Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2010

Striking at the enemy’s head

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Strategy Page looks at the relative success of both intelligence and implementation in attacks directed at Taliban leaders:

The American campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan continues, mainly because it works. Since this “decapitation” (of key terrorists) program began in 2008, about 120 attacks have been made, killing about a thousand people. Some 30 percent of the dead were civilians, as the terrorists try to surround themselves with women and children. They believe that the American ROE (Rules of Engagement) will not permit missiles to be fired at them when there are obviously civilians nearby. But most of the missiles hit buildings at night. The Taliban and al Qaeda don’t like to discuss these attacks, even to score some media points by complaining of civilian casualties. But the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services do monitor radio and email in the area, and believe that about 700 terrorists, including two dozen senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and nearly a hundred mid-level ones, have died from the UAV missile attacks. Civilian deaths are minimized by trying to catch the terrorists while travelling, or otherwise away from civilians.

[. . .]

While the terrorist groups are concerned about the losses, especially among the leadership, what alarms them the most is how frequently the American UAVs are finding their key people. The real problem the terrorists have is that someone is ratting them out. Someone, or something, is helping the Americans find the terrorist leaders. That would be Pakistani intelligence (ISI), which promptly began feeling some heat when the civilians were back in power in 2008. After the purge of many Islamic radical (or pro-radical) officers, the information from the Pakistani informant network began to reach the Americans.

This Hellfire campaign is hitting al Qaeda at the very top, although only a quarter of the attacks so far have taken out any of the most senior leaders. But that means over half the senior leadership have been killed or badly wounded in the last two years. Perhaps even greater damage has been done to the terrorist middle management. These are old and experienced lieutenants, as well as young up-and-comers. They are the glue that holds al Qaeda and the Taliban together. Their loss is one reason why it’s easier to get more information on where leaders are, and why rank-and-file al Qaeda and Taliban are less effective of late.

March 11, 2010

News bulletin: school still sucks

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Things aren’t improving in schools, as this report from James Stephenson makes clear:

I remember the day they installed the cameras in my high school. Everyone was surprised when we walked and saw them hanging ominously from the ceiling.

Everyone except me: I moved to rural Virginia from the wealthier and more heavily populated region of northern Virginia. Cameras have watched me since middle school. So I wasn’t surprised, just disappointed. “What have we done?” asked one of my friends. It felt like the faculty was punishing us for something. A common justification for cameras is that they make students safer, and make them feel more secure. I can tell you from first hand experience that that argument is bullshit. Columbine had cameras, but they didn’t make the 15 people who died there any safer. Cameras don’t make you feel more secure; they make you feel twitchy and paranoid. Some people say that the only people who don’t like school cameras are the people that have something to hide. But having the cameras is a constant reminder that the school does not trust you and that the school is worried your fellow classmates might go on some sort of killing rampage.

Cameras aren’t the worst of the privacy violations. Staff perform random searches of cars and lockers. Most of the kids know about locker searches because they see the administration going though their stuff in the hall. But not everyone knows about the car searches, all the way out in the parking lot where administrators aren’t likely to be observed. (People don’t often bother to lock their cars, either).

In a world where everyone seems to be desperately worried about dangers to kids, the one thing that’s overlooked is the almost complete loss of human rights: being a student in the public school system means you don’t have many rights at all. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that prisoners in jail have more rights — and better-protected rights — than children and teenagers in school.

Petty acts of rebellion–and innocent little covert activities–kept our spirits up. The school’s computer network may have been censored, but the sneakernet is alive and well. Just like in times past, high school students don’t have much money to buy music, movies or games, but all are avidly traded at every American high school. It used to be tapes; now it’s thumbdrives and flash disks. My friends and I once started an underground leaflet campaign that was a lot of fun. I even read about a girl who ran a library of banned books out of her locker. These trivial things are more important than they seem because they make students feel like they have some measure of control over their lives. Schools today are not training students to be good citizens: they are training students to be obedient.

Of course, obedience must be enforced.

