Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Concerning Terrorists and Tea Partiers
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Wednesday, November 24, 2010
TSA searches
There's been a lot of talk lately about the new TSA guidelines for inspecting air travelers. (Briefly, submit to an invasive X-ray scan -- which has unknown risks for radiation exposure, and is known to produce de facto nude pictures, which the TSA have tried to keep off the Internet with limited success -- or submit to an invasive pat-down, which is apparently thorough enough to warrant an instant sexual harrassment lawsuit anywhere else.)
Since I'm an Israeli citizen, you already know where I stand on such nonsense. Israel has a proven system, which has worked extremely well for the past forty years, in which the security risks are the only ones getting the pat-downs -- with human beings deciding who the security risks are, and on the whole doing an excellent job.
It's true that the Israeli system -- described in detail here -- is difficult to scale, and is in fact well-suited to the thousands of travelers Israel might see on a given day, not the tens of millions who pass through American airports every day. Personally, I think that this is a excellent opportunity for hi-tech solutions. (We already have, so I hear, computers smart enough to recognize a particular human face a high percentage of the time. So we ought to be able to scan crowds at airports, looking for the faces of known terrorists, and alerting a security officer if one is spotted. Could we enhance such systems, so as to identify suspicious behavior? I think we could.)
I hasten to add that such electronic systems should never do more than alert a human being, who would then go to double-check. But such solutions, so far as I know, have not been attempted yet. I think it's worth a try.
Here's another thought or two, inspired by Glenn Reynolds' recent Popular Mechanics article on the subject. The current American system looks for objects that could be used as weapons; the Israeli system looks for people who might employ such weapons.
It seems obvious to me that the latter approach is the correct one, since people are the bottleneck... and since just about anything can be used as a weapon. (I wouldn't like to think about what new procedures the TSA would put into place, after a skyjacking carried out entirely by unarmed black-belt terrorists. Would we then have to be handcuffed to our seats for the entire flight?)
And let me observe this -- keeping an eye on the potential weapon, and not on the person wielding it, is the philosophy of gun control. This is the school of thought that says people are good, but weapons are bad, and that we must remove all weapons in order to deal with violent crime.
This philosophy sounds good, but has never been borne out by experience. Communities with heavy gun control tend to have higher rates of violent crime, because armed criminals know that their victims will be unarmed.
So now we are trying this same failed philosophy on our airliners, by disarming the law-abiding passengers, so that in the process we'll also (hopefully) disarm any would-be terrorist hidden among them. We're also inconveniencing the law-abiding in a major way by depriving them of anything that has been used before as a weapon... thereby basing our security on the notion that the terrorists won't come up with anything new.
And, in the process, we're seeing what gun advocates have always predicted we'd see. It's impossible to remove all guns from society, they say... but even if you could, you'd then see the strong prey on the weak with knives, with chains, with iron bars, and anything else they can get their hands on. No matter how many of these things you outlaw, the outlaws will find something they can use to overpower the innocent.
So we disallowed sharp objects on planes... and got a shoe bomber. Then we got alerts about explosive liquids, so all liquids were disallowed. Then we got Captain Underwear, causing the authorities to decide that they must now check our underwear. Where does this process stop?... It doesn't.
In what way does this make sense?
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Since I'm an Israeli citizen, you already know where I stand on such nonsense. Israel has a proven system, which has worked extremely well for the past forty years, in which the security risks are the only ones getting the pat-downs -- with human beings deciding who the security risks are, and on the whole doing an excellent job.
It's true that the Israeli system -- described in detail here -- is difficult to scale, and is in fact well-suited to the thousands of travelers Israel might see on a given day, not the tens of millions who pass through American airports every day. Personally, I think that this is a excellent opportunity for hi-tech solutions. (We already have, so I hear, computers smart enough to recognize a particular human face a high percentage of the time. So we ought to be able to scan crowds at airports, looking for the faces of known terrorists, and alerting a security officer if one is spotted. Could we enhance such systems, so as to identify suspicious behavior? I think we could.)
I hasten to add that such electronic systems should never do more than alert a human being, who would then go to double-check. But such solutions, so far as I know, have not been attempted yet. I think it's worth a try.
