More on the Chicago police

I've written a fair amount about the Chicago police in the past year of two; most of the postings are not favorable to the police. The Chicago Reporter has written an extensive article on the city's attitude toward police misconduct; the attitude is mainly 'ignore it', although it has cost taxpayers about $263,000,000. Some major cities spend a fair amount of time analyzing the lawsuits for trends, identify the officers most frequently sued, or determine ways to reduce both the cost of the cases and officer misconduct. Chicago does not.

The Reporter looked at 655 police misconduct lawsuits that paid out from 2012 to 2015 and concluded that police misconduct extends beyond a few “bad apples” to department-wide practices. 

"In the small fraction of cases where officers and the city admit liability, the officers rarely are disciplined.

Nearly half of the lawsuits claim that officers filed false reports—and sometimes committed perjury on the witness stand—to cover up their misconduct.

More than one-quarter of lawsuits allege that two or more officers conspired to violate a person’s civil rights.

Nearly one-third allege that some officers on the scene could have but didn’t intervene to prevent misconduct.

In one-quarter of excessive force lawsuits, the person who alleged police abuse was also charged with either resisting arrest or assault of a police officer.

One in 10 cases involves minors. Officers have pointed guns at children, shot at teenagers and left toddlers alone while their parents were arrested. 

Roughly 1 in 6 cases alleges that an incident is part of a pattern of misconduct, fortified by specific Police Department policies or the city’s general failure to adequately investigate officer misconduct."

Sand is money

And so, people are murdered, river beds and beaches are stripped, islands disappear, fish and birds are killed. That's because sand is used as a main ingredient in cement and concrete in buildings, to make glass, in roads and in massive land reclamation projects. Desert sand does not fit the bill since it is too round and does not stick together as well as the rougher sand produced by water erosion. We use a lot of sand. If all the sand used by humans in a single year was turned into a wall it would be 20 metres high, 20 metres wide and stretch all the way around the equator.

Maybe Brexit will not happen

It's been interesting seeing the 'victors' not ecstatic on the days after; in fact, they seem worried. England may have a way of staying in the EU as Parliament must be the withdrawing party.

Useless licensing

Assad does not like doctors or hospitals

In the past five years, he has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.” The health ministry routinely prevents U.N. convoys from delivering medicines and surgical supplies to besieged areas.

Aleppo was the largest city in Syria, with thousands of physicians. Only 5% of them are still there, the others have fled the country.

The Joys of Travel

The Marijuana Church

It's in Lansing, Michigan, which allows the use, possession or transfer of less than one ounce of marijuana on private property by a person who is at least 21. The First Cannabis Church of Logic and Reason was founded by Jeremy Hall, a state-licensed medical marijuana patient and caregiver. The church, which has forty members, will be meeting inside the Lansing Farmers Herbal Market. The 'communion' will consist of a roach collection jar for marijuana patients in need.

The Jungle, 21st century style

A message for the U.S.?

You have to wonder whether Britain's leaving the European Union is a precursor to Trump becoming our president. It seems as though those really upset with the political order won the day. Clearly, a considerable number of Americans are equally upset. Is there a way of reducing the anger in an intelligent way?

Solar Impulse 2 reaches Europe

Here it is above Seville.

It uses only solar power. It landed in Spain Thursday after completing a 71-hour flight from New York. There was only one pilot. He survived by taking the occasional catnap. This was the 15th leg of a round-the-world trip which began on March 9, 2015, in Abu Dhabi.

Reneging

In our efforts in Afghanistan we got a lot of help from a lot of Afghans, particularly as interpreters. Sure, many of them did it for the money, but all of them put themselves and their families at risk to help us. Even now they are in trouble. They and their families are being hunted down by the Taliban. Some have been killed and wounded while waiting for an American visa. Many are scared to leave their homes, shop in open markets or take their children to school. 

We did establish the Special Immigrant Visa program to allow Afghans to seek refuge here. These visas are given to those who undergo rigorous screening and can demonstrate at least two years of faithful and valuable service to the United States. More than 9,000 Afghans have taken advantage of the program.

But now legislation is on track to stop this program while there are still 10,000 or so Afghans currently trying to come here. If the legislation is not changed, why 
would anyone agree to help the United States if we have a record of breaking our promises and abandoning those who assist us? Petraeus and McChrystal realize this and have urged that the legislation by changed.

