To prepare for the invasion of Japan, the US manufactured half a million purple hearts. (That’s the medal that goes to wounded soldiers.)
We still haven’t used them up.
Joseph Fouché says, Good job, atom bomb!
Purple Hearts
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010Irregular Warfare on the Korean Peninsula
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010David Maxwell examines the potential for irregular warfare on the Korean Peninsula and notes that the Chinese have a clear stake in what happens in the north:
[D]espite wishful thinking otherwise, China is going to intervene during a crisis in the north in order to protect four major interests. It must prevent the spillover of any conflict into China. Second, it must prevent the flow of refugees into an area where there are already some 2 million ethnic Koreans. Third, it will want to prevent not only the loss of control of nuclear weapons, but also prevent nuclear weapons from falling into ROK hands and simultaneously securing any information and evidence that might demonstrate Chinese complicity in the north Korean nuclear development program. Finally, China will want to ensure access to the natural resources that it has already secured through multi-year leases (in some cases 100 years) with the north Korean government. These interests will drive Chinese actions in the event of crisis, either conflict or collapse.
Remember Pearl Harbor
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010Remember Pearl Harbor, Jonathan says — and screw Google:
Note that, as usual, Google ignores the anniversary as it routinely ignores other US patriotic commemorations. You can’t say they don’t understand the importance of remembrance, since they seem to remember everything else. But for some memories they look the other way. What is that about? Whatever their intent, the conspicuous non-observance outlines that which isn’t acknowledged, much as black holes reveal themselves by distorting the space around them. Google’s odd behavior has been noted so often that Microsoft’s Bing.com makes a point of showing a photo of the USS Arizona memorial every December 7.
History and Moral Philosophy of Puppy Housebreaking
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
In reference to Foseti’s theory of crime and punishment, Winchell Chung just mentioned this passage from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:
I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century.
According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as Dillinger’s were as common as dogfights. The Terror had not been just in North America — Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces.
“Law-abiding people,” Dubois had told us, “hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons… to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.
This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.”
I had tried to imagine such things happening in our schools. I simply couldn’t. Nor in our parks. A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one — “Mr. Dubois, didn’t they have police? Or courts?”
“They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked.”
“I guess I don’t get it.” If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad… well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side.
But such things just didn’t happen.
Mr. Dubois then demanded of me, “Define a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ ”
“Uh, one of those kids — the ones who used to beat up people.”
“Wrong.”
“Huh? But the book said — ”
“My apologies. Your textbook does so state. But calling a tail a leg does not make the name fit ‘Juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms, one which gives a clue to their problem and their failure to solve it. Have you ever raised a puppy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you housebreak him?”
“Err… yes, sir. Eventually.” It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.
“Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?”
“What? Why, he didn’t know any better; he was just a puppy.
“What did you do?”
“Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him.”
“Surely he could not understand your words?”
“No, but he could tell I was sore at him!”
“But you just said that you were not angry.”
Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up. “No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn’t he?”
“Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn’t know that he was doing wrong. Yet you indicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?”
I didn’t then know what a sadist was — but I knew pups. “Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he’s in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won’t do it again — and you have to do it right away! It doesn’t do a bit of good to punish him later; you’ll just confuse him. Even so, he won’t learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it’s a waste of breath just to scold him.” Then I added, “I guess you’ve never raised pups.”
“Many. I’m raising a dachshund now — by your methods. Let’s get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class… and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret — in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.”
(I had reflected that my father must never have heard of that theory.)
“Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law,” he had gone on.
“Flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ ” Dubois had mused aloud, “I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment — and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.
“As for ‘unusual,’ punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose.” He then pointed his stump at another boy. “What would happen if a puppy were spanked every hour?”
“Uh… probably drive him crazy!”
“Probably. It certainly will not teach him anything. How long has it been since the principal of this school last had to switch a pupil?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. About two years. The kid that swiped — ”
“Never mind. Long enough. It means that such punishment is so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. Back to these young criminals — They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning — a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished — and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation — ‘paroled’ in the jargon of the times.
“This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called ‘juvenile delinquent’ becomes an adult criminal — and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You — ”
He had singled me out again. “Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house… and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken — whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”
“Why… that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”
“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”
“Uh… why, mine, I guess.”
“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”
“Mr. Dubois,” a girl blurted out, “but why? Why didn’t they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it — the sort of lesson they wouldn’t forget! I mean ones who did things really bad. Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he had answered grimly, “except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’ It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder — but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious ‘highest motives’ no matter what their behavior.”