Here's another thought or two, inspired by Glenn Reynolds' recent Popular Mechanics article on the subject. The current American system looks for objects that could be used as weapons; the Israeli system looks for people who might employ such weapons.
It seems obvious to me that the latter approach is the correct one, since people are the bottleneck... and since just about anything can be used as a weapon. (I wouldn't like to think about what new procedures the TSA would put into place, after a skyjacking carried out entirely by unarmed black-belt terrorists. Would we then have to be handcuffed to our seats for the entire flight?)
And let me observe this -- keeping an eye on the potential weapon, and not on the person wielding it, is the philosophy of gun control. This is the school of thought that says people are good, but weapons are bad, and that we must remove all weapons in order to deal with violent crime.
This philosophy sounds good, but has never been borne out by experience. Communities with heavy gun control tend to have higher rates of violent crime, because armed criminals know that their victims will be unarmed.
So now we are trying this same failed philosophy on our airliners, by disarming the law-abiding passengers, so that in the process we'll also (hopefully) disarm any would-be terrorist hidden among them. We're also inconveniencing the law-abiding in a major way by depriving them of anything that has been used before as a weapon... thereby basing our security on the notion that the terrorists won't come up with anything new.
And, in the process, we're seeing what gun advocates have always predicted we'd see. It's impossible to remove all guns from society, they say... but even if you could, you'd then see the strong prey on the weak with knives, with chains, with iron bars, and anything else they can get their hands on. No matter how many of these things you outlaw, the outlaws will find something they can use to overpower the innocent.
So we disallowed sharp objects on planes... and got a shoe bomber. Then we got alerts about explosive liquids, so all liquids were disallowed. Then we got Captain Underwear, causing the authorities to decide that they must now check our underwear. Where does this process stop?... It doesn't.
In what way does this make sense?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
On Gerrymandering
Zombie has a great primer up on gerrymandering -- also known as the Congressional practice of making your district contain only (or nearly only) the voters who support you, even if your district winds up looking like a pretzel.
(Or like a salamander... which is what Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts did, nearly two hundred years ago; hence the name. See here for more background, and the cartoon that gave the practice its name. It turns out that Mr. Gerry didn't originate the practice named after him; it was done in 1788, under the direction of none other than Patrick Henry, to keep James Madison out of Congress. )
This is a subject of some sensitivity to me, and not just because I live in the state that made gerrymandering famous. Some of the most ridiculously gerrymandered Congressional districts in America are here in Massachusetts, and my own -- MA-04, the home of the unfortunately re-elected Barney Frank -- is one of the worst of all.
As Zombie points out, gerrymandering is by no means limited to one party, but it has been the specialty of Democrats for a long time. This may now change; redistricting of Congress happens every ten years, after the decennial census required by the Constitution, and new districts for each state are drawn up by that state's legislature, where Republicans have made impressive gains. So in 2011, Republicans will be in a position to get some of their own back. (There's a spirited discussion going on in Zombie's comments, arguing whether or not Republicans should now gerrymander in their own favor.)
Could Congressional districts be drawn up in a more fair (i.e. nonpartisan) manner? It seems that mathematicians have been arguing about that for some time, but aren't agreed on the best way to do it.
(I must say, I like some of the proposals offered in Zombie's comments. This one looks promising -- restrict the census to what the Constitution requires, namely the number of people per household, without ethnic info or voting registration or anything else. I think it's naive to assume that this would do away with gerrymandering... although it does mean that, if a politician wants to make a "safe" district for himself, he'll need to gather the demographic information on his own, instead of the Federal government doing it for him at taxpayer expense. I'd like that.)
Personally, I detest the idea of "safe" seats. There's a reason these people need to stand for re-election every few years, and it should not be a mere formality! With very few exceptions, I refuse to vote in uncontested elections, and I wish we had a lot fewer of them. So I'd be against a redistricting solution that preserved "safe" seats, even if the representation is fair (e.g. 45% of the state voting Democrat and 45% of the districts "safe" for Democrats).
Instead, I'd much rather we divvy up the districts themselves. Every census comes two years after a statewide election, in which we can determine what percentage, statewide, voted for each major party. Fine; let the redistricting, after the census, try to preserve that ratio, district by district, with a major priority being to keep each district as compact and geographically contiguous as possible. If it's not feasible -- say, if a state voted exactly 50% Democrat and 50% Republican, and the best we can do for one district is to make it 55% Republican -- then let that be balanced out in another district, which would therefore be 55% Democrat.