An alternative social order?

Employee training at one bank in China

Does Trump have enough money for his campaign?

And does he spend it wisely? Here are some facts gleaned from Trump's latest filing with the Federal Elections Commission:

1.) Trump only has $1.3 million in cash on hand. Hillary has $42 mil.
2.) Trump’s campaign raised only $3.1 million in May.Hillary raised $4,500,000 in one day.
3.) Trump’s campaign paid Trump’s own companies more than $1 million in May.
4.) Trump’s campaign spent more money on ‘Make America Great Again’ hats than on web advertising.

A good investment for drug companies

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at payments to 279,669 doctors who prescribed specific drugs in four categories: cholesterol lowering statins, two types of blood pressure drugs and antidepressants. These doctors received 63,524 payments, 95 percent of which were for meals sponsored by drug companies, worth about $12 to $18 each. 

Doctors who were treated to a single meal, where drug companies present information about their medications, were 18 percent more likely to prescribe, a brand-name cholesterol-lowering medicine. They were 70 percent more likely to prescribe Bystolic, a brand-name beta blocker for high blood pressure, and 52 percent more likely to prescribe Benicar, also for hypertension. And they were more than twice as likely to prescribe Pristiq instead of a generic antidepressant.

Why would The Atlantic post this video?

I can't see where there is any point made beyond advertising the woman's 'art'.

You can't manage without measuring

The U.S. Army War College publishes the Quarterly, Parameters. Although I know nothing about military matters, I find the publication interesting. For example, the Spring issue has an article entitled "Measuring the Effectiveness of America’s War". It seeks to evaluate just how well the war on terror is doing. The author's conclusion: not very well.

By and large our leaders make statements, such as the killing of Osama, which they point to as indicating that we are doing well. Yet, there is very little quantitative data that shows this even though the Government Performance and Results Act mandates all agencies establish performance objectives and measure progress in meeting those objectives.

The author of the article, Erik W. Goepner, has done his own calculations using available data. His basic conclusion is that the war on terror has made matter worse. 

"Statistical modeling indicates for every additional billion dollars spent and 1,000 American troops sent to fight the war on terror, the number of terror attacks worldwide increased by 19. The data show countries the US invaded had 143 more terror attacks per year than countries the US did not invade. Similarly, countries in which the US conducted drone strikes were home to 395 more terror attacks per year than those where the US did not. In 2001, some 1,880 terror attacks occurred. By 2014, the number had risen to 16,818. Fatalities caused by terror attacks have increased to unprecedented levels. The average number of deaths rose 72 percent for the 13 year period after 9/11 as compared to the 13 years prior. In 2014, a record 43,512 people were killed by terrorism, a staggering 297 percent increase from the worst year in the pre-9/11 period which was 1997."

A less free press?

Buy a car, get a gun

That's what a used car dealer in New Hampshire is promoting. The gun is an AR-15. The deal has been available since May and will end August 31. So far, he has given away four AR-15s.

The Dickey Amendment

A surprise proponent of gun control

General Stanley McChrystal has a strong article in today's NY Times. It is entitled "Home Should Not Be a War Zone". He properly labels it a national crisis. 

"From 2001 to 2010, 119,246 Americans were murdered with guns, 18 times all American combat deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.... I believe we need a national response to the gun violence that threatens so many of our communities." 

He wants the loopholes closed and this can only be done on a national basis. "In my life as a soldier and citizen, I have seen time and time again that inaction has dire consequences. In this case, one consequence of our leaders’ inaction is that felons, domestic abusers and suspected terrorists have easy access to firearms. Some opponents of closing these gaps in our laws will continue to argue that dangerous people will obtain guns in our country no matter what, and therefore that taking steps to make it harder for them is fruitless. That is both poor logic and poor leadership."

A different summer camp

It's only two days and it is in Arizona in the middle of summer.  The curriculum reads as follows,  “The campers will follow jail regulations, wear inmate clothing, work as an inmate laborer, eat jail food, sleep in jail tents/bunks, and attend education programs”. The purpose of the camp is to show youngsters the miseries that await them if they commit crimes and wind up in prison.

Did you guess that the camp is offered by Maricopa County, whose sheriff is the estimable Joe Arpaio?

