Kieran Healy

Microsoft showcased the new features of “Windows Vista”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/default.mspx (due for release late 2006) at “CES”:http://www.cesweb.org/. Some people got a sense of “deja vu”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/, so they took the Microsoft keynote speech and matched the audio demoing the new features to video from elsewhere. So now Windows users can see what exciting, innovative, ground-breaking features are coming in the areas of “the user interface”:http://maclive.net/sid/134, and “smart search technologies”:http://maclive.net/sid/135.

Technorati’s “List of Popular Books”:http://www.technorati.com/pop/books/ introduces me to “There is Eternal Life for Animals”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0972030107/kieranhealysw-20, which argues that

bq. All animals go to heaven. How do we know? We look in the book that God left us, the Bible. This book takes you through the Bible and proves through the scriptures that there is life after death for all the animals. It covers: — God’s relationship with the animals; — The current life of the animal kingdom; — The future life of the animals and its restoration; — What animals are currently in heaven; — Whether animals have souls and spirits; — Praying for animals. There Is Eternal Life For Animals includes numerous Bible scriptures, opinions and commentaries from Bible Theologians, visions, stories, near-death experiences of children, and personal experiences. It also reviews many of the original Greek and Hebrew words and their translations.

I am tempted to buy the book and have it sent to “P.Z. Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/ as a gift. It’s true that if the book’s argument is right the downside for P.Z. is, of course, that there is a benevolent God filling up Heaven with our beloved cats and dogs. On the other hand, maybe the “beloved giant squid”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/squid_sighting_in_the_deep_dark/ are up there, too, in the deep-sea regions of heaven.

I’m interested to read the “What animals are currently in heaven” section. Does the author mean what _kinds_ of animals, or particular _individual_ animals? If the former, do Deer Ticks make it? Or Liver Fluke? If the latter, “Phar Lap”:http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/pharlap/ is surely there (despite also being scattered around Australia), but what about Garfield?

[click to continue…]

Mark Schmitt “provides some historical context”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2006/01/our_long_nation.html for the current wiretapping scandal, and reminds us of the main practical reasons why allowing the President to circumvent the law is a bad idea:

Roughly speaking, there have been four great showdowns over abuse of executive power in modern U.S. history. … These episodes have certain themes in common. Yes, one of them is that they were all hatched in the first term of Republican presidencies and revealed only after reelection, but that’s not the answer I’m looking for. … First, all of them produced a backlash. … The lesson seems clear: In a constititutional system, those who want executive power to be protected and respected, should be especially wary of presidents who take it too far. … Second, all of them involved creating a zone of extreme secrecy in which decisions, and even the processes leading to those decisions, were kept secret not just from Congress and the Courts, but _within the executive branch itself_. … Third, in these zones of extreme secrecy, in which nothing ever has to be justified to anyone outside of the closed circle, all sorts of insanity flourishes. Personal obsessions take hold and are pursued unchecked. Ideas that would be too embarassing to explain to anyone seem to make sense and are carried out. This was true in every example, from the nutball Castro assassination schemes hatched in the CIA to the idea of firebombing the Brookings Institution in the Nixon White House, to the bizarre excesses of Iran-Contra, such as delivering a cake shaped like a key and a Bible signed by Reagan to the Iranian clerics. … Given what we know about these previous episodes in which the executive branch created zones of extreme secrecy, I think it’s quite likely that we will soon learn that the NSA domestic surveillance program involved much more than just tracking people who received calls from known _al Qaeda_ suspects, something that I certainly wouldn’t object to. I don’t know what it will be — some have speculated that it involved monitoring journalists — but whatever it is, it was something that couldn’t be justified even within the administration.

This is a good counterpoint to the detailed legal readings provided by people like Orin Kerr: the fine-grain of the legal issues is very important, of course, but the political sociology of executive/judicial relations is a much broader topic than the proper reading of particular statutes. Mark reminds us that we have historical cases to remind us what tends to happen to the institutions of American government when its officials want to throw the cloak of secrecy over substantial parts of it — not just to keep things from the public but, as Mark says, to hide things from other parts of the executive.

