Following

I'm tivoing the Iranian revolution. I have people right now gathering the information into book form, and in a few months I will purchase the paperback.

That's my way of saying it's great the the Iranians are dissatisfied with Ahmedicatedad, but I don't have to spend my day following it. It's not like I can affect the situation.

On the other hand, it does show once again that the global connectivity in general and the Internet in particular make it hard to keep tyranny going. Just as the PC and fax machine are said to have helped bring down the former Soviet Union, it appears that the Iranian revolution is being broadcast on Twitter.

But that presupposes that this is a revolution. It's impossible for me to know whether that is true or not -- are the protests against Ahmedinnerjacket, or against the Islamic regime itself?

And if they are against the Islamic regime, with what form of government will the revolution replace it?

I guess Barack Obama thinks maybe the revolution will bring something worse than totalitarian dictatorship - capitalism.

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Big Boondoggle Rescues FutureGen Boondogglet

Chris Edwards has a piece on FutureGen in the Cato@Liberty blog. FutureGen is a project to take CO₂ from burning coal and pump it into layers of rock beneath Illinois farmland. I live and work near Mattoon, and would probably personally benefit from the boondogglet. Edwards:

FutureGen was launched in 2003 by President Bush as a public-private partnership to build a low-emission coal-fueled power plant and demonstrate technologies to capture carbon dioxide. The government was to share the cost of the project with 12 private energy companies. The project was originally estimated to cost $1 billion, but by 2008 the estimate had ballooned to $1.8 billion. By mid-2008, $176 million had been spent.

A lot of the money spent for FutureGen in the Mattoon area went to building an interstate exchange. The exchange also serves other light industry in the area. It was needed already.

The FutureGen decision to locate in Mattoon was still ringing in the air when Rod Blagojevich sent a letter to President Bush asking him to come to Mattoon for a photo op demonstrating the President's commitment to fighting greenhouse gases and such. The tone of the letter, and Blago's announcement of it, were a clear attempt to rub the President's nose in the fact that Illinois had been chosen over Texas. It was embarrassing to me that Blago thought Bush so small-minded, but that's what we had for a governor.

Immediately after that letter was announced, the project got the axe (or got sent back to the proverbial committee).

Maybe it was a coincidence, but I've always thought that if Blago had just kept his mouth shut, the project would have gone on as planned.

As a global warming skeptic, I see little need for this project. I've also seen too many B-movies not to be scared silly about pumping steamy-hot CO2 into underground rock formations. It just screams Godzilla plot.

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Obama's ACORN Denial of Service Attack

Barack Obama knows ACORN from the inside. He trained them.


So now that ACORN is submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in over a dozen States, the reason his $800,000 campaign expense for front work went at least partially to ACORN is now clear.

The purpose of an Internet Denial of Service attack is usually not (just) to disable the particular computer or network under direct attack, but either to draw response resources (troubleshooters) to the attacked system, or to force secondary systems to be used. Sometimes the DOS attack is merely designed to create the appearance of poor performance, so that users of the system turn to competitors or in any case away from the service it provides.

And so it is with the ACORN attack.

Rather than merely registering new Democratic voters, ACORN so clogs the system with phony registrations that it becomes nearly non-functional.

This is a result of ACORN employing people of questionable character (e.g., felons) to strong-arm and wheedle ordinary citizens into registering -- whether or not they are already registered voters (in the same district or another). Further, ACORN assigns to these unvirtuous employees quotas, making it virtually certain that the employees will submit fake registrations, en masse.

So across the country in battleground States, voter registration has ground to a halt, or limps along with demoralized staff and tarnished public image. ACORN is doing direct damage to confidence in the sanctity of our electoral process, in an attempt to destroy its overall integrity. Rather than being content to register new voters, perhaps ACORN wants to make the registration process unnecessary. After all, if the system cannot be trusted, why use it?

And remember, Barack Obama trained them.

