Would you even notice?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

What would you do if you were in the Discovery Channel building when an armed eco-terrorist arrived?

Mildred Ugay, a research strategist for Discovery, said she was at her fourth-floor desk when an alarm sounded. She said employees initially thought it was a fire drill, but they shortly received a work email that explained a gunman was in the building.

She and coworkers went into an office, closed the door and turned on a TV to watch reports of the incident, Ms. Ugay said. A law-enforcement official eventually told them to go to a higher floor, which they did. About 45 minutes later, they were told to leave the building.

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

James Lee ID’d as Discovery suspect

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

James Jay Lee has been identified as the Discovery suspect, responsible for shots fired and a “small number” of hostages taken at the headquarters of the educational TV network.

We live in an odd era, when a crazed eco-zealot’s MySpace page and list of demands are immediately available to peruse.

When I first heard that the children at the on-site daycare had been evacuated, I was somewhat relieved, but after reading world guardian Lee’s demands, I was really relieved that the children got out:

  1. The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!
  2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

Wow. Just wow.

Posted in Crime, War | 1 Comment »

Mumbai’s The Word

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

After the terrorist attack on Mumbai a few years ago, William Dalrymple asserted in The Observer that the well-dressed, clean-shaven killers were thoughtfully fighting oppression:

These were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.

It’s pretty clear now that the killers were poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs.

Theodore Dalrymple, no relation to William, doesn’t make that point.  Instead he takes issue with the shock and surprise that violent guerrillas would be well off:

The assumption underlying this surprise is that there is some direct connection between poverty and ignorance on the one hand, and extreme political violence or terrorism on the other. Well-to-do people are not driven to the desperation of terrorism. And this view, it seems to me, genuinely implies an almost total absence of knowledge of world history, to say nothing of an inability to make fairly obvious connections.

Although I am not an historian, it has long seemed to me that some acquaintance with the history of Nineteenth Century Russia is absolutely crucial to understanding the modern world, for it was there that the various forms of modern revolutionary terrorism, and politics as the pursuit of an ideological end, first developed. And the first terrorists were certainly not downtrodden peasants brainwashed by religious or other leaders: they were either aristocrats suffering angst at their own privilege in the midst of poverty, or members of the newly-emerged middle classes, angry that their education had not resulted in the influence in society to which they thought themselves entitled by virtue of their intelligence, idealism and knowledge.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again. Latin America is a very good example. Castro was the spoilt son of a self-made millionaire who had a personal grudge against society because he was illegitimate and sometimes humiliated for it; in other words, he was both highly privileged, with a sense of entitlement, and deeply resentful, always a dreadful combination. Ernesto Guevara was of partially aristocratic descent, whose upbringing was that of a bohemian bourgeois, who was too egotistical and lacking in compassion for individual human beings to accept the humdrum discipline of medical practice.

The leaders of the guerrilla movement in Guatemala (a country, oddly, with many parallels to Nineteenth Century Russia) were of bourgeois and educated origin; one of them was the son of a Nobel-prize winner, not exactly a true social representative of the population. The leader and founder of Sendero Luminoso of Peru, a movement of the Pol Pot tendency (and Pol Pot himself, of course, studied in Paris), was a professor of philosophy, and his followers were the first educated generation of the peasantry, not the peasants themselves. Peasants are capable of uprisings, no doubt, even very bloody ones, but they do not elaborate ideologies or undergo training for attacks on distant targets.

From what I can tell, the actual attackers were poor and desperate — in some cases sold into Lashkar-e-Taiba — while their handlers matched Theodore Dalrymple’s description of guerrilla leaders.

Posted in Policy, Theodore Dalrymple, War | 1 Comment »

Poisoned By Celebrity

Friday, August 27th, 2010

In his work as a doctor in a prison, Theodore Dalrymple came across a number of poisoners, who tended to be more interesting as a group than other murderers. Dalrymple shares the story of one famous English poisoner:

A man called Graham Young poisoned several people, some to death and others only to near-death, in the 1960s and 70s in England without any pecuniary motive, indeed without any obvious motive at all, starting when he was thirteen or fourteen years of age. Among his victims (who did not die) were his father and his sister. It is probable that he poisoned his step-mother (who was devoted to him) to death.

His sister, Winifred Young, who was eight years older than he, and whom he had tried to poison, wrote a book about him, published in 1973 entitled Obsessive Poisoner. It is a remarkable book in several ways, and not only because there can have been few memoirs by people who survived attempted poisonings. It is a valuable document of social history, for it implicitly records a period of great cultural change, not only in Britain but I suspect throughout the world.

Graham Young was born in 1947, to parents of the aspiring lower middle class. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was very young, and his father re-married in 1950, to the woman whom he was almost certainly to poison to death nearly twelve years later.

From an early age, Graham Young showed marked peculiarities. He did not make friends easily, or at all, and in so far as he sought out the company of other human beings it was of people considerably older than himself. He was almost emotionless, apart from a love of dogs. He was highly intelligent and looked down on people who were less intelligent than he, which was most people, but, while good at his schoolwork, was not perseverent in subjects that did not interest him. From about the age of eleven he displayed an obsessive interest in two subjects: the Nazis and poisons. He talked about them incessantly. One of his great heroes was Dr William Palmer, who was known as the Prince of Poisoners, who is suspected of having poisoned a great many of his close relations and friends in the 1850s for financial reasons.