After viewing an episode of “Fraggle Rock”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RQSSW/kieranhealysw-20/ with my daughter, I am led to wonder whether the Emperor Gorg (shown here on the left) bears rather more than a passing resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard (on the right). In the matter of bearing, demeanor and possession of the notion that they rule the universe, they are of course indistinguishable.

Best wishes this Christmas to all our readers. Here’s a little bit from Alexander McCall Smith’s _At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances_ that I like to think about at this time of year. Plenty of time for shouting at one another in the New Year, but for the moment:

The Master then rose to give a short address.

‘Dear guests of the College,’ he began, ‘dear Fellows, dear undergraduate members of this Foundation: William de Courcey was cruelly beheaded by those who could not understand that it is quite permissible for rational men to differ on important points of belief or doctrine. The world in which he lived had yet to develop those qualities of tolerance of difference of opinion which we take for granted, but which we must remind ourselves is of rather recent creation and is by no means assured of universal support. There are amongst us still those who would deny to others the right to hold a different understanding of the fundamental issues of our time. Thus, if we look about us we see people of one culture or belief still at odds with their human neighbours who are of a different culture or belief; and we see many who are prepared to act upon this difference to the extent of denying the humanity of those with whom they differ. …

‘Here in this place of learning, let us remind ourselves of the possibility of combating, in whatever small way we can, those divisions that come between man and man, between woman and woman, so that we may recognise in each other that vulnerable humanity that informs our lives, and makes life so precious; so that each may find happiness in his or her life, and in the lives of others. For what else is there for us to hope for? What else, I ask you, what else?’

It’s that time of the year again: the “King William College General Knowledge Paper”:http://www.kwc.sch.im/gkp.html has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything to go by it’s designed to be google-proof, but you’re in with a shot if you can guess the theme that unites all the questions in each section. Have at it. (The Great Miracle, incidentally, is scoring more than, say, 20 points.)

John “Hannibal” Stokes at “Ars Technica”:http://arstechnica.com has some “interesting speculation”:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html/ on what the new technology behind the NSA “wiretap abuse”:http://news.com.com/Bush+lets+U.S.+spy+on+callers+without+courts/2100-1028_3-5998178.html?tag=st.num scandal might be. Because he knows a lot about computers, he’s also in a position to explain to the likes of “Richard Posner”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/21/posner-forgets-himself/ one of the (several) things that’s wrong with “computer-automated mass surveillance:”:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5813.htm

Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let’s suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That’s still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on—a very high number, and still much higher than any courts could possibly oversee. Furthermore, only a miniscule fraction of the overall total of 2 million calls per day on only a few days of each month will contain any information of genuine interest to the feds…

… Here’s where the real problem with this scheme lies: the odds that a particular terrorist’s phone call will rate enough hits to sound an alarm are not primarily dependent on factors that we have control over, like the amount of processing power and brain power that we throw at the task, but on factors that we have no control over, like how good that terrorist is at hiding the content of his communication from the feds. …

As the TSA, with its strip-searching of people’s elderly grandparents, “abundantly proves”:http://news.com.com/Theres+no+getting+off+that+no-fly+list/2100-7350_3-5996897.html every holiday season, blunt instruments and scorched earth tactics are of dubious value in catching genuine bad actors. … All you need to beat such surveillance tools is patience and know-how. This is true for face recognition, it’s true for biometrics, it’s true for RFID, and it’s true for every other high-volume automated technique for catching bad guys. …

Targeted human intelligence has always been and will always be the best way to sort the sharks from the guppies … Government money invested in much less intrusive and much less defense contractor-friendly programs like training more Arabists and developing more “human assets” in the field will be orders of magnitude more effective than mass surveillance could ever be. … any engineer or computer scientist worth his or her salt will tell you that an intelligent, targeted, low-tech approach beats a brute-force high-tech approach every time.

There is no high-tech substitute for human intelligence gathering. … In the end, brute force security techniques are not only corrosive to democratic values but they’re also bad for national security. They waste massive resources that could be spent more effectively elsewhere, and they give governments and countries a false sense of security that a savvy enemy can exploit to devastating effect.

