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I'm pretty sure the GP was talking about the gate security, not the air marshals, which existed under the FAA long before the TSA was ever even thought of. The TSA guys at the gate don't carry guns, they call the local police if there is a problem and, on average, have the intellect of fly larvae, no insult intended towards fly larvae. So something tells me the casting director for the gate TSA guys didn't hire the plainclothes marshals on the planes.

And nobody has any problem with the air marshals, they don't grope you as you pass by them. Furthermore, air marshals can prevent many types of terrorist threats, and this is true a priori, on the other hand, the TSA's gate screens have only managed to catch a few staff members they accidentally hired that had a criminal history for molesting children. That's right, we hired people who like to molest children to ... molest children! ! It's the fucking pedophile cream dream! And don't think for a second there wasn't a line a mile long of yet-to-be-identified pedophiles lining up for the "Molest the children" job. No, no terrorist plots uncovered. Nobody wishing harm to the people on the aircraft stopped. Oh, they were there! They just let those guys go by. And as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They have a 100% failure rate, they piss everyone off, El Al thinks they are a fucking joke and they make 1984 look a lot more like it could really happen. Can someone explain why are we blowing our money on this bullshit!?

In the US there's a run around that as well: even if what you say is true you can be sued.

http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/16/this-week-in-free-speech

What about the 16 year old girl who sent a sexual nude pic of herself to her boyfriend who then went and shared the pic with the whole class getting the 16 year old girl arrested for creating and distributing child porn?

She is now a registered sex offender and can't go to school or college. Her life is destroyed because of some blind application of a law that was not intended to target her but because of overzealous DA's who want a notch on their political belt go after such easy crimes because of the emotional appeal to people like you.

http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/sexting-teens-makes-sex-offender-list-20110121-19zwu.html
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-07/justice/sexting.busts_1_phillip-alpert-offender-list-offender-registry?_s=PM:CRIME
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20001082-504083.html


Or how about the grandmother who took pictures of her naked grandchildren (under the age of 3) in a bathtub and then took the pics to walmart to get prints? Another overzealous DA went and prosecuted her. She was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/04/grandma-arrested-for-child-por


It is evil that children are getting exploited. The problem is, the ones getting punished by the application of the laws due to the political and emotional fervor such application engenders for those leading the crusade, are not the ones exploiting the children.

Both those who download decade old pictures, or pictures of jailbait teens who voluntarily post their own pics on the net, or of innocent grandmothers who take pictures of their infant children, these are not the people being exploited nor are they the one's exploiting others, yet they are the people being targeted by the current application of the law.


Because a DA with 10 "Child Porn convictions" under his belt has an emotional appeal to mindless cosmic space zombie followers and that emotional appeal will get him elected / re-elected.

Yes, but the problem is today you have the guy dealing in kiddy porn who also has a PCP habit.

So everything should always be delivered by SWAT team, kicking in doors, throwing people down stairs, and pointing guns in their faces? "You see, the problem today is, you have the guy with unpaid parking tickets who is ALSO a serial killer who has wired half-the city block with C4, and . . ."

Nobody died because the police aren't there to shoot people

Err, the police do shoot innocent people in these kinds of raids. Sometimes because they "slip" ("The SWAT team was justified in this case of sports betting! He might have been a suicide bomber!") . Sometimes because the startled homeowner came out of a room with a baseball bat (thinking he was being robbed). Sometimes, there doesn't appear to be a reason when they gun down a grandpa. And they often get the wrong house.

If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there.

No it's not. Police deaths are declining. Critical Thinking 101: Just because the media hypes it up does not make it true.

Yes, but the problem is today you have the guy dealing in kiddy porn who also has a PCP habit.

So everything should always be delivered by SWAT team, kicking in doors, throwing people down stairs, and pointing guns in their faces? "You see, the problem today is, you have the guy with unpaid parking tickets who is ALSO a serial killer who has wired half-the city block with C4, and . . ."

