TSA: Our bad, lighters aren’t a big deal

So I guess you can carry lighters onto planes these days:

• TSA to lift ban on flying with cigarette lighters (MSNBC)

Yeah, as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to blow up a plane with a Bic disposable.

Airline passengers will be able to bring many types of cigarette lighters on board again starting next month after authorities found that a ban on the devices did little to make flying safer, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said Friday.

The agency also announced that it was changing its policy on breast milk, and will allow mothers with or without children to carry more than three ounces onto planes.

I guess you can’t blow up an airplane with breast milk, either. Still no word on whether milk from cows is dangerously explosive.

But heck, in this suddenly frightening post-9/11 world, you can understand when government takes swift, decisive action to address what first appears to be a potent threat:

Congress banned lighters from flights after Richard Reid used matches to try to light explosives hidden in his shoes while on a Paris-to-Miami flight in 2001. Lawmakers worried that Reid might have succeeded if he had had a lighter. The lighter ban took effect in April 2005.

So much for “swift, decisive action”. That’s right, it took three and a half years for Leviathan USA to go from “oh noes, sum1 cud set up us teh bomb with a lighter” to actually banning lighters from planes. If the threat had been legitimate, that would have been an inexcusable delay. Given that it hasn’t, it’s equally inexcusable that Congress didn’t come to their fucking senses over those three and a half years.

And speaking of Congress placing the public at risk by enacting bad legislation:

In an interview with The New York Times, TSA chief Kip Hawley said confiscating lighters has not helped security much because other items could be used to detonate bombs.

“The No. 1 threat for us is someone trying to bring bomb components through the security checkpoint,” the newspaper quoted Hawley as saying. “We don’t want anything that distracts concentration from searching for that.”

Yep: banning lighters actually made it easier for the bad guys to defeat security by distracting TSA officers from other threats.

Speaking of Kip Hawley, Bruce Schneier just posted part one of an interview with Hawley:

• Conversation with Kip Hawley, TSA Administrator (part 1) (schneier.com)

As usual for Schneier’s work, it’s a worthwhile read.  The comments are also (so far) worth reading, and bring up issues not yet addressed in the interview itself.

Kiwi Leviathan Can’t Take a Joke

Let’s start by bringing people together — by finding common ground.  The one thing that ties together the politically-minded of all stripes is vicious satire.  Leftists and right-wingers; commies, centrists, and corporatists; greens and globalists; lovers of Liberty and lovers of Leviathan: we all share that most noble of human traits: we mock, slander, send up, take the piss, and otherwise caricature the politicians we despise in every way and by every means imaginable.  A multipartisan government easily mocked would truly unite its country.

Unless, of course, that country is New Zealand:

• MPs outlaw satire in New Zealand (Press Gazette)

To wit:

New Zealand’s Parliament has voted itself far-reaching powers to control satire and ridicule of MPs in Parliament, attracting a storm of media and academic criticism.

The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for “satire, ridicule or denigration”.

The rules apply any to broadcasts or rebroadcasts in any medium.

They also ban the use of such footage for “political advertising or election campaigning”, except with the permission of all members shown.

(Aside: what’s up with these single-sentence paragraphs?  Does “PA Mediapoint” fear that s/h/its readers will be frightened by long blocks of text?  Sigh.)

This essentially amounts to poor sportsmanship upon the part of the MPs.  Satire is not a matter of national security, nor is it damaging to the nation as a whole.  These MPs simply don’t want those mean, wicked citizens to hurt their poor widdle feewings.

Of course, that’s not how it’s being spun:

Leader of the House and deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen said the rules were designed to prevent the misrepresentation of what happened in the House through partial editing or other trickery. He insisted that they would be interpreted liberally and would not constrain legitimate debate and comment on politics.

So, Parliament just voted itself sweeping powers of censorship to address a particular well-defined issue (misrepresentation of events in the House), but promises not to abuse them?  Bullshit.  If Parliament wanted to address misrepresentation and nothing else, the standing orders would have addressed misrepresentation and nothing else.  This is a power grab: “let’s see how much we can get away with”.

