This case is not really so unusual.
A criminal defendant tells his attorney that he wants to appeal and the criminal defendant's attorney agrees. The criminal defendant's attorney screws up and, prior to the deadline for filing an appeal, e-files the wrong document to the court. The criminal defense attorney then screws up again when the clerk of the court asks him if he screwed up. Result: The criminal defendant loses his appeal on procedural grounds.
Either the court got the criminal defendant's case wrong, or it didn't. The criminal defendant did nothing wrong. But, the criminal defendant will suffer because of his lawyer's obvious mistake in which the criminal defendant had no involvement.
Money in a malpractice case (where the burden will be on the criminal defendant to prove not just that his lawyer screwed up, but that he would win on appeal) is not a very good substitute for getting the right result.
The attorney who screwed up in this case will probably face professional discipline for harming a client through his negligence. But, that doesn't get the defendant out of jail.
This result is a natural consequence of an adversary system of justice, but, where the criminal defendant's lawyer (who may have been appointed for him) makes an obvious screw up, it is not clear that this result is appropriate in the same way that it would be if this were simply a civil dispute over money where mistakes can be remedied in kind by the private lawyer hired with a malpractice settlement. The assumption that go into making it fair for a principal to be held responsible for his agent's actions in a criminal case are often unrealistic, particularly in cases where criminal defense attorneys' screw up.
18 August 2006
17 August 2006
Bank Robbers At Large In West Wash Park
Today, its been a bit hectic in my neck of the woods. It seems that there are bank robbers at large in the neighborhood.
Police with automatic weapons in your neighborhood are rarely a good sign.
The robbery took place at the Bank of the West in Englewood. The perps fled at high speeds in a car. It was ditched on the 600 block of South Pennsylvania Street, where the car was identified by an off duty police officer.
The police converged on the scene at about 2:30 p.m., concerned that the robber or robbers (one to four of them) might have taken refuge in a house on the block and/or taken hostages, so they sealed the perimeter and called in the SWAT team.
The intense reaction probably has something to do with the fact that one of the robbers is described as a man wearing a white turban and wearing a gas mask.
Two and a half hours later, a search by the team revealed that the suspected temporary hideout was robber free, the residents were returned to their home (they were not present at the time), and the robbers were believed to be at large in the neighborhood.
No local media outlets covered the story while it was breaking.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
Police with automatic weapons in your neighborhood are rarely a good sign.
The robbery took place at the Bank of the West in Englewood. The perps fled at high speeds in a car. It was ditched on the 600 block of South Pennsylvania Street, where the car was identified by an off duty police officer.
The police converged on the scene at about 2:30 p.m., concerned that the robber or robbers (one to four of them) might have taken refuge in a house on the block and/or taken hostages, so they sealed the perimeter and called in the SWAT team.
The intense reaction probably has something to do with the fact that one of the robbers is described as a man wearing a white turban and wearing a gas mask.
Two and a half hours later, a search by the team revealed that the suspected temporary hideout was robber free, the residents were returned to their home (they were not present at the time), and the robbers were believed to be at large in the neighborhood.
No local media outlets covered the story while it was breaking.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
Survey USA/KUSA: Ritter Up By Ten.
A new Survey USA/KUSA poll show Democratic candidate for Governor in Colorado, Bill Ritter, with a 50-40 lead over Republican candidate Bob Beauprez. Libertarian candidate Winkler received support from 3% of those surveyed, and 7% were undecided.
The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.1%.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.1%.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
Warrantless Spying Illegal
A U.S. District Court Judge in Detroit has ruled that the warrantless wiretapping program which President Bush admits has been in place since 2002 is illegal, as a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, the Separation of Powers doctrine, the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act (FISA) interpreted in light of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first law to ban wiretapping without a warrant.
A permanent injunction ordering the program shut down has been entered.
A number of government arguments were rejected.
(1) A government effort to invoke the "state secrets" privilege was rejected because President Bush and other senior officials had publicly admitted enough to make clear that the program existed and that it is in violation of the law. A related state secrets claim was rejected because the claims were not brought by people engaged in espionage for the United States themselves.
(2) A government claim that the Plaintiffs were improper people to bring the suit because they lacked standing was rejected because the scholars, journalists and lawyers involved could identify concrete instances where the program prevented them from discussion of matters with people in the Middle East via phone and e-mail in the furtherance of their legitimate professional duties.
(3) A government claim that the Authorization For Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the war in Afhganistan, was rejected because FISA expressly provides for situations when there is a declaration of war and provides for only a 15 day exemption in that situation. This intepretation was informed by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi.
(4) A government claim that the end of the program would make foreign intelligence impossible for practical purposes was rejected because the judge noted numerous very flexible procedures in FISA designed to address that concern.
There is no doubt that the government will appeal the ruling and seek a stay of the injunction.
A permanent injunction ordering the program shut down has been entered.
A number of government arguments were rejected.
(1) A government effort to invoke the "state secrets" privilege was rejected because President Bush and other senior officials had publicly admitted enough to make clear that the program existed and that it is in violation of the law. A related state secrets claim was rejected because the claims were not brought by people engaged in espionage for the United States themselves.
(2) A government claim that the Plaintiffs were improper people to bring the suit because they lacked standing was rejected because the scholars, journalists and lawyers involved could identify concrete instances where the program prevented them from discussion of matters with people in the Middle East via phone and e-mail in the furtherance of their legitimate professional duties.
(3) A government claim that the Authorization For Use of Military Force (AUMF), which authorized the war in Afhganistan, was rejected because FISA expressly provides for situations when there is a declaration of war and provides for only a 15 day exemption in that situation. This intepretation was informed by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi.
(4) A government claim that the end of the program would make foreign intelligence impossible for practical purposes was rejected because the judge noted numerous very flexible procedures in FISA designed to address that concern.
There is no doubt that the government will appeal the ruling and seek a stay of the injunction.
16 August 2006
Rocky: Solar System Local News
The decision to add, at least, three new planets to the list of the existing nine is front page news in all the dailies. But, the Rocky Mountain News is the only one I'm aware of that considers it local news. I guess local is a state of mind.
The New Planets
New planet Xena is about the size of Pluto and further out in the Kuniper Belt.
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, will now be classified as a double planet with Pluto.
Ceres, the third, is between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres was classified as a planet in 1801 when it was discovered, but later had its status revokes when the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was discovered.
The International Astronomical Union will put the matter to a vote of its 2,500 members on August 24, 2006.
Proposed Planet Definition
Under the proposal, anything that is round by virtue of its mass (something that happens only for large objects in nature because substantial gravity is required to do so) and orbits a star rather than another planet, is a planet, unless it is a star. According to the IAU:
Star status starts with brown dwarft stars which are believed to have a cutoff with bodies "about 13 times more massive than Jupiter." Jupiter itself has a mass of about 1,321 times that of Earth and a mean radius of about 43,441 miles. The Sun has a mass of about 333,000 times the mass of Earth and a mean radius of about 432,500 miles. Thus, planets generally, by virtue of the laws of physics, have radii of very roughly between 200 and 200,000 miles. Gravity won't make smaller ones round, and gravity will make larger ones go nuclear.
This is a sound definition.
The other way the committee could have gone would have been to allow satellites which otherwise meet the definition to qualify as planets. But, this would greatly increase the number of planets and would fail to recognize the nature derived structure of the solar system in which big planets have satellites which they dominate.
Classes of Planets
Planets would be themselves divided into three classes, the big eight called "classical planets," plutons, and dwarf planets like Ceres. There might be 50 to 100+ planets in the solar system by the new definition.
Plutons
According to the IAU:
The IAU believes that:
This categorization is a valid one, because plutons are, as a class, meaningfully different from other planets, and this arbitrary definition seems to capture that difference, even though a more generalizable definition, rather than one based on an arbitrary number of years might be preferrable.
Double Planets
A double planet would be defined as:
While this decision has the primary effect of elevating Charon from satellite status to planet status, is one of two physically sensible definitions that preserve the distinction between a planet and a satellite of another planet. The only other sensible alternative that would have maintained this distinction, which would not have changed the status quo, would have been to designate the largest planet in any double or multiple planet system the primary planet, and to label all other planets in the system satellites of the largest one.
Also, because it appears that Pluto and Charon may have a quite rare relationship, this is a definition that doesn't seem likely to have a big effect. I don't know what the precedent is in multiple star systems, where an analagous rule should be used.
Small Solar System bodies
The rejects that orbit the sun that fail to meet planet status would be called “small Solar System bodies.” According to the IAU:
This default category is as good as any. And, the prior useage that called these objects minor planets probably gave too much credit to big rocks floating around the solar system.
