Straczynski then presumably added, “DC’s action subjected Siegel & Shuster to years of extreme poverty. They forced Jerry Siegel’s wife to beg DC to give her husband work. By the time Joe Shuster was 62, he was almost blind and living in a California nursing home, despite having created a character known and beloved throughout the world. And those are the reasons why I’m extremely proud to make comics for DC today. Those are my dogs! Those are my dogs that did that! That’s how my bros make it do, nephew! Woot Woot! Alan Moore signed a crummy contract, Joe Siegel signed a crummy contract, Jerry Shuster signed a crummy contract, DC is an empire of cruelty built on a mass grave of crummy contracts signed by broken men, but if that’s why I can make money today, then obviously, it was all worth it. And if I can anticipate your next question: no, there’s technically no evidence yet that anyone at DC was implicated in the death of Whitney Houston, but my fingers are crossed.

In one study, researchers used computers to generate several faces that were exactly the same except for the skin color — half were black and half were white. All respondents (yes, including black people studied for the project) were more likely to rate the black faces as showing greater hostility. In another study, scientists showed a group of subjects a video of one person pushing another person. When the “shover” was black and the “victim” was white, 75 percent of research subjects said the push was aggressive. When the “shover” was white and the victim was “black,” only 17 percent of subjects said the push was aggressive. Implicit racial bias has also been found in what researchers call a “shooter bias” — in which subjects playing a simulated video game are more likely to mistakenly pull the trigger on unarmed black men than on unarmed white suspects. The phenomenon has been tested and proved with police officers, too.

Though no one would ever think of using the term honor violence (we reserve that descriptor for brown people who live somewhere else, motivated by religious something-or-other or tribal something-or-other), one-third of women murdered every year in the United States are killed by their intimate partners. In 2005 that amounted to 1,181 women, or three women every day. To put that in perspective, the UN estimates there are 5,000 honor killings every year in the entire world. 5,000 in a world of 6 billion versus nearly 1,200 in a single country of 300 million. In other words, a woman in America runs a greater risk of being killed by her husband or boyfriend than a woman in Pakistan.

Imagine you’re Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old black kid walking home from the store, and some stranger follows you down the street in his car. He’s not a cop, and he’s harassing you. How do you react? What happens when you indicate you will defend yourself & he kills you? Does anyone arrest him? Does anyone care that you just died for not letting a stranger invade your space? Does anyone even think you deserve justice?

Building a profitable small-market company is difficult and carries a high risk of failure. Building a profitable large-market company is also difficult and carries a high risk of failure. But the marginal risk in building a company decreases as the addressable market increases. While a larger company may require more total work, the relative effort is less. Make no mistake: small-market companies still come with 18 hour days, flaky vendors, upset customers, and exasperated spouses.

Thinking small increases our risk. So let’s think big.

One week. Two car trunks. Four women dead.

Detroit police may be on the hunt for a killer who might be targeting escorts after it was discovered that three of the four women found dead this month are linked to sex-related advertisements on Backpage.com, police said Monday.

The website includes dozens of come-hithers from metro Detroit escorts offering exotic fantasies and erotic playtime.

“This tie for us is disconcerting,” Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. said Monday. “We’re stopping short of calling it a serial pattern.”

The key to the MM’s power is that most drug dealers will sooner or later, usually sooner, end up in prison. Thus, the MM can credibly threaten drug dealers outside of prison with punishment once they are inside prison. Moreover, prison is the only place where members of many different gangs congregate. Thus, by maintaining control of the prison bottleneck, the MM can tax hundreds of gangs.

One of the most interesting aspects of Skarbek’s analysis is that he shows–consistent with Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit theory–that as the MM grew in power it started to provide public goods, i.e. it became a kind of government. Thus, the MM protects taxpayers both in prison and on the street, it produces property rights by enforcing gang claims to territory and it adjudicates disputes, all to the extent that such actions increase tax revenue of course. The MM is so powerful that it often doesn’t even have to use its own enforcers; instead, the MM can issue what amounts to a letter of marque and reprisal, a signal that a non-taxpaying gang is no longer under its protection, and privateers will do the rest.

Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” If Jan had gone to the officers she trusted, they would have had to repeat her story to the same warden. Jan was only a few months away from release to a halfway house. She was desperate to get out of prison, to return to her husband and children. So she kept quiet—and the officer raped her again, and again. […]

A large majority of inmates who have been sexually abused by staff or by other inmates never report it. And corrections officials, with some brave exceptions, have historically taken advantage of this reluctance to downplay or even deny the problem. According to a recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a branch of the Department of Justice, there were only 7,444 official allegations of sexual abuse in detention in 2008, and of those, only 931 were substantiated. These are absurdly low figures. But perhaps more shocking is that even when authorities confirmed that corrections staff had sexually abused inmates in their care, only 42 percent of those officers had their cases referred to prosecution; only 23 percent were arrested, and only 3 percent charged, indicted, or convicted. Fifteen percent were actually allowed to keep their jobs.

No one, neither guard nor prisoner, wants to come here. The inmates are all high risk, and many have gang affiliations. With fewer staff monitoring the housing areas, among a host of other complicating factors, officers have been charged with deputizing violent teenagers to keep order for them and falsifying documents to cover it up. This muddled relationship—“the devil’s bargain,” as former prison commissioner Marty Horn calls it—can easily get out of hand as the inmates take over the asylum. “There’s nothing you can do, or anyone else, to make them stop fighting,” says the captain. “They are kids, and they want to fight each other. That’s what they do.” And some are stronger than others. “Jail is like the ocean,” says a deputy warden. “You got your bluefish, your barracudas, and your great whites.