Recent studies...have suggested more police might mean less crimeSo glad they cleared that up.
2: A lot of liberals and "activists" hand wave that kind of thing away. Something not mentioned in the article is the huge reduction in street level stops. It was an express goal of the ACLU out there and they managed to pull it off. Basically they managed to get instituted a system where every stop generates a two page form per person stopped. Every person stopped gets a receipt and the records are then combed through by ACLU lawyers looking for what they deem to be improper stops, profiling, etc. Those lawyers likely don't live in the areas where the murders take place so they don't have to actually care beyond their public hand wringing. Meanwhile Chicago will likely continue to lose more population than any other major U.S. city in 2016. People can only take so much. A good example of what a progressive hitting his limit in a shit neighborhood looks like at the link below.(Baltimore, not Chicago, but it's a good read)
http://thebaltimorechop.com/2016/05/24/the-chop-leaves-the-city/
Dude, you've already been a cop too long. Do cops have the right to stop me on the street without a good reason? No they do not. Freedom from harassment by the state has an independent value.
4: I remember that London study from OP link from when it came out. IIRC it focused on the effect of more visible police, more frequent patrols, not stop-and-frisk.
4: What I'm talking about is this mentality.
The family of a 16-year-old boy fatally shot by Chicago police during a chase on the West Side last week has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit alleging the department's long-standing racist practices "result in the unjustified deaths of people of color."...The lawsuit cites statistics from the report showing that of the 404 police-involved shootings from 2008 to 2015, 74 percent of the victims were African-American. Yet, the report noted, the population of Chicago is almost evenly split: 32.9 percent African-American, 31.7 white and 28.9 percent Hispanic.
Chicago has already passed 1200 shootings for the year with over 250 homicides. 95 percent of those homicides are black or hispanic. Any realistic effort to target those shootings is going to disproportionately target young males in those groups. Comparing ethnic makeup of cities to police stops is dangerous nonsense.
Pierre Loury is a textbook example of why police should be shaking people in those neighborhoods for guns. Who else was going to regulate him? Certainly not his parents. Mom's little up and coming rapper never had a chance and neither did anyone else that kid was going to encounter. Sure mom disapproves of his selfie with a gun but look, his finger isn't even on the trigger! Stepdad sounds great. "We never knew he was doing all this stuff because we gave him his privacy." Stepdad also assures us he was beating that kid with a belt until he was fifteen. Nothing molds a productive member of society like a solid mix of gross negligence and physical abuse.
Those neighborhoods will never see an influx of solid citizens until the violence is brought down. Ogged recently linked to Daniel Hertz attributing the non gentrification of these areas to racism with no mention of crime, which is idiotic. Yes, the murder risk is not going to be the same for you if you move into that neighborhood, but that doesn't mean it's still not a more dangerous neighborhood even if you're not in a gang or involved with drugs. At the time of his shooting Pierre Loury was on probation because he and some friends spotted a lone white woman on the train and decided to rob her, administering a pretty vicious beating in the process, including a few kicks to the head. Do you want to be the first white guy with a new phone and a nice bike to move onto that block and hope for the best? That blog I linked in 2 talked about similar issues in Baltimore.
If you think that violence can be brought down without the police targeting young black and hispanic men, I'm open to suggestions. Those communities aren't doing it themselves and Judge Toomin laid out the current state of the courts out there.
"The judges here today give every latitude to the minor. They bend over backwards not to confine them," he said. "There's the progressive thought of, we don't want to jail anybody. Well, that's nice for the offenders, but for the rest of society who might be victimized ... they're not really on board. ... And the conservatives who look at it as a money-saving technique."
My take is that the CPD brought a lot of its problems on itself by being clearly, and quite retrograde-idly for a major urban PD, racist. And there's no reason why you need to give officers the power to unconstitutionally stop-and-frisk without basis; the perfectly legit stop-and-frisk bases are more than enough. And the main problem has nothing to do with technique, it's just number of officers.
With that said, the number of people who need to be convinced that more police really do mean less crime, and also that less crime is the absolutely critical foundation for any kind of decent urban living, always stun me. Like, literally your whole coffee-shop, brew pub and walkable dense neighborhood utopia is based on policing bringing crime down to reasonable levels, we all need to understand that and pay for it.
And GSwift is absolutely right that any reasonable anti-crime strategy needs to allow police discretion and needs to account for the risk that police will tend not to do their jobs at all when it is too burdensome to do so. That's not a position that's particularly complimentary to cops by the way, but it's just basic reality. If you have enough cops so that the cops feel safe, and the police have enough discretion, combined with training, to make basically tactically good decisions w/out resorting to stupid violence, you can get good policing. If you cheap out or over-bureaucratize in dumb ways, cops won't do their jobs or do them stupidly, and you can indeed increase crime. Requiring proportional police-involved shootings to the ethnic makeup of the city is one easy way to legislate bad policy. The fact that the CPD was quite clearly racist and quite clearly mismanaged for a long time doesn't make those facts any less true, it just makes them much harder to deal with.
I think that's exactly right. It would be great to flood some neighborhoods with police, except that the CPD is, like so many things in Chicago, a poorly run organization full of racist assholes. This is compounded by the fact that those racist assholes see black youth who are disadvantaged right down to their lead-addled brain cells, doing inhuman things to each other, and think, "you'd be racist too!"
But you have to start somewhere, and I'd take whatever money Rahm plans to give away to developers to pay cops more, hire more cops, give them all body cameras, and set up a civilian review board with teeth.
Of course there's also the lead problem, and the poverty problem, etc.
My take is that the CPD brought a lot of its problems on itself by being clearly, and quite retrograde-idly for a major urban PD, racist.
