How A Post-9/11 Law Can Get You Arrested For Your Emoji Choices →

Our justice system is far behind culture and technology.

Most of Aristy’s anti-cop status updates seem tame compared to the vitriol found all over the internet. They are not altogether different from many hip-hop lyrics, where the figure of the cop killer is sometimes an archetype of rebellion and power. 

But on the evening of Jan. 15, according to a criminal complaint, Aristy posted a photo of a revolver with bullets beside it, and wrote he felt “like katxhin a body right now.” A few minutes later, he posted “nigga run up on me, he gunna get blown down .” An hour later, he posted, “fuck the 83 104 79 98 73 PCTKKKK .” (All three of the posts appear to have since been deleted.)

Less than three days later, on Jan. 18, the New York Police Department arrested Aristy at his Bushwick home on a warrant accusing the teenager of “making a terroristic threat,” a felony that could carry seven years in prison upon conviction.

None of the Facebook posts that were cited to in the criminal complaint that led to Aristy’s arrest appear to include verbal or text-based threat to police officers. The teen’s references to law enforcement officers appear to be limited to cartoon representations of police and firearms.

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As with many laws passed in the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, the New York State statute defining “terroristic threats” is remarkably broad. The charge entered the penal code shortly after the attacks, when the state legislature found a need for laws “specifically designed to combat the evils of terrorism.”

The statute says that any statement intending to intimidate civilians or the government by threatening to commit a specific offense can be prosecuted as terrorism. It adds that a defendant’s unwillingness or inability to actually carry out the threat “shall be no defense.”

But the statute does include one important qualifying factor, legal experts who specialize in civil liberties told BuzzFeed News. Namely, it requires prosecutors to prove that the person making the statement intended it as a threat, rather than a boast or a joke.

(This quote doesn't contain the emoji, so click through if you're interested in what the full messages looked like.)

Solving Homelessness in San Francisco →

"Solving" is perhaps too strong a word, but there's a lot of wisdom in this post.

San Francisco has between 7,000–14,000 homeless people. And to support them, we have roughly 1,145 shelter beds. Leaving the majority of our homeless to figure out “where to sleep” and “how to survive” on a daily basis.

Now here’s the kicker!

It costs the city $61,000/yr between ER’s, jail, and support services per homeless person living on the streets. And only $12,000/yr to provide a homeless person with permanent housing, giving them free safe housing, instead of suffering on the street. So buying the homeless housing is not only the right thing to do, it’s also saves the government a lot of money. Over $40,000/yr per person!

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We need to create an affordable and scalable homeless housing plan, which ensures no one is ever left to fend for themselves on the streets. The system breaks the moment people have nowhere safe to sleep. Depression sets in, substance abuse rises, crime rises, and the costs to the rest of us rise dramatically.

The Billionaire Boys’ Club →

Democracy to the highest bidder! (...?)

The rise of the super PAC in the 2012 presidential election seemed like the pinnacle of Big Money politics—an unprecedented expansion of fundraising and donor influence.

But that was then. For 2016, the pioneers of that kind of politics—conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch—have found a new summit. According to the New York Times, the siblings plan to spend close to $900 million on next year’s campaign, with incursions into the Republican presidential primary. At more than double the roughly $400 million the Koch brothers spent in 2012, this money would go to polling, analytics, advertising, grassroots campaigns, single-issue advocacy groups, and more.

For comparison’s sake, in the last presidential election, the Republican National Committee—along with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee—spent a total of $657 million. It’s Democratic counterparts, likewise, spent a total of $647 million. The committees spent somewhat smaller amounts in the 2008 election and are likely to spend similarly larger amounts next year.

Nevertheless, an interesting line of thinking at the end:

For liberal observers, there’s a certain irony to these moves and machinations. In Democratic politics, the Koch brothers are real-life bogeymen, avatars of rapacious greed and a dangerous threat to our public institutions. But in Republican politics, the Koch brothers may become a new tool foraccountability: a way for less powerful parts of the party to ignore the usual gatekeepers and exert their will.

Historic Victory for SYRIZA Greece →

Elections are important institutions that define the national narrative. I'm very interested to see what happens in Greece after this, given a decidedly leftist party is in the lead, and one that's hostile to a lot of EU economic policy which has kept Greece in grinding indebtedness for the last several years.

