...But, six and a half years later, Europe has distinguished itself by not having much of a recovery at all. And, as you can see above, that's about to make it worse than the worst of the 1930s.
Dispatches: On the Ground in Ferguson, Missouri
When the police riot:
The heavy-handed police response to the protests over the past week has done nothing to change that perception. On Sunday, Chandler went to the main protest site on West Florissant Avenue with her 15-year-old daughter, where she said protesters were gathered and milling about. She said that, around sunset, police arrived and ordered the crowd to disperse. As she and her daughter were trying to leave, her daughter was teargassed. Since then, they’ve been going to the quieter, smaller protest site on a tire shop parking lot across the street from the Ferguson police department, about 2 miles away. Late Wednesday night, police drove up to that site in armored trucks and full military-style gear, she said, and ordered them to leave: “They had about 40 or 50 men in it looked like military gear with M-16 [assault rifles], pointing them directly in our faces, and they put the gun in my daughter’s face, and [told us we were] trespassing,” she said. (She said that they had permission to be there from the tire shop's owner.) Chandler saw one woman, a pastor, get shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet.
Why the Fires in Ferguson Won’t End Soon
These weren’t isolated events. A 2012 report from University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist David Klinger found that, from 2008 to 2011, St. Louis police officers fired their weapons 98 times. “Any comparison across cities right now is still missing the lion’s share of circumstances in which people are shot by the police,” Klinger said to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “There are only a smattering of cities that report their officer-involved shootings, and when compared against them, St. Louis is on the high end.” The data on police violence is incomplete, as there is no federal effort to pull together information on unjustified homicides.
...But the St. Louis area PD seem highly dysfunctional (putting it mildly), in light of increasing evidence.
Like many American cities, St. Louis can’t be untangled from segregation. In 1916, it became one of the first places to formalize racial segregation by designating particular “Negro blocks” where blacks would be concentrated and legally forbidden from leaving. The Supreme Court struck the ordinance in 1917, but private real estate agents and other groups responded with informal means of enforcing segregation. In 1923, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange created zones in the city’s black neighborhoods to limit the extent of black housing. Real estate agents could sell to black families inside the zones, but would lose their licenses if they sold homes outside the zones.
The list of nefarious anti-black schemes continues through the decades. That's the background for the story. Even if that were not the case, this community is behaving extraordinarily peacefully; they have every right to be angry, let alone exercise their right to assemble.
Sentencing, by the Numbers →
IN a recent letter to the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized the growing trend of evidence-based sentencing, in which courts use data-driven predictions of defendants’ future crime risk to shape sentences. Mr. Holder is swimming against a powerful current.
Guilty of... being slightly more likely to be guilty of something in the future? How is this not un-Constitutional (regardless of its moral component)?
Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? →
Really tough read.
One of the fundamental points of the article, though, is that life is complex, and we need to be cautious to avoid simple narratives (if there's one thing I could teach every human on this planet, I might choose that):
...A substantial proportion of the public reacts not merely with anger, but with frothing vitriol.
Ed Hickling believes he knows why. Hickling is a clinical psychologist from Albany, N.Y., who has studied the effects of fatal auto accidents on the drivers who survive them. He says these people are often judged with disproportionate harshness by the public, even when it was clearly an accident, and even when it was indisputably not their fault.
Humans, Hickling said, have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
Basically, that's not the case. Saying "our brains aren't perfect" is an understatement. They're complete shit under the right circumstances, and easily misled (at best) the rest of the time. We only look like god-beings compared to the rest of the animal world. If I were designing a human, I wouldn't have settled on this.
Again, really good (difficult) read. Read it to increase your understanding of human beings, and to increase your empathy.
How Conservation and Groundwater Management Can Gird California for a Drier Era →
...In the weekly update to the U.S. Drought Monitor site yesterday, nearly 80 percent of the state was in extreme or exceptional drought conditions.
Potentially one of the biggest medium-term problems we face is potable water, here in the US and around the world.
Arizona’s Checkpoint Rebellion →
A frontier war is being waged in southern Arizona, but it’s many miles north of the Mexico border. People are fed up with the immigration checkpoints. A round-the-clock U.S. Border Patrol presence at the checkpoints means that American citizens must endure inspection when they commute to work or run errands; every major road has one of these blockades.
The two-state solution, R.I.P. →
For at least two decades, a key assumption to U.S. policy on this question is that the final outcome would be two states within the territory that Israel currently controls. That assumption will have to be revised — and US policy in the region will have to be revised along with it.