America's Real Criminal Element: Lead | Mother Jones

So we're back to square one. More prisons might help control crime, more cops might help, and better policing might help. But the evidence is thin for any of these as the main cause. What are we missing?

Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once--as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be--the cause is a molecule.

A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?

Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH2CH3)4.

Choosy thief leaves Redmond gear on the table
A savvy sneak slipped into a Microsoft campus, stole five iPads and left all the Microsoft products untouched, according to cops.

Some of the things I'd normally howl at were just too painful

keep to the Fen Causeway

Most of the entries on the 2012 list of top anti-Semites published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center just after Christmas are unsurprising. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood makes the list. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is there. European soccer fans, some of them notoriously racist, land at No. 4. A handful of right-wing extremist parties in Europe are also fingered.

His comment about being ranked number 3:

O artista, que classificou sua colocação no ranking de "piada digna de filme de Woody Allen", disse ao Opera Mundi se sentir "motivado" pelas críticas do centro judaico. "Se organizações do lobby pró-Israel estão incomodadas com minhas charges, é porque estou no caminho certo", afirmou ele.

Ele lembra que o escritor português José Saramago, o ativista sul-africano Desmond Tutu e o ex-presidente norte-americano Jimmy Carter, e muitos outros também sofreram com esse tipo de acusações: "Estou em boa companhia".

Needless to say, the genuinely antisemitic Magma Messiah, with Judas as a gay Jewish money manager (distributed in the U.S. army) is nowhere on the list.

Keynes demonstrated that the main cause of bouts of heavy and prolonged unemployment was not worker encroachment on profits, but the fluctuating prospects of private investment in an uncertain world. Nearly all unemployment in a cyclical downturn was the result of the failure of investment demand.

Thus, the important thing was not to nationalize the capital stock, but to socialize investment. Industry could be safely left in private hands, provided the state guaranteed enough spending power in the economy to maintain a full-employment level of investment. This could be achieved by monetary and fiscal policy: low interest rates and large state investment programs.

...

Today, ideas about full employment and equality remain at the heart of social democracy. But the political struggle needs to be conducted along new battle lines. Whereas the front used to run between government and the owners of the means of production - the industrialists, the rentiers - now, it runs between governments and finance. Such measures as the efforts by the European Parliament to regulate the derivatives market or the British government's ban on short selling in the wake of the financial crisis or the demand to caps bankers' bonuses  are contemporary expressions of the wish to reduce the power of financial speculation to damage the economy.

French film star Gérard Depardieu failed to appear in court to face drink-driving charges because he was preparing to play disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a film, his lawyer said.

He said his client was in Montenegro preparing to play Strauss-Kahn, who was widely regarded as the next Socialist president of France before a US sex scandal brought down his career last year.

Bowie


"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin