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Alger Hiss is covered in The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder.

I dimly remembered the Alger Hiss case as a prelude to McCarthyism, but the case turns out to be a compelling example of what not to do.

Hiss was almost certainly guilty of working for the Soviets, but he couldn’t have been prosecuted for that due to a five-year statute of limitations on treason/espionage (at the rate that Robert Mueller’s investigation is going, let’s hope that this is extended for Donald Trump!). From the course notes:

In the 46 years that Alger Hiss lived after his perjury conviction, he
never departed from his claim of innocence. But he and his supporters
found their case weakened in the mid-1990s with the release of the
Venona cables, intercepted communications sent to Moscow by Soviet
agents in the United States. The intercepted cables suggested that Hiss
was a Soviet agent who had supported the Communist cause at the
1945 Yalta Conference.

Hiss would have gotten away with everything if he hadn’t denied via letter and then via testimony in Congress that he was a working Communist. He claimed never to have met Whittaker Chambers, a guy who told Richard Nixon that Hiss and his wife were birdwatchers and “had once been excited to spot a prothonotary warbler.”

A turning point in the investigation came when Richard Nixon asked,
“What hobby, if any, do you have, Mr. Hiss?” Hiss answered that his
hobbies were “tennis and amateur ornithology.” Congressman John
McDowell jumped in: “Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?” Hiss
fell into the trap. He answered enthusiastically, “I have—right here
on the Potomac. Do you know that place?” This response convinced
previously skeptical committee members that Chambers had been
telling the truth.

Hiss then went so far as to sue Chambers for slander and discovery in that case revealed “65 typewritten copies of State Department documents, and five strips of microfilm featuring photographs of State and Navy Department documents.” Chambers had actually been trying to spare his former friend and Communist comrade Hiss from a lot of embarrassment.

From the course notes:

The confrontation between Chambers and Hiss initiated a polarization
of the political left and the political right. Chambers saw the world as
a battle between godless Communists and Christian anticommunists,
between darkness and light. Liberals largely rejected this division as
arrogant and overly simplistic.

I’m not sure that we can attribute today’s political divisions to the struggles against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. For one thing, a larger percentage of the U.S. economy is centrally planned than the Russian or Chinese economies.

But the Hiss case certainly shows the virtues of keeping quiet about past misdeeds! (The course also covers the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, which never would have happened if Wilde hadn’t first sued a friend’s father for libel in the form of a note calling him “a posing sodomite.”)

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One idea that we have these days is that DNA evidence and scientific evidence in general is the gold standard for a jury.

One thing I learned The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, is that the trial of the Scottsboro Boys included excellent scientific evidence.

From Wikipedia:

The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.

The U.S. Communist Party took over the defense of these guys. From the course notes:

The star prosecution witness was Victoria Price. Direct examination was brief, lasting only 16 minutes. Price recounted her trip to Chattanooga, a fight that had broken out on the train between white and black youths (the reason the train was stopped in the first place), and the alleged gang rape. Prosecutor Knight’s strategy was to cover the essential facts in a condensed, unadorned way. He wanted to minimize opportunities for defense attorneys to expose contradictions with the more detailed story Price had told in the first trials.

Leibowitz’s cross-examination of Price was merciless. His questions suggested his answers. She never, as she claimed, stayed at Callie Brochie’s boardinghouse in Chattanooga. There was no boardinghouse, no Callie Brochie. Semen that had been found in Price’s vagina came not from rape on a train, but from an adulterous encounter with a man named Jack Tiller two days earlier.

Dr. R. R. Bridges, the Scottsboro doctor who examined the girls less than two hours after the alleged rapes, was the next prosecution witness to take the stand. He turned out to be a better witness for the defense. He confirmed that semen was found in the vaginas of the two women, but observed that the semen contained no live sperm—even though sperm generally survive for 12 to 48 hours after intercourse. On cross-examination, Bridges admitted that the women were both calm, composed, and free of bleeding and vaginal damage when he had examined them two hours after the alleged rape.

