It’s Time to Stop Saying “Caucasian”

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

It’s time to stop saying Caucasian for White, Justin Erik Halldór Smith says:

Because when I say ‘Caucasian’, I intend it as an adjective that refers to the land and peoples between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The origins of the use of this adjective as an umbrella term for so-called white people are rooted, it seems, in the Ottoman slave trade. Thus in 1684 François Bernier reports having been to a slave market in Constantinople. He is spellbound by the ivory beauty of a Circassian (presumably Georgian) slave girl. He notes that women from the Caucasus region have been praised since antiquity as the palest and most beautiful slave girls in all the world, and he regrets not having enough money to buy her.

Phenotypically, the girl Bernier desired was most likely very similar to, say, the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, yet for all that something altogether different from what, say, an Atlanta Republican maven has in mind when she imagines of herself that she is a ‘Caucasian’.

A century later, Christoph Meiners would attempt to transform the designation into a natural kind: now Caucasians constituted, alongside ‘Mongolians’ and ‘Negroes’, one of the basic subtypes of humanity. The mountain region and its peoples came to stand in metonymically for a third or so of humanity. Who makes the cut has been a matter of much dispute over the centuries. For Blumenbach, Slavs were Mongolian, while Tatars (presumably because of their long presence in the extensive Caucasus region) were included as Caucasians.

François Bernier left his native province of Anjou and became the personal physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in India:

His 1684 publication Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l’habitent is considered the first published post-Classical classification of humans into distinct races. He also wrote Travels in the Mughal Empire, which is mainly about the reigns of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. It is based on his own extensive journeys and observations, and on information from eminent Mughal courtiers who had witnessed the events at first hand.

[...]

François Bernier developed a racial classification system in his New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. He declared in this paper that Native Americans, North Africans and South Asians have little physical dissimilarities from Europeans other than their dark skin. He is counted as one of the first anthropologists to specify race using physical characteristics.

The Wikipedia entry on the Caucasian race makes no mention of Bernier but skips ahead to Meiners:

The term “Caucasian race” was coined by the German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785).[4] In Meiners’ unique racial classification, there were only two racial divisions (Racen): Caucasians (“white and beautiful”) and Mongolians (“brown and ugly”). These terms were used as a collective representative of what Meiners personally regarded as good looking and far less attractive, based solely on the appearance of the skin of the face, for example the Germans and the Tartars he considered Caucasian, and the best looking, while Jews, Slavs and Native Americans as Mongolian, and ugly in the face.[5]

This racial classification did not receive much support. However, in 1795, a colleague of Meiners from the University of Göttingen, Blumenbach, one of the earliest anthropologists, adopted the term Varietas Caucasia (“Caucasian Variety”), for a new major hypothetical racial division.[6] Blumenbach named it after the Caucasian peoples (from the Southern Caucasus region), whom he considered to be the archetype for the grouping.[7][8] Unlike Meiners, Blumenbach based his classification of the Caucasian race primarily on craniology after coming to realise that there was more to racial difference than skin pigmentation.[9][10]

In his earlier racial typology, Meiners maintained that Caucasians had the “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin”.[11] Europeans with darker skin he considered to be “dirty whites”, admixed with Mongolian. Such views were typical of pre-anthropological attempts at racial classification, where skin pigmentation was regarded as the main difference between races. Meiners’s view was shared by the French naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey, who believed that the Caucasians were only the palest-skinned Europeans.[12]

The earliest anthropologists, such as Blumenbach however came to recognize that skin pigmentation within European populations differed, without explaining it with the obsolete idea of admixture with another race. Thus Blumenbach, in the 3rd edition of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind, recognized that poorer European people (such as peasants) whom he observed generally worked outside, often became darker skinned (“browner”) through sun exposure.[13] He also came to realize that darker skin of an “olive-tinge” was a natural feature of some European populations closer to the Mediterranean Sea.[14] Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology rather than prioritizing skin pigmentation, and thus considered more than just the palest Europeans (“white, cheeks rosy”) as archetypes for the Caucasian race.[15]

Blumenbach owned the greatest contemporary collection of human skulls, 245 whole skulls and fragments and two mummies. Drawing from Petrus Camper’s theory of facial angle, Blumenbach and Cuvier classified races, through their skull collections based on their cranial features and anthropometric measurements. Caucasian traits were recognised as: thin nasal aperture (“nose narrow”), a small mouth, facial angle of 100°-90°, and orthognathism, exemplified by what Blumenbach saw in most ancient Greek crania and statues.[16][17] Later anthropologists of the 19th and early 20th century such as Pritchard, Pickering, Broca, Topinard, Morton, Peschel, Seligman, Bean, Ripley, Haddon and Dixon came to recognise other Caucasian morphological features, such as prominent supraorbital ridges and a sharp nasal sill.[18] Some anthropologists in the latter half of the 20th century, used the term “Caucasoid” in their literature, such as Boyd, Gates, Coon, Cole, Brues and Krantz replacing the earlier term “Caucasian” as it had fallen out of usage.[19]

The physical traits of Caucasoid crania are still recognised as distinct (in contrast to Mongoloid and Negroid races) within modern forensic anthropology. A Caucasoid skull is identified, with an accuracy of up to 95%, by the following features:[20][21][22][23][24]

  • Little or no prognathism exhibited—an orthognathic profile, with minimal protrusion of the lower face.
  • Retreating zygomatic bones (cheekbones), making the face look more “pointed”.
  • Narrow nasal aperture, with a tear-shaped nasal cavity.

Other physical characteristics of Caucasoids include hair texture that varies from straight to curly,[3] with wavy (cymotrichous) hair most typical on average according to Coon (1962), in contrast to the Negroid and Mongoloid races. Individual hairs are also rarely as sparsely distributed and coarse as found in Mongoloids.[3]

Skin color amongst Caucasoids ranges greatly from pale, reddish-white to dark brown tones.[3]

Orthognathism, retreating zygomatic bones, and narrow nasal apertures are social constructs, of course.

Posted in Linguistics, Science | 2 Comments »

R.I.P. Ray Bradbury

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Ray Bradbury has passed away, at the age of 91. I can remember reading a borrowed copy of Fahrenheit 451 in one school day in eighth grade. I don’t know whether the teachers failed to notice or they opted to show some discretion in ignoring my transgression that day.

Posted in Education, Media | No Comments »

Ukrainian Racism

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Apparently Ukrainian racism is in the news in soccer-loving nations, because the country will be hosting this summer’s European Championship — and because the country is really, really racist, in Alexander Boot’s experience:

For if it’s true that racism is a poor man’s snobbery, then Russians and Ukrainians must be very poor indeed.

