Hope is not a plan

Nothing is ever truly uniform. This is probably a good life lesson to keep in mind. Certainly, it leads to clarity of thought to recall that any political unit is fundamentally just a bunch of people rather than a uniform mass.

South Ossetia, now even more than ever a de facto independent state in the wake of the sound beating down of the Georgian military by their Russian counterparts, is holding its parliamentary elections this week. Russian faux news source Russia today reports that the ruling party has won. This will be a disappointment, if not a surprise, to opposition members, as their two parties were actually banned from the election. As a consequence, the voting was basically between "the ruling party" and "that other party that likes the ruling party."

With 50,000 people eligible to vote, it's quite likely that South Ossetia has fewer eligible voters than the city or town you live in. It's important to remember, even at this scale, that this is not a uniform mass of identical people. Even if most of them were in agreement about not wanting to be part of Georgia (and I have not actually looked to see if we have survey data that says this is the case), that doesn't mean they all want or like their current leadership.

Interestingly, it looks like Nicaragua has become the second country (after Russia) to recognize South Ossetia as a nation. This is an interesting step to take in light of the fact that Nicaragua may well have its own separatist movement to deal with.

al Jazeera article

Especially when you do it in a recorded, archived medium.

The SEC is charging Angelo Mozilo, David Sambol, and Eric Sieracki with fraud, alleging that they misled the market when they insisted that Countrywide Financial was doing fine. Mozilo in particular receives the bonus charge of insider trading, as he earned $140 million off of his shares prior to Countrywide's collapse.

Notably, Mozilo is on record demonstrating that he was not blind to the risks:

The SEC published extracts from e-mails sent by Mr Mozilo.

"The bottom line is that we are flying blind on how these loans will perform in a stressed environment of higher unemployment, reduced values and slowing home sales," he wrote on 26 September 2006.

Thus, fraud.

BBC article

In late 2006, an arsonist's fire killed five Riverside county firefighters. This week, the arsonist was sentenced to be killed after having been found guilty of first degree murder. Concerns about the specific choice of sentences (death versus life imprisonment) aside, I appreciate that he was found guilty of the murders, as "indirect" killings of this type seem to be more prone to escaping that fate.

Riverside County Superior Court Judge W Charles Morgan found that the aggravating circumstances in Oyler's case outweighed the mitigating circumstances.

"He knew that young men and woman would put their lives on the line to protect other people and property and he continued anyway."

Given the Southern California ecosystem, arson is fundamentally a terrorist act, with the potential for far more widespread destruction than most conventional terrorists can manage. Given this, it's important from both the safety and cost standpoints that arsonists be aggressively pursued and quashed.

BBC article

Mr. Obama -

As you already know, the government of North Korea recently announced the sentencing to over a decade of hard labor of two American citizens, Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Especially given the reasonable likelihood that these two American journalists were kidnapped from China by members of the North Korean military, I am unwilling to watch them be held and tortured by a government that has shown its willingness in the past to abscond with citizens of other nations and hold them indefinitely.

Clearly, begin with negotiations. But if those fail, please bring Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling back, one way or another.

Thank you

You can write your own letter here.

This is what I'm talking about.

We have seen repeatedly in the last decade that an initial wave of sympathy or at least noncommital coexistence between locals and radicals predictably dissolves once the locals realize that the radicals do not have their best interests at heart. Whether it's Iraqis being turned off by the mass slaughter of their own populace or residents of the Swat valley tiring of watching young women stoned to death for no good reason, local residents find that the fanatics who have intercalated themselves in their midst really are just there to serve their own needs, and not to help.

The latest line of dissonance between radicals and locals is occurring in the Somali south, where Wahhabi fanatics are desecrating locals tombs. While the north operates as a semi-autonomous state, the south of Somalia is under the influence and de facto rule of Islamic radicals based on the Wahhabi tradition. Their view of the local Sufi-oriented faith is that it is a corruption of the true faith. Specifically, they view Sufi-style tombs as idolatry, and have taken to defacing them as a consequence.

This has not gone over well.

"The people of Brave feel the desecrations of graves are actions against humanity," said Mohamed Sheikh, a Bravenese community leader in Manchester in the north-west of England.

"These people cannot teach us about Islam. Islam reached Brave and all the coastal areas when the religion arrived in East Africa 1,250 to 1,300 years ago."

BBC article

Just ahead of an actual court date, Royal Dutch Shell has paid out $15.5 million in a settlement with families of nine Ogoni activists who were hanged in 1995 following conviction by a military tribunal. The assertion is that...

...Shell officials helped to supply Nigerian police with weapons during the 1990s, participated in security sweeps in parts of Ogoniland and hired government troops that shot at villagers who protested against a pipeline.

The case was brought under an old American law, apparently:

The lawsuit was brought under a 1789 law which allows US courts to hear human rights cases brought by foreign nationals over actions that take place abroad.

Interviewed on the BBC today, one of the attorneys involved on the plaintiff side said he was satisfied with the settlement, rather than going to trial, as, in his words, "Shell would never admit wrongdoing," even if a judgment were made against them.

This is an interesting era of increasing international pressure and, in the right circumstances, accountability.

BBC article

Following irrational opposition to housing them somewhere in the United States, seventeen Uighurs being held on Guantanamo are going to be sent to Palau, where apparently enchantment awaits.

