Cav > Books: crime‎ (69)

"...In their campaign to dominate the nation’s criminal economy, the Zetas had blazed a trail of violence through more than a dozen Mexican states, trafficking drugs, smuggling migrants, and kidnapping for ransom.
Two years earlier, in January 2014, the Zeta cell that the Florist belonged to had kidnapped Karen. Miriam had begged, pleaded, and paid ransoms she could not afford, following the Zetas’ every instruction. She got nothing in return, not even knowledge of what had happened to Karen.
Government authorities had dismissed her, ignoring her entreaties or meeting them with a practiced formality that barely masked their apathy. In that void, her grief gave way to acceptance, and then to resolve: to seek revenge and pursue justice herself, for Karen, and for the other families of the disappeared."

"Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous."

"...Ghosts of convicted criminals haunted the clearing in the forest. In an earlier era, the convicts, bearded and gaunt after months of marching from European Russia, had been allowed by their guards a brief stop at the pillar.
Some kissed the European side of the pillar while others pressed their tearsoaked faces to it. Convicts collapsed to their knees and buried their faces in the earth. Some hugged each other or dug up handfuls of dirt to take with them. A few scraped their names or inscriptions on the pillar. “Farewell life!” The exile convoy commander shouted an order to form ranks. With a clinking of their chains and shackles, the convicts assembled, crossed themselves, and resumed their march to the east.
Of those who survived to reach their Siberian destinations, few managed to return to Mother Russia after their sentences ended, which is why convicts wept at the pillar. A few years before Kennan’s investigation, the Russian government had completed a railroad line that transported convicts across European Russia and over the Ural Mountains, apparently without stopping at the boundary pillar. But since the Russian rail network did not yet penetrate far into Siberia, the convicts still had to march thousands of miles from the railhead to Siberian prisons, mines, and factories. Like their predecessors at the boundary pillar, few saw their homes again..."

"The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand.
Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”
As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.
Abolition of the death penalty did more than free up laborers for Siberia. As historian Andrew A. Gentes points out, abolition emphasized the divine-like power of the ruling Romanovs to either execute their subjects or show them mercy:
'I could kill you, but I choose instead to spare you out of Christian mercy (milost). Therefore, although you have been flogged nearly to death and have had your face branded and your nose cut off, you should be grateful that you have been allowed to commence a two year, three thousand mile journey in chains for the purpose of sowing grain in His Majesty’s fields near the Arctic Circle.'"

"On his return to the United States in August 1886, he became an ardent critic of the Russian autocracy and began to espouse the cause of Russian democracy. Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to promoting the cause of a Russian revolution, mainly by lecturing. Kennan was one of the most prolific lecturers of the late 19th century. He spoke before a million or so people during the 1890s, including two hundred consecutive evening appearances during 1890–91 (excepting Sundays) before crowds of as many as 2000 people. His reports on conditions in Siberia were published serially by Century Magazine, and in 1891, he published a two-volume book Siberia and The Exile System. It, with first-hand interviews, data, and drawings by the artist George Albert Frost, had an influential effect on American public opinion."

"...Breshkovsky’s powerful imagery of sacrifice and suffering at the hands of a brutal regime that was succeeded by an even more brutal regime created what one historian called a “sturdy narrative bridge” between the Siberian exile system and the gulag system under Stalin. After taking power, the communist regime began converting parts of the Siberian exile system’s infrastructure into what eventually became known as the Gulag Archipelago, a forced labor camp system whose scale and lethality far exceeded anything Kennan had witnessed in his 1885–86 investigation. In the mid-1930s, Stalin launched the Great Terror whose countless victims included more than a hundred members of the Russian Society of Former Political Penal Laborers, which had been formed by the now elderly revolutionaries who had fought to overthrow the tsar. They had survived hard labor in Siberia only to be executed by Stalin. Today, the Russian penal system and its nearly seven hundred penitentiaries have features that can be traced to the Siberian exile system. These include use of penal colonies with large inmate barracks, convict organizations that resemble the brutal artels that Kennan found in the tsarist-era Siberian exile parties and prisons, and the state’s use of the judicial and penal system to silence and punish its political opponents.
George Kennan grasped the nature of the new regime, unlike some of his fellow journalists. Lincoln Steffens, a prominent investigative reporter, after returning from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1919, famously proclaimed that “I have seen the future, and it works.” By contrast, when the communist government enacted a “constitution” for the newly formed USSR in 1923, Kennan observed that the constitution left power in a small group of self-appointed rulers without accountability to the Russian people, where it had always been since the Bolshevik takeover. With a hint of bitter realism, he warned, “But let no one be deceived. The Russian leopard has not changed its spots.”

