Baghdad: The Urban Sanctuary in Desert Storm?

According to Baghdad: The Urban Sanctuary in Desert Storm?, published by the Federation of American Scientists, Baghdad was not carpet-bombed in the Gulf War. In fact, it was hardly bombed at all:

• In 43 days of war, a mere 330 weapons (244 laser-guided bombs and 86 Tomahawk cruise missiles) were delivered on Baghdad targets (a mere three percent of the total of all smart weapons expended) (see tables 1 and 2).³


• Ordnance impacting in Baghdad totaled 287 tons (not even one tenth of one percent of the total in the air war).⁴ Contrast this with Linebacker II, during which aircraft dropped 15,000 tons on Hanoi in 11 days, 50 times the bomb tonnage on Baghdad.


• There were 18 days and nights when there were no Baghdad strikes at all. In eight additional days and nights, five or fewer weapons fell. There were only 14 nights when more than two individual targets were attacked within the city.


• Three of Baghdad's 42 targets — Iraqi air force headquarters, Muthenna airfield, and Ba'ath party headquarters — absorbed 20 percent of the effort.⁵


• The most intense "leadership" attack in Baghdad occurred on the last day of the war, when 21 bombs were delivered against the empty Ba'ath party headquarters.


• Only once, on 7 February, was a suspected presidential target hit with more than two bombs during an attack.

Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses

According to Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses, a report on the human cost of Saddam's policies by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Hussein's regime has used the following means of torture:

Eye gouging: Amnesty International reported the case of a Kurdish businessman in Baghdad who was executed 1997. When his family retrieved his body, the eyes had been gouged out and the empty eyesockets stuffed with paper.

Piercing of hands with electric drill: A common method of torture for political detainees. Amnesty International reported one victim who then had acid poured into his open wounds.

Suspension from the ceiling: Victims are blindfolded, stripped and suspended for hours by their wrists, often with their hands tied behind their backs. This causes dislocation of shoulders and tearing of muscles and ligaments.

Electric shock: A common torture method. Shocks are applied to various parts of the body, including the genitals,ears, tongue and fingers.

Sexual abuse: Victims, particularly women, have been raped and sexually abused, including reports of broken bottles being forced into the victim's anus.

"Falaqa": Victims are forced to lie face down and are then beaten on the soles of their feet with a cable, often losing consciousness.

Other physical torture: Extinguishing cigarettes on various parts of the body, extraction of fingernails and toenails and beatings with canes, whips, hose pipes and metal rods are common.

Mock executions: Victims are told that they are to be executed by firing squad and a mock execution is staged. Victims are hooded and brought before a firing squad, who then fire blank rounds.

Acid baths: David Scheffer, US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, reported that photographic evidence showed that Iraq had used acid baths during the invasion of Kuwait. Victims were hung by their wrists and gradually lowered into the acid.

Stress Test Recovery Predicts Heart Attack Death

According to Stress Test Recovery Predicts Heart Attack Death:

Lauer and his team found that the traditional stress test could predict some deaths. Patients with premature heartbeats during exercise were 80 percent more likely to be dead within five years than people with a normal rhythm.

But they found that the heart's behavior during the recovery period was even more revealing.

The death rate when an irregular beat surfaced immediately after exercise was 240 percent higher than normal, with an 11 percent chance of death over the next five years compared to 5 percent for people without the rhythm abnormality.
[...]
Three and a half years ago, Lauer and his colleagues discovered that patients whose hearts failed to slow down quickly during the first minute after exercise were four times more likely to die over the next six years that people whose hearts had a normal recovery time.

The Twin Towers Project: A Cautionary Tale

The Twin Towers Project: A Cautionary Tale makes a point I hadn't heard before:

It's cruelly ironic that the terrorists who attacked New York on September 11 targeted the World Trade Center as a symbol of American capitalism. For, from the moment it opened its doors in the early 1970s, the center, owned and operated by the publicly funded Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was really a grandiose monument to the ills of state capitalism, where government substitutes its bureaucratic and politically motivated thinking for the wisdom of the free market's invisible hand. Indeed, the WTC offers a case study in why government should not be in the business of developing and managing commercial property.

Our Islamic Fifth Column

In Our Islamic Fifth Column, Farrukh Dhondy, an Indian-Briton, describes his early experiences with Islam:

I was born a Zoroastrian, in India, a descendant of refugees from the Muslim conquest of Iran by Arab armies in the seventh century. The India of my childhood was full of superstition, of faith in myriad manifestations of the unseen, but even then one knew that Islam and its followers were distinctive. From the Shia mosque in Poona, where I grew up, there emerged every Moharrum night, the end of Ramzaan, a procession of chanting Muslims in black shirts, cutting themselves with chains and little daggers strung together, in frenzied and bloody penance through the night — a demonstration of a belief beyond the threshold of pain. They believed that theirs was the only creed, that their book was dictated by God, that Hindus were idolators and the worshipers of trees and monkeys, that Zoroastrians were fire-worshiping infidels, and that Christians were an ancient military enemy. Their faith seemed to me even at the time to exclude what it had not invented.

Creepy. His take on radical Muslims living in Britain?

If you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful and unfathomable being five times a day, if you are constantly told that you live in the world of Satan, if those around you are ignorant of and impervious to literature, art, historical debate, and all that nurtures the values of Western civilization, your mind becomes susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots.

