You can’t violate anybody’s civil rights while eating

June 21st, 2020

What happens to America’s big blue cities, Steve Sailer asks, when The Establishment switches sides from the cops to the blacks?

Our elites appear intent on trying that experiment once again, although we have been through a couple of highly relevant historical examples that they ought to recall first.

Because blacks, despite making up only about one-eighth of the population, have accounted for the majority of homicide offenders in recent decades, overall long-term murder rates tend to be driven by the authorities’ attitudes toward African-Americans: indulgent or hardheaded?

Thus, the first Black Lives Matter era (2014–2016) saw the total number of homicides in the U.S. grow a record-setting 23 percent in two years. Moreover, the most spectacular exacerbations of homicide rates happened precisely where BLM won its most famous political victories over the police, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Milwaukee. By this point, Black Lives Matter has gotten more incremental blacks murdered than all the lynchings in American history.

This “Ferguson Effect,” named after the celebrated August 2014 riots, was repeatedly denied by the media, until the evidence became overwhelming, at which point they stopped talking about it.

Voters at the national level didn’t allow the White House to continue to worsen homicide. Murders fell 7 percent from 2016 to 2018 under Trump.

And the earlier period in which the influential sided with blacks over cops, from the end of the Kennedy Era to the end of the Carter Era, saw the murder rate double nationally, destroying many American cities.

Most notoriously, in New York City murders grew sharply in the early 1960s, from 390 in 1959 to 634 in 1965, before exploding under the new liberal Republican mayor John Lindsay, reaching 1,691 in 1972.

Lindsay, a handsome WASP, had sided with blacks against the city’s Irish policemen and Jewish school administrators.

As usual, the cops responded by slowing down on the job: the retreat to the doughnut shop. By one estimate, NYPD cops got down to doing about two hours of policing per eight-hour shift. After all, you can’t violate anybody’s civil rights while eating.

White residents fled many neighborhoods, such as the once-tranquil Bronx (where Ogden Nash had complained in 1930 about the lack of excitement with the couplet “The Bronx?/No, thonks!”), which saw reported burglaries increase by 1,559 percent from 1960 to 1969. In turn, the white population of the Bronx fell nearly 50 percent between the 1970 and 1980 Censuses.

Today, the media portrays those whites who fled as the Bad Guys, far worse than the criminals who preyed on them: The whites were guilty of the racial felony of abandoning blacks and Puerto Ricans to the ravages of segregation. In the past, however, media coverage was less hateful and bigoted in part because journalists were often related to former outer-borough whites. But today fewer and fewer dare speak up about what really happened to white residents of the cities after the Civil Rights Era unleashed liberalism on them.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Urbanism | 11 Comments »

Explosive volcanic eruptions triggered by cosmic rays

June 20th, 2020

Japanese researchers suggest that explosive volcanic eruptions are triggered by cosmic rays:

Volcanoes with silica-rich and highly viscous magma tend to produce violent explosive eruptions that result in disasters in local communities and that strongly affect the global environment. We examined the timing of 11 eruptive events that produced silica-rich magma from four volcanoes in Japan (Mt. Fuji, Mt. Usu, Myojin-sho, and Satsuma-Iwo-jima) over the past 306 years (from AD 1700 to AD 2005). Nine of the 11 events occurred during inactive phases of solar magnetic activity (solar minimum), which is well indexed by the group sunspot number. This strong association between eruption timing and the solar minimum is statistically significant to a confidence level of 96.7%. This relationship is not observed for eruptions from volcanoes with relatively silica-poor magma, such as Izu-Ohshima.

It is well known that the cosmic-ray flux is negatively correlated with solar magnetic activity, as the strong magnetic field in the solar wind repels charged particles such as galactic cosmic rays that originate from outside of the solar system. The strong negative correlation observed between the timing of silica-rich eruptions and solar activity can be explained by variations in cosmic-ray flux arising from solar modulation.

Because silica-rich magma has relatively high surface tension (~ 0.1 Nm?1), the homogeneous nucleation rate is so low that such magma exists in a highly supersaturated state without considerable exsolution, even when located relatively close to the surface, within the penetration range of cosmic-ray muons (1–10 GeV). These muons can contribute to nucleation in supersaturated magma, as documented by many authors studying a bubble chamber, via ionization loss. This radiation-induced nucleation can lead to the pre-eruptive exsolution of H2O in the silica-rich magma. We note the possibility that the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption was triggered by the same mechanism: an increase in cosmic-ray flux triggered by Typhoon Yunya, as a decrease in atmospheric pressure results in an increase in cosmic-ray flux.

We also speculate that the snowball Earth event was triggered by successive large-scale volcanic eruptions triggered by increased cosmic-ray flux due to nearby supernova explosions.

