From Jack Shafer.

The human reflex to find cause, meaning and lessons in the detritus of a massacre – and to impose a solution on the chaos based on those findings – should be trusted only to the extent that it allows us to muddle through the confusion churned up by such a crazed act. As we recover from the initial shock, we revert to our fundamental and irresolvable arguments about freedom and individuality, which aren’t very good at explaining why people shoot or dynamite innocents – or at stopping them from doing so.

Pollsters tell us that killings like the Colorado massacre don’t seem to move the public opinion needle very much. The 1999 Columbine shootings turned support for stronger gun-control laws upward, as this Huffington Post analysis of poll data from ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, and Pew shows, but the public’s attitude soon reverted to the previous baseline and actually continued to fall for the next 11 years.

Sadly, he’s right.

Any criminal justice system worthy of the name will throw up lots of anomalies, but in the case of the death of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who died during the G20 protests in London in 2009 shortly after being struck and knocked to the ground by a police officer, Simon Harwood, the British system has apparently excelled itself.

First of all, there’s the fact that the assault on him would never have come to light if things had been left to the Metropolitan Police, which in recent years has sometimes functioned as a part-time subsidiary of News International. It was only reporting by the Guardian‘s Paul Lewis, and an American businessman’s cameraphone video of the assault, that launched the independent inquiry which eventually led to the trial of Harwood for manslaughter.

The Met’s performance in the case was truly lamentable. Tomlinson’s family were discouraged from speaking to journalists and initially prevented from seeing his body. They were not told of the three police officers who, 48 hours after Tomlinson’s death, said they had seen a colleague strike him with a baton and push him to the ground. And for five days the family were denied details of the bruises and dog bites on the dead man’s legs, not to mention the three litres of bloody fluid found in his stomach.

Then there was the conflict in pathologists’ opinions on the probable cause of Tomlinson’s death. The first pathologist opined that he had died from a heart attack. QED. But after the Guardian published the camera phone video, the Independent [sic] Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched a criminal inquiry and further post-mortems concluded that Tomlinson had died from internal bleeding caused by blunt force trauma to the abdomen, in association with cirrhosis of the liver. In May 2011, a inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, which then led to the prosecution of PC Harwood for manslaughter. Yesterday, he was found not guilty on a majority verdict of the jury.

So now we have two contradictory verdicts: unlawful killing; and acquittal of the only person who might have been implicated in the death.

Fair enough, you may say — though obviously very hard on the Tomlinson family. Our justice system stipulates that juries have to be convinced “beyond reasonable doubt” and members of this panel clearly were unable to convince themselves that there was an unambiguous causal connection between Harwood’s assault and Tomlinson’s death.

But then came the revelations of the information about Harwood that had been withheld from the jury. It turns out that he has had a chequered history as a police officer, including disciplinary hearings over allegations of having punched, throttled, kneed or threatened suspects while in uniform (although it should be said that only one of these complaints was upheld).

Question: would the criminal trial jury’s verdict have been different if they had known about Harwood’s background?

Answer: possibly yes, which is why so many lay people today are outraged by the acquittal. But keeping the jury in the dark was the right thing to do, given the values embodied by our justice system. Harwood was not being tried for his past, but for this particular offence. People are innocent until proven guilty, and even bad eggs can be innocent of a particular crime, no matter how heinous their backgrounds might be.

It’s an interesting case of the importance of intangible values. A justice system which convicted people on the sworn testimony of a police or Intelligence officer would doubtless be a highly efficient one. But we — rightly — value justice more highly than efficiency. And, as m’learned friends sometimes say, hard cases make bad law.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley:

A pair of surveys released today detail the latest trends in what people are doing with their iPads. The interesting bits in a nutshell: The wildly popular Apple tablets are being used more, and more often for business purposes.

