Month: April 2013

The Smoke Starts To Clear In Boston

Adam Clark Estes tries to separate fact from fiction in the media’s coverage of last Friday’s manhunt:

Among other revelations, police are now saying that they don’t believe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers suspected of carrying out the attack, was armed when they opened fire on him Friday evening. In fact, authorities admit that the two brothers didn’t quite have the small arsenal of weapons they thought they did — just one gun, a gun that wasn’t anywhere near Dzhokhar when he was found in the boat after a shootout. …

[I]t was also revealed on Wednesday night that the Tsarnaev brothers used a remote control to detonate the bombs on Marathon Monday.  According to Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Maryland Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, it was the same kind of remote control used for remote control cars. And according to CBS News, it was bought with drug money. We already knew that Dzhokhar was a pothead and potential dealer, but the latest reports suggest that Tamerlan got in on the action, too. This leads to the natural conclusion that the bombing, somehow, was funded by their drug money. But honestly, it’s very tough to tell how they got the money they spent on the bombs.

Can The Kochs Save Conservative Journalism?

With their latest round of newspaper acquisitions, Yglesias thinks it’s possible:

[T]he big problem with right-leaning media in America isn’t that it doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s terrible. There is a large audience out there that’s so frustrated with the vile MSM that it’s happy to lap up cheaply produced content from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and you can make lots of money serving that kind of thing up. By contrast, to build a great media company that’s top-to-bottom staffed with conservatives is going to be very expensive.

Expressing skepticism about the possibility of a “pro-business conservative media chain”, Garance Franke-Ruta explains a big reason why newspapers frequently lean liberal:

The main reason is that all major U.S. newspapers are based in cities. Cities in America are in the main run by Democrats, because they are populated, by and large, with Democrats, and very often also surrounded by Democratic suburbs. And because cities are run by Democrats, and populated by not only by Democrats but, very often, by liberal, minority, and immigrant Democrats, they tend to have laws on the books that at least formally signal a desire to serve the interests of these voting groups — their residents, let’s call them. …

American newspapers originated as physical objects designed to be distributed in defined, geographically constrained regions. They originated as urban creations because only in urban areas was there enough commerce, enough politics — enough news — for them to grow, and enough readers to make them strong. There are newspapers based in rural areas, but it is hard for them to grow large, both because of the lack of regional news, and because of the difficulty of getting the physical object of the paper to enough people to scale it.

The Turing Tetris

Computer scientist Thomas Murphy has designed an artificial intelligence, PlayFun, that can figure its way through videogames by relentlessly testing strategies that lead to high scores. Gary Marcus explains further:

The program proceeds by automating trial and error. It records everything in the Nintendo’s memory, and correlates every simulated press of a joystick with particular memory locations in the game that represent a player’s score. Any action that increases the score gets weighted more heavily; actions that decrease the score become less likely. In essence, Murphy aims to overpower the Nintendo through sheer brute force, not by what humans would consider actually playing the game. He writes that the “central idea … is to use (only) the value of memory locations to deduce when the player is ‘winning.’ The things that a human player perceives, like the video screen and sound effects, are completely ignored.”

Reality Check

Enten points out that George W. Bush “is still quite unpopular compared with other former presidents”:

Back in 2010, Gallup asked Americans what their retrospective approval rating was for Presidents John F Kennedy through George W Bush. In every instance except for one, the retrospective approval was higher than the final approval was when they left office. Most Republicans, for instance, love to make fun of Jimmy Carter. Carter was the only president of the 20th century to lose re-election after replacing a president of a different party. He left office with a 34% job approval rating. His retrospective job approval rating in the 2010 Gallup poll jumped by 18pt.

Second, Bush’s retrospective approval is the second worst among presidents in the last 50 years ago. To save you doing the math, Carter’s 52% approval rating is higher than Bush’s 47%. Only the Watergate-tainted Richard Nixon recorded a lower retrospective approval than Bush.

Blogging Mexico’s Drug War

Closeup on one of the corpses of two mur

Bernardo Loyola describes the book Dying for the Truth, based on Blog del Narco:

According to the book, in 2012, their website—whose aim is to collect uncensored articles and images about the Mexican cartel’s extreme violence, their activities, and the government’s fight against them—registered an average of 25 million visits a month. According to Alexa, it is one of the most visited sites in Mexico. Although criticized by some media outlets for publishing gory images and information that’s given to them by cartels (such as executions and video messages aimed at rival organizations), the blog has become an essential source of news for journalists, citizens, and visitors.

Loyola interviewed the site’s female editor, anonymously, about where traditional media in Mexico have failed the public:

People began to wake up, to realize there’s a shoot-out going on two blocks away from their home and they’re seeing nothing about it in the news or in the papers. Citizens realize drug traffickers have set up a road block on the main avenue in broad daylight and no one is covering that. People got angry with the traditional media and started using the blog as a means to express what’s going on. That’s what it was created for, so that people could use it to their advantage, to protect themselves. If no one will take care of us, we’ll take care of ourselves.

From an excerpt of the book on the threats the site’s editor and programmer have endured:

Shortly before we completed this book, two people – a young man and woman who worked with us – were disemboweled and hung off a bridge in Tamaulipas, a state in the north of Mexico. Large handwritten signs, known as narcobanners, next to their bodies mentioned our blog, and stated that this was what happened to internet snitches. The message concluded with a warning that we were next. A few days later, they executed another journalist in Tamaulipas who regularly sent us information. The assassins left keyboards, a mouse, and other computer parts strewn across her body, as well as a sign that mentioned our blog again.