(Hat tip to Hans G. Schantz.)

Posted in Science | 11 Comments »

A little bit of pandemic risk was just the thing

June 19th, 2020

Analysts at Munich Re realized that a pandemic could overwhelm life insurance companies — and reinsurance companies, too:

To tackle Munich Re’s exposure, Kraut’s team began attempting to quantify and price this incredibly remote, unpredictable risk. If they managed to do that, they would then need to sell part of that risk—to find someone willing to insure the reinsurer. “No one really had tried to do a transaction at a one-in-500-year return period,” Kraut said. His boss gave it a 50–50 chance of success.

But over the course of two years, the group gradually built up a list of potential buyers. It turned out that there were a few large institutional investors looking to diversify their own portfolios, and a little bit of pandemic risk was just the thing. Munich Re would provide them with annual payments, year after year. In the rare event of a pandemic, they would have to cover Munich Re’s losses. One interested class of investor—if a macabre one—was pension funds, which typically grapple with something called longevity risk: the chance that people will live longer than expected.

“It’s not really good terminology to call it a ‘risk,’ ” Kraut said. “It’s a good thing, technically! But if people live a lot longer than expected, then a pension fund needs to pay out a lot more pensions than they originally calculated.” A deadly pandemic that takes the lives of pensioners, to put it in the most clinical terms, means fewer years of pension payouts, canceling some of the longevity risk. Should no pandemic arise, they would pocket payments from Munich Re.

By 2013, Kraut and his team had put together enough investors—starting with a large Australian pension fund—to take some of the pandemic problem off of Munich Re’s books. But he soon encountered an unexpected hitch: The mechanisms written to trigger the deal relied on a series of “pandemic phases” monitored by the World Health Organization. (Phase 1: Virus is circulating in animals. Phase 2: Reports of human infection. Phase 3: Human-to-human transmission. And so on up to Phase 6: Sustained outbreaks in multiple regions.) Sometime in 2013, however, the WHO abandoned this system for a less specific four phases. Kraut suddenly needed some other organization to delineate the stages of epidemics reliably enough to write into an insurance policy. And he needed someone to monitor epidemics closely, to know when they hit agreed upon triggers—illnesses, deaths, spread. “But you can’t just hire the WHO,” he said.

In studying up on the world of epidemiology, Kraut happened to have picked up a book called The Viral Storm. It was written by Nathan Wolfe. Part memoir, part prescription, the book laid out a vision for how to counter the threat that novel viruses represent to humans. Kraut looked up Wolfe and saw that he’d formed a company.

[...]

Kraut, however, had an even more ambitious idea in mind. What if, instead of simply hedging its own life insurance business in the case of a pandemic, Munich Re could use the same concept to insure other businesses against them? Business interruption insurance, the policies that protect companies against income losses from disasters like fires or hurricanes, often explicitly excluded disease. (And when it didn’t, insurers could still use the ambiguity to deny claims.) The risk was thought to be too large, too unpredictable to quantify. But Munich Re had already proven it could cover its own life insurance risk in pandemics, and now it had a partner in Metabiota that specialized in seemingly unpredictable outbreaks. What if they could create and sell a business interruption insurance policy that covered epidemics, starting with acutely vulnerable industries like travel and hospitality? They could then pass on the payout risk from those policies to the same types of investors who had bought their life risk.

[...]

Where Munich Re’s epidemic solutions division had been struggling to get traction with potential customers, now, in early January, buyers were banging at the door. “That’s just the nature of human psychology,” he said. “Whenever a catastrophe arrives, people immediately want insurance for that catastrophe.” The virus was still confined to China and Kraut faced a grim calculation: Should the company write business interruption policies that would cover SARS-CoV-2, outside of Asia? “You clearly have the human tragedy,” he said. “On the other hand you are in charge of the business unit.” But there were too many warning signs—too much risk for Munich Re. It would have been like selling fire insurance for a house already in flames. Kraut made the decision not to sell.

In a sense, Munich Re had dodged a bullet: Had the company succeeded at selling pandemic protection to corporate giants starting 19 months before, it would have collected almost no premiums and now be paying out on every single one. Kraut acknowledged as much, but offered that if insurers never pay out, “then you lose the reason of existence.”

By March, Metabiota had closed its offices in downtown San Francisco, and its employees joined the legions of new remote workers. “It is painful to see loss of livelihoods, insecurity, fear,” Oppenheim said, “when potentially we would have had tools to prevent that.”

Posted in Business, Science | No Comments »

Restraining the suspect on his abdomen is a common tactic in excited delirium syndrome situations

June 18th, 2020

There are six crucial pieces of information that have been largely omitted from discussion on the Chauvin’s conduct:

George Floyd was experiencing cardiopulmonary and psychological distress minutes before he was placed on the ground, let alone had a knee to his neck.

