This ad seems squarely aimed at the NFL’s target demographic, but the NFL wouldn’t run it:
Against NFL Policy
Friday, December 6th, 2013Spear of the Nation
Friday, December 6th, 2013Nelson Mandela led not only the African National Congress, or ANC, but also Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, its armed wing:
In 1983, the Church Street bomb was detonated in Pretoria near the South African Air Force Headquarters, resulting in 19 deaths and 217 injuries. During the next 10 years, a series of bombings occurred in South Africa, conducted mainly by the military wing of the African National Congress.
In the Amanzimtoti bomb on the Natal South Coast in 1985, five civilians were killed and 40 were injured when MK cadre Andrew Sibusiso Zondo detonated an explosive in a rubbish bin at a shopping centre killing five people, including three children, shortly before Christmas. In a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the ANC stated that Zondo acted on orders after a recent SADF raid in Lesotho.[9]
A bomb was detonated in a bar on the Durban beach-front in 1986, killing three civilians and injuring 69. Robert McBride received the death penalty for this bombing which became known as the “Magoo’s Bar bombing”. Although the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Committee called the bombing a “gross violation of human rights”,[10] McBride received amnesty and became a senior police officer.
In 1987, an explosion outside a Johannesburg court killed three people and injured 10; a court in Newcastle had been attacked in a similar way the previous year, injuring 24. In 1987, a bomb exploded at a military command centre in Johannesburg, killing one person and injuring 68 personnel.
The bombing campaign continued with attacks on a series of soft targets, including a bank in Roodepoort in 1988, in which four civilians were killed and 18 injured. Also in 1988, in a bomb detonation outside a magistrate’s court killed three. At the Ellis Park rugby stadium in Johannesburg, a car bomb killed two and injured 37 civilians.
[...]
The TRC found that torture was “routine” and was official policy – as were executions “without due process” at ANC detention camps particularly in the period of 1979–1989.
[...]
South African police statistics indicate that, in the period 1976 to 1986, approximately 130 deaths were attributed to the Umkhonto we Sizwe. Of these, about thirty were members of various security forces and one hundred were civilians. Of the civilians, 40 were white and 60 black.
Wikipedia’s suggested further reading is literally Communist propaganda:
- Vladimir Shubin (Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences), “Unsung Heroes: The Soviet Military and the Liberation of Southern Africa”, Cold War History, Vol. 7, No. 2, May 2007
- Vladimir Shubin, Moscow and ANC: Three Decades of Co-operation and Beyond
- Rocky Williams, see articles in the Journal of Security Sector Management and others
Are Humans Hardwired to Detect Snakes?
Friday, December 6th, 2013Lynne Isbell was running through a glade in Kenya back in 1992, when she spotted a cobra. She froze in her tracks before she realized what she’d seen. Isbell is an anthropologist and behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Davis, and she believes that her life-saving reaction was the result of millions of years of evolution:
You can see large carnivores from afar, but the same is not always true for snakes: To pick out camouflaged snakes, you need great close-range vision. So to spot snakes better, primates evolved to have color vision and forward-facing eyes, which improves depth perception and allows 3D vision. They also evolved to have the best visual acuity among mammals, Isbell said. These visual features, which required the enlargement of some parts of the brain, were co-opted for other purposes, such as social interactions and reaching and grasping for objects.
Interestingly, the evolutionary interaction between snakes and mammals was not a one-way street, according to the snake detection theory. As mammals became better able to evade snakes — which till this point relied on squeezing their prey to death — the reptiles needed a new, easier way to kill. So they evolved venom. In response, primates evolved even better vision. Indeed, primates that live in areas without venomous snakes, such as on Madagascar, have poorer vision than other primates.
For the snake detection theory to be true, primates would have to be amazing snake detectors. And there is some research that appears to support this idea.
For example, a 1993 study by Arne Öhman, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, showed that people are able to visually detect snakes before they’re even consciously aware of the reptile, just as Isbell learned firsthand.
More recently, Öhman and his colleagues compared how quickly people detected snakes and spiders. Based on Isbell’s snake detection theory, they predicted that participants would detect snakes more rapidly than spiders because the arachnids were historically less of a threat to primates — and this is exactly what they found. They also discovered that snakes are more distracting than spiders, and concluded that “attending to snakes might constitute an evolutionary adaptation.”
