Tag Archives: brita

Is Steve Jobs Responsible For the Decline of Shoplifting in Denmark?

by alejandrohayden Posted on February 22, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a loyal reader who knows how to punch my buttons:

Fine. What fresh hell do we have today?

“In Denmark, we are observing a trend toward a much more law-abiding youth,” said Rannva Moller Thomsen, an analyst with the Danish Crime Prevention Council. A recent long-term study funded by the council found that the share of 14-to-15-year olds who confessed to shoplifting at least one time dropped from 46 percent in 1989 to 17 percent in 2016.

….There are numerous possible explanations….But the most surprising explanation may be the simplest one: the Internet. “When young people spend time together in public spaces or meet privately and unwatched, the likelihood of them committing crimes increases,” said Moller Thomsen. “Many young people spend significantly more time online today than they did a few years ago. Overall, they are less social — but also less criminal.”

….In Britain, where youth crime levels have also sharply fallen, government and privately owned initiatives have been praised for creating organized activities that keep kids away from both the streets and from their computers and smartphones.

Right. In Denmark juvenile crime is declining because teens are all hunched over their smartphones instead of hanging around corner shops. In Britain, juvenile crime is down because of innovative programs that pull kids away from their smartphones. So let’s take a look at crime in Denmark. I will give myself a maximum of five minutes to research this. Starting…now.

I’m back. That took longer than I expected. I’m sure there’s better data out there, but here’s what I found after six minutes of googling. The numbers are from Table 8 in Nordic Criminal Statistics 1950–2010:1

I’ve overlaid the shoplifting statistics, and as you can see they pretty much follow the overall crime stats for Denmark. There’s a divergence between 2006-10, when overall crime increased, but the rest of the time both crime and juvenile shoplifting move pretty much in sync. I doubt very much that smartphones are responsible for the decline in murder and rape and fraud and so forth, so I doubt it’s responsible for the decline in juvenile shoplifting either.2

Besides, give me a break. Shoplifting declined by nearly half between 1989-2005, when smartphone penetration was about zero. This whole theory is ridiculous. I really wish everyone would knock it off with the outré just-so stories every time they run across some kind of crime statistic. Seriously, folks, what are the odds that smartphones have put the kibosh on shoplifting?

1Just because I love you all so much, I went ahead and filled in the 2011-16 crime figures from Danmarks Statistik.

2I think everybody knows what I do think is responsible, so I won’t mention it.

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Is Steve Jobs Responsible For the Decline of Shoplifting in Denmark?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 February 2017

by HannahLombardo Posted on February 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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We have exciting news this week: Yale University has decided to rename one of its colleges after Hopper. It’s a well-deserved honor for her contributions to this blog, and she will be replacing the odious John Calhoun, who spent the second half of his life defending states rights and slavery in uncompromising terms.

You will note, by the way, that Yale plans to keep up a pretense in public that Hopper College is actually named after an admiral who earned degrees from Yale in the 30s and went on to do some kind of computer stuff. But we all know better, don’t we?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 17 February 2017

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Here’s the Real Reason Democrats Spent So Much Energy Trying to Defeat Betsy Devos

by ValeriaDriscoll Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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Why were Democrats so hellbent on stopping the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education? Jonathan Chait reviews the possibilities today and points out that the federal government has a fairly small impact on education. This is true:

So if the Department of Education doesn’t have that much klout, why worry so much about DeVos? Here is Chait’s conclusion:

Her candidacy struck an authentic note of fear in the Democratic grassroots….DeVos frightened middle-class Democrats because she seemed to pose a threat to their children and their schools (a threat she is unlikely to carry out). Meanwhile, Price will be trying to snatch health insurance away from millions of Americans too poor or sick to buy it, Puzder will be grinding labor rights into dust, Sessions will be attacking voting rights and protections from police abuse for minorities, and Pruitt will be turning the EPA into a vassal of oil and coal interests.

Meanwhile, over on the right, it’s an article of faith that Democrats are puppets of the teachers unions, and that’s why they spent a lot of political capital opposing DeVos rather than other, far more dangerous characters.

I think this is all wrong. On a policy level, opposition to DeVos mostly centered on her devotion to vouchers and charter schools. But if DeVos had been defeated, Trump would simply have sent up another pro-voucher-pro-charter nominee. Defeating DeVos wouldn’t have changed anything.

The real reason Democrats spent so much energy on DeVos is pretty simple: she badly fluffed her Senate testimony, and came out looking like an idiot. Because of this, there was a realistic chance of finding three Republicans to join in opposing her, and thus defeating her nomination. In the end, only two Republicans stepped up, but for a while it looked like Democrats had a real chance at claiming a scalp.

This hasn’t been true of any of the others. There were never any Republicans who might have voted against Sessions or Pruitt or Price, and it’s hard to get the masses psyched up for battle when there’s really no chance of winning. That’s why, relatively speaking, Democrats haven’t mounted as big a campaign against any of Trump’s other nominees.

