North Texas Nonconformist

This recent incident, where Officer Crowley arrested a Harvard professor for disorderly conduct, only to have the local prosecutors pretty quickly drop the charges, is fascinating on a number of levels.
Having read (directly or indirectly) the accounts of both men, it seems clear to me that they both were not at their best during the encounter, and I suspect that they would both admit that in private.
The main challenge is that, having gone public with their narratives, they are now locked into their positions publicly. In addition, President Obama, having stated his opinion that the arrest of Professor Gates for disorderly conduct was "stupid", now has a public position to defend.
Since the original incident, and the decision by President Obama to comment on it, we have seen some rather predictable events unfold.
Firstly the police have closed ranks behind Officer Crowley, acting all hurt and demanding an apology from the President. The sight of a collection of pompous, huffing, barrel-chested authoritarians whining about the President making an obviously correct statement (whichever way you parse it, the decision to arrest Professor Gates was not a smart one) is not an attractive one, especially to the African-American community, for whom the Gates incident is yet another reminder of the many instances of racial profiling and general disrespect thrown their way over the years by law enforcement. I did not see a single African-American law enforcement official in the gathering, which further throws the position of law enforcement into sharp relief.
Secondly, and interestingly, President Obama seems to be using the incident as a "teaching moment" to try and get both sides to move beyond their hurt and indignation and see things differently. His decision to even get involved at all, and his investment of a lot of time behind the scenes in talking to both Officer Crowley and Professor Gates, tells me that he wants to use the incident as a means of moving discussions about race relations and the roles of the communities into a new zone. Whether he will succeed is an open question. Both law enforcement and the African-American communities tend to take refuge in predictable and inflexible positions when incidents like this occur.
Lastly, the incident has triggered a massive discussion about what happened/should have happened/did not happen, and also a wider discussion about the roles and responsibilities of both law enforcement and the public. The best discussion I have found so far is this one, triggered by a considered posting from a policing expert who has worked with law enforcement for many years.
The fact that such widespread discussion is occurring is further proof that, over 40 years after the passing of civil rights legislation, race is still a divisive issue in modern America. I see a lot of racism in the country still, wrapped up in coded language and distracting nonsense such as the "birther" controversy, which I see as nothing more than an attempt to de-legitimize a sitting President, and not a very good attempt at that. America needs to grow up rapidly in this and other areas if it wants to remain a top world power in the years to come.
UPDATE - From the Croked Timber discussion comes this excellent, nuanced response from a military veteran who has seen just about all sides of the issue in the past.
UPDATE 2 - One of the issues not highlighted in this whole incident is how the decision by Officer Crowley to arrest Prof. Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was in itself an abuse of the law. From the Reason blog we have this post by Radley Balko which explains why arresting Gates for "tumultuous conduct" was an abuse of the law; laws governing disorderly conduct were originally created to give the police methods of heading off riots and disturbances, not for the arrest of angry single citizens perceived as engaging in "contempt of cop".
The abuse of laws in this way is nothing new under the sun. In the 1960's and 1970's, the police in the UK engaged in racial profiling using an obscure law (the 1824 Vagrancy Act) which gave them (as they saw it) the ability to stop anybody on the street with little or no suspicion or probable cause. In practice, a lot of people became wearily used to being stopped, frisked and questioned under the dr facto pretext of "walking on the street while black". It took the Brixton Riots, the Scarman Report, and a whole heap of public anger before the police stopped abusing the act (the section of the act that was being abused became known as the "sus" law). There were other potential abuse mechanisms that the police also used, such as a law which made it an offense to be "equipped for theft". Apart from the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, it is difficult to find a more badly-written piece of law; under this law my bunch of car keys could be claimed to be "equipment for theft" in the eyes of a paranoid law enforcement official...

...so why is it that a Christian group paying for pro-religion billboards feels it necessary to just make shit up?
The blog Computing Intelligence has a suitable riposte:

"There is nothing so simultaneously dull and mentally detrimental as spending your Sunday morning in a church." - George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America.
Haven't heard that quotation before? That's because I just made it up. Chances are, George Washington never said that, but a lack of documented evidence for the attribution of a quotation is apparently no problem for some people. It would seem that a pair of theocratically minded citizens of the United States decided it was perfectly reasonable to make up a sentence that corresponded to their beliefs, and then slap that statement on a billboard and attribute it to George Washington.

However, if this is the way that some Christians want to behave in furtherance of their ideas and beliefs, I look forward to either calling BS on this, or getting into the business (like Computing Intelligence) of Making Stuff Up. Given the razor-sharp wits available at websites like Pharyngula, I am sure that we can out-BS them.
Bottom line though: these billboard charlatans are deceitful sacks of shit, hypocritical lying loons.
UPDATE - No sooner have I written this than another example pops up, this time from Oklahoma...you cannot make this stuff up.

