Category: Best

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Complexity as War on the Consumer

There are two ways to cheat consumers. One is to simply lie to them. This method is fraught with peril, however. After all, there are still a few laws around that protect consumers from something called “fraud”, which is a fancy word for “lies”. And nobody likes to be called a liar.

And nobody needs to lie. The second method is safer, and just as effective.

Make it so difficult and annoying to exercise your rights as a consumer (or patient, or citizen) that most people will just give up and go away.

Complexity is your friend. Complexity is your ally. Complexity is a blunt force instrument of such potency that entire industries and professions have sprung up from it’s forehead like the children of Zeus: lawyers.

We see it in everything from operating manuals to software to insurance policies to health care agreements to employment contracts to amusement park disclaimers. We see it in the forms you fill out to claim the “benefits” you are entitled to under insurance policies or government funded entitlements. You even see it on every piece of software you run on your computer– the EULA (End User Legal Agreement) which means nothing to almost every person who clicks on “yes, I agree”. They don’t know what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know what they are agreeing to. The point is that there is a lot verbiage in there can be roughly translated as “you have no rights whatsoever”.

It’s a good turf on which to choose your battle. You will always have allies among those who believe the common folk should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take a course or two in American law, or lay out $15,000 for lawyers. And you have many other allies among similarly interested corporations and government functionaries who know very well that they might be in the wrong but count on the numbing effect to make you go away.

Some companies even ask you to sign employment agreements that are absolutely illegal because they abridge rights that are guaranteed to every employee under state or provincial law. For example, the organization I work for, Christian Horizons, asks employees to agree that any “wrongful dismissal” issues will be settled by an arbitrator appointed by— guess who?– Christian Horizons. In reality, if you were “wrongfully” dismissed, you retain every right to bring your case to the Labour Relations Board of Ontario, no matter what you signed. I’m not worried because I happen to work for a good, ethical organization, but I still disagree with that provision of the employment agreement.

In this province, you cannot sign an agreement giving your employer a right to cheat you.

Why is there no Greenpeace or World Wildlife Federation or Amnesty International for understandability? We are trying to preserve the environment, unusual species, and the ozone. Why doesn’t someone form an organization to protect language from similar exploitation and abuse?

Complexity is more than a strategy to diminish our rights. It is an assault. To be human is to use language. The highest achievements of humanity, of nation, of history, of culture, is expressed in language. The most intimate human feelings, the great principles of morality and ethics, and even our spiritual aspirations are expressed in language. To pervert, twist, and abuse language, is to abuse humanity.

The strategy of these corporate lawyer hucksters is not really to express complex legal and contractual details. The real purpose is to express nothing, and thus, everything. You might have a right, you might not. The agreement might stand up in court, but more likely, it won’t.

Judges are not entirely stupid. Sometimes they say what everyone thinks: nobody reads those things and nobody understands them. Sometimes, however, they will say, “You should have read the agreement carefully.”

Yes, yes: here on page 59, paragraph 113c, section iii, it says that you accept liability for all damage caused by misuse intentional or not, or actions construed as misuse for the purposes of this agreement as specified in section ii, paragraph 78, notwithstanding any non-specified damages resulting from uses construed to be within specified actionable exceptions deemed applicable”.

But most people don’t know that judges will sometimes rule against these agreements. They assume that if they sign some kind of complex agreement, they are bound to observe the terms. Sometimes they are. It doesn’t matter. The lawyers enter the picture, like a long row of fat, disease-ridden can-can dancers, and the performance begins.

You don’t have to get to court, or to any kind of judgment or agreement. You just have to realize that it will cost you enormous sums of money to even make a contest of it.

The solution is quite simple. There should be a law that specifies that all contractual agreements, warranties, and conditions must be written in plain and understandable English. A panel of grade six teachers should be set up to review any questionable documents. This panel should be empowered to declare null and void any agreement that is not understandable by a reasonable person with a reasonable degree of effort. A consideration will be the fact that the average person is inundated with dozens or hundreds of these agreements every year, and can’t possibly spend every waking hour reviewing them all to see if he or she is in full compliance.

Added May 1, 2003:

The RIAA recently sued four students for facilitating the sharing of pirated music files on their university networks. However, as usual, it is reported that they plan to settle out of court. So they are using the potential complexity and inconvenience of court action to club the students into submission, without actually having to prove their case in court.

Wise decision on their part: they might not win. I have yet to read or hear of a single court case like this in which the RIAA actually won a judicial decision saying that copying of music for personal use is illegal.

I thought, at first, that this would be one– but of course! The inevitable out-of-court settlement!