“But — good heavens!” the girl answered. “I didn’t like being spanked any more than any kid does, but when I needed it, my mama delivered. The only time I ever got a switching in school I got another one when I got home and that was years and years ago. I don’t ever expect to be hauled up in front of a judge and sentenced to a flogging; you behave yourself and such things don’t happen. I don’t see anything wrong with our system; it’s a lot better than not being able to walk outdoors for fear of your life — why, that’s horrible!”
“I agree. Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.”
“Sir? But I thought — But he does! I have.”
“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not — and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.
These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.”
“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.”
“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.
“These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures,’ to ‘reach them,’ to ‘spark their moral sense.’ Tosh! They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral.’
“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’ ”
“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.”
Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”
“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called ‘natural human rights’ that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
“The third ‘right’? — the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives — but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”
Mr. Dubois then turned to me. “I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue — indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.”
“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”
(That’s from Chapter VIII, pages 90–96 in my old paperback edition.)
Accurate Action
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010A bolt action is the most accurate action one can have on a rifle, John Plaster (The Ultimate Sniper) says:
In the early 1960s, I pooled money with my boyhood squirrel-hunting companions Joe Remarke and Vic Evaschuk to buy a single-shot bolt-action .22 rifle. Our arrangement was that one of us stalked forward until he had a shot and then turned the rifle over to another. If you missed, it could be an hour before it was your turn again, and any bushy-tail you saw during the interim laughed at your predicament. No unarmed boy likes being the butt of squirrel humor.
Seriously, though, shooting in such disciplined circumstances meant each shot counted and resulted in one squirrel bagged for each shot fired. It was phenomenal shooting.
A year or two later, when we all had part-time jobs, we purchased .22 automatics — Joe got a Ruger, Vic got a Browning, and I a Remington — and our shooting went to hell. We’d lost the mental focus required for one-shot hunting.
Foseti’s theory of crime and punishment
Monday, December 6th, 2010Foseti’s theory of crime and punishment has evolved from a libertarian concern for rights to a reactionary priority on law and order first:
The link above tells the tale of nice, law-abiding woman walking home from the grocery store on a lovey November day in DC. The unfortunate woman’s route took her past a group of “youths” (interestingly, this phrase is seemingly used in all countries and societies to describe the class of people that commit nearly all the crime, so in the US it refers to young black males) who live in a housing project. (The houses that surround the project sell for $500,000+, creating an interesting dynamic). Anyway, while this woman walked by the “youths” one of them randomly punched her in the face, breaking her jaw in a couple places. The “youths” then fled into the project, where escape from consequences is defining characteristic of life.
This is the sort of activity that I am “worried about.” It was no more caused by the illegality of drugs than it was caused by rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The war on drugs is for libertarians like original sin is for the Catholic. (If you’d like my — non-religious — opinion, the Catholics have the better of the choices here, by far).
Worse yet, these “youths” will likely not be caught and if they are, they are unlikely to stand trial for their crime. Even if they do, they’ll be back on the street in a matter of days or weeks. If we’re lucky, they’ll get caught holding some drugs in the near future and spend some real time behind bars, however insufficient. Perhaps there is some injustice in the fact that they are in prison for the wrong “crime,” but I will lose roughly zero minutes of sleep for this particular injustice. The real injustice is that the modern “justice system” is completely incapable of providing justice for this particular type of crime. Absolutely no one actually expects the “youths” to get caught and punished in any manner that even approximates justice.
If I were in charge, the war on drugs would end immediately, and many drugs would be legalized. I would, however, not expect the result to be a utopia in which there was no more drug-related crime (let alone no crime at all!). Drugs, after all, would still cost money and be addictive. These facts combined with the fact that persistent drug use makes it hard to hold a normal job, mean that many drug addicts will resort to crime (regardless of the legality of drug use).
However, if I were in charge, policing methods (and the justice system) would radically change prior to any changes in the drug laws. I think that libertarians must shoulder a lot of the blame for the decline in the quality of policing and prosecuting. Virtually all responsibility has been taken away from individual police officers. Instead they are required to follow ever-more complex guidelines and procedures, which are designed to protect the guilty and guard against even the possibility that someone, somewhere might say, think or do something racist.
