Hope is not a plan

You may already be aware, as it's made a significant circuit around various social networking sites, of the current case of 1LT Dan Choi, who is about to be drummed out of the United States military because he violated the risible "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy by, effectively, telling. This is unfortunate since, as the text of circulating petitions tells us:

Lt. Dan Choi, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, an Iraq War veteran, Arabic translator and California native, is a capable soldier and leader who could continue to play a vital role in this time of war.

It's hard to imagine his gender proclivities playing a significant role in his ability to apply his skills to defending our country. Perhaps even more to the point, the military men and women I've been friends with were strongly ambivalent about this kind of trivia about their fellow soldiers and sailors. Admittedly, I've mostly spoken with members of the Navy and the Marine Corps, but I'm willing to use them as a representative sampling of our armed forces generally.

This link from Courage Campaign encourages you to sign a petition that Lieutenant Choi will bring with him when he goes to talk with Speaker Pelosi. The petition encourages the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," since as long as the law is on the books, our military is relatively hamstrung in dealing with these situations, whether the people involved care or not.

I encourage you to go a step beyond and contact your representative and senators. Let them know that this is important to you, and that it will impact your willingness to vote for them in the future.

You can click here to learn how to contact your representative and senators.

Call or write your legislators today. Let them know you want your country to use all its available resources to win our wars and maintain the peace.

Posted by parakkum at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my major news sources is the BBC. A knock-on effect of this is that I keep getting exposed to the curious (read: crazy) panic about sharp objects that has swept through the UK, moving in parallel with the general fear of their own youth that seems to have swept the nation as well. Previously, I've reported on entirely rational plans like evicting families with problem kids, and the general manufacturing of a knife epidemic in the UK. In that latter post, I made a crack about how I'd just order my kitchen knives from Amazon to avoid the risk of being arrested for walking home with them from the local Tesco.

Well, apparently the fear is one up on me there, as a new BBC article reports that, in true scandal fashion, a teenager managed to order some machetes online.

Trading standards officers have called for a ban on online knife sales after a machete was sold to a 15-year-old for £1.50 over the internet.

"As knife crime remains a problem in many of our towns and cities, it beggars belief that so many traders are still prepared to sell potentially lethal weapons to children," said Ron Gainsford, chief executive of the Trading Standards Institute (TSI).

They're going to be awfully disappointed to learn that people can stab each other with screwdrivers and pointed sticks. I'm not sure what the game plan will be the next time someone is beaten to death with a cricket bat.

Clearly, knives (as with guns and pretty much any other weapon) raise the likelihood that violence will result in serious injury and death. That said, they don't cause the violence, and the increasing tendency to panic about kids and assume in advance that they are all criminals isn't going to help promote non-violent resolutions, nor will make those same kids feel like they can comfortably talk to their parents, the police, or other authorities if there's an issue.

Seen from a distance, the current panic in the UK about "those kids these days" is curious and a little sad.

BBC article

Posted by parakkum at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've posted before about the curious phenomenon of areas that pride themselves on "small government" and "self sufficiency" nonetheless being happy to rake in giant piles of government money, more, in fact, than they put into the system.

At the moment, our state budget is stalled out due to our foolish supermajority rule, and the recalcitrance of the Republican party as buoyed by this rule. I am far from a partisan for the Democrats, but I am frustrated at the willingness of our state's Republicans to commit organizational suicide rather than reach reasonable compromise.

Now, the SF Chronicle is reporting on a review of state income and spending that was commissioned by Assemblymember Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, which shows, briefly, that our self-reliant 'conservative' counties are pulling down a disproportionate share of state government money.

Marin County was No. 1 in contributions, at $4,793 per person, and San Francisco was No. 3 at $3,578. Modoc was No. 2 in consumption at $2,216 per person, and conservative Tulare was No. 1, with $2,223.

"I don't think voters in the conservative counties understand the connection between the service they are receiving and the votes their representatives are making," Evans said. "Maybe the layers of government are so convoluted that many people don't realize how it works."

Ms. Evans has hit the nail on the head here, as the misunderstanding of the link between money paid in and services received is at the heart of the problem (as I've discussed previously). Note that as the SF staff writer tells us, it's not an issue of 'dumb Republicans' in these areas, either:

The prevailing attitude among the right-wing ranchers and modern hippies who define Modoc County is of fierce self-reliance - but more people here than just about anywhere else depend on welfare checks of some kind to get by.

It is, instead, the difficulty in understanding that money in yields services out, and that these services are critical to our communities existing as we want them to.

In Modoc, the way it works is that if the cuts being proposed go through, near-catastrophe will reign, said County Administrative Officer Mark Charlton.

"You'll be able to translate these cuts into more accidents on the road, more people in jail, more people getting sick," Charlton said.

Right now, counties like mine are funding counties like this - and I am glad we are, because I want my fellow citizens to have good roads, appropriate medical care, and opportunities that will lead people out of poverty and into rewarding work. I understand that my money in yields these things, and that is why I am happy to pay taxes for these purposes.

There are no road faeries, nor are there school or hospital faeries. If we do not pay in for these services, they will disappear, and people will suffer. It's unfortunate that some citizens of the state don't realize that they are those people.

SF Chronicle article

Posted by parakkum at 05:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

al Jazeera is reporting that Taliban leader Qari Zainuddin has been shot and killed by one of his own guards following criticism by him of Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Taliban in Pakistan.

Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, said: "Zainuddin had accused Baitullah Mehsud of going against the tenets of Islam for carrying out attacks on religious scholars.

