x - 96 Louis Sheehan

debt increases the cost of doing business, because of interest payments. The investors have to get their money back within ten years. And the deal has to generate income for the private-equity firm. Some moribund companies are turned around or fruitfully combined with a powerful new partner; some close plants and lay off workers; some take on debt just to pay fees to the investors; some are sold and then go bankrupt. Even as Bain Capital was making a lot of its money in buyouts, it still took pride in its consulting skills. Romney likes to say that he was a consultant or a venture capitalist, not that he was in private equity. Consultants think that people in private equity make most of their money from the way a deal is structured (Bain Capital aggressively pursued that aspect of its business), not from how well they analyze a company and its problems. Some Bainies liked to talk about “the nuclear reactor”: their all-powerful analytic methods, which the dummies on Wall Street didn’t have. They weren’t traders; they were efficiency experts. What they did wasn’t mere “financial engineering”; it was “operational engineering.” They replaced management, reorganized the supply chain, upgraded equipment, changed the accounting system. Romney loved to order up charts and graphs; in his personal pantheon of admirability “data” ranks right up there with “leadership.” During meetings, he still challenges the person making the PowerPoint presentation, poking holes in the argument, demanding different ways to solve the problem. In his own mind, he is a master chief executive who started a very successful business that brought a particular approach to problems—not a guy who used debt to buy and resell businesses. Bain Capital did many dozens of deals under Romney. One of them involved a carpet company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called Masland, which had been owned and operated by one family for four generations. It went public in the nineteen-sixties. In 1986, it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Burlington Industries. The next year, Burlington itself came under attack from a corporate raider, and it arranged a leveraged buyout with Morgan Stanley. Desperate for cash, it put Masland up for sale. Bain Capital bought the company, which by that time was largely selling interior components to the auto business. Before making the deal, Romney flew to Detroit with the C.E.O. of the company, Bill Branch, and met with Masland’s biggest customer, Ford, to make sure that it would stay on board after the deal. Then Romney helped the company acquire another interior-components supplier, in Wisconsin, which had General Motors as a customer. In 1993, only two and a half years after the acquisition by Bain, Masland went public. On the profits from that transaction, Bain made seven times its initial investment. In 1996, Masland was merged with an auto-parts company called Lear. In 2005, Lear formed a partnership with W. L. Ross & Company, a big New York private-equity firm. In 2008, the original Masland manufacturing plant, in Carlisle, which at its peak had employed a thousand workers, shut down. So goes the transactional society, as it plays out across the middle range of the economy and the middle of the country. Three years after Bain Capital was founded, Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” came out. Gordon Gekko, its protagonist, expressed his greed by doing buyout deals. A few years later, in “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere was a private-equity guy who redeemed himself by falling in love with Julia Roberts and cancelling his plans to buy a company and do all the things that private-equity firms do. In popular culture, private equity had become the most conveniently available symbol of everything that people didn’t like about the transactional economy. In 1994, when Romney ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign figured out (as President Obama’s campaign has this year) that an essential element of a race against Romney was to run against the private-equity business. Within private equity, people don’t talk about the questions that are on the mind of the public. One professor at a leading business school whose subject is private equity put it simply: “Can I change the free cash-flow equation of the company? If I do, I win. If I don’t, I lose. It’s not the job of private equity to create jobs. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not.” A comprehensive study of private equity published last year found that the industry has a negligible effect on employment. Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals (unless you think those are large social goals). Because Mitt Romney is incapable of explaining his career in a way that makes it sound admirable to people who aren’t in business, the country, for now, is directing at him its very mixed feelings about the financialization of the American economy. Everyone who knows Romney agrees that his father is unusually important to him. “His dad is his biggest hero,” says Ben Coes, who managed Romney’s successful 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, seven years after George Romney’s death. “He thinks about him at least once an hour, if not more. He worships the guy.” In 1994, just after his unsuccessful Senate campaign, Romney called William Weld, then the governor of Massachusetts, to ask if he could stop by with his dad to talk about volunteerism. “Mitt and his father came in,” Weld remembers. “I got out from behind my desk. George talks for forty-five or sixty minutes, with one or two interjections by me. Mitt not only didn’t say a word; his eyes never left his father’s face. The expression in his eyes was hero worship. . . . And six months later his father was dead.” When Mitt Romney announced that he was going to run against Ted Kennedy, George Romney started making appearances at the Bain Capital office. He was delighted by Mitt’s decision, and evidently thought of politics as a higher calling than business. For Mitt, honoring and pleasing his father seems to have been the highest calling of all. Finally, in George Romney’s mind, his son’s real career had begun. III. POLITICS Just about the only thing in life that Mitt Romney is obviously not very good at is the public aspect of running for office. During his four campaigns for office—U.S. senator, in 1994; governor, in 2002; President, in 2008 and 2012—he must have undergone endless hours of training and practice, but the magic just isn’t there. In June, I spent a few days on the campaign trail with him, in Wisconsin and Iowa. Romney’s trip had several purposes. A film crew was gathering footage for campaign commercials to run in the fall; Romney stopped in Janesville, Wisconsin, talking privately and doing an event with Paul Ryan, soon to be his running mate; and it was another attempt, apparently fruitless, on the part of the campaign to demonstrate the candidate’s concern with ordinary people. This segment was officially called the “Every Town Counts” tour. Romney rode around in a sleek bus painted with all-American scenes of mountains, church steeples, and ships in harbors. Romney cannot light up a crowd. He dresses the way one is supposed to dress (checked shirt, no tie), he dutifully repeats his applause lines at every stop (“Last time there was hope and change—this time it’s ‘We hope to change the subject’ ”), he takes his body through motions and gestures meant to read as forceful and high-energy—and nothing happens. This summer, his audiences were strikingly small, and white, and middle-aged or older. One problem is that Romney’s voice lacks resonance and range. Another is that, even in brief appearances, he tends to offer up three- and five-point policy plans that bore the audience. He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company—Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s—it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero. And Romney’s political references (the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, the organized-labor cause known as “card check,” Obama’s failure to negotiate new free-trade agreements) don’t register much with the people who turn up at rallies. He sounds like someone speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in the nineteen-fifties. The weekend before the Republican Convention, I travelled to Powell, Ohio, a picture-postcard small town just outside Columbus, where there was a Romney rally early on a Saturday morning. Ryan spoke before Romney. He was loud and kinetic, and full of cultural references (football, deer hunting, Catholicism), which got far more applause than his comments on economics and policy. When Romney took the stage, he picked up on the distant shouts of a group of protesters who were outside the security perimeter of the rally, and began to riff. He referred to the protesters as a Greek chorus, went on to recall the grandiose Greek columns that stood behind Obama when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, in 2008, and finally arrived at the Greek fiscal crisis and how the Obama Administration was leading America in that direction. His punch line was “Everything they do reminds us of Greece!” Then he predicted that although Obama would accept the nomination this year at the Bank of America Arena, in Charlotte, he would not call the arena by its name, because he would never acknowledge a bank. Then it was on to Chinese-currency policy. After the rally, I interviewed Romney. He was sitting at a folding Formica-topped table in a corner of the town’s city-council chamber, with his travelling press aide, Rick Gorka, at his side. Romney has done a lot of meeting and a lot of selling during his rise in business and politics, but mainly indoors, in small groups of peers. He’s as adept in that setting as he is unnatural talking to a big crowd. Unlike most candidates, he did not communicate a sense either of being too restless to give you his full attention or of having to establish that he is the alpha and you the beta. He was direct and pleasant and engaged. His voice sounded husky, rather than flat. His gestures seemed spontaneous, not staged. Because Romney’s answers to the standard political questions are usually scripted and unrevealing, I asked him about business. Why had General Motors, the economic titan of his youth, fallen so low? “My dad had a statement he would make that proved to be true in this industry, as in all others,” Romney said. “I remember, as a boy, saying to him, ‘Dad, we make the best cars, don’t we?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘Then why don’t we sell the most cars?’ And he said, Well, someday we may. And he said, ‘Because, Mitt’—and this is a quote—‘there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.’ And the auto industry, in particular General Motors, was so successful for so long that it didn’t recognize the need to innovate, to become more productive, to become more efficient, or it would ultimately be vulnerable to foreign competition. So the industry itself, its managers, made some critical mistakes.” Romney ticked off the mistakes. “One, they agreed to union contracts that were uncompetitive with those of other companies around the world, and ultimately with the so-called transplants, foreign companies doing business in the U.S.,” he said. “By calculations that some consulting firms did, a U.S. car was two thousand dollars more expensive to build than a comparable foreign product.” He added, “The benefit packages, the work rules, the wages, and other decisions by the management were not consistent with the need to be more competitive.” I asked Romney how he would reconcile this account with the central theory of his first employer, the Boston Consulting Group, that experience gives a company a powerful economic advantage. Actually, he said, Bruce Henderson’s insight was tempered by the word “could.” A successful company could have low costs, it could make a better product, and it could have a highly profitable run. “But if companies become complacent,” he went on, “in my dad’s lexicon, they could become more vulnerable. And the history—I.B.M., Western Union, A.T. & T., the history of the great nations of the earth, the great empires of the earth—there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success. “And there are some enterprises that have found that they can, despite their huge success, reinvigorate themselves, reinvent themselves, and maintain their lead. G.E. did that under Jack Welch,” he said. “Bruce Henderson’s vision was important because it said what’s important is not just how good you are as a company; it is how good you are relative to your competition. . . . And Bill Bain’s innovation was to go one step further, and to say, ‘We don’t just give the company a road map; we help them implement that road map.’ Because giving someone an answer without actually helping them implement it will often not yield a result. So both firms, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, and then ultimately McKinsey and others, all caught on to the same vision, which is: help American and foreign companies recognize that they must change to survive.” Romney clearly loved talking about this, and he was showing how he thinks about running things, including the federal government. The motif of understanding business and government in terms of a competition between entrenched, unproductive costs and efficient investments, which animates the video of the talk to donors in Boca Raton, ran through our conversation. He went on, “I’ve seen, for instance, in a company like Marriott International—you have Bill Marriott, who is the chief executive officer there, and there’s the Host Hotels, which was part of the company at one point. It’s now a separate company. It’s headed by another Marriott brother, Dick Marriott. Both of them have been highly successful over many decades . . . and their chief executives are constantly pushing the businesses to become more efficient, more customer-friendly, to expand into new markets.” He led into a discussion of politics by talking about the strategic myopia of many business executives. “They agree to actions which are good on a short-term basis but may be more hazardous long term. And so, for instance, if you’re the chief executive officer of General Motors back in the nineteen-seventies and a contract comes forward which has onerous legacy costs, why, you know that those costs are not going to be borne on your term, because it’s going to be done for future retirees. And so you might agree to something that is harmful to the company long term but, by the way, beneficial short term, because who wants to take a strike, to prevent a provision that’s going to hurt ten years or twenty years down the road? “This is particularly true, by the way, in politics,” he went on, “where politicians regularly agree to huge contracts with back-end-loaded benefits, and the day of reckoning finally comes, but they’re long gone.” He allowed a hint of sarcasm to creep into his voice. “While they were there, everything was great. But look at the contracts they entered into!” I asked whether it was possible to run the vast, diffuse American government the way you would run a business. “The private sector is less forgiving,” he said. “If you make serious mistakes in the private sector, you’ll lose your job, or, if you’re in a position of responsibility, you might lose other people’s jobs. In politics, politicians make mistakes all the time and blame their opposition, or borrow more money, or raise taxes to pay for their mistake. In the business world, the ability to speak fast and convincingly is of very little value. I remember the first time I met Jack Welch. I expected him to be a super-salesman. Instead, he spoke quietly, somewhat haltingly, but brilliantly. Stuff matters a lot more than fluff in the private sector.” It was clear where Romney placed himself. “I can’t imagine making politics my profession,” he said. “I can’t imagine having to think about winning elections through a lifetime, to be able to put food on the table and provide for my family.” Because his profession was in the private sector, “I don’t get wound up about winning an election. Instead, I think about what I want to do, hopefully communicate that as well as I can to people, and, if they vote for me, fine, and if they don’t they don’t. That’s their right.” He recalled watching his father on Election Night in 1964, when George was running for reëlection as governor of Michigan. Lyndon Johnson had won the Presidency by a landslide. “The numbers had come in, and in Michigan Johnson was way ahead of what our pollster, Walter DeVries, had estimated. And Walter DeVries came in. Our family was in a hotel room. He said, ‘George, you probably can’t win. Most likely you’ve lost tonight.’ And I, as a seventeen-year-old, was thinking about how embarrassing it would be to go to school and have your dad having lost as governor, and those kinds of personal things. My dad, I looked at him, he was not in the slightest affected.” George Romney told his son, “I’ve put out what I think I can do, and if they want someone else that’s their right.” Mitt Romney said, “He was not defined, in his own mind, by winning elections. He was defined by the things he believed. And if people wished to follow his lead that was up to them.” Romney went on to talk about the social-welfare functions of government. “Government, by and large, is less efficient than churches and private institutions and family members. A family member can say to someone, ‘I’m not going to give you another dollar until you clean up your act, son!’ A government can’t do that. A government has to say, ‘If you qualify, you get it.’ And, that being said, one has no choice but to have a safety net provided by government for housing needs, for food needs, for welfare to get people back on their feet. I recognize that, support that.” Between Presidential campaigns, Romney wrote a book, “No Apology,” without a ghostwriter. It reveals a man doing a slow burn as he watches the man who won the election take office and make the wrong decision on every major issue. So I asked him what he would have done differently in January, 2009. “Let’s start domestic,” he said. “The President failed to focus on the economy. He delegated to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the stimulus. He did not personally guide the process with Republicans and Democrats, hearing the ideas of both, shaping a piece of legislation which he thought would be most effective. Instead, it was done by Congress. He instead devoted his time and his political capital to the Affordable Care Act, to cap and trade, to Dodd-Frank, and to other pieces of legislation that he thought were going to be historic in their scope. “No. 2, related to foreign affairs. We had men and women in harm’s way, particularly in Afghanistan,” he said. “We knew that there was a decision point about Afghanistan that would be coming forward. We had tens of thousands of men and women in conflict, but he spent almost no time meeting with the commanders and leaders of our military to understand the needs in Afghanistan, to understand what level of a surge, to understand what level of troops might be appropriate for that kind of action. And so when the decision point came he had to delay. I think that was a mistake. He concluded to put in thirty thousand troops instead of the forty thousand that the military had requested. That was a mistake.” On foreign policy, where he has no direct experience and no long-standing team of helpers, Romney consistently shows a moralistic streak; his critique of President Obama is partly managerial, and partly based on the idea that Obama’s foreign policy is all about “apologizing for America.” Regarding the nations of the Middle East, there needed to be a concerted effort to move them “toward a more representative form of government, particularly among our friends. And then when our enemies—when I say our enemies, I’m thinking of Iran, or Syria—we obviously would have very little influence of that nature with them, but when there were movements that began to spring forward seeing greater representation in those countries, we should have been all over that, encouraging it, standing with them, shouting from the mountaintops. Instead, the President, wanting to engage with Iran, was silent when the dissidents took to the streets.” He went on, “It was as if the President was trying to show our foes in the world that we are not biased, we’ll work with anyone. In my view, the right course for a President is to show our friends that we are linked arm in arm with them, and to show those that oppose our interests that we are happy to talk with them, to engage in diplomacy with them, but we will not give an inch to their agenda.” Romney also discussed Russia (whose support of Iran and Syria he strongly objects to) and China (which he feels is playing unfairly in trade with the United States). In both cases, he believes that by getting tougher he could get the other superpower to change. Then our conversation returned to businesses and countries that founder. “We’re all worried,” he said, “but the consequence of not recognizing problems when they’re small and dealing with them can be severe when the problems become large. And that’s frankly what’s happening with the country over all.” He went on, “The President said Medicare is going to be bankrupt in eight to nine years. And we have to fix it or reform it. And he’s made no proposal whatsoever to do so. I don’t know how you can be President of the United States and not say, Well, here’s something that will make Medicare work permanently. Or here’s something that’ll fix Social Security permanently. And here’s what we need to do to make our tax system fair, equitable, and one that encourages growth. And, by the way, trillion-dollar deficits? For four years?” Romney described this as “a very dangerous course, because, as you know, at some point the people who loan us all this money, if they get nervous that they’re going to get repaid in dollars that might not be worth too much, they are going to ask for higher interest rates, and if that happens our budget is going to get overwhelmed by high interest costs. And it can kill our economy. And, by the way, kill jobs. We see what’s happening in Europe.” Our time was up. We stood and shook hands. “I enjoy speaking about substance, as opposed to just the political process,” Romney said. IV. THE RESCUER Throughout his years at Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, and Bain Capital, Romney was an active Latter-Day Saint. The Mormon Church does not have a professional clergy, so its members perform the clergy’s functions themselves, and they also tithe. The late-adolescent mission is, in a sense, meant to get Mormons accustomed to devoting a great deal of time to the Church. In Massachusetts, Romney became a bishop and then “stake president.” He played a role in building a temple in Belmont. There are many stories of his pastoral activities: the time he rushed over to Doug Anderson’s home to help after a fire, the time he deployed a group of Bain Capital employees to go to New York to find Bob Gay’s missing teen-age daughter, the time he straightened out a wayward son of Kim Clark’s. If elected, Romney would arguably be the most actively religious President in American history. Clayton Christensen told me about his days as a struggling young consultant. He is from a modest background in Utah, and had married and started a family while still a student, so when he bought his first house, in Belmont, he and his wife had to fix it up themselves, a process that took twelve years. One night, exhausted, he was on his hands and knees on the living-room floor applying polyurethane. There was a knock on the door; it was Mitt Romney, who explained that he had driven by just to check up earlier in the evening, and had seen Christensen through the living-room window. “There’s a better way to do it, Clay,” Romney said. “Here, let me show you.” He produced a tool that he had devised at home. As he was telling me this story, Christensen (who once or twice had to wipe tears from his eyes when he was speaking about Romney’s church activities) got out a sheet of paper and drew a diagram of Romney’s solution. Romney had laid three four-inch paint brushes side by side, then fixed them to each other with duct tape, then attached the brushes to a pole—“so rather than being on my hands and knees, I was standing up, and applying the polyurethane with a wide brush. I was done in half an hour.” Romney’s career in the years since Bain Capital has repeatedly followed the narrative of the rescuer, the person who combines moral passion and practical skill to fix seemingly insoluble situations. He referred to the first of these in our interview, the rescue of Bain & Company, saying that he had applied three simple rules: “Focus, focus, and focus.” According to colleagues of Romney’s, Bill Bain and his group of founders had created a financial structure that enabled them to take out bank loans on behalf of the firm in order to pay themselves the big lump sums that they felt they deserved but that the consulting business doesn’t ordinarily produce. Then the business took a dip, and the company began missing its payments on the loans. In 1990, Romney returned from Bain Capital to save Bain & Company. He worked long hours, studying the data and talking to all the parties. Within a couple of weeks, colleagues say, he was able to persuade Bain and the other founders to give up most of their overly generous payments, and to get the banks to forgive a portion of the loans. That removed enough immediate financial pressure to re-start the firm. When Romney ran for office for the first time, against Kennedy, in 1994, he felt called to clean up a moral cesspool. The Romneys were disgusted by the stories they were seeing on television about Kennedy’s carousing, especially during testimony at the Florida rape trial of Kennedy’s nephew William Kennedy Smith. There seems to be a connection in Romney’s mind between lack of personal discipline and, in government, a free-spending, fiscally irresponsible liberalism. As Clayton Christensen put it, “People who run against him are liberal in the sense that they vote for legislation that takes money out of one person’s pocket and puts it in another person’s pocket, and say they’re compassionate. They don’t get it. They don’t have any idea of what life is like at the bottom of the pyramid”—but Mormons, who work hands-on in an elaborate church welfare system, do. If Romney had won the Senate race, he would have instantly become a plausible Presidential candidate, especially since Massachusetts borders the key Presidential primary state, New Hampshire. Romney’s taking over of the 2002 Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City, followed the same rescue narrative. Salt Lake City had been an unsuccessful bidder for the Winter Olympics three times. Not long after it finally succeeded in its bid, there were reports that members of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee had given bribes to the International Olympic Committee. The mayor of Salt Lake City resigned and the lead Olympic organizers were indicted. In Romney’s version of the story, he selflessly answers a call to service, and moves to Utah to save