Technology, Unemployment, and Our Children’s Future

By Hunter Richards

(The following is a guest post by Hunter Richards, a blogger for Software Advice. Hunter graduated in 2010 from Washington University in St. Louis with degrees in economics and film studies. Besides business software, his background includes government and non-profit work; he has worked for Senator Blanche Lincoln and the International Dark-Sky Association, a non-profit organization that works to curb light pollution.  In 2008, he was an intern for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Despite the tremendous benefits of information technology (IT), it comes at a human cost - the displacement of less-skilled employees. As software and systems automate an increasingly large portion of business processes, the displacement is affecting a wider set of workers. So despite an improving economy, 9.5% unemployment might last longer than many think.

Here we walk through a fairly simple story of man versus machine. It’s not a new story, but we went to the effort of pulling together and visualizing the relevant data.

Our conclusion? Drop the Wii-mote and hit the books.

IT spending has risen dramatically over the last 40 years...

IT spending has steadily risen since 1970. Trendlines and new opportunities like cloud computing suggest that the current dip in spending is only temporary.

...making us more productive...

Technology has made labor more productive. There’s a long-term upward trend in labor output rates, and it isn’t slowing down.

...which has led to rapid growth in corporate profits.

The resulting productivity has been great for business - greater productivity means higher profits. But these profits don’t benefit everyone. They accrue to the executives and shareholders.

IT is slowly replacing many functions. There’s an ever-widening divide in the labor market between skilled occupations and what one might call “low-level jobs” - simple clerical roles, plant-floor workers, and low-level support roles.

While national unemployment rates have ebbed and flowed...

...the uneducated are consistently left behind...

This polarization between highly-skilled and less-skilled workers is part of what’s eroding the middle class, pushing more and more people into the low income bracket.

...and wealth has shifted toward the highest earners.

The less-educated workers who manage to keep their jobs are falling further and further behind in the national income distribution as the relative value of their services declines.

Alas, high-tech industries are growing...

So how can you avoid being replaced by a machine? You’ll need to be one of the people who work in an advanced field that still requires highly-skilled human capital. Take the IT field, for example. The Tech Pulse Index tracks the growth of national economic activity in technology by combining data on employment, investment, production, shipments, and consumption. The Tech Pulse Index has risen sharply (with the exception of the dot-com bust around the year 2000), reflecting continued demand for high-tech workers. The same is true in other engineering disciplines, healthcare and finance.

...but an advanced education is required.

Are we educating people enough to slow the widening of labor market gaps? The graph above shows the percentage of all 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in degree-granting institutions since 1970. There’s an upward trend, but is it growing fast enough?

IT is good for society in the long term, but it’s a double-edged sword when considered together with labor market trends. Sure, the current economic despair owes its severity to many different issues - offshoring of jobs, the real estate collapse, and the national debt are just a few - but education and income disparities are long-term problems that demand attention. We must align education growth with productivity growth to close the gaps.

Abused Nation Syndrome: The Abuse of Politics and the Politics of Abuse

Alice Miller (1923–2010), the preeminent and influential Swiss psychologist, devoted her life to spreading this message: The roots of violence are known. No child, she says, is ever born violent. Violence is driven by nurture, not nature. Violence exists because most children on this planet are raised in violence … often beaten, humiliated, and broken in the first years of their lives.

Consider the options available to a battered child. If a child runs away, who will provide food and shelter? Self-defense is no option because fending off an overpowering adult is more likely to result in further mistreatment. How can a child resolve the contradictory experiences of adult as caregiver versus adult as tormenter? A child may try to be perfect, but perfection never works.

In most corners of the world, child abuse is sanctioned - even held in high regard as long as it is defined as child rearing. Thus, abusive practices are allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation often under the cover of righteous piety and administered with this injunction: This is for your own good.

The normal emotional release for anxiety, pain, and resentment is forbidden to battered children, who will suppress their feelings, repress all memory of trauma, even put their abusers on pedestals and idealize them. The life of an abused child turned adult may take many paths. Some may turn their repressed rage against themselves in the form of addictions, anxiety disorders, and depression, even suicide. Others may turn their suppressed rage against their own children ... or against society as criminal offenders.

The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world.

If we write a history of tyrants through the ages - along with their adherents, adulators, and henchman - what should we write about them? Shall we focus on recorded events, on the mass murder of their victims, and their legacy as villains of history? Or might we gain more insight in studying the abuse and violence that shaped their lives?

Joseph Stalin. From historical accounts, Stalin’s father, Vissarion, was a cobbler whose alcoholism led to business failures, domestic violence, and frequent relocations that left his family in poverty and deprivation. A family acquaintance recalls: “Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father.” Thus, the brutal and ruthless dictator remained faithful to his father’s example.

Adolph Hitler. Numerous biographies recall the Führer’s obsession with doubts over his family lineage - the illegitimate birth of his father, Alois Schicklgruber, and the true identity of his paternal grandfather. The presumptive fathers of Alois were two brothers, Johann Hüttler or Johann Georg Hielder. A third possibility was a Jewish family from Graz who employed the maternal grandmother during her pregnancy and paid her support money for 14 years. For Alois, the stigma of being born illegitimate, and part Jewish in a time of rising anti-Semitism, was a source of intolerable shame. Alois projected his self-loathing upon his sons, especially Adolph, in the form of daily beatings that once left the boy unconscious and near death at 11 years old.  Later, Adolph Hitler would write:

I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel (…) They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them.

More to the point, Hitler avenged his father’s shame upon the political stage … culminating in the Final Solution.

In the biographies of dictators, there is a consistent thread of early abuse in the lives of Ceausescu, Franco, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein, as examples.  Furthermore, brutal tyrants have an uncanny ability to mobilize the suppressed rage of followers, presumably abused as children, who become their adherents, adulators, and henchman.

It should come as no surprise that brutal tyrants and serial killers share common traits. Neurologist Jonathan Pincus interviewed violent criminals on Death Row to study the long-term consequences of severe childhood mistreatment. His findings:

• Every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and emotional abuse by at least one parent or caregiver;
• Each homicide reflected the same kind of brutality that the murderer had endured in childhood;
• Those who experienced extreme cruelty as children directed their anger at others as a form of retaliation;
• None of the convicts incriminated their abusers, even when consciously aware of the abuse;
• The pathologies of convicted murders were similar to the pathologies of their abusers;
• The biography of each and every convict represents a feedback loop of terror directed back at society.

The research of Jonathan Pincus shows that aggressive impulses accumulated in childhood play a role in causing developmental brain damage, usually as a consequence of long-term brutal mistreatment.

Is it possible for a nation, a society, and a culture to follow a similar path?  When demagogues and hacks strut their hypocrisy, hysteria and lies upon a national stage, why shouldn’t we regard these as analogous to abuse?  When citizens brandish guns, or imply Second Amendment remedies as an alternative to civil discourse, why shouldn’t we assume their purpose to bully, stifle debate, and suppress the rights of others? Does the impulse to win by any means and win at all cost remind you of the tactics of tyrants? Are these the signs and symptoms of Abused Nation Syndrome?

Assassinations, Arson, and Bomb Attacks,

Slaughter in a Unitarian Church,

Three Police Officers Killed in Precinct Attack,

Holocaust Museum Guard Shot and Killed,

Hispanic Family Murdered by White Supremacists,

If Ballots Don't Work, Bullets Will,

Don't Retreat, Reload.
(chilling - have a listen.)

Tucson Shooting Rampage - An Act of Political Terrorism

Lethal Bomb at MLK Parade in Spokane

An Interactive Map of Terrorism Since 2008

Is this the kind of society in which we want to raise our children - and the legacy we want to leave for future generations?

Open for comments …

Season's greetings

If you thought there was a silly season in Florida, you're right. If you think the season is shorter than 52 weeks, then I would disagree, although a case can be made that as long as the legislature is in session, idiocy is in season.

But there are high points, special events worthy of special status, although which ones to celebrate differ from political faith to faith. I don't know how Florida's "smaller government" believers took the statement by one state representative against a bit of legislation forbidding anyone to participate in or watch for purposes of pleasure any sexual act including animals with the exception of the requirements of animal husbandry, but she seemed to understand that as allowing female humans to marry animals and she certainly opposed that, thank you very much. It's hard to stand out as an idiot in a Florida crowd, but perhaps the following resolution, which was introduced last Christmas Eve by Sen. Gary Siplin, an Orlando Democrat, that would designate "Merry Christmas" as the official state greeting for December 25 will come close:

WHEREAS, Christmas, a holiday of great significance to most Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world, and
WHEREAS, on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, and
WHEREAS, popular modern customs of the holiday include gift-giving, music, the exchange of greeting cards, a special meal, church celebrations, and the display of Christmas trees, lights, and nativity scenes, and
WHEREAS, many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world celebrate Christmas as a time to cherish and serve others, NOW, THEREFORE,
Be It Resolved by the Senate of the State of Florida:
That “Merry Christmas” is recognized as the State of Florida’s official greeting for December 25.

