The Daily Parker

In computers, as in any technical or artistic field, sometimes words have different meanings than they do in ordinary English. Take "or," for example. When a computer sees "or," it understands that if either condition is true, then the entire thing is true. The logic chart looks like this, with the conditions along the edge and the result in the middle:

So, if condition 1 is true, then the statement is true, regardless of condition 2, and vice-versa. Only when conditions 1 and 2 are both false is the result false.

In standard spoken English, the word "or" doesn't work that way. Instead, it functions as an "exclusive or" (XOR), wherein one and only one condition must be true (and the other false) for the entire thing to be true. That grid looks like this:

So if condition 1 is true and condition 2 is false (or vice-versa), then the result is true; but if both 1 and 2 are the same, the result is false.

Leave it to master logician and brilliant philosopher Newt Gingrich to use a logical "or" in conversation today when he said, "either I really believe the things I've said my whole life, or I'd be a fraud." See? To a computer, he can be both!

Actually, he can be both to a person, too, but that's another problem.

Rod Blagojevich, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties:

The prelude to this curse is also quite interesting because Blagojevich is on a conference call talking to his advisors and he quickly seems to come unhinged. He starts the conversation by saying he’s been politically successful, but Obama’s rise to the White House makes it difficult for him to run for president. He tries to keep his cool, but then he makes clear to his advisors what he wants: money. Then an advisor asks one question and he loses it.

(Go to the WBEZ City Room for a link to the uncensored tape.)

Some of the former governor's money woes might—might—have come from spending $400,000 on clothes in the six years before his impeachment. Just maybe.

Pat Quinn will never give us this kind of entertainment, running the state competently as he does. I mean, this is f****n' Illinois. And we had this thing, and it was f****n' golden. But then it got tossed out of office, and all we have now is the retrial.

The costumed head of a Tea Party organization this morning clarified the movement's small-government ethos:

[Tea Party Founding Fathers chairman William] Temple said that "if the House Armed Services Committee and the Pentagon slow down on injecting open homosexuality and females into forward combat roles," tea partiers might be able to put up with their new Republican House voting to ensure American government services paid for with more borrowed cash.

Temple's line of reasoning:

When the Pentagon's own studies show that military effeminization may have an extremely costly impact on recruiting and retention, when Islamists have shown their willingness to sexually brutalize American female reporters, why would John Boehner's House Republicans be caving to political correctness? Why would House Republicans who know better be fostering inappropriate attractions in the intimacy of tents, bunks, barracks, platoons, subs, tanks, convoys, cockpits, latrines, showers, toilets and locker rooms when we are fighting wars in three Muslim nations?

This is, of course, the kind of reasoned argument one would expect from a man standing in front of video cameras wearing a tricorn hat.

They aired two back-to-back stories on Weekend Edition. First, they reported that for reasons that passeth understanding, the NRA got Florida to pass a law prohibiting doctors from asking about guns in the house:

For decades, the American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged its members to ask questions about guns and how they're stored, as part of well-child visits.

But Marion Hammer, the National Rifle Association's lobbyist in Tallahassee, says that's not a pediatrician's job.

"We take our children to pediatricians for medical care — not moral judgment, not privacy intrusions," she says. NRA lobbyists helped write a bill that largely bans health professionals from asking about guns. Hammer says she and other NRA members consider the questions an intrusion on their Second Amendment rights.

"This bill is about helping families who are complaining about being questioned about gun ownership, and the growing anti-gun political agenda being carried out in examination rooms by doctors and staffs," Hammer says.

What the...? Getting shot causes medical problems, right? And there's a demonstrated (but not necessarily causal) link between gun ownership and medical risks, right? So asking about guns and other dangerous items in the house might be part of a good medical history, don't you think? Apparently the NRA don't. If they're so concerned about gun-owner privacy, why not pass a privacy law instead? Oh, right—doctors are already forbidden from sharing medical histories.

