Sunday, November 20, 2011
Pain Compliance
[ed. If you haven't seen the video of this fiasco, please take a minute. It's attached to this article. Then ponder, as Digby does, the use of "pain compliance" as a method of asserting police authority (and her account of a similar situation against environmental protesters in Humbolt County in the 90s who had chained themselves to a tree and had their eyes swabbed with liquid pepper spray). For other reactions to the U.C. Davis incident see: Glenn Greenwald, James Fallows, Peter Moskos. From tasers to rubber bullets, tear gas to pepper spray, water cannon to body scanners, and, recently, even the use of drones, we're now living in a para-militarized society increasingly hostile to its citizens' First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.]
Police dressed in riot gear at U.C. Davis on Friday afternoon used pepper spray to clear seated protesters from the university quad where they had set up a small Occupy encampment, pro-actively and repeatedly dousing the passively-resisting students with a chemical agent designed to cause pain and suffering in order to make it easier to remove them.
It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America.
And yet it is all too American. America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century. It is a common fantasy among people born in the years since the great protests movements -- and even some not so great ones -- that they would have stood on the bold side of history had they been alive at the time and been called to make a choice. But the truth is that American protest movements in real time -- and especially in their early days -- often appear controversial, politically difficult, out-of-the-mainstream, and dangerous. And they are met with fear.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Current Events: USDA Targets Stores in Food Stamp Trafficking
by Laura Crimaldi, AP
A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores around the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.
Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer funds annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stories and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.
Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International, Inc., to step up the technology used to combat fraud.
"It's misuse of the program. It's a misuse of taxpayer dollars at a tough time. Not only the people who need the program are having a tough time, but the people who are paying for the program are having a tough time, too," said Kevin Concannon, USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.
The fraud is almost always found among the 199,000 smaller stores that process 15 percent of the nation's total food stamp transactions, Concannon said. (...)
The modern food stamp program was created in 1977 to help low-income families. Benefits are loaded onto plastic debit cards that can only be redeemed at authorized stores. More than 45 million people were receiving benefits as of August, according to program figures, nearly half of them children.
Nationwide, 234,000 stores are authorized to accept food stamps, including 35,000 supermarkets where 85 percent of benefits are redeemed, Concannon said.
Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated. A March USDA report found more than 8 percent of the large and small stores, 210,000 in all, allowed people to cash in their benefits between 2006 and 2008.
The analytical tools officials are turning to have paid off, they say. Even though food stamp spending has ballooned from $22.7 billion to $64.7 billion since 1995, the misuse of benefits has dropped from four cents to a penny on every dollar spent, said Food and Nutrition Service spokesman Aaron Lavallee.
Read more:
A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores around the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.
Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer funds annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stories and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.
Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International, Inc., to step up the technology used to combat fraud.
"It's misuse of the program. It's a misuse of taxpayer dollars at a tough time. Not only the people who need the program are having a tough time, but the people who are paying for the program are having a tough time, too," said Kevin Concannon, USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.
The fraud is almost always found among the 199,000 smaller stores that process 15 percent of the nation's total food stamp transactions, Concannon said. (...)
The modern food stamp program was created in 1977 to help low-income families. Benefits are loaded onto plastic debit cards that can only be redeemed at authorized stores. More than 45 million people were receiving benefits as of August, according to program figures, nearly half of them children.
Nationwide, 234,000 stores are authorized to accept food stamps, including 35,000 supermarkets where 85 percent of benefits are redeemed, Concannon said.
Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated. A March USDA report found more than 8 percent of the large and small stores, 210,000 in all, allowed people to cash in their benefits between 2006 and 2008.
The analytical tools officials are turning to have paid off, they say. Even though food stamp spending has ballooned from $22.7 billion to $64.7 billion since 1995, the misuse of benefits has dropped from four cents to a penny on every dollar spent, said Food and Nutrition Service spokesman Aaron Lavallee.
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The Hipsterfication Of America
by Linton Weeks, NPR
The hotel lobby in Franklin, Tenn., has an ultra-urban loft-esque feel — exposed air ducts, austere furniture and fixtures, music videos projected onto a flat panel. Everywhere there is lava-lampish aqua and amber lighting.
Sale racks near the front desk display chargers for iPods and BlackBerrys and a variety of snacks, including Cocoa Puffs and Red Bulls. Every room features a media box for digital video and music.
Welcome to Aloft, a hipster hotel on the outskirts of Nashville.
Nearby are Plato's Closet, a recycled-clothing store where hipsters shop, and Which Wich, a sandwich shop — touting its "edgy, magnetic environment" — where hipsters eat.
On the streets of Franklin and Nashville and almost every town throughout America now, hipsters scuttle by on scooters, zip around in Zipcars or Smart cars, roll by on fixed-gear bikes or walk about in snazzy high-top sneakers and longboard shorts. They snap Instagram photos of each other — in black skinny jeans and T-shirts with funky epigrams like "If You Deny It, You Are A Hipster" — and turn the pix into iPhone cases. They buy cool-cat snuggle clothes at American Eagle and down-market monkey boots at Urban Outfitters. They drink cheap beer, listen to music on vinyl records and decorate their lairs with upcycled furniture.
What's funny is that people who aren't hipsters generally express distaste for them and those who appear to be hipsters hate to be identified as such. Everybody hates hipsters ... especially hipsters.
They follow indie bands and camp out at Occupy movements. They work as programmers and shop clerks, baristas and bartenders. They are gamers and volunteers, savvy entrepreneurs and out-of-work basement dwellers.
In case you haven't noticed, hipsters — and those who cater to them — are everywhere. And that really galls some hipsters.
The Ironic Hipster
"Hipster culture is omnipresent," says Peter Furia, a founder of Seedwell Digital Creative Studio in San Francisco. "It dominates fashion, music and lifestyle. It crosses borders of ethnicity, socio-economic status and sexual preference — something that we haven't seen since the boom of hip-hop culture."
Furia's studio is producing a documentary-style Web series, American Hipster — for its nascent YouTube channel — that will debut in April 2012. "What's funny is that people who aren't hipsters generally express distaste for them and those who appear to be hipsters hate to be identified as such. Everybody hates hipsters ... especially hipsters. And the ironic part is that hipsters' opposition to pop culture has become pop culture."
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Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters /Landov
The Probability of Your Existence: Basically Zero
by Juliana Breines
At some point after first learning about the birds and the bees as a child (possibly after watching the opening credits of Look Who's Talking or thinking too hard about the implications of Back to the Future), it occurred to me that I could have easily been someone else. Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn't be here. Apart from being a minor existential crisis, this realization made me feel incredibly lucky. Out of an infinite number of possible people, I was one of those who got a chance at life.
I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration of one person's attempt to approximate the odds that each of us came into the world and exist as we are today. It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents' first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:
The probably that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to "the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided die. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero."
From a psychological perspective, this realization may induce a sense of awe. In a seminal paper, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as an emotion that is characterized by vastness (perceiving something that is much larger than the self, physically or psychologically) and by a need for accommodation (a struggle to comprehend something that does not easily fit into existing ways of seeing the world). The double rainbow guy of youtube fame, for example, is clearly in a state of awe (and probably also on drugs).
Awe can be elicited by interpersonal experiences, such as being in the presence of a powerful leader, or having an encounter with God or the supernatural, by physical experiences, such as witnessing a beautiful sunset or a natural disaster, or by cognitive experiences, such as trying to comprehend a grand theory (or an idea as seemingly simple as one's own existence). Research on awe suggests that it involves both a feeling of personal smallness and a sense of connectedness with something larger than the self. Awe-prone individuals (those who tend to have their minds blown more often than most) were found to define themselves as belonging to more universal categories (e.g., "an inhabitant of the earth").
In addition to feeling awe-struck by the near impossibility of your existence, you may also feel another emotion that has attracted the attention of psychologists in recent years - gratitude. Reflecting on near misses can increase happiness and appreciation, as Amie discusses in a previous post. So with Thanksgiving approaching, why not include on your list of things to be grateful for the fact that, against all odds, you and your loved ones made it into the world in the first place.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion Cognition & Emotion, 17 (2), 297-314 DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297
via:
Photo: thomasje
At some point after first learning about the birds and the bees as a child (possibly after watching the opening credits of Look Who's Talking or thinking too hard about the implications of Back to the Future), it occurred to me that I could have easily been someone else. Had my parents not happened to meet when they did, and happened to conceive at the moment they did, with a specific pair of egg and sperm, I wouldn't be here. Apart from being a minor existential crisis, this realization made me feel incredibly lucky. Out of an infinite number of possible people, I was one of those who got a chance at life.