That's part of it along with that Chicago at all levels of govt appears to be a corrupt shitshow even relative to other big cities. I mean, christ, the ongoing Laquan McDonald fiasco. It wasn't the police that withheld that video. It was State's Attorney Anita Alvarez keeping it under wraps at the same time Rahm's lawyers (with his knowledge) were paying the family off to keep quiet about the video in the weeks during where Rahm was in the middle of a runoff election after he couldn't get 50 percent in the primary.
8.2 and 8.3: NONE of that shit will get addressed. Run away!
3.last: gswift, thanks for linking that piece from a (former?) Baltimore resident of Waverly. Of course, if he wanted to live in Towson all along, he shouldn't have moved to Waverly.
I had a student who worked for an alderman's office in the South side and wrote her BA thesis on Chicago government, and the stories she told about government corruption were incredible! (None of them could make it in her BA thesis unfortunately) Let's just say they involved several organized crime rings and alderman-owned sex dungeons. She says it's a strong-mayor system, and Rahm is a vindictive asshole who viciously goes after aldermen who won't do his bidding. A good example is Rahm gerrymandered an alderman completely out of his own district.
A problem on top of this is that Rahm and Rauner used to be friends but had some sort of falling out and now Rauner is doing his best to make Rahm fail by fucking up Chicago. There has been a reasonably successful anti-gang program run by former gang members, and despite the success the IL legislature with support/encouragement from the government cut all the state funding for the program. Given how little funding it got (we're talking around a million dollars or so) and how successful it was as a program in reducing violent crime, it's hard to read that as anything other than a giant middle finger to Rahm (not that it was his program or anything, but anything that raises violent crime in Chicago fucks over Rahm).
A big problem with gang violence in Chicago too that the article briefly mentioned is that the traditional hierarchical gangs and their internal policing have been destroyed, so you have gang anarchy run by hotheaded teenagers, with a teenage strongman or two controlling a little several-block turf. She said the sorts of savage violence and murders you're seeing now would not have been acceptable to gang leadership in the past either, and somebody, say, (I'm making this particular example up) executing a 5 year old would have been murdered or punished harshly by their own gang. Similarly, because gangs are now just groups of kids, there's no strong initiation process or obvious sign of affiliation, so any kid can be considered an acceptable target. This is also why you're getting a rise in what would have been in the past accidental or collateral violence, as kids who aren't involved in gang activity are getting murdered simply for living on a certain block, or being related to a certain person.
12.3 - I obviously don't know enough about Chicago gangs to discuss the accuracy of that in context, but I do know that one of the reasons drive by and random shootings of kids went down in LA from 1995-2010 is that the Mexican Mafia, which controlled a lot of activity through its control of prisons, would either greenlight murdering bangers who did drive-bys/random murders or have them raped in prison. How much of a difference this made os a big question but no one doubts that it mattered.
6.3
I read that and it did seem like a major omission. Obviously racism is in the mix, but it seems disingenuous to ask why people aren't moving to neighborhoods which have ridiculously high crime rates without at least mentioning them. In contrast, I find that the few people I know who refuse to live in HP because they're worried about crime to be operating mostly on (hopefully unconscious) racism, because HP has a crime rate comparable to other safe parts of the city, but off the university campus it is a majority black neighborhood.
" gswift, thanks for linking that piece from a (former?) Baltimore resident of Waverly. Of course, if he wanted to live in Towson all along, he shouldn't have moved to Waverly"
Some dude riding a bicycle was stabbed to death on his block. That would be a strong no for me. Maybe he thought his neighborhood was less stabby.
Is it my faulty memory, or has Chicago basically always had a higher muder rate than New York or LA, in both low and high crime time periods? I can't readily find a source for that, but my thought is that any explanation of crime in Chicago probably needs to back at least to Prohibition. So many stories try to explain why Chicago is worse than LA or NYC, but without Prohibition, agressive redlining, corruption from both Daleys, powerful mayors and aldermen, a police force that is brutal and corrupt, public housing trial and error, and a dollop of white flight, it's blind men describing an elephant.
We had a higher murder rate, I'm fairly sure, in the 80s and early 90s.
Chicago is more and differently segregated than NY or LA, however, for sure.
And duh the linked article has a chart. But only back to 1995. But it supports 16 more than I'd remembered.
Note also that the chart peaks at about 30 homicides/100,000 for Chicago in the early 90s. DC in the Marion-Berry era 90s regularly got north of 70 homicides/100,000, even though the DC police, while known for incompetence, weren't known for Chicago-style racism.
Right. I wasn't super happy with the chart in the article, because it starts at (basically) the peak. I wanted it to go back farther, at least through the 80s, when NY was more crime-ridden than the 90s. I just couldn't find anything without pulling crime stats for each city, which sounded like way more work than speculating.
To your last, Chicago has never been a higher crime per capita city than lots of other big US cities. However, a lot of comparisons limit analysis to NY and LA, because comparing New Orleans to Chicago (or Flint, like I saw in one analysis) is pretty dumb.
Maybe "crime ridden" should be in quotes. I meant the perception rather than actual numbers.
The OP article notes this, and I'll mention it again: citywide stats for Chicago don't really get at the story. Whole swaths of the city are basically safe, but the dangerous areas are just horrendous, and the homicide rate doesn't tell the whole story, because as that Peter Nickeas video I linked a while back said, shootings have kept going up, even as murders have gone down.
Got it. Nice. But it's not silly to want to have sex with me, it's a widely shared human emotion.
I'm on a lot of Valium so take this with a grain of, I guess, Valium. BUT while I know more about this in New York/DC context I'd bet (1) the replacement (noted in the article) of what were the black gangs of the 90s which were very organized with block-by-block crews (a shift which did *not* happen for Latin gangs, medium-happened for E. Asian gangs not sure if Albanian gangs still a thing) combined with (2) the fact that Chicago's hyper-segregated areas are so contiguous seems to explain a lot of it. If your crew's tiny territory is surrounded by other crews' tiny territories its' a lot easier to start something by ending up in the wrong place than it is if your crew's tiny territory is surrounded by idk a random Burmese neighborhood and a Lowes parking lot that you have to cross to find rivals.
