The Reality-Based Community

This morning, as California's wildfires continued to burn, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared that the feds had learned many lessons from Hurricane Katrina.

Maybe.

By nearly all accounts, the fires have been extraordinarily well managed (400,000 plus acres have been torched, nearly a million people have been evacuated, but only a handful of deaths are fire-related).

But I'm not sure Chertoff and other federal officials deserve as much credit as they are giving themselves. Two other factors are worth considering:

1. The fires.
Megafires in California are, by nature, high damage/ high likelihood events. The 2nd worst fire in state history --after this one -- occurred just 4 years ago. From a preparedness standpoint, this combination of impact and probability is as good as it gets: Fires occur often enough to make investing in prevention and reponse politically attractive for federal, state, and local officials. And they are familiar enough to make agency planning efforts both useful and continuous. (By contrast, high damage/lower likelihood events like Cat 5 hurricanes and WMD terrorist attacks are scary to imagine, outside our immediate experience base, and politically unattractive to prepare for precisely because they are unlikely).

Lessons may have been learned in Washington after Katrina. But they are learned here in California every fire season. Since the 2003 Cedar fire, state and local officials have substantially improved radio interoperability among first responders, adopted a "reverse 911" phone system which was used to evacuate San Diego county, and developed a new modified DC-10 that can drop 12,000 gallons of firefighting chemicals from the sky -- that's roughly ten times more than the next best aircraft.

2. State/County/Local Efforts (or, everything outside of Washington)
Good coordination between different agencies on the firelines is no accident. The incident response system that is now used nation-wide to handle major disasters was invented in California years ago. California's city, county, and state agencies are playing by the playbook they designed. And they are working across agency (and sector) lines with the people they've fought alongside for years. Teams that play often together usually do better.

Don't get me wrong. The devastation is massive. I' m sure we'll learn how things could have been done better. And federal coordination and assistance are critical. But lesson #1 from Katrina should be that local capabilities matter. A lot.

...who'd make a Babbitt of the Lord" is the moral of Thurber's fable, "The Bat Who Got the Hell Out". This story, about the revival-meeting atmosphere of the Colorado Rockies, is irritating to the point of creepiness, rolling up fatuous pietism, hypocrisy, and flat-out blasphemy, in a wrapper reeking of intolerance and pride, and generallly besmirching two institutions that deserve better (baseball and Christianity).

The idea that a God one might worship should be invoked to give your baseball team (!) an edge over another approaches the arrogance of the "God is my copilot" bumpersticker. The value structure under which a player who solicits a prostitute is fired and $16m of his contract with him, while a manager nailed for drunk driving (which can kill people) just gets to make everyone else act more better is not easy for me to distill out of the Bible. Apparently these guys believe it's their faith and clean living that explains their amazing run of wins: can we infer that if they go down in the series they all fell off their pompous wagon in Boston dives of the Scollay Square tradition? are any of these millionaires thinking about camels and eyes of needles, or does that apply only to some other false sect? Of course Ty Cobb's Christian forbearance, generosity, and clean living was the source of his ballplaying chops...

Sheesh; let's render unto with a sense of fitness and proportion, or we'll be starting games with "Pray ball!"

Does the Pope say mass?

Does a bear sh*t in the woods?

C'mon, fellas! Ask me a hard one.

Other than, perhaps, the rack and thumbscrews, water-boarding is the most iconic example of torture in history. It was devised, I believe, in the Spanish Inquisition.

[snip]

Following World War II, the United States prosecuted Japanese military personnel as war criminals for waterboarding U.S. prisoners.

Footnote Note that not a single Republican Senator signed the letter to Mukasey.

Doesn't the Republican censure resolution against Pete Stark (promptly tabled) break the "ethics truce"? If so, let's have some all-out warfare. The Republicans have done well so far pretending that everyone is just as corrupt as everyone else. Let's start making them vote to defend their colleagues who are about to be indicted.

