Wannabe RoboCops Kill Bambi

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2013-08-04 Militarized Police

The Wall Street Journal ran an article called The Rise of the Warrior Cop on July 22 about the militarization of ordinary police forces. The problem–and it is a problem–has to do with the proliferation of SWAT-style police units:

The country’s first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. According to surveys conducted by the criminologist Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University, just 13% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team in 1983. By 2005, the figure was up to 80%. The number of raids conducted by SWAT-like police units has grown accordingly. In the 1970s, there were just a few hundred a year; by the early 1980s, there were some 3,000 a year. In 2005 (the last year for which Dr. Kraska collected data), there were approximately 50,000 raids.

If you want an idea of how absurd this is consider that the Fish & Wildlife Service, NASA and the Department of the Interior each have their own SWAT-style unit. Why does NASA need a military-grade police unit?

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Book Reviews for 2013 Aug 3 (J. K. Rowling is Back!)

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2013-08-03 VALIS

I finished VALIS last week, but I didn’t get a chance to post my review. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily think you will like it. Full review. Next up: 

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Pressure Cookers and XKeyscore

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XKeyscore map

Yesterday we had a semi-false alarm from a woman that merely Googling “pressure cooker” could get you a visit from jackbooted thugs. I say “semi-false” because the tip-off didn’t from from the NSA searching through the Google search records of private Americans. It came because Michele Catalano’s husband or son (unclear which) was using a work computer to Google “pressure cooker bomb” and this was discovered by the employer and they sent a tip to the police. So, having the cops show up because of an Internet search is slightly Orwellian, but the fact that it was just the company monitoring their own hardware is a lot different than some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet.

Only, at more or less the same time, we had the Guardian publish more docs (originally from Snowden) documenting how there is, in fact, some kind of all-encompassing NSA dragnet. It’s called XKeyscore.

The devil is always in the details with these things, but there are some alarming details. First, no court order is required for a search. Second, the database that is searched is near real-time.

As a general rule, I think that you basically have to choose one of two mindsets about these things:

  1. It’s not a problem until someone actual abuses the system.
  2. It’s a problem as long as someone could abuse the system.

I tend to fall into the second camp, and so these revelations are disconcerting (to put it mildly). I think that, in principle, the idea of keeping huge amounts of data on American citizens (or non-citizens) could be defended if there were some really, really robust transparency measures and checks and balances. But the really big problem is that these are all secrete programs we weren’t supposed to know about. And if we can’t know about them, then I have a hard time trusting that they won’t inevitably be abused.

What Are “Obamaphones”?

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2013-08-02 Obamaphone

I’ve heard lots about so-called “Obamaphones”, but this is the first article that really explained what’s going on.

The Federal Communications Commission oversees the so-called Lifeline program, created in 1984 to make sure impoverished Americans had telephone service available to call their moms, bosses, and 911. In 2008, the FCC expanded the program to offer subsidized cell-phone service…

The rest of the article is really easy to predict once you know just one simple fact: the companies are paid by the government for every cell phone plan they create. If you’ve got a company that’s supposed to only hand out one free cell phone per household, but they’re getting paid by the cell phone, what do you think will happen? Jillian Kay Melchoir (who wrote this piece) decided to find out. Although she doesn’t qualify for any phones and although she never lied on any of the applications, she ended up with a handful of free phones anyway. She got progressively sillier in her attempts to get new phones, culminating in a scene like this one: 

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Reza Aslan and Fox News: It’s Never That Simple

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2013-07-31 Aslan

I love watching partisan news stories play out. It’s fascinating to see the way everyone weaves as fast as they can so that each new fact can be nestled snugly into a pre-existing worldview before the next one. That’s one of the changes of the Internet-based news era, I guess. We all make our own spin now.

I’ll be honest, though, when the painful-to-watch Fox News interview of Reza Aslan hit my social networking feed, I thought this was a pretty cut-and-dry case of total cluelessness on Fox’s behalf. Here, you can spin up the video while you read the rest of the post if you like.

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Go Ahead and Raise Those Expectations, Ladies

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2013-07-31 Dating

Melissa Langsam Braunstein thinks it’s time for ladies to raise their dating expectations. I agree. (Then again, I haven’t been on the dating scene for about a decade, so maybe that’s easy for me to say). The gist of Braunstein’s argument is that the hookup culture isn’t really giving (most) women what they want. For political reasons some feminists may disagree (acknowledging any difference between the sexes at all is bound to get you in trouble with at least one angry feminist somewhere), but I think this is by now sort of obvious for people without an ideological hill to defend.

What struck me as interesting, however, was her observation that when she went ahead and announced that she expected to be courted (to use an old phrase), she got results. She writes:

And the more I communicated that I expected to be treated like a lady, the more I found men eagerly rose to the occasion.

I’m going to go ahead and be stereotypical and say that Braunstein is on to something. Men like to accomplish things, but in a world that has thrown away the rules for courtship it’s increasingly hard for men to know what to accomplish. And the result is that too many quit trying.

Look, I’m not saying that women have an obligation to rescue men from the prison of their own low-expectations. Just that a little direction can be helpful, and that the more clear and widespread expectations for men are the more of them that will take it as an opportunity to rise to the occasion.

 

My John Scalzi Envy Deepens…

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Art from Morning Star Alpha, which John Scalzi is writing.
Art from Morning Star Alpha, which John Scalzi is writing.

I’ve been following sci-fi author John Scalzi since his first novel (Old Man’s War) debuted back in 2005. He got a lot of favorable and well-earned comparisons to Heinlein (not to mention a Hugo nomination) for that book , which does a lot of things that I like: 

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The Psychology of Anthony Weiner’s Photo Problems

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2013-07-30 Weiner

With an odd blend of poignancy and frankness, Katy Waldman explains at Slate just how mistaken Weiner is if he thinks his, *ahem*, “self-portraits” are having their intended effect:

Is there anything more depressing than the crotch shot? Any other form of so-called erotic communication that telegraphs the same mix of loneliness and tawdriness? Amanda Hess finds Anthony Weiner’s newly-unearthed sexts boring. To me, they are more like the photos of oil-soaked birds that surface after a petroleum spill: greasy, helpless, and broadcasting a frantic need.

The rest continues in this vein and I think it’s worth the read precisely because it’s not trying to be funny. It’s a serious consideration of Weiner’s issues and, along the way, of what men so often get wrong about what women

(I’m sure there’s all kind of ridiculous fun I could have had with this headline, but I think I’ll just leave that to Matt Drudge. The self-portrait line is as far as I’m going to go.)