The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Real train service

Yesterday I took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and back. The 476 km trip takes two hours and twenty minutes, averaging 200 km/h including stops.

The best we have in the U.S. over the same distance, the Acela from Boston to Philadelphia (511 km), takes just over five hours on a good day and more if it snows. Chicago to St. Louis (457 km) is scheduled for five and a half hours, but I haven't ever made the trip in under six.

The U.S. made different choices than Japan (or Europe: London to Newcastle, 483 km, takes 2 hours and 50 minutes), because our vast depopulated spaces made an automobile-based infrastructure deceptively appealing. Wouldn't it be incredible if the U.S. experienced some kind of economic situation where it made a lot of sense to start correcting that monumental error? Oh, right.

In any event, I left the Tokyo train station a little past 10 in the morning and got to see this by 2, which is really the point:

On vacation, not on Mars

Someday, I may got on a total vacation, a trip during which I completely disconnect from all that matters in the world. This may be saudade[1], or possibly outright delusion. In any event, this week, I'm still reading the news before breakfast.

Here's Krugman this morning (last night? It's dinner time Saturday in Princeton):

[T}he notion that denying health care to the near-poor is a serious deficit-reduction policy, but raising taxes on the very rich is not, is not something you can justify at all on the basis of the actual numbers. Anyone who says different is practicing, well, class warfare.

More wealth in the middle classes means more wealth for everyone. This is what next November will be about.

Speaking of elections, the front page of today's Japan Times ("All the News Without Fear or Favor") mentions New Zealand Prime Minister John Key's re-election this weekend. New Zealand matters in Japan. Who knew? (No offense to New Zealand, which I very much hope to visit one day and I will certainly love with all my heart, but that brings to three the number of countries who do. The others, of course, are New Zealand and Kiribati.) Interestingly, the story does not appear on the paper's website.

Enough paying attention to the world. I'm off to explore.

[1] "The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost," according to Pamela Haag in a cute list of phrases describing love that don't translate directly into English.

Reasonable suspicion of criminal activity

A cop in Tuscaloosa, Ala., arrested a suspicious foreigner under the state's xenophobia laws, with predictable results:

A German manager with Mercedes-Benz is free after being arrested for not having a driver's license with him under Alabama's new law targeting illegal immigrants, authorities said Friday, in an otherwise routine case that drew the attention of Gov. Robert Bentley.

Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson told The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag Wednesday night and asked the driver for his license. The man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters, Anderson said.

Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman Felyicia Jerald said the man is from Germany and was visiting Alabama on business. The company's first U.S. assembly plant is located just east of Tuscaloosa.

As someone in my industry might say to a customer who has inadvertently deleted all of his mother's photos because of a major usability flaw in the software, "the application is working as designed." Harassing all foreigners, even the ones who bring you millions of dollars in revenue, is a feature of Alabama's law, not a defect. Alabama wants to ensure that any foreigners in the state have a legal right to be there. They have made tremendous progress towards this goal since the law took effect for the simple reason that most foreigners, legal or not, now avoid Alabama.

Because when your economy is in the toilet, the best thing you can do is make people want to spend money somewhere else. Go Bama. Roll Tide.

Davis police chief, cops suspended

After Saturday's PR disaster at UC Davis, the university suspended its police chief and two officers:

UC Davis said early Monday in a news release that it was necessary to place police Chief Annette Spicuzza on administrative leave to restore trust and calm tensions. The school refused to identify the two officers who were place on administrative leave but one was a veteran of many years on the force and the other "fairly new" to the department, Spicuzza earlier told The Associated Press. She would not elaborate further because of the pending probe.

It still baffles me how a cop could so brazenly assault a bunch of kids lie that when he was surrounded by cameras. Forget how wrong his actions were absent the media; I get that some cops have authority problems. But how stupid could this guy be?

On the same thread, notice the university suspended the cops "to restore trust and calm tensions," not because they allege the police used inappropriate force.

Actually, we *are* in foxholes

Via Sullivan, the L.A. Times reports that atheists are moving toward official recognition in the U.S. military:

Religion — specifically Christianity — is embedded in military culture. The Chaplain Corps traces its origins to the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Until the 1970s, the service academies required cadets to attend chapel services. Nightly prayers still are broadcast throughout Navy ships at sea. ... [N]onbelievers describe themselves as a minority that is often isolated and sometimes closeted.

In practical terms, [Army Capt. Ryan] Jean says, lay-leader status would make it easier for atheists at Ft. Meade to get access to facilities and services on the base. But he says recognition would carry a larger message.

Since a majority of Americans practice religion, it follows that a majority of the military do as well. But the proportion of people who don't, and of military personnel who don't, may be larger than the proportion of people who practice any single religion. They deserve the same mental-health services that military chaplains provide to religionists.

