Coastal Dash 2012 Travelogue – Part 2

By on May 18, 2013

I’m finally getting around to posting pictures of my roadtrip from last summer. (Part 1 is here.)

When I went to Avalon in 2011, I was pretty disappointed in the pictures I took. I saw a lot of interesting spots filled with local color that seems a bit exotic to a Midwestern city boy like me. But I was in vacation mode and couldn’t quite bring myself go out of my way to take pictures of any of it, so I just took snapshots of whatever places I happened to be. I kept telling myself that I’d take more pictures next time.

Well, this time was next time, and I did pretty much the same thing. Still, here are a few pictures, starting with this shot of the shore at Avalon:

View of the beach at Avalon, NJ
Beach at Avalon

Just a few miles down the shore in Stone Harbor is Villa Maria By-the-Sea, a retreat for the teaching nuns of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart order.

Villa Maria by the Sea at Stone Harbor, NJ, a retreat for nuns of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart
Villa Maria by the Sea

The town of Avalon is the northernmost incorporated area of a series of barrier islands. I got a few pictures while I was driving across the lagoon between the islands and the shore.

The lagoon between the mainland and the barrier islands at the southeastern tip of New Jersey.
Lagoon at the Jersey Shore
The lagoon between the mainland and the barrier islands at the southeastern tip of New Jersey.
Lagoon at the Jersey Shore
Road leading between the The Roads between the barrier islands at the southeastern tip of New Jersey.
Road at the Jersey Shore

Finally, down at the southern end is Cape May Harbor, where I had lunch at Schooner bar at the Lobster House on one of the small islands. Here’s a picture of the dock area.

Cape May Harbor in Cape May, New Jersey, as seen from the Schooner Bar at the Lobster House
Cape May Harbor

That’s it. So maybe I’ll try to get better pictures next time.

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Coastal Dash 2012 Travelogue – Part 1

By on May 15, 2013

I’m getting ready to start planning my next summer road trip, but I realized I never got around to posting anything about last summer’s road trip.

The trip started the same as any trip from Chicago must start: Stuck in traffic. I left home around 6pm on Friday, so I caught the tail end of the rush hour as I drove through downtown Chicago to get to Indiana. It was pretty rough going into town, but it got better on the way out.

After crossing the border into Indiana, as is my tradition, I filled up on that cheap non-Illinois, non-Cook-County, non-Chicago gas at the Gas-a-roo.

Valero Gas-a-Roo in Hammond, Indiana
Gas-a-Roo

My first real stop for the evening was meeting my friends George and Rich for dinner at Wagner’s ribs in Porter, Indiana. Wagner’s does really good Chicago-style ribs. I prefer to ask for them “Tim’s Style,” which isn’t on the menu any more but they’ll still make up a batch that way if you ask. I no longer remember what it means, but they’re damned good going down.

Wagner's Ribs in Porter, Indiana
Wagner's Ribs

After dinner, I drove east to the Indiana-Ohio border. My plan was to stay the night just over the border in Montpelier, Ohio, a town I had picked off the map because it seemed like the right distance.

My wife travels a lot on business, so she has certain standards for a hotel, but when I’m traveling by myself I really don’t care about the amenities, especially when I’m driving, because the only time I’m in my hotel room is when I’m asleep. So I picked the cheapest hotel that had internet, which turned out to be a mom-and-pop motel called the Plaza Motel, which was actually a little down the road in Bryan.

Plaza Motel in Bryan, Ohio
Plaza Motel

I had told them I’d be a little late, and they promised they’d stay up for me, but I screwed up. I left the restaurant later than I planned to, then I got lost and went a few miles out of my way, so I was running a little late. Or so I thought. I had foolishly forgotten that in driving from Chicago to Ohio I would cross into a new timezone, so I arrived almost an hour and a half later than I’d told them.

Plaza Motel in Bryan, Ohio
Plaza Motel Parking Lot

The office was dark and shut down, so I was mentally preparing to decide whether to sleep in my car or look for another hotel. That latter was looking like it might be difficult since my iPhone had locked up and gone dark about 5 minutes before I got there. However, when I approached the office I discovered that someone was still waiting up for me, and she checked me in without yelling at me, which I thought was very nice of her.

My room was in what looked like a brand-new second building (or at least it was built more recently than the main building). When I got settled in, I tried to hop on the internet, but the wi-fi asked for a password, and I wasn’t about to bother the poor woman in the office again after making her stay up for me. I eventually figured out how to get my iPhone working again and tried to get on the internet, but it only had Edge service, which might have worked but I lacked the patience to try. I went to sleep.

Plaza Motel in Bryan, Ohio
Plaza Motel Second Building

The next day I woke up, got some breakfast, and took a long and uneventful drive across Ohio and most of Pennsylvania, following I-80 all the way. As evening approached, I estimated that I would be stopping near Scranton, and I asked my wife to find a hotel for me. She picked out a place called the Pocono Inne Town, which had a decent rate and sounded like a nice place to rest up after a long drive.

Pocono Inne Town in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania
Pocono Inne Town

As it turns out, Stroudsburg is a bit of a college town, and the Pocono Inne Town was the party hotel located right in the middle of downtown Stroudsburg. I could hear a ruckus from the hotel bar while I was checking in, but my room on the fourth floor was quiet enough, although not really up to the standards of the Plaza Motel I had stayed in the night before.

Lobby of Pocono Inne Town in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania
Lobby of Pocono Inne Town

It was a very old building with some odd features. For example, I travel with a lot of gear which I didn’t want to leave in the car, so after getting my key I loaded up a luggage cart in the lobby and took the elevator up to my floor and followed the directions to my room, only to discover that I couldn’t take the cart all the way because there were some stairs in the middle of the hallway.

Random stair to frustrate luggage carts in Pocono Inne Town in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania
Random Stairs Pocono Inne Town

The next morning I hit the road on the final leg of my outbound trip. The drive through the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania is very beautiful, but it’s hard to find places to pull over to take a picture. But knowing I’d be posting a travelogue, I decided I’d better stop at at least one “scenic overlook” to get a few pictures. This one was pretty decent:

Scenic Overlook in Eastern Pennsylvania
Scenic Overlook in Eastern Pennsylvania

And here’s a panoramic view:

Panorama of Scenic Overlook in Eastern Pennsylvania
Panorama of Scenic Overlook in Eastern Pennsylvania

(My gallery plugin doesn’t present that very well, so you might just want to look directly at the image in your browser here.)

I made it through the hills and tunnels into north Jersey in time for a late lunch at someplace called the Six Brothers Diner, which had some pretty decent food.

Six Brothers Diner
Six Brothers Diner

After that, it was one long trip down the Garden State Parkway to Avalon on the Jersey Shore, where I met up with my wife (she had come out earlier with friends). We had dinner that evening at the Princeton on Ocean drive. Here’s a shot I took looking out at the street.

Princeto Grill Bar in Avalon
Princeto Grill Bar in Avalon

More to come…

Update: I almost forgot. On my trip out east I stopped in to meet Jeff Gamso and his wife. Here’s a picture of Jeff with his puppydog, looking not too much like a badass capital defense lawyer.

Jeff Gamso
Jeff Gamso

Update: Part 2 is here.

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Illicit Transfer of Cookery

By on May 14, 2013

Who didn’t see this coming?

America has already started detaining and arresting people for the obviously suspicious act of moving a pressure cooker from one location to another.

I feel safer already.

I suppose the real question is when will we finally come to our senses and outlaw doing science in pressure cookers?

