Month: April 2015

I always expected Jeffrey Dahmner to die rather quickly in prison. But, yes, I guess there were details. I didn’t expect refined sugar to be involved, however.

Johnny Rotten:

It’s one of those days.

Mike Huckabee makes an important point:

Mike Huckabee rallied a crowd of Hispanic evangelicals on Wednesday night, pushing back in the debate over religious freedom just one day after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments to determine whether states have the right to ban same-sex marriage.

“I respect the courts, but the Supreme Court is only that — the supreme of the courts. It is not the supreme being. It cannot overrule God,” he said. “When it comes to prayer, when it comes to life, and when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, the court cannot change what God has created.”

But I am concerned that Mike is a bit selective on this score.

Huckabee, who is famous for dropping 110 pounds, still considers himself an excellent cook, having shared his methods to reporters since Iowa. When handed a bottle of barbecue sauce today, he announced, “Now I’m a connoisseur of good barbecue and good barbecue sauce. My own ribs – my family can tell you – are as good as you can have.”

At another point, he quipped. “When God intended barbecue, he meant it to be pork. Texans go out, they burn a bunch of beef, and they call it barbecue.

Someone said, “I didn’t think God’s people ate pork.”

Huckabee: “That’s before they knew it could be barbecue.”

I’ll allow for a bit of tongue in cheek fun here, but what are we to make of Huckabee dismissing God’s commandment that “the pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you [and] you must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses”?

Now, you might dismiss this as a commandment from the Old Testament, but when Christians talk about their opposition to homosexuality they tend to quote from the Old Testament, too. And Huckabee isn’t just blowing off the commandment. He’s saying that God intended the exact opposite of what he dictated. God said, “no pork,” and Mike’s saying that God wants all barbecue to be pork. And he’s encouraging others to break God’s prohibition against pork, which seems even worse than whatever Socrates allegedly did. It also takes away the common defense that prohibitions against certain foods are not to be taken as seriously as moral laws against, for example, murder or polytheism. After all, it’s one thing to eat a pork sandwich (worthy of a slap on the wrist) and another to be a Druid (a clear stoning offense), but twisting the Word of God is the work of the devil.

To a certain degree, I sympathize with what Matt Taibbi is saying here about how the press is treating Bernie Sanders’ nascent presidential campaign.

The Washington/national press has trained all of us to worry about these questions of financing on behalf of candidates even at such an early stage of a race as this.

In this manner we’re conditioned to believe that the candidate who has the early assent of a handful of executives on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is the “serious” politician, while the one who is merely the favorite of large numbers of human beings is an irritating novelty act whose only possible goal could be to cut into the numbers of the real players.

But, ultimately, I can’t really agree with this argument. I’m not trained by the national press to view the ability to raise money as a key component of any “credible” political campaign. I just believe this to be true as a matter of basic, responsible political analysis.

Money is not the only important thing. Prior to the New Hampshire primary in 2000, former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley had managed to raise more money than the sitting vice president, Al Gore, but that didn’t translate into any victories. It did indicate, however, that Bradley would have the money to compete. What killed Bradley was a combination of lack of skill, a hostile press, and all the free press John McCain was getting from fawning reporters. But he could afford to organize, run advertisements, and could have capitalized on his victories if he had had any of them.

In 2012, Rick Santorum was in a different situation. He had several small victories but no money to turn those into a real campaign on the ground. In some states, Santorum couldn’t even get his name on the ballot. In others, he watched his rivals steal the delegates he had won in caucuses at later state conventions.

That last point is important because it highlights that winning the nomination isn’t just a matter of getting ahead in the polls and getting the most votes in some primaries and caucuses. You have to build a political organization of activist citizens who will serve as your proxies at the state level. Ron Paul was really good at this kind of organizing and regularly poached other candidates’ delegates. However, he still needed to win occasionally at the ballot box and this is what he could not do. A candidate that combined Santorum’s ability to win votes with Paul’s organizational prowess might have taken Romney out, and the same thing could theoretically happen to Hillary Clinton (again).

