“I must confess that that crowd was a little scary,” Bart said, referring to Polanski and Tate’s circle. “There was an aura of danger around them… there was an instinctive feeling that everyone was pushing it and things were getting out of control. My wife and I still talk about it,” he said. “Anybody who underestimates the impact of the event is full of shit.”
This was my first taste of the “live freaky, die freaky” view: the idea that Polanski’s circle, with its bacchanalian parties and flexible morals, had brought about their own murders.
[…]
I mentioned the rash of rejections to Peter Bart. His observation stayed with me, especially as the months wore on and I began to see that Manson might have been more plugged into Hollywood than anyone cared to admit. “Just the fact that they’re all saying no,” he said, “is fascinating.”
[…]
I pulled a book from my bag: Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, a history of L.A.’ s music industry. I’d been reading it for research — what with all the rejections I’d gotten, I had a little more free time on my hands than I’d expected — and I wanted Bugliosi to look at a passage I’d highlighted. Hoskyns alleged that a few S&M movies had been filmed at the Tate house, and that a drug dealer had once been tied up and flogged against his will at a party there. Other sources, including Ed Sanders’s 1971 book The Family, had made the same claims, but Bugliosi had conspicuously omitted the anecdote from Helter Skelter.
Bugliosi seemed to be in the midst of some kind of internal debate. After what felt like a long silence, he told me to turn off my recorder. “This can never be attributed to me,” he began. “Just say it’s from a very reliable source.” (I’ll explain later in the book why I’m treating this as an on-the-record response.)
When he’d joined the case, the detectives told Bugliosi they’d recovered some videotape in the loft at the house on Cielo Drive. According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men. Bugliosi never saw the tape, but he told the detectives, “Put it back where you found it. Roman has suffered enough. There’s nothing to gain. All it’s going to do is hurt her memory and hurt him. They’re both victims.”
It was a tawdry aside, I thought, and anyway, Bugliosi had reported most of this episode before. In Helter Skelter, he wrote that the cops had recovered a tape of Roman and Sharon “making love,” and that it had been discreetly returned to their home. Polanski had found it not long after, on the same visit with Julian Wasser and the psychic. He “climbed the ladder to the loft,” Bugliosi writes, “found the videotape LAPD had returned, and slipped it into his pocket, according to one of the officers who was present.”
The more I thought about it, the more startled I was that the footage was so sordid. It gave yet more weight to the “live freaky, die freaky” motto. And soon after, it occurred to me: if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.” Was it rape? If Bugliosi was telling the truth — and that was a big if, I soon acknowledged — the tape seemed like something that could’ve raised Polanski’s profile as a suspect, and something, therefore, that the police should’ve retained as evidence.
I hoped that I could verify Bugliosi’s story. It was the first piece of new information I’d found so far. In my haste to keep reporting, I failed to see that the revelation came with a slipup on his part, one that would take me more than six years to recognize. He couldn’t have told the detectives to put the tape back in the loft. As a DA, he wasn’t assigned the Tate murder case until November 18, 1969, months after Polanski’s August 17 return visit to the house.
In the early phases of a case, police need to talk to DAs like Bugliosi to authorize search warrants. If he’d learned about the tape from the detectives back in August — if he’d been the one, as he claimed, who ordered its return to the house — then something in the police investigation had necessitated his involvement much earlier than he’d ever acknowledged. Maybe it was something trifling; maybe it was something he felt he’d had to cover up to protect some celebrities’ reputations. The point was, we’d never know, because it was something he’d hidden from his readers. Though I hadn’t caught this mistake, there were more variations to come. When I finally found them, it would change the whole tenor of our relationship.
Days after the murders, as part of an editorial for Life, Wasser had accompanied Roman Polanski on his first return visit to the house on Cielo Drive. One of Wasser’s pictures from that day is a study in grief. Polanski, in a white T-shirt, sits slumped and devastated on the front porch of his home, his eyes carefully averted from the faded word “Pig” written in his wife’s blood on the front door.
“It was too soon,” Wasser told me. He’d shadowed Polanski as he moved through the bloodstained rooms. It wasn’t a home anymore; it was evidence. “There was fingerprint-dusting powder all over the bedroom and the phones, and there was blood in the carpet. It was thick like Jell-O.” And there was so much of it that it hadn’t even dried yet, Wasser said. “You could still smell it… Salty, carnal.” The odor reminded him of a slaughterhouse.
Right away, Wasser regretted the assignment. But Polanski wanted him there, even at his most vulnerable moment. It wasn’t an exercise in vanity, at least not entirely. Hoping to help solve the murders, Polanski had invited along a psychic, Peter Hurkos, whose alleged clairvoyance had made him a minor celebrity. Wasser was enlisted to provide duplicates of his photos to Hurkos, who could glean “psychic vibrations” from them.
Polanski led them to the nursery, which Tate had carefully furnished and decorated in anticipation of the baby. “Roman went over to the bassinet and just started crying. I said, ‘This is such a private moment, I shouldn’t be here,’ and he said, ‘Please, don’t take any more pictures right now.’ It was just the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole career. I’ve never seen anything, in my mind, so intrusive, even though he had invited me… The enormity of it,” Wasser added, “going into this pregnant woman’s bedroom and seeing her intimate area covered with fingerprint powder and realizing what happened there.”
Hurkos, it turned out, didn’t share Wasser’s sense of solemnity. A week before the Life story ran, pirated reproductions of Wasser’s photos appeared on the front page of the tabloid the Hollywood Citizen News. The psychic had sold his copies, vibrations and all.
