Not Held in High Esteem

Saturday, October 17th, 2015

The Kenyan authorities are not held in high esteem:

News of the [Westgate mall] assault was beginning to spread via frantic phones calls, texts, and WhatsApp messages. Westgate is in the heart of a Kenyan-Indian part of the city, and the close-knit community there knew better than to rely on the authorities to send help. Instead, the call went out to the community’s own licensed gun holders, who were organized into self-appointed armed neighborhood watch units.

Harish Patel, a member of an outfit calling itself the Krisna Squad, was returning home from a morning spent volunteering at the nearby Hindu crematorium when he received a distress call: There was a robbery at the Nakumatt store in Westgate, with shooting going on. A couple of minutes later, the 43-year-old was within sight of the mall. He patted the pistol he wore on his hip and grabbed the spare magazine he kept in his car.

On the western side of town, Abdul Haji was in a business meeting at the Yaya Centre, another Nairobi shopping mall. The 38-year-old bitumen trader was sipping an Americano when his white iPhone chirruped. It was a text message from his brother: “Trapped in Westgate. Terrorist attack. Pray for me.”

Abdul abandoned the business meeting and rushed to his silver SUV in the basement. As he sped toward Westgate, swerving around cars and over sidewalks to cut through the traffic, he ran through a mental checklist: He had his gun, as always, a Ceska 9mm, but no spare magazine and no body armor.

He reached Westgate minutes after Nura and Harish.

[...]

When Abdul, an ethnic-Somali Kenyan who is Muslim, arrived carrying a pistol, Harish got in his face, shouting. Abdul pulled out his gun license ID and calmed Harish down.

Nura was the first to go up the ramp toward the rooftop car park, spurred on by shame at the cowardice of his police colleagues rather than the desire to be a hero. The carnage in the car park was horrifying. There was a mess of bodies in the corner, more scattered beneath the open-sided marquees, and still others poked out from beneath and between cars. Nura thought he was spearheading a rescue mission, but all he could see were bodies and blood. It looked like a slaughterhouse. Nura noticed some movement and stopped, suddenly realizing how he must appear: an ethic-Somali man in civilian clothes, clutching an AK-47. “I am the police,” he shouted in English. “I’m the good guy!”

[...]

The crowd outside Westgate was growing, but with no sign of any official or organized security response. Instead, an ad hoc volunteer rescue mission had begun to take shape, comprising a motley crew of uniformed, plainclothes, and off-duty police and licensed civilian gun holders. From the rooftop car park, they could hear shooting inside and could tell it was not coming from the mall’s upper levels. Nura led the way with Abdul and Harish and two plainclothes armed officers: two Muslims, a Hindu, and two Christians. All Kenyans.

Imagine driving to the scene of a terrorist attack, armed with a pistol, against AKs and grenades. No thank you.

By the way, I mentioned that the authorities aren’t held in high esteem:

Most of the at least 67 people who were killed at Westgate died in the first hour of the attack, before any rescue effort had even begun. Kenyan security forces did not launch their operation until 4:00 p.m., by which time it was already too late: Most of those who would escape had already escaped; most of those who would be wounded had already been struck; and most of those who would die were already dead. It is likely that many of the victims bled to death in the slow hours between the start of the attack and the arrival of help.

A special police unit trained in counterterrorism operations, known as the Recce Squad, eventually entered from the rooftop car park. Kenyan soldiers entered from the ground floor. Neither group was in communication with the other. Soon afterwards, there was a shootout on the first floor between the Recce Squad and the soldiers, in which the police unit’s commander was killed and another two officers were wounded. The remaining Recce Squad members pulled out of the operation in disgust, and the army, too, withdrew.

After the friendly fire incident, Westgate became a military operation. Armored personnel carriers with heavy machine guns patrolled in front of the mall; soldiers with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades moved in and out; and sporadic gunfire and explosions echoed from within. On Sunday, Kenya’s interior minister claimed that there were as many as 15 attackers and that the siege was ongoing. By that time, however, the mall was mostly under the army’s control. On Monday, a rocket fired by the Kenyan army collapsed the back of the mall, dropping the rooftop car park into the basement, pancaking the room where the terrorists had taken shelter and throwing a thick plume of smoke into the Nairobi sky. The fire burned for days. Parked cars with full fuel tanks fell into the gaping hole and exploded like bombs.