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Supreme Injustices

Leandro Andrade, 37 years old, stole video tapes from K-Mart. He stole 5 tapes and then he stole 4 tapes. These were not Leandro Andrade’s first criminal offenses. Leandro Andrade is incorrigible. He stole and stole again.

He broke into some houses and stole things. He was caught. He went to prison. Ten years went by. Do you think you can escape your past? Not in California. He was caught shoplifting in two different K-Marts, by store employees each time. The goods were recovered.. He was convicted twice.

Leandro Andrade has never committed a violent crime. But he stole 9 tapes worth about $150.00 from K-Mart.  (They actually worth a lot less than that– $150 is what they would sell for– but the real cost to K-Mart and the manufacturer is probably less than a dollar.)

Now he is going to pay for it. He is going to rot in jail for 50 years. There is no possibility of parole. No time off for good behaviour. No early release. He is going to spend the rest of his natural life in prison.

I am not making this up.  I have to say that, because any sensible person would immediately say, “that can’t be true”.

This is essentially the “second most severe” sentence that can be imposed by a court, after death, of course. For stealing video tapes. So, when you think about it, the court, in this case, decided that Andrade was such a threat to society that they should almost execute him. But that would be unreasonable. That would be barbaric. Well, what’s the next most severe possible sentence? Life in prison with no chance of parole.

If Mr. Andrade had been smart, he would have stolen all of those tapes at once. Then, due to a technicality, he would have had only three, not four, offences, and could have served “only” a maximum of 25 years. I’m not kidding.

If he had been really smart, he would have committed only one theft, and then murdered somebody in a rage, without premeditation. Then he could have received a lighter sentence. I’m not kidding. He might have been out of prison in 20 years, at 57.

But no– he had to go and steal some video tapes again. Fifty years. In a nation that probably thinks of itself as “civilized”.  In nation in which a majority of citizens claim they are Christians.   They are not.

According to Justices Sandra Day O’Conner, William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas, that is not an unreasonable sentence for an incorrigible criminal who stole 4 video tapes from K-Mart.

The Justices who upheld Andrade’s conviction believe that his crime of stealing the video tapes must not be seen in isolation. He is receiving 50 years for all of his crimes, in a sense. So 50 years in prison is not an unreasonable sentence for several non-violent thefts, according to O’Conner & company.

Even though… even though California prosecutors did not have to charge Mr. Andrade with a felony. His crime could have been classified as a misdemeanor, at the discretion of the state. The state prosecutors, knowing the consequences, chose to charge him with felonies, even though the crimes were not really very serious. They also chose to charge him with the two thefts separately, so that he would have four convictions instead of three, which led to the doubling of the 25-year maximum.

If you think this is a disproportionate sentence– maybe you don’t– consider the case of Mr. Rummel. In 1964, Mr. Rummel was convicted of using a credit card fraudulently to obtain $80.00 worth of goods. In 1969, he forged a check for $28.00. In 1973, he obtained goods worth $120 under false pretenses.

Life sentence.

Yes, life in jail for passing a few bad checks. Have you ever written a bad check? A check that bounced?

I’m not sure if they do things more cheaply in Texas than in New York, but In New York State, it cost about $30,000 a year to keep a man in prison. So the state considers it worthwhile to spend $1.5 million to prevent losses of about $20 a year.  It would save the government $1.5 million to just pay for the tapes and let him go.

In fact, if they had simply fined Mr. Andrade, they would have been ahead on the deal.

One of the arguments offered in defense of this draconian sentence is that the people of California, who voted for the “3 Strikes” law in a referendum and approved it, should have their expressed desires respected. Aside from the question of whether the citizens believed the three-strikes law could be applied to non-violent offenders (you could make a good case that they didn’t), one wonders how far such respect should go. Suppose they wished to introduce flogging for littering? Suppose they wanted to castrate rapists? Suppose they wanted to cut the hands off of pick-pockets? Our noble, enlightened Republican Supreme Court appointees would pronounce, “Yea, for the people hath spoken, let the mutilations begin!”

In fact, if I lived in California, I believe I would start a campaign to introduce a referendum forcing the government to arrest witches.  Just so we can make it clear what kind of people we are.

Insane Justices
Sandra Day O’Conner
William H. Rehnquist
Antonin Scalia
Anthony Kennedy
Clarence Thomas

Sane Justices
David H. Souter
John Paul Stevens
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Stephen J. Breyer

It’s worth reading about the Supreme Court’s reasoning on the case, especially if you seriously believe the Republican majority is smart and psychologically healthy.  Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion on Rummel and defended the absurd severity of the sentence on the basis of the fact that other states had equally or more severe sentencing requirements.  Give that argument a few minutes and think it over.

This is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court telling us that Timmy’s mom let’s him swim in the alligator pond.

Balances of Justice: how other criminals, who only stole millions, are treated.