Former members of the Family have often recounted Manson’s systematic “brainwashing” methods, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), beginning with the seduction of new recruits by “bombarding” them with love, sex, and drugs:
On the witness stand, Paul Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter,
Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”
If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”
Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me?, tells a similar story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents had programmed into us.”
Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars. Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”
Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions — often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks — during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.
Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled, Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.”
[…]
Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine — words came out of her mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”
For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”
[…]
What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case.
[…]
How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies — among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess — into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?
Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.
When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate, O’Neill explains, the details were even more jarring:
Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.
It gets worse.
After they were found guilty, and the trial moved to its death-penalty phase, the three convicted women from the Manson Family — Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten — took the witness stand:
One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse.
[…]
To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love — it freed that person from the confines of their physical being.
Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”
Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know? “Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.”
“‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has happened. She is gone.”
Inside the issue, the “Manson women,” many of them barely teenagers, posed with babies slung over their slender shoulders. They spoke of their love and undying support for “Charlie,” whom they deemed the second coming of Christ and Satan in one.
Life still hosts a gallery of images, including that cover:
The underground press supported Manson:
People thought he was innocent, that his status as a left-leaning communard had been overblown. Tuesday’s Child, an L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists, named Manson their “man of the year.” Some didn’t even care if he was behind the murders. Bernardine Dohrn, of the Weather Underground, put it most outrageously: “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”
An L.A. counterculture paper geared toward occultists?
The trial became a spectacle:
On the very first day of the trial, Manson showed up at the courthouse with an X carved into his forehead, the wound so fresh it was still bleeding. The next day, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten arrived with their own bloody Xs. The women skipped down the courtroom hallways, three abreast, holding hands, singing nursery rhymes that Manson had written. They laughed at the photographers who jostled to get their pictures. During the trial, if Manson took umbrage at something, they took umbrage, too, mimicking his profanity, his expressions, his outbursts.
[…]
Things were no more orderly outside the courtroom, where, at the corner of Temple and Grand, members of the Family gathered each morning to hold sidewalk vigils. Barefoot and belligerent, they sat in wide circles, singing songs in praise of their leader. The women suckled newborns. The men laughed and ran their fingers through their long, unwashed hair. All had followed Manson’s lead and cut Xs into their foreheads, distributing typewritten statements explaining that the self-mutilation symbolized their “X-ing” themselves “out of society.”
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a father he never met, he’d known little but privation and suffering. Few would be naturally inclined to look up to him, and in the most literal sense, not many could: he was only five foot six.
Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours, they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years. He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny.
Eventually, she pursued a traveling salesman in Indianapolis, marrying him in 1943 and trying to cut back on her drinking. Manson, not yet nine, was already a truant, known to steal from local shops. His mother looked for a foster home for him. Instead, he was made a ward of the state and sent to the Gibault School for Boys, a Catholic-run school for delinquents in Terre Haute, Indiana. He ran away. His mother took him back. The separation must have weighed on him, at least to go by his acolyte Watson, who later wrote that Manson had “a special hatred for women as mothers… This probably had something to do with his feelings about his own mother, though he never talked about her… The closest he came to breaking his silence was in some of his song lyrics: ‘I am a mechanical boy, I am my mother’s boy.’”
The “mechanical boy” made short work of the Gibault School. Ten months in, he ran away again, turning to burglary to keep himself afloat. His crimes soon landed him in a correctional facility in Omaha, Nebraska. He ran away from there, too, and started breaking into grocery stores. At age thirteen, Manson was sent to the Indiana Boys School, a tougher institution, where he claimed the other boys raped him. He learned to feign lunacy to keep them at bay. And he kept running away: eighteen times in three years.
In February 1951, when he was sixteen, Manson broke out again, this time with a pair of other boys. They drove a stolen car across state lines—a federal offense. When a roadblock in Utah brought their escapade to an end, Manson was sent to the National Training School for Boys, in Washington, D.C. Thus began a long stint in the federal reformatory system. From there, Manson went to the Natural Bridge Honor Camp, where he was caught raping a boy at knifepoint; to a federal reformatory in Virginia, where he racked up similar offenses; and to a reformatory in Ohio, where a run of good behavior earned him an early release in 1954, though caseworkers had taken frequent note of his antisocial behavior and psychic trauma.
In less than a year’s time he had a wife, and a baby on the way. He took on various service jobs, but he couldn’t give up stealing cars, several of which he drove, again, across state lines. Those crimes, plus his failure to attend a hearing related to one of them, netted him a three-year sentence to Terminal Island, a federal prison in San Pedro, California. By the time he got out, in 1958, his wife had filed for divorce, and he turned to pimping to make a living. The following May, he was arrested yet again, this time for forging a government check for $37.50. This got him another ten-year sentence, but the judge, moved by the plea of a woman who said she was in love with him and wanted to marry him, suspended the sentence right away, letting him go free.
Manson kept pimping, stealing cars, and scheming people out of their money. The FBI was surveilling him, hoping to bust him for violating the Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of prostitutes across state lines. They were never able to bring the charge, but when Manson disappeared to Mexico with another prostitute, he was found in violation of his probation, and the ten-year sentence he’d received earlier was brought into effect. The same judge who’d granted him probation now decreed: “If there ever was a man who demonstrated himself completely unfit for probation, he is it.”
Stuck in prison for the long haul, Manson took up the guitar and dabbled in Scientology. The staff noted his gift for charismatic storytelling and his enduring “personality problems.” He made no secret of his musical aspirations. From behind bars, he observed, with great interest and envy, the meteoric rise of the Beatles.
When he was released at age thirty-two, he’d spent more than half his life in the care of the state. He preferred life in prison, he said, so much so that he asked if he could simply remain inside. “He has no plans for release,” one report said, “as he says he has nowhere to go.”
