Bill O'Reilly lies about statistics to whitewash cops - I know, it's SUCH a surprise!

Once again, troubles in America are perpetrated because counting is a skill few people seem to develop.  Please, America, learn to count!

Bill O'Reilly - who, admittedly, also thinks that NYPD Officer David Pantaleo shouldn't have choked to death Eric Garner - gave the statistics that 123 black people were shot by cops last year while 326 whites were shot by cops.

First, the caveat that there are no accurate statistics about police shootings in the US.  Police departments are not obligated to tell anyone when a cop kills someone.  So, let's bear that in mind.

Second, let's do the math.  About 50% of Americans are white.  About 12% of Americans are black.  The ratio, there, is about 4:1.  Even accepting O'Reilly's numbers as absolutely accurate and representative, he's saying that around 2/5ths of the people killed by cops are black.  Translation?  Black people are seventy percent more likely to be killed by cops than white ones.  If you can't figure that out, shame on you, because it allows assholes like O'Reilly to pretend that everything is hunky-dory and to convince other people that racism isn't a thing.

He's also just reprehensibly saying that, hey, cops killing 459 people is okay.  Dude, countries have gone to war over less provocation.  The Boston Massacre?  FOUR people were killed.  FOUR.  It was considered by those Founding Fathers O'Reilly claims to love as a clear sign of tyranny.  So when you're at the place when it's necessary to talk about proportions and percentages to get a better handle on how many people are killed, you're waaaaaaaaaay past that into the territory of "just stop it, already" and maybe into the territory of "maybe a revolution isn't that bad an idea".

Also, other countries don't feel the urge to shoot their citizens so often.  Places like Great Britain can go whole years without cops killing anyone.  This is particularly interesting because Britain - with the exception of murder, where we outstrip all industrialized nations, often by an order of magnitude - has very similar crime rates to the US.  Yet, English bobbies don't feel the need to kill over a hundred Brits a year (if you can count, you know this is about proportionally accurate).  Indeed, the last time a cop in Britain shot someone dead was March 3rd, 2012.  Before that, August 2011 and before THAT June 2007.  That's right.  Between 2007 and 2011 - four years - no English cops fatally wounded NO ONE.  (And, unlike the US, Britain does keep accurate statistics about police killings.  Though, granted, it's a lot easier over there since their cops kill so few people.)

So the idea that, hey, cops are okay because the only kill 459 people a year and only black people are only 70% more likely to be gunned down by cops than white ones, everything is hunky-dory.  Nope, no problem at ALL that police kill 459 people a year, a disproportionate number of them black.  Not a problem at ALL.  Not to Bill O'Reilly.

Okay, and here's the real bogus part - O'Reilly was just plain lying.  There were about 459 people killed by cops in 2013, sure, but not all of them were either black or white.  A lot of them were, y'know, Hispanic because about 1 in 3 Americans is Hispanic.  A whole bunch of them are unnamed, without any attribution of race and sometimes not even of gender!

Remember, the US does not keep police officer killing statistics.  So such records are usually compiled from police crime desk stories.  Often, the information given is very scant and is rarely accurately fact checked.

For instance, according to Wikipedia's list of people killed by cops in January of 2013, forty-six people are listed as having died that month.  Eleven of them - over 20% of them - are listed as unnamed.  Hmm.  I checked seven entries before exhausting myself, and in the news articles about the shootings, in no case was the race of the person identified.

So, since out of those 459 people (barring the unlikely event that O'Reilly has access to data taht I don't have), O'Reilly assigned everyone who got killed by cops in American as black or white (which is, itself, disturbing) - totally ignoring the fact that many people killed by the police do not have their race released AND that a bunch of Americans are neither white nor black . . . well, what else can I conclude other than O'Reilly lied.  He pulled this specious bullshit "fact" out of his pocket to distract an outraged guest and whitewash racist police brutality.

Fuck Bill O'Reilly.

More BBC nonsense - their inability to understand what "murder" is

The BBC has a story, "Leaked report reveals Pakistan failures on Bin Laden", that says something everyone knows - a lot of people in Pakistan helped protect Bin Laden.  Duh.

But one of the things they say is, "A version of the report leaked to al-Jazeera says the killing of Bin Laden by US forces was a 'criminal act of murder' ordered by the US president."

