Minor Thoughts from me to you

I spend a lot of time discussing Iraq with a friend. We both agree that the U.S. needs to stabilize Iraq, but we have occasional disagreements about what that will take and what the best plan is. We're both frustrated with the lock of political progress in Iraq. It's great that casualties are down, that civilian deaths are down, that terrorist deaths are up. But it feels like we're running in place without political progress to backup the military progress.

Well, today I read the first explanation that made any sense about why there has been no real political progress: several of the political parties involved in the national government are front groups for the terrorists themselves. Obviously, such parties would have every interest in tying the government up in knots and delaying progress.

So while it is true that Al Qaeda seeks to kill the Shiites, and the Mahdi Army seeks to kill the Sunnis, they need one another to block other political options from emerging from either side's adherence to Sharia.

On the Sunni side, the terror bloc is composed by most of the Tawafuq slate of three fundamentalist parties that include individuals like Khalaf al Ayan who plotted terror attacks from his office inside the green zone, including what Iraqis and Americans suspect was the April suicide bombing of the parliament cafeteria. Mr. al Ayan has denied his guilt. He has also gone on satellite television and declared himself the next Saddam.

On the Shiite side, the saboteurs include the politicians loyal still to Moqtada al Sadr, who remains popular in Iraq, though not as popular as he was in 2005, and whose deputies turned Iraq's health ministry and Baghdad's hospitals into an instrument of ethnic cleansing by refusing to treat the Sunnis freshly wounded by Mr. Sadr's militias.

While General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker did not say this directly last month, it is obvious that they too have given up hope of reaching a meaningful accord within the current government. Hence Mr. Crocker touted some of the de facto cooperation on oil profit sharing in the absence of a petroleum law.

A fruitful approach for now is to mold alternative local Shiite and Sunni parties through the tribal network that could challenge the confessional terror parties in the national elections at the end of 2009. Until those elections come, it would be wise for Mr. Graham to abandon his wish for national reconciliation and be content with the local variety.

Mitt Romney recently wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal comparing his own healthcare plan to Hillary Clinton's plan. He tried his best to present his plan as a small-government solution to the healthcare problem.

As governor of Massachusetts, I led the fight for reforms that used free markets and innovation, rather than big-government control, to lower health-care costs and cover the uninsured. I recently proposed a federalist reform plan that will use these principles to improve America's health-care system.

There's only one problem with his editorial. It's misleading. The Cato Institute explains why RomneyCare and HillaryCare are really two sides of the same (bad) coin.

The cost of healthcare goes up every year. Prescription drugs get more expensive too. But, even though they get more expensive, they're different from the rest of healthcare. While the rest of healthcare was increasing in cost by 6-7%, prescription drugs were only increasing in cost at the rate of 1%!

What caused this remarkably slow growth? Maybe it's because 25 cents out of every dollar spent on prescription drugs comes straight out of consumers' pockets. Maybe consumers really are more frugal when they're spending their own money.

This story (Ban Sought on Cold Medicine for Very Young - New York Times) made my pharmacist wife shake her head.

It seems more than a little overkill to ban an entire class of medicines just because a few doctors start jumping up and down and yelling "There's no proof that it works! No proof!"

And look at the number of children supposedly killed by these medicines in a 37 year period: 123. That's about 3.3 children per year. Far, far more than that are killed via accidents every year (such as parents backing over kiddies with the SUV) than by baby dimetap. Some perspective might be in order here.

Various teaching methods intrigue me. What makes a good teacher or a bad teacher? What makes a kid learn or sleep through class? How can we best prepare the next generation to face an increasingly complex world?

I tend to largely agree with Alex Tabarrok: Heroes are not Replicable.

You know the plot. Young, idealistic teacher goes to inner-city high school. Said idealistic teacher is shocked by students who don't know the basics and who are too preoccupied with the burdens of violence, poverty and indifference to want to learn. But the hero perseveres and at great personal sacrifice wins over the students using innovative teaching methods and heart. The kids go on to win the state spelling/chess/mathematics championship. c.f. Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds etc.