[...]

Before and after blowing up the mall, the Kenyan army looted shops, broke open safes, and emptied tills. The looting was captured on closed-circuit television cameras and reported by business owners after they returned to the mall and found their shops ransacked and stock missing. A public inquiry into the disastrously ineffective security response was promised but never delivered. Somehow, Kenya’s interior minister managed to cling to his job for another 15 months. The army chief retired this spring, with full honors.

Welcome to Kenya!

Posted in Crime, War | 1 Comment »

How Tom Wolfe Became Tom Wolfe

Friday, October 16th, 2015

Michael Lewis explains how Tom Wolfe became Tom Wolfe — when he left the South:

For the first time in his life, it appears, Tom Wolfe has been provoked. He has left home and found, on the East Coast, the perpetual revolt of High Culture against God, Country, and Tradition. He happens to have landed in a time and place in which art — like the economy that supports it — is essentially patricidal. It’s all about tearing up and replacing what came before. The young Tom Wolfe is intellectually equipped to join some fashionable creative movement and set himself in opposition to God, Country, and Tradition; emotionally, not so much. He doesn’t use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience. He picks for his Ph.D. dissertation topic the Communist influences on American writers, 1928–1942. From their response to it, the Yale professors, who would have approved the topic in advance, had no idea of the spirit in which Wolfe intended to approach it:

Dear Mr. Wolfe:

I am personally acutely sorry to have to write you this letter but I want to inform you in advance that all of your readers reports have come in, and … I am sorry to say I anticipate that the thesis will not be recommended for the degree…. The tone was not objective but was consistently slanted to disparage the writers under consideration and to present them in a bad light even when the evidence did not warrant this.” [Letter from Yale dean to T.W., May 19, 1956.]

To this comes appended the genuinely shocked reviews of three Yale professors. It’s as if they can’t quite believe this seemingly sweet-natured and well-mannered southern boy has gone off half cocked and ridiculed some of the biggest names in American literature. The Yale grad student had treated the deeply held political conviction of these great American artists as — well, as a ploy in a game of status seeking.

[...]

He’d gone to Yale with the thought he would study his country by reading its literature and history and economics. He wound up discovering sociology — and especially Max Weber’s writings about the power of status seeking. The lust for status, it seemed to him, explained why otherwise intelligent American writers lost their minds and competed with one another to see just how devoted to the Communist cause they could be.

Posted in Education, Media, Policy | No Comments »

Probably Just a Robbery

Friday, October 16th, 2015

When the Westgate mall attack kicked off, a fruit and vegetable supplier tried to get people to flee:

Looking over the balustrade and down into the atrium, Sandeep saw people running. He dropped his shopping and joined others rushing for the exit. “Move out! Move out! We’re under attack!” he shouted as he raced for the door. Sandeep made straight for the children’s cookery competition, shouting at people to run. One of the organizers told him to calm down, saying it was probably just a robbery and would be over soon.

So, with grenades exploding, AKs firing, and people screaming, there’s no need to run away, because it’s probably just a robbery? Welcome to Kenya?

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

My Education Was A Complete Waste Of Time

Thursday, October 15th, 2015

Roosh Valizadeh suggests that his entire education was a complete waste of time, and a commenter who taught college for five years adds this bit of advice:

The one thing that school, from primary school through university, is able to teach a person is how to wake up, show up on time, do something you do not want to do, do it in a timely fashion and do it well.

For what it is worth, any branch of the military could have taught this exact same lesson and they would pay you (though admittedly not much) instead of the other way around.

Posted in Education | 7 Comments »

What really happened at Kenya’s Westgate Mall

Wednesday, October 14th, 2015

Tristan McConnell explains what really happened at Kenya’s Westgate Mall two years ago:

Far from a dramatic three-day standoff, the assault on the Westgate Mall lasted only a few hours, almost all of it taking place before Kenyan security forces even entered the building. When they finally did, it was only to shoot at one another before going on an armed looting spree that resulted in the collapse of the rear of the building, destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade. And there were only four gunmen, all of whom were buried in the rubble, along with much of the forensic evidence.

