Well, my old nemesis ComEd has reared its head again.

Last night, I had another beep hunt. This was a steady, rapid beep, so it only took about 30 seconds to find the problem: The alarm was going off on the UPS protecting the television and TiVo. It's a fairly dumb UPS, so there's no way to tell what the problem is, but I figured it was just the battery. I shut it off and unplugged it, and I plugged our television gear directly into the wall. Problem solved. I could replace the UPS later this week.

Then, about 4:30 this morning, I woke up to more beeping. This one was a little harder to localize for a reason I couldn't quite figure out, but I eventually traced it to the UPS protecting my work computer.

This was a bad sign. One UPS alarming is probably a battery problem or some other end-of-life issue. Two UPS alarms is a problem with the electrical power coming in to the house.

I had shut down that computer for the weekend, so I just turned off the UPS to stop the alarm...and I realized that something else was still beeping somewhare in the house. That's why I had trouble figuring out where the beep was coming from! I was hearing beeping from two sources.

The other alarm turned out to be the UPS protecting my wife's computer. It had tripped out and turned off the computer, so I just turned off the UPS to kill the alarm. This time it worked. Silence.

It took me a minute to find my DMM and another to find a pair of probes, but with the dial set to measure AC voltage, I stuck the probe tips into an outlet in the kitchen: 138 volts.

That's high. American residential electricity is supposed to be about 120 volts, with houses closest to the transformer getting a slightly higher voltage, and houses farthest away getting a slightly lower voltage, plus some variation during the day due to the changing load.

So it was high, but how high is too high? Surprisingly, that's not an easy thing to find out. The ComEd site has nothing about it that I could find, and the Citizens Utility Board site is useless: Lots of stuff about rates, but nothing about the power supply specification.

I eventually found what I wanted in the ICC regulations governing electrical voltage in Illinois (emphasis mine):

Section 410.300 Voltage Regulation

a) Standard voltage. Each entity supplying electrical energy for general use shall adopt a standard service voltage of 120 volts (when measured phase to neutral) and shall maintain the service voltage within the allowable variations from that value at all times.

b) Allowable voltage variations. For service rendered at the standard service voltage, voltage variations as measured at any customer's point of delivery shall not exceed a maximum of 127 volts nor fall below a minimum of 113 volts for periods longer than two minutes in each instance.  For service rendered at voltages other than the standard voltage value, voltage variations as measured at any customer's point of delivery shall not exceed 10% above or below the service voltage for a longer period than two minutes in each instance.

So it was definitely way too high.

While I was writing this, the lineman showed up. He was a friendly guy, and he seemed to take the problem seriously. (I suspect ComEd gets a lot of complaints about "the voltage" from crackpots, so I've been trying to act as sane as possible so they take me seriously.) I let him into the basement to check the voltage at the meter, and he measured it at 139 and 140 VAC.

The UPS on my main home computer is bigger and more expensive than the other three, and it has a voltage regulation feature, so that computer is still working, and I've plugged my work computer into it so I can do my job. However, I've got most of the household electronics shut off, and I also shut off the air conditioner, because I'm concerned that the compressor will overheat on the high voltage.

So now I wait. They've seen the problem. Now I just need them to fix it.

Lawyers in the blogosphere are always complaining that having a presence on the internet doesn't bring them more business, just more people asking for free legal advice. Today, while cleaning out a bunch of spam email, I discovered that somebody was asking me for free legal advice.

Since I'm not a lawyer in any way, shape, or form, I figured I'd throw it out to all my readers, some of whom I believe are actual lawyers.

I came across your site / blog and I thought perhaps you could answer a question.  My 23 yr old sister has started making extra money selling her used panties.  Is there anything illegal in Illinois regarding buying or selling used panties?  I worry about her safety, but also the legality.  Perhaps, this would be an interesting topic for you as well.  Thanks

Used panties are not really a very interesting topic for me, thanks for asking. Nevertheless, I'm throwing it out for my readers. Any takers? Anyone want to jump in here? If you're an Illinois laywer, this could be your chance to own the state's used-panty legal advice market!

I've learned from long experience that nobody ever contributes anything if you just ask. But if you write something yourself, everybody will jump in to correct it. So here are my NON-LAWYER bits of advice to young ladies thinking of selling their unmentionables:

• Get advice from an actual lawyer.
• Illinois law enforcement is probably not the problem. Federal law enforcement is.
• Invest in a plastic bag sealing machine to keep in the freshness of that just-sweated scent.
• Just because it's kinky doesn't mean you won't have to do all the paperwork any other business would have to do. If local authorities discover your activities, this is an easy way for them to make trouble for you.
• The limiting production factor is the time it takes to wear the panties long enough to impregnated them with the smell of a woman. To avoid idling the process, be sure to order new panties well before the last pair ships. Don't forget you'll need time for modeling and updating the web site before you can bring in new orders.
• There's probably nothing illegal about selling used clothing or shipping it through the mail. But when you model the clothing and send flirtatious messages to customers, it becomes a sex-related business, and the government gets a little weird about stuff like that.
• Boyshorts are slower movers than you'd think. You'll need them for completeness, but don't let them build up in inventory.
• There's a world of difference between soiled and wet. Shipping bodily fluids through the United States Postal Service is probably a very bad idea. You say "soiled panties," the Postal Inspection Service says "biological hazard in contravention of anti-terrorism laws." I made that up, but the post office really can be dickish about things like that.
• Including a "special" photograph and a hand-written perfumed note is a nice way to say "thank you" to a regular customer. Don't put the note in the bag with the panties though, it ruins the smell.
• Always follow Mark Bennett's million dollar legal advice.

That's all I've got. Anybody else have suggestions? Corrections? Angry and abusive rants?

One of the bigger crimlaw news items these days is a report from the Columbia School of Law that claims Texas executed an innocent man in 1989. According to an AFP wire story by Chantal Valery:

The report, entitled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," traces the facts surrounding the February 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a single mother who was stabbed in the gas station where she worked in a quiet corner of the Texas coastal city of Corpus Christi.

...

Forty minutes after the crime Carlos DeLuna was arrested not far from the gas station.

He was identified by only one eyewitness who saw a Hispanic male running from the gas station. But DeLuna had just shaved and was wearing a white dress shirt -- unlike the killer, who an eyewitness said had a mustache and was wearing a grey flannel shirt.

DeLuna denied killing Lopez and instead identified Carlos Hernandez as the killer, but it appears police didn't give his claim much credence. Prosecutors even accused DeLuna of making up Carlos Hernandez. DeLuna was convicted and sentenced to death, and six years later he was executed.

The Columbia report identifies an actual person named Carlos Hernandez who was in the area at the time. He looked a lot like Carlos DeLuna, and police knew who he was. He was eventually imprisoned for murdering another woman. He died there of natural causes, but not before repeatedly confessing to the murder for which DeLuna was executed.

I haven't read the actual report, but from what I'm hearing, it makes a pretty good argument. I think Texas has probably executed an innocent man. He might not be the only one, if you believe the forensic argument that Cameron Todd Willingham didn't commit the murder for which he was executed in 2004.

Regarding the DeLuna case, Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett says we should shout it from the rooftops:

The position of most adherents of the death penalty is that there are enough procedural safeguards built into the system that nobody has ever been executed for a crime he did not commit, and that the probability that someone factually innocent could be executed is so small that it does not merit chucking the penalty altogether.

It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.

Kansas v. Marsh (Scalia, J., concurring).

Prepare for that to change. Shout it from the rooftops: Carlos DeLuna, executed in Texas for the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez.

Well, why not? I guess. I'm not really surprised by this news, though. Although some death penalty proponents have their heads in the sand, if we continue to have capital punishment, execution of an innocent person is inevitable.

About six years ago I got into an argument with a prosecutor who blogged that "the error rate for carried-out executions remains zero." At the time, neither the Willingham nor DeLuna cases had come to light. Even if we ignore those cases, however, the prosecutor's statement was misleading on two counts.

First, nobody knows the ultimate truth about the errors of our system of capital punishment. It's not as if God comes down after the execution and tells us whether we got it right. We'll never be able to rule out the excution of an innocent person with perfect certainty. The best we can do is talk about the rate of discovered errors.

There have been a number of cases where death row inmates had their sentences -- or even their convictions -- overturned because some error was discovered in the process that put them there. Proponents of the death penaltly say this is an example of the system working and correcting its mistakes. That's true enough, the system corrected a mistake, but that doesn't mean the system has corrected all its mistakes.

Imposition of the death penalty is a long road that starts with the sentence and ends with the execution. In between, there are a bunch of corrective measures, appeals and reviews, each of which reduces the chance of an erroneous execution. It's a mistake to think that no innocent people have reached the end of the road just because we don't know their names.

In response to a couple of comments along those lines, the prosecutor responded,

Nice try, but the issue is not what statistical probabilities tell us, since they after all are only educated guesses. The point I have made is that the known error rate for completed executions stands at zero. That is fact, not conjecture: there has not been a single case of an innocent person being executed who was thereafter shown to be factually innocent. It's as simple as that, and all the statistical gymnastics in the world do not change that actuality.

This brings us to the second reason it's misleading to look at the error rate for carried out executions. The prosecutor dismissed "conjecture" about the error rate, but that ignores the purpose of our argument. We're talking about capital punishment because we are trying to make a policy decision: Should we continue to execute criminals? And if so, under what circumstances?

This is necessarily a decision about our future, and when it comes to our future, we don't have the facts yet. Even if we could prove, with absolute and perfect certainty, that no innocent person has been executed, that doesn't prove we won't execute one tomorrow. When it comes to the future, conjecture is the all we've got.

We've got to make decisions about the future of our capital punishment system, and that requires us to understand how our capital punishment system behaves, for which the best evidence is its performance in the past. But the past is only a sample of the system's behavior, not a complete description. We use past performance data to constrain statistical models that predict its future.

Suppose you flip a coin five times, and it comes up heads all five times. Would you be willing to declare that the coin is a perfect head-flipping coin? Probably not. What if you got 10 heads in a row? That should make you more confident, but is it enough? How many times in a row would the coin have to come up heads before you would be willing to bet something valuable on it? Something like the life of an innocent American.

Let me try to make this a little more complete with a very rough mathemetical model. Suppose we can approximate the decision to execute someone -- from identification of a suspect to throwing the final switch -- as a linear series of steps. If there are N steps in the capital punishment system, and at each step i there is a probability p_i (where 0 <= p_i <= 1) that an innocent person will slip past, then the probability p_execution of an innocent person slipping past all the steps and being executed is given by:

p_execution = p₁ × p₂ × p₃ ×...× p_N

Simple math tells us that The value of p_execution can only be zero if at least one of the terms p_i is zero. That is, unless one step in the process is perfect, the whole process is necessarily imperfect. If any death penalty proponent really thinks the process is perfect, I invite them to identify the one perfect step so we can save a lot of time and money by dispensing with the rest of the justice system.

If that's too abstract, then imagine our current policy extended into the distant future. Assume we execute about 50 people year, and assume we do it for the next million years. Do you really believe we can execute 50 million people without even one of them being innocent? No? Great, then we agree the death penalty isn't perfect. Now we're just arguing about the number.

Elsewhere in his concurrence on Kansas v. Marsh, Justice Scalia cites Oregon District Attorney Joshua Marquis's absurd calculation of a false felony conviction rate of only 0.027%. However, assuming that DeLuna and Willingham were both innocent (as seems likely to me), and knowing that there have been 1295 executions since the Supreme Court decided it was constitional (again), we can set a lower limit on p_execution of (2/1295=) 0.15444%, more than five times higher than Scalia's number.

The wrongful execution rate of 0.15444% is a lower limit because we can't be sure there weren't more innocent people executed. We've discovered two of them, but the total number depends on the probability of discovery p_discovery of a wrongful execution, and right now all we can say is

p_execution × p_discovery = 0.15444%

The smaller the probability of discovery, the more innocent people must have been executed for us to discover two of them.

In the end, Scalia did get it right:

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

That may sound callous, but it has the advantage of being true.

Chicago will be hosting the NATO summit meeting this month, and it's turning into a typical display of government arrogance. For a recent example, the Metra commuter rail system has announced that they will be stopping service on the line that runs through the summit location:

Metra plans to operate regular service on 10 of its 11 lines. For the Metra Electric Line, most trains will operate, although some stations and the Blue Island branch line will be closed for all or part of the summit. Those closings are detailed below.

In other words, "Sorry, you poor working stiffs who have been our customers for years, but we're doing important stuff here and you'll just have to make do."

Naturally, they're also using this as an excuse for various infringements of our Fourth Amendment rights:

Riders of all lines may be subject to screening and baggage checks, with more extensive screening on the Metra Electric Line. Passengers on all lines will be prohibited from carrying many items onboard trains and will face other security restrictions outlined below.

These restrictions apply to all lines, even those that have nothing to do with the NATO summit, and Metra's description of the changes is kind of chilling:

In addition, the following safety measures apply to riders of all Metra lines during the three days (May 19, 20 and 21) of the summit:

1. Riders may be subject to search and/or screening before boarding or while en route.

2. Riders may carry only one bag not exceeding 15 inches square and 4 inches deep. Boxes, parcels, luggage, backpacks and bicycles will not be allowed on trains. Banned items cannot be stored at Metra stations. They must be removed or they will be disposed of.

3. Riders may not carry any food on the trains. Liquids and personal effects (such as makeup) must be less than three ounces in size. This includes coffee and other beverages. Breast milk can be carried but is subject to inspection and should be declared during any screening.

4. Riders may not carry any type of tools, pipes, stakes, wood or weapons, including pocket knives and pepper spray, on the trains.

5. Law enforcement personnel must identify themselves and present their credentials and any weapons. Security guards will not be allowed to carry any weapons onboard.

Failure to comply with these safety measures or instructions from law enforcement personnel, or attempted avoidance of screening, will result in ejection from the station or further police action.

The suspicionless searches amount to some kind of internal checkpoint, which is bad enough, but the rest of the rules are going to inconvenience thousands of people. No tools or pocket knives? What's the theory here? That someone will use a Swiss Army knife to derail a train? And the rules against food and beverages sound insane.

They even have the 3-ounce beverage rule! That was put in place on airplanes because of the theoretical threat that 3-ounces of liquid explosives could bring down a plane. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure 3 ounces of explosives wouldn't do much damage to a 40-ton solid-steel Metra passenger car, let alone a whole train of cars. And in the worst case, the train can just roll to a stop.

Remember, this is not just for people entering the NATO summit site. It affects everyone riding on the entire commuter rail system. Because, you know, someone might threaten the NATO summit from 15 miles away by carrying a sandwich onto a rail car.

The powers that be in NATO and Washington, D.C., and Chicago City Hall have decided to host this summit, and they're cracking down with the violent power of they state because they're scared that somebody somewhere might do something they don't understand and control. This is the totalitarian impulse in action.

(Hat tip: Tina Sfondeles and Casey Toner at the Chicago Sun-Times.)

A few weeks ago at the Ethics Alarms blog, Jack Marshall published his list of 24 ways people justify unethical behavior. He starts the list with an old rationalization that is the basis for several others:

1. The Golden Rationalization, or "Everybody does it"

This rationalization has been used to excuse ethical misconduct since the beginning of civilization. It is based on the flawed assumption that the ethical nature of an act is somehow improved by the number of people who do it, and if "everybody does it," then it is implicitly all right for you to do it as well: cheat on tests, commit adultery, lie under oath, use illegal drugs, persecute Jews, lynch blacks. Of course, people who use this "reasoning" usually don't believe that what they are doing is right because "everybody does it." They usually are arguing that they shouldn't be singled out for condemnation if "everybody else" isn't.

Since most people will admit that principles of right and wrong are not determined by polls, those who try to use this fallacy are really admitting misconduct. The simple answer to them is that even assuming they are correct, when more people engage in an action that is admittedly unethical, more harm results. An individual is still responsible for his or her part of the harm.

If someone really is making the argument that an action is no longer unethical because so many people do it, then that person is either in dire need of ethical instruction, or an idiot.

Despite Jack's warning in the last paragraph, I'd like to write a few posts about situations where "everybody does it" is a actually a pretty good argument. I'll let you decide whether I'm in need of ethical instruction or if I'm just an idiot.

I'll start with the most obvious example: I don't think anyone in this country doubts that driving on the left-hand side of a two-way road is unethical. First and foremost, it creates an immediate and potentially deadly hazard to oncoming traffic. Second, even if there's no traffic, driving on the left side increases the possibility that a pedestrian will get hit because he or she was looking the other way. It's so dangerous that I think we can safely say that only drunks and maniacs drive on the left-hand side of the road.

Or Englishmen. At least while they are in England, because everyone there drives on the left-hand side of the road.

I'm not sure how people ended up driving on different sides of the road in different countries -- the best explantions I've heard have something to do with differences in the types of wagons pulled by horse-drawn teams -- but whatever the reason, once one side began to dominate common practice, it would have been a huge gain in safety and efficiency to require everybody to drive on that side.

In other words, it's the right thing to do because everybody does it.

(Arguably, the ethical rule is not "drive on the left side of the road" but rather "drive on the agreed-upon side of the road." Driving on the other side is unethical not because there's something bad about that side, but because it violates our common agreement about how to drive safely. That common agreement is exactly the sort of consensus ethical rule I'm talking about when I say that "everybody does it" can be a good justification.)

For another example, in the condo building where I live, except for the occasional party, I never hear the sounds of my neighbors' lives. It would be rude for any of us to play lound music or crank up the television. If was a persistent problem, it would be cause for a complaint to the board.

This is very different from when I lived in a college dormitory, and everyone played loud musing all day and late into the night. It's not that my college dorm mates were any less ethical than my condo neighbors. They were just younger and in college. Tolerating their neighbor's loud music was a small price to pay for being able to play their own loud music. If anyone had complained, he would have been the one behaving rudely.

It was a case of different cultures, different rules. When the rules are defined in terms of cultural norms, then "everybody does it" isn't just an excuse, it's the way the rules are made.

It's important to note that cultural norms variation of "everybody does it" only works when everybody involved is a willing participant in the culture. It's no excuse for cultural practices such as gay bashing, slavery, or burning the heretics.

Welcome to the new century, Mr. President, thank you for joining us.

"I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married," Obama told Roberts in an interview to appear on ABC's "Good Morning America" Thursday.

I don't see why Obama couldn't have said that three years ago, but I'm glad he finally said it. By way of explanation, he said his thoughts went through an "evolution" to reach this decision.

The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states' deciding the issue on their own.

So...still a little more evolving to do...

Whenever I get tired of checking the bestseller lists on my Kindle book reader for new novels to read -- the top of the list has been owned by Hunger Games and Lisbeth Salander ever since I got the thing -- I like to try out a few of the cheap e-books. It's a bit like checking out experimental theater productions: Most of them turn out to not be very good, but sometimes they're unusual and different enough to get your attention.

I've been thinking for a while that it might be fun to blog about a few of these books, and the first one I'd like to tell you about is Shifted, by Colin D. Jones. It's been a while since I read it, and even at the time, it defied easy explanation, but I'll try.

First, however, I should point out that even though the main character is a werewolf of sorts, Shifted is not one of those books spawned by the popularity of the Twilight books or the Underworld movies. It's not even a counterpoint to those storylines. Colin Jones arrives at his werewolf story from a whole different direction.

Or maybe from several different directions. Shifted is kind of a coming-of-age story about a kid who grows up in an abusive environment and discovers that he has a...werewolf, of sorts...inside him, or maybe alongside him, since there's something about quantum physics and multiple universes. There's a ghost of sorts too, and secretive government agents, and a little bit about Norse legends.

Jones pulls these elements together from all over the place, and assembles them into a story that -- while not exactly a seamless whole -- isn't nearly as messy as it sounds. Jones's writing style is simple and unpretentious, and the book is a pretty quick read.

A couple weeks ago, Jack Marshall wrote a post criticizing the ethics of George Zimmerman's legal team. Later that same day, California criminal defense lawyer Mary Frances Prevost at California Criminal Lawyer Blog wrote a post about the same subject. Her post used many of the same words. And rather a lot of the same phrases and sentences.

Marshall decided to call her out for plagiarism on Thursday. Given that Prevost's blog is basically marketing her lawfirm, my guess was that Prevost had hired someone to ghost-write her blog, and that person had figured they could just steal Jack's post instead of doing actual work. I figured that she'd probably apologize when she found out.

That's not what happened, according to Jack Marshall in a followup post a few days later. He had emailed Prevost, asking for "an explanation, and failing that, an apology, a retraction, and proper credit." Instead, according to Jack, she responded via Facebook with a message that included this:

I have counseled with one of the country's premiere ethics attorneys. Here's the result: 1) accusing me of a crime is defamation per se and unethical; 2) suggesting that my entire law practice has been based on unethical conduct is defamatory and unethical. I maintained copies both of your email and blog. It is clear that you are hell bent on engaging in systematic harassment and unethical conduct, the likes of which can, and most likely will, develop into a lawsuit unless rescinded forthwith.

It is clear you have little to do in your life besides sent me emails accusing me of crimes, and writing poorly written blog posts accusing me of immoral behavior. Interesting how one making such claims, engages in most egregious conduct himself....But the sheer amount of energy really suggests something more: a lack of work; too much time; off your meds. I suggest you take a look inward and remove your defamatory and unethical blog post regarding me. Indeed, you should come clean on your blog. You've practiced law only two weeks before giving up. Yet, your resume suggests far more experience. I think you should rethink what you've done.

[paragraph breaks added for readability]

Perhaps this is a good aggressive response in the legal arena, but it doesn't go very far in the blogosphere. For all I know, she could very well be right to question Jack Marshall's motives and knowledge of legal ethics, not to mention his sanity, honesty, writing skils, and personal hygiene. Lord knows, I strongly disagree with a lot of what Jack says. But when I quote what he writes, I follow the standard blogger ethic: I give credit and a link. And that highlights what this response is missing: She never addresses the substance of Jack's complaint. She neither admits nor denies the alleged plagiarism.

What really bothers me about Prevost's response, however, is her accusation that Jack is obsessed and has too much time on his hands. For someone who's been running a blog for five years, she really doesn't know much about blogging.

An email and a blog post do not come within a mile of being systematic harassment by blogosphere standards. Jack was just passing by. He says he sent one email, and he'd only written the one post at the time. Prevost could have just ignored him and he'd probably have moved on to something else. Instead, she responded in anger, triggering a second blog post. And now Jack says he filled out a bar complaint.

[Update: Jack says he hasn't filed the bar complaint yet and isn't sure that he needs to. See comments.]

As a criminal defense lawyer, Prevost probably gets the question all the time, "How can you defend those people?" I can almost see my defense lawyer readers flinching as they read that. It's not that they don't have a good answer, it's just that they're really tired of the question, and of the implication that there's something wrong with them for doing what they do.

For bloggers, I think the equivalent question is "Why are you bothering with this?"

I get that a lot. I'll read some news story, and some aspect of it will stick in my brain, and eventually a blog post will come out of it. This is how blogging works. Quite often, we leave the big, obvious stories to the news media and focus our attention on an interesting detail. And for some reason, this upsets people.

They say we're missing the big picture, as if the details couldn't possibly hold an important lesson. They accuse us of bias in picking a subject, as if having a point of view was sufficient to prove us wrong. They tells us we're ignoring the important story, as if life was a television script, and it would be confusing if too many things were happening at once.

This is the weakest possible criticism of a blog post. If you're not interested in what we're writing about, just stop reading. If you actively dislike what we're writing about, then write your own blog. In your own words.

One of my regular blog reads is Ravings of a Feral Genius where Jennifer Abel rants about libertarian topics. Jennifer's a writer by trade, not just by virtue of having a blog, which means she gets paid and published in real publications, the most prominent of which is probably her column in the Guardian.

This last Wednesday, however, Jennifer made this stunning announcement:

If you go to the newsstand and buy the May 2012 issue of Playboy, YOU WILL SEE ME INSIDE! .... no, wait, that came out wrong. Let me try again: if you buy the May 2012 Playboy, you'll find my latest anti-TSA column inside. It's on page 42 (which, as any Douglas Adams fan knows, is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything).

Whatever else Playboy is about, they've often attracted quality writers, so that's a pretty cool publication credit for Jennifer. Naturally, I wanted to read it.

That turned out to be harder than I thought. Playboy's website doesn't let you read much of its content without paying, and the May issue isn't even online yet. This meant I would have to go out and buy a printed copy of a magazine. Yeah, I know. Back before the web was big, I used to buy a bunch of magazines, but they were mostly about either computer software or politics, and these days you can find plenty about either of those subjects online. I had no idea where to buy a printed copy of Playboy.

I drove out at lunch time to a nearby magazine shop, but they turned out to have closed a while ago. The next day I tried some nearby convenience stores, but they all apparently stopped selling magazines without my even noticing. Last night I stopped in at Barnes & Nobel, but I could only find a single copy of Playboy, and it wasn't the right issue. I guess all that print-is-dead hype was pretty real.

Finally, I found out that City Newsstand in Evanston had the May issue, so I drove out there today and sent my wife in to get a copy. Score!

The article is in the Playboy Forum section (which is nothing like the Penthouse Forum section). If you're a regular reader of Jennifer's blog, it will be a familiar subject, although as an amateur writer, it's fascinating to see how she's adopted her style to the publication. I don't quite understand what's different, but it feels like there's about 20% less scorn and derision which, given her feelings about the TSA, is pretty amazing. It almost feels a bit (dare I say it?) playful.

Anyway, check it out. (Normally, that would be a link but, you know, dead-tree media.)

One of the things Kip Hawley left out of his explanation of why the TSA sucks is the TSA's infestation of other forms of transportation, such as the one described in this press release from the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority:

In an unprecedented approach that involved four law enforcement agencies - including federal agents - METRO launched a national BusSafe pilot program last Friday that saturated its system and resulted in quality arrests, making transit safer for passengers.

The METRO Police Department, Houston Police Department, Harris County Precinct 7 Deputy Constables and 15 agents - part of so-called viper teams - from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) joined forces in a synchronized, counter-terrorism exercise that focused on bus stops and shelters and transit centers.

Law officials performed random bag checks, conducted sweeps with our K-9 drug and bomb-detecting dogs, and assigned both uniformed and plainclothes officers at transit centers and rail platforms to detect and prevent criminal activity.

The call it a "counter-terrorism exercise," but in the very next paragraph they mention drug-sniffing dogs, which of course have nothing to do with catching terrorists. And given the incredibly self-serving nature of this press release, they would have mentioned it if any of the "quality arrests" had been for something even remotely resembling terrorist activity.

In reality, what they did was setup an internal checkpoint -- a place were citizens just going about their business are forced to show their papers and submit to questioning and investigation by the authorities -- which is the hallmark of tyrannical governments everywhere, and a sign of creeping totalitarianism here.

Naturally, our elected representatives don't see the problem:

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas District 18), a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called this a new era for the TSA, and a new era for surface transportation security.

"We're looking to make sure that the lady I saw walking with a cane...knows that METRO cares as much about her as we do about building the light rail," said Jackson Lee at the news conference.

What the hell is that? Mention a woman with a cane and somehow that makes it alright to harass citizens for no reason? Is she that stupid? Or does she think we're that stupid?

(Hat tip: Mark Bennett.)

Update: And now the Houston METRO folks have realized that "random" searches may not hold up in court, so they're trying to change their story. Mark Bennett is all over it.

According to Kip Hawley the TSA's airport security system is broken:

Airport security in America is broken. I should know. For 3½ years--from my confirmation in July 2005 to President Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009--I served as the head of the Transportation Security Administration.

You know what Kip? Fuck you. You're part of the problem. The very first words out of your mouth should be "I'm sorry." Anything less is just not good enough.

You know the TSA. We're the ones who make you take off your shoes before padding through a metal detector in your socks (hopefully without holes in them). We're the ones who make you throw out your water bottles. We're the ones who end up on the evening news when someone's grandma gets patted down or a child's toy gets confiscated as a security risk. If you're a frequent traveler, you probably hate us.

I've flown once since 9/11. I still hate you. I hated you even before I flew. You know why I hated you, even though I hadn't flown? Probably not. It's because I have something called empathy for other people. I realize that's a foreign concept for you, but you really should try it out.

Any effort to rebuild TSA and get airport security right in the U.S. has to start with two basic principles:

First, the TSA's mission is to prevent a catastrophic attack on the transportation system, not to ensure that every single passenger can avoid harm while traveling. Much of the friction in the system today results from rules that are direct responses to how we were attacked on 9/11. But it's simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.

We've been telling you this for YEARS, you dumb son of a bitch! Years!

Sigh. According to Hawley, it's not all his fault, and I have to admit his explanation rings true:

I wanted to reduce the amount of time that officers spent searching for low-risk objects, but politics intervened at every turn. Lighters were untouchable, having been banned by an act of Congress. And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public.

We did succeed in getting some items (small scissors, ice skates) off the list of prohibited items. And we had explosives experts retrain the entire work force in terrorist tradecraft and bomb-making. Most important, Charlie Allen, the chief of intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security, tied the TSA into the wider world of U.S. intelligence, arranging for our leadership to participate in the daily counterterrorism video conference chaired from the White House. With a constant stream of live threat reporting to start each day, I was done with playing defense.

Still, he's kind of clueless:

Taking your shoes off for security is probably your least favorite part of flying these days. Mine, too.

Actually, most offensive part is when the TSA pricks look at us naked and touch us in places that strangers shouldn't touch us. I realize that system came online after Hawley left the TSA, but it was going through procurement while he was in charge.