Dwarf Planets
The demise of the term minor planets requires the invention of a new term for small planets that won't be confused with the historical useage of the term "minor planet." While not technically defined, dwarf planets would be used as a "descriptive category":
Mercury has a mean radius of 1,516 miles, which makes it larger than the Moon (at 1,079 miles), Pluto at 742 miles, and Xena of similar size. Pluto would be just another dwarf planet under the new rules, but for its special pluton status. Thus, in light of the definition of planet itself, this means that dwarf planets would generally have a radius of 240 to 1,515 miles.
This definition is justified on the ground that:
In short, while Pluto is the first and largest of the plutons discovered, the committee felt that it has more in common with other plutons than with the other eight planets.
All of the proposed new candidates for planet status (other than Xena) are smaller than Pluto and hence are dwarf planets (footnotes omitted):
The IAU doesn't break these candidates down into plutons and non-pluton dwarft planets, but comments that identify which belong in which category would be appreciated.
The dwarf planet defintion is the most arbitrary of the lot, which explains its non-official status. It has little scientific basis, yet a lot of practical importance.
Kids, and for that matter, most college students and astronomy hobbiests, will not memorize the names of several dozen to a hundred planets. Similarly, few people will even learn the names of all the plutons. But, everybody will learn the names of the classical planets.
Whether people learn the names of non-pluton dwarf planets probably will depend on how many exist. If Ceres is it, or there are only a couple more, people will probably learn all of them by name. If there are lots of candidate non-pluton dwarf planets out there, people probably won't learn their names.
A "smaller than Mercury" definition excludes plutons Pluto, Charon and Xena, despite current useage that calls Pluto a planet. In contrast, a smaller than Pluto definition would make Xena a tenth classical planet, but would make almost all other prospective planets dwarf planets. But, a Pluto standard for dwarf planet, would mean that Pluto is a non-dwarf planet, while co-double planet Charon is not. And, a Charon standard for a dwarf, non-dwarft planet divide would open the door to quite a few more non-dwarf planets.
The argument for eight classical planets is that they can be detected with the naked eye or only minimal optical equipment and have less ecentric orbits, while Pluto, Charon, Xena and the other plutons cannot be so easily detected and is more irregular in its orbit. On the other hand, if you are going to have an arbitrary classification like dwarf planet and non-dwarf planet that has no real basis in science, there is something to be said for respecting current common useage (i.e. the status quo) in doing so.
One suspects that this dwarf planet undefinition was necessary to please anti-Pluto factions on the committee in question, with the pluton category enshrining the special place of Pluto as the first known pluton as a consolation prize.
If the dwarf planet threshold were sight at Pluto level, in contrast, there would be two classical Plutons, and the remaining plutons would be dwarf plutons.
The New Planets
New planet Xena is about the size of Pluto and further out in the Kuniper Belt.
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, will now be classified as a double planet with Pluto.
Ceres, the third, is between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres was classified as a planet in 1801 when it was discovered, but later had its status revokes when the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was discovered.
The International Astronomical Union will put the matter to a vote of its 2,500 members on August 24, 2006.
Proposed Planet Definition
Under the proposal, anything that is round by virtue of its mass (something that happens only for large objects in nature because substantial gravity is required to do so) and orbits a star rather than another planet, is a planet, unless it is a star. According to the IAU:
The shape of objects with mass above 5 x 10^20 kg and diameter greater than 800 km would normally be determined by self-gravity, but all borderline cases would have to be established by observation.
Star status starts with brown dwarft stars which are believed to have a cutoff with bodies "about 13 times more massive than Jupiter." Jupiter itself has a mass of about 1,321 times that of Earth and a mean radius of about 43,441 miles. The Sun has a mass of about 333,000 times the mass of Earth and a mean radius of about 432,500 miles. Thus, planets generally, by virtue of the laws of physics, have radii of very roughly between 200 and 200,000 miles. Gravity won't make smaller ones round, and gravity will make larger ones go nuclear.
This is a sound definition.
The other way the committee could have gone would have been to allow satellites which otherwise meet the definition to qualify as planets. But, this would greatly increase the number of planets and would fail to recognize the nature derived structure of the solar system in which big planets have satellites which they dominate.
Classes of Planets
Planets would be themselves divided into three classes, the big eight called "classical planets," plutons, and dwarf planets like Ceres. There might be 50 to 100+ planets in the solar system by the new definition.
Plutons
According to the IAU:
Plutons are distinguished from classical planets in that they reside in orbits around the Sun that take longer than 200 years to complete (i.e. they orbit beyond Neptune).
The IAU believes that:
Perhaps as many as a dozen or two new planets in the IAU category called “plutons" remain to be discovered.
This categorization is a valid one, because plutons are, as a class, meaningfully different from other planets, and this arbitrary definition seems to capture that difference, even though a more generalizable definition, rather than one based on an arbitrary number of years might be preferrable.
Double Planets
A double planet would be defined as:
A pair of objects, which each independently satisfy the definition of “planet” are considered a “double planet” if they orbit each other around a common point in space that is technically known as the “barycentre”. In addition, the definition of “double planet” requires that this “barycentre” point must not be located within the interior of either body.
While this decision has the primary effect of elevating Charon from satellite status to planet status, is one of two physically sensible definitions that preserve the distinction between a planet and a satellite of another planet. The only other sensible alternative that would have maintained this distinction, which would not have changed the status quo, would have been to designate the largest planet in any double or multiple planet system the primary planet, and to label all other planets in the system satellites of the largest one.
Also, because it appears that Pluto and Charon may have a quite rare relationship, this is a definition that doesn't seem likely to have a big effect. I don't know what the precedent is in multiple star systems, where an analagous rule should be used.
Small Solar System bodies
The rejects that orbit the sun that fail to meet planet status would be called “small Solar System bodies.” According to the IAU:
This collection includes the category of objects we continue to call asteroids and comets. This collection also currently includes, near-Earth objects (NEOs), Mars- and Jupiter-Trojan asteroids, most Centaurs and most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). In the new system of IAU definitions, the term “minor planet” is no longer used.
This default category is as good as any. And, the prior useage that called these objects minor planets probably gave too much credit to big rocks floating around the solar system.
Dwarf Planets
The demise of the term minor planets requires the invention of a new term for small planets that won't be confused with the historical useage of the term "minor planet." While not technically defined, dwarf planets would be used as a "descriptive category":
A dwarf planet is a term generally used to describe any planet that is smaller than Mercury. Note that the term “dwarf planet” is simply a descriptive category and not an IAU definition. Terms such as “terrestrial planets” and “giant planets” are additional examples of descriptive categories that are not IAU definitions.
Mercury has a mean radius of 1,516 miles, which makes it larger than the Moon (at 1,079 miles), Pluto at 742 miles, and Xena of similar size. Pluto would be just another dwarf planet under the new rules, but for its special pluton status. Thus, in light of the definition of planet itself, this means that dwarf planets would generally have a radius of 240 to 1,515 miles.
This definition is justified on the ground that:
The classical planets are those recognized by sky watchers and astronomers starting from the beginning of human history until the year 1900 A.D. . . . The classical planets can be numbered by their distance from the Sun, and there is no change in their order. Plutons, on the other hand, may due to their high eccentricity change their relative distances from the Sun with time (and hence their order).
In short, while Pluto is the first and largest of the plutons discovered, the committee felt that it has more in common with other plutons than with the other eight planets.
All of the proposed new candidates for planet status (other than Xena) are smaller than Pluto and hence are dwarf planets (footnotes omitted):
Object -- Unofficial diameter estimate
*2003 EL61 2000×1000×1200 km
*2005 FY9 1500±300 km
*(90377) Sedna 1200-1800 km
*(90482) Orcus 1000±200 km
*(50000) Quaoar ~1000 km
*(20000) Varuna 600 ± 150 km
*(55636) 2002 TX300 <700 km
*(28978) Ixion 500±100 km
*(55565) 2002 AW197 700±100 km
*(4)Vesta 578×560×458 km
*(2) Pallas 570×525×500 km
(10) Hygiea 500×400×350 km
The IAU doesn't break these candidates down into plutons and non-pluton dwarft planets, but comments that identify which belong in which category would be appreciated.
The dwarf planet defintion is the most arbitrary of the lot, which explains its non-official status. It has little scientific basis, yet a lot of practical importance.
Kids, and for that matter, most college students and astronomy hobbiests, will not memorize the names of several dozen to a hundred planets. Similarly, few people will even learn the names of all the plutons. But, everybody will learn the names of the classical planets.
