Shafer considers why the Oso, WA landslide has gotten so much press:
Not to diminish the cataclysm and the human loss, but for all its fearful power and creepiness, the landslide isn’t much of a killer — at least not in America. According to a Wikipedia chart of major landslides worldwide since 1900, only 11 have struck the United States, including the one in Oso. When you factor out landslides propagated by exploding volcanos (Mount St. Helens), earthquake-tsunamis (Seward, Alaska, and Lituya Bay, Alaska) and hurricanes (Nelson County, Va.), the death count falls very low. Before Oso, fewer than two dozen people had died in all other major U.S. landslides, which you could count on two fingers (Gros Ventre, Wyo., and La Conchita, Calif.). …
Avalanches, much more frequent and deadly than landslides, don’t enthrall readers and journalists because our curiosity about how they form and how and why they kill has been adequately covered. The landslide, as an atypical disaster, demands great concentration by the press. Most reporters (outside of landslide territory) have probably never covered one, leaving hundreds of questions to ask and answer. Explainers must be posed and sorted out. Follow-ups assigned. Historical records searched. Curiosity sated.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took to Facebook Monday to elaborate on his “comments about the NFL imploding in TEN YEARS”:
I wouldn’t want my son playing football, would you ? I’m sure helmet technology will improve over the next 10 years, but why risk it? There are plenty of sports to play. Plenty of ways to get exercise and if my son decided to do anything outside of sports and never pick up any ball of any kind, I’m fine with that. I can think of 1k things I would prefer him to get excited about doing.
As far as watching, I good with that. I don’t think I’m alone. If we start to see a decline of popularity at the high school and then college level because kids choose other sports, it will hurt the interest in watching the NFL[.]
But the drop-off in young football players is still less pronounced than in basketball and baseball. Neil Paine suggests less youth interest for a different reason:
The NFL’s high-profile concussion issues might be playing some role in the sport’s falling popularity among kids. But as Forbes’ Bob Cook pointed out in November, the effect is just as likely attributable to other factors, including the increasing trend toward specialization in young athletes. Cook noted that data from sporting-goods retailers shows an increase in sales among hardcore football players ages 7 to 11 and a sharp decrease among more casual players in the same age range. In essence, players who don’t receive a large investment in their careers at a young age appear to be getting squeezed out of organized football.
A new paper finds no evidence that medical marijuana leads to more crime:
[T]hese findings run counter to arguments suggesting the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes poses a danger to public health in terms of exposure to violent crime and property crimes. To be sure, medical marijuana laws were not found to have a crime exacerbating effect on any of the seven crime types. On the contrary, our findings indicated that [medical marijuana legalization (MML)] precedes a reduction in homicide and assault. While it is important to remain cautious when interpreting these findings as evidence that MML reduces crime, these results do fall in line with recent evidence and they conform to the longstanding notion that marijuana legalization may lead to a reduction in alcohol use due to individuals substituting marijuana for alcohol. Given the relationship between alcohol and violent crime, it may turn out that substituting marijuana for alcohol leads to minor reductions in violent crimes that can be detected at the state level. That said, it also remains possible that these associations are statistical artifacts
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas looked at the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report data across the country between 1990 and 2006, a span during which 11 states legalized medical marijuana. Throughout this time period, crime was broadly falling throughout the United States. But a closer look at the differences between these states – and within the states that legalized the drug before and after the law’s passage – further shows no noticeable local uptick among a whole suite of crimes: homicide, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft.
How relevant is research on medical marijuana laws to the debate about broader forms of legalization? Highly relevant, if you take the view that medical marijuana is mostly a cover for recreational use, as prohibitionists tend to argue. In truth, the legal regimes governing the medical use of marijuana range from very strict (such as New Jersey’s) to very loose (such as California’s). But it is fair to say that a lot of people with doctor’s recommendations in the looser states are recreational users in disguise. It therefore makes sense that legalizing medical marijuana would be accompanied by a decline in drinking, as Morris et al. suggest.
Whet Moser considers the historical irony of Sweden’s hugely successful music industry:
Sweden, and in particular Stockholm, is home to what business scholars and economic geographers call an “industry cluster” – an agglomeration of talent, business infrastructure, and competing firms all swirling around one industry, in one place. What Hollywood is to movies, what Nashville is to country music, and what Silicon Valley is to computing, Stockholm is to the production of pop. In fact, Sweden is the largest exporter of pop music, per capita, in the world, and the third largest exporter of pop overall. …
So how did Sweden, a sparsely populated Nordic country where it’s dark for much of the year, become a world capital of popular music? Rarely does such a complex question lead to such a satisfying answer: Three-quarters of a century ago, Swedish authorities tried to put a stop to the pernicious encroachment of international pop music, and instead they accidentally built a hothouse where it flourished.
