De-Institutionalizaton, Update

Observations and graphs of numbers institutionalized are discussed by Bernard Harcourt guestblogging at Volokh. His conclusion:

What is also clear is that Seung-Hui Cho probably would have been institutionalized in the 1940s or 50s and, as a result, the Virginia Tech tragedy may not have happened. According to the New York Times, the director of the campus counseling services at Virginia Tech said of Cho: “The mental health professionals were there to assess his safety, not particularly the safety of others.” It’s unlikely we would have taken that attitude fifty years ago.
 
But the problem is, we would also be institutionalizing another huge swath of humanity — and it’s simply not clear how many of those other lives we would be irreparably harming in the process.

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Quote of the Day

“Having been a senator during 9/11, I understand the extraordinary horror of that kind of attack,” she said. “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. That doesn’t mean we go looking for other fights. Let’s focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them.”

Hillary Clinton

Hubris

A former prosecutor of white-collar criminals, now hustling business for his private law practice, opines humbly:

White-collar crime is rarely about greed, in the opinion of the former prosecutors. “It is generally hubris,” Mr Owens says. “It’s a corporate culture that is detached and guarded by advisers who never challenge.”

The same could be said, with perhaps more justification, for the US culture of criminal prosecution. Businessmen are subject to criminal liability for a wide range of behaviors, and often stand to lose enormous amounts of money and their careers based on mere allegations of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, prosecutors who destroy highly productive business people out of hubris and personal ambition are almost never accountable for their most egregious actions, and indeed are likely to benefit professionally from them.

Word Puzzles

1. Think of a set of three words that sound the same (homophones) but begin with different letters. Example: nice and gneiss sound alike and they begin with different letters, but there are only two of them. There is no third that I can think of that sounds like that. I can come up with four sets of three words, but I believe I have forgotten one.

2. How many English words begin with s but not sh, and are pronounced as sh? I can think of three, not counting derivatives of these three.

3. Give yourself 1 minute and write down all the words you can think of that are doubled syllables. Examples: bye-bye, Dada. Punctuation and capitalization do not matter, but spelling does (syllables must be spelled identically). See if you can come up with a primate, a flowering tree, an actress (her Magyar nickname for the name Susan, in English), and a treat.

Musings On Intelligence

Read a few things this week that gave me pause on the subject of intelligence.

Kent’s Imperative – “Network analysis in historical contexts

Haft of The Spear – “The Power of Math

The Small Wars Council – ” Blackwater Brass Forms Intelligence Company

Bill Sizemore – “Blackwater brass forms intelligence company

Total Intelligence Solutions, inc.

The longitudinal implications here are very interesting.

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