The Red Cross strikes out again

I don't think I've seen a positive story about the Red Cross in years. It has been the subject of negative articles for about ten years. The Senate has just released a report that has been in the works for a year. Here are the report's major conclusions:

• After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Red Cross spent tens of millions of dollars more than it has previously acknowledged on internal expenses. The Red Cross told Grassley that the money was largely spent on oversight to make sure the Haiti aid was used properly. But Grassley’s office found that the charity “is unable to provide any financial evidence that oversight activities in fact occurred."
• Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern made false statements to Grassley’s office about whether the charity cooperated with congressional investigators.
• McGovern and her subordinates have kept the charity’s own internal investigations and ethics unit “severely undermanned and underfunded.” The charity is “reluctant to support the very unit that is designed to police wrongdoing within the organization.”

Animals and Serial Killers

The 21st century in Qatar

A Dutch woman claimed to the police in Qatar that she was drugged and raped. So, the cops convicted her of a crime and sentenced her to a year in jail and a fine of $850. Her attacker was not convicted of rape. Instead, he received 140 lashes for sexual activity outside of marriage and drinking alcohol. The Dutch government intervened and was able to get her out of Qatar after she had served three months.

College Costs Have Risen the Most

Keeping drug prices high

Drug prices in the United States are higher, often far higher, than those in any other country on earth. Part of the reason is that, unlike most countries, we do not regulate drug prices. One reason we don't is that we don't want to squelch research by the drug companies. Yet, companies spend roughly one-third of their revenues on marketing and only half as much on research and development. Drug research funding has been declining for more than a decade.

The purpose of drug research here is to get a patent on the drug. But companies now get more than one patent on a drug; they get secondary patents to thicken the protection around their original patent. These additional patents rarely represent anything new in terms of science. Instead, their purpose is to prolong a company’s monopoly and, along with that, its ability to charge high prices for its drugs. Some drugs have dozens of secondary patents. Abbott Labs, for example, has over 108 patents on its HIV drug Kaletra. In many cases both the base and secondary patents for the drug are based on old science and commonly known techniques.

Flint is not alone

The Guardian asked 81 Eastern cities for water testing information; 43 replied. Of the 43, 33 were found to have inadequate and dangerous testing methods; 21 used the same water testing methods as Flint. And the EPA has done little to correct this problem. 

The cities affected are not all failed cities like Flint; they include Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee.

Memories

May was not a good month for me

I made a lot of stupid - but, fortunately, minor - errors in May. My worst was booking a room at Motel 6 in Portland, Maine. Problem 1: the door would not open unless kicked. There were black spots in the bath tub. The only chair was a desk chair, but the desk lacked paper and a writing implement. There was no information about the Portland area. The sink had insufficient space to hold even a toothbrush. There was no hot water and that which came out was in bursts. But there were no bed bugs that could be seen.

Following my mother's advice, I offered it up for the poor souls in purgatory

True love conquers all

A kangaroo lived in a roadhouse (an Australian fuel stop and shop) in Northern Australia for 28 years. Last year a pig moved into the roadhouse and love blossomed between the two to the point where they now have an intimate relationship.

Measuring Peace

Although it's been around for almost ten years, I'd never heard of The Institute for Economics and Peace. Maybe that's because it is headquartered in Australia. It is a  "think tank dedicated to developing metrics to analyse peace and to quantify its economic value. It does this by developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analyzing country level risk and understanding positive peace." It claims that it has the ear of the people who count -  governments, academic institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organisations and by intergovernmental institutions such as the OECD, The Commonwealth Secretariat, the World Bank and the United Nations. 

Their most recent report looks at 163 countries and territories. They conclude that Syria is the least peaceful country, followed by South Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. The world’s most peaceful countries are Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Portugal.

Where does the U.S. stand? 103rd.

A sense of decency

That's what Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer, asked Senator Joseph McCarthy fifty-four years ago today. This was the beginning of the end of THE scare of the 1950s. Bill Moyers recalls the interchange and gives an example from 2012 of a repeat of McCarthyism by Allan West, a Congressman at that time. Are we seeing another repeat today?

How many consecutive hours can you work?

What about aerosols?

