Drug Offenders, Violent Offenders, and Stock vs. Flow

Tuesday, December 8th, 2015

The length of prison sentence varies by kind of crime committed, so we should note the critical distinction between stock and flow when comparing drug offenders to violent offenders:

As of 2009, the median incarceration time at state facilities for drug offenses was 14 months, exactly half the time for violent crimes. Those convicted of murder served terms of roughly 10 times greater length.

The picture is clear: Drug crimes have been the predominant reason for new admissions into state and federal prisons in recent decades. In every year from 1993 to 2009, more people were admitted for drug crimes than violent crimes. In the 2000s, the flow of incarceration for drug crimes exceeded admissions for property crimes each year. Nearly one-third of total prison admissions over this period were for drug crimes.

Violent crimes account for nearly half the prison population at any given time; and drug crimes only one fifth. But drug crimes account for more of the total number of admissions in recent years — almost one third (31 percent), while violent crimes account for one quarter:

Prison by Type of Offense, Stock vs. Flow

Firearms, Kings, and the Emergence of the Peaceful Life

Monday, December 7th, 2015

The United States has a higher homicide rate than most other developed countries, and it has more civilian gun ownership — but the causality isn’t straightforward:

There are large gaps among the states when it comes to homicide, with rates ranging all the way from about two to twelve per 100,000 in 2013, the most recent year of data available from the CDC. These disparities show that it’s not just guns that cause the United States to have, on average, a higher rate of homicide than other developed countries do. Not only is there no correlation between gun ownership and overall homicide within a state, but there is a strong correlation between gun homicide and non-gun homicide — suggesting that they spring from similar causes, and that some states are simply more violent than others. A closer look at demographic and geographic patterns provides some clues as to why this is.

The first major factor is race. Blacks lacked the government’s protection from violence through most of American history and even today have higher rates of homicide than other racial groups do. Despite being 13 percent of the general population and owning guns at just half the rate of whites, blacks commit about half of murders, overwhelmingly against other blacks. Drawing on recent CDC data, the website FiveThirtyEight has reported that while blacks suffer homicide at a rate of 19.4 per 100,000, the rate for non-Hispanic whites is just 2.5 — “not so much of an outlier” in the international context, FiveThirtyEight notes.

[...]

Whites in 14 states face a roughly European level of violence, with an annual homicide risk of no more than 1.5 per 100,000. Confusingly, these states don’t appear to have much in common culturally. They include liberal states known for gang violence in poor minority areas (New York, New Jersey), mostly rural red states teeming with firearms (Idaho, North Dakota), Upper Midwest states with strong hunting cultures but also large urban areas (Wisconsin, Minnesota), and gun-loving states either purple (New Hampshire) or solidly blue (Vermont).

But there is, in fact, a common thread: They are all in the northern United States. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, documenting this pattern in The Better Angels of Our Nature, ascribes differences in state violence to a North–South divide reflecting “historical routes of migration.” He notes that “the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia started out more violent than New England.” As Pinker and countless others have discussed, inhabitants of the North were relatively quick to establish the rule of law and allow the government a monopoly on violence, while the South developed a “culture of honor” in which individuals took personal slights seriously and handled their disputes themselves, sometimes resorting to violence. This difference suggests that there will be higher homicide rates in the South, regardless of the prevalence of guns. In fact, whites in the most violent states — mainly in the South and Southwest, where gun ownership is high — have non-gun-assault death rates around 1.5 to 2 per 100,000, enough to put them above the total rates of the least violent foreign nations and of white Americans in peaceful northern states. Similarly, to return to the previous topic, blacks nationwide have a rate of non-gun-assault death above 3.5 per 100,000.

Definitely read the whole thing.

Educating Warriors

Monday, December 7th, 2015

Retired Marine Corps General James Mattis answers some questions about the importance of educating warriors for the challenges of modern-day warfare:

You often quote Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is nothing new under the sun.” What does it mean to you?

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us. It started long ago. If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself. Further, you recognize there is nothing so unique that you’ve got to go to extraordinary lengths to deal with it.

How did the Marine Corps prepare you for warfare?

The Corps made very clear that I was responsible for my own learning, and that it would guide me with a required reading list. We learned the Corps was as serious about that as it was about 3-mile runs and pull-ups. It set an institutional expectation with a moral tone to it: War is bloody enough without having to have amateurs send young men into a fight.