In short: don’t be seduced by technology. Computers are extremely powerful tools, but this isn’t the movies. Think of the last time you had to deal with the confluence of state bureaucracy and computer-based record-keeping — at the DMV, say, or at tax time, or at the local University’s Registrar’s office. Did it strike you as a ruthlessly efficient, accurate, and purpose-driven system?

A commenter in “our previous post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/21/posner-forgets-himself/ points to “this chat session”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/12/20/DI2005122001142.html with Posner, hosted by the _Washington Post_. Besides forgetting everything he ever learned about public choice theory, Posner also seems to have abandoned the cost-benefit methods which made him famous. He is now convinced that radical uncertainty is not amenable to probabilistic analysis:

*Question*: … Nothing in the Constitution does (or could) provide a guarantee of safety. I suspect that I am statistically much more at risk of being run over by a car than of being killed by a terrorist (even though I live within five miles of the White House). Should the government ban all automobiles to protect me?

*Richard Posner*: If your premise were correct, your conclusion would follow. But how do you know you’re at less risk of being killed by a terrorist than being run down by a car? The risk in the sense of probability of being killed by a nuclear bomb attack on Washington, a dirty-bomb attack, an attack using bioengineered smallpox virus, a sarin attack on the Washington Metro (do you ever take the metro?), etc., etc., cannot be quantified. That doesn’t mean it’s small. For all we know, it’s great. Better safe than sorry.

How far this all is from the confidence with which Posner “typically slaps probabilities on things”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/06/posner-and-becker-comedy-gold in order to justify some policy. Here he is arguing about preventive war in 2004:

Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified.

I guess his epistemological position has changed a great deal in the meantime. Incidentally, about “forty two thousand people a year”:http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/ are killed in automobile accidents in the United States. Do the math yourself.

Earlier this month, Judge Richard Posner “wrote”:http://volokh.com/posts/1133483156.shtml a “brutal opinion”:http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=04-1339_033.pdf (accompanied by some “entertaining oral argument”:http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=04-1339_031.mp3) savaging the Bureau of Immigration Appeals for its capricious decision-making process, its inability to keep track of paperwork, and its willingness to dump the consequences of its ineptitude onto the people it passes judgement on — in this case by deporting them for no good reason. “We are not required to permit [the unlucky victim] Benslimane to be ground to bits in the bureaucratic mill against the will of Congress,” he said.

Today, Posner has an “Op-Ed”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001053.html in the _Washington Post_ arguing that the Defence Department and the FBI need extensive new powers to spy on as many U.S. citizens as possible. It seems that Posner’s well-founded belief that big state bureaucracies are good at grinding-up innocent people has evaporated within the last week or two.

[click to continue…]

All over the U.S. at the moment, academics like me are complaining about end-of-semester woes like administering exams and grading papers. Cheer up! It could be worse. For instance, take this “despairing page”:http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jdh1/exams/index.htm put up by the economist “John Hey”:http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jdh1/, who spends some of his time teaching in England, and the rest as Professore Ordinario at a University in Italy. Pretty nice gig, you might think — “except when”:http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jdh1/exams/index.htm it comes to exams:

The intention of this web page is to draw attention to large differences in the number of examinations in different countries of the world, with the particular intention of revealing Italy as an outlier. I also want to draw attention to an associated bureaucratic procedure called “verbalizzazione”:http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jdh1/exams/verbale.htm, which I do not think exists anywhere else in the world other than in Italy. … Here is a broad summary of the number of examinations in different countries of the world. …
* ONE exam per course each year with no right to resit: Canada, United States
* ONE exam per course per year with at most one resit: Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, United Kingdom.
* ONE exam per course per year with at most two resits: Austria, The Netherlands
* (Up to) TEN exams per course per year with the right to resit as often as you wish: *Italy*.

His page summarizing the “verbalizzazione”:http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~jdh1/exams/verbale.htm business (what it takes, once you administer all those exams, to actually get the grade recorded) is enough to give a public choice theorist an aneurysm.