12: Let's just say they involved several organized crime rings and alderman-owned sex dungeons
I'm going to be humorless: What's the problem with the sex dungeons? How does that relate to corruption?
She says it's a strong-mayor system
In Chicago? Stop the presses!
26: Further to both, Chicago's high rise housing projects were demolished in the 90s and early 2000s, leading to extra turf wars as residents were displaced to new areas, igniting new violence over previously "owned" real estate. Some of the violence was displaced to suburbs as well, leading to more white flight into exurbs.
But, back to my point, maybe there should be some kind of white-people resilience training in the schools.
"Your ancestors stole all this land at gun point from hostile natives. Now you're going to run to ten miles into Michigan because of a some teenagers with shittier guns than the average Pennsylvania householder."
32- Sure, even just a few decades ago white mobs routinely killed black people who didn't know their place. A little training and we could bring those days back I'm sure. ;)
Nobody tries to find the middle point.
I think the idea that there was a middle point is wrong.
27
Nothing, per se, except when they're fronts for smuggling guns, drugs, and women. Many sex dungeons have a legal front part and then an illegal back part where you can indulge in your favorite flavor of iniquity.
At least the ones owned by Chicago aldermen...
citywide stats for Chicago don't really get at the story. Whole swaths of the city are basically safe, but the dangerous areas are just horrendous, and the homicide rate doesn't tell the whole story
You ready to flee to the Rockies yet? My sister moved up here about a year ago, same city as me, only three or four miles from my house. Today she took my niece and nephews to a local park where there's a great water feature/splash pad for the kids. The mountain views are all right at this end of the valley, if you're into that kind of thing.
Note also that the chart peaks at about 30 homicides/100,000 for Chicago in the early 90s. DC in the Marion-Berry era 90s regularly got north of 70 homicides/100,000
That's depressing stuff from the past. Winners look for depressing stuff to dwell on in the here and now! Baltimore hit 55 per 100K last year. Western District by itself? 140 per 100K.
Vienna's homicide count doubled last year, to 20, so about 1.1/100k (but 2014 was a modern low). Apparently no unsolved homicides since 2009!
I hear you recently averted overt fascism too. Well done!
A big problem with gang violence in Chicago too that the article briefly mentioned is that the traditional hierarchical gangs and their internal policing have been destroyed, so you have gang anarchy run by hotheaded teenagers, with a teenage strongman or two controlling a little several-block turf. She said the sorts of savage violence and murders you're seeing now would not have been acceptable to gang leadership in the past either, and somebody, say, (I'm making this particular example up) executing a 5 year old would have been murdered or punished harshly by their own gang.
I am always a bit sceptical about older conservative men (in this case older conservative criminals) saying "oh, the kids today are out of control, it's not like it was in my day" because this is something that older conservative men have been saying since approximately Periclean Athens.
London's homicide rate isn't much different from Vienna. It's well under 2 per 100K. There were about ~120 murders in London last year, and London is a BIG city.
43: I would be sceptical but have heard similar explanations from many cops. Gangs strive for a monopoly of illegitimate force within their territories and some of them sometimes attain it.
34- No one asked for clarification but here it is anyway; You don't want middle ground, you want higher ground.
Assume a two-dimensional white person.
46: so, you're agreeing with gswift that white people should all move to the Rockies.
I would be sceptical but have heard similar explanations from many cops.
a.k.a. "older conservative men".
I guess I'm trying to think in public here. I want people to be better, but I don't see how to get there. I don't think it is reasonable to expect white people to suddenly have courage, or even to train them in it. It seems like it ought to be possible to pay for and get good policing, but right now I feel like positive political change is pretty hopeless.
I think if the feds stopped subsidizing highways to the suburbs, things would get better.
52- Maybe you should be supporting Republicans, they don't like to pay for stuff.
I like the "kids these days aren't as good as we were in the old days" arguments--which I don't think is what is actually being used here--because I like imagining exponential decay from godlike Sumerians.
54: It all started going downhill with the Darkening of Valinor.
Couldn't all those old fogies be right about the individual generation following them? Not a general trend throughout history, but temporary declines in the functioning level of people as that particular civilization undergoes decline. I dunno, certainly we are going through decline now but I don't think kids today are worse. The ruling class in America is certainly worse, and that is bad enough.
Four Yorkshire men, but with Eru Ilúvatar.
A big problem with gang violence in Chicago too that the article briefly mentioned is that the traditional hierarchical gangs and their internal policing have been destroyed, so you have gang anarchy run by hotheaded teenagers, with a teenage strongman or two controlling a little several-block turf.
I spoke with an old friend last weekend who, as a journalist on the crime beat, has interviewed the parents and/or neighbors of most of the Chicago homicide victims of the last decade. He said that the decapitation of the established gangs is a major contributing factor in the upsurge in chaotic violence. Whether that's true or not I can't say, but it is at least widely believed by the people closest to the shootings.
I think it's fair to say that the difference between an organization with a real hierarchy and older members and a group of twelve sixteen to eighteen year olds with semi automatic weapons is going to be significant in any generation whatsoever. People might be thinking in terms of "kids these days", but really "kids" would cover the problem just as easily.
certainly we are going through decline now but I don't think kids today are worse. The ruling class in America is certainly worse, and that is bad enough.
Compared to when? Is the American ruling class worse now than it was in, say, 1820, when a large number of them actually owned other human beings whom they worked to death? Or are we starting our comparison in 1890, when the American ruling class employed armies of mercenaries with machine-guns to shoot strikers? Or are we looking back to the great days of the 1950s? Help me out here.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect white people to suddenly have courage, or even to train them in it.
