Proportionate Response

Over at Slate, William Saletan shows once again why he's not to be taken seriously.

In his breathless, tough-guy prose, he lays out why we should all be happy to let TSA do full-body scans. Terrorists can hide bombs anywhere! We're not checking people's crotches, so that's what they'll do! Won't someone think of the children? This is keeping us safe! OK, sure, the TSA said they wouldn't use this on everyone and they've already shown that to be a lie, but hey, the TSA is keeping us safe! It's for our own good! If you're one of those mamby-pamby privacy types, then you just don't understand what a scary dangerous world it is, like tough-guy Saletan!

Okay, so I'm paraphrasing. A bit.

Do the numbers. Fly 20 times a year and your chances of being directly involved in a terrorist incident is about the same as getting hit by lightning that year. Fly daily for the rest of your life, and the risk goes up to almost a tenth of one percent. The marginal utility of forcing everyone to be scanned simply isn't worth it. (There's also the problem of false positives, which Saletan, conveniently, disregards, simply assuming 100% accuracy and 100% discrimination on the part of the technology and the operators.)

The Detroit incident doesn't show the failure of the scanners, it shows the failure of intelligence coordination. If they're already at the airport with explosives, it's already too late. This is theater, not security. But it's easier to install scanners and make it look like you're doing something than it is to actually do something. Particularly when it's something as hard to do and to get right as security. But the full-body scanners are analogous to searching for lost keys by looking under the streetlight because the light's better there.

Yes, there are bad people who want to do us harm. But Saletan has let himself be terrorized (which is, after all, the point of terrorism) into falling for the Yes, Minister fallacy: We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this. Instead of recognizing that there are risks, we have to bear them, such is life, he's cowering under the bed and begging TSA to make him feel secure, whether there's any basis for that feeling in reality or not.

Road accidents kill almost 40,000 people per year. That's about one 9/11 per month. But we haven't declared a "war on cars."

Renting Vs Buying

Megan McArdle on ownership vs renting a house:

For a long time, I didn't care so much about this. I liked the freedom renting gave me. But once you're committed to a city, and another person, that freedom starts looking overrated.

Most of her column is spot-on, and matches with my own experience.. For years I said that owning a house may be part of the American Dream, but isn't part of my dream, and happily rented. And then at some point, something changed. I can't point to a specific incident that pushed me over the edge, though the loud upstairs neighbors certainly helped. Likewise the hassles to get minor stuff fixed that was more important to me than to the landlord, and the inability to make serious modifications, no matter how heartily sick I was of white walls and beige carpet.

And of course I have no idea what Ms. McArdle's thought processes are, or were. But in my case, it wasn't that the freedom to pick up and move at the end of my lease was suddenly overrated; it was that it was no longer as salient. It had been an important factor in my renting for quite a while, but my situation changed; and with those changes, other factors came to the fore as higher priorities. I hadn't been mistaken in valuing that freedom before; but it was no longer as important as it had been.

I resisted the urge to jump in during the boom--running out to buy something because the price has been skyrocketing lately doesn't strike me as too smart--and besides, it took a while to get my finances in order for the down payment and so forth. And I didn't see it as an investment; if it turns into that, great, but mostly it's for a place to live. (Taxes & insurance push the cost up, but the payment on just my note is lower than I was paying in monthly rent.)

And another advantage of owning: my apartment had electric heat, because electric furnaces are cheap to buy & maintain. Which is what the landlord is looking for, since the electric bill is my problem. My utility costs have dropped.

I'm thinking about the home-ownership thing a lot lately, as I just paid my first round of property taxes and ordered some things online for the house. Are there hidden costs? Of course. There are also hidden benefits--I understand the economic argument against the mortgage interest deduction, and broadly agree with it, but as long as it's on the books I'm going to take it all the same.

[and reading back through, this post is particularly living up to the "random musings" title... oh well, i'm on semester break, I'm taking the morning off before going in & working on next semester's coursework.]

Quote of the Day

Nate Silver notes that from October 1999 through September 2009 there has been one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 airplane departures.

Furthermore, "the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning."

With a large tip of the hat to Paddy at The Political Carnival.

Culture & Politics

Andrew Sullivan linked to an interesting follow-up by Julian Sanchez on the politics of resentment. Sanchez is making the point that the resentment isn't a psychological diagnosis, and isn't necessarily a code for something else, that the internet has allowed previously marginalized groups to suddenly find each other and organize in a way they couldn't before. But I think the bit Sullivan excerpts isn't the most relevant point in the article; it's this one:

People have read racial undertones into the rallying cry “I want my country back!” and its cognates—probably because this is a strange way to present opposition to a policy agenda, however misguided you might find it. The instinct is right, but I think the conclusion is wrong: Race—and communism, as Tim Curry would remind us—is another red herring. What we’re seeing is the natural sentiment of people who think of themselves as quintessentially American looking at an American popular and public culture that presents them as marginal.

