The Inefficacy of Sin Punishment, cont.

PBS I, Cringely . Archived Column

Why should we care about any of this?

Well, for one thing, I knew Fred Nold and hate to think that his work would die with him. But much more importantly, we should care because I'm told the Block and Nold study, which was intended to economically validate the proposed sentencing guidelines, instead showed that the new guidelines would actually create more crime than they would deter. More crime, more drug use, more robbery, more murder would be the result, not less. Not only that, but these guidelines would lead to entire segments of the population entering a downward economic spiral, taking away their American dream.

There is no mention anywhere of this study, which was completely buried by the DoJ under then-secretary Edwin Meese. The proposed sentencing guidelines were accepted unaltered and the world we have today is the result. We spend tens of billions per year on prisons to house people who don't contribute in any way to our economy. We tear apart the black and latino communities. The cost to society is immense, and as Block and Nold showed, unnecessary. AND THE FEDS KNEW THIS AT THE TIME. -- Cringely

The latest coffee blossoms by low light.
Posted by Hello

Cory Doctorow, and not a moment too soon

Microsoft Research DRM talk, Cory Doctorow

Or the html vers: http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html


"As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control
spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own
music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a
time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple."

[What's DRM?]

Credit the ALA

http://tinyurl.com/5oxml an Unfogged Link.

American Library Association stands up to the inJustice Department:

Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the department has deemed not "appropriate for external use." The Department of Justice has called for these five these public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.

An open and transparent government is our only hope. No number of handguns and assault rifles will defend us from tyranny we can't see coming.

Don't Forget Iraq, Too

Krugman on Iraq, still and again, a hello, please wake up reality call:

http://tinyurl.com/3mzxt

One thing is clear: calls to "stay the course" are fatuous. The course we're on leads downhill. American soldiers keep winning battles, but we're losing the war: our military is under severe strain; we're creating more terrorists than we're killing; our reputation, including our moral authority, is damaged each month this goes on. . . .

But when Mr. Allawi proposed an amnesty for insurgents - a move that was obviously calculated to show that he wasn't an American puppet - American officials, probably concerned about how it would look at home, stepped in to insist that insurgents who have killed Americans be excluded. Inevitably, this suggestion that American lives matter more than Iraqi lives led to an unraveling of the whole thing, so Mr. Allawi now looks like a puppet.

Willy Nilly

G Bush as quoted in TPM:

Knowing what I know today, we still would have gone on into Iraq. We still would have gone to make our country more secure. He had the capability of making weapons. He had terrorist ties. The decision I made was the right decision. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.

In other words, the quality of the intelligence and the reality of the data made no difference to decision making, only to window dressing. War was a foregone conclusion when Florida fell to Bush.

Knight Ridder, Going It Alone

AJR - Going It Alone

Susan Moeller, a University of Maryland journalism professor who has studied the way various news organizations covered questions about weapons of mass destruction, says a "patriotic bounce from 9/11" is one of the best ways to explain the disparity in stories. When most of the media covered reports of WMD in North Korea, news outlets made clear the uncertainty of those claims. With Iraq, it was more or less stated as fact that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction "and the question is, 'What do we do with them?' " Moeller says.

Few, if any, covered Iraq differently, but, Moeller says, "Knight Ridder was among them."

"We felt they were ahead of the curve with some of their stories," says Carl Leubsdorf, Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News and a member of the panel that judged entries for the Clapper award. "They sort of set the ball rolling about whether the CIA had provided proper information to the administration and whether the administration made proper use of it."

Strobel says it has been a "dream story" to cover. It's also the most important story any reporter can cover, Hoyt adds.

"Anytime the nation is about to go to war and commit itself to something that drastic, there ought to be a full and open examination of a case and everything ought to be out there for people to see and make judgements about," Hoyt says. "That really was not the case here."
"I think the failure of the media in general in covering this story," Landay says, "is as egregious as the intelligence failure."

--from http://tinyurl.com/6vons

Will Ferrell Talks Straight

The America Coming Together site has a powerful political commercial for you to watch. I don't know who's side it's supposed to be on, but I tell ya it's a powerful, powerful--commercial is what it is.

http://tinyurl.com/42k8e

Watch it.

Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004

Democracy in the Balance, Sojourners Magazine/August 2004

Bill Moyers makes eloquent our cry of warning.

What has been happening to the middle and working classes is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual collusion, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made an idol of wealth and power, and a host of political decisions favoring the powerful monied interests who were determined to get back the privileges they had lost with the Depression and the New Deal. They set out to trash the social contract; to cut workforces and their wages; to scour the globe in search of cheap labor; and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less….It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

Sins Of Commission, by Robert Dreyfuss

TomPaine.com - Sins Of Commission

Some flaws in the substance and methodology of the 9/11 Commission Report discussed.