Oh, your neighbour got murdered? Suck it up, you big ponce.
That's not usually what happens with white flight. It's "your neighbor now has the same color skin as the guy who was on the TV news as being murdered/murdering."
61: the day that "My Love" by Paul McCartney and Wings reached Number 1 in the US top 40.
63: I was thinking of the Baltimore Chop link that gswift posted.
Right. I'm not saying there aren't actually very dangerous places. But there is way, way more to white flight that than. I think most of it that isn't just racism is about fear of losing money on house prices.
So in fact you don't need braver white people, you need less racist white people or a lower level of home ownership.
Financial courage is thing, I think. But probably less racism would help more.
And racism kind of fades into bravery. That is, there are people who are in some sense 'honestly' mistaken about how dangerous it is to live in minority-majority neighborhoods. That mistake can be racist, but it's not exactly the same thing as not wanting to live around black people because of a direct racist antipathy, and it's the kind of thing that tends to get better through experience and exposure.
White people with that class of issues would be more willing to live in majority-minority neighborhoods if they were either less racist (and so less confused about the actual dangers involved), or braver (and so willing to disregard the imaginary dangers they believed in due to racist misconceptions).
The comments sections of local newspapers were really eyeopening to me in a sort of destroy-faith-in-humanity kind of way. If the story didn't report the race of the suspect, that was all anybody would talk about about. If the suspect was black, it was always talk about "those people". If the suspect was white, there was nothing generalized about it.
I think the editors eventually realized this and now don't open comments on many stories about murders.
This was before Wendy Bell got fired.
Is white flight even an actually-existing thing anywhere in the US anymore? I guess in some inner ring suburbs. But mostly that got sorted out 40-50 years ago and in Chicago the segregated neoghborhoods have been all black for at least 60 years. So I think we need better or different terminology. The Maryland guy seemed like more of an I will reverse white flight guy, until murders and unresponsive cops/politicians made him scared because he wasn't tough enough.
58
When it's said by journalists, cops, sociologists, politicians in the neighborhood, and community activists, I tend to believe it. Those people almost never get along, so if all those people are saying the same thing, it's usually because it tends to be true.
Gangs function/are tolerated because they provide governance otherwise there is very little. They provide protection, keep the peace of sorts, and run services like banking, money lending, charity etc. When the gangs themselves are destroyed (or decapitated) but the conditions that makes people turn to organized crime over the legitimate state aren't, then you get the equivalent of a failed state, and violence skyrockets. It's happened in the South side, and it's happened in a somewhat different way in Southern Italy, where the Italian state managed to take down the Cosa Nostra enough that now a lot of the illegal stuff is being run by the Comorra out of Naples, whom are horizontally organized, harder to take out, and much more ruthless.
When we moved to DC in the late 80s, the same argument was made of the high murder rate: not enough stodgy management oriented Italian-American Mafia in the crack business, too much initiative on the part of local entrepreneurs. Creative destruction!
This thread reminds me of a newspaper article I recently read about the Kottbusser Tor area of Berlin, famous for squatters, hipsters, and now, a growing problem with muggers. The Green city councillor was complaining that some of her ex-squatter constituents kept coming to her hoping she could do something about it, but they looked at her funny when she suggested calling the police.
60- I don't mean morally worse. I mean worse as in more reckless, less conscious of other people's positions. Better able to look after American interests.
What I go back to in my thinking is that people will almost always prefer living in chains to dying on their feet, but once the option of living is taken away, will often put up a surprisingly good fight.
I linked this in facebook the other day: http://www.salon.com/2016/05/28/the_defense_department_is_ruining_america_big_budgets_militarization_and_the_real_story_behind_our_asia_pivot/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
" The Chinese were the only ones who seemed to notice that Carter was trying to turn daytime into night. I know no one in our great country who gave any thought to Carter's bluster about China's assertive military while standing on an aircraft carrier near the Chinese coast. Beijing subsequently barred the Stennis from docking in Hong Kong--a highly unusual move on China's part, Hong Kong having been a port of call for U.S. vessels for decades. So what? What about those Yankees?
We will pay for our failures to pay attention to the world around us and our place in it, and do not say no one warned you. We are, indeed, already paying--a point to which I will return."
We had to work pretty hard recently to get the Russians and the Chinese to start cooperating. The way down is a lot faster than the way up.
I don't know how I put Better above when I meant worse at.
I also meant to bring up the US's bizarre conduct in Ukraine. How we can get our press to talk about Russian aggression there just boggles my mind.
I looked up my census block data, and my block is 10% white. It's funny, I thought it would be higher. Actually, probably about 10% of the people I see are white, but I assumed that I was engaging in the observed phenomenon of overestimating the number of minorities I saw and underestimating the number of white people I'd seen. My building I'd say is about 40% Chinese, 40% black, 10% white, and 10% other (Korean, South Asian, Latino, etc.)
Because Russia was invaded through the Ukraine a bunch of times, they get to run it?
I learned in high school 30 years ago that Ukraine had been a vassal state of Russia for two hundred years.
When you grab an old lady's purse and she tries to pull it away from you, to describe what she is doing as aggression makes you look like a lunatic.
So does Finland have to go back too?
You do understand that the whole "Breaking free from a larger, more powerful state" is sort of a thing that resonates here.
Also, let me be the first to mention Holodomor.
Ukraine doesn't have to go back either, but describing a US sponsored coup as "breaking free" does a lot of violence to the language.
I'd feel like it was a healthier sign for America if Ukraine were being offered an opportunity to be treated like part of the west, instead of just another province to be looted.
