May 03

Today’s News 3rd May 2017

  • Will The Second Civil War Turn Violent?

    Authored by Dennis Prager via TruthRevolt.org,

    "If college presidents, mayors and police chiefs won’t stop left-wing mobs, other Americans will."

    In a recent column, I made the case that Americans are fighting the Second Civil War. The deep chasm that has opened up between the left – not liberals, the left – and the rest of the country is so wide and so unbridgeable that there is no other way to describe what is happening. But I noted that at least thus far, unlike the First Civil War, this war is not violent.

    Unfortunately, there is now reason to believe that violence is coming. In fact, it’s already here. But as of now, it’s only coming from one direction.

    Left-wing thugs engage in violence and threats of violence with utter impunity. They shut down speakers at colleges; block highways, bridges and airport terminals; take over college buildings and offices; occupy state capitals; and terrorize individuals at their homes.

    In order to understand why more violence may be coming, it is essential to understand that left-wing mobs are almost never stopped, arrested or punished. Colleges do nothing to stop them, and civil authorities do nothing to stop them on campuses or anywhere else. Police are reduced to spectators as they watch left-wing gangs loot stores, smash business and car windows, and even take over state capitals (as in Madison, Wisconsin).

    It’s beginning to dawn on many Americans that mayors, police chiefs and college presidents have no interest in stopping this violence. Left-wing officials sympathize with the lawbreakers, and the police, who rarely sympathize with thugs of any ideology, are ordered to do nothing by emasculated police chiefs.

    Consequently, given the abdication by all these authorities of their role to protect the public, some members of the public will inevitably decide that they will protect themselves and others.

    This ability of the left to get away with violence is one of the gravest threats to American society in its modern history. Since the Civil War, I can think of only two comparable eruptions of mob violence that authorities allowed. One was when white mobs lynched blacks. The other was the rioting by blacks, such as the Los Angeles riots 25 years ago, and the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland.

    Today, authorities in what we once proudly proclaimed the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” are intimidated to the point of paralysis.

    And exactly what do they fear? Not violence — they have made peace with left-wing violence. What they fear is the left-wing media. If the Black Lives Matter movement is forcefully prevented from blocking tens of thousands of cars from entering or leaving San Francisco, the police and local authorities will be labeled racist by black leaders, a smear that will then be echoed by The New York Times and rest of the left-wing media.

    Likewise, if a college president requests enough police to come to a college campus so that a Heather Mac Donald, a Charles Murray or an Ann Coulter can deliver a lecture, some of the student-gangsters engaged in violence might be injured — and that college president will then be pilloried by the mainstream media.

    Furthermore, left-wing violence doesn’t only succeed where it takes place. It succeeds where nothing happens. The left can now shut down places and events just by threatening violence. This is what happened last week in Portland, Oregon. One leftist called in a threat to the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, saying that the Republican Party contingent marching in the parade would be beaten up. The business leaders organizing the parade canceled the whole event for the first time in its 10-year history. If they’d had any reason to believe that the police would have adequately protected the marchers in left-wing Portland, one assumes (hopes?) that they would not have canceled the parade.

    An email sent to parade organizers perfectly summed up the left’s dominance of America through violence. It said, “You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

    Meanwhile, the press lies about alleged white supremacists in President Trump’s administration and an alleged massive surge in anti-Semitism in order to do what the left has done since Lenin: blame others while it alone organizes violence.

    So, here’s a prediction: If college presidents, mayors and police chiefs won’t stop left-wing mobs, other Americans will. I hope this doesn’t happen, because electing conservative Republicans and not donating money to colleges will be more effective. But it is almost inevitable.

    Then the left-wing media — the mainstream media — will enter hysteria mode with reports that “right-wing fascists” are violently attacking America.

    And that’s when mayors and college presidents will finally order in the police.

  • President Trump Responds To Hillary Clinton's Blame-mongering

    Following Hillary Clinton's earlier proclamation that she "was on the way to winning before Jim Comey's letter and 'Russian' Wikileaks… scared off late voters," it appears President Trump has his own perspective on how he won the greatest upset election in US history…

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    "FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony… …Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?"

    We leave it to Hillary to conclude this brief blamescaping with an admission she made later in today's interview…

    "I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate. I was the person on the ballot."

