World's Smallest Political Quiz

If you have 30 seconds to spare, use them to take the World's Smallest Political Quiz. Ten yes-no-maybe questions unlock the secrets of your deepest political, social, and economic motivations.

My personal issues score is 70%; my economic issues score is 20%. That puts me right in the middle of the vertical small government-to-large government axis, and about 1/3 of the way into "left" on the left-center-right axis. The quiz is provided by a Libertarian organization, which means that the Libertarian bent to the questions is pretty strong -- ironically leading to an underestimation of my own free-trade, market-economics bent, I think: as I like to say, I'm a Liberal; I am not a Leftist. But for a five-question economics quiz, it does a pretty good job.

Crime and Punishment

A judge has just ruled that California must reduce its prison population by tens of thousands on inmates within the next three years. Of course, this decision has predictably opened up the old debates about punishment vs. prevention, who is or is not soft on crime, and on ad nauseum.

I put forward the humble proposition that there are three possible (although not exclusive) purposes for a corrections system:

1. Protect the population
   
   1. ...in the short term, by removing harmful elements from it.
   2. ...in the long term, by making examples of current criminals to discourage future crime.
2. Rehabilitate criminals, that is, transform destructive elements of the society into constructive ones. Rehabilitation means more than simply reducing recidivism; it further means taking advantage of previously-untapped creative resources in the community: the former criminals themselves.
3. Revenge: Doing harm to those who have done harm to restore some kind of karmic balance, because they "deserve" it.

I further propose that revenge has no place in a just and compassionate society, so let's set that aside as a goal of our corrections system.

What we're left with is something I think is a very positive vision: a society seeking the safety and positive contribution of all of its members. So let's move beyond a discussion about how we punish criminals and towards a discussion about how to build that kind of society. We may still end up talking about crime, prisons, and recidivism, but hopefully with a more focused and effective mission and a renewed sense of our common values.

Green Bird of Happiness

I was walking to the mailbox this morning (a longer walk than it used to be: the post office has removed our usual collection box due to budget cutbacks) when I heard a familiar-yet-unfamiliar chuckling, cackling sound. I thought back to my trip to Australia, years ago.

Those are parrots, I thought to myself.

I smiled, thinking of some homeowner with a cage full of the noisy birds in their backyard. Their neighbors must love them.

I walked on, and the sound grew louder. I realized that the sound was not coming from a house; it was coming from the trees. I stopped and looked up.

A cloud of grass-green birds wheeled above me, now disappearing into the foliage, now leaping skyward a dozen at a time to fly in great circles, the red patches under their wings flickering in and out of visibility as they furiously beat their wings. All the while, they called to each other: laughing, screeching, and clucking like a waterfall made of of live chickens. A lone crow sat hunched in a tree in the midst of the madness, looking disgruntled and grumbling to himself and to his noisy neighbors.

I smiled, and continued on my way.

Kaching

One of the most beautiful cars in the world just sold for $4M. Zounds.

In my mind, though, it's a distant second to this one. And it's even hotter from the back.

Why did it have to be...

Fellow avid public radio listeners are probably all over this story, since it's been covered every day for the last week. But in case you haven't heard, the headline reads:

Prehistoric Snake Discovered, Longer Than a City Bus

My favorite quote, from the usually-staid Bloomberg:

The Colombian snake, a relative of the boa family, would have been bigger than the South American one from the 1997 thriller movie “Anaconda” that terrorized Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube.

...but a bigger threat to civilization than the 1997 thriller movie "Anaconda" starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube? I think not. "Ha ha," you say, "but this snake is extinct." Not so fast: we will see "Anaconda II: Titanoboa" before too long, methinks.

One last treat to leave you with: things that can go wrong when giant snakes eat crocodilians.

Addendum (10:49 pm):

Make that "Anaconda III": "Anaconda II" already exists, scoring an extra-classy 4.2 out of 10 from viewers at IMDB. Brilliant.

Insightful, Even in Death

I have often said that a chief misunderstanding of life-long atheists is that they deem a religion to be primarily a collection of arbitrary truth claims and paired with a false authority bent on convincing people of those claims without evidence. Now I find that the late John Updike has expressed the essential aspect of religious storytelling much more concisely than I could:

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication — as opposed to the value of factual reporting and analysis — is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience.

Read My Lips

I sitting at my desk working, and I'm listening to news about the steps California Republicans are taking to prevent tax increases. Some of this stuff is pretty extreme. Let's summarize:

• If the government has a surplus (Bush's first tax cut), the correct response is to cut taxes.
• If there's a recession (Bush's second tax cut), the correct response is to cut taxes.
• If we're in a severe liquidity crisis (now), the correct response is to cut taxes.

This isn't a policy; this is a religion.

At the same time, there are continuing claims that California places a huge tax burden on its residents and businesses, and that that burden hampers economic growth. Other analyses don't back that up. (The latter article emphasizes an important point: the maximum tax rate on the book isn't the same as the effective tax rate; the latter takes into account credits, deductions, and exemptions.)

My conclusion: the tax code is sufficiently complex that people of average intelligence have very little ability to reason about what it says and what it does. The result is that we spend a lot of time bickering that we could spend on higher-value activities.

Here's my income tax proposal (I'll have to get back to you on sales and property taxes):

• The state of California -- why stop there: the federal government as well -- should have a simple table of two columns and very few rows. The left-hand column has an amount of annual income. The right-hand column has your tax rate.
  
• Every taxable entity -- every single individual, every family, every business -- calculates its tax liability using this same table.
• The dollar amount in the left-hand column is dollars of income per person. If I have a family of four, and a total income of $80,000, I will read the table row for $20,000. If I have a company with 100 employees and total income of $20 million, I will read the table row for $200,000.
• The government can choose to incentivize certain activities (e.g. charitable giving) by giving tax breaks. However, the whole tax code -- the list of incentives as well as the aforementioned table -- must fit on a single letter-sized piece of paper printed with text no smaller than nine points.