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Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Gun Violence: Where We Ought To Intervene
It's taken me over a month to get to this post. Scared, I guess.
Donella Meadows said that every model is a simplification, but the shooter-weapon model is too simplified to give us enough leverage to reduce the carnage of mass shootings.
On the other hand, if I'm going to broaden the model to the point where we can make a difference,
* Somebody's going to think I'm nuts;
* I'm going to talk about an area in which my understanding is shallow;
* What it will take might be harder than rounding up all the ARs and forty-round clips in the US.
I just wrote a profile of Heinrich Himmler for Zenith City (semi-) Weekly, because Himmler, the 3rd Reich's top cop, was the all-time world-champ mass shooter. And he was raised according to an idiotic pedagogy in which, for the sake of his soul, "the child should be permeated by the impossibility of locking something in his heart."
They gave children enemas before bed, and ice baths, both to keep them from masturbating. They tied them to their beds for the same reason, and to keep them from curling up and getting comfortable.
There were other insanities, and when little Heinrich and his contemporaries grew up, they thought it was okay to murder millions.
For contrast I included information about James W. Prescott's 1975 Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence. Prescott did a cross cultural survey of pre-literate societies. Societies which were physically affectionate with their children were usually peaceful. If a society was neglectful, they could still avoid violence by being sexually permissive. Cuddle babies, and let teenagers cuddle each other, and everybody got along. Prescott said that violence and pleasure are inversely related. If you had one, you didn't have the other.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.
There's another couple or three things I want to throw into the mix.
* The shooters are usually young and aggrieved; they're seeking some warped version of justice.
* Researchers believe that schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, autism, ADHD, and major depression are genetically linked.
* Autism, schizophrenia, and depression seem to be common among mass shooters.
* Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory of schizophrenia says that what's happening with schizophrenics is that they got paradoxical communication ("Come here and give me some sugar, why are you always so clingy?") from somebody important when they were little. Consequently, they tend to mistake direct statements for metaphor, and vice versa. Their own conversation can be bizarrely metaphorical. In my sample of one schizophrenic acquaintance, this has been true. It's also true that this friend will perceive himself as attacked or slighted by surprising things, and acts out in what he calls "street theater" -- usually over environmental issues -- but which can look like the threat or beginning of violence.
Maybe what happens is that a baby's genetic tendency is shaped into one form of confusion or another by a welcome to the world that's contrary to what this individual organism -- who is smarter than we are, albeit entirely ignorant -- needs.
Bottom line: cuddle your kids, and don't jerk their chains. Make sure they understand about sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, and let them go.
Donella Meadows said that every model is a simplification, but the shooter-weapon model is too simplified to give us enough leverage to reduce the carnage of mass shootings.
On the other hand, if I'm going to broaden the model to the point where we can make a difference,
* Somebody's going to think I'm nuts;
* I'm going to talk about an area in which my understanding is shallow;
* What it will take might be harder than rounding up all the ARs and forty-round clips in the US.
I just wrote a profile of Heinrich Himmler for Zenith City (semi-) Weekly, because Himmler, the 3rd Reich's top cop, was the all-time world-champ mass shooter. And he was raised according to an idiotic pedagogy in which, for the sake of his soul, "the child should be permeated by the impossibility of locking something in his heart."
They gave children enemas before bed, and ice baths, both to keep them from masturbating. They tied them to their beds for the same reason, and to keep them from curling up and getting comfortable.
There were other insanities, and when little Heinrich and his contemporaries grew up, they thought it was okay to murder millions.
For contrast I included information about James W. Prescott's 1975 Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence. Prescott did a cross cultural survey of pre-literate societies. Societies which were physically affectionate with their children were usually peaceful. If a society was neglectful, they could still avoid violence by being sexually permissive. Cuddle babies, and let teenagers cuddle each other, and everybody got along. Prescott said that violence and pleasure are inversely related. If you had one, you didn't have the other.
Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.
There's another couple or three things I want to throw into the mix.
* The shooters are usually young and aggrieved; they're seeking some warped version of justice.
* Researchers believe that schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, autism, ADHD, and major depression are genetically linked.
* Autism, schizophrenia, and depression seem to be common among mass shooters.
* Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory of schizophrenia says that what's happening with schizophrenics is that they got paradoxical communication ("Come here and give me some sugar, why are you always so clingy?") from somebody important when they were little. Consequently, they tend to mistake direct statements for metaphor, and vice versa. Their own conversation can be bizarrely metaphorical. In my sample of one schizophrenic acquaintance, this has been true. It's also true that this friend will perceive himself as attacked or slighted by surprising things, and acts out in what he calls "street theater" -- usually over environmental issues -- but which can look like the threat or beginning of violence.
Maybe what happens is that a baby's genetic tendency is shaped into one form of confusion or another by a welcome to the world that's contrary to what this individual organism -- who is smarter than we are, albeit entirely ignorant -- needs.
Bottom line: cuddle your kids, and don't jerk their chains. Make sure they understand about sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, and let them go.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Gun Violence And Positive Feedback
Positive feedback is a cycle in which something's happening makes its happening again more likely.
Example: Compound interest. When you put a dollar in the bank, the bank is renting your money to invest by loaning it out at interest. So the first year, they put another penny with your dollar. You leave it there, and the second year the bank adds one and one hundredth pennies. In seventy years, you have two bucks, courtesy of positive feedback.
Donella Meadows offers several other examples:
Eroded soil increases erosion because the thinner, poorer soil supports fewer erosion-stopping plants;
"The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, they more they knock into nuclei and generate more;"
The more flu sufferers, the more the flu spreads;
The larger the population, the more offspring, which in turn produce even more offspring;
Income from production and trade invested in building more capital to allow the production of more goods for trade.
There are a couple of examples I like, and that Meadows didn't include in this section.
There's methane, a greenhouse gas, frozen in the arctic tundra. As the climate warms, the tundra thaws and releases the mathane, accelerating warming.
The other is the Tom Baker Dr. Who, trying to explain positive feedback to an evil, giant spider that is running some kind of power through some science fiction gadget to get more, more, more, mwahahahaha, unlimited power. Fortunately the Doctor wises up, and bails before the spider goes nova.
Usually a negative feedback loop kicks in, and slows the positive feedback, but Meadows says that we can get quicker results, less threatening to ourselves by slowing the positive loop. Back off the gas before you slam on the brakes. She says this give the existing negative loops time to work. (Meadows was probably thinking of her predictions from the Limits to Growth study.)
She tells us to "look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, 'success to the successful' loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more."
What does this have to do with gun violence? It took me a while to get around to writing this, because I was hoping something would come to me. I don't think we get more guns because we have more guns, and I don't believe that conceal-carry laws are adequate or desirable negative feedback. You can't buy a gun in Chicago, but there are high schools there with multiple shootings every year. There was an armed guard at Columbine, and you know somebody in the audience was packing in the Aurora Batman shooting.
We have to intervene in some related system to end mass shootings. Meadows write about five more leverage points, but the next post will be me, going off about what I think is going on.
Example: Compound interest. When you put a dollar in the bank, the bank is renting your money to invest by loaning it out at interest. So the first year, they put another penny with your dollar. You leave it there, and the second year the bank adds one and one hundredth pennies. In seventy years, you have two bucks, courtesy of positive feedback.
Donella Meadows offers several other examples:
Eroded soil increases erosion because the thinner, poorer soil supports fewer erosion-stopping plants;
"The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, they more they knock into nuclei and generate more;"
The more flu sufferers, the more the flu spreads;
The larger the population, the more offspring, which in turn produce even more offspring;
Income from production and trade invested in building more capital to allow the production of more goods for trade.
There are a couple of examples I like, and that Meadows didn't include in this section.
There's methane, a greenhouse gas, frozen in the arctic tundra. As the climate warms, the tundra thaws and releases the mathane, accelerating warming.
The other is the Tom Baker Dr. Who, trying to explain positive feedback to an evil, giant spider that is running some kind of power through some science fiction gadget to get more, more, more, mwahahahaha, unlimited power. Fortunately the Doctor wises up, and bails before the spider goes nova.
Usually a negative feedback loop kicks in, and slows the positive feedback, but Meadows says that we can get quicker results, less threatening to ourselves by slowing the positive loop. Back off the gas before you slam on the brakes. She says this give the existing negative loops time to work. (Meadows was probably thinking of her predictions from the Limits to Growth study.)
She tells us to "look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, 'success to the successful' loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more."