During the roughly three-and-a-half hours that the killers were loose in the mall, there was virtually no organized government response. But while Kenyan officials prevaricated, an unlikely coalition of licensed civilian gun owners and brave, resourceful individual police officers took it upon themselves to mount a rescue effort. Pieced together over 10 months from more than three dozen interviews with survivors, first responders, security officers, and investigators, the following account brings their story to life for the first time since the horrific terrorist attack occurred exactly two years ago.

Weapons Man shares some lessons learned:

Afterward, the intelligence services find out they should have seen it coming, but oops.

The rescue that matters is self-rescue and self-started civilian rescue. The cavalry only comes in time in Hollywood.

Most untrained people are passive even in the face of certain death.

Talking to terrorists doesn’t work. The guys who stood up to remonstrate with the terrorists would agree, except they’re all dead.

In the imagined “gun-free zone,” even the most inept miscreant with a gun is king. We’ve seen ten clowns with rifles tie all Bombay in knots for days, and here’s a mass-casualty (and mass-headline-producing, the terrs’ metric) event caused by four shooters with minimal training and basic equipment.

Kenya’s policy of issuing concealed carry licenses to trusted individuals worked to the benefit of all here. Contrary to popular expectation, the licensees worked well with each other and with the police. We hope Kenya will consider expanding the policy.

An ad-hoc, self-organized response right here right now, is not only “not necessarily bad,” but might be a lot better than the perfect, coordinated SWAT raid an hour from now. (And as we’ve seen, the raid was not perfect and coordinated).

Once your forces are on scene, there is no more reason for delay — only excuses and pretexts. To be sure, the murders of those people at the Westgate Mall were on the heads of as-Shabaab, but a significant number of the dead would have been surviving wounded with speedy and resolute action, which was lacking.

The time to make sure your radios are interoperable is before the attack. If you haven’t done that, and Kenyans hadn’t, you can pretty much guarantee they won’t be, and they weren’t.

Finally: don’t expect the security forces to investigate themselves after a cock-up of this magnitude. After the initial raid at Waco, the ATF leaders of the raid shredded their raid plan and lawyered up. After the final incendiary attack, the FBI destroyed mountains of evidence. So it should surprise no-one that the promised investigation of the Westgate attack has never materialized in Kenya. It won’t, and if it does, it will be an empty whitewash.

One of the licensed concealed-carriers in the photos is literally wearing a vest with an IDPA patch:

Security officers secure an area inside Westgate Shopping Centre in Nairobi
International Defensive Pistol Association indeed.

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

Imparting Civilization

Tuesday, October 13th, 2015

For half a century we’ve been trying to reduce the academic achievement gap and ameliorate the social pathologies of the underclass. Robert Weissberg suggests that our test-centric school system should pull its narrow focus back from pure academics and work toward imparting civilization:

First, the civil society requires people controlling their emotions, especially violent urges. As Pinker depicts the transformation, reacting to insults with immediate violence (defending one’s honor) slowly gave way to dueling that permitted multiple “honorable” escape routes which, in turn, transitioned to relying on litigation (“see you in court”). Simultaneously, the culture shifted so defending one’s reputation by drawing a sword for some trivial offense vanished thanks to the aggrieved party learning to hold his tongue, count to ten or develop a thick skin. Pinker also tells how ridicule eventually undermined the violence-soaked code that demanded a gentleman risk his life over trifling slights. Today’s civilized people see virtue in what was once spinelessness.

Second, civilization requires across-the-board delayed gratification, self-discipline and moderation. One does not eat a lunch snack at breakfast or crave the latest iPhone. Refined people now wait until all the others are served before eating. Think habits such as finishing school work before heading off to play or forgoing sex until adulthood. Most of all learn to resist crime as an alternative to employment and saving money.

Third, civilized people learn to obey authority regardless of contrary urges. When the teacher tells you to sit still and be quiet, you sit still and stop talking. As an adult one heeds police orders regardless of opinions regarding the police officer or policing more generally. In other words, civilization is impossible if “everybody does their own thing” or people can autonomously decide their own rules. Respect for the rule of law is what separates civilization from savagery.