We are supposed to be uplifted by these stories but they depress me. If it takes a hero to save an inner city school then there is no hope. Heroes are not replicable.

He talks about an instruction method called "Direct Instruction" (overview from the Washington Times or a slightly more technical overview) that was tested in a research study from 1967 through 1995. The study cost $1 billion and involved more than 20,000 students. It was judged to be a huge success, more so than any other method studied. The other methods are popular ones in use today, including the Learning Center Model, Open Education Model, and Self Esteem model. DI trounced all of them.

There's a catch though. DI involved giving teachers a script and having them follow it. Apparently, teachers don't take kindly to the suggestion that they'd do better following a script than they would following their own initiative. So, nothing much has come of DI yet.

What I found more interesting, however, was the comment section at Marginal Revolution. I saw three broad themes: 1) you should fire all of the econ profs at GMU and teach economics this way, 2) how boring: rote instruction from a script, 3) I did a scripted training class at work and it was worthless.

I find #1 and #3 interesting, because the entire method is about teaching young children. Why anyone would think that that automatically applies to teaching adults is beyond me. I'm intrigued by the idea of DI, but I'd need a lot of convincing to use it as a method for college or corporate instruction.

I find #2 interesting because the more technical overview specifically states:

In poorly designed phonics programs, young children are expected to sit through hours of dull repetition. This is unfortunate, since it is possible to turn drill into a highly engaging, exciting group activity through the use of Direct Instruction.

It appears that most of the commentors didn't really read through the material -- either that or they reject the entire idea without even seeing what the scripts look like. Neither option speaks well of their intelligence.

Given how utterly failed most of America's big-city public schools are, I think a switch to DI could hardly make things worse. Isn't it worth a shot?

UPDATE: In fact, the reaction in the Marginal Revolution comments section reminds me of this post from Scott Adams and The Dilbert Blog. Might these commentors be suffering from cognitive dissonance?

Bubbles are good for you. Not the bubbles kids play with or the bubbles in your bubble bath, but the bigger, flashier kind. You know -- the tech bubble, the housing bubble, etc. At least, that's what Daniel Gross says.

Well, the conventional wisdom holds that bubbles are bad. Economists don't like them because they represent irrational behavior. A lot of people get hurt. They invest at the top, they lose their money. It's a misallocation of resources. My argument is that the pop of the bubble is only half the story.

Well, the way that new infrastructures get built in this country is frequently through investor enthusiasm. The government may help roll out new technologies, but we don't have the government putting up telegraph lines or stringing fiber optic cable that connects people's homes to the internet.

These activities don't proceed in a rational, easy-going way. They move in fits and starts. It's the bubbles that lead to this very rapid roll out of a new commercial infrastructure, one that businesses can plug into and use, like the telegraph or the railroad or the internet.

So bubbles create platforms for growth and innovation that help propel the economy forward.

I like his argument. It's the same one, basically, that Tom Friedman makes in The World is Flat. During the .com boom, telecommunications companies were convinced that the boom would go on forever and that they all needed their own fiber optic cables. So, they spent wildly and laid thousands of miles of fiber.

They were wrong. They didn't all need their own fiber. One by one, they went bankrupt. But the fiber remained. Now, it's been bought up on the cheap by new companies and they're using it to deliver YouTube, Google Apps for Your Domain, Facebook, online video of the NCAA basketball tournament, etc.

Right now, we're reaping the benefits of the irrational exuberance of the .com bubble. Gross thinks that we'll be reaping the benefits of the housing bubble within a few years, and that we're just in the beginning phases of an alternative energy bubble.

I hope he's right -- both for my long-term housing values and because I want to see what we can invent next.

Even the King is under the law. That's one of the fundamental ideas behind the British and American system of government. No one in power -- not the king, not the president, not the judges -- is allowed to break the law.

That idea has a strong corollary: those who enforce the law are also under the law. After all, who is the king if not the chief enforcer of the law? And if the king is under the law, shouldn't those who work for him also be under the law?

That's why I reacted with anger and outrage when I saw this site. Cops Writing Cops - Where's the Professional Courtesy? Law Enforcement and Police Officers help each other.

