Exercise for Depression, Illegal Immigrants Not So Scary, and Chocolate Causes Depression?
Exercise for depression or anxiety: The effect is similar to medication and talk therapy and better than relaxation, meditation, stress education and music therapy.
Surprise finding: Illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native Americans.
I think the chocolate argument is a correlation is causation error. Depressed people eat chocolate. But perhaps it doesn’t cause depression.
At least that’s my hope.
Interesting finding about illegal aliens. But it makes intuitive sense. If you were in a country illegally and trying not to get caught, wouldn’t that make you more likely to obey every law — even traffic laws?
Hope you are right Virginia. I think I’m going to go have a chocolat Kiss.
My experience is “It’s not what you eat, but what is eating you.”
In regards to exercise, it is my favorite activity of the day!
Don Levit
Surprising finding: Arizona column long on supposition, short on fact.
It says that over the last decade, violent crime has dropped by 19 percent, property crime by 20 percent. Crime has also gone down in the rest of the country, but “not as fast.”
As 19 and 20 percent aren’t rates, we don’t know how they compare to the rest of the country. Crime usually goes down in recessions. Furthermore, the article tells us nothing about a) the population of illegals (as opposed to legal) immigrants in Arizona over the decade, b) changes in the Arizona population over that time period that might affect crime rates, or c) changes in enforcement over that time period.
The srticle says that El Paso is one of the safest cities in the U.S. Compared to cities of the same size? By what criteria? And what does this prove about anything in Arizona? At its end, the article does quote a scholar as saying that closing old entry points, El Paso is specifically mentioned, diverted the flow of illegals elsewhere. Did that have anything to do with El Paso safety? We don’t know.
It says that Ruben Rumbaut and Walter Ewing (of the Immigration Policy Center) concluded that if immigrants suddently disappeared, crime rates would likely increase. The Arizona law is about illegal immigrants not legal ones. The article suggests that the Rumbaut/Ewing study combines the two. I could look, but life is short.
However, a couple of minutes on Google produced a 2005 GAO entry that an incarcerated populaton of 55,322 illegal aliens averaged about 8 arrests each. Eighty percent of all the arrests occurred in California, Texas and Arizona.
How does this compare to legal U.S. residents? The article doesn’t bother to say.
Thanks for your post, Linda. What you have to say is always informative.
I feel I must take some issue with the link claiming that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native Americans.
Since by their very presence here ILLEGALLY, all ILLEGAL immigrants have commited a crime, meaning they have a 100% likelihood to have violated our laws, I find it hard to accept that native Americans are more likely to commit crime.
Maybe I’m missing something (which I will admit is entirely possible as I did not read the linked article), but on the surface at least, this seems to defy logic.