I’ve written a number of times before about a relative safety of police work. But recently, Ted McLaughlin at Job’s Anger provided more detailed information than I’ve been able to find, Police Officers Do NOT Have the Most Dangerous Jobs. So I thought we should go through the issue again. The point is not that police work should be dangerous. All human activities should be safe as possible. But the issue with policing is that as a society, we make such a big deal of the danger of police work. And this is used as an excuse for all manner of police abuse and incompetence. This would be bad enough if it were true that police work were really dangerous. But even that isn’t true.

One thing that I hear all the time is an officer saying (and more commonly, it being said for them), “When I leave for work, I don’t know if I’m coming home that night.” While technically true, it is also technically true of literally every person who leaves for work. Or you want to take it to absurd levels? “When I take a bath, I don’t know if I’m leaving that bathroom alive.” It’s true! In 2000, 341 Americans drown while taking a bath.

But you might counter this, “Yeah, but people drowning aren’t shot by criminals!” True enough. But most people who drown seem to fall and hit their heads. And here’s the thing: most police officers are not shot by criminals either. I discussed this in a related article, Let’s Not Turn Dead Police Officers Into Heroes. I noted, “The majority of police officers who die on the job, do so in traffic accidents. Thus far this year, there are almost as many health related deaths (mostly heart attacks) as shooting deaths.” So really, the most dangerous thing about being a police officer is driving so much — it means accidents and bad health because they sit around so much.

Ted also presented a chart that shows both total and violent deaths of police officers has gone down by almost a third in the last ten years. I know that Ted worked in and around law enforcement. He’s got a more positive view of the industry. I tend to think there is a more fundamental problem: police work (like politics) tends to attract the wrong kind of people for those jobs. But I think he is right that the issue is mostly one of management. The problem could clearly be minimized with better management. I am always reminded of something Jim Hogshire[1] wrote in You Are Going to Prison, “Rape and other forms of violence happens in any prison in inverse proportion to the amount of time and effort the prison’s administrators put into stopping it.” I think it is largely the same thing in police departments.

But my interest in the subject is primarily about the way that police officers spend so much time whining about how difficult and dangerous their jobs are. And the bigger issue is that we as a society allow them to do it. I respect police officers in the same way that I respect any civil servants. They are people paid to do a job. They have a fair amount of power. I don’t want to make their lives hard. But I won’t stand for their abuse of power. And the “police work is dangerous” myth is nothing but an apologia for police misconduct.[2]

[1] Jim was a taxicab driver in Texas many years ago. According to the graph above, that is a more danger job than being a police officer. He told me that he once crashed his cab when a customer threatened him with a gun. Jim was certain he was going to be murdered.

[2] It’s very possible that the myth is also helpful in keeping police salaries high. I don’t want to see their salaries lowered, however. I want to see effort made to bring back the middle class so that their quite reasonable salaries don’t stand out.

For much of this year, I really thought that Scott Walker was the most likely person for the Republicans to pick for their nominee. Part of this was just that I thought the Republicans would not pick another Bush. I mean, really: it’s embarrassing. This is the top pick of the “deep bench”? A third Bush?! Republicans don’t even like the first one. And everyone knows that the second one was a catastrophe. But Walker was everything that Republicans dream of: a hardcore union buster who is also washed in Jesus’ blood. And he even seemed to be getting a little fiery on the campaign trail. But now: nothing.

It seems to me the biggest problem is that Scott Walker is a follower, not a leader. And frankly, this is a big problem in the Republican field. It is probably one of the reasons that Trump is getting so much traction. Most of the others seem like they are afraid of going off script. This is especially true of Scott Walker. I don’t feel any passion in him. If he became president, it would be hard not to see him as a puppet of the Koch brothers. It’s hard for the Republican base to get excited about him when they see themselves as “bold” and “decisive” and (this is really funny) “independent.”

But the most obvious manifestation of this is the fact that Scott Walker is boring. And Matt Yglesias noticed that the newest ad for the guy just highlights this. It “casts Walker’s 2011 showdown with Wisconsin’s civilian public sector labor unions as a kind of awesome, exciting action movie.” It also, it should be added, totally distorts the whole thing. (“Liberal activists”? I think they were actually workers.) But Walker has been doing that all along. To me, all his talk of death threats just makes him seem weak. “Don’t get out of the car! Ordinary Americans are scary!” Again: he’s just being the good soldier for the Koch brothers.

