Month: September 2014

The Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) has become a monster that does
more harm than good. But most people say, “What else we got?” They
assume greedy capitalists will run amok and destroy the Earth
unless stopped by regulation.

Yet, contrary to what environmentalists assume, it’s really
property rights that encourage good stewardship, John Stossel
argues. Property rights and a simple, honest court
system—institutions that can exist without big government—solve
problems that would be fought about for years by politicians,
environmental bureaucrats, and the corporations who lobby
them. 

View this article.

Since 1997, Mary Landrieu has served as a Democratic Senator
from Louisiana. That means she works in Washington, D.C., and
maintains a home in the nation’s capitol as well. That’s now a
potential liability. As a new ad targeting Landrieu unsubtly notes,
she seems to have made Capitol Hill her primary residence.

American Crossroads:
Landrieu for Washington from American Crossroads on Vimeo.

It’s a brutal little spot, and if you’re the sort of person who
believes that clever TV ads can swing a tight race, then this is an
ad that probably whispers “game-changer!” in your ear.

But what’s the argument here? As Paul Waldman
writes in The American Prospect, there’s something a
little bit strange about this attack, which implies that voters
should reject Landrieu because she lives where they have repeatedly
sent her to work. (She maintains joint ownership of a family home
in New Orleans as well.) 

Now, maybe there’s a case to be made that someone who has made a
life elsewhere for the better part of two decades is not in tune
with the interests of her potential constituents. But that’s not
really what the ad says. It just makes Landrieu out to be, well, a
pretty good neighbor on Capitol Hill.

Which is why the bigger problem, I think, is that there’s not a
lot of substance to the ad. That’s not to say there aren’t reasons
to disagree with Landrieu’s policy positions: She supports
reauthorization of the Ex-Im bank. She opposes efforts to end
energy subsidies.
She voted for Obamacare, despite its unpopularity in her state, and
offered minimalist, gimmicky “fixes” when it crashed last year. Now
she calls it
“a solid law that needs improvement.”

These are issues, and it’s possible to craft ads that
touch on some of them. Landrieu’s town home on Capitol Hill,
where she works, and her relationship to the neighborhood, seems
like less of one.

That said, I wouldn’t go as far as Waldman does in rejecting the
entire genre of populist anti-Washington attacks. There is
a problem with Washington. It’s just that the problem isn’t that
longtime legislators live there, or own homes near their offices,
or don’t own a sufficient amount of property in their
districts.

The problem is that Washington isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be,
the core of what makes America great or important or interesting.
It’s a city of administrators and bureaucrats and rulemakers. Some
are necessary. Many are not. But the making of the bureaucratic
particulars shouldn’t be confused with the country’s purpose.
Washington should be as central to American life as filing cabinets
and basement storage systems are to one’s home.

It’s not that the various mechanisms and organizational schemes
aren’t important—they are, and often require considerable time and
thought and effort to implement and maintain well—but ultimately
they should exist to free people up to do other things, rather than
live strictly in service of themselves.

But that’s a broader problem with a culture and sensibility more
than with any particular candidate, and it’s harder to run ads
against. 

A new study in the Journal of Experimental
Criminology finds in an experiment measuring the reactions of
participants to various threatening situations that people tended
to pull the trigger faster when confronted by armed white suspects.
This sounds counterintuitive to most people (including me). A 2001
Bureau of Justice Statistics report (latest
available) analyzed justifiable homicides and noted:

Felons justifiably killed by police represent a tiny fraction of
the total population. Of the 183 million whites in 1998, police
killed 225; of the 27 million blacks, police killed 127. While the
rate (per million population) at which blacks were killed by police
in 1998 was about 4 times that of whites, the difference used to be
much wider: the black rate in 1978 was 8 times the white rate.

The BJS study also found that black suspects were also as likely
to shoot at police as be shot at.

In the deadly force experiments participants (85 percent white)
face a life-sized HD video screen on which the stance, clothing,
hand motions, objects being held, and race of suspects can all be
modified. The subjects are hooked up to brain wave measuring
devices and can respond using a laser gun. The
press materials from Washington State University detailing the
results report:

Participants in an innovative Washington State University study
of deadly force were more likely to feel threatened in scenarios
involving black people. But when it came time to shoot,
participants were biased in favor of black suspects, taking longer
to pull the trigger against them than against armed white or
Hispanic suspects…

[WSU researcher Lois] James’ study is a follow-up to one in
which she found active police officers, military personnel and the
general public took longer to shoot black suspects than white or
Hispanic suspects. Participants were also more likely to shoot
unarmed white suspects than black or Hispanic ones and more likely
to fail to fire at armed black suspects.