The good news, as Pinker documents, is that history overflows with recipes to refine the unruly. Surely, even in the absence of stable families, teachers can impart these requirements if permitted to employ the traditional classroom discipline — stigma, humiliation, shame and even corporal punishment. Youngsters can certainly be taught the etiquette facilitating peaceful society — saying “excuse me” if inadvertently bumping into a classmate. Even students with room temperature IQ’s can be socialized though, to be sure, this quest may take years of punishment before avoiding fights over petty insults becomes second nature.

Moreover, it would cost almost nothing to begin teaching even kindergarten students habit such as punctuality, always being prepared and respective language — its “Mr. Smith,” not “hey teach.” Teachers could demand that youngsters tidy up after themselves so no milk and cookies until everything is neatly put away and the proper place. When I attended grade school no student could enter the building until everyone was perfectly lined up outside and absolutely silent. What about assigning books where the kindly hero outsmarts his boorish, brutal rival? Pinker tells of the many etiquette books of the Middle Ages that carefully spelled out behavior for a proper gentleman, and these can be adapted for today’s youngsters. While there might be rough and tumble sports but woe to any kid who turns a friendly dodge ball game into an exercise of taunting rivals that will almost guarantee violence. Punishment would be especially heavy if the miscreant continued this out of place behavior post game — who needs sports insults escalating into vendettas? The Battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but if inner-city civilization is to be restored, the task must begin in thousands of violence prone schools and playgrounds.

Japanese educators have long understood the link between inculcating good behavior and academic achievement (it is called “learning to learn”). One practice requires youngsters to sit still and stare at a dot on the blackboard. Each student keeps a personal record of how long they are able to perform this patience-building task and those who excel are recognized for their accomplishment. In some classrooms the heat is turned down to 55 degrees and students wear shorts so as to learn how to work despite discomfort. Obviously there are countless other tactics, all practical, proven successful and many virtually cost-free but these examples should suffice.

Now, what is the prognosis for this civilizing mission? Alas, our advice is doomed and will surely be denounced.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

The History of the Mason Jar

Monday, October 12th, 2015

The Mason jar, which was created in 1858 by John Landis Mason, a New Jersey native, wasn’t always a hipster accessory:

The idea of “heat-based canning” emerged in 1806 and was popularized by Nicholas Appert, a French cook who had been inspired by the need to preserve foods for long periods during the Napoleonic wars. But, as Sue Shepard writes in her book Pickled, Potted, and Canned, the products of this technique were often compromised by imperfect seals: Appert originally used champagne bottles, which he secured with the improbable mixture of cheese and lime. He soon exchanged champagne bottles for glasses with wider necks, and by 1803 his canned goods were being successfully distributed to the French Navy. Mason’s design, which possessed a ribbed neck and a screw-on cap that created an airtight seal, helped to refine a canning process that had been prone to error. The transparency of the glass that Mason used also made the contents appealingly visible.

In the early 20th century, mass production made Mason jars ubiquitous in America. One of the most prolific manufacturers was the Ball Corporation. One often sees jars etched with this name, in lilting cursive, opposite an engraved cornucopia and measurement markers. Printed discreetly near the bottom is the label: “Made in U.S.A.”

[...]

Mason jars experienced a renaissance during World War II, when the U.S. government rationed food and encouraged people to grow their own. In the aftermath of the war, however, economic and industrial developments displaced canning as the primary form of food preservation. Large numbers of people began leaving farms for the city, refrigerators became ubiquitous, and canning was supplanted by freezing. As transportation systems improved, fresh fruits and vegetables became available year-round (even in New Hampshire), lessening the need for food preservation. Tin canning, based on Appert’s glass-canning technique and patented in 1810 by the Englishman Peter Durand, industrialized the food-preservation process, making its benefits available on a massive scale and at relatively cheap prices. (While millions of Americans were purchasing Mason jars during World War II, soldiers overseas were eating daily rations of tinned food.) In the early 20th century, the invention of the plastics bakelite and nylon paved the way for the billions of plastic containers used in contemporary industrial preservation.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Racist Instructions

Sunday, October 11th, 2015

Playmobil made the unforgivable mistake of including a freed slave in the crew of its pirate ship, with racist instructions to put the slave-collar piece on the dark-skinned character:

“It’s definitely racist,” she said. “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Partly an Englishman

Sunday, October 11th, 2015

World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly:

When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world — or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

[...]