In the world of climate change aerosols are ultra-small particles which blanket vast areas in a haze that blocks and scatters sunlight reducing the solar energy that reaches the earth’s surface. Thus, evaporation is reduced and the water cycle (that governs where, when, and how much rain falls) is slowed. Currently, these effects are most pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere, which is the source of most of the world’s aerosols and thus suffers the most dimming from these pollutants. However, aerosols move around the world.

In the mid- to late-20th century global emissions of sulfur dioxide (which in the atmosphere becomes sulfate, a reflective aerosol) nearly doubled, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface by about two percent, on average. As a direct result of this dimming, average rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere declined by between three and four percent over the same period. 

Now the problem is in East Asia and South Asia. These regions, which have rapidly industrialized over the past four decades, have seen a two- to fourfold increase in sulfur dioxide and black carbon emissions since the 1970s. As a result, in 2010, China and India received somewhere between ten and 15 percent less sunlight than they did in 1970. As the wind has carried sulfates and black carbon over thousands of miles, the dimming effect has extended to the atmos­phere over the Indian Ocean, reducing the evaporation of seawater and thus weakening the monsoons that bring much-needed water to East Asia and South Asia every year. From 1950 to 2002, the most recent period for which estimates are available, there was a seven percent decrease in average annual rainfall over the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the fertile belt of land crossing eastern Pakistan, northern India, and Bangladesh that is home to more than one billion people, many of them dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Over the same period, summer monsoon rainfall in parts of northern China decreased by more than ten percent.

Not good news

The U.S. Education Department released the latest installment of the Civil Rights Data Collection, a trove of data drawn from surveys of nearly every single one of the nation’s 95,000 public schools and a total of 50 million students. Here are some interesting findings:

1. In the 2013-2014 school year, 6.5 million children were chronically absent from school, missing 15 or more days of school.

2. 850,000 high school students didn’t have access to a school counselor.

3. 1.6 million students went to a school that employed a sworn law-enforcement officer, but no counselor.

4. Nearly 800,000 students were enrolled in schools where more than 20 percent of teachers hadn’t met state licensure requirements.

5. Racial disparities in suspensions reach all the way down into preschool: Black children represent 19 percent of all preschoolers, and 47 percent of all those who were suspended.

A 21st century business

The ability to take courses and tests on-line has sparked a new business - cheating. In most cases those giving the courses and tests really have no idea who is really at the computer. This provides an opportunity for companies to sit at the computer pretending to be students. Many companies in China do just that for people who want to enter a college in America. These companies game entrance exams, concoct college applications and complete college coursework on behalf of students. The market is there because the buyers, Chinese students, are pushed by their families and the culture to study overseas, and the sellers, U.S. colleges, profit from foreign students willing to pay full tuition.

The market is pretty big. About 761,000 degree-seeking foreign students now study in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education. A third come from China. Department of Commerce statistics show that Chinese students spent almost $10 billion on tuition and other goods and services in America in 2014.

How can anyone vote for this guy?

Joey Alexander, Jazz Pianist

He's gone far since my posting last year.

Doll with prosthetic leg

Relieve yourself

Food stamp fraud

How long will the NY Times Magazine last?

Over the past year or so the quality of the magazine has really gone downhill. It is not what it was for the first twenty or so years I have subscribed. There are fewer and fewer articles I read. This week's issue is particularly abominable. There is no need to have every page horizontal. The title font in each article is very difficult to read. As for the subject matter, who cares? 

If I didn't do the puzzle every week, I would cancel my subscription.

Elections

From a Duncaster correspondent

An interesting chart

More questions from Bacevich

Does waging war across a large swath of the Islamic world make sense? When will this broader fight end? What will it cost? Short of reducing large parts of the Middle East to rubble, is that fight winnable in any meaningful sense? Above all, does the world’s most powerful nation have no other choice but to persist in pursuing a manifestly futile endeavor?

Drought in California is not over

Although the state is once more allowing local communities to set their own water limits, things are still bad, especially in Southern California. There are still two or three entire years of rain missing since this drought began five years ago. The snowpack from this winter is already melting, by late May it was down to just 35 percent of normal.

And,of course, one additional problem re the drought is forest fires. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that 40 million trees statewide have died during the five-year drought, 29 million in just 2015. Dead trees are like matchsticks for forest fires.

June 1, 2016