"What happens when a police department can no longer afford its bad behavior? In 2013, Tony Miranda was brought in to lead a police department in crisis. Bad behavior by a handful of officers had led to investigations and lawsuits with costs in the millions of dollars. That was more than the city could cover."
"He knew change would be difficult. But he also knew he had a powerful ally on his side: insurance coverage. On today's show, the overlooked force motivating police departments to reform bad behavior β not protests and picket signs, but spreadsheets and actuaries. This is the story of how Irwindale, California turned its police department around."
"This is especially true when the question involves the fundamental rights of citizens. That the government of New Zealand does not recognize the right to keep and bear arms as a civil right β a right that distinguishes citizens from subjects β is no more relevant to the question than the censorship enacted by the junta in Beijing is to the status of free speech as a civil right. Governments do not create human rights β they only recognize them or violate them."
"Democratic governments violate civil rights most often when their citizens are terrified and angry: That kind of fearful stampeding is how you get nice liberals like Franklin Roosevelt building concentration camps and rounding up citizens for detention based on their ancestry."
"The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we donβt count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age."
"The prevailing take on Attorney General William Barrβs letter to Congress on the Mueller report is summed up in the New York Times: βThe investigation . . . found no evidence that President Trump or any of his aides coordinated with the Russian governmentβs 2016 election interference.β But a careful reading of Barrβs letter suggests that that may be wrong."
"In fact, Barrβs letter quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as stating that the investigation βdid not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.β Saying that the investigation did not establish that there was collusion is not the same thing as saying that the investigation established that there was no collusion. Two points are worth emphasizing."
"We've written a lot about how income has changed (or not) for the rich, middle class and poor in the U.S. We've written much less about what the rich, middle class and poor actually do for work. To remedy that, we made this graph. It shows the 10 most popular jobs in each income bracket. Click on each job to see where it appears in different income brackets."
"No matter how you respond to the stories of climate past and climate future that these books tell, their very appearance may portent the beginning of a cultural transition. As the wild fires and flooding of the last few years demonstrate, climate change isn't just an idea anymore. Now it's something we all see playing out on the news everyday. We are, indeed, in uncharted territory β and we've just started down this road. Given that certainty, whatever hope we can find for the future will be the hope we create."