Eight years before the outbreak of world war in Europe, Britain’s King Edward VII asked his prime minister why the British government was becoming so unfriendly to his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, rather than keeping its eye on America, which he saw as the greater challenge. The prime minister instructed the Foreign Office’s chief Germany watcher, Eyre Crowe, to write a memo answering the king’s question. Crowe delivered his memorandum on New Year’s Day, 1907. The document is a gem in the annals of diplomacy.

The logic of Crowe’s analysis echoed Thucydides’s insight. And his central question, as paraphrased by Henry Kissinger in On China, was the following: Did increasing hostility between Britain and Germany stem more from German capabilities or German conduct? Crowe put it a bit differently: Did Germany’s pursuit of “political hegemony and maritime ascendancy” pose an existential threat to “the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England?”

Crowe’s answer was unambiguous: Capability was key. As Germany’s economy surpassed Britain’s, Germany would not only develop the strongest army on the continent. It would soon also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” In other words, Kissinger writes, “once Germany achieved naval supremacy … this in itself — regardless of German intentions — would be an objective threat to Britain, and incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”

Three years after reading that memo, Edward VII died. Attendees at his funeral included two “chief mourners” — Edward’s successor, George V, and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm — along with Theodore Roosevelt representing the United States. At one point, Roosevelt (an avid student of naval power and leading champion of the buildup of the U.S. Navy) asked Wilhelm whether he would consider a moratorium in the German-British naval arms race. The kaiser replied that Germany was unalterably committed to having a powerful navy. But as he went on to explain, war between Germany and Britain was simply unthinkable, because “I was brought up in England, very largely; I feel myself partly an Englishman. Next to Germany I care more for England than for any other country.” And then with emphasis: “I ADORE ENGLAND!”

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be — none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Perfectly Pandering

Saturday, October 10th, 2015

Nick Beauchamp, an assistant professor in Northeastern’s department of political science, decided to analyze political arguments, sentence by sentence:

First, he needed to pick an issue. He settled on Obamacare because, he says, it’s an issue on which many Americans still have fluid opinions. He then skimmed 2,000 sentences from a pro-Obamacare website called ObamaCareFacts.com and fed it to a machine learning model. The system grouped the 2,000 sentences into individual topics, such as sentences related to costs or health care exchanges — and began mixing and matching.

After the machines took a swing at political discourse, Beauchamp turned to the human brains on Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s online community for crowdsourcing tasks. Using the formulations developed by the model, Beauchamp sent hundreds of Turkers in the United States various combinations of sentences, then asked them, on a scale of 1 to 9, whether they strongly approve or strongly disapprove of Obamacare. Based on their answers, the system would go back to the topic pools to find more and more favorable sentence combinations and send them out to a new group of Turkers.

“The goal is: Can you combine better and better collections of sentences such that after people read them they’re more disposed toward Obamacare?” Beauchamp says.

Within an hour-and-a-half, Beauchamp was left with a collection of text that had a 30 percent higher approval rating than the original text. He discovered that sentences about pre-existing conditions and employer-employee relationships tended to be viewed most favorably, while sentences about legal rights and state and federal rights were viewed least favorably.

The conclusion:

“Democracy has this inherent problem where if you do it right, you’re perfectly pandering to the audience,” he says. “We’re all worried by that, but we also, at the same time, all believe in democracy.”

If we’re more aware of how easily we can be manipulated, perhaps we’ll be more willing to question those who are trying to manipulate us.

Maybe we shouldn’t all believe in democracy?

Posted in Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Thucydides’s Trap

Saturday, October 10th, 2015

Can China and the United States escape Thucydides’s Trap?

The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.

Thucydides Case Studies

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not. Moreover, current underestimations and misapprehensions of the hazards inherent in the U.S.-China relationship contribute greatly to those hazards. A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

How Spree Killers Differ From “Normal” Criminals

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Weapons Man enumerates how spree killers differ from “normal” criminals:

We’re not big fans of scare quotes, but criminal behavior is by definition deviant. and so criminals are only “normal” by reference to other criminals. After looking at thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of criminal gun acquisitions, certain things stand out about, say, your typical murderer versus these going-postal types.

