It takes direct aim at the thesis of Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in the 2011 bestseller, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The paper's already making waves. On his Twitter page Harvard's Niall Ferguson calls it "hugely important."
In the paper Taleb, the author of The Black Swan,
the blockbuster book that alerted economists to the importance of
unexpected events, argues that "Violence is much more severe than it
seems from conventional analyses and the prevailing 'long peace' theory
which claims that violence has declined."
Contrary
to current discussions, all statistical pictures thus obtained show
that 1) the risk of violent conflict has not been decreasing, but is
rather underestimated by techniques relying on naive year-on-year
changes in the mean, or using sample mean as an estimator of the true
mean of an extremely fat-tailed phenomenon; 2) armed conflicts have
memoryless inter-arrival times, thus incompatible with the idea of a
time trend. Our analysis uses 1) raw data, as recorded and estimated by
historians; 2) a naive transformation, used by certain historians and
sociologists, which rescales past conflicts and casualties with respect
to the actual population; 3) more importantly, a log transformation to
account for the fact that the number of casualties in a conflict cannot
be larger than the world population.
The authors base their article on the methods of extreme value theory.
alternet | Mega-family superstar, Josh Duggar, has resigned his position as lobbyist for the Family Research Council after In Touch Magazine
published a police report confirming that JimBob and Michelle Duggar of
TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” fame’s oldest son confessed to molesting
several female minors in 2002 - 2003.
According to
the 2006 police report, Duggar family patriarch, JimBob actively covered
up Josh’s confession and neglected to notify authorities or provide
professional help for Josh and/or his victims. To make matters worse,
Josh’s pregnant wife, Anna Duggar, believes her husband is a changed man
and continues - along with the couple’s three young children - to live
with an admitted child sex offender. And to top it all off, the Duggar
family publicly declared that God used the tragic situation to draw
their family closer to Him.
Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what a mess! As a former Quiverfull
believer, I recognize in this Duggar family debacle several essential
beliefs which are widely held amongst fundamentalist Christians which
shackle True Believer’s™ common sense to an outdated and irrelevant
god-myth and seriously impair their ability to make sound moral choices.
JimBob and Michelle Duggar live in a fantasy world of their
own making, and they believe that, just like in the fairy tales, they
all will live happily ever after. While confessing to not being a perfect family,
and admitting their family faces challenges and struggles every day,
the Duggars are convinced “that dark and difficult time caused [the
family] to seek God like never before,” which in their minds, means the
molestation really wasn’t so bad, and in fact, has turned out to be a
kind of blessing in disguise since each one of them “drew closer to
God,” as a result of “something so terrible.”
According
to the “eternally happy ending” story which the Duggars are telling
themselves, the little girls whom Josh allegedly groped and fondled are
not victims or even survivors of sexual abuse, but are instead equated
with the “highly favored” Old Testament Joseph whose brothers sold him
into slavery: What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.
Suffering in this life is insignificant - even trifling - compared to the faith-strengthening
and soul-saving purpose of trials which will be richly rewarded with
eternal life in Heaven … so praise the fucking Lord for whatever misery
He sends to you and your children.
agingrebel | The unnamed Cossack’s account is layered with and given the same
credibility as ludicrous statements made by Waco police spokesman W.
Patrick Swanton. The Post also has discovered the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report, “OMGs and the Military
2014,” which was published last July 1 and first reported here last
July 11. The Bandidos are mentioned 26 times in the report. The Cossacks
are not mentioned once. The Iron Order, the “law abiding motorcycle
club” is mentioned eight times. The Post uses the ATF report to
substantiate a claim by the Waco police that “the Bandidos, the most
notorious biker gang in Texas,” are arming themselves “with grenades and
C4 explosives.” Not some Bandidos but “the Bandidos.”
The Post’s story raises at least as many questions as it answers.
For example, the Post states that two large packs of outlaw bikers travelled to Waco. The Post
says there were 70 Cossacks and 100 Bandidos but it neglects to mention
how many Texas Highway Patrol cruisers and how many Texas Department of
Public Safety helicopters followed the packs. Anyone who has ever
ridden in a large pack probably has the same question. Where were the
helicopters? Where were the police who followed the big packs into the
Central Texas Market Place shopping center?
According to the Post, the Bandidos made a disturbance at
and shot up their own event. Whether the Bandidos is the preeminent club
in Texas or not, the club thinks it is. The COCI meeting had at least
the tacit approval of the Bandidos and most one percenter motorcycle
clubs in the world, when placed in a similar situation, would assume
responsibility for keeping the event violence free.
According to the Post: “A Bandido with a patch identifying
him as sergeant-at-arms of the same chapter threw a punch at Richard
Matthew Jordan II, 31, known as ‘Richie,’ who was from Pasadena, Tex.
Jordan punched the guy back. ‘“At that point in time, the sergeant in
arms shot Richie point-blank,’ the Cossack said.”
Really? In front of at least 22 sworn peace officers? In broad
daylight? In a location that was obviously well-surveilled by video
cameras?
