ON WHY TOM PAXTON AND STEVE MARTIN ARE AMERICA'S BEST CRIMINOLOGISTS

What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.

-- from "What Did You Learn In School Today?", Tom Paxton (1967)

Kelso, has in the recent and not so recent past stolen tons of stuff from the estimable folk singer.
Kelso has been equally brazen with the early comedy routines of Steve Martin. Most recently, we employed hyperbole in describing Giuliani's debate response to the question of "What do you think of the sentence imposed on Scooter Libby?" We stole this joke from Steve Martin: Giuliani would like the death penalty for parking violations (from "Let's Get Small" (1977).

Everything you've read above is ironic and light-hearted. This fucking well isn't:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070611/ap_on_re_us/death_penalty_deterrence

Here's is the "scholarship" itself:

http://econ.cudenver.edu/mocan/papers/GettingOffDeathRow.pdf

And -- gee whiz, go figure -- how surprising that Mr. Freakanomics, Steven Levitt, is cited in Mocan's paper! An aside: all of these weak econometric arguments for retrograde social policy make Kelso puke.

Please read the yahoo news piece in its entirety and skim the econometric piece. No, really. Do it, because in order for Kelso's posting to be effective it has to be short and can't be boring or abstract. Maybe some day we'll spend a few months analyzing this issue, but, for now, sorry to say, all you get from K is going to be shorthand.

While neither Paxton nor Martin are economists nor probabilists (Martin's supposed to be a fair NLHE player, though) both have cracked Mocan and other death-penalty proponents' arguments quite elegantly. The DNA argument that both the reporter and the scholars brush aside, seems to have been anticipated 40 years ago by Paxton, the pacifist folk singer. Steve Martin, being perhaps the more mathematically inclined of the two, employs the "limiting" argument: yes, a law requiring the death penalty for parking violations, and worse for worse, one guesses, would do way better than the best result obseved by the scholars: 18 lives saved for 1 execution. In the world according to Martin's joke, 1oo,000,000s of millions of lives would be saved by a few executions! Except even that fantasy doesn't work. See Hitler and Stalin for details.

Here's Kelso's brief take on the math. It will be a bit of a winding path but please follow. Kelso has thought long and hard about using a multiple linear regression model to win betting the world's most popular sport, soccer. What has presented the biggest hurdle in this is paucity of data which would allow Kelso to employ really good proxies for the strikers' contributions to defense, the defenders' contribution to scoring and the mid-fielders' contributions to both. There is also way too little scoring to make truly accurate player ratings. And there are way more and way better soccer statistics in the public domain than there are sociological data. Moreover, soccer is a much more "closed" system than "life" is. Think about that for a second. A successful professional gambler is chicken to bet soccer using math but some bullshit professors have SOLVED one of life's ultimate questions using the same math!

Go to page 7 of the Mocan paper to find THE SOLUTION. How fucking elegant! They solve a biblical problem by fitting a 5-degree surface to a data set that's not stationary with velly, velly questionable proxies, which, despite the professors' claims to the contrary, are indeed auto-correlated. And why not dance through raindrops instead of employing rigor? Every American loves capital punishment so this passes for scholarship. Again, even in terms of gambling, Kelso's not a gnat on a dog's dick, so go ask someone really bright in the gambling world: WSOP Champion Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, PhD, UCLA, who knows all of this shit like he knows what his mom looks like.

Or read this rebuttal by an actual scholar:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FaganTestimony.pdf

Finally, let's pull back from the micro to the macro, because correlation is association not causation. HOW DO WE KNOW THAT STATE-SPONSORED MURDER, ESPECIALLY IN AMERICA'S UNIQUELY BAROQUE STYLE, DOESN'T CAUSE MORE MURDER IN SOCIETY AT LARGE?

It's important now to ask why a 2006 redraft of a 2003 working paper is breaking news on Monday, June 11, 2007. Why? It's presidential campaign season, of course. Now, that the media have most of the candidates on record as Jesus (of Nazareth not Chris Ferguson) freaks, the media have to get them on the record as domestic murderers as well as international ones. Just because that's how it is. The death penalty question is yet to be asked of the candidates, but from recollection, every Republican except Ron Paul is for it. Among the Democrats, Dodd, Gravel, Kucinich and Richardson are against it. Your big three are for it. Al Gore may now be against it following his Damascene conversion. Or maybe not. President Bill Clinton dug it as much as he did getting his freak on.

Now, for the famous final scene. Lyrics to Johnny Cash's "The Mercy Seat."

It began when they come took me from my home
And put me on Death Row
a crime for which I am totally innocent, you know.
I began to warm and chill
To objects and their fields
A ragged cup, a twisted mop
The face of Jesus in my soup
Those sinister dinner deals
The meal trolley's wicked wheels
A hooked bone rising from my food
All things either good or ungood.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
I hear stories from the chamber
Christ was born into a manger
And like some ragged stranger
He died upon the cross
Might I say, it seems so fitting in its way
He was a carpenter by trade
Or at least that's what I'm told
My kill-hand's tatooed E.V.I.L. across it's brother's fist
That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist.
In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I'm told
All history does unfold.
It's made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.
Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied.
And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I'm yearning
To be done with all this weighing of the truth.
An eye for an eyeAnd a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is burning
And I think my head is glowing
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all this twisting of the truth.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway there was no proof
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is glowing
And I think my head is smoking
And in a way I'm hoping
To be done with all these looks of disbelief.
A life for a life
And a truth for a truth
And I've got nothing left to lose
And I'm not afraid to die.
And the mercy seat is smoking
And I think my head is melting
And in a way that's helping
To be done with all this twisting of the truth
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
But I'm afraid I told a lie.

As much as Kelso hates bathos from others, he despises it from himself, so we return to our usual closing with some (lately bad) sports opinions. U.S. Open golf finds the usual suspects to be value in the outright market: Allenby and Stricker. The 2007 Tampa Bay Devil Rays are starting to feel an awful lot like the 1990 Atlanta Braves, i.e., a likely last-place team on the verge of fighting Rudy Giuliani's Girls and the Sawx every year for two of the playoff spots. In addition to all of these young power hitters, to a very good young staff of starting pitchers, in comes Andy Sonnastein, who may be as good as Kazmir or Shields. Wow. This team is going to fart around a bit this year using or not using a fine pitching prospect named Tim Corcoran while wasting time with two burnt-out former prospects, Casey Fossum and Edwin Jackson, and in 2008, the American League East will have quite a surprise.

Kelso's Nuts love you.