GPS Stops Sex Offender Recidivism

While criminals are frequently not rational actors, apparently, a near certainty that they will be caught if they reoffend does have an impact.

Only one out of the state's 225 worst sex offenders, all being monitored by a new satellite-tracking system, was implicated in a new sex crime over a two-year period, the State Parole Board said Wednesday. . . . The one offender arrested out of the 225 being monitored was apprehended at the scene of a rape in April 2006. That case is pending. Nineteen other offenders committed technical offenses, such as not properly wearing the GPS device, in the two-year window.

From here.

In Colorado, two-thirds of sex offenders in an intensive supervision program have their probation (which admittedly isn't technically the same as parole as it usually involves less serious offenders) have their probation revoked or abscond. In raw numbers, out of 214 offenders in the 2007 fiscal year, 121 had their probation revoked and 23 absconded, while 70 successfully completed their probation. Of the revocations, 11 were for new felonies, 7 for new misdemeanors and 103 were for technical violations.

The story quoted above implies, but doesn't actualy state, that no one in the program committed a new non-sex felony or misdemeanor. But, at any rate, given the low number of technical violations, it is safe to conclude despite imperfect information, that the failure rate in the GPS program in New Jersey is far lower than in a similar Colorado program. This is true despite the fact that the Colorado program appears to have less serious offenders who ought to do better rather than worse.

Given the immense cost to the state of reincarcerating felons who fail when released, and the immense cost to the public when felons commit new crimes when released, there is little doubt that the GPS program is good for New Jersey's state budget as well.

Federal Oops!

A month ago, I discussed the case of lucky Mr. Ly, who was convicted and sentenced to rape, but not asked to show up to prison for sixteen years. The highest court in the state of Massachusetts held that while Mr. Ly had an obligation not to resist lawful attempts to place him in custody, that he has no duty to affirmative try to bring about his own incarceration. It also held that after sixteen years and plenty of opportunities to incarcerate Mr. Ly, that it was too late for the state to ask for him to serve his sentence now.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, is decidedly more wrathful and indignant. In a case decided today, it refused a prosecution request to set aside a prosection victory, because the man in prison was released and deported before the prosecution got around to carrying out the increased sentence they were awarded against the man. According to the 7th Circuit, it is perfectly fine to leave a twenty-four month remainder of a sentence hanging over a defendant's head indefinitely, over the objections of the prosecutors, stating:

[T]he United States Attorney’s Office has asked us to proceed as if it
had never appealed in the first place. It wants us to recall the mandate (issued more than 14 months ago) and reinstate the 33-month sentence that we have already held is erroneous. The reason for this proposed step is that the case otherwise will loiter on the district court’s docket until Reyes-Sanchez again illegally reenters the United States, is caught, and is compelled to resume serving time in this case.

It is not clear to us why leaving this case open on the district court’s docket is a bad thing. The prosecutor and district judge have themselves to blame for any untidiness. . . .

Although a court of appeals has the authority to recall its mandate, the power should be used only in extraordinary circumstances when inaction would lead to an injustice. Calderon v. Thompson, 523 U.S. 538, 549–53 (1998). The Court held in Calderon that the negligence of two appellate judges in handling a capital appeal was not a sufficient justification for the recall of an appellate mandate.If judicial negligence does not justify recalling a mandate, how could the prosecutor’s negligence do so? For that is the only reason the United States gives—that the prosecutor’s office was napping when action was required. And it is likewise difficult to see how the bookkeeping issues that occupy the prosecutor’s thoughts amount to an injustice. Many a case remains unresolved for years. Take, for example, the situation when a defendant is a fugitive. That’s functionally Reyes-Sanchez’s situation. Instead of alerting the prosecutor and the district court to a mistaken failure to impose a new sentence, Reyes-Sanchez got on a plane and left the United States. The prospect of a lawful, though higher, sentence should he return is his due.

The United States may seek his extradition from the Dominican Republic, or it may offer to permit his entry under the immigration laws (the technical phrase is “parole into the United States”) so that he could be resentenced. If Reyes-Sanchez declines that opportunity, then his absence will be a voluntary act and he could be resentenced in absentia under Fed. R. Crim. P. 43(c)(1)(B). See United States v. Achbani, No. 06-4190 (7th Cir. Nov. 8, 2007).

According to the prosecutor, United States v. Londono, 100 F.3d 236 (2d Cir. 1996), supports the conclusion that an appellate mandate should be recalled if the defendant is removed from the United States before being resentenced. Londono was decided before the Supreme Court stated in Calderon that recalling an appellate mandate requires compelling circumstances. What is more, Londono does not say that a mandate may be recalled to avoid inconvenient bookkeeping. The defendant in Londono had been removed from the United States before the court of appeals rendered its decision, and the court stated that a recall of mandate was appropriate to consider “the issue of potential mootness, a jurisdictional question that should have been timely presented by disclosure” of the alien’s absence from the United States. 100 F.3d at 237. There was no jurisdictional problem when our decision was made and none when the mandate issued.

If the United States Attorney thinks that a case lingering on the district court’s docket is an intolerable blot on a federal record-keeping system, he is free to dismiss the indictment or recommend that the President commute Reyes-Sanchez’s sentence to time served. As things are, however, the Judicial Branch should stand ready to impose a lawful sentence as soon as the defendant is available for sentencing, or is deemed voluntarily absent for the purpose of Rule 43(c)(1)(B).

The decision was renderd by Chief Judge Easterbrook with with concurrence of Circuit Judges Cudahy and Manion.

The 7th Circuit's indifference to the injustice to the Defendant in this case, and the difference between the prosecution and the judiciary in an adversary process is shocking.

The situation of a fugitive is very different from that of someone who shows up to prison, serves his time until the warden tells him to leave, and is put on a plane out of the country against his will when his prison term is over. Easterbrook's crabbed tunnel vision fails to permit him to see this obvious point.

Moreover, in an adversary system, the burden of enforcing the law is upon the executive branch, and not the judiciary, which interprets the law. While a mistake by a judge is not attributable to "the People" who bring a criminal case, a mistake by the prosecution or the prison warden is generally attributable to the prosecution and cannot be held against a criminal defendant. In the American system of justice, the prosecution does not have an obligation to seek the harshest sentence available. It is permissible for them to say "never mind".

Thus, Judge Easterbrook's outburst in this case is puzzling, troubling, and a firm indication of how out of touch the federal judiciary is with anything resembly notions of fairness and reasonableness in the criminal justice system.

Hat Tip to How Appealing.

Physics and Fate

The most important philosophical questions in physics concern the nature of time.

The Deists, following in Newton's footsteps, envisioned a clockwork universe that is purely deterministic, with a single past and future. Fate exists and free will is illusory. Special relativity changes the rate at which time flows in different local parts of time-space, but is not a philosophically important change so long as the speed of light cannot be exceeded.

Conventional quantum mechanical theory assumes based upon strong empirical evidence that at the quantum level, particles behave in a genuinely random manner. In this scenario that future is unknowable (to a perfect level of detail) and there are also theoretical limits to the extent we can know what happened in the past.

You can still get to "soft determinism" in contexts when the random variations at the quantum level cancel out and don't translate into different macroscopic observables. Randomness is philosophically different, but practically identical to determinism except in chaotic systems, i.e., those which are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Also, even many chaotic systems behave in highly predictable ways when viewed from afar, even if the details at a fine level are unpredictable. Predicting a high temperature, low temperature and precipitation amount at a particular place five days in advance is more art than science. Predicting the broad outline of the weather over the course of the year (and even such details as how many hurricanes will develop over the course of a given hurricane season) is much easier. Jupiter has had a great red spot for decades or centuries, but predicting its precise shape and location exactly 30 days from now isn't necessarily easy.

