A coup in Africa is another quiet embarrassment for the US military’s most idealistic mission
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coup-africa-another-quiet-embarrassment-172939887.html
No, Police Officers Aren’t Resigning in Droves
“In an attempt to push back at the anger over violent police conduct and efforts to reform policing in America, we’ve been warned that all this outrage is damaging police morale, causing officers to quit and recruiting to plunge, possibly contributing to 2020’s spike in homicides and gun violence.
A survey released in July by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found what they called a “widespread staffing crisis,” declaring a dramatic 45 percent increase in retirements between 2019 and 2020 and an 18 percent increase in resignations.”
…
“The survey actually presents it as a more complex matter. Some of the quotes from the departments they’ve surveyed suggest that officers were retiring as soon as they could because they didn’t want to deal with the policing conflicts, but other quotes indicated other reasons and one mentioned “pandemic fatigue.” Some departments insisted that everything was fine, while others indicated that the problem was not with who they were losing, but with difficulty recruiting new officers.
A lot of people quit, retired, or lost their jobs during the pandemic. So this doesn’t really tell us much about increases in police resignations and retirements compared to other fields; we don’t have enough evidence to indicate that it’s a morale issue connected to demands for policing reform.
Once we actually do put the losses in the context of all other industries, the reality becomes clear: We actually have not seen a massive decline in the number of police compared to drops in employment in other fields. Over at The Marshall Project, reporters looked at the actual numbers coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In reality, police employment has been fairly stable, losing less than 1 percent—4,000 jobs—during 2020.
The losses actually followed several years of expanded police job growth, essentially returning it back to numbers from just a couple of years ago.”
Why white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts are obsessed – but very wrong – about the Byzantine Empire
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-white-supremacists-qanon-enthusiasts-222625204.html
India seizes $2.7 billion Afghan heroin haul amid Kabul takeover chaos
“Indian officials said..they had seized nearly three tonnes of heroin originating from Afghanistan worth an estimated 200 billion rupees ($2.72 billion) amid the chaos following last month’s takeover of the country by the Taliban.”
2020 Georgia Legislative Policy Forum Healthcare Panel Discussion, August 25, 2020
Vaccine Passports Should Be Neither Mandatory Nor Forbidden
Medicare Is About To Run Out of Money. Democrats Want To Make the Program Cost Even More.
“Medicare’s board of trustees produced their annual report on the program’s fiscal health. That report contained some expected yet nonetheless alarming news: Medicare’s hospital insurance (HI) trust fund, itself a kind of accounting fiction, will be insolvent in just five years. Starting in 2026, the HI fund, which covers inpatient hospital services, will be depleted.
The program will have to rely on the HI fund’s incoming revenues, essentially operating on a cash flow basis—and there won’t be enough cash. In 2026, the HI fund will only cover about 91 percent of its bills. In the years that follow, that gap will only grow larger. So without changes to the program’s financing, doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers will face rapidly reduced payments from the program, with ensuing ripple effects on both the wider economy, roughly a sixth of which revolves around health care services, and on the provision and availability of health care.
If anything, the program’s fiscal problems may be even worse than that: The new report assumes that an array of cost-reduction measures, including a series of technical tweaks the physician payments and bonuses, will persist. But they also note that Medicare’s “long-range costs could be substantially higher than shown throughout much of the report if the cost-reduction measures prove problematic and new legislation scales them back.
As anyone who has even a passing familiarity with attempts to control the cost of federal health care programs through doctor payment tweaks knows, those sorts of measures often prove problematic—which is to say, doctors don’t like them, and thus, for political reasons, Congress overrides those payment changes.”
Trolls Will Be Trolls, Online and Offline, Reports New Study
“If you’re a troll online, you are most likely also a troll offline, at least with respect to political discussions, reports new research published in the American Political Science Review. In their study, Aarhus University researchers Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen investigate what they call the “mismatch hypothesis.” Do mismatches between human psychology, evolved to navigate life in small social groups, and novel features of online environments, such as anonymity, rapid text-based responses, combined with the absence of moderating face-to-face social cues, change behavior for the worse in impersonal online political discussions?
No, conclude the authors. “Instead, hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline,” they report. However, they also find that online political discussions may tend to feel more hostile because the greater connectivity and permanence of various Internet discussion platforms make trolls much more visible online than offline.”
LC: The article and study seem to use a broader definition for “trolling” than I use.
Police Broke This 73-Year-Old Woman’s Arm During a Brutal Arrest. The City Will Pay Her $3 Million.
“Additional video shows three cops—Hopp, Jalia, and Tyler Blackett—watching the footage the day they booked Garner.
“Ready for the pop?” asks Hopp, as Jalia squirms and appears visibly uncomfortable. “Hear the pop?”
“What’d you pop?” asks Blackett. “I think it was her shoulder,” responds Hopp, as he re-enacts the motion.
“I hate it,” says Jalia.
“I love it,” one of the male officers responds. Garner did not receive medical care for six hours after the ordeal, according to the suit. (Blackett later resigned.)
Loveland Police Chief Robert Ticer has claimed that the department was unaware of the extent of the brutality until the lawsuit became public, but the contents of an internal report released yesterday appear to directly contradict that, with documents showing that Assistant Chief of Police Ray Butler viewed the footage and said that Hopp’s actions were “necessary, reasonable and within policy.”
“There is no excuse, under any circumstances, for what happened to Ms. Garner. We have agreed on steps we need to take to begin building back trust,” Ticer said in a statement. “While these actions won’t change what Ms. Garner experienced, they will serve to improve this police department and hopefully restore faith that the LPD exists to serve those who live in and visit Loveland.” He also said that department policy now requires an assistant city attorney and personnel from city of Loveland human resources to review use of force incidents, as opposed to just a member of the police force. Sarah Schielke, an attorney for the family, has called for his resignation.”