The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) allows the use of neck restraint on suspects who actively resist arrest, and George Floyd actively resisted arrest on two occasions, including immediately prior to neck restraint being used.

The officers were recorded on their body cams assessing George Floyd as suffering from “excited delirium syndrome” (ExDS), a condition which the MPD considers an extreme threat to both the officers and the suspect. A white paper used by the MPD acknowledges that ExDS suspects may die irrespective of force involved. The officers’ response to this situation was in line with MPD guidelines for ExDS.

Restraining the suspect on his or her abdomen (prone restraint) is a common tactic in ExDS situations, and the white paper used by the MPD instructs the officers to control the suspect until paramedics arrive.

Floyd’s autopsy revealed a potentially lethal concoction of drugs — not just a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, but also methamphetamine. Together with his history of drug abuse and two serious heart conditions, Floyd’s condition was exceptionally and unusually fragile.

Chauvin’s neck restraint is unlikely to have exerted a dangerous amount of force to Floyd’s neck. Floyd is shown on video able to lift his head and neck, and a robust study on double-knee restraints showed a median force exertion of approximately approximately 105lbs.

Let’s be clear: the actions of Chauvin and the other officers were absolutely wrong. But they were also in line with MPD rules and procedures for the condition which they determined was George Floyd was suffering from. An act that would normally be considered a clear and heinous abuse of force, such as a knee-to-neck restraint on a suspect suffering from pulmonary distress, can be legitimatized if there are overriding concerns not known to bystanders but known to the officers. In the case of George Floyd, the overriding concern was that he was suffering from ExDS, given a number of relevant facts known to the officers. This was not known to the bystanders, who only saw a man with pulmonary distress pinned down with a knee on his neck. While the officers may still be found guilty of manslaughter, the probability of a guilty verdict for the murder charge is low, and the public should be aware of this well in advance of the verdict.

Posted in Crime | 2 Comments »

A quiet reservoir of economic strength is forming

June 17th, 2020

A quiet reservoir of economic strength is forming among households flush with cash, the Wall Street Journal reports, and it is reviving consumer spending:

The crisis caused by the coronavirus has pushed millions into unemployment and left them straining to get by. But many consumers in the U.S. and Europe who have held on to their jobs or are getting government benefits have seen their bank accounts swell during lockdowns, according to government data, because of restrictions on shopping and big-spending activities such as tourism.

Consumers with means are driving surprising strength in a number of sectors. People are flocking to home-improvement stores and car dealerships. They want to install pools in their backyards and Jacuzzis in their bathrooms. Spending on furniture has jumped. So have sales of fitness and sports equipment.

And with vacations and summer camps canceled and pool memberships on hold, families are looking for other ways to entertain themselves this summer.

Posted in Business, Economics | 2 Comments »

No man-made vehicle has ever presented such an awe-inspiring spectacle

June 16th, 2020

When Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program was considering a nuclear-powered cargo-passenger ship, Mechanix Illustrated suggested something even better, an Atoms-For-Peace dirigible. What could go wrong?

Unlike a ship, the dirigible moves in an aerial ocean that completely envelops our globe. Hence, it can display its wares anywhere on the face of the earth. Seas, mountains and deserts present no barrier. Neither, considering its mission of peaceful education, should national frontiers.

atoms_dirigible_0

A modern dirigible would be unique, the cynosure of all eyes. Unlike the ship, one-third of whose bulk is hidden by the water in which it rides, the dirigible discloses every inch of its dramatic size as it coasts along against the clear backdrop of the sky. The lower it flies, the more majestic it appears, as anyone who saw the Akron, Macon or Hindenburg will testify. No man-made vehicle has ever presented such an awe-inspiring spectacle as a giant airship breaking through a low-hanging cloud or cruising above the rooftops of a darkened city.

atoms_dirigible_1

Its effect upon the peoples of the world would be many times more potent than that of an ordinary-looking, seaborne freighter. The fact that the dirigible, traveling at relatively low speeds and altitudes, a silvery giant by day and dramatically illuminated at night, will be visible to practically everyone en route, makes it the perfect Atoms-For-Peace transport. It can show our flag in every nook and corner of the globe, scattering as it goes messages of good will in every literate dialect.

atoms_dirigible_3

I suppose that part’s true. What did they propose?

