Fool’s Gold Politics

Brett Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal notes that the "America is declining" meme is growing popular, yet again. This happens on a fairly regular basis and the doomsayers are generally wrong.

In 1788, Massachusetts playwright Mercy Otis Warren took one look at the (unratified) U.S. Constitution and declared that "we shall soon see this country rushing into the extremes of confusion and violence." This, roughly, is the origin of American declinism — and it's been downhill ever since.

A couple centuries later, an international relations theorist at Yale named Paul Kennedy sought to explain the decline of great powers in terms of a ratio between military commitments and economic resources. The Reagan military buildup and the deficits that went with it, he warned, had brought the United States to the point of "imperial overstretch." Not quite. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe and Japan (with no military burdens to speak of) entered a long period of economic stagnation, and the U.S. consolidated its position as the world's only true superpower.

Heh, I'm sure it the negativity started long before that. But consider some evidence that refutes the ones who keep saying things like this:

Yet each of these assumptions collapses on a moment's inspection. In his 2006 book "Überpower," German writer Josef Joffe makes the following back-of-the-envelope calculation: "Assume that the Chinese economy keeps growing indefinitely at a rate of seven percent, the average of the past decade (for which history knows of no example). . . . At that rate, China's GDP would double every decade, reaching parity with today's United States ($12 trillion) in thirty years. But the U.S. economy is not frozen into immobility. By then, the United States, growing at its long-term rate of 2.5 percent, would stand at $25 trillion."

Now take military expenditures. Yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal for 2009, which includes $515.4 billion for the regular defense budget. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this would be the largest defense appropriation since World War II. Yet it amounts to about 4% of GDP, as compared to 14% during the Korean War, 9.5% during the Vietnam War and 6% in the Reagan administration. Throw in the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals, and total projected defense spending is still only 4.5% of GDP — an easily afforded sum even by Prof. Kennedy's terms.

Finally there is the issue of our allegedly squandered prestige in the world. There is no doubt America's "popularity," as measured by various global opinion surveys, has fallen in recent years. What's striking, however, is how little of this has mattered in terms of the domestic political choices of other countries or the consequences for the U.S.

As Stephens points out, there are two main groups who inhabit the declinosphere; those who simply accept the meme as fact and those who are actively rooting for it. I'd only add that memes like this can become self-fulfilling prophecies if enough people buy into them. But do read the whole thing, things are never as gloomy as the America in decline Eeyores make them out to be.

Gotta Love The Underdog

The New York Giants just killed the New England Patriots chances of a perfect season. 

Sometimes things just work out. 

AP Report : 

GLENDALE, Ariz. - The Giants had the perfect answer for the suddenly imperfect Patriots: a big, bad defense and an improbable comeback led by their own Mr. Cool quarterback, Eli Manning.

In one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, New York shattered New England's unbeaten season 17-14 Sunday night as Manning hit Plaxico Burress on a 13-yard fade with 35 seconds left. It was the Giants' 11th straight victory on the road and the first time the Patriots tasted defeat in more than a year.

It was the most bitter of losses, too, because New England (18-1) was one play from winning and getting the ultimate revenge for being penalized for illegally taping opponents' defensive signals in the season-opener against the New York Jets.

But its defense couldn't stop a final, frantic 12-play, 83-yard drive that featured a spectacular leaping catch by David Tyree, who had scored New York's first touchdown on the opening drive of the fourth quarter.

That didn't end the way a lot of people assumed it would. 

UPDATE: Well, McCain just got a vote.  

Destructive Ambition

Robert Samuelson has a thought-provoking column out today. His subject is the dark side of ambition and how it can lead to pointless, self-destructive behavior. Ambition is both the blessing and the curse of America.

A great strength of American society is the drive to succeed — well, not just to succeed but to do better than anyone else; to be a star, a tycoon, an authority, a power, a celebrity or a leader; to be admired, respected, feared or obeyed more than your peers. It is the belief in these possibilities that motivates countless Americans to strive for excellence, to work hard and to search for new discoveries and inventions. As for one of the great weaknesses of American society, see all of the above.