Depending on how Nannygate and a few other things turn out, it’s possible that Andy Puzder might also look vulnerable when his hearings start. If so, I expect that we’ll see a full-court press similar to what we saw with DeVos. The key variable here is not badness—Trump’s nominees are all bad from a liberal perspective—nor demonstrating loyalty to teachers unions—that’s just gravy—but the realistic possibility of defeating one of Trump’s nominees. That’s where most people want to spend their energy.

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Here’s the Real Reason Democrats Spent So Much Energy Trying to Defeat Betsy Devos

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

by StewartOZX Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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For a brief moment, let’s turn our attention away from Donald Trump and focus on another country’s woes. The folks over at National Review are no fans of the EU and have generally been pretty happy about the passage of Brexit. Today, however, Andrew Stuttaford—relying on Brexit expert Christopher Booker—is pretty scathing about prime minister Theresa May’s handling of the whole thing. First, here’s Booker explaining what he’s learned over the past 25 years about exiting the EU:

As I came to appreciate just how enmeshed we were becoming with that system of government, was that extricating ourselves from it would be far more fiendishly complicated than most people realised…Also, as I listened and talked to politicians, was how astonishingly little they seemed really to know about how it worked. Having outsourced ever more of our lawmaking and policy to a higher power, it was as if our political class had switched off from ever really trying to understand it.

That sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Continuing:

On leaving the EU the UK becomes what the EU terms a “third country”, faced with all the labyrinth of technical barriers to trade behind which the EU has shut itself off from the outside world. Last week I read a series of expert papers explaining some of the mindbending regulatory hurdles we would then have to overcome in trying to maintain access to what is still by far our largest single overseas market.

Take, for instance, our chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, which currently account for a quarter of all our exports to the EU, which currently account for a quarter of all our £230 billion a year exports to the EU. By dropping out of the EU, these would lose all the “authorisations” which give them what Mrs May calls “frictionless” entry to its market, and the process of negotiating replacements for them would be so complex that it could take years.

And now Stuttaford:

Booker observes that these aspects of Britain’s divorce from the EU “could have been achieved infinitely more easily if Mrs May had not slammed the door on our continued membership of the EEA the European Economic Area, which would guarantee us much the same “frictionless” access we enjoy now”.

That would be the ‘Norway option’ that you may have read about a few times in this very Corner, an option rejected by May for reasons so unclear that I cannot keep thinking the (doubtless unfair) thought that she has very little idea of what it actually is.

And then, Booker frets, there is May’s “terrifying” threat “that, if she is not given what she wants, she will simply “walk away”.” He’s right to worry. May has said that “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain”, an elegant but false dichotomy: “No deal” for Britain would be a “bad deal”, a very bad deal indeed.

This has all the signs of becoming an unbelievable cockup. By a slim 52-48 vote, Britain has doomed itself to many, many tortuous years of negotiating dozens or hundreds of separate agreements with the EU. Switzerland has done the same, and it’s taken them the better part of 20 years.

If there were any real advantage to this, it might be worth it. But just to keep Polish immigrants out? This might be one of the dumbest things any country has ever voluntarily subjected itself to.

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Britain Will Spend the Next Decade Doing Nothing But Negotiating a Pointless Exit From the EU

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Donald Trump Backs Away From His Campaign Pledge to Resurrect Torture

by MichaelPn Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly said that torture works, and that should he enter the White House he would utilize techniques such as waterboarding and “much worse” against ISIS fighters. But at a short press conference with UK Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday, Trump said that though he still thinks torture “works,” he will allow newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis to “override” him on this point.

Trump was questioned about his views on torture and other controversial matters by a BBC reporter, who asked, “Mr. President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion. For many people in Britain, those sound like alarming beliefs. What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?”

In typical Trumpian fashion, the new president lashed out at the slightest bit of media criticism. “This was your choice of a question,” he said, clearly perturbed. “There goes that relationship,” he darkly joked.

Once he turned to the substance of the question, Trump said he would let Mattis make the decision about the sort of interrogation techniques used by the United States. Mattis has long been opposed to torture, fighting back against “enhanced interrogation” during George W. Bush’s presidency. He reaffirmed that view at his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month, and the Pentagon once again reiterated its opposition to techniques such as waterboarding earlier this week. During Friday’s press conference, Trump noted that he doesn’t concur with Mattis’ views on torture. “Mattis has stated publicly that he does not necessarily believe in torture,” Trump said, “or waterboarding, or however you want to define it—’enhanced interrogation’ I guess would be words that a lot of people like to use. I don’t necessarily agree, but I would tell you that he will override, because I am giving him that power. He’s an expert, he’s highly respected.” Trump added, “I happen to feel that it does work—I’ve been open about that for a long period of time. But I am going with our leaders. And we’re going to win, with or without, but I do disagree.”

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to resurrect interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. During a February debate in New Hampshire, Trump said, “I would bring back waterboarding. And I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” He regularly complained that Barack Obama had weakened the United States’ ability to fight abroad by banning the use of torture. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work—torture works,” he’s said.

