All's Quiet on the Front

I'm heading to Nashville for a conference through Friday, so not a lot of blogging until then. Two quick November 11-related things:

1) Happy Veterans' Day. I guess it was observed on the 9th this year, but it has historically been on the 11th for a reason and I'm stubborn. So thanks to all the veterans and current servicemen and women out there who stumble across this blog (and to all those who don't, for that matter).

2) And we remember the day, 81 years ago at 11 AM, when the guns fell silent, putting an end to one of the dumbest wars in world history.

Crumblin' Down

20 years ago today...

Anyway, here's an article Balko linked to claiming that totalitarian communism killed 100,000,000 people over the course of the last century, mainly through forced-labor camps but also through massacres, genocide, and famine. Worth remembering.

Obligatory Jesus Jones link here.

Update: Just for Mike, here's the Scorpions.

The Kids Are Alright

Remember that survey from a while back that claimed that Oklahoma high school seniors are Teh Stoopid? The one that claimed that only 23 percent of them could name George Washington as the first president? Well, Nate Silver's been on the case, and has apparently discovered that the pollster, Strategic Vision LLC, was just making shit up.

According to Oklahoma Rep. Ed Cannaday, he administered the exam to every high school in his rural eastern Oklahoma district, and the results were much, much better than the ones Strategic Vision reported. The number of students who could identify America's first president is 98%, not 23%. Only two questions - the number of judges on the Supreme Court, and the length of senators' terms - got correct responses from under 70% of students.

I can't remember if I posted on this or not, but this is the kind of story that gets around the blogosphere and can really do some damage. People read this and it fits into a narrative of how kids are getting dumber and less politically involved, that our country's going to shit, etc etc. The truth is that kids aren't stupid, that for the most part they are informed and capable citizens.

What confuses me is why Strategic Vision would make up those numbers. The poll, it seems, was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, who Silver describes as a "conservative-leaning think tank." But it seems to me that liberals have more of an interest in such numbers than conservatives, since such a poll could easily be used to justify increased government spending on education. Why would conservatives want a poll that shows that high school seniors are leaving schools without any knowledge? How do the results of this poll help conservatives? Silver doesn't explain this - I wish he would, because I'm at a loss.

Update: A commenter on the FiveThirtyEight thread, who works as the communications director for the Oklahoma Democratic Party, explains:

There has been an ongoing Republican-led legislative fight to dismantle public schools and essentially create a charter school system instead. Pushing the notion that public schools are failing would help their misguided argument. I still don't doubt that certain GOP legislators will quote the SV results on the floor next session, sadly.

That's certainly plausible - these results would seem to suggest that the schools are failing. But the results could easily be interpreted as an impetus to support increased funding for public schools. So these data, in and of themselves, aren't uniquely useful to conservatives if that's the case.

Note that I doubt OCPA is responsible for cooking the data. SV probably wanted numbers that would play well so OCPA would come back to them for other results. Note also that Cannaday is a Democrat - if the bizarre nature of OK politics means that conservatives want bad numbers while liberals want good ones, Cannaday's survey numbers might be a bit on the high side. Wouldn't explain the entire discrepancy, of course, but Cannaday's numbers might be a little high.

Don't Whisper Prayers

Thomas Friedman has a new column out, and he actually says something intelligent. I won't bother trying to quote it, because Friedman's, er, unique writing style makes quoting him comprehensibly all but impossible, but the gist of it is this: Israelis and Palestinians don't want peace. Let's stop trying to impose it on them.

This is interesting coming from the generally interventionist Friedman. It is, perhaps, a lesson taken from Iraq - you can't impose your will on an entire population unless most of that population really wants what you're providing. It ought to be clear to most observers that neither Israelis or Palestinians want peace. Sure, they talk a good game, but in the end something else is always more important. Israelis want a good chunk of the West Bank more than they want peace. Palestinians want part of Jerusalem and a right of return for their refugees before they want peace. Peace simply won't happen unless that becomes both sides' first priority. Israel will have to give up its settlements. Palestinians will have to lay down their rockets and learn to share. We can't do that for them.

