On the way from New Jersey to Kentucky I stopped in the D.C. area to meet some friends I used to work with, and then the next day my wife and I met up with Feral Genius Jennifer Abel, who’d just recently moved there.

Then we headed south to Front Royal, Virginia, which anchors the northern end of the most famous scenic route through Shenandoah National Park: Skyline Drive.

Front Royal, Virginia, from Skyline Drive

I took 129 photos, so there should be plenty of good stuff. Let’s see…hazy view of rolling hills, hazy view of rolling hills, hazy view of rolling hills, winding road, hazy view of rolling hills, hazy view of rolling hills, interesting tree, hazy view of valley, hazy view of rolling hills…

Skyline Drive

Skyline Drive

Hazy View of Rolling Hills

Hazy View of Rolling Hills

Interesting Tree

Winding Road

Hazy View of Valley

Hazy View of Valley

Actually, some of that haze wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill haze. When we entered the park, the ranger informed us that there was a small wildfire in one section. Protip: You get better landscape photos if you take them when the landscape isn’t on fire.

Wildfire

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:

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

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.

Lagoon at the Jersey Shore

Lagoon at the Jersey Shore

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

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

Update: Part 3 is up.

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.

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

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

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 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 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

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

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 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

And here’s a panoramic view:

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

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

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

Update: Part 2 is up.

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?

For example, I saw this the other day:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

…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)

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.

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.

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):

Donation 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.

…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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

Larger ImageRipley With Dozer

[Profitable punishment] provides a much greater incentive for unnecessary criminal laws. But even when fines are used to punish genuine crimes, they also provide a perverse incentive to not actually reduce the amount of bad behavior. When a city is spending a million dollars a year running a batch of red-light cameras, the last thing they want is for everyone to drive safely.

As Radley Balko points out in his recent HuffPo piece on proposed changes in Tennessee asset forfeiture law, the ill effects of profitable punishment have perverted drug enforcement:

That can create some odd incentives. For example, in a 2011 report, Nashville’s News Channel 5 found that the vast majority of police stops looking for suspected drug smugglers were made on the side of the highway leaving the city, not the side entering it. For police coffers, it was better to let the drugs come into Nashville, be sold and then seize the cash as the dealers left town.

Likewise, in a 1994 study published in the journal Justice Quarterly, criminologists J. Mitchell Miller and Lance H. Selva found that several police agencies delayed making busts of suspected drug houses until most of the drug supply had been sold. They waited until the drugs had already hit the streets so that they could maximize their forfeiture bounty.

In other words, police have perverted their anti-drug enforcement policy so that illegal drug dealing has become a source of revenue for the department.

I’ve complained in the past that forfeiture laws turn police departments into auto theft rings and pirates. My guess is that if anyone other than a police department deliberately allowed drug deals to take place and then took money from the drug dealers, prosecutors would hold press conferences and call them “drug kingpins.”

Here are some summaries of what Fitzgerald said (from Mark Herrmann at Above the Law), followed by Scott’s puzzled responses:

First, if you’re responding to allegations made by a whistleblower, don’t assume that you’ll avoid trouble by explaining that the whistleblower is nuts. Whistleblowers may often be nuts — it takes a certain personality to blow the whistle — but the fact that you’re nuts doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re wrong. Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. It’s okay to explain briefly to prosecutors that the whistleblower is nuts, but the heart of your presentation must respond to the allegations.

So nuts doesn’t equal wrong? True, but not exactly new.  Maybe the white collar “specialists” at Biglaw never crossed a junkie snitch, but for the rest of us, this is pretty 101 stuff.

Scott’s totally missing the context here. Fitzgerald isn’t approaching this as a trial. Here, see if this one helps:

Second, for many corporate criminal investigations, the company’s misconduct may be less important than how the company responded to the misconduct. If you have a few hundred (or a few thousand, or a few tens of thousands, or more) employees working in your organization, then some of those employees won’t follow the rules. That’s inevitable, and prosecutors understand it. What distinguishes good corporate citizens from bad ones is often not the misconduct itself, but how the corporation responded when it learned of the misconduct.

Ah, now we’re getting a bit trickier. So the secret is to presume guilt before the government does (or just pretend, for the sake of pleasing the fine men and women in federal buildings) and throw a few people under the bus to satisfy their bloodlust?  Perhaps we could give this trick a cool name, like “when baby prosecutors say jump, corporate titans ask “how high”?

Well, yeah. That’s pretty much what he’s saying. Still don’t get it? This next one gives the game away:

Third, Fitzgerald suggested providing a candid, comprehensive narrative when you meet with prosecutors. Too many companies, says Fitzgerald, hold their cards close to the vest, not wanting to give prosecutors information unnecessarily. That leaves the prosecutors to rely exclusively on the FBI’s version of the facts, which probably won’t paint the company in a great light.

The last thing a multinational corporation wants is to have a prosecutor rely on what the FBI says, so Fitzgerald’s solution is to confess to snatching the Lindbergh baby up front?

You see? Fitzgerald is concerned the prosecutors won’t get all the facts right. It’s as if he thinks getting the right facts to the prosecutor is what matters to defendants — as opposed to getting the facts to the official finder of facts, which is supposed to be the judge or the jury.

Or so I’ve been told. When criminal defense lawyers give me advice on how to stay out of jail, I try to pay attention, and one of the things I’ve heard pretty clearly is that no matter how much you want to set the record straight with cops who are questioning you or a prosecutor who is threatening you, the best thing you can do is to save your story until you can tell it to the judge and the jury. They’re the only ones that matter. (Unless your lawyer tells you otherwise.)

In a comment on his own post, Scott Greenfield makes it pretty clear what he thinks of Fitzgerald’s nonsense:

It’s my understanding that Fitzgerald does not handle defense, which makes it very unclear what he does other than gave speeches and show people the quickest way to the United States Attorney’s office.

Here’s what bothers me: Fitzgerald was a successful U.S. Attorney for 24 years, and was involved in the prosecution of everyone from Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to  Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. He’s not just some random political hack. He knows how federal prosecutions work. What if he’s telling it like it is?

I’ve heard plenty of people complain that federal prosecutors have too much power. Lawyer Harvey Silverglate has argued that the federal criminal code has become so expansive and is interpreted so broadly that the average American commits three felonies a day, at least according to the interpretations offered by U. S. Attorneys in past prosecutions. What this implies is that any federal prosecutors who decides to take a close look at your life will find something they can prosecute you for, and the longer they look, they more they’ll find.

Further, many federal laws are so vague and so harsh that it’s easy to find interpretations that can have you facing a lot of prison time. This leaves a lot of leeway to prosecutors in their charging decisions. For the same act, they maybe able to charge you with misdemeanor with no prison time, a felony that will get you a year in jail, or a special felony that comes with a 5-year mandatory minimum. This puts a lot of power in the hands of federal prosecutors.

So what if Fitzgerald is right, and the most important thing you can do is please the federal prosecutor?

If it’s true, it’s a damning indictment of the federal justice system that Fitzgerald has been part of for over two decades. If the law makes criminals of us all, and our freedoms can be taken at the whim of powerful prosecutors, then we no longer live under the rule of law but the rule of powerful men, and our freedom is a lie.

Sometimes it sure seems that way, but I sure hope Fitzgerald is wrong and Scott is right.

1-800-LAW-REP-4

It sounds like marketing for some kind of cheesy lawyer, but it’s actually an 18-year old program that is supporting our Sixth Amendment right to counsel by filling in some of the gaps surrounding the Supreme Court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which was handed down 50 years ago today.

Gideon made it clear that the right to counsel in a criminal case didn’t just mean you had the right to bring a lawyer; it meant you had a positive right to have a lawyer. If you couldn’t afford one, the government had to provide one for you. This ruling created our public defender system.

(Public defenders are one of the few government programs that us libertarians can love. We may not be very fond of big government, but I can’t recall ever hearing a libertarian denounce the public defender system. If the government is going to spend money trying to screw us into the ground, they can damned well spend some money to defend our rights.)

However, as Jeff Gamso points out, Clarence Earl Gideon got his new trial, but the decision forever associated with his name doesn’t cover every situation in which a lawyer would be helpful:

Gideon had no lawyer to help him ask the Supreme Court to hear his case.  The court’s decision didn’t change that.  Nothing in the last 50 years has.  The accused has a right to an appointed lawyer at trial and on a first appeal.  If the state offers two levels of appeal (most do in most cases) he doesn’t have a right to a lawyer at the second.  He doesn’t have a right to a lawyer to pursue a collateral attack on his conviction through state or federal habeas corpus procedings.

There’s a similar problem at the front end: The defendant’s right to have a lawyer under Gideon doesn’t start until he becomes a defendant. You have the right to counsel at any time, but the government doesn’t have to provide you with a lawyer until it decides that you’re too poor to afford one on your own. And that doesn’t happen until a judge says so, which means that from the time a police officer first looks at you funny until the time the deputies stand you up in the courtroom, you’re on your own.

As you might expect, the kinds of people who choose public defense as their life’s work are not the kind of people who are happy with the limitations of Gideon, and they try to work around them. The Bronx Defenders, for example, are well known for providing a wide range of legal services related to criminal matters, and they’ll talk to anyone about a criminal matter at any time. They maintain a 24/7 hotline for helping people handle police encounters. “The ability to find legal advice before the formal assignment of a public defender can make all the difference and influence whether someone is arrested at all,” says Executive Director Robin Steinberg.

One of the reasons the Bronx Defenders can do this is that they’re organized as a private firm that provides public defense services under a contract. This gives them the latitude to receive money from other sources, including government grants and private donations, which they can use to fund additional legal services.

Here in Chicago, the Law Office of the Public Defender is part of the Cook County government, and therefore the Illinois state government, which limits its ability to provide extra legal services (although it does provide some non-criminal legal representation). Illinois public defense lawyers can only provide representation after they are appointed by a judge at their client’s first court appearance. (Gideon informs me that pretty much the same is true in Connecticut.) They can’t even talk to you about your case until that happens. The problem is, by the time you’ve been arrested and charged, you’ve probably already passed up several opportunities where a lawyer could have helped you.

Matt Haiduk, a crimlaw blogger from nearby Kane County, suggests these three signs that you need a criminal defense lawyer:

1. The police want to talk to you at the station.

2. They are reading you your Miranda rights or telling you that you have a right to remain silent.

3. Things get weird. [I.e. the cops do something that makes you uneasy.]

In none of those situations will you be able to get a lawyer from the Cook County Public Defender’s office. In fact, even if you are under arrest, you still have to wait for your first court appearance before the Public Defender’s office can help you. So what are you supposed to do in those situations?

That’s where 1-800-LAW-REP-4 comes in. It’s the 24/7 hotline run by First Defense Legal Aid, a nonprofit organization that provides free advice and representation to people who are arrested or detained by the Chicago Police. In fact, the Cook County Public Defender’s office FAQ recommends that parents call the FDLA if one of their children is arrested.

(This support from the Public Defender’s office is not surprising; the former Chief Executive, Edwin Burnette, is on the FDLA board. So are several current and former assistant public defenders, a few law professors, and a bunch of other local lawyers, including author Scott Turow and both Terry MacCarthy and his successor, Carol A. Brook, from the Federal Defender Program.)

The Chicago Commons Association launched the FDLA in 1995 to provide legal advice and representation for people in police custody. In 2003, they emerged as a standalone 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. With a surprisingly small budget (about $166,000 in 2011 according to IRS filings) they staff their 24-hour hotline and provide other services using over 100 volunteer lawyers and law students.

According to their most recent annual report, a parent or other legal guardian is the most likely caller for an arrestee, followed by peers, professional advocates (social services, the PD’s office), siblings, and other relatives. Clients themselves call the FDLA only about 2% of the time. FDLA lawyers visited clients in police stations 277 time in 2011. About 30% of these clients (37% of juveniles) were released without charges.

Those lawyers face some legal hazards of their own. Two years ago this month, FDLA volunteer lawyer Sladjana Vuckovic was visiting with a client in a police interrogation room, and she let him use her cell phone. Other local criminal defense lawyers claim this is not unusual, but perhaps because her client was accused of killing a police officer, prosecutors charged her with the crime of bringing contraband into a penal institution. The case went to trial, and in November of last year she was found not guilty.

In addition to operating the hotline and providing representation to people in police custody, FDLA has an educational Street Law program that teaches people, mostly juveniles, how to protect themselves and their rights during encounters with the police. In 2011 FDLA volunteers gave 130 presentations, reaching 3200 people. (They have a handout for those who want the short version.) They also work with a lot of community organizations and schools to get the word out.

Personally, I’m glad I heard about the FDLA. I realize that as an educated, gainfully-employed, middle aged white guy with no criminal record, my chances of being picked up by the police are relatively slim. Yet for as long as I can remember, I’ve always had the feeling that someday I’ll get arrested. And if or when that happens, I’d like to have a plan.

I know I’m supposed to Lawyer Up and Shut Up, but I’ve always had a problem with the lawyering up part because, despite being involved with the legal blogging community for years, I have no idea who I’d hire if I got into trouble. And shackled to a desk in a police station is a hell of a place to try to figure it out.

Now I know I can just call 1-800-LAW-REP-4.