Can anyone make up stuff like this? I can't, and I wouldn't dare clog up the wheels of progress, if I'm still allowed to advocate it, with such Christmas fruitcake legislation while Florida is at the top of the unemployment and foreclosure heap. And yes, Siplin is a Democrat and no, there's no false equivalence here. I report, you decide and let the batshit fall where it may.

If it passes or does not, it's a gift to cynics that keeps on giving and it seems that every time the legislature meets it is indeed Christmas. Just don't ever call it a holiday.

Some Thoughts on Being Human

Every generation has bemoaned that we are on the course to self-destruction and I suppose that it is inevitable that one day we will achieve annihilation.
However, until we do, what makes us human is our ability to hope, to strive for something better. We do horrible, despicable things to each other and the planet but still we struggle onward. Even in the midst of our destructive impulses we manage to create works of art that make one breathless, and music that momentarily transports one to a place of infinite pleasure. We create ugliness but we also create beauty. Perhaps that is what makes us human, the dark and the light.

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy familes are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."[ Anna Karenina] I can't help but think that there would be no great art if we were all happy and harmonious; certainly, there would be far less great literature for it's our foibles and failings that fill the billions of pages written over the generations.

My fellow humans fascinate, repulse, and enchant me. I find myself aghast at the horrors that we are capable of perpetrating upon one another. The recent masacre by a mentally unstable young man leaves me choking on a mix of sadness and anger. It appears that his illness was apparent and had been noted by others but no one engaged in any concrete intervention so he was left to listen to the voices in his head and eventually act upon their advice.

However, I also find myself astounded at our creativity. A poem that makes me affirm, "That's exactly how I feel!" Or a singer heard on the radio who makes me pause whatever I may be doing and engage fully in the performance. A Puccini aria sung by Kiri te Kanawa can literally stop me in my tracks and sweep me off to some land that I've never been except in my dreams. Or it can be something as simple as my two-year-old great nephew scribbling with fat crayons thicker than his fingers on a sheet of paper and then proudly sharing his work with me so that I may look and marvel. My reward is the sweetest smile that I've ever seen and my heart aches with love and I'm content.

This being human is a complex state. Our flaws are many but I would not choose to be anything more or less than simply human.

Dame Kiri te Kanawa singing "O Mio Babbino Caro."

NORMAN MCLAREN - REVISITED

Pound, pound, pound … sometimes I feel as if I am on the wrong end of a pile driver. The constant bickering between Rhett or Rick is wearing me down.

Almost two years ago, I posted this short, stop-motion animation by Normal McLaren who won an Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1953.  Yikes: 1953!  You would think we would have learned something in the past half century, in the past 234 years since the republic was born, in the past 6,000 years of recorded history …

Never mind: Just watch the damn film (and pay attention).

Out, out, damned spot

I saw this clip on The Impolitic this morning: perky Sharron Angle having a bit of a smugfest about how Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Ben Franklin really wanted us to have the uninfringable right to own firearms, not to facilitate raising a militia, as was stated, or to put food on the table or keep the fox out of the henhouse, but to protect us against tyrannical despots demanding to provide us with affordable health care.



To be fair, I'd like to know the rest of the sentence starting "we need to take Harry Reid out. . ." Vote him out of his elected position, or just "take him out?"

Inquiring minds want to know, but batshit crazies with their hairy ears glued to the radio don't bother to ask. They already know. One has already spoken and as in Mao's famous statement about the voice of revolution -- from the muzzle of a gun. Indeed many self styled conservatives seem to have read intensively from the little red book.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt for the nonce, but although Jefferson did indeed, how literally I don't know, suggest further revolutions, one would have a hard time convincing me the system he helped design wasn't intended to facilitate that process bloodlessly and with due process of law.

