All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

The war at home

Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , , ,
Courtesy of Reuters.
Courtesy of Reuters.

It’s the one being waged against our own population, via mass incarceration and often inhumane treatment of inmates. From Reuters’ impressive gallery of the year in 95 photos, here’s the story behind this one:

LUCY NICHOLSON, United States

“I arranged to travel on a bus from Los Angeles with children who were visiting their fathers in San Quentin state prison. The prison has the largest death row in the United States, and the only gas chamber and death row for male inmates in California.

The children slept on the bus overnight as it made the nearly 400-mile journey, met with their fathers for a few hours, before returning to LA the same day.

I had arranged to meet reporter Mary Slosson from Sacramento at the prison. We chatted with the families and photographed them for a couple of hours. I wasn’t allowed to photograph one family who was visiting a death row prisoner in a separate locked room, but Mary talked to the press officer and arranged for Reuters to have a prison tour.

We were shown around the exercise yards, some of the cells, and the medical building. A lot of the prisoners wanted to chat to us, and they swarmed around as we walked through the exercise yard.

In the medical building we crossed paths with a death row inmate and other shackled “administrative segregation” prisoners. One inmate was sitting in a cage in an empty room, watching television.

We passed a room of administrative segregation prisoners sitting in cages for a group therapy session. I took four frames before the prisoners started staring and a guard told us to move along.

The return of mean streets in New York?

Miscellaneous, , , , , , ,
Courtesy of New York Magazine.
Courtesy of New York Magazine.

Robert Kolker reports on the recent spike in traffic-related fatalities in New York City:

In 2010, in keeping with Bloomberg’s penchant for data-driven analysis, Sadik-Khan issued the results of a report the DOT had undertaken on pedestrian safety. The idea, she says, was to help the city learn “who gets hit, why they get hit, where they get hit, and how they get hit.” The prime culprit turned out to be speeding cars. The study noted that a pedestrian struck at 40 miles per hour is four times more likely to die than one struck at 30 miles per hour, who in turn is six times more likely to die than one struck at 20 miles per hour. The report also showed that 74 percent of the car crashes resulting in fatalities and serious injuries took place at intersections, not highways. The most likely way to die on the street in a car-related crash in New York, the DOT’s data suggests, is the same way Jessica Dworkin died—at the hands of a driver who was turning at an intersection. Most of those incidents do not appear to be the pedestrian’s fault: 57 percent of those crashes occurred while the pedestrian was crossing with the signal. The problem, in other words, is cars.

Safety advocates say the DOT needs to continue to look for new engineering solutions that can help slow down speeding vehicles. But the biggest problem, they say, lies with law enforcement. Analyzing DOT data and police reports, Transportation Alternatives has found that of all the crashes between 1995 and 2009 in which a pedestrian or bicyclist was killed and the cause of the crash could be determined, 60 percent were caused by illegal driver behavior. Despite the known dangers of speeding, most police precincts in New York only hand out about two speeding tickets per week. In 2011, cops gave out more tickets for drivers with cars with tinted windows (4,967) than they did for drivers who were speeding (3,779).

We should be paying more to watch sports on TV

Politics, Sports, , , , , , , , ,

So says Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. After reading a Los Angeles Times piece stating that sports channels account for almost half of the average cable TV bill, Drum advocates a consumer revolution:

The obvious answer, of course, is to offer channels on an a la carte basis—or perhaps on a semi-a la carte basis—but both the content providers and the cable companies fight this tooth and nail. Here’s the excuse:

National and local sports networks typically require cable and satellite companies to make their channels available to all customers….The idea of offering channels on an “a la carte” basis used to be sacrilege to the industry. Executives argued it would not lower prices because networks would just charge more to make up for the loss of subscribers.

You know what? That’s exactly what would happen. People would start to understand just how much they’re paying for sports programming and they’d be appalled. Many wouldn’t subscribe, and sports fans would be forced to pay the actual cost of their sports programming without being subsidized by the rest of us. This is exactly how it should be. There’s no reason that, for all practical purposes, every single person in the LA area should be forced to pay a tax to the Lakers and Dodgers even if they don’t care about basketball and baseball.

Not that I disagree with him, but it’s funny to what extent his sentiment sounds eerily similar to that of Tea Partiers and their ilk — namely, it’s outrageous that I should pay for them. Of course, the content is quite different — welfare checks would be quite a bit more foundational on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than, say, the ability to watch the Lakers at home in high definition — but the philosophy is strikingly similar.

In fact, even the apparent gap in importance between these two examples is somewhat irrelevant, since the entire debate on the role of government is centered on what, exactly, is reasonable or necessary. In other words, even for something as seemingly trivial as sports programming, it would be easy to mount a rebuttal of à la carte programming on cultural grounds: sports, it could be said, facilitate a common social experience, a kinship with fellow citizens, and so on, to such an extent that the costs of broadcasting sports matches should be socialized to the broader population, whether they decide to watch or not.

This may sound ridiculous to many of us, but clearly fiscal conservatives feel very similarly in relation to many facets of government spending such as Medicaid, unemployment distributions, and so on. Again, this is not to justify the archetypal fiscal conservative’s point of view, but just to point out that, even for liberals such as Kevin Drum, there is always a line beyond which the people must “revolt” against undue expenditures that subsidize those other people. The only questions are where the line should be drawn, and which group of “other people” to target as benefitting from unfair subsidization.

