Is terrorism a real threat to the US?

Update: As one individual has pointed out (and this is an important distinction), "homicide" and "murder" are not defined the same. Further, the study suggests that the majority of this is likely to be justifiable homicide. Thus, my "murder" comment was going too far.

After reading the latest comical terrorism plot (the intent may have been real, but the plan was silly), I've decided to take a bit of a side track from my usual posting because terrorism is a subject of special study on my part. I became fascinated with it years ago and have read voraciously on it and am quite dismayed to find out that very few people have any knowledge of the subject, but they have strong opinions about what should be done.

Of course, my background is also economics. Economics is about the best (whatever that means) allocation of scarce resources. So if you think it will be equally easy to prevent two diseases and one kills 1,000 a year and the other kills 10, if all other things are equal, which do you cure? The answer should be obvious.

Moving along, I couldn't help but be fascinated by this 2007 article a study which details deaths in police custody. The report on the study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (I didn't find the source material) contains a very disturbing bit of information.

The review found 55 percent of the 2,002 arrest-related deaths from 2003 through 2005 were due to homicide by state and local law enforcement officers.

Note that they make this distinct from "killed while fleeing", "committing suicide",  and so on.

So if you do the match, that's an average of about 367 homicides a year committed by the police, or one every day. A homicide every single day. This isn't some radical liberal group making this accusation, it was the Justice Department under President Bush. If terrorists were killing a person a day on US soil, we'd be up in arms over it. Fox News would certainly have a thing or two to say (and for once they might be right).

Now contrast this to the US State Department which reports that there were only 56 deaths of US citizens worldwide from terrorism in 2005.

So even limiting police behavior to the US compared to terrorism behavior everywhere, in 2005 you were still around seven times more likely to be murdered by police than by terrorists. But why did I compare US activity to worldwide activity? Because if you only consider US deaths from terrorism, the comparison becomes a joke.

According to this FBI report on 2002-2005 terrorism activity on US soil, we had:

• Two deaths from terrorism related activity in 2002.
• No deaths from terrorism related activity in 2003.
• No deaths from terrorism related activity in 2004.
• No deaths from terrorism related activity in 2005.

While some of this is undoubtedly due to the excellent work our law enforcement officials are engaged in, those same law enforcement officials are murdering Americans at the rate of one a day.

Or they're macing non-violent protestors in New York City right now.

Part of the issue lies in the breakdown of the US judicial system. So many Americans are gung ho about punishment (without thinking about the consequences) and support zero tolerance policies that an extraordinary amount of power has been given to the police without question. And then we punish people with mandatory sentences, not considering the circumstances, such as the homeless man sentenced to life in prison for stealing food. Contrast this to Oregon's Measure 94 which allows someone convicted of attempted murder to spend as little as 2 years and 10 months in prison. Life in prison for a attempted theft of a sandwich versus 34 months for attempted murder.

And how has our harsh crackdown on crime helped? Well, we still have gobs of crime, but the US also has far and away the highest per capita prison population in the world, easily worse than Iran, China, Russia or many other countries we might think have worse crime or more oppressive governments.

But to really nail the point home, we can read well-known security expert Bruce Schneir's article about why there aren't more terrorist attacks on US soil. Part of this is law enforcement, but part of it should be painfully obvious: there just aren't that many terrorists on US soil.

But maybe we think the threat of Muslim extremists is so prevalent that we simply cannot take chances. Except that the FBI report on US terrorism from 1980 to 2005 shows that 94% of terrorist attacks on US soil weren't inspired by Islam. In fact, Jewish extremists committed more terrorist attacks against Americans in this timeframe.

Naturally, the thousands of deaths on 9/11 will be used as a rebuttal and it's a hard one to deal with at that. Take that event away and terrorism in the US is insignificant compared to the threat from our own police. Add that in and rational thought on the subject goes away. That's why we had a 9/11 Commission Report with thirteen sections, fifty-five subsections, three appendices, 567 pages, written after reviewing 2.5 million pages of documents, interviewing 1,200 individuals in ten countries and interviewing most senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations — and summing up the motivations for the attack in a single vague paragraph.