Still, this campaign ad looks pretty good — right up to the part where Walker starts talking:

Yglesias’ argument is that Walker is the Tim Pawlenty of this campaign cycle. In a lot of ways, that seems to be fair. In particular, they look good on paper but they just don’t excite the voters. And maybe that’s a big part of the problem. Looking good on paper is good for a job interview or getting into college. But it doesn’t get you named prom queen. And that’s especially so when all the other people you are running against look fairly good on paper too.

But Yglesias attacks Pawlenty for the following video. His point is “the more amped up your video content gets, the more it sends the dullness of the candidate into stark relief.” I don’t think that’s the problem. I think Pawlenty’s ad works great. Maybe it didn’t contrast well to the candidate on the stump; but just looking at this ad, Pawlenty looks impressive:

Tim Pawlenty didn’t inspire in 2012. Part of that was his campaign. And given the way the campaign went — with Rick Santorum becoming a contender — I think Pawlenty might have succeeded if he had stayed in. There are fundamental differences between him and Scott Walker. First, he was clearly smart. Second, he seemed like he was at least in charge of himself. I really think that the way the Republican base sees Walker can be summed up in an honest slogan, “Scott Walker: He’ll Do As He’s Told!” And that is his ultimate problem.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog has a message worth heeding, Dear Reform Conservatives: the Anti-Reform Plutocrats Who Finance Your Party Won’t Magically Disappear. It is in reference to a recent article by Josh Barro, Is Trump the Candidate Reform Conservatives Are Seeking? In that article, Barro is more or less making the argument that Trump can cause a “reform conservative” to gain traction in the Republican primary. Barro seems to just get more and more silly as he ages. But that’s true of the “reform conservative” movement. These people will be waiting a long time for the conservative movement to reform itself. And the “reform conservatives” aren’t really helping.

Steve M scoffed at the notion that support for Trump does not, as David Frum was quoted as saying, serve “notice that the donors’ platform isn’t even acceptable inside the party.” The Tea Party — as I seem to repeat at least weekly — started not because of some libertarian concern about “big government.” It didn’t rise up when the banks got bailed out. It rose up when the government started talking about helping home owners. Of course, what it really meant is that the Tea Party isn’t an independent thing. It is just a new name for the Republican base. They’re always pissed off. It was just that the big money donors were willing to fund organizing against helping out ordinary Americans. The money wasn’t there to fund organizing against the bank bailout.

But the point stands. As Steve M said, “These same voters pulled the lever for a hell of a lot of Republicans running on precisely the donors’ platform in the past few years. What do you think the agenda was when Republicans blew out the Democrats in the 2014 midterms? It certainly wasn’t a rebuke-the-Koch-brothers agenda. It certainly wasn’t a rebuke-the-Koch-brothers agenda when Scott Walker won those three elections.” They actually do want to protect Social Security and do think that the oligarchs are manipulating the system for their own benefit. But these are minor issues compared to what all the Republican candidates deliver: demagoguery against the weak.

Even Reihan Salam in Barro’s article indicates that the Tea Party movement isn’t libertarian. Of course, that was clear from the start. The Tea Party movement has never made much sense. But the one aspect of it that binds them all together are conservative social issues. And in particular, it is all about abortion. A radical anti-choice position is the one thing you can depend upon with a Tea Party candidate. It’s probably because they are so focused on such issues that the plutocrats have no problem getting their own way on the economic issues that they care about.

The main thing for me is just to be reminded about how silly the “reform conservative” movement is. The truth is that it is filled with really smart people like Barro and Frum and Salam. Yet they are totally deluded. They can’t get past their own ideology to focus on the practical matters at hand. Are they really interested in policies that would help the middle class? Then why don’t they stand up for union rights? But the answer to that is obvious: they are far more committed to conservatism than they are to the middle class that their “reforms” are supposed to help. And that means that it isn’t just the Republican base that is willing to carry water for the rich — it’s the “reform conservatives” themselves.

See also: Josh Barro Phenomenon. That article, which caused me a lot of grief two years ago, looks pretty damned good now. I’d be curious to hear what Barro now thinks of Christie’s great decision on the tunnel. Was it really a good idea to kill it because it was too costly? If that was the reason he killed it (and I don’t accept that for a moment), then it is a whole lot more costly now.

Via Talking Points Memo, Ted Cruz: “I Stand With Kim Davis.” Davis, of course, is the woman now sitting in jail for refusing to do her job of issuing any marriage licenses because she is offended by the idea of same sex marriage. Cruz and Mike Huckabee are coming down in the same place on this one. Davis is supposedly a Christian martyr. Cruz said, “Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny.” It’s pretty boilerplate stuff coming from a “Constitutional” conservative. They love to throw around the word “tyranny” because it was in the Declaration of Independence. But the way they use it makes it meaningless. It’s just a word they use whenever the government does anything they don’t agree with.