If this item from Andrew Sullivan reminds you of my favorite limerick, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The contrast between the resources lavished on "special needs" children in public schools and the widespread lack of any programming for very-high-performing children is stark. And of course No Child Left Behind discourages paying any attention to high performers, since they're nowhere near the cutoff scores. It's widely believed that kids with very strong cognitive abilities don't need any help; "they'll make it anyway."

A friend who has been looking at the literature reports that the data say otherwise. Apparently very-high-IQ kids, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods, are so different from "normal" kids that they risk being misdiagnosed with everything from ADHD to character disorder. And their sheer boredom in classrooms that don't challenge them may lead them to drop out. High-IQ girls face social pressure not to seem "too smart," which no doubt helps account for the paucity of female math and physical science professors. Similar forces may be at work black and Latino boys. Yet no one seems to think that improving K-12 education for extra-smart girls and extra-smart minority boys is part of the solution to the "diversity" problem.

So here's the puzzle: is there any justification for not treating high-IQ kids as having "special needs" and therefore entitled to individualized instruction? Yes, yes, I know that in the South "gifted" programs have been used as a technique of within-school resegregation. But that doesn't change the real needs of very bright kids.

I don't know how the special-ed laws are written. Is there a potential lawsuit here?

Dear Mr. Rove:

Congratulations! Your plan to take the Louisiana Governor's mansion from the Democrats worked perfectly. Not only did you and your tame dogs at FEMA discredit Kathleen Blanco, you also managed to drive lots of people who would otherwise have been Democratic voters out of the state entirely. And of course Michael Brown took the hit.

By any reasonable standard, 1400 dead seems an acceptable level of collateral damage. That's less than half the death toll from 9/11, and almost none of the dead were significant contributors.

Mission accomplished! Take a bow.

WaPo:

Politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections, the former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay said last night, adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month.

Note that the pressure came from a general, not directly from a civilian political appointee. Turning the career civil service and the uniformed military into partisan weapons is among the worst sins of the current junta. A Democratic President will need to do a thorough housecleaning.

Perhaps you thought the following line of reasoning (from "Yes, Minister") was supposed to be a joke:

We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.

But consider the logic, if one can call it that, of the minority of the FDA scientific panel that voted not to ban a wide range of children's cold medications, which are known to be dangerous to some children and which have never been shown to be (and probably aren't) effective in children:

Nine panel members voted against an outright ban in children ages 2 to 5, arguing that doctors and parents need something for ill children, even if it has no proven effect.

Whatever happened to "Primum, non nocere"?

I've long believed that homeopathic remedies serve the "must do something" urge for maladies without remedies, and do so at lower expense and with fewer side-effects than "real" medicines. If we could just convince people to take ineffective homeopathic medicines for their colds rather than antibiotics, we could slow the spread of drug-resistance in bacteria.

Footnote One of the side-comments gives away the game: the drugs are valued by some parents for their soporific properties, which are supposedly side-effects.

Second footnote The NYT story is frustratingly vague about the actual molecules involved: it gives brand names, but no generic names. As far as I can tell, the drugs in question are phenylephrine, pseudoephedrine, diphenhydramine, and dextromethorphan.

I understand Mukasey is supposed to be a reasonably good guy, by comparison with the run of Bush appointees. But if Mukasey won't say that waterboarding is torture and claims that the President has some undefined power to violate statute law — even criminal laws, such as the ban on torture and other war crimes — under his "Article II powers," then why should the Senate Judiciary Committee even bring his nomination to a vote? If he says he hasn't read the latest torture memos or decided whether waterboarding is torture, Sen. Leahy ought to tell him to read the memos and observe a waterboarding session and come back when he's done his homework.

I see no disadvantage in the Senate Democrats taking a firm stand on the rule of law and human decency.