He put belladonna in his sister’s tea in 1961, which she was prepared, out of an inability to imagine evil of her brother, to believe was an accident.

Their stepmother died in 1962 of symptoms that, in retrospect, were compatible with thallium poisoning. He put thallium in a sandwich that her brother-in-law ate at the post-funeral collation.

At the same time, Graham Young administered antimony to his father and to a friend of his, so-called, at school, as well as his ‘favourite’ aunt. With horrible cunning, he sought to console them as they suffered from what he had given them, as he had consoled his dying stepmother.

The penny finally dropped, he was arrested, tried aged 14 for attempted murder (unfortunately, his stepmother had been cremated and her ashes were not available for forensic examination, so he could not be charged with murder itself), and sent — as a psychopath — to Broadmoor, an institution for the criminally insane.

What shines through his sister’s narrative is the complete absence of motive for his crimes, and indeed the ordinary and even banal goodness of everyone by whom he was surrounded. Whatever else might be said, it could certainly not be said that his background had anything to do with what he did. His father was a steady, hardworking man, without obvious character defects, not very interesting or exciting perhaps, who for years did overtime in order to pay off the mortgage on his house — which he did, in fact, in 12 years — to secure the future of his children. He was the very archetype of the reliable, modest, industrious, law-abiding citizen upon whom the maintenance of civilisation partly, but importantly, depends.

Furthermore, the goodness of the author herself is obvious, precisely because she is herself so unaware of it. Not only was she reluctant to believe evil of her brother, but even when that evil became manifest to her she did not cast him into outer darkness. Her love, the ordinary love of a sister for a brother, exceeded her condemnation of him: which did not mean, however, that she sought any legal exculpation for him, or made any excuses for him. She loved him as a brother, but as a citizen she knew that he had to be punished and the public protected from him.

It is worth pointing out here that this morally sophisticated attitude was not that of an exceptionally-educated person: she was a secretary, without tertiary education. In other words, her moral sophistication was absorbed from the general culture, not from explicit teaching.

(Incidentally, but not coincidentally, her book was extremely well-written, far, far better written than many people with postgraduate degrees could write such a book today).

Graham Young spent ten years in Broadmoor, before being released in 1972. Between the time of his arrival and his departure the whole ethos of society had changed. He arrived shortly after a man died there in his eighties, having been sent to the institution (for a crime which could hardly have been more serious than Young’s) more than seventy years before. But, despite the fact that two psychiatrists at the time of his trial had asserted that it was unlikely that his perverse interest in poisons would ever decline, he persuaded his psychiatrist at Broadmoor, by then probably seeing himself in the role of Graham’s St George against the dragon of society, that he was ‘cured.’ And this, despite the fact that a patient at the institution in the meantime had almost certainly been poisoned to death with cyanide distilled from laurel leaves in the hospital grounds (though admittedly, this had not been proved to be Young’s handiwork) and that — beyond doubt — he had attempted to poison the tea of nearly a hundred fellow-inmates. By now, it seems, the need to think well of humanity in general trumped altogether the disinterested and objective examination of particular instances of it.

So Graham Young was released. He was sent to a government rehabilitation centre. Within two months, he was buying dangerous poisons again. But no one who dealt with him was informed of his background or his previous history, not even the probation officers whom he was told to visit every two weeks. Was he not cured? Did not the director of Broadmoor say that, if they thought there was any risk at all, they would not have released him in the first place? It would therefore be unfair to him, unduly prejudicial, to let people — anyone — know what he had been up to all those years ago.

A job was found for Graham Young in a photographic factory. His employers knew that he had had ‘mental problems’ that accounted for his lack of an employment history, but they took the laudably unprejudiced view that everyone deserved a chance, and that no one’s past should be held against him. The employers were not told that he had been a poisoner or an inmate of an institute for the criminally insane for ten years, and so when members of their staff began to suffer mysterious symptoms shortly after his arrival, they did not connect him with them.

So many of the staff, in fact, began to suffer from such symptoms as nausea and polyneuritis that the public health authorities were called in. The most likely explanation seemed to be a virus, especially as the factory was searched high and low for heavy metals that might equally have caused the symptoms, and none was found. Two of the staff died, and it was largely because Graham Young himself asked the local doctors at a meeting that they convened in the factory whether they did not think that the illness from which the deceased had died might not be thallium poisoning that he was first suspected and then arrested.

Stores clerks are not normally expected to be knowledgeable about toxicology, but so eager was he to prove his superiority over the doctors in public that he over-reached himself. Phials of thallium were found among his possessions in his lodgings.

Two things struck me about the narrative, apart from the literacy and goodness of his sister. The first was the deeply old-fashioned stoicism and devotion to duty of the staff of the company for which he worked.

Many of them were made desperately ill by his addition of poison to their tea (he again used two poisons, as he had when he was fourteen years old, antimony and thallium which, because they caused rather different symptomatology, confused the public health doctors), but despite being hardly able to walk or to hold anything down, they insisted that they would soon be all right, and continued to try to work. Above all, they did not want to make a fuss, until some of them were admitted as emergencies to hospital.