Eventually, he gets to a list of changes he proposes, most of which are pretty good:

What would a better system look like? If politicians gave the TSA some political cover, the agency could institute the following changes before the start of the summer travel season:

1. No more banned items: Aside from obvious weapons capable of fast, multiple killings--such as guns, toxins and explosive devices--it is time to end the TSA's use of well-trained security officers as kindergarten teachers to millions of passengers a day...

2. Allow all liquids...

3. Give TSA officers more flexibility and rewards for initiative, and hold them accountable...

The TSA's basic problem with accountability is that it is responsible for enforcing its own standards. That's not very effective, especially since TSA employees have civil service protections that make them hard to fire. They aren't law enforcement officers, so they don't need to be government employees. The best way to hold airport security employees accountable is to lay off 90% of TSA employees and go back to the private security system we had before. Turn the remaining TSA officers into inspectors that hold the private system accountable.

4. Eliminate baggage fees: Much of the pain at TSA checkpoints these days can be attributed to passengers overstuffing their carry-on luggage to avoid baggage fees...

You could also try to make baggage handling safer and more efficient. Stop losing bags. Stop letting baggage handlers and TSA officers steal stuff. All that security, and someone can still walk off with anything you check. That's why people carry stuff on.

To be effective, airport security needs to embrace flexibility and risk management--principles that it is difficult for both the bureaucracy and the public to accept. The public wants the airport experience to be predictable, hassle-free and airtight and for it to keep us 100% safe. But 100% safety is unattainable. Embracing a bit of risk could reduce the hassle of today's airport experience while making us safer at the same time.

Again, some of us have been telling you that for years.

--Mr. Hawley is the author of "Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security," to be published April 24 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Like we didn't see that coming...

Security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been explaining the TSA's errors for years, has posted his reaction, which is basically that Hawley has finally caught up to the rest of us. Also, Hawley was saying something completely different as recently as one month ago.

Wow, it looks like somebody hacked into John Derbyshire's email and sent one of his publishing outlets something that would make him look a racist asshole. I mean, would even a jerk like Derbyshire really write shit like this?

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

Holy Crap!

I keep thinking I must not be getting the joke, that this is some kind of rude satire, and I'm just missing the clues that give it away, like someone who never heard of Chris Rock tuning into the middle of him doing his "Controversy LaRue" character.

In my heart, though, I know Derbyshire's just a tool.

Update: Derbyshire, who is best known as a writer for National Review, isn't:

Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we'd never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It's a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

Cue complaining about NR's caving in to political correctness in 5...4...3...

[WARNING: This post is part of an April Fools Day prank. The Arizona bill is real, but the bill by Senator Lieberman is completely fictional. Eric Turkewitz was the ring leader for this event, and he has the wrap-up. The short version is that no one bit who should have known better.]

This weekend we're seeing a one-two-punch against freedom of speech -- at least as it exists on the internet -- one from Arizona, the other from the U.S. Senate.

You may have heard of the first punch, in the form of a stupid law that I can only guess is an overreaction to the "bullying" panic. The Media Coalition offers this description of Arizona House Bill 2549:

Arizona House Bill 2549 would update the state's telephone harassment law to apply to the Internet and other electronic communications. It would make it a crime to communicate via electronic means speech that is intended to "annoy," "offend," "harass" or "terrify," as well as certain sexual speech.  However, because the bill is not limited to one-to-one communications, H.B. 2549 would apply to the Internet as a whole, thus criminalizing all manner of writing, cartoons, and other protected material the state finds offensive or annoying.

The Media Coalition explains what's wrong with this in their letter to Arizona Governor Janice Brewer:

Government may criminalize speech that rises to the level of harassment and many states have laws that do so, but this legislation takes a law meant to address irritating phone calls and applies it to communication on web sites, blogs, listserves and other Internet communication. H.B. 2549 is not limited to a one to one conversation between two specific people. The communication does not need to be repetitive or even unwanted. There is no requirement that the recipient or subject of the speech actually feel offended, annoyed or scared. Nor does the legislation make clear that the communication must be intended to offend or annoy the reader, the subject or even any specific person.

In other words, this law would enact broad censorship of the press, and precisely because its result is so blatantly unconsitutional, I'm not too worried about it, even if it spreads outside of Arizona.

The second punch comes at the federal level, from reliable internet panic-monger Senator Joe Lieberman.

I know a lot of blogs attract crazy people, but I don't get too many of them here. I was reminded of this recently when I got a comment on this post about Julian Assange blaming me for the decline of journalism since Walter Cronkite died (or something). Perhaps the most dangerous sounding was "Albatross," who stopped by to defend writing about his fantasy of killing one of my former co-bloggers, and even he wasn't as crazy as that short summary makes him sound. I'd like to think the relative lack of crazy is because all of you regular readers are so goddamned intelligent and level headed, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that there just aren't very many of you.

But even if the craziness in the comments got much, much worse, I don't have to spend too much time worrying about it, largely due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes it clear that web sites that accept content from third parties are not considered publishers of that content, and are therefore not legally responsible for it. Essentially, comments I receive are not editorial content of this blog; they're more like sheets of paper pinned to the billboard at a neighborhood community center.

All that could change if Senator Lieberman gets his way with a stupid new bill he's just proposed. The bill changes Section 230 to essentially strip away the protection against third-party content, making every blogger responsible for what commenters post. This will kill or cripple the lively comment areas of many blogs.

Even worse, remember that in many cases the blogs themselves are third-party content on someone else's site, such as blogs hosted by Live Journal, Blogger, or Wordpress. (The Huffington Post media empire itself would never have gotten off the ground if this law had been passed a few years ago.) There's no way those companies could afford to police the millions of blogs for which they would now be liable, and I suspect most of them would go out of business. Even my own humble blog might go under, since the company I pay to host it might somehow become liable for its content.

The Arizona law seems blatantly unconstitutional, but I'm not sure to what extent something as technical as the status of third-party content is constrained by the Bill of Rights, especially since 1st Amendment lawyer Brian Cuban seems concerned:

One may look at this and think, "good riddance to sites like the Dirty" but free speech for one is free speech for all, even commentary we find offense.  If this amendment passes, we are all stripped naked in our ability to engage in the honest and blunt discourse that anonymous commenting protects. It  puts an unbearable burden on not only the sites we might not like but the sites that encourage legitimate discourse. All consumer rating sites would disappear practically overnight.

Hat-tip to Florida criminal defense Lawyer Brian Tannebaum, who takes a Voltaire-esque stand:

I'm not a fan of the sewage that is most anonymous comments. In my little part of the blogging world they come from lawyers, lawyers parading as cowards - afraid to express their thoughts unless protected by anonynimity. But I certainly don't support federal legislation controlling the sewage.

Strangely, Mark Bennet thinks it might be a good idea:

Obviously, making it possible for web hosts to be held responsible for the conduct can't help but raise the tone. Letting people who have been libeled online seek justice from those who allow the comments rather than chasing anonymous ghosts will essentially bring much-needed grown-up (but -- and this is the key -- nongovernmental) supervision to the Internet, raising barriers to entry and therefore the quality and utility of the discussion.

I think the Other Mark is forgetting that he doesn't own the servers his blog is hosting on, and if this stupid bill passes, he might get an ugly surprise when his hosting company decides they don't have the time to research the facts behind some of the potentially libelous things he writes.

First Amendment Badass (and restauranteur) Marc Randazza confirms my interpretation and, naturally, stands strong, so I'll let him have the last word, in his inimitable style:

Although Lieberman is touting this amendment as an anti-terrorist effort, this action will have a chilling effect on all forms of Internet speech. Service providers from Comcast to Consumerist may now be treated as publishers to content posted to their websites. This opens up the possibility that review sites and others that rely on third parties for content will be held responsible for those very same deranged, sub-literate contributions. Lieberman's proposed amendment will have a chilling effect on free speech, as any site that does not want to drown in legal bills likely won't accept anonymous comments.  If you're a sissy with paper-thin skin or an obsession with "bullying," rejoice, I suppose.

...

Needless to say, inhibiting anonymous speech is an attack on this right in gross.  It will be a grave day if this amendment succeeds.  Although anonymous speech on the Internet is not always the most intelligent, it still has its place in public discourse -- for me to poop on.  Civil liberties should not be victims in the attempt to curb terrorism, yet we have already succumbed to the Scylla and Charybdis of the TSA and NSA in entrusting our rights to the benevolent government.  At this point, what's one more right ceded to the security theater's alphabet soup?

Eternal vigilance, folks. Enternal vigilance.

For those interested in the numbers, the Mega Millions jackpot stands at $540 million. That's the estimated nominal value of the annuity payout over 25 years (26 payments, the first one is immediate and the rest are at the end of the year). That annunity is calculated based on the current cash prize pool of $389 million.

If you won that cash prize, the federal government's tax bite would be about $136 million, based on the top marginal tax rate of 35%. (And really, the top bracket is all that matters for this kind of money.) There could also be a state income tax, depending where you live. For those of you here with me in Illinois, that's another 5% or about $19.5 million.

That leaves you with a mere $233 million after time-value-of-money and tax calculations. Given the 1 in 175,711,536 odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot, this means that each Mega Millions lottery ticket you purchase has a mathematically expected value of $1.33.

That's right, for the first time I know of, the Mega Millions lottery is above the breakeven point. It could actually make some kind of financial sense to buy a ticket.

Of course, that's only if you're completely risk-blind, since the most likely outcome by far is loss of all your money. By comparison, synthetic CDO's backed by residential mortgages were a much safer investment even during the crash.

If you have a handy $175 million in cash, it might make sense to use it to buy all 175,711,536 possible lottery tickets, which would guarantee you a $58 million profit.

Well, that's not quite true. You see there's one thing these calculations didn't take into account, which is that someone else could also pick the winning number. I don't know the odds of that happening -- it depends on how many people buy tickets -- but if even one other person wins, it will cut your prize in half to about $117 million, for a net loss of $59 million.

Because of this possibility -- multiple winners splitting the prize pool -- even at a jackpot of over half a billion dollars, the Mega Millions lottery still might not actually be at breakeven.

Paul Krugman has a strange take on the Stand Your Ground law:

Florida's now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy -- and it is.

Florida's Stand Your Ground law may or may not be crazy -- the devil is in the details -- but Krugman's description of it misses by a mile. The legal principle that lets you "shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution" is plain old self-defense.

Krugman tries to make this sound sinister by using the deceptive phrase "consider threatening" which implies that the standard for opening fire is weak and highly subjective. In general, the standard is stronger than that: It's not self-defense unless a reasonable person in the same situation would fear for his life. Typically the defendent would have to prove that the person he shot had the means, opportunity, and intent to do great bodily harm. Also, the shooter has to have clean hands: You can't generally initiate a confrontation with someone and then shoot them if they fight back.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and there is a lot of state-to-state variation in the details of how these laws are written and interpreted. For all I know, Florida law may enact a frightenly broad definition of self-defense. But that's not what Stand Your Ground laws are about:

The distinguishing factor of "Stand Your Ground" laws, which have been under renewed debate since George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, is a simple concept: The rule was that a person had the duty to retreat if he can safely do so rather than use force against an aggressor in proportion to the force being used against him. "Stand your ground" laws eliminated this duty.

You may or may not think that's a good idea, but in either case, you'd be thinking more clearly than Krugman was.

Also, I don't know enough about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to know if Krugman's description is accurate, but Krugman's link to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) sounds like nonsense:

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it's the same old story -- the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It's neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

I'm not saying that CCA doesn't participate in ALEC -- it does -- but it's hard to see why a private prison corporation would back a law that puts fewer people in prison.

Update: And then there's this line:

And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin's killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society -- and our democracy.

So, Trayvon Martin was shot to death...but there's still a "silver lining" because some semi-shady public/private thinktank will get bad publicity. Good to know.

I'm sure you've all heard that Geraldo Rivera has diagnosed the problem in the Trevon Martin shoooting: He wore a hoodie!

Geraldo's case is, well, not entirely insane.

People do react to the symbols you wear. Ask any ex-hippie from the '60's if he was harassed about his long hair. That's not an entirely crazy response to long hair either: Hippies wore long hair as a statement, and some people were offended by the statement. Then other people started wearing long hair just because it seemed cool. They weren't trying to make a statement, but that didn't keep them from being treated as if they were.

No one controls the meanings of symbols -- not even the symbols of language, as the internet has taught us with its fast evolution of new words ("LULZ") or old words with new meanings ("trolls") -- and no one controls the meaning of an article of clothing. Which can have unexpected consequences.

American businessmen have sometimes run into this problem in England. In the clip above, Geraldo is wearing a striped tie. His tie looks mostly grey, but these striped "rep" ties come in all colors, and a lot of businessmen in America like to wear them. So do a lot of businessmen in London, but in London, these ties mean something.

To English men, striped ties are symbols of their affiliations. The patterns are specific to each organization. There are ties for schools, ties for clubs, and ties for military regiments (which is probably where the tradition of such ties began). It sometimes rubs them the wrong way to meet with an American businessman who shows up wearing a tie that represents a school that he didn't attend, or a Royal Army regiment he couldn't possibly have served in.

I've heard that kids in America's inner cities run into a similar problem with more tragic results when they unknowingly wear some element of gang colors -- just because they thought it was cool -- and then run into gang members who aren't pleased to see their colors disrespected, or find themselves in the territory of a rival gang, when they're not even in the gang.

In any case, just as the backwards-facing ball cap stopped being a gang symbol about the time parents started wearing them on outings with their kids, I don't think the hoodie is really much of a sign of a miscreant any more. My wife and I are both middle-aged white folks, and we've been wearing hoodies for years.

On the other hand...

A few weeks ago. My wife and I were returning home on a Saturday evening when, over a period of about three minutes, we saw eleven Chicago Police cars go flying by with the full light show. Curious what was going on, I downloaded a police scanner app to my phone, and we listened in on the radio chatter.

As we listened for the next 90 minutes or so, we learned that it was a manhunt for some people who had shot (without success) at a police officer. The police had only a sparse description, but it was enough to catch at least one of them as we listened: Two males. Wearing hoodies.

Imagine how awesome it must be to live in Alabama, where voters get to choose their next Chief Justice on the Alabama Supreme Court.

On the one hand, there's the Republican candidate, Roy Moore. He had the job before, at least until a few years ago when he was kicked off the bench. He's the judge who insisted on having a copy of the Ten Commandments displayed in his courtroom. When a federal court ordered it removed, he refused, and the Alabama Court of the Judiciary responded by removing him from the post.

Moore is also not too fond of teh gay:

To disfavor practicing homosexuals in custody matters is not invidious discrimination, nor is it legislating personal morality. On the contrary, disfavoring practicing homosexuals in custody matters promotes the general welfare of the people of our State in accordance with our law, which is the duty of its public servants... The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle... Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it.

So that's the Republican.

Then there's his opponent, Democrat Harry Lyon, who favors mandatory random drug testing for all high school students, in public and private schools. Also, one day while discussing the illegal immigration problem, this came out of his mouth:

"My idea is to bring attention to the problem and let the Legislature [and courts] decide," Lyon said. "I'd give them 90 days to make arrangements to make them leave and if after that, you'd have to go to public execution."

He also gave an interview, partially transcribed here:

Tim Lennox: "'It would only take five or 10 getting killed and broadcast on CNN for it to send a clear message not to fool, or not to step foot rather, in Alabama.' Is that an accurate quote?"

Harry Lyon: "That's an accurate quote. You have have to get tough on things like this. We're losing 35 to 50 soldiers a day in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a tough proposal, but the legislature would have to approve it."

Lyon: "If I were an illegal alien in Alabama and I read that in the newspaper, I wouldn't wait around for laws to be passed, I would be going back to my homeland. They broke in here, they violated our laws. It's no different than breaking into your house."

And then somewhat later:

Lyon: "Now, I can assure you that proposal would fly right through the Alabama legislature is one of these illegal immigrants were to blow up the Galleria, OK?"

Lennox: "Well, but there's no indication that any immigrants in Alabama, illegal or otherwise, have done anything along these lines--"

Lyon: "Well, there's no indication about 9/11 until the buildings came down."

Lennox: "I mean, are you suggesting that this is a real concern of yours?"

Lyon: "Absolutely. These people are not here legally, they are here illegally. What do they care about the laws of Alabama, or the United States? Slap in our face."

He now claims he was being facetious (see the comments), but you can watch the actual interview (starts around 6:00, the second part comes around 19:50) and decide for yourself.

Roy Moore's campaign page is here (warning: plays audio on load).

Harry Lyon's criminal defense firm web site is here (although I wouldn't recommend him if you're worried about collateral immigration issues).

(Hat tip: Ed Brayton)

Today I did something that probably would have disappointed my father if he were still alive: I voted in the Republican primary.

My father was a yellow dog Democrat. Oh, there were a few Democrats he wouldn't vote for -- such as Tip O'Neill, whom he considered corrupt -- but he would never have voted for a Republican. In his declining years, he hated George W. Bush most of all. Whenever I took him to the VA hospital, he always insisted I position his wheelchair in the waiting room so he wouldn't have to see Bush's portrait on the wall. I was glad he lived to see Bush depart the Whitehouse.

Of course, as regular readers could probably guess, I voted for Ron Paul. His positions on several issues differ from mine in some important ways, but he comes a lot closer to my views than anyone else in the Republican party, and I long ago lost all respect for the current occupant of the Whitehouse. Paul hasn't got a chance in hell of winning, but I hope he'll have more influence after this. More importantly, I hope his libertarian ideas of freedom will become more popular, and that future candidates will make more of an effort to win the votes of people who hold libertarian values.

I also just like messing with Republicans.

I don't know if I could explain my vote in a way my dad would have understood. But I do know that the reason my dad hated George Bush so much is because he got our country into these painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And Barack Obama has turned out to be every bit the warmonger Bush was. I don't think my dad would agree with many of Ron Paul's other policies, but I'd like to think he'd be okay with me voting for the only candidate of either party who wants to end the wars.

Even if he is a Republican.

I once heard a story -- I'm not sure where, but it seemed reputable at the time -- about a Ford automotive plant where one of the assembly line workers realized, after some time assembling cars, that he had been doing it wrong. He told his boss, and Ford had to pull hundreds of cars from the delivery process and re-work them to fix his mistake, at a cost of over a million dollars.

So what did Ford do to this employee who made such a costly mistake? They gave him that month's award for quality improvement. After all, he'd prevented a lot of defective cars from being sold.

Some people who've heard this story have called it idiotic to reward an employee who caused so much damage. What was Ford thinking? To understand, let me tell you another story. This one comes from W. Edwards Deming's Out of the Crisis.

A company was looking at ways to improve quality at one of its factories, when they noticed something funny about the monthy defect reports. The monthly reports clustered around an average, as expected, but the deviations from that average were lopsided.

On the bottom edged, with fewer defects, they trailed off as expected -- some months were a little better than average, a few were much better, and occasionally they had a really good month. But on the top edge, some months were worse than average, but never too bad. Above a certain cutoff point, there was noting. Not a single month had a defect rate higher than this cutoff number.

What really spelled it out for the quality team was that the monthly quality figures showed a spike of reports just below the cutoff. The defect rate tailed off away from the average and then spiked just before cutting off completely. In a quality reporting data set, this almost certainly means that someone is faking the numbers. When the real defect count was below average or not too high above average, they were getting the honest defect report. But whenvever the real defect count went above the cutoff, someone changed to to a number just below the cutoff, causing the numbers there to spike.

The quality team eventually figured out what was going on. Word had gotten around the factory that the company's managment were planning to shut that factory down if its defect rate got above a certain number. (It's not clear from the story if this the truth, but it's what everyone at the factory believed.) So the quality assurance person responsible for that factory was hiding defects when the count got too high. From his point of view, he was saving thousands of jobs.

This is exactly what Ford was trying to prevent. By rewarding a worker who reported a massive screwup, they hoped to reassure everyone that they would not be punished for reporting their own mistakes or for giving management bad news. This is because one of the early lessons learned by statistical quality control experts is that you can't punish people for giving you bad news if you want accurate news.

Which brings me to the New York Police Department, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, and a recent investigation into how the CompStat program was run, as reported by the Village Voice:

For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the "stats" that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports.

Arresting bystanders made it look like the department was efficient, while artificially reducing the amount of serious crime made the commander look good.

The NYPD tried to stomp all over Schoolcraft, even having him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward, but under pressure from outside, they also ran their own investigation, and the Village Voice got a copy.

Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft's specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.

These weren't minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.

"When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications," investigators concluded. "This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct."

Remember, as Radley Balko points out, this was at the same time as the NYPD was arresting people in bogus marijuana arrests in which officers stopped people and tricked them into pulling small amounts of marijuana out of their pockets. (Possessing small amounts of marijuana is not a crime in New York, but displaying it in public is.) This allowed officers to pad their arrest statistics with the kinds of crimes that are discovered and cleared at the same time.

John Eterno, a criminologist at Molloy College and a former NYPD captain, says that what was happening in the 81st Precinct is no isolated case. "The pressures on commanders are enormous, to make sure the crime numbers look good," Eterno says. "This is a culture. This is happening in every precinct, every transit district, and every police housing service area. This culture has got to change."

As for Mauriello, he's no rogue commander, says Eterno, who has published a book about crime reporting with John Jay College professor Eli Silverman. "Mauriello is no different from any other commander," he says. "This is just a microcosm of what is happening in the entire police department."

Indeed, it is clear from Schoolcraft's recordings that Mauriello was responding to pressure emanating from the Brooklyn North borough command and police headquarters for lower crime numbers and higher summons and stop-and-frisk numbers.

This is a standard recipe for disaster in quality control -- and CompStat is at heart a statistical quality control program. Take a bunch of people doing a job, make them report quality control data, and put pressure on them to produce good numbers. If there is little oversight and lots of pressure, then good numbers is exactly what they'll give you. Even if they're not true.

The entire Village Voice article by Graham Rayman, "The NYPD Tapes Confirmed," is filled with a lot more information and disturbing examples.

I think I first heard of Marc Randazza when one of the other bloggers around here started calling him a "First Amendment Badass," and that's how I always think of him.

I didn't really encounter him, however, until Jon Katz posted this bit about Randazza a few years ago. I took the opportunity to poke fun at Marc in the comments about the absurdist severity of his blog's terms and conditions. I suspect that much of it is unenforecable, and he knows it, but it looks like he had fun writing it. For example, he's got a wonderful blacklist of people who aren't allowed to quote from his blog, including any member of the KKK, Stormfront, or the Nazi party, a bunch of politicians, the American Family Association, and a variety of named persons he finds annoying, include Joe the Plumber.

Marc responded in the comments, poking fun at me for some of the things in my blog's Terms and Conditions. We then exchanged a few emails, in which he gave me a little free legal advice and offered to help me register the Windypundit trademark. (I haven't actually taken him up on that, however, because one or another of us has always been busy. I should probably get around to it.)

Now, he might not like me suggesting that Marc Randazza will help you for free but, well, he just might. For example, Randazza and Ken-at-Popehat recently teamed up to give free help to a science blogger who was being hassled by a quack.

The fun thing is that Marc Randazza doesn't just win cases, he wins them with attitude, as when the copyright trolls at Righthaven were demanding the domain names of everyone they claimed had infringed on their intellectual property. Not only did Randazza beat the crap out of them in court, but his actions forced them to auction off their own domain name.

In case you didn't notice, today is kind of an informal let's-celebrate-Marc Randazza day in the blogosphere. Other celebrants include:

• Marc Randazza: First Amendment Badass.
• Marc Randazza, Hero.
• Marc Randazza would support me, right?
• Righthaven, Liquified
• Marc Randazza: The Mark of Excellence
• Marc Randazza: 1st Amendment Lawyer Exemplar
• Marc Randazza: Super Lawyer, Super Blogger?
• Marc Randazza, First Amendment Lawyer, on the Rush Limbaugh Fiasco
• Marc Randazza: A Sentinel For Free Speech

So Good Luck, Marc Randazza. You're my first call if I get sued for anything I write in my blog!

I've held off writing anything about the whole contraceptives/Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh mess because it's a classic example of an important political debate turning trivial, stupid, and misogynistic. At the top level, we have the ongoing debate about how to reform the healthcare industry in this country. The current big and controversial plan is the Affordable Care Act, which is either going to save or destroy our medical industry, depending on what you believe.

The first step down toward stupidity is that under the Affordable Care Act every health insurance plan is supposed to include a lot of things that don't belong under an insurance plan. As a general rule, it's a bad idea to buy insurance that pays for things you can afford to pay for directly. Insurance is supposed to be a mechanism that protects you against disasters. This is why your car insurance protects you against the risk of major car repairs due to a crash, but not the risk of replacing worn-out tires or changing dirty oil. It's also why it's foolish to want health insurance to cover routine office visits and inexpensive medications. It's cheaper to pay directly.

So why do health insurance plans cover these things? Two reasons, one good, the other bad. The good reason is that some of these things actually reduce your overall healthcare costs, so it's to your insurance company's advantage to cover you completely. This is efficient and good for everybody. The bad reason is that your medical expenses are not deductible from your taxes (unless they're huge) but your employers are allowed to deduct the cost of buying you medical insurance from their taxes. Essentially, you are funnelling payments for your routine medical care through your employer to avoid paying income tax. It's a complicated and wasteful response to tax policy.

The first step down toward trivia is the discussion over the requirement that all health insurance plans should provide contraceptive pills for women. If this was any other medication, it would hardly be worth discussing. In any serious attempt to reform healthcare, the criteria by which drugs are included in the formulary requirements for the standard insurance plans should be spelled out and applied to all medications. There shouldn't be any need for Congress to decide these things on a pill-by-pill basis.

That's where the Catholic Church enters the fray with their insistence that contraception is immoral, and that they shouldn't have to pay for something they consider immoral. I don't understand the Chuch's position on contraception. I've heard explanations, but they always make it sound like the Catholic Church thinks that (1) people shouldn't have sex for any reason other than to have a child, and (2) the way to stop them from doing that is to force them to have unwanted children if they do. Both of those points sound stupid to me, but I was raised as a Protestant, so I might be biased.

This all leads to a confrontation over whether or not religious freedom means the Church should receive special accomodations as a religious institution so that it can sidestep the requirement to fund contraception. Given that I've heard that contraception is one of those things which insurance companies like to include for free because it reduces their long-term costs, the Church may actually be paying more for the privilege of refusing to provided birth control to women, which seems stupid and more than a little misogynistic.

Then we get Sandra Fluke's testimony before congress. It was largely a typical and unremarkable litany of the the difficulties women face from having to pay for birth control. I don't think there's any doubt that women's lives would be better if they received free birth control, just as their lives would also be better if they received free iPads. But the money for either of those things has to come from someone, and I'm sure those other people's lives would be better if they were allowed to keep the money. There's an argument to be made here, but Fluke's testimony was little more than a plea to be given someone else's money. There was nothing unusual about this, as asking to be given someone else's money accounts for a large fraction of the reasons people talk to members of Congress.

Then, for some reason. Rush Limbaugh got involved, which did nothing to reduce the stupidity of the discussion and really cranked up the meanness. He did some radio bits where he tried to portray Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" who wanted to be "paid to have sex."

For some reason I don't quite understand, out of all the outrageous things that Limbaugh says, this one really upset people, to the point that they are organizing boycotts against his sponsors. My co-blogger Ken tells me it's because Limbaugh didn't just call her names, he really laid into her during a lengthy series of degrading tirades.

Maybe. I haven't heard Rush Limbaugh's show for any length of time since 1994, but I distinctly remember he used to go into a lengthy series of tirades about everything -- although mostly, it seemed, about what other people were saying about him -- and I somehow doubt this was any different. Just bad luck on Rush's part, I guess.

Some of Rush's defenders responded by reminding everyone the Bill Maher called Sarah Palin some bad words. And thus the debate on national healthcare has degenerated into an argument over which side has meaner talk show personalities.

And then, as I was writing this, I found out that Gloria Allred is trying to encourage a Florida State Attorney to press criminal defamation charges against Rush Limbaugh for "falsely and maliciously imputing to her a want of chastity" because "his reference to Ms. Fluke as a 'slut' and 'prostitute' were baseless and false." I think somebody needs to explain to Ms. Allred that there is a hell of a lot of territory between "slut" and "chaste."

I'm a Bobcat fan from way back, so I'll probably want to go see this movie, which he wrote and directed, if it actually gets released to theaters. After which, there will probably be Congressional hearings.

Oh my God. Seriously? Houston criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett has just announced on his blog that he's running for office as a Judge on the Texas Court of Appeals. It even brought Old Man Greenfield out of retirement.

The good news is that he'd be a great person to have on the bench. The bad news is that he's running on the Libertarian ticket. To which I can only respond:

Mark, my friend. You're running as a Libertarian? Do you realize they are insane? Are you insane? You haven't got a chance. Not prayer, not a hope. If I hooked up an electron microscope to the Times Square JumboTron, it wouldn't be powerful enough to see the infinitesimally small possibility that the voters would pick a Libertarian, let alone a Libertarian criminal defense lawyer. It just can't work.

So how can I help?

Update: A couple of weeks ago, in response to Scott Greenfield's announcement that he was shuttering his blog, Mark Bennett wrote:

...some day--probably very soon--someone will publicly say something so outrageously stupid, illogical, unethical or ugly that it will pull Scott back in.

Congratulations, Mark, on being the one!

Jamison Koehler has a post up on his blog offering tips for new bloggers. Although he wrote it specifically for legal bloggers, and some of the examples might not make sense if you don't know the personalities, it's good advice for anyone considering a new blog. If you're thinking you might like to join the conversation, you should check it out.