Well, yes, when you send in your special forces into a country we are supposed to be allies with and those people then shoot an old man dead, yes, that's a criminal act of murder.  That's just fact.  It doesn't matter of it's Bin Laden or a sweet little old lady - the US President ordered troops into a country we are supposed to be allied with and they killed someone.  The designation of "enemy combatant" - even were it not a farcical term - does not give Obama the legal right to order executions in a foreign country with whom we are at peace.  What the US did is, indisputably, a criminal act of murder if you're actually bothering to go by the normal standards of international law.

(If you don't see that, do a little thought experiement and imagine how outraged people in the US would be if China send commandos into Nebraska where they then killed a murderer of Chinese people.  We wouldn't care if the guy was guilty.  It would be an intolerable violation of our sovereignty.  Everyone knows that China has no right to send soldiers into the United States to kill people, no matter who that person is, no matter if the Chinese government had designated that person an enemy of the people.  Just because Pakistan can't retaliate doesn't change the law.  It was just as illegal and immoral for us to kill Bin Laden in Pakistan as it would be for Chinese soldiers to kill an admittedly guilty person on US soil.)

The inability of newspapers to say things that are obvious and true is quite amazing.

BBC headline: "Egyptian interim leader calls for calm". Translation: "Forget the coup that happened and accept your new overlords".

The language of newspapers is, to me, fascinating.  So, the Egyptian Freedom and Justice Party, with nearly half the seats in the Egyptian Parliament, "has accused the army of staging a coup".  To me, that's fascinating.  The BBC isn't calling the coup a coup, it's just reporting that some people in Egypt are calling it a coup.  Why the hesitation to call a spade a spade?  When the army tosses a constitution in the garbage, arrests a legally elected head-of-state and then puts their own stooge in power, that's a coup.  That's pretty much the dictionary definition of a coup.  But they can't call it that, they merely "report" that people in Egypt are calling it a coup.

Then, in a move that stunned, well, it didn't stun me, the Egyptian army committed a massacre.  But the BBC asks, "Who fired first?"  How about this, BBC, who fucking cares?  Even if the official story is true and the protesters tried to charge machinegun nests to overcome the Presidential Guard barracks - where the deposed leader of Egypt was reputed to be staying - the army is still the bad guys because the committed a coup!  That fact, that illegal, constitution destroying fact, justifies action against the tyrants who deposed a legally elected leader.  Even if the army was attacked, by fighting back against people moving to secure the legal President of Egypt merely worsens their crimes.  That they shot kids in the process is just icing on the cake.

The the absurdity increases.  There are just layers of newspeak going on.  The White House has said it is not aligned with any political movement in Egypt but cutting military aid to Egypt is not in US interests.  So . . . America isn't supporting any political movement, just the Egyptian army . . . ?  It's bafflingly stupid. As statements go it's literally self-contradictory, it literally contradicts itself in the same statement, but the BBC does not deign to notice the absurdity of what the White House said or what it reported.

And this is one of the most respected new sources in the world!  But they refuse to use common language to describe events, they dutifully report on things that make absolutely no sense without also reporting that it makes no fucking sense.  That Washington is spewing out statements that make no sense is, itself, a story, guys!  It's a story that Washington is lying, saying one thing ("We don't support any political group in Egypt!") while doing another ("Giving weapons to the very army that performed the coup.").  That's relevant, but unreported.

It's fascinating and black humor all at the same time.

The BBC's offfensive lines

It happened, again, a story so bafflingly stupid that it makes my toes curl.  In the BBC, there is a story, "The offensive line", that is about crime and NFL players.  In it, they conclude - mind you, conclude - that because the arrest rate of NFL players is 1 in 47 (instead of 1 in 6 for their age and gender cohort) that NFL players behalf considerably better than the average person.

At no point does anyone consider, even briefly, any intervening hypothesis as to why NFL players should be arrested 1/7th as often as men of their age.  Such as, perhaps, that NFL players are not likely to be arrested because they're professional sports figures, not to mention rich.

I grant, that sort of questioning requires both the ability to ask questions and the desire to do research, but both seem in slight demand in newspapers.  Still, the idea that professional athletes, along with other rich and famous people, are given numerous breaks by law enforcement isn't a real reach, not to mention the ability to hide many crimes that comes along with wealth - when you live in a big house with good soundproofing on a large lot and all your neighbors do the same, well, not a lot of calls get made when you disturb the peace . . . or beat the shit out of your girlfriend.  (All NFL players are rich.  Their base pay is around $400K a year.)

