If it had been a white teenager who was shot, and a 28-year-old black guy who shot him, the black guy would have been arrested.
So assert those demanding the arrest of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin.
And they may be right.
Yet if Trayvon had been shot dead by a black neighborhood watch volunteer, Jesse Jackson would not have been in a pulpit in Sanford, Fla., howling that he had been "murdered and martyred."
Maxine Waters would not be screaming "hate crime."
Rep. Hank Johnson would not be raging that Trayvon had been "executed." And ex-Black Panther Bobby Rush would not have been wearing a hoodie in the well of the House.
Which tells you what this whipped-up hysteria is all about.
It is not about finding the truth about what happened that night in Sanford when Zimmerman followed Trayvon in his SUV, and the two wound up in a fight, with Trayvon dead.
It is about the exacerbation of and the exploitation of racial conflict.
And it is about an irreconcilable conflict of visions about what the real America is in the year 2012.
Zimmerman "profiled" Trayvon, we are told. And perhaps he did.
But why? What did George Zimmerman, self-styled protector of his gated community, see that night from the wheel of his SUV?
He saw a male. And males are 90 percent of prison inmates. He saw a stranger over 6 feet tall. And he saw a black man or youth with a hood over his head.
Why would this raise Zimmerman's antennae?
Perhaps because black males between 16 and 36, though only 2 to 3 percent of the population, are responsible for a third of all our crimes.
In some cities, 40 percent of all black males are in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or have criminal records. This is not a product of white racism but of prosecutions and convictions of criminal acts.
Had Zimmerman seen a black woman or older man in his neighborhood, he likely would never have tensed up or called in.
For all the abuse he has received, Geraldo Rivera had a point.
Whenever cable TV runs hidden-camera footage of a liquor or convenience store being held up and someone behind the counter being shot, the perp is often a black male wearing a hoodie.
Listening to the heated rhetoric coming from demonstrations around the country, from the Black Caucus and TV talkers -- about how America is a terrifying place for young black males to grow up in because of the constant danger from white vigilantes -- one wonders what country of the mind these people are living in.
The real America is a country where the black crime rate is seven times as high as the white rate. It is a country where white criminals choose black victims in 3 percent of their crimes, but black criminals choose white victims in 45 percent of their crimes.
Black journalists point to the racism manifest even in progressive cities, where cabs deliberately pass them by to pick up white folks down the block.
That this happens is undeniable. But, again, what is behind it?
As Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has written, from January to June 2008 in New York City, 83 percent of all identified gun assailants were black and 15 percent were Hispanics.
Together, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 98 percent of gun assaults.
Translated: If a cabdriver is going to be mugged or murdered in New York City by a fare, 49 times out of 50 his assailant or killer will be black or Hispanic.
Fernando Mateo of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers has told his drivers, "Profile your passengers" for your own protection. "The God's honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these guys are blacks and Hispanics."
Fernando Mateo is himself black and Hispanic.
To much of America's black leadership and its media auxiliaries, what happened in Sanford was, as Jesse put it, that an innocent kid was "shot down in cold blood by a vigilante."
Yet, from police reports, witness statements, and the father and friends of Zimmerman, another picture emerges.
Zimmerman followed Trayvon, confronted him, and was punched in the nose, knocked flat on his back and jumped on, getting his head pounded, when he pulled his gun and fired. That Trayvon's body was found face down, not face up, would tend to support this.
But, to Florida Congresswoman Federica Wilson, "this sweet young boy ... was hunted down like a dog, shot on the street, and his killer is still at large."
Some Sanford police believed Zimmerman; others did not.
But now that it is being investigated by a special prosecutor, the FBI, the Justice Department and a coming grand jury, what is the purpose of this venomous portrayal of George Zimmerman?
As yet convicted of no crime, he is being crucified in the arena of public opinion as a hate-crime monster and murderer.
Is this our idea of justice?
No. But if the purpose here is to turn this into a national black-white face-off, instead of a mutual search for truth and justice, it is succeeding marvelously well.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Vigalante
One vital piece of evidence were segments of Mr. Horn’s 9-1-1 calls which could have possibly incriminated Mr. Horn or shown his innocence. The most scrutinized segment is presented below:
Joe Horn: “I’ve got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?”
The Pasadena emergency operator responded: “Nope. Don’t do that. Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”
Mr. Horn said: “But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain’t going to let them go.”
Mr. Horn then said he would get his shotgun.
The operator said, “No, no.” But Mr. Horn said: “I can’t take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I’m going to shoot.”
The operator told him not to go out with a gun because officers would be arriving.
“O.K.,” Mr. Horn said. “But I have a right to protect myself too, sir,” adding, “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”
The operator said, “You’re going to get yourself shot.” But Mr. Horn replied, “You want to make a bet? I’m going to kill them.”
Moments later he said, “Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.”
Then he said: “Move, you’re dead.”
There were two quick gunshots, then a third.
“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said when he got back on the line with the dispatcher. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”
The 9-1-1 call ended about 80 seconds after the shots were fired, when officers arrived on the scene. [1]
Joe Horn: “I’ve got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?”
The Pasadena emergency operator responded: “Nope. Don’t do that. Ain’t no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”
Mr. Horn said: “But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain’t going to let them go.”
Mr. Horn then said he would get his shotgun.
The operator said, “No, no.” But Mr. Horn said: “I can’t take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I’m going to shoot.”
The operator told him not to go out with a gun because officers would be arriving.
“O.K.,” Mr. Horn said. “But I have a right to protect myself too, sir,” adding, “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”
The operator said, “You’re going to get yourself shot.” But Mr. Horn replied, “You want to make a bet? I’m going to kill them.”
Moments later he said, “Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I’m going.”
Then he said: “Move, you’re dead.”
There were two quick gunshots, then a third.
“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said when he got back on the line with the dispatcher. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”
The 9-1-1 call ended about 80 seconds after the shots were fired, when officers arrived on the scene. [1]
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Juan Williams on the Martin case
The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has sparked national outrage, with civil rights leaders from San Francisco to Baltimore leading protests calling for a new investigation and the arrest of the shooter.
But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?
Where is the march against the drug dealers who prey on young black people? Where is the march against bad schools, with their 50% dropout rate for black teenaged boys? Those failed schools are certainly guilty of creating the shameful 40% unemployment rate for black teens.
Enlarge Image
Associated Press
Rev. Jesse Jackson leads a rally for Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., on March 26.
How about marching against the cable television shows constantly offering minstrel-show images of black youth as rappers and comedians who don't value education, dismiss the importance of marriage, and celebrate killing people, drug money and jailhouse fashion—the pants falling down because the jail guard has taken away the belt, the shoes untied because the warden removed the shoe laces, and accessories such as the drug dealer's pit bull.
Supposedly all of this is just entertainment and intended to co-opt the stereotypes. But it only ends up perpetuating stereotypes in white minds and, worse, having young black people internalize it as an authentic image of a proud black person.
There is no fashion, no thug attitude that should be an invitation to murder. But these are the real murderous forces surrounding the Martin death—and yet they never stir protests.
The race-baiters argue this case deserves special attention because it fits the mold of white-on-black violence that fills the history books. Some have drawn a comparison to the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was killed in 1955 by white racists for whistling at a white woman.
The Martin case is very different from the Emmett Till case, in which a white segregationist Mississippi society approved of the murder of a black child. Black America needs to get out of the rut of replaying racial injustices of the past.
All minority parents fear that children who embrace "gangsta" fashion, tattoos and a thug attitude will be prejudged as criminal.
Recall what Jesse Jackson once said: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. . . . After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating."
That is the unfair weight of being black in America for both the black person who feels the fear and the black teen who is judged as a criminal.
Related Video
New York Post editorial writer Robert George on the Trayvon Martin investigation and leaked story from neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.
Despite stereotypes, the responsibility for the Florida shooting lies with the individual who pulled the trigger. The fact that the man pursued the teen after a 911 operator told him to back off, and the fact that he alone had a gun, calls for him to be arrested and held accountable under law. The Department of Justice is investigating the incident and the governor of Florida has appointed a special prosecutor to review the case.
But on a larger scale, all of this should open a serious national conversation about how our culture made it easier for this type of crime to take place.
As President Obama said last week, "I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident."
While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this one tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America.
The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported.
Almost one half of the nation's murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation's murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.
Less than half of black students graduate from high school. The education system's failure is often a jail sentence or even a death sentence. The Orlando Sentinel has reported that 17-year-old Martin was recently suspended from his high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Office, in the 2006-07 school year, 22% of all black and Hispanic K-12 students were suspended at least once (as compared to 5% of whites).
This year 22% of blacks live below the poverty line and a shocking 72% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. The national unemployment rate for black people increased last month to over 13%, nearly five points above the average for all Americans.
The killing of any child is a tragedy. But where are the protests regarding the larger problems facing black America?
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 28, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Trayvon Martin Tragedies.
But what about all the other young black murder victims? Nationally, nearly half of all murder victims are black. And the overwhelming majority of those black people are killed by other black people. Where is the march for them?
Where is the march against the drug dealers who prey on young black people? Where is the march against bad schools, with their 50% dropout rate for black teenaged boys? Those failed schools are certainly guilty of creating the shameful 40% unemployment rate for black teens.
Enlarge Image
Associated Press
Rev. Jesse Jackson leads a rally for Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., on March 26.
How about marching against the cable television shows constantly offering minstrel-show images of black youth as rappers and comedians who don't value education, dismiss the importance of marriage, and celebrate killing people, drug money and jailhouse fashion—the pants falling down because the jail guard has taken away the belt, the shoes untied because the warden removed the shoe laces, and accessories such as the drug dealer's pit bull.
Supposedly all of this is just entertainment and intended to co-opt the stereotypes. But it only ends up perpetuating stereotypes in white minds and, worse, having young black people internalize it as an authentic image of a proud black person.
There is no fashion, no thug attitude that should be an invitation to murder. But these are the real murderous forces surrounding the Martin death—and yet they never stir protests.
The race-baiters argue this case deserves special attention because it fits the mold of white-on-black violence that fills the history books. Some have drawn a comparison to the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy who was killed in 1955 by white racists for whistling at a white woman.
The Martin case is very different from the Emmett Till case, in which a white segregationist Mississippi society approved of the murder of a black child. Black America needs to get out of the rut of replaying racial injustices of the past.
All minority parents fear that children who embrace "gangsta" fashion, tattoos and a thug attitude will be prejudged as criminal.
Recall what Jesse Jackson once said: "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. . . . After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating."
That is the unfair weight of being black in America for both the black person who feels the fear and the black teen who is judged as a criminal.
Related Video
New York Post editorial writer Robert George on the Trayvon Martin investigation and leaked story from neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.
Despite stereotypes, the responsibility for the Florida shooting lies with the individual who pulled the trigger. The fact that the man pursued the teen after a 911 operator told him to back off, and the fact that he alone had a gun, calls for him to be arrested and held accountable under law. The Department of Justice is investigating the incident and the governor of Florida has appointed a special prosecutor to review the case.
But on a larger scale, all of this should open a serious national conversation about how our culture made it easier for this type of crime to take place.
As President Obama said last week, "I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident."
While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this one tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America.
The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported.
Almost one half of the nation's murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation's murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.
Less than half of black students graduate from high school. The education system's failure is often a jail sentence or even a death sentence. The Orlando Sentinel has reported that 17-year-old Martin was recently suspended from his high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Office, in the 2006-07 school year, 22% of all black and Hispanic K-12 students were suspended at least once (as compared to 5% of whites).
This year 22% of blacks live below the poverty line and a shocking 72% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. The national unemployment rate for black people increased last month to over 13%, nearly five points above the average for all Americans.
The killing of any child is a tragedy. But where are the protests regarding the larger problems facing black America?
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 28, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Trayvon Martin Tragedies.
Black crime
While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this one tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America.
The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported.
Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.
Less than half of black students graduate from high school. The education system’s failure is often a jail sentence or even a death sentence. The Orlando Sentinel has reported that 17-year-old Martin was recently suspended from his high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office, in the 2006-07 school year, 22% of all black and Hispanic K-12 students were suspended at least once (as compared to 5% of whites).
This year 22% of blacks live below the poverty line and a shocking 72% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. The national unemployment rate for black people increased last month to over 13%, nearly five points above the average for all Americans.
A few black intellectuals have explored this theme in my lifetime, but you couldn’t call Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly and other black conservatives “leaders.” You pretty much have to go back to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to find a credible leader who would have offered a forthright response to Juan Williams’ line of questioning, rather than ignoring him and hoping he’ll go away. I wonder what Booker T. Washington, Medgar Evers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other African-American heroes of the past would think of today’s poor imitation of black leadership.
Here, by the way, is Walter Williams’ variation on the same theme.
Any chance one or more of today’s black leaders will submit to the Journal a response to Juan Williams? Will any of them offer an explanation for their high-energy attacks on the (statistically small) problem of white-on-black crime, and silence on the epidemic of black-on-black crime? I’ll be watching, but I won’t be expecting much.
The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported.
