Summer Reading for College Guys

 

[UPDATE: Click here for the new Summer Reading list for 2014!]
 

Esquire magazine has a list of "75 Books Every Man Should Read" on its website. I have excerpted from that list the books that you really should read, as soon as possible. I think that every undergraduate (and particularly male undergraduates) would enjoy/benefit from reading these books. Let me put it this way -- if you don't take pleasure in reading any one of the following books, there's something lacking in you.

I'm serious about that last comment, by the way. Somehow people have been led to believe that their subjective response to a literary work is all that matters, and that if they do not like a book, well, that means that there is something wrong with that book. This is not so. If you read and do not appreciate a book from this list, then there is probably something wrong with you. I suggest that you seriously contemplate the defects in your intellect and/or character revealed by your reaction.

These aren't in any particular order -- for my personal favorites, start the list from the bottom up.

1. Deliverance, James Dickey

2. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

3. Hell's Angels, Hunter S. Thompson

 

4. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren

5. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

6. The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara

7. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

9. This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolfe

10. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

11. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre

12. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe

13. American Tabloid, James Ellroy

14. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Advanced

1. Dubliners, James Joyce
2. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
4. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
5. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
6. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

 

 Man Reading, John Singer Sargent

Rise of the Warrior Cop

WSJ

On Jan. 4 of last year, a local narcotics strike force conducted a raid on the Ogden, Utah, home of Matthew David Stewart at 8:40 p.m. The 12 officers were acting on a tip from Mr. Stewart's former girlfriend, who said that he was growing marijuana in his basement. Mr. Stewart awoke, naked, to the sound of a battering ram taking down his door. Thinking that he was being invaded by criminals, as he later claimed, he grabbed his 9-millimeter Beretta pistol.

The police say that they knocked and identified themselves, though Mr. Stewart and his neighbors said they heard no such announcement. Mr. Stewart fired 31 rounds, the police more than 250. Six of the officers were wounded, and Officer Jared Francom was killed. Mr. Stewart himself was shot twice before he was arrested. He was charged with several crimes, including the murder of Officer Francom.

The police found 16 small marijuana plants in Mr. Stewart's basement. There was no evidence that Mr. Stewart, a U.S. military veteran with no prior criminal record, was selling marijuana. Mr. Stewart's father said that his son suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and may have smoked the marijuana to self-medicate.

Early this year, the Ogden city council heard complaints from dozens of citizens about the way drug warrants are served in the city. As for Mr. Stewart, his trial was scheduled for next April, and prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. But after losing a hearing last May on the legality of the search warrant, Mr. Stewart hanged himself in his jail cell.

 

Really dude? A machine gun? And do the cheesy moustaches serve some kind of tactical purpose?

 

 

 On a related note, here's a news story on home invaders pretending to be police.

 

H.M. (Henry Molaison) -- anterograde amnesia

This is a very well written and interesting review of a recent book on patient H.M. (Henry Molaison), whom you cannot help but to learn about in Intro Psych, Biopsych, Neuropsych, etc. Hint: He's the guy without the hippocampus who couldn't form new memories. See also this post, which suggests that HM's doctors probably caused his unnecessary brain damage..

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Something like this happened to the most famous case of amnesia in 20th-century science, a man known only as ‘H.M.’ until his death in 2008. When he was 27, a disastrous brain operation destroyed his ability to form new memories, and he lived for the next 55 years in a rolling thirty-second loop of awareness, a ‘permanent present tense’. During this time he was subjected to thousands of hours of tests, of which naturally he had no recall; he provided data for hundreds of scientific papers, and became the subject of a book (Memory’s Ghost by Philip Hilts) and a staple of popular science journalism; by the 1990s digital images of his uniquely disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory. Since his death his brain has been shaved into 2401 slices, each 70 microns thick, compared in one account to the slivers of ginger served with sushi. Suzanne Corkin, an MIT neuroscientist, first met him in 1962 and after 1980 became his lead investigator and ‘sole keeper’. Permanent Present Tense is her account of Henry Gustave Molaison – his full identity can finally be revealed – and the historic contribution he made to science.