I mean, every time I read a biography of a sports figure, I'm just stunned at the crazy shit they get away with, shit I am quite sure would get me arrested for everything from rape to assault if I did it.  Likewise, my friends who have been college athletes just have crazy stories of fights and crazy parties where the cops came by but, well, it's the college football team, so they just got off with a warning.  So, both in sports biographies and according to my personal experience, yeah, athletes get off real light from the authorities.

So, it isn't reaching to say that perhaps there's a reason why NFL players aren't arrested as much as their poorer, less famous cohorts.  Yea, verily, an obvious reason.  But why bother actually researching something.  It's much easier to find some raw data and write a couple of hundred words off the top of your head.

Bad news and the case of Morsi in Egypt

Generally speaking, the new reporting, newspapers, news TV and news blogs are bad.  I don't delude myself into thinking it was ever any good, generally.  Newspapers have always been owned by people who shaped their papers according to their interests - from William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch, from the New York Times to the BBC.

The BBC is where I am starting this little adventure.  In Egypt, they have had a lot of anti-democratic protests that have lead to the Egyptian army ousting the legally elected President of Egypt, suspending the Egyptian Constitution and installing a stooge.  As of me writing this, the BBC, nor any news source I've seen, has called this an anti-democratic military coup that demonstrates the lack of both democracy and the rule of law in Egypt.  The Egyptian army is now in the business of deposing civilian leaders as they see fit.  Egypt is a de facto military oligarchy, a banana republic, with elections and the rule of law a farce.

For some reason, the BBC - my primary news source - doesn't seem to recognize the banana republic nature of Egypt or the generally recognized belief that military oligarchic dictatorships are horrible forms of government even when they seem to be supporting populist causes.  That support is entirely coincidental.  Almost always, military oligarchies end up in civil war as either they shift from supporting populist causes to opposing them for their own gain and/or the colonels who run the military carve out their own private fiefdoms and start squabbling with each other.  The fact that Egypt is quite likely set on a course of protracted civil strife and/or warlordism is simply not brought up because, I think, the narrative that the recent populist uprisings in the Middle East - the so-called Arab Spring - are essentially benevolent and democratic in character, rather than the horrible clusterfuck that has made Egypt, in whole, an even worse place than when under more stable forms of dictatorship.

It's like when we in the West don't like a government, we have this incredibly, just shockingly naive view that any revolution is a good one.  Which is why in Afghanistan we supported al-Qaida and the Taliban, why we supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, why we supported the brutal Shah of Iran in murdering Mossedegh, why we propped Manuel Noriega's rule in Panama, the list just goes on and on.  We think that because we don't like a ruler that anyone resisting that rule must be a-okay.

We're currently making the same mistake in Syria, too.  Is Assad a tyrant?  Yes.  But there's a lot of reason to think the rebels are every bit as tyrannical as Assad and anti-West.  Oh, plus, it could start another cold war with Russia and China.  But here we are, supporting crazy religious zealots against a secular tyrant because we dislike Syria's persistent autonomy and it's unwillingness to line up as a client state of the US.

Likewise, we're praising the Egyptian army's impending warlordism and Egypt's civil strife even as the supposed Arab Spring turns more and more into an Arab Winter as sectarian violence grips the area.  Even as religious hostilities in Iraq increase, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan highlights how little power the Kabul government has, even as our missile strikes into Pakistan continue to destabilize that country socially and politically, as war rages in Syria, as demonstrations get violent in Turkey, the newspapers are essentially reporting that the destruction of the rule of law and the rule of colonels in a banana republic in Egypt are a good thing.

Reporting sucks today - the BBC editors and writers should be fired

I read two fairly horrible articles on BBC.com.  The first was "Big rise in new 'legal highs' - UN Drug Report" and the second was "Did our brains evolve to foolish follow celebrities?"

In the first about legal highs, the article is about the spread of designer drugs for whom no legislation exists and how the chemistry of drug designers works faster than law enforcement in criminalizing them.  The article goes on to say that this is bad because the new designer drugs are dangerous.  This is stupid in at least two ways.  One: it takes as a given that getting high, in any fashion at all, should be illegal.  Two: the facts are wrong.