the Olympics. Actually, he competed for the job (which another prominent Mormon scion turned politician, Jon Huntsman, also wanted), and he seems to have understood that it had the potential to launch him into public life. In Salt Lake City, he recruited one of the founding crew at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, to serve as his chief aide in running the Olympics. But, before he completed his assignment in Utah, he had an even closer Bain associate, Bob White, who was back in Boston, preparing for a race for governor in Massachusetts. The situation in Salt Lake City was not quite so dire as Romney has made it sound: the indicted officials were eventually acquitted, and there was always government funding for the Games. Still, by all accounts he did an excellent job. Massachusetts, to Romney’s way of thinking, also needed to be rescued. The state budget was in deficit, and the heavily Democratic state legislature didn’t have the discipline to fix the problem. The sitting Republican governor, Jane Swift, came to understand that she had to step aside so that Romney could run. The 2002 campaign had a much stronger flavor of the Bain Capital approach to life than the 1994 Senate campaign had, and this carried over into governing. “Mitt Romney believes in his competence as a manager,” Rob Gray, one of the people Romney hired to run his gubernatorial campaign, told me. “If he’s elected, he’ll do an adequate job of dealing with the issues of the day. He’s not a vision guy. He’s not policy-driven. He thinks he’ll do a good job.” Ben Coes, the campaign manager, who is in private equity, told me that he got the job because he had gone to Romney’s house and given a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. Then he implemented an elaborate system that used databases and poll results to divide the state into eleven cultural groups, identify the six most likely to vote for Romney, and find volunteers to establish personal contact with each identifiable member of those groups. These techniques, along with the money that Romney was able to spend, helped him win. In office, Romney was heavily involved both in management—he brought in another of the Bain Capital founders, Eric Kriss, as the state’s top administrator—and in the drama of reëstablishing morality in government. He pushed out the state’s head of patronage, the president of the state university, and the head of the Big Dig highway-construction project. He improved the state’s finances and passed health-care reform. Romney was harder-working and far more cautious as a policymaker than William Weld, the previous Presidentially ambitious Republican governor. He saw his major initiatives as exercises in problem-solving, not as expressions of lifelong convictions. Or one could say that the process itself—identify the problem, analyze the data, kick around solutions until the best one emerges, lead—is his conviction, not the principle involved. He took on health-care reform because rising medical costs were putting stress on the state budget. He endorsed an individual mandate to carry health insurance, which was a favored conservative idea at the time, and opposed a similar mandate for businesses, but when the state legislature made it clear that both mandates were going to have to be in any bill that passed Romney accepted that and signed with a smile on his face. Problem solved. He was always thinking ahead. Within just a few years of taking office, he was laying the groundwork for a Presidential campaign. After the 2008 campaign failed, the Romneys moved to San Diego, where their sons live. And he was soon at work on his book, “No Apology,” setting out his Presidential vision for 2012. This spring, after Rick Santorum dropped out of the race for the Republican Presidential nomination, Romney called Michael Leavitt, who, as governor of Utah, had supported the idea of bringing him in to run the Olympics and, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, had signed the waiver of federal rules he needed to launch the Massachusetts health-care plan. (Leavitt says that Romney was the only governor he dealt with who always came with a PowerPoint presentation, which he would deliver personally.) Romney asked Leavitt to set up a Presidential-transition office in Washington. He called it the Readiness Project. One day during the summer, I dropped by the Readiness Project office to talk to Leavitt. It is on the ninth floor of a brand-new, grade-A office building near Union Station and the Capitol. There was no sign on the door or listing in the building directory. The office was neat and hyper-organized, with no piece of paper visible on any desk. There were conference rooms with screens and whiteboards (all blank). On the walls were poster-size color photographs of the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, and the Golden Gate Bridge. At the exact time my meeting was supposed to begin, the receptionist came over and said that she was very sorry, but Governor Leavitt was running late. About two minutes afterward, he came in from the elevator lobby, and asked what conference room we had been assigned to. It was the Constitution Room; the receptionist walked us down a hallway and keyed in a security code that unlocked the door, and we sat down. Like everyone I met who’s close to Romney, Leavitt was clean-cut, friendly, and straightforward. He had a firm handshake and he looked me in the eye. Our conversation had a combination, which I had become accustomed to, of directness and opacity. He told me that when Romney called to offer him the job “he said that the point is not just to get the nomination, and not just to win, but to be prepared. So I want you to start thinking about this.” What would Romney do as President? “I believe Mitt truly believes the pattern he has followed in other turnarounds will provide benefit to the country,” Leavitt said. “Job one, it’s a disheartened country. Give people confidence again. Two, bring things into balance. Give the speech about sizing our response to our resources. Three, build a team that can execute the plan. He believes that formula is a sound one.” Romney is a creature of two realms that he evidently believes American society doesn’t understand, and that have been the frequent object of hostility: his church, and the corner of business where he has spent his career. He combines an utter confidence in his ability to fix anything with an utter lack of confidence in his ability to explain to people what he intends to do, which is why he appears so stiff and so unspecific in talking about his prospective Presidency. Even Romney’s friends and business associates find him guarded. He doesn’t give anybody, except his immediate family, access to his emotional life. He has the caution of a crown prince who has always been intensely aware of the demands imposed by his destiny. This election is activating large parts of the American psyche. After the 2008 financial crisis and the long, painful recession, people’s desire for a big fix, a new social compact, is palpable. The main project of the business careers of Romney and the other transaction men—to make American business competitive in the global economy—may have succeeded on its own terms, but most Americans haven’t shared in the benefits. Even Michael Jensen, the chief theorist of private equity, expressed some doubts to me about how the transaction economy has played out. Private-equity firms can be more attentive to their fees than to the value of the company, he said, and too inattentive to the overarching purpose of financial engineering. “Value, in the way I’ve defined it, is the score that shows up on the scoreboard,” he said. “It’s not the objective. It’s not the strategy. Your life can’t be just about you, or your life will be shit. You see that on Wall Street.” If Romney loses this election, he will be, to some extent, a victim of the widespread resentment of the new economy, and of the Obama campaign’s skill at directing that resentment toward him. But the story won’t have ended. It’s not clear what will reverse the rise in economic inequality and uncertainty. Government is unpopular, and the Democratic Party has its own ties to big money. The larger forces of global capitalism will continue to unfold. Perhaps a future Republican candidate can persuade the country to see the world as he sees it. Romney, it seems, can’t do that. Clayton Christensen told me that when Romney was made a bishop, in the early eighties, Christensen took him aside for a little talk about how he needed to open up more. “He never at church was able, in front of the whole congregation, to talk about himself,” Christensen said. “You have to push a neuron across the synapse. If you’ve never landed a neuron across that path . . . It’s as if Mitt has never had the thought of talking about himself.” Christensen decided to offer Romney a Biblical parable: the story of Moses, which, as he recounted the conversation to me, he delivered to Romney with a distinct M.B.A. flavor. “God spoke to the guy: ‘I want you to lead Israel out of Egypt.’ He tried over and over. Nothing worked. Finally, it worked. The Red Sea parted. Up to that point, you would have had a Plan B and a Plan C. Here there was no backup plan, ladies and gentlemen. Sure enough, God parted the Red Sea. “So then, on the other side, Moses had no experience in management. His father-in-law shows up, and says, ‘Moses, you’re a horrible manager. Ever heard the word “delegation”? Can you do this, Moses?’ And Moses had never been responsible for the supply chain in any industry, but now we have run out of water. So he banged the rock and out comes water. Then he goes to Mt. Sinai. He gets the instructions, he sees what the people are doing, and he’s so mad. They can’t handle anything beyond the elevator pitch for God. So then Moses told everything about himself. Mitt, look at the impact his openness had on Israel! Most of the other prophets, you had no idea what their life was like. All the other prophets aren’t in the psyche of Israel. Why?” I asked Christensen if the talk worked. He shrugged. “It had no effect whatsoever. The neuron can’t get across that synapse.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: Barry Blitt </p> 18923857 2014-07-20 06:26:07 2014-07-20 06:26:07 open open from-the-new-yorker-masland-carpet-october-1-18923857 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New Yorker Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 06:53:39 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Linguistics Words on Trial Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? by Jack Hitt July 23, 2012 [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. Not a subscriber? Get immediate access to this story, along with a one-month free trial, by subscribing now. Or find out about other ways to read The New Yorker digitally. July 23, 2012 Issue Related Links Audio: Jack Hitt on forensic linguistics. Keywords Forensic Linguistics; Robert Leonard; Roger Shuy; Unabomber; James Fitzgerald; Natalee Holloway; Ronald Butters DEPT. OF LINGUISTICS about forensic linguistics. These days, the word “forensic” conjures an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” show who delicately retrieves a hair or a paint chip from a crime scene, surmises the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as incontrovertible evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers of meaning from old letters and stray audiotape before announcing that the perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far from the truth. Tells about the testimony of forensic linguist Robert Leonard in the 2011 murder trial of Chris Coleman. Discusses the work of James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist who brought the field to prominence in 1996 with his work in the case of the Unabomber. Fitzgerald had successfully urged the FBI to publish the Unabomber’s “manifesto.” Many people called in to say they recognized the writing style. By analyzing syntax and other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald narrowed down the possible authors and finally linked the manifesto to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclusive former mathematician. Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic linguistics, including starting the Communicated Threat Assessment Database. The CTAD is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing some four thousand “criminally oriented communications” and more than a million words. The pioneer of forensic linguistics is widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a Georgetown University professor and the author of such fundamental textbooks as “Language Crimes: The Use and Abuse of Language Evidence in the Courtroom.” The field’s more recent origins might be traced to an airplane flight in 1979, when Shuy found himself talking to the lawyer sitting next to him. By the end of the flight, Shuy had a recommendation as an expert witness in his first murder case. Since then, he’s been involved in numerous cases in which forensic analysis revealed how meaning had been distorted by the process of writing or recording. In recent years, following Shuy’s lead, a growing number of linguists have applied their techniques in regular criminal cases, such Chris Coleman’s, and even certain commercial lawsuits. Mentions a suit between Apple and Microsoft over the use of the phrase “app store.” Writer visits Robert Leonard at Hofstra University and describes some of his cases, including the investigation of the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba. Mentions Carole Chaski, the executive director of the Institute for Linguistic Evidence and the president of Alias Technology, which markets linguistic software. Chaski has been working to perfect a computer algorithm that identifies patterns hidden in syntax. read the full text... read the full text... Jack Hitt, Dept. of Linguistics, “Words on Trial,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2012, p. 24 </p> 18747758 2014-06-28 06:53:39 2014-06-28 06:53:39 open open new-yorker-can-linguists-solve-crimes-that-stump-the-police-by-jack-hitt-july-23-18747758 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan New Yorker: The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:23:09 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Dept. of Criminology Dangerous Minds Criminal profiling made easy. by Malcolm Gladwell November 12, 2007 The F.B.I.’s criminal profilers try to think their way into the head of the offender. [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison building on West Sixty-fourth Street in Manhattan found a homemade pipe bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: “Con Edison crooks, this is for you.” In September of 1941, a second bomb was found, on Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks from Con Edison’s headquarters, near Union Square. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York police received a letter promising to “bring the Con Edison to justice—they will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Sixteen other letters followed, between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase “dastardly deeds” and all signed with the initials “F.P.” In March of 1950, a third bomb—larger and more powerful than the others—was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. The next was left in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth in Grand Central. In 1954, the Mad Bomber—as he came to be known—struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955, he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department’s crime laboratory, and two plainclothesmen paid a visit to a psychiatrist by the name of James Brussel. Brussel was a Freudian. He lived on Twelfth Street, in the West Village, and smoked a pipe. In Mexico, early in his career, he had done counter-espionage work for the F.B.I. He wrote many books, including “Instant Shrink: How to Become an Expert Psychiatrist in Ten Easy Lessons.” Finney put a stack of documents on Brussel’s desk: photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photostats of F.P.’s neatly lettered missives. “I didn’t miss the look in the two plainclothesmen’s eyes,” Brussel writes in his memoir, “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist.” “I’d seen that look before, most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense.” He began to leaf through the case materials. For sixteen years, F.P. had been fixated on the notion that Con Ed had done him some terrible injustice. Clearly, he was clinically paranoid. But paranoia takes some time to develop. F.P. had been bombing since 1940, which suggested that he was now middle-aged. Brussel looked closely at the precise lettering of F.P.’s notes to the police. This was an orderly man. He would be cautious. His work record would be exemplary. Further, the language suggested some degree of education. But there was a stilted quality to the word choice and the phrasing. Con Edison was often referred to as “the Con Edison.” And who still used the expression “dastardly deeds”? F.P. seemed to be foreign-born. Brussel looked closer at the letters, and noticed that all the letters were perfect block capitals, except the “W”s. They were misshapen, like two “U”s. To Brussel’s eye, those “W”s looked like a pair of breasts. He flipped to the crime-scene descriptions. When F.P. planted his bombs in movie theatres, he would slit the underside of the seat with a knife and stuff his explosives into the upholstery. Didn’t that seem like a symbolic act of penetrating a woman, or castrating a man—or perhaps both? F.P. had probably never progressed beyond the Oedipal stage. He was unmarried, a loner. Living with a mother figure. Brussel made another leap. F.P. was a Slav. Just as the use of a garrote would have suggested someone of Mediterranean extraction, the bomb-knife combination struck him as Eastern European. Some of the letters had been posted from Westchester County, but F.P. wouldn’t have mailed the letters from his home town. Still, a number of cities in southeastern Connecticut had a large Slavic population. And didn’t you have to pass through Westchester to get to the city from Connecticut? from the issue buy as a print e-mail this Brussel waited a moment, and then, in a scene that has become legendary among criminal profilers, he made a prediction: “One more thing.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to see their reaction. I saw the Bomber: impeccably neat, absolutely proper. A man who would avoid the newer styles of clothing until long custom had made them conservative. I saw him clearly—much more clearly than the facts really warranted. I knew I was letting my imagination get the better of me, but I couldn’t help it. “One more thing,” I said, my eyes closed tight. “When you catch him—and I have no doubt you will—he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit.” “Jesus!” one of the detectives whispered. “And it will be buttoned,” I said. I opened my eyes. Finney and his men were looking at each other. “A double-breasted suit,” said the Inspector. “Yes.” “Buttoned.” “Yes.” He nodded. Without another word, they left. A month later, George Metesky was arrested by police in connection with the New York City bombings. His name had been changed from Milauskas. He lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, with his two older sisters. He was unmarried. He was unfailingly neat. He attended Mass regularly. He had been employed by Con Edison from 1929 to 1931, and claimed to have been injured on the job. When he opened the door to the police officers, he said, “I know why you fellows are here. You think I’m the Mad Bomber.” It was midnight, and he was in his pajamas. The police asked that he get dressed. When he returned, his hair was combed into a pompadour and his shoes were newly shined. He was also wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned. In a new book, “Inside the Mind of BTK,” the eminent F.B.I. criminal profiler John Douglas tells the story of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Wichita, Kansas, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Douglas was the model for Agent Jack Crawford in “The Silence of the Lambs.” He was the protégé of the pioneering F.B.I. profiler Howard Teten, who helped establish the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, in 1972, and who was a protégé of Brussel—which, in the close-knit fraternity of profilers, is like being analyzed by the analyst who was analyzed by Freud. To Douglas, Brussel was the father of criminal profiling, and, in both style and logic, “Inside the Mind of BTK” pays homage to “Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist” at every turn. “BTK” stood for “Bind, Torture, Kill”—the three words that the killer used to identify himself in his taunting notes to the Wichita police. He had struck first in January, 1974, when he killed thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero in his home, along with his wife, Julie, their son, Joey, and their eleven-year-old daughter, who was found hanging from a water pipe in the basement with semen on her leg. The following April, he stabbed a twenty-four-year-old woman. In March, 1977, he bound and strangled another young woman, and over the next few years he committed at least four more murders. The city of Wichita was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. In 1984, in desperation, two police detectives from Wichita paid a visit to Quantico. The meeting, Douglas writes, was held in a first-floor conference room of the F.B.I.’s forensic-science building. He was then nearly a decade into his career at the Behavioral Science Unit. His first two best-sellers, “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” and “Obsession: The FBI’s Legendary Profiler Probes the Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers and Their Victims and Tells How to Fight Back,” were still in the future. Working a hundred and fifty cases a year, he was on the road constantly, but BTK was never far from his thoughts. “Some nights I’d lie awake asking myself, ‘Who the hell is this BTK?’ ” he writes. “What makes a guy like this do what he does? What makes him tick?” Roy Hazelwood sat next to Douglas. A lean chain-smoker, Hazelwood specialized in sex crimes, and went on to write the best-sellers “Dark Dreams” and “The Evil That Men Do.” Beside Hazelwood was an ex-Air Force pilot named Ron Walker. Walker, Douglas writes, was “whip smart” and an “exceptionally quick study.” The three bureau men and the two detectives sat around a massive oak table. “The objective of our session was to keep moving forward until we ran out of juice,” Douglas writes. They would rely on the typology developed by their colleague Robert Ressler, himself the author of the true-crime best-sellers “Whoever Fights Monsters” and “I Have Lived in the Monster.” The goal was to paint a picture of the killer—of what sort of man BTK was, and what he did, and where he worked, and what he was like—and with that scene “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. We are now so familiar with crime stories told through the eyes of the profiler that it is easy to lose sight of how audacious the genre is. The traditional detective story begins with the body and centers on the detective’s search for the culprit. Leads are pursued. A net is cast, widening to encompass a bewilderingly diverse pool of suspects: the butler, the spurned lover, the embittered nephew, the shadowy European. That’s a Whodunit. In the profiling genre, the net is narrowed. The crime scene doesn’t initiate our search for the killer. It defines the killer for us. The profiler sifts through the case materials, looks off into the distance, and knows. “Generally, a psychiatrist can study a man and make a few reasonable predictions about what the man may do in the future—how he will react to such-and-such a stimulus, how he will behave in such-and-such a situation,” Brussel writes. “What I have done is reverse the terms of the prophecy. By studying a man’s deeds, I have deduced what kind of man he might be.” Look for a middle-aged Slav in a double-breasted suit. Profiling stories aren’t Whodunits; they’re Hedunits. In the Hedunit, the profiler does not catch the criminal. That’s for local law enforcement. He takes the meeting. Often, he doesn’t write down his predictions. It’s up to the visiting police officers to take notes. He does not feel the need to involve himself in the subsequent investigation, or even, it turns out, to justify his predictions. Once, Douglas tells us, he drove down to the local police station and offered his services in the case of an elderly woman who had been savagely beaten and sexually assaulted. The detectives working the crime were regular cops, and Douglas was a bureau guy, so you can imagine him perched on the edge of a desk, the others pulling up chairs around him. “ ‘Okay,’ I said to the detectives. . . . ‘Here’s what I think,’ ” Douglas begins. “It’s a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. . . . He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed.” He went on: a loner, kind of weird, no girlfriend, lots of bottled-up anger. He comes to the old lady’s house. He knows she’s alone. Maybe he’s done odd jobs for her in the past. Douglas continues: I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got their offender. One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile. “Are you a psychic, Douglas?” “No,” I say, “but my job would be a lot easier if I were.” “Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things.” You might think that Douglas would bridle at that comparison. He is, after all, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who studied with Teten, who studied with Brussel. He is an ace profiler, part of a team that restored the F.B.I.’s reputation for crime-fighting, inspired countless movies, television shows, and best-selling thrillers, and brought the modern tools of psychology to bear on the savagery of the criminal mind—and some cop is calling him a psychic. But Douglas doesn’t object. Instead, he begins to muse on the ineffable origins of his insights, at which point the question arises of what exactly this mysterious art called profiling is, and whether it can be trusted. Douglas writes, What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with . . . and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there’s a psychic component to this, I won’t run from it. In the late nineteen-seventies, John Douglas and his F.B.I. colleague Robert Ressler set out to interview the most notorious serial killers in the country. They started in California, since, as Douglas says, “California has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes.” On weekends and days off, over the next months, they stopped by one federal prison after another, until they had interviewed thirty-six murderers. Douglas and Ressler wanted to know whether there was a pattern that connected a killer’s life and personality with the nature of his crimes. They were looking for what psychologists would call a homology, an agreement between character and action, and, after comparing what they learned from the killers with what they already knew about the characteristics of their murders, they became convinced that they’d found one. Serial killers, they concluded, fall into one of two categories. Some crime scenes show evidence of logic and planning. The victim has been hunted and selected, in order to fulfill a specific fantasy. The recruitment of the victim might involve a ruse or a con. The perpetrator maintains control throughout the offense. He takes his time with the victim, carefully enacting his fantasies. He is adaptable and mobile. He almost never leaves a weapon behind. He meticulously conceals the body. Douglas and Ressler, in their respective books, call that kind of crime “organized.” In a “disorganized” crime, the victim isn’t chosen logically. She’s seemingly picked at random and “blitz-attacked,” not stalked and coerced. The killer might grab a steak knife from the kitchen and leave the knife behind. The crime is so sloppily executed that the victim often has a chance to fight back. The crime might take place in a high-risk environment. “Moreover, the disorganized killer has no idea of, or interest in, the personalities of his victims,” Ressler writes in “Whoever Fights Monsters.” “He does not want to know who they are, and many times takes steps to obliterate their personalities by quickly knocking them unconscious or covering their faces or otherwise disfiguring them.” Each of these styles, the argument goes, corresponds to a personality type. The organized killer is intelligent and articulate. He feels superior to those around him. The disorganized killer is unattractive and has a poor self-image. He often has some kind of disability. He’s too strange and withdrawn to be married or have a girlfriend. If he doesn’t live alone, he lives with his parents. He has pornography stashed in his closet. If he drives at all, his car is a wreck. “The crime scene is presumed to reflect the murderer’s behavior and personality in much the same way as furnishings reveal the homeowner’s character,” we’re told in a crime manual that Douglas and Ressler helped write. The more they learned, the more precise the associations became. If the victim was white, the killer would be white. If the victim was old, the killer would be sexually immature. “In our research, we discovered that . . . frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman,” Douglas writes. Given that organized rapists were preoccupied with control, it made sense that they would be fascinated by the social institution that symbolizes control. Out of that insight came another prediction: “One of the things we began saying in some of our profiles was that the UNSUB”—the unknown subject—“would drive a policelike vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice.” On the surface, the F.B.I.’s system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in the profiling literature. The body of a twenty-six-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her Bronx apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after she left her house for work, at six-thirty in the morning. She had been beaten beyond recognition, and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, chopped off her nipples, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, masturbated, and then defecated next to the body. Let’s pretend that we’re an F.B.I. profiler. First question: race. The victim is white, so let’s call the offender white. Let’s say he’s in his mid-twenties to early thirties, which is when the thirty-six men in the F.B.I.’s sample started killing. Is the crime organized or disorganized? Disorganized, clearly. It’s on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight—high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning? He could be some kind of serviceman, or he could live in the neighborhood. Either way, he appears to be familiar with the building. He’s disorganized, though, so he’s not stable. If he is employed, it’s blue-collar work, at best. He probably has a prior offense, having to do with violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he’s probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem. How does that sound? As it turns out, it’s spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age thirty, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when he was not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the fourth floor of the building where the murder took place. But how useful is that profile, really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you’re looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don’t really need a profiler to tell you to check out the dishevelled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor. That’s why the F.B.I.’s profilers have always tried to supplement the basic outlines of the organized/disorganized system with telling details—something that lets the police zero in on a suspect. In the early eighties, Douglas gave a presentation to a roomful of police officers and F.B.I. agents in Marin County about the Trailside Killer, who was murdering female hikers in the hills north of San Francisco. In Douglas’s view, the killer was a classic “disorganized” offender—a blitz attacker, white, early to mid-thirties, blue collar, probably with “a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals.” Then he went back to how asocial the killer seemed. Why did all the killings take place in heavily wooded areas, miles from the road? Douglas reasoned that the killer required such seclusion because he had some condition that he was deeply self-conscious about. Was it something physical, like a missing limb? But then how could he hike miles into the woods and physically overpower his victims? Finally, it came to him: “ ‘Another thing,’ I added after a pregnant pause, ‘the killer will have a speech impediment.’ ” And so he did. Now, that’s a useful detail. Or is it? Douglas then tells us that he pegged the offender’s age as early thirties, and he turned out to be fifty. Detectives use profiles to narrow down the range of suspects. It doesn’t do any good to get a specific detail right if you get general details wrong. In the case of Derrick Todd Lee, the Baton Rouge serial killer, the F.B.I. profile described the offender as a white male blue-collar worker, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, who “wants to be seen as someone who is attractive and appealing to women.” The profile went on, “However, his level of sophistication in interacting with women, especially women who are above him in the social strata, is low. Any contact he has had with women he has found attractive would be described by these women as ‘awkward.’ ” The F.B.I. was right about the killer being a blue-collar male between twenty-five and thirty-five. But Lee turned out to be charming and outgoing, the sort to put on a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots and head for the bars. He was an extrovert with a number of girlfriends and a reputation as a ladies’ man. And he wasn’t white. He was black. A profile isn’t a test, where you pass if you get most of the answers right. It’s a portrait, and all the details have to cohere in some way if the image is to be helpful. In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed a hundred and eighty-four crimes, to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That’s just 2.7 per cent, which makes sense if you consider the position of the detective on the receiving end of a profiler’s list of conjectures. Do you believe the stuttering part? Or do you believe the thirty-year-old part? Or do you throw up your hands in frustration? There is a deeper problem with F.B.I. profiling. Douglas and Ressler didn’t interview a representative sample of serial killers to come up with their typology. They talked to whoever happened to be in the neighborhood. Nor did they interview their subjects according to a standardized protocol. They just sat down and chatted, which isn’t a particularly firm foundation for a psychological system. So you might wonder whether serial killers can really be categorized by their level of organization. Not long ago, a group of psychologists at the University of Liverpool decided to test the F.B.I.’s assumptions. First, they made a list of crime-scene characteristics generally considered to show organization: perhaps the victim was alive during the sex acts, or the body was posed in a certain way, or the murder weapon was missing, or the body was concealed, or torture and restraints were involved. Then they made a list of characteristics showing disorganization: perhaps the victim was beaten, the body was left in an isolated spot, the victim’s belongings were scattered, or the murder weapon was improvised. If the F.B.I. was right, they reasoned, the crime-scene details on each of those two lists should “co-occur”—that is, if you see one or more organized traits in a crime, there should be a reasonably high probability of seeing other organized traits. When they looked at a sample of a hundred serial crimes, however, they couldn’t find any support for the F.B.I.’s distinction. Crimes don’t fall into one camp or the other. It turns out that they’re almost always a mixture of a few key organized traits and a random array of disorganized traits. Laurence Alison, one of the leaders of the Liverpool group and the author of “The Forensic Psychologist’s Casebook,” told me, “The whole business is a lot more complicated than the F.B.I. imagines.” Alison and another of his colleagues also looked at homology. If Douglas was right, then a certain kind of crime should correspond to a certain kind of criminal. So the Liverpool group selected a hundred stranger rapes in the United Kingdom, classifying them according to twenty-eight variables, such as whether a disguise was worn, whether compliments were given, whether there was binding, gagging, or blindfolding, whether there was apologizing or the theft of personal property, and so on. They then looked at whether the patterns in the crimes corresponded to attributes of the criminals—like age, type of employment, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, number of prior convictions, type of prior convictions, and drug use. Were rapists who bind, gag, and blindfold more like one another than they were like rapists who, say, compliment and apologize? The answer is no—not even slightly. “The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons,” Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.’s approach, says. “You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.” A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.’s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation. Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic “The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading,” itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the “statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.” (“I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.”) The Jacques Statement, named for the character in “As You Like It” who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, “If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.” There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that “leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.” (“I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?”) And that’s only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight. “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the “Vanishing Negative.” No, I don’t. “No, I thought not. That’s not really your role.” Of course, if the subject answers differently, there’s another way to play the question: “Moving on to career matters, you don’t work with children, do you?” I do, actually, part time. “Yes, I thought so.” After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the F.B.I., and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board, and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What’s more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the F.B.I.’s profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender. James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country—about sixty-five years ago.” The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky. Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick. “Here’s where I’m at with this guy,” Douglas said, kicking off the profiling session with which “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. It was 1984. The killer was still at large. Douglas, Hazelwood, and Walker and the two detectives from Wichita were all seated around the oak table. Douglas took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid-to-late twenties,” Douglas began. “It’s now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late thirties.” It was Walker’s turn: BTK had never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggested to him someone with an “inadequate, immature sexual history.” He would have a “lone-wolf type of personality. But he’s not alone because he’s shunned by others—it’s because he chooses to be alone. . . . He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he’d feel very inadequate with a peer-group female.” Hazelwood was next. BTK would be “heavily into masturbation.” He went on, “Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.” Douglas followed his lead. “The women he’s been with are either many years younger, very naïve, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” he ventured. What’s more, the profilers determined, BTK would drive a “decent” automobile, but it would be “nondescript.” At this point, the insights began piling on. Douglas said he’d been thinking that BTK was married. But now maybe he was thinking he was divorced. He speculated that BTK was lower middle class, probably living in a rental. Walker felt BTK was in a “lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar.” Hazelwood saw him as “middle class” and “articulate.” The consensus was that his I.Q. was somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wondered whether he was connected with the military. Hazelwood called him a “now” person, who needed “instant gratification.” Walker said that those who knew him “might say they remember him, but didn’t really know much about him.” Douglas then had a flash—“It was a sense, almost a knowing”—and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the job he’s in today, that he’s wearing some sort of uniform. . . . This guy isn’t mental. But he is crazy like a fox.” They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won’t be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won’t be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you’re keeping score, that’s a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren’t really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two. “This thing is solvable,” Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up and put on his jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance.” You can imagine him taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. “You’re gonna nail this guy.” ♦ ILLUSTRATION: GLEN BAXTER </p> 18747120 2014-06-28 03:23:09 2014-06-28 03:23:09 open open new-yorker-the-f-b-i-s-criminal-profilers-try-to-think-their-way-into-the-head-of-the-offender-18747120 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan New York Times http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/new-york-times-18747111/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:20:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Ghost of the Confederacy ‘Clouds of Glory,’ Michael Korda’s Robert E. Lee Biography By FERGUS M. BORDEWICHJUNE 27, 2014 Photo Lee, photographed by Mathew Brady in Richmond, shortly after the surrender. Credit Photograph from Library of Congress Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Share This Page [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Robert E. Lee occupies a remarkable place in the pantheon of American history, combining in the minds of many, Michael Korda writes in this admiring and briskly written biography, “a strange combination of martyr, secular saint, Southern gentleman and perfect warrior.” Indeed, Korda aptly adds, “It is hard to think of any other general who had fought against his own country being so completely reintegrated into national life.” Lee has been a popular subject of biography virtually from his death in 1870, at the age of 63, through the four magisterial volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman in the 1930s to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s intimate 2007 study of Lee and his letters, “Reading the Man.” Korda, the author of earlier biographies of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower, aspires to pry the marble lid off the Lee legend to reveal the human being beneath. He draws a generally sympathetic portrait of a master strategist who was as physically fearless on the battlefield as he was reserved in personal relations. He was, Korda writes, “a perfectionist, obsessed by duty,” but also “charming, funny and flirtatious,” an animal lover, a talented cartographer and a devoted parent, as well as “a noble, tragic figure, indeed one whose bearing and dignity conferred nobility on the cause for which he fought and still does confer it in the minds of many people.” Graduating second in his class at West Point, Lee was commissioned into the engineers, then the most prestigious branch of the Army. He spent several unremarkable decades directing the construction of coastal fortifications, including Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and somewhat more memorably, diverting the course of the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Lee legend was born during the Mexican War, when he won the highest praise from the commander of the invading American army, Winfield Scott, for his bold reconnaissance behind enemy lines, during which he participated in three battles and crossed enemy territory three separate times in 36 hours — “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage” of the campaign, in Scott’s words. In 1859, when Scott was the overall commander of the United States Army, Lee was tapped to lead the company of Marines that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. Two years later, as state after state seceded from the Union, Lincoln offered Lee the command of the federal forces. He of course declined, and took his talents south. Korda portrays the Lee of 1861 as a man tragically torn between loyalty to his nation and his native state. That Lee agonized over his decision is certainly true. However, Korda does not consider the fact that Lee was also heir to an antifederalist tradition embedded deep in the political circuitry of the Virginia elite, and of his own family: 70 years earlier, in 1790, Robert’s father, the Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee, declared in response to what he considered a slighting of Southern interests, “I had rather myself submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent Northern majority.” Many other Southern-born officers remained unshaken in their loyalty to the Union. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Korda provides crisp and concise, if conventional, accounts of Lee’s major engagements. We rarely hear from ordinary soldiers or feel the terror of battle amid the fog of war, but Korda is good at explaining Lee’s strategic thinking, the maneuvering of armies and the sometimes crippling limitations imposed by logistics, bad maps and worse roads. Lee was not infallible. Although Korda generally gives him the benefit of the doubt, he admits that Lee was “not always an effective commander,” too often leaving it to his subordinates to guess at what he intended. He is too generous in his assessment of Lee’s disastrous frontal attacks at the Battle of Malvern Hill that capped the Seven Days campaign, and his equally futile assault — now famous as Pickett’s Charge — on another impregnable federal position at Gettysburg, in 1863. To Lee’s credit, as Pickett’s shattered survivors straggled back to their lines, Lee leaned from his horse to shake their hands, telling them, “All this has been my fault.” Yet without Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia would most likely have been defeated long before Appomattox. Korda acknowledges that it is impossible to consider Lee without facing the problem of slavery. Lee owned slaves himself, and he arguably did more than any other man to try to create a country founded on slavery. Korda asserts that Lee was at least “moderate” on slavery, writing that he “was never, by any stretch of the imagination, an enthusiast for slavery.” That said, Lee did nothing to bring slavery to an end, and regarded abolitionists as troublemakers and revolutionaries. Korda quotes a revealing letter that Lee wrote to his wife, Mary, in which he described slavery as “a moral and political evil,” but went on to say, “I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race. . . . The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race.” How long their “subjugation” would be necessary, Lee complacently concluded, “is known and ordered by a wise and Merciful Providence.” As Allen Guelzo noted in “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” Lee’s army systematically kidnapped both former fugitive slaves and free blacks in Pennsylvania, dragging scores, perhaps hundreds, of them back to slavery in Virginia. Lee may not have approved of this atrocity, but he did little or nothing to stop it. “Clouds of Glory” is unfortunately marred by more than a few annoying errors of fact. Northern politicians with Southern leanings were called “doughfaces,” not “doughboys” — a 20th-century term for American soldiers in World War I. At the time of the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, the enslaved population of the United States was about two million, not four million. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, not 1845. More troubling is a footnote in which Korda likens the burning of Atlanta in “1865” (actually 1864) and William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. “Britain’s bomber command . . . simply had more sophisticated technology than Sherman did, but the intention was the same,” Korda writes. He uncritically asserts that “Sherman introduced what a later generation would call total war, involving the burning of cities, homes and farms on a wide scale.” Although Sherman’s march was destructive of property, it was far less extensive than Lost Cause mythology claims, and was carried out with remarkably little loss of life: Perhaps fewer than 2,500 Confederate soldiers were killed in open battle, and very few civilians died. The bombing of Dresden took tens of thousands of lives, virtually all civilians. The worst war crimes of the Civil War were perpetrated by Confederates, in the savage massacres of black federal soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tenn., and by Lee’s own troops at the Crater at Petersburg, in 1864. “Clouds of Glory” will satisfy readers who wish to be reassured that Lee was a splendid and courageous soldier, as well as the fine-mannered epitome of antebellum aristocracy. Those who might regard him as a reactionary who betrayed his country, and whose skillful generalship prolonged an unwinnable war on behalf of a cause that Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought,” may find Korda’s enthusiasm less persuasive. CLOUDS OF GLORY The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee By Michael Korda Illustrated. 785 pp. Harper. $40. Fergus M. Bordewich’s most recent book is “America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union.” A version of this review appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Ghost of the Confederacy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe </p> 18747112 2014-06-28 03:20:37 2014-06-28 03:20:37 open open new-york-times-18747111 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:19:00 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Zimbabwe's Unfolding Humanitarian Disaster: We Visit the 18,000 People Forcibly Relocated to Ruling Party Farm Friday, 27 June 2014 09:06 By Davison Mudzingwa and Francis Hweshe, Inter Press Service [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Masvingo, Zimbabwe - As the villagers sit around the flickering fire on a pitch-black night lit only by the blurry moon, they speak, recounting how it all began. They take turns, sometimes talking over each other to have their own experiences heard. When the old man speaks, everyone listens. "It was my first time riding a helicopter," John Moyo* remembers. "The soldiers came, clutching guns, forcing everyone to move. I tried to resist, for my home was not affected but they wouldn't hear any of it." So started the long, painful and disorienting journey for the 70-year-old Moyo and almost 18,000 other people who had lived in the 50-kilometre radius of Chivi basin in Zimbabwe's Masvingo province. When heavy rains pounded the area in early January, the 1.8 billion cubic metre Tokwe-Mukosi dam's wall breached. Flooding followed, destroying homes and livestock. The government, with the help of non-governmental organisations, embarked on a rescue mission. And even unaffected homes in high-lying areas were evacuated by soldiers. According to Moyo, whose home was not affected, this was an opportunity for the government, which had been trying to relocate those living near Chivi basin for sometime. "They always said they wanted to establish an irrigation system and a game park in the area that covered our ancestral homes," he tells IPS. For Itai Mazanhi*, a 33-year-old father of three, the government had the best excuse to remove them from the land that he had known since birth. "The graves of my forefathers are in that place," he tells IPS. Mazanhi is from Gororo village. After being temporarily housed in the nearby safe areas of Gunikuni and Ngundu in Masvingo province, the over 18,000 people or 3,000 families were transferred to Nuanetsi Ranch in the Chingwizi area of Mwenezi district, about 150 kms from their former homes. Chingwizi is an arid terrain near Triangle Estates, an irrigation sugar plantation concern owned by sugar giant Tongaat Hulett. The land here is conspicuous for the mopane and giant baobab trees that are synonymous with hot, dry conditions. The crop and livestock farmers from Chivi basin have been forced to adjust in a land that lacks the natural fertility of their former land, water and adequate pastures for their livestock. The dust road to the Chingwizi camp is a laborious 40-minute drive littered with sharp bumps and lurking roadside trenches. From the top of an anthill, a vantage point at the entrance of this settlement reveals a rolling pattern of tents and zinc makeshift structures that stretch beyond the sight of the naked eye. At night, fires flicker faintly in the distance, and a cacophony of voices mix with the music from solar- and battery-powered radio sets. It's the image of a war refugee relief camp. A concern for the displaced families is the fact that they were settled in an area earmarked for a proposed biofuel project. The project is set to be driven by the Zimbabwe Bio-Energy company, a partnership between the Zimbabwe Development Trust and private investors. The state-owned Herald newspaper quoted the project director Charles Madonko saying resettled families could become sugarcane out-growers for the ethanol project. This plan was subject to scathing attack from rights watchdog Human Rights Watch. In a report released last month, the organisation viewed this as a cheap labour ploy. "The Zimbabwean army relocated 3,000 families from the flooded Tokwe-Mukorsi dam basin to a camp on a sugar cane farm and ethanol project jointly owned by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front [ZANU-PF] and Billy Rautenbach, a businessman and party supporter," read part of the report. The sugarcane plantations will be irrigated by the water from the Tokwe-Mukosi dam. Upon completion, the dam is set to become Zimbabwe's largest inland dam, with a capacity to irrigate over 25,000 hectares. Community Tolerance Reconciliation and Development, COTRAD, a non-governmental organisation that operates in the Masvingo province sees the displacement of the 3,000 families as a brutal retrogression. The organisation says ordinary people are at the mercy of private companies and the government. "The people feel like outcasts, they no longer feel like Zimbabweans," Zivanai Muzorodzi, COTRAD programme manager, tells IPS. Muzorodzi, whose organisation has been monitoring the land tussle before the floods, says the land surrounding the Tokwe-Mukosi dam basin was bought by individuals, mostly from the ruling ZANU-PF party. "Villagers won't own the land or the means of production. Only ZANU-PF bigwigs will benefit," Muzorodzi says. The scale of the habitats has posed serious challenges for the cash-strapped government of Zimbabwe. Humanitarian organisations such as Oxfam International and Care International have injected basic services such clean water through water bowsers and makeshift toilets. "It's not safe at all, it's a disaster waiting to happen," a Zimbabwe Ministry of Local Government official stationed at the camp and who preferred anonymity tells IPS. "The latrines you see here are only one metre deep. An outbreak of a contagious disease would spread fast." Similar fears stalk Spiwe Chando*, a mother of four. The 23-year-old speaks as she sorts her belongings scattered in small blue tent in which an adult cannot sleep fully stretched out. "I fear for my child because another family lost a child due to diarrhoea last week. This can happen to anyone," she tells IPS, sweating from the heat inside the tent. "I hope we will move from this place soon and get proper land to restart our lives." This issue has posed tensions at this over-populated camp. Meetings, rumour and conjecture circulate each day. Across the camp, frustrations are progressively building up. As a result, a ministerial delegation got a hostile reception during a visit last month. The displaced farmers accuse the government of deception and reneging on its promises of land allocation and compensation. The government has promised to allocate one hectare of land per family, at a location about 17 kms from this transit camp. This falls far short of what these families own in Chivi basin. Some of them, like Mazanhi, owned about 10 hectares. The land was able to produce enough food for their sustenance and a surplus, which was sold to finance their children's education and healthcare. Mazanhi is one of the few people who has already received compensation from the government. Of the agreed compensation of 3,000 dollars, he has only received 900 dollars and is not certain if he will ever be paid the remainder of what he was promised. "There is a lot of corruption going on in that office," he tells IPS. COTRAD says the fact that ordinary villagers are secondary beneficiaries of the land and water that once belonged to them communally is an indication of a resource grabbing trend that further widens the gap of inequality. "People no longer have land, access to water, healthcare and children are learning under trees." For Moyo, daily realities at the transit camp and a hazy future is both a painful reminder of a life gone by and a sign of "the next generation of dispossession." However, he hopes for a better future. "We don't want this life of getting fed like birds," says Moyo. *Names altered for security reasons. </p> 18747104 2014-06-28 03:19:00 2014-06-28 03:19:00 open open zimbabwe-s-unfolding-humanitarian-disaster-we-visit-the-18-000-people-forcibly-relocated-to-ruling-party-farm-friday-27-june-2014-09-06-by-daviso-18747104 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan SCIENCE 3 Blackholes http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/28/science-3-blackholes-18747044/ Sat, 28 Jun 2014 03:02:34 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>3 Blackholes Collection of three supermassive black holes detected Posted on June 26, 2014 in Science [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The galaxies we see in the present-day Universe were built through the merger of smaller ones. Almost all of the galaxies contain supermassive black holes at their cores. Basic logic would suggest that the mergers would also have placed supermassive black holes in close proximity at the cores of galaxies. What’s less certain is what happened to them once they were brought together. Ultimately, the fate of these black holes will be to merge. But if the process is slow enough, we should see a large number of binary supermassive black holes lingering in the cores of galaxies, producing gravity waves as they interact. We’d love to detect those gravity waves, but it’s hard to justify building the appropriate detector until we know they’re out there, which means we need to determine whether supermassive black hole binaries are common. Today, an international team of researchers is announcing that they’ve found a triple black hole system, with two of the objects forming a tight binary system. The good news for gravity waves is that they found this system in one of the first handful of systems they checked, and they suggest that the signs of these systems might be relatively easy to spot.</p> 18747044 2014-06-28 03:02:34 2014-06-28 03:02:34 open open science-3-blackholes-18747044 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 05:11:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Israel Claims $3B in Cyber Exports; 2nd Only to US Netanyahu: 'We Have a Land Flowing With Milk and Cyber' Jun. 20, 2014 - 03:19PM [ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] DEFENSE NEWS | By BARBARA OPALL-ROME ISRAEL-CYBER-SECURITY-NETANYAHU HERZLIYA, ISRAEL — Israeli exports of cyber-related products and services last year reached $3 billion, some 5 percent of the global market and more than all other nations combined apart from the United States, according to Israel’s National Cyber Bureau (NCB). Officials here say the latest data, cited last week at an international conference here and presented in detail at a closed briefing of the Israeli Cabinet in late February, clearly ranks Israel as the second leading cyber exporting nation. “As far as industry goes, Israel is a superpower indeed,” Tal Steinherz, NCB chief technology officer, told participants at a June 9 session of the annual Herzliya Conference here. “Our part of the international market equals the entire world apart from the United States... We’re talking 5 percent of all world exports,” he said. Itzik Ben-Israel, a retired major general who chaired a high-level task force that pushed to establish the NCB, said Israel aspires to 10 percent of the global market in less than five years. By then, MarketsandMarkets, a Dallas-based research and consulting firm, estimates the global market to grow beyond $150 billion. “We’re already at 5 percent. With the capabilities we have now and the programs and partnerships that are being planned, I see us realistically reaching that goal in the near term,” Ben-Israel told Defense News. In a briefing to Cabinet ministers, NCB Director Eviatar Matanya noted that Israel’s $3 billion in 2013 exports was three times that of the United Kingdom’s. Israeli firms last year raised $165 million in investment funding, a figure he said represents 11 percent of global capital invested in the field of cyber. According to NCB data, 14.5 percent of all the firms worldwide attracting cyber-related investment are Israeli-owned. Israel’s cyber industry, Matanya said, comprises 20 multinational corporate-funded research-and-development centers and 200 local start-up firms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it a personal and national goal to elevate Israel’s status as a global cyber power. Since he established the NCB in 2011 — an increasingly high-priority organization that reports directly to Netanyahu’s office — the gov­ern­ment has augmented annual cyber defense spending by 30 percent, despite a budget crisis. In parallel, Israel is investing hundreds of millions of shekels each year on infrastructure to transform the southern desert city of Beersheba into what Netanyahu calls “a global cyber hub for innovation.” The effort involves relocation of national labs, military intelligence units and C4I organizations, a new National Cyber Command, a new industrial park co-located with Beersheba’s Ben Gurion University and a high-speed train connecting it all from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. “We established the National Cyber Bureau for the purpose of transforming the state of Israel into a cyber superpower,” Netanyahu told ministers after Matanya’s closed-door Cabinet session, a summary of which was provided to Defense News. Beyond the national security requirements driving Israel’s Cyber program, Netanyahu said the national effort would yield tremendous economic benefit. “I see [NCB] also as a huge economic force multiplier. There is tremendous international interest in our abilities,” he said. Netanyahu’s office has also directed the government’s chief scientist, the Ministry of Industry and Trade and other agencies to serve as “angels” and incubators to nurture and assist start-up firms. “I see the Prime Minister’s Office as a public relations agency for the cyber industry,” Raviv Raz, a young chief executive officer of an Israeli start-up firm called Hybrid Security, told the June 9 Herzliya Conference panel. Raz said his firm, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence for detection and identifi­cation of what he called “bad web­site users,” received generous funding assistance at multiple phases of the business process. “All entrepreneurs start with an idea, and for that, the chief scientist can help ... Then there are grants to see you through the prototype phase, and this is followed by the need to raise money, where it also assists,” Raz said. “Israel is becoming a mega power in cyber, and we are a good example of how this is happening,” he added. “The government gives, and takes no equity.” In a Cabinet meeting this month, just days before the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Festival of Weeks) that commemorates, in part, the first fruits of the harvest, Netanyahu likened national cyber investments to modern-day “first fruits.” “We always knew that we have a land flowing with milk and cyber,” Netanyahu said. ■ Email: bopallrome@defensenews.com.</p> 18735280 2014-06-26 05:11:35 2014-06-26 05:11:35 open open israel-claims-3b-in-cyber-exports-2nd-only-to-us-18735280 publish 0 0 post 0 Lou Sheehan Louis Sheehan Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us Jerusalem Post http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/26/netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245/ Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:38:42 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Netanyahu: We struck Syrian army forcefully and will continue to hit those who harm us By GIL HOFFMAN 06/23/2014 16:46 PM sends warning to Assad and vows to take further steps against Hamas, including house demolitions. Binyamin Netanyahu Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, June 15, 2014 Photo: AVI OHAYON - GPO Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned Israel's enemies throughout the Middle East on Monday that Israel would strike back if any of them attempt to harm the Jewish state. Speaking at a meeting of his Likud Beytenu faction in the Knesset, Netanyahu praised the Shin Bet security service, police, and IDF for identifying and apprehending the murderer of police deputy major general Baruch Mizrahi, whose arrest was revealed Monday. Related: Netanyahu: Israel will take all action necessary against 'scourge of terrorism' Netanyahu noted that he had ordered the demolition of the home of Mizrahi's killer, a Hamas operative released in the Gilad Schalit deal. He vowed to take more steps against Hamas, including more arrests and house demolitions. The prime minister told the faction that he had taken steps against terrorists in Israeli jails. He said their visiting hours were cut to the minimum required by international conventions. Responding to a question from Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon about Israeli prisons being "summer camps," Netanyahu said the terrorists' cell phone usage would be cut and they would not be permitted to watch the World Cup. He also reported to the faction about the IDF's airstrikes in Syria that came in retaliation for the deadly missile attack that killed teenager Muhammad Karaka. "We demonstrated strength overnight versus the Syrian army that took action against us and if there is a need, we will use more force. We will continue to take forceful action against anyone who harms us or attempts to harm us," Netanyahu said. He received support from the ministers in his cabinet, including those on the Left. Finance Minister Yair Lapid reminded his Yesh Atid faction of the revenge taken following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre when he said “Even if it takes time, we will get to all the kidnappers.” Justice Minister Tzipi Livni did not show any impatience with the ongoing IDF action in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. She justified continued action against Hamas. “Our central goal remains returning the kidnapped and arresting the kidnappers,” she told her Hatnua faction. “We won't stop until we accomplish our goals. Meanwhile, the IDF is acting to weaken the infrastructure of Hamas, a terrorist group that does not recognize Israel's existence.” Livni said Israel must continue trying to reach an agreement with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas for Israel's interest while taking action against Hamas and other terrorist groups. Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett told his Bayit Yehudi faction that following the arrest of Mizrahi's killer, the era of releasing terrorists was over. “The concept of releasing terrorists has reached its end,” Bennett said. “It only leads to more deaths. They say it will bring peace or they get reformed. But we live in the Middle East and in the Middle East, a murderer remains a murder. The PA must be held accountable for funding killers and encouraging murder. Labor faction chairman Eitan Cabel said the opposition had lowered its profile to let the prime minister and defense minister do their work in bringing about the return of kidnapped teens Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel. “Speaking for all of us, I hope that there will be good news,” he said. “We are hoping for a miracle.”</p> 18735245 2014-06-26 04:38:42 2014-06-26 04:38:42 open open netanyahu-we-struck-syrian-army-forcefully-and-will-continue-to-hit-those-who-harm-us-jerusalem-post-18735245 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm Ralph Nader http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:19:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] The Food Safety Movement Grows Tall Posted: 06/20/2014 2:18 pm By Ralph Nader Let us celebrate today the latest initiatives of our nation's growing food safety movement. Across the country, consumers are demanding the right to know what is in their food, and labeling of genetically engineered food. It's a vibrant and diverse coalition: mothers and grandmothers, health libertarians, progressives, foodies, environmentalists, main street conservatives and supporters of free-market economics. Last year, a New York Times poll found that a near-unanimous 93 percent of Americans support such labeling. This is no surprise. Genetically engineered food has yet to be proven safe. In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted in court that it had reached "no dispositive scientific findings" about the risks of genetically engineered foods. There is no scientific consensus about the risks of eating genetically engineered food, according to a statement last year signed by nearly 300 scientists. The scientists agree that "Concerns about risks are well-founded" and that a "substantial number" of "animal feeding studies and reviews of such studies...found toxic effects and signs of toxicity" in animals fed genetically engineered food, compared with controls. "Some of the studies give serious cause for concern," the scientists write. For example, a review of nineteen studies on mammals, published in Environmental Sciences Europe, found that the "data appear to indicate liver and kidney problems" arising from diets of genetically engineered food. According to Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen PhD, the ability of genetically engineered crops to induce allergic reactions is "a major food safety concern." When it comes to genetically engineered food, there are questions about risks, but no convincing answers. There is no mandatory pre-market safety testing for genetically engineered food. These questions of risks and safety have festered for years because the big agrichemical companies use their intellectual property rights to deny independent scientists the ability to test genetically engineered crops, or to report their results. Scientific American called these restrictions on free inquiry "dangerous." "In a number of cases," the magazine reports, "experiments that had the implicit go-ahead from the seed company were later blocked from publication because the results were not flattering." When scientists do publish studies adverse to the interests of the big agrichemical companies, they are met with vicious attacks on their credibility, their science and even in their personal lives. Sixty-four nations have already required labeling of genetically engineered food, including the members of the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, even Russia and China. The food industry is feeling the pressure. Paul Bulcke, CEO of Nestle, the world's largest food and beverage company, said that: "It is not business as usual anymore. Pressure is mounting from all sides and angles." Despite the overwhelming popularity of labeling, Congress refused to act, so citizens took up the cause in their own states. Under heavy corporate lobbying and deceptive TV ads, ballot initiatives for labeling of genetically engineered food were narrowly defeated by 51 percent-49 percent in both California and Washington State. In May, legislation in the California Senate led 19-16, but failed without the 21 vote majority needed for passage. Finally, on May 8, in a major victory, Vermont approved the first unconditional statewide labeling law for genetically engineered food. "Vermonters take our food and how it is produced seriously, and we believe we have a right to know what's in the food we buy," said Gov. Peter Shumlin. Since then, the food and agrichemical industries have escalated to a full panic. On June 13, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and three other trade associations -- the heart of the junk food industry -- filed a lawsuit in federal court to block the new Vermont labeling law. The good news is that people are rushing to Vermont's defense, including Ben & Jerry's ice cream, which will re-name one of its flavors "Food Fight! Fudge Brownie" to help fund a vigorous legal defense of Vermont's new labeling law. Elsewhere, industry is spending lavishly against the food movement. In New York State, the Daily News reported that: "Trade organizations, farm groups and corporate giants such as Coca-Cola and Kraft have spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign contributions to defeat" labeling of genetically engineered food. The food industry is quick to scare consumers with the canard that labeling of genetically engineered food will raise food prices. But manufacturers change their labels often, so their claim doesn't make sense. It has been debunked in an study by Joanna Shepherd Bailey, a professor at Emory University School of Law, who found that "consumers will likely see no increases in prices" as a result of labeling genetically engineered food. In Congress, U.S. Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS) introduced a bill at the behest of the Grocery Manufacturers Association -- dubbed by its consumer opponents "the Deny Americans the Right-to-Know (DARK) Act" -- to block any federal or state action for labeling of genetically engineered food. Sometimes, politics is drearily predictable: Can you guess Rep. Pompeo's largest campaign contributor? You got it: Koch Industries. But the shame is fully bipartisan: sleazy Democratic lobbyists like former US Senator Blanche Lincoln and Steve Elmendorf are plying their trade for Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association to keep you from knowing what's in your food. Meanwhile, the food disclosure movement is going full speed ahead with ballot initiatives for GMO labeling in Oregon and Colorado, as well as legislative efforts in many other states. There's a great lesson in all this: when left and right join together, they can defeat big corporations and their subservient politicians. That's the theme of my new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Food labeling is hardly a radical idea. Conservative economists are quick to point out that the free exchange of information about products is crucial to the proper functioning of a free market. Even Monsanto supported labeling of genetically engineered food in Britain. But it spends millions to oppose labeling here in America. Such is corporate patriotism in the 21st Century: St. Louis-based Monsanto believes the British deserve more consumer rights than Americans do. There are other reasons to be concerned about genetically engineered crops. Genetically engineered crops have led to increased use of pesticides. For example, a study by Professor Chuck Benbrook of Washington State University found that between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops have brought an increased use of more than 400 million pounds of pesticides. Mutating weed resistance is requiring the Monsantos to sell even more powerful herbicides. More details on these backfiring GMO crop technologies are contained in the new book titled The GMO Deception edited by Professor Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber. Perhaps most alarming is the corporate control of agriculture in the hands of the world's largest agrichemical companies -- Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer and BASF. "The Big 6 chemical and seed companies are working diligently to monopolize the food system at the expense of consumers, farmers and smaller seed companies," said Philip H. Howard, an associate professor at Michigan State University. These companies may be meeting their match in the mothers and grandmothers who have powered the movement for labeling of genetically engineered food. Like Pamm Larry, the pioneering grandmother who came up with the spreading idea reflected by the California ballot initiative for labeling. Mothers know that food is love. Certainly, my mother did. She taught me early and often about how important it is to eat healthy food. She even wrote about these values in the book, It Happened in the Kitchen. I'd like to think that she'd feel right at home with the mothers and grandmothers of today's food movement. I sure do. In some ways, that's the point: a movement that makes you feel at home, no wonder it is so popular. Follow Ralph Nader on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RalphNader </p> 18715442 2014-06-22 06:19:15 2014-06-22 06:19:15 open open the-food-safety-movement-grows-tall-posted-06-20-2014-2-18-pm-ralph-nader-18715442 publish 0 0 post 0 Louis Sheehan Lou Sheehan Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2014/06/22/hillary-s-haughty-hyperbole-ralph-nader-june-18-18715419/ Sun, 22 Jun 2014 06:04:53 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>[ My intention with my blog is to simply collect articles of interest to me for purposes of future reference. I do my best to indicate who has actually composed the articles. NONE of the articles have been written by me. – Louis Sheehan ] Hillary’s Haughty Hyperbole! Ralph Nader June 18, 2014 Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section featured a one page interview with Hillary Clinton, author of the just released Hard Choices which brought her a $14 million advance from Viacom’s Simon and Schuster. My first reaction was “Can anybody believe this?” I’m referring to the replies by Mrs. Clinton to questions about her book reading habits which turn out to be prodigious. How can such a super-busy person have the time to absorb such a staggering load of diverse books? The Times sends questions in advance to the person that they are going to interview each week. This gives the person being interviewed enough time to think about their favorite books and be precise about titles. The titles Hillary said she is reading could have been poll-tested for the 2016 presidential race. First Hillary declared that she is absorbing three books at one time, which she explained are among the “pile of books stacked on my night stand that I’m reading.” They included Mom & Me & Mom by the late Maya Angelou. To the question, “What’s the last truly great book you read?” She listed not one, but four of them: The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert, Citizens of London by Lynne Olson and A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Revving up, she took on with gusto the question “Who are your favorite contemporary writers,” including “any writers whose books you automatically read when they come out?” She replied that she “automatically” reads “anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carré, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker,” plus “the latest installments from Alex Berenson, Linda Fairstein, Sue Grafton, Donna Leon, Katherine Hall Page, Louise Penny, Daniel Silva, Alexander McCall Smith, Charles Todd and Jacqueline Winspear.” Whew! That’s not all of her responses. I have read some of this popular New York Times column’s interviews over the years, many with professional authors, fiction and non-fiction, and not one replied with such an oceanic immersion, even though many of these authors regularly read many books for their craft. The former First Lady explained that she finds time to indulge in “guilty pleasures and useful time fillers,” by reading “cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books.” Time fillers? For one of the busiest people on Earth? Has Hillary discovered the 72 hour day? It gets better, when asked her opinion on the best books about Washington, DC to recommend, she chose Our Divided Political Heart by E.J. Dionne Jr., who “shows how most everybody has some conservative and liberal impulses, but just as individuals have to reconcile them within ourselves, so does our political system if we expect to function productively.” To the question