Even without modern DNA evidence, therefore, the jury could have acquitted these guys on scientific grounds. There was conflicting evidence from the two women at the second trial:

The defense’s final witness was Ruby Bates, who said that she suffered from a troubled conscience after her testimony in the first trial and had returned to tell the truth about what happened. Bates testified that there was no rape, that none of the defendants touched her or even spoke to her. She said that her allegation had been made up after Price told her “to frame up a story” to avoid morals charges.

(Not as confusing as the first trial, in which one defendant said that the rapes had occurred, but were perpetrated by the other defendants. From Wikipedia: “Defendant Clarence Norris stunned the courtroom by implicating the other defendants. He denied participating in the fight or being in the gondola car where the fight took place. But he said that he saw the alleged rapes by the other blacks from his spot atop the next boxcar”)

So we do have a lot more scientific tools at our disposal these days, but it seems that there was plenty of science back in the 1930s and it wasn’t enough to keep these guys out of jail.

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“A $2 Billion Question: Did New York and Virginia Overpay for Amazon?” (nytimes):

Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended the deal, arguing that New York has to offer incentives because of its comparatively high taxes. At 6.5 percent, New York’s corporate income-tax rate is only modestly higher than Virginia’s 6 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. But other business and individual taxes are higher in New York.

“It’s not a level playing field to begin with,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview Tuesday. “All things being equal, if we do nothing, they’re going to Texas.”

In the history of the U.S., how many times has a governor admitted that, absent special treatment, a company would be better off locating in a different state?

[Separately, any family court plaintiff suing an Amazon worker will be very grateful that the company didn’t move everyone into Texas, where the profitability of a child is capped at about $20,000 per year and “lifetime alimony” typically turns into “no alimony”.]

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/11/13/amazon-settles-into-low-tax-new-york-city/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/11/14/the-amazon-hq2-deals-show-how-to-implement-a-planned-economy/

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If you’re traveling today, God help you!

I made it back to Boston from Denver via United Airlines on Wednesday. Buried in the fine print of a “Fare Breakdown” was “September 11th Security Fee: $11.20”. There is also “U.S. Passenger Facility Charge: $9.00”

It has been 17 years since 9/11. Why do we still pay a fee associated with that event? The TSA is not temporary. If we have a permanent high cost of going through an airport, shouldn’t that just be added to the “facility charge”? That would make it an even $20.

Inquiring minds want to know!

(Separately, my hotel in downtown Denver tacked on a mandatory “resort fee” that added roughly 10 percent to the cost of the stay. What stops them from selling rooms at $1 via Orbitz or Expedia and then using fine print to note that there will be a mandatory $175/night “resort fee”?)

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Thanksgiving weekend seems like a good time to ponder the big picture.

Here are a couple of potentially helpful articles. From Newsweek:

The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual “Costs of War” report Wednesday, taking into consideration the Pentagon’s spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as “war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The final count revealed, “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans.”

This could explain why many Americans aren’t all that thankful. The economy has grown, but $6 trillion of the growth has been spent on something that does not make us better off.

“Taxpayers Cannot Afford More Subsidies For The Middle-Class” (Forbes):

The federal government spends about $4 trillion per year. Of that, somewhere around $3 trillion is what economists call transfer payments. A transfer payment is when the government just takes money from one person (through taxes or borrowing) and gives it to somebody else. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare payments, farm programs, corporate welfare, and the like are all transfer payments which simply redistribute money.

Middle-class benefits are an entirely different story, however. The bottom 75% of households by income pay only about 13% of all income taxes. If we define the middle-class as the 70% of households below the top 10% and above the bottom 20% of households by income, the middle-class only pays about 29% of all income taxes, according to IRS data.

