Read. Think. Then Post.

An easy three steps that would (still!) keep a lot of people out of trouble.

Instapundit links this, apparently approvingly. "Drunk driving" kills, so why do cops mainly give out speeding tickets? Slogans and fallacious logic driving spending priorities, the linked editorial suggests (while Instapundit thinks it's all about revenue).

Many, many methodological fallacies permeate its five short paragraphs. Again, let us count the ways.

1) "Drunken drivers". Since these are NHTSA stats, numbers of "drunken drivers" are actually going to be "those whose blood-alcohol content levels are at or above .08%". Sorry, but for most people, the level of impairment after one or two beers is nowhere near "drunken". Bzzzt for unsubstantiated hyperbole.

2) "Distracted drivers". This category comes to us also from the NHTSA with some unknown contribution from VA Tech. While in the main I sympathize with attributing influence to this conceptual factor, as an empirical, measurable phenomenon it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Presumably data must be self-reported in many cases, and mixing self-reported with other data sources (passengers; post-accident circumstantial evidence) increases unreliability across the data pool.

All normal people multitask when driving, in part because driving requires multitasking in the first place: You must be able to check your speed and scan other dials and indicators, flick the turn signal, start/stop the wipers, hit the lights/brights, etc., without coming to a screeching halt every two minutes to adjust one of the functional driving controls. Thus, if you are driving along and fooling with the radio, are you a "distracted driver"? Maybe, maybe not. If you are driving along obsessing over the fight you just had with a random store clerk or loved one, are you distracted from driving? Maybe, maybe not.

Taking it one step further: There are bad drivers and good drivers. I'll posit that good drivers are ones who have a substantial foundation of automatic multitasking and learned reactions to smaller or more peripheral signals. Good drivers can take on significantly more distraction -- or apparent distraction -- than a less-experienced or a less naturally alert person, and/or can selectively tune in and out with respect to safety signals versus other 'noise' in the environment.

So, who are the "distracted drivers"? Those who report afterwards that they were talking to others in the car or changing the radio station, or those who report afterwards that they were distracted by talking to others in the car or changing the radio station? Or those whose passengers report the baby in the back seat was screaming (when we all know that parents can be astoundingly oblivious to the horrific noises their offspring make any time, any place)? Or the cop who finds a cell phone on the seat of a car after an accident? Is it methodologically defensible to use any of these criteria? Which? How has the validity of whatever measure was used been tested?

Philosophically, what traffic accident isn't caused at some level by a distracted driver? Is the theory that there is a significant class of accidents caused by people who are paying attention? Sure, occasionally a tire may blow out or cars can slide on snow. However, since those types of incidents don't invariably result in accidents, and in fact the skill, experience/knowledge, and attention level of the driver (and sometimes sheer luck) often avert damage to that car or others, wouldn't all drivers who have accidents also be drivers who were distracted, if only by their own thoughts or perhaps simple disinterest in the task at hand?

3) Unfortunately, the editorial links nowhere, so there's no way to assess whether or how the numbers presented in conjunction with these conceptually and empirically murky were constructed.

3a) In the days of Usenet, I researched official (USG) figures on drunk driving and drunk driving related statistics. It turned out at that time that accidents "caused" by drunk driving are, for the purposes of USG slogans and MADD proselytizing, any accident that includes a driver whose BAC is over the legal limit is deemed to have been caused by the "drunk" behind the wheel. Now, this is nutbar territory on the face of it. This means I could be in my lane, traveling at the safe and posted speed limit, with a BAC of .080%, and some idiot could run a stop sign or red light and ram into the side of my car, and the statistics would show that that accident was my fault. As I say, nutbar territory.

NB: It's a little jangly, but more dissection along these lines here, including one precious bit I'd forgotten from that long-ago Usenet debate: If a sober driver hits a pedestrian who has been drinking, that counts as an accident caused by "drunk driving". Another item I don't recall from back when: An accident involving a designated driver counts as one caused by drunk driving -- passenger BACs count as much as anyone behind the wheel. Well, that's one way to hit 40% "caused" by "drunks".