Two other commentators, Glenn Greenwald and Joe Klein, go further. Both the liberal Greenwald and the moderate Klein think that the U.S. ought to put a hold on "all economic and military aid to Israel" (Klein's words) until the Israelis want peace. This wouldn't be a bad idea if we weren't also helping Palestinians. Or Egypt. Or Jordan. Or... you get my drift.

But if we keep our aid open, what's our leverage? Aren't we enabling both sides to keep the status quo in place by sending them money and, in Israel's case, guns? It's a sticky wicket for sure, and there's no good answer.

So maybe Friedman's right - the best thing to do is simply to disengage from the whole thing. Stop making trips over there, stop making proclamations that aren't listened to by anyone, stop trying to force peace. If there are complaints, don't try to settle them, and if there's violence, don't intervene. Clearly, taking the direct approach isn't working.

Everybody Knows...

800!

I spend a lot of time on this blog whining about stupid people. Well, point taken, xkcd. Stupid people have been around since the beginning of time, and panicking about their effect on our society is just as dumb as panicking over what the queers are doing to our soil. That's not to say we shouldn't call out idiots or make fun of them when they do stupid crap - just that we shouldn't infer that we're somehow getting collectively dumber as a result. We're as stupid as we've ever been, folks, and we'll be stupid tomorrow. So let's just enjoy the ride.

"More harm has been done by people panicked over societal decline than societal decline ever did." Words well worth remembering.

A Sick and Twisted Game

By now we've all read about the shootings at Fort Hood, where a deranged Army psychiatrist - apparently in need of psychiatric help himself - shot up an Army readiness center, killing 13 before he was shot himself. (The shooter remains alive in a civilian hospital in Killeen.)

Of course, the shooter's religion has set a few wingnut blogs all atwitter - professional green-baiter Donald Douglas is hardly able to contain his excitement at the prospect of another Moooooooslim terror attack.

Blaming the shooter's religion - by all accounts, he was a devout Muslim who prayed damn near every day - is convenient, but probably not particularly instructive. In fact, this WaPo profile of the shooter reveals that there are other things to blame that make just as much sense as blaming his religion. For example:

Hasan was born in Arlington

He's from Arlington. The Virginia Tech shooter was from Centreville. That's it - Northern Virginians are all murderous maniacs. Stop me before I shoot someone, readers!

Or maybe it was Obama's fault?

Lee told Fox News that Hasan "was hoping that President Obama would pull troops out. . . . When things weren't going that way, he became more agitated, more frustrated with the conflicts over there. . . . He made his views well known about how he felt about the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan."

See? Obama killed those troops. I just knew it.

And, well, we Washington-area natives blame everything else on Dan Snyder, might as well blame this on him too:

Hasan is an avid Redskins fan. "That was his main entertainment," his aunt said. "He was not a movie watcher. He worked hard and had been studying for years. He buried himself in his work."

If only Snyder had drafted decent offensive linemen and a receiver, the shooter wouldn't have been so depressed...

Truth is, of course, none of those things make any sense. A more comprehensive reading of the Post's profile gives us a picture of someone who was deeply disturbed, a smart but isolated, depressed, and fragile man, scarred by the stress of his job, who couldn't deal with the added stress of his impending deployment, and just snapped. In short, he bears more resemblance to Eric Harris than to Mohammed Atta.

Anyway, let's pause a moment to remember those who died in the massacre. You expect danger abroad when you're a soldier. You don't expect it at home, on a heavily guarded base, from someone who wears your own uniform.

...

Also, let's give a warm ONAF round of applause to the Fort Hood civilian policewoman, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who ran into the readiness center and took down the shooter despite having been shot herself. In the process, she saved heaven only knows how many lives. And an extra round of applause to the soldiers who immediately began tending to their wounded comrades after the shooting was over. Heroes, all.

...

(Wow, second Unexpectedly Sober reference in a week. WTF?)