The story immediately following that one had Barbara Bradley Hagerty asking, completely straight-faced (which is easier to discern on the radio than you might imagine), why people believe May 21st is judgment day:

Most Bible scholars note that even Jesus said he had no idea when Judgment Day would come. But May 21 believers like Haubert are unfazed.

"I've crunched the numbers, and it's going to happen," [actuary Brian Haubert, 33,] says.

Haubert says the Bible contains coded "proofs" that reveal the timing. For example, he says, from the time of Noah's flood to May 21, 2011, is exactly 7,000 years. Revelations like this have changed his life.

"I no longer think about 401(k)s and retirement," he says. "I'm not stressed about losing my job, which a lot of other people are in this economy. I'm just a lot less stressed, and in a way I'm more carefree."

Only last week I read a Mother Jones article about denial science, which opened with a description of The Seekers, who believed aliens would spirit them away on or before the end of the world, which would happen 21 December 1954. After giving up all they owned and waiting for their version of the Rapture, they concluded from the lack of cataclysm that the aliens had seen their devotion and decided to save the planet, thanks to the Seekers. I wonder what Haubert and his friends will say on May 22nd?

Not only that, but: he's an actuary? On the basis of the available information, one must conclude he's not a very good one.

On Tuesday, Andrew Sullivan posted a note about the South's economic lagging after the U.S. civil war. Yesterday, he posted a follow-up quoting one of his readers repeating the destruction-of-wealth canard, which posits that $4 bn of wealth (about $400 bn today) got wiped out with the 13th Amendment. The reader, an historian, said:

Perhaps the most important factor in the South’s economic underdevelopment was the fact that emancipation, while a milestone in human freedom, was an economic calamity. There were approximately 4 million slaves, with an average value of $1,000. Emancipation meant the destruction of $4 billion of Southern capital. Slavery as a symbol of status had encouraged successful professionals and entrepreneurs to invest in slaves rather than industry. With the end of the war, that “investment” was rendered valueless, and that put severe limits on the available local capital for investment.

Fortunately, this evening Sullivan posted a response from another reader (presumably an economist) who corrected the record:

If the economic value of a slave was the value of his future expected labor, less the cost of his subsistence, then to destroy his value as an asset would require that he be killed or disabled. In fact, Emancipation simply took that value from the slaveholder and returned it to the former slave, the rightful owner. For this transfer to be destructive of economic value workers would have to have been more productive enslaved than working freely for wages, which is unlikely.

The historian seems to suggest that possession of slaves had become a status symbol, causing overinvestment in this variety of asset. If this is true, then there was a "slave bubble", the popping of which would have erased value with or without Emancipation. In fact, if slavery had still existed when the bubble popped, the result would have been terrific brutality, as slave owners attempted to use starvation and the whip to salvage what profit they could. The rationalizing force of the market took the evil that was always present in slavery and made it an efficient evil.

I think the second reader has got it right. The whole thread is worth a read, though. I've always found the regional differences fascinating, even more after spending six months in North Carolina.

As I ride my bike past all the cars stuck in traffic this evening, I will think, briefly, about gasoline prices. So far this year, I've filled up my Volkswagen twice, for a total of $90 or so. Ouch, I said as I paid $50 for a tank last week, that's a lot. Of course, living in a dense urban area, taking public transit, and using my own legs to get around almost all the time (plus driving a car that gets 8 L per 100 km), I think gasoline eats up about 1% of my annual spending.

According to the Chicago Tribune, it actually doesn't make up that much of anyone's budget, but people still freak out about high gas prices for obvious reasons:

For consumers, there's no escaping the high prices, which helps explain their obsession.

Not only do many drivers see gas prices every time they fill up, but tracking the price is unavoidable because gas is about the only product consumers regularly buy that requires visiting a special store. So, they're intensely focused on a single product, as opposed to noticing the price rise of tomatoes when buying a full shopping cart of goods.

They also stand in front of the pump and feel the financial pain as the price digits whiz upward.