Because the middle-class doesn’t pay much in taxes and because they are the largest in number, there is no way to pay for generous benefits for that many people. Today, the middle-class is collecting around $2 trillion per year in federal transfer payments. Yet, even accounting for payroll taxes, they are only paying taxes of $1 or $1.1 trillion per year (29% of all individual income taxes and about 50% of all payroll taxes). Thus, the rich are already fully paying for all the benefits to themselves and to the poor, plus around half of the benefits to the middle-class.

Another reason why we might not be thankful is that many of us expect more than is theoretically possible given the size of our economy. Also, a huge amount of these transfer payments is devoted to subsidizing an inefficient health care industry. So beneficiaries of Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare subsidies are not actually benefitting as much as we might expect given the spending levels.

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“Danger spins from the sky: The Robinson R44, the world’s best-selling civilian helicopter, has a long history of deadly crashes” (LA Times):

It is the world’s best-selling civilian helicopter, a top choice among flight schools, sightseeing companies, police departments and recreational pilots.

It also is exceptionally deadly.

Robinson R44s were involved in 42 fatal crashes in the U.S. from 2006 to 2016, more than any other civilian helicopter, according to a Times analysis of National Transportation Safety Board accident reports.

That translates to 1.6 deadly accidents per 100,000 hours flown — a rate nearly 50% higher than any other of the dozen most common civilian models whose flight hours are tracked by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Robinson points out that the flight hours reported to the FAA are likely undercounted (e.g., if an owner/operator gets sick of onerous annual surveys and tosses them into recycling… not that I know of anyone that irresponsible…)

I’m not surprised that an owner-flown $400,000 R44 is twice as likely to be involved in a fatal accident than a professionally-flown $3 million Airbus AStar.

Having been an instructor in the Robinson R22, however, I’m shocked that the fatal accident rate for this $200,000-ish (rebuilt) flight school mule is comparable to that of a $3+ million Bell 407 (i.e., less than half the rate for the much-more-forgiving R44). I guess this shows the advantage of being in the training environment, in which encountering bad weather is much less likely than when an aircraft is used for transportation. Alternatively, you could say that this shows the safety advantage of a two-pilot crew. A higher percentage of R22 hours are student and instructor rather than a single pilot. (The Schweizer 269‘s accident rate is even lower; this is a machine that is essentially exclusively used for training.)

Here’s a cited accident that would have been much less likely to occur with two pilots on board:

Take the case of Jim Bechler, an Orange County attorney who had piloted Robinson helicopters for more than 30 years and bought a new R44 in 2008. He was flying home from a business meeting near Temecula when he stopped to refuel at Corona Municipal Airport.

Minutes later, as the helicopter lifted off with 40 gallons of fuel in its tanks, its rotor blades clipped a metal canopy over the fuel island. The R44 flailed briefly, dropped a few feet to the pavement and burst into flames.

(This also shows the tragic backwardness of certified human-occupied aircraft compared to $500 drones. A consumer drone wouldn’t fly itself into an obstacle as described above.)

Given the numbers, the LA Times could have cast the story as “local company makes an inexpensive helicopter that is remarkably safe when flown by two pilots”. The story’s focus on mast bumping does not make sense. The statistics in the article show that the Bell 206, which has a two-bladed rotor system subject to mast bumping, has a lower rate of fatal accidents than the Bell 407, whose 4-bladed rotor system isn’t at risk.

Personally I would like to see robot copilots for both helicopters and airplanes.

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“What the Lion Air Pilots May Have Needed to Do to Avoid a Crash” (nytimes) contains a lot of good cockpit photos and illustrations explaining the combination of manual and automatic flight controls that likely played a role in the recent Boeing 787 MAX 8 crash (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/11/11/boeing-737-crash-is-first-mass-killing-by-software/ ).

If it sensed a stall, the system would have automatically pushed up the forward edge of the stabilizers, the larger of the horizontal surfaces on the plane’s tail section, in order to put downward pressure on the nose.