The bit about guns being needed to protect against "tyranny?" to allow the minority to have bloody revenge for the actions of elected representatives? Sorry, Sharron, this is beyond the boundaries of acceptable speech and perhaps even further into the territory of treason, if fomenting armed insurrection against an elected government be such.

It recalls Henry II crying "will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Not exactly a demand that someone kill Thomas à Becket, but someone soon did and Hank got to wash his hands of the matter. Whether it be the king of England, the Queen of Scotland or a Prefect of Roman Judea, some bloody bastard is always seeking such cleanliness, but that damned spot usually proves rather difficult to remove.

Just keep saying it. "Words have consequences"

Good freaking god, right wing! What the hell is the matter with you? Can't a guy take a break? I mean, don't you know that Fallout: New Vegas is out there? And it's not going to play itself! Can't you just chill the hell out for a while?'

But no. It's Glenn Beck, it's Sarah Palin, it's all the rest of you ignorant fucks. You go spewing your violent rhetoric when you don't think it means anything, and then try your damnedest to back away from it when your chickens come home to roost, don't you? Seems to me like the only person who would, you know, "retreat," instead of "reload"... well, hell, if you can't live up to the stupid philosophy you've been spouting for the last three or four years, then I guess you're kind of a pussy, aren't you?

I mean, come on!!

It's sad when you've got to let your congressbitches Durbin and Alexander make excuses for you because you're too scared to face the demon you raised.

And you know, it's even sadder when people have been pointing out that the crazies are coming out of the woodwork on this very issue, over this specific graphic, for almost a year, and you still can't figure out that maybe you're part of the problem.

OK, let's be real. Every time you meet up with some rightard screaming about how "liberals just want to blame this on Palin," there's a couple of things to remember.

If they say "well, lefties talk mean about Republicans, too," remind them that there's a big difference between "talk" and "shoot." (The saddest part, of course, is the right wing trying to justify Sarah Palin's rhetoric by digging deep into the farthest depths of the internet to find leftists making threats, too.)

On July 27, 2008, Jim Adkisson walked into a Unitarian church, killed two people and wounded two others, because he "wanted to kill... every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book,” but knew he couldn't get to them.

On April 4, 2009, Richard Poplawski shot and killed three police officers, because he was scared of "the Obama gun ban that's on the way." He was an avid watcher of Glenn Beck.

There are literally dozens of examples of increasing, escalating rightwing violence over that last three years. It's time for these frothing media types to get a clue, that maybe their spittle-flecked rants are only making things worse.

As usual, Keith Olbermann said it best. And if you haven't seen this yet, you need to.


And, you know what? If you just have to get your violence on, you could try Fallout, where you get to kill people virtually for a while, instead of out here in meatspace. Give it a shot (so to speak). Nobody gets hurt, except for a couple of pixels. Try it.

The Liberals did it, the Liberals did it!

The reaction was swift and predictable. Trolls, whose abusive name calling I won't indulge by posting have assured me that the Arizona shooting was the work of a "Liberal" like me although a man obsessed with returning to the gold standard and pretty much toeing the Tea Party line sounds pretty conservative although I'm the first to say those words are less meaningful as descriptive words than they are as tribal markers. Enraged paranoid schizophrenic who was provided a target by irresponsible political rhetoric? But that won't do, this is a game for two parties, not for reasonable people.

Fox, without of course admitting any culpability or telling it's viewers that they were doing it, has demanded it's talking heads tone down the rodeo of rage. Sarah Palin redacted the hell out of her web site and that picture of smiling Beck pointing two pistols at the camera suddenly disappeared from view so that they can say who me?

I don't expect any public self-examination and I do expect the hunt for false equivalence to escalate on the Republican side along with the effort to portray the shooter as being outside the ring of righteous wrath, around which their circus tent is pitched. I'm sure that soon enough, Michelle Bachmann's desire to have people "armed and dangerous" so that they can "fight back" will be cleansed of inherent irresponsibility and any trace of inappropriateness, but I'm not sure the idiot rage can be stopped at this point even if God raptures up the entire Fox staff and Bachmann loses the power of speech. (please, God?)

The hoplophobes, the safety nuts who would dearly like and fatuously think they can legislate away all they are afraid of, (and that's lots of things) from cars that go faster than a Model T to McDonalds Happy Meals are pushing more gun control and usually without any knowledge of guns or how they're already controlled. There's a great deal of hoopla about "extended magazines" from those who call them clips and confuse cartridges with bullets.