1. Texas Secession and all that crap
Not to be outdone by Gov. Rick Perry's inane hints about secession, the Texas State Legislature is now getting in on the act, proposing to use up limited legislative time on a motion re-affirming the existence of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.
Texas Rep. John Culbertson has also gotten in on the act, pointing out that Texas has the right to subdivide itself into up to 5 states. In his world, this somehow means that Texas can SHAZAM! morph into 5 states overnight, each with 2 Republican senators. Leaving aside any practical considerations of whether all the Senators would be Republican, Culbertson is either stupid or talking total BS, or both. The clause in the agreement by which Texas joined the Union which refers to Texas splitting also states that this must be done within the rules laid down in the U.S. Constitution i.e. the other states have to agree. Somehow I do not see other states agreeing to this sort of a split without some form of matching split (California, which has more electors than Texas, will probably want the same sort of split). Culbertson's bloviating nonsense is yet more evidence that the GOP in Texas are currently a whiny-ass bunch of losers.

2. That Darned Taxpayer Hotel in Dallas
Harlan Crow has spent in excess of $4 million on the campaign against the hotel and convention center backed by the Dallas City Council and the Mayor. I am getting tired of this group's adverts - they are slick and narrated by people with resonant well-modulated voices, but they are nothing more than innuendo-ridden polemical slams, mostly consisting of ad hominem attacks on Mayor Tom Leppert. Whenever I see a campaign like this relying almost exclusively on the ad hominem fallacy, my BS/sleaze meter gets pegged to the end-stop. Where's the argument?
There is also a rich vein of hypocrisy lurking in the adverts - Crow himself refuses to talk publicly about the campaign, claiming he wants it to be about issues, but as the Dallas Morning News has pointed out, one of the most recent adverts is nothing more than an ad hominem slam against Mayor Tom Leppert.
Crow's campaign is the most egregious example of special pleading (his family business just happens to own the Anatole hotels) that I have seen since the Dallas Cowboys spent millions to con the city of Arlington into ponying up for a second major-league sports stadium in 10 years. That campaign was similarly one-sided in terms of the amount of money being spent by the pro and anti stadium factions.
The Dallas Obsever has a fairly comprehensive article outlining the main facts and issues in this unfolding saga.
UPDATE - The ballot initiative to prevent Dallas City Council from supporting the hotel was narrowly voted down by the city voters.

3. The Big Bank Bailout
Here is a pretty cogent explanation for why the recent bank bailout was not a very good idea...

I was examining our Yahoo inbox the other day when I found another chain email sent by a friend. Regular readers of this blog will know that I have limited patience for chain emails, since they are usually reflexively forwarded by people who (in some cases) have not even bothered to read and understand the contents of the email.
This email deals with US healthcare reform, a vexed subject if ever there was one. It is a link to the website http://freeourhealthcarenow.com.
I went to the website. It purports to be a "group of concerned citizens". That twigged my BS meter straight away. A phrase like that, to me, has about as much credibility as somebody saying "you can trust me" when telling you a story.
To cut a long story short, after doing some fairly elementary research, I was able to write this reply to the sender:

I decided to do some research...the website freeourhealthcarenow.com is owned by the National Center for Policy Analysis. This organization is not "a group of concerned citizens". It is a pressure-group funded by a number of conservative organizations who have a track record of funding lobbying efforts, not just against government involvement in healthcare, but also against the idea that global warming actually exists, and in favour of reduced environmental regulation (this group has been funded by such environmentally responsible organizations as Exxon/Mobil in the past). See wikipedia.org for some information.
I would be leery of signing this petition, partly for this reason, but for a whole raft of related reasons:

