One of the least acknowledged but most pervasive drivers of American judicial culture is that the American legal system has fewer judges, relative to the number of lawyers, relative to the number of lawyers who have litigation practices, relative to population, relative to the number of cases in the system, or by just about any other measure you would care to chose, than any other country in the world.
The U.S. Has Fewer Judges
This is true of every U.S. state and territory. Most of the variation from state to state within the United States arises from the fact that some places have limited jurisdiction courts staffed by full time judges, while other places have limited jurisdiction courts staffed by part-time judges sometimes called justices of the peace. There is less variation in the staffing patterns of general jurisdiction courts and appellate courts, although obviously there is some variation in these staffing decisions as well. Something on the order of 90% of U.S. judges are state or local government employees, rather than federal government employees.
This conclusion is robust across a wide variety of definitions of judges applied consistently (e.g. including or excluding federal judges, including or excluding magistrates and administrative law judges, including or excluding staff lawyers in the judicial branch including or excluding ADR professionals such as mediators and arbitrators in the public and/or private sectors).
The number of judges in the Europe, whose population is perhaps a third that of the United States, is on the order 700,000 according to a recent report from the "Eurocracy" reported at the Legal Theory Blog, yet Europe has fewer "lawyers" than the United States. This appears to include lay judges who are not legally educated, chosen on a non-random basis, and sit for limited terms in more serious cases (typically criminal ones or labor disputes). Other civil law jurisdictions (e.g. Japan and South Korea) are generally similar, although the number of judges per capita declines significantly in the Third World. Definitional issues become deeply problematic in places like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that don't adhere closely to European style arrangements of formal dispute resolution.
The number of lawyers in the United States (which is larger than the number of lawyers in other countries at least in part as a function of the broader definition of who counts as a lawyer in the United States - fewer professionally trained legal professionals count as lawyers in other most countries) is about 1,400,000 and the number of judges in the United States with the title of judge or federal administrative law judge is something under 28,000.
Thus, Europe has about one and a half lawyers for every judge, while the United States has about fifty lawyers for every judge.
This Is Still True If One Adjusts For The Uniquely American Version Of Jury Trials
The two complicating factors that would even these scales are that the United States military justice system uses non-legally trained soldiers in a variety of courts-martial system roles, particularly in less serious cases, although not particularly more than any other modern military force, and that the United States makes much greater use of juries than other countries (even relative to countries in the Anglo-American legal tradition like England).
Many countries around the world make use of juries in criminal cases, but most of those countries reserve them for very serious charges (typically aggravated felonies), while juries usually of at least six ordinary individuals in misdemeanor cases and twelve in a felony cases. Jurors are chosen for a particular case in a manner that is at the first cut random from the general adult population, are routinely utilized in American criminal cases involving even minor misdemeanors. Grand juries who are likewise chosen at random but to serve for longer terms on multiple cases during their terms are used to screen charges prior to trial and judicially investigate alleged criminal conduct in all federal criminal cases, in most serious state criminal cases in perhaps a third to a half of U.S. states, and in exceptional cases with political or organized crime implications in almost every U.S. state.
Juries are virtually absent from all but the narrowest class of exceptional cases in civil law countries and in England. In the United States, juries are available in perhaps 80% of non-family law, non-juvenile civil cases in courts of general jurisdiction (waivers of the right to jury trial without arbitration clauses are routine in large dollar debt-collection practice), compared to perhaps 1%-2% of comparable cases in England (although juries are allowed in some claims for money damages against the government in England where they are not available in most U.S. states).
No country other than the United States utilize juries so routinely in ordinary contract and tort disputes, although civil jury trials are increasingly very rare, especially in cases where an award of damages for pain and suffering or emotional distress is not available, in the United States. About three-quarters of civil juries hear personal injury cases involving run of the mill accidents from car collisions to slip and fall cases to more exceptional incidents.
About sixty jurors sit in jury trials at petite jury members (as opposed to grand jurors) each year per judge. So, including jurors, the United States has something on the order of 1,708,000 judicially acting individuals in any given year. In addition, the number of grand jurors serving in a given year in the United States is something on the order of 60,000-90,000.
On a full time equivalent basis, however, jurors make up something on the order of 16,800 FTE equivalents. The number of grand jurors serving in a given year on a FTE equivalent basis is something on the order of 5,000-7,5000 people. Given that not every judge is a full time judicial official either, the number of FTE equivalent judges in the U.S. and the number of FTE equivalent jurors in the U.S. is roughly equal, and the total number of FTE judicial decision making officials in the U.S. in any given year is about 56,000, roughly one per 25 lawyers admitted to practice in the United States. This is still an order of magnitude less than the number of European judges, some of whom are also part-time, possibly bringing the ratio of FTE European judges to something like 2.5 per European lawyer.
The U.S. Judiciary Is Bottom Heavy
The mix of judges in non-Anglo-American law cases is also quite different from those in the United States. The mix of judges in civil law countries is typically much more top heavy.
In the U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court has nine judges, while the state supreme court's have five to nine judges each. Every U.S. Supreme Court judge and many state supreme court judges (and not an insignificant number of well respected intermediate federal appeals court judges) are minor celebrities. In civil law countries, it isn't unusual for the highest ordinary court to have scores of judges who are assigned to cases on a subject-matter expertise basis, and except for the chief justice and heads of each subject-matter division, they are no more well known than comparable intermediate appellate court judges in the United States. The celebrity and relevance to interpreting the law that we heap on the written opinions of elite appellate judges in the United States is mostly carried in civil law countries by leading law professors in various specialties, with the written opinions of elite appellate judges playing a much less prominent role due to the deceased quasi-regulatory authority of civil law judges to make law and rule on public law questions commonly addressed by U.S. judges such as civil rights violations and rulings on the constitutionality of statutory laws. In civil law countries, these tasks are often delegated to a specialized and prominent constitutional court whose appointments are quite political relative to ordinary judges and who don't involve themselves in routine private law issues of torts, breaches of contract, and the like.
In civil law countries, cases that would be handled by a single U.S. general jurdisdiction court judge supported by a jury at the trial stage, are typically handled by three or five civil law judges (sometimes including one or two lay judges) one of whom takes a lead and manages most of the non-dispositive stages of the process such as taking testimony from witnesses, and the intermediate appellate court panel which would typically consist of three judges in the U.S. would typically have a couple more judges than the first instance court in civil law countries and would typically take some new evidence as well as legal argument. The only cases typically handled by a single judge in civil law countries are the kinds of cases that would be handled by limited jurisdiction trial court judge or magistrate (often without jurors) in the United States, i.e. minor criminal matters and small civil claims.
Notably, the mix of judges in civil law countries more closely matches the mix of lawyers in comparable U.S. litigation. It is almost routine in general jurisdiction civil cases and felony criminal cases that go to trial for at least two lawyers to handle the case at trial, and in very high stakes cases each side's team of lawyers is routinely larger. It isn't unusual to have half a dozen lawyers work directly on a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and to have many more file amicus briefs solicited by one party or another.
Judicial Career Tracks
The career track of judges in civil law countries (and even England, to a lesser extent) also influences this structure. In civil law countries, one goes directly from law school into the judiciary, starting in traffic or parking court and working one's way up the ranks with a decent shot of becoming a rank and file supreme court judge before the end of one's career if you are smart and competent. Judicial appointments (other than to the constitutional court) are often no more political than the appointment of any other civil service professional in the U.S. would be, and the vast majority of judges have never been lawyers who represent individual clients (although some countries treat serving as prosecuting attorneys and serving as judges as part of the same profession in the judicial branch allowing for some exchange between those two groups).
The career track of civil law judges is more like that of U.S. prosecutors or attorney-general's office lawyers than it is like that of American judges. And, unlike American law professors, who typically have only entry level experience practicing law beyond a judicial clerkship, if any, law professors in civil law countries (unlike judges), at least until they have reached a rank equivalent to that of a tenured full professor and sometimes even afterwards, will typically maintain a part-time private practice of law in which the professors act like wily lawyers instead of stodgy professors (civil law law school academics are far more stuffy and doctrinal, and far less ideologically boundary pushing and teaching oriented than U.S. legal educators).
In contrast, in the U.S., most judges are fairly well politically connected individuals in a second career that followed a successful career as a litigation lawyer in public or private practice, most often as a prosecuting attorney, but not infrequently also or instead as a criminal defense lawyer, or a private civil litigator. The track of moving from a less prominent career to a position as a subordinate magistrate judge to taking the job their judge-boss held is also increasingly common in the U.S. And, sometimes, particularly in the case of high profile appellate judge appointments, a judge's first career is as a law professor or legally trained senior civil servant or a legally trained politician, although each of these kinds of appointments would be exceptional. Until roughly the 1950s it wasn't all that uncommon, particularly in rural areas, for a prominent local citizens who was a non-lawyer to be appointed as a part-time trial judge in a limited jurisdiction trial court, and the practice hasn't entirely ended. Colorado, the last time I checked, had at least four non-lawyer county court judges, and also at least some non-lawyer municipal judges in small towns and non-lawyer parking magistrates. But, in New York State outside metropolitan New York City (at least until very recently) and many other states, part-time non-lawyer judges outside major cities with jurisdiction only over small claims cases and minor misdemeanor, traffic and ordinance violation cases remain fairly common.
The prestige judicial appointments in the U.S. most often, but not always, follow a previous judicial appointment as a less prestigious appellate judiciary position, a stint as a general jurisdiction trial court judge, or less often, a position in a state or federal solicitor general's office (the branch of the attorney-general's office that argues cases in front of the relevant supreme court), or as a renowned law professor.
The exception to the general rule would be members of the French Council of State and public law institutions crafted in its image in civil law countries and constitutional courts. These institutions staffed at the entry level with elite civil servants who are graduates of top universities drawn from the ranks of the kind of people who in the United States might serve as judicial law clerks out of law school, as kitchen cabinet political aides to elected officials and senior political appointees (e.g. as a Congressman's legislative aid or Congressional committee staffer), as entry level professional employees in elite government agencies like the solicitor-general's office or CIA or SEC, or as associates at Big law firms or entry level investment bankers. At first, they are assigned in pairs to public law cases, sometimes representing a complaining member of the public as a devil's advocate, and sometimes representing the government, and their cases are judged by more senior members of the same institution who have come up through the ranks. The overall process is more akin to Congressional and executive agency constituent service work than it is to conventional lawyering.
Implications For American Law
How does this play out in the legal life of an American lawyer?
* The shortage of judges has produced a strong institutional bias in favor of negotiated settlements over judicial resolution of litigated disputes on the merits in American courts, and in favor of arbitration and mandatory mediation processes.
* The shortage of judges and a bottom heavy distribution of judges has encouraged doctrines affording exceptionally high levels of finality to trial court decisions and relatively weak appellate review of trial court decisions. U.S. judges and juries have far more effectively unreviewable discretion than civil law judges. For example, outside the U.S. when a decision of a judge is reversed for abuse of discretion, the case is almost automatically assigned to a different judge when it is remanded for further proceedings. In contrast, in the U.S., in all but the most rare and exceptional of cases verging on a gross ethical violation by the judge, a decision of a judge that is reversed for abuse of discretion is automatically remanded to the same judge who must exercise his discretion again subject to the appellate court's order that may still afford him considerable authority to reach a similar, although less extreme, decision.
* Doctrines and procedures that reduce judicial case loads by resolving cases prior to the taking of any evidence in a trial (with or without a jury), or in a preliminary hearing limited to more narrow issues, have thrived in U.S. courts, because they reduce judicial time constraints. Doctrines that resolve cases on narrow procedural grounds, rather than on a consideration of the merits based upon all of the evidence are favored.
* Doctrines and procedures that reduce attorney work loads, for example by narrowing the scope of discovery through close judicial supervision of the process or reducing the uncertainty involved in trial preparation, without actually getting a case off the docket, have not thrived in the U.S. courts despite being at the core of civil law country civil procedure.
* The administrative and litigation process strongly favors rules and procedures that delegate more of the time consuming components of the process to the lawyers and limits the judges to a final decision making mode whenever possible.
Most of the trial court level testimony in civil law jurisdictions is conducted in the presence of a judge in a first official examination of a witness by anyone involved in the case, and the judge personally takes notes in lieu of a verbatim transcript; in the U.S., most of that testimony would have taken place in depositions in the absence of a judicial official other than a court reporting preparing a verbatim transcript, in a lawyer's office, before trial, and only critical portions of the deposition transcripts are presented to the judge in support of pre-trial motions.