Corkin had a reputation for strict policing of access to Henry, a charge she happily concedes: ‘I did not want him to become a sideshow attraction – the man without a memory.’ After the death of his mother, his last thirty years were spent at a Connecticut nursing home in strict anonymity, with staff sworn to secrecy and filming prohibited. More than a hundred carefully screened researchers were admitted over the years to perform brain scans and cognitive tests, but were never told his name. Corkin’s lucid, well-organised telling of Henry’s story merges intimate case history with an account of the current scientific understanding and how it was reached.

Henry’s surgery was undertaken in an era of freewheeling experiment in pursuit of the idea that memories were indelible snapshots of sense experience, stored in chronological sequence like the frames of a celluloid film. Over the course of his decades as a test subject, the field was colonised by information theory, the processes of memory divided like those of a computer into encoding, storage and retrieval. Now the post-mortem scanning and mapping of Henry’s brain is exposing the artificiality of these divisions and revealing complexities that no computer can emulate.

 

Henry had his first epileptic episode in 1936, at the age of ten; by 1953 his seizures had become increasingly frequent and debilitating. His family doctor referred him to William Beecher Scoville, a leading neurosurgeon at Yale Medical School. When massive doses of medication failed to quell his attacks and EEGs revealed no obvious locus of brain damage, Scoville suggested a novel surgical procedure. Using a trepanning drill he had constructed himself from auto parts, he cut two coin-sized holes in the skull, ‘doorways to Henry’s brain’, and suctioned out most of his medial temporal lobes, the front half of the hippocampus and most of the amygdala. After recovery, Henry’s seizures were significantly reduced, but it soon become apparent that the operation had vacuumed away any recollection of his hospital stay, and indeed most of the significant events of the previous few years. Catastrophically, it had also created a global anterograde amnesia: the loss of the ability to form new memories of any kind.

The holes that Scoville cut to expose Henry’s brain to his instruments stand as a grisly metaphor for the science that underpinned the operation: small patches of illumination surrounded by an uncharted expanse of darkness. In 1953 the hippocampus was believed merely to support the sense of smell: its role in memory was unsuspected. Yet neurosurgery seemed to be banishing the darkness at an astonishing rate. The inspiration for Scoville’s work was the Canadian surgeon and researcher Wilder Penfield, who had pioneered surgical interventions for epilepsy at McGill University in the 1930s. Penfield had discovered that by moving an electrode over the brains of patients while they were conscious under local anaesthesia he could sometimes identify the source of their seizures. But the technique also produced some unexpected, even miraculous responses. As the electrode passed across the temporal lobes, patients would twitch, vocalise and describe strange sensations, and some would experience intense ‘flashbulb’ memories such as childhood scenes or long-forgotten songs.

By plotting the sites that provoked these responses, Penfield generated brain maps that led him to new theories of ‘functional localisation’. Lavishly funded, first by the grateful families of patients whose epilepsy he had relieved and later by the Rockefeller Foundation, he expanded from remedial surgery into an intoxicating programme of research, teaching and experiment. His operating theatre was customised with cameras and EEG facilities, and he worked intensively with his ‘memory patients’ to harvest their recollections and match them to the moment of their formation. All experience, he came to believe, was perfectly preserved in memory, and perfectly recoverable: a ‘library of many volumes’, organised in an orderly record along ‘the thread of time’.

Penfield’s work suggested to Scoville that Henry’s seizures might be localised in his temporal lobes, but it also exposed the risks of operating on them. By 1953 Penfield had established a standard procedure for epileptic patients: the partial temporal lobectomy, in which the cortex of the temporal lobe was removed along with deeper tissue from the amygdala and the hippocampus. The procedure’s success rate was impressive, but in two patients, ‘F.C.’ and ‘P.B.’, it had for some reason produced severe amnesia. Extensive cognitive testing on the pair had begun to sketch the role of the hippocampus in memory formation; but should these alarming and unpredicted cases have stayed Scoville’s hand? Corkin accepts that the dangers and abuses of psychosurgery were becoming more conspicuous by the early 1950s but cautions against condemnation with hindsight: ‘Scoville arguably saved Henry’s life, even if he took his memory.’