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When Smart People Have Bad Ideas

Lunactivism meets geek: Blackle, as the name suggests, is an effort to SaveThePlanet™ by having a search page that uses a black background. Clue in, fellas: one of the reasons Google was successful is that their screen was visually appealing. Yours is just plain ugly. Eye-averting, skin-crawlin', get-me-away-from-here ugly.

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Paperless Electronic Voting?

Haven't we been over this?

A "think tank" called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is due to release a report on Tuesday, September 18, with the counterintuitive conclusion that a paper trail does not add to the security of electronic voting systems. The briefing hould be hilarious.

Read more at Modern Sourcery.

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TANSTAAFL

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Liberals (and that means you who run about calling yourselves "Progressives", as if a name changed a thing) are fond of promising a free lunch. They never call it a Free Lunch, but use terms like "compassion" and "fairness", for who is against compassion and fairness? But a Free Lunch is always promised, and a Free Lunch never is.

• Tax the rich their "fair share" while "real people" need not pay taxes, and half the country doesn't. There is no pain directly associated with a tax increase, so government grows in its taxing power.
• Punish Big Oil companies who will pass on their costs to consumers, or who will not have incentive to invest in new sources and new technology, reward their investors, or grow in other ways.
  
• Free health care will cost more to deliver than private care does, and will be of inferior quality. While those using free health care will suffer the consequences first, eventually everyone will suffer. By competing with the private sector (or outlawing it), the government health care will decrease the quality and increase the cost of care.
  
• Free health insurance, also known as insurance company welfare. Health insurance is the biggest scam ever, except maybe for Global Warming Carbon Offsets. Why do you need insurance? Because health care is expensive. But do the insurance companies make a profit? Yes, a huge profit. If they make a profit, then it stands to reason that the money you pay for insurance does not all pay for health care. For the government to pay insurance premiums, or even to become an insurance provider itself, is merely to suck money away from health care and toward the bureaucracy.
  
• Free housing should be subsistence-level, at most: a way to keep out the elements and lock the door, but not much more. Instead, public housing competes with private landlords, forcing them off the bottom two rungs of the ladder.
  
• The Minimum Wage is an exercise in tail-chasing, which also outlaws certain kinds of work. Jobs which a person could perform that would be helpful, but are not profitable enough, can not be done, or must be done by volunteers. If a volunteer cannot be found, the task must be handled by employees who would otherwise be doing more profitable work, thereby decreasing their productivity, their value, and their wages.
  
• Broadband Internet is not a right, contrary to what you may have heard. If you want the government to ruin the Internet experience, have them regulate it. Once they start, there will be no limit on their control, either in the technology to be used or the content to be found.
  

Now comes Hillary Clinton with he free plan for mortgage bailouts. Rather than allow people to face the consequences of their decisions and fail, learning a lesson for next time, she wants to allow people to live inconsequential lives.

All of these promised free things come at a cost. The cost is hidden, and the person promising it may see that cost as a benefit, but that doesn't mean that it is actually a benefit, at least not to the one on the consuming end of the supposed free lunch.

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The Planet is Underpopulated

Is the problem with the world that we have too many people?

Many liberals would be surprised that there is even a question: population should be reduced to medieval levels to fix everything from African Hunger to Global Warming. But rather than battle that particular straw man, let me restate my counterthesis by positing rather weakly that many of our problems, to the liberal way of thinking, are caused by overpopulation.

Assuming arguendo that all (or most) of the world's problems are caused by having too many people, is the prospect of having too many people one we have to address? That is, how should we address the threat of overpopulation?

Hopefully all of the answers to that will involve attrition this time, not mass slaughter as they did in the 20th century. Now, that wasn't fair. Sorry. Just because every Communist who has ever gained power has been a world-class mass murderer doesn't mean that the next one will be. And that all communists are liberals doesn't imply that all liberals are communists of the mass-murdering persuasion.

But people are writing (and purchasing) books about how wonderful the planet would be without us. What if Man were to be wiped off the face of the Earth? I've thought about that. Seeing the weeds that grow in the cracks in the driveway, it seems obvious that in a few short years, they would overgrow it. The roof of the house would soon start to leak, the leaks would lead to rot, and soon trees would take root in the attic. No, wait, that's how it is now. I really should patch those holes soon.

