Latest Publication

Finally, the publisher released this book, to which I contributed half of Chapter 6 (or rather, Dr. N. VanDerHeyden and I co-authored all of Chapter 6):
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/713754/description#description

Why shouldn't Jose Padilla sue John Yoo? - By Emily Bazelon - Slate Magazine

Why shouldn't Jose Padilla sue John Yoo? - By Emily Bazelon - Slate Magazine: The author, admittedly a friend of the litigants, can't understand (or pretends to be unable to) why it's wrong to criminalize policy differences.

Here's the short version from a less credulous perspective:

1. Lawyer named John Yoo working for DoJ is asked - as part of his job - to give a legal opinion. His bosses want to know how rigorously they can interrogate suspected terrorists without going over the line into torture, which is illegal under US and international law.

2. Said lawyer follows his bosses' instructions and gives his opinion, in the form of the "Torture Memo". The result might be good, bad or ugly - folks disagree on that - but it seems impossible to hold that he didn't (a) follow his bosses' instructions and (b) do his job.

3. These same bosses take his work, combine it with other considerations including political ones, and pick a course of action for the armed services and other parts of the executive branch.

4. Jose Padilla gets arrested, gets treated as an "enemy combatant" and eventually gets treated as a criminal defendant.

5. Jose Padilla gets convicted - in a regular criminal court, by a jury - of engaging in a conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, etc.

6. Activist lawyers at Yale decide to sue the lawyer from items #1-2 above, personally, for doing his job, using the Bivens precedent.

Here is where I think the Democrat/Liberal approach is tremendously dangerous.

Bivens is for getting relief when an executive branch agency violates your Fourth Amendment rights (and presumably other rights). Whether it's a rogue agent, or his boss issues wrongful and unlawful orders, or whatever, if you have your rights violated in certain ways you can ask to have the wrong-doers held accountable.

So, who should be sued? Everybody in item #3 above? The people who put Padilla in the military brig? The contractor who built the brig? The maker of the car used to transport him? The secretary who filed the lawyer's memo, made copies and faxed them?

If the Left really wants to make the specific treatment outlined by John Yoo illegal, they control Congress - they can PASS A LAW making it illegal. But they can't or won't. So instead they want to intimidate people who really are doing exactly the job they were hired to do, for the crime of not thinking like a Leftist.

Slate's writer, Emily Bazelon, commits a serious sin of omission, claiming that Yoo isn't facing much risk: "It's also worth noting, in this context, that Yoo isn't facing financial ruin or even risk: Following Padilla's wishes, the suit asks for damages of exactly $1. And DoJ has to offer to provide and pay for Yoo's defense."

Bazelon fails to mention that, if Yoo loses, he has to pay the $1, PLUS the other side's legal expenses, which DoJ will NOT cover. Why would they? If Yoo is guilty, then by definition he was acting outside his official capacity (even though common sense says he was). That will be millions of dollars. Oh, but "Yoo isn't facing financial ruin or even risk" - right.

The real lesson here is that the Left will go to any lengths - even destroy the inner workings of government and create new Thought Crimes - even criminalize legitimate policy differences - to win a political struggle.

The Yale lawyers in question should have their case thrown out with prejudice and have to pay Yoo's and DoJ's expenses.

DHMC | Center for Shared Decision Making

DHMC | Center for Shared [Medical] Decision Making

Sponsored in part by the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, this site makes me want a similar service in my home town. This is geared towards empowering the patient and family with information AND with guidance for structured decision-making. Wow.

Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine by Peter W. Huber, City Journal Autumn 2007

Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine by Peter W. Huber, City Journal Autumn 2007

A long and winding essay that covers in detail the history of some of medicine's old breakthroughs, and predicts how the new ones - such as chemicals and molecules tuned to specific conditions, including genetic ones - will provide pressure against socialized medicine.

Not sure if I buy the prediction -- the history alone is fascinating and well worth the read.