The first draft of longer court orders in U.S. courts are routinely drafted by counsel for the prevailing party for review, consideration, modification or adoption by the judge. U.S. judges rely more heavily on briefing from counsel relative to their own legal research and knowledge than civil law judges, and are more likely to have their own legal research done by a subordinate law clerk rather than doing the research personally, in an ordinary case.
In criminal cases, investigations are conducted mostly by non-lawyer police aided from time to time by mass producible search warrants and subpoenas. So, unlike civil litigators who must develop the evidence themselves, criminal prosecutors have considerable staffs of sworn police officers and other investigative officials to do the work that would fall to the discovery process and extra-judicial investigations managed by lawyers in civil litigation. In civil law countries, some of the investigative work in criminal cases that is the responsibility prosecutors in the United States is the responsibility of the judge.
* The shortage of judges and their career track in the United States have conspired to make the U.S. judiciary a very elite group of individuals, even compared to the already elite professional ranks of U.S. lawyers. U.S. judges are not only the cream of the crop in a way that judges elsewhere are not, they are also at intermediate levels of the system more likely to have a wealth of experience in some kind of litigation and considerable social clout in elite political and business circles. While many non-U.S. judges are merely "middle class", the vast majority of U.S. judges are upper middle class and many have roots at least in the upper class and are working as judges as much for the prestige and out of a sense of civic obligation, as for money. For them, it is a form of reduced pay early retirement.
These dynamics produce a group that collectively sees the opportunity to exercise power as a perk in and of itself. U.S. judges are relatively speaking, ambitious and power hungry. The classic problem in U.S. legal practice is how to restrain a judge who abuses his authority, not how to encourage a judge to act boldly where necessary.
The elite status of judges has produced a quality of decision making that has facilitated considerable legislative and public trust in the judiciary. Judges are entrusted with political sensitive common law decision making on emerging private economic and family issues, loose discretionary standards for decision making in equity matters, vaguely drafted statute and regulations, substantial public law decision making power including the power of judicial review of statutes for constitutionality (contrary to popular myth, is shared by every judge from the traffic court judge to appellate court judges, not just the U.S. Supreme Court), the contempt power (using fines or imprisonment to punish those who disobey their court orders, at least until compliance is secured, or to punish people engage in courtroom misconduct), the power to decide cases without the involvement of other judges on a panel, the power to manage cases with potential unlimited punitive damage awards, with potential long terms of imprisonment, with resolution of custody and citizenship maters, and in death penalty cases, because they tend to be far more intelligent than even the average politician, are more willing to show self-restraint in the interest of applicable but effectively unenforceable rules, and are also not politically tone deaf or naive. U.S. judges are almost immune to performance reviews that personally impact their lives during their terms of office for anything other than gross ethical breaches. Even high rates of appellate reversal do not personally impair a judge's career or employment situation in most cases.
Non-U.S. judges mostly lack contempt of court power, have much narrower public law jurisdiction, i.e. authority over governmental entities (if any), do not have the power of judicial review, must often make decisions on important matters as part of a panel, have legal standards to implement that afford them less discretion, implement more tightly drafted statutes and regulations, can have their factual decisions as well as their legal decisions reviewed de novo on a first appeal of right, have less of an ability to make precedents that have force beyond the current case, have more finely nuanced layers of jurisdictional authority with a far small proportion of judges having the full authority of a U.S. general jurisdiction trial court judge, less personal clout, less elite backgrounds, smaller caseloads, less opportunity to make politically sensitive decisions, less practical legal experience in most cases, and less ambition. Non-U.S. judges, by virtue of their career tracks, have far more incentive to fit managerial expectations in order to move up the ranks with attendant higher pay, greater power and more interesting cases.
* Judges, by virtue of their far greater case loads and among trial judges, minimal need to sway a group to their judgments, have far more personal influence on their cases and on the legal environment in their jurisdiction. Conversely, judicial decision making in the U.S. is less consistent.
* Some of the perennial proposed civil procedure reforms, like "active case management" routinely flounder, because judges with huge case loads simply cannot spare the time to devote more attention to cases that are likely to eventually through the discovery process and either settlement or a straight forward culminating motion, be resolved prior to trial with minimal judicial involvement. Any case where both sides are represented by lawyers is particularly likely to resist active judicial involvement since the lawyers often are capable of working things out. These reforms will only succeed if a sustainable solution to a lack of judicial resources is devised for the class of cases receiving additional judicial attention.
* Two factors among many that has driven low judicial staffing levels have been the twin desires to keep court filing fees low so that access to the judicial system is not formally barred by public official's rules, and the desire to have civil courts (where judicial resource constraints are even more acute than in criminal cases) fund themselves as much as possible from filing fees. Policy makers have tended to disfavor the equation of higher filing fees and lower case loads found in private sector non-consumer arbitration procedures.
* Policy makers have also tended to favor having fewer elite judges over having more less elite judges, because our legal system gives all judges considerable power and non-elite judges in this system have great potential to do mischief. This has removed one option to reconcile low filing fees with adequate staffing levels.
07 September 2012
05 September 2012
Smoking and Internet Addiction Mechanisms Similar
The researchers . . . compared the genetic makeup of the problematic Internet users with that of healthy control individuals. This showed that the 132 [Internet addicts] . . . are more often carriers of a genetic variation [on the CHRNA4 gene that changes the genetic makeup for the Alpha 4 subunit on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor] that also plays a major role in nicotine addiction. "What we already know about the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in the brain is that a mutation on the related gene promotes addictive behavior," explains Dr. Montag. Nicotine from tobacco fits -- just like acetylcholine, which is produced by the body -- like a key into this receptor. Both these neurotransmitters play a significant role in activating the brain's reward system. "It seems that this connection is not only essential for nicotine addiction, but also for Internet addiction," reports the Bonn psychologist.
From here.
The abstract states:
Recent studies from Asia provided first evidence for a molecular genetic link between serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmission and Internet addiction. The present report offers data on a new candidate gene in the investigation of Internet addiction—the gene coding for the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit alpha 4 (CHRNA4). A case-control study was carried out. The participants were recruited from a large gene data bank, including people from the general population and from a university setting. A total of 132 participants with problematic Internet use and 132 age- and sex-matched controls participated in the study. Participants provided DNA samples and filled in the Internet Addiction Test Questionnaire. The T- variant (CC genotype) of the rs1044396 polymorphism on the CHRNA4 gene occurred significantly more frequently in the case group. Further analyses revealed that this effect was driven by females. Combined with the findings from other studies, the present data point in the direction that rs1044396 exerts pleiotropic effects on a vast range of behaviors, including cognition, emotion, and addiction.
Other questions naturally follow and will have to be answered by those who can get behind the paywall or in future studies.
What are the raw numbers of percentages of persons with or without the gene mutation? What is the statistical signficance of this finding and how does it compare with the referenced prior study of the same gene? Are there look elsewhere effects from other studies done with the same methods drawn from the same gene data bank that weren't reported? Why is this gene more important in women than in men and does that confirm prior research?
Is this receptor and the associated genetic mutation implicated in other mental health conditions? Are there additions that have distinct genetic and biochemical pathways that have nothing to do with this receptor and genetic mutation? Are there therapies that target this biochemical pathway, either cognitive or drug based? Are their benefits that come with the vulnerability to addiction? Is the gene linked to a personality type?
The study is Christian Montag, Peter Kirsch, Carina Sauer, Sebastian Markett, Martin Reuter. The Role of the CHRNA4 Gene in Internet Addiction. Journal of Addiction Medicine, 2012; 6 (3): 191 DOI: 10.1097/ADM.0b013e31825ba7e7
04 September 2012
Which Environmental Effects Matter When?
It is widely understood that there are a variety of environmental exposures that have immense impact during pregnancy but much less impact at other times (e.g. folic acid deficiency, or fetal alcohol syndrome). There is also a lot of medical literature that points to links during particular time periods during pregnancy, or for that matter, development generally, that there is enhanced vulnerability to particular environmental conditions.
Generally speaking, these tend to be front loaded. The first trimester of pregnancy is a more vulnerable time, in general, than the third trimester, which is more vulnerable than the first year after birth, which is more vulnerable than preschool, which is more vulnerable to elementary school, until in adulthood, one is much, more robust.
I've seen charts describing what happens at particular stages of pregnancy and after birth developmentally. But, perhaps because I've never studied the right subjects in sufficient depth academically, I've never seen a chart really mapping out particular conditions arising from particular exposure periods (ideally, footnoted with peer reviewed journal references) in a comprehensive way. I would welcome anyone who can point me to such a chart in the comments, either with a link or a reference to a print source. I could embark on the task myself, but reinventing the wheel in this case would be a real waste.
Generally speaking, these tend to be front loaded. The first trimester of pregnancy is a more vulnerable time, in general, than the third trimester, which is more vulnerable than the first year after birth, which is more vulnerable than preschool, which is more vulnerable to elementary school, until in adulthood, one is much, more robust.
I've seen charts describing what happens at particular stages of pregnancy and after birth developmentally. But, perhaps because I've never studied the right subjects in sufficient depth academically, I've never seen a chart really mapping out particular conditions arising from particular exposure periods (ideally, footnoted with peer reviewed journal references) in a comprehensive way. I would welcome anyone who can point me to such a chart in the comments, either with a link or a reference to a print source. I could embark on the task myself, but reinventing the wheel in this case would be a real waste.
Apple Amazingly Dominant
Apple became the world’s most valuable-ever company two weeks ago. It is worth $624bn, more than all the listed companies in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain together. The employer of 63,300 people – each valued at $10m – is more valuable than all the shares available to investors in the MSCI China index, the international benchmark.Via this post.
Given that Apple must have many employees who contribute below average amounts to market valuation, the contribution of the core and difficult to replace employees to market valuation must be high indeed.
According to a recent article at Fortune, Apple sells 8.8% of mobile phones, but it has 73% of profits in the market. Samsung sells 23.5% of phones and earns 26% of profits. Everyone else is barely breaking even or losing money.
Via this post.
03 September 2012
Twenty Four Seven Service
I was looking over the traffic statistics for Wash Park Prophet over the last week and noted that there was only a single hour in the last 168 hours (one week), 7 a.m. on Saturday, that no one visited this blog. Thank you for reading.
31 August 2012
Charismatic Leaders Set Tone For Movements
How do you tell the difference between a movement on the verge of violence, a potentially violent movement still far from taking decisive action, and one that will instead choose non-violent direct action? A recent U.S. Department of Defense sponsored study argues that the emotional character of major public speeches from its leader. In other words, charismatic leaders can play their followers like violins and attentive observers can hear the implicit emotional directions that the leaders are offering.
From here.
Of course, domestically, in a society with strong legal protections for the freedom of speech, there is little that authorities can do with this kind of information. The leader who is driving the movement, quite possibly intentionally, doesn't actually rely on overt direct threats to achieve his objective, so it may be impossible to take direct legal action against a potentially violent group's leader. Violence seems to be driven more by the emotional subtext and framing in the speeches than by the particular calls to action themselves.
On the other hand, this analysis could be useful in formulating counterpropoganda initiatives designed to defuse the violent frenzy (or call for non-violent resistance) that a movement's charismatic leader is trying to whip up. Anti-terrorism rhetoric, presumably, ought to focus on defusing anger, destabilizing the sense of superiority that makes contempt possible, and densensitizing movements members to whatever it is that has incited their disgust. More succinctly, counterterrorist rhetoric ought to focus on a message of forgiveness, humility, and tolerance.
The researchers analyzed the pattern of emotions conveyed when leaders spoke about their rival group and examined speeches given at three points in time before a specific act of aggression. They compared the results with the content of speeches delivered by leaders whose groups engaged in nonviolent acts of resistance such as rallies and protests.
Among leaders of groups that committed aggressive acts, there was a significant increase in expressions of anger, contempt and disgust from 3 to 6 months prior to the group committing an act of violence. For nonviolent groups, expressions of anger, contempt and disgust decreased from 3 to 6 months prior to the group staging an act of peaceful resistance.
Matsumoto says the findings suggest a leader's emotional tone may cause the rest of the group to share those emotions, which then motivates the group to take part in violent actions.
"For groups that committed acts of violence, there seemed to be this saturation of anger, contempt and disgust. That combination seems to be a recipe for hatred that leads to violence," Matsumoto said.
Anger, contempt and disgust may be particularly important drivers of violent behavior because they are often expressed in response to moral violations, says Matsumoto, and when an individual feels these emotions about a person or group, they often feel that their opponent is unchangeable and inherently bad.
From here.