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A Few Reasons for Opposing Background Checks For Gun Purchases

By on May 13, 2013

I see lots of political and policy commentary go by on Facebook, and I’d like to respond to some of it, but Facebook is a very annoying place for that kind of give-and-take. People don’t write articles or blog posts on Facebook, they post images with text in them, and the only response you can provide is a brief comment. It’s not as bad as Twitter, but it’s not a great format for they way I write — Windypundit has turned out to be more than just a reference to my hometown.

For example, I saw this the other day:

BackgroundCheckSecondAmendment

Then why don’t we have waiting lists for any of the other rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights? Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to remain silent, the right to counsel…hell, that last one, if you can’t afford a lawyer, the government pays for one for you.

In an earlier era, some states required literacy or citizenship tests in order for people to vote, supposedly to ensure that voters had some minimal level of intelligence and were able to understand the issues. In reality, this was a way to stop African Americans from voting, sometimes by blatantly requiring them to take more difficult tests. And today, whenever some Republican proposes stricter voter registration–requiring say, bringing ID to a voter registration office–progressives point out that this will tend to suppress the vote of poor people, mostly minorities, who don’t have the easy ability to take time off from work, or don’t have a car to drive 30 miles to the registration office.

Gun owners have similar concerns about background checks — that they will create an excessive burden on gun owners, or that government officials will abuse them to deny gun transfers arbitrarily. For example, when gun control advocates were pushing the Brady Bill to require waiting periods and background checks, opponents pointed out a curious thing about the bill: It required gun stores to get a background check on potential buyers before selling them a gun, but it did not require any government agency to perform a background check and produce a result in a timely manner. Governments could have denied otherwise lawful purchases by simply not fulfilling background check requests.

(Think that’s paranoid? It doesn’t seem that way from here in Chicago. A few decades ago, the city passed a law requiring handgun registration, and then shortly thereafter the city stopped accepting new handgun registrations, effectively banning residents from acquiring handguns.)

And speaking of the Brady Bill…it’s now the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. It passed. It’s the law of the land. All federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct background checks on buyers through NICS. So don’t think that just because the “background checks” bill didn’t pass that there are no background checks.

You may not find any of these arguments convincing, but you wouldn’t have to be crazy, insane, or an NRA lobbyist to believe there’s something to them.

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The Unreal Liberal Argument for Conscription

By on May 11, 2013

I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for the liberal/progressive mindset because I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1960′s. The era brought lots of changes for the better — the free speech movement, the expansion of civil rights, Miranda and Gideon — but the one that most vividly affected me at the time was the abolition of the draft. I was only 8 years old — too young to have any understanding of war or dying — but just the idea that I could be forced to leave my friends and family to spend years in the army was frightening enough.

Conscription ended in 1973, but the government required young men to continue registering for the draft until the selective service system was shut down in 1976. That period of respect for freedom lasted all of four years, until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1980, and President Carter re-instituted selective service registration to show the Soviets that we were really seriously angry at them. (The fact that the Soviets have since been driven out of Afghanistan and we invaded it ourselves a few years ago would seem to imply that selective service registration is no longer necessary, but nobody listens to me.)

Since then, the United States has become the single preeminent superpower in the world. No other nation comes close. We basically won the war for global domination. And yet there are still those calling for a return to conscription.

Surprisingly to me, these calls come not from war-mongers on the political right, but from the ideological descendants of the same political liberals who so effectively opposed conscription in the ’60′s and ’70′s. I just noticed an example of this from David Sirota at In These Times in an article titled “The Military’s 40-Year Experiment”:

In operations across the globe, the all-volunteer military has been employed by policymakers to birth what Gen. George Casey recently called the “era of persistent conflict.” Four decades later, we therefore have an obligation to ask: How much of the public’s complicity in that epochal shift is a result of the end of the draft?

This is the beginning of a common bring-back-the-draft argument: That the reason we live in a time of seemingly continuous war is that not enough Americans care enough to oppose it, and they don’t oppose it because they know that it would mostly be fought by other people’s children. Bringing back the draft would mean no one was safe from the consequences of war, which would make us think more carefully as a nation before going to war.

(The idea of making things worse to raise public opposition to make them better is not unusual among those seeking social change. The movie Amistad portrays some abolitionists as wanting the Africans to lose in court because it would help build support for abolition, terrorists often hope to incite reprisals from their targets that will serve to send more people into their arms, and both white and black racial separatists in America have tried to foment racial war, each thinking it would rally their race to their side.)

Sirota supports his argument by looking back to the Nixon administration’s thinking about how to end the draft:

[A] look back at some lost history shows that today’s public acquiescence to militarism was exactly what the government wanted when it ended the draft.

That loaded term—“militarism”—was, in fact, a prominent part of the 1970 report by President Nixon’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force. In its findings, the panel worried about “a cycle of anti-militarism” in a nation then questioning America’s increasingly martial posture.

Noting that “the draft is a major source of antagonism” toward the growing military-industrial complex, the report praised the fact that “an all-volunteer force offers an obvious opportunity to curb the growth of anti-militaristic sentiment.”

Nixon’s commission did devote some empty rhetoric to downplaying “the fear of increased military aggressiveness or reduced civilian concern” about military actions in the event of an all-volunteer force. But the report’s political conclusions were clear: By disconnecting most Americans from the blood-and-guts consequences of war, the end of the draft would “decrease dissent stemming from conscription” and “close one of the channels” of anti-war organizing.

It’s fascinating that people in the Nixon administration thought this, but both theory and history demonstrate that they (and David Sirota) were missing a big part of the picture. Sirota is also proceeding from a false assumption about our history of warfare.

Today, such conclusions read like prophecy. Though polls showed that many Americans opposed the Iraq War, that invasion and occupation was historically unprecedented in length and yet never generated the kind of mass protest that earlier shorter wars evoked.

So Sirota’s evidence of how bloodthirsty we are is that the Iraq War was “unprecedented in length”? This is disingenuous. As I write this, the Iraq war is only a little longer than the Vietnam War (and maybe shorter, depending on when you want to say Vietnam started) and the U.S. death toll is just under 4500. By comparison, the U.S. death toll in Vietnam was more than that in every year from 1966 to 1970. In 1968 alone, almost 17000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Same thing for the Afghanistan War. Same thing for all the forward deployments to far-flung bases and one-off missions.

David Sirota is writing as if we’re living through a time that suffers unprecedented levels of war, but he’s mistaken in that premise. The last dozen years are more violent that the dozen years that preceded them, but we’re still living in a time of relative peace, and the wars we’re fighting are producing relatively few American casualties.

Let’s consider the numbers: The gigantic death toll of World War II would skew the numbers in a way that’s hard to think about, so for the sake of argument let’s set aside those 400,000 dead soldiers and consider the period from the end of World War II to the end of conscription in 1973. In that 29-year period, we had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and a number of small deployments that lead to the combat deaths of almost 95,000 American soldiers, for an average of a little over 3200 deaths per year.

After conscription ended in 1973, no American solders died in war for the next 6 years. Things got only a little more violent over the next two decades, with about 400 more combat deaths in the ’80′s (mostly Beirut) and the ’90′s (mostly the first Gulf War). Even with the explosion of violence from the War on Terror (6700 U.S. soldiers dead and still counting) the average annual combat death rate for the post-conscription era is only about 200 per year, or 1/16th the rate during conscription.

Even if we accept Sirota’s implied hypothesis that the War on Terror since the 2003 invasion of Iraq represents the new normal, that’s an average death rate of about 670 per year, or about 20% of the rate during conscription. In the worst year of the War on Terror, 2007, we had 1021 combat deaths, still less than one third of the average during conscription. (By comparison, drivers on Illinois highways have become familiar with electronic signs proclaiming that 957 people died in traffic accidents in this state in 2012.)

