FBI Mass Murder report

Here's the key graphic from the FBI's recent report on Mass Murders in the U.S. Q: What do you think the takeaway message is that they are trying to get across? A: The FBI needs more money! They did the same thing in the 1980s with serial murder -- gin up a story about some scary phenomenon and position the agency as the solution.

The problem with the "epidemic" of mass murder is that there isn't one. The Daily Beast produced the following reality check during the hysteria that followed the Sandy Hook shooting:

Here's my own graph, using the FBI's own 160 cases, but only including incidents in which a single-shooter killed 4 or more people (not including himself) in a single location (which is the FBI's own definition of a mass murder, which they redefined for the recent report):

We've still got the scary trendline heading skywards, making it look like 2014 is going to be a record year for mass murders. The thing to remember is that the trendline is an artifact of the data in the table -- it's not being driven by some cosmic force. (Think about how well the trendline up until 2009 would have predicted the number of mass murder incidents in 2010.)

How many mass murder incidents will there be in 2014? The best thing to do would be to take the annual average for the past 14 years (3 events/year). If you want a high estimate, you should take the average over the past 7 years (4 events/year), which is twice as high as the average from 2000-2006 (2 events/year).

Well, it's October already and I can only think of two mass murder incidents so far in 2014 -- the Isla Vista, California fellow and this family annihilator. I suppose we should expect one or two more before the year is over.

How freaked out should we be about these events? Well, in 2012, the worst year we are considering, the 6 mass murders accounted for a total of 56 homicides. The data isn't finalized for 2012, but in 2011 there were 16,238 homicides in the U.S. So about what percentage of homicides are caused by mass murderers?

About one-third of 1%.

 

 

 







 

 



Stanley Milgram, Nazis, and Ethics

Aeon

"The spectre of Nazism and the banality of evil haunted the Milgram experiment. The capture and trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann took place at the same time as Milgram’s tests; the tests concluded within days of Eichmann’s execution. At the core of Milgram’s tests was the scientist’s desire to replicate as best he could the conditions of the gas chamber. He sought to induce the Holocaust in individual subjects so that he could measure evil at the atomic level. In an interview for 60 Minutes in 1979, Milgram told the host Morley Safer:

I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for these camps in any medium-sized American town.

It’s an ugly thing to know, and no doubt a stressful thing to prove a thousand times. After controversy regarding the ethics of his experiments, Milgram was denied tenure. He had a successful career at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, but nothing he did could eclipse the notorious experiment he had designed in his 20s. In 1984, Milgram died, after his fifth heart attack, at the age of 51.

When I first learnt about Milgram in a high-school psychology class, I asked my grandfather, a Jewish clinical psychologist of the same era, about the experiments. He shook his head, sighed, and said ‘Poor Stanley’. Milgram had hoped a version of the Nazis’ own racial logic could save the rest of us from being implicated in the depths of their crimes: that there might be some distinctive evil about the Germans. But once the cross-cultural comparison was quickly deemed irrelevant, why proceed with the experiments? 

...The conclusion that man is cruel and beastly is repeated throughout art, theology and philosophy, not to mention the historical record. Milgram half-heartedly hoped that knowledge and awareness about obedience might decrease the human propensity to follow orders, but there’s no evidence that this is the case. In 2007, the Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry M Burger in collaboration with ABC News reproduced the experiment under current ethical guidelines. Nearly half a century after Milgram first performed the test, they found virtually no change in compliance, even with additional warnings and disclosures to the participants. It’s one of the most famous social science experiments of all time, but awareness, like pleading, doesn’t seem to do much good."

The whole article is worth reading. Most Intro Psych textbooks leave out the original hypothesis -- that there was something wrong with Germans that made them so obedient to immoral orders. The texts also shy away from the obvious conclusion -- that there's something deeply wrong with us, human beings. The textbooks try to play off the Experimenters as being evil -- if only we could do something about the people giving evil instructions, the rest of us would go our innocent way. But there are no innocents.