Of course, domestically, in a society with strong legal protections for the freedom of speech, there is little that authorities can do with this kind of information. The leader who is driving the movement, quite possibly intentionally, doesn't actually rely on overt direct threats to achieve his objective, so it may be impossible to take direct legal action against a potentially violent group's leader. Violence seems to be driven more by the emotional subtext and framing in the speeches than by the particular calls to action themselves.
On the other hand, this analysis could be useful in formulating counterpropoganda initiatives designed to defuse the violent frenzy (or call for non-violent resistance) that a movement's charismatic leader is trying to whip up. Anti-terrorism rhetoric, presumably, ought to focus on defusing anger, destabilizing the sense of superiority that makes contempt possible, and densensitizing movements members to whatever it is that has incited their disgust. More succinctly, counterterrorist rhetoric ought to focus on a message of forgiveness, humility, and tolerance.
Afghan War Takes Horrific Turn
KABUL, Aug. 31, 2012 (Reuters) . . . A 12-year-old boy was kidnapped and killed in southern Kandahar province on Wednesday, his severed head placed near his body to send a warning to police, said provincial governor spokesman Jawid Faisal.
The brother of the boy, neither of whom were named by officials, was a member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), a U.S.-trained militia charged with making Afghans in Taliban strongholds, like Kandahar, feel more secure, Faisal said.
"It's a Taliban warning to the ALP and to others who support the government," Faisal said of the killing, which happened in Kandahar's Panjwai district.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf denied the group was involved.
Separately, a 6-year-old girl was beheaded in eastern Kapisa province on Thursday, said provincial police chief Abdul Hamed.
"We are not sure if she was beheaded by her family or the Taliban, but we know the Taliban control the area," Hamed said of the killing in Jalukhil village. He added that he could not send investigators to the area out of fears for their safety.
The murders follow the shooting or beheading of 17 young revelers attending a party in southern Helmand province this week, which officials said was the work of the Taliban, a charge the group also denied. . . .
In Kandahar's Zhari district, officials also said on Friday that a 16-year-old boy accused by the Taliban of spying for the government was beheaded and skinned in late July.
Such incidents highlight the difficulty that Taliban leaders have in enforcing discipline across an estimated 20,000 fighters spread from Afghanistan to Pakistan.
The central Taliban leadership is trying to improve the group's image in case it wants to push forward tentative reconciliation steps and perhaps even enter mainstream politics. But some militant units are hard to control, roaming the countryside and attacking those deemed immoral.
From here.
The only other places in the world that I can recall with recent cases where this level of brutality has been used as a political tactic are Mexico, as a part of their drug war, and a number of places in Africa, where interethnic conflicts seem to be at the root of the wars in question.
History and Context
The U.S. involvement in Afghanistan's civil war started shortly after 9/11 in 2001 and after more than a decade of U.S. military involvement is the longest U.S. military conflict in history other than the "Indian Wars", although certainly not the largest in terms of the number of troops involved or the number of U.S. casualties inflicted. But, Afghanistan has endured civil wars more or less continuously, with only brief respites, for more than three decades. Afghanistan is the most wretched non-African country in the world as measured by a wide variety of public health and economic measures. Yet, in the 1970s, before everything fell apart, it has seemed as if it was on track to become a fairly Westernized, modern, central Asian nation.
During the Reagan administration, the U.S. secretly supported Afghan insurgents against Soviet power brokers who eventually abandoned Afghanistan. The Taliban was a Saudi Arabian funded initiative that had almost achieved the goal of impose an orderly strict fundamentalist Islamic theocracy on Afghanistan and controlling almost the entire territory of Afghanistan against which a handful of warlords had been holding out when the U.S. took their side when the Taliban failed to hand over Osma bin Laden and shut down his terrorist organization's demands.
At first, the U.S. involvement (mostly consisting of CIA agents and U.S. Special Forces) and a newly created civilian democratic government put in place with a light U.S. diplomatic touch had seemed to have definitively vanquished the Taliban. But, this turned out to be an illusion. The organization had relocated to Northwestern Pakistan's frontier provinces where an entirely different insurgency against the Pakistani government was underway, and in a few years, insurgent activity in Afghanistan had surged and so had U.S. troop levels together with a few coalition partners such as the United Kingdom. The violent conflict is mostly concentrated in a handful of the country's provinces, while most of its provinces remain almost violence free, a pattern that to some extent reflects the ethnic coalition that has backed the Taliban in this multilingual and multiethnic patchwork of an "in between" country whose boundaries are to some extent arbitrary colonial era relics that are part of the large narrative of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that culminated in its total collapse after World War I.
President Obama has pledged to leave the country (which the U.S. also uses to hold detainees in an wide ranging covert international war on terrorism) by the end of 2014. So far, there has been little organized and well articulated opposition to this time frame for U.S. withdrawal.
U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq has led to major advances in tactics, military personnel skill sets, military equipment, and weapons systems relevant to fighting asymmetric counterinsurgency operations more effectively and efficiently, notwithstanding Defense Department distaste for devoting resources to and developing capabilities pertinent to these kinds of conflicts. Senior military officials have long perferred to focus on large scale conventional military conflicts with "near peers" like Russia and China with its most powerful weapons system - warships, nuclear attack submarines, fighter jets and heavy tanks. But, recent Defense Department cuts that reduce Army and Marine active duty force levels more deeply than the expensive weapon system oriented Air Force and Navy, threaten to deprive the U.S. military of the "soft" counterinsurgency skills that have recently been developed by veterans of U.S. involvements in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. military involvement in the region has produced regime change and eliminated a capacity to engage in international warfare in both Iraq and Afghanistan, two of Iran's most threatening neighbors. The region has also recently seen regime change in Tunisian, Libya (a transition in which the U.S. military played a role), Egypt, South Sudan, Kosovo (with U.S. military involvement), Bosnia (with U.S. military involvement) and Yemen. The U.S. is also playing a low key military and/or CIA role in the current insurgency in Syria. Israeli agents are widely believed to have been involved in recent instances of apparent sabatogue of Iran's nuclear program.
30 August 2012
Republicans Still Racist
A black camerawoman who works for CNN says she was "not surprised" to have two people at the Republican National Convention throw peanuts at her and say "this is what we feed animals."From here. It is worth recalling that the people acting this way aren't just any ignorant, uninformed Republicans whose decision to affiliate with the party is a unilateral one made on a voter registration card. They are party leaders who worked their way up through a long and convoluted process one must weather to be selected as a delegate to the national convention by their Republican party official peers. They are "party insiders" who have an outsized say in running partisan politics in their home states. They are the embodiment of the party's values.
And, the comments aren't notable only because it shows that there are some bad apples in an event with a cast of thousands. Far more telling is the fact that someone could possibly think that this was socially acceptable behavior in the Republican political community in front of a member of the mass media. It is one thing to be unsuccessful at screening out every last racist from your political organization, and it is another to have an organization where racists feel comfortable revealing themselves.
Silver Lining: RNC Delegates Are Irrelevant
The only silver lining is that the delegates in this year's Republican National Convention have essentially no say in any issue of real public policy. The nomination was decided months ago in primary elections and caucuses. Romney's victory was conceded then by all candidates except Ron Paul, who never came close to having enough delegates to defeat Romney. By virtue of powerful traditions in American politics, a Presidential nominee always has more or less unfettered discretion to appoint his own running mate without consulting the delegates to the national convention. Party platforms are interesting historical documents but have almost no influence on the behavior of the party's elected officials.
Delegates in certain committees at the convention can tweak the formula for nominating a Presidential candidate a bit. But, the national party leadership's influence on how funds donated to the party are raised and managed is minimal in an era where most campaign contributions are raised by candidates and political action committees. The conventions of the national political parties are about networking and providing party leaders with bully pulpits, not about making decisions (except in the very rare cases where the primary and caucus results are inconclusive and there is a "brokered convention").
The United States made a decision more than a century ago to gut the power of rank and file parts of political parties relative to candidates, and by and large, its political institutions have adhered to that policy consistently ever since then. Modern American political parties are primarily a brand and a tool for organized networking of politically like-minded individuals. They are not directly an important source of funds for candidates, they don't have strict control over who their nominees are in elections, they engage in only modest amounts of candidate recruitment, and rather than imposing policy coordination or generating new policy ideas they merely articulate ideas that have independently been introduced and become popular among its members already. There is virtually no policy coordination between partisans at the local level and those at the state and federal level, there is only minimal interstate and state-federal policy coordination in either of the two major political parties, and political parties are only minimally involved in the process of making law by citizen initiative. The heavy lifting of partisan politics in America has been delegated to other institutions. The residual political party institutions merely provide a framework within which prospective candidates for elected office can be vetted in a somewhat organizated manner and act collectively in the process of litigating election law issues. (Of course, the situation in state legislatures and Congress where political parties are viable and powerful institutions is quite another thing.)
Texas Voter ID Law Struck Down
In a nutshell:
A Texas claim that the Voting Rights Act provision striking down its voter ID law is unconstitutional is unlikely to prevail. An emergency order from the U.S. Supreme court staying the Court's ruling until the election is over is also unlikely.
Earlier this week, the 2012 Congressional redistricting plan for part of Texas by the Republican controlled legislature was also recently found to be invalid and that its drafted intentionally discriminated against minority voters. This ruling keeps the Court redrawn interim maps in place for the November election.
Time is not on the side of Texas in its efforts to appeal the redistricting ruling or the voter ID ruling. The closer a court making a ruling is to election day, the less inclined it will be to use its discretion in a close case to wreck havoc on the complicated electoral process by changing the status quo at the last minute.
Generally speaking, both rulings help Democrats in the state. The rulings are unlikely to impact the Presidential election, however, since Texas is generally viewed as an easy win for Romney anyway and electoral votes in the Presidential race are an all or nothing affair. Polling strongly favors Republican Ted Cruz in the open U.S. Senate race in Texas (which is not affected by Congressional redistricting since it is a statewide race), so that race won't likely be influenced much by these decisions either. But, Texas could have some close Congressional races and the redistricting ruling makes it more likely that the voter ID law ruling will matter in the Congressional races.
In the long run, this ruling once again cements the image of the Republican party as the anti-minority, anti-Hispanic party, which doesn't help them with the nation's long run demographic trends.
[T]he [unanimous] court bases its analysis [striking down a Texas voter ID law] on three basically uncontested facts:
(1) Minority voters are at least proportionately as likely as white voters in Texas to lack the documents needed for Texas’s new id law (which the Court calls perhaps the most “stringent” in the nation);
(2) the new i.d. law will put high burdens on poor people who lack id (many of whom would have to travel up to 200 or 250 miles at their own expense to get the i.d. as well as pay at least $22 for the documents needed to get the i.d.); and
(3) minority voters in Texas are more likely to be poor.
Using this simple structure, the court concludes that Texas, which bears the burden of proof in a section 5 case, cannot prove its law won’t make the position of protected minorities worse off. And the court suggests this was a problem of its own making: Texas could have made the i.d. law less onerous (as in Georgia, which the court suggests DOJ was probably right to preclear) and Texas could have done more to produce evidence supporting its side at trial, but it engaged in bad trial tactics.
A Texas claim that the Voting Rights Act provision striking down its voter ID law is unconstitutional is unlikely to prevail. An emergency order from the U.S. Supreme court staying the Court's ruling until the election is over is also unlikely.
Earlier this week, the 2012 Congressional redistricting plan for part of Texas by the Republican controlled legislature was also recently found to be invalid and that its drafted intentionally discriminated against minority voters. This ruling keeps the Court redrawn interim maps in place for the November election.
The decision . . . appears unlikely to affect the November elections because those electoral maps were drawn as interim replacements by a federal court in San Antonio. The interim maps were not at issue before the judges in Washington.The finding that the redistricting process was conducted by sitting Texas Republicans in the state legislature in an intentionally discriminatory way also undermines an appeal by Texas of ruling invalidating the Texas voter ID law, enacted by the same Republican controlled state legislature, because there is recent judicially found evidence of intentional discrimination in Texas politics that shows that Section 5 preclearance of voting changes for Texas is necessary.
Gov. Rick Perry signed the Legislature’s maps into law last summer. But the federal court in Washington refused to grant preclearance, prompting the San Antonio judicial panel to create the interim maps to allow this year’s elections to proceed. The federal judges in Washington presided over a trial in January and issued their decision on Tuesday.
Time is not on the side of Texas in its efforts to appeal the redistricting ruling or the voter ID ruling. The closer a court making a ruling is to election day, the less inclined it will be to use its discretion in a close case to wreck havoc on the complicated electoral process by changing the status quo at the last minute.