Yet Sirota is clearly right about Americans being less engaged with the war:

The pattern suggests that in the absence of conscription, dissent—if it exists at all—becomes a low-grade affair (an email, a petition, etc.) but not the kind of serious movement required to compel military policy changes. Why? Because as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, without a draft “wars remain an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally.”

And yet despite this apparent apathy, the statistics show that war casualties are far lower in the post-conscription era. That doesn’t keep Sirota from reaching an idiotic conclusion:

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But forty years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces—a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

Ending conscription may have “weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces” as Sirota believes, but judging by the stunning decline in the death toll, there must be something that caused the U.S. to become far less militant.

An economist wouldn’t have a hard time identifying a likely cause. (And conservative economist Milton Friedman was one of the key figures arguing for an all-volunteer military force.) Fewer Americans may have a personal connection to the costs of warfare now that they and their friends and family can’t be drafted, but ending conscription vastly increased the influence of those Americans who care the most about the human cost of our wars: The soldiers themselves.

In market terms, under conscription the price of a soldier’s labor was held artificially low because draftees had no right to refuse the deal and therefore they had no bargaining power. But since the end of conscription, no solder has joined the military against their will. Every single soldier must consent to the risks of combat. And that consent now comes at a much higher price.

A big part of that price has been paid not in salary and benefits but in a reduction in the rate at which soldiers are sacrificed to combat. Just as corporations facing high labor costs will switch to more capital-intensive operations, the increased bargaining power of American solders has forced the U.S. military to invest heavily in equipment and training to make soldiers more effective with less risk.

An all volunteer army isn’t going to put up with shoddy equipment and poor support. They want reliable guns, working radios, GPS guidance, body armor that can stop an enemy bullet, vehicles that can take a rocket hit or an IED, good battlefield intelligence, air support, decent food, medical care, and internet service. There’s a reason it costs over $800,000 per year to put a soldier in Afghanistan, and it isn’t the soldier’s pay.

Note that all this doesn’t mean that the end of conscription increased the cost of warfare. The difference is that under conscription the cost of warfare was unfairly borne by the soldiers, whose labor, safety, and lives were confiscated for the public good. Now that those soldiers’ services have to be purchased at market rates, the cost is more properly borne by the American people on whose behalf they are fighting.

I suppose you could argue that it’s unfair to compare the present low-intensity wars against the major land conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, but I think that just proves my point: The folks who choose our wars are a lot more careful when when they have to pay the full market price for warfighters.

I’m not arguing that the War on Terror is insignificant, but it is a huge improvement on the horrors of the past. And keep in mind that having wars which are “an abstraction—a distant and unpleasant series of news items that does not affect (most people) personally” is a good thing. The alternative is a much higher human cost.

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Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship!

By on May 11, 2013

Chris Hallquist intrigued me with a recent post about the number of crazy people who think an armed revolution will be needed in the US in the next few years. I’ll ignore the horrible infographic he used at the start of the post for now since I’m currently more interested in his attitude toward such an armed rebellion against the government.

Chris suggests that these people (supposedly 29 percent of Americans) would be too busy getting ready to avoid or run from such a rebellion if they really believed it was coming soon. And I see his point. There are, after all, currently more than a million refugees fleeing Syria’s rebellion.

I’m certainly not in that 29 percent who thinks we will need (or be in) an armed rebellion any time soon (or, indeed, in my lifetime), but I would be one who would take up arms if needed rather than try to hide from the rebellion. Maybe that’s just my age talking. Rebellions tend to involve the young and the old. Those in the middle often have too much to lose.

Hmm, I guess that makes me quite selfish. I’d be pushing the rebellion along, dragging the young with me, who don’t realize the value of their own lives, while putting everyone else who doesn’t want to be involved in mortal danger. All for my high-minded ideals.

And if we win, the surviving young would build statues to assholes like me.

Yeah, that sounds nice. Just be sure to get my beard right.

Seriously, though, that’s my point. I’ve always supported the Second Amendment on the principle that, someday, citizens may need it to defend themselves from the government. I don’t own a gun, nor do I want to own a gun. In case you didn’t know, those things are dangerous!

Still, if the situation arose where I thought we needed to rebel against our government, that danger is a useful trait.

Yet in every rebellion I’ve ever studied, the vast majority of the population just wants to get away, or simply survive. It’s a small minority of the people actually fighting on either side of such a conflict. Most are just like Chris Hallquist, simply looking for a way to lay low until the conflict blows over one way or another.

Studying the American Revolution has made me realize how few people carried the population along towards war and how they used questionable morality and ethics to do so. Nelson Mandela, on the other hand, turned away from violent rebellion and successfully overthrew a well established and armed government using peaceful methods.

Is defending the Second Amendment just the selfish act of a minority of old assholes like me with grand notions of a just armed rebellion? Have I now lost so much of my libertarian ideals that I can’t even muster the strength to defend the Second Amendment anymore?

Come on. The readers on this site should be able to reason some sense back into me. Give it a shot. Or maybe I just need to dig out some of the Heinlein books I read too often as a kid. I just have to avoid picking up that copy of Forever War from the same box.

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George Bush is History’s Greatest Monster

By on May 8, 2013

George Bush is History’s Greatest Monster. No, not W — he’s another matter — I’m talking about his father.

I just finished using an auger to unclog a toilet for what must be the 200th time since we had to replace our old, reliable toilet with one of the low-flow models. We used to have good, working toilets in this country. Reliable toilets. Toilets that we could count on to flush the dump we took after a whole day of eating Mexican food, including the half-roll of toilet paper it took to wipe ourselves down. Now all we have are inadequate rage-inducing pieces of junk that can barely flush away a few pieces of tissue paper.

All thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 1992, signed by so-called small-government Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Yeah. Fuck that guy.

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Why Don’t Authors’ Websites List Their Books in the Right Order?

By on May 1, 2013

Monday night I finished reading Linda Nagata’s far-future epic series The Bohr Maker, Deception Well and Vast back-to-back-to-back, and I wanted to take a break from amazing stories of super-science and find something a little more down to earth, so I looked at my Kindle’s recommendations and something about Mark Gimenez’s Accused caught my eye. Yeah, a new courtroom drama sounded about right.

But the description says it’s a sequel, so I figured I’d try to find the first one in the series. Amazon is useless for that kind of thing, so I Googled up Gimenez’s website and found this:

Mark Gimenez Website 2013-04

Well, that’s pretty useless to me. The site does not list the books by series or even in order of publication. So if I want to start reading Gimenez’s work, I have to figure out the publication dates myself. Amazon lists publication dates, but I’d have to look up every book individually. Even worse, the publication dates on Amazon seem to be the date the book was first sold on Amazon, which may not have anything to do with the order they were originally published.

Fortunately, I’ve learned that one of the best sources of this kind of information is the author’s bio page on Wikipedia. Gimenez’s page doesn’t break them down by series, but at least it gives a publication order:

  • The Color of Law (2005)
  • The Abduction (2007)
  • The Perk (2008)
  • The Common Lawyer (2009)
  • Accused (2010)

Minutes later, I had downloaded and started reading The Color of Law.

But it bothered me. Mark Gimenez wasn’t the first time I’d run across an author whose website didn’t give me useful information about their books. I’d seen it a lot, and I wanted to know why.

I decided to check out what science fiction author Charles Stross did on his website. His blog is one of my regular reads — as are his books — and it’s clear he spends a lot of time thinking about how the publishing industry works. I figured he’d have a pretty good list of books, but no, it’s almost as screwed up as the rest of them.