3b) Awareness of this feature of the statistical landscape raises my suspicions about the claim that "fully 80%" of accidents are (Warning!) "caused" by distracted drivers.

4) ObHyperbole Alert: "The latest data demonstrates that such drivers kill and maim far more people than speeders." Not in this editorial the latest data do not. "Fully 80%" of crashes does not exceed the unknown number of persons killed, which presumably is over twice the "nearly half" of all fatalities from crashes. If there are other data, the editorialist should have produced them, since otherwise this looks like a specious conflating of unrelated statistics (which are, see above, highly dubious and unreliable in themselves).

*****
And that's the first two paragraphs...
*****

5) I'll just note in passing the emotive language throughout the 'policy' grafs. A classic tool of demagoguery that editorials typically use, it's a dangerous and foolish way to make public policy. Its mixture with the bad numbers used badly does add to the bad odor of this piece.

6) Whether or not speeding is "more" important than drinking and distracting might be an interesting question, but not as this editorialist frames it. Public policy requires juggling interests and priorities along a number of dimensions, and in this editorial we are in the flat land of If It Saves One Life mob-raising talk instead. Not a single number is presented that distracted driving "causes" traffic deaths, even in the distinctly loose and ambiguous way "drunks" do. And surely no one can claim that people aren't upset enough about drunk driving, when the Constitution has already been impaired by legalization of checkpoints and current talk is of pushing legal limits down to .05%?

It appears that the editorialist has jammed together the largely unrelated issues of distraction with drinking in order to drive (heh) up the Deadly! Numbers! factor lacking on the distraction side and the Let's Get Serious About This Serious Problem which is clearly not lacking on the drunk-driving side. A little semantic sleight of hand and, boy, it really looks like the cops have everything all backwards!

But until we don't have speed limits, it just makes sense for traffic cops to give tickets for speeding. That seems at least more useful than parking tickets.

And what's the justification for not giving out speeding tickets? The editorial presents two: Speeding tickets are expensive, and giving speeding tickets at this time of year is scrooge-like. As to the first: Yes, dear, that is the point. The expense is part of the deterring structure of laws against speeding. The second: Totally unserious.

7) Furthermore, there's an eentsy problem with the idea that cops should stop writing so many speeding tickets and start "focusing" on drunks and distracted drivers. How?

Sure, we could set up more checkpoints. I'm against them in principle, but chasing speeders isn't preventing checkpoints. And there's all the extra manpower freed up by red-light cameras, too. Personally, I would consider Scrooge a pretty jolly, well-intentioned fellow by comparison with cops and cop administrators who feel increased intrusion into my private life and lawful business is justified on the theory that Something (More) Must Be Done about the non-zero probability that someone, somewhere, might be in hypothetical danger in the vicinity of a vehicle and BAC>.0-whatever.

Beyond that point, how the heck are cops supposed to focus in on distracted drivers? There are already laws against driving-and-talking in many (most?) places [NB: I don't have a cell phone, so I don't pay attention to those laws], and all sorts of things distract (bad) drivers. Food, non-alcoholic beverages, conversation, life, love, the universe, and all that. Distracted-while-driving status can't be determined by a test, so even checkpoints won't help. Rip out radios and CD players, criminalize Ipods and crying babies -- or all passengers, require No-Doz before trips over 15 minutes? But most accidents occur close to home! And society wants folks to carpool! Wow, this social engineering stuff is Hard.

8) Wrt revenue: A red herring to the editorial's central point, that we should care more about nabbing, prosecuting, and penalizing drinkers and distractables (whence could cometh, presumably, a whole lot more revenue) than we do about poor ol' speeders. Revenue is an outcome of nabbing whomever. Which miscreants public policy targets for the revenue extraction (as penalty or deterrent) is the question. Sure, other questions can be raised, but ultimately that's not "why" we do it.