I don't seriously expect the US to say 'We decided to grab the Ukraine because we didn't think Russia could defend it,' but I would find the honesty refreshing.
I'm mainly concerned because it doesn't seem like the people doing this stuff recognize there is a danger of provoking nuclear war. That seems reckless to me.
"Being treated like the rest of the west" was the whole problem. Russia didn't want it in NATO or the EU.
As there was no coup and the U.S. didn't sponsor the protests. Russians, bob, and whoever puts up posters on street light posts are the only people I've ever heard put it that way.
It's weird that nearly every political poster* I see around here (which is to say about 12 out of 15 or so) is about Russia and the Ukraine. I have no idea why they are so fond of putting up wordy posters by bus stops, but nobody else seems to do that regularly.
* Leaving aside the election posters or the ones carried by somebody in a protest.
I guess you didn't hear about this: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
prefer living in chains to dying on their feet
Tell it to the Belgians.
I never know which of the languages I don't speak to tell them in.
89: I hadn't, but I don't understand what's supposed to be so incriminating there. One U.S. diplomat is allowed to discuss U.S. foreign policy goals with another U.S. diplomat.
Sure is a neat coincidence how she wanted Yats to take over there and then he did. Wow what are the odds?
86. What? The US did not grab Ukraine.
The U.S. is not supplying advanced weapons definitely, neither is the US much supporting the Ukrainian gov't financially as far as I know-- there was a hedge fund buying some bonds in 2015, but I lost the thread on that, at least have not seen more. The US has sent some radar systems to Ukraine, but I think they're pretty old. Maria Gaidar and Saakashvili are both interesting politicians in Ukraine to pay attention to.
Estonia is the border to watch, maybe Finland also, definitely there is heavy pro-Russian propaganda being written in bulk about Finland.
Are we tired of Sanders vs Clinton so soon?
The only news from Russia I pay attention to is the crazy dash-cam videos.
95: I think we gave up on Lawrence Lessig too soon.
96 my nephew was addicted to those.
Are we tired of Sanders vs Clinton so soon?
Whichever candidate pledges to launch a war of conquest to seize Ukraine has my vote. Otherwise, "not a dime's worth of difference" & etc. as far as I'm concerned.
There's a clinic where they give you substitute videos of cats. Meowthadone Clinics.
Independent Livonia will rise again!
86: wow, the guy whose user name is a joke about child rape also turns out to be a Putin fan WHAT ARE THE ODDS I KNOW RIGHT?
102: I'm guessing it's just a fan of Captain Pugwash urban legends.
I really don't think making fun of pseuds is the way to go here.
It's bizarre. There are no US troops in Ukraine. There are Russia troops in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, you could probably argue Transnistria...
s/Russia/Russian/. Still finding it difficult to not refer to it as The Ukraine--the one and only, original, accept no alternatives.
105. I think that there are some trainers, under 1k. Defensive training they say, refusing sniper training for UA troops according to AP.
UA gov't is dense with corrupt people-- Saakashvili and Gaidar are part of the anti-corruption faction. Klitschko, mayor of Kiev , is an ex-boxer, persistent reports that he used to work for a mobster. He denies this. Part of the reason the IMF and EU are uneasy about helping out is that some disbursed funds wind up disappearing there.
Even if the worst that is said about them is true, though, it's a border country with a mediocre government. Yanukhovych had been much much much worse for corruption and intolerance of dissent, in addition to being a Russian puppet. Standard struggling democracy without enough money, nonstandard for having a powerful meddling destructive neighbor.
104- I think it is OK if ajay has a problem with my pseud he is entitled to feel that way.
I'm kinda bored with this argument at this point, it seems like a minor point really, I am surprised what I wrote is getting interpreted as my being a Putin fan and I wonder how many people share that impression.
minor Yet you're still talking, still without having said anything that's either substantive or funny.
I don't follow Ukraine closely and hadn't realized that Klitschko was a major political player there or the mayor of Kiev.
UA Klitschko's twin brother is a borderline US celebrity.
They're both giants physically, and the US one has chosen a girlfriend not much bigger than a standard twelve year-old; in fairness, maybe she chose, or some crazy mutual thing that I find hard to imagine. In any case, serious dimorphism in a B-list celebrity coiuple that likes being photographed together, seems uncommon.
How tall was Motumbo's shortest girlfriend that he was photographed with?
Right but [Vitali] Klitschko himself was a celebrity and a top-1 in the world heavyweight. Between that and Pacquiao's serving in the Philippine Senate (?) you've got a lot of surprising boxer/politician overlap.
I'll one-up the cabin boy by linking to the Vineyard of the Saker
5 Reasons Washington Has Already Decided to Go to War with Russia
I am no Putin fan! AMERICA FUCK YEAH. Bomb Hillary Bomb! Bring it fucking on, Russkie bear.
As someone who dreams of setting himself on fire for the pure love of flames and destruction, how can I be anything but a proud American?
Signed, renamed, Trashcan Man.
Also, since this has come up and someone here might know, what is the deal with spelling Wladimir Klitschko with a "W." It's just Vladimir, right? I get that Ukranian and Russian are different languages but since it's written in cyrillic either way what is the deal with the W instead of V choice.
Blagojevich was a golden gloves contender.
116. Yes, W is the German transliteration. Klichko would be a normal English transliteration-- Tchaikowski and Chekhov begin with the same letter, composer was famous in Germany first.
This issue causes serious visa problems sometimes, I can only imagine what it's like with less uniformly standardized writing systems.
113: Oh cmon, y'all don't know Hayden Panettiere? She has had the lead in Nashville for four years (before that supporting in Heroes 4 years) and is a much more famous celebrity than Klitschko.
If you did know, you could have given an identity more respecting than "loli on boxer's arm"
This incredible sexism and misogyny on the left in America is why I want us liberated by some alliance of Russia and Japan.
