The Dish

Terrorism Is Hard To Pull Off

David Sterman points out another reason why the threat of homegrown jihadis fails to live up to our outsized fears of it:

Once in an American city, an extremist must still acquire weapons. And if he plans to conduct a large-scale strategic attack (rather than a lone wolf-type shooting), he must also connect with others, engage in planning and surveillance activity, and finally prepare and carry out the attack. All of these steps are constrained by the willingness and ability of local Muslim and non-Muslim communities to report extremist and suspicious activity, as well as by the domestic efforts of law enforcement. …

None of this is to say that Jihadist groups in Syria should be allowed to fester and develop the capability to conduct attacks in the United States, or that it is impossible that a returning Syrian foreign fighter will evade the layered defenses that protect the American homeland. That Abu Salha was able to return undetected to the United States after participating in Jihadist training should concern law enforcement. The layered defense system may need reinforcement to deal with new challenges, but the constraints it imposes upon jihadist activity ought not be obscured, particularly when making the case that the threat posed by foreign fighters calls for military action. Doing so does a great disservice to the admirable efforts of Muslim communities, local and federal law enforcement, and American citizens in confronting Jihadist extremism at home.

Recidivism By Design?

Research finds that “someone lasts 5,000 days (about 14 years) before finding themselves back in the cooler,” but “a tattooed ex-con lasts half that”:

[Researcher Kaitlyn] Harger compares people with different types of tattoos: those that can easily be seen, and those that cannot. People with tattoos on the face, head, neck or hands go back to prison 714 days earlier than other tattooed ex-offenders. Having a visible tattoo is the real problem for employers.

What’s the cost of all this to the hard-pressed American taxpayer? Uncle Sam pays roughly $30,000 a year to house one prisoner (though this figure varies wildly from state to state). About 600,000 prisoners are released each year, 70% of whom have tattoos. Tattooed types return to prison earlier: that translates into an extra cost of $5.5 billion per year (a little less than the budget of the Federal Prison System, which houses 200,000 prisoners). Tattoo removal can cost thousands of dollars. Even so, free removal for every prisoner would be sensible economics.

Update from a reader:

As you have often pointed out, correlation does not equal causation. The data in Kaitlyn Harger’s research might lead one to assume that face tattoos are causing a higher rate of recidivism. I suspect that the reverse is true. Face tattoos are very common in gangs. The recidivism rate for gang members is high because they go back to that life when the get our of prison. Tattoo removal will not wipe away all of their connections and affiliations. They are not career criminal acts because they have face tattoos; they have face tattoos because they are career criminals.

Paternity Pays

Claire Cain Miller discusses new findings showing that having kids furthers men’s but not women’s careers:

This bias is most extreme for the parents who can least afford it, according to new data from Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has studied the parenthood pay gap for 15 years. High-income men get the biggest pay bump for having children, and low-income women pay the biggest price, she said in a paper published this month by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance moderate policy ideas. … [M]uch of the pay gap seems to arise from old-fashioned notions about parenthood. “Employers read fathers as more stable and committed to their work; they have a family to provide for, so they’re less likely to be flaky,” Ms. Budig said. “That is the opposite of how parenthood by women is interpreted by employers. The conventional story is they work less and they’re more distractible when on the job.”

Update from a reader:

Hi Andrew, welcome back! I have no doubt that paternity pays, at least in the corporate world, and need look no further than the phrase I most despise when used in a business setting: Family Man. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, following a hire or a promotion, “Bill’s a great guy, a family man”. It doesn’t matter if Bill is a good father/husband, just that he is one. You will never hear, “Jill is a great gal, a family woman”. Family Man = Stable, solid, dependable. Family Woman = More devoted to family than career. This is why it pays to be a dad.

“One In Five”

Sarah Kliff provides a graph with a stark visual representation of new CDC figures on rape:

Jessica Roy expresses alarm:

After polling over 12,000 participants in a randomized, nationally representative telephone survey, the CDC found that an estimated 19.3 percent of women and 1.7 percent of men have been raped during their lifetimes. 19.3 percent — nearly 1 in 5 American women — have been raped. Just let that sink in. The study also yielded some shocking statistics about other forms of sexual violence, defined as “being made to penetrate, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and noncontact unwanted sexual experiences.”

Other surveys have found significantly fewer rape victims. Claire Groden explains the discrepancies:

The CDC … did not mention any legal terms in the survey queries, instead asking questions like, “How many people have ever used physical force or threats to physically harm you to make you have vaginal sex?” Because of this, the CDC included cases in which the victim might not have been aware or willing to identify her experiences as rape.

This difference made the CDC’s survey broader, especially in the case of victims who were under the influence during the attack. The CDC counted alcohol- and drug-facilitated rape, asking if the respondents had ever experienced various sex acts while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.” But, as Scott Berkowitz at RAINN, the Rape and Incest Abuse National Network, pointed out, not all of those 1.2 million cases in 2011 would be considered rape by the Department of Justice. A person who was drunk might have still been lucid enough to give consent, but the CDC would have counted that experience as “alcohol-facilitated rape.”