    Indeed you were.

  • Why There Will Never Be A Political Solution To America's Problems

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    Why do things never seem to change no matter who we send to Washington? 

    It seems like for decades many of us have been trying to change the direction of this country by engaging in the political process.  But no matter how hard we try, the downward spiral of our nation just continues to accelerate.  Just look at this latest spending deal.  Even though the American people gave the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, this deal very closely resembles “an Obama administration-era budget”.  It increases spending even though we have already been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt, it specifically forbids the building of a border wall, it fully funds Planned Parenthood, and there are dozens of other concessions to the Democrats in it.  As I previously warned, these “negotiations” were a political rout of epic proportions.

    Perhaps many of us were being highly unrealistic when we expected that Donald Trump could change things.  Because fixing America is going to take a lot more than getting the right number of “red” or “blue” politicians to Washington.  Rather, the truth is that the real problem lies in our hearts, and the corrupt politicians that currently represent us are simply a reflection of who we have become as a nation.

    The generations of people that founded this nation and established it as the greatest republic that the world had ever seen had far different values than most Americans do today.

    So until there is a dramatic shift in how most of us see the world, it is quite likely that not much in Washington will change.

    Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump spoke boldly about “draining the swamp”, but this spending deal very much reflects the swamp’s priorities.  The Washington Post has published a list of eight ways that “Trump got rolled in his first budget negotiation”, and in this case the Post is quite correct…

    1. There are explicit restrictions to block the border wall.

     

    2. Non-defense domestic spending will go up, despite the Trump team’s insistence he wouldn’t let that happen.

     

    3. Barack Obama’s cancer moonshot is generously funded.

     

    4. Trump fought to cut the Environmental Protection Agency by a third. The final deal trims its budget by just 1 percent, with no staff cuts.

     

    5. He didn’t defund Planned Parenthood.

     

    6. The president got less than half as much for the military as he said was necessary.

     

    7. Democrats say they forced Republicans to withdraw more than 160 riders.

     

    8. To keep negotiations moving, the White House already agreed last week to continue paying Obamacare subsidies.

    In essence, the Democrats got virtually everything that they wanted, and the Republicans got next to nothing.

    Trump and the Republicans are promising that they will fight harder “next time”, but we have already heard that empty promise from Republicans year after year going all the way back to 2011.

    Among many other conservative pundits, author Daniel Horowitz is absolutely blasting these “weak-kneed Republicans”…

    Now, with control of all three branches and a president who sold himself in the primaries as the antithesis of weak-kneed Republicans who don’t know the first thing about tough negotiations, we are in the exact same position. Last night, President Trump signaled that, after not even fighting on refugee resettlement and Planned Parenthood, he would cave on the final budget issue – the funding of the border fence. But fear not, he’ll resume his demand … the next time!

     

    This degree of capitulation, with control of all three branches, is impressing even me … and I had low expectations of this president and this party. They have managed to get run over by a parked car. It’s truly breathtaking to contrast the performance of Democrats in the spring of 2009 with what Republicans have done today with all three branches. At this time in 2009, Democrats passed the bailouts, the stimulus, the first round of financial regulations, an equal pay bill, SCHIP expansion, and laid the groundwork for other, bigger proposals, such as cap and trade and Obamacare. Then they got everything they wanted in the March 2009 omnibus bill, and a number of GOP senators voted for it. We, on the other hand, are left with nothing.

    And even the mainstream media is admitting that the Democrats made out like bandits in this deal.

    Just check out the following quotes…

    • “Overall, the compromise resembles more of an Obama administration-era budget than a Trump one,” Bloomberg reports.
    • The Associated Press calls it “a lowest-common-denominator measure that won’t look too much different than the deal that could have been struck on Obama’s watch last year.”
    • Reuters: “While Republicans control the House, Senate and White House, Democrats scored … significant victories in the deal.”
    • The Los Angeles Times describes the agreement as “something of an embarrassment to the White House”: “Trump engineered the fiscal standoff shortly after he was elected, insisting late last year that Congress should fund the government for only a few months so he could put his stamp on federal spending as the new president.”

    If Trump can’t get his priorities funded now, do you think that the Democrats will somehow become more agreeable after he has spent a year or two in the White House?

    Of course not.

    If there ever was going to be a border wall, it was going to happen now.