It is an enduring paradox of the American condition. There is a point at which ambition and the determination to succeed, which generally serve us well, turn destructive, corrupting and dishonest. Success becomes its own god. Winning is what matters; the methods or consequences count little or not at all.

The latest reminder of the paradox comes from three recent cases: Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots; runner Marion Jones; and trial lawyer William Lerach. Belichick had opponents' defensive signals videotaped, contrary to explicit National Football League rules; Jones admitted taking illegal drugs around the 2000 Olympics; and Lerach pleaded guilty to illegally hiring plaintiffs as fronts for filing suits against companies. Belichick got off fairly easy (a $500,000 fine), but the others did not. Jones has returned five medals (three gold, two bronze) won at the Sydney Olympics, and Lerach faces $8 million of penalties and at least a year in jail.

What connects these cases is that the transgressions were largely, or perhaps entirely, pointless. Does anyone really believe that Belichick's Patriots didn't win three Super Bowls (2002, 2004, 2005) on inherent ability? Jones almost certainly would have earned some medals without doping. Lerach was among the kingpins of trial attorneys. Although he might have missed some suits by not having dummy plaintiffs, his firm surely could have remained in the top tier while abiding by the rules.

Read the rest, Samuelson makes a number of excellent observations. Part of the problem is the distorted view that the media gives us of the world and the importance of celebrity. Just look at how much time, money and effort is spent on reporting about a ditzy singer-turned-parent, Britney Spears. Look how much time people invest in living life vicariously through unreal reality television shows like American Idol.

There are many examples of blind ambition turned ugly these days. I would submit that James Dobson's threats to back a third party fit into that category. His own self-importance would lead him into ruining himself. I would also submit that Hillary Clinton's latest round of pandering could also backfire. Ed Morrisey today points to the latest Hillary pandering move, vastly expanding entitlements at the same time the Social Security time bomb is starting its slow-motion explosion with the first boomers retiring. Morrisey points to Clinton's proposal to expand the Family Medical Leave Act and provide even more funding for day care.

"With an eye toward flexibility and supporting the needs of small businesses"? Ask businesses now, small and large, how "flexible" the FMLA makes them now. Small businesses do not have "needs" for more government mandates on leave or sick days. Both are better left to the labor market. The expansion of FMLA to smaller businesses will make them less competitive against larger firms who can absorb that federal mandate easier and will force them to spend more on labor, driving up their prices and making them uncompetitive.

The "needs" Hillary wants to address are her own.

Yes they are. As Samuelson points out, there can be a dark side to ambition.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports the annual cost of Clinton's "family friendly" proposals to be $1.75 billion. To be funded by magic, apparently.

Did Anyone Else Notice?

Senator Craig began his statement to the press today by saying:

"Thank you for all coming out."

No one thought, "Nice to see ya" would have been a less ironic opening?

Just Curious

Will the moonbats disapear during tomorrow's lunar eclipse?

 I, for one, could use the break.

Fast, Cheap Or Good. You Can Pick Any Two.

The post title is an old engineering saying that reflects the true nature of any engineering project. It might as well be a natural law - it holds across the board for any type of engineering endeavor. If you want a project completed quickly at the lowest cost, it won't be very good. The other options all follow from there. Which is what worries me about the rush ahead plans by Minnesota authorities to replace the collapsed bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Some other people are starting to sound the alarm over the headlong rush to do something. Because the "something" they are leaning toward is fast and cheap.

Politicians, meanwhile, wrangled over how to replace a 1,900-foot highway span that once carried 140,000 cars a day.

The state Department of Transportation released a preliminary design Tuesday for the new bridge, but it showed little more than an aerial view of a 10-lane span, two lanes wider than the old bridge. It will be up to a contractor, to be chosen from an initial field of five, to flesh out the design.

The state's goal is to open the new bridge by the end of 2008, a speedy timetable that worries Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and Steve Murphy, head of the state Senate Transportation Committee.

Murphy said transportation officials appeared to be "rushing headlong" into rebuilding, and it could lead to shortcuts that compromise safety.

"They could throw up that bridge and only spend $250 million, but 10 years from now we might be back investing another $250 million in it so it functions the way we want," he said Monday. "Let's not build it fast and not to last. Let's build it to last, period."