How did such training inform your decisions?

It meant I was never really bewildered for very long by anything an adversary did. I remember in 2001 when the fleet commander [Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr.] asked if I could get the Marines from the Mediterranean and the Pacific together and move against Kandahar, Afghanistan. I did my reconnaissance in a Navy antisubmarine plane with beautiful telescopes on board. I could see the fighting up north, a little bit going on further east. Out west there wasn’t much. And then down south at Kandahar, this big dark area—no one down there, not scouts, not even patrols. And I knew right away.…I didn’t care how brave their boys were. I didn’t care how many guns they had. I knew I was going to stick a knife in their back. Based on all that reading the Marine Corps had required at each rank, I could see exactly how to take this enemy down.

Who tops your reading list?

Colin Gray from the University of Reading is the most near-faultless strategist alive. Then there’s Sir Hew Strachan from Oxford, and Williamson Murray, the American. Those three are probably the leading present-day military theorists. You’ve got to know Sun-tzu and Carl von Clausewitz, of course. The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

How would you answer critics who accuse you of espousing “old school” values?

It takes a military with what could be considered old-fashioned values or quaint values to protect the country. There’s always going to be a bit of a tension, a dynamic that has to be understood by those responsible for leading a progressive America that does not want to be militarized yet needs certain military attributes for protection.

Held Hostage

Sunday, December 6th, 2015

PBS’s Held Hostage looks at the January 2013 al-Qaeda siege of a gas facility in Algeria:

You really don’t want to be taken hostage by Islamist terrorists, but you don’t exactly want to be rescued by a Third-World army, either.

Black Metal and Self-Liquidation

Sunday, December 6th, 2015

In the 1980s heavy metal bands rode the Satanic panic to popularity with over-the-top lyrics and album-cover art, but its more extreme subgenre of black metal led to actual anti-Christian action in Norway:

In the early to mid-1990s, black metallists launched a wave of arson attacks on churches, including one dating from the 12th century. By 1996 there had been 50 church burnings, with similar attacks spreading to Sweden.

Those convicted showed no remorse, and lack of remorse still prevails among many in the black metal scene:

Many, such as Infernus and Gaahl of Gorgoroth, continue to praise the church burnings, with the latter saying “there should have been more of them, and there will be more of them”. Others, such as Necrobutcher and Kjetil Manheim of Mayhem and Abbath of Immortal, see the church burnings as having been futile. Manheim claimed that many arsons were “just people trying to gain acceptance” within the black metal scene. Watain vocalist Erik Danielsson respected the attacks, but said of those responsible: “the only Christianity they defeated was the last piece of Christianity within themselves. Which is a very good beginning, of course”. (Wikipedia, 2015b)

Why this hostility to Christianity? And why is it more extreme in Norway? These questions are raised in a review of black metal around the world:

Individualistic and anti-Christian rhetoric is common across the American death metal scene, and metal bands worldwide look to native traditions as a means to combat cultural hegemony [...], yet nothing on the scale of the crimes in Norway has occurred elsewhere. (Wallach et al., 2011, p. 198)

One reason is the role of organized religion in Norwegian life. Although there are other denominations, the Church of Norway is the leading one and receives State support. Despite recent legislation in 2012 to weaken this relationship with the State, all clergy remain civil servants, the central and regional church administrations remain part of the state administration, all municipalities must support the Church of Norway’s activities, and municipal authorities are still represented in its local bodies (Wikipedia, 2015a)

As either a partner or a rival of the government, the Church of Norway has helped to make public policy: first, the postwar expansion of the welfare state and, later, the boycotts against South Africa. Now, it is leading the push for large-scale non-European/non-Christian immigration, which began in the early 1990s through the “sanctuary movement.” By 1993, as many as 140 congregations were housing 650 Albanians from Kosovo. By reframing immigration in moral terms, the Church made it that much harder to place limits on it, since morality is normally perceived in absolute terms, e.g., murder is always wrong, and not wrong within limits (Lippert and Rehaag, 2013, pp. 126-129).

After a lull, this movement is once more on the upswing:

As the group of unreturnable refugees in Norway has risen over recent years, churches have again become places for public appeals for these groups, through hunger strikes, tents camped as protest at the walls of central churches, and asylum marches following old pilgrimage paths. (Lippert and Rehaag, 2013, p.129).