Naturally, I have a few thoughts on the subject...

Sometimes I write for other bloggers. At the beginning especially, I was intrigued by the back-and-forth among other bloggers I read and sought to participate in the discussion. The problem with this, I have found, is that these entries don't hold up very well over time.  I'll look back at a blog entry I did one or two years ago and wonder what we were ever talking about.  Reading such a blog entry can be like listening in on one side of a telephone conversation.

I say you shouldn't worry about how well your posts will hold up over time. Just because a topic is short-lived doesn't mean it isn't worth your time to think about and write about. However, if you want readers from the distant future to understand what you're saying, make sure to link to other parts of the conversation and quote relevant parts, in case the linked pages go away. It may help to recap a bit. I usually try to do all this in one obvious paragraph, so people already familiar with the context can skip it.

Regarding tip #3, "Find Your Voice," if your writing skills do not extend to consciously creating a style for yourself (as mine do not), or if you're just not sure what your style should be, the best way to find a style is to just keep writing. Eventually, you will adopt certain habits -- certain turns of phrase, certain narrative structures -- and your style will emerge.

There's also some important tension between rule #5, "Do Your Own Thing," and rule #8, "Lurk Before Joining the Conversation," because of the implication that you are lurking so you learn the rules. It's important to keep in mind that while it's helpful to know the rules, you don't have to obey them.

Also, once you start blogging, for God's sake, make sure you really do join the conversation. Link to other bloggers, and talk about the things they talk about. It's really the heart of what makes the blogosphere different from other media.

I've always been wary of Godwin's Law -- the internet maxim which says that if you are in an argument and you compare someone or something to Hitler or the Nazis, you automatically lose the argument. (Actually, Mike Godwin's original comment was more nuanced than Godwin's Law has become today. Wikipedia has a nice summary.)

Granted, there's way too much of that going around. Not everyone we dislike is a Nazi, and no matter what a lot of silly protesters said, George W. Bush didn't turn into Hitler and Barack Obama won't either. We invoke Godwin's Law as a reminder that such comparisons are often ridiculous, and also as a reminder that an analogy can become a replacement for careful thought.

On the other hand, Godwin's Law can also become a replacement for careful thought, if we allow it to shutdown the debate.

Part of the reason we have Godwin's Law is also part of the problem with it: When we think about Hitler and the Nazis, we naturally think of their greatest crimes, and compared to the Holocaust, all our current problems seem small, which is why a comparison is so often foolish. Nothing happening in the United States today comes close the ultimate horrors of Nazi Germany.

However, it's important to remember that Adolf Hitler didn't murder 12 million people on his first day, and those ultimate horrors were preceded by many lesser horrors. Hitler was active in German politics for over a decade before becoming Chancellor, and it would be another nine years before the Wannsee conference and the Final Solution. So while it's correct to say that nobody in America today is as bad as Hitler, it's also correct to point out that for the first fifty years of his life, neither was Hitler.

Yet it's not as if Hitler was a nice guy for most of his time in office. It's not as if Germany was a great place for Jews (or Gypsies or homosexuals or any of the other victims) right up until the moment the death camps began operating. There were clues to what was coming, and those clues are worth thinking about today. It's not enough to remember history; we also have to recognize the evils of history when we see them again, if we don't want to be doomed to repeat them.

As Kevin Carson says in his own denounciation of Godwin's Law:

Godwin's Law, by treating Nazi Germany as some sort of unique, metaphysical evil in human history, essentially nullifies its practical lessons for people in other times and places. Although Nazi precedents are now used as symbols of ultimate evil -- just look at Darth Vader -- they didn't seem anywhere so dramatic to the German people at the time they were happening.

Nazi repression came about incrementally, in the background, as people lived their ordinary daily lives. Each new upward ratcheting of the security state was justified as something not all that novel or unprecedented, just a common sense measure undertaken from practical concerns for "security."

After all, the bulk of Hitler's emergency powers were granted by the Reichstag after a terrorist attack (blamed at the time on communists), a fire which destroyed the seat of Germany's parliament. Any parallels to 9/11 and USA PATRIOT are, of course, purely accidental. Each new security clampdown, after an initial flurry of discussion, was quickly accepted as normal because it didn't affect the daily lives of most ordinary people. And of course, those ordinary people had nothing to fear, because they'd done nothing wrong!

The Nazis weren't the last totalitarian bastards the world will ever see, and when the next Adolf Hitler begins his rise to power, it will be a lot harder to stop him if we're not allowed to point out that he's acting just like the last Adolf Hitler.

Jennifer Abel gives an example of how this works:

I've been banging the anti-TSA pro-civil liberties drum on this blog since 2006, the same year I started it. And America's gotten worse, incrementally, as people lead their ordinary lives. It led directly to the passage and acceptance of the NDAA, with its unconstitutional insistence that the government can arrest any citizen at any time with no evidence, no trial, no legal rights at all, provided the government first says "Trust me, he's totally a terrorist." It's led to what Carson calls a "de facto internal passport" required for travel within the borders of our own country. And when those who support these laws watch documentaries on the rise of the Third Reich, they shake their heads in patriotic superiority and swear "It can't happen here."

But of course it could happen here. America is still basically a free country, but there's no natural law that says it has to stay that way. There are certainly things going on in this country that look a lot like the early days of the Nazi rise to power. The TSA's metastasis into a system of internal checkpoints (the hallmark of totalitarians everywhere) is one good example. Another example, is the War on Drugs, which strikes me as a slow-motion Kristallnacht, with drug users and the inner-city poor in place of the Jews. 

I can't point to any major American politician and say he's the next Hitler, but I can think of a at least one minor figure who certainly fits the uniform: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He fought the DEA's war on drugs for 25 years, he brags about the cruelty of his prisons (in which inmates regularly die), he uses the investigative powers of his office to intimidate people who criticize him -- including journalists and other members the justice system -- and he has even tried to imprison judges who ruled against him or his officers. And to top it off, much of his political power comes from exploiting racial and ethnic hatred against illegal immigrants.

So in the spirit of civil disobedience against Godwin's Law, I'll say it out loud: Sheriff Joe Arpaio is like Hitler. Not like the Hitler who killed millions in the death camps, of course, but like Hitler from twenty years before, filled with hate and lusting for power. But not as successful. And unlike the real Hitler, we don't need a time machine to stop him. We can do it by voting him out of office.

That said, identifying "the next Hitler" isn't really the important point. Hitler wasn't evil because he was Hitler. Hitler was evil because he did evil things. Similarly, our goal need not be to stop the next Hitler. Our goal should be to recognize when people in our government are doing evil things, and spread the word so they can be stopped. If that means saying that they're behaving like Nazis, so be it.

If you've ever tried to use Google to find a lawyer for a DUI or traffic offense, you've probably stumbled across one of those relentlessly SEO optimized sites that isn't actually a law firm but promises to put you in touch with a lawyer. Basically, they're referral services.

This always seemed annoying but harmless to me. To Spokane, Washington criminal defense attorney Steve Graham, however, it seemed like something worth a bit of investigation:

I googled the phrase "Spokane dui lawyer" and came across the site www.1800duilaws.com, and typed in some very sensitive information about my "case". I conducted the experiment from a coffee shop in north Spokane. About 5 minutes after I entered the details of my "Spokane DUI case", the comment I had entered into the site 1800duilaws.com came back to me in the form of a spam email to my law firm email account.

The contact form on these websites usually includes something along the lines of "you are not forming an attorney-client relationship," which sounds like they're just warning you that no one has promised to be your lawyer yet. What they don't say explicitly, however, is that this means that what you are writing is not a privileged communication. The people who receive them are not acting as your lawyer, and they have no legal obligation to keep your secrets.

I was aware of this, but as Graham explains, it's much worse than I thought:

The lawyers who receive this information aren't even necessarily DUI lawyers...Many of the lawyers could be friends, neighbors, or relatives of the DUI suspect, and the lawyers are under no obligation to keep the information confidential. In Washington state, it is not uncommon for a lawyer to defend DUI cases in the county district courts, but to work as a part-time prosecutor in the local city or municipal courts...It is possible that a DUI suspect could have his or her DUI case information sent directly to the city prosecutor's email inbox.

Geez. I did not see that one coming.

Steve Graham's post has a lot more information, including one site that masquerades as a law firm with offices in thousands of U.S. cities.

Read the whole thing.

My Nobody's Business co-blogger Rogier has a pretty good article up about divine delusions v.s. observable reality. It's a plea for rationality, even if faith and mysticism seem like more fun. As is often my way, I have a small quibble.

Rogier and his opponent are discussing a Facebook poster's insistence that a bit of lens flare in a photo of a pyramid is actually a sign that the "goddess era has arrived." Rogier's opponent is arguing that her subjective interpretation has meaning.

So here's perhaps how she making the connection between her beliefs and aspirations and this photo. This photo for her is a symbol of her convictions: To bring the masculine energy (which she perceives is out of whack) into balance with the feminine energy.

He goes on to conclude:

So this image is a visual confirmation and symbol of her beliefs, and makes perfect sense.

Rogier had a problem with that:

I don't see how he arrived there. At all. Unless he means that it makes perfect sense for some poor guy in an asylum to believe that he is Napoleon Bonaparte, or for the cat lady down the street to worship her scraggly charges as multiple reincarnations of Nefertiti. Yes, it makes sense to those two people, I'm sure. But almost everyone else easily recognizes the outsized fallacies involved.

There is no equivalence between the unprovable views of Cat Lady and Fake Bonaparte on the one hand, and the provable ones of Richard Feynman, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and all the rest of science on the other.

This is where I feel the need to add a small clarification. I think "provable" is the wrong word. The key difference between the theories of scientists and the pronouncements of mystics is not that they can be proven, but rather that they can be disproven. In the terminology of Karl Popper, the theories of scientists are falsifiable.

What distinguishes a scientific theory from other kinds of ideas -- personal beliefs, religious faith -- is that scientific theories allow you to make predictions about the world that can be tested and that might be found false. (Note that I'm not saying that a theory has to be disproven to be scientific -- that would make it a false theory -- only that it has to be conceivable that it could be disproven.) Conversely, if there's no way that an idea can be disproven, then it's not really a scientific theory. If the theory can't be tested against the real world, that means it doesn't say anything useful about the real world.

Rogier's opponent implicitly agrees that the goddess theory is not falsifiable:

For her [the Facebook poster] it's a sign that the goddess era or whatever has arrived. Who's going to prove she's wrong?

If no one could ever prove her wrong, then she's not saying anything interesting about the world.

I know that everybody stuck here in the wake of the mortgage securities crisis hates bankers, but it still seems like there's something wrong about this:

The news for Wegelin, its headquarters nestled in the town of St. Gallen next to the Appenzell Alps near the German-Austrian borders, would only get worse. Six days later the U.S. Justice Department, acting on plans it had been making for weeks, indicted the 270-year-old bank on charges of enabling wealthy Americans to evade taxes on at least $1.2 billion from 2002 through last year. U.S. criminal laws apply to foreign banks that do business in the United States, even if the banks, like Wegelin, have no U.S. branches.

So the United States is prosecuting Swiss banking executives for helping Americans evade income taxes, even though the bank's activities did not violate Swiss law. Apparently we've made it illegal for anyone anywhere in the world to violate our tax laws, even if they never enter the United States to do so, and even if doing so isn't a crime where they are.

[Wegelen's leading partner Konrad] Hummler's error, rival Swiss bankers say, was in thinking Wegelin was safe from a U.S. indictment just because the bank didn't run any U.S.-based branches.

This is a terrible precedent (although it's hardly the first time). What if other countries started regularly doing that to us? Would we want Americans to be prosecuted for apostasy in Iranian courts for evangelizing and converting Muslims to Christianity in Alabama? Would we want American web site operators prosecuted for helping France-based bloggers violate European hate speech laws?

Martin Naville, chief executive of the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce in Zurich, told Reuters that Hummler had "exposed himself pretty heavily" around 2009 by publicly calling America the "worst aggressor since the Second World War" while taking in tax-evading clients fleeing other Swiss banks in the wake of the crackdown. "Clearly, he made some people very angry," Naville said. "And usually, the boomerang comes back."

What Hummler said is over the top, but it's not a crime. I would like to think that federal prosecutors have better ways to prioritize their time than prosecuting people who piss them off.

I'm taking my employer's mandatory security training course, and I just ran across this paragraph:

The World Wide Web is a powerful tool for such tasks as research, communication, marketing and more. It provides access to more information than we could read in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, it has also become inundated with sites that are completely inappropriate for our work environment.

True, but that's not an unfortunate thing about the Web. It's an unfortunate thing about being at work.

A few months ago, after reading posts about the concept of reasonable doubt in our legal system by Scott Greenfield and Rick Horowitz, I decided to tackle the subject myself. Despite my facetious claim of a breakthrough, I didn't really reach any great conclusions, but that didn't keep me from rambling on for a while. (And it's not going to stop me this time, either.)

As with many of my more thoughtful posts, it received almost no comments. At least until a few days ago when a grad student named Sam emailed to ask for a little more information about where I got my ideas. He wisely starts with flattery:

Hi Mark,

I am writing my thesis about moral certainty/reasonable doubt in the moral context of the ascertaining of death. I came across an article in your blog, which I found rather interesting...

Sam then goes on to discuss the idea a bit, with references to James Q Whitman, James Franklin's The Science of Conjecture, Pius XII, and John Paul II. Then he asks me for a bit of information.

...

Is there any book on the history of moral certainty/reasonable doubt that you can recommend me? I would be interested in non-historical books as well.

Thank you for taking time to read this e-mail. I would greatly appreciate if you could answer me.

Yours truly,

Sam

I don't know of any books about the history of moral certainty per se, but I can think of a few books that directly or indirectly influenced the way I discussed the subject in the previous post. I started to explain this in a brief reply, but I soon realized I had enough material for a blog post, and I thought someone else out there might be interested.

Although I'm not a scientist, I have great admiration for the discipline of scientists, and much of my thinking about issues of certainty and doubt is based on what I've read about the philosophy of science, which is somewhat related to the philosophy of pragmatism. On that subject, the most obvious book to read is William James's Pragmatism, but I've found that C. S. Pierce explains the philosophical issues more clearly.

One of the key points of pragmatism is that when trying to answer a question, it matters a great deal why you're asking. Here's an excerpt from one of James's lectures that is illustrative of both the pragmatic approach and James's writing style:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel -- a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the numbers on both sides were even. Each side, when I appeared therefore appealed to me to make it a majority. Mindful of the scholastic adage that whenever you meet a contradiction you must make a distinction, I immediately sought and found one, as follows: "Which party is right," I said, "depends on what you practically mean by 'going round' the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute. You are both right and both wrong according as you conceive the verb 'to go round' in one practical fashion or the other."

The relevant point is that in order to think about how to define reasonable doubt, we have to keep in mind how we're going to use the answer. The definition is inseparable from its use.

If you want a more rigorous approach to thinking about certainty and doubt, you might want to learn about the way scientists use probability and statistics to quantify the degree to which they can be certain that a theory is true based on limited evidence.

In science, the evidence is limited because scientific theories are statements about universal truths. For example, suppose your theory is that a flipped Euro coin is more likely to land heads than tails, perhaps because of aerodynamics or weight distribution. You can't possibly do an exhaustive test: Not only are there billions of Euro coins in the world, but each coin can be flipped essentially an infinite number of times.

The only way to test a theory like that is to look at a small sample of all the possibilities. Conduct an experiment by flipping a few coins, tabulate the results, and then use probability and statistics to answer this question: What are the chances that I would get these experimental results even if my theory is wrong?

For example, if you flipped 10 coins and got six heads, that's very poor proof: A little math with the binomial probability distribution tells us that there's a nearly 38% chance of getting at least 6 heads in ten flips. In other words, if the Euro coin is totally fair -- 50/50 -- there's still a 38% chance of getting 6 or more heads in ten flips. With odds like that, it's hard to distinguish whether our theory is correct or not.

Our certainty is increased, however, if our result is stronger or if there are more tests. So if we get 7, 8, or 9 heads, the likelihood if it happening even if our theory is wrong is 17%, 5%, or 1%, respectively, indicating we can be more confident that the theory is true. Alternatively, we can also be more confident if we increase our sample size. The probability of getting 60 heads in 100 flips even if our theory is wrong is just under 3%. That's good enough for publication in some fields.

In a criminal case, the jury is evaluating the prosecution's theory that the defendant is guilty. Although the jury is not deciding a universal truth, the evidence is still limited to whatever could be learned about the crime, and without experimentation there's no way to increase the amout of evidence. Nevertheless, the same rules apply: The jury's certainty about its conclusions depends on the strength and quantity of evidence, so in order to reach a conclusion, they need either a few pieces of very good evidence (the defendant's DNA) or a lot of poor evidence (partial fingerprints on the gun, the defendant owns the same kind of car that was seen leaving the scene, a witness who picked the defendant out of a lineup). Either way, the question for the jury is: What are the chances that this evidence would exist even if the prosecutor's theory was false?

(I'm pretty sure juries don't actually think about the problem this way, let alone try to calculate the probabilities, but the math still applies whether they use it or not.)

It's important to note that, as a matter of math, neither scientific experiments nor criminal trials can offer perfect certainty. There is always the possibility of error. The chances of a mistake never go to zero. There is always the chance that the jury will convict an innocent person or release a guilty one. Therefore it's important to recognize that, whatever we decide we mean by reasonable doubt or moral certainty, it's never going to be perfect.

I learned about the math when I took a college-level course in probability and statistics that used the book Probability and Statistics for Engineers and Scientists by Walpole, Myers, and Myers. I have qualms about recommending it, however, because it gets bad reviews on Amazon and it's a textbook for a class, so it's not really oriented toward someone trying to learn the subject by themselves.

Also, learning college-level calculus-based probability and statistics is probably more of a commitment than you're prepared to make. I don't have an actual book to recommend, but I suggest you find one that approaches the subject on a level you're comfortable with. Note that this shouldn't just be a book about statistics -- how to calculate the mean or find a median -- it should specifically address the use of probability and statistics to test scientific hypotheses. This is often called "experimental design" in the table of contents.

This leads somewhat naturally to the third influence on my discusison of reasonable doubt: Statistical quality control. Whether they're making cars or computers or just parts for something else, some portion of every factory's output is going to be defective. This defective output has a cost: Either the product is discarded or reworked, or it is delivered to customers who will demand a refund or replacement.

Manufacturers would like to turn out perfect products, but reducing defects comes with a cost. Every time you add a new inspection step, you increase the cost of production. Eventually, you can make your product so expensive that nobody wants to buy it, no matter how good it is. The key is to spend money to improve your product only until you reach the point where the cost of eliminating one more defect is higher than the cost of allowing the defect through the system.

The first relevant point for moral certainty/reasonable doubt is that perfection has a trade-off: We have to strike the right balance between the cost of error and the cost of quality. In a factory, the cost of quality is an increased cost of production. In criminal justice, quality is two sided: There are two kinds of errors, and the cost of reducing errors on one side is an increase in errors on the other side.

If the jury instruction sets the bar too high, you'll make it extremely unlikely that they'll convict an innocent person, but you'll do so at the cost of freeing too many guilty people. On the other hand, if you choose a system that makes it extremely unlikely the guilty will go free, you'll do so at the cost of wrongly imprisoning too many innocent people.

The second relevant point comes from the emphasis statistical quality control places on the importance of using operational definitions. When you tell someone to measure something, you should also tell them exactly how to measure it. For example, you don't just say, "The temperature of the reaction vessel should be 220°C."

Instead, you should give detailed instructions something like this:

"Obtain a Fluke 52-2 digital thermometer from the instrument cabinet. Verify that the calibration sticker has not expired. Using the provided cable, connect the digital thermometer to each of the upper, middle, and lower integrated thermocouples on the reaction vessel. Allow the probe to stabilize for 30 seconds on each thermocouple before recording the reading. If any two readings are more than 12°C different, disgard all readings and file a malfunction report with your supervisor. If the readings are successful, average the values of the three readings. The reactor vessel is at the correct temperature only if the average temperature is at least 220°C and no single reading is below 119°C."

As you'd imagine, the second instruction is a lot more likely to produce accurate, repeatable results than the first. This suggests to me that the judge should try to provide the jury with a similarly operational definition of reasonable doubt.

The most famous name in statistical quality control is W. Edwards Deming, and I think reading a little bit of either Out of the Crisis or The New Economics would be worthwhile. J. M. Juran offers a more business-like approach in Juran's Quality Handbook.

Quality control helps you understand how the process affects the error rate, but before you can develop a policy, you also have to know the costs of your errors and therefore the benefits of preventing them. Sending an innocent person to prison has direct costs for the person, the prison system, and society; but freeing the guilty allows them to continue their predatory behavior.

In addition, an especially large and mysterious cost is the incentive that the error creates for others: What happens when criminals realize they are unlikely to be punished for their crimes? What happens when society loses faith in the justice system's ability to protect the innocent?

Analyizing the strange and far-ranging consequences of changing incentives is something that economists have been studying for years in a field called benefit-cost analysis. There are books on the subject, but to get the flavor of it, I recommend Armchair Economist by Steven E. Landsburg. Be warned that Landsburg has some rather strong opinions and is something of a curmudgeon, but his description of cost-benefit analysis is relatively easy to understand, and the end notes contain references to more scholarly publications.

I've been meaning to write something about the recent criticism of Apple's use of the Foxxconn factory in China, but now I don't have to, because my co-blogger Rogier has just posted a great piece about it over at Nobody's Business. So go check out The iPhone owner's guide to liberal hypocrisy.

I guarantee that it is far more interesting than my obligatory post on the State of the Union below. Also, way shorter.

I'm always late to this party -- it's become a Twitter thing -- but as has been my occasional custom, here are a few thoughts about the President's State of the Union address. Obama should, of course, be judged more by his actions than by what he says, but as with anyone in authority, understanding his thoughts and ideas is helpful.

Arguably, the State of the Union speech is just a big show, and that Obama's less well-planned statements are more revealing, but I think the speech is worth looking at for two reasons. First, this is Obama at his most considered and prepared, with his whole team participating, so you're seeing his governing philosophy presented at its best. Second, precisely because it's been so carefully prepared, this is one speech he can't back away from.

This is the entire text, taken from the official White House transcript, although I have reformatted it slightly and removed all the notations of when the audience applauded, because that's the silliest possible way to evaluate this speech.

It begins the customary way.

THE PRESIDENT:  Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

In 2009, when a Fairfax, Virginia police officer shot and killed an unarmed man, the police department refused to identify the officer who pulled the trigger. When reporter Michael Pope asked a few questions, Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings became obstinate:

When asked why her department won't even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. "What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?" Jennings asked in reply, presumably rhetorically. "I'd be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

Contrast Officer Jennings' response with the more recent shooting of Tri Truong Le by a San Jose SWAT team, as reported in the Mercury News the day after it happened:

The terrifying abduction of an 11-year-old girl began with a kidnapper's gunshots in the early-morning hours Friday as she was grabbed from her San Jose home. It ended almost five miles away and 12 hours later with a single shot, when a SWAT officer killed 42-year-old Tri Truong Le, the alleged kidnapper, during a gunbattle in a narrow staircase.

The girl, who was in the kidnapper's arms when the gunbattle started, was miraculously almost unharmed and recovering from the trauma at a hospital, police said.

The officer who fired the fatal head shot was identified by police Friday night as Mauricio Jimenez.

This is what it looks like like when the police have nothing to hide. A violent criminal kidnapped a little girl, and a daring and skilled police officer killed him to rescue her. It was a good day for the San Jose police, and officer Jimenez did something that his department is rightly proud of. This is what it looks like when the police are not afraid of the truth.

Martin Luther King's holiday seems to be as good a day as any to talk about how we should respond to police barbarism.

It's no secret that a lot of people with libertarian leanings aren't happy with the way the United States seems to be turning into a police state. As a reminder of the degree to which our cops have become militarized, check out the Cop or Soldier quiz at Radley Balko's place. I did pretty good, so see if you can beat me:

Some folks in the blogosphere have been saying that the emerging police state won't be stopped until the cops start getting hurt. Some have even suggested that it may be time for a violent uprising. I can understand where they're coming from -- it looks pretty bad to me too -- but then I know that some people in every generation have been certain that America was about to plunge into tyranny, and they've always been wrong. I think it's safe to assume that with a longer perspective, we'd see that our current time isn't so bad either.

(Then again, American freedom is going to end eventually. Nothing lasts forever. I sure hope that future generations will not look back on mine and ask, "Why didn't they shoot them while they still had the chance?")

Recently, some people on Twitter have been lauding this video, posted under the title "Police Brutality - Handled the Way It Should Be":

In the video, you can see some idiot run onto the field, and then then a bunch of uniformed security guards or cops tackle him and pin him down. So far, so good. But then the cop/guard on the right apparently starts to jab him with a nightstick. At which point people in the stadium rush the field to attack the cops.

I can't fault the sentiment. Although violence as a response to violence often isn't the wisest approach, there's certainly nothing morally wrong with using violence to stop violence. Resisting arrest is wrong. Defending yourself or others against police brutality is not.

However...

Watch the video carefully. The cop/guard on the right jabs the guy on the ground a few times. The other cop/guard yells at him. Then the mob attacks, and it looks like the yelling cop takes a beating. As for the cop who was jabbing the guy on the ground...he abandoned his buddies to the crowd and got away without a scratch.

This, in a nutshell, is one of the problems with trying to defeat the police state by violence. It never seems to work out the way it's supposed to. It's too easy to hurt the innocent, and too hard to make sure only the guilty are punished. And the kinds of people who attack or kill cops are not the kinds of people you want on your side. Back around the Days of Rage, the Weathermen killed a cop, but they didn't target a particularly bad one, just whoever was standing there when the bomb went off. The Symbionese Liberation Army claimed to be leaders of a black revolution, but they ended up killing a black school superintendent and a mother of four.

Fantasies of vengeance are commonplace and often make for entertaining fiction, but in real life, violent reprisals are rarely instigated by people who value freedom and respect human life. In the movies, we get a mysterious stranger in a Guy Fawkes mask who speaks eloquently of liberty, outwits the authorities, and strikes at the heart of a brutal state by blowing up empty buildings. In real life, we get Timothy McVeigh using a bomb in a truck to kill children.

It has been pointed out that my blogroll is deficient, so it's time for a few additions, corrections, and deletions.

First of all, one of my regular daily stops is the Honest Courtesan, written by retired call girl (and Nobody's Business guest blogger) Maggie McNeill. She's a good writer with mad research skills, and her blog takes a frankly libertarian approach in advocating for the rights of prostitutes and other sex workers. Also, now that she has declared me a Friend of Whores in her blogroll, I feel guilty about not having added her to the blogroll already.

(Marital tip: I told my wife about this right away. Being declared a "Friend of Whores" is really the sort of thing you want to get out in front of.)

I could have sworn I'd already added Eric Mayer at Unwashed Advocate (formerly Military Underdog), but he wasn't on the list. He is now.

I often thing Jack Marshall is very, very wrong, but his Ethics Alarms blog is usually thought-provoking and has been a continuing source of Things to Blog About.

I'm an on-again/off-again player of EVE Online, and one of the best blogs covering spaceship-to-spaceship combat is The Altruist, by Azual Skoll from Agony Unleashed.

Lindsey Beyerstein has stopped blogging at Focal Point (which I have removed) and is now blogging at Duly Noted.

What little I know about cryptography, I learned from Bruce Schneier's books, and I'm a regular reader of his blog Schneier on Security, which is about more than just computers.

WolframAlpha gets added to the resource page.

Marginal Revolution was listed in two places, but is now listed in one less place.

Pete Guither's Drug WarRant has moved, as have Norm Pattis, the Underdog Blog, and Seeking Justice.

Kip Esquire isn't blogging at A Stitch in Haste anymore, The D'Alliance is closed, and Jamie Spencer has stopped blogging at Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer. Woman of the Law is long gone. As is The Matlock Blog.

Blonde Justice hasn't blogged in about half a year, but she gets a pass.

BlogNetNews.com has been replaced by a squatter page. 

Over on the Twitter, retired call-girl Maggie McNeill is urging some of us bloggers to join her campaign to make every Friday the Thirteenth a day to speak up for the rights sex workers. She think's it's especially important to get support from outside the sex work community:

A number of advocates are working to respond to the lies, propaganda and misinformation wherever we find them, but we can only do so much and we're often outnumbered by the brainwashed zombie slaves of the "trafficking" witch-hunters.  Also, we're often accused of distorting facts to make ourselves look good, and no matter how assiduously we work to present a balanced view this is a natural and credible accusation against anyone who advocates for some issue which directly concerns her. That's why allies are so important; it's much harder for the prohibitionists to shout down people who don't have a dog in the fight, but merely support prostitutes' rights on moral grounds.

That makes sense, and although I don't have much time today, I have posted on the subject before, including a two-part series about how a deceptive Illinois law to protect prostitutes from exploitation will actually make things worse for them and how to really protect prostitutes. I also wrote a series about how the supposedly feminist idea of prosecuting the customers discriminates against men, confuses prostitution with slavery, and shows contempt for women's choices.

The problem is that I'm a middle-aged male, so when I stand up for the right of attractive young women to perform sex acts for money, oppponents can dismiss my arguments as self-serving. I think it's much more effective when sex workers speak up for themselves. To that end, I strongly recommend Maggie's blog The Honest Courtesan. It's straightforward and well-written, full of carefully researched arguments and (if you're into that sort of thing) salacious details.