The next night at the Spahn Ranch, the same group convened, with three additions. There was the eighteen-year-old Steven “Clem” Grogan, a musician and high school dropout, and the nineteen-year-old Leslie “Lu-Lu” Van Houten, a former homecoming princess from the suburbs of Los Angeles who’d played the sousaphone in junior high.
And there was Charles Manson. Their leader.
The seven of them piled into the beat-up Ford on a search for more victims. After nearly three hours of restive driving through Los Angeles and its environs, Manson finally settled on a home in Los Feliz, at 3301 Waverly Drive, next door to a house he’d once stayed in. With no idea of who lived there, he broke into the house by himself, armed with a pistol and a knife. Others maintain that he brought Tex Watson with him. In any case, he spotted Leno LaBianca, forty-four, a grocery store owner, asleep on the couch, a newspaper over his face. Leno’s wife, Rosemary, thirty-eight, was in the bedroom. Rosemary was paranoid that people had been breaking in and moving their furniture around lately — and, like the whole city, she was spooked by the Tate murders the previous night. Even so, Manson was apparently able to walk right in through an unlocked side door, and he tied up the couple by himself. Then he rejoined his acolytes at the bottom of the long driveway, where they were waiting in the car.
Manson chose Watson and Krenwinkel, again, as his executioners. This time he added Van Houten to the mix. She’d never so much as struck another person before that night. He told the three of them to go inside and kill everyone. They had only buck knives.
They burst into the house, separated the couple, and stabbed Leno twenty-six times; they cut the word “War” into his stomach and impaled a carving fork beside it, its handle jutting out of his belly. They left a steak knife protruding from his throat. Rosemary suffered forty-one stab wounds, many inflicted after she’d died. Before they left, the killers scrawled “Healter [sic] Skelter” in blood on the refrigerator — misspelling the Beatles song “Helter Skelter.” On the walls, they smeared “Rise” and “Death to Pigs” in Leno’s blood.
[…]
But Manson and his cohort weren’t brought to justice for nearly four months.
[…]
As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, two separate teams of LAPD detectives — one assigned to Tate, the other to LaBianca — failed to share information, believing the crimes unconnected.
[…]
Talk about the murders long enough, and inevitably someone will bring up Joan Didion’s famous remark from The White Album: “The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969… The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” There’s the germ of truth in that. But the process wasn’t so abrupt. It began that day, but it wasn’t over, really, until December 1, 1969, when the police announced the crimes had been solved and the nation got its first glimpse of the killers. Here was the final fulfillment of paranoia, the last gasp of sixties idealism.
[…]
[Susan] Atkins had been charged with another, unrelated murder — that of Gary Hinman, an old friend of Manson — and was being held at the Sybil Brand Institute, a jail for women in Los Angeles County, where she bragged to cellmates about her complicity in the Tate murders. Those offhand remarks broke the case open for the LAPD, who began to connect the dots they’d been staring at for nearly four months.
[…]
These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.
They talked like hippies, too, spouting an ethos of free love, eschewing monogamy and marriage in favor of sexual experimentation. They lived in roving communes, caravanning along the Golden Coast in Technicolor — bright buses and clunkers cobbled together from spare parts.
They believed that hallucinogens strengthened the spirit and expanded the mind. They gave birth naturally and raised their children together in rustic simplicity.
In other ways, though, their philosophy was gnostic, verging on theological. Time did not exist, they proclaimed. There was no good, no bad, and no death. All human beings were God and the devil at the same time, and part of one another. In fact, everything in the universe was unified, one with itself. The Family’s moral code, insofar as it existed at all, was riven with contradictions. While it was wrong to kill animals — even the snakes and spiders in their bunkhouses had to be carefully spared — it was fine to kill people, because a human life was inherently valueless. To kill someone was tantamount to “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” as Tex Watson later put it. If anything, death was something to be embraced, because it exposed your soul to the oneness of the universe.
Marc Andreessen recently commented on the popularity of psychedelics in Silicon Valley:
Charles Manson’s cult introduction method was daily dosing of LSD and speed. Today we do that to ourselves with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, MDMA, nitrous and Adderall.
I was never particularly interested in the Manson murders, but enough different people had recommended the book that I gave it a go, and the story is even weirder than I’d imagined.
First, it was an odd time:
Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity.
Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.
This passed me by when I was just listening to it, but reading it I realized I’d never heard of Zager and Evans or their number-one song:
If you go back and revisit the Top 40 from each year, it’s fascinating how many hits have disappeared down the memory hole.
The murderers were an unlikely bunch:
Late that night at the Spahn Movie Ranch, a man and three women got in a beat-up yellow 1959 Ford and headed toward Beverly Hills. A ranch hand heard one of the women say, “We’re going to get some fucking pigs!”
The woman was Susan “Sadie” Atkins, twenty-one, who’d grown up mostly in San Jose. The daughter of two alcoholics, she’d been in her church choir and the glee club, and said that her brother and his friends would often molest her. She had dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco, where she’d worked as a topless dancer and gotten into LSD. “My family kept telling me, ‘You’re going downhill, you’re going downhill, you’re going downhill,’” she would say later. “So I just went downhill. I went all the way down to the bottom.”
Huddled beside her in the back of the car—they’d torn out the seats to accommodate more food from the Dumpster dives they often went on—was Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel. Twenty-one, from Inglewood, Krenwinkel had developed a hormone problem as a kid, leading her to overeat and fear that she was ugly and unwanted. As a teen, she got into drugs and started to drink heavily. One day in 1967, she’d left her car in a parking lot, failed to collect the two paychecks from her job at an insurance company, and disappeared.
