Headline Of The Day

A reader nominates it:

Disco Clam Freezes Prey With Toxic Snot

How Nicholas St. Fleur describes the little bugger:

Known as “the disco clam,” this six-centimeter shellfish has tentacles that flash like a strobe light. At first, researchers thought the light was a type of bioluminescence like fireflies or deep-sea angler fish. But last year marine biologist Lindsey Dougherty from the University of California, Berkeley, found that the flashing lights are caused by highly reflective silica spheres in the clam’s bright orange lips. They initially thought the glow attracted mates, but now, new research from her team suggests that the light display may ward off would-be attackers.

St. Fleur provides some great footage of the clam defending itself from the formidable mantis shrimp. The above video shows off the disco clam’s light show.

The Revolt Against Boehner

Bernstein calls bullshit:

A real uprising against the speaker would have happened back in November, when House Republicans met and instead endorsed him for another term. Had conservatives been unhappy with Republican leadership, they could have rounded up the votes and made it clear that Boehner was finished. They could even have proposed a plausible replacement. But they didn’t have the votes or an alternative then, and they won’t have them now.

Yes, Louie Gohmert of Texas has proposed himself as a new speaker, but the last thing any of the radicals want right now is Boehner’s job – which entails, more than anything else, cutting deals with Barack Obama on must-pass items such as the debt limit and next year’s appropriations. House Republicans aren’t really unhappy with how Boehner has handled those negotiations; that’s why they supported another term for him. This “revolt” is nothing more than a tantrum against the inescapable fact of compromise.

Another reason Boehner is likely to keep his job:

The defections Tuesday appear as though they could be more significant than at any point since 1923, but Boehner has one major advantage amid the revolt: the biggest GOP majority since the 1929-30 Congress. The GOP’s 246-188 advantage means Boehner can lose 29 votes before we can even talk about him being in real trouble.

Beutler believes that Boehner was more vulnerable two years ago:

Republicans had just lost an election badly. The Republican House majority had been diminished to the point where a small, determined group of rebels could conspire to force a second ballot, and a third ballot, and as many ballots as it might take to shake up the leadership ranks. Assuming Boehner would neither seek nor find aid from Democrats, the logic of a voluntary exodus would have become difficult to resist. That’s more or less what Newt Gingrich realized early on after presiding over the poor GOP showing in the 1998 midterms.

Today, a sneak attack is neither plausible, nor theoretically sound. Under Boehner’s leadership, Republicans expanded their majority in the midterm. He has a much bigger cushion this year than he did in 2013. Pulling off a surprise upset wouldn’t be in the cards, even if House conservatives were the adroit operators everyone knows they aren’t.

How Ben Jacobs thinks about the vote:

[T]his episode serves as a clear test of how Boehner can manage what will be the biggest Republican caucus in the House since the Hoover Administration. If he manages to pull through while limiting the number of dissidents it’s a sign that the speaker might be able to finally enforce party discipline in his caucus. But a close run contest would indicate the opposite and point to yet another Congress where Boehner would have to tiptoe around conservatives in his party to accomplish anything of substance.

“Thought Crime Now Exists In This Country”

Last week, Scottish police examined “complaints about Ebola comments tweeted by controversial TV personality Katie Hopkins”:

After news that a Scots nurse was being treated for the virus, Hopkins wrote: “Sending us Ebola bombs in the form of sweaty Glaswegians just isn’t cricket.” Another tweet said: “Glaswegian ebola patient moved to London’s Royal Free Hospital. Not so independent when it matters most are we jocksville?” Police confirmed they were looking into an unspecified number of complaints.

Massie, who is quoted in this post’s headline, is disturbed by the police reaction:

Morons post moronic comments on Twitter or Facebook or wherever and other morons report them to the police who in turn waste their time deciding whether a given tweet is grossly offensive or merely run-of-the-mill offensive.

