The subject matter lends itself to visual storytelling. (I’d love to see Atlantropa.)
The Man in the High Castle
Sunday, January 18th, 2015Protester Running through Police Simulation
Friday, January 16th, 2015Reverend Jarett Maupin, who led protests against a police shooting of an unarmed man in Phoenix, was invited to participate in a use of force simulation. This is the video from a GoPro camera attached to Maupin’s vest.
The Amazons
Friday, January 16th, 2015The Amazons of Greek myth may have been real steppe warriors — who did not live without men:
Around a quarter of the ancient female bodies unearthed from the steppes are equipped as warriors.
Advances in osteological analysis (the study of bones) have allowed old evidence to be reconsidered and suggests that the numbers may have been even higher. For instance, two fourth-century B.C. burial mounds discovered in Romania (1931) and Bulgaria (1965), containing skeletons of both humans and horses as well as magnificent weapons and treasure, were originally assumed to be the resting places of ancient male warriors with their wives. It turns out that all the bodies in these graves are female.
One might well wonder why the peoples of the steppes should have been so much more open to having women play an active part in society than ancient Greece or Rome. Ms. Mayor has a simple but appealing answer: It was all about horses and arrows. In Greek and Roman warfare, women were at an obvious disadvantage, since they are (on average) smaller and less capable of marching into battle on foot clad in heavy armor and carrying a heavy shield, spear and sword. Women also have a physical disadvantage in societies based on agriculture. But they can be the equals of men in riding and controlling horses and in shooting arrows (including the nomad’s specialty, the Parthian shot, in which the rider fires arrows back over her shoulder while galloping away from the enemy).
Moreover, life in the barren landscapes of the steppes was difficult; these societies could not afford the waste of having half the population (or at least half the elite population) take little part in the gathering of food. Amazons are depicted as hunters in ancient Greek vase paintings, and the archaeological evidence seems to confirm that women as well as men rode on horses, with hunting dogs and trained birds to catch game for the tribe.
Ms. Mayor gives a fascinatingly detailed account of the physical conditions of these peoples’ lives. They dressed in clothes that would be practical for the cold weather and for long hours of riding: The people of these cultures, both women and men, may have been the first in the world to wear pants — a practice that the Greeks found both shocking and effeminate. They tattooed themselves with elaborate designs: Archaeologists have found the remains of mummified bodies in which inked patterns depicting animals such as deer, horses, leopards and tigers can be precisely reconstructed under infrared light. They may have been at least semi-literate; they made use of runes and “tamgas,” symbols used to mark an individual’s property. They ate food they could hunt or gather, and they drank the milk of their mares, fermented into a slightly alcoholic drink called koumiss, which can be stored unrefrigerated for longer than regular milk. Koumiss is still made by modern people in this region. They smoked cannabis: Herodotus writes of the Scythians burning this (to him entirely alien) “fruit” over a brazier, inhaling the smoke, and jumping up to dance and sing around the fire. Archaeologists have discovered little burners for smoking buried along with other daily possessions.
That’s from a review of Adrienne Mayor’s The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.
Gambia Coup
Thursday, January 15th, 2015An attempted coup in Gambia has failed:
Preparations began in August, when Mr Njie allegedly started recruiting men for his plan, according to a US criminal complaint. On December 3, a small group of about 10-12 men flew via South African Airways to Dakar in Senegal and from there they made their way overland to Gambia.
They planned to ambush the president and convince the head of the Gambian army to “stand down and support the change in leadership”, it is alleged. Gambia’s poorly equipped army numbers fewer than 3,000 soldiers.
“They hoped the president would surrender, but were willing to shoot him if he fired at them,” Nicholas Marshall, an FBI special agent, said in an affidavit. But the president never got the chance to surrender — he had left the country to celebrate New Year.
As in other mercenary-led coups in Africa, the target was a dictator. Mr Jammeh has run Gambia with an iron fist since he seized power in a coup more than two decades ago. He is known for his authoritarian rule and eccentric beliefs. In 2007, he claimed that he had found herbal cures for HIV and personally administered his treatment to patients. The following year he vowed to execute any gay person discovered in Gambia. In 2013, Gambia pulled out of the Commonwealth, the organisation that groups together mostly former territories of the British empire, following criticism over the country’s human rights record. Mr Jammeh called it “neocolonial”.