Magnesium, titanium and strong, lightweight Fiberglas promise greater ruggedness and durability with less poundage. This improved weight-strength ratio opens new possibilities to the dirigible engineer. For instance, the single, bottom-keel structure, an outgrowth of age-old surface ship design, might be augmented by external side and top “keels,” containing additional passenger accommodations. These extra stiffeners would vastly strengthen the airship longitudinally without too great a weight penalty.

atoms_dirigible_4

In place of the Akron and Macon pickup gear and airplane hangar, a modern helicopter landing pad and internal hangar deck might be installed atop the hull’s center section. Built in the form of a shock-absorbing elevator, the pad could lift the copter clear of the hull for take-off and after landing, lower it to the level of the protected hangar deck for the safe, comfortable unloading of passengers. This is merely a reversal of the earlier airplane setup with the added safety advantage that both copter and airship travel at the same speed. The copter could provide a ferry service en route and at points where it is inadvisable or impractical to land the airship.

atoms_dirigible_5

Another possibility is the development of water landing gear. A seagoing dirigible, embodying a water-tight hull and lower gas bag, was recently publicized in Germany. MI feels, however, that retractable pontoons of inflated rubber would prove lighter and more efficient. They need not be large, as airships can be trimmed so as to be almost weightless. Water, pumped up from the surface — using the hose gear long since perfected — would provide ballast to hold the ship down when anchored.

Due to the horsepower limitations of the early internal-combustion engines, dirigible designers have always had to install multiple power plants, scattered along the length of the ship. This has not proven too good an arrangement. In addition to difficulties in coordination, the propeller slip-streams have added to the skin friction of the hull with a consequent increase in drag. Modern research indicates that some form of dragless stern propulsion would better the airship’s efficiency and speed by as much as 15 per cent.

With this in mind, MI weighed the various power plant possibilities.

The final solution proved to be the easiest to apply and the one that offers the maximum advantages weight wise. This is a midship atomic steam plant using turbines to generate electricity. Comparatively lightweight wiring car ries the juice to the stern of the ship where an electric motor drives a huge, four-bladed, reversible propeller. To assist in landing and take-off maneuvers, ducted fans are mounted in gimbals in the forward and after stabilizers. These enable the skipper to move his ship up, down or at sidewise angles.

The fission plant is of the latest type, consisting of a central reactor contained within the core of a cylindrical heat-exchanger, the whole being enclosed in lightweight, laminated shielding. Its operation is simple. Steam, generated in the exchanger by the heat of fission, is ducted to twin turbine-generator installations set on either side of the reactor. Passing successively through high and low pressure turbines, the used steam is condensed and routed back to the heat exchanger in a closed system. The turbines drive twin generators and the electricity thus produced, passes into storage batteries. While heavier than a single installation, the duplicate turbine generators provide a safety factor, one being always available in the event of mechanical failure or repair work on the other.

This compact arrangement is mounted on a reinforced deck within the hull and may be readily reached from the exhibition hall directly below it. Galleries around the engine room permit visitors to inspect the unique plant without interference or danger to themselves. If the public exhibition is considered sufficiently important, a water shielded “fishbowl” type of reactor might be used. While heavier and less compact, it would provide a more impressive show.

The power plant used in the atomic submarine Nautilus weighed roughly three times as much as the entire Hindenburg. That seems like a stumbling block.

Posted in Technology | 9 Comments »

The flash of a circular mirror is visible to the naked eye for 10 miles for each inch of mirror diameter

June 15th, 2020

In a recent Jocko Podcast on the Boer War, he and Echo wondered aloud about how big a signal mirror would have to be to be seen at 40 miles. Not that big, it turns out:

Most heliographs were variants of the British Army Mance Mark V version (Fig.1). It used a mirror with a small unsilvered spot in the centre. The sender aligned the heliograph to the target by looking at the reflected target in the mirror and moving their head until the target was hidden by the unsilvered spot. Keeping their head still, they then adjusted the aiming rod so its cross wires bisected the target. They then turned up the sighting vane, which covered the cross wires with a diagram of a cross, and aligned the mirror with the tangent and elevation screws so the small shadow that was the reflection of the unsilvered spot hole was on the cross target. This indicated that the sunbeam was pointing at the target. The flashes were produced by a keying mechanism that tilted the mirror up a few degrees at the push of a lever at the back of the instrument. If the sun was in front of the sender, its rays were reflected directly from this mirror to the receiving station. If the sun was behind the sender, the sighting rod was replaced by a second mirror, to capture the sunlight from the main mirror and reflect it to the receiving station. The U. S. Signal Corps heliograph mirror did not tilt. This type produced flashes by a shutter mounted on a second tripod (Fig 4).

