wikipedia |Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is the application of game theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. EGT is useful in this context by defining a framework of contests, strategies, and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modelled. EGT originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price's
formalisation of the way in which such contests can be analysed as
"strategies" and the mathematical criteria that can be used to predict
the resulting prevalence of such competing strategies.[1]
Evolutionary game theory differs from classical game theory by
focusing more on the dynamics of strategy change as influenced not
solely by the quality of the various competing strategies, but by the
effect of the frequency with which those various competing strategies
are found in the population.[2]
Evolutionary game theory has proven itself to be invaluable in
helping to explain many complex and challenging aspects of biology. It
has been particularly helpful in establishing the basis of altruistic
behaviours within the context of Darwinian process. Despite its origin
and original purpose, evolutionary game theory has become of increasing
interest to economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.
The most classic game (and Maynard Smith's
starting point) is the Hawk Dove game. The game was conceived to
analyse the animal contest problem highlighted by Lorenz and Tinbergen.
It is a contest over a non-shareable resource. The contestants can be
either a Hawk or a Dove. These are not two separate species of bird;
they are two subtypes of one species with two different types of
strategy (two different morphs). The term Hawk Dove was coined by
Maynard Smith because he did his work during the Vietnam War when
political views fell into one of these two camps. The strategy of the
Hawk (a fighter strategy) is to first display aggression, then escalate
into a fight until he either wins or is injured. The strategy of the
Dove (fight avoider) is to first display aggression but if faced with
major escalation by an opponent to run for safety. If not faced with
this level of escalation the Dove will attempt to share the resource.
Payoff Matrix for Hawk Dove Game
meets Hawk
meets Dove
if Hawk
V/2 - C/2
V
if Dove
0
V/2
Given that the resource is given the value V, the damage from losing a fight is given cost C:
If a Hawk meets a Dove he gets the full resource V to himself
If a Hawk meets a Hawk – half the time he wins, half the time he loses…so his average outcome is then V/2 minus C/2
If a Dove meets a Hawk he will back off and get nothing - 0
If a Dove meets a Dove both share the resource and get V/2
The actual payoff however depends on the probability of meeting a
Hawk or Dove, which in turn is a representation of the percentage of
Hawks and Doves in the population when a particular contest takes place.
But that population makeup in turn is determined by the results of all
of the previous contests before the present contest- it is a continuous
iterative process where the resultant population of the previous contest
becomes the input population to the next contest. If the cost of losing
C is greater than the value of winning V (the normal situation in the
natural world) the mathematics ends in an ESS – an evolutionarily stable
strategy situation having a mix of the two strategies where the
population of Hawks is V/C. The population will progress back to this
equilibrium point if any new Hawks or Doves make a temporary
perturbation in the population. The solution of the Hawk Dove Game
explains why most animal contests involve only “ritual fighting
behaviours” in contests rather than outright battles. The result does
not at all depend on “good of the species” behaviours as suggested by
Lorenz, but solely on the implication of actions of “selfish genes”.
WaPo | Richie was the first to die, then Diesel, then Dog.
Whatever
else they were in life, the men with the biker nicknames were Cossacks,
loud and proud and riders in a Texas motorcycle gang. And that’s what
got them killed, shot to death in a brawl with a rival gang in the
parking lot of a Texas “breastaurant” that advertised hot waitresses and
cold beer.
“I saw the first three of our
guys fall, and we started running,” said their brother in arms, another
Cossack, who said he was there May 17 when the shooting started at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Nine bikers died, 18 were wounded and more than 170 landed in jail.
The
Cossack, president of a North Texas chapter of the motorcycle gang,
asked not to be identified because he is now in hiding and said he fears
for his life. He is a rare eyewitness speaking publicly about the Waco
massacre, one of the worst eruptions of biker-gang violence in U.S.
history.
The bulletin warns that Bandidos who serve in
the U.S. military may be “supplying the gang with grenades and C4
explosives” to target officials and their families with car bombs, the
network reported.
A spokesman for the Waco
police, Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, said police had received an increasing
number of threats in recent days. “We are taking the necessary
precautions,” he said.
U.S. military ties
to the Bandidos and other biker gangs were detailed in a U.S. Justice
Department report published last year that concluded the gangs were
using “active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense
(DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the
United States.”
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives study, first reported by the Intercept,
concludes that biker gangs have recruited scores of employees of
federal, state and local governments, police and firefighters, National
Guardsmen and reservists, some of them with government security
clearances, to help them “maim and murder” in support of their
“insatiable appetite for dominance.”
So how would Pollack compare outlaw motorcycle gangs, like those that
got into a gun battle Sunday in Waco, with urban street gangs, such as
those that commit terror in Chicago? Here’s his take, courtesy of The Marshall Project:
#1 The
number of perps involved in the Waco shootout – not to mention the nine
deaths – far exceeds the typical urban gang-related shooting. “I have
never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this.”
#2Urban gangs and their criminal organizations rarely get into gun battles with police.
#3Outlaw
biker gangs are rarely found in big media centers. Given our
expectations regarding race and geographic location of people who
perpetrate crime, biker gangs are perceived as more “curiosity” than
threat. That must change.
#4 100 weapons at one crime scene is absolutely remarkable.
#5Biker gangs have far-flung connections, particularly in South and Central America.
Money quote: “If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freakout.”