Worse, it can become the instrument of others who send you out on suicidal missions.

The Dystopian Imagination

The Dystopian Imagination, by Theodore Dalrymple, covers a literary genre near and dear to any libertarian sci-fi fan's heart:

It is hardly surprising that a century of utopian dreams and coercive social engineering to achieve them should have been a century rich in imaginative dystopias. Indeed, from The Time Machine to Blade Runner, the dystopia became a distinct literary and cinematic genre, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 became so much a part of Western man's mental furniture that even unliterary people invoke them to criticize the present.

The Monument They Deserve

The Monument They Deserve describes one potential 9/11 monument I could endorse:

Stoddart envisions two bronze figures, personifying the muses of memory and history, atop two massive stone plinths that evoke the vanished Twin Towers. Each of the thrice-life-size figures — little sisters (as Stoddart calls them) of the nation's and the city's greatest and most iconic sculpture, the Statue of Liberty — holds out one of Liberty's attributes: Memory holds up her torch, and History holds out her tablet to catch the light the torch sheds. Between the bases of the two figures, directly below the torch, lies a heavily draped bronze catafalque, the only grave many of the dead will have.

In case you don't use terms like plinth and catafalque everyday, here are some definitions from Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: plinth
Pronunciation: 'plin(t)th
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin plinthus, from Greek plinthos
Date: 1601
1 a : the lowest member of a base : SUBBASE b : a block upon which the moldings of an architrave or trim are stopped at the bottom
2 : a usually square block serving as a base; broadly : any of various bases or lower parts
3 : a course of stones forming a continuous foundation or base course

Main Entry: cat�a�falque
Pronunciation: 'ka-t&-"fo(l)k, -"falk
Function: noun
Etymology: Italian catafalco, from (assumed) Vulgar Latin catafalicum scaffold, from cata- + Latin fala siege tower
Date: 1641
1 : an ornamental structure sometimes used in funerals for the lying in state of the body
2 : a pall-covered coffin-shaped structure used at requiem masses celebrated after burial

How to Fix Gotham's Taxi Mess

How to Fix Gotham's Taxi Mess, by Steven Malanga, explains some of New York's taxi history:

In the mid-1920s, New York licensed as many as 21,000 cabdrivers, and those who did the actual driving held the permits. But during the Depression, many drivers simply let their licenses lapse, so that by 1937 only about 12,000 were active. That year, under pressure from drivers, the city passed a law limiting medallions, a limit that eventually settled at 11,787. But the law went one crucial step further: it granted current medallion holders their licenses permanently, and it permitted them to sell the medallions. Later, the city allowed individuals to accumulate more than one medallion and to lease them to others.

The city, in other words, created a protected oligopoly in the right to provide cab service to an ever growing city. Just like the favored nobles and merchants to whom European monarchs of old gave a monopoly on precious commodities like salt, the fixed number of medallion holders, without ever lifting a finger, were certain to coin money out of the public's need for the service they controlled, a service whose supply became increasingly less likely to meet demand fully as the city's economy expanded.

Singapore Diarist: Lion in a Jungle

Singapore Diarist: Lion in a Jungle, by Howard Husock, makes the point that Singapore is surrounded by Muslim-dominated nations (Malaysia and Indonesia), has its own Muslim minority, and presents quite a target for anti-Western, anti-capitalist terrorists. It also makes some lighter points:

If Singapore is multiethnic, it is decidedly not "multicultural." When the island became an independent nation in 1965, the ruling People's Action Party made English the national language, even though few Singaporeans spoke English at home. Today, when I ask an American expatriate to describe the difference between Singapore and his former home of Los Angeles, his deadpan reply speaks volumes: "More people speak English here."

Tort Turns Toxic

Tort Turns Toxic, by Steven Malanga, summarizes what has happened to our legal system, and why we're so "sue happy" these days:

The tort mess began with a radical change in our civil justice system, presented as compassionate by its advocates. From colonial times, civil justice lawsuits required allegations of real negligence or broken contracts. But beginning in the 1950s, activist lawyers and judges succeeded in replacing the old tort system with a new one, based on the idea that people who had suffered harm while using a product or service should receive compensation regardless of whether negligence had anything to do with their misfortune. Over time, negligence all but disappeared as a legal concept, replaced by "strict liability," which meant that anyone remotely linked to a product or service that caused harm might have to pay the injured parties, even if he'd done nothing wrong. Under strict liability, doctors and hospitals guilty of no demonstrable negligence, for example, now found themselves facing — and losing — birth-defect lawsuits. The courts simply assumed that insurers would pack the costs of such judgments into the premiums doctors paid, and that the doctors in turn would pass those costs on to the rest of us in the form of higher medical fees. Misfortune would be compensated, and the cost would be spread across society.

Sounds reasonable, but what kind of incentive system does this set up?

One reason the trial lawyers have so much to spend on politics is the contingency-fee system. Under this system, lawyers get paid only for cases they win — typically 15 to 40 percent of each judgment. But as awards have grown humongous, fees increasingly bear little relation to any actual work the lawyers have done. In a Texas case that produced a $122 million payment to the families of victims of a fatal bus accident, for example, lawyers merely participated in settlement negotiations and never set foot in court — but scooped up $40 million in fees, or about $25,000 an hour, estimates Cardozo law professor Brickman. But even such mammoth sums seem tiny when compared with the fees from tobacco litigation. To date, lawyers have won nearly $13 billion for themselves, with some estimates of their hourly rates running as high as $100,000.