To counter the nose-down movement, the pilot’s natural reaction would probably have been to use his yoke, which moves the other, smaller surfaces on the plane’s tail, the elevators. But trying that maneuver might well have wasted precious time without solving the problem because the downward force on the nose exerted by the stabilizer is greater than the opposite force the pilot would be trying to exert through the elevator, said Pat Anderson, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry Riddle.

“After a period of time, the elevator is going to lose, and the stabilizer is going to win,” he said.

(The same guy gave an interesting lecture this summer; see “Transitioning to electric flight (lectures at Oshkosh)”.)

The pictures show a mix of 1950s (the big trim wheel), 1980s (the switch-controlled trim and trim interrupt), and 1990s (the MCAS layered on top that puts in heavy trim silently).

My comment on the NYT piece:

I sometimes fly the Pilatus PC-12, a simple 11-seat turboprop. Its stall-protection system was designed in the early 1990s. There are two angle-of-attack (AOA) sensors, one on each wing. There are two computers, each one of which is connected to a single AOA sensor. Only if both AOA sensors show a stalling angle of attack (“nose too high”) AND both computers agree THEN there will be a “stick push”. Thus there could never be a nose-down push due to a single bad AOA sensor. In the unlikely event that both sensors and/or computers went haywire at the same time, there is a “pusher interrupt” switch right on the yoke (“stick”). So the pilot need not hunt for an out-of-sight and never-previously-used switch.

It sounds as though Boeing engineered something that relies on just one sensor.

Plainly the Pilatus-style system would not have interfered with these 189 souls making their way safely to the destination. I wonder if a simple voice annunicator on top of the Boeing system would have also saved the passengers and crew. If it had said “trimming down, trimming down” into the headsets, the pilots would have known to direct their attention to the trim and trim interrupt switches.

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“7 Women Accuse Dartmouth Professors of Sexual Abuse in Lawsuit” (nytimes):

Seven women are suing Dartmouth College for sexual assault, harassment and discrimination they say they experienced from three prominent professors who, according to the suit, turned a human behavior research department “into a 21st-century Animal House.”

For over a decade, the professors — Todd Heatherton, William Kelley and Paul Whalen — “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and even raped female students,” according to the court papers, which were filed Thursday in federal court in New Hampshire.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages…

There are approximately 4,300 undergraduates at Dartmouth. In-state tuition at University of New Hampshire is $18,500 per year (source). At rack rates, therefore, 4,300 students would pay $79.5 million at UNH. Assuming only a modest amount of financial aid, then, it would cost less to send all 4,300 of these undergrads to UNH than the amount of damages that was inflicted on these seven women.

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I’m wondering if the Amazon HQ2 deals show how to implement a planned economy without having to acknowledge that one’s country has transitioned away from the market.

Planned Economy v1.0: It is illegal for anyone to operate a business without approval from a government ministry. Government experts decide which companies can operate, from which locations, and engaging in which businesses.

Planned Economy v2.0: Set up tax rates that are, by global standards, punishingly high. It is therefore impractical to do business if a company must pay the headline rates. Government experts decide that certain companies, in certain locations, and engaging in certain activities, can operate with tax rates that are closer to global norms.

We’re not quite to this point, but with a few upward tweaks of the tax rates I think that we could be.

Related:

• “A $2 Billion Question: Did New York and Virginia Overpay for Amazon?” (nytimes): “An additional $7.5 billion in subsidies wasn’t enough to get Amazon to move across the river,” said Michael Farren, an economist at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, referring to the difference between Maryland’s offer of $8.5 billion and Virginia’s of less than $1 billion. “That just says that subsidies were never what mattered in the first place.” (the Maryland location would have been awesome for family court plaintiffs suing Amazon employees! See Real World Divorce for what is obtainable.)
• “Helipads and everything else Amazon is getting out of its deals with New York and Virginia” (CNN). This has been a good month for Airbus (Eurocopter)!