However, we refuse to be intimidated. Until writing this, we have never confirmed that we knew these people, so as not to let the narcoterrorists think we are scared or influenced in any way by their threats. We would never give criminals that satisfaction. Yet the attacks continue. In the last four days, they’ve sent us photos of nine people, dead, with messages on their skin that read: “You’re next, BDN.”

(Photo: Closeup on one of the corpses of two murdered men found near the Costera Avenue in Acapulco, Mexico, on February 5, 2011. By Pedro Pardo/AFP/Getty Images)

Theology As “Intellectual Foam”

Millman, Dreher and I have been debating the importance of certain violent passages in the Koran. Razib Khan has a long, fascinating addition to the debate. Read the whole thing, but this is the gist:

Theology and texts have far less power over shaping a religion’s lived experience than intellectuals would like to credit… On many specific issues I agree with Rod Dreher a great deal when it comes to Islam. I do think too many Muslims and their liberal fellow travelers attempt to squelch justified critique of the religion by making accusations of bigotry (I’m on the receiving end regularly). Obviously I disagree with that. But, where I part with Rod is his “theory of religion.”

As a religious believer with a deep intellectual predisposition I doubt Rod Dreher and I will be able to agree on the primal point at issue. Not only do I believe that the theologies of all religion are false, but I believe that they’re predominantly just intellectual foam generated from the churning of broader social and historical forces. Some segments of the priestly class will always find institutional politics exhausting, mystical experience out of their character, and legal commentaries excessively mundane. These will be drawn to philosophical dimension of religious phenomena. Which is fine as far as it goes, but too often there is an unfortunate tendency toward reducing religion to just this narrow dimension. But I have minimal confidence that most people will accept that the Christianity church has little to do with Jesus and that Islam has little to do with Muhammad. And yet I think that’s the truth of it….

I wonder if Tamerlan Tsarnaev or Richard Reid believed that Muhammed has little to do with Islam. I’m not talking about an intellectual grasp of theological nuances. I’m talking about a text that, unlike the Gospels, is asserted to have been directly given by God through Muhammed with no human intervention or error. And I’m talking about a religious genius who wielded temporal power from the get-go. Jesus accepted powerlessness in the face of Roman imperialism. Muhammed? As Khan notes,

Muhammad was his own Constantine. That is, he was not simply a spiritual teacher, but also a temporal ruler. More broadly, while Christianity became an imperial religion, Islam was born an imperial religion.

And it seems strange to me that that early, critical fact has not had an impact on Christianity’s eventual ability to disentangle itself from worldly territorial power and on Islam’s inability to do so. Jesus allowed himself to be crucified by power. Muhammed was an expansionist conqueror, who waged war for territory. I do not believe, as Khan does, that those two facts are irrelevant to the manifestations of Christianity and Islam today – especially in their compatibility with secular government.

Trees On Skyscrapers

Bosco-verticale

Tim De Chant shakes his head:

[T]rees atop buildings have become an architectural crutch, a way to make your building feel sustainable without necessarily being so. And that’s a charitable assessment. Here’s how I really feel—trees on skyscrapers are a distraction from rampant development and deforestation. They’re trees for the rich and no one else. They’re the soma in architecture’s brave new world of “sustainable” development.

In reality, trees on skyscrapers will likely be anything but sustainable. Structures built to support trees need to be over-engineered compared with their abiotic equivalents—trees are heavy, so is dirt (multiply so when wet), and so are watering systems required to keep them alive. If those trees are to have a chance on these windy precipices, their planters had better be deep, which further compounds problems raised in the previous sentence. A skyscraper that’s built to support trees will require more concrete, more steel, more of anything structural. That’s a lot of carbon, not to mention other resources, spent simply hoisting vegetation dozens of stories up, probably more than will ever be recouped in the trees’ lifetimes.

(Image: Boeri Studio‘s architectural rendering of Bosco Verticale, a pair of residential towers currently under construction in Milan, Italy.)

Where Human Rights Evaporate

A reporter recalls speaking to a colonel in the Afghan National Security Forces:

I asked the colonel what he thought of human rights.

“Human rights is wrong,” he said.

The colonel didn’t believe the concept could work in Afghanistan. It is too abstract, he said. It is like a piece of clothing so big it is worthless, or a tool no one knows how to use.

“It works in other countries because the people are educated and the government and the police function,” the colonel said. “Here the people aren’t educated and the government is corrupt. If I catch a guy planting an IED, what am I supposed to do with him? I turn him over to the police, and someone bribes them or gives money to the judge, and they release him. Now he’s free to go set more IEDs—and he wants revenge against me.”

The colonel turned up his hands. It is simple.“It’s better to just shoot him,” he said.

“There should be no human rights in war.”

A man after Dick Cheney’s heart.

Yes, Of Course It Was Jihad – In Canada Too

Just listen to the plotter of an attack on a railway line, caught before he even had a chance to get the explosives. Any idea why he may have done it? Take a wild guess:

“Only the Creator is perfect,” said Esseghaier, who refused a court-appointed lawyer in favour of representing himself. “We know that the Criminal Code is not (the) Holy Book. So if we are basing our judgment (on Canadian laws), we cannot rely on the conclusions taken out from these judgments.”

No extremist religion there at all, is there, Glenn?