Ignorance Is Your New Best Friend

Election hangover time. Here's a few thoughts on last night's vote-o-rama. Nate Silver does some good analysis here, so if you want some intelligent thoughts, make with the clicky. But for you who set sail with the Good Ship Rant, we'll start south and move up:

Virginia: McDonnell won, and won big here. No surprises - Creigh Deeds' campaign was so weak and so negative that one could be forgiven for thinking that this guy was the actual candidate. And as much as was made of McDonnell's woman-hating graduate thesis, he actually ran as more center-right than anything - or at least he kept his distance most of the far-right national luminaries like Sarah Palin. And the people who actually turned out to vote were a conservative lot - according to Silver, they voted for McCain 51-42. Anyway, this continues a bizarre trend in Virginia politics - the party controlling the White House has lost every governor's race in my lifetime (1977 was the last time it didn't happen). I don't want to dismiss the role of Virginia's fierce regional rivalries in this result either - McDonnell, from Fairfax, was probably thought of by a lot of Northern Virginia voters as better on NoVa issues than Deeds, who hails from Appalachia.

New Jersey: This douchebag-turd sandwich challenge went to Republican Chris Christie, a moderate who defeated one of the most reviled governors in the country, Democrat Jon Corzine. Corzine had a perception of sleaziness that wasn't helped by the fact that his former employer, Goldman Sachs, isn't exactly at an acme of popularity right now. Christie, whose reputation as a corruption-buster was called into question in past weeks, was just better enough to win. Independent Chris Daggett was a non-factor. This reminds me of nothing more than the last time a Republican Christie won the NJ governorship - Christie Todd Whitman, back in 1993.

NY-23: The North Country gets its first Democratic representative since... since... hell, I don't know if anyone can remember the last time a Democrat won up there. Bill Owens was the beneficiary of a civil war among conservatives so fierce that when Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out last weekend, she actually endorsed Owens instead of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. A sizeable chunk of Scozzafava's voters appear to have followed her, which is what drove Owens to victory. It's tempting to look at this race as a rebuke to far-right conservatives, but I don't think we can discount a major factor - the sheer incompetence of Doug Hoffman. An MSNBC reporter last night said that not only did Hoffman go into an interview with NY-23's largest newspaper not realizing that Ft. Drum was the district's largest employer and that he'd be responsible for fighting to keep its funding if he won, he seemingly went into the interview not knowing what Ft. Drum was. When there's a one-on-one battle between a guy who knows the district and a guy who doesn't, always bet on the former even if his party hasn't won a race there since God-knows-when.

Oh, and is there any doubt that Scozzafava runs away with this race if not for Hoffman's presence? It's a district tailor-made for moderate Republicans.

Maine: In by far the most depressing result of the night, Maine voters chose to take away gay people's right to enter into a legal contract with one another by a 52-48 margin. I was crunching some numbers on this race last night and I noted a couple of bizarre trends. One was that the vote had a distinct urban-rural split. Portland and environs generally held to their liberal lean; the numbers from Portland basically track those of Obama last year. However, the rural areas were a disaster. In Caribou, a town in the sparsely populated northern reaches of the state, Obama won 56-44 last year - but voted to overturn gay marriage 72-28.

Second is that conservatives were far more motivated than liberals (again). Raw numbers for the anti-marriage voters generally tracked McCain's raw numbers for the state - remarkable for an off-year election - while pro-marriage numbers were well below Obama's numbers last year. For the life of me, I can't understand why conservatives are so motivated on an issue that doesn't affect them at all, but there you go.

Anyway, I see two, and only two, ways forward for marriage equality from here. One is to wait until all the old people die off. Opposition to gay marriage is generally driven by cranky meddlesome old people who think they know everything (what I call the Get Off My Lawn Lobby) - young people are generally okay with the idea. The other is to figure out what's causing so many people to think that gay marriage actually affects them. I read an article a while back (I can't find the link for the life of me) that argued that the main problem with democracy was that it's trivially simple for the majority to take away rights from minorities, because they have the numbers. I don't think we can blame widespread malice for the failure of marriage equality in Maine and California though - in my experience, most people don't just to want to take away rights from others out of spite, especially when they're not affected by the decision one way or the other. So people must be convinced that they are affected by marriage equality - but how? How do straight people conceivably think that two gay guys signing a legal contract actually affects them? Answer that riddle and a strategy for achieving full legal rights for gay couples will emerge.