Policy < Politics

Judging by what they’ve done, Pelosi and Dubya agree on (at least) two things:

1. It’s better for the war in Iraq to continue than for the Republicans to win in 2008.
2. Farm subsidies are a bad idea.

Now, you’d think that — with the Speaker of the House and the President against them — farm subsidies would be on the way out, right?  We all remember Pelosi’s hundred hours, right?  Breaking the link between lobbyists and legislation, get stuff done, that sort of thing.  Sounds like the farm bill’s already in the shitcan, doesn’t it?

Nope.

• Why Politics As Usual Will Always Be Politics As Usual (The Liberty Papers)

Once again, protecting the party’s chances in 2008 win out over actually, you know, doing good:

But as the latest farm bill heads to the House floor on Thursday, farm-state lawmakers seem likely to prevail in keeping the old subsidies largely in place, drawing a veto threat on Wednesday from the White House.

[...]

Faced with fierce opposition from the House Agriculture Committee, Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders lowered their sights and are now backing the committee’s bill, in part to protect rural freshmen lawmakers who may be vulnerable in the 2008 elections.

Doug Mataconis at TLP attributes this shift to farm lobbyists (see “lobbyists and legislation”, above), and in a sense I agree, but there’s a bigger problem here: the first priority of the majority party is staying in power.  We’ve seen it with the Republicans, and now we’re seeing it with the Democrats.  They came to power on an anti-war, anti-Bush platform — but they’ve passed up every realistic chance they’ve had to end the war (setting timetables that guarantee a veto is not a realistic chance; refusing to fund the war is a realistic chance) and “impeachment is off the table”.

One can’t claim to be surprised when politicians game the system.  When a dog shits on your yard, it’s not because he hates you: it’s because he’s a dog.  So it is with politicians and politics.

Against innumeracy, vol. 3

Dear Internet: quit using the word “average” when you don’t know what it means.

• Surveys: 90% Of Households Think They Carry Average Or Below Average Amount Of Debt (Consumerist.com)

Newsflash, dipshits: not all averages split the population down the middle. But let’s not let mere numeracy get in the way of smug smirking schadenfreude, eh?

We think most of the respondents are either lying or are misinformed, part of the reason there’ such a debt problem to begin with. Either that, or the survey must have drawn its population entirely from Lake Woebegone[sic].

Let’s really quickly talk about different kinds of averages. The usual version is the arithmetic mean , which gives a rough indication of the centre of a balanced distribution.  It’s what most people think of as “the average”, which (somehow) they also think of as “the most likely” or “the most common”.  It’s pretty easy to see that the arithmetic mean is heavily influenced by outliers: if your sample has ninety people with $1k debt and ten poor fools with $11k in debt, the “average” debt comes out to $2k.  Clearly, something’s wrong, but it isn’t underreporting: it’s poor statistics.  The arithmetic mean is useful for reasoning about balanced distributions, but it doesn’t tell you what you think it tells you for skewed distributions.

 Just as an aside, the mean doesn’t tell you enough about even a balanced distribution to have much of an idea about what that distribution looks like.  A perfectly constant distribution — everyone has $1k in debt — and a uniformly random distribution between $0 and $2k in debt will have the same mean (rather, they’ll approach the same mean as you take more samples, but let’s not get to calculus until we’ve figured out arithmetic, okay?).

Okay, so the arithmetic mean is interesting in certain statistical terms, but it doesn’t do a good job of reporting “typical” values unless the distribution is balanced.  Our next candidate is the median — the value which splits a sample in half (and for which our friend at Consumerist.com mistook the reported “average”).  For example, the median of our ninety-ten debt sample above is $1k — if you order people by debt, both the 50th and the 51st hold $1k in debt (with the ten most indebted right at the top).  Notice that in this example, 90% of respondents are actually right on the median.
For a skewed distribution, the median might be a better indicator of the “typical” result than the mean, if the distribution has one peak and similar behaviour around extreme values.  I’m willing to believe that household debt might follow such a distribution, but it’s going to take at least a little bit of supporting evidence to convince me.

