, but it is mentioned in the article, so one could imagine that the five hours includes redaction time. That said, we know that the state uses an absurdly time- and labor-intensive redaction method. Saying that they're 'not set up for' digital redation, they print hardcopies and redact those, then photocopy the redactions. Now, if you're redacting hardcopy, then yes, you absolutely photocopy, because otherwise it's possible to read the redacted text in many cases. But if you redact digitally by deleting the redacted text and replacing it with, say, the letter 'X', then there's no possibility of reading the redacted text and you haven't had to take the time and effort to to print, magic-marker and photocopy all that hardcopy.

Plus -- and here's the best part -- every PC in the AK state governmenment is "set up" to do this. After all, they all have 'Delete' and 'X' keys.