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Colin Powell’s Big Lie

According to Colin Powell, the tape that was recently released by Osama Bin Laden and broadcast on the Al Jazeera network, “proves” that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are linked.

Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, was less coy. Forgetting, perhaps, that one of the initial reasons for America’s inevitable invasion of Iraq was its links to the terrorist organization, Fleischer said that the tape showed that Al Qaeda and Saddam were “linking up” (New York Times, February 12, 2003). Ooops. I meant “had linked up”.

These guys have spun out of control here. They are beginning to believe their own propaganda. If, like me, you read the text of the tape first and then saw Colin Powell, you wondered what the hell he was talking about. If, like most Americans, you heard Powell speak first, and never read the transcript, you thought, what’s with those crazy French? Don’t they realize we have proof?

George Tenet of the CIA is somewhat more circumspect. I think he is embarrassed, but, like Powell, has had his arm twisted and has decided he’d rather ride in circles whooping and wheezing with this posse of yahoos than exit quietly out the back door. A few years from now, he’ll need to make some money and you don’t get $50K a speech if you can’t talk about something exciting like plotting the extra-judicial killing of a foreign leader or terrorist.

The scale of the Bush administration’s mendacity has become breathtaking. This government does not “feel it’s way” carefully, with scrutiny and foresight. It acts like it believes it is receiving direct messages from the Almighty on stone tablets that are carefully dusted for anthrax before being smashed over the heads of the Democrats.

How does this play out in 2004? I’m old enough to know better than to think too wishfully. I suspect that Bush will shortly crash and burn– the economy is not perking up and probably won’t perk up until after the war. The war is obviously scheduled for political reasons this year, so it can be done with and celebrated in early 2004, but late enough so that the inevitable debacle afterwards– regional instability, new terrorist attacks, Osama thumbing his nose– won’t happen until after the 2004 elections.

I made the mistake before of believing that U.S. military victory would not come easy. I now tend to think that it will, indeed, come very easily. That’s why Bush has chosen Iraq to bear the brunt of his Mosaic complex. It has no air force. It has no real defense. Bush and Powell keep raving about the “threats” from Iraq as if Iraq had any kind of military strength, but that is essential to their political survival: if Americans see that they are the bully and Iraq is the 90 pound weakling, the medal ceremonies and flag-waving afterwards won’t have much resonance.

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The Evidence Comes After the Verdict

One of the many problems with George Bush’s position on Iraq is so embedded in the entire debate that I doubt most people even pay it much thought it any more.

Bush announced that Saddam Hussein was evil and must be deposed and Iraq must be invaded right from the get go. He didn’t say, we have some concerns about Iraq’s adherence to the U.N. disarmament pact. He didn’t say, let’s investigate the issue and communicate our concerns to the world community and to Iraq so that groundwork for a solution can be laid. He didn’t say, here’s the proof. He said, guilty. Let’s invade. He said that more than a year ago.

The U.N. decided to be silly and weigh all the evidence first, as well as the real issue– regardless of Iraq’s alleged infractions, is a military invasion and a war the best way to handle the problem? Is there a downside? Has the U.S. jerked Iraq around, by supporting them against Iran, encouraging them to invade Kuwait, then invading and defeating them and inciting rebel groups to rise against Saddam, only to ensure that he remained in power in the name of stability?

The fact is, the U.S. changed the rules half way through the game.

Most people could see some common sense in a policy of containment. It actually appears to have been working. And most people can see the sense in a line in the sand: if you invade Kuwait, or Iran, or Turkey, or whatever, or you sponsor terrorists, we will take this or that action. In fact, I’m in favor of a clear policy like that, with clear, direct consequences. No negotiations, no extensions, no exceptions. All that is required is for all sides to understand the policy. And of course for a little something called “evidence”.

But when the U.S. blows off North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, it is clear that there is no policy at all. But that’s been clear all along. Bush wants to whack Iraq, and it was only at Powell’s insistence that he even bothered notifying the U.N. The deck is stacked, however.

Some pundits claim that Powell’s presentation to the U.N. means that Iraq now has “the burden of proof”. Is there a bigger piece of bullshit out there in pundit-land right now? The burden of proof never shifts. It has always been the burden of the United States to show that Iraq’s actions justify war. The absurd insistence that Iraq must prove that they don’t have weapons of mass destruction is surely the emperor’s new clothes of this era. How can you prove that you don’t have something? For some reason, commentators like the New York Times’ William Safire see no absurdity here. That’s how crazy this whole Bush administration is.

You know what I suspect is actually happening here.