Generally speaking, both rulings help Democrats in the state. The rulings are unlikely to impact the Presidential election, however, since Texas is generally viewed as an easy win for Romney anyway and electoral votes in the Presidential race are an all or nothing affair. Polling strongly favors Republican Ted Cruz in the open U.S. Senate race in Texas (which is not affected by Congressional redistricting since it is a statewide race), so that race won't likely be influenced much by these decisions either. But, Texas could have some close Congressional races and the redistricting ruling makes it more likely that the voter ID law ruling will matter in the Congressional races.
In the long run, this ruling once again cements the image of the Republican party as the anti-minority, anti-Hispanic party, which doesn't help them with the nation's long run demographic trends.
29 August 2012
Prenatal Risk Factors For Autism?
A New York Times opinion piece from last week by a research who argues for prenatal effects in the womb as a cause of some share of autism cases in a trade non-fiction book. Some of the key observations and evidentiary points from the scientific literature that the author is advocating for regarding the pressing health issue are as follows:
A few points of context and emphasis are in order here:
* A variety of past data has already established a very strong genetic component to autism associated with rare rather than common genetic variants (sometimes in the form of deletions and copy number variants, rather than specific SNPs), in a particular complex of genes with particular functions. A majority of all autism cases probably have a genetic basis, although the particular mutations that are involved in any particular case vary widely. Non-genetic pre-natal causes are, at most, an important cause of only a minority of autism case.
* The autoimmune hypothesis offered above is not exclusive of genetic causes. In a significant share of the up to one third of pre-natal inflamation associated cases cited, the inflamation has a genetic component. In those cases where there is not a genetic component, the mechanism described sounds like an epigenetic effect in many cases. Epigenetic effects can be hereditary, although unlike true genetic effects, they usually persist for only a few generations and can be induced during someone's lifetype by means other than mutations.
* Childhood vaccination does not cause autism. Few cases of non-causation are better established.
* Even in cases where the environmental effects described above are at work, autism is still congenital, i.e. present at birth. Indeed, all of the evidence of maternal inflamation during pregnancy increasing autism risk involved the first two-thirds of the pregnancy, with a significant share of that risk attributable to early parts of the pregnancy when the mother may not even know that she is pregnant. Autism has not been convincingly linked in published scientific studies to the child's diet or parenting styles, for example.
* Controlling inflamation during pregnancy poses its own risk, and can't be limited to the period when people know that they are pregnant alone since the high risk period is front loaded. Many, if not all, anti-inflammatory drugs may present their own risks to a fetus during pregnancy. The author of the article quoted above argues for a comprehensive rethinking of our public health measures to address the problems associated with an overly hygenic environment, without definitively proposing a single solution. But, this calls for a balancing analysis. Lack of hygene causes deadly and unpleasant diseases. Excessive hygene can promote succeptibility ot excessive autoimmune responses. Even though Cambodia has lower rates of autoimmune disorders and autism, very few people would trade that benefit for the overall public health harms associated with its relative lack of hygene. Some level of excessive autoimmune disfunction may be a price worth paying for a reduced incidence of infectious disease agents.
* Autism is the fever of mental health conditions. It is a common symptom of a disorder with a non-specific cause. Indeed, this is more than just an analogy. Autism symptoms, like fevers, appear to be associated with inflamation.
* Regardless of the epidemiology of autism, if a large subset of autism cases involve an autoimmune inflamation mechanism, then early diagnosis and treatment designed to reach that mechanism, particularly during period key to brain development, such as anti-inflammatory drugs, in theory, might be effective. Treatments designed to selectively reverse epigenetic methylation of a child's genome related to autoimmune function also look like a promising avenue to investigate. But, please don't rely on me in turning to a totally unproven theory as a medical treatment without advice from a doctor. I'm a lawyer with a solid background in mathematics who stays abreast of the literature, not a doctor.
* Universal health care has collective public health benefits. One reason that really good population genetic and epidemiological studies often come from Scandinavia is that countries like Denmark have comprehensive national medical records in a well indexed form that is linked to other data about the patients that can be used for medical research. Strict American medical privacy and human subjects research laws make these kinds of studies almost impossible to conduct in the United States with the same level of rigor and statistical power. Nothing has more statistical power than a complete data set for an entire national population.
At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb. . . . In autistic individuals . . . [i]nflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.
Nowhere are the consequences of this dysregulation more evident than in the autistic brain. Spidery cells that help maintain neurons — called astroglia and microglia — are enlarged from chronic activation. Pro-inflammatory signaling molecules abound. Genes involved in inflammation are switched on. . . .
A population-wide study from Denmark spanning two decades of births indicates that infection during pregnancy increases the risk of autism in the child. Hospitalization for a viral infection, like the flu, during the first trimester of pregnancy triples the odds. Bacterial infection, including of the urinary tract, during the second trimester increases chances by 40 percent.
The . . . mother’s attempt to repel invaders — her inflammatory response — seems at fault. . . .Inflaming pregnant mice artificially — without a living infective agent — prompts behavioral problems in the young. In this model, autism results from collateral damage. It’s an unintended consequence of self-defense during pregnancy.
Yet to blame infections for the autism epidemic is folly. . . . the epidemiology doesn’t jibe. . . . Better clues to the causes of the autism phenomenon come from parallel “epidemics.” The prevalence of inflammatory diseases in general has increased significantly in the past 60 years. As a group, they include asthma, now estimated to affect 1 in 10 children — at least double the prevalence of 1980 — and autoimmune disorders, which afflict 1 in 20. Both are linked to autism, especially in the mother. One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother. . . .
Mothers of autistic children often have unique antibodies that bind to fetal brain proteins. A few years back, scientists . . . injected these antibodies into pregnant macaques. (Control animals got antibodies from mothers of typical children.) Animals whose mothers received “autistic” antibodies displayed repetitive behavior. They had trouble socializing with others in the troop. In this model, autism results from an attack on the developing fetus. . . .
A mother’s diagnosis of asthma or allergies during the second trimester of pregnancy increases her child’s risk of autism. . . . Amniotic fluid collected from Danish newborns who later developed autism looked mildly inflamed. . . .
Why are we so prone to inflammatory disorders? . . .
[P]eople living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently. . . . Generally speaking, autism also follows this pattern. It seems to be less prevalent in the developing world. Usually, epidemiologists fault lack of diagnosis for the apparent absence. A dearth of expertise in the disorder, the argument goes, gives a false impression of scarcity. Yet at least one Western doctor who specializes in autism has explicitly noted that, in a Cambodian population rife with parasites and acute infections, autism was nearly nonexistent.
For autoimmune and allergic diseases linked to autism, meanwhile, the evidence is compelling. . . . asthma and autism follow similar epidemiological patterns. They’re both more common in urban areas than rural; firstborns seem to be at greater risk; they disproportionately afflict young boys. In the context of allergic disease, the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from microbial deprivation — has long been invoked to explain these patterns. . . . it should apply to autism as well. (Why the male bias? Male fetuses, it turns out, are more sensitive to Mom’s inflammation than females.)
A few points of context and emphasis are in order here:
* A variety of past data has already established a very strong genetic component to autism associated with rare rather than common genetic variants (sometimes in the form of deletions and copy number variants, rather than specific SNPs), in a particular complex of genes with particular functions. A majority of all autism cases probably have a genetic basis, although the particular mutations that are involved in any particular case vary widely. Non-genetic pre-natal causes are, at most, an important cause of only a minority of autism case.
* The autoimmune hypothesis offered above is not exclusive of genetic causes. In a significant share of the up to one third of pre-natal inflamation associated cases cited, the inflamation has a genetic component. In those cases where there is not a genetic component, the mechanism described sounds like an epigenetic effect in many cases. Epigenetic effects can be hereditary, although unlike true genetic effects, they usually persist for only a few generations and can be induced during someone's lifetype by means other than mutations.
* Childhood vaccination does not cause autism. Few cases of non-causation are better established.
* Even in cases where the environmental effects described above are at work, autism is still congenital, i.e. present at birth. Indeed, all of the evidence of maternal inflamation during pregnancy increasing autism risk involved the first two-thirds of the pregnancy, with a significant share of that risk attributable to early parts of the pregnancy when the mother may not even know that she is pregnant. Autism has not been convincingly linked in published scientific studies to the child's diet or parenting styles, for example.
* Controlling inflamation during pregnancy poses its own risk, and can't be limited to the period when people know that they are pregnant alone since the high risk period is front loaded. Many, if not all, anti-inflammatory drugs may present their own risks to a fetus during pregnancy. The author of the article quoted above argues for a comprehensive rethinking of our public health measures to address the problems associated with an overly hygenic environment, without definitively proposing a single solution. But, this calls for a balancing analysis. Lack of hygene causes deadly and unpleasant diseases. Excessive hygene can promote succeptibility ot excessive autoimmune responses. Even though Cambodia has lower rates of autoimmune disorders and autism, very few people would trade that benefit for the overall public health harms associated with its relative lack of hygene. Some level of excessive autoimmune disfunction may be a price worth paying for a reduced incidence of infectious disease agents.
* Autism is the fever of mental health conditions. It is a common symptom of a disorder with a non-specific cause. Indeed, this is more than just an analogy. Autism symptoms, like fevers, appear to be associated with inflamation.
* Regardless of the epidemiology of autism, if a large subset of autism cases involve an autoimmune inflamation mechanism, then early diagnosis and treatment designed to reach that mechanism, particularly during period key to brain development, such as anti-inflammatory drugs, in theory, might be effective. Treatments designed to selectively reverse epigenetic methylation of a child's genome related to autoimmune function also look like a promising avenue to investigate. But, please don't rely on me in turning to a totally unproven theory as a medical treatment without advice from a doctor. I'm a lawyer with a solid background in mathematics who stays abreast of the literature, not a doctor.
* Universal health care has collective public health benefits. One reason that really good population genetic and epidemiological studies often come from Scandinavia is that countries like Denmark have comprehensive national medical records in a well indexed form that is linked to other data about the patients that can be used for medical research. Strict American medical privacy and human subjects research laws make these kinds of studies almost impossible to conduct in the United States with the same level of rigor and statistical power. Nothing has more statistical power than a complete data set for an entire national population.
20 August 2012
What If Someone Else Wrote Lord of The Rings?
Explorations about how the fantasy epic might have been written in the hands of the likes of Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde are linked here.
17 August 2012
About 40% of U.S. Suicides Linked To Parasite
About 10-20 percent of people in the United States have Toxoplasma gondii, or T. gondii, in their bodies, but in most it was thought to lie dormant. . . . In fact, it appears the parasite can cause inflammation over time, which produces harmful metabolites that can damage brain cells. "Previous research has found signs of inflammation in the brains of suicide victims and people battling depression, and there also are previous reports linking Toxoplasma gondii to suicide attempts. . . . In our study we found that if you are positive for the parasite, you are seven times more likely to attempt suicide."From here (emphasis added).
If these numbers are right, infected people make up about 15% of Americans, but about 55% of all Americans who attempt suicide. (The study itself was conducted in Sweden with 54 probands and 30 controls.)
This is huge. To be clear, the study itself looked only at non-fatal suicide attempts and not completed suicides. But, the linked article notes that there were 36,909 suicides in 2009 in the United States. Thus, if the percentage of suicide attempts resulting in death is similar for both infected and non-infected individuals, this parasite may be the statistical proximate cause of more than 14,000 suicides a year in the United States; 40% of the total number of U.S. suicides.
The only other infectious agent with a comparable mortality impact in the United States is influenza. But influenza deaths, which are predominantly among infants, people with compromised immune systems, and the elderly, while suicide is found in appreciable frequencies at all ages from adolescence onward.
Also, "90 percent of people who attempt suicide have a diagnosed psychiatric disorder. If we could identify those people infected with this parasite, it could help us predict who is at a higher risk."
The mere fact that one has a parasite that infects 45,000,000 people in the U.S. of whom 20,300 a year commit suicide, does not itself create an overwhelming individualized risk, and some of those people who were infected with the parasite (statistically) would have committed suicide anyway.
But, the presence of this infection is a much more powerful screening tool when combined with the stastically powerful screen of a previously diagnosed psychiatric disorder (and, in fact, only some diagnosed psychiatric disorders, not all of them, are associated with elevated suicide risk), which is probably mostly independent of the incidence of infection with this common parasite. There are tens of millions of Americans who have diagnosed psychiatric disorders as well, but the intersection of the two categories is probably small enough to justify increased vigilance for the individuals of the appropriate ages (i.e. not young children) who have both risk factors.