The third annual iPad usage survey from Business Insider found that people are spending significantly more time on their tablets. 47 percent of those polled use their iPad between two and five hours a day, up from 41 percent last year and 38 percent in 2010, and 10 percent use it five to eight hours a day (up from 8 percent last year). Overall, 64 percent reported increasing their time on the iPad once they got past the giddy initial exploratory phase. That increased usage is coming at the expense of desktops and laptops — 47 percent now consider their iPad their primary computer, up from 29 percent in 2010. Web surfing is the most popular iPad activity (taking up 37 percent of users’ time), followed by email and social networking (21 percent). The survey found almost 60 percent of web browsing by those polled is now done away from a traditional computer, with 45 percent using their iPads the most and 14 percent using smartphones the most. People also seem to be happy with their iPads — 84 percent have no interest in a Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 tablet, and 70 percent say they wouldn’t be interested in a smaller iPad.

From the Pew Internet Survey

Thirty percent of U.S. adults help a loved one with personal needs or household chores, managing finances, arranging for outside services, or visiting regularly to see how they are doing. Most are caring for an adult, such as a parent or spouse, but a small group cares for a child living with a disability or long-term health issue. The population breaks down as follows:

24% of U.S. adults care for an adult
3% of U.S. adults care for a child with significant health issues
3% of U.S. adults care for both an adult and a child
70% of U.S. adults do not currently provide care to a loved one

Eight in ten caregivers (79%) have access to the internet. Of those, 88% look online for health information, outpacing other internet users on every health topic included in our survey, from looking up certain treatments to hospital ratings to end-of-life decisions.

Today’s International Herald Tribune has nice piece by Ralph Blumenthal based on a visit to Le Thor, the village in Provence where Pierre Salinger, JFK’s Press Secretary, made his home. Concludes with this story, which will touch the heart of every cigar smoker:

Here in Le Thor, Mr. Salinger’s penchant for fine wine and cigars is fondly recalled. A centerpiece of the museum is a large wooden cigar box, all that remains of a gift that Nikita Khrushchev presented Mr. Salinger during a visit to Moscow in 1962. The 150 cigars had come from Fidel Castro and violated the newly installed embargo. President Kennedy was aghast, directing Mr. Salinger to surrender the cigars so Customs could destroy them.

Years later, Mr. Salinger reflected ruefully that he could have done that himself, “one by one.”

Sigh. In the Summer of 1968 I took an impoverished elderly friend to dinner at l’Epicure, a lovely French restaurant (now sadly gone) in Greek Street in Soho. After dessert, I asked my guest if he would like a cigar. His face lit up: yes, he said, very much. So I summoned the waiter and said we’d like to see a selection of his better cigars. He went off and whispered to his boss, when then approached us and, bending down, asked me in a confidential tone “Would either of you be an American gentleman, Sir?”. “Certainly not!” I replied indignantly. He smiled, bowed and withdrew, returning a few moment later with… a box of Cohibas. Bliss!

Quentin’s two tips for those who are overwhelmed by email.

Don’t have it on all the time, and for God’s sake don’t let it ping or beep at you whenever a message comes in. That way madness lies. For your loved ones as well as for you. I tend to check my emails in the morning and in the evening. Occasionally in the middle of the day…but don’t count on it.

Email isn’t instant messaging. If people need an immediate reply they should be using some other technology to contact you. And one of the best ways to ensure you get more email is to keep responding to it promptly! Besides, I often read emails in a spare minute on my phone, when replying isn’t really practical.

You know it makes sense.

The shark, originally uploaded by jjn1.

This is one of those blog posts that lead people to cancel their subscriptions. I’ve just come back from an academic assignment at one of my almae matres (that’s plural of alma mater, since you ask) — University College Cork. As usual, I flew on Ryanair. Indeed, I had little choice, because I live near Stansted and Ryanair is the only carrier that has scheduled services between there and Cork.

The plane was full on both the outward and return trip. The flights departed and arrived on time. The boarding and disembarking processes were efficient and painless. And the fares were reasonable. And I suddenly fell to thinking: what’s not to like?