In the passenger seat was Linda Kasabian, twenty, from New Hampshire. She’d played basketball in high school, but she dropped out to get married; the union lasted less than six months. Not long after, in Boston, she was arrested in a narcotics bust. By the spring of 1968, she’d remarried, had a kid, and moved to Los Angeles. She sometimes introduced herself as “Yana the witch.”
And at the wheel was Charles “Tex” Watson, twenty-three and six foot three, from east Texas. Watson had been a Boy Scout and the captain of his high school football team; he sometimes helped his dad, who ran a gas station and grocery store. At North Texas State University, he’d joined a fraternity and started getting stoned. Soon he dropped out, moved to California, and got a job as a wig salesman. One day he’d picked up a hitchhiker who turned out to be Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys — a chance occurrence that changed both of their lives forever.
That night in the Ford, all four were dressed in black from head to toe. None of them had a history of violence. They were part of a hippie commune that called itself the Family. Living in isolation at the Spahn Ranch — whose mountainous five hundred acres and film sets had once provided dramatic backdrops for Western-themed movies and TV shows — the Family had assembled a New Age bricolage of environmentalism, anti-establishment politics, free love, and apocalyptic Christianity, rounded out with a vehement rejection of conventional morality. More than anything, they lived according to the whims of their leader, the thirty-four-year-old Charles Milles Manson, who had commanded them to take their trip that night.
They all seemed to have developed drug problems before Manson took them to the next level.
I wouldn’t expect any of them to be any good at violence, except Tex.
Another detail that passed me by while listening was the name of the film Roman Polanski was working on overseas when his wife was murdered:
The four arrived at 10050 Cielo Drive, where the actress Sharon Tate lived with her husband, the filmmaker Roman Polanski. He was away in London at the time, scouting locations for The Day of the Dolphin, a movie in which a dolphin is trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
That is perhaps the most late-60s, early-70s movie imaginable — and it did get made a few years later, directed by Mike Nichols and starring George C. Scott.
The attack is premeditated:
Watson scaled a pole to sever the phone lines to the house. He’d been here before, and he knew where to find them right away. There was an electric gate leading to the driveway, but instead of activating it, the four elected to jump over an embankment and drop onto the main property. All of them were carrying buck knives; Watson also had a .22 Buntline revolver.
I had assumed that the .22 revolver was a small gun, but I looked up what a Buntline revolver was, and it is not small gun:
The Colt Buntline Special was a long-barreled variant of the Colt Single Action Army revolver, which Stuart N. Lake described in his best-selling but largely fictionalized 1931 biography, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. […] Lake described them as extra-long Colt Single Action Army revolvers, with a 12-inch (300 mm)-long barrel, and stated that Buntline presented them to five lawmen in thanks for their help in contributing local color to his western yarns.
In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) carries a Colt Buntline Special.
The murder weapon was apparently missing its trigger guard:
So many details don’t make sense to me:
At the top of the driveway they found Steven Parent, an eighteen-year-old who’d been visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse to sell him a clock radio. He was sitting in his dad’s white Rambler, having already rolled his window down to activate the gate control. Watson approached the driver’s side and pointed the revolver at his face. “Please don’t hurt me, I won’t say anything!” Parent screamed, raising his arm to protect himself. Watson slashed his left hand with the knife, slicing through the strap of his wristwatch. Then he shot Parent four times, in his arm, his left cheek, and twice in the chest. Parent died instantly, his blood beginning to pool in the car.
Those four shots rang out through Benedict Canyon, but no one in the house at 10050 Cielo seemed to hear them.
Visiting the caretaker in the guesthouse, after midnight, to sell him a clock radio?
I’m curious how Tex cocked the hammer on that single-action revolver, with a buck knife in his left hand, because that first victim might have had a chance to get away with survivable injuries if he’d just floored it before taking all four shots.
Even if you’re in a nice neighborhood, you might want to lock all your doors and windows:
Finding no open windows or doors, Watson cut a long horizontal slit in a window screen outside the dining room and gained entry to the house; he went to the front door to let Atkins and Krenwinkel in. In the living room, the three killers came across Wojiciech “Voytek” Frykowski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish émigré and an aspiring filmmaker, asleep on the couch with an American flag draped over it. Frykowski was coming off a ten-day mescaline trip at the time. Having survived the brutal Second World War in Poland, he’d gone on to lead an aimless life in America, and friends thought there was something “brooding and disturbed” about him; he was part of a generation of Poles who’d been put on “a crooked orbit.”
This is where Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood diverges drastically from what happened in our timeline. Hollywood stuntman and tough guy Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), while high as a kite, just handles it:
What really happened does share a few elements:
Now, rubbing his eyes to make out the figures clad in black and standing over him, Frykowski stretched his arms and, apparently mistaking them for friends, asked, “What time is it?”
Watson trained his gun on Frykowski and said, “Be quiet. Don’t move or you’re dead.”
Frykowski stiffened, the gravity of the situation beginning to seize him. “Who are you,” he asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business,” Watson replied, kicking Frykowski in the head.
In a linen closet, Atkins found a towel and used it to bind Frykowski’s hands as best she could. Then, on Watson’s instructions, she cased the house, looking for others. She came to a bedroom, the door ajar, where she saw a woman reclining on a bed, reading: Abigail Folger, twenty-five, the heiress to a coffee fortune. She’d been staying at the house with Frykowski, her boyfriend, since April. Now she glanced up from her book, smiled, and waved at Atkins, who responded in kind and continued down the hall.
