James Edward Johnson

Please note, this is the second of a two-part post. Read the first part here.

Kinnick Stadium at The University of Iowa (via HawkeyeSports).

So, you are sitting in a packed Kinnick Stadium with 70,000 of your closest friends …  A small single-engine plane flies low overhead and a fine powder begins falling from it.  What do you do?

The natural reaction is to panic and flee.  But why?  What do you accomplish by running?  You breathe more deeply, expose yourself to a wider area, endanger others with your panic, and gain nothing.   Imagine the powder is anthrax – how will this save you?  Anthrax, even in inhalational anthrax infections, does not kill quickly and is treatable.  You should stay still, avoid exposure in place by covering your mouth, and wait to find out what just happened.  You will be no worse off for doing so and you could very well be much better off.  By staying calm and reacting specifically to what you do know, you will help avoid causing harm to yourself and others.

The best solution to mitigating terror is not a top-down government solution.  It is public awareness and education.  Terrorism works because people improperly weigh risks and respond irrationally.  If people respond rationally – even if this were an anthrax attack – few would die at all and none would die because of mass hysteria.

Of course, as I noted in the prior post, a fake attack without any anthrax is easy.  Obtaining many pounds of anthrax spores, however, is many times more difficult.  Most likely, a terrorist making such an attack is relying on the response of people to his actions because he is likely not capable of an attack with the actual thing.  It is wise to remain cautious, but reasonable to presume that the attack is a hoax.

If we all responded to terrorism in the way we respond to auto accidents, terrorism would disappear tomorrow in most places.  Terrorism has a very low death count.  If it is worth your fear, then dozens of ordinary things deserve your fear too.  Never get in a car; in fact, stay at home.  Never meet new people.  Rarely use electricity or gas. Don’t even think of ever getting a pool in your backyard.  Become a recluse.  You should be crippled by fear of every ordinary risk if terrorism scares you.   It is not worthy of your fear because you will almost certainly die of causes other than terrorism.

Even at a small airport, the government should do little more.  Small airplanes are not, in themselves, very lethal.  You can kill as many people with one as you could with an SUV.  It is not worth hardening or securing.  If the government should secure small planes, then it should secure every gasoline semi-trailer, every fertilizer inventory, every gun store … every theater where someone might shout “fire!”  Even in these places, it is the diligence of the local people, and not the government, that will flag people for further examination by the authorities.

Persistence by pilots and staff in a municipal airport – by securing aircraft, noting and responding to suspicious people, raising alertness, … – will probably do far more to thwart my described potential attack than any government action.  This is, in large part, because terrorists adapt and exploit security holes.  The only practical response is to develop a cultural attitude wherein people adapt and change their behavior when they see potential criminal planning.  Remember, America mitigated the harm of one of the attacks on September 11.  Untied 93 was brought down prematurely, saving untold numbers of people, because ordinary people did something that the terrorists did not expect them to do – implement a response directly based on the specific actions of the terrorists.

Only that kind of ordinary vigilance will thwart these sorts of attacks.  More importantly, only this response will thwart attacks in a manner consistent with our nation’s commitment to a liberal, tolerant, and open society.  We need to be reasonably alert, remain in control when we sense heightened danger, respond with appropriate action when we see suspicious activity, and most of all, not respond with the irrational fear upon which terrorists rely for their efficacy.

I work in hospital finance.  One of my duties is to adjust hospital prices.  Hospital pricing is part of an obscenely complex system.

The reason why I am skeptical of anyone who has answers on healthcare is that I don’t know the answers with any certainty.  Even someone in my position cannot completely understand the why and how of hospital finance and healthcare costs.  We make a lot of assumptions and proceed to do our jobs.  We don’t worry about getting things right – we worry about getting things close.  If we aren’t close enough, we nudge our decisions away from the error.

There are many far more complex systems in the world.  The system I deal with is entirely man-made.  Nature is far more complex.