The Uighurs, who have been determined to not be enemy combatants, will not be repatriated to China since the government of China may well just slot them straight into torture as soon as they hit soil, and we fortunately are not down with that prospect. Unfortunately, American representatives are also so high on the concept of the magical power of detainees to wreak havoc that we can't simply have them here on American soil (which they apparently despoil just by the very touch).

Which is too bad, really, since I think it might be good for us to have some friendly contact with people who are from, and understand the people of, a key critical region of instability within one of our major world competitors. Also, I know a pretty decent Uighur-run restaurant in Southern California. They might like it.

Most likely wanting to play nice with the U.S., the government of Palau has stepped up where American representatives have pissed themselves, and will face the threat of seventeen random dudes from China.

Good to know we have Palau on our side, then.

BBC article

Stephen Tyrone Johns died defending visitors at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. From the museum site:

There are no words to express our grief and shock over today’s events at the Museum, which took the life of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Officer Johns, who died heroically in the line of duty, served on the Museum’s security staff for six years. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Officer Johns’s family. We have made the decision to close the Museum Thursday, June 11, in honor of Officer Johns and our flags will be flown at half mast in his memory.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Zimbabwe's finance minister, Tendai Biti, reported this week that they expect the economy of Zimbabwe could grow 4-6% in the coming year.

"I think we will be able to achieve a growth rate of at least 6%, although conservatively it will be 4% in 2009," he told journalists.

The fact that the government was able to address Zimbabwe's economic problems "without any cent from anyone", he added, showed that "we can do it with or without huge financial resources".

It is, perhaps, time to do some due diligence on that statement before believing it, as Zimbabwe was quite recently suffering from economic contraction and staggering inflation.

The United States has pledged $73 million in aid, following in the wake of a meeting with Morgan Tsvangirai.

BBC article

A cargo vessel was recently hijacked off the coast of Oman, marking an extension of Somali-bred piracy even farther from home waters, presumably to attempt work around naval patrols along the Gulf of Aden.

This again suggests that the required course of action is to address the piracy at its source. This could mean raids into the middle and south of Somalia, but it might also just mean offering support for Somali governments that work.

BBC article

A federal judge ruled Friday that Cal law professor and torture facilitator John Yoo can be sued by Jose Padilla, by dint of Yoo's role in generating a 'legal' framework for torture for the Bush administration.

"Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct," White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Yoo.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said.

The activist judge behind the decision to allow this trial to go ahead is Jeffrey White, who was appointed by noted liberal George W. Bush.

SF Chronicle article

As an interesting footnote to the ongoing tumult in Iran, consider this bit from the BBC's reporting on the topic:

Some telephone, SMS and internet services have also been restricted, prompting some protesters to turn to the internet messaging service Twitter to communicate.

The official said the state department contacted Twitter over the weekend to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have cut daytime service to Iranians.

I don't really use Twitter myself, but consider the hopeful nature of (1) twitter dodging attempts at censorship and (2) someone at State being aware of this fact and making the move to keep Iranian citizens communicating with the world by contacting Twitter. This is an impressive positive on both counts.

BBC article

This week the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles ruled that the LAPD (and by extension, any local police agency) can order its officers to neither stop nor arrest people to attempt to determine their immigration status. This case was brought by Judicial Watch over their concern that this kind of policy - also in place with the SFPD - violated a Federal law that requires state and local governments to let their employees share information about someone's immigration status with federal authorities.

In what honestly sounds like a fairly clear-cut decision (and 3-0, at that), the court determined that preventing stops and arrests to determine immigration status is completely orthogonal to letting officers relay that same information to Federal authorities.

Los Angeles police can ask immigration-related questions of people they arrest for other reasons and can relay the information to federal agents, Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling. He said the Constitution prohibits the federal government from requiring state and local governments to enforce immigration law but allows voluntary local enforcement under federal supervision.

It feels like a pretty big stretch to try to go from "you can't keep your officers from reporting immigration status" to "you have to let your officers arrest people to determine their immigration status," so this outcome is not unexpected.

Now, the actual important question undergirds the entire point of a case like this. Clearly, Judicial Watch is playing to the "kick them all out" goal vis-a-vis illegal immigrants, but as a citizen of the state, I'm far more concerned with the public health and safety outcomes of different policies. With an estimated 6.5% of California's population being illegal immigrants, tasking the LAPD with proactively collecting illegal immigrants could be reasonably expected to do even more damage to their ability to prevent and solve crimes. After all, if any routine contact can result in deportation, you are automatically strongly disincentivizing 6.5% (and probably more, really) of your population from ever, ever talking to the police. This, in turn, could potentially lead to a dangerous knock-on effect of closing communities even further to the police.

I say "it could," because we need more empirical analyses to determine what actually happens when you do or don't task your local police department with aggressively following up on immigration status. Judicial Watch believes that everything will be magically better if the LAPD presses hard on deporting people. I, in turn, am concerned about potentially dramatic increases in community harm were that to happen. Neither of us has empirical data to generate an actual cost-benefit analysis of these potential measures, however, which makes it especially ridiculous that Judicial Watch pursued this in court.

Their ideological cart is well ahead of their invisible empirical horse, and means that they're wasting my tax dollars and their time pursuing the legal course of action when they could, instead, generate an empirical dataset to support their beliefs (assuming, of course, reality decides to line up with their ideology).

SF Chronicle article

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

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.

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

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

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