The Wondering Mind

Only weeks ago, we heard about what has got to be the dumbest US Airways employee ever (which is saying a lot) helping his equally retarded roommate smuggle an unloaded handgun on board a US Air flight. The only reason this master-plan failed was due to an observant passenger who reported the suspicious activity. Makes those long lines and waits at the security checkpoints all worthwhile, knowing these sleuths can’t even spot a passenger handing over his luggage to his roomie at the gate.

Now, we have another episode of stupidity on the part of the TSA.

Steve Bierfeldt was pulled aside at a TSA checkpoint and questioned about a box of money in his carry-on luggage. Bierfeldt, who works for a Ron Paul organization appears to have asked if he was required to answer questions about the money. And for his troubles, he was detained for half an hour.

You can hear an audio recording of the entire half hour in the interrogation room here. But as the website summarises, as does the CNN article, essentially, Bierfeldt wants to know if he is required to answer any of the questions he is being asked. The TSA “agents” refuse to tell him whether he is required to or not and basically demand that he just do whatever he is told. The incident is not resolved until an FBI agent comes on the scene and is able to guess that the money in question is for the Ron Paul organisation, which Bierfeldt (I think somewhat inadvertently) confirms.

What you can’t get a sense of without listening to the audio recording is that Bierfeldt is being somewhat of a smart-ass. He’s not being rude in any way, but he is being a smart-ass. Of course, that’s not against the law, and it’s his right to be that way if he so chooses. He is also not acting particularly suspicious or gives any reason for a reasonable person to believe he is acting suspicious, unless you have an overactive imagination.

The trouble really seems to have stemmed originally from the fact that TSA agent #1 is an idiot with a chip on his shoulder, who felt Bierfeldt represented a threat to his self-perceived authority. I’m guessing from the recording that his sense of threat was heightened by the fact that he seems to have no idea what Bierfeldt is or is not required to do under the law. I mean, it would have been bad enough if Beirefldt was only not bowing down to his authority.

Even after it is revealed who Bierfeldt is and what the money is for (about 6 minutes left on the recording), when the FBI agent tells Bierfeldt he’s free to go, this moron insists that he won’t let Bierfeldt go without checking with his supervisor, because Bierfeldt is “suspicious”. The FBI agent curtly tells him he can do whatever he wants, but as far as he’s concerned, there’s nothing suspicious about Bierfeldt or his money.

This hero is probably the one who was disciplined. If the TSA has any idea what it is doing, that meant he was fired, or he’s doing a task where he is under constant supervision by someone without a Napoleon complex.

TSA agent #2 is, at least, not a complete douche. He is, generally, not on a power trip and is genuinely more concerned about trying to get to the bottom of things. Unfortunately, he also seems clueless as to what passengers are actually required to do, versus what the TSA would like them to do. As a result, he too is unable to answer Bierfeldt’s questions and gets frustrated. He probably would have acquitted himself much better if only he was actually, you know, given real training.

In fairness, the FBI agent too is unable to tell Bierfeldt what he is or is not required to do. Now, it is entirely possible that Homeland Security and the Justice Department don’t think this is something they should teach their agents. If that’s true, that’s stupid.

It is also possible that this is standard operating procedure, trying to keep the “suspect” in the dark and off balance. If that’s true, then between all these agents you would think at least one would have realised that it was not working and wasn’t worth continuing, and that they should have just told Bierfeldt, “Yes!”

One last possibility is that answering that question constitutes giving legal advice and the agents are barred from doing that. If that’s the case, I’m not sure how you deal with that without it escalating to everyone “lawyering up” whenever they encounter law enforcement. Like I said, Bierfeldt was being a smart-ass.

In any case, being a TSA screener is probably not one of the more desirable jobs in that agency. It’s probably tedious, definitely monotonous, and is probably not all that pleasant, having to deal with the public who are probably mostly not all that happy with the hassles of the security checks. But it is an important job. One that has to be done properly and diligently. By people focused on their jobs, not on a power trip.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea for anyone, regardless of what they’re supposed to be doing.

Another inmate at Guantanamo has apparently committed suicide.

It is way past time that the Obama administration shut this place down. Congress may be balking and the American public maybe hesitant. But they are wrong. The camp is a continuing source of shame to the U.S. and does not make the country safer one iota.