Almost one half of the nation’s murder victims that year were black and a majority of them were between the ages of 17 and 29. Black people accounted for 13% of the total U.S. population in 2005. Yet they were the victims of 49% of all the nation’s murders. And 93% of black murder victims were killed by other black people, according to the same report.
Less than half of black students graduate from high school. The education system’s failure is often a jail sentence or even a death sentence. The Orlando Sentinel has reported that 17-year-old Martin was recently suspended from his high school. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office, in the 2006-07 school year, 22% of all black and Hispanic K-12 students were suspended at least once (as compared to 5% of whites).
This year 22% of blacks live below the poverty line and a shocking 72% of black babies are born to unwed mothers. The national unemployment rate for black people increased last month to over 13%, nearly five points above the average for all Americans.
A few black intellectuals have explored this theme in my lifetime, but you couldn’t call Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly and other black conservatives “leaders.” You pretty much have to go back to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to find a credible leader who would have offered a forthright response to Juan Williams’ line of questioning, rather than ignoring him and hoping he’ll go away. I wonder what Booker T. Washington, Medgar Evers, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other African-American heroes of the past would think of today’s poor imitation of black leadership.
Here, by the way, is Walter Williams’ variation on the same theme.
Any chance one or more of today’s black leaders will submit to the Journal a response to Juan Williams? Will any of them offer an explanation for their high-energy attacks on the (statistically small) problem of white-on-black crime, and silence on the epidemic of black-on-black crime? I’ll be watching, but I won’t be expecting much.
Trayvon
0 1
This was a good article, and hits all the points I keep hearing about this case.
Let’s look at some of the so-called “hard evidence” the media, outraged citizens, and the carnival barking so-called legal and law enforcement experts are using to justify arresting George Zimmerman:
The law mandates that George Zimmerman should have been arrested.
Law enforcement has no legal requirement or obligation to make an immediate arrest for anything. There is no mandate. There is no question that Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman admitted it. There is a question as to whether or not a crime—a legal crime not a social or moral crime—was committed.
Mr. Zimmerman called the police 46 times in one year.
This is absolutely meaningless and ludicrous. It is not an indication of premeditated criminal activity. It is not an indication of anything. If he called 365 or 730 times in one year it proves nothing, except the experts are not really experts.
Mr. Zimmerman was not tested for drugs or alcohol. Trayvon Martin was.
Except for DUIs, police cannot test suspects for drugs or alcohol, unless the accused demands or consents to it, or they get a warrant. Trayvon Martin was tested for drugs and alcohol because it is the normal procedure of autopsies to determine the exact cause of death or contributing factors of death. The so-called law enforcement and legal experts who claim Zimmerman should have been tested demonstrate they have no expertise. As stated before, they are carnival barkers.
George Zimmerman is a racist.
There is no proof of that. Being a racist is socially and morally repugnant. It is not illegal.
This was a hate crime.
See above. There is no evidence that a hate crime was committed. No one heard Mr. Zimmerman call Trayvon Martin a racial epithet before, during or after the incident. A—h— is not a racial epithet, no matter how many code word cryptologists come out of the woodwork.
George Zimmerman did not obey the police dispatcher.
Disobeying a police dispatcher is not illegal. It is stupid. Stupidity is not a crime.
George Zimmerman was an overzealous neighborhood watch captain.
So what? It is not an indication of criminal behavior. It does not prove he was hunting people down to kill them.
George Zimmerman had some minor scrapes with the law.
So have vast numbers of other people. Some were even allowed to become police officers, federal agents, and high elected officials.
The federal government has stepped in.
They stepped in because of national publicity and power politics; some congressmen have their shorts in a twist. The Department of Justice and the F.B.I. will take no action unless they have jurisdiction. They will investigate to determine if a federal crime was committed. They also have much more stringent standards for arresting people than local police.
The cell phone call to Trayvon Martin’s (girl) friend.
Nothing in that call indicates a crime was committed or going to be committed. It only shows Martin was fearful of Zimmerman following him.
Here is something the so-called legal experts are not telling you. Arresting George Zimmerman the day of the incident, even on a minor charge of reckless conduct, would have been potentially damaging to future prosecution. Once someone is arrested a clock starts ticking. He must be arraigned or brought before a grand jury within a certain time period. He must be brought to trial by a certain date. If the police and prosecutor’s investigation is not complete in order to charge him with more serious crimes, or it is weak, a judge would let George Zimmerman walk. That could hypothetically happen the first day of a trial. What would all the exploding heads do with their moral indignation then?
Trayvon Martin was killed. George Zimmerman killed him. That is all we legally know, no matter how many lawyers, experts, or professional social justice protesters spout speculation.
This was a good article, and hits all the points I keep hearing about this case.
Let’s look at some of the so-called “hard evidence” the media, outraged citizens, and the carnival barking so-called legal and law enforcement experts are using to justify arresting George Zimmerman:
The law mandates that George Zimmerman should have been arrested.
Law enforcement has no legal requirement or obligation to make an immediate arrest for anything. There is no mandate. There is no question that Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman admitted it. There is a question as to whether or not a crime—a legal crime not a social or moral crime—was committed.
Mr. Zimmerman called the police 46 times in one year.
This is absolutely meaningless and ludicrous. It is not an indication of premeditated criminal activity. It is not an indication of anything. If he called 365 or 730 times in one year it proves nothing, except the experts are not really experts.
Mr. Zimmerman was not tested for drugs or alcohol. Trayvon Martin was.
Except for DUIs, police cannot test suspects for drugs or alcohol, unless the accused demands or consents to it, or they get a warrant. Trayvon Martin was tested for drugs and alcohol because it is the normal procedure of autopsies to determine the exact cause of death or contributing factors of death. The so-called law enforcement and legal experts who claim Zimmerman should have been tested demonstrate they have no expertise. As stated before, they are carnival barkers.
George Zimmerman is a racist.
There is no proof of that. Being a racist is socially and morally repugnant. It is not illegal.
This was a hate crime.
See above. There is no evidence that a hate crime was committed. No one heard Mr. Zimmerman call Trayvon Martin a racial epithet before, during or after the incident. A—h— is not a racial epithet, no matter how many code word cryptologists come out of the woodwork.
George Zimmerman did not obey the police dispatcher.
Disobeying a police dispatcher is not illegal. It is stupid. Stupidity is not a crime.
George Zimmerman was an overzealous neighborhood watch captain.
So what? It is not an indication of criminal behavior. It does not prove he was hunting people down to kill them.
George Zimmerman had some minor scrapes with the law.
So have vast numbers of other people. Some were even allowed to become police officers, federal agents, and high elected officials.
The federal government has stepped in.
They stepped in because of national publicity and power politics; some congressmen have their shorts in a twist. The Department of Justice and the F.B.I. will take no action unless they have jurisdiction. They will investigate to determine if a federal crime was committed. They also have much more stringent standards for arresting people than local police.
The cell phone call to Trayvon Martin’s (girl) friend.
Nothing in that call indicates a crime was committed or going to be committed. It only shows Martin was fearful of Zimmerman following him.
Here is something the so-called legal experts are not telling you. Arresting George Zimmerman the day of the incident, even on a minor charge of reckless conduct, would have been potentially damaging to future prosecution. Once someone is arrested a clock starts ticking. He must be arraigned or brought before a grand jury within a certain time period. He must be brought to trial by a certain date. If the police and prosecutor’s investigation is not complete in order to charge him with more serious crimes, or it is weak, a judge would let George Zimmerman walk. That could hypothetically happen the first day of a trial. What would all the exploding heads do with their moral indignation then?
Trayvon Martin was killed. George Zimmerman killed him. That is all we legally know, no matter how many lawyers, experts, or professional social justice protesters spout speculation.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Econ 101. Rent.
The institutional critique turns our attention to market failures that generate what economists call “rent.” Rent is income that exceeds what would be needed to ensure that a particular asset, such as labor, continues to be deployed in a competitive market. A manager, for instance, is collecting rent when she earns more than she would in a perfectly competitive market (bearing in mind that a perfectly competitive market is an “ideal type” that doesn’t obtain in any existing economy). Because of corruption, bottlenecks in labor supply, or sweetheart deals, the manager is paid in excess of what would be needed to convince her to do the job.
The concept of rent is tailor-made for the OWS argument that power and privilege are built into our markets. Although the market is usually represented as highly competitive, the OWS retort is that such a representation only camouflages the many ways in which the rules are rigged to benefit the already advantaged. This is a simple story about an economy rife with rent.
It’s one matter to argue that opponents of inequality have embraced the rhetoric of rent and quite another to demonstrate that the rhetoric is on the mark. To make that case, I offer two illustrations. The first suggests that the increasing financial benefits of schooling, well appreciated as a main cause of rising inequality, are partly attributable to market failure. The second suggests that excessive executive compensation is rooted in non-competitive practices and that a true market wage would likely reduce inequality. These two examples imply that rent benefits the rank-and-file college-educated worker as well as members of the 1 percent. In laying out both, I will draw heavily on the work of others, especially that of Kim Weeden.
• • •
Education Rent
With all the recent worrying about the travails of the college-educated, it is easy to forget that the payoff of a college education has dramatically increased over the long run, with the sharpest increase occurring in the 1980s. The growing earnings gap between the college-educated and the rest of the labor force is an important source of rising inequality.
But why has this college premium endured, indeed, expanded? To understand the puzzle, let’s imagine that we live in a perfectly competitive economy. In that economy, information about the high returns of a college education would gradually diffuse, workers in pursuit of those returns would invest in college, and the resulting influx of college-educated workers would drive down the premium. The high returns generated by a shortage of educated labor would therefore disappear.
Since 1975, the share of pre-tax income flowing to the top 1 percent has more than doubled.
But they haven’t disappeared. The persistence of high returns suggests that institutionalized bottlenecks are preventing workers from responding as they would in a competitive market. Although other explanations are possible, the bottleneck account is appealing because it is consistent with our understanding of how education is rationed to the select few.
Two types of bottlenecks are especially important. The supply of potential college students is artificially lowered because children born into disadvantaged families are poorly prepared for college and, in any event, haven’t the money to afford it. The demand for college students is kept artificially low because most elite universities, both public and private, ration their available slots. It’s not as if Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley are meeting the rising demand for their degrees by selling some profit-maximizing number of them. If top universities met demand in this way, the outsized benefits of a high-prestige education would disappear.
Is this how a competitive market works? Absolutely not. When, for example, the demand for hybrid cars increased dramatically in the United States, car manufacturers didn’t set up admissions committees charged with evaluating the qualifications of prospective buyers. Instead, they ramped up production to a profit-maximizing level, and the shortage-driven uptick in prices soon corrected itself. We have become so accommodated to high prices for college-educated labor that we don’t appreciate the rationing and market failure that underlie them.
These bottlenecks create inequality by changing the relative size of the college-educated and poorly educated classes. Because bottlenecks generate an artificially small college-educated class, its wages are inflated and its unemployment rate suppressed. Because they generate an artificially bloated class of poorly educated workers, its wages are suppressed and its unemployment rate inflated. This crowding at the bottom has helped build a massive reserve army of unskilled labor evocative of mid-nineteenth century England.
By addressing such market failure with redistribution, we could indeed prop up wages at the bottom, but with all the angst, opposition, and political drama that redistributive programs evoke in a market-loving society. The better response to market failure is to undertake market repair. If all children, even those born into poor families, had access to adequate primary and secondary school training and then to college education, the high unemployment and poor pay at the bottom would be reduced, as would the low unemployment and excessive pay at the top. We’d have less poverty and inequality if we increased the number of slots in higher education and committed to fair and open competition for them.
Who would win and who would lose from such market repair? The losers would be those who are now artificially protected from competition and are therefore reaping excessive returns. The winners, by contrast, are those currently locked out of higher education who would gain access once markets are repaired.
But these are not the only winners. The other main winners are the businesses that currently pay inflated prices for high-skill employees but will no longer have to do so once higher education is opened up fully to competition. It’s hardly in the interest of business to pay the excessive cost of rationed higher education, nor is it in the wider interest of any country to settle for the lower national income that such restrictions on competition imply. If the emerging economic niche for the United States is product innovation, creative oversight of global product streams, and related forms of high-skill production, then we need a well-educated labor force. We risk choking off that high-road strategy by allowing bottlenecks and high labor costs to persist.
The happy conclusion is that market repair, if taken seriously, can yield a higher national income as well as less inequality. Although it’s conventionally argued that a taste for equality can only be indulged at the cost of reducing total output, this standard tradeoff thesis no longer holds once we realize that existing economies, and perhaps especially the U.S. economy, are burdened with inequality-increasing rent.
This rent will not be shorn off with the usual half-hearted, flavor-of-the-day reform efforts. What’s required is a radical overhaul of our education system. The seemingly uncontroversial objectives of such reform would be to provide the same opportunities to rich and poor children alike and to provide enough higher-education slots to meet the additional demand that equalization would generate. In the education reform industry, most initiatives are marketed on the basis of their effects on school quality, and any possible residual effects on equalizing opportunity are treated as a convenient side benefit. That’s a travesty. We should instead begin and end all discussion of reform by asking whether it secures our commitment to equalizing opportunity. This should be our main goal in just the same way that equalizing civil rights was in the 1960s and 1970s. If we were to commit to this objective, as many other countries have, it would be child’s play to settle on the reforms needed to implement it.
