Who benefits

I now see the error of my ways.  I thought of the war on drugs as pointless and ineffective. I now see it as perfect for what it is intended to do. Look what would happen if we ended the war. 

We have built the world’s largest prison system; we have to keep it and all the people and contractors it employs busy.  What would we do with all those people warehoused in prison?  Would they join the ranks of the unemployed, or become just be petty criminals?  In addition to prisons we have courts, judges and their other employees that depend on the jobs it creates.

 Without low level drug users to plea bargain prosecutors would have to work much harder to maintain their important win/lose ratio.  Thousands of defense lawyers depend on the drug trials for easily earned income with no remorse for failure 

Police at every level from local departments to FBI have become dependent on the opportunities it provides, advancement, excitement, publicity, overtime, free drugs, bigger budgets and the assets that civil forfeiture provides: cars, boats, aircraft, electronics, weapons, and cash. 

The small arms industry depends on equipment, gun and ammunition sales to police and organized crime to stay in business and employ thousands of people.

The economies of several countries, and counties in the US, are dependent on the high prices they get for crops that produce an illegal product. What will they do when cocaine and marijuana bring the same price as oregano and tobacco?  Legal drugs would deprive independent vendors of a major source of tax free income.

All the hoopla about illegal drugs distracts people from the tobacco and alcohol industries, and the pervasive and harmful effects of their products. Constant news coverage of the War pushes news about the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco off the front page.  Celebrity scandals about illegal drug usage are almost as interesting as sex.  Rehab is so much more newsworthy when it is paralleled with a threat of jail time. 

Pharmaceutical companies can justify the high prices of their mass produced product on the comparably high price of street drugs.  How could oxycodone compete with legal codeine or even safer, more effective marijuana?  Hundreds of chemists, now busy designing drugs (prescription and illegal) around the controlled substances act would be redundant. 

The drug test industry employs thousands.  Employers need a simple reason to reject minority applicants "You failed the drug test".  Since marijuana usage is somewhere between 50 and 80% and can be detected for months, this is almost always credible, and impossible to rebut, although meaningless. 

Political contributions from all those with vested interest in the drug war would stop, then what would all the campaign service providers do without the Mothers-milk of politics?  War of any kind provides speech material for polidioticians, “We need to work harder, we're seeing the light the end of the tunnel, can't stop now.”  Gets more votes than, “300 million Americans are quietly behaving themselves.” 

In fewer words, the war on drugs has so thoroughly pervaded our culture that we, or at least our ruling class, can't live without it any more than they could live without their own hypocrisy. It is a small part of the basis of popular politics: keep the public alarmed with an endless series of boogie-men preferably imaginary, or manufactured as necessary to the needs, of the reelection cycle.

The War on Drugs has taken combat mentality into the streets of America. We need to end the insanity by decriminalizing things that really have no business being crimes in the first place, drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, and half the vehicle code.

K

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Translators

TRANSLATORS, AUTHORS OF CONFUSION

A lot of cases require witnesses whose English language skills are weak, or non-existent.  The obvious remedy is a translator.  The flaw is that translation is not always accurate, especially simultaneous translation. This may be why diplomacy is so futile.  Languages are idiomatic. Groups of words do not mean the same thing as their literal translation. Consider, “He is used to cream in his coffee.” Versus “A wrench is used to tighten nut”   Translation is so difficult that in both World Wars the U.S. used Native Americans speaking in their Native language to baffle enemy intelligence.

In W.W.I General Pershing suspected that the Germans had tapped his telephone lines, and broken the codes.  He assigned Ojibwa Indians to transmit telephone messages in the Ojibwa language.  The Germans officers did not speak Ojibwa and did not catch on.  The only problem was that too many military terms did not have an Ojibwa equivalent.

In W.W.II the effort was much more organized.  Radio voice communication was efficient, but not secure.  Encryption was secure most of the time, but painfully tedious.  Hundreds of Navajo were organized as Code Talkers.  They made up codes within their language for military terms and other critical words.  Various airplanes, for example took on the names of birds; ships, fish etc.  None of the code was written down, but instead was passed on through oral methods similar to those traditions used to preserve tribal history.  A Navajo who was not initiated could not have usefully translated their messages, and none of their messages were ever understood by the Japanese.  In addition they had the distinct advantage of being simultaneously translated instead of laboriously encrypted.  What took cryptologists four hours, code talkers could do in two and a half minutes.  Sometimes the code talker could just describe what he saw without having it written then encrypted before it could be sent.