My take:Outlaw
biker gangs are homegrown terrorists. That doesn’t mean everyone who
walked into that Twin Peaks Sunday is an outlaw or a homegrown
terrorist. But those who weren’t should be charged with stupidity for
associating with bikers who clearly are.
thenation | the US bombed Cambodia, a sovereign nation Washington was not at war
with, from 1965 to 1973. When Nixon and Kissinger entered the White
House in early 1969, they greatly intensified (in terms of bombing rate
and amount of munitions dropped) and expanded (in terms of extent of
territory targeted) the air assault. They did so both because Cambodia
reportedly housed the headquarters of the National Liberation Front and
because they wanted to send a message to Hanoi that Nixon was “mad” and
unpredictable. Between 1969 and 1973, the US dropped at least 500,000
tons of bombs on Cambodia, killing over 100,000 Khmer civilians,
according to Ben Kiernan, the founding director of Yale’s Cambodian
Genocide Program. Broadly speaking, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Cambodia
bombing comprised two named operations. The first, Operation Menu, ran
from March 18, 1969, to May 1970. The second, Operation Freedom Deal,
ran from May 1970 to August 1973. Menu was the phase that was most
secret, carried out with the deception protocol put into place by
Kissinger. Freedom was less covert, justified by requests for support
from the Cambodian government to fight the growing insurgency. Still,
the extent and intensity of Freedom Deal was under-reported in the US
press, which was often fed confusing and mixed messages by the
administration.
It wasn’t until 1973 that Congress and journalists began to
investigate Operation Menu, around the same moment that the Watergate
scandal was unfolding. At the time, some members of Congress were
“convinced that the secret bombing of Cambodia will emerge as another,
perhaps more dangerous, facet of the Watergate scandal,” as Hersh, then a
New York Times reporter, wrote in July of that year.
But investigators couldn’t identify the person (it was Kissinger) in
Nixon’s staff that presided over the cover-up nor find the link (Sitton)
connecting the conspiracy to the White House. “Who ordered the
falsification of the records?” one senator asked General Creighton
Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam. “I just do not
know,” he answered.
Hersh didn’t give up. Nixon resigned, Ford finished his term, and
Kissinger left office in 1977 having largely escaped association with
Watergate. Compared to the preverbal thuggery of the rest of Nixon’s
inner circle—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell—not to mention actual thugs
like G. Gordon Liddy, Kissinger’s reputation was intact: “prodigiously
intelligent, articulate, talented, witty, captivating and imposing man….
he is not mean-spirited, he seems drawn to telling the truth, and he
wants to serve his country well. He also appears to have a historical
vision,” as none other than The New Yorker’s William Shawn wrote (in 1973).
Hersh “countered” in 1983 with The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. An
“authorized” biography of Kissinger will be out soon, but Hersh’s
Kissinger is still the one to top. He gives us the defining portrait of
the man as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and
sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the
B-52s. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in
Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean, because the pettiness gets
played out on a world stage with epic consequences. The Price of Power covers
all of Kissinger’s many transgressions—from Bangladesh to Chile, from
wiretapping his own staff to giving Suharto the greenlight to invade
Timor.
But the secret bombing of Cambodia is the book’s centerpiece, fueling the paranoia that drives Nixon’s downfall.
doj | Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) are organizations whose members use their
motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises. OMGs are highly
structured criminal organizations whose members engage in criminal
activities such as violent crime, weapons trafficking, and drug
trafficking. There are more than 300 active OMGs within the United
States, ranging in size from single chapters with five or six members to
hundreds of chapters with thousands of members worldwide. The Hells
Angels, Mongols, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Sons of Silence pose a serious
national domestic threat and conduct the majority of criminal activity
linked to OMGs, especially activity relating to drug-trafficking and,
more specifically, to cross-border drug smuggling. Because of their
transnational scope, these OMGs are able to coordinate drug smuggling
operations in partnership with major international drug-trafficking
organizations (DTOs).
Dale sent me a link to some interesting pictures on Thursday, pictures that I think may have had something to do with my little epiphany about the nature of the thugs and the peculiar parasitic outlaw subculture quietly tolerated in our midst. The characters mugging in this picture are not in fact samurai, as much as the characters dressing up in leathers and riding around on Harley Davidson motorcycles are not in fact warriors. These are peasants dressed-up and posed in found armor - you can see it in their faces as well as in the unsheathed steel slung across the 2nd from the left's shoulder.
My introduction to Edo culture was as romanticized and artificial as it could be, coming from a teenage encounter with the book Shogun compounded and instantiated by the presence of a genuine Japanese martial arts studio on the outskirts of my neighborhood that preserved, highlighted, and sought to faithfully transmit a cultural and religious ethos embodied - at least in part - in the warrior's arts. Better to watch the period series Zatoichi and be reminded how bleak, predatory, brutal and crimey every installment was inclined to be, and to remember that there was a reason that the samurai put aside their old and lethal religion and imposed the Meiji restoration upon Japan.
angelo.edu | This paper outlines the evolution of the Big Four one percent
motorcycle clubs—Hell’s Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Pagans—from
near-groups to well-organized criminal confederations. The insights of criminological theory unify a variety of journalistic and scientic sources into a holistic picture of the development of these
organizations. The interaction of members’ psychological needs with
group dynamics and mainstream social forces lead to periods of
expansion as core values shift to emphasize dominance over rivals. The
resulting interclub tensions encourage the creation of organized
criminal enterprises but also attract police attention. Internecine rivalries were eventually
subordinated to these enterprises as their profit potential was
recognized and intergroup warfare took its toll. Core biker values were
reasserted as certain aspects of club operation became less countercultural in order
to assure the future of the subculture and its basic components.
DallasNews | The real name for this is mindless, idiot violence. The correct term
for the people involved is criminals so stupid they shot and stabbed one
another in a chain-store shopping center where ordinary citizens go to
eat lunch, browse sporting goods, shop for sofas.
“Thug” might be a little too smart for this bunch. And while we’re at it, “biker” and “outlaw” may be a little too romantic.
Los
Angeles writer Donald Charles Davis, who blogs about the “1 percenter
lifestyle” under the pseudonym “The Aging Rebel,” elegantly describes
gang-affiliated bikers as “brotherhoods of men who have left themselves
no choice but to stand apart from the world at large.”