Neoneocon has more to say on this, here and here. And Zombie has posted Part II of the previous essay, listing ten of the worst gerrymandered districts, ten more that don't even bother to be contiguous (have they no shame??)... and some ridiculous honorable mentions. (I'm surprised to see that only one Massachusetts district made the cut, and for an honorable mention at that... although sure enough, it's mine, MA-04.)
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The Day After The Election
Good!
Rats.
With Congress firmly in Republican hands, and the Senate still controlled by the Democrats, we can expect some old-fashioned Capitol Hill gridlock -- which, to those of us who think the government has been doing all too much, is not a bad thing.
It does mean that the Republicans won't have much of a chance of undoing President Obama's massive changes of the past two years -- but, given that there was never a chance of Republicans getting a veto-proof majority in the Senate, that wasn't really in the cards anyway.
Yesterday's conservative radio commenters were hoping for better results, and seemed very concerned that the Republican party would misinterpret this as a victory for them. It's not -- it's a rebuke of the Democrats, and not an overwhelming one at that. The big story this year was of the Tea Party people, who stood up across America and declared that they'd been Taxed Enough Already... and were willing to do something about it.
No doubt there will be establishment Republicans who miss the message, and continue to contribute to out-of-control spending. There will also be Tea Party candidates, now Senators and Congressmen, who distance themselves from that label; every new group on Capitol Hill has a few who quickly forget why they were sent there. But hopefully, this will be just about right -- the Congressional Republicans have enough power to assert themselves against the Administration, but not so much that they'd lose sight of the basics.
Congress now has a job to do -- to stop the overreaching Obama Administration from overreaching any further. We'll see if they are up to it.
It'll be interesting now, as well, to see the President's reaction. Now would be the time for him to reach across the aisle, something he's so far been very resistant to doing. It would also be a time for him to be gracious, acknowledge that The People Have Spoken, and pay attention to what they are saying.
Personally, I don't think he'll do it; it's not his style. I hope I'm wrong.
In the meantime, it seems that Massachusetts has reverted back to its status as a Democrat stronghold. Governor Deval Patrick (known locally as Obama-lite) is back, as is my Congressman whom I despise, Barney Frank. It's too bad. But perhaps I should have expected it.
One more thing to watch out for -- what will the House and Senate do, between now and January? Will this be a lame duck session that acts like a lame duck, as most of them do? Or will they try to push forward with as much overtaxing, overreaching, and overspending as possible while they still can? There have been many dark predictions of the latter. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The President has responded, sounding as though he may indeed be more willing to compromise with Republicans than he has in the past.
UPDATE 2: Nicely put!
Barack Obama helped elect 255 Democrats to the House in 2008. This year, he helped elect 240 Republicans to the House.
Now that’s bipartisanship.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Who Sucks?
(I wonder how many Google hits that headline will get...)
Frank J., of imao.us fame, has outdone himself. Here he predicts the outcome of next Tuesday's election, and explains why:
Republicans Kind of Suck ...
Which Is Why They Will Win Huge in November
During the second term of the Bush presidency people just got fed up with Republicans. They were idiots, they were no good at the whole fiscal conservatism thing (which is sort of the whole point of them), we had these wars that seemed to be going nowhere, and the economy was beginning to fail. They sucked, and people were sick and tired of them.
Thus people turned to the Democrats. And Obama.
Let’s just say they also sucked.
AMERICANS: “So, the economy is pretty bad and there’s high employment. You think you can do something about that?”
DEMOCRATS AND OBAMA: “We can spend a trillion dollars we don’t have on pork and stuff.”
AMERICANS: “No ... that’s not what we want. We’d really like you not to do that.”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re stupid. We’re doing it anyway.”
AMERICANS: “That’s not going to help us get jobs!”
DEMOCRATS: “Sure it will; millions of them ... though they may be invisible. You’ll have to trust us they exist. And guess what else we’ll do: We’ll create a giant new government program to take over health care.”
AMERICANS: “That has nothing to do with jobs!”