Heliograph

The heliograph had some great advantages. It allowed long distance communication without a fixed infrastructure, though it could also be linked to make a fixed network extending for hundreds of miles, as in the fort-to-fort network used for the Geronimo campaign. It was very portable, did not require any power source, and was relatively secure since it was invisible to those not near the axis of operation, and the beam was very narrow, spreading only 50 feet per mile of range. However, anyone in the beam with the correct knowledge could intercept signals without being detected. In the Boer War, where both sides used heliographs, tubes were sometimes used to decrease the dispersion of the beam. In some other circumstances, though, a narrow beam made it difficult to stay aligned with a moving target, as when communicating from shore to a moving ship, so the British issued a dispersing lens to broaden the heliograph beam from its natural diameter of 0.5 degrees to 15 degrees.

The range of a heliograph depends on the opacity of the air and the effective collecting area of the mirrors. Heliograph mirrors ranged from 1.5 inches to 12 inches or more. Stations at higher altitudes benefit from thinner, clearer air, and are required in any event for great ranges, to clear the curvature of the earth. A good approximation for ranges of 20–50 miles is that the flash of a circular mirror is visible to the naked eye for 10 miles for each inch of mirror diameter, and farther with a telescope. The world record distance was established by a detachment of U.S. signal sergeants by the inter-operation of stations on Mount Ellen, Utah, and Mount Uncompahgre, Colorado, 183 miles (295 km) apart on September 17, 1894, with Signal Corps heliographs carrying mirrors only 8 inches square.

Posted in Technology, War | 3 Comments »

Only you can figure out what your stomach can tolerate

June 14th, 2020

As Patrick Wilson points out in his new book The Athlete’s Gut: The Inside Science of Digestion, Nutrition, and Stomach Distress, the path to a happy gut is nuanced and context specific:

One study found that roughly 70 per cent of athletes experience at least one severe side stitch in a given year. Another study found that 40 per cent of marathoners get an uncomfortable urge to defecate during hard runs. “It’s fair to say,” Wilson writes, “that most athletes occasionally experience gut problems during training or competition.”

There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that your muscles demand oxygen-rich blood during exercise, which diverts blood away from the gut. The oxygen-starved digestive organs then struggle to deal with whatever partially digested food remains there.

For that reason, hard exercise is a more potent trigger than easy exercise. Activities with lots of jostling, such as running and horseback riding, increase your risk. Women report more gut problems than men, for reasons that aren’t understood. The bottom line: Most symptoms have more than one contributing factor, which means you’ll need to experiment with several possible countermeasures.

[...]

Is it the lactose that’s messing up your workout? For a few people, yes; for most people, no. Same goes for the gluten, the fructose, the fibre, the too-big or too-small meals, the underdrinking or overdrinking. Only you can figure out what your stomach can tolerate.

But once you figure it out, you can change it. Just like your muscles, your digestive tract adapts to the stresses you put on it. If you carb load, your intestine will develop more transporters to ferry those carbohydrates into your bloodstream more quickly. If you practise drinking on the run, your stomach will adapt to feel less full with a bellyful of liquid.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Heat is now hot

June 13th, 2020

Endure by Alex HutchinsonHeat is now hot, in the world of athletic training:

Maybe the sauna-loving Finns — who, in addition to topping the rankings in this year’s World Happiness Report, have racked up more than 100 Olympic track and field medals — have been onto something all along.

The origins of the current boom in heat research can be traced back to the 2008 Olympics. University of Oregon physiologist Chris Minson was helping marathoner Dathan Ritzenhein prepare for what was expected to be a sweltering summer in Beijing. Heat-acclimation protocols, which usually involve a week or two of sweaty workouts, are a well-established way of triggering adaptations — increased blood-plasma volume, lower core temperature, higher perspiration rate — that help you perform in the heat. “But I had this niggling fear,” Minson recalls. “What if the race wasn’t hot? What if it was cooler?”

No one knew for sure whether being well-adapted to heat might come with trade-offs, like performing worse in cool conditions. So Minson set up a study with 20 cyclists to find out. The results, published in 2010, sparked a frenzy among sports scientists. Ten days of training in 104-degree heat boosted the cyclists’ VO2 max by 5 percent and improved their one-hour time-trial performance by 6 percent — even when the testing room was kept at a brisk 55 degrees. Suddenly, hot rooms and nonbreathable track suits were being hyped as the poor man’s altitude training.

The initial thinking was that, whereas working out in thin air triggers the formation of oxygen-carrying red blood cells, a main benefit of heat training was an increased volume of blood plasma to ferry red blood cells to your muscles. Whether that plasma boost actually translates to improved athletic performance remains contentious. Carsten Lundby, an endurance expert at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark who has studied heat training, is skeptical that simply increasing plasma volume improves performance after just a week or two. However, the resulting dilution of your blood might trigger a natural EPO response to produce new red blood cells, just like altitude training — an idea he’s currently testing with a six-week protocol.