(Maggie McNeill is also an occasional contributor to Nobody's Business.)

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall writes:

Most of all, I do not understand the persistence of the myth that a college education can, does, or should qualify a graduate for good job, when it appears that a large percentage of students, if not a majority, leave the campus unable to write, think, or name the men on Mount Rushmore.

Mount Rushmore? That's old media...

Seriously, though, in the context of qualifying for a job, what does knowing the faces on Mount Rushmore have to do with anything? Still, Marshall's got a point about the mixed-up priorities of some universities. Read the whole thing.

One of the themes I keep hitting over and over here at Windypundit is that SWAT raids for drug crimes are a bad idea. Of course, I think the whole War on Drugs is a bad idea, but fighting that war through an endless series of armed home invasions is a plan that will only lead to carnage and tears.

It's simple statistics. The more times you send armed teams to break into people's homes, the more times people will get killed. It's the inevitable consequence of such a policy. No amount of propaganda and posturing can beat the math. So sometimes the victim is a 92-year-old grandmother, sometimes it's a mother with her baby in her arms, and sometimes it's a United States Marine.

But last Wednesday, on January 4th, police in Ogden, Utah raided the house of Matthew Stewart, and something unusual happened: The cops lost the gunfight. Stewart is a military veteran, and unlike the aformentioned Marine, when the SWAT team came through his door, he apparently didn't hold fire. Officer Jared Francom was killed, and five other cops were wounded. Stewart is still alive.

When cops win the gunfight and kill an alleged offender during a drug raid, there's usually a complete news blackout while they "investigate." Months may pass before they even release the name of the cop who pulled the trigger, if they ever do. In this case, however, the roles are reversed, and it's a cop who's dead, not a lowly civilian, so the law enforcement establishment has gone into high gear. Weber County Attorney Dee W. Smith has already announced that he will seek to have him executed.

I guess the investigation proceeds a bit faster when the deceased is someone the cops care about, and the shooter isn't a cop.

(By the way, if you've been following the excesses of the War on Drugs, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the police officers conducting this raid were part of a multi-jurisdictional task force. In this case, calling it a "task" force must not have sounded macho enough to the commander, so it's something called the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Strike Force.)

Other than the reversal of victim and shooter, however, the shooting of officer Francom was a pretty typical drug raid death. By which I mean it was completely unnecessary. From media reports, the raid appears to have been executed to serve a search warrant for a marijuana grow operation. Not only is that an inherently non-violent activity, it's not even the sort of thing where a criminal could dispose of the evidence if the cops moved too slowly. There was no point in turning this into a violent incident.

DEA Agent Charge Frank Smith doesn't see it that way:

"It's not a legalization issue, it's not an immigration issue, it's a public safety issue. If someone is willing to shoot it out with police, who is self-medicating on marijuana, what's to say he's not willing to walk out his house and start shooting his neighbors?" Smith says.

Well, there's the fact that he didn't walk out of his house and start shooting his neighbors. From all the reports I've read, he didn't start shooting until armed cops invaded his home.

Agent Smith is doing a little something called "moving the goalposts." This was originally an attempt to serve a search warrant. It should have been one swift assault with, at worst, a dead dog or two. Instead, it turned into a clusterfuck, and the Weber-Morgan Narcotics Stike Force has gotten a cop killed. So now Agent Smith is trying to reframe this as if taking out a violent threat to the community was what they planned all along.

Smith says the shooting case will be reviewed and he hopes lessons will be learned to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.

I doubt it. Police departments have been doing raids like this for decades, and they keep getting people killed.

To head off a few objections, note that I'm not saying Stewart was a good guy. For all I know, he's an evil fuck who's been waiting for a chance to kill a cop. Maybe he saw the raid team coming and decided to try to kill them. That still wouldn't change the fact that it was a bad idea to send cops charging into his home.

With one officer dead, four others wounded, and a suspect who is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison, this raid has caused an awful lot of misery. And if this is a typical year, there will be another 40,000 raids in the War on Drugs.

So expect more dead bodies.

The title is not about Mitt Romney winning the Iowa caucus, it's about Rick Santorum coming in second. I explain my reaction over at Nobody's Business in this post. If nothing else, watch the three minute video in which Santorum explains why freedom is bad and ask yourself if this is the guy you want to have the power to detain Americans without a trial.

It's not too early to start drinking, is it?

This is kind of awesome: New Year's Eve party at Mala Restaurant in Wailea, where the audience got to hear "Come Together" as performed by Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper, and...you won't see this coming...Weird Al:

Note that Weird Al is the only one who knows all the words.

There are worse ways to start the new year.

2011 was kind of a busy year for me, especially during the latter half of the year when -- after 10 years in the part-time consulting racket -- I returned to full-time employment. It really cut into my blogging time, and I want to thank all of my loyal readers for sticking around. In any case, here at Windypundit, 2011 was the year in which:

• I argued that bloggers shouldn't tone it down. (In that post, I responded to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik's call for less vitriolic speech by pointing out that "A dozen guys like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann--or a thousand bloggers like me--couldn't begin to do as much harm with words as Sheriff Dupnik's SWAT team could do in one bad day." A few months later, they had that bad day.)
• I wrote about keeping the balance between insensitivity and despair when writing about the kinds of issues I cover.
• I discovered that Chicago had a real criminal defense blogger in Marcus L. Schantz.
• Chicago had a bit of snow.
• I reviewed a few episodes of The Chicago Code (episode 2, episode 3, episode 4).
• I explained how flat legal fees are a form of trial insurance.
• I explained one reason there's a blogging gender gap.
• I discussed the math behind drug-sniffing dogs.
• I discovered street terrorism.
• I argued that SWAT shootings are inevitable.
• Like everyone else, I had some thoughts about Fukushima.
• I explained why it's hard to decide who to vote for.
• For some reason, I was almost shocked that big media companies are scumbags.
• I promoted a couple of local businesses.
• I argued for strict liability for wrongful imprisonment.
• My co-blogger Ken complained about the Qur'an-burning reaction.
• I found the coolest geek website ever.
• I ran into some costly geese.
• Sprint annoyed me again.
• Chicago didn't get a space shuttle.
• I complained about a Stalinist feature of American criminal trials.
• I discovered that even best-case immigration is annoying.
• I offered a defense of some street photographers.
• I responded to the horrifying contention that there are no innocent civilians.
• The Weird Al-Lady Gaga battle exploded.
• I was so angry at the world that I totally missed it when my co-blogger Ken posted this for Easter.
• Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I launched the new Nobody's Business blog.
• I blogged about the scandal that Obama is afraid to confront.
• I bravely spoke out in favor of killing Osama bin Laden.
• I explained that Trump is crazy.
• My cat Dozer died.
• I gamed the Alexa blog rankings. (Back down now.)
• I explained libertarian compassion.
• I complained about unnecessary seizures of computers.
• I posted a compilation of clips from porno movies.
• I proposed a model jury instruction on reasonable doubt.
• Joel Rosenberg died.
• The TSA...did what they do best.
• I drove to Avalon and back.
• I argued that Caylee's law would probably do more harm than good.
• I explained why the iPad is more futuristic than the space shuttle.
• I got a new kitten.
• I learned the two of my nemeses have teamed up.
• I explained a point of etiquette to Wayne LaPierre.
• I denounced the idea of a debt ceiling.
• I won a lawsuit.
• I reviewed Declaration of Independents.
• I met Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie.
• I fell for a Paul Krugman parody.
• I paid some medical bills.
• I wrote one last 9/11 post.
• I called out the University of Wisconsin Threat Assessment team.
• I found the flaw in the new iPhone 4S.
• I went on yet another beep hunt.
• I explained why Jana Svrzo might not be a psychopath.
• I discovered that some people don't know why you shouldn't let your kids lick lollipops from strangers.
• I revealed the conspiracy against Lindsay Beyerstein.
• I did some math about GPS tracking.
• I joined the call for a national conversation on law enforcement.
• I wanted to emulate the DEA in a plan to stop auto accidents.
• Business Insider paid me a compliment.
• I'm still confused about the mortgage crisis.
• I owned the #1 and #2 Google search result for "Obama's left testicle".

Happy New Year everyone!

This is a great explanation of how and why the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R.3261) is going to do a lot of damage to the Internet:

And this is what you can do about it. Make waves. Talk to people. Tell your congresscritters to vote against it.

If you want to know more, you can read more about SOPA at Wikipedia, you can see its progress at GovTrack, and you can find out more about your representatives at places like Project Vote Smart and OpenSecrets.

That's right! When it comes to search engine optimization, I can now claim to be one of the giants. Thanks to this post, Windypundit now owns the #1 and #2 Google search results for the phrase "Obama's left testicle".

I'm reading Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. It's an account of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market at the beginning of our current economic mess. The book tells the story at an odd level of detail: It doesn't give a lot of details about the characters and institutions involved, but neither does it present a broad economically-informed description of what was going on.

For example, mortgage originators were making bad loans to unqualified borrowers and then selling bundles of these loans as mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and a host of investment banks. The book emphasizes over and over that these loan originators had a poor incentive to produce high-quality (or at least honestly-described) mortgages because they knew they wouldn't be holding on to them. This is an obvious agency problem, and I couldn't understand from the book why the investors weren't on the lookout for it.

Yet about 2/3 of the way in, the authors mention that under the terms of the securitization agreement, the originators had to buy back all loans that were materially misrepresented and all loans where the borrower defaulted early in the loan's term. In other words, the purchasers had sought to protect themselves from agency risks by requiring the originators to shoulder substantial default risks. In that case, why didn't the originators pay more attention to the quality of the loans?

As it happens, according to the book, the loan portfolios were so toxic that the originators would have gone bankrupt if forced to buy them all back, which would have cut off the flow of new loans, so the investment banks didn't force them to take a loss. But that just raises more questions: Could threatening bankruptcy really have been the originators' plan for protecting themselves from the consequences of their poor loans? How did the investment banks not see that coming?

So far, when it comes right down to it, I've reached two conclusions:

(1) Unscrupulous sociopaths can make a lot of money in the financial markets, especial during the manic phase of an asset bubble.

(2) I've got to figure out how to get a piece of that.

Update: Not directly connected, but I've just noticed that Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is available as a Kindle download for only $0.99. It's a classic work about asset price bubbles and other types of craziness. And it was published in 1841. If nothing else, spend the 99 cents (or just get it free here) to read the extraordinary story of the seventeenth century Dutch tulip bulb craze.

I'm not naming any names or spoiling any books, but here's a plotting tip from a longtime reader: If you want us to be surprised that one of your characters is a bad guy, don't have him quoting Friedrich Nietzsche the first time we see him.

It's not subtle foreshadowing. It's giving the game away.

I spend a day away from the internet and come back to find out that Vaclav Havel died.

Update: Oh, but there's good news too. Kim Jong Il is also dead.

I generally find anti-gay bigotry disturbing, but sometimes it's also kind of amusing. I know that's wrong -- that gay people face real threats of discrimination and violence -- but some anti-gay nonsense just makes me want to point and yell, "I didn't know they still made people like you!"

Which brings me to Rick Perry's culture-war campaign ad:

Aside from the fact that he's a bit mixed up about school prayer, this is just plain embarassing. It's like that older relative who keeps calling black people "colored" because he doesn't realize times have changed. I immediately flashed back to an infamous Sid Davis classroom film called Boys Beware about the dangers of homosexuality. The whole thing is about 10 minutes long, but here's a taste:

At its most basic, Boys Beware is vile crap that conflates homosexuality with predatory pedophilia. Yet it's so disconnected from our current day and age that I can't really get angry about it. I mean, it features a homosexual man who prowls the streets trying to seduce young boys by -- I'm not making this up -- taking them fishing at the duck pond. I guess there weren't a lot of gay dance clubs.

(Boys Beware's odd style is pretty typical of Sid Davis's social guidance films: The subject is alarming, but it's shot with what Ken Smith in Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 described as "a trancelike style, stripped of anything even remotely approaching drama or human emotion." You never even hear the actors speaking; the narrator just describes what they're saying. I suspect's that's because Davis couldn't afford synchronized sound.)

And how can you not love the line "You never know when the homosexual is about"? If I were gay, I'd wear that on a T-shirt.

I don't really have a point here, except that to me, Perry's anti-gay attitude seems like something from another era. I hope it seems that way to most other people too.

Here's something I never thought about before: It's time to stop using pennies.

Aside from its actual subject -- the uselessness of pennies -- this video is also worth watching because it's a terrific example of how to make an argument. It's clear, it's concise, and in four minutes and 31 seconds I went from not thinking about pennies to being completely convinced they should be eliminated. They fail as money.

And frankly, the nickel doesn't look to good either. Let's just drop the last digit from prices and be done with it.

(Hat tip: Alex Tabarrok)

Over at Reason, they're boasting because Business Insider chose Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie for its list of the only pundits you need to pay attention to between now and the election.

I'm happy for Matt and Nick, but I want to draw your attention to something else that caught my eye. Go ahead and follow either of those links and look at the picture that Business Insider used of Matt and Nick.

Actually, let me just include it here:

Now I happen to think that's a pretty good picture of Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. It's in the classic Reason tradition of making them look slightly goofy, yet they're still identifiable, and it shows them in the very act of punditry. Kudos to the Business Insider photo editor.

I do have one problem, though. Take another look at the photo. Notice anything...familiar about it? Think you might have seen it before?

I'll give you a hint: In the background you can see the logo of the Heartland Institute, which held a book signing event for Matt and Nick at Jaks Tap here in Chicago a few months ago. You can even check out my post about it, which starts with a similar photo. A very similar photo.

A few days ago, at the conservative Illinois Review, an unnamed author who I assume is editor Fran Eaton got excited about some basic science in a post titled "Biology Textbook Author Asserts Life Begins at Conception":

When does life begin?  At conception?  When the fertilized egg begins to multiply cells?  When the zygote embeds itself into its source of nutrition?

A growing number of scientists are beginning to assert that life can begin nowhere else but at conception, because at the moment when an egg is fertilized, it is either a human, a squirrel, an elephant or a dog. At that moment on, then, is when human life should be protected from planned destruction.

Actually, this is not some new trend that is getting support from "a growing number of scientists." I'm pretty sure that biologists have never disputed the fact that fertilized eggs are alive -- at least not since 1651, when William Harvey figured out that all animals, including humans, come from eggs -- nor is there any doubt that a fertilized egg is of the same species as its parents. Fertilized human eggs have been human life since as long as scientists have known where babies come from.

In referring to an article at LifeNews.com by biologist Gerard Nadal, Eaton describes it as reporting Professor Scott Gilbert's "findings." But the quote is from the 9th edition of Gilbert's Developmental Biology, which is one of the standard textbooks in the field. I doubt that Gilbert is reporting any novel findings.

Here is the quote:

Traditional ways of classifying catalog animals according to their adult structure. But, as J. T. Bonner (1965) pointed out, this is a very artificial method, because what we consider an individual is usually just a brief slice of its life cycle. When we consider a dog, for instance, we usually picture an adult. But the dog is a "dog" from the moment of fertilization of a dog egg by a dog sperm. It remains a dog even as a senescent dying hound. Therefore, the dog is actually the entire life cycle of the animal, from fertilization through death.

I don't have a copy of the book handy, but that doesn't sound like a scientific conclusion. Rather, it sounds like a scientific definition. It sounds like Gilbert is describing what his book is about, and why it is an important field of study. He's making the point that a thorough scientific study of life isn't only about what an organism is, it's also about the changes that organism underwent to become what it is.

Eaton finishes with this conclusion:

Gilbert says a dog's life begins at fertilization and ends at that dog's death. How soon can we expect him and other scientists to define a human's life cycle the same?

I think that's backwards. Dr. Nadal was't quoting Gilbert's book as evidence that scientists have changed their minds, he was using the quoted passage to show that his own pro-life position is based on science that is so widely accepted it's in a textbook. Here's part of Nadal's conclusion:

We are human for our entire life cycle. We are whole and complete in form and function at every stage of our development, for that given developmental stage. The prepubescent child is fully human, even though they lack the capacity to execute all human functions, such as abstract reasoning, or reproduction.

In the same way, the early embryo is alive and fully human, though it has not yet executed all human organismal functions.

Except for the overloaded use of the word "fully," that's certainly how I'd expect a biologist to see it, especially a developmental biologist who studies organisms' entire life cycles. I really don't think it's a controversial idea. Eaton is missing the point if she thinks this is some new breakthrough. No one seriously doubts that fertilized eggs are human life.

Or so I thought. You see, just to be sure, I decided to do a little Googling, which lead to the National Abortion Rights Action League's answer to the question:

DOESN'T LIFE BEGIN AT CONCEPTION?

That's a question each person must decide for him- or herself. These issues involve matters of personal, moral, religious, and scientific beliefs. This is an area where politicians should have no role.

Here NARAL is using the word "life" to mean something more than just biological life. That's not exactly unjustified -- there's plenty of etymological support -- but it seems to me they're evading the question.

The Pro-Choice Action Network also has an evasive answer to the same question:

There is no scientific consensus as to when human life begins. It is a matter of philosophic opinion or religious belief. Human life is a continuum---sperm and eggs are also alive, and represent potential human beings, but virtually all sperm and eggs are wasted.

This is technically true, and I think it's the same point Nadal was making in his article. Human life doesn't begin at birth. It doesn't even begin at conception. The unfertilized human egg was alive, and it came from a woman who was alive, and she grew from a living egg, which came from a living woman...and so on, going back maybe 100,000 generations until you reach the predecessor species from which humans evolved. Human life extends back continuously over millions of years.

But that's not what people mean when they ask, in the context of the abortion debate, "Does life begin at conception?" That's because they're not really asking the right question.

Professor Scott Gilbert has been out of the office, but he found the time to dash off a quick note when I asked him to comment:

Thanks for sending this on. One can't help people taking quotations out of context. Creationists do it all the time. We also call a human a human when that person is dead, even if they are not a person anymore. We don't eat humans, we bury them. But the dead can't vote or inherit. So calling a dog a dog even as a zygote is kind of obvious. Even a dog sperm is a dog sperm and not a human sperm. But (unless your a Monty Python fan), that don't make the sperm a person.

(Professor Gilbert also suggests reading an op-ed he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Nadal stumbles into this when he argues that we consider both prepubescent children and embryos to be human life, even if neither is capable of performing all human functions. He's right on the biology of course, fertilized human eggs are human life, but he's not properly addressing the moral issue, because when it comes to morality, function matters.

Here in the United States, the legal and clinical definitions of death are specified in terms of brain activity. A person's body can be kept alive by machines, and that's certainly human life -- blood is still flowing, the metabolism is still processing nutrients -- but if the brain has irreversibly ceased to function, we pronouce the person dead.

Or consider that having consensual sex with an adult is not generally considered an immoral act, but having consensual sex with child is a crime. The reason we make this moral distinction is because even though a child is fully human, we don't believe they have the mental function to make decisions about their sexuality.

Similarly, a person's rights depend on their behavior, which is another aspect of how they function. Obey the law, and you remain free. Rob a bank, and you go to jail. Try to kill someone, and you can be killed in self-defense, or executed after a trial.

The rights we grant people, and the respect we show to them, do not depend solely on the scientific fact that they are human life. We usually make the distinction by discussing not when a fertilized egg develops into human life, but when it becomes a person. That's a harder question, and one that science can inform but not fully answer. 

Over 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents. This is a terrible tragedy. But I have a simple plan that will completely prevent all 40,000 of these deaths.

The key to my plan is to note that these 40,000 accidents are a result of 40,000 careless people driving cars. So all we have to do to eliminate these accidents is to make sure these 40,000 people aren't allowed to buy cars. Of course, the greedy auto makers insist on pushing their cars on everyone in the country, so some regulation will be required.

We need to impose strict production limits on U.S. auto manufacturing (and importing) to reduce the number of cars produced each year by just over 40,000, thus completely ensuring that irresponsible drivers are unable to obtain cars, which will completely eliminate all automobile deaths. This plan can't possibly fail.

What's that you say? You think my plan is completely stupid?

Well then, smartass, what does that mean for the DEA, which uses the exact same plan to prevent misuse of the prescription drug Adderall:

The DEA gets involved. It's an arm of the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Its job is to make sure, to the extent you can, that drugs don't get diverted into illicit use, drugs of abuse or potential abuse like amphetamines, the way these are.

And so it, every year, sets a ceiling on how much on the raw material, the active ingredient for a whole bunch of drugs, including these, can be made. So it's an overall aggregate amount of raw material that the DEA regulates.

Sigh, naturally, the people who were diverting the drugs before are simply continuing to do so now. On the other hand, the people who actually need Adderall for their health and sanity are having trouble finding enough of the drug. And naturally, the price of this now-scarce drug is rising, pricing some patients out of the market, and forcing them to do without any medication for their condition or switch to less effective drugs.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

For whatever it's worth, I've started writing a series of posts about Occupy Wall Street over at Nobody's Business.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

The last few years have been a bit difficult. Between my parents getting sick and dying, my consulting work drying up, and the ongoing recession, by this time last year things were looking precarious and about to get worse. But now my life is settling back into order and things are starting to look up again.

So on this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for all my friends who stuck with me through a difficult time, and all the new friends I made along the way. You made a difficult time much, much easier.

Thank you.

I haven't had much to say about the Occupy Wall Street protests, mostly because I don't understand the Occupy Wall Street protests. I think that's because the protesters don't understand them either. That's okay, because building a consensus is a process. and it takes time. There's nothing wrong with that. Here at Windypundit however, I like to talk about ideas and policies, and I can't discuss what I can't understand.

Which brings me to this, which I understand all too well:

That's UC Davis police Lt. John Pike pepper spraying some students who are just sitting on peacefully on the public sidewalk at their school.

Some people have tried to explain this by pointing out that the protesters were blocking the sidewalk and had to be removed, but that doesn't justify using pepper spray. Police have been arresting peaceful protesters forever, and the way to do it is for 2 to 4 police officers to approach each protester, pick him up, and carry him off to the wagon for transport.

What officer Pike did is a chemical variation on what is sometime euphemistically called "pain compliance," which means hurting people until they do what you want. When used to control a violently resisting offender, it's a legitimate escalation step in a police use-of-force policy. When used against non-violent people sitting on the ground, it makes you look like a dickhead.

I wouldn't normally have written anything about this incident because, well, nobody out there seems to care. I don't mean you, my faithful readers, I know you care. But somehow the news media and the American public don't seem to mind that our police forces are routinely doing things that make them indistinguishable from violent street gangs.

Oddly, I was moved to write by, of all people, Brian Tannebaum, who actually took a break from his usual rants about legal marketing to write an impassioned call for a national conversation on law enforcement. That Brian would sound impassioned about anything as nebulous as a "national conversation" is a sign that his cynicism has been shaken.

It's almost a daily exercise, watching video of law enforcement conduct that raises eyebrows. The responses are always the same: 1) The video doesn't tell the entire story, 2) We don't understand the "adrenaline" that causes police officers to beat the living crap out of suspects after they are securely in custody, and 3) So what, the guy's a criminal anyway.

We as criminal defense lawyers, civil libertarians, and yes, even some prosecutors and judges, watch these videos and know that there is a large segment of the country that finds this conduct just "part of the job."

And then something like this pops up.

Brian, in turn, seems to have been inspired by Alexis Madrigal's brilliant commentary in the Atlantic, in which he points out that Pike isn't necessarily an innately evil person. He was probably following orders:

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. "It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11," former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. "In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers," Lough continued, "and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances."

[Emphasis Madrigal's.]

I knew as soon as I read George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni's ridiculous bootlicking CNN op-ed (via a tweet from Radley Balko) that I wanted to write something about it. As often happens, Scott Greenfield beat me to it with a biting response to the legal issues. Still, let me give you a taste:

The Supreme Court is about to hold hearings on whether the police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car and trace its movements while it is in a public space...

The intense debate the case has already elicited among legal scholars, civil rights and libertarian activists, and those particularly concerned with public safety and national security is largely focused on the question: what would the Founding Fathers have said about the case? As I see it, at least equal weight should be accorded to the question: How well are our public authorities doing in their dealings with criminals?

Yes, because police expediency is such an excellant way to decide what our rights should be. In fact, it would really speed things along for our overworked police forces if young black males would be so courteous as to report to the nearest prison when they turn 16. Thank you for your cooperation.

Basically, Etzioni seems willing to give police whatever power they want, as long as they say they need it to protect us. As is usually the case when someone makes this argument, Etzioni seems unwilling to consider that giving police this power might come with a significant cost, that the cost might include significant abuse by the police, and that the giving the police this power might not actually make us safer.

It's a common enough way of thinking. But what got my attention is Etzioni's depressing misuse of science, statistics, and logic.

According to national statistics for 2010, less than half (47%) of violent crimes committed in this country are "cleared" (that is, suspects are arrested, charged, and turned over for prosecution) and only one out of five (18%) criminals who commit nonviolent crimes (such as burglary) are caught and tried.

Etzioni offers no context for these numbers. Is a 47% solve rate bad? Or is it an all-time high? Crime rates have been falling since the 1990s and if clearance rates are not unusually low, it's not clear that we need to grant police such a broad privacy-destroying power.

For obvious reasons there are no such statistics available for terrorists, and the fact that there was no successful attack in the U.S. over the past 10 years tends to make us complacent.

However, if one takes into account that there are many millions of people in the world who hate us and wish us harm (and at least a few right here in the U.S.), we should maintain our vigilance. As one terrorist group once put it, "You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once."

Etzioni likes the statistics when they are in his favor (the low clearance numbers, which imply a large number of criminals roaming around) but when the statistics cut against his argument, as with the low terrorism rate, his response is to downplay the statistics and warn us not to get complacent.

I get the feeling this is due more to intellectual laziness than dishonesty, since Etzioni is actually wrong on the facts when he asserts that there has been "no successful attack in the U.S. over the past 10 years." Thirteen people died in the shooting attack at Fort Hood in 2009, and twelve more people have been killed in smaller incidents that are considered terrorism. (Five more died from the anthrax mailings after 9/11, but that's technically just outside the 10-year boundary.) It averages out to about three domestic terrorism deaths per year.

As to what is reasonable, it obviously changes with the circumstances. Given that criminals can use freely all the new technologies -- including of course GPS trackers, smartphones and spyware -- it seems eminently reasonable that the police should also be able to use some of these, especially in public spaces, in which people have no expectation of privacy (or at least should not have one).

Huh? Criminals also smoke crack. Does that mean we should let the cops smoke crack?

The proper question is not whether police have the same technology the criminals have, it's whether Police have the right technology to do the job. For example, cops have been arguing for years that they need better weapons because the criminals have better weapons. That makes some sense, because one of the best ways to counter an opponent's weaponry is with weaponry of your own. But it's not clear that criminals are doing anything with GPS systems that the police could counter with GPS systems. What's the logic for demanding GPS parity? This seems like lazy thinking.

Moreover, often some such surveillance is needed before a tip or lead can be developed to the point that it meets the standard of probable cause.

The counter-argument that if the police are allowed to proceed, we shall be all tracked seven days a week, round the clock does not withstand minimal criticism. At most, the GPS data tells us that someone drove a car to certain places. Who lives or works there, what happened, etc. etc., all remain to be investigated.

Again, Etzioni is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. If we don't need to worry about cops having our GPS data because it's so useless, then why do cops want it so badly? The obvious answer is that knowing where a person travels in a day or a month tells us a lot about that person. That's why the cops want it.

And then Etzioni says something really stupid:

If the police put GPS devices in all the cars on the road, or even only in one out of every thousand, cops would be buried under an endless flood of data points -- among which suspects would be lost.

Um...no. Not at all. Not even a little bit. This one really bothers me, because I've encountered this misconception before and it's seriously wrong. Etzioni is trying to sound smart by talking about things he doesn't understand. Modern internet-scale computing routinely solves these kinds of problems.

I got curious and did some of the math. Assuming we can store GPS latitude, longitude, altitude, timestamp, and transmitter ID in five 64-bit fields, and that we want to get a GPS fix every 10 seconds for all 309 million Americans, that works out to about 99,000 gigabytes per day, or 3 million gigabytes per month, equivalent to the data bandwidth used by 11 million iPhones. Using prices from Amazon Web Services, I estimated that it will cost $150,000 per month to transfer the data, and if we to retain the data for a year, that will cost 36.3 million gigabytes, the storage rental will eat another $2 million per month.

Computing cost is harder to estimate because it depends on what sort of data processing we're planning, but assuming that a large Amazon server instance can process 1000 samples per second, we'll need 30,900 running server instances, which will cost us $8.9 million per month. Now that's a heck of a lot of servers, but it's not unheard of. Large sites like Yahoo and Facebook are probably using that many servers, and Google is widely estimated to operate 900,000 servers.

Retrieving the full year of data for any single person would probably take a minute or two (mostly transfer time) and with that many servers, we could retrieve tens of thousands of records simultaneously. If you want to be able to answer geographic questions  -- "Who was within 500 yards of the crime scene on the day in question?" -- you'd probably need twice as much storage for the geospatial index. On the other hand, you could also save space by eliminating duplicate GPS data from when people aren't moving. Call it a wash.

There are lots of other costs, including programming and management, but I think we can safely say that the cost of handing the data would be less than $150 million dollars per year. And if we cut our sample rate from every 10 seconds to every minute, the cost scales down to only $25 million per year. The government could contract this out, and depending how you classified the work, it might be considered a small business.