March 9, 2010

It’s pesticide-free . . . but don’t call it “organic”

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:43

Organic wine, in theory, should be better quality than non-organic wine because the lack of pesticides requires much more manual labour in the vineyard to produce useful grapes. If you have to put in all that extra effort just to get sufficient grapes at harvest, it’s prudent to treat the resulting wine with care and further attention (otherwise, you’re wasting all that effort up front to grow the grapes in the first place). But, after all that (at least in California), don’t put the word organic on the label:

“You’ve heard of the French paradox?” quipped Delmas, associate professor of management at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “Well, this is the American version. You’d expect anything with an eco-label to command a higher price, but that’s just not the case with California wine.”

[. . .]

So long as they didn’t carry eco-labels, these wines commanded a 13-percent higher price than conventionally produced wines of the same varietal, appellation and year. Their ratings on Wine Specator’s 100-point scale, in which wines tend to range between the mid-50s and high 90s, were also higher. Wines made from organically grown grapes averaged one point higher than their conventionally produced counterparts.

While the higher Wine Spectator scores still prevailed when producers slapped eco-labels on their bottles, the financial rewards for going to the trouble of making certified wine evaporated. The “made from organically grown grapes” label not only wiped out the price premium for using certified grapes but actually drove prices 7 percent below those for conventionally produced wines, the researchers found.

[. . .]

“Organic wine earned its bad reputation in the ’70s and ’80s,” Grant said. “Considered ‘hippie wine,’ it tended to turn to vinegar more quickly than non-organic wine. This negative association still lingers.”

Even today, the absence of sulfites reduces the shelf-life of organic wines, making them less stable, the researchers said.

I’m afraid my experience of “organic” wine is similar: the ones I’ve tried haven’t been very good, mostly due to rapid aging (the wine was already well past its best when others from the same region/same vintage were still improving). I certainly don’t pay extra if I notice an “organic” label, and I’m likely to avoid such a wine in favour of a non-organic option where possible.

QotD: Early America

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Early America enjoyed, perhaps, a little more participatory local democracy than Britain, and had a slightly broader electorate and already the highest standard of living in the world. But the revolution so rapturously mythologized by Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and others, was really, as Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison and Adams did not forget, a somewhat grubby contest over taxes.

In one of the greatest feats of statesmanship of all history, the Americans, and especially Benjamin Franklin, persuaded the British to expel the French from North America, and then persuaded the French to provide the margin of victory in evicting the British themselves. This precocious manipulation of the world’s two greatest powers by a group of colonists showed astounding finesse and precocity, made more piquant and ironic by the fact that their rebellion was against paying the colonies’ share of the cost of removing the French, and the French were recruited to save the Americans their proportionate share of the cost of their own eviction.

All countries swaddle themselves in myths, and the Americans aren’t more self-indulgent than others; only more successful and operating on the grand scale of a country that in two long lifetimes grew to possess completely unprecedented power and influence in the world.

Even without the great pre-eminence of America, the founders of the country possessed a presentational skill that vastly exceeded the procession of demagogues and lunatics that sent and followed each other to the guillotine in the French Revolution. And they were certainly more persuasive and sophisticated than the British spokesmen for constitutional monarchy.

But their unintended legacy of this gift for theatricality is the endless hyperbole and hucksterism of American materialism and individuality.

Conrad Black, “Send in the clowns”, National Post, 2010-03-09

This is why Fark.com has a special “Florida” tag

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

The headline really does say it all:

Shows with gay characters could lose Florida tax credits

Florida lawmakers are considering a “family friendly” bill that would deny tax credits to films and television shows with gay characters in favor of those promoting traditional values.

The proposal, which has fueled a heated controversy for its discriminatory nature, would increase current tax credits from 2 to 5% of production costs for shows considered “family friendly.”

I’m not in favour of tax credits for TV and movie production in any case, but if your government is going to be providing them, they should at least be available to all legal forms of entertainment. Discrimination in this way is ridiculous — and I’d be astounded if it was actually constitutional.