What does this have to do with gun violence? It took me a while to get around to writing this, because I was hoping something would come to me. I don't think we get more guns because we have more guns, and I don't believe that conceal-carry laws are adequate or desirable negative feedback. You can't buy a gun in Chicago, but there are high schools there with multiple shootings every year. There was an armed guard at Columbine, and you know somebody in the audience was packing in the Aurora Batman shooting.
We have to intervene in some related system to end mass shootings. Meadows write about five more leverage points, but the next post will be me, going off about what I think is going on.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Sequestration Proximate Cause Of The Next Recession
Next Donella Meadows/Mass Shootings post will be "Driving Positive Feedback Loops." I'm struggling with this one a little; I understand the difference, can give examples, and Meadows explains them both successfully, but I don't have a handle on how to work with positive feedback in general, much less in respect to violence. It seems like Meadows is continuing her discussion -- at least practically -- of negative feedback.
In the meantime, the thought struck me while listening to the news about Congress and "sequestration," that the consumption business cycle is said to take five to seven years, and the recession hit a little more than four-and-a-quarter years ago. The burst housing bubble was the proximate cause, but it was time for a recession, and something had to trigger it.
Predicting whether this particular cycle will be a long or short one is over my head, and I have pretty conflicted thoughts about the federal austerity. Still...
In the meantime, the thought struck me while listening to the news about Congress and "sequestration," that the consumption business cycle is said to take five to seven years, and the recession hit a little more than four-and-a-quarter years ago. The burst housing bubble was the proximate cause, but it was time for a recession, and something had to trigger it.
Predicting whether this particular cycle will be a long or short one is over my head, and I have pretty conflicted thoughts about the federal austerity. Still...
Monday, February 25, 2013
Mass Shootings And Regulating Negative Feedback Loops
Donella Meadows writes, "Now we're beginning to move from the physical part of the system to the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found."
In the few times I've heard the phrase "negative feedback" spoken, the speakers have usually meant criticism or psychology's negative reinforcement. Meadows is using the phrase to mean that something a system does has a slowing effect on itself. Think of foxes as negative feedback for field mice. The more the mice breed, the more food there is for the foxes, making more foxes, which reduce the mouse population.
What Meadows was saying was that we can get better results from a kind of system jiu jitsu than from concentrating on a problem's hardware.
She uses the thermostat example to illustrate negative feedback. You want a certain temperature, and you set the thermostat. There's a furnace in the basement that comes on when the house temperature drops below the setting. The fire in the furnace would keep heating the house until it became uncomfortable, except for the thermostat's also being an off switch. The negative feedback is that the more heat the furnace puts out, the more likely it is to turn itself off.
Meadow' other examples include:
Emergency cooling in nuclear power plants,
Sweating and shivering,
Rest,
Recreation,
Meditation,
Socializing,
Markets (provided they get accurate information).
She says that the real leverage related to markets is in ways of getting them accurate, unambiguous information.
One paragraph that I took to be encouraging, in thinking about gun violence, says, "The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.
"A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day -- but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail."
The reason this is hopeful is that the phenomenon of mass shootings -- even gun violence in total -- is a minor blip in the system of our society. Horrific as it is.
If we can figure out what's happening, we ought to be able to correct for this painful phenomenon without strong negative feedback.
In the few times I've heard the phrase "negative feedback" spoken, the speakers have usually meant criticism or psychology's negative reinforcement. Meadows is using the phrase to mean that something a system does has a slowing effect on itself. Think of foxes as negative feedback for field mice. The more the mice breed, the more food there is for the foxes, making more foxes, which reduce the mouse population.
What Meadows was saying was that we can get better results from a kind of system jiu jitsu than from concentrating on a problem's hardware.
She uses the thermostat example to illustrate negative feedback. You want a certain temperature, and you set the thermostat. There's a furnace in the basement that comes on when the house temperature drops below the setting. The fire in the furnace would keep heating the house until it became uncomfortable, except for the thermostat's also being an off switch. The negative feedback is that the more heat the furnace puts out, the more likely it is to turn itself off.
Meadow' other examples include:
Emergency cooling in nuclear power plants,
Sweating and shivering,
Rest,
Recreation,
Meditation,
Socializing,
Markets (provided they get accurate information).