    If Planned Parenthood was ever going to be defunded, it was going to happen now.

    The next “big battle” is going to be over a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, but the truth is that “Trumpcare” is going to end up looking very much like Obamacare.

    Instead of repealing it, the Republicans are trying to “fix” Obamacare, and that is kind of like going to the dump and trying to “fix” a big, steaming pile of garbage.

    But like I explained earlier, we should not expect things to move in a positive direction in Washington D.C. until the values of those representing us change.

    At this point, there are only a few dozen members of the House and a handful of members of the Senate that even give lip service to the values of our founders.

    And until our values change, we are not going to send representatives to Washington that share the values of our founders.

    Sadly, most Americans know very little about the history of early America.  I would encourage everyone to look into why our founders came to this country in the first place, what they believed was most important in life, and how they viewed the world.

    If we ever want to “make America great again”, we need to return to those values.  Otherwise, we are just blowing a lot of hot air.

  • China Issues Unprecedented Warning To Citizens In North Korea: Return Home

    In an unprecedented move, the Chinese Embassy in North Korea has advised Korean-Chinese residents to return home amid concern that the North's military provocations may trigger a U.S. attack on the North.

    The Korea Times reports that the embassy began sending the message on Apr. 20, five days before the North celebrated the 85th anniversary of the Korean People's Army with a show of military power, according to Radio Free Asia (a U.S.-based station specializes in North Korea).

    The station cited a Korean-Chinese living in the North's capital, who said he left for China late last month after the embassy contacted him. He said he has been visiting China every two to three months but, after being told he should "stay in China for a while," left North Korea a month early.

    "The embassy has never given such a warning. I was worried and left the country in a hurry," said the man, whose name was withheld.

    But he said that most Korean-Chinese residents in Pyongyang were ignoring the message.

    The city's "peaceful" atmosphere, despite the global crisis due to the state's threats involving missiles and nuclear tests, might have kept them unaware of the situation, he added.

    The embassy's warning indicates that China is worried that the saber-rattling North and U.S. moves to destabilize the Kim Jong-un regime might affect Chinese citizens abroad.

  • "It's A Public Health Crisis" – Is Pittsburgh The Next Flint?

    We have noted that Flint, Michigan is not alone with its 'poisonous water' problems, it appears Pittsburgh is near a tipping point as WSJ reports, according to EPA data, a total of seven U.S. water systems, which each serve more than 100,000 people, had lead concentrations above the federal action level of 15 parts per billion in recent months. "It's a public health crisis," warns one city official.

    A Reuters investigation late last year uncovered nearly 3,000 different communities across the U.S. with lead levels higher than those found in Flint, Michigan, which has been the center of an ongoing water contamination crisis since 2014.

    click image for link to interactive map…

    Last week, Michigan’s legislature voted to send $100 million in federal funds to Flint for lead-pipe replacements and other infrastructure upgrades. The funds were approved by the Obama administration in December.

    And now, as The Wall Street Journal reports, Pittsburgh, which exceeded the lead limit last July for the first time, is drawing renewed attention to the problems besetting crumbling and heavily indebted water systems nationwide. Pittsburgh’s troubled water authority has nearly $1 billion in debt and has been plagued with allegations of overbilling and water-main breaks. It began testing for lead in the late 1990s.

    The Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority serves about two-thirds of the city, or about 250,000 people. It treats water from the Allegheny River and distributes it through 1,000 miles of pipes to 81,000 homes.

    The authority estimates that a quarter of those homes have lead pipes.

    The lead levels in Pittsburgh’s drinking water, based on sampling from a limited number of homes, reached 22 parts per billion last July and fell to 18 ppb in December. The next test results will be released in June. Exceeding the 15 ppb federal action level triggers increased regulatory oversight, and cities are typically required to begin replacing lead pipes and launch a public awareness campaign about the hazards of lead in water.

    “It’s a public health crisis,” said Ms. Wagner, a Democrat who has criticized the mayor for not responding quickly enough when higher lead levels were found last year.

    Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who helped uncover lead contamination in Flint, said Pittsburgh’s lead woes are representative of issues facing many older cities. “No one in Pittsburgh with a lead pipe should be drinking the water without a filter,” he said.