There is an undercurrent in progressivism that holds Man to be a locust, destructively feeding on The Planet to the misfortune of all other living, and non-living, things. Obviously, if there weren't so many people the damage would not be so great. Mankind (and by unavoidable extension, individual people) are parasites, an unpleasant blight on an otherwise perfect world.

But even without considering the damage to the planet, overpopulation (and of the "wrong" type of people) has been the left's bogeyman since Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to do something about it. The efforts continued, branching from the eugenics movement to encompass the horrors of World War II. And it continues unabated.

According to a 1994 study at the site dieoff.org (yes, really), "U.S. agricultural productivity is already unsustainable". That quote is, fortunately, not supported very well by the study. A key logical error interposed itself, wherein the study notes that population growth is primarily due to immigration, but concludes that individuals must exercise family planning or the entire population will be at the mercy of nature. Nowhere in that study did they actually look at U.S. agricultural productivity due to technological advances over time, except noting in the conclusion

Given the fact that the supply of natural resources is finite and that the ability of technology to replace many of these resources is limited, we are left with the necessity of controlling population numbers. Certainly, diminishing consumption levels by stringent conservation programs will help slow depletion. But individual responsibility on the part of men and women to control family size is vital to control population numbers and maintain a high standard of living, otherwise the harsh realities of nature will impose its control on the population.

Another flaw in the logic employs the fallacy of Division: just because the whole population will suffer if everyone doesn't exercise "individual responsibility", that doesn't imply that anyone in particular will suffer, whether or not they choose to exercise "individual responsibility".

But a more basic problem with the logic is the assumption that resources are finite. New resources, and new uses for old resources, and new ways to avoid using resources altogether are found with a regularity and pace which blows that assumption out of the water. It's a case of failing to understand that what appears to be a constant is actually a curve that changes in ways we don't understand.

In a piece from 2005, Jeff Lindsay wrote

How can the "obvious" logic of the population control lobby be wrong? Because the resources of the planet are not a fixed pie that dwindle with each birth. The resources are whatever we can make of this planet - or solar system - and it takes the work of human beings to transform raw materials and energy into useful resources. Humans are not a liability, but a resource that we need!

Population growth is only a problem if your basis vectors are skewed. I look at population growth as the goal, and the lack of place to put the people as a problem to overcome. I want the human race to dominate the universe. That goal is unattainable at our current population numbers.

I am for any plan or technology that allows continued, sustainable population growth, and I reject any plan to artificially limit that growth. Even if the population growth curve is exponential, it doesn't mean we can't sustain it.

If the people are hungry, figure a way they can feed themselves. If that means skyscraper farms (beware the popup), or floating farms over the 70% of the Earth that's covered in seawater, then that's what it means.

Unrestricted population growth should be our goal not only because we want growth itself, but because the restrictions are worse than the growth. Artificially restricting growth is saying "I've got life, but you can't have it.", which is akin to stomping waterlogged hands from the rails of the lifeboat.

Furthermore, it has been shown that the populations of prosperous, industrialized societies naturally level off, all by themselves. Or perhaps that's all Margaret Sanger's doing, by birth control and abortion.

Humans have the right to procreate. Whether they do it well enough to suit us is irrelevant, because it isn't our call. To fret and bother about where we will get the food to feed their children is equally silly, because that is certainly not our problem, it is theirs. Is that irresponsible? No, it's simply practical. Responsibility is taking possession of the effects of your actions. Someone else's actions are not part of that.

The lifeboat metaphor fails in several ways, not least in that there is a very good chance that one extra person in the boat could drown everyone, and that is wholly unlike the effects of increased population. One extra person could be the one who saves the rest of us.

But all in all, it seems better to work on how best to keep the boat afloat, rather than telling anyone they need to swim ashore.

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Acceptable Electronic Voting

H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (pdf), would mandate a "paper trail" for electronic voting machines and provide for public access to the source code for programs that control voting machines. I am withholding endorsement of HR811, because I want to be sure that the wording of the Act doesn't cause more problems than it solves, but on the surface the steps look positive.