Cruz made an analogy between Davis and San Francisco Major Ed Lee (for the sanctuary city) and President Obama (for immigration law enforcement). These are false analogies, but I don’t feel like going into them right now. The main thing is that this is being made out like a religious freedom issue. And of course that’s the way they are going to play this. But as German Lopez noted, the government actually offered to accommodate her by letting her pass the job on to a willing subordinate. But she refused.

I heard her husband on NPR earlier talking about how “the gays” want their rights recognized, but they don’t want to recognize the rights of Christians. Well, here we have it. Davis didn’t need to be involved with this. But she won’t be satisfied unless she is actually able to stop same sex couples from exercising their secular rights to marriage. It’s all about bigotry. And this could not be more clear. When last I wrote about this, I noted how strange it was that Christians like Davis didn’t just say, “Sure the government can ‘marry’ whomever they want, but God doesn’t accept those marriages!” But Davis isn’t standing up for God’s word; she’s standing up for her cultural privilege.

I’m not a legal scholar, but I do know a bit about drug law. For a very long time, drug users of various kinds of been making the argument that the use of this or that banned substance is part of their religious practice. And the courts have always said the same thing, “Nice try!” Similarly, people could say, “My religion forbids me from allowing African Americans to eat at my diner.” Or they could say, “My religion forbids me from paying income taxes.” It doesn’t matter; your religion could say anything at all. And that is why the courts have decided that you still have to follow the law.

Kim Davis is doing a great service to same sex marriage. In a different article, German Lopez wrote, Republican Candidates to Kentucky Clerk: Follow the Law and Marry Same-Sex Couples. Admittedly, the three candidates he highlights are on the less-crazy side of the crazy party. But still: Davis isn’t fooling anyone. She’s just making a big deal out of her religion and most people see it for what it is: narcissism. Most people I’ve talked to find it exhausting. Their response is, “Oh, just do your job!” It doesn’t matter whether they are for or against same sex marriage, they understand that the issue has been settled and Kim Davis is just an annoyance.

Meanwhile, if God exists, he, she, or it approves of this:

There is a Polish legend called the Nazi gold train. Supposedly, at the end of World War II, some Nazis filled up three train cars with gold and other valuables and then hid it in a tunnel under the Owl Mountains in southwest Poland. It is said to contain 300 tons of treasure. The reason I bring it up is because there are two treasure hunters who claim that they have found it. This is despite the fact that there is no actual historical record of it, and when Poland was under communist rule, the government did a lot of work trying to find it.

But who cares? Well, for one: an employer of mine. I’ve been working on a project that relates to this. But it puts me in a difficult position because I just ain’t buying it. Just check out the story here. Recently, someone who was supposedly involved in burying the train died. That was 70 years ago, so we are talking someone really old. And on his death bed, he revealed where the train was hidden. So these two treasure hunters went out and used ground penetrating radar and discovered a train. But that’s as much as we know at this point.

More recently, the two men — Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper — came forward. Maybe they think this is the real thing — or at least that the train must contain something of value. They offered the location of the train to the Polish government for a 10% cut. Of course, I’m even skeptical of this. It is a way of getting the Polish government to pay the bill for a speculative dig. Is the probability good or bad? It doesn’t matter to these guys. Even if there is just a 1% chance, it’s worth it to them!

It’s also interesting that the location of this train is not consistent with the local legend. The train was supposed to be in a tunnel. Instead, it was found simply buried under ground near a rail line. That doesn’t encourage me. On the other hand, maybe the reason no one has ever found the train is because the legend got it wrong. But that’s not the only issue. Maybe this is a train that the Nazis buried for other reasons. Or it is just a train that crashed and got buried in the course of the war. I find it fascinating, but not really from the treasure angle. Treasure never much interests me — just the stories that go along with it.

I really wonder about this dying Nazi too. Why didn’t he go to the Polish government and collect the prize? This is my guess: he didn’t think it had gold in it. He was involved in burying a train. He’s an old man. A couple of treasure hunters heard something about this guy talking about a buried train. So they go to him and get the information. No one has reported that the guy said there was gobs of treasure to be found. All we know is that he provided the location of a buried train.

One thing I am pretty sure of: this train doesn’t contain the amount of treasure of legend. If it had 300 tons of gold, that would be worth roughly $15 billion. I doubt that legends tend to make treasure troves smaller over time. So I’m skeptical. But the best thing for me is that it is a huge treasure find — because it means more (paid) work. That kind of treasure I am interested in.