A Science-Fiction Story
Thursday, December 5th, 2013Scott Alexander recently shared a science-fiction story of sorts:
Mr. S, an ordinary American, is minding his own business outside his East Coast home when he is suddenly abducted by short large-headed creatures like none he has ever seen before. They bring him to their ship and voyage across unimaginable distances to an alien world both grander and more horrible than he could imagine. The aliens have godlike technologies, but their society is dystopian and hivelike. Enslaved at first, then displayed as a curiosity, he finally wins his freedom through pluck and intelligence. Despite the luxuries he enjoys in his new life, he longs for his homeworld. He befriends a local noble who tells him that the aliens in fact send ships to his world on a regular basis, quietly scouting and seeking resources while the inhabitants remain blissfully aware of these incursions. He gets passage on such an expedition.
Before his ship gets far, he is abducted and sold into slavery again, only to be rescued by a sect of alien priests who believe he may hold the key to saving his entire race. They are kind to him and ask him to stay, but when he refuses they reluctantly arrange him passage home.
Yet when he returns, Mr. S finds a postapocalyptic wasteland utterly unlike the world he left. America is empty, its great cities gone, a few survivors fighting for scraps among the ruins. 95% of the population is dead, slain by a supervirus unlike any doctors have ever seen. The few rumors from afar say Mexico, Canada, and lands further abroad have suffered the same or worse. He finds the site where his hometown once stood. There is nothing. Wandering in despair, he is captured by a gang of roving bandits and awaits execution or slavery.
Instead, the bandit leader reveals he is the state governor, reduced to his current station by the devastation that destroyed his capital and entire government. An alien ship has landed, and a handful of colonists have set up a little settlement. The governor’s scouts have been watching them from afar and noticed their strange powers. With their help, he could defeat his rivals and re-establish control over the state, restore his old position. “You have been to these creatures’ homeworld,” he says. “You know their ways, you can speak their language. Negotiate an alliance with them, and I will let you live.”
Mr. S is split. The aliens have shown themselves capable of terrible cruelty. They might kill him or enslave him. But they have also shown themselves capable of something resembling kindness. In the end he decides they are neither fully good nor fully evil — just alien. And his own people now seem as alien to him as his former abductors.
So Mr. S heads to the alien settlement, where once again he finds dystopian squalor and shocking ignorance combined with fantastic technology. The aliens are unfamiliar with even the basics of agriculture and desperate for aid. He quickly makes himself indispensable, and although he successfully gets the ex-governor his treaty, he starts forming grander plans. What if he could use these aliens as a tool to unite the warring bands of survivors? Break the ex-governor’s stranglehold on the region? Start rebuilding civilization? What if he could make something completely new, a merger of American ingenuity and alien technology?
Gradually establishing a base for himself in the alien colony, he starts sending out feelers to the local warlords and bands of survivors, speaking of the aliens’ power, implying but never stating outright that such power could be theirs. At first it seems to be working. The warlords treat him as an equal, start to listen to his ideas. They just need one little push. He decides to try an insane bluff.
The apocalypse, he reveals, was no plague but a bioengineered alien superweapon, an attack unleashed by their warships in retaliation for some offense real or imagined. The aliens have brought caches of this weapon from their homeworld and buried it underneath their colony. If they are crossed, they will unleash a second cataclysm, killing even the scattered survivors who made it through the first. And the one who manipulates the aliens, who can unleash their wrath upon a target of his choosing and who is thus unstoppable? This guy.
Just as he seems on the verge of some success, Mr. S takes a step too far. He tries to free himself from his old nemesis the ex-governor by “warning” the aliens of his plot to kill them; the alien leader discovers the subterfuge and the strike against the ex-governor never takes place. When the surviving Americans learn of this betrayal, they accuse Mr. S of going native and turn against him en masse. He dies a few months later of what is suspected to be poison, perhaps planted by one of the governor’s men. The aliens seem to take it in stride.
And then a few generations later, they kill nearly everyone. Mercilessly. They do it while praising and admiring their victims. When their genocide is over, they make loud protestations of regret, and try to placate the survivors with gifts. But they do not stop until the massacre is complete. They are neither fully good nor fully evil — just alien.
The Most Dangerous Machine
Thursday, December 5th, 2013The most dangerous machine in modern America is the automobile:
- More than 33,000 Americans die per year in automobile accidents.
- This is despite the fact that the rate of fatal crashes per automobile mile driven has declined by two-thirds since 1975.
- One of the earliest safety innovations was putting a line down the middle of the road. Having a centerline on a road will cut crash frequency by at least 20 percent.
- Until the 1980s, seat belt use was only 10 or 15 percent; today, we’re up to about 86 percent. Seat belts reduce the risk of death by as much as 70 percent — at a price of $25 a piece. There’s one life saved in the U.S. for every $30,000 worth of seat belts installed in cars — versus one per $1.8 million for air bags.