Of course, for the time being at least, I’m pretty far from being indigent, so I’d probably feel obligated to make a donation large enough to cover the cost. Oh, what the heck…In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, I just made a small donation through my employer’s matching gifts program. If you want, you can donate through the FDLA front page.

(Now if I can just find a public defender to hug…)

Our brown tabby, Ripley, is getting on in years, and we’ve noticed he’s been resting more, eating less, and generally just slowing down. We figured it was just old age, but in January he suddenly got much worse, so we took him to his vet, who figured out that he was suffering from something called immune mediated hemolytic anemia, which meant his immune system was attacking his red blood cells. IMHA has a very high mortality rate, and our vet figured there was less than 50% chance he would survive, even with treatment.

They gave him a blood transfusion to restore some of the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity, which immediately restored some of his vitality. Then they kept him for a week for additional treatment, which included a bunch of drugs and a second transfusion.

When he was released from the veterinarian hospital a few weeks ago, Ripley was OK, but he hasn’t been bouncing back as well as our vet would like him to. There have also been a couple of days in which he started to crash during the day — stopped eating and drinking, and stayed in one location all day — so we had to take him back to the vet so they could give him more drugs and rehydrate him.

Since his release, we’ve been giving him several drugs, including high doses of the steroid prednisone, which suppresses his immune response. It also has side effects, which could include the problems with appetite and sluggishness, and our vet decided it was time to taper it off, which we’re doing now.

Also, to make sure he’s hydrated, every day we put Ripley on a high work table, hang a bag of veterinary-grade lactated ringers solution off our bookshelves, pull Ripley’s skin so it forms a tent-shape away from his body, poke the needle in, and open up the valve until he’s received 150 milliliters of fluid under the skin.

Ripley’s holding on and doing okay this past week, so it’s probably helping.

Still, it seems like a very weird thing to do.

Update: As it turns out, when I wrote this, Ripley was nearer the end than we knew. He will be missed.

Even now, when I think about the things I hate about our criminal laws and the way those laws are applied, I get all worked up with simmering rage at the hubris and callousness of those who claim to protect us. The war on drugs, civil forfeiture, border control, violent cops, control-freak legislators, heartless prosecutors — I hate it all, I hate the people responsible for it, and I want them to suffer for the evil that they’ve done.

Eventually, I calm down. And then I write a blog post about it. What you read here is often the product of anger and frustration. Thank you for enabling me.

That little bit of anger serves me well as a blogger, but I’m glad that dealing with the criminal justice system is not my full-time job. I can’t imagine the stress of having to work within the system and having to struggle with all that bullshit every day, with much more than rhetoric on the line. I would probably say something in anger that I’d later regret.

Which brings me to criminal defense blogger Rick Horowitz, who wrote a scathing and angry post about way the criminal justice system will take away people’s rights bit by bit unless you fight over everything.

Not only was it angry, it was apparently also anger-making, because the next day, the courthouse deputies decided it was time for some payback:

…I put my bag on the x-ray machine belt, as always, and pulled out my identification to show, as always. But I was stopped.

“You have to empty your pockets.”

“What?,” I asked.

“You have to empty your pockets.”

“Why?”

The officer said something about a new security issue or something along those lines. He stated that they were making all court personnel and attorneys empty their pockets now.

“A court person went through just ahead of me,” I said, motioning in the direction the prosecutor had gone. “You didn’t check her.”

And then one of them told me it was because of my blog post yesterday. He even specifically referenced the sentence that they found so offensive. “So now you’re a security risk,” I was told.

Rick has since removed some of the offending material from his post — because on re-reading he agreed it went too far. (He’s a former Nobody’s Business co-blogger and a friend, so I won’t quote the excised material, but can find it online if you look.) What he wrote was incendiary, but it doesn’t really justify the response.

The Fresno County Sheriff’s Department, however, has proven that I was on the right track. In addition to the above, I went through two more complete searches — basically, every time I left the court, when I returned, I was searched again. They opened my bag, and then opened everything inside my bag, on the pretense that they were looking for “something metal” that showed up in the x-ray machine. What they did today proved that they can be a lawless force which, when it does not get its way, is to be both feared and resisted.

…At least a few attorneys — including me — think that there was a plan in place this morning to set up a situation where I could be given a beatdown, which almost certainly would have been followed by criminal charges against me for “resisting arrest,” or “assaulting an officer,” or something similar to that. Because that happens to more people than you could possibly imagine, more often than you would believe. And, as I said, there is reason to believe they were trying to set it up — reason enough that another attorney decided to stick around “just in case.” (Which is probably why it didn’t happen.)

I have to admit, my first reaction was that maybe Rick’s being a little paranoid. (A beatdown in the courthouse? Really?) But then I realized that the reason I don’t think of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department as a bunch of feckless thugs is because I really don’t know anything about the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department. I mean, what if it’s run by some kind of psychopathic third-world-dictator-wannabe? You know, like Maricopa.

Today, as I said, I went through three complete searches. I suspect for a long time to come, I’m going to go through more. Until there are enough for me to go to court over it. Because there is no probable cause to search me. I have never done anything illegal, nor have I threatened to do anything illegal, nor would I do anything illegal. I’m carrying the same things in my bag today that I’ve carried every day for as long as I’ve been an attorney. My bag has been through their x-ray machine probably thousands of times over the years, and until today, I never had a problem.Why?

Because piss off a cop — even if it’s just by writing something they don’t like — and they will show you just how far from being public servants they have gone. They are our overlords.

I think that to put this in the right perspective we have to keep in mind Rick is a lawyer, meaning he writes and talks for a living. And that’s all he did in his blog post. He wrote some words. And when he showed up in court, he was just there to drop off some more words.

It was the Sheriff’s deputies who had shown up prepared to do violence. I’m not even talking about the purported plan for delivering a beatdown; I’m talking about their everyday job. If Rick or anyone else had tried to walk through the security checkpoint with going through the required rituals, the deputies were ready with their weapons — guns and batons and maybe tasers and pepper spray — prepared to do violence to anyone who defied them.

In the grand scheme of civilization, that’s a good thing. Sometimes violence is the only way to stop violence, and we need to defend ourselves and the important institutions of our society, which is why we have armies and police forces.

But shouldn’t the people who deal in violence be subject to much more scrutiny than those who deal in words? And shouldn’t they be just a little less sensitive?

I remember when Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, and all these politicians were getting on television and making pronouncements about inflammatory rhetoric and telling us to “tone it down”. For example:

But in Pima County, Ariz., Sheriff Clarence Dupnik suggested “all this vitriol” in recent political discourse might be connected to Saturday’s shootings. “This may be free speech,” he told reporters, “but it’s not without consequences.”

As I pointed out at the time, Sheriff Dupnik has his own SWAT team. Rick Horowitz and I and a hundred more bloggers like us couldn’t do as much damage in ten years as Dupnik’s SWAT team could do in one bad day. And within four months of my writing that, they had their bad day, when the Pima Sheriff’s office killed U.S. Marine Jose Guerena during an apparently pointless raid on his home.

One of the recurring themes of this blog has been that violence does not magically become non-violent just because it is approved by the criminal justice system. Capital punishment is still the taking of a human life, prison is still caging a human being like an animal, and SWAT raids are still a form of home invasion. They’re not exactly the same — because the police are presumably restrained somewhat — but the damage does not go away. We may permit this violence because we believe it is necessary to prevent greater harm, but it’s still harmful in itself.

Much police violence is not abusive but rather normal police activity. We probably don’t even think of it as violence, but it still takes a toll, as described so well by Nicholas K. Peart, a 23-year old black man living in New York city:

We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.

These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head.

That isn’t police brutality from a few bad cops, it’s the everyday behavior of New York’s finest. And it’s exactly what the police department wants them to do. Low-level violence of this sort is part of the job description.

If you think it’s no big deal, if you think “Oh, it’s just a stop-and-frisk,” or “Oh, it’s just an arrest,” then you’re missing the reality of what’s happening. As Molly Crabapple says,

Arrest is always violent. The NYPD may or may not break your ribs, but the process of arrest in America is still a man tying your hands behind your back at gunpoint and locking you in a cage. Holding cells are shit-encrusted boxes, often too crowded to sit down. Police can leave you there for three days; long enough to lose your job. If this seems obvious, I say it because the polite middle classes trivialize arrest. They talk about “keeping people off the streets.” They don’t realize that the constant threat of arrest is traumatic, unless it happens to them or their kids.

Getting back to Rick Horowitz’s confrontation, the Fresno County Sheriff’s police bring that threat of arrest to work every day. I wish they’d pay more attention to how they conduct themselves, and less attention to a guy who’s only bringing words.

I especially remember one episode where the detective team discovered someone who had been wrongfully arrested by some other New York cops and been convicted of a crime they did not commit. The show’s lead detective soon gave the poor guy the good news that (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “The District Attorney discovered that your lawyer made some mistakes, and he’s going to release you soon.”

Crazy, right? It was the district attorney’s people who made the mistake of prosecuting an innocent man, and now they’re trying to blame his lawyer for not being able to stop them? Of course, it’s just a silly TV show.

Or is it?

The lawyer for a woman suing the city alleging a host of civil rights violations has, in an unusual legal turn of events, himself become a defendant in the civil case he filed.

In answering the lawsuit brought late last year by Nga Truong, who was charged by Worcester Police with killing her infant son four years ago based on what was later ruled to be a coerced confession, city lawyers have hit back with a third-party complaint against her lawyer, Edward P. Ryan Jr.

…

“Her lawyer allowed almost two years to pass before he made a motion to get her released by suppressing her confession. While there are numerous defenses in this case, our position on this point is that, if the city is somehow found liable for the excessive incarceration, then the lawyer who represented her also bears liability for her time in jail,” Mr. Moore said.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not in a good position to criticize Ryan for taking too long to file his motion. For all I know, he might have had a good reason for the two year delay. Although Scott Greenfield is a lawyer, and he has doubts:

That said, the delay in submitting motions, assuming that they could have been submitted earlier, presents a second issue that merits concern. Too many lawyers fit their work on behalf of their clients into their schedule. They’ll get to motions when they find the time, or when the mood strikes. In the meantime, the client sits in jail, thinking that she has a lawyer working diligently on the case.

It’s not that client expects, or would be reasonable to expect, that the lawyer has no other clients, no other work, that might possibly interfere with the lawyer’s spending 24/7 on the defendant’s case. It’s expected and understandable.  But if you can’t make time to prepare and file motions for almost two years, good motions, then something is wrong.  No defendant should have to sit in a cell that long before her attorney has her case on the front burner.

Given that, I can even see where the Worcester police are going with their argument. It’s an argument that actually makes sense in other contexts. For example, if you hit a baseball through my living room window, you pretty clearly owe me damages to the tune of whatever it costs to repair one broken window. But if I know about the broken window and foolishly don’t repair it for a month, during which time two rainstorms blow water in and damage the furniture, walls, and flooring, there’s little chance a court will make you pay for all of that mess. Once I’m aware of the broken window, I have a certain responsibility to mitigate the damage, so all the damage that I could have prevented is my problem.

In the case of a wrongful conviction, I can think of a few reasons (although perhaps not legally sound reasons) why the rule about mitigating damages shouldn’t apply.

First of all, I’ll bet it just doesn’t. I’ll bet there’s already some legal doctrine or case law that covers this sort of thing.

Second, the Worcester police department had all the proof of a coerced confession in their hands and the city could have acted on it at any time. If you broke my window, you probably don’t have the right to enter my home to clean it up, but the District Attorney’s office surely has the power to undo its own mistakes and get innocent people out of prison.

Third, as I’ve argued before, wrongful imprisonment should be a strict liability offense. Grabbing people out of their homes and locking them in cages is an inherently dangerous activity that can do great harm to innocent people if something goes wrong. If it’s your job to do that sort of thing, you should be especially careful about it and take full responsibility for the consequences, including full responsibility for wrongfully imprisoning someone.

The first category consists of cuts that would be pretty damned awesome:

• …Illinois will lose about $587,000 in Justice Assistance Grants that support law enforcement, prosecution and courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, and crime victim and witness initiatives…
• …the automatic cuts would reduce loan guarantees to small businesses by up to approximately $900 million…
• …The FBI and other law enforcement entities would see a reduction in capacity equivalent to more than 1,000 Federal agents…
• …The Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) ability to leverage private sector resources to support projects that spur local job creation would be restricted…
• …U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would not be able to maintain current staffing levels of border patrol agents and CBP officers as mandated by Congress. CBP would have to reduce its work hours by the equivalent of over 5,000 border patrol agents and the equivalent of over 2,750 CBP officers…
• …The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would reduce its frontline workforce, which would substantially increase passenger wait times at airport security checkpoints. TSA would need to initiate a hiring freeze for all transportation security officer positions in March, eliminate overtime, and furlough its 50,000 officers for up to seven days.

Intrusive busybodies, useless bureaucrats, politically connected businesses, and thugs with no respect for freedom. Fuck them all. And the Administration’s report leaves out the best part:

• …the Drug Enforcement Administration will lose $166 million from its $2.02 billion staffing and appropriations budget…
• DOD’s Drug Interdiction and Counter-Drug Activities budget of $1.6 billion will be reduced by $157 million
• DOJ’s Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement budget of $528 million will be reduced by $43 million
• The DEA Diversion Control Fee Account budget of $335 million will be reduced by $25 million
• The Office of National Drug Control Policy budget of $25 million will be reduced by $2 million
• The High-intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program budget of $239 million will be reduced by $20 million
• “Other Federal Drug Control Programs,” with a total budget of $100 million, will undergo $8 million in cuts.