The Church of Norway is now working with Lutherans elsewhere in Northern Europe to facilitate immigration from Africa and the Middle East. At a meeting this year in Trondheim, the Lutheran World Federation pushed for three measures: expansion of Italy’s Mare Nostrum initiative to the entire Mediterranean; creation of “safe passage” corridors for migrants; and “just distribution” of migrants within Europe (Anon, 2015).

Norway is not the only country where churches have been promoting African and Muslim immigration, but church involvement is especially pivotal there and in Scandinavia as a whole. Because immigration was very limited until recent decades, it is legitimized much more by Christian universalism than by a pre-existing tradition of immigration, as in the United States, Canada, and France. A second reason is the relative dominance of one State-supported church and the unthinking adherence of most Scandinavians, even atheists, to the Lutheran tradition. Thus, in comparison to other predominantly Christian societies, they can more quickly reach a policy consensus, or have one imposed on them.

Frost concludes:

Aside from a few frozen islands and a brief claim to part of Greenland, Norway never had a colonial empire. Nor was it ever involved in the slave trade. Yet, today, the average Norwegian feels more guilt over having white skin and more deference toward dark-skinned people than do citizens of most European countries, including former colonial powers. This is a relatively recent development, being postwar and mostly post-1960 — a time when Norway and other Scandinavian countries were striving to assimilate modern Western values, including antiracism.

Scandinavians have been very good at internalizing and acting out those values. They are like model students who have learned to outdo their teachers. This partly reflects — ironically — their cultural homogeneity and their ability to reach consensus and act collectively with little foot-dragging.

This also reflects certain profound psychological traits that characterize Northwest Europeans in general, with Scandinavians forming the epicenter. To the north and west of the Hajnal line, Europeans have long had weaker kinship ties and correspondingly stronger individualism. This social environment has in turn favored a greater emphasis on absolute, universally applicable rules, combined with a stronger desire to expel rule breakers. This system of morality differs from the relativistic, kin-based morality that prevails elsewhere in the world, where right and wrong are more a matter of whose side you are on… and who does what to whom.

Moral universalism and moral absolutism have brought many benefits. They have enabled Northwest Europeans to free themselves from the limitations of kinship and build large high-trust societies that leave greater room for the individual. But such societies have an Achilles heel. They are vulnerable to people who play by a different rule book, be they native deviants who practice “selfishness for me and selflessness for thee” or immigrants from low-trust, kin-based societies… in short, the majority of humans on this planet.

In the past, this was no problem because Norway received few immigrants and because rule breakers of any origin were ruthlessly ostracized. Over the past half-century, however, Norwegians have been persuaded that the supreme rule is Thou shalt not be racist. It follows, therefore, that racists are supreme offenders who must be expelled from society, like witches and heretics of another age. A psychological mechanism that once enabled Norwegian society to perpetuate itself has been reprogrammed to ensure its self-liquidation.

Revisiting the Parable of the Good Samaritan

Saturday, December 5th, 2015

Let us revisit the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-36), Jim suggests:

So the good Samaritan is the neighbor of the man who fell among thieves.

Which implies that the Levite and the priest were not the neighbor of the man who fell among thieves, let alone all the other Samaritans.

Since the protagonist of the story was from Jerusalem, the Levite and the priest were geographically his neighbors, but, being no good, did not deserve to be treated as neighbors. The Samaritan was not geographically his neighbor, but did deserve to be treated as a neighbor. The word “neighbor” implies that geography and ethnicity matters, but not to the extent of overriding human decency.

Notice that wine is mildly antiseptic, and prevents wounds from becoming infected, while oil protects the exposed living flesh that is trying to form scar tissue to cover the wound. Jesus is not only commending good behavior, but also reminding his audience to follow the best medical practice of the day.

So you are not required to love the Levite, the priest, and all the other Samaritans. Just that good Samaritan.

The Birth And Death Of Privacy

Saturday, December 5th, 2015

Greg Ferenstein summarizes the birth and death of privacy over the last 3,000 years:

Cerf suffered a torrent of criticism in the media for suggesting that privacy is unnatural. Though he was simply opining on what he believed was an under-the-radar gathering at the Federal Trade Commission in 2013, historically speaking, Cerf is right.

