Lamar Soutter Newsletter

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”
Bill Bennett (09/28/05)
“We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect (09/26/01)

A few years ago I met a psychic. Skeptical at first, I was amazed by the overwhelming proof of her ability to predict the future. She had even predicted the assassination of JFK and called the White House days before his trip to Texas, warning him not to go. If only they had listened to her….

She keeps with her a clipping from a newspaper, where her ominous warning to the president was published, as were her credentials as a psychic.

Unfortunately, as impressive as her abilities are, there are a few things she fails to mention to prospective clients. First of all, the White House receives 600 calls a year from “psychics” warning the president of his impending assassination. At nearly two calls a day, a far more surprising event would be if the president was assassinated and someone hadn’t predicted it.

Secondly, she failed to mention that that particular call was the fourth she had made predicting an assassination. The previous three had all been wrong (as were the next 12 she made for future presidents). Further, as impressive as predicting the assassination was, she has not made any other successful predictions in the last 40 years.

It is true, that she accurately predicted, and even attempted to warn of, the Kennedy assassination. But that fact, without a larger context, is extremely misleading.

When Bill Bennett said that one could lower the crime rate by aborting black babies, the media went wild. How could he advocate such a position?

The truth is he didn’t. He stated a fact.

It is far easier (and more self satisfying) to adopt a position of anger and moral outrage, than it is to look at his statement in context, and see if the apparently obvious implication of the statement is in fact what he intended to say. It is a case of Attribution Error, assuming that his motives must have been racist.

A listener had called into Mr. Bennett’s show and argued that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would have been enough to save Social Security.

Mr. Bennett was immediately skeptical of that statistic, and argued he did not believe it to be accurate, that it painted an incomplete picture of the economic impact of abortion. The caller claimed the statistic to be completely accurate, to which Mr. Bennett replied that it was also true “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

His point? That statistics can often only paint half the picture, that such “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” (as he put it) were meaningless, and that to argue that abortion should be illegal as a means of saving Social Security was as ludicrous as to argue that abortion should be legal as a means of reducing crime, no matter what the statistics said. His called his own statements “ridiculous, and morally reprehensible”, which is of course why he made them.

For his comment about the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Maher was fired from ABC for being to insensitive (despite the fact that he had held an empty seat on his show for a month for conservative commentator Barbara Olson, who died when her plane hit the pentagon while she was on her way to be on his show). What was Bill Maher’s point? That it’s easy to be dismissive of the terrorists, to call them cowards and say that there is no reason that they hate us, but it isn’t the truth, and it greatly underestimates them.

I once announced to a college class that women generally have smaller brains than men, suffering a politically correct backlash that followed me for four years. Somehow I was sexist. Somehow people thought that I must mean that women aren’t as smart as men. The fact that my statement was scientifically accurate had no bearing on the fact that I was obviously sexist, that I obviously meant to say that women weren’t as smart as men. I was in fact attempting to discuss the differences between men and women, in how the hemispheres of the brain communicate through the corpus callosum.

Women do have smaller brains (if you find that offensive, talk to God, I had nothing to do with it). Why anyone thinks this implies a lower intelligence is beyond me. A five foot person has smaller organs (including the brain) than I do, but can easily be smarter. A blue whale has a significantly larger brain than I do, but it can’t calculate a 15% tip. Intelligence is measured, not by the size of the brain, but by the ratio of brain mass to body mass. This fact, which I had assumed would be obvious given the wide range of human body sizes, was not considered by the people who judged my statement, leading to the erroneous conclusion that I necessarily implied that which I hadn’t.

I have never heard of Bill Bennett. He may be a racist – I have made arguments neither for nor against that claim. His declaration was a stupid thing to say, and I can imagine a hundred better ways to prove the point he was trying to make. But this country has (likely out of boredom) concluded that he stated or implied that blacks are the cause of crime, or that they should be aborted, or that blacks are less important than whites. He implied none of those things. What he said was that statistics can, when extrapolated properly, be used to justify positions which are clearly incorrect. And he’s right.