Oh, those
daring outlaws, the ghostly remnants of a manly frontier spirit that
“stands apart” from a culture made soft by iPads and wine tastings and
women who talk back. TV and Hunter S. Thompson-addled journalists have
turned “MC clubs” into the last of the Marlboro men.
Except
they’re not. Take away the motorcycles and the vests (“cuts”) and the
hieroglyphic patches and you have your basic gang-banger. A thug. A
dum-dum so besotted by his own sense of “badness” that he’ll shoot
someone over some perceived act of “disrespect” — walking into the wrong
bar, wearing the wrong color, sporting the wrong patch.
Sure, you can call that “bad.” You can also call it “dangerously stupid.”
“These
guys become very violent to each other very quickly over nothing,” said
McClennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara. “Very quickly over nothing”
is a woefully inadequate reason for a broken jaw or a knife in the gut
or a gunshot to the head.
Davis (“Aging Rebel”) is a gifted
writer, but if you read some of the 1 percenter comments to his blog
post about the Waco shootings, you’ll find something scary but drearily
familiar.
You’ll find the contemporary flavor of bunker-brained
craziness that’s poisoning everyday culture: vicious hatred of
government, contempt for ordinary citizens (“sheeple”), manic belief in
elaborate conspiracy theories.
One online scenario that’s floating
around the Waco shootings is this: Law enforcement orchestrated the
Sunday killings, sending undercover cops disguised as bikers into the
bar to start a fight. Once the fight spilled outside, SWAT teams opened
fire, deliberately slaughtering members of the brave brotherhood who
dare to stand apart.
That’s a level of paranoid delusion I find a lot more alarming than an academic debate over who we can or can’t call a “thug.”
Time | “Motorcycle clubs are function of military service, period,” declares William Dulaney, who is both national
president of Hell on Wheels Motorcycle Club and a professor of
organizational communication at Air University, located on Maxwell Air
Force Base in Alabama. “Chain of command is very strictly adhered to.
Its’ about identity for a group of people who, outside this social
structure, don’t have much identity. You’re talking about a core
identity to a bunch of warriors.”
And yet, even as Harley sales soared and weekend warriors, known
derisively by outlaw clubs as RUBs, or rich urban bikers, crowded
highways, the clubs that started it all lost a lot of their juice. “Back
in the ’80s, or like 1995, dude, gangland, no doubt about it,” Dulaney
says. “But those days are gone. ” Federal RICO prosecutions and other
law enforcement efforts have dramatically reduced the criminal threat
level from outlaw groups, as perhaps has aging. Dulaney now numbers
himself among the older generation, and understands the violence in Waco
as a problem of kids these days.
“They don’t have years and years if not decades in the subculture,
understanding that there is hierarchy,” he says. Young bucks may enjoy
the swagger of wearing a leather vest, but they fail to respect the full
import of the patches, or “colors,” sewn on the back, he says. The
diamond-shaped patch reading “1%” denotes the wearer as a member of the
outlaw elite. And the place name — “Texas” — sewn at the base of the
vest in the embroidered crescent bikers call the bottom rocker,
announces more than a claim on turf.
“The way to understand the bottom rocker, with 1 percenters, is it’s
territory, yeah, but it’s responsibility,” Dulaney says. “Because they
have responsibility to enforce peaceful coexistence in that area.
Because if they don’t, law enforcement will come in and be all over
you.”
NYTimes | In much of Brazil, proponents of harsh policing tactics are growing stronger.
Responding to widespread fears in a crime-weary country with more homicides than any other — 50,108 in 2012, according to the United Nations
— conservative politicians with law enforcement backgrounds and tough
talk on crime collected huge vote counts in recent state and federal
elections, bolstering what is often called Brazil’s “bullet caucus” in Congress.
Some
bullet caucus members openly celebrate the number of people they killed
while patrolling the streets. One rising political star, Paulo Telhada,
boasted of killing more than 30 people as a police officer in São Paulo, saying in a recent interview he felt “no pity for thugs.”
“There
are parts of the middle class that accept killings by the police as a
legitimate practice,” said Ivan C. Marques, director of Instituto Sou da
Paz, a group that tracks police issues.
In
the state of Rio alone, the police killed at least 563 people in 2014, a
35 percent increase from the year before, according to the state’s
Institute of Public Security.
That
is significantly more than the F.B.I. recorded for the entire United
States, which has a population about 20 times as large as that of Rio
State.
Researchers
say the reasons for the large numbers of police killings are varied. To
begin with, poorly trained and poorly paid police forces in
crime-plagued slums are often imbued with a shoot-first instinct
stemming from a mixture of fear, paranoia and a sense of impunity.
Some elite units, like the Police Special Operations Battalion in Rio, openly advertise, and even glorify, their lethality. The unit’s symbol is a skull and crossed pistols.
But
analysts say such squads are merely the sharp end of larger policing
systems in which criminals, or people perceived to be criminals, are
considered undesirable elements who cannot be reformed.
As
drug gangs control many prisons in Brazil, arresting criminals and
sending them to jail is viewed by some police officers as feeding the
growth of crime, not reducing it.
Many
cases involving the police are registered as “resistance killings” or
“deaths in police confrontation,” though rights groups say that the
episodes often amount to summary executions.
themarshallproject | If you thought violent biker gangs were a relic of the Altamont era, Sunday’s shootout at a Waco, Texas restaurant might have come as a shock. A long simmering beef
between the Bandidos and Cossacks boiled over into gunfire. When police
arrived at the scene, gang members shot at them, too, leaving nine
bikers dead, 18 people injured, and 170 suspects in police custody. Over
100 weapons have been confiscated.
The scale of this incident dwarfs a typical urban gang confrontation, says Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab
and an expert on gangs and guns. We talked to Pollack about why biker
gang violence typically gets so little attention. He believes the Waco
incident confounds our expectations regarding the race and geographic
location of people who perpetrate crime, causing us to see biker gangs
as more of a “curiosity” than a threat.