The concept of rent is tailor-made for the OWS argument that power and privilege are built into our markets. Although the market is usually represented as highly competitive, the OWS retort is that such a representation only camouflages the many ways in which the rules are rigged to benefit the already advantaged. This is a simple story about an economy rife with rent.
It’s one matter to argue that opponents of inequality have embraced the rhetoric of rent and quite another to demonstrate that the rhetoric is on the mark. To make that case, I offer two illustrations. The first suggests that the increasing financial benefits of schooling, well appreciated as a main cause of rising inequality, are partly attributable to market failure. The second suggests that excessive executive compensation is rooted in non-competitive practices and that a true market wage would likely reduce inequality. These two examples imply that rent benefits the rank-and-file college-educated worker as well as members of the 1 percent. In laying out both, I will draw heavily on the work of others, especially that of Kim Weeden.
• • •
Education Rent
With all the recent worrying about the travails of the college-educated, it is easy to forget that the payoff of a college education has dramatically increased over the long run, with the sharpest increase occurring in the 1980s. The growing earnings gap between the college-educated and the rest of the labor force is an important source of rising inequality.
But why has this college premium endured, indeed, expanded? To understand the puzzle, let’s imagine that we live in a perfectly competitive economy. In that economy, information about the high returns of a college education would gradually diffuse, workers in pursuit of those returns would invest in college, and the resulting influx of college-educated workers would drive down the premium. The high returns generated by a shortage of educated labor would therefore disappear.
Since 1975, the share of pre-tax income flowing to the top 1 percent has more than doubled.
But they haven’t disappeared. The persistence of high returns suggests that institutionalized bottlenecks are preventing workers from responding as they would in a competitive market. Although other explanations are possible, the bottleneck account is appealing because it is consistent with our understanding of how education is rationed to the select few.
Two types of bottlenecks are especially important. The supply of potential college students is artificially lowered because children born into disadvantaged families are poorly prepared for college and, in any event, haven’t the money to afford it. The demand for college students is kept artificially low because most elite universities, both public and private, ration their available slots. It’s not as if Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley are meeting the rising demand for their degrees by selling some profit-maximizing number of them. If top universities met demand in this way, the outsized benefits of a high-prestige education would disappear.
Is this how a competitive market works? Absolutely not. When, for example, the demand for hybrid cars increased dramatically in the United States, car manufacturers didn’t set up admissions committees charged with evaluating the qualifications of prospective buyers. Instead, they ramped up production to a profit-maximizing level, and the shortage-driven uptick in prices soon corrected itself. We have become so accommodated to high prices for college-educated labor that we don’t appreciate the rationing and market failure that underlie them.
These bottlenecks create inequality by changing the relative size of the college-educated and poorly educated classes. Because bottlenecks generate an artificially small college-educated class, its wages are inflated and its unemployment rate suppressed. Because they generate an artificially bloated class of poorly educated workers, its wages are suppressed and its unemployment rate inflated. This crowding at the bottom has helped build a massive reserve army of unskilled labor evocative of mid-nineteenth century England.
By addressing such market failure with redistribution, we could indeed prop up wages at the bottom, but with all the angst, opposition, and political drama that redistributive programs evoke in a market-loving society. The better response to market failure is to undertake market repair. If all children, even those born into poor families, had access to adequate primary and secondary school training and then to college education, the high unemployment and poor pay at the bottom would be reduced, as would the low unemployment and excessive pay at the top. We’d have less poverty and inequality if we increased the number of slots in higher education and committed to fair and open competition for them.
Who would win and who would lose from such market repair? The losers would be those who are now artificially protected from competition and are therefore reaping excessive returns. The winners, by contrast, are those currently locked out of higher education who would gain access once markets are repaired.
But these are not the only winners. The other main winners are the businesses that currently pay inflated prices for high-skill employees but will no longer have to do so once higher education is opened up fully to competition. It’s hardly in the interest of business to pay the excessive cost of rationed higher education, nor is it in the wider interest of any country to settle for the lower national income that such restrictions on competition imply. If the emerging economic niche for the United States is product innovation, creative oversight of global product streams, and related forms of high-skill production, then we need a well-educated labor force. We risk choking off that high-road strategy by allowing bottlenecks and high labor costs to persist.
The happy conclusion is that market repair, if taken seriously, can yield a higher national income as well as less inequality. Although it’s conventionally argued that a taste for equality can only be indulged at the cost of reducing total output, this standard tradeoff thesis no longer holds once we realize that existing economies, and perhaps especially the U.S. economy, are burdened with inequality-increasing rent.
This rent will not be shorn off with the usual half-hearted, flavor-of-the-day reform efforts. What’s required is a radical overhaul of our education system. The seemingly uncontroversial objectives of such reform would be to provide the same opportunities to rich and poor children alike and to provide enough higher-education slots to meet the additional demand that equalization would generate. In the education reform industry, most initiatives are marketed on the basis of their effects on school quality, and any possible residual effects on equalizing opportunity are treated as a convenient side benefit. That’s a travesty. We should instead begin and end all discussion of reform by asking whether it secures our commitment to equalizing opportunity. This should be our main goal in just the same way that equalizing civil rights was in the 1960s and 1970s. If we were to commit to this objective, as many other countries have, it would be child’s play to settle on the reforms needed to implement it.
Buddhism
Among Western Buddhists, there are college-educated men and women who apparently believe that Guru Rinpoche was actually born from a lotus. This is not the spiritual breakthrough that civilization has been waiting for these many centuries.
The fact is that a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion. In many respects, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious encumbrances, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to develop our scientific understanding of human subjectivity.
It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes—biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is much more to be discovered about the nature of the human mind. In particular, there is much more for us to understand about how the mind can transform itself from a mere reservoir of greed, hatred, and delusion into an instrument of wisdom and compassion. Students of the Buddha are very well placed to further our understanding on this front, but the religion of Buddhism currently stands in their way.
The fact is that a person can embrace the Buddha’s teaching, and even become a genuine Buddhist contemplative (and, one must presume, a buddha) without believing anything on insufficient evidence. The same cannot be said of the teachings for faith-based religion. In many respects, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its religious encumbrances, could be one of our greatest resources as we struggle to develop our scientific understanding of human subjectivity.
It is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our culture—and even our biology itself—remains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will be a thousand years from now—or indeed that we will be, given the lethal absurdity of many of our beliefs—but whatever changes await us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want to understand those processes—biochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and spiritual—that account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings. Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is much more to be discovered about the nature of the human mind. In particular, there is much more for us to understand about how the mind can transform itself from a mere reservoir of greed, hatred, and delusion into an instrument of wisdom and compassion. Students of the Buddha are very well placed to further our understanding on this front, but the religion of Buddhism currently stands in their way.
Share the wealth
We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure? Have you seen Ralph Lauren’s car collection? Yes, it is beautiful. It also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. “So what?” many people will say. “It’s his money. He earned it. He should be able to do whatever he wants with it.” In conservative circles, expressing any doubt on this point has long been synonymous with Marxism.
And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation’s bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?
And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation’s bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?
Automation
Sadly there is truth in Manjo’s conclusion that many jobs will go away for good thanks to automation. As many liberal political activists and the OWS movement point out, productivity and corporate profits are booming, but while they often use this as a starting point to blame outsourcing and bonus-saving layoffs for a lack of jobs, they forget the role of automation. It’s not something we think about often and it’s not easy to make slogans to shame robots into quitting. You can fault an executive for laying off a thousand people to meet quarterly goals or deciding that hiring an American worker is too expensive and going overseas, but the uncomfortable reality is that a lot of companies are about as lean as they’re going to be after years of layoffs and belt-tightening and a number of smaller companies that used to outsource have been slowly weaning themselves off a reliance overseas factories citing increased labor costs, blatant theft of intellectual property aided and abetted by local bureaucrats, quality issues, and customs troubles. So how is productivity still up? Automation. How could you fault a company for increasing productivity not by simply getting rid of a job for questionable reasons, but to an automated tool? Of course the takeaway here is that some jobs will be completely unnecessary.
But just how many jobs will go the way of the dodo? Extending Manjo’s formula, we could even argue that one day not even programmers will be needed, only architects who run code generation tools as in an ironic twist, those who automated away tens of thousands of jobs now automate themselves away. But funny thing is that this approach has been tried before in IT and it did not end well. Model Driven Architecture, or MDA, attempted to create a kind of factory line for software where many steps could be fully automated, including generation of code. But lack of standards, incompatibilities with existing tools, and the many big and little issues in trying to turn an abstract model into a complete piece of software made the end products unmanageable. Why? While computers are great at repetitive tasks and crunching immense amounts of data, which is what they’re made to do, they’re not good at design or nuance. In programming, how does a machine know that object X needed to be encapsulated? Or that it could use less code to get the same behavior meaning less code to test? You need humans who know how to write code and define the rules to step in, roll up their sleeves and work on a creative problem like this. The MDA scholars tried to counter this issue by creating ever more abstract ways of designing logical models but abstraction doesn’t always yield lean, mean, performant applications.
But just how many jobs will go the way of the dodo? Extending Manjo’s formula, we could even argue that one day not even programmers will be needed, only architects who run code generation tools as in an ironic twist, those who automated away tens of thousands of jobs now automate themselves away. But funny thing is that this approach has been tried before in IT and it did not end well. Model Driven Architecture, or MDA, attempted to create a kind of factory line for software where many steps could be fully automated, including generation of code. But lack of standards, incompatibilities with existing tools, and the many big and little issues in trying to turn an abstract model into a complete piece of software made the end products unmanageable. Why? While computers are great at repetitive tasks and crunching immense amounts of data, which is what they’re made to do, they’re not good at design or nuance. In programming, how does a machine know that object X needed to be encapsulated? Or that it could use less code to get the same behavior meaning less code to test? You need humans who know how to write code and define the rules to step in, roll up their sleeves and work on a creative problem like this. The MDA scholars tried to counter this issue by creating ever more abstract ways of designing logical models but abstraction doesn’t always yield lean, mean, performant applications.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Hoodies and the rape defense
I do get what Rivera is saying; clothes are a statement of values that get communicated instantly to the people around him, including crazy people,
That doesn’t mean that baggy pants or a hoodie makes you complicit in your own death when someone shoots, but it does, and you get dead. Don't take that chance.
The same could go for the old blame the rape victim. Reduce your chances of getting raped and don't dress provocatively. Don't get killed, don't get raped, temper your need for freedom with the realization that there are stupid dangerous people out there. Increase your chances of staying alive or unraped. What's so difficult about that!?
you for no other reason, however, and it’s a blame-the-victim impulse to make that argument. But stay safe.
That doesn’t mean that baggy pants or a hoodie makes you complicit in your own death when someone shoots, but it does, and you get dead. Don't take that chance.
The same could go for the old blame the rape victim. Reduce your chances of getting raped and don't dress provocatively. Don't get killed, don't get raped, temper your need for freedom with the realization that there are stupid dangerous people out there. Increase your chances of staying alive or unraped. What's so difficult about that!?
you for no other reason, however, and it’s a blame-the-victim impulse to make that argument. But stay safe.
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
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Dan Ziferstein "My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. ---- ----- Albert Einstein.
19 hours ago · Like
Dan Ziferstein And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense
18 hours ago · Like
Dan Ziferstein But what difference would that make? We enjoy success, satisfaction and admiration completely and totally irrespective of any concept of earned or deserved. It doesn't matter.
a few seconds ago · Like
Like · · Share
Dan Ziferstein "My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. ---- ----- Albert Einstein.
19 hours ago · Like
Dan Ziferstein And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense
18 hours ago · Like
Dan Ziferstein But what difference would that make? We enjoy success, satisfaction and admiration completely and totally irrespective of any concept of earned or deserved. It doesn't matter.
a few seconds ago · Like
Friday, March 23, 2012
Five Easy Pieces
INT. ROADSIDE CAFE - DAY
All four are seated at a booth. The women have
given their orders and a WAITRESS stands above
Bobby, waiting for his:
BOBBY
(looking at his menu)
I'll have an omelette, no potatoes.
Give me tomatoes instead, and wheat
toast instead of rolls.
The waitress indicates something on the menu with
the butt of her pencil.
WAITRESS
No substitutions.
BOBBY
What does that mean? You don't have
any tomatoes?
WAITRESS
(annoyed)
No. We have tomatoes.
BOBBY
But I can't have any. Is that what
you mean?
WAITRESS
Only what's on the menu...
(again, indicating with
her pencil)
A Number Two: Plain omelette. It
comes with cottage fries and rolls.
BOBBY
I know what it comes with, but
that's not what I want.
WAITRESS
I'll come back when you've made up
your mind...
She starts to move away and Bobby detains her.
BOBBY
Wait, I've made up my mind. I want
a plain omelette, forget the
tomatoes, don't put potatoes on the
plate, and give me a side of wheat
toast and a cup of coffee.