But regardless of whether people are grossly offended by such posts or not it is plain that, in the absence of direct harassment or threats of specific harm, they’re simply expressions of opinion. Distasteful opinion, perhaps, but still only opinion. Which ought not to be enough to trigger an investigation, far less arrests and prosecutions. This is so even if – no, especially when – a reasonable person might conclude the tweets (or whatever) were racist, sectarian, homophobic or anything else. The freedom to be a moron is an important one. Ditto for bigots.

Charles C. W. Cooke discovers that the policing of thought is widespread in Britain:

I would like to report that this represents little more than an idle threat, or, perhaps, that it is merely the product of a rogue and overzealous intern. But, alas, I cannot. As The Independent’s James Bloodworth noted this week, this is in fact rather typical. “Around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online,” Bloodworth confirms, “with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Worse, some of these people have actually been imprisoned: among them, a “woman found guilty of a public order offence for saying that David Cameron had “’blood on his hands,’” a man named “Azhar Ahmed, who was prosecuted for an online post mocking the deaths of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan,” and a young man named Liam Stacey who tweeted something unprintable at a top-flight soccer player and was incarcerated for two months in consequence.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown puts the news in its greater context:

Of course, the British have always been more censorship-happy than Americans—why should we worry too much about their current speech-limiting antics? Because they come at a time when countries around the world—from Japan to India to Turkey—have been debating (and legislating) the handling of hate speech, and the European Union’s Council on Human Rights has been taking up the “no hate speech” mantle more vociferously. The United Nations is also pressuring countries, particularly Japan, to enact anti-hate speech laws. I’m really afraid that speech penalties of the past are the wave of the future.

If The Earth Were To Stop Orbiting …

… we would slowly fall into the sun. Aatish Bhatia provides a timeline. Here’s what Day 35 would look like:

It’s been over a month of Earthfall, and we’re now 20% of the way to the Sun. The Sun in unbearably bright and intense, and noticeably larger in the sky. At 58 C (137 F), the average global temperature now exceeds the historic hottest temperature recorded on Earth, which was 56.7 C (134 F) measured in Death Valley, CA.

For most people on the planet, it’s now impossible to stay alive without air conditioning, and the electricity infrastructure is either tapped out or failing. Forest fires are ravaging through the wilderness. Land animals that can’t burrow in to the soil to get respite from the heat are going extinct. The insects, too, are feeling the heat and dying out. The increasing water temperature will cause fish to start dying out, because warmer water holds less oxygen and more ammonia (which is toxic to fish), and because the entire marine food chain would be disrupted and collapsing.

It’s so hot that even the Saharan silver ant, one of the most heat resistant land animals on Earth, can no longer survive the heat (for it can stay alive up to 53.6 C). However, the Sahara desert ant is thriving – it can survive surface temperatures of up to 70 C. As scavengers, these ants feed on the corpses of other creatures that have died from the heat, and there’s now plenty of food to go around.

Update from a reader:

I’m sure I won’t be the only person to point this out, but I think the title “If The Earth Were To Stop Spinning …” is a bit misleading.  The hypothetical scenario that the post presents is where the speed of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is reduced to zero, not if the Earth stops spinning around its own axis, which is what the title sounds like. Now, it wouldn’t work out so well for us either if the Earth stopped spinning around its axis, but at least it’s a different sort of problem.

Is “Broken Windows” Broken?

NYC police commissioner Bill Bratton and criminologist George Kelling, two of the earliest advocates of the “broken windows” theory, have published a lengthy piece defending it against fresh critics outraged by Eric Garner’s death:

Our experience suggests that, whatever the critics might say, the majority of New Yorkers, 9722024610_f768258614_kincluding minorities, approve of such police order-maintenance activities. After all, most of these activities come in response to residents’ demands, which are made to patrolling officers directly, to precinct operators by telephone, to precinct commanders at community meetings, and via the 311 and 911 call centers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, citizens almost invariably are more concerned about disorderly behavior than about major crimes, which they experience far less frequently. We have attended countless meetings with citizen groups in high-crime areas, and, almost without exception, disorderly behavior and conditions are the central concerns. …

[E]ven in this highly charged context [of Garner’s death], support for Broken Windows [in an August 2014 poll] remained high. African-Americans supported it by 56 to 37 percent, whites by 61 to 33 percent, and Hispanics by the largest margin of all—64 to 34 percent.