"Why would anyone want one?"

is the loaded question as though they weren't the choice of many yacht owners who find themselves in an updated and unwanted episode of Pirates of the Caribbean - and many of my friends have been. It's either that or buy an Uzi at twice the price. They used to be banned! it's said, and that's true - or sort of true since they weren't really taken off the marked by that ban. With a supply of tens of millions of units, banned weapons and accessories actually saw a boost in sales of "pre-ban" items, but that remains news to those who really are so far out of the great loop of reality they think a semi-automatic rifle is far more dangerous when it has a plastic military stock instead of a nice walnut one. No military in the world uses what we're told is an "assault rifle" and of course the famous ban didn't actually ban these civilian weapons -- but who reads? Who needs to when we have those freeze dried, microwaveable TV Dinner opinions available? Solidarity, on both sides of the mainstream, is too much fun to risk and emoting is the American pass-time, of course. But I digress.

"That Jared Loughner was legally able to obtain the gun and ammo that he used to attempt an assassination of a member of Congress, slay a federal judge, and kill others should send a shiver down the collective spine of this nation."

writes one website Jeremiah. How could we have made that illegal without making it illegal for millions and millions and millions of people who like to shoot targets, clay pigeons or real pigeons? How could we make it impossible when all our efforts to make things go away by outlawing them have failed and made the alleged problem worse? Are Democrats all about not trusting the citizenry and imposing prior restraints without probable cause? It's too easy for their opposition to make that case and apparently it's too hard for Democrats to recognize the contradiction or that they're equally the party of fear as the party that obsesses about taking away guns and imposing Sharia law. In fact this incident could be a gain for Republicans who have used the fear of more gun bans to make Democrats into depraved authoritarian bogeymen.

Hey, that a handful of Saudis and Egyptians could hijack a plane because reinforcing the cockpit doors was an unnecessary government regulation is scarier, but that's just me. I still don't want to make all sharp things illegal. That Tim McVeigh and accomplices were able to buy fertilizer and fuel oil and rent a truck was more deadly. Where's the Mothers Against Ammonium Nitrate movement? What's to stop me from buying some and going spontaneously insane?

Frankly I'm more spinally shivered that people drive drunk while talking on the phone and smoking cigarettes at 40 over the limit in 7500 pound vehicles with bumpers at the height of my face. It's a clear and present danger. I'm in danger from people who run jet skis through packed anchorages at 60mph and towing their kids behind on inner tubes more than from madmen with guns in a country where violent crime has been declining for decades. If I go 6 miles southwest of here, I'm in more danger from alligators and wild hogs than from any man sane or otherwise. But even if we do ban everything that has the potential for mayhem -- like alcohol or drugs or 1200 horsepower speed boats; kitchen knives and chain saws, most of us are smart enough to know it won't solve the problem. Most of us.

The problem is crazy violent people. Instead of providing care and treatment, we protect their freedom to roam about, soak up the Fox fantasies about overthrowing the government with violence until they flip and buy a gun or drive the wrong way down the interstate -- or fly a plane into an IRS office.

Freedom isn't safe. I wish I could make those words flash like a neon sign and I wish the Democrats would not so quickly and obliviously shoot themselves in the foot by making this about more ineffective gun control. That's not because I like them so much. It's because what I want is something between the "we can't trust you to be responsible" and the "why should I have any responsibility for anything" attitudes.

I'm digital

I've decided to go digital; to give up the kind of thinking that goes along with gelatinous biological brains and let my thoughts be the product of magnetic patterns on spinning discs and the movement of charges across doped semiconductor junctions. It's amazing how clear things become without the hormones. It's remarkable how far you can see when the emotional soup is gone. I've decided I don't give a damn any more and why should I? You can't squeeze tears from monocrystalline silicon.

So if I see the pathetic end of the United States of America as anything but an increasingly irrelevant, ever petulant and narcissistic giant with little left but monstrous weapons and antiquated mythology as a claim to dignity, it doesn't bother me. Just look at Shanghai and then look at Detroit and tell me how our unending gobbling about rights and duties and liberals and conservatives aren't just aftershocks from an argument settled elsewhere a while ago. The world isn't going in our direction and our direction isn't going anywhere. All our concepts, whether they're from the danger-free and packed in cotton safety state side or the every man his own alpha ape, armed and dangerous fantasy camp, are already irrelevant. We obsess, we make ourselves impotent arguing about making happy meals illegal and whether we should have public education. In the fastest growing and largest country on earth, they shoot you for drunk driving and they're financing our consumerist binge drinking.