The Ukrainians in particular have always enjoyed the reputation of being the most anti-Semitic people in the USSR, which is saying a lot. Their claim to that dubious distinction is amply supported by history.

For example, throughout the seventeenth century Ukrainian Cossacks were perpetrating the kind of atrocities that only the Nazis were able to match and eventually outdo. Those reached their peak in 1648-1649, when the Cossacks ably led by their Hetman Bohdan Chmielnicki massacred 300,000 Jews. Chmielnicki then went on to sign the 1654 treaty of Pereyaslav, incorporating the Ukraine into the Russian Empire and thereby achieving the improbable feat of making the Russians look tolerant by comparison.

The fine tradition of racially and religiously inspired massacres never really abated. Both under the tsars and during the Civil War, Kiev, Odessa, Bialystok, Lwów and numerous other Ukrainian cities saw numerous bloody pogroms, a word the Russians and Ukrainians contributed to a grateful world. And during the Second World War, Ukrainian nationalists unleashed torrents of blood that sometimes scared even the SS.

The reason I’m talking specifically about anti-Semitic outrages is that violence against blacks is a relatively recent phenomenon in that region — for the simple reason that even Russia, never mind the Ukraine, had had little experience of blacks until the 1957 International Youth Festival, the massive propaganda exercise following which the Patrice Lumumba University was founded.

This venerable institution trained Third World students for advanced degrees in terrorism, subversion and related subjects. One of their ablest Latin American alumni would later become famous as Carlos the Jackal. But most students were African, which delivered a massive shock to the Muscovites’ systems.

The term ‘blackarse’, traditionally used to describe anyone born south of Kiev, now had to do extra service to include not just Georgians and Armenians, but people who actually were black. Within months, the same racial stereotypes as in the erstwhile American South became standard fare around Moscow. Negroes smell. They stick their oversized penises into willing blondes. They rape the unwilling ones. They secretly practise cannibalism. They — well, you get the picture.

Russians wouldn’t be Russians if at some point they hadn’t begun to act on such stereotypes, particularly since the police tacitly approved. In fact, the well-oiled KGB rumour mill quickly went into high gear, promoting racial hatred. One suspects their motivation was the same as that of the Tsar’s secret police that had produced the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anything was welcome that could act as a distraction and relief valve.

Before long interracial relations in Moscow crystallised into a pattern not dissimilar to that of Alabama in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whenever a black man walked with a Russian girl in broad daylight, both would be cursed and sometimes spat at, a scene I witnessed many times. If they dared to walk together after dark, the man would be beaten within an inch of his life, and sometimes beyond that point.

Such incidents were hardly ever investigated. The cops would simply shrug with the same ‘well, what d’you expect’ nonchalance exhibited everywhere by policemen asked to investigate a crime they consider trivial. ‘Wrong place at the wrong time,’ they’d shrug, as if the incident had been force majeure with no human agency involved.

Then came a particularly snowy winter during which two black students disappeared. What was left of them was found when the snow melted in April. They had been beaten to death.

The next day several hundred African students staged a demonstration of protest in Red Square. Such events were never publicised as the papers had more important things to worry about, such as the starving existence of working-class people in the United States. But it was impossible to keep a rally in the centre of Moscow under wraps. Before long rumours began to circulate, and the KGB felt they had to set the record straight by countering with rumours of their own.

The grapevine they activated informed curious Muscovites that the demonstrators had been protesting against the absence of whorehouses in Moscow. To satisfy their beastly urges they had been demanding a hard-currency brothel staffed with full-bodied Russian blondes.

Since then the Ukraine has parted ways with Russia, at least formally. Her universities and football teams have been welcoming African arrivals, though welcoming is perhaps the wrong word to describe the public reaction. It’s roughly the same as it was in a post-1957 Russia, only worse. Every day one reads accounts of blacks in the Ukraine being attacked verbally if they are lucky, or physically, if they aren’t. Black footballers plying their trade there complain of the kind of abuse that these days wouldn’t be tolerated in Milwall or Barnsley. Passers-by routinely spit at them off the pitch, bananas are tossed at them on it.

That fruit is particularly close to Ukrainian hearts. Oleg Blokhin, manager of the Ukraine, which is in the same group as England, has publicly called for his players to learn from home-grown stars, rather than those visitors who ‘have climbed down from a tree and were given a couple of bananas to play football.’ Just imagine Roy Hodgson saying something along those lines.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Did Retained Juvenile Traits Help Birds Outlive Dinosaurs?

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Humans resemble juvenile apes, and this neoteny may explain how our species diverged from the other apes and became so successful.

Now it looks like birds may also have neoteny — or paedomorphosis — to thank for their outliving the (other) dinosaurs:

Bhullar and Abzhanov reached this conclusion by comparing the skulls of birds and dinosaurs across phylogenies, or related groups, and at different developmental stages. To quantitatively compare cranial geometries, they scanned the skulls of theropod dinosaurs (which are thought to be birds’ ancestors), crocodiles and alligators (dinosaurs’ cousins), early transitional birds such as Archaeopteryx, and modern birds. Then they created digitized versions of each skull and mapped out cranial landmarks, such as nostril tips, eye socket dimensions and places where bones meet.

Their measurements showed that whereas a typical non-avian dinosaur began life with a round head, large eyes and a big brain (relative to the rest of the body) then later developed an elongated snout and smaller relative brain size, birds kept their baby faces.

If birds did evolve by paedomorphosis, they join species such as axolotls. These salamanders evolved to retain tadpolelike gills and fins and, unlike most other amphibians, remain aquatic into adulthood. This feature appears to be due to a hormone disruption. By adding thyroid hormone into their water, researchers have caused axolotls to metamorphose into terrestrial salamanders.

But why would it be advantageous for adult animals to look like kids? Greg Erickson, who studies evolutionary morphology at The Florida State University and was not involved in the study, says that paedomorphosis can help a species to develop new adaptations and exploit new niches. In particular, he suggests that paedomorphosis may have enabled birds to develop larger eyes, which aid in spatial assessment during flight as well as a high brain-to-body-mass ratio, which may contribute to intelligence.

