How Blackberry, not Twitter, fuelled the fire under London’s riots

Learning to Cope With a Mind’s Taunting Voices

The job was gone, the gun was loaded, and a voice was saying, “You’re a waste, give up now, do it now.”
It was a command, not a suggestion, and what mattered at that moment — a winter evening in 2000 — was not where the voice was coming from, but how assured it was, how persuasive.
Losing his first decent job ever seemed like too much for Joe Holt to live with. It was time.
“All I remember then is a knock on the bedroom door and my wife, Patsy, she sits down on the bed and hugs me, and I’m holding the gun in my left hand, down here, out of sight,” said Mr. Holt, 50, a computer consultant and entrepreneur who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
“She says, ‘Joe, I know you feel like quitting, but what if tomorrow is the day you get what you want?’ And walks out. I sat there staring at that gun for an hour at least, and finally decided — never again. It can never be an option. Patsy deserves for me to be trying.”
In recent years, researchers have begun talking about mental health care in the same way addiction specialists speak of recovery — the lifelong journey of self-treatment and discipline that guides substance abuse programs. The idea remains controversial: managing a severe mental illness is more complicated than simply avoiding certain behaviors. The journey has more mazes, fewer road signs.
Yet people like Joe Holt are traveling it and succeeding. Most rely on some medical help, but each has had to build core skills from the ground up, through trial and repeated error. Now more and more of them are risking exposure to tell their stories publicly...

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Benedict Carey @'NYT'

Philip K. Dick’s Bible is on eBay for $6,500

HA!

Lest We Forget

U.S. Agents, an Aerial Snoop and Teams of Hackers

America's attempted Quartet sophistry

(Thanx Son#1!)

Australian court halts Malaysia asylum deal

Australia's High Court has stopped the authorities from deporting a boat-load of asylum seekers to Malaysia.

Lawyers for the group of refugees argued that their transfer to Malaysia would be illegal.
Judges ruled there was a "sufficiently serious question", and ordered a halt to such transfers until a full hearing can be held later this month.
The ruling could jeopardise Australia's deal to send 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia over the next four years.
Under the deal, Australia would take 4,000 refugees who have already been processed in Malaysia.
But critics say refugees are often mistreated in Malaysia, which has not signed several human rights treaties.
The group of asylum seekers was the first to be targeted under the deal.
They were picked up in Australian waters and taken to Christmas Island, which hosts a controversial facility where hundreds of asylum seekers are kept in detention while their claims are processed.
A human rights lawyer representing the 42 asylum seekers argued that sending the group to Malaysia would be illegal.
The lawyer, David Manne, told Australian radio ahead of the hearing that Malaysia had a "troubling record when it comes to treatment of refugees".
High Court Justice Kenneth Hayne ruled there was a "sufficiently serious question" for the case to have a full hearing, ordering a temporary injunction on the transfers.
Both Canberra and Kuala Lumpur have insisted their agreement provided the necessary safeguards.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said the agreement will "smash the business model of people smugglers".

But the Australian Human Rights Commission, a watchdog body, has expressed concern - particularly over the welfare of young asylum seekers.
"It is very difficult to see how he [Immigration Minister Chris Bowen] can be satisfied that it is in the best interest of an unaccompanied child to send that child to Malaysia, a country that is not a signatory to the refugees convention," its head, Catherine Branson, said last month.
Australia currently has more than 6,000 asylum seekers in detention originating from countries including Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.
The UN has previously criticised Australia for holding all asylum seekers in detention centres while their applications are assessed.
The migrants are held for months at the Christmas Island centre, about 1,500 miles (2,400km) from the Australian mainland, and in other facilities.
@'BBC'

A lover of fairy tales casts Obama as villain-in-chief

This one is going to hurt.
In what seems like a bid to definitively cement the perceptions of progressives disappointed in Obama, psychologist Drew Westen, a student of the alleged power of stories to shape political perception, has put together his own master narrative about Obama -- a merciless tale of presidential FAIL. It's a quadruple-length op-ed (over 3000 words) on the front page of The New York Times' Sunday Review section -- a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland.
Westen is a good storyteller. There is real force to many of his charges. But modeling what he says Obama should have done, he tells a simplified morality tale -- highly selective, with a clear villain, and in some points demonstrably false. He makes copious use of political cliches about messaging that fail to take into account the degree to which economic conditions shape audience reception of a politician's message. Founded on the alleged timidity of the 2009 stimulus, his story fails to engage the question of whether Obama could have got a larger stimulus through Congress. And in the end, it devolves into an ad hominem attack with recourse to cheap psychologizing (notwithstanding Westen's protestations of scientific detachment) and unfounded impugning of motive.
Most of the indictment is familiar. Obama hedges and trims his positions (most notably the too-small stimulus). He avoids conflict and has made a fetish of compromise ("fetish" is Michael Tomasky's word, from a more focused and I think better grounded critique of Obama's conduct of the debt ceiling negotiations). It is hard to know what he stands for. And -- here is psychologist Westen's chief contribution to the indictment --he has failed to tell the story of the Great Recession in a manner that will advance effective progressive solutions...