In sum: Drunks, cell-phone users, people with kids, people who get sleepy (or tired or enraged [and whatever happened to activism drumming up Concern about road rage?]), and just plain bad drivers -- heck yeah, get 'em all off the road. And I admit, speeders don't bother me at all unless they're tailgating me, which is a different problem. I'll even admit that I recently got a speeding ticket, which was pretty much a big PITA. So, I suppose I should be on the editorialist's side.

But I'm not. I'm never on the side of the sloppy pseudo-factoid argument. I don't want cops' priorities determined by the loudest whiner -- not MADD, true; but not this writer either. I don't want public policy determined by the Nanny-est of the Nanny State attitudes. People die. People get killed unfairly. Speed kills, drunk driving kills, cell phones kill (for all I know). Even if I disagree with the mania against doing anything but sitting still in a chair until every .000001% of alcohol content has left your blood, I see no advantage in that attitude being displaced by some other irrational phobic mania.

Policy should be informed by facts, and still will involve hard choices and trade-offs on principles and/or resources. Even if that's not how it works, it's how we should try to make it work. The fanatic fighting the shrill demonizing the hysterical only means we'll all end up disrespecting everything.

How far are we from that now?

Let me count the ways

1. Patronizing
2. Braindead
3. Out-0f-touch
4. Disinterested
5. Unimaginative
6. Passive
7. Ludditean
8. Narrow-minded
9. Apathetic
10. Lazy

And those are just my reactions to the attitude conveyed by the 'news' cited here (first item), not even touching on the atrocious paucity of seriousness, profound lack of engagement, and risk aversion revealed by the choice itself.

Gaaawlee, it's the internerd, har har. Them geeks are funny weirdos, not wanting to plop down on the couch and make like a potato. Why, those goofy folks are thinking, and it seems like they're working hard, and they're doing it for free??? Great balls o' fire, what's the world coming to?

Over the past week, I've probably spent 11 or more hours fooling around with various programs in order to convert a video file and a text file into a series of files suitable for burning into a DVD that will play on a standalone player with selectable subtitles. This will not make me any money. This will not make me any friends. This will not advance my career. This will not impress anyone I know or love. No one will understand how challenging it was or how many dead ends I explored before I got the steps of the process (I hope, I hope!) in order and operating.

At the same time, it wasn't 11 hours wasted watching TeeVee (although the tube was probably running in the background for at least half of the time). It didn't keep me out of the 70-degree sunshine blessing us in the middle of December. It didn't keep me from doing laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing the stove, paying bills, or cooking a few meals. It didn't cost me a dime.

As a matter of fact, I had fun. I tested a half dozen things and figured out where problems lie. I'm further along the production curve than I was a week ago -- more creative self-production, even, if I feel like it sometime. I communicated with a number of people I'll never meet. If what I figured out last night works (it's running at home while I'm at the office now), I'll share it with people I'll never meet -- potentially contributing to strangers' happiness and ability to accomplish tasks around the globe, or maybe ultimately read by no one, anywhere.

Maybe in three weeks someone else will come up with some tool to do what I've done with much effort and using all the ingenuity I can muster after, as noted, a long day at work. Many long days at work. I myself, if this works, will be able to explain how to do it in five minutes. But I've figured out how to do it myself. If not all by myself, all on my own. People who don't get why that's a buzz don't understand much about life, what makes it fun, what builds its meaning.

I feel sorry for people who see no value in engaging the world and mastering even a tiny piece of it this way.