This is a site for officers getting traffic tickets that ANY normal civilian could get a warning on, verbal or written. This is a site for cops, about cops, and designed by cops. Needless to say, we are fed up with hearing about this and think something should be done. There's always another ticket down the street. We are all family and maybe someday you may need one of us to get out of our car and save your sorry ass. But odds are you're the cop that doesn't do anything to begin with.

If you are a police officer, trooper, court officer, correction officer, telecommunicator, highway patrol, federal agent, or any other type of police (peace) officer either full-time, part-time or retired that has been disrespected or insulted by another police agency (officer) by not receiving some sort of professional courtesy, please email staff (at) copswritingcops.com with the information.

They have all kinds of nifty features like "DICKS OF THE MONTH", dedicated to exposing cops who have the absolute gall to actually write up another cop for breaking the law. Personally, I think that feature should be renamed "HEROS OF THE MONTH".

The entire idea that cops -- by virtue of their job -- should be immune from "minor" tickets is utterly offensive. They shouldn't be granted special privileges just because their job has a certain element of danger. Despite what they seem to think, they are civilians just like the rest of us. They are no more or no less under the law as a result of enforcing the law.

Many people believe we live in a Christian society. Well, the Bible had some pretty specific things to say about treating everyone justly.

[esvbible reference="Deuteronomy 16:19" header="on" format="block"]Deuteronomy 16:19[/esvbible]

These officers aren't accepting bribes, but they sure are showing partiality. That never works out well for society.

[esvbible reference="Proverbs 11:1" header="on" format="block"]Proverbs 11:1[/esvbible]

A false balance: sometimes traders would have one scale to measure goods and money for friends and another (false) scale to measure goods and money for people they didn't know. What better way to cheat somebody? These officers are cheating society by using one standard for "brothers" and another, harsher, standard for everyone else.

[esvbible reference="Proverbs 20:10" header="on" format="block"]Proverbs 20:10[/esvbible]

I don't like that kind of a double standard. And neither does God. Non-Christian officers aren't expected to follow God's standards -- they're not His, after all. But Christian officers had better beware if this is the standard of justice that they're using.

How profane was Paul and what does the command in Exodus 20:7 mean?

Well, Paul could be really profane when the situation warranted and the study of Pauline Scatology is dedicated to understanding how and why he was profane.

"Taking God's name in vain" actually means something entirely different than you think it does. Prosperity preachers, friends of sneezers, and speakers of religious-ese -- watch out!

The truth is, I really enjoy saying "I told you so". So I read this article with great pleasure and much chuckling.

A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in [Riverside, NJ, a] faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Here's the town's former mayor, on the law:

"The business district is fairly vacant now, but it's not the legitimate businesses that are gone," he said. "It's all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens."

Or, as I like to call them, taxpayers and the backbone of the local economy.

State Children's Health Insurance Program. It's a program created by Congress to provide health insurance for children whose parents are too poor for private insurance, but too rich for Medicaid. It's set to expire at the end of this month and Congress is fighting with President Bush over the terms of its renewal.

The House wants to double funding from $5 billion a year to $10 billion a year and cover about 3.4 million more children. The President wants to increase funding by only 20%, to $6 billion a year, and only cover children whose parents earn less than $34,340 -- twice the poverty line.

Bloomberg reported a heartwarming story from New Jersey about a family that uses SCHIP to pay for private school and basic cable.

If SCHIP weren't available, Carlie's parents could cover only the teenager through a $230-a-month policy with Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, according to the Web site ehealthinsurance.com.

What are the Siravo's spending their money on instead?

There's also $352 a month on a home-equity loan the Siravos took out to send Carlie to a private Catholic high school. Tuition is $9,000 a year.

The family's monthly bills consume most of their take-home income. Pulling out her checkbook, Lori said there's the mortgage ($1,500), utilities ($743), phones and Internet service ($200), car insurance and gasoline ($205), property taxes ($230), basic cable television ($48), food ($600) and credit- card payments ($325) on an outstanding $11,000 balance. That's $46,212 a year, not including clothes, school books and extra- curricular activities for Carlie.