Effective communication is the basis of civilization. It can not exist without an understanding of what one is trying to say. That understanding comes in part through the sharing of a common vocabulary, but language alone is often ineffective at conveying thoughts. As important as language is, of equal importance is learning how to listen. One can attempt to understand offensive speech without condoning it, but one can never truly object to offensive speech unless they know what was said.

Having just defended him, I do hope he’s not a racist.

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Exactly one week from today is Columbus Day.

For many Native Americans, the name Columbus is synonymous with Adolph Hitler. For many Italian-Americans, the name is synonymous with Neil Armstrong. The remaining 95% of Americans are vastly unaware of the bitter feud between them, and simply think of him as the man who discovered America. None of these is particularly accurate.

Many Italian Americans take great offense at charges of genocide and rape levied against Columbus. They consider him a symbol of their national pride and heritage. All of that would make sense, if Columbus had in fact been Italian. Nobody is quite sure where he was from, but Italy is about the least likely. The strongest evidence suggests that his real name was Salvador Fernandez Zarco, that he was born in Portugal in a town after which he would eventually name one of the islands he discovered… Cuba.

Whoever he was, there were no significant records of him before the 1470’s. Columbus took great pains to hide his true identity, and whatever his name was, he may have found the “New World,” but he did not discover America.

The first people to discover the Americas were of course, the Native Americans. Their decedents likely walked here from eastern Siberia, some 14,000 years ago on the land bridge of Beringia. As the Ice Age ended, the ocean level rose, giving us the world as we know it today. Beringia was submerged, the British Isles trimmed from the European mainland, and Borneo, Sumatra, and Java were cut off from the Asian mainland.

Inaccessible to Europe and Asia except by boat, America was “lost” until re-discovered Leifur Eiriksson, a Viking explorer (and the first European to find the continent). The Vikings settled a colony in Nova Scotia, L’Anse aux Medows, roughly 500 years before Columbus was even born. The settlement didn’t survive very long, and the Vikings then apparently “misplaced” North America, and promptly forgot about it.

Columbus was next, and he never discovered the mainland. In an attempt to sail around the globe to Asia, he traversed the vast ocean and completely missed the continents of North and South America, landing on the only land between America and Spain… the Bahamas. The odds of that are astonishing. Missing the continents themselves for a few tiny islands was like looking for a haystack and coming up with a needle instead.

He named the islands the “Indies”, and made a total of four trips there. In his life, he never saw North America, and went to South America only on his third trip in 1498, by which time North and South America had already been discovered and explored by another man… Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci found the mainland on April 10, 1497, more than a year before Columbus did. Having correctly calculated the circumference of the earth, Vespucci also recognized the land for what it was, a new continent, and named it “America.”

Contrary to popular belief, it was well understood at the time that the world was round. The only question was, how big was it? The land route to Asia was dangerous, and controlled by the Turks. A sea route would be safer and faster, if Asia were close enough. But boats could only go about 40-45 days without re-supplying, so they couldn’t explore further than about 20 days out (needing half their supplies to get back).

Columbus’ calculations put Asia about 24-28 days away, and he was literally willing to bet his life on it. He was given three ships and was charged with bringing back gold from Asia. In return he would get 10% of the profits, governorship over any new lands, and the title of Admiral.

30 days later, they had not found Asia, and the crew was understandably restless. Though there was a reward (10,000 maravedias a year for life) for the first person to spot land, they were also desperate for supplies. Three days later, a sailor spotted one of the Caribbean islands. This caused considerable jubilation, after which Columbus claimed that he had actually seen it the night before (though he failed to mention it), and took the reward.

Arriving in the Caribbean, Columbus named the land the “Indies”, and the natives he found “Indians”. “I showed them my sword,” he wrote in his journal, “they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance… With fifty men we could subjugate them all.”¹

Many of the natives wore gold jewelry, suggesting to him that gold was plentiful. He enslaved what natives he could, and demanded they take him to the gold. He was led to Haiti and Cuba, but found little of interest. So he loaded his ships with native slaves and returned to Spain.