The greatest cities, the longest bridges, biggest dams and buildings - the fastest growing economies: they're all elsewhere and in countries with little respect for our ideas of personal liberty and where our individualism is seen as childish and antisocial and obstructionist. Sure, we'll go on yammering about mama grizzlys like this was the 9th century, and small town values and dietary fads, mysterious toxins and quack medicine. We'll still mistrust any new technology and talk to the spirits in pieces of quartz and call on their undetectable energy. We'll still wrap ourselves with bright pieces of red, white and blue and strut about like peacocks, booming about being the best, the biggest, the bravest, the most important -- and if we continue to subvert, dominate, steal and kill on our long downhill road to penury and oblivion, it will still be all about freedom and saving the world. They can ride from Beijing to Shanghai at 300mph in air conditioned comfort in the time it takes us to be x-rayed and manhandled in our decaying airports. I can't even take a 60 mph train to Chicago from here, or go there at all if it snows.

We quibble about our divine right to drive a Hummer or our divine duty to drive a Prius -- they build the biggest hydroelectric plant on the planet even if it means wiping out 5000 years worth of archaeology and displacing millions. They buy more Chevrolets then we do. They're building moon landers and aiming at Mars. We can't afford to go to the doctor.

No, when Haiti begins to look down and laugh at us while we bellow about smaller government and trickling wealth and creeping socialism, there won't be much left but our bloated delusion of relevance. It won't end with a bang or whimper but with the antic, puppet show grotesqueries of Beck and the nasal bleating of Palin. But it will end.

Will we hear the laughter eventually? Of course I won't notice or care if we do or don't. I'm digital.

ARIZONA CRIME STATS BACK SHERIFF DUPNIK’S CLAIM: “A MECCA FOR PREJUDICE AND BIGOTRY”

Original Research: RockyNC

Commentary: Octopus

Last year, RockyNC of the Swash Zone posted this article, Arizona Draconia, arguing in part that anti-immigration hysteria in Arizona is NOT supported by Arizona's crime statistics:

RockyNC - "With these numbers in mind, what DID prompt the Draconian measures enacted by the Arizona governor and legislature? The argument that they had to "do something" about illegals in order to fight crime sure doesn't stand up in light of Arizon's own numbers.

In aftermath of the Tucson massacre that claimed 6 lives and injured 13 others, it is revealing to revisit Rocky’s findings, especially within the context of Sheriff Dupnik’s remarks:

Sheriff Dupnik - "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

In response to Sheriff Dupnik, here is what Senator Jon Kyl said:

Senator Jon Kyl - “First, I didn't really think that that had any part in a law enforcement briefing last night. It was speculation. I don't think we should rush to speculate.”

And here is what right-wing radio host Jon Justice, of KQTH FM 104.1 in Arizona, said … calling on Sheriff Dupnik to resign:

Jon Justice - “It was a complete misuse of his power and he owes the media in town, TV and radio, an apology for his horrible comments in the middle of such a tragic day. He should step down immediately from his position as Pima County Sheriff.”

Lets look at the facts.

Overall crime rates in Arizona are down by roughly 12%; whereas bias and hate crimes are up by substantial margins. According to Arizona’s Total Crime Index, the composite crime rate dropped from 289,554 in 2008 to 255,133 in 2009, a decline of 12%.  In contrast, bias and hate crimes increased from 168 incidents in 2007 to 226 in 2009. Please note: These data show a reversal in bias crime trends. In previous years, bias and hate crimes had declined from 207 incidents in 2005 to 168 in 2007 … until anti-immigration hysteria kicked in and pushed the numbers up.

The good sheriff is right. Arizona has turned itself into Ground Zero for prejudice and bigotry, and there is nothing Senator Kyl, any baghead, or Sarah Palin can say to ‘refudiate’ the data.

In the abattoir, there is an old saying about the utility of pig slaughter:  Use everything but the squeal, they say. Tell me, Messrs Kyl and Justice and Mizz Palin …

How do you put lipstick on a squeal?