Feed-your-head Friday

Okay, so I stole the idea from Science Friday on NPR. So sue me. And yeah, I'm a day late. No cookie for you.

How snakes slither:

The Catch-22 list again, ack

Never mind how Joe Heller might feel about this ugly use of the title of his great novel. I'm wondering who's being served by our annual 22 Days of Prescott's Most Wanted (cue musical theme ripping off Highway Patrol).

If you thought a lot of these mugshots seem familiar, there's little wonder, just look at the dates. Many of them have been on the list for years.

Adam Stevenson, wanted since 2004. Manuel Acosta, 2002. Miguel Franco and Claudio Lopez, 2006. Hector Reyes, 2002. Joel Medina-Ortiz, 2006. Domingo Valdez-Anguiano, 2004. Others have no dates, but I'm sure I've seen them before, and not this year.

Yavapai Silent Witness, which is the primary source of these stories, carries the list. The Courier ran that list on May 1 of this year, and it contained all the same names as were on last year's Catch-22 list, one going back to 1998, one wanted for "prescription fraud," another a probation violation, locations from Holbrook to Wickenburg.

What does it mean when the annual push to "catch 22 felons in 22 days" focuses on the same people year after year? Maybe it means that there really aren't enough bad guys out there to scare us with. Averaged over ten years, that's only 2.2 per year.

I've seen and written about the tilt toward Hispanics we see on this list. Add in that the editors have at least ten years of bad guys to choose from, and the racial-profiling angle really lights up.

But what concerns me more is the suspicion that reportage is drifting over into newsmaking and adjusting public perceptions of reality for political purpose. Cherry-pick 22 uncaught, mostly Latino felons from over ten years, dump their mugshots and precious little else one by one on the front page over three weeks, and you might create the impression among those who aren't paying close attention that there's a lot of crime going on around here by scary brown people. Which spreads unwarranted fear, which sells newspapers and, not incidentally, Republican candidates for office.

Now note today's editorial, defending it as "a new list" of "the most violent offenders currently at large." Prescription fraud. Hmmm.

City use of pulverized glass on streets raises questions

Lots of people are clearly hopping mad about the glass-in-the-streets story, but a different factor comes to mind for me.

The point of recycling glass, going all the way back to the first new-era mandatory bottle deposits in Michigan in the '70s, was to keep the glass out of the environment and make more new glass with it, since it is so easy to recycle cheaply. It's not waste, it's a resource.

Recall a couple of years ago, when Mr Norwood removed the City glass containers from supermarket parking lots, calling the operation unprofitable? Now we see what should be reasonably valuable materials crushed and spread on our streets. We've come full circle, only where citizens were once the litterers, now it's our government.

The angle I'd have liked to see in the Courier's story isn't who's to blame for this little incident, but rather why a City asset is being systematically wasted in this manner. Has the raw-glass market crashed, leaving municipalities with worthless piles of glass? Have we failed to build the necessary market-to-manufacturer infrastructure to make recycling worthwhile? Are other materials similarly in glut or nearing it? Or are our administrators just unwilling to make it a priority and deal with it? There are many interesting questions of vital public interest to be asked here.

















This is from secondarycommodity.com, which tracks prices on recyclables, and this chart covers curbside-gathered materials over the past two years. I dunno much about interpreting these data, but it looks to me like prices track fairly well with the economy overall, and they're up substantially over a year ago. To me that means the City is wasting public assets of increasing value into our environment, not unlike burning a ten-dollar bill to light a cigarette.

I can see the amped-up Hollywood treatment now -- a film about Prescott City government with Heath Ledger as Steve Norwood.

Gettin' the ol' Xmas spirit on

Not a lot of time for blogging this week, we've got a big project to finish before the weekend, but but given the season I just had to get in here and deck the blog, as they say. This pretty well expresses the whole thing for me. Enjoy!

Feed-your-head Friday

The universe is quite likely weirder than we can imagine.

Holiday travel kept me away last week, so I've got a bonus for this week. National Geographic presents a piece in its latest issue to help us understand and teach about the carbon problem and why it's really important to get ahead of it. Check it out.