At a stellar level, these kinds of systems are rare after the very early period in which the universe was formed, but important to the extent that the chaotic system in an expansion phase of the universe allowed random quantum variations to establish the large scale structure of the universe, and at the details of star formation in nebula and collapse patterns in binary and more complex multi-star systems. Non-chaotic determinism is so close to accurate in the domain of what astronomers are actually capable of directly observing (as opposed to merely theorizing about) that determinism is an excellent first order model for all practical purposes.

At a planetary level, you are mostly looking at weather and currents on planets with atmospheres and oceans. Up close and personal, we are mostly looking at the impact of random quantum behavior on thought processes in the brains of sentient creatures, mostly social ones, where one persons thoughts can influence many individuals.

A couple of subtle issues in quantum theory can have big philosophical impacts, even though they are hard or impossible to observe.

One is that quantum mechanical behavior is actually deterministic at a scale so decoupled from the macroscale that it appears almost exactly like random process, in the same way that a random number generator on a computer looks random even though it isn't. Almost everything we call "random" in nature is random for all practical purposes, rather than truly random, so this isn't as profound a shift as it might seem. All the really disturbing results (e.g. every quanta on Earth suddenly moving in unison through pure random chance to a point a thousand miles closer to the sun than it is now) turn out to be so fleeting and so unlikely that they aren't actually worrisome over the 14 billion year life of the universe in a system as large as a galaxy or larger.

A deterministic approach wouldn't change any quantum calculations, but would imply a pure fate view of the universe just as surely as a Newtonian clockwork universe. While experimental evidence is insufficient to distinguish between various "interpretations" of quantum theory, the various interpretations are radically different in how they answer the natural philosophy question of fate.

The other is the arrow of time issue. In a deterministic single past, single present, single future model, asking which direction time flows is a meaningless question.

In a stochastic system (i.e. one with truly random quantum behavior), the direction of time matters. We perceive time as going relentlessly forward, and relativity and observation makes clear that macro-matter and energy systems at sublight speeds going backwards in time are impossible, and the energy barriers under special relativity associated with get to superluminal speeds make tachyons impossible except as a decomposition of speed of light energy particles that have never been observed.

But, whether information, which is neither matter nor energy, or individual quanta can exceed the speed of light or travel backwards in time (and the two things non-obviously are equivalent or very nearly equivalent), is not a settled question. No one has every outright observed either phenomena. But, quantum tunnelling phenomena make clear that individual quanta predictably do things that are impossible for macroscopic objects (and more importantly that multiple quanta with a coherent quantum state can also do impossible things). Different camps of quantum physicists argue at length over how close to succeeding experimental efforts to communicate information superluminally have come which basically involve disputes over how experiments are characterized.

On the other hand, the argument that nothing every runs backwards in time is supported by certain charge parity symmetry violations in some much studied and theoretically important (but practically not too useful) handful of systems.

Of course, philosophically, the main reason we care about the existence of fate at a fundamental level which we can't even observe in experiments, is because of what it implies about free will. But, defining free will turns out to be a slippery business.

One can devise fair definitions of free will that can survive even a deterministic conception of the universe. If you live in the world of "The Little Prince" where everyone always willingly complies with the dictates of fate because it only demands what they were going to do anyway, then the two are not inconsistent. Indeed, it also isn't clear that a genuinely stochastic universe affords any more meaningful free will than a deterministic one, because it is not much easier to attribute to notion of free will to uncontrollable random events than it is to attribute free will to a deterministic system.

In order to get to common sense free will, you need a god or gods. For these purposes, I define these terms quite unconventionally, as something or someone capable of acting with moral purpose in the universe that is external to the micro level fundamental laws of physics (theologically and metaphysically, "creature with a soul" might be a better phrase than "god" or "gods" to match my mean in common sense language). These definition thus excludes from the definition of God a Deist clockwork god unless that god set up the initial conditions in a deterministic universe with particular end results far in the future carefully plotted out. Thus, to have common sense free will it is not sufficient that god play dice with the universe. God needs to have loaded dice, and we must all be gods.

The other part of the issue of free will that is a theoretical math and physics issue is the extent to which either truly random or truly deterministic systems (when viewed at a micro level) can have emergent properties that do not share those characteristics at a macro level. For example, can a computer program without a true random number generator ever have the same free will that proponents of the concept assume that humans share, and, if not, why are biological systems different?

Yet, despite these seemingly obvious philosophical conclusions, for most practical purposes the most useful theories flow from the assumption that free will exists, even if this has a weak evidentiary basis at the level of fundamental physics.

Vanishing Methodists

The story of the shrinking of the United Methodist Church, a quintessential mainline denomination, in the United States, bears watching. It is told by a loyal Methodist church elder.

I am pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse the decades-long downward trend in the number of people belonging to the UMC in the United States. (The UMC is a worldwide denomination and is growing outside the US.) In 1968 there were almost 13 million UMs; now there are about 8 million. Of these, we were told, the average age is 60. They didn't say what the median age is, but I expect it's higher. However, for this post I'll assume that the median age and the average age are about the same. The median age for all Americans is 36.4 years . . . .

The thrust of the convocation was that we UMs can reverse the decline if we return to Wesleyan basics. Now, I'm keen to return to Wesleyan basics and think we should do that anyway, but the idea that we can evangelize faster than the Grim Reaper reduces our numbers is a proposition that I find highly dubious.

Consider some actuarial facts. If indeed the median age is about the same as the average age, 60, that means that of the 8 million UMs living today, one-fourth, or 2 million, will be dead within 20 years, and another million dead about eight years later. So in less than 30 years, we will lose from death alone three-eighths of our present membership, leaving us at 5 million.

That decline does not include the hemorrhage of our youth who, when graduating from high school, graduate from the church as well (an issue affecting all denominations). I don't have the demographic breakdown for that age group as a percentage of the UM total, but the church admits that, relative to the general population, people under 35 are underrepresented.

So the decline due to death of our numbers will be amplified by dropouts, mostly, though not exclusively the under-35 cohort. There is only a small chance, IMO, that the number of people electing to leaved the denomination can be matched by those joining. But the idea that new members can offset losses from both dropouts and death is simply not supportable. If we could do that (or were willing to do it), we would already be doing it. And the losses from death in the coming years will only accelerate.

It goes without saying that with an average age of 60, United Methodists are generally no longer bearing children. Of course there are families in our churches, but there is a very large number of UM churches that have no children. The fertility rate among European-descended, American women is lower than the 2.1 replacement rate. The overall American fertility rate of 2.08 is that high only because non-white women are having more than two children each (on average, of course).

The U.S. population was about 37% smaller fifty years ago. The declining UMC membership and so as a share of the total U.S. population the UMC has fallen by about 61% in five decades, and it will only get worse for the foreseeable future.

There is nothing unusual about this trend for a mainline American church that serves mostly white people. It has been repeated in most of the mainline denominations in the United States, and white Catholics (but not immigrant Catholics) are also following this basic trendline.

The same source also has an interesting post on evidence that small family size causes people to become less religious, rather than the other way around.

Honey Better Than Cough Medicine For Kids

A teaspoon of honey before bed seems to calm children's coughs and help them sleep better . . . . The folk remedy did better than cough medicine or no treatment in a three-way comparison. . . . The research appears in December's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Federal health advisers recently warned that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines shouldn't be used in children younger than 6. . . . [H]oney should not be given to children younger than 1 because of a rare but serious risk of botulism.

From The Associated Press via the Denver Post.

Some Christmas History

Christmas hasn't always been popular with the Christian Right, or celebrated in its modern form.

When Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took control of England in 1645, they outlawed Christmas because they saw it as decadent revelry. The Pilgrims of New England felt the same way. They also waged war on Christmas — it was banned in Boston from 1659 to 1681.