116: Nosing around, one official transliteration system (adopted 2004, superseded with another in 2007) included spelling в sometimes as w, although all other systems seem to use v regularly. But v is also how both Polish and German pronounce w, so it's not per se illegitimate. Maybe an explicit attempt to distinguish from standard transliteration of Russian?
I know Hayden Panettiere. But had no idea she was with W. Klitschko, because I am a hardcore misogynist.
79 et seq constitute a very odd reading of the Ukraine situation and background.
And this Ukraine just confirmed the horror I have felt since December 2000, Democrats and liberals were all total bullshit about Iraq, Bush's Republican war, and of course about difference between HRC and Obama on Iraq and all you bloodthirsty imperialist fucks will follow Clinton's false flag to going all Slim Pickens jumping up and down on the Bomb to vaporise 10 million Muscovites for the sake of Pussy Riot.
I have had no doubt at all that I will be the only one here to oppose the next Clinton War.
Personally I am all in if I can get the title "Voivod" for rulership over some portion of our conquered Ukrainian province, to be renamed Clintonia, of course.
Though no doubt the Crimea will be given as a personal fief to the Elizabeth Bathory of our time, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
116. Oddly enough, ajay has addressed this.
http://languagehat.com/comrie-et-al/#comment-57338
Well, Clinton is a little more hawkish on foreign policy than I would like, but...
...oops. 25 million dead?
Umm, Ummm SCOTUS. SCOTUS!
And Trump would have been so much worse, like 30 or 40 million dead.
We have to be serious grownups here, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and they were Russians anyway, and it is obviously all Putin's fault.
I don't regret my vote.
What has discouraged me is the 100% groupthink on this blog, "It's all and always Putin's fault." combined with Obama! Hillary! Oh, I fucking guarantee you that wherever the bombs fall, HRC will give you an out "It's the other guys fault."
America has created and supported authoritarian governments for more than a century but when what
Slovakia goes fascist, Poland goes fascist, Turkey goes fascist, Hungary goes fascist, Bandaristan goes fascist, Latvia moves way right, Finland moves way right...all in the last decade...Greece and Cyprus are rendered irrelevant...Austria a mere hair from going fascist
...you think this is all coincidence? That you can't quite 100% see how it was done and really don't want to think about why it was done means America didn't somehow do it?*
It is all scary Putin's fault? Couldn't they protect themselves with more liberal governments?
*Just picked up Varoufakis new book. Clue:they do it with money and arms sales.
I'm glad that ATM my "someone is wrong on the internet" sensor is turned way down, because the level of utter gullibility I'm seeing here from bob and roger is fairly breathtaking. I just pray that for your own sake you guys never wander over to a pro-Scientology or anti-Climate Change site.
What was it Rothschild said:
"Give me control of the money supply, the reserve currency, The Fed and the Euro, and I can send the world into global war in a decade?"
Krugzilla etc and even Varoufakis ask oh why o why won't they inflate and grow the Western economies? Are they stupid?
No, fucks you are. It takes a while but bad economies move governments to the right and prepare the populations for war in many ways.
They are smarter and more evil, genocidally evil, than you can handle.
Okay, Abe is a righty and is trying to inflate, but shit has changed, and soon India and China and Asia will be most of the market Japan needs.
Story is, meeting between Obama and Abe was spent entirely on Okinawa bases.
So what does it mean, Obama going to Hiroshima while implementing the biggest renovation and expansion of America's nuclear arsenal in decades? See link at 77, it's good. What does it mean, no apology, no disarmament?
Obama: "Remember, Japan, who's your daddy and what we can and will do? Remember who we are. Look on Hiroshima and think it over."
Obama delivered a very vicious and powerful threat.
OBAMA: Japan, stop trying to team up with Russia to make Americans less misogynist and more aware of Hayden Panettiere! I've got a world to plunge into war here, and my so-called liberal base must never learn of the Disney Channel program Tiger Cruise or Bring It On: All Or Nothing. I must do some financial mumbo jumbo and thus create eternal war!
SHINZO ABE : You are correct. I stand here on Hiroshima, and feel threatened.
And I won't even start talking about South America, Brazil and Venezuela.
I'm gullible? Christ, I'm surrounded by flat out insanity.
The US is the bad guys, the evil guys the worse guys, the suppliers and fomenters and exploiters of war and death and destruction.
Motherfucking Evil Empire are us.
Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
Feeling my weakness, a coward for company
I joined the ranks of the hot and hungry
To teach what it means to have love for your country
We marched away.
We lowered our lives for the lines of a border
We danced with the mothers, played with the daughters
We followed our fantasies, following orders
It was child's play.
After the war the bullets were bored so we capped the game
With cynical smiles we put them on trial to place the blame
Now what kind of beast would love such a feast
Have you no shame?
So we hung them by the feet
Oh, we shot them in the street
Oh, the victory was sweet
On victory day.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers
When in rome do as the romans do.
132: Yeah, funny Tigre. Real funny.
Goodnight. I got Taine and Renan and Sainte-Beuve to read.
Oops, aren't supposed to talk about reading.
I have three pints of Yuengling, a fountain pen, and a scientific article to edit. Let's do this.
I've got two cans of Heady Topper and 10 more chapters to finish editing for submitting the book.
I have to review an FDA briefing package. And finish filling out my timesheet for May, which will definitely be the more difficult task of the two.
I just had a whiskey sour. Postmarital random organizational projects have revealed that my liquor collection makes no sense, and I have about six months of drinking bad scotch and unlikely liqueurs before I will have cleared out enough space to buy reasonable booze.
That's a really big pile of bad Scotch.
Anyway, I think the fountain pen is the key.
That's a really big pile of bad Scotch.