MIT's 6.370 Contest

MIT always runs cool contests for its project classes, and this year's 6.370 competition bears an uncanny resemblance to something I wanted to do almost eight years ago, when Java was new (and real-time strategy games were fairly new too, I guess):

As in last year's contest, your task will be to develop Java programs that will play a realtime strategy game using virtual droids. Each droid's hardware will be modelled as a set of abilities which your software will control through a fixed interface. Software will run in timesliced Java virtual machines written in Java, what we will call Droid Virtual Machines (DVMs). Using these abilities, droid software will be able to explore the closed universe and interact with other objects and droids.

This contest is based on realtime (RTS) strategy games. If you are unfamiliar with RTS terminology, please consult our primer. There are some differences to note from traditional RTS:

• Resources are not gathered and expended from a single, omnipresent "account" for each player. A droid may only gather and spend resources for itself.


• There is not a single omniscient player controlling the army. Each droid has a limited sensor and radio range and must communicate with other friendly droids to accomplish goals. As such, there is a very foggy fog-of-war in effect.


• There are no buildings per se. One type of droid is stationary, guards territory, and serves some other functions traditionally associated with buildings. However, they can also run code like other droids.


• There is no human intervention in the action of your droid army. Once a game begins, your software controls the droids until the game ends or is aborted.

What Do You Think?

I love The Onion. From the most recent What Do You Think?:

Decried as gas-guzzling road hazards, SUVs are also under fire for supporting terrorism by increasing U.S. dependence on Mideast oil. What do you think?

"But what if I need my SUV for sporting or utilitating?"
— Carl Davis, Roofer

"Yes, the average U.S. automobile has doubled in weight since 1990, but so has the average U.S. citizen."
— Amy Benton, Teacher

The End of Herstory

The End of Herstory, by Kay S. Hymowitz, makes the case that, in some ways, we're all feminists now, and that hard-line Feminism has become obsolete:

Up until a year ago, Amanda Laforge could have served as a poster girl for Ms. After graduating from Boston University, she went to American University law school. When she married, she kept her maiden name and her job with the Maryland secretary of state. When she got pregnant, she continued commuting 45 minutes to her new job at the state attorney general's office. When the baby came, she planned to take three months' maternity leave, and then return to the office for a continued climb up the career ladder.

It didn't turn out that way. Instead of becoming super career mom, she quit her job. Yet she shows no symptoms of Oppressed Housewife Syndrome.

Notes on Camp

I never attended summer camp, but from reading Notes on Camp, by Kay S. Hymowitz, I think I can conclude that things have changed:

One steamy night last July, while sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, I got a phone call from the head counselor of my daughter's camp in the Adirondacks. "Anna's fine," he assured me immediately, "but there's been an incident." During an overnight canoe trip, he continued, a 15-year-old girl from her cabin had downed a vial of the antidepressant Wellbutrin, left the lean-to where eight other campers were in their sleeping bags, and drowned in the shallow water of the lake. The counselor put my distraught child on the phone, and she chokingly told of a night far worse even than what he had described. Four other girls had also popped some pills: two of them had spent the night hallucinating; the two who were still lucid screamed threats when several girls in the next lean-to, including Anna, wanted to call a counselor for help. Three girls woke at dawn and stumbled upon the corpse facedown on the muddy beach. To cap the experience, the girls spent the next morning making a statement to a state trooper.

London Muslims 'Celebrate' 9/11

London Muslims "Celebrate" 9/11 describes a pretty disturbing celebration:

An obscene spectacle took place in North London on September 11, 2002. A thousand Muslims gathered at the Finsbury Park mosque to "celebrate" the bombing of the World Trade Center. The Metropolitan Police deployed a force 500-strong to protect the meeting, called "A Towering Day in History," from disruption. A dozen or so menacing-looking men with kaffiyehs over their faces stood on the mosque's steps to prevent unfriendly journalists from entering.

The "celebration" began promptly at 1 pm, so that participants could applaud the action of the WTC bombers at exactly 1:46 London time — the exact time, a year earlier, when the first plane hit its target in New York. Chairing the meeting was Abu Hamza, an Egyptian-born engineer turned Muslim mullah, who presides over the notorious Finsbury Park mosque, where several of the detainees in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, captured fighting for the Taliban and al-Qaida, received their theological training. Hamza also reportedly recruited to the jihad Richard Reid, the would-be shoe-bomber who failed to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001. The good imam is implicated as well in the training and instigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, under arrest on suspicion of conspiring with the 19 murderers of September 11.

I particularly enjoyed (if that's the right word) the description of their sinister leader, Hamza:

Hamza is in every way a sinister character. He is blind in one eye, and his left hand has been blown off and replaced by a metal claw. He claims in interviews that he lost his hand and eye when fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, and he uses these injuries as his warrior credentials. The claim is a lie. A British documentary producer, Alu Jamal, interviewed him on camera in Pakistan for a BBC film a year after the Russians left Afghanistan. The footage shows Hamza with his eye and hand intact. His injuries probably result from mishandling explosives.