And, where did the date for Christmas come from anyway:

In the Western world, the birthday of Jesus Christ has been celebrated on December 25th since AD 354, replacing an earlier date of January 6th. The Christians had by then appropriated many pagan festivals and traditions of the season, that were practiced in many parts of the Middle East and Europe, as a means of stamping them out. . . . Saints Days have also contributed to our Christmas celebrations. A prominent figure in today's Christmas is Saint Nicholas who for centuries has been honored on December 6th. He was one of the forerunners of Santa Claus. . . . Celebrating Christmas has been controversial since its inception. Since numerous festivities found their roots in pagan practices, they were greatly frowned upon by conservatives within the Church. The feasting, gift-giving and frequent excesses presented a drastic contrast with the simplicity of the Nativity, and many people throughout the centuries and into the present, condemn such practices as being contrary to the true spirit of Christmas.

The earliest English reference to December 25th as Christmas Day did not come until 1043.

Details of the pagan festivals appropriated can be found in the link above. According to "Christmas in America: A History," by Penne L. Restad (1996), at page 4, in the 200s Chistian scholars claimed various dates for the birth of their namesake including May 20, April 19, November 18 and March 28.

Wikipedia notes some of the American history of Christmas:

Christmas fell out of favor in the United States after the American Revolution, when it was considered an English custom. . . . Interest in Christmas in America was revived in the 1820s by several short stories by Washington Irving appearing in his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon and "Old Christmas", and by Clement Clarke Moore's 1822 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas (popularly known by its first line: Twas the Night Before Christmas). Irving's stories depicted harmonious warm-hearted holiday traditions he claimed to have observed in England. Although some argue that Irving invented the traditions he describes, they were widely imitated by his American readers. The poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas popularized the tradition of exchanging gifts and seasonal Christmas shopping began to assume economic importance. In her 1850 book "The First Christmas in New England", Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a character who complained that the true meaning of Christmas was being lost in a shopping spree. Christmas was declared a United States Federal holiday in 1870, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant.

An English actress in America Fanny Kemble observed in 1832 (Restad at 17):

Christmas Day is no religious day and hardly a holiday with them. New-year's day is perhaps a little, but only a little more so. For Twelfth-day it is unknown; and the household private festivals of birthdays are almost universally passed by unsevered from the rest of the toilsome days devoted to the curse of labor.

New England Sufferagist Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't recall Christmas as a great festival of her youth. (Restad at 17) Many Calvinist New Englanders took days off for election day and Harvard's Commencement Day (in July), but not Christmas. (Restad at 19).

The Advent Calendar tradition is roughly 150 years old.

The Advent Calendar has been around for more than 150 years and becomes more popular every year.

The origin of the calendar, like so many of our Christmas traditions, started in Germany back in the 19th century. Different methods of counting down the days to the celebration of Christmas were used. . . . The first printed calendar was produced by Gerhard Lang in Germany. When he was a child, his mother attached little candies to a piece of cardboard and each day Gerhard would take one off. His first (printed) calendar consisted of miniature colored pictures that would be attached to a piece of cardboard each day in December. Later Advent calendars were made with little doors to open on each day.

The child might find a small piece of candy, a Christmas picture, a religious picture or a bible verse.

The German calendars were sold until World War II, at which time production was stopped due to the war shortages. After the war, the production of calendars resumed in 1946 by Richard Selmer. Selmer credits President Eisenhower with helping the tradition grow in the United States during his term of office. A newspaper article at the time showed the Eisenhower grandchildren with The Little Town Advent calendar.

The modern relevance of advent seems to be waning. Secular Americans don't have a context for it. Non-liturgical Protestants, who eventually succumbed to peer pressure to recognize and embrace Christmas itself, rarely went on to adopt the nearby seasons of the liturgical calendar -- Advent, Epiphany and Lent, as well. The ranks of liturgical Christians are ebbing. Also, almost all of the mainline Christian denominations have shifted their worship practices to some extent in the direction of those of the Evangelicals over the past few decades.

Spooks To Prez: Iran Not A Threat

The New York Times explains:

An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach.

The impact of the National Intelligence Estimate’s conclusion — that Iran had halted a military program in 2003, though it continues to enrich uranium, ostensibly for peaceful uses . . . [has put] the main argument for a military conflict with Iran . . . off the table for the foreseeable future. . . . [National Security Advisor] Hadley said the drastic reversal in the intelligence agencies’ knowledge about Iran’s weapons programs was based “on new intelligence, some of which has been received in the last few months.”

Let us hope that Congress listens to these facts in the 13 months left of George W. Bush's administration. There is no execuse now to start a new war with Iran.

Unions In Colorado

The Big Picture Numbers

As of 2006, in Colorado, 5.0% of the private sector work force (92,589 workers), and 22.8% of the public sector work force (82,564 workers) was made up of union members. Another 10,948 private sector workers and 10,096 public sector workers were in union covered work places but were not union members themselves.

In contrast, in 1983 in Colorado, 11.2% of private sector workers (120,298 workers) and 24.1% of public sector workers (57,592 workers) were union members. In absolute terms, the number of union members in Colorado (public sector and private sector combined) has declined only about 4% from 1983 levels. But, rising public sector union membership in absolute numbers masks a significant decline in private sector union membership in absolute numbers. Falling private sector union membership rates continued from 2005 to 2006 in Colorado.

For many decades, Colorado has had less unionization than the nation as a whole. Nationally, 7.4% of the private sector labor force and 36.2% of the public sector labor force was in a union in 2006. In 1983, 16.5% of the private sector labor force and 36.7% of the public sector labor force in the nation was in a union. In 1973, 24.2% of the private sector labor force and 23.0% of the public sector labor force in the nation was in a union. At the 1950s peak, about a third of private sector employees in the United States were in unions. Current private sector union membership levels in the United States are at 1920s pre-National Labor Relations Act levels.

Declines in unions membership are matched, at least nationally, by a decline in the number of strikes in the United States. The strikes that do happen also tend to be shorter and involve fewer workers. While two of the big three automakers experienced strikes this year, for example, both were very short.

The Changing Character Of Colorado's Union Movement

The shift of the union movement, in Colorado and nationwide, from the private sector to the public sector, and from industrial and construction workers to service workers, has also changed the character of the labor movement itself.

Public sector workers tend to be more white collar, and also have different concerns and objectives. Unlike workers in traditionally heavily unionized sectors like mining, manufacturing and construction, public sector workers who more often work in offices are less concerned about job safety (obviously there are exceptions such as road workers, police and fire protection employees). Unlike many unionized private sector workers, public sector workers are largely immune to both offshoring and the direct economic impacts of immigration, although outsourcing to private sector contractors such as private prison and probation providers is still an issue. Public sector workers have job security through the civil service system, whether or not they organize, and have generally had state and local retirement system coverage that make concerns about solvency of social safety nets like Social Security largely irrelevant to them personally. Governments are generally law abiding and usually pay more than minimum wage, so sweat shop issues like getting paid as agreed for work performed is rarely an issue in the public sector, with the occasional exception of overtime disputes.

Finally, public sector labor relations are largely a matter of state law, while private sector labor relations are largely subject to federal law in a time period that has seen more anti-union Republican influence than pro-union Democratic influence over the last quarter of a century. Since public sector unions are asking for different things than private sector unions are from their employers, the employer aversion to unions in the public sector isn't nearly as strong as it is in the private sector. Many public sector unions in the United States don't even have a right to strike or to engage in collective bargaining. Private sector opposition to unionization is as much about a fear of loss of control as it is about a fear that union worker's share of the economic pie will increase. Public sector employers, in contrast, are already hidebound by a myriad of regulations and procedures, so they have less of a visceral stake in being able to run their organizations precisely as they wish. While employees have less to gain from unionizing in the public sector, public employers have less to lose from unionization. Equally critical, management pay in the public sector is rarely significantly impacted by management's ability to reduce worker pay, something that is almost always the case in the private sector.