WAITRESS
I'm sorry, we don't have side
orders of toast. I can give you an
English muffin or a coffee roll.
BOBBY
What do you mean, you don't have
side orders of toast? You make
sandwiches, don't you?
WAITRESS
Would you like to talk to the
manager?
PALM
Hey, mack!
BOBBY
(to Palm)
Shut up.
(to the waitress)
You have bread, don't you, and a
toaster of some kind?
WAITRESS
I don't make the rules.
BOBBY
Okay, I'll make it as easy for you
as I can. Give me an omelette,
plain, and a chicken salad sandwich
on wheat toast -- no butter, no
mayonnaise, no lettuce -- and a cup
of coffee.
She begins writing down his order, repeating it
sarcastically:
WAITRESS
One Number Two, and a chicken sal
san -- hold the butter, the mayo,
the lettuce -- and a cup of
coffee... Anything else?
BOBBY
Now all you have to do is hold the
chicken, bring me the toast, charge
me for the sandwich, and you
haven't broken any rules.
WAITRESS
(challenging him)
You want me to hold the chicken.
BOBBY
Yeah. I want you to hold it between
your knees.
The other three laugh, and the waitress points to a
"Right to Refuse" sign above the counter.
WAITRESS
You see that sign, sir?!
Bobby glances over at it, then back to her.
WAITRESS (CONT'D)
You'll all have to leave, I'm not
taking any more of your smartness
and your sarcasm!
He smiles politely at her, then:
BOBBY
You see this sign?
He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for
All four are seated at a booth. The women have
given their orders and a WAITRESS stands above
Bobby, waiting for his:
BOBBY
(looking at his menu)
I'll have an omelette, no potatoes.
Give me tomatoes instead, and wheat
toast instead of rolls.
The waitress indicates something on the menu with
the butt of her pencil.
WAITRESS
No substitutions.
BOBBY
What does that mean? You don't have
any tomatoes?
WAITRESS
(annoyed)
No. We have tomatoes.
BOBBY
But I can't have any. Is that what
you mean?
WAITRESS
Only what's on the menu...
(again, indicating with
her pencil)
A Number Two: Plain omelette. It
comes with cottage fries and rolls.
BOBBY
I know what it comes with, but
that's not what I want.
WAITRESS
I'll come back when you've made up
your mind...
She starts to move away and Bobby detains her.
BOBBY
Wait, I've made up my mind. I want
a plain omelette, forget the
tomatoes, don't put potatoes on the
plate, and give me a side of wheat
toast and a cup of coffee.
WAITRESS
I'm sorry, we don't have side
orders of toast. I can give you an
English muffin or a coffee roll.
BOBBY
What do you mean, you don't have
side orders of toast? You make
sandwiches, don't you?
WAITRESS
Would you like to talk to the
manager?
PALM
Hey, mack!
BOBBY
(to Palm)
Shut up.
(to the waitress)
You have bread, don't you, and a
toaster of some kind?
WAITRESS
I don't make the rules.
BOBBY
Okay, I'll make it as easy for you
as I can. Give me an omelette,
plain, and a chicken salad sandwich
on wheat toast -- no butter, no
mayonnaise, no lettuce -- and a cup
of coffee.
She begins writing down his order, repeating it
sarcastically:
WAITRESS
One Number Two, and a chicken sal
san -- hold the butter, the mayo,
the lettuce -- and a cup of
coffee... Anything else?
BOBBY
Now all you have to do is hold the
chicken, bring me the toast, charge
me for the sandwich, and you
haven't broken any rules.
WAITRESS
(challenging him)
You want me to hold the chicken.
BOBBY
Yeah. I want you to hold it between
your knees.
The other three laugh, and the waitress points to a
"Right to Refuse" sign above the counter.
WAITRESS
You see that sign, sir?!
Bobby glances over at it, then back to her.
WAITRESS (CONT'D)
You'll all have to leave, I'm not
taking any more of your smartness
and your sarcasm!
He smiles politely at her, then:
BOBBY
You see this sign?
He reaches his arm out and "clears" the table for
George Carlin on Rights.
“Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but there’s no such thing as rights, okay? They’re imaginary. We made them up! Like the boogeyman, the three little pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea, they’re just imaginary. Cute idea! Cute. But that’s all. Cute…and fictional.”
“The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. It came from God. Anything you can’t describe must have come from God. Personally, folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would’ve given you the right for some food every day, and he would’ve given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would’ve been lookin’ out for ya. God would’ve been lookin’ out for ya. You know that.”
“But let’s say it’s true. Let’s say that God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has 10 stipulations. OK…10 rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week, because we’ve had to amend the bill of rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things, like…SLAVERY. Just fuckin’ slipped his mind. But let’s say…let’s say God gave us the original 10. He gave the British 13. The British Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. The Germans have 29, the Belgians have 25, the Swedish have only 6, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fuckin’ god damn god given deal is that!?…NO RIGHTS AT ALL!? Why would God give different people in different countries a different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn’t sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning . Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words…business as usual in America.”
“They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY privileges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter. Yeah, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn’t give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in it’s own power. That’s the only thing…keeping it, and expanding wherever possible.”
“Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all.”
“The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. It came from God. Anything you can’t describe must have come from God. Personally, folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would’ve given you the right for some food every day, and he would’ve given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would’ve been lookin’ out for ya. God would’ve been lookin’ out for ya. You know that.”
“But let’s say it’s true. Let’s say that God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has 10 stipulations. OK…10 rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week, because we’ve had to amend the bill of rights an additional 17 times. So God forgot a couple of things, like…SLAVERY. Just fuckin’ slipped his mind. But let’s say…let’s say God gave us the original 10. He gave the British 13. The British Bill of Rights has 13 stipulations. The Germans have 29, the Belgians have 25, the Swedish have only 6, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fuckin’ god damn god given deal is that!?…NO RIGHTS AT ALL!? Why would God give different people in different countries a different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn’t sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning . Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words…business as usual in America.”
“They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY privileges; and if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter. Yeah, sooner or later the people in this country are going to realize the government doesn’t give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in it’s own power. That’s the only thing…keeping it, and expanding wherever possible.”
“Personally when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true: I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all.”
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Conservatism
Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”
Dali Lama
At the turn of this century, the Dalai Lama issued the following eighteen rules for living. 12 years on, we thought that 2012 was a great time to revisit these timeless points.
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson
3. Follow the three Rs: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
Follow Wake Up World
Web - http://www.wakeup-world.com/ - Alternative News & Information
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1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson
3. Follow the three Rs: 1. Respect for self 2. Respect for others 3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
Follow Wake Up World
Web - http://www.wakeup-world.com/ - Alternative News & Information
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/joinwakeupworld
Twitter - http://twitter.com/joinwakeupworld
Pat Buchanin
The new mortal sins are not filthy talk or immoral conduct, but racism, sexism, homophobia and nativism. The establishment alone defines these sins and enforces the proscriptions against them, from which there is no appeal, only the obligatory apology, the act of contrition and the solemn commitment never to sin again.
If you still believe homosexuality is unnatural and immoral and gay marriage absurd, you are a homophobe who is to keep his mouth shut.
If you think some ethnic and racial groups have greater natural athletic, academic or artistic talents, don't go there, if you do not wish an early end to your journalistic career.
If you think illegal aliens should be sent home and legal immigration should mirror the ethnic makeup of the nation, you are a xenophobe and a racist.
All of these terms -- racist, sexist, homophobe -- are synonyms for heretic. Any of them can get you hauled before an inquisition.
If you still believe homosexuality is unnatural and immoral and gay marriage absurd, you are a homophobe who is to keep his mouth shut.
If you think some ethnic and racial groups have greater natural athletic, academic or artistic talents, don't go there, if you do not wish an early end to your journalistic career.
If you think illegal aliens should be sent home and legal immigration should mirror the ethnic makeup of the nation, you are a xenophobe and a racist.
All of these terms -- racist, sexist, homophobe -- are synonyms for heretic. Any of them can get you hauled before an inquisition.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Santorum language gaffe
He clearly says, “Well, as I’ve said repeatedly, that is a condition for admission, that people would and could speak both languages. But they would have to speak English. That would be a requirement. It’s a requirement that we put on other states as a condition to entering the union. If you’re going to participate as a state in the United States, then you need to participate in the language people speak in the states.”
He’s flat out wrong, of course. There is no such requirement. Moreover, along with Spanish, English is the official language of Puerto Rico. He was not only wrong on the facts but hit a trip wire on an issue near and dear to Puerto Rico — local control.
He’s flat out wrong, of course. There is no such requirement. Moreover, along with Spanish, English is the official language of Puerto Rico. He was not only wrong on the facts but hit a trip wire on an issue near and dear to Puerto Rico — local control.
Automation
Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Cling to guns and religion.
it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations
Egypt
In prehistoric Egypt before Egypt was Egypt it was known as Khem.
A landing force of UFO’s known as the Emerald Force touched down there.
As legends were handed down from various cultures about this UFO landing, one consistent theme ran through them.
The leader was called The God of 8, from the city of 8, reporting to 8 officers.
This leader said that he built the grand pyramid.
In 1940 a Navy plane flying over the grand pyramid found something strange.
The pyramid did not have 4 sides.
Each side was concave giving it 8 sections.
The leader of 8 had left his mark.
The fact that the great pyramid was found to have 8 sides and not four was reported by archeologist J.P. Lepre
The information can be found also at a web site called catchpenny.org
I have done a full page on my web site about this at http://www.hiddenmeanings.com/Sermon694110609.htm
Bill Donahue
A landing force of UFO’s known as the Emerald Force touched down there.
As legends were handed down from various cultures about this UFO landing, one consistent theme ran through them.
The leader was called The God of 8, from the city of 8, reporting to 8 officers.
This leader said that he built the grand pyramid.
In 1940 a Navy plane flying over the grand pyramid found something strange.
The pyramid did not have 4 sides.
Each side was concave giving it 8 sections.
The leader of 8 had left his mark.
The fact that the great pyramid was found to have 8 sides and not four was reported by archeologist J.P. Lepre
The information can be found also at a web site called catchpenny.org
I have done a full page on my web site about this at http://www.hiddenmeanings.com/Sermon694110609.htm
Bill Donahue
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Kashmir
Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face
And stars to fill my dream
I am a traveller of both time and space
To be where I have been
To sit with elders of a gentle race
This world has seldom seen
And talk of days for which they sit and wait
All will be revealed
And stars to fill my dream
I am a traveller of both time and space
To be where I have been
To sit with elders of a gentle race
This world has seldom seen
And talk of days for which they sit and wait
All will be revealed
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Dershowitz
Davis was convinced after lobbing hard questions at Diallo during a two-hour interview on July 18 that the housekeeper was mostly telling the truth about what happened in Strauss-Kahn’s hotel suite back in May. And after carefully reviewing the evidence from the hotel—especially the time stamps on the hotel security logs and the outcry witness testimony of Diallo’s hotel colleagues—he was certain prosecutors were mistaken in some of their claims that Diallo had changed her story. He saw problems with the investigative work and understood the communication gaps that a shy Guinean immigrant might face when confronted by New York’s grittiest prosecutors in the pressure cooker of a court case with international consequences.
“Many rape victims have credibility issues. But what does it say to future rape victims if a case with this much physical evidence and credible outcry witnesses gets dropped because the victim lied about how she got in the country and other personal issues? Please take another look,” Davis pleaded.
Dershowitz obliged. And he reversed his thinking: the decision on whether Strauss-Kahn was guilty or innocent shouldn’t rest with prosecutors, but with a jury.
Soon after, Dershowitz called me up at Newsweek to describe his change of heart. He was willing to go on the record saying so.
And he wanted to do one better. For weeks he had been looking for a fresh subject for his fall legal-ethics class at Harvard. Now he had a theme: how would you, America’s future lawyers, handle the DSK prosecution?
Before Dershowitz started with his mock-court lesson, though, he needed to set a few predicates for his students, now acting as the jurors. First, Dershowitz would tell the jury they had every right to doubt the accuser. Second, Dershowitz would seek to get entered into evidence a picture of Strauss-Kahn’s naked body, possibly from the police forensic exam after his arrest. If that failed, Dershowitz would have to help jurors picture in their imagination a naked 62-year-old DSK—overweight and slightly hunched, his chest sunken and his skin sagging from the natural progression of age. With the ground rules established, Dershowitz took center stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he started, “we have enough evidence to convict this man beyond a reasonable doubt even if you don’t believe the accuser. In fact, we are prepared to concede that based on statements she’s made in other contexts, you would be within your right to have some suspicions about her credibility.”
The classroom was silent, with students hanging on every word. “What we are asking you to do is to look at all the facts in the case and decide based on all the facts whether she is, in fact, telling the truth about this one instance, mainly that she was sexually assaulted in that hotel room,” Dershowitz bellowed in his usual impassioned courtroom voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have seen the photograph of Dominique Strauss-Kahn naked. Now I just want you to imagine for a second him walking out of the shower, stark naked, and this young woman who you see before you, an attractive young woman, looks at him.”