Finally, a fun conservative contradiction: why are conservatives so in favor of the right to free contract when it comes to businesses and employment but not when it comes to personal matters?

Update: Just checked the census data for Maine - it was projected to be the third oldest state by 2010, behind only Florida and West Virginia. As I noted, there's a huge generation gap on this issue, which put equality deep in the hole in Maine before the fight even began...

Assorted other issues: It wasn't all bad news for our LGBT brothers and sisters - Washington voters approved full legal rights for same-sex couples, and the city of Kalamazoo, MI passed its anti-discrimination ordinance.

Democrat John Garamendi, to no one's surprise, beat Republican David Harmer to become CA-10's new congresscritter, replacing Democrat Ellen Tauscher.

And if you like gambling, you have a new vacation spot... Toledo. Yes, Ohio voters approved a measure that would allow one - and only one - casino in each of Ohio's four largest cities (Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo). Only one casino per city? Isn't basically granting a monopoly on gambling to one company asking for trouble? Why not just make gambling legal and allow cities to decide whether or not they want casinos, and how many they want? Just a ton of weirdness all around there.

What You Want Said, It Ain't Clear

In which I offer an extremely tepid defense of Virginia Foxx.

Foxx is the representative from North Carolina's 5th District, a rather heavily Republican part of the state that includes the suburbs of Winston-Salem and some of the hinterlands in the state's northwest corner. She has a tendency to say some, well, nutty things, like when she called the Matthew Shepard murder a "hoax." She's a few donuts short of a dozen, to be sure. But the latest Foxxism to draw left-wing ire isn't really all that nutty, considering:

And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

OK, let's get the crappy stuff out of the way. Needless fearmongering? Check. Exaggeration of a threat? Check. Gratuitous invocation of terrorism? Check.

But let's parse a little further and see if she isn't on to something here. The conservative view of the health-care reform package is that it'll create a massive entitlement program that will end up destroying us budget-wise. That'll force us to either raise taxes or go even further in hock to China. Also, conservatives believe that higher taxes will seriously injure our already fragile economy. Put it all together, and conservatives view this health-care reform bill as a serious threat to our country's economic well-being. We can argue about whether or not conservatives are right to fear reform, but for now let's accept that fear for what it is.

(As an aside, my opinion is that the budget concerns are legitimate, but the taxation concerns are not, so if the cost of health care reform rises too much we can raise taxes without really hurting the economy. But that's off topic, and I can post on that later if anyone's interested.)

But note Foxx's comparison to terrorism. She says that the consequences of health care reform - prolonged economic sluggishness and higher taxes - are worse than terrorism. In saying this, she's doing something quite welcome - she's tacitly admitting that terrorism isn't really an existential or serious threat to Americans' well-being. And in that sense, she's right. Botched health-care reform that seriously injures our economy is more worth fearing than terrorism, because terrorism isn't really worth fearing that much anyway.

(Another aside: Foxx's ideological opponents could also point out that abdicating health care reform is a worse mistake than giving up the fight against terrorism, for much the same reason.)

So let's look past the bombast of Ms. Foxx's statement and recognize that the main thrust of the statement is correct. The debate over health care reform is a far more consequential struggle than our "war on terror" against al-Qaeda; it will certainly have a greater overall impact on our lives than any terrorist could possibly have. Now that's not to say this is what Foxx meant when she was saying what she said - it's more likely that she was just trying to score cheap rhetorical points by invoking everyone's favorite bogeyman than it is that she actually views the terrorism threat soberly and rationally. But even the blind mouse finds the cheese sometimes.

And Your Bill of Rights Is Gone

(Yeah, I know that song quote will be known to, like, three people. Sue me.)

Hey, did you ever wonder what our kids are being taught about the Bill of Rights? And did you ever wonder what that means about how our kids understand state power? Well, wonder no more.