So again, when we analyze the libertarian position carefully, we conclude with Moldbug that, “[j]ust as Newtonian rules only make sense at low speeds, Misesian [i.e. libertarian] rules only make sense in a secure order.” You cannot both demand the police strategy that we now have and demand and an end to the war on drugs. Well, you can, but you’re demands are incoherent at best, and deadly at worst
Oregon’s Speed-Freak Football
Monday, December 6th, 2010Oregon’s speed-freak football starts on the practice field:
Oregon does no discrete conditioning during practice, no “gassers” — the sideline-to-sideline sprints that are staples in many programs — and no “110s” — sprints from the goal line to the back of the opposite end zone. The practice itself serves as conditioning. Just as they do during games, Oregon’s players run play after play — offensive sets; punt and kickoff returns and coverages; field goals; late-game two-minute drills — but at a pace that exceeds what they can achieve on Saturdays. Nick Aliotti, Oregon’s defensive coordinator, explained that the team can go even faster in practice because the “referees” — student managers sprinting around in striped shirts — spot the ball faster than any real game official would.
Trying to reach (or exceed) competition speed in training is a common goal across a range of sports. I once asked Bob Bowman, the longtime coach of Michael Phelps, why Phelps did not swim the languorous distance sets that were part of some other competitors’ regimens. “We don’t want him to swim slow in meets,” he said, “so why would we have him practice swimming slow?” John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, was known for fast-paced practices that reduced the need for aerobic training.
But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct. Coaches , after all, get into the business because they love a sport and want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game. Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection.
Imagine the following, which you would see at a typical football practice across nearly any level: An offensive-line coach wades in after a play, puts his hands on the shoulder pads of his big left tackle and tries to correct the angle on his block or some subtle aspect of his footwork. Another play is run, and the coach says, “Better,” but he wades back in to make another small adjustment. That’s how a crisp two-hour practice becomes a three-hour ordeal.
It doesn’t happen at Oregon. Coaches sometimes pull players from the field for quick talks, but first they send in substitutes, and the plays keep on rolling. They look back at the films from each practice — identify mistakes — and then point them out in early-evening players’ meetings, which are also short.
This style has been easier for Kelly’s players to adjust to than for his coaches, most of whom have spent many more years than he has at the major college level. Aliotti, the defensive coordinator, is 56 and in his third stint on the Oregon staff. He has also coached in the N.F.L. “It’s insanity for a coach,” he said when we talked one morning after practice. “You’ve got the music blasting, you look around and your kids are dancing and you don’t want to stop the fun. But when you’re an old-school guy like me, it takes patience and change, because you want to make yourself heard. I want to correct a guy, but we’re already on to the next play. Don’t get me wrong. This has been good for us as a team. But I have to be real with you. It’s still hard for me.”
This lets them push the pace on the playing field:
College-football offenses have become more wide open in recent years, but the highest-scoring attacks tend to rely mainly on the forward pass. They are aerial circuses, like Texas Tech under former Coach Mike Leach, whose celebrated spread offense from 2000 to 2009 was so pass-first that his quarterback, in 2003, averaged about 60 pass attempts and 486 passing yards per game. By contrast, Oregon was leading the nation in scoring through 10 games this season with an attack almost evenly split between passing and rushing attempts. The run plays — because receivers are not spread all over the field at the end of a play — allow the Ducks to scramble back to the line of scrimmage and quickly snap the ball again. And Oregon sequences its plays and formations in such a way that it can push the tempo even after pass attempts. The running-backs coach, Gary Campbell, told me that if a receiver on the right side of a formation is sent on a crossing pattern to the other side of the field, Oregon coaches have already planned a formation for the next play that keeps him on the side of the field where he finished.
Mark “Jimmy” Essex
Monday, December 6th, 2010The story of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower sniper, is fairly well known. I’ve discussed it before.
I hadn’t heard the story of Mark “Jimmy” Essex though, until I stumbled across it in John Plaster’s The Ultimate Sniper. It’s pretty wild.
It starts on New Year’s Eve, 1972, when the young black man decides to get back at his white oppressors by killing New Orleans police officers. He opens fire with his .44 magnum carbine during a shift change at the central lockup — and kills a black cop.
He escapes to a bad part of town and breaks into a warehouse — which is wired with an alarm. When an unsuspecting police officer shows up to check on things, Essex shoots him in the back, from ambush. The officer’s partner calls for back-up though, and soon they storm the building.
