January 2006 – Richard Bennett

Filibuster Alito

The New York Times urges Democrats to filibuster Alito: It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle. Even a losing battle would draw the public’s attention to the import of this nomination. And I agree. Of course the man is qualified, and of … Continue reading “Filibuster Alito”

The New York Times urges Democrats to filibuster Alito:

It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle. Even a losing battle would draw the public’s attention to the import of this nomination.

And I agree. Of course the man is qualified, and of course the Democratic attacks in the hearings were lame, but this guy creeps me out. He’s just too deferential to government power and just doesn’t seem to be sufficiently impressed by the Bill of Rights. A conservative President is surely entitled to nominate a conservative judge, but said nominee needs to be a little more ballsy when it comes to striking down examples of Congressional over-reach.

Bush can do better than Alito, and he should be encouraged to try again. Third time’s a charm.

Going for Google

You’ve probably noticed that Google doesn’t work as well as it used to. Instead of finding good links on the first page or two of a search, you now have to page through 5 or 6 pages until you get to the good stuff. I don’t know why this is, unless it’s a combination of … Continue reading “Going for Google”

Whatever the reason, it’s apparent that Google hasn’t addressed the problem with its core product, despite the merry time it’s having building marginal add-ons to basic search. And the company has grown so large it’s considered invulnerable. It reminds me of IBM in the mainframe days, or Alta Vista before Google.

While Google is sitting on its laurels, the rest of the tech world isn’t, and the Silicon Valley’s golden company may soon be facing some competition from some former classmates of Page and Brin who’re building a more sophisticated search engine:

If there’s anyone itching to take on Google, it is the two Indian guys who went to Stanford with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Meet Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee, and who twice seriously considered acquiring Google in its early days, but decided their friend Brin was too bold, if not arrogant, to deal with.

Now they plan to officially launch an ambitious search engine company, Kosmix at the Demo conference to begin the week of Feb 6 in Phoenix. They’ve also raised $7.4 million in venture capital.

They are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic of a Web page. “This is an unsolved problem on the Web,” says Harinarayan, from his office perched on the seventh floor of a Mountain View high-rise. His window commands a sweeping view of the valley, stretching out over toward the Googleplex, just three miles away.

Their search structures results by analyzing the context around the key words, something Google should have already done by now.

We may shortly see another example of how fleeting fame can be in this valley.

Why political discussions are so stupid

A shocking new study reveals that people don’t process political information with their rational brains, but with their hysterical emotions: The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain … Continue reading “Why political discussions are so stupid”

A shocking new study reveals that people don’t process political information with their rational brains, but with their hysterical emotions:

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.

The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

“The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,” Westen said.

Duh.

Moving on up

Matt Welch, the man who invented the Warblog, has moved into the Big House with a shiny new job editing the opinion pages at the LA Times. He’s going to be shaping the national political dialog: I’ll be helping shape the section; editing and writing both columns and editorials, hopefully bringing some new voices to … Continue reading “Moving on up”

Matt Welch, the man who invented the Warblog, has moved into the Big House with a shiny new job editing the opinion pages at the LA Times. He’s going to be shaping the national political dialog:

I’ll be helping shape the section; editing and writing both columns and editorials, hopefully bringing some new voices to paper, and cooking up new schemes in the steamrooms under Spring Street. I’ll have the pleasure of working for a smart editor I have a great deal of faith in, Andres Martinez.

And not only is he free from the stifling politically correct conformity of Reason Magazine’s Burning Man crowd, he’ll get to be a frequent object of the wrath of assistant DA and petty Times-hater Patterico Frey.

This is definitely a step forward for civilization.

Ten years too late

Family Scholars Blog is up to their old tricks again, touting some discredited old advocacy research as if it were bright, shining, and new: Family structure clearly influences educational outcomes for U.S. children. The weakening of U.S. family structure in recent decades, driven primarily by high and rising rates of unwed childbearing and divorce, has … Continue reading “Ten years too late”

Family Scholars Blog is up to their old tricks again, touting some discredited old advocacy research as if it were bright, shining, and new:

Family structure clearly influences educational outcomes for U.S. children. The weakening of U.S. family structure in recent decades, driven primarily by high and rising rates of unwed childbearing and divorce, has almost certainly weakened the educational prospects and achievements of U.S. children. Put more positively, there is a solid research basis for the proposition that strengthening U.S. family structure in the future — increasing the proportion of children growing up with their own, two married parents — would significantly improve the educational achievements of U.S. children…

Lower levels of income account for some of the differences in educational outcomes between children living with their own married parents and those in other family structures. For this reason, improving the economic circumstances of one-parent families would probably improve children’s educational outcomes in those families.

In fact, educational outcomes for boys in single-mother families are much worse than for girls, but this fact gets no mention in their latest “research brief”, a very shoddy piece of work based on an advocacy research paper by some group in Alabama. Pumping more money into these families is not going to help the boys, but alternative custody arrangements will, and that’s what the data actually show.

See a related and only slightly less clueless article on the marriage gap by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal. Hymowitz observes a big difference between highly-educated and poorly-educated women with respect to views on marriage, but fails to register the shortage of well-educated men in poor communities. So we have a self-reinforcing system in the poor and mostly ethnic communities: high rates of single-parent families lead to low numbers of well-educated boys, which lead to low rates of marriage, etc. It really shouldn’t take a network inventor to figure this stuff out.

Milton in the code

I found this in some code I was reading today: /* * Farewell, happy fields, * Where joy forever dwells; hail horrors! * * John Milton, Paradise Lost */ system_reset(); I work for a very literate company, apparently.

I found this in some code I was reading today:

/*
* Farewell, happy fields,
* Where joy forever dwells; hail horrors!
*
* John Milton, Paradise Lost
*/
system_reset();

I work for a very literate company, apparently.

Not much scholarship

The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the so-called Family Scholars Blog are all upset over Georgia’s attempt to correct inequities in its child support guideline. The AJC says it’s going to make children live on mac and cheese, and the Family Scholars see equally grim consequences: The “second family” who actually has the dad in the … Continue reading “Not much scholarship”

The “second family” who actually has the dad in the home still typically gets a lot more than the “first” family kids who don’t live with him. And of course the dad bears some responsibility for bearing new children if he did not feel he could adequately care for them. So while I’m sympathetic to the needs of the second family children, it’s also the case that their parents are married and they are benefitting in tangible and intangible ways from that situation, while too often the kids of a father’s earlier marriage suffer a dramatic drop in family income, social capital, and family connectedness that the states, even if they wanted to, could not fully rectify.

The AJC editorial that FS quotes pushes the stereotype that divorce is about men running off and leaving their families. Once this is cemented in the reader’s mind, he’s going to be sympathetic to hanging dad out to dry. Of course, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of divorce knows that this stereotype is false; the vast majority of divorces are chosen by women, typically for very flimsy reasons.

Family Scholar Marquardt claims: The “second family” who actually has the dad in the home still typically gets a lot more than the “first” family kids who don’t live with him., also incorrect. While child support guidelines are state law and vary wildly across the country, the norm removes an enormous amount of money from the father’s household and, when tax consequences are taken into account, leaves him in a poorer financial position than the mother’s household. (even Peterson’s full review of the Weitzman data showed that, and guidelines are much higher now than they were then.) As children still need to spend time with their fathers, costs of maintaining the less-custodial household aren’t substantially less than those of the more-custodial household.

And then you have the double standard problem: married parents are simply required by law to provide their children with the basics of food, clothing, medical care, and shelter, while divorced fathers are required to go beyond that and provide a certain lifestyle to both the children and the mother. This is a constitutional problem.

And then you have the problem of incorrectly characterizing support for the mother as “child support” rather than alimony. The problem here is that alimony is taxable for the recipient but child support to the payer. If these stay-at-home divorced moms have no income except what their ex-husbands pay them, it’s much more tax-efficient to the family as a whole to characterize the support as alimony, and much more honest.

Second families aren’t a new issue in the discussion about divorce laws; they’ve been a major part of the dialog since at least the mid-90s. Men tend to get re-married faster than women, and there’s no law or public policy objective that says men are better off single. Even David Blankenhorn, no friend to fathers, says men need the “civilizing influence of marriage” Does that principle apply any less to divorced men than to never-married ones? (Family Scholars is Blankenhorn’s blog.)