If persuasion doesn’t work, raise the taxes

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:12

New York City is moving ahead in their war on junk food, with a new proposal to add a significant tax to the sales of carbonated pop:

[Mayor Michael Bloomberg] described the soda tax — equivalent to an extra eight pence on a can — as “a fix that just makes sense”, saving lives and cutting rising health care costs.

“An extra 12 cents on a can of soda would raise nearly $1 billion (£663 million), allowing us to keep community health services open and teachers in the classroom,” he said on his weekly radio programme on Sunday.

“And, at the same time, it would help us fight a major problem plaguing our children: obesity.”

David Paterson, the mayor of New York state, has already proposed a soda tax but it was dropped last year following a public outcry.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link, who said “Let’s see now, prohibition didn’t work, so let’s try something different!”

Of course, the proposed tax would be very popular in some areas: all the retailers outside NYC who would be able to reap significant additional sales to New Yorkers who didn’t want to pay the sin tax.

March 5, 2010

Government wages and benefits outpace private sector

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:59

Once upon a time (and this is becoming long enough in the past to qualify as legend), government work was less well-paid than equivalent work in the private sector. The advantage of taking the lower-paid government job was job security: government workers had a “job for life” and a nice pension at the end of it. Private sector workers got more in the weekly pay, but generally had worse pensions and more uncertainty for long-term employment.

During the last generation or so, this basic trade-off has been lost. Government workers now get better paid than their private sector counterparts, still get practically guaranteed lifetime employment, and not-just-nice-but-very-nice pensions. No wonder governments have become the employer of choice. Katherine Mangu-Ward has the gory details:

There are two million civilian federal workers. 1.1 million of them have direct private sector equivalents. And they are laughing their asses off at those private sector suckers, who are doing similar jobs for less pay — often a lot less.

“Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector,” according to a USA Today report. In jobs where there are private equivalents, the feds are earning $7,645 more on average than their private counterparts.

[. . .]

Note that the figures above are salaries and don’t include the value of benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker.

March 4, 2010

Don’t plan on riding those new high speed trains any time soon

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

I’m a train fan, always have been. I’d love to see new rail lines developed, but only where they make economic sense. Most of the proposed HSR lines don’t even come close, and as they point out in the video, they don’t deliver on the other claimed benefits either. I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

The jokes just write themselves

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

By way of Kathy Shaidle’s blog, a court case that was custom-designed for certain political campaigns:

A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.

And remember, guns don’t kill people: lobbyists for anti-domestic violence groups do.

Shooting the messenger over extra taxes

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:32

An article in the Chicago Tribune talks about the latest “extra” to appear on restaurant bills in San Francisco: the “health” charge. This is how many restaurants in the city are handling the latest tax increase — making it explicit on the bill — but the Tribune writer appears to feel the restaurant owners should “eat” the new tax as “part of doing business”. Implied in this is that the restaurants shouldn’t raise prices either.

So, let’s all blame those evil restaurant owners, shall we?

The rationale for this one is to cover the employers’ mandatory contribution to the City’s “Healthy San Francisco” health-coverage system. The charge actually is levied on employers, but at least some restaurants are adding a few dollars or percentage points to each customer’s bill to cover this charge.

The restaurants’ excuse for assessing this charge separately is to let customers know how much they’re paying for employees’ health coverage. That’s the same excuse hotels use when they add “resort” or “housekeeping” fees to unsuspecting guests’ room bills. It’s the same excuse airlines would use to exclude fuel surcharges from their advertised fares if the Department of Transportation would allow them. And it’s sheer nonsense. Employees’ health insurance is no less of a cost of doing business than rent, property taxes, food costs, security services and all the other inputs businesses require to operate. To single out health care for a separate surcharge is unwarranted.

What’s missing here is the distinction between mandatory fees or taxes which various levels of government impose, and extra charges for things which logically should be intrinsic to the basic price. I agree that adding a “housekeeping” item to a hotel bill is wrong, but calling out a new tax that has to be paid is correct. Hidden taxes (in which category the Tribune writer misleadingly includes the San Francisco “health” charge) are the ones that don’t get itemized for you on your bill . . . that’s the “hidden” part.