The other thing that struck me was the obvious and sometimes openly expressed desire of Graham Young to achieve celebrity by his poisonings. He wanted to be known and remembered as the greatest poisoner in history; he took great pleasure in the publicity that he received, and he was more concerned with the newspaper coverage of his first trial than with the medical condition of his blameless father whom he had poisoned.

He lived at a time of a fundamental shift in our culture. On the one hand he was very old-fashioned; he dressed conservatively, always in a shirt and tie, and with a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. In writing to his future employers to accept the job they had offered him, he ended his letter as follows:

I shall endeavour to justify your faith in me by performing my duties in an efficient and competent manner.

Until Monday morning, I am,

Yours faithfully,

Graham Young

This is the language of an era soon to be as bygone as that, say, of the Etruscans.

On the other hand, he matured at the time when the cult of celebrity, for celebrity’s sake, was fast gaining ground. It was a new form of celebrity, disconnected from any solid form of achievement, of which an ability to attract publicity became the sine qua non. Graham Young was highly intelligent, without the character to stick at anything to achieve something solid, but with a burning desire to be acknowledged as superior, important and outstanding.

When trying to explain why he could not get close to people, he once said to his sister (and she ends her book with these words), ‘You see, there’s a terrible coldness inside me.’ Could a spread of that coldness not help to explain our contemporary preoccupation with celebrity?

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Fujimori

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Does the end justify the means? Theodore Dalrymple had to think about that when he read that Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, had been sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment for corruption, to run concurrently with the twenty-five years he is already serving for abuse of human rights:

As it happens, I was in Peru just before, during and after the election that first brought Fujimori to power. His opponent was the world-famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, who I, like many others, assumed would win. Indeed, I hoped that he would win. He was highly intelligent, extremely eloquent, had a clear idea of what was needed for Peru to emerge from its current nightmare, and he was standing for election out of patriotism and for the good of his country. He had nothing to prove, nothing to gain; it is rare indeed to encounter a candidate so transparently unmotivated by personal goals.

Fujimori won. I hadn’t appreciated just how much his obscurity might help him, so great was the disillusionment in the country with national figures. Fujimori was a distinguished academic agronomist, but you could be the most famous agronomist in the world and still live in the most perfect obscurity. One Peruvian peasant captured the mood perfectly when asked why he had voted for Fujimori. ‘Because I didn’t know anything about him,’ he replied. In other words, every man’s past disqualifies him from high public office.

The Peru that Fujimori inherited was in terrible condition. Inflation was so rapid that you couldn’t buy anything of any value in the local currency: you had to use dollars. Money-changers, of whom there seemed to be thousands, stood in the streets, waving thick wads of notes at passers-by in exchange for dollars. Once, in Arequipa, my friend and I walked out to visit a convent there. The rate was 90,000 intis per dollar (and each inti was 1,000,000 old soles) on the way; on the way back, an hour later, it was 110,000 – or, to put it more dramatically, 110,000,000,000 old soles. I suppose that inflation of this kind at least makes you adept at mental arithmetic.

But inflation was, if not the least of Peru’s worries, at least not the worst or greatest of Peru’s worries. That honour belonged to Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Maoist insurgency that at the time controlled quite a lot of the national territory. I was convinced that, if Sendero won, there would be another Cambodia in Peru: a Cambodia on a much larger scale. And it was far from certain at the time that Sendero would not win. Indeed, if I had had to put my money on it winning or losing, I think I would have put it on it winning.

The history of Sendero was instructive, from two points of view. The first is that it destroys the notion that such revolutionary movements are the direct and spontaneous product of the grievances of the poor. The second is that it illustrates the dangerous folly of expanding tertiary education as a means of economic development rather than as a consequence of economic development.

The founder of Sendero was the professor of philosophy at Ayacucho University, Abimael Guzman, known to his acolytes as Presidente Gonzalo; his ideas, if such they merit being called, being the application of Maoism to Peru, were known collectively as Gonzalo Thought. Although living in clandestinity, he was already the object of a grotesque cult of personality and he wrote and spoke in that terrible langue de bois that is not the least of the tortures inflicted on society by communist regimes because it claims a monopoly of public speech and bores into the brain like a loud burrowing insect:

The ideology of the international proletariat erupted in the crucible of the class struggle, as Marxism, becoming Marxism-Leninism and, subsequently, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Thus the all-powerful scientific ideology of the proletariat, all-powerful because it is true, has three stages: 1) Marxism, 2) Leninism, 3) Maoism; three stages, moments or landmarks of its dialectical process or development; of a single entity that in a hundred and forty years, from the Manifesto, and in the most heroic epoch of the class struggle, in the bloody and fruitful struggles of the two lines within each communist party and in the immense labour of the titans of thought and action that only the proletariat could generate, three inextinguishable luminaries stood out: Marx, Lenin Mao Tse-Tung, who through three leaps have armed us with the invincible Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, today principally Maoism.

Ayacucho University itself had been in abeyance since the seventeenth century; the Peruvian government thought to revive it as a means of developing the economy of the local area, one of the poorest and most backward in the country, and bringing to it a modicum of social progress. What it brought instead was a Peruvian Pol Pot (who had written his thesis on Kant), who was easily able to influence and indoctrinate young men and women who were the first generation ever to receive tertiary education, and who were, in all truth, the scions of an immemorially oppressed people.