End-of-semester stuff has been piling up — Who knew that there was a well known social theorist named Marx Weber? Or that he developed the idea of the Protastic Ethic? — which means that I haven’t had enough time to digest the NYT report that “President Bush secretly authorized the NSA to spy on Americans without any legal oversight”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ex=1292389200&en=e32072d786623ac1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss, or reactions to it. But from a quick perusal, it seems like both the Administration’s rationale and the response from supporters online is essentially the same as the effort to justify the arbitrary detention and torture of people (including U.S. citizens). In other words, choose any or all of:

# _Epochal Shift_: “9/11 Changed Everything and so the President can do whatever he likes.”
# _You Can’t Handle the Truth!_: Your “Jack Nicholson moment”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Few_Good_Men, viz: “Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? … I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it!”
# _Exquisite Regret_: “I fully appreciate the strength of the arguments (moral, practical, empirical) that you put before me about the evil nature of torture, arbitrary detention and spying on the very citizens from whom our claim to legitimate government derives. So believe me when I say that I have agonized over these decisions, lain awake at night, analyzed the hypotheticals in detail and now, with a great sense of the weight of the choice I am making, I will sign this piece of paper suspending the rights of anyone whom our staffers feel should be investigated.”
# _Rubber Stamp_: “We obtained a legal opinion from one of our own lawyers. He said it was OK and I believe him. He’s totally objective.”
# _World Weary_: “Oh, puh-leeze. This is nothing new. It’s been going on for years — Americans have no idea how little legal protection they have from arbitrary government surveillance. That’s why I became a libertarian. I still fully support the Government’s right to monitor, lock up, ‘render’ and torture anyone they declare is an enemy combatant, though. I absolutely still _don’t_ trust them to run a Social Security Program or redistribute taxes to the poor, obviously.”
# _Radical Empiricist_: I’m not sure we have all the facts about this, and we should “suspend judgment”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_12_11_dish_archive.html#113457341984976288 until either more real evidence becomes available or the black GM Suburban pulls up outside my house and bundles me off to a disused Soviet-era facility in Eastern Europe.

Mix and Match as appropriate.

_Update_: “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/12/alito_and_the_w.html, “Dan Koffler”:http://finnswake.blogspot.com/2005/12/high-crimes-and-misdemeanors.html and “Ezra Klein”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/fisa.html have more comments. “Orin Kerr”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1135029722.shtml offers a detailed legal analysis.

Iraqis “vote for their first post-Saddam, full-term parliament”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/15/news/iraq.php today. As I write this it’s just before 7am in Arizona, but I’m sure some warbloggers are already up and about, compiling evidence of indifference to freedom and democracy amongst anti-war types.

My own view on the long-term prospects hasn’t changed much since “last January’s elections”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/31/prospects-for-iraqi-democracy/. If the goal is a viable multi-party democracy, then in the short-term the election should be free and fair with a clear winning coalition, which ideally would then lose the next election and peacefully hand over power. Back in January I thought it looked like this:

It’s often said that the key moment in the growth of a democracy is not its first election but its second, because—as Adam Przeworski says somewhere—a democracy is a system where governments lose elections. The question planners need to be asking is what are the chances that Iraq will be able to do this again in four or five years without the presence of U.S. troops and with the expectation that whoever wins will get to take power. This partly depends on whether some functioning government can really be established within the country, and partly on whether the U.S. wants a working democracy in Iraq (with the risks that implies) or just a friendly puppet state. … Unlike thousands of desk-jockey warbloggers, I don’t have any expertise in Iraqi politics. But it seems to me that if Iraq is going to succeed as a democracy then it has to consolidate itself in something like this way. A continued heavy military presence by the U.S. won’t help this goal, because it won’t do anything to legitimate the government as an independent entity. … The current prospects are not good at all, especially with respect to the continuous attacks on the new police force and the efforts to systematically eliminate the nascent political class. The fact that Iraq has a lot of oil and was formerly a brutal dictatorship doesn’t help much either. … Cases of successful transitions in resource-rich nations are few.