DEMOCRATS: “We don’t care about that anymore. We really want a giant new health care program. We’re sure you’ll love it.”
AMERICANS: “Don’t pass that bill. You hear me? Absolutely do not pass that bill.”
DEMOCRATS: “Believe me; you’ll love it. It has ... well, I don’t know what exactly is in the bill, but we’re sure it’s great.”
AMERICANS: “Listen to me: DO. NOT. PASS. THAT. BILL.”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re not the boss of me! We’re doing it anyway!”
AMERICANS: “Look what you did! Now the economy is way worse, we’re even deeper in debt, and we have a bunch of new laws we don’t want!”
DEMOCRATS: “You’re racist.”
AMERICANS: “Wha ... How is that racist?”
DEMOCRATS: “Now you’re getting violent! Stop being violent and racist, you ignorant hillbillies! And remember to vote Democrat in November.”
So the Democrats sucked. But not just plain old, usual politician sucked, but epic levels of suck where it’s hard to find an analogue in human history that conveys the same level of suckitude. [...] It’s Godzilla-smashing-through-a-city level of suck -- but a really patronizing Godzilla who says you’re just too stupid and hateful to see all the buildings he’s saved or created as he smashes everything apart.
By all means, read the whole thing. While you're at it, check out the latest (imaginary) antics of my Congressman, and feel free to donate to his opponent.
And don't forget to vote!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Two Quotes
From an article in Sunday's New York Times magazine, President Obama seems to think that, regardless of the outcome of the mid-term elections on November 2, Republicans will have to work harder with him:
Obama expressed optimism to me that he could make common cause with Republicans after the midterm elections. “It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,” he said, “either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”
Please note that the President isn't talking about doing anything to meet Republicans halfway; he expects them to work harder to accommodate him.
That's a pretty incredible statement, coming from him. Remember this?
Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”That was in January 2009, before he even took the oath of office. Since then, he's rammed through hugely unpopular health-care reform legislation, without reading it, without the votes of a single Republican. Clearly, this is a President who expects the mountain to come to him, no matter what.
Actually, have a good look at that New York Times piece; it's got quite a few gems in it that I wouldn't have expected of them. For example:
That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election.How can he say that with a straight face? "Good jobs to the jobless", when unemployment is higher (at 9.6%, at best) than when he took office, and higher than the 8% he was going to save us from with his stimulus package? Does he really believe in his own rhetoric about slowing the rise of the oceans?
[...]
Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. When Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, he told an admiring crowd that someday “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”
I read that line to Obama and asked how his high-flying rhetoric sounded in these days of low-flying governance. “It sounds ambitious,” he agreed. “But you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.” [. . .] “It would be very hard for people to look back and say, You know what, Obama didn’t do what he’s promised."
And frankly, I don't think it's difficult at all to say about him that he didn't do what he promised. He promised to close Guántanamo Bay in a year; he promised to meet face-to-face with America's enemies. These, and other issues, have a good many Democrats criticizing him.
(He also harps on some of his favorite themes -- Republican obstructionism, for example, which sounds utterly ridiculous when he has majorities in both houses of Congress -- and that bit about "throwing bombs", when Republican criticism of him has been tame indeed compared to the way he, and his supporters, talked about George W. Bush.)
The more he talks like that, the more out-of-touch he looks. And, although Congressional Democrats are distancing themselves from him as much as they possibly can, they still must answer to the voters for supporting President Obama's agenda -- at his insistence -- no matter what it would cost them.
The President will be in for a rude awakening on November 3rd. The polls have been moving in one direction for months, and it's been towards an ever-larger Republican victory at the midterms. Once it seemed unthinkable that the House of Representatives would switch to Republican control; now it seems all but inevitable, and people are even speaking glibly about a Republican majority in the Senate.
If they didn't need to work with him when they were in the minority, they sure won't have to as the majority party. And if they take their cues from him, the "Republican obstructionism" he complains about now will look pleasant indeed in retrospect.
Monday, October 11, 2010
On "Leftism"
With thanks to Instapundit, this article at ChicagoBoyz.net has a lot to say about leftists and leftism:
The single most dangerous thing about leftists is their capacity for self-delusion. Most leftists really do believe that they personally know what is best for everyone.And that's just the first two paragraphs...