The combination of millenarian hopes and age-old resentments is an unfortunate one, to say the least; Gonzalo Thought, so called, gave ideological sanction to bestial brutality, and turned sadistic revenge into the fulfilment of a supposedly scientific destiny. From what I personally saw in Ayacucho on the eve of the election, which had the atmosphere of a city under siege, waiting for the barbarians to arrive and carry out their long-announced massacre, I was convinced that, if Sendero achieved power, millions would be slaughtered.

I also saw, and heard about, actions by the Peruvian army that were less than gentlemanly. People suspected of Senderista sympathies were disappeared (it took the twentieth century to turn the verb ‘to disappear’ into a transitive one). I saw relatives petitioning the local garrison officer for news of their husbands, sons and brothers whom the army had whisked away and obviously consigned to permanent oblivion. The army did not say please and thank you for what it commandeered; it was more an occupying force than a protector of the people.

Still, it was what stood between Peru and the Apocalypse. But, at the time of Fujimori’s election, it looked as if it might collapse.

On my way back to Europe, I happened on the aircraft to sit near a man who turned out to be an investigator for Amnesty International. When I told him about what I had seen the Peruvian Army do, he looked like a man who had just been fed with a tantalisingly delicious dish, or a cat at the cream; it was, it seemed to me, exactly what he wanted to hear. He almost purred. But when I told him what I had seen Sendero do, his expression turned sour; and he looked at me as if I were a credulous bearer of tales about unicorns or sea-monsters. He turned away from me and took no further interest in my conversation. No doubt illogically, I lost a great deal of my respect for Amnesty after that; constituted governments do a lot of evil, but they are not the only ones to do evil. In this case, the government was the lesser evil, and by far.

Posted in Policy, Theodore Dalrymple, War | 1 Comment »

Shrinking the USMC

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

When I saw recruitment ads as a kid for the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, I was a bit puzzled. What exactly were Marines? Why would the Navy have its own army?

James C. Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge explains that, under our British-inspired system, the army only gets called up in times of war. The navy — including its small corps of marines — might get called on for a show of force at any time.

(By that reasoning, a force like America’s Strategic Air Command, would be, in some sense, naval — ever ready to intervene anywhere in the world — but America’s strategic bombers had always been part of the land-based army, like tanks and artillery, so the new non-Army Air Force became independent — and protective of its turf.)

The Marines never wanted to be an army auxiliary, so they may shrink back down and re-focus on amphibious operations:

Over the years, the marines have acquired more and more autonomy from the navy. When the U.S. Marine Corps was created, over two centuries ago, marines were sailors trained and equipped to fight as infantry, and they were very much part of the navy, and part of ship crews. This changed radically in the late 19th century, when all-metal steam ships replaced wooden sailing ships. The new “iron ships” really didn’t need marines, and there were proposals to eliminate them.

In response, the American marines got organized and made themselves useful in other ways. For example, the marines performed very well as “State Department Troops” in Latin America for half a century (late 19th century to just before World War II), where American troops were frequently used to deal with civil disorder abroad, and nation building. During World War I (1914-18), they provided a brigade for ground combat in Europe, where they demonstrated exceptional combat skills.

During the 1930s, as World War II approached, the U.S. Marine Corps really ran with the ball when the navy realized they would have to use amphibious assaults to take heavily fortified Japanese islands in any future war. Thus, once the U.S. entered World War II, the marines formed their first division size units, and ended the war with six divisions, organized into two corps.

The Marine Corps was no longer just a minor part of the navy, but on its way to being a fourth service. Over the next half century, it basically achieved that goal. But in doing that, the navy lost control of its ground troops. Navy amphibious ships still went to sea, with battalions of marines on board. But because the marines are mainly an infantry force, and the war on terror is basically an infantry scale battle, the marines spent a lot more time working alongside the U.S. Army.

Thus, over the last five years, the new U.S. Navy has built a new ground combat force, staffed by 40,000 sailors. This is NECC (Navy Expeditionary Combat Command), which is capable of operating along the coast and up rivers, as well as further inland. NECC units have served in Iraq, and are ready to deploy anywhere else they are needed. The 1,200 sailors in the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) teams are particularly sought after, because of increased use of roadside bombs and booby traps by the enemy. NECC has also organized three Riverine Squadrons, and these served in Iraq. NECC basically consists of most of the combat support units the navy has traditionally put ashore, plus some coastal and river patrol units that have usually only been organized in wartime.

This new navy organization, and the strategy goes with it, still comes as a surprise to many people, especially many of those in Congress who were asked to pay for it.

This reminds me of the Navy SEALs — who seem like they should belong to a specialized unit within the Marine Corps. Instead we get the US Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC), which was created a few years ago:

In that time, it has sent some of its 2,400 personnel on over thirty deployments (in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Asia). MARSOC is organized into a headquarters, a two battalion Special Operations Regiment, a Foreign Military Training Unit, and a Marine Special Operations Support Group. There are 3-4 Special Operations companies in each battalion. The marines basically lost two of their four Force Recon companies (one of them a reserve unit) in order to build MARSOC. Meanwhile, more troops have been added to division level reconnaissance units, to take up some of that slack.

