1) I have about eight books worth of research piled up waiting to be explained, but as everything seems to complicate itself before I can get it explained, maybe I should write something I can finish now so you don’t think I’ve forgotten about you.
2) I thought of this when I was fifteen years old, and have been puzzled by it ever since. Why is there not an accepted system to measure how hard it is raining?
The way this could be done is quite obvious. Visualize an instrument a little like a pinwheel, but instead of the fan blades of the pinwheel, four, six or eight “spokes” with a small, triangular paper or light plastic cup attached to each spoke, so that it catches the rain rather than catching the wind. There is a very, very low co-efficient of friction—like a pinwheel—so that as the rain falls in one cup the weight of the water drives that cup down, and more of the rain accumulates in the next cup on the wheel. As the wheel gathers momentum, each cup empties itself at the bottom and then is upside-down as it returns to the top, when it again begins to accumulate rainwater. As it rains harder the wheel will spin faster—thus, the speed with which the wheel spins measures how hard it is raining.
It seems to me that there is a clear and obvious need for a such a measurement. . .so much so that I always “hear the gap” where that measurement should be. I notice this, of course, because of baseball. The Red Sox had two rain delays on Sunday, and the announcers try to communicate how hard it is raining in the vague, imprecise language available to them. . .it is raining pretty hard; I don’t think it is raining as hard now as it was a minute ago; it is coming down in buckets; if this rain keeps up we will have to stop the game; they can play through this type of rain, etc.
Wouldn’t it be obviously better if they could communicate to us how hard it is actually raining? A “20” might mean that if it rained at this intensity for one hour that would result in two inches of rainfall.
Of course, it would take us a little while to learn the meaning of the terms, but if you grew up with a system like this, by the time you were an adult you would be able to just look at a rainstorm—even without a reading—and say “I’d guess we’re at about 13 IPH right now”, and
a) the observer would be very nearly right almost all of the time, and
b) the listener would know exactly what he meant.
IPH is Inches Per Hour; it’s not actually inches per hour, it’s tenths of an inch per hour, but IPH sounds better than TPH. You’d know that, too, if you grew up with the system.
Over time, standards would evolve, records would develop, and the measurement would integrate itself into the weather vocabulary. It is now raining at 12 IPH in Poughkeepsie, 10 down in Spackenkill, 3 in Wappingers Falls, and now pouring down at 18 in Hyde Park. A 22 was reported an hour ago in Woodstock. Eventually a standard would develop to help determine when a baseball game should be stopped: Baseball games can be stopped for:
a) lightning,
b) wet grounds, or
c) rain in excess of 15 IPH.
As long as you don’t have lightning, as long as you don’t have intolerably wet grounds, you can play baseball until you have a sustained rainfall of 15 IPH. You don’t have managers complaining that the game should have been stopped; you don’t have managers complaining the game shouldn’t have been stopped. There’s a standard. When the standard is met, the game is stopped.
Of course, you don’t stop the game the moment that the scale touches 15; it would be a more complicated standard than that. You stop the game when the scale touches 20 or is sustained for two minutes at 15; something like that. You re-start the game when the rainfall drops below 5 IPH and stays there for ten minutes.
Over time, the existence of such a system would be useful in predicting rainfall patterns. Suppose that the metropolitan area is blanketed by a system of “rain meters” measuring how hard it is raining across the area. Over time, computer models would develop that could predict that, once it hits 7 IPH right here, it will hit 15 IPH one minute later. Then you don’t have to wait until it hits 15 IPH; you can pull the players off the field and cover the field as soon as it becomes apparent that it very shortly WILL hit 15 IPH.
But it is very, very difficult to develop those computer models without an accurate measurement of exactly how hard it is raining at each location at each moment. It just seems obvious to me that such a system SHOULD exist, and I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that it doesn’t.
3) While we’re in the business of inventing stuff in our heads. . . has it ever occurred to you that physical stoplights are now completely unnecessary? Visualize an intersection near your home, with stoplights. Now visualize the same intersection, as it would look without stoplights. Looks a lot better, right?
Physical stoplights are now totally unnecessary. It would be extremely easy, with modern technology, to have a system that broadcasts stoplight signals directly to the vehicle, where they would be displayed on the dashboard as small red, green and yellow lights. Every vehicle would be required to have working receptors, but with modern technology, it’s not that big an issue, and there would have to be a small ground-level signal that would tell the pedestrian when it was safe to cross.