I recently came across a lovely (if statistically questionable) visual demonstration of one person's attempt to approximate the odds that each of us came into the world and exist as we are today. It incorporates probabilities ranging from our parents' first encounter to our unbroken line of ancestors to the emergence of the first single celled organism, concluding with the following analogy:The probably that we as unique individuals came to be is equivalent to "the probability of 2 million people getting together each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided die. They each roll the dice, and they all come up with the exact same number - for example, 550, 343, 279, 001. The odds that you exist at all are basically zero."
From a psychological perspective, this realization may induce a sense of awe. In a seminal paper, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt define awe as an emotion that is characterized by vastness (perceiving something that is much larger than the self, physically or psychologically) and by a need for accommodation (a struggle to comprehend something that does not easily fit into existing ways of seeing the world). The double rainbow guy of youtube fame, for example, is clearly in a state of awe (and probably also on drugs).
Awe can be elicited by interpersonal experiences, such as being in the presence of a powerful leader, or having an encounter with God or the supernatural, by physical experiences, such as witnessing a beautiful sunset or a natural disaster, or by cognitive experiences, such as trying to comprehend a grand theory (or an idea as seemingly simple as one's own existence). Research on awe suggests that it involves both a feeling of personal smallness and a sense of connectedness with something larger than the self. Awe-prone individuals (those who tend to have their minds blown more often than most) were found to define themselves as belonging to more universal categories (e.g., "an inhabitant of the earth").
In addition to feeling awe-struck by the near impossibility of your existence, you may also feel another emotion that has attracted the attention of psychologists in recent years - gratitude. Reflecting on near misses can increase happiness and appreciation, as Amie discusses in a previous post. So with Thanksgiving approaching, why not include on your list of things to be grateful for the fact that, against all odds, you and your loved ones made it into the world in the first place.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion Cognition & Emotion, 17 (2), 297-314 DOI: 10.1080/02699930302297
via:
Photo: thomasje
Austerity Alternatives
by George Zornick, The Nation
On the eve of some decision by the supercommittee—or no decision and painful automatic cuts—this is a time to remember the other ideas out there for balancing the budget. There are plenty of credible and thoughtful plans out there. Granted, they are not politically viable at the moment, given the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives, and its ability to stop virtually anything in the Senate—not to mention the six votes it controls on the supercommittee.
But to listen to most media coverage of the deficit debates—and too often, the rhetoric thrown about by Republicans and some Democrats—one comes away thinking the only way to get the fiscal house in order is via “entitlement reform” and deep domestic spending cuts, along with higher taxes and fewer loopholes.
But this just isn’t so. For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus crafted a “People’s Budget,” which eliminates the deficit within ten years while creating a $31 billion surplus—all while protecting valuable programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. You can read the entire budget here (PDF), a one-page summary here (PDF), and an outside analysis by the Economic Policy Institute here (PDF).
Here are some of the plan’s features. On taxes:
The key theme of this plan is to put investment and job creation up front, while protecting the programs that many Americans rely upon for their economic well-being during a recession. Even Bill Clinton, no flaming liberal, called the plan “the most comprehensive alternative to the budgets passed by the House Republicans and recommended by the Simpson-Bowles Commission.”
Read more:
On the eve of some decision by the supercommittee—or no decision and painful automatic cuts—this is a time to remember the other ideas out there for balancing the budget. There are plenty of credible and thoughtful plans out there. Granted, they are not politically viable at the moment, given the Republican Party’s control of the House of Representatives, and its ability to stop virtually anything in the Senate—not to mention the six votes it controls on the supercommittee.
But to listen to most media coverage of the deficit debates—and too often, the rhetoric thrown about by Republicans and some Democrats—one comes away thinking the only way to get the fiscal house in order is via “entitlement reform” and deep domestic spending cuts, along with higher taxes and fewer loopholes.
But this just isn’t so. For example, the Congressional Progressive Caucus crafted a “People’s Budget,” which eliminates the deficit within ten years while creating a $31 billion surplus—all while protecting valuable programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. You can read the entire budget here (PDF), a one-page summary here (PDF), and an outside analysis by the Economic Policy Institute here (PDF).
