Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do too little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct. The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In January 2013, a patrol sergeant stopped an African-American man after he saw the man talk to an individual in a truck and then walk away. The sergeant detained the man, although he did not articulate any reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot. When the man declined to answer questions or submit to a frisk—which the sergeant sought to execute despite articulating no reason to believe the man was armed—the sergeant grabbed the man by the belt, drew his ECW [i.e. taser, AT], and ordered the man to comply. The man crossed his arms and objected that he had not done anything wrong. Video captured by the ECW’s built-in camera shows that the man made no aggressive movement toward the officer. The sergeant fired the ECW, applying a five-second cycle of electricity and causing the man to fall to the ground. The sergeant almost immediately applied the ECW again, which he later justified in his report by claiming that the man tried to stand up. The video makes clear, however, that the man never tried to stand—he only writhed in pain on the ground. The video also shows that the sergeant applied the ECW nearly continuously for 20 seconds, longer than represented in his report. The man was charged with Failure to Comply and Resisting Arrest, but no independent criminal violation.

As a child, I was a bad baseball player because my mind wandered.  Adults and teammates tried to improve my performance with a classic adage: "Always keep your eye on the ball."  I didn't change, but their advice was excellent nonetheless.

Laymen often criticize economics for its arcane complexity.  When I talk with non-economists, though, so many gravitate toward Rube Goldberg stories.  Random example: Yesterday someone suggested to me that failing to fire under-performing government employees is actually economically beneficial, because secure jobs sustain the middle class, the crucial bedrock of our economy.

When I encounter stories like this, I reply with an adage I urge my fellow economists to adopt: "Always keep your eye on production."  Whenever analyzing an economic problem, you should, by default, ignore longs chains of social causation and ignore distribution.  Instead, remember that mass production is the root cause of mass consumption.  Then ask yourself, "How will whatever we're talking about change the total amount of stuff produced?"
...
Productive societies are rich societies.  The rest is details.

When they're in major wars, governments often seem to suddenly discover my "Always keep your eye on production" principle.  Case in point: During the New Deal, Team Roosevelt eagerly pushed militant unionization, using now-standard arguments about the hidden economic benefits.  Like: "Unions boost demand by putting money into the hands of people who will spend it," and "Unions encourage technological progress by raising the price of low-skilled labor."

Once the U.S. entered World War II, however, the Roosevelt administration asked for - and received - the famous No-Strike Pledge.  Unions promised not to strike for the duration of the war, and their real wages eroded in the face of high inflation.  The reasoning behind the Pledge was clear: The war effort depends on production, strikes reduce production, so strikes are bad.  What about all those arguments about the hidden wonders of militant unionism?  Whatever - we're got to win the war.

Much as big industries have found natural allies in Republican attorneys general to combat federal regulations, plaintiffs’ lawyers working on a contingency-fee basis have teamed up mostly with Democratic state attorneys general to file hundreds of lawsuits against businesses that make anything from pharmaceuticals to snack foods.

The lawsuits follow a pattern: Private lawyers, who scour the news media and public records looking for potential cases in which a state or its consumers have been harmed, approach attorneys general. The attorneys general hire the private firms to do the necessary work, with the understanding that the firms will front most of the cost of the investigation and the litigation. The firms take a fee, typically 20 percent, and the state takes the rest of any money won from the defendants.

While prospecting for contracts, the private lawyers have also donated tens of thousands of dollars to campaigns of individual attorneys general, as well as party-backed organizations that they run. The donations often come in large chunks just before or after the firms sign contracts to represent the state, campaign finance records and more than 240 contracts examined by The Times show.

“This has gotten out of hand,” said Scott Harshbarger, a Democrat who was the attorney general of Massachusetts in the 1990s, when this practice first burst into prominence as a result of the litigation against tobacco companies. “And it seriously threatens the perception of integrity and professionalism of the office, as it raises the question of whether attorneys are taking up these cases because they are important public matters, or they are being driven more by potential for private financial gain.”

Regardless of your starting point, regardless of how quickly you may be able to process something initially, that most people who get to a high degree of success, it's usually because of this growth mindset. They're doing a lot of struggle, a lot of effort, they're embracing failure on a regular basis, and that's what's allowing them to succeed. Sure, I could have practiced basketball everyday, and I wouldn't be LeBron. That's just a reality of the world. But I would be a lot better. And it's hard to say who's going to get to that point. And you know there's a lot of even in our society and i think our Prussian model of school kind of reinforces this, we associate the ideas of slower and dumber together because it's like if you can't keep up with the assembly line, okay you're just going to be tracked someplace else. But there's actually starting to be a lot of research even that people who read slower, who process slower, actually get a much deeper understanding and if you kind of give them the time to process, they are more likely to be able to make significant connections in an idea. One example I give right now, you know, math, science, engineering, these are intensely creative fields. But they don't feel creative because, you know, the way we assess students right now in this domain is like if you were to assess future painters based on how well you mix paint, or future dancers based on how flexible they are, that's the same thing, to assess someone's mathematical creative ability based on how well they can factor a polynomial and how fast they can do it when they are twelve.

“In the absence of better sanitation and hygiene, we are forced to rely heavily on antibiotics to reduce infections,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, vice president for research and policy at the Public Health Foundation of India. “The result is that we are losing these drugs, and our newborns are already facing the consequences of untreatable sepsis,” or blood infections.

Some health experts and officials here say that these killer bugs are largely confined to hospitals, where heavy use of antibiotics leads to localized colonies.

But India’s top neonatologists suspect the large number of resistant infections in newborns in their first days of life demonstrates that these dangerous bacteria are thriving in communities and even pregnant women’s bodies.

“Our hypothesis is that resistant infections in newborns may be originating from the maternal genital tract and not just the environment,” Dr. Paul said in an interview.

In a continuing study in Delhi at several government-run hospitals that has so far included more than 12,000 high-risk newborns, and was made available to The New York Times, about 70 percent of the babies’ infections were found to be immune to multiple powerful antibiotics, confirming the results of earlier and smaller studies.

The brain is an exotic learning machine, to put it mildly. It does not take orders well. You can tell it to remember the major players in the settling of Manhattan, stress how crucially important that is, and on the test a week later very little comes back. And yet you might remember nearly every play in the San Francisco Giants’ Game 7 World Series victory. Why? Because the brain doesn’t listen to what you say; it watches what you do. And thinking often about Madison Bumgarner pitching, talking about the game, arguing about it: These are mental actions, as well as subtle forms of testing knowledge.