The thing is, my datacenter calculations are just a diversion, because if Etzioni had given it a little thought, he'd realize we already have a working example. When you call a mobile phone, the cellular network has to know which antenna to use to connect to it, and since the network can't know in advance when the next call will come, it has to be constantly tracking every phone. So at this very moment our national cellular phone networks are using 250,000 cellular antenna sites to track over 300 million mobile phones in real time. It's not as accurate as GPS, but it's just as much data, and it's fast, cheap, and reliable.

At the same time, the police should be required to file reports after the fact about their use of GPS trackers. If it turns out that they are employed too often or to track people who are, say, political activists, the police should be reprimanded and if they persist, elected officials (say, a city council) should set limits on the use of this and other crime-fighting technologies and punish those who abuse them.

Or, we could set the limits and punish the abusers right now. Keep in mind, the argument isn't about whether the police should be able to track bad guys with GPS, it's only about whether they should be able to do so without a signed warrant from a judge.

If the data ran the other way -- if most criminals were neutralized and we did not have to be concerned about terrorists -- reasonable people who seek to deny the police the use of GPS trackers without probable cause might have a much stronger case.

"If the data ran the other way"? What data is he talking about? There is no data. The only data he presents is the low clearance rate. He offers no evidence that any part of this low clearance rate is due to the inability of police to use GPS trackers without a warrant. He simply takes the police at their word that this is a tool they need.

Personally, I'm against this kind of big-brother system even if it would produce a substantial increase in clearance rates, because I think the government would use it to do more harm than good. But even if you don't agree with me, don't you think we should make the police prove they need this power before we give it to them? Make them gather statistics about how many bad guys got away without GPS tracking that would have been caught with it. Make them show us the math. My guess is, they can't.

I've got to get the word out about Lindsay Beyerstein.

I first encountered Lindsay a few years ago at Magikthise, her original personal blog. (That name sounds like one of the lesser-known Bond girls, but it's actually a geek reference to a character -- a philosopher, your basic working thinker -- in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Lindsay is a liberal, not a libertarian, so I don't always agree with what she has to say, but I like the way she says it. She's smart, she's intellectually honest, and she's a good writer.

Recently, however, I've made the disturbing discovery that Lindsay is the victim of a widespread campaign to wipe her presence off the internet. Surprisingly, the campaign is not the work of the nefarious Koch brothers, as you might expect. It's much more insidious than that. The conspiracy to silence Lindsay is orchestrated by none other than her own publishers!

It all started with Focal Point, Lindsay's brilliantly-named blog at big think. Ever since this new blog came online, the original Magikthise home page has redirected to it. Fortunately, this first attempt was not completely successful, and Lindsay's classic Magikthise posts can still be found at the Magikthise archives.

The next attempt to silence Lindsay was much more effective. It came when the progressive magazine In These Times set her up with a new blog called Duly Noted. It sounds great, doesn't it? Her posts would be appearing alongside those of key progressive figures such as Noam Chomsky. What could possibly be wrong with that?

It was only when I tried to add Duly Noted to my feed reader that I tumbled to their clever plot. You see, the feed link on the Duly Noted home page doesn't link to Lindsay's blog feed at all. Instead, it subscribes me to the main In These Times feed, and the main In These Times feed doesn't include Lindsay's posts. It was a fiendish trick. A nefarious rip-off. A blatant bait-and-switch to hide Lindsay's writing from the world.

Finally, just yesterday I uncovered yet another attempt to suppress Lindsay's voice. She wrote a piece about how and why unemployment is a feminist issue, and it's gong to be the cover story of the Fall 2011 issue of Ms. magazine. As we've seen before, this at first sounds like a terrific career milestone for Lindsay: A chance for her work to appear in the magazine of the feminist movement.

But once again, Lindsay has fallen into trap, as you can see for yourself at the preview page for the next issue of Ms. Lindsay's story "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" is featured prominently in the image of the magazine's cover, but it doesn't name Lindsay as the author. Next, check out the table of contents below. The article is listed, but Lindsay's name appears nowhere on the page. Most baffling of all, clicking on the name of the article in the table of contents doesn't take you to Lindsay's article.

Admittedly, there may be an alternative explanation. If you explore the Ms. magazine table of contents more thoroughly, you will soon discover a shocking truth: None of the article titles are linked to articles. The entire page is nothing but dead text.

This invites us to consider the possibility that there is no conspiracy to silence Lindsay Beyerstein's promising young progressive voice. Perhaps it's just another case of the sort of tragic ineptitude that results when old media publications like In These Times and Ms. try to make use of that new interweb thing all the kids are talking about.

I'm not sure which would be worse for Lindsay.

Update: Lindsay's Duly Noted blog now has its own proper RSS feed.

I'm pretty sure the anti-vaccination crowd is seriously deluded. Some of them are so scared of vaccines that they prefer to give their children immunity to diseases the old fashioned way: By giving them the disease itself.

The usual way to do that is with a "pox party": Wait until one child in your circle of anti-vax fanatics gets the chicken pox, and then bring all your kids over so they'll be infected too. It's okay, you know, because it's natural.

But what if you don't have any friends who have the disease? Via Radley Balko, the AP's Erik Shelzig reports:

Parents fearful of vaccinations are being warned by a federal prosecutor that making a deal with a stranger who promises to mail them lollipops licked by children with chickenpox isn't just a bad idea, it's against the law.

Jerry Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, said he was spurred by reports this week by KPHO-TV in Phoenix and WSMV-TV in Nashville about people turning to Facebook to find lollipops, spit or other items from children who have chickenpox.

"Can you imagine getting a package in the mail from this complete stranger that you know from Facebook because you joined a group, and say here, drink this purported spit from some other kid?" Martin told The Associated Press.

If you're thinking this might be a good idea, let me see if I can change your mind. Maybe you're not daunted by the fact that it's illegal. (It's a crime to send chickenpox through the U.S. mail for the same reason it's a crime to send anthrax through the U.S. mail.) And maybe it doesn't bother you to intentionally infect your child with a disease. And maybe you're not going to concern yourself about other people who might catch the disease from your deliberately disease-ridden child. Heck, maybe you don't even mind the fact that doctors say it won't work -- after all, they're the ones who wanted to vaccinate your kids, right?

In that case, let me see if I can still head you off by telling you what I think the U.S. Attorney is hinting at when he dropped the word "purported" into that sentence: When a stranger on the internet sends you lollipops so that your child will lick them, it's because he jerked off all over them. And now he's jerking off at the thought of your child licking them.

I know that's a disgusting thought, and probably only a handful of perverts are sick enough to get off on something like that. But by now, every single one of them has a website offering free lollipops.

At about the time that Brittany Norwood was beating and stabbing Jayna Murray to death inside a store in a shopping mall, two employees in the Apple store next door heard sounds of the struggle coming through the wall.

The Apple Store employees were closing up for the night. One of them heard strange sounds from the other side of the wall: grunts, thuds, hysterical screams.

"Talk to me. Don't do this," a voice said. "Talk to me. What's going on?"

"At that point, there was some more sounds, kind of, screams, yelps, yells," Jana Svrzo, a manager at the Apple Store in Bethesda, said Friday, testifying on the third day of Brittany Norwood's murder trial in the killing of her Lululemon Athletica co-worker.

The screams faded. Then Svrzo heard low, quiet tones.

"God help me," Svrzo recalled hearing. "Please help me."

After hearing all that, Svrzo and the other employee, Ricardo Rios, didn't do anything about it. They neither called the police nor investigated it themselves.

I heard about all this from Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, who has this to say about it:

We need to agree on the proper treatment for people like this -- self-centered, fearful slugs who can't summon the fortitude and decency to help a fellow human being in peril even when it only requires a phone call. They are not quite criminals, but they are significant contributors to the evil in the world, the kind of citizens who accept the benefits of society but won't lift a finger to contribute to it.

...

I don't want to hire someone like Svrzo. I don't want her as a neighbor or a friend. If I'm an independent service provider, I don't want her business; if I'm a banker, I don't think she's trustworthy enough to get a loan. Her conduct is unacceptable in a cooperative society, and the one constructive thing she can do now is to serve as a living lesson to others that there are minimum standards to participating in civilization, and consequences of failing to meet them.

That would have been my reaction too, except that I've seen stories like this before, and I've learned to be skeptical. I can't rule out evil as an explanation for her behavior; it's entirely possible that Jana Svrzo is exactly the kind of psychopath who wouldn't bother to help a woman being beaten to death. However, given what I've read so far, I feel the need to point out that you don't have to make that assumption to explain what happened. Inaction that at first seems inexplicably callous sometimes turns out to be rather ordinarily human.

My guess is that the most critical factor in explaining her inaction is this: Until that day, I'm pretty sure that Jana Svrzo had never heard someone being beaten to death before. In fact, I'm willing to bet that she had never even seen a serious fight. And now we're supposed to assume that she should have been able to figure out what was going on just by how it sounded? Through a wall?

That doesn't sound possible. At least not unless she had reason to be familiar with the sounds of close-in personal brutality, perhaps from growing up in a violent family. Otherwise, all she heard was some strange sounds.

Well, then, what about the cry for help? According to the news story, she heard a variety of noises -- variously described as grunts, squealing, and screams -- and while this was going on, she heard someone say "Talk to me. Don't do this," and then "Talk to me. What's going on?" And later she heard a different voice say "God help me," and "Please help me."

Again, knowing what we know now, it's pretty obvious that something bad had happened. But it's not hard to imagine other scenarios which Svrzo would have had to consider. She heard two people in a room, some noise, and one of them asked for help. Isn't it possible that she was asking the other person for help? If you've never witnessed a violent crime before, what would be your first guess?

It's really easy to misunderstand novel situations like this and make a dangerous mistake. About 20 years ago, I was in my kitchen, and I happened to glance out into the parking lot, where I noticed one of the other residents of our condo was kneeling next to her car, like she'd dropped her keys and they'd skittered underneath it. A few minutes later, I happened to glance out again, and she was still there, and I wondered what the heck that silly woman was up to...and then I put it together: She was elderly, she was overweight, it was winter, and the ground looked wet. She had slipped on the glare ice and couldn't get up.

I didn't realize what had happened the first time because she wasn't lying down like an injured person -- in fact, she wasn't injured at all, she simply didn't have the strength to pull herself up by her arms when her feet had no grip on the pavement. This was many years before I had to help take care of my parents (and my own knees still worked like they're supposed to), so I'd had no experience with people who had infirmities. I had no way of recognizing what had happened from one brief glance.

Once I saw her again and realized she probably wasn't in that position voluntarily, my wife and I went down to help her. She was fine. No big deal.

But had I not glanced down at her a second time, things might have ended less happily. She was down on the ground between two cars where it was hard for someone to see her, so she could have been stuck for long time in the freezing cold. She might even have died from exposure. And if I told people that I'd seen her there on the ground, they'd think I had let her die on purpose.

One of the things that affects how people react to a situation is their observation of how everyone else is reacting. I used to work across the street from a housing project, and whenever there was a loud bang, I'd look to the reactions of the residents to determine if it was a gunshot or something harmless, because they could tell the difference.

Svrzo called over co-worker Ricardo Rios, but according to his testimony, he couldn't make out much of what he was hearing. So both of them heard something strange, but each of them saw that the other wasn't too alarmed. They reinforced each other's decision to do nothing.

If my wife had glanced out the window at our fallen neighbor and decided that she was just fiddling with something on her car, she might have laughed at my ridiculous concerns, and she might have convinced me. Later, when our neighbor's lifeless body was discovered, we'd both look like callous psychopaths to people who hadn't been there.

I think there's a fair chance that Svrzo also thought that if something was really wrong, someone else would provide help. After all, how often do any of us find ourselves in a situation where we have the opportunity to save someone from serious injury or death? (In 47 years, it's only happened to me once that I know of, and I'm not sure anything bad would have happened if I hadn't been there.) The noises Svrzo was hearing were coming from another store in the mall. Surely if anything bad had happened, another person in the store would have helped, right?

There's a saying -- I've seen it used with respect to medical diagnostics: "When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras."

The point is that when faced with a mystery, the most likely explanation is probably going the correct explanation. When a patient presents with flu-like symptoms, your best bet is to assume he has the flu, at least until you learn more.

Based on Svrzo's actions, she obviously knew something wasn't right, but what are the chances that anything in her life experience could have prepared her for this? You and I and everyone we know will probably go through our whole lives without hearing anyone being murdered. I'm assuming she's no different in that respect. So on that terrible night, she heard some strange hoof beats, and she decided it was probably just horses. Because, really, what else could it be?

By now, some of you are probably sputtering that I'm just making stuff up. That I can't possibly know what was going through her head. That I wasn't there.

True enough. But then again, neither was anyone else who is criticizing her. They read the accounts of what happened, and they consider the facts, and they reach the only conclusion that makes sense: That she's a callous narcissist.

What I'm trying to do is point out that there may be another way to fit the facts to the known range of human behavior. Of course, in doing so, I might be making the same horse-or-zebra mistake that I think Svrzo made. Psychopaths are pretty rare, but the ordinary failures of human cognition are not, so I'm guessing this is an ordinary failure. But I could be wrong.

I decided to write this post for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are a couple of lessons we could learn, the most important one being: If you need help from strangers in a strange situation, don't just ask for help. Tell them you've been attacked and tell them what you want them to do. Be very specific. Not "Help me!" but "Help! I've been stabbed! Get me an ambulance! Somebody get me an ambulance!"

No, I'm not blaming the victim. Jayna Murray was severely wounded and probably had no idea anyone could hear her. I'm just saying that if you or I ever find ourselves in need of emergency medical help, it's something we would do well to remember.

(Here's another example of the kind of thing I'm talking about: Somewhere I read about an incident in which a doctor choked to death in the middle of a medical conference dinner, surrounded by dozens of other doctors. It sounds at first like gross incompetence, but really, how many doctors have ever seen someone actually choking to death before? This is why if you're ever unable to breath because you're choking on something, you should make sure you put your hands to your neck and make a face like you're gagging, so people understand what you need.)

Another lesson is that if nobody else is taking charge of the situation, it may be that you're the one who has to take charge. If my speculation here is correct, then Jana Svrzo is not the villain that some people have made her out to be. But if something different had triggered in her brain, if she had decided that, you know, maybe she should call the police, just to be safe...then Jana Svrzo might have been a hero. And Jayna Murray might still be alive.

Wouldn't it be cool to be the hero? You can't be one though, unless you take action.

Finally, Jack Marshall had this to say:

...the societal condemnation of individuals who allow another human being to be harmed when they have it in their power to summon assistance is appropriate, and should occur informally, like most enforcement of social behavioral norms.

Well, there's some evidence that people may be taking things much further than Jack intends. I Googled Jana Svrzo, and I find a blocked Twitter page, a missing LinkedIn page, an inactive flickr stream, a missing Facebook page and, well, you get the idea. There seems to be only one Jana Svrzo out there, and she seems to be hiding from something.

I'm guessing that people are harassing her. If she's the narcissistic bitch that some people think she is, then in a sense she has it coming. (Although, really, if she's that narcissistic, she's not going to be the least bit bothered by what other people think.)

But if she's just an ordinary person who made an understandable mistake under terrible circumstances...let's not make this any worse than it already is.

It looks like Google has decided to screw up Reader with a new design:

I guess they wanted it to have a more modern-looking design, and I suppose it looks nicer, but it's kind of goofy from a usability standpoint. The biggest problem is that everything is, well, bigger. They're following the modern web design trend of separating things on the page with space rather than graphical components.

The thing is, though, nobody visits a web page for its use of space. You visit a web page for its content. Now, your enjoyment of the content is affected by how it's presented, of course, but the presentation should enhance the content, not hinder it or overwhelm it.

So what's the content of Google Reader? Links to other content. Users of Reader want to be able to scan through dozens or hundreds of items to see what looks worth reading. That means a good page design for a feed reader should present as many links as possible, so users can scan them easily for something of interest. The new design simply doesn't display as many links as the old one.

And here's another thing they could do instead of filling the page with space: Let us see the full names of the blogs we're reading. The column on the left can't be resized, so I'm going to be left reading "Marginal Revolut..." and "Technology Liber..." I can't remember if the old page design occasionally cut something off, but it's certainly become more of a problem now.

Oh, and the scrollbar is slightly narrower, making it slightly harder for me to click. And the scroll thumb -- the part that moves up and down -- doesn't appear until my mouse is over the scroll bar, which means I can't position the mouse vertically until I've got it positioned horizontally.

It's like one of those weird buildings, where all the architecture critics ooh and aah over how swirly and unconventional is, and no one seems to be noticing that the offices are cramped, there aren't enough bathroom stalls, and the roof leaks.

It happened again a couple of nights ago. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. As I took care of business, something was nagging at me, but I was groggy enough that it didn't quite rise to the level of a conscious concern. As I lay back down in bed, however, it finally pushed through the fog: I was hearing a quiet beeping sound. Some electronic device somewhere in the apartment wanted my attention.

Thus began the Beep Hunt.

It's one of the more annoying tasks of the wired life. I have a lot of electronic gadgets, and many of them are smart enough to let me know when they need attention. But few of them do it well.

The first time it happened was 20 years ago, when a pager battery got critically low in the middle of the night. It freaked me out. I started awake with an adrenaline rush and ran out into the living room to track down the strange noise. I guess that's an old animal reflex -- a strange and unexpected noise in the night could be a threat, so I responded in full fight-or-flight mode, ready to defend my family against the mysterious intrusion.

(Some of you kids may not know this, so I should explain that a pager at that time was a special-purpose one-way communication receiver. It works kind of like those things some restaurants use to tell you when a table is ready, except over much longer ranges. Someone who wanted to talk to you would call a special number you had given them. A computer would answer, and they could punch in a phone number where they could be reached. The computer would then send out a radio message to your pager, telling you the number. This was before widespread inexpensive cellular service, so you'd have to find a land-line to call them back. These were one-way devices because without a cellular antenna network, the signals had to go out over a small number of dedicated commercial antennas which used 1000-Watt bursts to broadcast the page over hundreds of square miles. Nothing you'd want to keep in your pocket could generate enough power for a return signal.)

This beep wasn't a bad one. It was a long oscillating beep that happened every few seconds. They aren't always that easy.

As far as I know, your brain uses three basic factors to figure out where sounds are coming from. First, there's the relative volume difference between the ears, which works best when the sound is coming from one side and the other ear is hidden from the source by your head.

Second, there's the different arrival time of the sound at your ears. As with the volume difference, it doesn't work so well with sounds that aren't far to one side because the sounds arrive closer together.

Third, there's the way the sound waves interact with the structure of your ears. Your ear will attenuate different frequencies of sound in different ways depending on the direction from which the sound strikes your ear. This works best when the sound is complex, consisting of many frequencies, each attenuated a little differently, such as the rustling noise of an animal creeping through bushes -- which would often have been a life-or-death concern for our ancient ancestors.

(Modern video games use a mathematical model of the human ear to simulate this attenuation in order to give you better directional cues for sounds. Warning systems for fighter pilots use a similar mechanism to make the sound easier to distinguish.)

Your brain has to pick the beeping sound out of a cacophony of other noises -- everything from outside traffic and air conditioning to the sound of blood flowing through your head -- so it helps if the sound is loud. It also helps if there's a lot of information for your brain to analyze, which means that longer or more repetitious sounds are easier to localize. It's especially helpful if you can turn your head and change the way the sound strikes your ears.

Thus, the easiest sounds for your brain to localize are long, loud, complicated, and repeated frequently. Of course, the easiest sound for a cheap low-power electronic device to generate is a quiet beep at a single pure frequency, and it helps power consumption to keep the duty cycle low by using a short duration sound delivered at a long interval. In addition, I think many devices are designed to emit a discrete and unobtrusive sound, in order to be less annoying. Of course, that only makes it more annoying when you don't know what's beeping, and you have to hunt for it.

My procedure for finding a beep is tiresome but fairly straightforward. First I stand sideways in the hallway of our condo, very still, with my back to the bathroom, waiting for the beep. This maximizes the sound difference from either end of the hall. If it comes from my left, it's either the kitchen or the living room. If it comes from my right, it's either the bedroom or my office. If neither, it's probably something in the bathroom behind me.

This last time, it came from the office/bedroom direction, so I move to stand still at that end of the hall, with my office to the left and my bedroom to the right. It was coming from the office. I walked in and stood between the two desks, and quickly figured out it was coming from the VPN phone I use for work. Now I was close enough that it actually sounded like it was coming from the phone, and the display said something about incoming voicemail. I hit a couple of buttons and the sound stopped. Despite the message, I had no voicemail.

(When I first walked in, I noticed two of our cats sitting by the phone. It could be that they were curious about the noise, but I suspect that one of them may have stepped on a button. It wouldn't be the first time one of our cats was responsible for a disturbing noise in the night.)

This wasn't a bad one. It probably took me less than a minute. The worst beep hunt I ever had was caused by a failing battery in a UPS that emitted a pure beeping tone for one second every hour. The tone was so pure and high-pitched (which also makes it hard to locate) that even standing a few feet away, I couldn't be sure where it was coming from. I had to find it by relative volume in different locations, which is kind of hard to compare when the beeps are that far apart. It took days to figure it out.

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited about the iPhone 4S. I've had my iPhone 3S for a couple of years now, and although it's been pretty cool, it was beginning to show its age. Some of the newer apps are a bit sluggish on my less-than-leading-edge hardware, and my phone doesn't have the iPhone 4's WiFi hotspot feature, which I'd find pretty useful. By the time my contract ran out this summer, the tech rumor mill was saying Apple would have a new phone out in October, so I decided to wait.

I'm not normally an early adopter of anything, so when Apple made their announcement on Wednesday, I thought about it for a few days before deciding I was going to buy the new phone. Finally, this weekend, I took the plunge and visited the Apple online store, and promptly stumbled on a defect that even the design wizards at Apple were unable to eliminate. In the otherwise elegant and powerful iPhone, I had discovered a glaring problem. A fly in the ointment. A monkey in the wrench.

The problem, simply put, is that you can't use an iPhone as a mobile phone without having to involve a mobile phone company. Apple's iPhone may be one of the design and technology sensations of the modern world, but they depend for their functionality on one of the most despised industries in the modern world. It's like buying a Lamborghini Murcielago supercar and discovering that you're only allowed to drive it on gravel roads.

(Mobile carriers aren't as bad as they used to be. When I first started using one, I remember I wanted to change some feature and when I called the company, they told me that the change would require a $35 "programming fee." Their network computers could follow me all over the country and stream audio to my phone in real time, but changing a field in the database was so difficult that I'd have to pay for it.)

The new iPhone works with any one of three carriers: AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. I used to have Verizon before I switched to AT&T for my iPhone, and I'd love to go back -- they were great to work with and I had good connectivity -- but they use CDMA technology which (for reasons beyond my comprehension) doesn't allow users to talk and surf the web at the same time. That could be a problem if I'm going to be tethered and online for hours at a time.

As for Sprint, well...let's just say I have a history with those fuckers.

So that means I'm stuck with my current carrier, AT&T.

Picking out the iPhone at the Apple site was easy, and even linking the purchase to my AT&T account seemed to work just fine. The problem came when I tried to arrange shipping. You see, I have a rental box at a nearby UPS Store. Everything I buy online gets sent to that address so I don't have to choose between staying home all day or having the package left in the hallway where anyone can steal it.

It turns out that this offends AT&T. Even though I had the UPS box listed as my default shipping address for the Apple store, the ordering system wouldn't let me ship the phone to the UPS box, and a chat with Apple support confirmed that AT&T would only allow them to ship the phone to the billing address on my mobile account. It didn't even matter that this was the exact same address to which they had successfully shipped the iPhone I was currently using.

I suppose there's some security rationalization for this, but it's not much security, since all I had to do was visit the AT&T site to change my billing address to the rental box and then go through the purchasing process again. I'll change it back after I get the phone, so my bills arrive at home again. It was a useless and annoying waste of my time.

I realize this is not a huge problem, but I thought it deserved attention -- perhaps some sort of prize for Special Achievement in Bad Customer Service. I mean, think about it: AT&T has figured out a way to screw with me that (a) is completely gratuitous, (b) hits me before I even have the product in my hands, (c) affects a product I'm actually buying from someone else, and (d) only really hurts their returning customers.

It's a pity the folks at Apple have to work with losers like this.

Apparently, Professor James Miller at the University of Wisconsin (Stout campus) is a Firefly fan, because he had on his office door a poster of Nathan Fillion as Captain Mal Reynolds, with the quote "You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me. And you'll be armed."

That sentiment so enraged the morons in the campus police department that they ripped down the poster. and Chief Lisa Walter sent Miller a nastygram:

Dr. Miller,

I wanted to notify you that I removed a printed/copy (pictures attached) of a poster from the outside of your office. I don't know if you posted it or if someone else placed it on your board, but it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing.

I knocked on your office door while there, but it appeared as though you were not in your office at the time.  Contact me if you have any questions.

Respectfully,

Chief Walter

When someone complains about something because it "refers to" a killing or "refers to" drug use or "refers to" some actual conduct, it's almost always a sign that they are censorious bastards trying to stretch a loophole to cover something they don't like.

Miller's reply was short and to the point:

Unacceptable to whom?

How dare you act in a fascistic manner and then sign your email "respectfully!" Respect liberty and respect my first amendment rights.

Walter, who hasn't learned that you don't have to respond to everything people say to you, responded thus:

I appreciate and understand the First Amendment, but also understand my responsibilities as the Chief of Police at UW Stout regarding postings that refer to violence and/or harm.

There's that stretchy "refer to" again.

My actions are appropriate and defensible. Speech can be limited on a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat. We were notified of the existence of the posting, reviewed it and believe that the wording on the poster can be interpreted as a threat by others and/or could cause those that view it to believe that you are willing/able to carry out actions similar to what is listed.  This posting can cause others to fear for their safety, thus it was removed.

I am willing to schedule a meeting with you to discuss this further, if you wish.  If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.

As Professor Miller points out, this is insane: 

Postings that "refer" to violence constitute a threat? As in a poster from Hamlet? Or a news clipping about Hockey players that commit violent murder?

Don't threaten me with charges that have no basis in reality--I am a committed pacifist and a devotee of non-violence, and I don't appreciate card carrying members of the NRA who are wearing side arms and truncheons lecturing me about violence.

Exactly right. Police officers have no business complaining that words on a poster can cause people to fear for their safety. Not when they're carrying weapons.

Miller responded with another poster on his door, this one showing a diagram of a cop beating someone down, with the text "Warning: Fascism. Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets."

On the one hand, calling this incident Fascism is a bit over-blown. This is just a run-of-the-mill case of an overbearing bureaucrat abusing her power for her own self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, Chief Lisa Walter certainly seems to be trying to live up to Professor Miller's expectations with her response to the new poster:

Dr. Miller,

My office removed another posting from the outside of your office. The posting depicts violence and mentions violence and death. The campuses threat assessment team met yesterday and conferred with UW System Office of General Counsel and made the decision that this posting should be removed. It is believed that this posting also has a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat.

Got that? A college Professor puts up a poster showing police beating someone and the police tear it down because it depicts violence. It doesn't get much more blatant than that.

This part gets me: "The campuses threat assessment team...made the decision that this posting should be removed."

As it happens, I know a little bit about threat assessment. A very little bit. As in, I've read a few books on the subject. That's it. I am far from an expert. And yet I'm pretty sure I know more about distinguishing actual threats than the entire University of Wisconsin (Stout campus) threat assessment team.

The materials in question -- one from a popular television series and the other an anti-fascism message -- simply aren't indicative of any kind of threat. They lack specificity, especially as to the target of the threat, and they therefore lack the intimacy that makes it likely the threat will result in action. Miller's responses to the chief are hardly enraged or indicative of unstable emotions. I suppose his references to Fascism could indicate a paranoid over-reaction, although the chief did threaten to have him arrested for a poster. And technically a fascination with violent entertainment is an indicator, although I don't think ordinary American television counts.

In fact, as the wording of the email indicates, they didn't do a threat assessment at all. They simply decided that people seeing the poster could feel threatened. That's really not what a threat assessment is about. That's not how a threat assessment team should be used.

Fortunately, University Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen stepped in and reminded Chief Walter that the campus police are there to support the university's faculty, and that trying to suppress their First Amendment rights is unacceptable...Nah! Just kidding. Chancellor Sorensen was actually a total dick:

UW-Stout administrators believe strongly in the right of all students, faculty and staff to express themselves freely about issues on campus and off.  This freedom is fundamental on a public university campus.

Don't be fooled. That's just the standard bureaucratic tyrant's obligatory genuflection to free speech. It always comes right before they explain why they're suppressing free speech:

However, we also have the responsibility to promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind--both direct and implied. It was our belief, after consultation with UW System legal counsel, that the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.

This was not an act of censorship. This was an act of sensitivity to and care for our shared community, and was intended to maintain a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure.

Of course it was an act of censorship. Free speech is not limited to only speech which makes people feel safe and secure. Although, really, if either of the things that Miller had on his door makes you feel threatened, you're kind of a wimp. Or a liar.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has gotten involved.

I've haven't been writing very much lately, but other people are keeping busy, and I thought I'd share a few items with you folks.

• Ken Lammers at Crimlaw has written a fascinating series of posts about how the criminal justice system (at least in his Virginia) determines the value of a stolen item for purposes of charging and sentencing. He covers items with a fairly obvious price tag, items without a price tag, and intangible property like music and software. It seems like a fairly thoughtful balance between an economically meaningful valuation and the need to have bright lines for making clear decisions.
• Meanwhile, over at Popehat, Ken is posting a multi-part series about his investigation of someone who tried a fake invoice scam on him: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. [Update: Chapter 4] He shows how much information you can get about someone like this with simple, inexpensive online tools.
• And here's the important op-ed of the day, by Orin Kerr. Looks like the government is about to get its wish and make us all guilt of something.