Emily Badger finds that Bratton and Kelling “make some fair points”:

Randomized experiments have supported the argument that “broken windows” can work. And crime has notably declined in New York since the philosophy was first embraced there. But in making this case, Bratton and Kelling overstate the role that “broken windows” has played in making New York a safer place — or, at least, they understate the very likely possibility that many factors far beyond the control of law enforcement have contributed to making it so. This is the weakest part of their argument.

She points to many of those other factors:

The Marshall Project recently rounded up 10 of the most popular theories for why urban crime has declined. So many exist — from the rise of legal abortion to the decline of lead-based fuel and paint — precisely because the phenomenon has proved so difficult to explain. Can we really dismiss, for instance, the fact that anti-theft technology in vehicles has grown much more sophisticated? Or the fact that the crack epidemic finally waned? Or that our increasingly cashless economy makes people harder targets for crime? We recently wrote about a Chicago summer-jobs program that appears to have cut down on violent arrests by at-risk teens.

Drum backs up Badger’s basic point with data:

blog_violent_crime_six_large_cities_3It’s true that crime in New York is down more than it is nationally, but that’s just because crime went up more in big cities vs. small cities during the crime wave of the 60s through the 80s, and it then went down more during the crime decline of the 90s and aughts. Kelling and Bratton can dismiss this as ivory tower nonsense, but they should know better. The statistics are plain enough, after all.

Take a look at the [two charts]. The top one shows crime declines in six of America’s biggest cities. As you can see, New York did well, but it did no better than Chicago or Dallas or Los Angeles, none of which implemented broken windows during the 90s.

The bottom chart is a summary of the crime decline in big cities vs. small cities. Again, the trend is clear: crime went up more during the 80s in big cities, but then declined more during blog_crime_big_small_cities_1985_2010the 90s and aughts. The fact that New York beat the national average is a matter of its size, not broken windows.

Now, none of this is evidence that broken windows doesn’t work. The evidence is foggy either way, and we simply don’t know. My own personal view is that it’s probably a net positive, but a fairly modest one.

Christina Sternbenz adds:

When University of Chicago professors Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig revisited broken windows [in 2006 – pdf], they reported criminologists knew very little about the theory’s effectiveness. Their paper found no evidence outside of Kelling’s work to support the notion that cracking down on minor offenses leads to a decrease in more serious crime.

Much of the new research claiming to debunk broken windows has also found that targeting minor crimes harms poor people and minorities. For example, a later paper, again by Harcourt and Ludwig, found that the policy, albeit indirectly, led to a disproportionate number of drug arrests for blacks, the New Republic reported.

Charles F. Coleman Jr. chimes in:

As a former prosecutor, I found the most common reasons people committed crimes to be connected to their own finances and/or rooted in the economic constraints of their surrounding environment. The threat of a summons for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk is hardly a deterrent for larger crimes when those crimes might help make ends meet for unemployed or underemployed people. This is the problem with broken-windows policing: The theory fails because it attributes the cause of crime to the “tolerance” and escalation of lesser crimes rather than acknowledging that crime rates are higher in poorer communities primarily because people do not like being poor.

But Matthew Hennessey defends Bratton and Kelling from such critics:

Broken Windows is a key part of the difference between a proactive police force and a reactive one. It’s the difference between cops that look for ways to stop criminals from victimizing neighborhoods and ones that sit in patrol cars drinking coffee and waiting for a 911 call to come in. That commitment to dynamic policing permeated the department, from the cop on the beat to the commissioner. Now, thanks to a year of official slander, public protests, and outright lies, the culture of results and accountability that made the NYPD the finest police force in the world could be at risk.