The hysteria over the "ethics" of Milgram's study is also worth considering. It is important to note that no lasting harm was caused to any of the participants, only temporary distress. They were all informed that they hadn't actually hurt anyone. None of the participants sued Yale University or became drug addicts or died by suicide as a direct result of their participation. In a civil suit they would be very hard pressed to prove damages. I suspect that our current hyper-scrupulosity over the treatment of psychology research participants stems more from our faint hope that we could actually harm them in our experiments (which would make us just like "real" doctors). It is interesting that the ethical horror stories we tell always involve physicians, not psychologists (e.g., the Tuskegee Syphilis study, Nazi medical experimentation). It is quite ridiculous that the informed consent procedure to participate in an undergraduate's little psych experiment is more involved and complex than the informed consent procedure you have to undergo prior to surgery.

Getting upset about the "ethics" of Milgram's treatment of his participants is a way of distracting oneself from the implications of his findings. We're no better than the Nazis. There is something broken about all of us. We don't need Experimenters in White Lab Coats to make us do bad things. We know we do bad things. That's why we are so restless and discontented.

Do you think Freud would have been surprised by Milgram's findings? Would Dostoevsky have been?

Dulce et Decorum est -- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.







See also Owen's Mental Cases.

As they would say here in Rockbridge County, Virginia: "Captain Owen might be anti-war, but he come by it honest."

My Baby Just Cares for Me -- Nina Simone

 

 

My baby don't care for shows
My baby don't care for clothes
My baby just cares for me
My baby don't care for cars and races
My baby don't care for high-tone places

 

Liz Taylor is not his style
And even Lana Turner's smile
Is somethin' he can't see
My baby don't care who knows it
My baby just cares for me

 

Baby, my baby don't care for shows
And he don't even care for clothes
My baby just cares for me
My baby don't care for cars and races
Baby don't care for
He don't care for high-tone places

 

Liz Taylor is not his style
And even Lana Turner's smile
Is something he can't see
Is something he can't see
I wonder what's wrong with baby

My baby just cares for
He just says his prayers for
My baby just cares for me

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The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian -- Edouard Manet (1867-68)

NYT

Manet’s images are electrifying. For him, painting was thinking, and his thoughts shoot out in bold, impetuous strokes, ricocheting off multiple targets.  

One of his targets was the conservative French emperor Napoleon III. In the mid-19th-century this ruler, ravenous for new territory, had his eye on Mexico. When a reformist government under Benito Juárez came to power in the country, a privileged minority of landowners and clergy appealed to France for help, and Napoleon (counting on the United States being distracted by the Civil War) sent his army their way in 1862.  

The initial invasion, under the pretext of collecting debts owed by Mexico, resulted in a mortifying French defeat, now celebrated by Mexicans as Cinco de Mayo. To provide a cover for a second one, Napoleon [n.b., Napoleon III, not Bonaparte] persuaded Maximilian, the idealistic younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, to become emperor of Mexico, backed by the French military. Maximilian, who knew nothing in particular about Mexico, accepted the offer with a missionary zeal, giving Napoleon both a colony and a Hapsburg alliance.  

But problems instantly arose. The new emperor arrived in 1864 and was led to believe by Mexican monarchists that he would be embraced. He wasn’t. Popular support was for Juárez, pushed north by the French but poised to return. Maximilian, despite his liberal sentiments, made repressive moves, alienating everyone.  

Napoleon soon realized he had a fiasco on his hands and wanted out. Maximilian was urged to abdicate, but stayed on, as his wife dashed in a panic to Europe to rally support. None came. The French Army departed. Juárez returned. Maximilian was arrested and, along with two of his generals, Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía, was tried for treason and sentenced to die. He was 35. 

On the morning of June 19, 1867, the three were brought to open ground near a walled cemetery and shot by a squad of Mexican Army riflemen. Maximilian’s end was agonizingly protracted. The initial round of fire didn’t kill him; the coup de grâce was botched and had to be repeated to finish the job.

