Do you know what that building is? I would have guessed some sort of civic center in a town near Chernobyl. Nope. It’s the abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit, which fell out of use in 1988, after years of dramatically declining passenger train use. That image is part of a haunting Atlantic slideshow of abandoned places around the world. When I lived in Philadelphia, I used to take the train sometimes from my house in a far-flung part of the city. The route took us through blighted areas of North Philadelphia, which look like they were bombed out. These were once neighborhoods that boomed with life emerging from manufacturing. When that collapsed, so did the neighborhoods. It’s hard to overstate how eerie the view from the train is. It’s like a sci-fi landscape, or something. Here’s a 1995 report from Nightline about the so-called “Badlands” of north Philly.

In The Atlantic, Emily Badger looks at how the city of Memphis is fighting crime by doing data-mining. This brought to mind an Atlantic piece from four years ago by Hanna Rosin, which also looked at how numbers-crunching and crime-fighting in Memphis. The picture that emerged from that data was not something people were eager to see. Excerpt:

The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.

Er, no. More:

 The “Gathering Storm” report that worried over an upcoming epidemic of violence was inspired by a call from the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky, who’d seen crime rising regionally and wondered what was going on. Simultaneously, the University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime. She had begun her work years before, going blind into the research: she had just arrived from India, had never heard of a housing project, had no idea which were the bad parts of town, and was clueless about the finer points of American racial sensitivities. In her research, Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, one that emerged first in the late 1990s, then again around 2002. A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: “Crime is going along with them.” Except for being hand-drawn, Suresh’s map matching housing patterns with crime looks exactly like Janikowski and Betts’s.

And:

If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal—infusing the poor with middle-class habits—then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing.

Charles Murray? Bueller?

Here’s a good, righteous, scornful essay by Thomas Frank on what it takes to make it as a member of the Washington-NY-Wall-Street elite today. There are no consequences for being wrong, as long as you were wrong in a way that suits the prejudices of the elites. There is no bonus for being right, if your correct call was not one that flattered the views of the elites. Excerpts:

In the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.

First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness.

Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well.

And then, Wall Street blew up the global economy. Empowered by bank deregulation and regulatory capture, Wall Street enlisted those tough-minded men of the media again to sell the world on the idea that financial innovations were making the global economy more stable by the minute. Central banks puffed an asset bubble like the world had never seen before, even if every journalist worth his byline was obliged to deny its existence until it was too late.

These episodes were costly and even disastrous, and after each one had run its course and duly exploded, I expected some sort of  day of reckoning for their promoters.

Wrong! More:

What I didn’t understand was that these were moral failures, mistakes that were hardwired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that—from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them. Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, for chrissake, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready should they fu*k things up again.

Read the whole thing.  What’s so interesting about it is not that it’s a rant against the failure of those who were so very wrong to be held to account for their mistakes. No, what’s so interesting is how this lack of accountability is built into the system. The market, so to speak, cannot work, because there is little or no moral hazard. You can be very wrong about very big things, and nothing will happen to you as a result. Frank says it’s all about money, and about how you get to be an “expert” not by being right, but by being well-connected, and by holding and expounding opinions that suit those with money and connections. The gist:

Another way of putting this idea might be to say that the individuals who got things wrong—the ones who saw few problems in financial deregulation, anyone who thought derivatives eliminated risk, anyone who counted on markets to police themselves—were “one of us.” There can be no consequences for them because they merely expressed the consensus views of the time. Like John Maynard Keynes’s “sound banker,” they might have failed, but they failed in the same way that the rest of “us” failed. To hold them accountable for what they said and did would expose the rest of “us” to such judgment as well. And obviously that can’t happen.

Isn’t that how nearly all our elite institutions work? Isn’t that why not a single Roman Catholic bishop — save, arguably, Boston’s Cardinal Law — lost his post as a result of the abuse scandal? United we stand, or divided we hang.

Frank’s observations seem to argue that there are two ways to go in this world: you can choose to have integrity, but relatively little money or influence; or you can choose to have money and influence, but at the cost of your integrity. Maybe it has always been that way. But look, here is what’s most interesting to me about this dynamic. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that most of the people who represent the elite consensus opinion are consciously aware that their opinions are so determined by what their fellows think about things. It is damned difficult to be a truly independent thinker, and to account for the biases of your information environment, which includes all your social and professional cues. How’s that saying go? “Do not count on a man to see something when his livelihood depends on his not seeing it”? Something like that.  I think many of us must imagine these people sitting in their Ivory Towers of government, academia, media, banking, etc., and making decisions they consciously know are wrong, or corrupted. Maybe some do, but the key point here is that many, even most, of them don’t realize at the time how social, emotional, and psychological factors corrupt their own judgment. And if there is no serious reckoning for grave failure, there is no incentive for decision-makers to seriously question their own biases when they’re making these decisions. If you’re a made man, there will always be a bailout, a golden parachute.