I think it would be a better system, I think 95% of people would prefer such a system if they did have it, I think it would be cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain, and the only reason we don’t have it is just the historic pathway of development. The old system was necessary in the past, and we still have it because we don’t know how to get rid of it. We don’t know where to start. No state can mandate the better system until all the cars have it; the cars don’t have it because no state uses it. No state can move until the other states move. It doesn’t pay to manufacture the equipment until the system is in place; it doesn’t pay to put the system in place until the equipment is manufactured. We’re stalemated by the inertia of obsolete technology.
4) While we are here, I am something of a nut on the subject of red-light cameras. I have been known to rant about red-light cameras until told to shut up.
I think that I was fascinated by the concept, first, as a puzzle. There is something about the idea of being anonymously sent an $85 ticket for allegedly running a red light that just really chaps my joy buzzer, and I always wish that there was some organization that I could send my $85 to now to fight against these damn things, or, better yet, I wish there was some politician running for Congress who, rather than spending his advertising dollars trying to convince me that the opposing politician is a bigger creep than he is, would spend just a little bit of the money running commercials saying, “Vote for me; I’ll introduce legislation to require that any city councilman who proposes installing a red-light camera to be strung up by his testicles, or, if it is a woman, by her toenails.” OK, you got my vote. $50 million spent trying to convince me that your opponent is a ne’er-do-well, you’re wasting your money; $25 spent opposing red-light cameras, I’m sold.
Another way to defeat them, by the way, is simply to organize and demand a trial. If everybody who hates the cameras demands a trial whenever they get a ticket, that will swamp the system and force it to fail. But why? I mean, it’s not like we have a right to run red lights, nor is it that I secretly enjoy running red lights, or that I feel entitled to run red lights. I probably haven’t had a ticket for running a red light in. . I don’t know, ten years. Why, then, am I offended by the concept of red light cameras?
Paradoxically, I am all in favor of police public surveillance cameras. Should the police have the right to post video cameras in public areas, to be used to investigate crimes?
Well, hell yes, they should; in fact, I’m in favor of having them pretty much everywhere. What is done in public areas is by definition not “private”, and one doesn’t have any right to commit crimes without being observed by the police. Put up the cameras everywhere; hell, put one up in my alley. You can use my fence post; I’m all in favor.
OK, well. . .what’s the difference?
We don’t want to live in a paranoid country. Americans should not have to drive around in constant fear of straying across a line. If we have red-light cameras and radar cams, what’s next? Lane-straying cameras, that send you a ticket when your tire goes out of its lane? Signaling cameras, that send you a ticket when you change lanes without signaling? Who wants to live in that America?
The thing is, I don’t have any intention of running red lights. I’m sure that I do run red lights from time to time. I’m sure that most everybody does, but it’s not done from a desire to break the law or a desire to ignore the law; it sort of just happens. You’re in a hurry, you’re trying to get out of a traffic box, the light turns yellow, you miscalculate how long it will take you to get through the light and how long the light will stay yellow. It shouldn’t cost you $85.
The police surveillance cameras are different because they’re not a practical response to petty misbehaviors. A couple of years ago, a guy down my alley had his garage set on fire in the middle of the night. We’ve had people walk down the alley and spray-paint graffiti. Probably the same people who spray the graffiti are the people who set the fire, but who knows? If you have a surveillance camera, you can review the tapes and maybe identify the people who set the fire. That’s deliberate misconduct, intent on causing harm. There is a real need to prevent that.
5) This relates to a much larger issue. I’ve just written a book, you know, about crime.
It is my belief that, in the broad sweep of history, serious crime is being gradually eliminated. You don’t see that, when you look around you one day at a time. You can’t learn that through experience. When you compare America today to America a hundred years ago, when you compare 2010 to 1610, when you compare 1610 to 1010, when you compare 1950 to AD 50, when you compare AD 500 to BC 500, you can see that war, murder, slavery, and other evils are being very gradually eliminated from human history, and that over the period of centuries enormous progress has been made. Not everybody sees that; that’s my view.
Over the last hundred years America has made great progress in eliminating murder, and really, it would be in many ways stunningly easy to make vast strides from where we are now. If we could, as a nation, stop the silly left/right arguments and focus on practical solutions, and if we could somehow seize control of the system of justice away from a court system that hampers innovation at every step, we could eliminate 80% of the murders we have now within twenty years. One of the biggest obstacles to that is a barbaric, punishment-based judicial system that has gotten worse over the last 30 years, while many other elements of the system of justice have gotten better.