They split into two teams, codenamed “Alpha” and “Bravo”, and hid in the woods near the palace. In rented cars, they approached State House. But, instead of fleeing, the soldiers responded with heavy fire. Within minutes, the members of the Alpha team were dead while the Bravo group had run for safety. The 160 members of the Gambian army who supposedly agreed to support the coup never showed up.
Mr Faal told the FBI that he “fled the scene and took refuge in a nearby building, removed his body armour, boots and military-style clothing and changed into clothes obtained from a man in the building”. Within days, he had surrendered himself to the US authorities in the embassy in Dakar. He apparently identified Mr Njie in a photograph shown to him by US investigators.
Community College: What is the Right Price?
Thursday, January 15th, 2015Arnold Kling is skeptical about free community college:
Just based on my gut feeling, I think that the vast majority of students attending community college do not have favorable outcomes. [...] I am not even sure that students in the lower tier of four-year colleges have favorable outcomes. Instead, the true cost, including what the students pay out of pocket plus subsidies plus opportunity cost, exceeds the benefit for many who attend college. In contrast, President Obama seems to endorse the fairy-dust model of college, where you can sprinkle it on anyone to produce affluence.
Politicians and policy wonks face different incentives:
If I were President Obama, of course, I would champion universal “free” community college. Worst case, my proposal becomes law. A lot of money gets wasted, but it’s not my money. Best case, the Republicans vote it down and I call them anti-opportunity meanies.
The Case for a Revenue-Neutral Gas Tax
Wednesday, January 14th, 2015Charles Krauthammer quixotically makes the case for a revenue-neutral gas tax:
The average American buys about twelve gallons of gas a week. Washington would be soaking him for $12 in extra taxes. Washington should therefore simultaneously reduce everyone’s FICA tax by $12 a week. Thus the average driver is left harmless. He receives a $12 per week FICA bonus that he can spend on gasoline if he wants — or anything else. If he chooses to drive less, it puts money in his pocket. (The unemployed would have the $12 added to their unemployment insurance; the elderly, added to their Social Security check.)
The point of the $1 gas-tax increase is not to feed the maw of a government raking in $3 trillion a year. The point is exclusively to alter incentives — to reduce the disincentive for work (the Social Security tax) and to increase the disincentive to consume gasoline.
The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras
Tuesday, January 13th, 2015Researchers studied the effect of police body-worn cameras on use of force and citizens’ complaints against the police and the results were stark:
We found that the likelihood of force being used in control conditions [no camera] were roughly twice those in experimental conditions [with a body-worn camera]. Similarly, a pre/post analysis of use-of-force and complaints data also support this result: the number of complaints filed against officers dropped from 0.7 complaints per 1,000 contacts to 0.07 per 1,000 contacts.
An order-of-magnitude drop in complaints sounds good.
Commenter Nicholas Marsh shared two explanations for the drop in complaints:
The first is that the camera wearing police are deterred from abusing their authority. The second is that members of the public are less likely to make false complaints.
If the public believe the former and police the latter there might be wide support for cameras.
Mobs
Tuesday, January 13th, 2015Chris Hernandez answers some questions about Ferguson and how police handled the shooting:
[Why would Wilson be allowed to wait a week before making a statement?]
My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that Wilson did what most cops do after a shooting: he gave a brief statement to investigators summing up the reason he fired, then gave a full statement after conferring with his attorney. The way I’ve seen it done, the officer says “I fired because he was pointing a gun at me, now I’ll wait for the union lawyer before I make a full statement.” That’s what police union attorneys suggest we do, and that’s what a lot of lawyers who take self-defense cases advise private citizens to do after a shooting. I don’t think Wilson had access to all the statements from witnesses, alleged witnesses and forensic evidence; after only a week, the evidence wouldn’t have been analyzed and witnesses were still coming forward. On its face, the claim “he waited a week to make a statement” sounds bad, but in reality it’s what all people involved in self-defense shootings are told to do: give only the bare facts, then wait until you confer with your lawyer.