Here are some of the plan’s features. On taxes:
- Ends the recently passed upper-income tax cuts and lets Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of 2012 Extends tax credits for the middle class, families and students Creates new tax brackets that range from 45 percent starting at $1 million to 49 percent for $1 billion or more Implements a progressive estate tax Eliminates corporate welfare for oil, gas and coal companies; closes loopholes for multinational corporations Enacts a financial crisis responsibility fee and a financial speculation tax on derivatives and foreign exchange
- Enacts a healthcare public option and negotiates prescription payments with pharmaceutical companies Prevents any cuts to Medicare physician payments for a decade
- Responsibly ends our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to leave America more secure both home and abroad Cuts defense spending by reducing conventional forces, procurement and costly R&D programs
The key theme of this plan is to put investment and job creation up front, while protecting the programs that many Americans rely upon for their economic well-being during a recession. Even Bill Clinton, no flaming liberal, called the plan “the most comprehensive alternative to the budgets passed by the House Republicans and recommended by the Simpson-Bowles Commission.”
Read more:
Friday, November 18, 2011
Forever Green
[ed. Very sweet interview with the Green One himself.]
by Emma Barker, The Daily
He has had decades of success — if not ease — being green. But Kermit the Frog is known to keep his personal life close to his little collar.
His celebrity has been free of public scandal — no affairs, no drug-fueled hotel trashings, no anti-Semitic (or anti-human) slurs. Nothing too notable — aside from his stunningly successful career itself, and a very public, somewhat masochistic, cross-species relationship with a pig.
With a new movie opening Wednesday, Kermit is riding high — and available for a rare interview. Despite his docile demeanor, I was nervous when I emailed Kermit, now 56, a question about his late friend, Jim Henson. Was it a touchy subject? And, more importantly, can Kermit type? I kept it simple: Describe your friendship. But my worry was misguided.
“I’m not exactly sure what Jim did, but whatever it was he really moved me,” Kermit wrote back. “Whenever I needed someone to lend a hand or give me a lift, Jim was there. Jim was so filled with great ideas. He loved to have fun, and he made everyone believe that absolutely anything is possible. Most of all, he wasn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and make dreams come true.” Then, “I love him and I miss him.” After Henson’s death in 1990, Kermit shied away from the public eye.
Now he is back, bigger than ever, in the loosely autobiographical “The Muppets,” a new take on the 1979 “The Muppet Movie.” Kermit is shown living out his retired years in a dusty, gilded mansion, complete with the likenesses of Kermit and Miss Piggy smiling from a high, electric fence. In the movie he acts tired, coming back to show business with the groan of getting out of a warm bed in the winter.
The turbulence and certain stress of working with “these crazy Muppets” since just after he lost his tail doesn’t show on Kermit’s face. He kicks his feet with a youthful exuberance and his wide, slightly crossed eyes pinch at the corners just a bit more than when he was still a collarless young frog. The frog’s mental fatigue shows only barely through the bright felt, like a mellowed Keith Richards.
Fozzie Bear, who is taller than Kermit and, unlike his best friend, generally wears at least one item of clothing, emailed me about the night he met Kermit. “I was working as a stand-up comic at the El Sleezo. I wasn’t doing much standing-up, but I was doing a lot of ducking and cowering in fear. Kermit walked in and liked what he saw — I don’t know if he liked my act or my ability to avoid injury, but from that moment on we were together, like brothers.” He continued on their special bond: “It was like I’d known him my whole life. He understood what I was trying to do — to become the world’s funniest stand-up comic bear — and he believed that I could do it. That’s what makes Kermit so special to me. Oh, and I also noticed that he was very green and still dripping wet from the swamp.”
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Ten Las Vegas Secrets
by Rick Lax, Guardian
If you want to gamble but don't know anything about gambling, play craps. More specifically, play craps and bet the PASS LINE. It's easy: you put your money on the table and somebody rolls the dice. If everybody starts cheering, you've won. If everybody gets quiet, you've lost. It's the closest thing to a 50/50 bet you're going to find (except for the DON'T PASS LINE. But if you play that, it'll piss the other players off). Head to O'Sheas, where the low-stakes craps tables practically pour out onto the strip, and where, if you crap out, you can take your final $20 and play beer pong against a team of just-turned-21 frat guys from Ohio State. Tell them you went to college at the University of Michigan – see what happens!
