Isegoria

If you’re reading this, there is a high probability that, like Weird Al, you are White & Nerdy.

What happens when police kill?

“Everybody in our nation, including law enforcement, gets their training about police shootings from Hollywood,” says Dr Lewinski, professor of sociology at Minnesota State University.

That ignorance extends to police, judges and juries. It wasn’t until Dr Lewinski started conducting experiments in the early 1990s that anyone had looked at how quickly suspects could move and how long it took police officers to react to that movement.

He discovered that in the two seconds it takes an officer to draw and pull the trigger, a suspect can fire nine rounds. A person can turn and move as much as 13ft (4m) in one second.

So an officer facing an attacker may decide to shoot — and later swear they were facing them — when in reality their victim has turned to run and been shot in the back.

In the US, an astonishing 70% of victims of police shootings are shot in the back or the side.

The stress of such an encounter affects recall:

In a pilot study in Minneapolis in August, the results were alarming. The officers did not know how many shots they fired and their description of the suspect was inaccurate.

“One of the things lost in the stress response is the counting. Mathematical ability is certainly suppressed. We know that people can’t think and shoot simultaneously in this kind of high stress situation,” says Dr Lewinski.

If police officers cannot remember key details, it raises serious concerns about the reliability of their evidence. But it does not mean they are lying.

In ‘This Meeting Is Over’, Alan Dowd looks back at Reagan’s Reykjavik meeting with Gorbachev, which most observers considered a failure, and America’s subsequent victory over the “evil empire”:

We can measure its evil in many ways, but perhaps the easiest way is its utter contempt for human life: One historian estimates the Soviet regime’s murder toll at a staggering 62 million. And Lenin’s victims died on nearly every continent. The trail of blood stretches across eight decades and spans four generations.

In short, Reagan was not overstating when he called the USSR “evil.”

A “new” Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs:

With standard techniques exhausted, [Professor Jennifer] Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient’s ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again.

“I’ve used honey in a dozen cases since then,” said Eddy. “I’ve yet to have one that didn’t improve.”

Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.

Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed.

In Madagascar, Digging Up the Dead Divides Families:

In a culture where the ancestors are revered, many families are splitting along religious lines over whether ritual exhumation of the dead is an act of respect or an act of sacrilege.

Madagascar, an island nation half again the size of California, has long had an uneasy relationship with Christianity. During the 19th century, Queen Ranavalona I suspected that missionaries were colonial agents, so she ordered her soldiers to push Christian converts off a cliff, which they did.

Today, 52% of Malagasy practice indigenous religions, while 41% are Christians, according to the CIA World Factbook. The reality, however, is far more complicated. Many families include both Christians and animists. And many individuals blend Christianity with a belief that the ancestors can intercede with the Creator to bless the living with wealth, health and happiness or, if mistreated, curse them with unemployment, disease and misery.

The melting pot often comes to a boil over the turning of the dead, or famadihana, as the ceremony is called in Malagasy. Although the Malagasy are an ethnic blend of Malaysians, Indonesians, Africans and Arabs, the origin of the famadihana itself is a mystery. Elie Rajaonarison, an anthropologist at the University of Antananarivo, says that the ceremony survives in part because it reinforces social order. People lead good lives so that they, too, will be honored as ancestors some day.

Generally, the exhumations are held in the dry season every five or seven years, after a family member has a dream in which a dead relative complains that he is cold in the tomb.

Exhumation ceremonies can be very expensive in a country where the average person earns roughly $900 a year. The new shrouds range from about $3.50 for a synthetic fabric to $110 for a fine shroud of light-brown raw silk. Buying a cheap one raises the specter of offending the ancestors, and the living.

Happy Leif Erikson Day!

In case you haven’t heard, Russia has A Dying Population:

The former Soviet Union, with almost 300 million people, was the world’s third-most populous country, behind China and India. Slightly more than half of its citizens lived in Russia. The country has lost the equivalent of a city of 700,000 people every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, only partially offset by an influx of people from other former Soviet republics.

A country that sprawls across one-eighth of the globe is now home to 142 million people.

The losses have been disproportionately male. At the height of its power, the Soviet Union’s people lived almost as long as Americans. But now, the average Russian man can expect to live about 59 years, 16 years less than an American man and 14 less than a Russian woman.

Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said last year that if the trend didn’t change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.