If this were fiction, I’d be baffled that the author threw the Folger’s coffee heiress into the story — but it gets weirder:
She peered into a second bedroom, where a man sat on the edge of a bed, talking to a pregnant woman who lay there in lingerie. The man, Jay Sebring, thirty-five, was a hairstylist. His shop in Beverly Hills attracted a wealthy, famous clientele; he’d been the first one to cut hair in a private room, as opposed to a barbershop. He’d served in the navy during the Korean War. An intensely secretive man, he was rumored to allow only five people to keep his phone number.
On the bed with him was his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Tate, then twenty-six and eight months pregnant with her first child. She’d recently filmed her biggest role to date, in The Thirteen Chairs, and her manager had promised she’d be a star someday. Born in Dallas, Tate was the daughter of an army officer, and she grew up in cities scattered across the globe. Her beauty was such that she’d apparently stopped traffic, literally, on her first visit to New York. She’d been a homecoming queen and a prom queen; even at six months old, she’d won a Miss Tiny Tot contest in Texas.
The Thirteen Chairs (French: 12 + 1; Italian: Una su 13) was released posthumously:
You really, really don’t want to find yourself taking orders from deranged criminals:
In their shock and confusion, they offered the intruders money and whatever they wanted, begging them not to hurt anyone. Watson ordered the three who’d come from the bedrooms to lie facedown on their stomachs in front of the fireplace. Tate began to cry; Watson told her to shut up. Taking a long rope, he tied Sebring’s hands behind his back and ran a length around his neck. He looped the rope around Tate’s neck next, and then Folger’s, throwing the final length over a beam in the ceiling.
Sebring struggled to his feet and protested — couldn’t this man see that Tate was pregnant? He tried to move toward Tate, and Watson shot him, puncturing a lung. Sebring crumpled onto the zebra-skin rug by the fireplace. Since they were all tied together, his collapse forced the screaming Tate and Folger to stand on their toes to keep from being strangled. Watson dropped to his knees and began to stab the hairstylist incessantly; standing up again, he kicked Sebring in the head. Then he told Krenwinkel to turn off all the lights.
Tate asked, “What are you going to do with us?”
“You’re all going to die,” Watson said.
Frykowski had managed to free his hands. He lurched toward Atkins, attempting to disarm her, but she forced her knife into his legs, stabbing him constantly as they rolled across the living room floor, a tangle of limbs glinting with steel. He pulled her long hair. His blood was spraying everywhere, and he’d been stabbed more than half a dozen times, but Frykowski staggered to his feet. Atkins had lost her knife, so he made a run for the front door and, with Atkins still pummeling him, got as far as the lawn. Watson halted him with two bullets and then tackled him to the ground, pounding the butt of his gun against the back of his head again and again, with such force that the right grip shattered, and Frykowski’s skull cracked.
I would expect a guy who’d survived the war in Poland to put up a fight. I’m assuming the 10-day mescaline trip left him impaired.
Inside, Tate was sobbing. Then Folger, who’d lifted the noose from her neck, ran down the hall and out of the house through a side door. She was halfway across the front lawn, her nightgown flowing behind her like an apparition, when Krenwinkel caught up to her and brought her knife down, stabbing her twenty-eight times. Watson joined in and Folger went limp, saying, “I give up. I’m already dead. Take me.”
Drenched in blood and their own sweat, the two killers rose to see Frykowski, yet again, on his feet stumbling toward them. Soon they were stabbing him with the same mechanical precision, forcing steel through flesh, bone, and cartilage. The coroner tallied fifty-one stab wounds on the Pole, plus thirteen blows to the head and two bullet wounds.
[…]
Watson came back inside and ordered Atkins to kill her. Tate begged her to spare her life, to spare her unborn child. “I want to have my baby,” she said.
“Woman, I have no mercy for you,” Atkins responded, locking her arm around Tate’s neck from behind. “You’re going to die, and I don’t feel anything about it.” She stabbed her in the stomach. Watson joined in. The pair stabbed her sixteen times until she cried out for her mother and died.
Atkins dipped her fingers into one of Tate’s wounds and tasted her blood. It was “warm, sticky, and nice,” she’d recall later. “To taste death and yet give life,” she said, “wow, what a trick.” She soaked a towel in Tate’s blood and brought it to the front door, where, following Watson’s instruction to “write something that would shock the world,” she scrawled the word “Pig.”
[…]
When Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian returned to the Spahn Ranch early that morning, they went to their beds and slept soundly.
Of all the Consulate’s policies, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the one to smash rural brigandage was among the most popular:
‘The art of policing is in punishing infrequently and severely,’ Napoleon believed, but in his war against the brigands who were terrorizing vast areas of France, he tended to punish both frequently and severely. Brigands could be royalist rebels (especially in western and southern France), groups of deserters or draft-dodgers, outlaws, highwaymen, simple ruffians or a combination of all these. The Ancien Régime, the Committee of Public Safety and the Directory had all fought against endemic lawlessness in the countryside, but the Consulate fought to win with every means at its disposal. Napoleon interned and deported suspected brigands, and used the death penalty against convicted ones, who were often called such unedifying names as ‘The Dragon’, ‘Beat-to-Death’ and ‘The Little Butcher of Christians’, and who raided isolated farmhouses as well as hijacking coaches and robbing travellers.
Although the gendarmerie or paramilitary police had been inaugurated in April 1798 with a force of 10,575 men, Napoleon reorganized it, increased its numbers to 16,500, paid it well and on time, improved its morale and stamped out most of the corruption within its ranks.
Patrols were increased and were mounted on horseback when before they had been on foot; special tribunals and military commissions guillotined suspects on circumstantial evidence without the right to a defence lawyer; and huge mobile columns were sent out which meted out summary justice. In November 1799, some 40 per cent of France was under martial law, but within three years it was safe to travel around France again, and trade could be resumed. Not even his Italian victories brought Napoleon more popularity.