Essex is gone — but he has left a trail of dropped .44 magnum rounds. The trail is suspiciously consistent though. While the police debate whether to storm the nearby church at the end of the trail, they receive a call from their Chief of Police, Clarence Giarrusso — who calls off the search. The police are not welcome there in Gert Town, a black neighborhood.
Eventually, after shooting a white grocer and stealing a car at gun-point, Essex makes his way to a Howard Johnson’s hotel:
When Essex burst out of the Gravier stairwell into the 18th floor hallway, he startled three black housekeepers. As he ran past them, Essex told the hotel workers not to worry. He said he was only after white people. In the hallway in front of room 1829 Essex found 27-year-old Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife Betty. It was the last day of the Steagalls New Orleans vacation, and they were moments away from checking out of the hotel.
Dr. Steagall tried to stop the man he saw running down the hallway clutching a rifle. The two men struggled briefly; then Essex shot the doctor in the chest. As Mrs. Steagall dropped to the floor and wrapped her arms around her husband, Essex pushed the muzzle of his .44 carbine against the back of her head and fired.
Essex slipped into the Steagalls’ room and snatched the telephone book from the nightstand. He doused it with lighter fluid, set it on fire, then tossed it under the window drapes. As he scuttled into the hallway and past the blood-soaked bodies of the Steagalls, Essex dropped a red, green, and black African flag onto the floor beside them. Within minutes, room 1829 was an inferno.
Essex ran down the stairwell to the 11th floor. This time he didn’t knock on the fire door. He just shot the lock off. He strode down the hallway, ducking in and out of empty rooms and lighting fires.
Calls started coming into the hotel switchboard about a man with a gun wandering the hotel and shooting guests. Frank Schneider, the hotel assistant manager, rode the elevator up to the 11th floor to investigate. As soon as Schneider stepped off the elevator, he spotted the big gun in Essex’s hands and bolted for the Perdido stairwell. Essex raised his rifle to his shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The .44 Magnum bullet hit the assistant manager in the back of the head. His body fell just short of the fire door at the end of the hall.
Essex walked down to the 10th floor.
Outside the hotel, a crowd started to gather. Plumes of smoke poured from several of the upper-floor windows.
Walter Collins, the hotel general manager, started climbing the Gravier stairwell. The switchboard had received more reports of a man with a gun. The eighth and ninth floors were filled with smoke. When Collins reached the 10th floor he spotted someone through the fire door window. He opened the door with a passkey. As Collins stepped into the hallway, Essex shot him. Mr. Collins died from his wound three weeks later in the hospital.
Someone called the fire department. A few minutes later, policemen and firemen were on the way.
Essex shoots some more guests and, of course, some of the firemen and police officers who arrive on the scene. This is before SWAT, so most of the officers have .38 revolvers, a few have shotguns, and others have brought their own personal deer rifles.
Some of the spectators cheer when Essex fires.
Because Essex keeps on the move, the police assume they are facing multiple snipers.
Essex manages to hold off an attempt to storm the roof. The police do manage to secure all the floors of the hotel though.
Then it really starts to sound like a movie:
Eighth District officer Antoine Saacks had worked undercover in the French Quarter until four or five o’clock Sunday morning. Around 10 a.m. his wife woke him up and told him there was a sniper at the Howard Johnson’s. Saacks knew immediately that it was connected to the string of police shootings.
His wife got hysterical when he started collecting his gear and told her he was going to the hotel. To calm her down, Saacks claimed to have changed his mind. He told her he wasn’t going; then he tossed his weapons and equipment out through the bathroom window of their house. He sneaked outside and loaded it into his car and headed for the Howard Johnson’s. With him he brought an M-16 rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He thought that would be enough. He was wrong.
[...]
Since his arrival early that afternoon, Saacks had been across Gravier Street in the Rault Center, the location of the deadly high-rise fire two months before. He had found a position opposite the cubicle that sat on top of the Gravier stairwell. A solid cinderblock wall shielded the sniper from Saacks’ view, but he could hear the gunman shouting obscenities and firing his big gun. Saacks occasionally saw the sniper flick out still-burning cigarette butts. Less than 100 yards separated the two men. “I periodically would pepper the cubicle just to let him know somebody was close by,” Saacks says.Eventually, the sniper tossed a crumpled red and white cigarette pack onto the roof. “I shot the pack a couple of times and bounced it around on the rooftop,” Saacks says. He was trying to send the sniper a message: He wasn’t the only one who knew how to shoot.
