Monthly Archives: May 2014

Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere.

First thing… THIS is how you do a kickstarter.

This is the kind of thing that kickstarter can be great at, and do great things with; being done by people who understand their medium and their audience, and who design their campaign properly around it.

If this doesn’t become one of the most overfunded kickstarters in history, I would be amazed.

I’ve been watching it for about 2 hours, and it’s gone from $100k to over $500k in that time.

… And this is something I’m backing… even as little as I can afford right now. It’s a good idea, and it’s something I’d like to see done. I can’t do much, but I pledged… It’s the price of a cup of coffee or a little more than a gallon of gas. You should too if you can.

Anything we can do to increase the net level of education, intelligence, and reading in this country… on this planet… we should be doing. If it’s a smart, well designed, well implemented way of doing so, even better.

Long term, I’d like to see what their fee schedule and sustainability model is, are they organizing long term as for profit, not for profit etc… but let’s get this off the ground at the very least.

Now… for my more skeptical, and more conservative friends and readers… yes, liberals, education blah blah blah.

THIS IS A GOOD THING – IGNORE THE POLITICS

This is an essentially libertarian thing, using the power of private enterprise and initiative, and the power of market preference, to fund education. Using market research tools, they can evaluate the preference share for education, find a way to use funds properly, and ignore the noise coming from politics.

WE WANT MORE OF THIS. LOTS MORE OF THIS.

There is one specific issue that I personally have a problem with… but I can get over it, because I understand the issue, and why it’s presented as it is.

So for my fellow skeptics, and numbers geeks…

Ignore the claim that 25% of children don’t learn to read in this country…

That is not an outright lie… it’s also not the absolute truth. It’s a matter of how we define literacy, and to what degree we count someone literate based on that definition.

That’s a concept that takes more than 30 seconds, and more than one paragraph to explain… so it gets simplified here as “1 in 4 children don’t learn to read”.

It a political number, not a real number. A classic example of using definitions to make things scarier, to emphasize the problem.

Don’t let that stop you from the core message here, or from supporting what looks to be an excellent idea.

Oh and, be sure to watch the video to the very end… priceless…

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Reframing the Hierarchy of False Dichotomies

This image is one way of reframing the common conception of the left/right false dichotomy… and it’s an important first step of reconceptualizing the false dichotomy to reveal the true dichotomy… but if you stop there, you have failed, and will continue to fail.

Reframe the statement further…

Neither work for the corporations.

“Both” work in furtherance of their own power over the people. They do so through the same types of tactics and manipulations, largely paid for by the same corporations (or similar if theoretically oppositional positioned interests), presenting a hierarchy of false dichotomies.

The true dichotomy is control over others, vs. liberty.

It’s a rather important distinction, with difference… because the core issue and the motivation behind it are both different, the potential solution sets are different.

Both potential solution sets include the “get corporate money out of politics” point within them…

…but for one way of framing the issue, it’s the primary… even the only meaningful point in that potential solution set (thus dooming it to inevitable failure, as doing so is functionally impossible without a complete transformation in the nature and structure of our politics).

For the other, it’s just one of the many possible points within the potentially viable solution set or sets, and importantly is recognized as neither necessary nor sufficient.

One cannot proceed to successful resolution of complex issues, without understanding the second and third order issues which underly them. This increases complexity and multiplies the problems of imperfect information, imperfect reason, and unintended consequences… again, dooming such efforts to failure by their nature.

Only by reducing the problems to first principles, and their associated core motivations, can true dichotomies be resolved… Or even perceived or realized.

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Armed Customer Kills Armed Robber; Family of Robber May File Lawsuit

In January of 2012, two armed thugs entered a Waffle House in Chesnee, SC. One thing these thugs didn’t account for: the possibility that one or more of the customers might be carrying a concealed handgun. One customer by the name of Justin Harrison saw his opening to act and fired several shots at one of the thugs Dante Williams, DRT.* The other thug, unfortunately, escaped with his life (he’s now the taxpayers’ problem for the next 30 years).  

Tamika McSwain, cousin of Dante Williams, is upset that Harrison “took the law into his own hands”** and that charges were not filed against Harrison for doing so. Due to this perceived miscarriage of justice, McSwain says the family might file a lawsuit. McSwain also contends that more training should be required before someone earns their CWP. Harrison’s CWP instructor David Blanton, however; disagrees.

“Not only was he defending his own life, which the law says he can do [***] but there were other people in the restaurant,” Blanton said.

Harrison, in defending his own actions said “They got the gun, he [Williams] picked it up. He could have said no.”

And that’s the bottom damn line, Tamika: your dirt bag cousin could have said no. Your cousin made a very bad choice and he paid with his life.

Let me further say, I really don’t give a rat’s ass how “sharp” or “goofy” or how much he “loved to dance” or that you think he was “a respectable boy.” On that night at least, he was a thug. A thug who deserved to die. People like your thug cousin are the reason why we need to have the right to carry weapons in public places. I wish people like your cousin didn’t exist at all. In a world without people like your cousin, we could beat all the guns in the world into plow shears. But as long as we do have people in this world like your cousin, we will need guns and people willing to use them to defend the rest of us.

*Dead Right There

**This phrase drives me crazy. The law is always “in our own hands” particularly in a threatening situation like this one.

***Isn’t that so nice of the law to allow individuals to protect their own lives!

One Out of 25 Prisoners on Death Row is Innocent

Benjamin Franklin once argued: “It is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.” The purpose of courts as drafted in the Constitution was to minimize the occurrences innocent people from “suffering” via an adversarial system in which the accused is considered innocent until proven guilty to a jury of his or her peers.

Regardless of these lofty goals, the question must be asked: how well has this system worked?

If the standard is that of Franklin’s (i.e. less than 1%), then the idea that a rate of 1 in 25 death row convicts are likely innocent is clearly unacceptable. According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, to the best the researchers were able to determine, this about what the rate is. If you feel that you are grieving as a result of wrongful death, contact Bill Berenson Injury Law.

Pete Yost for the Associated Press reports:

From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. – 138 prisoners – were exonerated and released because of innocence.

But the great majority of innocent people who are sentenced to death are never identified and freed, says professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law School, the study’s lead author.

The difficulty in identifying innocent inmates stems from the fact that more than 60 percent of prisoners in death penalty cases ultimately are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. Once that happens, their cases no longer receive the exhaustive reviews that the legal system provides for those on death row.
[…]
Because of various assumptions, it might be best to use the margin of error in the study and say the innocence rate is probably between 2.8 percent and 5.2 percent, said University of South Carolina statistics professor John Grego, who wasn’t part of the study.
[…]
“The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution,” says the study. “But most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply.” The study estimates that if all defendants sentenced to death remained in that status, “at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.”

I have to say that, even as a fierce opponent of the death penalty, I would have never guessed the number of innocent individuals on death row to be this high. I was horrified by the notion that 1 in 100 or even 1 in 1,000 such individuals could be killed by the state, but 1 in 25?

This brings me to my question for those who support state sanctioned killing: is this an acceptable error rate to you? How many innocent people are we willing to sacrifice in order to kill the most heinous of individuals? Based on this study, the current policy is that we are apparently at peace with the idea of killing 4 innocent people to kill 96 guilty.

This is a price that a free and just country should be unwilling to pay. Yet it is a reality for many people who are falsely convicted and find themselves on death row, with many hoping that their appeals attorneys would be able to have their convictions exonerated.