The Cosmopolitan is the newest and swankiest hotel on the Strip. It's the one that looks like the Wynn, if the Wynn were bedazzled by Liberace. As long as you're gambling away your hard-earned cash, you might as well do it alongside the pretty and the powerful. Oh, and if you're gambling at the Cosmo on a Friday, Saturday or Monday night, do it at a table below the elevator that leads up to Marquee, the hottest club on the strip; this is the best people-watching spot in Vegas. More affordable people-watching destinations include Kokomo's Lounge at Mirage and the coffee shop at Wynn.
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G.E. Bringing Good Things to Life
by John McCormack, Weekly Standard
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
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Image: Forbes.com
The fact that GE paid no taxes in 2010 was widely reported earlier this year, but the size of its tax return first came to light when House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wisc.) made the case for corporate tax reform at a recent townhall meeting. "GE was able to utilize all of these various loopholes, all of these various deductions--it's legal," Ryan said. Nine billion dollars of GE's profits came overseas, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. tax law. GE wasn't taxed on $5 billion in U.S. profits because it utilized numerous deductions and tax credits, including tax breaks for investments in low-income housing, green energy, research and development, as well as depreciation of property.
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Image: Forbes.com
Cargotecture
by OpenBuildings, The Atlantic
It is estimated that two million empty shipping containers are sitting idle at any given time. Given that, cargotecture, or the adaptive reuse of these giant steel shells, sounds like a remarkably obvious idea: It is sustainable; it creates original and surprising architecture; and there are time-saving, manageability, and module organization advantages as well.
The term cargotecture was coined by HyBrid Architecture of Seattle around 2004 to describe any system built entirely or partially from ISO shipping containers. It's a broad definition. Containers are so versatile that they can be exposed and incorporated into the exterior of a building or construction project, or they can be hidden away, used merely as a structurally strong prefab element. And, if they're used for a temporary project, shipping containers can easily be re-recycled into a new structure.
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Photos: Graft Architects: Platoon Kunsthalle; Mesarchitecture: Sky Is The Limit Observatory
Crowds R Us
by Ian Leslie, Intelligent Life
Shortly after the popular uprising that led to the establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871, the politician Georges Clemenceau recalled witnessing a riot: “Suddenly a terrific noise broke out, and the mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy…All were shrieking like wild beasts without realising what they were doing.” For those who followed the English riots of 2011, the terms are familiar. On television, in newspapers and comment threads, the rioters were repeatedly likened to animals in the grip of a primitive frenzy, induced not by drink or drugs but by another culprit: the crowd.
Crowds, we are often told, are dumb. They obliterate reason, sentience and accountability, turning individuals into helpless copycats. Commentators on the riots offered different explanations but most agreed that crowd psychology was part of the problem. “The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona,” wrote the novelist Will Self in the New Statesman. “The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds.” The violence was said to have spread like a “contagion” through the crowd, facilitated by social media. For those who wanted to sound scientific, the term to drop was “deindividuation”: the loss of identity and moral responsibility that can occur in a group. But do crowds really make us more stupid?
Earlier this year, the world watched a crowd bring down an autocratic government, by the simple act of coming together in one place, day after day, night after night. Egyptian protesters created a micro-society in Tahrir Square, organising garbage collection, defending themselves when they needed to, but otherwise ensuring the protest remained peaceful. As well as courage, this took intelligence, discipline and restraint. Few international observers accused the crowd in Tahrir Square of being dysfunctional, or of turning its members into animals. The Tahrir protesters also used social media, but rather than calling for a ban, as some in Britain did after the riots, people wrote eulogies to the liberating potential of Twitter. It seems that not all crowds are bad. But when bad things happen, the crowd gets the blame. (...)
John Drury, a psychologist at Sussex university who studies crowd behaviour, believes that the idea that crowds induce irrational behaviour and erase individuality just isn’t supported by the evidence. First, most crowds aren’t violent. The crowd in the shopping mall or at a music festival is usually calm and ordered. Even crowds that include conflicting groups, as at football matches, are more likely to be peaceful than not. Second, even when crowds do turn violent, they aren’t necessarily irrational. In the 18th century England was afflicted by food riots. If ever there was an atavistic reason to riot, that was surely it. But the historian E.P. Thompson showed that the riots took place not when food was at its most scarce but when people saw merchants selling grain at a steep profit; the rioters were motivated by a rational sense of injustice rather than the “animal” drive of hunger.
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Picture credit: Lorianne DiSabato (via Flickr)
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