Let's not forget: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. I daresay if Congress can't, neither can the armed services.

UC Davis Police Reactions

The Atlantic has a few good Friday's police overreaction at UC Davis.

First, the university has launched an inquiry into the incident. I sincerely hope the guy wielding the pepper spray, John Pike, loses his job, as does the guy who ordered him to use it.

Alexis Madrigal feels bad for him: "[W]hile it's [Pike's] finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn't become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably."

James Fallows raises a good question: "[W]when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?"

Reacting to police claims the protesters were a threat, Ta Nahesi Coates writes: "Those of who've followed police brutality cases over the years will see the pattern at work. When accused of police brutality cops often claim to be endangered, regardless of the facts of the situation. An abusive [cop] could be driving a tank and facing off with a baby stroller, and yet somehow he/she would be the one outgunned."

Finally, Garance Franke-Ruta has a round-up of police violence against the Occupy movements.

Quis custodiet custodiens? Fortunately, in 2011, everyone with a cell phone. Let's start taking the video evidence to court.

More inappropriate police actions

Video from yesterday in Syria California:

Fallows says:

Let's stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people's rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I'll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus -- and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.

I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population.

It makes me proud to be an American.

The GOP wants to censor the Internet

The Atlantic's James Fallows is justly exercised about the Orwellian "Stop Online Piracy Act" making its way through Congress:

The Vimeo clip below does a very clear and concise job of explaining the commercial, technical, and political issues at stake. Short description of the problem: in the name of blocking copyright-infringing piracy sites mainly outside the United States, the bill would make U.S.-based Internet companies legally liable for links to or publication of any pirated material. This would be technically cumbersome, economically and commercially dampening, and potentially politically repressive. The video tells you more.

Every developed society has had to work out the right balance of how far it will go to ensure that inventors and creators will get a reasonable return for their discoveries. If it does too little -- as in modern China, where you can buy a DVD of any movie for $1.50 from a street vendor -- it throttles the growth of creative industries. (China both over-controls political expression and under-controls commercial copying.) If it does too much -- encouraging "patent troll" lawsuits, arresting people for file-sharing music or video streams -- it can throttle growth and creativity in other ways. There is no perfect answer, but this bill would tip the balance way too far in one direction, to defend incumbents in the entertainment industry.

Write your representative. And then write a few other reps.

A heartbreaking scene of staggering idiocy

Last night, Penn State students rioted in support of disgraced football coach Joe Paterno:

Jimmy Gallagher, raised on the shoulders of students at the top of the Old Main staircase, shouted from a megaphone.

"We stand united as students. We don't care what anyone else has to say. We want Joe and we want him back," Gallagher (freshman-energy business and finance) said.

Jimmy, your football coach—a grandfather, if one can believe—failed to take action for nine years after he learned that one of his subordinates reported witnessing another subordinate raping a 10-year-old boy in a locker room shower. And there's evidence that Paterno had received other allegations against Sandusky going back to the mid-1990s.

The legal process must take its course before we can actually call former coach Jerry Sandusky a child rapist. But that doesn't matter to the appalling lack of moral intelligence Penn State students, staff, and administrators have displayed in the last few days.

Jerry Sandusky may not have done anything he's accused of doing. But if someone witnessed him having sex with a 10-year-old boy in the showers, for that person at the very least not to run to the nearest phone and call 911, or (given the witness was a former football player) not to beat the snot out of the (alleged) child rapist on the spot and then call 911, beggars the imagination.

So, Penn State students who rioted yesterday, you are voicing your support for a man who did nothing to investigate a credible report of child rape for 9 years after he learned of the incident. You're mad he won't get to coach a football game, but not mad he (allegedly) covered up a horrible crime? Wow.

The damage that Paterno, Sandusky, and everyone who failed to act even with the morality of a professional tobacco lobbyist did to Penn State's reputation will take a generation to fix. Who cares about the next three football games.

Updated to correct grammar, dates.

The Big Lie

Barry Ritholtz at the Washington Post explodes the big lie about why we're in a recession:

A Big Lie is so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. There are many examples: Claims that Earth is not warming, or that evolution is not the best thesis we have for how humans developed. Those opposed to stimulus spending have gone so far as to claim that the infrastructure of the United States is just fine, Grade A (not D, as the we discussed last month), and needs little repair.

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash.

[New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg was partially correct [when he blamed the crisis on Congress]: Congress did radically deregulate the financial sector, doing away with many of the protections that had worked for decades. Congress allowed Wall Street to self-regulate, and the Fed the turned a blind eye to bank abuses.

The previous Big Lie — the discredited belief that free markets require no adult supervision — is the reason people have created a new false narrative.

The entire column is worth reading.