Stross’s US books page breaks out his two major series, Merchant Princes and Laundry Files, but otherwise all the books are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent first. I figured that might make some marketing sense because the casual visitor probably just wants to see if he has anything recent, but it’s a crazy thing to do in a series, especially one like Merchant Princes, which tells a single coherent story. Once you know how Trade of Queens ends, you won’t want to read the five books that came before it.

Because Stross seems to like explaining things like this, I decided to ask him directly why authors’ websites don’t list the series in any meaningful order of publication. He very kindly took the time to respond:

The primary reason is that most readers don’t want to wade through a lengthy list of stuff they’ve already read or which was published years ago: they want to see the new stuff first!

Also, if you’re maintaining a log of books, it’s easiest to add new content at the top.

Also, publication order may not reflect the order in which books were written. Or the order in which series are intended to be read.

But, in a nutshell: the place for an order-of-publication list is a bibliography or FAQ. The place for a reverse-order list with most-recent-first is a promo page telling people BUY MY BOOKS!!!1!!ELEVENTY!!!PLEASE.

(Stross is something of an ubergeek.)

So I guess that’s the explanation. Most of the people checking out an author’s website for books aren’t like me. They don’t obsessively want to read his books from the beginning. They just want to know what’s new.

I assume that people like me who want a specific reading list will just keep looking until we find it. For what it’s worth, I’ve found that if I want to know how to read a particular subset of a particular author’s books in a particular order, the first (and often only) source to check is Wikipedia.

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Fighting Crime the Easy Way

By on April 29, 2013

Apparently, iPhone theft is a big enough problem in San Francisco that police have come up with a special solution:

…these cops are taking a different approach than just running after iPhone robbers and cuffing them. Instead, they are going after the buyers of the stolen products, in a scheme that they call “cutting the head off the snake”. San Francisco Police Captain Joe Garrity says that if the iPhone thieves aren’t able to sell their goods, there’s no market for them.

That sounds reasonable. Instead of going after iPhone thieves one at a time, they’re going to try to shut down the professional fences who create the market. That actually sounds reasonably intelli… Oh. I see. That’s not what they’re doing at all.

In the scheme, an undercover cop, Tom Lee, dresses up as a normal civilian and speaks like the buyers that he is targeting. He has worked at an Apple retail store before, so he knows all of the lingo of persuading people to purchase his goods. When approaching a buyer, he confirms that the iPhone he is selling is stolen, and instead of offering a price for the phone, he asks the potential buyer to make an offer.

Once the buyer offers to purchase the phone, and begins the transaction process, Lee signals nearby undercover officers to come in and arrest the buyer. With this scheme, the police officers are poisoning the market for stolen electronic goods and making would-be buyers think twice before making an illegal transaction.

Ah, so instead of going after grab-and-run street thieves who steal iPhones one at a time, they’re going after ordinary folks who are willing to buy phones from total strangers one at a time. I assume San Francisco police have decided to do this because all arrests count the same in their activity reports, and this way involves less running.

I have no idea if this constitutes entrapment, but it sure sounds like a colossal waste of time that doesn’t do a damned thing to stop crime. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Just read what lawyer George Gascon has to say:

[Gascon] states that these operations “yield little deterrence” and don’t really lower iPhone thefts in the city. Instead, he believes that these sting operations fuel the fire for more iPhone thefts. He says,

“The numbers don’t appear to be abating at all. This is like a drug war — the more arrests you make for drug use, the more drug use seems to go on.”

Oops, I hope I didn’t give you the impression that Gascon was a criminal defense lawyer. He’s not. He’s a San Francisco District Attorney. Yeah. It’s a really dumb way to fight crime.

(Hat tip:@sergiopereira)

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Here Come the Naked Rescuers

By on April 24, 2013

Hallandale Beach Police have got a great job:

The police officer lay face down on the massage table, on duty, unarmed and naked.

For 30 minutes Shu Yuan Sun worked the muscles of the officer’s back, his shoulders and legs, and then told him, “Turn over.” And that, said Hallandale Beach Police Sgt. Todd Crevier, is when the crime went down.

(Went down, get it?)

During one visit, the woman identified as Nikki “brushed her hand across my penis” and then “made an up and down motion with her hand” to indicate an offer of masturbation, wrote one officer. The officer said he declined, saying, “Maybe next time.”

Naturally, this raises a few questions regarding just how far a police officer should go to make a prostitution arrest. And here’s the answer from Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy:

“Sometimes officers have to make their own moral decision as it relates what they feel comfortable with,” he said.

So your officers get to make their own moral decisions, but when these women and their customers make moral decisions you disagree with, you drag them off and throw them in a cage? Fuck you, Dwayne. Fuck you in your ass with a cactus.*

Of course Dwayne offers the usual excuse, invoking the moral panic du jour:

Hallandale Beach Police Chief Dwayne Flournoy said the nude stings are integral to a joint investigation with federal authorities into human trafficking, where women, many from China, are held as sex slaves. Florida ranks third in the nation in the number of such cases, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center.

Yes, yes, they were rescuing these women from the ubiquitous-but-oh-so-elusive sex slavery rings of America.

The thing is, this is the United States of America. We had slavery, actual real slavery, for about 250 years. And during much of that time, we had real rescue operations. How exactly the “underground railroad” worked isn’t entirely clear because it operated in secrecy and few records were kept, but it didn’t involve dragging the slaves off to cages and publishing their names and pictures in the newspaper.

Yes, I realize that modern slavery is different, and some women really are coerced into sex slavery, but even so, what the Hallandale Beach police are doing still isn’t how you rescue slaves.

Hat tip: @mistressmatisse

*”Fuck you in your ass with a cactus” is a trademark of Marc Randazza.

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A Bad Week For Liberty

By on April 21, 2013

It’s been a rough week for liberty.

To begin with, we had two terrorist style attacks, the moderately successful Boston Marathon bombing, and the failed ricin poisoning. I doubt either attack was because “they hate our freedom” (few attacks are) but the attacks themselves are attacks on our freedom. As is often the case, just as the human body’s immune system sometimes overreacts to a contagion and does more damage than the disease, the overreaction of the government to terrorism often does a great deal of harm.

In this case, the overreaction was triggered after one of the bombing suspects was killed in a shootout, but the other was on the run, a state of affairs which prompted the easily alarmed Boston Police to shut down the whole city while they tried to catch him. I don’t know what law gives them the right to order citizens off the streets of the whole city — perhaps they used an absurdly broad interpretation of their power to order people away from danger at the scene of a hostage taking or bank robbery — but I’ m guessing they seriously exceeded their constitutional powers.

It’s also kind of stupid to detain millions of people in their homes for no good reason. These people faced real costs, not just in wages losses but also in time, convenience, and freedom, all to avoid a risk that was actually very small. Police should have warned them, and then let them make their own choices.

Then there’s the fact that police allowed Dunkin’ Donuts to stay open so police officers could get food while on duty. As Clark at Popehat brilliantly points out this demonstrates that the Boston Police Department is run by insincere hypocrites:

The government and police were willing to shut down parts of the economy like the universities, software, biotech, and manufacturing…but when asked to do an actual risk to reward calculation where a small part of the costs landed on their own shoulders, they had no problem weighing one versus the other and then telling the donut servers “yeah, come to work – no one’s going to get shot.”

Like minor bureaucratic authoritarians everywhere, they completely dismiss the concerns of anyone who isn’t them.

And then there’s Senator Lindsey Graham, who released an asinine statement from himself and Senator John McCain:

It is clear the events we have seen over the past few days in Boston were an attempt to kill American citizens and terrorize a major American city. The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorist trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans.

Actually, Senator, they didn’t just try to injure, maim, and kill innocent American. They succeeded. But go on, I’m sure you’re making a point…

Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks.

What a tool. The suspect wasn’t part of some foreign invasion force. He’s a criminal who killed some people. We put criminals in jail all the time. There’s no need for this Jack-Bauer-national-security bullshit.

We will stand behind the Administration if they decide to hold this suspect as an enemy combatant.

I won’t.

(On the other hand, the whole issue of him being questioned without Miranda warnings is something of a distraction for reasons explained here.)

Meanwhile, as everyone was watching other news, the House passed CISPA.

For the second year in a row,  the House voted to approve CISPA, a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government.

…

“This bill undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users,” said Rainey Reitman, EFF Activism Director.  “Hundreds of thousands of Internet users opposed this bill, joining the White House and Internet security experts in voicing concerns about the civil liberties ramifications of CISPA.  We’re committed to taking this fight to the Senate and fighting to ensure no law which would be so detrimental to online privacy is passed on our watch.”

Finally, I’ll leave you with a few depressing comments from Rick Horowitz.

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No Comps For the Homeless in Vegas

By on April 15, 2013

In an earlier post, I pointed out that not even the most heartless Ayn Rand disciple would go as far as some city governments and make it a crime to feed homeless people. I singled out Las Vegas as an example, citing a report by the ACLU:

In 2006, the City of Las Vegas became locked in a bizarre war with homeless advocates, and decided that no one should be engaging in charity in the public parks… When the ACLU of Nevada took issue with this interpretation of permit laws, the City took a more direct approach: it explicitly outlawed the sharing of food with anyone who looked poor…

Other homeless individuals were being kicked out of parks under a questionable trespass policy called “86”ing, where Park Marshals essentially took photographs of certain people – almost always homeless people – who were then kicked out of the public parks on pain of a trespass misdemeanor if they returned. The 86ing process had no paperwork, no right to appeal, and no due process whatsoever.

In my post, I summarized this mindset as, “How dare you help the poor yourself! You should be paying us to help them.”

In a comment, Jeff Gamso offered a different theory:

You probably give Las Vegas too much credit when you say that it insists that it alone provide for the needs of the poor.

The real message, I suspect, is that it doesn’t give a rat’s ass for the poor and that anyone giving them sustenance induces them to stick around rather than either dying or migrating to a less heartless community…

I had assumed Las Vegas has some sort of city-approved homeless services through which they wanted to funnel all aid. But I have to admit Gamso’s theory seems plausible. We could probably summarize that mindset as, “Ick! Smelly, smelly homeless people!”

Out of curiosity, I decided to Google around to see what kind of homelessness programs were available in Vegas, and it turns out there are a few. The real payoff, however, came from finding the official Las Vegas city government Ten-Year Homeless Services plan which specifies a grand total of two (2) programs for the homeless.

I admit don’t know much about homelessness, or what cities try to do about it, but neither of these two programs seems intended to actually help the homeless.

Reconnection to Family Program
This program provides one-way, one-time, out-of-town transportation assistance to individuals and families to reach designated housing with awaiting family and/or other secure housing situations and support.

In other words, although they try to dress it up as a plan for reuniting families, I think we can summarize Part 1 of Las Vegas’s Ten-Year Homeless services plan as putting homeless people on a bus out of town.

So it seems Jeff Gamso was right. At least until you read the description of the second program (complete with spiffy brochure):

Las-Vegas-Donation-Station-DetailDonation Stations to End Homelessness
A way to contribute to the city’s Home for Homeless Nevadans: 10 Year Plan to Reduce Homelessness. Spare change normally given to panhandlers will be redirected into programs for those at-risk of homelessness and currently homeless in the city of Las Vegas. Restored parking meters are painted a vibrant green color and installed in strategic downtown locations with significant foot traffic and panhandling issues. All collected coins will go directly to enhancing the city’s Housing and Homeless Services Program.

In other words, the goal of this program is to get residents to stop giving money to the homeless, and instead to give to the city of Las Vegas, which promises to use it to do nice things for homeless people. Perhaps even putting them on a bus out of town.

So it looks like Jeff Gamso and I were both right: The people who run Las Vegas don’t give a rat’s ass about homeless people, and they want you to pay them rather than helping the homeless directly.

I have to admit I don’t know much about homelessness, so before I posted this, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t criticizing programs that were actually more effective than they sounded. I contacted Neil Donovan, Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, who responded that

Unfortunately, these idea are all too common. They are even suggested by some “federal partners” and “advocacy” organizations. Las Vegas just happens to be “one of the best of the worst ideas”. It’s all too apparent that the homeless were not part of this planning process.

He went on to make a very important point about how governments respond to homelessness:

Las Vegas and hundreds of other communities are so frustrated by the chronic nature of this national social crisis called homelessness that they criminalize the very activities of daily living for those who are unhoused…

The homeless are hardly the only group that finds their everyday life to be the target of law enforcement, but they may be the least able to resist through the political process. Even worse, they are also the least able to give in: Criminalize driving while using a cell phone, and I’ll switch to a hands-free system, but what the heck is a homeless person supposed to do if you make it a crime to search dumpsters for food or accept handouts from strangers? Criminal punishment only works as a deterrent when people have options.

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More About Talking To a Lawyer When Arrested

By on April 10, 2013

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an organization called First Defense Legal Aid that provides legal advice to people arrested or detained by the Chicago Police, just by calling 1-800-LAW-REP-4. Criminal defense lawyer Matt Haiduk (whose blog I quoted in the original post) adds this note in a comment:

…don’t ever think it’s as easy as mentioning you want a lawyer and thinking they’re going to give you a phone to call one. You have to absolutely refuse to answer any of their questions until a lawyer is present. Believe it or not, the cops don’t like this. Sometimes they’ll just stop the questioning and leave it at that (without letting you call a lawyer). It’s not uncommon for them to screw with you, though (ie. asking for the name of your lawyer before you call anybody).

I’ve had clients call from the station and when I talk to the cops (and tell them not to ask another question until I get there) they’ll tell me that they can’t be sure I’m really a lawyer, or that my client “isn’t a suspect” so it shouldn’t much matter, etc.

Be persistent, regardless of what they tell you, or what you’ve previously told them.

That sounds like good advice from a lawyer.

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“I’ve got mine, Jack!” Is a Lie

By on April 9, 2013

I’ve heard Stephen Colbert summarize the Objectivist mindset — and by extension, libertarian mindset — as “I’ve got mine, Jack!” This is true as far as it goes, but it is also a lie by omission.

Consider this story in the Wall Street Journal:

There’s no free lunch, goes the old saying. The IRS may take that literally.

The Internal Revenue Service is looking into the “free lunches” that companies like Google Yahoo Facebook , and other Silicon Valley heavyweights provide to their employees, and whether those meals should be subject to taxation.

“It appears for a lot of these companies that they’re not actually including (them) in their employees paychecks or W-2s and therefore the question is whether there’s some skirting of the tax laws,”

I think that illustrates the government mindset pretty well, which could perhaps be summarized as “Oh, you’ve got nice stuff! I’m going to take some.”

You see, what Stephen Colbert and other critics leave out is that libertarians always follow “I’ve got mine” with “and you’ve got yours.” Leaving that out makes libertarianism seem pretty selfish.