[This case was not handled differently because Wilson was a cop?]
There are a couple of important facets to that question. First, you’re right that police shootings are handled differently, because police are a “known quantity”. When the officers arrived on the Wilson shooting scene they knew Wilson’s level of training and experience, knew he was responding to a reported crime, and knew he had identified two suspects and called for backup. So going into it, they wouldn’t have reason to suspect it was a random execution.
Second, an accusation screamed by a crowd is NOT considered credible by itself. Mobs get whipped into a frenzy pretty easily, and people start repeating what they’ve heard others say.
Hernandez gives two examples of mobs behaving badly:
My friend arrived on a rollover accident. A local young man had been ejected and killed. Officers blocked the road and started working the scene. Word spread, and the man’s friends and family started arriving. After the officers had been on the scene several minutes, someone in the crowd started yelling, “He didn’t die in a wreck! The cops killed him!”
The accusation started being repeated through the crowd. Officers had to hold a perimeter to keep people from trying to get the body before it was loaded into a hearse (this was a small town where bodies went straight to a funeral home). When the hearse was loaded and started driving away, people in the crowd ran to their cars and drove after it. Several police cars had to escort the hearse to the funeral home and then block the doors to keep people from forcing their way inside. The spontaneous outburst started with one person screaming a false accusation, which then spread. The fact that numerous people were repeating it did not make it credible.
My experience: I was at a murder scene at a huge club. When we arrived there were over a thousand people in the parking lot, and it was a near-riot. A man had been killed in the parking lot and was still there. We cleared the area around him, called for EMS and checked him for vital signs. He was DOA. A large and aggressive crowd surrounded us and tried to break through to the body. People started yelling “Why haven’t you called an ambulance?” and “They aren’t calling an ambulance because he’s black!” In the meantime, an ambulance had arrived but couldn’t get through the crowd. This was one of the most frustrating, ridiculous experiences of my career: being screamed at by enraged people for refusing to call an ambulance, and no matter how loud I screamed back, “Turn around, the ambulance is behind you!”, I couldn’t even get them to turn and look. As far as they were concerned we didn’t care enough about a dead black man to even call an ambulance, and weren’t interested in hearing or even seeing anything to the contrary. Their loud and repeated accusations weren’t credible.
Angel Islands
Tuesday, January 13th, 2015South Korea has a chain of islands where the locals farm sea salt:
“Angel Islands,” the regional tourist board calls the 1,004 islands clustered in the sun-sparkling waters off South Korea’s southwestern tip, because the Korean word for “1,004″ sounds like the word for “angel.”
Local media call them “Slave Islands.”
Parts of the region have been shut out from the country’s recent meteoric development. On many of the 72 inhabited islands, salt propels the economic engine, thanks to clean water, wide-open farmland and strong sunlight.
Sinan County has more than 850 salt farms that produce two-thirds of South Korea’s sea salt. To make money, however, farmers need labor, lots of it and cheap. Around half of Sinui Island’s 2,200 people work in salt farming, according to a county website and officials.
Even with pay, the work is hard.
Large farms in Europe can harvest salt once or twice a year with machines. But smaller Korean farms rely on daily manpower to wring salt from seawater.
Workers manage a complex network of waterways, hoses and storage areas. When the salt forms, they drain the fields, rake the salt into mounds, clean it and bag it. The process typically takes 25 days.
Sinan salt, which costs about three times more than refined salt, is coveted in South Korea, found in fancy department stores and given as wedding gifts.
The farms provide work for unwanted mentally and physically disabled Koreans:
An outsider might cringe at what’s happening on the island, said Han Bong-cheol, a pastor in Mokpo who lived on Sinui for 19 years until June. “But when you live there, many of these problems feel inevitable.”
He sympathized with farmers forced to deal with disabled, incompetent workers whom he described as dirty and lazy. “They spend their leisure time eating snacks, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. They are taken once or twice a year to Mokpo so they can buy sex. It’s a painful reality, but it’s a pain the island has long shared as a community,” Han said.
