Flash mobs started out innocuously enough. Groups of people would pre-arrange to meet at a particular location and engage in what was essentially a form of street theater, ‘spontaneously’ breaking into opera arias in department stores or Handel’s Messiah in shopping mall food courts at Christmastime, or performing some sketch and the like, with the bystanders initially taken by surprise but enjoying the performance once they caught on. It was fun and meant to entertain and educate and enlighten.

The advent of social media has enabled people to arrange for flash mobs to appear with very little notice and no prior organization and this has led to new forms of flash mob behavior. This has been of considerable value for organizing protest demonstrations in repressive countries, as we saw with the Arab spring. These were not for fun but had a serious social purpose.

But a darker side to flash mobs is now emerging and Cleveland has seen its share of them. Large numbers of young people are being notified at short notice by social media to gather at a location purely for the sake of disrupting the lives of people in that area. Recently we had a case where a street fair in the suburb of Cleveland Heights was suddenly invaded by a large number of young people who are reported to have rampaged through the crowds attending the fair, knocking over people and stalls, stomping over people’s property in the surrounding neighborhoods, and seemingly bent on just destroying the enjoyment of the people attending a local community event. As a result, that city has imposed a curfew that prohibits young people being on the streets in the evening unless accompanied by an adult.

Soon after, the Fourth of July fireworks display that is put on in my town also suddenly saw the arrival of about 500 youths who again tried to rampage through the large crowd assembled to see the show, but apparently the police were ready for them and managed to control to situation before it got out of hand.

What complicates the situation is that the young people in these mobs are almost all black and not from the small communities where the disruptions occurred (which are both racially integrated) but from the neighboring large city of Cleveland, so this has raised racial tensions. There are concerns that the curfew policy is racially motivated and will only be enforced against unaccompanied black youth. It seems that the city of Philadelphia has adopted a similar curfew policy to deal with flash mobs there.

In one of the community meetings that followed one of these incidents, a young man tried to explain the actions by saying that young people had nothing to do because the community did not provide adequate outlets for them, and that this kind of behavior was a backlash to that state of affairs. I must say that I have very little sympathy for this point of view. I do not think that it is the obligation of the community to provide amusements for young people and am baffled that they feel entitled to it. When and why and how did this feeling originate? Is it because young people today grow up with their parents taking them hither and yon to organized events so that they have not developed the ability to amuse themselves?

At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man (which I am but that is neither here nor there), when we were young the thought that our parents or the community had to provide avenues for our entertainment never occurred to us. When we had free time, we young people would get together and organize our own amusements, which often just consisted of hanging around talking or organizing pickup games on vacant lots or going to see films, and the like. We were pretty much left to ourselves and yet I do not recall being particularly bored.

Frankly I simply cannot understand the mentality of the young people who are taking part in these destructive flash mobs. There seems to be no motive other than to spoil the enjoyment of ordinary people taking part in a community event. What enjoyment does one get disturbing the peace and frightening and even injuring total strangers? After all, the events that were disrupted were free and open to everyone so it is not as if they were being excluded.

Now there are reported cases where flash mobs are being created for the purpose of looting, taking advantage of the fact that they can send out the call to the mob, gather, loot, and disperse before the police can arrive.

In some ways, the phenomenon of flash mobs that form purely for the purpose of disrupting events and attacking people is more disturbing than those which either have theft as their explicit goal or where some people use demonstrations and other forms of social protest as an opportunity to create chaos and then steal, as seems to be what is happening in England right now. These are disturbing but at least they seem to have some rational basis, however slight.

My sense of bafflement as to what is gained by these purely disruptive flash mobs is similar to my reaction to vandalism. What does one gain by simply defacing and destroying things? It does not benefit you in any way. It merely degrades the very community and the environment that the young people themselves live in, making their situations even worse. Destroying things and creating trouble and fear among ordinary people just because you think you can and want to, with no other purpose in mind, bespeaks a seriously antisocial mindset. It reminds me of the disturbing dystopian futuristic Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange (later made by Stanley Kubrick into a film), where the young toughs terrorize people just for the fun of it.

It is a bad sign when young people start destroying their own communities and daring the authorities to come after them for no apparent reason but seemingly just to show that they can.

Stephen Walt traces the beginning of the end to 1990 and the first Gulf war, which ushered in an era of American hubris about its ability to direct events in the Middle East to its and Israel’s liking.

It is noteworthy that he does not ask if the American empire is in a state of decline. He takes that as a given. The question is what has caused it.

It seems pretty obvious to me too that the US is heading for a major crash because of its unsustainable policies, a combination of oligarchical looting at home and disastrous wars overseas. What puzzles me is why more people, especially those in the upper levels of government, don’t see this and take the necessary steps to avert the catastrophe.

Maybe Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon from 2010 is right.

I fully expect the Tea Party to go on the war path over this Newsweek cover photo of their icon.

When the same magazine published a cover photo of Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign that I thought was quite nice, I was taken aback at the protests that her wrinkles, pores, and facial hair had not been airbrushed away.

