Privatizing the agencies that find foster parents made the job cost a lot more. A little of that increased cost provided a raise for the foster parents, but most of it went to the business owners, through a tax-dodging scheme.

Privatizing the supervision of convicts on probation was supposedly going to do a better job of keeping them out of crime, and more efficiently. It didn't work. This is what I would have expected, for two reasons — one specific, and one general.

The general reason is that privatizing government services usually does a bad job. It has to cut corners in order to squeeze out profit. It has to pay people less, so it gets workers who are less capable and has them spend less time on each job (convict).

The specific reason is that human contact helps guide people away from crime. The way these companies increase "efficiency" means less human contact.

War is mutating into an urban guerrilla in which there is no one with the authority to make peace.

Protecting heavily addictive OxyContin was a bipartisan effort.

Tying the support for Boko Haram to desertification caused by global heating effects.

The article also says that Algeria has boosted al Qa'ida in the region, with tacit US backing.

People need attention, and paradoxically lack of attention makes people act in ways that repel attention, driving them into a pit of loneliness that digs itself deeper despite their best efforts.

A tiny fraction may be driven by this to commit various crimes, but the number of people that suffer without committing crimes is enormous.

I wonder if humans have a systematic tendency to reject any behaviors that are often signs of loneliness precisely because they may indicate loneliness. We might feel we dislike them for various unrelated reasons, all stand-ins for the fact that they suggest loneliness.