Don’t think of it as budget cuts, think of it as an investment in freedom. Reading that list makes me feel like the night before Christmas.

The second category of cuts, on the other hand, consists of threats that, if allowed to happen, should be grounds for impeaching President Obama:

…Up to 1,100 disadvantaged and vulnerable children could lose access to child care, which is also essential for working parents to hold down a job…

…around 5,230 fewer children will receive vaccines for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, influenza, and Hepatitis B…

…up to 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children could go untreated…

…At the major gateway airports, average wait times could increase by 30-50 percent. At the nation’s busiest airports, like Newark, JFK, LAX, and Chicago O’Hare, peak wait times could grow to over 4 hours or more. On the southwest land border, our biggest ports of entry in California and Texas could face wait times of 5 hours or more during peak holiday weekends and travel periods…

…Title I education funds would be eliminated for more than 2,700 schools, cutting support for nearly 1.2 million disadvantaged students…

…Cuts to special education funding would eliminate Federal support for more than 7,200 teachers, aides, and other staff who provide essential instruction and support to preschool and school-aged students with disabilities…

…More than 100,000 formerly homeless people, including veterans, would be removed from their current housing and emergency shelter programs, putting them at risk of returning to the streets…

…close to 8,900 homeless persons with serious mental illness would not get the vital outreach, treatment, housing, and support they need…

The federal budget is famously bloated and wasteful. Yet when forced to trim between 1 and 2 percent of the budget (depending how you count) these are the things Obama says he would cut.

Let’s put that in perspective. At the beginning of the year, the federal government unceremoniously (and with surprisingly little debate or media coverage) increased payroll taxes by 2 percent. And all over America, millions of middle-to-low income-families — anybody with earnings below the cap, really — quietly learned to live with a 2 percent cut in the family budget.

But now when the government is asked to cut its budget by about the same percentage, they say they’ll have to cut programs that help women and children, the sick and the disabled. It’s hard to interpret this as anything other than a threat.

This whole problem came to a head originally with the debt ceiling crisis in the summer of 2011, at which point Obama gave the Republicans everything they wanted and set up the sequestration plan in return for postponing the hard decisions until after the election. If the Democrats are right that the Republicans are holding us hostage, it’s only because the Democrats sold us out to them so they could stay in power.

Despite all this, my gut tells me that thoughtlessly imposing across-the-board cuts is a dumb idea. But you know what? We’ve been trying the dumb idea of profligate borrowing and spending since 2008 and it hasn’t done much to fix the economy. Could sequestration really be any worse than that mess? I say let’s try it and find out.

I remember years ago reading some feminist anti-sex-work exposé of strip clubs which revealed that many clubs don’t even pay their dancers. In fact, the clubs were so exploitative that they actually made the dancers pay them. Shocking! And also, as it turns out, unclear on the concept of how strip clubs work.

More recently, as the Wichita Eagle reports, the Kansas Department of Labor has decided to crack down on this supposed exploitation:

The Kansas Department of Labor won a victory for strippers when the state Supreme Court ruled that exotic dancers are employees of the club where they work, not independent entertainment contractors.

So now the club will be required to treat strippers as employees, withholding taxes and providing unemployment insurance.

Meanwhile, here are some of what the Eagle piece refers to as “conditions inside the club”:

Club owner John Samples bought the majority ownership in Club Orleans in 2002. Two years later, he stopped paying the dancers a nominal salary, leaving tips from customers as their only source of income, according to court records. The court decision doesn’t require the club to pay the dancers a salary, because tips can be considered as wages under Kansas law.

This is some sort of Bizarro-world labor law. All of the money paid to the dancers is coming from the gentlemen who patronize the club, yet under Kansas labor law those payments are now considered to have been wages paid by the club, even though the club never payed the dancers any money.

According to the Labor Department, dancers were required to pay non-negotiable “rent” for use of the stage and dressing rooms, as well as extra fees for the disc jockeys and bouncers.

The rent was higher during peak business hours and the women paid extra to use the more private “VIP” and “Champagne” rooms to entertain guests.

That really makes it sound exploitive, doesn’t it? Especially with the scare quotes around “rent.” Not only was the club not paying the dancers, but the dancers were being force to pay the club, and pay even more to use the special rooms.

One thing that’s notably missing from the Eagle article — and many other accounts of such supposed exploitation of women by strip clubs  — is any mention of the reason why dancers put up with such conditions. You can read all about how much the dancers are paying and what kinds of rules they have to follow without coming across any mention of the fact that exotic dancers can easily earn $1000 or more in tips every week. That’s for less than 40 hours of work on a job that has fairly flexible hours and no educational requirements.

On the other hand, I think the club’s defense that the dancers are independent contractors is nonsense that has no relation to economic reality. After all, if the dancers were independent contractors, the club would still be paying them for the work they’re doing, just not as employees. (In contracting jargon, they’d be getting paid on a 1099 instead of a W-2.) But the club isn’t paying them a dime.

So what does that make the dancers then? Well, as they said during Watergate, if you want to understand what’s really going on, you have to follow the money. And the money is flowing from the dancers to the club. You know what that makes them with respect to the club?

Customers.

That’s what you call people who pay a business for services. The gentlemen patrons are customers because they pay the club a door fee for the right to come in and see the dancing girls, and the dancing girls are customers because they pay the club a house fee for the right to come in and sell dances to the gentlemen patrons. Both the men and the dancers are customers of the club.

That may sound crazy, but it’s not an uncommon business arrangement for vendors to pay for a venue in which to conduct business. Flea markets operate this way, for example. Chicago’s Randolph Street Market charges consumers $10 to come in and shop, and they charge vendors $75 to $300 for the right to operate a display space and sell stuff to the consumers. The strip club is doing something very similar.

But what about all those rules the dancers have to follow, as if (according to the Kansas Department of Labor) they were employees?

House rules governed what the dancers could do in their shows and the prices they had to charge for specific types of dances. Employees of the club would enforce the price structure on the dancers and the customers, court records said.

The women were required to sign in with the bouncer at the beginning of a shift and weren’t allowed to leave the premises until the end of the shift, according to the Labor Department.

Again, that’s no different from how a flea market operates. The Randolph Street Market has tons of rules for vendors as well. Some of them are there to protect consumers, other are designed to keep vendors from interfering with each other’s business, and some of them are for the benefit of the venue owner.

Note that some of the club rules exist for the benefit of the dancers. When the article says “employees enforce the price structure” it means that the club does not allow dancers to offer discounts. This benefits the dancers because they don’t have to compete against each other on price. Essentially, it’s a miniature price-fixing cartel. As with all cartels, cheating is a problem. Dancers have an incentive to draw customers away from other dancers by offering lower prices, which encourages the other dancers to cheat by lowering their prices as well. But when they all lower their prices, they all lose money. The club’s rules about the price structure prevent this. Essentially, the dancers are paying the club to provide enforcement of the cartel rules.

The Eagle article doesn’t mention it, but many strip clubs enforce is a “no-touching” rule, or at least a “no handjobs, no blowjobs, no sex” rule. Again, this is cartelization to reduce competition. If some of the dancers offered “extras,” then the other dancers would be faced with the choice of either losing customers to those dancers or offering extras themselves. However, the dancers can avoid the pressure to offer extras by agreeing collectively not to do so. Again, the dancers pay the club to prevent cheating that would hurt them all.

Even the rules setting work hours are part of the enforcement services provided by the club. If too many dancers show up at one time, there won’t be enough gentlemen patrons to go around, and the short-term average per-dancer income will be low for that night. On the other hand, if too few dancers show up for some shifts, the gentlemen patrons won’t be able to get dances and over the long term they’ll stop showing up, which will also reduce the dancers’ income.

The latter situation is a real concern with the flea markets’ big brother, the shopping mall. One of the reasons consumers like shopping malls is because they can hit several stores in a single trip. If some of those stores keep shorter hours, however, the malls will be less beneficial for consumers, which will naturally reduce the number of consumers coming to the mall, which will in turn reduce the sales volume of all the stores at the mall, not just the ones that are closed. For this reason, malls set standardized hours of operation and assess penalties against stores that don’t comply.

Something similar goes on with department store makeup counters and jewelry counters. Many of them are stocked and staffed not by the department store but by the manufacturers, who have to pay the store for the right to sell their product there. The contracts include detailed rules about hours of operation and staff training to ensure that store patrons receive the expected level of service.

I’m not saying strip club owners are saints who only want to help the poor dancing girls. They’re in it for themselves, trying to make some money by mediating the transactions between the dancers and their customers. Sometimes they do this in direct zero-sum opposition to the dancers’ interests — by charging house fees, for example — but to get dancers to pay those fees, they have to offer something of value — the venue, a DJ, a stage with a pole and flattering lighting, booze, bartenders, waitresses, snacks, parking, security, advertising, credit card processing, and enforcement of standards of conduct and pricing. They’re selling a service. Just like any other business.

Bad luck. The asteroid that came so close to Earth is coming baaaaak. dld.bz/chPtq

Well, of course. It’s a known near-Earth object. They do that by definition. But the linked article by Andrew Malcolm at Investor’s Business Daily was a little more alarming than that, at least until I realized he was making stuff up:

Now, about that other bad news. According to the same computer calculations, in 2080 the orbit of 2012 AD 14, if unaltered in these next 67 years by some super-natural force like Bruce Willis, will slam into Earth at almost 18,000 miles an hour.

That explosive encounter, NASA says, will release about 2.5 megatons of energy into the atmosphere, causing “regional devastation.”

Um. No.

First of all, there’s no asteroid called “2012 AD 14.” The proper designation of the asteroid that just flew past the Earth is “2012 DA14″ indicating that it was the 351st object logged with the Minor Planet Center in the second half of February 2012. (Whole ugly numbering system explained here.)

Second, the day after it passed the Earth — and two days before the publication date on Andrew Malcolm’s article — it was removed from the Sentry Risks Table. That’s the up-to-date listing of all potential collisions by known asteroids for the next 100 years.

Newly discovered asteroids get added to this list if the margin of error for their projected orbital track could possibly allow them to hit the Earth on one or more dates in the next 100 years. As the asteroids are repeatedly observed over the years, scientists refine their estimate of the orbit, and the shrinking margin of error reduces the number of possible dates for an impact. For example, the top item currently has a 1 in 59,000 chance of hitting the earth some time after 2078. This means that that the orbital track is good enough to eliminate the possibility of an impact at any earlier date. Eventually, when no possible impact dates remain in the next 100 years, the object is removed from the table.

Because 2012 DA14 was removed the day after its closest approach, I’m pretty sure what happened is that it came in range of so many telescopes and radar systems that its orbit has been thoroughly pinned down that there was no longer any doubt that it will keep missing the Earth for the next 100 years. Indeed, the Minor Planet Center records 297 observations of the orbit of 2012 DA14 on February 16th alone.

There are still many as-yet-undiscovered near-Earth asteroids out there, some of them probably quite large. It’s possible — arguably inevitable — that one of them will hit us some day. But not 2012 DA14. At least not soon. We know it far too well.

Eric Blumberg, deputy chief counsel for litigation at the FDA, pulled no punches. Commenting on the growing, billions-per-year monetary fraud settlements by the drug industry, he stated: “Money is clearly not doing the job; qui tam (whistleblower) complaints are still falling across my desk like snowflakes! We need to employ a ‘bigger hammer,’ to send people to jail.” He advocated, as he has previously, greater use of the so-called Park Doctrine, which allows prosecutors to hold corporate executives personally responsible for regulatory infractions without need to prove prior knowledge or intent to defraud. Blumberg pointed out that under the Park Doctrine, corporate executives and managers not only have a positive duty to seek out and take steps to eliminate fraud, but also a duty to put into place policies and procedures to prevent violations. This duty, he stated, cannot be delegated to lower-level executives or employees.

[Emphasis in the original.]

As the emphasized portion highlights — and in context Wolfe clearly thinks this is a great idea — FDA deputy counsel chief Eric Blumberg wants to eliminate the mens rea requirement in American criminal law, at least for some things that piss off the FDA. He literally wants to be able to charge drug company executives as criminals for things they they didn’t even know about.

Apparently this outrage is already used for some purposes by the FDA, because it’s mentioned in their Regulatory Procedures Manual. The summary of the Park Doctrine is chilling:

The Park Doctrine, as established by Supreme Court case law, provides that a responsible corporate official can be held liable for a first time misdemeanor (and possible subsequent felony) under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (“the Act”) without proof that the corporate official acted with intent or even negligence, and even if such corporate official did not have any actual knowledge of, or participation in, the specific offense.

Doctor Wolfe apparently thinks this is a good thing. I wonder how he’d feel if his profession was regulated the same way, and doctors could be jailed for billing errors by their clerical staff. (Then again, his bio makes it sound like he hasn’t actually treated a patient in 40 years, so who knows?)

As you might suspect, the mens rea requirement has been eroding for a while now, thanks to the leviathan regulatory state:

The mens rea requirement of the criminal law embodies the fundamental principle that punishment requires personal fault.

However, this principle also renders the criminal law a very poor mechanism for economic regulation. Regulation is not concerned with punishing wrongdoing, but with ordering human interaction so as to improve social welfare. To achieve this end, regulation must prohibit not merely conduct that is wrongful in itself (in lawyers’ Latin, malum in se), but any conduct that would thwart the overall regulatory scheme even when it is not wrongful in itself (malum prohibitum). When such regulatory offenses are embodied within the criminal law, the assumption that everyone is on notice of what the law requires–that ignorance of the law is no excuse–does not hold. Citizens may violate  malum prohibitum laws without personal fault–without a guilty mind. To the extent that the mens rea requirement prohibits punishment in such cases, it undermines the efficacy of the regulatory scheme–something that suggests that regulation is best enforced administratively through civil sanctions.

Unfortunately, at an ever-accelerating rate over the course of the 20th and 21 st centuries, federal and state governments have elected to employ the criminal law as a means of achieving regulatory ends. To do so, they have created a myriad of criminal offenses known as “public welfare offenses” that would be virtually unenforceable if the government had to prove that they were committed intentionally. As a result, Congress and the state legislatures did away with the  mens rea  requirement for such offenses, allowing citizens to be convicted of a crime even if their violation was merely inadvertent or was entirely innocent. Further, under what is called the “responsible corporate officer doctrine”, supervisors may be punished for the inadvertent or innocent violations of their subordinates.

“Responsible corporate officer doctrine” is another term for the Park Doctrine.

It’s never been an excuse in criminal law that you didn’t know that what you were doing was a crime (no matter how many thousands of pages of law you’re supposed to obey), and I guess now it’s not even an excuse that you didn’t know a crime was going on. I guess we should be thankful that, at least for the moment, they still have to tell us what crime we’re accused of.

Tonight, thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, there is much progress to report. After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home. After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over six million new jobs. We buy more American cars than we have in five years, and less foreign oil than we have in 20. Our housing market is healing, our stock market is rebounding, and consumers, patients, and homeowners enjoy stronger protections than ever before.

Your mileage may vary.

So, together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and we can say with renewed confidence that the State of our Union is stronger.

Hey, the state of the union is strong. Who saw that coming?

But we gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs — but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs — but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged.

Two things: First, corporate profits are paid to shareholders, where they are counted as income. So somebody must be getting the money.

Second, most economists believe that the income statistics understate the welfare increase due to advancing technology. Our phones are better, our cars are better, our computers are better. These things are hard to convert to a dollar value, so in the interest of reliable measurement, they are left out of the calculation. I’m not saying it’s tons better, but it’s better.

It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation.

Remember those phrases. I have a feeling I’ll be mentioning them again.

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion — mostly through spending cuts, but also by raising tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. As a result, we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.

I’m not sure exactly what he’s talking about, but that sort of statement about deficit reduction usually just means that our current plan for the next ten years is to spend $4 trillion less than our previous plan for the next ten years. It doesn’t mean we’ll actually spend less than we have been, and anyway it’s all kind of theoretical at this point.

Already, the Affordable Care Act is helping to slow the growth of health care costs.

Actually, there’s some evidence it’s increasing some costs…which is, I guess, not incompatible with slowing the growth…well played Mr President, well played.

Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing. After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.

God, it’s always about manufacturing with politicians! Like the rest of us don’t count. Only about 9 percent of the people have manufacturing jobs. Does anybody remember “make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few” from only a few paragraphs back? I guess sometimes government does work just for the few.

So tonight, I’m announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs, where businesses will partner with the Department of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs. And I ask this Congress to help create a network of 15 of these hubs and guarantee that the next revolution in manufacturing is made right here in America. We can get that done.

Industrial policy. Because that always works.

Now, if we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas. Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar.

Yes. I agree. If we’re going to invest in research, it should be in the kind of basic science that benefits everybody. That’s generally the sort of thing where a little government investment can go a long way.

But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods — all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.

That’s not quite how the science works. It’s almost impossible to attribute a single weather event — such as a hurricane or a drought — to climate change. Sometimes, the weather just does what it does. It really could just be a freak coincidence. Global warming is proven by statistics, not anecdotes.

I’m also issuing a new goal for America: Let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next 20 years. We’ll work with the states to do it. Those states with the best ideas to create jobs and lower energy bills by constructing more efficient buildings will receive federal support to help make that happen.

Actually, lower energy bills should be their own reward. If that’s not good enough, perhaps it’s time to increase the cost of energy.

So tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country. And to make sure taxpayers don’t shoulder the whole burden, I’m also proposing a Partnership to Rebuild America that attracts private capital to upgrade what our businesses need most: modern ports to move our goods, modern pipelines to withstand a storm, modern schools worthy of our children. Let’s prove that there’s no better place to do business than here in the United States of America, and let’s start right away. We can get this done.

Hey, giving out public construction contracts! Obama really is from Chicago! I guess sometimes government does work just for the few.

Right now, there’s a bill in this Congress that would give every responsible homeowner in America the chance to save $3,000 a year by refinancing at today’s rates. Democrats and Republicans have supported it before, so what are we waiting for? Take a vote, and send me that bill. Why would we be against that? Why would that be a partisan issue, helping folks refinance? Right now, overlapping regulations keep responsible young families from buying their first home. What’s holding us back? Let’s streamline the process, and help our economy grow.

I wish I knew what he was talking about here. Government promotion of the idea that banks should loan money to everyone who wants a home was a big cause of the mortgage crisis.

And that has to start at the earliest possible age. Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. So tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America. That’s something we should be able to do.

Hey, more jobs for teachers! I guess sometimes government does work just for the few. I mean, this may not be a bad idea, but it’s also a handout to Democratic supporters.

So tonight, I ask Congress to change the Higher Education Act so that affordability and value are included in determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. And tomorrow, my administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria — where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.

You could also let the banks take more risk on student loans and restore the right of college students to declare bankruptcy. You’ll get more bang for your bucks when the people providing the bucks have more skin in the game.

Real reform means strong border security, and we can build on the progress my administration has already made — putting more boots on the Southern border than at any time in our history and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years.

The reduction in immigration is almost certainly because our economy tanked, not because of Obama’s odious border enforcement.

Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship — a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English, and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally.

Again, there is no frickin’ line. Not unless you actually start letting them in. Although maybe that’s what he means with this part:

And real reform means fixing the legal immigration system to cut waiting periods and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy.

…Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour.We should be able to get that done.

The key phrase being “no one who works.” The general rule of demand is that people buy less of something when its price goes up, so raising the minimum wage should reduce the number of available jobs. As it happens, however, econometrics studies have found little if any effect on jobs from raising the minimum wage (probably because low labor mobility forces workers to take below-market jobs). But if we keep raising it, eventually we’ll get it high enough to start killing jobs. I hope this isn’t the time.

In fact, working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher.

What, other than class warfare, do those things have to do with each other? CEO’s get lots of money for a variety of reasons, not all of them good, but that’s a problem of corporate governance that has little to do with minimum wage policies.

Tonight, let’s also recognize that there are communities in this country where no matter how hard you work, it is virtually impossible to get ahead. Factory towns decimated from years of plants packing up. Inescapable pockets of poverty, urban and rural, where young adults are still fighting for their first job. America is not a place where the chance of birth or circumstance should decide our destiny. And that’s why we need to build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class for all who are willing to climb them.

Propping up failed cities is not a good policy. Cities with shrinking populations should make adjustments to what they’ve become.

Let’s offer incentives to companies that hire Americans who’ve got what it takes to fill that job opening, but have been out of work so long that no one will give them a chance anymore. Let’s put people back to work rebuilding vacant homes in run-down neighborhoods.

The homes are vacant because people don’t want to live there. Why fight it? Tear down the vacant homes and turn them into parks. Or let neighbors buy them to expand their plots, as larger play areas for children or as small farms for locally-grown food. Or maybe car parks. Really, just do whatever works when population density declines.

And this year, my administration will begin to partner with 20 of the hardest-hit towns in America to get these communities back on their feet. We’ll work with local leaders to target resources at public safety, and education, and housing.

These cities are emptying out. They don’t need housing.

We’ll give new tax credits to businesses that hire and invest.

No. Please don’t. It will just distort business decision making to try to score some tax relief, probably by gaming the system. Also, if you do this, then businesses that did the hard work of hiring and investing last year will then be forced have to compete against businesses that got a government handout this year. That’s not fair.

Now, as we do, we must enlist our values in the fight. That’s why my administration has worked tirelessly to forge a durable legal and policy framework to guide our counterterrorism efforts. Throughout, we have kept Congress fully informed of our efforts. I recognize that in our democracy, no one should just take my word for it that we’re doing things the right way. So in the months ahead, I will continue to engage Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.

Obama has promised transparency before, and he failed to deliver. Heck, he’s actively fought transparency. The only prosecutions of those involved in torture under the Bush administration have been those who blew the whistle on it.

America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber-attacks. Now, we know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private emails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.And that’s why, earlier today, I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs, and our privacy.

That doesn’t sound good…

But now Congress must act as well, by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks. This is something we should be able to get done on a bipartisan basis.

He says “secure our networks.” I hear “control our networks.”

Now, even as we protect our people, we should remember that today’s world presents not just dangers, not just threats, it presents opportunities. To boost American exports, support American jobs and level the playing field in the growing markets of Asia, we intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership. And tonight, I’m announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union — because trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.

Free trade is always good. If that’s what this is (and the whining from the protectionist left suggests it is) then it’s a good thing.

We also know that progress in the most impoverished parts of our world enriches us all — not only because it creates new markets, more stable order in certain regions of the world, but also because it’s the right thing to do. In many places, people live on little more than a dollar a day. So the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades by connecting more people to the global economy; by empowering women; by giving our young and brightest minds new opportunities to serve, and helping communities to feed, and power, and educate themselves; by saving the world’s children from preventable deaths; and by realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation, which is within our reach.

That all sounds real good. I hope it happens.

In defense of freedom, we’ll remain the anchor of strong alliances from the Americas to Africa; from Europe to Asia. In the Middle East, we will stand with citizens as they demand their universal rights, and support stable transitions to democracy.

More freedom in the world. Sounds great. See if you can send a little of that freedom our way while you’re at it.

Defending our freedom, though, is not just the job of our military alone. We must all do our part to make sure our God-given rights are protected here at home.

Then stop violating our rights. That would be doing your part!

Of course, what I’ve said tonight matters little if we don’t come together to protect our most precious resource: our children.

Protecting the children. That never ends well, legislatively speaking. In this case, it’s gun control:

It has been two months since Newtown. I know this is not the first time this country has debated how to reduce gun violence. But this time is different. Overwhelming majorities of Americans — Americans who believe in the Second Amendment — have come together around common-sense reform, like background checks that will make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a gun. Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals. Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because these police chiefs, they’re tired of seeing their guys and gals being outgunned.

If you want to get “weapons of war…off our streets” then stop giving them to police departments!  These guys and especially these guys are not outgunned. And neither was this guy, or these guys. If you want to get weapons of war off the streets, you go first. Reverse the trend toward increasingly militarized police forces.

But as Americans, we all share the same proud title — we are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe.

It also describes the rights we’re supposed to have and the freedoms that the government is supposed to protect.

It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter of our American story.

I suppose it does. My chapter would not include the War on Drugs, grabby TSA agents, vast armies of border guards, or cops and other government officials that hate us for our freedoms.

If there is a message buried deep within Dorner’s incoherent litany of recriminations, anger, and random name-checks, it’s this: People who go on shooting sprees typically tell us very little about society at large. They are by definition far, far beyond the range of normal (or even abnormal) behavior and, as such, shouldn’t be used to generalize about larger social forces at work.

That sounds right to me, but let’s put some numbers to it:

Mother Jones magazine (unlikely to downplay shooting statistics) counts 29 people who committed mass shootings in this country in the last decade. In that same period, the United States had 50 Nobel prize winners.

Using an average of 3 shootings per year, and making the unrealistic assumption that each shooter lives out his full U.S. life expectancy of almost 80 years, that works out to a total of 240 mass shooters among us, many in jail (and many only among us in theory by my unrealistic assumption) in a population of over 313 million. That’s less than one in a million of us, even by the most generous assumptions. By comparison, we have over 400 billionaires.

These killers do not represent us. They are nothing like us.

So now today I read that Chris Crane, president of the ICE employees’ union, wants its agents to have even more power.

[T]he National ICE Council 118, which represents agents in the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement wing, is demanding broader latitude to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants.

You know, I don’t like it when unions tell businesses how to operate — when they don’t allow truck drivers to help unload trucks, or conference hall exhibitors to set up their own exhibits — but that sort of thing pales in comparison to my hatred for law enforcement agencies that tell us what our laws should be.

Crane highlighted limited authority to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants as one of the biggest contributors to low morale. In particular, he singled out the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which grants tens of thousands of young immigrants a temporary reprieve from deportation.

Said Crane, “News has spread quickly through illegal alien populations within jails and communities that immigration agents have been instructed by the agency not to investigate illegal aliens who claim protections from immigration arrest under DACA.” Additionally, he bemoaned the fact that current policy prohibits ICE from prosecuting individuals for illegal entry or overstaying a visa unless they had also been convicted for criminal misdemeanors.

So your fakey police job turns out not to allow you to be as aggressive as you’d hoped? Boo fuckin’ hoo. If you don’t like it, quit.

The result, suggested Crane, was widespread “low morale” among ICE agents, which he implied may have contributed to “the tragic shooting in a Los Angeles ICE office last year, in which an ICE Agent shot his own supervisor and was himself shot and killed by another ICE employee.”

Let me get this straight. Crane’s people are shooting each other, and he thinks that’s a great argument for giving them even more power and responsibility?

God, what a whiny little shit. I mean, what kind of psychopathic fuck whines about how his feelings are hurt because he can’t throw enough people in jail?

FACT SHEET: Fixing our Broken Immigration System so Everyone Plays by the Rules

“So everyone plays by the rules” is a worrisome phrase. The biggest problem with our immigration system is not some people are not playing by the rules, but that the rules themselves are stupid, arbitrary, and cruel. One of the most effective ways to get people to play by the rules is to have good rules.

America’s immigration system is broken. Too many employers game the system by hiring undocumented workers and there are 11 million people living in the shadows.  Neither is good for the economy or the country.

If we’re going to complain that 11 million people are hiding, let’s be clear about who they’re hiding from. They’re not living in the shadows because they’re afraid of their employers; they’re living in the shadows because they’re afraid of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The page goes on to outline 4 key principles of “President Obama’s commonsense immigration reform proposal”:

Continuing to Strengthen Border Security: President Obama has doubled the number of Border Patrol agents since 2004 and today border security is stronger than it has ever been.  But there is more work to do.   The President’s proposal gives law enforcement the tools they need to make our communities safer from crime.  And by enhancing our infrastructure and technology, the President’s proposal continues to strengthen our ability to remove criminals and apprehend and prosecute national security threats.

Doubling border security and building wall sounds wasteful, as does giving law enforcement “the tools they need to make our communities safer from crime,” which also sounds like it will lead to some sort of abridgment of our rights.

Cracking Down on Employers Hiring Undocumented Workers: Our businesses should only employ people legally authorized to work in the United States. Businesses that knowingly employ undocumented workers are exploiting the system to gain an advantage over businesses that play by the rules. The President’s proposal is designed to stop these unfair hiring practices and hold these companies accountable.  At the same time, this proposal gives employers who want to play by the rules a reliable way to verify that their employees are here legally.

There are a couple of things very wrong with that paragraph. First of all, it shouldn’t be the job of employers to enforce federal immigration policy. That’s the job of the United States government. And just because the government can’t do its job, doesn’t mean they should push these responsibilities onto private employers, turning every business owner into an unpaid ICE agent.

(Some of you may think that’s crazy talk, but it used to be the law of the land up until sometime in the 1980′s. Before that, nobody had to show ID and fill out an I-9 form to take a job. Worrying about an employee’s immigration status just wasn’t the employer’s job, nor had it ever been.)

The second problem is that the President and Congress really ought to ask themselves why employers that hire illegal immigrants are able to “gain an advantage over businesses that play by the rules.” Is it because those rules are bad for business? In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense to get rid of the bad rules? Or maybe it’s because illegal immigrants can be exploited. But the reason they are open to exploitation is because they can be imprisoned and deported if they come to the attention of the authorities. If you’re working illegally in the U.S. and you get cheated (or for that matter, if you get robbed or raped or beaten), do you go to the authorities? Or do you try to handle it as best you can on your own?

Earned Citizenship: It is just not practical to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants living within our borders.

Not only is it impractical, it’s also a very cruel thing to do, ripping all those people away from their friends, families, and communities. Someone has to say it.

The President’s proposal provides undocumented immigrants a legal way to earn citizenship that will encourage them to come out of the shadows so they can pay their taxes and play by the same rules as everyone else.  Immigrants living here illegally must be held responsible for their actions by passing national security and criminal background checks, paying taxes and a penalty, going to the back of the line, and learning English before they can earn their citizenship.

That last sentence has a lot of bad parts. National security and criminal background checks are a good idea — we don’t want terrorists and gangsters to get a free pass — but the devil is in the details, and given that ICE has no sense of proportion and uses their own private definition of criminality by treating misdemeanors as felonies, and dismissals as convictions — I’m more than a little worried about how much damage they can do.

I’m not sure what taxes and penalties they’re talking about here, but I have similar concerns about how those will be calculated. It’s one thing if the IRS just grinds through the process for back taxes, and quite another if the the monkeys at ICE will be assessing penalties of their own.

As for “going to the back of the line,” that’s complete nonsense. “The line” is why so many immigrants come here illegally in the first place. The quota for immigrants who just want a job — and have no special skills or relatives living here — is only about 10,000 people per year. Before the economy collapsed, illegal immigration was at least 500,000 people per year. If they had waited in line, it would have taken 50 years to get a work visa. Nobody is willing to wait that long to make a better life for themselves and their families. Going to the back of the line — even just having “the line” — is how we got here in the first place.

There will be no uncertainty about their ability to become U.S. citizens if they meet these eligibility criteria.

That would be great if it actually happened. Who’s going to invest in America if they aren’t sure they won’t be kicked out? But this means committing to not kicking people out without a damned good reason. In our three-felonies-a-day society, any government employee who gets paid to kick out immigrants will be able to do so for the stupidest of reasons.

The proposal will also stop punishing innocent young people brought to the country through no fault of their own by their parents and give them a chance to earn their citizenship more quickly if they serve in the military or pursue higher education.

Great idea. But why isn’t being innocent good enough? Since becoming a citizen would be better for everybody, why make it harder by adding extra criteria?

Streamlining Legal Immigration:  Our immigration system should reward anyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules.  For the sake of our economy and our security, legal immigration should be simple and efficient. The President’s proposal attracts the best minds to America by providing visas to foreign entrepreneurs looking to start businesses here and helping the most promising foreign graduate students in science and math stay in this country after graduation, rather than take their skills to other countries.  The President’s proposal will also reunify families in a timely and humane manner.

So the wealthy, the educated, and those with family members here will have it easier than other immigrants? That’s not reform. That’s our immigration policy today. Most of the people who have come here illegally are neither wealthy nor educated — that’s kind of why they want jobs here — and most of them don’t have close family here (aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews don’t count).

Let’s look at the “Streamlining Legal Immigration” section a little closer by examining the detailed items listed further down in the Whitehouse press release:

Keep Families Together: … The proposal also raises existing annual country caps from 7 percent to 15 percent for the family-sponsored immigration system.

…

Cut Red Tape For Employers: The proposal also eliminates the backlog for employment-sponsored immigration by eliminating annual country caps and adding additional visas to the system.

Dropping the essentially racist country caps is a great idea, but there is no principled reason to drop them for employer-sponsored immigrants while keeping them for family-sponsored immigrants. The contrast between these two sections makes clear that the proposed reforms are being driven mostly by the needs of businesses that want to hire immigrants, rather than concern for the welfare of the immigrants themselves. The next provision makes that crystal clear:

“Staple” green cards to advanced STEM diplomas:  The proposal encourages foreign graduate students educated in the United States to stay here and contribute to our economy by “stapling” a green card to the diplomas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) PhD and Master’s Degree graduates from qualified U.S. universities who have found employment in the United States.  It also requires employers to pay a fee that will support education and training to grow the next generation of American workers in STEM careers.

In other words, they’re going to allow in cheap high-tech workers so businesses don’t have to pay American high tech workers so much. I guess there’s a lot less political pressure to allow in more graphics designers, artists, waitresses, and auto mechanics.

Finally, check out the thicket of economic micromanagement in these three sections:

Create a “startup visa” for job-creating entrepreneurs:  The proposal allows foreign entrepreneurs who attract financing from U.S. investors or revenue from U.S. customers to start and grow their businesses in the United States, and to remain permanently if their companies grow further, create jobs for American workers, and strengthen our economy.

Expand opportunities for investor visas and U.S. economic development: The proposal permanently authorizes immigrant visa opportunities for regional center (pooled investment) programs; provides incentives for visa requestors to invest in programs that support national priorities, including economic development in rural and economically depressed regions; adds new measures to combat fraud and national security threats; includes data collection on economic impact; and creates a pilot program for  state and local government officials to promote economic development.

Create a new visa category for employees of federal national security science and technology laboratories: The proposal creates a new visa category for a limited number of highly-skilled and specialized immigrants to work in federal science and technology laboratories on critical national security needs after being in the United States. for two years and passing rigorous national security and criminal background checks.

Every industry and every single business that wants to hire cheap immigrant labor will have to lobby Congress to make sure their needs are on the approved list. You don’t think that will lead to any corruption, do you?

If we really want to reform our immigration policy and reduce the damage caused by illegal immigration, the solution is to make legal immigration predictable, easy, and fast. Strip out the country caps, shorten the wait for permanent residency, and make it legal for everyone living here to work here.

That’s actually pissing off criminal defense lawyers like Gideon at a public defender, who is wondering where all this outrage suddenly came from:

To all of you who’ve been engrossed by the above; shocked by it, angered, even, I say: welcome to the real world. Welcome to the world that’s existed around you for decades, but that you’ve been too blind to see.

Because Aaron Swartz wasn’t special. Not in that sense. He was just like every other criminal defendant that walks through the doors of every courthouse in America: a conviction waiting to happen. He was an opportunity for someone to flex their muscle over; for someone to teach a lesson to; for a system to fail to live up to its promise. Aaron Swartz is no different that the guy who sat in jail for 5 years waiting for a trial, or the guy who was arrested 20 years after the crime and the Supreme Court changed substantive law just to ensure that he was prosecuted, or the guy in whose case the judge texted the prosecutor questions to ask, or the man who refuses to give up his First Amendment rights and keeps getting arrested or the inmate who loses his appeal because his lawyer didn’t file the right paperwork and the courts don’t care, or Ronald Cotton or Cameron Todd Willingham, or maybe tomorrow: you. In the eyes of the law, there was no difference between any of them: their crimes may have been disparate; their rights all the same to eviscerate.

And over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield makes a different point about those who want to name-and-shame Ortiz the way she handled this case:

The naive and uninitiated think this is about Carmen Ortiz’s efforts to enhance her political career. There may be an element of self-aggrandizement in here, but it’s puny compared to the bigger issues of overcriminalization, prosecutorial overreaching, fundamental fairness in the criminal justice system. It reduces a problem that has been growing for 50 years, touched tends of thousand of people, made America the largest incarcerator in the world and caused enormous harm to society, to a triviality.

Scott’s got a point here. The problems with our criminal justice system do not begin and end with the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, and Ortiz is not the only only person doing terrible things to people in the name of justice.

On the other hand, this isn’t the only bad thing Carmen Ortiz has done. At the risk of promoting the one-bad-apple myth, I just found out that Ortiz is also the villainous prosecutor in another case I’ve been following. She’s the US Attorney who was trying to steal the Motel Caswell:

At the $57-a-night Motel Caswell in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, just the right amount of wrong is what the federal government says it needs to take the business from the family that has operated it for 57 years.

That amount, it turns out, is tiny. During a recent trial before a U.S. magistrate judge in Boston, a federal prosecutor cited one heroin overdose and 14 incidents in which guests or visitors were arrested for drug crimes at the motel from 1994 through 2008—a minuscule percentage of the 200,000 or so room rentals during that period—to show the business is a “dangerous property” ripe for seizure.

The government is arguing that the hotel’s 69-year old owner, Russell Caswell, knew or should have known about the drug dealing on his property. Of course, as is typical, they’re not actually charging him with a crime. That would require hard work to meet a substantial burden of proof. Instead, they’re just trying to take the motel.

(By the way, for those of you who are unfamiliar with civil forfeiture proceedings: Yes, it really does work that way. They don’t have to prove you’re guilty to take your property. I am not making this up.)

Under federal law, property used to “facilitate” a drug crime is subject to forfeiture. In 2000 Congress added a safeguard aimed at preventing exactly the sort of injustice Caswell faces: An owner can stop a forfeiture if he shows, by “a preponderance of the evidence,” that he did not know about the illegal activity or that, once he discovered it, he “did all that reasonably could be expected under the circumstances to terminate such use of the property.”

Caswell, whose father built the motel in 1955, has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and the local Motel 6, Fairfield Inn, Walmart, and Home Depot have had similar problems with drug activity. But the government argues that Caswell was “willfully blind” to drug dealing and could have done more to prevent it.

So why the focus on the Motel Caswell? Because it’s valuable enough to steal:

This cruel surprise was engineered by Vincent Kelley, a forfeiture specialist at the Drug Enforcement Administration who said he read about the Motel Caswell in a news report and found that the property, which the Caswells own free and clear, had an assessed value of $1.3 million. So Kelley approached the Tewksbury Police Department with an “equitable sharing” deal: The feds would seize the property and sell it, and the cops would get up to 80 percent of the proceeds.

Fortunately, Ortiz lost:

In a major triumph for property rights, a federal court in Massachusetts dismissed a civil forfeiture action against the Motel Caswell, a family-run motel in Tewksbury, handing a complete victory to owners Russell and Patricia Caswell.  In one of the most contentious civil forfeiture fights in the nation, Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts concluded, based on a week-long bench trial in November 2012, that the motel was not subject to forfeiture under federal law and that its owners were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, Ortiz may appeal:

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said her office is weighing an appeal against a Tewksbury motel owner who criticized her for prosecutorial bullying last week after he won his battle in the feds’ three-year bid to seize his business, citing drug busts on the property.