It is hard for me to imagine a just cosmos that doesn’t have a place in the deepest pit of hell’s grimmest dungeon for the Kim family of North Korea, for what they and the powers and principalities in their service have done to people there. This is communism, through and through. Read this about a man born into the North Korean gulag, and who is the only person ever born there known to have escaped. It’s hard to imagine that such a place exists on this earth. But there it is. Excerpt:

“Do you know why you are here?” The officer did not know, or did not care, that Shin had been a dutiful informer. “At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. Were you aware of this fact or not? If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.”

Shin would eventually figure out that the night guard had claimed the credit for discovering the escape plan. But on that morning Shin understood nothing. He was a bewildered 13-year-old. Finally, the officer pushed some papers across his desk. “In that case, bastard, your thumbprint.”

The document was a family rap sheet. The papers explained why his father’s family had been locked up in Camp 14. The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during the Korean war. Shin’s crime was being his father’s son.

Shin’s cell was barely large enough for him to lie down. Without windows, he could not distinguish night from day. He was given nothing to eat and could not sleep.

On what seemed to be the morning of the third day, guards wordlessly entered Shin’s cell, shackled his ankles, tied a rope to a hook in the ceiling and hung him upside down. They did not return until evening. On the fourth day, the interrogators wore civilian clothes. Marched from his cell, Shin met them in a dimly lit room. A chain dangled from a winch on the ceiling. Hooks on the walls held a hammer, axe, pliers and clubs. On a table, Shin saw the kind of pincers used for carrying hot metal.

“If you tell the truth right now, I’ll save you,” the chief interrogator said. “If not, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

The chief’s lieutenants pulled off Shin’s clothes and trussed him up. When they were finished, his body formed a U, his face and feet toward the ceiling, his bare back toward the floor. The chief interrogator shouted more questions. A tub of burning charcoal was dragged beneath Shin, then the winch lowered towards the flames. Crazed with pain and smelling his burning flesh, Shin twisted away. One of the guards grabbed a hook and pierced the boy in the abdomen, holding him over the fire until he lost consciousness.

Shin awoke in his cell, soiled with excrement and urine. His back was blistered and sticky. The flesh around his ankles had been scraped away. As his burns became infected, he grew feverish and lost his appetite.

Shin guesses it was 10 days before his final interrogation. It took place in his cell because he was too weak to get up. For the first time, he found the words to defend himself. “I was the one who reported this,” he said. “I did a good job.” His interrogators didn’t believe him. He begged them to talk to Hong Sung Jo.

Shin’s fever grew worse and the blisters on his back swelled with pus. His cell smelled so bad, the guards refused to step inside. After several days Shin was carried to another cell. He’d been granted a reprieve. Hong had confirmed his story. Shin would never see the school’s night guard again.

They’re trying to come up with genetically engineered decaffeinated coffee, but so far, no luck. Monsters! I side with the redoubtable Father Joseph Wilson, the Sage of Queens, who says decaf coffee is a mortal sin, according to Humanae Vitae, because it violates the natural purpose of the bean. So there.

(Via Sullivan).

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, here’s a segment from this week’s Bill Maher show in which Alexandra Pelosi, fresh off her trip to Mississippi to interview racist white morons, turns her cameras on no-count black welfare recipients in New York City. Watch:

Here’s TNC’s reaction. Excerpt:

Pelosi’s commentary is worth listening to. She evidently is declining to understand the critique, preferring instead to undermine it by proving that her sneering knows no bounds. But cruelty is cruelty and the fact that one’s condescension is of the rainbow doesn’t make one any less condescending.

Pelosi thinks she’s surprising by her willingness to unleash her quick wit against poor black people. But there is nothing noteworthy about offending “both sides,” a feat that can be managed simply relieving yourself on a crowded street.