    He criticized Pittsburgh officials for replacing only the public portion of lead service lines. In the short term, the disruption typically causes more lead to be released from the remaining lead pipe, he said.

    “We have old pipes, and some of those pipes are lead,” said Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat. “What took many decades to happen with the system itself will take at least a decade to solve.”

  • What Nassim Taleb Can Teach Us

    Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not suffer fools gladly. Author of several books including The Black Swan and Antifragile, Taleb is known for his incendiary personality almost as much as his brilliant work in probability theory. Readers of his very active Medium page will experience a formidable mind with no patience for trendy groupthink, a mind that takes special pleasure in lambasting elites with no “skin in the game.”

    “Skin in the game” is a central (and welcome) tenet of Taleb’s worldview: that we are increasingly ruled by an intellectual, political, economic, and cultural elite that does not bear the consequences of the decisions it makes on our (unwitting) behalf. In this sense Taleb is thoroughly populist, and in fact he correctly identified trends behind the Crash of ’08, Brexit, and Trump’s election. He understands that globalism is not liberalism, that identity and culture matter, and most of all that elites don’t understand how randomness and uncertainty threaten the inevitability of a global order. 

    Thus Taleb argues the intelligentsia are not only haughty when they plan our future, they are also clueless: fragility abounds, and threatens to crash the Party of Davos. Hubris results from unearned wealth and prominence, coupled with a blindness to the Black Swans lying in wait.   

    Born in Lebanon to a prominent family, educated at the University of Paris and Wharton, Taleb was poised to become part of the cognitive aristocracy he mocks. But he was never one of them. His hard-nosed persona, enhanced by a dedication to rigorous deadlift workouts, is quickly evident in his notorious interviews and very public Twitter brawls. His willingness to delve into history and and religion sets him apart from the neoliberals who hope to wish them both away. Taleb writes for the intelligent everyman, and this blue-collar approach also extends to his description of himself as a “private intellectual, not a public one.”

    Austro-libertarians will find much to admire in his brilliant takedowns of the “pseudo-experts” he identifies in academia, journalism, politics, and science. But Taleb is no Austrian. While he holds a decidedly jaundiced view of most economists—calling for the Nobel in economics to be cancelled— he does not denounce economics as a field of study per se. Nor does he claim heterodox or reactionary inclinations:

    “I am as orthodox neoclassical economist as they make them, not a fringe heterodox or something. I just do not like unreliable models that use some math like regression and miss a layer of stochasticity, and get wrong results, and I hate sloppy mechanistic reliance on bad statistical methods. I do not like models that fragilize. I do not like models that work on someone's computer but not in reality. This is standard economics.”

    While he is not averse to using mathematics and statistics in economics, Austrians share his perspective that both are tools for economists. Statistical models are mostly bunk that provide no value to economic forecasters or investors, despite the highly paid Ivy League quants who produce them. In fact, models often have harmful effect of creating a false sense of relative certainty where none exists. It's refreshing to see Taleb make this claim so effectively from outside the Austrian paradigm of praxeology. But if his view of economics is mainline, his tone is Rothbard meets Hayek:

    I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.

     

    We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

    Taleb does see a role for government, and supports consumer protection laws against predatory lending as one example. But he also purportedly supported Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election, and has indeed mentioned Hayek as an influence regarding the dispersal of knowledge in society. He’s also applied special venom to several worthy targets in professional economics, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Samuelson. Taleb labels as “Stiglitz Syndrome” the process whereby public intellectuals suffer no financial or career consequences for being spectacularly wrong in their predictions.

    This is especially galling to a man who correctly called (and in fact became wealthy as a result of) economic crises in 1987 and 2008. In both instances, Taleb had “skin in the game” as a market trader. His own money and reputation were on the line, unlike the court economists in the New York Times.

    For an excellent (albeit indirect) analysis of how Austrians and libertarians can advance their cause from a minority position, Taleb’s recent article The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority is a must-read. He reminds us that a small minority with courage—the most important form of skin in the game— can prevail over the slumbering masses. And he also reminds us that courageous individual actors, not 51% mass movements, drive real changes in every society:

    The entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people. So we close this chapter with a remark about the role of skin in the game in the condition of society. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

    Economics is lost, mired in a quicksand of predictive models that fail to predict and macro-analysis that fails to analyze.

