Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2015

The changes in language describing changing gender

Filed under: Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Charlotte Allen discusses how quickly the language has changed when talking about transsexuality over a very short time:

In 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) approved a set of proposed revisions to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the new version is the DSM-5), designed to remove the stigma of mental illness from the transgender classification. Earlier versions of the DSM had defined transgenderism as “gender identity disorder,” which seemed to imply illness. The DSM-5 changed that term to “gender dysphoria.” The change paralleled the association’s removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. It signaled that whatever problems transgenders might experience were not due to a pathological misconception that their bodies and gender identities were mismatched but to the fact that their bodies and gender identities were mismatched. Hormones, surgery, cosmetics, and different clothes might still be the “cure” (enabling transgenders to qualify for medical reimbursement for a variety of procedures), but the APA was making it clear, as far as it was concerned, that the problem was not inside the transgender’s head.

The medical evidence for a mismatch between brains and bodies is ambiguous. The two studies cited most frequently by transgender activists, published in 1995 and 2000, examined the brains of a total of seven male-to-female transgenders and found that a region of the hypothalamus, an almond-shaped area of the brain that controls the release of hormones by the pituitary gland, was female-typical in those brains. But those studies have been criticized for not controlling for the estrogen​—​which affects the size of the hypothalamus​—​that most male-to-female transgenders take daily in order to maintain their feminine appearance.

Accompanying the APA’s change of classification was a change of vocabulary. Ever since the days of Christine Jorgensen (1926-1989), the World War II serviceman whose surgery in Denmark during the early 1950s brought transgenderism under the media spotlight for the first time, the procedure was known in popular parlance as a “sex change operation.” Then in the 1990s, when the idea of one’s “gender” as something distinct from one’s biological sex began to take hold (thanks to the efforts of academic feminists and other postmodernists, who argued that gender is “socially constructed”), the preferred term became “gender reassignment surgery.” Now the preferred phrase seems to be “gender confirmation surgery.” The change in terminology renders more credible transpeople’s claims to have always belonged to the gender to which they have transitioned.

The once commonly used word “transsexual” has thus become passé ​—​ even verboten in the most sensitive circles —​ just during the past decade. For example, Washington Post reporter Abby Ohlheiser issued a severe scolding to news media for using the word “transsexual” in reference to a 27-year-old male-to-female victim of a grisly murder and dismemberment at the hands of her 28-year-old male lover (who subsequently committed suicide) in Brisbane, Australia, in October 2014. “Although some individuals do identify as ‘transsexual,’ the term is often viewed as old-fashioned and not an appropriate umbrella word,” Ohlheiser wrote in a column deriding the coverage of the crime as “transphobic.” Ohlheiser also objected to media describing the victim, Mayang Prasetyo, as a “prostitute” (Prasetyo had been working as an escort before her death) and reproducing photos of Prasetyo’s busty self clad in a tiny swimsuit that she had posted on the Internet. “Many of the articles covering the murder are laden with provocative photographs of the victim in a bikini, as if any story about a trans person is an excuse to view and scrutinize trans bodies,” Ohlheiser wrote.

February 26, 2015

Are submarines facing premature obsolescence?

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Harry J. Kazianis looks at the risk for the US Navy as underwater detection systems become cheaper and more effective:

What would happen if U.S. nuclear attack submarines — some of the most sophisticated and expensive American weapons of war — suddenly became obsolete? Imagine a scenario where these important systems became the hunted instead of the hunter, or just as technologically backward as the massive battleships of years past. Think that sounds completely insane? If advances in big data and new detection methods fuse with the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) ambitions of nations like China and Russia, naval planners around the world might have to go back to the drawing board.

Submarines: The New Battleship?

The revelation is alluded to in a recent report by the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) called “The Emerging Era in Undersea Warfare.” Smartly named by a certain TNI editor as the “think-tank’s think-tank,” CSBA has crafted in the last decade many of the most detailed and sophisticated reports regarding the most pressing national-security challenges around — sometimes years before anyone else. Ever heard of a little operational concept called AirSea Battle? They were at the forefront of it before it was in the news.

In a piece for TNI, the report’s author, Bryan Clark, lays out the problem in more layman’s terms:

    Since the Cold War submarines, particularly quiet American ones, have been considered largely immune to adversary A2/AD capabilities. But the ability of submarines to hide through quieting alone will decrease as each successive decibel of noise reduction becomes more expensive and as new detection methods mature that rely on phenomena other than sounds emanating from a submarine. These techniques include lower frequency active sonar and non-acoustic methods that detect submarine wakes or (at short ranges) bounce laser or light-emitting diode (LED) light off a submarine hull. The physics behind most of these alternative techniques has been known for decades, but was not exploited because computer processors were too slow to run the detailed models needed to see small changes in the environment caused by a quiet submarine. Today, “big data” processing enables advanced navies to run sophisticated oceanographic models in real time to exploit these detection techniques. As they become more prevalent, they could make some coastal areas too hazardous for manned submarines.

Could modern attack subs soon face the same problem as surface combatants around the world, where some areas are simply too dangerous to enter, thanks to pressing A2/AD challenges?

America’s not-so-hidden class structure

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In The Federalist, Robert Tracinski looks at the recent brouhaha over Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s lack of a university degree and what it reveals about America’s class structure:

On the surface, of course, it’s certainly about Scott Walker. The left-leaning mainstream media senses that he’s a potential danger. After all, he has won three straight elections in a swing state, while challenging the public employees’ unions head-on and significantly reducing their government privileges. (This is precisely what makes him interesting to those of us on the right.) The mainstream media feel that they need to disqualify him now, so they’re looking for anything they can use against him.

But behind that, there is a more visceral reaction. The real purpose of higher education is to learn the knowledge and skills required for success later in life. So if someone has already become a success, whether or not he went to college is irrelevant. If he has achieved the end, what does it matter that he didn’t do it by way of that specific means? But for the mainstream elites, particularly those at the top level in the media, a college education is not simply a means to an end. It is itself a key attainment that confers a special social status.

There are no real class divisions in America except one: the college-educated versus the non-college educated. It helps to think of this in terms borrowed from the world of a Jane Austen novel: graduating from college is what makes you a “gentleman.” (A degree from an Ivy League school makes you part of the aristocracy.) It qualifies you to marry the right people and hold the right kind of positions. It makes you respectable. And even if you don’t achieve much in the world of work and business, even if you’re still working as a barista ten years later, you still retain that special status. It’s a modern form of “genteel poverty,” which is considered superior to the regular kind of poverty.

If you don’t have a college degree, by contrast, you are looked down upon as a vulgar commoner who is presumptuously attempting to rise above his station. Which is pretty much what they’re saying about Scott Walker. This prejudice is particularly strong when applied to anyone from the right, whose retrograde views are easily attributed to his lack of attendance at the gentleman’s finishing school that is the university.

February 25, 2015

Net Neutrality, Title II Proponents “Assume Nothing Has Changed” Since 1995: Daniel Berninger

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 23 Feb 2015

“All the logic that we are seeing in the Net Neutrality debate is assuming that nothing has changed; it’s assuming that it’s 1995. What’s actually happened is that people get more and more service, year in and year out,” says Daniel Berninger, a telecom activist who was involved in the early days of internet-phone service of Vonage.

Net Neutrality proponents, including President Obama, argue that internet-service providers (ISPs) need to be regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in order to keep the internet “free and open.”

Berninger heads up VCXC, a nonprofit that is pushing for regulatory and policy changes to speed up the transition to IP-based networks for voice and data sharing. He’s an unsparing critic of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to implement Net Neutrality by regulating broadband network operators under Title II or “common carrier” provisions of federal law.

Title II has historically applied to telephone companies, which were regulated as public utilities and subject to government scrutiny regarding every aspect of service, including pricing and universal service obligations. Since the mid-1990s, the internet has been classified as an “information service,” which is subject to much less regulation under Title I of the relevant federal law.