1. The Pentagon with it’s $300 billion a year in weapons of mass destruction is always itching for war. It’s in the nature of things. Carpenters want to make things, architects want to design things, actors want to act, Generals want to kill. They look at the world and see all kinds of things that need killing. They look at their chests and see all kinds of space for medals. They look at their billions of dollars worth of bombs and ordnance and jets and submarines, and want to blow things up. It’s human nature. You don’t invest that scale of resources into tools that you really don’t want to use. And military men, of course, see violence and intimidation and plain military might as the solution to everything, just as diplomats see negotiation as the solution to everything, and mothers see an all-knowing beneficent authority as the solution to everything.

2. The Clinton administration was unresponsive, by and large, to the generals’ constant clattering for action, action, action. I’ll bet they had meetings in the situation room in the White House where the generals simply listed hot-spot after hot-spot and begged for authority to act. And Clinton probably said, calm down boys, we’ll try some diplomatic channels first and see if we can get the two sides talking.

3. Enter George Bush. He has a couple of meetings with the generals. They say the same thing they said to Clinton– like, hey, Iraq scares us, lets go over and whack them. He’s a bad guy. And Bush went, he is? By golly, I didn’t know that. Where is Iraq? Why don’t the Iraqians elect a new leader? In short, the generals realized they had an enormously sympathetic, paranoid ear for their ravings and continued to build their case, and reinforce it, and exaggerate it, and accumulate every scrap of evidence they could muster in support of their case. Still, with Powell in State, they weren’t quite able to get the action they wanted until….

4. 9/11. A bunch of Saudis, likely indirectly financed by the Saudi Arabian government which pays off Islamic fundamentalists to go screw up other country’s regimes, attack the WTC. Now the generals sense their opening. There is a mushy, irrational, uneasy shift from Osama, whom they let slip away, to Saddam, whom they are able to locate in the vicinity of Yasser Arafat. Let’s whack him. If he hasn’t already done something evil, he probably will.

5. At this point, the Bush administration is not in analysis mode. They are in prosecutorial mode, and you know how that works.

But I think the world intuitively understands this. The U.N. speeches are not about making a case. They are about twisting arms and bullying for a case that the U.S. does not believe needs to be made. The fundamental arrogance of the U.S. is that they believe that if they prove that Saddam Hussein is willing to resist their ultimatums, that alone is enough to justify a full-scale invasion and the deaths of 250,000 people. They really believe they are “good”, that God has imbued President Bush with the authority to make sophisticated moral judgments about different cultures and histories, and that Jesus is returning soon anyway.

The mocking tone of recent New York Times editorials on the issue make it plain– we’re now into calling the French and Germans weenies and wimps. And how dare they label genetically modified food when the always trustworthy American corporations have determined that this process does no harm whatsoever?

Obviously, these people are serious about weighing all points of view.

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Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing”

“The West Wing” may well be one of the best shows on television right now. I don’t know for sure. I’m not qualified to judge. I can’t stand to watch more than fifteen minutes of most television anyway. Except on Wednesday nights, at 9:00 p.m. I am willing to put up with 20 minutes of ads to watch the latest episode of “The West Wing”. I am even more willing to download commercial-free versions from the internet. God bless piracy.

I do scan tv now and then. I don’t pay rapt attention, but I have watched a few episodes of ER and I’ve sat in on “Friends” a few times, and I actually enjoyed “Seinfeld” regularly. The only shows I’ve liked over the past few years have been “The Simpsons”, “The West Wing”, and “Malcolm in the Middle”, which, bless their hearts, runs without a laugh track. “The Sopranos” looks really good but I can never remember when it is on. As for “Friends”, please, please, please get rid of the laugh track. It’s an insult to your intelligence when such lame comedy is lavished with so much audience hilarity. It is the producers of the show laughing at their own bad jokes.

The West Wing is a good show. It is shamelessly political and topical and intelligent. It shamelessly worships intelligence, which is astonishing for a culture that more typically worships anti-intellectualism. The girl always falls for the sincere dolt and rejects the prissy genius.

It is shockingly liberal in outlook, to a degree. Actually, it would be more accurate to label the show “Democrat”–in the sense of being sympathetic to the Democrat political platform–than truly liberal. It’s Blair and Clinton, not Eugene McCarthy or Trudeau. It’s that phony liberalism that feels shameful about the idealist tendencies in some progressives. Sorkin doesn’t want to be accused of muddle-headed bleeding heart pacifism. Nor does he really want to believe that America is not fundamentally the greatest nation on earth.

After watching a lot of episodes, you begin to realize that Sorkin doesn’t really know very much about the world outside of America. Every foreign crisis dramatized in West Wing has the feel of a CNN report filtered through Oprah Winfrey with Barbra Streisand as guest commentator. A long discussion of health care issues failed even once to refer to the most obvious model of socialized health care in Canada.

