Idea--Sentencing Guidelines or Community Standards

Societies and bureaucracies face the problem of uniformity versus diversity: given reality (yes, you have to accept the gift) strict rules don't work in all cases but basic fairness calls for similar cases to receive similar treatment. In the '80's Congress came up with sentencing guidelines for federal judges to ensure that someone convicted of a crime in Maine would receive roughly the same sentence as someone in Arizona. Last (?) term the Supreme Court struck down the guidelines as too restrictive, too much of an encroachment by the legislature into the judicial realm. Congress is now considering raising minimum sentences to achieve much the same result. Meanwhile, New York is essentially backing away from the Rockefeller minimum sentence law that was very hard on drug offenders.

I've an alternative to offer. As usual it's technocratic and incorporates principles of feedback and transparency. A parallel is found in from tax software, that compares your tax return to the national average. It is:

• have DOJ set up a central database/Internet application
• for each conviction, the federal judge enters data on the crime (the data would fit parameters of the sentencing guidelines, i.e., age of malefactor, prior convictions, gun involved, etc.)
• the judge enters his or her proposed sentence
• the software compares the sentence to all others given for the same crime and similar parameters.
• the judge can decide whether or not to adjust the sentence to fit more closely the national averages.
• the public could see the judge's record over time.
  

The theory is that this idea would permit judges to be free to use their discretion to fit oddball cases. Because judges and everyone else would have the feedback information, the tendence would be for sentences to cluster near the national average.

The Real Intelligence Failure

Seems to me that everyone (except me of course) has missed the real Iraq intelligence failure. The WMD issue seems relatively trivial. Suppose Bush knew on September 12 that Hussein had no significant stockpiles of any WMD. He still could, and most likely would, have made the case for military force to get the inspectors back in. He'd have pointed to the fact that Hussein still had the scientists and therefore the knowledge and therefore the potential threat, both in himself and in providing stuff to bin Laden. Because Hussein's cooperation with the reinstalled inspectors in January/February 2003 wasn't sufficient for Bush and Blair, Bush would still have gone to war. So better WMD intelligence might not have changed decision making.

Where the intelligence establishment failed was in the assessment of the state of Iraq's economy and society. There's been no evidence in all of the postmortems that much attention was paid to the subject. Everyone just assumed, as Wolfowitz I think said, that it would be easy to get the oil flowing. We also assumed that we could easily improve the state of the economy, more electricity in particular. Finally we assumed that an invasion and overthrow of the government would not unleash any energies, like looters. In part we may have been misled by the aftermath of the Afghanistan conflict.

It looks to me as if Bush was the victim of the bureaucracy--bureaucracies shape the way issues are posed and resolved, as we can see in the case of Iraq. CIA was focused on the threat, on getting secret information, on what is needed to make a decision. It didn't have any customers asking for data on how old the generators were, what Iraq had done given the embargo on spare parts, etc. DOD was focused on the invasion, avoiding a quagmire and minimizing casualties. They were late in planning for post-conflict action. State did planning for the aftermath, but didn't have responsibility. Gen. Garner or Ambassador Bremer should have been called in August 2002 (the Blair election showed that Bush had effectively made the go decision by July) and told: "We aren't sure there's going to be an invasion of Iraq. But if there is, you're in charge of picking up the pieces and rebuilding. You can task the intelligence establishment to try to get all the information you need."

If we had had a "nation building" bureaucracy sitting in the decision making meetings, they might have flagged our lack of information and raised the question of money. Without a bureaucracy to represent that viewpoint, everyone from Bush on down blithely assumed a rosy scenario.

Real ID: Principal versus Principle

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy writes on the Real ID bill (included by House Republicans in the emergency appropriation bill for Iraq/Afghanistan to change requirements for drivers licenses) as commented on by Bruce Schneier here. Kerr is tentatively against Real ID, but thinks Schneier may overstate the case. Without going over the history, current law, and significance of the bill, I'd make these points:

• I wish they'd teach spelling in Minnesota--the bill talks of "principle residence" when they mean "principal".
  
• I don't have major problems with the aim, which is to tighten rules on issuing drivers licenses. As a technocrat, however, I wish we had a debate over identification, national standards, and data privacy.
  
• I do believe in encryption, both of the data contained on the card and the data in state databases. The occasions when the license needs to be swiped should be rare, and readability should be limited to authorized agents of the state. If private entities want to swipe the card, let them OCR it.

Unfortunately the U.S. doesn't have a rational debate about identification, security, and data privacy. Since we don't and won't, I say:

* we should be doing away with the social security number, not further embedding it into our systems (Unlike other data it often serves both to identify and authenticate the person, which violates good security logic.)
* the implementation of Real ID should be flexible. The Federal govt. has guidelines for e-authentication that agencies are in the process of implementing, but that seems to be a separate line of discussion/development from Real ID. It's going to be expensive to implement both; we ought to be doing them logically.
* RealID ought to include restrictions on the state databases, including provisions for audit trails and transaction logs, encryption of data, provision for review and access.