Both men said the state also should consider adding light rail tracks to the bridge design. The state already has expansion plans for a north-south light rail line that currently runs from downtown to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

"It's possible we could save millions of dollars by putting it on or next to this bridge, Rybak said. "Now is the time to ask that question."

But MnDOT spokeswoman Lucy Kender argued there isn't time to wait, and speed doesn't have to equal lower quality.

"Our economy, our society here, needs that bridge back up," she said.

It may be politically expedient to get it built fast, but it honestly is more important to get it done right. Officials would be advised to keep that in mind. Fast, cheap or good. Pick two.

Educated Guess

I am quite sure there will be a lot of media attention on this item, which I caught over at Memeorandum. The New York Times is blaring a headline: Potential Flaw Is Found in Design of Fallen Bridge. Which is fine, the Federal Highway Administration has obviously raised a real red flag here. Here's the start of the article:

MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 8 — Investigators have found what may be a design flaw in the bridge that collapsed here a week ago, in the steel parts that connect girders, raising safety concerns for other bridges around the country, federal officials said today.

The Federal Highway Administration swiftly responded by urging all states to take extra care with how much weight they place on bridges when sending construction crews to work on bridges. Crews were doing work on the deck of the Interstate 35W bridge when it gave way, hurling rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River and killing at least five people.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation is months from completion, and officials in Washington said they were still working to confirm the design flaw in the so-called gusset plates and what, if any, role it had in the collapse.

Still, in making public their suspicion about a flaw, the investigators were signaling they consider it a potentially crucial discovery and also a safety concern for other bridges around the country. Gusset plates are used in the construction of many bridges, not just those with a similar design to the one here.

“Given the questions being raised by the N.T.S.B., it is vital that states remain mindful of the extra weight construction projects place on bridges,” Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters said in a statement issued late today.

Nothing out of line here. But there is something missing and it matters a lot. What traffic load was the bridge originally designed for? There is a design criteria on file for that bridge, or someone did not do their job. The bridge was designed in the early to mid 1960's - how many cars per day was it expected to carry? What was it designed for? Reports say it was carrying 141,000 cars per day. I rather suspect that the design criteria will not project that load. There may - and quite likely is - a real problem here. But without that information it is very, very hard to judge. Taking an educated guess here, that bridge was probably not designed for the load that was on it daily (it really isn't the weight here, per se - that is limited by physical constraints - only so many cars can fit on there at one time. The vibrations of the traffic, however, do matter. Anticipated traffic speeds also matter. Weight is somewhat important since loads - especially on big trucks - have gone up. But there is a lot in play here from an engineering standpoint.) That bridge was also designed by engineers using slide rules (and healthy fudge factors). If you are reading this, you are working at a computer that engineers back then would have killed to get their hands on.

Notice Anything?

The Associated Press is reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting that the "La Nina" phenomenon will not form this year. The report says that means that there should "generally" be a less severe hurricane season (which is not at all what the NOAA website says that La Nina usually brings - but we digress). But we'll let the AP report:

MIAMI - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that La Nina — a cooling of Pacific Ocean waters that generally brings a more active Atlantic hurricane season — will be absent for the next two months.

The absence of La Nina doesn't necessarily herald a tame summer for tropical storms and hurricanes, said Dennis Feltgen, meteorologist and spokesman for NOAA in Miami.

"There are so many other ingredients that contribute to the development of tropical cyclones, it's not just the fact that we don't have a La Nina that comes into play here," Feltgen said.

Hurricane season 2005 was a textbook example of this. La Nina wasn't around, but the season managed to break records, with 28 named storms, including 15 hurricanes, seven of which were major.

La Nina is the counterpart to the better known El Nino, a warming of Pacific waters near the equator that creates a less conducive environment for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic. Both ocean conditions are hard to predict long-term and don't follow regular patterns.

This year, forecasters have predicted an above-average hurricane season, which runs June 1 through November. They believe there will be 13 to 17 named storms, with seven to 10 of them becoming hurricanes and three to five of those reaching at least Category 3 strength.

