entirely safe and fun

Vote Actual Lamprey — why settle for a metaphor! Image from wp marked PD.

The good news: loathsome pork-barrel parasite Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was (finally) convicted of making false financial statements. He faces up to 35 years in prison, five years for each of seven counts.

The bad news: he will almost certainly not serve a day. He even gets to keep his pension! We may be quite certain that on the outside chance that he is sentenced to prison, he will not be treated as a member of the general population, searched intimately after each visit from his family, subject to the punishing depersonalization that prisons do and ought to impose on their inmates. Stevens was not completely wrong to believe that his seniority in the Senate — put plainly, his persistent, lamprey-like rasping and sucking grip on taxpayer wallets — would immunize him from the full force of the law. His status as a legislator, even as a convicted felon senator, may be counted on to overawe the human agents of the law.

Topping all previous displays of hubris, Senator Stevens did not make plans to suspend or redirect his re-election campaign in case he was convicted. In fact, he has announced that he will continue to run for the Senate despite the fact that, after his felony conviction, he can no longer vote for himself. Quoth the AP:

Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel him on a two-thirds vote.

“Put this down: That will never happen — ever, OK?” Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. “I am not stepping down. I’m going to run through, and I’m going to win this election.”

He is depressingly likely to be right. So remember to do your part and Vote Freshman on 4 November. No matter how much you think you like your incumbents, the consequences of serial incumbency are so dire that you can’t afford to send them back to Washington. It’s best to blindly pull any lever that doesn’t have that fatal “(I)” next to it.

Oh, and when we get around to amending the Constitution to add term limits for Congressional representatives, can we please maybe add something that bars convicted felons from serving, especially if the felony in question is committed in office? It just seems like a good idea. Actually, I thought of an even better reason why convicted felons should be allowed to serve. Never mind.

Update again, 30 October: Turns out Senator Stevens will, by some tortuous legal reasoning, probably be allowed to vote.

One down, 434 to go!

Primary season has been a real downer here in California’s 14^th. Not only did our serial incumbent Representative Anna Eshoo not draw a competitor within her own party, she doesn’t appear to have even drawn a Republican challenger! We don’t have a shot at either of our Senators, and all of the Presidential candidates are basically identical. Surely there must be some good news, right?

There is! Arizona Republican Representative Rick Renzi had already announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election this year, and now we know why… and can be sure that he’ll actually keep his promise, a rare and beautiful treasure among Congressthings. He’s been indicted on charges of abusing his power as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee to secure sweetheart federal land deals for his co-conspirators, showing again how any power a government has, even something as simple as owning land, is bound to lead to corruption sooner or later.

The disgraced Congressman has appeared on the radar of many corruption NGOs over the past few years, and the group CREW has apparently featured him on their “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list (fascinating read) for the last three years. Congressman Renzi, great job, and thank you for supporting term limits and the “Vote Freshman” campaign!

Dante hangs out with Debra. Cuteness is still a critical skill for two-week-olds, but they are beginning to develop others.

Our old friend Debra visited us this weekend and, as we went along, took a bunch of pictures which make up the bulk of the new slug of photos tagged “day eighteen”. Thanks to her for letting me put them up.

Beginning his third week of life, Dante has started becoming responsive to his environment. He is beginning to track people with his eyes a little bit, lifting his head toward things he wants for a few seconds at a time, and reliably getting his hands to his mouth whenever he feels the need. It all points to a time when he will have the ability to feed and move himself, rather than relying on baby appeal to move adult muscles in his service… but for now, his first endogenously motivated activities just serve to highlight how cute he is, and provoke nearby grown-ups to more strenuous activity on his behalf.

I understand that everything that my son does at this point in his life is part of an instinct that babies have evolved to efficiently mine their parents for resources, and that his “cuteness” along with my deep need to respond comes straight from the stupidest mammal part of my brain, being a manifestation of parents’ instinct to be exploited to a greater or lesser extent by their offspring. I can’t help but marvel at how deep our biases, in the learning theory sense, run — that is, at how much information about the nature of the world is simply encoded into our bodies before we even have to make decisions, or to learn new behaviors or policies. Well underneath the level at which I can reason about my reasons, I simply know that a crying baby requires attention, and it’s very stressful to be around one. Conversely, it’s very calming to be around a happy baby. Consequently, babies and adults form a homeostatic system that stabilizes on happy babies and calm adults, which presumably has good evolutionary consequences.

This sort of instinctual model of the universe, present and rich even before learning can take place, is a theme that’s run through my thinking about machine learning in the decade I’ve been working on it, making me think that the conventional wisdom about high-bias ML systems like expert systems (said CW being that those systems are old and busted) is completely wrong. Successful living and learning systems in the real world carry an immeasurably great bias in every aspect of their design: most feet are flat because the ground mostly is flat too, and they’re mounted on the bottom of a creature because a part designed to touch the ground needs to be below all the other parts… and that’s just feet. How much more bias, subtle or profound, must inform the architecture of a learning organ? And why should we expect “purer” learning systems, drained as completely as possible of bias, to succeed in making predictions about a world so complex that real organisms, embodying huge amounts of background information, can barely cling to life?