Note well that TNC, a black liberal, was put off by Pelosi’s clip about poor and working class whites too. I share TNC’s view contra the paternalistic materialism of liberals like Pelosi, who believe that voting for one’s economic interests is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t see her questioning why wealthy coastal liberals would vote Democratic, against their economic interests. These people plainly and correctly believe there’s a lot more at stake in our polity than divvying up the money. Why should she fault lower-class GOP voters for voting their moral beliefs over their economic interests, but laud, or at least not fault, wealthy Democratic voters for doing the same?

Anyway, about this new video, maybe it’s where I’m from, but I’m not the least bit surprised to discover that both sides exist. I mean, that you have poor and working-class white people who believe stupid and despicable things, and that you have poor and working-class black people who believe stupid and despicable things. What, exactly, does one prove by showcasing this? I found myself watching that welfare-queen video, and thinking how much those people make me sick. I found myself doing the same with her previous video, the Mississippi one. What am I supposed to do with that emotion, though? Decide which group is more disgusting, and vote accordingly?

I’m not one of those people who believe in Victim Classes, whose members are not to be held morally responsible for their beliefs and actions because they are downtrodden, discriminated against, or what have you. Just because you are poor doesn’t give you the right to be immoral (e.g., racist, lazy). What gets people’s back up about these things is knowing that half the country sees cretins like those Pelosi interviewed, and finds their nastiest beliefs about the Other confirmed. Ah-ha, that’s how all white Southerners are! Or: See, that’s just like black people, isn’t it? 

That’s not true, of course, but it’s easy to think the worst of people who are not like us. It’s easy to see the worst examples of a people, or a class of people, and think that they are indicative of the whole. But that’s too easy. It’s harder to see through the racism, the shiftlessness, the ignorance, the this and the that, to the real people beneath, and their dignity, however abused or self-degraded. This is something I struggle with. This is something my late sister, the schoolteacher, did not struggle with, because it was in her nature to try to see the dignity in every person, no matter how messed up and unrighteous. I will never forget her patient upbraiding of me for being scornful of the low marks her sixth-grade students made on a quiz I was helping her grade. She gave me the back stories of several of those low-scoring kids, informing me of the squalid domestic situations those children had to endure, and how for many of them, it was a triumph just to come to school at all.

I interviewed a couple of weeks ago a young black woman who was one of my sister’s students back in the day. She’s now very successful, and lives and thrives in California. She told me that my sister was the only adult who cared for her at all when she was a sixth grader. She had a really messed up home life (how messed up? three of her brothers are now in prison), and absolutely no help or guidance. Except for my sister, her teacher. S. told me how all the teachers who knew about her home life pitied her, but only Ruthie seemed to see through her awful circumstances and challenge her to draw on her inner resources and overcome it. And she did.

It would have been easy for Ruthie to take a paternalistic stance, and write S. off — either from a “conservative” point of view (“You can’t expect much from poor black kids”) or a “liberal” point of view (“You can’t expect much from poor black kids, bless their hearts”). But she didn’t do that.

I wish Ruthie were here to watch both of Alexandra Pelosi’s clips and give me her opinion. I’m sure she would recognize in both clips the fathers of many of the children, white and black, that she taught every day. I’m fairly certain that she would have been hard-pressed to find any redeeming quality in HBO spotlighting their moral and intellectual degradation. The hard thing — the really hard thing — is to love and respect people in spite of their wretchedness. I’m very, very bad at this. So, I think, are my fellow privileged Americans Alexandra Pelosi and Bill Maher.

However old you are, consider that in 1968, when he was only 23 years old, Van Morrison released “Astral Weeks.” He followed that up at 25 with “Moondance,” and then “His Band and the Street Choir,” and then at 26, “Tupelo Honey.”

What had you done by the age of 26? Me, not much. Then again, by the time he was 30, Van Morrison had creatively burned out. If you ask me — though I’ll conced that 1979’s “Into the Music,” and the glorious 1988 collaboration with the Chieftains are two arguments against that position.

You’ve heard, I take it, about the British subjects who are appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to defend their right to wear a Christian cross at work, against their employers’ rules. The British government has taken the other side, saying, get this, that there is no religious issue in play here because Christianity doesn’t require its adherents to wear a cross. Ridiculous! David Gibson rolls his eyes at that, and snarks that “we wouldn’t dare impede the sacred right of commerce.”

Perhaps he should have said “rite”…

Who was it that said you can always tell what’s most important to a society by the use to which they put their tallest buildings?

From the Baton Rouge Advocate: