The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Harris and Sullivan talk about Gaza

Two of my favorite authors, Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, recently had a long phone conversation (which Harris transcribed) about Israel. I haven't finished reading it, but as I respect both men, I consider this a must-read.

Also, I'm back in Chicago, possibly for two whole weeks. That said, the Cleveland Client was pretty happy with our work and may move to the next phase, so I may be going back there soon.

What the hell is going on in Missouri?

On Saturday, an 18-year-old black man was shot to death while running away from a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, the town has imploded.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial yesterday calling on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to get involved. The governor put out a statement saying nothing of substance.

Meanwhile, the New Republic has three stories in the last 24 hours:

Add James Fallows to the list of people (of whom Radley Balko has done the most reporting) saying "enough with the militarization of police!"

The events in Ferguson this past week should make all Americans nervous. This isn't who we are. At least, not since the civil rights crackdowns at the end of the Jim Crow era. Enough.

Update: Josh Marshall is calling Ferguson an example of the Hollywoodization of policing, while Dilbert creator Scott Adams wants the U.S. military to disarm the Ferguson police.

Posse comitatus

It is against U.S. law for the U.S. military to enforce local or state laws. That's a job for the police, or the National Guard (but only when acting under state authority).

The law came about as part of a compromise to end reconstruction in the south. We still have it on the books because, among other things, the regular military's mission, training, and equipment makes it a really bad police force.

So why do small towns have paramilitary police units? And don't they make things worse?

Despite the fact that a Department of Homeland Security report once listed more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than New York or California, the state has never been hit by a terrorist attack, much less an assault involving IEDs. The MRAP vehicles amount to only a small fraction of the $45 million in materiel that Indiana has acquired from the Pentagon since 2010. While such detailed findings aren't available for every state, The New York Times reports that 432 MRAP vehicles have been distributed to law-enforcement agencies across the states, in addition to 435 other armored vehicles, 533 planes and helicopters, and nearly 100,000 machine guns.

In a lot of cases, these advanced armored military vehicles are only ever used for parade pieces, Bieler says. That's in stark contrast to SWAT deployments. Peter Kraska, a professor and senior research fellow at Eastern Kentucky University, reports that between 1980 and 2000, police paramilitary teams registered a 1,400 percent increase in deployments.

It is far from clear that a weapon of war is a tolerable answer to civil unrest even under the worst circumstances. Ferguson [Missouri] is hardly the only community where assemblies protected by the First Amendment have been met by paramilitary force. The police reaction following [unarmed 18-year-old Ferguson resident Michael] Brown's death—the latest in the hopeless litany of young black men killed by authorities—shows how far the militarization of law enforcement is spreading.

This is a hallmark of the right, of course. Right-wingers are essentially terrified of their own shadows. They're weak and insecure, which leads them to seek hard power, like guns and military force, in order to feel less afraid. For exactly the same reasons (weakness, insecurity) they have no tolerance of dissent or even peaceful protests. It's up to rational people to tell the irrational ones they can't have these things, because those things make everyone worse off.

Exhibit: After the events this weekend in Missouri, having a heavily-armed police force seems to have made everyone in town less safe. With emotions running this high, and with one side having military-grade weapons, how will anyone have a good outcome?

Matthew Yglesias trolls the IANA Time Zone list

He thinks we should all use GMT instead:

[W]ithin a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It's to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things.

If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. But of course London's bartenders would probably be at work while some shift workers in LA would be grabbing a nap. The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there'd be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don't need to remember that it's in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.

Sigh.

It's even easier to get people to use International System measurements than to get them to understand the arbitrariness of the clock, but let's unpack just one thing Yglesias seems to have missed: the date.

Imagine you actually can get people in Los Angeles to use UTC. Working hours are 16:00 to 24:00. School starts at 15:45 (instead of ending then). In the summer, the sun rises at 12:30 and sets at 02:00.

Wait, what? The sun sets at 2am? So...you come home on a different day? That makes no sense to most people.

Yes, in a world where people are unwilling to give up their 128-ounce gallons and 36-inch yards in favor of 1000-milliliter liters and 100-centimeter meters, a world where ice freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 makes more sense than freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, a world where Paul Ryan is thought to be a serious person, we're not moving away from the day changing while most people are asleep.

And don't even get me started on the difference between GMT and UTC.

Good riddance to a Brutalist nightmare

As a big Jane Jacobs fan, I'm very happy to learn that the FBI's ugly headquarters in Washington may be demolished soon:

This week came the news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leaving its home in Washington, D.C. While plans to keep the bureau downtown were always a longshot, a short list of candidates released by the GSA confirms that the FBI will build a new consolidated headquarters in either Maryland or Virginia. Washingtonian spotted the release and wasted no time in celebrating the FBI's departure—despite the fact that the move will send as many as 4,800 jobs to the suburbs.

That's how much D.C. residents hate the J. Edgar Hoover Building. And really, that doesn't come close to painting how passionately people hate this building.

Yeah, because it's a really ugly building.