"The evolutionary history of the human species is far from being a conveniently linear ‘March to Progress’. As we saw in the last chapter, it is hard enough with related living species to work out where one ends and the other begins. The task of working out our own lineage when all we have to go on is fossils is made much harder. The early Homo habilis may have been a separate species or one and the same as Homo erectus. Furthermore, it looks like Homo sapiens has been around for a very long time, although not sequentially but simultaneously with other Homo species. Which raises the interesting and potentially knotty problem of what happened when humans met Neanderthals?"

"...By 2010, increasing numbers of Americans were beginning to express fears that they were losing the country they grew up in, and that they had hoped—or perhaps too complacently assumed—that they would be passing on to their children and grandchildren.
No one issue and no one administration in Washington has been enough to create a perfect storm for a great nation that has weathered many storms in its more than two centuries of existence. But the Roman Empire lasted many times longer, and weathered many storms in its turbulent times—and yet it ultimately collapsed completely.
It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Europe rose again to the level it had achieved in Roman times. The collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins.
Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet—and that nothing is inevitable until it happens."

"When we look back at the decades-long erosions and distortions of our educational system, our legal system and our political system, we must acknowledge the chilling fact that the kinds of dangers we face now were always inherent in these degenerating trends. The essays that follow deal with these trends individually, but it may help to keep in mind that they were all going on at the same time, and that these are the dangers whose coming together can create a perfect storm."

"...My Bosniak driver believed the ethnic conflict in his country was horrific and exceptional, but he was only partly right: it was horrific—but utterly unexceptional. Collectively, ethnic conflicts around the world, from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, have killed more than ten million people since World War II.
Many Americans reflexively tune out news of these conflicts. In the words of one satirist, it’s just the “unspellables” killing the “unpronounceables”—peoples too distant or inexplicable to pay attention to. But as Americans, we need to pay attention, not just for the sake of the millions around the world suffering from ethnic division, but for our own sake. We must deepen our understanding of what it takes for diverse ethnic groups to get along and share a country, for America is rapidly becoming vastly more multiethnic..."

"...Thus, as the United States has veered from melting pot to multiculturalism, there has been little serious discussion about how similar course changes have worked out in other countries. The reality is that both the melting pot and multiculturalist models have been tried many times in history. In some cases, societies have shifted from one to the other. It’s worth examining how it has worked out for them; perhaps we can distill some useful lessons from their experiences. That is what this book endeavors to accomplish."

"After considering the terrible consequences of ethnic divisions in countries like Bosnia and Sri Lanka, it is disheartening to see Americans advance the same types of policies and rhetoric that promoted and toxified those divisions. America has a regrettable past of racial and ethnic discrimination, but if the examples in this book teach anything, it is that the solution to past segregation is not even more segregation. The answer to past racial discrimination is not even more racial discrimination. Two African countries demonstrate this best.
While it was a British protectorate, Botswana endured extensive white racism. Yet it managed to recover quickly to become one of the developing world’s outstanding success stories. It achieved this not with compensatory preferences and racial payback but by completely eliminating racial and ethnic distinctions and by fostering botho, the Batswana version of asabiyah. It also followed the melting pot model, which has repeatedly demonstrated its effectiveness since the time of ancient Rome.
In proportional terms, Rwanda’s genocide stands out as one of the worst racist crimes of all time. Although the genocide occurred only a few decades ago, Rwanda has managed to recover spectacularly from it. Like Botswana, Rwanda accomplished this by “erasing race” and adopting the melting pot model. Rather than instituting ethnic preferences like affirmative action, it outlawed racial and ethnic distinctions altogether. Rather than dividing people into groups, it has sought to unify them with institutions like umuganda. Rather than brooding on past injustices, it has cultivated the shared asabiyah lauded by Ibn Khaldun.
The path taken by Botswana and Rwanda lies open to America. It starts with resolute and unwavering commitments to principles like those made by Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot and by the children in Rwanda’s Nyange school:
There are no groups. We are all Americans."