To be fair, Ayn Rand also criticized people for giving in to their altruistic impulse, as if helping the needy was some kind of weakness. Then again, even the staunchest Ayn Rand disciple wouldn’t have done this:

In 2006, the City of Las Vegas became locked in a bizarre war with homeless advocates, and decided that no one should be engaging in charity in the public parks. The City began ticketing good Samaritans who shared food with more than 24 people, under the belief that giving food to people already in the public park violated statutes requiring permits for gatherings of 25 or more people. When the ACLU of Nevada took issue with this interpretation of permit laws, the City took a more direct approach: it explicitly outlawed the sharing of food with anyone who looked poor…

Other homeless individuals were being kicked out of parks under a questionable trespass policy called “86”ing, where Park Marshals essentially took photographs of certain people – almost always homeless people – who were then kicked out of the public parks on pain of a trespass misdemeanor if they returned. The 86ing process had no paperwork, no right to appeal, and no due process whatsoever.

I’m not even sure how to summarize that mindset…maybe “How dare you help the poor yourself! You should be paying us to help them.”

(Hat tip: Reason 24/7)

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Yet Another Tale of the Awful, Awful People at ICE

By on April 6, 2013

I have long maintained that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has some of the worst un-American tendencies of any identifiable group in the country. Whether they’re turning back friendly tourists, keeping out musical styles they don’t understand, jailing people for years and deporting them for crimes they were never convicted of, or letting cancer victims die in their custody, in a nation that prides itself on diversity, it would be hard to find a similar bunch of intolerant thugs that wasn’t on the SPLC’s list of hate groups.

Now, via Maggie, here’s another example of ICE depravity, as described by Clay Nikiforuk, a young woman traveling through the United States:

First I was held by Vermont border guards for two hours in the middle of the night on my way to visit Nashville. They searched my bags at least five times. I could not help but notice how often my lingerie and “sexy underwear” were mentioned, how often the condoms they found were looked upon scathingly, and how most of the four male officers’ questions pertained to both. I was baffled as to why this was any of their business and unsure of what their objective was, other than fondling lady’s undergarments.

While I wouldn’t discount the pervert explanation — ICE is a sibling agency to the fondlers at the TSA — my assumption was that the ICE goons did the math something like this:

Lingerie + Condoms = Filthy, Filthy Whore!

The young lady’s next encounter confirms it:

The next time it happened was two weeks later in Montreal’s airport. After scanning my passport, without being asked a single question, I was immediately led to a back waiting room. When I was summoned into an office, the officer cut to the chase: “How much is he paying you to go on this trip?” He was referring to the man I was travelling with.

Confused, I just stared back at him for a few beats.

“N-nothing?”

The next question was whether this man was married or not. The answer, unfortunately for me, was yes. He asked whether I was planning on sharing a hotel bed with this man. I’m not one to sugar coat things and decided that now would not be a particularly good time to be found lying. Again, I answered yes. Righteous, the officer demanded what exactly I was doing in a bed with a married man.

“That’s actually none of your business.”

I had kicked the hornet’s nest. Inflamed, he raised his voice at me that it was his business and that adultery was a crime in America — a crime that he could deny me entry for. He made me tell him my partner’s name and date of birth and threatened to detain him, too. I pointed out that we would be in Miami for a total of forty minutes to catch our next flight to Aruba; hardly enough time to run to our gate, let alone commit adultery. The next thing I knew he was searching my bags, pulling out condoms and waving them in my face.

“I could have you charged with being a working girl! The proof is right here!”

They eventually let her go, but on her third passage through U.S. territory, this happened:

This time I had left the condoms behind. But it was too late – there was a detailed profile of me, in which my nefarious condom-carrying behaviour was noted. Again, I was told to sit and wait for further questioning.

I watched as my entire flight’s passengers whizzed through customs in front of me. I was shaking. By the time someone got around to questioning me, I was told my flight was leaving.

I was detained, yelled at, patted down, fingerprinted, interrogated, searched, moved from room to room and person to person without food, water or being told what was going on for what seemed like forever. Just as I thought they were tiring of me and going to refuse me entry but at least let me back into Aruba, a ‘Bad Cop’ type took me to a distant, isolated office and yelled at me that I was full of shit. He had found information online that in the last couple of years I had been modelling and acting. This, he concluded, was special code for sex work, and I was never going to enter the U.S.A. ever again. I tried not to laugh and cry at the same time. I told him I’m currently writing a book on the sociology of sexual assault.

“Are you looking to be sexually assaulted?”

I blinked at him. I couldn’t breathe.

That line about sexual assault came from angry man who was holding a women alone in the room with him against her will. And it’s not like ICE agents haven’t raped women detainees before. The sad thing is that if she had freaked out and, say, gouged out one of his eyeballs with a pen so she could make her escape, some prosecutor would have tried to make it seem like she was the bad guy.

They eventually let her go, but not without further threats and orders not to re-enter the United States.

So, to summarize: ICE agents apparently think that women carrying condoms must be prostitutes. And they must be prostitutes who aren’t smart enough to just buy condoms after crossing the border. And if they’re traveling with a man, he must be either a client or a pimp. And they think stopping adultery is somehow part of their job description. And because of all this, they harassed and frightened this poor woman every time she crossed the border.

On the one hand, having seen how the assholes at ICE treat foreigners, I’m glad I’m a citizen. On the other hand, as a citizen, I’m pissed off that these customs goons are giving foreigners an impression of Americans that makes me look bad.

Finally, in addition to everything else that’s wrong with this series of incidents, think for a moment about what the ICE agents thought they were doing: They believed they had discovered that an attractive and sexually active young woman was coming here to have sex with members of the American male population. And they tried to stop her.

Talk about your un-American values.

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Going To The Movies Won’t Be The Same

By on April 4, 2013

Dammit, Roger Ebert died.

Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg has an obituary/eulogy for him. As with other great eulogies I’ve read, I finish it feeling like I’ve missed out on something good by never getting to know the subject personally.

Yet, in a way I can’t help feeling like I did know Roger Ebert personally. He’s been part of my life since I was a child, when I first started watching him and Gene Siskel on Sneak Previews on WTTW, our local PBS station, and I’ve been using his reviews to decide what movies to see ever since. My wife and I saw a lot of movies when we were dating and during our first decade of marriage — probably about 100 a year — and “What does Ebert say?” was almost always an important question.

Not that I agreed with him all that often. He would love movies I hated and hate movies I thought were lots of fun. The thing I noticed, however, was that regardless of how he felt about a movie, after reading his review I could usually make a pretty good guess about whether or not I would like it.

I think this is because Ebert was always honest in his reviews. His wasn’t afraid to show his biases, which meant that we could easily learn what they were and compensate for them. He was fascinated by realistic movies about addiction, for example, so I always knew to discount his reviews a bit when deciding whether to go see a movie that had addiction as a theme. And when he said the plot was confusing, that usually meant I would find it intriguing. By being himself in his writing, and being consistent about it, he conveyed a lot more information than if he had tried for some kind of journalistic neutrality.

(This is an attitude I have taken to heart. It’s something I try to do when I blog, and it’s one of the reasons I admire blogging as a journalistic form. The author’s biases are an important part of any written work, and the better we understand them, the better we understand the subject of the work.)

One of the things I found endearing about Ebert’s reviews is that he so clearly loved the movies. He always seemed genuinely happy for the filmmakers when he thought they did a great job. And even when he gave a movie a low rating, he would still spend some of his review discussing the parts of the movie that worked well. You could tell that he wanted movies to be better. Even in his infamous review of North, (“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.”) I got the feeling that he was not feeling snarky reviewer triumph, but rather that he was angry at having witnessed a filmmaking tragedy.

Ebert was an incredibly busy guy. In addition to writing reviews for the newspaper and talking about movies on his various television shows, he also wrote books about the movies and lectured about at the University of Chicago and hosted the Ebertfest film festival.  He was also online going way, way back. Before the internet, he was on AOL, and before that, he was on Prodigy and Compuserve. He also made his reviews available on the Cinemania movie encyclopedia software for PCs and Macs.