This is a fairly long treatment of the subject for a blog post, but is far from a complete one. First I will give some background on information systems and security, followed by some specific principles that affect electronic voting. I'll give what should be non-controversial, or at least apolitical, policy statements, and then combine all of that together to show what an acceptable voting system would look like.

Background

To see why the things the bill addresses are important, we need to explore the basics of information security, as it applies to electronic voting. My goal is to introduce the topic to people who understand voting from a political or legal perspective, or that of a citizen, but who may have very little exposure to the technology at issue.

Electronic voting is an information system, a collection of processes arranged to transform, transmit, or store data. Information systems should be robust. A robust system is one which operates correctly and efficiently under a wide range of conditions, even under conditions for which it was not specifically designed. In particular, a robust system resists attempts to make it operate incorrectly.

In the subfield of information security, several principles are acknowledged by experts to help achieve robust and "secure" operation. "Secure" is in quotes there because it must be defined for each system. It has been noted that security is an emotion(†), which is an attribute of people, not of systems, but the feeling of security is engendered by some practices and endangered by others, and those practices can usually be analyzed without regard to why a certain result is desirable. A secure system is one about which the designers, implementers, and users feel confidence in its protection of their assets, within acceptable margins of risk. As in any risk analysis, the likelihood of a particular attack or failure must be balanced against the value of a given asset. It is meaningless to label a system secure without specifying the expected level and type of risk, and the assets to be protected against those risks.

While there is no perfect system, there are practices and principles which lead to secure operation. We try to anticipate problems and design to eliminate, or at least mitigate them. I'm going to get to the voting part soon, I promise.

The Principles

The hallmarks of secure operation are generally recognizable by anyone familiar with the concepts:

1. Economy of Mechanism - this means to keep things simple. Simpler processes are easier to understand and generally more robust.
   
2. Fail Safe Design - Erroneous input should result in the least harmful action.
   
3. Open Design - The reliability of the system should not depend on keeping its workings hidden.
   
4. Complete Access Control (Mediation) - Access to assets should be allowed only to those authorized to access those assets.
   
5. Least Privilege - Access to assets should be given only as required.
   
6. Separation of Privilege - Access to assets should be based on multiple independent criteria.
   
7. Least Common Mechanism - Shared means of operations should be minimized.
   
8. Psychological Acceptability - If the perceived inconvenience associated with system safeguards is higher than the perceived value they allow, users will tend either to circumvent the safeguards or to bypass the system altogether, and use something less effective but more accessible.

There are some principles to bear in mind when creating correct, robust systems:

1. Input should be validated before it is used.
   
2. Efficiency: when possible, the resources (typically time and space) used by a process should not grow faster than the size of the input.
3. Special cases signal that a design can be improved.
4. Hope is the enemy of "is".
   

OK, Now the Voting Part

There are two fundamental resources in voting, the physical ballot and the information contained on the ballot, the votes. The ballot is important as a physical record of the intention of the voter, but the information on the ballot is far more important to the process. A ballot may contain several votes, one per contest (except for multiple-choice board races, ballot initiatives, etc.).

Voting must be done in secret, or maintaining confidentiality.

Voting must be done with assured information integrity, so that no one can alter data or exert influence over the process itself in order to alter the outcome.

Voting must work, or be available. It is unacceptable for voters to be delayed longer by process failure as they are waiting to vote than it takes them to cast their ballots. Preliminary results must be known soon after the polls close in the last polling place (e.g., Hawaii).

Counting all votes should be a feature of any system, but there are several ways in which votes could fail to be counted properly:

• Individual ballots could be mangled, rejected, or lost by the voter or by the system
• Blocs of ballots could be mangled, rejected, or lost by the system
• Individual or blocs of votes could be unused or used multiple times by the system

Let's take the general principles in order, produce some policy statements, and then wrap those policy statements into a high-level outline of a system.