Socialist America

Politics, , , , , , , ,

John Nichols suggests that all the talk of creeping “socialism” during the Republican primaries and beyond may have actually increased Americans’ positive disposition towards socialism generally:

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Needless to say, this provoked the predictable fine whine of right-wing media. The conservative Washington Times newspaper declared: “Yes, Democrats, liberals favor socialism.” The Business Insider website announced: “Everything Republicans Fear About Democrats Is True.” William F. Buckley’s old magazine, National Review, allowed as how there is “much that is peculiar, and much that is worrying” about the new polling data.

That reactionary Republicans get a little hysterical at the mention of the word “socialism” is not news. But the reaction to there reaction is. No two groups of Americans talk so much about socialism in so many public settings these days as Republican candidates and conservative commentators. And this appears to be influencing the discourse.

Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing has done more to promote the cause of socialism than the ranting and raving of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just that the right has spread the word about socialism, raising the ideology’s profile to levels rarely experienced in recent decades—if ever—and associating the ideology with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, President Obama and a lot of other programs and people that Americans actually like. The fact that so many agitated, angry and—at least in some cases—politically toxic characters go apoplectic at the mere mention of the ideology has undoubtedly caused millions of Americans who don’t know much about socialism to say to themselves, “Anything that Paul Ryan does not like must have some merit.”

But I have to agree with the National Review assessment that the Gallup survey information “is worrying”—at least for conservatives. The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

Related articles

Egypt’s dangerous proposed constitution

Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

morsi

Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi has scheduled a national referendum for December 15 to vote on the new proposed constitution. Juan Cole is concerned:

The new constitution promises many rights, but also limits them in vague ways that could be opening to abuse.

As a historian, I am fascinated by the parallels of this proposed constitution with the 1906 Iranian constitution. In the latter, a committee of five ayatollahs was given review power to decide if legislation is in accordance with Islam. That provision was never really implemented (in 1979 it was made moot when the clerics just took over altogether). Likewise, the Egyptian constitution gives to the Muslim clerics of Al-Azhar Seminary (the closest thing the Sunni world has to a Vatican) the prerogative of interpreting Islamic law as it pertains to the constitution. Since the constitution puts Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for personal status purposes, and has other provisions that invoke Islamic law, someone had to decide what Islamic law is. Having al-Azhar make determinations that then feed into constitutional law is a way of ensuring orthodoxy.

The Iraqi Constituent Assembly in 2005 drafted a similar provision, for the Shiite clergy of Najaf to review legislation and interpret Islamic law as it touched the constitution. That article was dropped, however, under severe pressure from the US ambassador of the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, and from other Iraqi groups such as the Kurds.

Putting Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for matters of personal status is also troubling. Many secularists would not want to have their private lives governed in this way. In cases of intestacy, their daughters would only inherit half what their sons did. There is also a danger that this constitution could normalize the interference of religious groups and authorities in private matters such as marriage.

Disappearing the Internet

Politics, Technology, , , , ,

Ezra Klein takes a look at how difficult it would be for the government to shut off the Internet in various countries, as the nation of Syria just did on Thursday:

There are 61 nations, including Syria and Libya and even Greenland, where there are only one or two providers connecting people to the outside world. “Under those circumstances,” Cowie writes, “it’s almost trivial for a government to issue an order that would take down the Internet. Make a few phone calls, or turn off power in a couple of central facilities, and you’ve (legally) disconnected the domestic Internet from the global Internet.”

But countries with a more diversified Internet infrastructure are harder to cut off. It took Hosni Mubarak’s government a few days to shut down Egypt’s Internet. And a blackout is even harder to pull off in countries like Mexico and India. (It’s interesting to see that China is ranked as a “low risk” countries. As James Fallowsreported a few years ago, the Chinese government was able to set up its “Great Firewall” to censor the Internet in part because most of the country’s access runs through fiber-optic cables at just three points.)

Meanwhile, it would be nearly impossible for a government to shut down the entire Internet in the United States or Western Europe. “There are just too many paths into and out of the country,” Cowie writes, “too many independent providers who would have to be coerced or damaged, to make a rapid countrywide shutdown plausible to execute.”

Related articles

After the end of the world

Miscellaneous, , , ,

tree

Artist Lori Nix creates painstakingly detailed miniatures of bleak, post-apocalyptic landscapes:

“I loved Towering Inferno, and it just happened the other day, in Dubai,” she says, referring to the 34-story tower that went up in flames on November 18th. The diorama, Control Room, which was inspired by Chernobyl, brings to mind Hurricane Sandy and New York’s flooded subways. While the collection started a few years ago, Nix has added new scenes along the way (the subway and anatomy classroom dioramas above were completed last month).

“Our life as we know it is spinning wildly out of control and we may not be able to finance our way back to a healthy planet,” says Nix. This is The City’s premise, though Nix doesn’t specify exactly how human beings have screwed up the planet–and, ultimately, become extinct. “It could be climate change, nuclear annihilation, a virus. I leave it up to the reader to decide. But if you were the last person left alive, these are the scenes you might find.”