Another defender of Broken Windows may surprise you:

“Because of the broken-windows approach, we are the safest we’ve ever been. I lived through the 1980s in this city and the early ’90s, and I don’t ever want to go back there,” de Blasio said. And: “If I said, ‘Do you want responsive policing?’ ‘Do you want the police to come when you call?’ ‘Do you want small problems addressed, or do you only want big problems addressed?’ I think the vast majority of New Yorkers would say, ‘Yes, we want the police to come when we call.’ ‘Yes, we want order kept.’ ‘Yes, we want small things addressed and big things addressed.’ ”

Recent Dish scrutinizing Broken Windows here.

(Photo by Nick Harris)

Face Of The Day

Florida Federal Judge Issues Ruling Allowing Gay Marriages Across The State

Juan Talavera and Jeff Ronci (L) celebrate after receiving their marriage license from the Clerk of the Courts – Miami-Dade County Court on January 5, 2015. Gay marriage is now legal statewide after the courts ruled that the ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

The Morals Of Modern Economics

Christina McRorie urges us to rethink them, going back to Adam Smith to show that there’s more to economic analysis than narrow, self-interested calculations. She reminds us that Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments before he turned to The Wealth of Nations:

Smith’s moral psychology is decisively operative in The Wealth of Nations, and approaching his economic treatise with that in mind can helpfully challenge the tendency to read it, as Chicago school economist George Stigler does, as “a stupendous palace erected upon the granite of self-interest.” Although a growing number of intellectual histories now bring into question this once dominant interpretation of Smith’s work, Stigler is hardly alone in his interpretation.

In fact, this misreading remains the single greatest reason for Smith’s popular reputation as a conservative neoclassical economist whose pessimism about governments, regulation, and human nature was matched only by his optimism about market outcomes, and who accordingly proclaimed that free markets tidily channel individual selfishness toward the greater public good, as if by an “invisible hand.” Although the heyday of the conservative sartorial phenomenon of “Adam Smith neckties” has passed, most invocations of his name in contemporary politics still focus on his alleged discovery that free markets lead to the greater good by shaping selfishness through some unseen force.

Connecting Smith’s philosophy with his economics militates against this caricature by helping us see the moral ambivalence in his evaluation of commercial society. Take, for example, his claims regarding that “certain propensity in human nature…to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Pointing out that no one has ever seen two dogs make a “fair and deliberate exchange,” he noted that this uniquely human ability rests on the art of making contracts that are advantageous to both parties: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

With all due respect to George Stigler, I find that reading these famous lines with Smith’s moral psychology in mind reveals that it is the faculty of sympathy on which exchange is built, not self-interest. Understanding another’s advantage through sympathy is what allows bargaining in the first place. Why talk about engaging the butcher’s self-love at all, unless we can imagine and therefore anticipate it? Along with reason and rationality, it is this imaginative capacity that distinguishes humans from animals, and allows us to bargain with each other toward mutual advantage. The two dogs certainly have self-interest, but they don’t have this.

Firebombs And “Love Bombs” For Swedish Mosques

Over the holidays, Sweden’s Muslim community was shaken by a string of attacks on mosques in several cities:

Swedish police launched a manhunt Thursday after the third arson attack against a mosque in a week, amid growing tensions over the rise of a far right anti-immigration movement.”People saw a man throwing something burning at the building,” police in Uppsala said in a statement, adding that the mosque in eastern Sweden did not catch fire and that the suspect had left behind “a text on the door expressing contempt for religion.” …

Thursday’s attack in Sweden’s fourth-largest city came just three days after a late-night blaze at a mosque in Esloev in the south, which police suspect was also arson. On Christmas Day, five people were injured when a petrol bomb was thrown through the window of a mosque in Eskilstuna, east of the capital Stockholm.

Local residents in Uppsala responded to the attack by “love-bombing” the damaged mosque with notes of support. Amanda Taub applauds:

The demonstration and “love bombing” were a powerful way for ordinary Swedes to reject racism and show support for Muslims. But the march also carried broader political significance, because it showed that Swedes felt a duty to publicly reaffirm the country’s identity as a place that is tolerant and welcoming towards immigrants.