Any theory of human nature based on a blank slate reflects an astonishing naïveté and lack of insight. Careful consideration of what is packed up in our notion of “cute” reveals its irreparable lacunae. John Locke is considered the concept’s most important proponent among Anglophone philosophers; I think he must never had any children (edit: sure enough), which, married with a lack of introspection, might have allowed him to convince himself that there is no immutable human nature, that humans have no instincts. But how would such impoverished creatures survive and learn in such a phenomena-rich world?

Update: Coincidentally, Jen Kirsch of Juror2, who drew es&f’s banner, recently put up a new piece with a very expressive infant in it. She gets a lot of mileage out of her sticks, which are evocative and imaginative and, yeah, cute.

Remember: Pork, not tubes. Tubes photo by wheresmysocks (cc-by), barrel photo by MissBeckles (cc-by-nc-sa).

Now comes it to my attention that Senator Ted Stevens, crown jewel of the spectacularly corrupt Alaskan delegation to Washington, had his home raided by the FBI while I was engrossed in baby matters. His shameful record of waste and cash politics were in some danger of being overshadowed by his laff-riot “Series of Tubes” gaffe (“[...] an Internet was sent by my staff [...] again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”), which would have been a shame, because clearly he deserves to be remembered as the consummate Beltway parasite, elbows planted square on the lid of the pork barrel. Maybe now he’ll get his chance, and history books of the future will talk about Stevens and his colleagues the way that current history books talk about Tamany Hall or Crédit Mobilier.

Incoming freshmen, then. Way to go, Alaska!

OK, out of my system. More baby pictures soon. Did you see the new ones linked from my last post? They are very cute.

Law school was out of ctrl, but I just spaced out and found myself board shiftless.

Via the vital blog Anonymous Lawyer comes this gem of a story. Adrian Zachariasewycz, a law student at the University of Michigan Law School has brought suit against the school (among other things), alleging in his complaint that:

18. Upon information and belief, the system of course examination and grading at the Law School in certain exams disadvantaged students that could not type at a sufficient speed to produce the volume of text required to produce competitive examination responses.

In other words, he’s suing the law school for discriminating against him as a slow typist. I’ve got no sympathy for any party to the case; law schools’ feathers fletch the arrows that are shot at them. Train enough litigators and you’re bound to get sued. But the law school is the least unsympathetic party, like Mel Gibson’s character Potter in Payback.

I’ve prepared a little rubric about what’s wrong with this picture…

1. Law school grades are proportional to the amount of text produced. This certainly explains the cost of litigation — we’re apparently paying by the word!
2. Somehow, this guy, who is supposed to be training as a lawyer, missed the fact that “slow typists” are not a protected class. Volunteer for the Army, or convert to Mithraism, and try again, buddy.
3. He is also proceeding pro se, meaning, as the old saw has it, that he has a fool for a client. Also, it means that he couldn’t convince a lawyer not related to him that his case has a lick of merit (assuming that Maria Zachariasewycz, co-complainant, is a lawyer).
4. If this guy wins his lawsuit, the precedent will be set such that every Computer Science graduate with a GPA less than 4.0 is in for a payday. No lie, I wore an inch off each finger in college.

Anonymous Lawyer has this to say: “I don’t think this kid who’s suing his law school is going to have much luck finding a job. Not even so much because of the lawsuit, but because he’s admitting he’s a lousy typist. What else is a first year associate good for anyway?”

“I allowed myself to get too comfortable with the way things have been done in Washington, D.C., for too long.”

CNN, reporting on disgraced former Ohio Congressthing Bob Ney, carried this poetically economical confession in their story on Ney’s recent sentencing (30 months, which I believe is probably not enough to deter his former colleagues, given the rewards to be reaped from corruption at that level). In a previous post, I said that Ney’s “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense was thin cover, and that the real root of corruption was hubris — his belief that, as a protected incumbent, he was beyond the reach of the law. The story can now be amended a bit to say that he was within the reach of the law, but the law’s grip was not strong enough to really hurt him.

The astute reader will note that Ney isn’t really confessing to morbid incumbency, but rather offering a new excuse: “Everybody does it!” He shouldn’t be able to get away with not naming names, but of course he will. At least he is displaying some insight about the major driver of corruption in American politics (the near-invincibility of incumbents at the polls); shouldn’t America, taken as a whole, try to benefit from its travails and embarrassments, and implement term limits for Congressthings?

It looks like the scandal of incumbency, while still going strong, did take a stiff punch to the gut with today’s elections. To pick out three Senatorial elections that made me especially happy:

The people of Pennsylvania are double winners today, turning Beltway embarrassment Rick Santorum out onto the cold streets of the Capitol District in favor of the un-re-electable Bob Casey Jr. The second win for Mr Casey’s new constituents will come in six years, when they get another freshman. Kudos to the residents of the Keystone State! I can’t bring myself to congratulate Casey, as literally any warm body could have defeated Santorum this year. I do not think it a great exaggeration to say that even if the Pennsylvania Democratic party had exhumed the worm-gnawed corpse of the late, great (and wealthy beyond corruption) John Heinz and run it around the state, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, Santorum could not have beaten it.