Privacy, as it is conventionally understood, is only about 150 years old. Most humans living throughout history had little concept of privacy in their tiny communities. Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

History of Privacy

The lesson from 3,000 years of history is that privacy has almost always been a back-burner priority. Humans invariably choose money, prestige or convenience when it has conflicted with a desire for solitude.

How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?

Friday, December 4th, 2015

Mark Follman, the national affairs editor at Mother Jones, has written a disarmingly sane piece asking, how many mass shootings are there, really?, and the New York Times has published it:

On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that “The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.” Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015.

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.

What explains the vastly different count? The answer is that there is no official definition for “mass shooting.” Almost all of the gun crimes behind the much larger statistic are less lethal and bear little relevance to the type of public mass murder we have just witnessed again. Including them in the same breath suggests that a 1 a.m. gang fight in a Sacramento restaurant, in which two were killed and two injured, is the same kind of event as a deranged man walking into a community college classroom and massacring nine and injuring nine others. Or that a late-night shooting on a street in Savannah, Ga., yesterday that injured three and killed one is in the same category as the madness that just played out in Southern California.

While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them — and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.

For at least the past decade, the F.B.I. regarded a mass shooting as a single attack in which four or more victims were killed. (In 2013, a mandate from President Obama for further study of the problem lowered that threshold to three victims killed.) When we began compiling our database in 2012, we used that criteria of four or more killed in public attacks, but excluded mass murders that stemmed from robbery, gang violence or domestic abuse in private homes. Our goal with this relatively narrow set of parameters was to better understand the seemingly indiscriminate attacks that have increased in recent years, whether in movie theaters, elementary schools or office parks.

The statistics now being highlighted in the news come primarily from shootingtracker.com, a website built by members of a Reddit forum supporting gun control called GunsAreCool. That site aggregates news stories about shooting incidents — of any kind — in which four or more people are reported to have been either injured or killed.

It’s not clear why the Redditors use this much broader criteria. The founder of the “shooting tracker” project, who currently goes by the handle “Billy Speed,” told me it was his choice: “Three years ago I decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ definition of mass shooting.” It’s also not clear how many of those stories — many of them from local outlets, including scant detail — are accurate.

Galactic Warfighters

Friday, December 4th, 2015

Visual storyteller Matthew Callahan put his military experience to use producing these Galactic Warfighters photos (and captions):

Galactic Warfighters 1

Galactic Warfighters 2

Advanced Recon and Airborne Commandos fire a Mk 153 shoulder-fired multi-purpose assault weapon during joint weapons system familiarization training. The projectile explosive weapon is used to bust tanks and bunkers for light infantry. The troopers worked together as gunners and assistant gunners to get used to operating in the same environment together for future operations.

Galactic Warfighters 3

Advanced recon commandos stack up on a compound wall and make entry to eliminate a suspected Separatist intelligence cell in Mos Eisley, Tatooine.

Galactic Warfighters 4

Advanced Recon Commandos herd droids into a compound and await extraction after raiding a suspected Separatist intelligence cell in Mos Eisley, Tatooine.

They came to kill

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015

In September 1992, two Israeli widows were shown 20-year-old photos of their husbands, who had been murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics — and they were told not to share what they’d been shown:

The photographs were “as bad I could have imagined,” Ms. Romano said. (The New York Times reviewed the photographs but has chosen not to publish them because of their graphic nature.)

Mr. Romano, a champion weight lifter, was shot when he tried to overpower the terrorists early in the attack. He was then left to die in front of the other hostages and castrated. Other hostages were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones, Ms. Spitzer said. Mr. Romano and another hostage died in the Olympic Village; the other nine were killed during a failed rescue attempt after they were moved with their captors to a nearby airport.

It was not clear if the mutilation of Mr. Romano occurred before or after he died, Ms. Spitzer said, though Ms. Romano said she believed it happened afterward.

“The terrorists always claimed that they didn’t come to murder anyone — they only wanted to free their friends from prison in Israel,” Ms. Spitzer said. “They said it was only because of the botched-up rescue operation at the airport that they killed the rest of the hostages, but it’s not true. They came to hurt people. They came to kill.”