    Democratic politics is lost, ruined by bad actors with perverse incentives to burn capital rather than accumulate it.

    And academia is lost, still stuck in a centuries-old model run by hopelessly sheltered PhDs.

    Taleb gets all of this, and does an admirable job of explaining it. Austro-libertarians would be wise to see him as a valuable ally and voice in the ongoing fight against states, central banks, and planners of all stripes.

  • Who Is Interested In A Conflict In North Korea?

    Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    In case of war with North Korea, the US would face a military challenge as perhaps never before in the last seventy years. This is why a conventional deterrence is actually more important than the nuclear one if we break down a realistic war scenario. The downside is that the DPRK is fully aware that if it responded to a US attack, even in a limited way and only on military targets, it would be flagged as an aggressor, paving the way for a larger foreign intervention.

    To answer this question, it is necessary to examine what would entail a US attack on North Korea. Suffice it to say that as the neocon Senator John McCain has admitted, the US would be unable to defend Seoul (as well as its US bases nearby) in the first 24 to 48 hours of a conflict. A city of 20 million inhabitants, together with military bases containing thousands of soldiers, would suffer untold loss of life.

    The United States would certainly suffer huge losses, revealing weaknesses that could be exploited in future conflicts, a consideration that would need to be considered if contemplating shooting down DPRK missiles.

    China would certainly not be happy to risk a humanitarian catastrophe on its own border, not to mention being eventually forced to intervene to defend its ally (there is a treaty between the two countries). Japan and South Korea would be hit hard, being clearly exposed to a North Korean retaliatory attack; so they clearly do not want a war with Pyongyang. The great truth about the Korean Peninsula is that despite the fact that every country flexes its muscles and seems ready to act, no one wants this eventuality, as no one could win this war, and everyone would suffer devastating effects both economically and militarily. This is not to mention the popular uproar that would arise from so many civilian deaths, let alone were there to be a nuclear escalation.

    In the Korean peninsula, we are faced with a great strategic game in which the DPRK becomes more difficult to attack with each passing day, thanks to its conventional forces rather than its nuclear power. This is something that western planners tend to ignore in order to avoid accentuating the power of the DPRK. Unfortunately for them, this is something that is far too well known to US soldiers, and especially South Koreans, which is why a real attack on the DPRK is absolutely out of the question for Seoul.

    Finally, there is a worrying aspect to consider for the DPRK’s opponents, namely the alleged ways in which the DPRK preserves and launches its conventional forces. In the parade on April 15, a large availability of solid-fuel mobile platforms was displayed. This creates two great advantages: the first being the ability to launch a missile within a short space of time, thereby minimizing the risk of detection during such things as refueling operations; and the second, of course, being the ability to launch a missile and then quickly change position (shoot and scoot). With mobile launchers, it is impossible to track and hit all such systems in a preemptive attack. This is without factoring into the equation the North Korean submarines that are said to be able to launch medium- and short-range SLBMs with conventional or nuclear warheads.

    An indication of the confusion that prevails amongst military planners regarding North Korea can easily be seen with the story of USS Carl Vinson. Ships with significant attack capabilities, Trump said a few days ago, were sailing towards the DPRK with the intention of inducing Kim to talks through military intimidation. However, the reality was that the carrier group was actually thousands of miles away, continuing to navigate in the opposite direction. Even without this ridiculous situation, US military leverage hardly works with the DPRK for the reasons explained above.

    With this unprecedented gaffe, the United States is at least divided internally on what to do, sending a troublesome message to its allies, leaving them with the following set of questions: Is Trump really in control of the armed forces? Can his words be taken seriously? Is he consistent with his intentions? The first 100 days of the Trump presidency raise these questions, and in difficult scenarios such as the one that obtains in the Korean Peninsula, they take a heavy toll. At the end of the day, in Korea we are faced with a lot of smoke and mirrors, threats and promises. But realistically, no one wants an actual conflict.

    On the contrary, war rhetoric rewards virtually all the actors involved.

    Japan and South Korea aim for more American involvement in the region, but for very different reasons.