So, the key question then is this: was the press wrong not to take Rick Santorum and Ron Paul very seriously as legitimate threats to win the nomination?

I don’t think so.

And a related question is this: how important are ideas to a campaign if they aren’t offered by someone who has the potential to both raise money and build a proxy army on the state level?

To turn this around a bit, we might say that ideas can be really important in a campaign, but only if they inspire people to give money and work for the candidate who offers those ideas. Barack Obama had some ideas that accomplished this, but he also had personal qualities and political skills that inspired and motivated people. And what won the nomination for him wasn’t so much how he was treated by the press, whether seriously or otherwise. What won him the nomination was the proxy army he built and the money he had to build and fund them.

So, when it comes to Bernie Sanders there are really two questions. The first is to ask whether he’s built this kind of army and the second is whether he has the potential to build one.

The answer to the first question is clearly ‘no.’ The answer to the second is that it is too early to say with any certainty but there are good reasons to be skeptical. Most people look at Bernie Sanders and think that he’s too old, too ethnic, too socialist, too politically isolated, too unknown and too late to replicate what Barack Obama did eight years ago. Can he prove the skeptics wrong?

Well, maybe, but he ought to show some results before he expects people to consider him a “credible” candidate.

At the heart of what Taibbi is saying is the lament that ideas (and, perhaps, character) alone cannot prevail in our political wars. I understand that lament but standing alone it is really a rather unsophisticated and almost churlish kind of analysis. Yes, to some degree life is unfair and the system is rotten down to the studs, but we want political leaders who can prevail over the odds. If you go on with this kind of analysis it is not too long before you are wishing for ponies and leprechauns.

If I were a U.S. Senator, my voting record would look a lot like Bernie Sanders’ voting record. I love the guy and would very much enjoy living in an America where he might legitimately be seen as a prospective president. This does not mean, however, that I am going to suggest that we do live in this hypothetical America.

I think Sanders has a message that will resonate with a lot of people and I hope he gets some traction. If you want to join his proxy army, I won’t dissuade you and wish you every success. If I see successes, I will report them as successes.

But it’s not up to the media to do the hard work that Sanders needs to do for himself. Let’s see him qualify for all the ballots. Let’s see him raise serious money. Let’s see him build an army of engaged true believing citizens who go knocking doors for him.

Until this happens, even movement in the polls won’t be a good reason to treat him as “credible.”

You don’t have to be “credible” as a winner to be worth listening to, but you do have to be “credible” to be treated as credible.

The Guardian report on Adelson’s testimony in a civil suit is most illuminating and fascinating.  Combative Adelson rails against ‘greedy bosses’ in entertaining court testimony

It’s possible that the man has developed dementia.  It’s also possible that he’s always been this much of a loon.  Not word salad a la Palin, but conceptual chopped salad that fails as a whole and the separate bits aren’t tasty either.  Easy to overlook that smarts and rationality aren’t necessary personal qualities for success in business and politics.

Can imagine Adelson’s attorneys cringing during his time on the witness stand.  

No one has ever described Sheldon Adelson as a man happy with the world. Happy billionaires do not spend tens of millions of dollars trying to get Newt Gingrich elected president.

To that we can add that unhappy but sane billionaires would not spend tens of millions of dollars trying to get Newt Gingrich elected president.

Read the whole article to appreciate how pathetic this man is.  Only less pathetic than the money grubbers that have been paying homage to him.

 

Politicians say whatever they’re going to say, but there are a lot of things they tend not to say. One thing they almost never say is that we’re locking up too many people in this country. So, I welcome Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric even if I will definitely be taking a “wait and see” attitude.

Hillary Rodham Clinton focused her presidential campaign Wednesday on the unrest in Baltimore, vowing to work to upend the criminal justice system by ending the “era of mass incarceration” and equipping every police officer on the street with a body camera.

Her speech at Columbia University in New York City marked the unveiling of Clinton’s first major policy proposal as a presidential hopeful, coming as candidates are under pressure to confront racial disparities in the criminal justice system highlighted by the violence in Baltimore.

“What we have seen in Baltimore should, and I think does, tear at our soul,” Clinton said. “The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. … We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

I am pretty cynical, especially about both Clintons, but I do not totally dismiss the value of Hillary’s listening tours.

Clinton’s plan also stems from the “listening tour” she has been on since launching her campaign this month. In round-table meetings with residents in the early ­voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the issue of drug abusers whose troubles were compounded by mental health problems played prominently.

“Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions,” Clinton said. “I was somewhat surprised in both Iowa and New Hampshire to be asked so many questions about mental health.”

I don’t blame Hillary for living in a bubble and I’m willing to give her credit for making a concerted effort to get outside of it and get a taste of what’s really going on in this country. I’ve been writing about the opioid problem for a while now from a variety of angles, and one of the most important is treatment. Another, related, issue that’s important is how we treat people who commit crimes in the pursuit of feeding their addictions.

These problems are only a part of what is ailing Baltimore, our cities generally, and the nation, but they’re usually ignored.

I’m going to quote driftglass at length here for the simple reason that I like to reward and draw attention to good writing:

Eventually even very high-powered, very highly-paid and very public political con men like Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times start to run out of road.  After enough years have passed, a career’s worth of public bullshit and bad faith start to roll downhill faster than he can outrun them and no matter how many of your cronies lock arms to protect you and the scam you’re running, your past begins to nip at your heels.

Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, over the course of his professional life, Mr. Brooks has forged a vast and heavy chain of absurd claims, asinine pronouncements, outright lies and venomous slanders. He made it link by link and yard by yard. He gartered it on of his own free will and by his own free will he wore it!

And now Mr. Brooks would very much like for this ponderous and inconvenient chain which clanks along behind him to magically disappear (at no personal or professional cost to himself of course.)

Straight-up denial (I never said those things!) has worked for awhile, because there is not one living soul above Mr. Brooks who is interested in lowering the boom on him, and his aforementioned cronies have grown so dependent on the Both Siderist Big Lie he has pioneered that they dare not raise their voices even when the lies get embarrassingly ridiculous.

But flat denial is not a sustainable proposition over the long term, especially since that long and terrible chain is welded to together with names and dates and facts and figures and clearly enunciated positions and predictions.  It is not merely a boo-boo or two or a misstep or two from which Mr. Brooks is trying to separate himself: he is seeking to annul thirty years of well-documented facts.

He is filing for divorce from his own past, and factual reality does not grant such requests.

I admire that kind of talent and it inspires me.

Where I live here in Chester County, Pennsylvania, there are no easy refuges from the heroin problem. Even in the county prison some of the correctional officers are dealing H. I swear that I am not shitting you when I tell you that a two month old kitten overdosed on heroin here last year.

Don’t get me wrong, though, because the law enforcement community here is aware of the problem and have been proactive enough to win an award for their diligent work trying to bust up these drug pipelines into the county.

And the legislature, governor, and local social services agencies have been making good strides, too. Most recently, the state passed some reforms that allow police officers and a wider number of emergency responders to carry Narcan (Naloxone) which can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose and save lives. County service workers are training the police how to properly administer the remedy. The legislature also passed a Good Samaritan law that prevents the prosecutors from pressing charges against people who call 911 to help an overdose victim. They can’t charge the victim either.

Another welcome angle of attack has been the introduction of locked depositories at local police stations where you can take your unused pain medication so it won’t be stolen out of your house and put into the local supply.

Even down in Philly, lots of people are getting popped for selling heroin. But the problem isn’t getting better.

And it’s not getting better because the root of the problem is the overprescription of opioid painkillers. The doctors and pharmaceutical companies create the addicts but their pills are expensive when compared to heroin. The drug dealers don’t have to push their product to get people hooked. The people are already hooked when they come seeking out the drug dealers.