In the construction industry, within the private sector in Colorado, 6.0% of workers were union members. In the manufacturing industry, within the private sector in Colorado, 8.8% of workers were union members. Thus, even in the private sector the union movement in Colorado does not fit the rust belt factory worker stereotype very well. One in ten private sector union members in Colorado works in construction, and another two in ten work in manufacturing.

The big gorilla in Colorado's private sector union movement is the SEIU, which represents service workers and recently split from the AFL-CIO (rifts are weaker in Colorado than in much of the rest of the nation, however). This is due in large part to the fact that it has been among the most effective of all of the private sector unions at growing its ranks by organizing additional employers in a sector of the U.S. economy which is growing as a counterpart to the high tech sector in an increasingly stratified economy. While immigration has an important impact on service industry workers, offshoring is not much of a concern for most of these jobs. It is impractical for hotels to send their laundry to India or China or Mexico, or for casinos to have cards dealt from the Philippines, for example.

Also, in Colorado, unlike some states with more private sector unionization, a significant number of union businesses find union status to be useful niche marketing tool and means of establishing credibility with their customers, as opposed to a hindrance. For example, this is true of Denver's new unionized hotel (the Hyatt), its small number of union printers, and its unionized performing artists. Some people and organizations feel a social responsibility and general desire to buy union when they are able to do so, and these businesses meet their demand.

Political Impact

Historically, unions have been a key constituency of the Democratic Party, so declining union membership in Colorado hurts Democrats. Unions play much the same role in the Democratic party that the Christian Right plays in the Republican party. They provide the legions of rank and file activists needed for the endless barrage of volunteers needed to keep the party functioning, while other party constituencies provide the bulk of the money needed to fund campaigns and party operations. In much of the same period, a significant number of union members became "Reagan Democrats" because of their more conservative opinions of social issues than the rest of the Democratic party. According to writers at the National Review these voters remain at the core of Republican efforts to widen their base.

Together, these forces have also reduced union clout in Democratic politics. For example, Colorado unions have been bitterly disappointed at Denver Congresswoman Diana DeGette's support for certain free trade pacts, and this union dissatisfaction, combined with a desire on the part of the large Hispanic community for greater representation, attempted unsuccessfully to back a primary challenge to DeGette on that basis a few years back.

This lack of clout on trade issues may in part be due to a less enthusiastic commitment in the base to the issues than in other states. In Colorado's union movement, a majority of unionized workers aren't personally impacted at work by offshoring, because they are in public sector or captive construction and service sector jobs, but are impacted in their pocket books by import prices. Solidarity may be enough to get Colorado union members to oppose trade pacts that hurt members in the goods producing industries anyway. But, solidarity alone isn't enough to get people to devote massive amounts of time and trouble to making a full court press on these issues.

In contrast, Colorado's unions have largely avoided potentially explosive intraparty and internecine fights over immigration with a strategy of embracing a policy of better treatment of less skilled and undocumented immigrant workers as a means of leveling the playing field, improving working conditions for all, and expanding their ranks in the process. This firm policy has contained fights between U.S. born workers who see their job security and pay compromised by immigration, and immigrant workers, who make up a particularly large share of Colorado's working class. In part, this stance of a product of the fact that it is harder for the larger (and often public sector) employers who are more frequently unionized to flaut immigration requirements, which already strongly discourage employment based less skilled immigration. In part, it is an ideology decision driven by a generally pro-minority, pro-working class, pro-outsider orientation that permiates the Democratic party. The civil rights movement of the 1960s established a set of widespread values that have muted personal self-interest in reducing immigration.

Of course, unions are still very much at the table and a player in Democratic party politics, and union money is still an important part of the funding base for Democratic politicians. While unions are hurting in terms of private sector membership, their superior organization to almost all other Democratic party constituencies (in union talk, solidarity), and the rising numbers of public sector union members who have brought new talents relevant to political action to the movement have kept unions powerful well beyond what their numbers might suggest. Also, the trend of the union movement towards the public sector and relative weakness of the union movement in the state, has limited the amount of intraparty conflict in Colorado between business oriented Democrats and labor oriented Democrats. The issues that unions care about in Colorado are often not the issues that worry most business oriented Democrats very much.

What Next?

The big unanswered question for Colorado unions is to what extent their decline has been fundamentally a product of the Democrats years in the wilderness, that have led to scores of anti-union rulings from the NLRB and little legislation to counteract that trend. If anti-union legislation is the main problem, unions have good reason to hope for growing clout in the years to come as Democratic power in Washington is waxing. This often gets summed up in a conclusion that management union busting efforts are behind the observed decline in union membership.

But, an alternative hypothesis or two are possible, and, of course, in reality, there isn't a yes or no answer. One is that union decline is a result of substantive legislative gains already made that render the average worker's need for a union less acute. When government officials enforce minimum wage, overtime, worker safety and others laws to protect you, you don't have to negotiate with your employer on those points.

Another hypothesis is that the changing structure of the United States economy, which has hurt industries where unions have historically been strong, and helped industries that lack a tradition of, or need for unionization, like professional dominated high technology firms were distinctions between management and labor are more muted, and small businesses, where collective action isn't materially helped or hurt by organization at the firm level -- the traditional pattern of union organization in the United States. Transitioning from a firm based pattern of unionization to an industry based pattern of unionization might help the labor movement, but it would also require a massive legislative effort that would face fierce business opposition and would disrupt the vested interests of many union officials in the status quo.

If these alternative causes of union membership decline are important, recovery will be much harder for private sector unions. And, of course, the weaker private sector unions get, the less clout they will have to reform laws that hurt them as well.

The War In Afghanistan According To NATO

According to NATO, in the fall of 2006 the following was true:

NATO troops dead: 19 out of 20,000
Afghan soldiers and police dead: Over 100
Taliban dead: 1,000 out of 3,000-5,000
Civilians killed by NATO: 53
Civilians killed or kidnapped by Taliban: Several hundred
Civilians fleeing homes due to Taliban in last four months: 80,000

No one's statistics are really trustworthy in war. For example, if we had an accurate census of Taliban troops they'd all be dead now. But, I'm willing to give the numbers the benefit of the doubt for argument's stake, and even to overlook some of the not strictly comparable numbers, such as the lack of numbers regarding civilians killed by Afghan government forces, and the fact that "killed or kidnapped" is not exactly the same as killed.

We also don't know how many Taliban soldiers or how many friendly forces, were captured. From our perspective, a Taliban foot soldier in a prison camp is as good or better than a dead Taliban soldier. The goal is to reduce the numbers of their forces in the field. Are the bulk of the 14,000 people in secret CIA prisons Taliban, or are they civilians from around the world believed to be involved in terrorism, for instance?

What do the numbers show?

1. NATO and the Afghan government are much better at killing their enemies than their enemies are at killing them. The implication is that we kill eight of them, for every one of us that gets killed, and that their forces have taken heavy losses, while ours have taken light losses (one would guess that Afghanistan should have on the order of 75,000 soldiers and police or more, given its population, although we aren't given that number).

2. NATO and the Afghan government are more discriminating in their use of force than their enemies. The implication is that about 5% of our kills were civilians, while two-thirds or more of their kills were civilian, and that they killed civilians six times or more as often as we do. The further implication is that we kill civilians by accident, while they are doing so on purpose.

3. The numbers also show that there is still an active war in progress in Afghanistan in which law and order is not prevailing in large parts of the country.