“Title II regulation has been around for 80 years,” says Berninger, “and we know exactly what it can accomplish and what it can’t accomplish … in all the things that it touched, it essentially destroyed innovation.” In 1956, he explains, as part of a consent decree involving ATT, phone service was regulated by the FCC under Title II while “information services” were essentially unregulated. “We split communications and computing and treated them entirely different — essentially as a twin experiment. Well, one twin prospered and one twin did not do very well.” Berninger argues that virtually all the problems that proponents of Title II regulation and Net Neutrality worry over — such as the blocking of specific websites and the deliberate slowing of traffic — haven’t occurred precisely because ISPs are subject to market competition and must constantly innovate to keep customers happy. FCC regulation would hamper that.

The FCC will vote on Wheeler’s proposal later this week and is widely expected to endorse it. The FCC has lost two previous attempts to assert regulatory control over the internet.

February 24, 2015

The “Little Free Libraries” and their enemies

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf talks about the charming origins of the Little Free Library movement … and its potential demise at the hands of greyfaces everywhere:

Three years ago, The Los Angeles Times published a feel-good story on the Little Free Library movement. The idea is simple: A book lover puts a box or shelf or crate of books in their front yard. Neighbors browse, take one, and return later with a replacement. A 76-year-old in Sherman Oaks, California, felt that his little library, roughly the size of a dollhouse, “turned strangers into friends and a sometimes-impersonal neighborhood into a community,” the reporter observed. The man knew he was onto something “when a 9-year-old boy knocked on his door one morning to say how much he liked the little library.” He went on to explain, “I met more neighbors in the first three weeks than in the previous 30 years.”

Since 2009, when a Wisconsin man built a little, free library to honor his late mother, who loved books, copycats inspired by his example have put thousands of Little Free Libraries all over the U.S. and beyond. Many are displayed on this online map. In Venice, where I live, I know of at least three Little Free Libraries, and have witnessed chance encounters where folks in the neighborhood chat about a book.

I wish that I was writing merely to extol this trend. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things.

Last summer in Kansas, a 9-year-old was loving his Little Free Library until at least two residents proved that some people will complain about anything no matter how harmless and city officials pushed the boundaries of literal-mindedness:

    The Leawood City Council said it had received a couple of complaints about Spencer Collins’ Little Free Library. They dubbed it an “illegal detached structure” and told the Collins’ they would face a fine if they did not remove the Little Free Library from their yard by June 19.

Scattered stories like these have appeared in various local news outlets. The L.A. Times followed up last week with a trend story that got things just about right. “Crime, homelessness and crumbling infrastructure are still a problem in almost every part of America, but two cities have recently cracked down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small-community libraries where residents can share books,” Michael Schaub wrote. “Officials in Los Angeles and Shreveport, Louisiana, have told the owners of homemade lending libraries that they’re in violation of city codes, and asked them to remove or relocate their small book collections.”

QotD: A form of pattern recognition

Filed under: Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Islam draws attention in our era not because its adherents tend to be brown-skinned or because it is easier to fear those who live abroad than those who live down the street, but because it is used so frequently as the justification for attacks around the world that its critics have begun to notice a pattern. In most cases, it is reasonable to acknowledge simultaneously that representatives of every philosophy will occasionally do something evil — maybe in the name of their philosophy; maybe not — and to contend that it is silly to blame that philosophy for the individual’s behavior. As far as we know, there is no more evidence that today’s killer is representative of atheism per se than that the man who opened fire at the Family Research Council was representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center or that Scott Roeder was representative of the pro-life cause. Further, there are no evident superstructures within atheism or the SPLC or the right-to-life movement that routinely condone mass murder, and nor are there many friends of those groups who would be willing to justify or to indulge the maniacs they have attracted. It seems reasonably clear that any lunatic can appropriate a cause or provide a name as his inspiration, and that, when he does, we should neither regard that lunatic’s behavior as indicative of the whole nor worry too much about repeat attacks. As I have written before — in defense of Right and Left — words do not pull triggers.

