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MonthDecember 2009

Good riddance to day care sexual abuse prosecutor

December 23, 2009 /

Radley Balko writes:

In October, Jagels told the Bakersfield Californian that after 26 years in office, he won’t be running for reelection in 2010. Good riddance to him. […] If history dispenses justice more honorably than Ed Jagels ever did, the boyish-looking D.A. will be most remembered for his role ruining countless lives in perhaps the most shameful of the Reagan-era “tough on crime” debacles: the coast-to-coast sex abuse panic of the 1980s. […]

Relying on suggestive police and social worker interrogations of children, Jagels’ office put 26 people behind bars on felony child sex abuse charges in the 1980s and ‘90s. Of those 26 convictions, 25 have since been overturned.

The details were lurid, and bore striking similarity to the fantastical stories that were springing from similar cases all over the country, from Florida to Massachusetts to Washington State. Parents were accused of having sex with their own children, of forcing young siblings to have sex with each other, of inviting neighbors over for adult-child orgies. When the national panic began to include stories of cult activity and Satan worship, Jagels’ and the Kern County Sheriff’s Department managed to locate that sordid activity in Bakersfield, too. Now children began telling investigators they had been forced to drink blood; they were hung from ceilings naked and beaten; infants were sodomized, murdered, and cannibalized. There was never any physical evidence to back the accusations. The photos the children alleged the accused to have taken during the acts never surfaced. The bodies of the murdered babies were never found. In one case a child alleged to have been murdered was found alive and healthy, living with her parents.

Many of Jagels’ victims are profiled in the moving 2008 documentary Witch Hunt. They aren’t limited to the people he put in prison. Particularly wrenching are the interviews with children who made the false accusations. They’re now adults, and have carried unfathomable guilt and remorse. Some of these children put their parents in prison for a decade or more. In one scene, a man who falsely accused his neighbor of molesting him as a child breaks down in tears as he explains how due to fear and guilt, he’s never been able to bathe his own son. […]

Perhaps the most troubling thing about Ed Jagels’ career is that not only have the legal and political systems in California never sanctioned him for his monstrous behavior, he’s been regularly rewarded for it. He has served as both president and director of the powerful California District Attorneys Association (CDAA), and on a number of blue ribbon panels charged with advising state officials on crime policy. Upon Jagels’ retirement announcement, Scott Thorpe, the current head of the CDAA, told the Associated Press that Jagels is a “prosecutor’s prosecutor,” a remarkable and revealing statement of that organization’s commitment to justice. Jagels is also listed as a crime policy advisor to Meg Whitman, a leading candidate for the California GOP’s 2010 gubernatorial nomination.

Reason: Kern County’s Monstrous D.A.

(Thanks OVO)

How business schools undermine American manufacturing

December 22, 2009 /

Another piece in the puzzle:

One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.” […]

After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned themselves into massive conglomerates. In their landmark Harvard Business Review article from 1980, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Robert Hayes and William Abernathy pointed out that the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.

The New Republic: Upper Mismanagement

The Futurist Magazine’s Top 10 Forecasts for 2010 and Beyond

December 22, 2009 /

1. Your phone will tell you when you’re in love.
2. In the design economy of the future, people will download and print their own products, including auto parts, jewelry, and even the kitchen sink.
3. The era of brain-to-brain telepathy dawns.
4. Tomorrow’s inventors will spend their days writing descriptions of the problems they want to solve, and then letting computers find the solutions.
5. Micronations built on artificial islands will dramatically shift the face of global politics.
6. Young people will read more, and the old will play more video games.
7. Ammonia may become the fuel of choice for cars by 2020.
8. Algae may become the new oil.
9. Radical methods of altering the planet may be the only way to prevent the worst effects of climate change.
10. The existence of extraterrestrial life will be confirmed or conclusively denied within a generation.

The Futurist Magazine’s Top 10 Forecasts for 2010 and Beyond

(Thanks Pink Tentacle)

There are many more forecasts other than the top ten at this link.

I find #s 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 doubtful. Nine is quite possible, but doubt it will be successful. I find this scenario more probable than 2 as described. I find 6 probable, and hope 8 is correct.

Has Matt Taibbi failed journalism, or has journalism failed Matt Taibbi?

December 22, 2009 /

I don’t recall any journalist in recent history taking as much flack for making an error as Taibbi has over the Jamie Rubin thing. The way journos and pundits are lashing out at him, you’d think he’d committed journalistic crimes just shy of Jayson Blair’s. John McQuaid joins in the Taibbi bashing just a bit, but does offer some insight in this portion of his post. Emphasis mine:

But post-Watergate pre-9/11 journalism doesn’t traffic in outrage. Take Watergate. Facts and digging – often against the tide of conventional wisdom – exposed the true extent of the Watergate scandal and brought Nixon down. This event has shaped much of the generation of investigative journalism that followed: the Platonic ideal is to get someone indicted, to resign, or both. The problem with this is that its assumptions are essentially naive: that the system basically works, or can work once the facts come out. But what if it doesn’t work, or cannot? What if what’s most shocking and unjust is what’s perfectly legal? Also: what if, in society, there’s no consensus on what’s shocking and unjust?