How does the shootout in Waco differ from the gang violence you study in Chicago?
I have never encountered a gang incident in
Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to
mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related
shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this
decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of
anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think
this would cause a national freak out.
One of the shocking parts of this incident
is that after the police arrived, there was a gunfight between the gang
members and the authorities.
Urban gangs and criminal organizations very rarely
get into gun battles with police. They certainly have access to
powerful weaponry. Police around the country periodically capture large
caches of AR-15s and other weapons in cities. Yet when they break down
the door to a gang safe house or a drug location in a city, whatever
weapons might be piled on a mattress in the adjoining room are left
where they are. They aren’t picked up and used to attack the police. The
people who do attack police are typically cornered individuals or
people with serious mental health problems.
These biker gangs have a long history in organized crime. They began
with restless, traumatized veterans returning home after World War II.
Today, biker gangs still act as a sort of private militia that police
can’t always control, patrolling festivals and other events. Why don’t we pay more attention to them?
Geography may be part of the answer. There are not
a lot of outlaw biker gangs in gentrifying Brooklyn and other key media
centers. Of course, the number of deaths is lower overall with these
groups. You don’t have the daily deluge of homicides the way we would in
Chicago. But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed
by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity
seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine
receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle
gangs as a kind of curiosity.
dailymail |The
waitresses who were working at a Texas restaurant when a massive
gunfight broke out over the weekend are revealing the terror they felt
as bullets began to fly.
The
women, all employees at Twin Peaks sports bar in Waco, have taken to
social media to share stories of hiding in freezers, running in fear and
their belief that this tragedy could have possibly been prevented in
the first place.
And now, after enduring this horrific scene, they all find themselves unemployed.
'What we went through Sunday was scary as s**t,' wrote Alicia Ortiz on her Facebook page.
'I
wouldn’t want to have gone through it with anyone else. Being in that
freezer with y’all made me see how much of a family we really are.'
She also
bemoaned the fact that the restaurant has been closed down in the wake
of the incident, and what that means for the staff.
'So
the whole restaurant needs to be shut down because of bad management?
Peoples jobs need to be lost because of bad management?' she wrote
'We are getting the short end of the stick. And people are blaming all of Twin Peaks like we knew what was going to happen.'
Another employee, Sara Violet Parker,
seemed to echo Ortiz's comment, writing on her Facebook; 'Twin Peaks is
not to blame, my heart is so heavy for all of my friends who were
scared for their lives. Now we are worried none of us have jobs, with
bills to pay and some have children to provide for.'
WaPo | Two days after nine people were shot and killed at the Twin Peaks
restaurant here, Oddissie Garza can’t seem to shake a single, unnerving
thought:
“I was supposed to be there,” she told The Washington
Post on Tuesday as she lingered on her porch in a solemn mood. “That
keeps running through my mind. I was supposed to be right there at the
front where all the fighting was.”
Garza, an easygoing
18-year-old with a shock of pink hair, was often the first person
customers saw when they walked into Twin Peaks. She began working at the
new restaurant in September as a waitress and was promoted to hostess
five months later, placing her just past the front door at the
restaurant.
“It
was my first job and I was nervous in the beginning, but I found out I
had a bunch of sisters in plaid,” she said, referring to the servers’
infamous uniform. “After I got pregnant, I kept this job because of the
other girls.”
When she thinks about Sunday’s violence she is less
concerned with her own safety than the person she would have been
carrying with her. Garza is eight months pregnant with a baby boy, a
fact that may have saved her life, she said.
After a long shift
on her feet Saturday night, Garza’s legs were swelling and she asked a
co-worker if they could trade shifts the next morning.
Her
co-worker agreed. The next time she heard from anyone at the restaurant
was when they were locked in a freezer as gunfire erupted. Garza got a
call from her mother saying something — possibly a shooting — had
occurred at work. She immediately texted her friends at Twin Peaks,
hoping the rumor was some sort of joke.
HuffPo | Rival biker gangs clashed violently in Waco, Texas, on Sunday
afternoon, in a brawl that ultimately left nine gang members dead and at
least 18 others injured. As the fight spilled out of a local restaurant
and into the parking lot, participants reportedly used fists, chains,
knives and later firearms to attack one another. Eventually they
exchanged gunfire with police. Waco law enforcement announced Monday
that 170 people had been arrested and will be charged with engaging in organized crime.
The
brutality terrorized the surrounding community, leading to large-scale
evacuations, closed businesses and ongoing fears, though remarkably no
physical harm to bystanders.
The incident has temporarily shoved biker gangs and their overwhelmingly white membership
into the national spotlight. But these groups -- which the FBI labels
outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs -- typically receive far less media
attention than urban street gangs, though the biker gangs' criminal
networks reach across the country and have erupted violently before.
Sunday's bloodshed reportedly began inside the bathroom of a local Twin Peaks "breastaurant"
that has catered to bikers in the past. Between 150 and 200 gang
members were apparently inside at the time, and one witness said that as many as 30 gang members were shooting at each other at the height of the battle.
Police
have accused the Waco restaurant of being uncooperative in earlier
attempts to scale back large and often contentious biker gatherings, and
now its clientele has led to serious consequences for management. On
Monday, the Twin Peaks corporate office revoked the establishment's franchise,
stating that "the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco
chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our
company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place
to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants." The Texas Alcoholic
Beverage Commission had already closed the restaurant for a week in
order to avoid further possible violence.
Nearby businesses that
fell within the police perimeter were also put on lockdown or evacuated
following the initial melee. Walmart reportedly closed early
Sunday after being cleared. Best Buy, Cabela's and other stores in the
Central Texas Marketplace -- the shopping center that contains the Twin
Peaks restaurant -- remained closed Monday as the investigation continued.