Nobody died because the police aren't there to shoot people

Err, the police do shoot innocent people in these kinds of raids. Sometimes because they "slip" ("The SWAT team was justified in this case of sports betting! He might have been a suicide bomber!") . Sometimes because the startled homeowner came out of a room with a baseball bat (thinking he was being robbed). Sometimes, there doesn't appear to be a reason when they gun down a grandpa. And they often get the wrong house.

If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there.

No it's not. Police deaths are declining. Critical Thinking 101: Just because the media hypes it up does not make it true.

> Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him...
> Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.

I have some advice for law enforcement. Don't treat someone suspected of a non-violent crime as an excuse to play with all the new weapons you just got budget for. Things go wrong. People end up dead. Read http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/02/our-militarized-police-departm or http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 or Google for "Paramilitary raids", "militarized police".

I'm sure he's familiar with it, this case has gotten a lot of coverage in those circles. Since you like his work, I'll direct you to someone from the same spectrum that I enjoy more. Radley Balko over at The Agitator is a great, award winning writer who is known for finding stories that deliver a swift kick in the... well, a punch in the stomach. This story about a forensics team that framed a man for murder in Mississippi won him some heavy awards and helped the innocence project free a few wrongly convicted men. Just be sure you take your blood pressure medicine before you read that story - it really is too much to handle if you take justice seriously. There's a couple-dozen more at the same magazine that can keep your sense of moral outrage exercised for days.

You're gonna have to do better than that. Addressing his article from ages ago is nice, but limited. Addressing his "Good Calories, Bad Calories" work, now that's another thing.

Here's Gary's actual response to the specious attacks you note:

http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/an-exercise-in-vitriol-rather

The whole point of the "cherry-picking" you're criticizing is to debunk the conventional wisdom -> and all it takes is a single refutation of the "calories in, calories out" hypothesis to make it false.

If you had an ounce of integrity, you would not ignore the single refutations that falsify your thesis :)

I don't trust a single thing Taubes says. He is a dishonest, cherry-picking, quote-mining sell-out.

If he had an ounce of integrity, he would do some true investigative journalism and not just ignore the volumes of studies that disagree with his thesis.

http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/big-fat-fake/singlepage

You want citations?

Read any of Radley Balko's reporting on the War on Drugs (the "Studies" section of that page is a good place to start).

Reason Magazine has a number of articles on how asset forfeiture laws let cops seize things from innocent people and keep them (or auction the things to buy new toys), and how little traction the victims of the seizures get from the legal system.

If you would like more general examples, read this book.

Then get the dangerous driver off the road. Sobriety checkpoints aren't the way to do that.

In typical bureaucratic fashion, we get an approach that penalizes everyone, without effectively addressing the real problem.

Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Tom Udall (D-NM) asked Scott Forstall, the head of Apple's iPhone software group, to pull an unspecified number of apps from the company's App Store. The senators also made similar requests of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt and Research in Motion's (RIM) co-CEOs, James Balsillie and Michael Lazaridis.....

4 Democrats, who would've guessed? The party that thinks it can save us from ourselves. Look guys, you want to help? Get me some of that money like you gave to the Wall Street guys. How come no one wants to "save me from myself" in that fashion?

More money into the FBI White Collar Division

And then they can fight the threat of private currencies. Or did you actually think an expanded financial crime unit would go after real criminals?

And I said, no, personhood has nothing to do with protecting shareholder rights. It protects the shareholders from liability. Maybe that is what you meant to say?

Well, you should have said here what you said there. Personhood doesn't have to do with the corporate veil, the shield against liability.

I doubt that was ever true. The UK never did that, for example. Further, given the often vile envy and hate that cuts through any human society, it is better that US society currently has no say in corporate charters.

See: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/Hx_Corporations_US.html or just google "corporation history charter revoke"

From that link, I read:

In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.

So I was right about UK corporations. Further, when I googled on your suggested search term I came across this article.