Also, knowing that this parasite has a profound mortality impact, at least in certain populations, may make finding a way to treat this infection, previously viewed as mostly harmless, a major new public health priority. An effective diagnosis and treatment for this parasitic infection, if affordable, could be the biggest advance for public health since the invention of vaccines again common viral diseases and antibiotics against bacterial diseases.
The underlying study is:
Yuanfen Zhang, Lil Träskman-Bendz, Shorena Janelidze, Patricia Langenberg, Ahmed Saleh, Niel Constantine, Olaoluwa Okusaga, Cecilie Bay-Richter, Lena Brundin, Teodor T. Postolache. Toxoplasma gondiiImmunoglobulin G Antibodies and Nonfatal Suicidal Self-Directed Violence. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 2012; DOI: 10.4088/JCP.11m07532
GDP Doesn't Measure Economic Well Being
Gross national product aka GNP (or the slight variant on it, gross domestic product aka GDP) are measures of aggregate national production in the monetary economy. Two calendar quarters of GDP decline is the standard definition of a recession. GDP growth is the standard measure of a healthy economy that has the virtue of being readily comparable internationally and between units within federal states.
GDP per capita is a reasonable useful first order approximation of economic standard of living, and of value creation, but is flawed in both respects, and one does not need to resort to something far more subjective and hard to compare like Bhutan's National Happiness Index to address these flaws.
Intra-Household Production
One of the big flaws of GDP is that it fails to adequately measure intra-household production. Paying for child care or a maid service or eating out increases GDP. Caring for your own children, or cleaning your own home, or adding value by cooking, serving and cleaning up after your own meals as part of a family, even if it provides an identicial or superior value to paying for these services, does not increase GDP. Selling agricultural products in a marketplace increases GDP, while growing food for personal consumption as a gardener or subsistance farmer does not.
As long as the proportionate share of intra-household production over time, or between compared regions stays more or less constant, this isn't all that serious a problem. The trendlines and comparisons remain valid, even though the absolute numbers are wrong. But, it is problematic if there is a material shift from market production to intra-household production (or visa versa), or if two compared regions have very different levels of intra-household production.
This is serious problem in development economics, because GDP is a very poor measure of economic production in less developed countries where a very large share of economic activity, for example, involves subsistance farming.
Notably, GDP already includes one important category of intra-household value creation: imputed rental value of homes occupied by homeowners. Extending GDP measures to impute value to intra-household personal services and other forms of intra-household production would not be a revolutionary reform of the measure.
Leisure and Other Non-Monetary Goods
Another big issue, which isn't so much a flaw in the metric as it is a flaw in how to use the metric, is that it doesn't capture tradeoffs between work and leisure. It is possible to look at GDP per hour worked, or per average number of working days per year, which measure productivity and which also implicitly place an economic value on leisure. People in a nation where the average worker voluntarily goes on vacation for one month a year are both more productive and more affluent than people in another nation where the per capita GDP is the same, but the average worker voluntarily goes on vacation for just two weeks a year.
A similar problem arises with positive and negative externalities that the monetary economy fails to capture. GDP does not take into account air quality, for example, or if it does, may actually treat air pollution as something that increases GDP because it increases health care spending. A cost-benefit analysis valid air regulation that reduces health care spending by more than it costs to implement the pollution control measures could very easily reduce GDP even though it improves quality of life and makes people more economically prosperous. But, because the benefit from the non-market good (clean air) doesn't get traded monetarily, it doesn't go into the GDP computation.
Quality
A third big issue, which was a huge problem in non-market Soviet economies that were trying to boost GDP, and is also a big problem in making intertemporal comparisons, is measuring changes in quality over time. If you can buy a better TV than could have ten years ago for the same price, a nation is better off even if the amount of money spent producing TVs in the same now as it was ten years ago, but GDP does not capture this reality.
Similarly, if two countries spend the same amount per capita on health care, but one country uses modern medical methods and gets good outcomes from that spending, while the other uses leeches and snake oil and gets bad outcomes from that spending, nothing in the GDP measure distinguishes between the two cases.
In general, quality issues tend to overvalue past economic production relative to current economic production, and also tend to be particularly problematic for comparing GDP between regions when a good or service is not easily traded.
In theory, market mechanisms in international trade will tend to resolve cases where the same dishwasher sells for $100 in one country and $1,000 in another, for the same good. But, prescription drugs and medical equipment, for example, present just that conundrum. An MRI machine sold in the United States contributed much more to the U.S. economy than the same MRI machine sold in Japan where identical medical equipment is much cheaper.
Many services like health care and education, are not easily traded or commoditized, so it is particular hard to compare them, even though at some level it may be clear that better outcomes are being provided for similar expenditures in different places.
Zero Value Or Inefficient Production
Perhaps the most difficult correction to GDP, conceptually anyway, is the notion that some activity in the monetary economy may have zero or negative value. More generally, GDP doesn't measure the efficiency with which inputs and converted into outputs. This raises many of the same issues as the quality issue.
Health care is one place where this can be well illustrated. Suppose that one country spends $2,000 per capita to receive a particular set of healthcare outcomes, and another country spends $5,000 per capita to receive the same healthcare outcomes. By this measure, the country with the more efficient health care system looks more prosperous by GDP measures than the one with the less efficient health care system, all other things being equal, when in fact, their prosperity would be identical. The marginal $3,000 per capita that the second country is spending to receive the same product is adding no value to its economy.
In the Soviet economies, again, this was a huge issue, because the Soviet economies often produced too much of goods that no one needed, and too little of goods that people did need. But, GDP isn't designed to measure the use to which good are produced are put. If the economy churns out too many televisions and people start to use them as dinner plates, GDP doesn't care, even though the actual value the excess televisions are adding to the economy has plummeted.
In a well functioning market economy, the private sector is supposed to produce goods at efficient prices and in efficient amounts, so neither of these distortions are material. But, all economies are mixed economies to some extent, and the private sector may have systemic distortions.
Another place this comes into play is in the guns v. butter issue. GDP, in general, assumes that production purchased by government is worth what government adds value to the economy proportionate to what government pays for it.
Many economists aren't too worried about the zero value production issue in the private sector because they assume that goods produced for consumption in the private sector are appropriately valued for aggregate economic purposes based on actual production at market prices because the mechanism of a reasonable functional market economy place natural checks on the production of useless goods or overpriced goods. In a reasonably functional market economy, this isn't a grossly unreasonable assumption and has immense practical administrative value in calculating GDP.
But, few economists are equally comfortable in saying that a decision of the elected officials who make spending decisions for government is as an effective a means of preventing the production of useless or overpriced goods as a private market mechanism. A bridge to nowhere that costs $100 million to build adds the same amount to GDP as a bridge that is used constantly. A $1 billion dollar warship adds $1 billion to GDP whether it greatly enhances the nation's military might or is actually worthless. Likewise, if the government spends $1 billion on a military cargo plane when an identical one could be purchased in the private sector for $100 million, because the Defense Department is bad at getting good prices on defense contracts, GDP goes up by $1 billion rather than $100 million. Certainly, military spending, in general, does not directly impact consumer stadnard of living. Prison spending on a wrongfully convicted inmate adds the same amount to GDP as prison spending on someone who committed a serious crime and would reoffend if not incarcerated.
Valuing all spending at actual transaction prices makes GDP computation much less subjective. But, if ignores the capacity of the economy to add value by increasing efficiency or quality rather than merely increasing production in the narrow sense. The problems related to zero marginal value production in GDP computation are essentially a more subtle variation on the problems with using Marx's labor theory of value, which economists have long derided.
GDP per capita is a reasonable useful first order approximation of economic standard of living, and of value creation, but is flawed in both respects, and one does not need to resort to something far more subjective and hard to compare like Bhutan's National Happiness Index to address these flaws.
Intra-Household Production
One of the big flaws of GDP is that it fails to adequately measure intra-household production. Paying for child care or a maid service or eating out increases GDP. Caring for your own children, or cleaning your own home, or adding value by cooking, serving and cleaning up after your own meals as part of a family, even if it provides an identicial or superior value to paying for these services, does not increase GDP. Selling agricultural products in a marketplace increases GDP, while growing food for personal consumption as a gardener or subsistance farmer does not.
As long as the proportionate share of intra-household production over time, or between compared regions stays more or less constant, this isn't all that serious a problem. The trendlines and comparisons remain valid, even though the absolute numbers are wrong. But, it is problematic if there is a material shift from market production to intra-household production (or visa versa), or if two compared regions have very different levels of intra-household production.
This is serious problem in development economics, because GDP is a very poor measure of economic production in less developed countries where a very large share of economic activity, for example, involves subsistance farming.
Notably, GDP already includes one important category of intra-household value creation: imputed rental value of homes occupied by homeowners. Extending GDP measures to impute value to intra-household personal services and other forms of intra-household production would not be a revolutionary reform of the measure.
Leisure and Other Non-Monetary Goods
Another big issue, which isn't so much a flaw in the metric as it is a flaw in how to use the metric, is that it doesn't capture tradeoffs between work and leisure. It is possible to look at GDP per hour worked, or per average number of working days per year, which measure productivity and which also implicitly place an economic value on leisure. People in a nation where the average worker voluntarily goes on vacation for one month a year are both more productive and more affluent than people in another nation where the per capita GDP is the same, but the average worker voluntarily goes on vacation for just two weeks a year.
A similar problem arises with positive and negative externalities that the monetary economy fails to capture. GDP does not take into account air quality, for example, or if it does, may actually treat air pollution as something that increases GDP because it increases health care spending. A cost-benefit analysis valid air regulation that reduces health care spending by more than it costs to implement the pollution control measures could very easily reduce GDP even though it improves quality of life and makes people more economically prosperous. But, because the benefit from the non-market good (clean air) doesn't get traded monetarily, it doesn't go into the GDP computation.
Quality
A third big issue, which was a huge problem in non-market Soviet economies that were trying to boost GDP, and is also a big problem in making intertemporal comparisons, is measuring changes in quality over time. If you can buy a better TV than could have ten years ago for the same price, a nation is better off even if the amount of money spent producing TVs in the same now as it was ten years ago, but GDP does not capture this reality.
Similarly, if two countries spend the same amount per capita on health care, but one country uses modern medical methods and gets good outcomes from that spending, while the other uses leeches and snake oil and gets bad outcomes from that spending, nothing in the GDP measure distinguishes between the two cases.
In general, quality issues tend to overvalue past economic production relative to current economic production, and also tend to be particularly problematic for comparing GDP between regions when a good or service is not easily traded.
In theory, market mechanisms in international trade will tend to resolve cases where the same dishwasher sells for $100 in one country and $1,000 in another, for the same good. But, prescription drugs and medical equipment, for example, present just that conundrum. An MRI machine sold in the United States contributed much more to the U.S. economy than the same MRI machine sold in Japan where identical medical equipment is much cheaper.
Many services like health care and education, are not easily traded or commoditized, so it is particular hard to compare them, even though at some level it may be clear that better outcomes are being provided for similar expenditures in different places.
Zero Value Or Inefficient Production
Perhaps the most difficult correction to GDP, conceptually anyway, is the notion that some activity in the monetary economy may have zero or negative value. More generally, GDP doesn't measure the efficiency with which inputs and converted into outputs. This raises many of the same issues as the quality issue.
Health care is one place where this can be well illustrated. Suppose that one country spends $2,000 per capita to receive a particular set of healthcare outcomes, and another country spends $5,000 per capita to receive the same healthcare outcomes. By this measure, the country with the more efficient health care system looks more prosperous by GDP measures than the one with the less efficient health care system, all other things being equal, when in fact, their prosperity would be identical. The marginal $3,000 per capita that the second country is spending to receive the same product is adding no value to its economy.
In the Soviet economies, again, this was a huge issue, because the Soviet economies often produced too much of goods that no one needed, and too little of goods that people did need. But, GDP isn't designed to measure the use to which good are produced are put. If the economy churns out too many televisions and people start to use them as dinner plates, GDP doesn't care, even though the actual value the excess televisions are adding to the economy has plummeted.
In a well functioning market economy, the private sector is supposed to produce goods at efficient prices and in efficient amounts, so neither of these distortions are material. But, all economies are mixed economies to some extent, and the private sector may have systemic distortions.
Another place this comes into play is in the guns v. butter issue. GDP, in general, assumes that production purchased by government is worth what government adds value to the economy proportionate to what government pays for it.
Many economists aren't too worried about the zero value production issue in the private sector because they assume that goods produced for consumption in the private sector are appropriately valued for aggregate economic purposes based on actual production at market prices because the mechanism of a reasonable functional market economy place natural checks on the production of useless goods or overpriced goods. In a reasonably functional market economy, this isn't a grossly unreasonable assumption and has immense practical administrative value in calculating GDP.