1. Fail Safe Design - All legal votes should be counted. It should be difficult to present erroneous input. It should be impossible to make one ballot choice that is counted for another ballot choice. Input on one ballot choice should not affect other choices.
   
   
2. Complete Access Control - Only the voter should know what choices he made in the voting booth. The system should allow authorized voters to vote one time per election.
   
   
3. Least Privilege - Individuals should be given only the access to ballots their role requires. For instance, those counting votes do not need to know which election they are counting.
   
   
4. Separation of Privilege - Access to ballots, vote tallies, and control data should be based on multiple independent criteria.
   
   
5. Least Common Mechanism - Votes and ballots should be separated as soon as possible. That is, the transmission of votes must not rely on shipping physical ballots.
   
   
6. Economy of Mechanism - We should use the simplest system satisfying all of the requirements
   
   
7. Open Design - A standard for voting machines should be produced, so that a machine from any manufacturer could be put through exact, reproducible tests. Security should not be used to justify hiding the operation of the system. The overall system must be documented clearly and simply enough for anyone to understand.
   
   
8. Psychological Acceptability - The voting process should change as little as possible from the voter's perspective. The voting process should also be understandable to all voters, or at least should present no obstacle between the voter and voting. Safeguards should not appear to prospective legitimate voters to be more trouble than they are worth.
   

Now For The Tricky Part

With policy statements in hand, we can now see what sort of system would meet the requirements of those policies.

If voting is seen to be difficult because of the security measures, the measures will be worked around, or people will simply not vote.

Only those authorized to access ballots that have been cast should be able to do so. There really should not be an argument against this, but some have demagogued this issue saying that identification is an attempt to exclude poor or minority voters, or that it is psychologically unacceptable as a security measure. As long as the difficulty of obtaining identification for purposes of voting is low, and the identification of who voted does not show how they voted, vote suppression is a red herring.

As quickly as possible, the information on the ballot should be copied from the physical ballot, or a physical ballot ("paper trail") created from an electronic ballot, and if possible the voter should verify a correct copy. Both the physical ballot and the electronic ballot should be transmitted to their secure destinations, by separate means. In no case should the public Internet be used as a means of transmitting official ballots, because this introduces too much shared mechanism: an Internet denial of service would jeopardize voting availability.

While some would step away from anonymous ballots or even away from the secret ballot altogether, the problem of voter intimidation is still a bigger enemy of democracy than voter anonymity. That is, balanced against the ability for others to punish or reward a particular vote, the secret ballot allows the potential of multiple votes per voter or ineligible people voting. Non-secret voting does not completely cure these problems, and introduces many others, besides. The secret ballot follows the principle of Least Privilege: no one but the voter knows how he voted.

The source code (what the programmers edit) for a voting machine really should be available for everyone to see. But companies are wedded to the idea that keeping their code hidden gives them a business advantage, and we must rely on businesses to produce the machines, or rely on the government to make them, a truly intolerable situation. H.R.811 addresses these concerns by mandating that source code be given to election officials, but it is not clear whether citizens "inspecting" the source code would be allowed to do anything useful with it, or merely inspect it visually on paper. Inspecting the code without being able to execute it in a debugging environment is an unacceptable half measure.

The principle of Open Design does not require that the source code be revealed, however. While hiding the source code makes the attacker's job more difficult, it also lowers overall confidence in the system. If the attacker cannot force the system to behave in an unauthorized way even with the source code, the system can be assumed to be more secure than an equivalent system with hidden code. Hiding the source therefore should not be relied upon as a security measure. Companies who hide their source code should assume that the attackers have somehow obtained it, and design their countermeasures accordingly.

An electronic voting system should validate entries before a physical ballot is created, to catch the error early and allow for a good ballot to be taken. Processing two votes should take only twice as long as one vote takes. There should be no special handling required for the elderly or those for whom typical voting procedures are physically difficult: it should be easy for everyone.