In both wars, the Code Talkers were fluent in both languages, and participating members of both cultures.

The court translator needs to be as fluent in each language as the questioners and answerers are in their individual languages, including slang, technical terms and jargon.  Usually they are not.  Fortunately lawyers always speak in plain simple grammar school English.  (Yeah right)   English has twice as many words as any other language, at least 600,000.  This is why the Navajo code talkers had to make up expressions in Navajo.  At the other extreme Pidgin, the official language of Papua New Guinea has only a few thousand.  In Pidgin for example there is no name for a piano you could say “bigpella box many teeth alla same you bang ‘em he cry out”.  A translator who learned his Pidgin where there were no pianos might not translate that as piano.  And who is to say every Pigin speaker would describe a piano the same way?

I have learned to tell from the transcript if a translator was used, even if it is not noted.  Certain words are repeatedly misused, for example door for gate, because in Spanish they are both La Puerta.  In a deposition of a Lao witness to a traffic accident the testimony became very confused about lines and lanes.  Finally the translator remarked that in the witness’s language, line and lane were the same word.  A quick thinking attorney suggested a synonym; stripe for line and the deposition proceeded smoothly.  You would think a competent translator would have noticed the problem, but, obviously, she was working by rote, as they often do because translators seldom have the technical vocabulary of the witness.

A deposition of a truck driver proceeded for an hour with the driver making repeated reference to the “tar”.  Finally one attorney said “I don't see any tar in that photo.”  The driver, from North Carolina said “thet tar” and pointed to the left front tire.

In a series of depositions regarding an accident on a tuna boat all hardware on the boat was simply “an iron.”  The Captain who spoke English referred to cleats, chocks, blocks, davits, and winches, but in the transcripts of translated depositions none of those words appear, just “iron”.  Every crewman spoke a different language, and for a long time I wondered how they communicated, and if it mattered since everything was simply an iron anyway.  If the Samoan or the Portuguese said “chock,” or the equivalent the translator did not recognize that word in that language, and asked for an explanation.  No doubt the explanation included that it was metal, so it became an “iron”.  If the Hawaiian or Mexican said cleat, it became an “iron,” and so on.  You would think the translator would have at least said “iron thing” so the ambiguity would be obvious.  

One solution would be for each party to bring their own translator to the proceeding, just as we saw with Bush and Gorbachev.  Our firm did that once in a case involving an imported forklift.  Our client’s German engineer came here for a deposition.  As a precaution we provided an engineer, who had worked in both countries and was thus fluent in engineering terminology in both cultures, to verify the translations.  After only 45 minutes the deposition was terminated because the translations were unrelated to the engineers answers.  The German-American housewife court approved translator could carry on a domestic conversation in either language, but the engineering terms meant nothing to her.  Our engineer got qualified as a court translator the next day, and the deposition was completed the following day.

I can understand this from my own experience talking to a Mexican mechanic through a translator.  We were examining a concrete pump in Mexico that had been involved in a local amputation accident.  I asked him to show me the accumulator, which the interpreter dutifully translated as accumulador.  We were met with a blank stare.  I drew the simplest of schematic sketches, an upright oval with a line sticking out of the bottom.  His face lit up he said "Oh, La bottella hydraulico,"  (the hydraulic bottle), and led me right to it.  American engineers and mechanics often say “accumulator bottle” a reasonably descriptive term.

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cities

Maybe cities, like Detroit, are obsolete. 

First there was the family, Mother and her children. Then in some cultures the dad and other relatives became part of the extended family.  This got larger and became a tribe.  Many tribes merged into a clan.  Then things got complicated, some tribes and clans merged into nations.  Other tribes formed cities.  The large cities conquered surrounding territory and became city states, often with extensive territories, empires.