Editorial: DVDs free to use, not for the taking

This is exactly the sort of thing a careful reader might expect to see when editors get lazy. The unnamed Courier editor's Barcalounger has turned in yet another cut-and-paste version of yesterday's page-one story. But this time it ought to be particularly embarrassing, because he's failed to think through the basis for the story, uncritically passing on nonsense from a press release that seems designed to unfairly manipulate him and the public.

I like Toni Kaus and she seems to be doing well with a tough job as head of the library. This is the first indication I've seen that she or her staff may be doing anything less than above board. But the story of 1,500 stolen DVDs smells of week-old fish.

The library wants a new security system to mesh with those at other libraries in its network and reduce the workload on its staff and volunteers, and this will cost a lot of money. But to justify this expense, it points to people picking way too many things up and neglecting to check them out. This indicates to me that the library has been pretty well failing to provide adequate security against theft of public property. One might think that security would have been an important design factor in the recent total renovation of the library, but we must infer that it wasn't considered or isn't working. That's a fail worthy of note by a local paper. The editor misses it completely.

The library uses the value of the stolen DVDs to help justify the expense, valuing its donated, secondhand, hard-used discs at $25 each. Actual replacement cost for discs in better shape might run to six or seven bucks tops, more like four or five in my experience. Average that high with labor involved, factor in donations of a third of them, and replacing 1,500 DVDs might cost around $7K. Not cheap, but not any $37K. That's ridiculous price-inflation to justify the $93K price tag on the RFID system and imply that it will amortize in a fifth of the time. It may be in a good cause, but it's underhanded all the same, and a local newspaper editor ought to be asking why, if this is such a good thing for the library, the staff needs to use such tactics in pitching it.

We also see nothing but acceptance that the new system will be airtight -- it won't be, there will still be shrinkage, and we ought to know the relative projection -- and we don't hear how many DVDs wear out and have to be replaced anyway, another useful data point in gauging the importance of the security system relative to other spending priorities.

An important part of a news editor's job is critical thinking and skepticism about what people in authority say, particularly where it involves public policy and the public purse. On seeing this ham-handed move by the library, the editors could have asked pointed questions, or simply dropped the smelly elements from what is otherwise a perfectly good story. Instead the readers (and advertisers) get simple-minded stenography. Our city deserves better.

ToT: Fann on infrastructure

Since there was nothing in the first section, I was hoping that in her followup Karen Fann might suggest some ideas for solving the problems she copiously cites. I was disappointed.

It matters because Ms Fann is the anointed successor to Lucy Mason in the House, so her abilities as a leader and problem-solver are important. (The idea that a Dem challenger might beat her for the seat seems remote at this point.)

Ms Fann risks public derision for complaining about the state of public infrastructure -- because of her close ties to firms that do so much of it on the public dime -- so you'd think she would want to offer some sort of plan that makes sense. Instead we see nothing but complaints about other public initiatives that she thinks have little or no value, like research on how we can reduce the impact of climate change and keep Arizona habitable.

This illustrates exactly the sort of conventional pigheadedness that has rammed us full-speed into an obvious economic wall. It does not bode well for our legislative delegation.

I agree wholeheartedly that our infrastructure is woefully neglected, including portions of it that Ms Fann neglects to mention. But our problem is not addressing other problems, rather it's that Americans are unusually resistant to the idea that we have to pay for everything we need, and unwilling to accept that the majority rules on what we need.

In the comments, George Seaman brings up a good point. It appears that the editors are showing marked favoritism toward Ms Fann in getting her views published. I'm so surprised.

Restoration uncovers intact 1920s Elks marquee

I've been rubbing my hands hoping for this. The face work comes down and we can see the original electric-era sign. I'm guessing that certain people in the Foundation were hoping it had been previously erased, because now they'll have to figure out what to do with it.

