Shannon Love

Complexity or Culture?

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In reading this story about Blagojevich getting a hung jury on all but one charge, this bit leapt out at me:

But one juror, a woman whom other jurors declined to identify, saying they wanted to respect her privacy, never budged in her opposition to convicting on the counts. She was unmoved by recorded calls in which Mr. Blagojevich and his aides spoke of possible jobs, donations, even a White House cabinet appointment he might get after making his Senate choice.
 
Mr. Wlodek described her stance as “very noble,” adding: “She did not see it as a violation of any laws. It was politics. It was more of conversations of what-ifs.”[emp added]

This makes me wonder if Blagojevich got off owing to the political culture of Illinois which assumes that a high level of corruption is simply how politics and government get done. With such a culture, it might seem unjust for a juror to convict Blagojevich for actions which are expected of all politicians. I mean, who expects that elected officials will have long conversations about “what-ifs” that at least sound a lot like discussions about corruption?

The arcane complexity of the legal charges is definitely a problem. It’s very much like the trouble that lay juries have in evaluating cases concerning complex and technical financial, technological or scientific evidence. We expect people to get an advanced specialized education and then get years of experience before making major decisions in technical fields, and yet we expect lay juries to choose between two dueling experts based on just a few days of exposure to the issues at hand.

However, corruption would seem to be fairly straightforward in most cases and wouldn’t require a lot of legal hair-splitting. Was the complexity of this case really the challenge here, or was it really a matter of a culture so broadly tolerant of corruption that only the most extreme and explicit acts of corruptions will draw legal censure? Was the complexity of the judge’s instructions itself a result of this culture?

Perhaps some readers from Illinois can pitch in with insight.

Anti-Vaccination Hysterics Kill Seven Babies

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Great, anti-vaccination hysteria has killed seven infants in California. Whooping cough, once thought to be virtually wiped-out in the developed world, is making a comeback thanks to illegal immigration and greedy anti-vaccination activists.

As I noted in my previous post on the subject, too many people make emotional decisions based on graphic images. They see pictures of kids with autism or whatever the anti-vaccination hysteria du jour is but they don’t see countervailing images of the diseases that vaccinations prevent.

Just to provide some real education, here is a video of a 12-week-old infant with whooping cough. You can hear the distinctive strangling intake of breath at the end of a coughing fit which gives the disease its name.

As you listen to this, recall that in the normal course of the disease, this horrific coughing last for a month with two more months of less-harsh coughing. The disease kills by sheer exhaustion.

There is an adult whooping cough booster available. If you have contact with infants and/or a large illegal population (legal immigrants have to get vaccinations), I strongly recommend you get the booster.

And, if you know some anti-vaccination idiot, strap them down and make them listen to the video in a loop.

Save the Frogs! Burn Coal!

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OMG! All the little froggies are dying world wide! It’s all caused by evil, greedy humans destroying habitat, the ozone layer and causing climate change! Oh, wait, they’re dying because of fungus plague spread by migrating waterfowl? Never mind, stop shooting the 3rd world charcoal makers. Turns out they’re not to blame…this time… we’ll get them on something else next month.

Still we need to do something for the little froggies! After all, how do we know that some obscure amphibian species in an isolated valley somewhere isn’t the linchpin species for the entire planetary ecosystem? Frankly, the biosphere is so incredibly fragile that it’s amazing it’s survived 3.5 billion years at all. Obviously, we need to completely reengineer the planetary economy based on the pronouncements of the heartthrob of the poli-sci department or everything, everywhere will die!

Hmmm, what kind of environmental conditions do amphibians like? Oh, yeah, they like it warmer and wetter. How could we make things warmer and wetter everywhere? Wait, don’t most of the absolutely-proven-without-a-doubt-just-because-climatologists-are-so-confident-they-don’t-actually-have-to-test-computer-models-against-real-world-observations computer models predict that increasing CO2 concentrations will lead to significantly warmer and wetter conditions virtually everywhere?

That’s it! To save the froggies all we have to do is increase our CO2 output. With hard work and massive government regulation and subsidies we could turn the whole planet into a froggy-friendly swamp within a few decades.

Write your elected representative and demand we spend hundreds of billions every year burning every carbon containing compound on the planet. If you don’t, it means you’re an ignorant racist who hates absolutely every living thing everywhere!

Easy Come, Easy Go

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Of course Senator Kerry will pay the $500,000 Massachusetts tax he dodged on his yacht. After all, why does he care? It’s not his money.

Kerry is the only human being since Cleopatra to marry not one, but two billionaires. Heck, even his wives weren’t self-made. They inherited their fortunes from husbands. Unlike a self-made billionaire, Kerry didn’t spend decades risking everything to build his fortune. He has no clue what enormous economic creativity and persistence it took to create the fortune he so dearly enjoys. Kerry won his wealth in a gigolo lottery and he won’t miss a chunk of it.

Perhaps if we could lay hands on a real reporter, we could get him to ask Kerry if he was paying those taxes from money that he personally earned or if he was just looting the Heinz family’s trust.