Yes. That's the biggest reason why so much of the politics of the right currently involves resentment of so-called elites, exclusion by "the mainstream media" (um, hello, FOX gets higher ratings than CNN or MSNBC), and an insistence that "real Americans" agree with them--and by implication, anyone who doesn't, therefore isn't a real American.

I don't see things improving for at least another full election cycle. The GOP right is currently where the Democratic left was after Reagan shellacked them--dazed, confused, out of ideas, and not quite believing that the old truths aren't holding anymore. The craziness has to burn itself out, and the remainder has to grow up.

And the sooner, the better. Yes, I'm an unabashed lefty partisan, but a healthy democracy needs a healthy opposition party, and today's GOP isn't it. They've adopted the tactics of the old left--identity politics, a political catechism that must be accepted without question, a total unwillingness to consider any other view as being anything other than hopelessly corrupt--and charged it up on tribal identification, with a good healthy dose of religious fervor and nativism. And, like the old left, have become more concerned with all of the above than the realities of governing or of addressing the problems in front of us today, rather than the problems of 30 years ago. (1980's Democrats couldn't quite grasp the idea that the heyday of the civil rights movement and the Great Society were over; today's GOP wants to apply Regan's platform from 30 years ago to today's problems.)

But the GOP seems short of grown-ups at the moment; it's all tribal politics and red meat for the base. If it's got to burn out before it starts to change, then run, Sarah, run!

Edit/addendum: incredibly minor nit-pick. Tim Curry would remind us that it's socialism that's the red herring.

Tiger Woods & Celebrity Culture

I hadn't particularly followed or got too worked up about the Tiger Woods hype because we've seen so much of it before. Wealthy famous athlete apparently starts to believe his own "you can do anything" routine, steps out on his wife one or more times, scandal erupts when it's discovered, and everyone is shocked and appalled someone they'd made a hero turned out to be human.

(I'm not going to use the phrase role model because unless we're talking about how to fulfill the role of pro golfer, Tiger wasn't modeling any particular role... He's an extremely talented athlete, and paid endorser for several products. That doesn't mean he's actually an expert on razor blades or shaving technology, of course, just that he is paid to speak on behalf of Gillette products, and presumably uses the products he endorses. But there's no other role-modeling, or moral example, involved.)

Conor Friesdersdorf over at the Daily Dish has a thoughtful post up about what it all means and why the people screaming that Tiger gave up any claim to privacy when he stepped in front of a camera are wrong.

Let the man, and his family, have some space. If he's willing to take time off from golf, meaning he's giving up tournament income and putting his endorsement income at risk--Gillette has already cut him back--to deal with his family and the pain he's caused them, I certainly can't fault him. People freaking out about this need to take a deep breath. As Conor points out, he doesn't owe us anything beyond using the products he's endorsing. He's made some bad relationship choices, and things have come home to roost. He's taking time to deal with it, and doesn't want a media circus in the middle of it.

Good for him.

I am shocked, SHOCKED...

So it turns out that the CEO of Blackwater (now Xe), the biggest suppliers of mercenaries, er, private security forces, to the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, claims to have been involved in espionage operations, assassination squads, getting personnel into and out of areas where US personnel were technically not supposed to be, and various other things of questionable morality and legality.

Just one question.

Given Blackwater's track record, why is everyone pretending to be surprised by this?

His revelation that he's planning on teaching high school... now that's a surprise. And the source of an abundance of snark, but I'll save that for another day.

Slavery is OK, God Says So

Today's stumbled-across-and-wish-I-hadn't. You see, slavery is only bad because humans corrupted it, but Biblical slavery was entirely beneficial and not at all exploitive...

This is what happens when your standard for rationality becomes "does it support a self-contradictory bronze age text."

And can we put to rest once and for all that the correlation between religion and morality is statistically significant?

Current reading list

Recent reading:

RFC 4880, OpenPGP Message Format

RFC 1951, DEFLATE Compressed Data Format Specification

All-Pairs Shortest Path with Floyd-Warshall

Yes, I am a geek. I'm on break. What's your point?

Why I [heart] Mark Kleiman

Because sometimes, there simply oughta be a law.

My PGP public key

Cleaning some stuff up, realized I hadn't made this available... which rather defeats the purpose, now doesn't it?