They want to restore the theatre to its look before the electric era, putting that sign out of period. But no one will be able to even suggest taking it down, nor should they. There's also the little problem of the name of the place. It might be embarrassing after these several years of calling it an opera house (it is not, never has been and never could be an opera house) to have to go back and start calling it Elks Theatre again, as it always was. But with that sign there'll be no choice.

It's not the marquee, by the way, that would be a projecting structure holding the signage. It's the sign.

The mammogram tempest

I don't really wonder that a lot of people are confused by the media treatment of this week's announcement about mammograms, and clearly the unnamed Courier editor is among them. There are a couple of factors involved in this that shouldn't be, and they muddy the water considerably.

The first is that this is a science story, an area where we can count on our journalists to fail us pretty generally. Start talking about random trials, control groups and methodologies and their eyes instantly glaze over. They just want the bottom line, and they have a hard time remembering that the conclusion of a scientific study does not constitute a fact, but rather the best estimate the scientists can get of the truth given the specific conditions involved. Big difference.

In this case what we have is a new report from the US Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts on preventive care set up by the Reagan administration to "review the evidence of effectiveness and develop recommendations for clinical preventive services." The PSTF

"recommends against routine screening mammography in women aged 40 to 49 years. The decision to start regular, biennial screening mammography before the age of 50 years should be an individual one and take patient context into account, including the patient's values regarding specific benefits and harms."

(Incidentally, this backs up a similar conclusion from a study not long ago in Canada.) It's a simple, straightforward message. On looking at the current evidence, the panel found that the benefits of routine mammograms for low-risk women do not outweigh the associated risks.

The second factor making a huge mess of this is that a small proportion of people in this country are convinced that health-care reform is about rationing, killing off Republicans early and making lots of Democrats, and so they jumped in with both feet on the idea that this is a a nefarious scheme to deprive women of their necessary cancer tests. (Like they ever gave a rat's behind before about preventive services for women.) They came out screaming bloody murder (again) over nothing, and this is where we are.

In a way I wish it were a little more like the screamers fear. The profit motive in US health care leads to huge amounts of overprescription, overtesting, unnecessary procedures and other highly profitable waste. I think it would be reasonable to infer that profitmaking insurance companies will look for a way to use this to deny reasonable coverage. This has nothing to do with the public plan, which of course does not yet exist.

But it just isn't that important. It's another data point in the continuing refinement of our understanding that science pursues, no more, no less, and if more experts agree, a consensus may emerge to stop pushing women to have these tests because they're not necessary.

The editor basically gets it right in describing how to respond, but his tut-tutting the experts for unclear communication is ridiculous. The media have messed up the message, not them.

Where do the elements come from? It's feed-your-head Friday.

Talk of My Ass: Kirkpatrick won't get his vote again

Fred Veil leads by calling Democrats "Neo-Socialists," ticks off a few of the outright falsehoods the radical right is flogging as talking points, then complains that the representative failed to respond to his list of nonsense questions inspired by those talking points. He's right in that she should have responded, preferably telling him to take his disrespect and attitude and stuff it.

The piece wouldn't matter a bit except that the Courier editors slapped a "Talk of the Town" flag on this idiotic rant, giving it column status, rather than leaving it in the letters box. Dumb move.

To the headline-writer: Where did Mr Veil state that he voted for Ms Kirkpatrick the first time?

Editorial: Peavine Trail calls for right crossings

I've looked at the design presentation for the Road 39 trail crossing, and none of the options look all that good. I have to disagree with the unnamed Courier editor and probably with most of the trail-lovers, though. Building a tunnel or a bridge for the trail would suck for the trail in terms of environmental damage and access problems for horses and wheels, it would suck for the adjacent properties in terms of acres of earthwork encroachment, and it would suck for the taxpayer in terms of untenable expense.

I notice something missing from the plan though. The at-grade crossing design does not include a traffic light. With pedestrian request buttons to stop traffic when necessary (estimating from current numbers, not that often), it seems to me that the at-grade crossing would be a lot safer.

Anybody know otherwise?

Wiederaenders: Should we buy gold?

Gosh, what a mess. I hardly know where to begin.