Still, the CDC numbers are a reminder of how many sexual assaults and rapes go unreported. The total number of rapes reported to police in 2011 was 83,425—far lower than either the NCVS or CDC numbers.

When Your Textbook Is Your Teacher

Gabriel Kahn takes note of textbook publishers muscling into the online education market:

Creating online courses from scratch is expensive and time-consuming. When universities try to do it themselves, the results can be erratic. Some online classes wind up being not much more than grainy videos of lectures and a collection of PowerPoint slides.Publishers have rushed in to fill the gap. They’ve been at the game longer, possess vast libraries of content from their textbook divisions, and have invested heavily in creating state-of-the-art course technology….These courses feature content vetted by experts, slickly produced videos, and a load of interactive tests and quizzes. Some are so advanced that they can simulate a physics experiment, engage a student in a developmental psychology exercise, or even run software that grades an 800-word essay. They provide pretty much the entire course experience, without much interaction with a professor and without the hassle of showing up to class on time – or, for some instructors, the hassle of teaching.

The growing uniformity, though it has its advantages, puts schools in an awkward position. The transaction can reduce colleges’ academic mission to that of middleman, reselling course materials produced elsewhere. If schools are offering the same basic courses with minimal variations, it makes it all the more difficult to sell themselves to prospective students or justify their tuition levels.

As I was catching up today on the details of various stories I’d left hanging in the air, I came upon today’s news analysis by the NYT. In particular, this paragraph, which we excerpted here, about the various phases of Obama’s extension of the Iraq war:

The next phase, which would begin sometime after Iraq forms a more inclusive government, scheduled this week, is expected to involve an intensified effort to train, advise or equip the Iraqi military, Kurdish fighters and possibly members of Sunni tribes.

What I found delightful in that paragraph was that little sub-clause – “scheduled this week!” Yes, this week, after a few centuries of rancorous vengeful sectarian divides, and brutal sectarian cleansing in the very recent past, the Iraqis were going to produce a coalition government of Sunnis, Shia and Kurds in order to face down ISIS. At least, it’s: “scheduled.” It’s that kind of fantasy – the same kind of fantasy we heard so often from 2002 to 2009 – that really reveals to me how amnesiac we really are.

And on cue, of course, today the new government did not quite arrive on schedule:

Iraqi lawmakers approved a new power-sharing government led by the Shiite prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, late Monday. But they left the two most divisive security posts unfilled, potentially extending a contentious debate even as American officials prepared a new campaign of military support for the Baghdad administration … Mr. Abadi said he would nominally run the Defense and Interior Ministries himself, and gave lawmakers a week to agree on new ministers before filling the posts with his own choices.

Even now, the key decisions have not, it seems, been made by the Iraqis. There is no real unity government yet for the United States to support. The one we have exists tenuously with multi-sectarian trust not close to being built – even as the state itself is besieged. Which means we could be already Americanizing this civil war, making it less resolvable by the actors themselves, and making it ever more likely that the US will once again become the focus of Islamist hatred and terror.

My sense is that Obama knows this – hence his incredibly careful statements over the last few weeks. So it seems to me he should postpone any commitment to a campaign against ISIS until the Iraqis unite against it. This is not our war; it’s theirs. And we should only intervene behind a multi-sectarian government that represents all of Iraq. Which means, in my opinion, never. We can win no friends in Arabia; we can merely increase the number and ferocity of our enemies.

Today, I worried that ISIS was baiting the West into another religious war, and tried to make sense of the calm and sanity I felt while off-off-grid. We pondered the end of Britain, the deaths of Russians and some new grisly details from the torture files of the Bush administration.

The most popular post of the day was Back From The Desert, my reminiscence (such as it is) of Burning Man, followed by Are We Being Baited? Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Dish t-shirts and polos are for sale here. A reader writes:

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(Photo: Yes and Better Together supporters exchange views with one another as Jim Murphy Shadow Secretary of State for International Development (not seen), speaks on his soapbox during his “100 Towns in 100 Days” tour in Dundee, Scotland on August 27, 2014. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.)

Seeing Stars

Colin Schulz flags the above video explaining why we see stars as having pointed ends:

Stars twinkle for a fairly intuitive reason: The movement of the air in Earth’s atmosphere can momentarily dim a star’s light. This is why, says NASA, stars on the horizon seem most twinkly—“because there is a lot more atmosphere between you and a star near the horizon than between you and a star higher in the sky.”

But what about stars’ characteristic pointy star shape? The science behind that is surprising and has less to do with the stars or the Earth or with space than it does with us. Stars are shaped like stars, says Henry Seeing StarsReich in the Minute Physics video above, because of imperfections in the back of our eyeballs. Most intriguingly, says Reich, this biological explanation means that every one of us sees stars slightly differently.