"...That’s not to say we don’t lie; indeed, multiple studies have found that lying is an inherent part of human nature, and who hasn’t told a white lie to protect feelings or get out of a spot of trouble? Still, we continue to tell our children not to lie, and for good reason. Even when we put aside morals and ethics and just focus on the practicality of the thing, lying is more often than not a damaging practice that tends to spiral out of control, creating chasms and domino effects that are impossible to reverse. If this is the effect that lying can have on our individual lives, then you can imagine the immense impact it’s had on history."

"Over the next fifty chapters, we’ll traverse some of the darkest events in human history. At times it can feel inescapably bleak, but in that mire of lies there is always light. Because, when we peel back the lies of history, we can gain a better understanding of not only history itself but the legacies of the past we’re left with today. This isn’t so much a book about uncovering the truth, as it is one of untangling the web of deceit that hid it and looking at why that web was there in the first place."

"...When the Devil’s Highway was a faint scratch of desert bighorn hoof marks, and the first hunters ran along it, someone died. But the brown and red men who ran the paths left no record outside of faded songs and rock paintings we still don’t understand.
Desert spirits of a dark and mysterious nature have always traveled these trails. From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace— those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here. “You need a new kind of prayers,” she says, “to negotiate with this land.”

"This account was based on many sources. Interviews and travel, of course, provided many insights and testimonies. I was granted unusually generous access to documents and governmental reports from both Mexico and the United States; these were central to the collection of stories. Border Patrol reports, sheriff’s department reports, Mexican consular reports, Justice Department reports, legal documents, testimonies and trial documents, correspondence, and many hours of taped interrogations and confessions went into the research. Due to concerns about the personal safety of the survivors, their actual depositions were sealed.
I spent hours in federal defenders’ offices, in various consulates, in Border Patrol stations, with Samaritan groups, in diners over cups of coffee, in Migra trucks, and on the Devil’s Highway itself. At the time of this investigation, the survivors were material witnesses in a criminal case, and were also clients in the notorious civil suit against the United States; because of this, they were shielded from direct contact with me. The hours of their torment, however, were well documented, often in their own words. And the Mexican officials who handle their cases were forthcoming with information, sometimes offered surreptitiously, off the record, or representing messages the survivors wanted heard. Some of the sources for this book did not choose to be—or could not be— quoted directly.
The year I spent researching and traveling consumed four leather-bound notebooks of about 144 pages each. Much of that material, of course, was tangential. Still, about half of each notebook went into this book. Certain passages, nevertheless, were subject to educated conjecture. For example, no number of letters to Jesús Antonio Lopez Ramos, aka Mendez, will ever be answered. He simply won’t answer questions, largely to protect his loved ones from payback by the Coyote gang. Fortunately, his testimony and writings and taped pensées are available for study."

"However long it takes you to die, you will pass through six known stages of heat death, or hyperthermia, and they are the same for everyone. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways.
The stages are: Heat Stress, Heat Fatigue, Heat Syncope, Heat Cramps, Heat Exhaustion, and Heat Stroke.
The people most at risk from hyperthermia are the elderly. That’s why Midwestern heat waves feature dead Chicago retirees by the score. But the wicked genius of Desolation is that it makes even the young old so that it can kill them more easily."

"...They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. Packed so tightly onboard that they could barely move, they traveled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles—one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that “human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.”

"From the beginning of the Duterte era, recording these deaths became my job. As a field correspondent for Rappler in Manila, I was one of then reporters covering the results of the president’s pledge to destroy anyone— without charge or trial—whom he or the police or any of a number of vigilantes suspected of taking or selling drugs. The volume of Duterte’s dead was at times overwhelming, as was covering the powerful in a country nwhere the powerful refuse to be held to account."