New Jersery better be expensive. Between Vonage, DSL, and a two-line family plan, we only pay a little over $100 for phones and Internet service. We also don't spend anywhere near $600 a month for groceries. I'll grant that our daughter is only 7 months and Carlie is 16, but I'd be shocked if our grocery spending really quadruples over the next 15 years.

The Siravo's have every right to spend their money as they wish. But they don't have every right to take tax-payer subsidies for healthcare, then turn around and spend their savings on luxury goods. Private school, cable, and gourmet food? Give me a break.

Space Solar Power is a fascinating idea. It involves putting satellites into space, covered with solar panels. These satellites would catch the energy from the sun -- undiluted by atmosphere or night -- and beam it down to earth. The idea has been around since the 1960's, but has yet to actually become feasible.

Still, recent studies have indicated it might be possible to do this economically in the near future.

A special study group of the National Research Council (NRC) has taken a new look at NASA's current SSP efforts. Their findings are in the NRC report: Laying the Foundation for Space Solar Power - An Assessment of NASA's Space Solar Power Investment Strategy.

While not advocating or discouraging SSP, the advisory team said "it recognizes that significant changes have occurred since 1979 that might make it worthwhile for the United States to invest in either SSP or its component technologies." The study urges a sharper look at perceived and/or actual environmental and health risks that SSP might involve.

The NRC study group singled out several technological advances relevant to SSP:

• Improvements have been seen in efficiency of solar cells and production of lightweight, solar-cell laden panels;
• Wireless power transmission tests on Earth is progressing, specifically in Japan and Canada;
• Robotics, viewed as essential to SSP on-orbit assembly, has shown substantial improvements in manipulators, machine vision systems, hand-eye coordination, task planning, and reasoning; and
• Advanced composites are in wider use, and digital control systems are now state of the art - both developments useful in building an SSP.

Now it appears that the Pentagon is interested in doing some trials as early as 2015.

"A first demonstrator project in, say, the year 2015 might power a military base, be capable of sending power to disaster areas, or transmit energy to troops abroad. The cost of petroleum fuel, not only money but lives lost in wars fought over oil, is a big driver of the Pentagon’s interest in space solar power. [Col. M.V. Smith] has gone from skeptic to enthusiast since the study began. ..."

Sounds good to me.

Last night I said that homebuyers were more likely to be greedy than lenders. I haven't changed my mind yet. Instead, I read a story that convinced me even more.

The New York Times describes a couple who bought "a modest home at the southern end of Silicon Valley". Now they're suing their broker and real estate agent for setting them up with a third loan that they didn't even know they had. They may well have a valid complaint -- from the facts presented in the article, the agent was playing both the lender and the buyer for suckers.

But that's not the part of the story I'm interested in. I'm interested in how much house this couple tried to buy. Here a few facts, hidden throughout the story.

First -- how much did their house cost? This is never directly mentioned in the article. It's buried beneath a photo caption.

Sarai Torralba, 5, riding by the home that her family bought for $595,000 in San Jose, Calif. Prospero and Cirila Torralba borrowed almost $610,000 for it.

Second -- how much does this family make? The article never actually says. I would have thought that a key piece of information. The article does mention the Hernandez family, who only earns "about $4,000 a month", or $48,000 a year. We'll assume that the Torralba's are in a similar situation.

Third -- how were these loans set up?

The first and biggest loan was a pay-option adjustable rate mortgage. The loan allows borrowers to pay less than the interest due, adding the difference onto the balance so more is owed with each passing month. The interest rate on the loans from Mr. Curiel was 10 percent, with a 15 percent upfront fee added to the principal balance. That loan called for borrowers to make interest-only payments and pay off the full amount in two years.

The loan from Mr. Curiel is the one that the owners are suing over. Still, what's with the pay-option adjustable rate mortgage? I'd think that simply considering such a loan for 5-10 minutes would convince me that having the loan get bigger month after month was a really bad idea.