Abuse In The Public Eye

Today new video surfaced of NFL player Ray Rice hitting his now-wife. Dara Lind provides the backstory:

In February, TMZ posted a video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice dragging his apparently unconscious then-fiancée (now his wife Janay Rice) from an elevator at the Revel casino in Atlantic City. The incident led to Ray Rice’s arrest for domestic violence, though he was assigned to a pre-trial diversion program rather than being charged with a crime. It also led him to receive a two-game suspension from the NFL. League commissioner Roger Goodell, after facing harsh criticism for the relatively light punishment (first-time marijuana offenders generally get suspended for more games), he announced a new, much stricter league domestic-violence policy in August.

But the original video didn’t show exactly what had happened inside the elevator, leaving an opening for Rice supporters to assume that he was acting in self-defense. Janay Rice apologized for her role in the incident, which seemed to confirm this suspicion. Now, TMZ has released a second video (warning: it’s very graphic) from inside the casino elevator. It shows Rice punching Palmer — and makes it clear that what happened wasn’t a “fight,” but an attack.

After the release of this new video, Rice’s contract was terminated. Jonathan Cohn hopes some good comes from this episode:

The footage is not easy to watch, but it shouldn’t be. Domestic violence is violent. Maybe if more people realize that, more people will take it seriously.

Dave Zirin disagrees with that line of reasoning:

[I]f no one is going to talk about the welfare of the person who is actually subjected to the violence on that tape, let’s talk about it here. I spent the morning communicating with people who work on issues involving domestic violence and violence against women nearly every day of their lives. They all said the same thing, without dissent: releasing this tape to the world is incredibly damaging to Janay Rice. Just as we would protect the name of an alleged rape victim, just as we would not show a video of Ray Rice committing a sexual assault, we should not be showing this video like it’s another episode of Rich People Behaving Badly. If Janay Rice wanted to show this tape to the world, in other words if she had offered her consent, that is a different matter. But showing and reshowing it just because we can is an act of harm.

Josh Marshall is not settled on the ethics of showing images of domestic violence. But he does “have a general stance against those who think news reporters should be in the business of not reporting certain things to advance various purportedly good ends”:

Two examples. Recently we have used still photos from the videos of the beheadings of the two American reporters by ISIS. Not stills of the actual killings but from the parts before that happens. Like many other press organizations, we’ve never published the videos themselves. In recent days I’ve heard from a number of readers who’ve said we should not be publishing any of these photos, even in stories which directly relate to the videos themselves because this is somehow too upsetting or doing ISIS’s work for it.

Similarly, I know there’s a move afoot to refrain from publishing the names of mass shooters on the theory that this just gives them the notoriety they crave and which led to their atrocities. I disagree. These killings are facts. The ISIS beheadings are facts. There’s no reason to publish imagery of mutilated bodies. But within certain bounds, these things happened. And withholding critical information about what happened just doesn’t make sense. I’d go further and say that it’s actually wrong. Ugly things happen. We shouldn’t play games about reporting them. We shouldn’t get into mind-games about what a mass murderer might or might not have wanted. Journalists should just focus on doing their jobs.

Meanwhile, Coates thinks the “idea that it took today’s release to understand the gravity of things is insupportable.” He feels the NFL is simply in damage control mode:

The league suspended Rice for a meager two games for knocking his wife unconscious. The league now propose to suspend him indefinitely for….the same thing. This suspension only indirectly relates to the protecting women. It mostly relates to protecting the shield.

Lots Of Americans Are Earning Less

Neil Irwin delivers a reality check:

Many groups, including both the youngest and oldest families and those without a college education, saw steep income declines even after an economic recovery had begun. Separate people by age or education, and the same basic pattern applies. Those with a college degree have done fine, but anything less than that and incomes have fallen. Both young adult households (those headed by someone under 35) and those households headed by someone over 75 have seen steep income declines in that same period.

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

Late last week, Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers also covered the continued fallout from the Great Recession. They warned that the young may be in even worse shape than the numbers suggest:

Many young people are living with their parents because they can’t afford to strike out on their own; they aren’t included in the Fed’s figures because they don’t count as their own households. Young people have also become less likely to own their own homes (35.6 percent listed their primary residence as an asset in 2013, down from 40.6 percent in 2007) and much more likely to have student debt (41.7 percent in 2013, up from 33.8 percent in 2007). Whether by choice or by necessity, young people are also taking fewer financial risks, holding more of their assets in cash and less in stocks.

Faces Of The Day

Costumed characters who work taking photos and collecting tips from people in Times Square hold a protest during a press conference announcing new legislation being introduced by city and state officials for the licensing and regulation of costumed people in Times Square on September 8, 2014. As the number of such characters has grown over the past year, a growing number of complaints and arrests of the characters have followed. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.