The manager of a local Denny's told the Austin American-Statesman
that a "huge" group of bikers came into her restaurant a few hours
after the shooting. Many were served but left abruptly a short time
later, some without paying their checks. The manager said a SWAT team
showed up minutes after the bikers departed, leaving her and other
patrons rattled.
The Waco Tribune reported
that "other local dining and drinking establishments" closed early
Sunday amid fears that gang members might be looking to resume the
violence.
Law enforcement officials in Texas said they've received numerous retaliatory threats from biker gangs following Sunday's incident and have gone on high alert in case of any backlash.
Biker
gang violence is not unusual in Central Texas. OMGs play a key role in
methamphetamine and marijuana trafficking throughout the region. The FBI says
they're involved in cross-border drug smuggling as well as domestic
drug trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking and other criminal
enterprises. Police said that five OMGs took part in the violence on
Sunday, though authorities haven't identified the organizations by name. Fist tap Rohan.
questioneverything | One could reasonably argue that I am, after all, biased and will tend
to ignore evidence against my basic hypothesis, that civilization must
necessarily collapse due to the decline of net free energy (i.e. peak
oil combined with declining energy return on investment — EROI — and
still growing populations). I am probably not immune to such selective
bias. Thus I put it to you, the readers, to let me know of any evidence
of some reasonably impactful institutions or organizations that seem to
be working and contributing positively to human happiness (please also
include estimates of the magnitude of such impact). As I was writing
this one possible example did come to mind, if I allow that some kinds
of religious experiences are positive (and I do even if I do not believe
in most of what religions teach about an ethereal world). The current
Pope of the Catholic faith (Francis), it seems to me, has done some
worthwhile things that could have a positive impact on the followers of
that religion, if not on other states owing to their leaders paying
deference to what the Holy See says (e.g. calls for peace). But I
reserve judgment of the effectiveness of his reign on the Church. For
example, will he ferret out gross behaviors like child sex abuses or
financial corruption in the Vatican's dealings?
If you have any contributions please make them in comments here. Let's
see what sort of list we come up with. But please do not post examples
of dysfunction. We already know so many it would be an act of waste of
bandwidth.
Economists' View the “New Normal”
Meanwhile if we just examine the state and trends of the global economy
we get a basic picture of the developing collapse. An article in today's
New York Times Business section by Tyler Cowen, a professor of
economics at George Mason University “Signs of a Shakier New Normal”,
May 17, 2015, brought into focus a variety of comments made by a number
of neoclassical economists of late (including, from time to time, the
titular representative of ‘liberal’ economists, Paul Krugman) that we
have entered a new kind of economic situation that they don't quite
understand but have labeled “the new normal.” I suppose they are trying
to subtly say that they expect the current set of conditions to continue
indefinitely into the future. But, their reasons for saying so have
nothing to do with their understanding the dynamics of the real economy
and making predictions based on their bogus models. They are just
tacitly admitting that something unusual is happening and it has
persisted long enough now to be acknowledged as possibly permanent.
While the US government and a variety of media talking heads are hailing
the “recovery” the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans
does not demonstrate recovery. They continue to grow poorer, budgets are
stretched even for those who have jobs, the real cost of living is
still going up even in spite of the recent relief in energy costs, in
short for most people there is no recovery. And that is what these
economists are referring to (academically) as the new normal.
NYTimes | The
difficulties facing the police and prosecutors were foreshadowed by the
last mass arrest of bikers in the United States. In that case, in 2002,
three motorcycle gang members were killed and about a dozen others were
injured in a shooting and knifing brawl in Laughlin, Nev. The brawl
broke out at Harrah’s Casino and Hotel between the Hells Angels and the
Mongols, all of whom were attending an annual motorcycle rally. About
120 people were detained by law enforcement. A total of 44 Hells Angels
were indicted in federal court, but only seven were convicted. Six
Mongols members pleaded guilty to state charges.
“Oftentimes,
these mass prosecutions fail because of the overreach,” said Robert
Draskovich, a Las Vegas criminal defense lawyer who represented a member
of the Hells Angels in the Laughlin case. The charges against his
client were dropped. In the Waco case, Mr. Draskovich predicted, “the
majority of these people will walk.”
Officials,
however, have defended their handling of the arrests and the $1 million
bonds. “I set that bond because there was nine people killed, and I
felt that was appropriate for the incident that occurred,” said Walter
H. Peterson, the justice of the peace in McLennan County who made the
decision.
Sgt.
W. Patrick Swanton, a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, said
the three bikers who had been released — Juan Garcia, Drew King and Jim
Harris, all of Austin — were back in custody. The three men were
arrested Sunday after they rode up to the scene carrying weapons and
wearing motorcyle-gang colors, Sergeant Swanton said. After their
release, new arrest warrants were issued for them, and bond was set at
$1 million for each, he said.
“They were not mistakenly released,” he added.
Law
enforcement officials and gang experts said conflicts between two
motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, had led to the
shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in south Waco on Sunday. The
shooting, which left nine bikers dead and 18 others wounded, stemmed
from both petty disputes and broader tensions over the smaller group,
the Cossacks, failing to pay respect, and money, to its larger rival,
the Bandidos, officials said.
texas.gov | The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has released the updated Texas Gang Threat Assessment, which was developed to provide a broad overview of gang activity in the state of Texas.
“Gang violence and crime are a chief threat to public safety in
Texas, and protecting our communities from these criminals remains a
top priority,” said DPS Director Steven McCraw. “This assessment
provides detailed information about the gangs operating in our state,
which will enhance the ability of law enforcement to combat these
dangerous organizations and their associates.”