It seems Scoville’s judgment on himself was harsher. His grandson, writing about Henry’s life and death for Esquire in 2010, characterised Scoville in his early career as a risk-taker with a love of fast cars, a history of daredevil medical-school stunts, a disdain for Freudian theory and bottomless confidence that the brain sciences were on the point of overturning it: the stereotype of the postwar neurosurgeon. But he never repeated the procedure, and in later life admitted it had been ‘a tragic mistake’. By the 1970s he was arguing against neural implants on the grounds that ‘we are more aware of the disastrous effects that sometimes occur in neurosurgery.’

For the long remainder of his life Henry was blandly unaware of his own story. He would readily volunteer that he had ‘a lot of trouble remembering things’; if pressed, he might speculate that ‘I have possibly had an operation or something.’ His short span of consciousness led to repetitive behaviour – making the same observation repeatedly, or mechanically eating two lunches in a row – but his conversation was characterised by a gentle wit and quizzical, punning exchanges that seemed to test every statement for possible meanings. (When Corkin commented on Henry’s love of crosswords by dubbing him ‘the puzzle king’, he responded: ‘I’m puzzling!’) He had occasional episodes of frustration, anger or panic, but was usually good-natured and accepting of the scene around him. In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future. He was certainly more content than his most extreme opposite, Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Shereshevsky’s inability to forget became a life-destroying torment. ‘The trail of memory can feel like a heavy chain,’ Corkin observes, ‘keeping us locked into the identities we have created for ourselves.’ Henry was, by contrast, ‘free from the moorings that keep us anchored in time’, though Corkin also wonders whether his lack of anxiety and emotional churn might have been related to the partial loss of his amygdala.

 

It was fortunate that Henry’s condition allowed him to tolerate without complaint the lifetime of intensive testing that makes up a large part of Corkin’s book: physical scans that progressed from EEG to CT to MRI, and cognitive tests of everything from memory and attention span to reaction, IQ, image recognition, maze-learning, reflex conditioning, perceptual learning, pain tolerance and language fluency. Although he responded to each test as if it were his first, he may have developed a vague undertow of déjà vu; he once remarked to a researcher with characteristic drollery: ‘You just live and learn. I’m living, you’re learning.’ Yet some aspects of his inner life remained mysterious. Did he, for example, remember his dreams? He would often recount them if prompted on awakening, but Corkin suspects that they were confabulated: real dreams must have taken place beyond his thirty-second window of recall. EEG monitoring showed that he reported dreams from both REM and non-REM periods of sleep, and his brain damage may have meant that he never dreamed at all.

Unwittingly snatching ‘dreams’ from the recesses of his waking mind was consistent with the ways Henry, always intelligent and perceptive, became adept at filling the gaps in his memory with hunches and canny guesswork. Sometimes this would baffle his researchers: one day he astonished Corkin by knowing that he was in the MIT laboratories, only to reveal that he had deduced his location from a passing student’s sweatshirt. When asked a question beyond the reach of his memory, he would often pause and then reply, ‘I’m having an argument with myself’: a range of possible answers would come to him, whether from intuition, partial recall or informed guesswork, but he would have no means of deciding between them. Although he was unable to recall specific events, regular routines would prompt him in ways that eluded conscious recognition: walking a familiar route, he might turn the correct way without knowing he had done so. A situation that recurred often enough seemed to create a ghostly outline. In 1977, after the death of Henry’s father, a lab researcher noticed that he kept in his wallet a handwritten note to himself – ‘Dad’s dead’ – to anchor his recurring feeling of absence.

Over five decades, Henry established himself as the experimentum crucis for an emerging model of mind; as Corkin puts it, ‘the purity of his disorder made him a perfect focus for the investigation of memory mechanisms in the human brain.’ Time and again he provided proof that memory was a complex of circuits and systems, each underpinned by substrates in different brain areas. His short-term memory functioned normally, except that he lacked any means of preserving it; it could be extended briefly beyond its thirty-second span with tasks such as repetitions and calculations that used his working memory, or ‘mental workspace’. His episodic memory was almost non-existent even of his life before the operation: it turned out to be a bricolage of familiar routines, locales and characters rather than specific incidents. His semantic memory – facts about the world, as opposed to incidents in his life – was stronger: while he could not recall any of his childhood birthdays, he could rehearse the events of the Wall Street crash of 1929. He could acquire new forms of procedural memory such as motor skills, and adapted happily to using a walking frame in later life. He showed that declarative memory – the storage and retrieval of facts – was dependent on the hippocampus. Non-declarative memory – ‘knowing how’, rather than ‘knowing that’ – functioned independently of the temporal lobe structures he had lost.