The revocation movementâ(TM)s account of history has been laid out in many places; one is Taking Care of Business, a 1993 pamphlet by activists Richard Grossman and Frank Adams. The tract notes that in the early 19th century, enterprises took many forms, from limited partnerships to unincorporated associations to cooperatives. âoeLegislatures also chartered profit-making corporations to build turnpikes, canals and bridges,â the authors write. âoeBy the beginning of the 1800s, only two hundred such charters had been grantedâ¦. Citizens governed corporations by detailing rules and operating conditions not just in the charters but also in state constitutions and state laws.â

The pamphlet does not explain why a business would tolerate such restrictions, if all it need do to avoid them was not incorporate. The answer, of course, is that incorporation bestowed certain advantages. In those days, historian Robert Hessen notes in his 1979 book In Defense of the Corporation, corporate charters often included special privileges, such as âoea legally enforced monopoly, exemption from taxation, release of employees from militia and jury duty, power to exercise eminent domain, and authorization to hold lotteries as a means of raising capital.â Others received direct subsidies from the government.

So how are obtaining special competitive advantages from government in the public interest?

Second, you ignore that no one is able to determine what the public interest is. In the US, the Supreme Court punted on this subject for the most part, acquiescing at the federal level to the legislative branch on deciding what is in the public interest. The legislative branch in turn is notorious for placing special interests ahead of public interests.

My view is that it is best that the option remains unused. There are better ways to destroy a corporation or other business that has used up its public interest credit card, namely, through bankruptcy court.

For local affairs, society is not capable of determining for the most part what is in the public interest. Common dangers that threaten everyone? I think we can usually find consensus on that (doesn't always happen, for example, this very debate about corporate personhood happens because people disagree on what the problem is). But a corporation whose dissolution would have a numbe

Those are some pretty big if's:

1. The safety of the machines hasn't been proven, they haven't been out long enough to compile long term statistics on their safety to the public and to the people running the scanners. Xrays are ionizing radiation, and even if they don't penetrate the skin I can't imagine that messing around with skin cell DNA molecules is healthy for anyone and there are some real questions about the effects of the machines. What safeguards are in the machine to monitor X-ray levels and prevent overdosing? Everyone here knows that even if there are safeguards in place, they are not foolproof.

2. The security of the scanners is quite another unknown - who will be viewing the images? What precautions are taking to protect the privacy of the virtually naked pictures of an unsuspecting public?

And the biggest "if": Have the machines proven to be effective? Some researchers have already found trivial ways to bypass the scanners (hiding contraband in a body cavity is the obvious hole (no pun intended), but they also found that you can tape high explosives to your body to conceal it. And a typical bus station or stadium has more security holes than an airport (which have already been shown to have a porous perimeter despite the security screenings), so why should we think that scanning the public will enhance security at all?

1 out of every 1000 people will die from terrorist attacks? Thats just not true, but lets go with an extremely generous estimate of 1 out of every 10,000. As a UK male there is a 1.8 in 10,000 chance you will kill yourself. You're absolutely right, the threat of terrorism is just silly to handle with random spot-checks.

If you want to improve peoples lives with them big terrorism places aren't where you want them, you want them to prevent domestic, run-of-the-mill crimes in subway tunnels or something. Even then its still stupid, but at least you're fighting a real problem that way. "Oh no! Our big ass bomb didn't make it all the way inside the stadium!" probably isn't going to stop the boogey-man from blowing it up from the outside if he actually exists.

Or other totally ridiculous stuff.

The real issue I have with the GP is the idea that spammers are reformed by jail time, but sex offenders aren't.

I'm a little late to this party, and I can't speak of everyone, but I'm American and I'm totally on board with being annoyed by things. I think Philip Pullman said it best when he said: "No one has the right to spend their life without being offended."

There is a quick video and context here.

Just thought you might like the quote, if you haven't heard it already.