Of course, this sort of abuse isn’t unique to Ortiz either. And for every millionaire hotel owner they go after, forfeiture operations probably take dozens of homes and hundreds of cars from poorer people. Ortiz did not invent the abuses she is currently being pilloried for. But doesn’t she still have it coming nonetheless?

Update: And now this story is spreading about another case handled by Ortiz’s office:

In the latest setback for Boston’s beleaguered U.S. attorney, red-faced feds admit they may have arrested the wrong man during a massive gang and drug takedown two weeks ago because he looked like someone they wanted, after they were forced to tell a judge there was “sufficient doubt” that he was the suspect.

Again, arresting the wrong person is not that unusual, but that’s still no excuse.

(Hat tip: Reason)

Then in Part 2, I explored the ideas of a supply-side version of rational addiction in which past production of some good or service makes it less costly to engage in future production of that good or service, using as an example the difficult job of caring for the very sick and elderly.

Please join me now for the thrilling conclusion.

You’ll notice that I started out talking about the demand for goods like video games and heroin, but now I’ve switched to talking about the supply of labor for nursing and firefighting and prostitution. The idea of extending rational addiction and intertemporal complementarity to the supply side is an idea I came up with on my own. It’s a pretty obvious extension of some basic economic ideas (economists often extend theories of consumption to things we don’t usually think of as consumption), and I don’t think it would be controversial, but I wanted to try to find actual economists saying something similar.

It took me a while. My research skills don’t go much beyond Google, and I didn’t have much luck at first. Searching for obvious things like “economics of prostitution and rational addiction” got me a lot of hits for stories about drugs addicts who engage in prostitution to feed their habit. I didn’t do much better when I stretched my knowledge of economic jargon to search for phrases like “prostitution and intertemporal complementarity” or “intertemporal cross-elasticity of supply.”

Eventually, I did stumble across what I was looking for, and really, it should have been obvious.

It’s common to use the word “capital” to mean money, as in capitalizing a corporation, but to an economist, capital refers basically to tools. That is, to the things we make in order to improve our ability to make other things. To a baker, capital is the kitchen and cooking utensils. To an airline, capital is the airplanes and all the associated airport facilities and service equipment. To a web publisher, capital is the website hardware and software.

(Note that capital goods are not consumed in the process — that would be raw materials — and things like land are not capital goods because we don’t have to produce them.)

Because capital goods have to be produced, however, they take away from production of consumer goods. So every business has to decide what capital it needs to achieve the desired level of production, and it has to expend effort to first produce (or spend money to buy) capital goods before it can produce the consumable goods it will sell. You have to have a kitchen before you can bake some bread, you have to buy airplanes before you can sell travel tickets, and you have to build a website before you can monetize page views.

Because the stock of capital must be accumulated at some cost before it can be used to produce the salable goods and services, it is an investment. This is why money invested to start or grow a company is called “capital”– it’s used to buy or build the real economic capital.

Much of the reason we in the industrialized nations live so much better than the rest of the world is because we have accumulated a huge stock of capital. Here in the United States, we produce $11 trillion in consumer goods annually because we have an estimated $28 trillion in private and government-owned capital.

But there’s more to capital than just what is owned by business and government. Economists consider many personally-owned durable goods to be personal capital, in that we don’t consume them directly but we use them to produce other goods and services that we consume. Cars produce transportation, refrigerators and stoves produce meals, and homes produce housing. To account for this, we have to add another $22 trillion in residential assets, bringing the total stock of U.S. capital to about $51 trillion.

Even that figure is only a fraction of all the capital in the U.S., because not all capital is physical goods like factories and airplanes and homes and cars. Some capital is intangible.

Consider why a surgeon makes far more money in a day than most other laborers: Because he knows how to perform surgery. That’s a skill he acquired by paying for an expensive education and spending a great deal of time training. Developing the ability to perform surgery required a sacrifice, an investment of money, time, and energy that could have been spent on other things. But having made that investment, he now profits from being able to produce an incredibly valuable service. In other words, a surgeon’s training and skill is a form of capital. It’s an example of what economists call human capital. Indeed, to an economist, a surgeon consists of little else but human capital.

Because it’s intangible, human capital is kind of a squishy concept. You can see physical capital like airplanes and factories and tools, and you can trace the transactions involved in its purchase or construction, but human capital is created and forever invisibly encoded in the mysterious convolutions of the human brain. This makes it less obvious than it probably should be. But just because it’s impossible to see doesn’t mean it’s any less real.

Estimation of the stock of human capital is difficult because it doesn’t show up in most accounting records — it has to be deduced from other numbers and from estimates of its effects — but by all estimates the U.S. stock of human capital is gigantic. I found a study from 2006 that estimated the U.S. stock of human capital was an incredible $212 trillion — more than four times the current stock of physical capital. As much as our way of life in the U.S. benefits from our accumulation of capital, most of that capital is held in the minds of our people. We live as well as we do because of what we’ve made ourselves into.

And some of us, to bring this post back around, have made ourselves into people who can tolerate unpleasant jobs.

If you take on work that others consider unpleasant because it simply doesn’t bother you, then you are exploiting your personal natural resources. Just as people with good voices can more easily become singers, people with a limited sense of smell can more easily become garbage collectors, and people who don’t mind having sex with lots of strangers can become happy hookers.

But if you take on work that others consider unpleasant because you have become used to it through experience, then your tolerance for that unpleasant job is the result of an investment in your human capital. Like any other investment, it comes at a cost, partly of time and energy, but also at the cost of enduring the initial unpleasantness needed to build up tolerance. The logic for this is the same whether you’re a nurse getting used to the burden of caring for sick people, a fireman running into burning buildings, or a prostitute having sex with strangers.

I’ve been playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of rational addiction, in that I’ve mostly been talking about the effects of intertemporal complementarity, the mechanism by which present consumption makes future consumption more beneficial. But rational addiction is more than that. The theory of rational addiction assumes that people are aware of the phenomenon of intertemporal complementarity and take it into account when making decisions. That’s what makes it rational.

Engaging in certain types of “addictive” behavior is a rational thing to do. From the first time our parents convince us to try some new type of food, or take us somewhere we don’t want to go and tell us we’ll make friends there, aren’t we always finding ourselves in situations where perseverance pays off?

The rational nature of these kinds of decisions is especially clear if we switch to the supply-side view and think in terms of investment in personal human capital. We go to school so we can start careers, and we take crappy jobs so we can learn skills to get better jobs. We take music lessons so we can play an instrument, we exercise so we’ll have better health, and we take a thousand falls off surfboards so we can learn to ride the big waves.

I should conclude by pointing out that I can’t actually prove any of this. In my defense, I’m not really describing a theory so much as a point of view based in some not-terribly-controversial economic theories. The scientific question would be whether those theories actually apply to prostitution. It’s hard to imagine that they don’t, since they have been shown to apply to just about everything else, but given the illegal and hidden nature of prostitution, it seems nearly impossible to get the kind of data you’d need to prove it.

For example, if it becomes known that prostitution will be less profitable in the future — either because it will cost more or pay less — then these theories both predict that prostitution should begin dropping off immediately, either because rationally addicted prostitutes will face a reduced value of future prostitution, which by intertemporal complementarity means that present prostitution will also be less valuable, or because prostitutes who are investing in their ability to tolerate unpleasantness will be facing a reduced return, discouraging that investment.

Even if given a natural experiment, such as a jurisdiction deciding to increase the penalty for prostitution (thus raising its cost for prostitutes) at some point in the future, it would be difficult to distinguish the effects of rational addiction or human capital investment from other effects, such as prostitutes who switch to other work early because they don’t want a period of unemployment, or who work harder to build up a savings buffer before the costs go up. It’s hard enough to do those kinds of studies when everything is out in the open with honest bookkeeping.

So what’s the point of all this? If you’ve stuck with me through all five thousand or so words, you may have been wondering if I have a point. I think I have a few of them.

The first point is that I like thinking about stuff like this. I warned you up front that this would be a one of my long thinking-out-loud pieces. I’ve meandered from prostitution to addiction to video games, and linked them all together with my understanding of some economic theory. I also managed to tie in some national capital stock accounting and a couple of personal stories about a difficult time in my life. It’s the kind of thing I enjoy reading, and I certainly hope you do too.

(If not…sorry. I’m planning some cat blogging later.)

My second point is that there’s nothing special about how and why most women become prostitutes. You don’t have to assume that prostitutes are brainwashed and turned out by evil pimps in order to explain how they get into the profession or why they stay in it. Ordinary theories of economics seem to offer reasonable explanations. Economists have long been making similar findings with regard to illegal drug dealing — once you find a way to convert the risks of prison and street violence into equivalent dollar costs, drug dealers make risk-vs.-reward decisions just like every other economic actor — and I expect that similar results would be found in detailed studies of the economics of prostitution. As Maggie McNeill often argues, prostitution is not much different from other jobs, except for the sex. And getting arrested.

My third point is that I think a lot of people don’t get the second point. The phenomena of being “turned out,” of becoming numb to the horrors, and of getting caught up in “the life” are not unique to prostitution, and getting used to unpleasant work is not evil in and of itself. Failure to realize this leads to believing in nonsense such as “false consciousness,” brainwashing, and ubiquitous-yet-hard-to-find human trafficking rings.

My fourth point is that I suspect our attitude towards people with chemical addictions influences our attitude towards people with rational addictions. After all, both types of addiction produce similarly unusual behavior as seen from the outside. Depending on our views, we may think of junkies and alcoholics as either morally weak or tragic victims, so it’s not surprising that many people take the same view of video game addicts and sex workers.

Re-reading all this, I should probably clarify that I’m not saying that prostitution is a good thing for women, and I’m not encouraging more women to become prostitutes. The economic theories I’m talking about are positive, not normative. They depend on no moral judgement. If I’m right, they describe what happens, but they are in no sense a prescription for what should happen.

Even the staunchest advocates for sex workers agree that prostitution is not for everyone. Some prostitutes may find it liberating, but for many others, it’s just a way to pay the bills. And for most women, it’s something they’ll never do. I can’t possibly decide what would be best for any woman. As a libertarian, of course, I would leave that decision entirely up to her.

Almost nobody mentions that. Everybody talks about the controversial issues raised by Catherine Bigelow’s new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden — the use of torture, the slam at criminal defense lawyers — but if you can set aside your differences with the politics of the characters (and by extension, the filmmakers) Zero Dark Thirty is thoroughly enjoyable as a modern espionage thriller about an intelligence agency’s attempts to break open a terrorist network and trace it to its heart. The plot may not be as intricate as George Smiley’s battle with Karla, but the movie is filled with crunchy details of tradecraft, and the characters are just as morally dubious.

A recent example of this is NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s diatribe against video games. I don’t know if LaPierre is serious or merely spouting nonsense to distract from the gun issue, but I’ve heard other people express similarly intolerant views. It’s not hard to see how someone who doesn’t have an interest in video games would conclude that people who play them constantly are deranged — maybe even dangerously so. They don’t understand why it’s a rewarding experience, so they denigrate it and are willing to see it restricted by law.

Which is a pretty stupid thing for the head of a gun-rights organization to do, considering that some folks in the anti-gun crowd do the exact the same thing when they accuse gun owners of paranoia and extremism.

Inter-temporal complementarity works when past consumption increases the net benefits of future consumption, which can mean increasing the benefits or reducing the cost. To people who aren’t familiar with guns, there is a considerable psychic cost to gun ownership, including a not unreasonable fear of injuring themselves or others, so when they imagine buying a gun, they imagine doing so only when they have a dire need for self-defense. However, they make a mistake when they assume that gun owners face similar costs. Because those high costs would make it worthwhile to have a gun only if they were in extreme peril, they assume people want to buy guns because they believe themselves to be in extreme peril, and since no such peril is evident, they conclude that gun owners must be paranoid.

Many gun owners, however, grew up with guns or have become familiar and comfortable with them, so they incur no more psychic penalty for gun ownership than they would for other hazardous implements such welding torches, lawn mowers, or power tools. They want to own guns not because their paranoia has overcome their common sense, but because their common sense tells them there’s little cost to doing so. In terms of this discussion, they have become rationally addicted to guns.

And because rational addiction depends on the net benefit, it doesn’t just apply to the demand side of the market. Just as we can use intertemporal complementarity to explain seemingly high levels of demand for goods and services that appear to to have little value to outsiders, we can also use it to explain high levels of supply for goods and services that appear unpleasant to produce.

I experienced something like this a few years ago when my mother died, and I suddenly had to start taking care of my bedridden father. I discovered that there were all kinds of special steps for preparing his food, maintaining his oxygen equipment, giving him his medications, and dozens of other things I had to do to take care of him. Cleaning up my father’s soiled clothing and bedlinen was downright repulsive. And no matter how hard I worked, my father was always complaining about something. The job of taking care of him was difficult, disgusting, and thankless.

Since I couldn’t afford to take care of him full time, I began looking for a good nursing home. And as I read up on the subject and visited potential homes for him, I met a lot of the staff, and I found myself wondering what the hell kinds of people chose do this for a living? Were they saints? Or were they just crazy?

