The Anatomy of a Stimulus Package

It is a slow day in the small Saskatchewan town of Pumphandle and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit. 

A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night. As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op. The guy at the Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit. The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner. 

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves. No one produced anything. No one earned anything... However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a "stimulus package" works.

Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID

Student jailed for 2 nights when she can't show ID

By JIM DWYER
updated 11/2/2011 1:25:46 PM ET

NEW YORK — The arresting officer came by the cell, Samantha Zucker said, to make snide remarks about finding her with a friend in Riverside Park after its 1 a.m. closing.

For instance:

“He was telling me that I needed to get a new boyfriend, that I should get a guy who takes me out to dinner,” Ms. Zucker said. “He mocked me for being from Westchester.”

Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.

There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.

The judge proceeded to dismiss the ticket in less than a minute.

News about the Police Department lately could run under the headline of the daily Dismal Development, starting with a judge declaring Tuesday that an officer was guilty of planting drugs on entirely innocent people and continuing back a few days to gun-smuggling, pepper-spraying and ticket-fixing.

Here, in the pointless arrest of Ms. Zucker, is a crime that is not even on the books: the staggering waste of spirit, the squandering of public resources, the follies disguised as crime-fighting. About 40,000 people a year — the vast majority of them young black and Latino men — are fed like widgets onto a conveyor belt of arrest, booking and court, after being told to empty their pockets and thus commit the misdemeanor of “open display” of marijuana.

Such arrests are a drain on the human economy.

Ms. Zucker said that throughout her stay in police station cells, other officers were shocked that she had not been given a chance to have a friend fetch her ID. “The female officers were gossiping that the officer who arrested me had an incredibly short fuse,” she said.

We are instructed by the mayor that the garish crimes of police gun-running and fake arrests are the work of rogues, not the daily toil of honest police officers. A fair point — but no more than Ms. Zucker’s observations of spiritual corruption.

“While it may have been one out-of-control officer that began the process,” she said, “no other officer had the courage to stand up against what they knew was a poor decision.”

After two days of storming design firms around the city with about 80 classmates, Ms. Zucker stopped at the hotel near West 103rd Street where the group was staying so she could drop off the bag she had been schlepping. Then she got Mr. Fischer — a classmate, not a boyfriend, the leering remark of the police officer to the contrary — to walk with her a few blocks to the park, at about 3 a.m. They wanted to see the Hudson River, which runs past her hometown of Ardsley, N.Y.

“We’re there five minutes when a police car came up and told us we had to leave because the park was closed,” Mr. Fischer said. “We said, ‘O.K., we didn’t know,’ and turned around to leave. Almost immediately, a second police car pulls up.”

Its driver said they would get tickets for trespassing and demanded their IDs. Ms. Zucker suggested that someone could bring her papers from the hotel. “He said it was too late for that, I should have thought of it earlier,” she said.

Asked about the policy, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said officers can allow a friend or relative to retrieve ID. He did not say if a supervisor approved the arrest of Ms. Zucker, which was attributed in court papers to a Police Officer Durrell of the 26th Precinct.

Twice, she said, the officer told her not to call him by a specific foul term.

“I said, ‘Sir, I never used that word.’ ”
Advertise | AdChoices

No doubt he was hearing things: the unspoken truth about his unspeakable actions.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

This article, "Dismal Tale of Arrest for Tiniest of Crimes," first appeared in The New York Times.

Tony Robbins & Chet Holmes on Business Today

Demise of Guys?

Top 10 Takeaways from the Debt Deal

Top 10 Takeaways from the Debt Deal

How to mend a broken heart

"Faced with such overwhelming evidence of human lunacy, I let go of the notion that there is, somewhere, a proper, measured response to losing love. A broken heart makes us human, and sometimes being human is a ridiculous, painful, desperate thing." ~ Shannon Service


How to mend a broken heart

Erase Painful Memories With a Pill??

Pill could erase painful memories, study shows

By Linda Carroll, msnbc.com contributor

What if you could take a pill and erase painful memories? Most of us would probably choose not to lose parts of our past, but for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, such a pill might bring welcome relief.
In a study that sounds very much like a scene from the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” researchers have shown that the right medication might actually help rub out wrenching remembrances.

For the new study, researchers rounded up 33 university students and asked them to watch a video presentation that told the story of a little girl who has a horrible accident while visiting with her grandparents. While the girl and her grandfather are constructing a birdhouse, one of the little girl’s hands gets caught in a saw. One of the pictures shown to the study volunteers is of her mangled hand.

Though the girl’s hand is eventually saved at the hospital and the story ends fine, the presentation is tough to sit through and tends to cause viewers emotional distress, explains the study’s lead author Marie-France Marin, a doctoral student at The Center for Studies on Human Stress at the University of Montreal. “It’s not fun to watch,” she says. “It induces a lot of emotion.”

Before the video, Marin had instructed the volunteers to watch and listen very carefully to the presentation. Afterwards, she and her colleagues collected saliva samples to measure levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Then the 33 were sent on their way.

Three days later, the study volunteers were brought back in to the lab. Some were given a placebo, while the rest were given one of two doses of a drug that knocks back the amount of cortisol coursing through the body.

The theory is that cortisol is somehow involved in preserving memories, especially emotionally charged ones, Marin explains. Cut back on cortisol and maybe you’ll be able to mess with a memory -- even after it’s already been created and stashed away in the brain.

When Marin asked the volunteers to try to recall the video presentation, those who were given the cortisol-damping drug had a harder time recalling the more wrenching details. The higher the dose, the harder it was for them to remember.

Four days later the volunteers were asked to once again come back to the lab. Surprisingly, the drug’s impact on memory was still apparent: volunteers who took it still had trouble recalling the emotionally charged scenes.
Marin hopes that the study, published in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, might one day help people suffering from PTSD. She suspects that, in the right setting, the drug might help diminish the power of the traumatic event that kicked off the condition. The idea is that a patient would review the event with a psychotherapist after having taken the drug.
 
One of the most intriguing findings of the study is the fact that memories aren’t quite as indelible as we like to think. Each time we review them in our minds, there seems to be a chance for editing to occur, Marin says.
And that might lead to other interesting lines of research. “It might be that we can actually change them and create false memories,” she explains. “It’s a question that should be investigated. Using this paradigm, can memories still change once they’re formed? If they can, that raises some ethical questions when it comes to legal testimony.”

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.