The leader of the left-wing SYRIZA Party, Alexis Tsipras, claimed a jubilant victory in Athens, Greece, on Sunday. SYRIZA took 36.5 percent of the electorate compared with the 27.7 percent for Antonis Samaras of the New Democracy Party. This is according to official election data. The far-right Golden Dawn placed third at at 6.3 percent, followed by To Potami garnering 5.9 percent of the vote party...

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LEO PANITCH, PROF. OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, YORK UNIVERSITY: ...But he made it very clear this was a victory against what he called the elite and the oligarchs in Greece. I think people need to understand that this is a positive outcome of a clear class struggle.

PERIES: So what does he mean by the oligarchs?

PANITCH: He means the very small number of Greeks who own the Greek economy. This doesn't get talked about much. The enemy gets portrayed as Angela Merkel, etc., but who she is defending, of course, is the ruling class of Greece, who brought Greece into the European Union on the terms it was brought in. We're talking about the great shipowners, the people who used to identify with Aristotle Onassis, although he's been succeeded by a new generation, who weren't paying any taxes until last year. Since the military coup in 1967, the first thing they did was remove all taxes from Greek shipowners. And they weren't paying any taxes until last year. We're talking about the families who own the private media, the television companies, the newspapers, who own the development companies, the construction companies. They dominate merchant trade. And they are the ones who have benefited from privatization, in partnership with foreign companies who bought up parts of Greece. So it's very much a victory for the people.

Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time DEA spy program →

If license plate readers continued to proliferate without restriction and the DEA held license plate reader data for extended periods the agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people’s lives, the ACLU said, especially if combined with other surveillance data such as bulk phone records or information gleaned by the US Marshals Service using aircraft that mimic cellphone towers.

"Data-mining the information, an unproven law enforcement technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only exacerbates these concerns, potentially tagging people as criminals without due process," the ACLU warned.

That last part is what I'm most worried about. There have been several stories over the last couple years of "law enforcement" agencies badly abusing the data they have, leading to over-policing, false arrests, and cries of "pre-crime". Some of this is growing pains, while society as a whole learns how to more properly use advanced scientific methods. Some of this we might also choose to avoid, on philosophical grounds, if only we knew what was happening.

Why Do Teen Girls in America Want to Get Pregnant? →

Some very enlightening data, and then this:

...A variety of studies have shown that having children can lower teenagers’ involvement in crime, drug use, and delinquency—meaning that, despite the dreadful outcomes associated with teen pregnancy in most policy literature dedicated to the subject, having kids can actually be positive and stabilizing for teen mothers. Further, researchers like Kathryn Edin, author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, have argued that putting off pregnancy simply doesn’t make sense for women who find themselves without much hope of social mobility anyway. In those cases, Edin argues, motherhood provides a sense of stability, cohesion, and purpose.

Aid in a World of Crisis →

Never in the 64-year history of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has it had to address so much human misery. At the beginning of 2014, more than 51 million people were displaced from their homes, uprooted by conflict and persecution. Many more have had to flee in the past twelve months.

Protracted wars, environmental disasters, and state failure have stretched the international humanitarian-aid system passed its breaking point. If the UNHCR and other relief agencies are to address the unprecedented amount of human need, they will have to broaden their base of support. Without a massive scaling up of private-sector involvement, both in terms of shared expertise and funding support, we will fail to provide for millions of people who have lost almost everything.

Syria is the canary in the coalmine...

Throw More Money at Education →

It’s become almost conventional wisdom that throwing more money at public education doesn’t produce results. But what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

A new paper from economists C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson and Claudia Persico suggests that it is. To disentangle correlation from causation, they look at periods from 1955 through 1985 when courts ordered governments to spend more on schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade. They then track how students in those areas did, up through 2011. The result is a very detailed long-term picture of the effect of spending more money on education.

The economists find that spending works. Specifically, they find that a 10 percent increase in spending, on average, leads children to complete 0.27 more years of school, to make wages that are 7.25 percent higher and to have a substantially reduced chance of falling into poverty. These are long-term, durable results. Conclusion: throwing money at the problem works.

Here’s the hitch: The authors find that the benefits of increased spending are much stronger for poor kids than for wealthier ones. So if you, like me, are in the upper portion of the U.S. income distribution, you may be reading this and thinking: “Why should I be paying more for some poor kid to be educated?” After all, why should one person pay the cost while another reaps the benefits?

Well, let me try to answer that. There are several good reasons...