She says that the real leverage related to markets is in ways of getting them accurate, unambiguous information.
One paragraph that I took to be encouraging, in thinking about gun violence, says, "The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.
"A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day -- but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail."
The reason this is hopeful is that the phenomenon of mass shootings -- even gun violence in total -- is a minor blip in the system of our society. Horrific as it is.
If we can figure out what's happening, we ought to be able to correct for this painful phenomenon without strong negative feedback.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Systems Within Systems
In Environment, Power, and Society, Howard Odum wrote something to the effect that systems are limited in what they can do by what the larger systems of which they are parts will allow, and by what their own subsystems can provide for.
Thinking about gun violence, particularly inane mass shootings, in terms of systems, can be frustrating because the system is much larger and more detailed than individual, weapon, and victims. Where do you draw the line?
Adam Lanza, the reported Sandy Hook killer, was an un-photogenic twenty-year old Aspergers sufferer, with another learning disability, and divorced, affluent parents. That's somebody who had to have been part of a bullying system, who didn't have the internal system that would let him understand, cope, or avoid. He may have been alienated from his parents, or they from him. "Who knows what's going on in the kid's head. I don't know what to do with him. Listen, the child support's late again. When are you going to realize that you have a responsibility here too."
And yet, there are a million kids that fit that description.
Thinking about gun violence, particularly inane mass shootings, in terms of systems, can be frustrating because the system is much larger and more detailed than individual, weapon, and victims. Where do you draw the line?
Adam Lanza, the reported Sandy Hook killer, was an un-photogenic twenty-year old Aspergers sufferer, with another learning disability, and divorced, affluent parents. That's somebody who had to have been part of a bullying system, who didn't have the internal system that would let him understand, cope, or avoid. He may have been alienated from his parents, or they from him. "Who knows what's going on in the kid's head. I don't know what to do with him. Listen, the child support's late again. When are you going to realize that you have a responsibility here too."
And yet, there are a million kids that fit that description.
Liberals Excuse Child Killing
Yesterday I made up a story that might be taken as excusing wicked behavior. It was about a local man who killed a child and injured two women while shooting at random vehicles. The man really did shoot into traffic and kill a child. The part I made up was the story of his life, and that might be taken as my saying, "You poor put-upon murderer. I understand. it's alright."
It's been my experience, for about as long as I've been conscious of the news, that people who try to understand vicious behavior are trying to excuse it. "The bully comes from a broken home," etc.
It's certainly true that there's a large area of intersection between understanding and compassion, but, with me at least, the impulse to understand comes from a desire to protect myself by accurately understanding what's going on.
It's been my experience, for about as long as I've been conscious of the news, that people who try to understand vicious behavior are trying to excuse it. "The bully comes from a broken home," etc.
It's certainly true that there's a large area of intersection between understanding and compassion, but, with me at least, the impulse to understand comes from a desire to protect myself by accurately understanding what's going on.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Mass Shootings and Systems Theory: Materials Stocks And Flows
Material stocks and flows have to do with how things are arranged. Meadows uses her bath tub analogy, the idea being that the faucet's adding water at the same rate to a huge tub doesn't make the same difference as it does to a small tub. It's the same with the drain. If you don't have the drain stopped, you can probably get a bath in a big tub before the water runs out. If you're sitting in two inches of water, you'd better hurry.
Other examples are:
The effect of Hungarian road system, in which you have to go through Budapest to get from one side of the country to the other, on pollution and congestion;
Large commercial inventories, which allow for supply interruptions, and just-in-time inventories which make a business more flexible;
The baby-boom swell in US population;
The rates at which the environment removes pollutants (CFCs, acid rain, sewage, etc.);
Flooding in rivers, as opposed to lakes.
Meadows refers to large stocks as "buffers," and notes that correcting problems may be difficult because of the investment that went into the stocks, and what it would take to replace it. She says a dam (or a Hungarian highway) is literally "cast in concrete."
In terms of mass shootings, the stocks and flows are:
The inventory of firearms in the American private arsenal;
The inventory of ammunition in the American private arsenal;
Industrial capacity for producing weapons and ammo;
The population that is likely to murder groups of strangers.
There have been buy-back programs, but these have been few in relation to the size of the arsenal.