Then Marine Corps Lt. Col. Pitman volunteers to fly a helicopter within shooting range of the rooftop sniper:
Because of the wind, the rain, and the low clouds, Pitman had to make his approach from the south. He came thundering in below the tops of the buildings then swept up over the roof of the Howard Johnson’s. Once he was over the hotel, Pitman fixed his searchlight on the Gravier cubicle but couldn’t see anyone. Saacks and the other police sharpshooters figured the sniper was either hiding just inside the stairwell or in one of the two alcoves on either side of the door. They opened fire.
During several passes over the cubicle, Saacks used his M-16 to cut gaps in the cinderblock walls. Although the policemen couldn’t find the sniper, he didn’t have any trouble finding them. Each time Pitman pulled away from the hotel, police officers in nearby buildings reported seeing the gunman run out of the cubicle and fire at the helicopter.
When the policemen ran out of ammo, Pitman had to set the Sea Knight down so they could get more. They made a second flight over the roof at about 7:30 p.m. Essex fired at the helicopter as Pitman made his approach, but again he vanished as the aircraft roared over the roof. The policemen in the back of the helicopter continued to blast away at the cubicle.
Soon, they needed to land again for more ammunition. Saacks had burned through the 1,000 rounds he’d brought from his house. As Pitman dropped away from the hotel, the sniper again popped out of his hole and started shooting at them. “It was obvious the helicopter was getting hit,” Saacks says. “You could feel the strikes.”
At 8:50 p.m., Pitman lifted off from behind City Hall for a third time. Reloaded, Saacks and the other officers were ready for another confrontation with the elusive sniper. On the approach to the hotel, the helicopter again took fire, but as they rose above the roof, the sniper had once more disappeared. Pitman hovered just over the rooftop and tried to hold his searchlight steady as the policemen fired into the Gravier Street cubicle.
Essex was in the back of the alcove on the right-hand side of the Gravier stairwell. A metal water pipe ran up along the back wall of the alcove. Each time the helicopter passed overhead, Essex shimmied to the top of the pipe and clung there. As they looked down onto the top of the cubicle, the marines and policemen inside the helicopter couldn’t see him. It was an almost perfect hiding spot.
As Saacks fired into the cubicle, trying to open even bigger holes in the cinderblock walls, he noticed that the water pipe at the back of the alcove was shaking. He stopped firing and tapped Officer Tom Casey on the shoulder. When Casey looked over, Saacks shouted above the roar of the engines, “I think he’s on the pipe.” Casey nodded that he understood, and Saacks said, “Put some fire on his ass to try to get him to drop.”
Saacks fired several rounds into the roof just outside the alcove. He was trying to skip them high up along the back wall near the pipe. One of the shots from the helicopter hit the water pipe and shattered it, sending a torrent of water down on top of the policemen in the Gravier stairwell.
In the cockpit of the helicopter, Pitman was aware that the policemen had discovered the sniper’s hiding place. He eased the big helicopter away from the roof as if he were pulling out. It was a high stakes game of cat and mouse.
With the pipe under him split open and the helicopter again flying away, Essex dropped to the floor of the alcove and picked up his rifle. He charged out onto the roof to fire another couple of parting shots at the retreating aircraft. Then the searchlight hit him.
After dropping away from the hotel, Pitman had reversed direction and slipped back over the building. He swept his searchlight across the roof. “I saw him come out of the dark,” Pitman says. The gunman was caught out in the open, 30 feet from the Gravier cubicle. The sniper snapped his rifle up to his shoulder. Pitman saw a flash and a red-hot ball rocketing up toward him. The gunmen’s round slammed into the transmission housing just above the cockpit. Pitman knew the helicopter had been hit. He didn’t know how badly or even how long they could stay in the air, but he held the big bird steady over the hotel as the policemen in the back adjusted their line of fire. They were 10 feet off the roof and less than 50 feet from the sniper.
“We were looking eyeball to eyeball at him,” Saacks says. With a fresh magazine in his M-16, Saacks opened fire. “I just walked the bullets right into him.”
When Pitman’s searchlight finally caught Essex out in the open, the elusive enemy that the police had been chasing for a week was finally exposed. Policemen who’d crouched for hours in open windows and on rooftops all around the Howard Johnson’s started shooting.
Mark Essex’s body convulsed beneath the fusillade of police bullets and collapsed onto the roof. His Ruger .44-caliber Magnum carbine lay beside him, broken into pieces by the hail of gunfire.