Finally, there are a few giggles from the jurors’ box. Then another hush.
“Now the theory of the defense is that she looked at him and could not resist her lustful temptations to have seven minutes of oral sex with this man. She simply couldn’t control herself,” he continued, a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“She didn’t do it for pay because if she did, you would have heard in the media or this courtroom the theory that this was a financial transaction. She didn’t do it because she was forced to, if you believe the defense. She did it because she wanted to. And why would she want to? The only reason she would want to, according to the defense, is that she was so lustfully driven by this beautiful 62-year-old, white-haired, overweight man’s presence that she couldn’t resist his chops.”
Dershowitz elicited healthy laughter with that last line, a sign that the student jurors were beginning to see the absurdity of DSK’s defense. Now the legal scholar wanted to remind them of the forensic evidence pointing to a sexual encounter that was forced, unplanned, and uncomfortable from the victim’s point of view.
“She must have been really enticed by this man’s beauty because she was willing to have this sexual encounter in just seven minutes, with her maid’s uniform still on. Remember that’s where we found his DNA, on her uniform top. And it doesn’t appear she arrived planning on such an encounter, either. There’s no nightie or sexy lingerie. In fact, she wore two pantyhose that day, hardly the attire of a woman looking for casual sex in a hotel room.
“And so we don’t forget, let me remind you also where this all happened. He’s rented a $3,000-a-night suite, one worthy of a honeymoon. It’s got a big bed and a glorious living room. But that’s not where this all went down. In fact, this sexual encounter seems to occur in the most inglorious of places. She was prostrate on the floor, her back pressed to a wall in a narrow hallway near a bathroom, right where we found that DNA. And when this encounter ends, how does the woman the defense says couldn’t control her sexual desires show her appreciation? By spitting his semen on the floor and running out of the room.”
The giggles and laughter are now yielding to a slow-boiling anger.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you believe that story you should acquit. But if you don’t believe that—if you say to yourself that there is no plausible basis for that account—then you have to seriously consider the prosecution’s account: mainly that she was forced to submit to his sexual advances.
“When you then look at that and put that in the context of the timeline that morning, the semen stains on her dress, his DNA on her crotch, the sickened, disgusted way she acted in the immediate aftermath when she encountered the outcry witnesses, I’m confident you will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that he sexually assaulted her.
“And you can do so whether or not you believe she is a woman who is generally credible in the other aspects of her life, whether or not this is a woman who has previously lied about other important matters in her life. Yes, she lied to get into the country. But so have many other immigrants seeking a better life. And yes, she told the prosecutors a bogus story about an earlier rape in her homeland because that is what her immigration adviser instructed her to memorize. We’ll concede that,” Dershowitz said.
“But let’s not forget what tales our defendant and his surrogates have tried to get us to believe—even before his current account at this trial. At first, they said it couldn’t have happened because he was out at lunch with his daughter. But that got thrown out as soon as we found his DNA mixed with her saliva in the room and on her dress. Then there were the various theories of a conspiracy, the old ‘honey trap’ scenario. Maybe it was his rival for the French presidency. Or the guy staying next door to him in room 2820. Or the French intelligence agents who he believed bugged and then took his IMF cellphone.
“Now, back in law school we had a name for this. We called it the ‘multiple-choice defense.’ And he’s been playing it. You don’t like this defense? Don’t worry, I got another one for you ... I know you can see right through it. We’re asking you to look at the totality of the evidence and the circumstances in this case and to return a just verdict that reflects the truth of what happened in suite 2806 on May 14, 2011. And I believe if you do, you will vote to convict this man of sexual assault.”
Dershowitz had offered the argument that Vance’s prosecutors failed to devise in weeks of deliberations after they learned of Diallo’s flaws. Now, no one is certain how a jury would rule. But Dershowitz had shown that a credible case—one meeting the burden to overcome reasonable doubt—could at least be presented to a jury.
So where did Vance’s team go wrong with Strauss-Kahn? Dershowitz says Vance “accepted a general rule that you can’t win a sexual-assault case unless you believe the victim, and I believe that is a flawed analysis.” Second, prosecutors failed to realize that had they taken the DSK case to trial, “his defense would have sunk him. Then it would become a case of who is more likely to be lying. And jurors would ultimately see he’s much more likely to be lying even if she is a liar on other counts,” he said.
And with that, the gavel bangs down on his court of lessons.
Excerpted from DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn by John Solomon, out in June 2012 from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
“Many rape victims have credibility issues. But what does it say to future rape victims if a case with this much physical evidence and credible outcry witnesses gets dropped because the victim lied about how she got in the country and other personal issues? Please take another look,” Davis pleaded.
Dershowitz obliged. And he reversed his thinking: the decision on whether Strauss-Kahn was guilty or innocent shouldn’t rest with prosecutors, but with a jury.
Soon after, Dershowitz called me up at Newsweek to describe his change of heart. He was willing to go on the record saying so.
And he wanted to do one better. For weeks he had been looking for a fresh subject for his fall legal-ethics class at Harvard. Now he had a theme: how would you, America’s future lawyers, handle the DSK prosecution?
Before Dershowitz started with his mock-court lesson, though, he needed to set a few predicates for his students, now acting as the jurors. First, Dershowitz would tell the jury they had every right to doubt the accuser. Second, Dershowitz would seek to get entered into evidence a picture of Strauss-Kahn’s naked body, possibly from the police forensic exam after his arrest. If that failed, Dershowitz would have to help jurors picture in their imagination a naked 62-year-old DSK—overweight and slightly hunched, his chest sunken and his skin sagging from the natural progression of age. With the ground rules established, Dershowitz took center stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he started, “we have enough evidence to convict this man beyond a reasonable doubt even if you don’t believe the accuser. In fact, we are prepared to concede that based on statements she’s made in other contexts, you would be within your right to have some suspicions about her credibility.”
The classroom was silent, with students hanging on every word. “What we are asking you to do is to look at all the facts in the case and decide based on all the facts whether she is, in fact, telling the truth about this one instance, mainly that she was sexually assaulted in that hotel room,” Dershowitz bellowed in his usual impassioned courtroom voice. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have seen the photograph of Dominique Strauss-Kahn naked. Now I just want you to imagine for a second him walking out of the shower, stark naked, and this young woman who you see before you, an attractive young woman, looks at him.”
Finally, there are a few giggles from the jurors’ box. Then another hush.
“Now the theory of the defense is that she looked at him and could not resist her lustful temptations to have seven minutes of oral sex with this man. She simply couldn’t control herself,” he continued, a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
“She didn’t do it for pay because if she did, you would have heard in the media or this courtroom the theory that this was a financial transaction. She didn’t do it because she was forced to, if you believe the defense. She did it because she wanted to. And why would she want to? The only reason she would want to, according to the defense, is that she was so lustfully driven by this beautiful 62-year-old, white-haired, overweight man’s presence that she couldn’t resist his chops.”
Dershowitz elicited healthy laughter with that last line, a sign that the student jurors were beginning to see the absurdity of DSK’s defense. Now the legal scholar wanted to remind them of the forensic evidence pointing to a sexual encounter that was forced, unplanned, and uncomfortable from the victim’s point of view.
“She must have been really enticed by this man’s beauty because she was willing to have this sexual encounter in just seven minutes, with her maid’s uniform still on. Remember that’s where we found his DNA, on her uniform top. And it doesn’t appear she arrived planning on such an encounter, either. There’s no nightie or sexy lingerie. In fact, she wore two pantyhose that day, hardly the attire of a woman looking for casual sex in a hotel room.
“And so we don’t forget, let me remind you also where this all happened. He’s rented a $3,000-a-night suite, one worthy of a honeymoon. It’s got a big bed and a glorious living room. But that’s not where this all went down. In fact, this sexual encounter seems to occur in the most inglorious of places. She was prostrate on the floor, her back pressed to a wall in a narrow hallway near a bathroom, right where we found that DNA. And when this encounter ends, how does the woman the defense says couldn’t control her sexual desires show her appreciation? By spitting his semen on the floor and running out of the room.”
The giggles and laughter are now yielding to a slow-boiling anger.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you believe that story you should acquit. But if you don’t believe that—if you say to yourself that there is no plausible basis for that account—then you have to seriously consider the prosecution’s account: mainly that she was forced to submit to his sexual advances.
“When you then look at that and put that in the context of the timeline that morning, the semen stains on her dress, his DNA on her crotch, the sickened, disgusted way she acted in the immediate aftermath when she encountered the outcry witnesses, I’m confident you will conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that he sexually assaulted her.
“And you can do so whether or not you believe she is a woman who is generally credible in the other aspects of her life, whether or not this is a woman who has previously lied about other important matters in her life. Yes, she lied to get into the country. But so have many other immigrants seeking a better life. And yes, she told the prosecutors a bogus story about an earlier rape in her homeland because that is what her immigration adviser instructed her to memorize. We’ll concede that,” Dershowitz said.
“But let’s not forget what tales our defendant and his surrogates have tried to get us to believe—even before his current account at this trial. At first, they said it couldn’t have happened because he was out at lunch with his daughter. But that got thrown out as soon as we found his DNA mixed with her saliva in the room and on her dress. Then there were the various theories of a conspiracy, the old ‘honey trap’ scenario. Maybe it was his rival for the French presidency. Or the guy staying next door to him in room 2820. Or the French intelligence agents who he believed bugged and then took his IMF cellphone.
“Now, back in law school we had a name for this. We called it the ‘multiple-choice defense.’ And he’s been playing it. You don’t like this defense? Don’t worry, I got another one for you ... I know you can see right through it. We’re asking you to look at the totality of the evidence and the circumstances in this case and to return a just verdict that reflects the truth of what happened in suite 2806 on May 14, 2011. And I believe if you do, you will vote to convict this man of sexual assault.”
Dershowitz had offered the argument that Vance’s prosecutors failed to devise in weeks of deliberations after they learned of Diallo’s flaws. Now, no one is certain how a jury would rule. But Dershowitz had shown that a credible case—one meeting the burden to overcome reasonable doubt—could at least be presented to a jury.
So where did Vance’s team go wrong with Strauss-Kahn? Dershowitz says Vance “accepted a general rule that you can’t win a sexual-assault case unless you believe the victim, and I believe that is a flawed analysis.” Second, prosecutors failed to realize that had they taken the DSK case to trial, “his defense would have sunk him. Then it would become a case of who is more likely to be lying. And jurors would ultimately see he’s much more likely to be lying even if she is a liar on other counts,” he said.
And with that, the gavel bangs down on his court of lessons.
Excerpted from DSK: The Scandal That Brought Down Dominique Strauss-Kahn by John Solomon, out in June 2012 from Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
Poverty
"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I'll fix it."
Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month -- for we are not to speak of the poor without unctuous empathy.
Yet, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reports in "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor," Mitt was more right about America's magnanimity than those who bewail her alleged indifference.
First, who are the poor?
To qualify, a family of four in 2010 needed to earn less than $22,314. Some 46 million Americans, 15 percent of the population, qualified.
And in what squalor were America's poor forced to live?
Well, 99 percent had a refrigerator and stove, two-thirds had a plasma TV, a DVD player and access to cable or satellite, 43 percent were on the Internet, half had a video game system like PlayStation or Xbox.
Three-fourths of the poor had a car or truck, nine in 10 a microwave, 80 percent had air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
America's poor enjoy amenities almost no one had in the 1950s, when John K. Galbraith described us as "The Affluent Society."
What about homelessness? Are not millions of America's poor on the street at night, or shivering in shelters or crowded tenements?
Well, actually, no. That is what we might call televised poverty. Of the real poor, fewer than 10 percent live in trailers, 40 percent live in apartments, and half live in townhouses or single-family homes.
Forty-one percent of poor families own their own home.
But are they not packed in like sardines, one on top of another?
Not exactly. The average poor person's home in America has 1,400 square feet -- more living space than do Europeans in 23 of the 25 wealthiest countries on the continent.
Two-thirds of America's poor have two rooms per person, while 94 percent have at least one room per person in the family dwelling.
Only one in 25 poor persons in America uses a homeless shelter, and only briefly, sometime during the year.
What about food? Do not America's poor suffer chronically from malnutrition and hunger?
Not so. The daily consumption of proteins, vitamins and minerals of poor children is roughly the same as that of the middle class, and the poor consume more meat than the upper middle class.
Some 84 percent of America's poor say they always have enough food to eat, while 13 percent say sometimes they do not, and less than 4 percent say they often do not have enough to eat.
In fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent $910 billion on 70 means-tested programs, which comes to an average of $9,000 per year on every lower-income person in the United States.
Among the major programs from which the poor receive benefits are Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food program, Medicaid, public housing, low-income energy assistance and the Social Service Block Grant.
Children of the poor are educated free, K-12, and eligible for preschool Head Start, and Perkins Grants, Pell Grants and student loans for college.
Lyndon Johnson told us this was the way to build a Great Society.
Did we? Federal and state spending on social welfare is approaching $1 trillion a year, $17 trillion since the Great Society was launched, not to mention private charity. But we have witnessed a headlong descent into social decomposition.