Punishing people as a way of modifying behavior is massively inefficient at best, and is very often counter-productive. The prison system manufactures as much crime as it prevents. To move forward from where we are now—to move forward rapidly—we have to un-hinge the judicial system from the punishment model, and get more focus on repairing the things that are broken. In other words, yes, there are some people who are determined to do wrong, and we have to physically prevent them from doing wrong, but there are many people who stray across the lines because they’re not really paying attention to the lines and they’re not very good at leading productive lives. These people also need to go to prison; don’t get me wrong about that. But they need to be sent to prison and forced to accept help and guidance. Our judicial system too often takes people who just are kind of screwed up and need guidance to live a better life, and pushes them forcefully into the pathways of a criminal life. We need to stop that.
That’s a liberal point; there are conservative points that I would make with equal vigor, but you’ll have to trust me on that.
We all know why the city councils want red light cameras, don’t we? Money. You set up a camera at the right intersection, you can print 200 tickets a day. $85 a ticket, processing costs of $15. . .what is that, a half-million a year? It’s a sweet deal. The companies that manufacture these money-sucking machines are there to assuage your conscience with re-assuring studies about how many lives you are saving by preventing people from running red lights. You’re doing the right thing, Mr. City Councilman. The fact that you’re lining your pockets while doing it is just a side benefit.
The problem is, you’re trying to punish people into driving more carefully. It will not work. It will backfire, absolutely and without question. We don’t know how it will backfire, exactly, but it will. Punishment works through the mechanism of fear. Fear changes people. It makes them angrier. Fear makes people dislike those who cause them to fear.
Look, I obey traffic laws—and you obey traffic laws, 99% of you—because we wish to be good citizens, we choose to be safe drivers, and we do not intend to violate the laws. Occasionally we may stray; occasionally we may need to be reminded.
It would more effective, in preventing accidents and obtaining compliance with traffic laws, if we would reduce the number of traffic fines that we levy, and replace the practice of writing costly “tickets” with a system of reminders, feedback and positive re-enforcement designed to keep people focused on voluntary compliance. The problem with the red light cameras is that they risk doing to traffic law enforcement what we have already done with the prison system. It risks creating an ever-expanding cycle of punishment, fear, resistance and evasion.
So here’s what we can do with the red-light cameras. I like red-light cameras; I support them, I endorse them—under one condition. The one condition is, governments absolutely are not allowed to levy fines based on them, or to use them as revenue-producing instruments. If you videotape somebody driving a through a red light, send them a notice, letting them know they’ve done it. If they do it all the time, if they don’t stop doing it, even after you call their attention to it. . .well, that’s a different issue.
If it’s a $10 fine, OK. If it’s no fine, but when a policeman writes you a ticket for doing the same thing that adds $50 to the ticket, OK. I don’t have a problem with that.
Look, I think the use of technology to expand the capacities of the police force is a good thing. I’m actually in favor of that. What I am opposed to is expanding punishment as an instrument of social policy. It is irresponsible to do that. We should be thinking, as a people, about how we can reduce our reliance on a punishment-based justice system, and transition out of that. We certainly should not be rapidly and suddenly expanding it by electronic multiplication.
And if governments are trying to milk money out of essentially good people and essentially careful drivers by electronic snooping, I have a real problem with that, and I think that’s a very serious issue. It’s a big step down the wrong road, when we have an opportunity, because of new technology, to go down a better road, a more productive road.
6) My great-grandmother’s maiden name was McReynolds. When my father was a little boy there was a picture of the Supreme Court in the newspaper one day, and his grandmother showed him the picture, and pointed to Justice James Clark McReynolds. There, she said—that’s my cousin; that’s your cousin. Supreme Court Justice McReynolds.
They were poor, rural people living hundreds of miles from the seats of power, not the kind of people that you would ordinarily think would have a relative on the Supreme Court, and so we were always rather quietly proud of this.
What we did not know, unfortunately, was that Justice McReynolds was a horrible bigot. I read several books a year about the Supreme Court. In the last three months I have read The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment that Redefined the Supreme Court, by John Dean, and Minnesota Rag: The Dramatic Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Case That Gave New Meaning to Freedom of the Press, by Fred Friendly. As McReynolds was basically the only unrepentant racist to serve on the Supreme Court in the modern era, books about the Supreme Court very often will invent some way to tell some ripping tales about McReynolds’ boorishness and intolerance, even if their book really has nothing to do with McReynolds. He was colorful and different, and people like to talk about him, much in the way that the pig that wandered into church during the sermon and dropped a load right in front of the altar was colorful and different, and one might imagine that the people who were in church on that Sunday morning would probably talk about it for the rest of their lives.