It’s well-written, well-acted, and well-filmed. Some of the “ground-breaking” techniques (well, “ground-breaking” only if you never saw “Hill Street Blues” in your life) have grown a bit tiresome, and most of the characters do tend to sound a lot alike. The Steadicam shots should be retired– it’s been parodied brilliantly and accurately by MAD TV and a parody that deadly should be heeded.

West Wing won an Emmy in 2000 but Sorkin was criticized by writer Rick Cleveland for hogging all the credit. Sorkin refused to allow Cleveland to come to the podium with him to accept the award even though the story that won the Emmy for Sorkin was based on Cleveland’s father, who was a homeless Korean war vet. Sorkin went on-line in a chat room to trash Cleveland and claimed that he didn’t deserve the Emmy for the episode, though the Writer’s Guild, which sets the rules in these kinds of disputes, certified that he did. The episode– a good one– concerned a Korean War Vet who died homeless, wearing a coat Toby had donated to Goodwill. Toby made Herculean efforts to see that the man was given a proper military funeral to honor his selfless sacrifice. Sorkin’s curiously muddled but rapt devotion to the military was front and centre in this episode.

The good “liberal” President Bartlett displays conspicuous reverence for his generals– and he ought to– on “West Wing”, they are efficient, rational, prudent, and wise. Gosh. Not at all like the real life Curtis Lemay or Westmoreland.

The generals in “West Wing” treat a liberal Democratic president with respect because he’s tough enough to order assassinations and preparations for armed intervention at the slightest provocation. This is old nonsense– this defensive phony liberalism sees it’s shining emblems in tolerance for gays and feminists, good funding for schools, and preservation of wilderness areas, but, by golly we’re not pussies: if there’s killing that needs doing, we’ll do it.

Nobody on the White House staff, in “West Wing”, seems aware of anything America has ever done wrong in the Middle East or Asia or Latin America. They are stunningly unaware of earlier American involvements in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Pathetically, Donna flushes with excitement at meeting a military aide played by Christian Slater. Something about that uniform, I guess. Wow. That may well have been the lowest moment for a good show.  I happen to believe there really are a lot of Donna’s in the world– but their love of men in uniform is ridiculous, not noble.

The best? The unusual character of Ainsley Hayes, a Republican lawyer, hired by Bartlett to work in the office of the White House Counsel. Bartlett wanted her after seeing the diminutive cute blonde humiliate Sam in a debate on network television. Emily Proctor, who played Haynes, was a find. It’s too bad they didn’t find more to do for this character– creating the unfortunate impression that she was a token character, intended only to deceive viewers into thinking the writers were more broad-minded than they really were.

That brings me to the worst episode of West Wing, the premiere episode of 2001, which supposedly came to grips with the terrorist attack on the WTC. Sorkin’s characters, in most episodes, have amazing command of even the most obscure facts and figures on the most diverse topic. But in trying to explain why terrorists hate America to a group of talented high school students touring the White House, not a single one of them, not Toby, or Sam, or CJ, or Josh, could remember an insignificant detail like the coups in Iran or Guatemala or Chile, or the embargo against Cuba, or the bombing of Cambodia, or the installation of pro-American dictators in Iran and Iraq, or the way we used Afghanistan to help bring down the Soviet Union, and then abandoned them to the fangs of the Taliban, or the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank, or the Viet Nam War.

No, if you were to believe Sorkin, those terrorists hate us because we are free, and because we are prosperous and successful, and they’re really just envious.

Even worse, the high school students themselves– one craved for even a single rebellious mind in the lot of them– asked simpering embarrassing softball questions. Could not Sorkin at least have put one independent, incisive mind among these supposed honor students? For the all the world, they sounded like unduly reverent acolytes, groveling at the feet of their karmic masters. Haven’t any of them ever read Noam Chomsky? Could there not have been one student whose parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Egypt or Syria or something, who had a different perspective? It was shameful.

Sorkin didn’t have to argue that America deserved to be attacked– but it was astonishing that he tried (and succeeded) to get away with suggesting that there was no reason at all for the attacks.

That’s not the issue. The issue is why do so many Arabs and others around the world think that America is a bully? The point is that their reasons for hating the U.S. are founded in real historical actions that resulted from very real, sometimes mistaken or bad, U.S. policy.

The episode was an unmitigated disaster, artistically and thematically. It was an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.

This weird blind spot in Sorkin’s liberalism– he’s obviously liberal on many social issues, like homosexuality and women’s rights– also shows up in Toby and CJ’s tirades against middle eastern Islamic regimes that abuse women. They’re right about the moral issue but they seem blissfully unaware of the fact that the U.S. itself is partly responsible for these regimes. They talk as if the U.S. has been consistently preaching liberal democracy to Syria and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and to Iran under our protégé, the Shah, and that wicked Islamists suddenly came along one day and drove our kindly diplomats out the country and instituted Sharia. It’s a cheap attempt to say, we can be just as militaristic and confrontational as the Republicans because we are liberals– not in spite of the fact that we are liberals.