“In other words,” wrote James and her co-authors, “there was
significant bias favoring blacks where decisions to shoot were
concerned.”

When confronted by an armed white person, participants took an
average of 1.37 seconds to fire back. Confronted by an armed black
person, they took 1.61 seconds to fire and were less likely to fire
in error. The 24-millisecond difference may seem small, but it’s
enough to be fatal in a shooting.

This hesitation occurred even though the electroencephalograph
generally identified brain wave patterns indicating significantly
greater threat responses against black suspects than white or
Hispanic suspects. So then why the difference?

James and her team speculate:

This behavioral ‘counter-bias’ might be rooted in people’s
concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a
member of a historically oppressed racial or ethnic group.

Sometimes a social science study turns up something
interesting.

“Black Americans Failed by Good Intentions: Q&A with Jason
Riley” is the latest video from Reason TV.

Watch above or click on the link below for downloadable video,
full transcript of interview, supporting links, and more Reason
TV.

View this article.

“These Clues Help Identify a Mentally Ill ‘Lone
Gunman’ Before Tragedy Strikes,” says the headline over a
Huffington Post essay
by Canadian psychologist Romeo Vitelli. Nine hundred words later,
Vitelli has arrived at the end of his post, and he still has not
revealed any of those clues. His bait and switch illustrates the

false promise that paying more attention to “warning signs” can
prevent mass shootings and other acts of violence by unhinged
malcontents.

“In one recent study comparing lone right-wing offenders
to right-wing offenders belonging to larger organizations,” Vitelli
writes, “the rate of mental illness was significantly higher among
the lone offenders.” I thought we were looking for factors that
distinguish people who commit acts of violence from people who
don’t, not factors that distinguish one kind of violent criminal
from another. Even assuming that “the rate of mental illness” is
higher among unafilliated terrorists than among the general
population (as seems likely), how useful is that
information?

“Among the diagnoses linked to potential violence are
schizophrenia and mood disorders (usually depression),” Vitelli
writes. But he concedes that “most people with these disorders
are not a violent risk.” Furthermore, “though some
lone offenders may have a previous history of minor offending, most
have no previous history of violence,” and they “act normally to
avoid suspicion until the offense happens.”

You’d think that last observation would be enough to
discourage Vitelli, but you’d be wrong. Although he cautions that
lone offenders “can vary widely in terms of what may have driven
them to violence,” he mentions divorced parents, “major life
change,” “acute stress,” a recent experience with “prejudice,” and
“recent financial problems” as other possible markers of homicidal
impulses. The problem with “clues” like these is that they identify
a very large population of suspects, almost none of whom will turn
out to be guilty.

The same is true of people who say weird or disturbing
things online. Yet Vitelli thinks the British government is onto
something with its Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, which aims to
protect members of the royal family and other public figures by
“monitoring social media for ‘manifestos’ being published or other
suggestions that some sort of violent incident is about to happen.”
Apparently if someone’s comments about Prince Charles are deemed
excessively vituperative, he can expect a visit from the
authorities. Not that posting a manifesto is necessarily a crime;
it may merely be a symptom of treatable mental illness.
“Along with identifying potential threats,” Vitelli
cheerily informs us, “FTAC also provides psychiatric services to
defuse the threat where possible.” 

Imagine how many such services could be provided if FTAC
were transplanted to the U.S. and expanded to protect not just
celebrities but the whole population. In case you are wondering how
those services feel to people on the receiving end, consider the
experience of Brandon Raub, a Virginia man who was locked in a
psychiatric institution and
forcibly evaluated because of political opinions he expressed
on Facebook. Judging from his
lawsuit, Raub did not appreciate those services.

Vitelli laments that “police and security agencies are
usually not able to act until an actual criminal offense occurs.”
He does not seem to consider the possibility that there are sound
civil lbertarian reasons for that inability. But
don’t worry: “research…can help these agencies make more informed
decisions about how to intervene before it is too late.” After all,
“whether or not they are able to act in time can often spell the
difference between life and death.”

If Vitelli had provided even a single example of a mass
murder prevented by the sort of intervention he has in mind, his
argument would be stronger. But it still would not account for all
the innocent people caught in the psychiatric dragnet he is
proposing.