In March 1800 the Consulate replaced more than 3,000 elected judges, public prosecutors and court presidents with its own appointees. Political opinions don’t seem to have been the deciding factor so much as practical expertise, as well as Napoleon’s keenness to sack elderly, corrupt or incompetent lawyers. It took seven months for the system to run smoothly again due to the backlogs, but thereafter the delivery of justice was improved.
In his bid to end some of the more symbolic aspects of the Revolution once he had declared it to be over, Napoleon ordered that the red bonnets that had been put on church steeples and public buildings during the Revolution be taken down. Monsieur and Madame replaced citoyen and citoyenne, Christmas and Easter returned, and finally, on January 1, 1806, the revolutionary calendar was abolished.
Napoleon had always been alive to the power of nomenclature and so he renamed the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV) as the Place de la Concorde, and demolished the giant female statue of Liberty there.
[…]
Other examples of his passion for renaming included rechristening his invention the Cisalpine Republic as the Italian Republic, the Army of England as the Grande Armée (in 1805), and the Place de l’Indivisibilité – the old Place Royale – as the Place des Vosges. Over the Consular period, Napoleon’s written style subtly altered, with revolutionary clichés such as inaltérable and incorruptible being replaced by the more incisive grand, sévère and sage.
Napoleon next went about persuading the émigrés — aristocrats, property-owners, royalists and priests who had fled during the Revolution — to return to France, on the understanding that they must not expect to get their property back. He eventually restored their voting and citizenship rights. In October 1800 he removed 48,000 émigrés’ names from the list of 100,000 proscribed during the Revolution, and in April 1802 all but 1,000 irreconcilable royalists were removed altogether.
[…]
By May 1803, some 90 per cent of all émigrés had returned to France, reversing the huge drain of talent that had so weakened the country.
Of the 281 prefects appointed by Napoleon between 1800 and 1814, as many as 110 (39 per cent) had been Ancien Régime nobles.
[…]
Napoleon instructed General d’Hédouville to deal with the rebels robustly: ‘If you make war, employ severity and activity; it is the only means by which you make it shorter, and consequently less deplorable for humanity.’
[…]
On January 17, 1800, Napoleon closed no fewer than sixty of France’s seventy-three newspapers, saying that he wouldn’t ‘allow the papers to say or do anything contrary to my interests’.
[…]
‘The printing press is an arsenal; it cannot be private property.’
[…]
France had no tradition of press freedom before the Revolution. Freedom of speech was declared to be a universal right in 1789, and the number of officially sanctioned journals ballooned from four to over three hundred, but the government started closing journals as early as 1792, and periodic purging on political grounds had brought the number down to seventy-three by 1799. Freedom of the press didn’t exist in Prussia, Russia or Austria at the time, and even in 1819 the British government passed the notorious Six Acts, which tightened the definition of sedition, and by which three editors were arraigned. That was in peacetime, whereas France in January 1800 was at war with five countries, each of which had vowed to overthrow its government. Objectionable by modern standards, Napoleon’s move was little other than standard practice for his time and circumstances.
[…]
‘My intention is that everything is printed, absolutely everything except obscene material and anything that might disturb the tranquillity of the State. Censorship should pay no attention to anything else.’
[…]
Ten days after announcing the results of the plebiscite in February 1800, the Consulate passed a law (by 71 to 25 in the Tribunate and 217 to 68 in the Legislative Body) placing the administration of all eighty-three departments or regions of France, which had been created in 1790 in an effort to devolve power, under prefects who were appointed by the minister of the interior. An essential element of local democracy established by the Revolution was thus completely abolished at a stroke, and brought about a massive concentration of power into Napoleon’s hands. Each department now had a centrally appointed prefect, with sub-prefects to look after the arrondissements and mayors for communes, who were also centrally appointed if they had more than 5,000 inhabitants in their charge.
[…]
Local self-government, in which after 1790 about one Frenchmen in thirty was a local official of some kind, was thus replaced by one in which initiative and control were vested ultimately in the First Consul.
[…]
As First Consul Napoleon made all public officials salaried servants of the state, ensured they were properly trained, and abolished promotion through corruption and nepotism, replacing it with rewards for talent and merit.
[…]
Boniface de Castellane-Novejean, prefect of the Basses-Pyrénées, summed up the prefect’s task as to ‘make sure that the taxes are paid, that the conscription is enacted, and that law and order is preserved’. In fact he also had to impound horses for the cavalry, billet troops, guard prisoners-of-war, stimulate economic development, deliver political support for the government at plebiscites and elections, fight brigands and represent the views of the department, especially its elites, to the government.
Only in areas in which Napoleon wasn’t interested, such as the relief of the poor and primary education, was much power left with the departments.
Democrats and Republicans can’t agree about how to regulate guns, Zaid Jilani notes, but they have succeeded in ”hardening” schools — putting more law enforcement in schools, implementing measures like metal detectors and reinforced doors, and requiring students in dozens of states to do active shooter drills:
And all of this is being done for a type of shooting that is actually very rare.
[…]
The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.
[…]
But this cycle of being terrorized and reacting to that terror can be self-defeating. A few years ago, I reported on a study showing that mass shootings seem to correlate to news coverage of mass shootings — when a big shooting happens and gets a lot of press coverage, we see a cluster of shootings pop up after that. We may be experiencing mass shootings in clusters the same way we see suicide clusters.
[…]
But most of America’s gun violence comes in two forms: suicides and routine homicides.