Hidden taxes are far worse than itemized entries, because when prices rise due to changes in the tax rate, they naturally blame the seller (who doesn’t benefit from the raised price) and not the government which raised the tax rate underlying the price increase.

Canadian air travel now to be subject to US oversight

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:11

I’d always suspected that the close co-operation between Canadian and US officials meant that even theoretically domestic flights might be scrutinized by the other country, but now it’s official policy:

Starting in December, passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board the aircraft once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has determined they are not terrorists.

Secure Flight, the newest weapon in the U.S. war on terrorism, gives the United States unprecedented power about who can board planes that fly over U.S. airspace — even if the flights originate and land in Canada.

The program, which is set to take effect globally in December 2010, was created as part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, adopted by U.S. Congress in 2004.

Parliament never adopted or even discussed the Secure Flight program — even though Secure Flight transfers the authority of screening passengers, and their personal information, from domestic airlines to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

March 3, 2010

That’s not data: that’s collated anecdotes

Filed under: Environment, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:

The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.

Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.

That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.

“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.

Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.

There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.

March 2, 2010

SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:

. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.

Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.

Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.

The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.

Those ominous parallels again

Filed under: Cancon, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

I originally just added this as a comment on this post, but it appears to have a bit more life in it.

Gil LeBreton made this pithy observation in his column about the Vancouver Olympics on the 28th of February:

After a spirited torch relay ignited pride in every corner of the country, the Olympic Games began and quickly galvanized the nation.

Flags were everywhere. The country’s national symbol hung from windows and was worn on nearly everyone’s clothing.

Fervent crowds cheered every victory by the host nation.

But enough about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I thought it was amusing, so I just added it to the comment thread, but I guess I wasn’t the only one to notice Mr. LeBreton’s insight:

So true. The parallels between Berlin 1936 and Vancouver 2010 are clear, if you just pay attention.

Not everyone has the perspicacity to discern the neo-Nazi threat north of America’s borders. Fortunately, Mr. LeBreton does. Because he’s more observant than most. He makes the cognitive connections others miss:

“For 17 days we were barraged with Canadian flags, rode buses and trains with people in sweatshirts and jerseys adorned with Canadian maple leafs, and were serenaded at venues by Canadian spectators, lustily cheering for Canadian athletes.”

My God. It’s spine-chilling.

The rest of the world was lulled into complacency and Olympic fever. But the Star-Telegram’s crack reporter wasn’t fooled by the crafty Canucks. Their display of patriotism reminded him of something. Something terrifying.

“I didn’t attend the ’36 Olympics, but I’ve seen the pictures. Swastikas everywhere.”

You see? Maple leaf flag equals swastika. Damn you, Canada.

He’s so right. Connect the dots! Look it up, sheeple!

March 1, 2010

Miami considers new ways to marginalize the homeless

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

Miami has a problem with the homeless, so it has come up with a new and innovative way to address it: making it even more difficult for people to (legally) help feed them.

Miami residents may have to think twice before giving up their leftovers to the homeless.

The Miami City Commission is set to consider a proposal next month that would prohibit unauthorized people and groups from feeding the homeless downtown, an ordinance proponents say will cut down on litter and ensure the safety of the food the homeless do eat.

The Miami Downtown Development Authority recently approved the measure, sending it up to the commission.

Though the change could draw objections, David Karsh, spokesman for Development Authority Chairman Marc Sarnoff, said the rule isn’t a blanket ban. He said that anybody would be able to feed the homeless, but they would have to go through formal training first — amateurs couldn’t just give up part of their lunch to help someone they meet on the street.

I’m sure there are problems . . . few people are homeless voluntarily unless they have other issues (commonly mental health problems). But this proposal appears to be moving in the wrong direction, by discouraging individual efforts to help. Give a homeless man a sandwich and face a $300 fine? Two predictable results 1) fewer ad hoc efforts to help the homeless, and 2) fewer meals for the homeless.

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