Delish

Okay, I'm trying (in my 'spare' time) to provide more content than links, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for a merciless fisking. Douglas Kern provides an elegant example, including but not limited to:

Gosh -- clarifying complicated ideas and then expecting your audience to handle sensitive news in light of those ideas. What will those crazy pajama-clad bloggers think of next?
[...]
Look, MSM: no one cares about what you think is "bad for democracy." Democracy got along just fine before you and will continue to flourish once you are gone. Don't worry about protecting democracy from us horse-brained masses. Tell the truth, give us balanced commentary for perspective, and you'll have done quite enough for democracy.
[...]
But if I don't deserve a medal, I deserve at least enough respect to be permitted to draw my own conclusions about some stupid polls. And if I'm not afforded that respect -- well, Mr. Engberg, you may find that when you hold the intelligence and judgment of the American people in contempt, the American people will return the favor.

As the saying goes, RTWT.

On the record

I was wrong. I had too much faith in the integrity and judgment of others. It's a character flaw -- hasn't done me much good personally, and led me last week to expect too much also of large chunks of the American voting population. I thought there were more 9/12 voters out there; I thought we'd win walking away, instead of just winning handily overall and improving margins (increasing absolute margins where Bush won and decreasing relative margins where he didn't) in every state.

On the other hand, I think one thing I grossly overestimated was the decline of the old-timey, agenda-driven, hugely dishonest and manipulative mainstream media. To me, Ra^thergate was the dying gasp of a morally-corrupt, intellectually-vacant empire, collapsing from the weight of its own self-importance -- an opinion that was all superstructure, no content. They are not, shall we say, a reality-based club.

But I've been paying close attention. The fact is, for considerable swaths of the non-information-junky population, that egregious incident was practically a first shot across the bow, the first 'mistake' that they'd consciously noticed in the whole atrocity that this campaign season, this entire Iraq campaign, and more-or-less the whole Bush administration has risen above. It was a decidedly marginal thing to most people.

So I would say that the MSM got their 15% this year.

I hope they enjoyed it, because it's the last time that will happen. The Gutenberg press has been invented, the Bible has been translated into the vernacular, and more and more people will come to the realizations hundreds and thousands of us already have: those people don't know more than I do, they're not smarter than I am, and (if they're thinking at all) they're making judgments and insinuations that don't stand up to the light of day.

They'll keep banging the defeatist drum about Iraq, but we're winning, and now we have four years to brick in some meaningful foundations over there. Thank God. I hope we can also turn some personal attention back to Afghanistan, because they need more help than the crippled creature NATO has become seems capable of providing, too. No bribing/bartering with the madman running North Korea -- the continuation of six-way talks to keep him frustrated in his regional corner is an excellent side-effect of this affirmation of Bush's leadership. It would be wonderful if some of the Old Yurripeons would get on the stick, at least rhetorically, wrt Iran, instead of whining and undermining par for the pre-election course. I wouldn't say I'm hopeful, exactly, of seeing that change, but it would be a hopeful turn of events -- not for Bush particularly, nor even for America, but hopeful for the hard times ahead throughout the world in the ongoing struggle to break the hideous current "international community" that demonizes that very struggle while continuing to legitimate terrorism as an acceptable political strategy.

On to victory, insha'allah.

Catching up

Lots of key stuff around to read and contemplate this morning...

Let's start off with a red-blooded rant to get the juices flowing:

Lacking anything resembling human shame, you were tossed out of the NYT and spent the next year whining about how it wasn't your fault. And to this day, you refuse to even look down at your blood-soaked claws.

Speaking of the Times et al., this is interesting:

With few exceptions (New York Post up 5.2%), our twenty most popular dailies are basically flatlining or losing readers (LAT down 5.6%, SF Chron down 8.5%!).

Note that the Post's increase is the largest listed, with the next two highest upticks at 3.8 (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and 2.8% (USA Today) -- every other increase (7 of the remaining 17) is in the 0.x percents. Every downward percentage (10) is more than 1.1 (average fall in circulation among the losers: 3.5%).

As I said to my newspaper-editor relative just this past weekend, it will be interesting when advertising revenues start reflecting the new realities. Shades of the RIAA's lumbering toward either extinction or radical metamorphosis? No more "nooze" "stars" with multi-million dollar contracts? Stay tuned ... to the 'net.