There might or might not be a political case to be made for the Shah of Iran and American support for a regime that repressed and tortured their own citizens so we could have cheap oil for our oversized cars, but it could not and should not have been ignored, and the apparent sudden and complete ignorance of Toby et. al. of the history of U.S. involvement with Arab regimes was inexcusable.

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Those Crazy Finns!

While the rest of the world…. well, while the West…. er… while the United States has come to it’s senses and has stopped molly-coddling criminals and has given up the utopian myth of rehabilitation, those crazy Finns are practically letting their criminals off scot free.

If I were President Bush, I would add them to the “axis of evil”. There is no greater threat to the American way of life than cool calm reason and enlightened self-interest. Damn them all! Damn them to hell!

You see, those crazy Finns have the lowest rate of incarceration in Europe. For every 100,000 people, they keep about 52 in jail! Fifty-two! By golly, the Americans know how to get rid of crime! They keep about 750 people in jail for the same 100,000 citizens. And it ought to be more, by golly, because we still have lots of crime out there in the streets.

And do you know what their prisons are like? Do they make up for the light sentences and the easy parole by exacting harsher punishments in shorter periods of time? Force labour?  Floggings?  Solitary confinement?  Not a chance! Their prisons are like dormitories, their guards are unarmed, and the the prisoners are sometimes referred to as “clients”.

Are they mad?

The Finns were not always so crazy. Back in the 1950’s, they were pretty well like everyone else in “civilized” Europe. But the crime rate was high and there was lots of prison violence and escapes and stuff. They didn’t like it. Do you know what the fools did? More of the same, like the Americans? No, no, no. They consulted the “experts”. Right. The eggheads. The nerds. Those pinko eastern liberal establishment types. And you know what they recommended? They recommended that the prison system be structured to rehabilitate rather than punish! God help us, Satan has taken over the government!

Naturally, the general population was outraged and demanded a return to capital punishment.

Well, no, they didn’t.

They said, okay, let’s try it. Fortunately the results proved the folly of their ways. The crime rate went down and the prison population went down and there was less violence in prison and fewer escapes. Wait a minute…

Even the Finns admit that their approach might not work in the U.S. For one thing, you have the victims of crimes who demand brutal retribution for offenses committed against them. Apparently those push-over Finns get compensated for crimes by the government, and kind of pathetically chill out, and seem to take the view that the long range health of their society is more important than any personal satisfaction to be gained by seeking revenge. Oh the godlessness of it all!

Let us hope that the Soviet Union (over 600 individuals imprisoned for every 100,000 population) invades them soon to knock a little sense into their crazy little heads. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be likely that a vicious crime wave will come along and sweep the public up into a new frenzy of paranoia and hysteria. You see, it seems that the crime rate is way down. Rehabilitation seems to actually work.

Not as much fun as sending someone to prison for fifty years for stealing a box of cookies, is it?

We know one thing. The Finns must be godless, because it is the Christian Right that leads the charge for stiffer sentencing in the U.S. Something about someone’s traditional family values.

Or just hatred. I don’t know.

Danish incarceration rate: 52
American incarceration rate: 750
(per 100,000 population)

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Heartless Merciless Bastards

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states. New York Times, December 28, 2002

In the 1990’s, the Christian government of the United States put its heart into getting “tough on crime”, because they loved everyone. One of the things they did was pass a law that deprives convicted criminals of access to social programs intended to help people trapped in the cycle of poverty and social dysfunction.

Well, who are they intended to help? I don’t know. The U.S. government often acts as if it should be a crime to be poor, period. But let’s think about this. Most robberies are committed by people who need money. Most people who need money are poor. If a poor person commits a crime, steals money, because, after all, they have none, then let’s make sure they are always poor.

Not that welfare amounts to anything that could be interpreted as helping anyone get out of poverty in the first place, of course. But the logic is clear. The way to get rid of poverty is not by sharing the fabulous wealth most of us possess, or by making it easier for the poor to access education and social services, but by making your life on earth as hellish as possible, and one of the things we can do to ensure that is to make sure that you will never get any help again if you steal once.

States can opt out of the lifetime ban on welfare, but only two, New York and Connecticut, have.