"My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.
I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bags ran out. They are the hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.
It’s handy to have a small vocabulary in my line of work. The names go first, then the casualty counts. Colors are good to get the description squared away. The hill is green. The sky is black. The backpack is purple, and so is the bruising on the woman’s left cheek.
Small words are precise. They are exactly what they are and are faster to type when the battery is running down..."
"...Kill, for example. It’s a word my president uses often. He said it at least 1,254 times in the first six months of his presidency, in a variety of contexts and against a range of enemies. He said it to four-year-old Boy Scouts, promising to kill people who got in the way of their future. He said it to overseas workers, telling them there were jobs to be had killing drug addicts at home. He told mayors accused of drug dealing to repent, resign, or die.
He threatened to kill human rights activists if the drug problem worsened. He told cops he would give them medals for killing. He told journalists they could be legitimate targets of assassination.
“I’m not kidding,” he said in a campaign rally in 2016. “When I become president, I’ll tell the military, the police, that this is my order: find these people and kill them, period.”
I know only a few dozen of the dead by name. It doesn’t matter to the president. He has enough names for them all. They are addicts, pushers, users, dealers, monsters, madmen."

"1. The aforementioned serotonin-oriented compounds, of which there are hundreds
2. “Dissociatives,” such as ketamine and salvia, which produce the sensation of detachment from one’s body
3. “Empathogens,” such as MDMA, which, although less overtly “trippy” than other substances, still amplify emotions and insights in a decidedly psychedelic way
4. “Unique” substances that can’t easily be categorized, including cannabinoids such as THC, which, in high doses, can induce visionary reveries"

"This book is not stuffy and academic. No background in botany, chemistry, or medicine is necessary—come as you are and learn about some of the most fascinating plants and molecules on the planet. Nor is this an instruction manual—for information on how to use these substances, readers will have to look elsewhere..."

"Whereas sensory information was often considered to be the starting point of experience, the emerging science of the predictive brain suggests a rather different role. Now, the current sensory signal is used to refine and correct the process of informed guessing (the attempts at prediction) already taking place. It is now the predictions that do much of the heavy lifting. According to this new picture, experience—of the world, ourselves, and even our own bodies—is never a simple reflection of external or internal facts. Instead, all human experience arises at the meeting point of informed predictions and sensory stimulations.
This is a profound change in our understanding of the mind that fundamentally alters how we should think about perception and the construction of human reality. For much of human history, scientists and philosophers saw perception as a process that worked mostly “from the outside in,” as light, sound, touch, and chemical odors activate receptors in eyes, ears, nose, and skin, progressively being refined into a richer picture of the wider world. Even well into the twenty-first century, leading models in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence retained core elements of that view.
The new science of predictive processing flips that traditional story on its head. Perception is now heavily shaped from the opposite direction, as predictions formed deep in the brain reach down to alter responses all the way down to areas closer to the skin, eyes, nose, and ears—the sensory organs that take in signals from the outside world. Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction—the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories."

"...In this book, I draw on paradigm-shifting research to confront these crucial questions and ask what these insights mean for neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and how we live our lives. We’ll look hard at experiences of the body and self, from chronic pain to psychosis, and see how work on the predictive brain helps explain a wide spectrum of human behaviors and neurodiversity. We’ll reassess our own experiences of the world, from social anxiety and emotional feedback loops to the many forms of bias that can creep into our judgments. We’ll also explore some ways that predictive brains might support “extended minds,” blurring the boundaries between ourselves and our best-fitted tools and environments."