After Action Reviews

Keys to a good After Action Review meeting:

0. Only include the people who took part in the action (including planning it)

1. No names, no ranks - everybody speaks their mind, and past performance is referred to by title or position, never by name. No ego, no fear, just truth and openness. Everybody is subordinate to the mission.

2. Focus is on fixing the future (not assigning blame for the past)

3. Put the needs of the firm above your need to be right, to be perfect, to be safe - approach the task of improving our process with humility and candor.

4. The seven stages of the debrief are STEALTH:

[S] Set time, location, and prepare
- assign roles: timekeeper, scribe, data input person, discussion leader (same as mission planner)
- inform everyone what they need to bring
- prepare the room with flip charts, clean table tops
- start on time / keep on schedule / end on time
[T] Tone is nameless, rankless
- lead by example; be open
- talk in the third person - never "I" or "you" but "the lead carpenter", "the estimator"
- don't care about WHO is right - care about WHAT is right
[E] Execution vs. Objectives -
- were objectives SMART?
- reconstruct the sequence of events
- did we accomplish the mission?
[A] Analyze execution
- list errors and successes
- for each error/success, list cause(s)
- identify underlying root cause(s) of each
[L] Lessons Learned
- prominent or recurring root causes
[T] Transfer Lessons Learned - make part of future process
[H] High note - positive summation


Source: "Flawless Execution" by James D. Murphy, ISBN 0-06-083416-1
(http://www.afterburnerseminars.com/ )

Massanutten Military Academy. The Leader in small Military Schools in Virginia. The finest co-ed, college prep, boarding, military school.

Massanutten Military Academy. The Leader in small Military Schools in Virginia. The finest co-ed, college prep, boarding, military school.

Daughter #2 is interested in this school. Can she handle it, though?

Banks Gone Wild - Krugman deconstructed

Banks Gone Wild - New York Times:

“What were they smoking?” asks the cover of the current issue of Fortune magazine. Underneath the headline are photos of recently deposed Wall Street titans, captioned with the staggering sums they managed to lose.

The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed. And they were encouraged to make socially destructive decisions by a system of executive compensation that should have been reformed after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, but wasn’t.

So opens former Enron advisor Paul Krugman's column, a study in how not to persuade. Krugman buries his good ideas under a layer of over-simplification, asides, and self-congratulation.

Over-simplification
"The answer, of course, is that they were high on the usual drug — greed." The answer. The one, single answer. The only possible answer. The alpha and the omega. As soon as I read the sentence, I feel Krugman trying to be too sweeping. He seems to be implying that the answer is to abolish greed, which is as likely to work as abolishing selfishness, hunger, or self-aggrandizement by newspaper columnists.

Self-congratulation
Krugman writes:

In a direct sense, the carnage on Wall Street is all about the great housing slump.

This slump was both predictable and predicted. “These days,” I wrote in August 2005, “Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a sustainable lifestyle.” It wasn’t.

Whee - Krugman works in his own brilliance. So how does this expand my understanding of the current situation? It doesn't feel like it does - rather it seems like a gratuitous bit of self-love. More persuasive would have been for the author to show us the external signs of doom that the fools didn't see. Because he doesn't offer that, Krugman seems to be saying that the only way to avoid future disaster is for everyone to listen to him - hubristic, especially coming from a former Enron advisor.

Asides
In fact, the entire sub-prime mortgage debacle is tangential to Krugman's real point - that corporate titans who make bad calls don't pay for it. This is a great point and deserves serious treatment, which Krugman fails to give. It's also a point that transcends the current crisis. Dwelling overmuch on subprime lending obscures that more universal point.

When he makes a good point - for example:

...[T]here’s a pervasive loss of trust, which is like sand thrown in the gears of the financial system. The crisis of confidence is plainly visible in the market data: there’s an almost unprecedented spread between the very low interest rates investors are willing to accept on U.S. government debt ... and the much higher interest rates at which banks are willing to lend to each other.