The above can be accomplished in two basic ways, each of which has advantages and disadvantages:

1. Scanned Ballot: A voter fills out a human-readable form and drops it into a scanner. The scanning process can optionally allow the voter to confirm the ballot, or it can simply acknowledge that the ballot was read properly. The scanner tallies and transmits the votes.
2. Printed Ballot: The voter interacts with a machine to make his ballot choices. The machine prints out the ballot for the voter's inspection. The voter confirms his choices for the machine, and then drops the ballot into the ballot box. The machine tallies and transmits the votes.
   

In either case, Votes are tallied, batched, and the unofficial electronic results are transmitted automatically when the polls close. The physical ballots in the ballot box are counted when the polling places close, and the official results transmitted by a different means than the unofficial electronic ones were. The physical ballots are retained indefinitely, for recounts and academic analysis.

The Scanned Ballot method is simpler and more familiar to voters, and can be mimicked with a purely manual method and minimal communication infrastructure. The Printed Ballot method has better error detection and correction, and removes any doubt about what a ballot actually says, which is sometimes a problem in recounts.

In either case if there is a serious discrepancy between the official and unofficial results, an audit can be performed to uncover the problem, but the physical ballots should be considered authoritative unless there is sufficient evidence of tampering. By gathering and transmitting the unofficial and official results separately, errors (whether accidental or intentional) become very unlikely to affect the result of the election.

Thanks for reading. Those wanting to know more could do worse than to start with Bruce Schneier, who also blogs about squid on Fridays.

---

(†)I first heard that thought expressed at SANS'99 by a presenter from gnu.org, and I'm sorry I don't have a better cite than that.

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War and Peace

The history of mankind is the history of war and waiting for war. Peacetime is a kind of stalemate, in which the cost of war is judged by all sides to be greater than the fruits of victory, or at least, greater than the cost of peace.

The search for new weapons and destructive power in warfare is the search for leverage. Leverage is the ability to exert a small amount of effort to command a large amount of force. The history of war is the history of learning to use leverage.

In The Balance Sheet, we saw a hierarchy of values, ranging from our ideals at the top, then our civilian lives and on down to enemy military lives and enemy ideals at the bottom. Depending on the situation, we might spend or compromise massive amounts of items lower on the list to preserve or obtain things at the top.

In case it isn't clear, the notion that we can't put a value on human life holds true only because we value the things ranked below it so much less than we value it. We can, however, engage in cold calculation when we weigh the cost in lives of our decisions against the return in lives saved, or ideals defended, or the return of something of greater value to us than the lives we anticipate losing.

The calculus of war is a kind of vector equation, in which that range of values interacts with a set of risks. In a given situation, we calculate the risk that we will be forced to lose too much of a higher-value item than we will likely gain in other items. More generally, we have

War =

(Risk to ideals)*(Value of ideals)*(Quantity of ideals) +
(Risk of civilian loss)*(Value of a civilian loss)*(Quantity of civilian losses) +
Risk*Value*Quantity{Our Territory
Ally Ideals
Ally Civilian Lives
Ally Territory
Neutral Civilian Lives
Enemy Territory
Ally Military Lives
Enemy Civilian Lives
Our Military Lives
Neutral Territory
Our Money
Our Resources
Ally Money
Ally Resources
Neutral Ideals
Neutral Military Lives
Neutral Money
Neutral Resources
Enemy Resources
Enemy Money} +
(Risk of killing enemy)*(Value of enemy soldier)*(Quantity of enemy losses) +
(Risk of civilian loss)*(Value of enemy ideal losses)*(Quantity of enemy ideals)

While many military thinkers have considered the goal of war to be ending the enemy's ability to enforce his will, that maxim has shown weakness as the cost to acquire leverage has fallen. In particular, the cost of leverage has gotten so low that we now face an enemy whose values place all of the terms in the above equation except his own values at zero. When we can't convince the enemy that his cost for imposing his will is too high, our end goal must be to utterly discredit the enemy's ideals that conflict with our own.

When a new technology comes on the scene, people are quick to exploit it for military advantage. A tiny change in weaponry, or a change in the availability of weaponry or training in the use of weaponry, can have a large impact on the conduct of war.