    The South Korean elite is in a crisis, Park Geun-hye daughter of the founder of the country having been fined for corruption and the likely new president seeming to have positions on the DPRK and the alliance with the US that are very different from that of his predecessors. The danger the US sees is that a substantial part of the South Korean elite prefers a shift from a strongly anti-DPRK and pro-US policy to a more balanced one, especially with China, South Korea's main partner. The best solution to prevent this change is to raise the level of tension with the DPRK (and, as a consequence, with China), aiming to solidify the US presence in the country (witness the urgent deployment of the THAAD system, which candidate Moon Jae-in seems to oppose).

    The Japanese case is even more explicit, with Abe's nationalist vision aiming for a constitutional revision that does away with the limits placed on Tokyo’s armed forces.

    The US war industry will of course benefit, ready to sell weapons of all kinds to Japan in to reassure its ally over the “North Korean threat”.

    China and Russia start from different assumptions in their relations with the DPRK, but both have enough problems on the world stage to become embroiled in an open crisis involving the DPRK. Obviously, Moscow and Beijing would like a reasonable diplomatic resolution, negotiated by several actors, with the backdrop of talks with the Iranian Islamic Republic over nuclear matters. The latter is a matter, as we have seen, that is difficult to reach between Washington and Pyongyang for lack of mutual trust. In the case of an extended negotiation with other regional and global actors, perhaps Beijing and Moscow could ensure the inviolability of the DPRK’s territory in exchange for disarmament that would lead to a lifting of the sanctions and embargo on Pyongyang.

    This is still a controversial consideration, as Russia and China should provide military aid to the DPRK without Pyongyang having nuclear deterrence. From another point of view, it is the conventional forces of the DPRK that provide real deterrence, so a multi-stakeholder peace proposal is to be considered the second most likely outcome of tensions in the region.

    What will happen next?

    In the first place, a likely outcome is immobility and inaction, coupled with strong statements filled with threats from both the US and its allies, as well as a defiant response from Pyongyang. Personally, I am convinced that Kim would like an acknowledgement of his country’s status as a nuclear power in exchange for a halt in his development of nuclear weapons, thereby standardizing relations with neighbors and with the United States as well as gaining greater independence from China.

    It should not be surprising that Pyongyang also has a more multi-polar vision in its foreign policy, but this relies more on Washington than Beijing. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine an immediate resolution of the situation given the commitment of Japan and South Korea to maintaining a hostile climate for the DPRK in the region, calling for American involvement. It is likely that the situation will not degenerate but instead return to normal as tensions in the region progressively subside, without seeing any particular concessions from either side.

  • Feds Send In Reinforcements After Baltimore Mayor Pleads For Help: "Murder Is Out Of Control"

    There have been 108 homicides so far this year in the city of Baltimore.  According to the Baltimore Sun, there were five murders in the city just last weekend alone.

    The only year that Baltimore has ever come close to recording so many murders in just the first 4 months of the year was in 1993 during the height of America’s gang wars that plagued inner cities all across the country.  In that year, some 24 years ago, 110 people were killed through the end of April. The city went on to record 353 homicides that year, the most in its history.  That said, Baltimore has about 110,000 fewer residents now than in 1993, making this year’s murder rate the highest ever, on a per capita basis.

    Meanwhile, if the level of violent crime in Baltimore continues at the same rate as the first four months, for the remainder of the year, the city will blow right through the previous all time record high 353 homicides from 1993.

    Baltimore

     

    Therefore, it should come as little surprise that just yesterday we noted that Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh had publicly requested federal help from the FBI to combat the surging homicide rates in her city.  Per CBS Baltimore:

    “I’m calling on all the assistance we can possibly get because I can’t imagine going into our summer months with our crime rate where it is today, what that’s going to look like by the end of the summer.”

     

    “Murder is out of control.”

     

    “We are looking for all the help that we can get.”

    Now, just one day after a plea for help from a concerned mayor, the ATF has announced plans to send in reinforcements to help fight Baltimore’s surging violent crime…

    On Tuesday, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives plans to begin using a gun-tracing van in Baltimore to try to quickly solve gun crimes.

     

    Daniel L. Board Jr., the ATF Baltimore Field Division special agent in charge, called the gun-tracing technology and the national database it connects to a “critical piece to solving and preventing gun violence in Baltimore.”

     

    Bond said the van will be “a tremendous asset to Baltimore by supporting a timely and comprehensive collection of firearm-related evidence at crime scenes, which in turn will help us reduce and prevent violent crime.”