At this point, most of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances leap onto my shoulder, where they perch like a flock of cathecising parrots. They complain about, inter alia: Ryanair’s outrageously bumptious CEO, Michael O’Leary; the company’s crassly commercial website with its hidden (and pop-up) traps for the unwary (for example the one that makes the choice of travel insurance a default which can only be turned off by hunting though a drop-down list of countries; or by having non-optional pop-ups trying to flog you car hire or hotels); its fierce restrictions on cabin-baggage (and the brusque way they are enforced by staff); the way it charges extra for everything (speed-boarding, seat-reservation, even the mandatory online check-in); how it adds an “administration fee” for using a non-Ryanair credit card when booking; the intrusive (and idiotic) inflight audio ads for scratch cards, phone cards and coach tickets; the bumpy touch-downs it incentivises in order to achieve rapid turnaround of planes; the canned trumpet fanfare that announces “yet another on-time arrival”; and lots more complaints that I’ve heard but cannot at the moment recall. Listening to this chorus of disdain and disapproval it’s easy to slip into the cliched view of Ryanair as the company that everybody loves to hate.

There’s just one problem with this. How come that Ryanair’s planes are always full? Last year Ryanair carried 79 million passengers, operated 300 aircraft on 1,500 routes. It had fewer cancellations than any other carrier and mishandled far fewer bags than any of its competitors. (The worldwide average for mishandled bags is 9 per 1000; Ryanair’s is less that 0.5 per 1000). If people really hate the company, then they have an odd way of showing it.

I suspect that the cognoscenti’s distaste for Michael O’Leary’s enterprise has something to do with the fact that he stripped away the romantic and exclusive aura that surrounded air travel during the era when it was an expensive mode of travel available only to a tiny elite. When I was a child in the 1950s, for example, only the rich — or company executives who were not paying for their tickets — flew. The Irish national airline (state-owned Aer Lingus) was a glamorous outfit, and a career as an Aer Lingus “Air Hostess” was much prized. (My first father-in-law wanted his daughters to be Air Hostesses because he thought that this would provide them with a fool-proof way of landing rich husbands. Both girls grew up to be militant feminists, I am glad to report.) Every Autumn a fixture on Irish fashion-editors’ calendars was the show in which Aer Lingus displayed the new outfits — designed by some fancy couturier — that their airborne stewardesses would be wearing that year.

But it was much the same in most other countries. National airlines were national flagships. And passengers were treated like royalty. In 1968, as a result of a reservation error, I was once upgraded onto First Class on an Aer Lingus morning flight from London to Dublin, and was astonished to find myself being offered unlimited quantities of champagne. But of course this royal treatment never came cheap. The implicit deal was that you paid through the nose for the privilege of air travel, but that lots of extras — together with sycophantic service and champagne — came with the ticket.

Ryanair’s original sin was to call this bluff. It was the first European airline to recognise that air travel had become a routine commodity. And one of the first (after the sainted Freddie Laker) to realise that if air travel were realistically priced then ‘ordinary’ people would become frequent fliers. Michael O’Leary’s fixed strategy ever since has been relentlessly to pare away the romantic illusions and charge people on an itemised basis for anything over and above their seats. And although they might not like this, passengers recognise that the deal they are getting is at least an honest one.

Ryanair has changed my life for the better. It has made it immeasurably easier to keep in touch with my extended family — who live up and down the Western seaboard of Ireland. In the old days, a journey from Cambridge to there was a two-day affair, involving a long car journey to Holyhead, a three-hour ferry voyage, and then a four or five-hour drive from Dublin. Same story on the return journey. Not surprisingly, we didn’t go back very often. But when the regional airports in the West opened up — Knock in Mayo and Farranfore in Kerry — Ryanair immediately offered scheduled services to both. (Aer Lingus, needless to say, snootily declined to service such low-rent locations.) And where Ryanair went, my kids and I followed. As a result, the family dislocation that used to follow emigration was reduced or dissolved, something that IMHO has been an unmitigated blessing.

So you can perhaps see why I’ve begun to bristle when I hear the well-bred distaste for Mr O’Leary’s airline being endlessly rehearsed. You may not like his style, or how he does business, but at least Ryanair does what it says on the tin.