This instinct, however, has its limitations, for it is one thing to acknowledge that one swallow does not make a summer, and quite another to insist that it is not summer when the whole flock is overhead. Individual acts should be taken as such, of course. But when the same names pop up over and over and over again it is fair for us to connect the dots. To wonder why conservatives worry about Islam specifically — and not, say, about atheism or progressivism or the Tea Party or the Westboro Baptist Church — is to ignore that Islam is so often deployed to rationalize violence around the world that it makes sense for them to ask more questions. An inquiry into the violent tendencies of contemporary atheists is likely to reach a dead end. An inquiry into modern Islam, by contrast, is not. Can anybody say with a straight face that it is irrational to wonder whether there is something inherent in present-day Islam that, at best, is attracting the crazy and the disenfranchised, and, at worst, actually requires savagery? I think not.

Charles C.W. Cooke, “Why We Worry about Islamist Violence and Not Progressive Atheist Violence”, National Review, 2015-02-11.

February 22, 2015

Obamacare’s externalities

Filed under: Economics, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Megan McArdle on just what externalities are and why we pay attention to them:

For those who might not know the term, “externality” is economist-speak, and it means about what it sounds like: an effect that your action has on others. An externality can be positive or negative, and obviously, we as a society would like to have as many as possible of the former and as few as possible of the latter. In other words, “Your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose.”

I’m a libertarian, and libertarians love talking about externalities. They give us a (relatively) clear way to define what are and are not legitimate scopes of public action. Whatever you’re doing in the privacy of your own bedroom with another consenting adult is really none of my business, even if I think you oughtn’t to be doing it. On the other hand, if you’re breeding rats and cockroaches in there, and they’re coming through the shared wall of our respective row houses, then I have the right to get the law involved.

Framing things as “externalities” is therefore a good way to get a libertarian, or someone who leans that way, on your side. And such frames have come up over and over in the debate over Obamacare, which has been variously justified by the cost to the state of emergency room care; the cost to society of free-riding young folks who don’t buy insurance until they get sick; the public health cost of people who don’t go to the doctor and get really, expensively sick; an unhealthy workforce that is less productive; and the cost to friends and relatives who have to chip in to cover uninsured medical expenses.

I didn’t find any of those arguments particularly convincing. The third can just be dispensed with on the grounds of accuracy: In general, preventive medicine does not save money. Oh, it may save money in the particular case of someone whose diabetes or cancer went long undiagnosed. The problem is, you can’t just look at the cost of sick folks who would have been a lot cheaper to treat if their conditions had been caught earlier. You also have to include the cost of all the healthy people you had to screen in order to catch that one case of disease. And with limited exceptions, the cost of screening the healthy generally outweighs the cost of treating the chronically ill. Now, you can certainly argue for preventive care on other grounds — for example, that it makes people healthier (though even then you have to add the cost of unnecessary medical procedures, such as biopsies following a false positive on a blood test, which is why we do not, say, give annual mammograms to every American woman). But it’s not generally a money saver, so this particular externality doesn’t exist.

The rest of the arguments have some weight, but in the end, I don’t think they’re weighty enough. Let me explain.

February 21, 2015

Ace unloads on the media over their “coverage” of the Ebola outbreak

Filed under: Health, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace is underwhelmed by the Washington Post‘s belated acknowledgement that they aided and abetted the CDC in downplaying the seriousness of the Ebola outbreak last year:

Scientists: “There Was Almost a Rush to Assure the Public That We Knew A Lot More Than We Did” About Ebola; Experts Now Concede Ebola May Be Transmitted by Purely Airborne Route

Incidentally, the Washington Post, which is itself an Expert at Writing to whom you should bow and scrape, reported his words as “there was a rush to ensure the public,” which is not what he said, because it’s stupid. And if he did say it, you throw a “(sic)” after it to indicate the error is in the quoted material, not in your own writing.

[…]

I assume he is speaking here of a proper airborne transmission, and not the layman’s “airborne” transmission; either way, the experts who so ensuredly ensured us that there was no way to get ebola from the air were wrong.

Not just wrong. Arrogantly and loudly wrong.

See, the media is not particularly bright but they are Bossy and they like pretending they Love Science. So when they see an opportunity to Pretend to Be Scientists and Yell At Their Dumb Readers, they seize upon it, even if they don’t have any idea about what the fuck they are talking. (Note preposition smartly undangled, all expert-like.)

The media were always wrong on this, and the CDC was always deliberately deceptive. This new information about an actual airborne route of transmission is new (ish), but even before, the CDC was falsely suggesting that “no airborne transmission” meant that you could not catch ebola except by direct contact with an infected person or his fluids, like his blood and stool.

They sort of forgot that his “spit” and vapor in his breath counted as “liquids,” so you could in fact catch ebola by what the layman would call an airborne route. (Scientists do not call this path of transmission “airborne” transmission, but rather “spray” transmission or “droplet transmission.”)

The CDC deliberately lied to people, and the demented little Apple Polishers of the media rushed to scream at the rest of the class that you could not possibly get ebola by anything other than direct contact.

Don’t learn firearms “rules” from the big screen

Filed under: Media, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Robert Farago learned a lot from watching TV and movies. Luckily, it didn’t kill him:

My main squeeze had never watched High Noon. Thanks to Netflix, I rectified that omission. I hadn’t seen Gary Cooper’s darting eyes in a good forty years. Watching the Marshal fail to marshal the townspeople to defend themselves against a quartet of outlaws, it all came flooding back. How a good man sometimes has to stand alone. How fine Grace Kelly looked in a skin-tight bodice (not an observation I shared with my SO). How a single shot can make a man fall down dead in an instant. Wait. What? Yup. Here are three really stupid lessons I learned from watching cowboy movies as a kid …

1. Handguns kill instantly

What I learned …

Thanks to Saturday matinée westerns on UHF TV, I grew-up believing bad guys died when you shot them. They did so without hesitation, deviation or repetition. One bullet was more than enough to shuffle a bad guy off this mortal coil. I also learned that the good guy never dies from a gunshot wound, although he sometimes seems to. And if a bad guy’s bullet does take out a good guy — usually a supporting player — he’s got more than enough time to say something heroic and stoic first.

Truth be told …

With modern medical care and internal combustion-powered hospital transportation, most people who get shot live. No matter what caliber ammo you use, it’s really hard to stop someone in their tracks with a handgun round. Even if you hit the bad guy center mass, perforating his heart or severing a major artery, they’ve got at least 30 seconds to drag your ass into the afterlife with them.

February 19, 2015

QotD: The prohibitionists

Filed under: History, Law, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This notion, I believe, is at the bottom of much of the current pathetic faith in Prohibition. The thing itself is obviously a colossal failure — that is, when viewed calmly and realistically. It has not only not cured the rum evil in the United States; it has plainly made that evil five times as bad as it ever was before. But to confess that bald fact would be to break the forward-looking heart: it simply refuses to harbor the concept of the incurable. And so, being debarred by the legal machinery that supports Prohibition from going back to any more feasible scheme of relief, it cherishes the sorry faith that somehow, in some vague and incomprehensible way, Prohibition will yet work. When the truth becomes so horribly evident that even forward-lookers are daunted, then some new quack will arise to fool them again, with some new and worse scheme of super-Prohibition. It is their destiny to wobble thus endlessly between quack and quack. One pulls them by the right arm and one by the left arm. A third is at their coat-tail pockets, and a fourth beckons them over the hill.

The rest of us are less tender-minded, and, in consequence, much happier. We observe quite clearly that the world, as it stands, is anything but perfect — that injustice exists, and turmoil, and tragedy, and bitter suffering of ten thousand kinds — that human life at its best, is anything but a grand, sweet song. But instead of ranting absurdly against the fact, or weeping over it maudlinly, or trying to remedy it with inadequate means, we simply put the thought of it out of our minds, just as a wise man puts away the thought that alcohol is probably bad for his liver, or that his wife is a shade too fat. Instead of mulling over it and suffering from it, we seek contentment by pursuing the delights that are so strangely mixed with the horrors — by seeking out the soft spots and endeavoring to avoid the hard spots. Such is the intelligent habit of practical and sinful men, and under it lies a sound philosophy. After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits. Going outside them with our protests and advice tends to become contumacy to the celestial hierarchy. Do the poor suffer in the midst of plenty? Then let us thank God politely that we are not that poor. Are rogues in offices? Well, go call a policeman, thus setting rogue upon rogue. Are taxes onerous, wasteful, unjust? Then let us dodge as large a part of them as we can. Are whole regiments and army corps of our fellow creatures doomed to hell? Then let them complain to the archangels, and, if the archangels are too busy to hear them, to the nearest archbishop.

H.L. Mencken, “The Forward-Looker”, Prejudices, Third Series, 1922.

February 18, 2015

Listen to the lawyer, gentlemen, and don’t get involved in a BDSM relationship

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At The Federalist, Leslie Loftis provides a bit of friendly (lawyerly) advice to men in the wake of the Fifty Shades of Grey bandwagon:

The Fifty Shades of Grey hype has started its saturation run-up to the movie release this week. I expected the music video releases, the Super Bowl commercials. I did not expect the branding promotions.

I am a lawyer. Ever since their first year of law school, lawyers see liability. And in this bondage-for-amateurs fandom that is 50SOG (hat tip to Tracinski for the abbreviation) liability lurks everywhere.

We live in an era of “yes means yes” and “always believe the woman.” Fun or not, consent or not, signed document or not — no man should ever engage in bondage sex behavior. The best of the law doesn’t allow contracts for bodily harm, no matter the parties’ intent. Some of the worst law throws out the constitutional standard of innocent until proven guilty. If a woman regrets and later reports consensual acts as rape and it comes down to her word against his, then he will lose.

In this legal environment, this sort of sex play is high-risk. So I was shocked to learn that mainstream chain Target was selling 50SOG-branded toys. I saw the 50SOG display and my mind immediately went to the McDonalds’ coffee-burn case. They are selling candles … for bedrooms … next to blindfolds. No potential problems here.

February 17, 2015

The illusionary arrival of racial equality in the NFL

Filed under: Football, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Minnesota Vikings were a racially integrated team from their very first game … yet not quite fully integrated, as this post on the team’s official web site explains:

Six African Americans out of 42 total players appear in the first team photo in franchise history: Jim Marshall, Jamie Caleb, Mel Triplett, A.D. Williams, Raymond Hayes and John Turpin.

A color barrier that lasted 13 years in professional football had been broken in 1946 by Bill Willis and Marion Motley of the Cleveland Browns (as a member of the All-America Football Conference) and Kenny Washington and Woody Strode (both teammates at UCLA with Jackie Robinson) of the NFL’s L.A. Rams.

The expansion Vikings were able to acquire veterans from other teams. Marshall, Caleb and Williams came from the Browns (which joined the NFL in 1950), Triplett came from the New York Giants, and Hayes was the first African American player drafted out of Central Oklahoma by Minnesota in the 13th round with the 169th overall pick.

Players of that era were taking the field as one team, but weren’t allowed to have roommates of a different race. On road games, particularly to the “Jim Crow” South but also places like Miami and Los Angeles, reservations were booked at separate hotels, and black teammates often were refused service at restaurants.

“There was a definite separation there, and it was a separation that was enforced by the teams,” said Marshall before recalling a trip while with Cleveland to a posh Miami Beach hotel.

“We pulled up to the Fontainebleau and white players were let out at the Fontainebleau and black players were sent to an inner-city hotel owned by a black gentleman that of course was a very good host for us,” Marshall said. “We could play on the field together, but we couldn’t room together, and now we couldn’t stay in a hotel together.”

In praise of “dynamic scoring”

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dan Mitchell explains why there’s a need to change the way the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) “keep score” on how proposed legislative changes will impact the US economy:

cartoon-cboThe CBO, for instance, puts together economic analysis and baseline forecasts of revenue and spending, while also estimating what will happen if there are changes to spending programs. Seems like a straightforward task, but what if the bureaucrats assume that government spending “stimulates” the economy and they fail to measure the harmful impact of diverting resources from the productive sector of the economy to Washington?