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Song of the day

With a large tip of the hat to Andrew Sullivan...

Maine, the day after

A blogger at DKos nails it.

"Then at one o'clock you're heading out to the county jail to marry Carr the crack addict mother of eight and Blankenship the axe murderer before they send him up to maximum security for a hundred years. Then you've got Welch and Nutt at two-thirty. He's the neo-nazi anarchist and she's the former nun who got booted for schtupping sixteen priests, two bishops and a cardinal."

"Great. As long as they love each other..."

"Then at two you're joining Kettlebaum the porn addict and Ganz the kitten-drowner, and at three you'll unite Smith the deadbeat dad and Browlowski, who chain smokes in front of her kids."

"And then the gay couple at four, right?"

"Oh, no, sir! That's against the law. They're too unstable for marriage..."

Go read the whole thing, it's worth it.

[H/T: Louise, at Pam's]

Cool Picture of the day

Axel Mellinger has done it again, with another composite panorama of the Milky Way, this one zoomable.

Very cool.

http://141.209.165.197/~axel/mwpan2/

Lest Anyone Doubt...

...that for some, religion is used as a tool to serve neo-con/GOP-style political ends, we present:

The Conservatising the Bible Project.

Here's the whole thing. Read it if you dare.

Wow. Just... wow. But it's nice to see the reversal of priorities being presented in such an up-front manner.

(H/T: Andrew Sullivan.)

Nailing it

I snark occasionally about Andrew Sullivan, but when he's right, he's right:

The protestors keep saying that they want their country back. Sorry, my fellow small-governmenters, but this country is a democracy, and you didn't lose your country, you just lost an election. You had your chance for eight years. You blew it, and you lost. What Obama is doing is what he was elected to do. The principled response is not a massive, extremist-riddled hissy fit a few months in, but a constructive set of proposals to build on universal care for a more market-friendly and cost-conscious system in the future. You have to win some political credibility for that; and then you have to beat the man you lost so badly to last year. That's the civil and civilized way forward for the right. It also seems, alas, to be the one they are currently refusing to take.

About Time

The British government has issued an apology for its treatment (and hounding to the point of suicide) of Alan Turing, rightly regarded as the father of computer science. His leadership of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park shortened WWII by at least 2 years--at one point, Churchill was reading field reports from Wermacht officers before Hitler was. He demonstrated that the Halting Problem was undecidable; that is, it has no general solution applying to all programs. When he was burglarized and blackmailed by an ex-lover, he reported it to the police...and found himself on trial for gross indecency, his security clearance revoked (and thus his career in cryptography destroyed), his career over, forced to undergo estrogen treatments, which were known to have numerous side effects, including depression. He committed suicide at age 41.

Turing, I suspect, would have been appalled at the idea of being any sort of martyr for gay rights. And yet his career and life were cut short, and the world deprived of at least 20 years of a brilliant researcher, because of homophobia.

It's nice to see the British government recognizing, finally, some of the injustice that it perpetrated and condoned for so long.

Least Surprising Headline of the Day Award

And today's award goes to CNN:

The Speech: Quick Reax

Once again, a solid speech.

Once again, I'm left wondering whether a speech is enough.

He presented a strong moral case for reform, using language that wouldn't have been strange coming from Reagan. Of course, if he'd cast it that way a month ago, this summer might have been much different.

The thing I'm worried about is that it's going to take more than a speech. This seems to fit the pattern of hanging back, letting things ripen, letting things ripen a bit more, perhaps too much, then stepping in, giving a great speech, and expecting that to fix everything. Too confident by half in the ability of his speechifyin' to bring everyone together. He's off to a great start, but now he's got to follow through with some of the leadership that's been lacking on this and SO. MANY. OTHER. issues for so long.

A community organizer doesn't get out too far in front of the community he's trying to organize; they might not follow. So he hangs back, works the phones, nudges people to sit down and talk with each other, and, if all goes well, at the end of the process people are amazed at what they've been able to accomplish.

The problem, of course, is that Mr Obama is not the Community Organizer In Chief. The situation doesn't call for cautious nudging, it calls for leadership. It looks like he's finally stepping up to the plate. But there has to be follow-through. One good speech, aided by an ill-mannered boor from South Carolina, won't do it.

Dear State Farm Insurance

I understand that each agent is an independent businessperson. I get it.

However, when I get the same form letter telling me I can save $426 from three different agents all on the same day, it makes it seem as if your agents are competing mostly with each other (rather than agents of other companies) and makes me wonder about how well-organized the entire operation is.

That is all.

Image of the day

[h/t: GottaLaff]