The Reform Islam Needs

In The Reform Islam Needs, James Q. Wilson tries to make the point that "in time Islam will become modern, because without religious freedom, modern government is impossible" — but he also lays out exactly why that's not likely:

Moreover, the Muslim religion is quite different from Christianity. The Qur'an and the hadith contain a vast collection of sacred laws, which Muslims call shari'a, that regulates many details of the public as well as private lives of believers. It sets down rules governing charity, marriage, orphans, fasting, gambling, vanity, pilgrimages, infidelity, polygamy, incest, divorce, modesty, inheritances, prostitution, alcohol consumption, collecting interest, and female dress.

By contrast, the Christian New Testament has rather few secular rules, and these are best remembered as a reaffirmation of the Ten Commandments as modified by the Sermon on the Mount. One can grasp the whole of Jesus' moral teachings by recalling only two things: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

As Bernard Lewis has pointed out, the differences between the legal teachings of the two religions may have derived from, and were certainly reinforced by, the differences between Muhammad and Jesus. In the seventh century, Muhammad was invited to rule Medina and then, after a failed effort to conquer Mecca, finally entered that city as its ruler. He was not only a prophet but also a soldier, judge, and governor. Jesus, by contrast, was an outsider, who neither conquered nor governed anyone, and who was put to death by Roman rulers. Christianity was not recognized until Emperor Constantine adopted it, but Muhammad, in Lewis's words, was his own Constantine.

Jesus asked Christians to distinguish between what belonged to God and what belonged to Caesar. Islam made no such distinction; to it, Allah prescribed the rules for all of life, encompassing what we now call the religious and the secular spheres. If a Christian nation fails, we look to its political and economic system for an explanation, but when a Muslim state fails, it is only because, as V. S. Naipaul put it, "men had failed the faith." Disaster in a Christian nation leads to a search for a new political form; disaster in a Muslim one leads to a reinvigoration of the faith.

Islam's early history is one of conquest over infidels. Thus, the early Muslims never had to "render unto Caesar" — and now, hundreds of years later, Islam still explicitly states how government should be run.

How I Was Smeared

In How I Was Smeared, Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), describes a nightmare scenario that started with a few tongue-in-cheek questions from his book's back-cover list of How to Tell if You've Joined the "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy":

• You're actually relieved that your daughter plays with dolls and your son plays with guns.


• You sit all the way through Dead Man Walking and at the end still want the guy to be executed.


• At your kids' back-to-school night, you are shocked to discover the only dead white male on your tenth-grader's reading list is Oscar Wilde.


• And by the end of the night you realize the only teacher who shares your values teaches phys ed.

Stein goes on to tell the story of his son's English teacher announcing that Huck Finn is "racist":

My son, already very familiar with the Twain classic, raised his hand and told the teacher that, in fact, it was an anti-racist book — indeed, one of the most powerful ever written. Thus began an increasingly heated back-and-forth that went on for a good 15 minutes, culminating with the teacher saying, "It's clear you have to work on your racial sensitivity." "Are you calling me a racist?" my son demanded, deeply aggrieved. When the teacher turned away, refusing to answer, he stalked out of class.

And this all led to Stein getting smeared in the papers for using racial epithets.

What the Voucher Victory Means

What the Voucher Victory Means, by Sol Stern, gives some background on school vouchers, including this image of Ted Kennedy, anti-voucher, and David Brennan, pro-voucher:

Kennedy never found a public school good enough for his own kids, so why was he there in the front row, signaling support for the teachers' union lawyers trying to force Cleveland kids back into their dismal neighborhood schools? [...] The public education industry, with 5 million employees and $350 billion in annual expenditures, has become one of the key Democratic political constituencies, supporting through its powerful unions those candidates willing to keep the Wall in place and throwing its considerable weight behind other liberal policy goals such as national health insurance and affirmative action.

Sitting near Kennedy was David Brennan, the spirited, six-foot-five, Stetson-topped entrepreneur and industrialist from Akron, Ohio, who's been the prime mover behind the Cleveland voucher experiment. Like others in the school choice movement, Brennan joined up after some painful experiences with the public schools. During the 1980s, he discovered that many of the young workers in his manufacturing firms were functionally illiterate and innumerate. To help them — and to improve his workforce's productivity — Brennan created "learning centers" at his facilities. These company schools quickly and inexpensively boosted the employees' math and reading skills.

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, by Theodore Dalrymple, describes modern France's criminal-infested housing projects (cités), and the parallels to American housing projects are uncanny:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them — a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, "official," society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust — greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years — is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements.
[...]
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti — BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
[...]
[Pit bulls were] the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
[...]
Antagonism toward the police might appear understandable, but the conduct of the young inhabitants of the cités toward the firemen who come to rescue them from the fires that they have themselves started gives a dismaying glimpse into the depth of their hatred for mainstream society. They greet the admirable firemen (whose motto is Sauver ou périr, save or perish) with Molotov cocktails and hails of stones when they arrive on their mission of mercy, so that armored vehicles frequently have to protect the fire engines.
[...]
The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking. In Les Tarterets, for example, I observed two dealers openly distributing drugs and collecting money while driving around in their highly conspicuous BMW convertible, clearly the monarchs of all they surveyed. Both of northwest African descent, one wore a scarlet baseball cap backward, while the other had dyed blond hair, contrasting dramatically with his complexion. Their faces were as immobile as those of potentates receiving tribute from conquered tribes. They drove everywhere at maximum speed in low gear and high noise: they could hardly have drawn more attention to themselves if they tried. They didn't fear the law: rather, the law feared them.