The Texas Gang Threat Assessment was developed according to
statute, which requires an annual report to be submitted to the
governor and Texas Legislature assessing the threat posed by statewide
criminal gangs. The report is based on the collaboration between
multiple law enforcement and criminal justice agencies across the state
and nation, whose contributions were essential in creating this
comprehensive overview of gang activity in Texas.
“Gangs represent one of the top organized-crime threats to public
safety,” said Sen. Craig Estes, chair of the Senate Committee on
Agriculture, Rural Affairs and Homeland Security. “The Texas Gang Threat Assessment
will serve as a critical tool to assist law enforcement agencies in
developing and executing strategies to protect Texans, and I applaud
the Texas Department of Public Safety for its efforts in combating this
critical threat.”
“The most effective tool in fighting any threat is understanding the
enemy. This intelligence report amasses information about gang trends
and their relationships that is critical to effectively targeting and
disrupting these criminal organizations,” said Rep. Joe Pickett, chair
of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety.
This assessment details the state’s systematic approach to
evaluating and classifying gangs in order to identify which
organizations represent the most substantial threat. The report reveals
that current gang membership across the state may exceed 100,000
individuals.
Additional significant findings include:
Gangs continue to pose a substantial threat to public safety in
Texas and are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in our
communities.
Many gangs in Texas continue to work with Mexican cartels to
smuggle drugs, weapons, people and cash across the border. The
relationships between some gangs and cartels have evolved over the past
year due in part to volatility and changes in cartel structures
and relationships in Mexico.
Of the incarcerated members of Tier 1 and Tier 2 gangs, more than
half are serving a sentence for a violent crime, including robbery (25
percent), homicide (13 percent), and assault/terroristic threat
(15 percent).
Texas-based gangs, gang members and their associates are active in
both human smuggling and human trafficking, which often includes sex
trafficking and compelling prostitution of adult and minor
victims. Gangs will continue to operate in human trafficking due to the
potential for large and renewable profits and the assumed low risk of
detection by law enforcement.
Tango Blast remains the state’s most significant gang threat. The
Tier 1 gangs in Texas are: Tango Blast and Tango cliques (more than
8,200 members); Texas Syndicate (more than 4,400 members); Texas Mexican
Mafia (more than 5,500 members), and Barrio Azteca (more than 2,000
members).
NYTimes | A
Duke University professor criticized for an online post comparing
blacks and Asians said Monday that it's not racist to discuss what he
sees as differences in how the groups have performed in the U.S. over
the past few decades.
Political
science professor Jerry Hough has been sharply criticized for a
response he posted in the online comments section of the New York Times
editorial "How Racism Doomed Baltimore," dated May 9. The 80-year-old
professor, who is white, has been on an unrelated academic leave for the
past school year.
In
his online comments, Hough wrote that Asians have been described as
"yellow races" and faced discrimination in 1965 at least as bad as
blacks experienced. Of Asian-Americans, he wrote: "They didn't feel
sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard."
The
posting goes on to say: "I am a professor at Duke University. Every
Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes
their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new
name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration."
In
an email Monday to The Associated Press, Hough defended his comments
but said it's difficult to be subtle in a post on a newspaper's comments
section with a limited word count.
"I
only regret the sloppiness in saying every Asian and nearly every
black," he wrote in the email. "I absolutely do not think it racist to
ask why black performance on the average is not as good as Asian on
balance, when the Asians started with the prejudices against the 'yellow
races' shown in the concentration camps for the Japanese."
Hough
described himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s
who supported integration. In his lifetime, he said, he's observed
prejudice ranging from the World War II-era internment camps for
Japanese-Americans to segregation in the South, and he's dismayed that
more progress hasn't been made.
"My purpose is to help achieve the battle of King's battle to overcome and create a melting pot America," he said.
dailymail |FoxNews.com
reported Monday that on February 25, Ms Chamberlin went on a public
Facebook thread and weighed in on a controversial article posted on
TheGrio.com condemning Patricia Arquette's Oscar speech, in which she
famously said that women deserve to get equal pay for equal work.
The
author of the opinion piece, writer and filmmaker Blue Telusma, who is
black, argued that African-Americans and members of the LGBTQ community
do not owe white women any assistance.
‘I
LITERALLY cry and lose sleep over this,’ Ms Chamberlin wrote in
reaction to the op-ed, revealing that she had been raped as a child.
‘What this article did was tell me that I'm not aloud [sic] to ask for
help… Because I am a WHITE woman… So when I read this article… you do
understand what that does to me, right? It kills me…’
In
response, a commenter by the name Sai Grundy, who used the same photo
as the BU professor on her now-private Twitter account, poked fun at the
married mother of two, writing: ‘I literally cry… While we literally
die.’
When
Mrs Chamberlin replied that she ‘got’ Grundy’s message and assured her
that she can now take her ‘claws’ out, the African-American studies
professor unleashed a torrent of vitriol in the form of a foul-mouth
message partially written in caps.
‘^^THIS IS
THE S**T I AM TALKING ABOUT. WHY DO YOU GET TO PLAY THE VICTIM EVERY
TIME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OUR ALLIES WANT TO POINT OUT RACISM. my CLAWS??
Do you see how you just took an issue that WASNT about you, MADE it
about you, and NOW want to play the victim when I take the time to
explain to you some s**t that is literally $82,000 below my pay grade?
And then you promote your #whitegirltears like that’s some badge you get
to wear… YOU BENEFIT FROM RACISM. WE’RE EXPLAINING THAT TO YOU and
you’re vilifying my act of intellectual altruism by saying i stuck my
“claws” into you?’
Chamberlin
tried to extricate herself from the tense exchange by writing to
Grundy: ‘'I am choosing to "exit" this conversation, You don't know me. I
don't know you. It's really as simple as that.'
But Grundy continued piling on and ended up having the last word in the heated back-and-forth.