[…]
We are accustomed to the kinds of violence that takes place in certain neighborhoods of Chicago. There were 617 homicides in Chicago in 2023, (most of them committed with guns) and that’s a city of just over 2.5 million people. There were about 900 murders in the nation of Japan the same year. Japan has a population of 125 million people.
[…]
But it’s not a coincidence that America’s gun homicide problem is so heavily concentrated in a few places. Maine or Vermont, which have very few gun laws, are some of the safest states in the country.
[…]
From the 1990s through the 2010s, America cut gun murders in half.
How this happened is still debated to this day, but the consensus is that more effective policing played a big role. And this policing happened in an environment where gun restrictions didn’t get all that much tougher. So cracking down on serial violent offenders and more effectively addressing homicides by catching killers to reduce cycles of violence can work. Honor culture is most prevalent in places where people don’t trust the cops. So better policing can also help reduce the cultural factors that drive violence.
Can gun restrictions work? The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference. America’s big killer is the handgun — ask any police department in America. And nobody’s proposing banning that (and it’s not clear our current courts would even allow us to).
But there are some gun reforms we can make on the margins that have been proven to work. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children and increasing the age of purchase can help reduce accidental gun deaths and gun suicides. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers also seems to help, as does reducing the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws.
The personal data of 2.9 billion people — full names, addresses going back 30 years, and Social Security Numbers — was stolen from National Public Data by a group that goes by the name USDoD:
The complaint goes on to explain that the hackers then tried to sell this huge collection of personal data on the dark web to the tune of $3.5 million.
[…]
So how does a firm like National Public Data obtain the personal data of almost 3 billion people? The answer is through scraping which is a technique used by companies to collect data from web sites and other sources online.
What makes the way National Public Data did this more concerning is that the firm scraped personally identifiable information (PII) of billions of people from non-public sources. As a result, many of the people who are now involved in the class action lawsuit did not provide their data to the company willingly.
One scenario that played out over and over again was when a mass of protesters blocked a road or highway. Those “protesters” would occasionally attack people in the cars that were stopped on the roadway. Others used the opportunity to carjack the victims and steal their cars. In one such carjacking attempt, an elderly man was dragged from his car by carjackers and beaten with his own oxygen tank.
[…]
Avoidance is key. Many protests and riots are either predictable or planned in advance. Stay away from the riots if you want to avoid being victimized. When you see masses of people blocking the roadways, STOP. Don’t go any farther. Do whatever necessary to change directions and get out of the area.
[…]
You can’t just run people over if they are in the road. The safest thing to do in a situation like this is to keep moving, bumping people out of the way with your car. Unfortunately, that usually isn’t legal. It’s considered vehicular assault. Even if people are illegally blocking the road, you will likely go to jail if you run them down absent a legitimate threat to your life.
[…]
The situation changes, however, once the rioters attack you or your vehicle. With your vehicle surrounded in a manner that you can’t escape and your attackers trying to burn your car, flip it over, or drag you out, it is reasonable to assume that you will suffer serious injury or death. That’s when you can start striking people with your car.
[…]
Doors locked and seat belt OFF. It should go without saying that your doors should be locked when driving.
[…]
You may not have enough time to do it, but cracking your windows and turning off your ventilation system would also be a good idea when driving in areas where crowds may gather. Windows that are down approximately 1/2” are actually harder to break than windows that are tightly closed. You want to turn off the ventilation system so you don’t get overcome by any smoke or tear gas that is in the air where you are driving. Your seat belt should be off. Seat belts will reduce your ability to draw a firearm. They will also prohibit you from making a speedy escape should your vehicle be set on fire or overturned. In general, it’s safer to stay inside the car in a crowd. If Molotov cocktails hit your car, drive quickly away. The wind will likely extinguish the burning liquid before you are hurt. If the car is disabled, and under fire attack, get out. It’s best to take your chances on foot than be trapped inside and burned alive.
[…]
Beware of other forms of roadblocks. The roadblocks designed to make you stop, may not take the form of people. The rioters will steal cars and then purposely abandon them in the middle of roadways. It causes you to stop and also prevents police/fire vehicles from getting to the scene. It’s a common occurrence around the world. Even more nefarious are homemade caltrops. A bunch of those strewn across the roadway would cause all kinds of havoc.
When Rob Henderson got to Yale, he explains (in Troubled), he helped a female senior with some boxes:
We entered her room, and I set the boxes down. She opened the larger box and pulled out a large case of pills.
The medication rattled as she set it on her desk.
“Nice stash. Anything for sale?” I joked.
“Yeah, the Adderall is.” She didn’t appear to be joking.
I thought back to my first day in high school, and how my neighbor offered to sell me drugs. Now here I was at this fancy college, and this senior is offering to sell drugs, too. Later, I’d observe rampant drug and alcohol use on campus. This was at odds with the widespread belief, which I held at the time, that poverty was the primary reason for substance abuse.
Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates. Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners—the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.
That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.
Admittedly, in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have pointed guns at all of those folks.
In my defense, training doctrines, levels of violent crime, and public scrutiny were very different back in the mid-1990s as compared to our modern age. We were taught to point guns directly at any felony suspect regardless of the level of danger they posed to us. It was just the way things were done. Back in the day, very few cops would have ever considered using a position like “low ready” to confront a potentially armed suspect. We took people down “at gunpoint.” That meant pointing a gun at the suspects’ chests and faces while demanding compliance.
Things have changed.
Most likely due to the fact that most cops now record every criminal arrest on body cameras, police administrators have demanded changes to use of force policies. Cops were pointing guns at too many people without a reasonable cause to do so. Sticking a gun in the face of an unarmed teenage kid in a stolen car looks bad when the bosses review the body cam footage.