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Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau says that Canada welcomes any refugees or asylum-seekers that the U.S. rejects. “Central American Migrants in Mexico Want Buses to US Border” (nytimes) says

Central American migrants in a caravan that has stopped in Mexico City demanded buses Thursday to take them to the U.S. border, saying it is too cold and dangerous to continue walking and hitchhiking. About 200 migrants, representing the roughly 5,000 staying in a stadium in the south of Mexico’s capital, marched to the United Nations office in Mexico City to make the demand for transportation.

What is the practical obstacle to giving them plane tickets to Toronto?

Separately, “Caravan Walks Quietly On, U.S. Opposition a Distant Rumble” (nytimes, 11/9/2018) is interesting for describing the experience of the folks in the current caravan:

Ms. Alvarado and her relatives left their home on the outskirts of Comayagua, a city in central Honduras, on Oct. 12. They came from a family of farm laborers who worked for abysmal wages in coffee plantations. Generations of residents from Comayagua had made the trek to the United States to find better-paying work, and the possibility was always forefront in the minds of those who remained behind.

Ms. Alvarado, one of the few in her family who had managed to escape the coffee fields, had been working as an assistant in a government social development program, but barely getting by on a salary of $200 a month.

(So the woman who gets a monthly paycheck from the Honduran government will have to claim in her asylum hearing (2-3 years from now?) that she is being persecuted by the Honduran government?)

Do-gooders should considering seeting up a shoe distribution center on the southern border of Mexico, rather than thoughts and prayers on Facebook:

They, like most members of the caravan, were ill-prepared for walking. Ms. Jiménez was wearing pink plastic sandals. Ms. Banegas and her son wore flip-flops. Ms. Jiménez’s 3-year-old had to be carried by the adults for much of the way.

The mechanics of getting into the U.S.:

The group did not plan to apply for asylum. Rather, like many other families in the caravan, their plan was to cross between official border entries and turn themselves into the United States Border Patrol. Since they were women traveling with children, they hoped they would be released quickly from detention and allowed to remain in the United States pending the outcome of their deportation cases. It’s a practice that has been widely used for years, but one that Mr. Trump is seeking to end.

Ms. Banegas said she picked Elmer, who left school three years ago to work in the coffee fields, to travel with her to the United States because he was her oldest minor child.

With him, “I might have a better chance of getting in,” she said.

The women had heard that the Trump administration policy of family separation had ended. Other migrants from their hometown had successfully crossed into the United States since then and had been released with their children.

I’m still confused by the policy of limiting refugee/asylee status to those who are fit enough to make an overland trek to the U.S. If we are humanitarians, given that Honduras has an awesome airport with a 9,500′ runway (MHLM), why aren’t we sending a daily Airbus A380 to pick up the elderly and disabled in 900-person groups? If we are not humanitarians, why do we accept any low-skill refugees/asylees?

Circling back to the top of this post… even if we take Canada out of this, why buses? Why wouldn’t the U.N. charter an Airbus A350 (after the A380, the world’s quietest airliner so that caravan members can relax!) to bring caravan members to the U.S. destination of their choice? If the U.S. objects to the daily arrivals, the U.N. can simply cite that the U.S. signed up to the 1967 refugee protocol.

Related:

• “Can the refugee caravan at the U.S. border simply fly up to Canada?” (April 30, 2018; I offered to pay $50,000 to ferry a previous caravan to Vancouver)
• “Deployed Inside the United States: The Military Waits for the Migrant Caravan” (nytimes, 11/10/2018), on the suffering of U.S. troops: “The tents sleep 20 soldiers and have no electricity or air-conditioning. Phone charging is relegated to a few generators that power the spotlights around the living area. … Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the troops do not receive extra combat pay. … Come Thanksgiving, they most likely will still be here.” (this is why new veterans have higher rates of disability than Vietnam combat vets?)

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