Skip forward a few months, however, and my attitude had changed. I had worked out efficient ways to manage my father’s life, and the tasks I had found repulsive were now just part of my day. The complicated process of taking care of my father had become a matter of routine. And although my father was as cranky as ever, I had stopped taking it as a personal rebuke. In economic terms, my prior “consumption” of my care-giving labors had reduced the costs I was experiencing. Taking care of my father became something of a rewarding experience, and I appreciated the chance to spend so much time with him before he died.

And now that I had gained some experience, I no longer viewed nursing as the work of either saints or crazy people. Although it wouldn’t be a good fit for me, I now had some understanding of how professional nurses could learn to manage the effort and get accustomed to the unpleasantness, allowing them to make a career out of taking care of the elderly. I had experienced a bit of rational addiction for myself, which gave me the insight to see it in others.

I suspect this is a common path into the caring professions. One day when I was at my favorite pizza joint picking up an order, I got to talking with one of the servers about about the situation with my father, and she told me she had recently taken care of a close family member in hospice care and had since taken CNA training to turn care-giving into a career. We immediately hired her, and she made a huge difference in all our lives.

It seems likely to me that she went through the the same process of adaptation that I did, except that she went a lot further and turned it into a career. In economic terms, she had become rationally addicted to caring for the old and infirm, an activity that many people, including myself just a few months earlier, would have found repulsive.

This seems like a pretty common phenomenon that must apply to a lot of jobs that are difficult or unpleasant — firefighter, nurse, police officer, miner, soldier — which brings me back to Maggie’s concerns about prostitution:

…what I’m saying is that the anti-whore crowd wants to pretend sex work is something people get drawn into by malefic forces (just as so-called “addicts” are supposedly drawn toward their obsessions), when in fact both are cases of people choosing the most attractive of the available options.  The majority of sex workers choose sex work from a number of valid options, and even women of high opportunity cost (those with degrees and other advantages) consider it a rational economic choice…

It’s not hard to see how rational addiction could help explain why women become prostitutes and why they are so often misunderstood.

I think it’s safe to say that most people find the idea of working as a prostitute a bit disturbing. For most women, having impersonal sex with an unending stream of strange men probably sounds like a repulsive way to make a living. And it probably would be for them, at least at first. But it seems likely to me that many prostitutes become rationally addicted to prostitution. Like a healthcare worker who gets used to changing diapers on bedridden patients or a firefighter who gets used to running into burning buildings, they have become used to the hardships of prostitution.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not about a difference of tastes. From what Maggie and others have written, it’s clear that some prostitutes really are happy hookers — having sex with lots of different men is a defining part of their exciting and adventurous lifestyle, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s great for them (and for their lucky clients) but rational addiction doesn’t depend on a this difference in tastes. Rational addiction can work on anyone who gives prostitution a try, and learns to like it as a job.

This is often portrayed in a very negative way by people who oppose prostitution in the name of protecting women. They describe experienced prostitutes with loaded terms such as “numb” or “deadened,” and anyone who helps them through the acclimation process is said to be “turning them out.” You rarely hear that kind of loaded language when discussing, say, nursing assistants who give sponge baths to 90-year-old invalids or police officers who patrol in dangerous neighborhoods.

Just as outsiders assume that video gamers are obsessive or gun owners are paranoid because they don’t understand the costs and rewards, and just as I thought people in the nursing profession must be either saints or lunatics, so people who look at prostitutes from the outside often make up stories to explain their behavior. They know that they would hate having to engage in prostitution, and they assume everyone else would hate it too. From that false premise it’s a simple deductive step to a dangerous conclusion: If all women hate having sex with strangers for money, but some women are doing it anyway, then someone must be forcing them into it.

Once they’ve rejected other possibilities and latched onto that conclusion, it colors their view of everything else. When faced with “freed” prostitutes who return to the life, they assume that these women must be damaged or brainwashed, and when faced with ex-prostitutes who speak well of sex work, they call them liars. Knowing that they would never consent to be a prostitute, they deny the agency of all prostitutes, robbing them of their right to make decisions about their own lives.

Next post: Prostituting yourself as an investment.

The proposal by Vista Health System to build a $131 million hospital in Lindenhurst would add more beds to an area that already has a substantial surplus, according to a report released today by the staff of the state health care facilities board.

The plan by Waukegan-based Vista to build a 132-bed facility 13 miles west of its existing facilities would increase the oversupply of hospital beds in Lake County, which already has 86 more beds than needed, according to a report by the staff of the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board.

In other words, in an era of rising healthcare costs, the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board (who can’t even keep a website running as I write this) is worried that people might have access to too much medical care, to the tune of 86 hospital beds in a county with a population of 700,000 people.

Supposedly, the purpose of the Illinois HFSRB is to lower healthcare costs by preventing “over-investment” in healthcare facilities, which would somehow drive up healthcare costs, despite the fact that increasing the supply makes the price drop for every other good and service in the world. It’s hard to see how this is anything other than the government protecting the interests of existing hospitals at the expense of new hospitals and of patients.

Well, it does serve one other purpose… It’s an opportunity for graft by the board members who get to control the permit process for billion-dollar corporations:

[The Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board] was embroiled in scandal when federal authorities in 2005 indicted Stuart Levine, a former board member who later pleaded guilty to using his position to squeeze hospitals for favors, kickbacks and contributions for his political friends. The same investigation led to the conviction of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

If the CEO’s of a bunch of hospitals got together and conspired to limit the number of hospital beds in the market, they could increase their profits tremendously by reducing price competition. However, that would be a cartel, which is a crime under U.S. anti-trust laws. They might still make some back-room deals — with promises and handshakes — but they could couldn’t enforce those deals, and they couldn’t prevent outsiders from entering the market and driving prices down.

But if the hospital CEOs can get the state legislature to set up a regulatory board that is specifically allowed to limit the number and size of hospitals, that’s called a Certificate of Need, and it’s completely legal. It’s the state-wide cartelization of the hospital market, and it’s enforceable even against outsiders entering the market. It’s exactly what a bunch of greedy conspirators would want.

It’s also the law in 35 states.

Eliminating the Certificate of Need requirements is one of the most obvious steps to reduce healthcare costs, and not doing anything about it is one of the biggest failings of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). How can you pass a law that’s supposed to give us easier access to healthcare while leaving in place a system specifically designed to limit the availability of healthcare?

The belief that people can become “addicted” to things that do not produce chemical dependency (food, sex, the internet, etc) is fallacious in two ways.  The first, which we have discussed before, is a confusion of the concept of addiction (physical and psychological dependence on a substance which affects biochemistry in such a way as to render normal physiological function impossible without the substance) with the related concepts of habituation (psychological reliance on a substance which is not physiologically addictive) and obsession (psychological fixation on a behavior).

Maggie goes on to make the point that some people who want to save women from prostitution treat them as if they were addicts, denying their personal agency and freedom. This struck a bell, and reminded me of an interesting economic theory I’ve heard about, so I started to write one of my thinking-out-loud posts about it, and I ended up with enough speculations and conjectures to fill several posts, of which this is the first.

I’m going to have to deviate from Maggie’s purist usage of addiction, however. In some contexts, it’s common to limit addiction to chemical dependency as Maggie does, but in typical usage it has a broader meaning, and I think that broader meaning is more useful. I’d rather use addiction to describe the behavior, and use terms like habituation and chemical dependency to describe the reason for the behavior.

In any case, when I talk about addiction in this series of posts, I’m talking about any behavior that appears to be habit-forming or compulsive.

Economists have some difficulty analyzing the concept of addiction because it appears to overturn one of the critical assumptions of economics: That people rationally choose to consume more of things they think will improve their lives. But that assumption doesn’t seem to apply to addicts in the usual sense who are, almost by definition, engaging in behavior that is causing them harm, which seems to conflict with the idea that they are rational agents.

It would be easy to explain addiction by assuming that addicts are indeed irrational, but that answer doesn’t satisfy economists because it explains too much. You can explain any human behavior you don’t understand by declaring it irrational. And that’s no explanation at all. It’s certainly not an explanation you can verify with experiments and studies.

Economists have tried a number of ways to address the problem of addiction without completely abandoning the assumption of rationality, but the one which interests me here is the theory of rational addiction, which attempts to explain addictive behavior by assuming that under certain conditions past consumption will increase the benefits of future consumption. For example, first-time marijuana users often find it unpleasant, but if they keep trying marijuana, they eventually get used to it. Having used it before, they now gain greater benefits from using it again, so they use it more and more.

This is a special case of what economists call complementary goods, which are goods that make each other more useful to consumers, so that an increase in consumption of one leads to an increase in the other. For example, high-def video players are more enjoyable if you have a big-screen television, and big-screen televisions are more valuable if you have a high-def video player, so the sales of both tend to increase together, which makes them complementary goods. Other examples are peanut butter and jelly, hamburgers and french fries, and gin and vermouth. We say that all these are complementary goods. Rational addiction results from inter-temporal complementarity, in which consumption of a good is complementary to consumption of the same good at a later time. Consuming more of the good today leads to consuming more of the good tomorrow.

This doesn’t seem like a good explanation for all addictive behavior — it’s hard to see how heroin addicts living in the streets could really be pursuing a rational addiction. Nevertheless, as with many counter-intuitive economic theories, it has produced a some successful predictions under surprising circumstances. And I think it could be a good explanation for the more figurative forms of addition.

Consider the malady of “video game addiction,” which many serious people pretend is a real thing, at least when they can make money off of it. Although such behavior could be a sign of a mental disorder — people can become obsessive about anything — it strikes me as far more likely to be a case of rational addiction. Video games are often difficult and confusing to play at first, leading to a frustrating experience, but players who keep at it long enough will become good at the games and learn to appreciate the artistry, technology, and style of the games, so they enjoy them a lot more.

This is actually a pretty common human experience, because the logic of rational addiction applies to almost anything that is an acquired taste. Wine tasters have to train the palate before they can appreciate the intricacies of fine wines. Rap music is more enjoyable when you learn about its history and movements and understand how the artists have influenced each other. Soccer is a lot more fun to watch once you understand how to recognize skillful play. Without taking the time to acquire the taste, wine is just bittersweet liquid, rap is just yelling, and soccer is just a bunch of people running around on the grass.

It’s easy to see how this could be confusing to outsiders. They haven’t done the past consumption, so they don’t experience the extra benefits, which makes it harder for them to understand other people’s desire for such consumption. Soccer looks boring to many Americans who haven’t grown up with it as part of their culture. Chinese martial arts movies and steamy romance novels both seem silly if you don’t know the dramatic conventions of the respective genres. Many members of the rock-and-roll generation hated rap and thought disco sucked.

Note that I’m not talking about differences in taste. Taste is a subjective difference between people’s preferences — some people enjoy jazz, and some people enjoy hip-hop — there’s no accounting for it, and economists don’t even try. What I’m talking about is a purely objective difference: Even if we all had exactly the same tastes, we could end up with different levels of demand for different types of goods depending on our prior consumption experiences.

Nevertheless, rational addiction is related to taste, in that they are both reasons for people to make bigoted mistakes in judgement. Just as some people mistake their personal tastes for the universal measures of quality, they also fail to take into account that other people’s differing histories may have lead them to different opinions about the value of certain consumption.

Not only do outsiders not experience the extra benefits from prior experience, but they fail to recognize that such benefits are even possible. This leads to a narrow-mindedness that is very much like bigotry — the same people who rant about video game addiction will speak admiringly about people who spend many hours practicing the piano or training for a marathon. In the worst case it can result in discriminatory rules and legislation.

I should emphasize that the word “addiction” as used in rational addiction theory is not judgmental or indicative of some kind of moral failing. Murphy and Becker developed the basic idea behind rational addiction by studying addictive behavior, but it applies to any behavior where past consumption increases the benefits of future consumption. Had they begun their studies with wine tasting or dog shows, they might have called it “acquired taste.”

Next post in this series: How all this applies to unpleasant jobs.

It may seem like a childish metric, but as a general rule, you know how effective your activism is by how fiercely the state comes after you.

She should know. In 2011, out of curiosity, she sent off FOIA requests to several government agencies for her record, and got a bit of a shock:

I’d actually pretty much forgotten about it after getting form letters back from a number of agencies saying they had nothing on me – or at least, nothing they felt like releasing.  Then, I got a padded mailer from the FBI yesterday.  My FBI file had arrived!  The contents were not what I was expecting.  I don’t think I’m that terribly interesting to the government, but I have had the fortune/misfortune to have socialized with, dated, and befriended a number of wonderful people who definitely would be considered “interesting” to law enforcement.  I was expecting a few pages about my friends and lovers, but what I found was that I was physically followed by a group of FBI agents for five days of my life when I was 18 and involved in organizing a protest/campaign.

The FBI released 436 pages of intelligence related to or about me, none of which dates later than 2002.  436 pages!  Printed out, it would be almost a whole ream of paper.  And the most exciting things contained within are reports of us doing things like making photocopies, buying beer, riding the bus, and eating at a restaurant.  99% of it is mundane or mildly creepy, 1% of it is hilarious, and I hope there is something to be learned.