States, at least in the US context, certainly are subject to different financial constraints than is the federal government. There are some other differences as well. At least for stuff that can be stamped "national security" the feds have greater leverage over private sector actors: It is perfectly legal for Yoyodyne LLC. to say "Dear Florida, give us the land to build a spaceport, some cushy tax breaks, and exemption from certain local zoning restrictions, or we will take our precious, precious jobs to New Mexico". That is, in fact, entirely standard practice for corporations siting facilities. On the other hand, were Slaughtertek industries to say "Well, if you don't like the price of our proposed air-defense missile package, perhaps China will be more cooperative...", they would likely find themselves in legal hot water.

This tends to create a countervailing pressure on state governments: As you say, even if they are willing to take the macroecomic consequences, they cannot print money and are generally limited in their ability to run debts. On the other hand, state governments are often much easier to play against one another in competition for the most generous public/private "partnerships". In non-defense industries, some of the same stuff happens nation to nation; but there are still barriers like language, tariffs, currencies, etc. that states either are powerless to erect(interstate commerce is federal, so state x can't impose a tariff on goods from state y) or that don't exist(all states use USD and have high concentrations of available native English speakers, say). Unfortunately, there is some evidence from empirical economic study that this countervailing pressure often ends up with state governments being made into what amounts to a corporate booty call. Governors just cannot resist the electoral value of cutting the ribbon at some new plant with some shiny new jobs for their constituents; but often end up paying out alarming sums in taxpayer money per job, and long-term retention(once the goodies run out) can be surprisingly low. Apparently, southern states have it particularly bad; but others are not immune(Municipalities that shell out to build stadiums for private sports teams are in a similar boat and that seems to be a universal vice...)

This isn't just a US phenomenon: Euro-zone nations, because of comparatively low borders, often face some of the same problems and national governments generally are not exempt, though they have somewhat stronger tools to work with.

What conceivable situation would fulfill all three, ie. being oppression rather than good police work?

Here's an easy example, since we are talking about smartphones. The police are now arresting people for taking video on public streets with their cellphone. No, really.

The referenced articles will lead you to a trove of cases where there is no other reason for police action other than oppression. Why might you want to record something happening on a public street if you are not a criminal?

Well, the cops might jump you, beat the crap out of you, charge you with felony assault on a police officer and then destroy the police surveillance videos that document the crime. In this case a cell phone video of what really happened surfaced and the charges were dropped. Lest you think this is a "one off", there are plenty of other cases where police video equipment mysteriously malfunctions just at the critical moment. You can find examples via the referenced articles.

Still wondering why you might want to keep your cellphone private if "you have done nothing wrong"? Follow those links and you'll find plenty of cases where people were arrested (and later released) and evidence on their cellphone was destroyed by the police. Catching bad guys by searching cell phones is probably quite possible. Does that mean that you should give up your right to privacy and have the police rifling through your electronic papers every time you interact with them? Does the 4th amendment really mean nothing?

I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?

http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate

Both sides of this debate _outside_ of the scientific community are disturbingly simplistic. On the one hand we've got the chicken littles who blame _every_ major weather event on global warming. The flooding here in Australia is point-in-case - we are in the grip of a very strong La Nina event, climatologists might argue that it is particularly strong because of an underlying warming trend but the floods themselves are due solely to La Nina. On the other hand we have the "temperatures haven't risen since 1998 crowd", well the graph provided here shows a clear upward _trend_ in temperatures since 2000 and when you take into account the local minima and maxima (Mt. Pinatubo and El Nino) there is an obvious upwards trend over the whole graph. Come on people, this is basic high school math.

News for nerds... I don't think so.

I keep seeing people saying that temperatures have not risen since 1998, but nobody ever cites any real data to back up that assertion. Care to step up?

http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate

Here's the temperature plotted over the last 32 years http://reason.com/blog/2011/01/06/global-temperature-trend-upate not as dramatic as you might think.

