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One more reason to take care of the animal kingdom – extinction fuels climate change:

Predators are bigger animals at the top of the food chain and their diets are comprised of all the smaller animals and plants in the ecosystem, either directly or indirectly. As a result, the number of predators in an ecosystem regulates the numbers of all the plants and animals lower in the food chain. It’s these smaller animals and plants that play a big role in sequestering or emitting carbon.

Julia Whitty illustrates the process:

[T]he researchers experimented on three-tier food chains in experimental ponds, streams, and bromeliads in Canada and Costa Rica by removing or adding predators. Specifically by adding or removing three-spined stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) and the invertebrate predators stoneflies (Hesperoperla pacifica) and damselflies (Mecistogaster modesta). When all the predators were removed the ecosystems emitted a whopping 93 percent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

In the wake of attempts by colleges to game the US News & World Report’s rankings [NYT], a new paper proposes a system that looks at the actual choices made by students. Eric Hoover has details:

[The] researchers propose a method of ranking colleges according to students’ “revealed preferences”—the institutions they choose to attend over others that have accepted them. Using survey data from a national sample of high-achieving students, the researchers determined the winners and losers of each applicant’s “matriculation tournament.” They then used those outcomes to rank about 100 selective colleges. (Harvard University topped the list, but you already knew that; the University of Notre Dame nearly cracked the top 10.)

This model enabled the researchers to approximate the odds that an applicant would choose one college over another. For instance, there was a 59-percent chance that a student considering only Harvard and the California Institute of Technology would choose Harvard. If the student were choosing between only Harvard and Wellesley College—10 spots below Harvard on the revealed-preferences list—there was a 93-percent chance that she would end up heading to Cambridge, Mass.

The Wilberforce instinct re-appears today in George Will’s superb and important column on prison reform. It’s worth reading in full. He brings some righteousness to the need to tackle prisoner abuse – primarily solitary confinement, and its essential nature as torture. He cites the words of the federal law defining torture (rare in the conservative media), words that plainly refute the Bush administration’s continued, ludicrous argument that they didn’t torture people – an argument still used by the Republican party with a straight face, when they don’t avoid the topic altogether.

But look at the zig-zag in the first paragraph:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Notice that “meanwhile,” which I italicized. Can you hear the tires screech? It seems to me that Will is saying that solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time is torture. And yet he also wants to imply that the full extent of the torture carried out by the Bush-Cheney administration was three waterboarded suspects. He implies we are missing the real scandal for a minor one.

But surely George Will knows that indefinite solitary confinement was routine for many, many prisoners in the war on Jihadist terror under Bush – and critically, deliberately combined with other torture techniques to intensify the impact on the human psyche. Here’s what Will rightly notes about solitary confinement:

Supermax prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals more impulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.

They do; and Will’s column is dead-on about our relative equanimity when it comes to this cruel, brutal androutine violation of American law. We cannot campaign against torture when it is committed in the war on Jihadist terrorism and ignore the torture our domestic prison system is perpetuating. We can’t worry about the treatment of foreign alleged enemy combatants if we do not worry about US citizens who are treated the same way.

So allow me to introduce Mr Will to another US citizen, Jose Padilla. What he went through gives a whole new meaning to the terms “solitary confinement”.

Padilla was arrested without any formal charges and put in solitary for three and a half years. He was not just isolated; he was subjected to “total sensory deprivation.” He never knew night from day; he couldn’t sleep because they blasted noise at him day in day out; he was even manacled, deafened and goggled when taken for dental treatment (see photos above) so the total isolation and destruction of his psyche wouldn’t be interrupted. He lived in a nightmare world of darkness, deafness and total isolation for three years. And he was a US citizen, detained and tortured in a navy brig.

Here is what one of his psychiatric evaluators said when it became a serious question whether the torture had rendered him mentally incapable for the trial that eventually took place:

Number one, his family, more than anything, and his friends, who had a chance to see him by the time I spoke with them, said he was changed. There was something wrong. There was something very “weird” — was the word one of his siblings used — something weird about him. There was something not right. He was a different man. And the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us. He was like — perhaps like a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would, as I said earlier, he would subsequently pay a price if he revealed what happened.