The Special Operations companies (with about 120 personnel each) can provide Force Recon capabilities to marine units they are attached to. The two Special Operations Battalions provide a combination of services roughly equal to what the U.S. Army Special Forces and Rangers do, as well as some of the functions of the Force Recon units. Eventually, there are to be nine companies in the two Special Operations Battalion.

All the other services, except the marines, contributed to the formation of SOCOM (Special Operations Command) in the late 1980s. The marines finally got around to working with SOCOM in 2005, when it was agreed that they would create a marine special operations command (MARSOC). The Marine Corps had long resisted such a step, largely because of its belief that marines are inherently superior warriors, capable of highly specialized missions.

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A Lead Cyst

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

A Polish man living in Germany went to have a cyst removed from the back of his head, and the surgeon found a .22 caliber bullet:

Presented with the 5.6mm projectile, the man recalled he had received a blow to the head around midnight at a New Year’s party “in 2004 or 2005,” but had forgotten about it because he had been “very drunk,” a police spokesman said.

“He told us he remembered having a sore head, but that he wasn’t really one for going to the doctor,” the spokesman said.

The wound later healed around the bullet and it was not until the man decided to have the lump examined due to recurring pains that the discovery was made.

Posted in Weapons | No Comments »

Crime and Punishment

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Theodore Dalrymple shares a conversation on crime and punishment:

Recently in my house in France I had two English guests, one who was what might be called a hard-liner with regard to crime, and the other a liberal. By analogy with the Cold War, we might even call them the Hawk and the Dove.

The Dove, of course, was concerned about the causes of crime. These were multiple and complex, not to be fully apprehended by the mind of Man, but nevertheless connected in some way with social injustice. The evident fact of unmerited inequalities in our societies was enough to provoke crime. (Who will deny that, even in a meritocracy, some are born rich, others achieve riches, while others have riches thrust upon them?) On this view, then, crime is an inchoate attempt at restoring perfect justice to the universe.

In favour of the Dove’s outlook may be mentioned the equally indisputable fact that most criminals emerge from highly unfavourable circumstances, circumstances that they did little or nothing themselves to create. In my career as a doctor in prison, I did meet a few criminals who were born with the silver spoon in their mouth, and who went to the bad despite their advantages; but their number was trifling by comparison with that of those who experienced deprivation, cruelty, hardship or violence in their childhood. It seems elementary humanity, therefore, to have some sympathy with and for them, and not to victimise them further by condoning punishment. A better approach would be to create social conditions in which there was no childhood deprivation, hardship etc. Punishment is at best a plaster over an unhealing wound, and will never eliminate crime. It is the causes of crime that need to be addressed.

The Hawk would have none of this, of course. Leaving aside the Dove’s failure to distinguish between unfairness and injustice (a very large philosophical topic), he pointed out that if it was true that most criminals were deprived in their childhood, it was also true that most people who were deprived in their childhood were not criminals. There is therefore considerable margin for the operation of what is usually called free will. Moreover, if the connection between life history and crime were as described, it could as easily lead to the most illiberal conclusions as to liberal ones.

If it is really true that certain childhood conditions lead inexorably to criminality then, in the absence of any proven technique to break the connexion, this is as much an argument for preventive detention as for leniency. There is, of course, no such technique. Since society must protect itself from criminals, the presence of a deprived background would constitute an argument for longer, not shorter, prison sentences.

The Hawk pointed out, furthermore, that one must not confuse the causes of crime with the appropriate response to criminality once it has developed. And this is so even if one disregards the probability that how society responds to crime is one of the factors a person takes into account when deciding to commit a crime (the decision so to commit being the proximate cause of all crime).

Thus, if as a matter of fact, imprisonment prevents the criminal from re-offending, it is quite beside the point that he commits crime in the first place because (shall we say) his mother did not love him enough in childhood. What society is interested in is the prevention of further crime; it cannot engage upon the task of giving him a different past or (slightly less impossible, perhaps) of nullifying the effect of that past.

The Hawk then horrified the Dove further by citing evidence that, contrary to what is often said, prison is actually very effective in the suppression of crime. Indeed, it is the only thing that is effective. For example, offenders sent to prison the first time they are caught (which, of course, is rarely the first time they offend) have a recidivism rate lower than those who receive other kinds of sentence.

Moreover, prison is not a university of crime as is often alleged. If it were, one might expect that prisoners sentenced to longer terms had higher degrees in crime: that is to say, were more likely to re-offend. But in fact they are less likely to do so; prison is therefore the place where criminals learn (eventually, for they are not quick learners on the whole) not to re-offend.

But, said the Dove, if what the Hawk was saying were true (and the Hawk, being a professional writer on the subject had devoted much more time to the study of it than the Dove had done), it would lead naturally to conditions in Europe with regard to imprisonment that resembled those in America – and the Dove would hate that, indeed could think of nothing worse or less acceptable.

This, I need hardly say, was not the end of the discussion. What exactly, asked the Hawk, as so terrible about the American example? Well, said the Dove, they have more than two million prisoners over there. But what is terrible about that, asked the Hawk, if they have all been sent there by due process and are, in fact, criminals (except for those mistakes that are consequent upon any system of criminal justice whatsoever)?

But some races are imprisoned more than others, said the Dove; this hardly seems fair. But, said the Hawk, a differential rate of imprisonment is not in itself evidence of injustice; one would hardly wish to increase the number of Chinese in American prisons simply to bring their proportion up to that in the general population.