Bad Scotch is the porcupine poop of humans. Also, can we buy LB some better Scotch?
Also, can we buy LB some better Scotch?
It sounds like what she really needs is for us to drink her bad Scotch. I'm in.
I also have what seems to be a half gallon of creme de cacao. Not sure how that happened.
And an alarming amount of Sambuca.
There is no such thing as bad Scotch. Just drink good Scotch for a while, then switch.
Creme de cacao sounds alarming, but I can't say that I've had it. Sambuca isn't (necessarily) bad.
147 is true, though it is also true that, no matter how much you have had to drink, there is no good Sambuca.
That was written before seeing 148. Now we disagree, and one of us must therefore kill the other.
Beware the sunk costs fallacy. There are some things that it's better just to pour out and replace with something you actually want to drink. (I have a soft spot for Sambuca because my dad liked it, but it's hard to defend on the merits.)
I'm saving miles, so if you buy me a ticket on Southwest, maybe.
This stuff is going to be the next big thing in Italian liquors.
Mmm. Tastes like bark. How could that be bad?
Cinnamon and quinine and both barks, right?
Assuming LB is still awake and not too drunk on bad liqueurs, London meetup post? (Check your email). Thanks.
Sambuca can be used to advantage, sparingly very very sparingly, in certain buttercream flavoring strategies. For similar reasons I periodically have to defend the bottle of green chartreuse - indispensable for making dark chocolate taste witchy. Also because inexplicably better half does not appreciate a Last Word, associating all things green chartreuse with the evil dude in The Lady Vanishes. That's just letting art interfere with enjoyment, I mean if you go that road post-Grass there'd be no more eel and that can't be right.
Creme de Cacao can be really nice actually. I have bottle of it right now.* And many cheap scotches can be redeemed with a strip of lemon peel and some hot water. (Not all, but many. They'll never be what you get if you do that with good single malt, but still they can turn from wince-inducing into basically inoffensive and warming.)
Anyway I think the answer is to try to foist all the bad stuff off on Buck when you split things up, and then insist that he compensate you for your loss by buying you new things which aren't awful.
*That I bought in 2005, fine. It is good in some things, though! Just not many things, and never in the quantities that would make sense of the fact that it comes in liter bottles.
I blame Jimmy Carter's metrication.
156 Sorry, neb. I don't want to VSOOBC but I mentioned it to LB earlier in the week in the course of discussing something entirely different.
"Very superior old outstanding blog content"?
163 In keeping with that it looks like we're near full McManus up top. The man clearly needs a dog.
Sambuca is good for the set-it-on-blue-fire-while-in-your-mouth trick when you're young and without judgment, but I doubt it has other virtues.
Really? I admit I haven't had Sambuca, I think, since the last time it was set on fire for me (with a coffee bean in), but it tastes good, doesn't it? If you like that aniseed liqueur/brandy thing (which of course all people of good will do).
Just don't make the mistake of getting hammered on it as one is won't to do when young and without judgement.
OK, that might be too harsh. Sambuca is awfully sweet, though, and I think in my mind I was comparing it unfavorably to ouzo.
Which I have gotten hammered on at many ages without judgment, and who cares, Κλῦθ᾿ Ἀλαλά, Πολέμου θύγατερ
169 when I think on it I can still feel some decades-old ouzo hangovers.
So we hit peak bob and I was asleep. Timezones suck.
We're probably going to run out of eel anyway because we don't have the global will or organization to protect anadromous species.
174: I doubt he's actually hit peak.
176 Yeah, nowhere near peak, just back on form.
Just wait til October. It'll be peak everyone.
I dunno, peak Bob is a very high peak we're nowhere near, but Russia and Japan joining up to invade the USA to enforce increased Hayden Panetierre awareness among liberals was IMO a top 20 Bob moment.
I've clearly fallen very far behind on this thread.
Nah, peak Bob is in our past. Classic era Bob would have kicked off a massive war in this thread. Instead, everyone's just going "Yeah, yeah". If he was the Rolling Stones he'd be up to Steel Wheels or one of the other 1980s nobody-cares-any-more albums.
So you're saying we're no longer worthy of the true bobtroll? That we should ask not what peaks bob can scale for us, but what wars can be flamed for bob?
Do not ask for the true bobtroll, Mossy. It's more than mere mortal beings can handle. Recall that when the Most High trolled Moses on Mount Horeb, the latter had to wear a veil over his face when he came down off the mountain lest the Hebrews be scorched by the sick burns reflected on his face.
We've secreted a pearl of indifference around the trolly grit.
176: Perhaps it hasn't peaked yet, but if anything this is a sign that we should be conserving our finite Bob reserves. One day we'll need to move beyond trolling, but we're not ready for that yet.
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Please God don't let it be Cory Booker.
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183 excels. 184 I plan to use without attribution at every oppurtunity.
From the link in 153: "Irresistible in fruit salads" is not an especially convincing endorsement.
186: Agreed. I have never heard of him, but discover he
lost to incumbent Sharpe James ; he ran again in 2006 and won against deputy mayorHis opponents have been made-up joke people, therefore he sucks.
Ronald Rice
According to Bill Kristol, the next president will be David French.
Which seems unlikely, but not unusually so for Kristol.
Well thank heavens Bill Kristol didn't say the next president wouldn't be David French.
176: I propose we part-privatise Bob, so that we can transition from a trolling extraction economy to a diversified troll ownership economy.
It's an awesome power Bill Kristol wields would he but know it.
It's just that he said he knew somebody with a real chance was going to run an an independent and I was expecting somebody I heard of.
American Death Rate Rises For First Time in a Decade NYT, Centers for Disease Control
Thanks Obama!
Exactly what I have been looking for as Obamacare finally kicked in, and expecting, health and wealth outcomes free of the bullshit of But they have insuuuurance noooow.