Henry’s death in 2008 triggered an elaborately planned logistical operation. His body was transferred from its hearse to an MRI scanner, where a vast 11 gigabytes of brain images were taken, then rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital for autopsy, where Scoville’s trepanation holes were still faintly visible as the skull was lifted away from ‘the most famous brain in the world’. After 53 hours of dissection, live-streamed on the web, its slices were frozen and preserved in a block of gelatin for microscopic examination; a digital version rotates in high-resolution 3D on a dedicated website. But this neuronal level of resolution is no longer expected to hold all the answers. Wilder Penfield’s vision of each cell ‘containing’ a memory or percept has long been abandoned, and the computer-based model of domain-specific storage is increasingly qualified by the language of ‘emergent properties’ and the ‘system as a whole’. As Corkin observes, ‘we have learned – initially from Henry – that memory does not reside in one spot in the brain.’

In life, too, the world’s most studied memory retained its inscrutable aspects. From time to time Henry would inexplicably form new memories: ‘little islands’, as Corkin calls them, ‘like driftwood washing up from an empty sea’. He would suddenly know what contact lenses were, or recall that Skylab was ‘a docking place in space’ where people were weightless. These anomalies may perhaps indicate that the vestigial stumps of Henry’s hippocampi were occasionally able to flicker into life; or they may hint at unknown levels of neuroplasticity that allow the brain to reassign tasks from its damaged regions; or they may simply have been inspired hunches, arrived at in ways impossible to describe or repeat, and invisible to the finest biological scrutiny.

Henry Molaison was memory’s sacrificial martyr, though he remained largely unaware both of his own suffering and of the ways in which it was being turned to the common good. In life, he was a stranger to himself; in death, his brain is the closest that science approaches to a saint’s relic. The triumphant unveiling of memory’s secrets is inseparable from the double violation of his identity: first the act by which his memory was taken, and then the long process whereby it became the property of all the world but him. Since his death, Corkin tells us, ‘I have dedicated my work to linking 55 years of rich behavioural data to what we will learn from his autopsied brain.’ Her account is not sentimental. She celebrated his birthdays and treasured the craft works he gave her, while recognising that he could never have felt more than ‘a vague sense of familiarity for me’. When colleagues commiserated with her after his death she reminded herself that ‘my interest in Henry … had always been primarily intellectual; how else would I explain why I had stood on a chair in the basement of Mass. General, ecstatic to see his brain removed expertly from his skull?’

Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies -- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour, And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a jack-knife, And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all. And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails, And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion With fleas that one never knew were there, Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know, Trekking off into the living world. You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now: So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep. But you do not wake up a month from then, two months A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God! Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters, —mothers and fathers don't die. And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?" Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!" Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun, Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother." To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak; Who do not drink their tea, though they always said Tea was such a comfort. Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries; they are not tempted. Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason; They are not taken in. Shout at them, get red in the face, rise, Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake them and yell at them; They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide back into their chairs. Your tea is cold now. You drink it standing up, And leave the house. Edna St. Vincent Millay

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered -- Ella Fitzgerald

Lyrics by Lorenz Hart

Men are not a new sensation
I've done pretty well I think
But this half-pint imitation
Put me on the blink

I'm wild again, beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

Couldn't sleep and wouldn't sleep
When love came and told me I shouldn't sleep
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I

Lost my heart, but what of it
He is cold I agree
He can laugh, but I love it
Although the laugh's on me

I'll sing to him, each spring to him
And long for the day when I'll cling to him
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

He's a fool and don't I know it
But a fool can have his charms
I'm in love and don't I show it
Like a babe in arms

Love's the same old sad sensation
Lately I've not slept a wink
Since this half-pint imitation
Put me on the blink

I've sinned a lot; I'm mean a lot
But I'm like sweet seventeen a lot
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