First, as some of you know, for 22 years I've earned a major portion of my income from work for Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's business paper of record, equivalent to The Wall Street Journal. Japan's economy lives and dies on international currency exchange rates, so to stay current I read a lot about this stuff. I won't claim expert status, but I know more about it that your average Courier editor.

Next, two points of fact.

Tim asserts that "China is ... purposely deflating its currency." This is plain nonsense. In point of simple fact the yuan has been rising steadily against the dollar for many years, albeit more slowly than it would naturally because the Chinese government has been buying dollars like crazy. The purpose of this has indeed been to protect export values, yes. But deflation? No way. US and international pressure is what's causing the Chinese to slowly relent on their currency, and this is positive progress from our perspective. Everyone manipulates their currencies, that's the primary purpose of central banks. This stuff goes on everywhere all the time.

Tim goes on: "the world economy’s recession led Russia and China to call for a One World Currency – other than the U.S. dollar – earlier this year." Tim's conflating two different discussions. One -- which hit the news not this year but over four years ago, while the economy was still hot and oil was becoming stupidly expensive -- was not about a scary "One World Currency," as Fox News would have it, but rather the idea of denominating more international trade in one or more currencies in addition to the dollar, which would help hedge the risk of loss of value of the dollar. Our currency has been vastly overvalued for decades, in small part because of its hegemony in international trade in vital commodities like oil, but more because other countries (especially China) buy dollars to reduce their own currency values to support exports to us. The other, going back to October last year, involves China and Russia agreeing to oil trade between them denominated in rubles and yuan rather than the dollar, which is perfectly reasonable and beside the point.

It helps to understand that currency has no intrinsic value. It's like atomic structure -- it seems solid, but if you look really closely, there's almost nothing there. Currency is just a medium of exchange, and its value is always relative. Domestically we judge value by purchasing power -- how many burgers or gallons of gas it will buy. Internationally it's set relative to other currencies. These two factors rarely track together. So, with no intrinsic value, the idea that the dollar "should" have a high value is just wrong. The value you want depends on whether you're buying or selling.

Tim says, "Within the past week we have seen reports of the U.S. dollar’s value dropping." He's behind the curve by a couple of years. Against the yen, for example, the dollar has fallen by about 20% since June of '07.

That matters to me because I earn yen and spend dollars. But changes in the international value of the dollar mean almost nothing to you if you earn dollars and spend dollars. Think -- has the dollar's 'loss' of 20% of its relative value raised prices here by 20%? Of course not. It does affect the cost of imported goods, materials and resources somewhat, but bear in mind that exchange rate is only one factor in prices. No manufacturer wants to cut his own throat by allowing his prices to rise above norms in the world's largest consumer market, so exporters to the US are mostly eating the exchange losses. (What about oil!? I hear you cry. It's generally denominated in dollars, so no change!)

If anyone's been purposely deflating a currency recently, it's been the US, and that's generally a good thing. Since what goes up must eventually come down, artificial inflation of the dollar to improve international buying power caused international investors to gradually lose confidence in it, and the return to natural balance is restoring the soundness of the currency. It's also giving a little boost to what's left of our manufacturing base by making US goods cheaper internationally and foreign goods more expensive for us.

Now we get to the real nutty stuff. Tim says darkly, "Could the U.S. dollar fully collapse? I suppose so," imagining that the dollar could lose value to the point where it becomes useless, like Confederate scrip or the Iraqi dinar as the bombs were falling. Tim may suppose it, but the idea is plainly preposterous short of an asteroid strike. The US economy is huge and it has a strong (sometimes too strong) central bank. There is no risk of real military threat to us. Most important, the entire world is holding our bonds, which means both that our currency is the one they prefer when theirs seem shaky, and they have a closely vested interest in maintaining the value of that currency. Where people agree that something has value, for whatever reason, it has value.

Sure, go buy gold if you like, and make the gold dealers richer (both when you buy it and when you sell it later). But bear in mind that gold has volatile relative value just as currency does, so it carries exactly the same risks.