But, few economists are equally comfortable in saying that a decision of the elected officials who make spending decisions for government is as an effective a means of preventing the production of useless or overpriced goods as a private market mechanism. A bridge to nowhere that costs $100 million to build adds the same amount to GDP as a bridge that is used constantly. A $1 billion dollar warship adds $1 billion to GDP whether it greatly enhances the nation's military might or is actually worthless. Likewise, if the government spends $1 billion on a military cargo plane when an identical one could be purchased in the private sector for $100 million, because the Defense Department is bad at getting good prices on defense contracts, GDP goes up by $1 billion rather than $100 million. Certainly, military spending, in general, does not directly impact consumer stadnard of living. Prison spending on a wrongfully convicted inmate adds the same amount to GDP as prison spending on someone who committed a serious crime and would reoffend if not incarcerated.
Valuing all spending at actual transaction prices makes GDP computation much less subjective. But, if ignores the capacity of the economy to add value by increasing efficiency or quality rather than merely increasing production in the narrow sense. The problems related to zero marginal value production in GDP computation are essentially a more subtle variation on the problems with using Marx's labor theory of value, which economists have long derided.
Progressive Insurance Not
I care more about what companies do than what they say. Call you company what you will. Spend millions on advertising. But, what matters from a casualty insurance company is that it won't screw you over when the chips are down.
Progressive Insurance failed that test in a recent highly publicized case, not only denying benefits to its insured in a fairly run of the mill accident, but intervening in the litigation brought by their insured against the other driver against their insured. Bad viral Internet PR launched by Matt Fischer, the brother of the insured, Katie, who was killed in the accident, persuaded the insurance company to ultimately back down. But, the damage was done. I would not recommend that anyone I know buy casualty insurance from them.
Progressive Insurance failed that test in a recent highly publicized case, not only denying benefits to its insured in a fairly run of the mill accident, but intervening in the litigation brought by their insured against the other driver against their insured. Bad viral Internet PR launched by Matt Fischer, the brother of the insured, Katie, who was killed in the accident, persuaded the insurance company to ultimately back down. But, the damage was done. I would not recommend that anyone I know buy casualty insurance from them.
03 August 2012
Scalia's Absurd Take On Gun Control (Again)
In light of the July 20 massacre in which a gunman killed 12 moviegoers in Colorado, Scalia was asked whether legislatures could ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons. He said the 2008 [Heller] ruling stated that future cases will determine "what limitations upon the right to bear arms are permissible. Some undoubtedly are."
Scalia -- a proponent of the idea that the Constitution must be interpreted using the meaning of its text at the time it was written -- cited "a tort called affrighting" that existed when the Second Amendment was drafted in the 18th century making it a misdemeanor to carry "a really horrible weapon just to scare people like a head ax."
"So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed," he said. "I mean, obviously, the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried. It's to 'keep and bear' (arms). So, it doesn't apply to cannons. But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to be ... decided."From here.
What did the United States ever do to deserve a Supreme Court justice who thinks that it might be constitutional to ban carrying a head ax, but thinks banning a handheld rocket launcher that can bring down an airplane might be a hard question? And, why would a Supreme Court justice reach the linguistically inaccurate assumption that "bearing arms" in this context means literally carrying them by hand?
To restate my own view on the matter, I think that any coherent modern individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment cannot properly to be viewed as a political right incident to the collective right of the People to replace their governments by revolution as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, in scenarios like the one currently unfolding in Syria. The constitution is not a suicide pact. It also simultaneously declares that taking up arms against the United States or a State constitutes the crime of treason punishable (then at least) by death (although no longer working a "corruption of blood").
Instead, the most sensible theory of an incorporated individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment is that it is the flip side of the absence of an affirmative duty in American law on the part of the state to protect an individual from private violence.
In other words, it is an imperfect alternative to governmental indifference or delay in the face of rapists, murders, robbers, homoe invasion burglars, lynch mobs and the like, without regard to whether the cause of law enforcement inaction in inability, negligence, or deliberate indifference to a person's safety. By its own reference to a well regulated militia, it implies that reasonable regulation of the right to bear arms is permissible, and the courts should analyze reasonableness in the context of backstopping the ability of individuals to protect themselves from private violence in the face of potential law enforcement inaction. The reference to a militia in this context also dovetails with the notion that in the 18th century volunteer citizen's patrols, sometimes called militias, rather than professional police departments that would not be invented for another half a century at least, were a central institution for the enforcement of criminal laws.
This theory of the Second Amendment still leaves many hard cases related to the issue of what regulation is reasonable. But, it at least provides an intelligible way of weighing the relevant considerations in the modern era, that does not rely on esoteric accounts of the detailed state of the common law and statutory law in 18th century colonial America, and respects the values that makes sense in the large individual human rights oriented interpretation that we have given to the Bill of Rights as a whole over two centuries (well mostly the last century, before which the Bill of Rights was mostly ignored as a means to declare laws unconstitutional) of interpretation. The Constitution was kept short, in part, in order to retain flexibility that wouldn't keep our political system hidebound by the kind of accidental and long forgotten precedents that Scalia puts so much stock in under his crabbed version of originalism.
Yes, the intent of the Founders is relevant to the analysis of the meaning of the constitution, but a drafters intent analysis ought to be conducted at a much higher level of generality. Judges should be trying to discern from the Founders statements and the overall context, the core principles behind a constitutional provision, rather than minutae of how cases that could never have come up then would have been decided by those particular people at that particular time. Originalism also needs to recognize that not every law and common law decision in force in 1791 was necessarily constitutional even then under the newly adopted Bill of Rights, which marked a revolutionary step in law making and not simply a rubber stamping of the status quo. It was adopted because the Founders were concerned that the 1789 status quo might be flawed. The Bill of Rights was adopted because the Founders felt that some of the rights it protected could be in the near future, or already were being, violated by the new federal government of the independent and united States who had adopted the new constitution in 1789 that replaced the Articles of the Confederacy (not to be confused with the Confederate States of American in 1861) that had preceded it.
The nation was just a quarter century old at the time, and no one was thinking about how the exact language its provisions might apply in a science fiction future where a man could fly, or another man could hold in his hands a weapon that might shoot hundreds of people out of the sky, two centuries later. Even mass produced semi-automatic or revolving pistols were far in the future at that point.
This isn't to say that the Second Amendment should exclude any weapon that didn't exist at the time of the Founding, but the opposite assumption makes no more sense. The issue is why the Founders thought it made sense have the Second Amendment, and why the drafter of the 14th Amendment under the authority of which the Second Amendment is applied to the states felt it was necessary to expand the scope of federal power over state law in the 1860s, not what its specific scope the Second Amendment was believed to have in 1791.
01 August 2012
The Governor's Marriage and Mine
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (a Democrat) and his wife Helen Thorpe, separated yesterday. They lived in a nice urban residential neighborhood in Denver (Park Hill) with their ten year old son. John is moving out, to the Governor's Mansion in somewhat less tranquil Capital Hill. They are doing their best to cooperate and be civil, for each other and for sake of their child. It is still sad.
My wife of eighteen years and I also separated yesterday. We lived in a nice urban residential neighborhood in Denver (Wash Park) with our two middle schoolers, who are just a little older than John and Helen's son. I am moving out, although not to any place as nice as the Governor's mansion (my new home is in Bible Park). We are doing the best to cooperate and be civil, for each other and for the sake of our children. It is still sad.
I'm probably less surprised about the Hickenlooper and Thorpe announcement than most. I have heard credible rumors that this would happen sometime after the 2010 election for about two years now. I don't know if those rumors were correct or if they were simply stopped clocks that are right twice a day anyway. I don't really care. And, of course, I'm hardly the best connected person in Denver, so I'm sure that many other people had heard these rumors as well.
It is a testament to the respect that members of the political world and the press have for Governor Hickenlooper that these rumors were not made public or reported on by anyone until he and his wife issued a press release to that effect yesterday. A large number of people must have known. The media has a strong tendency to consider the private lives of all celebrities to be newsworthy. Needless to say, I personally refrained from blogging about even the fact that those rumors existed until today after it had been announced, and I didn't talk to any of the reporters I count among my friends about these rumors either (although surely some reporters must have known).
In truth, I didn't personally foresee that I'd be splitting up myself until much more recently than I heard these rumors (and certainly had no idea that John and Helen's announcement would come yesterday).
Even though I was born in Georgia and lived there the first seven years of my life, I am fundamentally cut from Yankee, not Dixie cloth. The Governor, Colorado's Governor Bill Owens (a Republican) who also separated while recently serving as Colorado's Governor, and I all agree that when a marriage ends that the right thing to do is to be civilized about it. It is not the time to air dirty laundry, or to seek some sort of legal or extralegal form of fault assignment and redress for wrongs within the marriage. "No Fault" divorce has caused or follows a cultural change our sensibilities as well as our laws. It is a time to look forward and see what is possible now, and not to look back and tally up rights and wrongs. I'm sure that all of the husbands and wives involved have ranted privately a little to intimate friends and family. But, private rants and public statements are two different things even in the age of the Internet and cell phone camera.
This isn't to say that that state of our society and our laws when it comes to divorce is the best of all possible worlds. The fact of the matter is that Governor Hickenlooper's marriage, the marriage of Governor Owens, and my own marriage, which is to say marriages of reasonable, together people who are still capable of interacting, at least as co-parents, with each other in a civil, good faith manner, would have continued to stay married and continued to live together in a single household, a couple of generations ago. Then, the people who are capable of having a "good divorce" today would have stayed married. But, that debate is one for another day. The situation now is what it is. We aren't living two generations ago, we're living now.
Today, John, Helen, their son, my wife, my two children and I start muddling through the complicated world of separated life after long discussions leading up to yesterday on everyone's part. I wish them luck and hope we'll manage to find some of our own.
Still Hot And Dry In Denver
Denver's average daily temperature in July 2012 was 78.9 degreees, a new record high average daily temperature (there were seven days over 100 degrees). The runner up was 77.8 degrees in July 1934, followed by 77.7 degrees in July 2005, followed by 77.6 degrees in July 2008, followed by 77.3 degrees in July 1936.
On July 2, 2012 there was a record high for that day for Denver of 101 degrees. But, the hottest day this month in Denver (102 degrees on July 21) did not exceed the record high for any July day in Denver (105 degrees set on July 20, 2005).
Denver has also been dry this month, receiving just 0.48 inches of precipitation compared to an average 2.16 inches in July, more than 77% below average (there were just 0.13 inches of precipitation in June 2012). For the year to date after seven months, Denver has had 5.29 inches of moisture, compared to an average of 9.67 inches, a shortfall of about 45% that is part of a broad national drought of which Colorado has been among the hardest hit.
This follows record heat and record wildfires in June 2012. See June fires, June fires and heat records, and more June heat records.
On July 2, 2012 there was a record high for that day for Denver of 101 degrees. But, the hottest day this month in Denver (102 degrees on July 21) did not exceed the record high for any July day in Denver (105 degrees set on July 20, 2005).
Denver has also been dry this month, receiving just 0.48 inches of precipitation compared to an average 2.16 inches in July, more than 77% below average (there were just 0.13 inches of precipitation in June 2012). For the year to date after seven months, Denver has had 5.29 inches of moisture, compared to an average of 9.67 inches, a shortfall of about 45% that is part of a broad national drought of which Colorado has been among the hardest hit.
This follows record heat and record wildfires in June 2012. See June fires, June fires and heat records, and more June heat records.
29 July 2012
Bible Park Prophet
I am not going to alter the Wash Park Prophet "brand" that I have used to blog here under for the last seven years. But, in the interest of transparency, I must report that I no longer living the neighborhood of Denver's beloved Washington Park that I have known and loved for more than a decade. Instead, I now live in the neighborhood of Denver's James A. Bible Park, commonly known as "Bible Park."
Oh, the irony! Am I now a godless biblical prophet? I have not yet grown accustomed to the suburban-style digs, but all things come with time.
Oh, the irony! Am I now a godless biblical prophet? I have not yet grown accustomed to the suburban-style digs, but all things come with time.
26 July 2012
European v. American Party Politics
Most European countries, mostly due to their proportional representation electoral systems and/or strong regional political differentiation, have more viable political parties each at the national level than the United States, which has just two viable national political parties.