The Senate is just like high school in many ways. For instance, frequently absent former Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican from Ohio, has incurred expulsion for his repeated offenses. Congratulations to the newly-promoted Congressman Sherrod Brown, apparently so diligent in DC that he hasn’t had time to get his website re-designed since about 1994.

My favorite story so far: Missourians have done themselves proud by booting Jim Talent after just four years! Most electorates are content to wait six or more, but the people of the Show Me State exhibited real industry in electing Democrat Claire McCaskill. McCaskill succeeds to a seat that Missourians wanted, just four short years ago, to see occupied by Zombie Mel Carnahan. Well played, Ms McCaskill!

The American people would gladly have paid to see Senatorial proceedings involving Zombie Mel Carnahan and the corpse of the late, great John Heinz, by the way. Could be one way to fund Social Security for a few more years, just sayin’.

As for me, well, I’ve blogged before about my feeling of disenfranchisement at not having a viable alternative candidate to the strongly statist senior Senator Dianne Feinstein. As expected, she’ll be heading back to Washington — looking a little better in my eyes for not being her opponent, the alternately risible and terrifying Dick Mountjoy — along with the… mostly unobjectionable… Anna Eshoo, Silicon Valley’s Congresswoman. My only objection to Eshoo, besides antics like enlarging the power of the executive, is her decade and a half of incumbency. For a variety of reasons, I think that objection is fatal, but things could be worse. She could be entrenched and objectionable, right?

Update 8 Nov 2006: Freshman Mania is spreading! It’s not just for elected politicians anymore – Donald Rumsfeld is being turned out too. Way to serve your country, Mr Rumsfeld! I can finally salute you.

If your elected representatives voted for H.R. 5122 — and you can check here to see — you probably ought to vote for someone else on the Seventh. Your Senators didn’t care to hold a recorded vote on the issue, so why not just toss every single one of ‘em? It seems like a good plan!

The worrisome portion of H.R. 5122 is Section 1076, “USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.” Tucked away in between a tweak to the H-2B visa program and the utterly innocuous Section 1077 (”INCREASED HUNTING AND FISHING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES, RETIRED MEMBERS, AND DISABLED VETERANS”), 1076 authorizes the President to override state authority with respect to the National Guards, and use the Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement more or less at his discretion. It deeply weakens the Posse Comitatus Act, one of the most important protections of our civil rights.

Anyhow, Vote Freshman. Freshmen don’t have a track record of selling us out to tyrants.

Update: Wikipedia already has a hotly-debated article outlining the changes. Yay Web 2.0!

CNN.com headline: “3 out of 4 say Congress is clueless.” In other news: 1 out of 4 non-Congressthings is clueless. The Pope is still Catholic, Canada still borders the US to the north, and the sun will rise and set as usual tomorrow. Exclusive film at 11.

Proud to serve his country, no doubt

Bob Ney (previous entry), the soon-to-be former Republican congressman from Ohio, has plead guilty to charges of accepting bribes from the Jack Abramoff apparatus. His plea was strictly pro forma, an attempt to salvage some dignity under the weight of a mountain of evidence — “At least I told the truth that one time, in court!”

He invoked the popular “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense. His alcoholism made him accept gifts from Abramoff, and, apparently, cash from a Cypriot aircraft parts manufacturer. Next time I’m having a beer, I need to remember whether it makes me solicit bribes and then attempt to carefully cover my tracks. Quoth the Times:

Another person familiar with the department’s investigation said at least one of the criminal charges in Mr. Ney’s guilty plea would involve the accuracy of his claim in a House financial disclosure statement that he won $34,000 in a private London casino during a trip in 2003.

Those winnings were also under scrutiny by the Justice Department, in part because the amount of the winnings coincided to a surprising degree with the amount of debt outstanding on Mr. Ney’s credit cards. Mr. Ney’s host on that trip was a Cyprus-based aviation company that was seeking Congressional support for sales of airplane parts to Iran.

That’s what alcohol does to a man. Certainly it couldn’t have been the case that Bob Ney had been lulled into hubris by a long career of not being caught accepting inducements beyond what is appropriate? Nope! Obviously it was the alcoholism, which is a real medically recognized disease. Bob Ney is wholly lacking in character flaws!

And there’s no chance that he had come to believe that his seniority in our government insulated him from consequences — a belief bolstered by our seniority-based legislative rules and electoral regulations bent to ensure re-election. No, Ney isn’t a tyrant wannabe – he loves freedom and the democratic ideal, but he’s sick, can’t you see?

The good news is that the increasing popularity of the “But I’m an alcoholic!” defense (as invoked recently by Mark Foley) correlates strongly with more freshmen entering Congress. It’s great when people choose to Vote Freshman; it’s even better when every candidate for an office is a freshman!

update 16 Oct: Jeff Rowland weighs in on “But I’m an alcoholic!” at Overcompensating.