Eventually modern nations, with subdivisions called states, provinces, counties and cities evolved. Unfortunately the boundaries of these subdivisions have become in many ways obsolete.  Cities on opposite banks of a river may be in different states, but have more in common with one another than they do with their home state.  Suburban residents outside a city may make more use of some city services: libraries, museums, colleges than residents within.  Some cities require critical employees to live within, even though this may be a financial or cultural hardship.  It may deprive the city of the best candidate for some jobs, like teachers and police officers.

Many cities have learned to blur the lines to improve services.  Port districts manage the entire waterfront of multiple cities.  Many utilities are based on topographic boundaries rather than political, and some school districts are based on demographic boundaries.  Regional transportation has largely replaced municipal.

Unfortunately some cities, like Detroit, appear to be locked into the city state mentality and try to be everything to everyone within the arbitrary (historic) boundary, while at the same time supporting services that benefit non-residents more than taxpayers.  With today’s information technology there is no reason for all city services to have the same boundaries.  A separate service district for each service can be designed and managed to maximize efficiency, within much larger boundaries, such as county or state.  This of course might make mayors and city councils obsolete, but I can live with that.

  

  

ISIS is piracy on land

We cannot defeat ISIS or Al Qaeda by thinking of it as a government. Our outmoded strategy of killing the leader is a throwback to medieval times when capturing the enemy king meant you won. But each ISIS cell is more like a pirate crew. Their leaders are more like a pirate captain, answerable only to his crew and totally dependent on booty. They have no capacity to create what they need to function. Like pirates they are funded by what they steal "liberate, confiscate, commandeer". Killing a "leader" is just a promotional opportunity for the next in line to fight over.

To fight they need to steal ordinance.  To defeat them they have to be deprived of everything they steal.  Fortunately those things are easy targets. It is easy to hide a "sheikh" in a crowd, but where do you hide a tank or howitzer in the desert?   If it is hidden, it is ineffective.  The key to defeating them, which the Saudi's seem to understand is to destroy that which they love, hardware. The threat of death is no deterrent to those who think that to die in jihad is desirable.

Republicans

I feel the last thing the Republicans want, is a Republic. Their goal seem to be an oligarchy of only Republicans in power, chosen by other invisible Republicans.
It's a system proven to sort of work, in China.

Telescope

First let me confess, I am a supporter of the TMT. As an engineer, I love challenging projects, and the advancement of science. There will be long term benefits that we cannot imagine. As Ben Franklin said when he was experimenting with electricity. He was asked what use it was. His answer applies equally to the telescope. “Of what use is a newborn baby?”

The protesters make the telescope sound enormous, but it has about the same relationship to Maunakea as the dot at the end of this sentence to the full page of a newspaper.

What I cannot understand is the Universities reluctance to give it a Hawaiian name.

I Suggested the King David Kalakaua telescope, but they will probably name it after some obscure haole astronomer.

The original mauli Hawai’i was as concerned about the stars as most cultures.  They had a special haiau for observing the stars, luakini and a specialist to interpret them, kahuna kini. Is not an observatory the natural extension? King David Kalakau seemed to think so.

To not build the telescope at this point would be a crime against the education of all humanity.

Scarebus

When you board an airplane you expect to be putting your life in the hands of a professional pilot. Since he is on board with you, you expect he wants to complete the journey safely just as much as you do.
However when you board an Airbus, or Sukhoi you life is also in the hands of the programmer who designed the fly-by-wire side-stick control system. He is not on board.
The side stick can allow one pilot to make serious errors without his partner being aware. e.g. Air France 447, and probably Air Asia 8501
Every other commercial airliner builder retains the tradition mechanically linked dual yoke control system, so that both pilots know what's happening. Even a third officer in the cockpit can see instantly who is doing what.
BUT THERE IS MORE TO IT
We have more and more hybrid systems where the airplane, or automobile is partly under human control and partly automated. The Asiana 777 pilots thought the automatic throttle control was engaged. It wasn't, the plane was too slow and therefore too low.
Cars with ABS do not crash less than cars without it, because drivers do not understand the difference in driving technique. We have to consider whether to go full automation, or hybrid where humans remain in the loop but may not be competent to deal with actually controlling something with which they have no experience.