I'll sing to him, each spring to him
And worship the trousers that cling to him
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

When he talks, he is seeking
Words to get off his chest
Horizontally speaking, he's at his very best

Vexed again, perplexed again
Thank God, I can be oversexed again
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered am I

Wise at last, my eyes at last
Are cutting you down to your size at last
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more

Burned a lot, but learned a lot
And now you are broke, so you earned a lot
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more

Couldn't eat, was dyspeptic
Life was so hard to bear
Now my heart's antiseptic
Since you moved out of there

Romance, finis, your chance, finis
Those ants that invaded my pants, finis
Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered no more

Tibetan Sand Mandalas

I very much enjoyed reading this article on Tibetean Buddhist sand mandalas, exhibitions of which are now touring the U.S.

Until relatively recently, if you were not a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the chances of seeing a sand mandala were slim. Today, however, opportunities abound. In July alone, monks from the Atlanta-based Mystical Arts of Tibet will create shimmering, colorful sand mandalas in New York, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia. As I discovered earlier this year at the Mattie Kelly Arts Center of Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, even more entrancing than the end result is the three-to-five-day process: A slow-paced feast of religious ritual, symbolism, performance and temporal art.

It begins with sound: Preternaturally low, vibrating notes energizing the air like the complex tones of a pipe organ. They emanate from nine Tibetan Buddhist monks dressed in dark red and golden saffron, eyes lowered. Punctuated by the wail of horns and the clash of cymbals, their rhythmic chanting dispels harmful spirits and invites the blessing of the Buddha—for it is here that they will build him a palace.

When the senior monk, or vajra master, steps forward, he visualizes the symbolic rendering of that divine abode. The chanting then drops away, the horns, cymbals and drums are stored, and the monks embark on a transfixing exercise in memory, precision and what Buddhists refer to as mindfulness, a state of being present in the moment.

Each manifestation of the Buddha has its own particular design, and they always begin by drawing the axes in the four cardinal directions using chalked string that has been blessed. With large wooden compasses, small metal calipers, and lots of rulers and pencils, they then create an explosion of radiating spokes, overlapping circles, concentric squares and parallel lines. Just when the confusion seems overwhelming, a monk wipes away the excess chalk guides, and an elegant blueprint of the mandala emerges.

 

Next come slender metal funnels and pots of finely ground marble sand. White, salmon red, blue and black, orange and yellow—symbolizing the elements of water, fire, air and earth, as well as the four directions. Along with pots of green, the colors also represent the five aspects of our lives, Vajra Master Chungstan Rinpoche explains. The aspects are form, sensation, perception, response and consciousness, and "when they are in balance," he adds, "we are healthy."

The best way to appreciate the mandala is to stop in every day and linger. At first you notice the basic technique. The monks scoop up sand with the broad end of a funnel that has a ridged strip running down its length. When they're ready to "paint," they rub the strip with a thin metal rod, producing vibrations that cause a trickle of sand. When four monks are working together, it's like listening to a chorus of crickets.

At the Mattie Kelly Arts Center, a clever curator set up a table in another room where visitors could practice. Brilliant. It makes you appreciate the skill involved—monks typically need five years to master the technique and memorize designs. And the repetitive task makes you realize that some meditation is no more esoteric than bypassing the voices in your head in pursuit of the task at hand.

As the work progresses, note the symbols the monks paint around the central Buddha figure, how the background colors form a harmonious balance and denote cardinal directions. When they draw the palace walls, try in your mind's eye to see the T-shaped outcroppings as tall gates—the mandala may appear flat, but it represents a tall, multistory structure. Watch, too, how the design grows increasingly complex, how different colors interact, and how the layering of sand gives the surface three-dimensionality, like decorative frosting on a cake. And watch the monks: There is much to be learned from their teamwork.

For centuries, only the initiated were allowed to see such mandalas, just as only those with the requisite preparation can receive communion in the Roman Catholic Church. But in 1988, almost three decades after Chinese troops marched into Tibet, the Dalai Lama broke with tradition. He sent four monks to make a sand mandala at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as part of an effort to raise awareness about the culture, religion and plight of Tibet.