1. We already have government involvement in health care in the form of Medicaid and MediCare, and I have yet to hear or read any compelling rationale for why those forms of healthare delivery do not deliver effective results. I hear lots of sniping against them by small-government lobbyists, but I do not see them being cut back or dismantled, which suggests that they are probably filling a need and have electoral support.
2. Most of the current debate around healthcare in the USA is not grounded in reality. This country spends around 13% of GDP on healthcare based on 2003-2005 WHO figures, and has worse healthcare metrics than many other westernized countries that spend a lot less on healthcare as a percentage of their GDP. Something is not working well in the system. Mouthing platitudes "we have the best healthcare in the world" while ignoring metrics looks to me to be rather like head-in-sand.
3. Empty slogans and phrases like "socialized medicine" fail to impress me or fill me with dread - that is what is in place in Canada, the UK, France and many other European countries, according to what I keep reading from the harbingers of doom. I have bad news. Those countries have not become sink-holes of government-run healthcare hell. I have lived in the UK, and visited European countries, I have friends in those countries. The system operates differently, but acute medical needs are taken care of. There is also the ability of anybody in those countries to pay for their own private treatment if they choose to do so. When I lived in the UK, I had private medical insurance paid for by my employer, but I never used it, because the National Healh System took care of my needs at the time.
4. There is a deep reflexive anti-government animus in the USA that has the effect of choking off any sensible debate about healthcare systems and options. The words "government" and "socialism" are bandied about like bogeymen in much the same way that "communist" was used as the ultimate demonizing phrase in the 1950's. Whenever I find myself reading slogans, I wonder where the argument is.
The petition request implies that government involvement reduces choice, but there is no argument to back up this assertion. The request relies on the reader making the reflexive connection "govenment = bad". My threshold for a compelling argument is a hell of a lot higher that that. If government really is bad, then somebody ought to have little trouble assembling an argument instead of a collection of linked assertions and slogans.
As you can probably tell, I would not sign a petition like this. It is a lobbying device being marketed by a free-market pressure group masquerading as "concerned citizens". That is BS deceptive marketing from the outset. The petition makes no case, it deals in empty sloganeering. That being the case, I regard it as a meangingless distraction. We should be having a deep and wide-ranging debate about healthcare, (now I am going to sound pompous and possibly condescending) and everybody needs to take some time out to become informed about what the current state of healthcare in the USA is, and also what really goes on elsewhere in the world (note - radio and tv talking heads with anecdotal stories do not provide any useful information about Canada, for example).
Oops, I just noticed that my soapbox hit the roof...Better get down off it now.

Usually when I send these types of replies, I never get a response, which is a shame, since I would like to understand the reaction. However, I am getting very weary of hearing and reading misinformation, cherry-picked outlier examples, and other forms of BS being deployed to support an ideological perspective that Government Healthcare Involvement Is Bad. Most of the posturing in this area is intellectually risible, it would not have survived 15 minutes in my high school debating society, and it should not be allowed to survive scrutiny today.
As a follow-up, I found this diary on DailyKos today that explains some of the key concepts that do not exist in the Canadian healthcare system...

In the Financial Times I found this article by Ben Funnell. He begins by laying out his stark hypothesis:

Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression.
The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite.

It's a very good article. His conclusion, while sounding all too simple, is inarguable:

...we need a new political consensus, one aimed at reducing overall debt levels while reducing inequality by encouraging education, entrepreneurship and investment in innovation.

In 2004, off-duty police officers in Milwaukee engaged in what can only be described as totally psychopathic behaviour when they beat up a bi-racial man at a house-warming party.
The most amazing thing about the whole affair was not that the police force attempted to cover up the incident (sadly, that is exactly what I would have expected a quasi-military body dominated by authoritarians to do), but that the cover-up almost made it through the criminal justice system. It took a civil trial for the extent of the police cover-up to be revealed.
The good news is that a number of officers involved in the incident are now serving long jail terms. The bad news is that Frank Jude is permanently physically and emotionally scarred. As far as I can tell, he has not received a dime in damages for his suffering. There is also no evidence that the Milwaukee Police Department has really made any institutional changes to prevent (a) hiring borderline pyschos as police officers and (b) improving monitoring to prevent abuses and cover-ups like the one seen here.
The case, distressing though it is, does bring to light one of the downsides of public and electoral attitudes to law enforcement. In most industrialized countries, police officers are paid no more than average salaries. This for a job where they are in many places, quite literally in the line of fire. They could go out on a patrol and not come back. This is a quasi-military organization in that respect. Unsurprisingly, military disciplines such as closing ranks, mutual loyalty etc. will trump logical behaviour.
The bigger underlying challenge, however, is that paying police forces poorly is a very dumb strategy. For a start, it makes police highly vulnerable to corruption. A poorly-paid officer with a family to support cannot help but be tempted by sums of money waved under his nose by criminals in return for some variant on "look the other way". Additionally, poor pay is unlikely to attract high-quality recruits. Police forces therefore tend to be dominated by recruits with lower educational attainment, and a correspondingly greater propensity towards emotional, prejudiced or racist attitudes, and (as we saw above) psychopathic behaviour. Add all of these factors together and you have a major institutional problem across the western world.
The bad news is that we are not going to make much headway on solving the issues until we stop paying police officers peanuts, and instead reward them properly for dealing with the nasties and crazies, and also putting their lives literally on the line during an average work week. While the behaviour of the officers in the above story was appalling, and the response of the police department was typically head-in-the-ass, this is not out of the ordinary, and it will continue to be the norm until we significantly improve the pay of police forces. You can't have good-quality anything on the cheap, and law enforcement is always supposed to be at or near the top of the careabouts of electors, so why are we surprised when we get bad behaviour from people who are paid poorly and then exposed to criminals?
This is so blindingly obvious that I should not have to even be writing about it...