Over time, these stories seem to be gathering steam. Justice McReynolds vigorously objected to Jews being on the Supreme Court or anywhere else that he had to deal with them, and he made no secret of his objections. When Justice Brandeis was selected to the Supreme Court, McReynolds refused to attend his swearing-in ceremony, refused to shake his hand, refused to travel with him, and refused for several years even to speak to him. Supreme Court conferences—then and now—begin with each justice shaking hands with each other judge, but McReynolds refused to shake Brandeis’ hand. There is a traditional Supreme Court photograph taken at the beginning of each term, but in1924 McReynolds refused to be photographed with Brandeis. He refused to sign opinions that Brandeis had authored, even if he agreed with them.
Now I read that, when Brandeis spoke in conference, McReynolds would get up and leave the room, but I never heard this until recently, and I am not convinced that it is true. When Benjamin Cardoza was elected to the Supreme Court some years later, McReynolds did attend the swearing-in ceremony, but pointedly read a newspaper as Cardoza took the oath.
He objected to women as attorneys, and he accepted blacks only in servile positions. He thought wearing fingernail polish was vulgar, and he would ridicule men who wore wrist watches, which he thought were effeminate. Because of this behavior, my good cousin is often singled out for censure, and people will quite often say that he was the worst Supreme Court Justice of all time. This is not exactly true—in fact, I would argue that he was, all things considered, a better Supreme Court Justice than any of the string of losers appointed to the court by Harry Truman. Despite his personal failings he was in many ways a competent judge, and at times, particularly early in his career, a progressive judge. He was also, perhaps, not quite as much of a pig as the church goers remember that he was. Oliver Wendell Holmes was quite fond of him, and William O. Douglas remembered him warmly, and wrote of him that, when leading the court due to the absence of the Chief, “he was the soul of courtesy, graciously greeting and raptly listening to the arguments by lawyers of both sexes.”
Anyway, reading McReynolds’ entry in Wikipedia, I was struck by this passage:
In addition, he hated tobacco and forbade smoking in his presence. He is said to have been responsible for the "No Smoking" signs in the Supreme Court building, which was inaugurated during his tenure. He would announce to any Justice who attempted to smoke in Conference that "tobacco smoke is personally objectionable to me." Few Justices would try, and those who did "were stopped at the threshold.”
Well. . .but isn’t that the attitude that everybody has about smokers any more? Doesn’t almost everybody nowadays object to smoking in their presence? Isn’t Wikipedia just piling on here, faulting McReynolds for being ahead of his time as an anti-smoking activist? If McReynolds wasn’t a universal object of contempt, might he not be singled out for praise in this regard, rather than condemnation?
And if Justice McReynolds is excused on this count because he was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history, then shouldn’t it be pointed out as well that, with regard to the other attitudes that we now condemn, Justice McReynolds as well was merely on the wrong side of a line drawn across history? After all, the attitudes that Justice McReynolds had toward Jews and blacks and working women, in the time and place where he grew up, were the universal attitudes that everybody held. . .that is, everybody who counted. Everybody who was white, male, and Protestant. McReynolds’ only fault was that he held on to these attitudes after others had discarded them.
Well. . .no.
Of course Justice McReynolds’ bigotry can not be so easily excused. Intolerance of people is different than intolerance of bad habits. McReynolds was a Supreme Court Justice, a thinking man and a leader. He is held to a higher standard than the conventions of time and place. He is expected to search for truth, and to see the truth when it shines so brightly in front of him. He is expected to promote justice. He is not expected to be a defender of injustice.
But I always think of Buck O’Neil, and of Buck’s conviction that there is enough good in any white man that you can reach out to him. Buck would have embraced James McReynolds, and there is a 50/50 chance he would have made him his friend.
Buck was a tremendously effective warrior against racism, and part of that was that he battled against the racism, rather than the racist. To recognize that there is good in everyone is also to recognize that there is evil in everyone—that the sins of Justice McReynolds and Bull Connor live deep within each of us, asking quietly to be fed. To talk too much about the racism of others, I think, is a kind of self-righteousness, an effort to deny our own sins by talking loudly about others’.