And what's the reason for the attack? Ultimately, the vast majority of anti-US terror stems from one simple premise: leave us alone. It's an appallingly simple solution to a problem that's not going to go away otherwise. However, the world dependence on oil means that the world is going to heavily focus on maintaining influence and directing events in those countries with plenty of oil (nobody would give a damn about Hugo Chavez were it not for Venezuela's oil).

So while the US is so incredibly focused on a relatively minor threat from abroad, we continue to ignore a very real problem at home. Remember how Rodney King only received justice because the police attack on him was filmed? Now the police are arresting people who film them, even though such activity is generally not illegal.

I believe the vast majority of police in the US are decent, hard-working individuals who have one of the most difficult (and dangerous) jobs in the country, but this doesn't mean that oversight should not be allowed. Nor does it mean that we should forgive their excesses. We do enough of that already and we see the result: a murder a day.

Amsterdam family photos

Our daughter is almost 8 months old now. Angelina, of Angelina Mok Photography, came to our flat and took some pictures.

Our daughter's new hobby - stealing my glasses.

It's a big responsibility, being the parents of the world's most beautiful baby.

A happy family.

We're very blessed.

The great thing about my job in Amsterdam

While I can't say much about what I do on a day to day basis (aside from working on our search engine), I really enjoy the fact that my company has around 90 nationalities (or so I'm told) working in our Amsterdam office.

Yesterday I was stuck on a particularly pernicious problem and didn't know why 中华人民共和国 wasn't returning China. In fact, there were several similar issues I was trying to work out, but the simple way of handling this was to walk over to Lynne, who just happens to be Chinese.

She explained that 中国 is how one would actually write "China" (the first version being the long form I stole from the Wikipedia China entry) and pointed out a few other issues for me.

It's great being able to say "I need someone who speaks Chinese" and there she is.

I've listened to French women at lunch complain (in French) to each other that they were tired of speaking English.

I had a Hungarian translator teach me how to say the most foul thing (I'm not telling) because a lady from our Australian office wanted to know.

I've sat down with Serbian, Brazilians, Portuguese, Italians and so many other nationalities tell me that it is like back in their home countries. To me that's practically the holy grail in a work place. The world is pretty damned amazing.

Living in Europe

Preface: I can understand why I've had people accuse me of being "anti-American", but they're wrong. There are many wonderful things about the US, but I believe patriotism should not be blind. It should be the love a parent has for a child: unconditional, but action should be taken when they do something wrong. The "America right or wrong" attitude is repugnant. So what follows is going to sound to some people like it's anti-American, but it's not. It's anti- a certain section of America who thinks they can get something for nothing.

---

On Saturday, while at a friend's birthday party in the De Baarsjes area of Amsterdam, I think I nailed down a key difference between the US and Europe. For the day to day life, you really won't notice much of a difference. You'll get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, have dinner, hang out with friends at a pub or their house, and so on. On Saturday, we were drinking beer, talking about my friend's job and how his company is struggling, watching their children laugh and play, snacking on chips and cheese. Aside from lots of Dutch and French also being spoken, you wouldn't have seen much of a difference here.

It's when you step out of day to day activities that things change. Time and time again my European friends are amazed at how Americans are so insistent on not letting the government help people. While Americans give more to charity than other nationalities, many in Europe don't feel as much need to give to as much charity because that's what their taxes are for. And more importantly, they're happy to pay those taxes. Sure, you'll here the usual grumbling about the tax rates, just as you do in the US, but when directly asked, I've had plenty of Europeans tell me that of course they should pay those taxes: you're supposed to help one another.

A typical American response other's suffering might be "get a job, hippie". The Protestant individualist culture which grips America has created a nation of people who often equate money with personal value. If you don't have a job or don't make much money, you're obviously not very important. That it's gotten to such blatant class warfare as Republicans fighting like mad to ensure that millionaires keep their tax breaks (guess who votes for Republicans?) is a bit of a head scratcher.

So this boils down to:

USA: government is there to promote individual liberty
Europe: government is there to protect and promote the welfare of its citizens

Interestingly, while many Americans strongly object to the government helping people, they're pretty quiet about the government helping the individual states. Specifically, the states whose residents are more likely to vote Republican, object to universal health care or other government subsidies of social programs states who receive more aid money from the federal government than they pay in taxes. In Europe, it's the other way around. People don't mind helping people in their own country; they complain bitterly about helping people in other members of the EU on grounds that often sound rather similar to the Americans who don't want to help the poor.