The Atlantic's Kriston Capps, who wrote the linked article, worries that its replacement will be bland, and therefore maybe we don't want to tear it down? No. Tear it down. And worry about the replacement building during its design phase.

The Brutalist period was so called for a reason.

Because it's easier than actually legislating

For reasons I do not understand, except possibly that the average IQ is below 100 in some Congressional districts, the House of Representatives has sued the President to make him do...something:

The House adopted the resolution by a vote of 225-201. Five Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic conference to vote against the measure.

The resolution authorizes Boehner to challenge Obama in court for exceeding his authority by unilaterally delaying deadlines under Obamacare. Although he has said he'll target the one-year delay of the health care reform law's employer mandate penalties, the text of the GOP resolution gives the Speaker room to legally challenge implementation tweaks to other provisions of the law.

"This isn't about Republicans and Democrats. It's about defending the Constitution that we swore an oath to uphold," Boehner said.

Right. And the problem with American politics today is that the sets of people that understand the Constitution and that believe the Speaker do not overlap at all.

Let's review. The current House opposes a law passed by the House two sessions ago, but the Senate—last I checked, half the legislative power in the country—and most of the state governors support this law. The courts have upheld it. The President is enforcing it as he deems appropriate.

Kapur's commentary fixates on standing (the requirement that you can't sue unless you, personally, have been injured), but I'm wondering whether this suit would fail on the doctrine of political question. One half of one branch of government is opposed to the actions of another branch. And the representatives opposed to the executive actually represent a minority of voters. I'm not sure the courts are the appropriate venue here. Maybe try the ballot box?

Now, I opposed the majority in 2003 and 2004, when we went to war against a country that hadn't actually attacked us. So I get that minorities can feel oppressed. I had to pretend to be Canadian every time I went overseas for about five years, just so I wouldn't get dirty looks. And I really, really hated the outcome of the 2004 election, because it suggested to me that my countrymen were terrified children who shouldn't be trusted with cap guns, let alone nuclear weapons.

But you know what I did about it? I worked on Barack Obama's U.S. Senate campaign. Then I contributed to his Presidential primary in 2008. Then I volunteered for his 2008 general election campaign. Then he bloody well won the office. Because we were able to convince a clear majority of Americans that ours was the right set of policies, and ours was the right person, to govern the country for the next four years.

This is all of a piece. Republicans don't want to govern; they want to rule. And the reason they want to sue the President is because even though they can't convince the American electorate that they're right, they want their policies enacted anyway.

The legislature suing the executive to change the enforcement procedures of a popular law is just sad. I'd send John Boehner a copy of the Federalist Papers but it would just be a waste of money and postage.

Tuesday afternoon link round-up

Client deliverables and tonight's Cubs game have compressed my day a little. Here's what I haven't had time to read:

Now back to the deliverable...

The end of capital punishment?

In the wake of Arizona torturing a prisoner to death this week, Josh Marshall thinks this signals the end:

Why is this craziness happening now?

The simplest, best, and almost certainly accurate explanation is that as the noose has tightened around the death penalty, both internationally and within the United States, fewer and fewer credentialed experts have been willing to involve themselves with state mandated executions. Pharmaceutical companies have become more aggressive in making sure their drugs are not used to kill people. (Here's a good run-down of the way in which Europe has sequentially banned exports of a series of drugs used in US executions - forcing states with the death penalty to keep switching from one drug to the next to evade the export bans, thus inevitably going further and further into unknown territory in terms of how these drugs work in an execution setting with relatively untrained staff.) Medical experts or really anyone with serious life sciences expertise just won't participate anymore. I'm not saying never. But it's become much more difficult. And in order to access and use the relevant medications without the knowledge of pharmaceutical companies, the people charged with finding ways to carry out executions now mostly have to operate in secret. Secrecy leads to a lack of transparency and review of methods which in turn produces more badly conceived plans and botched executions.

At the very least, I hope those states still stuck in the middle ages will be forced into transparency and away from the torture they're inflicting on prisoners. This is a clear 8th Amendment issue. It's time the courts weighed in.

Sickening

Capital punishment is apparently not barbaric enough in itself in Arizona, where another botched execution has made national—but, strangely, not local—news:

A condemned Arizona inmate gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half during his execution Wednesday before he died in an episode sure to add to the scrutiny surrounding the death penalty in the U.S.

Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne's office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m., one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started.

The case has highlighted scrutiny surrounding lethal injections after two controversial ones. An Ohio inmate executed in January snorted and gasped during the 26 minutes it took him to die. In Oklahoma, an inmate died of a heart attack in April, minutes after prison officials halted his execution because the drugs weren't being administered properly.

Arizona uses the same drugs — the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone — that were used in the Ohio execution. A different drug combination was used in the Oklahoma case.

Josh Marshall commented, "As much as it's treated as sick or a joke, firing squad really would be a vastly more humane form of execution than the one we now have."

Or, you know, not killing people, the way they don't do it anywhere else in the West.