The Hawk was a passionate bird, and began to tremble with excitement (I know the symptoms well, and try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to control them in myself). He pointed out that it is completely absurd to dwell on the prison population as a proportion of the general population. To have but one prisoner in a country in which there had never been a crime would be an outrage. What counted was not the prison population as a proportion of the general population, therefore, but the prison population in relation to the number of crimes committed.

Now if Britain, which has gone in half a century from being a country with a low crime rate to one with among the highest rates of crime in the western world had the same sentencing policy as Spain – that is to say, if it sent people to prison for the same reasons and for the same length of time as in Spain – its prison population would be not 80,000 but 400,000. Not coincidentally, Spain is a country whose crime rate is – yes, about one fifth of Britain’s. Furthermore, said the Hawk, if Britain had 400,000 prisoners, it would have the same proportion of the population in prison as – yes, the United States.

Furthermore, it has been estimated that if Britain now had the same sentencing policies as it had in Edwardian times, its prison population would be – well, about 400,000. According to the Hawk, the crime rate in Britain started its vertiginous rise after, and not before, the sentencing policy became weaker, as a result of years of Dove-ish propagandizing; I did not know enough either to agree or to disagree with his historical analysis, but I (who was much more in sympathy with the Hawk than the Dove) added my mite, to the effect that to fail properly to punish and disable criminals from committing further crimes was a failure to protect the poor, given two cardinal facts: first, that if it is true that the vast majority of criminals are poor, so it is also true that the vast majority of their victims are also poor; second, that the class of victim is always very much larger than the class of perpetrator.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that no minds were changed in the course of this argument: after all, one argues for victory, not for truth. However, I suspect that the Dove might be slightly less dove-ish in the future, should the argument recur in other circumstances and surroundings, with other people, without (for temperamental reasons) undergoing a full avian metamorphosis. For those with a soft heart, the problem with the Hawk’s argument is this: that while long imprisonment causes tangible distress to certain easily-imagined individuals, the harm therefore appearing concrete, the people to whom good is done by the use of imprisonment because they are prevented from becoming victims of crime remain shadowy, and therefore the good is purely abstract or notional. It is for this reason that Hawks always have a public relations problem.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

How to miss the target

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Frank Clarke takes aim at the Mumbai police — at their training, really — as he explains how to miss the target:

This British Para has the back sight on his rifle set for 300m battle zero. See it sticking up? Good thing, with all that terrorism going on. Somebody trained him to do that, and he cares enough to check.

The Mumbai police have the same rifle, click to enlarge. People are dying, every back sight is folded down for storage.

Nobody cared enough to train these people, and they don’t even have the smarts to look through their own sights to see something is wrong. The guy above has had all day to work it out, and he’s one of the experienced officers, presumably.

Can you find a picture from Google search with a Mumbai police officer with an L1A1 rifle with the sight folded up? Good luck. 1: They haven’t been issued with ammunition (no spare mags). 2. They don’t know enough to fold the sight up for the cameras to pretend they care. You have to know how your sights work.

Addendum: The photos of the Mumbai police are from the day of the terrorist attack.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

India Charlie Alfa Oscar

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

The International Civil Aviation Organization’s spelling alphabet was adopted by NATO in the 1950s, but various military alphabets existed before that:

Royal Navy Signalese RAF US NATO
1914–1918 (WWI) 1924–1942 1943–1956 1941–1956 1956–present
Apples
Butter
Charlie
Duff
Edward
Freddy
George
Harry
Ink
Johnnie
King
London
Monkey
Nuts
Orange
Pudding
Queenie
Robert
Sugar
Tommy
Uncle
Vinegar
Willie
Xerxes
Yellow
Zebra		 Ack
Beer
Charlie
Don
Edward
Freddie
Gee
Harry
Ink
Johnnie
King
London
Emma
Nuts
Oranges
Pip
Queen
Robert
Esses
Toc
Uncle
Vic
William
X-ray
Yorker
Zebra		 Ace
Beer
Charlie
Don
Edward
Freddie
George
Harry
Ink
Johnnie
King
London
Monkey
Nuts
Orange
Pip
Queen
Robert
Sugar
Toc
Uncle
Vic
William
X-ray
Yorker
Zebra		 Able/Affirm
Baker
Charlie
Dog
Easy
Fox
George
How
Item/Interrogatory
Jig/Johnny
King
Love
Mike
Nab/Negat
Oboe
Peter/Prep
Queen
Roger
Sugar
Tare
Uncle
Victor
William
X-ray
Yoke
Zebra		 Able
Baker
Charlie
Dog
Easy
Fox
George
How
Item
Jig
King
Love
Mike
Nan
Oboe
Peter
Queen
Roger
Sugar
Tare
Uncle
Victor
William
X-ray
Yoke
Zebra		 Alfa/Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliett/Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu

Posted in War | No Comments »

Army transforms recruit training

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

I mentioned a few months ago that the Army was dropping bayonet training from its boot camp — or Basic Combat Training. That’s not the only change, of course, and the Army’s own story sounds a bit defensive:

First, United States Training and Doctrine Command public affairs wanted to dispel any rumors the training has become “softer.” In a press release they stated with an extra week of training, the warrior tasks and battle drills have been refined and are now geared toward training fewer and more relevant tasks, well.