The law is the brainchild of former Senator Phil Gramm, now vice chairman of UBS Warbuck, the investment bank. Well, we knew he wasn’t going to join Habitat for Humanity after his little lucrative stay in the Senate. It’s payback time for Mr. Gramm. After years of passing laws that are monumentally beneficial to the rich and to corporate interests, the corporate interests have put him more directly on their payroll. And it’s probably cheaper for them than it was when they had to contribute to his election campaigns instead to keep him in servitude.

In many states, convicted felons are barred from jobs like plumbing, teaching, health care, or security. I’m not making this up. In Pennsylvania, theft of two library books is sufficient to ban you for life from working in a nursing home. A man who was convicted of possession of marijuana (and received probation) when he was 18 recently discovered that, after 30 years of working in the health care field, he could not get a new job in the same field because of that previous conviction.

This is because our leaders love Jesus.

“The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States, according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.”

[2011-03: that figure is now 10%]

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The NRA and Iraq

Does the NRA, and Charlton Heston, know what their lusty cohorts in the White House are doing in Iraq?

The NRA argues that every man, woman, and child in America should be armed. That’s the best way to ensure democracy and freedom. If the government starts regulating the possession of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and Uzi submachine guns, it will soon be able to take away our precious freedoms and liberties.

The U.S. government under George Bush is trying to do precisely that to Iraq. It is bursting into their “homes” and searching for weapons and it plans to take them away if it finds them.

The NRA says that just because guns are dangerous and are often used to commit felonies doesn’t mean that any citizen should have the slightest difficulty obtaining them. In other words, you can’t assume someone is going to do something illegal with a gun, the way you can assume someone is going to do something illegal with a blank CD or a minidisc.

But here you have George Bush acting as if Saddam Hussein doesn’t have the natural right as a citizen of the world to own a few nukes or chemical bombs.

My question is– what if Saddam, or somebody, persuaded the U.N. to send a weapons inspection team to the U.S., to see if they have anything that could hurt people around the world? Like mines, chemical weapons, nukes, artillery, and guns.

Ah– but we’re the good guys. Well, we are. But we’re not perfect. And who knows what kind of idiot might end up in the White House some day?

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that in a society that controlled access to guns, the police would still have access to them. That’s the special nature of their jobs. They have special authority. They’re supposed to keep us from hurting ourselves and each other.

So the U.S., it could be supposed, has to have nukes to make sure that the Saddam Husseins– and Charlton Hestons — of the world don’t go around bullying other people.

The trouble is that the U.S. sells mines and helicopters and bombers to other countries. Sometimes, through happenstance, we end up facing the barrels of our own guns.

Why doesn’t the NRA step up and put an end to this nonsense? Where is Charlton Heston when you really need him? He should be railing against the Bush administration! Chemical weapons don’t kill people– despots do! And when you criminalize the possession of nukes, only the tyrants will have nukes! Saddam Hussein should show up at the next NRA party– usually held in a nearby town after a mass shooting– and hold a nuclear bomb in his arms above his head and proclaim, “…from my cold dead fingers!”

I can’t even begin to explain North Korea or Iran in this context. Except that Iraq, of course, has the oil.

And that reminds me of what a famous outlaw, Willie Sutton, said when someone asked him why he robbed banks.

Because that’s where they keep the money.

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About Schmidt– Bernhard Schmidt

I’ve been thinking about a German named Bernhard Voldemar Schmidt. Schmidt was so fascinated by stars and galaxies and space that he worked as an unpaid astronomer at the observatory in Hamburg in 1929. He invented a new kind of telescope that allowed the viewer to take large, fast photographs of the stars. Fritz Zwicky, who discovered black holes, used a Schmidt telescope at Palomar in California. Since then, thanks to Schmidt, there has been a tradition of devoted amateurs making important discoveries in space through small but powerful telescopes based on Schmidt’s design.

What made me think about Schmidt all day– as if that wasn’t enough– was this paragraph:

When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Schmidt was so disgusted that he gave up hope and quietly drank himself to death.

That’s true poetry. A man who, through his dedication and ingenuity, gave the world a gift, that helped people contemplate the mysteries and beauties of the universe, of space, of colliding meteors and comets and collapsing stars, and even of time itself, as the universe continues to fling itself outward madly…. that this man should drink himself to death when his own universe contracted around him into a black hole of hatred and bigotry. It’s too much.

Technically, he died of pneumonia. More accurately: cognac. He spent the last year of his life in an asylum. He died on December 1, 1935, Wiki says he had just returned from a vacation in Holland. In December?

I can’t find any reference to wife or children.

He lost his right hand and fore-arm in an accident involving experiments with gunpowder when he was fifteen.

He sang a broken hallelujah to his grave.

I know, I know– he was kind of pathetic. You might even say he was a loser. It’s hard to be sympathetic to a man who gave up. It helps no one to give up and let yourself sink into a morass of self-pity and despair.