The tactics and armor needed to fight an enemy armed only with swords, spears, and bows are dramatically different than those needed against one armed with crossbows. The canon reduced mighty castles and fortresses to so much rubble. The musket altered tactics again, as did in turn the rifle, the repeating rifle, and barbed wire. But each of these technologies depended on advances in manufacturing technique and technology for non-military purposes.

Technology changes the calculus of war by changing the relative risks. When access to information is as easy as it is today, coordination of resistance and the ability to impose some amount of will is in reach of very small operators. Leverage is higher than ever before, and increasing with no end in sight.

History happens

Technology is not the only reason war becomes an option. Governments grow and change, tyrants come and go, reformers reform and burn out, and the people endure it all. Sometimes the government of some state or another will decide it needs to grow more than its territory will allow. When the desire for territory exceeds the value of the costs associated with taking it, we have war.

Sometimes a government will become so corrupt or incompetent that it fails. The resultant 'power vacuum' makes the decision to attack that territory easier, because it lowers the risk involved.

History waits for a technology, people, resources and tactics to come together. When the dreaded combination presents a lower risk to achieve a goal by military force, peace is soon only a sweet memory.

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The Silver Bullet Syndrome

After the VaTech massacre, there have been calls for more gun control, calls for teaching self-defense, calls for calls for censoring video games, and lots of complaints about campus security. Panicky, unrealistic charges sprang up saying implicitly that campus police should have known who committed the first two murders and explicitly that they should have "locked down" the campus in response to what their evidence said was a domestic dispute.

Since the lunatic was a student who lived on campus, under a campus lockdown he could simply have gone back to his own dorm and done the same thing he did at Norris Hall.

It has come out that the campus security and counseling staff knew or suspected that the lunatic was a lunatic, there have been calls for whisking away all such people to padded cells, whether they like it or not.

The human brain is a complex piece of organic machinery, with a delicate and powerful interaction between mental process, biochemistry, and cell growth. Thought patterns actually influence the physical layout of the brain. The subtle chemical balances vary from person to person, such that what might be a harmful combination for one is not for another. Further, the chemistry is offset by experience and training: a person with a tendency to believe his own opinions are facts, such as myself, can through training come to value the opinion of others. That's all hypothetical in my particular case, of course. Haha. Yes, you're right, not a laughing matter.

So there have been calls for all college students to receive mental health screenings.

It's a prime example of the Silver Bullet Syndrome: reacting to a crisis with a solution that may or may not work on a particular instance an intractable general problem. The silver bullet may not kill the werewolf, because you still have to shoot, and hit, the werewolf. Neither gun control, self defense training, locking down a campus, locking up all known lunatics, nor screening incoming college students for mental health are guaranteed to work against the general problem of how to kill the werewolves of a free, dangerous society.

There has always been an unquestionable oddness and questionable mental health of artists and writers, from Edgar Alan Poe to Adolph Hitler, from cartoonists daring to depict a prophet to those sent to Siberia for opposing an evil empire. Liberals should take note that when we give the government a power, it doesn't readily give it up, and the power to imprison those who have done nothing wrong is a dangerous one, indeed.

But it will at least be interesting to see Nannyism duke it out with the menace of drug company profit. Will liberals fall on the side of protecting us from those whose oddness can only be detected with mental health screening, or will their distrust of Big Pharma prevail?

(Somewhere in here, a link to Dr. Sanity would be nice.)

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Avoiding the Next School Massacre

What happens to make people shoot up a school classroom?

Eric at Classical Values asks why the Virginia Tech students, especially the adult males, didn't fight back.

There are several factors which intuition says probably contributed.

• From the time kids are babies until the end of high school, they are told that fighting is what bad kids do, and not to do it.
• Those with the urge to protect others before themselves are in Iraq and Afghanistan, not Southwest Virginia.
  
• The cops are always saying not to fight back.
• It's a gun free zone. He can't possibly have a gun.
• No one told them to fight back, that they had offensive capability and could fight back.
  

That last point bears expansion. Have ever had an object, such as a ball, thrown at you when you weren't expecting it, even in a context where you should be? It takes a lot of concentration to deal with it.