"This new understanding of the process of perceiving has real importance for our lives. It alters how we should think about the evidence of our own senses. It impacts how we should think about the way we experience our own bodily states—of pain, hunger, and other experiences such as feeling anxious or depressed. For the way our bodily states feel to us likewise reflects a complex mixture of what our brains predict and what the current bodily signals suggest. This means that we can, at times, change how we feel by changing what we (consciously or unconsciously) predict.
This does not mean we can simply “predict ourselves better,” nor does it mean we can alter our own experiences of pain or hunger in any way we choose. But it does suggest some principled and perhaps unexpected wiggle room—room that, with care and training, we might turn to our advantage.
Handled carefully, a better appreciation of the power of prediction could improve the way we think about our own medical symptoms and suggest new ways of understanding mental health, mental illness, and neurodiversity."

"...Oak Island had long been a Rorschach test for dozens of historical loose ends and broken threads, most of the major conspiracy theories and a good many of the minor ones, and just about every tale of lost treasure out there. The island drew obsessive compulsives, crackpots, and the sincerely curious to it like no place on Earth. None of this changed the fact, though, that Oak Island was a genuine enigma and quite arguably the most mysterious spot on the planet. I wanted another shot at the place."

"...I headed home and started typing. What has resulted is, I hope, not one story, but three. The first is my own tale of being kidnapped. The second is the wider story of the Somali pirates, whose activities I had originally gone to Somalia report on. And the third is the story of Somalia itself, and why it has fallen into such a state of anarchy that such outlaws can thrive in the first place.
This book does not claim to be an exhaustive account of either Somalia’s piracy or its politics. It is intended more as a snapshot of what remains a complex, disputed and ever-changing picture. This is partly due to the ongoing difficulties of reporting on the ground. Somalia remains as dangerous for foreigners as ever, and pirates, like most people in organised crime, do not generally welcome scrutiny of their activities.
I have also focused on those parts of the country of which I have some direct experience; inevitably, this means ignoring others. This book does not for example, discuss the rather happier picture in Somaliland, the breakaway region of north-west Somalia that has now been largely peaceful for two decades, and which wants its independence recognised by the outside world. Nor, contrary to the practice of many outsiders who write books on Africa, is this a book that tries to highlight the ‘good side’ – the virtues, decency, and courage-under-fire of the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants. Instead, it is about the villainous minority, the bandits, crooks and warlords who have so often enjoyed the upper hand in recent years. On which note, I should point out that for legal reasons, the names of a few of the people I have come across have been changed."

"There was, however, one important difference between the pyrates of old and the pirates of new. Whereas the storybook buccaneers of my youth would steal a ship’s treasure and make its crew walk the plank, today it was the opposite way around. Somali pirates weren’t really interested in the ship’s cargo. A 50,000-tonne consignment of cement or mineral ore was impossible to ship ashore in their small launches, never mind to find buyers for. Instead, they were after the ship’s crew, whom they would take as hostages for ransom. That effectively made the pirates professional kidnappers rather than robbers, and, for obvious reasons, therefore a risky interview prospect.
Our aim was to try to meet one, and tell the story from his point of view. That point of view might be, though, that a pair of Western journalists would make far better hostages than a few Filipino deckhands..."

"My brother and I against my father. My father’s household against that of my uncle’s. My father and uncle’s households against the rest of the clan. The clan against other clans. And our nation against the world."

"At the time, I was a professor of photography at California State University in Sacramento. We would frequently receive emails calling for volunteer teachers. It was through one of those emails that I first heard about an organization called the Prison University Project—a nonprofit organization that offers men inside San Quentin the opportunity to earn an AA degree. They were looking for someone to teach an art history class. At the time, this was the only on-site degree-granting program in California prisons, with all classes taught by volunteer teachers, professors, and graduate students from the Bay Area. It seemed like an ideal position. I could go inside with a purpose, meet the incarcerated men in an academic context, and use the tool I knew best at the time—photography—to form a connection and learn their stories.
In 2011, I started teaching the first history of photography class inside San Quentin. I taught the class for three semesters. Photographic images gave me and my students something to bond over, and became our bridge to conversation. Those conversations were the foundation for everything that came after..."

"A prison is a kind of a cloistered society with rules and ways of being that were new and at times unreal to me. Understanding how to function as an outsider takes time. You have to learn to respect the racial divisions, the standards for how and when to deal with COs, and the all-important rule of minding your own business.
Navigating a prison as an outsider requires politeness, patience, and persistence. Without those three qualities, you will spin your wheels and burn out.
Prison life is more complicated than I could ever articulate. If I’d gone in presuming I understood the lay of the land, I would have been tremendously misguided. In addition to needing to intuit unspoken rules and figure out how to get through reels of administrative red tape, you also have to figure out—quickly—who you can trust. The biggest mistake volunteers make is entering with arrogance, presuming they know best what people inside want or need. Pre-cooked assumptions get you nowhere."

"...The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer in May 2020 epitomized such bias, according to elite opinion leaders. The riots following Floyd’s death were portrayed as a wake-up call: address America’s pervasive discrimination or face even greater disruption.
Those fiery months spawned a cultural revolution that could prove as transformative as its 1960s antecedent. That earlier youth-led upheaval challenged the adult establishment’s allegedly oppressive norms of propriety in the name of liberation. This time the targets are the very fundamentals of a fair society: meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and respect for our civilizational inheritance. All are now tarred as impediments to racial justice.
The driving concept behind this revolution is disparate impact. Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. If academic admissions standards for colleges and high schools result in a student body in which the percentage of black students is less than that of the national population (13 percent), then those standards must be lowered for the sake of racial equity. If the enforcement of criminal law results in a prison population that is more than 13 percent black, then that enforcement must be unwound. If hiring and promotion criteria mean that a workplace is not proportionally “diverse,” then those criteria must be abandoned.
Disparate impact analysis first arose in the law as a way to expand then reach of civil-rights-era discrimination statutes. Those early statutes banned deliberate discrimination: an employer could only be found guilty of a civil rights violation if he intentionally discriminated against a minority applicant. A 1971 Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., changed that rule.1 Even if an employer had no intent to discriminate and had used color-blind standards for hiring or promotion, the court held that he could still be liable under the 1964 Civil Rights Act if those job requirements - such as a certain level of literacy or a high school diploma— disproportionately affected underrepresented minorities and were not required by business necessity."

"The driving concept behind this revolution is disparate impact. Under this ideology, any standard or behavioral norm which negatively and disproportionately affects blacks is presumed to be a tool of white supremacy. If academic admissions standards for colleges and high schools result in a student body in which the percentage of black students is less than that of the national population (13 percent), then those standards must be lowered for the sake of racial equity. If the enforcement of criminal law results in a prison population that is more than 13 percent black, then that enforcement must be unwound. If hiring and promotion criteria mean that a workplace is not proportionally “diverse,” then those criteria must be abandoned..."
"...And now, even the greatest achievements of the West are being subjected to disparate impact analysis. The most devastating charge that can be levelled against a tradition today is that its practitioners have historically been white. Classical music, European art, and science are on the defensive for their demographic past as well as for inadequate “diversity” in the present. Objectivity, individualism, a respect for the written word, perfectionism, and promptness have been tarred as markers of whiteness because insisting on those values has a disparate impact on blacks."

"These double standards now predominate. Elite “anti-racists” absolve blacks from responsibility for their actions. All crime is the result of racism, if such crime is even acknowledged. This patronizing attitude is today’s real racism, and it guarantees that the bourgeois behavioral gap—the cause of lingering socioeconomic disparities—will continue. (Bourgeois values include respect for authority and the law, hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification.) No one in a position of elite authority is sending the message that society expects blacks to live by the same standards as other groups (even if those other groups abide by such standards imperfectly). Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement—whether it’s the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment—if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks."

"America turns its eyes away from this pathological culture and blames itself for phantom racism. We pretend that the reason for the lack of proportional representation in institution after institution is racist measures of achievement rather than vast academic and behavioral gaps. As a remedy for this alleged racism, we create double standards of accomplishment and behavior. But double standards help no one. They are condescending, and they are lethal. The crime wave that began after the death of George Floyd claimed thousands of additional lives, mostly black, and there is no end in sight to the spreading anarchy. The redefinition of excellence in the medical profession, in engineering, and in other STEM fields will prove lethal as well.
Unless the criminal justice system goes back to enforcing the law without fear of disparate impact, vigilantism will rise, as law-abiding Americans lose faith that the state will protect their lives and property. White and Asian flight from “diverse” cities and communities will accelerate. And the willingness of non-elite Americans to acquiesce in the fiction that they are white supremacists may eventually give out. Ideally, that vanished acquiescence would lead to an overdue defense of the Western heritage and of color-blind standards. It may, however, result in a country violently divided along racial lines."