Having come up 13 votes short on the S-CHIP bill, Congressional Democrats need to think about next steps. I think the right strategy is obvious: pass the damned thing again, and keep passing it, making the Republicans vote against health care for middle-class children from now until Election Day. It looks to me like a no-lose: either the bill passes, and we have an accomplishment to claim, or it doesn't pass, and we have an issue for 2008 that (1) is salient (2) is easy to understand and (3) where 75% of the voters, including almost all the swing voters, are on our side.

But passing exactly the same bill looks too much like a gimmick. And the bill that just crashed and burned did have one substantial flaw: it was to be financed with higher cigarette taxes, with fairly bad consequences for a substantial number of poor elderly nicotine addicts, who really haven't done anything to deserve it. As Jon Caulkins once remarked, "Their decision to damage their lungs is no reason to make them pay through the nose."

So let's pass a new S-CHIP bill, identical to the previous one except for the financing mechanism. And since the second over-ride might also fail, we should have additional backups.

Where should the money come from? Obviously, from people who have more than they need. There are two basic ways of doing that: higher taxes on the highest incomes (let's say, $500,000 per year) or taxes on things that rich people consume.

The policy analyst in me says "Income taxes good; sumptuary taxes bad." So my first choice would probably be to create an additional tax bracket at the $500,000-per-year level (indexed for inflation).

But politically there's an advantage in taxing "wicked waste." And fortunately, we now have a symbol of wicked waste that's actually A Bad Thing: travel by private jet. It ought to be discouraged on global-warming grounds alone, in addition to the contribution of private jet travel to airport crowding. (Landing a plane ties up a runway for the same amount of time no matter how small it is.) Since all aircraft file flight plans with the FAA, administering a per-hour or per-takeoff-and-landing tax on private and corporate jet aircraft would be trivially easy. If it made some of the wingnuts feel better to think they were "taxing Al Gore's private jet," that's fine with me.

So all we need to turn these concepts into proposals is the numbers. What marginal rate at the $500,000 bracket, and what tax per hour in the air or per operation for private jets, would be needed to raise $7B/yr.?

Update A reader points out that figure is $35 billion over 5 years, not $35 billion a year as the post originally stated. A quick calculation suggests that the requisite private-jet tax would be too high to be practicable. On the other hand, a reader with the data at his fingertips estimates that it would take only a 0.7% surtax on incomes over $500k per year to raise $7B per year. "Of course," he adds, "that would completely destroy their incentive to work and save."

The slogan of the HRC campaign seems to be "Resistance is futile." Barack Obama seems to have come up with a good counterpunch:

Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare mission accomplished a little too soon.

The NYT gives us the health facts about margarine and butter. Bottom line: "Margarine generally contains less fat and cholesterol than butter, but it is not ideal." I'll say, and not because of it's trans fats. It's a fairly short story, but nowhere in it does the author recognize that how they taste might have anything to do with the choice; indeed, the recommendation is to use olive or canola oil. Sure, but to spread on a piece of nice bread? To fry an omelet?

When I was a kid, my mother served margarine (mostly for reasons of cost) on vegetables and fried with it, but put out butter for bread. I realized that her baked potatoes never tasted as good as the ones at school, and began a really elaborate research project, grilling the school cook to find out exactly how she cooked them. Nothing worked; then my mom volunteered to work in the kitchen a few hours a week during a time of budget crisis and learned that the melted fat they poured over the potatoes on your plate was butter - from the government school food program, of course. I can enjoy a Wendy's baked potato with the high-tech marge they give out, but butter on a spud is just a whole lot better than margarine. Hedonic utility is utility and food is good; good food is better and won't kill you, but it will help to make life worth living.

I think the implication of the Times story, that diet should be optimized for physical health, is as nuts as the idea that one should ruin one's health at a young age eating junk. A body is something to wear out at an efficient rate over a lifetime. Why is it obvious to so many people that they should give up all their favorite foods in order to die slowly from things that hurt a lot (cancer, mostly) a few years later, rather than a nice quick cheap coronary?