A parent in the Garland, TX school district (it's really weird to me when entities smaller than counties have their own school districts, but whatever) posts this disturbing list of what the Bill of Rights looks like after run through a shredder of a 6th-grade history textbook. It's pretty hilarious and awful at the same time.

The parent concentrates mostly on the severe bastardization of the Second Amendment - "We can get permission to own weapons to protect ourselves" - and he's right that it's probably the worst bastardization of the bunch. I mean, that's not even close to what the amendment says. "Get permission?" Don't you mean that the government has extremely limited - if any - power to regulate gun ownership.

But the Fifth and Tenth are pretty awful, too. The bastardization of the Fifth Amendment completely ignores the due process clause and the whole "public use" clause that leads to eminent domain law. The Tenth Amendment fails to recognize the "or to the people" bit at the end, instead saying that states can do anything that the federal government can't, which of course isn't necessarily true. (They screw up the Third pretty bad too, but who cares about the Third Amendment anyway?). And it hedges the Fourth Amendment in a way that the Amendment itself doesn't by saying that police "usually" need permission to search our homes.

Paging James Loewen...

There seems to be a bit of a pro-government control bias here. Each of these oversimplifications makes it look like the government has more power than the Constitution actually gives it. You don't need permission to own a gun - you always have the right to own a gun, and the government can't regulate that power too much. Government can't take away your property without paying you for it, and government can't throw you in jail unless they hold a fair trial and convict you first, but you'd never know that from reading this summary. The states and the federal government both have to abdicate a good deal of their power to the people, but from the summary of the Tenth Amendment, you'd never know that either.

Is it any wonder why violations of civil liberties are so often overlooked by most Americans? They're taught from an early age that government has far more power than it actually should have. Say the government violates someone's due process rights in a terrorism case. How many people who learned the Bill of Rights from this summary are going to know that the government is doing something unconstitutional? And how many are going to call the government on it instead of simply saying "oh, they're trying to keep us safe, carry on"?

It behooves us to teach our children the actual Constitution, no matter how difficult or awkward we might find it to be. People can have different interpretations of it, and that's okay... but we ought to at least all start from the same facts, right?

A Big Ol' Pile of Them Bones

Balko's latest Reason.com post highlights an Institute for Justice campaign to overturn a law against compensating bone marrow donors.

Now I've thought for a while, and I see no reason why this law exists in the first place. Anyone know why a hospital paying a potential bone marrow donor is against the law, especially if donors are in short supply in the first place? I don't think the legal case has that much merit - I don't see a constitutional prohibition against this law, and just because a law is dumb doesn't make it unconstitutional - but it is a dumb law that someone needs to repeal.

Political Football

Breaking off the music quote thing because this title works too well.

By now, we've all heard the story of Rush Limbaugh's failed bid to help take over the St. Louis Rams. Conservatives have tried to spin it as some sort of bias against conservatism in the NFL - as if 32 rich old white guys who once let notoriously bigoted asshat George Preston Marshall own a team could somehow have it in for right-wingers - and liberals have tried to claim a victory for race relations in sports (in a league that still has to require its teams to interview one minority candidate for its coaching jobs, lest all the coaches be white).

You're both wrong. It was a business decision. Dave Checketts, the leader of the group seeking to take over the Rams, needed money. Limbaugh has gobs of it and is from the vague St. Louis area. Makes sense. But when Checketts saw the backlash, what he saw weren't pangs of guilt over associating with a supposed racist. He saw dollar signs flying away. He saw good players refusing to play for his team because of their perception of its ownership. He saw liberal fans (probably a good chunk of St. Louis' fan base) refusing to give money to the team because of Limbaugh. And Checketts realized that he could make more money without Limbaugh than he could with him aboard. Simple as that. We can argue until the cows come home about whether Limbaugh is really racist or whether it's fair to view him as such, but it doesn't matter. In the end, the road from sports to politics runs only one way - high-profile political figures simply aren't going to fly in a business that, by its nature, has to accommodate people from all over the political spectrum. It simply wouldn't do to have half your fan base hate the owner of the team.