Cops Can't Keep Up With Cactus Rustlers

According to Cops Can't Keep Up With Cactus Rustlers, thieves are stealing desert flora from public lands:

Cactus thievery pays. A single ocotillo, with its spindly arms reaching out, can fetch as much as $150 on the retail market, while mighty saguaros, which grow to more than 20 feet, can command as much as $5,000. Saguaros are expensive because they take about 100 years to reach maturity.

Clever Octopus Caught with Tentacle in Shrimp Jar

From Clever Octopus Caught with Tentacle in Shrimp Jar:

A common octopus in a German zoo has learned to open jars of shrimp by watching zoo attendants perform the act underwater.

I've heard of this before. Evidently, not all invertebrates are slugs. An on-line review of The Octopus and the Orangutan cites some more examples:

In addition to running vertical mazes with ease, learning by observation to choose a red ball over a white one, figuring out creative ways of accessing the meat in mussels and clams sealed by researchers, Octos have often stunned owners and aquarium curators with unexpected bursts of creativity. This includes escaping from "maximum security" tanks, crawling out on perfectly-timed "raids" on tanks of crustaceans, sliding bolts on tank covers open by extending arms through airholes, jetting water (for some inexplicable reason) at redheaded women, and in one remarkable instance even "telling" a teuthologist in no uncertain terms what it thought of being fed slightly stale shrimp!

Who needs to fabricate sci-fi creatures when we've already got an intelligent mollusk that can change colors almost instantly, regrow lost limbs, and spray ink as an underwater smoke screen? Frankly, they don't quite seem of this earth — especially if you've ever seen one crawl across the beach out of the water.

GEDs Aren't Worth the Paper They're Printed On

It shouldn't surprise anyone that GEDs Aren't Worth the Paper They're Printed On:

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and colleague Stephen Cameron have found GED holders to be "statistically indistinguishable" from high school dropouts: they're not significantly more likely to land a job or to have higher hourly wages. Other studies find that GED holders do slightly better than dropouts but still lousy compared with regular high school grads — who themselves, in today's knowledge-based economy, earn only 54 percent of what college grads make, according to 1999 Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.

A great quote from Lois Quinn, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, who has written a critical history of the GED:

It's the Wizard of Oz; they give you a piece of paper.

The Campus Diversity Fraud

The Campus Diversity Fraud, by John H. McWhorter, presents some sad facts:

At the University of California at Berkeley, where I teach, the quota system was as obvious on the ground as it had been at Rutgers in the 1980s. One older white professor, an avowed leftist, confided in me that since the early 1970s black students had done badly in his classes so often that he had found himself viewing any black student who appeared on the first day of class as a potential problem. A white remedial-composition tutor observed that he had worked with so many minority students hopelessly underprepared for Berkeley-level work that he had found himself questioning the wisdom of racial preferences, despite his leftist persuasion. Professors across the country have expressed similar views to me.

Many would dismiss such observations as bias and stereotyping. The facts are otherwise. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom note in America in Black and White that black Berkeley students who enrolled in 1988 had an average SAT score below 1,000, compared with white students' average of over 1,300. The highest quartile of black SAT scores in this class clustered at the bottom quarter of the SAT scores of all students. The high school grade average among black students was B-plus, rather than the straight-A average required of white students. Nor was this a mere Berzerk-ley aberration: in 1992, the gap in average SAT scores between black and white entrants was 150 points at Princeton, 171 at Stanford, 218 at Dartmouth, and 271 at Rice.

Why We Don't Marry

Why We Don't Marry, by James Q. Wilson, restates an interesting statistical sound-bite:

Former Clinton advisor William Galston sums up the matter this way: you need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty — finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor; 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.

What Looks Like Profiling Might Just Be Good Policing

What Looks Like Profiling Might Just Be Good Policing — which should be fairly obvious:

In Los Angeles, crime rates are in fact lopsided. In 2001, blacks committed 41% of all robberies, according to victims' descriptions given to the LAPD, though they constitute only 11% of the city's population. Robbery victims named whites, who make up 30% of the population, 4% of the time, while Latinos, 46% of the population, were identified as the assailant in 45% of such crimes. The figures for aggravated assault and rape are similarly skewed.

The Starving Criminal

The Starving Criminal, by Theodore Dalrymple, starts by reporting some recent findings from the British Journal of Psychiatry:

Researchers carried out a double-blind trial of the effect of vitamin and mineral supplements on the behavior of prisoners aged 18 to 21. Two hundred and thirty-one such prisoners were divided randomly into two groups: one that received real vitamins, one that got only a placebo. Those who received the real vitamins committed about a third fewer disciplinary offenses and acts of violence during the follow-up period than those who took the placebo.

That's amazing, until you realize just how malnourished most prisoners are — when they get to prison.

From the dietary point of view, freedom has the same effect upon them as a concentration camp; incarceration restores them to nutritional health. This is a new phenomenon, at least on the scale on which I now see it. Last week, for example, I treated in my hospital a skeletal man who had been released from prison only two months before and had in that short time lost 44 pounds. A recidivist, he had served many short sentences for theft, and his weight went up and down according to whether he was in prison or at liberty. This is a common enough pattern of weight gain and weight loss among the males of my city's underclass. It has a meaning quite alien to those who believe that modern malnutrition is merely a symptom of poverty and inequality.
[...]
He smoked heroin, but the connection between his habit and his criminality was not what is conventionally assumed: that his addiction produced a craving so strong, and a need to avoid withdrawal symptoms so imperative, that resort to crime was his only choice. On the contrary — and as is usually the case — his criminal record started well before he took to heroin. Indeed, his decision to take heroin was itself a continuation, an almost logical development, of his choice of the criminal life.