Half of all children born to women under 30 in America now are illegitimate. Three in 10 white children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanic babies and 73 percent of black babies. HOLY MOLEY!
Rising right along with the illegitimacy rate is the drug-use rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate.
The family, cinder block of society, is disintegrating, and along with it, society itself. Writes Rector, "The welfare system is more like a 'safety bog' than a safety net."
Heritage scholars William Beach and Patrick Tyrrell put Rector's numbers in perspective:
"Today ... 67.3 million Americans -- from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries -- depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid or other assistance. ... The United States reached another milestone in 2010. For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes."
JESUS H.CHRIST
The 19th century statesman John C. Calhoun warned against allowing government to divide us into "tax-payers and tax-consumers." This, he said, "would give rise to two parties and to violent conflicts and struggles between them, to obtain the control of the government."
We are there, Mr. Calhoun, we are there.
Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month -- for we are not to speak of the poor without unctuous empathy.
Yet, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reports in "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor," Mitt was more right about America's magnanimity than those who bewail her alleged indifference.
First, who are the poor?
To qualify, a family of four in 2010 needed to earn less than $22,314. Some 46 million Americans, 15 percent of the population, qualified.
And in what squalor were America's poor forced to live?
Well, 99 percent had a refrigerator and stove, two-thirds had a plasma TV, a DVD player and access to cable or satellite, 43 percent were on the Internet, half had a video game system like PlayStation or Xbox.
Three-fourths of the poor had a car or truck, nine in 10 a microwave, 80 percent had air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
America's poor enjoy amenities almost no one had in the 1950s, when John K. Galbraith described us as "The Affluent Society."
What about homelessness? Are not millions of America's poor on the street at night, or shivering in shelters or crowded tenements?
Well, actually, no. That is what we might call televised poverty. Of the real poor, fewer than 10 percent live in trailers, 40 percent live in apartments, and half live in townhouses or single-family homes.
Forty-one percent of poor families own their own home.
But are they not packed in like sardines, one on top of another?
Not exactly. The average poor person's home in America has 1,400 square feet -- more living space than do Europeans in 23 of the 25 wealthiest countries on the continent.
Two-thirds of America's poor have two rooms per person, while 94 percent have at least one room per person in the family dwelling.
Only one in 25 poor persons in America uses a homeless shelter, and only briefly, sometime during the year.
What about food? Do not America's poor suffer chronically from malnutrition and hunger?
Not so. The daily consumption of proteins, vitamins and minerals of poor children is roughly the same as that of the middle class, and the poor consume more meat than the upper middle class.
Some 84 percent of America's poor say they always have enough food to eat, while 13 percent say sometimes they do not, and less than 4 percent say they often do not have enough to eat.
In fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent $910 billion on 70 means-tested programs, which comes to an average of $9,000 per year on every lower-income person in the United States.
Among the major programs from which the poor receive benefits are Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food program, Medicaid, public housing, low-income energy assistance and the Social Service Block Grant.
Children of the poor are educated free, K-12, and eligible for preschool Head Start, and Perkins Grants, Pell Grants and student loans for college.
Lyndon Johnson told us this was the way to build a Great Society.
Did we? Federal and state spending on social welfare is approaching $1 trillion a year, $17 trillion since the Great Society was launched, not to mention private charity. But we have witnessed a headlong descent into social decomposition.
Half of all children born to women under 30 in America now are illegitimate. Three in 10 white children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanic babies and 73 percent of black babies. HOLY MOLEY!
Rising right along with the illegitimacy rate is the drug-use rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate.
The family, cinder block of society, is disintegrating, and along with it, society itself. Writes Rector, "The welfare system is more like a 'safety bog' than a safety net."
Heritage scholars William Beach and Patrick Tyrrell put Rector's numbers in perspective:
"Today ... 67.3 million Americans -- from college students to retirees to welfare beneficiaries -- depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid or other assistance. ... The United States reached another milestone in 2010. For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes."
JESUS H.CHRIST
The 19th century statesman John C. Calhoun warned against allowing government to divide us into "tax-payers and tax-consumers." This, he said, "would give rise to two parties and to violent conflicts and struggles between them, to obtain the control of the government."
We are there, Mr. Calhoun, we are there.
Talk Radio
Valerie Geller, an industry insider and author of Beyond Powerful Radio, confirmed the trend. “I have talked with several reps who report that they're having conversations with their clients, who are asking not to be associated with specifically polarizing controversial hosts, particularly if those hosts are ‘mean-spirited.’ While most products and services offered on these shows have strong competitors, and enjoy purchasing the exposure that many of these shows and hosts can offer, they do not wish to be ‘tarred’ with the brush of anger, or endure customer anger, or, worse, product boycotts.”
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Language essay
In this guest post, David Bellos, director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication, demolishes the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. New Yorkers have more words for coffee than Eskimos do for snow, he says.
The number of New Yorkers who can say "good morning" in any of the languages spoken by the Inuit peoples of the Arctic can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But in any small crowd of folk in the city or elsewhere you will surely find someone to tell you, "Eskimo has one hundred words for snow." The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax was demolished many years ago, but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.
People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it's a fair point to make. Languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. "Eskimo language" and the "snowbound world of the Eskimos" are mutually dependent things. That's a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.
To the dismay of many a lost tourist, that can't be translated into tournez a gauche or a droite unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing. Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from "left" to "right" or the other way around but starting from east, wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.
But languages can be even weirder than that. In Nootka, a language spoken on the Pacific coast of Canada, speakers characteristically mark some physical feature of the person addressed or spoken of either by means of suffixes or by inserting meaningless consonants in the body of a word. You can get a very faint idea of how this works from vulgar infixes such as "fan-bloodytastic" in colloquial English...
...However, the rapid exploration of the diversity of human languages in the nineteenth century also led people to wonder in what ways the languages of less developed peoples were different from "civilized" tongues. Greek had "produced" a Plato, but Hopi had not. Was this because so-called primitive languages were not suited to higher thought? Or was it the lack of civilization itself that had kept primitive languages in their irrational and alien states?
Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names. But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for "time," "past," "future," "language," "law," "state," "government," "navy," or "God."
More particularly, the difficulty of expressing "abstract thought" of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind... The "concrete languages" of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, "too many concrete nouns" and "not enough abstractions" became the conventional qualities of "primitive" tongues.
That's what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. The multiplicity of concrete terms "in Eskimo" displays its speakers' lack of the key feature of the civilized mind--the capacity to see things not as unique items but as tokens of a more general class. We can see that all kinds of snow--soft snow, wet snow, dry snow, poudreuse, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen--are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call "snow"; "Eskimos" see the varieties, not the class. (This isn't true of real Inuit people, only of the "Eskimos" who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)
Translation between "civilized" and "primitive" languages distinguished in this way was clearly impossible. The solution was to teach colonial subjects a form of language that would enable them to acquire civilization, and the obvious tool to carry out the mission was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn't solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.
The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continent--it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop peoplespeaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provencal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural patois were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward "standard languages" was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world.
It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought. What, then, can it mean to "think in Hopi"? If it means anything, can it be called "thought"? The linguist Edward Sapir came up with a revolutionary answer in the early part of the last century. Breaking with millennial practice and prejudice, he declared that all languages were equal. There is no hierarchy of tongues. Every variety of human language constitutes a system that is complete and entire, fully adequate to performing all the tasks that its users wish to make of it.
Sapir didn't argue this case out of political correctness. He made his claims on the basis of long study of languages of many different kinds. The evidence itself brought him to see that anyattempt to match the grammar of a language with the culture of its speakers or their ethnic origins was completely impossible. "Language," "culture," and "race" were independent variables.
He... showed that there is nothing "simple" about the languages of "simple" societies--and nothing especially "complex" about the languages of economically advanced ones. In his writings on language he showed like no one before him just how immensely varied the forms of language are and how their distribution among societies of very different kinds corresponds to no overarching pattern.
[However] different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world. Having to mark presence or absence in languages that have evidentials, or being obliged to mark time in languages of the Western European type, lays down what he called mind grooves--habitual patterns of thought. The question for translation (and for anthropology) is this: Can we "move more or less satisfactorily from one 'habitual pattern' to another?" The view that you can't ever really do this has become known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, despite the fact that Edward Sapir never subscribed to the idea.
The trouble with the simple form of this misnamed prejudice--that translation is impossible between any two languages because each language constructs a radically different mental world--is that if it were true you would not be able to know it...
If we grant that different languages provide different kinds of tools for thinking but allow for substantial overlaps--without which there could be no translation--we are left with the idea that there are just some things in, let us say, French that can never be expressed in English, and vice versa. There would then be an area of "thinking in French" that was "ineffable" in any other tongue... The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others.
If Plato had had Hopi to think with, he would not have come up with Platonic philosophy, that's for sure--and that's probably not a merely retrospective illusion based on the observable fact that there's no Hopi speaker who thinks he is Plato. Hopi thinkers think something else. That does not make Hopi a primitive language unsuited to true thought. It means that speakers of what Sapir called "Average West European" are poorly equipped to engage in Hopi thought. To expand our minds and to become morefully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
If you go into a Starbucks and ask for "coffee," the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk. Unless you use one of these individuated terms, your utterance will seem baffling or produce an unwanted result.
You should point this outnext time anyone tells you that Eskimo has a hundred words for snow. If a Martian explorer should visit your local bar and deduce from the lingo that Average West Europeans lack a single word to designate the type that covers all tokens of small quantities of a hot or cold black or brown liquid in a disposable cup, and consequently pour scorn on your language as inappropriate to higher forms of interplanetary thought--well, now you can tell him where to get off.
Excerpt from Bellos' book, Is That a Fish In Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything reprinted courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. For more, check out Bellos' author page here.
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The number of New Yorkers who can say "good morning" in any of the languages spoken by the Inuit peoples of the Arctic can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But in any small crowd of folk in the city or elsewhere you will surely find someone to tell you, "Eskimo has one hundred words for snow." The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax was demolished many years ago, but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.
People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it's a fair point to make. Languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. "Eskimo language" and the "snowbound world of the Eskimos" are mutually dependent things. That's a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.
To the dismay of many a lost tourist, that can't be translated into tournez a gauche or a droite unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing. Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from "left" to "right" or the other way around but starting from east, wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.
But languages can be even weirder than that. In Nootka, a language spoken on the Pacific coast of Canada, speakers characteristically mark some physical feature of the person addressed or spoken of either by means of suffixes or by inserting meaningless consonants in the body of a word. You can get a very faint idea of how this works from vulgar infixes such as "fan-bloodytastic" in colloquial English...
...However, the rapid exploration of the diversity of human languages in the nineteenth century also led people to wonder in what ways the languages of less developed peoples were different from "civilized" tongues. Greek had "produced" a Plato, but Hopi had not. Was this because so-called primitive languages were not suited to higher thought? Or was it the lack of civilization itself that had kept primitive languages in their irrational and alien states?
Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names. But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for "time," "past," "future," "language," "law," "state," "government," "navy," or "God."
More particularly, the difficulty of expressing "abstract thought" of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind... The "concrete languages" of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, "too many concrete nouns" and "not enough abstractions" became the conventional qualities of "primitive" tongues.
That's what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. The multiplicity of concrete terms "in Eskimo" displays its speakers' lack of the key feature of the civilized mind--the capacity to see things not as unique items but as tokens of a more general class. We can see that all kinds of snow--soft snow, wet snow, dry snow, poudreuse, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen--are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call "snow"; "Eskimos" see the varieties, not the class. (This isn't true of real Inuit people, only of the "Eskimos" who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)
Translation between "civilized" and "primitive" languages distinguished in this way was clearly impossible. The solution was to teach colonial subjects a form of language that would enable them to acquire civilization, and the obvious tool to carry out the mission was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn't solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.
The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continent--it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop peoplespeaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provencal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural patois were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward "standard languages" was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world.
It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought. What, then, can it mean to "think in Hopi"? If it means anything, can it be called "thought"? The linguist Edward Sapir came up with a revolutionary answer in the early part of the last century. Breaking with millennial practice and prejudice, he declared that all languages were equal. There is no hierarchy of tongues. Every variety of human language constitutes a system that is complete and entire, fully adequate to performing all the tasks that its users wish to make of it.
Sapir didn't argue this case out of political correctness. He made his claims on the basis of long study of languages of many different kinds. The evidence itself brought him to see that anyattempt to match the grammar of a language with the culture of its speakers or their ethnic origins was completely impossible. "Language," "culture," and "race" were independent variables.
He... showed that there is nothing "simple" about the languages of "simple" societies--and nothing especially "complex" about the languages of economically advanced ones. In his writings on language he showed like no one before him just how immensely varied the forms of language are and how their distribution among societies of very different kinds corresponds to no overarching pattern.
[However] different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world. Having to mark presence or absence in languages that have evidentials, or being obliged to mark time in languages of the Western European type, lays down what he called mind grooves--habitual patterns of thought. The question for translation (and for anthropology) is this: Can we "move more or less satisfactorily from one 'habitual pattern' to another?" The view that you can't ever really do this has become known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, despite the fact that Edward Sapir never subscribed to the idea.
