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Thursday 24 July 2014

Deconstructing Modern alchemy.

Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories

Monday 21 July 2014

Every bit as "sapien" as his brothers.

A Deep and Abiding Need for Neanderthals to Be Stupid. Why?

Believe it or not.




Sunday 20 July 2014

Civil war


Law enforcement in the United States

Armed and dangerous

No-knock raids, assault weapons and armoured cars: America’s police use paramilitary tactics too often




EARLY one morning a team of heavily armed police officers burst into the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retired engineer in Los Angeles county. What happened next is unclear. The officer who shot Mr Mallory six times with a submachine gun says he was acting in self-defence—Mr Mallory also had a gun, though he was in bed and never fired it. Armed raids can be confusing: according to an investigation, the policeman initially believed that he had ordered Mr Mallory to “Drop the gun” before opening fire. However, an audio recording revealed that he said these words immediately after shooting him. Mr Mallory died. His family are suing the police.
Such tragedies are too common in America. One reason is that the police have become more militarised. Raids by Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units used to be rare: according to Peter Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University there were only about 3,000 a year in the early 1980s. Now they are routine: perhaps 50,000 a year (see article).

Some of the uses to which SWAT teams are put defy belief. In Maryland paramilitary police have been sent to break up illegal poker games; in Iowa, to arrest people suspected of petty fraud; in Arizona, to crack down on cockfighting.
These teams, whose members wear body armour and are equipped with military-style weapons, were originally intended to tackle only the most dangerous criminals, such as murderers or hostage-takers. Now they are most commonly used to serve search warrants in drug-related cases. The police raided Mr Mallory’s home, for example, because they thought they would find a methamphetamine factory there. Instead they found two marijuana plants, belonging to a stepson who had a California medical-marijuana licence.
America’s courts tend to smile on SWAT tactics. They have ruled that police may enter a home without knocking if announcing their presence might give a criminal a chance to destroy evidence, for example by flushing drugs down the toilet. Such “no-knock” raids carry the advantages of surprise—and the disadvantages.
Having armed men burst into one’s home is terrifying. Startled citizens may assume they are being burgled—the “flash-bang” grenades that SWAT teams toss in to (temporarily) blind and deafen their targets tend to add to the confusion. Some people shoot back, with tragic consequences. Radley Balko, a campaigning journalist, has identified more than 50 innocent civilians who have been killed in SWAT raids.
Two factors have pushed the American police to militarise. First, thanks to the “war on terror”, there is plenty of money available for big weapons. Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security handed out a whopping $35 billion in grants to state and local police. In addition, the Pentagon supplies surplus military hardware to police forces at virtually no cost. That is why the quiet little town of Keene, New Hampshire has an armoured personnel carrier called a BearCat, which the local police chief said might be used to protect its pumpkin festival.
Second, the war on drugs creates perverse incentives. When the police find assets that they suspect are the proceeds of crime, they can seize them. Under civil asset-forfeiture rules, they do not have to prove that a crime was committed—they can grab first and let the owners sue to get their stuff back. The police can meanwhile use the money to beef up their own budgets, buying faster patrol cars or computers. All this gives them a powerful incentive to focus on drug crimes, which generate lots of cash, rather than, say, rape, which does not. This is outrageous. Citizens should not forfeit their property unless convicted of a crime; and the proceeds should fund the state as a whole, not the arm that does the grabbing.
Bang! Knock, knock...er, sorry, wrong house
The police do a difficult and dangerous job, and it is completely understandable that they do not wish to be outgunned by bad guys. A big show of force can sometimes deter criminals from starting a fight. And police departments are right to spend generously on defensive equipment such as body armour, which increases the chance that officers will come home alive.
Nonetheless, the militarisation of American law enforcement is alarming. The police are not soldiers. Armies are trained to kill the enemy; the police are supposed to uphold the law and protect citizens. They should use the minimum force necessary to accomplish those goals.
That does not mean getting rid of SWAT teams entirely. But it does mean restricting their use to situations where there are solid grounds to believe that the suspect involved is armed and dangerous. They should not be used to serve search warrants on non-violent offenders, or to make sure that strip joints are code-compliant, or in any circumstance where a knock on the door from a regular cop would suffice. The “war on drugs” is supposed to be a metaphor, not a real war.