I see more and more people writing about this issue. I can no longer accuse the media of neglecting the problem. Local and state governments are trying to mobilize to address it.

But it’s all tinkering around the edges of a problem that keeps growing more and more prevalent and dangerous. There are some people who are trying to focus attention where it belongs, but it seems like howling into the wind. And I’m tired of running into the chronic pain lobby every time I try to discuss this.

The chronic pain lobby should have one of the most prominent seats at the table. But they should be seeking to find solutions, not claim that every grieving parent and proposal is a threat to their supply.

All we need to do is compare how many opioids are prescribed in this country to the rest of the world to know that we’re creating our own crisis.

I had a busy day today offline.

How’s the riot porn going?

There are many factors that contributed to the riots that broke out yesterday in the lower income community of West Baltimore, the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, despite the best intentions of community leaders, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the Police Commissioner, as well as the wishes of Gray’s family.

Obviously, the pent-up anger toward the Baltimore police over the death of Freddie Gray was a huge factor, there were many others, as well. Decades of abuses by the BPD, including the far too often employment of excessive force that led to many injuries and deaths. The utter lack of any accountability by police officers to the community that suffered under these oppressive and unjust policing practices. The failure of the local educational system due to serious underfunding and official neglect. “Poor” economic outcomes for people living in that part of Baltimore, grossly inadequate housing and high rates of incarceration, especially among young people.

All those are relevant to what occurred, but I’d like to address a more immediate factor that I believe set the stage for the riots yesterday: the heavily militarized presence of the police themselves. Even before the first rock was thrown, legions of police were openly deployed in full riot gear, armed with tear gas, pepper spray, batons, tasers, guns that fired “non-lethal” rounds such as rubber bullets, etc. Take a look at this image of these officers in their full gear yesterday (from Slate):

These don’t look like cops, they look like an invading military force. How would it make you feel if large numbers of police that looked like this suddenly showed up in your local town or community on a day when you and other residents were dealing with the grief of a family’s loss caused by the very same police force? What did the appearance of heavily armed, paramilitary style police units in the neighborhoods tell the people who live in West Baltimore about what the “authorities” expected to happen?

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is taking a lot of heat for not having a more “robust” police response and presence, but I suggest to you that more police and more police “force” would not have staved off yesterday’s riot. The problem wasn’t a lack of police, but the presence of too many police deployed as military units with the aim of intimidation, i.e., by sending an implicit threat of violence against unarmed civilians should “things get out of hand.”

In short, the very nature of the police who were “deployed” in this manner begged for a violent reaction from the residents of West Baltimore, people already highly charged emotionally by the events of the past 15 days since Freddie Gray was arrested and fatally injured in the custody of “Baltimore’s Finest” back on the morning of April 12th. To understand why the presence of large numbers of police in their full riot gear helped spark the rioting, it is necessary to examine the the psychological effect of large crowds faced by exactly this type of police response.

Follow me below the fold for a further discussion of why large numbers of paramilitary-style police units is more likely than not to lead to violent confrontation rather than prevent that reaction.

(cont.)

The common response of most elected officials and politicians, when confronted with outbreaks of crowd violence, is to condemn those rioting as “criminals” and “thugs,” whose bad behavior is both senseless and counterproductive. In fact, Mayor used many of those words, including the characterization of the rioters as “thugs,” to describe the participants in yesterday’s riot.

But the notion that rioters are always comprised of people motivated solely by a desire to destroy, loot and commit acts of violence, like many lazy explanations of complex human behavior, makes the issue of riots into an overly simplified morality play in which there are only two camps: “good guys,” i.e., peaceful protestors, and the “bad guys, ” or the rioters. The real world dynamic that plays out when otherwise normal individuals suddenly engage in violent behavior when they are part of a larger group does not lend itself to such easy answers, however.