A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain - New York Times

A piece in the NYTimes on How the Mind Emerges From the Brain:
Dr. Gazzaniga was a founder of cognitive science, often focusing on people who had the link between the left and right hemispheres of their brain. In one case, each hemisphere received sensation from one eye:

"Dr. Gazzaniga and Dr. LeDoux showed P. S. a picture of a chicken claw in his right eye and a snow-covered house in the left eye. P. S. pointed to a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left.

'I'll never forget the day we got around to asking P. S., 'Why did you do that?' ' said Dr. Gazzaniga. 'He said, 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken.' That's all the left hemisphere saw. And then he looks at the shovel and said, 'The reason you need a shovel is to clean out the chicken shed.' '"

The big point to me is that the brain tries desperately, as here, to integrate input into a comprehensible picture/narrative. We make up stories or we ignore or omit data that's inconsistent, as here. You can see the phenomena in blogs, which are people telling themselves stories.

Doctors Do Know Things Patients Don't Know - New York Times

Dr. Kent Sepkowitz writes in the NY today about the pros and cons of having the course of treatment of an illness being directed by the doctor versus the patient, a patient who may have researched the illness on the Web. He says doctors don't want control for ego purposes.

"No, the difference between doctors and patients is that you are stuck playing on our home court. We know all the subtle bumps and slick spots, the places where things suddenly can ricochet out of control. With luck, we know when to pounce and when to shrug, when to grab the phone and start shouting and when to stall another week to see if things quiet down.

Managing an illness, in the best of circumstances, is an uncertain endeavor. Basically here's how it works: you inch along as if groping in blackest night for the light switch, trying first this, then that. Actual guideposts are rare. It can be most unsettling, especially if you haven't tried it before."

The bottom line is that things that look very simple from the outside turn out to be very complex and murky once you start in. Of course, that statement is true of any area of expertise; just ask a do-it-yourselfer who tries to do his own plumbing, etc. I generally give more trust and credence to experts than do the MSM, who almost always are looking in from the outside. But experts always have to remember both Lord Acton ("power corrupts") and the unequalled ability of people to fool themselves.

x

Teacher of the Year and No Electricity

Last night Brian Lamb did an interesting interview with the Teacher of the Year, Jason Kamras of DC. See the transcript here. It touched on a number of questions, from Israel to idealism. Jason is a very good interviewee. Lamb has little tolerance for a long answer. Often he'll come in with a new question when the subject is just a few sentences into the answer. (Keeps the interview lively and interesting, but is frustrating when you really want to hear the whole thing.) Jason was one of the few I've seen who could smoothly answer the new question then switch back to the prior subject.

Jason has taught for 8 years, and spent his summers writing for grants, so he now has $50,000 of audio-video, computer, and other extras in his room But down the hall, in the same building:

"But back to your question. I have a colleague that does not have electricity in her classroom, and so she can't even use technology if she wanted to." (She has lights but no live electrical outlets.)

That's revealing, of a number of things. First, bureaucrats like Jason can be entrepreneurial. It's an unsolved mystery why Jason has power for his goodies and his colleague doesn't, but I've no doubt he would have scrounged a generator if he had had to. Second, most people see their job as doing their job. His colleague reasonably assumes she's not responsible for diagnosing problems in electrical circuits. Third, the school system is good enough to attract and keep a Jason and bad enough to tolerate the dead outlets. Fourth, I'd generalize and say that maintenance is almost always treated as something to be put off. That's true whether it's kids picking up their clothes, or Congress appropriating money for bureaucracies like the Park Service, IRS, or the military: money goes for new historical sites or new weapons but not for maintaining the old, collecting revenue or training and repairing weapons.

Another interesting item was touching on salaries. Jason started at $28,000. Lamb asked whether you could buy a home in DC on a teacher's salary and Kamras said it was getting difficult. Trying to find current DC salaries I stumbled on this piece. It seems to be very thoughtful, though I've not digested it. One figure I'd point out is that 1995-6, DC paid its teachers about 3 percent more than the average DC worker, which ranked 51st in the nation.

Hanson Mourns the Loss of History

Victor Davis Hanson mourns What happened to history? - The Washington Times: Commentary - May 07, 2005. He says Americans don't commemorate their great leaders and warriors of the past. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria is mildly critical of Hanson for not crediting Emerson for "the tyranny of the present", the phrase he uses to start the piece and notes a post by eb at No Great Matter showing that Hanson is repeating the past because he doesn't know the history of such charges.