Basically, the FBI had spent a few days documenting her public life in mind-numbing detail. “Her sweatshirt had a skull and crossbones on the back. She was also wearing glasses.” “Observed standing up, picking up trash and placing it in trash can.” It’s the kind of stuff agents on a boring detail would write down just to prove to their bosses that they’d been on the job.

I could use this to launch a post about the depressing waste of the surveillance state, or something like that, but that’s not why I remember this post of hers. I remember it because I originally found it when I followed a link to a post by Mike Masnick at Techdirt, where he wrote about it:

When you read stuff like this, and then think back to the various cases we’ve seen of the FBI manufacturing their own terrorist plots, it really makes you wonder if the money we’re spending on law enforcement for these kinds of things is money well spent… or if the FBI really just has way too much time (and money) on their hands.

I could have used that to launch a post that said pretty much the same thing. But Masnick’s commentary is not why I remembered Furry Girl’s post either. No, I remember it for slightly more personal reasons because of a comment on Masnick’s post:

Oh, as a side note: Mike, you do understand that you basically linked yourself to porn, right? She makes her living as a porn girl, specializing in hairy and natural menstruation porn. Classy. Now you know why you are blocked in Germany.

I have no idea if that’s an accurate description of what Furry Girl does for a living, but when I read that, all I could think was: Thank God I’m not running the kind of blog where readers get upset over a link to porn. What a sad, sad blog that would be.

I have developed, and I suspect that most criminal-defense lawyers develop, an intuitive sense for when we shouldn’t take cases. I get myself in trouble when I ignore that intuition. So I listen to it.

As Mark points out, this is also good advice for avoiding trouble in other areas of your life. Your intuition about bad situations isn’t always going to be correct, but it’s always based on something that triggered it, and it’s not acting in anyone’s interests but yours.

His advice about what to say is also spot-on:

There had been one unfortunate incident after another, and even with prompting he was unable to explain the logical connections between the incidents and his immediate need for a lawyer. My “spidey sense” tingled. I told the caller: “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with that.”

That is all the explanation that should be needed. You don’t owe anyone a justification for not taking his case… If you tell someone, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you with that” and he demands an explanation, be glad that your intuition has been confirmed.

This is great advice for every area of your life. There are no rules of social behavior or good manners that require you to explain yourself when you reject an offer from a stranger. Whether it’s the salesman who just spent 30 minutes showing you a new car or the guy at the bar who wants you to leave with him, you rarely owe them anything more than some variation of “I’m sorry, but I simply can’t.”

That’s not to say you couldn’t explain more if you want to, especially if you have a good specific reason for your decision and you want to help the other person understand it. So if you’re a criminal lawyer and the client has a matter of civil law, go ahead and explain. If you’re at the bar with your husband when a man offers to buy you a drink, go ahead and tell him you’re married. But if your reason for declining an offer is because your intuition is screaming “No!” then remember that you don’t have to explain anything.

Think of it as a form of rhetorical self-defense. By not offering an explanation, you’re keeping them from getting a grip on you. If you offer explanations and equivocations out of a desire not to seem rude, you’re just opening yourself up for them to take advantage of you. It’s one of the tools that manipulative people use against you.

Salespeople, for example, are taught to get reluctant customers to explain their concerns so they can offer counter-arguments. If you really want to know more about what they’re selling, go ahead and enter into this discussion. But even after they’ve addressed all your concerns, you can still say “no” and you still don’t have to explain yourself.

I’ve had salespeople get angry at me when I do that. I can kind of understand that. To them, it seems like I’m being childishly unfair and not playing by the rules. I’ve also heard of guys swearing at women who decline their advances without offering an explanation. Again, I can kind of understand. It feels a bit rude. Nevertheless, people who get angry because they think strangers owe them explanations are probably going to be unreasonable about other things.

(Some manipulative people will try to trick you into offering explanations by implying that you have  disreputable motives. Maybe the prospective client will accuse you of not wanting to help people of his ethnicity, or the pushy guy at the bar will tell you that, “I can see you’re uncomfortable letting yourself trust people.” A less obvious variation that you’ve probably seen is the salesperson at a high-end store who subtly implies that a person of your station in life wouldn’t appreciate what they have to offer. Don’t fall for these tricks by offering an alternative explanation. When someone tries this on you, it’s just more proof that you should stay away.)

Note that I’m not saying you should be rude to strangers when you turn them down. You should be polite. Maybe even excessively polite. But your politeness should not take the form of explaining your decision.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, but I simply can’t.”

If they press you for an explanation, just keep repeating your apologetic refusal.

“No, really it’s just not possible.”

They’ll usually get the message. And if they don’t. Well, then you can be rude.

Hi Mark,

Did you see this article?

It’s about Racial violence over Christmas season — all over the country. More than a dozen episodes. All in the last month or so.

Thought it might be grist for your mill.

Mark

p.s. Apparently holidays are a good time for mob violence.

The link is to one of Colin Flaherty’s crazy WorldNetDaily articles about what he calls “racist mob violence” or, when he’s being more direct, “black mob violence.” However, the incidents aren’t just from  “the last month or so.” They’re selected from all over the United States over a two-year period. And Flaherty’s summary descriptions of them aren’t exactly a high point of precision journalism. For example:

In Baton Rouge over the weekend, a mob of 200 black people caused a panic at the Mall of Louisiana after they began fighting and running through the shopping center.

As it turns out, if you follow the story links, a crowd of 200 juveniles, apparently mostly black (as seen in one picture), showed up at the mall for some kind of impromptu meet-and-greet put together via Instagram, and a few fights broke out. Police arrested ten of them and dispersed the rest, calling for their parents to come and pick them up. No serious injuries were reported.

In February, police used pepper spray on a black mob of 600 waiting for the release of a new style of basketball shoe.

Actually, 600 people were waiting outside a store for a new shoe when some guy cut in line, causing a fight. He was the only arrest. A few people fighting in a crowd of 600 does not make for a mob, although police did help control the crowd. Also, this was from eleven months ago, not the recent Christmas season.

In September, WFAB reported Baton Rouge police had to break up a riot of more than 100 black people at a skating rink. One man brandished a gun, and families were “fearing for their lives.

It looks like everyone in the building was black. Flaherty refers to these incidents as “racial” violence, but it looks all black-on-black to me. And again, this was not Christmas.

In Newport News, Va., a black mob broke out in a “large fight” at the Patrick Henry Mall two days after Christmas. Police were called to the mall to quell mob violence involving more than 100 black people.

Actually, a fight broke out in a shopping mall food court. There were no weapons, no injuries, and police arrested five teenagers.

You can see what Flaherty’s doing here. He has obsessively curated a collection of reports of violent incidents at establishments frequented by black people, probably because they are in black neighborhoods. These are real incidents — sometimes an idiot cutting in line at a sale, and sometimes a dozen or so kids who might be gang members — but Flaherty tries to portray these incidents as mob action by attributing the violence to every black person in the building. Thus a fight between a handful of teenagers in a mall food court becomes, in his mind, a riot by every black person in the mall.

The fact that he’s been able to collect a few dozen incidents of this nature isn’t all that shocking when you consider that the U.S. black population is around 40 million people. There are bound to be thousands of violent goons in any group that size.

Flaherty, however, explains the discrepancies between the reported facts and his summaries a little differently:

In Dallas at the East Texas Mall, police and shopping center officials said a “Black Friday” disturbance was just a scuffle. The video tells a different story: It shows a black mob of more than 100 people fighting, throwing furniture, tossing trash cans, and hurling wreaths – all while police with dogs and tasers try to subdue the crowd.

(“Hurling wreaths”? Oh no! They could put someone’s eye out!)

But that’s not what’s actually in the video. The four or five big black teenagers throwing things at each other are kind of scary, but the other black people in the video are spectators, either watching or taking cover. Police made one arrest for shoplifting. Flaherty’s description of the story is a huge exaggeration of the actual story.

Of course, Flaherty doesn’t see it that way. Everywhere he looks, he sees unruly mobs of black people, and yet the media isn’t reporting the story, and cops aren’t making mass arrests. In Flaherty’s mind, that’s proof of a conspiracy between the police and the media to hide the truth about black mob violence. Because Liberals.

No, really. That’s his theory. Because, you know, police are always reluctant to arrest black people. And the media hates making a big deal out of things.

Update: And to whoever sent this, thanks. You were right, it was something I could write about.

Here’s a question that will blow your mind: What if he’d said “Zap!”? What then, huh? Is shooting someone with a finger ray gun a lesser crime than shooting someone with a finger firearm because the pretend gun uses pretend technology? Or is it a greater crime because if ray gun technology existed it would be even more dangerous? I urge the Montgomery County school board to address this issue immediately!

When I was in high school, a bunch of us would do this thing where whenever we ran into each other we’d point and say “zap”. Just a silly thing we did. One of the teachers even joined in sometimes. Then again, he was the irresponsible child-endangerer who also sometimes borrowed my Swiss Army knife instead of having me arrested for it. It was the 80′s, people were irresponsible that way.

That’s right, I carried a blade in school, because I was badass.

(Hat tip: Jack Marshall)

• The inevitable drug war deaths remained inevitable.
• I spoke up for sex workers, although, really, it was just a bunch of links.
• I became a friend of whores.
• I explained why criminal violence against the police is not the best response to criminal violence by the police.
• I showed what it looks like when police are afraid of the truth.
• I gave some questionable advice about thinking about reasonable doubt.
• I worried about the long reach of U.S. banking law.
• I discovered the dangers of searching for a DUI lawyer online.
• I complained about misuse of Godwin’s law.
• I commented on some tips for new bloggers.
• I explained why the NYPD fails at statistical quality control.
• I voted in a way that would piss off my dad.
• I addressed the hoodie issue.
• I took on Paul Krugman’s foolish take on “stand your ground.”
• I tried to estimate the Mega Millions breakeven amount.
• John Derbyshire explained black people.
• I agreed with Kip Hawley that the TSA is stupid…
• …and they’re spreading like a cancer.
• My friend Jennifer was in Playboy.
• I explained why bloggers bother with these issues.
• I reviewed Shifted by Colin D. Jones.
• Obama decided he was once again in favor of gay marriage.
• I started, but never finished, exploring the idea that it’s okay when everybody does it. Part 1, Part 2.
• The NATO summit came to Chicago and suppressed our freedom in order to save it.
• Columbia School of Law makes a good argument for a second wrongful execution.
• I answered an urgent legal question about ladies’ undergarments.
• I gave up on Movable Type.
• I reviewed Fragment by Warren Fahy.
• I complained about the TSA ruining everything.
• I explained that sometimes your camera matters.
• The individual mandate paved the way for retaliation.
• I worried a bit too much about the heatwave.
• I defended a Chris Rock tweet.
• I discussed what DNA does’t prove.
• Florida made it easier to commit crimes without knowing it.
• I explained why prosecutor blogs are less fun.
• New York State became slightly less dickish about charitable bail.
• I celebrated 10 years of blogging.
• I scolded the DEA for forgetting they’re supposed to stop crimes.
• Pinellas County, Florida was saved from a Scott Andringa judgeship.
• The surveillance state continued to grow.
• Toni Preckwingle damned a drug warrior to hell.
• I complained about the TSA even more.
• I had some photos taken.
• I offered my theory on why cops shoot puppies.
• I learned that Obama hates American car owners.
• I explained why a Romney Presidency wouldn’t hurt Big Bird.
• I noticed some Koch Derangement Syndrome at In These Times.
• I moved Windypundit to WordPress. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Finish.
• I drew some distinctions concerning Lance Armstrong and sports doping.
• I predicted the results of the election.
• I made fun of post-election up-down financial market reporting.
• Chicago’s police-can-do-no-wrong attitude came back to bite it.
• I pointed out that Mike Huckabee was talking nonsense.
• I tried a visual explanation of the difference between libertarian society and socialist society.

See you in the nNew Year!

Patrick’s own response is pretty good:

Popehat readers have stepped up in the comments and offered other suggestions, and this one from Erbo is pretty good:

(For you young kids, the bottom one is a scene from Logan’s Run.)

For my own entry, I figured why go Sci-Fi? We have some examples right here on this planet:

But then I came across this nonsense:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) weighed in on the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. on Friday, saying the crime was no surprise because we have “systematically removed God” from public schools.

“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Marc Randazza’s response is not exactly a well-reasoned counter-argument, but I can’t fault the sentiment:

Fuck you, Mike Huckabee. Fuck you in your ass with a cactus.

In the comments, however, my Nobody’s Business co-blogger Rogier steps up and fills in some of the argument:

What claptrap. The heavily secularized nations of Western Europe have never tolerated God in public schools, not in recent times anyway, and they have nowhere near the homicide rate of the U.S.

HuffPo also quotes Huckabee from earlier this summer, talking about a different shooting:

“We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “And since we’ve ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn’t act so surprised … when all hell breaks loose.”

One big problem for Huckabee’s argument is that, despite yesterday’s horrors, all hell is not breaking loose. The national homicide rate has been declining for almost two decades and is currently (as of the latest data from 2009) just barely above the low that began the 1960′s:

U.S.Homicide Rate Trend 1960 – 2009

(Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, murder and negligent manslaughter rates.)

So the good news is that — despite godlessness, gun ownership, video games, and internet porn — we’re actually safer from violence than at any time in the last 40 years. This was a bad moment in an otherwise pretty good time.