An even simpler explanation is that kids are small and, in times of environmental stress, small is good. Bhullar cites an example of Temnospondyli — large primitive amphibians that were common before 120 million years ago. Catastrophic events killed off most of the temnospondyli, except for a few paedomorphic species. “The interesting thing to me is that [after the catastrophe] these little paedomorphic animals were at the base of a giant radiation,” Bhullar says. He suggests that a similar phenomenon may have occurred during the catastrophic events that killed the dinosaurs — being small may have been an advantage, because smaller animals require less food and can more easily hide. “Everything that lived on land and weighed more than one kilogram perished,” Bhullar says. “The only dinosaurs that survived were the paedomorphic ones.” And after many of those larger species went extinct, the little dino may have been better placed to exploit the new niches that opened up.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Adam Piore lumps together the “juicers, trippers, and crocodiles” of the dangerous world of underground chemistry under one headline — and then describes the work of Patrick Arnold:

Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”

It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.

One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.

It wasn’t long before it hit him: “I hate my job, I’m sitting here, I’ve got a lab—I can try making some of these things myself. No one will even know what the hell I’m doing.” Arnold added the steroid precursors he would need to the regular list of laboratory chemicals he ordered through the company, and nobody was the wiser.

Progress was slow at first. Often he would set out to make a product that he knew should form a crystalline structure, only to end up with a sticky oil stuck to a flask. To Arnold that residue was like a flashing “caution” sign, an indication that potentially toxic impurities and leftover reactants had failed to separate from the brew. But over time he became expert at using solvents to wash the impurities and reactants away, and his compounds increasingly came to form translucent, icelike crystals that indicated a high level of purity.

Arnold’s intellectual appetite grew with his mastery. Soon he was spending 10 hours a week visiting libraries, combing through obscure patents and research journals for compounds with molecular structures worthy of further exploration. Finally he settled on a recipe that he found in a 1930s-era Swiss journal called Helvetica Chimica Acta and translated using a German-English dictionary. It detailed the synthesis of mestanolone, one of the first anabolic steroids ever made. Arnold figured it would make a good first test, since its effects were widely known, unlike some of the more exotic compounds he had come across.

In the lab Arnold watched the greenish byproducts wash out and pure crystals form. When his lab’s mass spectrometer showed a chemical profile identical to the one he was seeking, he dissolved the compound in propylene glycol, an odorless solvent that turned the mestanolone into a liquid. He put himself on a regimen of 75 milligrams a day.

“There wasn’t anything in there that was going to hurt me,” he says. “But I was cautious. I kept the dose at a reasonable level. I didn’t do it for more than a few weeks.”

A week after Arnold took his first dose of liquid mestanolone, his life began to change. At the gym, he was on fire. The amount he could bench-press spiked and kept rising, topping out at 30 extra pounds. Soon his clothes were tighter, and his muscles popped with new veins. The physical transformation was hard to ignore, and Arnold confessed his actions to his office friends. “It got around; everybody found out,” Arnold recalls. “But I didn’t give a damn.”

Arnold left his job, moved back to Connecticut, and started taking graduate-level chemistry classes at the state university. He also joined an Internet discussion group on fitness and weight lifting. Arnold’s knowledge of steroids quickly set him apart from other members of the discussion group. People began to seek his advice.

One of them was former bodybuilder Dan Duchaine, the author of The Underground Steroid Handbook, an indispensable reference manual for juicers. He had also served two prison stints for trafficking in steroids. Duchaine was well connected in the emerging field of gray-market nutritional supplements, products that often pushed the limits of laws regulating steroids. Through a friend, he put Arnold in touch with a Trinidadian entrepreneur, Ramlakhan Boodram, who owned a company that sold soy-processing and farm equipment in Champaign, Illinois, and had manufactured a nutritional supplement for Duchaine’s friend. Boodram was hoping to break into the booming field himself and needed a chemist to develop products for him.

Arnold moved to the Midwest. There, surrounded by cornfields, he set up a lab in an old brick warehouse that was crammed with tractors, metal presses, and oversize mixers used to process soy. He started out with just a few flasks and a hot plate, but eventually he filled his corner of the building with a mass spectrometer, vacuum pump, and all the lab equipment he would need to brew up new substances. Arnold focused his efforts on a patent he came across while flipping through chemical abstracts. It came from an East German pharmaceutical company called Jenapharm, which produced most of the steroidal compounds used in the former communist nation’s athletic doping program.

Jenapharm’s patent concerned a compound known as androstenedione, a naturally occurring testosterone precursor produced by the adrenal glands, testicles, and ovaries. Synthesized andro was widely used in labs as a steroid precursor. But the patent noted that if you administered the hormone orally, the body’s own enzymes would catalyze reactions that would convert it to testosterone, theoretically providing performance-enhancing benefits similar to those of steroids derived from the substance in the lab.

Andro would be potent, easy to make, and possibly legal; after all, Arnold reasoned, how can you regulate something that occurs naturally in the body? Still, he knew it would push legal boundaries to sell something that would turn into a banned substance once ingested. He worried he might get arrested. As an entrepreneur trying to break into nutritional supplements, he decided to take the risk anyway. “Nobody was going to buy vitamins from me,” Arnold says. “When you’re trying to start a business from nothing, you have to have something unique to sell.”

Once andro hit the market, word of its potency spread quickly through the athletic community. Then a reporter spotted a vial of the supplement in the locker of baseball slugger Mark McGwire during the season when he shattered the 37-year-old single season home run record. Suddenly Arnold was famous. In 1998 Sporting News named him number 84 on its list of the 100 most powerful people in sports, sandwiched between sportscaster Bob Costas and superagent Arn Tellem.

Arnold moved to cash in on his renown. He went back to the journals, scanning abstracts for other naturally occurring metabolites that looked likely to be converted into testosterone once ingested. He came out with several more so-called prohormones. In 2003 he and his partners moved to a shiny new 38,000-square-foot warehouse with 30-foot ceilings, 2,000-gallon reactors, and a state-of-the-art research lab with a gas chromatograph and other analytic instrumentation. By 2004 their revenues hit $12 million a year.

Secretly Arnold continued to experiment with illegal steroids. Back in New Jersey, he had come across an anabolic steroid he’d never seen anywhere else, a compound that had been developed by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now owned by Pfizer) in the early 1960s. Called norbolethone, it had a unique chemical structure that would be impossible to detect, but it also seemed to have many characteristics of the more potent steroids Arnold had tried. Back then, as a lowly lab tech at a chemical company, Arnold could never get hold of the precursor, a prohibitively expensive synthetic progestogen known as levonorgestrel, the active ingredient in the morning-after pill.

One day, talking to a business associate at another nutritional supplements company, Arnold mentioned norbolethone and his problems getting the precursor. Soon afterward, a gift arrived in the mail from China: a package of levonorgestrel. Arnold brewed up a batch of norbolethone, cross-checked the molecular structure with his instruments, and gave himself a mild dose.