While the slaves had value, it was small compared to the gold that had been expected. He knew that he could not get a second trip without the promise of a considerable return on Spain’s investment. So he lied, claiming that most of the mountains and rivers he had seen contained vast quantities gold. He was given 17 ships for a second trip.

He was also given explicit instructions by the King and Queen of Spain to maintain friendly relations with the natives (in the hopes of later converting them to Christians). He was there for gold, spices, and silks, not for slaves.

His second trip to the Indies was as fruitless as the first. He ordered all natives over the age of 14 to collect a weekly quota of gold. Any person not meeting his quota would have his hands cut off. Knowing there wasn’t nearly enough gold to make the quotas, the Native Americans fled. Columbus had them hunted down and mutilated for their betrayal. So ferocious were the Spaniards that suicide by poison became preferable to many of the natives. 110,000 of them were slaughtered in just two years, wiping out the entire population on several islands.

Columbus then established a fort in Hispaniola and captured 1600 Arawk “Indians”. Most were kept there and used as slaves. Women and children were raped, and Columbus himself wrote in his journal of using slaves for sex and sword practice. He took 550 of the slaves back with him to Spain. Half of them died on the trip there. Spain, surprisingly, did not consider enslavement within the bounds of “friendly relations,” and freed the surviving slaves.

Even more surprisingly, he was given 6 ships for a third trip. The priest Bartolome de Las Casas was instructed to go with him and keep an eye on him. Bartolome would later publish “A short account of the destruction of the Indies” based on what he saw. He wrote that “from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.”

When Columbus arrived for the third time, he found his fort in near rebellion. While he was away it had become clear to them that the gold Columbus had described to get his second trip did not exist. Faced with mutiny, he began hanging his own men. Finally, he was arrested, striped of his governorship, had his profit sharing deal with Spain revoked, and was sent home in shackles.

Columbus was insulted by suggestions he had found a “New World.” He died vehemently opposing the increasingly popular idea, believing instead that his calculations had been correct, that had found Asia, and that Amerigo Vespucci’s “America” was simply the Asian mainland.

As the governor of the Indies, he was responsible for what many historians consider to be genocide. Bartolome’s figures are likely highly inaccurate- 500,000 being a more realistic number. Does this put Columbus in the same league as Hitler? No. But we are talking the same ball game. One is forced to wonder how many Native Americans would have died had Columbus had Hitler’s technology, had Spain not arrested Columbus, or had there been more people to kill.

Many Native Americans find the name “Indian” offensive. It was the name Columbus gave them. Columbus Day became a national holiday in 1971, though in some South American countries it is called the “Day of Indigenous Resistance” and is a day of mourning.

Footnotes:

1. Zinn, H. (1999). A Peoples History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins. [↩]

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Last month was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once again begging the question… Should we have dropped the bomb?

A rough timeline outlining the 1945 bombing is as follows:

July 16th: Trinity Test – first successful atomic bomb test.

August 6th: Hiroshima bombing. 100,000 people killed instantly.

August 9th: Nagasaki bombing. 80,000 people killed instantly.

August 9th: USSR declares war on Japan.

August 14th: Japan surrenders / fighting stops.

September 2nd: USA officially accepts the surrender of Japan.

It is often suggested, knowing that the USSR was going to enter the war, and that Japan could not possibly defeat both enemies, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks were un-necessary. There are, however, some problems with that line of reasoning.

The Samurai code had had a strong cultural influence on the Japanese. They had often claimed that to them, dying was preferable to losing the war. What we had seen while taking Okinawa bore that out. The Japanese had begun loading Kamikaze (suicide) planes with explosives and ramming them into the US fleet, and the fighting on land had been the fiercest yet of the entire war.

The fact that the Japanese ultimately surrendered might seem to be proof that death was not in fact preferable. This is a common error in logic. The truth is that even at the moment of surrender, the Japanese likely still would rather have died than loose.