Gun control advocates have suggested that cities, universities and pension funds divest their investment portfolios of weapons manufacturers' stocks, a la the anti-Arpartheid movement of twenty years ago. I think there are candidates for this kind of campaign that will save more lives, and I'd like to keep my powder dry. Also, I'd like to preserve the firearms industry.
Who knows why people kill strangers. From the Associated Press: "Oakdale police said Tuesday they are still trying to determine why a 34-year-old man apparently began randomly shooting at vehicles, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring two women." This was a couple of weeks ago in the suburban Twin Cities. The guy has a Hmong name, and at 34, he might have been born in Laos. My imagination cooks up a story for him, pretty quickly: Family disoriented and dysfunctional because of circumstances, kid picked on for being a "slope" or a "gook." Wishes he could have stayed in Indochina, sees his people as betrayed by their allies (the US) during the Vietnam War. Can't get a date, loses his job, sees his suburban neighbors as privileged, smug, and ignorant. Decides to teach them a lesson. Note that I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. Tran's story could be entierly different. The thing is that it describes dozens of other guys in this one's milieu, and only one goes on a rampage.
The Aurora Batman-movie shooter sounds like a schizophrenic to me, but I've known two schizophrenics, and I've never known a murderer.
Same thing for bullying victims, and kids with stupid parents. There are millions of us.
I feel like the answer to this kind of violence probably lies in the human part of the system. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But, you know, we're stuck with each other, and we can't say, "I think it's the nuts. Let's lock 'em all up, and medicate the shit out of 'em."
Next post will be about systems within systems.
Other examples are:
The effect of Hungarian road system, in which you have to go through Budapest to get from one side of the country to the other, on pollution and congestion;
Large commercial inventories, which allow for supply interruptions, and just-in-time inventories which make a business more flexible;
The baby-boom swell in US population;
The rates at which the environment removes pollutants (CFCs, acid rain, sewage, etc.);
Flooding in rivers, as opposed to lakes.
Meadows refers to large stocks as "buffers," and notes that correcting problems may be difficult because of the investment that went into the stocks, and what it would take to replace it. She says a dam (or a Hungarian highway) is literally "cast in concrete."
In terms of mass shootings, the stocks and flows are:
The inventory of firearms in the American private arsenal;
The inventory of ammunition in the American private arsenal;
Industrial capacity for producing weapons and ammo;
The population that is likely to murder groups of strangers.
There have been buy-back programs, but these have been few in relation to the size of the arsenal.
Gun control advocates have suggested that cities, universities and pension funds divest their investment portfolios of weapons manufacturers' stocks, a la the anti-Arpartheid movement of twenty years ago. I think there are candidates for this kind of campaign that will save more lives, and I'd like to keep my powder dry. Also, I'd like to preserve the firearms industry.
Who knows why people kill strangers. From the Associated Press: "Oakdale police said Tuesday they are still trying to determine why a 34-year-old man apparently began randomly shooting at vehicles, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring two women." This was a couple of weeks ago in the suburban Twin Cities. The guy has a Hmong name, and at 34, he might have been born in Laos. My imagination cooks up a story for him, pretty quickly: Family disoriented and dysfunctional because of circumstances, kid picked on for being a "slope" or a "gook." Wishes he could have stayed in Indochina, sees his people as betrayed by their allies (the US) during the Vietnam War. Can't get a date, loses his job, sees his suburban neighbors as privileged, smug, and ignorant. Decides to teach them a lesson. Note that I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. Tran's story could be entierly different. The thing is that it describes dozens of other guys in this one's milieu, and only one goes on a rampage.
The Aurora Batman-movie shooter sounds like a schizophrenic to me, but I've known two schizophrenics, and I've never known a murderer.
Same thing for bullying victims, and kids with stupid parents. There are millions of us.
I feel like the answer to this kind of violence probably lies in the human part of the system. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But, you know, we're stuck with each other, and we can't say, "I think it's the nuts. Let's lock 'em all up, and medicate the shit out of 'em."
Next post will be about systems within systems.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Gun Violence And Numbers As A System Levrage Point
I put off writing this post, worried that I might be missing something. This one's supposed to be about Donella Meadows' least effective leverage point for intervening in a system, numbers, and numbers as a way of reducing mass shootings.
Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)
In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?
Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.
Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."
Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)
In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?
Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.
Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."
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