We can find any number of people in American prisons who are, and would be if released, more dangerous than some of the people being held in Guantanamo. The continuing existence of this camp sends nothing by negative messages about this country to the world, and to the terrorists who want to do it harm.

It says that America is so terrified of these few criminals that they can’t stand to have them on American soil, even in some of the most secure prisons on Earth. It says that the U.S. won’t try these people because Americans themselves believe that their justice system is so weak and ineffective that they cannot stand up to a motley crew of Third World thugs. It says that Americans believe that they are above the standards that they preach to the rest of the world to abide by. That they think they are somehow special and above everyone else.

If the debacle in Iraq, the current troubles in Afghanistan, and the continuing fight with terrorists has shown us one thing, it is that even the most powerful nation needs friends. Getting rid of Guantanamo won’t dissuade those inclined to believe the worst about America, but it wont’ hurt to make everyone else more sympathetic to the American cause.

A really fascinating article on the BBC is about surveillance at protests. Specifically, video surveillance by the protesters on the police.

I just found it really interesting because, as obvious an idea as it is, it had never occurred to me that protesters would want to film the protests, and especially the police.

In any case, anything which acts as an additional check on abuse of power is welcome. And really it should be welcomed by the police as well, if they are doing what they are supposed to be, as they claim. The potential for misleading footage aside, the more cameras there are, the more evidence to show the public what a great job they are doing.

Of course, putting my social scientist cap on, I couldn’t help notice the little bit of information towards the end of the article on police being outfitted with body-worn cameras, usually on their helmets.

Pilot tests by police in 2006-07 were pronounced a success by the Home Office. Its assessment found that as well as reducing some crime, the use of the headcams reduced the amount of paperwork and, crucially, led to a drop in complaints against the police. There were no complaints against officers wearing the headcams during the pilot period.

The most obvious conclusion many people might take away from this is that people did not file false against the officers equiped with cameras, knowing there was footage. But an additional conclusion to be reached should be that those officers behaved better knowing they would be on camera. It’s the same effect as protesters filming the police.

I’m not sure how obvious that last point was to other people, but it was just the most interesting part of the article for me.

One thing you learn to do when you learn economics is to think of a problem in terms of incentives. Not always easy, but I think I have a very clear and good example. The piracy problem off the coast of Somalia. This is something that has been in the news much this past week due to the U.S. crew on cargo ship which was attacked. Thankfully, all crews are now free and safe.

The piracy problem, however, is far from resolved and only seems to be getting worse by the day. And when one looks past a lot of rhetoric and bluster, it’s clear that no one has an answer to this problem.

On a BBC News web page soliciting public opinion, there appear to be broadly 3 types of actions being suggested. (I am not counting a lot of the political finger-pointing, which is not all that helpful.)

1. Punitive collective punishment, against all the pirates, the various villages they come from, or the whole damned country. A less violent (and legal) version of this is for forceful response to piracy.
2. Use of escort convoys. People make comparisons to WWII, but this is something that is actually being done now with some, if not all, shipments of food aid to Somalia.
3. Arming the merchant ships and sailors.

(There are also some other useful suggestions at the very end of the article here.)

What all these suggestions seem to have in common is that fact that they seem to have resulted from a complete lack of any thought on the incentives and disincentives at work on the various parties.

So let us look at each party one at a time and see what incentives and disincentives they have.

First, the pirates.  The incentives are obvious. According to one report on the BBC, one pirate claims to have netted $250,000 from just one incident. You don’t have to live in Somalia for that to be exceptional pay for a day’s work. The disincentives are that it is dangerous work. Just look at what happened to three of the pirates holding the U.S. captain hostage.

Unfortunately, this is not that much of a disincentive. Those cases where the pirates are captured, less actually come to harm, are rare. And for pirates who are captured, it is not at all clear what you can do with them. Somalia has no functioning government, less an effective judicial system. No country wants to start bringing Somalis to their own country to prosecute. Some have tried dumping them on Kenya, but no one actually knows how effective a deterrent that has been, or if the Kenyans are even equipped to prosecute pirates seized by other countries.

What we have just looked at are absolute incentives and disincentives. There are also comparative incentives and disincentives. How does piracy compare against alternatives for these people?

In terms of incentives, it compares very well, since there are very few, if any, alternative means of income for many of these people. If there are no alternatives, it doesn’t really matter what you think or feel about piracy.