This time around, as before, voting will probably go reasonably smoothly (by Iraqi standards I mean: there will probably only be a small number of attacks and deaths), and this counts for a lot. I think the main problem will be the protracted round of post-election negotiations between the various blocs. If it’s anything like January’s election, we might not see a government for months. Another drawn-out tussle between the two or three biggest slates will do little to consolidate the legitimacy of the election or the institutions of government, especially seeing as the occupying power has a strong interest in seeing their favored groups win. An outcome like that will just continue to raise questions about the viability of the state itself, while doing little to change the day-to-day round of violence.

“Jim Henley”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/12/12/4753 points us to “Radley Balko’s”:http://www.theagitator.com extensive coverage of the astonishing case of “Cory Maye”:http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=cory+maye. Here is “Radley’s initial post”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025962.php#025962 on the case; and here are a series of posts of his updating and clarifying the details — “1”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025971.php#025971 “2”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025975.php#025975 “3”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025977.php#025977 “4”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025982.php#025982 “5”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025983.php#025983 “6”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025986.php#025986 “7”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025987.php#025987 and “8”:http://www.theagitator.com/archives/025989.php#025989 (the first and last will tell you a lot). He’s been talking to a lot of people involved in the case. Here’s a link to “a lot of commentary”:http://battlepanda.blogspot.com/2005/12/outrage.html by others.

_Update_: I’ve updated this summary to better reflect the facts of the case as I understand them.

I’ll put the details below the fold. I urge you to read them. The guts of it is that Cory Maye is a black man on death row for shooting a white police officer dead. The officer was part of a paramilitary no-knock drug raid which broke down the door of Maye’s apartment at 11:30pm, when he and his young daughter were sleeping. The building was a duplex and the officers had a warrant for Jamie Smith, the person who lived in the other half, and for “occupants unknown” in Maye’s half. It’s not clear that the officers expected anyone to be in that half of the duplex. There’s no evidence that Maye had anything to do with Smith, and Maye did not have a criminal record. When the officers broke in, Maye woke up, took his gun and ran to his daughter’s room. When Officer Ron Jones entered the room, Maye shot him. Jones later died. There is disagreement about whether the officers announced they were the police as they broke in, and what the exact sequence of events was once they were in there. (I don’t think it’s in dispute that Maye really had no reason to expect the police would come breaking down his door at midnight.) Jones was (1) first into the apartment but (2) not part of the SWAT team — he was invited along because he tipped off the Narcotics Task Force about the suspected dealer in the other half of the duplex. He was also (3) the son of a local police chief. Mayes was tried, apparently was not well-represented, and was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

[click to continue…]

I’ve been moving house, so my apologies for the lack of content (as we used to say in those late-90s, Venture Capital days when CT was set to become a major portal/ bookseller/ search-engine/ content-provider … Ah, “content” — fungible like money, homogenous like lard, extrudable like sausage. A marvelous substance.) The other day our own “John and Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ suffered a “nasty double-meltdown”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/11/idied_update_pu.html of their “computers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/11/idied.html. This prompted me to do something I should have done ages ago, which is set up an off-site backup system. Like John and Belle I’d previously relied on synchronizing my laptop and desktop machines (using “Unison”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). Properly backing-up your data can be a pain, but then so can losing everything. Thankfully, though, the Interwebs nowadays provide some useful and easy-to-use services in addition to all that content (consistency somewhere between Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Cool-Whip; can be used as spackle if needed). So I’ve also signed up for a basic account with “Strongspace”:http://www.strongspace.com/, part of Dean Allen et al’s “Textdrive”:http://textdrive.com/ outfit. With the assistance of a helpful tutorial from “MagpieBrain”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index (Part “One”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/29/strongspace_backup, Part “Two”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/31/strongspace_and_ssh, Part “Three”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/31/automated_backups), I now have secure, automated, passwordless, incremental, daily remote backups of the important stuff on my Mac. Strongspace starts at eight bucks a month for just over 4GB of space (and unlimited bandwidth). I recommend it. (And they’re not even paying me to endorse them.)