All of which is interesting. But buried at the bottom of the story is something that suddenly struck me as odd. There has not been a single named Atlantic storm since June 1st. Not one. That would be six weeks with no storms worth noting. That, I think, is unusual for this time of year, isn't it? There is no guarantee that there will not be a lot of storms in the next few weeks or months, of course. And La Nina actually does not, according to NOAA, form all that often anyway. But six weeks without a named storm? 13 to 17 predicted storms would average out to more than two per month over the season. (Yes, I know these things do not actually average out, it still seems very quiet.)

UPDATE: Well, I found the historical data for hurricanes, and it isn't really unusual not to have any storms through the first six weeks - there is no real pattern to any of that. (I did not check every year they have records posted for, of course, just a random sample). Some years there are several through the early part of the season, some years they all hit late in the year. Take a look at 1933 if you get a chance, though. It would have been a crappy year to go for a Caribbean cruise.

Plan Ahe

ad. You know, I posted about new passport requirements for entry into the US all the way back in September. I wasn't - am still am not - all that happy with the increased requirements on citizens when illegals are being given kid glove treatment. That's another discussion, however. It seems that a lot of people are pitching fits at their elected officials because they did not allow enough time for a new passport to be processed. Yes, the State Department is being swamped, yes, they are 'way behind in getting them issued.

But what in the world are people doing not planning ahead?

A proposal set to be announced as early as Friday will temporarily waive a requirement that U.S. passports be used for air travel to and from Canada and Mexico, provided the traveler can prove he or she has already applied for a passport, officials said Thursday.

The suspension in the rules is aimed at clearing a massive backlog of passport applications at the State Department that has slowed processing to a crawl, they said. Some officials said the change would last several months; others said as long as six months.

But the plan had run into opposition from the Homeland Security Department, which controls U.S. border points and fears the move could make it easier for terrorists or other undesirables to enter the country, the officials said.

Instead of a passport, travelers will now be able to present a State Department receipt showing their passport application is being processed, and a government-issued ID such as a driver's license.

Homeland Security signed off on the proposal on Thursday after consultations with the State Department, the White House and members of Congress, who have been deluged with complaints from furious constituents, according to four officials at the agencies involved.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision has not yet been announced.

"This is pre-decisional, and I have no comment," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said.

Under the plan, those without passports would receive additional security scrutiny when they travel, which could include extra questioning or bag checks, according to one official familiar with the discussions.

The suspension will give the State Department time to deal with a surge in applications that has overwhelmed its processing centers since the new rules took effect earlier this year.

When my wife booked the cruise we just got back from - in December - we immediately got her and the kid's passport applications in (I already had one). We had no problem at all and had the documents well before they were needed. I can understand a few people having to travel on short notice being in a bind, but seriously, if you are booking overseas travel you usually do so with a pretty good lead time. And these rules have been widely publicized for a long time now. There's an old, snarky saying, "poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." I think that applies here to all but a few of the people complaining.

Still More Pain In The Plains

And even more water. Flooding has started to become an issue in many areas of the Midwest as the persistent storm front continues to hover over the nation's midsection. At least one interstate has been closed at this hour and a number of areas are already flooding or are under flood warnings. The storms and rain are expected to continue today.

The southern and central Plains today will be the target of more severe storms today, following a weekend of deadly tornadoes, flooding rain, hail and destructive winds. Severe thunderstorms will erupt today and tonight over a widespread area from New Mexico and Texas to Kansas and Oklahoma.

Severe thunderstorms wreaked havoc on the Plains this past weekend, with reports of more than 100 tornadoes. The prolonged severe weather event will continue today with additional severe thunderstorms, accompanied by destructive winds, hail and isolated tornadoes.

Thunderstorms are forecast today for Greensburg, Kan., the town obliterated Friday by an EF-5 (Enhanced Fajita) tornado, with wind speeds topping 200 mph. This was the first F-5 tornado since an F-5 tornado tore through Moore, Okla., outside of Oklahoma City, on May 3, 1999.

The Midwest Regional News report states heavy rain will produce an increased threat of flooding across the Plains states. The Severe Weather Center lists all the watches and warning for these storms.