(Hat tip: Greenfield)

Are some people still stuck in the 9/11 world? Over at Nobody's Business, I explain why there's no room for them here in the future.

I've written a few posts about 9/11 over the years. My wife used to work for Aon, which lost over 170 people on 9/11, and she'd met at least one of them, a nice guy named Jim Berger. And a few years ago, I stumbled across the memoral for U.S. Navy Commander Dan F. Shanower in Naperville. Then last year, I wrote about my discomfort over the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, and I explained why I had nothing more to say about 9/11.

As it turns out, I have a few more thoughts about 9/11 bouncing around in my brain after all, and this is as good a time as any to ramble on about them.

First of all, remember that the number of Americans who died on 9/11 is much larger than the three thousand people who died in the World Trade Center, in the Pentagon, and on the hijacked airplanes. I don't have an exact figure, but the true death toll for September 11, 2001, is much closer to ten thousand people.

That's not some conspiracy theory, it's mortality statistics. There are about 300 million people in the United States, and a small percentage of them die every day. If 9/11 was otherwise a typical day, it means that in addition to the 3000 deaths from terrorism, another 7000 Americans passed away for other reasons.

I can't get it out of my head that the families of some of those people have got to feel a bit...cheated, maybe? Imagine, for example, the wife of some liquor store clerk who was shot to death in a robbery on the night of September 10th, 2001. She wakes up the next morning for one of the worst days of her life, only to discover that nobody seems to care.

I don't want to be all holier-than-thou about this, but just this once, when we think of the people who died on 9/11, let's try to think of all the people who died on 9/11.

On another matter, I'm bothered by how often we we make the mistake of judging people's actions by the results, rather than by the expected probability distribution when they acted. Consider a guy who buys a lottery ticket and wins a million bucks. Was he smart to buy that lottery ticket? If you say yes, because he won all that money, you're part of the problem.

At the time he made the decision and acted by purchasing a ticket, he didn't know he was going to win. All he knew is that there was a very small chance he would win, and a much larger chance he would lose. A typical state lottery probably only gives away half the money as prizes, which means that, speaking in terms of probability (and simplifying a lot), he could expect to lose half of what he spent on the ticket. Financially speaking, buying that ticket was a bad move. It's only pure luck that prevented him from paying the price.

I bring this up in connection with 9/11 because the exact same argument applies to the firefighters, police officers, and EMTs who responded to the World Trade Center and died in the collapse. We call them heroes, and indeed they are. But they didn't know they were going to die when they made the decision to respond to the scene and enter the towers. All they knew was that there was a risk --  a non-zero probability of death -- and they went ahead and did it anyway. They are heroes not because they died, but because they risked death.

I think that's an important distinction because there are plenty of other people -- other firefighters and police and EMTs and anyone else who helped -- who took the same risk that day, and happened by chance to survive. That they didn't die does not in any way diminish their heroism. So remember the dead heroes, but also remember the heroes who still walk among us.

Everybody knows at least one line from Shakespeare's Henry VI: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

But really, that line is hundreds of years old. Anybody writing today wouldn't put lawyers first on the list. Not while there are still people alive in medical billing departments.

My God, this is a stupid business.

My wife had surgery a few months ago, and I'm in the process of cleaning up the last of the bills. As near as I can tell, there are seven different entities sending us bills:

• My wife's regular doctor who took the initial complaint and helped us decide what to do about it.
• The surgeon who went in and fixed the problem.
• The anesthesiologist who knocked my wife out and brought her back.
• The hospital where the procedure was performed.
• The completely different hospital that did the lab tests.
• The radiologists who analyzed images of the problem.
• The pathologist who evaluated tissues that had been removed.

We got some of these bills relatively quickly, but others took weeks to get here, and I have no way of knowing if there are any more bills still to come. (When I had very minor surgery last summer, the surgeon's bill took months to arrive, and it arrived in the form of a collection notice for non-payment.)

By comparison, around the same time, my car had an unfortunate encounter with some suicidal geese. It took about four days to repair the car, but unlike with my wife's surgery, the entire bill was available immediately, and more importantly, the entire bill was payable to the bodyshop. I didn't have to pay the paint supplier or the Toyota parts supplier or the specialty shop that reclaimed the coolant from the air conditioner and refilled it. Even the insurance company had already promised to pay their share. It was a single, consolidated bill.

That's pretty much how everybody else handles billing. If you hire a photographer for your wedding, you don't have to pay his assistant or the lab that makes the prints. If you add a room to your house, you pay the general contractor, and he pays all his suppliers and subcontractors. Consolidating the bill is a very common service.

So, the first question is: Why can't medical billing be this simple? Why couldn't I pay for my wife's surgery with a single payment? It wouldn't necessarily have to be a single payment to the surgeon or the general practitioner. In fact, given the unpredictability of medical costs, it would probably have to be an intermediary with reasonably deep pockets. The hospital or the insurance company are both obvious candidates.

Or, given that there's money involved, perhaps it should be a new niche for the banks. It all went on my American Express card, so maybe they'd like more of the action. After all, if they can offer Travel Services, why not a new Medical Services division?

It seems like everybody from the doctors to the hospitals to the patients -- heck, maybe even the insurance companies -- would benefit from making this process more efficient. And they ought to be willing to pay someone to do it. So why isn't it happening?

I don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say that this is the sort of customer-be-damned inefficency that is at the heart of any monopoly. Since there's no obvious monopoly player, I'm guessing that it's actually a cartel of medical service providers, probably enforced by the government. This is not entirely just libertarian suspicion of government: The hospital cartel is right out in the open in many states, enforced by Certificate Of Need requirements before any hospital can open or expand. The ban on interstate sale of health insurance also serves to cartelize the insurance companies of each state, protecting them against competition in a national market.

Now we come to the second and more important question: What else in healthcare is this inefficient? I can recognize the inefficiency of the billing process because it is a relatively simple non-medical matter. I don't have to know a lot about medicine or hospital management or actuarial science to see the problem.

So if the small part I can see and understand is so absurdly inefficient, what else is screwed up just as badly, except that I don't know enough to spot it? Operating room scheduling? Radiology equipment maintenance? Laboratory workflow? Ten other things that I don't even know exist? If the problem with billing is systemic (as I suspect) there's nothing to stop it from affecting every part of healthcare.

[Update: I am relieved to note that the Google+ page referenced below below does not actually belong to Paul Krugman. It is a fake. The author offers an explanation, "hope it will enlighten many..." blah, blah, blah, but it was kind of an annoying stunt. It's true that Krugman has said similar things in the past, but that's all the more reason not to make stuff up.]

I first got interested in economics when I read a magazine article about Paul Krugman and decided to check out a few of his books. I read Peddling Prosperity and Pop Internationalism back-to-back, and I still use the phrase Accidental Theorist to refer to people who claim to disdain fancy theories and rely on common sense. Even though I disagree strongly with some his politics, I always assumed it was safe to respect him as an economist. Especially after that Nobel prize, right?

Which is why it pains me to see him say this on his Google+ page:

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

There are a number of ways to explain why this is an economically silly thing to say. Perhaps the simplest is to ask, "Why do we need an earthquake?" If the earthquake didn't do enough damage, why not just send in the Army Corp of Engineers to dynamite a few buildings? Or just ask dissatisfied Americans to riot in our business districts for a few weeks. Maybe tell the fire departments of our major cities not to put out fires so quickly.

Rebulding after a disaster doesn't turn the disaster into a net economic gain because all the productive output goes into replacing wealth that was destroyed in the disaster. If this sort of thing worked, unemployed people could solve all their problems by waking up every morning and hammering holes in the walls of their home and then paying themselves to spend the rest of the day patching the holes.

This is known as the broken windows fallacy, and it's a really, really well-known error in economic thinking. It grates when I hear pundits and politicians say this sort of thing. But when a trained economist says it, that's just painful. Seriously, Paul, are you reading what you're writing?

So, I got to meet these guys:

Larger ImageMatt Welch and Nick Gillespie

That's Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie from Reason magazine, and on Tuesday night they were at a book signing event sponsored by the Heartland Institute at Jaks Tap in Chicago to promote their new book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America. (I reviewed part of the book here).

Larger ImageMatt Welch and Nick Gillespie

I must admit, it was a bit of a fanboy moment. I've been reading and admiring Reason magazine for years, and these guys are the current editors-in-chief. Actually, according to the masthead, Matt Welch is the real editor-in-chief of the magazine, and Nick Gillespie is the editor-in-chief of the website version of the magazine and of reason.tv which is the video production arm of Reason. Really, though, Nick is kind of a libertarian-at-large who manages to appear on an amazing number of talk shows.

When I first started reading Reason, Virginia Postrel was editor-in-chief, but when she moved on to other things, Nick Gillespie took over. Most of us readers didn't know much about him, and it soon became a running joke that everything the magazine did was "better when Virginia Postrel was in charge." The truth is, though, that Reason is still a great magazine, and Nick Gillespie did a lot to make sure that not just a handful of libertarians knew it.

Larger ImageMatt Welch and Nick Gillespie

One of Nick's announced goals was to pay more attention to cultural issues. I was skeptical when I first heard about that, because I was reading Reason for the way it addressed policy issues from a libertarian point of view. What the heck did culture have to do with that?

I think I'm beginning to understand what he was getting at: The best parts of our culture are often the result of individuals doing thing their own way. It's not that very best books or music are highly individualistic. Rather, with so many people writing their own books and music, we each have a better chance of finding something that appeals to us, and we each have a better chance of writing something that appeals to others. In an age where following the smallest authors and bands is as easy as following the giant superstars, our culture has become customized. The libertarian impulse to do things our own way is thriving.

I'm less sure of Matt Welch, because his job isn't really all that visible from outside, but Reason is as good as ever, so he must be doing something right.

When I met Matt and Nick, I snarked at them a bit about their performance at Reason--they had pretty much seeded the room with snark during their presentation, so it was hard to resist--and while I'm 99% sure they recognized the snark for what it is, I feel I really should say that Reason is the best magazine I've ever read, and they've done a spectacular job with it. It remains the only paper magazine I still subscribe to.

Larger ImageMatt Welch and Nick Gillespie

Update: Matt and Nick at Jaks photo dump.

Over at Nobody's Business, I've put up my review of part 1 of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch.

Update: And I got a mighty nice shout-out from Matt Welch at Hit & Run.

In my email this morning, I got this notice about a proposed class action settlement with Verizon Wireless due to some alleged misdeads in the way they handled roaming charges. The beginning part sets the scene, but note the bits I've highlighted:

A proposed settlement has been reached with Verizon Wireless ("Verizon Wireless") in a class action, Cowit, et al., v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, No. A0505869 (Ct. of Common Pleas,Hamilton County, Ohio), related to a lawsuit about whether Verizon Wireless failed to provide roaming service without any roaming charges under the America's Choice II Calling Plan. Verizon Wirelessdenies all of the claims.

WHO IS INCLUDED? The Settlement Class includes all current and former customers of Verizon Wireless who, since February 21, 2005, subscribed to its America's Choice II Calling Plan. If you are a member of the Settlement Class, you have certain rights and options, such as submitting a claim for benefits, requesting exclusion from the settlement, or objecting to the settlement.

SETTLEMENT BENEFITS. In summary, current Verizon Wireless customers whose calling plan provides for a specific allowance of minutes as part of their monthly access fee automatically will receive 25 additional wireless calling minutes, which they can use for a period of one year, or, in the alternative, if these class members submit a Claim Form they can receive a transferable PIN for 40 calling units, which will be valid for 24 months, that can be used to make domestic or international long distance calls. Current Verizon Wireless customers whose calling plan provides for an unlimited number of minutes as part of the monthly access fee will automatically, without filing a Claim Form, receive a transferable PIN for 40 calling units, which will be valid for 24 months, that can be used to make domestic or international calls. Former Verizon Wireless customers must submit a Claim Form to receive a transferable PIN for 40 calling units, which will be valid for 24 months, that can be used to make domestic or international calls. You can submit your claim online at www.cowitsettlement.com or by mail. The claim deadline is November 8, 2011.

This is called a coupon settlement, and it's a total ripoff. The class members -- who are supposedly the victims of Verizon's perfidy and the clients of the lawyers who negotiated this deal -- get at most 40 minutes of long distance calling. How much is that worth?

Looking at prepaid plans in my area, I see one for 450 minutes for $44.99 which is about 10 cents a minute, so the settlement here is worth $4.

But that's not the only way to compute the value of 40 minutes of long-distance talk time. If you go over your pre-paid minutes, Verizon charges between 25 and 45 cents per minute, which works out to a value as high as $10 to $18 per settlement.

On the other hand, Verizon's costs are essentially fixed -- they already own or lease all the towers, computers, and trunk lines they need to provide service. A few extra users spending class-action minutes wouldn't increase their costs, so the cost to Verizon of giving out minutes on their own network is essentially zero.

Then again, the settlement includes international calling, which may involve real costs to buy time on international trunk lines. The per-minute rates for these calls run as high as $2.99, which makes the settlement worth a whopping $119.60. Of course, that's only for people who don't have a calling plan. And only if they need to call Afghanistan.

So what's the right value? Well, I think I have a good argument that if you use the only proper method of calculating the value of this settlement, it's a big fat zero.

Here's why: I cancelled my Verison Wireless account when I got my iPhone (Verizon iPhone hadn't come out yet) so all I get out of this is a PIN number good for 40 minutes of free long distance. However, I have unlimited free long distance on my home phone. My mobile phone has limited minutes, but I never come close to using them all, so I have thousands of unused rollover minutes and hundreds of them age out every month. Finally, I don't ever have to make international calls.

My guess is that I'm pretty typical, in that most mobile phone users already have calling plans that provide all the minutes they could ever use. They will never have a need for the 40 extra minutes this settlement provides. Therefore, the value of this settlement to most people is zero.

You could argue that the settlement still hurts Verizon and teaches them a lesson, which is one of the justifications for class action suites, but that's a matter of policy. It's not what counts here. The lawyers who are supposed to represent me in this deal are supposed to look out for my best interests, so only my interests matter. And since this is worth nothing to me, it means my lawyers have failed me.

Speaking of my lawyers (Richard S. Wayne of Strauss & Troy and Jeffrey P. Harris of Statman, Harris & Eyrich), how much will they get? That's not in the email they sent me, but you can find a hint in the FAQ on the settlement website:

How much will the attorneys be paid and who will pay it?

The attorneys for the plaintiffs and the class have worked on this case for more than 5½ years including appeals to the Supreme Court of Ohio. They will submit a request for attorneys' fees, expenses, and incentive awards for the Class Representatives in an amount not to exceed $6 million. The Court will determine the amount of any attorneys' fees and expenses awarded to class counsel, which will be paid by Verizon Wireless and will not affect the benefits to the class under the Settlement.

Six million dollars? Holy crap!

So the lawyers want to get paid millions of dollars because they put in over five years of work on this thing, even though the value to their supposed clients is nearly zilch. What is it that Mark Bennett always says? "Gunfighters don't charge by the bullet."

If they think long-distance minutes are such a great idea, why don't they accept them in payment for their services instead of asking for cash? I'm tempted to suggest that the class action statutes should be amended to require lawyers to accept the same kind of payment that they get for their clients. (I was vaguely under the impression that the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 already did something like that, but I'm obviously mistaken.) Or else their payment should be based on the actual value of these payments that are redeemed by the clients. I'll bet it's less than 10% for something like this.

I think probably the best solution would be to require that all class action settlements must be in cash and cash only, but I'd sure like to hear from someone who's given this a little more thought.

I few weeks ago when I was driving to the Jersey shore it only seemed appropriate to dig out the old Springsteen albums. I had ripped his Live/1975-85 3-disc set to my iPod -- if you're at all a fan of his, it's a terrific collection -- and I enjoyed cruising through the mountains and blasting the Boss on the speakers.

One of the songs that stuck in my mind was "Candy's Room". Maggie McNeill had mentioned it in a post regarding songs about prostitutes. It's one of those songs that I like because of the sound and shape of it, without necessarily listening to the words, so I hadn't remembered that Candy was a prostitute, but it certainly makes sense from the lyrics:

In Candy's room there are pictures of her heroes on the wall
but to get to Candy's room you gotta walk the darkness of Candy's hall
Strangers from the city call my baby's number and they bring her toys
When I come knocking she smiles pretty she knows I wanna be Candy's boy
There's a sadness hidden in that pretty face
A sadness all her own from which no man can keep Candy safe

We kiss, my heart's rushes to my brain
The blood rushes in my veins fire rushes towards the sky
We go driving driving deep into the night
I go driving deep into the light in Candy's eyes

She says baby if you wanna be wild
you got a lot to learn, close your eyes
Let them melt, let them fire, let them burn
Cause in the darkness there'll be hidden worlds that shine
When I hold Candy close she makes these hidden worlds mine

She has fancy clothes and diamond rings
She has men who give her anything she wants but they don't see
That what she wants is me,
oh and I want her so
I'll never let her go, no no no
She knows that I'd give
all that I got to give
All that I want all that I live
to make Candy mine
Tonight

Maggie contrasts "Candy's Room" with John Entwhistle's "Trick of the Light":

Entwhistle has captured here one of the most common of client fantasies, that he is such a wonderful lover that he can impress a professional and thereby evoke emotions in her that will induce her to give herself only to him.  But while Entwhistle's narrator seems to begin to glimpse the truth in the end (as evidenced by his plaintive "was I all right?" as she shows him the door), Springsteen's narrator is completely lost in his fantasy that his inamorata will give up her money and freedom for him; he imagines he sees sadness in her face and that she values his poor clumsy affection over that of "men who give her anything she wants".

With all due respect to Maggie, I think she has this one a bit wrong. The reference to "strangers from the city" suggests that the narrator is not one of them. I get the impression that he is someone who knew Candy from before she was a working girl, and that there is genuine affection between them. After all, he's clearly not one of the men who gives her "anything she wants," and yet she sees him anyway.

I'm not saying there's going to be a happily-ever-after. The characters that fill Springsteen's songs are people who lose at life, criminals and failures. But in order to fail, in order to lose, they first have to want to win, they have to have desire. And in order for it to be a tragedy, that desire has to be their downfall. And so the narrator of "Candy's Room" desires Candy, he wants her all to himself, and that desire is the source of his torment.

So let me see if I get this right. If I understand the new budget deal correctly, the Republicans got the spending cuts they wanted without any tax increases, and all Obama got was an increase in the debt limit large enough that it won't need to be raised again until 2013. (I'm ignoring the 12-member "super-congress" that will make future proposals for balancing the budget because who knows what they'll do, if anything.)

The key here is that the next debt-ceiling crisis will come after the next election. In other words, Obama gave lip service to wanting new revenue for the good of the country, but when it came down to the wire, he gave it all up in return for a chance at avoiding a big fight while he was running for re-election. He sold out everybody else in return for personal gain.

I'm really tired of hearing about the debt ceiling, and I've avoided contributing to the cacophony so far, but I just have to get this off my chest. It's not so much that I think one side is right and the other side is wrong. Rather, I think everyone who created this mess deserves a kick in the ass from every America. Unfortunately, parts our current problem are the result of some really bone-headed thinking long ago, and the culprits aren't around any more. Let me explain...

First of all, consider how the national debt arises. It happens because government spending is greater than government revenue, and the amount of the debt is equal to the difference between spending and revenue. In mathematical terms,

debt = spending - revenue

Now let's consider where each of those terms comes from.

The spending term is essentially the entire federal budget. Sometimes it's a specific amount to be spend on a particular budget item, such as the budget for the FBI, or the cost of running an infantry division, and other times the spending is authorized in the form of an entitlement, such as social security or medicare. The budget is incredibly complex and detailed, and it is essentially authorized by Congress.

The revenue term is essentially federal taxes, including payroll taxes, income tax, gas tax, phone tax, tariffs, fees, and any other way the government can think of to squeeze money out of us. Parts of it vary with the activity of our economy, but all of it is essentially authorized by Congress

The debt term is the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow. Ever since the Public Debt Acts passed around 1940, it has been subject to an upper limit (the infamous ceiling) set by Congress.

At this point, anyone with a background in math (or science or engineering or economics or business...) should see a very obvious problem: The system is overdetermined.

We've got a system of three variables related by an equation that uses all three variables. In a situation like that, once you know any two variables, you can always solve for the third one. If you know spending and debt, you can solve for revenue:

revenue = spending - debt

And if you know revenue and debt, you can solve for spending:

spending = revenue + debt

And as we said at the outset, if you know spending and revenue, you can solve for the debt:

debt = spending - revenue

In other words, once you determine any two of these numbers -- perhaps by passing a budget and a tax plan, thus determining spending and revenue -- you have mathematically determined the value of the third one as well.

In this case, Congress has spelled out the spending plan and the revenue plan, which of course implicitly determines the debt. Our Congress, however, also spells out the debt (or at least an upper limit to the debt), which means they have determined more of the variables than they should. The system is overdetermined. And as is often the case with overdetermined systems, there is no exact solution. Thus the current crisis.

The only way to fix this is that something in the system has to change to make the equation work with the numbers. The equation itself is an accounting identity, so it can't be changed, which means that one of the variables has to change. Normally, it's the debt that would be changed, by raising the debt ceiling, but this time there's an argument. Republicans want to hold the debt fixed and change spending instead, and in return, Democrats are now arguing that a revenue increase is in order.

This is no way to run a country.

None of this would be necessary if Congress hadn't tried to control all three variables in the budget equation at the same time. Unfortunately for those of us yearning to kick the bums out of office, the current members of Congress aren't entirely to blame. Much of the problem goes back to the Public Debt Acts passed between the Great Depression and World War II, which established the debt ceiling. And the problem may extend all the way back to 1787, when the United States passed its Constitution, which gave Congress the power to spend money, raise revenue, and "borrow Money on the credit of the United States."

Still, it's a stupid mistake that could be easily fixed by removing the debt ceiling entirely and, if necessary (and I suspect it is) passing a law that specifically authorizes the Treasury to borrow money to meet the debts that arise as a result of the spending and revenue plans passed by Congress. This takes nothing away from Congress, since they are still in complete control of the other two variables of the equation.

Well, it takes one thing away from Congress: It takes away the ability to do a lot of stupid grandstanding by taking the federal budget hostage. If the Tea Partiers want to reign in the federal deficit -- something which, broadly speaking, I agree needs to be done -- the proper way to do it is by controlling federal spending. (Or, if you lean that way, you could do it by raising the taxes.) But that would require specifying exactly which spending you propose to reduce, which will surely anger the voters who benefit from it.

The federal debt ceiling, however, is a single number with no internal parts assigned to constituencies. That makes it much safer politically. So we have this massive Republican opposition to raising the debt ceiling, but when it comes to actually cutting spending, there's little agreement within the party how to do it. Finding an agreement with the Democrats will be even harder.

My prediction, by the way, is that the Republicans and Democrats will cut a deal to raise the debt ceiling before anything drastic happens. Of course, in order to reach that agreement, each side will have to receive something good in return, and there's a pretty good chance that (a) the final bill will be larded full of many pages of special provisions designed to win support from various members of Congress, (b) no one will really know what it says, and (c) it will somehow end up costing us more than if we'd simply raised the debt ceiling.

This is no way to run a country.

Wayne LaPierre
National Rifle Association of America
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030

Dear Wayne,

I just received your letter of July 18, 2011 inviting me to your upcoming American Values Leadership Forum at the end of September. I must say, the guest list looks like a conservative all-star lineup -- Michele Bachmann, Haley Barbour, John Boehner, John Bolton, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Oliver North, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney -- although, as a libertarian, I was disappointed to see you did not include Ron Paul. I guess he would have freaked the traditionals, huh?

By the way, I can't help notice you call them all "invited speakers," as if some of them haven't actually agreed to appear. I sure hope that's not the case, otherwise people might think you're padding the list to make yourselves look important. Ha, ha.

My reason for writing is to let you know about a matter of incompetence among your staff that reflects badly on the NRA and on you personally. You see, I was pretty excited that you, the Executive Vice President and CEO of the NRA, wrote to me personally to say, "I'm extending to you this invitation to be my personal guest at NRA's 2012 American Values Leadership Forum." So you can imagine my surprise that your letter was accompanied by an "Official R.S.V.P." that in included a list of ticket prices ranging from $125 all the way up to $1000!

I know! Right? You're a sophisticated Washington insider, a power broker representing millions of NRA members. There's no way you'd commit the serious etiquette breach of inviting someone to attend a gathering as a personal guest and then expect them to pay to be there. You need to look into this, because someone in your mail room is making you look like a total ass.

I just thought you should know.

In any case, as I am starting a new job and it would be imprudent to take the time off, I regret I must decline your kind invitation.

Sincerely,

Mark Draughn

After reading about Jennifer's ambition to "touch every U.S. citizen," I was randomly poking around the Department of Homeland Security website when I stumbled on this horrifying headline:

Secretary Napolitano Announces Stop.Think.Connect. Campaign Partnership with D.A.R.E. America

Oh God. The DHS and D.A.R.E. That's a partnership forged in the pit of hell. I can smell the fail from here.

Actually, the Stop.Think.Connect program doesn't seem like an awful idea. It's supposedly an educational effort to help children and adults learn about the importance of staying secure online. I say "supposedly" because as far as I know, no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that the D.A.R.E. program accomplishes any of its goals.

(And if someone from D.A.R.E. wants to respond, let me head off the usual distraction: You're going to tell me that those studies are out-of-date because they were of the old D.A.R.E. program. The new one really works. At least until the next study comes out, and you change the program again.)

Of course, the program is more about "awareness" than about actually teaching people specific and helpful skills. If you're a government agency like the DHS or public interest group like D.A.R.E., awareness is always a cool thing to promote, because you can easily survey people's awareness, launch an educational program, and do another survey to show that people are more "aware." They won't actually be any better off, because you haven't taught them anything useful, but you'll have numbers to prove that people are more "aware," which will make it easier to get more money next time.

Then there's the key issues page. In addition to warning people about identity theft and fraud, it also has a section on this decade's version of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic: Cyber Bullying and Cyber Predators. The warning about predators is especially amusing coming from the people who brought you TSA patdowns for children.

So last night around 2am I sat down at my computer and...no internet. Called Comcast and accepted the automated system's offer to reset my modem. When that didn't work, I asked for a human being. The technician told me there was an outage in the area, but they couldn't give me anymore information, and they couldn't take a trouble ticket because their system was down for maintenance.

Woke up this morning, and it was still down, so I called Comcast and went through the automated diagnostic procedure, which gave up and transferred me to a human tech. He poked around from his end and said everything seemed to be up. He could access my modem, but he said my router hadn't requested an IP address from the modem.

Something didn't sound right about that...oh yeah, I have a static IP address. My router doesn't have to ask for an IP address because it already knows one. Once before, some piece of Comcast equipment had forgotten my address and stopped routing my internet traffic. It looked like it was happening again.

I mentioned this to the tech, and he checked my order and proceeded to set up the static IP service again. For some reason, however, he issued me a new IP address instead of giving me the one I had before. He doesn't know what happened. I don't know what happened. It's just one of those mysteries, I guess.

Anyway, I'm back up. For now.

Anders Behring Breivik's terrorist attacks in Norway are bringing out the idiots. For example, from the (more-or-less) right, there's Cheradenine Zakalwe at Islam Versus Europe in a post titled "Why the Left Shouldn't Gloat about Anders Breivik":

Reading through Anders Behring Breivik's comments on the document.no website, it's clear that he was on the verge of giving up on democracy. ... That's what drove him to despair and to an act of apocalyptic violence. He felt there was a conspiracy among the media and political elite to suppress any derogatory information about Muslims or mass immigration. And, of course, he was right. ...

He was particularly struck by the Andrew Neather revelations about the Labour government's conspiracy to flood Britain with immigrants in order to "rub the right's nose in diversity." The left rubbed Breivik's nose in diversity and he rubbed theirs back in blood. Well done Neather. Well done Blair. Well done Rusbridger.

It is the left-wing that is responsible for this outrage, not the right-wing. This act of violence is the consequence of a deranged political elite attempting to demographic re-engineer an entire continent against the wishes of its people; exploiting imperfections in the democratic system so that the people are never allowed a real choice; passing laws to criminalise free speech so that honest discussion is scarcely possible any more; and a media conspiracy (embodied in laws or informal agreements like the NUJ Guidelines on Race Reporting) to systematically suppress information about the negative consequences mass third-world immigration, and particularly the Muslim component of it, is having on Europe.

Personally, I think responsibility for Anders Behring Breivik's actions begin and end with Anders Behring Breivik. I'm willing to change my mind if the ongoing investigation manages to link his actions to any other organizations. Right now, however, he's just a lone wacko.

To the idiots on the (more-or-less) left, that makes me part of the conspiracy, as illustrated by Roger Cohen in a New York Times op-ed title "Breivik and His Enablers":

LONDON -- On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly murderous psychotic loner: the 32-year-old mama's boy with no contact with his father, obsessed by video games (Dragon Age II) as he preens himself ("There was a relatively hot girl on [sic] the restaurant today checking me out") and dedicates his time in asexual isolation to the cultivation of hatred and the assembly of a bomb from crushed aspirin and fertilizer.

No doubt, that is how Islamophobic right-wingers in Europe and the United States who share his views but not his methods will seek to portray Breivik.