Reading these stories, I'm convinced that these buyers were trying to buy something that they knew they couldn't afford. Rather than having enough of a backbone to say "no" to pushy agents and brokers, they allowed themselves to be talked into obviously bad loan ideas.

Again, lack of resources isn't a truly valid complaint. Internet site after internet site explains what the various loans mean and what the amortization schedules are. Even having a poor command of English isn't really a complaint. After all, you are the person signing on the line. It's your responsibility to find someone that you trust, with a good command of English, to go over the loan terms with you. Otherwise -- don't sign.

Though vowing to fight, Mr. Hernandez said his family’s hopes and goals have been dashed. They came to the United States from Mexico nearly three decades ago. Over the years, he and his wife have worked in agriculture, picking cherries, apples and asparagus. They had three sons here — two have their own families, and one son, 17, still lives with them.

They doubt they will be able to pay for him to go to college, as they had planned.

The Hernandez family was trying to buy a $745,000 house. Whether or not their mortgage was a good one, I'm not sure how you afford college at all with a three-quarter million dollar loan of any sort.

Although an apparently crooked agent was involved, I think greed ultimately did these families in.

I've been reading more good news from Iraq. Here's a brief roundup.

Officials: Shiites Interested in Alliance With American Troops

American commanders in southern Iraq say Shiite sheiks are showing interest in joining forces with the U.S. military against extremists, in much the same way that Sunni clansmen in the western part of the country have worked with American forces against Al Qaeda.

Standing up the Concerned Citizens in southern Baghdad - The Long War Journal. This is critical because southern Baghdad is far more complex -- politically, ethnically, and religiously -- than Anbar is. And yet:

The impact of the Concerned Citizens on security in regions where these units have been established is unmistakable. In Haswa, IED attacks have dropped by 80 percent. Casualty causing IED attacks have dropped by 60 percent throughout Multinational Division Central’s battlespace. Markets are beginning to reopen and reconstruction projects are moving forward.

Empty wards in Baghdad hospital offer hope

A row of beds lies empty in the emergency ward of Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital. The morgue, which once overflowed with corpses, is barely a quarter full.

Doctors at the hospital, a barometer of bloodshed in the Iraqi capital, say there has been a sharp fall in victims of violence admitted during a seven-month security campaign.

Last month the fall was particularly dramatic, with 70 percent fewer bodies and half the number of wounded brought in compared to July, hospital director Haqi Ismail said.

"The major incidents, like explosions and car bombs, sometimes reached six or seven a day. Now it's more like one or two a week," he told Reuters.

All three of these articles sound like reason for optimism about Iraq. We'll have to see if it holds up -- especially once General Petraeus starts withdrawing troops -- but I can't help but feel that we and the Iraqi people are slowly turning a corner.

I've discussed before how toy companies are using "safety" as an excuse to pile more and more regulations on top of their competitors. Mattel has been blaming China for a recent spate of recalls and using the accusations as leverage to push for more safety regulations.

Turns out, China wasn't to blame.

Mattel Inc. made a public apology to China for damage to the country's reputation stemming from a spate of toy recalls. It was an extraordinary attempt to placate Mattel's most important supplier, but it is likely to shift the spotlight to the company's own responsibility in the crisis.

In its apology, the world's largest toy maker said its own "design flaw" was responsible for the biggest recall by far, involving around 18 million playsets studded with potentially dangerous magnets.

Oops. I'm guessing that regulation wouldn't have done much to catch Mattel's design flaws. Maybe we don't actually need regulation after all.

So, has America been throwing our future away the past several decades? Have we been exporting all of our manufacturing capability? Are we at the mercy of China, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia?

No.

U.S. manufacturing output reached its all time high in 2006. U.S. manufacturing revenue reached its all time high in 2006. U.S. manufacturing profits reached their all time high in 2006. Average annual compensation for U.S. manufacturing jobs is over $66,000. The U.S. manufactures 2.5 times more goods than China does. Finally, the U.S. produces the largest share of total world manufacturing, not China.

So, who's economy has been all hollowed out and is on the verge of collapse? Not ours.