Whether people learn the names of non-pluton dwarf planets probably will depend on how many exist. If Ceres is it, or there are only a couple more, people will probably learn all of them by name. If there are lots of candidate non-pluton dwarf planets out there, people probably won't learn their names.
A "smaller than Mercury" definition excludes plutons Pluto, Charon and Xena, despite current useage that calls Pluto a planet. In contrast, a smaller than Pluto definition would make Xena a tenth classical planet, but would make almost all other prospective planets dwarf planets. But, a Pluto standard for dwarf planet, would mean that Pluto is a non-dwarf planet, while co-double planet Charon is not. And, a Charon standard for a dwarf, non-dwarft planet divide would open the door to quite a few more non-dwarf planets.
The argument for eight classical planets is that they can be detected with the naked eye or only minimal optical equipment and have less ecentric orbits, while Pluto, Charon, Xena and the other plutons cannot be so easily detected and is more irregular in its orbit. On the other hand, if you are going to have an arbitrary classification like dwarf planet and non-dwarf planet that has no real basis in science, there is something to be said for respecting current common useage (i.e. the status quo) in doing so.
One suspects that this dwarf planet undefinition was necessary to please anti-Pluto factions on the committee in question, with the pluton category enshrining the special place of Pluto as the first known pluton as a consolation prize.
If the dwarf planet threshold were sight at Pluto level, in contrast, there would be two classical Plutons, and the remaining plutons would be dwarf plutons.
New Life For Preons and Loop Quantum Gravity
Preon theory suggests that the particles in the Standard Model of Particle Physics may have their roots in more fundamental particles.
Now, Lee Smolin, the guru of Loop Quantum Gravity (a geometrically oriented quantum gravity formulation in which time-space itself comes in discrete chunks, which is one of the main competitors of String Theory), has suggested in a scientific paper that his theory, combined with a preon theory along the lines of one recently suggested by Sundance Bilson-Thompson, could recreate the Standard Model. As it is described in the abstract:
Smolin discusses the general predictions and conclusions of Loop Quantum Gravity and theories like it in a paper released this May:
The August 12, 2006 edition of New Scientist magazine discusses the developments from an educated layman's perspective. (My source is the Physics Forums, rather than the subscription controlled New Scientist.)
Now, Lee Smolin, the guru of Loop Quantum Gravity (a geometrically oriented quantum gravity formulation in which time-space itself comes in discrete chunks, which is one of the main competitors of String Theory), has suggested in a scientific paper that his theory, combined with a preon theory along the lines of one recently suggested by Sundance Bilson-Thompson, could recreate the Standard Model. As it is described in the abstract:
We show that a class of background independent models of quantum spacetime have local excitations that can be mapped to the first generation fermions of the standard model of particle physics.
Smolin discusses the general predictions and conclusions of Loop Quantum Gravity and theories like it in a paper released this May:
Some generic consequences are well known, including the discreteness of quantum geometry, the elimination of spacetime singularities, the entropy of black hole and cosmological horizons and the fact that positive cosmological constant spacetimes are hot. Within the last few years three possible generic consequences have come to light. These are 1) Deformed special relativity as the symmetry of the ground state, 2) Elementary particles as coherent excitations of quantum geometry, 3) Locality is disordered.
The August 12, 2006 edition of New Scientist magazine discusses the developments from an educated layman's perspective. (My source is the Physics Forums, rather than the subscription controlled New Scientist.)
Bad Timing On Mine Sweepers?
"The U.S. Navy is decommissioning its twelve Osprey mine hunting ships." But, the replacement, the Littoral Combat Ship, won't be available to replace them for several years and may need to operate in somewhat deeper waters. The ships will be given away or sold cheap to U.S. allies. The rush to be rid of the ships at a time when the U.S. is contemplating war with Iran in the Persian Gulf is confusing.
Fuel Efficient Vehicles.
When it comes to petroleum, conservation efforts need to be all about fuel efficient vehicles, because it is used primarily for transportation. This sucks, because most efficiency technologies and many neat energy generation technologies are well suited only for electricity or heating.
Popular Science this month looks at ways to make vehicles more fuel efficient.
The approaches are logical enough. Reduce aerodynamic drag, reduce weight, recover energy lost to heat in braking, and recover energy lost to heat in exhaust products. But, by and large, they are not being done.
At first, your intuition is assume that this is because they can't be done. But, the Toyota Prius hybrid, which owes much of its efficiency to low drag, low weight and recovery of energy lost in braking, dispels this idea. As the article notes, industry hasn't exactly been trying hard to address fuel efficiency (emphasis added):
It is hard to know whether to feel elated that there is some hope for big improvements in fuel efficiency, or to feel betrayed that the industry has never made a serious effort to address the problem before, as none of this is really ground breaking technological development in concept, even if it could have immense practical importance.
Popular Science this month looks at ways to make vehicles more fuel efficient.
The approaches are logical enough. Reduce aerodynamic drag, reduce weight, recover energy lost to heat in braking, and recover energy lost to heat in exhaust products. But, by and large, they are not being done.
At first, your intuition is assume that this is because they can't be done. But, the Toyota Prius hybrid, which owes much of its efficiency to low drag, low weight and recovery of energy lost in braking, dispels this idea. As the article notes, industry hasn't exactly been trying hard to address fuel efficiency (emphasis added):
The average price of a gallon of gas is higher than at any time since the early 1980s. The Middle East seems more volatile than ever. And even climate skeptics are starting to admit that the carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere might have disastrous consequences. To these circumstances, automakers have responded with a fleet of cars that averages 21 miles per gallon, about four miles per gallon worse than the Model T.The energy recovery from braking and exhaust heat could both be almost invisible to the driver, and hence, these are prime choices for widespread adoption. And, the approaches can both be done in the same vehicle without interfering with each other materially. This doesn't have to be an either/or technology choice.
It is hard to know whether to feel elated that there is some hope for big improvements in fuel efficiency, or to feel betrayed that the industry has never made a serious effort to address the problem before, as none of this is really ground breaking technological development in concept, even if it could have immense practical importance.
New TB Drugs
New tuberculosis drugs, which cure the disease in two months, instead of six, could save hundreds of thousands of lives per year.
Hat Tip to Science News.
Hat Tip to Science News.
Dementia Drug Works In Rats
A drug designed to cure memory loss is working better than expected in animal trials. It doesn't just slow age related memory loss, it reverses it.
Hat Tip to Science News.
Hat Tip to Science News.
15 August 2006
The Cook Political Report on 2006
The Cook Political Report claims (as of a month ago)that there are 20 seats that are likely or leaning Democratic party seats, and 54 Republican seats that are likely or leaning Republican or are toss ups. Fifteen of those Republicans, and none of the Democrats, are in toss up seats. Every other seat is deemed a safe seat for the party that holds it.
In Colorado, the 7th CD (currently Bob Beauprez) is listed as a toss up, and the 4th CD (currently Marilyn Musgrave) is shown as a likely, but not sure, Republican win. John Salazar's 3rd CD seat is listed as a likely, but not sure, Democratic party win. Salazar's seat has a partisan voting index of R+6, meaning that it tends to vote six percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. Musgrave's seat has a partisan voting index of R+9. The 7th CD has a partisan voting index of D+2.
The two regions that are prone to swinging from Republican held seats are the Northeast (14 seats) and the West (Rocky Mountain and Pacific) with 11. The South is mostly bad new for Democrats, but a number of seats in Florida look promising.
In Colorado, the 7th CD (currently Bob Beauprez) is listed as a toss up, and the 4th CD (currently Marilyn Musgrave) is shown as a likely, but not sure, Republican win. John Salazar's 3rd CD seat is listed as a likely, but not sure, Democratic party win. Salazar's seat has a partisan voting index of R+6, meaning that it tends to vote six percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. Musgrave's seat has a partisan voting index of R+9. The 7th CD has a partisan voting index of D+2.
The two regions that are prone to swinging from Republican held seats are the Northeast (14 seats) and the West (Rocky Mountain and Pacific) with 11. The South is mostly bad new for Democrats, but a number of seats in Florida look promising.
People of Doubt
My father is in town. He brought with him a copy of "The Christian Century" from last fall. The magazine is aimed at mainline to liberal, mostly Protestant, Christians in the United States. It aptly captures of the doubt filled mood of this group of Christians caught between the non-Christian left and the Christian right.