Unpopular Populism
Monday, January 12th, 2015Some populist ideas are much less popular than others:
Populism usually refers to the idea that power should rest in the hands of the little guy, and not in the government or some elite. Public-opinion polls show that this basic form of populism has wide appeal. One of every two Americans believes that most politicians are corrupt (51 percent, according to a 2013 poll of national voters); 76 percent that special interests wield too much power; and 88 percent that big money has too much sway. Very low on people’s “trust” lists are all those perceived as powerful, including not just the government but also banks and corporations and labor unions. This kind of populism appeals to both those on the left, such as the Occupy Wall Street folks, and to Tea Partiers. (Polls show that, at least for a while, at least one in 10 Americans favored both!) I call this popular populism.
Much of the appeal is lost — that is, populism becomes much less popular — once leftist themes join the mix. There is little support for policies that look like wealth transfers, taking from the rich and giving to poor, reducing inequality, or making sacrifices for the common good. Large segments of the right and center view these policies as taking from “us” and giving to “them.” That’s why Social Security is so popular, while welfare is not. It’s the reason Medicare is very popular and Medicaid is much less so.
Populations, not Nations, Dictate Development
Monday, January 12th, 2015One of the more intriguing empirical regularities in recent economic growth research involves population origins:
Rather than thinking about rich and poor countries, work by Louis Putterman and David Weil tells us to think about rich and poor population groups (Europeans and Native Americans, for example). Countries are rich if their population is made up of rich population groups, and vice versa. The U.S. is rich because it has lots of European descendants, and relatively few Native American descendants. Mexico, in contrast, is relatively poor because it has a few European descendants but lots of Native American descendants.
[...]
As an example, the weighted state history for the U.S. is a weighted average of the state history of England, Germany, Italy, etc.. (quite long) as opposed to the state history of North America (quite short).
The length of time that populations have had settled agriculture and organized states is highly correlated with output per worker today. Countries that have more history with economic organization are richer today.
Spolaore and Wacziarg’s next table shows that even holding those features constant, the share of Europeans in the population of a country is highly correlated with output per worker today. The upshot is that Europeans and their descendants are rich (as a group), wherever they are in the world, but not so for other population groups.
Bad Policies Based on Fragile Science
Sunday, January 11th, 2015Bold policies have been based on fragile science, and the long term results may be terrible, Richard Smith says — speaking of diets:
By far the best of the books I’ve read to write this article is Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise, whose subtitle is “Why butter, meat, and cheese belong in a healthy diet.”The title, the subtitle, and the cover of the book are all demeaning, but the forensic demolition of the hypothesis that saturated fat is the cause of cardiovascular disease is impressive. Indeed, the book is deeply disturbing in showing how overenthusiastic scientists, poor science, massive conflicts of interest, and politically driven policy makers can make deeply damaging mistakes. Over 40 years I’ve come to recognise what I might have known from the beginning that science is a human activity with the error, self deception, grandiosity, bias, self interest, cruelty, fraud, and theft that is inherent in all human activities (together with some saintliness), but this book shook me.
Teicholz begins her examination by pointing out that the Inuit, the Masai, and the Samburu people of Uganda all originally ate diets that were 60-80% fat and yet were not obese and did not have hypertension or heart disease.
The hypothesis that saturated fat is the main dietary cause of cardiovascular disease is strongly associated with one man, Ancel Benjamin Keys, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. He was clearly a remarkable man and a great salesman, described by his colleague Henry Blackburn (whom I’ve had the privilege to meet) as “possessing a very quick, bright intelligence” but also “direct to the point of bluntness, and critical to the point of skewering.”
Keys launched his “diet-heart hypothesis” at a meeting in New York in 1952, when the United States was at the peak of its epidemic of heart disease, with his study showing a close correlation between deaths from heart disease and proportion of fat in the diet in men in six countries (Japan, Italy, England and Wales, Australia, Canada, and the United States). Keys studied few men and did not have a reliable way of measuring diets, and in the case of the Japanese and Italians he studied them soon after the second world war, when there were food shortages. Keys could have gathered data from many more countries and people (women as well as men) and used more careful methods, but, suggests Teicholz, he found what he wanted to find. A subsequent study by other researchers of 22 countries found little correlation between death rates from heart disease and fat consumption, and these authors suggested that there could be other causes, including tobacco and sugar consumption.