...it's easy to overlook because of the chaff. Yet it's a great point, and he quickly backs it up, not by quoting himself predicting it, but by offering us a look at "the market data" - score one for the otherwise slumbering economist trapped deep inside Krugman.

And finally, he gives the market the finger by suggesting that the way to fix the underlying problem - that "[t]he huge rewards executives receive if they can fake success are what led to the great corporate scandals of a few years back" - is some sort of vague "political" solution.

Right. Campaign finance legislation has been profoundly ineffective at driving the money out of politics, so we should do what - copy that failure and try to legislate away greed? Krugman, having filled the column with fluff, can't or won't say. The only strong conclusion he even implies is that there is no market based solution. A curious conclusion for an economist, but par for the course for a former economist turned emotion-based, second-rate political hack.

Dear Mr. Krugman, please raise the bar on yourself. This column is beneath your abilities.

TIME Magazine's Loaded Language

Shooting Deer for the Homeless contains heavily loaded language - so biased it might as well be an editorial. Here's an analysis of the first part of the opening paragraph.

"Hunting may seem a cruel and heartless activity to animal-rights activists and many Americans. But hunters are trying to show they can be compassionate people too. A growing number of American hunters are donating part of their bounty each year to people who need it most, the poor and the homeless, through nationwide campaigns like Hunters for the Hungry, which delivers game meat to local food banks and shelters. In Georgia, where the group was founded 15 years ago, more than 1,000 hunters delivered 5,000 pounds of meat in 2006, making 25,000 meals. Nationwide, the group is on track to deliver its one-millionth meal in December."

Let's look at these crucial opening sentences:

Hunting may seem a cruel and heartless activity to animal-rights activists and many Americans. The author uses two adjectives - "cruel and heartless" gives her two bites at the apple, reinforcing the wickedness of hunters. Ending with "...and many Americans" reinforces an impression that this is the majority opinion, implying without saying "most".

But hunters are trying to show they can be compassionate people too. Too? Why "too"? Meaning hunters can be compassionate alongside being "cruel and heartless" or meaning that hunters can try to approach the compassion levels of "animal-rights activists and many Americans"? And "trying to show" implies that they haven't succeeded - that the jury is still out. One gets the image of cruel, heartless hunters engaged in some clever scheme to slap compassionate-looking whitewash on their underlying evil.

The article goes on to give the animal-rightists yet another crack at the hunters, but at this point the damage has been done. There can be little doubt that the author is leaning personally towards the "cruel and heartless" angle - and seems to be struggling to bring a biased person's impression of "balance" to the piece, through a sort of rote he-said/she-said formula.

Writing like this makes me glad I don't subscribe to TIME any more.

Lieberman condemns Democrats' far left

Lieberman: profoundly wrong:

"…there is something profoundly wrong—something that should trouble all of us—when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

"There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base—even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime."

I blame Bush for having started the partisan divide on the war in Iraq, but I blame its depth and intensity on these Democrats that Lieberman so courageously identifies - they hate Bush more than they love their own country.

The Presidential Leadership Project - Blogging for President

The Presidential Leadership Project - Blogging for President is a post by Jim Kouzes discussing his research (with Barry Posner) about what people say (or claim) they want in a leader.

As Kouzes puts it:

For people to follow someone willingly, the majority of constituents believe the leader must be

* Honest
* Forward-looking
* Inspiring
* Competent
Taken by themselves, these four characteristics are useful. Write them down and take them into the polling booth with you. Put them next to the names and then vote. But what is more significant is what these qualities mean when taken as a whole. Three of these four key characteristics—honest, competent, and inspiring—make up what communications experts refer to as “source credibility.” More than anything, people want leaders in whom they can believe. Credibility is the foundation of leadership. Period. Full stop. Put another way, if you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message.

My only quibble with this is, it's what people say they do, which often differs from what people actually do. (Everybody says they want more mass transit - just not for themselves. They want the other drivers to take it and get off the road.)