Lately, the dollar has been sinking lower and lower. Indeed, Nixon was President the last time the dollar was this low. A lot of people are really upset about that. I'm having trouble understanding why. Take this commenter for instance:

The dollar, as predicted is being crushed. We are now at Par with the Canadian Dollar, the Loonie as it is called. This was all so predictable. You cannot run an 800 billion dollar trade deficit and have your currency in demand. We have a lot farther to fall. Within 5 years from 2008 we should see the Canadian Dollar worth 25 % more than the U.S. dollar. The Euro at 1.40 now, should move to near 2.50, as China buys more and more of the Euro. The pound at 2.04 as I write this will be near 3.00. Be ready for CHINA. When they finally let their currency float it will appreciate 70% over a 36 month period. The US trade deficit will be cut in half and then some by 2020.

He starts out by blaming everything on our trade deficit (which is pretty much an illusion to begin with). He finishes by saying that the disastrous result of a falling dollar will be ... a smaller trade deficit. Isn't that exactly what a lot of people (not me!) have been saying that we need? Where's the problem?

A high dollar is worth more compared to foreign currencies. Consequently, imports are cheap and the country imports a lot of stuff. On the downside, our exports are more expensive and we sell less stuff overseas. A low dollar is worth less compared to foreign currencies. Consequently, imports are expensive, but our exports are cheap. We export a little and import a little.

Right now, it appears that our exports may be picking up. People living on our northern border are used to seeing Americans going to Canada to buy things cheaply. Now, the trend is reversing. Canadians are crossing the border to buy cheaper goods.

On either side of the border, a buck is now a buck, or as Canadians call it on their side, a loonie. Coupled with high prices and high taxes for many things in Canada, the strength of the Canadian dollar is driving Canadians into the United States to shop for shoes, school supplies, gasoline, used cars and second homes.

In Vermont, Buzz Roy, owner of Brown's Drugstore in Derby Line, said of his Canadian customers: "They don't buy anything in particular, but everything in general. We've seen a gradual increase over the summer, and we've seen a bigger increase this week."

Mr. Roy said more customers would make trips if it were easier to cross the border, "but they're still coming in droves."

In North Dakota, Crystal Schlecht, who works for the City of Cavalier, said the arts and crafts show in town last weekend had a surprisingly international feel in spite of the slow-go at the border crossing.

"I'd say 60 percent of the people the whole weekend were from Canada," she said. "And we've never really had that before."

Why does it matter that people choose to buy things in Euros or Loonies instead of dollars? Why does it matter that import may slow down and exports may pick up? How does that foretell that nation's doom?

I find the current narrative, about the housing market meltdown, to be extremely disingenuous. Take Barack Obama, for example.

He described this summer's subprime lending crisis as a case study of greed among mortgage lenders and the agencies that provide information about them. ...

Well, that's certainly one way to describe what's happening in the housing market. But I don't think it's very honest. As I've said before, I don't see how giving mortgages to people who are unable to afford them, then going bankrupt when they default on the loan, qualifies as greed.

Instead, I prefer to consider Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Stupidity, sure. Giving money to people who can't give it back is about as far from greed or theft as a business can possibly get.

However, I'll be happy to accuse home buyers of greed. What would you call it when someone earning $40,000 a year decides to buy a home costing $200,000 or $250,000? Many of the families now defaulting on their loans were looking to get in on a "hot" housing market that had the potential to double or triple the value of houses in the area. They saw cheap money and jumped at the opportunity to get rich.

That's why I'm convinced that this won't do any good:

Mr. Obama of Illinois called for regulatory efforts to increase transparency and accountability among financial companies. Mr. Obama zeroed in on the housing market, proposing tighter federal rules on mortgage fraud and government rating systems for mortgages and credit cards.

"If more Americans were armed with this kind of information before they purchased risky mortgage loans," he said, "the current crisis might not have happened."

If Senator Obama really believes that, he's delusional. We were buried in paperwork when we bought our house. We had to sign sheet after sheet of paper, giving us all of the details about our mortgage. Our Realtor and mortgage banker answered all of our questions, throughout the entire process. Even if they hadn't, website after website offered comprehensive information about every different type of mortgage. Americans had plenty of opportunity to arm themselves with whatever information they needed.