So as you enjoy the fruits of your education — probably paid for with tax dollars — while driving to work on roads — paid for with tax dollars — and enjoy police protection — tax dollars — and living in a country protected by a vast military — tax dollars — or read mail delivered by your mailperson —educated with tax dollars — or marvel that your cabin on the lake in the middle of nowhere has electricity — tax dollars (Rural Electrification Act) — or are happy that so many criminals are behind bars — tax dollars — or enjoy that park — tax dollars — or admire the courage of the 9/11 first responders — tax dollars — perhaps you should ask yourself why you want your already low taxes lowered even more?

About the book I linked to, "Europe's Promise", I keep hearing good things about it and it's been on my radar for a while. However, many Americans are brainwashed into thinking that theirs is the only way. I don't expect any serious change from the US in my lifetime, barring a complete economic collapse.

How many expats are there?

As reported in Organisation appeals for expat Americans to stand up and be counted, the Overseas Vote Foundation is trying to leverage the Web to count how many US expats there are around the world. Estimates seem to range between four and ten million, but no one is sure. And here's an interesting twist: my daughter is a French American, but she was born here in Amsterdam and has never been in the US. She's clearly not an expat, but will eventually (in theory) have the right to vote.

They're a non-partisan group and they are there to help overseas Americans claim their right to vote.

It's about damned time.

Expat conferences

Future Expats Forum | How to Jumpstart Your Overseas Move

Someone should be in that chair. Me?
Photo by Mohammad Jangda

This surprised me. I knew there were "how to be an expat conferences", but I didn't realize they were this popular. And this conference looks like it might actually be a good one. In the past I toyed with finding some of these conferences and pitching to be a paid speaker. I already speak quite regularly at technical conferences and I'm fairly comfortable doing it. I thought about just doing "howto" seminars, too.

That being said, I suspect most of them would be better targeted to the US market. After all, if you're here in Europe, you can already easily move to many other countries. Thus, it would be too hard to make howto seminars work, but it was a fun thought for a while. I'll just keep writing this blog.

Buying a house in the Netherlands

My wife and I have considered buying a home in the Netherlands, but obviously the process is intimidating. Last night I went to a seminar on how to buy a house if you're an expat and the lovely folks from Expat Mortgages managed to shock the heck out of me.

Amsterdam House
Photo by Michela Mongardi

Mind you, I'm originally from the US but I lived the UK for many years, both places where I saw a different housing market. In fact, the UK today, many young adults simply have no ability to buy a home and the US isn't much better. In the Netherlands today, though, it's still easy and if you're looking to move to Europe and settle down, this might be a big factor for you.

First, most home loans are zero down payment. Sure, you can put money down if you want, but it's not required. Second, like in the US, your interest on the loan is generally deductible from your taxes, meaning that buying, even if you put nothing down, can be cheaper than renting! As for credit rating, it turns out that you really don't want one. Over here, the credit agency generally reports negative items, not positive ones, so if you have no credit rating, that's a good thing!

One gentleman from India asked if he could qualify for a loan. He is a "knowledge worker", has the 30% ruling, a permanent contract, but only a one year residence permit. Not a problem. He's a knowledge worker and apparently the banks consider them a good risk.

So want a home? Get a job here in Amsterdam, get your permanent contract and buy. It's that simple (well, with the help of experts to guide you through the Dutch legal system).

If you're an expat living in Amsterdam already, check out the Expat Housing Seminar. It's free and, even if you don't buy a home, you at least get free drinks and snacks.

And no, I wasn't paid to make this advertisement :)

Update: I removed one comment from this post for using profanity in a derogatory manner. I don't object to profanity per se, but when it's directed at someone else I'm going to remove the response. It's a shame because otherwise that response would have been perfectly appropriate. Here's that anonymous response, minus the profanity:

try anywhere else in the world... any you'll realize you have it much easier than most. I'm nearly 30 and can't even think about buying a place for even 20% down on average home prices in the $700k range.