Yes, you can thank WWII-era Lutheran ministers for Katy Perry’s latest:
In the 1940s, church leaders and cultural conservatives in Sweden rallied together around a solemn mission: to safeguard the country’s youth against the degenerate music — the “dance-floor misery” — that was being piped in from America. To combat this threat, the country built one of the most ambitious arts-education programs in the West. Municipal schools of music spread across the country, offering morally uplifting instruction in classical music. Many of the schools, which were often free to attend, allowed students to borrow instruments, as if from a public library, for a nominal fee. The aesthetically conservative intent of the municipal schools created an extremely democratic form of education. … An initiative that started out as an antidote to the licentious sounds of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the like, instead set loose a musical juggernaut that would help give the world such hits as Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” and Britney Spears’ “If You Seek Amy” (try saying it out loud: F, U, C…). As the super-producer Max Martin once said, “I have public music education to thank for everything.”
Reporting from Ukraine, Frum finds little evidence of them:
Since February 22, there have been six notable anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine: four involving the defacement or desecration of synagogues and cemeteries, and two involving outright violence. These incidents have alarmed Jewish communities worldwide. In Ukraine, however, they are regarded with unanimous skepticism, if not outright disbelief.
All my conversations on these subjects were off-the-record. The incidents are ongoing police matters, and older Ukrainians have developed a hard-learned caution about being identified in the media. However, I spoke to more than a dozen people who occupied a variety of leadership roles within the Ukrainian Jewish community. And not a single person took seriously the idea that these anti-Jewish incidents had been carried out by “neo-Nazis.”
Jamie Dettmer is more worried about Ukraine’s pervasive corruption problem:
Ukrainians had high hopes for the Orange Revolution a decade ago only to see them dashed as the politicians and their backers and allies in the business elite clawed back power and unleashed ten years of squalid political manipulation that culminated in the Yanukovych kleptocracy.
According to Ukrainian officials more than $20 billion of gold reserves may have been embezzled and $37 billion in loan money disappeared. In the past three years more than $70 billion was moved to offshore accounts from Ukraine’s financial system.
Many in the political class are still wedded to those old ways, judging by the bribes they have been offering investigators from a new anti-corruption agency set up by the interim government on the insistence of the Maidan revolutionaries.
Previous Dish on fascist fears in Ukraine here and here.
The skinny on yesterday’s major terrorism conviction:
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, former al-Qaeda spokesperson and Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, was found guilty of three counts: conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and providing support to terrorists. The jury returned its unanimous verdict fairly quickly, on the morning of the second day of deliberation. Mr Abu Ghaith was the most prominent member of al-Qaeda to be tried in a civilian court.
Adam Serwer feels vindicated. He notes that “Ghaith, who was captured in Turkey in February 2013, was charged, tried and convicted in about a third of the time it’s taken for the trial of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators to even get started”:
It’s been three years since charges were sworn against Mohammed and his co-defendants, Abu Gaith, an actual Al Qaeda preacher, was convicted in about a year, and somehow without creating “a whole new generation of terrorists.”
Although Republicans did criticize the decision to try Abu Gaith in civilian court – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Abu Gaith was “an enemy combatant and should be held in military custody” – the reaction to the trial in New York has been muted compared to the frenzied hysterics of 2010 and 2011. Media coverage of the trial has drawn scant attention. An accused terrorist received a fair trial, and somehow New York City managed to survive. There was no need to abandon the very Constitution public officials are sworn to protect.
Amy Davidson also contrasts this case with that of KSM and his co-conspirators:
Back in 2009, Holder announced that those 9/11 defendants would be tried in the same lower Manhattan courthouse where Abu Ghaith was convicted, but there were loud complaints from all sorts of parties, from Congressional Republicans to Mayor Bloomberg. (It is one of the small shames of my native city that some people objected because a trial would tie up traffic.) The Obama Administration backed down, opting to keep K.S.M. at Guantánamo and make use of a military commission there. That was five years ago; the stop-and-start pretrial hearings for his tribunal since have been so disjointed that, at times, they verge on the absurd. …
Abu Ghaith’s conviction may end “the political debate,” but when the military trial of K.S.M. finally begins – maybe next year – we’re still likely going to have to sit through a farce where the great Al Qaeda courtroom drama should have been. Abu Ghaith’s successful trial does prove something, but it’s something we ought to have already known: putting on a trial is not actually that hard when you have a justice system that is a couple hundred years old and rich in precedent, with hundreds of terrorism trials behind it.
Ben Casselman looks at how the labor force participation rate has changed over time:
The recession and weak recovery have led millions of jobless Americans to give up looking for work, meaning they no longer count as part of the labor force.