We've seen the movie. When Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords this year in Tuscon, Arizona -- after Sarah Palin placed rifle sights over Giffords' constituency and Giffords herself predicted that "there are consequences to that" -- the right went into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner whose crazed universe owed nothing to those fanning hatred under the slogan of "Take America Back." (That non-specific taking-back would of course be from Muslims and the likes of the liberal and Jewish Giffords.)

Look, some people think Islam is a religion with a substantial history of violence and oppression. Others think this is yet another case of panic about immigration. Whatever the case, unless you can find an actual conspiracy -- people, organizations, plans, money, that sort of thing -- it's ludicrous to say that either side is responsible in any meaningful way for Breivik's crimes.

I was going to blog about the President's speech, but look! Kitty pictures.

Larger ImageHotch

Taking all these pictures of Hotch is proving to be more difficult than I expected. For one thing, the color balance is all over the place. The room is actually lit with incandescent light, which gives everything a warm glow, but of course the flash on the camera is daylight white. So while the colors in the camera images are probably accurate, it's not matching what I saw when I was there, so I've been making some adjustments, and the results havn't been very consistent.

The problem is that the camera is guessing one color balance and then I'm making rough adjustments to that guess, so the variance is accumulating. I should probably get out the grey card and switch to raw mode.

Larger ImageHotch chewing on the iPhone...

As you can see, Hotch thinks my iPhone case makes a great chew toy. Too bad the iPhone's still in it.

Larger Image...and trying to look like he's sorry.

The other problem with taking pictures of Hotch is that my focus technique doesn't work very well. With the kinds of photograpy I usually do, I've found it works better when I disable the automatic auto-focus on the shutter button, so when I want to take a picture, I pick the object I want in focus, press the manual focus button, and then recompose the picture and press the shutter button. Now I can take as many pictures as I want at that distance, without the auto-focus deciding to do something different.

The problem is that Hotch moves so fast sometimes that between the time I press the focus button and the time I press the shutter, he's moved away from the focus distance. I've taken thousands of photos this way -- weddings, children, flowers, buildings, even marathon runners -- and it works just fine, so I wasn't expecting a problem, and it took me a while to recognize what was happening, because the camera's LCD screen is too small to show the problem unless I know to look for it.

Larger ImageHotch

Still, I got a few nice ones.

More to come in a few days.

Larger ImageHotch

Remember Lori Drew? She's the woman who used MySpace to play a very unkind trick on a teenage girl named Megan Meier, who killed herself. Prosecutors in Missouri, where Drew and Meier both lived, didn't prosecute her for this, probably because saying mean things to little girls isn't a criminal act.

That didn't stop grandstanding U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien from stepping in. Even though he was located 1500 miles away in the Central District of California, he used the fact that MySpace's computers were located in California to charge Drew with computer fraud because she violated MySpace's Terms of Service (TOS) when she used fake information to setup her account.

Fortunately, the judge assigned to the case wasn't having any of that and dismissed the case. If this had gone forward, it had the potential to set a horrifying precedent. Instead of being merely a contract between us and the websites, the TOS would essentially be elevated to federal law. All that stuff you click past would be something that could send you to jail.

Well, according to a terrific post by Gideon at a public defender, something similar is happening to Reddit's Aaron Swartz. It sounds like an ordinary hacking complaint at first, but it's not, because Swartz did not apparently hack past security. He just downloaded more stuff than the TOS allowed. The full story is up at Wired, but read Gideon's post first.

Update: Scott Greenfield agrees the government's position is absurd, but finds the intellectual property issues more troubling.

Defenders of Caylee's Law have been arguing in my comments and elsewhere that even though the rush to legislate will result in a poorly-written law, my fear that it will punish innocent parents and babysitters far more than it helps any child is unfounded, because prosecutors will use their discretion wisely and mercifully.

In most cases, I'm sure they're right, but why rely on it? Why not just take the time to write a good law? It's not like there aren't grandstanding prosecutors out there who will punish people just to make themselves look tough, and it doesn't take more than a few handfuls of them to ruin a lot of lives.

Radley Balko has an example:

Last April, Nelson was crossing a street with her three children when her 4-year-old was struck and killed by a car. She was crossing at an intersection, but was apparently not in a designated crosswalk. The driver who killed her had been drinking, taking painkillers, and was blind in one eye. He also has two prior hit-and-run convictions. Nelson and her daughter were also struck and injured. Residents of Nelson's apartment building have complained to the city about the intersection. The nearest crosswalk is a half mile away.

In other words, she jaywalked, and she had very, very bad luck. Here's what the wise and merciful prosecutor did:

Nelson was charged with second-degree vehicular homicide. Which is insane. She was convicted last week. When she's sentenced later this month, she could spend more time in jail than the man who struck and killed her son. The prosecutor will say he was just enforcing the law. The jury will say they were just applying it. Both are excuses to duck responsibility (prosecutors can decline to bring charges, juries can nullify). But if both are true, then the time to prevent the unjust application of well-intentioned laws is to anticipate those applications while the laws are being written and proposed.

Which is the whole point I've been trying to make all along.

I just drove through Maryland a few weeks ago, and now I'm back, this time on business. One of my on-again, off-again clients has a bit of work that I'm suited for, so I flew out here for a meeting.

Yeah, that's right. I flew. For the first time in about 11 years.

My lack of flying had nothing to do with 9/11. I've always disliked flying -- getting through the airport traffic, all the walking around, all the standing in lines, the tedium of security -- it grates at me. I can remember back in the late '90's or maybe 2000, I had flown out to D.C. for some meeting, and I was standing around waiting for something at Dulles, and I realized that I probably had another 30 years of waiting around in airports ahead of me. As it turned out, that was one of the last flights I ever took. I stopped working full time in 2001 and never had a reason to fly again.

Until now.

Air travel was pretty much how I remembered it, except that I arranged the whole trip myself online instead of having the company's travel agent do it. And, of course, security was even slower. I didn't have to go through the nudie-pic X-ray machine, but maybe that will change on the return trip. The truth is that it doesn't bother me as much as you might think from reading this blog. (Besides, the punishment for taking nudie pictures of me is that you have to look at nudie pictures of me.)

Don't get me wrong, I still hate the TSA. It's kind of like when a clerk at a store swears in front of me. The swearing itself doesn't bother me at all. However, he doesn't know that. For all he knows, I might be easily offended by swearing, yet he goes ahead and swears anyway. He doesn't respect me enough to care that I might be offended. And that offends me.

It's the same with the TSA. I don't mind so much that they intrude on my privacy, but I hate them for not giving a damn about my privacy. Someday, when the worm turns, I want them all to lose their jobs. Every smiling, friendly, blue-costumed asshole TSA agent in the country.

The weirdest part of security, though, was having to take off my shoes. I'd read about the TSA making people take off their shoes, of course, and knew intellectually that it was coming, but until I actually did it, I couldn't quite believe something that stupid was for real.

When I got to Baltimore, I had a little trouble finding the offices where we were meeting. The rental car GPS had never heard of those streets. I used my phone's Maps app to find a nearby intersection, and the GPS knew about it, but it tried to take me there via Fort Meade, home of the NSA. I managed to turn around before running into checkpoints full of armed guards.

Anyway, the meeting went well, and then a few of us went out to dinner. One of the guys had heard about a resturant called Maiwand Kabob in Columbia, and we decided to try it. The GPS got us there safely, and it turned out to be a tiny little store-front middle eastern restaurant in a mall. I decided to order the beef-and-chicken kabob, and when one of the other guys ordered that, I said, "I'll have the same thing."

I'd misheard, however. He'd actually ordered the lamb-and-chicken kabob. I don't generally like lamb, but I went ahead with it anyway, which turned out to be a good idea. Apparently, I don't like lamb because I've never had it prepared properly. If you ever find yourself in the area with a taste for middle eastern food, you could do a lot worse than Maiwand Kabob.

Anyway, I'm just about to pack up and head for the airport. My flight isn't for 4 hours, but I'd rather get there early. The only thing worse than waiting around in an airports is rushing through airports.

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About 10 years ago, my wife had just adopted Ripley, and we were thinking of getting a kitten next, and we thought it might be fun to get a purebread kitten. We weren't sure what breed we wanted, so we did some research on the web and at cat shows. Eventually we settled on the Ragdoll breed, and began to contact a few local breeders to learn to learn how the adoption process works and to get an idea of the difference between breeders.

What we learned -- and this will shock you -- is that some cat breeders are a bit nuts. They all had lots of special rules we were supposed to follow once we got the cat, not all of which seemed, uh, entirely grounded in reality. I remember one even wanted the right to take back the cat if they thought it was being abused. (Taking back an abused cat makes sense, but they wanted to make the determination themselves, rather than, say, a neutral veterinarian.)

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That turned us off the idea a bit, and somewhere along the way we got a kitten from a shelter, Buffy. (I didn't have the camera back when she was a kitten, sorry) Then, a year or so later, we were visiting the Orphans of the Storm shelter (where we had adopted Ripley and Buffy), and we stumbled a cat with more hair than I'd ever seen before. We picked him up and played with him and brushed his hair -- which really needed it, there was an awful lot of loose hair stuck to him -- and put him back in his cage. But he just sat there, looking at us with those big blue eyes... So we took him home, and he became my favorite cat, Dozer.

Sadly, Dozer passed away a few months ago. He looked like a purebread blue bicolor Ragdoll, and he probably was. You can't really tell if a cat is purebread without the breeding history, but Ragdoll breeders are a fairly protective bunch, so there aren't too many fakes out there. (Unlike, say, Persians.) Based on our experiences with Dozer, my wife and I decided that we must always have a Ragdoll cat.

After a period of grieving, we began looking at web sites for Ragdoll kitten breeders, trying to decide what kind of Ragdoll we wanted. My wife fell in love with the blue lynx pattern, and we found a couple of blue lynx kittens at Dr. J's Perfect Dolls. Last Friday, we met with Jennifer Woll, DVM, and took home a kitten. Check out the expression on his face in this shot:

Larger ImageDr. Jennifer Woll With Our New Kitten

As usual, we had some trouble coming up with the name. Because he's so cute, it's tempting to name him "Nermal," but he'll eventually grow up, and "Nermal" is a silly name for a grown-up cat. We could also name him "Joel," after the kitten in The Closer, but that too seems like a silly name for a full-size cat.

My wife likes "Roark," after Eve Dallas's love interest in the In Death series by J.D. Robb, which would also tie in nicely with my libertarian leanings because of the link to Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. On the other hand, "Roark" sounds a bit pretentious to me, and I'm not really a Rand fan. Alternatively, we could name him "Dallas" after Eve Dallas and also after the captain of the Nostromo in Alien.

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For now, he's Hotch, named after Aaron Hotchner, the character Thomas Gibson plays on Criminal Minds. Among other things, it has the advantage of being a single syllable, which means it might be possible to train him to respond to it.

It could happen.

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Anyway, we have the kitten locked in the master bathroom for a few days as part of the process of introducing him to the rest of the household. He's a bundle of energy, so I thought it would be amusing to setup the video camera to record his activity until it ran out of space, then I could edit it into a fun highlights video. As it turns out, however, all that energy is just for show. With no one watching, he just slept for an hour and a half.

I managed to salvage something, however, by compressing the video timeline. Here's Hotch asleep for an hour and a half, shown at 50 times normal speed:

If you haven't had enough, here's the whole set of photos of Hotch.

I've been getting slammed in the comments to my earlier post about why Caylee's Law is a bad idea, as has Radley Balko on his piece in the Huffington Post. Perhaps people will ease up a bit if I point out that Serena Straus, a former prosecutor in the Bronx Sex Crimes and Domestic Violence Unit, also thinks that Caylee's Law is a bad idea.

Some of her reasons are pretty familiar, such as the lack of deterrence:

Certainly, Caylee's law would be no deterrent. Let's play this out. I murder my kid and have an hour to report it:

"Hmm...I can report this murder that I just committed thereby avoiding 1 - 5 under Caylee's Law, but then I will be giving law enforcement access to all kind of wonderful forensic information that will lead to my conviction of 25 to life for murder. So....do I turn the body in or do I hide it somewhere hoping that by the time someone finds it, the condition will be so bad that forensics are useless....hmmmm...."

Or the troublesome definitions:

Even the requirement to report a child missing or risk criminal penalty is fraught with complications: What's the age cut off? Is it 18 and under?  12 and under?  5 and under?  When does the clock starts ticking?  Is it when your 15 year old tells you they are leaving to sleep at a friend's house or 15 hours later when you find out they lied?

But Straus also points out a few unintended consequences that could do more harm than good:

The potential for the police to be flooded with unwarranted complaints from guardians who think the kids are fine but are afraid of going to jail is real. Also, again, guardians who are going to do the right thing (or have half a brain) are going to report a child missing regardless.  And we don't want to punish or deter later reporting for fear of jail.  Take the case of a parent whose kid has a tendency to not be totally honest about where they are going.  They say they are sleeping at a friend's house.  They lied.  The parents find out 25 hours later - do you want to punish them for reporting within a reasonable time under their circumstance? Do you want to deter them from reporting with threat of prison?

This is similar to the ways the drug laws have discouraged people from seeking medical attention for drug users: You're at party where there are drugs, and your friend becomes agitated, has difficult breathing, and then passes out. Knowing what the police will do if they find evidence of drugs, do you call 911 for an ambulance? Or do you wait to see if he'll recover by himself?

If something like Caylee's Law is enacted, parents of children who have been missing more than 24 hours will have the same kind of wonderful decision to make.

I think it's fair to say that Scott Greenfield is not a fan of Apple's iPad. From reading his banter with Brian Tannebaum, I gather there's been a lot of hype about how the iPad is a "game changer" for lawyers -- I guess because it can serve as a thin client front-end to some sort of "virtual office in the cloud" web application. Whatever. As criminal defense lawyers, Scott and Brian have no need for such things.

That seems reasonable, but sometimes Scott's hatred for the iPad goes a bit overboard. I always assumed it was an act -- hyperbole for the purpose of emphasis -- but his latest post seems pretty serious:

When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within ten years, it began a commitment to the future that drove us to create innovation which carried us to great heights and banal depths.  And with the last flight of the space shuttle, it's over.  And we have given up.

Actually, I'm with Scott here. We stopped going to the moon almost 40 years ago, and the shuttle has been hideously expensive to operate because it has to be human-rated, and we never developed any sort of unmanned heavy spacelift vehicles, which is why the space station is small and pitiful compared to some of the earlier plans for a permanent station. More recently, I believe they just postponed plans to develop a sort of space-tug for moving stuff around the inner system.

(We don't post about it here, but my co-blogger Ken and I have been complaining about the state of our space program since the 70s. And I'm sure he can correct anything I just got wrong.)

But the most significant thing represented by the last shuttle mission is America's abdication of concern with our future.  To the extent something as self-serving as American Exceptionalism exists, it does so because of our drive to find the future, to dream big and achieve our dreams.  We have no dreams anymore.

...

We have no goals.  As a society, we think we've accomplished something by putting out a fire, never considering that at best we're stagnant.  At worst, we fool ourselves, as the first isn't really out but just left smoldering, waiting for someone else to shoulder the burden of putting it out later.

We're a nation of big shots, every one of us too important to get our hands dirty doing hard work, or suffering personal sacrifice to achieve a future goal.

That sounds a lot like "national greatness," which is how Republicans used to waste our money (and sometimes lives) when they weren't busy complaining that Democrats were wasting our money on social programs. Of course, in our modern times, both parties seem quite flexible as to how they waste our money.

Anyway, guess what Scott sees as a symbol of all that is wrong with us today?

The lovers of technology hold dear to shiny gadgets like the iPad in the belief that they are the future. They are toys, which suck money out of the pockets of those least able to afford toys and give back nothing. Do you really think a great future exists because we can check our emails anywhere, or watch television shows we missed while we were twitting to each other?

I don't have an iPad, but if it's anything like my iPhone, it can also keep a list of everyone I know, and it can show me where they live, and give me turn-by-turn directions to get there. It lets me view a map of all the visible stars, showing exactly what they look like from where I am on Earth, or it can show me the Earth from space and zoom in to show me a single building, and pictures people have taken of the area, and all the nearest restaurants, ATMs, police stations, and hospitals. Or I can take my own pictures and movies, edit them, and share them with my friends.

My iPhone can keep a list of groceries, which my wife can update as I drive to the store, and if I'm not sure what she wants, I can send her pictures of what's available. Then I can find the nearest theater that's playing a movie I want to see and reserve two tickets. And if we're too far from home, I can find the nearest hotel and book a room.

I can read all the world's newspapers, watch all the world's news feeds, find the current prices of all the world's commodities, and read all the world's public domain books. I can lookup the population of Connecticut in 1950 or the address of a good sushi bar in Avalon. If a friend has a book I like, I can scan the bar code and have a copy delivered to my house, or maybe I can just download it directly to the phone. Of course that's only after I've read a few online reviews.

And I haven't even mentioned that it holds every song I own, lets me buy more from a catalog of millions, and recommends other I might like. It also lets me manage my bank account and cash checks just by scanning them. I can track my wife's flight as it approaches Chicago so I can pick her up within minutes of landing. I also have access to the world's largest encyclopedia, photographs of every landmark in the world, weather reports from anywhere in the world, a notebook, a calendar, a voice memo recorder, and several types of calculators.

In the 1980's, I participated in a government funded educational program that made supercomputers available to students at universities too small to afford their own. The absolute top-of-the-line supercomputer was the Cray 2, which cost $17 million in 1985 dollars. An iPad 2 is just as powerful as a Cray 2, except that it's smaller, produces less waste heat, runs on batteries, and you can carry it in your pocket. For about 1/70000 the price.

And I know this sounds like an ad for an iPad, but remember that there are at least two other vendors making products that directly compete, and most laptop makers have a small footprint model aimed at the same group of consumers.

We are easily played by emotional appeals that distract us from hard realities, the ones the require some small amount of thought.  We're a nation of marketers, liars who string together meaningless words and pretend that by making stuff up we can somehow slip past the mess all around us without contributing anything of substance, without actually doing anything that will achieve a needed goal.

Oh my God. Scott, dude, you're a friggin' lawyer! Talk about people who don't contribute anything of substance...most people would put lawyers very near the top of that list. Those aren't lawyers on that Space Shuttle.

And yet, lawyers are completely necessary in our society. They may not fly spaceships or cure diseases or invent cleaner sources of energy, but they're a part of the vast cooperative enterprise we like to call civilization. As are we all. (I don't talk about my job much on this blog, but trust me, as fascinating as it is to me, it's nothing that will ever be in the history books.)

The space program was only partially about space, though the vast unknown around us offered the potential to survive the damage we do to our own planet because we're too lazy to pick up our own garbage, and too enamored of our shiny toys to worry about where to put the nuclear waste.  As long as it's not in our backyard, we just don't care.

This is nit-picking, I know, but the Space Shuttle only goes up into low earth orbit. It never really got out into the vast unknown. I mean, if you knew where and when to look (something an iPad could tell you) you could see it from your backyard.

The space program gave us a wealth of opportunity along the way, as scientists and engineers created things that could be used to create more things to solve previously unsolvable problems.

That's pretty much the process behind the iPad as well. In addition to the pocket supercomputer aspect I mentioned earlier, iPads also have state-of-the-art LCD displays, state of the art digital cameras, state-of-the-art batteries, state-of-the-art 3G transceivers, and even state-of-the-art glass panels. It's not like Apple spent billions of dollars to invent these things from scratch, they are just one of many products that can be built from high-tech parts that are becoming ever more common.

There was a time when Mr. Fusion might have been a reality someday, instead of oil from the mideast.

Uh, no. I loved Back to the Future, but Mr. Fusion was fiction inspired by cold fusion research, which also turned out to be fiction.

There are still people who have the knowledge and interest to create a future out of the mess that swirls around us today, but the death of the space program reflects our nation's decision to look backward rather than forward.  We have been seduced by the shiny toys, and they are good enough to make us forget that we are doing nothing as a society to invest in our future.

Enjoy your iPad 5. There may not be many new toys on the horizon because the drive that brought us this far is gone. We're too cheap to pay the price of innovation, and we're too lazy and preoccupied with our transitory self-interest to put in the effort necessary to change.  There will be a few tweaks to our shiny toys, which will be touted as wonders and snapped up at exorbitant prices by young people spending their daddy's money, so that they can sit on their couches and eat Cheetos while surfing youtube.

Is this enough of a future for you?

The iPad is nothing less than a personal pocket supercomputer that gives you instant wireless access to a multi-million-node world-wide computer network. That's about as science fiction as it gets. I know we don't have the flying cars, but we are living in the future.

Do you not realize that you've bet the farm that some kid in Cambridge or Palo Alto, with no help from you, is going to come up with some truly incredible brainstorm that will create an industry, revitalize America, drive our economy in a direction that we can't conceive of today?

If I did something like that, I'd be an idiot.

Consider Scott's example of fusion power. Scientists have been experimenting with nuclear fusion for 50-60 years. Getting hydrogen to fuse came early, but the process required more energy than it produced. I believe scientists reached technological breakeven in the 80's, but only on a small scale, and at great expense. Creating industrial-scale economical fusion power systems will be a long, slow process. It's unlikely there will be any giant breakthroughs, just hundreds or thousands of small engineering breakthroughs that eventually advance the technology far enough for us to benefit.

So, what I'm betting on is that millions of people in thousands of cities will come up with millions of ideas, each of which improves our life a tiny, tiny bit, and that this process of continuous improvement will slowly grind away to make our lives better. After all, that's how we got this far.

When you've got that many people working together, an awful lot of effort goes into dealing with the complexities of communications and organizing, and while each of those people is a specialist, an awful lot of their productive time is spent doing routine activities outside their area of specialization. Anything that makes those routine activities less time consuming is going to leave more time for people to do what they're best at. This is why we need lawyers and accountants and garbage collectors and teachers and dog walkers. It's also why we need overnight mail and photocopiers and email and iPads. Every little bit helps. It's the story of civilization.

Besides, unless the medical folks figure out how to solve that death problem, it's not like we're going to live much longer than our great grandparents did. And if we can't live longer, than at least we should use our vast technological wealth to live better. And if living better means streaming kitten videos while you're sipping a Frappuchino at Starbucks, what the hell is wrong with that?

Irony Addendum: The last shuttle flight is not the last manned space flight. We'll be using foreign spacecraft to get into orbit for a little while, and there are about five private companies developing various forms of spacelift, several of which will be man-rated.

Meanwhile, the astronauts on this last shuttle flight took a pair of iPhones:

Why the iPhone and not the iPad? "There's no reason in principle why we couldn't have done the iPad," Rishikof says. Yet, the compact size of the iPhone gives the device less mass and volume, and therefore a smaller footprint when calculating measurements. "In the future, the iPad is definitely on our list," he says.

It's a supercomputer that talks to a world-wide cloud of supercomputers. Of course a bunch of rocket scientists can put it to good use.

I haven't posted anything about Casey Anthony trial. I'd pretty much like to keep it that way because, really, I don't know anything about the case. On the other hand, I know there's a long and painful history of laws like this:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 6, 2011

Contacts: Michelle Crowder, "Caylee's Law" petition-starter, 918-289-8479 (CDT)
Brian Purchia, Director of Communications, brian@change.org, 202-253-4330 (PDT)
Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, Campaign Director, rpbp@change.org, 919-423-4783 (EDT)

***PRESS RELEASE***
CAMPAIGN TO CREATE "CAYLEE'S LAW" GOES VIRAL
Oklahoma woman calls for parents who fail to notify police of missing child to be charged with felony; more than 37,000 supporters join in less than 24 hours

WASHINGTON, DC - More than 37,000 people in all 50 states have joined a Change.org campaign calling for a federal law -- called "Caylee's Law" -- that would make the failure of a parent to notify law enforcement of a child's disappearance a felony.

Casey Anthony was found "not guilty" of first-degree murder or manslaughter on Tuesday in the case of her two-year-old daughter Caylee's death. One of the central controversies of the case has been the fact that Anthony never notified law enforcement that her daughter was missing. Caylee was last seen on June 16, 2008; grandmother Cindy Anthony notified the police on July 15, a month later.

After hearing the verdict and seeing a Facebook page response, Oklahoman Michelle Crowder started a Change.org petition asking Congress to create "Caylee's Law," making it a federal offense and a felony for a parent or guardian to fail to report a child's disappearance to law enforcement.

Nearly 2,000 people have signed the "Caylee's Law" petition each hour since its creation, making it the fastest-growing campaign on Change.org.

"When I saw that Casey Anthony had been found not guilty in the murder of little Caylee, and that she was only being convicted of lying to the police about her disappearance, I was sickened; I could not believe she was not being charged with child neglect or endangerment, or even obstruction of justice," said petition-starter Michelle Crowder.

"I saw a page on Facebook proposing that a law be made, but I saw nothing about a petition being started for it. So, I decided to start one on Change.org because I have signed several petitions on the site and I knew it would be a way to reach people and hopefully get something done."

Michelle continued, "I am hoping that this will be made into a federal law so that no other child's life, disappearance, and/or death is treated in the manner that poor Caylee's was treated. No child deserves that."

"There is extensive debate about this issue, and this campaign has been remarkable," said Change.org founder Ben Rattray. "In less than 24 hours, a woman in Oklahoma has recruited tens of thousands of supporters for her cause. Change.org is about empowering anyone, anywhere, to take action on the issues that are important to them, and it is the perfect platform for this record-breaking campaign."

Change.org, the world's fastest-growing platform for social change, was profiled this week in the New York Times, Sacramento Bee, and Washington Times.

Live signature totals from the "Caylee's Law" petition on Change.org:
http://www.change.org/petitions/create-caylees-law

Facebook page that prompted Michelle to start the Change.org campaign:
http://www.facebook.com/CreateCayleesLaw

Facebook page tied to Michelle's Change.org petition:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Create-Caylees-Law/239305669422074

(I've left all the links in the press release so you can see the startling amount of self-promotion involved. Most of those links that appear to lead to a news story -- e.g. "thousands of supporters" or "record-breaking campaign" lead right back to the Change.org petition page.)

You don't have to follow news about our criminal justice system for very long to know that laws named after (alleged) crime victims are often just legislative theater ("Behold! I have done something about this problem!"), in which case they are usually a poorly-written overreaction to a single incident, and they usually do more harm than good.

Here's the text of the petition:

Create Caylee's Law, Not Reporting Child's Death Should Be a Felony

Greetings,

On July 5, 2011, at 1:15 pm CST, Casey Anthony was found not guilty of first degree murder in the death of her daughter Caylee Anthony. The only charges she now faces are four counts of falsifying police reports, each of which only carries a 1 year prison term. Since she has been in jail since August 2008, she will be out of jail ENTIRELY too soon.

I'm writing to propose that a new law be put into effect making it a felony for a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to not notify law enforcement of the death of their child, accidental or otherwise, within 1 hour of said death being discovered. This way there will be no more cases like Casey Anthony's in the courts, and no more innocent children will have to go without justice.

Also, make it a felony for a parent, legal guardian, or caretaker to not notify law enforcement of the disappearance of a child within 24 hours, so proper steps can be taken to find that child before it's too late.

The case of Caylee Anthony was tragic, and there is no reason for another case like this one to hit the courts. Let's do what is necessary to prevent another case like this from happening.

[Your name]

Offhand, I see at least four problems.

First of all, why should this be a federal crime? The related crimes -- murder, manslaughter, endangering a child -- are not generally federal crimes.

Second, does it really make sense to require parents to notify law enforcement within one hour? My God. I don't have children, but my guess is that if you discover your child dead, it could take you an hour before you even have the strength to get up off the floor.

Third, most children who die in the home, or otherwise in their parents' care, are not murder victims. They die of accidents or medical conditions. Thus, nearly all parents who suffer the death of a child -- and are therefore subject to this law --- are not actually criminals. They did nothing wrong. And they know they did nothing wrong. So, in the midst of mind-numbing tragedy, they might not realize they're supposed to call the cops. After all, it's not like the cops can help.

Fourth, the petition says parents are supposed to notify law enforcement of the disappearance within 24 hours. I don't know if it's true, but haven't we all heard that the police won't even begin a missing person investigation until at least 24 hours have passed? So why try to report it before then? And if we're talking about a troublesome teenager, involved with drugs, I'd imagine that disappearances of several days are not unusual. And if you suspect your child is involved with drugs, calling the police is probably a terrible idea.

Most of the problems I've mentioned might sound like they could be handled with a carefully drafted law. For example, the requirement to report a disapperance could be limited only to young children like Caylee. That's the logical and sensible thing to do. Then again, it would be logical and sensible if laws against child molestation did not apply to 18-year-old boys who have consensual sex with their 16-year-old girlfriends, and yet they do. Logic and sense often go out the window when children are involved.

The problem is that laws like this -- laws named after people -- are usually passed for show, and so thoughtful, careful drafting is not a priority. If someone actually does propose a Caylee's Law (and I'm guessing someone will) it may not have any of the flaws I've suggested here, but it's a good bet that it will have something wrong with it.

There's also a good chance it will be loaded up with unrelated provisions. After all, why should it apply only to children? Don't we care about the elderly too? Or the mentally impaired? And isn't there something else on the law enforcement wishlist we could add to the bill?

And then there's the issue of how the law will actually be applied. I predict that many years will go by before the law is used in a case similar to the Casey Anthony trial. On the other hand, if history is any guide, a law like this will probably turn into a de-facto sentencing enhancement/plea-bargaining chip.