Now imagine a college textbook flying at you. You can't catch it with a gun in your hand. A hail of textbooks, pens, cell phones, backpacks, and furniture would be impossible to deal with for an attacker. A group of two or three people picking up furniture and charging the attacker with it would be able to disable him without being killed. If he happened to need a body bag after that, well, better him than the rest.

That's how kids should be trained, from kindergarten, to react to someone who threatens them or attacks their teacher. Fight back, with whatever means you have available.

A school district in Texas tried training like that, but the media controversy shut them down.

Burleson Independent School District (BISD) hired Response Options, a Dallas-based company, to provide general school safety training, which included fight-back training. The latter included encouraging students to throw objects at armed intruders, knock them off balance, make as much noise as possible, lock onto an intruder’s limbs, and try to take intruders down.

Teachers, 650 freshmen, and some elementary school students in the 8,500-student district received the training.

But after a national media buzz, on October 20 the district sent students’ parents a letter stating “BISD does not, nor will we support teaching our students to attack an intruder.”

Instead, they're trained to be helpless targets.

Why should students live with a general background fear, an implicit picture of themselves as victims in waiting? The odds of an attack are very low, after all. For a number that may as well be 100% of students, a classroom attack will never happen. Telling them that if an attack occurs, they are not just allowed but called on to repel it will do more for them than all the counseling and empowerment sessions they could attend. It's real empowerment, not feel good happy talk.

A bit of math: there are 55,000,000 K-12 students enrolled in US schools. Assuming that number holds for 10 years, then each year there will be about 4.25 million different students, or about 93,000,000 students total. Supposing that there will be 930 students involved in school attacks in the next ten years, an outrageously high number, that's 1 in 100,000 (0.001%) or approximately zero.

Compared to the number of kids who will be involved in violent crime not part of a "school shooter" scenario, it's statistical noise.

So why not teach them to fight back? Does not fighting back increase their survival chances, even for the zero percent of them who will be in that situation? Logic says no: killers who come to school have come to leave no survivors. The kids will be killed if they do nothing.

With regard to the charge that we are trained to act with cowardice in the face of a VaTech scenario, the always insightful Mark Steyn writes:

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

The lessons from VaTech are few in number. But we do know that when the targets fought back and became adversaries, more people lived. When they sat nicely or played dead, more people died.

Take your pick.

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Leverage

The media dustup over Dr. James Dobson's interest in Fred Thompson's faith made me think about Dr. Dobson. I used to be a devoted follower, back when I was a single dad trying to figure out kids. This isn't about him at all, though.

A few years ago, Focus on the Family interviewed Dr. Richard Swenson on his book Margin. I haven't read it, but that interview stuck with me ¹.

Since the invention of writing a few thousand years ago, technology has been able to increase at an exponential rate. I use "exponential" advisedly. Prior to writing, Man possessed only the amount of knowledge that a group could memorize and pass on to its next generation orally. After writing, information could be recorded in much more detail, allowing an individual to acquire or recaquire the details of an area of knowledge as needed.

A quantity increases exponentially when the amount of its increase is a function of how much of it there is. That's not a rigorous definition, but it will do.

Writing allowed information to spread, even being carried by people who could not read it. Once written down, it could last as long as its medium. The more people there were who could read, the more information there was to store and disseminate.

The Internet has greatly expanded our power to communicate. We can form cliques with people whose interests we share, even though we have never met them and couldn't pick them out of a crowd.

Likewise, the technology of war has come a long way, from spears and slings to firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and supersonic fighters whose targets never see or hear them. Many of these weapsons require only one person to operate, and greatly magnify a single human's power.

Dr Swenson was writing before 9/11, but he foresaw the leverage acquired when a handful of people with simple knives can control the destructive power of a jumbo jet, or derail a train, or poison a city. Blogs and online communication allow us to control of vast amounts of power with the flick of a switch or the click of a mouse. Well, "us" may be a bit of an overreach.

I really should read that book.

¹ Or maybe I've got it confused with some other book. It's been several years.

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