Which brings us to our second item today, which is Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder's evolution from incompetent to evil. My beloved 'Skins are already in the aforementioned unenviable situation, except instead of having half the fan base hate the owner, in this case it's more like 75-80%. Many (myself included) blame Snyder and his organization's mismanagement of the team for the fact that the 'Skins haven't won the NFC East since 1999 - all three other teams have won at least once since then - and haven't hosted a playoff game since '99 as well, one of the longest droughts in the NFL. (In fact, when Dan Brown's most recent novel, set in Washington, came out, the D.C. sports community widely lampooned it for being set on a day when the Redskins were playing a playoff game at home. We can deal with the crazy conspiracy theory stuff, but a 'Skins home playoff game? That's too much to believe.)

Anyway, such dissatisfaction among sports fans - ever the expressive lot - are bound to lead to shenanigans at games. Signs, T-shirts, and chants decrying Snyder's ownership have begun to proliferate at 'Skins home games. So what's Snyder's reaction? He bans all signs, and has security throw out people who have the temerity to bring signs critical of Snyder. Mr. Irrelevant has one over-the-top example (bonus: fans chanting "Free Speech!" as he's being escorted out - does this happen in other cities?). Dan Steinberg has a few others.

Snyder's weak reasoning for banning signs is that they could cause injury and obstruct others' views - but if those were really reasons for banning signs it would have been done long ago. Furthermore, Steinberg's chatters report that security threw people out for chanting and wearing T-shirts. Deadspin has more if you trust them. Anecdata isn't the most trustworthy thing in the world, but it does point to a culture of discouraging dissent that Snyder has instituted at FedEx Field. If it sounds dictatorial to you, you're not the only one - The New Yorker's Steve Coll compares Snyder's reign to Zimbabwe.

Snyder, of course, can do what he wants with his property. But it does seem to suggest something that's occurring to a greater extent in our culture. Our public figures are unwilling, for the most part, to listen to people who criticize them. Admitting error has become a sign of weakness rather than of strength, and so people like Snyder who want to continue to appear "strong" can't change course. The only option, in their mind, is to control the message, and that means crackdowns on dissent in the stands.

(Fascinating side note - when the 'Skins played the Chiefs two weekends ago, the Kansas City Star refused to print the name of the team, which many Native Americans find offensive, referring to them instead as "the Washington football team." One advantage to the 'Skins' shittiness is that the row over the team's name hasn't been all that serious since the last Super Bowl. Once the 'Skins are healthy again, we're going to have to confront that name)

Lovers in a Dangerous Time

I bitch about anti-gay rights laws in America in this space, and with good reason: I take the whole "equal protection under the laws" thing seriously. Also the Ninth Amendment.

But you know what? We might be bad, but at least we're not Uganda, which has just introduced an anti-homosexuality bill that even one-ups the strictest reading of Leviticus. Burroway, who I linked to there, has a summary of the bill's main features here:

The proposed bill would:

• Reaffirm the lifetime sentence currently provided upon conviction of homosexuality, and extends the definition from sexual activity to merely “touch[ing] another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”


• Create a new category of “aggravated homosexuality” which provides for the death penalty for “repeat offenders” and for cases where the individual is HIV-positive.


• Criminalize all speech and peaceful assembly for those who advocate on behalf of LGBT citizens in Uganda with fines and imprisonment of between five and seven years.


• Criminalize the act of obtaining a same-sex marriage abroad with lifetime imprisonment.


• Add a clause which forces friends or family members to report LGBT persons to police within 24-hours of learning about that individual’s homosexuality or face fines or imprisonment of up to three years.


• Add extra-territorial and extradition provisions, allowing Uganda to prosecute LGBT Ugandans living abroad.

The list goes on. If it passed, it'd probably put half of Uganda behind bars.

Of course, the chances of a Western country actually extraditing someone found guilty of Teh Ghey (or of supporting someone who has Teh Ghey) are slim to none. And I don't know what the bill's chances for passage are, considering it violates some 10 articles of Uganda's constitution. But still, the fact that someone in Uganda thinks that this bill is actually a good idea... it just boggles the mind. Even our wingnuts aren't that nutty.