Arnold rationalized that the compound was probably safe. “One dose of a steroid will never kill you, even if it is massive,” he later explained. Whereas psychoactive drugs can have immediate unpredictable and dramatic effects, steroids work primarily by activating genes, a slow process that only gradually yields detectable physiological effects. “Only with chronic intake will you see adverse effects from a steroid,” Arnold says. He did notice the compound turned his urine a dark shade of yellow, which led him to believe it might be placing a strain on his liver. On the other hand, he was on fire again at the gym. It was potent stuff.

As a side job, Arnold gave phone consultations for people aiming to bulk up, which he advertised on a bodybuilding website. If a client inquired about untraceable steroids, Arnold would send him samples of his compound. “I must emphasize,” he would later say, “that I made everyone aware these drugs had potential long-term adverse effects.”

Just as Arnold suspected, norbolethone was so obscure that professional doping programs had no reference sample and thus could not detect it. It was a brash entrepreneur named Victor Conte who pushed the limits of that obscurity. He ran a sports-nutrition center in Burlingame, California, called the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). Through BALCO, Conte sold legal zinc-magnesium supplements of questionable efficacy and enlisted topflight athletes to promote them. Among them were true superstars: Marion Jones, who would become the fastest woman in the world, and Barry Bonds, who would go on to break the record for most home runs in a single season. In addition to providing these athletes with supplements, Conte offered up secret supplies of illegal steroids on the side.

Arnold, who met Conte in an Internet chat group, sent him the new compound. Conte rechristened it “the clear” and began distributing it to top athletes. Arnold himself gave the clear to Olympic cyclist Tammy Thomas, whose heavy use would eventually alert authorities to the drug. Thomas ignored Arnold’s dosing advice, he claims, and by 2002 was using so much norbolethone that she had grown facial hair. When her natural testosterone dropped to levels far below normal, testers began to scrutinize her urine. It was only a matter of time before they identified metabolites that led them to norbolethone.

Conte got wind that the authorities were closing in and told Arnold to find a replacement compound. In response, Arnold gambled with a move both rare and bold in underground chemistry: He created an entirely new steroid. To do so, he sat down with The Merck Index, a standard reference manual for chemicals, drugs, and other compounds, and turned to the section on the class of hormones to which norbolethone’s precursor belonged. He hoped to find a different precursor that could be transformed into a steroid using the same molecular processes used to render norbolethone.

Arnold dismissed some because he knew they were associated with steroids on watch lists. Others he knew from experience had molecular properties that would make them weak. Then he spotted tetrahydrogestrinone, a compound never before used to create a steroid. It had three alternating carbon double bonds, called conjugations, that he had seen in some potent steroids, as well as an additional carbon atom that he recognized would give it extra strength.

“I knew I was looking at an exciting structure,” Arnold recalls. “It’s very complex compared with other ones. It was more potent. People would not have to take as much. The stuff would have been invisible forever. It was perfect, perfect stuff.” He put clients on 10 milligrams a day, then reduced it to 5 milligrams when he was sure it worked.

But Conte had a lot of enemies, among them Marion Jones’s former coach Trevor Graham. In June 2003 Graham sent a syringe that contained the new substance to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Once the group had a sample, it was only a matter of time. The authorities closed in and exposed one of the biggest scandals in the history of sports.

In 2005 the Feds raided Arnold’s home and lab. He was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison in 2006. The investigation touched off litigation that lasted through last year, when Barry Bonds was finally sentenced to 30 days of house arrest for obstructing justice during the inquiry.

Today, Arnold insists he is out of the steroid game. Andro and many other prohormones like it have been outlawed by Congress, and Arnold says he is focused solely on legal supplements. To pay fines, he and his partner were forced to auction off their new warehouse with all its top-of-the-line equipment. Today they are back in the old warehouse in the cornfields outside of Champaign, looking for compounds that are distinct from any banned substances to keep them out of trouble.

Posted in Fitness, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Like the Ghost Dance of the Sioux

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Older conservatives often hold “incorrect” views, while younger conservatives often hold “correct” views, but, John Derbyshire says, those older conservatives aren’t holding on to old ideas from their youth:

When I was 17 in England, and the Civil Rights movement was starting to make news even from across the pond, I whole-heartedly supported it. So did everyone else of my generation known to me. (I was born in 1945.)

Older people were a different matter. A shared experience among us late pre-Boomers and early Boomers was the yelling match with a parent over the rights and wrongs of what was happening in the U.S.A. and being shown on our TV screens.

My Dad was wont to say things like (I shall bowdlerize slightly): “Blacks are hopeless. They’ll never amount to anything. It’s ridiculous to let them mix freely with whites.”

That would start me off, and we’d go at it hammer and tongs for a few minutes until the Weather Forecast came on. In England, nobody talks through the TV Weather Forecast.

Yes, I was a youthful idealist. We all were—including, by his own testimony, VDARE.com’s resident “white nationalist,” American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor.

So what happened? Whence the “pessimism and cynicism” about race?

Fifty years happened—that’s what happened. Fifty years that thoughtful, observant people of my generation lived through at the regulation speed of one day per day.

We watched the trillions of dollars being spent on social programs—watched the actual dollars disappearing out of our own paychecks. We saw the vast apparatus of make-work government jobs being assembled. We were there, observing, day by day, when the preferences and favoritism and set-asides were being implemented. We watched as jurisprudence was twisted into pretzel shapes in the name of a bogus “fairness.” We saw the independent black nations of Africa and the Caribbean implode into ruin, chaos and beggary.

We lived through it; we saw it all.

And fifty years on, we see the results. Yes, some real gains in equity, though offset by some losses; but also intractable black poverty, intractable gaps in academic achievement, intractable, stupendous differentials in crime rates.

Pessimism and cynicism? Is someone surprised?

Derbyshire shares an anecodote about “kids today”:

I need to do a little scene-setting. It’s the Memorial Day weekend. We have an assortment of friends over for a backyard barbecue. The only two relevant to the story are Kyle and Sammy (neither the person’s real name).

Kyle is precisely my daughter Nellie’s age, 19. The two of them in fact first got acquainted at an infants’ playgroup. Both are home on vacation after completing their college freshman year.

Sammy is much older—even older than me. He is a businessman who owns a string of small enterprises, including some convenience stores. One of those stores, he mentioned at the barbecue, is in Jamaica, a majority-black neighborhood of New York City.

