This week's dispatches from the Ministry of Intrigue
Hello, faithful reader.
We published the following fresh dispatches this week:
How Baltimore achieved a historic drop in violent crime
July 16, 2025
April of 2025 represented a huge milestone for Baltimore. During that month, they had a total of five homicides, the lowest amount since they began tracking them back in 1970. This follows a progressive trend downward in overall violent crime. So how did they do it?
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D), who was first elected in 2020, has brought the city’s homicide rate down by treating violent crime as a public health crisis. That means treating violent crime as a symptom of multiple factors, including racism, poverty, and past violence. Addressing violent crime as a public health issue involves going beyond arresting people after violence is committed and taking proactive and preventative measures.
“What Baltimore did that’s so impactful is really invested in a whole ecosystem of community–oriented interventions,” The Vera Institute for Justice’s Daniela Gilbert told Popular Information. Under Scott, Baltimore has fought violent crime not only through policing but through a network of programs that provide support for housing, career development, and education.
In today’s political environment, these approaches are frequently derided as “woke” and “naive.” But the dramatic decline in violent crime in Baltimore over the last few years suggests that there is a better word to describe its holistic strategy: effective.
— Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, The secret to Baltimore’s extraordinary year
Well worth your time to read, and I hope lots of people do. This approach has been recommended by health officials for decades to virtually no avail, and it’s examples like this that will (hopefully) inspire more cities to follow suit.
Ed Zitron: Make Fun of Them
July 14, 2025
This one is a long read but well worth your time. The hardest part of this post was picking only one part to quote.
Yet men like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman continue to be elevated because they are “building the future,” even if they don’t seem to have built it yet, or have the ability to clearly articulate what that future actually looks like.
Anthropic has now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will “blackmail” people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system, something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, this is all a result of the halo effect of being a Guy Who Raised Money or Guy Who Runs Big Company. We must, as human beings, assume that these people are smart, and that they’d never mislead us, because if we accept that they aren’t smart and that they willingly mislead us, we’d have to accept that the powerful are, well, bad and possibly unremarkable.
And if they’re untrustworthy people that don’t seem that smart, we have to accept that the world is deeply unfair, and caters to people like them far more than it caters to people like us.
We do not owe Satya Nadella any respect because he’s the CEO of Microsoft. If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the state of Microsoft products. Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess that only sometimes works, leaving workers spending 57% of their time either in Teams Chat, Teams Meetings or sending emails according to a Microsoft study.
— Ed Zitron, Make Fun Of Them
And that's it!
Grave dust and falling leaves.