And like every other cutting-edge media figure, Roger Ebert had a blog. I’ll close with the first and last paragraphs of his last post, put up just before he went into the hospital for the last time. They serve as his  goodbye (although if you read the whole piece, you’ll see he had every intention of sticking around):

Thank you. Forty-six years ago on April 3, 1967, I became the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Some of you have read my reviews and columns and even written to me since that time. Others were introduced to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website, the film festival, or the Ebert Club and newsletter. However you came to know me, I’m glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for.

…

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.

Thank you, Roger, for forty-six years of terrific writing and wonderful movie reviews.

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No April Fools For Me

By on April 1, 2013

I’ve decided that running April Fools Day prank posts is not a good idea for me. I let Eric Turkewitz talk me into it last year, and the only people I fooled were my loyal readers. That’s not the relationship I want to have with them. I don’t expect readers to agree with me or even like me, but (except for obvious sarcasm or hyperbole) I want them to know I believe what I say here.

Even Eric, who has pulled off some legendary pranks, seems to be giving it up this year, although this could be part of some super-subtle meta-prank I just don’t get.

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How Hotch Became Beezle

By on March 29, 2013

It’s been a long, long time since I did any Friday catblogging, but I just found some old video I took of the Ragdoll kitten we got in the summer of 2011, and that gave me the impetus to finally put something together.

[Update: This post is now linked at the Carnival of the Cats at The Opinionated Pussycat.]

We like to name our cats after characters from movies and television, and we decided to name this one “Hotch” after the character of Aaron Hotchner on Criminal Minds. “Hotch” sounds sturdy and reliable, and Ragdolls are big, sturdy cats, so it kind of made sense.

The problem is that you really have to get to know a cat a bit before you can learn his true name. Our new Ragdoll kitten turned out to be bundle of energy. Lots of energy. Scary amounts of energy. The video in this clip was from maybe an hour of total playtime.

Yes, he was like that all the time. Hour after hour, week after week. He was constantly running around, climbing pieces of furniture, jumping to other pieces of furniture, knocking off small objects and chasing them around the floor and eventually bringing them into the bathtub, where he could bat them around and around. Anything we touched, he would race over to explore and attack. He knocked over stacks of books, plates of food, small electronic gadgets, rolls of toilet paper, cups full of coins, stacks of boxes, lamps, external hard drives, speakers, and at least three 7-Eleven Double Gulps full of Diet Coke.

He was always trying to play-fight with the other cats (Ripley declined, but Buffy would take him on) and even with us. One night when my wife was trying to fall asleep, he scared the crap out of her by trying to play-fight with her face.

Most cats are pretty sensitive to your reactions. If they hop up on the table, all it takes is a gentle push in the right direction to encourage them to jump back down. The kitten wasn’t having any of that. If he jumped on the table to sniff at our food and we picked him up and set him on the floor, he would just jump right back up and try again. And again. And again.

These were not the actions of a reliable and sturdy “Hotch.” This was something else, and it was time to find a new name.

After some thought, we decided name him Beezle, after the character played by Patrick Bergin in 1991′s Highway to Hell, an amazing B-grade comedy/horror mashup that is probably best known for casting Gilbert Gottfried as Adolf Hitler. The story (spoiler alert) is about a young couple who stumble upon a literal highway to hell, where they meet a bunch of strange people, including a mysterious figure named Beezle. At first, Beezle appears to be friendly and helpful, but it is eventually revealed that that “Beezle” is short for Beelzebub.

Because this kitten has the devil in him.

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Facebook Thinks I Like What?!?

By on March 28, 2013

Over on her Facebook page, writer Jennifer Abel is getting pissed off at some of the stuff Facebook is recommending for her:

If this were England, I would sue Facebook for libel; I am THAT offended by the pages they suggest I “like.” Seriously: what the hell did I EVER post, here or anyplace else, to make anybody think I’m a bigot who would support any of those vile organizations designed specifically to deny full human rights to gay people? Hey, Facebook: why not recommend that I “like” Stormfront and the Klan, too? After getting a swastika tastefully tattooed on my ass, of course.

This is why I like Jennifer so much.

Later, in a comment, she elaborates:

…Seriously: for all the stuff I’ve posted on Facebook — including things like “Aww, how sweet, this same-sex elderly couple is getting married” — what the hell makes them think “Oh, yeah, Jennifer is a GREAT candidate to join one of those hateful anti-gay groups with the word ‘family’ in the title”? And given all the anti-TSA stuff I’ve done, what the fuckity-fuck makes them think I want to get a degree in “Homeland Security”?

You don’t have to spend all your free time in Facebook to know what she’s talking about. Facebook can recommend some strange stuff.

I don’t know how Facebook chooses recommendations, but I know a little bit about data mining and searching document collections, and I think I can make some educated guesses. I’m assuming that the algorithms used by Facebook for finding recommendations are related to the algorithms Amazon uses to make product recommendations and (to a lesser extent) the algorithms Google uses for document search. If I’m right, several mechanisms seem likely to be the culprits behind Facebook’s strange recommendations.

We should start with a fact that some people find surprising: No matter what it seems like, neither Facebook nor Google nor Amazon has any idea what you’re talking about. Computers understand a lot of artificial languages — Java, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, Python — because they are constructed according to rigorous sets of simple rules and talk about a limited set of concepts. When it comes to understanding natural languages such as English, however, random 3rd-graders have much better reading comprehension than even the most advanced software. A service like Google only appears to understand our language because it uses some very clever shortcuts and a lot of processing power.

Early search engines worked entirely off of the individual words in a piece of text, ignoring context completely. On any given web page, rare words scored high and common words scored low. Extremely common words like “and” and “the” were ignored entirely. So if someone searched for several unusual keywords, and your web page happened to have those words, it was likely to be returned near the top of the list of results.

(This is why it’s hard to get to the top of the list for keywords like “criminal lawyer” — the word combination is not very rare — but it’s slightly easier to get to the top for “New York criminal lawyer” and much easier to get to the top of “Muncie Indiana criminal lawyer free consultation”.)

Search technology has gotten better, but to get an idea how primitive it remains, you only have to look at one of the most well-know natural language applications in the world, Apple’s Siri. The voice recognition system is pretty good at figuring out the words (compared to earlier voice systems) but once it gets the words, Siri still has trouble making sense of what you’re trying to say. Ask it “How far away is Moscow?” and it shows you Moscow on a map. It completely missed the question and fell back on matching the keyword “Moscow”.

(Impressively, WolframAlpha gets the answer right — guessing at my location from my IP address — but that’s exactly the kind of question it was designed to answer. You can stump it easily enough with other questions. Siri, by the way, knows about WolframAlpha, but it wasn’t smart enough to recognize my question as the kind of query it should refer to WolframAlpha.)

If Facebook looks at the text of posts to make recommendations — and I’m not sure that it does — it probably can’t understand the text in a post any better than Siri. If you rant about anti-gay discrimination in your timeline — or “like” a page that opposes anti-gay discrimination — Facebook’s computers may pick up on the words and phrases you use, such as “gay” or “family” or “God”, but they won’t have a clue why you’re using those words, or how much you disagree with religious objections to gay marriage. Organizational Facebook pages that support gay marriage and those that oppose it probably seem very similar to a keyword-oriented matching algorithm — they’re talking about the same thing from two different points of view, after all — and if you keep ranting about the Department of Homeland Security, Facebook will assume you want a job there.