While I agree with Luker and EB, I want to challenge this:

"To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own.
In contrast, if one believes human nature is malleable -- or with requisite money and counseling can be 'improved' -- history becomes just an obsolete science. It would be no different from 18th-century biology before the microscope or early genetics without knowledge of DNA. Once man before our time appears alien, the story of his past has very little prognostic value. "

At best this is exaggeration to make his point (lefty thought devalues the worth of history). At worst it's nonsense. Whether we're talking about people in different cultures today, or people in our culture in the past, both similarities and differences matter. In my opinion, a responsible historian searches assiduously for both. And that should make for good history.

The Post had a very good article on an Afghanistan village that stoned a young woman who committed adultery. Her father aided the execution, then expressed his sadness as he remembered her personality. I can understand the adultery and understand the sadness. It takes a hell of an effort to understand the emotions that may have accompanied the father's assent to the execution. But the article gave me enough on which to try.

On Mothers Day: For Tom DeLay and His Mother

I was thinking about politicians and baking bread.

Then I saw today's piece in the Times on DeLay's Empire of Favors which says DeLay is more than the caricature. For one thing, he's kind:

"The reason, it seems, is that over the years, brick by brick, Mr. DeLay has built a wall of political support. His small acts of kindness have become lore. Pizza during late night votes. Travel arrangements for low-level lawmakers. Birthday wishes, get-well cards, condolences for House members in emotional need.

On a larger scale, friends - and enemies - describe him as a favor-trader extraordinaire, piling up a mountain of goodwill."

The Washington Post did a magazine article on him a year or two ago. His father was an alcoholic and DeLay is now estranged from his mother. That offers an entrance to his psyche. In my experience, children of alcoholics are often very eager to please the people they meet (think Clinton, Reagan, my wife). Hence the kindnesses. Both the Post piece and the new Times article remind us of the dangers of stereotyping those we oppose, even though it's so much fun and emotionally satisfying. The fact that DeLay and his mother are estranged is sad, particularly on Mothers Day.

Why are politicians like bread? Well, when you make bread you knead it and work it and generally punch the hell out of it, just like the public does to politicians. Bread doesn't have any shape of its own, when rising it often goes all over the place, good bread requires a very small amount of yeast and lots of dough, its changes of shape and composition result from hot air, alcohol and gas, when baked some breads have body and substance and many are vapid, and brown breads are often more interesting than whites.

Agriculture and the Reds, Nathaniel Weyl

The New York Times obit on Nathaniel Weyl touches on the close connection between farm programs and communism and lawyers:

"Mr. Weyl (pronounced 'while') had been active in leftist student groups while he was an undergraduate at Columbia College. He left academic life for Washington in 1933 and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, where he was recruited into a communist cell that, he would later testify, included Hiss."

The "communists" were in the Office of the General Counsel, and basically were purged in 1935 in a controversy over the treatment of sharecroppers in the South. AAA was a magnet for young talent, along with Hiss both JK Galbraith and Adlai Stevenson worked there. It may have been similar to the Peace Corps under JFK. For the communists and other leftists the job meant a chance to make a difference, to satisfy one's moralistic idealism by working on behalf of the poor and powerless. I suspect they also had a romantic view of agriculture, shared by such current writers from different perspectives as Wendell Berry and Victor Davis Hanson.

As it's Mother's Day, it's appropriate to be sentimental. The obit boils Weyl's life down to early communism, spying, and then testifying against Hiss. But a recent article in the American Historical Review pointed out the contribution that the old left made to the cause of civil rights and feminism in the 30's and 40's. It seems that some charges of the segregationist leaders in the 1950's about leftist influence on civil rights had more validity than I wanted to admit. Yes, it's a fault of the young to want their causes to be pure and true; it's wisdom in the old to realize the best of men have mixed motives and even the worst may achieve some good.

Know Your Beef

As agricultural prices continue to decline, more and more people are seeking custom niches. Now the entire state of South Dakota is backing their certified beef, as described in this WPost article:

"Enlisting its police and administrative authority, the state guarantees consumers who buy South Dakota Certified Beef that they will be partaking of a computer-tracked cow that was born, fed and butchered inside state borders, using exacting standards of nutrition, with a humane upbringing and walled off from all possible contact with mad cow disease.

After a consumer takes home the beef, he or she can use the Internet to find a photograph of the South Dakota family ranch where it came from. And if a rancher or a butcher cheats in caring for cows under the new rules, the state is ready and willing to charge him with a felony and send him to prison for two years."

The idea may sound good, but there's some problems with it.

• First, as described here, USDA is implementing a national animal ID system. So anyone, state, or individual, could piggyback on the system to offer similar guarantees with little or no added investment.
• Second, while I've invested in Whole Foods because I think organic-style marketing is only going to grow, I'm not sure how much of a premium South Dakota could command. (What they really need, about a year or so from now, is a really major mad cow problem.)
• Third, the logical extrapolation is using the Internet to see, not the ranch, but the actual steer being raised. But that may be more reality than city types really want to deal with. (Michael Pollan had an article in the NYTimes magazine a couple years ago where he bought a calf and had it raised, so he could write about the process. My memory is he wasn't happy about eating it.)