  1. For a career criminal, a homicide or homicides is not an entry level crime, but a culmination of a life of increasing legal deviancy.
  2. Ergo, most murderers have one of more prior felonies, permanent restraining orders (or equivalent), or other disqualifying entries on their records, and can’t buy guns in shops.
  3. Criminals take the path of least resistance to an even greater extent than the normal exemplar of Homo sapiens. Therefore, they go for firearms the same place you might go to for, say, lawn care advice, to their normal informal social networks.
  4. Most crime guns are acquired by purchase or barter from friends or family. Criminals’ girlfriends are a particularly fruitful source; except for some pockets of check-kiting and insurance fraud, they tend not to be as criminal as their men.
  5. Before being acquired by their ultimate criminal who will lose them when murdered, at a crime scene, or in a police search, the bulk of crime guns circulate for some time in a black market.
  6. Our best guesstimate is that about 80% of murder weapons come from this black market, about 15-18% are straw-purchased to order for criminals (although seldom with a specific planned crime in mind), and the balance are stolen to order or acquired by the end-user criminal directly from the thieves.
  7. ATF’s median time-to-crime figures for most states support this analysis. We’ll look into this in depth below.

Meanwhile, the spree killer is a different animal entirely.

  1. Murderers are, in the main, career criminals. Spree killers have seldom been in serious legal trouble. (Lots of them were weird or creeped people out, but the vast majority of weirdos never kill anybody, so weird is not a useful indicator any more than buying a gun is).
  2. Murders are conventionally the nexus between something inconsequential and a violent person with poor impulse control. The spree killer plans his attack for months or years.
  3. The goal of a conventional murderer is to kill somebody. The goal of a spree killer is to make a statement, often stated as, “get on TV.” In this, he’s more like a terrorist.
  4. Murderers tend to be, let’s not sugar-coat this, stupid. They let rage or an ill-thought-out “perfect crime” lead them into a path which never ends well for them, although they don’t usually wind up as dead as their victims — just locked up. Spree killers may be just as full of rage as your average PO’d crack dealer, but they tend to be above average in intelligence. Many of them are smarter than the cops pursuing them and the reporters writing about them, not that intelligence makes them good people. They are likely to be systematic and plan their crimes for a long time (often, for maximum media impact). It’s commonplace for cops to find plans, spreadsheets, and statements of admiration for previous spree killers, after the fact. Spree killers frequently write self-important manifestoes. For an example of planning, some of them waited out state waiting periods for firearms.
  5. Murderers usually act in the heat of the moment, spree killers plan their crimes in detail, often fantasizing in obsessive detail (based on movies, video games, and the media reporting on the others they emulate).
  6. Murderers expect, however unrealistically, to get away with their crimes. Spree killers have no such illusions and usually plan to kill themselves when confronted by police or armed resistance.
  7. A “regular” murderer is less likely to be socially isolated, so he can do things like have a girlfriend straw-purchase a firearm for him, or acquire one through criminal associates who (however unwisely) trust him. A spree killer is isolated, even in the midst of family, workplace, or school, and never has a girlfriend or anybody who trusts him that much. So he has to keep his nose clean, legally, and acquire his weapon legally; or, as in two of the Times’s cases above, he steals them from someone he knows who owns them — in one case, his father; in the other, his mother, after murdering her with four shots to the head from a .22.

Posted in Crime | 3 Comments »

Jerusalem Mayor Urges Residents to Carry Weapons

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has called on residents who are licensed to carry weapons to do so on a daily basis:

“One advantage that Israel has is that there are quite a few ex-members of military units with operational combat experience,” Barkat said. “Possessing weapons increases the confidence of residents, who know that in addition to police there are many people who are not afraid to intervene. If we look at the statistics in Jerusalem and elsewhere, we see that aside from the police, civilians carrying weapons have foiled terror attacks. They will increase the likelihood of fast intervention.”

Posted in Policy, War, Weapons | No Comments »

The Value of Being Cavalier

Friday, October 9th, 2015

Harold sees the value of being cavalier after realizing that all of the smartest and most dedicated people he knew from college were on incredibly conventional, though prestigious, career tracks:

You could almost draw a 2 x 2 matrix with the axes labeled “Courage” and “Capability” and see a vast yawning void where the right upper quadrant ought to be. I scratched my head about this puzzle for a long time, but no explanation was forthcoming.