The disincentives compare favourably also. Living in Somalia is hard and dangerous by any standards. The main difference between engaging in piracy and not seems to be that most people try to avoid the dangers of Somali life, whereas you are seeking a higher level of danger by pursuing piracy. Unfortunately, piracy has a huge potential payoff, the other option does not. And besides, there’s no getting away from the hardships of Somali life short of leaving the country.

When seen in this light, the suggestions for action don’t have much merit. Action against Somalia will not work, unless you are intent on wiping out the entire population (I think they call that genocide), or you want to occupy the country and rebuild it.

Convoys are hugely expensive and, for that reason, untenable.  The pirates can just wait it out, until the navies get sick of escorting convoys, and then start again.

Arming merchant ships is not very practical. The pirates can, and will, always out-gun any armed merchant vessel. The only certain result of such policy will be increased danger and fatality, mostly for the merchant crew. Remember, the pirates’ lives are already pretty miserable and dangerous; how much worse will armed merchant ships make things for them?

What everyone seems to be missing in all this is that they are intent on setting up punitive deterrents. Clearly that won’t work. If punishment as deterrent worked all the time, we wouldn’t have any crime. So how about taking away the incentives for the pirates?

One, admittedly very simplistic, suggestion would be to make it illegal (maybe even criminal) to pay ransoms. This would be somewhat different from the classic “kidnap for ransom” scenario in that the party capable of paying the ransom is disinterested. While a rich person might pay a ransom for a family member even if it was against the law, a business would not, at least not without risking going out of business.

Businesses would then be faced with a choice. They can risk piracy by taking the same routes, assuming that they can find people to crew the ships. If a ship is taken by a pirate, the company can either pay up and face being prosecuted out of business, or not pay and face ruin in the court of public opinion. Or, they can reroute their ships to stay clear of pirates.

As people have already observed, rerouting ships is costly. But so is paying ransoms, and the various navies who protect ships don’t come free.

Under such a scenario, the payoff from piracy may decrease sufficiently that there is no longer enough incentive to keep doing it. The problem is in the details of such a plan.

This will take collective action on the part of many governments to enact, and properly enforce, the anti-ransom laws. Piracy will not be discouraged as long as there are ships to loot from countries with no such policy. And enforcement will also be problematic. There will be those sympathetic to companies paying ransom to save lives (while conveniently forgetting that it was those companies who put those lives deliberately in harms way in the first place).

The point isn’t that I think I have some great solution. The point is that public debate doesn’t seem to be considering all the incentives at work in shaping our current situation.

President Obama was in the news (very briefly) about a small comment he made on legalising marijuana. It was during the “cyber-townhall” meeting he held on a wide ranging set of issues.

Apparently, one of the more popular questions posed was regarding legalising marijuana. As President Obama characterised it, the question proposed that legalising the use of the drug, and thereby taxing its sale, might help create jobs and improve the economy. (You can see a video of it here.)

If that was a fair characterisation by the President, then it was a silly question and it deserved to be brushed off. You don’t need to be an economist to realise that the size of the current economic problem is such that, for legalised sales of marijuana to solve the economic problem, we would all have to consume vast quantities.

To put this in context, Diageo, one of the world’s largest drinks companies, has sales (not profits) of £10.6 billion for the year ended June 30, 2008. (The current exchange rate is approx. $1.40 for £1.) With banks such as Chase having received two and a half times that individually to bail them out, you can see that for marijuana sales to rescue the economy, it would have to become the most popular drug sold, by a factor of thousands.

All this is my way of saying that it was an incredibly silly way of asking about legalisation of marijuana. But I suspect the questioners thought they were being very clever and sly in asking their real question: Will President Obama support legalising marijuana for recreational use?

There are potentially powerful arguments to be made for legalisation from a law and order perspective. There is little evidence to support the notion that it is a “gateway drug” and, because it does not have the sorts of addictive properties as some of the “Class A” drugs such as cocaine or morphine (heroine), it is debatable whether marijuana causes additional criminality that is not associated soley with the fact that possession and use of it is a criminal act in and of itself.

There are, however, also good reasons for opposing legalisation. For example, marijuana can and does come in different grades of potency and it is questionable as to whether the more powerful variants would ever be allowed for recreational use. In that case, the recreational users are likely to keep on seeking out the more potent, and illegal, variant. Legalisation of the less powerful variants may then not alleviate the law and order issues, and may eaxcerbate them by creating potential loopholes for criminals.