Facebook adds to the confusion because it’s always talking about things for you to “like,” but the traditional goal of search engine technology was not to find things you like, but to find things that are relevant. When Facebook tries to find stuff for you to “like,” it essentially treats content you create as a giant query in a search engine. So if you like 10 pages that talk about gay marriage and you write about gay marriage in your timeline, Facebook will recommend other pages and people that talk about gay marriage, but it can’t understand if you support or oppose gay marriage.

If you think of Facebook as recommending relevant things rather than likeable things, then its suggestions to Jennifer were dead-on: She may not like them, but they matter to her, and they spurred her to write about them. (And, in the time it took me to write this, she has gone on to write a Daily Dot article on the subject.)

Facebook’s algorithm for finding suggestions probably depends on data drawn from three basic sources. First, there’s stuff you like, post on your timeline, or otherwise interact with. Second, there’s stuff your friends like, post on timelines (yours or theirs), or otherwise interact with. Then, given those two collections of stuff, Facebook’s algorithm can find other people who have shown an interest in the same things. From that collection of people, the algorithm derives its third data set, consisting of things those other people like, post on their timelines, and otherwise interact with.

[Update: Gideon reminds me in a tweet that there's a fourth source of data: Other sites you visit, and the things that you do there, provided those sites load Facebook content, even if you don't click on it. Facebook would be able to use this to increase the number of people used to build the third data set above.]

This last mechanism is similar to how Amazon can look at the products you buy and recommend other items you might like. It’s based on finding other customers who view and buy the same things as you and then looking at what else those people tend to view and buy. With large data sets — Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all about “big data” — these algorithms can be very effective. (I find that Amazon in particular makes some eerily accurate guesses.) So if you “like” something wildly popular like Dr. Who, Facebook’s computers will find tons of people with similar interests and notice that they also share interests in shows like Star Trek or Farscape, which Facebook will probably recommend to you.

However, when the data is very sparse, the queries can return highly variable results of little significance. It’s similar to how the accuracy of a survey falls off when the sample size is small: Ask 10,000 people about their vote and you can predict the outcome of the next election; ask 5 people about their vote and your result is random nonsense. Since Amazon and Facebook are essentially surveying other people with similar interests in order to predict your interests, if your interests are obscure and unusual then there won’t be many other people from whom to get data, which can lead to strange results.

Suppose you search Amazon to find something obscure, maybe a little-known French translation of an old Turkish book. If it’s esoteric enough, perhaps only one other person has also bought that book in recent times. And then let’s assume that maybe a month later they had to buy a toy for their daughter and settled on a My Little Pony play set. Now, when you visit the page for your obscure book, Amazon’s algorithms are going to look for all other people who bought that product and then at all the other products they bought. And in this hypothetical case with only one other buyer, Amazon is going to see your French translation and offer you Twilight Sparkle.

A similar effect occurs when something really big hits Amazon: So many people buy it that no matter what product you search for, some of the people who bought your product also bought the hugely popular thing. So when you search for a new camcorder, Amazon recommends the new Twilight novel.

I’m pretty sure Facebook is not immune to this problem and may even make it worse because it gives extra weight to people near you in the social graph, effectively narrowing its dataset. If you “like” a little-known performance artist that almost no one else has heard of, then when Facebook’s algorithm searches for other people who like that artist, it may only find one person anywhere near you in the social graph who likes that artist. And if that person also likes Stormfront and the KKK, guess what Facebook’s algorithm is going to suggest?

Another big issue is that a search engine like Google is engineered to produce stable result sets. Given the same query, it should return the same result set every time. You might not always see it that way, e.g. if the queries go to two different servers using document indexes with different update schedules, but the design intent is to return the best result, which should be always be the same for the same incarnation of the document database.

That wouldn’t work on Facebook. You’d quickly grow tired of receiving the same recommendations over and over, no matter how much you liked them. So Facebook’s servers probably try to mix things up a bit, randomly pulling in suggestions from much farther afield than if they used a purely mathematically optimal set.

It’s possible too that Facebook pays attention to what you click on, and if you ignore its best guesses too often, it demotes those suggestions and lets something else into the recommendations list. If you keep ignoring its suggestions, more and more of the weird low-ranked pages will bubble up and be recommended.

Finally, think about how you respond on those rare occasions that Facebook suggests something you actually like: You look at it, and you click “like”, and it joins the collection of all the other things you already “like”. And now Facebook has no need to ever recommend it to you again. Between the things you “like” when you set up your account, and the things you “like” along the way, after a little while all of the good suggestions get used up, and all that’s left is the weird stuff.

To summarize, let me first remind you that this is just guesswork on my part — I don’t know anything definitive about Facebook’s algorithms for recommendations — but here are some of the factors that I think contribute to the screwiness of Facebook’s recommendations:

  • Facebook doesn’t understanding natural languages so it doesn’t understand what you and your friends are writing about.
  • Keyword-based matching finds text that uses similar words, which may or may not express similar ideas.
  • Text search and data mining algorithms are intended to find stuff that is relevant or interesting to you, which may not mean it’s stuff you really “like.”
  • Facebook’s recommendations to you are influenced by your friends’ activities and interests.
  • Facebook’s recommendations are also influenced by other people who show the same interests as you and your friends.
  • [Update: Facebook also learns about you from your activities on affiliated sites.]
  • Topics that are very popular can overwhelm the algorithms and show up everywhere.
  • Activities related to rare or unusual topics can have the effect reducing the amount of data available for data mining, which increases the variability and reduces the significance of the results.
  • Bottlenecks in the social graph can also reduce the amount of data available for mining, which increases the variability and reduces the significance of the results.
  • In the quest for clicks, Facebook intentionally offers you unusual opportunities.
  • By ignoring suggestions for things you do like, you may be encouraging Facebook to show you other things.
  • You use up all the good stuff early, so the stuff you get later tends to be crap.

As I said at the beginning, most of this is guesswork, but I think that if even half of my guesses are correct, it’s not hard to see why Facebook recommendations are so strange.

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Ripley R.I.P.

By on March 26, 2013

Ripley
Larger ImageRipley

We adopted Ripley about 14 years ago from the Orphans of the Storm animal shelter about 10 miles north of Chicago. We had been thinking of getting a kitten, but we decided to get an adult cat, in part because most people pass them over in favor of kittens, but mostly because when you get an adult cat, what you see is what you get. If you adopt an adult cat, the way they are when you meet them is the way they’ll be for the rest of their lives.

We found Ripley by sitting down in the adult cat room and paying attention to which cats came over to play with us. Cat D51 (back then Orphans didn’t name them) came over to both of us several times and climbed right up into our laps. He responded to attention and purred and didn’t pick fights with the other cats. We decided to bring him home with us and name him Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Aliens.

Just like at the shelter, Ripley loved to come visit us. The first time I laid down on the couch after bringing him home, he hopped right up and sat on my chest, purring. Almost every evening, my wife would sit in the reclining chair to read or watch television and Ripley would slowly creep up and curl up on her lap or her chest, where she could hold him and pet him. He was her best cat ever.

Ripley
Larger ImageRipley

Toward the end of January, Ripley was diagnosed with immune mediated hemolytic anemia, which meant his immune system was attacking his red blood cells. Our vet gave him two transfusions and put him on very high dosages of immune suppressants. The drugs were causing liver damage, so we had to taper them off, and at yesterday’s vet visit, his red blood cell count was a little below normal again, and by this morning he was barely moving, so we took him right back to the vet for more tests. His red blood cell count had gone way down in just 15 hours, and his blood chemistry indicated multiple organ failure. There was nothing else we could do for him.

Ripley will be sorely missed. My wife is heartbroken. We’re both taking the day off from work.

Here he is with my old cat Dozer, who passed away in the summer of 2011. They were a couple of really good cats.

Ripley With Dozer
Larger ImageRipley With Dozer

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