And then those people will be arrested and sent to prison for wiretapping the police. It is happening.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras

"Awful Pity" doesn't begin to describe it... This quote: "officials say all seven dashboard cameras in the police cruisers coincidentally malfunctioned" is a couple pages in, but the whole article is worth reading.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras

They were able to use further loans from the gov to pay back the TARP funds. I know GM did this, not sure how widespread it is among TARP recipients. So they went around and got another loan, paid back the original loan, and everyone's happy.

As to G-S, give me access to 0% loans direct from the fed and I'm sure I can make money too. Like oh, use these no interest loans to buy government bonds that return 5%.. That's right, we give these bastards money at no charge so they can turn around, buy government debt, that we as taxpayers pay back at a 5% charge. Sweet! No wonder so many NY Stock exchange board members jumped onto G-S when they became a bank specifically to allow them to get bailout money.

Do this scam enough and the facebook money is nothing.

About two weeks ago a motorcyclist with a helmet cam was arrested when he posted a traffic stop on youtube. The cop had pulled a gun on the citizen w/o identifying himself AS a cop (he was plain clothes), and then the Police Bureau arrested the man after the Chief saw the video online.

Actually, that happened in April, and is mentioned in the fine article.

In a sudden outbreak of common sense, those charges were dropped about three months ago.

Hey OP how about linking to the real article rather then a tiny oped that gives no real detail: http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras

Reason has an article about recording the cops today:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/21/how-to-record-the-cops

Also, if you search on site, they have had multiple articles on the legal aspects of recording cops. Just use the search feature.

But, but... According to Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, police misconduct is "so rare it might as well not exist."

The only way to keep the numbers low is to view every action as an infraction. Besides, the on duty police officer views everyone as a potential criminal, if only for self-preservation.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodet

But, but... According to Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, police misconduct is "so rare it might as well not exist."

No fuss, single page view - http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras/print

This is the link to the actual article. The link in the summary leads to a details-free summary.

Start here.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/21/how-to-record-the-cops

The link is to a stub article with no real content on Bruce's blog that just points to the real article:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras

Bruce has useful articles sometimes but it isn't any more legitimate for Bruce to use his blog as gateway page to real articles than anyone else trying to scam hits for content that isn't theirs.

Serendipitously, this article about the first war on terror - governmental suppression of 19th century peaceful anarchists - was just published by Reason.

The authorities made extensive use of agents provocateurs because the anarchists were too peaceful to be threatening enough. Accidental side effects included the Russian Revolution and the exacerbation of the First World War (which events of course led to the Second World War and the Cold War).

It looks like history is repeating itself.

Stallman expressed concern about government searches without search warrants for data in the cloud.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/12/14/great-4th-amendment-news-from
(Quoting another article)

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers....

One of the regulars on Hit&Run (Reason Magazine's blog, http://reason.com/blog).

There are a small handful of votes where Ron Paul has voted in a way that would be upsetting to left-liberals (gay adoption in DC comes to mind), but aside from that, I don't think there is anyone in DC more passionately committed to personal freedom than Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is anti-science, anti-choice, anti-separation of church and state, a liar (in that he's given two contradictory stories about the controversial racist statements that appeared in his newsletter), and either a racist or incompetent to run a 'zine.

A great deal of his faux-libertarianism is about removing federal safeguards against state governments and big business fscking you over. Ron Paul wouldn't know personal freedom if it bit him in the ass.

The fact that he still makes more sense than most of the G.O.P. is an indictment of the conservative movement, not an endorsement of Paul.

Maybe that was your conclusion after reading that book but it was not the same conclusion that others had..

http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/14/superfreakonomics-errors-nathan-myhrvold-intellectual-ventures-bill-gates-warren-buffet/
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-13-new-book-superfreakonomics-pushes-global-cooling-myths/
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/global-warming-in-superfreakonomics-the-anatomy-of-a-smear/
http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/03/superfreaking-out-over-climate

It's close to paying back every dime it borrowed, and it's now almost certain that the taxpayers will ultimately pay very little for saving GM.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!