For example, when a parent kills his own child in a drunk-driving accident, in addition to the DUI, reckless endangerment, manslaughter, or whatever else would be typical, he might find himself charged with a Caylee's Law violation because he was too drunk to report the death in a timely fashion. It's just another charge on the pile to get a little more jail time.

Or maybe the missing-child reporting requirement will be used to harass the families of suspected criminals: "You say you don't know where your son is? And you haven't seen him since Friday? That's more than 24 hours. Tell us where he is, or we'll arrest you right now."

None of this will address the problem that has everybody so upset: The impression that Casey Anthony got away with doing evil because there just wasn't enough evidence. Caylee's Law would do nothing to fix that. Instead, Caylee's law would criminalize certain actions or inactions, not because they are especially evil, but because they are easy to prove. And that's no way to write criminal law.

Update: Radley Balko says it better:

This is a bad way to make public policy. In an interview with CNN, Crowder concedes that she didn't consult with a single law enforcement official before coming up with her 24-hour and 1-hour limits. This raises some questions. How did she come up with those cutoffs? Did she consult with any grief counselors to see if there may be innocuous reasons why an innocent person who just witnessed a child's death might not immediately report it, such as shock, passing out, or some other sort of mental breakdown? Did she consult with a forensic pathologist to see if it's even possible to pin down the time of death with the sort of precision you'd need to make Caylee's Law enforceable? Have any of the lawmakers who have proposed or are planning to propose this law actually consulted with anyone with some knowledge of these issues?

This is exactly what I mean about the trouble with hastily-passed laws. People could go to jail for breaking this law, and Crowder didn't even spend a day doing research. That's irresponsible and dangerous.

So, after I drove to Avalon, I had to drive back to Chicago. My wife had gone to Avalon ahead of me with her friends, and I was going to meet her there and bring her home. We were planning to swing south into Kentucky to visit family on the way.

Step one was getting out of New Jersey, which proved a little tricky. There are several bridges across the Delaware from south Jersey, and our GPS system wanted to take the southern-most bridge, the Delaware Memorial, presumably because it was closest to our starting point in Avalon. But we were reliably informed that traffic on the small roads between Avalon and the bridge would be very congested, and that we should take one of the northern bridges, possibly even the Ben Franklin into Philadelphia. Even though we'd have to travel in the wrong direction, it was supposed to be much quicker.

So I decided to ignore Jill (the GPS) for a little while and cruise north along the Garden State Parkway until Jill stopped advising me to turn around, at which point I could assume that it had chosen a more northern route. This took us close to Atlantic City, at which point we switched to the Atlantic City Expressway heading west toward the Ben Franklin bridge.

It all went wrong when I followed Jill's instructions to take an exit onto some small roads. I should have balked, but I needed gas anyway, so I decide to see where Jill would take us. After maybe 15 minutes of driving on silly little streets -- definitely not a major route for driving to D.C., although I did get gas -- we got on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike -- and promptly proceeded down to the Delaware Memorial bridge anyway. By the time I figured out what Jill had done, it was a little too late to change directions. Except for the silly little streets, it may have been faster than the more direct route -- there was very little traffic -- but it was not what I had been planning.

As for Delaware, all I know is that we were in a traffic jam. Then we left Delaware and everything got better. I realize this is probably not a representative sample of life in Delaware.

We crossed Maryland without incident -- not even in Baltimore -- entered Virginia, and headed for the western burbs of D.C., where we met up Mirriam Seddiq. I've known her for years through her blog, where I followed her job-hunting and the birth of her children and the re-launch of her legal career, so I wasn't about to pass this close without taking the opportunity to meet her in person.

My wife and I didn't want to intrude, so our plan had been to call her when we got close and meet her for late lunch or early dinner somewhere in her neighborhood. Mirriam, however, insisted on inviting us over, so we got to meet her whole lovely family.

Larger ImageMirriam, Yakob, Drue, and Yonas a.k.a. Stick Kid

Afterwards, we got out of D.C. and dashed southwest a few hours to get a headstart on the next day's travels. I had been hoping to take Skyline Drive for the view, but we were running a bit late and the sun was almost down, so we just drove down Interstate 81 to Lexington. It went pretty fast, and I had ripped about 80 more of my CDs before leaving home, so we had some music. At one point we were listening to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and I couldn't help reinacting the headbanging scene from Wayne's World, which probably wasn't the smartest thing to do while driving 70 miles per hour down a unfamiliar two-lane undulating mountain road at night, surrounded by trucks, in the rain, and fog.

The next morning, I decided to add some scenic driving to our trip -- unaware that Jill would later add some scenery of her own -- by taking Virginia-39 northwest to Warm Springs. I had noticed that there weren't a lot of photos along the route on Google Earth, so I thought I might be able to contribute a few, but the road was narrow and had no shoulders for stopping. I would have had to either stop right on the road or find a place to park and walk back. I didn't want to risk the first, and we didn't have time for the latter. I did get pictures from a lookout, but since everyone does that, Google Earth doesn't need another one.

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As we were leaving, another guy was also leaving, and he was driving what looked like some kind of Mazda coupe (Miata maybe?). I figured that having my comparatively ungainly RAV4 in front of him would ruin his fun drive through the hills, so I let him go ahead of me. This turned out to be a mistake. He proceeded to amble along comfortably below the speed limit for the next 3 or 4 miles. Then he slowed down even more to look for the right turnoff.

People, please: If you want a slow, relaxed drive, buy a big sedan. If you're going to buy a nimble little coup, learn to drive it like the sports car that it is. If I can keep up on a mountain road in my SUV, you're not doing it right.

Anyway, once we reached Warm Springs I decided to get off the scenic route. I wanted Jill to find a route back to the main road, but the GPS system didn't really have a routing mode for that, so I improvised by asking it to find all the nearest fast food places, and I picked a McDonald's in cluster of them to the southwest of us, which pretty much had to be on the highway.

That worked, but Jill found some hilariously tiny and windy roads for the trip. I guess that even though they are built like a roller coaster ride, with steep banking and sharp blind turns, they're rural roads, and therefore the default speed limit is 55mph. I guess that looks pretty attractive to the GPS system's routing algorithms.

When we reached Beckley, West Virginia, the GPS system took us northwest along the West Virgina Turnpike, and then southeast toward our destination in Prestonsburg. It should have been simple -- there were state roads all over the place -- but when the GPS system took us off the Turnpike, it once again took us on a tour of twisty little roads that had ridulously high speed limits.

The lesson, I think, is that GPS routing doesn't replace good old map reading. In the future, I'll use a good road map to plan the basic route, then I'll plug a series of waypoints into the GPS system to let it handle the finer details and deal with problems like finding my way back to the highway after a stop for gas.

We eventually got to our hotel, checked in, and drove the 25 miles or so to Pikeville. We had been hoping to stay in Pikeville itself, but Pikeville is no longer the tiny little town I remember visiting as a child. It's turned into a sort-of Eastern Kentucky Enterprise Zone, with chain restaurants, a Walmart, and outposts for large corporations. We found out that all their hotels were filled up for weeks in advance.

We were in Pikeville to take my Uncle Hagan out to dinner. He was my father's younger brother, and out of a total of ten brothers and sisters, he's the only one still alive. That pretty much makes him the Draughn family patriarch. Which is probably why he ended up taking us out to dinner.

Hagan's kind of an amazing and inspirational guy. His wonderful wife, Mary Lou, passed away about ten years ago, and despite having gone blind, he still lives by himself in a beautiful home on a hillside just a few miles outside Pikeville proper. He worked hard to learn the skills that allow him to take care of himself, and he keeps himself fit with a daily exercise regimen. He had no trouble giving me driving directions to the restaurant.

(Hagan's son Jim and his wife Peggy were away at the time, but they have a home on another part of the hill, so Hagan's not without family support. Hagan visits them all the time, finding his own way along the path through the woods.)

The next day, we loaded up the RAV and set out for Louisville.

I should mention that my wife and I had a ridiculous amount of luggage for two people on a short driving trip. We had initially traveled separately, so we each brought along a suitcase full of clothing, a computer, and a utility bag. In addition, I had my camera gear, and we brought along a small cooler filled with Diet Coke. We needed to use a luggage cart at every hotel.

The trip to Louisville was uneventful, until we checked into the hotel and found out the wi-fi service sucked. This was a problem because my wife had to give a training webinar of some kind. She ended up having to use her phone's tethering capability, which was a little slow for screen sharing, and she had to use my phone to call in.

On the other hand, when we were on the road, my wife was able to get an amazing amount of work done while I was driving. It got a bit spotty in the hills -- email would come in bursts as we passed through islands of 3G service -- but we were pretty much always in touch with the world.

That evening, we took my cousin Betty out to dinner. She had a lot of great stories. She'd known my father long ago, and she'd spent a lot of time with my Aunt Mary Elizabeth, who passed away last year. Mary had always gone to great lengths to appear prim and proper -- because she was prim and proper -- whereas Betty was a bit more willing to speak her mind and tell people off.

Mary Elizabeth enjoyed playing Bridge, and she apparently played a lot with a fairly elite group. Toward the end, her mind was letting go a bit, and she'd get confused. One day, someone from the group called Betty to complain that Mary's mental difficulties were making the game less fun for the rest of them or something. I don't know what she wanted Betty to do about it, and neither does Betty, because she hung up before they finished their whining. I'm proud to have Betty as family.

The next day, we GTFO of Louisville. Really, our hotel was almost on the Ohio river, about three miles from the nearest bridge. We were gone in minutes. And thus we started the last and most boring leg of our journey: Driving across Indiana.

Indiana's not a bad place, but compared to the states I had been driving across, it was really, really flat. And I've been up and down I-65 a bunch of times, so there wasn't a lot to see. We got home on Wednesday, and I've been recovering ever since.

Normally, I would have more photos for a trip like this, but (1) it was hard to find a good place to stop for some of the photos, (2) we were in a bit of a hurry, and (3) I seemed to have lost the ability to get a properly exposed photograph. First the photo would be too dark, then I'd adjust something and the highlights would be all blown out. After a while, I got discouraged and stopped taking pictures.

Embarassingly, the problem turned out to be that I had done a few high-dynamic-range photos earlier and had left the camera in bracket mode, so it was alternately under- and overexposing my shots. It wasn't until several days later that I noticed the bracket indicator on the LCD display, and suddenly I was able to take decent photos again.

Acouple of things from the other blog:

• Maggie McNeill gives a nice overview of the different styles of laws about prostitution.
• My road trip gives me an excuse to address one of the sillier arguments against libertarianism.

So I just drove from Chicago to the Jersey Shore, and boy are my arms tired... Knees. I meant to say, boy are my knees tired. They got really stiff from sitting in one position for 20 hours of drive time over 2 days.

I wanted to leave on Thursday morning, but a couple of things came up, so I didn't hit the road until around 1 pm, a bit later than I had planned. As most eastbound trips must, this one began with killer Chicago traffic, followed by a stop at the Gas-A-Roo in Hammond, Indiana to fill up with that cheap, cheap non-Chicago fuel.

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Then, eastward.

Indiana is pretty normal. I've been there before and it's no big deal. I was just going to see more of it this time. I've got an Illinois I-Pass transponder for tolls, and it also works in Indiana. At some point, I took a break and used my iPhone to find the tollway website, to see if it would work in any of the other states. As it turns out, Illinois I-Pass is the same as E-ZPass, so it works in a few other states, including all the ones I'd be passing through in the outbound leg of my trip.

Ohio was next, and boy is it a boring state. Actually, for all I know, it's an interesting place, but I was driving the Ohio Turnpike, so I didn't see any of it. Just mile after mile of boring highway. The Ohio Turnpike is a depressing thing. It's a limited access tollway, so the only places you can stop at along the way are the tollway rest stops, which are pretty dreary and all the same. Actually, they're not quite the same. The rest stops are being upgraded, so there are two types: Obviously old and dreary, or brand new and less obviously dreary.

This dreariness has a well-known economic cause: Monopoly power.The restaurants, stores, and gas stations in the rest stops are the only places you can get to without the annoyance of leaving and reentering, so they have a bit of monopoly pricing power. As is usually the case, not only do they raise prices, they also reduce the quality and variety of goods and services.

For example, I've always mapped out my driving routes before taking them, but on this part of the trip, I hadn't bothered. For the first time ever, I was relying solely on Jill for navigation. ("Jill" is what we call our GPS, because the English language speech files for our Nuvi are named Jack and Jill.)

The problem with using Jill for guidance, I discovered, is that once I got a few hundred miles from home, I was basically just the monkey that drove the car. I had no locational awareness. (At one point, I pulled up a tiny map on my iPhone and was surpised to see that I was skirting the southern shore of Lake Erie and I didn't even know it.) So I decided to stop and pick up one of those 50-state road atlases that I used to use to plan all my trips.

It turns out they don't sell those on the Turnpike. Monopoly power means they don't have to. I was thinking of driving over to the other side of the rest stop and asking the truckers if they know where I could find a proper truck stop. A good truckstop has an awesome variety of driving supplies -- everything you could need for living a life on the road.

Anyway, it was getting dark as I passed Cleveland, so I stopped at the Brady's Leap rest stop just before Youngstown to figure out where I was going to get a room for the night. I tend to stay up kind of late, and I didn't want to spend three or four hours staring at the hotel room walls when I could still have been driving.

I decided I could make it into Pennslvania. That's a turnpike too, so it looked like I had only a handful of places I could get off and look for a hotel. Between Kayak and advertising in the rest stops I found a few candidates, but and I couldn't make up my mind where I was going to stop, so I decided to postpone the decision.

The drive through Youngstown, Ohio was slightly interesting, because somehow Jill got me off the Turnpike. I swear I stayed to the side I was told to stay on, but somehow that got me onto I-680 through town. After that, it was just boring highway all the way to the border.

Pennsylvania was only a little different, mostly because of the mountains, which I couldn't see at night anyway. It was another boring turnpike. I stopped at the first reststop to figure out my plan for the night. (By the way, the rest stop had Wi-Fi, but they wanted you to pay to use it. Monopoly power again.) Based on the hotel ads, it looked like I could stop at either Irwin, New Stanton, or Somerset. I decided I could make it all the way to Somerset, which looked like it had a lot of hotels.

Unfortunately for me, it also had a lot of motorcyclists for Thunder in the Valley. When I got off the turnpike at 2am and started calling hotels, they were almost all booked up. The Days Inn had a smoking room for $70, and the Super 8 had a Jacuzzi room for $90. I went with the Jacuzzi, but when I got there, the guy offered to let me have the room for $50 if I didn't use it. I took the deal. I was only going to sleep.

On Friday morning I woke up, checked out, had breakfast, and drove through the mountains of Pennsylvania, which were more interesting in daylight. Also, there were tunnels through some of the mountains, which are an unusual experience for me, being from Illinois, where we don't really have geography.

(I wonder why they don't allow lane changes in the tunnels. I guess lane changes must be a cause of accidents, which would be an awful mess and block traffic for a really long time.)

The rest of the drive through Pennsylvania was weaving through mountain valley after mountain valley. I found it relaxing and pleasant, but there's not a lot to write about. And I never got that road atlas, so I still have no sense of where I've been

I had to meet some people at 4:30, and I was on track to be at least an hour early until I crossed the Delaware river into New Jersey. At which point the traffic began to suck. I reached my destination in Avalon at about 4:40, which was close enough that I still got to join everybody for dinner at Sylvesters. Later that night, I took camera and tripod to the beach for some long exposures as the sun went down, although I did something wrong because they came out too dark.

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I started to blog all this last night, but I got too tired to finish. I'll stay here until Sunday morning, and then I'm headed to Pikeville, Kentucky by way of D.C. and whatever scenic routes I can find in Virginia.

Update: The return trip.

I'm going to take a break for a week or so (maybe), but here are a few random shots around the web:

• I've always wondered why the TSA doesn't make it easier for passengers at security checkpoints to mail packages that they're not allowed to take on planes. I believe Jennifer has stumbled on the answer.
• You know how some legal bloggers try to get clients by posting about current events in the news in the hope that one of the participants will Google himself and hire the blogger to represent him? Here's how the the big dog does that.
• Timothy B. Lee has a pretty good response to the Jose Antonio Vargas story, but I actually like this piece of his even better, and not just because it's so similar to one of mine.
• Then there's a post of mine at Nobody's Business about the link between consensual crime enforcement and the abuse of our civil liberties.
• Finally, I posted the "No Knock Raid" music video that everyone else has already posted. Warning: It's not cheerful.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

-- F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

An AP story by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar explains a glitch in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA):

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.

The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.

Up to 3 million more people could qualify for Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the anomaly. That's because, in a major change from today, most of their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted as income for determining eligibility. It might be compared to allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps.

Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster says the situation keeps him up at night.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you try to restructure a huge chunk of the American economy by quickly passing a giant bill that nobody understands.

And this sort of thing isn't really what Hayek was talking about. This is a problem with the way various provisions of the bill interact with themselves and other law. Hayek was talking about the kinds of problems that will arise when this complex piece of legislation collides with the thousands of companies and millions of American's it's going to affect. People will respond in ways that are hard to predict. There will be unintended consequences.

Of course, some problems have already popped up that seem likely to cause a lot of trouble in the future. The worst thing I've heard of so far is the PPACA's attempt to regulate medical loss ratios, which has a pretty good chance of making a lot of health insurance companies -- especially the smaller ones, which would have to manage more volatility in their MLRs -- decide to go into some other business. On the other hand, having insurance companies stop insuring children because of onerous regulations is also pretty bad.

I've had a few job interviews recently, and although the subject has never come up, it seems likely that, in this day and age, someone at one of these companies is probably going Google me, and the first thing they'll find is this blog.

Uh-oh.

So...If you found this blog because I applied for a job at your company or because someone at your company is thinking of hiring me as a consultant, there are a few things I should probably explain...

I'm not like this all the time. I'm not that guy who just has to slip politics into every conversation. ("The project is over budget? Sounds like it's run by a bunch of Liberals!") I know how to turn it off. In fact, I really only turn it on for the blogosphere and for private conversations with other people who share my interests. I understand that some subjects are not suitable for the workplace.

I'm not going to blog about company business. I might end up blogging about some interesting things that happened while I was on the job ("I was in Phoenix on business and someone stole my rental car!"), but I'm not going to blog about company business unless your media policy permits me to talk about it. I understand that some things need to stay confidential.

I'm not going to blog on your dime. If reasonable personal use of the internet is one of the perqs of the job, I'll probably take advantage of that to do some blogging or answer a few comments in my spare time. But other than that, I won't be working on my own projects while you're paying the bill.

I'm not a freak. As a matter of public policy, I think we send too many people to jail for a lot of things that should be legal. That doesn't mean that I want to do those things. I can comply with your workplace policies.

We can talk about the blog. If something on this blog makes you uncomfortable enough that you'd consider not hiring me because of it, tell me about it. If I'm otherwise a good fit to your needs, it would be a shame not to at least try to work something out.

I look forward to working with you.

Thanks,

Mark

No here's a dumb story from Portland, Oregon:

When an apparently drunk man peed in a Mount Tabor reservoir around 1:30am last night, he set off an unprecedented chain reaction.

A security officer who had been watching the man and his four friends drinking from the reservoir guard tower alerted police, then called on the water bureau to take the reservoir offline. Using a new $23 million remote control system, just installed in April, the bureau immediately shut off the pipes leading from the reservoir. The guard and a police officer confronted the men and got their information, including the alleged 21-year-old pee-er.

Then, the water bureau made the call to dump the entire 7.2 million gallons of water in the reservoir, at a cost of over $35,000. That's one expensive trip to the bathroom.

On top of that, the city is working with the district attorney to consider pressing charges against the pee-er, perhaps to help recoup some of the cost. Water Bureau administrator David Shaff isn't sure what the charge would be exactly, "Well, I just dumped 8 million gallons, there's maybe a 'theft' in there somewhere... He has some idea that he's made a mistake, but he has no idea how big."

[Emphasis in the original.]

His mistake wasn't as big as the one the Water Bureau just made by dumping all that water. Maybe I'm missing something but doesn't the Water Bureau clean the water? Not to mention that when you dilute a bladder's worth of urine with seven million gallons of clean water, for all practical purposes the resulting water is still urine-free. Especially since urine itself is mostly water.

Also, urine is normally sterile, so the only risk is from bacteria if the guy had an infection that could get into the urine stream. Another story indicates that he was out that night with four other people. I haven't done the math, but my guess is that those people face a greater health risk than the population of Portland because they probably touched a guy who had just peed without washing his hands.

Jonathan Turley links to yet another story of TSA idiocy:

The family was going through security when two TSA agents singled Drew Mandy out for a special pat down. Drew is severely mentally disabled. He's 29, but his parents said he has the mental capacity of a two-year-old, which made the experience that followed at metro Detroit's McNamera Terminal that much harder to deal with.

"You have got to be kidding me. I honestly felt that those two agents did not know what they were doing," Mandy told us.

Dr. Mandy claimed they asked Drew to place his feet on the yellow shoe line, something he didn't understand. They proceeded to pat his pants down, questioning the padding which was his adult diapers. When the agents asked Drew to take his hand and rub the front and back of his pants so they could swab it for explosives, his dad stepped in and tried to explain that Drew was mentally challenged.

"They said, 'Please, sir, we know what we're doing,'" Mandy said.

The TSA agents saw Drew holding a six-inch plastic hammer.

"My son carries his ball and his hammer for security. He goes everywhere with (them)," said Mandy.

The TSA it seems saw the toy as a weapon.

"He took the hammer and he tapped the wall. 'See, it's hard. It could be used as a weapon,'" Mandy explained.

So the TSA took the toy hammer away. Because they're assholes.

A little over four years ago, a gunman entered a building on the Virginia Tech campus and started shooting. By the time it was over, he had killed 32 people. After the fact, a lot of pundits said stupid things (e.g. blaming it on video games or the gays), but probably the worst comment was from John Derbyshire:

As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake-one of them reportedly a .22.  At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage-your chances aren't bad.

At the time, I went into a great bit of detail about why this kind of thinking is wrong-headed, but it basically boils down to the fact that people in general aren't very good at responding to unusual situations under stress.

About a year later, a bunch of pundits got upset about a 78-year-old man who was supposedly hit by a car and left lying in the street as people walked by. It was apparently a great opportunity to decry the moral poverty of our society, and again I explained why they were overreacting.

I can't say for sure why people at the scene did what they did, but I think we should cut them some slack for the inability of this crowd of strangers to quickly organize a response to an unusual and frightening situation.

Maybe it's because I've spent so much time wrangling computers for busy executives, university professors, and engineers, but I'm not surprised or disappointed when very smart people have trouble figuring out what to do in novel and complex situations. And I've done enough reading about how people respond to crises to know that stress only makes it worse.

Now some people are criticising Dr. Mandy for his handling of the TSA agents who mistreated his mentally disabled son:

Whether it's the parent of a mentally challenged young man, or the mother of a baby, at what point does a parent decide not to back away and acquiesce in the abuse of their child?  Apparently, the tipping point is when told to do so by anyone wearing the uniform of a government agent. 

No doubt Dr. Mandy, an osteopath specializing in pediatrics per a quick search, has spent a good part of his life helping his son to enjoy life as best possible.  He likely a wonderful, caring father who has shown love and devotion to Drew, and that's great.

But some parents would rather take a bullet between their eyes than allow anyone to do harm to their child.  This situation hadn't escalated to the point where bullets were in the offing, and yet Dr. Mandy complied with the instructions of his TSA handlers.  Was there something about them to suggest they really did know what they were doing?  It's hard to believe.

So why did he just back off and let the TSA do as they pleased?  Where is the outrage?  Where is the will to tell the blue-shirted monkeys that they don't have the first clue what they're doing, that they are doing pointless harm to your child and that you are not going to be compliant sheep?

First of all, Dr. Mandy's a mature, accomplished individual. He's wealthy and white. This sort of treatment is probably a bit unusual, and he wasn't prepared for it.

Second, beyond explaining his son's problems to them, what would arguing have accomplished? Yelling at people always feels good, but could he have changed the TSA goon's mind? Gotten him to stop annoying his son? I doubt it.

Third, those TSA people are sort-of cops, but they're the worst kind of cops: A cop with very little power except for one specific area. That you happen to be in. Anyone who's run into a self-important mall cop knows what I mean. Escalating the situation could lead to the family being separated for questioning. Worse, if the father got himself arrested, Drew could have been tossed into some sort of state welfare system until he got out. (Or, since we're talking about the TSA, he could have been left to wander the airport, which might actually be safer.)

Years ago, I read a story by a tough-sounding criminal defense lawyer who got stopped on the highway by a cop who wanted to search the car. He knew he didn't have to let him, but he let the cop do the search anyway because the cost of a confrontation would be too high. You see, the lawyer had his dog in the car. If he got arrested, he was afraid of what would happen to his dog while he was locked up. How much more concerned do you suppose Dr. Mandy was for his son?

I've told my children that my love for them is such that I would jump in front of speeding bullet to protect them.  There have been moments when I'm put to the test, fortunately not a speeding bullet but a time when I am faced with the decision to either stand up and protect them at my own risk, or snivel and justify why I backed away.  I've made my choice. How any parent could back down is unfathomable to me.

Eh, the TSA goons were annoying his son, and they took away one of his toys. Maybe his father should have put on a symbolic show of resistance, but he only had a few seconds to make up his mind, and this is what he did.

And then he got the TSA to apologize and change their training, and the whole stupid incident was turned into a three-minute news segment that's getting attention all over the internet. It's quite possible that mentally challenged air passengers will be treated better as a result. It's not exactly a bad result.

I saw X-Men: First Class on Saturday, and I know some other reviewers don't agree, but I thought it was the best superhero movie I've seen in a long time. I've not seen any of director Matthew Vaughn's other movies, but on the strength of this one, I think I'll have to. It's that good.

It was well-written too, which is a bit of a surprise since there are six credited writers, which is usually a very bad sign. Instead, the movie gives us a pretty good origin story for the X-Men as an organization.

Most superhero stories are escapist fun at a very basic level, and First Class delivers, but as with many of the best superhero comics, there's a strong moral element. Some people complain that comic characters are too simple, but that misses the point. The characters in a story like this are simplified to make their moral choices clearer.

Charles Xavier is a mutant raised in a good home. He's smart, wealthy, and in possession of a telepathic power with few downsides. He looks completely like a normal human and wants to get along with them.

Hank McCoy's beastly mutation has its advantages, but he's also noticeably deformed. He can hide it with the right clothes, but it makes him feel like an outcast. Charles's adopted sister Raven, later to become Mystique, also feels like an outcast. Her power of disguise allows her to hide herself perfectly, but she resents the need to use it.

Then there's Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto, who looks like a normal human. However, as a Jewish child in the heart of Nazi germany, he saw the cruelty that humans could inflict on those who were different. He hides now, but he thinks that a Nazi-like genocide of mutants is inevitable, unless the mutants destroy humanity first.

Please don't let me give you the idea that First Class is yet another show about teen angst over "being different." (I mean, Claire from Heroes was indestructible, and she whined about it. Sheesh.) There's more to the story than just a morality play, including lots of fun with the various mutant powers. And the whole story eventually winds up at the Cuban missile crisis, which turns out to be instigated by a Bond-esque supervillain millionaire named Sebastian Shaw.

The film is visually impressive and at times beautiful. The special effects are impressive, yet they're clear and clean, and about as realistic as you could expect from a superhero movie. They support the story rather than overwhelming our ability to understand it. In one of the key scenes that illustrates their relationship, Charles helps Erik learn to maximize his magnetic powers, which he tests by trying to move an enormous object in the distance. Rather than yet another special effects set piece, the distant motion is quiet and understated. It's not what the scene is about.

All in all, X-Men: First Class is familiar fare, but it's a decent story, well-told, filled with interesting characters and impressive sights.

Joel Rosenberg - husband, father, mensch

On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37pm Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation.

He is survived by his daughters, Judith Eleanor and Rachel Hannah, and his wife, Felicia Herman. Today, June 3rd would have been his 32nd wedding anniversary.

Felicia

Dammit. The internet just got a little less interesting.

Update: Got a little more time now...

I first ran into Joel in the comments at Scott Greenfield's blog, where I was struck by the fact that even though he clearly had an emotional investment in the issues, he was willing to accept the possibility that he could be wrong, he was willing to consider alternative explanations, and he seemed to believe that, despite their errors, most of his opponents were acting with good intentions.

Another time, in his typically disarming style, Joel found a common link between gun owners and gay couples:

[Joel] suggests that after five years, mild-mannered Minnesotans have finally learned that a gun tucked into a waistband isn't the sign of a blood-hungry nutcase.

"It's like the gay couple that moves in down the block," he says. "At first some people get upset, but after a while it's just like, 'Yeah, that's just Joe and Todd.'"

Soon, he made an impression on me in another way when he cost me $99. Actually, if you read that post, Joel didn't really cause the problem -- MovableType just flaked on his avatar photo (above) for some reason -- but he nevertheless apologized in the comments. That fits my impression of Joel: I'm pretty sure he knew I was kidding around, but he nevertheless responded by being courteous. Joel is quite capable of being a pain in the ass to people who've got it coming, but he'd hate to be a pain in the ass unintentionally.

A couple of months later, I invited Joel to be a co-blogger here. I did that based on the strength of his comments at other blogs. What I didn't realize at the time is that Joel was an actual science fiction author. That's right. I had asked a published author to come write for me for free. Joel, however, graciously accepted and went on to write 39 posts for me before moving on.

It's going to be kind of quiet around here without him.