See The Idiot Talk

This online column by professional idiot Bill Donohue might be the worst piece of writing ever published in America. I'd answer Donohue's arguments, but I have no idea what they are. It's like his computer got food poisoning and the Washington Post published the ensuing vomit. He apparently has a book along these lines - I'm kind of morbidly curious about it, actually.

Mr. Donohue, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Down with the Sickness

H1N1 fever is sweeping the nation, kids, and so it's time for ONAF to look at this supposedly SUPER-DEADLY DANGEROUS OUTBREAK OMG!!!11!1!!1 and see if the panic is warranted.

First, there's not a lot of data we can go on right now. Flu season hasn't begun in earnest yet, so current infection and hospitalization rates aren't really indicative of what the final rates would be. We can, however, get a sense of how dangerous the virus is compared to the normal flu by comparing the mortality rate of H1N1 with the mortality rate of the average flu.

The CDC, ever helpful, provides both in this web page, but of course you have to go digging for it. The normal flu, claims the CDC, kills 36,000 and hospitalizes more than 200,000. We'll assume that those who die of the flu are hospitalized first - that leads to a mortality probability of roughly 0.18 for flu infections serious enough to require hospitalization. (That number seems a bit high to me, but it's corroborated by the academic literature.)

So what has the swine flu wrought? So far, there have been 4958 confirmed H1N1 hospitalizations in the U.S. and 292 deaths. That's a mortality probability of 0.059 - far less than the standard seasonal flu. Not all infections lead to hospitalization, of course, but it's reasonable to expect that similar symptoms would lead to hospitalization for both seasonal and H1N1 flu.

Now I'm not prepared to say that this means the H1N1 virus is less deadly than the seasonal flu, but that appears to be the case right now. So why the disparity? The reason could be that H1N1 tends to infect younger people. For some reason, old people - those most at risk for death from the seasonal flu - aren't getting H1N1 at anywhere near the normal rate, while younger people are getting H1N1 at a higher rate than normal. Since H1N1 is infecting lower-risk populations, one would expect the mortality rate to be significantly lower.

So why the hysteria over H1N1, if it's not any more dangerous than the seasonal flu? One reason is that it's a novel flu strain that people haven't experienced before. This means more people will get H1N1 than would normally get the seasonal flu, as natural immunities to the seasonal flu strains won't protect people against H1N1. The hysteria is certainly misplaced, but it's worth noting that because of H1N1, this flu season will probably be a bit worse than normal flu seasons. It's not a super-deadly strain of influenza, though, and fears of a 1918-style pandemic are overblown. Flu symptoms from H1N1 might be worse because of the lack of antibodies in the average person's system, but so far it won't kill you any more than season flu would.

The final question revolves around the vaccine, and I'd like to pose a question to the commentariat here. Novartis' documentation says their H1N1 vaccine is only intended for children ages 4 and up. Is there a toddler version of the vaccine that is proven safe for little people like my daughter? Has anyone heard differently about kids under 4 not being recommended for the vaccine? Anyone know who the FDA approved it for?

His Soul Is Marching On

The story is this: a bearded religious fanatic, convinced of the righteousness of his cause, hatches a plan to violently attack all those who stand in his cause's way. He attracts several like-minded recruits, who join for a variety of reasons, and carries out a string of successful, often bloody and destructive attacks, culminating in a symbolic attack on an American landmark that is remembered for a long time thereafter.

There are those who say it's difficult to get inside the mind of a terrorist, to understand what could possibly drive them to kill their fellow man. But if you sympathize with the story of radical abolitionist hero John Brown, whose story I just told you and whose attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry occurred 150 years ago last week, you should find it rather easy. Brown was, after all, a terrorist... but one that, on the whole, most Americans agree with. (Southerners who still hold out in their opposition to Brown, substitute William Quantrill or John Mosby here. While both were official rebel army officers, their tactics were similar to Brown's.) Perhaps we can support Brown because history proved Brown right - the despicable institution of slavery would require widespread violence to bring down. Or perhaps it is because we know that slavery was a violent system, and using violence to bring it down was therefore justified. Or perhaps it's just because the model of non-violent resistance practiced by Gandhi and King simply hadn't been thought up yet.