Who were you calling stupid, sonny?

This past election cycle over $400 million was spent on independent expenditures.

Are you sure that's all? In the California governor's race alone Meg Whitman spent more than $140 million of her own money in the campaign. All together she spent more than $160 million. Her opponent Jerry Brown's spending topped $50 million. Now according to those who claim money buys political offices she should have won, spending 3 tymes as much as he did, but he won.

On Anthony Kennedy's decision on the Citizens United case:

It sounds to me like he naively believed that there would be automatic disclosure. I think given that there is a good chance a full disclosure law would be found constitutional.

It was naive of him. However if a law were proposed that addressed full disclosure, and only that, then it may pass USSC scrutiny. Now if that was his thinking I don't know how the government's lawyers overlooked that thinking. A quick google returns results saying that corporations do not have to disclose them. The first two results, Why Don’t Corporations Have To Disclose Their Campaign Contributions Like Unions? and again Why don't corporations have to disclose their campaign contributions like unions? answer the question.

Falcon

One thing that Wyden is famous for here is that he holds a town hall meeting in every county of the state at least once a year and pays attention to their concerns.

And how are those townhall meeting paid for? Out of pocket, contributions, or taxpayers? Each has problems, out of pocket means only the wealthy can afford it. Taxpayers paying means freeloaders can game the system. And contributions possibility means the candidate is beholden to contributors, but if those contributors are voters in the district what's wrong with that?

Oh, and please notice that as I said earlier, I don't believe corporations and unions should have the same rights of freedom speech, not politically. Nor should industry trade groups. But I don't have a problem with individuals paying voluntarily, none when Ross Perot ran for president, or when Meg Whitman spent $109 million of her own money for the governorship of California. When her campaign spending topped $140 million many pundits wailed about the "corrosive effect on basic democratic principles." And who won the race? Jerry Brown, her democratic opponent.

Falcon

That's what your saying, cause if everyone gave a few dollars to be shared, then no one would have to worry about one entity giving billions.

What did I say? What I said was I wanted to support those I support and not give to those I oppose. I also want to freely be able enjoy my speech. If I want to pay for ads for a candidate, I don't want government telling me I can not do so. Whether I am in the the ads myself or I get others who also support the candidate to appear, or whether we pool our resources to produce the ads. Then place them.

I'm sorry that doesn't seem to make sense to you.

By the same terms, I'm sorry you can't understand that. I don't want my speech limited by you, government, or anyone else. I thought it was BS the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations could fund political ads, a corporation is not a person and does not have the same rights.

You seem to think that your individual donation means something It doesn't even make a blip on the screen compared to what a corp donates.

So thousands of people donating to Obama's campaign didn't help him get elected? HAHA!!!

he cares about the donation from the Koch brothers.

If anything the Koch brothers funded McCain not Obama, yet Obama not McCain is president. How intelligent does a person have to be to understand that? However much apparently you're not intelligent enough.

Oh, and not all of the wealthy support the same candidates. While the Koch brothers support Republicans, and anti-global warming groups, George Soros who Forbes ranked 35th richest person in the world in 2010 supports Obama. And Warren Buffet said raise my taxes.

Now can you understand that? Or are you too stupid?

Falcon

showing that juries are best off determining that the law is being properly applied

Sounds like you just made an argument in FAVOR of nullification. If I don't think the law is being properly applied then I'm voting for acquittal even if the defendant broke the letter of said law.

Do you think this guy deserved to be convicted of a crime? He should go to prison for seven years and permanently lose the right to own firearms and vote, along with all the other consequences that go with a felony conviction?

Remember, again, the jury can convict wrongfully as easily as it can acquit wrongfully

So what? That's not an argument against jury nullification. Voting for acquittal when you think the law is unfair and/or being unfairly applied is not the same thing as voting to convict an innocent man.