“It’s not soft. It’s just different and the physical training has become a lot more regimented and more battle-focused. It’s focused on training more people to achieve that initial basic training standard while mitigating injuries,” explained Capt. Kyle Lippold, commander of G Battery, 1st Battalion, 79th Field Artillery.
[...]
One major revamp was to the traditional physical training of pushups, sit-ups and long runs.The new physical readiness training is geared toward progression.

“A lot of these Soldiers come in and haven’t been in physical activities in high school so we start out with a preparation drill to warm up the muscles and go on from there,” said Sgt. 1st Class Zachary Parrish, who is a Fort Sill drill sergeant. “It used to be you take a Soldier and without the progression you may be putting too much on that Soldier. They’re going to inevitably get hurt.”

He said he’s seen less injuries so far with the new crawl, walk, run methodology. Even in the beginning if some of the Soldiers are more physically fit, he said they all progress to the end state where a rigorous workout is safe for everyone.

The Army is also taking a more holistic approach focusing on nutrition as well to keep Soldiers healthy and resilient.

“We talk nutrition from day one. The health of the Soldier is the bottom line. They’re going to be ineffective if they’re in sick call, so we make sure they get time to eat and that the food they’re eating is good for them,” said Parrish.

Posted in Fitness, Martial Arts, War | No Comments »

War is Boring

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Noah Shachtman of Wired‘s Danger Room interviews his friend and colleague, David Axe, about his war reporting:

Danger Room: Okay. Of all the f—ed-up places you’ve been, what’s the most f—ed-up of all? Why?

David Axe: Chad, by far. Even in Somalia, I felt like there was a fairly clear division between “danger” and “safety.” When I was with my fixers, I felt safe. In Chad, I never felt safe. In that country, violence visited me everywhere: in the capital, when corrupt cops hijacked my car; in a Catholic mission in Sudanese border country, when heavily-armed child soldiers hopped the fence and tried to break into my photographer’s and my rooms as a gunfight erupted all around us.

Now, as it turns out, my sense of safety in Somalia was an illusion. Just a few months after I left Mogadishu, the guards my then-girlfriend Daria and I had worked with — and had felt safe with — sold a couple of Western freelance reporters into the captivity of an Islamic group. The reporters — Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan — were held for months, tortured, abused. My fixer in Mogadishu narrowly escaped coming to a bad end in that episode. Realizing he could no longer trust the guards and others around him, he went into hiding.

DR: Dude, you dragged your girlfriend to Somalia?

DA: Hey, it was her idea! She insisted, and, as I had predicted, it meant the end of our relationship. But it was worth it, I guess. Based in part on her freelance work in Somalia, she got a job with the Wall Street Journal and is now doing quite well for herself. Me? I suffered something of a breakdown and had to move back in with my parents for several months just to get back to normal. Embarrassing, I know.

Axe saw the Dutch counterinsurgency go catastrophically wrong:

It’s unfair to compare the Dutch and American militaries. The Dutch army’s “soft-power” approach was, in fact, hard power wearing a clever disguise. Let me explain.

The Dutch military had always claimed that their strategy was to rely on reconstruction and development, rather than combat, to secure Uruzgan province, near Helmand. Of course, that strategy hinged on the Taliban essentially cooperating with NATO activities. They didn’t. In the summer of 2007, the Taliban targeted with a car bomb a Dutch convoy at a girl’s school in the province’s capital then massed hundreds of fighters for an infantry assault on Afghan police positions in a key town. The Dutch had no choice but to fight. Problem is, they were not prepared to risk the lives of their infantrymen in close combat. Rather than close with the Taliban and root them out of the town, as I believe the Americans would have done, the Dutch chose to bombard the town with Apache helicopters, F-16s and 155-millimeter artillery. A post-battle NATO report found that as many as 90 civilians died in the bombardment. Ironically, the Dutch army’s reluctance to shift to a focused, “hard” approach — dismounted infantry — resulted in a huge loss of life and credibility.

The Americans, by contrast, tend to hold back on the heavy artillery in favor of infantry maneuver — at least these days, they do. When the Taliban attacked an American patrol in Logar province in 2009, I watched as a squad bailed from a damaged vehicle and assaulted the enemy position. One of the soldiers told me later that the safest tactic in such a situation is to close with the enemy, because it ends the fight quickly and precisely. That’s preferable to a drawn-out fight in which one side refuses to accept the short-term risk resulting from a decisive maneuver. Had the Americans been there in Uruzgan in 2007, I believe they would have handled the fight differently, and civilians’ lives would have been saved — though potentially at the cost of a few American lives. Soft power should not mean a reluctance to risk soldiers’ lives during the occasional firefight, if that means saving the people you’re trying to influence. A truly effective soft-power approach should be built on the stick backbone of courage and military prowess.