But make no mistake - were Brown alive today, he'd be considered a terrorist. (So would Mosby and Quantrill.) So when we call someone a "terrorist," we'd do well to realize that they care about whatever cause they support in the same way John Brown cared about ending slavery, and that if we're to fight them, we might want to understand what that cause is, and why people care about it so much. This isn't to say that Brown was wrong, or that the Islamic extremists are right. It's just to say that the kind of passion terrorists have for their causes isn't so foreign to us after all.

Don't Go Tossin' Your Stones Around

Incidentally, since Mike's not doing it any more, I figured I'd pick up with the song lyric post title thing.

Anyway, Greenwald reports some good news on the drug war:

The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday.

This is good to hear, of course, but color me skeptical for now. This was one of Obama's campaign promises, but DEA raids on CA medical marijuana clinics have continued so far. In fact, the "as long as they conform to state laws" statement is a pernicious phrase - it means that should a marijuana clinic violate any little state regulation (and CA has a ton of 'em), the DEA can bring down its vengeance upon that clinic just like old days. It'll take a year or so of that not happening before I'm a believer.

Greenwald points out, though, that Obama's already taking a better approach to the "war on drugs" than his predecessor - he didn't pressure Mexico out of decriminalizing minor possession crimes. On the other hand, the Democratic Congress and Obama also included the awful Byrne Grant program in the stimulus bill, so we have a bit of a mixed bag here. And the "war on drugs" goes far beyond Obama, of course - even ending the worst of the war on drugs requires a sea change in the attitudes of police forces across the country (insert obligatory Agitator plug here). And if you expect Obama and the Democrats to do the right thing and completely remove federal drug laws, you're freakin' nuts.

One more thing: Greenwald notes the following about Obama's new drug policy:

Just as is true for Jim Webb's brave crusade to radically revise the nation's criminal justice and drug laws, there is little political gain -- and some political risk -- in adopting a policy that can be depicted as "soft on drugs" or even "pro-marijuana."

I disagree that there's little political gain from softening the tone of the drug war. Anti-drug war sentiment has exploded in the past few years, as more and more people become affected by the heavy-handed tactics it employs. See the outrage over the Cheye Calvo incident for proof of that.

Most importantly, though, here's a Newsweek poll that says that 80% of Americans think marijuana should be legal for medical purposes. Aligning your policy to agree with 80% of Americans hardly carries a political risk. In fact, I think Obama could probably go further without incurring too much risk. That same poll suggests that only 21% of Americans think minor possession should be a prison-worthy offense. Abolishing federal prison sentences for drug possession would be another positive step that would carry next to no political risk.

And here's another thing. Check this chart on drug use from the head drug warriors at the ONDCP. The key stat: over half of people aged 18-35 have used illegal drugs. Almost a third of those aged 18-25 have gotten high in the past year. Remember, Obama won the White House with roughly 2-1 support from young voters. Not only have most young people used drugs (weird that I'm in the minority here), but most of the data I've seen suggest that young people are far more likely to support legalization of marijuana than older voters. Roughly half of voters under 45 support legalization, and while I haven't seen any numbers, my guess would be that support for legalization would float around 60% for the 18-29 set. Obama will need to keep his margin among young voters if he is to win in 2012. Adopting policies that are popular with young voters is hardly a bad strategy for him.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight makes much the same point I'm making, though he notes even higher numbers for marijuana usage among the aging-hippie generation.

(Weird statistical issue, though: according to Rasmussen, men actually favor legalization while women are heavily opposed. Why the gender gap? And does the gender gap exist among younger voters, or is it just prim-and-proper old Phyllis Schlafly types dragging the numbers with them? Marijuana polls need to have better demographic info...)

(Update 10/20: Gallup reports that the gender gap has closed. Also, a majority of Americans under 50 support legalizing marijuana outright. It's only the Get Off My Lawn Lobby holding us back here.)