And a wrongful conviction is a far worse thing than a rightful conviction on a law that should be changed.

I'm not in the business of measuring degrees of "wrongness". If I think something is wrong you aren't going to compel me to go along with it. My conscience will trump the jury instructions.

BTW, not to reply twice, but would you have pushed for nullification if you were on this jury? I would have -- that case cries out for jury nullification.

I love the sheep that served on that jury. "Even the jurors who convicted him seem to have been looking for a reason to acquit him. But the judge gave them little choice" Uhh, yeah, you HAD a choice. Nobody can FORCE you to vote for conviction. Mindless fucking sheep that did whatever the DA and Judge wanted them to. What the hell is the point? 12 people on that Jury and not a single one of them knew about nullification or had even bothered to read a civics textbook in school? Depressing.

What's interesting about these sorts of discussions is that they are much more approachable for everyone than if we were arguing over calculus type things. And, these sorts of calculation are sometimes much more amenable to reasonable discussions and amendments and improvements related to bounds than overly precise ones about exact outcomes.

As Freeman Dyson said:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html
"As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist. I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science. The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen. I will be telling stories that challenge the prevailing dogmas of today. The prevailing dogmas may be right, but they still need to be challenged. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. Since I am heretic, I am accustomed to being in the minority. If I could persuade everyone to agree with me, I would not be a heretic. We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, "Too bad he has lost his marbles", and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role."

Back of the envelope calculations can give us a better idea of the range and scale of possibility, even if someone probably needs to do more detailed calculations to really make things work. So, we can answer "Might it fly?" with ballpark figures, whereas, "What is the best way to make it fly, given certain constraints and goals?" might take calculus or something else (evolutionary annealing algorithms or whatever).

It's been said (Knuth) that "premature optimization is the root of all evil":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization
but related to that may be the notion that teaching people optimization techniques and high precision math (like calculus or even the full times table) as opposed to basic approximation (like working with only one degree of precision or round numbers) may be the root of all extreme dumbness and math illiteracy? :-)

By the way, related to general errors in assumptions (or calculations), especially in relation to the LHC at CERN:
http://reason.com/archives/2008/09/02/a-1-in-1000-chance-of-gotterda
"At the Global Catastrophic Risk conference, Future of Humanity Institute research associate Toby Ord asked an interesting question: How certain should we be about safety when there could be a risk to the survival of the human species? As Ord argued, "When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in their modeling of the problem, or a mistake in their calculations.""

There is also the risk of "social group think" perhaps leading to this:
"The CERN black hole"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXzugu39pKM

Seriously, the LHC cost billi

http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/27/pity-the-poor-rich-incumbent

Democrats are still outspending Republicans in nearly every race. So for all the fear mongering by progressive groups, none of their fears have come true. Once again, people with no real understanding of an issue completely failed at predicting the outcomes of it.

Speaking of Citizens United, surely you're aware it has no effect on the relative levels of spending by the two major parties, right?

http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/27/pity-the-poor-rich-incumbent

The simple fact of the matter is that spending and tax reduction during economic downturn has been shown to be ineffective at best (the Hoover presidency shows how bad it can be).

Post-war USA, Canada, and New Zealand all disagree with you. For example:

In 1994 government debt was 68 percent of Canada's GDP. By 2008 that number was down to 29 percent. Finance Minister Paul Martin Jr. and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, both of the Liberal Party, are the two unlikely stars in this heroic tale of fiscal discipline.

By Keynsian logic, during that time Canada should have descended into chaos and civil war with 90% unemployment. Well, that didn't happen.

No doubt. The wealthiest area of the country(Northern virginia) permits its officers to commit homicide knowing their will be no charges.

The furtive gesture justification
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/27/AR2010012703907.html

The accidental discharge defense
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/23/AR2006032301117.html

Forgot to pay the bill
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/27/AR2006022701515.html

You have no right to know what the police are up to
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/police-blackout