The tricky part of a counterinsurgency operation is that the goal of the operation is not primarily to kill insurgents. Killing insurgents is a means to an end. The goal is to reduce the number and impact of insurgent attacks. In this respect, the mission is failing. Taliban military impact is increasing about five years later, rather than decreasing, and the opium trade is also flourishing. Some Republican big wigs have been quoted saying that there may need to be a political solution in Afghanistan that involves the Taliban in government. This isn't simply caving to terrorists, this is the reality of how insurgencies are ended and the Republicans shouldn't be chastized for being more aware of this fact in Afghanistan than they are in Iraq.

This doesn't mean that the war in Afghanistan hasn't been, on the whole, a success, or that it isn't worth continuing.

While the primary goal of the Afghan war, which was to destroy the leadership group behind the 9-11 attack, was not accomplished by the Afghan war, as this group fled to Pakistan, getting the Taliban out of power was not a bad thing. The Taliban regime was rightly despised worldwide, which is one of the main reasons that the U.S. was able to commence the war in Afghanistan without significant international opposition. The replacement, while hardly what a Western utopian vision would hope for, is better than the Taliban, came about more smoothly, is more widely accepted as legitimate than the current regime in Iraq.

This is being accomplished with a foreign force almost an order of magnitude smaller than the one in Iraq. The U.S. share of the total coalition is also a little smaller on a percentage basis, than the U.S. share of the coalition in Iraq. This is true despite the fact that Iraq and Afghanistan are similar in both population and geographic expanse, despite the fact that they are both Islamic countries with non-Islamic foreign military forces keeping peace, and despite the fact that in both cases, an existing regime which was the de facto government of the country was completely deposed.

Learning English

About 35% of foreign born Hispanics speak English pretty well or very well. For their U.S. born children the percentage is 91%. For their grandchildren, the percentage is 97%.

Of foreign-born Hispanics, those who have become naturalized citizens are more likely to speak English very well or pretty well than those who are not citizens (52% versus 25%). At the other extreme, nearly three-quarters (73%) of non-citizens say they speak just a little or no English compared with 46% of naturalized citizens.

Foreign born Hispanics are more likely to speak English if they have lived in the country longer and have more education. Education also accounts for much of the different in English proficiency between foreign born Hispanics from different countries. Age of immigration is also critical:

Adult immigrants who arrived as young children are more skilled at English than are those who crossed the border when they were older. Three-quarters (76%) of foreign-born Latino adults who arrived at ages 10 or younger report that they can carry on a conversation in English very well. That compares with 30% of those who arrived at ages 11 to 17; 16% of those who arrived at ages 18 to 25; and 11% of those who arrived at ages 26 or older.

Add those who speak English "pretty well" and you are approaching 80% English proficiency for those who immigrate at ages 10 or younger.

Source: Meta-analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center.

None of this is surprising. Indeed, it is entirely consistent with both the literature on immigrant language acquisition, family discussions of language acquisition by my immigrant ancestors, and my own personal experiences in multiple immigrant communities.

Indeed, the research shows that if you spent your infancy abroad in a place where a foreign language was spoken, then come to the United States, that you will lose your ability to speak your language of birth if it is not maintained. Language acquisition is basically hard wired. People automatically and almost effortlessly learn the languages spoken around them as children. The ability then wanes, eventually ending when we become adults.

The myth that Hispanics will assimilate into the United States less than prior waves of immigrants have is simply untrue. Foreign born adults are never going to have perfect English accents. But, the vast majority of foreign born persons who come to the United States as young children, and almost everyone born in the United States is linguistically and culturally an American.

If we want citizenship requirements to match some sort of defacto reality of assimilation into United States culture (a normative question which I don't necessarily agree with, but which is implicit in much of our naturalization law), then we should not only retain birthright citizenship, but should further extend it to anyone who has lived in the United States to adulthood or near adulthood, from the time they were young -- a cutoff that is no younger than age ten, and probably several years older. The scholarly literature (e.g. this study)shows that late youth shows a partial decline in average language acquisition ability which plateaus at a lower average level for adults.

Judge Removed For Abusing Power

Robert M. Restaino, a city court judge in New York State (whose jurisdiction if comparable to that of county court judges in Colorado) was removed from office for abusing his authority.

He ordered 46 defendants in a courtroom, who were on what amounts to probation for domestic violence offenses and were appearing a routine status hearings, jailed because someone in the courtroom (quite possibly a lawyer, staff person or spectator) let a cell phone go off and didn't confess. He reversed his order only many hours later when a reporter inquired.

New York State removes far more judges than most states, because it has a system of elected judges, many of whom are justices of the peace with little education who aren't up to the task they are charged with carrying out. This case was different, as it involved a more powerful, experienced, legally educated judge.

Getting SCOTUS Attention

Do experienced Supreme Court advocates have a higher success rate at the certiorari stage? If so, why might that be?

They do. Roughly speaking they enjoy a 15 to 25 percent success rate and their petitions currently represent between 40 and 50 percent of the non-SG petitions before the Court, which is astoundingly high. I looked at the progression for several years since 1980, and it has steadily significantly increased from fewer than 6 percent in 1980 to approximately 44 percent in OT 06. So far this Term as of last Friday (11/23/07), they are responsible for 49.5 percent of the successful non-SG petitions. . . .

[T]he expert counsel know the kinds of things that will interest the Justices and they know how best to make their cases seem like they relate to those interests. This frequently requires dramatically recasting the legal arguments and policy implications raised by a case and abandoning wholesale arguments made below, sometimes aided by petitions for rehearing in the lower courts in an effort to place a new legal issue in the record. It also often requires creative characterizations of circuit conflicts by looking at a case from a variety of angles and several different degrees of generality. . . .

To persuade the Court that the legal issues presented are important, the expert Bar is especially effective at securing the filing of amicus briefs in support of review. . . . The experts know the filing of amicus briefs by certain kinds of entities (and counsel) are more likely to demonstrate to the Justices and the clerks that a case is important. And, no less important, the expert advocates have the professional connections and credibility necessary to get those briefs filed within the short time frames. My article both documents a dramatic increase in the number of such filings and confirms a previously-established statistical correlation between amicus filings and cert grants.

Another, related tactic often used by the better advocates is the prompt publication in national news media outlets of stories touting the importance of a case now pending on petition before the Court. Wall Street Journal op-eds are a favorite. . . . And these publications are timed to appear precisely when the Court is considering the petition.

Finally, although many clerks formally deny that the mere name of a well known Supreme Court advocate on a petition makes the clerk more likely to pay closer attention to the petition, many others in private interviews have confirmed the obvious that they do.

More at SCOTUS Blog.

Zogby Unethical; MSM Stupid

Zogby verges on the unethical in touting results from his wildly inaccurate "interactive" polls with unscientifically gathered survey samples to anyone. The media shows their stupidity by reporting on these non-event results. Daily Kos cites chapter and verse to explain the situation.

Low Flow Toilets Are Evil

The Denver Post, cited by Coyote Gulch, claims that low flow toilets are better now. My own experiences with these beasts, mandated by Congress, has been decidedly more negative. Simply put, they do a very poor job of sending feces down the drain, which is a mission critical purpose of a toilet. Pulling out a toilet brush, or hogging the bathroom while the toilet recharges for another dubious weak flush, are activities few of us relish.

True, I could have simply encountered old and inferior models. But, I am certainly not yet convinced and won't be until I have seen these allegedly superior new models myself.

Also, low flow toilets are a classic example of poor regulatory judgment. Toilet choice has a widespread personal impact on large numbers of people where even modest differences in quality are notable. The difference for a consumer between an old fashioned toilet and a low flow toilet is much greater than the difference between, for example, a car with a six cylinder engine and a four cylinder engine, that people are willing to pay a great deal of money to enjoy, despite significantly reduced fuel efficiency and increased pollution. Yet, no one is mandating four cyclinder engines for all sedans.