At a World Health Organization meeting in 1955 Keys’s hypothesis was met with great criticism, but in response he designed the highly influential Seven Countries Study, which was published in 1970 and showed a strong correlation between saturated fat (Keys had moved on from fat to saturated fat) and deaths from heart disease. Keys did not select countries (such as France, Germany, or Switzerland) where the correlation did not seem so neat, and in Crete and Corfu he studied only nine men. Critics pointed out that although there was a correlation between countries, there was no correlation within countries and nor was there a correlation with total mortality. Furthermore, although the study had 12?770 participants, the food they ate was evaluated in only 3.9%, and some of the studies in Greece were during Lent, when the Greek Orthodox Church proscribes the eating of animal products. A follow-up study by Keys published in 1984 showed that variation in saturated fat consumption could not explain variation in heart disease mortality.
An analysis of the data from the Seven Countries Study in 1999 showed a higher correlation of deaths from heart disease with sugar products and pastries than with animal products. John Yudkin from London had since the late 1950s proposed that sugar might be more important than fat in causing heart disease, but Keys dismissed his hypothesis as a “mountain of nonsense” and a “discredited tune.” Many scientists were sceptical about the saturated fat hypothesis, but as the conviction that the hypothesis was true gripped the leading scientific bodies, policy makers, and the media in the US these critics were steadily silenced, not least through difficulty getting funding to challenge the hypothesis and test other hypotheses.
Tyranny of the Minority
Saturday, January 10th, 2015Theodore Dalrymple discusses the potential tyranny of the minority in France:
The shots in the Paris street that were seen and heard around the world killed Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim policeman going to the defense of Charlie Hebdo: a reminder that by no means all Muslims in France, far from it, are France-hating, Allahu-akbar-shouting fanatics, and that many are well-integrated. I go to a Muslim boulanger in Paris whose French bread and pastries are as good as any in the vicinity; and, if anything, I have a prejudice in favor of patronizing his shop precisely to encourage and reward his successful integration. And he is only one of many cases that I know.
Unfortunately, this is not as reassuring as it sounds, because a handful of fanatics can easily have a much more significant social effect than a large number of peaceful citizens. There is more to fear in one terrorist than to celebrate in 99 well-integrated immigrants. And if only 1 percent of French Muslims were inclined to terrorism, this would still be more than 50,000 people, more than enough to create havoc in a society. The jihadists now have a large pool from which to draw, and there are good reasons to think that more than 1 percent of young Muslims in France are distinctly anti-French. The number of young French jihadists fighting in Syria is estimated to be 1,200, equal to 1 percent in numbers of the French army, and probably not many fewer than the number of Algerian guerrillas fighting during much of the Algerian War of Independence.
Never Allowed out of the Hood
Friday, January 9th, 2015A promising “Black Ivy” football star got shot in a home-invasion robbery — he and his friends were doing the invading — and the Z man blames racial solidarity:
The explanation for this that jumps out to me is the extreme racial solidarity in black America. In white America, keeping the good kids away from the bad kids is the focus of everyone. Even back in the paleolithic when I was coming along adults had no trouble culling the defects from the herd. Somewhere around puberty, the stupid and uncontrollable ended up in “special” classes, away from the rest of us. That is not permitted in black culture.
The result is Terrance gets to hang with Jakobi as an equal, but they are not equals. Jakobi, I’m guessing, is high status in the hood. His ghetto name is what I’m going on here. In the white world, Dakota is not allowed anywhere near Dwayne and that was the case from about the fifth grade. By the time Dakota is at college, Dwayne is long gone. In black America. Terrence is never allowed out of the hood. He has to “keeps it real.” Otherwise, he runs the risk of being a “Tom” or acting white.
Until blacks drop the racial solidarity, this story will be a common one.
(Hat tip to our Slovenian Guest.)
Extremism Thrives on Pusillanimity
Thursday, January 8th, 2015Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.
Is it uncharitable of me to point out that the Nazis were not inexorably defeated by tolerance?