Psychologists have long studied the dynamics of crowd behavior. The question of why crowds erupt into violence in some situations and not others has been considered by a number of researchers. The truth is large groups change how people see themselves and changes what behaviors they are willing to undertake as part of that group. People rarely gather together for the sole purpose of starting a riot.

If you have ever been in mob that was agitated about some injustice, you know how contagious it can be. Ordinary people, normal citizens, you and me – we get swept up and do things that would be unlikely under other circumstances: shouting, shoving, throwing rocks, smashing windows, and, yes, even looting.

It usually takes an incident to get a riot started, such as an accident or the police attacking or killing an innocent bystander. But once it has begun, the raging mob has a life of its own. Deep-seated resentments, repetitive frustrations and long standing disappointments galvanize people into action. And the mob provides cover, an anonymity that makes it easier to overcome one’s usual reticence or moral scruples. One is immersed, engulfed. And it can become an exuberant experience, a joyful release for long suppressed emotions. It can also become manic, driven, a means of restlessly seeking new outlets. Leadership emerges spontaneously and changes rapidly.

It offers a kind of intense belonging, not dissimilar to what spectators feel at a sports event or fans at a rock concert. But because it isn’t focused on a game or performance, it easily gets out of hand. Freud described such “mass psychology” in 1924, in the tumultuous aftermath of World War One. Others have studied it since as a recurrent form of group behavior.

One significant factor that affects whether crowds remain peaceful or turn violent, which has been identified in the research literature, is the manner in which police at the scene are deployed for the purpose of “crowd control.” Specifically, a militarized police presence increases the risk of crowd violence.

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

In effect, what happens is that when police present themselves as an occupying force, armed to the teeth in military style gear, it changes the psychology of the people whom the police confront. It inflames the situation, and creates an “us” versus “them” mentality among the crowds faced with an image of deadly force at the hands of police arrayed in this fashion.

[A] great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully.

“Theory underlying the weapons effect or similar kinds of phenomena would suggest that the more you fill the environment with stimuli that are associated with violence, the more likely violence is to occur,” said Bruce Bartholow, a University of Missouri social psychologist who has studied the weapons effect. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State, agreed. “I would expect a bigger effect if you see military weapons than if you see normal weapons,” he said.

This isn’t just about a link between visual stimuli like guns and violence, however. It also has to do with the roles people adopt, with how they respond to the presence of others who may — or may not — mean them harm. To a certain extent, if you dress and treat people like soldiers facing a deadly enemy, they’ll act like it.

In other words, the very equipment, gear and tactics that police forces in the United States have adopted with the intent to enhance public safety, instead often has the opposite effect. This occurs because of the psychological effects these “indicia” of violence create in the minds of those targeted by this “display” of force:

Rather than passively controlling a protest, heavy riot gear actively changes the dynamics of crowd behavior, according to the best new behavioral evidence. The twisted outcome is one that too many police forces have yet to learn: the military-style equipment intended to enhance public safety often ends up threatening it.

Research into the behavior of crowds has led to what one social scientist in the field, Clifford Stott, named the Elaborated Social Identity Model. That’s a mouthful of jargonese, but the essential elements of his theory are not beyond the realm of comprehension by lay people. In short, it refers to the way the psychological identity of individuals in crowds change based on the situation in which they find themselves.

Science writer Vaughan Bell gave a great hypothetical example of this behavioral model during the U.K. riots in 2011. Picture yourself on a bus with lots of strangers. Technically, you all share a common goal of reaching your destination safely. But you each have a social identity that doesn’t necessarily overlap: the old people, the commuters, the annoyingly loud teenagers. If the bus suddenly comes under attack, however, those various identities are united by a single goal: defend against the outside force. “You didn’t lose your identity,” writes Bell, “you gained a new one in reaction to a threat.”

Here’s where the militarization of local police becomes so problematic. Officers in full-on riot gear give all the individuals in a protest crowd a common enemy. It’s not that everyone in the protest crowd suddenly assumes the identity of a violent jerk—it’s that the many peaceful protestors feel a sort of kinship with the violent jerks against the aggressive police. Despite their differences, they’re united by a single goal: defend against the outside force.