He was thin and malnourished in the manner I have described. Five feet ten, he weighed just over 100 pounds. He told me what many young men in his situation have told me, that he asked the court not to grant him bail, so that he could recover his health in prison — something that he knew he would never do outside. A few months of incarceration would set him up nicely to indulge in heroin on his release. Prison is the health farm of the slums.

I examined him and said to him, "You don't eat."

"Not much," he said. "I don't feel like it."

"And when you do eat, what do you eat?"

"Crisps [potato chips] and chocolate."
[...]
I asked the young man whether his mother had ever cooked for him.

"Not since my stepfather arrived. She would cook for him, like, but not for us children."

I asked him what they — he and his brothers and sisters — had eaten and how they had eaten it.

"We"d just eat whatever there was," he said. "We'd look for something whenever we was hungry."

"And what was there?"

"Bread, cereals, chocolate — that kind of thing."

"So you never sat round a table and ate a meal together?"

"No."

In fact, he told me that he had never once eaten at a table with others in the last 15 years. Eating was for him a solitary vice, something done almost furtively, with no pleasure attached to it and certainly not as a social event.
[...]
These young men's malnutrition is the sign of an entire way of life, and not the result of raw, inescapable poverty. Another patient whom I saw soon after, similarly malnourished, told me that he ate practically nothing, subsisting on sugary soft drinks.

Creepy. Dalrymple's darkly humorous suggestion?

It can't be long before someone suggests that the solution to a problem like this is to fortify chocolate with minerals and vitamins.

Peru Prehistoric Horse Most Complete in Americas

According to Peru Prehistoric Horse Most Complete in Americas, horses existed in the Americas before the Spanish brought them — but they went extinct 10,000 years ago:

Peruvian geologists have discovered the most complete horse fossil in the Americas, a reminder that the hoofed mammal existed in the New World long before the Spanish brought horses in the 1500s.

"Horses were reintroduced to South America. With this (find) we hope to remind people this animal did exist here, but died out some 10,000 years ago," Rodolfo Salas, head of Peru's Natural History Museum's paleontology department, said on Friday.

A team from the museum discovered the preserved skeleton of an Equus (Amerihippus) santaeelenae in July 2002 in the arid department of Arequipa, some 600 miles south of Lima.

So did early American humans hunt them to extinction?

U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba

I stumbled across this entry in Julian Sanchez's Notes from the Lounge:

Whatever you might think of our leaders, they're surely not so truly morally monstrous as to kill thousands for some secret, self serving reasons.

That's when my friend pointed me to an ABC News report on the declassification of documents related to something called Operation Northwoods...

How had I not heard of this? From U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba:

In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

I'm assuming these were the same guys who wanted to spike Castro's drink with LSD before an important speech.

Use of Ceramics Is Critical To Pentagon's War Goals

According to Use of Ceramics Is Critical To Pentagon's War Goals, ceramics are replacing steel for both personal body armor and vehicular armor:

Elite American units such as the Delta Force have been wearing ceramic armor — about half as heavy as the metal variety — since the mid-1990s. Now more U.S. ground forces will get it.
[...]
As depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down, U.S. soldiers removed the metal plates from their body armor because it weighed them down too much for urban fighting, leaving them vulnerable when local militiamen attacked with gunfire.

For Soldiers, Desert Becomes Cruel in April as Heat Rises

For Soldiers, Desert Becomes Cruel in April as Heat Rises points out one more reason I'm glad I'm not going to war:

A blacktop road in Baghdad on a July day can hit 150 degrees Fahrenheit. [...] With typical desert temperatures cresting at a fiery 120 degrees in July, Iraq could prove to be an inhospitable place to fight a war, especially if the conflict bogs down. [...] Most U.S. tanks and personnel carriers aren't air conditioned, and temperatures inside can easily rise 25 degrees above outdoor air temperatures. Although biological or chemical attacks on invading U.S. troops are considered by most analysts to be unlikely, just the threat of them means soldiers probably will wear protective gear and not just carry it in their packs. [...] Indeed, the military's new chemical suits, though far lighter than earlier versions, can get steamy quick. Last November, at a Pentagon briefing to show off the lighter suits, one soldier modeling the gear became overheated under the harsh camera lights and fainted, pitching face-first into a row of chairs.

Perhaps our army's new ninja powers will protect them from the heat:

Although military planners have steadfastly refused to discuss timing for a war, tradition suggests the start date may come shortly after March 3, the beginning of the new moon — the phase when it reflects no light. [...] To some extent, the U.S. military will mitigate the effects of sun and sand by doing most of its traveling at night, when temperatures can drop into the 80s and troops, outfitted with night-vision gear, will have a distinct advantage.

Bird-Size Surveillance Craft See, Hear, Even Smell Enemy

I eat this stuff up. From Bird-Size Surveillance Craft See, Hear, Even Smell Enemy:

While most of the military's attention in recent years has been focused on larger UAVs that can fly for hundreds of miles and fire missiles, scientists and military planners are trying to build aircraft that can fit in a backpack. The idea is to give individual soldiers a better idea of what might be over the next hill or, in the case of urban combat, what's around the next corner.