High flow toilets are not all that significant a cause of wasted water. In most arid watersheds, 90% or more of water is used for marginal, inefficiently irrigated horticulture, despite the fact that fishing and boating are more important to the local economy than the entire economic product of horticulture. Half of residential water use is for landscaping. A golf course uses as much water as roughly 800 homes. Slight increases in irrigation efficiency by the 1% of so of the population that uses irrigated horticulture (something that would also benefit the farmers themselves by reducing their consumption) and wider use of xeriscaping could produce far less intrusive water savings than the campaign for low flow toilets.

There are better places to seek efficiency in residential water use, even within homes. Simply fixing leaking in aging infrastructure can save a great deal of water. Even better would be to revamp water law and the regulatory structure to provide for wider use of gray water for appropriate purposes like toilet flushing. As I understand it, strictly speaking, gray water systems are illegal under Colorado water law. This doesn't matter for a few renegade do it yourselfers, but it means that systemic efforts to install or mandate graywater systems for new subdivisions and new construction are legally impossible. Gray water systems are far more water conserving (a 100% reduction in the demand for fresh water for use in toilets), while working better because they are the same toilets we used to know and love, with a different pipe hooked up to them.

Most water misuse is simply a product of economic incentives. Tap water is very, very cheap in the quantities used by a typical household. For farmers who irrigate, tap water costs just a fraction of that price. When something is cheap, it is used in excess. If we really want to promote efficiency with minimum inconvenience, we should increase the cost of water (perhaps with a tax, or a more efficient market in water rights), rather than take heavy handed steps that are far less efficient at conserving the resource.

Also, if we are to impose disparate prices, why not penalize less essential landscaping use rather than more essential in-home municipal use which is the smallest part of the water consumption pie. Denver Water already has a system in place to segregate the portion of each bill attributable to each kind of use which it uses to bill people for sanitary sewers, based upon baseline winter water useage. This would fairly reflect the fact that the last gallons of water Denver water buys, when it must increase its supply, are generally the most expensive.

Transportation, Energy and Peak Oil

Oil prices will go up. They are at almost an all time high of $100 a barrel as it stands. The fundamentals point in that direction. No significant quantities of new oil from mineral sources is being produced and the easiest to use big supplies have already been identified.

While we will get far more than current reserves in the long run with more technologically intensive methods, the technologies needed to do so will get more and more expenses, and so the availability of cheap oil will decline. Industrialization in places like China and India, will inevitably cause demand to surge. The result is increasing prices. The fancy name for this phenomena is Peak Oil.

The primary impact of these predicted rising oil prices is on the transportation sector. The dominant use of oil is in the transportation sector. Within the transportation sector, moreover, the overwhelming use of oil is as fuel and for engine lubrication for cars and trucks where there is the greatest impact.

It is also used in trains, boats and aircraft, and as components of other products, but those uses are a much smaller share of the total.

Freight Trains

Trains, particularly freight trains, are overwhelmingly diesel-electric hybrids (except for intracity electric passenger trains and some high speed rail passenger trains not found in the United States). Trains far more fuel efficient than cars and trucks, making them a desirable alternative to cars and trucks as oil prices rise, whenever the form a reasonable substitute. Also trains can be refitted to use different fuels like coal, electricity, or natural gas, simply by redesigning locomotives (not always all that dramatically, in many cases an existing chassis and electric transmission of power to the drive train could be retained with only the power plant replaced). So, the bulk of the rolling stock inventory doesn't have to be replaced.

The main problem with a shift to trains are that the system has been optimized for highly efficient, slow bulk transportation. Many freight rail systems are basically one way, one lane or two way, two lane highways, with few passing lanes, so one slow heavy bulk service train can prevent express deliveries from arriving on time.

Also, while all the technology for intermodal containerized shipping exists, in practice, the freight rail system is primarily set up to handle bulk shipments of commodities like coal and grain. There are freight rail stations all over the nation near key industrial centers, but many lack the ability to swiftly and efficiently transfer shipping containers to trucks for local delivery.

Still, the cost of upgrading our intercity freight transportation system so that medium speed trains with container cargo would carry freight most of the way, deferring to trucks only for local delivery from the nearest train station, would be fairly modest and technologically unambitious, while saving vast amounts of fuel, increasing road safety, reducing wear and tear on existing roads, and smoothing the way for a transition to electric vehicles which work best for short range trips.

Within a decade of the time that diesel hits $8 a gallon, I expect that the lion's share of intercity freight now carried by truck will instead be carried in shipping containers first by train and then by truck locally. Freight rail's market share will grow in a lagging lock step with oil prices.

Passenger Trains

A viable passenger rail system would probably have to be build using high speed rail on dedicate passenger rail lines which could also be used for small, time sensitive package delivery, on the model of the Northeast Corridor.

Existing Amtrak service is virtually useless outside the Northeast Corridor. It isn't time competitive with passenger vehicles, and struggles to keep pace with commercial intercity buses. It is also plagued with long delays, most of which are due to competition with slow moving freight traffic. Amtrak manages to stay price competitive with intercity buses only through massive federal subsidies of operating costs. And, the routes where this kind of high speed rail service makes sense often doesn't overlap with existing Amtrak lines (e.g. the I-25 corridor).

This new system would have to be developed more or less from scratch, with interim systems using "passing lanes" in the freight system designed to carry time sensitive container shipments. Thus, real passenger rail could lag a couple of decades behind freight rail innovations, leaving the United States economy hurting compared to better prepared European and Japanese economies with high speed rail systems already in place.

In a mature expensive oil economy high speed passenger rail would handles most medium distance trips. Local trips would still be by some form of motor vehicle, probably an electric or biofuel one, or an intracity transit system (bus and/or rail), due to incompatibility of high speed rail with frequent stops. Aircraft would still retain the edge for all but the most bargain basement long distance travel, because aircraft are so much faster, and because existing crippled passenger boarding systems would work better with a more elite smaller volume passenger load.

Cars, Trucks and Buses

During the transition from a cheap oil economy, where personal cars and trucks are the dominant means of transportation, to a mature expensive oil economy, when high speed rail was not on line, people would cope by making far greater use of bus service between cities. The fuel cost per passenger mile is much lower (particularly for families with pre-hybrid vehicles, if a hybrid electric bus is used), and as fuel prices rise this cost advantage would draw in middle class business and family passengers, who previously would have taken their own vehicles.

Cars and trucks won't go away. But, they will be used differently and many will have different fuels.

Electric vehicles with current technology are viable in all but range, particularly at modest speeds (e.g. up to 55 mph rather than 80 mph). This will make electric vehicles popular in compact urban areas as oil prices rise much faster than electricity prices. If you rarely drive more than 50 miles a day, and don't get onto interstate highways outside of rush hour, an electric vehicle is perfect. Electric vehicles are a good fit for commuting, routine grocery shopping and errands, and for local deliveries. Also, there is no reason that a big vehicle, like a minivan, commercial van or semi-tractor trailer can't be electric or hybrid electic. The technology scales up and down well.

As people transition to electric vehicles, the market to rent liquid fuel vehicles for occasional out of town trips should grow.

Rural personal motor vehicles will probably become ethanol-gasoline mix hybrid electric drives or diesel-electric hybrid drives. Buses and trucks that must serve intercity trips will probably convert to diesel-electric hybrids, probably with at least some biodiesel in the mix.

Hybrid electric vehicles are already commercially viable, even though the extra cost of a hybrid doesn't justify the reduced gasoline consumption at current gasoline prices. As oil prices rise and hybrids go into larger scale production and lose some of their novelty, they seem likely to become the dominant form of engine for cars and trucks.