This “social identity” is fluid, and easily influenced by changes in the environment. For example, lets consider the situation yesterday in Baltimore. A large number of people, particularly young people, were upset over the death of a Freddie Gray, a young man who died of massive trauma from injuries sustained while in police custody, actions yet to be fully explained. When these young people were released from school back onto the streets they found themselves confronted by a large police presence, police who affected the image of combat soldiers on the very day of Gray’s funeral, an emotional and gut wrenching experience for everyone in that community. The militarized image of the police, one intended to passively intimidate anyone they police came across, was not the optimal tactic for de-escalating the tension and anger of West Baltimore’s residents.

It was the equivalent of throwing gasoline on hot coals. So, what should Baltimore’s officials and the police have done differently? Well, based on Stott’s research into English soccer “hooligans” several things.

First, the police visible in the community should have been in standard uniforms, maintaining a low profile, similar to the policy adopted by Seattle’s former Police Chief, Gil Kerlikowske:

INSKEEP: The anniversary of WTO, a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization led to violent street protests. Kerlikowske became Seattle’s police chief soon afterward. And then came the anniversary protest. Kerlikowske’s response says a lot about the complexities of using force. The new chief did not want violent protests. So, he started by concentrating on what his officers wore.

KERLIKOWSKE: Rather than have all of our officers in very hard gear, helmets and masks and on and on. I was with them in the streets in soft gear.

INSKEEP: Meaning just uniformed police officers, looking like police officers.

Such an approach yesterday in Baltimore would have sent a message that violence was not expected by the authorities. It also would have shown respect for the community. After all, Gray’s family had requested a moratorium on all protests over his death yesterday. West Baltimore should have been given the opportunity to honor that request. Any police in riot gear should have been held back, far from the view of West Baltimore’s residents.

Instead, the Mayor and the police panicked. in the face of rumors of a planned “purge”, they opted for a high profile militarized show of force by police in full riot gear.

With tensions in the city running high on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, police began alerting local businesses and mobilizing officers.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore was one of the first institutions to acknowledge law enforcement concerns. With exams about to begin, school officials abruptly canceled classes “on recommendation of the BPD.” […]

When 3 p.m. came, 75 to 100 students heading to Mondawmin Mall were greeted by dozens of police officers in riot gear. The mall is a transportation hub for students from several nearby schools.

The students began pelting officers with water bottles and rocks. Bricks met shields. Glass shattered up and down Gwynns Falls Parkway. Officers sprayed Mace. Confrontations bled into side streets, where officers threw bricks back. A heavily armored Bearcat tactical vehicle rolled through the neighborhood.

One officer, bloodied in the melee, was carried through Westbury Avenue by his comrades. Police used tear gas to move crowds down the street. […]

Some said the presence of the police antagonized the neighborhood.

“The thing is if the cops never came up here, they weren’t going to [mess] up Mondawmin,” said a young woman who was watching the clash. ” What are they going to [mess] up Mondawmin for? They shop here. This is their home.”

If those police had not been there to confront the kids walking home from school, would yesterday’s violence been averted. We will never know, but I believe that would have been the case. There was no need for the BPD to be out in full riot gear positioned to confront those kids, no need to have spread panic among businesses and schools, no need for any of these actions, when research and the experience of other police departments around the world in dealing with similar situations, demonstrates a militarized police presence is just as likely to lead to an outbreak of violence as it is to prevent one. Probably moreso.

I hope that Baltimore’s local government and the BPD will draw the correct lesson from yesterday’s experience and modify their practices to minimize the risk of further violence in the wake of this tragedy. I fear, however that will not be what happens. I fear they will conclude that next time they must deploy police in even greater numbers, with an even greater arsenal, and react to any “bad actors” in the crowd with an even more aggressive response. If they do that, God help the people of Baltimore.