In many countries, anti-immigrant populism dominates the public conversation about immigration not because it necessarily represents the majority view, but because people with more moderate and tolerant views don’t make it a priority to speak up publicly. These demonstrations suggest that Sweden may be different: thousands of people took to the streets to say that they are not willing to stay silent, and will not allow extremists to dominate the debate.

Still, many Muslims throughout Europe have reason to be wary of their neighbors; a new poll finds that one in eight Germans would join an anti-Muslim march if one were organized in their hometown:

The survey highlighted growing support in Germany, as in other European Union countries including Britain and Sweden, for parties and movements tapping into voter fears that mainstream politicians are too soft on immigration.

Some members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc worry that they risk losing support to the euro-sceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has shifted its focus to immigration and includes many who also back the PEGIDA protest movement — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. PEGIDA is holding weekly rallies in the eastern city of Dresden, and attracted more than 17,000 people to a Dec. 22 rally. A few small marches have taken place in other towns, and it plans to stage further rallies in other German cities.

The NYPD Turns Its Back On Civilian Control

At Sunday’s funeral for slain police officer Wenjian Liu, hundreds of New York’s Finest turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio for a second time:

The silent protest against de Blasio came after a Friday memo from New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton specifically asking officers to refrain from turning their backs on the mayor at Liu’s funeral, as they had at the funeral of his partner, Officer Rafael Ramos. “A hero’s funeral is about grieving, not grievance,” Bratton wrote. Urged by their unions, NYPD officers have also sharply reduced their law enforcement duties to protest what they view as de Blasio’s lack of support.

Calvin Wolf sympathizes with the NYPD’s sensitivity to the increased scrutiny and criticism it’s facing, but urges the cops to change tactics before their petulance comes back to bite them:

Police officers, I understand. But you must not turn your backs.

Though it is tempting to turn your back on a mayor who has insinuated that you are brutal racists, and may be trying to score cheap political points, you must use the power of your voice instead. Turning one’s back on the mayor may be mistaken as turning one’s back on the entire citizenry. Critics will use this gesture against you. You must show the people that you are not turning their back on them. You must step forward, not turn your back. You must use your words to explain, not to condemn. Do not let your critics have a monopoly on the heart-wrenching op-eds.

How TNC frames the NYPD’s recent actions:

If the public appetite for police reform can be soured by the mad acts of a man living on the edge of society, then the appetite was probably never really there to begin with. And the police, or at least their representatives, know this. In this piece, by Wesley Lowery, there are several amazing moments where police complain about things Barack Obama and Eric Holder have not actually said. There simply is no level of critique they would find tolerable.

Denis Hamill, meanwhile, rips the police union chief a new one for not speaking up against the department’s “virtual work stoppage“:

If you agree with Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch that the blood of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu is on Mayor de Blasio’s hands, then is the blood of Zbigniew Truszkowski, 37, stabbed to death protecting his teenage stepdaughter from a drunken stalker on Dupont St. in Brooklyn on Monday night, on the hands of Lynch? By not condemning an apparent police work slowdown, Lynch has essentially sanctioned a mass breach of the NYPD oath to protect and serve the public.

I think it’s completely unfair, of course, to smear Lynch with Truszkowski’s blood. But if you apply Lynch’s twisted logic of de Blasio’s culpability in the two police assassinations, you can make the case that in the police work slowdown, suggested by a reduced number of summonses and arrests, Lynch with his silence gave the killer the means and opportunity to commit the only murder in Greenpoint in 2014.

While others have noted that the “work stoppage” has had little noticeable effect on crime rates, and that lighter-touch policing might actually be beneficial, the fact that the police made this decision unilaterally makes Charles Ellison nervous:

[A]ctive work stoppages … add a whole new ugly dimension to the dispute and could create a slippery slope towards bad police practices in New York City and beyond. That ventures into a future no one would want and no one benefits from: a scenario where distressed and underserved communities are left to fend for themselves once police departments consider “quality of life” crimes as too much hassle and not worth the headache. Is that where we’re headed? A world where police, who already know the dangers and risks of their profession, suddenly want to skip out or provide lower levels of service because they feel under-appreciated and targeted? Not sure if it’s a good idea to get comfortable with that.