So let’s tackle a different question: why is Donald Trump so interesting? I don’t mean his politics per se, but rather his personality. In a time when lots of politicians try to brand themselves an outsider to politics, he actually acts like one, for better or worse. He exudes an attitude of “I’ve already made it, I’m gonna do my thing, and maybe people will like it or not.”

And sure, he’s a billionaire, so it’s easy for him to do that sort of thing. But it’s notable that there are 536 billionaires in the US — just two short of the number of Congressmen and Senators — and almost all of them are fairly boring in their interests and activities. Trump, Soros, Musk, and Thiel are the ones that jump out as exhibiting, in very different ways, the sort of agency you’d expect from someone who’s already made it. Sure, most of us have day jobs and families to feed, so you’d expect us to veer closer to convention. But if anyone could be brashly unconventional, it would be billionaires. And yet that’s not what we observe.

My sense is that aristocrats were way more interesting, and this is not unrelated to their remarkable intellectual productivity. Darwin noodled around with naturalism after abandoning a career in medicine. Edward Gibbon wrote his famous Decline and Fall only after several equally ambitious failures, such as a panoramic history of Switzerland and a survey of contemporary English literature. These were not the equivalents of a grad student carefully publishing some cautious extensions of his PI’s work to get some guaranteed publications, they were bold, imaginative, and ambitious.

In a world where more people than ever could live materially quite comfortably, it seems notable that so few of our elites are demonstrating that level of ambition. It’s as though we had all the tools necessary to support enormous levels of human agency, and decided to just sit on them.

There are probably lots of causes for this shift, from changes in culture to differences in education. But one striking difference is that for past generations of elites, it was common to take a position as a military officer while growing up — whereas today, outside maybe Israel and a few other countries, it’s unheard of. Being a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment was as common then is going to grad school is today.

Part of this, sure, was carrying on the tradition of the nobility as being responsible for physical security. But part of it, too, is the sense that command over men in situations that matter fundamentally changes the way you see the world. As a leader, you have to be responsible both for planning and for execution. You have to closely monitor how the men under your command are behaving. And it forces you into a frame of mind where taking initiative and making decisions are the default, rather than the exception.

We don’t really have analogues of this anymore. Pretty much every prestigious career track involves not personal command but prolonged institutional subordination.

Posted in Business, Education, Policy | 3 Comments »

The Media Hall of Mirrors

Thursday, October 8th, 2015

Henry Dampier looks into the Media Hall of Mirrors:

Most of what’s in the media has become internally reflective. Wire services and newspapers write original reports, which are then digested by secondary news providers (TV, radio, and the web). Then, authorized pundits tell you how you are supposed to feel about the news. The pundits and the secondary news-mongers then provide fodder for people to react to on tertiary communications networks like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. While this system might not be capable of developing perfect consensus, people tend to feel a need to pay (and that payment is costly, even to people earning $8/hour) attention to what the consensus is — or at least what the fragmentation of consensus happens to be.

This makes sense, because the operating assumption of democracy is that generating consensus is what a legitimate government does — it verifies the consent of the governed, providing a moral patina to the state which wouldn’t be present otherwise. They might not be able to garner 300,000,000 signatories to the social contract, but the opinion-molders can generate a serviceable consensus reality. Not everyone will agree, but most people will agree about the fundamentals of ‘reality,’ and even if they don’t agree, they will know what those fundamentals are supposed to be.

At the personal level, all this consensus-generating is enormously wasteful and is often quite damaging. Paying attention to crashed Malaysian planes means that you have less attention to devote to the actually important matters of life within your locus of control. Knowing all the details about the latest lurid scandal means that you have less space in your mind for the people, tasks, and things that actually matters to you.

In this way, democracy generates a pervasive mental pollution which wouldn’t be present otherwise. The media isn’t an entity independent of politics, despite all the pretenses about a free press. The reason for this is because every man is supposed to be a political micro-sovereign. Each person is, at least in theory, supposed to be sufficiently educated so as to be able to ably exercise their tiny slice of authority. And the only way that sovereigns can act with confidence is to accumulate enough support from all those micro-slices to do whatever it is that they wanted to do in the first place.

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