Under the Geneva Conventions, torture is a war crime. Unlike the Bush administration—which at least cloaked its torture program under the Orwellian term of “enhanced interrogation” to duck international laws—Trump isn’t trying to obfuscate what he believes.

Even if the country isn’t about to revive its torture program, it is noteworthy that the president of the United States said, during his first press conference since taking office one week ago, that if he had his druthers he’d order the nation’s military forces to commit war crimes.

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Donald Trump Backs Away From His Campaign Pledge to Resurrect Torture

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Infant Mortality Rose 1.3% Last Year

by VeroniqCollier Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today the Centers for Disease Control announced that life expectancy at birth declined slightly between 2014 and 2015. I wonder how they calculate that? They’re basically predicting death rates around the year 2100, and it hardly seems likely they can do this. My understanding is that it’s based on age-specific death rates prevailing for the current year, but what makes anyone think those death rates will remain the same for the next 80 years?

That’s a question for another blog post, I suppose. One thing is for sure, however: we can certainly take a look at death rates right now. And this, in particular, is disturbing:

Infant mortality in the US is already far higher than it is in the rest of the developed world. It’s under 450 in France, Germany, and Britain, for example, and under 350 in Italy, Japan, and Norway. The only OECD countries with higher infant mortality rates have per-capita incomes less than half ours.

To make things worse, the rate of infant mortality among blacks is double what it is among whites and Hispanics. It’s a horror story—and apparently it’s getting worse. How is this possible?

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Infant Mortality Rose 1.3% Last Year

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What? Bill O’Reilly Is Urging Trump to Keep the Paris Climate Agreement

by OctavioAranda Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Conservative TV host Bill O’Reilly is urging Donald Trump to stick to the Paris climate agreement, the global pact to reduce emissions that the president-elect has railed against for months. “It doesn’t really amount to much anyway,” O’Reilly told his Fox News audience Wednesday evening. “Let it go.”

O’Reilly is no fan of climate action. He said in 2011 that “nobody can control the climate but God.” But on Wednesday, O’Reilly said staying in the Paris agreement would “buy some goodwill overseas” for the incoming president. At least one prominent politician—Nicolas Sarkozy, the former leader of France who is running again for the presidency—has proposed tariffs on US imports should Trump pull out of the deal, which was signed in December 2015 and came into force just before the election.

On Thursday, Britain announced it had ratified the deal, while hundreds of major companies co-signed a letter urging Trump to uphold America’s climate pledges. The 360 companies included Nike, General Mills, and Hewlett Packard.

Trump has said that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and has pledged to slash funding to United Nations climate programs. He put a prominent climate change denier, Myron Ebell, in charge of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

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What? Bill O’Reilly Is Urging Trump to Keep the Paris Climate Agreement

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Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

by Jim Bow Posted on July 15, 2016

snorlax attention

Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

By on Jul 15, 2016Share

Soon after Pokemon Go hit the App Store, reports started rolling in of the dumb lengths people have gone to in order to capture the little guys — like playing at the Holocaust Museum, Ground Zero, a funeral, or — more commonly — the middle of the street. Concerned about potential accidents caused by zombie-like trainers with their heads in their screens, the National Safety Council urged people to exercise caution playing the game. “No race to ‘capture’ a cartoon monster is worth a life,” wrote the Council. Clearly, they’ve never seen a Charizard.

Naturally, both players and haters alike took to Twitter to remind people to look up from their screens every once in awhile — and, for once, we recommend listening to them. And if you need a reminder, well, there’s an app for that, too.

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Playing Pokémon Go? The internet has some advice for you.

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Britain’s new leader just replaced the climate department with a business department

by ReynaldoWilding Posted on July 14, 2016

Come what May

Britain’s new leader just replaced the climate department with a business department

By on Jul 14, 2016Share

After the Brexit vote, climate hawks voiced concern that a new British government could be less aggressive in fighting climate change. Looks like they may have been right: New British Prime Minister Theresa May hasn’t even unpacked her bags at 10 Downing Street and she’s already got green groups very worried.

May announced Thursday that she would axe the Department for Energy and Climate Change and replace it with the newly formed Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Climate experts and politicians called the move “plain stupid,” “terrible,” and “beyond daft.”

“The decision to shut down DECC is a deeply worrying move from Theresa May,” said Green Party Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas. “Climate change is the biggest challenge we face, and it must not be an afterthought for the Government.”

Also troubling, May appointed Andrea Leadsom as the new environment secretary, a woman who has regularly opposed climate action. One of the first questions Leadsom asked officials when she became energy minister last year was, “Is climate change real?” Leadsom also supported selling off British forests in 2011, a thwarted proposal that proved to be deeply unpopular with British citizens.

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Britain’s new leader just replaced the climate department with a business department

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This Is The Best "Letter To The Editor" You’ll Read All Summer

by AkilahCollits8 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oh, Britain!

With their accents,

Harry Potters,

and balls (both “foot” and “net“).

Oh, Britain!

With their insane political choices,

badger culls,

and questionable condiments.

Oh, Britain!

Is from where

this funny thing comes.

Have a nice day.

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This Is The Best "Letter To The Editor" You’ll Read All Summer

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