Overall, in general and on average, European countries have a political center (median set of policy views) that is discernably to the left of the American political center. In substantial part this is because they have wider electoral participation (ca. 90%+ v. ca. 50% eligible voter turnout in top of the ticket elections), in part because their electoral system makes everyone's vote count much more palpably, and also because they did not have strong franchise limiting factions in the post-WWII era when the franchises were set. But, they also lean left for historical reasons: the leveling effects of World War II, the Nazi movement's defeat's effect in discrediting the political far right for a while, and the sense of shared collective purpose that followed from the need to rebuild after World War II.
But, the multiparty systems of Europe also mean that political extremists, such as Communists (as opposed to Center-Left Socialists and the Labor Party), Fascists or Neo-fascists (as opposed to Center-Right Christian Democrats and the British Conservative Party).
Europe also has more separatist parties. This is due to stronger and more ancient regional identities, often with their own languages, compared to that of the United States. It is also probably due in part to a lack of federal institutions that can sufficiently satisfy separatist urges.
The supermajoritarian features of the American living constitution (e.g., separation of powers, judicial review, Senate filibusters, bicameralism, staggered Senate elections, federalism, Senatorial privilege in judicial appointments), also heightens the political power of politicians in the muddy middle relative to political extremists, in a way not nearly so true in strongly majoritarian unitary parliamentary systems. The path to real power in American politics is ultimately through moderation and not extremism, although there are still fewer moderate elected officials than there are moderate members of the enfranchised population. More accurately, the path to political power in the United States is through moderate partisanship as opposed to extreme partisanship.
A very weak tradition of direct action in American politics (e.g. general strikes, insurgencies, assassination, huge street protests) relative to our European peers also weakens the power of extremists in our political system. Then again, this may put cause and effect backward, the political weakness of extremists may be an important source of a weak tradition of direct action in American politics.
The not quite consensus in academic political science and on the political left is that a European multiparty system created by European style electoral and constitutional institutions would be preferrable to the American political system. But, would the cultural price that American democracy would pay in legitimatizing a much wider range of ideological extremism really be worth having a set of politicians who more precisely and unfettered by political party history match the views of the voting public at large?
There is, of course, middle ground. One could ease up the constraints of our election laws in a way that naturally favors three or four political parties, rather than just two. This would open the door to less extremism than the kind of political systems of Europe that naturallly gravite towards five or six political parties, let alone an Israeli style nearly pure proportional representation system that allow a panopoly of tiny parties to flourish. But, whether one expands the number of parties that the electoral system can naturally support from two to four or to twenty, the trade off between legitimatizing political extremism and providing more choice to voters, represents two sides of the same coin. They are almost inextricably intertwined with each other.
Overall, in general and on average, European countries have a political center (median set of policy views) that is discernably to the left of the American political center. In substantial part this is because they have wider electoral participation (ca. 90%+ v. ca. 50% eligible voter turnout in top of the ticket elections), in part because their electoral system makes everyone's vote count much more palpably, and also because they did not have strong franchise limiting factions in the post-WWII era when the franchises were set. But, they also lean left for historical reasons: the leveling effects of World War II, the Nazi movement's defeat's effect in discrediting the political far right for a while, and the sense of shared collective purpose that followed from the need to rebuild after World War II.
But, the multiparty systems of Europe also mean that political extremists, such as Communists (as opposed to Center-Left Socialists and the Labor Party), Fascists or Neo-fascists (as opposed to Center-Right Christian Democrats and the British Conservative Party).
Europe also has more separatist parties. This is due to stronger and more ancient regional identities, often with their own languages, compared to that of the United States. It is also probably due in part to a lack of federal institutions that can sufficiently satisfy separatist urges.
The supermajoritarian features of the American living constitution (e.g., separation of powers, judicial review, Senate filibusters, bicameralism, staggered Senate elections, federalism, Senatorial privilege in judicial appointments), also heightens the political power of politicians in the muddy middle relative to political extremists, in a way not nearly so true in strongly majoritarian unitary parliamentary systems. The path to real power in American politics is ultimately through moderation and not extremism, although there are still fewer moderate elected officials than there are moderate members of the enfranchised population. More accurately, the path to political power in the United States is through moderate partisanship as opposed to extreme partisanship.
A very weak tradition of direct action in American politics (e.g. general strikes, insurgencies, assassination, huge street protests) relative to our European peers also weakens the power of extremists in our political system. Then again, this may put cause and effect backward, the political weakness of extremists may be an important source of a weak tradition of direct action in American politics.
The not quite consensus in academic political science and on the political left is that a European multiparty system created by European style electoral and constitutional institutions would be preferrable to the American political system. But, would the cultural price that American democracy would pay in legitimatizing a much wider range of ideological extremism really be worth having a set of politicians who more precisely and unfettered by political party history match the views of the voting public at large?
There is, of course, middle ground. One could ease up the constraints of our election laws in a way that naturally favors three or four political parties, rather than just two. This would open the door to less extremism than the kind of political systems of Europe that naturallly gravite towards five or six political parties, let alone an Israeli style nearly pure proportional representation system that allow a panopoly of tiny parties to flourish. But, whether one expands the number of parties that the electoral system can naturally support from two to four or to twenty, the trade off between legitimatizing political extremism and providing more choice to voters, represents two sides of the same coin. They are almost inextricably intertwined with each other.
Navy's Cargo Helicopter Drone Works
The U.S. Navy (in support of the Marine Corps) has deployed an unmanned cargo helicopter called K-MAX in Afghanistan where it has worked well. Since they helicopter doesn't put flight crews at risk, it can operate in weather conditions where the military wouldn't ordinarily have risked flying for a mere cargo mission and it has had little downtime.
Also, unlike many military technologies, Lockheed's K-MAX helicopter has obvious cross-over potential in civilian applications.
Lockheed has also successfully tested a system that uses lasers to wirelessly recharge the two hour life batteries on a small unarmed electrically powered UAV with a three pound payload while it is flying. In a flight test, Lockheed was able to keep the drone aloft for 48 hours, in admittedly optimal indoor conditions.
The U.S. Navy is also at an advanced state in using drone helicopters (the Fire Scout) in roles similar to a (sometimes) armed reconnaisance helicopter.
And, the Navy is in an advanced prototype stage of the development of a carrier based drone stealth fighter with both Boeing and Northrop Grumman having advanced prototypes in contention for a weapons system that is supposed to enter service in the U.S. Navy six years from now, in 2018. Adapting such a drone to the less specialized requirements of deployment from ordinary runaways for the Air Force would presumably be a trivial modification of the technology.
One of the primary ethical issues that is emerging as armed drones develop is serious skepticism about the extent to which their strikes are causing civilian casualties in places like the CIA prosecuted drone strikes in Northern Pakistan intended to target Taliban forces that have taken refuge there from their former base of operations in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military's top of the line (and extraordinarily expensive) manned Air Force fighter, the F-22, has been having serious problems with a system unique to human piloted craft, its oxygen systems, that have cost several planes and some pilot lives.
Also, unlike many military technologies, Lockheed's K-MAX helicopter has obvious cross-over potential in civilian applications.
Lockheed has also successfully tested a system that uses lasers to wirelessly recharge the two hour life batteries on a small unarmed electrically powered UAV with a three pound payload while it is flying. In a flight test, Lockheed was able to keep the drone aloft for 48 hours, in admittedly optimal indoor conditions.
The U.S. Navy is also at an advanced state in using drone helicopters (the Fire Scout) in roles similar to a (sometimes) armed reconnaisance helicopter.
And, the Navy is in an advanced prototype stage of the development of a carrier based drone stealth fighter with both Boeing and Northrop Grumman having advanced prototypes in contention for a weapons system that is supposed to enter service in the U.S. Navy six years from now, in 2018. Adapting such a drone to the less specialized requirements of deployment from ordinary runaways for the Air Force would presumably be a trivial modification of the technology.
One of the primary ethical issues that is emerging as armed drones develop is serious skepticism about the extent to which their strikes are causing civilian casualties in places like the CIA prosecuted drone strikes in Northern Pakistan intended to target Taliban forces that have taken refuge there from their former base of operations in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military's top of the line (and extraordinarily expensive) manned Air Force fighter, the F-22, has been having serious problems with a system unique to human piloted craft, its oxygen systems, that have cost several planes and some pilot lives.
23 July 2012
Life Happens
I expect my blogging volume to be far below average over the next two or three months, at least, due to a variety of other responsibilities that have come up. But, I have not abandoned this blog and will post from time to time when I do have the opportunity to do so (finding something to write about is rarely a problem).
19 July 2012
There Is A Shortage Of Ideas, Not Money
The strongest argument that the biggest current barrier to new capital investment is a shortage of good ideas, and not a shortage of investment capital, is the revealed preference of "technology" companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple that have huge stockpiles of cash, and effectively zero percent interest rates at a time of very low inflation, to horde that cash rather than investing it in new technology projects.
Google has tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world working for it. Microsoft and Apple do too. If those companies don't have the collective brainpower to come up with capital investment that make economic sense in a time of zero percent interest rates, when they have large hordes of cash that they don't need any banker's permission to spend, how can we expect less well positioned economic players to be making new capital investments?
Notably, commercial banks also have far more of a capacity to lend money profitably at low interest rates than they are utilizing. There are far more ways to explain their activity than there are to explain tech companies that horde cash. But, the behavior of commercial banks is certainly consistent with the theory that banks are lending money to support capital investments because would be borrowers have failed to identify them. And, I've seen blog posts from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's economist's blog that likewise make the point that the banks it gathers data from in its Federal Reserve district aren't making as many business loans in substantial part because businesses aren't coming to the banks asking to borrow money for business investment.
While Schmidt reiterates a number of potential non-cash limits to business investment stated by another participant in the discussion, "limits of recruiting, limits of real estate, regulatory limits" suffice it to say that limits of real estate can almost always be solved with enough cash. Recruiting and regulatory limits are far more serious obstacles.
This is pretty depressing.
There are a number of quite well understood tax policy and fiscal policy options for improving the availability of money to firms that want to make capital investments in ways that are consistent with a belief by the firms using the money that the capital investments will be profitable, at least in the medium to long term. A shortage of money to invest is a problem that government can solve.
The problems associated with a shortage of ideas of ways to make profitable capital investments is muddier territory. There are policies that can address these problems as well. But, economic policy makers have become wedded to the notion that economic growth policy in the developed world begins and ends with the operation of the capital markets. Other options have gotten dusty from sitting on the shelf and lack the kind of broad based political and academic support that they need to be implemented. For example, there are several measures one can take to address recruiting limitations, which either have a sound theoretical basis in economics and logic, or strong empirical support, or both. You can:
* Make it easier for highly skilled people to immigrate. Free trade in labor markets is the last bastion of free market economics that economic policy makers in the United States have failed to adopt.
* You can weaken the legal effectiveness of non-competition contracts. This has been empirically identified as a key component of greater tech company competitiveness in California relative to Massachusetts.
* You can make a bigger and more effective public investment in education.
Similarly, while the universe of potential regulatory barriers to technological information are conceivably so many that they can't be numbered. But, a company like Google isn't very concerned, for example, about the Clean Air Act regulations that regulation opponents have consistently identified as the most costly of recent new federal regulations. From the perspective of an Internet technology company look Google, some of the principal regulatory barriers to innovation are:
* Excessively protective copyright, patent and trade secret laws that infer that can create "gridlock" in the process of trying to combine old ideas in new and profitable ways, or to better implement old ideas. Many of Google's potentially most profitable concepts that it has developed to date are limited materially by the way that copyright laws and weak policing of new patents have shrunk the public domain and expanded the breadth of intellectual property protection via doctrines like the protection of "derivative works" under copyright law.
* Privacy protections and confidentiality rules that prohibit useful data from being shared at a low cost without considerable advanced planning by the sources that collect the data. Securities laws also impair dissemination of "insider information" and create a risk that for the sharing of ideas for addressing corporate governance by a select subset of investors could be prohibited as a form of market manipulation of as some form of "civil conspiracy."
* Securities laws requiring costly disclosures before public offerings of investment opportunities can be advertised and offered to the general public that prevent companies like Google from getting into the investment brokering business for small capital firms where disclosure costs are material relative to the amount of funds that could be raised.
Even more depressing, of course, is the possibility that a lack of ideas is due not to governmental barriers to innovation but due to "the end of science," i.e. to the fact that we are close to mastering the a whole host of scientific disciplines and hence have fewer innovations that can arise from new scientific discoveries. To the extent that this is the case there are fundamental reasons, indifferent to government policies or business policies that we can expect greatly diminished long term economic growth, i.e. "the Great Stagnation."