I admit I’m not the most well-versed person on the topic, but there does not appear to be sufficiently convincing arguments for legalisation which overwhelm those opposed, at least for recreational use. I also suspect that that is not far off from what many people think. Which is why the “cyber-potheads” ask silly questions.

What’s more disappointing is the level of discourse coming from some people who apparently favour legalisation, at least for medical use. I’ve read two on Huffington Post, both of which are poorly argued and off the mark.

The first one was so off the mark I’m still not sure why the author was so worked up. First, the President’s point was addressing the question whether legalising pot would aid the economy. Neither this nor the second article address that point. As one of the commentors for the first article noted, this may have been deliberate on the President’s part to avoid having to tackle a tricky issue he’d rather not deal with. But the author didn’t even make this obvious observation.

In fact, in this author’s case, he was talking about a legally available drug containing an active ingredient derived from pot. So what is his beef? Other people can get the same drug he did, legally!

If his point was to argue that there are people who would benefit from having access to a more powerful variant of the drug he had, i.e. medicinal marijuana, then he never got around to making that argument. And he never makes any link between those posing the silly question to the President and those who need medicinal marijuana, which would have justified the comment that the President was laughing at “them” as a group.

The second article I mentioned seems to make exactly the same mistake.

While this author makes a more convincing, and coherent, argument for legalising medicinal use of marijuana, he is still missing the point. Which is, the President was not addressing that issue; he was saying legalising marijuana would not help the economy. (At this point, I suspect that was at least a mischaraterisation of the sorts of questions which came in on the issue, deliberately setting up an easy straw, and I’m amazed it seems to have worked so well.)

I think what both authors are missing, or deliberately avoiding, was the question of whether marijuana should be legalised for medicinal use only, or if it should also be permitted for recreational use as well. Because lets face it: whatever the merits or demerits of a serious argument about marijuana’s benefits, the majority of those who support legalising marijuana want to use it recreationally.

Of the many people I know, and have known, who favour legalisation of recreational use, most of whom are recreational users themselves, I have never met a single person who had anything to say about its medicinal properties.

That means that the supporters of medicinal marijuana are faced with a choice. They can support keeping the drug illegal for recreational use, in which case there is almost certainly not enough interest, let alone support, among the public in legalising the medicinal use. Or, they can support recreational use, in which case their cause is linked with a much weaker cause, and one which has powerful law-enforcement opponents.

If supporters of medical marijuana want real change, they have to start making difficult, and brave, choices, instead of venting misdirected anger and frustration like the two authors.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover. Maybe the same thing applies to excerpts.

Reading these excerpts of a book on spouses and partners of paedophiles, I’m not entirely sure what the book is supposed to tell us. It’s entitled, “Understanding Child Abuse: The Partners of Child Sex Offenders Tell Their Stories”. The thing is, if the excerpts are anything to go by, there isn’t much to be understood.

Many of the women quoted are former victims of abuse themselves. And many also display clearly irrational judgement. Perhaps the best example of both is “Cheryl”, the last person quoted.

There was one social worker that tried giving me a lecture because I’d said I wanted to try and help him and she said, like, I shouldn’t stay with him just to help him. She felt because I had been in a violent relationship before, I had to be one of these people and I said, “No, I’m not like that, I just do want to help Graham – he’s worth helping.” He has his off moments but I don’t stay with him to stick two fingers up at everybody – I stay with him because I love him and I think he’s worth the effort.

“Graham”, incidentally, has been convicted of on multiple occasions, so has clearly demonstrated a tendency for recidivism. And there is nothing in any of Cheryl’s account which explains how Graham might be “worth the effort”.

Judging by these examples, it’s hard not the reach the conclusion that most of these women find themselves in their predicament at least in some part due to their own circumstances and failings. Which is not to say that all women whose partners turn out to be paedophiles are that way. “Rachel” perhaps best exemplifies a woman who is as close to someone who is not herself  already “damaged” or displaying poor judgement.

Even in her case, however, there is nothing in her story which lends us any greater understanding of child abuse, the abusers, or their partners and family.

Unless the excerpts are missing something, I’m not sure what the book achieves, except satisfying morbid curiosities.