By page 7 you see quick hit stories with money lines like:
Appeals to mysticism are scarce, although they are tucked away deep in the text. Awareness that their faith is not the only one in the country is acute in an article entitled "Local Color: American religion, region by region," written by a sociologist. The story is prefaced with its authors musings on growing up Baptist, while eventually rejecting the conservativism of the Southern Baptist Convention. The article also carries echoes of fear, for instance, in a blurb about New England which states:
Or, in it observation that in the Pacific Northwest:
The angst expressed goes part way towards explaining the relative public silence of the religious left. When discussing the Christian Right they are as appalled as any secular American. But, they have a hard time defining themselves in any way but in opposition to secular American or the Christian Right. They see themselves declining, and know that change is necessary, but are groping, without reaching a consensus or even a conclusion about where they need to be headed.
How can you build a consensus for change when one of your defining characteristics is that you have held fast to traditional methods of worship and ancient denominational institutions? How can you comfortably deride atheists for looking at life and reasoning in much the same way that you do?
There are consensus religious values in the religious left, mostly social gospel values. But, it is tough to balance a commitment to tolerance with a need to advance your own agenda so that it can survive.
Mainline Christians are people of doubt. They reject the easy, but easily shown wrong, answers of Christian fundamentalism. They wonder if they will ever really have a "special spiritual experience" or if the one they had was really just a figment of their imagination. They want to believe, but are tempted by secular rationality and aren't sure what the downsides of that are, even though it makes them "uncomfortable." In truth, they are probably more comfortable having an atheist over for dinner than a conservative Christian. Basic religious questions like "is there evil" and "is there a Hell" are ones they have to think hard about. They worry that they will go so far in refuting conservative Christianity that they may end up refuting their own version of the faith. They quote the Bible, but aren't immersed in it. They look over their shoulders in every direction, but don't articulate their own vision clearly.
Tens of millions of Americans are in the same boat as the readers of "The Christian Century," although, for most, their feelings are less articulate, mere demi-urges of foreboding and discomfort.
Nobody knows the name of the leaders of the Methodists, or the Evangelical Lutherans of America, or the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), or the American Bapist Church. The organizations are big, but they are led by volunteers, democratically elected, by similar, mild mannered church functionaries. They have no bully pulpit and little freedom to speak their minds in a manner that speaks for the denomination on much of anything. They were elected to write budgets and hire staff, not to articulate visions of radical change from within, or a national social transformation. They are politicians without a platform, trying to broker centrifugal forces within their own organizations.
Everyone is waiting for the trend that will restore them to the place of pre-eminence they enjoyed back in the days when "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" was synonmous with high caste American. They are looking for a middle path and ramming their noses into the cement divider between the lanes. They care about philosophy a great deal, because they long for an intellectual foundation to secure their faith against doubt.
And, it is also worth noting what isn't going on. The wars between the mainline denominations have been halted indefinitely. The differences between Episcopalians and United Church of Christ congregants and Lutherans starts to pale when you have Southern Baptists and Mormons on one side of you, and atheists on the other. Some congregations in Seattle are actually taken ecumenical feelings to the point of de facto mergers across denominational lines, so that they can make common cause with each other about the dual threats they perceive. Just as the Methodists, the United Church of Christ and the Lutherans are all denominational products of repeated mergers, the remaining players are prone to merging again.
This isn't a good sign. Growth spurs division. Decline spurs mergers. Newspapers enter into joint operating agreements because they know that without one, that both will fail. Christian denominations act the same way. The old find tradition a compelling enough reason to stay with what they have always known. Their children do not.
By page 7 you see quick hit stories with money lines like:
"What can turn a dying mainline church into a vital congregation?" . . . . the painful awareness that if they didn't make radical changes they would die. . . .A review of The Exorcism of Emily Rose concludes:
The Church of England has become "a club for the old, the resigned and those tired of life." . . . .
"There is a noisy, almost angry, literalism around desires to define and codify who is, or who is not, a 'real Christian,' and what seems to accompany this is a plodding, narrow biblicism which is punititive in tone and joyless in character."
There may be a case to be made that Methodists and other rational types are too wary of the supernatural and too trusting of science. This film does not make that case. . . . For what sort of faith would this film convert us to? One ruled by fear, one powerless against the forces of darkness, one that trusts in the demon-iduced death of a God-appointed martyr. It has nothing to do with the goodness, beauty and piece of God that enchanted Augustine and has enchanted the church for 2000 years.Augustine, the ancient doctor of the Roman Catholic Church in its formative years is a recurring touchstone in the issue's articles. It is hardly surprising. Augustine was a new Christian convert living at a time when Christianity was still a minority religion in a pagan world. As a result, he didn't have the luxury of merely accepting received tradition. He had to justify his faith and sought to reconcile it with the rational traditions of an urbane Roman. Mainline American Christians today sympathize with his plight. They too are trying to live in a civilized empire in a way that reconciles faith and reason.
Appeals to mysticism are scarce, although they are tucked away deep in the text. Awareness that their faith is not the only one in the country is acute in an article entitled "Local Color: American religion, region by region," written by a sociologist. The story is prefaced with its authors musings on growing up Baptist, while eventually rejecting the conservativism of the Southern Baptist Convention. The article also carries echoes of fear, for instance, in a blurb about New England which states:
only 4 percent belong to the old established church, the United Church of Christ.
Or, in it observation that in the Pacific Northwest:
25 percent of the adults in the region have no identification with any religious tradition. Evanglicals now account for 38 percent of the church-affiliated population in Washington.The observations are not accompanied promptly by any proclamation that the Pacific Northwest is going to hell in a hand basket as a result. Instead, the observation that follows is that:
Numbers like that [the 38% that are evangelical] may help to explain why conservative political inititatives there meet with success.Some of the questions asked of an author of a new book about religion and metaphor likewise point to the questions on the minds of the readers:
What would you say to people who haven't been privy to the special spiritual experience you've described? . . . .A professor of religion at Smith College embraces evolution by buying her husband a fossil, while at the same time feeling "uncomfortable" that "biologists and philosophers are advancing metaphysical claims . . . that outrun their actual competence." She goes on to argue that:
You're touching on a popular but questionable myth: that atheism provides the neutral common sense view of the world, while religion is pie in the sky. . . .
It seems you've been campaigning on two fronts: against the limitations of secular reasoning, and against the unacknowledged secularity common in modern Christian thought.
No biologists can grant us and no biologist can take away from us the privilege of seeing God's handiwork in creation.One of the books reviewed is "How the Republicans Stole Christmas: The Republican Party's Declared Monopoly on Religion and What Democrats Can Do to Take It Back." (by Bill Press).
The angst expressed goes part way towards explaining the relative public silence of the religious left. When discussing the Christian Right they are as appalled as any secular American. But, they have a hard time defining themselves in any way but in opposition to secular American or the Christian Right. They see themselves declining, and know that change is necessary, but are groping, without reaching a consensus or even a conclusion about where they need to be headed.
How can you build a consensus for change when one of your defining characteristics is that you have held fast to traditional methods of worship and ancient denominational institutions? How can you comfortably deride atheists for looking at life and reasoning in much the same way that you do?
There are consensus religious values in the religious left, mostly social gospel values. But, it is tough to balance a commitment to tolerance with a need to advance your own agenda so that it can survive.
Mainline Christians are people of doubt. They reject the easy, but easily shown wrong, answers of Christian fundamentalism. They wonder if they will ever really have a "special spiritual experience" or if the one they had was really just a figment of their imagination. They want to believe, but are tempted by secular rationality and aren't sure what the downsides of that are, even though it makes them "uncomfortable." In truth, they are probably more comfortable having an atheist over for dinner than a conservative Christian. Basic religious questions like "is there evil" and "is there a Hell" are ones they have to think hard about. They worry that they will go so far in refuting conservative Christianity that they may end up refuting their own version of the faith. They quote the Bible, but aren't immersed in it. They look over their shoulders in every direction, but don't articulate their own vision clearly.
Tens of millions of Americans are in the same boat as the readers of "The Christian Century," although, for most, their feelings are less articulate, mere demi-urges of foreboding and discomfort.
Nobody knows the name of the leaders of the Methodists, or the Evangelical Lutherans of America, or the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), or the American Bapist Church. The organizations are big, but they are led by volunteers, democratically elected, by similar, mild mannered church functionaries. They have no bully pulpit and little freedom to speak their minds in a manner that speaks for the denomination on much of anything. They were elected to write budgets and hire staff, not to articulate visions of radical change from within, or a national social transformation. They are politicians without a platform, trying to broker centrifugal forces within their own organizations.
Everyone is waiting for the trend that will restore them to the place of pre-eminence they enjoyed back in the days when "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" was synonmous with high caste American. They are looking for a middle path and ramming their noses into the cement divider between the lanes. They care about philosophy a great deal, because they long for an intellectual foundation to secure their faith against doubt.