And why are gas prices so high? Economics 101, baby. Combine low supply with high, inelastic demand and you get high prices:

So how can we get lower gas prices? Use less of it. Increasing supply won't change the price much because of gasoline's demand inelasticity, meaning how much gas we buy doesn't respond to price increases very much. (The actual rate is about -0.25; that is, for every increase in price of 1, demand goes down about 0.25.)

Yesterday I passed on Andrew Sullivan's thoughts about the role of torture in finding bin Laden. TPM makes the same point this morning: despite what torturers like Dick Cheney say, we found bin Laden using conventional interrogations and a tiny bit of sloppiness by bin Laden's flunkies.

As AP reports, the principal source of information about bin Laden "did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic."

Leaving it up for debate? No. We settled that debate in 1949, shortly after the details of Hitler's crimes became public knowledge.

Torture is morally wrong, even if it were "a valuable tool." Except it isn't a valuable tool at all: it produces crap intelligence, because someone being tortured will generally say anything to stop the torture. Plus, if people think being captured by a particular enemy will lead to torture, they'll do two things which really suck: they'll fight a lot harder to avoid capture, resulting in more of your guys getting killed, and they'll torture your guys in retribution. Armies have known this for centuries. Recall that at the end of World War II, German soldiers readily surrendered to the Americans and British but fought the Russians to the last man. Why? Because they believed we would treat them humanely and that the Russians wouldn't. (Generally the Russian army treated them humanely as well, but the Germans didn't believe that, which emphasizes how important reputation can be.)

Again, and I can't stress this enough, torture is morally wrong. So really, arguing about how effective it is misses the point. But what is morality and what are facts when you're really pissed at the terrorists, right? This is how they win, by the way: by making us diminish ourselves.

'Nuff said:

Also, as Sullivan pointed out: "All I know at this point is: seven years of torturing = no Osama. Two years without torture = Osama."

I don't know what to say, so I'll let CNN, the AP, the Trib, the Economist, and the Times say it:

• Osama bin Laden, the face of terror, killed in Pakistan
• Obama: Al-Qaida head bin Laden dead
• Obama announces Osama bin Laden killed by U.S.
• Editor's update: President Barack Obama has announced that Osama bin Laden has been killed in an American operation in Pakistan.[1]
• Obama Announces Killing of Osama bin Laden

[1] Look, you know, it's 5 am in London. I suspect they'll have more to say after they've had their morning cuppa.

Gulliver this afternoon examines whether we might want to examine them:

A new academic paper [PDF] from John Mueller (of The Ohio State University) and Mark Stewart (of the University of Newcastle in Australia) attempts to determine whether the return on investment justified those huge expenditures. ... [T]he findings in this paper are truly remarkable. By 2008, according to the authors, America's spending on counterterrorism outpaced all anti-crime spending by some $15 billion. Messrs Mueller and Stewart do not even include things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which they call "certainly terrorism-determined") in their trillion-plus tally.

"[A] most common misjudgment has been to embrace extreme events as harbingers presaging a dire departure from historical patterns. In the months and then years after 9/11, as noted at the outset, it was almost universally assumed that the terrorist event was a harbinger rather than an aberration. There were similar reactions to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 truck bomb attack in Oklahoma City as concerns about a repetition soared. And in 1996, shortly after the terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo set off deadly gas in a Tokyo subway station, one of terrorism studies' top gurus, Walter Laqueur, assured the world that some terrorist groups 'almost certainly' will use weapons of mass destruction 'in the foreseeable future.' Presumably any future foreseeable in 1996 is now history, and Laqueur’s near 'certainty' has yet to occur."

The paper also found that anti-terror spending has outpaced anti-crime spending by some $15 bn, despite crime costing society significantly more. The paper doesn't go into the politics of why this might be so, but I'll hazard a guess that cutting crime benefits more people a little while spending on anti-terror measures benefits a few people quite a bit. Lowering the likelihood that my car will suffer $300 in damage from a break-in has less immediacy than a $30m contract for a new security gadget would were I in that line of business.