Beyond their personal intellectual and moral hubris, leftists think they know best because they believe themselves to belong to a line of ideological descent which has always been altruistic, benevolent and always proven correct in the long run. The reason they believe that is because leftists know nothing of their own history. Instead, they take a simplified, cartoonish view of their ideological predecessors that can only be described as hagiographic. Any mistakes or evils perpetrated by anyone that leftists identify with are simply written out of leftists’ history.
Personally, I'm reluctant to write off an entire political school of thought so glibly -- particularly since I used to think of myself as politically liberal. (Well, I was a teenager once. As the saying goes, liberal teenagers are the rule, not the exception.)
Then again, I used to take issue with Hugh Hewitt's book "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat", written just before the 2004 Presidential election. At the time, I thought the idea of Democrats cheating to win a Presidential election, just because they could, was far-fetched and offensive. These days I'm not so sure.
In any event, we were talking about leftism... and, when Shannon Love's article "The Left's Power of Self-Delusion" gets past its glib dismissals, it actually has some interesting things to say. Using Che Guevara and Kent State as two examples of the Left rewriting history to suit itself, we then get to some interesting conclusions:
Then again, I used to take issue with Hugh Hewitt's book "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat", written just before the 2004 Presidential election. At the time, I thought the idea of Democrats cheating to win a Presidential election, just because they could, was far-fetched and offensive. These days I'm not so sure.
In any event, we were talking about leftism... and, when Shannon Love's article "The Left's Power of Self-Delusion" gets past its glib dismissals, it actually has some interesting things to say. Using Che Guevara and Kent State as two examples of the Left rewriting history to suit itself, we then get to some interesting conclusions:
Empiricism is the final test of any idea. This is the fundamental idea of science but it holds true in all fields of human endeavor. An idea must manifest in a physical form and interact with the material world before its truth can be truly verified. Business people have ideas of businesses all the time but the only real test of the idea is to create the business and see if it thrives. Generals create weapons, tactics and doctrines only to see them all disintegrate when real war breaks out. Engineers build objects and machines that must work.A good point indeed -- and a sobering one.
Leftists, however, live in a world isolated from physical consequence. They pay no material consequence for the failure of the ideas. It is not as if any of the leaders of the Kent State rioters ever ended up with hands bound, kneeling in the mud of a Cambodian rice paddy waiting for a raped and brainwashed 12 year old to suffocate them by wrapping a plastic bag tightly over their heads. No radical leftwing radical professor of the era lost his job for failing to predict the psychotic nature of the Khmer Rouge or the consequences of the horrific rule of Cambodia. No American leftists has ever paid a serious material consequence for any error, no matter how sweeping. It is always someone else who pays.
It was the Kulaks, Ukrainians, idealistic communists and others who paid the price for Stalin, not the legions of western leftists who ignored his crimes and cheered him on. It was the Chinese peasants who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and not the college student with the “Mao more than ever” t-shirt. Less dramatically, it is the poor of America who suffered from crime, permanent joblessness and the disintegration of families because of leftists’ policies, not the ivory-tower intellectuals who created those policies.
It does, however, beg the question: isn't the same true for the Right, as it is for the Left? Are conservative ideas judged, more than liberal ones, on whether they actually work in the real world?
Well, they are by conservatives. Conservative ideas that have not passed the test of history are abandoned -- but not forgotten -- and attempts to revive them are ridiculed, by conservatives. (Witness Sen. Trent Lott, who lost his role as Senate Minority Leader in 2002, because of an ill-conceived comment suggesting support for segregation. Both segregation and slavery were enshrined in the Constitution, and as such preserving them were conservative ideas... although, in fairness, the efforts to end them both were led by Republicans, not by Democrats.)
So perhaps Ms. Love's point is that liberals, in general, don't test their own ideas in terms of what works in the real world, while conservatives do try to test their ideas. (At any rate, I like that better than her conclusion -- that conservative ideas have to be tested in the real world because conservatives live in the real world, and not in the ivory tower -- her words -- of leftism.)
I'm not sure yet how I feel about this. I welcome comments by my readers, if I still have any.
I'm not sure yet how I feel about this. I welcome comments by my readers, if I still have any.