The JCT, by contrast, prepares estimates of what will happen to revenue if politicians make various changes in tax policy. Sounds like a simple task, but what if the bureaucrats make the ridiculous assumption that tax policy has no measurable impact on jobs, growth, or competitiveness, which leads to the preposterous conclusion that you maximize revenue with 100 percent tax rates?

Writing for Investor’s Business Daily, former Treasury Department officials Ernie Christian and Gary Robbins explain why the controversy over these topics – sometimes referred to as “static scoring” vs “dynamic scoring” – is so important.

    It is Economics 101 that many federal taxes, regulations and spending programs create powerful incentives for people not to work, save, invest or otherwise efficiently perform the functions essential to their own well-being. These government-induced changes in behavior set off a chain reaction of macroeconomic effects that impair GDP growth, kill jobs, lower incomes and restrict upward mobility, especially among lower- and middle-income families. …Such measurements are de rigueur among credible academic and private-sector researchers who seek to determine the true size of the tax and regulatory burden on the economy and the true value of government spending, taking into account the economic damage it often causes.

But not all supposed experts look at these second-order or indirect effects of government policy.

And what’s amazing is that the official scorekeepers in Washington are the ones who refuse to recognize the real-world impact of changes in government policy.

    These indirect costs of government, in particular or in total, have not been calculated and disclosed in the Budget of the United States or in analyses by the Congressional Budget Office. The result of this deliberate omission by Washington has been to understate many costs of government, often by more than 100%, and grossly overstate its benefits. …It is on this foundation of disinformation that the highly disrespected, overly expensive and too often destructive federal government in Washington has been built.

QotD: Psychology as the modern civic religion

Filed under: Quotations, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a certain sense in which psychology has taken the place of religious faith for many in the western world. When people seek answers for the bad that we do, how we can deal with our faults, motivation for a better life, and deeper questions of meaning and purpose, psychologists and psychology are where modern westerners tend to turn.

Where previous cultures saw acts of evil as evidence of internal sin against an external code of righteousness, psychologists tend to explain this as the product of environment and upbringing, external pressures causing improper behavior.

Even many otherwise religious people have so embraced this system of understanding. Many mainstream churches every Sunday have content very similar to the latest psychological teachings and popular psychology with a few religious themes thrown in. Popular teachers and writers such as Rick Warren are less minister of the gospel than motivational speaker, with more in common with Dr Phil than Jesus Christ.

Christopher Taylor, “COMMON KNOWLEDGE: Psychological myths”, Word Around the Net, 2014-05-28

February 16, 2015

Even if you do nothing, you can still be arrested for “resisting arrest”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We’ve seen examples of this before, but if the NYPD gets its way, the all-purpose charge of “resisting arrest” will become a felony offense:

The most half-baked “weapon” in any policeman’s arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. “Resisting arrest” is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you’ll see plenty of “resisting arrest” charges.

When a San Francisco public defender tried to head off a detective who wanted to question and photograph her client without her permission, she was arrested for “resisting arrest.”

When someone has been brutalized by the police, the words “resisting arrest” are repeated nearly as frequently as the mantra that accompanies every taser deployment and baton swing (“stop resisting”). Resisting arrest is a dodge that makes bad cops worse and marginal cops bad.

Turning resisting arrest into a felony shouldn’t happen anywhere. But perhaps especially not in New York City.

[…]

To turn this into a felony is to grant bad cops a longer leash — and allows them to do much more damage. Not only will the victims of excessive force have to deal with injuries and psychological trauma, they may also find their futures severely disrupted by a felony charge that will follow them around for years.

The protests following the clearing of the officer involved in Eric Garner’s death, followed shortly thereafter by the murder of two NYPD officers by a civilian, have turned the NYPD against the public. Bratton’s support of this abhorrent idea makes it clear he’s willing to put more power in the hands of his worst officers. However bad he feels the situation is now, this action will only make things worse. The answer lies in greater accountability from the NYPD, not additional punishments for members of the public.

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