The police bosses started cracking down on excessive gun play. Pointing a gun at someone was once considered a “threat” of force generally equivalent to harsh verbal language. At some point during the last decade or so, pointing a gun directly at another human being changed from a low consequence “threat of force” to a serious ”use of force” that was documented and investigated.
While some changes were certainly needed, I fear we might have gone too far.
[…]
Police bosses will argue “pointing a gun at someone meets the elements of the crime of aggravated assault.” That’s correct, in some cases. Putting someone in a painful wrist lock or throwing a person to the ground meets the statutory definitions for assault as well, yet cops do that all the time without issue. Handcuffing someone without their consent meets the statutory definition of “kidnapping” or “unlawful restraint.” Does that mean that cops shouldn’t handcuff people? That’s silly. Society recognizes that cops can legally use force to affect a lawful arrest so long as it is objectively reasonable to do so. I would argue that there are lots of scenarios cops face where it is reasonable to point a gun at someone even if it isn’t (yet) reasonable to shoot that person.
[…]
The thing that many police bosses fail to realize is that sometimes pointing a gun at someone compels compliance when all other tactics don’t work. Cops generally aren’t pointing guns at suspects just for fun. They often point guns as a last resort when all other tactics have failed. When an officer appears competent and points a gun at a suspect, that threat of lethal force often convinces the bad guy to go along with the program. The officer doesn’t have to physically hurt the suspect.
The whole thing includes some illustrative stories.
Jim: T. Beholder: “Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect.” No offense, but literally what the fuck are you talking about?
T. Beholder: Wanweilin says: …and yet we remain human after millions of years. Biological advantage of sentience can be expressed simply as “upgrade from adaptation only via slow hardware evolution to much faster software evolution”. Evolution of memeplexes via mutation and branching off (ethnogenesis) is a replacement for evolution of subspecies via mutation and branching off. Once it hit tool building stage, evolutionary pressures simply had very little effect. Which is why humans remain mostly good...
Jim: That is a technical way of saying it works just as well as the most expensive, high-tech catalysts. That is a specific expression of a general phenomenon.
T. Beholder: Jim says: LLMs now provide (a) and (c) It also provides (b) to some of the Pointy Haired Bosses, if as a mixed blessing. In that the big downside is having much fewer subordinates involved in BS production, but the upside is perfect excuse for a purge and then having much fewer potential backstabbers.
Isegoria: Well, we certainly haven’t ascended to become beings of pure energy.
Wanweilin: …and yet we remain human after millions of years.
Jim: For the avoidance of doubt, that is a jab at “people” vibing the progress of their codebases by lines accreted.
Jim: T. Beholder: “For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants.” The objective functions of that code were and are: (a) something that looks like it works...
VXXC: Strangely enough, when one returns to our common roots of armed raiding combined with presently energy production dominance, and we covered the insurance angle via DFC Chubb, how odd the success when one has a country not a global market… and doesn’t want the blasted ground. I refer to the present matter of the Pirates of Persia and their Boomer resistance allies.
T. Beholder: He is almost certainly wrong on LLM keeping the verbal lawns shapely. For one, let’s remember that more powerful computers did not help to write and optimize a better code, but rather allowed greater inefficiency. Thus lowering standards for software to the levels that would be considered absurd but a few years earlier. The Daily WTF found IIRC embedded Java machines whose only purpose was to perform simple arithmetic operations with string constants. So instead it’s one more way so-called...
Jim: The legitimacy of the American regime is drawn from the Constitution accepted by the Founding Fathers in 1789. Did the Founding Fathers intend to arm Blacks, Mexicans, traffic cops, women, enforcers of divorce “court” orders, SWAT, Israelis, or the institutional progeny of slave patrol against normal white Americans? The Founding Fathers dueled. Do the American Bar Association, National Judicial College et al. have any right to prohibit normal white Americans from privately settling...
Gaikokumaniakku: “Vannevar Bush once said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas the prevalent confusion of decision-making in a democracy was more efficient. He could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.” I used to quote William S. Lind, who used to compare American defense procurement to Soviet defense procurement. Any sufficiently corrupt...
Gaikokumaniakku: Note that obviously non-white wrongdoers are often documented as white in order to throw off official statistics.
Jim: I, an AI enjoyer, have been assured by my fellow AI enjoyers that quantity of lines of code has become a relevant metric at long last. I look forward to computers obeying my every whim. May the imminent godlike superintelligence have mercy on our souls.
Jim: In any case, never listen to a woman purporting to speak in authority on the raising up of boys. The sensitive young white teen was born to go to war. He should be set loose upon Africa, the Middle East, India, and elsewhere with a Toyota Hilux, some automatic weaponry, and a gas and ammunition ration, provided only that consorting with the local fauna be punishable by death.
Jim: The things you know form the threads of your thought.
Isegoria: Give me a minute, David, to Google “Bob Dylan”…
Anomaly UK: Of teenage boys who are incapable of learning by memorization because it is unnatural and they are not academically inclined, how many can name 11 members of their favourite sports team?
David Foster: Phileas Frogg..”David Starkey has been arguing for ages that memorization is a key cognitive skill that is missing from modern education. He’s not wrong”…here& #8217;s an analogy I came up with: A song by Jakob Dylan includes the following lines: Cupid, don’t draw back your bow Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know …note that in order to understand these two simple lines, you’d have to know several things: 1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love 2)And that...
Peter Bart, the longtime editor in chief of Variety, had been close to Polanski, and what he told Tom O’Neill (for what became Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) gave O’Neill some semblance of a lead:
