Hate Crimes and Repeat Offenders

Welmer's rambling rant against hate crime legislation reminded me that I had intended to write on the topic as well.

I used to be really strongly against the idea of hate crimes, simply on the basis that a common law ought to be good enough for all of us. My view has shifted over time however, as I shifted my focus from the rights of the victims to the handling of the offenders.

If hatred of the victim's group is the motivating factor in a crime, the perpetrator is more likely to search out more victims fitting the same profile. And assuming that the goal of criminal law is to protect everybody else, likelihood of repeat offenses is clearly relevant to sentencing.

I also think that there is widespread confusion between the hate crimes prosecuted by the justice system and the thought crimes prosecuted by "human rights" commissions. I am certainly not in favor of hate crimes being standalone charges.

Logging Public Relations

Back in my childhood, logging was a big deal. There were always protests going on, trees being spiked, etc. Now, not so much. I gather that this has more to do with logging companies preventing public eyesores than anything else. I was recently told that computer modeling is used heavily to decide how many trees can be cut before anyone will notice.


The first kind of modeling helps hide clear cuts - obviously you can't clear cut an area that people can directly see, but it is nearly as important to leave horizon views untouched. This means calculating (for all likely vantage points) exactly how high you can cut on the other side a hill before the horizon degrades. This might seem like an easy calculation, but imagine that the possible viewpoints are defined by a nearby highway that twists and turns and has numerous elevation changes.

The second kind of modeling is for "thinning" a high-visibility forest. Again, for all reasonable vantage points, the question becomes how many trees can be be selectively removed before the stand looks damaged. I am led to believe that the average percentage of trees that can be unobtrusively removed is pretty high if it is done right.

I'm curious if this low visible impact style of logging is actually significantly more friendly to the local ecosystems, or if people just can't be bothered to protest what they can't see.

Aside: Another way logging companies use GIS is to game the government bodies who issue cut block licenses. Logging companies typically have better resolution data than the government, so they can plan their roads to go through the highest value portion of a supposedly uniform cut block - and there are no stumpage fees on trees cut for road building purposes.

Obama's Support For American Hegemony

I'm getting a chuckle out of Obama's "new" stance on Nukes. Essentially the US will maintain the ability to annihilate all other nations while preventing them from developing the ability to defend themselves from imperial aggression, but try to reduce the cost to US taxpayers by disposing of the oldest and crappiest missiles.

Which is actually a very reasonable policy, just not a particularly meaningful change from the last X administrations.

I would have been impressed if he had announced that the US would scale back nuclear reserves to the point that only deathbed counterstrikes against other nuclear powers would have been feasible. That also would be beneficial to Americans, but I'm not so sure that a world without Team America: World Police would be a very nice place.

Dennis Schornack is Astroturfing

I absolutely don't understand why, but Dennis Schornack has started leaving increasingly hostile comments written in the third person on my old posts.

Raven's research is pathetically poor. The only law that matters in U.S. is the treaty itself; there is no other enactment. The width of the "vista" was set by the commission, check their minutes - it used to be 30'. The president can only fill vacancies, he cannot create them - this to insulate commissioners from political pressure - if you can be fired, you can be manipulated. Schornack is a hero for doing his job exactly in accord with the treaty.

This behavior seems worth nipping in the bud by exposing it... It's pretty strange given that Schornack was fairly forthcoming in the interview I conducted with him. He did not respond to my query about these latest comments.

This has also been one of the few times I felt uncomfortable about having a Facebook presence. Schornack requested a connection some time ago, and I agreed, not thinking much of it. That's been revoked now. (All I could glean from his FB details is that he has a decent taste in movies.)

As an aside, if the commission has the power to set the vista to whatever width it likes, what would stop it from declaring a vista that extends all the way into Oregon? My claim was never that the commission had not defined a vista width, but that it doesn't seem to have much of a legal standing to do so.

Methods of Control

After reading about the "is Obama a fascist?" debate on Megan McArdle and Coyote Blog, I decided to memorize the definition of fascism for once and for all. I like to bandy the word around a lot and when challenged regarding who I consider fascists my response has to be the unsatisfying "people I don't like (because they tell me what to do)".

A search led me to this summary of the differences and similarities between fascism and socialism.

I think I can further summarize that summary:

• Fascists control the stuff by controlling the people.
• Socialists control the people by controlling the stuff.

Personally I think that managing the economy through a combination buying a major (but not majority) stake in companies and then subjecting them to additional regulation could put you (mildly) in either camp. But the burning of the bonus-receiving-AIG-witches would seem to push you more towards fascism...

Oh well. It's not like McCain would have been much better.