“He was hit a number of times,” recalls Pitman, in a bit of understatement. An autopsy later revealed Essex had been struck by more than 200 bullets.
Police later find ever inch of Essex’s apartment covered in anti-white graffiti.
Inside Kevin Smith’s Booming Podcasting Business
Sunday, December 5th, 2010Kevin Smith, the fat director, has a booming podcasting business:
For Smith fans, the live-podcasting theater is the sanctum sanctorum where they get to see the king of the comic-book geeks in action, regally decked out in his signature PUCK U jersey amid a hockey-inspired decor featuring mountains of sticks and red-and-black carpeting for his beloved New Jersey Devils.
For a handful of Smith’s friends who podcast with him and share in the profits, SModcastle is the saving grace that has freed them from living with their parents. And for Smith himself, it’s the source of creative freedom and emotional solace he desperately needs. “All the fun that went away from the movies is here,” Smith says. The 40-year-old feels like he’s back in the Wild West of indie filmmaking, when he made Clerks for $28,000, before his movies became corporate Frankensteins. “No bosses saying, ‘You can’t do that,’” he says, “or, ‘This is going to cost too much money.’” Or having to deal with difficult stars like Bruce Willis, who starred in Cop Out. “That’ll kill your fucking soul,” he says.
The SModcastle has also become the hub for Smith’s expanding podcast business: “We don’t have the balls to say, ‘Pay what you will as you exit,’ like the Little Rascals did. We like to get the money up front.” That’s 50 seats at 10 or 25 bucks a head depending on the show, one or two performances a night, four nights a week, in a place that rents for $4,000 a month. “We haven’t advertised at all; we’re selling out shows simply because of Twitter,” he says, looking extremely pleased as he stands at the refrigerator of the bus he uses as his on-set trailer. Smith is holding a carton of low-fat chocolate milk, occasionally lifting it to his mouth, but he doesn’t take a swig because he’s talking too much. “It’s shocking how self-sufficient you can be.”
SModcast 3D commands roughly $2,000 for an advertising spot, with two spots running in a typical hour. “For as much as I thought, Wow, this is a brand-new world, it’s really the same old world,” Smith says. “Everyone tries to figure out how to keep it as similar to everything as possible, so this is like TV or radio ad buys.”
Samuel T. Cohen has passed away
Saturday, December 4th, 2010Samuel T. Cohen has passed away — but his property is still intact:
Unlike J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the respective fathers of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, Mr. Cohen was not well known outside government and scientific circles, although his work for years influenced the international debate over the deployment and potential uses of nuclear arms.
In contrast to strategic warheads, which can kill millions and level cities, and smaller short-range tactical nuclear arms designed to wipe out battlefield forces, the neutron bomb minimized blast and heat. Instead, it maximized a barrage of infinitesimal neutrons that could zip through tanks, buildings and other structures and kill people, usually by destroying the central nervous system, and all other life forms.
While doubters questioned the usefulness, logic and ethics of killing people and sparing property, Mr. Cohen called his bomb a “sane” and “moral” weapon that could limit death, destruction and radioactive contamination, killing combatants while leaving civilians and towns unscathed. He insisted that many critics misunderstood or purposely misrepresented his ideas for political, economic or mercenary reasons.
The goal was not to kill, kill, kill, kill, kill the poor but to reduce fall-out and widespread damage:
Fired via a missile or an artillery shell and detonated a quarter-mile above ground, his bomb limited death to an area less than a mile across, avoiding wider indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. It was not a radioactively “clean” bomb, but its neutrons dissipated quickly, leaving no long-term contamination that could render entire regions uninhabitable for decades.
[...]
“It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised,” he said in September in a telephone interview for this obituary. “It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact.”
Doinkers Lose
Friday, December 3rd, 2010I recently mentioned that posturing is a terribly underestimated element of combat and cited Dave Grossman on the importance of loud weapons:
The reality is that, on the battlefield, if you are going “doink, doink,” no matter how effectively, and the enemy is going “BANG!, BANG!,” no matter how ineffectively, ultimately the “doinkers” lose.
John Plaster (The Ultimate Sniper) shares an anecdote from Nam that demonstrates that exact point:
The only time I ever shot a man with a suppressed weapon was in April 1969. Our SOG recon team, RT Illinois, had been inserted in Cambodia 30 minutes after one of the heaviest B-52 strikes of the war to assess damage to the enemy’s secret cross-border sanctuaries. The target was the suspected headquarters of the NVA 27th Infantry Regiment. This was part of the “secret bombing” for which Henry Kissinger was later criticized. Of course, I thought it was a splendid idea and still do.