And, it is also worth noting what isn't going on. The wars between the mainline denominations have been halted indefinitely. The differences between Episcopalians and United Church of Christ congregants and Lutherans starts to pale when you have Southern Baptists and Mormons on one side of you, and atheists on the other. Some congregations in Seattle are actually taken ecumenical feelings to the point of de facto mergers across denominational lines, so that they can make common cause with each other about the dual threats they perceive. Just as the Methodists, the United Church of Christ and the Lutherans are all denominational products of repeated mergers, the remaining players are prone to merging again.
This isn't a good sign. Growth spurs division. Decline spurs mergers. Newspapers enter into joint operating agreements because they know that without one, that both will fail. Christian denominations act the same way. The old find tradition a compelling enough reason to stay with what they have always known. Their children do not.
Real Life Daredevil.
Comic book and movie superhero Daredevil is a man who lost his sight as a child who uses echolocation to see.
Pure Hollywood? Not quite. Ben Underwood, who like Daredevil also comes from a not terribly wealthy family, can echolocate too. He isn't quite Daredevil, but he's just a kid and no one in the world comes closer.
Pure Hollywood? Not quite. Ben Underwood, who like Daredevil also comes from a not terribly wealthy family, can echolocate too. He isn't quite Daredevil, but he's just a kid and no one in the world comes closer.
More California Three Strikes Injustice.
In this habeas case we review whether it was an unreasonable application of federal constitutional law for a California state court to decide that a "three strikes" sentence of 25 years to life for possessing 0.036 grams of cocaine did not violate the Eighth Amendment.At the time the defendant went to trial his prior felony convictions were 12 and 18 years old, respectively.
The 9th Circuit upheld the sentence.
The amount of cocaine involved, 0.036 grams, is equivalent to 0.18 carats. The diamond in the average engagement ring is twice a large as the amount of cocaine at issue in this case. It was a small rock. Possession of a small amount of cocaine consistent with personal use and a prior criminal record is enough to put you away for life in the United States.
The result isn't terribly surprising. Challenges to exceedingly long terms for people with prior criminal records for petty offenses are routinely upheld. But, this doesn't make the laws involved any more sensible.
Hat Tip to Sentencing Law and Policy Blog.
Does Electing Judges Make Sense?
Colorado voters this fall will consider Amendment 40, which will bring up appellate judges for recall elections more often, and impose a ten year term limit on judges that will prevent many of them from running again in the next retention election.
Do voters cast intelligent votes on judges? Probably not.
A Zogby International survey shows that most Americans have only a dim idea which judges sit on even the prestigious and exhaustively media covered U.S. Supreme Court. Of those who responded:
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
Do voters cast intelligent votes on judges? Probably not.
A Zogby International survey shows that most Americans have only a dim idea which judges sit on even the prestigious and exhaustively media covered U.S. Supreme Court. Of those who responded:
[O]nly a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices . . . . [11 percent] were able to name the Supreme Court Justice confirmed in January 2006, Samuel Alito.Awareness of state appellate judges is almost certainly weaker.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
Douglas County Still Doesn't Get It
The general assembly hereby finds that the issuance and enforcement of protection orders are of paramount importance . . . .
Colorado Revised Statutes Section 13-14-102(1) (in part).
Last year, Castle Rock, Colorado argued in the U.S. Supreme Court that it had a right to ignore a plea to enforce a temporary restraining order with impunity, despite the statute quoted above, and won. The court clerk's office in Castle Rock isn't much better at hearing the Colorado General Assembly's message about the importance of restraining orders, I learned Friday.
As the syllabus to the Castle Rock decision explains, the facts were, and the U.S. Supreme Court held, as follows (emphasis added):
[I]s police officers, acting pursuant to official policy or custom, failed to respond to her repeated reports over several hours that her estranged husband had taken their three children in violation of her restraining order against him. Ultimately, the husband murdered the children. . . .
Held: Respondent did not, for Due Process Clause purposes, have a property interest in police enforcement of the restraining order against her husband.
Last Friday morning, at about 11:00 a.m., I was in the Douglas County Justice Center, across the street from Castle Rock's town government building. It appears that the clerk's office is also having trouble implementing the general assembly's mandate regarding restraining orders.
Colorado law on how restraining order requests are to be handled is particularly clear:
A motion for a temporary civil protection order shall be set for hearing, which hearing may be ex parte, at the earliest possible time and shall take precedence over all matters, except those matters of the same character that have been on the court docket for a longer period of time. The court shall hear all such matters as expeditiously as possible.
Colorado Revised Statutes Section 13-14-102(3).
Some metropolitian area courts take this mandate very seriously. During a multiday civil trial regarding a consumer dispute in the Arapahoe County Court at its location in Aurora a couple of year ago, our trial was interrupted several times a day so the judge could immediately deal with incoming restraining order cases. When a restraining order case came in, the litigants in our case got a rest break for ten or fifteen minutes, while this higher priority business could be addressed.
Douglas County wasn't taking this approach on Friday. A woman had made her way to the front of the line. She was pleading with the clerk that she had been beaten seriously by the person she was seeking the protection from, that she feared for her life, and that she needed a restraining order. She didn't have a lawyer.
The clerk advised her, at about 11:00 a.m., that it would take twenty minutes to put the information into the computer, and that there was no way that all the other cases on the docket in the court could be disturbed, and that Douglas County judges and clerks took their lunch breaks very seriously. So, there was no way that her case could be heard before that afternoon.
But, the women pleaded that it would be a huge burden for her to come in the afternoon, as she needed to be at work and could lose her job. The clerk told her she should have come earlier in the morning, and that if she couldn't come in that afternoon, that she could come back on Monday, three long days away.
I wasn't there to see how it would be resolved, but there was no supervisor on hand to intervene, and it certainly looked like this woman in need of protection would be turned away on that Friday morning.
Admittedly, the problem is not really a result of malicious disregard for the law. TABOR budget cuts have resulted in every court house in the state laying off large numbers of court clerks and court reporters, and putting those who remain on unpaid leave for part of the year. In Jefferson County, the judges passed the hat among themselves to help financially strapped clerks trying to meet their expenses with reduced paychecks.
Douglas County was no different, prominently advertising the reduced hours and services available as a result of budget cuts on a sign next to the clerk's windows. The Elbert County court clerk's area was completely unstaffed. And, there is little reason to doubt that training budgets have also taken a hit.
The clerks in Arapahoe County probably had an in session training class about handling restraining orders that the Douglas County clerk's office had not. The Douglas County court clerk was enforcing a policy that applies, reasonably, to non-restraining order cases in the county. And, not every court system in Colorado interprets the state mandate to handle restraining order cases promptly in the same way. Empathy is not high on the job qualification list of court clerks who are the gate keepers of our system of justice.
But, whatever the reason, the bottom line is that Douglas County still doesn't get it, when it comes to the paramount importance that should be given to restraining orders, at least in the clerk's office.
The TV news didn't report anyone being murdered in Castle Rock over the weekend, so maybe she managed to escape the threat she perceived until Monday. I will never know. In a big, largely urbanized state, like Colorado, police blotter cases like that often don't make it into the papers at all. And, as the Castle Rock v. Gonzales case that went to that U.S. Supreme Court shows, having a restraining order is no guarantee that the police won't blow it off with impunity in Castle Rock, so maybe it wouldn't have made a difference.
But, ultimately, there is no legal excuse for the court system to fail to give restraining orders the priority that state law affords them.
Cross Posted at Colorado Confidential.
14 August 2006
Flynn Effect Alive and Well
The Flynn Effect is the tendency for intelligence scores of people taking the same IQ test to be better than those of their ancestors. Your grandparents probably did worse on an IQ test than you did on the same test. The effect is been apparent to researchers at least since World War II and World War I military test scores were compared, and Flynn is the scientist credited with generalizing this result.
This is a big deal because it implies that an important part of group averages in intelligence scores are not genetic in origins, providing one of the most powerful refutations of the hypothesis of books like "The Bell Curve" by Murray, that there are inherent genetic intelligence difference detween different ethnic groups. A wide variety of evidence, including studies such as those of twins separated at birth, have shown significant hereditary patterns in performance on intelligence tests, which are also corollated with perofrmance on a wide variety of other academic tasks and socioeconomic success.
James R. Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the individual after whom the effect is named, has just released a new paper showing that since 1972, that the gap gap in IQ scores between blacks and whites observed by Murray has declined by a quarter to a half.