If you really want to maintain the value of what you own, on the other hand, invest in your community, vote against warmongers (the single most reliable cause of lost value is war), vote against oil interests, and help make sure everyone is healthy and the kids are well educated.

YCSO investigates alleged employee misconduct

This looks like another case where something comes in over the transom and the Courier hasn't the curiosity or wherewithal to ask a question.

A Sheriff's captain has resigned, apparently because he did the nasty while on duty. There's an investigation ongoing. The question any good cub would ask is why. If the guy just got caught with his pants down and quit, what's to investigate? Either something big is missing from the story, or something in the story is just wrong.

Editorial: Prescott's lucky Norwood is staying

The unnamed Courier editor is allowed his opinion of City Manager Norwood, whether or not it's assembled from a patchwork of plain misapprehension, assigning him the credit for other people's work, and wishful thinking. I have a different opinion. But the really odd thing about this article is that the editor has clearly missed the primary implication of recent events and got the news backward.

The headline and the editorial express relief that Norwood is not leaving his post. That's true for this week, at least. But what we know now that we didn't know last week is that while he hasn't found the right deal yet, the manager is openly looking to move on. Every headhunter in the country working this market now has him on a list of names. More deals will be forthcoming. If Council has any sense, they're already putting feelers out for the next manager.

The aficionados of dark conspiracy like to infer new conflict between Norwood and Council driving events, but such conflict would be neither new nor necessary here. Norwood is a young, ambitious player in a very specialized profession where success is measured in population and budget numbers. His priorities and focus since he came have been on resume-building projects. I've discussed this with many connected people across the spectrum over the years and all agree, most with a sense of relief, that he won't be here long.

Today's Chuckle

An anonymous commenter: "Reading comprehension can be your friend. Invite him in. Let him stay awhile."

Stockmar: Annoying – and healthy – facts

Steve turns in a smackdown today of the hysterical claims about health-care reform, and manages a still entertaining but more refined approach than I've seen previously.

This is how it's done, folks -- calmly, factually, confidently, with citations and good humor. Steve gets a cookie.

Editorial: Law should ban feeding bears

What do we do about a bear in the neighborhood? It's not an easy question for a thoughtful person. The bear is just doing its bear thing, and killing it for that is truly awful. Leaving it alone justifiably freaks people out, since they have no idea how to deal with it and are left to inflate the threat to the limits of their imaginations. So we try putting it back in its safer habitat, but it finds its way back because it's become habituated to humans, so its preferred habitat has changed. Problem.

The unnamed Courier editor, in good Republican fashion, advocates tort reform as the answer. Just "restore the immunity" of the state from suits by people who believe it's part of the state's job to protect them from animals, and it's all fixed. People who are maimed by bears must have been feeding them, we gather, so no foul.

It fascinates me how easy it is to blame the victims. The editor cites two cases in which people who were hurt won judgments against the state, infers that Game and Fish has to kill bears because it's afraid of more suits, and leaps to the conclusion that the law is the problem. These people won their cases because the court saw it as reasonable for them to expect protection from the state and the state did something wrong. That's not a political opinion, it's a legal ruling. It demands that the state do right.

So the editor twists this basic, practical problem to his own political end of reducing public access to the courts, essentially ignoring all the practical aspects. It's a stunning mental trick.

Lacking interest in any real problem-solving, the editor misses that Game and Fish is not talking about other options for these animals. There's more we can do than kill the bear, leave it alone or send it away. Right here in town we have an institution dedicated to the care of animals that cannot be released into the wild -- the Heritage Park Zoological Sanctuary. We could be exploring the possibility of moving human-habituated bears into sanctuary as a "third way," perhaps involving some state funding to help. I'm sure there are other options available as well if we really care more about these animals than whether they're convenient to us.

Editorial: Immigration calls for action

It feels like the unnamed Courier editor really wants to tell us that illegal immigration is a huge and costly problem, and to find some way of criticizing Secretary Napolitano, but he can't quite find a way to do it. I could put a different headline on this piece and it would read like a bouquet for Janet and a statement that the problem really isn't all that big.