Now, why should it be taken that getting high should be illegal?  It is untrue, of course.  We are allowed to get high, legally, with alchohol and nicotine (I should, perhaps, add caffiene to that list).  These things are legal and regulated and they get you high.  Alcohol, in particular, has the power to get you as fucked up as any illegal drug -- the characteristic of the high is different than, say, LSD, but you can get yourself totally wasted by alcohol to a similar extent as LSD.  While nicotine lacks that kind of potential in the way the industrialized world generally uses it (though if you're fond of a hookah, you can get pretty goddamn smashed, I should add), clearly we are not systematically opposed to intoxication.  So why should we presume all other forms of intoxication are bad?  Yet, in a totally unspoken way, the article does exactly that.

Afterward, it just says that designer drugs are unsafe.  Really?  Let's think this through.

(One of the unsafe drugs mentioned is "bath salts", which is just sloppy journalism.  Almost no one takes bath salts because the high isn't very good and the crash is quite bad.  But after that guy freaked out here in Miami had started eating a dude's face, there was a bath salts scare.  Bath salts had nothing to do with the attack, but once a good scare is started it's good for sensationalism to bring it up.  Who cares if people don't actually use bath salts?  Bath salts are bad!)

Alcohol and nicotine can kill you.  In the US, alone, the CDC says that 60,000 die every year because they drink too much.  The CDC says that cigarette smoking causes twenty percent of deaths in America, 443,000.  Fifty thousand of those deaths are from second hand smoke -- fifty thousand non-smokers die every year because of cigarettes.

In 2010, a study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs ranked how dangerous various drugs were on a scale of 1 to 100, taking into account personal harm, harm to others, costs to society.  Alcohol got a 72, the highest score - this is above heroin at 55 and crack cocaine at 54.  Tobacco was right under cocaine at 25.  Cannabis rated a 21.  Mephedrone - one of the "dangeorus" designer drugs - rated a 12.  Ecstasy rates a 9.  LSD is down at around 7 and magic mushrooms a 5.

So, most illegal drugs are safer than most legal ones.  The dangerous mephedrone, meow meow in the article, is . . . pretty goddamn safe.  Safer than cannabis.  Ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms?  Single digits.

I question the report in several serious ways.  There is no real indication that cannabis harms the user.  So why does it rate above, y'know, in the same ballpark as cocaine and amphetamines?  And how does nicotine, causing so many deaths, rate lower than alcohol?  So, far from perfect.

Yet, many of the drugs we thing are dangerous - mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy - are very . . . well, safe compared to things that are already legal.  And mephedrone, one of the drugs the reporter specifically mentions, is much safe than the legal drugs of tobacco and alcohol. 

In short: there is no reason to presume designer drugs are dangerous.  That's just pure sensationalism created out of a fairly bizarre idea that being high on anything other than booze or cigarettes is somehow worse than being high on booze and cigarettes.  It's also just plain wrong and clearly no one fact-checked the article, so it's a failure on the editorial level, too, for a newspaper that is supposed to report facts.

The second bad article is about the effects of prestige on society.  The article opines that we should not care what underwear David Beckham wears - that Beckham's social prestige makes us care more than we "should" for extraneous things like his fashion choices.

What the article fails to really address is that this isn't happenstance.  We care what underwear David Beckham wears because someone make a multimillion dollar advertising campaign to sell us Calvin Klein briefs.  Left to our own devices, most of us would never, ever learn, or care to learn, what briefs Beckham wears and care about his prestige in his area of legitimate expertise - soccer.

The use of the prestige of celebrity to sell us things is not a maladaptation to the modern world.  It is an adaptation that is being consciously, actively subverted by advertisers to sell us crap we do not need.  Without the influence of advertisers, would the prestige of celebrity be so odious?  Is it bad to hold up David Beckham in considerable prestige due to his really incredible athletic skills?  Or to hold up Beyonce for her skill as an entertainer?  But what happens is this prestige, this false authority, is being repackaged by advertisers as a means to manipulate us.  It isn't just happenstance.  Someone is doing it.

When you fail to mention something so important in an article about how prestige is used to influence us - that there are a group of people consciously manipulating this psychological reality - then you've failed as a journalist.