If there are major improvements in battery technology, electric cars could simply entirely replace gasoline and diesel cars with very little adjustment to the overall transportation system, but the better battery has proved to be a tough nut to crack. This kind of development would also put great pressure on the electricity industry to increase production and improve conservation in current uses.

Natural gas is also an option, but requires lots of new infrastructure and will be growing more expensive a few steps behind corresponding increases in oil prices, even though it is almost as clean as electricity in generating pollution (probably cleaner overall if the source of the electricity is coal).

Boats

Boats are a fairly small part of the total and have a fair amount of flexibility to use alternative fuels. They could return to the coal age of the steamer. They could use modern more efficient sails. They could use biodiesels in amounts that wouldn't deplete the entire agricultural output of the nation. Boats are far more fuel efficient per mile traveled than cars and trucks in any case.

Aircraft

Aircraft demand has much greater ability to absorb increasing oil prices than other transportation modes, so the main effect on rising oil prices on the aircraft industry will be higher ticket prices. The truly cost conscious travelers like those grabbing discount tickets to the Caribbean, and families taking trips where rail is a possibility but a strain, would be the first to stop traveling by air. Business travel and affluent tourists are likely to continue to fly.

Coal Derivatives

Electricity and biofuels aren't the only alternatives to petroleum and natural gas based fuels. Another likely replacement in cars, trucks, trains, boats, homes and power plants are hydrocarbon gases and liquids derived from coal.

It has been done, and Montana is building plants to do it. There is likely some energy loss in the conversion process and the jury is still out on how clean the conversion process is likely to be.

At worst, it could generate all the pollution associated with a coal fired power plant at the time of conversion (on top of all the environmental and safety hazards associated with coal mining). The products would also be at least as polluting as the natural gas and/or gasoline or diesel they are replacing when used. Still, even then, it isn't a total waste, as it creates of gas or liquid fuel product that is more convenient to use than electricity in many instances, and the supply of coal is effectively limitless.

At best, the process could also much more effectively sequester the pollutants associated with burning coal and even sequester the CO2 produced in the process, producing environmental impacts significant less that using coal outright, and if the output were prodominantly a gas state fuel, rather than a liquid, the combustion of the fuel itself could be reasonable clean.

I suspect that a mix of electricity, biofuels, natural gas and synthetic coal based products will probably power the ground vehicles of 2040, as petroleum based gasoline and diesel become too expensive outside of particular niche markets.

Land Use and Lifestyle Changes

Any way you cut it, even with replacement technologies, the cost of transportation will almost certainly go up.

There could be some market response with increased teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and other forms of online collaboration.

This could also result in a pullback of large physical inventory from point of sale. Heavier items like vehicles, appliances and furniture might be reviewed in a display store and then special ordered in most cases to minimize the need to phyiscally move them. Even where demand was fairly predictable, for say, refrigerators in a large metropolitan area, there might be an increased tendency to have containers of finished goods stored at a warehouse at a railhead in the metropolitan area and then delivered from there to a customer within a day or two of purchase after a purchase was made at a display store.

Some physical items like reference books and professional journals and advertising will likely continue to move to electronic form from physical form in the face of rising transportation costs. Likewise e-communication will likely replace communication by letter more and more.

Locally grown food products would get a slight edge as transportation costs rise.

I suspect that the most noticable life style change, however, will be in land use. Simply put, it will be more expensive to live in the exurbs and more distant suburbs, and more and more affordable to live in central cities and inner ring suburbs. Cities like Castle Rock and Longmont, seemingly designed for couples who both have long commutes to different cities, could be hard hit indeed, as the pressure to localize increases.

The result may be higher density, more mixed use development, more transit oriented development, and a wealth inversion, as central cities become affluent, while suburbs become poorer. The sterotype of the poor families crowding onto a city bus could be replaced with that of double sized buses of working class people living in the suburbs making their way to central business districts, perhaps after having first taken a neighborhood shuttle or bicycle or motorcycle or microcar to the central bus stop.

Oil prices don't greatly impact many energy sectors.

Outside some recalcitrant holdovers in the Northeast (mostly homeowners) and Alaska, almost nobody uses heating oil for space heating. Outside Alaska, Hawaii and some rural generators, almost nobody uses oil to generate electricity any more. Some oil is used in other industries in products like fertilizers, plastics and non-transportation lubricants, but this is a small share of the total.

Peak oil will pressure farmers to shift from oil based fertilizers to organic ones. It will make plastic more expensive, curtailing its use in low budget disposable applications. It will encourage R&D departments to develop animal and vegetable oil based lubricants, a change which unlike a massive conversion to ethanol and biodiesel would not require the vast majority of the agricultural output of the nation to be converted to vegetable oil production.

Estate Tax Repeal Dead

In their opening statements [at the Nov. 14 Senate Finance Committee's Estate Tax Hearing], both Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) expressed their personal support for estate tax repeal, but Baucus went on to acknowledge repeal is not part of the discussion any more in the Senate. Most outside observers rule out estate tax repeal as well. Mark Bloomfield, president of the American Council for Capital Formation, who has lobbied for repeal, told Bloomberg News, "I don't think complete repeal has the votes, has not had the votes for a few years and won't have the votes in the future."

While no legislative action is expected on the estate tax for the rest of the year, Baucus said he plans to introduce a bill reforming the tax for markup sometime this spring. It will be interesting to see what Baucus proposes, if anything, in view of the deep divide within the Senate on the issue. In 2006, the Senate rejected GOP proposals to end the estate tax as well as an amendment by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to reduce the estate tax rate to 15%. At the same time, a Democratic proposal to bring the rate down to 30% was also rejected.

From here.

My prediction is that the estate tax will be frozen at 2009 levels (a 45% tax rate and $3,500,000 per person exclusion from taxation). The 2010 elimination of the estate tax, and the 2011 return of the estate tax with 55%+ top rates and a $1,000,000 exclusion are both unlikely to materialize.

In 2007 and 2008, we have a 45% tax rate and a $2,000,000 per person exclusion.

Lifeboats Work

The Explorer sinking (Chilean Government photograph).

On November 23, 2007 a ship called the Explorer full of passengers sank after hitting an iceberg. Unlike the Titanic, it had enough lifeboats. The roughly 100 passengers and crew on board all survived, despite the frigid waters, and no one was injured. They were picked up by Nordnorge, a Norwegian cruise ship.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Someone at Daily Kos wondered why someone like me wouldn't take a train to visit family that is just under 1,200 miles away for the holidays. Let me explain by showing the real life itineraries via car, train and plane.

Plane
Leave from home for DIA on Sunday at 4:45 p.m.
Leave from DIA to Dayton, Ohio on Sunday at 7:30 p.m.
Arrive in Dayton, Ohio on Sunday at 11:59 p.m.
Arrive at Grandpa's house from Dayton Airport at 1:35 a.m.

Leave from Grandpa's house for Dayton airport at 12:30 p.m.
Leave Dayton on Saturday at 3:35 p.m.
Arrive in Denver on Saturday at 4:35 p.m.
Arrive home on Saturday at 5:50 p.m.

Total Travel Time: 13 hours 10 minutes

Car
Leave from home on Sunday at 6:00 a.m.
Drive to Grandpa's house with ETA of Sunday just before midnight (per mapquest).

Leave from Grandpa's on Saturday at 6:00 a.m.
Drive to home with ETA of Saturday just before midnight.

Total travel time: 36 hours (even with two or three additional hours for breaks each way, it is very competive with traveling by train).

