US markets were following the drops on global markets earlier today. I’m not entirely sure the US media is the primary cause here.
In that case it’s “panicky media blames already extent stock market drop on its own clickbait reporting” which is, I guess, marginally better? I certainly don’t think the “we’re all doomed!” headlines are helping anything.
On the other hand, we are all doomed. Sigh.
Except for Mitch McConnell, he is a lich
It is fair to bash the MSM, but occasionally they publish some gems
This ode to reading was terrific.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/26/banned-books-libraries-school-board-satire/
I regret to say they are putting the books back on the shelves now in Virginia, the threatened books, the banned ones. They have evaluated them and found them to contain no threat. (Reports of their containing pornography were greatly exaggerated, or perhaps adjudicators were simply not flipping fast enough.)
This is no good. Such books are bad. Maybe all books are bad, not just the challenged ones. Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside. They make you feel things, sometimes, hope and grief and shame and confusion; they tell you that you’re not alone, or that you are, that you shouldn’t feel ashamed, or that you should; replace your answers with questions or questions with answers. This feels dangerous to do, a strange operation to perform on yourself, especially late at night when everyone else in the house is sleeping.
They are an insidious and deadly poison. Years after you read them, they come back and bother you late at night. They clang around inside your skull. They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again. They have no respect for the boundaries of your dreams. They put turns of phrase into your gut where you digest them slowly and regurgitate them where they are least expected.
Maia Kobabe: Schools are banning my book. But queer kids need queer stories.
They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows. Nothing happens in them at all, or they take you to hell and take you back out of it. They teach you how to fold a paper airplane or what is the wrong dress to wear. When people in them do things that are wrong, you are just as upset as you would be if you knew them.
Bootlickers gonna lick boots, what ya gonna do?
How do you cover the crime beat and not realise that clearance rate is absurdly high?
There’s a new guy in town. His name’s Robocop.
RayRayK
3807
Here’s the clearance data I found from NYPD and FBI , not sure if there is a better sources. Looks like they were close to 90% on murders in the 4th quarter of 2019 and above 100% in the first quarter of 2020. Definitely looks like the reporter got sold a bit a framing (notice the drop in Q3 isn’t mentioned), but it is noticeable that clearances on murder hit close to 90% a couple of times and from the FBI appears to be pretty close in 2019, 2018, and 2017. The overall thrust of the story, that clearances dropped as homicides grew, seems to be accurate according to the data.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/clearance.page
Here is from the FBI.
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
Got to read that whole thread man.
116% clearance rate seems…unlikely?
antlers
3811
It’s perfectly possible if you have a backlog of uncleared cases and you are able to clear more in the quarter than are added, so the backlog shrinks.
That would be the obvious lie that’s there to distract everyone from all the other lies, I suppose.
Sharpe
3813
Classic example of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. For most of us, “clearance rate” means percentage of murder cases that are individually cleared, which means 100% is the maximum possible number. What’s being reported in those statistics above seem to be some kind of quarterly churn thing which to my mind is NOT a “clearance rate” in the sense most of us think of it.
It does seem a bit off. Nationally, the murder clearance rate is about 50-60%, so it raises some eyebrows that NY was reporting a ~90% clearance rate for years.
Sharpe
3815
They are obviously using “clearance rate” to mean something different than the general understanding which is IMO deceptive. What they are reporting is apparently “number of murders cleared this quarter (including old previously unsolved murders) relative to the current number of murders in that quarter” which is NOT the way I (and most people IMO) understand “clearance rate”.
Aleck
3816
Does anyone know what the “norm” is in how this is defined? I would imagine that murders often take more than a few weeks to “clear”, so quarterly numbers would naturally be depressed somewhat (and would then constantly be revised upwards after the fact as previous cases which hadn’t been “cleared” in the original quarter are subsequently cleared).
A more meaningful statistic might be the percentage of cases that are cleared within a specific time period – say one year – but I don’t know what the appropriate time period would be.
RayRayK
3817
The FBI stats I put above are on an annual basis and I think give a more realistic look at clearances, I think NYPD is required to report quarterly. The way of reporting clearances done by the NYPD is pretty standards as far as I’ve seen.
An issue I think is that because investigations can go on for months or years it makes it very difficult to put a time frame around clearances without losing data.