He calculates that 2 to 4 million of these workers could return:
A sufficiently strong economic recovery today could repeat the 1990s magic, drawing back all the missing workers, even the ones on disability. But there is also a more troubling possibility: If the recovery remains weak, people we now expect to return to the labor force will instead drift further away. More of them will go on disability, or retire, or otherwise drop out. The pool of 2 to 4 million workers who are still reachable by economic policy will eventually become unreachable, and the decline in the labor force will at last be permanent.
Ambinder believes the Secret Service needs an intervention:
The Secret Service has a drinking problem. It’s much worse than any other cultural deficit the elite agency has. It’s more widespread than sexism, certainly, and the other isms that have been attached to the agency since the prostitution scandal in Cartagena, Colombia. It’s something that every journalist who covers the White House kind of knows, intuitively, if they’ve ever traveled with the president. Pick your favorite White House correspondent and ask him or her whether agents on President George W. Bush’s detail created problems at the Wild West saloon in Waco. One former White House scribe told me that although reporters regularly witnessed agents drinking heavily before shifts, “we just assumed they could control themselves. After all, they were the ones who were the most responsible of all of us.”
For the most part, the agents are fine the next day. The job is stressful. But looking back at a string of incidents, many of them not well-publicized, over-consumption of alcohol is the common denominator. Sometimes, agents drinking alone make bad choices. But often, agents drinking with each other don’t have the foresight, or the ability, frankly, to tell their colleagues to stop drinking without losing face.
Margaret Carlson adds that the punishment for Colombia’s escapades obviously didn’t teach them a lesson:
Note that it wasn’t a supervisor or another agent who was worried that this behavior could compromise the agency. It was the locals — which gets to the real problem in the Secret Service. The job brings with it hours of boredom for men (it’s mostly men) ever-ready to take a bullet for the president (and a long list of lesser officials), followed by moments of danger, real and imagined. There are many nights and days away from home on an expense account, in exotic locales, some where prostitution is legal or easy to access. The temptation to turn advance trips into spring break is great.
Previous coverage of Secret Service shenanigans here.
US President Barack Obama meets Pope Francis at his private library in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City on March 27, 2014. By Vatican Pool/Getty Images.
In a new explainer series from Vox, Yglesias downplays the importance of the debt:
Allahpundit asks how this fits within Vox’s larger mission:
Of all the current affairs they could be usefully Voxplaining to the BuzzFeed generation right now — a primer on Crimean geopolitics or Venezuela post-Chavez, a quickie take on what the Fed’s “taper” could mean to the average paycheck, etc — it’s revealing that they put out a sort of Krugman-for-kindergarteners video like this. Also revealing is how self-contained it is: There’s no hint of counterarguments, like, say, what growing interest payments on ballooning debt will do to a federal budget that’s already slowly being cannibalized by Medicare, nor is there even a hint that the issue might be more complex than this. That’s smart rhetorically, especially given the time constraints, but … complicates, shall we say, the site’s pretensions to explanation. What sort of “explanatory journalism” launches by encouraging its readers not to spend too much time thinking about a particular subject, especially one this politically salient?
Virtually everyone who follows these issues knows that the U.S. national debt is over $17 trillion. The U.S. Treasury issues daily statements on the national debt here. The latest report is that for March 25, 2014 (.pdf). It lists the closing balance for “Total Public Debt Outstanding” at $17,555,984,000,000, which is over $17.5 trillion dollars. Of that amount, $4,976,757,000,000 (almost $5 trillion) consists of “intragovernmental holdings,” and $12,579,227,000,000 (over $12.5 trillion) is “debt held by the public.” That latter number is what Yglesias is citing, as you can tell from the chart that accompanies his narration, which has a bar on a chart labeled: “Debt held by the public.”
But the debt held by the public is not the U.S. national debt.
Yglesias is pretty clear that he’s excluding debt owed from one arm of the government to another, and only including federal debt held by the public. That is completely rational. After all, money the government owes to itself is simply money moved from one side of the government balance sheet to the other. There’s nothing dishonest or disingenuous about citing the lower figure that only includes debt held by the public, especially given that Yglesias was clear about this.
Patterico makes the point that the only people who’d recognize the difference between public and national debt are people already familiar with the subject, and thus wouldn’t need the video’s basic explanation. Anyone in need of the kind of explanatory journalism Vox is looking to provide would simply assume the two are the same, since the video seems to use them interchangeably.
Which brings up a good question: just how effective (and ideological) is Vox’s explanatory journalism going to be? In an email to Patterico, Klein wrote, “If we did have an article we’d probably spend some time explaining the difference.”
Whether or not you think the video was misleading, the fact that Klein admits an explanation deficiency on an explanatory video doesn’t look great.
The Dish 