The North Vietnamese soldiers who managed to survive this aerial bombardment, however, thought it a terrible idea, and — Kissinger and the B-52 crews not being available — they attempted to convey their feelings to we members of RT Illinois. The ensuing firefight was horrific.
While our team leader, Ben Thompson, led two badly wounded Vietnamese mercenaries and the rest of the team toward an extraction landing zone, teammate George Bacon and I delayed the assaulting North Vietnamese in a series of short ambushes. In addition to tossing grenades, George and I took turns peppering our pursuers with small-arms fire, he riddling them with 5.56mm from his CAR-15 and me “ppfff-fff-tt-ting” at them with a suppressed 9mm Karl Gustav Swedish K submachine gun. When George fired, the NVA sought cover and slowed down, but when I let loose, it had no effect. They had no idea I was shooting at them.
Fighting Tumors With Tumors
Friday, December 3rd, 2010Researchers at Dartmouth are fighting cancer with a personalized vaccine developed from the patient’s own tumor:
The personalized vaccines were injected into each patient a month after surgery. Barth was able to determine that about 60% of the patients developed an immune response from the vaccine.
About five years later, he was able to compare the clinical outcomes between those who had had an immune response, and those who had not. Of the group who did not have an immune response from the vaccine, only 18% were alive and tumor-free. Of the group who did have an immune response from the vaccine, 63% were alive and tumor-free — a remarkable result indeed. (The vaccine approach has the added benefit of being non-toxic, in contrast to chemo.)
I suppose that still leaves some questions of causality.
Anyway, one of the keys to their (apparent) success is that they weren’t relying on the vaccines to kill fully grown tumors:
“The small number of T-cells generated by a vaccine can’t destroy a large tumor. However, what they may be able to do is search out and destroy tumor cells that exist as only microscopic deposits. Once we brought patients into a measurable tumor-free condition with surgery, the anti-tumor T-cells induced by the vaccine may help keep them that way.”
(Hat tip à mon père.)
Posturing
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010As a child, playing with little army men, I had only the slightest grasp of tactics — but every little boy growing up after the World Wars osmotically absorbs what were originally highly novel stormtrooper tactics: don’t bunch up, take cover, use bursts of rapid fire to “cover” your friends as they sprint from one bit of real cover to another, and so on.
Marching, shoulder to shoulder, into machine-gun fire is the height of folly. No amount of élan or “heart” is going to overwhelm entrenched machine-guns. To modern Americans, even marching at a line of enemy soldiers armed with muskets seems downright insane.
But soldiers did it, right behind the officers who led them. Napoleon, who knew a thing or two about warfare, declared that the moral is to the physical as three to one — it’s not the size of the dog in fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog. Why would he say that?
Because it’s true — largely — just not for marching into modern automatic weapons or massed rifle fire. Throughout most of history, posturing — convincing yourself and your enemy that you’re bigger, meaner, and scarier — has been far more important than physical fighting ability:
It is widely known that most killing happens after the battle, in the pursuit phase (Clausewitz and Ardant du Picq both commented on this), and this is apparently due to two factors.
First, the pursuer doesn’t have to look in his victim’s eyes, and it appears to be much easier to deny an opponent’s humanity if you can stab or shoot them in the back and don’t have to look into their eyes when you kill them.
Second (and probably much more importantly), in the midbrain, during a pursuit, the opponent has changed from a fellow male engaged in a primitive, simplistic, ritualistic, head-to-head, territorial or mating battle to prey who must to be pursued, pulled down, and killed. Anyone who has ever worked with dogs understands this process: you are generally safe if you face a dog down, and you should always back away from a dog (or almost any animal) in a threatening situation because if you turn around and run you are in great danger of being viciously attacked. The same is true of soldiers in combat.
Thus one key to the battle is simply to get the enemy to run. The battlefield is truly psychological in nature, and in this realm the individual who puffs himself up the biggest, or makes the loudest noise, is most likely to win. The actual battle is, from one perspective, a process of posturing until one side or another turns and runs, and then the real killing begins. Thus posturing is critical to warfare, and victory can he achieved through superior posturing.