The trouble with the simple form of this misnamed prejudice--that translation is impossible between any two languages because each language constructs a radically different mental world--is that if it were true you would not be able to know it...
If we grant that different languages provide different kinds of tools for thinking but allow for substantial overlaps--without which there could be no translation--we are left with the idea that there are just some things in, let us say, French that can never be expressed in English, and vice versa. There would then be an area of "thinking in French" that was "ineffable" in any other tongue... The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others.
If Plato had had Hopi to think with, he would not have come up with Platonic philosophy, that's for sure--and that's probably not a merely retrospective illusion based on the observable fact that there's no Hopi speaker who thinks he is Plato. Hopi thinkers think something else. That does not make Hopi a primitive language unsuited to true thought. It means that speakers of what Sapir called "Average West European" are poorly equipped to engage in Hopi thought. To expand our minds and to become morefully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.
If you go into a Starbucks and ask for "coffee," the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk. Unless you use one of these individuated terms, your utterance will seem baffling or produce an unwanted result.
You should point this outnext time anyone tells you that Eskimo has a hundred words for snow. If a Martian explorer should visit your local bar and deduce from the lingo that Average West Europeans lack a single word to designate the type that covers all tokens of small quantities of a hot or cold black or brown liquid in a disposable cup, and consequently pour scorn on your language as inappropriate to higher forms of interplanetary thought--well, now you can tell him where to get off.
Excerpt from Bellos' book, Is That a Fish In Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything reprinted courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. For more, check out Bellos' author page here.
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What Do You Mean by 'Love'?
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God Is Love
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Friday, March 9, 2012
Gangs of New York
''Gangs of New York'' is an important film as well as an entertaining one. With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative of historical change, to explain how we -- New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of corruption -- got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Racism
In a conclusion that is particularly grim for a crusading civil rights lawyer, Bell claims that legal victories are hollow if society's mind-set remains unchanged. He often refers to the Brown v. Board of Education case as an example, claiming that the 1954 school desegregation decision by the Supreme Court was neutered when whites began to abandon public schools and flee the cities. In general, Bell judges that civil rights laws and decisions are worthlessbecause America's white-dominated society continues to undermine black advancement while allowing racism to prevail.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Atheism
Two atheists - John Gray and Alain de Botton - and two agnostics - Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I - meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.
De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists' temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.
“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts," wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. "You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy." Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.
There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, "You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die."
De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. "To say something along the lines of 'I'm an atheist; I think religions are not all bad' has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?"
First, a definition. By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
“There is this strange supposition," says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, "that if you're a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I'm an anti-Darwinian and I'm an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it's hard for me to figure out what is driving them."
The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the "perverse kind of secular" believer, who wants to "wipe religion from the public sphere" on principle.
“Why," she asks me, "are the followers of reason so unreasonable?"
As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4's Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin'sOrigin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser's point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: "Oh, God!"
“Immediately he was out of control, he said, 'Oh, God!'" Warsi recalls, "so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith."
De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.
“He has taken a very strange position. He's unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.
“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him."
I ask Fraser what he thinks are the roots of this ideological rigidity among the neo-atheists. “It coincides with post-9/11," he says. "The enemy is Islam for them. That was true about [Christopher] Hitchens in an obvious way and Dawkins said something like 'it was the most evil religion in the world'.
“With Hitchens, it was bound up with liberal interventionism. It is also clearly an Americanisation. It has come over from their culture wars . . . People are pissed off with Dawkins because there is a feeling that we don't do that over here."
For me, the events of 9/11 were certainly a catalyst, the new ingredient that turned the already bubbling mix of anti-religious feeling into an explosive concoction. Coming from a scientific family, I had accepted the common-sense orthodoxy that religion and science were two separate but complementary and non-conflicting entities, or what the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA). I first became aware of my own complacency in this regard when I interviewed Stephen Hawking just before the publication of A Brief History of Time (1988). He had become - it was his then wife who told me this - vehemently anti-religious. And in my presence he was contemptuously anti-philosophical.
There had always been an anti-religious strain in science, a strain that had been present since Galileo and which, indeed, had grown stronger after Darwin. In the postwar period, both Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion. It was strengthened even further in the popular imagination when Dawkins expounded the outlines of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in his fine bookThe Selfish Gene (1976). In the 1990s it became routine to hear scientists - notably in this country Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert - pouring scorn on the claims of philosophy and religion. They were, for entirely non-scientific reasons, in a triumph ant mood. The sales of A Brief History of Time had sent publishing advances for popular science books soaring, and the more astounding the claims, the better the money.
While observing this, I became aware that the ground had shifted beneath my own cosy orthodoxy. Scientistic thinkers were no longer prepared to accept NOMA, the separate, complementary, non-conflicting realms. In the early 1990s I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue. If, in effect, God could not live up to the standards of scientific proof, then He must be declared dead. There were no longer two magisteria, but just one, before which we must all bow.
After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by books such as Dawkins'sThe God Delusion, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell and Christoper Hitchens's God Is Not Great.
These authors became known as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. It was no accident that their books appeared not just after the 9/11 attacks, but also at a time of neo-Darwinian triumphalism. The Human Genome Project, combined with the popularisation of the latest Darwinian thinking, was presented as an announcement that science had cracked the problem of human life. Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology - an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits - seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. "I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway."
For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. "I think the story is that we are supposed to
understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it's true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It's just sloppy thinking."
Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion - or, indeed, the human experience - in scientific terms is futile. "It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love," de Botton says. "It's a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It's a kind of category error. It's a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers."
The project is also curiously pointless. A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.
In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. "No," he replied. I almost crashed the car.
The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't.
Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult's own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: "Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?" At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.
bryanappleyard.com.
De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists' temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.
“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts," wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. "You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy." Myers has a vivid but limited prose palette.
There have been threats of violence. De Botton has been told he will be beaten up and his guts taken out of him. One email simply said, "You have betrayed Atheism. Go over to the other side and die."
De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. "To say something along the lines of 'I'm an atheist; I think religions are not all bad' has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?"
First, a definition. By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
“There is this strange supposition," says the American philosopher Jerry Fodor, "that if you're a Darwinian you have to be an atheist. In my case, I'm an anti-Darwinian and I'm an atheist. But people are so incoherent on these issues that it's hard for me to figure out what is driving them."
The neo-atheist cause has been gathering strength for roughly two decades and recently exploded into very public view. Sayeeda Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative Party, was in the headlines for making a speech at the Vatican warning of the dangers of secular fundamentalism, which aims to prevent religions from having a public voice or role. Warsi, a Muslim, subdivides propagators of this anti-religious impulse into two categories. First, there are the well-meaning liberal elite, who want to suppress religion in order not to cause offence to anybody. Second, there is the "perverse kind of secular" believer, who wants to "wipe religion from the public sphere" on principle.
“Why," she asks me, "are the followers of reason so unreasonable?"
As Warsi was on her way to catch her flight to Rome she heard Dawkins, the supreme prophet of neo-atheism, on Radio 4's Today programme. He was attempting to celebrate a survey that proved, at least to his satisfaction, that supposedly Christian Britain was a fraud. People who said they were Christians did not go to church and knew little of the faith. Giles Fraser, a priest of the Church of England, then challenged Dawkins to give the full title of Darwin'sOrigin of Species. Falling into confusion, he failed. Fraser's point was that Dawkins was therefore, by his own criterion, not a Darwinian. Becoming even more confused, Dawkins exclaimed in his response: "Oh, God!"
“Immediately he was out of control, he said, 'Oh, God!'" Warsi recalls, "so even the most self-confessed secular fundamentalist at this moment of need needed to turn to the Almighty. It kind of defeats his own argument that only people who go to church have a faith."
De Botton finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.
“He has taken a very strange position. He's unusual, in that he came from an elite British Anglican family with all its privileges and then he had this extraordinary career, and now he stands at the head of what can really be called a cult . . . I think what happened was that he has been frightened by the militancy of religious people he has met on his travels and it has driven him to the other side.
“It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him."
I ask Fraser what he thinks are the roots of this ideological rigidity among the neo-atheists. “It coincides with post-9/11," he says. "The enemy is Islam for them. That was true about [Christopher] Hitchens in an obvious way and Dawkins said something like 'it was the most evil religion in the world'.
“With Hitchens, it was bound up with liberal interventionism. It is also clearly an Americanisation. It has come over from their culture wars . . . People are pissed off with Dawkins because there is a feeling that we don't do that over here."
For me, the events of 9/11 were certainly a catalyst, the new ingredient that turned the already bubbling mix of anti-religious feeling into an explosive concoction. Coming from a scientific family, I had accepted the common-sense orthodoxy that religion and science were two separate but complementary and non-conflicting entities, or what the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA). I first became aware of my own complacency in this regard when I interviewed Stephen Hawking just before the publication of A Brief History of Time (1988). He had become - it was his then wife who told me this - vehemently anti-religious. And in my presence he was contemptuously anti-philosophical.
There had always been an anti-religious strain in science, a strain that had been present since Galileo and which, indeed, had grown stronger after Darwin. In the postwar period, both Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion. It was strengthened even further in the popular imagination when Dawkins expounded the outlines of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in his fine bookThe Selfish Gene (1976). In the 1990s it became routine to hear scientists - notably in this country Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert - pouring scorn on the claims of philosophy and religion. They were, for entirely non-scientific reasons, in a triumph ant mood. The sales of A Brief History of Time had sent publishing advances for popular science books soaring, and the more astounding the claims, the better the money.
While observing this, I became aware that the ground had shifted beneath my own cosy orthodoxy. Scientistic thinkers were no longer prepared to accept NOMA, the separate, complementary, non-conflicting realms. In the early 1990s I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue. If, in effect, God could not live up to the standards of scientific proof, then He must be declared dead. There were no longer two magisteria, but just one, before which we must all bow.
After the September 2001 attacks, all the dams of reticence burst and neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by books such as Dawkins'sThe God Delusion, Sam Harris's The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell and Christoper Hitchens's God Is Not Great.
These authors became known as the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. It was no accident that their books appeared not just after the 9/11 attacks, but also at a time of neo-Darwinian triumphalism. The Human Genome Project, combined with the popularisation of the latest Darwinian thinking, was presented as an announcement that science had cracked the problem of human life. Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology - an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits - seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. "I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway."
For him, evolutionary psychology plays a large part in this mindset with its loathing of religion. "I think the story is that we are supposed to
understand why there is religion on Darwinian grounds without having to raise the question as to whether it's true. But these are just fabricated stories. If you found something with two heads and a horn in the middle you could cook up some story from evolution saying it was just dandy to have two heads with a horn in the middle. It's just sloppy thinking."
Ultimately, the problem with militant neo-atheism is that it represents a profound category error. Explaining religion - or, indeed, the human experience - in scientific terms is futile. "It would be as bizarre as to launch a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina or love," de Botton says. "It's a symptom of the misplaced confidence of science . . . It's a kind of category error. It's a fatally wrong question and the more you ask it, the more you come up with bizarre and odd answers."
The project is also curiously pointless. A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.
In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. "No," he replied. I almost crashed the car.
The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't.
Happily, the backlash against neo-atheism has begun, inspired by the cult's own intolerance. In the Christmas issue of this magazine, Dawkins interviewed Hitchens. Halfway through, Dawkins asked: "Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?" At dinner at the restaurant in Bayswater we all laughed at this, but our laughter was uneasy. The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.
bryanappleyard.com.
Crime and Punishment
In two brilliant books, Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, Wilson countered the despairing fatalism of law enforcement in the 1960s and 1970s. He argued that it was not first necessary to solve all of society's other ills—racism, unemployment—before reducing crime. He demonstrated that practicable changes in the behaviors of police and courts could powerfully alter the choices made by potential wrongdoers. If (as he hypothesized) a relatively small number of criminals committed relatively large amounts of crime, then holding those few criminals in prison longer would substantially reduce the overall crime rate. And so it has proven over the past generation of the swiftest record reduction of criminality in American history.
Conservatism
Professor James Q Wilson is honored with the 2007 Bradley Prize for his outstanding achievement and singular vision despite odds and criticism, held at The Kennedy Center, Carrie Devorah, WENN / Newscom
"If you seek his monument, look around you."
That epitaph is carved on a stone in a quiet corner of St. Paul's Cathedral, to honor the great English architect Christopher Wren.
And likewise, the monument to the great scholar James Q. Wilson can be seen by standing in New York City's Times Square. The city life you see streaming all around you is as much James Q. Wilson's achievement as that of any other human being. It was James Q. Wilson who, over a long career in intellectual and public life, (re)taught Americans how to keep their cities safe, and thus alive.
James Q. Wilson is perhaps most famous for his work (with George Kelling and Catherine Coles) of the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement.
The theory was based on a famous experiment in which two cars were abandoned on city streets. One car was in pristine condition; the other car had a window broken. The car with the broken window was almost instantly scavenged and vandalized. The other car was left alone.