Here is how he appeared to one lawyer after the torture:

“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body. The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”

This sounds to me an extreme example of a fact that Will is rightly bringing to light: “prisoners often lose their minds.” But this kind of torture was done to almost everyone at Gitmo and far worse at countless black sites. Here is another specific case, that of al Qahtani, as recorded by the FBI:

“[He] was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).”

I am writing this not to hammer Will for being unwilling to confront these war crimes when they were discovered. I am writing to say that his review of Zero Dark Thirty and this latest column make him the most prominent establishment conservative journalist to, as he put it, “look facts, including choices, in the face.” He wrote this of the ghastly phrase “enhanced interrogations” or what the Gestapo called Verchaerfte Vernehmung:

“In the end, everybody breaks, bro — it’s biology,” says the CIA man in the movie, tactically but inaccurately, to the detainee undergoing “enhanced interrogation.” This too familiar term has lost its capacity for making us uneasy.

America’s Vietnam failure was foretold when U.S. officials began calling air attacks on North Vietnam “protective reaction strikes,” a semantic obfuscation that revealed moral queasiness. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, who warned about governments resorting to “long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

We may be seeing a crack in the conservative edifice of lies and newspeak that was constructed to protect Republican officials from legal responsibility for what were clearly war crimes in a country that since 2002 has been in violation of the Geneva Conventions it helped create. I sure hope so. And if conservatism can turn its endorsement of torture into a movement for prison reform, it might go some way to repair the damage.

But first: honesty about what was done. George Will is slowly, gingerly moving toward it. Will others follow?

(Photo: An Iraqi prisoner peers from his solitary confinement cell in the criminal section of the prison October 28, 2005 on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq. The solid structure of the Abu Ghraib prison complex, infamous for photos of prisoner abuse in 2003, is now in the hands of Iraqi authorities, who house about 1,000 criminal prisoners at the site. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has about 4,600 suspected insurgents housed in tents on the same compound. By John Moore/Getty Images.)

Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy respond to critics of their op-ed. One of their proposals:

There is an obvious alternative to community rating as practiced by Switzerland and Obamacare: require insurers to charge the same rates to those within a specific birth year, regardless of gender or prior health status. The vast majority of the variation in health risk is accounted for by age; eliminating age-based community rating would do much to counteract the incentives for adverse selection that are contained in the Obamacare exchanges. Remember that Obamacare’s individual mandate, the thing that is supposed to force young people to buy overly costly insurance, is quite weak.

In our approach, all 24-year-olds might pay the same rate for actuarially equivalent insurance. But that rate would be much lower than the rate that all 41-year-olds would pay, or that all 62-year-olds would pay. That’s a fairer, less expensive, and more economically sound system than what both Obamacare and Switzerland impose.

Robert Cottrell, editor of The Browser, touches upon something we have been thinking a lot about since the Dish recently integrated all 12 years of posts under one roof:

Why do even big publishing groups with the resources to do so (the New Yorker is an honourable exception) make so little attempt to organise, prioritise and monetise their archives? The best explanation I can suggest comes from an analogy given to me by George Brock, a former managing editor of The Times, who is now professor of journalism at City University in London. Think of a newspaper or magazine as a mountain of data, he says, to which a thin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week. Everybody sees the new soil. But what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten.

Even the people who own the mountain don’t know what’s in the lower layers. They might try to find out but that demands a whole new set of tools. And, besides, they are too busy adding the new layer of topsoil each day. I suspect that the wisest new hire for any long-established newspaper or magazine would be a smart, disruptive archive editor. Why just sit on a mountain of classic content, when you could be digging into it and finding buried treasure?

Douthat sighs:

Until the ideas themselves change, our politics is going to be stuck with the dynamic that Matt Yglesias describes all-too-accurately here, in the context of the minimum wage debate — with Democrats proposing questionable policies that nonetheless address real challenges, Republicans declining to counter with serious policies of their own, and Democrats eventually winning the policy debate more or less by default (or else winning politically because the problems keep festering and the G.O.P. just looks out of touch). I don’t think that dynamic can last forever, for reasons I’ve elaborated on before, and I’m hopeful that the 2016 election will be healthier for the right than 2012 turned out to be. But right now, the pattern of the last two political cycles still holds: Real Republican reinvention is a cause in search of a standard bearer, and the right’s reformers are doing a far, far better job proposing solutions to the G.O.P.’s dilemmas (and the country’s problems) than they are persuading actual Republican politicians to embrace them.