Hearing this, I asked him if his Jamaica store had suffered the attentions of a flash mob.

Sammy of course knew what I was talking about. No, he replied, so far he’d been lucky; though a store further along on the same street had been flash-mobbed.

Nellie and Kyle, standing nearby, were both looking puzzled.

Nellie: “Why would the store get flash-mobbed?”

Me: “It’s a store. In a black neighborhood.”

Nellie (slightly affronted): “Dad, you don’t know anything. A flash mob is when people pre-arrange to all be in the mall or somewhere at the same time and start singing or something.”

Me: “It’s also when a gang of young blacks pre-arrange to storm a store, steal stuff, then run off before the police can arrive.”

Nellie, with her well-practiced Uh-oh, Dad’s-in-racist-mode-again look of resignation and disgust: “I never heard of that.”

I cross-checked with Kyle.

No, he’d never heard of it, either.

So here are two intelligent, well-read 19-year-olds, both utterly unacquainted with one of the minor antisocial phenomena of our time.

Why? Why do you think? Because that phenomenon is race-centered, that’s why.

New York Times Token Conservative columnist David Brooks has remarked that our preferred method for dealing with unpleasant social realities is to keep as far away from them as possible.

Just so.

And the kids’ ignorance of race realities is of course the fault of us—their parents—practicing the David Brooks Rule.

When my (Chinese immigrant) wife and I decided to move to the ‘burbs and start a family, we bought the best house we could afford in a neighborhood as far as possible from concentrations of blacks.

This is what everyone does. It’s what our neighbors did.

Those neighbors are all white—and about 95 percent liberal Democrats.

Was there ever such a nation of hypocrites as ours? Here, for the record, is the student racial breakdown of the high school Nellie attended. (Click on “Students.”)

Here is the same for Kyle’s high school. Here is the same for the high school at Cold Spring Harbor, our next door community.

We would dearly have liked to settle in Cold Spring Harbor, but the house prices were out of our range. See if you can figure out why.

And so the kids end up at age 19 with a big reality gap.

So sheltered have our kids been from racial realities, they even find ghetto scum culture exciting, in a remote and abstract way, like alien robo-warriors.

[...]

Bottom line: the kids are plumb ignorant about race—because we took care to raise them that way.

The antics of ghetto degenerates are so far removed from their direct experience that they find them interesting and exciting, like the Ghost Dance of the Sioux.

We parents had much assistance in our Ignorance Project from the Main Steam Media, with their crime stories filled with strangely raceless perpetrators, with “teens,” “youths,” “thugs,” and “the robber was described as a tall man in his thirties.”

I suppose he already crossed the Rubicon a while ago…

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Notes from Iceland

Monday, June 4th, 2012

Justin Erik Halldór Smith shares his notes from Iceland, which he is visiting for the first time in many years:

A series of small hops then, brings one from Europe to North America, and even in the absence of archaeological evidence it is not hard to understand why, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in the 1530s, local Iroquois ran out to greet the ship with furs in hand, ready, to all appearances, to resume a well established trade. The Basques and the Norse are the likely first-comers in those parts. Of the latter, an early-medieval settlement in Newfoundland is now considered a certainty, while their colony in southwestern Greenland, well documented both archaeologically and textually, is know to have endured for several generations.

The Norse were preceded in Greenland by Skrælingjar, which is to say Inuit, but only if we consider that massive island as a whole. When the Norse established their settlement in the 10th century, the Inuit were confined to the northern part of the island. Norse and Inuit coexisted in the same region from the 13th century, and by the 15th century the Norse had been entirely driven out. As far as we can tell, Scandinavians were also preceded in Iceland by an indigenous people, of sorts, even if they do not meet our ordinary criteria for counting as such: the so-called Papar are thought to have been Irish hermits, probably monks, who drifted up on rafts by mistake, and hunted and gathered for bare subsistence. (Their presence as well remains unconfirmed by archaeology, and is based entirely on textual sources, as well as on toponymy: in particular, the Vestmannaeyjar are islands off the south coast of Iceland, thought to have been settled by the ‘Westmen’, a Norse designation for the Irish.)

The Skrælings and the Papar together should cause us to reconsider our ordinary understanding of indigenousness: the Inuit came after the Vikings to southern Greenland, and drove the Vikings out thanks to their superior adaptation to the environmental demands of the region; the Irish came first to Iceland, were vastly more primitive than the Vikings who arrived after them, and were exterminated or assimilated. (I would argue, in fact, that there are many good reasons for seeing the Celtic nations of Europe as aboriginal within Europe proper, and not only on a distant satellite of Europe, but that’s another topic.) The matter gets even more counterintuitive when we consider that at the moment of first contact the indigenous hunter-gatherers were Christians, while the invading Europeans were pagans.

As is well known, this point of difference would not remain an issue for long, not only because the Celtic element would soon be entirely erased, but also because Iceland would be converted to Christianity, en masse, just before the dawn of the 2nd millennium. 999 CE is extremely early for such a distant extremity of the West. Lithuania and neighboring Baltic regions, by contrast, squarely on the mainland and practically absorbed into the Prussian sphere of influence by the high middle ages, would nonetheless hold out against conversion until the 15th and 16th centuries. Nonetheless, as might be expected in such a case of mass conversion, the majority of the converted likely had little idea —and some, out on their homesteads, under the glacier, at first surely had no idea— of what was going on. Even those who did know that they were now to call themselves ‘Christian’, we may assume, probably brought with this new name a universe of connotations that would have been quite foreign to the Romans who believed they had won a whole island, all at once, to the true faith.

To return to the ethnographic data from a neighboring island, we know from the early-20th-century explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen that Inuit conversion was in fact a movement within one and the same universe of signification. Rasmussen reports that Greenlandic Inuit shamans would take their ‘first communion’ by ceremonially devouring those organs of the walrus that had hitherto been prohibited to men of their status. The body of Christ as tabooed walrus meat: that is the essence of conversion. Should we suppose that the case of the pagan Icelanders was much different? They were ‘white’ and originally European, but so what? These categories didn’t mean anything at all at the time.

And so we find the well-known survival of pagan preoccupations well after 999. Unlike the case of Britain, where charlatan neopagans began in the 19th century to construct a wholly imaginary romantic past of high priests and priestesses, in Iceland the enduring power of animistic explanations for natural phenomena, complete with personified forces inhabiting every ditch and spring, is well attested by both indigenous and outside sources. The 16th-century Swedish author Olaus Magnus gives us a lengthy account in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus [History of the Northern Peoples] of the enduring folk-beliefs, including all the spells and incantations, of the Icelanders, and some decades later the German scientist and astrologer Johannes Kepler claims in his Somnium (at least if we take the protagonist as a stand-in for the author) that his own mother was Icelandic, that her name was Fiolxhilda, and that she was (therefore) a witch. (Kepler took Iceland to be the ideal spot from which to teletransport to the moon.)