'^^YOU
DONT HAVE TO KNOW ME. what you SHOULD know is that you don't know more
about this issue than margenalized women. And instead of entering this
conversation with an iota of humility about that, you have made it a
celebration of your false sense of victimization. no [sic] go cry
somewhere. snce that's what you do.'
Chamberlin signed off with the words: 'Will do.'
Ms
Grundy wrote in a separate comment in the thread: 'am I mocking her
tears or am I saying that her tears are meaningless displays of emotions
because they don't reflect at ALL an intention to understand the issue
from the prospective [sic] of women of color and queer women.'
The entire conversation has since been removed from Facebook, along with Saida Grundy's social media account.
WaPo | For $9, you will soon be able to buy an insanely cheap computer the size of a credit card
that runs Linux and comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB
storage, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. While that’s enough computing
power to surf the Web, play video games, check e-mail and use word
processing software, the real potential is what DIY innovators, hackers
and inventors will do with this cheap computing platform once they
integrate it into other projects.
The world’s first $9 computer — known
as C.H.I.P. — won’t be available for shipping until early 2016. For
now, it’s still only a Kickstarter project with nearly a month to go –
but the promise and potential of a crazy cheap computer is so alluring
that the Oakland, Calif. company behind the project – Next Thing Co. – has already raised more than $925,000 from more than 18,000 backers in just a few days, easily blowing past the $50,000 they had hoped to raise via Kickstarter.
C.H.I.P. comes from the same innovation oeuvre as the $35 Raspberry Pi — a
credit-card size computer that is cheap, portable, highly programmable
and highly connectable. So if Raspberry Pi has managed to attract a worldwide user community
at a price point of $35, you can just imagine what the lower-cost, more
powerful C.H.I.P. might be able to do once it attracts a critical mass
of users.
WaPo | There is a race to build quantum computers, and (as far as we know)
it isn’t the NSA that is in the lead. Competing are big tech companies
such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft; start-ups; defense contractors;
and universities. One Canadian start-up says that it has already
developed a first version of a quantum computer. A physicist at Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands, Ronald Hanson, told Scientific American
that he will be able to make the building blocks of a universal quantum
computer in just five years, and a fully-functional demonstration
machine in a little more than a decade.
These
will change the balance of power in business and cyber-warfare. They
have profound national-security implications, because they are the
technology equivalent of a nuclear weapon.
Let me first explain what a quantum computer is and where we are.
In
a classical computer, information is represented in bits, binary
digits, each of which can be a 0 or 1. Because they only have only two
values, long sequences of 0s and 1s are necessary to form a number or to
do a calculation. A quantum bit (called a qbit), however, can hold a
value of 0 or 1 or both values at the same time — a superposition
denoted as “0+1.” The power of a quantum computer increases
exponentially with the number of qubits. Rather than doing computations
sequentially as classical computers do, quantum computers can solve
problems by laying out all of the possibilities simultaneously and
measuring the results.
Imagine being able to open a combination
lock by trying every possible number and sequence at the same time.
Though the analogy isn’t perfect — because of the complexities in
measuring the results of a quantum calculation — it gives you an idea of
what is possible.
There are many complexities in building a
quantum computer: challenges in finding the best materials from which to
generate entangled photon pairs; new types of logic gates and their
fabrication on computer chips; creation and control of qubits; designs
for storage mechanisms; and error detection. But breakthroughs are being
announced every month. IBM, for example, has just announced
that it has found a new way to detect and measure quantum errors and
has designed a new qubit circuit that, in sufficient numbers, will form
the large chips that quantum computers will need.
Most
researchers I have spoken to say that it is a matter of when — not
whether — quantum computing will be practical. Some believe that this
will be as soon as five years; others say 20 years. IBM said
in April that we’ve entered a golden era of quantum-computing research,
and predicted that the company would be the first to develop a
practical quantum computer.
academia | Abstract: For the past two decades, it has widely been assumed by
linguists that there is a single computational operation, Merge, which
is unique to language, distinguishing it from other cognitive domains.
The intention of this paper is to progress the discussion of language
evolution in two ways: (i) survey what the ethological record reveals
about the uniqueness of the human computational system, and (ii)
explore how syntactic theories account for what ethology may determine
to be human-specific. It is shown that the operation Label, not Merge,
constitutes the evolutionary novelty which distinguishes human language
from non-human computational systems; a proposal lending weight to a
Weak Continuity Hypothesis and leading to the formation of what is
termed Computational Ethology. Some directions for future ethological
research are suggested.
Keywords: Minimalism; Labeling effects; cognome; animal cognition; formal language theory; language evolution
Why are you humans mesmerized by the lurid compelling pictures,
the practical, pretend, and photoshopped other-worldliness of the demi-humans in the pantheon of celebrity?
What purpose is served by these larger, more
perfect, and more colorful avatars that cycle above your pedestrian peasant lives?
Is celebrity-worship a sign
of the downfall of western civilization, or, more of the
same augmented by new, pervasive, and not entirely understood cognitive distributive media?
Do celebrities serve the same purpose in fin d'siecle western culture as the pantheon of gods did in Greek and
Roman culture and the saints did in Roman Catholic culture?
hbdchick |you will never understand human biodiversity without first turning an hbd-eye on yourself.
before i elaborate on that, a small exercise. indulge me.
at the end of this sentence, when i ask you to, i want you to raise
your eyes from your monitor (or smartphone or tablet or whatever device
you’re using), glance around for a few seconds, and then come back here.
okay: go!
back? great.