     

    The network is used by law enforcement throughout the United States to generate leads in gun-related crimes. The van will be deployed in Baltimore starting this week and will be available throughout portions of the spring and summer, federal officials said.

    …reinforcements which were gratefully received by concerned city officials.

    “We’re grateful to the federal intervention in the city of Baltimore,” Pugh said. “We are looking for all the help we can get. Murder is out of control. There are too many guns on the streets.”

    City Councilman Brandon Scott, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said he welcomed the federal resources.

     

    “Every little bit helps,” Scott said. “It’s clear we have to do things differently. What we’re doing currently isn’t working. The strategy isn’t working.”

    Ironically, Martin O’Malley, the former Mayor of Baltimore and a Democratic candidate for President in the 2016 election, took to his blog to advocate for cops to take a harsh stand against violent crime with a “zero tolerance” policy. 

    Former mayor and governor Martin O’Malley wrote in a recent blog post that “sadly, my own hometown of Baltimore chose to forget a lot of hard-earned lessons learned about crime reduction.”

     

    O’Malley was known for a data-based policing policy that resulted in high arrest rates. While homicides and other crime declined, the “zero tolerance” policy was blamed in a Department of Justice report for harming the relationship between the police and the community.

    Of course, such advocacy from a democrat is surprising in light of the efforts taken by Obama’s DOJ to intentionally undermine the authority of cops by labeling excessive enforcement actions as inherently ‘racist’ (for example, see: “DOJ Finds Pattern Of “Racial Discrimination” And Unconstitutional Use Of Force By Chicago Police“). 

  • Former Facebook Exec: "They're Lying Through Their Teeth"

    Authored by Antonio Garcia-Martinez (former Facebook product manager), author of Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley, originally posted at The Guardian,

    For two years I was charged with turning Facebook data into money, by any legal means. If you browse the internet or buy items in physical stores, and then see ads related to those purchases on Facebook, blame me. I helped create the first versions of that, way back in 2012.

    The ethics of Facebook’s micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel “insecure”, “worthless”, “defeated” and “stressed”.

    Facebook claimed the report was misleading, assuring the public that the company does not “offer tools to target people based on their emotional state”. If the intention of Facebook’s public relations spin is to give the impression that such targeting is not even possible on their platform, I’m here to tell you I believe they’re lying through their teeth.

    Just as Mark Zuckerberg was being disingenuous (to put it mildly) when, in the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, he expressed doubt that Facebook could have flipped the presidential election.

    Facebook deploys a political advertising sales team, specialized by political party, and charged with convincing deep-pocketed politicians that they do have the kind of influence needed to alter the outcome of elections.

    I was at Facebook in 2012, during the previous presidential race.

    The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke.

    Converting Facebook data into money is harder than it sounds, mostly because the vast bulk of your user data is worthless. Turns out your blotto-drunk party pics and flirty co-worker messages have no commercial value whatsoever.

    But occasionally, if used very cleverly, with lots of machine-learning iteration and systematic trial-and-error, the canny marketer can find just the right admixture of age, geography, time of day, and music or film tastes that demarcate a demographic winner of an audience. The “clickthrough rate”, to use the advertiser’s parlance, doesn’t lie.

    Without seeing the leaked documents, which were reportedly based around a pitch Facebook made to a bank, it is impossible to know precisely what the platform was offering advertisers. There’s nothing in the trade I know of that targets ads at emotions. But Facebook has and does offer “psychometric”-type targeting, where the goal is to define a subset of the marketing audience that an advertiser thinks is particularly susceptible to their message.

    And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: “and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform”. Why else would they be making the pitch?

    The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let’s assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically.

    I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had “liked” rapper Jay Z. While that was a statistical fact – people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing.

    I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them.

    African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do respond disproportionately to ads for usurious “payday” loans.

    Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service.

    Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco’s Marina district?

    The hard reality is that Facebook will never try to limit such use of their data unless the public uproar reaches such a crescendo as to be un-mutable. Which is what happened with Trump and the “fake news” accusation: even the implacable Zuck had to give in and introduce some anti-fake news technology. But they’ll slip that trap as soon as they can. And why shouldn’t they? At least in the case of ads, the data and the clickthrough rates are on their side.

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