On the other hand, I took a logic course in my first year of university that had a strongly bimodal distribution.  It was offered in the Philosophy department, so it satisfied the Humanities requirements for a number of computing science students, but it was listed as a Formal Studies course, and therefore satisfied that requirement for a number of Arts students.  Formal logic is easy meat for programmers (or should be, but that’s another rant), but requires a level of rigorous axiom-and-theorem deduction that’s not often found in Arts programmes.  The course ended up with a bimodal distribution: one peak around 55% composed mostly of Arts majors, and one around 90% for the CS majors.  The median in that course was probably around 70%, but almost no-one earned a 70% average.  Amusingly, this pattern repeated (and reversed) itself when many of those CS majors decided that philosophy was trivial and took a course in epistemology.

Finally, we can look at the mode of a distribution, which is merely the most common value. That sounds like exactly what we’re after, but it isn’t: for one thing, the mode isn’t necessarily unique.   If we have two people in our sample with $1k debt, two with $100k debt, and ninety-six somewhere in between with debts varying between $49k and $51k, the modes of our sample are $1k and $100k.  (Not very representative, eh?)

There are other averages (perhaps we’d better call them measures of central tendency, to make it more clear that there are a bunch of different ways to approach the problem), but these three are probably the most important to basic numeracy.

Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just going to prison?

Pop quiz, my fellow Canadians: are you carrying a gun right now?

Of course not, you indignantly reply.  How horrendously un-Canadian!

Are you sure?

• Offender can ‘use’ a handgun even without carrying one, top court rules (CBC.ca)

Threatening someone with a gun may be enough to warrant being charged with a firearms offence, even if one isn’t being carried, Canada’s top court ruled Friday.

In a unanimous ruling, the nine-member Supreme Court of Canada upheld a court decision in B.C. that convicted a man of gun possession, even though he argued he never had the weapon on him during a break-in four years ago.

It didn’t matter whether 25-year-old Andre Omar Steele or his three accomplices carried a gun during the crime, the top court said.

The weapon in question was in the man’s car, not in his hand, when he broke into a grow-op with his buddies.  Steele & co. (doesn’t that sound like an extravagantly mediocre men’s clothing chain?) never actually used a gun during their escapades.

But they talked about it:

According to court documents, Steele and three accomplices warned the residents inside, “We have a gun,” and repeatedly told one another to “Get the gun, get the gun.”

At one point, one of the men pulled a dark metal object from his inside jacket that was described by the victims as “about the size of a gun.”

Sounds like a scene from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, doesn’t it?

It’s apparent from this account of the crime (apparently, “Get the gun, get the gun” really means “Get the gun; well, on second thought, don’t get the gun”) that the gun in the car played no actual part in the break-in.  In particular, nothing would have changed had that gun not been in the car.

But it was in the car, and that makes this (gasp!) a gun crime.

There is some weapons-grade surreality going on here.  The Supreme Court has ruled that talking about a gun (even if it isn’t actually present, but merely “readily accessible”, whatever that means) is the same as using it.

An offender “uses” a firearm when he or she makes it known “by words or conduct” that it is available, and as long as it is on the body or readily available, Justice Morris Fish wrote.

Have we been reading too much Kafka lately, Mr. Fish?

Now, I’m perfectly happy that Steele and his band of merry thugs are behind bars, but when the courts start twisting reality (claiming that mentioning a gun is the same as using it, for example) in order to convict people of emotionally-charged offences, I get nervous.

Centre of Grass misses the fucking point again

New York State is apparently trying to ban texting whilst driving:

• NY State May Ban Text Messaging While Driving (Daily Exhumation)

Yeah, it turns out that not paying attention to where you’re going can be fatal if you’re driving along the Interstate at high speed.

Tests conducted on the driver after the fiery crash showed the primary cause of the accident was driver inattention due to the apparent text messaging. Alcohol was not a factor.

Oh, how horrifying!