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ASP @'XPOSTFACTOID'

♪♫ Lethal Bizzle - Babylon's Burning The Ghetto

(Thanx SJX!)

david_manne David Manne

High Court just ordered further injunction stopping Govt expelling #asylumseekers pending outcome of trial before Full Bench of High Ct

PaulLewis Paul Lewis

Met confirm disturbances in Enfield, Ponders Bar, Edmonton, Brixton, Waltham Forrest, Islington and Oxford Circus #londonriots

Revealing the roots of a riot

Senator Philip A. Hart (with glasses) next to mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh inspect damage done as result of the 1967 Detroit riot. (Credit: Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library)

In July 1967, an early morning police raid of an unlicensed bar—or blind pig—on 12th Street in Detroit set off looting, fires, and shooting that soon escalated out of control. By the time the civil disturbance ended six days later, 43 people were dead, hundreds were injured, more than 7,000 people had been arrested, and entire blocks of East and West Detroit had been consumed by fire.
The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News threw every resource they had into covering the uprising. And as the disturbance died down, journalists and commentators, most of them white, struggled to understand who the rioters were and why they had taken to the streets. One theory was that those who looted and burned buildings were on the bottom rung of society—riff raff with no money and no education. A second theory speculated that rioters were recent arrivals from the South who had failed to assimilate and were venting their frustrations on the city.
But for many, those theories rang false.
Philip Meyer, a national correspondent for the Knight Newspapers—parent company of the Free Press—flew into Detroit to help the exhausted Free Press staff. In a brainstorming session the day after federal troops left the city, Meyer proposed that the Free Press do a survey to delve into the identities and attitudes of the rioters. It was a bold idea. Louis Harris had published survey results in a newspaper column and in Newsweek, and the University of California had just released a report analyzing the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, but no newspaper had ever tackled such a project. Moreover, Meyer wanted to publish the results in three weeks. The Watts report had taken two years. “We had a lot of adrenaline going,” Meyer says with a laugh.
About 45 miles to the west in Ann Arbor, ISR psychologist Nathan Caplan was having similar thoughts. Caplan had spotted the smoke rising from Detroit on his way back from a family vacation, and had driven to Detroit’s 12th Street on the second day of the disturbance to see for himself what was going on. “I came back from there convinced that somebody has got to study this thing and get some sense of the inner dynamics while it’s still possible to get real-time data on its social/economic reality,” Caplan recalls.
Caplan fired off an emergency proposal to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) asking for funding to study the uprising. At about the same time, Meyer called an old grad school friend at ISR to see who might be willing to work with him on a fast but accurate survey for the Free Press. Caplan and Meyer met and quickly agreed to collaborate.
With the sponsorship of the Detroit Urban League and funding from area foundations and Henry Ford II, the survey team went to work. In one week, Meyer and Caplan drafted the questionnaire—pulling some questions from the Watts survey—and recruited and trained about 30 interviewers from a group of Black Detroit school teachers who fortuitously had just finished a nearby enrichment training program. Meanwhile, ISR researcher John Robinson, recruited by Caplan, used the city directory to draw a random probability sample of addresses in the riot area.
The next week, interviewers spread out through the stricken neighborhoods, reaching a representative sample of 437 Black residents; each day’s completed interviews were sent to Ann Arbor to be quickly transcribed to punched computer cards. The third week, Meyer and Caplan analyzed the data, and Meyer began to write.

Special survey report published by the Detroit Free Press on August 20, 1967. (Courtesy of Philip Meyer)

On Sunday, August 20, a month after the uprising began, the Free Press‘s special survey report took the city—and the nation—by storm. Among the findings: There was no correlation between economic status and participation in the disturbance. College-educated residents were as likely as high school dropouts to have taken part. Recent immigrants from the South had not played a major role; in fact, Northerners were three times as likely to have rioted.
The top grievances of those surveyed were police brutality, overcrowded living conditions, poor housing, and lack of jobs. Finally, the rioters were a distinct subgroup and did not reflect the overall attitudes of area residents. “The survey helped defuse the situation by showing how much good will there was in the Black community,” Meyer says.
The staff of the Detroit Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the riot. That, plus Meyer’s publication a few years later of Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods, changed media practices forever by inspiring newspapers to embrace the blending of social science and journalism.
NIMH sent Caplan’s survey proposal to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission. The commission, created by President Lyndon B. Johnson less than a week after the Detroit uprising began, gave Caplan the funding requested from NIMH.
Caplan and Jeffrey Paige, a graduate student, then worked together on a research design to repeat and extend the Free Press data, and collect new data in Newark, New Jersey. Their work became an integral part of the commission’s 1968 report, which made broad recommendations to correct inequalities between the races and to open opportunities for Black participation.
Susan Rosegrant @'ISR Sampler'