 

 

 

 

Have a problem? Take a pill!

Telegraph

"Hundreds of thousands of people drinking half a bottle of wine a night are to be put on the first ever drug to help reduce alcohol consumption, under plans announced by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).  

Men drinking three pints of beer and women drinking two large glasses of wine per night and who do not cut down within two weeks should be prescribed a new drug, NICE has said.  

There are an estimated 750,000 people in the UK who would be eligible for nalmefene who show no overt symptoms associated with their drinking.  

The plans mean GPs will actively ask patients about their alcohol consumption even when they see them for unrelated health matters such as low mood, inability to sleep, diabetes and high blood pressure.  

...

Prof Mark Bellis, alcohol lead for the Faculty of Public Health said there were relatively simple alternatives that would reduce alcohol consumption without the need to medicate the middle classes such as reducing advertising of alcohol and introducing a minimum price per unit.  

... 

The drug, which costs £3 per tablet, is taken when people feel the urge to have a drink and stops them from wanting more than one. In clinical trials the drug helped people to cut their alcohol consumption by about 60 per cent from 13.5 units a day to five units. 

However this was only 1.8 units more than those receiving just counseling."

Why not just pump it into the water supply, like fluoride?

This is actually a really old drug (1970s) that is not even sold anymore in the U.S. If it works anywhere near as well as the other opioid-antagonists, like its cousin, Naltrexone, then I'm pretty confident that it doesn't work at all. (Not that I'm all that sanguine about the benefits of counseling in this regard, either.) There's a big difference between demonstrating positive effects in a clinical trial and success in the real world. How many patients do I know who've kicked opiates with Naltrexone? None.

White House Shooter Oscar Ortega-Hernandez

Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez:
Can you tell if someone is schizophrenic just by looking at a photo of them?

 

Washington Post

"An Idaho man pleaded guilty [on September 17, 2013] to opening fire on the White House in November 2011.

No one was injured, but two members of President Obama’s family were there when Oscar R. Ortega-Hernandez began shooting, according to court documents filed Wednesday. Ortega-Hernandez admitted firing eight rounds from a semiautomatic assault rifle into the second and third floors of the White House.

The 22-year-old had been scheduled to go to trial in federal court in Washington on charges that included attempted assassination of the president. Instead, he pleaded guilty to using a firearm during a crime of violence and to damaging the White House and putting “lives in jeopardy.”

He faces up to 27 ¹ / ₂ years in prison, according to federal sentencing guidelines. [He got 25 years, and he has to pay $94,000 in restitution to repair the damage to the White House.]

... 

In the months leading up to the White House shooting, Ortega-Hernandez had become agitated [and paranoid], authorities said. He told friends that the federal government was seeking to control Americans by implanting global positioning chips in children, according to the plea agreement. [He was also worried that the government was using fluoride and aspartame for the purposes of mind control.]

Acquaintances told authorities that Ortega-Hernandez had told them that he “needed to kill” the president and that Obama was “the antichrist.”  

In October 2011, he recorded two videos of himself in which he called for a revolution, according to the statement of offense signed by Ortega-Hernandez. He then drove 2,200 miles from his home in Idaho Falls to Washington. 

On the evening of Nov. 11, he stopped his 1998 Honda Accord on Constitution Avenue NW shortly after passing the entrance to the Ellipse. He began firing a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a telescopic sight.

Driving away moments later, Ortega-Hernandez lost control of the car and crashed near the ramp to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. He fled on foot and was arrested at a hotel in western Pennsylvania after a five-day manhunt."

 NYT

"Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.

They said that he could not have truly wanted to kill the president, but that he may have wanted a larger audience. He read his speech to anyone who would listen. In September, Mr. Ortega made a video in which he asked Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

“You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”

Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.

“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Mr. Ortega, he acknowledged, is accused of going much further than pestering a guard or climbing a wall.

“I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense,” Dr. Torrey said. “If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist.”"

How did this guy not get a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity acquittal? He should be in a forensic mental facility, not a federal prison.