Wikipedia notes that some scholars believe that the Flynn Effect may be largely a product of improved nutrition for the poor, noting, for example, that "the effect primarily reduced low-end scores, resulting in a pile up of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores." Similar causes could be behind the American experience still be observed as the gaps between minority and majority IQ test scores declines.
This is a big deal because it implies that an important part of group averages in intelligence scores are not genetic in origins, providing one of the most powerful refutations of the hypothesis of books like "The Bell Curve" by Murray, that there are inherent genetic intelligence difference detween different ethnic groups. A wide variety of evidence, including studies such as those of twins separated at birth, have shown significant hereditary patterns in performance on intelligence tests, which are also corollated with perofrmance on a wide variety of other academic tasks and socioeconomic success.
James R. Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the individual after whom the effect is named, has just released a new paper showing that since 1972, that the gap gap in IQ scores between blacks and whites observed by Murray has declined by a quarter to a half.
Wikipedia notes that some scholars believe that the Flynn Effect may be largely a product of improved nutrition for the poor, noting, for example, that "the effect primarily reduced low-end scores, resulting in a pile up of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores." Similar causes could be behind the American experience still be observed as the gaps between minority and majority IQ test scores declines.
Air Fresheners Bad For Lungs
Chemicals used in many air fresheners, toilet bowl deodorants and moth balls, are as bad for your lungs as second hand smoke.
Hat Tip to Science News.
Hat Tip to Science News.
11 August 2006
Smart Artillery Shells?
The Excalibur 155mm artillery shell is expected to be fielded by the Army in a few months, with an improved version expeccted to arrive two years later. It has been in development for a very long time, and they still don't work when its cold. The also don't live up to their promised accuracy:
This is far less than the Department of Defense was promised when the program began.
The pitch for the new shells, including the expected performance that R&D still hasn't been able to pull off, is as follows (paragraph breaks added for easier reading):
Longer range, with greater accuracy, for tens times as much per round as the current "dumb" version sounds good. Don't cancel the project yet. Maybe R&D will make good on their promises this time.
But, how do Excalibur shells compare in cost and utility to comparable sized short range missiles like the Hellfire missiles used on the Army's Apache AH-64 helicopters, or smart bombs dropped from ground attack aircraft?
Both the Excalibur and the Hellfire have a similar sized explosive punch, about 100 pounds. "Smart" bombs are bigger, but the Air Force is hot to develop the "small diameter bomb" which would be about 250 pounds.
Hellfire missiles now cost about $100,000 each, a little more than Excaliber shells do now. In both cases, the bulk of the cost (this week's front page story in the Onion about the rising prices of rocket fuel notwithstanding), is in the guidance system. For what it's worth, "smart" bombs are expensive too, again due to the cost of the guidance system. Presumably, any decrease in cost for one system should be matched in the other systems to a great extent.
Back in the age before missiles had sophisticated guidance systems, and were called rockets instead, cannon based artillery was much more accurate than rockets. And historically, one of the reasons to have the big cannon barrel is to get greater accuracy.
Indeed, the same principle is one of the reasons that big long sniper rifles are more accurate than pistols. A long barrel makes it easier for a solidier's inherent clumsiness of perhaps +/- a millimeter in the case of a rifle or pistol, and more for a cannon, into a far smaller change in the direction that the business end is pointed. A millimeter change in the direction of a 150 mm pistol may make the difference between pointing it due North, and perhaps 2 degrees East. In a 3000 mm long gun, it may make the difference between point it due North and perhaps 0.1 degrees East. And, the better you point a gun in the right direction, especially at long ranges, the more accurate your shot.
But, this doesn't follow when the shell has a guidance system. A missile, delivered from a moving object buffeted by the wind, with no cannon barrel at all, is capable of being just as accurate as an artillery shell, so long as the target is within range, when both have similar GPS guidance systems. And, if the several dozen ton delivery system that is the long barrelled self-propelled howitzer isn't adding a whole lot of value in the accuracy department, the justification for the Excalibur starts looking more like intraservice politics (i.e. the cannon based artillery colonels want to keep their jobs and budget share within Army brigades and divisions), and less like a budget choice that makes military sense.
After all, when you buy a missile, you can use a pretty cheap delivery system. The canceled Crusader self-propelled howitzer, at about $24 million each, would have cost ten times as much as the vehicle now used in the multiple rocket systems of the Army, which cost about $2.4 million each. Basic, non-supersonic, non-stealthy ground attack aircraft designed to support ground troops are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as fighter aircraft optimized for stealth and air to air combat like the F-22 and to a lesser extent, the F-35. The cancelled Crusader vehicle (visualize a tank with a really long barrel and a trailer to carry extra ammunition), at about $24 million, wouldn't have been that much less expensive than a basic ground attack aircraft. The F-35 was originally budgeted to be in the $30 million a piece range, although cost overuns have changed that number for the worse. Take away some of the F-35 features not important when air to air combat isn't a major concern, and the price comes down.
Of course, right now we have more late model Paladin howitzers than we know what to do with, so this is a sunk cost. In contrast, we would have to buy new multiple rocket launchers or ground attack aircraft, at great expense, to replace that capability. So, for the short term (meaning until existing howitzers wear out), as a transitional measure, the Excalibur program may make good sense. You may get a lot more bang for your buck buying new and better shells, rather than new and better cannons.
But, as the Army looks ahead to the long term (the time frame of its so called "Future Combat System"), it isn't at all obvious that it makes sense to buy a big, heavy cannon based missile delivery system (and that it was a howitzer with projectiles of the Excalibur variety really is), rather than using a smaller and less sophisticated delivery system.
In the alternative, a comparably (to the self-propelled howitzer) priced aircraft that can be brought to the theater and moved from theater to theater more quickly, to deliver missiles with a similar impact, also looks attractive. As we move to an environment where two or three or more small wars at the same time, or the need to go to distant conflicts on short notice, seems more likely, highly mobile systems start to make sense. If you have to move projectile delivery systems by ship, you need one set of artillery in each combat zone. If you have aircraft, you can bring the same projectile delivery system from one battlefield to another in hours or days, eliminating the need to have a separate set for each conflict.
The first Excaliburs, that will reach U.S. and Canadian troops this Fall, will have a range of 23 kilometers, and reliability of only about 75 percent.
This is far less than the Department of Defense was promised when the program began.
The pitch for the new shells, including the expected performance that R&D still hasn't been able to pull off, is as follows (paragraph breaks added for easier reading):
[A] new version of Excalibur will be ready, one with a range of over 35 kilometers (and eventually up to 60 kilometers). These versions will have reliability of over 90 percent. . . .
In the past, the army had lots of artillery fire power, but it wasn't very accurate. Infantry had to back off hundreds of meters before the bombers or guns could let loose on the enemy. If you didn't back off, you risked friendly fire casualties. . . .
The "dumb" shells can, at best, land with 75 meters of the aim point. Excalibur can hit within 15 meters, on the first shot, at any range. Infantry can use that kind of accuracy to stay close to the enemy, and quickly rush them after a smart bomb, or shell, has landed. Using Excalibur will also mean much less ammo will be needed, and there will be less wear and tear on the guns, and their crews.
While the first Excalibur shells going to the troops cost about $80,000 each, that price is expected to come way down, real fast. In five or ten years, the price of a smart shell will be under $5,000. That's still over ten times what a dumb shell costs, but the many advantages of smart shells make the price difference worthwhile.
Longer range, with greater accuracy, for tens times as much per round as the current "dumb" version sounds good. Don't cancel the project yet. Maybe R&D will make good on their promises this time.
But, how do Excalibur shells compare in cost and utility to comparable sized short range missiles like the Hellfire missiles used on the Army's Apache AH-64 helicopters, or smart bombs dropped from ground attack aircraft?
Both the Excalibur and the Hellfire have a similar sized explosive punch, about 100 pounds. "Smart" bombs are bigger, but the Air Force is hot to develop the "small diameter bomb" which would be about 250 pounds.
Hellfire missiles now cost about $100,000 each, a little more than Excaliber shells do now. In both cases, the bulk of the cost (this week's front page story in the Onion about the rising prices of rocket fuel notwithstanding), is in the guidance system. For what it's worth, "smart" bombs are expensive too, again due to the cost of the guidance system. Presumably, any decrease in cost for one system should be matched in the other systems to a great extent.
Back in the age before missiles had sophisticated guidance systems, and were called rockets instead, cannon based artillery was much more accurate than rockets. And historically, one of the reasons to have the big cannon barrel is to get greater accuracy.