That is why I was not surprised to read this:

An upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere recently collapsed in an unexpectedly large contraction, the sheer size of which has scientists scratching their heads, NASA announced Thursday.

The layer of gas – called the thermosphere – is now rebounding again. This type of collapse is not rare, but its magnitude shocked scientists.

via Earth’s upper atmosphere collapses. Nobody knows why. – Christian Science Monitor

The only thing that is terribly shocking is that we believe we can predict atmospheric change and weather any better than we could if we simply looked in the past and assumed it would be the same as before.  The atmosphere is a huge and complex thing.  There is a reason why long term weather forecasts revert to historical averages … the meteorologists do not know any better about a week from today than does The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Personally, I do think we need to do certain things to prepare for climate change.  However, whenever anyone asserts that they know the future of the climate, they are probably either lying or overconfident.  Carbon dioxide will warm the atmosphere by preventing heat losses to space.  However, there is a huge distance between such observations and the bizarrely specific statements about what will and will not happen as a result of man-made global warming.  We need to be prepared for potential future risks, but we should not pretend that we understand such complex systems well enough to predict the need for anything other than general readiness.

My column on Frank Meeink’s autobiography, Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, is in today’s Iowa City Press-Citizen.  Here is the opening:

Losing all of his hatreds

Frank Meeink grew up in South Philly doing things that one would hope could not happen anywhere. The power of his story is its demonstration of how easily dejected kids can be radicalized into terrorists.

“Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead” is the story of Meeink’s journey from a rough life in the streets of South Philly … and his sometimes rougher life at home. Most centrally it is a story about his radicalization into the top neo-Nazi skinhead recruiter on the East Coast and his recovery from hatred. More generally the reader is drawn through a variety of problems from which Meeink learns that he must recover.

Read the rest of Losing all of his hatreds.

Meeink will be speaking tomorrow, Tuesday, July 13 at 7pm at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City.  I spoke with him over the phone a few weeks ago; he is a colorful speaker and has an interesting personality.  It should be an excellent event and if you are in the Iowa City area, I hope to see you there.

In Iowa, Democrats have fairly good records of fiscal responsibility.  Republicans have generally failed to advance any significant conservative social agenda.  It makes for pretty balanced politics in the state.

So, what tips the balance?  This does:

A Republican takeover in the Iowa House next year would apply sufficient pressure to force both houses of the Legislature to pass a measure allowing Iowans to vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Republican candidate for governor Terry Branstad said Thursday.

via Branstad: If GOP takes Iowa House, there will be a gay marriage vote.

Simply put, I am proud to live in a state that protects families of every sort.  I think gay parents should be held responsible for their children just as straight parents are held responsible.  I think gay partners should be able to rely on one another just as do straight partners.  I believe these bonds should be defended with the force of law.

While I also support pro-natal policies, it is clear from the low fertility rate among straight couples that this problem is not one of sexuality, but of other factors.  Moreover, gay women have children all the time and gay men use surrogates to achieve the same results.  We can have a pro-natal policy that recognizes these facts.

So, this tips the balance for me.  Republicans want to break apart families where the married couple is the same-sex.  That’s damaging to Iowa families, endangers the welfare of Iowa children, and is a violation of the basic civil rights of Iowans.

At the time  of his presidency, I was not a fan of Bill Clinton.  But, times have changed and my mind has changed along with it.  It is my reflection on Clinton’s tenure that have forced me to reconsider how I label myself.  I am comfortable with the term “liberal” largely because of what it meant then, even as talk radio was flushing it down the toilet.

Here’s Matt Welch over at Reason:

[A]s the Bush-Obama era of bailout economics and Keynesian rehabilitation settles into something like cruising speed, perhaps the most fantastic fact to swallow will be that once upon a time the United States had a president who restrained government spending, balanced the budget, argued forcefully for the benefits of free trade, and declared that “the era of big government is over.” And he was a Democrat.

via The Death of Neoliberalism – Reason Magazine.

The whole piece is worth reading.