Then I stopped reading the news because I remembered how horrible it is, generally.

Wikileaks is not a terrorist organization for crying out loud

Wikileaks is releasing around a quarter of a million diplomatic cables from the United States. A lot of people, mostly Republicans, definitely want something done about this . . .

I oppose, altogether, government secrecy. As such, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is nearly a hero of mine. He clearly agrees that secrecy stinks and has done something about it.

I don't think that government secrecy works. Government "secrets" are not generally very secret. Publicly available sources of information are almost always better than information gathered through secret means. This is the reason that science is very nearly totally transparent, it's the best way to improve the quality of information. This is true of all other fields, as well. So, hidden information is far, far more liable to be rife with errors and lies than publicly available information that can be robustly checked.

The criticism that is almost universally leveled against Assange and Wikileaks are these leaks threaten life. That's idiotic. What threatens people's lives are the often downright fucking insane foreign policy decisions of the US, not the person who reveals these foreign policy decisions. In the history of Wikileaks, not a single person has ever died because of the information released. When asked who has died because of the published leaks, a vast silence falls or, more commonly, a mindless rant against the person who dares ask for proof. (Which is kind of the elephant in the room -- proof. I am always suspicious of people who attack people who either have proof or who refuse to give proof, but so prostituted has our government become that the idea that proof is meaningful has been almost entirely erased. This disturbs me profoundly.)

These diplomatic cables are mostly just . . . very slightly embarrassing. They're private communications between diplomatic staff. Any country in the world that has a diplomatic staff can look at their own cables and they'll find the exact same kind of frankness. It's a total tempest in a teapot. Sure, a few egos are no doubt bruised but that's gonna be it.

Overwhelmingly, what we're finding out is these things are tedious. Is it a shocker that a lot of US-allied Arab leaders don't want to see Iran get nuclear weapons? No. Absolutely not. This has been publicly available information for years, now. Is it a surprise that Israel seriously thought about bombing the Iranian nuclear plant? No. It's not even surprising that Saudi Arabia has both urged the US to attack Iran while at the same time continued to support al-Qaida. Everything these documents say is either more or less irrelevant -- "Kim Jong Il is a flabby old chap" level nonsense -- or already known.

But you have people saying that Wikileaks is a terrorist organization. Terrorist organization . . . ? That's right. Publishing the truth makes a person a terrorist in the eyes of a disturbingly large number of Americans. Even though the information published ranges from the slightly embarrassing to the publicly available.

I think what's really going on here is that these leaks point out that the government lies. Oh, this is also no surprise to people who pay attention, but when you get it from the horse's mouth it does contextualize things. So, it was a big deal when some documents were leaked that demonstrate pretty clearly that the British government knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then continued to use the fear-mongering mushroom cloud argument. It's a big deal when these leaks demonstrate that the US knows that its troops are committing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan but do nothing about it. Our government gets away with a lot with the justification that, hey, we just don't known.

What Wikileaks documents provide is proof that they did know, that they do know, and they're lying to our faces. However, anyone who's been in a bitter argument when they're wrong has probably had the experience of inventing charges against their opponent then inflating them to distract from the truth while justifying one's actions. So, rather than looking at these leaks and going, "Hey, maybe we should clean up our act" what the government does, instead, is say, "They're TERRORISTS who are KILLING AMERICANS." Yeah, the charge is idiotic -- how can they be terrorists if there's no damage done to anyone and what is being revealed is, in truth, reasonably unremarkable? -- but they have a big pulpit from which to shout.

(This is particularly true because of the complaisant media. One of the big stories about this whole Wikileaks thing is that it isn't big news organizations that are breaking these stories, but a couple of guys with a website. A big story in this is that the multi-billion dollar news empires that control most news content are being repeatedly and savagely beaten to the punch by seven unfunded volunteers. Let's face it, news corporations suck. That's a big story, here, that you won't see the news talking about!)

They so shout and the pimps in the traditional news media repeat their shouts, acting as an amplifier, so instead of talking about how it's clear the government is really, really lying to us about what they do and what they know, we end up talking about how Wikileaks is or is not a terrorist organization. The diplomatic cables are mostly banal, except when they confirm how often the government lies to us, which should be the story. That and, y'know, why the big news corporations are time and again being scooped by part-time volunteers.