Now, I’m not accusing the average Dutch trooper of being a coward. Far from it. But I am accusing Dutch commanders and political leaders of advancing a failed strategy.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Epic Fail In The Straits Of Hormuz

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Apparently a suicide bomber attempted to sink a Japanese oil tanker on July 28th:

It took over a week to determine the attack had occurred, because the damage to the 300,000 ton (DWT) ship M. Star was negligible. There was an indentation in the hull near the bow. But there was no hull breech or structural damage (aside from the deformed hull plates). One member of the 31 man crew was slightly injured. All the crew saw was “a light on the horizon”, when the explosion took place shortly after midnight.
Investigators recovered traces of homemade (fertilizer and fuel oil) explosives. An Islamic terror group, the “Abdullah Azzam Brigades” took credit. This outfit is believed to be a name of convenience for several independent terrorist operations. The “Abdullah Azzam Brigades” took credit for recent rocket attacks against the Israeli Red Sea resort town of Eliat. But these failed and the rockets fell in nearby Jordan, killing and injuring people.

The attack on the tanker was amateurish, as the explosives were not prepared properly.

There’s a reason why the attack was amateurish:

What the Israelis did in response to the latest Palestinian terror campaign was to concentrate on the technical personnel and management (the terrorist leaders who organized the attacks). This worked against the Palestinians, and the terrorists in Iraq. The tactic is being used worldwide, because it was found that the Islamic terrorist “technicians” tend to travel to where they are needed (and the pay is best). Thus every one of these bomb builders and attack organizers you kill or imprison, shrinks the world supply of these scarce personnel. The recent attack on the Japanese tanker is another example of what that shortage means.

Posted in War | No Comments »

The Fall of the West

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Tim O’Neill reviews Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, which explores how the Crisis of the Third Century, with its cavalcade of emperors, usurpers and assassinations, led to Rome’s eventual collapse:

Firstly, he notes how barbarian invasions are a symptom of Roman weakness and instability, not a cause of it. Over and over again during the Third Century renewed bouts of Roman civil strife invited larger and deeper raids by barbarians over the Rhine and Danube. This culminated in the massive land and seaborne raids on the eastern Empire by large Gothic and Herulian warbands in the AD 260s that was only finally brought to an end by Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269. That this barbarian reaction to Roman weakness — the Empire was at the lowest ebb of the Third Century crisis at the time — is a clear prefigurement of the later barbarian incursions and settlements in the west in the Fifth Century is a point that Goldsworthy makes very clearly.

Secondly, he notes that the “reforms” which are often said to have stabilised the Empire and brought the “Military Anarchy” to an end actually weakened it in the long run. He points out that the Empire was and had always been a military dictatorship. Augustus had created it out of years of civil war by winning the struggle for military supremacy. But what he created was what Goldsworthy refers to as “a veiled monarchy”. Though he was a military dictator who won control by force of arms, Augustus and his First and Second Century successors created a facade whereby they (and everyone else) pretended they ruled by consent, particularly by the consent of the Senate and the Senatorial class. In return, trusted Senators could receive relatively powerful (and rich) provincial governorships and other honours. The whole arrangement worked well and was in some ways inherently stable. The small number of Senators with any real power — ie ones who controlled rich provinces with large armies — could be carefully chosen and the remainder stayed in Rome where they could be carefully watched. The only major instability was the fact that while everyone was pretending that the emperors were not really kings, the whole idea of the succession to the throne-that-was-not-meant-to-be-a-throne was a murky one. Despite this, civil wars were rare in the first two centuries of the Empire and the whole system worked.

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been. So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly. All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival. As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place — changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation. Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting. But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple. The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge. But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself. Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them. Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

So while these and similar changes — often called “reforms” — brought the Crisis to an end, Goldsworthy makes a strong case that in the longer run the Empire was weakened and that the seeds of the collapse of the Fifth Century were sown in the chaos of the Third.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Bothersome Bears

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

A 700-pound black bear dubbed Bubba has been living large on Lake Tahoe’s shores:

The bear has broken into at least 50 homes in search of food the past year, causing more than $70,000 of damage, and leaving stinky, basketball-size deposits as his calling card.

In fact, bears are causing all kinds of trouble these days:

Across California and Nevada, last year’s harsh winter forced bears across California and Nevada down from the mountains in search of food.

In May, Mr. Lackey says one bear killed eight sheep and goats in a single incident in Carson City, Nev. That same month, he says, another bear broke into a garage in Gardnerville, Nev., and got stuck in a Mercedes, surprising the car’s owner when he found the vehicle occupied the next morning.

And in July in Yosemite National Park, bears caused $67,915 of damage in just one week by raiding parking lots, campgrounds and other areas, according to the National Park Service. In comparison, last year bears caused only an average of $1,500 in damage per week.

At Lake Tahoe, Mr. Lackey and other biologists have killed 13 bears so far this year, triple the normal average by August. Bubba, double the size of the average adult black bear, has proven remarkably elusive.

Some of Bubba’s exploits and escapes are the stuff of legend. In one incident in mid-2009, a bear matching Bubba’s description confronted a frightened homeowner, who told officials that he shot the bear between the eyes with a .44 Magnum. The bullet apparently bounced off the bear’s skull, leaving him wounded but still alive, Mr. Lackey says.

Oh, bother!

A powerful rifle is superior to any handgun in killing power, shooter Chuck Hawks says, but if you’re going to carry a handgun for protection against bears, he recommends a Ruger Blackhawk revolver (6.5″ barrel) in .357 or .41 Magnum, or a Ruger Super Blackhawk revolver (5.5″ or 7.5″ barrel) in .44 Magnum. He may have to revise his recommendation upward.

Posted in Animals, Weapons | 1 Comment »

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