Mimsy Were the Borogoves

California’s Proposition 14, the “top two primaries act” looks like an attempt by California politicians to protect themselves from voter revolt. It’s clearly about reducing choices to two—and two who aren’t even necessarily different voices. If we really wanted better choices, we’d remove the government from the primary process and remove the artificial barriers to ballot access.

Proposition 14 sounds a lot like California politicians want to avoid Scott Brown-like upsets. If Massachusetts had a system like this, the voters would have had a choice between Martha Coakley and Michael Capuano, both Democrats, rather than between Democrat Coakley and Republican Scott Brown.

Given the tendency to go with the perceived winner, Massachusetts’s votes probably would have been even more lopsided under a “top two primary” system. Massachusetts voters would never have had the opportunity to move to Scott Brown, because Brown would not have been on the ballot. There’s always a tendency to “vote for the winner”. That’s why campaigns always try to play up (or even release their own) polls that put their candidate ahead. Move that tendency into the primary, and it’s likely that in districts that lean heavily to one party, both of the top vote-getters will be from the same party. Massachusetts would have been guaranteed a Democrat.

I’m sure the Democrats wish they’d thought of this last year while they were trying to figure out how to bypass the voters and just appoint Ted Kennedy’s successor.

Proposition 14 will remove choices from the ballot. It will reduce the voices heard during the election process. That’s probably its purpose: incumbent protection. California’s Governor Schwarzenegger comes right out and confirms it, though he tries to make it sound like a win:

Schwarzenegger says California's state legislators are “scared of everything because their main purpose is to get re-elected” and that this measure will solve that problem.

A little light reading for Bob of Bainbridge.

I had heard of The Dresden Files when it came out, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Mainly because I don’t get cable, but also because I had no desire to learn any more about the bombing of Dresden than I already know. In fact, the television series had nothing to do with Dresden, Germany, or World War II. It’s a noir detective wizard series set in Chicago in modern times.

The show only lasted one season, which is unfortunate. It was a good series, and had a lot of room for growth. It was sort of a cross between The Night Stalker and The Rockford Files. I enjoyed both of those series, so it isn’t surprising that I really enjoyed watching the Dresden Files on DVD over the last few weeks.

The strangest part watching it, and seeing those references, was the age difference. When I watched these shows in the seventies, the starring roles were all “really old people”. Carl Kolchack was fifty. Jim Rockford was forty-six! Today, I’m older—Jim Rockford would be my contemporary, and Kolchak not too far off; and starring roles tend to go to younger actors than they did then. So these hard-boiled detectives and police officers seem to be wet-behind-the-ears rookies at first. But they’re not: both Paul Blackthorne (Harry Dresden) and Valerie Cruz (Lieutenant Connie Murphy) were in their thirties.

Lieutenant Murphy, Harry’s contact and friend in the Chicago Police Department.

There’s a strong sense of “monster-of-the-week” here; each episode brings in a new bit of supernatural lore. That probably would have changed if they’d gotten a second season, but it works fine. In fact, while I would have loved to see another season or two, the Dresden Files series ended well. With the exception of the crammed-together off-kilter semi-pilot, the show presented a nice arc, electrical and otherwise, between Harry Dresden and Lieutenant Murphy.

One really nice thing about the show is the near-lack of an opening title sequence. Rather than waste the minute or more that over shows do, they did a couple of quick anchoring shots of Chicago and went right back into the story.

Looks like civil forfeiture/seizure is in the news again. For all practical purposes, forfeiture has become legalized bribery. For drug dealers, it’s a cost of doing business; for the cops, it’s a way of institutionalizing hush payments. The cops take the money, the criminal gets to go free.

In 2008 there was about 2.8 billion dollars taken by federal law enforcement without any charge. Eighty percent of “criminals” whose assets were taken by the feds were never charged. If those billions truly were taken from criminals, what’s the difference between this and bribery? And that’s just the federal government. Another billion or more is taken in by local authorities.

The only people who win are drug dealers. The innocent lose. Their money or property is gone; they can’t get it back except by proving it innocent—and can only do this on the government’s timetable.

Take a look at the case of Anthony Smelley. Sounds suspicious enough, but think about it: if Smelley were a drug dealer, he just paid the cops to look the other way; if he’s innocent, the cops just stole the money from him. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone except drug dealers and corrupt police departments.

Or take a look at RowerinVA’s comments on the Volokh Conspiracy. He’s trying to justify the practice by saying that his clients, who he knows are guilty, don’t want the money back. To them, it’s just a cost of doing business.