"For all of the high-tech intelligence that was available at upper levels during Desert Storm, a company commander had no more situational awareness of his immediate surroundings than a commander working for Robert E. Lee had during the Civil War," says Col. Barry Ford, chief of staff for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Va. "We think these mini-UAVs will fill a critical capability gap."

Naturally, I need one.

The Inspections Dodge

How did I miss The Inspections Dodge, by Khidhir Hamza? Read the opening paragraph:

My 20 years of work in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program and military industry were partly a training course in methods of deception and camouflage to keep the program secret. Given what I know about Saddam Hussein's commitment to developing and using weapons of mass destruction, the following two points are abundantly clear to me: First, the U.N. weapons inspectors will not find anything Saddam does not want them to find. Second, France, Germany, and to a degree, Russia, are opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq mainly because they maintain lucrative trade deals with Baghdad, many of which are arms-related.

Smile...But Britons May Not Smile with You

I'm not sure how scientific this study was, but Smile...But Britons May Not Smile with You presents some wild numbers:

Psychology students spent an hour smiling at 100 strangers in 14 British cities as part of the Comic Relief fundraising campaign, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

Only 4% of people in Edinburgh, 12% in Nottingham and 18% in London returned the students' smiles.

On the other hand, the residents of Bristol smiled back 70% of the time, and 68% of Glasgow citizens were cheery enough to raise the corners of their mouths.

Just 4% in Edinburgh versus 70% in Bristol? Those are some grumpy Scots.

American Conservatism

According to a recent Opinion Journal article playfully subtitled "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll":

Libertarians have more fun — and make more sense.

I can believe that. I don't agree with the notion that libertarians are necessarily libertines though — and many letters to the editor agree.

A Novel Way to Recover from Injury

From A Novel Way to Recover from Injury:

Flamboyant French tennis player Arnaud Clement is pioneering an unusual way to keep his eye in while sidelined with a painful right wrist injury — he plays left-handed.

The 2001 Australian Open runner up — instantly recognizable by his brightly colored outfits and bandanas and his on-court sunglasses — has been out of action with lingering tendinitis since the beginning of the season.

But instead of putting his feet up while he recovers, the right-handed baseliner has been playing left-handed at an amateur tournament in the south of France.

The French Tennis Federation gave Clement permission to play in the tournament in Gap with his "wrong hand" and he went on to beat two good local players in straight sets, French sports daily l'Equipe reported.

"Why am I smiling? Because I know something you don't know: I am not left-handed either!"

Disney's Al Hirschfeld Tribute

Animation Blast explains the origin of Disney's Genie:

In honor of Al Hirschfeld's passing [in January], here's a reprint of the full-page ad that Disney took out in Variety. The ad features a drawing of the Genie from Aladdin. Lead animator Eric Goldberg had used Hirschfeld's flowing calligraphic line style as inspiration for the character's design.

Echoes of Appeasement

Echoes of Appeasement points out a delicious irony:

Neither the protester holding this sign nor the Reuters copy editor who captioned the photo have any idea of the historical significance of its message, or what it says about the so-called "anti-war movement."

In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference after throwing Czechoslovakia to the ravening Nazi wolves, and gave a speech that lives in infamy as a symbol of craven appeasement: Peace in Our Time.

"We, the German Fuehrer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognizing that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for two countries and for Europe.

"We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.

"We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe."

Chamberlain read this statement to a cheering crowd in front of 10 Downing St. and said; "My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."

Having learned nothing from history — indeed, having learned no history at all — the fools above rush gleefully into the arms of dictators who promise peace.

Unthemely Behavior

According to Urban Legends Reference Pages: Television (Unthemely Behavior), the Star Trek theme song did have lyrics:

Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand'ring in star-flight
I know
He'll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.

Why did it have lyrics? It's complicated, but basically because making up lyrics got Roddenberry half the rights to the theme's royalties — and that was a lot of money.

The Evolution of Gollum

TheOneRing.net posted a series of images showing the subtle evolution of Smeagol into Gollum.

Evidently Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum, wasn't going to be just the voice and the model for the CGI Gollum. (Thanks, Dan, for the link.)

Decision To Ask Out Girl Made Using 10-Sided Die

I love The Onion. The caption to that photo:

Decision To Ask Out Girl Made Using 10-Sided Die

The 37,385th Best Movie of All Time

A few days ago, I commented on Mike Myers Samples Unusual Film Deal and how it ignored some works that "sampled" older films:

They didn't mention Wooden Allen's Zelig or Steve Martin's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.

My friend John's comment?

You also forgot the 37,385th best movie of all time: Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.

Woman Gets Allergic Shellfish Reaction from Kiss

At first, I felt bad for the young lady in Woman Gets Allergic Shellfish Reaction from Kiss. Then I read the punchline at the end.

A 20-year-old woman with shellfish allergies went into severe anaphylactic shock after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a few shrimp, doctors reported on Friday.
[...]
Both the woman and her boyfriend worked at a seafood restaurant, and Steensma said the patient may have sensitized herself to the shellfish by repeatedly touching it.