“Then all the Bandidos standing in the parking lot started pulling
guns and shooting at us,” the Cossack chapter president told the Post. Really? Without a thought to what their legal defense would be? In broad daylight in front of numerous police?
The anonymous Cossack told the Post, “Three of our guys went
down instantly. They caught a couple more that tripped and fell, and
Bandidos were shooting at them.” In other words, the police stood and
watched as Bandidos executed five Cossacks? Does that pass the smell
test?
Talk
Presumably, the Post verified that its anonymous source was
actually a Cossack club officer and an eyewitness. But it is unclear how
he escaped and it is equally unclear how and why he started talking to a
freelance writer named Tim Madigan.
The Post’s story reads like a federal racketeering
indictment so the biggest question of all is whether the source is
working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Has
he been debriefed by the ATF? Is he under arrest now? Is he working for
the government now? Was he working for the government eight days ago?
Why is this man talking?
guardian | Every day, indigent Americans are ripped from their homes and their
communities and forced into jails of varying degrees of dysfunction and
decay. The US supreme court ruled three decades ago that it is
unconstitutional to imprison people because they cannot afford to pay
debts. The ruling, however, hasn’t ended the practice of jailing people
for unpaid government fees and fines.
In 2010, the ACLU found
that courts across the nation regularly deny Americans proper
consideration of their financial position and throw them into jail over
fines they could never hope to pay. As a result, local jails nationwide
have transformed into modern-day “debtors’ prisons” overcrowded with indigent people whose only punishable offense is being poor. The effects are devastating.
This
growing phenomenon funnels poor Americans into the criminal justice
system with sentences that disrupt their lives, too often trapping them
in a damning cycle of poverty and incarceration that far outlasts their
initial conviction. These practices have a disparate impact on
communities of color in the United States.
Consider 19-year-old Kevin Thompson,
a black teenager in DeKalb County, Georgia, who was jailed simply
because he was unable to pay $838 in fines and fees associated with a
routine traffic citation. Though only half of DeKalb County’s residents
are black, nearly all probationers jailed for failure to pay by its recorders court, which handles minor offenses like traffic misdemeanors, are black. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mr Thompson and reached a settlement
with the county that included a number of new reform measures aimed at
preventing others from facing the same unconstitutional treatment.
Jail sentences like those imposed on Mr Thompson and Mr Staten aren’t just unjust – they’re also costly. The ACLU’s 2010 report In for a Penny
found that individuals incarcerated for failure to pay often cost the
state more than they owe. The report identifies one individual whose
incarceration in New Orleans cost more than six times his $498 debt. So
why are we stuck with this senseless system?
NYTimes |
Illinois is facing one of the worst fiscal crises of any state in
recent decades, largely because it has mismanaged its pension system.
The shortfalls could potentially mean sharply higher taxes and cuts in spending. And even though the state’s highest court just this month threw out
a landmark plan to cut worker and retiree benefits, some lawmakers say
they may have to find another way to make those reductions as well.
Illinois’s
problems resonate well beyond its borders. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and
Kentucky are among the states confronting similar problems, and to
them, Illinois is a model of what can go wrong — with political
intransigence, mounting costs and a complicated legal terrain.
The
state faces a range of problems. Illinois has one of the worst-funded
pension systems in the nation. Chicago also has a pension crisis, leading Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade its credit rating to junk status on May 12, potentially threatening the city’s ability to borrow.
And the state faces an expected budget deficit of $6 billion,
which it needs to address quickly. With just days before a legislative
deadline, the new Republican governor, who ran on cutting costs and
holding down taxes, is at odds with Democrats who hold a veto-proof
supermajority in the legislature.
“Really, it’s not a clear road map at this point,” the governor, Bruce Rauner, said of solving the pension crisis.
“We
have to make big decisions,” Mr. Rauner told reporters. “The state is
in dire financial straits. Chicago is in big, big challenges. And
everybody’s a little bit on edge.”
Courts in other states, including Colorado and Minnesota,
have sometimes approved measured pension cuts for public workers,
especially for the benefits that current workers have not yet earned.
And in Detroit and Stockton, Calif., federal judges have said pensions could be cut in a bankruptcy.
reuters | Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.
The film "A Beautiful Mind" was loosely based on his battle with schizophrenia.
Nash
received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950 and spent much of his career
there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He
began experiencing what he described as "mental disturbances" in 1959
after marrying Alicia, a MIT physics major who was then pregnant,
according to his biography on the Nobel Prize website.
"I was disturbed
in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years," Nash said in
a 2004 video interview on the Nobel website.
He
stressed that his was an unusual case, as he was able eventually stop
taking medication and return to normal activities and his research.
The
2001 movie represented an "artistic" take on his experience, giving
insight into mental illness but not accurately portraying the nature of
his delusions, Nash said in the interview.
"John's remarkable
achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and
scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in
game theory," Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said
in a statement.
"The story of his
life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled
at their courage in the face of daunting challenges," he added.
Nash and his wife were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, New Jersey police said.
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 scientiŽc 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 profiŽt 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.
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