In the case of Michele Bachmann, not only do we see manic eyes, but also wrinkles, and who knows what else that I did not notice but I am sure will be highlighted by those who pay close attention to these things.

One of the worst pieces of legislation was the USA PATRIOT Act that was rushed through in the wake of 9/11 and enabled some of the worst abuses of civil liberties.

The original act was bad enough. But now two US senators have charged that “the government has a secret legal interpretation of the Patriot Act so broad that it amounts to an entirely different law — one that gives the feds massive domestic surveillance powers, and keeps the rest of us in the dark about the snooping.”

The two senators have called for an investigation but the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by the awful Diane Feinstein of California, has refused to allow this information to be revealed. Feinstein has been one of the most ardent supporters of the national security state apparatus, more concerned about protecting the powers of the government than the rights of people.

In research, the gold standard is to do a double-blind study in which you compare the effect of some intervention on a test group with that of a perfectly matched control group. But sometimes this is not possible, say if one is doing historical research or the conditions of the research are not amenable to being controlled by the researcher. Ethics considerations limit what one can do with animal and human subjects and if the trial might result in either group being denied a valuable benefit, such studies will be disallowed. For example, it might be valuable to know what the effect of some chemical is on infant development but it would be unthinkable to try out the experiment on test groups of infants if there is the risk of harm.

In cases such as this, researchers look for ‘natural’ experiments in which the desired experimental conditions occur naturally. Natural experiments are particularly valuable when it comes to medical research where the double-blind randomized trial is the ideal.

Such a natural experiment overcame the problem of determining definitively if Medicaid produced benefits for poor people or not. It would not have been ethical to divide the population randomly into two groups and give Medicaid benefits to one and deliberately deprive the other of them, as would have been necessary to create the appropriate protocols. As a result of this restriction, no definitive studies could be done to prove the benefits of Medicaid and thus opponents of Medicaid were able to argue that Medicaid was of no use and should be eliminated.

But in Oregon, budget woes resulted in a natural experiment occurring. Since the Oregon government had money to cover only 10,000 of the 90,000 eligible Medicaid patients, it created a lottery system in which only the winners obtained benefits, thus effectively creating a database of a large pool of subjects who could be randomized and matched in terms of other variables. Researchers seized upon this opportunity to study the effects of this difference.

Health economists and other researchers said the study was historic and would be cited for years to come, shaping health care debates.

“It’s obviously a really important paper,” said James Smith, an economist at the RAND Corporation. “It is going to be a classic.”

Richard M. Suzman, director of the behavioral and social research program at the National Institute on Aging, a major source of financing for the research, said it was “one of the most important studies that our division has funded since I’ve been at the N.I.A.,” a period of more than a quarter-century.

Researchers who used the resulting data to study the issue found in the first phase that people on Medicaid had better health outcomes than those not on it.

Those with Medicaid were 35 percent more likely to go to a clinic or see a doctor, 15 percent more likely to use prescription drugs and 30 percent more likely to be admitted to a hospital. Researchers were unable to detect a change in emergency room use.

Women with insurance were 60 percent more likely to have mammograms, and those with insurance were 20 percent more likely to have their cholesterol checked. They were 70 percent more likely to have a particular clinic or office for medical care and 55 percent more likely to have a doctor whom they usually saw.

The insured also felt better: the likelihood that they said their health was good or excellent increased by 25 percent, and they were 40 percent less likely to say that their health had worsened in the past year than those without insurance.

They benefitted in non-medical ways too.

The study found that those with insurance were 25 percent less likely to have an unpaid bill sent to a collection agency and were 40 percent less likely to borrow money or fail to pay other bills because they had to pay medical bills.

Thus being on Medicaid made people’s lives a lot less stressful.

Those who seek to deny poor people benefits in order to increase the wealth of the rich will try their best to find other reasons to do so. But this research is so definitive that it should end this particular argument.

Despite the strenuous efforts of the Obama administration to cover up torture by getting the lawsuit dismissed, a federal judge has allowed a torture suit against Donald Rumsfeld to proceed.

This is the second time a judge has allowed such a suit. Rumsfeld appealed the previous one and no doubt this will be appealed too but anything that causes these torture authorizers to sweat over the possibility of going to prison is a good thing.

I am sure that everyone is curious as to how The Undefeated is doing. On its third weekend, the number of theaters showing the film dropped from 14 to 4, resulting in gross receipts of $5,080, which I estimate works out to about an average 13 people showing up for each screening.

The total gross for the film so far is $112,078 which means that the producers are taking a financial bath but I fully expect them to recoup their investments (and more) when they release the film globally. I hear that Palin is really big in Kazakhstan because they can also see Russia from their houses.

The Onion gets it right again.

One sign of a smoothly functioning oligarchy is when everyone is so in agreement with what needs to be done that they don’t even have to discuss things.

David Corn writes about how this manifested itself in the debt ceiling vote. Despite all her public talk about how she disliked the deal, Nancy Pelosi came through for the oligarchy.

The interviewers have this weird idea that if people are really insecure about their jobs, they will work better. Damon lets them have it, but nicely. Listen to his very last words.