Saturday 19 July 2014

Seeking an amicable divorce?

Established churches

The palace and the desert





IS THE proper place of religion in the emperor's palace or in the world's toughest, poorest locations? That has been a hard question for Christianity at least since the fourth century of its existence. During that period, the faith was first tolerated, then adopted by the Roman empire; but some believers went to the opposite extreme and took up lives of poverty, prayer and self-discipline in barren, remote spots on the edge of the known world.
It's not just a scholarly debating point. In most historically Christian countries, one or more churches enjoy privileges inherited from the past which seem way out of proportion to the active followers they now command. Should they hang on to those perks or gracefully discard them? One country where this problem arises is England, where the state religion, Anglicanism, has been in the news twice this week, as I wrote in the print edition. On Monday, the Church's Synod voted in favour of women bishops, and today, (male) Anglican bishops were using their seats in Parliament to express their opposition to an assisted dying bill.
As with many British institutions, the power enjoyed by the Church of England is both entrenched and "soft"—it burns no heretics and generally deals emolliently with other sects and faiths, and with society as a whole. Still, at least two kinds of people are keen to see that power removed: principled secularists, who oppose religious privilege in all forms, and groups within the Church of England with a sharply defined vision which might be easier to pursue if the church were to cut loose from the state. These range from leftists like Giles Fraser who see links with the state as corrupting, to evangelicals who dream of an initially smaller, more vigorous body of believers which would not need to compromise with the social mainstream.
For some conservative evangelicals (those who take literally the Biblical passages about teaching as a male prerogative), the women-bishops issue probably reinforced their belief in the virtues of independence. Their camp caused a furore by blocking the proposal in November 2012, but some were apparently persuaded to change their minds this week because the earlier vote had shocked public opinion and made establishment seem less tenable. If preserving establishment were not an issue, then Synod members could arguably have followed their consciences, however idiosyncratic in the eyes of the world.
But there might be better reasons than that, from the church's point of view, for loosening the bonds. That view was put to me by Patrick Comerford, an Irish Anglican priest and theology lecturer. In his opinion, the English discussion about women bishops was disappointingly shallow at times; it had stressed the general need for gender equality in top positions, as though the English church was just a worldly bureaucracy. In the non-established Anglican churches of the British Isles (Wales, Scotland and Ireland), there was a more spiritual debate, unheeded by the secular world, about the church as an inclusive "body of Christ" and all three Celtic groups had marched ahead of their English brethren in blessing a female episcopate. Ireland's first woman bishop, Pat Storey, was consecrated last year.
So would it be a better idea, for everybody, if the Church of England were simply cut adrift? Frank Cranmer, a research fellow at Cardiff University and law-and-religion blogger, notes one interesting reason why that would be hard unless the church actively co-operated. In 1920, when the Anglican Church in Wales was disestablished, it was summarily deprived of any endowments which went back further than the 1660s. But since 1953, the European Convention on Human Rights has made that sort of arbitrary confiscation much harder: it is now "vastly more difficult to disendow an organisation against its wishes," Mr Cranmer thinks, in view of the ECHR's guarantee of the "peaceful enjoyment of property".
So in practice, the Church of England will probably not be separated from the state unless both sides want it. And the separation will be gradual; indeed it is happening already. Margaret Thatcher had some discretion in nominating the Archbishop of Canterbury; David Cameron does not. A bill is now going through parliament to terminate a bizarre arrangement under which some English home-owners can be required to help repair Anglican churches.
The question for the Church of England (and churches in a similiar position like those of Denmark and Norway) is whether the tide of separation should be accelerated or held back. To make a disappointingly secular point, you generally have a better chance of controlling a process if you push it forward rather than delaying it till the last moment.