So paganism lived on, and the conversion was an ambiguous affair. One of the pièces de résistance of the stunning, and stunningly empty, National Museum of Iceland is a small figurine, in bronze, dated to around the beginning of the 11th century, depicting either Thor or Jesus Christ. He is holding an object that is either a Valhallan war hammer, or a crucifix. Who knows? The people who have spent their lives studying the matter don’t. It’s possible no one ever did.

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The Myth Of The Invincible Guerilla

Monday, June 4th, 2012

The Myth Of The Invincible Guerilla defies the evidence:

Before long it became conventional wisdom that the U.S. was incapable of handling irregular warfare. This was odd, as the United States had an enviable track record when it comes to defeating guerillas and irregular forces in general. Even Vietnam, which conventional wisdom counts as a defeat, wasn’t. The conventional wisdom, as is often the case, is wrong. By the time the last U.S. combat units pulled out of South Vietnam in 1972, the local guerilla movement, the Viet Cong, was destroyed. North Vietnam came south three years later with a conventional invasion, sending tank and infantry divisions charging across the border and conquering their neighbor the old fashioned way.

When the United States first got involved with Vietnam in the late 1950s, there was good reason to believe American assistance would lead to the defeat of the communist guerilla movement in South Vietnam. That was because the communists had not been doing so well with their guerilla wars. In the previous two decades there had been twelve communist insurgencies, and 75 percent of them had been defeated. These included the Greek Civil War (1944-1949), Spanish Republican Insurgency (1944-1952), Iranian Communist Uprising (1945-1946), Philippine Huk War (1946-1954), Madagascan Nationalist Revolt (1947-1949), Korean Partisan War (1948-1953), Sarawak/Sabah “Confrontation” (1960-1966), Malayan Emergency (1948-1960), and the Kenyan Mau-Mau Rebellion (1952-1955). The communists won in the Cuban Revolution (1956-1958), the First Indochina War (1945-1954), and the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). The communists went on to lose the guerilla phase of the Second Indochina War (1959-1970). Guerillas make great copy for journalists. You know, the little guy, fighting against impossible odds. What we tend to forget (and the record is quite clear and easily available), is that these insurgent movements almost always get stamped out. That does not make good copy and the dismal details of those defeats rarely make it into the mass media or the popular consciousness.

The main problem with COIN (Counterinsurgency Warfare) is that the American armed forces take it for granted. U.S. troops have been defeating guerilla movements for centuries. Through most of American history COIN has been the most frequent form of warfare American troops have been involved with. But COIN has always been viewed as a minor, secondary military role. It never got any respect. The generals preferred to prepare for a major war with a proper army, not playing cops and robbers with a bunch of poorly organized losers.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

China’s Bad Emperor Problem

Monday, June 4th, 2012

The Communist Party has not solved China’s Bad Emperor problem, Francis Fukuyama says:

For more than 2000 years, the Chinese political system has been built around a highly sophisticated centralized bureaucracy, which has run what has always been a vast society through top-down methods.  What China never developed was a rule of law, that is, an independent legal institution that would limit the discretion of the government, or democratic accountability.  What the Chinese substituted for formal checks on power was a bureaucracy bound by rules and customs which made its behavior reasonably predictable, and a Confucian moral system that educated leaders to look to public interests rather than their own aggrandizement.  This system is, in essence, the same one that is operating today, with the Chinese Communist Party taking the role of Emperor.

A high-quality centralized government with few checks on its power can do wonders when the leadership is good:  it can take large decisions quickly because it doesn’t have to form coalitions or wait for consensus; it is not subject to second guessing or legal challenges; and it can ignore populist pressures to undertake questionable policies.

The issue that Chinese governments have never been able to solve is what was historically known as the “Bad Emperor” problem:  while unchecked power in the hands of a benevolent and wise ruler has many advantages, how do you guarantee a continuing supply of good Emperors?  The Confucian educational system and Mandarinate was supposed to indoctrinate leaders, but every now and then terrible ones would emerge and plunge the country into chaos, like the Evil Empress Wu who killed off much of the Tang Dynasty’s aristocracy, or the Ming Dynasty’s Wanli Emperor who in a fit of pique refused to come out of his palace or sign documents for nearly a decade.

In the view of many Chinese, the last Bad Emperor to rule China was Mao Zedong, who in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution unleashed unspeakable suffering on the Chinese people, and whose power could not be checked until his death in 1976.  The current rules governing decision-making and leadership at the very top of the party reflect this experience:  responsibility is shared among the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo; there are ten year term limits on the tenure of the president and prime minister; no one over the age of 67 can be considered for membership on the Standing Committee.  These rules were designed explicitly to prevent the rise of another Mao, who would use his personal authority to singlehandedly dominate the party and the country.

China’s authoritarian system is distinct because it follows rules regarding term limits and succession.  Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, or Libya’s Qaddhafi, not to speak of authoritarian African leaders like Robert Mugabe or Meles Zenawi, would be much more fondly remembered by their people had they stepped down after their first ten years in office and arranged for an orderly transfer of power.

This is why, then, the recently purged Bo Xilai was such a threat to the system:  using his base in Chongqing, he used the media effectively to build his own charismatic authority, which was strong already given his status as a Princeling or son of a revolutionary hero; he was ruthless in the use of state power to go after not just criminals and corrupt officials but businessmen and rivals who had accumulated too much power and wealth; and he revived Mao-era mobilization techniques like the singing of revolutionary songs at mass rallies.  Unlike his gray compatriots, he could potentially dominate the leadership with an independent power base if he were promoted to the Standing Committee.  It therefore makes sense that Hu Jintao and the existing leadership should use the scandal of a coverup and murder to eliminate him from consideration and remove the Bad Emperor threat.

The commentary to date has noted how the Bo Xilai affair has demonstrated serious cleavages in the senior leadership of the party, corruption and turpitude among its members, and weakening control over what the Chinese public can say on vehicles like Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.  All of this is true, but the incident reveals an even deeper problem, which is the lack of formal institutions and a real rule of law.