Hey, I have an idea: rather than pass narrow and specific laws against every single manifestation of reckless driving, why don’t we just pass a law against reckless driving?  Sure, such a move would deprive those poor widdle politicians from taking gruesome advantage of every highway tragedy that comes along by passing nigh-meaningless overspecific tear-jerking legislation, but at least it’d save the rest of us from those negligent cage-jockeys whose recklessness has not yet been codified.  What if someone whips out a PSP whilst driving and starts playing Killzone?  Nobody would be safe!  It’s not specifically illegal yet!

Oh, wait: a reckless driving law already exists, doesn’t it?

Why would someone want to pass a law that duplicates a subset of a law that already exists?   Cheap political gain comes immediately to mind.  Never mind that when one of Leviathan’s tentacles — er, I mean, one of your elected representatives — tells you that all you need to be safe from a particular overblown danger is yet another law it (the tentacle) merely reinforces the power of the state in the minds of the grass-eaters (“They passed another law, George, we’ll be safe now”) without actually doing anything but waste time and money.

Better luck next election, folks.

Your tax dollars pounds at work

Brian Haw is a British anti-war protester. He began his career by protesting UN sanctions against Iraq, and when the War on Terror was thrust into upon us, he protested that too. Decent guy, fairly remarkable story, but not the sort of thing you’d expect to hear about on this blog, right? I mean, not unless the British security state wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to shut him down, or something crazy like that.

Well….

• Police spend £111,000 to remove lone protester, but fail (Press Esc)

Better luck next election, chaps.

Maybe we should tax junk food…

…but not to (try to) save lives by economic coercion.

Here’s the theory: some people eat a lot of crap, partly because farm subsidies and the vagaries of the agricultural market sector make crap a cheap source of calories, and partly because once you’re inculcated to it crap tastes really good. These people eat burgers and fries and pizza and wings and chips (and so on) and drink Coke and beer and those obnoxious whipped-mocha-bull-semen-latte things they sell at Starbucks (and so on)… and, surprisingly enough, they thereby make themselves fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease (and so on).

Well, fine.  You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that these people simply do not know that Twinkies are bad for them.  We passed the realm of innocent ignorance several decades ago and are now frolicking about in the glucose-sodden fields of the land of reckless self-indulgence.

I don’t have a problem with that.  It’s your body, do what thou wilt.

On the other hand, most well-established industrialized nations subsidize their health-care systems (or even fund them entirely publicly).  In other words: every taxpayer gets dinged for your Cheetos-induced myocardial infarction.  That just isn’t nice.

You can see where I’m going: crap food enables obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and so on — so let’s tax crap food to offset the costs thereof to J. Random Taxpayer.  By the time you land yourself in hospital, you’ve probably already paid enough taxes on your Pringles and Pepsi to cover your angioplasty.  People who rigorously stick to their complex-carbs-and-lean-protein diets don’t have to pay for your nutritional indiscretions, and those of us who like the occasional bag of chips can probably cope with the extra expense.  Everyone wins!  Huzzah!

Well, kind of.

First of all, what foods and drinks are we going to tax?  We have yet to agree upon what constitutes truly healthy eating — is it low-carb?  Is it low-fat?  Do we track glycemic index, glycemic load, or what?  Saturated fats are bad — no, trans fats are bad — no, not all trans fats are bad.  This is a hard problem: do we honestly expect the fucking Government to figure it out?  Bitch, please.

Next: fat taxes aren’t exactly precision instruments.  They’re better than indiscriminate taxation, sure — but taking someone’s money because they might maybe some day clog up an artery with those chips they’re buying is somewhat less than equitable.  Most of us who eat a glancingly healthy diet and get a reasonable amount of exercise can chomp down the occasional bag of chips with no ill effect whatsoever.  Why should we be taxed to pay for treatments we’ll never need for conditions we’ll never acquire?

And finally: just think of how much money’s going to be spent on the bureaucratic equivalent of friction.  You’ll need at least a few dozen people (salary, benefits, office space, etc) to run the programme, along with procedures for choosing crap foods to tax, processing appeals from food corporations, and so on and so forth.  I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find out that the extra administrative cost incurred by a “fat tax” would overwhelm the supposed tax break those of us who aren’t stuffing our faces with Twinkies would achieve.

In the final analysis, I guess I’m still against the idea — but less so than I was yesterday.