- Over the last ten years, alcohol-related traffic fatalities have fallen by 28 percent.
- Younger drivers tend to be more dangerous. In 1980, 18 to 29-year-olds were 30 percent of the population. By 2000, that number was down to 22 percent.
- Driving in a city might seem dangerous, but wide-open stretches of rural road are three times more dangerous.
- Cell phones are a dangerous distraction, but they also save lives, by getting emergency personnel to the crash site much sooner.
Eventocracy
Thursday, December 5th, 2013The entertainment industry values timeliness above all:
New is better than old, live trumps prerecorded, original episodes always beat reruns. That’s overwhelmingly obvious in sports and news, and accounts for the manufactured ephemerality of reality and talent shows. Yet it is also implicit in dramas and sitcoms, with their premieres, finite seasons, and finales. The rule holds fast for film as well. From its opening weekend in major theaters, through nearly two years of “release windows,” a movie drifts downward through airlines, hotels, DVDs, cable and network television, and the Internet, decaying in perceived worth.
The desire to be current is in some sense human nature. But when it comes to viewing choices, it also arises from the specific history and revenue model of the entertainment business. In its early years, television was necessarily live, for the technology of broadcasting preceded effective and cheap recording technologies. The first popular shows, like “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” were short serial dramas designed to keep audiences on a fixed daily schedule, each episode ending with some aspect of the plot unresolved. If you missed an installment, you missed it forever and might lose the big story in the bargain.
In normal markets, the most popular products aren’t necessarily the most profitable (think Louis Vuitton). But on network television, where the prices charged for advertising depend on ratings, comparative popularity matters a lot. If some sense of newness or urgency can get viewers from the desired demographic to tune in to one channel rather than another, that can make the difference between success or failure. The upshot is a business whose highest ambition is to get enormous groups of people watching the same thing at the same time: “event television.”
Atop this eventocracy are productions like the Super Bowl or the Oscars, which by managing to grab much of the nation therefore command the highest ad rates, about $4 million and $2 million, respectively. That compares with the $77,000 per spot that “30 Rock,” a smart but under-watched series, commanded at the end of its run. The premium on audience size orients creative decisions toward an ideal embodied by a Jay Leno monologue, avoidant of controversy or anything too weird or challenging. TV shows, in the words of economist Harold Vogel, are “scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins.” And television itself, as Walter Lippmann, a founder of this magazine, put it, has long been “the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.”
Africa’s Trauma Epidemic
Thursday, December 5th, 2013Africa is facing yet another epidemic, a trauma epidemic, Ola Orekunrin argues:
Nigeria, a country of more than 170 million people, has no organized trauma response system and no formal training for paramedics. Injured people are often taken to the hospital in a car or minibus or draped across the motorcycle of a good Samaritan, sometimes several hours after the accident has occurred.
Even if the patient does reach a local hospital, it may not have the skilled staff or equipment needed. (There are only a few that do, and there are huge distances between them.) Most of those who are seriously injured probably bleed to death.
He describes a crash scene:
Bystanders were pulling the driver out of the car. Before long they were joined by a barefoot “prophet” in a white robe. No Nigerian accident scene is complete without a prophet who commands everyone to stand by while he loudly predicts that the patient will stop bleeding. The patient is often drained of blood by the time the prophecy is complete.
Africa is dangerous:
Sub-Saharan Africa has the world’s smallest number of motorized vehicles but the highest rate of road traffic fatalities, with Nigeria and South Africa leading the pack.
The World Bank predicts that in the next two years, road accidents could be the biggest killer of African children between 5 and 15. By 2030, according to the Global Burden of Disease study, road accidents will be the fifth leading cause of death in the developing world, ahead of malaria, tuberculosis and H.I.V.
If you add to these numbers the injuries caused by violent crime and communal conflict, then you have all the ingredients for a public health emergency.
Hollywood Cougar
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013Biologist Miguel Ordenana found a photo of a mountain lion captured by a camera trap set up in Griffith Park in Hollywood. Since then, National Geographic wildlife photographer Steve Winter has spent a year waiting for the perfect shot of the animal:
Confessions of a bad teacher
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013After a three-decade career as a writer, editor and corporate executive, John Owens decided to become a New York City public-school teacher — a bad teacher:
Despite what we read in the press about the “the powerful teachers’ union,” each school’s principal has a great deal of power in the form of a U — unsatisfactory — rating. To a veteran, tenured teacher, a U means stalled raises. For a new teacher, a U is death. You’re out of the System.
Right off the bat, I don’t think he understands how unions work and what the complaint against them is. They exist to protect their current membership — and leadership — not hungry, new recruits.