now, i don’t know exactly what you saw during your brief adventure away, but what i do
know is that when you looked around your room or office or the coffee
shop or your own private tropical island (d*mn you!), you experienced
seeing a smooth, undisturbed, flowing picture of your surroundings — it
was a video-like experience (hopefully not a shaky cam-like one! if so,
get to a doctor, quick!). that experience is a false one, created by your brain to make life easier for you. what happens, in fact, is that each and every time
we move our gaze from one object or scene to another, in the
intervening nanoseconds, we are effectively blind. we don’t “see”
anything for those split seconds. the reason we don’t experience what
would presumably be a very disturbing and confusing one — the lights
going off and on all day long! — is because our brains fool us. the
brain interpolates
the visual data captured via eyeballs, etc., and presents it all to its
owner (user?) in a nice, even — but unreal — picture of what that
individual “sees.”
cool, huh? yeah.
the reason i bring this up is just to illustrate how our brains are not really to be trusted.
fantastic, wonderful, unfathomable organ! — but one that fools us. a
lot! it deceives us so that we don’t go around bumping into things all
day long (the saccadic masking mentioned above). it deceives us
(deceives itself!) so that we can decieve others. it probably fools each of us into believing that we are discrete individuals — that we are or have “selves.” h*ck! it even looks like our consciousness is not a stream but more like rhythmic pulses. all for good evolutionary reasons, of course. but, still, there it is: the brain is a trickster.
once you realize this about the human brain — that it’s an indispensible but untrustworthy organ — all of the cognitive biases and dissonances that we suffer from start to make sense. humans are not rational creatures. we are capable of some
amount of logic and rational thought (some more than others), but more
often than not, our “reason” serves as an excuse generator for our
innate drives, desires, and proclivities.
the next thing you need to know — and you really have to internalize
this — is that all of those drives and desires and proclivities are
innate. all behavioral traits are heritable
to some degree or another, which means that genes are behind them, and
which means that there’s not much any of us can do to change our
natures. for instance, there prolly aren’t specific genes that will
make a person a christian versus a muslim, but there are definitely genes “for” religiosity. which
religion a person with “genes for” religious belief follows will
obviously depend to a large degree on the culture in which he is
immersed, but persons with “genes for” religious belief will tend to be religious or spiritual somehow.
all behavioral traits are heritable. and, so, you cannot change people or peoples — not fundamentally.people are what they are.
you are what you are, and so most of your thoughts and conclusions and
feelings about life and the world around you are expressions of your
innate traits. mine, too. (don’t worry. i’ll get to that.) and let’s
be honest: innate traits and a deceiving brain are no foundations for uncovering the truth.
we cannot rely on our gut instincts in trying to uncover the facts
about reality or to (consciously) understand how the world works. the
only way around this problem of our lyin’, cheatin’, no-good brains is
to rely on science and its finding. of course, since science is
conducted by humans, we run into all those cognitive biases, etc.,
again. but with enough effort, i think we can eventually
discover some truths. either that or space stations will some day start
falling out of the sky, and we’ll know we’re doing it wrong.
ndpr.nd.edu | The idea that groups have minds was popular in the late-19th and early-20th
centuries. The group mind was posited as a force that influenced and
dominated individual agency and provided an explanation for various
types of human behavior. But such explanations were deemed mysterious,
and, with the rise of behaviorism and operationalism, the idea fell out
of favor. But interest in group mentality has experienced a rebirth over
the past few decades. Within philosophy, Margaret Gilbert's work (e.g.,
1989, 2004, 2013) has done a great deal to bring attention to the ways
in which individuals might form a single unit of intentional agency, and
Christian List and Philip Pettit's recent book Group Agency
(2011) argues that there are genuine group mental states that cannot be
reduced to the mental states of individuals within the group. Outside of
philosophy, the study of distributed cognition is a growing area of
research in cognitive science, and the hypothesis of group mind is
gaining traction in economics, social psychology, organizational theory,
and politics. Recent theories of group mentality, however, are thought
to be just as mysterious as their 19th and early-20th century ancestors. Macrocognition goes
a long way to demystifying the idea. It provides the most sustained and
detailed defense of group minds available in the literature today. Macrocognition
arvix | "Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state.
Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes
contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers
can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology,
thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own
brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows
cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other
cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance
powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition.
Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend
cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital
databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our
'Cognitive Commons,' in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology
can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity
inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language,
the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely
instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think
and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental
states, and on our very nature. Cognition Distributed
NYTimes | This
week, during a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University,
President Obama lambasted the media, and in particular Fox News, for
creating false, destructive narratives about the poor that paint them
broadly as indolent and pathological.
“Over
the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make
folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And
I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t
want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.”
He continued:
“And,
look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you
watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will
find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them.
[Laughter.] They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama
phone — [laughter] — or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative —
right? — that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview
of a waitress — which is much more typical — who’s raising a couple of
kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.”
MSNBC’s
Joe Scarborough took umbrage. After saying that “the arrogance of it
all is staggering,” and that he was “a little embarrassed” for the
president, Scarborough demanded of his befuddled panel: “What about the
specific clip about Fox News calling poor people leeches, sponges and
lazy? Have you ever heard that on Fox News?” One panelist responded,
“No, I have not.” Then Scarborough opened the question to them all: “Has
anybody ever heard that on Fox News?”
Well, yes.
In 2004, Bill O’Reilly, arguably the face of Fox News, said:
“You gotta look people in the eye and tell ‘em they’re irresponsible
and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is,
ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get
educated and work hard. Period. Period.”
In 2012, O’Reilly listed what he called the “true causes of poverty” including “poor education, addiction, irresponsible behavior and laziness.”
In 2014, during the week that marked the 50th anniversary of L.B.J.’s “War on Poverty,” O’Reilly again said
that “true poverty” (as opposed to make-believe poverty?) “is being
driven by personal behavior,” which included, according to him,
“addictive behavior, laziness, apathy.”
Even
though the president didn’t say that Fox News specifically used the
words “sponge,” “leeches” and “lazy,” O’Reilly has indeed, repeatedly,
called poor people lazy, and the subtext of his remarks is that many
poor people are pathologically and undeservedly dependent on the
government dole.
9/29 again
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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