The rules that the Chinese leadership follows are neither embedded in their constitution, clearly articulated, or enforced by a judicial system.  They are simply internal rules of the Party, which actually have to be inferred from the Party’s behavior.  Had Bo Xilai succeeded in getting onto the Standing Committee and increasing his personal authority, he could easily have overturned any one of them.  Latin American presidents who want to linger in office still have to go through a process of constitutional revision, and every now and then the rule of law is strong enough to prevent them from doing so (as was the case recently when Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe was denied a third term in office by the country’s Constitutional Court).

I can’t imagine living under a bureaucracy bound by rules and customs instead of our vibrant democracy…

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“Cold Tracer” Glow Ammunition

Sunday, June 3rd, 2012

I’m not sure when I’d find “cold tracer” glow ammunition useful, but it is “cool”:

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The First Transhumans

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

Jess Nevins calls early bodybuilder Eugen Sandow and his followers the first transhumans and describes the backlash that followed the Physical Culture movement’s stunning growth:

In 1905 Staff Surgeon A. Gaskell, in the British Statistical Report of the Health of the Navy for the Year 1905, claimed that “the physically strong man as trained by the original Sandow or other system withstands the attacks of disease very badly,” and that the strong man who is the product of Physical Culture rarely reaches old age, and is, in Gaskell’s words, “a giant with muscles of brass and, in a constitutional sense, feet of clay — that the strong man is a whited sepulcher.” In 1907 Herbert Forder, a former instructor at Sandow’s school, turned on his former employer, describing the “utter worthlessness of Sandowism.” By the mid-1930s official opinion of Physical Culture was almost universally negative, and American physical educators claimed that Physical Culture as a movement was based on “faulty conceptions of human nature.”

Nor was Sandow exempt from criticism. H.G. Wells parodied Sandow and the marketing and claims of Physical Cultures in Tono-Bungay in 1909. Rumors spread during World War One that Sandow was a German spy, and in 1915 the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that he’d been executed in the London Tower by the British government for spying.

The Physical Culture Movement had been aimed at the working and middle classes, and the Physical Culture bodybuilders had advertised themselves as beings that any follower of Physical Culture could become, and the bodybuilder superhumans of popular fiction were often explicitly described as being ordinary people apart from their superhuman physical abilities. But the working and middle classes, the intended audience for Physical Culture’s claims, eventually turned on the movement. A typical reaction appears in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom sees Sandow as the last hope for “rejuvenation” but also feels intimidated by Sandow and by his own failure to live up to Sandow and his exercise regimen. After the enthusiasm for Physical Culture faded, the common reaction to the movement and to the prospect of potential superhumanity, available to all, was insecurity, depression over the inability to achieve it, and envy toward those who had. Envy, as it will, became jealousy, and then dislike, spreading from individuals to the movement itself.

Adding to this dislike was the embrace of Physical Culture by the nascent American and British fascist movements in the late 1920s and early 1930s and then by the Nazi party in Germany in the mid-1930s, and by Physical Culture’s embrace of fascism. Interest in the Physical Culture movement surged in the 1920s and 1930s after a post-World War One wave of fears over the physical decline of the white race. But many in the Physical Culture movement saw fascism as the answer to this problem, just as many British, American, and German fascists celebrated the “body beautiful” and saw Physical Culture as the best way to achieve it. Many in Physical Culture reacted negatively to the fascists in the movement, but to the American and British public only saw the linkage between Physical Culture and fascism.

The backlash was slower to appear in popular fiction, but was more emphatic. From 1919 to 1954, roughly 75% of all superhumans in popular fiction outside of comic books either lost their powers, had them fade away without explanation, or got married and abandoned using their superhuman abilities. Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Avenger were the most popular superhumans in the pulps. Each began with superhuman abilities: Doc Savage, his strength; The Shadow, his ability to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him; and The Avenger, his ability to rearrange the muscles in his face so he can take on any other person’s features. By the Avenger’s last appearance in 1944, an operation has cured the facial paralysis which gave him his superhuman ability. By Doc Savage’s last appearance, in 1949, he is simply a talented, strong human being, his superhuman strength having disappeared years before without explanation. By the Shadow’s last appearance in 1954, his powers have disappeared and he is merely a standard private detective.

Numerous other examples appear. In 1931 Philip Strange is “the Brain Devil,” an ESP-wielding pilot and agent of American Army Intelligence; by 1939 Strange’s mental powers have faded away and he’s just another pulp flying spy. In 1940 the Red Knight has superstrength, invisibility, and mind control. In 1943 he loses his powers during a mission in Japan. In 1940 Scarlet O’Neil can turn invisible by pressing a nerve on her left wrist. By 1949 O’Neil is merely a fast-talking crime-busting reporter, her invisibility long-since forgotten. In 1919 cowboy Dan Barry can talk to animals. In 1923 he is turned into a villain and killed by his lover. In 1939 the Black Bat can see in the dark thanks to an eye transplant. By 1953 that ability is gone. And so on.

Posted in Fitness, Media | No Comments »

Mongrel & The Wrath of the Ape King

Friday, June 1st, 2012

I find this tribute to rotoscoped fantasy cartoons — like Heavy Metal and Fire and Ice — not good, but oddly compelling:

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Quick on the Trigger

Friday, June 1st, 2012

Research shows that civilians overwhelmingly disagree with veteran officers about when police are justified in shooting armed, threatening perpetrators — and that when facing shoot/don’t shoot decisions of their own, civilians tend to be quick on the trigger and wrong in their perceptions:

In their experiments, Sharps and Hess report, they first addressed “how untrained people would react if placed in the position of police officers confronting a situation potentially involving firearms and firearm violence.”

Eighty-seven female and 38 male college student volunteers of various races were each shown 1 of 4 high-quality digital photos of simulated “crime scenes.” The settings were stage-set with the guidance of veteran FTOs from the Fresno PD, “all highly experienced in tactical realities and the sorts of situations encountered by witnesses and officers on the street.”

Three photos showed a lone M/W subject, holding a Beretta 9mm pistol in profile: one depicted a “simple” scene, “sparse in terms of potentially distracting objects”; another a “complex” scene, “including street clutter, garbage cans, and other potentially distracting items”; the third a complex scene that included several bystanders and a young, female “victim” being threatened by the armed perpetrator pointing the gun at her in a 1-handed grip.

In a fourth photo, the scene was the same as the third — except that the Beretta was replaced with a power screwdriver.

Before any pictures were shown, each volunteer was told that a scene “which may or may not involve a crime or sources of danger” would be flashed for 2 seconds or less on a movie screen. “You may intervene” by shooting at the perpetrator “to protect yourself or others if you see an individual holding a weapon,” the researchers explained. Participants could “shoot” either by pressing a button or by firing a suction-tipped dart from a toy gun.