Speaking of the Post (which I admit I find myself reading *far* more often than the Times), I know it gets tiresome but this is absolutely a must-read:

"A clear path runs to 9/11 from the day of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages.
[...] "What especially surprised Khomeini was that Cater[sic] and his aides, notably Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, rather than condemning the seizure and the treatment of the hostages as a barbarous act, appeared apologetic for unspecified mistakes supposedly committed by the United States and asked for forgiveness and magnanimity."

It goes on. Sticking with the serious, this is both sobering and blood-pressure-raising:

I think that those who advocate war for legitimate self-defense have a defensible position. I think that those who are dedicated pacifists are at least morally and logically consistent, even if I disagree with them strongly.

But I cannot recognize the position of Andrew Sullivan, and John Kerry, as legitimate or honorable. Their shared position is unserious, highly partisan, and morally obscene. Those who would urge the nation into a war, or vote the nation into war, without contemplating the possible difficulties and pain of the struggle are cowards-- and worse than cowards. A man who would send another man to his death for a cause he does not think is important is a villain. What else can one call it?

And finally (because I suppose I really do have to do some work here today), a note on the election processes (gee, is it election day? How did it sneak up on us like this??), which clearly demonstrates One. More. Time. how important it is that the shallow entitlement whiners* not only lose, but lose rilly rilly big:

Instead of offering a defense of our Constitution and our process, Kerry instead promised to roll over for European demands to change it all.

Insha'allah, they will lose, today, bigtime.

*/and don't get me started on the whole damn "international observers" grotesquerie, at all.

Sunday Blather part 2 follow-up 2

Re-heard the panel discussions from ABC's news show and Fox News this morning on the drive in to work (C-SPAN radio is a boon to mankind), and noted that the three states Brit Hume mentioned the Republicans should be worrying about were *New Mexico*, Ohio, and Florida. I'm not sure if Brit was talking about opinion polls or vote fraud, but there's some better polling news from last night about Ohio, at least, via Powerline, and maybe Florida too. Nobody else mentioned NM yesterday, that I recall; is that where that toad Bill Richardson lives? Eeew.

Also, I know I didn't blog any more after Fox yesterday, but I did have George the Greek on while I was working on other stuff later. He actually seemed to be trying to hew a center line, at times, oddly enough. However, there was some chippie on their panel discussion who was so dim it was like a black hole of political savvy around her chair. The replay this morning reminded me of how irritatingly absurd she was as she went on and on imagining that if there's any closeness to the vote this time, "Americans" would simply rise up and throw out the Electoral College. Apparently she hasn't read her Constitution lately. Or ever. Sadly, that's par for the course for MSM -- I would say especially girlies on TeeVee, but if any of them have read more than what someone else has extracted and interpreted (often wildly wrongly) from the First Amendment, they certainly don't show it.

Debate 2

I'm watching the townhall "debate" on NBC, because locally that channel comes in as one of the best. It made me wonder, since we had two PBS moderators, tonight an ABC guy, and next time that CBS fellow, what NBC did wrong to get cut out? I can see why the Bush campaign wouldn't care to have any of these guys running things (I concur that Lehrer was more slanted than Gwen Ifill, no real opinion yet on Charlie Whosits (except my pre-existing impression that he's essentially an intellectually-vacant lightweight), but CBS at best doesn't come into any conversation without an odor of bias these days. On the other hand, NBC's no worse, I don't think, than ABC, CBS, and PBS. And we may (or may not) be more polarized these days, but didn't Fox run one of the debates last time?

I'd like to see these two guys in front of William F. Buckley, Mara Liason (sp?), David Brooks, Cici Connelly, Juan Williams, Ralph Peters, who else...

I do think that stupid thumb gesture needs to be retired. Point, gesture, or wave, but don't thrust your stupid thumb toward me like someone who doesn't have the 'nads to point.