But I have a soft spot for Bernhard Schmidt because though he did not become a force for a change or a resistance leader or a leading dissident, he saw the truth and lived the truth the only way he thought he could. I don’t even know if he was wrong. It might be truthful to say that any action he could have taken, given his time and circumstance, would have been useless.

There should be an international prize called the “Bernhard Schmidt”. And it should go to the person who best exemplifies the spirit of dismay and grief at the incredible persistence of stupidity, bigotry, hatred, and violence in human affairs. The awarding committee, which should include Leonard Cohen, and Cyndi Lauper, will descend upon a bar somewhere, and move into a dark corner, and play a little fanfare on the ukulele and kazoo, hand over the award– a crystal beer mug– and then race back to their headquarters in the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam to begin considering nominations for next year’s prize.

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Rome’s Peculiar Position on Zero Tolerance

As everybody knows, the Roman Catholic Church has a sexual abuse problem. It is besieged by lawsuits from former alter boys and others. It appears that many of the abusers, instead of being punished, were moved to other dioceses. Sometimes, they were ordered to seek psychiatric treatment or counseling, and sometimes not. In many cases, their crimes were covered up and hidden by the church hierarchy. In some cases, the church hierarchy simply denied that anything untoward had happened. In too many cases, priests went on to abuse other children after they had been caught once, twice, or several times.

There might or might not be a distinction to be made between consensual affairs between priests and teenaged boys, and younger boys who clearly could not or did not give consent. The church tried to make that distinction in many cases.

The American Bishops, prodded into action by wide publicity and a public outcry, have proposed a new set of guidelines and rules that is based on the principle of “zero tolerance”. Rome, astonishingly, has rejected it.

I say “astonishingly” because the mass herds of mindless conformists that comprise middle management in most companies and institutions flock to “zero tolerance” like lawyers to litigation. It’s how they earn their bread and butter. It’s the consensus. It’s the gist of popular opinion. It’s the bureaucrat’s hot-tub- a steaming, comfortable wash of feminist theory, righteous conservative paranoia, and muddled legalisms. It means that we are virtuous and pure and strong and moral. It really means, we have no ability to make a rational, reasonable judgment based on facts. If you deny being a witch, then you must be a witch.

Rome worries about two things: that the Bishop’s proposal doesn’t distinguish between types or degrees of abuse, or between real abuse and stupidity, and that it doesn’t leave any room for a rather fundamental component of the Christian faith: grace. In other words, forgiveness. Zero tolerance means that the slightest allegation against a priest, substantiated or not, will result in suspension or worse, and there can be no forgiveness, even for an offender who recognizes his sin and asks for grace.

And it must be said– some of the advocates of “zero tolerance” (like the fundamentalists who wanted Bill Clinton impeached) will argue that they “forgive” the sinner, but not the sin. That is a lie. That is not the Christian idea of forgiveness. Read your bible: when Christ demands that his followers forgive their enemies, he leaves no room for revenge or “justice” or retribution. Someone strikes you on the cheek? You turn the other cheek. You forgive the sinner and you do forgive the sin.

If you forgave someone who had assaulted or robbed you, in Israel in 33 AD, that person was freed: the sentence was over, because you forgave the offender.  Look it up: it’s true.

Rome also has expressed concern about the fact that the zero tolerance policy is adopted, rather wholesale, from public and private institutions in America. The church is not the government or IBM. It takes the word of God as it’s constitution, and the living presence of Christ as it’s inspiration. The American Bishop’s abuse policy sounds much like something that could have come out of McDonald’s Corporation or the YMCA.  If Rome accepted this policy, it would be to admit that the very wellspring of church leadership and authority is incapable of producing a authentic Christian response to the crisis in the church.

Some people would say, well, yes. It can’t. Rome, of course, could never accept that, the same way lawyers could never accept that laws could be simple and understandable.

But I’m not unsympathetic. In fact, I think Rome is right. Zero tolerance is one of the stupidest ideas of our society. It’s a code word, really. It’s bulldozer logic. It gives all of the power to accusers and strips the accused of all recourse. It treats offenses that really are minor the same way it treats serious offenses.

Thus, a kindergarten student is suspended from school and charged with “sexual harassment” for kissing a classmate.  Yes, this really happened.

It is a response to a real problem. There really are people out there who abuse positions of trust for sexual purposes. Too often, those people, when caught, have received trifling punishments, or no punishment at all. Sometimes, the person alleging the abuse received the punishment– losing his or her job, or being accused of lying.

The real solution is to do the hard work of sorting out the trivial from the serious, the truth from exaggeration, the substantial from the trite.

What zero tolerance means is that we now believe that accusers never lie and that is obviously not true, was never true, and never will be true.