The ritual monks perform today is removed though not unmoored from its religious meaning and context. At initiations, the opening ceremony alone can last up to three hours. Here the opening lasts 30 minutes, and instead of being out of sight, the monks work like artists in an open studio: people wander in and out, snapping photos and exchanging comments. "We talk about creating mandalas for different purposes," says Rinpoche who, like all teachers, is traditionally addressed by his honorific alone. "This one is for cultural sharing," he explains, likening it to retreats; some are in isolation and silent, others communal and less strict. Truncated or not, however, this remains a spiritually charged activity. Monks always "follow the steps in the proper way," Rinpoche adds. "We believe that by seeing the mandala people will receive its blessing."

Once completed, the monks chant to invite the Buddha to enter. This is when, Tibetan Buddhists believe, the mandala is most powerful and beneficial. But, says Geshe Yeshi of the Mystical Arts of Tibet, "we don't ask the deity to stay forever." At a monastery, monks meditate upon it for several days, using it to explore the teachings of the enlightened mind. Here, it rarely lives more than an hour. Amid more chants that deconsecrate the mandala, the vajra master scores it, then another monk sweeps the sand into a swirl reminiscent of a galaxy: the Tibetan symbol of primordial energy and unity.

Later, as the master pours what is now just a grayish mix of sand into a nearby river, the mandala ritual yields its final lesson: The perceiving of impermanence, the Buddha taught, "removes and abolishes all conceit of 'I am.'"

 Carl Jung was a big fan of the mandala.

Brazilian Police Apparently "Take No Prisoners"

This is an eye-opening article on police killings in Brazil from the Wall Street Journal. Some choice excepts:

Brazilian "police kill more suspects than almost anywhere else in the world. Police in São Paulo state killed one suspect for every 229 they arrested last year, according to government figures, compared with one per 31,575 in the U.S. in 2011."

That sounds pretty bad. So who do more than half of Sao Paulo residents believe that police officers who are found to be members of grupos de extermino (death squads) should NOT be punished?

Paulistanos live on high alert when it comes to crime. Robbery-homicides have soared this year from already high levels, and newspapers here are filled with accounts tinged with vengeful brutality. In a new trend this year, three victims were set ablaze in separate crimes, apparently because they didn't have much cash. Regular newspaper fare relegated to the back pages: clean-out jobs by armed crews who take over entire restaurants, or even whole buildings, and rob everyone inside.

Few of these crimes are solved, while cases that are prosecuted can take years to come to trial. Criminals who are jailed go to prisons dominated by the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, a gang big enough to challenge the police head-on. Last year, the PCC put a bounty on police after officers killed a PCC leader. More than 100 police were killed.

The key fact about the graphic below is not the lack of correlation between number of homicides and number of justified police homicides, but rather that as recently as 2002, this one state in Brazil (Sao Paulo, population 40 million) has nearly as many annual homicides as did the entire United States (population +311 million).

 

 

We should hear more about this during the run up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero.

 

By the way, UFC fighter Paulo Thiago is a member of Brazil's "special police," which is why I always pick him to win his bouts.

 

 

"UFC welterweight Paulo Thiago comes into the UFC with an uncommonly unique background. With six years experience as a B.O.P.E. officer on the deadly streets of Brazil, hand-to-hand combat inside the Octagon is merely "fun and joy" for Thiago. The real danger is on the streets where he's conducted hostage rescues, bomb diffusions, gun seizures and drug busts.

So what is B.O.P.E.?

B.O.P.E. (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, Portuguese for Special Police Operations Battalion) is the elite special forces unit of the Military Police for the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Due to the nature of crime in favelas (Brazilian Portuguese for slum), B.O.P.E. units have extensive experience in urban warfare as well as progression in confined and restricted environments. They also utilizes equipment deemed more powerful than traditional civilian law enforcement. Utilizing more than 400 soldiers, B.O.P.E. is believed to be one of the most efficient military forces in the world.

Best said by Captain Wesley Santos, "When society needs help, they call the Police. When the Police need help, they call B.O.P.E. Thiago is a true B.O.P.E officer." Santos describes his best characteristic as being able to remain tranquil in dangerous situations."

SOURCE