“The conditions for all 4 scenes involved uniformly excellent lighting (strong sunlight), and the relative comfort of witnesses being seated,” Sharps and Hess write. “There was no movement or occlusion of important elements of the scenes, and of course there was no personal danger for the respondents in the experiment.”

The smallest number of individuals decided to shoot at the lone subject holding a gun in the simple environment with no victim. Yet “even under these circumstances, in which no crime was depicted,” a strong majority — 64% — decided to fire. This despite the fact that the “perpetrator” as depicted could have as easily been target-shooting as committing a crime, the researchers note.

In the complex but victimless scene, 67% chose to shoot. When a victim and bystanders were added, the proportion of shooters rose significantly, to 88% — nearly 9 out of 10.

But most revealingly, when the suspect pointed a power screwdriver instead of a gun, some 85% “shot” him. “In other words,” Sharps and Hess write, “respondents were equally likely to shoot the perpetrator whether he was armed or unarmed, as long as there was a potential ‘victim’ in the scene. It made no [statistically significant] difference whether the perpetrator held a gun or a power tool.”

Across the range of scenes, “when untrained people…‘confronted’ a suspect, the majority decided to shoot him under all conditions….[The] very high number of those who decided to shoot the unarmed suspect under ideal conditions might be inflated even further under the rapidly changing and visually confusing circumstances of a typical police emergency.”

The challenge the volunteers faced in distinguishing between the gun and the power tool was relatively easy, compared to officers making split-second decisions in the field. Cops frequently have to employ “rapid cognitive processing” in darkness or semidarkness, often deciding in less than a second whether to shoot, the researchers observe.

“During that time, many factors in a scene must be evaluated: the suspect’s motions; where the weapon is aimed; the presence of other people, including other potential suspects, and whether they are in the officer’s probable field of fire; other potential sources of hazard, to self, to others, and to the suspect, in the immediate environment….

“In view of these extensive processing demands, errors in perception or cognitive processing are likely to be relatively frequent….

“[E]xtraordinary demands are placed on the cognitive and perceptual abilities of police officers in cases of gun violence. Public perception of these incidents, however, typically does not center on the cognitive or perceptual issues involved.”

Instead, officers’ errors in shooting suspects brandishing innocuous objects rather than guns are “attributed, in many sources, to racism…and failures of integrity.” It seems “incomprehensible, to many people, that officers could possibly mistake a [non-weapon] for a real firearm in the dark.”

[...]

A disturbing insight into the public mind-set regarding police use of deadly force surfaced through a companion experiment conducted by the research team.

Again using digital photography projected onto a screen, 33 females and 11 males recruited from freshman psychology classes were asked to view scenes in which a male or female Caucasian perpetrator, positioned “among typical street clutter,” pointed a pistol in a 1-handed grip at a young, female “victim.”

After viewing the scene for a full 5 seconds (“far more than ample observation and processing time”), each subject was asked “what a police officer should do on encountering the situation depicted”…and why.

Previously, 3 senior FTOs and a senior police commander had evaluated the proper police response. All concluded that “there was no question that this situation absolutely required a shooting response for both the male and female perpetrator…. [A]ny police officer encountering this situation must fire [immediately] on the perpetrator…in order to prevent the probable imminent death of the victim.”

To the researchers’ surprise, the civilian volunteers overwhelmingly rated this a no-shoot situation. Only 11.36% — roughly 1 out of 10 — “felt that a shooting response was called for,” the researchers report. “[A]pproximately 9 out of 10…were of the opinion that an officer should not fire…although all of the senior police officers consulted stated that the situation depicted absolutely required a shooting response.

“This result may have important implications for situations in which 12-person juries must evaluate a given police shooting….In any given, randomly selected jury of 12 citizens, these results suggest that on average, 1 or at most 2 jurors out of 12 would be likely to see an officer on trial in an officer-involved shooting situation as justified in shooting a perpetrator, even under the clearest and most appropriate of circumstances.”

Sharps and Hess want to conduct further research before drawing any solid gender conclusions. However, “no male respondent felt that a shooting response was justified with a female perpetrator,” and only 1 in 16 female respondents favored shooting the male gunman.

The reasons the respondents gave overall for their negative views on shooting graphically illustrate the cop-civilian disconnect. Some thought the suspect wouldn’t really fire because of “the daylight, public conditions of the situation.” Others “concocted elaborate rules of engagement” under which an officer might shoot: if the suspect fired first, or if the suspect had already committed murder, or if the officer had first tried to “convince” the suspect to drop the gun.

Still others “literally invoked the need for clairvoyance on the part of the police, saying that an officer should not fire…because the suspect ‘did not look like she wanted to kill.’ Several qualified their responses with the idea that if the police had to fire, they should shoot the perpetrator’s leg or arm, because…‘a shot to the leg is relatively harmless….’ ”

Posted in Crime, Weapons | No Comments »

German teen solves 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Sir Isaac Newton

Friday, June 1st, 2012

When I studied physics in high school, we touched on ballistics by calculating the path of a projectile, ignoring air resistance.

I knew that taking air resistance into account would complicate things, but it turns out that drag — which is proportional to velocity squared, in the opposite direction — makes the calculus intractable. Ballistics tables are computed by brute force.

Now an Indian-born “German” teenager, Shouryya Ray, has (kind of, sort of) solved the 300-year-old mathematical riddle posed by Sir Isaac Newton:

Ray won a research award for his efforts and has been labeled a genius by the German media, but he put it down to “curiosity and schoolboy naivety.”

“When it was explained to us that the problems had no solutions, I thought to myself, ‘well, there’s no harm in trying,’” he said.

Ray’s family moved to Germany when he was 12 after his engineer father got a job at a technical college. He said his father instilled in him a “hunger for mathematics” and taught him calculus at the age of six.

Ray’s father, Subhashis, said his son’s mathematical prowess quickly outstripped his own considerable knowledge.

“He never discussed his project with me before it was finished and the mathematics he used are far beyond my reach,” he said.

Despite not speaking a word of German when he arrived, Ray will this week sit Germany’s high school leaving exams, two years ahead of his peers.

The math geeks at Reddit and StackExchange explain in much more detail:

This solution is implicit, therefore has little use in actual calculations as you would need to numerically solve it in order to use it, might as well solve the differential equation numerically directly. Exact solutions similar to the one presented here have been known since 1977 in a paper I posted in another thread . Anyway the trick used to solve the ODE is quite clever, especially for a 16 year old.

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