"He said he would take his men and go after Baitullah Mehsud."

...and...

Zainuddin had said: "Whatever Baitullah Mehsud and his associates are doing in the name of Islam is not a jihad, and in fact it is rioting and terrorism.''

Hm.

al Jazeera article

Posted by parakkum at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As protests flare with concomitant government-backed violence in Iran, it can be easy to miss the ongoing unrest in other parts of the world.

Today, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, president of the Russian republic of Ingushetia, was injured during a car bomb attack on his convoy in the town of Nazran (the former capital of Ingushetia, actually). This is just the latest in a string of attacks on government officials in Ingushetia, a string that has already resulted in the deaths of the deputy chief supreme court justice (hit while dropping her kids off at school) and a former vice prime minister (shot outside his home).

Even as Chechnya has "calmed down," Ingushetia has picked up more than its share of refugees from its neighboring state. At the same time, its government has a dubious record when it comes to dealing with internal dissent, including the highly suspicious death in custody of vigorous critic Magomed Yevloyev (whose site, I note, is no longer active).

Despite its apparent pacification of Chechnya via tremendous violence, and the smashing of the Georgian offensive, the Russian government has not managed to actually stop elements of its southern Muslim minorities from taking violent action against local authorities. The latest string of attacks on Ingushetian authorities may well motivate military action much in the mode of the Ossetian and Chechen conflicts. If so, we can expect a new wave of refugees from Ingushetia, but whether they will try to return to Chechnya or perhaps spill into the Ossetias is unclear.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Posted by parakkum at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in 2006 the California electorate fairly overwhelmingly voted for Prop 83, also known as "Jessica's Law." If you've forgotten what that is, you can return to my review of it here. The major additions of this proposition to our state law concerning sex offenders were (1) the ability to hold offenders after their normal sentence is up, (2) a GPS tracking system, and (3) an increase in the required stand-off distance between where a registered sex offender can live and park and schools. Since its passage, the law has been challenged repeatedly, largely on the basis of the possibly unconstitutional nature of the indefinite hold following completion of the assigned sentence. For more on those challenges and the law's current status, I'll direct you to this post on the California Criminal Defense Attorney Blog.

I ended up opposing Prop 83 based on the lack of a good analysis of the effectiveness of the GPS tracking proposal and, perhaps more importantly, the inherent problems involved in increasing the parks and schools stand-off distance to 2,000 feet (from 1,300 feet). The concern, even at the time, is that this amounted to California's urban and suburban areas effectively making registered sex offenders into a rural problem, since the only places you can find that are 2,000 feet away from schools and parks are in our farm counties.

Now, in this article the BBC reports on the consequences of a similar law in Miami. There, the stand-off distance is 2,500 feet, and this has led to a peculiar consequence:

The area under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in downtown Miami has in recent years become the unlikely home for a growing community of about 70 convicted sex offenders.

Some of them have even been issued driving licences with the bridge listed as their home address.

Naturally, there are concerns about this from a humanitarian perspective vis-a-vis the former offenders themselves. That said, pragmatically speaking this is a concern even if you don't care at all about their well-being. Consider the words of Dr. Pedro Green, interviewed in the BBC article:

"What we're doing is we're saying 'let's take the people that we most despise, that did some of the most egregious things in society and let them all get together and not supervise them and let them wander around the community'," he tells me with a clear sense of frustration in his voice.

This is the urban equivalent of California's problem. If you are saying that these individuals are too dangerous to be allowed within residential areas, then how comfortable can you be at unleashing them into our state's heartland, where police are not readily at hand but there are, nonetheless, a lot of kids (which may, perhaps, surprise voters who don't regularly make it through our farm counties).

This is the problematic consequence of half-assed, feel-good law design. In making a former offender "somebody else's problem" you make them your problem, whether it's by putting them into one angry, like-minded, disenfranchised mass, as in Miami, or shunting them into the vast stretches of the rural heartland, as we are now obligated to do in California. If we, hopefully for evidence-based reasons, are concerned that former sex offenders will consistently revisit their crimes, then we must address that problem, rather than hoping that if they are not in your community, they won't get your kids, which is ultimately both ignorant and selfish.

Posted by parakkum at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm amused at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech today, as it offers up such helpful gems as:

"There is 11 million votes difference," the ayatollah said. "How can one rig 11 million votes?"

Given the apparent fact that the voting certification did not even follow the Republic's normal rules for vote certifications.

"The Islamic establishment will never manipulate people's votes and commit treason ... the legal structures and electoral regulations of this country do not allow vote rigging," he said in his first public address on the issue since the election.

I'm confident that, by the book, elections in Chicago can never be rigged, either.

At the same time as the Ayatollah was telling everyone to shut up and go home, Ahmadinejad was backing off from generally derogatory remarks he'd made about the protesters, insisting that he just meant the ones who were burning buildings. Inasmuch as those are his loyalist Basij militia members (who are also killing off their fellow Iranians), that's fairly risible as well.

When a young Persian expat was interviewed on the BBC today, he complained that reporters are only reporting from Tehran, whereas out in the rest of the country, people like Ahmadinejad. When the BBC interviewer pointed out that this was because most foreign reporters had been ejected and the others couldn't leave Tehran, the expat suggested they could "find a way" and that the coverage of election-related unrest is all about hating on the Islamic Republic.

Of course, what seems most accurate is that what happens next will depend on people within Iran, and we will continue to simply watch and see.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Posted by parakkum at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)