The housing meltdown happened because everyone involved believe that the market would continue to go up forever. Consumers got greedy and banks began taking irresponsible risks thanks to easy money. This "crisis" can't be blamed on any one group and I'll not respect anyone that tries to do so.

You don't own your car unless the government allows you to. If I were you, I'd avoid driving through Rockford, Illinois anytime soon.

TheAgitator.com: Turn It Up, Lose Your Car: Comments

A new Rockford, Illinois law allows police to seize the automobiles of owners who play their stereos too loud. But it gets worse:

There is no requirement that a police officer responding to a complaint objectively measure sound levels with electronic equipment or even personally witness an alleged offense. Instead, the ordinance states that "hearsay evidence shall be admissible" and that property will be seized upon the assertion of probable cause.

The only way to protest the seizure is to prove you weren't driving your car at the time virtually anyone could have lodged a complaint against you. But look at what you have to go through to get it back:

If a motorist believes his car has been unlawfully towed on a Friday after 5pm, he may challenge the taking by "depositing a written request for a hearing in the silver drop box located behind city hall," according to the ordinance. The city must then respond by the following Wednesday. If the registered owner was not driving at the time the car was taken, he will be mailed a letter within ten days. After this time he is given less than fifteen days to request a hearing. The city may then wait another 45 days to schedule a hearing while storage fees accumulate up to $1100.

A hearing officer designated by Rockford will decide under a preponderance of evidence standard whether it is likely the motorist is guilty, in which case the hearing officer's employers will collect the fine and fee revenue from the motorist. If the vehicle's owner does not receive the mailed notice or cannot pay the fees within 30 days, the city will confiscate the vehicle permanently.

A woman feels trapped in a loveless marriage. She goes online and starts chatting with "Prince of Joy". His compassion, tenderness shine through even as he describes his own loveless marriage. After several months of talking, they decide to meet in her person. Each will carry one rose. Imagine her surprise when she shows up at the cafe and sees her husband carrying a rose!

Apparently, that actually happened. (I say "apparently" because the whole story reads like something out of the Onion.)

This line tells you everything you need to know about human behavior.

"When I saw my husband there with the rose and it dawned on me what had happened I was shattered. I felt so betrayed. I was so angry."

So, they're both filing for divorce as a result of the other person's adultery.

Delays are caused by flight volumes that the FAA Administrator's ineptly-managed Air Traffic Control system cannot handle. The skies are full, not because there's no more room in the air, but because the flight controllers can't keep up with any more flights.

What's Congress's solution to this problem? Why, funding a Peace Garden instead of updating air-traffic control towers.

Want to know what had to be cut from the bill in order to get the North Dakota Peace Garden? Oh, just a silly little project that would have updated technology in air-traffic control towers. But the Peace Garden wasn't the only beneficiary of freeing up funds from making air travel safer. California will also get a "mule and packer museum". Perhaps Americans can start traveling by donkey instead.

Senator Tom Coburn attempted to stop the pork party, to no avail. He offered an amendment that would have forbidden earmarks on transportation bills until all deficient bridges had been properly updated. That just barely failed -- by a vote of 82 to 14. Eighty-two Senators voted to prioritize pork over infrastructure maintenance.

In fact, the pork comes to one out of every eight dollars spent on transportation now. In the past eleven years, earmarks have increased a whopping 1150%, while the dollar value of the pork has increased over 300% in the same period. Ninety-nine percent of these earmarks bypassed planning agencies, meaning that the monies got no review for prioritization. How many bridges could have been repaired with that money over the last decade?

Still believe that Congress should manage a multi-trillion dollar budget? Still believe that government is more interested in your safety and well-being than a private company would be? Private companies would be embarrassed to run the air-traffic control system that the FAA runs. Private companies would be embarrassed to have roads and bridges as well-maintained as the governments.

Don't put your faith in government spending. It's the worst "investment" you could possibly make.