Anyway, it’s pretty clear what the problem at his South Bronx school was:
With the remaining half-dozen hardcore kids, nothing made them put their phones down and do something resembling schoolwork. I assigned seats, reassigned seats and re-reassigned seats. But with these uncontrollable older kids in the class, it was tough to control the others. And sometimes, the parents were an even bigger problem.
“Please sign the original and keep the copy,” the assistant principal said one afternoon, handing me a manila folder. Inside was a letter from Ms. P to me.
It concerned parent-teacher night. I had stressed to the parents who showed up how important it is for the students to behave, to be quiet and focus on their work. I told them how I had observed a class in a wealthy school district, and how the kids just came in, sat down and got to work.
“They don’t waste time on discipline, so those students get much more instructional time,” I told the parents. “Those kids aren’t smarter. I think the kids here are smarter. But our kids waste teaching time. Please, stress to your children how important it is to behave in class.”
Dear Mr. Owens:
We are giving you this letter to file for your failure to show cultural sensitivity… One parent, in particular, complained about your insensitive remarks comparing students from our school with those of Chappaqua with what she perceived as a racial subtext, i.e. that our students — predominantly African American and Hispanic — do not do as well academically as the predominantly Caucasian students in the suburbs. The parent felt offended and disturbed by your remarks….
It didn’t matter that I never mentioned race or Chappaqua (a place I’ve never been); I was officially a bad teacher.
When he tried to keep the class after school, he was reprimanded by the principal.
Another point he reiterates in a recent interview is that the data driving the process is worthless:
We have to understand that the numbers that we’ve been looking at—that most of them are meaningless. And made up. And bogus. They are. We are not using scientific research. We’re using data. I had to put in 2,000 points of data a week for my kids. Everything from attendance to homework. But I also had to put in things like self-determination. I mean, what is self-determination? I don’t know, but it can really help boost your grade if you have it. It was just so that the administration could prove whatever they wanted to prove. They didn’t want to prove that the kids were learning, they wanted to prove that they were passing. And then that they would graduate.
[Ed. note: According to Owens, Ms. P, his principal, and the school's assistant principal were eventually removed from their positions for alleged involvement in a scheme to falsify student records.]
Lant Pritchett makes a similar point about education in “developing” countries:
I think, well, one of the conjectures I put in the book is that it persists partly by camouflage. It pretends to be something it’s not and then can project enough of the camouflage that it maintains its legitimacy. So, sociologists of organization have a term called “isomorphic mimicry”, which is adapted from evolution where some species of snakes look poisonous but aren’t, but get the survival value of looking poisonous. So, one of the things that’s happened is by this pressure to expand schooling and by the governments’ desire to control that socialization process, they have created all the appearances of schools that provide education but without actually doing it. But have at the same time not produced the information that would make it clear that they weren’t doing it. So they produce enrollment statistics, numbers of buildings, numbers of toilets, numbers of textbooks, numbers of everything. But have, you know, all of which can project the image that there’s a functional system and providing real learning there. But they don’t provide metrics of learning or incentives for learning or feedback on learning or accountability for learning at all. And so persist in this kind of, you know, what I’ve called elsewhere a technique of persistent failure. If you came and said, “How could I fail and yet have never have anybody hold me accountable to failure?” you would design something very much like many of the current education systems.
Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools Lag Behind
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013The US has never ranked at the top of international education tests, Gregory Ferenstein notes, yet has been the dominant economic and innovative force in the world the entire time:
The reason for the apparent disconnect is because schools don’t prepare students for the real world, so broad educational attainment will have a weak correlation with economic power. Research has consistently shown that on nearly every measure of education (instructional hours, class-size, enrollment, college preparation), what students learn in school does not translate into later life success. The United States has an abundance of the factors that likely do matter: access to the best immigrants, economic opportunity, and the best research facilities.
[...]
In a massive review of research, the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute for Education Sciences, could not find any evidence that college preparation actually prepared students for college. The only effective tools were (sadly) non-classroom-based strategies, such as teaching students how to fill out financial aid forms.
Students’ time in college isn’t much better. Researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa concluded in Academically Adrift that most students float through college without learning much in the way of critical thinking.
“Indeed, the students in our study who reported studying alone five or fewer hours per week nevertheless had an average cumulative GPA of 3.16,” they write, “given such a widespread lack of academic rigor, about a third of students failed to demonstrate significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing ability (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) during their four years of college.”
These facts should not come as a shock. When I taught college, it was commonly known among the professors that incoming high schoolers were not prepared with the requisite critical-thinking skills for our classes. Now as a writer in the private sector, I don’t expect incoming employees to have been prepared in their college classes. Determination, raw intelligence, and creativity are the measures of a successful college student and employee — none of those factors are learned in school.