The bottom line is that women who want to be stay-at-home moms are better off married than divorced, which is simply common sense to anybody but the Family Scholars and their comrades across the political divide, the anti-father feminists.

Julie Batson’s Op-Ed in the AJC is a reasonable analysis of the Georgia situation:

Public and elected officials have recognized what judges have been slow to recognize — the current guidelines are blatantly unfair and have no basis in economic reality.

With the adoption of the new tables and the clarifications to the statute, Georgia will finally be in line with all of the other states in the Southeast and most of the nation regarding how child support is calculated.

There has been a lot of heated debate regarding the parenting time adjustments included in the bill. If Georgia wants to encourage fathers to be involved in their children’s lives, then fathers need to be able to afford to spend time with their children.

Under the current system, many fathers simply could not afford to spend time with their children after paying the monthly child support amount they had been ordered to pay. Many had to pay child support amounts as if they never exercised visitation, let alone had joint physical custody.

Family Scholars would do well to consider her argument.

Baiting the blogosphere

Declan McCullagh is Cnet’s chief political correspondent and an ardent champion of civil liberties, EFF-style*. He runs the Politech e-mail list, a place where such stories as the Little Red Book hoax are given wide currency and writes a column on civil liberties for Cnet, which most recently consists of a hysterical misconstruction of the telephone harassment provision added to the Violence Against Women Act. I’m no fan of VAWA, which is mainly a barrel of pork to fund “feminist” advocacy groups and has very little to do with reducing violence, but McCullough’s interpretation of the harassment law is completely ridiculous:

It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

Well actually, it is a joke, as Cal Lanier explains:

Jeff Jarvis and others are upset about a News.com story declaring that President Bush made it a crime to write annoying comments on the internet. But perhaps the ranters didn’t read the source material.

Section 113 of the Violence Against Women Act adds a parameter to the telephone harassment law’s definition of “telecommunications device”: include any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications.

The definition already excludes “an interactive computer service”, defined as any information service, system, or access software provider, which should eliminate Internet postings from consideration, unless I’m missing something.

Here’s the important part of the new definition: includes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications .

If that doesn’t ring a bell, you probably aren’t familiar with the battle to define VOIP (voice over internet protocol). The previous law assumed that all phone calls would be made via a “telecommunications service” using a “telecommunications device”. The FCC has consistently found that VOIP is an unregulated “information service”, thus exempting it from all sorts of fees and services. A VOIP call may be functionally indistinguishable from a landline or cell phone call. Legally, though, it’s not a telecommunications service and doesn’t require the use of a telecommunications device. Adding the new text to the definition removes a potential loophole and ensures that VOIP calls will be treated just as any other telephone call.

and Orin Kerr concurs:

This is just the perfect blogosphere story, isn’t it? It combines threats to bloggers with government incompetence and Big Brother, all wrapped up and tied togther with a little bow. Unsurprisingly, a lot of bloggers are taking the bait.

Skeptical readers will be shocked, shocked to know that the truth is quite different. First, a little background. The new law amends 47 U.S.C. 223, the telecommunications harassment statute that goes back to the Communications Act of 1934. For a long time, Section 223 has had a provision prohibiting anonymous harassing speech using a telephone. 47 U.S.C. 223(a)(1)(C) states that

[whoever] makes a telephone call or utilizes a telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications . . . shall be [punished].

Seems pretty broad, doesn’t it? Well, there’s a hook. It turns out that the statute can only be used when prohibiting the speech would not violate the First Amendment. If speech is protected by the First Amendment, the statute is unconstitutional as applied and the indictment must be dismissed.

This isn’t the first time McCullough has gone over the deep end on a story like this, and not the first time that bloggers have fallen for it, esp. those who suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Silly bloggers.

*The EFF is an ersatz civil liberties organization that’s more concerned with virtual rights than real ones. They’re more worried about the fact that the Patriot Act enables the Justice Department to look at your library records, which they don’t actually do, than with the fact that Title IV-D of the Social Security Act enables child support agencies to data-mine bank accounts and utility records, which they do, and to imprison debtors without right to counsel, even innocent ones, as they also do. I have very little respect for rights groups who think it’s more important to collect child support than to defeat Al Qaeda; crazy, I know.