"...Uranium will always be with us. Once dug up, it can never be reburied.
In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind: the capacity for scientific progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror. We must find a way to make peace with it. Our continuing relationship with uranium, as well as our future as a civilization, will depend on our capacity to resist mirroring that grim and never-ceasing instability that lies within the most powerful tool the earth has to give."

"The cybersurveillance system the company created and continually updates and upgrades for its sixty-plus clients in more than forty different countries has made the world a much safer place, says NSO. Tens of thousands of lives have been saved, they say, because terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles (pedophiles is a big company talking point the last few years) can be spied on and stopped before they act. The numbers are impossible to verify, but the way NSO describes it, the upsides of Pegasus, used within legal and ethical boundaries, are pretty much inarguable. Who doesn’t want to stop pedophiles? Or terrorists? Who could be against it?"

"THIS BOOK IS the behind-the-scenes story of the Pegasus Project, the investigation into the meaning of the leaked data, as told by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud of Forbidden Stories, the two journalists who got access to the list of fifty thousand phones. With the list in hand, they gathered and coordinated an international collaboration of more than eighty investigative journalists from seventeen media organizations across four continents, eleven time zones, and about eight separate languages. “They held this thing together miraculously,” says an editor from the Guardian, one of the partners in the Pegasus Project. “We’ve got, like, maybe six hundred journalists. The Washington Post is maybe twice the size. And to think that a small nonprofit in Paris, with just a handful of people working for it, managed to convene a global alliance of media organizations and take on not just one of the most powerful cybersurveillance companies in the world but some of the most repressive and authoritarian governments in the world, that is impressive.''”
"...In the daily back-and-forth of American news and politics—my wheelhouse—it is rare indeed to come across a news story that is both a thriller and of real catastrophic importance. Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons—against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse—is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it. The Pegasus Project saga not only shows us how to stop it; it’s an edge-of-your seat procedural about the heroes who found this dragon and then set out to slay it."

"WHERE’S YOUR PHONE right now? That little device in your pocket likely operates as your personal calendar, your map and atlas, your post office, your telephone, your scratchpad, your camera—basically as your trusted confidant. Matthew Noah Smith, a professor of moral and political nphilosophy, wrote in 2016 that a mobile phone “is an extension of the mind.… There is simply no principled distinction between the processes occurring in the meaty glob in your cranium and the processes occurring in the little silicon, metal, and glass block that is your iPhone. The solid-state drive storing photos in the phone are your memories in the same way that certain groups of neurons storing images in your brain are memories. Our minds extend beyond our heads and into our phones.”
Professor Smith was making the case back then for a zone of privacy that extended to our mobile phone. If the state has no right to access the thoughts in our head, why should it have the right to access the pieces of our thoughts that we keep in our mobile phone? We tell our cell phones almost anything these days, even things we aren’t cognizant of telling it,b and use it as the conduit to offer the most intimate glimpses of ourselves. (See sexting.) If you believe your privacy is being secured by encryption, please read this book, and consider the fifty thousand people on that horror show list, who unbeknownst to them were targeted to unwillingly share every single thing that passed through their phones with people who only had to pay for the privilege.
That list of fifty thousand was just our first keyhole view of the crime scene. If they could do it for fifty thousand, doesn’t that mean they could do it for five hundred thousand? Five million? Fifty million? Where is the limit, and who is going to draw that line? Who is going to deliver us from this worldwide Orwellian nightmare? Because it turns out you don’t have to be married to the emir of anything to find your every thought, every footstep, every word recorded and tracked from afar. Turns out you just need to have a phone, and a powerful enemy somewhere. Who among us is exempt from those conditions?
Where did you say your phone is right now?"