But plasma volume isn’t the only parameter that heat changes. According to Meylan, psychological resilience and altered perception of high temperatures are among the key benefits his players received from heat training. That, in part, is why Canada’s women’s soccer team will likely head to southern Spain or Portugal right before next summer’s World Cup, which will take place in France.

More generally, heat is a shock to the system, generating some of the same cellular responses that exercise and altitude do. For that reason, scientists are now studying its therapeutic benefits, as well as cross-adaptation, the idea that heat training might prepare you for a trip to high elevations, or help you maintain an edge when you return.

A practical example: Last year, three elite steeplechasers visited Minson’s lab three or four times a week to soak in a 105-degree hot tub for roughly 40 minutes, hoping the heat would help sustain the elevated red-blood-cell levels they’d developed during altitude training in Flagstaff, Arizona. Blood tests suggested the approach worked.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 3 Comments »

This was amateur totalitarianism

June 12th, 2020

If you think cultural revolution isn’t bad enough, Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) suggests you read Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. John Derbyshire shares his own review:

The Khmer Rouge, a peasant movement led by utopian leftists educated in postwar Paris, took over the country and began shoveling her population around like wet concrete, with the aim of eliminating forever such bourgeois blights as private property, money, love, education, and religion.

The Khmer Rouge practiced a collective style of leadership, but from 1968 onwards a middle-aged cadre named Saloth Sar emerged as first among equals. In 1970 he changed his name to Pol Pot, for reasons he never explained. It is as Pol Pot that he is known to history; and it is under this name that he is commonly listed with the other ideologically driven gangster-despots — Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim, and Castro — who brought so much destruction and misery to the world in the 20th century.

Like most communist leaders, Pol Pot came from a well-off family. His sister became a concubine of Cambodia’s King Norodom, and was at the king’s bedside when he died. Cambodia was at that time a French colony, and Pol went to Paris for education as a young man, arriving in the city on October 1, 1949 — the precise day on which Mao Tse-tung declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Pol fell in with a group of other young Cambodians, all receptive to the rampant leftism of that time and place. This was the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and his circle, the France in which 25 percent of the electorate regularly voted for the brutishly Stalinist French Communist Party.

Pol seems not to have been an intellectual convert to Marxism. In fact, he seems not to have been very intellectual at all, and probably never read the communist classics. The Cambodia from which these young men came did not at all resemble the industrialized Europe that had brought forth Marx and Lenin. It was a purely agricultural nation in which the major institutions were monarchy and priesthood. The revolution that got these young men’s attention was not the Russian, nor even the Chinese one, but the French. Pol’s revolutionary heroes were not Marx and Lenin, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robespierre.

Returning to Cambodia, Pol and his friends soon fell foul of the deeply unlovely government of the young Prince Sihanouk and were obliged to take to the maquis. This was not difficult to do in Cambodia, which had few roads or railways and tens of thousands of square miles of impenetrable forest. As the terrible great-power game of the 1960s played out in southeast Asia, with Russia, China, the USA and Vietnam all maneuvering for advantage, Sihanouk performed a brilliant balancing act for a while, but fell off the high wire in 1970 when his army staged a coup while he was in Moscow. Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, broke the news to him as they were driving to the airport for the Prince to catch a plane to Beijing.

With Zhou Enlai’s support, Sihanouk threw in his lot with the Khmer Rouge, thereby adding monarchical and patriotic glamor to Pol Pot’s resistance movement, which was already at war with the coup regime headed by Lon Nol. A united-front party and a government-in-exile were formed, known by their French acronyms as, respectively, FUNK and GRUNC. Full-scale civil war broke out, ending with the Khmer Rouge victory of 1975 and the subsequent four-year reign of horror. Pol Pot’s government was ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, followed by a ten-year occupation. Popular support for the Khmer Rouge, even as a patriotic resistance movement, rapidly dwindled to nothing. Pol Pot died of natural causes, in the jungle, in April 1998. Cambodia is now a wrecked beggar-nation under the crude and corrupt but non-totalitarian rule of Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge foot soldier.

What the reader of a Pol Pot biography mainly wants to know is whether the egregious savagery of Cambodian communism had its origins, or some of them, in the personality of the leader. On Philip Short’s account, the answer seems to be that it did not. Pol was in any case never a supreme leader in the classic totalitarian style. The principle of collective leadership was always maintained. Pol seems not to have possessed the spirit of single-minded ruthlessness towards old comrades that characterized those other despots and left them alone at the summit of power. With the exception of the unfortunate So Phim, nobody at the highest levels of the party was purged.

The overriding impression Philip Short gives of Pol, his comrades, and his government, is in fact one of slovenly incompetence. This was the case even under the apparent rigidities of the 1975-79 period of total power. The Vietnamese invasion, for example, could have been avoided by some adroit diplomacy. The well-documented horrors of the forced evacuations, the interrogations, the massacres, were all counter-productive, even by the Khmer Rouge’s own bleak standards. This was amateur totalitarianism.