These questions tend to drive practitioners of empirical journalism (and I count myself among them) crazy. If the system doesn’t work, you have to make some value judgments. If you make value judgments, though, people who disagree with you will attack you as biased. Which can’t be, because we’re trained to be cool and detached, to convince people through rational argument, to reach for universal approbation of our conclusions. But this goal, always elusive, is now nearly impossible. Should that stop us from investigating? Or making judgments?

But that’s now it works in practice. The establishment media is, after all, tied up with government and business itself in various ways. If those things aren’t “working” the media has trouble grasping the failure. To do so would be “controversial.” It would invalidate the hoped-for universal approbation! Better to keep your head down, withhold judgment.

John McQuaid: Has Matt Taibbi failed journalism, or has journalism failed Matt Taibbi?

Illustrations for A Thousand Plateaus

December 22, 2009 /

1000platos-intro-06b

1000platos-intro-06

More here

(Thanks Abe)

Education: Learning Styles Debunked

December 21, 2009 /

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone — for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public. […]

But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their own unique style?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, according to a major new report published this month in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. […]

Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity. Any experiment designed to test the learning-styles hypothesis would need to classify learners into categories and then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods, and the participants would need to take the same test at the end of the experiment. If there is truth to the idea that learning styles and teaching styles should mesh, then learners with a given style, say visual-spatial, should learn better with instruction that meshes with that style. The authors found that of the very large number of studies claiming to support the learning-styles hypothesis, very few used this type of research design. Of those that did, some provided evidence flatly contradictory to this meshing hypothesis, and the few findings in line with the meshing idea did not assess popular learning-style schemes.

Science Daily: Education: Learning Styles Debunked

Just half of Britons now call themselves Christian after a ‘sharp decline’ in faith over past 25 years

December 21, 2009 /

Researchers describe a large proportion of the country as the “fuzzy faithful” who have a vague belief in God but do not necessarily belong to a particular denomination or attend services.

However, most people still say religion helps bring happiness and comfort, and regret its declining influence on modern society.

Professor David Voas, who has analysed the latest data, said: “More and more people are ceasing to identify with a religion at all.

“Indeed, the key distinction in Britain now is between religious involvement and indifference. We are thus concerned about differences in religiosity – the degree of religious commitment – at least as much as diversity of religious identity.”

Telegraph: Just half of Britons now call themselves Christian after a ‘sharp decline’ in faith over past 25 years

US Supreme Court: No More Due Process, Torture is OK

December 21, 2009 /

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.

It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here’s how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving “process stories” that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people “unpersons” was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn’t fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat — and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

Dred Scot Redux: Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery

Seattle mayor-elect calls for marijuana legalization

December 21, 2009 /

And Washington state legislature is considering a legalization bill as well:

e hasn’t even taken office yet, but the words of Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn have already perked some citizens’ ears.

McGinn believes pot should not only be legal, but also taxed.

“We recognize that, you know, like alcohol, it’s something that should be regulated, not treated as a criminal activity. And I think that’s where the citizens of Seattle want us to go,” said McGinn on a public radio show on Friday. […]

And the state could be one step closer to legalizing marijuana. State Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle, is sponsoring a bill that would do just that. […]

Under the state bill, marijuana would be sold in state liquor stores, and the drug tax would be used for drug and alcohol abuse prevention.

KOMO News:
The ‘green’ mayor? McGinn wants to legalize pot and tax it, too

Predictions for 2010 from 2000

December 19, 2009 /

# “Ninety percent of all consumer goods will be home-delivered.” — trend forecaster Faith Popcorn

# Biomonitoring devices that look like wristwatches will continually update you on your blood chemistry, while microchips implanted in your forearm will interact with the heating and lighting systems of the buildings you enter. — World Future Society

# Animal-to-human transplants will be routine, as scientists will learn how to prevent human immune systems from rejecting the animal organs. — Dr. Jim Raymond, associate dean at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine

# A “skycar” that can take off and land like a helicopter will hit the market — San Antonio Express-News

## “By the end of the decade, Americans will be fed up with substituting virtual life for real life. A backlash against facelessness will prompt a resurgence of person-to-person interactions.” — The Daily Herald

Chicago Tribune: Cracked, cloudy or clear? The crystal ball report

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