Indeed, the same principle is one of the reasons that big long sniper rifles are more accurate than pistols. A long barrel makes it easier for a solidier's inherent clumsiness of perhaps +/- a millimeter in the case of a rifle or pistol, and more for a cannon, into a far smaller change in the direction that the business end is pointed. A millimeter change in the direction of a 150 mm pistol may make the difference between pointing it due North, and perhaps 2 degrees East. In a 3000 mm long gun, it may make the difference between point it due North and perhaps 0.1 degrees East. And, the better you point a gun in the right direction, especially at long ranges, the more accurate your shot.
But, this doesn't follow when the shell has a guidance system. A missile, delivered from a moving object buffeted by the wind, with no cannon barrel at all, is capable of being just as accurate as an artillery shell, so long as the target is within range, when both have similar GPS guidance systems. And, if the several dozen ton delivery system that is the long barrelled self-propelled howitzer isn't adding a whole lot of value in the accuracy department, the justification for the Excalibur starts looking more like intraservice politics (i.e. the cannon based artillery colonels want to keep their jobs and budget share within Army brigades and divisions), and less like a budget choice that makes military sense.
After all, when you buy a missile, you can use a pretty cheap delivery system. The canceled Crusader self-propelled howitzer, at about $24 million each, would have cost ten times as much as the vehicle now used in the multiple rocket systems of the Army, which cost about $2.4 million each. Basic, non-supersonic, non-stealthy ground attack aircraft designed to support ground troops are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as fighter aircraft optimized for stealth and air to air combat like the F-22 and to a lesser extent, the F-35. The cancelled Crusader vehicle (visualize a tank with a really long barrel and a trailer to carry extra ammunition), at about $24 million, wouldn't have been that much less expensive than a basic ground attack aircraft. The F-35 was originally budgeted to be in the $30 million a piece range, although cost overuns have changed that number for the worse. Take away some of the F-35 features not important when air to air combat isn't a major concern, and the price comes down.
Of course, right now we have more late model Paladin howitzers than we know what to do with, so this is a sunk cost. In contrast, we would have to buy new multiple rocket launchers or ground attack aircraft, at great expense, to replace that capability. So, for the short term (meaning until existing howitzers wear out), as a transitional measure, the Excalibur program may make good sense. You may get a lot more bang for your buck buying new and better shells, rather than new and better cannons.
But, as the Army looks ahead to the long term (the time frame of its so called "Future Combat System"), it isn't at all obvious that it makes sense to buy a big, heavy cannon based missile delivery system (and that it was a howitzer with projectiles of the Excalibur variety really is), rather than using a smaller and less sophisticated delivery system.
In the alternative, a comparably (to the self-propelled howitzer) priced aircraft that can be brought to the theater and moved from theater to theater more quickly, to deliver missiles with a similar impact, also looks attractive. As we move to an environment where two or three or more small wars at the same time, or the need to go to distant conflicts on short notice, seems more likely, highly mobile systems start to make sense. If you have to move projectile delivery systems by ship, you need one set of artillery in each combat zone. If you have aircraft, you can bring the same projectile delivery system from one battlefield to another in hours or days, eliminating the need to have a separate set for each conflict.
10 August 2006
Communitarian Thinking II
I received some feedback in regard to my post on Communitarian Thinking, where I called for big picture, wholistic thinking about several social problems:
1. Public housing officials there want to evict single mothers than their children from public housing if they don't get a job or start an education program, even though this plunges those people immediately into vagrantdom, creating a new problem.
2. Failure to address recidivism in the criminal justice system with prevention, and the related problem of failing to devote sufficient resources to those at very high risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system in the future (e.g. high school dropouts with a history of disciplinary problems in school.)
3. Failing to note that it is cheaper for the health system as a whole to have everyone insured, so that providers aren't overwhelmed with bad debt from emergency cases and so that people get cheap preventative care from low cost providers like an office based medical practice, rather than getting expensive care from emergency rooms once problems are acute.
My reader poses a couple of groups of questions:
In fact, the name of the program was changed from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), to reflect the major overhaul of the program involved.
For lots of people, temporary help, and someone pointing them towards opportunities to improve themselves is all they need. In the same way, the federal health care law COBRA, which allows people to continue to receive health care from their employers who eighteen months or so, at their own expense, has problem materially reduced the ranks of the uninsured in the American middle class.
But, this isn't a perfect and complete solution. There are some people who, while not having any particular disability you could identify in a medical text, are simply disfunctional and marginally employable. They may be cantankerous, or mean, or unreliable, or whatever. Often they have subclinical level mental health problems, developmental disabilities (i.e. low grade retardation), or under so much stress that they have lost their ability to think straight for a while.
Welfare reform was based on something of a law and economics model that came to the conclusion that if you create strong incentives for people to get themselves off welfare fairly soon, that they will respond to those incentives, find jobs, and be better off than they would have been on welfare and in public housing. And, this, along with a healthy economy following the enactment of welfare reform had the intended effect. Many people responded to the incentives, got off welfare and are better for it.
Some people can't. And, the incentives aren't universal. One of the bigger barriers to leaving welfare has turned out to be that many people who can work, are not qualified to get jobs that actually provide health insurance, and have health problems. Thus, leaving welfare means losing Medicaid, which means being worse off with a job than they were on welfare.
Rather than taking a hard line approach with the hard core welfare dependent who are unemployed, and evicting them, and punishing dependent children for having parents who have trouble getting their act together, we would be better advised to create a new program, call it "Sustained Intervention For Treatment of Economic Realities" (SIFTER). The program might be on a model of a guardianship and conservatorship relationship, where a case worker receives funds to provide the family with its needs, but has control over how those funds are spent and have a more hands on, high intervention role in the beneficiary's life.
Maybe the problem is poor budgeting or spending too much money on booze and drugs. Maybe the solution is to have necessities like rent, utilities, car payments or bus passes, and so on deducted from welfare checks and paid directly, and have food money deposited directly to a food stamp card, leaving that person only a small allowance in cash every week. Some people have the money management abilities of preteens, even if they can otherwise function, and without money to waste, they can act more responsibly.
If a case worker felt that a beneficiary was unemployable in a competitive market situation, the case worker might formula a plan suited to the person's abilities that makes maximum use of what they are able to do. Maybe this person can only do work economically worth $3 a hour when the minimum wage is $5.85. People in the program could still be placed and the program would receive the compensation to be held in trust for the beneficiary. Maybe the person is capable of taking care of their own kids and did tolerably O.K. as a homemaker, but has utterly failed in the world of work. Maybe for that person, staying home with the kids is a more sound choice than putting the kids in daycare and getting a job that pays little more than the cost of daycare.
Everyone who has made it to two years would be given a choice. Get out, or enter SIFTER. Many would still leave, because they value their own freedom. Some would welcome having few decisions to make in life and receiving more attention. No additional forms would be required other than a one page opt in or opt out form -- those would have been filled out upon entry to TANF, and any new forms could be completed by a case worker.
This way, at the very least, until the children in the family reached adulthood, beneficiaries wouldn't just be left to starve and die on the streets when left to their own devices. The adult beneficiary might never become independent of welfare. But, protecting the children from becoming homeless and hungry, and instead putting them into an environment where their family situation was constantly monitored and the basics of life were made available to them providing stability, could keep the system from spawning a new generation of traumatized people.
One of the reasons people come to the emergency room is because few doctors take Medicaid, doctors are scarce as it is in most rural areas and not all of them take Medicaid, and so receiving other kinds of care is hard.
If everyone had health care coverage, and a certain amount of money was invested in educating people about how to use it, this could change. I think that people would go to, for example, a public clinic, which could be self-supporting if everyone had health insurance, similiar to an urgent care center, if they knew about it and it could handle walk ins, at a much lower cost than an E.R., if they could have coverage for that. Waits at E.R.s for non-emergency situations discourage people too. If the two were located close to each other, and everyone had health insurance, it would be much easier for an E.R. to say: "You don't have an emergency, the urgent care is down the block.", and a few disappointments like that would have people going to the right place. A bill in the mail for inappropriate usage might also help teach people, working class people with no health insurance -- although the truly destitute might not care.
And, while some of the 14% of people who don't have health insurance wouldn't get preventative care, many, particularly young, basically together people with families and starter jobs, would, even if vagrants still might not.
Some days the required work might be grounds work, another day it might be filing, another day it might be data entry, another day it might be janitorial work, or preparing for a county fair. Some days it would basically be make work, some days it would be valuable. The point is not that it makes economic sense as a job, but that people have a minimum wage job guaranteed and a guaranteed bare bones way to spend that money to survive.
Every able bodied adult would have a "no excuses" fall back position. No able bodies single adult could say "I have to be homeless because I can't find a job and can't find a place I can afford to live."