Open Source Household Gadgets
Wednesday, December 4th, 2013Weilung Tseng deconstructed 50 common household gadgets — everything from fans to tea kettles — and realized that you could recreate all of them with five basic modules — a light socket, rotating motor, air heater, immersion heater, and a heated surface — and some 3D-printed accessories:
Conquest’s Second Law
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013I’ve mentioned Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics before:
- Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
- Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
- The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Recently Andrew Sparrow of The Guardian linked to my post while discussing the British Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
By coincidence, Samo Burja of More Right recently discussed Conquest’s Second Law:
It seems difficult to even have a bird watching society or cycling club, let alone a church or book club that doesn’t eventually end up spending its resources on pushing the ideological goals of Progressivism. If you can’t think of an example of such leftward drift at all stop reading now to compare Henry Ford to the Ford Foundation.
The most promising explanation, Burja suggests, relies on James A. Donald’s model of leftism as Phariseeism:
He uses the word Pharisee to mean a person who reckons that since he is holier than you, you should obey him. If this is an effective strategy you will see competitions among them to be holier than each other. He proposes this holier than thou spiral as a rough fit for what we know about how American Progressivism evolved from American Protestantism. The carriers of Puritan descended memeplexes where becoming holier and holier until they became holier than Jesus. This requires either claiming the same title for yourself or demoting him from the position of Son of God. They chose the latter, giving him the new title of Chief Community Organizer and having done so where free to demonstrate holiness by advocating violently freeing slaves, outlawing alcohol and rebuking St. Paul’s advice on marriage. After a short trip along this branch, the only way to escalate is a smooth transition from being Unitarian to being holier than that fictional god person in general. Welcome to liberal secular humanism.
If you aren’t very good at bird watching, or programming, or painting, or cycling gaining status by signalling holiness via progressive causes and initiating a local instance of such a spiral seems a good strategy. If so, it is likely one our social brain evolved for, it could easily be sensed and enacted without our conscious mind even noticing we are doing so. This is a plausible reason why this could sooner or later corrupt all institutions, it just takes a small push, under the right conditions that come about, sooner or later, for the ball to start rolling.
Inside the Boston Bomb Squad’s Defining Day
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013The Boston bomb squad’s defining day wasn’t what they trained for:
Several years after 9/11, I conducted training with a military bomb unit charged with guarding Washington, DC. Our final exam was a nightmare scenario—a homemade nuke at the Super Bowl. Our job was to defuse it while the fans were still in the stands, there being no way to quickly and safely clear out 80,000 people. That scenario made two fundamental assumptions that are no longer valid: that there would be one large device and that we would find it before it detonated.
Boston showed that there’s another threat, one that looks a lot different. “We used to train for one box in a doorway. We went into a slower and less aggressive mode, meticulous, surgical. Now we’re transitioning to a high-speed attack, more maneuverable gear, no bomb suit until the situation has stabilized,” Gutzmer says. “We’re not looking for one bomber who places a device and leaves. We’re looking for an active bomber with multiple bombs, and we need to attack fast.”
A post-Boston final exam will soon look a lot different. Instead of a nuke at the Super Bowl, how about this: Six small bombs have already detonated, and now your job is to find seven more—among thousands of bags—while the bomber hides among a crowd of the fleeing, responding, wounded, and dead. Meanwhile the entire city overwhelms your backup with false alarms. Welcome to the new era of bomb work.
(Hat tip to Bruce Schneier.)
Amazon Prime Air
Monday, December 2nd, 2013Amazon Prime Air looks like a well-executed April Fools prank:
Violent crime is rare in Iceland
Monday, December 2nd, 2013Iceland is awash in guns, yet it has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. For the first time, ever, Iceland’s police have shot a man dead:
Tear gas canisters were fired through the windows in an attempt to subdue the 59-year-old, who lived in the east of the capital, Reykjavik.
When this failed he was shot after firing at police entering the building. Between 15 and 20 officers took part.
Back-up was provided by special forces.
The tear gas was used when the man, who has not been named, failed to respond to police attempts to contact him and continued shooting.
When they entered the apartment, two members of the special forces were injured by shotgun fire — one in the face, the other in the hand.
Iceland’s police, like the English bobbies of old, don’t carry guns. Only their “special forces” do. Oh, and they’re called the Viking Squad.
I love how the only explanation for their low crime rate is their equality, and not, say, the fact that everyone knows everyone else and is rather closely related — even more so than in Japan, I’d guess.
(Hat tip to Reason‘s Hit & Run.)