Rainfall totals over the 60-hour period ending at 1 a.m. CDT include:

• Aberdeen, S.D. - 8.42"
• Topeka, Kan. - 6.57"
• Great Bend, Kan. - 5.51"
• Atlantic, Iowa - 4.83"
• Shenandoah, Iowa - 4.75"
• Manhattan, Kan. - 4.29"
• Beatrice, Neb. - 4.13"
• Aberdeen, S.D. - 8.42"
• Topeka, Kan. - 6.57"
• Great Bend, Kan. - 5.51"
• Atlantic, Iowa - 4.83"
• Shenandoah, Iowa - 4.75"
• Manhattan, Kan. - 4.29"
• Beatrice, Neb. - 4.13"

I had to pump out the pool yesterday and will have to do so again today since it rained all night. The ground is saturated right now, which is why the flood warnings are now so serious. The rain will have to go somewhere and the ground can't hold any more. The problem appears to be a stalled jetstream that is sucking moisture up from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping it right in the middle of the country.

Center Of The Country Threatened Again

For the third straight day, the center of the United States is under threat of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. (We just got hit again with a very strong storm.) It looks to be another rough night coming up.

(State College, PA) - A slow-moving potent storm will threaten the Plains with severe thunderstorms and potentially destructive and deadly tornadoes for the third-straight day Sunday. Meanwhile, winds howling along the mid-Atlantic and Southeast coast will be the first signs of a storm taking shape offshore.

The Plains are amidst a prolonged severe weather event that has produced deadly and destructive tornadoes. A storm, whose eastward progress has been blocked, has been the culprit for the severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that have slammed the country's midsection since Friday afternoon and will continue to do so today.

According to the Midwest Regional News story, the slow-paced storm will once again deliver severe thunderstorms from eastern South Dakota and southwestern Minnesota to western Texas, with Dallas on the eastern fringe, through tonight. Flooding rain and stronger thunderstorms currently over the region will be followed by more intense thunderstorms starting this afternoon.

I had to go to the store a short while ago and we have some severe erosion damage in various areas around where I live. This hit at a particularly bad time, just after a lot of fields had been plowed but before anything sprouted. There's a lot of bare soil to carry away. It did and more hard rain is hitting right now. The creek that runs through our town is almost out of its banks already. Time to start monitoring the local channels for warnings, I'm afraid.

Tornado Alley: “Another Long Night”

Yet another series of tornadoes has ripped through Kansas with still more on the way. Weathermen are predicting another long night. The number of tornadoes reported so far are "well into the double digits."

The National Weather Service said it had received reports "well into the double digits" of twisters touching down in six counties.

Among them were a series of half-mile wide "wedge" tornadoes — similar to the one that devastated Greensburg on Friday night, meteorologist Mike Umscheid said.

"We're going to expect quite a lot of damage," he said.

Earlier, emergency crews called off the search in Greensburg for victims as the weather deteriorated again.

Umscheid said the slow-moving storm system would likely to spawn severe weather early into Sunday morning.

"It looks like it's going to be another long night," he said.

Rescuers had spent the day hurrying through the wreckage from Friday night's giant tornado, which left little standing beyond the local pub.

Friday's weather was blamed for nine deaths in the region, a figure authorities feared could rise even before the latest twisters.

City Administrator Steve Hewitt estimated 95 percent of the town of 1,500 was destroyed and predicted rescue efforts could take days as survivors could be trapped in basements and under rubble.

Our local television stations are on the air with live warnings almost continuously. Whenever they go back to regular programming, it is only a short time until they break in again. This is a really bad one and there will be a lot of damage through the Heartland by morning.

Live From Tornado Alley

We are in the middle of a series of very powerful thunderstorms and at least one tornado has touched down briefly less than a mile from our house. That happened just to the west of our house. This is what happened just east of us. It's a bit jerky since it is spliced together stills, but it shows the wall cloud trying to form to spawn a new tornado. This one, fortunately did not become a tornado.