Some people would choose to be vagrants anyway, but many wouldn't if they had a simple alternative.
1. Public housing officials there want to evict single mothers than their children from public housing if they don't get a job or start an education program, even though this plunges those people immediately into vagrantdom, creating a new problem.
2. Failure to address recidivism in the criminal justice system with prevention, and the related problem of failing to devote sufficient resources to those at very high risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system in the future (e.g. high school dropouts with a history of disciplinary problems in school.)
3. Failing to note that it is cheaper for the health system as a whole to have everyone insured, so that providers aren't overwhelmed with bad debt from emergency cases and so that people get cheap preventative care from low cost providers like an office based medical practice, rather than getting expensive care from emergency rooms once problems are acute.
My reader poses a couple of groups of questions:
Regarding the public housing policy that was being adopted in Atlanta, GA, I wonder what you feel would be a better solution? While I feel that eviction is a pretty extreme solution, I wonder if there were any details you left out?The plan you describe in Alaska is national policy, it is part of the welfare reform system adopted in the Clinton administration, and the public housing issue in Georgia probably has similar roots.
I have a friend (no, really,) who was a resident of Alaska. When she was quite young she became a single mother, through poor choices, and then became a client of the Social Services Department. It seems their policy there is to give clients two years of support, during which time they will pay tuition, child care, housing, and board. At the end of the two year period there support is withdrawn. This allows a person (not just a woman,) the opportunity to get at least an Associates degree (or some technical certificate) in the field of their choice while having total support. This sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me, having supported myself while going to school full time. Perhaps this would be a better policy for GA. I know I would certainly support a nation wide policy of this type, and would be happy to suggest this type of policy to any state official. Does this sound like a better long term plan to you?
In fact, the name of the program was changed from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), to reflect the major overhaul of the program involved.
For lots of people, temporary help, and someone pointing them towards opportunities to improve themselves is all they need. In the same way, the federal health care law COBRA, which allows people to continue to receive health care from their employers who eighteen months or so, at their own expense, has problem materially reduced the ranks of the uninsured in the American middle class.
But, this isn't a perfect and complete solution. There are some people who, while not having any particular disability you could identify in a medical text, are simply disfunctional and marginally employable. They may be cantankerous, or mean, or unreliable, or whatever. Often they have subclinical level mental health problems, developmental disabilities (i.e. low grade retardation), or under so much stress that they have lost their ability to think straight for a while.
Welfare reform was based on something of a law and economics model that came to the conclusion that if you create strong incentives for people to get themselves off welfare fairly soon, that they will respond to those incentives, find jobs, and be better off than they would have been on welfare and in public housing. And, this, along with a healthy economy following the enactment of welfare reform had the intended effect. Many people responded to the incentives, got off welfare and are better for it.
Some people can't. And, the incentives aren't universal. One of the bigger barriers to leaving welfare has turned out to be that many people who can work, are not qualified to get jobs that actually provide health insurance, and have health problems. Thus, leaving welfare means losing Medicaid, which means being worse off with a job than they were on welfare.
Rather than taking a hard line approach with the hard core welfare dependent who are unemployed, and evicting them, and punishing dependent children for having parents who have trouble getting their act together, we would be better advised to create a new program, call it "Sustained Intervention For Treatment of Economic Realities" (SIFTER). The program might be on a model of a guardianship and conservatorship relationship, where a case worker receives funds to provide the family with its needs, but has control over how those funds are spent and have a more hands on, high intervention role in the beneficiary's life.
Maybe the problem is poor budgeting or spending too much money on booze and drugs. Maybe the solution is to have necessities like rent, utilities, car payments or bus passes, and so on deducted from welfare checks and paid directly, and have food money deposited directly to a food stamp card, leaving that person only a small allowance in cash every week. Some people have the money management abilities of preteens, even if they can otherwise function, and without money to waste, they can act more responsibly.
If a case worker felt that a beneficiary was unemployable in a competitive market situation, the case worker might formula a plan suited to the person's abilities that makes maximum use of what they are able to do. Maybe this person can only do work economically worth $3 a hour when the minimum wage is $5.85. People in the program could still be placed and the program would receive the compensation to be held in trust for the beneficiary. Maybe the person is capable of taking care of their own kids and did tolerably O.K. as a homemaker, but has utterly failed in the world of work. Maybe for that person, staying home with the kids is a more sound choice than putting the kids in daycare and getting a job that pays little more than the cost of daycare.
Everyone who has made it to two years would be given a choice. Get out, or enter SIFTER. Many would still leave, because they value their own freedom. Some would welcome having few decisions to make in life and receiving more attention. No additional forms would be required other than a one page opt in or opt out form -- those would have been filled out upon entry to TANF, and any new forms could be completed by a case worker.
This way, at the very least, until the children in the family reached adulthood, beneficiaries wouldn't just be left to starve and die on the streets when left to their own devices. The adult beneficiary might never become independent of welfare. But, protecting the children from becoming homeless and hungry, and instead putting them into an environment where their family situation was constantly monitored and the basics of life were made available to them providing stability, could keep the system from spawning a new generation of traumatized people.
Regarding your ideas on health insurance, and it being cheaper for everyone to be insured vs. emergency treatment, I can tell you that some people just do not act in a responsible proactive manner when it comes to their health. I work in a rural Emergency Room, and the number of people that I personally see each day that has no primary care physician and is on Medicaide is astounding. The majority of these patients do not believe in preventative medicine. They do not have a regular Dr. that they see because they wait until they are sick to try to get into see a Dr. and then have to wait, and so do not go. They come to the ER, not the emergent clinic, because they know that we do not turn anyone away, and that we seldom collect the co-pay that is supposed to be required. I would venture to guess that the majority of these patients also smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.
One of the reasons people come to the emergency room is because few doctors take Medicaid, doctors are scarce as it is in most rural areas and not all of them take Medicaid, and so receiving other kinds of care is hard.
If everyone had health care coverage, and a certain amount of money was invested in educating people about how to use it, this could change. I think that people would go to, for example, a public clinic, which could be self-supporting if everyone had health insurance, similiar to an urgent care center, if they knew about it and it could handle walk ins, at a much lower cost than an E.R., if they could have coverage for that. Waits at E.R.s for non-emergency situations discourage people too. If the two were located close to each other, and everyone had health insurance, it would be much easier for an E.R. to say: "You don't have an emergency, the urgent care is down the block.", and a few disappointments like that would have people going to the right place. A bill in the mail for inappropriate usage might also help teach people, working class people with no health insurance -- although the truly destitute might not care.
And, while some of the 14% of people who don't have health insurance wouldn't get preventative care, many, particularly young, basically together people with families and starter jobs, would, even if vagrants still might not.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think these things should be illegal, rather I think that these people have made some really poor life choices and continue to do so by choosing alcohol and cigarettes and pet food and cell phones over healthcare and dental care and excercise.For single, able bodied people, one program model I think would work would also have a guardian and conservator model. Beneficiaries who sign up would have a guaranteed part time job, in exchange for a dorm room style single occupancy hotel accommodation, a food stamp or cafeteria card, and a small allowance. They would simply have to show up at a work site 25 hours or so a week, their pay would go directly to the program, and a municipal or county official would be in charge of figuring out whatever the government could use having done that was most useful and within their skill set.
Some days the required work might be grounds work, another day it might be filing, another day it might be data entry, another day it might be janitorial work, or preparing for a county fair. Some days it would basically be make work, some days it would be valuable. The point is not that it makes economic sense as a job, but that people have a minimum wage job guaranteed and a guaranteed bare bones way to spend that money to survive.
Every able bodied adult would have a "no excuses" fall back position. No able bodies single adult could say "I have to be homeless because I can't find a job and can't find a place I can afford to live."
Some people would choose to be vagrants anyway, but many wouldn't if they had a simple alternative.
The town I live in has no public transportation - it's not really necessary since you can ride your bicycle from one end of town to the other in about 15 minutes - yet more of these folks use the local taxi service than any other population in town. I can't afford a taxi on a daily basis - how can they? It maddens me to see this over and over again.Many poor people use taxis to get groceries because they don't have cars, and can't afford them, and can't carry groceries on foot or on a bike. If society doesn't provide public transportation people have to do something. Another option is to widely provide bikes with baskets big enough for trips like that.
I thought when I got out of low income property management I would get away from this clientele, but find I am faced by the same folks every day. Many of them are 2nd and 3rd generation medicaide/social services clients. I would love to know how to stop this cycle.Often the adults are beyond escaping from the cycle. It is a matter of providing care, not changing people profoundly. Children who get a decent, stable life with their necessities met growing up can escape.
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