Perfectly put. Barro is on the same page:

Unlike many on the right, Gerson, Wehner and Ponnuru have correctly diagnosed the economic challenges that Republicans aren’t addressing. (Gerson and Wehner identify “stagnant wages, the loss of blue-collar jobs, exploding health-care and college costs.”) And they have even advanced some ideas that would improve matters. But the key word there is “some”: All three writers leave unaddressed major Republican stumbling blocks with the middle class. Particularly, they are far from developing health-care and fiscal policies that can serve middle-class interests.

Yeah, the beard looks very scraggly in the video we posted last night. But better than it does now: I just got it butchered by yet another bad New York City barber.

Yes, another of my waxing and waning complaints about NYC is the absence of decent, professional barbershops. Well, I don’t mean an actual absence. They’re everywhere, it seems, and yet almost all of the ones I’ve tried are dreadful.

My starter was a Yelp-recommended, first come, first served joint. I put my name down and was told to come back in 30 minutes. Ok. Back 25 minutes later, I was told it could be done in ten minutes. A further half hour of Angry birds later, I asked when I could get my beard trimmed. 20 minutes. Half an hour later, when they started hedging again when I asked, I left. New York City: wait for almost two hours not to get a haircut.

The next one I tried, I asked if they had wifi so I could blog while I waited. They did, so I asked for the password. Instead of simply telling me, the owner asked me to hand him my iPad (to write it in himself), which he then dropped, causing the screen to shatter on the floor.

Instead of apologizing, he first asked – I’m not making this up – if the iPad looked like that before he dropped it. He then insisted I have it repaired by some dude he knew. I said I’d have it repaired at the Apple Store. He harrumphed. I had a thought they might waive the fee for the beard trim. This is New York City: no fucking way.

Then I tried a third barber – recommended by a friend. The dude turned the beard into a lopsided brick. Aaron had to fix it later, and even now my head looks lop-sided. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but it amazes me that New Yorkers have such an attitude about good service when they are not in the city. Where do their expectations come from? This city has the worst service I’ve ever experienced. Yes, it remains impossible to use Time Warner wifi to listen to music on our sound system without it breaking up every few seconds. Yes, AT&T is still a nightmare. No, it doesn’t really get much better, you just get used to living in one of the least competent, self-loving cities I’ve ever known. Maybe over the years, you slowly develop your known competent individuals. From pharmacists bound by Bloomberg’s nannying to a super-intendent who cannot show up to fix a broken doorlock to even UPS (one of my meds was just “found” on the sidewalk outside my apartment by a neighbor), you just find it harder to live here, even as you’re fleeced everywhere you move. The sidewalks almost suck the money from your pockets and give back attitude in return.

And you wonder why I have no worries about Pret-A-Manger. Fawning would be lovely. But actual, simple competence in this city? A miracle.

http://vimeo.com/11330377

Pushing back against the idea that rappers frequently “glorify criminality”, Lisa Wade highlights a recent study that analyzed the lyrics of popular hip-hop songs:

[Criminologists Kevin] Steinmetz and [Howard] Henderson concluded that the main law enforcement-related themes in hip-hop are not pleasure and pride in aggressive and criminal acts, but the unfairness of the criminal justice system and the powerlessness felt by those targeted by it. Lyrics about law enforcement, for example, frequently portrayed cops as predators exercising an illegitimate power. Imprisonment, likewise, was blamed for weakening familial and community relationships and described a modern method of oppression.

The study’s authors concluded that “the overwhelming message in hip-hop wasn’t that the rappers disliked the idea of justice, but they disliked the way it was being implemented.” More insights from the authors via Meredith Mohr:

“[T]he music is maturing, evolving,” Henderson said. “Take Jay-Z for example. If you look at his lyrical content from 1990-2012, you see the evolution from talking about drug selling at the beginning of his career to now talking about meeting with the president, helping with the campaign. It’s a very different conversation. We never saw an artist go backwards. You only saw them mature as they age, and experience and their music changes with them.”

Part of this, Henderson said, is because the audience has also changed with the artists. “Jay-Z’s listenership has aged with him,” Henderson said. “Part of it is that artists recognize that if they go back and talk about that very animalistic behavior, their listeners are going to say, ‘hey listen, this is not what I want to hear,’ and they’re going to go somewhere else.