But dying to prevent losing the war was not an option they had. By August 10th it was likely quite clear that they were going to loose. The choice they had was to loose and live, or loose and die. The fact that they were prepared to die to avert loosing was no longer sufficient. Losing had become inevitable.

It appears likely that they would not have surrendered until victory was truly beyond all hope.

Based on the experience in Okinawa, and given the sacrifices the Japanese were willing to make, conservative estimates suggested that taking the Japanese mainland would cost the lives of 250,000 US troops, 3 Million Japanese troops, and 1 Million Japanese civilians (who had thrown themselves from cliffs rather than be captured).

Roughly 38 Million people had already lost their lives in World War II. The idea of decisively ending the war at a cost of 200,000 enemy lives probably seemed reasonable.

One must also remember that it was a war. Gambling 250,000 American lives on whether or not Japan would surrender when the USSR entered the war would not be particularly good war planning. Not finishing off an enemy because you assume that they will surrender isn’t so smart either. Such assumptions have lost many a country many a war. The Japanese were an industrious people, and assuming they were finished before it was true could have been a huge mistake.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that it would have been a mistake, that the Japanese did have hopes of beating the combined forces of the USA and USSR. Though it seems impossible, there was one way they thought they could…

With nuclear weapons…

A little known fact (even after being published by the AP and the Japan Times¹) is that the Japanese had two active nuclear weapons programs in 1945, with the goal of developing a 20kT bomb nearly 40% larger than the Hiroshima device.

The first program was started by the army in the spring of 1941, and was based in the Rikin Laboratory in Tokyo. Though progress was steady (and possibly assisted in by a US spy from Los Alamos) they suffered continual supply problems. They had hoped to solve these problems with 560kg of uranium from Germany², but the sub carrying the shipment was seized by the Americans before it could get to Japan. The program finally ended in failure when the Rikin lab was destroyed in the fire-bombing of Tokyo on April 14th, 1945.

However the second program, run by the Japanese Navy³, had considerably greater success. Anticipating the possibility of bombing in Tokyo, the project was halted for three months and moved to the N2 lab in Japanese occupied North Korea, where bombing was less likely, and labor and uranium were more plentiful.

On August 12, 1945, the Japanese detonated a nuclear blast off of the coast of Konan⁴, less than a month after the US Trinity test. Japan had become a nuclear power just two days before it surrendered.

On August 5th, the Japanese plan to win the war was not unreasonable⁵. It would take one to three months to make nuclear weapons which could be deployed in the field. They would hold off the invasion of the mainland while they made two bombs. They would then detonate one in the middle of the US Pacific fleet and one in San Francisco. To that end they had built a submarine, which could hold and launch aircraft, to carry a plane and the bomb to the United States. With the US Fleet gone, they would have enough time to make dozens of nuclear bombs.

However, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it became clear to them that despite the successful nuclear test, by the time they built a deployable nuclear weapon, there would be no Japan left to defend. The US had won a nuclear race it didn’t even know it was in.

Had the moving of the N2 lab taken less than three months (or had the US not attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it is quite possible that Japan would have successfully built and deployed two or more nuclear weapons against the United States. We would likely still have won the war (by all accounts we had more uranium and could build bombs faster than they could), but not without our own deployments. The result would be a nuclear war with a total of 5-8 deployments before the Japanese surrender.

Truman had no idea that the Japanese even had a nuclear weapons program. Fortunately, however, he didn’t take the risk.

Footnotes:

1. Hall, K. (2003, March 7). Wartime Documents Set Record Straight. The Japan Times [↩]
2. Benke, R. (1997, June 1). New Evidence Tracks Japan’s Efforts to Create Atomic Bomb. ASSOCIATED PRESS [↩]
3. Physics Daily [↩]
4. Snell, D. (1946, October 2). Japan Developed Atom Bomb; Russia Grabbed Scientists. The Atlanta Constitution [↩]
5. Japan’s Atomic Bomb [↩]

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