Unexpected charity can sometimes benefit giver and recipient, but expectations of charity are **HIGHLY TOXIC**. The government has spent decades encouraging a substantial segment of society to become OPM addicts (“Other People’s Money). Weaning all those people from the government teat isn’t going to be easy or pleasant, but OPM addiction is horribly destructive to the recipients of “government largesse”; those who want to continue to enable people’s addictions are doing the addicts no favors.

Good point. This is one of those depressing “your tax dollars at work” stories.

Today in my local paper, I saw to interesting “Red Team, Blue Team” stories. In the first, a protest for tax fairness was being covered. The reporter said that the crowd was chanting “tax the rich, tax the rich.” Boring. I then flipped the page and saw a story about how Republicans in congress are trying to cut food stamp programs. Nothing unusual there either. Same old, same old.

Team Red and Team Blue need to read more stories about the massive waste–in lives and public funds–that is being promoted by the prison-industrial complex and the war on drugs. You want to save money? You want to lowere your taxes? Well we could save a whole lot of money by ending the war on drugs and the obsession with incarceration. Oh, and we could also stop intervening in the affairs of other countries.

But Team Red and Team Blue would rather just pick on rich people and welfare recepients. Why? I guess its just the way we’ve always done it ’round here.

But I can’t really even think of what poorly-structured incentive would have prevented the members of this task force from doing more than the bare minimum that was required of them.

Simple: “Do nothing and you’ll do nothing wrong.”

Also: “One ‘dumbshit’ wipes out 14,000 ‘attaboys’.”

But I can’t really even think of what poorly-structured incentive would have prevented the members of this task force from doing more than the bare minimum that was required of them.

Simple: “Do nothing and you’ll do nothing wrong.”

(g) When a prosecutor knows of new, credible and material evidence creating a reasonable likelihood that a convicted defendant did not commit an offense of which the defendant was convicted, the prosecutor shall:

(1) promptly disclose that evidence to an appropriate court or authority, and

(2) if the conviction was obtained in the prosecutor’s jurisdiction,

(i) promptly disclose that evidence to the defendant unless a court authorizes delay, and

(ii) undertake further investigation, or make reasonable efforts to cause an investigation, to determine whether the defendant was convicted of an offense that the defendant did not commit.

Presumably, most states have adopted a similar rule. For those SA’s who were informed of this info and chose not to disclose, they should be looking at a serious bar complaint. However, I won’t hold my breath waiting for them to be disciplined.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/doj-review-of-flawed-fbi-forensics-processes-lacked-transparency/2012/04/17/gIQAFegIPT_story.html

Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and lawyer who worked in the FBI’s crime lab, testified that he was told by his superiors to ignore findings that did not support the prosecution’s theory of the bombing.

“There was a great deal of pressure put upon me to bias my interpretation,” Whitehurst said in U.S. District Court in New York in 1995.

Some quick brainstorming: apathy, groupthink, more apathy, viewing the convicted as “the other,” pressure from superiors to remain quiet, more groupthink, crimethink, desire to not rock the boat, satisfaction with minimal acceptable effort instilled by the group culture, feelings of helplessness when faced with the bureaucracy, fear of retribution for whistleblowing and a whole lot more apathy, apathy apathy.

Plenty of incentives there. Maybe not the monetary sort, unless you count preserving one’s [pathetic, evil] career as monetary, and I’m sure the average bureaucrat thinks exactly that.

Any way to get more info on this stuff?

My wife loves “CSI” type things, so I was telling her about the Hayne/West part of the story this morning. She wondered why this isn’t a national news story – how it doesn’t make the “CBS Evening News”…. then proceeded to check out of the conversation before I could tell her about the video of West and the dental mold. Unfortunately most people – even people who are interested and receptive to the topic – most people are just not able to hold on for a difficult and complicated argument. They want something that is feel-good, or it has to fit neatly into a 60 second package.

I was chatting with some parents at the kids’ baseball game last night. A fairly tea-party-ish group was discussing the excesses of local and state government. They got off onto the police pay (higher than you’d believe, they said), but universally believed they were doing a dangerous job and we need more SWAT teams. They were firmly convinced that “a hundred police are killed in the line of duty just in Miami every year”. I tried to point out that not even a hundred are shot and killed every year nation wide, but they quit listening. I was the kook who thinks that cops should’t shoot child molesters and drug dealers on sight (’cause if they don’t shoot them, the cops won’t go home to their families). Forget bringing up the fact that a few hundred unarmed citizens are killed by police every year during arrest… they checked out long before that point. Any nutter who thinks that the police are not being gunned down every day is to be avoided.

I mourn my lack of rhetorical skills – I had a somewhat receptive audience and I couldn’t move them off of the idea that hundreds of police are being slaughtered in our city, and they almost never shoot the wrong people. That should have been a slam-dunk. But even with FBI statistics at hand, all I was able to elicit was “you can find a website that will spin any statistic any way you want”. In fact, having actual facts at hand was something of a disadvantage. People don’t like having opinion confronted with fact, so they do the mental gymnastics of moving your “fact” into the realm of “opinion” and then invalidate the facts. If anything they dug in to their position even more tenaciously when I pulled out FBI police fatality statistics.

Did it work?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/

Yeah, I noticed. Corrupt, induglent and reckless in direct proportion to
how bossy and nosy they get toward us…. What crazy times.
Every day a new alphabet soup group (GSA,TSA,DEA, DHS) caught
breaking the law…

“The world is my country, Mankind is my brethren and to do good is my religion.”
-Thomas Paine

Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will turn them all to pillars of salt. (A particularly poetic end to Bloomberg, I’d say. ;) )