Dolly, Cloning's Poster Child, Dies at Age 6

Dolly, the first cloned sheep, is dead — of a lung infection — and now the debate's over whether her poor health was cloning related, as Dolly, Cloning's Poster Child, Dies at Age 6 explains:

Dolly, aged 6, was put to sleep by veterinarians on Friday after they failed to cure her of a severe lung infection, her creators said.
[...]
In contrast to her hardy cousins, put out to graze on steep hillsides in Scotland, Dolly lived indoors. She reared up on her hind legs to nuzzle visitors, looking for handouts.

Some scientists believe this behavior, and not her lab-dish origins, led to Dolly's well-documented arthritis. "There is a very real chance Dolly's illness had nothing to do with cloning," said Dr. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts, a private firm doing cloning research.

"There is a virus ... that sheep get at almost precisely Dolly's age. This virus can cause arthritis and respiratory infections, particularly in animals raised indoors," he said in a telephone interview.

At least the Roslin Institute team isn't lying when they say, "It's OK, honey; we'll get you a new sheep just like the old one."

More seriously, if sheep raised indoors are known to get diseases they don't get in their natural habitat, what does that say about humans working in office buildings and living in apartments?

Candy Bars Use Wine Lingo In Bid to Justify High Prices

The humble chocolate bar has gone gourmet. Candy Bars Use Wine Lingo In Bid to Justify High Prices explains:

Bars sold at gourmet food shops now boast names like "Premier Cru," and "Single Bean Origin." Turn them over and you'll read about things like the candy bar's "vintage" (the year the cocoa was harvested) or the "terroir" of the beans (where they came from). Some tout their "varietals," or type of bean, as well. High on the totem pole: One company makes a chocolate solely from rare Porcelana beans and sells it for about $75 a pound. By contrast, a pound of Hershey's chocolate can cost roughly $4.

But here's where it gets really crazy:

Two months ago, the Ritz-Carlton Philadelphia promoted one of its bartenders, Caesar Bradley, to the position of "Hot Chocolate Sommelier."

Hot chocolate sommelier? Please.

I love this metaphor:

Every gourmet food producer wants its product to be "the next olive oil," which has developed such a following that some supermarkets now carry bottles costing $30 a liter.

Work & Family

I keep wondering when telecommuting is finally going to take off, and Work & Family offers some suggestions for making it happen:

Those obstacles aside, the Internet can jump-start any flexible-work plan. AJ Marston, a grant writer in Southern California, says, "I started out completely clueless" about how to morph from a full-time office job to the part-time telecommuting lifestyle she wanted. She found www.workingfromanywhere.org, a site run by the International Telework Association & Council, a telecom industry research and advocacy group. By clicking on "Resources-ITAC Resources," she found statistics and workshop presentations in support of telework -- a catch-all term for working from anywhere, including home. Under "Resources-Career," she found links to other useful sites. All were helpful as she proposed and successfully negotiated for the change she wanted. "The Internet is an invaluable tool," Ms. Marston says.

The best all-around Web site is www.workoptions.com, by flexibility coach Pat Katepoo of Kaneohe, Hawaii. Ms. Katepoo covers the bases for employees on four options -- part-time hours, a compressed workweek, job-sharing and telecommuting. The site lays out some excellent homework for wannabes, with checklists of things to do before approaching the boss. This includes boning up on workplace policies and precedents, such as finding out whether others have been granted schedule changes and how they worked out.

Dashboards Are Latest Hub Of Auto-Design Renaissance

Dashboards Are Latest Hub Of Auto-Design Renaissance explains that "in an increasingly crowded market, designers are under more pressure to make cars stand out," and moving the dashboard gauges is one way to do that:

The Saturn division of General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp.'s new Scion youth division and Nissan Motor Co. are all rolling out vehicles with interior designs that move the dashboard gauges out of their traditional box behind the steering wheel toward the center of the dashboard.

What kind of usability studies are they doing?

Sumo Heavies Throw Weight Behind Crime Fighting

Can near-immobile sumotori catch criminals? I don't know, but as Sumo Heavies Throw Weight Behind Crime Fighting points out, they may deter crime:

About 10 wrestlers from Isenoumi Stable, as sumo gyms are known, began nightly patrols in their neighborhood in the east of Tokyo this week, hoping their bulk would deter would-be crooks.

Trapeze Artist Attacks Rival with Castration Tongs

How made-up does this sound? Trapeze Artist Attacks Rival with Castration Tongs:

A lovesick 58-year-old German man was sentenced to seven years in jail after attacking a factory worker with a pair of bull castration tongs in the western town of Duesseldorf, a state court said on Friday.

The circus trapeze artist had tried to emasculate the man using the steel pincers after accusing him of having a relationship with his former girlfriend, a 46-year-old belly dancer who performed in the same circus.

Mike Myers Samples Unusual Film Deal

On the one hand, it's about time. On the other hand, I'm surprised Hollywood made the move. Mike Myers Samples Unusual Film Deal explains:

Mike Myers has inked an unusual production deal with DreamWorks in which the actor will insert himself, other actors and new plots into existing films to create new properties.

The studio is calling the process "film sampling," similar to the music business practice in which an artist takes part of an existing song and works it into his own tune, sometimes with new lyrics and music.
[...]
The idea isn't new; Woody Allen created new dialogue for a Japanese film and released it as "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" in 1966. More recently, commercials have altered old movie footage starring John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Fred Astaire to promote beer, soda and vacuum cleaners.

They didn't mention Wooden Allen's Zelig or Steve Martin's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.