His biggest number is $150 million for health care, supplied by the hospital lobby, which of course inflates its numbers to the max to justify more subsidies. (Hospitals don't ask about legal status, after all, so there's certainly some windage in there at least.) Not even an eighth of the jail budget for illegals? That's not bad! Considering how much thunder we've heard about this for years, one might expect it to be more like 40%.

Then he gives us a couple of grafs on the sensible approach Napolitano is taking, and closes with an ambiguous non-opinion that could be read as approval or not.

Seems like the editor, after years of table-banging about this non-problem, is more than a little perplexed all of a sudden.

Hansen: Let' check the national pocketbook

Another extremely dull Monday at the Courier forces me to turn to the funny pages -- the pseudoblogs. Ben offers a column today in which he puts on his pundit's mitreboard and tries to take us to school on the national debt and budgets. As we've come to expect, he fails miserably.

Let's just breeze by the headline failure by our self-described "pit bull about spelling, grammar and usage." He writes,

The current national debt is $11,998,747,017,892.96. That’s 11 trillion dollars. A trillion is 1,000 billions.

Now we’re getting to the root of the problem. The last time the U.S. had a balanced budget was 1957. I was 12 years old. Congress, over a long period, under presidents and congressional majorities of both parties, has lost all sense of fiscal responsibility.

Let's take a good look at the inferences that Ben hopes his reader will make, since he is apparently incapable of just writing them out.

First, the national debt is really, really big (and if you don't know what a trillion is, he'll explain it in billions, which, since you're under age eight, you probably don't understand either), and that, we gather, is really bad, for reasons Ben apparently figures we all know.

A little historical context could be useful here. Check this out:

This is national debt as a percentage of GNP, the index that economists and investors use. Notice that they don't pay much attention to the hard number, as Ben does above, because it's meaningless except relative to the size of the economy supporting it, not unlike the size of your mortgage relative to your income. So in historical terms, yes, the national debt is high right now, but not anything like as high as we've experienced in living memory.

This one breaks out the more recent figures above by administration, which is enlightening:















I also think it's important to compare our debt with other big economies for a relative credit score:

So we see in hard numbers that our current national debt is not exceptional relative to our own history or to the rest of the world. I won't go so far as saying it's a non-problem, but given the new confidence investors can have in our decision-makers relative to the Bush administration and the interest we all have in responding decisively to our credit and employment problems, it's nothing like as scary as Ben would like to imply.

Next he makes a claim about balanced budgets. I went on a little fact-checking tour and I found where he got this idea. It's (gasp!) a blog by an anonymous guy selling stock-market advice and opining occasionally on "reckless government spending." His unusual take on the budget requires us to add government trust funds to outstanding debt to get what he sees as total public debt. If we take a somewhat more rational and conventional approach, we see that the Big Dog managed several balanced budgets in the '90s:

The way Ben juxtaposes these two ideas -- national debt and balanced budget -- he creates the impression that he thinks they're pretty close to the same thing. If he truly won't be satisfied until we clear off the national debt, he'll likely have a long wait. That's occurred exactly once in our entire history, for about a week in 1835.

Ben skims quickly over this twisted history to support his real point, and it's the usual one -- that Congresscritters can't be trusted with anything, that they're only interested in getting potted, laid and reelected, presumably so they can get potted and laid some more. I'd just love to see him say that to the face of any of the people he's criticizing. (Quite frankly I'm guessing he's just projecting what he would do if he got to Congress.)

Looking at this column as a whole, I'm having a hard time imagining what good public purpose Ben thinks he's fulfilling by publishing it. Who would be served if readers further adopt his cynicism about politicians? How would that make anything better? Does he imagine that angry voters will rise up and elect better politicians, even as he trashes everyone in Congress? What would he have them do differently?

Fueling anger without clear purpose leads only to mob mentality. Is that Ben's vision for a better America?

Update, Tuesday: I just ran across this version of the debt graph, which includes a pair of interesting projections. Notice that the editor of the graph is confusing the debt and deficits as well.