This will get worse. Much worse.
Four more years of Democratic control and the death rate will rise to 105%.
Don't they run anything by epidemiologists? This rise is going to continue to happen for the next 20 years or so. The percentage of old people in the U.S. is rising and this trend is especially pronounced for white people (lower birth rates, fewer white immigrants). Old people die more from all of those causes mentioned except drug overdoses.
These things will be especially pronouncing in working class whites since not being particularly healthy is a very good way to find yourself pushed out or kept of the middle class and this is especially pronounced in white people as there are fewer other barriers for them.
the death rate will rise to 105%.
An unexpected statistical issue with reincarnation technology.
Unless everybody wants to have babies like a Texas mathematician, the dead rat that is the baby boom will continue to drive trends in the snake's gullet that is American.
Moby Hick, analogizer of champions.
Demographers always use the term "the Great Dumps" when talking about the flattening of trends as the baby boom slowly fades.
188: I think that just means it's sort of dark/spicy/bitter tasting, like a lot of good liqueurs. Putting angostura bitters or pimento dram on fruit salad can be pretty good (in small quantities).
I never heard of that but I could see it with bitters. I don't know what pimento dram is.
Pimento in this case means that it's made with a lot of allspice.
I didn't think that's how words worked.
Is this the fault of the "literally" people?
No it's that pimento is also a (now) less common word for allspice, because it comes from a tree of that name. (Careful inspection would have revealed that this is also what the previous link stated.)
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Perhaps everyone has beaten this dead horse a long time ago, but when Don Draper gets hooked up with the sybarites in California during the second season of Mad Men, isn't there a bit of a "Vintage Season" aspect to that sequence?
||>
Is this the fault of the "literally" people?
Thin ice, JRoth.
179 et al
Peak Bob would have compared Obama to Pol Pot.
197: So I went out looking for US Child Mortality Rate, and no improvement as of 2013-2014, but I have seen how that works here Obama! and the usual flacks will say everything got ten times better in 2015 2016 Obama! and just hasn't shown up in the data yet Obama!
But US still sucks for dead babies in 2013-2014. Will keep an eye out for the revolutionary improvement.
But I know you will have an excuse or rationale there too, because the point really isn't about healthcare or saving lives but tribal identification.
Obama didn't really expand coverage much for kids. That was done before. I know none of the elderly care about what Obama did for health care because they're already covered.
197: Yup. As usual, most of the value is in the "Readers' Picks" comments. Here's one:
Obviously this isn't good but couldn't it be largely the result of an aging population? In the last 40 years the US median age has risen by about 10 years. Isn't a higher death rate sort-of what you would expect to see given that kind of change in the population? What surprises me is that the death rate has for the most part decreased over the same period the population has collectively aged.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the-us-population/
And of course our aging population is in part driven by low levels of undocumented immigration (the number has been essentially flat for 6-8 years now, though it may be ticking up).
And the child mortality rate is, IIRC, children under 5. Who have been covered by CHIP* for approximately 20 years now.
*except for undocumented kids in some states
Medical research is a tricky business where you have to get the math right. Nobody wants to go the way of Preparation G.
Tell us about Preparation G, Grandpa Hick!
It was marginally less effective. Preparation J was the one that made you see ghosts.
You're never prepared for Preparation J.
The place we lived was a big condo tower. There were a couple of occasions when a man, either experiencing mental troubles or very heavily drugged, did a fair bit of screaming outside the building or from his balcony.
Once-from his balcony-it was "fuck fucking Obama, he's a Motherfuckin [n-word]!" Chanted three or four times in the middle of the night.
The other time, I guess it was the preparation j or something. He was outside, yelling "hellp! I'm a ghost! You can't see me! I'm a ghost!" Again three or four times, dead of night. That was followed by the sound of him roaring away in a car, peeling out thru the parking lot.
That was probably good old fashioned alcohol.
First incident, sure.
The second, tho? I have had the odd bibulous night, but never thought myself a ghost, or even close.
So, what, "US Child Mortality dead last worst for developed countries" is not Obama's job description, not Democratic Party problem, already covered by SCHIP doing terrific, or Obamacare not designed to help there cause whatever?
But what a historic achievement. Not totally perfect, as LGM would say.
What metric would you suggest to see if Obamacare has improved general health outcomes? I do not trust any measure of monetary expenditures or hospital stays etc, because of deductibles and co-pays people are avoiding doctors, making those numbers look good, but living sicker.
Maybe diabetes and obesity in over 40s?
Ahh, why would I ask you? As we have seen already, the point is to cherrypick to grab credit and avoid blame, even when it's child mortality.
I'll keep looking.
You've not tried Jannamico Super Punch.
Obamacare wasn't enough to improve general health outcomes. It was a successful transfer of wealth/income to the bottom 2/5th of the U.S. (plus sick people) and a non-trivial increase in economic security for the next 2/5ths or more.
194:
The only truth - if that word can have any meaning - is that we are not free. We live only because Bill Kristol allows it. Because any moment he might take it upon himself to make another optimistic prediction for the sunny future of humanity. 'We'll do great,' he says, lounging on his chair in the ABC studio. 'The human species will carry on, today, tomorrow, and for all the days to come.' Cut to black.
Speaking of Kristol, I went over to NRO this morning to see who David French is. There was a huge ad about the NR cruise that mentioned when it would be (shortly after the election) and who would be there (David French, neglecting his transition team).
Did you learn anything else about him?
Or the cruise? Is it a Latvian freedom cruise? Probably not, I guess, if it's in November.
I learned that NRO thinks he's good enough to write for them but not good enough to be president.
That's hilarious, as is the whole David French thing in general.
This is David French. I mean, there's any number of other things he wrong, but this one is good enough to cover everything else. He's pretty bad even for NRO.