The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015

After each sensational shooting, newspapers print detailed information about the killer and his methods:

You might not have noticed, but the mass media rarely reports on suicides, particularly teen suicides. When it does, the coverage is careful, understated, and dampened. This is no accident: Following guidelines endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Mental Health, the media carefully and voluntarily avoids sensationalizing such deaths especially among teenagers. They almost never make the news unless the person is a public figure; methods of suicide are rarely mentioned; suicide pacts are not reported upon.

This is for good reason: Suicide, especially among teens, is contagious. It’s a morbidly attractive idea that offers an established path of action for a troubled youngster. And we know from research in many fields that establishing a path of action — a complete narrative in which you can visualize your steps and their effects — is important in enabling follow-through.

This, for example, is exactly why political campaigns ask people about where and how they plan to vote — imagined events are more likely to be carried out in real life. If you have a full story in your head, you are more likely to enact it, step by step. We also know such “contagion” effects are especially strong in adolescence and young adulthood — an especially turbulent time for mental health.

As a sociologist, I am increasingly concerned that the tornado of media coverage that swirls around each such mass killing, and the acute interest in the identity and characteristics of the shooter — as well as the detailed and sensationalist reporting of the killer’s steps just before and during the shootings — may be creating a vicious cycle of copycat effects similar to those found in teen and other suicides.

No Boots on the Ground

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

American advisers have been operating against ISIS alongside Kurdish forces for some time now:

“The joke going around here is there are no boots on the ground because they’re all wearing sneakers.”

Iron the primary driver of aging?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

Mangan is becoming more convinced that excess iron may be one of the most important drivers of aging:

In aging, we see a progressive increase in inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and a loss of autophagy intensity. These processes normally rise and fall together, so that an improvement or deterioration in one means the same for the others. One reason I’ve emphasized autophagy so much on this blog is because simple interventions like fasting and certain supplements can readily increase autophagy to youthful levels, leading to an improvement in all aspects of aging.

Could iron be the cause of these important aspects of aging? I believe that they could.

Consider insulin resistance, which increases with age and is strongly related to many disease states, including heart disease, cancer, and sarcopenia (1), not to mention diabetes. Insulin resistance features elevated levels of inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and decreased autophagy, making it an archetype of aging.

In insulin resistance, serum ferritin, the most important measure of body iron status, is strongly correlated with glucose tolerance.(2) The correlation coefficient was 0.73, i.e. high. Ferritin also correlated with blood pressure.

In men, a high serum ferritin, >300, was associated with a 5-fold increased risk of being diagnosed with diabetes.(3)

Many of these studies control for body mass index (BMI), but consider that visceral and subcutaneous fat both also correlate with ferritin.(4)

Metformin is a drug commonly used to treat diabetes, and in contrast to other diabetic drugs, actually extends lifespan in lab animals.(5) There have been suggestions that diabetics treated with metformin may actually live longer than non-diabetics without metformin, leading to the idea that metformin is a true anti-aging drug. Some people are now taking metformin for the purpose of lifespan extension.

How does metformin work? In a cell culture model in which metformin protects against damage from chemotherapy, it was found that the mechanism is restoration of iron homeostasis.(6) Without going too deep into the biochemistry, the body keeps iron under tight control, and metformin restores that control.

Metformin is also effective on non-alcoholic fatty liver, and the mechanism may be decreased iron absorption.(7)

You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time.

Failed leadership is the disease

Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

Trump and Sanders are just symptoms, Glenn Reynolds argues, of a ruling class that takes important subjects out of play:

On many issues, ranging from immigration reform, which many critics view as tantamount to open borders, to bailouts for bankers, the Republican and Democratic establishments agree, while a large number (quite possibly a majority) of Americans across the political spectrum feel otherwise. But when no “respectable” figure will push these views, then less-respectable figures such as Trump or Sanders (a lifelong socialist who once wrote that women dream of gang rape, and that cervical cancer results from too few orgasms) will arise to fill the need.

He cites Angelo Codevilla from a few years ago:

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time, America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the ‘in’ language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector.

Orphaned voters aren’t a bug but a feature for a ruling class that would prefer to rule without them, Reynolds notes.

Binkley’s Safe Space

Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

Berkely Breathed’s latest Bloom County looks inside Binkley’s safe space:

Bloom County Thomas Jefferson Report