Bagpipes, bugles, drums, shiny armor, tall hats, chariots, elephants, and cavalry have all been factors in successful posturing (convincing oneself of one’s prowess while daunting one’s enemy), but, ultimately, gunpowder proved to be the ultimate posturing tool. For example, the long bow was significantly more accurate and had a far greater rate of fire and a much greater accurate range than the muzzle-loading muskets used up to the early part of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the long bow did not need the industrial base (iron and gunpowder) required by muskets, and the training of a long bowman was not really all that difficult.
Thus, mechanically speaking there are few reasons why there should not have been regiments of long bowmen at Waterloo and the 1st Bull Run cutting vast swaths through the enemy. [Similarly there were highly efficient, air-pressure-powered weapons available as early as the Napoleonic era (similar to modern paintball guns), which had a far higher firing rate than the muskets of that era, but were never used.] But it must be constantly remembered that, to paraphrase Napoleon, in war, psychological factors are three times more important than mechanical factors.
The reality is that, on the battlefield, if you are going “doink, doink,” no matter how effectively, and the enemy is going “BANG!, BANG!,” no matter how ineffectively, ultimately the “doinkers” lose. This phenomenon helps explain the effectiveness of high-noise-producing weapons ranging from Gustavus Adolphus’ small, mobile cannons assigned to infantry units to the U.S. Army’s M-60 machine gun in Vietnam, which fired large, very loud, 7.62-mm ammunition at a slow rate of fire vs the M-16′s smaller (and comparatively much less noisy) 5.56-mm ammunition firing at a rapid rate of fire.
A guy in a bright red coat, with a shiny steel breastplate and a tall helmet, atop a thundering beast, charging at you, is really, really scary — and if anyone getting charged decides to turn and run, rather than hold fast with his bayonet, well, then the whole line crumbles. It’s a game of chicken.
(I’ve mentioned those surprisingly advanced air rifles before, by the way. Fascinating.)
Tablets and Etherealization
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010Paul Graham suspects that we’ll end up calling iPhones, iPads, and their Android equivalents tablets:
The only reason we even consider calling them “mobile devices” is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone; we’d think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.
The iPhone isn’t so much a phone as a replacement for a phone. That’s an important distinction, because it’s an early instance of what will become a common pattern. Many if not most of the special-purpose objects around us are going to be replaced by apps running on tablets.
This is already clear in cases like GPSes, music players, and cameras. But I think it will surprise people how many things are going to get replaced. We funded one startup that’s replacing keys. The fact that you can change font sizes easily means the iPad effectively replaces reading glasses. I wouldn’t be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale.
The advantages of doing things in software on a single device are so great that everything that can get turned into software will. So for the next couple years, a good recipe for startups will be to look around you for things that people haven’t realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.
In 1938 Buckminster Fuller coined the term etherealization to describe the increasing tendency of physical machinery to be replaced by what we would now call software. The reason tablets are going to take over the world is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow etherealization to flow into a lot of new areas. No one who has studied the history of technology would want to underestimate the power of that force.
Marines’ New Sorta-Gunship
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
The Marines are a thoughtful, learning organization, which is why they threw together a new sorta-gunship to kill insurgents cheaply:
When the Marines boosted their forces in Afghanistan last year, they discovered they didn’t have the kind of on-call air support they needed to deal with pop-up groups of insurgents across a wide battlefield. “Because of the dispersed nature of our force, we suffered some casualties,” Trautman said.
That was the impetus for the Marines’ nine new gunship kits for its KC-130 tankers, pictured. The idea is to arm an airplane that’s going to be nearby, anyways, giving it just enough firepower to deal with insurgents that Trautman described as “un-determined.”
“We’re not building an [Air Force] AC-130,” with precision sensors and a vast weapons load-out, he said. “We’re building a roll-on, roll-off capability that can be put on existing KC-130s.”
The “soul of the system,” he said, will be a targeting pods “mounted on a wing station,” plus wing-mounted Hellfire missiles or gliding Viper Strike missiles tossed out the back. A gun firing out the side door is a less likely addition. The system is meant to be installed in just four hours.
This is just one example of the quickly-fielded, just-in-time, just-good-enough modularity we can expect to see in counter-insurgency air power:
We’re seeing it with the Air Force’s MC-12W spy planes, quickly modified from King Air twin props. We’re seeing it with drone designs, like the Predator family, that can be bough cheaply and therefore continuously replaced with better models. Plus, the Air Force is talking about buying gun kits for its T-6 trainers to turn them into “instant” insurgent killers.