The police aren’t interested in finding them, because they are a source of funds. Asset forfeiture was one of the worst things to happen to prohibition enforcement. Enforcing our drug laws has never been successful, but letting the police and the state make money off of drug dealers means that some departments, cities, and states, just as with speeding, rely on at least a certain number of criminals in order to make their budget. These localities and law enforcement agencies need more drug dealers.

Forfeiture has become a means for criminals to get off free, and the innocent to suffer.

“From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule. That government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well if no one among is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else… We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”

One of the occasional nice surprises of digging through vinyl back in the days before Amazon had everything, and iTunes had everything Amazon didn’t, was occasionally running across a Makem & Clancy album in a thrift shop or the world music section of a dusty record store. I had previously known of the group from a mix tape by a college friend who grew up in Ireland. That tape was a tape of a tape of tapes. As I began to collect the albums, it was a pleasure to both hear more songs, and familiar songs more clearly.

My favorites are:

1. The Makem and Clancy Concert
2. Irish Songs of Rebellion
3. Recorded Live in Ireland!
4. Hearty and Hellish
5. A Spontaneous Performance Recording!

Well, looking up that list on Amazon I see three out of five are still not available, so you may still have to haunt used music stores. But at least the top two are, and my favorite, the Makem and Clancy Concert, includes a version of Get Drunk (I like it better than the video here, but that’s probably because I heard the record version first).

All but Recorded Live in Ireland! are available on iTunes, but you’ll need to search by album title: the group is under at least four different names, making it difficult to find their music.

Part of why the Makem and Clancy Concert is my favorite album is the spirited rendition of Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk” by Liam Clancy. For your inspiration, here is the translation he’s using:

One should always be drunk, that’s all that matters.

So as not to feel time’s horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you down you must get drunk without ceasing.

But what with? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose, but get drunk.

And if at some time on the steps of a palace, or in the green grass of a ditch, or in the bleak solitude of your room you are waking up when drunkenness is already abated, ask the wind, a wave, the star, the bird, the clock, all that which flees, all that which rolls, all that which groans, all that which sings, all that which speaks, ask them what time it is.

And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply “It is time to get drunk! So that you may not be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk and never pause for rest. With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose.”

Heh. State Department vehicle hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk and the State Department claims that it was the pedestrian who “collided with” the vehicle, not the other way around. I’ve seen that wording before: when one of San Diego’s Finest was speeding in Pacific Beach and hit a homeless person who was pushing a shopping cart in front of them while crossing the street.

It’s amazing how dangerous pedestrians are when law enforcement is around. This sounds like the Chicago Musical defense: “Yeah, I know the light was red, but the pedestrian ran right into me. He ran into me six times!”

Dafydd again demonstrates why Big Lizards is on my blogroll. The effects of lawsuit mentality on health care costs:

“Doctors pay stunning premiums for malpractice insurance, in some cases more than $200,000 annually for physicians in certain specialties, such as obstetrics or anaesthesiology—and far more for hospitals—even for doctors and hospitals with excellent records.”

“Virtually every doctor and hospital is guaranteed to be sued several times in his career… no matter how good and careful a doctor he is. Several estimates have found that the cost of malpractice insurance alone is about 10% of the total cost of doctor and hospital care in America, or $110 billion. This is money directly out of the pockets of doctors and hospitals… which naturally means costs directly passed along to all patients.”

“As far as actual money out of the system due to defensive medicine—that is, due to the threat of malpractice litigation—estimates range from huge ($60 billion per year) to gargantuan ($200 billion per year). But there are even vaster and more indirect damages caused by the congressional majority’s love affair with lawyers. The first hidden cost is resource depletion: we have limited resources available for medical tests, such as X-rays or CAT scans. While a patient with no serious injury is being CAT scanned, just so that the doctor and hospital won't be dragged into court later, that particular sanner is unavailable to other patients with more serious injuries.”

“Similarly, if a doctor prescribes drugs for patients who don’t really need them, because the doctor fears that some persuasive lawyer will convince a jury that he knows best, and the drug would surely have saved the patient’s life—then supplies of that vital drug will become scarce, and it may not be available for patients who really do need it. (It also drives up the price of drugs by the elementary rule of supply and demand.)”

“One hidden cost that few think about is that doctors must overdocument everything he does, just in order to defend himself when he’s sued; all the paperwork extensively cuts into the time he can actually spend with his patients.”

“Malpractice tort costs amount to a tax on the practice of medicine—and a subsidy for malpractice trial lawyers. What you tax, you get less of; and what you subsidize, you get more of; does America really want fewer doctors and more lawyers?”

“The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.”

“Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the ‘hacker era’ of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.”

“For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.”