[Discussion moderator] ADAM LASHINSKY: You have $50 billion at Google, why don’t you spend it on doing more in tech, or are you out of ideas? . . .
ERIC SCHMIDT [of Google]: What you discover in running these companies is that there are limits that are not cash. There are limits of recruiting, limits of real estate, regulatory limits as Peter points out. There are many, many such limits. And anything that we can do to reduce those limits is a good idea.
[Discussion participant] PETER THIEL: But, then the intellectually honest thing to do would be to say that Google is no longer a technology company, that it’s basically ‑‑ it’s a search engine. The search technology was developed a decade ago. It’s a bet that there will be no one else who will come up with a better search technology. So, you invest in Google, because you’re betting against technological innovation in search. And it’s like a bank that generates enormous cash flows every year, but you can’t issue a dividend, because the day you take that $30 billion and send it back to people you’re admitting that you’re no longer a technology company. That’s why Microsoft can’t return its money. That’s why all these companies are building up hordes of cash, because they don’t know what to do with it, but they don’t want to admit they’re no longer tech companies. . . .
ERIC SCHMIDT: So, the brief rebuttal is, Chrome is now the number one browser in the world.One exception to the rule of lack of innovation that was identified in the discussion was Amazon.com, which it was noted, is less profitable than the companies that are hording their cash.
Google has tens of thousands of the smartest people in the world working for it. Microsoft and Apple do too. If those companies don't have the collective brainpower to come up with capital investment that make economic sense in a time of zero percent interest rates, when they have large hordes of cash that they don't need any banker's permission to spend, how can we expect less well positioned economic players to be making new capital investments?
Notably, commercial banks also have far more of a capacity to lend money profitably at low interest rates than they are utilizing. There are far more ways to explain their activity than there are to explain tech companies that horde cash. But, the behavior of commercial banks is certainly consistent with the theory that banks are lending money to support capital investments because would be borrowers have failed to identify them. And, I've seen blog posts from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's economist's blog that likewise make the point that the banks it gathers data from in its Federal Reserve district aren't making as many business loans in substantial part because businesses aren't coming to the banks asking to borrow money for business investment.
While Schmidt reiterates a number of potential non-cash limits to business investment stated by another participant in the discussion, "limits of recruiting, limits of real estate, regulatory limits" suffice it to say that limits of real estate can almost always be solved with enough cash. Recruiting and regulatory limits are far more serious obstacles.
This is pretty depressing.
There are a number of quite well understood tax policy and fiscal policy options for improving the availability of money to firms that want to make capital investments in ways that are consistent with a belief by the firms using the money that the capital investments will be profitable, at least in the medium to long term. A shortage of money to invest is a problem that government can solve.
The problems associated with a shortage of ideas of ways to make profitable capital investments is muddier territory. There are policies that can address these problems as well. But, economic policy makers have become wedded to the notion that economic growth policy in the developed world begins and ends with the operation of the capital markets. Other options have gotten dusty from sitting on the shelf and lack the kind of broad based political and academic support that they need to be implemented. For example, there are several measures one can take to address recruiting limitations, which either have a sound theoretical basis in economics and logic, or strong empirical support, or both. You can:
* Make it easier for highly skilled people to immigrate. Free trade in labor markets is the last bastion of free market economics that economic policy makers in the United States have failed to adopt.
* You can weaken the legal effectiveness of non-competition contracts. This has been empirically identified as a key component of greater tech company competitiveness in California relative to Massachusetts.
* You can make a bigger and more effective public investment in education.
Similarly, while the universe of potential regulatory barriers to technological information are conceivably so many that they can't be numbered. But, a company like Google isn't very concerned, for example, about the Clean Air Act regulations that regulation opponents have consistently identified as the most costly of recent new federal regulations. From the perspective of an Internet technology company look Google, some of the principal regulatory barriers to innovation are:
* Excessively protective copyright, patent and trade secret laws that infer that can create "gridlock" in the process of trying to combine old ideas in new and profitable ways, or to better implement old ideas. Many of Google's potentially most profitable concepts that it has developed to date are limited materially by the way that copyright laws and weak policing of new patents have shrunk the public domain and expanded the breadth of intellectual property protection via doctrines like the protection of "derivative works" under copyright law.
* Privacy protections and confidentiality rules that prohibit useful data from being shared at a low cost without considerable advanced planning by the sources that collect the data. Securities laws also impair dissemination of "insider information" and create a risk that for the sharing of ideas for addressing corporate governance by a select subset of investors could be prohibited as a form of market manipulation of as some form of "civil conspiracy."
* Securities laws requiring costly disclosures before public offerings of investment opportunities can be advertised and offered to the general public that prevent companies like Google from getting into the investment brokering business for small capital firms where disclosure costs are material relative to the amount of funds that could be raised.
Even more depressing, of course, is the possibility that a lack of ideas is due not to governmental barriers to innovation but due to "the end of science," i.e. to the fact that we are close to mastering the a whole host of scientific disciplines and hence have fewer innovations that can arise from new scientific discoveries. To the extent that this is the case there are fundamental reasons, indifferent to government policies or business policies that we can expect greatly diminished long term economic growth, i.e. "the Great Stagnation."
11 July 2012
Looking for Islamic Civil Society References
Any references my readers could point me to that discuss governance practices, ideally more than just theoretically, in business and NGOs (including mosques and political movements), in majority Muslim countries (online or on paper) would be greatly appreciated.
10 July 2012
Around and About
Colorado's intense heat wave and dry spell has abated a bit, although we are still almost three inches (about 40%) below normal for rainfall for the year.
The construction industry seems to have finally recovered in Denver. Cranes, not as many as at the peak, but plenty, have popped up across the city. St. Joseph's Hospital has a major new project underway in Uptown, Union Station's ongoing redesign as a FasTracks hub has heavy machinery moving, and the new RTD West line is set to open in April. The new appellate court building and Colorado attorney general's office is going up. The new Colorado History Muesem, Denver jail, Denver criminal court house, and Denver zoo renovations are just coming on line. The Fitzsimmons Medical Complex continues to grow like kudzoo. National Jewish Hospital has finished the demolition of the city block sized former Gove School site and is now working on building its own improvements there. The Beyers School (formerly Denver School of the Arts) complex renovations are about to take start. Street repairs are in progress everywhere. The reconstruction of the Valley Highway part of I-25 is moving forward after long and hard efforts by Diana DeGette and the Colorado delegation generally to make it happen. Washington Park's trail system is being tweaked. The Denver Convention Center has managed to fence in a little bit of its green space to serve as a locale for catered events. Mayor Hancock has thwarted the efforts of "Occupy Denver" in part by doing work at Civic Center. All of these projects from the public and non-profit sectors are providing a lot of what is buoying the construction economy in Denver, especially at the scale of big projects.
There are private sector projects too, of course. A huge new luxury apartment building with ground floor shops is going up at the corner of University and Evans immediately across the street from the University of Denver campus. A new retail complex next to the Hilton Gardens hotel in Glendale is going up. A new Target location is going up near Tamarac square replacing a dead mall and movie theater. I have clients working on a new downtown Denver hotel, a new apartment complex in the North suburbs of Denver, and on a smaller scale, a few new apartments in one of Denver's old urban residential neighborhoods. The Denver Post reports that building permit activity is up. Here and there you can see union picket lines pronouncing shame on this or that building contracting company.
One by one vacant retail spaces are filling up in the never ending process of creative destruction. The hole left by the two Blockbuster franchises that once sat at 6th and Grant have been replaced by a Sushi restaurant, Cosmos Pizza (one of the best new pizza producers in town on an old school model), and a frozen yogurt shop. A failed thrift shop near the Esquire movie theater is being replaced by an independent video store, a necessity given that there is now only one, ratty, ill patronized Blockbluster store in the entire City and County and kiosks, Netflix, the Denver Public Library, and Hulu all have flawed selections of movies. My neighborhood as seen Cafe/Bar succeed where a Vietnamese restaurant and used book store failed, a new high end Italian restaurant (La Scalia) where there was once a weekly dinner assembly storefront, a new breakfast place and local gym in a the real estate of yet another dead Blockbuster, and a Larkburger franchise. After a gloomy moment or two at the Cherry Creek Mall with many TBA storefronts, the holes in the mall are starting to fill in with new shops and other shops are spilling out into Cherry Creek North which against all logic and reason given that most of the botiques sell expensive, useless stuff, the parking is only so so, and the space is almost too big to be walkable, is somehow thriving - my favorite coffee shop, Avianos, managed to find a new home there as well after being booted out of the Beauvillon on Broadway by an insane common space owner who foreclosed when construction defects maimed its financial viability.
The construction industry seems to have finally recovered in Denver. Cranes, not as many as at the peak, but plenty, have popped up across the city. St. Joseph's Hospital has a major new project underway in Uptown, Union Station's ongoing redesign as a FasTracks hub has heavy machinery moving, and the new RTD West line is set to open in April. The new appellate court building and Colorado attorney general's office is going up. The new Colorado History Muesem, Denver jail, Denver criminal court house, and Denver zoo renovations are just coming on line. The Fitzsimmons Medical Complex continues to grow like kudzoo. National Jewish Hospital has finished the demolition of the city block sized former Gove School site and is now working on building its own improvements there. The Beyers School (formerly Denver School of the Arts) complex renovations are about to take start. Street repairs are in progress everywhere. The reconstruction of the Valley Highway part of I-25 is moving forward after long and hard efforts by Diana DeGette and the Colorado delegation generally to make it happen. Washington Park's trail system is being tweaked. The Denver Convention Center has managed to fence in a little bit of its green space to serve as a locale for catered events. Mayor Hancock has thwarted the efforts of "Occupy Denver" in part by doing work at Civic Center. All of these projects from the public and non-profit sectors are providing a lot of what is buoying the construction economy in Denver, especially at the scale of big projects.
There are private sector projects too, of course. A huge new luxury apartment building with ground floor shops is going up at the corner of University and Evans immediately across the street from the University of Denver campus. A new retail complex next to the Hilton Gardens hotel in Glendale is going up. A new Target location is going up near Tamarac square replacing a dead mall and movie theater. I have clients working on a new downtown Denver hotel, a new apartment complex in the North suburbs of Denver, and on a smaller scale, a few new apartments in one of Denver's old urban residential neighborhoods. The Denver Post reports that building permit activity is up. Here and there you can see union picket lines pronouncing shame on this or that building contracting company.
One by one vacant retail spaces are filling up in the never ending process of creative destruction. The hole left by the two Blockbuster franchises that once sat at 6th and Grant have been replaced by a Sushi restaurant, Cosmos Pizza (one of the best new pizza producers in town on an old school model), and a frozen yogurt shop. A failed thrift shop near the Esquire movie theater is being replaced by an independent video store, a necessity given that there is now only one, ratty, ill patronized Blockbluster store in the entire City and County and kiosks, Netflix, the Denver Public Library, and Hulu all have flawed selections of movies. My neighborhood as seen Cafe/Bar succeed where a Vietnamese restaurant and used book store failed, a new high end Italian restaurant (La Scalia) where there was once a weekly dinner assembly storefront, a new breakfast place and local gym in a the real estate of yet another dead Blockbuster, and a Larkburger franchise. After a gloomy moment or two at the Cherry Creek Mall with many TBA storefronts, the holes in the mall are starting to fill in with new shops and other shops are spilling out into Cherry Creek North which against all logic and reason given that most of the botiques sell expensive, useless stuff, the parking is only so so, and the space is almost too big to be walkable, is somehow thriving - my favorite coffee shop, Avianos, managed to find a new home there as well after being booted out of the Beauvillon on Broadway by an insane common space owner who foreclosed when construction defects maimed its financial viability.
02 July 2012
Texas Republicans Opposed To Critical Thinking
The following is part of the duly adopted 2012 party platform of the Republican Party in Texas.
From the Talking Points Memo blog.
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.Elsewhere in the document, the platform stipulates that “[e]very Republican is responsible for implementing this platform.”
From the Talking Points Memo blog.
01 July 2012
The Road To Truth
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.- attributed, probably inaccurately, to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) (there are no published citations to him as a source for this quote prior to 1951).
Other attributions are to Dr. J. Marion Sims, Richmond & Louisville Medical Journal, Vol. 7, p. 290 (1868) (similar but not verbatim) and to Sir James Mackenzie (1853-1925) in The Beloved Physician, by R. M. Wilson, John Murray, London.
All sources would reflect the lessons learned by the direct inheritors of (but not the participants in) the Age of Englightenment.
The saying may have been a source the concept that was later elaborated into the "five stage of grief".
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