Anyone who grew up in a working class urban neighborhood can tell you how minor offenses and “broken windows” can quickly add up into crime-ridden nightmares for the residents. Policy makers should figure out a approach that’s less punitive on folks who can’t afford it. But allowing the dramatic slashing of local police presence out of police fear and arrogance is an insane proposition.

The Kims Get Even Ronerier

While security experts have been skeptical of the US government’s claim that North Korea was behind the Sony hack, Washington is sticking to its guns and leveling new sanctions against the already isolated regime of Kim Jong Un:

The United States on Friday sanctioned 10 North Korean government officials and three organizations, including Pyongyang’s primary intelligence agency and state-run arms dealer, in what the White House described as an opening move in the response toward the Sony cyber attack. The sanctions might have only a limited effect, as North Korea already is under tough U.S. and international sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs. President Barack Obama also warned Pyongyang that the United States was considering whether to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terrorism, which could jeopardize aid to the country on a global scale.

North Korea has already been under severe US sanctions for some time, Foster Klug observes, but that hasn’t done much to deter it from making mischief:

Some analysts say Washington and others have the ability, should they choose, to apply more severe financial measures to hurt the North’s leadership. But many others point out that a raft of multilateral penalties from the United Nations, as well as national sanctions from Washington, Tokyo and others meant to punish the government and sidetrack its nuclear ambitions, have done nothing to derail Pyongyang’s pursuit of a nuclear tipped missile that could reach America’s mainland.

The most recent sanctions, which target 10 North Korean government officials and three organizations, including Pyongyang’s primary intelligence agency and state-run arms dealer, will have a limited impact because North Korea will likely assign other people or organizations to take over the work of those targeted, analysts say.

And even if the new measures had sharper teeth, Matt Schiavenza points out that there’s not much chance of them damaging the Kim regime as long as Beijing remains willing to prop it up:

The country does have one important ally on the global stage: China, which provides Pyongyang with nearly 90 percent of its energy needs and occasionally thwarts U.S.-led attempts to impose sanctions. In recent years, Beijing has grown increasingly impatient with North Korea’s intransigence on the nuclear issue, and, in a pointed rebuke, President Xi Jinping has not yet met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un since the former assumed China’s highest office in 2012. But even if China’s relationship with the North has chilled, it is unlikely to sympathize with the U.S. over the Sony hacks. When the New York Times uncovered evidence in early 2013 that a unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army conducted cyber-espionage against American interests from an unmarked building outside Shanghai, Beijing argued that the U.S. is no less guilty.

Max Boot, who is pretty sure that “the spooks have some highly classified clue pointing the finger of blame at Pyongyang”, approves of tightening sanctions but also wants the US to commit to a grander objective of regime change:

In the final analysis, beyond sanctions, the real solution to the North Korean threat lies in peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. That won’t happen overnight but it is a goal that the U.S. should dedicate itself to–as urged by the noted North Korea watcher, my friend Sue Mi Terry, and more recently by my boss, Richard Haass. If President Obama truly wants the right answer not just to the cyber-attack but to other North Korean outrages, this is it: Come up with a strategy to hasten the eventual implosion of Communist North Korea, the worst human-rights violator on the planet, and the creation of a single, democratic, unified Korean state.

But Bershidsky joins the chorus of those who find it hard to swallow the claim that Pyongyang was behind the hack:

The biggest problem with blaming North Korea is that Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship gained nothing from the hack. Because of the phenomenon known as the Streisand effect, “The Interview,” the Sony comedy spoofing Kim, became a major hit on download and streaming services, pulling in $18 million in just a couple of days. All the free publicity the movie received is likely to make other film makers consider attacking Kim — of course, after taking measures to take their sensitive information offline. Are North Korean spies so stupid that they couldn’t predict the explosion of interest in “The Interview” after the hack? I doubt it: no one should be so dumb.