Train
Leave from home for Union Station in Denver on Sunday at 8:00 p.m.
Board Train in Denver on Sunday at 8:25 p.m.
Arrive in Chicago on Monday at 4:00 p.m.
Board Train in Chicago on Monday at 5:25 p.m.
Arrive in Cincinnati on Tuesday at 3:17 a.m.
Get in car to Grandpa's house on Tuesday at 3:21 a.m.
Arrive at Grandpa's house on Tuesday at 4:10 a.m.

Leave Grandpa's house on 12:06 a.m. on Saturday
Leave Cincinnati 1:10 a.m. on Saturday
Arrive in Chicago 10:35 a.m. on Saturday
Leave Chicago 2 p.m. on Saturday
Arrive in Denver at 7:15 a.m. on Sunday
Drive from Union Station in Denver to home on Sunday with ETA 7:30 p.m.

Total Travel Time: 62 hours 52 minutes

Cost
Flying costs about twice as much as driving or taking a train for a family of four.

Train tickets would cost about $840 for a family of four and there would be an additional parking cost (on the order of $84 for a week). Driving would cost about $400 for gasoline, about $24 for a pro-rata share of oil change costs, and about $500in car depreciation. So, the cost of traveling by train and by car for a family of four is roughly identical.

Footnote
I didn't bother to consider some unrealistic alternatives such as taking a boat down the South Platte to the Mississippi, then up the Mississippi to the Ohio River and its tributaries to my destination. I also didn't consider biking, travel by foot, or travel by horse. There is no commercial blimp service between the destinations.

Georgia Court Strikes Down Sex Offender Limits

Today, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously struck down part of a Georgia law:

which prohibits registered sex offenders from residing or loitering at a location that is within 1,000 feet of any child care facility, church, school or area where minors congregate (the "residency restriction") . . . or being employed by any business or entity located within 1,000 feet of any child care facility, church or school (the "work restriction").

The court noted that: "While this time it was a day care center, next time it could be a playground, a school bus stop, a skating rink or a church."

As the Georgia Supreme Court explained:

[The law] contains no "move-to-the-offender" exception to its provisions. . . . third parties may readily learn the location of a registered sex offender's residence. The possibility exists that such third parties may deliberately establish a child care facility or any of the numerous other facilities designated in [the law] within 1,000 feet of a registered sex offender's residence for the specific purpose of using [the law] to force the offender out of the community. . . . A registered sexual offender who knowingly fails to quit a residence that is located within 1,000 feet of any of the facilities or locations designated in the statute commits a felony punishable by imprisonment for not less than ten nor more than 30 years.

The statute was struck down not as a cruel or unusual punishment, or for lack of procedural due process, but under the takings clause, which prohibits government takings of property without just compensation.

As a result, the Georgia count found that "it is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected."

It rejected the argument that the economic value of the residence could be retained by renting the house, arguing instead that the right to reside in a home purchased for the purpose of using as a private residence was a distinct property right.

The court kept in force the employment restriction on the grounds that it limited income from services, but not ownership interests in business, and hence did not deprive offenders of a property interest.

The case is remarkable because it strikes down a widely criticized type of law relating to sex offenders on a novel ground, the takings clause, which is almost never applied to criminal cases (although I have often argued that it should have broader application to the field of civil rights litigation generally).

As noted by the Associated Press:

The law had been targeted by civil rights groups who argued it would render vast residential areas off-limits to Georgia's roughly 11,000 registered sex offenders and could backfire by encouraging offenders to stop reporting their whereabouts to authorities.

State lawmakers adopted the law in 2006, calling it crucial to protecting the state's most vulnerable population: children.

Georgia's law, which took effect last year, prohibited them from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather - schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools or one of the state's 150,000 school bus stops. . . . Twenty-two states have distance restrictions varying from 500 feet to 2,000 feet, according to researchers. But most impose the offender-free zones only around schools, and several apply only to child molesters, not all sex offenders.

Colorado doesn't have such a law. Indeed, this appears to make the state safer according to data in a July 23, 2007 story from the Rocky Mountain News:

A number of studies, including one released last month by the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, conclude that restricting where offenders may live does not prevent repeat sex crimes.

Instead, the restrictions encourage sex offenders to "disappear," blending into communities where they live in the privacy essential to committing new sex crimes, the studies say. . . .

Colorado has more than 10,500 registered sex offenders. More than 3,000 live in the metro area. As of last week, Denver had 1,337 registered sex offenders.

Sex offenders generally have a high rate of recidivism - 18.9 percent for rapists and 12.7 percent for child molesters over a period of five years, the Colorado study reported. . . .

"Residency restrictions prevent us from having sex offenders living together . . . but 25 years of my experience and significant research all support that the more you can make them live together, the easier it is to control them. . . ."

The Colorado research, based on a 2004 survey of sex offenders, found that high-risk sex offenders living in shared living arrangements had significantly fewer probation and criminal violations than those living in other living arrangements. . . .

"Offenders hold each other accountable for their actions and responsibilities and notify the appropriate authorities when a roommate commits certain behavior, such as returning home late or having contact with children," the 2004 Colorado report said.

The study found that sex offenders living with their families re-offend or violate probation at twice the rate of high-risk sex offenders living with other offenders. . . . Colorado has no state laws restricting residency of sex offenders, though probation and parole officers must approve residency and keep sex offenders away from schools or other high-risk situations . . . The Colorado study concluded that a "tight web of supervision, treatment and surveillance" - like that offered by shared living arrangements - was more important in maintaining public safety than where a sex offender resides.

Colorado is one of the few states where shared living arrangements are used . . . It also is one of the few states that uses polygraphs to monitor sex offenders and requires lifetime supervision of some. . . none of the 15 new crimes committed by the 130-member study group involved sexual contact, and most were identified through polygraph examinations. Only one was detected by law enforcement. Two were reported by group members and one man reported himself. . . .

A 2007 Minnesota Department of Corrections study of new offenses committed by known sex offenders concluded that none would have been prevented by a boundary restriction.

Most of the 224 sex offender recidivists surveyed for the study found their victims through another adult, and none made contact with a child near a school, park or playground.

"It is unlikely that residency restrictions would have a deterrent effect because the types of offenses such a law is designed to prevent are exceptionally rare and, in the case of Minnesota, virtually nonexistent over the last 16 years," the report said.

Colorado has no state buffer zone law, though there have been several unsuccessful attempts to pass one. Some local governments, however, have adopted such measures.

These laws are ineffective because sex offenders most often prey on a victim they know . . . . "We keep passing public policy as if these are 'stranger' crimes, but most are not," she said.

Hat Tip to How Appealing.

Feds Lie To Federal Judge

The Bush Adminstration does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, and should not be allowed to rely on secret pleadings and secret evidence.

At a post-trial hearing Tuesday for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim cleric from Virginia sentenced to life in prison in 2004 for soliciting treason, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said she can no longer trust the CIA and other government agencies on how they represent classified evidence in terror cases.

Attorneys for al-Timimi have been seeking access to documents. They also want to depose government witnesses to determine whether the government improperly failed to disclose the existence of certain evidence.

The prosecutors have asked her to dismiss the defense request. The government has denied the allegations but has done so in secret pleadings to the judge that defense lawyers are not allowed to see. Even the lead prosecutors in the al-Timimi case have not had access to the information; they have relied on the representations of other government lawyers.

After the hearing, the judge issued an order that said she would not rule on the prosecutors' motion until the government grants needed security clearances to al-Timimi's defense lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and the lead trial prosecutor so they can review the secret pleadings. . . .

In a letter made public Nov. 13, prosecutors in the [Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias] Moussaoui case admitted to Brinkema that the CIA had wrongly assured her that no videotapes or audiotapes existed of interrogations of certain high-profile terrorism detainees. In fact, two such videotapes and one audio tape existed.