C-SPAN2′s Book Tv covered the book when it came out years ago:

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year

June 11th, 2020

Chicago Sun-Times reports that 18 people were killed Sunday, May 31, making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab:

From 7 p.m. Friday, May 29, through 11 p.m. Sunday, May 31, 25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire, according to data maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

In a city with an international reputation for crime — where 900 murders per year were common in the early 1990s — it was the most violent weekend in Chicago’s modern history, stretching police resources that were already thin because of protests and looting.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the crime lab. “ … I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

The next highest murder total for a single day was on Aug. 4, 1991, when 13 people were killed in Chicago, according to the crime lab.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a longtime crusader against gun violence who leads St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham, said it was “open season” last weekend in his neighborhood and others on the South and West sides.

“On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing,’” Pfleger said.

“I sat and watched a store looted for over an hour,” he added. “No police came. I got in my car and drove around to some other places getting looted [and] didn’t see police anywhere.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on May 31 alone, Chicago’s 911 emergency center received 65,000 calls for all types of service — 50,000 more than on a usual day.

Jason L. Riley, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes that the media likes to break down cops’ behavior by race, but doesn’t do the same for civilian crime:

None of these deaths or shootings involved police, so there will be no massive protests over them, no tearful commentary on cable news and social media, no white politicians wrapped in Kente cloth taking a knee for photographers.

Sadly, the only thing remarkable about the episode is that it occurred in the middle of a national discussion about policing. The political left, with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media, has convinced many Americans that George Floyd’s death in police custody is an everyday occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what’s typical, law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides, and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. According to the Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago last year, and only three of them involved police.

So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population, and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion’s share of police attention. Defunding the police, or making it easier to prosecute officers, will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that most need protecting.

[...]

In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year. By 2019 that number had fallen to 34.

[...]

A recent New York Times report, for example, tells us that the racial makeup of Minneapolis is 20% black and 60% white, and that police there “used force against black people at a rate at least seven times that of white people during the past five years.” Left out of the story are the rates at which blacks and whites in Minneapolis commit crime in general and violent crime in particular.

Posted in Crime | 2 Comments »

The era of criminalized public drunkenness was over

June 10th, 2020

Drinking in public wasn’t a crime until rather recently:

In 1963, it was unlikely that you would have been arrested for drinking in public — but you could have been arrested for being a “common drunkard.”

Most states and municipalities had laws on the books that made it illegal to be a “common drunkard” or a “vagrant,” terms used to describe those who would be known today as alcoholic and homeless, respectively. The police arrested hundreds of thousands of people every year for violating these so-called vagrancy and public drunkenness laws, which were at the heart of the police’s mission to control urban social disorder. Such laws defined life on Skid Row: Some perennially homeless, alcoholic men spent years of their lives in jail, in 30-day increments, on charges of public drunkenness and vagrancy.

But in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, legal scholars started to criticize how these laws were enforced, using arguments that would be familiar to anyone following the contemporary debate around drug decriminalization. Critics argued that arresting, charging and incarcerating “drunkards” wasted scarce police and court resources; that the laws were enforced more stringently against poor black people than against affluent white people; and that “public drunkenness” was a moral and medical issue better addressed in churches and hospitals than jails and courtrooms.

In short, they called for reform. The Supreme Court heeded that call in 1964, in its landmark decision Robinson v. California. The immediate effect of the decision was to strike down a California statute classifying drug addiction as a crime. But it also rang the death knell for all “status offenses,” vagrancy chief among them.

In a later decision, the Supreme Court chose not to strike down public drunkenness laws as unconstitutional. The court found that such laws prohibited the act of “appearing in public while drunk,” rather than “being an alcoholic.”

But the writing was on the wall. Vaguely defined status offenses like public drunkenness and vagrancy were constitutionally unsound and, in the long run, unenforceable.

Further pressure to overturn public drunkenness laws came from the executive and legislative branches. Two Presidential Commissions on Crime described public drunkenness laws as ineffective deterrents to repeat offenders and a burden on the criminal justice system. They strongly recommended that public drunkenness be decriminalized. And in 1971, Congress passed the Uniform Alcoholism Treatment Act, which called on states to decriminalize public drunkenness and shift their handling of public inebriates to the health system. Thirty-five states adopted it, and most of the others passed similar laws.

By the end of the ‘70s, arrests for public drunkenness had dropped by half nationwide. (They would continue to fall, almost unabated, until the present.) The era of criminalized public drunkenness was over, after 350 years. Doctors and advocates for the rights of the homeless and alcoholics started to breathe easier.