“Mr. President, It’s The Bees And The Spiders Again”

I can't believe the news let me get that line from I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus by the Firesign Theater into a post. But bless their hyperventilating hearts, they managed it. First the bees then. The media, anxious for something to pump up into the crisis de jour, has decided on the bees again. (They've done this before, incidentally. Remember the hysterically hyperventilating news reports of the killer bees? The very early Saturday Night Live - you know, when it was mostly funny instead of rarely - ripped hell out of the media for the killer bees hysterics.) So now, instead of, "We're all going to be stung to death," we get, "We're all going to starve to death."

BELTSVILLE, Md. - Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

Get a grip. Seriously. Most of the crops mentioned here may be a nice side dish - but they are not and have never been the staple foods of the vast majority of the earth's population. Buried deep in the article is the fact that - lo and behold - these sudden disappearances have happened before.

Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.

So the difference is what exactly? The media hype? Gee, scientists have figured out, like Pavlovian dogs, that playing the media brings gobs of money. This is not exactly rocket surgery. Item to be looked at? Sure. Item to predict yet another end of the world? At this rate, who freaking cares what's going to end the world. Everything is a monstrous crisis the likes of which has never been seen. Until next week when something else is the monstrous crisis. And forget about those other bees, they aren't important any longer. So, on to the spiders!

British "experts" have declared, authoritatively, that global warming causes spiders!

It may be no bigger than a pea, but its bite can put grown men in hospital.

And thanks to global warming, the false black widow spider is on the march across the country, posing a threat to gardeners and anyone else spending time outdoors.

Officially called steatoda nobilis, it is closely related to the black widow spider whose poison can be fatal to humans.

The species had kept a low profile since arriving in Britain with a cargo of bananas from the Canary Islands 200 years ago.

But according to Stuart Hine, an insect expert at the Natural History Museum, it is rapidly spreading.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this is due to the milder winters caused by global warming," he said.

(Note the photo accompanying the story. The spider appears to have a peace sign on it. Interesting.) Local weather is not a sign of global warming. We had a mild winter where I live this year and a brutally cold spring. Last year, we had heavy winter storms and a warm spring. So is the spring the sign of global warming or the winter? Depends on the media hype and what can cause the most hysteria, I suppose.

Me, I think I'll break out a few Firesign Theater CDs. Seems fitting. After all, I think we're being treated like we're all Bozos on the bus.

A Brief History Of Mental Health

Jonathan Kellerman, professor of psychology and best-selling author, provides a short history of mental health in the United States since the 1970s. In a nutshell, excuse the expression, it boils down to one thing: turn 'em loose on the streets. The rest, as they say, is history.

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built–predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

Because crazy people rarely showed up for treatment voluntarily, and when they did, the treatment milieu consisted of queuing up interminably at Thorazine Kiosks.

And now we had a Homeless Problem.

And everyone was astonished.

Estimates vary but there's no doubt that a significant percentage of people living on heating vents, pushing their belongings in shopping carts, squatting in city parks and immersed in the squalor of tent cities suffer from severe mental disease. And their psychosis is often exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse–what is, essentially, a regimen of self-medication that should make a Szaszian proud.

Many of these unfortunates end up as victims of violent crimes. A few become victimizers and when they do, watch out. For though it is true that schizophrenics are responsible for a proportionally lower rate of violent offenses than the general population (because many forms of the disease engender passivity and physical inactivity), when crazy people do act out the results are often horrific: bloody spree killings ignited by paranoid thinking and the angry urgings of internal voices.

Which brings us to outrages such as the Virginia Tech massacre.

Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior–prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech–is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms.

No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous "counseling"–an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to "treatment" for a patient with metastasized cancer.

But even that minimal care wasn't given. The shooter didn't want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.

Kellerman explains how much of this came about, why it became all the rage to "liberate" the mentally ill. It is worth taking the time to read. From personal experience in a related topic, I can attest that opening the doors to the state hospitals was a questionable idea at best. I have a brother who has Downs Syndrome. He was at a state hospital in New York for many years after several instances where my mother realized she could not control his violent outbursts. He did quite well at the hospital and regarded it as his home. When they started closing the hospitals, they sent him to a group home. A series of them, in fact. Because he has had repeated problems in those settings through the years and ends up getting transferred. Is he better off? I don't know that he is, really.