Wilson, Kelling, and Coles drew powerful lessons from this experiment. In the 1960s and 1970s, law-enforcement had tended to shrug off minor urban disorder: street-corner drinking, graffiti. Those were years of rising crime, and law-enforcement officials thought it most rational to focus resources on the most dangerous offenses. The concentration of resources was both supported and excused by an academic leftism that depicted efforts to keep order in cities as the oppressive imposition of bourgeois morality on poor people not doing any real harm to anyone.
Wilson, Kelling, and Coles debunked these ideas. The disregard of petty disorder created an environment that invited major offenses. And a crackdown on minor offenses would ease the work of police in suppressing major crime.
These ideas were tested, first in Boston by chief of police William Bratton, then in the New York subway system, then finally on the streets of New York itself.
I remember one spectacular case.
A woman who owned a dry-cleaning store was knifed to death in the early morning hours on New York's Upper East Side. The fingerprints on the knife were unrecognized. The crime threatened to go unsolved. Until New York police made one of their new sweeps to crack down on marijuana smoking and loitering in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Previously, police had shrugged off the Washington Square scene: if ever there seemed a victimless crime, marijuana smoking in the park seemed to qualify. But when they arrested the marijuana smokers and fingerprinted them, they found a match to the fingerprints in the knifing.
People who break one law break many others. If the police enforce laws against subway-turnstile jumping, public drinking, and so on, they will catch the people who rob, knife, and shoot.
But "broken windows" was premised on an even more audacious idea: enforcing rules against petty disorder sends the message: the authorities are in control. The city is not only statistically safe; it looks and feels safe. Older people and women return to the streets. Shops open. Potential criminals feel eyes upon them. Potential victims cease to feel isolated and vulnerable and come to feel empowered and supported by the force of law.
The New York of Death Wish is transmuted into a New York where the greatest danger is the risk of being trampled to death in Times Square by the hordes of happy tourists.
"Broken windows" would seem a sufficient achievement for any one life. In the case of James Q. Wilson, however, that achievement flowed from a huge body of powerful social science work.
In two brilliant books, Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, Wilson countered the despairing fatalism of law enforcement in the 1960s and 1970s. He argued that it was not first necessary to solve all of society's other ills—racism, unemployment—before reducing crime. He demonstrated that practicable changes in the behaviors of police and courts could powerfully alter the choices made by potential wrongdoers. If (as he hypothesized) a relatively small number of criminals committed relatively large amounts of crime, then holding those few criminals in prison longer would substantially reduce the overall crime rate. And so it has proven over the past generation of the swiftest record reduction of criminality in American history.
James Q. Wilson showed a way toward self-restoration that almost all the great American cities have followed.
Wilson thought about crime not only as a student of criminal behavior, but also—and maybe even more usefully—as a student of the behavior of government agencies.
For all the real-world importance of his work on crime, the most enduringly fascinating of his books may be his Bureaucracy.
He argued there against the tendency—urged by some economists—to see government agencies as equivalents to firms. Bureaucracies (Wilson showed) responded more to their internal culture than to external incentives. To improve the behavior of a bureaucracy, one had to change its internal culture—above all by defining finite tasks whose performance would improve results.
It was no good to set broad goals for agencies: those goals tended to contradict each other—or else to baffle the agency itself.
"Stop crime" is a goal. "Remove graffiti from the subway cars" is a task.
"End poverty" is a goal. "Require every welfare recipient to work a certain number of hours per week" is a task.
"Close the achievement gap" is a goal. "Drill students at XYZ high school until they can correctly answer the questions on ABC standardized test" is a task.
James Q. Wilson identified politically as a conservative. He was also a conservative in a deep intellectual sense: somebody who thought hard about institutions, who took an unsentimental view of human nature; who rejected attempts to reduce policy to abstract formulas.
Wilson epitomized and led that brilliant generation of dissidents who challenged the scientistic pretensions of the sociologists and criminologists of the postwar era—academics dazzled and infatuated by the dream of remaking all society. James Q. Wilson did not aspire to remake society. He regarded it as success enough to remake the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Wilson developed a policy conservatism that was empirical; relevant; useful; and convincing even to those not predisposed to be convinced. It is a conservatism that often seems crowded to the margins by shouters and hucksters. Yet it is a conservatism that leaves an intellectual legacy that could be of the highest value again—if only that legacy were rediscovered, reappraised, and returned to service.
No man of thought ever served his society and country better than James Q. Wilson. We mourn his loss after his long struggle with illness. But as we mourn, we honor his work and cherish his mighty contribution.
Thank you, Professor Wilson.
"If you seek his monument, look around you."
That epitaph is carved on a stone in a quiet corner of St. Paul's Cathedral, to honor the great English architect Christopher Wren.
And likewise, the monument to the great scholar James Q. Wilson can be seen by standing in New York City's Times Square. The city life you see streaming all around you is as much James Q. Wilson's achievement as that of any other human being. It was James Q. Wilson who, over a long career in intellectual and public life, (re)taught Americans how to keep their cities safe, and thus alive.
James Q. Wilson is perhaps most famous for his work (with George Kelling and Catherine Coles) of the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement.
The theory was based on a famous experiment in which two cars were abandoned on city streets. One car was in pristine condition; the other car had a window broken. The car with the broken window was almost instantly scavenged and vandalized. The other car was left alone.
Wilson, Kelling, and Coles drew powerful lessons from this experiment. In the 1960s and 1970s, law-enforcement had tended to shrug off minor urban disorder: street-corner drinking, graffiti. Those were years of rising crime, and law-enforcement officials thought it most rational to focus resources on the most dangerous offenses. The concentration of resources was both supported and excused by an academic leftism that depicted efforts to keep order in cities as the oppressive imposition of bourgeois morality on poor people not doing any real harm to anyone.
Wilson, Kelling, and Coles debunked these ideas. The disregard of petty disorder created an environment that invited major offenses. And a crackdown on minor offenses would ease the work of police in suppressing major crime.
These ideas were tested, first in Boston by chief of police William Bratton, then in the New York subway system, then finally on the streets of New York itself.
I remember one spectacular case.
A woman who owned a dry-cleaning store was knifed to death in the early morning hours on New York's Upper East Side. The fingerprints on the knife were unrecognized. The crime threatened to go unsolved. Until New York police made one of their new sweeps to crack down on marijuana smoking and loitering in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Previously, police had shrugged off the Washington Square scene: if ever there seemed a victimless crime, marijuana smoking in the park seemed to qualify. But when they arrested the marijuana smokers and fingerprinted them, they found a match to the fingerprints in the knifing.
People who break one law break many others. If the police enforce laws against subway-turnstile jumping, public drinking, and so on, they will catch the people who rob, knife, and shoot.
But "broken windows" was premised on an even more audacious idea: enforcing rules against petty disorder sends the message: the authorities are in control. The city is not only statistically safe; it looks and feels safe. Older people and women return to the streets. Shops open. Potential criminals feel eyes upon them. Potential victims cease to feel isolated and vulnerable and come to feel empowered and supported by the force of law.
The New York of Death Wish is transmuted into a New York where the greatest danger is the risk of being trampled to death in Times Square by the hordes of happy tourists.
"Broken windows" would seem a sufficient achievement for any one life. In the case of James Q. Wilson, however, that achievement flowed from a huge body of powerful social science work.
In two brilliant books, Thinking About Crime and Crime and Human Nature, Wilson countered the despairing fatalism of law enforcement in the 1960s and 1970s. He argued that it was not first necessary to solve all of society's other ills—racism, unemployment—before reducing crime. He demonstrated that practicable changes in the behaviors of police and courts could powerfully alter the choices made by potential wrongdoers. If (as he hypothesized) a relatively small number of criminals committed relatively large amounts of crime, then holding those few criminals in prison longer would substantially reduce the overall crime rate. And so it has proven over the past generation of the swiftest record reduction of criminality in American history.
James Q. Wilson showed a way toward self-restoration that almost all the great American cities have followed.
Wilson thought about crime not only as a student of criminal behavior, but also—and maybe even more usefully—as a student of the behavior of government agencies.
For all the real-world importance of his work on crime, the most enduringly fascinating of his books may be his Bureaucracy.
He argued there against the tendency—urged by some economists—to see government agencies as equivalents to firms. Bureaucracies (Wilson showed) responded more to their internal culture than to external incentives. To improve the behavior of a bureaucracy, one had to change its internal culture—above all by defining finite tasks whose performance would improve results.
It was no good to set broad goals for agencies: those goals tended to contradict each other—or else to baffle the agency itself.
"Stop crime" is a goal. "Remove graffiti from the subway cars" is a task.
"End poverty" is a goal. "Require every welfare recipient to work a certain number of hours per week" is a task.
"Close the achievement gap" is a goal. "Drill students at XYZ high school until they can correctly answer the questions on ABC standardized test" is a task.
James Q. Wilson identified politically as a conservative. He was also a conservative in a deep intellectual sense: somebody who thought hard about institutions, who took an unsentimental view of human nature; who rejected attempts to reduce policy to abstract formulas.
Wilson epitomized and led that brilliant generation of dissidents who challenged the scientistic pretensions of the sociologists and criminologists of the postwar era—academics dazzled and infatuated by the dream of remaking all society. James Q. Wilson did not aspire to remake society. He regarded it as success enough to remake the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Wilson developed a policy conservatism that was empirical; relevant; useful; and convincing even to those not predisposed to be convinced. It is a conservatism that often seems crowded to the margins by shouters and hucksters. Yet it is a conservatism that leaves an intellectual legacy that could be of the highest value again—if only that legacy were rediscovered, reappraised, and returned to service.
No man of thought ever served his society and country better than James Q. Wilson. We mourn his loss after his long struggle with illness. But as we mourn, we honor his work and cherish his mighty contribution.
Thank you, Professor Wilson.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Luck
There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck is decisive.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Johnny Cash
"I See A Darkness"
Well, you're my friend and can you see,
Many times we've been out drinkin',
Many times we've shared our thoughts,
But did you ever, ever notice, the kind of thoughts I got?
Well, you know I have a love, a love for everyone I know.
And you know I have a drive to live, I won't let go.
But can you see this opposition comes rising up sometimes?
That it's dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind.
And that I see a darkness.
And that I see a darkness.
And that I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Is a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.
Well, I hope that someday, buddy, we have peace in our lives.
Together or apart, alone or with our wives.
And we can stop our whoring and pull the smiles inside.
And light it up forever and never go to sleep.
My best unbeaten brother, this isn't all I see.
Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Is a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.
R. Kelly
I am a mountain
I am a tall tree
Oh, I am a swift wind
Sweepin' the country
I am a river
Down in the valley
Oh, I am a vision
And I can see clearly
If anybody asks u who I am
Just stand up tall look 'em in the Face and say
I'm that star up in the sky
I'm that mountain peak up high
Hey, I made it
I'm the worlds greatest
And I'm that little bit of hope
When my backs against the ropes
I can feel it mmm
I'm the worlds greatest
I am a giant
I am an eagle
I am a lion
Down in the jungle
I am a marchin' band
I am the people
I am a helpin' hand
And I am a hero
If anybody asks u who I am
Just stand up tall look 'em in the Face and say
In the ring of life I'll reign love
(I will reign)
And the world will notice a king
(Oh Yeah)
When all is darkest, I'll shine a light
(Shine a light)
And use a success you'll find in me
I saw the light
At the end of a tunnel
Believe in the pot of gold
At the end of the rainbow
And faith was right there
To pull me through, yeah
Used to be locked doors
Now I can just walk on through
Hey, uh, hey, hey, hey
It's the greatest
I'm that star up in the sky
I am a tall tree
Oh, I am a swift wind
Sweepin' the country
I am a river
Down in the valley
Oh, I am a vision
And I can see clearly
If anybody asks u who I am
Just stand up tall look 'em in the Face and say
I'm that star up in the sky
I'm that mountain peak up high
Hey, I made it
I'm the worlds greatest
And I'm that little bit of hope
When my backs against the ropes
I can feel it mmm
I'm the worlds greatest
I am a giant
I am an eagle
I am a lion
Down in the jungle
I am a marchin' band
I am the people
I am a helpin' hand
And I am a hero
If anybody asks u who I am
Just stand up tall look 'em in the Face and say
In the ring of life I'll reign love
(I will reign)
And the world will notice a king
(Oh Yeah)
When all is darkest, I'll shine a light
(Shine a light)
And use a success you'll find in me
I saw the light
At the end of a tunnel
Believe in the pot of gold
At the end of the rainbow
And faith was right there
To pull me through, yeah
Used to be locked doors
Now I can just walk on through
Hey, uh, hey, hey, hey
It's the greatest
I'm that star up in the sky
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Free will
I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape. I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will, that can be read in a single sitting.
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit’s hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters—Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11—still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7:00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9:30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband’s injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls’ mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her—which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn’t untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, “It just didn’t cross my mind.” The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really. What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was “different” from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky’s shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it.
How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit’s hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters—Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11—still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7:00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9:30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband’s injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls’ mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her—which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn’t untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, “It just didn’t cross my mind.” The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really. What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was “different” from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
Whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky’s shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it.
How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
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