Not everyone was happy, though. Entrenched business interests and well-to-do citizens, and their allies in state and local legislatures, still wanted the police to take undesirable homeless and alcoholic people off the streets. But as public drunkenness and vagrancy were no longer criminal acts, the police had no tools at their disposal.

Enter the ban on public drinking.

[...]

They leave no room for ambiguity or subjectivity. You either are violating the law, or you aren’t.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 3 Comments »

A hot air balloon is almost entirely hot air

June 9th, 2020

A hot air balloon is almost entirely hot air — even by mass:

Component Pounds Mass Fraction
Envelope 250
3.3%
Basket 140
1.9%
Burner 50
0.7%
Fuel Tanks 405
5.4%
Passengers 750
10.0%
Sub Total 1595
21.2%
Heated Air 5922
78.8%
Total 7517
100.0%

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

2,750 years of achievement by the top tier of homo sapiens

June 8th, 2020

Ethan Morse opens his “detailed” review of Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment with this warning:

There are reasons to read this book and not to read this book.

First, the not-reason. From the title, Human Accomplishment details the successes of humans from 800 BCE to 1950 — 2750 years of achievement by the top-tier of homo sapiens. Statistically speaking, the average person will neither contribute nor perform anything absolutely significant to society. (They may contribute some relatively significant, but nothing absolute.) This book serves as a stark reminder of this fact. Some are uncomfortable with this and prefer to live thinking that they have or eventually will have a profound impact on the world, which is perfectly fine. Don’t read this book nor this review. Done.

Now, the more compelling to-reason from another perspective. From the title, Human Accomplishment details the successes of humans from 800 BCE to 1950 — 2750 years of achievement by the top-tier of homo sapiens. Conveniently compiled in a single 668-page book (which includes the main body chapter, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index), Murray objectively (more on the use of this term later) lays out the crowning moments of the human race in science and the arts. No need to go through volumes of text wondering if your favorite author is considered among the best ever (hint: they’re probably not). Instead, consult this book and find out who the best ever are among sciences, philosophy, art, technology, and literature.

Posted in Media, Science | 11 Comments »

The air transport market requires both high specific power and high energy density

June 7th, 2020

Existing lithium batteries have a low energy density, while existing fuel cells have low specific power. The air transport market requires both high specific power and high energy density:

Forecasting that suitable lithium battery technology might be as much as 15 years away, the HyPoint team began focusing its efforts on a fuel cell design specifically targeted at eVTOLs. To keep things lightweight, it would have to be an air-cooled design; liquid-cooled fuel cells, says Ivanenko, work well in the automotive world, but the associated coolant tanks and pumps add parasitic mass that literally isn’t going to fly in the aviation world.

But today’s available air-cooled fuel cells, he says, have limited power capacity and lifespan, and they only work in temperatures between -5 and 30 °C (23 and 86 °F). So the HyPoint team set out to develop something faster and hardier, and came up with what they call the “turbo air-cooled fuel cell.”

“We boost the power of the fuel cell stack by placing it inside an air duct, where pressurized, humidified and thermally stabilized air is circulated by fans,” says Ivanenko. “The compression of air is maintained about 3 bars inside by a compression system, and the air with reduced oxygen content is charged through a control valve, and replaced with fresh compressed air with normal oxygen content.”

The extra oxygen on the cathode side of the fuel cell stack, in conjunction with a new High Temperature Proton Exchange Membrane (HTPEM) technology HyPoint has developed, allows you to force three times as much hydrogen through the fuel cell as a traditional design, tripling its specific power output without adding any parasitic cooling mass that might weigh a VTOL aircraft down.

With the entire system taken into account, the HyPoint system delivers 2,000 watts of power per kilogram of mass. The best of the liquid-cooled fuel cells deliver between 150-800 W/kg, and other air-cooled fuel cells sit at about 800 W/kg.

The energy density of the full system comes in at around 960 Wh/kg, where lithium batteries typically sit at about a third of that figure and other air- and liquid-cooled fuel cell systems come in a little over half – all according to HyPoint’s own figures.

The system has some other huge benefits as well, says Ivanenko; it accepts “dirty” hydrogen that’s only 99 percent pure, which is a fraction of the cost of the 99.999 percent purified hydrogen you need for an LPTEM system. “That’s a huge decrease in a significant operational parameter for a commercial eVTOL operation,” he adds.

It works at more or less any real-world temperature, from -50 to +50 °C (-58 to 122 °F) and beyond. And while it’s still in the lab at this stage, the team projects these fuel cells will last some 20,000 hours without maintenance, where LTPEM systems typically last around 5,000 hours – another very significant factor for a commercial operator.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

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